Thread by @Thom_Hartmann

1/ What Will You Do When the GOP Comes For Your Wife, Daughter, or Sister? (a thread)

2/ Last week a Texas woman with an ectopic pregnancy — a life-threatening condition that never produces a baby — was forced to wait until it ruptured inside her, putting her life in danger. Imagine if that was you or someone you loved.

3/ Republican laws are now making doctors wait until women are nearly dead before they can provide life-saving medical treatment for lethal conditions like that ectopic pregnancy and incomplete miscarriages. This is insane.

4/ What would you do if that was your daughter, wife, mother, or sister who was forced to bleed out for ten long days so a Republican politician could crow about being “pro-life”? They’d have to physically restrain me.

5/ As you read these words, Republicans in state after state are feverishly pushing this to the next step to strip women of even more reproductive rights, including access to IUDs and birth control pills.

6/ Republican pharmacists and drugstore clerks are refusing to sell condoms to married couples.
Meanwhile, Fox “News” appears to be trying to replicate Bill O’Reilly’s successful campaign

7/ to get Dr. George Tiller murdered, putting on TV the name and picture of the physician in Indiana who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim.

8/ In the weeks since six Republicans on the Supreme Court…

9/ ruled in their Dobbs decision that Republican-controlled legislatures could legally insert police between women and their doctors, multiple rape victims (including a 10-year-old) have been denied abortions or had to flee their GOP-controlled states.

10/ Reports continue to pour in about women across the nation pushed to the edge of death before services are provided for resolving miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and dead or malformed fetuses.

11/ But this Republican insistence on male supremacy and the re-subjugation of women goes way beyond birth control or abortion: there’s a long history here.

12/ In 1869, Republicans in Congress proposed the 14th Amendment, which included the phrase that voting rights shall not be denied “to any of the male inhabitants of such state.” The proposed amendment represented the first time gender would appear in the Constitution.

13/ Women’s suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued strongly against the amendment as written. Stanton wrote in 1866:
“If the word ‘male’ be inserted [in this amendment] it will take a century to get it out again.”

14/ Stanton was off in her prediction by only two years: it wasn’t until the Democratic Kennedy/Johnson administrations…

15/ that the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required equal pay for women and prohibited workplace discrimination against women by any company with more than twenty-four employees.

16/ The Biden administration proposed updating the expiring Equal Pay Act of 1963 with the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2021, which passed the House on a 217-210 vote but is now blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

17/ In the House vote, only one Republican voted “Yes”; every other Republican in the House voted “No” to reauthorizing and expanding equal economic rights for women, with the GOP providing all 210 of those “No” votes.

18/ Men controlling and regulating women to maintain male supremacy in this country has a long history.

19/ The Supreme Court gave corporations powers of personhood and access to the Bill of Rights a full forty years before women gained the right to vote, and 90 years before women could sign a contract without a man’s co-signature.
For the first century or so of our republic:

20/ * A married woman was not allowed to make out a will; she was not allowed to own land or legally control anything else worthy of willing to another person.

21/ * Any property she brought into the marriage became her husband’s at the moment of marriage, and would only revert to her if he died and she did not remarry.

22/ * But even then, she’d only get one-third of her husband’s property, and what third that was and how she could use it were determined by a court-appointed male executor, who would supervise her for the rest of her life (or until she remarried).

23/ * When a widow died, the executor would either take the property for himself or else decide to whom it would pass: the woman had no say in the matter, because she had no right to sign a will.

24/ * Women could not sue in a court of law, except by the weak procedures allowed to the mentally ill and children, supervised by men.
Doubling down on those ignoble years of male supremacy is now job one for today’s GOP.

25/ In 1974, it was still the law in most states that a father, husband, brother, or male friend had to sign for a women to get a credit card, car loan, or sign a mortgage (I remember having to sign for Louise’s first credit card in 1972, the year we were married).

26/ The occasional bank that was willing to offer women a loan in those states where it was legal usually required a “baby letter,” an affidavit promising that over the course of the loan the woman would not have a baby.

27/ Sexual harassment and employment-based coercive rape exploded through the 1970s and 1980s as birth control pills and abortion were both legalized, allowing women to comfortably enter the workplace in significant numbers for the first time in American history.

28/ Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as the Reagan Revolution pushed back against the legal gains racial minorities and women had made in the 1960s and 1970s, the battlefield for women’s rights shifted from Congress to the media.

29/ Republican talk-show host Rush Limbaugh introduced the word “Feminazi” into the American lexicon, telling men who were losing good jobs to Reagan’s neoliberalism gutting unions and offshoring factories that it was really all women’s fault.

30/ Limbaugh said:
“Women should not be allowed on juries where the accused is a stud” and proclaimed that “feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.”

31/ An estimated 15 million Americans listened to him daily, the vast majority of them men. Limbaugh seeded the ground for today’s generation of male incel mass shooters seeking revenge on women who spurn their sexual advances.

32/ Today literally hundreds of Limbaugh wannabees populate the American landscape of roughly 1,500 rightwing talk radio stations, about 300 of them now in Spanish, still selling racism and misogyny as staple items.

33/ Nonetheless, Democrats keep pushing back, trying to strengthen women’s rights — and Republicans keep doing everything possible to stop them.

34/ Just a decade ago, as high-profile reports of the wage differential between men and women filled the news, Democrats in Congress tried to update the 1963 law mandating equal pay for equal work. As the Obama administration noted on June 5, 2012:

35/ “This afternoon, Senate Republicans refused to allow an up-or-down vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act, a commonsense piece of legislation that would strengthen the Equal Pay Act and give women more tools to fight pay discrimination.”

36/ When the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (renewed in 2013) expired last year, Democrats proposed an update that would have retained that law’s protections against spousal rape,

37/ funded shelters for abused women, and updated laws against sexual assault and stalking. Fully 172 Republicans in the House of Representatives proudly voted “No.”

38/ When the bill finally went to die in Mitch McConnell’s Senate, Marjorie Taylor Greene justified her “No” vote in the House by echoing the sentiment of many of her Republican colleagues:

39/ “If you want to protect women, make sure women are gun owners and know how to defend themselves. That’s the greatest defense for women.”

40/ Watered down provisions of the bill were finally put into law — without protections for women on Native American reservations, lesbians, undocumented immigrant women, or closing the boyfriend gun loophole —

41/ when President Biden and Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders went around united GOP opposition by slipping it into a must-pass omnibus spending bill that was signed this March.

42/ Now Republicans are renewing their campaign of terror.
Fox host Jesse Waters worked for and helped Bill O’Reilly promote his smears of ObGyn Dr. George Tiller. Now, he’s apparently trying out his own hand at stochastic terrorism.

43/ O’Reilly repeatedly, on the air in 29 separate show segments, called the gynecologist “Tiller the baby killer” and kept at it month after month until Tiller was assassinated while serving as an usher in his church.

44/ Watters appears to be trying to provoke a similar response, although this time it’s a twofer for these woman-haters, as the physician being attacked on Fox this time is also a woman.

45/ Frightened by these public Republican attacks on physicians who are willing to perform abortions, hospitals and doctors across the country are pulling back on their willingness to help women in crisis.

46/ Republicans are forcing doctors and hospitals to play Russian Roulette with women’s lives. People will die because of this grotesque effort to court the vote of misogynist men and religious zealots.

47/ Again, I ask: how will you respond when this happens to someone in your life?
It’s no longer an academic question:

48/ the Idaho Republican Party, just this week, voted to change their party’s platform to support a total ban on abortion in that state that does NOT include an exception to save a woman’s life.

49/ As The Hill reported yesterday:
[State Senate candidate Scott] “Herndon said even in the cases where a person’s life is endangered, doctors should not be giving priority to the person over the unborn child.”

50/ The Republican war on women — waged in earnest for over a century and now turbocharged by six fanatics on the Supreme Court — shows no sign of letting up.

51/ The only thing that will stop them is enough people turning out this fall to vote these freaks out of office, get the courts under control, and return sanity to our nation.

@Thom_Hartmann hartmannreport.com/p/what-will-yo…