It’s not as though they haven’t tried this before. Whenever Democrats have trouble riling up voters about their agenda – as they are now – they quickly revert to their tried and true playbook. Specifically, page 138: “Drive a wedge between women and men. Women tend to vote liberal; if you can alienate them from men, they vote even more liberal.” It comes right after the rule on page 137: “Use scare tactics about Social Security to get the votes of seniors.”
There’s only one problem: the scare about women isn’t going to work.
The premise of an alleged Republican war on women is faulty as well as sexist: it assumes that women are the mild and weak and require men to pay for their services. The Democrats, including columnists like Sally Kohn, lament the fact that in February 2011, “anti-choice Republicans pushed a rogue measure to cut off all federal funding from Planned Parenthood, even though less than 3% of services provided by Planned Parenthood are abortions, none of which are paid for using federal grant dollars. Still, Republicans saw an opportunity to fire up their fringe base while undermining a liberal-leaning advocacy organization.”
Meanwhile, stealth activist Sandra Fluke famously appeared before Congress to explain why a Catholic institution should pay for her birth control: “In the media lately, some conservative Catholic organizations have been asking what did we expect when we enroll in a Catholic school? We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable burdens that impede our academic success.”
But all of this assumes that women are incapable of providing their own contraception or pay for their own health care. This is sheer nonsense. Birth control costs $9 per month (and poor Fluke can afford it – she spent time recently in Spain and Italy with her boyfriend). Planned Parenthood is hardly the only health care provider. Independent women are willing for us to hear their roar – as they tell everybody else that they can handle their own bodies, thank you very much. Even so, liberals still contend that Republicans are fighting a war on women while they themselves try to subsidize women to keep them dependent.
And make no mistake: what we’ve seen over time is that government funding of services creates dependency. Was welfare reform a blow against women or for women? Democrats would say that it was a blow against women – and they said so at the time. But in truth, it was a blow for women, since it encouraged accountability, job-taking, and responsible child-bearing and child-rearing.
The problem with the Democratic war on women rhetoric is that liberals want it both ways. They want women to have full control of their own bodies, but they want both men and women to foot the bill. They want women to be fully autonomous, but they also want women to pose as maidens in distress, requiring the help of big strong government males to pay the bills. That’s sexist. Women who are responsible generally have no personal problem with a government that leaves them alone. This isn’t a war on women by the Republicans. It’s a war on responsibility by liberals.
But will Democrats get away with it? They will only if they succeed in convincing Americans that subsidizing activity is the same thing as allowing it. They have an uphill battle here: they have to show that failure to pay for Sandra Fluke’s contraception is the same as refusing Sandra Fluke contraception. Clearly, those two activities aren’t the same.
But for liberals, they are. That’s because they believe that rights are given to you by governmental representatives, rather than freedoms that exist because the government leaves you alone.
We can only hope that Americans wake up to the fact that the Republicans’ supposed war on women is truly a Democratic war on reason and freedom, and a part of a larger campaign to turn American women into a dependent class.
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