Putz and sluts
by digby
Mike Huckabee's feelings are hurt. But he's not going to let that stop him from shilling for money:
I am apparently the worst conservative ever or at least the most annoying one according to the left wingers in Washington today. My remarks to the RNC today were immediately jumped on and blown sky high by hand-wringing, card carrying liberals from coast to coast, some of them in the media.
What did I say? Here you go:
"Our party stands for the recognition of the equality of women and the capacity of women. That’s not a war on them, it’s a war for them. If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control, because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. Let us take that discussion all across America, because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be."
Guess what liberals? If you can't stand to look at yourself in the mirror, then get ready for more of this talk, because conservatives are going to continue to fight back against your destructive policies towards women and families.
I'm afraid Huckabee has been spending waaaay too much time in the Fox bubble.
On the other hand that fundraising email will probably bring in a boatload of money. There is literally nothing that animates the right wing base more than being the perceived victims of liberal political correctness. It doesn't matter if it's nonsense. And it doesn't matter that most of them know what he said was BS. It's about cricling the wagons.
This piece by Paul Waldman successfully unpacks what Huckabee "means" better than anything I've read. He notes that this is at least partially a throwback attitude of older men who have never figured out how birth control works and assume that Huckabee and Limbaugh are making sense when they assume that women who use birth control must be having a lot of sex (because of their uncontrollable libidos.) That's just plain old ignorance.
Waldman also points out that like a lot of conservative Christians, it just reflects his attitude toward sex in general. It's a sin. (And the story of Eve tells you all you need to know about who it is that causes all that hotsy-totsy temptation ....) But he also gets to exactly what it is about this that's so tone deaf --- and why these Republicans can't hear it:
Huckabee's position is that saying "Democrats are treating women like dirty sluts by saying they should have access to birth control!" is very, very different from just saying women are dirty sluts. He feels he's been falsely accused of saying the latter, when he was really just saying the former. I'm sure that he thinks that if women just understood the full context of his statement, they'd realize he respects and honors them. What he doesn't get is that women actually want and need contraception, and 99 percent of women who have had sex have used some form of contraception at some point in their lives. So when he tells them that contraception is for sluts, what they hear isn't "Because I care for you, I don't want you to become a slut," what they hear is, "You're a slut."
This seems to come up again and again: Republicans think they're talking to a nation of nuns, when in reality they're talking to actual women whose lives and experiences are different from what Republicans imagine them to be. If you told them that, guess what, your wife uses contraception, and so does your sister, and so does your daughter, and not only that, so did your mom, they'd cry "Nuh-uh!" and stick their fingers in their ears.
Which is why this is going to keep happening
Frankly, I think "because I care for you I don't want you to become a slut" is just as bad. Who are any of these people to be telling women they shouldn't enjoy sex --- and with whomever they choose to have it? To hell with that. But I'll bet that this that gets to the nub of the problem a lot of these conservative men don't want to think about. Their wives don't want to have a lot of sex with their husbands, and their wives are good women. Therefore, women who want to have sex are dirty sluts. They must be. Otherwise the fact that no one wants to have sex with the Mike Huckabees of the world (at least unless they are paid to do so) might just reflect badly on the men rather than the women.
After all, if a man can't even be bothered to figure out how birth control works, I'm going to guess he hasn't spent a lot of time figuring out how a woman's sexual response works either.
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