Republicans Hate Women

A republican from Kansas (where else) who thinks that rape is pretty much like a flat tire. We should just plan ahead and carry a spare.  Here’s the exact quote:

DeGraaf: We do need to plan ahead, don’t we, in life?

Bollier: And so women need to plan ahead for issues that they have no control over with a pregnancy”

DeGraaf: I have spare tire on my car. I also have life insurance. I have a lot of things that I plan ahead for.

This was part of a debate on further limiting abortion rights in Kansas. If I understand it correctly, DeGraaf and his cronies want to ban insurance companies from covering any abortions. So that kind of makes his comment about having life insurance a complete load of crap.

Well the house passed H.R. 3 which pretty much shows how Republicans view women.  Good summary story on Kos is here with a link to the National Women’s Law Center who say the bill will increase costs and taxes for millions of women and businesses.  The vote was 251 to 175.  16 Democrats were among those voting yes. Here’s the rollcall if you want to see what your representative did.

The Republicans in the house are still attempting insert language that will prohibit victims of “non-forcible” rape whatever that is from receiving any federal funcing if they seek abortions.  I wrote about this earlier. Its pretty typical behavior from the slimy weasels. They tried to push through a bill that most Americans disagree with. When there was push back on that, they dropped the offensive language, but they are trying to insert the equivalent of a presidential signing statement by crafting a committee report with similar wording.  If the law is ever challenged, then the courts typically allow examination of the committee report to clarify intent.  Here’s the story courtesy of Mother Jones.

We all know that the republicans have been very busy this year attacking Women’s rights, but I didn’t realize just how busy. I seem to remember Rachel Maddow stating that they had found somewhere on the order of 300+ pending bills. Now I’ve found a report by the Guttmacher Institute that claims there have been 916 bills introduced in 49 state legislatures (the only reason its not 50 is that Louisiana hasn’t convened yet).

I don’t have any idea how accurate the report is, but there is a reasonable amount of supporting data on the website. Also, just based on the number of news reports about some of these bills we know there are a lot of them out there.  I was surprised that there are over 900 however.  Now I’m guessing that there are probably a lot of these bills introduced every year and most of them don’t have much chance of being passed. The scary thing this year is that a number of state legislatures are packed with batshit crazy right wing tea party types and every other republican is afraid of them, so some of these bills are being passed.

Here’s hoping that at least some republicans will have the courage to vote for what the majority of Americans want and expect. You wouldn’t think it would take courage to support a majority position…