Republicans Want Government Out Of Food Safety, But In Your Uterus [Pictures]

Look at all the things wrong in America right now from the real obvious: poverty, lack of healthcare, crime, education, unemployment, to the less obvious: pollution of both our air and drinking water, the effects of global warming on our weather patterns.

Then look at the Republican solutions since 2010: legislation against the teaching of evolution, banning the word “gay” from schools, denying women control over their own uteruses, banning contraception, legislation to put children back to work and limit the pay of middle class workers, legislating the Ten Commandments, – none of which address any of the problems faced by Americans today. Even when they do touch on an actual problem – proclaiming days of prayer to combat drought – the solution is laughable.

The GOP has no intention at all of addressing any real problems; they are, however, very anxious to address non-existent problems, to identify and then legislate against them, like people eating food made from human fetuses. We all know that’s a huge problem in this country, cannibalism. And then there are all those women being coerced into having abortions. There has been no evidence of job creation legislation coming from the Republican-controlled House. Nothing at all.

The government needs money and the Republican solution to that is to cut taxes on the rich, pay oil companies to charge us exorbitant prices at the gas pump, and raise taxes on the poor and middle class, segments of the population that are already fighting to survive in a still shaky economy. For a decade we’ve been pouring billions into wars overseas and what better time to start a new war, when the economy can barely support the two we’ve been fighting? They don’t want Obama intervening in Libya, an inexpensive affair both in terms of money and American lives, but they are more than happy to urge a war on Iran which is sure to g on for years. We barely got out of Iraq with our skins intact and they want to go into the even less hospitable Iran.

It seems conservatives have descended into madness, a sort of group psychosis, a collective desire to leap off the cliff in a form of ritual mass suicide, taking the rest of us with them. Rather than legislation to resolve any of our real problems, they have dedicated themselves to grid locking government so that nothing at all gets one outside of their social agenda.

What is an American to do?

Well, we can fight back against the propaganda and misinformation. On March 14, 2011 we first published a list of thirty pieces of Republican legislation “that Republicans are using to destroy America” and called it “The Dirty Thirty.” That original list has been updated several times and grown significantly although the list is incomplete, given there have been a thousand bills alone restricting a woman’s right to abortion. If most of the laws directed toward Women’s Reproductive Rights seem petty and punitive, well…they are.

Some readers have objected to the use of the term “war” in this series of articles but I believe in calling things for what they are and there is no other way to describe the sustained legislative attack on women’s reproductive rights, marriage equality, the environment, education, children, the poor and unemployed and the middle class. The chart below from the Guttmacher Institute is illustrative of my point:

The New York Times relatesthat “Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State, the top-ranking Republican woman in the House, was quoted by The Daily Beast last week as saying that Democrats were fabricating the ‘war on women’ to distract from real issues.” Read and decide for yourself if this war on women is imaginary. As Joan Walsh writes onAlterNet,

“Democrats didn’t make the GOP presidential field back “personhood” laws that would criminalize some forms of birth control. They didn’t force the newly elected House GOP to make defunding Planned Parenthood their first legislative goal. And they didn’t propose the Blunt Amendment that would have allowed employers to withhold health insurance coverage not only for contraception, but for any treatment they disapproved of…”

(As always, new items and categories in red – note that hyperlinks in new material are not readily apparent because they too are red).

The War on Women’s Reproductive Rights

Despite an electorate that is overwhelmingly pro-choice, there is no doubt that the GOP’s first goal is to deprive women of their reproductive rights and to frame that argument not as one of health but religion. It is in fact so important an issue to the GOP that out of some 40,000 laws of all types enacted in 2011, as RMuse wrote hererecently, “there were nearly 1,000 bills in state legislatures to restrict a woman’s right to legal abortion services” (up from 950 in 2010). Alternet lists the 10 worst states in which to be a woman. The lone piece of good news was the unexpected sanity of Mississippi voters. Interestingly, the GOP is now trying to co-opt the War on Women for their own, accusing liberals of waging war on “pro-choice” women, or declaring that Obama is waging a war on women and that the Obama White House has been a hostile work environment. This is while Congress, already in 2012, has taken no less than eight votes against women – in just three months. It is frightening to think what the final toll might be by December 31.

o A recent report from the Guttmacher Institute details the extent of 2011-s war on Women’s Reproductive Rights. The report states,

• By almost any measure, issues related to reproductive health and rights at the state level received unprecedented attention in 2011. In the 50 states combined, legislators introduced more than 1,100 reproductive health and rights-related provisions, a sharp increase from the 950 introduced in 2010. By year’s end, 135 of these provisions had been enacted in 36 states, an increase from the 89 enacted in 2010 and the 77 enacted in 2009. (Note: This analysis refers to reproductive health and rights-related “provisions,” rather than bills or laws, since bills introduced and eventually enacted in the states contain multiple relevant provisions.)
• Fully 68% of these new provisions—92 in 24 states—-restrict access to abortion services, a striking increase from last year, when 26% of new provisions restricted abortion. The 92 new abortion restrictions enacted in 2011 shattered the previous record of 34 adopted in 2005.
• Abortion restrictions took many forms: bans (6 states), waiting periods (3 states), ultrasound 5 states), insurance coverage (3 states joined the existing 5 with such restrictions), clinic regulations (4 states), medication abortion (7 states).                  source