Republicans are Russia and American women are Ukraine
There is no more sovereign territory than a person’s body.
And since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating reproductive freedom for the first time in 50 years, Republicans in Congress and those in control of state houses around the country have decided to stage an all-out attack on women.
The GOP goal, using both Congress and the radically stacked Supreme Court, is to declare dominion over the female population in the fashion of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Or, if you eschew contemporary dystopian fiction in favor of current events, look at it this way: Republicans are Russia and American women are Ukraine.
It’s an invasion, an occupation, with the goal of complete supremacy.
Banning travel, health care and love
Consider what happened in just the past week or so.
A vote was taken in the U.S. House on a bill to guarantee women are able to travel across state lines in order to receive an abortion. It passed, but 205 Republicans voted no.
And it is stalled in the Senate, where Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington said, “Let’s be really clear what that means: They (Republicans) want to hold women captive in their own states. They want to punish women and anyone who might help them for exercising their constitutional right to travel within our country to get the services that they need in another state. I hope everyone really observes how extreme and how radical and how un-American that is.”
In Arizona: Planned Parenthood asks court to keep abortions legal
It doesn’t end there, of course.
On Thursday the House passed legislation to protect access to birth control. Again, 195 Republicans voted no.
Likewise, when the House voted to codify same-sex marriage across the land, 157 Republicans voted no.
In the Senate, it is unlikely that 10 Republicans would be willing to join the 50 Democrats in support of any of those bills, meaning they’ll not reach the 60-vote super majority needed to pass.
GOP transforms into the American Taliban
Match all that with the fact that Republican lawmakers have been reluctant to support programs that assist parents (women in particular) with things like paid family leave, or the many different proposals that have been made by Democrats to make child care universally affordable.
The dark message the GOP is sending to women is: You can’t travel where you want to travel. You can’t receive the medical care you want. You can’t purchase the health care products you need. And you can’t marry the person you love.
It is nothing less than stripping away the autonomy of an entire gender, forcing them to conform to a warped, religious-based notion of females as chattel.
If this puzzles you, it should.
There was a time when Republicans vehemently opposed a radical theistic approach to governing, and even voted to send American troops into war with countries where such barbarity was practiced.
Now they are taking a page from what was considered to be a terrorist regime’s playbook, trying to impose a twisted form of evangelical Sharia law on women and transforming the GOP into an American Taliban.
Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: On abortion, Republicans are Russia and women are Ukraine
