Why Republican lawmakers are obsessed about sex
Three reasons
The Republican Party, once a proud proponent of limited government, has become a font of government intrusion into the most intimate aspects of personal and family life.
Last Friday, a judge who previously worked for a conservative Republican legal organization and was then nominated to the bench by Trump and pushed through the Senate by Mitch McConnell, invalidated the FDA’s approval of a 23-year-old abortion pill (mifepristone) used in over half of pregnancy terminations in the United States.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the Dobbs case (in which Republican appointees on the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade), Republican states are criminalizing abortion. Some are criminalizing the act of helping women obtain an abortion in another state. Texas gives private citizens the right to sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion. Idaho just passed an “abortion trafficking” law that would make helping a minor leave Idaho to get an abortion without parental consent punishable by five years in prison. Tennessee Republicans have made it illegal to mail medical abortion pills. In the last Congress, 167 House Republicans co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, conferring full personhood rights on fertilized eggs.
At the same time, Republican lawmakers want to make it more difficult for couples to buy contraceptives. Sixteen Republican-dominated state legislatures already bar abortion clinics from receiving public contraception funds.
So far, at least 11 Republican states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors, even if parents approve. Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has ordered state child welfare officials to launch child abuse investigations into reports of transgender kids receiving such care. Republican lawmakers are also pushing teachers to refer to students by their gender assigned at birth. Many are restricting which bathrooms trans students can use.
Republican states are also limiting discussions of gender and sexuality in classrooms. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a bill banning public school teachers in kindergarten through third grade from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity, calling it an “anti-grooming bill” and accusing opponents of wanting to groom young children for sexual exploitation.
Republican lawmakers are also putting obstacles in the way of same-sex marriage and are considering appeals to the Supreme Court to reverse its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. Texas’s Republican attorney general says he’d “feel comfortable defending a law that once again outlawed sodomy” in the wake of Dobbs.
Oh, and Republicans now routinely accuse political opponents of favoring child pornography. In her confirmation hearings, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was barraged with questions from Republican senators about her alleged lenient treatment of child pornographers. (In four days of hearings, the phrase “child porn” or “pornography” or “pornographer” was mentioned 165 times, along with 142 mentions of “sex” or related terms like “sexual abuse” or “sex crimes.”)
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Why are Republican lawmakers obsessing about sex? Three reasons.
First, by focusing on sex, Republicans can court both the evangelical right and the right-wing extreme QAnon vote (with its loony “Pizzagate” conspiracy claim that Democrats are pedophiles).
Second, by focusing on sex, Republican lawmakers don’t have to talk nonstop about Trump. They don’t have to discuss his indictment or other pending cases against him. They don’t have to say whether they agree with his vitriolic diatribes against other Republicans (DeSantis, McConnell, and any other Republican who criticizes him). They don’t have to defend his bonkers positions (on Ukraine, NATO, George Soros, immigrants, and all else).
Finally, creating a culture war over sex allows Republicans to sound faux populist without having to address the practical problems faced by most Americans — lack of paid sick leave, unaffordable child care and elder care, stagnant wages, and inadequate housing. And by focusing on sex, they believe they can ignore the sources of populist anger — corporate profiteering and price gouging, monopolization, union busting, soaring CEO pay, and billionaires who pay a lower tax rate than the average worker (courtesy, in part, of the 2017 Republican tax cut for the wealthy).
But the Republican obsession about sex is backfiring on them, as we saw in the 2022 midterms and again in last week’s elections in Wisconsin and Chicago. It’s drawing a contrast between the two parties that pits the GOP against the vast majority of voters.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent to Americans that while Democrats want to make life easier for average working people and end corporate abuses of economic power, Republicans want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of peoples’ lives.
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On a different note, please join me Friday for the second session of my course on Wealth and Poverty. (If you missed the first session, you can find it here.)
What republicans are showing us is the results of repressed sexual desire. The evangelicals are very obsessed with the very thing they supposedly can't have, sex. What we have seen in the past is that it's all hooey....from Jim Baker to Jimmy Swaggart to several republicans who have been caught being unfaithful to their wives (and getting their girlfriends abortions), to republicans that have been caught looking for gay sex in airport bathrooms ...we see they are all full of sh%t. Every campaign season republicans come up with new culture war topics that they know will gin up their base. Since they are not capable of doing anything but supporting the gun lobby and giving rich people tax breaks, they use the culture war to redirect their base from topics that really matter like healthcare, affordable child care, tax breaks for the middle class, affordable college tuition and things like that which they don't and will never support. The other thing is that they look at women as one of the biggest threats to their party's power, so they concentrate all their effort on punishing women by controlling them and trapping them with pregnancy. The next thing they will do will be to outlaw giving a child up for adoption while cutting SNAP and WIC benefits and eliminating school lunches effectively ensuring that the kids they force you to have will starve to death. Am I the only one who sees how diabolical this really is? Why aren't people with platforms out there calling these monsters out for who they really are. If I were well known, I would not be mincing words or being polite on these bs news networks....I would be calling them out as the fascist neo-nazis they really are!!
The current GOP playbook even goes after contraceptives because for them:
Punishing perceived promiscuity
Is more important to Republicans
Than preventing unplanned pregnancies
If they wanted LESS abortions, birth control and accurate sex education would be good things. But they’d rather shame than solve the problem. They are #HypiChristians, who care nothing for a baby after it CAN ACTUALLY CRY.
Furthermore, they preach a #SwissCheeseChristianity with holes where The Golden Rule and “Judge not, lest ye be judged” would go.
But they go farther still. They are #ProSTRIFE with heartless #AbortionAbsolutism that in many cases overrides the health risk to the mother. What if she’s already a mom, and Daddy has to explain to Sally and Timmy why Mommy has to die a horrible death from an ectopic pregnancy? Is that what a patriot roots for?