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Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune
Columnist Karl Frisch weighs in on Todd Akin, Mitt Romney and the GOP's "war on women"...
Republicans today are absolutely obsessed with micromanaging women's -- cover your eyes my right-wing friends -- vaginas.
Had I said that word aloud on the floor of the Michigan state legislature, I would likely have been banned from speaking any further by the Republican Majority just as it did to Rep. Lisa Brown in June when she dared to utter the ominous "v" word.
While the GOP may cringe at the word's use, it certainly has no trouble crafting public policy that would tie women's lady bits up with red tape.
Sure, Missouri's Republican U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin made waves this week when he absurdly claimed women are somehow biologically equipped to block pregnancies following instances of what he deemed "legitimate rape," but how far off are his archaic views on women from that of Mitt Romney and the rest of the grand old man's party?
Not very.
In Congress, Akin got an assist with his bizarre machinations concerning rape from none other than Romney's Vice Presidential running mate Paul Ryan, who co-sponsored legislation with Akin to redefine the definition of rape. Apparently "no means no" was not clear enough.
If Republicans, including Romney, really wanted Akin to abandon his Senate bid as they now insist, should they not be telling Ryan to pack it in and move back to Janesville too?
Truth be told, if the GOP were that consistent, you would be hard pressed to find a Republican on the ballot this fall, especially in the race for the White House.
Both Romney and Ryan support so-called "personhood" amendments that define human life as beginning when a human egg is fertilized. Many on both sides of the abortion debate have roundly criticized such amendments because they could outlaw various forms of birth control, open doctors up to criminal prosecution if an embryo does not survive in vitro fertilization, and subject women who suffer miscarriages to criminal investigations to make certain a "human life" was not murdered.
Joe Heller / Green Bay Press-Gazette
In Mitt Romney's America, women would not even be able to turn to birth control to prevent unplanned pregnancies. Not only does Romney believe that states should be able to outlaw all forms of birth control. But he and his choice for Vice President would cut all government funding for Planned Parenthood, which spent more than one third of its $11.4 million budget on contraception in 2009 and just three percent on abortions.
It seems the Republican standard bearer would prefer women take the advice of Foster Friess, his multi-millionaire super-PAC patron, who said women should use "aspirin for contraceptives" by holding the little pill "between their knees."
If past is prologue, women who do decide to start a family would not fare much better with Romney in the oval office.
As Governor of Massachusetts, Romney vetoed funding and asked for deep cuts to child care centers, cut funding that supported mothers at-risk of violence in the home, and proposed deep cuts to programs that assist new teenage moms.
Bob Englehart / Hartford Courant
When it comes to supporting the rights of women, about the only thing team Romney is willing to offer up are shallow promises to create jobs. With women earning 77 cents on the dollar for the same work as men, you would think Romney would have selected a running mate who supported the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which gave working women additional legal routes to receive equal pay. Paul Ryan opposed the common sense, bi-partisan measure.
Romney and Ryan have taken to describing their ticket as "America's Comeback Team." In a certain sense, I suppose they are right. The will come back for women's choice, women's health, and women's pay, and they will not stop until all of the progress made in the fight for women's equality over the past fifty years has been erased.
Karl Frisch is a columnist for Cagle Cartoons Inc. Read more of Frisch's columns here.
Leave a Comment:
Re: "With women earning 77 cents on the dollar for the same work as men..."
How do I put this: that's an outright lie.
Contrary to what pay-equity advocates say, women's 77 cents to men's dollar does NOT mean women are paid less than men in the same jobs. Nor does it mean, even more incredibly in the vein of “men are stronger than women” (which means to many that every man is stronger than every woman), that every woman earns 23% less than every man, perhaps leading some of the more benighted and the blinkered ideological to believe Diane Sawyer of ABC News earns less than the young man walking back and forth on the street wearing a “Pizzas $5” sign.
The figures are arrived at by comparing the sexes' median incomes: women's median is 77 percent of men's. In 2009, the median income of full-time, year-round workers was $47,127 for men, compared to $36,278 for women or 77 percent of men's median. http://www.catalyst.org/publication/217/womens-earnings-and-income
Median means 50% of workers earn above the figures and 50% below. That means that a lot of female workers in the higher ranges of women's median make more money than a lot of male workers in the lower ranges of men's median.
The advocates' use of “women's 77 cents to men's dollar" doesn't account for the number of hours worked each week, experience, seniority, training, education or even the job description itself. It compares all women to all men, not people in the same job with the same experience. So the salary of a 60-year-old male computer engineer with 30 years at his company is weighed against that of a young first-year female teacher. Also, men are much more likely than women to work two jobs; hence, more often than women, a man earning, say, $50,000 from his two jobs is weighed against a women earning $25,000 from her one job, so that he appears to be unfairly earning twice as much as she.
Over the decades, strategically ignoring the true meaning of "women's 77 cents to men's dollar" has been less than productive:
No law yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap - http://tinyurl.com/74cooen), not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.... Nor will a "paycheck fairness" law work.
That's because women's pay-equity advocates, who always insist one more law is needed, continue to overlook the effects of female AND male behavior:
Despite the 40-year-old demand for women's equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of "The Secrets of Happily Married Women," stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier....” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If indeed a higher percentage of women is staying at home, perhaps it's because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they're going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they're supported by their husband, an “employer” who pays them to stay at home.
The implication of this is probably obvious to 10-year-olds but seems incomprehensible to or is ignored by feminists and the liberal media: If millions of wives are able to accept NO wages, millions of other wives, whose husbands' incomes range from moderate to high, are able to:
-accept low wages-refuse overtime and promotions-choose jobs based on interest first, wages second — the reverse of what men tend to do-take more unpaid days off-avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/3a5nlay)-work part-time instead of full-time (“In 2011, 22% of male physicians and 44% of female physicians worked less than full time, up from 7% of men and 29% of women from Cejka’s 2005 survey.” http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/03/26/bil10326.htm)
Each of these job choices lowers women's median pay relative to men's.
Women are able to make these choices because they are supported — or, if unmarried, anticipate being supported — by a husband who must earn more than if he'd chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike their female counterparts, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap: as a group they tend more than women to pass up jobs that interest them for ones that pay well.
So we can stop blaming the income gap on women's job choices and start blaming the choices of both sexes. Which means blaming no one. Which means ending the "equal pay" legislation that acts to lower wages for both male workers and female workers and to create higher prices for customers.
Points to ponder:
If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.
Why would "greedy, profit-obsessed" employers, many of whom where possible hire illegal immigrants for their cheap labor, pay men more than women for the same work? If employers could get away with that, they would not hire one man, ever.
The power in money is not in earning it (there is only responsibility, sweat, and stress in earning money). The power in money is in SPENDING it. And, Warren Farrell says in “The Myth of Male Power” at http://www.warrenfarrell.org/TheBook/index.html, "Women control consumer spending by a wide margin in virtually every consumer category." Women (white women) also control most of the wealth. See http://www.she-conomy.com/facts-on-women (Women's control over spending, adds Farrell, gives women control over TV programs.)
“There were fewer cases charging sex-based wage discrimination last year than the year before the [Ledbetter law] was signed, and the wage gap was wider in 2010 than it was in 2007.... The bottom line: In Obama’s first three years in office, the EEOC filed six gender-based wage discrimination lawsuits — down from 18 during Bush’s second term." -BusinessWeek, May 13, 2012, at http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-17/to-lure-womens-votes-obama-turns-to-lilly-ledbetter” and at http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-13/obama-pitches-equal-pay-to-win-women-even-as-charges-drop
The Fact Checker at the liberal Washington Post gives President Obama "One Pinocchio" for lying about the gender wage gap. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/the-white-houses-use-of-data-on-the-gender-wage-gap/2012/06/04/gJQAYH6nEV_blog.html
Excerpted from "Will the Ledbetter Act Help Women?" at http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/will-the-ledbetter-fair-pay-act-help-women/