Republican women are embracing the politics of cruelty In an effort to break through the party's glass ceiling, a writer claimed Monday.
Salon's Amanda Marcotte took up the question of why so many female GOP lawmakers have gone along with voting on Republican-sponsored bills that seek to curtail human rights.
With members of the House like Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) becoming the female face of the party, the male wing has been provided cover as the women toe the line -- and sometimes take the lead -- on some of the Republican party's most restrictive measures.
But for some, it has come at a cost – and they are starting to rebel.
As Marcotte explained, "Republican women, like Republican men, enjoy cruelty to others. They also assume their class and race privilege will shield them from the misogyny of their party. But when that assumption gets rattled, they often panic. "
Case in point, she notes are proposals playing out at the state level that would either ban abortions entirely or place onerous roadblocks before women seeking to make private decisions about their personal health.
Writing, "Republican women understand that they live in a sexist society. They just tend to see feminism as a pipe dream not worth fighting for. A safer bet, to most of them, is to accept second-class status to men, and then try to leverage femininity and conservative politics to scratch out some level of status and power for themselves within a patriarchal system."
She added, "Indeed, anti-abortion politics has long provided this outlet for a lot of Republican women. They could go to clinics and harass patients going in. They could work at anti-abortion centers, trying to trick vulnerable women into not getting an abortion."
But, with the dismantling of Roe vs Wade by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, reality is starting to set in.
Pointing to female GOP lawmakers in South Carolina who are revolting against a proposed anti-abortion bill, the columnist described their dilemma.
"Then Roe was overturned and that two-faced approach suddenly became less tenable. Abortion bans rub Republican women's noses in the fact that the men in their lives would rather they be dead than free," she wrote before positing, "Most of these women are skilled enough at cognitive dissonance to find some excuse for ignoring that grim reality. They'll keep pretending that the 'real' problem is feminists or queer people, instead of the men in their homes and beds who believe they don't deserve basic rights."
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