'Raising Hope's' Martha Plimpton: 'No disguising' Republican misogyny after election
Actress and activist Martha Plimpton says that "binders full of women" voted in the 2012 election because there was "no disguising" the misogyny in the Republican Party after conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh called a Georgetown University student a "slut" for supporting birth control.
"It was a very clear referendum on the involvement of religious organizations in government decisions about health care," Plimpton told Current TV's Stephanie Miller on Monday. "It was clear that the American people -- which we've always known -- a majority of them do not agree with government interfering in women's health care decisions."
Plimpton said that after founding A Is For..., a grassroots organization which works to protect women's reproductive rights, she found that there was an "underlying an persistent perception of women's health as being dirty, nasty, something we shouldn't talk about, something we should be ashamed of. Our desire to want control over our bodies made us sluts and whores. And that kind of shame and that kind of misogyny is really what is at the heart of these things. There's no disguising it anymore after that, you couldn't hide it any more, what that was coming from."
"I heard Rush Limbaugh sputtering the day after the election, 'I guess we have to give out free birth control pills to women,'" Miller noted. "Like they just don't get what the entirety of what this is about."
"No, they don't," Plimpton agreed. "But they don't get a lot of things. They don't get a lot of things about science. Science is not their strong suit. And the fact that women's health and women's right to control when, if or how they have children or how many children they have is an economic issue, it's hard to get that through to them."
"During this election, I think it's pretty obvious that there were plenty of perfectly rational Republicans who voted for [President Barack] Obama for precisely this reason. Because they see that conservatism has absolutely nothing to do with giving the government control over individual human being's lives. And I think that's a big part of the swing right now that's happening. I think that Republicans got a big wake up call about their platform and the emphasis that they put on these social issues."
Plimpton currently stars on Fox's Raising Hope and CBS' The Good Wife. She has also appeared in numerous movies, including the 1985 hit The Goonies.
Listen to this audio from the Stephanie Miller Show, broadcast Nov. 12, 2012.
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