Donald Trump’s rapey comments from 2005 were replete with obvious misogyny but I didn’t find Speaker Paul Ryan’s paternalistic response all that much better.
“Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified."
Excuse me? Who are you, Paul Ryan? One of King Arthur’s men? A knight of the Round Table declaring fealty to the Code of Chivalry?
Let’s get one thing straight. You are not my knight in shining armor.
I don’t need to be “championed” by you. And I certainly don’t want to be “revered” by you. As to your assertion that women should not be “objectified”? GTFO. The entire modern Republican party does nothing but objectify women. You deny our humanity daily. You have made it your number one mission to reduce us down to our uteri and said you, and you alone, control what happens to our bodies.
You hold entire hearings about women’s issues without inviting a single woman. When you do deign to allow women to speak, you condescend to, brow beat and aggressively attempt to shame them. You have launched a single-minded assault on the ability of poor women in this country to obtain healthcare. Championed our employer’s rights over our own when it comes to our private healthcare decisions. You have legislated that our doctors lie to us and rape us with ultrasound wands. In Texas, you played God by keeping a dead woman artificially “alive” so that she could serve as an incubator. In Indiana, your new hero, Mike Pence, legislated that women had to deliver aborted or miscarried fetal blood and tissue to funeral homes for burial or cremation and crusaded to severely punish women for having miscarriages in the first place.
And what about you, Paul Ryan? How have you personally “championed” women? Was it in 1998 when you said that women should be criminally prosecuted for terminating pregnancies? When you tried to prevent women serving overseas in our military from having abortions in U.S. military hospitals even when they paid for it out of their own pockets? How about when you worked with Todd Akin to narrow the legal definition of rape to “forcible rape”? Or maybe it was in 2009 when you co-sponsored the “Sanctity of Life” Act which declared a fertilized egg a “person” and outlawed abortions, most forms of contraception and in-vitro fertilization? The numerous times you have voted to defund Planned Parenthood? In 2011 when you supported the “Let Women Die Bill” that allowed hospitals to refuse to terminate pregnancies even when the woman’s life was in danger?
Was it when you opposed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act? Opposed paid family leave?
When. When have you ever “championed” women, Paul Ryan?
Donald Trump may be a crass misogynist who thinks women exist for his own pleasure but you, Paul Ryan, are just as bad if not worse. You don’t respect us. You seek to be master over us and I, for one, could do without your paternalistic brand of “championing”.