Believe it or not, GOP state legislators in Georgia (and and earlier, in several other conservative states) recently determined that women should be treated as livestock in attempting to justify bills limiting a woman’s right to choose to only the first 20 weeks of pregnancy. What’s even worse, they have determined that it does not matter if the pregnancy resulted from rape or forced incest. In fact, the only exceptions allowed are in the case of a “medically futile” pregnancy, or one in which a woman’s life is in immediate danger.
While no one believes that abortion is a desirable form of birth control, it is occasionally necessary in the face of conservative rejection of sex education and their ridiculous abstinence programs.
This latest offensive attack on the part of conservatives in their holy War on Women is Georgia House Bill (HB954). It’s affectionately called the “fetal pain bill” by Georgian Republican, but everyone else is calling it the “women as livestock bill”. Both houses of the Georgia state legislature has passed this bill, and republican governor Nathan Deal has indicated he will sign it into law.
Georgia republican state Representative Terry England compared women who are pregnant with known stillborn fetuses to cows and pigs he attended to on his farm. He reasons that if farmers have to “deliver calves, dead or alive,” then a woman carrying a dead or dying fetus should also have to carry it for a full 9 months of her pregnancy. And as bizarre as that seems to many thinking people, he represents a thought process common to many ultra-conservatives whom, while espousing a hatred of government regulations, want endless government regulations in support of their personal religious beliefs. This is evidenced by the fact that Nebraska, Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma, Alabama and North Carolina all have “fetal pain” laws limiting abortion after a similar time frame. North Carolina, for example, prohibits abortion after 20 weeks. And Arizona is about to join them.
All of those eight states have something in common: Their state legislators and governors are controlled by conservative republicans. The ultra-conservative wing of the republican party seems to be taking over the GOP mainstream.
If that’s true, then the prospect of Mitt Romney winning the GOP nomination, whom after his sweep last night of the Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia primaries appears virtually certain, should scare every thinking citizen of the USA. Mitt Romney is the ultimate flip-flopper, pandering to whatever audience is in front of him at the moment. He has moved so far to the right during the primary season that he is probably unelectable by independent voters who determine the election outcome. He needs to pivot back to the center-right, where he was a governor of Massachusetts for his campaign against president Barack Obama in the fall.
But when he does his little pivot dance, he will also need to bring the ultra-conservative right wing of the GOP with him. To do that, he will need an extremely conservative running mate…someone perhaps as conservative as Rich Santorum, the ultra-religious right-wing anti-contraception, anti-women’s reproductive rights, anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-social safety net,anti-separation of church & state,, anti-federal government presidential candidate from Pennsylvania. Someone like that could attract the ultra-conservatives who are bound to stay home on election day if they have no other choice than to vote for Romney for president and a Romney clone for vice-president.
What’s particularly frightening about an ultra-extreme-religious right candidate for vice-president is that he (or she) is only one heartbeat away from the presidency. If, for instance, Romney should slip on a banana peel on his way to his presidential inauguration and break his perfect hair (thus disabling his ability to think), his VP would succeed him. If that VP is the kind of conservative Romney must pick to turn out the conservative vote in his party, then all hell would break loose as this VP became president and attempts to implement his personal version of religion in government, hands-off-business-no-matter-what-they-do, privatized social safety nets, and his own version of “women as livestock”.
That could not possibly be good for women, thinkers, scientists, employees, seniors, the poor, or other populations. But, on the other hand, corporate America, and the evangelicals and born-agains would literally eat it up.
Under these circumstances, imagine the new order: Women would need to be branded (for ownership identification of them as proprietary human factories, you realize), thinkers and scientists would be reprogrammed into “faith-based believers”, seniors and the poor would simply cease to exist (due to starvation and sickness), and the evangelicals and born-agains would inherit what Earth is left after corporate America decimates it.
Naw…This is America. THAT can’t happen here.
Nope. No more than women being compared to livestock. Could never happen here. 
Have you ever tried to herd women? Worse than cats.
On a serious note – the GOP is aspiring to relive the 17th and 18th centuries when women were chattel, could not vote, were not independent human beings with brains and opinions and ambitions and libidos and choices…when they were adjuncts and ancillary to all things MALE.
Can’t you see Newt or Rick or Mitt living in those good old days when their word was law and their whims anticipated and met by the good women around them?
Ah, if only clocks went the other way.