It’s a Grand Old Party… but only if you’re a man

Romney closes the gender gap?

Seriously?

Besides radical pro-lifers, ‘Job Creators’ and citizens who now believe Obama’s big second-term initiative centers around coming to get their guns, why would any woman even be tempted to vote Republican this year?

Every gender-issue stand they’ve taken has been at best insensitive, at worst wildly absurd. From candidates coining the phrase“legitimate rape” without irony; to opining that rape pregnancies are God’s will and still enjoying the support of the national party leadership; to “bindersful of women” who are revealed to have been foisted on the then-governor, not requested by him as he mischaracterized the story in a nationally televised Presidential debate…

Even on the pro-life issue, where I give a little wiggle-room to the opposition because abortion is such an awful, ugly procedure that it seems not unprincipled to me to stand in opposition to it. Even there, in defense of life in general, the GOP sticks it to women in particular. All the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and transvaginal ultrasounds and forced counseling and lack of legislative concern for the human rights of victims of rape and incest… It’s a smorgasbord of misogyny!

There isn’t one single issue specifically affecting women where the GOP platform and candidates aren’t working at deliberate cross-purposes with gender equity. We’re just one conservative Supreme Court justice away from Roe v Wade being struck down, and the issue of abortion being thrown back to the individual states to decide. Do we really, as a nation, want to put our reproductive rights into the hands of the same coalition of level-headed deep-thinkers who brought us the Civil War?

Yet new polls apparently show Romney/Ryan have somehow closed the gender gap that Obama had been enjoying up until now. I have actual, non-anecdotal friends and family members who are women, who plan to vote the Republican ticket.

And all I can say to them is, “Ladies, whatever single-issue has drawn you to the GOP, this is the year to take a broader view and think about the rights you want your daughters to have after you’re gone, and your granddaughters.”

This election, put family before fealty.