Rick Santorum’s focus on social issues is intended to mobilize voters, but he may be mobilizing more forces than he realizes.
Santorum has suggested that he would not be against states banning contraception, that women might be better off at home than in the work place and should not be allowed abortions even in the case of rape or incest. He believes homosexuality is a sin, says separation of church and state as espoused by JFK makes him want to throw up and calls President Obama a “snob” for advocating that kids go to college.
Pile all this on top of the debate over Obamacare and contraception, and a Pandora’s box of right-wing ridiculousness has sprung open.
Red-meat conservatives are eating it up. But voters in the middle and left have taken notice, too, and will be pushing back at the ballot box in the fall.
Especially women.
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Lately, we seem to be living within a sitcom within a movie.
Remember “Pleasantville,” the movie that transported two 1990s teenagers into a 1950s TV show? In the sitcom, people live in black and white and enjoy the squeaky clean idealism of happily-every-after plot lines. Life is simple. People are perfect. There’s no crime, no illness, no bad news.
Father, the sole breadwinner, marches off to work each morning. Mother stays home to cook and clean in her crisply pressed dress and high heels. Teenagers are obedient and asexual — in fact, everyone is asexual. No aspirin is needed.
And firefighters’ chief occupation is rescuing kittens from trees.
Is Santorum stuck in Pleasantville — or stuck on trying to convince us it’s real?
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What kind of ridiculousness has been unleashed?
Well, there was billionaire investor Foster Freiss, a big backer of the Santorum super PAC, enjoying a chuckle about birth control in a TV interview.
“Ya know, back in my days they used to use Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives,” Freiss said. “The gals would stick it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”
He was joking, repeating a line that was popular in days gone by. But the sentiment is suddenly current again.
That’s mild stuff compared to Rush Limbaugh’s rant about the Georgetown student who said she wanted her health insurance to cover contraceptives. Rush called her a “slut” and “prostitute” and said videos of her sexual activities should be posted online so he could watch.
Limbaugh seemed delighted by the attention this spiel brought him, and on Thursday he offered to “buy all of the women at Georgetown University as much aspirin to put between their knees as they want.”
Back to the aspirin.
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Santorum is not responsible for the venom that Limbaugh presents as commentary. But the hotly contested Republican primary race seems to be taking place in a split era. Men like Santorum, Freiss and Limbaugh live in the full-color 21st century, while women are being pushed back into the black and white 1950s — before the pill, before the breaking of countless glass ceilings, before people owned up to the fiction of “The Donna Reed Show” and “Father Knows Best.”
The Republican National Senatorial Committee’s Carly Fiorina insisted to Charlie Rose Friday that there is no “women’s vote” and that women’s issues are the same as men’s. Mostly that is true. But not when it comes to contraceptives. Birth control is a woman’s issue because reliable contraception has done more to move women toward political and economic equality with men than anything else.
Many women choose to stay out of the paid workforce to take care of their home and family. Fortunately, that is a choice. They’re not forced to stay home by social norms or pregnancy. They have control over their reproductive lives.
Yet this year’s debate suggests birth control is frivolous — Ann Coulter likened contraceptives to diet pills — expendable, humorous and promiscuous.
That is, for women. Men are exempt from aspirin jokes and slut accusations because they run no risk of becoming pregnant — which makes them such, um, qualified experts on whether insurance should cover contraceptives.
As Fiorina pointed out, there are more women registered to vote than men. Women make up as diverse a political group as males. But most women have this in common: The subject of birth control gets our attention. And we are not talking about aspirin.
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Elizabeth Cook is editor of the Salisbury Post. Contact her at editor@salisburypost.com or 704-797-4244.