6 Ways That the Republican War on Women Is a Real War

There are Six Significant Ways That the Republican War on Women (RWoW) is a Real and Dangerous War:

1. Women are dying.
2. Soldiers are on the front lines.
3. Congress declared the war.
4. Propaganda is used to gain public sympathy.
5. Additional funding is sought from the public.
6. Women are questioned as to their allegiances.

Women are dying.

Let it be known far and wide that war kills people. In this case, the casualties are primarily but not limited to women. The first to die in the Republican War on Women (RWOW) are in the lower economic class. Take for instance, 29 year-old Anna Brown, who died in a St. Louis jail cell after being refused treatment at a local hospital and having the police called on her for trespassing. Her story is one of the private sector in healthcare refusing to do for a woman what it is required by law to do. The police of St. Louis made it a crime for Anna to seek medical help. One can only assume that this might happen to men too.

Women around the world (including the United States) die every year due to botched do-it-yourself abortion procedures where medical expertise is not sought. But the shocking truth is that these deaths are not only acknowledged legislatively, but even encouraged. Under the Bush administration and with a Republican-ruled Congress, the Food & Drug Administration considered the effects of a medication that poor women were using to induce abortion at home. Though more than 10 years of research has overwhelmingly shown that Cytotec is a safe way to induce abortion when administered correctly during normal pregnancies, the Food and Drug Administration has never approved this particular use. What the FDA did, in fact, recognize was the drug's use by obstetricians to induce contractions in routine deliveries – a method which they know causes extreme hemorrhaging and risk to both the baby and the mother's lives.

One of the most awe-inspiring discoveries made about the Republican Presidential candidates in the 2012 election so far has been the far reaching grasp they have on the mental health industry under the guise of religion under George W. Bush's “Faith Based Initiatives” program. Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry were all discovered to sit on boards, take ownership of or otherwise run pseudo-healthcare rehabilitation facilities that focus on teenagers and children. A majority of these supposedly “troubled” youths are female and “at risk” for lesbianism or abortion according to their religious “therapists”. At least two of these girls are known to have died under rather ominous circumstances.

Related News: Recent Fire-bombings of Abortion Clinics on Rise Again In Florida and Wisconsin.

A Christian Fundamentalist Holding a Sign
Celebrating the  Murders  of Women at a
Democratic Event in  Arizona.

Soldiers are on the front lines.

On July 28, 2005 a female 'soldier' named Jamie Leigh Jones was stationed in Baghdad by a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root (called “KBR” in short) as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. On this day, Jamie Leigh Jones was, according to her and many witnesses (to varying degrees at various stages of the saga that was yet to come), gang-raped and then subsequently locked in a shipping container without access to a phone by her colleagues at KBR.

Three years after her rape (I refuse to use the word “alleged” on principal here), Jones lost her case against KBR and was counter-sued by the military-industrial contractor to the tune of $2million for what they claimed was a “frivolous” lawsuit. (A federal judge did at least dismiss those counter-claims). While the case was lost quietly, in comparison to the swell of outrage that finally led up to it, it is worth noting that none of the defendants were deemed innocent of having sex with Jones. Her case was lost primarily due to insufficient evidence that the sex was not consensual. Photos of the trauma to her vagina, anus, ruptured breast implants and torn pectoral muscles were not-so-mysteriously missing from the evidence collected by her colleagues themselves (the very defendants in the case).

Congress (30 white, male Republican Senators) Declared This War.

Jones' case against KBR (and thereby against the United States, considering the nature of their business), although certainly the most high-profile is not the only rape nor sexual discrimination case against a military-industrial contractor. What came to light in her 3-year struggle to face her attackers in a court of law was the audaciously horrible “mandatory arbitration clause” in her contract with KBR. KBR argued successfully that they had the right to deny Jones the ability to sue them for any reason at all. This contract, which was commonly administered to most contractors at the time, defied the very nature of justice and demanded that all legal disputes, no matter how severe or how outrageous the offense, would be handled “in-house” by the company itself – effectively giving persons wronged by the company NO RECOURSE to defend themselves legally.

One Senator, Democrat Al Franken, from Minnesota, had a serious problem with this injustice and drafted legislation which proposed that the United States stop doing business with companies that required such an egregious erosion of civil liability. When it came time for a vote on the Senate floor, the bill passed with bipartisan support. All were in favor of protecting women from becoming the Jamie Leigh Jones' of the future... Everyone except for the 30 White Male Republican Senators who voted against the measure. One such Senator, shockingly, was John Sidney McCain, whose daughter Meghan is exactly Jones' age.

The outcry and backlash from the public was widespread but short-lived. 30 White Male Republican Senators had essentially voted (albeit unsuccessfully) to legalize rape... Let the War Begin.

Pro-War Propaganda is Issued By Governmental Pundits and The Media

In any war, the real nucleus of the battle is known to be over “the hearts and minds of the people”, as George W. Bush famously noted. For that purpose, political propaganda is employed. There are currently no better propagandists in the world than our Republican party here in the USA. To illustrate this, there are far too many examples to simply list without format. The blogosphere is riddled with senseless arguments ranging from biblical scripture to ad hominem attacks against democratic female legislators and liberals. To provide this point with some citation at least, I've randomly selected a few of the most obvious attempts to culturally re-frame the RWOW as an acceptable and justified movement.

1. A female Republican legislator in Florida blames child rape-victims for dressing “like prostitutes”.
2. Due to pressure from Tea Party astroturfers, Republican legislators in Michigan spend weeks on end and countless public dollars on a law forbidding a kind of abortion that they admit is not even practiced in the state to anyone's knowledge. The procedure that they have incorrectly termed “partial birth abortion” is really called dilation and extraction and is only used by abortion doctors in 1/5 of one percent of all procedures and only when medically necessary.
3. An anti-abortion activist group called LiveAction sets up fake “sting operations” in which they target female employees of Planned Parenthood. Many professional women have their careers ruined by “Brietbart-style” video editing in which the public is falsely led to believe that Planned Parenthood is in cahoots with the perpetrators of human trafficking and sex-slavery.
4. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), and Connie Mack (R-FL) all vote against their own best interests and against the interests of their female constituents by voting against the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2009. Fortunately, thanks to a Democratic Majority and the vote of only ONE Republican woman (Ileana Ros-Lehtinen), the bill passed anyway and now women must be paid equally for doing the exact same job as a man.
5. Florida Representative and amateur pundit Allen West launches a full-scale attack (in writing no less!) against Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz after she dared to call his judgment into question regarding detrimental cuts to Medicare. West sent out public emails that termed his female colleague “the most vile, unprofessional and despicable member of the US House of Representatives”, “not a lady” and “a coward” who “wants a personal fight” and needs to “shut the heck up”.
6. Georgia's Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss is also a legislator-pundit hybrid who advocates the most extreme measures to deal with the most insignificant of problems. When his office isn't busy sending death threats to gay bloggers, they are advocating legislation which would make it illegal to use your car for the purpose of driving a woman to a clinic known to have performed abortions.
7. Republican blogger and ALEC propagandist Michelle Malkin has given birth to what she calls “the war on conservative women” (her feeble yet not-too-timid attempt at counter-spin) and in a nutshell, this is just a steady stream of tweets (every 5 minutes, depending on the day) on her Twitter account which attack Hilary Rosen, the Democratic pundit who dared to question Ann Romney's fitness as her husband's appointed expert on “Women and the Economy”.

Stay Tuned Tomorrow for 6 Ways That RWOW is a Real War Part II – Funding and Allegiance