Romney narrows the gap among women, likely voters

A few thoughts on the news that Mitt Romney seems to be narrowing the gap between himself and President Obama among likely voters, especially women.

This should really come as no surprise. The “War on Women” was bogus from the get-go, and intelligent women – unless they were blinded by partisanship – knew it or came to realize it. The very melodramatic ring of it reeked of propaganda. It also smacked of hypocrisy. For how can a party whose feminist rallying cry for decades has been the imperative that government, or men, or old white men, etc., stop trying to “control women’s bodies” turn around and sanctimoniously cry that Mitt Romney, Republicans, etc., don’t “care” about women and their bodies, about insuring cancer screenings for women, compelling institutions to provide them birth control, etc.  Personally, I find the idea of indoctrinating women to rely on the government-mandated insurance for birth control every bit as Orwellian as the idea of a government veto on abortion under all circumstances. If one is arguing that the government should generally stay out of women’s health care and the abortion issue, it is pretty difficult to rationally argue that the government should have the power to legally compel companies and institutions to provide women with birth control. You can’t have it both ways, really.

And is anyone buying the idea that Mitt Romney is by any stretch of the imagination going to overturn Roe v. Wade? The man’s not even that conservative. He’s a moderate Republican. If neither of the Bushes nor Reagan appointed enough ultra-conservative judges to overturn it, Romney ain’t gonna go there. He strikes me as pro-life from a place of decency, of realizing that the pro-choice movement, with its own propaganda, has sought to co-opt what is a very morally complex and  ethically wrought issue with self-serving blanket statements about a “woman’s right to control her body.” On the other hand, he is not a Catholic, and probably does not have an absolutist belief that life begins at conception, and so would probably not choose to make a legal issue of early term abortion. He certainly would not make a legal issue of it under extreme circumstances, because he has said so many times. Overall, he probably represents the common sense view on abortion so often drowned out by extremists on either side but probably much more in sync with what the solid majority of Americans feel and think.

This entry was written by and posted on October 26, 2012 at 1:11 am and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: , , . Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>