I can’t even tell if that thing on his head is a dunce cap or a hood at this point, but since both are signs of ignorance, does it really matter?
The louder they scream, the more we know that we are getting something done.
— Governor Rick Perry, Gold-Medal Winning Misogynist, notable Grand Wizard of Texas
and Texans whine about the $1B in social programs for all these damned kids as if they were villains finally unmasked at the end of an episode of Scooby Doo.
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Governor Perry’s recent comments about Wendy Davis and others who support reproductive rights for women ((and really, anyone who supports the right of a woman to have any doctor-patient confidentiality)) are intended to be demeaning and denigrate all the men and women who stood up to a room of bullies, bigots, and burros who don’t understand medicine, the Constitution of the United States, or high school biology.
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These idiots believe they’ve been voted into office to write laws contrary to all of those subjects — which is definitely helping, since Texas is a state where teaching basic biology and contraception is completely optional, teenaged girls are getting pregnant at alarming rates.
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Mr. Perry saying that Ms. Davis should “know better” than to support reproductive rights because she was the daughter of a single mother and a teenaged mother herself who went on to Harvard is a non sequitur. It’s like saying Rick Perry should know better than to block education efforts and funding for his state because he sold books door to door in the 70s. It doesn’t matter what Ms. Davis did; it matters that women are entitled to make that choice, and it matters that 66% of the young women in his state who get pregnant drop out of school and live in poverty, and it matters that only 1.5% of young women who get pregnant in their teens will get a college degree by the time they’re 30 years old. Ms. Davis’s success is representative of about 0.001% of teenaged mothers in Texas.
Furthermore, Mr. Perry commenting that “Even the woman who filibustered was born into difficult circumstances,” constitutes an egregious case of mansplaining if I’ve ever seen one. He is telling Ms. Davis not only that she’s wrong in her political convictions, but that she’s wrong about the meaning and lessons she draws from her own life. It’s not enough that he wants to dictate to women when and how to have children; he also now needs to micromanage the narratives they tell about those events, saying, [pullquote align=right back=1]”She managed to eventually graduate Harvard Law School and serve in the Texas Senate. It’s just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example.”[/pullquote]
So personally, I applaud Ms. Davis for all of her achievements: choosing motherhood, choosing Harvard, and choosing to run for office. But ultimately it doesn’t matter what I think of her personal choices — which is kind of the whole point. The only decision of hers that’s relevant to the conversation is that she chose to stand up for the women of Texas so that they could also choose their own destinies.
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Co-authored by notable woman Liz Lundberg[/yellow_box]