Marco Rubio Helps Demonstrate that the GOP Simply Opposes Paying Women Fairly

[phantom power]

...Rubio clearly believes women should be paid less than their male counterparts, at least if the boss wants to pay them less. How do I know this? Because he believes every avenue to fix the problem should be eliminated. This is apparently the standard position throughout the GOP: Cluck your tongue over the evils of discrimination, and turn around and defend it at every turn. They want to destroy collective bargaining rights. They oppose any government regulation that would help ensure equal pay. Oh yeah, and they don’t think you should have the right to sue, either. If asking nicely worked, they’d probably find some bullshit reason to be against that, too.

Part of this is clearly just the larger Republican belief that employees should be considered the property of their employers. But it’s worth noting that they try to expand employer power over your life by attacking women’s rights. Opposing equal pay gives them an excellent opportunity to build the case in the public’s mind that there’s some “principle” behind, oh, opposing the right of an employee to sue an employer. Opposing mandatory insurance coverage for contraception helps them establish the principle that an employer has a right to exert control over your private life, in this case by docking your compensation package to punish you for having sex they don’t approve of. Using misogyny as the lever to pull in this situation is kind of brilliant. They can’t win elections strictly by getting the votes of people who aren’t paid employees. But if their arguments about giving employers control over the lives of their employees are framed as a wink-wink-nudge-nudge attack on women’s rights—which they are!—they can get people to vote away their rights by viewing it as an attack on that hated feminism. And yes, I said “people” deliberately, because unfortunately there are a lot of women who, for diverse reasons, oppose women’s rights. Some live in conservative communities and feel that if they’re going to be treated like members of the servant class their whole lives, they’re going to make sure that every other woman in the country is, too. And some, like the female Republicans in Congress whose access to fair pay is guaranteed by their position, are just pulling up the ladder.

There is no reason to oppose Lilly Ledbetter unless you either believe women are inherently inferior or you believe employers should have absolute control over their employees—or some combination of the two. It’s very simple legislation that expands the window of opportunity for a woman who discovers she’s been discriminated against to sue, nothing more. Considering that the Republican opposition to “trial lawyers” somehow doesn’t apply if they’re being hired to, oh, push forward a truly bullshit claim of being the victim of “reverse racism”, it’s clear that the only principles in action are a belief that women are inherently inferior and a belief that employers should be able to treat their employees however they wish.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/22/marco-rubio-helps-demonstrate-that-the-gop-simply-opposes-paying-women-fairly/