Republicans Renew Their War on Women

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http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-02-16/article/37328?headline=The-Public-Eye-Republicans-Renew-Their-War-on-Women

The Public Eye: Republicans Renew Their War on Women
By Bob Burnett
Tuesday February 15, 2011

The new Republican House majority had no sooner settled into their offices than they proposed savage restrictions of women’s reproductive rights. Americans might question the GOP actions, since the new laws have nothing to do with Republican campaign promises to create jobs and reduce the Federal deficit. But it’s consistent with their archconservative ideology, yet another brutal attack in the three-decades-old Republican war on women.

During the Reagan regime, conservatives developed an ideology with three essential elements: unlimited military spending, unwarranted faith in the free market, and exaggerated emphasis on “traditional” values. Whatever we may think of the intellectual merits of their strategy, it reaped political rewards, producing twenty years of Republican Presidents. The GOP tenets recognized changing social mores: the desire of Southern Whites for an alternative to the Democratic Party they had come to see as favoring people-of-color and “undesirables;” the longing of many Americans for a simpler time; and widespread rural anger at coastal “elites” and their so-called “sixties values.”

Contemporary Republicans are still promoting the ideology that has worked for them if not for Americans, in general. Republicans maintain that it’s essential for the US to have the world’s largest military. And, despite the disastrous consequences of the Regan-Bush economic policies, the GOP dogmatically pursues the same flawed notions: low taxes for the wealthy, limited government, and an unregulated market place. And Republicans persist with their traditional values agenda.