Desperate to win women’s votes, the GOP is going above and beyond its usual outreach campaign of attacking equal pay, opposing access to reproductive health care, demonstrating absolute ignorance about women’s health while regulating their health care, etc. Now they’re adding “attacking the wives of prominent Republican candidates” to the standard list.
It started with an anti-Donald Trump Super PAC encouraging voters to “support Ted Cruz” — by slut-shaming Trump’s wife, Melania.
Trump (who only recently assured us that “nobody respects women more than I do”) responded by threatening to “spill the beans” on Cruz’s wife Heidi.
Cruz reacted by calling Trump a “coward.” To which Trump returned in fine form, “fart breath.”
Okay, so I made up the last part. The rest is all real, though. And it didn’t end there.
The next day, Heidi Cruz remarked that she and her husband were “not worried” about Trump’s threatened reveal because “most of the things Donald Trump says have no basis in reality,” anyway. That didn’t stop Trump from later retweeting a picture that juxtaposed a highly unflattering photo of Heidi Cruz alongside a very flattering photo of Melania Trump with the captions “No need to ‘spill the beans’” and “The images are worth a thousand words.”
It’s a typically Trumpian low blow. Because, you know, #respect. (Cruz, meanwhile, has hit back by calling Trump a “sniveling coward.”)
But you know who’s really to blame for a climate in which the Republican front-runner is attacking his opponent’s wife? Let’s ask Russell Moore, the President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Moore knows where the fault lies. It’s with the pagans. And pornography. Because there’s no other possible explanation for it.
Only a society trained by pornography could be drawn to a man so misogynistic. This is pagan patriarchy.
His statement is kind of a blend of all-things-Christians-hate with words-he’s-heard-other-people-use-in-a-negative-fashion. Sure, patriarchy is listed, but it’s qualified. Pagan patriarchy is responsible for an embrace of misogyny. Not the kind of patriarchy Moore supports as a Southern Baptist.
(That’s the kind where you say it’s religious persecution for Christian groups to have to sign a form exempting themselves from the ACA’s contraception coverage stipulations, because then women will be able to get things like birth control in another way, and that amounts to an infringement of Christians’ religious freedom to dictate what kind of healthcare options other women have.)
But that’s a mouthful. So Moore’s going with pagans and porn. No rationale needed. Or offered.
(Image via lev radin / Shutterstock.com)
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