In 2008 in Colorado, a rebel faction of antiabortion activists decided to pursue a “personhood” initiative. Over the objections of the mainstream antiabortion movement, they proposed amending the state’s constitution to redefine the word “person” to include zygotes. Under the proposal, “from the moment of fertilization,” a woman would be considered two people under Colorado law. When the initiative went before voters, it failed by more than 40 points [ http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Colorado_Fetal_Personhood,_Amendment_62_%282010%29 ].
The same activists brought up the measure again in 2010. They changed the “moment of fertilization” language to “the beginning of biological development,” but the intent — and the electoral result — were the same. Even with that year’s conservative electorate, Colorado voters said no to “personhood” by more than 40 points. Again.
The mainstream antiabortion movement opposed the Colorado effort because its members believed a challenge to it might have the unintended effect of reaffirming Roe v. Wade. They also worried that a blunt effort to ban all abortion might cause a backlash that would set back their incremental chipping away at abortion rights.
But voters seem to have rejected “personhood [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/11/02/i-am-zygote-hear-me-roar.html ]” for a different reason — legally redefining a “person” would not only criminalize all abortion but would probably outlaw hormonal forms of birth control as well. Hormonal contraceptives generally prevent an egg from being fertilized in the first place, but the at-least-theoretical possibility that they might also prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus was enough to raise the specter of birth control pills being viewed as an instrument of homicide.
In Colorado’s U.S. Senate election in 2010, the Republican candidate, Ken Buck, endorsed the “personhood” initiative during the primary. He later backed off that position, but Democrat Michael Bennet hammered Buck for it throughout the campaign. As the rest of the political map turned deep red that year, Buck lost — and lost the vote of Colorado women by a whopping 17 points.
Undeterred, the “personhood” folks tried again, getting their measure on the ballot in Mississippi last year. There were national predictions that any antiabortion ballot measure could pass in Mississippi, but it failed there, too [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/anti-abortion-personhood-amendment-fails-in-mississippi/2011/11/08/gIQASRPd3M_blog.html ], and by double digits. After a grass-roots campaign that included a “Save the Pill!” rally and billboards saying the measure would make “birth control a lethal weapon,” Mississippians voted it down by 16 points.
After Mississippi rejected “personhood” and its threat to contraception, after Colorado rejected it twice, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul attended (Paul by satellite) a Personhood USA candidates forum [ http://www.personhoodusa.com/category/states/south-carolina ] in South Carolina. All signed a pledge to pursue “personhood” at the federal level. Mitt Romney did not attend the event, but when asked on Fox News before the Mississippi vote last year whether he would have supported such a measure as Massachusetts governor, he replied, “Absolutely [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/03/democrats-attack-romney-over-controversial-abortion-amendment/ ].”
This is critical context for understanding the national media scrum over health insurance and contraception. Taken together — Republicans’ condemnation that birth control be a required benefit of health insurance, their insistence that Planned Parenthood lose all federal funding, their threat to cut federal Title X support for birth control and their support for “personhood” measures that threaten the legality of hormonal birth control — today’s Republican candidates are all Ken Buck now.
There is no constitutional infirmity in requiring religious institutions to follow the same insurance and labor regulations as other employers. Twenty-eight states already require that health insurance plans cover contraception; eight states do not even exempt churches from that requirement, as the Obama administration’s rules would, even before the president announced an expanded religious exemption on Friday [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-to-announce-adjustment-to-birth-control-rule/2012/02/10/gIQArbFy3Q_story.html ]. New York, whose Catholic archbishop has railed so vehemently against the administration on this issue, already lives under the rule he decries — it’s state law. The rule is also partially enshrined in federal law thanks to a December 2000 ruling of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. More than a dozen congressional Republicans proposed that this same rule become federal law in 2001, to a furious outcry from precisely no one.
The right has picked a fight on this issue because religiosity is a convenient partisan cudgel to use against Democrats in an election year. Despite that, some Democrats and even some liberals have embraced their logic. The thinking inside the Beltway seems to be that religious voters will turn against Democrats unless the White House drops the basic idea that insurance should cover contraception.
Time will tell on the political impact of this fight, but the relevant political context here is more than just a 2012 measure of Catholic bishops’ influence on moral issues. It’s also this year’s mainstream Republican embrace of an antiabortion movement that no longer just marches on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade to criminalize abortion; it now marches on the anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, holding signs that say “The Pill Kills.”
Rachel Maddow is a political commentator and host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
When Mitt Romney was 20 years old, he watched his father enter the Republican presidential race as a towering figure—a self-made auto executive turned popular progressive governor—and leave it a punch line. George Romney’s undoing was Vietnam. He attempted to approach the issue subtly, adjusting his position as events changed and his convictions deepened, but finally and famously met his undoing by employing the term “brainwashing” in explaining how he had come to distrust the official briefing on the war that he’d received from the Johnson administration. His campaign was subsequently chewed to bits between the twin gears of a mindless press corps and rabid right-wing nationalists. “The rest of our [electoral] system I know pretty well,” young Mitt wrote to his father, “only one thing I can’t understand: How can the American public like such muttonheads?”
Four and a half decades later, muttonhead-lovers continue to madden Romney, whose frustration has oozed out through blind quotes from his aides. One Romney adviser has sized up the conservative base like so: “They like preachers. If you take them to a tent meeting, they’ll get whipped into a frenzy. That’s how people like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich get women to fall into bed with them.” His disdain for the electorate pops up in other ways as well. Forced to defend his reform of the health-care system in Massachusetts, Romney invariably insists that it in no way resembles the hated socialistic scheme imposed by Barack Obama. It uses private insurance. Its individual mandate reflects a belief in personal responsibility. He knows perfectly well that this is true of Obama’s plan as well and is counting on the fact that his audience does not. It is the patronizing strategy of a parent who checks under his child’s bed for monsters rather than undertaking the tiresome and probably hopeless work of explaining that there’s no such thing.
To an extent, Romney’s secret antipathy is a healthy quality. The truly fanatical politicians are those who detect no contradiction between their interpretation of what is right and the desires of the great and good American public. (Michele Bachmann undoubtedly has a far deeper respect for the electorate than Romney could ever muster.) But feigning respect is exhausting. Romney does not suffer fools gladly—he does suffer them, though, because there are a lot of fools out there, and he has put himself in the fool-suffering business. His constant discomfort on the trail is the agony of suppressed contempt.
And so he trudges stiltedly along, treating the campaign as a grubby series of chores he must endure so as to assume his rightful place in the Oval Office. In this he most closely resembles George H.?W. Bush, another patrician son of an esteemed moderate Republican forced to jettison core beliefs as his party lurched rightward. (Bush, before joining Ronald Reagan’s ticket, had once been pro-choice and called supply-side economics “voodoo economics.”) Bush, like Romney, was cynical enough about electioneering to think that what you say to win votes—flag-burning! Willie Horton!—need not bear any relation to your manner of governing. It is no coincidence that Bush governed far more sensibly than his more naturally populist son.
Of course, conservatives eventually turned on Bush for making a pragmatic compromise to reduce the budget deficit and abandoning his vow to never, ever raise taxes. That is one of the problems with the dream of governing like a Prescott Bush or a George Romney, after you’ve run for office by selling yourself as a muttonhead.
Michigan GOP circumvents democracy with shady vote corner-cutting
The Rachel Maddow Show [video]
Rachel Maddow explains how Michigan Republicans are putting their radical laws into immediate effect even though they don't have enough votes to do so and refuse to recognize Democratic objections to their legislative railroading.
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