re: #46 The Ghost of a Flea

This seems apt and on-topic:

The “War on Women” Is About Public Policy

This one is good too:

What Rand Paul doesn’t understand about the ‘war on women’

[…]

Paul’s remarks highlight Republicans’ ongoing difficulty with not just in countering Democratic attacks on matters related to gender, but in understanding what the problem is in the first place.

First, Paul’s statistics regarding women in the legal and medical professions are plainly off. Paul began defending his stance on the “war on woman” by pointing to his own family. “I have a niece at Cornell vet school, and 85% of the young people there are women. In law school, 60% are women. In med school, 55%. My younger sister is an OB-GYN with six kids and doing great. You know, I don’t see so much that women are downtrodden; I see women rising up and doing great things. And in fact, I worry about our young men sometimes because I think that women really are outcompeting the men in our world,” he said.

Women make up less than half of enrollees at law schools, according to the American Bar Association, and are way underrepresented on the federal bench. The percentage of women in medical school is also less than 50%.

Whatever you think of the Democrats’ political framing, the “war on women” has never been primarily about individual politicians’ sleazy behavior towards women. Men in power behaving badly is a relatively bipartisan phenomenon. Democrats’ attacks on Republicans for waging a “war on women” is about the Republican Party’s policy agenda, one that includes weakening workplace protections against discrimination, forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, carving out religious exceptions to insurance regulations that compel companies to cover reproductive health, and opposing legislative measures to combat sexual assault.

[…]