Sexism. Misogyny. Abortion. When it came to women and issues like reproductive rights, here’s some of what we heard from the far right in 2014. Click here to read more quotes from the right in 2014.
“We already have, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know how many museums for women all over the country. They are called malls.”
— Right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh, expressing his annoyance with House Republicans for their plan to vote on the construction of a National Women’s History Museum, an undertaking Limbaugh considers totally unnecessary.
“Men are better negotiators, and I would encourage women, instead of pursuing the courts for action, to become better negotiators.”
— Beth Cubriel, executive director of the Texas Republican Party, talking about laws requiring equal pay for women.
“Clearly, what [the listener] has asked is a brilliant question because it does reveal that the bigotry we’re told they held back then, they didn’t hold and what they did was they put the family unit higher than the government unit and they tried to work hard to keep the family together. And, as we can show in two or three hundred studies since then, the more you weaken the family, the more it hurts the entire culture and society.”
— Religious-right leader and discredited, revisionist historian David Barton, explaining that women were denied the right to vote in order to “keep the family together.”
“He goes, ‘Well, there’s always a sin under other sin. There’s a root sin.’ And he said, ‘We have to find the sin in your life that caused your rape.’ And I just ran.”
– Katie Landry, a former Bob Jones University student, recounting the “counseling” she received from the fundamentalist Christian university’s dean of students after reporting a rape.
“Women don’t want to be objectified, and what the feminist movement has successfully done, is really, sexualized women instead of feminizing women. So, we’re here with a new brand of feminism, saying drop the shackles of the old feminism. It’s time for women who really want to be women, who want to be feminine, who want to be what God designed them to be.”
– Politichicks host Dr. Gina Loudon, giving her take on the modern feminist movement on Fox & Friends.
“You know how long that takes in Texas at 75 miles an hour? That’s a particularly flat highway.”
— U.S. 5th Circuit Court Judge Edith Jones, expressing skepticism that a new Texas abortion law creates an “undue burden” on women, even as abortion rights advocates say the new law has closed all clinics in the Rio Grande Valley, forcing women there to travel hundreds of miles to obtain the procedure.
“I certainly think that elections have consequences and frankly I think that President Barack Obama is a judgment of God on the United States because we have allowed 54 million of our unborn citizens to be aborted legally in the United States since 1973.”
— Southern Baptist Convention leader Richard Land, responding to a radio caller on the far-right Family Research Council’s radio show, “Washington Watch.”
“Let me give you a bit of settled science that they’ll never admit to. The science is settled, it’s not even a consensus, it is a unanimity, that human life begins at conception. I hope the next time someone wags their finger about science, they’ll ask one of these leaders on the left: ‘Do you agree with the consensus of science that human life begins at conception?’”
— Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s odd response to criticism of his skeptical remarks on climate change science.
