A Michigan legislator, Lisa Brown, gave a speech in the statehouse last week that would have made her right at home in a women's studies course at a local community college, but a wacko in a group of actual legislators.
She commented on a pending abortion bill by first announcing that she was Jewish, kept kosher, described her various sets of plates, and then saying that Jewish law makes abortion mandatory to save the life of the mother.
This had absolutely nothing to do with the bill being considered, but it may explain why there are no Jewish Tim Tebows.
Then she said: "I have not asked you to adopt and adhere to my religious beliefs. Why are you asking me to adopt yours?"
Her smashing crescendo was: "And finally Mr. Speaker, I'm flattered that you're all so interested in my vagina, but 'no' means 'no'!"
It's not clear where Rep. Brown got the idea that the Republican caucus was planning on date-raping her, but I think there's been a terrible misunderstanding. The bill under consideration merely ensured the safety of women having abortions -- and, in a small way, the safety of the fetus, whom the U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited legislatures from protecting directly.
Thus, the bill addressed insurance and inspections of abortion clinics, and included a requirement that the abortionist confirm that the woman having the abortion was not being pressured by a third party to do so.
I have not polled all the Republicans in the Michigan statehouse yet, but the ones I've spoken to assure me that Rep. Brown's vagina played a very small role in their deliberations. It's odd that she seems to think she's the object of so much Republican male fantasy.
Why must a certain type of woman always start shouting about her vagina whenever the topic of abortion comes up?
Do what you want with your vagina. Pro-lifers just want to stop babies from being killed. It would be as though a slaveholder complained that Republicans wanted to regulate his anus by abolishing slavery and taking away his right to crap on his slaves.
For making inappropriate remarks during a legislative session, Brown was prohibited from making floor speeches for one day. Being an hysterical drama queen who believes the Michigan Legislature was thinking about her and her vagina, Rep. Brown responded to the sanction by claiming she had been "silenced." A vulgarian gets a one-day penalty, and suddenly she's Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Rep. Brown was not being silenced. She was being admonished for a crazy display of narcissism utterly irrelevant to the bill under discussion. I would never in a million years silence a woman because of her views on abortion, but I'd vote for a month of silence from this self-dramatizing freak.
The media are in full smirk mode, not at Rep. Brown's perversely self-referential speech positing that Republican legislators wanted to date-rape her, but at Republican bluenoses, whom they seem to think are shocked by the word "vagina."
Hey, does anyone else remember way back into the distant past three months ago when liberals were ablaze with indignation because Rush Limbaugh used the "s-word" to describe Sandra Fluke, another drama queen, who was demanding taxpayers pay for her contraception? That word had liberals fainting like Victorian virgins.
In a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, 75 Democrats in Congress called the language used by Limbaugh "sexually charged," "patently offensive," "obscene and indecent," and called on Republican leaders to condemn it. The president of the United States even called Fluke to see if she was OK after having been called ... the "s-word"!
But now, lo these many weeks later, you can't find a liberal female who isn't screaming "vagina." Thousands of beastly women appeared near the Michigan statehouse on Monday -- as well as every show, every hour on MSNBC that night -- to shout "vagina!"
On one of the 800 TV shows Rep. Brown did this week -- which, ironically, were the exact same shows that had featured Fluke describing her trauma at having been called the "s-word" -- MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell gushed about the advances society has made since the days when women did not prattle about their vaginas in public. He said: "It's easy, I think, for some of our audience tonight who are in their 30s or 20s to not be able to even comprehend what that world was like."
Rep. Brown somberly agreed, saying, "We have all, as women, come a long way."
Another guest, Eve Ensler, authoress of "The Vagina Monologues," talked about the magic of thousands of women shouting "vagina" in public: "Many young women came up to thank both of us for giving them voice, for allowing them to be authentic, for allowing them to love their bodies, for allowing them to feel agency over their bodies and their rights, to know that they have choices, that what they decide to do with the reproductive decisions or abortion decisions or whatever they decide is their choice. It's their body."
That is, unless your little body hasn't been born yet, in which case, liberals think it can be torn to shreds and dumped in the garbage -- a point they argue by shouting "vagina" and claiming Republican legislators want to date-rape them.