Jacob Sklar
Not long ago, this paper published an opinion piece in which the author stated that Republican sponsored bills requiring trans-vaginal ultrasounds for all women seeking abortions would create “state-sanctioned rape.” Of course, this claim is utterly ridiculous, as neither force nor the threat of force would be used to cause women to submit to such exams. Expanding the definition of rape to score political points is shameful at best, but the assertion that these bills are endorsing rape is not simply the view of one College of Wooster student, but has been repeated by leftist commentators since mid-February. This unfortunate argument is merely a small part of a larger campaign to paint the Democratic Party as the party of women, and Republicans as the anti-women party. Though Democrats have been quite successful in this branding campaign, the reality is that when it comes to the issues, Republicans are sometimes the ones standing up for the interests of women.
One of the reasons Democrats have been so successful in proclaiming themselves the party of women is that they have been able to define which issues are “women’s issues.” Lately, according to the Democratic Party, “women’s issues” can be defined as the debate over legal access to contraceptives and abortion, as a recent blog post on democrats.org makes clear. The post criticizes “[Republican Mitt] Romney’s attacks on women’s rights,” and includes a bullet point list of seven of these supposed attacks. Six of the seven are directly or indirectly related to contraceptives or abortion. By defining “women’s issues” as access to contraceptives and abortion, and then subsequently working to bolster their availability, Democrats have been able to paint themselves as the party of women.
Obviously, the issues that impact women in the United States range far beyond the availability of contraceptives or abortion. Indeed, every issue at stake in the 2012 campaign can affect women. On many of these issues, neither party can seriously claim to be advancing the interests of women any more than it advances the interests of men.
When it comes to crime prevention, however, Republicans are clearly the party defending women. According to 2009 data, men were more than four times as likely as women to be arrested for committing a violent crime, but women were nearly as likely as men to be the victim of such a crime. Democrats have long been the softer of the two major parties on crime, as evidenced by the decisions made by their appointees to the Supreme Court.
For instance, just last year in the case of Brown v. Plata, the Court’s four Democratic appointees teamed up with the Court’s most liberal Republican appointee to issue a 5-4 decision concluding that overcrowded prisons violate the eighth amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and that prisoners must be released if the situation cannot otherwise be remedied. This decision is characteristic of the longstanding tendencies of the Court’s left wing to put the interests of criminals, who are overwhelmingly male, ahead of their potential victims, who are quite often female. The success of Democrats in defining “women’s issues,” however, has ensured that crime prevention is never considered one of them.
While it is also true that Republicans have failed to make strong arguments challenging the Democratic definition of “women’s issues,” this is a political failure, as when it comes to policy, Republicans are likely to be advancing the interests of women.