Women are so lazy, they won't work nights or weekends, amiright? That must be why so many of them work at Walmart—it's open so few hours.
Republicans are having real trouble with equal pay and the first rule of holes. As the New Hampshire legislature debates a Paycheck Equity Act, state Rep. Will Infantine
took his turn in the hole, digging:
“Men by and large make more because of some of the things they do. Their jobs are, by and large, more riskier,” Infantine, a former chairman of the Manchester Republican Committee, said on Wednesday, as captured by progressive advocacy group Granite State Progress. “They don’t mind working nights and weekends. They don’t mind working overtime, or outdoors in the elements.”
In response to an outburst from colleagues objecting to the Hillsborough Republican’s remarks, Infantine responded, “It’s not me!”
“Men work five or six hours longer a week than women do. When it comes to women and men who own businesses … women make half of what men do because of flexibility of work, men are more motivated by money than women are,” Infantine said, noting that facts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics validate his claims. “Guys! I’m not making this stuff up!”
Women don't work nights or weekends? Tell that to the women you'll doubtless find working in every store or restaurant you go into tonight or this weekend. Men are more motivated by money than women are? Are men also supposedly more motivated by having roofs over their heads and enough to eat than women are? Because that's more likely to be the difference made by the pay gap than, say, driving a Mercedes E-Class vs. a Mercedes S-Class.
You can come up with all sorts of justifications for the pay gap—Lord knows Republicans have put that fact on display over the last few weeks—but none of them explain it away. They just prove that if you want to discount something, you're going to find ways to say it doesn't count.
There's always a caveat that "New Hampshire state representative says X" is uncomfortably close to "that weird guy down the block says X," given that we're talking about a 400-person state House in a state with a population of 1.3 million. But in this case, Infantine is more or less in the mainstream of elected Republicans. Where he's not is in the mainstream of American voters.