As I’m sure you know, in the bad old days there was a vulgar, racist institution in the entertainment business known as the minstrel show. White performers in blackface would sing and dance in crude, “comic” parodies of black culture. This sort of thing, happily, died out. But there has been a revival of sorts in recent years. It’s part of the Radical Right’s obsession with controlling and subjugating women. It’s the monitoring of women’s menstrual cycles. Such monitoring is part and parcel of the relentless war against female reproductive freedom. And this hideous invasion of privacy, this violation of the fundamental rights of women, has gained a prominent advocate: J. D. Vance. Josh Marshall alerted us all to this last month:
So for instance, consider the ability of a woman from an abortion-ban state to travel to another state to get a legal abortion, or her ability to receive legal abortion drugs through the mail. The news has been filled with proposed or actual laws which would attempt to restrict travel to receive abortions in other states, charge those who travel or criminalize those who might facilitate such travel or facilitate the legal shipment of prescribed abortion drugs through the mail. Of course, local police agencies might simply take it upon themselves to pull records to see who had unexplained disruptions to their menstrual cycles.
Your local sheriff might just want to know.
And so does JD Vance, it turns out.
The Biden HHS passed a rule in 2023 that limits law enforcement’s ability to search a patient’s reproductive health records. Twenty-eight Congressional Republicans signed a letter objecting to this. Twenty were basically Freedom [sic] Caucus members and 8 were Senators.
Vance was one of only eight Republican senators willing to go this hard for menstrual surveillance by state law enforcement agencies. The other 20 signatories are members of the House and a quick review of the names shows they are mostly hardcore Freedom Caucus types.
But think about it: even in the House GOP caucus, they could only get 20 people to sign this thing. That’s how extreme it is. But JD Vance signed.
But this is only one episode in Vance’s repulsive war on the rights of women. I’ve highlighted some of these issues before, but I think they bear repeating:
VANCE HAS FLIRTED WITH THE MOST VICIOUS MISOGYNISTS IN AMERICA
VANCE INSULTS AND DEMEANS OLDER WOMEN
VANCE CLAIMS TO SPEAK FOR SUBURBAN WOMEN
VANCE HAS UTTERLY INSANE VIEWS ON ABORTION
VANCE ADVOCATES ABOLISHING NO-FAULT DIVORCE
VANCE HAS STRONG TIES TO THE VERY WORST OF THE RADICAL, MISOGYNIST RELIGIOUS RIGHT
As a reminder, this is Doug Wilson:
LET THIS BE THE RESPONSE OF AMERICA’S WOMEN:
Link to one of my GOTV diaries.
