The first thing you need to keep in mind about Mike Huckabee is that, above all else, he trusts his glibness and the sonic wonder of his oratorical wizardry.
It comes from a previous career spent preaching to a choir, articulating directly from God’s mouth to mortal ears. Presumably.
He’s heard “amen” too many times in his life.
He believes profundity will inevitably ensue so long as he keeps stringing syllables together rhythmically.
So he got started holding forth the other day to a roomful of Republicans and ended up saying women are nymphomaniacs.
Wait. No. That’s not what he said. He said Democrats think women are nymphomaniacs.
Wait. No. That’s not what he said either. He said that, if Democrats want to make women believe that they are nymphomaniacs—and dependent on the government to deliver them birth control because they are so sex-crazed that they can’t control their libidos—then Republicans will be glad to have that debate.
Yeah. That’s it. That’s what he said after a long-wending dependent clause. Except he didn’t use the word nymphomaniac. I put that in there for fun.
Well, not fun. To make fun. Not of women. Or of nymphomaniacs.
I make fun only of Huckabee’s odd emphasis on the subject of women having sex, not unlike Rush Limbaugh calling that young woman from Georgetown a “slut” because she had the utter temerity to testify for government assistance for women’s contraception.
Let’s put the whole Huckabee quote out there before moving on. Here’s what the preacher man said to the Republican National Committee: “If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. Let’s take that discussion all across America.”
That is to say that—no matter the ultimately deciphered meaning of Huckabee’s meandering verbal journey—he, like many old Republican men, couches the issue of women’s reproductive health in the context of promiscuous female sexual behavior.
And he plainly asserts, or at least implies, that Democrats could make women believe they are oversexed, and that Republicans could persuade them otherwise—that, either way, women are pliable, unable to make their own independent judgments of their own behavior.
Man, old Republican men inevitably commingle these subjects—women’s reproductive health, women’s high-risk pregnancies, women’s rights and women liking sex more than they ought to like it, at least by the worldview of these old Republican men.
Many of these old Republican men don’t want women enjoying sex because they think women enjoying sex is nasty, naughty, dirty—as bad, even, as dancing.
So they object to government assisting in the acquisition of women’s contraception. And they object to abortion.
They surmise that women might stop all this nastiness if they had to give birth more often. Sometimes they even seem to be saying that women would stop being raped or victimized by incest if they were forced to have those babies.
What these old Republican men cannot seem to grasp—what their hang-ups seem to blind them to—is that the issue of women’s contraception is based on something other than female horniness.
If a woman has a birth-control pill or device in her home, and if the cost of its purchase was borne by the prescription-drug rider of her health-insurance policy, then it does not necessarily follow that she is a prostitute or slut or porn star.
These old Republican men need to get that fantasy out of their political speechmaking and public policymaking.
Their fantasies are their own business, actually, so long as these old Republican men keep them where they belong, which is in their wildest secret imaginings.
It could be that—at her station in life—the woman possessed of government-aided contraception seeks the same right as a man to engage in discreet, mature sexual relations if she so chooses of her own free will, and to so engage without major ramifications for her personal organs or at great risk of pregnancy.
Or maybe her doctor has told her she has reproductive-health issues that would risk complications in pregnancy.
Or maybe she’s happily married and possessed of all the children she and her husband want.
Or maybe the woman is simply poor. There’s always that possibility, one seemingly lost on old Republican men.
Her libido likely is normal, which is to say under control, healthy in its compartment, but certainly not without existence.
Where would we be if the female libido was nonexistent?
We’d all be little aimless swimmers with nothing to catch up to and latch onto.
Also badly misfired in Huckabee’s meandering oratorical disaster was the assertion that Republicans want to have this debate with Democrats.
That’s not remotely so. Quite the contrary, actually.
Here’s where America stands on these issues: Health-insurance plans ought to cover women’s contraception. Religious groups not wanting to provide that coverage through employee insurance should not be forced. Private employers opposing the offering of such coverage on religious grounds—that’s close in the polling, but narrowly on the side of requiring those employers to follow the law like other private employers.
Nothing about that accrues to the political advantage of a bunch of old Republican men introducing a woman’s libido into the discussion.
Democrats want that debate. Democrats crave that debate.
Democrats call this the Republican war on women. But that’s not it, exactly. Old Republican men seem more basically at war with their own hang-ups.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.