Is America moving backwards?

photo taken from sustainabilityninja.com
By: Chris Valletta

As the 2010 mid-term elections came and went in the United States in the beginning of November, essentially everyone predicted the Republicans to be big winners. Well, essentially everyone was right. In the House of Representatives, the Republicans went from 179 seats to 239 seats, thus now gaining control as the majority. In addition, the Republicans gained another five seats in the Senate. Representative John Boehner has been selected to be the next speaker of the House of Representatives, and this fact should be quite alarming to the majority of American citizens. According to Nancy Keenan of the Huffington Post, we should all be concerned with this new selection for speaker.

Since the majority of American citizens do not yet know who Boehner is, Keenan tries to illustrate this fact in her article "Just How Bad Is Boehner for a Woman's Right to Choose?" Keenan is bold enough to state in the beginning that Boehner will soon emerge as the face and leader of the anti-choice movement in the United States. For his political agenda, Boehner even used this topic of anti-coice as the cornerstone, even going so far as to tell the National Right to Life Committee that "freedom is diminished when women have the right to choose." Boehner feels so strongly about the topic that he even accepted an endorsement from the Republican National Coalition for Life, which requires their endorsed candidates to not justify abortion even for those who were conceived through rape or incest.

Keenan also highlights some of Boehner's voting record:

1. Voted eight times against clinic protection for women and their doctors.
2. Voted twice to deny federal funding of abortion care to survivors of rape and incest.
3. Voted seventeen times to deny women in the military the right to use their own private funds for abortion care at overseas military hospitals.
4. Voted twice against the Family and Medical Leave Act (allows Americans to take off work for a sick family-member).

As one can see, there is a sexual repression undertone in Boehner's policies. Clearly, he is strictly against abortion, but in an extreme way, where he does not even see it acceptable in the cases of rape and incest. It seems as though he does not even want to acknowledge that sex exists and that sometimes terrible things can happen that is not the women's fault. Is he and the many other Americans that follow him moving backwards in time? Since when is it standard in this country to blatantly speak out against women's rights and still win elections in public office? The sad part is that there will be no problems for Boehner when it comes to voting on his proposals, for the House will now have 79 new anti-choice members to aid him. One cannot help but to  think of the sexual repression undertone that is the driving force behind all this madness.