I think we've found another Republican woman who is in serious competition with Sarah Palin for the word-salad award after watching this interview on Fox News Sunday with Republican, Utah House candidate Mia Love: GOP House Candidate Claims GOP War On Women Will Create ‘More Free Choice’ For Women:
Small town Mayor Mia Love (R-UT), a GOP congressional candidate who received a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, is considered a rising star by many within her party. Yet she offered a defense of the Republican Party’s plans to roll back reproductive freedom on Fox News Sunday today that takes a significant amount of liberty with the English language. In a discussion about the GOP’s plan to make abortion illegal, defund Planned Parenthood and enable employers to restrict their employees’ access to birth control, Love suggested these policies will lead to “more free choice and more liberties” for women.
Love also claimed that GOP policies will let her “keep a little bit of my own money so I can pay for my own contraceptives if I want to,” but that’s only true if Love is very wealthy. Even under the most generous reading of the Romney/Ryan tax plan, middle class families would experience a tax increase of up to $2000.
Transcript below the fold.
WALLACE: Let me talk about another subject. Democrats are accusing your party of waging a war on women, wanting to take away choice on abortion, wanting to cut federal funding for Planned Parenthood, wanting to limit access to insurance for birth control. How do you respond to these charges that the Republicans are waging a war on women?
LOVE: Well, think about this -- under President Obama, I think women have suffered a little bit more. If you think about it, 5.7 million women are out of the work. We've gone from 7 percent unemployment to 7.8 percent unemployment. And I would like federal government to let me keep a little bit of my own so I can pay for my own contraceptives if I want to.
WALLACE: That's one of the criticisms that Republicans level back at Democrats and say, oh, they are not talking about women's reproductive rights, they're not talking about the economy.
LOVE: Well, again, I -- to me, it's about choice. And I want more free choice and more liberties than anything else. So I think that federal government trying to get and bring the so-called war on women, I think it's just a way to distract from the fact that they're not talking about their failed policies, which is again --
WALLACE: When you say choice, Democrats would say your party would want to take away the choice when it comes to abortion?
LOVE: Well, I -- the role that government does play to protect life, liberty and pursuit of the happiness. And I think that we should be protecting life. I am a pro-life person. I believe that you have more choices before somebody ends up getting pregnant, and I think it's important that we are able to have the freedom to exercise that choice and it's up to you how you want to do that.
But I think that we should be getting into the weeds on all of this because I think that these are things that we teach in my home. These are things that are private. We should just focus on the economy and what's happening with the economy.
