Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, gets it. “Rick Perry's remarks are incredibly condescending and insulting to women... Women are perfectly capable of deciding whether to choose adoption, end a pregnancy, or raise a child, and they don't need Rick Perry's help making that decision.”
But like all too many Republicans, Rick Perry just can’t disguise his disdain for women, or his malevolent desire to control them, keep them in their place, treat them like chattel to be dominated by men. The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t so much a cautionary tale to Republican men like Rick Perry, but a wish fulfilment fantasy. Perry is not only smarting because a woman had the audacity to stand up to him, but actually won, even when the battle was far from fair and square. He can’t accept it, won’t accept it, and – just as the Texas Republicans did their best to falsify the timestamp on the vote to ram through SB5 – he’s called for a second special legislative session to begin on Monday where the bill will almost certainly be signed into law. They can’t win fairly, they know it, and don’t care if the world watches while they cheat.
But one thing Wendy Davis’s brave filibuster showed not just Texas, but the entire country, is that rich white conservative men like Rick Perry and the rest of his ilk in the Texas government might have to gerrymander and rig the rules to stay in power, but they are not representative of the majority of people. Wendy Davis has woken a sleeping giant, and it’s pissed off. She and the minority Democrats in Texas might ultimately lose this battle, but she has aroused an awareness that the crazies and the fundamentalists on the right not only can be beaten, they must be.
Or the proud daughters and sisters and mothers of Texas, and all the men who love them, will continue to be subjugated to the will of a malevolent few who know that opposing abortion is less about protecting any ‘rights’ of the unborn than it is about controlling an individual’s right of choice and silencing the voices of any who threaten their ideology and their power.