Small government, Republican style

Don’t you love the way Republicans pretend to be committed to small government?

For years they’ve decided that there is one small segment of society who isn’t entitled to privacy: women.

Things have gotten worse in recent years. We have seen an unprecedented wave of anti-choice, anti-woman legislative proposals.

According to USA Today:



Legislatures in more than 30 states are weighing – and in some cases passing – many fast-moving bills to restrict abortion rights in a blitz that could prompt the Supreme Court to revisit the issue.

Along with bills prohibiting abortion outright, or in certain circumstances, they’re also pushing bills that go to the heart of the doctor-patient relationship, limiting where abortions can be performed, telling doctors what they have to say to their patients, and the like.

I think it’s important to keep straight in our minds what these bills are. To say they are anti-abortion bills oversimplifies it, and it really plays into the other side’s hands because abortion is more controversial among the general public than other choice related topics.

The Supreme Court has recognized in its precedents that the questions of choice, contraception, and procreation are decidedly based on our constitutional right to privacy.

You would think that a political party that pretends to a commitment to individual autonomy and limited government would be against these laws that restrict the doctor-patient relationship, wouldn’t you? After all, not only do they impinge on the personal autonomy of the person, the interfere with what is, at least in part, an economic transaction between the doctor (vendor) and patient (customer).

But no.

Here’s the latest. I don’t ordinarily link to Fox News, but they’re kind of the source for this stuff.



With a stroke of the governor’s pen, Florida is positioned to become the first state in the nation to prohibit physicians from asking patients if they have guns in their homes, a move some doctors say will interfere with health care.

That’s right, a coalition of gun nuts and small government Republicans have decided that those private conversations between doctors and patients are just a little, well, too private, and the way to fix that is for the government to reach its hand into every doctor’s office in the state, and tell those doctors what they are and are not allowed to talk to their patients about.

So let me get this straight. We need to have small government because it’s un-American to have government interfering with people’s private lives and individual economic transactions.

Except that if protecting privacy rights means protecting women’s rights, well, then, privacy rights go out the window and so does small government.

Or if privacy rights interfere with someone’s paranoid fantasies of big, scary government, well, there again, we can’t stand up to those paranoid fantasies so the privacy rights get chucked aside.

Thanks, Republicans. Stay consistent.

6 thoughts on “Small government, Republican style

  1. It’s time to take control of the conversation.  Driven as they are now by the wacky right, the Republican Party is anything BUT “conservative.”  

    Many of the measures being proposed in the House now represent an effort to purposely unravel the entire federal system.  We’re heading back in time to re-negotiate the Civil War.   Subjugating women, committing the poor and infirm to workhouses and disenfranchising minorities are not such unthinkable scenarios if we allow them to keep picking away at the threads.

  2. Since when are Republicans in favor of ‘small government’?

    Since when do Republicans give a crap about religious people?

    These are all convenient lies that they tell their constituents in order to gain more power over the minimal opposition they face in politics.

    The sole point of the GOP is to gain total political power for their corporate owners.  Exploiting dumb religious nuts, or idiot ‘libertarians’ is just one tool of many that the GOP uses regularly to gain absolute power.  That’s all they care about.  And no one is trying to stop them.

    Watch what the GOP actually does, don’t believe one word of what they say.

    The governor of Michigan is eliminating local government, installing a state-wide dictatorship under the direct control of the Governor.  Republican politicians don’t give one crap about local control, they only care about absolute authority.

    When – not if, but when – the GOP does to the Democratic Party what they did to the Communists in the 1950s (which Rush Limbaugh has said is a goal of the GOP) the idea of ‘Small Government’ will be thrown out.  Christian churches will be regulated just as they are now doing with Muslims.  Women will no longer have any rights, they will revert to being property.  No one is trying to stop them.

    Just look at where the GOP ideology ends up: slavery for 95% of the country, working for their corporate owners for life, men women and children.  That is what they want.  America as a third-world nation, with no rights, total poverty, a Syrian style police state that ruthlessly murders everyone that dares dream of a better life.  That is what the Republican Leadership is actively creating in America. Who will stop them?

    And who is going to stop them?  The fake Democrats that are all moderate Republicans to begin with?  Ignorant Americans that revel in their own stupidity?  Fox ‘News’ watchers that ardently believe every single lie they are told through that propaganda outlet?  Rush Limbaugh listeners that will never believe anything if Rush didn’t say it?

    The Republicans are already ignoring the Rule of Law.  The State AG in Wisconsin brazenly ignored a court order.  Think about that one for a second: the state’s highest legal authority openly defied an order from the judicial branch because he lost the decision! But then, who was going to stop him?  

    There is a group of folks out there (just go read Free Republic) that believe that several state governors should stage a coup against the democratically elected president of the United States simply because that President is from the Democratic Party.  They believe that 5 governors should find five US Marshals and simply go arrest the President right now because they don’t like the results of the election.

    Any society function because the people agree to abide by the rules.  When segments of society openly defy those rules and continually get away with it, society collapses.  The Republican Party has been openly defying the Rule of Law for decades, and they now have 24 hour-a-day propaganda outlets on TV and radio that constantly call for defiance of civilization.  No one dares stop them.

    In 2012, when the GOP loses to Obama yet again, will the GOP abide by the election results?  Or will they hold a swearing-in of their One True Republican President and set up a second Patriotic government to issue decrees against the Democratic Party?  Who would stop them?

    I am pretty sure that America is doomed to the Republican Party’s vision of the future: a feudal society where the King’s word is the only law.  A society where the legal authority of the King is not controlled by the Catholic Church, but by the Captains of Industry.  The far-right has already won, it’s only a matter of time.

    Because no one stopped them.

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