(Apologies and full credit to Weapons Grade Stupid)
In the midst of all the chaos on Sunday night as the Texas legislature pushed through a series of stringent restrictions on abortion and women’s health, it was easy to miss what might have been the most inaccurate and dangerous claim of the evening: One state representative tried to argue on the State House floor that rape kits are a form of abortion. Texas Rep. Jody Laubenberg (R) sponsored several anti-abortion measures currently making their way to the Governor’s desk. Taken together, they would shut down the vast majority of the state’s women’s health clinics and criminalize abortions after 20 weeks. But in reasoning out why she did not support an exemption for rape victims in the 20-week ban, Laubenberg betrayed a woeful lack of information on the procedures a victim of rape undergoes — namely, the “rape kit,” which is used to collect data on the assailant and in no way relates to pregnancy
There’s ill-informed. There’s just plain wrong. There’s aggressively and wantonly stupid. And then there’s Jody Laubenberg, for whom I can’t find the words to adequately describe the depths of her…well, I’m not certain stupidity is strong enough, but it’s all I’ve got.
I can understand a Republican being wrong on the facts because they’re too lazy to do their homework and/or fixated on their ideology/theology; that’s hardly newsworthy. What I can’t abide is a Republican (and a woman at that) who can’t be bothered to understand something as simple as the purpose of a rape kit. To refer to Laubenberg’s idiocy as a “woeful lack of information” is beyond charitable. Her stunning vacuousness is behind public policy that all but legalizes the concept that women are rightfully the property of men. Stupid policy is bad enough. Stupid people making policy is dangerous and too often results in doing real harm to a class of people who lack the resources to effectively make their case.
Laubenberg seems not at all bothered by not having a clue about what a rape kit is actually used for. It’s not a form of abortion; it’s how evidence is collected from a woman after she’s raped. If Laubenberg could be bothered to emerge from her intellectual torpor, she might come to understand that a rape kit isn’t about a woman killing her unborn child (as Laubenberg defines it). It’s about making an effort to collect DNA evidence in the hope that her rapist might be identified and arrested.
The right of a Texas woman to control her own body suffered a significant blow yesterday morning. That might be understandable if Republicans behind the new law were operating from a place grounded in facts and truth. Instead, we have Jody Laubenberg, a Republican legislator who has difficulty even debating bills on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives, participating in the subjugation of her own gender. It’s What Jesus Would Do, no?
The Stupid is strong in this one….
