The root of the war on women

From Alternet, a compelling essay:

We’re having this debate over issues once considered settled because the right is trying to blame virtually all of the nation’s economic and social problems on one cause: the supposedly broken American family. It’s their only solution. It’s also increasingly clear that shoring up the family, in their view, involves restoring a traditional vision of the family, in which the man is head of the household, and women accept their civilizing role....

There it [is]: the notion that when government supports women, it is substituting itself in the role of husband and father. I tried to tell Steele that nothing about a woman having no co-pay for contraception prevents her male partner from being “responsible” once they “come together.” I never even got to make the point that women have a lot of the same health issues even if they’re not with a male partner. Some of us use the pill for health reasons, some of us use it to plan when to have children, and some of us use it to have sex we enjoy in relationships where there’s no thought of creating a family. The way men always have, by the way.

But the fact that I had to skirt the border of explaining how our lady parts work, and what special health needs we have from puberty to post-menopause, seems part of the problem: I don’t want to have to do that on national television — on a political news show. Why are we even having this conversation in 2012?

.... Today, there are other ways to shore up the family. If economically successful, college-educated people are more likely to marry and stay married, as Murray and his conservative colleagues agree they are, shouldn’t we look for ways to make sure more Americans are economically successful and college-educated? It seems like a win-win, whether our goal is to support marriage or to prevent the continued immiseration of the American working and middle classes, right?

Meanwhile, in Arizona, a new law would declare women pregnant two weeks before conception. Not kidding.

Arizona lawmakers gave final passage to three anti-abortion bills Tuesday afternoon, including one that declares pregnancies in the state begin two weeks before conception.