While the Internet debates the gender politics of Westeros, real-life state legislatures continue a war on women. Third place in DoubleX’s latest Worst State of the Week honors goes to Pennsylvania, where Republican legislators backed a resolution to honor John Patrick Stanton for his many years of obsessively harassing women trying to enter abortion clinics. The resolution calls Stanton, who died in January, a “humanitarian, activist and founder of the pro-life movement in this Commonwealth.”
Most people who had to deal with him regularly held a different opinion. Sari Stevens, executive director of Planned Parenthood in Pennsylvania, sent a letter to lawmakers detailing Stanton’s “humanitarian” harassment techniques. “He would use terms like ‘faggot’ and racial slurs—towards patients, staff, partners and even Rep. Brian Sims,” she explained, adding that he would wave “graphic, medically incorrect, and often racist signs around the facility targeting patients and staff.” His decades of hounding women “resulted in lawsuits, charges of harassment and trespassing, arrests and at least one incarceration,” Philly.com noted. Sounds like a real prince, Pennsylvania!
Frequent nominee Texas gets second place, for adapting voter suppression techniques into strategies to keep abortion out of the hands of young and low-income women. The Texas House approved a bill that requires women seeking abortions to present valid government ID. The ostensible reason is to shut out underage girls from accessing abortion. (And by the way, why do conservatives treat abortion like it’s an adult treat like booze or R-rated movies?) Undocumented immigrants would be most obviously affected, but as we see when it comes to voter ID laws, these restrictions shut out young adults and low-income women who move a lot or struggle to keep their driver’s licenses up to date.
This week’s winner is Louisiana, whose legislature gave into pressure from the National Rifle Association to water down a bill meant to keep convicted domestic abusers from getting guns. Under the NRA-approved version of the bill, you can beat up a woman you’re dating and still procure firearms so long as you’re not living with your victim. According to the Times-Picayune, gun-rights supporters worried that the original version of the bill could have applied “to someone who has been on a single date.” God forbid that a man who attacks a woman on a first date be denied access to a gun!
Keeping a loophole that allows men to terrorize dating partners with legal guns is particularly disturbing when you consider that, according to a report by Everytown for Gun Safety, the number of domestic homicides committed by dating partners now exceeds those committed by spouses.
The bill also excluded stalking as a crime serious enough to lose you your gun rights, even though a history of stalking behavior is reported in nine out of every 10 attempted domestic murders. But for creepy dudes who resort to stalking if women reject them after one date, don’t worry. Louisiana has your back.
