The shock value of Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment a week ago made it an instant national story, but the controversy also focused attention on the lack of a rape exception in the anti-abortion platform language Republicans will ratify in Tampa this week. This came a few months after the congressional GOP picked a fight with Obama over the administration’s efforts to mandate contraception coverage, and after Gov. Bob McDonnell and his fellow Virginia Republicans were forced to abandon a plan to compel women to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound before having an abortion. (Instead, McDonnell signed a bill that mandates a non-invasive ultrasound.) There’s also been a proliferation of “personhood” amendments at the state level, along with numerous other Republican-led efforts to restrict abortion. All of this has allowed Democrats to accuse the GOP of pursuing a “war on women.”
It can be hard to appreciate now, but the Republican Party that nominated Ronald Reagan in Detroit that July was far more diverse, demographically and ideologically, than today’s. In some ways, Reagan’s primary season victory cemented the rightward shift that Barry Goldwater’s 1964 nomination had begun, but the old Rockefeller wing wasn’t yet dead. Authentic liberals like Jacob Javits, Mac Mathias and Lowell Weicker remained prominent, and the party wasn’t intimately identified with Southern-tinged evangelical Christianity the way it now is.Reagan, though, had aligned himself with the social and religious conservatives who were increasingly prominent in the party. In the mid-1970s, as broad initial support from both parties pushed the ERA to the brink of ratification, Phyllis Schlafly led a right-wing uprising that stalled momentum and won over conservative leaders, Reagan included. Reagan was also cultivating an alliance with evangelical Christians, a long inactive voting bloc that had been energized by Carter, a born-again Christian , in 1976, only to become disillusioned during his presidency. As governor of California in the late 1960s, Reagan had actually signed a liberal abortion law, but by ’80 he ran as a staunch opponent of the Roe vs. Wade decision.
and there began the birth of an Evangelical dominated party, knowing the lack of appeal today the changed their name to Tea Party, were the people not able to notice the vitriol had ramped and the right wing preachers were becoming more prominent within the republican party to now giving orders to that same party they took over that hostaged out or ratings in the world and refuse to help American's for fear of giving the progressives another go so the economy is their baby, they told you "our number one job is to make Barack Obama a one term President to cheers by those who have no jobs, how anal is that? then brought to the public eye the on going "war on women". so far they are batting a thousand in the Atilla the Hun HALL OF SHAME.
poor Reagan they have made him the envy of the pedestal just to find out he was just one of the moderate liberals with a heart. oh he compromised to get the work done and raised taxes 17 times, they don't even bother to re-vet their heroes, goes to lack of record knowledge of those they propose now.dumber than a sack of hair with two bricks in it if you want to be Pres.
