Conn. is no Strict Daddy

Pretending there is such a thing as “settled law” when it comes to a woman’s body is a fool’s errand, and it will remain so as long as he-man woman haters write our laws.

Around the country, state legislators are doing their best to eliminate women’s access to safe abortions. In Texas, a law that shrinks the window for abortion to about six weeks, and encourages private citizens to be vigilantes sailed through the legislature. Idaho quickly followed suit. In my home state of Missouri, legislators want to penalize anyone who gets an abortion, even if they go to another state to do so. For a while, those same Missouri legislators actually considered banning abortions for ectopic pregnancies — which can kill a woman. But if you’re already thinking of women as strictly holding pens until fetuses are viable, a woman’s health is not really a consideration, now, is it?

In the bluest of blue states, Connecticut, legislators are discussing whether residents could be held liable by those vigilantes in other states, if Connecticut residents help people who cross the state line to get abortions here.

Forgive me, but there’s historic precedent for states trying to force other states to enforce their bad laws. It doesn’t work, not then and not now.

How did we get to such a ridiculous place? Linguist

George Lakoff wrote in “Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t” that the conservative views the world as a traditional family, with a Strict Father at the helm. Liberals, said Lakoff, see the world family as more nurturing and less ruled by fear.

The conservative approach supposes that people need to be led — by straight white men — who will make decisions for them, and those decisions range from the economic to the deeply personal — such as whether a grown woman can or should be sexually active.

Strict Daddy is everywhere. In states where Strict Daddy wants to take away a woman’s right to abortion, there festers attendant legislation that seeks to put contraceptives out of reach as well. So, this isn’t strictly about privacy or protecting fetuses. This goes deeper, and it shows itself in every way imaginable.

Last week, Strict Daddy mentality allowed — and even encouraged — a pack of legislators to badger, interrupt and harangue a highly qualified (Black female) candidate for the Supreme Court. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s resume is a call to arms for people who are in over their heads. She raises the cosmic bar, and those senators knew it, and they reacted like whiny children.

As he questioned Judge Jackson, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, mentioned “straw men,” “worn talking points” and “imagined grievances.” These, in fact, formed the framework of comments by Sen. Lindsey Graham, who couldn’t understand why 20 years ago, Democrats didn’t immediately confirm another African-American woman, retired U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a conservative whom even conservative columnist George Will found outside the mainstream. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human

Rights opposed her confirmation in the early 2000s, because, according to the group, then-California Supreme Court Justice Brown — who was eventually confirmed, by the way — had demonstrated “a strong, persistent and disturbing hostility toward affirmative action, civil rights, the rights of individuals with disabilities, workers’ rights and the fairness of the criminal justice system.”

In other words, she was not a judge Democrats could support, but Sen. Graham has never let the facts get in the way of a televised meltdown. And besides, in Graham’s world, two women who belong to the same race and share at least one name must certainly be the same woman. In Graham’s world, not supporting Brown — who is, after all, Black — was racist on the part of Democrats because Brown is, after all, Black.

That smells like racism from here, and if someone could let Sen. Graham know, that would be great.

It’s tempting to think that this is the mentality we now confront, but this is the mentality women — particularly women of color — have always faced. It is not new. And conservatives committed to taking America back to those halcyon years when women and people of color couldn’t vote have been among our legislators all along. In my grandparents’ day, those same people decried “modernity,” which included (but was not limited to) the telephone, moving pictures and shorter hem lines on women.

If their concerns have changed (immigrants, women, gays, lesbians and members of the trans community), conservatives have never stopped fund-raising, never stopped sponsoring ignorant billboards, never stopped hosting events such as their socalled March for Life last week in Hartford. The words on the posters may change (“Black Babies’ Lives Matter”), but the fear and overall conceit that women can’t possibly make choices for themselves are eternal.

Last week’s march was its first time in Hartford, which is hours and hours away from the sponsors’ regular stomping grounds in D.C. Does coming to Hartford mean Strict Daddy thinks progressive Connecticut, home of Griswold v. Connecticut , where a woman’s right to choose has been codified into our state law, is a potential win?

No, I can’t believe I’m still protesting this stuff either. But here we are. And Strict Daddies everywhere? Bring it.

Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.