The Republican Solution to Everything—Even School Shootings—Is Disenfranchising Women
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Twitter.com/RepTimBurchett
You’ve likely already seen the viral video of Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett being (probably unintentionally) honest about the Republican position on school shootings. After this week’s massacre at Nashville’s The Covenant School, Burchett told reporters, “we're not gonna fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals… I don’t see any real role that [Congress] could do other than mess things up, honestly… I don’t think you’re going to stop the gun violence. I think you got to change people’s hearts. You know, as a Christian, as we talk about in the church, and I’ve said this many times, I think we really need a revival in this country.”
The laissez-fair attitude toward the tragic and violent deaths of small children coupled with casual evangelism is disturbing enough, but he said something else in the same interview that really stuck out to me. When the reporter asked him how he and his wife protect their daughter, his response was, “we homeschool her.”
This is deeply insensitive, of course. But it’s also telling, because there is no ‘we,’ right? Burchett is a working politician; he means that his wife homeschools their child—which coincidentally fits into a larger, conservative endgame: using every tool they can, even massacres, to push women back into the home. As New York Times columnist, sociologist and associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out on Twitter this week, “their school shooting solution is women. At home. In the private sphere. And charters but mostly women at home. It’s all reproductive justice” (emphasis mine).
We’ve recognized the hypocrisy of claiming to be pro-life and not caring about people’s actual lives for a long time, but I don’t think I understood how directly gun control and reproductive justice were linked until watching that video. But now that I get it, I want to spend some time mapping out how these seemingly separate issues are actually deeply connected, and why it matters.
The conservative ‘solution’ to every social ill is for women to return to the private sphere
I distinctly remember the moment I identified myself as pro-choice, and it was because of an email forward. (So millennial.) I lost the password to tinkerbelle85@hotmail.com, or whatever my first email address was, a long time ago, so we’re depending on my somewhat hazy memory here, but I know I was struck by how clearly this anonymous writer broke it down: conservatives say they’re pro-life, but they’re actually pro-forced birth, because if they really cared about life, they’d support higher taxation to fund social services, they’d want cost-of-living raises, they’d invest in safe and affordable housing, they’d believe everyone should have access to healthcare. At 38, this seems obvious. But at 17? It was very clarifying to understand that Republican rhetoric about the sanctity of life was just that—rhetoric that didn’t accurately reflect their policy decisions, much less their values. This made it easier for me to appreciate that reproductive justice is about systems, and helped me understand why I shouldn’t disproportionately prioritize a single fetus’ potential in a larger conversation about the importance of bodily autonomy.
I don’t remember if that email mentioned gun control, but of course, that’s also part of it, right? And not just on the straightforward preservation of life front. As Sheldon Orgill and Kurtis Smith, then peer educators in the Planned Parenthood of New York City's Youth Health Promoters program, explained in a 2018 op-ed for Teen Vogue, “gun violence is not just a social issue, but is also a critical issue in reproductive justice. SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective defines reproductive justice as ‘the human right to maintain bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and healthy communities.’ Right now, countless parents nationwide must think about this threat to their children’s safety every day, and in their schools no less. This violates their fundamental right to raise their children in a safe and healthy environment, and it violates our right to live in one.” So: no matter how privileged we might be, none of us have reproductive freedom if our decisions to have, or not to have children, are shaped by external, systemic forces, like environmental racism, cost of living, police brutality and yes, school shootings.
Once we understand that, it’s easier to see how so many conservative policy decisions come back to the same thing: reducing women’s participation in public life by making that participation impractical or unappealing. Yes, American parents of all genders might fear sending their children to school knowing there is a not-zero-percent risk that their child might be killed, maimed or, at the bare minimum, deeply traumatized by someone who managed to buy an assault rifle from their local Walmart, or who lives in a state with a gun show loophole or private sale exemption. But there is one gender that bears the disproportionate responsibility for, and emotional labour of, childcare in Western society, so of course it’s women who are held up by conservatives as a potential solution (“we homeschool her,” remember?) and who may even self-select out of the workforce. And I’m deliberately not saying ‘choose to leave the workforce’ here, because is it really a choice if you’re doing something because you feel like you have no other option?
Conservatives are trying to disincentivize women from working in other ways, too
As feminist writer Moira Donegan argues, this goes well beyond guns. “If public schools are underfunded and circumscribed by political agitation such that fail to educate children, and guns are so ubiquitous that children are routinely massacred there, more and more women and kids will be forced to stay home—where men can control them more easily,” she wrote on Twitter this week. Which… yes. Republicans’ recent griping about “school choice” is actually about cutting public school funding. This has—unsurprisingly—devastating impacts on poor, racialized and queer kids, but it will actually further devastate the entire American public school system. And please don’t think underspending on education is only an American problem; in the most recent provincial budget, Ontario premier Doug Ford used an accounting trick to hide a $47 million cut to the province’s education system.
I’d argue this same strategy is also evident when we look at other factors that cause women to leave the workforce, like a lack of labour protections, low wages, limited access to childcare… This even played into America’s COVID response; politicians weren't worried about transmission and shutting down the public sector because they could push private solutions and homeschooling as an alternative, while simultaneously fighting against replacing Americans’ lost income. So yes, on an individual basis, making the call to quit your job looks like doing the math and figuring out what works best for your family. But when you zoom out, it becomes clear that your calculations are being influenced by deliberate policy decisions.
To be clear, I’m not saying Republicans are evil geniuses who have been executing a perfectly plotted-out plan to undo strides toward gender equality by undermining reproductive rights for the past five decades. (Marjorie Taylor Green alone undermines the genius thing, sorry not sorry.) I mean, they have been trying to undermine reproductive rights for decades, but I think they also just discovered a discriminatory little side benefit to their other, ever more right-moving policies and legislation, and embraced it. I mean, pre-1970, support for reproductive rights wasn’t even split along party lines. According to a 2019 Vox article, “while Republican President Gerald Ford opposed Roe v. Wade, first lady Betty Ford was an abortion-rights supporter and Ford’s vice president Nelson Rockefeller presided over the repeal of abortion restrictions in New York... [and] in Congress, Republicans voted against abortion at about the same rate as Democrats.” In fact, it was only during Republican Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign that anti-abortion policies became “part of a larger effort to paint the Republican Party as pro-family in a way that would help mobilize socially conservative voters.”
Gun rights also became a Republican issue in the 1970s, when the National Rifle Association transitioned from a hobbyist group into a hard-line lobbying body. Prior to that, the NRA and Republicans were for gun control, because they wanted to make it harder for the Black Panthers to arm themselves. It was only later that the group began promoting gun ownership and undermining any attempts at gun reform, which happened at the same time that it was forging economic ties to gun manufacturers. In both cases, power and money were the main motivators; over the years, though, these policies began working together to create a society that is increasingly inhospitable to women.
And then there’s conservative fearmongering about the Nashville shooter’s gender
This is not quite the same thing, but there’s another gender angle we have to acknowledge, too, and that is the shooter’s identity. Within hours of Monday’s massacre, Nashville police told media that they believed the shooter, Audrey Hale, was trans and were investigating whether that “played a role into this incident.” We still don’t know how or why they came to that conclusion, what role Hale’s gender may have played in their motive, or even confirmation that they were trans—but we have seen conservative media outlets and pundits gleefully attempt to use this attack to further demonize trans and gender nonconforming people. Both Taylor Green and Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham wondered whether Hale was taking testosterone and/or medication for mental illness and speculated how that might contribute to their motivations. And online, NBC News reports that “talking points about violence perpetrated by trans people quickly filtering to mainstream voices under the hashtag #transterror,” including far-right trolls that spread misinformation about other recent shootings that they claimed were carried out by people who weren’t cis.
The most important thing to note here is that this is false and incredibly dangerous for trans people, who are already facing increased threats and actual incidents of violence thanks to a steady pattern of escalating, Republican-driven anti-trans sentiment. But, I think it’s worth situating conservatives’ exploitation of Hale’s gender in the conversation we’ve been having here, too, because the end goal is pretty similar in both cases. Whether you’re a cis woman, a trans person of any gender or non-binary person, it’s clear that these powerful white men would like to see us retreat from public life, returning instead to a social and political position where we’re disempowered, disenfranchised and dependent.
On Instagram earlier this week, I said that I didn’t want to give into hopelessness, but that I was pretty sure America wouldn’t be taking any action on gun control. Instead, conservatives will only have thoughts and prayers to offer, and we’ll all share the little details we learn about the victims—nine-year-olds Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs, as well as Mike Hill, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60 and Cynthia Peak, 61—as a reminder that they were real… and gun violence will remain the leading cause of death for American children.
I still think that’s true, which is super depressing, but as usual, I think it’s better to talk about these injustices than not—even if that just allows us to acknowledge each other’s feelings about how fucked this all is.
✨ Episode 2 of Making Our Own Way: RepresentASIAN Project Founder Madelyn Chung ✨
In episode two of Making Our Own Way, I chat with writer, editor, psychotherapist and all-around gem Madelyn Chung about why we still need to push for representation, the importance of holding ourselves accountable and… the hot guys and girls of Physical 100. For balance!
And Did You Hear About…
Writer Jayson Greene revisiting “Blurred Lines” on its 10th anniversary. Click for the writing (“‘Blurred Lines’ is a poisonous time capsule. In many ways, all of them unfortunate, it could be considered the song of the 2010s”) stay for the smart analysis of the song’s impact, from the way it changed mainstream pop cultural critique to its effect on copyright litigation.
This truly perfect math lesson.
Why U.S. government agencies are suddenly really funny on Twitter.
Vulture’s profile of romance author Emily Henry, which argues very convincingly that love is humiliating and that we should just embrace the cringe. (Also: news just broke that Book Lovers, which is my favourite of her novels, is going to be a movie.)
This informative—but also kind of depressing—Twitter thread.
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