Republican War on Women Continues Unabated

A Republican-backed bill introduced in the North Carolina legislature would make exposing "the nipple, or any portion of the aureola, of the female breast" a crime punishable by up to six months in prison for a first offense. This bill is a direct response to topless women's equality protests that had been held in Asheville, NC in 2011 and 2012. In other words, it's a blatant attempt to criminalize a form of political statement that applies only to women.

Why are Republicans so afraid of titties? Why is an exposed breast so much more dangerous than  carrying a loaded weapon in public? In the last year tens of thousands of people have died from gun violence, but there are apparently no deaths caused by bared breasts. (Though there is that case from 1998 where a Florida man claimed he got whiplash from a stripper with 60-HH breasts who tit-slapped him upside the head.)

I can see passing a law that prohibits the exposure of hairy manboobs out of concern for the sanity of anyone who might see such a horror. But under this law such a man could freely flaunt  his grotesquely huge mammaries in public, while a slender woman with far smaller breasts would go to jail. A simple nipple slip could land a mother breastfeeding her child in the slammer for 30 days. A young woman flashing her breasts during Mardi Gras could go to prison for six months.

Are Republicans in North Carolina completely oblivious to the realities of modern life? Any 10-year-old boy can find countless naked breasts to ogle just by doing an image search on the Internet. Go into any art museum and you'll find numerous paintings and statues of the naked female form. Go to the library and dig through back issues of National Geographic and you'll find pictures of topless African and South American indigenes.

This is exactly the same Taliban mindset that kept Afghan girls out of schools, prevents women in Saudi Arabia from driving and forces women in some Muslim countries to wear head-to-toe chadors. This kind of thinking blames women for "inciting" lust in men, but it is in fact men who are incapable of controlling their basest impulses and want to blame and hurt those who they feel are tempting them.

By stigmatizing the female body as indecent they're programming their children to think that women are somehow unworthy and inferior. Half those kids will have breasts when they grow up, and -- I presume -- these Republican lawmakers will want the other half to marry someone who has breasts. And as any parent should know, they more you try to keep things away from kids, the more they want the forbidden fruit. So it's ultimately counterproductive.

Sadly, it's not at all surprising that this happened in North Carolina. They, like several other conservative states, passed a law that required invasive vaginal ultrasound probes before having an abortion. And last year Steven Colbert mocked the state for outlawing science when they passed a law that banned the sea level rise that's occurring due to higher ocean temperatures.

There's an old saw, usually attributed to Mark Twain, that goes, "No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." It needs to be updated to, "No woman's freedom, body and privacy are safe while Republicans control the legislature."