Today, the Star Tribune is reporting that Minnesota Lieutenant Governor wannabe Matt Birk is an ignorant bigot, proving that there are some things even a $216,000 Harvard education cannot fix.
Speaking at the National Right to Life conference in Georgia last month, Birk said American culture “loudly but also stealthily promotes abortion” by “telling women they should look a certain way, they should have careers.” Birk said abortion rights activists who oppose bans that do not have exceptions for victims of rape or incest “always want to go to the rape card.”
An abortion, Birk said, is “not going to heal the wounds of that.”
“Two wrongs is not gonna … make it right,” said Birk, a former Minnesota Vikings center who’s the running mate of GOP-endorsed governor candidate Scott Jensen.
First, the “rape card” crack. When a woman is raped, impregnated, and defends her right to an abortion, she is not “playing the rape card.” She is not playing any card. She has been forcibly dealt a trauamatic card by violent criminal. A very difficult decision has been forced on her by the worst kind of thug, and the subsequent decisions about how to deal with that trauma must be made by her and her alone, not Matt Birk or any other smug, judgmental politician.
By the way, this pooh-poohing of crime victims is coming from the candidate running on an anti-crime platform. Isn’t that rich?
And then there is the career comment. Women don’t have careers because liberal society forced it on them. They have careers for the same reason men do. To support themselves. To support their families. To chase their dreams. Whether we’re talking about this career choice or the choice of whether, when, and how to have a family, these kinds of choices should be made by the woman involved, and not judged by pompous politicians like Matt Birk.
This shocking chapter of the 2022 gubernatorial campaign is yet another reminder that Minnesotans know almost nothing about Matt Birk the politician. Birk is revealing himself to be an extremist, just like the person at the top of the ticket, Scott Jensen. As I noted earlier, reporters should probe to learn where he stands on a whole host of issues:
Public funding for free birth control, which is proven to dramatically reduce unplanned pregnancies and abortions? Codifying marriage equality? Paid family and medical leave? Giving Minnesotans the option to buy into MinnesotCare? Prayer in public schools, and which religion’s prayer? Taxpayers subsidizing billionaire sports team owners’ stadiums? Making the wealthiest 1% of Minnesotans, which includes Birk, pay higher taxes to fund education improvements? Accepting Obamacare funding for Medicare expansion in Minnesota? “Don’t say gay” laws to punish teachers who mention gay people in school? Allowing parents to ban books from school libraries?
Maybe Birk would accuse me of playing the “issue card” here, but Minnesotans need to know more about a guy who cavalierly characterizes rape victims as “playing the rape card.”
Frankly, conservatives don’t believe that rape OR incest are real – as long as the man ejaculated, it was consensual sex, because.
It does feel like the Birk’s of the world shrug off the plight of a raped woman. He seems to only think of the 136,000 reported rapes in America every year, year after year, as something that just annoyingly gets in the way of his crusade to impose his religious and political will on all women — “the rape card” — not traumatic attacks that leave forcibly impregnated women with truly horrific problems to sort out. The lack of empathy is pretty breathtaking.
In Birk’s mind, he seems to consider himself the victim in the situation, because he has to put up with the annoying “rape card” questions. That self-victimization mindset has caused him to lose track of the rights of the true victim.
I got put in Twitter jail for replying to a man who was posting vile things about that, basically, women were lying about rape, and rape never caused any physical pain to a woman, because…
I admit I responded forcefully.
I’m not sure you’re the one who should be in Twitter Jail.
Someone should ask Birk if he thinks women should have the right to vote. He already stated he doesn’t think they should be allowed to drive or work. If he thinks they shouldn’t be allowed to vote, is he going to accept votes from female voters or will he reject them and insist they not be counted towards him and Jensen?
To be fair, I think Birk was pretty clearly joking about the driving thing. It was an awkward and not very funny joke, but he wasn’t actually expressing regret that women can drive.
The career thing, however, was not a joke. He seems to think women should be home caring for kids and not working. He doesn’t seem to be able to grasp that this is their decision, not his or his party’s decision. He also doesn’t seem to be able to grasp that not working simply isn’t an option for millions of moms who don’t have multi-millionaire professional athlete spouses. THAT, not liberal social norms, is why two-thirds of Minnesota women choose to be in the workforce, with very little support from politicians like Birk who oppose things like paid family and medical leave and child care assistance.
There is a long-standing line of BS going around the conservativerse that feminism has brainwashed women into wanting careers, when their true calling is the home. (This is not new, BTW, it’s been preached ever since married women got the right to own property & keep any earnings they made – say through writing novels – back in the 1870. Oh, the horror! Once you let women keep their earnings, what’s next? Free divorce?) I told a very conservative man once that okay, if you say the Bible says that all women should be full-time homemakers (which it doesn’t), then it also says that all men should be full-time farmers.
Yes, Birk seems to be in that mindset. He fathered eight children and I believe his wife doesn’t have a job outside the home. That’s wonderful that she chose that and is fortunate enough, with an NFL-begotten estimated net worth of $12 million, to be able to afford such a life. But 1) many women make different choices for themselves, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and 2) most women need to work in order to support themselves and/or their kids, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-athletes/nfl/matt-birk-net-worth/