Video Spotlight: Rachel Maddow’s take on women candidates versus women’s rights

It’s feeling about time that I get back to my “Video Spotlight” roots, as it were.  Usually I post up short three or four minute videos.  Not today.  Today I’m asking you to take 13 minutes to listen to this BRILLIANT segment from this past Thursday’s The Rachel Maddow Show.  Rachel discusses the rise of women candidates in the GOP and the logical analysis that women candidates can have an influence on women’s votes.  She also explains that women (brace yourself) might not vote based on chromosomes, but rather on issues.  Shocking, right?!  Just as the number of women candidates in the GOP rises, so too rises that number of right-wingers, including women, who take the previously extreme view that abortion should be banned for ALL people, including victims of rape and incest.  So, will women citizens vote for women candidates who propose greater and greater limits to women and girls’ reproductive rights?  Hard to say.  I hope not.  They surely won’t have my vote.

In addition, the segment features a discussion with the wonderful Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University, who shares this gem:

"There is no place in the world and no time in history where restricting women's reproductive rights makes a people or a nation more free or more equal.  These extreme positions on abortion are without any question a war on American girls and women, and the fact that there are women who are both complicit and participatory in it is really neither surprising nor unprecedented.  It has always been true and it is incredibly important that we recognize that, despite the fact that we can be very proud of these women as women and as politicians, that the question is: how do women as citizens fair on the other side of them either being elected or not elected?"

Check it out:

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And, if you need a little laugh/what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you humor/sorrow in your life, you can give this little “Rachel Maddow is a lesbian vampire” segment from yesterday’s show a watch too.  Wow.