We all know now that Donald Trump likes women’s rights as much as his hair likes his head, but it’d also be wrong to think that he’s just one bad apple. If we’re going to use any sort of apple metaphor to describe him, it’s that they’re all apples in a barrel that someone’s used as a toilet for a lol, and they’ve been steeped and stewing in wee and the rest for decades. It’s not a nice barrel, as it’s the Republican race for the presidential candidacy (the winner will face Hillary Clinton, or maybe Bernie Sanders in 2016) and they’re all pretty right wing.
Here’s a list of what they’ve said and done that’s so gross:
Scott Walker
He says that the decision for a woman to have an abortion is not between her and her doctor, but rather, ‘I believe it’s an unborn child.’
Ben Carson
Has blamed the extrajudicial killings of black men at the hands of police officers on… feminism! He also suggested that women be ‘re-educated’, so they don’t get ‘riled up’ about abortion.
Ted Cruz
He thinks that it’s OK for women to be fired by their bosses if they take the morning after pill or get an abortion. He also said the US-wide legalisation of gay marriage is ‘a real danger to our liberty’.
Jeb Bush
George W Bush’s little brother didn’t only say in 1994 that women on welfare should ‘get a husband’, but planned for a law that would’ve made unmarried mothers list their own details and the child’s father’s details (if unknown, she’d have to submit a list of all the people she’d slept with, along with defining characteristics) in a bid to shame young people from having kids out of wedlock. Now? He’s come on leaps and bounds and blurted out in a speech, ‘I'm not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women's health issues.’
Mike Huckabee
He called his female colleagues at Fox News ‘trashy’ for swearing. ‘This would be considered totally inappropriate to say these things in front of a woman, but for a woman to say them in a professional setting… that’s just trashy.’ Oh, and he’s also anti-abortion.
Carly Fiorina
Arguably not the worst of the bunch – she’s received as much sexism as the rest dish out – she still doesn’t get that women should have a little leg-up in certain issues. ‘As a woman I am insulted when I hear somebody talk about “women’s issues”. Every issue is a women’s issue.’
Ricky Perry
As well as presiding over more executions than any other Senator in US history, Rick Perry’s taken to task Wendy Davis, the Texas politician who spoke for 13 hours on abortion, so that a law couldn’t be passed to restrict women’s access to it. He said, ‘She was the daughter of a single woman, she was a teenage mother herself. She managed to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School and serve in the Texas senate. It is just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realise its full potential, and that every life matters.’ Basically implying that she, too, could’ve been an abortion. He also had a staff member who sent an email saying that children’s lives would be at stake if America were to get a female president.
Rick Santorum
He’s said that women pregnant via rape or incest should ‘make the best out of a bad situation’, doesn’t want women to serve in the army and that feminism’s made the world a worse-off place. ‘The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.’
Marco Rubio
Is so anti-abortion he ran a campaign on it using the slogan ‘Human life won't become a cat’. It’s bizarre, but his explanation is that life must begin at conception because a human embryo can’t become a cat. Oh wait, it’s still bizarre.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.