Rand Paul: Rights And Liberties For Me... But Not For Thee, Not If You Are Female

Are any women out there thinking Rand Paul might be the presidential candidate for them, based on his emphasis of the often-mentioned "right to be left alone" by the government? If so, you'd better read what Zoë Carpenter at The Nation has to say:

“The right to be left alone is the most cherished of rights,” Kentucky senator and presidential aspirant Rand Paul said over the weekend in San Francisco. He was there to sell himself to the young tech elite as a civil-liberties crusader; the only candidate willing to take an uncompromising stand against government surveillance. He cares so deeply about privacy that he’s planning to filibuster the renewal of parts of the Patriot Act.

"What every woman really needs is
one of my fingers." - Sen. Rand Paul

But the leader of “the leave-me-the-hell-alone coalition” is simultaneously, albeit more quietly, arguing that women should have little privacy in their healthcare decisions. “The government does have some role in our lives,” Paul said at a summit organized by the anti-choice Susan B Anthony List in April, by which he meant making abortion illegal. Paul describes himself as “100 percent pro-life.” Along with all of the other Republican presidential candidates he supports a bill that resurfaced this week in the House that would ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

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Oh, yes: Rights for him; no rights for you. Women of reproductive age, take note...