What Marjorie Taylor Greene Doesn’t Understand

Earlier this month on The View, Marjorie Taylor Greene mentioned one thing that progressives would possibly as soon as have discovered astonishing: that “the Republican Occasion has a lady drawback.” It’s a part of her rebranding as an advocate of girls, following her current cut up from Donald Trump. The previous MAGA loyalist, who not too long ago resigned from the Home of Representatives, joined Republican Tom Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna in a high-profile marketing campaign to power the Division of Justice to launch its recordsdata on Jeffrey Epstein. On November 19, each the Home and Senate handed the Epstein Information Transparency Act, which mandated that “all unclassified information, paperwork, communications, and investigative materials” be launched to the general public.

Greene hasn’t stopped there. In December, she proposed inviting Epstein’s victims to the Oval Workplace, one thing Trump refuses to do. The recordsdata, she laments, signify “the whole lot mistaken with Washington.” And as a lady, she considers it significantly private. “Greene herself had by no means been sexually abused, however she knew girls who had,” wrote The New York Occasions’ Robert Draper, after he carried out two prolonged interviews along with her. “In her personal small method…she might perceive what it was like for a girl to face as much as a strong man.”

In those self same interviews, Greene cited Trump’s dealing with of the Epstein case, and his bullying of feminine members of Congress, as emblematic of “why girls overwhelmingly don’t vote Republican.” She added that “there’s a really massive message right here.”

However how honest is Greene’s newfound concern for the rights and experiences of girls? If she actually believes that “how girls in management current themselves sends a message to youthful girls”—together with her personal two daughters—why does she proceed to help insurance policies that inform younger girls they need to dwell with out bodily autonomy? Whereas her advocacy for Epstein’s victims is inspiring, she has didn’t defend sexual assault survivors when their alleged assailants had been distinguished Republicans. In June 2024, greater than a 12 months after a New York jury found that Trump had sexually assaulted author E. Jean Carroll, Greene compared him to Jesus Christ. When Dr. Christine Blasey Ford recounted, in horrifying element, how Trump’s Supreme Court docket nominee Brett Kavanaugh pinned her to a mattress, Greene didn’t communicate up for her. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s secretary of struggle, has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady in a resort room in 2017. In keeping with a 22-page report by the Monterey Police Division, he allegedly “block[ed] the door along with his physique” so as to forestall the lady he assaulted from fleeing. However when Hegseth was confirmed, Greene declared—with out irony—that “each American is safer with [Hegseth] main.” In December 2024, the Home Ethics Committee discovered “substantial evidence” that former Republican consultant Matt Gaetz engaged in “sexual exercise” with a minor, together with the potential of “statutory rape.” Greene responded on X that she “has proudly defended Matt Gaetz from the start,” and that “he has achieved nothing mistaken.”

If Greene hasn’t persistently defended girls’s proper to guard their our bodies from predatory males, she additionally hasn’t defended their proper to guard their our bodies from the state. When Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, she tweeted that it was a “nice victory for God and the unborn.” A number of months later, in a heated dialogue with a Democratic voter, she remarked sarcastically that she “appreciates your curiosity in girls’s rights, however killing an unborn child just isn’t a lady’s proper.”

She proudly supported the legislation handed by Texas legislators in 2021 to criminalize abortion as soon as the fetus has a heartbeat, which may seem after 5 to 6 weeks, when most girls don’t know they’re even pregnant. The “Heartbeat Safety Act” has since been replicated in additional than 10 different states. The results of this legislation will be deadly. In 2021, Josseli Barnica, a Texas mom pregnant along with her second little one, skilled a high-risk supply. The medical professionals at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest would have usually acted to hurry up the beginning and forestall an an infection within the uterus. However due to the Heartbeat Safety Act, doing so might have been against the law. Till the heartbeat of the fetus was undetectable, the docs couldn’t do something. Barnica died three days later from sepsis. Specialists who reviewed a timeline of her remedy created by ProPublica concluded that there was a “good likelihood she would have survived” if the legislation had allowed docs to intervene.

This isn’t the one such story. In 2022, Georgia resident Amber Nicole Thurman wanted a process to expel the remnants of fetal tissue from her uterus, in keeping with ProPublica. Due to Georgia’s Heartbeat Safety Act, any doctor who carried out this surgical procedure would have risked jail. After 20 hours of her mendacity in a hospital mattress ready for surgical procedure, Thurman’s organs failed. In keeping with an official state committee composed of 10 docs, she died a “preventable” loss of life. She was 28. This proof didn’t transfer Greene, nonetheless. She tweeted that Kamala Harris was “mendacity to girls” about Thurman’s loss of life, claiming that she “died from taking abortion tablets!”

Greene’s current criticism of the best way Donald Trump’s Republican Occasion treats girls is a step towards making amends for her sycophantic previous. However her efforts are shallow. The GOP’s drawback with girls stems from excess of Trump’s sexist feedback and his allies’ misdeeds. It’s certain up along with his occasion’s insurance policies, which deny girls probably the most fundamental proper: bodily autonomy. Till Greene challenges these insurance policies, her self-perception as an advocate for ladies’s rights will stay undeserved.