Opponents Offer Unhelpful Critique of Wendy Davis: She's A Bad Mom!

Texas gubernatorial candidate and pro-choice It Girl Wendy Davis announced just last week that she’d raised over $12 million dollars over the second half of 2013. And, on Sunday, like clockwork, a Dallas paper ran a barbecued garbage “expose” that slammed her for being a bad mother. Texas-style sexism really sticks to the ribs, doesn’t it?

The Dallas Morning News ran a piece this Sunday that called into question certain aspects of Wendy Davis’s personal story. Here HuffPo’s Laura Bassett breaks them down,

Davis has said she was a divorced single mother at 19, when she was only separated at 19. Her divorce did not become final until she was 21. She has told stories about the difficulty of living in a trailer with her daughter, but the article noted they lived in that mobile home for just a few months. Davis mentioned in 2012 that her mother had a sixth-grade education; in fact, her mother has a ninth-grade education.

Wow. This is some Congressman Francis Underwood-level fuckery. Lying about how much school your mom had? AND WE THOUGHT THIS WOMAN WAS FIT TO GOVERN. WHAT FOOLS WE WERE!

Predictably (and completely, 100% justifiably), conservative shoutmakers on Twitter and on the radio and on the toilet or wherever were quick to jump all over Davis, calling her a bimbo and a Barbie and implying that because she went to law school while a human child existed she was a bad mother who had abandoned her kid in favor of her selfish career in Professional Feminism. It was good old fashioned red meat apoplexy, made extra silly by events that were yet to transpire later this week. But we’ll get to that later.

Davis responded by clarifying some of the details of her backstory and saying that she should be more careful with conveying details now that she’s under the public microscope. And, you know, from as objective a standpoint I can muster, lying about personal details in your past when you’re running for elected office is both weird and sloppy. But, like, nowhere near warranting the kind of slobbering response it got from the right. In fact, in a state as red (turning purple-ish, but still red) as Texas, why are conservatives even wasting their time drawing attention to Wendy Davis in such a sexist, shitty way when all the overreaction does is remind people that Davis’s opponent, Greg Abbott, is of a party of petty, sexist bigots? It’s like using a gun you keep in your house for self-defense to accidentally shoot yourself in the leg while horsing around.

And the overreaction of the right looks especially silly in light of what happened today in Virginia, when Republican ex-Governor Bob McDonnell, he of mandatory vaginal ultrasound fame, was indicted (alongside his wife) on federal corruption charges. Apparently during all that time making his state a national example of Why Women Should Not Vote For Republicans, he found time to accept $120,000 in illegal loans — ironically, after a probe. I wonder how many of the people absolutely shitting American flags over allegations that Wendy Davis maybe didn’t accurately represent how long she lived in a trailer are equally upset that one of their anti-choice darlings was Illinois-level corrupt. Can’t wait for all the Vaginal Probe Ken jokes; McDonnell’s certainly got the hair for it.