Josh Hawley doesn’t know it, but women are more than the sum of their parts

First, Josh Hawley told us what it means to be a man: “A man is a father. A man is a husband. A man is somebody who takes responsibility,” he said last fall.

By this definition, Jesus was not a man. Catholic priests and all of those who’ve never married, along with the widowed and the divorced and the childless, are what, then? And wait, don’t women take responsibility?

Back then, Hawley also lamented that modern men are being forced into porn addiction by liberals. We’re not sure how that lines up with his recent announcement that those forced into porn addictions ought to get even longer prison sentences. Or with his refusal to ever disagree with the president who paid off a porn star.

But now, he has also defined womanhood for us.

At Ketanji Brown Jackson’s recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Hawley’s fellow Republican Marsha Blackburn, of Tennessee, asked her to “provide a definition for the word ‘woman.’”

Jackson, whose mother was a woman, but not one who had given birth to her only the previous evening, wasn’t falling into that maw. She told Blackburn that she was not a biologist, and would have no more to say on the matter.

“The meaning of the word ‘woman’ is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?” Blackburn asked, gleeful as on the day last month that she voted against aid for Ukraine.

“The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about,” she said, though we are only hearing about these purported dangers from Blackburn and others eager to close public schools.

Only, ever since Blackburn tried to coax Jackson into the quicksand, Republicans who thought this was such a great “gotcha” have themselves been got.

North Carolina Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who when last heard from was raving about being invited to an orgy, in a town where parties go pfft at 9 p.m., said it all boils down to “X chromosomes, no tallywhacker. It’s so simple.” Except that there are women with Turner syndrome who are missing an X chromosome. And some, sorry, who are born with tallywhackers.

“This is an easy answer,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia. “We’re a creation of God. We came from Adam’s rib. God created us with his hands. We may be the weaker sex — we are the weaker sex — but we are our partner — we are our husband’s wife.”

Are men not a creation of God? And since women are only women in relation to a man, was Mother Teresa not a woman? Or Susan B. Anthony? Or Queen Elizabeth I? Or Oprah?

Hawley said much the same. He told the HuffPost that “someone who can give birth to a child, a mother, is a woman. Someone who has a uterus is a woman. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.” After a hysterectomy, would that person still be a woman? “Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?”

In the view he laid out, no. If fecundity is all there is to womanhood, then no young or old or sick or celibate or infertile woman is a woman at all.

To see any human being as only valuable in relation to their ability to produce, or reproduce, is so awful that it’s shocking to hear him cop to it. There is a word for that view, and it isn’t “conservative.” We are all more than the sum of our parts.

This story was originally published April 7, 2022 at 5:00 AM.