Mo. State Lawmaker’s Effort to Honor Limbaugh, Sparks Pushback

by Jeremy Leaming

While some states work to advance equality, Maryland and Washington for instance recently enacted laws legalizing same-sex marriage, other state lawmakers unfortunately fritter away official time, frequently either infuriating constituents or reminding them of just how useless some of their actions can be.

For example, Missouri’s House Speaker Steven Tilley, as MSNBC notes, is working to induct the right-wing leader Rush Limbaugh into the state’s “Hall of Famous Missourians.” As MSNBC notes inductees are appointed by the House Speaker “and the bronze busts are paid for by the Speaker’s Annual Golf Classic” and then showcased in the capitol.

Limbaugh, from Cape Girardeau, has added to conservative backed efforts to make life tougher on women. National lawmakers, backed by Catholic bishops and right-wing activists, such as Limbaugh, continue to fight health care policy that will require insurance companies to provide contraceptives to employees of religiously affiliated institutions, such as colleges and universities.

When Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student, publicly supported the Obama administration’s health care policy of ensuring that workers at religious affiliated institutions receive adequate health care, Limbaugh went over-the-top, obviously not an easy feat for the radio host. Limbaugh took to the airwaves to spew invective against, Fluke, which prompted President Obama to call the law student praising her courage to speak out on behalf of health care policy, which riles a large swath of the nation’s conservatives.

But Tilley, a Republican, appears unconcerned about the timing of his action. The Kansas City Star reports that Tilley is moving forward with honoring Limbaugh. “It’s not the ‘Hall of Universally Loved Missourians. It’s the Hall of Famous Missourians,” he told the newspaper.

The newspaper notes that Progress Missouri is urging Missourians to join it in calling for Tilley to reverse his decision. The group’s website includes a call to action: “A Rush Limbaugh Statue in the Missouri Capitol? No. Freaking. Way.”    

As noted here last week conservatives have also launched strident opposition to the Violence Against Women Act, primarily because reauthorization of the bill is aimed at bolstering the law’s effect, including its aim to provide protection of even more women.

Tilley likely does not view his actions as an act of frivolity. Instead he seems to be merely following his Party’s seemingly insensitive, or more likely outright hostility, to women’s rights and protection of women’s health.

Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, recently took on the intensifying animus toward the Georgetown law student, saying it “revealed the deep-rooted hostility toward women that lies at the heart of the unprecedented wave of assaults on reproductive rights across the United States.”

Northup continued, “The deeply offensive and misogynistic commentary of recent days poisons public discourse and threatens to undermine many decades of progress in securing and protecting women’s fundamental rights to health, autonomy, dignity, and equal treatment under the law.”