The temptation is to think of Glenn Grothman as some sort of
moron, a Neanderthal throwback, an outlier, someone so impossibly backward as
to be unable to function in society.
He isn’t.
I believe he is a product of his environment, and that he
comes from one of those small sub-cultures you still find in various tiny
enclaves of Wisconsin. If you’ve spent
any time with the people in Glenn’s senate district – places like Oostburg,
Kewaskum, and Fredonia – you’ve encountered plenty of people who think, act,
and even talk like Grothman.
They believe, like Glen, that men should be paid more than
women; they are staunchly anti-abortion. A former member of the U.S. Congress
used to tell his friends confidentially of the story of the man from Oostburg
who said, in full seriousness, that a woman should be allowed only two
children, and after the second child, “that hole should be sewed up, and then
we wouldn’t have to worry about the abortion”.
The last two words were pronounced “thee a-bar-shun”, and the article always preceded
the term: “the” abortion.
Like Santorini, whose campaign button the senator wears in
the photo above, there is no small number of people in these rural enclaves who
publicly proclaim sex is for procreation only, and anything else can lead to
bad consequences. I had a college
fraternity brother from Kewaskum who firmly believed anyone who had “recreational
sex” was doomed to eternal hellfire.
Long before Wisconsin’s ridiculous adaptation of the “Castle
Doctrine”, these folks firmly believed that a man’s home (and it is a MAN’S
home) is his castle, and any sumbitch stoopid enough to come wanderin’ onto my
property without my specific invitation is gonna get more than a load of
buckshot to warn ‘em off.
Like Santorini, Grothman is quite suspicious about higher
education of any sort, though it may surprise you to learn Grothman has a BBA
and JD (he’s a lawyer) from the UW. I
can’t begin to explain the mindset of enigmas like Grothman or Santorini, who
obtain an advanced degree (Santorini has a BS, an MBA, and a JD) and then
regard higher education as the sort of thing a snob pursues.
There are other throwback enclaves scattered across the
Wisconsin countryside. You don’t have to
travel that many miles west of Madison to find tiny communities where people
keep goats in their yard and hold a set of beliefs similar to Grothman’s. And you don’t have to get too far above
Highway 8 in Wisconsin to run into a lot of people who were clinging to their
bibles and guns long before Barack Obama talked about such people during his
2008 campaign.
People like Grothman, who actually believe money is more
important to men than women, that men rightly have dominance over women’s
bodies (Adam’s rib, and all that), neither realize nor accept how far the rest
of the world has come in the past century, and certainly aren’t aware that it’s
exactly because of people like them that we have made laws forbidding
discrimination against women in pay, reproductive rights, and a wide array of
other elements of daily life.
This is part of pharmaceutical-grade conservatism: change is
BAD. Things should be kept the way they
ARE.
Call Glen Grothman what you want, but don’t call him
stupid. I think he really believes what
he espouses. To him and his kind, it
must be a very scary world indeed.
