Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) took to task a Missouri lawmaker who drafted a resolution calling for the state’s congressional delegation to push for a full repeal of Obamacare with “manly firmness.”
“I don’t think you prove your manhood by kicking folks off their health coverage and once again letting insurance companies discriminate against women and sick people,” McCaskill said in a Tuesday statement.
Republican state Rep. Mike Moon, the lawmaker who introduced the resolution, said he didn’t mean to insult women, according to the Columbia Tribune. He said he took the phrase “manly firmness” from the Declaration of Independence’s grievances with King George III.
“It is just like going to war,” Moon said. “You want a soldier to fight like a man. If a woman is in the trenches, you want them to fight like a man, too.”
McCaskill was not entirely satisfied with Moon’s explanation.
“It probably just is not a very effective way to communicate with a wide swath of people,” she told TPM Tuesday afternoon. “Using a phrase like ‘manly firmness’ is probably not gonna — he said it was a historic reference, well he’s referring to a point in time when women were chattels and didn’t have the right to vote. I think we can update our vocabulary.”
Sahil Kapur contributed reporting.
This post has been updated.
“Manly Firmness”
Does he also give his wife his Manly Firmness?
Gosh, this phrase has been getting a lot of play lately both here within TPM and on our tomato-stained national stage…Thank God the whining is so very manly in nature, I couldn’t take sissy whining or girlish whining.
Just stop, your attempt to explain is more insulting.
‘Manly firmness’ reminds me of the Seinfeld episode with the low talker, the puffy shirt and George working as a hand model.
“The muscles… became so strained with… overuse, that eventually the hand locked into a deformed position, and he was left with nothing but a claw.”
Another tea party chicken-hawk. Quoting the Foundling Fathers to hide his lack of anything remotely resembling the ability to serve as a lawmaker.