Greg Abbott tried to claim that Wendy Davis' ad accusing him of
siding with a corporation over a rape victim was "gutter politics"
Things aren’t going as planned for repugican AG
Greg Abbott, who is running for governor of Texas against national
champion for women’s rights and State Senator Wendy Davis. PolitiFact
has named Davis’ ad charging him of siding with a corporation over a
rape victim as “Mostly True”. This is the ad that
Abbott’s campaign tried to bluff their way out of by labeling it “gutter politics“. So, “gutter politics” are “mostly true” about Abbott.
Abbott has been claiming that he loves women, after all he married one and has a daughter, for as long as Davis has been using his
record as a repugican AG
to prove otherwise. But last Thursday she launched an ad against him
charging that as a Supreme Court justice, he sided with a vacuum cleaner
manufacturer against a woman raped by a salesman in her home.
Watch the ad here:
In his 1998 dissent, Abbott found that a company
selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door “had no responsibility” in the
hiring of a salesman who raped a customer. The ad got national
attention.
Sounds like Abbott sided with a company over a rape
victim, which is not exactly proving that he is not engaged in a war on
women. The bad news is that
PolitiFact found this charge “Mostly True”.
Our ruling:
Davis said that Abbott held that a company whose
vacuum cleaners are sold door to door “had no responsibility” in the
hiring of a salesman who raped a customer in her home.
Indeed, then-Justice Abbott said in 1998 the
manufacturer had no legal responsibility over whom its contractors hired
to give demonstrations in customers’ homes. But this claim fails to
include the substantive detail that Abbott, unlike the court majority,
considered most significant an existing agreement between the
manufacturer and its distributors explicitly giving full responsibility
for such hiring to the distributors.
We rate this claim Mostly True.
Even the caveat proves the point. Of course Abbott
considered that the agreement between the manufacturer and its
distributors got Kirby out of being responsible to vet their in home
demonstrators. (The Court ruled that they had a duty to take reasonable
care in hiring. Too much to ask?) Citing a “business contract” as a get
out of jail card is absurd — an entity could write any kind of lawless
contract to which a distributor would agree because it benefited both
parties.
This is the modern day repugican thinking: The
company is always right even when they are wrong, because the rights of a
company to do business any way they choose are sacred. Whereas, the
body and soul of a rape victim is not sacred, and is held beneath even a
bad business contract. These are values choices, not imminent
decisions.
A business contract is not an act of god. It is a
contract agreed to by two entities for whom profit is the number one
goal. It is the job of our legislators and courts to force these
entities to bear some human responsibility for the consequences of their
profit seeking, because just like people, corporations come in all
kinds. Some care about their impact on people and the environment and
some do not.
Contrast Abbott’s dissent against the majority on
the court with Democrat Wendy Davis, whose office announced that she
would use this morning to highlight her
record “of cracking down on rapists and empowering rape survivors, including the
law she wrote to ensure more DNA testing of rape kits, addressing the backlog of 18,500 untested kits.”
The repugicans seem to be in office only to give
“business” a free ride with taxpayer subsidies while they gun for less
regulations amounting to zero accountability.
Plenty of responsible business owners manage to make
a profit while also being accountable – in fact, back in the old days, a
business’s reputation was part of its assets, and being accountable to
the community was part of that. Thus, a business would do a background
check on men it was sending into the homes of women who were likely to
be alone just because it was the right thing to do for their own sake.
A responsible “pro-business” politician understands
that forcing companies to veer away from being predators is good for
everyone, the business included. But these days repugicans are the
Donald Trumps of the business world – forever predators, declaring
bankruptcy on the taxpayers’ dime and coming back to the trough to grift
again, with no responsibility and no accountability. They reliably
choose companies over people too much of the time.
