Oh, Look, Marjorie Taylor Greene Has Some Thoughts on How to Define a Woman

Why do people go into politics? For some, it’s a calling and a desire to make a difference in their constituents’ lives. For others, it’s to do things like cut taxes for the rich and go to bat for pharmaceutical executives. For freshman representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s to have a platform from which to spout every unhinged thought that comes into her brain, and elicit responses like “Wow, that‘s messed up” and “Hey, maybe this person shouldn’t be allowed near the room where bills are voted on” and “What the hell is wrong with her?”

For example, at a gathering over the weekend, Greene took the time to suggest that women are defined by being property of men. Responding to Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s refusal to be dragged into the GOP’s culture war du jour—during her confirmation hearing, Jackson declined to provide a definition of a woman for anti-trans Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn—Greene told the Georgia Republican Assembly, “I’m going to tell you right now what is a woman. 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’s, our husband’s, wife.”

Then on Monday, she casually asserted that the three Republican lawmakers supporting Jackson approve of pedophilia. Per HuffPost:

Greene used her congressional account to tweet the baseless accusation that GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine) and Mitt Romney (Utah) are “pro-pedophile” because they said [they] will vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. During Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearings, GOP lawmakers falsely accused Brown [sic] of being lenient in cases involving photos of child sexual abuse.

The response to Greene’s latest claims have been a mix of horror and head-scratching, given that, as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz pointed out on Tuesday, Republicans have happily embraced people like Donald Trump and Roy Moore. Moore, as you may or may not recall, was accused of sexual assault by two minors (claims he denied) and was reportedly banned from a local mall over attempts to pick up teenagers. As for Donald Trump, setting aside the dozens of adult women who have accused him of sexual misconduct, including rape (which, of course, he denies), the former president has said that if Ivanka Trump wasn‘t his daughter he’d be dating her. By the way, there’s also a sitting member of Congress who is currently under investigation for sex trafficking a minor. (He too has denied the allegations.) And if Republicans like Greene are so worried about pedophilia they should maybe take a look at what’s happening in Republican-controlled Tennessee state legislature:

A GOP-backed bill in Tennessee would eliminate any age requirements for marriage, a move that critics are calling hypocritical amid baseless Republican accusations that the LGBTQ+ community is attempting “groom” and “sexualize” school children. 

H.B. 233 gives Tennesseans “an alternative form of marriage” between individuals who have a “conscientious objection to the current pathway,” according to state Rep. Tom Leatherwood, the bill’s Republican sponsor. As WKRN ​​reported, the GOP bill, first introduced in January, establishes a common-law marriage between “one man” and “one woman” but omits any age requirements for the union, an omission that Democrats have blasted.