Celeb Obama Appointee Accuses Repubs of 'Legislative Violence Against Women'

Kerry Washington, who stars in ABC’s new political primetime drama, “Scandal,” went on MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry” show on Saturday and denigrated Republicans for engaging in “legislative violence against women.”

Washington, who campaigned for President Barack Obama in 2008 and whom Obama appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, said “it’s shocking” what Republicans are supposedly doing to women. She said “we’re supposed to be moving forward and have more equality” and not to a place of “stripping away our rights as women.”

Washington said she was disappointed in presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for saying he would put an end to Planned Parenthood and listed all of the “vital services” she thought the agency provided without mentioning that it is an organization primarily concerned with providing abortions. Washington mentioned that Florida Senator Marco Rubio had proposed an amendment during the contraception debate that would have taken rights away from women and given them to employers, even though Rubio’s amendment was focused on religious liberty.

Implying that women had to turn out in droves to support Obama or risk their rights being taken away, Washington, who will be a surrogate for Obama in 2012, said, “There is just too much at stake to not show up to not volunteer to make this another historic, grassroots election.” Shonda Rhimes, who created “Scandal” and has been known for using her television shows, such as “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice,”  to promote her liberal political agenda, has indeed found her perfect leading lady.

“Scandal” debuted last Thursday, and the pilot episode painted Republicans as anti-gay hypocrites, and the pilot seems to represent how conservatives will be caricatured in future episodes. Clips from  future episodes portrayed a Republican judicial nominee caught up in an adulterous affair with a prostitute, for instance. It is worth noting that the biggest and most outrageous extra-marital scandals — Anthony Weiner and John Edwards come to mind — in recent years have involved liberals.

Washington and Harris-Perry, without realizing the irony, engaged in a discussion about how Washington, one of the first Black woman female leads in a network primetime drama, was allowing Americans to see black people in different perspectives.

Washington noted that she and Harris-Perry were “both in a wonderful position of adding to the idea of inclusivity in the media” and said that “people should not just see one perspective, one story being told, one person’s take on current affairs.” The perspective she was referring to was the “white” perspective.  Washington also said that it is important not to stereotype different racial groups and “embrace the diversity within different groups” and that the country needed “more than one image of what a Black woman is.”

Sadly, Washington and Harris-Perry do not understand that Hollywood is not inclusive of conservatives or conservative points of views on their primetime shows and tends to stereotype conservatives as they think it does minorities. (Hollywood certainly does not recognize the diversity within the conservative movement, let alone acknowledge that non-caricatured conservatives even exist.)In discussing past political programs that cut through the culture, Harris-Perry spoke highly of Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing (Sorkin has a new show, “The Newsroom,” that will air on HBO this summer and which caricatures Republicans). 

“We could escape and Bartlett could be our president when George W. Bush was in office,” Harris-Perry said.

Unfortunately for conservatives, Hollywood offers no such escape during Obama’s presidency.