Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell

Writing on TownHall.com in December of 2008, Prager compares a man’s obligation to go to work, regardless of his “mood,” to a woman’s obligation to have sex with her husband. “Why would a loving, wise woman allow mood to determine whether or not she will give her husband one of the most important expressions of love she can show him? What else in life, of such significance, do we allow to be governed by mood?” he writes. “What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work?” He goes on to compare a wife’s commitment to meeting the needs of their children or parents or friends even when not in the mood to having sex with her husband, asking that, because the woman is doing what’s “right in those cases, rather than what their mood dictates,” “Why not apply this attitude to sex with one’s husband?”

Quite the charmer Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has hosting fundraisers for him. Dennis Prager is a talk radio host who thinks that one of the "mutual obligations" of marriage is for women to have sex with their husbands based on the husband's wishes and not the wife's "mood."Why not? Um, because sex is a more intimate act than remembering to buy milk at the store? Because while people (husbands, wives, whoever) are paid to go to work and be professional about it, sex is supposed to be a mutual thing? Do men not benefit if their wives actuallyto have sex rather than doing it out of a sense of obligation?

I don't know, just spitballing here. Maybe I'm crazy and sex really is the wife's version of having a job. Except ... no, that doesn't make sense if you consider it in the context of how Republicans generally view sex workers; if you view the wife as a form of property it makes a little more sense, though. And what if the wife also has a job? Then does she get to say "hey, I go to work regardless of my mood, just like you, so that means I get to say I'm not in the mood to have sex right now"?

It would probably take 3,000 words to unpack all the noxious assumptions about gender roles, sex, and marriage in those few short paragraphs, so let's leave it at this: Mitch McConnell is happy to have Dennis Prager's name attached to a Mitch McConnell fundraiser.