Posted on January 26, 2014

Rand Paul: "If There Was A War On Women, I Think They Won"

DAVID GREGORY: Let me ask you more about some of the debates within the Republican Party. Former candidate Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, got in some hot water this week with comments he made, I'll play a portion of it, as he talked about a war for women. Here's what he said.



MIKE HUCKABEE: The Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. Let us take that discussion all across America because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be.



DAVID GREGORY: Is this helpful?



SEN. RAND PAUL: Well, you know, I think we have a lot of debates in Washington that get dumbed down and are used for political purposes. This whole sort of war on women thing, I'm scratching my head because if there was a war on women, I think they won. You know, the women in my family are incredibly successful.



I have a niece at Cornell vet school, and 85% of the young people there are women. In law school, 60% are women; in med school, 55%. My younger sister's an ob-gyn with six kids and doing great. You know, I don't see so much that women are downtrodden; I see women rising up and doing great things. And, in fact, I worry about our young men sometimes because I think the women really are out-competing the men in our world.



DAVID GREGORY:My question, about whether you think it's appropriate for the party, key figures in the party, to be talking about women, women's health, women's bodies, and the role of the federal government related to those things?



SEN. RAND PAUL: I try never to have discussions of anatomy unless I'm at a medical conference. But what I would say is that we didn't start this sort of I think glossy and sometimes dumbed-down debate about, you know, there being a war on women. I think the facts show that women are doing very well, have come a long way.



And, you know, like I say, I have a lot of successful women in my family and I don't hear them saying, "Oh, woe is me. This terrible, you know, misogynist world." They look out and they're conquering the world. The women in my family are doing great, and that's what I see in all the statistics coming out. I have, you know, young women in my office that are the leading intellectual lights of our office.



So I don't really see this, that there's some sort of war that's, you know, keeping women down. I see women doing great and I think we should extol that success and not dumb it down into a political campaign that somehow one party doesn't like women or that. And that I think that's what's happened. It's all been for political purposes.