Earlier this year, Republican State Representative Isaac Latterell wrote a blog post titled "Planned Parenthood Worse Than ISIS and Lying About It.” It doesn’t seem particularly necessary to review the contents of that piece here because a) it’s filled with lies, misinformation and erroneous stats; and 2) Amanda Marcotte already did a pretty great job of refuting every point Latterell makes using actual, bonafide facts.

But suffice it to say, the South Dakota legislator’s goal was to gin up anti-choice outrage about procedures Planned Parenthood doesn’t actually provide, in order to pass a bill banning practices Planned Parenthood doesn’t actually perform. Latterell, like so many of his anti-choice cohorts, is a religious zealot who opposes reproductive justice, on a mission to eliminate one of our country’s biggest women’s healthcare providers. I am not suggesting this makes Latterell a terrorist. I am, however, pointing out the irony in Latterell bringing up ISIS in this context, since the GOP seems to share a lot of its goals in this area.

Recent events bring the similarities into even sharper focus.

Just a few days ago, the Independent reports, ISIS issued an order that all women’s clinics headed by male gynecologists in the Raqqa province of Syria be closed down. This mandate is based on the belief that men and women should be kept separate. Local activists told the UK newspaper that there have been “[death] threats and harassment towards doctors in the city,” and that almost all women’s healthcare clinics in smaller towns controlled by ISIS have already been shuttered. Though ISIS claims that affected women can simply go to female providers—as if it’s a safe environment for women clinicians to practice in—locals report there was already a “lack of female medical staff.” The closures, along with the mass exodus of gynecologists and obstetricians from Syria, leave a troubling void for women’s healthcare that holds terrible implications for the foreseeable future of women’s reproductive health.

Again, the GOP is not ISIS, and that kind of irresponsible comparison (you may want to take note here, Rep. Latterell) diminishes the daily devastation ISIS causes. (The last 35 years of GOP policies have also devastated much of this country, but the approach has been more measured, less bloodthirsty slash-and-burn.) Yet, it's no exaggeration to point out that the Republican party is currently waging a fundamentalist war on Planned Parenthood that would have the same kinds of dire consequences for millions of women in this country. There are 700 Planned Parenthood centers around the United States, and they serve 2.7 million women and men a year. Twenty percent of all women in America have visited a Planned Parenthood at least once in their lives. The organization provides millions of STD exams, and hundreds of thousands of Pap smears and cancer screenings each year. These are, without question, critical, life-saving services.

Like ISIS, the GOP seems to believe that if every Planned Parenthood were to shut today, the women it serves would have no problem finding the healthcare they need somewhere else. These legislators ignore the fact that a number of the women served by the organization are young, poor and uninsured or underinsured. The lawmakers can’t be bothered to calculate how many communities rely on Planned Parenthood’s subsidized services, or the fact that other clinics simply don’t have the capacity to absorb all the women who would be left without medical care. Instead, conservative politicians are so focused on staging a big moralistic show to appeal to religious extremists that they ignore the fact that abortion—which the Supreme Court decided was a legal right over 40 years ago, and most Americans believe should stay legal—makes up less than 3 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.

Now we have to endure Benghazi Part II, aka the Republican led-investigation of Planned Parenthood. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has announced the six Democrats who will serve on the panel, which is rightly being dubbed the Republicans’ Select Committee to Attack Women’s Health. Like Latterell’s blog post, the Republicans on the committee will fail as credible sources of information, but will almost certainly stand as shining examples of GOP extremism and hypocrisy. The terrorist organization that just eliminated women’s health care in Syria may not look the same as the right-wing smear merchants who wasted time and taxpayer money berating Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards. ISIS may differ greatly from the GOP panel’s religious adherence, methodology and long-term vision for itself. But the two groups share at least one common cause, and right now, ISIS just happens to be leading in getting it done.