MSNBC’s Joy Reid compared those on the right to the Taliban while discussing abortion on Wednesday.
Reid played footage from North Carolina’s statehouse where protesters decried Republicans after they voted to override the governor’s veto and pass a 12-week abortion ban.
“In that scene of women weeping and chanting ‘shame’ while a man bangs the gavel and basically tells them if you can’t be quiet and let us strip you of your rights you can get out, it felt very Taliban to me,” Reid said. “I bring up the Taliban a lot with my poor [inaudible] team, but the thing about Republicans now is that they are acting a very Taliban-esque way. They are a religious group of extremists who — they definitely don’t care about children. They want to control women. They want total control over women and they are exercising that control. Let’s put up the map. All across the former slave states and in states in the west that they control, while women have no power to stop them or a few … join them. And then these women wake up in a state where they have no rights. What to do?”
NARAL Pro-Choice America President Mini Timmaraju said voters need to mobilize before Reid once again compared the right to the Taliban.
“What we now have is the merger of right-wing extreme Christian right politicians and the judiciary. Their rulings are predictable based on their politics, not based on the law. I mean this is why, compared to the Taliban, when they took over in the 1990s, people were like, ‘yes, they’ll be great, because they’re anti-corruption’ and then they found out what they really are. They want total religious control over that population. Republicans are behaving the same way,” Reid added.
Reid isn’t the first to draw the comparison. Actress Patti LuPone recently said while co-hosting “The View” that she cannot tell the difference between the Taliban and the Christian right.
