Republicans chose Alabama’s Sen. Katie Britt to give their response to the State of the Union address, but the kitchen setting said more about what the party thinks of women.
A woman’s place is in the kitchen, even if she is a U.S. senator delivering the most important speech of her career.
Intended or not, that was the message conveyed by the GOP’s opposition response to President Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday, when Alabama‘s Sen. Katie Britt spoke for Republicans from a setting associated with centuries of female servitude.
Sharing the shot with a refrigerator and a fruit basket, the rising GOP star spoke in dramatic, hushed tones about the nightmarish condition of the country. “I just watched President Biden’s State of the Union address from our living room,” she said. “I wish he understood what real families are facing around kitchen tables just like this.”
Yet there was no table or family. Just a shot of Britt, sitting alone, in an overwhelmingly beige kitchen with eerily barren countertops. And the dry-erase message board on the fridge door? Blank.
GOP strategists were likely trying to covey a safe, homey family environment that real Americans could relate to in these troubled times. They have kitchens, after all, unlike fake Americans in blue states, who live in antifa communes and subsist on pressed juice. But the zombie kitchen ploy backfired.
Before Britt even opened her mouth, the rebuttal’s optics fed into widespread criticism that Republicans are turning back the clock on women’s rights and freedoms to June Cleaver times.
