Friday, September 05, 2008

Steinem on Palin

Another feminist icon has denounced McCain VP nominee, Sarah Palin. This time it's Gloria Steinem. Excerpted from Steinem's op-ed piece in the LA Times:

"This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters.

Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for - and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on "God, guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge."

4 comments:

  1. My it is exciting to watch the loney-lefties go nutty over Sarah!!!
    If there was any doubt before last week that the MSM is overwhelmingly leftist/progressive/marxist . . . that doubt has evaporated.
    Why not compare the accomplishments of the "Chosen One", the dimmicrapts candidate for president with those of Palen?
    Why this "Community Organizer", didn't Lenin start that way, comes up short. He was a pawn in the Daley Chicago machine, became an Illinois legislator, and voted on over a 100 bills, but always voted "Present" not NAY or YEA, a true decision maker.
    Then he spent a 100+ days in the Senate, did nothing noteworthy.
    Palin of course ran a State for over 2 years, was a Mayor of a small city.
    Its too bad the leftist media didn't examine the "Chosen One's" qualifications as dilligently. In fact he was given a complete pass, just like the the GW issue . . . the media was complicit by its inneptness!!!
    The comment about Rowe vs Wade is laughable!!! I have read the US Constitution many times . . . have never found the right to kill your children there, but loney-lefty judges do!!! If it was stuck down tomorrow it would change nothing . . . cause this is a state matter and states would deal according to the wishes of their populations . . . rather than some wacko like Gloria.

    The O'bambi one is a scarry prospect . . . his own words!!!
    "I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets." - Barack Obama (Dreams of My Father)

    Obama the 'Chosen One' chose these friends:
    Marxist Professors
    Structural Feminists (anti capitalists)
    Activist Black Students
    Mentor Wright - Black separatist and Mentor.
    James Cone - Black Separatist and racist.
    Saul Alinsky - Communist 'Community Organizer'.
    William Ayers - Radical anarchist.
    Fr.Pfleger - Radical religionist and race baiter.
    Louis Farrakhan - Radical Islamist and racist.
    Tony Rezco - Convicted felon and thief.
    Frank Marshall - Communist and Obama Mentor.
    Many other 'Radical Leftists'.

    American voters should look at some of the chosen associates in the life of a man who is a contender for the position of President of the United States and Commander in Chief of its Armed Force.

    Then there's the Biden one . . . 36 years in the Senate, a perennial GAFF Machine . . . Bambi's idea of a fresh face, but just a business-as-usual Dimmocrat.
    Do you think the approval rating of the Dimmocrat Congress could get any lower? 9% is pretty low, but still room at the bottom!!!

    Seems the polls show the two candidates for President in a dead heat . . . watch the Progressive/Marxist MSM pull out all the stops. Let the fun begin . . .

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  2. Sorry Old Stool but you're much too much a moron to warrant any reply to your ludicrous claims. Get help.

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