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[Read past the lead and first few sentences; she has some intriguing
insights to offer. Thanks to Dominick DiNoto for forwarding Ms. Steinem's
article from the LA Times.]
Gloria Steinem's comments...
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-steinem4-2008sep04,0,1290251.story
Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary Clinton. She is
Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.
By Gloria Steinem
September 4, 2008
Here's the good news:
Women have become so politically powerful that
even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the
Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a
first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men
too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at
the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took
the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham
Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million
votes.
But here is even better news: It won't work. 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.
Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last month
about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question
until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every
day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the
war in Iraq."
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 wa s 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.
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