Steinem on Palin: "Wrong Woman, Wrong Message"

Today, instead of writing my own blog entry as I should, I am choosing to reprint something by a woman who sums up the trouble with McCain's vice-presidential pick far better than I could, and who has the battle scars from the centuries long war against women to back up her credentials and credibility. This appeared on the September 4, 2008, Los Angeles Times Editorial page. Thank you Gloria Steinem.

Palin: Wrong Woman, Wrong Message
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 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.

Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women's Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.

Time Flies When You're Having Fun (and Even If You're Not)

I have been deplorably absent from this blog. I could make excuses for this, listing all the many oh-so-important distractions that have kept me away, but I won’t. I’m back, and I shall try to do better.

The good news that readers were spared commentary on those hot headlines that are now cold, or at least lukewarm: Hillary’s out, Obama’s in; John Edwards is a cheating louse; and Lindsay Lohan may marry her girlfriend, Samantha Ronson. (And Ellen DeGeneres DID marry Portia DiRossi—yea!) There’s a lot more, of course. School started, summer ended; scientists have discovered that if we leave our earwax alone—put down that Q-Tip!—our ears will stay perfectly fine all on their own; Obama chose attorney and U.S. Senator Joe Biden as his running mate, presumably for his extensive experience in foreign relations and judiciary affairs; and John McCain chose Alaska governor Sarah “Barracuda” Palin as his running mate, raising the frightening possibility that the old geezer might kick off while in office and leave us with a President who is light-years to the right of George W. Bush and has even less experience (but a LOT more ambition and brains).

So many topics, so little time. When I can pick just one, I’ll be back.

Photo by Lara Porzak

A Pact By Any Other Name Would Smell As Foul

In the words of that great gaggle of goofs, those corny comedic commentators, Monty Python, "And now for something completely different." Well, perhaps not completely different, as I suppose since everything is politics, even this discussion touches on the topic of the past few posts. but this is not the usual Democrat v. Republican, or Left v. Right, but more a case of freedom of speech v. (commercially motivated?) censorship.

Perhaps that discussion fitting in light of the recent death of one of the country's most outspoken and infamous champions of free speech, comedian George Carlin. Carlin's masterpiece of social satire, "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," was more than just a stand-up riff; it was the launching point for a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that in the name of "decency," there were some things that shouldn't be broadcast in case children were listening. In fact, although almost every obituary I've seen so far on Carlin mentions the "Seven Words" routine, none has actually printed them. I'd like to list them here, in his honor: shit, piss, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. It's frightening, but I don't even know if I am allowed to use these words on blogger. Will the morality police take away my laptop?

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about: censorship. Recently Time magazine reported that many of the 17 pregnant students at Gloucester (Massachusetts) High School had formed a pact to get pregnant at the same time and raise their babies together. (Normally only about 4 kids get pregnant there each year.) School principal Joseph Sullivan told Time that the girls—none of whom were over 16—confessed to being part of the pact. He also said that many of the girls had visited the school clinic for pregnancy tests, and "seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant then when they were."

Now, it seems, Sullivan's memory of where, when, and from whom he learned about the pact has become conveniently fuzzy. The mayor of Gloucester, Carolyn Kirk, says Sullivan is mistaken. "He was foggy in memory of how he heard the information," she said. "When we pressed for specifics, his memory failed him." She stopped short of saying he made the whole thing up.

Her view differs—sort of: "I am not able to confirm the existence of a pact…any planned blood oath," she said. According to her, the girls may have agreed after the fact to support each other, but that was not the same thing as making a plan to quadruple the typical birth rate at GHS. She had no explanation as to why one of the girls had sex with a homeless man, but I suspect a little bit of Orwellian/Carlinesque double-speak.

George Carlin once said, "I can remember when I was young that poor people lived in slums. Not anymore. These days, the economically disadvantaged occupy substandard housing in the inner cities. It's so much nicer for them."

Yes, and the good girls of Gloucester don't make pacts to get pregnant. They chat about how nice it would be if their children were to all grow up together and be friends with each other, too.

Up In Arms

What did Hillary say? Her exact words were these: "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June." (In fact, while celebrating his win four hours earlier in the California primary.)

Suddenly, everyone is accusing her of saying that she is staying in the race because if Obama were to be assassinated, she would win the nomination by default. While I repeat that I am by no means a great fan of Hillary, I can't understand how you could listen to what she actually said and reach that conclusion—unless, of course, you are predisposed to hear everything she says in the worst possible way. I tend to believe her explanation:

"Earlier today I was discussing the Democratic primary history and in the course of that discussion mentioned campaigns that both my husband and Senator Kennedy waged in California in June 1992 and 1968. I was referencing those to make the point that we have had nomination primary contests that go into June. That's a historic fact."

She went on to add that "the Kennedys have been much on my mind that last days," and this rings true. The Kennedys have been much on my mind as well; any mention of tragedy and Kennedy in the same sentence brings me back to my preschool self, hearing the news from Dallas and seeing everyone around me stuporous with shock and grief. I must admit that one of my first thoughts when I heard the recent news about Senator Ted Kennedy's brain cancer was not, perhaps, in the best of taste. Rather, it was a dark thought equating the effects of a bullet with that of the admittedly slower but just as devastatingly fatal effects of a glioma, and mourning the fates of all three Kennedys.

What I really wanted to point out was that even if she had somehow meant to suggest that there was a chance that Obama might be assassinated, she would hardly have been anything like the first to think it, or even to say it out loud. More than a few African-Americans have admitted (e.g., from February 2008) to the fear that supporting Obama in his bid for the presidency might somehow put him in danger. Read the daily news. It is all too easy to imagine some whack job feeling compelled to pull a trigger to "protect" his racist existence. Reading the news, though, will also remind you that there may be even more whack jobs out there willing to do whatever it takes to prevent a woman holding the country's highest office. After all, women hold fewer than 15 out of every 100 board seats in the Fortune 500 companies today. (An aside: you may recall that John McCain opposed the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, on the grounds that women weren't earning the same amount of money as their male counterparts because they needed more "education and training," not because of any silly old glass ceiling or the prevalence of misogyny in the workforce.)

But I digress. My main point is that I don't think Hillary is staying in the race with the thought that her opponent might be "taken out" of the running. Secondary to that is my acknowledgment that even if she did think such a thing—and only the most bitter of cynics could believe this—she would only be speaking aloud what so many of us are afraid of, which is that the U.S. may still be so far behind other developed countries that many voters can't imagine having anyone behind that desk except a wealthy white man.