I am trying not to rant about politics on my blog. Gloria Steinem says it better than I ever could.
From the Los Angeles Times
Opinion
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.
