Feminism and the “War on Women”
It has come to this. The Vagina Monologues is no longer progressive enough for feminists. At elite women’s college Mount Holyoke, Eve Ensler’s classic play has been canceled because it is “inherently reductionist and exclusive.” This play, this personification of vaginas hailed by feminists as liberation from our societal fear of the female anatomy, this ultimate form of modern campus progressivism, is literally a play in which women perform soliloquies as vaginas. It even inspired a nationwide day of activism—V-Day to supplant the Valentine’s Day of the patriarchy, February 14—on which women’s groups perform the play to raise money for combating violence against women.
The Vagina Monologues is now, improbably, part of the war on women, because it is insufficiently inclusive of women without vaginas.
If you find this confusing, you’re not alone.
You put your “ladyparts” in. You put your ladyparts out. You do the hokey pokey of womanhood, and you turn yourself around. That’s what it’s all about.
It’s not that catchy as a party game ditty, but it’s how many women feel.1 From the Mommy Wars to work-life balance, from parenting advice to Pinterest envy, the task of being a thoroughly modern, liberated woman can feel like a precarious balancing act of its own. It can feel like everyone and their momma (literally) has an idea about how you should live your life. Are you unwittingly enabling the patriarchy by making Angry Birds cupcakes for your kid’s birthday? Is staying at home with your kids or working part-time a betrayal of those who fought for your rights in the workplace? Is buying an iPhone 6, with its giant display designed for man hands, a sexist act? Is giving your child a toy soldier or a princess or a gingerbread man at Christmas sentencing him or her to a life of horrifying gender conformity?2
There seems to be some confusion at the heart of all this regarding the F-word. No, not the fun one. Feminist. What does it mean? Who is one? What does it take to be one? And, who the hell makes the rules? The standards, of course, are capricious, ever changing, frequently contradictory, and controlled by a cadre of self-appointed commentators who adjudicate the degree of your liberation and loyalty to womanhood in blog posts and MSNBC interviews. Seemingly the only thing these Pharisees of feminism agree on for certain is that any woman who holds conservative views cannot simultaneously be liberated or modern.
When it comes to defining feminism, there are clichés aplenty that simplify into disingenuous sound bites a political movement that is on its fourth (fifth? Ask five feminists and you’ll get five different answers) wave of bitterly infighting generations.
“Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.” Sure, you’d be daft to disagree with that! “Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” We wish it were that simple. If it were, there’d be no large group of women gathering online because they feel excluded by feminism.
In the fall of 2014, an online movement emerged that represented those women and irked the Pharisees of feminism. A Tumblr page called “Women Against Feminism” collected statements from such women, mostly in the form of selfies holding pieces of paper with their sentiments on them.
Some of the contributions to Women Against Feminism were silly or incoherent, as is to be expected with any movement based on aggregated selfies. But the movement was not defined by a retrograde desire for homebound careerless women and unequal protection under the law. Rather, as a blogger named AstrokidNJ found in surveying a week’s worth of contributions to the Tumblr page, “46 percent were egalitarian, 19 percent endorsed men’s issues, and 12 percent criticized feminist intolerance toward dissent. Only 23 percent reflected traditionalist views such as support for distinct sex roles, chivalry, or full-time motherhood,” as reported by columnist Cathy Young in the Boston Globe.
The thrust of most of the women’s complaints was this: Modern feminism does not welcome me. It does not reflect my life as a woman or accurately portray the men who love, respect, and support me in that life. In fact, it makes me feel like I can’t qualify as a woman if I don’t agree with a very specific slate of policy preferences and political positions, and make public pronouncements accordingly.
The backlash of the gatekeepers of feminism against these women was swift, merciless, incredulous, and biting.
“These women are slandering the movement that enabled their freedom,” wrote Nina Burleigh in the New York Observer.
Rebecca Brink satirized the movement with her own collection of mocking sign selfies, including “I don’t need feminism because I want boys to like me.”
Burleigh and prominent feminist writer Amanda Marcotte each wrote that the women in the pictures were probably just expressing what their boyfriends and husbands told them to, because as feminists in good standing, they respect the agency and intellect of women, unless those women disagree with them.
“I’d lay odds that the young Women Against Feminism anti-feminists are the girlfriends and wives of these frustrated young men,” because “their men (are) under-employed, bitter, and yes, bitching husbands and boyfriends,” Burleigh wrote in a 2014 column in the New York Observer.
“Indeed, unseen husbands holding cameras while their wife gives them ‘I won’t ever be one of those dirty feminists who wants equality’ eyes at them is a common theme here,” Marcotte wrote at Raw Story.
But a general disaffection with the cultural understanding of “feminism” is reflected in polling. A 2013 Huffington Post/YouGov poll showed only 20 percent of Americans call themselves “feminist,” though more than 70 percent in every demographic believe in social, economic, and political equality for the sexes.
Feminism, Americans say, it’s not me. It’s you.
FEMINISM IN THE BEYONCÉIC ERA
It’s not just regular women who feel the constraints that feminism foists upon them. A steady stream of young starlets who, despite their success and seeming independence, fail to embrace the term feminist fully and are castigated for their hesitance. Pop star Katy Perry sinned in 2012, as she accepted the Billboard Woman of the Year Award no less, saying, “I am not a feminist, but I do believe in the strength of women.” Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, a pair of powerful pop/country crossovers, both have misgivings about the word. “No, I wouldn’t say feminist—that’s too strong,” Clarkson said. “I think when people hear feminist, it’s like, ‘Get out of my way, I don’t need anyone.’ I love that I’m being taken care of and I have a man that’s a leader. I’m not a feminist in that sense.” Taylor Swift, Zooey Deschanel, and Shailene Woodley have also been found guilty of similar transgressions.
In the end, what all these powerful, famous young women seem to want is not just equality, but the freedom to shape that equality into exactly what they see fit. They recognize our society’s continuing problems with sexism but feel liberated and wish to live in a liberated fashion. Why isn’t the powerful way in which they choose to lead their lives the very symbol of feminism? They own businesses, they run brands, they have families, and they are international forces on their own terms. Is it any wonder they rankle at the notion of being required to dub themselves one thing? If the patriarchy and its expectations were confining and predictable, the demands of the Pharisees of feminism are confining and arbitrary.
If feminism were as simple as the purveyors of clichés about feminism proclaim, perhaps the most universally acclaimed woman currently on the planet might have had an easier time embracing feminism and being embraced by feminists. Yes, any discussion of modern womanhood must include an examination of Beyoncé. Because when historians look back on this era, they will call it Beyoncéic in the same way that there was an Edwardian or Mesozoic era before her reign.3
In the spotlight since the age of fifteen, she is truly a talent, a tour de force of preternatural pipes and stems, a stunning combination of bodacious body and businesswoman. The beautiful figure she presents has become a sort of symbol of perfect, modern womanhood. She is fierce, honey-haired, happily married, both GQ cover girl and happy young mother. She regularly inspires such awe that she’s inspired a parody of the awe she inspires.
In a fake movie trailer for “The Beygency,” on Saturday Night Live, a band of supersecret agents abduct and detain Americans who would dare speak in tones less than admiring of Beyoncé. “Everything she does is perfect,” coos one man at a typical American dinner party before another friend violates the number-one rule of the Beyoncéic era. “She is so good. I’m not a huge fan of that one ‘Drunk in Love’ song, though,” he confesses to gasps from his friends and wife.
The lights go out, black helicopters swoop in, and the violator is told to run.
Maybe everything she touches really is perfect.
But it hasn’t always been that way. She was taken to task in 2013 for telling Oprah while talking about her marriage to Jay Z, “I would not be the woman I am if I did not go home to that man,” and for calling her tour the Mrs. Carter tour after her marriage to Shawn Carter. Both of them changed their names to Knowles-Carter, in a quite progressive-approved and gender-neutral nod to equal partnership, but that mattered not in the pronunciations of the Pharisees.
In 2013, Beyoncé was among those young starlets who squirmed at the application of the term “feminist.” “That word can be very extreme,” she told British Vogue. “But I guess I am a modern-day feminist. I do believe in equality. Why do you have to choose what type of woman you are? Why do you have to label yourself anything? I’m just a woman and I love being a woman.” She went on: “I do believe in equality and that we have a way to go and it’s something that’s pushed aside and something that we have been conditioned to accept…But I’m happily married. I love my husband.”
Feminists scoffed that Beyoncé just didn’t understand feminism properly if she thought it precluded loving her husband and expressing that openly. The problem is these are the same people who groused at her for declaring her love for her husband and putting her married name on her tour bus.
But in the fall of 2014, Beyoncé gave what will likely go down in pop history as one of the iconic performances in Video Music Awards history on MTV. As silly as it sounds—and the VMAs are indeed silly—such performances are a cultural barometer, the feel of an era, for better or worse. Madonna’s stage-rolling “Like a Virgin,” Eminem’s marching clones, Britney Spears’s all-grown-up boa constrictor embrace in the ’90s, and yes, the over-the-top sexual clarion call/cry for help of another Disney kid in Miley Cyrus’s twerking spectacle alongside Robin Thicke in 2013.
Beyoncé’s 2014 performance felt like an attempt to reclaim the hypersexuality of a VMA performance as somehow meaningful, albeit with a level of subtlety worthy of the VMAs. She did so by performing sans pants, singing about oral sex and masturbation, with a sprinkling of sexual violence, surrounded by anonymous male and female dancers in bondage gear and painted like gold statuettes, and humping a fainting couch (a Beyoncéic-era nod to the Victorian era).
All of that is utterly routine on the VMA stage. But Beyoncé slapped a giant, neon sign reading FEMINIST behind her. And the world bowed down, bitches. The response to the display of the word, glowing white on a black background, with the powerfully posed Beyoncé’s silhouette in the foreground, stirred the American commentariat to such gushing testimonials as, “I cannot with this perfection.”
Vox explained, “How Beyoncé stole the show at the VMAs and made you forget anyone else was even there.” Beyoncé gave the Pharisees of feminism what they so ardently desired—a pop figure willing to stand up and embrace the word feminist.
So that’s what it takes to be woman enough for them.
Just be the most universally acclaimed woman on the planet and literally stand in front of a giant neon sign that proclaims simply FEMINIST. No wonder the rest of us feel like we don’t measure up.
What does a feminist look like? Not even they know. What it takes to be feminist enough is entirely fluid, controlled by a cabal of self-righteous priestesses, and the consequences of crossing them are dire—even for fellow members of their movement, as Michelle Goldberg found out when reporting on “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars” for the Nation: “[E]ven as online feminism has proved itself a real force for change, many of the most avid digital feminists will tell you that it’s become toxic. Indeed, there’s a nascent genre of essays by people who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in it—not because of sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists.” Again, it’s little wonder the average woman feels she can’t live up to the standard.4 Goldberg went on:
“On January 3, for example, Katherine Cross, a Puerto Rican trans woman5 working on a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote about how often she hesitates to publish articles or blog posts out of fear of inadvertently stepping on an ideological land mine and bringing down the wrath of the online enforcers.”
Cross told the Nation: “I fear being cast suddenly as one of the ‘bad guys’ for being insufficiently radical, too nuanced or too forgiving, or for simply writing something whose offensive dimensions would be unknown to me at the time of publication.” Welcome to our world, Katherine.
Eve Ensler, Beyoncé, ardent feminist activists. If even they are not pro-woman enough to avoid bans and boycotts, none of us stands a chance.
GETTING PAID AND LEANING IN
The scope of opinions liberal feminism has approved as “pro-woman” within mainstream cultural and political discussion is so narrow as to exclude many women and many ideas that might help them. One of the areas in which this reveals itself most clearly is the debate about women’s pay and careers, where the national discussion rarely reflects the needs and desires of regular women.
Instead, just as the language police demand you use only one label to define your modernity—feminist—the national conversation demands you create only one kind of success, defined ironically by the dated patriarch-inspired goals feminism once wished to slough off. In the battle to gain parity with men, especially in the workplace, modern feminism has often ignored the actual goals of working women. Instead, it embraces the career goals and challenges of a tiny number of tech CEOs like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer. Women all must want a corner office, CEO pay, and careers programming video games and designing bridges, according to the feminist movement.
While it is inarguably good to encourage smart young women to strive for leadership positions, demand equal treatment, and participate in male-dominated fields, it’s limiting to assume that “success” for women looks exactly like success for men. Young women of a new generation chafe at the confinement that comes with the “liberation” of feminist-defined success.
In a 2012 episode of the CBS law procedural The Good Wife, this generational split manifested itself in the resignation of promising young lawyer Caitlin D’arcy, played by Anna Camp. Having proved herself despite being hired thanks to her uncle’s influence at the show’s fictional Chicago law firm, D’arcy announced her intention to quit upon getting engaged and finding out she was pregnant. The women of the generation before her evinced shock at her decision. D’arcy serenely offered, “I like the law, but I don’t have anything to prove. I’m in love. I want to be a mom.”
Diane Lockhart, played by Christine Baranski, and the show’s titular character, Alicia Florrick, played by Julianna Margulies, reflected on D’arcy’s decision. “I don’t think this is what we broke the glass ceiling for,” Lockhart said. “I think maybe it is,” Alicia replied. Women’s liberation was supposed to be about choice. D’arcy made hers. Just because that choice was not confined to the second- or third-trimester “choice” for which feminists are always so ardently fighting doesn’t mean it’s not liberating.
Zosia Mamet, a young actress who rose to fame playing powerful countercultural characters on Mad Men and Girls, spoke to the need for flexibility in our definitions of success in a 2014 edition of Glamour. The current paradigm doesn’t allow for a lot of options.
We are so obsessed with “making it” these days we’ve lost sight of what it means to be successful on our own terms. As women we have internalized the idea that every morning we wake up, we have to go for the f—king gold. You can’t just jog; you have to run a triathlon. Having a cup of coffee, reading the paper, and heading to work isn’t enough—that’s settling, that’s giving in, that’s letting them win. You have to wake up, have a cup of coffee, conquer France, bake a perfect cake, take a boxing class, and figure out how you are going to get that corner office or become district supervisor, while also looking damn sexy—but not too sexy, because cleavage is degrading—all before lunchtime. Who in her right mind would want to do that? And who would even be able to?
I think, unfortunately, some of our need to succeed professionally is a by-product of a good thing: feminism. Feminism was meant to empower us as women, to build us up for fighting on male-dominated battlefields. It did that, but it did some other things as well. It gave us female role models like Hillary and Oprah and Beyoncé, and in the process implied that mogul-hood should be every woman’s goal. We kept the old male ideas of success: power and money. We need new ones!
…I hate that we look at women who choose not to run a country as having given up. I get angry that when a woman decides to hold off on gunning for a promotion because she wants to have a baby, other women whisper that she’s throwing away her potential. That is when we’re not supporting our own. Who are we to put such a limited definition on success?
Amen. Mamet is expressing what many women feel, and not just the conservative among us—a societal pressure that prevents many from voicing their real preferences about work-life balance and ideas of success for fear of being shunned as traitors to our sex.
Unfortunately, the Obama White House, Democratic politicians, and liberal activists find the appeal of the quest for “equal pay” too alluring to allow for the nuance of women’s different choices and outcomes. Instead, President Obama spent two election cycles harping on the issue of “equal pay” until his own White House was finally subjected to the same standard to which it holds the rest of us.
It started with then–White House press secretary Jay Carney on Equal Pay Day 2014, when reporters started using the administration’s own metric for “workplace fairness” against the White House by asking about government data showing the “women working at Obama’s White House earn 12 percent less than men on average,” or 88 cents on the dollar. Carney offered this explanation (April 7, 2014, White-House.gov press briefing transcript):
What I can tell you is that we have, as an institution here, have aggressively addressed this challenge, and obviously, though, at the 88 cents that you cite, that is not a hundred, but it is better than the national average. And when it comes to the bottom line that women who do the same work as men have to be paid the same, there is no question that that is happening here at the White House at every level.
When it comes to White House men and women in the same job, the ratio is actually 100:91, but let’s be charitable and give him that. If Carney contends it’s unfair to judge the White House’s commitment to gender equality by averaging salaries of male and female workers in a range of different positions and deeming all the difference between them to be a result of discrimination, he’s right. It is unfair. But the Left trots out that precise unfair statistic6 whenever it needs to claim Democrats are going to fix the problem with a piece of federal legislation or a wave of the regulatory wand. The statistic is bunk, as economist Betsey Stevenson, a member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, acknowledged when pressed about it.
“They’re stuck at 77 cents on the dollar, and that gender wage gap is seen very persistently across the income distribution, within occupations, across occupations, and we see it when men and women are working side by side doing identical work.” But “as soon as Stevenson was actually questioned about the statistic by McClatchy reporter Lindsay Wise, the White House adviser crumbled, admitting her earlier comments were inaccurate,” the Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow reported.
“If I said 77 cents was equal pay for equal work, then I completely misspoke,” Stevenson said. “So let me just apologize and say that I certainly wouldn’t have meant to say that…
“Seventy-seven cents captures the annual earnings of full-time, full-year women divided by the annual earnings of full-time, full-year men,” Stevenson clarified. “There are a lot of things that go into that 77-cents figure, there are a lot of things that contribute and no one’s trying to say that it’s all about discrimination, but I don’t think there’s a better figure.”
The problem, of course, with President Obama and the Left’s entire pitch for every iteration of his plan to boost women’s salaries (each of which is an admission the last one7 didn’t work) is that discrimination is the root.
Yes, there are differences in men’s and women’s salaries sometimes. Yes, discrimination exists. But most of the much-ballyhooed pay gap comes from the fact that women make different employment choices. They take less dangerous jobs with more flexible hours, they leave the workforce or cut back when having and raising children. To acknowledge this is not “blaming the victim.” For many women, these choices are made with open eyes.
“[A]mong all mothers with children under 18, just a quarter say they would choose full-time work if money were no object and they were free to do whatever they wanted, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll,” the New York Times reported in a rare article (“Coveting Not a Corner Office, but Time at Home,” by Catherine Rampell) addressing the gap between the one-dimensional national political rhetoric on women’s career desires and their actual desires.
But the Left’s goal in constantly raising this issue is to create a useful fictional workplace wherein women can exercise no choice and can exert no agency. With that fiction, the government must step in to help rectify the situation. Of course, it makes little sense to outsource such problem solving to the federal government, which—even if you have perfect faith in its intentions—is a clumsy vehicle for getting things done. This is perhaps best illustrated by the biannual federal bill Obama announces to solve the exact same problem.
Now, one place women really can take more control is in asking for more money. Even Stevenson, again of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, admitted that on the Freakonomics Radio program “Women Are Not Men”: “[T]here is this other thing, which I think I should mention, which is that often women are underpaid. And they’re underpaid because they simply don’t ask. They don’t ask for the raise they should get. And there’s really compelling research on this, that women tend to not negotiate as hard, tend to be less likely to ask for a raise. And so, if you could be earning more doing the exact same job you’re doing, I think you’d be better off. So you should go out there and ask for that raise.”
Yet when Texas GOP chairwoman Beth Cubriel made this point in 2014, she was lambasted by liberals and national media. She was insensitive, according to them. She was sexist, a symbol of the GOP’s women problem, alleged NBC’s Chuck Todd. She was also correct. Cubriel knew the research when she made her remarks, and was surprised by the backlash to a notion she’d heard feminists and women’s advocates push for years.
She told us she was so surprised, her first instinct was to ignore the dustup because she didn’t want to give the story legs.
“It had legs of its own. I was really surprised,” she told us, acknowledging she still gets Google alerts about the kerfuffle, which amounted to two weeks of national news stories. “In hindsight, I should have responded immediately,” she said.
Cubriel was understandably caught off-guard by a national firestorm. It wasn’t that what she said was offensive. It’s that her political opponents found it convenient to be offended that she said it. The notion was uncontroversial as long as it wasn’t a conservative expressing it, at which point it became politically useful to deem it insensitive insanity.
For many people, negotiating is not fun. It’s scary, it’s uncomfortable. And yes, it might be fraught with more peril for an assertive woman than an assertive man, depending on one’s boss. But getting a negotiating coach, daring to ask, being frank about what your time and talents are worth—these are skills we should encourage women to hone. Women can be trusted with methods for fighting unfairness. When the Left leaves out all nuance in discussing equal pay to pitch yet another tired legislative solution, it leaves out the best part—the part where women have power and can learn to become more powerful. What’s the word for that? Oh yes, empowerment.
SURE, YOU BASICALLY CURED BREAST CANCER, BUT WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR WOMEN LATELY?
Susan G. Komen for the Cure has been raising awareness and almost $2 billion for breast cancer research, patient and survivor support, and treatment for more than thirty years. Formed in 1982 as Nancy Goodman Brinker’s fulfillment of her sister Susan’s dying wish, the organization has given more money to breast cancer research than any other entity over a period of time during which survival rates increased by 30 percent and five-year survival rates hit 99 percent in America. A diagnosis that was a sure death sentence for women when Komen passed away tragically at age thirty-six in 1980 has become something much different in the face of one of the most aggressive and fruitful awareness and research campaigns in history.
Komen for the Cure is certainly not exempt from criticism. Like any large organization, it regularly faces charges of mission creep, prizing pink P.R. over tangible progress, or bureaucratization that hurts those it’s meant to help. What it can’t plausibly be accused of is being antiwoman. And yet, in 2012, that was the assertion of the Democratic Party, the entire liberal activist community, and much of the media.
Thirty years after a mourning woman formed this organization to honor her sister, Susan G. Komen for the Cure found out it was antiwoman. Why? Because this titan of fund-raising, this template for grassroots activism, this trailblazer for encouraging successful medical research into an inscrutable disease affecting mostly women had the audacity to end a seven-year partnership with Planned Parenthood.
It turns out utter fealty to the cause of abortion rights is truly the metric on which the Left measures being “pro-woman,” even though half of the country’s women are pro-life.
That January, Komen decided to end a partnership with Planned Parenthood affiliates, which they had been gifting since 2005. The grants amounted to a little over half a million dollars per year in 2010 and 2011, distributed among about twenty Planned Parenthood affiliates, and were meant for breast cancer screenings and other breast health services.
Komen gave several reasons for its decision. First, according to internal memos leaked to the Atlantic, the organization had decided to eliminate from grant consideration anyone “under formal investigation for financial or administrative improprieties by local, state or federal authorities.” Such an organization could regain consideration after the conclusion of the investigation if it was cleared of “financial and/or administrative improprieties,” which were another disqualifier in updated grant requirements.8
Second, Komen expressed a desire to eliminate “pass-through” grants to organizations that did not provide direct care. Planned Parenthood was one such organization, offering in-office manual breast exams but only referrals to mammogram services. At the time of the controversy and now, Planned Parenthood’s own website, under a section entitled “Where can I get a mammogram?,” answered thusly: “Ask your health care provider, health department, or staff at your local Planned Parenthood health center about where you can get a mammogram in your area.”
Komen founder Brinker told CBS News, “ ‘I don’t know very much about that investigation, frankly.’ Brinker said that under the new standards, ‘we like to be able to direct a person to proper training and diagnosis, and we don’t like to do pass-through grants anymore.’ ”
Planned Parenthood’s own numbers for breast exams, which it publicized during the controversy, suggest perhaps it was not giving Komen much bang for its many bucks. Komen claimed in its literature to have performed 170,000 breast exams with this money and produced about 6,400 referrals to other breast health services. That amounts to more than $3,000 per manual breast exam or referral to a mammogram, which seems inordinately high.
But Planned Parenthood supporters, including much of the media, were convinced a decision to remove any Planned Parenthood affiliate from grant funding was politically motivated, spurred by an investigation by former Republican representative Cliff Stearns (R-FL) and the hiring of one vocally pro-life employee to work on policy for Komen.
Karen Handel, a 2010 conservative candidate for governor of Georgia, was senior vice president for policy at the time of the grant restructuring decision. She had been hired after a stint as a contractor for the organization, during which she designed plans for convincing governments to maintain grant levels for Komen during a downturn that called for belt tightening.
But it wasn’t the millions she saved for breast cancer research through her efforts that attracted coverage. Instead, Planned Parenthood’s roughly $600,000 yearly grant—less than 1 percent of Komen’s $100 million annual grant-making budget—became the center of news coverage for a tumultuous three-day period during a presidential election year. The ensuing circus left Komen publicly bruised and seemingly bewildered, and Planned Parenthood the Hotel California of grants and donations. Turns out Komen was more than welcome to check in with their hundreds of thousands of dollars anytime they liked, but they could never leave.
Komen failed to anticipate this firestorm, allowing opponents to break and shape the announcement, staying silent as controversy built around them, and naively assuming thirty years of work to defeat a scourge of women’s health might have earned them enough goodwill not to be crucified as agents against women’s health for declining to continue one grant among its two thousand. Handel later wrote in her book about the controversy, Planned Bullyhood, that Komen leaders believed they “had made a ‘gentle ladies’ pact, agreeing to part ways amicably and acknowledging that a media firestorm was in no one’s best interest.”
But opponents of the Komen decision had a powerful political motivation of their own, and a blueprint for fighting to a win. They had lost one such fight before, in 1990, when AT&T pulled its funding for Planned Parenthood after twenty-five years, squeamish about the organization’s increasingly vocal role in abortion politics. Despite an onslaught of full-page ads in national newspapers declaring, “Caving in to extremists, AT&T hangs up on Planned Parenthood,” AT&T stuck by its decision. I bet the telecom giant is glad it checked out when it had the chance.
A firestorm was in the best interests of the Left, which desired to draw as stark a contrast as possible between Democrats and Republicans in an election year, particularly on any issue—real or trumped up—that could conceivably touch on women or women’s health. They caught Komen off-guard with a well-planned, coordinated political attack. “I think it was clearly orchestrated. It was so much ado about nothing,” Handel said in an interview with us. “The reality is [Planned Parenthood is] a political machine working on behalf of the Left.”
The fight over Komen’s grant-making procedures happened against a backdrop of a public fight the Obama administration (and by extension the Obama campaign) was waging with Catholic and other conservative and religious groups over a regulation in the Affordable Care Act. The so-called birth control mandate forced these groups to fund contraception and abortifacients that violate their religious beliefs and consciences. The rule was not in the original law, but regulators added it to Obama’s signature, partisan attempt to rewrite the health-care system in 2012. Jonathan Last explained the rule’s provenance in a Weekly Standard article entitled “Obamacare vs. the Catholics” in February of that year:
The beginnings of this confrontation lay in an obscure provision of Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which stated that all insurers will be required to provide “preventive health services.” When the law was passed, “preventive” was not defined but left to be determined at a later date.
This past August, Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius finally got around to explaining the administration’s interpretation of the phrase. Based on a recommendation from the Institute of Medicine, the administration would define “preventive health services” to include contraceptives, morning-after pills, and female sterilization. And they would interpret the “all insurers” section to include religious organizations, whatever their beliefs.
Much as Komen’s officials thought they had an agreement to respect a quiet parting of ways, liberal Catholic leaders9 thought they had an agreement with the Obama administration that its “preventive health services” final rule wouldn’t trample the conscience rights of the Church. They were wrong. Last, again:
While Catholics were blindsided by the January decision, the left had been paying close attention to the subject for months. In November, several leftist and feminist blogs began beating the war drums, warning Obama not to “cave” (their word) to the bishops. They were joined by the Nation, Salon, the Huffington Post, and the usual suspects. (Sample headline: “The Men Behind the War on Women.”) At the same time, Planned Parenthood and NARAL launched grassroots lobbying efforts and delivered petitions with 100,000 and 135,000 signatures respectively to the White House urging Obama to uphold the policy and not compromise.
By October, the two-front fight combined in President Obama’s talking points in the second presidential debate:
“Governor Romney says that we should eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood,” Obama said. “There are millions of women all across the country who rely on Planned Parenthood for not just contraceptive care. They rely on it for mammograms, for cervical cancer screenings.” Nonpartisan fact-checker FactCheck.org noted the next day, “Actually, mammograms are not performed at the clinics; Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses conduct breast exams and refer patients to other facilities for mammograms.”
Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards had also been caught misrepresenting what the organization offers, speaking to Joy Behar on CNN’s Headline News in 2011 about a proposal to pull federal funds from Planned Parenthood. “If this bill ever becomes law, millions of women in this country are gonna lose their healthcare access—not to abortion services—to basic family planning, you know, mammograms.”
In a move of creepy, statist solidarity, twenty-six Democratic senators signed onto a letter sternly asking Komen—again, a private breast cancer charity—to reconsider its decision to pull .6 percent of its grant-making budget from an organization that doesn’t offer mammograms. “We earnestly hope that you will put women’s health before partisan politics and reconsider this decision for the sake of the women who depend on both your organizations for access to the health care they need,” wrote the twenty-six partisans.
Nice charity you have there. Shame if anything should happen to it. Here we have a clear example of the Left putting an immense cost on dissent, as the force of the United States Senate is brought to bear on a private charity’s freedom of association and minuscule grants.
OF NERDS, NAIL POLISH, NAYSAYERS, AND NINJUTSU
A former beauty queen is standing against a bar in a crowded club. She’s approached by a man who gives her an instant and intense case of the creeps. It’s not just the popped collar, but an intuited sense of danger that turns her off. As he turns to order a drink for himself, he jostles her drink for just a moment. Acting on her gut, the woman dunks a purple nail into her drink. When the nail polish emerges streaked in green, a sure sign of foul play, the woman knows she must act. She has two hobbies—competing in beauty pageants and kicking ass, and she doesn’t see a crown in this club, bitches. So she promptly roundhouses her would-be attacker, calls the police, and enjoys a non-roofied cosmo with her friends.
Would you say this scene is an empowering study in modern womanhood and a shattering of a stereotype of the delicate, deferential pageant queen, with a James Bondian gadget twist? Or would you call this woman a feminist’s nightmare? Turns out, for modern feminists, it’s the latter.
In the fall of 2014, four men studying engineering and materials science at North Carolina State University came up with an innovation in nail polish, of all things. Billing themselves as the “The First Fashion Company Empowering Women to Prevent Sexual Assault,” the founders of Undercover Colors created a line of polishes that would react if dipped into a drink spiked with a date-rape drug such as GHB (gamma hydroxybutyrate), or Rohypnol. The invention would give women in clubs or college parties a way to test their drinks easily, giving them one more tool to ward off perpetrators of assault. “Our goal is to invent technologies that empower women to protect themselves from this heinous and quietly pervasive crime,” the team wrote on their Facebook page.
A few months before this nail lacquer made the news, the eventual winner of the Miss USA pageant, Nia Sanchez of Nevada, was asked a question in competition about sexual assault on college campuses being “swept under the rug.” Here is her answer, as quoted in the Washington Post’s coverage of the pageant:
“I believe that some colleges may potentially be afraid of having a bad reputation and that would be a reason it could be swept under the rug, because they don’t want that to come out into the public,” Sanchez said. “But I think more awareness is very important so women can learn how to protect themselves. Myself, as a fourth-degree black belt, I learned from a young age that you need to be confident and be able to defend yourself. And I think that’s something that we should start to really implement for a lot of women.”
For most who encountered either of these stories, the immediate reaction was something akin to “Wow, that’s neat. Technology and technical training as tools to limit the power of rapists.” Who could object to a new product that could potentially curb the use of drugs like roofies? Who’s offended by a pageant-queen pile driver that could potentially strike fear into the hearts of the criminals?
But we live in a society where creating a nail polish that might help women prevent rape is objectionable. We live in a society where Sanchez’s idea of arming herself is met with incredulity and ridicule. Sanchez was called “sick,” an “idiot.” Her answer “icky,” “awful and offensive.”
Why? Because of something called “rape culture.” Rape culture is the idea that our society, in its very fiber, is set up to give license to and make excuses for rapists. Such a society normalizes nonconsent, blames victims for attacks, and creates socially approved roles for women and men in sexual relationships that facilitate male control. The idea of rape culture moves blame for rape and sexual assault from individuals to a more societal, collective guilt.
For a less dense, academic description, with a taste of just how expansive this concept can get in mainstream feminist thought, here’s a treatise, titled “Rape Culture 101,” posted October 9, 2009, by feminist blogger Melissa McEwan on Shakesville. Aside from a couple of the more absurd suggestions and the last line, this sounds like a list of basic precautions that women—nay, human beings, in general—should consider when living life in an unpredictable and sometimes dangerous world.
Rape culture is telling girls and women to be careful about what you wear, how you wear it, how you carry yourself, where you walk, when you walk there, with whom you walk, whom you trust, what you do, where you do it, with whom you do it, what you drink, how much you drink, whether you make eye contact, if you’re alone, if you’re with a stranger, if you’re in a group, if you’re in a group of strangers, if it’s dark, if the area is unfamiliar, if you’re carrying something, how you carry it, what kind of shoes you’re wearing in case you have to run, what kind of purse you carry, what jewelry you wear, what time it is, what street it is, what environment it is, how many people you sleep with, what kind of people you sleep with, who your friends are, to whom you give your number, who’s around when the delivery guy comes, to get an apartment where you can see who’s at the door before they can see you, to check before you open the door to the delivery guy, to own a dog or a dog-sound-making machine, to get a roommate, to take self-defense, to always be alert always pay attention always watch your back always be aware of your surroundings and never let your guard down for a moment lest you be sexually assaulted and if you are and didn’t follow all the rules it’s your fault.
For those who believe the United States is a “rape culture,” giving women a new technology or skills that could potentially protect them from rape somehow empowers rapists. The idea is the very existence of the nail polish or ninjutsu assumes the presence of rapists and implies a woman’s responsibility to protect herself from them. “Prevention tips or products that focus on what women do or wear aren’t just ineffective, they leave room for victim-blaming when those steps aren’t taken,” posted Jessica Valenti, another prominent online feminist, in an August 26, 2014, Guardian article whose headline offered the false choice—“Why is it easier to invent anti-rape nail polish than find a way to stop rapists?” Why not do both?
The mere existence of a nail polish a woman might choose to wear to protect herself against a certain kind of sexual assault is tantamount to suggesting she asked for it by wearing a short skirt, according to some feminists. And, thus, literal empowerment of women is declared antiwoman. A protest of the nail polish—yes, a protest of antirape nail polish—by the Centre for Gender Advocacy of Concordia University in Montreal featured MANicures for protesters emblazoned with the words DON’T RAPE and ASK FIRST.
The objection is that the availability of any method of prevention somehow puts the onus on women to “not get raped” instead of teaching men “don’t rape.” Ashe Schow, who covers the feminist movement and its rhetorical and political crusades for the Washington Examiner, wondered, “What if we applied feminist logic to other crimes?” with absurd results:
We should be teaching people not to steal, not telling people to lock their doors and windows…
I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t jog down deserted streets at night. I shouldn’t have to change my normal behavior because someone wants to attack me or steal my iPod.
Telling me to be aware of my surroundings perpetuates “burglary culture” where it is somehow my fault that I got mugged.
People need to be taught not to abduct children; children shouldn’t be told not to talk to strangers.
But the fight over who is responsible is precisely why the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network recently critiqued the term rape culture, much to the chagrin of adherents to the philosophy. In March 2014, RAINN’s president and vice president said in a letter to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault:
In the last few years, there has been an unfortunate trend towards blaming “rape culture” for the extensive problem of sexual violence on campuses. While it is helpful to point out the systemic barriers to addressing the problem, it is important to not lose sight of a simple fact: Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime.
Giving women tools other than a mantra of “don’t rape” doesn’t change the fact that rape exists and those who perpetrate this heinous crime should be punished. Access to such tools as a complement to the idea of “don’t rape” seems rather reasonable, even laudable. But the idea is to declare anyone who disagrees with the liberal view on this issue a part of “rape culture.” Smearing one’s opponents as rape abettors for their mere words is pretty much the definition of ending the discussion.
GOING FULL FALLOPIAN
It was January of 2012 when ABC anchor and former Democratic campaign strategist George Stephanopoulos opened a new front in a culture war conservatives had no idea existed. Referring to a 1965 Supreme Court ruling, Stephanopoulos asked candidate Mitt Romney, a noncombatant in this nonexistent culture war, the following question during a Republican primary debate:
Governor Romney, I want to go straight to you. Senator Santorum has been very clear in his belief that the Supreme Court was wrong when it decided that a right to privacy was embedded in the Constitution. And following from that, he believes that states have the right to ban contraception. Now, I should add that he’s said that he’s not recommending that states do that…But I do want to get that core question. Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?
Explaining “Mansplaining”
Mansplain (verb): When a man talks down to a woman, explaining a subject matter she knows perfectly well or even better than the man in question, out of an ingrained, outdated, and sexist assumption that she needs things spoonfed to her because she is a woman.
Or that’s how they might define it, at least. This term is frequently used for one purpose: shutting down a conversation. For instance:
Man: “Actually, those equal pay statistics are misleading because…”
Liberal woman: “Oh good! I was hoping someone would MANSPLAIN away the unfair gender gap for me!”
Man: (slinks away)
When the nation was debating late-term abortion in the wake of Texas state senator Wendy Davis’s infamous filibuster of a popular legal restriction (more polling details to come), Guy tweeted some friendly messaging advice for fellow pro-lifers. Rather than calling the legislation a ban at “20 weeks,” he suggested, it might be more effective and impactful to describe the proposed limitations in terms of months. “Abortion in the sixth month of pregnancy” offers context that people can intuitively understand, whereas referring to “weeks” sounds more clinical. Democratic rapid-response specialist Lis Smith, formerly of the Obama campaign, swooped in and derided Guy for “mansplaining” the issue. She wasn’t disputing any of his facts. Indeed, as part of Democrats’ messaging apparatus, she likely knew that he was making an effective point. So she dropped a “mansplain” to try to instill doubt (“as a man, should I really be talking about these issues at all?”) and shush him.
Romney’s half-confused, half-bemused answer pretty much sums up the reaction of conservatives, who had not in any conceivable sense considered such bans, let alone pushed for them:
George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising. States have a right to ban contraception? I can’t imagine a state banning contraception. I can’t imagine the circumstances where a state would want to do so, and if I were governor of a state or a legislator of a state, I would totally and completely oppose any effort to ban contraception. So you’re asking, given the fact that there’s no state that wants to do so, and I don’t know of any candidate that wants to do so, you’re asking: Could it constitutionally be done? We can ask our constitutionalist here. (Laughter as Romney turns to Ron Paul)…
George, I don’t know whether the states have a right to ban contraception. No state wants to. I mean, the idea of you putting forward things that states might want to do that no state wants to do and asking me whether they could do it or not, is kind of a silly thing, I think. (Applause)
When Stephanopoulos pressed Romney further, the exasperated candidate slammed the door shut. “Contraception? It’s working just fine. Let’s leave it alone.” The hall packed with Republicans burst into laughter and applause. Issue resolved, right? Wrong, as we’ll soon discover.
Side fact: Three liberal mayors of major American cities threatened to use their government power to actually ban Chick-fil-A from establishing new franchises inside their cities because they disagreed with its leadership’s political views on gay marriage. Exactly zero conservative or Republican politicians have attempted to ban birth control anywhere in the United States of America.
The question seemed to come out of left field at the time, both in a figurative and in an ideological sense. Again, Romney’s reaction mirrored the reaction of the rest of the Right, which knew it didn’t want to ban birth control and didn’t think anyone else would believe they did. Stephanopoulos—who Politico reported in 2009 participated in daily conference calls with then White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, and fellow Clintonistas James Carville and Paul Begala—set the stage for the Democratic Party’s incessant, frantic, and false messaging for the next three years with one question. He has denied that this was an act of collusion with the party, claiming he was inspired by comments Santorum made in an interview earlier that week with Jake Tapper, who then worked for ABC News. But even Santorum himself, while supporting the right of states to theoretically ban contraception, didn’t support the idea, calling such a move a “dumb thing” in the interview with Tapper.
Regardless of Santorum’s explanation, there was no pressing need to know Romney’s position on the “issue,” as he’d never even hinted at any desire to prohibit birth control in the past. The premise of the question was fabricated, as even the most outspoken social conservative in the race literally called the idea “dumb.” Yet, Romney was asked the question four times in a prime-time debate. Conservatives, your writers included, figured this bizarre Stephanopoulos tangent would blow over by the end of the debate. Instead, it constituted approximately 75 percent of the Democratic Party’s messaging from that day forward.
Three weeks after Stephanopoulos’s seemingly bizarre question, the Obama administration announced a regulation that required every employer in the United States to provide birth control, free of charge, to all employees, regardless of the religious convictions of the employers. Its insertion into Obamacare, and conservatives’ resulting religious liberty concerns about it, kicked an incessant, frantic, and false narrative into high gear. The “war on women” was born.
By February, Stephanopoulos’s question and the Obamacare regulation had conveniently dovetailed to thrust birth control into the forefront of American political conversation, despite the fact that 85 percent of employer-based health-care plans already covered contraception, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Moreover, “[t]he federal government already paid for Medicaid recipients’ contraception and spent another $300 million each year on contraception for lower-income and uninsured Americans through the Title X program,” according to reporting by the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack.
It’s almost as if this threat had been concocted as a political battle cry, instead of serving an authentic need. In three short weeks, birth control had gone from a readily available and relatively cheap medicine used commonly and without issue by American women to a human right for which one should never have to pay, and which was suddenly in grave, grave danger of disappearing if Republicans got their way.
This was, and is, completely ridiculous. It sounded ridiculous when Stephanopoulos first asked the question, and it remains ridiculous in a post–Hobby Lobby10 world, which hasn’t even “turned back the clock” on women to the dark days of, like, seven minutes ago.11 McCormack again in “Hobby Lobby Hysteria”:
The Court didn’t even turn back the clock to the supposedly scary time when middle-class and wealthy citizens might have had to shell out $9 a month for birth control. It ruled that the government could achieve its goal of co-pay-free birth control for all without forcing conscientious objectors to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs. The federal government, which intends to spend $2 trillion on Obamacare over the next decade, could scrounge up the change to pay directly for contraceptives or abortifacients not covered by conscientious objectors’ health plans, for example.
The Obama administration has been fighting a group of nuns12 in court to force them to pay for birth control. That is a thing that’s happening in real life. Because…war on women.
The “vote with your ladyparts!” crowd will insist that women who don’t self-identify in a narrowly tailored way don’t really count as full women. They’ll intone that Republicans actively oppose pay equality and harbor a secret desire to grab your Yaz. And they’ll try to shut people up with discussion-ending epithets like “rape culture” and “mansplaining.” We’re smarter than this, ladies. Liberation includes the freedom to think for ourselves.
AKIN, FILNER, AND THE “EMBLEMATIC” GAME
Two rules of thumb: First, the term “legitimate rape” should be stricken from politicians’ lexicon. Period. Nothing good can come of stringing those two words together. Second, if you’re a man running for office, and you’re asked about abortion policy in the rare circumstance of pregnancies resulting from rape, you’d better have a rock-solid answer prepared. And it must never, ever include ignorant theorizing about the female body’s magical ability to shut off its reproductive functions during a sexual assault. Congressman Todd Akin violated both of those guidelines in epic fashion in 2012, pissing away a Senate race in which Democrat Claire McCaskill’s seat was ripe for the picking. McCaskill helped hand-select her gaffe-prone opponent by meddling in the GOP primary, and her strategy paid off.
But Akin’s idiocy heard ’round the country illustrates a maddening double standard, wherein virtually every Republican in America is asked to denounce any offensive or controversial statement made by a member of the party. Mitt Romney was asked on several occasions about Akin’s foot-in-mouth moment, forcing him to repeatedly reject the comments and clarify his own position. Similar scenes played out in down-ticket races from coast to coast. Everyone from Senate nominees to candidates for dogcatcher were compelled to weigh in, so long as they had an R next to their last name. The instantly congealed conventional wisdom determined that Akin’s indefensible comments were “emblematic” of Republicans’ problems with women. One skirmish in the war on women was nationalized, and the party took a real hit.
Bob Filner, in contrast, is a Democrat. He served in Congress for the better part of two decades before getting elected mayor of San Diego. In 2013, he was accused of sexual misconduct, an allegation that merely opened the floodgates. Before all was said and done, at least eighteen accusers came forward to point the finger at Filner. This group included a great-grandmother and several survivors of sexual assault in the military, whom Filner met in his capacity as then chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. One member of the National Women Veterans of America told CNN, “[Filner] went to dinners, asked women out to dinners, grabbed breasts, buttocks. The full gamut. Everything that is complete violation of what we stand for…He’s a sexual predator. And he used this organization for his own personal agenda.” Other women described “the Filner dance,” in which the lecherous pol would corner female subordinates in a room and make sexual advances, sometimes going so far as to put women in headlocks.
When this scandal finally detonated on the serial misogynist at a July 11 press conference, national Democrats remained curiously mum for weeks. More than a week later, with victims coming out of the woodwork, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked whether Filner—her longtime House colleague—should step down as mayor of a major city in her home state. “What goes on in San Diego is up to the people of San Diego. I’m not here to make any judgments,” she said. Can you imagine the shitstorm that would have been unleashed if Mitt Romney had said of Todd Akin, “Look, what happens in Missouri stays in Missouri. Get lost”? Senator Dianne Feinstein, who represents Filner’s state, finally got around to calling for his resignation on July 28, after nearly three weeks of hedging. Senator Barbara Boxer, California’s other U.S. senator and a hardened gender warrior, waited until August 9 to do the same. Her open letter was peppered with praise for Filner’s work on issues “from creating jobs to protecting the environment to helping our veterans.” She urged him to “get the help you need.”
Appearing on CNN in late July, Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen made an unusual confession: “I had dinner over the weekend with some female [House] members and former members who said that this guy has kinda been this way all along,” she said of Filner. “Everybody thought that he was a little creepy.” More than a dozen alleged victims don’t just appear overnight; logic dictated that Filner’s reign of harassment must have spanned years. Rosen’s comment indicated that his actions were an open secret among D.C.-based Democrats, who evidently shrugged off his conduct as a “creepy” peccadillo for years. Aside from naked partisanship, what can possibly explain the fact that Pelosi, Feinstein, and Boxer—grand defenders of women, all—were so reluctant to speak up? Even if we assume they knew nothing of his behavior while he was on the Hill with them, how long would it have taken after accusations started flying to race to a microphone if Filner sat across the aisle?
Filner eventually stepped down, but his habitually abusive behavior was treated as far less important, relevant, and urgent than Akin’s words. Akin was emblematic; Filner was…an unfortunate sideshow, halfheartedly defended before being cut loose. Who really cares if Filner grabbed everything that moved for his entire political career? What really mattered was his support for abortion and birth control “access.”
In another stark example, a Republican Hill staffer named Elizabeth Lauten became the subject of several days of blanket, national news coverage for writing a critical post on her personal Facebook page about the outfits and attitudes of the Obama daughters at the 2014 Turkey Pardon with the president.
The same week that Lauten was resigning from the backlash, a Democratic staffer pleaded guilty to sexual assault of two women, one a colleague whom he’d drugged and raped. Despite being an admitted rapist, Donny Ray Williams Jr., aide to then senators Mary Landrieu and Herb Kohl and prominent Democratic representatives Elijah Cummings and Jan Schakowsky, never made it onto the evening news.
The evidence is pretty clear that a D beside one’s name and a record of voting liberal is a get-out-of-assault-free card. Often the guilty individual isn’t made to pay much of a price, and his party gets little if any blowback; Democrats effortlessly shake it off and go along their merry way accusing others of warring against women.
1 MKH here. For reasons that are hopefully clear, I’m going to be taking the lead on this chapter, for the most part. Guy says he knows his place.
2 Katherine Timpf of National Review and Campus Reform keeps a running tally of the unending and ridiculous list of things feminists declare sexist. Several of these are among them.
3 Though not strictly a monarchy in the geopolitical understanding of the term, the reign of Queen Bey is far-reaching, powerful, and not to be questioned lightly.
4 MKH here. My grandmother was born in the 1930s in rural Virginia. She went to college, played basketball on an organized team, and was a Navy WAVE during World War II, working in intelligence in Washington, D.C., as a single woman before marrying her childhood sweetheart postwar. She raised three kids, sometimes single-handedly moving their household all over the country and world depending on where my grandfather was stationed. She later became a community leader and town councilwoman. By any measure, she was a woman who believed in the equality and immense capability of women, and illustrated it every day of her life. Her politics were also mostly conservative for most of her life. No modern feminist fighting microaggressions can reasonably argue her life wasn’t a credit to the progress of women, and if I stand on the shoulders of anyone who came before me, they are hers.
5 What’s all this “trans” stuff about anyway, you ask? “Shame on you for your ignorance and bigotry” is the official answer, but we’ll take a stab at it in chapter 8.
6 Several 2014 Democratic Senate candidates were offended when their Republican opponents held them to their own party’s standard on this issue. Incumbent Colorado senator Mark Udall was rendered practically speechless on the issue by challenger Representative Cory Gardner, who noted that not only did Udall pay women less (using Democrats’ preferred crude calculus) than men in his Senate office, Gardner paid women more than men in his House office. Yet Udall was the one yelling about equal pay in his television commercials.
7 Like, for instance, The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed by President Obama in 2009.
8 Why, yes, Planned Parenthood was indeed the focus of a Government Accountability Office investigation over the use of its funds—a separate issue from Live Action’s ongoing probe into Planned Parenthood on malfeasance ranging from illegal abortion practices to covering up statutory rape and sex trafficking. Champions of women!
9 In March 2010, Bart Stupak, a former Michigan congressman, was one of the final persuadable Obamacare holdouts among Nancy Pelosi’s caucus. She needed his vote, along with a small band of pro-life-leaning Democrats who were standing with him. Stupak was eventually won over by assurances from the White House and an executive order signed by President Obama that ostensibly ensured that no taxpayer funding would flow to abortion via the new law. Conscience protections were also part of the deal. Once the law was implemented, those aforementioned assurances were discarded, and the antiabortion executive order was being habitually ignored, according to a nonpartisan Government Accountability Office review. Four years later, Stupak penned a USA Today column announcing that his fellow Democrats’ “ironclad commitments” on conscience rights had been betrayed.
10 The scope of the Supreme Court’s laudable 2014 decision on religious liberty is likely more narrow than conservatives would hope, and less drastic than many liberals have been led to believe.
11 Isn’t it unconscionable the president “denied women access” (to use their preposterous parlance) to birth control for the first half of his presidency? The horror. We can’t believe Democrats didn’t address this historic injustice legislatively immediately upon gaining filibuster-proof majorities in both houses of Congress.
12 The Little Sisters of the Poor offer care to thirteen thousand indigent elderly around the world and would like the right, as nuns, not to pay for birth control that violates their religious beliefs.