It’s the year of the woman — or at least the year of the painful political pander to women. Both political parties are bending over backward to cater to this underrepresented minority group, which made up just 54 percent of voters in 2008.
Not that there are any women on either national ticket — but some get to be on the national stage standing next to their husbands, which is apparently evidence that those men love and care for all women.
Not that it would matter, after all: According to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic Party chairwoman, the women who spoke at the Republican National Convention are just “shiny packaging.”You can be a former secretary of state, like Condoleezza Rice, or the first female Hispanic governor in America, like New Mexico’s Susana Martinez, but you’re still just wrapping paper for the gift that is men.
Nice brand of feminism there, Debbie.
Women are so important this year that one political side has accused the other of launching a “war” on them. You know you matter when there’s a war over you.
Oh, and the Democratic National Committee hired a plane to fly over the Republican National Committee’s convention in Tampa carrying the banner “Romney, Ryan, Akin: Too extreme for woman [sic].”
Which woman exactly, they didn’t say. And apparently they’re not too extreme for men, but the weaker sex just can’t handle them.
There’s something more than a little distasteful about all this — as if, years after women’s liberation, we still can’t get by unless big, strong men (who most likely work for the big, strong government) come and take care of us.
What’s even more wild is that it’s the liberal side that is saying women just can’t go it alone. When the spotlight was on Sandra Fluke, it was embarrassing to watch an educated, 30-year-old woman say she was unable to fund her own birth control and would need the men listening to her testimony to step in and help her.
That Fluke will speak at the Democratic National Convention is even more shameful. Is this the status of women in 2012? Where are the men asking for help to buy condoms?
And why, exactly, are women being treated as some sort of mass unit? All this catering to “women’s issues” assumes that all women feel the same way about all issues — and that those issues are almost all tied to sex or reproduction. That women may worry about taxation, terrorism, government spending, jobs or other “men’s” issues is apparently inconceivable.
It’s not a step forward for women that we are the focus of all this; it’s condescension, pure and simple.
If the goal is still equality between the sexes, then the pats on the head women have been receiving from politicians in the last year show we’re just not there yet.
Karol Markowicz blogs at alarmingnews.com.