Wednesday, June 11, 2008

The Folly of Ferraro Feminism

The touchy subject of feminism, Hillary Clinton and her bitterly disappointed "we-got-robbed" older female supporters are addressed with clear insight by Maureen Tkacik in.... "The Feminine Mistake." (WaPo)

Tkacik muses over a flaw in this generation of women's-rights activists: "They lack a certain bedside manner. At times, a pungent cocktail of indignation and impatience fueling veteran feminists through this primary season has seemed suicidally poisonous.

"Witness Geraldine Ferraro's threat to vote in the general election for John McCain because she found Barack Obama's campaign 'sexist.' (Sweetie, McCain is an antiabortion Republican who has explicitly stated his intention to nominate Supreme Court justices in the mold of John Roberts. He also, incidentally, traded his first wife -- who'd been disfigured by a car accident -- for his second in the matter of a month.)"

All of this unseemly Hillary-supporter rage and whining ignores Obama's against-all-odds historic win, as Tkacik points out, it is "harder in this country to be born a black male than a white female."

A vote for McCain would also keep us mired in Iraq. Feminists should worry about that.... although the young Obama-supporting feminists seem to get it. Tkacik recounts the "soul-shattering story about a man in Basra who beat his daughter to death for forming a crush on a British soldier....."

"Honor killings have long been practiced in Iraq, but they have grown more common as women's rights have been curtailed under the reign of fear imposed by the chaos of the occupation and the puritanism of Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr."

Before acting like vindictive women scorned, perhaps Ferraro and others with similar grudges, should step outside of themselves to view the larger picture. The first African-American presidential candidate who opposed the Iraq war and supports feminist issues, as opposed to supporting the injustices and blows to women's rights spawned by The Decider and carried forward with gusto by McSame.

Hillary feminists.... don't look for progress on her "it's all about me" path. It's not the way forward.

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