NEW SMYRNA BEACH -- Many readers will understand when I acknowledge that I watched as much of the Democrats’ convention as I could. I did listen to the speeches of both the president and the first lady out of respect. I listened to as much of former President Clinton’s mendacity as I could stomach.
Later, via the Internet, I checked out other speakers. That former governor of Michigan sure gave a stem winder of a speech! If she’s looking for a job now that she is no longer governor, maybe she could try tent revival preaching. I don’t remember the last time I witnessed so much hysterical overacting.
What sticks in my mind the most, however, was the drumbeat of messages about female reproductive rights. This theme, framed as the Republican’s War on Women, has been a major part of the President’s team message and the White House campaign for a good part of this year.
I’ve got to say, as a married, college-educated, life-long career woman who is also a mother and grandmother, this theme and the people who are pushing it truly creep me out.
It is so insulting that I want to spit. To me, a woman who worked her way through undergraduate school and graduate school with honors – the first person, male or female, in my family to complete college, and who has managed to hold some influential positions of leadership, being reduced to the sum of my reproductive organs is about as demeaning as it gets. What happened to my brain?
And yet that convention was permeated by female speakers harping on contraception and abortion – and they demand them to be funded by the taxpayers. I’m sorry, this campaign about the non-existent War on Women is a clown show. Any woman dumb enough to fall for it deserves what she gets.
The serious leaders of the women’s movement were originally promoting equal opportunity in the workplace and a real seat at the table when public policy was made. How have they morphed into these ridiculous harpies who claim that all women care about is contraception and abortion? This is more than appalling – it’s bizarre.
You ask me and every woman who I know well what matters the most -- no matter the age, whether homemaker, employed outside the home or retiree, we’ll tell you that our priorities are improvement and growth in our sorry economy and job availability. We’re worried about soaring gas and food prices.
Those of us who are older are worried that so many financial sacrifices we made earlier in life in order to be no burden to our children in retirement are being up-ended.
We want to be self-sufficient and prosperous, not going to bed every night filled with uncertainty and fear about the economic strength of our families, community and nation. We are not happy that our grandchildren will likely have a worse rather than better future because of the horrendous national debt and our country borrowing 40% of the cost of the federal government every single day.
What we don’t worry about is losing reproductive rights. That is just not going to happen. However, the lack of attention by government leaders and the current administration to real problems is disgusting.
When I learned about and viewed a slide show produced by the president’s team and posted on his campaign web-site entitled, “The Life of Julia,” I was half furious and half depressed. This is an animated presentation in which a female is cared for from birth to death by a paternalistic government always there with a payment or a program that ensures that she is comfortable and unchallenged.
No personal courage and desire for independence is required. No husband or partner is needed. Big Daddy Government hugs you to his bureaucratic chest and provides for all you need, little darlin’.
When more than 50% of today’s college graduates, including those receiving higher degrees and professional degrees such as law and medicine, are women, why is the Democratic Party harping on handouts to women from the government?
A safety net in place in case of disaster? Of course. We want that for all our citizens who legitimately face crisis. But cradle to grave care from government? That is demeaning and insinuates that women are too stupid and helpless to care for themselves.
It looks to me that the real War on Women is being waged by the Democrats. As a Republican woman, I detect zero intolerance or lack of respect from the men of my party.
My husband, also a Republican, has been at my side with anything I’ve ever tried to accomplish. And when I’ve flopped, he’s encouraged me to get back in the game. In the world of work, I’ve only been personally belittled as a woman by middle-aged, white Democrat males. Maybe that’s because of where I worked, but it’s still true.
I served as Chief of Staff for the Republican Party of Florida in the '90s, for Pete’s sake. Growing numbers of Republican women are elected to office. Check out the number of female Republican compared to Democratic governors right now: four of the seven. Record numbers have been elected to the House of Representatives. Female mayors, commissioners, senators plus CEOs of major corporations and successful entrepreneurs -- where is the evidence of a war on women?
Nowhere except in Democrat La-La land.
No, we Republican women don’t believe in quota systems or affirmative action.
It’s in our DNA as free Americans to make it on our own now that our culture has evolved to accept women as more than stay-at-home wives and mothers. And, those women who choose to stay home to raise children are heroes in my book. The Democrats’ Victorian view of Republican women is comical.
Excuse me, but we fight; we don’t faint.
The Democrats appear to want women to be helpless, dependent-on-big-government-nitwits, concerned primarily with their female organs. I didn’t accept that sort of patriarchal baloney when I was young and struggling for success in the world of work and it was a much tougher journey for women. I sure don’t accept it today with all that women have achieved.
Sorry, Democrats, but I’ve never been interested in going backwards. Funny that our current president’s campaign theme is "Forward."