Left-wing women: Stop impaling Sarah Palin
Cupp: Left-wing women: Stop impaling Sarah Palin
BY S.E. Cupp
Saturday, September 20th 2008, 12:07 PM
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Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin arriving at the Orlando, Fla. airport on Friday, with son Trig, 5 months, in her arms. Palin has been assailed by women for many of her views.
I have a message for the self-styled guardians of womanhood who have decided that Sarah Palin is public enemy No. 1 - please stop talking. You're embarrassing yourselves and women all over the country.
You are making otherwise thoughtful, careful, intelligent, tolerant and modern American women of every political bent look and sound ridiculous. As a woman myself, I'm begging you to stop. Put the pen down, close out the blog, push the E! microphone away. Your trash-talking is disturbing and humiliating. In fact, it's setting back the true cause of feminism - the advancement of women - far more than your imagined nemesis.
Stop using and abusing Palin to pump up your own overweening egos. You are not the next Sojourner Truth, and Palin is not your next punch line. She's a mother, a governor, a wife and, yes, a real woman, whether you like it or not.
RELATED: CHARLES RANGEL CALLS PALIN 'DISABLED': http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... ling_.html
I have been reluctant to point fingers at Barack Obama for being sexist toward Palin. First, because I don't think he has treated her unfairly just because of her gender. Second, because Palin doesn't need to be rescued; she's capable of defending herself.
But the attacks on Palin by so-called feminists cannot be ignored. Many of the same voices who claimed the right-wing was attacking Hillary Clinton just because she was a strong woman are now attacking Palin not for her beliefs, but for her very gender identity.
RELATED: CUPP: NOTHING SEXIST ABOUT OBAMA'S PIG COMMENT: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/200 ... st_ab.html
Comedian Margaret Cho has said that Sarah Palin is "the worst thing to happen to America since 9/11." She also makes it clear that for her, feminists by definition must believe what she believes, writing on her blog, "to call [Palin] a feminist is as laughable as calling evangelicals 'Christians,' " a warm and fuzzy, open-armed double punch that she continues by crassly suggesting she'd also like to have explicit sex with Palin.
In a similar conceit, Sandra Bernhard promised that Palin would be "gang-raped by my big black brothers" if she came to Manhattan. Congratulations, Ms. Cho and Ms. Bernhard. You've officially joined the ranks of male misogynists everywhere.
RELATED: SANDRA BERNHARD'S WARNING TO PALIN: http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2008/ ... ing-2.html
Pink, the recording artist, flatly declared, "This woman hates women." Rosie O'Donnell haiku-ed, "Women who hunt in high heels gives one pause." Say again? On second thought, please don't.
It's not just blowhard celebs who are in on the act; politicians are taking part, too. South Carolina Democratic chairwoman Carol Fowler had the considerable bad taste to say that Palin's "primary qualification seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion."
I was beginning to like Hillary Clinton after Obama won the Democratic nomination. Whether it was the droning echoes of her leftover supporters or just something in the air, I grew more and more convinced that she would have made the better candidate for Democrats than Obama, and probably a better running mate pick than Joe Biden. But the 18 million cracks in the ceiling that Hillary made are apparently last month's news - for when Clinton heard that Palin was going to the same Iran protest rally she had planned to attend, Hillary canceled, in a move right out of Tina Fey's "Mean Girls." Oh, the irony.
Could anyone imagine men behaving this badly? Can you picture men like Biden, Howard Dean, Mitt Romney, George Bush or anyone else bickering over whether or not Barack Obama is "man" enough to care about other men? Or whether John McCain is a man who hates men? Or suggesting they'd like to have to sex with one of the candidates?
Could anyone imagine a Democratic woman of stature and accomplishment (Nancy Pelosi or Claire McCaskill, for example) being torn down as a bad woman? The question answers itself.
Sarah Palin is of course fair game for critics - as a politician. Feel free to say what you will about her record and her positions. Feel free to arduously and passionately disagree with her. But to smear her as an embarrassment to women (nearly half the population) is, well, an embarrassment to women.
In 1851, Sojourner Truth delivered a now-famous speech to a women's convention in Akron, Ohio. In it, she had the courage and dignity to tell a mostly male and white crowd, "And ain't I a woman? I have borne 13 children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?"
More than 150 years later, American women can hear a loud rumble in the distance. Is it the proud applause for Truth, for Margaret Thatcher, Amelia Earhart, Harriet Tubman, Margaret Mead, Golda Meir, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Day and Susan B. Anthony ringing through the streets? No, sadly, it's just the sound of Cho, O'Donnell, Bernhard and the rest testing out their megaphones.
Apparently, women like Sarah Palin don't have to worry about being slandered by men. Women are doing it for themselves.
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