Surely some feminist — Patricia Ireland, Gloria Steinem, Kim Gandy, someone — feels just a bit uncomfortable about the Democrats’ cartoonish appeal to women to vote based on “their lady parts.” (Note: The image has been removed from the Obama website.)
Is this really what those who fought for women’s equality — for women to be viewed as fully capable, intelligent, independent human beings who are more than just sex objects or vessels for incubating the next generation — had in mind?
Democrats are showing their cards too fully: They dare not ask women (or men) to consider the record of the last four years or how women and families have fared in the economy during this presidency. Instead they are reduced to trying to scare women into believing that they must forget about the economy and recent foreign-policy disasters because Republicans somehow threaten their “lady parts.”
Yes, ladies, we are supposed to believe that what George W. Bush failed to accomplish in eight years, in spite of having at times a Republican-led Congress, the former governor of Massachusetts would. That secret agenda that puts women in such jeopardy is not explained but just hinted at — though it must have something to do with failing to force Catholics to pay for others’ morning-after pills.
One would have to be little more than just a giant uterus lacking a brain to buy such ridiculous, overwrought rhetoric.
Needless to say, it’s impossible to imagine a major party appeal to men to vote as if their “male parts” depend on it. Men are expected to care about the economy, matters of war, regulation, and government’s role in private life. But women? Apparently Democrats think women shouldn’t bother our pretty little heads about such things since reproduction must be the dominant fact of our life.
Such insulting demagoguery should be resoundingly rejected by women of all political leanings.
— Carrie Lukas is the managing director of the Independent Women’s Forum and the co-author of Liberty Is No War on Women.