It is fundamentally unconscionable to me that any woman could ever even consider voting for a McCain/Palin ticket this November. If you are a woman, if you have daughters, you owe it to them and to yourself to vote for Obama this year.
If you’re considering voting Republican because you consider yourself a Republican, look more closely at Obama: he’s a far better fit to the traditional Eisenhower/Goldwater/Reagan military/fiscal/social conservative small-government model than McCain is. I refer you to my continuing series (part 2, on the economy will be published this weekend!) and to http://conservativesforchange.com/. It’s incredible and a watershed to see Eisenhower’s granddaughter, Goldwater’s grandchildren, Buckley’s son, and basically every respectable luminary of the Republican party endorse Obama as the smarter conservative choice.
If you’re considering voting Republican because you’re “pro-life,” you should be deeply ashamed of the fact that—because of anti-woman Republican policies—the US has the second-highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world (after Latvia). If you’re pro-life, you should advocate for every pregnant woman to receive top-notch neonatal care, unlike John McCain. If you’re pro-life, you should probably support the Family and Medical Leave Act, unlike John McCain. If you’re pro-life, you should demand that every child be granted high-quality health insurance, which McCain voted against. If you’re pro-life, you probably shouldn’t slash the budget to an organization that supports teen mothers by providing them a safe home, allowing them to finish school, and learn job skills—like Sarah Palin did. If you’re truly pro-life, you should probably be pro-gun control, anti-war, and anti-death penalty. Otherwise, you are merely anti-choice.
If you are anti-choice, I won’t change your mind here. But remember that Roe v Wade was about giving women full autonomy over their own bodies, the right to privacy, and full citizenship, and in no way an endorsement of abortion. It means I am not a child, and I am not chattel, and I know what is best for myself. Abortion happens whether it is legal or not; Roe v Wade merely allows women access to medical professionals, and it allows doctors to do their jobs without fear. Take a moment and read one doctor’s recollection of “bad old days” pre-Roe: yes, coat hangers, but also “darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.” Astonishingly, the Bush Administration’s policies and culture of shame, in combination with the internet, has ushered in the greatest increase in dangerous and medically unsupervised self-administered abortions in the past 40 years. After John McCain threw up sarcastic air-quotes around “women’s health” at the third debate, a forgotten sort of woman-who-has-had-an-abortion rose up in fury: women who suffered miscarriages that did not carry all the way, and one particularly outspoken woman with a 22-week unviable fetus, women who—if not for Roe v Wade—would have been condemned to carry a corpse inside of them for months, or until it killed them.
If you are a woman, you should know that Joe Biden authored the Violence Against Women Act, and that John McCain voted against it twice. The National Organization of Women called this legislation “the greatest breakthrough in civil rights for women in over two decades.” You should know that it was only a few months after Sarah Palin became mayor of Wasilla that the town began charging rape survivors thousands of dollars to have rape kits processed; when Joe Biden proposed a bill in the Senate to end this horrible practice on a national level, John McCain voted against it. In the Illinois State Senate, Barack Obama co-sponsored legislation to reimburse rape survivors for all personal out-of-pocket expenses incurred as a result of their ordeals.
If you are a woman considering voting McCain/Palin because one of them wears a skirt, think again. The truth is, John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin over more qualified men based on her gender was sexist. His selection of Sarah Palin over more qualified women based on her youth and looks was sexist. He was pandering to Hillary Clinton’s base while hoping to trump the “race card” with his own personal “gender card.” Palin was selected to be a professional victim, and that sickens me. I read a fantastic summary on feministing.com a few weeks ago: Baby Boomer women’s primary experience of sexism is “that less-qualified man got the job over me”; for Gen X and Gen Y women, the primary and most painful manifestation of sexism is usually “those men gave the job to that clueless chick instead of me, because the boss thinks she’s hot and/or will be a yes-man with no ideas of her own. …then the boss orders the attention of the entire team/department/etc. to focus on ensuring that ‘we’ shield her from ‘mistakes’ (or worse, we get blamed for her mistakes).” There’s only one Vice Presidential candidate in this election who will look out for women’s rights, and his name sure isn’t Sarah.
John McCain has a long, well-documented history of misogyny and disrespect for women. John McCain voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that says my worth is equal to any man’s. The summer after his sophomore year, McCain tried to pick up a pair of young women. When they laughed at him, he cursed them so vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge. McCain’s treatment of his first wife, who waited for him while he was in that prison camp, is heart-wounding. He has called his new wife a “cunt” and a “painted trollop” in front of a roomful of reporters; how does he treat her when the cameras aren’t rolling?
John McCain has no respect for women; I cannot respect a woman who respects him.
