“The march in Washington took on the feel of a political rally when US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and US Representative Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats, urged women to run for office and vote to oppose Trump and the Republicans’ agenda.” Washington Post, 1/21/18 (Celebrities join march for women’s rights, encourage voting)
I agree with most of the principles of women’s rights, especially equality on all levels. Most people in the U.S. do abide by those principles, even the President.
By turning the women’s movement into a leftist movement of the Democratic Party, it becomes not “inclusive”, but in fact “exclusive”. The idea that emerges is that women who do not support the “Party” (the Democratic Party) are not deserving of the same rights (in fact, the idea floated is that if you support the President, as a woman you definitely do not deserve any rights at all). This is the legacy of President Obama, the Great Divider. He championed the concept of “us or them”, either his disastrous ultra-leftist views or extremism on the right. As it turned out, there were 60 million people who voted otherwise, and an enormous legion of people who eschewed both the left and the right. But women’s rights should not be political.
Women’s rights are universal, not political. Yesterday, in Los Angeles, the marches for women were replete with political speeches against the current administration and any policies the Democratic Party does not support. Those issues have nothing to do with Women’s Rights.
In fact, and most importantly, many of the men who have been caught up in sexual harrassment cases (like Harvey Weinstein, a very high level high roller in the Democratic Party, and also Michael Oreskes, Chief of the news division of National Public Radio (who actually managed NPR’s coverage of the sexual harrassment narrative at NPR in recent months), and other TV and Screen stars) were high level members of, or supporters of the Democratic Party and extreme liberal views, proving that women’s rights transcend party lines. By co-opting the movement, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party has isolated at least half the women in the world. Now how is that “inclusive”?
The “women’s movement” as defined by the Democratic Party, has been designed to include many issues irrelevant to the woman’s movement itself, such as BLM, anti-Trumpism, and illegal immigration. By swelling the ranks with many people with other axes to grind, it makes it appear the movement is bigger than it might be, and also part of the Democratic Party’s platform, but also in doing so it robs the women’s movement of its absolute purity and righteousness, and obscures the universality of women’s rights. Actually, the women’s movement needs to reach all women, not just liberals. Women’s right’s advocates have said that already, only the Democrats, so worried about economic success of the administration, have sought to piggyback on the opportunity of opening Pandora’s box of sexual harassment (and much to its chagrin, many of the casualties have been their very own male “treasures”).
Hypocrisy has come to reside in the left, to infect it really, and it is very scary and tragic. It is one of the chief reasons I abandoned the Party some years ago, because when I saw the ideological table, I was shocked to find the Obama wing of the Democratic Party sitting right next to the most extreme right wing acolytes, both adamant that their own speech is the only permissible speech, that only their own ideas were worthy of protection, and that everyone and everything else had to be suppressed, stopped, destroyed, even questioning the wisdom of free speech, and seeming to support China’s totalitarian system and Palestinian terrorism. College campuses have become infected with this rot, and Obama’s political correctness has produced calls for many unconstitutional restrictions on speech. There is a name for that – fascism.
Strait Talk by Lee Longhwa 