Sarah Palin is disastrous for women’s rights, no matter how Republicans try to frame her as a feminist
Jessica Valenti | The Guardian, Friday September 12 2008
The New York Post calls her “a feminist dream”. National Public Radio asks if she’s the “new face of feminism”. And the Wall Street Journal, ever subtle, calls it “Sarah Palin Feminism”. I call it well-spun garbage. (Yes, I’d even call it a pig in lipstick.) It seems you can’t open a newspaper or turn on the television without running across a piece about how the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, is not just a feminist, but the feminist – a sign that all is right in the US when it comes to gender equality. (Turn in those Birkenstocks and picket signs, gals!)
Palin’s conservative cohorts are claiming her candidacy as a win for women and proof that it’s Republicans who are the real agents of change. After all, what more could American women want in a vice-presidential candidate than a well-coiffed “hockey mom”?
Never mind that Palin talks about her teen daughter’s decision to keep her child while awaiting the chance to take that choice away from American women. Don’t worry about how Palin cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers. And forget that, under Palin’s mayoralty, women in Wasilla, Alaska, were forced to pay for their own rape kits to the tune of up to $1,200.
We’re not supposed to care about these issues because – say Republicans – we should just be happy that there’s a woman on the ticket. The McCain campaign is cynically trying to recreate the excitement that surrounded Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, believing that all women want is … another woman.
Ann Friedman, deputy editor of the American Prospect, wrote: “In picking Palin, Republicans are lending credence to the sexist assumption that women voters are too stupid to investigate or care about the issues, and merely want to vote for someone who looks like them … McCain has turned the idea of the first woman in the White House from a true moment of change to an empty pander.”
What’s worse is conservatives can’t understand why women aren’t lining up to thank them. In fact, the same people who moaned that women – those darn feminists, especially – were only supporting Hillary because of her gender are now screaming to the rafters because they’re not supporting Palin for the same reason. That’s what makes Republicans pulling the feminist card that much more insulting – the stunning hypocrisy. The McCain touting himself as the person who will put a woman in the White House is the same man who joked that Chelsea Clinton is “so ugly” because “her father is Janet Reno”.
And despite the talk about being the party of change, appropriating feminist symbols – such as at a Pennsylvania rally, where people held up signs of Rosie the Riveter with Palin’s face – and propping up anti-feminist women as trailblazers is typical of the Republicans.
Organisations such as the Independent Women’s Forum and Concerned Women for America, who call themselves the “real” feminists while fighting against things such as equal pay and legislation to combat violence against women, have been around (and funded by conservatives) for years. Their brand of feminism means benefiting from the gains of the women’s movement while striving to keep other women down – all for a patriarchal pat on the head. Sound familiar?
As the feminist writer Rebecca Traister says: “Palin’s femininity is one that is recognisable to most women: she’s the kind of broad who speaks on behalf of other broads but appears not to like them very much … It’s like some dystopian future … feminism without any feminists.”
The good news is, this twisted homage to feminism means conservatives must recognise it as a force in American politics – why spend so much time framing Palin as feminist if we’re all just a bunch of hairy man-haters? The bad news, however, trumps all. If this campaign is successful, American women will suffer. We’ll be under the thumb of yet another administration that thinks nothing of rolling back women’s rights.
No matter how many times feminists point out the hypocrisy of Republicans pulling the F-card, however, the bigger truth is that it’s not Palin’s anti-feminist bona fides alone that matter. While Palin is bad for women’s rights, she’s terrible for America. In addition to being investigated by her own legislature for abuse of power, she is also reported to have asked a librarian about the process for banning books in Wasilla, doesn’t support sex education, and has made lying about her record unusually central to her candidacy – even for a politician. These are big warning signs that cut across gender lines.
So while the McCain campaign holds Palin up as a shining example of feminism in action, let’s not forget the truth about who’s doing the spinning and what they’re selling. Because the last thing America needs is another corrupt and lying politician – man or woman.
· Jessica Valenti, founder of the Feministing website, is the author of Full Frontal Feminism
Our scientists must nail the creationists
September 14, 2008The Royal Society should take a much stronger stance in opposing religion in the school lab
Robin McKie | The Observer, Sunday September 14 2008
There are two ways of reacting to the Royal Society’s claim that its education director Michael Reiss was misrepresented in reports alleging he thought creationism should be taught in science classrooms. Either journalists got it wrong or Reiss – an ordained Church of England clergyman – did indeed suggest religious dogma be mixed with science teaching. I tend very much to the latter view.
As Sir Harry Kroto, a society fellow, and a Nobel prize winner, pointed out in a letter to the Royal Society, Reiss was an accident waiting to happen: ‘I warned the president … that his was a dangerous appointment. I did not realise just how dangerous it would turn out to be.’
Now the society has been caught out, though in the short term it may ride out the current controversy. In the wake of Reiss’s remarks, most commentaries have focused, quite reasonably, on the issue of how science and religion should be taught at school. At the same time, the Royal Society has rushed to assure scientists that it still believes creationism has no place in school laboratories.
There is a second, more important issue at stake, however. How should the Royal Society, the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific organisation, treat religion within the confines of its own headquarters?
Science and religion do mix, though the combination is often volatile – the reaction often depending, intriguingly, on the discipline studied by a particular researcher, according to Sir Tim Hunt, winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for medicine. ‘Cosmologists and physicists dwell on cosmic forces which – if altered only slightly – would prevent many chemical reactions, and life, from occurring. The sheer improbability of our universe makes them all a bit spiritual and soft on religion. By contrast, biologists see evolution constantly at work in their research and are more hard-nosed about God.’
The idea is not without exceptions, of course. Hunt, a biologist, is scarcely hardline about Reiss’s creationism call, for example. ‘I am not worried about this one, though I am definitely anti-religious.’
But if he is unworried about God getting a foot in the Royal Society’s door, many other fellows find recent developments troubling. Scientists such as Kroto, Sir Richard Roberts (another UK Nobel winner), and Richard Dawkins look with horror upon the spread of faith schools; the growing influence of bodies such as the Templeton Foundation, a conservative US organisation which constantly seeks to establish links between science and religion; and the prospect of creationism being taught in Britain’s science classrooms. They expect the Royal Society to take a tough stand on these issues.
Many of their fears are based on their American experiences, it should be noted. Kroto and Richards now work there while Dawkins is a frequent visitor on the US lecture circuit. And what they see in America unnerves them: school science teachers who firmly believe the world and humanity are the 6,000-year-old handiwork of God and who cannot accept what DNA tells us about our close relationships with the animal world, what isotope research reveals about the deep antiquity of our planet, what astronomical studies tell us about the size and age of the universe; and what fossils reveal about our own species’ multimillion-year lineage. The prospect of such ignorance spreading to Britain quite rightly appals them.
‘I don’t know if it is too late to stop the slide in Britain but I think it is in the US where they [the religious right] have now almost complete control over politics, the judiciary, education, business, journalism and television,’ says Kroto. ‘And it will only take a presidential victory by McCain, followed by him having a heart attack weeks later, and Sarah Palin, a creationist supporter, will become head of the world’s most powerful country.’
It is the duty of scientists to fight such onslaughts and be examples of rationality in a darkening world, it is argued. Hence the anger at the Royal Society for failing to firmly nail its colours to its mast. The organisation has a motto: ‘Nullius in verba’ (roughly, ‘Take nobody’s word for it’). In other words, verify everything by experiment and think for yourself. Both are noble aspirations. It is therefore baffling how an ordained minister – a man committed to believing the word of God without question – could have been asked to play a senior role in the society. Equally, the society’s acceptance of money from the Templeton Foundation raises further concerns.
The Royal Society – which should set the fiercest of examples in its commitment to rationality – has shown worrying signs of spiritual sloppiness. (Its current president, Lord Rees, is a cosmologist who attends church ‘as an unbelieving Anglican’, it should be noted.) Those of a religious persuasion might welcome this softening. I would sound a note of caution, however. Britain is still a broadly secular society which guarantees freedoms not just to atheists but to all religions, no matter how few its adherents. If we follow the example of America then all are threatened by the rise of a powerful Christian right.
We badly need our premier scientific society to stand firm and present a clear vision of how our planet, our species, and the cosmos came into existence. It needs to be unequivocal about the wonders of nature as revealed through rational, scientific investigation. As Douglas Adams put it: ‘Isn’t enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are fairies at the bottom of it too?’
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Tags: creationism, Richard Dawkins, Royal Society, science and religion, Templeton Foundation, Tim Hunt, universe
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