Gregory tries to drag Paul back to the question — whether the GOP should be talking about "women's health, women's bodies." And Paul goes through the same tactics: cooling things off with a joke ("I try never to have discussions of anatomy unless I'm at a medical conference"), saying that the whole subject is "dumbed down" and political, and observing that way women are doing well. He adds another compliment, that the women he knows are "conquering the world," not complaining about how "terrible" and "misogynist" it is. He never says one thing about birth control, women's bodies, or the unfortunate locutions of other members of his party.Of course, Paul's a libertarian, and so he's one of those on the Right most inclined to let the whole business go.
So that's how Paul is going to deal with the media efforts to lure Republicans into playing the Democrats' war on women game.
And in truth, the Right as a movement had let it go before Obamacare. Whatever your personal feelings about contraception, they were personal feelings, and we were going to accept that people could make choices in private. Whatever else may be said about the decision to require free birth control in Obamacare-compliant insurance, it's been a huge political win for the Left because it's forced the issue of contraception back into the public space. "Free" just means that everyone else has to pay for it, which means that it's everyone else's business.
Dr. Althouse seems to be out at sea here:
If young women are "conquering the world" (as Paul said), why not credit Monica Lewinsky with her conquest of the world's most powerful man? She was enthusiastic and willing, from what I read. I think the sexual harassment problem in the case of Bill Clinton has to do with other women who were pressured to have sex and with the women and men who were not in a position to improve their standing in the workplace by interacting sexually with the boss.The relevant moral issue here is not that men in the White House were denied the opportunity to advance themselves by pleasuring the boss. That won't even come up as an issue if you hold the line on the real moral issue, which is... are we really so lost that we have to explain what it is? That we have to explain why this isn't something to celebrate? The oathbreaking, the use of power to seduce and corrupt, the lies under oath, the adultery, all of it?
No, the Clinton legacy hasn't been fully appreciated. Not at all.
3 comments:
The Professor is confused, yes.
I like Paul's approach. I'd like to see a lot fewer Republican men pontificating about women as if they were a separate category of beings under examination by the legitimate decision-makers. When a Republican man goes on about this kind of thing, there's often an unpleasant whiff of "Republicans are us men, and then there are all these women we have to deal with."
Admittedly feminists make the same mistake of treating "men" as a homogenous clump of alien conspirators, but I don't have to like that, either. If a message can't make sense except as a slogan delivered on behalf of only males, or only females, I lose interest. The world's about half male and half female. Neither half is here purely for the convenience or at the discretion of the other.
IIRC, the harassment in the Clinton Follies stemmed from the relative positions of power between the POTUS/governor and the interns and other women. I mean, if college campuses define sexual harassment as a male junior asking a female freshman "to come up and see my etchings," because of the power disparity between a Junior and a Freshman, then by definition for the POTUS to look lustfully at any woman not his wife is sexual harassment.
(Yes, I'm teasing a little, but not too much.)
LittleRed1
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