The Silencing (24 page)

The list of those filing legal briefs in support of Hobby Lobby was comprised of 131 individual women signers and six women’s groups: the Susan B. Anthony List, the Charlotte Lozier Institute, Concerned Women for America, Women Speak for Themselves, the Independent Women’s Forum, and the Beverly LaHaye Institute.
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The individual female signers included nine sitting U.S. senators and congresswomen, twenty-two state representatives, ten theologians, four international law and religion scholars, more than eighty members of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, and a number of law professors, including Helen Alvaré of the George Mason University School of Law and Mary Ann Glendon, the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
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The illiberal feminists nonetheless described the Hobby Lobby decision as an all-out assault on women. Jill Filipovic of
Cosmopolitan
tweeted that it meant that, “misogyny is acceptable if it’s a sincerely-held religious belief.”
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When Ray Rice was caught on video knocking out his fiancée, a
Salon.com
writer tweeted,
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“If Ray Rice continues to treat women like that, he’ll end up running the Hobby Lobby.”
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National Organization for Women’s Terry O’Neill
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explained on MSNBC that Hobby Lobby was guilty of “gender bigotry” and no matter how sincerely held Hobby Lobby’s belief was, “There are some beliefs that are so heinous a government should not respect them no way, no how.” She went on to compare not forcing Hobby Lobby to pay for emergency contraception to apartheid in South Africa, slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation.
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Not to be outdone, illiberal male feminists turned out in full force to explain how Hobby Lobby was a woman-hating oppressor and the men on the Supreme Court were waging a “War on Women.” At
Salon.com
, Paul Rosenberg claimed that Hobby Lobby’s refusal to pay for drugs they believed ended a human life put them in a position to “tyrannize” other people. “The tyrant’s freedom,” he asserted, “is everyone else’s slavery.”
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MSNBC host Ed Schultz
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proclaimed that the Hobby Lobby decision was “a real wake-up call to every woman in America that the Supreme Court is at war with women.” Jimmy Williams,
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another MSNBC personality, tweeted, “Five men just told women all across America that their employers decide anything they want about their bodies.”
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At the Huffington Post,
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Lincoln Mitchell asserted that the Court’s decision will “endanger the health and lives of many American women.”

At
Slate
, Mark Joseph Stern played the minority card. Claiming that Hobby Lobby was opposed “to women controlling their own bodies,” he said their stance—and the Supreme Court’s decision—revealed “a deep mistrust of minorities’ power to define their own destinies.”
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ILLIBERAL FEMINISTS AGAINST FREE SPEECH

All this name-calling, deceptiveness, and misstating of what the court actually held in the Hobby Lobby case is no accident. It’s part of a larger effort to demonize and delegitimize anyone who doesn’t agree with the illiberal left’s absolutist position on the issue of abortion. The goal is to shut down a debate they fear they are losing on the merits.

When men disagree with illiberal feminists, a favored silencing tactic is to accuse them of “mansplaining.” The term grew out of a fairly brilliant 2008 essay by feminist writer Rebecca Solnit, who described the exquisitely annoying feeling of having a certain type of man condescendingly lecture a woman on a topic about which he knows very little—in this case Solnit’s own book. This is certainly a phenomenon I and millions of other women have experienced, and it can be maddening. But the illiberal feminists have
forged the notion of “mansplaining” into a weapon to silence any man who expresses an opinion at odds with feminist orthodoxy.

How it works is relatively simple. A “pro-life” man who talks about abortion with a “pro-choice” woman is “mansplaining.” (But a “pro-choice” man agreeing with a “pro-choice” woman is not.) The
Atlantic
accused Texas Governor Rick Perry of “classic mansplaining” after he criticized Wendy Davis’s thirteen-hour filibuster to prevent a vote on a bill that would have placed restrictions on abortion. His offending comment? He noted, “It’s just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters.”
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Perry was referencing the fact that Davis had experienced an unplanned pregnancy while a teenager, which resulted in the birth of her first daughter.

Marin Cogan at
GQ
accused Mitt Romney of trying to “mansplain [his] way to the White House” during his 2012 presidential run.
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The examples she raised—his complaints about bureaucratic red tape or criticism about how security was being handled at the London Olympics—were standard political fare recast as “mansplaining.”
New York
magazine accused Republican Senator Ted Cruz of “mansplaining” to Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein when he made a conservative point about the Second Amendment during a hearing.
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Salon.com
accused Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin of “mansplaining” to incoming Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin when he told a local paper, “Hopefully I can sit down and lay out for her my best understanding of the federal budget because they’re simply the facts,” he told the
Chippewa Herald
. “Hopefully she’ll agree with what the facts are and work toward common sense solutions.”
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Illiberal feminists turn simple ideological disagreements, whether about the federal budget or the Second Amendment or anything else, into excuses to engage in character assassination, dismissing their opponents as sexists. Conservatives are their favorite targets, but any dissident can land in their crosshairs.

In their ideological zeal, the feminists of the illiberal left don’t seem to realize how they’ve given feminism a bad name. According to a 2013 Huffington Post/YouGov poll only 23 percent of American women said they would identify as a “feminist,” despite the fact that majorities of male and female respondents said “men and women should be social, political, and economic equals.”
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Even among Democrats, the “feminist” label is in low repute: only 32 percent applied the term to themselves.

Still, illiberal feminists wield a perverse power among academics and media pundits who take for granted the feminists’ outrageous claim that female dissidents from the illiberal left
aren’t actually women
.

Feminist writer Naomi Wolf once described the foreign-policy analysis of Jeane Kirkpatrick as being “uninflected by the experiences of the female body.” Feminist icon Gloria Steinem called former U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison a “female impersonator.”
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Patricia Ireland, former president of the National Organization for Women, once instructed Democrats to vote only for “authentic” (translation: pro–abortion rights) female political candidates. During the 2010 midterm election season, Democratic Congresswoman Janis Baird Sontany of Tennessee said of her GOP colleagues, “You have to lift their skirts to find out if they are women. You sure can’t find out by how they vote.”
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In August 2010, liberal talk show host Stephanie Miller laughed uproariously when a female guest on her show said that if she ever met conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, “I would kick [her] right in the nuts,” and warned, “Wear a cup, lady.”
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Ann Coulter is routinely referred to as “Mann Coulter” on liberal blogs.
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Dehumanizing slurs have routinely been used against Sarah Palin. In 2011, Gloria Steinem snarked that, “Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann . . . are on my list of ‘the women only a man could love.’”
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Her comment echoed the illiberal feminist attacks during the 2008 election, when Palin was derided by the Huffington Post as “Bush in lipstick.”
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Wendy Doniger blogged at the
Washington Post
that Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”
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Cintra Wilson wrote during the tsunami of anti-Palin hysteria in 2008, “Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she
ain’t no woman.”
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Get it? “Real women” are pro-abortion Democrats. And conservative women? Well, while reigning as the uber-liberal at Current TV, Keith Olbermann said on his show that conservative columnist S. E. Cupp should herself have been aborted.
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ILLIBERAL SEXISM

In 2012, when I criticized liberal men for their sexist attacks against conservative women in a Daily Beast column, Keith Olbermann went nuts.
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He proclaimed on his show that people should ignore me because I was a “house tamed liberal at Fox News,” comparing me to slaves forced to conform to the will of their masters.
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He took to Twitter to continue his attacks, and his followers jumped in, saying I was a “wind-up toy,” a “bobblehead,” and “just another brainless plastic doll Fox puts on camera to appease the horned up 60-year-old white dudes at home.”
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Olbermann never tried to refute anything I wrote; in fact, by his behavior he only added to my column’s many examples of liberal men making vicious sexist statements.

Character assassination was the method of discourse favored by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy; and it was a tenet of the liberal creed to resist such tactics. But Olbermann and his ilk are happy to use delegitimizing and demonizing tactics in an effort to further their ideological causes.

Strangely, while illiberal feminists treat conservative women as men in drag, men who identify as women are treated as women. At Mount Holyoke College in 2015, a student theatre group canceled its scheduled performance of
The Vagina Monologues
because it was too “reductionist and exclusive.” Who did this feminist masterpiece exclude? According to an e-mail sent to explain the decision, “At its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman. . . . Gender is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions.” The play’s author, Eve Ensler, defended her work, saying in an interview that it wasn’t meant to speak for all women and that “Women with and without vaginas need a voice.”

When illiberal feminists aren’t delegitimizing female dissenters from their worldview as fake women, they are portraying them in such a hyper-sexualized way that they are reduced to nonhuman objects. Avoiding classic sexist stereotypes would seem to be the minimum expected of avowed feminists.
Psychology Today
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reported in 2010 on multiple studies that found that “focusing on a woman’s appearance (fully dressed) is enough for . . . men and women . . . to dehumanize a woman. . . . [P]eople assign female targets less ‘human nature traits’ when focus is on their appearance.” The human traits that these men and women were seen as lacking include the ability to think, express emotions, or even feel pain.
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They noted that a key study on the issue found that when “women were dressed sexually. . . . people implicitly associated them more with animals.”

Illiberal feminists don’t need
Psychology Today
to tell them that treating women as sex objects is dehumanizing. Feminist scholars have been arguing this for decades.

Yet, in her 2011
Elle
piece titled “The Best and the Rightest,”
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writer Nina Burleigh described conservative women who were on the rise as, “right-wing girl Millennials” who were following “in the high heels of the former governor of Alaska.” One woman, she wrote, moved “from chair to podium with the lithe, twitchy ease of a big cat, hazel-eyed and trailing a honey-colored mane, all 20 tawny years of her packed into a skintight electric blue stretch-satin cocktail dress.” Another woman was described as, “A curvaceous, dark-haired 25-year-old . . . [with] a diamond-studded cross dangling above very visible cleavage.”
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When Senator Joni Ernst—a GOP rising star—delivered the State of the Union response in January 2015, MSNBC host Ronan Farrow tweeted, “Joni Ernst delivering response in the style of an in-flight safety video.” And again, pretending to quote her: “‘We’ll also cut wasteful spending and balance the budget’ [pantomimes latching shut safety belt].”
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This attempt to dismiss her as a serious person echoed comments made by then-Senator Tom Harkin who was campaigning for Ernst’s opponent in her 2014 race to fill Harkin’s seat. “In this Senate race, I’ve been watching some of these
ads,” Harkin said. “And there’s sort of this sense that, ‘Well, I hear so much about Joni Ernst. She is really attractive, and she sounds nice.’ . . . Well, I got to thinking about that,” he said. “I don’t care if she’s as good looking as Taylor Swift or as nice as Mr. Rogers, but if she votes like [Minnesota Congresswoman] Michele Bachmann, she’s wrong for the state of Iowa.”
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Pretty Republican women are apparently interchangeable, but it’s worth noting that Joni Ernst is, among other things, a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa National Guard, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and had served in the Iowa State Senate. She is, in other words, more than just a pretty face, and certainly entitled to political opinions that differ from Tom Harkin’s.

In a 2008
Salon.com
piece, Cintra Wilson referred to Sarah Palin as a “Christian Stepford wife in a ‘sexy librarian’ costume” and the GOP’s “hardcore pornographic centerfold spread.”
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Daily Kos
, a leading liberal blog, ran a mock
Playboy
cover featuring the forty-four-year-old then-governor of Alaska. The Huffington Post ran a photo montage of Palin—only the second woman to join a presidential ticket—headlined “Former Beauty Queen, Future VP?”
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MSNBC ran a November 2009 segment showing photo-shopped pictures of Palin wearing an American flag bikini and holding a rifle; and one of her wearing a tight black miniskirt. When they flashed on the screen, the host noted, “She’s hot.” MSNBC apologized later for not alerting viewers that the pictures were photo-shopped, but offered no apology for the sexist segment.
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