The Silencing (25 page)

In a
Salon.com
column headlined “Forget the tea party—what about the crumpets?” Gene Lyons wrote that, “The most entertaining aspect of the 2010 election season has been the rise of the right-wing cuties—political celebrities whose main qualification is looking terrific on television. From where I sit, in a comfortable chair in front of the tube, the GOP Cupcake Factor has enlivened an otherwise dreary campaign season.”
⁵¹
Liberal British comedian Russell Brand explained that the only reason Sarah Palin has any appeal is, “People want to f-ck her.”
⁵²
During the 2008 campaign, Paul Hackett, a high-profile but unsuccessful former
Democratic congressional candidate in Ohio, suggested that Democrats run against the McCain/Palin ticket by pointing out that Palin “accidentally got pregnant at age 43 and the tax payers of Alaska have to pay for the care of her disabled child.” “War on Women,” anyone? And so much for being “pro-choice.”

In April 2014 actress Kirsten Dunst, who describes herself as a feminist, told the UK edition of
Harper’s Bazaar
, “I feel like the feminine has been a little undervalued.”

“We all have to get our own jobs and make our own money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking—it’s a valuable thing my mom created,” she added. She also praised men: “Sometimes, you need your knight in shining armor,” she said. “I’m sorry. You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That’s why relationships work.”

The illiberal feminists were enraged. Jezebel ran a story saying that Dunst, an “actress and blonde who looks good in clothes,” is “not paid to write gender theory so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that she’s kind of dumb about it.”
⁵³
On Twitter, a few illiberal feminists wrote that, “She should just keep quiet. I wasn’t aware Kirsten Dunst could be more unlikable” and suggested Dunst be added to “the list of famous women who should never be allowed to talk near young girls. Ever.”
⁵⁴
Since Dunst didn’t say the right thing, she was labeled a sex object with no brains and essentially told to keep her pretty little mouth shut.

In her
Elle
hit piece on young conservative women, Nina Burleigh added insult to infantilizing. Not content with labeling the half dozen conservative women as “girls,” she dubbed them “Baby Palins.”
⁵⁵
Karin Agness, one of the women featured in the article, pointed out in a piece for
National Review
that “Rather than try to understand how some women could be conservative and the arguments we have against feminism, it is often much easier to explain us all away as ‘Baby Palins.’ The Palin brand has been so damaged by the media that the ‘Baby Palin’ label serves the purpose of quickly stereotyping and delegitimizing us at the same time.”
⁵⁶

In May 2010, Palin rocked the feminist establishment when she asserted in a speech to the Susan B. Anthony List that there is an “emerging, conservative, feminist identity.”
⁵⁷
She dubbed this “Western Feminism.”
⁵⁸
Illiberal feminists circled the wagons to begin the process of delegitimizing her. Gloria Steinem declared to Katie Couric that Palin was not a feminist because “you can’t be a feminist who says that other women can’t [have an abortion] and criminalizes abortion.”
⁵⁹

Never mind that many of the Suffragettes, the first American feminists, were anti-abortion, or that feminism is supposed to be about women making “choices” which should include the choice to decide their own beliefs. Feminist writer Amanda Marcotte asserted: “You look at someone like Sarah Palin trying to wear . . . [the feminist] mantle, and you see the flaw in trying to be a so-called conservative feminist, which is that you’re not very pro-women.”
⁶⁰
Jessica Valenti, founder of
Feministing
, blasted “the fake feminism of Sarah Palin” in the
Washington Post
, and argued, “Given that so-called conservative feminists don’t support women’s rights, how can they paint their movement as pro-woman? Why are they not being laughed out of the room?”
⁶¹

The demonizing continued unabated. Steinem told
New York
magazine that conservative women leaders like Bachmann and Palin are “there to oppose the women’s movement. That’s their job. . . . it’s inevitable. . . . there have always been women like this.”
⁶²
Note the distinction Steinem is making with “women like this.” Conservative women don’t just have differing opinions, they are double agents pretending to care about women while their real plan is to destroy women’s rights. This echoed something Steinem said to me when I told her I was writing a profile of Bachmann for
Elle
magazine: “Who are the people who are putting these women—Palin and Bachmann—up to running?” Steinem asked. Then she answered her question: “It’s men who want them to run.”
⁶³

There really is no winning with the illiberal feminists. They become enraged when the “wrong” people call themselves feminist, but then turn contemptuous when a woman says she isn’t. In Nina Burleigh’s
Elle
profile
of conservative women, she blasted her subjects for saying they were not feminists. She wrote, “Behold the new face of conservative womanhood. Young women [who] are the unintended, some might say ungrateful, daughters of feminism. . . .” Perplexed as to why these under-thirty-five women “who pride themselves on being totally modern” might not identify with a movement that treats conservative women like garbage, she landed on a theory. It was “politics and ambition” that drove them to say they weren’t feminists because, “Feminist bashing remains the surest way to earn cred in the conservative movement, and ‘feminist’ is an easy, all-purpose insult. . . .”

When actress Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting (Penny on the
Big Bang Theory
) told
Redbook
magazine that she didn’t consider herself a feminist, the illiberal left turned on her, calling her a “talentless bitch”
⁶⁴
and telling her “Being a feminist is about wanting equality. If you don’t believe in equality, you’re a shit human.”
⁶⁵
It became such a controversy that the actress prostrated herself before the illiberal mob, which was duly reported in the Associated Press under the headline, “Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting apologizes for comments on feminism.”
⁶⁶

For Ann Romney it was a Mother’s Day 2012 op-ed for
USA Today
that celebrated motherhood. She closed her piece with this: “Women wear many hats in their lives. Daughter, sister, student, breadwinner. But no matter where we are or what we’re doing, one hat that moms never take off is the crown of motherhood. There is no crown more glorious.”
⁶⁷
Dissing the column on MSNBC,
⁶⁸
Newsweek
/Daily Beast columnist Michelle Goldberg called Romney “insufferable” as other “pro-women” panelists giggled as she said the phrase “crown of motherhood” reminded her of Hitler and Stalin. This saccharine op-ed written for Mother’s Day was, claimed Goldberg, just like when authoritarian societies gave awards to women who had big families. In a column responding to people upset with her comparison of Ann Romney to two of the worst mass murderers in history, Goldberg doubled down on the demonization, writing, “bombastic odes to traditional maternity have a sinister ring, especially when they come from people who want to curtail women’s rights.”
⁶⁹

THE WRONG KIND OF “PRO-CHOICE” DEMOCRATIC FEMINIST

In 2014, the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and allegedly pro-women Planned Parenthood backed the male primary opponent of State Representative Margo Davidson—the first Democrat, woman, and African American to represent her district—because Davidson supported proposals that would regulate abortion clinics. She did so based on the grand jury report on the gruesome abortion/infanticide mill run by Kermit Gosnell. Davidson was one of more than forty Democrats who voted for the bill, yet none of the others found themselves on the receiving end of the illiberal feminist demonization campaign.
⁷⁰

Why was she treated differently? Davidson told me in a December 2014 interview, “I was singled out because I was so vocal and I did not back down on my views. Nor did I back down that I was pro-choice but I thought that was a reasonable accommodation to keep women safe. They hate it when I say this, but when a woman loses her life, she loses all her choices.” Davidson knew this all too well: her young cousin, Semika Shaw, was one of the women who died from being in Gosnell’s clinic. Davidson told me that after Planned Parenthood started targeting her, her campaign manager talked to them and said, “You and Margo are aligned on a lot more issues than not. Can’t you make a consideration for the fact that her cousin died?” They said no.

The Pennsylvania State National Organization for Women took the lead in demonizing Davidson, the only female candidate in her Democratic primary. In a robocall in support of her Democratic primary opponent Billy Smith, Caryn Hunt, president of the Pennsylvania State NOW, told voters that Davidson’s “votes are dangerous to women,”
⁷¹
when in fact her support for regulating abortion clinics was
explicitly to protect women
. Davidson told me in an interview how Planned Parenthood sent out mailers suggesting she didn’t support screenings for cervical and breast cancers, even though they knew she did. “I was surprised and disappointed by their behavior,” she said. “I thought it was a smack in the face to the people they say they represent: women.” In the end, the illiberal feminists’ attempts to
punish her for speaking out on an issue failed. Davidson narrowly won her primary
⁷²
and in the fall won reelection to her third term.
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Davidson learned the lesson that supporting even commonsense regulations spurred by the abuse and deaths of countless women is something the illiberal left considers extremist behavior. Imagine how the illiberal left views people who aren’t “pro–abortion rights.” Abortion opponents are routinely described as “extremists” and “anti-women’s health.”
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Planned Parenthood inevitably invokes the label “anti-choice extremists”
⁷⁵
to describe the roughly half of America that opposes abortion.
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They’ve even used that label to describe people who support parental consent for minors seeking an abortion,
⁷⁷
making most Americans “extremists.” (A 2011 Gallup poll put support for parental consent laws at 71 percent.)
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The National Organization for Women calls the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, representing the largest religious denomination in the United States, “anti-abortion radicals.”
⁷⁹
NARAL Pro-Choice America was inventive, blasting Ohio Governor John Kasich not for something he did, but for something he didn’t do: failing to use his line item veto to remove “anti-woman, anti-choice provisions from the budget” and thus of supporting “extremist policies.”
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Kansas Governor Sam Brownback is married and has three daughters (among five children), but NARAL Pro-Choice America said his signing of a bill regulating abortion “indicates his disdain for women.”
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Maybe it does the reverse.

Illiberal feminists can’t seem to fathom that some people actually believe that an unborn human matters or that abortion is harmful to women. Sometimes the mask comes off and what we see is that illiberal feminism is often driven by a base hatred of Christianity. Amanda Marcotte, a feminist who writes for
Slate
and the
Guardian
, once posted this “joke” on her blog:

         
Q
: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

         
A
: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.
⁸²

At other times abortion opponents are dismissed as stupid and primitive. Accepting an award for her support of abortion rights at Planned Parenthood’s 2014 annual gala, Nancy Pelosi bashed abortion opponents as close-minded and “dumb.”
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When Republicans proposed a law granting doctors and nurses a conscience exemption from having to perform abortions, Pelosi called it “savage.” Although the effort received support from some Democrats, she said, “When the Republicans vote for this bill today, they will be voting to say that women can die on the floor and health-care providers do not have to intervene. . . .”
⁸⁴

As we’ve seen, even being a Democrat is no protection. When Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak proposed an amendment to prevent federal funds from being used for abortion under Obamacare, Democratic Congresswoman Nita Lowey characterized the amendment as being driven by “anti-choice extremists.”
⁸⁵
At
Salon.com
, Katie McDonough “explained” what “‘pro-life’ efforts actually do: threaten, intimidate and squash women’s constitutional rights.”
⁸⁶

And that’s not the end of it. A Planned Parenthood newsletter reported on a keynote speech by feminist journalist Michelle Goldberg: “Goldberg explained how fundamentalist forces everywhere use an anti-choice agenda as a key leverage point in their fight to keep women under the oppression of ‘traditional’ gender roles.”
⁸⁷

Such conspiracy theories are rife among illiberal feminists. “While the rote use of the word ‘life’ as a code word to describe a series of anti
-
woman and anti-sex beliefs is probably going nowhere, there does seem to be a bit more willingness among anti-choicers lately to admit that what really offends them is that women are having sex without their permission,”
⁸⁸
explained Amanda Marcotte in one of her intolerant diatribes.