"Ultimate Betrayal?" NOW-NY Promotes Sexist Stereotypes

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 3:40 PM on January 29, 2008.

I suppose we should be proud to be lumped together with Teddy Kennedy and Democracy for America, but there's little reason to be joyful about the ugly identity politics that have marked this primary season.

If you haven't yet seen it, this is the response -- "unhinged" is not an inappropriate adjective to use in this case -- to Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama by the New York chapter of the National Organization of Women. This is not a hoax -- its authenticity was confirmed by NOW-NY president Marcia Pappas, who may have been its author. I've added a few comments …

Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy's endorsement of Hillary Clinton's opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard.

Consider how arrogant an organization has to be to claim to speak for 51 percent of the country like this. My question for NOW-NY is simple: how is Kennedy's endorsement a betrayal of "women" when 54 percent of women in South Carolina voted for Obama -- he won among white women as well as black -- as did 35 percent of women in Iowa, 34 percent in New Hampshire and 38 percent in Nevada?

The answer is simple: it isn't. NOW-NY has a preferred candidate in Hillary Clinton, as they have every right to do, and instead of honestly endorsing that candidate -- and perhaps making a substantive argument about why women should support Clinton -- they claim to speak on behalf of all "women" as if they're biological automatons genetically pre-programmed to support a female candidate regardless of whether they prefer that candidate's policies.

Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, and the Family and Medical Leave Act to name a few. Women have buried their anger that his support for the compromises in No Child Left Behind and the Medicare bogus drug benefit brought us the passage of these flawed bills. We have thanked him for his ardent support of many civil rights bills, BUT women are always waiting in the wings.

Credit where it's due: reading that passage, it sure feels like they wanted to throw a reference to Chappaquiddick in there, but perhaps realizing that it's a singular obsession of the Limbaugh Right, thought better of it. Would that they'd showed a little more restraint in the rest of this screed.

And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He's picked the new guy over us. He's joined the list of progressive white men who can't or won't handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton (they will of course say they support a woman president, just not "this" one).

As a progressive white man, I'll speak only for myself here. I think the best argument for Clinton is that she's a woman and it would be nice for us to catch up to Pakistan and break our current streak of 43 male presidents. I harbor no hatred of Hillary Clinton -- while not great, she hasn't been a bad Senator in the larger scheme of things -- but I would never dream of supporting her, and there are several reasons for that. Primary among them is her take on foreign policy. Clinton's eaten every bit of Iran propaganda the administration has run up the flag pole, has suggested -- like Shrub in 2004 -- that if her opponent wins the election Al Qaeda might hit us again, and while she talks publicly about ending the occupation of Iraq, I'm not able to get past this story, via David Swanson:

On Monday, Ted Koppel offered a report / commentary on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" which can be found online with this headline: "A Duty to Mislead: Politics and the Iraq War," and this introductory text: "Democrats are telling voters that if they are elected, all U.S. troops will be pulled out of Iraq. But as Sen. Hillary Clinton privately told a senor military adviser, she knows there will be some troops there for decades. It's an example of how in some cases, politics can force dishonesty."

In the audio report, Koppel points out that in a recent debate Senator Hillary Clinton said that her first priority if elected would be to "bring our troops home." She did not say ALL our troops, Koppel points out, and she does not mean ALL our troops. She told the New York Times three months ago that some forces would have to remain. And Koppel adds that he spoke with someone from the Pentagon who briefs Clinton, and that she had told this person that if she is elected and reelected, she expects to have troops in Iraq at the end of her second term. Koppel notes that that's 10 years away.

The possession of an X and Y chromosome does not prevent women from reading the news or understanding the candidates' positions. NOW-NY apparently believes that policy is immaterial -- women, in their view, universally and automatically back the woman in the race because … well, because that's what women do, and any deviation from their orthodoxy is a de facto "betrayal."

More …

"They" are Howard Dean and Jim Dean (Yup! That's Howard's brother) who run DFA (that's the group and list from the Dean campaign that we women helped start and grow). "They" are Alternet, Progressive Democrats of America, democrats.com, Kucinich lovers and all the other groups that take women's money, say they'll do feminist and women's rights issues one of these days, and conveniently forget to mention women and children when they talk about poverty or human needs or America's future.

What bullshit.

AlterNet is very highly-regarded by at least the non-institutional feminist community, in large part because we're the only publication that works overtime to give women a relatively equal voice. Our lineups tend to have about 40 percent female bylines, whereas less than 25 percent of political writers are women. It's no accident -- we work hard to make that happen.

As our own Jill Filipovic wrote on Feministing:

Not only am I not a die-hard Clinton supporter,* but I work for Alternet, which is apparently on the release-writer's Organizations to Kill list. I suppose I must have been psychologically gang-banged into whoring for the patriarchy - it's the only possible explanation.

AlterNet has a seven-person editorial staff -- four are women; two are white males.

And what about Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet's African-American columnist who's spent the better part of the last year and a half lobbing blistering attacks against Obama on Clinton's behalf -- I guess he doesn't count.

The truth is that including AlterNet in this rant gives away the game. NOW-NY are not behaving like political pros representing their constituents; they're Clinton partisans who, like many of our commenters who are backing a candidate, see bias against their guy or gal in every story and post we run. As best I can figure, the rule among a lot of strong partisans goes like this:

• Any article that doesn't shred Obama proves AlterNet's stunning pro-Obama bias.


• Any article that doesn't shred Clinton proves AlterNet's stunning pro-Clinton bias.


• Any article that doesn't shred Edwards proves AlterNet's stunning pro-Edwards bias.

It's really very easy -- you just have to believe that the article you're reading at the time is the only one we've ever run. This is perfectly normal for readers in a hotly-contested primary, but NOW-NY is supposed to be a professionally-run advocacy group -- not a Clinton fan club.

Back to NOW-NY:

This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women's rights, women's voices, women's equality, women's authority and our ability -- indeed, our obligation- to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who "know what's best for us.

No, women should follow the leadership of NOW like little sheep, because they really know what's best. A simple question that I would very much like NY-NOW to address is this: Ted Kennedy has fought for the rights of women, minorities, gays and every other group that faces discrimination. If he had endorsed Clinton, would it be a "betrayal" of the African American community? Would it be de facto evidence of racism?

The bottom line is that this group is just pitting blacks against women, and that's simply incredibly short-sighted and destructive.

The irony here is that for decades feminists have rejected a whole range of arguments based on biological determinism -- the idea that biology pre-ordains decisions, political preferences, work habits, etc. And here comes NY-NOW with a release that doesn't contain a single word about why women -- or Ted Kennedy -- should support Clinton. They're effectively in full-throated support of the idea that the 'little ladies' should vote a certain way -- in this case for NY-NOW’s preferred candidate -- simply because they happen to own the same kind of reproductive organs.

I won't pretend to speak for women, but I sure wouldn't want this bunch claiming to represent me and my interests.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.