Women: Pay Attention to History

As a white American male and a member of a privileged class (with 200+ years of history behind it), it is instructive to imagine how I would feel if suddenly the powers of business and government were continually manipulated to act against my best interest…because I was a white male.  I would feel defensive, and I hope I would have the courage to react furiously and definitively.

Women have faced this discrimination for centuries. Yet somehow too many men in power today think women have arrived, the prejudice is over, and everything is just fine the way it is.

The Republican effort to coronate Brett Kavanaugh to SCOTUS demonstrates just such an attitude. It caps hundreds of years of suppression that have been baked into this culture. If you’re a woman reading this I don’t care if you’re Conservative, if you’re a Republican, if you love guns, if you are repelled by abortion, if you love your man, or any homespun consideration, you should be angrily opposing this nomination.

If you have a daughter or care about young American girls at all you should be livid.

This next Supreme Court Justice will be the Nation’s 114^th. Out of that 114 only 4 have been women and half of them confirmed only in the past 9 years.  Women comprise an absurdly small percentage of the Federal Judiciary, about 20%.  However, that still says that there are about 500 Federal female judges out there.  Are we supposed to believe there isn’t one qualified, moderately Conservative woman in that pool that Republican’s couldn’t find?

They couldn’t find one because they weren’t looking. The token inclusion of Amy Barrett to Trump’s “short list” was simply his version of reality TV applied to reality…meaningless.

Obama appointed 268 judges to the Bench out of which about 40% were women. If you add minority men the percentage approaches 60%. To date, of Trump’s appointments 72% have been white men. It would be too easy just to blame Trump. He is an intellectually challenged and clueless President who takes his lead from those who pay him homage. This is simply the old boy network in action, and I’m sure that suits Trump just fine. They had been feeling a bit neutered with Obama’s Presidency.

Brett Kavanaugh is just another boy in the network. Did he, as a 17 year old Prep School student, attack a 15 year old girl at a party where underage drinking was extensive?  Of course he did. For an accomplished woman with extensive degrees and a professional career to risk it all, including her request for a FBI interview in which lying would be a felony, makes no conceivable sense unless it occurred. Her courage dwarfs those of her adversaries, included Kavanaugh and the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Ultimately, the implied defense by Kavanaugh, Trump, and Senate Republicans will be simply that Dr. Ford is a woman. It worked for Clarence Thomas.

Just the fact that Kavanaugh’s response was to deny it outright instead of arguing the circumstance shows an elevated sense of white male superiority. Add to that his rulings, notably of the 17 year old immigrant girl seeking an abortion last year where he used his power to manipulate the system against her, his attitude toward women is as baked in as it is in our culture.

Please, women of America…pay attention.  Too many of you are not. It makes no difference if he truly loves his wife and daughters or coaches a girl’s soccer team. It makes no difference!!

History should be a continual alarm that keeps going off for women (in the US and around the world). It should keep going off no matter how many times women hit the snooze button.  Women comprise at least half the population. They comprise a majority of college graduates. Their labors underpin economic stability equally with men. Yet they are still treated as a support class by too many men of power.

I am in my 60s and I only have to go back to my mother’s generation to find a time when women in America had no right to vote. The myriad of rules and outright laws that have restricted and underrepresented women in this Country, some confirmed by our Judicial System, have been whittled away over relatively recent years, but only that…whittled.  Status quo should not be an option.

Women of America, hold onto your values be they Conservative, Liberal, or in-between. But rage against a history that has categorized you and your daughters as something less than what you are.