by Ben Shapiro
Feminism recognized the basic truth that men are naturally pigs, but bought into the Kinseyan notion that institutions of civilization were utter failures. So instead of requiring men to act according to the dictates of traditional sexual morality—monogamy, care for and support of spouses, not being a jerk—feminism suggested that the solution was for women to act like jerks. After all, people behaving themselves was just impossible. Thus, the sexual revolution.
Feminism rejected basic biology by stating that women and men were essentially the same, except they had different sets of genitals. In The Feminine Mystique, that’s exactly what Betty Friedan, a politically radical leftist, argued. Because women had been oppressed by the patriarchal hierarchy, they were guaranteed to live unhappy lives, empty of all meaning—essentially, they were destined to become like Kate Winslet’s character in the film Revolutionary Road, cheating on their husbands, drinking heavily, and then dying.
Friedan hated marriage. The feminist movement has carefully avoided quoting Friedan’s heated rhetoric in The Feminine Mystique. There’s a reason for that: it’s sick-making. She argued that women who wanted to be housewives were “in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps—and the millions more who refused to believe that the concentration camps existed.” She said that suburban homes were “comfortable concentration camps,” and that women were “not, of course, being readied for mass extermination, but they are suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.”
Friedan went on to found the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (now NARAL Pro-Choice America). Friedan’s entire agenda was the remaking of modern marriage, without traditional sex roles; abortion was a vital component of the new feminism, since pregnancy clearly separated women’s capacities from men’s on a biological level. As the NARAL original charter stated, “NARAL, recognizing the basic human right of a woman to limit her own reproduction, is dedicated to the elimination of all laws and practices that would compel any woman to bear a child against her will. To that end, it proposes to initiate and co-ordinate political, social, and legal action of individuals and groups concerned with providing safe operations by qualified physicians for all women seeking them regardless of economic status.” Of course, this ignored the humanity of the child and the woman’s role in choosing to get pregnant in the first place. But the bottom line was that all obstacles to true equality—including physical equality—had to be discarded.
None of this is to argue that women are not capable of doing a great many things as well or better than men, including earning. True feminism would recognize the differences between the sexes while upholding the right of women to work in jobs for which they are qualified. My wife currently attends UCLA Medical School; my mother runs business affairs for major Hollywood firms. Women in the workplace are a tremendous good. So are women at home. Feminism should be about choice.
Instead, thanks to people like Friedan, it became about bullying.
Anyone who opposed the feminist agenda was quickly labeled a sexist and bullied into submission. When Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative woman, debated Friedan over the proposed Equal Rights Amendment in 1973—an amendment that would have removed dependent wife benefits under Social Security and exemption from Selective Service registration, and paved the way for same-sex marriage—Friedan growled, “I’d like to burn you at the stake!”17 Such bully tactics have become common for the left—when Larry Summers, the former Clinton and Obama administration official, and then president of Harvard, suggested in 2005 that perhaps there might be innate differences between men and women with regard to scientific capabilities, he was quickly ousted from his position. I was at Harvard at the time. Summers was beloved by the student body and backed in the community. The feminist faculty, however, would brook no quarter. They got rid of him.
Every mildly comprehensive scientific study ever done has shown significant brain differences between men and women—with women having some advantages, and men having some advantages.18 The science simply isn’t on the feminists’ side. But that’s why they bully. The feminist left has rammed their version of reality down Americans’ throats: Everyone, regardless of sex, is the same. Sex is the same as race—an irrelevant categorizer that can be ignored at will. Sure, that’s dumb. But so what? Wanna fight about it?
By leveling the sexes, the feminist left paved the way, as Schlafly thought they would, for the gay movement. If men and women are exactly the same except for a few appendages and holes, then why shouldn’t a man marry a man and a woman marry a woman? What’s the difference between a man and a woman raising a child and two men? Or three men? Or four women? Or three men, a woman, and a transvestite hooker who hitched a ride with Eddie Murphy?
Like feminists, gay rights activists had a point: nobody really should care (and now, nobody does) about what gays and lesbians do in their bedrooms. And gays and lesbians were bullied about what they did in their private lives.
But the gay agenda has moved well beyond tolerance of private behavior to acceptance of public behavior that would make anybody’s skin crawl. Parading assless chaps down the center of Santa Monica Boulevard on the taxpayer dime is not a right. Neither is ramming homosexual education down the throats of American schoolchildren. Neither, in fact, is gay marriage—marriage is restricted in every state in the union in one way or another, and the state has a legitimate and compelling interest in one man and one woman getting married, producing and raising children.
Like the feminist movement, the gay rights movement is based on a false premise: that homosexual behavior is the same as race. This is logically nonsensical. If behavior is inborn, then racists are right—populations with higher rates of crime must be “born that way,” the same way that the gay population is “born that way,” in the infamously moronic words of sterile autotuned sex symbol Lady Gaga. If all behavior is preordained by biology, we should open up all our prisons now, since nobody’s at fault for any of their behavior.
The fact is that behavior is not like race—it is not an innate characteristic that cannot be changed. That doesn’t mean that we should crack down on all behavior, or even most behavior. It certainly doesn’t mean we should start policing bedrooms. It does mean, however, that what people do in the public square—not in the bedroom—falls under the purview of community standards.
But not for the gay bullies, who suggest that it’s okay for them to wear banana hammocks on Fire Island but wrong for Christian students to wear shirts with Bible verses. Like the feminist bullies, they’re not going to use things like logic to argue their case—they’re simply going to slander people as gay-haters, incipient Matthew Shepard murderers riding the rails, looking for the next gay to beat to death with a tire iron. Don’t agree with their agenda? You’ll find yourself out of work in Hollywood, or boycotted, or cursed out.
This is the new sexual politics of America: devoid of reason, devoid of science, devoid of logic. Chock full of thuggery.
ABORTION BULLIES
Jane Fonda is not the smartest woman in the world. Actually, her greatest contribution to society has been a set of surprisingly effective exercise videos. That somehow doesn’t outweigh traveling to Vietnam and helping the Viet Cong torture American POWs—she rightly should have been jailed for that act of treason.
But if there’s one thing Jane Fonda is an expert on, it’s abortion. Or at least, that’s how she holds herself out. She’s tied in deeply with Planned Parenthood and routinely rallies to their cause. And, of course, she bullies those who disagree. Abortion opponents, she says, are the worst people on earth. “Every dictator—Stalin, Ceaucescu [sic], Hilter [sic]—has made anti-choice a central component of their agenda,” she said.19 As somebody who had actively supported a dictatorial regime—the North Vietnamese communists—Fonda should have known just how wrong she was. The communist Chinese, who backed the Viet Cong, were ardent proponents of abortion and remain so to this day.
But the point for the left is always to invoke Godwin’s law as quickly as humanly possible—cite Hitler at the first instance, then wait for conservatives to start weeping softly in the corner.
Fonda may not be the ultimate feminist, but Gloria Steinem is. Steinem cofounded New York and Ms. magazines. She is also a full-fledged intellectual lightweight who suggested after 9/11 that a U.S. military response would create a “cycle of escalating violence,” and thinks that boys should be raised more like girls. She also says that you can’t be a conservative feminist—you can’t be a feminist if you want to stop abortion. Katie Couric, who was interviewing Steinem, specifically asked Steinem if Sarah Palin could be a feminist. Steinem, of course, said no.20 Of course, some of that may be self-justification, given that Steinem had an abortion herself at age twenty-two. No wonder Pennsylvania Democratic state representative Babette Josephs says that pro-life women are “men with breasts.”21
This is the same notion with regard to sex that race bullies promulgate with regard to race. Clarence Thomas is an Oreo; Larry Elder is an Uncle Tom; Condoleezza Rice is a token and a sellout. So, too, are women who don’t think it’s morally sound to murder unborn children. They’re not even women. Only women who think that prospective children are polyps earn the title “women.”
It’s not enough for the pro-abortion feminist bullies to force their opinions on all women and question their status as females if they don’t agree with the pro-abortion agenda. Feminists expect taxpayers to fund their abortions. That’s why their great focus these days is on Planned Parenthood, the country’s leading provider of abortion. The organization, which originated with eugenicist Margaret Sanger in 1938, now has an annual budget of more than $1 billion and performs hundreds of thousands of abortions every year; about half of its budget comes from federal, state, and local governments. In 2009, they performed in excess of 330,000 abortions. More than a quarter of all abortions performed in the United States are performed at Planned Parenthood clinics. Estimates state that nearly 100 percent of pregnant women who come to Planned Parenthood for supposed prenatal care show up to end the “prenatal” part of that care.22 Estimates place Planned Parenthood’s income on abortion at hundreds of millions of dollars.
Planned Parenthood doesn’t just rake it in from taxpayer dollars, though. They take grants from other charitable organizations. Here’s where the bullying really comes in. If one of those groups should choose to end those grants, they wind up in the public relations toilet. Planned Parenthood, which funds political campaigns for Democrats across the country, has friends in high places. And they have plenty of friends in the media, too. When their cash flow comes under threat, even in the most minor way, they go ballistic.
Take, for example, the case of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Komen is a breast cancer foundation, pure and simple. That’s all they care about: fighting breast cancer. They had a long-standing deal with Planned Parenthood whereby they gave a few hundred thousand dollars to Planned Parenthood so that the clinics could refer women to mammogram centers. In 2011, Komen decided that this wasn’t the best use of grant money—after all, they could just give the grants directly to mammography centers, which would provide the mammograms directly. “Wherever possible,” said Nancy Brinker, who founded the organization after losing her sister, Susan G. Komen, to breast cancer, “we want to grant to the provider that is actually providing the lifesaving mammogram.” There was another factor, of course—Planned Parenthood was the source of major controversy for Komen due to Planned Parenthood’s support of abortion.23 Komen reportedly informed Planned Parenthood at that time that they’d be ending their grants program.
In late January 2012, the news hit the presses. And Planned Parenthood launched one of the great coordinated public campaigns of the last century. They did it in conjunction with the Obama administration, the media, and a bevy of other leftist nonprofit organizations.
To understand why the Komen bullying case was so critical, we have to recognize a fundamental truth: President Obama needed the women’s vote to win reelection in 2012. We also have to recognize a second fundamental truth: Obama is a big fan of the late Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s strategy was basic and immensely effective: pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.
So Obama needed a target—particularly in light of the fact that his economic policies had disproportionately impacted women negatively. As Mitt Romney pointed out in April 2012, “92.3 percent of the job losses during the Obama years have been women who lost those jobs.”24
The easiest target, as it turned out, was Komen.
As we’ll explore, that wasn’t President Obama’s only target—he decided to attack religious institutions, too, as enemies of women. But Komen was a more convenient target, since it didn’t carry the risk of alienating Catholics.
And so when Komen, a private organization, decided to cut off grants to Planned Parenthood—grants amounting to less than 1 percent of Planned Parenthood’s total budget—the Obama administration got active. When Coke pulled its cash from the American Legislative Exchange Council, the left cheered; when Komen pulled its cash from Planned Parenthood, it merited White House attention and horror.
Obama and company had deep ties to Planned Parenthood. Not only did the Planned Parenthood 501(c)4 provide consistent political cover to Democrats, but the head of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, was an Obama advisor. Actually, Richards advised Obama that he ought to force Catholic organizations to provide contraception under Obamacare.25
It’s no coincidence that in May 2012 she actually posted a video on behalf of Obama. “I think when women look at the positions of Mr. Romney, who really wants to take women back to the 1950s,” she said, “and the record of President Obama and all that he has done for women and American families, there’s a clear choice.”26 This is typical bully rhetoric—Romney had no intention of sending women back to the “concentration camps” of Betty Friedan. But Richards is a pro-Obama political hack.
And Obama is a pro–Planned Parenthood political hack. No wonder in June 2012, President Obama chose to stump for high school support by backing Planned Parenthood. “You can decide that instead of restricting access to birth control or defunding Planned Parenthood, we should make sure that in this country, women control their own health care choices,” Obama told a bunch of high school students in New Hampshire, few of whom had ever engaged with Planned Parenthood. It wasn’t the only time he’d cited Planned Parenthood as an inestimable good under assault from cruel Republicans. “We don’t need another political fight about ending a woman’s right to choose, or getting rid of Planned Parenthood,” he said in May. He said the same thing in California and Denver. It’s a regular part of his stump speech.27 Because if there’s a crowd that desperately needs taxpayer-provided abortions, it’s sixteen-year-old girls, God knows.
So, given the fact that the Obama administration is as cozy as a fetus in a womb with Planned Parenthood—pre-abortion, of course—there’s little doubt that when Komen defunded Planned Parenthood, the Obama administration was the first to know about it. And there’s little doubt that they coordinated the assault on Komen—an institution that takes precisely zero tax dollars.
The timing of the assault on Komen was peculiar. It happened the week after the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and within just days of the Obama administration decision to apply Obamacare mandates on contraception to Catholic organizations. As Politico, one of Obama’s favorite media outlets, later pointed out, “It deflected at least some of the attention away from the contraception controversy, and allowed reproductive rights groups—the administration’s allies on the contraception rule—to remind Washington that the anti-abortion forces aren’t the only ones that matter in politics.”28
The media campaign against Komen started with a leak from somewhere, not a public announcement by Komen. And the first piece came from the Obama outlet Huffington Post, which blamed Komen’s new strategy on evil right-winger Karen Handel, a staffer at Komen and a
former Georgia gubernatorial candidate who wasn’t too fond of Planned Parenthood—and who had been endorsed, saints preserve us, by Sarah Palin.29 That same day, the Associated Press ran a hit piece against Komen, too.30 Within days, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic had somehow been handed a copy of internal Komen documents about their granting procedures, and had inside sources at Komen who were willing to give him information to help Planned Parenthood.31
Soon it was all over the Internet. Planned Parenthood sent out a nasty email ripping Komen for its decision, stating that they had put anti-abortion ideology “over women’s health and lives”—and, of course, Planned Parenthood asked for donations.32 Other organizations, in a coordinated assault, began piling on: MoveOn.org, NARAL, Media Matters.
And the Democrats got active, too. The bullying campaign kicked into high gear. Twenty-two Democratic senators sent a letter to Komen pushing them to reverse themselves. “It would be tragic if any woman, let alone thousands of women, lost access to these potentially life-saving screenings because of a politically-motivated attack,” the letter stated. This was the height of irony, since the letter itself was a politically motivated attack on a fully private organization. Besides which, Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide mammograms.33
The coup de grâce, though, was provided by MSNBC “reporter” Andrea Mitchell, who did an absolute hatchet job of an interview on Komen founder Nancy Brinker. She pulled out every stop in an effort to press Komen to get back into bed with Planned Parenthood. She led off with a heartrending story about an obnoxious sweaty woman at her gym (who may or may not have been named Andrea Mitchell). As Mitchell told it, “I want to give you a chance to answer—let me just tell you what I was confronted with at the gym this morning. A woman came over to me, I had not met her before, gray-haired woman, probably in her 60s, she was wearing a gray T-shirt, and she said, ‘Look at my T-shirt. It’s inside out. I put it on by accident today. I’m not going to wear it anymore. I’ve torn the label out. It’s a Komen T-shirt.’ ” Now, what this had to do with a breast cancer institution deciding to cut grants to an abortion clinic was beyond human logic. But it did tug at the heartstrings. The rest of the interview resembled an enraged hippopotamus attacking a baby zebra. It was ugly, and it was painful, and it didn’t stop. And, naturally, Mitchell called in two of her friends—Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) to complain about Komen.34
