Despite an intense focus on gun control and campus sexual assault in the past few years from this administration, these two issues were noticeably absent from President Obama’s State of the Union address.
Also absent: a real discussion about the supposed oppression of American women.
Early on in his speech, Obama briefly mentioned gun control and the supposed gender wage gap, including them on a “traditional list of proposals for the year ahead.”
“Protecting our kids from gun violence” and “equal pay for equal work” were mentioned in this list, but never again. Campus sexual assault wasn’t mentioned at all.
This, in my opinion, is a good thing. Obama and Democrats and their supporters in the media have so demagogued the issue of gun control that nothing could possibly pass. From trying to deny due process rights by disallowing people on the “no-fly list” (or broader “terrorist watch list,” depending on who is speaking) from purchasing a gun to making outrageously false claims that buying a gun in this country is as easy as buying a carrot, the gun control debate is a lost cause.
Honestly, the issue of gun control demonstrates the worst about the media and Congress, where people who have no clue what they’re writing about and have never purchased or fired a gun try to tell other people how the system works.
On “equal pay for equal work,” that is already the law, and has been since 1963. What Obama and Democrats talk about when they bring up that phrase is the supposed gender wage gap, which is more appropriately called the gender earnings gap. It relates to the fact that men and women’s earnings are different, but this difference is due to the different choices men and women make in their career choices.
Women tend to take time off from work or leave work to raise a family, while men are expected to continue working. Women also enter lower-paying and less dangerous jobs. Men are more at risk to die in the workplace, and those dangerous jobs pay well. Nine of the 10 highest-paying majors are dominated by men, while nine of the 10 lowest-paying majors are dominated by women.
The only way to actually “fix” the gender wage gap is to control the choices women make, but no one would dare suggest that.
The complete absence of any mention of campus sexual assault is telling. Obama’s administration has single-handedly created the issue and made it as toxic as it is by repeating false statistics and basing policy off of them. The American people are waking up to the fact that the claim that one-in-five women are sexually assaulted while in college doesn’t comport with reality or common sense.
They don’t believe that America has a “rape culture” problem when they see groups like the Islamic State encouraging the rape of women. They don’t buy the argument that problems can and should be solved by eviscerating constitutional rights like due process for the accused.
Perhaps Obama realizes these things, or maybe his speech writers just forgot to ram yet another wedge issue into the speech. Either way, I’m thankful. Due process advocates keep making progress, but each lie, each misleading statement, sets constitutional rights back.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
