Seriously, where do they find people like this? A woman named Wendy Doniger, writing at the Washington Post’s religion blog, claims that Sarah Palin does not speak for women, has no sympathy for women, and in fact is not a woman. Doniger writes: “It’s evident that almost her only qualification in the minds of McCain & co. is her family.” Really? “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party’s cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.” This is exactly backwards. It is precisely because Palin knows and understands the working class — women and men — that her selection has transformed the race in the way that it has. Women see themselves in her and men see their mothers, their wives, their daughters. And few people outside the leftist academy and the elite media believe, as Doniger apparently does, that there is something shameful in a mother driving her children to school or at least something silly about those who would celebrate such a commitment. Doniger says she knows lots of women who have taken to their computers in outrage over the Palin pick. (Oblivious to her laugh-out-loud self-parody, she calls them “real women,” ostensibly to distinguish them from the fake women who, like Palin, have families and care for them.) But of course far more women, the ones who thanklessly do what Sarah Palin has done every day in raising their families, are outraged that some shrill, angry feminist would try to strip them of their womanhood because their views aren’t acceptable among her oh-so-cultured friends. (H/T: The Corner)
