Bullies

by Ben Shapiro

  The next day, Komen backed down. Karen Handel, the Palin-backed former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, was thrown under the bus. And the Democrat-media complex celebrated. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi led the cheerleading section: “It was an unfortunate situation but it was dealt with in a short period of time, [and] I commend the Susan G. Komen foundation for seeing the light on this,” she said. “[It] just goes to show you, when women speak out, women win. Women’s health has a big victory this morning.” Suddenly Pelosi was all sweetness and light, acting as though her allies had never accused Komen of political game-playing with women’s lives: “I can only take [Komen] at its word.” Of course, she couldn’t help adding a tacit threat that Komen had best keep in line from now on: “We certainly will be able to support them as we have in the past . . . [but there is] a question of what other people in the country think about it.”35 So stay in line, Komen—or face the wrath of the Botoxed Army!

  The bullying worked. The astroturfed outrage had its effect. And Obama had his double whammy: a “war on women” he could exploit, and a distraction from his own assault on the Catholic Church.

  The truth is that of all the liberal positions, the liberal position on abortion is the most inherently coercive and bullying. Feminists may think that they’re standing up for women, but they don’t give a damn about unborn women, who are the prime targets of abortion. In fact, liberals will even admit that they don’t care about unborn girls. When Lila Rose of Live Action released a series of videos demonstrating that Planned Parenthood was okaying sex-selective abortions—abortions in which women said they wanted to abort their prospective babies because the babies would be female36—the feminist left came to the defense of Planned Parenthood. Democrats in Congress said they’d never even consider legislation to stop women from having sex-selective abortions.

  So the feminist bully logic is simple: if you don’t pay for the abortions of others, even if you’re a private organization, you must be destroyed; if you abort a female fetus specifically because it’s female, you’re on solid feminist ground.

  ANTI-MOM BULLIES

  In April 2012, the Obama campaign realized that it had a bit of a problem. The Obama administration had been a disastrous failure on domestic and foreign policy; their “war on women” bullying rhetoric wasn’t working. And, worst of all, Mitt Romney had a secret weapon: his wife, Ann.

  While Mitt wasn’t personally popular, thanks to his generally bland image, Ann had high positive ratings with the American public. She was tough, a survivor; she’d raised five boys, all the while fighting off multiple sclerosis and breast cancer.

  Ann had to be stopped.

  So the Obama administration trotted out its resident feminist spokeswoman, Hilary Rosen, to talk about Ann Romney.

  Rosen is a militant lesbian. She made her name in politics as interim director of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy organization; her partner at the time, Elizabeth Birch, was the executive director of the same organization. Together, they adopted twins. Later on, Rosen dumped Birch and moved in with the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten. Who takes care of the kids? The Guatemalan nanny, undoubtedly. All of this may have something to do with Rosen’s less than traditional view of marriage and family.

  At the time she decided to speak up about Ann Romney, she was being paid by the Democratic National Committee to help Debbie Wasserman Schultz shave off the rough edges.37 Rosen was a frequent visitor to the White House, too. As a public relations executive at SKDKnickerbocker, her specialty was messaging.

  And message she did. She appeared on CNN, where she told the American public that Ann Romney wasn’t a real woman—she’d “never worked a day in her life.”38

  The blowback was immediate and harsh. President Obama sprinted to a microphone as fast as his skinny legs could carry him. He defended Ann Romney, stating, “[T]here’s no tougher job than being a mom. . . . Anybody who would argue otherwise, I think, probably needs to rethink their statement.”39 He was followed by Michelle Obama, The Most Beautiful Woman In The World™, who tweeted, “Every mother works hard, and every woman deserves to be respected.” This was a massive overstatement—the Octomom does not deserve to be respected. But point taken. David Axelrod and Obama campaign manager Jim Messina came out of the woodwork to express their disapproval, too40—though if the new media hadn’t picked up on Rosen’s comments, these same folks likely would have been nodding vigorously throughout Rosen’s nasty monologue. The Obamas condemned the remarks. But they didn’t disassociate from her.

  And Rosen wasn’t backing down. “This isn’t about whether Ann Romney or I or other women of some means can afford to make a choice to stay home and raise kids,” she said. “Most women in America, let’s face it, don’t have that choice. They have to be working moms and home moms. And that’s the piece that I am not hearing from the Romney camp.”41 In other words, if you’re a stay-at-home mom, you must be rich, so shut up.

  The only problem is that it’s not true. Stay-at-home moms are disproportionately poor and minority. So when Rosen argued that Ann couldn’t identify with other women, she was simply blowing smoke. In all likelihood, a lesbian with a six-figure job, two adopted children, and regular access to the White House probably isn’t in a position to talk about what the typical American woman is looking for out of life.

  Unfortunately, though, Rosen’s feminist bullying reflects the liberal perspective better than President Obama’s supposed respect for stay-at-home moms (remember, Hilary Rosen was his surrogate). It goes all the way back to Friedan, she of the Holocaust-victim-stay-at-home-mom mentality.

  The left ardently believes that a fulfilled woman works, that stay-at-home moms are less valuable to society, and that women who choose not to work have slighted their sex. Hilary Rosen was just echoing another Hillary—Clinton—who famously remarked back in 1992, “I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession.”42 Teresa Heinz Kerry, who’d never spent a day in her adult life not being married to a super-rich guy, said that First Lady Laura Bush had never “had a real job.”

  The main driver in this cultural crusade against stay-at-home moms is Hollywood, which used to uphold traditional family values but now mocks the Leave It to Beaver mentality. Pleasantville (1998) was cribbed straight from the Friedan playbook: the stay-at-home mom is sexually repressed, confined by her drab little life. The Stepford Wives has been made twice—and both times, it championed the Friedan notion that men who wanted women who played traditional wifely and motherly roles actually wanted women who were robots. Desperate Housewives, of course, provided one end of the spectrum for women—the miserable end; Sex and the City provided the other, more glamorous, end. And then there’s the Real Housewives reality series, which portrays housewives as self-obsessed, pathetic freaks.

  Of course, all that disrespect for stay-at-home moms goes out the window as soon as a conservative woman decides to enter the workplace. When Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol got pregnant out of wedlock, the media quickly suggested that Sarah get back to the kitchen and take off her shoes—she was a bad mommy! ABC News ran a story in September 2008 questioning Palin’s “parenting choices” and caustically suggesting that she had “morphed into America’s new conservative feminist.”43 Obama Campaign National Finance Committee member Howard Gutman said that she couldn’t be a good parent if she was going to campaign. “Your responsibility is to put your family first,” said Gutman on Laura Ingraham’s radio show. John Roberts of CNN echoed the slur, stating, “Children with Down’s syndrome require an awful lot of attention. The role of Vice President, it seems to me, would take up an awful lot of her time, and it raises the issue of how much time will she have to dedicate to her newborn child?” Brian Williams of NBC News questioned whether “she should be doing this.” Michelle Malkin, another working mom who clearly makes her kids her first priority—I’m not sure I’ve ever met a more involved mother—sum
s up: “We’re damned if we do stay home and we’re damned if we don’t. We’re damned because we conservative moms drive the Left and its feminist shills mad with our mere existence, our exercise of free will, our fierce belief in protecting our families from the Nanny State, our embrace of free-market principles, and our rejection of the perpetual victim/grievance mentality.”44

  Malkin’s right. But as a general matter, the feminist bullies particularly hate stay-at-home moms. And the feminist war on stay-at-home moms has wrought tremendous hell on the family structure. It’s certainly possible for women to work and for them to be great mothers—my wife hopes to practice medicine and be a mom, too. But to pretend that there’s no trade-off in time or effort—and to excoriate women for choosing family over career—is simply bullying. And that bullying results in real-world effects for society. With more and more women abandoning their families to work, children engage in more and more destructive behavior; the rest of us are supposed to pick up the slack via educational programs and babysitting projects paid for by the government. It’s all fun and games to talk about how terrible stay-at-home moms are. But the myth of the mom who can have it all has bred an even worse myth, one that has largely destroyed America’s inner cities: the myth of the supremely competent single mom. In the feminist world, men aren’t necessary. They must be cowed into submission.

  ANTI-BOY BULLIES

  The ultimate goal of the feminist bullies is to create a sexless society. Or, more specifically, a maleless society. Feminists want to paper over differences between men and women in favor of a bizarre sort of gender androgyny; if there are real differences between the sexes, then women might need men and men might need women. And that would destroy any semblance of pure equality.

  To achieve that sexual leveling requires more than just changing women into workhorses and “freeing their sexuality.” It requires changing the very nature of men, too. And so the feminist left has set about their most important project of all: bullying men.

  It starts within the educational system, where the feminist bullies informed teachers that they need to be sure to bend over backward to overcome the patriarchal bias of the existing teaching tools. As Christina Hoff Sommers points out, this perspective “has given rise to an array of laws and policies intended to curtail the advantage boys have and to redress the harm done to girls.” When teachers point out that girls generally perform better than boys do in school, they are dressed down. To level the system, the feminist thought goes, boys must be feminized.

  Carol Gilligan, the first Harvard University professor of gender studies (aka the BS course you take to look good for your armpit-hair-growing lesbian cousin) and now at New York University, says that we need to transform “the fundamental structure of authority” by teaching little boys to be more sensitive. Or, in the words of famed empty-headed feminist Gloria Steinem, “Raise boys like we raise girls.” As Sommers says, “In practice, getting boys to be more like girls means getting them to stop segregating themselves into all-male groups. That’s the darker, coercive side of the project to ‘free’ boys from their masculine straitjackets.”45

  But that coercive project—we might even call it bullying—has become a cause célèbre for the feminist left. Just take a look at the Sesame Street website, which informs parents that they ought to “[t]ry to use gender-neutral language. Use plural pronouns such as ‘they’ and ‘them,’ instead of masculine pronouns such as ‘he’ and ‘him.’ Use words such as firefighter, flight attendant, garbage collector, and humankind to replace the use of ‘man’ as a generic noun or ending.”46 And as for those toys for the kiddies—why not try mixing up the gender toys in order to “break stereotypes about men and women, for example, dolls for boys and building toys and puzzles for girls.”47 Sure, the science isn’t there for this idiocy. But it feels right!

  As boys grow up, they’re told not to engage in chivalrous action with regard to women, lest they infringe on women’s independence. The male instinct to protect women is considered cliché and patriarchal. Why, the science is in, and it turns out that holding doors for women leads directly to the burqa. At least that’s the conclusion of the Society for the Psychology of Women, which conducted a study of workers in America and Germany and found that women thought it was sexist for men to hold doors, call people “guys,” or even make romantic comments about how they can’t live without women. The study decided: “Women endorse sexist beliefs, at least in part, because they do not attend to subtle, aggregate forms of sexism in their personal lives. . . . Many men not only lack attention to such incidents but also are less likely to perceive sexist incidents as being discriminatory and potentially harmful for women.” To boil that down, if you offer to carry your girlfriend’s purse, you’re harming her self-esteem. So let her take out the garbage once in a while.48

  It gets even worse. Andrea Dworkin, so radical among feminist bullies that even they distance themselves from her, wrote, “Violation is a synonym for intercourse. . . . Intercourse as an act often expresses the power men have over women. Without being what the society recognizes as rape, it is what the society—when pushed to admit it—recognizes as dominance.”49 All penetrative sex, in other words, is dominant, and may be rape. This sounds like a philosophy bound to create sexual happiness.

  GAY BULLIES

  If the goal of the feminist left was to level the sexes, the goal of the gay bullies was to take the next step: if every person of every sex is exactly the same, there’s no difference between men sleeping with men, men sleeping with women, women sleeping with women, or transvestites sleeping with transsexual hookers. Everybody’s one big happy family. Or a big Modern Family, as Hollywood would have it. (Great show. Bizarre moral compass.)

  Now, in and of itself, there’s nothing bullying about this perspective. After all, what you do in the privacy of your bedroom is your business, no matter how distasteful anybody else finds it.

  Where this perspective lends itself to bullying is in the insistence that sex lives be made public.

  The sexual left insists, bizarrely enough, that the argument for the right to private sexual behavior is identical to the argument for the right to benefits predicated on such behavior. This is inane. Just because two men enjoy wearing assless chaps in the privacy of their bedroom doesn’t mean that society should be forced to allow them to wear assless chaps down Santa Monica Boulevard at taxpayer expense. Nor does it mean that Americans should have to reeducate their children to accept the presence of assless chaps in the public square.

  The same holds true of relationships. The state does have an interest in monogamous heterosexual relationships that produce children. That interest is greater than the interest it holds in monogamous homosexual relationships. That’s because men and women are inherently different, a child needs a mother and a father, and society needs children.

  Needless to say, however, there are good arguments for and against gay marriage. But for some reason, that’s a point that the gay left refuses to accept. Instead, they bully.

  For whatever reason, the gay bullies make the feminist bullies look like pikers when it comes to actual bully tactics. And as the group of people who cry the most about bullying, they’re also the biggest hypocrites.

  Take, for example, Dan Savage.

  Savage is a gay sex columnist who, aside from writing pieces that would make Kim Kardashian blush, runs an organization called the It Gets Better Project. The It Gets Better Project was designed to protect children, particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender children and teens, from bullying. Its suggested pledge states, “Everyone deserves to be respected for who they are. I pledge to spread this message to my friends, family and neighbors. I’ll speak up against hate and intolerance whenever I see it, at school and at work. I’ll provide hope for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and other bullied teens by letting them know that ‘It Gets Better.’ ”

  This is a good message. Nobody is for bullying, particularly of children and teens.

  It�
��s such a good message that President Obama cut a video on behalf of It Gets Better. He decried the suicide of several young teens who had been bullied. He said that it broke his heart, which is undoubtedly true. He explained how he had been alienated, and knew what it was like to feel left out: “I don’t know what it’s like to be picked on for being gay. But I do know what it’s like to grow up feeling that sometimes you don’t belong. It’s tough. . . . [As you get older] you’ll be more likely to understand personally and deeply why it’s so important that as adults we set an example in our own lives and that we treat everybody with respect.”

  Obama liked the It Gets Better Project so much that he decided to force his entire administration to support it. He had major members of his administration cut videos on behalf of It Gets Better: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, the Justice Department, senior advisor Valerie Jarrett. They all stood up for treating everybody with respect. His administration even started a website, StopBullying.gov, complete with helpful tips for parents and kids.

  This was wonderful. It was meaningful. It was touching.