Not yet anyway. Not until you know that I am a feminist, a liberal, and pro-choice. There. Now you know my biases, I want to talk about something that is making me out of my mind as I try to follow the way the media is talking about the presidential election. The language used on of the topics of race, rape and the female vote.
Let's start easy, shall we?
There seems to be a rash of media outlets talking about race as a factor in this election. I am not a fool; I understand racism is alive and well and living in the collective American basement eating Frito's and watching stolen cable. Having said that, the tenor of what is said seems more overt than I ever recall in my lifetime. Let's start with the idea that there are white men, and then there is everyone else. Here's what we find at the Washington Post:
Obama has a deficit of 23 percentage points, trailing Republican Mitt Romney 60 percent to 37 percent among whites, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News national tracking poll. That presents a significant hurdle for the president — and suggests that he will need to achieve even larger margins of victory among women and minorities, two important parts of the Democratic base, to win reelection.
Read that carefully please. Obama has a deficit of 23 percentage points among whites, so he will have to have a larger showing among women and minorities. The words that the don't use are just as important as the ones that they do use. Here, they've made a distinction between "white" and "women and minorities," glossing over the overlap, glossing over white women. They are other. What the article doesn't fully say, but means completely, is that Obama has an issue with the white men's approval. It's insidious, and it's important.
LZ Granderson says both sides have a race problem. While Obama is not polling well with white men, it would seem that Romney is having similar issues with minorities.
Mitt Romney may very well become the next president. But the polls suggest if he does, he will have little minority support. In a country that is growing browner by the decade, Republicans relying solely on white people to win elections is not a sustainable strategy.
NBCNews talks about which demographic will be more important. Their questions are about white men vs. all Latinos. Again, lumping and separating at the same time. If you read the "why" behind the minority support for Obama, it falls into a "Romney doesn't understand us" vagueness that is also detrimental. The theme seems to be that the only reason a minority would vote for Obama is the fact of his own minority status. Or, maybe it's just John Sununu, one of Romney's top advisors throwing that knife around.
With all of the talk about white men, what happens to the other 52% of the population? CNN has this pretty interesting article where they talk about how women's issues seem to be driving the narrative for this election a little more than in the past. They try to break it down to just the numbers. They say, for example, that 65.7% of eligible women voters actually voted in 2008. They also explain that a larger percent of eligible women voted in the the last 8 elections than their male counterparts. That probably means someone should pay attention.
Well, the Republicans say they are paying attention, but it seems that it is impossible for there to be a gathering of 20 or more of them without some powerful guy mentioning rape. There are plenty of other issues that could just as easily be construed as women' s issues, but choice seems to captivate this election year. The twist on the old faithful choice issue is adding an element that no one had previously thought was up for debate: the definition of rape. It started in Missouri, with Senator Akin offering up his opinion that if there is a legitimate rape, pregnancy can't happen. Senator Akin may not have realized it at the time, but "legitimate rape," and its cousin "forcible rape," are now a part of how public policy is created on a state level. Again, how people talk about this stuff is insidious.
Well, the Republicans say they are paying attention, but it seems that it is impossible for there to be a gathering of 20 or more of them without some powerful guy mentioning rape. There are plenty of other issues that could just as easily be construed as women' s issues, but choice seems to captivate this election year. The twist on the old faithful choice issue is adding an element that no one had previously thought was up for debate: the definition of rape. It started in Missouri, with Senator Akin offering up his opinion that if there is a legitimate rape, pregnancy can't happen. Senator Akin may not have realized it at the time, but "legitimate rape," and its cousin "forcible rape," are now a part of how public policy is created on a state level. Again, how people talk about this stuff is insidious.
In New Mexico, the Children, Youth and Families Department mandates that a woman file a child support claim before receiving state assistance. At this time, the CYFD is considering an amendment that would waive that requirement for victims of "forcible rape." What that means is that when seeking assistance, a woman would have to prove that she was raped in order to be qualified for the exemption. Like the race language, this is a slow, insidious move to normalize this language in a state where Obama is actually likely to win the popular vote. I wish I could say that New Mexico is an outlier on this issue but, sadly, Pennsylvania is looking at a bill right now that would require a woman to prove that she was raped in order to keep her state assistance if she becomes pregnant while on assistance.
"Forcible" and "legitimate" labels are finding their way into the dominant discourse because, in part, of the role rape plays in the conversation about abortion. Even there, the insults don't stop. Without any particular regard to what it might mean to hear a promenint public figure say so, Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said that he believes rapes resulting in pregnancy are "something that God intends to happen." He said this because he is against abortion for cases of rape or incest, despite the fact that having that child means a lifetime of the kinds of issues that are happening in New Mexico and Pennsylvania. There are also no protections in place, in many states, concerning the parental rights of the rapist.
Richard Mourdock was indorced by Mitt Romney. VP hopeful, Paul Ryan co-authored a bill called the Sanctity of Human Life Act. This isn't a tangental rant; this is relevant to choosing the next president of the United State of America - a man, by the way, who will likely fill at least one Supreme Court Justice position during his term.
This is serious stuff.
This is serious stuff.
I am going to ask you to do a little experiment: use the search term "wooing women voters" in Google. To woo. Court. Pursue. This is the language that is used by both the Romney and Obama camps. Women are being sought. Wooing Latinos isn't a search term. You can also skip "Courting minorities" in general. Those statistics I mentioned earlier tell us that women have picked the president in the past 12 elections. We're our own private Ohio, baby!
And we should never forget that, no matter what they say.
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