Photo credit: ProgressOhio on Flickr

Once upon a time, the phrase “gender equality” meant exactly what it sounds like – securing the equal rights of women to do whatever men could, from the workplace to the ballot box. It was fundamentally about making sex less relevant in judging people’s worth and qualifications, about viewing them as individuals first and members of a group second.

Today’s pretenders to the feminist throne, for whom “women’s rights” and “gender equality” are but code words for abortion and birth control, have completely turned that principle on its head, as strikingly demonstrated by a recent RH Reality Check post on comments made by New York Democrat Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Robin Marty reports that Gillibrand realizes “how much work needs to be done to get more women running for office, especially women who don’t stump for the religious right”:

“[I]f we had 50 percent of women in Congress, we would not be debating contraception,” she said at a fundraiser, according to The Washington Post. “We would be debating the economy, small business, jobs, national security — everything but.”

Gillibrand is using her massive fundraising prowess to focus on other women now–in this case Tammy Duckworth in Wisconsin, Christie Vilsack in Iowa, and Val Demmings in Florida. If all three women won, it could make a massive change in the ratio not just of Republicans to Democrats in the House, but from male to female as well.

If Congress isn’t achieving Gillibrand’s desired results because too few lawmakers are female, presumably that means there’s something about being male that makes one’s judgment on such issues intrinsically worse, and something about being female that makes it intrinsically better.

Of course, that raises the obvious question of whether there are also issues that men are inherently better at deciding. Is Kathleen Sebelius’s leadership handicapping the Department of Health and Human Services with some sort of female-centric bias? It’s safe to assume that most left-wing feminists would bristle at such a suggestion, leaving us with only one alternative: women are just better.

If that’s the case, then the original feminists were wrong. The sexes aren’t equal. Men’s objectivity, comprehension, and decision-making skills are fundamentally inferior to women’s. Reason, justice, and prudence aren’t independent concepts accessible to all; only by possessing the right chromosomes can one fully perceive them.

Simply put, this is bunk. We are all individuals capable of reason, not drones beholden to hive minds. Men and women are equally capable of understanding how religious liberty and freedom of association work, reading that the Center for Disease Control’s own data finds no sign that women are suffering a crisis of “access” to birth control, and learning about the humanity of the unborn.

Not only does it deny the equality of the sexes and the objectivity of truth to suggest that only members of a particular demographic group are fit to govern for that group, but it also threatens to widen society’s divisions. If self-interest and the ability to perceive it are inextricably tied to one’s physical characteristics, then there’s no such thing as common good or general welfare, and trying to find them is a nonsensical exercise in futility. Earnest efforts to cross identity lines and find what’s best for everyone must give way to people banding together in “every demographic for itself!” struggles.

Ironically, Marty undermines the very quote she’s highlighting with her quip about how the female politicians we need aren’t part of the “religious right,” such as Gillibrand’s pro-life opponent, Republican attorney Wendy Long. Long, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and other female politicians are exactly the type of women feminists always say we need in politics: confident, passionate, and just as comfortable in the professional world as they are in the home. But despite, y’know, being women, they aren’t good for womankind, because they don’t sign onto the pro-abortion/forced contraception agenda.

In the name of “feminism,” abortion advocates have hijacked and corrupted everything the real feminists fought so hard to achieve, and all for a cause those venerable women would have been disgusted by. The best way to honor the legacy of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and their allies is to rebuke Kirsten Gillibrand and her ilk.

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