At the National Review, Heather Mac Donald calls on the Republican Party to cease and desist with the gender-discrimination claims, because they’re starting to sound like liberals:
The chance that the Obama White House, staffed by eager products of the feminist university, is a hostile workplace for women is exactly zero — as low as the chance that the Bush I, II, or Reagan White Houses were hostile to women. Any Republican who actually believes [former White House aide Anita] Dunn’s charge has merely allowed his partisan desire for political victory to silence what should be his core knowledge about the contemporary world. …
Equally dismaying is the RNC’s embrace of the charge that the Obama White House pays female aides less than male ones. Such disparate pay claims are of course bread and butter to the discrimination bar and are virtually always based on junk social science. But the likelihood that this particular employer — the immaculately “progressive” Obama White House — is discriminating against female employees of equal merit as males is just as crazy as the charge that Walmart, say, discriminates against qualified female employees in its own pay scale. Conservative critics of extortionist feminist legal claims cannot have it both ways — rightly decrying them when directed at free-market employers but embracing them when they are directed against political opponents.
Mac Donald is right. It’s obviously tempting for Republicans to try to score political chips by playing the gender card, but the Romney campaign has to be careful not to undermine years of conservative arguments – and essentially kosherize fake gender discrimination claims – by doing so.
That said, conservatives should still raise issues like the White House pay wage gap and female unemployment claims as a way to contradict fake liberal outrage rather than try to top it. It’s a matter of hypocrisy. If the Obama campaign is going to argue Republicans are anti-women based on their criticism of the Lilly Ledbetter Act, then conservatives are right to point out that Obama’s own White House doesn’t live up to his own equal-pay standards.
Does this mean the Obama White House is anti-women? Of course not. But force the president try to explain the incongruity between his rhetoric and reality. He won’t be able to, unless he’s actually honest and admits that the gender wage gap (as far as it actually still exists) isn’t based on gender discrimination by employers, but on the fact that women and men (on average) tend to seek out different career choices and paths.
That was the point conservatives were trying to make by turning Obama’s gender pay gap into an issue. But when the RNC and the Romney campaign seize on these stories to try to play to the generic “women’s vote,” it destroys the message.
I disagree. n n"The chance that the Obama White House, staffed by eager products of the feminist university, is a hostile workplace for women is exactly zero." n nOnly if women aren't human beings — with all the frailties of humanity. Only if women aren't as willing as men to put personal gain ahead of principle, if they aren't willing to compromise on their principles in order to get ahead and to be IN the White House. Only if women don't have credit card bills and rent and other stuff that they need money to pay with — one can only be truly independently ultristic if one is really really rich, everyone else has the reality of the next meal. n nWhere were all the "products of the feminist university" resigning in disgust, making public statements of principle as to how they couldn't stomach working for that lecherous schmuck and how they would rather be working at McDonalds than continue to work for that man? n nDid any woman resign in protest? ANY woman? I can't remember any — and people had to know what he was doing — and we all eventually did — and still, none of these women sacrificed their career advancement for their feminist principles, did they? n nHow do you think the Intern Evaluations looked — the kids who busted their butts and then the one who got on her knees under the POTUS's desk — whom do you think knew she would have a letter of reference from the President? And is that an equitable workplace? nJust take the female interns — the majority of whom worked damn hard, and then Monica who was doing other things — and is that fair to the rest who were working? Wouldn't an expectation that you perform sex acts with the boss be the very definition of a "hostile workplace?" n nObama knows this as well as I do, as well as any conservative does. n nIf you want CONSERVATIVE women to work for you, you gotta pay them the same as the guys, you have to treat them no worse than you treat your male employers — or you won't have them. nBut if you mouth the appropriate Feminist mantras, if working for you is a "ticket punch" on the feminist career path, you can treat them like s**t and they still will work for you. And as no one will believe that you aren't treating women decently, you have no need to actually do so because you can discredit any woman who claims you mistreated her. n nIt is the same thing as the townies who hire the college kids to work for them. The conservatives will usually pay the college kids what they promised to pay them. The leftists, by contrast, will spend all day talking about "social justice" and "workers' rights" and the rest — and then NOT pay the college kids, or otherwise try to cheat them. It is so pandemic that I tell kids to go work for the conservative, that you will actually get what he promises to give you. And they ignore my advice, go work for the "social justice" folk, and then cry about not getting paid….