One of the amusing diversions on early fall television is the way the political pundits are treating women in this so-called “year of the woman.” The Democratic women candidates for office (such as Carol Moseley Braun and Dianne Feinstein) are usually treated as though they are on a royal tour rather than grubbing for votes, while pro-life female candidates (such as South Dakota’s Charlene Haar) never make it onto the Sunday public affairs programs.
The treatment accorded Hillary Clinton is in a class by itself! Initially, the pundits anointed her as the paramount exemplar of the modern wife who has her own career and makes more money than her husband. We were told that she represents the changing of the guard from old-generation wives like Barbara Bush, whose lifestyle is now presumably obsolete.
But when Hillary’s opponents started to analyze her paper trail and subject her writings to scrutiny, most of the pundits closed ranks to defend her and to accuse Hillary’s critics of “distortion” for daring to quote from her published articles.
There is absolutely no reason why Hillary should be protected from political criticism of her public writings and professional activities. She has made it clear that, if Clinton is elected, she will not be just First Lady, but will be First Woman or First Partner. As she put it, “if you vote for my husband, you get us; it’s a two-for-one, blue plate special.”
Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have made a big point of repeatedly touting her interest in children. Other people’s children, that is. She served for years as a director of the Children’s Defense Fund, the principal lobby for federally financed and regulated daycare — a goal so extreme that even the present liberal Congress refused to pass it.
Hillary comes out of the discredited “children’s rights” movement of the 1970s. She explicitly calls for our legal system to remove the presumption that children are minors subject to their parents’ care and decisions. In legal jargon, she would “emancipate” all minors in order to accord then the legal rights of an adult.
Hillary’s defenders have tried to drag a red herring across her paper trail by arguing that abused and neglected children need protection against their unfit parents. But her articles were by no means limited to such exceptional cases; she clearly urged a broad, new general rule of “enforceable rights” for all children.
Here is what Hillary actually said in her 1974 article, published in the Harvard Educational Review: “I want to be a voice for America’s children . . . advocating . . . the immediate abolition of the legal status of minority and the reversal of the legal presumption of the incompetence of minors in favor of presumption of competence; the extension to children of all procedural rights guaranteed to adults; the rejection of the legal presumption of the identity of interests between parents and their children, and permission for competent children to assert those independent interests in the courts.”
Republican National chairman Rich Bond was only slightly off the mark when he said that Hillary believes kids should be able to sue their parents to avoid helping with the chores. It would have been more precise to say that Hillary believes that kids should be able to sue their parents if they want, to play hooky from school and joyride in the family car.
Here are Hillary’s own words: “We are talking about everything from compulsory school attendance to driving privileges to nurturing requirements.” Then she added, “Decisions about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment, and others where the decision or lack of one will significantly affect the children’s future should not be made unilaterally by parents.” (Teacher’s College Press, L979)
Hillary’s views on marriage were spelled out in the Harvard Educational, Review 43:4, 1974: “The basic rationale for depriving people of rights in a dependency relationship is that certain individuals are incapable or undeserving of the right to take care of themselves and consequently need social institutions specifically designed to safeguard their position. Along with the family, past and present examples of such arrangements include marriage, slavery, and the Indian reservation system.”
That’s vintage 1970s feminism, an ideology which teaches that wives are second-class citizens, that marriage treats wives like servants bogged down in dirty diapers and dirty dishes, and that women need out-of-the-home careers to have real fulfillment.
Hillary’s defenders claim that her off-the-wall comments have been taken out of context. No such thing. The above quotations are fairly taken from articles that spell out the same radical feminist ideology in wordy detail.