The Democrat Party's War on Women
By Michael Bargo, Jr.
AmericanThinker.com
While his poll numbers have plummeted and a midterm election nears, President Obama is dusting off the old women’s issues playbook of his party and is basing his speeches on its anachronistic rhetoric. They are attempting to once again portray themselves as the only political party that serves women. They are doing this by attacking Republicans as the party that wants to abolish birth control and tolerate lower incomes for women.
The plain fact is, the rhetoric of birth control and income equality are relics of the 1960s and 1970s and are not directly relevant to the issues of adult women living under the Obama economy. It is the changes in their lives that have occurred since Obama took office that are on their minds.
When it comes to an examination of the behavior of Democrats toward women, however, what they have actually done, and what Obama has done, is far more damaging and revealing of their war on women. While Democrats might predict that women will suffer if Republicans are elected, it is easy to cite those things that are already happening to women under Obama’s rule that are hurting them.
The issues of reproductive freedom have their roots in Feminist activism of the 1960s. The driving concept of that movement was that men controlled the family, dominated women, and extended that domination to the workplace. Consequently they earned more money and held more wealth. If women had reproductive choice, feminists asserted, then they would no longer be bound by the old-fashioned chains of pregnancy and motherhood.
These issues, of birth control and same sex marriage, are topics of sex and marriage that are the concerns of single women, not adult women who are concerned with the needs of their homes and families. These are the focus of discussions on the college campuses and bars of America and not the kitchen tables. In short, with regard to women’s issues, the Democratic Party needs to grow up and address the concerns of adult women. Now that they are married with kids they are beyond talking to their girlfriends about sex and dating.
Obama’s record with American women is abysmal, perhaps the worst in U.S. history.
Under Obama’s policies and administrative agenda the adult woman’s life has become far more difficult. The price of gasoline has stayed near four dollars a gallon for the longest time in U.S. history. And while President G.W. Bush proved that a simple presidential announcement that drilling will open up on Federal land will lower the price of gasoline, Obama uses every administrative trick, such as delaying the Keystone pipeline and ignoring the issuance of new permits to drill on Federal land, to stifle oil production. And recent EPA rules to limit carbon emissions on power plants will only increase the price of electricity for all families. EPA lawyers support Democrats.
In 2007, the year before Barack Obama started to run for president, more women were in the labor force. At that time there were 70,988,000 women age 16 and over in the labor force. Now there are only 72,741,000 but their population has increased by 8.26 million. Before Obama took office 56.6% of eligible women were working, now it’s dropped to 53.5%. Women, whether single or married, have lost jobs and are now worse off than they were before Obama took office.
Some of this was due to the mortgage market crash of 2008 but as I have shown this also was caused by the Democratic Party initiative to pursue social justice in the housing industry.
And while fewer women are working, their property taxes have skyrocketed in this time period and their incomes have declined. Under Obama’s policies the top 1% have seized 95% of the wealth grown in the U.S. while he was in the White House. American women are without jobs and those who work are earning less while Obama has taken care to ensure that wealth is being redistributed to those in the top 1%.
Republicans have a unique opportunity to turn the women’s issues campaign focus around and feature TV ads with American moms talking about the price of gasoline has really hurt their weekly budget, and how they don’t know how much her health care will cost next year, and if they can afford it at all. For the first time in their lives, American mothers are genuinely fearful that they may lose their health care, and have to pay cash for doctor visits at a time when their property taxes and other expenses have dramatically increased. These actions are directly caused by President Obama and his party’s sneaky passage of the Affordable Care Act. An Act passed without public Congressional Hearings or the approval of the American people.
And since 2009 90% of all Americans have lost net worth. These are financial facts which affect all adult women all around the country, not just a tiny percentage who seek a same-sex marriage.
The average American woman may say, okay, if two women in love want to get married, then I suppose that’s acceptable, but my real concern is who my family doctor will be next year. And President Obama not only has no answer for that, he has created that question for the first time in the lives of American mothers.
And while Democrats have accused Republicans of interfering with the birth control rights of women, the single motherhood rate of Hispanic teenage women has skyrocketed to rival that of black teenagers. This does not bode well for the futures of Hispanics in the U.S. who are also suffering, under Democratic rule, a high school dropout rate twice that of blacks.
The groups that Democrats claim to help the most, blacks and Hispanics, seem to have the greatest issues with reproductive freedom. While polls show that American women do not support the Affordable Care, their concerns fall on deaf Democratic ears.
The Democratic Party rose to power and expanded its electoral base in the 1960s by representing the legitimate concerns of minorities and women. Now that feminism has become an institution, it has fallen into the traditional pitfalls of maintaining their prestigious jobs, perks, and control and lost touch with the concerns of American women.
They may still face a glass ceiling but many women are now more concerned about the holes in the floor which cause them to drop out of the middle class and earn less money and have less options in the work place.
While Democrats love to make reproductive choice a campaign issue, the major reason for this may be that if they focused on how American women are suffering due to Democratic policies on housing, employment, education, and health care they would lose the vote of every female voter.