Some Feminist Progress, After All?

[monk222]

Ellen Goodman sees a silver lining in all this dark-cloudy Palin business, as the conservatives are finally making it into the twentieth century with respect to the place of women in society:

Let us remember that Republicans had long targeted working mothers as the centerpiece of the culture wars. They ran an entire convention on Marilyn Quayle's line that "Most women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women."

Now their heroine is the in-your-face governor who once said: "To any critics who say a woman can't think and work and carry a baby at the same time, I'd just like to escort that Neanderthal back to the cave."

Hey, wasn't that our line? Weren't the Neanderthals who wanted women to stay in their traditional roles these same conservatives? Suddenly, we are watching the parade of the flip-floppers, patriarchs with pedicures.

Who can forget James Dobson, who blamed the decline and fall of morality on "working mothers and permissiveness," and told us that real women "are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership." He now says "I believe Sarah Palin is God's answer."

Who can forget Phyllis Schlafly who said the "flight from home is a flight from yourself, from responsibility, from the nature of woman." She now says that "I think a hardworking, well-organized CEO type can handle it very well."

I'd still prefer that our religion remain apart from government. Wasn't that one of the Satanic temptations that Jesus fought off in the desert, to resist the lure to become the government of the world? for coercion is the cardinal idea in government, and what place can coercion have in Christian love?