The fight against the War on Women canard appears to have been dumped in Cathy McMorris Rodgers lap in her capacity as a woman and the Chair of the House Republican Conference, who is responsible for messaging. This has an impact on issues beyond women. It has an impact on NATIONAL DEFENSE. What has she done? If you are interested, it is a 10 minute read.
Democrats have been claiming that Republicans have a War On Women for the last generation. They base this claim on two items, the Republican Party’s objection to abortion and the claim that Republicans are soft on enforcing workplace equality resulting in the continuation of women getting paid less than men due to sex discrimination.
The Roe vs Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973 established a right to an abortion, 43 years ago, based on a woman’s right to privacy. That battle has been lost, but the fight continues. The Republican objection to abortion is objection to what a large number of Republicans consider murder, at any stage of a pregnancy, from conception to birth. It is a matter of conscience, due to strongly held religious belief. It is objection to murder, and the fact that it impinges on a woman’s right to murder is exactly the point. My position on abortion is not the Republican Party position. That is another argument, covered on Abortion page of my web site.
The other claim, lack of equality in the workplace, is of long standing, but became a dominant theme of Democrat propaganda in 2010 and has continued since then. Taking an apples & oranges & tomatoes comparison of all men and women and their pay, women make about 79% of what men make. That is the start point of a rational discussion, not the end point. Taking a close look at employment data:
- Men work more hours per week.
- Significant numbers of women spend significant time out of the workforce caring for parents and children, so men have more years on the job, thus more experience
- Men and women are still different. They have different interests, aptitudes, priorities and physical capacities. Women still self select into traditionally female jobs that pay less than traditionally male jobs. Women opt out of the higher paying, dirtier, more physically demanding, more dangerous jobs that typically pay higher wages. Hard rock mining would be an example.
Those gathering and computing and massaging the statistics, “social scientists”, claim that after they “control” for the above factors that would logically result in men having higher pay, the data shows that men still have higher pay, 5% or so, and that the explanation is sex discrimination. If you are a “social science” type, you can believe that the number that finally comes out of this massage means something. If you are a “hard science” type, you know better. Any number that comes out of this kind of subjective massage of data, by fudge factors on three variables, is at best a guess, at worst a guess guided by the preconceptions of the masseuse.
Republicans have been running from the War on Women ever since 2010. It is a PR war. Democrats, and the Press are on one side and the Republicans on the other. To fight the charge, you can’t fight the charge. You take a bank shot at the charge. Hate to say it, but Trump showed the way to do it.
When charged with sexism, being anti-women, or having a War on Women, instead of our limp, reactive response, we should use Trump’s example and attack with: “For a generation now the guiding lights of the Democrat party have been a serial adulterer and abuser of women Bill Clinton and his enabling wife Hilary Clinton. Not only did Hilary enable Bill by tolerating his adultery, she actively sought to discredit the women involved in the adultery and the claims of sexual abuse by her husband Bill Clinton. And you say we have a War on Women?”. And that is all you say, time after time. It won’t work? Is Hilary calling Trump sexist any more? One time is all it took.
The fight against the War on Women charge appears to have been dumped in Cathy McMorris Rodgers lap in her capacity as a woman and the Chair of the House Republican Conference, responsible for “messaging”. What has she done? I have noticed two things:
- The last three replies to the President’s State of the Union Addresses have been by women, a campaign to showcase Republican women as leaders in the party, therefore there can be no Republican War on Women. Cathy gave us a Miss Congeniality speech in 2014, disappointing. Senator Joni Earnst did a little better in 2015. Governor Nikky Haley did pretty well in 2016 with about half devoted to push back and not too much vision pabulum. My taste goes more to red meat on these opportunities. Due to the lightness of their speeches, Cathy and Joni looked like tokens and their presence looked like pandering. Nikky’s speech had sufficient heft to be taken seriously.
- Cathy used the April 12, 2016 “Equal Pay Day” occasion to write an article for Glamour Magazine where she agrees that there is gender discrimination in pay, but makes no attempt to quantify the disparity. The example the article hangs on is a 2015 Woman’s World Cup Soccer player’s complaint over her pay, compared to the 2014 Men’s World cup players. There could be no worse example. The Soccer World cup is a multi national private entertainment enterprise. The players, entertainers, are paid in proportion to the income they generate for the enterprise. Yeah, they are all playing soccer, but the women’s games generated 3% of the advertising income of the men’s game. Given this reality, how could the women be paid the same as the men? Should they be paid the same as the men? If the World Cup was compelled to pay the women the same as the men, their answer would be simple, there would be no women’s World Cup. The World does not care much about women’s soccer, as proven by the add revenue. Cathy’s “3 Ways We Can Actually Close the Wage Gap” would amount to increased supervision of our employers by bureaucrats with an agenda, who must find some wrong doing to justify their existence. It also sounds like the prelude to a boon for trial lawyers, who will venue shop to find judges and juries likely to favor their client, with or without merit to their cases, further clogging our courts and resulting in unjust punitive judgments that will ruin businesses. Just what we need less of.
Does this sound like a Republican solution, to a problem very difficult to quantify and that may not really exist? Or is this just a pander?
NATIONAL DEFENSE IMPLICATIONS
The “War on Women” canard has the Republicans flummoxed and timid. This may be part of the reason that they don’t engage in women related issues that they should jump into with both feet. I am speaking here of the new Defense Department policy that all military jobs be open to women, including Infantry and Special Operations.
With the existing physical and mental toughness standards, there are very few women qualified for Infantry and Special Operations billets, probably a percentage of a percent, three or four in a thousand. Chances are that these three or four in a thousand women are not in the military and if they are, they have no interest in being an Infantryman or Special Operations soldier.
Imagine this woman. To have the strength, particularly upper body strength, to carry current infantry loads and to meet current standards, she is at least 5’7” tall or taller, a hard 150 to 170 pounds, a good athlete. She is going to be beautiful. She probably has got better things to do than spend her time as the only, or one of two or three women in a small unit with a bunch of testosterone crazed guys in their late teens or early 20’s that will spend a good portion of their time trying to figure out how to get in her pants. I remember being a young Marine, and that is all I would have been thinking about.
Reality will rear its head. In order to get a significant number of women in these billets, for social engineering purposes under an Obama or Clinton administration, two things will have to change:
- The physical requirements and training rigor will be dropped substantially
- The warrior macho culture that has led to impressive battlefield success will have to be changed to something quite different.
The time to fight on this issue is now so that this change is stopped dead. There is no fight on this issue coming from Congress. History is not over, so war is not over. The price for this social engineering, when facing a foe who has not similarly hamstrung himself, will be increased deaths and possible defeat. The Republicans in general and Cathy McMorris Rodgers in particular have done nothing to push back against this stupid PC policy that will cost us lives.
Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution: “The Congress shall have the power …. To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of land and naval Forces.” Congress has authority to step into this matter under this provision of the Constitution. They are doing nothing.
LINKS TO ARTICLES USED IN THIS PAGE
Cathy’s April 12, 2016, Equal Pay Day, article in Glamour a 5 or 6 minute read. http://www.glamour.com/story/3-ways-we-can-actually-close-the-wage-gap
A July 2015 article about the merits of the complaints that the Women’s World Cup team was underpaid. 10 minute read. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/10/are-women-soccer-players-close-to-scoring-equal-pay.html
The two articles below appear to use the same statistics and considerations but come to different conclusions.
4 minute read. An article making the case that the gender pay gap is a myth. http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/12/equal-pay-day-revisited-why-the-gender-pay-gap-is-still-a-myth/
10 Minute read “The real reason Women Still Get Paid Less” On Equal Pay Day. An article by Cass Sunstein, professor and former Obama staffer, that on close reading, does not support his premise, but would support the argument that the pay disparity is small and very hard to quantify. He must have had a deadline to meet. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-04-11/the-real-reason-women-still-get-paid-less
2014 Reply to the State of the Union by Cathy McMorris Rodgers
2015 Reply to the State of the Union by Senator Joni Earnst
2016 Reply to the State of the Union by SC Governor Nikki Haley