Misogyny in 2024? Unbelievable!
Dr. Roger Ray Sept. 22, 2024
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My sincere apologies for using this obviously fake photo of a bikini clad Kamala Harris in an embrace with Jeffry Epstein but, I assure you, it was the least offensive example of how people rushed to try to ruin Kamala Harris’ credibility with sexual innuendo as soon as she became the heir apparent of the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.
I’ll remind our long-term listeners that I have referenced more than once the night of the 2008 presidential election when I publicly wept when Barak Obama won the election. Obama was not an ideal candidate in my mind. He was too inexperienced and, frankly, way too conservative for my tastes, an opinion that was certainly validated in the looming housing crisis when he rushed in to save the banks while throwing vulnerable homeowners under the bus, and by calling for a military surge in Afghanistan rather than an immediate withdrawal of occupation forces.
But I didn’t weep because I was sorry that he won the election, I wept because America had, by popular vote, elected a young black man to the highest office in the country and the most powerful position in the world. I would have loved to have been able to give him the benefit of some pastoral guidance in 2009, but who he was, an intelligent, honorable, trustworthy man, in my opinion, would make him one of the two or three greatest presidents in American history. How much better off would the world have been if he could have had three terms rather than two?
I feel that history validated my concerns about his tendency to favor big corporations over lower income working Americans, but I was terribly wrong in my rather naive interpretation of the meaning of his having won the 2008 Election.
I thought Obama’s win stood on the shoulders of a dawning post-racist American public. I feel kinda stupid about that now, but I was so hopeful.
Maybe it was because many younger voters were eager to help move past racism that Obama won, but younger white men were certainly not united in that hope. The election of Barak Obama sparked a resurgence of racism in America that shocked even this southern boy. I had no idea how deep the racist roots were, not just in the south and not just among old white trailer park dwellers. Obama’s election provoked age-old beliefs in white supremacy, it struck fear in the hearts of people who had never consciously been aware of how much their white privilege meant to them.
I will even go so far as to say that most Americans, prior to Obama’s win, knew that Donald Trump was a pathetic, narcissistic, conman, little more than a carnival barker for America’s Id, but Obama’s popularity, exceeded only by his wife’s popularity, made Donald Trump the standard bearer for everything that is despicable and embarrassing about American culture. Maybe everyone who voted for Trump is not a racist, or a homophobe, or a xenophobe, or an Islamophobe, but those rare exceptions can hardly make us give up the generalization that is demonstrably based in the other 95% of Trump’s supporters.
Let me postulate that without the racist vote, Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 election by the largest margin in American history.
And if it makes you mad to hear me say that, I will further postulate that you are angry because, in your heart, you know that I am right.
While Obama’s election to the office of the president was not the sign of the end of American racism, it was siren that showed us how much work remained to be done. And I implore you not to be naive enough to believe that another decade of funerals will finish the job. It isn’t just retrenched old people who are keeping racism alive, the most frightening proponents of racism are among the young.
Stephen Miller was just 31 years old when he joined the Trump administration. He is the one who thought putting the children of illegal immigrants in dog cages was a good idea. One of the meanest and most dangerous ideologues of the Trump administration is several years younger than some of my favorite shoes.
If it were possible to hold a public vote on a proposal to reinstate African slavery in America, do any of you doubt that this little brown shirt would vote for it? I realize that the art of preaching often rests on plausible exaggeration and hyperbole, but you need to be able to tell the difference between fiction and painful reality orientation. America’s ID is strong and there is no shortage of people of all ages, genders, and even races who are prepared to normalize the most deplorable aspects of our national character.
So, when it became apparent that Kamala Harris was going to be the democratic candidate for president, I wasn’t surprised to see the immediate misogynist backlash. I was disgusted, I was disappointed, but I sure couldn’t be surprised.
Of course, entirely unlike what I was saying earlier about the surprising resurgence of racism after Obama was nominated and then elected, we cannot say that the nomination of Kamala Harris was the fuse that lit a sudden resurgence of misogyny.
It has now been 2 years since the unthinkable happened, when a radically Catholic and Evangelical Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, taking civil rights away from women of child bearing age. Not since the days of slavery have we seen a court that would take away civil rights and literally give control of women’s heathcare to right wing men who have no medical training. Would I be going too far to say, “gave control over women’s bodies to weak men?” Because a strong man doesn’t need to control women; strong men are not threatened by women having civil rights. Strong men want to give women equal rights. It is frightened men, weak men, insecure men who are not certain of their own masculinity who have a need to kill, abuse, or control strong women.
Just yesterday I was in Qatar and walking through the airport and the downtown area of Doha, when I see women covered in black either almost entirely or entirely in 100 degree weather, right down to just having a peep hole in their face coverings, well, I don’t have very charitable feelings about modern Islam. The need to hide women, to disguise and cover up their femininity, that’s not respect for women, is it? Isn’t that fear? Maybe I shouldn’t say things that promote anti-Muslim sentiments, but we have all seen the pictures that show Iranian women in the 70’s and Iranian women now:
Please forgive me if this is too strong, and certainly there is way too much misogyny in Catholicism, Fundamentalism, as well as in Hinduism, Judaism, and Buddhism: but much of Islam looks to me like a religion for really weak men. Men who love women, desire women, but who are terrified of them at the same time.
All organized religions are in desperate need of modernization and moral reforms but Islam, I am afraid, is marching towards extinction by insisting upon marginalizing the women whose genius and industry they so desperately need. I will have more to say about this in a couple of weeks but, I will tell you honestly, it isn’t that I hate Islam, it is that I am sad for people who fall into this absurd fear of women taking their rightful leadership roles in the world.
The Taliban in Afghanistan have just made it illegal for women’s voices to be hear in public…. It is not illegal for Afghan women to sing or to read aloud. This is not faith. This is fear. The Taliban defend their ruling saying that the voice of women is bewitching. I’ll admit that I’ve been bewitched by a woman more than once in my lifetime but I don’t think I can blame women for the fact that I was bewitched . . . I’m pretty sure that’s on me. I don’t think that Muhammad was afraid of women. In fact, for his time and in his world, the Prophet was a liberating force for women, at least for the most part. But Islam in Saudi Arabia, in Iran, in Afghanistan, this is not Muhammad’s faith, this is the irrational fear of weak men.
So Kamala doesn’t get the blame or the credit for the fearful reactions of weak men in the face of her candidacy. It was going on before her name became known to us, but boy, you sure can’t miss it now. I live in Florida, which is not, I am sorry to say, the MENSA Club capitol of the world. I am surrounded by grumpy old Trump supporters, many of whom couldn’t wait to suggest to me that Kamala should be portrayed wearing kneepads because, they insist, she climbed the political ladder by randomly giving out sexual favors to powerful men.
The hypocrisy should be obvious, but I am going to spell it out anyway: I have no idea who Kamala dated before she was married. I have no interest in knowing her intimate history because, whatever it is, it isn’t any of my business just like it isn’t any of yours. The implication that she is morally bankrupt because she was probably not a virgin when she got married to Doug Emhoff when she was 49 years old is nothing short of idiotically pathetic.
There have certainly been times when we expected male politicians to show some sexual discretion and more than one career has gone up in flames when it became publicly known just how rapacious their libidinal appetites had been, but in the era of Donald Trump, sexual infidelities have apparently become more of a badge of honor than a political liability. Trump’s history with child molester, Jeffery Epstein’s, fantasy island, his comments about wishing that he could date his daughter, the disgusting bragging about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood recording, along with rape trials and assault charges…. Drunk frat boys in the 1960’s showed more circumspection than Trump has shown in recent history.
Still, he has the temerity to cast aspersions on Kamala Harris whose is class and character personified compared to Trump. Republicans now seem to be comfortable with the middle-school assumption that sexual conquest is something men brag about and the same sexual encounters are a source of shame for women. None of us should be so primitive that we give such hypocrisy the slightest bit of credibility.
But even progressive talking heads on MSNBC just said, without hesitation or qualification, that when the subject of choosing a VP running mate came up, that Kamala would have to pick a white male, which, in my opinion, and you all know that I am right, that just makes oblation to the residual racism and misogyny of the American voting public. I like Tim Waltz, in fact, I like him a lot, but his selection lost some shine for me just knowing that Kamala was being told not to consider picking a woman, a gay man, or a person of color. As a woman of color, if she is successful in her bid for the presidency, she is breaking through some very tough barriers but the fact that she is doing that should absolutely mean that we have evolved beyond having to “balance” any political ticket by having at least one white straight man on the ballot to legitimate a person who happened not to have used white male privilege to get there.
But let’s be honest, equality of the genders is not the same thing as sameness. Men and women are equally intelligent and talented, but we can make some observations about the factual differences between them. Women tend to be shorter. Men tend to be physically stronger.
It is also true that almost all mass shootings are committed by men. Almost all terrorists are men. Men are much more likely to be criminals, with 13 men in prison for every incarcerated woman. Men committed more than 80% of the violent crimes in the United States. So, sure, there are some obvious differences between men and women, and it is a bit odd that being male is not seen as being more of a liability in elections.
We cannot overstate the importance of the fact that Kamala Harris may break the gender barrier for the highest office in America while simultaneously becoming the first woman of color to be president.
Other nations have elected women heads of state, famously, we remember Indira Gandhi of India, and Golda Meir of Israel, and Isabel Perón of Argentina who came to office in the 1960’s and 70’s. And while many nations have elected women as head of state since then, it is notable that not many have managed to do it twice, with the notable exceptions of Great Britain and Iceland.
Women were not even allowed to apply to go to most medical schools or law schools within my own lifetime but now women make up the majority in both medical school and law school and, in fact, them seem to be excelling beyond their male peers. But while the struggle for equal rights has seen notable successes in recent decades, breaking into politics has been a tough slog. Women make up more than half of our population but in the senate, they hold only a fourth of the seats and women occupy the governor’s office in only 12 states.
So, as a thought exercise, may I ask you if you believe that this nation would have universal healthcare, sensible gun laws, and stronger environmental protections right now if we had a majority of women in the congress and the senate? I know what I believe, but what do you believe? Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert who, by the way, despise each other, do not represent women’s potential for statesmanship but they do represent the kind of women that Republicans seem to like, gun toting, conspiracy theory loving, lunatics who are best known for lewd behavior in public and talking about Jewish space lasers.
Women are not like men. They tend to do better in higher education. They tend to be less violent, more compassionate, and on the whole, they tend to be more kind and more moral. So, is America ready to have a women president. Well, in my opinion, it’s about damn time.
