The Sexist Sidelining of Susana Martinez
Democrats and the liberal media are resorting to vitriolic personal attacks on the New Mexico governor
US News
By: Lara Brown
April 17, 2014
Most Democrats pretend that their party does everything it can to promote women. But the truth is that they, like many Republicans, only support some women — those who either agree with them on policies or don’t threaten their preferred candidates. They’ll resort to using violent imagery (e.g., “I want to have sex with [Sarah Palin] on my Barack Obama sheets while my wife reads aloud from the Constitution”) and gender stereotypes (e.g., “It’s going to be hard for Barack to be president. … Hillary’s not going to give up. She’s like Glenn Close in ‘Fatal Attraction‘”) to undermine successful women when it serves their political or partisan interests.
Yesterday, the ultra-liberal magazine Mother Jones published a piece by Andy Kroll that seeks to not only question the credibility of Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, a Republican, but also frame her as being “nasty, juvenile, and vindictive.” Using secretly recorded private conversations and e-mails with advisors and staff, Kroll aims to link Martinez to Sarah Palin and show that she is foul-mouthed and “petty.”
The artwork that accompanied the piece further made clear that this liberal magazine was intent on depicting Martinez as an angry and emotionally-unstable bully who is part of a Palin-run, flame-throwing Republican circus (read: the lunatic tea party fringe who launched the “war on women”).
This kind of criticism hasn’t been leveled against Chicago Mayor (and former White House chief of staff and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman) Rahm Emanuel or his profanity-laced, take-no-prisoners political style. In fact, he’s often lionized by liberals for his metaphorical willingness to “cut your balls off and feed them to you every day.” Rahm is frequently characterized as a strong and effective leader.
Frankly, Kroll’s line of attack is unoriginal. It’s been used against Republicans for a long time (see: Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie). Liberal comedian Bill Maher, well-known for his many sexist comments, even told MSNBC host Chris Matthews this past January that Republicans are “always looking for a bully.”
Still, the part that disturbs me is that this piece and its artwork traffic on the gender stereotypes that are already present in our culture and provide men with more latitude in expressing their anger than women. That’s what makes it sexist, as well as unbelievably disappointing given the Democrats’ rhetoric.
For instance, Kroll, in discussing Martinez’s legal and legislative efforts related to the horrific child abuse case of Brianna Lopez, works to diminish her significant achievements by quoting not someone from child protective services or an advocacy group focused on preventing child abuse, but “a state judge who once worked as a prosecutor under Martinez.” This state judge went on to describe Martinez as a person who “if you ran afoul … you were pushed off into purgatory or oblivion.” And this was one of the major pull-quotes in the article.
So, let me get this right: Martinez made sure that the three people who abused Brianna had long prison sentences and she “lobbied the state Legislature for three years” to pass a law allowing for tougher penalties for child abusers, but she’s the one who’s unreasonable? Shouldn’t we all perhaps be that “vindictive” when it comes to protecting children? And isn’t this a liberal magazine that promotes the notion that “it takes a village” to raise children?
But again, this article’s characterization of Martinez is not about children or liberal values or the good work that she has done as a woman prosecutor (surely that’s an easy profession for women to succeed in). And more to the point, would they have described these achievements the same way had they been accomplished by Pennsylvania’s Democratic Attorney General Kathleen Kane or California’s Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris? Somehow, I doubt it.
This piece was about bringing down a woman who no longer considers herself a Democrat, who happens to be Hispanic, and may well be a threat to the Democratic Party in 2016 among these very constituencies.
And while I can understand Democrats wanting to negatively frame politicians from the opposing party, what frustrates me is that they seemingly have no restraint when it comes to using sexist stereotypes to do it. And this is supposed to be the party of women? Get real. Democrats are no saints in the fight against sexism.