The Big Tent: Too Small for Women? - women in the Republican Party

Humanist, Nov, 2000 by Sarah J. McCarthy

The elephant's in the bedroom, throwin' all his weight around.

--Mick Jagger

Despite the fact that the gender gap has widened, one of the first pieces of business at the 2000 Republican National Convention was the ratification of a long-standing GOP principle calling for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion, without exceptions--a policy that would outlaw even those abortions done to save the life of the mother.

Although it claims to be the party of limited government, the GOP reaffirmed its position as a reactionary advocate of intrusive government in the most crucial, private, and personal areas of our lives. If you are a pregnant woman, the party of small government wants to nullify your right to choose, quite literally, whether you shall live or die.

Though women in the 1996 presidential election voted for Clinton over Dole by a margin of 15 percent, and some polls prior to the 2000 presidential election showed a gender gap as wide as 38 percent, Republicans are in denial about the extent of their problem with women, and particularly with younger women and single women. Columnist Camille Paglia explains it this way:

   There is little in the Republican platform that I as a pro-choice feminist
   Democrat can identify with. There is something very wrong with a party that
   has stifled and stunted one of its brightest stars, Gov. Christine' Todd
   Whitman, because of her moderate views on abortion. Whitman, whose
   articulateness and command of the issues far surpass Bush's, should have
   been our first female president.

Pollsters at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette found that in early September, large numbers of educated GOP women in the counties around Philadelphia had defected to Gore. "With that constituency, abortion is hurting Bush," says Kathleen Jamieson, dean of communications at the University of Pennsylvania. The GOP plank to end abortion with no exceptions was discussed at length in the Philadelphia news media during the convention, said Jamieson, and "voters here know just where Bush stands."

If you are a mother with two children and run into life-threatening complications in your pregnancy, the GOP platform declares that only one person in this scenario has the right to live, and it's not you. With the next president likely to appoint three new Supreme Court justices, women could forget their constitutional rights if social conservatives prevail.

How can the GOP tolerate such a hardline policy, an extremist position that's supported by only 16 percent of the U.S. population? Do Republican leaders really believe their own plank that declares pregnant women have fewer rights than an hour-old cell clump, even if that cell cluster is the product of a rape? Is the party of limited government saying that Big Brother should be calling the shots over emergency room gurneys where, presumably, women will be drugged or handcuffed if they refuse to cooperate in their own demise?

Does anyone really believe that any one of these politicians who make the rules for the rest of us would force his or her teenage daughter to die in childbirth or to continue a pregnancy forcibly injected into her by a street thug? The crucial question here, of course, is whether medical decisions should be made by women in conjunction with qualified physicians or by politicians and lobbyists.

The GOP gender problem is not only with the choice issue per se but with the no-compromise political strategy that has systematically driven women out of the party. "The good Republican women have been smoked out," says former GOP State Senator Susan McLane of New Hampshire, who defected from the party's conservative politics in 1996. In February of that year, McLane announced she would vote for Bill Clinton. "I told the Clinton White House I'd be happy to do anything. I'm an old-line Republican who has had enough."

In the August 19, 1996, New Yorker, Sidney Blumenthal wrote:

   Senator Kaye Bailey Hutchison, a party regular with an American
   Conservative Union Lifetime Rating of 92%, had been slated as a Dole
   delegate to the Republican National Convention, but the religious right
   held her accreditation in abeyance because she is reservedly pro-choice.

In Pittsburgh in the 2000 presidential election, despite the gender gap, social conservatives were refusing to deal with pro-choice Elsie Hillman, a Bush cousin and longtime GOP contributor who headed up the campaign here.

"They're not interested in moderate women," explained Dolly Madison McKenna, a moderate who ran for state party chair in Texas. "They're not interested in moderate anybody." McKenna is a businessperson who ran for the GOP nomination for Congress and faced an assault from right-to-life groups supporting her opponent, who charged her with being a "baby-killer." She lost the primary but got the chance to make a statement to the whole party--a remark that became notorious. "The Republican Party," she declared, "is not a church."

For moderate Republicans, such as Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, it was a shock to realize that they had become outcasts. "From our traditional roots, the party is becoming unrecognizable," Snowe said. "These groups on the right are driving the Republican Party. Can we sustain ourselves as a majority party in Congress moving in that direction? I would say not."