Sunday, January 27, 2008

A woman for president?

At least three times in the last week I have hard people say in public that they don't think a woman should be president -- twice on talk radio and once on talk TV. One was a yahoo who apparently just didn't like women; a second thought that putting women into positions of authority over men was a sin; a third said a woman would leave us in a position of weakness in the Mideast.

Gloria Steinem took a lot of heat for this op-ed piece. All the same, I can't imagine anybody saying publicly that a black man should not be president. People may think that, and they may vote that way, but saying it out loud has been pretty much out of the public picture since Al Campanis.

Publicly expressed racism is intolerable. Misogyny? Not so much.

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