Columns

Pundits hitting below our intellect

By Sue Carlton
Published January 22, 2007

Some pundits, and even the White House, are telling me that as a professional woman without children, I have just been gravely insulted.

I must be missing something. In more ways than one.

Here's how we childless types supposedly got trashed. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was before a Senate committee for a hearing on Iraq. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who has butted heads with Rice before, was making a point about who has what to lose in the war.

"Who pays the price?" Boxer asked Rice. "I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. (Here comes the sound bite:) You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."

Rice is not married, has no children. The topic may have been war, but the spin was antifeminism.

White House spokesman Tony Snow used words like "tacky" and "outrageous." Rush Limbaugh talked about hitting "below the ovaries." Some columnists and bloggers howled for an apology.

"Gee, I thought single women had come further than that," Rice later said.

Oh, snap! This is a great way to deflect an insult, real or overblown: you imply that someone's words were sexist, racist, antifeminist, whatever. Gov. Charlie Crist did this masterfully in his campaign when a Democratic spokesman called him "the Super Tan Man." Crist referred to his Greek heritage and lamented, "I thought we were at the place in this country where the color of somebody's skin or the complexion that they have is not something that's an issue of political debate anymore." In Crist's case, nicely handled.

But I did not sense the senator was subliminally saying, "Condi, sweetie. You're well over 35 and have not reproduced. You're less than a real woman and your opinions just don't count." But some reacted as if Boxer suggested Rice should be home changing poopy diapers. Never mind the senator made a point of saying she herself couldn't know the personal sacrifice of having a child in a war, either.

By the way, what exactly is the criticism implied in saying someone is childless? Is this supposed to be a defect, an embarrassment, a mistake? Because as a member of the club, I'd like to know what ugly thing is being said.

Yes, the world occasionally implies that even if you're a hard worker, good neighbor, steady taxpayer and faithful recycler of plastics, you are less than whole without kids. But this is not where Boxer was going.

Regardless of how you feel about the job Rice is doing, you can't look at her political career and think, oh, how unfulfilled she must be.

Boxer's critics might have more room to argue with the idea that only military families know the cost of war. We're all paying a price.

But don't parents whose children are fighting halfway around the world know something more keenly than the rest of us? How could they not?

What I heard from Boxer was an observation on who makes the big decisions about this war and who lives and dies with the repercussions - and the great divide between the two.

To divert from that with a sideshow, and from the larger point of where this war is going - now there's your insult.

[Last modified January 22, 2007, 00:34:37]