What has Hillary done to deserve the feminist endorsement besides she is a woman

Martha Burk, a prominent feminist and the most vocal critic of the membership policy of Augusta National, wrote a piece in the Huffington Post, an online newspaper founded by one-time California gubernatorial candidate and journalist Arianna Huffington, a little more than two weeks ago, which I saw only a few days ago. Not surprising Burk and the National Organization for Women (NOW) endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton. Neither of which is surprising. At around the same time as the NOW endorsement, CNN interviewed a feminist who claimed that, if Hillary was not elected, it would be a setback the women's movement for many generations. She also said something to the effect that Hillary is the best qualified woman America has to serve as the first woman president. I suspect the truth is closer to being the opposite. The Democratic Party has plenty of young bright female stars coming to the national scene, like Governors Christine Gregoire of Washington, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln and Senate candidate Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. None of them are nearly as dangerous as the Clintons and all of them are better prepared to serve as President given their wealth of experience.

However, what is interesting is that both Burk and NOW gave an amazingly pathetic reasoning for their endorsement. Frankly they would have been better off saying that they are endorsing women candidates only than what they offered. According to them, Clinton is the only candidate who will protect a woman's right to abortion. Give me a break... please. It is an insult to every socially liberal man in America at the very least and a sign as to how ignorant these activists are about the male population. Their bottom line is that every man in America is a church going religious fanatic of the Christian faith bent on turning every woman into one's property. As some journalists have so famously said time for them to smell the coffee and watch Christiane Amanpour's CNN Special entitled God's Christian Warriors.

For the record, I am a fiscal conservative and social liberal. In short, we should live within our means and adopt the free-will philosophy in life. I believe that the US Supreme Court decision regarding Roe vs Wade was right. The religious right would like the world to believe that life begins at conception and that abortion is in violation of the Ten Commandments. Firstly, could someone prove how a group of cells floating around a woman's womb constitute a human life? Furthermore, as far as I know, abortion, as we know it today, did not exist at the time of Moses. Also I tend to believe that human beings are not born evil, but rather driven towards evil by external circumstances. Who would know better than the mother the circumstances a child is being brought into this world? The ultimate question the religious right refuses to answer is it fair to a child that he or she should be born to suffer? Lastly, in eastern philosophy, human beings are a part of nature and not the ultimate being of nature.

In reading the NOW Political Action Committee support of Clinton's position, all the so-called Clinton accomplishments would not have been possible without the support of men in the Senate. As Feb. 2008, there are less than a dozen women in the Senate and to imply that Clinton's votes were critical or crucial to any of those outcomes are absurd. Many male Democratic Senators like Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Barack Obama and other liberals voiced deep reservation concerning the appointment of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. In pointed fact, Obama called Alito's appointment nothing short of a move to appease the religious right. More importantly, it was Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee, who led the charge to filibuster the nomination of Alito and not Clinton. Bear in mind, she publicly said that she along with Democratic leader Harry Reid were fearful that a filibuster could backfire. In short, she was unprepared to back the filibuster. Also, the Supreme Court that decided Roe vs Wade had no female justices.

Many of her fellow Democratic senators share and support her positions regarding minimum wage, social security, universal healthcare, stem cell research among many others. Sen. Edward Kennedy, the lion of the Democratic Party, has been advocating these positions for years long before Hillary even entered politics. Frankly, NOW's suggestion that Hillary is the only presidential candidate fighting to end violence against women seems to imply that every man in the US House and Senate would embrace in a heartbeat the notion of turning every woman in America into punching bags, if Senator Clinton was not there. This is utterly preposterous.

NOW and Burk have shown themselves for what they really are - political hacks from the suffragette movement from the turn of previous century. Earth to NOW, Earth to Burk: time to go back to the future - year 1890. Parapharsing the quote of former Treasury Secretary, Lloyd Bentson, Senator, you are no Margaret Thatcher. Sen. Bentson addressed his famous words of "Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy" to then Republican Vice Presidential nominee Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice presidential debate. I doubt whether they know the substantive policy differences between her and the other Democratic contenders. Burk and NOW fail to understand, from what I gather, what the Clintons are all about. Bill Clinton was, to some extent, a pragmatic liberal and understood the brilliance of stealing the idea of compromise. Hillary would turn American productivity into a federal felony and forward thinking into a capital crime. She does represent the future of women in politics in terms of aspirations becoming reality. Her presidential legacy, if elected, would be one of fear, fear of putting another woman in the White House, and a major setback for women in American politics for years to come.