“Far too many women are denied access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth. All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced,” Hillary Clinton said at the Women in the World Summit on Thursday night. “Rights have to exist in practice, not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
Clinton made it emphatically clear she’s not just talking about, say, the horrific abuse of women by Islamist extremists: “As I have said, and as I believe, the advancement of the full participation of women and girls in every aspect of their societies is the great unfinished business of the 21st century, and not just for women but for everyone… and not just in far away countries but right here in the United States.” She pointed at the very ground she was standing upon, to emphasize the point.
As an aside, that has to be one of the strangest, clunkiest rhetorical devices I’ve ever heard: “As I have said, and as I believe…” Granted, with politicians in general and Clintons in particular, a disclaimer that what they’re saying really is what they believe is often necessary, but there’s no particular reason to believe such a disclaimer when Hillary Clinton delivers it. If she really believed everything she was saying at this Women in the World Summit, why was she happy to rake in millions of dollars from countries that treat women horribly?
Quibbles about odd rhetorical devices aside, this vow to use government force to rewrite religious belief and make it more contraception- and abortion-friendly is deeply offensive, and par for the course with true believers in the Church of the State, as both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are. Clinton has been at it much longer. Back in the Nineties, she was high on the notion of the collectivist State as a spiritual vehicle – the “politics of meaning,” as the catch phrase went.
The difference is that Obama will occasionally use Christian symbolism and Scripture to advance his political agenda, as when he insists that charity can only be properly administered by the State, and Christians are therefore obliged to support high taxes, massive government spending, and regulatory power. Obama is also big on using Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” against Christians, as when he tried to shame them out of criticizing his foreign policy by pontificating about the Crusades.
Clinton, on the other hand, more explicitly views politics as absorbing religion, as in this example. Her Church of the State has made certain decrees concerning mandatory payment for other peoples’ contraceptives and unrestricted abortion; any organized religion that resists must be forcibly re-written to accept these judgments.
Unlike Obama, Hillary isn’t much interested in pretending to be a devout Christian. In this speech, she’s creating a continuum between Taliban savages murdering girls for daring to go to school, and American Christians who don’t want to pay for other peoples’ abortifacient drugs. Genital mutilation, opposition to late-term abortion… it’s all the same to her. Religions must be reprogrammed until they’re fully compatible with the latest version of radical-feminist code.
That’s one of the worst problems with the bizarre cult so much of modern feminism has degenerated into: they ignore vast amounts of real suffering in the most fearsome corners of the world to focus on using their notion of “women’s rights” as a cudgel against domestic political opponents. Clinton does mention some of those global horrors facing women, but mostly because she wants to roll them into an identity-politics scam that mixes a grab bag of collectivist political ideas into the very definition of “womanhood.” If you disagree with anything in that grab bag, you’re “anti-woman.”
Of course, voting for female Democrat candidates – most emphatically including Hillary Rodham Clinton – is an essential component of this politically engineered feminist identity. Asking questions about Hillary’s deleted emails or shady finances occupies a slightly different point on the same continuum as sexual slavery. The worst parts of that continuum lie in parts of the world where weak liberal culture has decided aggressive criticism of the “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases” is politically incorrect, or where the diminished American prestige brought about by the foreign policy of Obama and Clinton has left America with very little influence. Rest assured you will not see the likes of Hillary Clinton rewriting the deep-seated cultural codes of Dearborn mosques. When Boko Haram marched hundreds of girls into slavery, liberal feminism’s response was a Twitter hashtag.
Clinton offers a compelling case, as if more evidence was needed, that her and Obama’s brand of coercive liberalism is utterly incompatible with American ideals of religious freedom. She’s rather directly stating that almighty government leaves very little room for individual conscience. We’re supposed to have a government that serves the people and reflects their values; instead, the Left worships a State powerful enough to change the people, hammering square citizens into round holes of ideology.
We’ll have to rewrite our traditions and religious beliefs to comport with your vision, Mrs. Clinton? I think we’ll have to take a pass on your vision, then. Just in case you actually gain power, is there any chance we can keep our traditions by making generous donations to the Clinton Foundation?
Shortly after her “rewriting religion” remarks, Clinton declared that eliminating the sexual “wage gap” of left-wing mythology would generate zillions of dollars in enhanced national wealth. Since almost all of that “wage gap” is due to women choosing different career paths than men, what she’s actually calling for is frog-marching women into dangerous jobs with long hours and little accommodation for motherhood, requiring degrees in subjects they’d rather not study. This would require vast amounts of coercive force, stamping out the hopes and dreams of girls who prefer to set different courses in life, including full-time motherhood. Tell me who’s declaring “war on women,” again?
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