Lynette Long: Palin Displays Her Feminist Side – From the Washington Post.

AdvancingWomen.com adheres to a strictly non partisan policy, but we do support women and we’d like to see a lot more of them in office and a lot more of them recognizing and talking about positions which will help women.  So we’re always glad to see another excellent post by Lynette Long who is very outspoken on her pro-women positions.

HENDERSON, Nev. — Extolling the virtues of equal pay and opportunity for women, this afternoon GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin framed her White House quest in terms of feminist values.

“I have a question for the women in the audience,” the Alaska governor began her speech here at the Henderson Pavillion, underneath an arching white tent. “Are you willing to break the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America?”

Palin surrounded herself onstage with two higher-profile defectors from Sen. Hillary Clinton’s camp — Lynn Rothschild, a member of the Democratic Platform Committee, and Elaine Lafferty, a former editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine — along with Shelly Mandell, the president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, Linda Klinge, the vice president of Oregon’s NOW chapter and Prameela Bartholomeusz, a small business owner and member of the Democratic National Platform Committee….

And while Palin has spoken repeatedly on the stump about shattering the “glass ceiling” with her candidacy, this afternoon she lashed out at Democratic nominee Barack Obama as a hypocrite who fails to treat women — including Clinton — as equals.

“When the time came to make a decision, Barack Obama couldn’t bring himself to pick the woman who got eighteen million votes in the primary,” Palin said of Obama’s vice presidential pick, comparing it to the discrimination women face in the workplace every day. “The qualifications are there, but for some reason the promotion never comes … You’ve got to ask yourself, why wasn’t Senator Hillary Clinton even vetted by the Obama campaign?”

Palin went on to suggest Obama discriminated against women employees in his own Senate office, as opposed to GOP presidential nominee John McCain.

“There is a difference between what Barack Obama says and what he does,” she declared. “Out on the stump, he talks about things like equal pay for equal work, but according to Senate records, women on his staff get just 83 cents for every dollar that the men get. What is with that? Does he think that the women aren’t working as hard? Does he think they’re 17 percent less productive?”

“I know one senator who does pay women equal pay,” she added, referring to McCain.

Within minutes of Palin’s remarks, Obama senior advisor Anita Dunn issued a statement saying, “Senator Obama has fought for equal pay for an equal day’s work, while Senator McCain has suggested that women don’t get equal pay because they need more education and training. While Senator Obama has proposed a plan to help working women, the McCain-Palin campaign offers just more negative attacks and distortions.”

An Obama aide who asked not to identified said that women on McCain’s staff earn more comparable salaries to men on staff because they occupy more senior, high-paid posts in the Arizona senator’s office, not because Obama discriminates against women.

Palin went on to say, if elected, she would pursue policies such as flexibility in labor laws so women could engage in more telecommuting and would push for a tax code “that doesn’t penalize working families.”

“Working mothers need an advocate, and they will have one when this working mother is working for all of you,” she said, as the crowd cheered.

A former high school basketball player, Palin then launched into a detailed discussion of Title IX, a 1972 law that banned discrimination in any educational program or activity that receives federal financial assistance. The law applies to a broad range of activities, but it has helped ensure high schools and colleges provide equal funding for sports programs and other measures in which men and women participate.

Palin said that she had benefited from Title IX, and for women of her generation, “Over time, that opened more than doors to just the gymnasium. It allowed us to view ourselves, and our futures, in a different way.”

While she credited feminists with the enactment of Title IX — saying, “We owed that opportunity to women, to feminists who came before us” — Palin quickly emphasized that Americans who embraced a different ideology could also push for gender equality. “A belief in equal opportunity is not just the cause of feminists. It’s the creed of our country.”

Toward the end of her remarks Palin seemed to echo the theme that Clinton touted as First Lady: that women across the globe deserved the same rights that American women enjoy, including freedom for sex trafficking and honor killings. “If I am elected, these women will have an advocate and an defender in the forty-seventh vice president of the United States,” she told the audience.

Let’s hope that either candidate who is elected will choose to advocate for and defend women. It’s high time.

For more posts by Lynnette Long, go to Lynette Long

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