Several noted feminists have been using their mailing lists to get out the vote for Hillary Clinton. This is my response to them.
Does it not matter to you that Clinton voted for the war against Iraq, that she did not have the judgment that millions upon millions of people throughout the world had to stand against Bush’s obvious deception.
Does it not matter to you that she is now blaming the Iraqis for not stepping up to the plate – meaning not signing over their oil rights to us, does it not matter that in her war-provoking alliance with men in Congress, especially the right wing she voted to have the Iranian Army listed as a terrorist group, a step toward a US attack on Iran? or that she refused to support a ban on cluster bombs after a million of them, made and sent by the US, were dropped by Israel on villages and neighborhoods of Lebanon in 2006?
Does it not matter to you that having turned over 4 million Iraqis – yes mostly women and children into refugees in a war she supported, she stands ready to do that to Iranian women and children?
Does sisterhood have such a thin veneer that all of those Iraqi lives are forgetten in order to have a woman in the White House? Then why not Condoleezza Rice? Is there that much difference between them?
KATHLEEN BARRY is Professor Emerita of Penn State University. A feminist and sociologist, she is the author of Female Sexual Slavery, Prostitution of Sexuality: Global Exploitation of Women, and Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist and is now completing Expendable Lives, a new book on masculinity and war. She can be reached at kathy.barry@comcast.net