Newsgroups: soc.women,talk.politics.misc,bit.listserv.politics
Subject: Insulted By GOP? Join This Crowd (Cgo. Trib.)
Supersedes: <92236.140112U56503@uicvm.uic.edu>
Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Sunday, 23 Aug 1992 14:10:38 CDT
From: Brady Woodward <U56503@uicvm.uic.edu>

Forwarded note:
============================================================================
Chicago Tribune (August 23, 1992)

INSULTED BY GOP? JOIN THIS CROWD.
By Mary Schmich

"Who says the Republican National Convention wasn't about the politics
of inclusion?  Sure it was.  The convention has something for almost
everybody.  For just about everybody, the convention served up an
insult.

"Are you married?  What could YOU know about Family Values?

"Are you gay?  Childless?  A single parent?  What could YOU know
about Family Values?

"Are you a mother who works?  Darlin', your `essential nature',
to borrow a term from Marilyn Quayle, needs a goodo spring cleaning.

"Family Values.  Words to go to war over.

"Tell me I don't understand the economy and I'll say, Gee, you must
have seen my college report card.  Tell me I don't know beans about
foreign policy, and I'll say, Yep, and where is Croatia anyway?

"But, tell me I don't know Family Values, or worse, don't have them,
and I'll slice your political blarney off at the kneecaps.

"Nothing gets us madder than this talk about Family Values because
who doesn't have a family?  You may not have a BMW or a five bedroom
house or even a home, but you probably have a family.  It may be the
once you came from, it may be the one you made, but you've probably
got one and you probably value it more than anything in the world.

"But the Republicans have hijacked the term Family Values and flown
it into the conservative heart of darkness, a traditional-families-
only preserve.  No gays allowed.  No one who believes in the right
to abortion.  Preferably no mothers who work.

"One unmarried Chicago women in her 40s, who four years ago voted for
George Bush, responds this way:  `It's divisive, exclusionary, and
intolerant.  I hate it.  And this time I'm voting for Clinton.'

"Already there is hardly a woman in America who doesn't feel that no
matter what route she has navigated through life, it's wrong, or
perceived as wrong.

"Now here come the Republican leaders to set the women of America
against each, telling us, in images and words, that real women,
women with Family Values, bear children and say home to tend them.
Those who don't are to be pitied or condemned.

"How simple a philosophy that is for Marilyn and Barbara, women
blessed with the deluxe set of choices that money and good genes
confer in the game of life.

"How much more complicated for women who like to work, need to work,
prefer not to marry, are unable to bear children.

"`This pitting of women who are at home with their families against
women who are working, it makes me so angry.  It hurts me,' says
Barbara Williams, a Chicago free lance TV producer who stays home
with her three children three days a week.  `It's kind of like
the two girls who are fighting over a guy and you want to say to them,
`Wait a minute, it's not you.  He's the jerk.''

"Barbara Bush made a disingenuous pass at tolerance in her speech:
`However you define family, that's what we mean by Family Values.'

"Clearly, it is not.  The Republicans said so not only in their speeches
but in their images.

"All those little Bushes crowding at the speakers platform, waving to
America.  Obviously, we were supposed to contrast the Bush family fest
with the unit that masquerades as family for Bill Clinton.

"Poor little Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea.  Not even enough for a
bridge game.

"And Hillary.  `A radical feminist,' hissed Pat Buchanan.  Family
Values are surely in peril when women like Hillary Clinton devote
their lives to crusading for children.

"While I thinks that having seven brothers and sisters has taught me
a few things about family values, I am unmarried and have no
children.  And thus do not have the proper authority to speek on the
subject.

"So I leave the last word to a woman who is fully certified in
Family Values.  She is Margery Frisbie, an Arlington Heights woman
in her sixties who raised eight children.

"`Family Values is a code word for one particular kind of family,'
she says.  `It's subverting the whole idea of the United States
as a place of inclusion.  It's saying let's not be all those
different kinds of people, let's be just one kind of person.  It
breaks my heart.'"

Information in the public interest which does not imply that it
is the opinion of my employer.  Brady Woodward U56503@uicvm
Newsgroups: soc.women