I replayed the news tape from the Louisiana rally again because I’m hearing impaired and I wanted to make sure that I'd read the words correctly; the CC script can sometimes be inaccurate. That’s when I noticed the little boy wearing a red MAGA hat. He was sitting behind Louisiana senator John Kennedy who was speaking at the podium. Kennedy had just insulted Speaker Pelosi's intelligence, but the boy wasn't laughing like all the men around him. He was asking the young woman next to him a question. She was laughing uproariously as the little boy tried to make sense of what Senator John Kennedy had just said.
Sucks to be that dumb, the young woman mouthed to the boy, still smirking and shaking her “Women for Trump” sign.
As a family life writer and Mom to a teenage son, what’s disturbing to me wasn't the fact that the little boy next to the young woman was holding a Trump 2020 sign, though it was jarring. Or even that the boy was wearing an adult-size MAGA hat, though he’s probably only seven or eight years old. No, what’s most disturbing is that the young woman beside him laughed as a male senator insulted a smart and powerful adult woman. Additionally, Pelosi is not only intelligent, she’s the third highest-ranking government official in the United States. And Speaker Pelosi is doing the job she was elected to do to uphold the integrity of the Constitution. Yet, a young woman in Louisiana found it hilarious that a man was insulting her worth.
What’s additionally tragic about this moment is that the young woman, who’s repeating ‘sucks to be that dumb’ about another woman, doesn’t appear to have any idea that her home state of Louisiana is uniquely special when it comes to women. Not because women lead the way in Louisiana as elected officials in 2019, Louisiana’s actually among the lowest states to elect women for legislative positions, ranking in the bottom 10 according to the Center for American Women in Politics. https://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/women-elective-office-2019). And not because women’s reproductive rights have been safeguarded by the men who've been elected to represent them. This year, in fact, Louisiana’s state senate voted to approve a state constitutional amendment that says that citizens of Louisiana have no constitutional right to abortions.
What the young woman seemingly doesn’t know is that her state is extraordinarily special when it comes to the murder of women. The "Union, Justice, and Confidence" state ranks as the second-highest state in the nation when it comes to the number of women who are annually murdered by men, the Washington D.C. based Violence Policy Center's study revealed. That murder rate has steadily risen for five straight years. https://www.wdsu.com/article/louisiana-ranked-second-in-nation-in-rate-of-women-murdered-by-men/29113489#
I wonder how many of those women were called dumb or stupid by the men who murdered them? And I can’t help but wonder how many young boys have listened as their fathers and elected officials degraded women and their intelligence right in front of them. It would appear that Senator Kennedy would like to downplay this factual statistic about his home state. However, by all indications, in 2020 Louisiana may hold the number one spot in the country for women murdered by men because Senator Kennedy made it perfectly all right to call women dumb, while standing next to the president of the United States who's smiling from ear to ear.
“I don’t mean any disrespect,” he tried to say. Uh huh.
If Senator Kennedy is as “smart” as he suggests, he knew his deliberate insult of Nancy Pelosi would earn him applause from the crowd at the rally because the bully next to him receives applause on a regular basis for insulting women, comparing them to numbers, calling them "bad news," liars, dogs, slobs, fat pigs, and "nasty" if they accuse him of sexual assault or voice their opinion about his behavior based on facts.
Yet, the crowd, including women, laughs and claps for men like this.
Some days, I'm tempted to throw away my hearing aids so I can no longer hear the applause or the laughter when a man insults a woman’s intelligence, qualifications and authority. As a woman, I’d prefer to ignore the behavior, pretend that it never happened because it’s too painful and sickening to acknowledge. But as a mother, I have an impressionable son to raise – and if mothers like me don’t call this shameful behavior out, who will? Melania Trump? Second Lady, Karen Pence? Ivanka? Aren't they also mothers of sons?
It’s highly unlikely that any of the Trump administration women will ever speak up and defend Ambassador Yovanovitch or Speaker Pelosi for doing their jobs. Whether you agree with impeaching Trump or not, when you turn a blind eye or let lies and insults about women fall on deaf ears, you become complicit, and you also become the bully. I doubt even the First Lady, with her “Be Best” initiative, would ever defend an insult like “it sucks to be that dumb” in front of young, impressionable boys at a political rally or anywhere else. And if the First Lady and anyone in the White House does consider this behavior “best"? Well, then, our children, and particularly our daughters, are in for the worst.
Comments