This election is offering voters what seems like a chance to down either a glass of bleach or a glass of Drano. If you want to remain healthy, neither should be consumed. However, many voters have become obsessed with the idea that rejecting one means choosing the other. As a voter actively rejecting both options, let me know how that works.
Since I have a female perspective, I cannot speak as to why men are choosing Donald Trump. Yes, there is a large portion of voters who will choose him only because he is not Hillary. However, there is also a sizable amount voting for him because they like him, what he stands for, and who he is as a person. I’m sure some men view him as a macho male, saying anything he wants and doing anything he wants with little to no repercussions, as a gorgeous ex-model stands by his side. I’m guessing that freedom is a dream scenario for some dudes.
For those female voters who actively support, and not just endure, Donald Trump, I have often wondered: have you no self-respect?
I’m not one of those 2nd and 3rd wave feminist females, seeing misogyny around every corner and in everything. Having doors opened for me is not offensive, and compliments are not oppression. But, let’s get real, there isn’t a complete lack of sexism, even within the holy GOP. Rude, and downright criminal, behavior is still a thing. Some men have serious insecurities, and enjoy routinely dominating women with words, or much worse, with their own bodies.
Donald Trump is an example of this specific sickness.
One of the most powerful pieces I’ve read this election cycle came out on Friday in the opinion column of The Washington Post. In it, best-selling author Nancy French, wife of David French (whose own piece about terror at the hands of the alt-right is discussed here by Patterico), shares her perspective as a conservative and sexual abuse survivor. She had been abused by her own preacher as a girl, and had much to say about the direction the GOP has taken in 2016.
Sexual abuse robbed me of my ability to feel the right things at the right times. It awakened me to things I shouldn’t have known. My home — which should’ve been a place of comfort — became a place of abuse.
The first female president possibly will have ridden the coattails of her husband (who has been accused of rape) to the Oval Office; the GOP nominee likes younger women, used to hang out with a known pedophile and bragged on video about doing to women what the preacher did to me so many years ago.
It’s hard to describe the effect 2016 has had on sexual abuse survivors. I believed the men in my party when they shrugged off the constant liberal accusations of being anti-woman.
But Pope John Paul II’s words ring true: “Christ … assigns the dignity of every woman as a task to every man.” If that’s right, the men in my party, in my church, in my life have failed; they ask me to participate in overlooking the offense.
Republicans who have lamented the Clintonian proclivity to malign women are now defending the same activities because … well, they idolize power or their own strategic cleverness. Trump, like the preacher, is too important to abandon. We have become what we said we despised.
My party — which should’ve been a place of a certain set of values — now shelters an abuser. I’m thinking of this when the GOP presses against me and asks me to close my eyes just one more time.
Her sharp, necessary piece should shake all of us to the core. I applaud Nancy French’s honesty as a woman, conservative, and survivor of sexual crime. She embodies self-respect, something which shouldn’t be cast aside in a race to beat someone with the last name Clinton.
It’s difficult to understand how anyone can now support the GOP, a party which currently “shelters an abuser”. The males who don’t bat an eye are accomplices and not men. The females who aren’t bothered by it, or who even shrug it off, absolutely lack self-respect. Stockholm syndrome, anyone?
When there is corruption and moral bankruptcy within your own house, you must call it out. If complacency, unwillingness to change, and ridicule remain; then you move on. Period. It matters little who is on the other side of the political aisle if we have “traitors in our midst”.
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” – C.S. Lewis
Men should take note and not support a predator who is only sorry his words were caught, but not sorry for his actions. And women? Act like you have a bit of self-worth, and don’t support the abuser.
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