I don’t know Hillary Clinton personally, but she doesn’t seem like a really great person. I know for sure she has spent a lot of time lying to the American people, insulting Americans who don’t vote Democrat and degrading and destroying the lives of women who have come forward to accuse her husband of abuse and harassment.

There is a long, long laundry list of reasons not to respect a woman like Hillary Clinton and I subscribe to most of them.

However, I draw the line at insulting the woman because of how she looks or the clothes she wears and it baffles me why any conservative or otherwise thinks this is ever okay.

I feel compelled to bring this up after a picture of Mrs.Clinton at an event recently surfaced. After being relentlessly mocked for years about her pant suits, Clinton chose an outfit that has been (not inaccurately) described as a “sack” dress. Her newest looked spawned a litany of insults and ridicule.

Of course, it is not the first time…nor will it be the last. Over the years she’s been shamed for her hair, her suits, her aging body. People continue to speculate about her health, claiming that her outfits might be hiding a back brace or some other medical device. While this may have been relevant while she was asking for our votes, it should absolutely no longer be an issue. Another person’s private health issues should not be anyone else’s  business unless that person chooses to make it so.

I posted a little rant on Facebook about this subject and some people agreed with me while others said her vile demeanor and history make her fair game for such mocking. I couldn’t disagree more, and here’s why.

NEW RULES

The new rules about public discourse we’ve seen pop up have been brutal and unforgiving. They’ve trapped deserving subjects and decent people alike. They can be varied and vague but one of the primary rules is that if a given person is “evil” in our estimation, they are no longer human – once that person is dehumanized we can feel free to say pretty much whatever we want about her.

We might be okay with those rules when looking at a woman like Clinton, but we’re not as okay with them when we see appleholes on the internet and in real life applying those rules to women like Sarah Sanders, who has been cruelly disparaged by the left on a regular basis for how she looks and the clothes she wears.

By now you might be saying, “But Kira, Sarah Sanders is actually a decent person and Hillary is a reprobate! That’s the difference!”…but you must understand that to the liberal left, Sanders is exactly the type of reprobate many of us see Hillary as. To them, she works for LITERALLY HITLER. She deserves to be insulted and scorned.

Feminists on the left advocate for respecting women and their right to make choices for themselves, but it’s okay for Whoopi Goldberg to spit at Jeanine Pirro and scream at her because Pirro supports LITERALLY HITLER and thus is a disgusting sub-human who deserves their scorn. All bets are off. She’s free to be treated with whatever vitriol is coming her way.

What I’m getting at is that all of us think we’re right. We all believe our estimation of a person’s character is the best estimation. We all have perfectly good reasons for hating so and so or such and such. Likewise, there will always be someone with their own perfectly good reasons for hating us and dehumanizing us.

We’ve seen how ugly this policy can get. We’ve seen it genuinely hurt people and destroy careers. We’ve seen it be applied rashly and unjustly.

I hate it when I see an educated, accomplished woman and mother like Sarah Sanders cruelly insulted about her physical appearance. It’s one thing to mock a woman for her politics, it’s quite another to shame her about something which she has very little control over. It needs to stop.

BUT HOW?

In this case, the same principles we apply to the apparatus of liberty we must apply to our body-shaming proclivities. When it comes to government, the most sound policy is to avoid creating rules and policies that could come back to bite you in the butt when your party is no longer in power. The Democrats are currently learning this the hard way after they invoked the “nuclear option” to eliminate filibusters.

If we don’t think a woman like Sarah Sanders should be mocked and shamed for her looks then we must resist treating all women public figures that way. It’s not a new idea.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

It is the ultimate definition of hypocrisy if we become angry and defensive at insults lobbed against the physical traits of conservative women while gleefully lobbing the same insults at women like Hillary Clinton.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Hillary Clinton, but it should never be okay to mock a 70-year-old woman for what she chooses to wear.