In private, the President of the United States is a wannabe jock who neglects his wife and regards other women as pieces of ass.
Bush To Women: “Drop Dead!”
But Bush’s public record is even more revealing of the politician who would be happy to keep American women perennially barefoot and pregnant. New York Post reporter Marianne Goldstein, a founder of the Citywide Newswomen ’s Caucus, discusses Bush’s family fantasies in this open letter to the President.
Memo to: The President George H.W. Bush
From: American Women
Re: Your Grasp on Reality
Really, George. As election day draws closer and you’re frantically trying to consolidate your supporters, consider this: Women constitute a majority in this country and, in the 1988 election, accounted for 52 percent of the voters. That’s a lot of unhappy campers. We are particularly taken by a statement you made early on in your campaign — “We need a nation closer to the Waltons than the Simpsons,” you quipped, not fully realizing that these two favorite TV families are much closer to 1970 than they are to 1990.
Get real, George.
For all your fussing about preserving “family life” and all this blather about upholding “family values,” you’ve forgotten to take one thing into account — the family that you’re referring to is a thing of the past. The number of single-parent homes headed by women has almost doubled since 1970. Among blacks the number has more than doubled. The number of women in the work force has multiplied almost as significantly. All of these women are not entering the work force because they want to have careers. These women are working because of your damn recession and the fact that one salary can no longer support the average family. And some of these women are working because they are raising families alone and they don’t want to go on welfare.
The structure of society has changed — women of the 1990s have different needs, ones you’ve actively worked against since you took office. We have nothing against your alleged family values, but before you relegate us to the ranks of the apron-wearing, please acquaint yourself with the things we really need — and we’re not talking about higher-wattage microwave ovens or alcohol-free mousse for our hair-dos. Read on.
George, when you first ran for president, you promised to be tough on crime, so how can it be that crimes against women keep escalating? According to the Justice Department, 1991 was a banner year for rapists, with an estimated 207,610 rapes and attempted attacks-up 59 percent from the year before.
According to a study done by the University of New Hampshire, 42 percent of the women murdered in this country every year are killed by a family member, often a husband. In your rush to uphold family values, just remember that plenty of those rapes were cases of incest or husband-wife assault. That happy, patriarchal family you keep clamoring for can be, in many cases, pretty dysfunctional.
Meanwhile, pity the poor women and men who want to plan their families with care. You, George, were once pro-choice, but starting in 1980 — the same year you jumped on the Reagan band-wagon — you found it politically expedient not to be. Barbara, in fact, may be pro-choice, but like any good political wife, she won’t say conclusively one way or the other. And because you’ve chosen politics over personal choice, you’ve put women’s lives on the line — both their physical safety and their emotional and fiscal well-being. You’ve even taken that one step further by adopting an ignorance-is-bliss attitude: It’s not bad enough that poor women can’t afford abortions, or teens birth control — your agencies now actively block them from even getting information about their options.
The abortion “gag rule” is a perfect example of your meddling, condescending attitude toward women. Though the seeds of it were planted during the Reagan administration, it was your Supreme Court that upheld a federal regulation that prevented employees — doctors, nurses, counselors — of federally funded family-planning clinics for low-income women from offering any information or referrals on abortion. According to the guidelines, any woman with the temerity to inquire was supposed to be told that “the project does not consider abortion an appropriate method of family planning.”
After protest from many groups, particularly the American Medical Association, this regulation was later amended. Dr. William Archer, the deputy assistant secretary for population affairs of the Department of Health and Human Services, in a memorandum to soften the original guidelines, declared that doctors — just doctors — could “talk” to patients about abortion, though they could not give referrals or even suggest where they might locate an abortionist.
Before long a federal judge put an injunction on the enforcement of Archer’s guidance memorandum because it could be interpreted as a change in the rule. This allows many clinics, which had decided not to accept any federal funding rather than go along with this folly, to continue to accept government dollars until the dispute is resolved. If the gag rule is upheld, it would affect the 44 million women — young, poor, and/or in the military — who rely on federally funded clinics to get their health care. It would also put us squarely back in the 1920s, when women who provided birth-control information were arrested and charged with breaking obscenity laws.
There are plenty of other ways in which you insult our intelligence, George. Some states, like Pennsylvania, tried to make it mandatory for a woman to get her husband’s permission to have an abortion, as if she were chattel. Other states have adopted rules that force teenage girls to get a parent’s permission before having an abortion.
Did you know, George, that 500 women a day worldwide die from illegal abortions? If abortion was outlawed in this country — a distinct possibility unless congressional legislation is enacted — don’t you think that number would soar? Understand this: Women who have the money to do so will always find a way to get back-alley abortions.
When you screw around with women’s reproductive rights, you’re hurting not only women, but men, too. More than 1.5 million abortions are performed every year, and for every woman who gets pregnant and decides she is unable to have the child, for whatever reason, there is a man who, in many cases, helped make that grueling decision.
Last April almost one million Americans, men and women alike, marched on Washington to let you know that you cannot — and will not — erode this most basic right. All of the men we spoke with were irate that you were being so insensitive to the needs of their wives, girlfriends, sisters, and daughters. Dick Kelley, a grandfather from Rumson, New Jersey, said he went because, “I have two daughters, and I’m glad they had contraception and choice available to them. Now I’ve got two grandsons, and I’m fighting for them to have the same power of choice in their lives. I don’t want them to go back to the Dark Ages… or the dark alleys.”
The United States has the highest level of infant mortality in the industrial world, caused mostly by inadequate prenatal care, which leads to low birth weights. Why aren’t more people crying out against this instead of worrying about the motives of women who don’t want to give birth?
And just what happens to unwanted children? If they’re born to poor, unmarried women, they barely stand a chance. George, you’re even in favor of “Bridefare,” Wisconsin’s experiment to make welfare qualification dependent upon whether or not a woman is married to the child’s father! That’s right, better a baby should starve to death than be born out of wedlock.
Beyond the ethical considerations, the reasons that abortion is still an issue in this country exist because you and your predecessor have been truly negligent in shoring up the social structure around women. Federal and private funding for contraception research has declined to practically nothing. Reality-based sex education (how and why to use a condom, as opposed to swimming-sperm illustrations) is considered taboo and has been heavily and successfully lobbied against by religious groups. In the Bush-Quayle fantasy Familyland, boys and girls don’t have sex until marriage.
Well, here’s the reality: Plenty of kids are having sex way in advance of their wedding nights. A report from the Centers for Disease Control says that the typical high school student has sex by the age of 16, and one in five has had more than four partners. Only 45 percent of these teens are using condoms, leading researchers to fear an explosion of AIDS cases further down the line. What’s more, there are at least 400,000 abortions performed annually on teenagers. We also lead all the major industrialized countries in the rate of teen pregnancies, with an average of 98 per 1,000 teenagers. By contrast, Japan has only 10.5 per 1,000. We also lead the world in abortions on teenagers, with 44.4 per 1 ,000 girls; Norway comes the closest with 21.1 per 1,000. Another statistic: We also lead the world in the number of teenage mothers — 54 per 1,000 girls, whereas Japan has only four per 1,000.
A recent congressional panel called your administration’s response to AIDS “a national disgrace” and concluded that federal efforts have been “under-funded, uncoordinated, and largely unsuccessful” in dealing with the health crisis. One of the weakest areas is prevention, and no wonder: When a federally funded AIDS-awareness campaign was launched last spring, your peons decided to yank a series of ads that dealt specifically with the use of condoms. In its place they released an AIDS-awareness campaign that never even used the word condom or — get this — the word sex.
It gets more absurd: Your minions ordered that a five-page chapter on birth control be removed from a widely distributed health-care manual that is sent to federal employees with children. After much protest, the chapter was finally reinserted.
While you’ve been busy attempting to legislate our sex lives, there’s one area that seems to have gone unattended: contraception. Before Norplant was approved in late 1990, there had not been a new form of birth control made available since the introduction of the pill in the mid-sixties. And even after 20 years of trials, the injectable Depo-Provera — already in use in 90 other countries — is still waiting for F.D.A. approval. Thanks to stringent F.D.A. liability lawsuits, and anti-abortion activists, America has fallen way behind the rest of the world in developing and providing cutting-edge contraception. In fact, just one company, Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation, is currently displaying any willingness to do work on new contraception. {They’re examining the viability of a contraceptive vaccine.)
This is not true in Europe, where research is the norm. In fact, overseas testing on a weekly contraceptive injection for men is proving to be even more effective than the pill. The shots of testosterone enanthate have received some trials here, but if the Depo-Provera scenario is any indication, it’ll take quite a few years before the F.D.A. gives it the thumbs up. In France the RU-486 pill — also known as the “abortion pill” — has been tested on over 100,000 women as an alternative to surgical abortion. In addition, RU-486 has also shown some effectiveness in breast-cancer cases. When the manufacturer, Roussel-Uclaf, was given a chance to test it further here, however, the company declined because anti-abortion groups have threatened to boycott any distributor that sells it.
Promoting safe, cheap, and effective birth-control techniques — coupled with sex education — not only does not undermine your family values, it could help save lots of federal money. According to a 1990 survey by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the publicly financed family-planning services that are used by 5.4 million women here help prevent 1.2 million unintended pregnancies a year. The survey estimated that in 1987, the family-planning services cost taxpayers $412 million-but they’ve saved us $1.8 billion in long-term costs. Your reluctance to restore the money to the project that was taken away during the Reagan era cost us dearly, because one-quarter of all American women who use birth control get it from publicly financed clinics and hospitals.
Now, George, we know of very few men who haven’t taken some pleasure, some comfort, or even an occasional meal from breasts. Yet your government has been very stingy when it comes to the care and, uh, feeding of those mammaries. But we really shouldn’t joke about this, because breast cancer is a very serious issue, one that will directly affect one out of every nine women. As any man with a wife, girlfriend, mom, or daughter will attest, it’s a subject that deserves more money and support than your administration has been willing to give.
“Federal and private funding for contraception research has declined to practically nothing. In the Bush-Quayle fantasy Familyland, boys and girls don’t have sex until marriage.”
For example, a fight has been raging for a long time over extending Medicare coverage to include mammograms, one of the most important diagnostic tools in fighting breast cancer. It was only after tough lobbying from the women in Congress that there was finally an increase in spending on breast-cancer research — up more than $40 million this year to $133 million. This is despite the fact that two former First Ladies, Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan (both Republicans), are breast-cancer survivors. Many others were not as lucky: The disease claimed 44,500 lives in 1990 alone, and is the leading cause of death in women aged 40 to 45. Women see more than $1 billion going to AIDS research — and rightfully so — but then find themselves struggling to get any sort of parity. Women are no longer confident that the federal medical establishment is looking out for their best interests. If the National Cancer Institute has a $2 billion budget, surely more could be devoted to this disease. (And guess what, George — men can get breast cancer, too.)
Any discussion of your failings as a president who cares about women can be neatly summed up in two words: Anita Hill. Was the situation she described unique? On the contrary — the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports a 50 percent increase in reports of sexual harassment since Hill’s testimony. “Unbeknownst to me, my wife’s boss was always making suggestive remarks to her and brushing up against her,” said Steve, a New York City businessman. “She was afraid to tell me. She was afraid to mention it to anyone because she thought she’d get the blame or no one would listen to her. But after watching the hearing, she got angry enough to tell her boss’s boss. She got reassigned to another department and he got a verbal reprimand. It makes me angry that he would show so much disrespect to her, and it explains why she hated her job so much. She’s much happier now, though we both wish his punishment had been much stronger.”
Plenty of husbands, boyfriends, fathers, and pals would like you to know that those little grabs and gropes, those little suggestive remarks, are a direct insult to them, too. What if some guy came up and pawed your daughter? And wouldn’t you feel worse if (a) the guy in question laughed it off and (b) so did everyone else?
You say you are a defender of family values. But women — whether as parties in a traditional nuclear family or as the heads of households — are hurting in the pocketbook, thanks to your head-in-the-sand strategy. Money is power, as you know, George, and under your administration women have been earning as little as ever, usually 71 cents to a man’s dollar.
Tom, a 28-year-old real estate agent from Washington, D.C., knows firsthand how women get the short end of the stick financially. His wife, Sheila, also works in real estate, and, he says, “she’s paid one-third less than the guys doing the same work — and that means every penny that comes out of her check is out of my mortgage bill. A guy hired three days before her — with the same credentials and the same duties — is now her boss. That’s because she works for a good ol’ boy and he thinks she doesn’t need it.” Tom says he’s not sure when they’ll be able to afford to start a family.
The popular notion is that women have made phenomenal strides in breaking into the upper echelon of the professional ranks. The truth is, however, that while 58 percent of women are in the labor force, 46 percent of all female workers have low-paying jobs. Twenty-five percent of women earn just $16,000 a year or less.
The basic problem facing the American working woman — provided she can find a job and has given up all thoughts of bearing children — is establishing a career, not just a job. Like men, when women work hard at something, they want to be rewarded with a raise and a promotion. But often they find it impossible to rise above a certain level. Their career progress is halted by an invisible but detectable barrier that women can look through but can’t break through — hence the phrase glass ceiling.
Is this all our imagination, George? Well, let’s look at how civil service jobs are parceled out. Your office of personnel management — those geniuses who deleted the five pages of sex-education information from the child-rearing hand-book for government workers — reports the following: As of September 1991, men held more than 85 percent of the politically appointed high-ranking government posts, the G.S.-15 posts that have a starting salary of $61,643. For positions below that — with salaries ranging from $10,581 to $40,342 — women were a majority, with 825,614 posts compared to 783,999 men. And it’s a cinch that women make up the bulk of the $10,000-a-year jobs.
Many working women have inadequate health insurance and no guarantees that they can return to their positions if they have to take an unpaid leave — either to have a child or tend to a family crisis. The United States lags far behind the rest of the world in paid maternity leave. Sweden gives women 32 weeks off; the former Soviet Union gave 18 weeks off, as does Canada, Norway, and Denmark. Japan gives 14 weeks off, and the United States gives women an average of zero weeks off. The same holds true for parental leaves for men.
Talk about family. Why George, for years legislators have been trying to pass a law giving workers who are facing a family health crisis — or a new child — 12 weeks unpaid leave. In the most recent attempt, last winter’s bill had strong support in the House and the Senate despite the fact that you, George, vowed to veto it.
“I hope the President understands that we’re not talking about leave to go fishing for a month,” said Congressman Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat. “We are talking about leave to care for families with sick children or spouses, for elderly parents, to comfort loved ones who may be dying.”
Added Congresswoman Marge Roukema, a New Jersey Republican, “The President should understand… that this is a bill for hardworking, tax- paying American families.”
Then there is the dilemma faced by American mothers and fathers every day — what happens to the kids while they’re at work? It wasn’t until the election season was upon us, George, that you seemed to remember that this might be an issue. So last December you arranged to start throwing money — $2.5 billion — at Head Start programs, the same programs that were created during the 1960s, the Johnson era, and decimated in the 1980s, the Reagan era.
This was a sensible thing to do, because if you’re going to break that cycle of “welfare as lifestyle” that you’re always yakking about, you must provide families with a safe, affordable place to leave their tots during the day so that they can go out and get minimum-wage jobs.
Understand one thing, George: Even if you win, even if there are Republican gains in the House and Senate, and even if you manage to keep loading the Supreme Court with conservatives, the fight to protect the rights of women has just begun.
You can wrap yourself and your buddies in the flag all you want, but we know the truth. That flag was meant to envelop us all — male and female, young and old, rich and poor. That, my friend, is the true meaning of democracy.
We try not to get too deeply involved in political issues here — mostly because the at every single editorial meeting the CEO says, “Don’t get too deeply involved in political issues.” It seems fair, however to let you know about the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library without making it sound like we are dismissing the rampant sexism of his era. We do find it fascinating thay many of us some 30 years later are still avidly concerned with these exact same issues. (We have determined that “avidly concerned” does not represent being overly political. We also determined not to directly ask the CEO. So there’s that.) … For the record, we also did not give the President a pig nose on the cover. That was the original editors who apparently had an executive group with different standards.
