Heidi Li's Potpourri

One small blow for justice - an article worth reading

A good read about an important step toward returning the U.S. to the rule of law: Guantanamo inmates no longer "enemy combatants".

The Obama administration is moving swiftly, more swiftly than on the economy or other issues of social justice, to ensure that the United States is at dismantling the legal and rhetorical nonsense that put its treatment of Guantanamo detainees completely outside the ambit of international law, and in some respects, domestic Constitutional law. This is a positive, commendable development. It is not the end of the Bush era of abuse of citizen and non-citizen rights but it is absolutely a step in the right direction.

If the newly formed White Council on Women and Girls were to take as meaningful a step in improving the treatment of women in this country, it would be a major development. Go here to read the executive order creating the Council.

I have refrained from commenting on the creation of the Council on Women, because, like the Department of Justice, or any other office of the Executive Branch, the Council is positioned to make positive changes. It is also positioned to do nothing. Only time will tell.

City Tavern: a new blog for our times

Please pay a visit to City Tavern.

If Iceland can accept a gay woman as head of state, why does that seem so unimaginable for the United States?

Time for another thought experiment (admittedly, one not far removed from recent and present realities). Imagine if the United States were facing an unprecedented financial-social crisis, the makings of which had been brewing for years and the solutions to which were far from obvious. Suppose the mood of the country favored genuine unity. Genuine unity, of the sort that Churchill asked of the British people as they faced years of grueling warfare against Nazi Germany; deep social cooperation to solve deep  problems, not just starry-eyed rhetoric penned by a twenty-seven year old.

Suppose that the U.S. had a well-respected political leader available, one with a history of successfully addressing problems of social welfare, the sort of problems that the economic crisis will generate and exacerbate and which will have to be addressed if the the social - and therefore, economic- fabric of the country are to be restitched.

To this point in our thought experiment it might seeem quite obvious that the U.S. would turn to this leader. But now, include these variables: this leader is 66 years old and looks and acts consistent with that age; this leader is a woman; this leader is openly gay and has listed her domestic partner on official websites since such websites have been in place; this leader is a highly ambitious politician, somebody who sought to develop and cultivate her own political following, although also has shown the ability and willingness to work with and across political dividing lines.

Try to figure out which variable would most weigh against this person as the choice to lead the United States in time of such crisis.

Apparently, none of them are preventing Iceland from coalescing around Johanna Sigardardottir (right) as the Iceland's choice for its next Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, check this out:

The almost equal gender balance of AMs in the Welsh assembly has transformed how politics in Wales is conducted, according to a new report.

Women need an emancipation movement of their own, and no, we do not see it being headed up by Republicans or by Mr. Obama

And, now, because we have actually managed to begin to create a community so that not every one of us must reinvent the wheel in the reaction to each new episode of sexist and misogynistic politicians-with-tin-ears, I can simply refer you to this post from Uppity Woman, in which she neatly peels the layers of hypocrisy emanating from the Republican Party and the Democratic President when it comes to issues of equal pay for equal work.

I will simply chip in these two cents (they'd be about 2.5 cents in men's wages): Although I'm certainly happy to see the Lilly Ledbetter bill signed into law and although I'm all for applauding real displays of leadership when and if President Obama displays them, his signing of this bill is not an occasion of such leadership. He's said nothing about pressing forward on the larger issue of equal pay for equal work and what the government could do about it. He's ignored calls from every quarter to create anything like a Presidential Empowerment of Woman Advisory Board (PEWAB), such as I have mentioned, or a Commission on Women as has been proposed by WomenCount.

If our Secretary of State realizes the justice and economic good sense of full and equal empowerment of women abroad, how come our President cannot wake up to that goal here at home?

Feminists do not horse-trade women's rights to care for their bodies for Republican votes

A week or so into our new Presidential administration, and the strange sensation of living in a universe that only partially intersects that of many people I would formerly have have considered obvious political allies continues. Starting yesterday and on through today I began receiving messages from blogger friends and then from NOW-NY and then Planned Parenthood, that something very strange seemed to be happening with the economic stimulus bill. Apparently President Obama (who neither NOW nor Planned Parenthood can bring themselves to name as part of the problem, although Planned Parenthood does suggest calling the White House) and Congressional Democrats are willing to curry votes from Republicans on the Hill by cutting the Medicaid Family Planning State Option from the stimulus package the Congress is hoping to have ready for presidential signing by mid-Februrary. The Medicaid Family Planning State option is a provision that would provide health care coverage for 2.3 million low-income women, according to Planned Parenthood, by "allow[ing] states to expand their Medicaid family planning services, including cancer screenings and other preventive care, to more women in need, without having to go through the burdensome Medicaid waiver process." Or as the National Women's Law Center puts it, "In a disappointing move, the economic recovery package will not include a provision to make it easier for states to make family planning services more accessible and affordable to the millions of women and families who depend on them. The Medicaid Family Planning State Option would have allowed states to expand Medicaid eligibility for family planning services without having to obtain a federal waiver."  Meanwhile, when I went to look at the January 28 New York Times print edition to for details, I found no mention of this ditching of the Family Planning option until deep into one of the three stories on the stimulus package, mentioned in passing in a vague paragraph on page A16 of the Washington print edition of the Times:

As the House version of the legislation came to the floor on Tuesday, Democrats stripped from it a provision that Republicans had ridiculed as having nothing to do with economic stimulus, one expanding federal Medicaid coverage of family planning services. (The Congressional Budget Officehad estimated that the provision would actually save the government $200 million over five years by reducing pregnancy and postnatal-care expenses.)

Then, as I sat down to compose my thoughts about this latest bit of chicanery over women's bodies, things turned a bit more surreal. Apparently, despite its reported spike in subscriptions, Ms. Magazine has enough leftover editions of its inaugural issue - you know, the one with this patently ridiculous cover, to just today be offering me more "one more chance" to own the cover in poster size.

Please note: no way in hell does a feminist look like a person who is willing to horse-trade funds for family planning benefits under Medicaid to placate Republicans, who will do anything to beat back money for family planning which they are trying as quickly as possible to turn into an epithet. Family planning is a good idea. So is birth control in most people's lives. So, in some cases, is access to safe and legal abortion. Family planning, birth control, access to safe and legal abortions: these are not dirty words. They are real world, practical options - options needed, at least as options, by all women if they are to be truly autonomous actors in our society; and therefore options that must be as available to those whose health insurance is provided by the government as to those whose insurance is provided by private insurers.

Here's a little trick used by many who teach property law across the country. Most first year law students arrive in their Property Law courses with two visions of what property is: either the stuff they just put away in their dorm rooms or a field in the country somewhere. So we law professors often start by telling them that no,that isn't property at all. What property really is, is the set of entitlements and rights any particular person or the state has to control or use the stuff they just put their dorm rooms or the field in the country. In other words, property is a bundle of say-so's over what happens to the bits and pieces in the world. Who gets to say what about what happens to what what bits and pieces makes up the law of property. Today's casebooks tend to leave out the statutes and cases that blatantly assumed that women and black men were bits and pieces that were just as much the objects of debates about particular say-so's - cases about the details of chattel marriage (e.g. since a husband controlled all of his wife's legal rights, could she ever charge him with rape?) and chattel slavery (e.g., since a slave owner controlled absolutely the working conditions of slaves, could a slave owner be charged with murder for  willfully and knowingly depriving slaves of adequate rest or water thereby leading to their deaths?). Property casebooks tend to leave out these cases because it is rightly considered unacceptable to conceive of women and black men as the equivalent of the stuff in the dorm room or the field in the countryside. So, especially when it comes to chattel slavery, current law school curricula focus on the law that removed blacks from the status of chattel and recognized them as persons, not property.

Because there has never been a legal seismic shift in the status of women in this country - nothing comparable to a Civil War leading to an Emancipation Proclamation or the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution or the myriad of statutes and regulations passed to make the guarantees of these Amendments a reality - there is no natural place in law school curricula to address the halting transition our society is making toward giving women full say-so over their own bodies and the opportunity and means to give that say-so tangible effect.  Some family law courses consider the question; some specialized courses in feminist legal studies do. But even the most aspirational of law school curricula still must work from the law as it is, not as we would have it be. And the fact remains that women have not been liberated from the shackles legally imposed on them.

If President Obama and the Democratic Congress were to horse-trade away men's rights to control their health care, I am confident that there would be hue and cry. But this is because the baseline assumption in our society is that men are entitled to control their own bodies.  No man of any color is the property of the state, nor may the state dole out its aid starting from the presumption that the state has more say so over men's bodies then men themselves do.

But since President Obama has decreed "there's not a minute to spare" before he gets the stimulus package he is willing to settle for, apparently he has not a minute to spare to fight for the women's rights and resources to control and care for their bodies.

For those in pain because today is not the day Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes President of the United States

Today, many men and women of good will toward this country and its new president are, nevertheless, heavy-hearted. These are men and women who looked heartily forward to seeing Hillary Rodham Clinton inaugurated president. In an election cycle when winning the Democratic nomination was tantamount to winning the presidency, these men and women worked and rooted hard for Mrs. Clinton during a hotly contested Democratic primary season, one where she won the popular vote and where we can never know for sure who would have won at the Democratic National Convention had announced and promulgated Party procedures been allowed to run their course.

Some of these men and women supported Mrs. Clinton despite of her gender, some because of her gender. For some, gender truly was not part of the equation of their support. Some, like me, started as a firm Clinton supporter for reasons that had nothing to do with Mrs. Clinton's gender and ended up realizing that in order for this country to ever elect a woman president, we will have to work together at the deepest of social and cultural levels - let alone in politics -to eradicate the misogyny and sexism that reared its head as soon as it became clear that there was high likelihood that a woman would become the next president of the United States. Misogyny and sexism did not just pop up out of nowhere, either. It was used deliberately or willfully ignored by alleged liberals from whom we expected so much better.

The pain felt today by many of Mrs. Clinton's supporters is the pain of frustration: frustration at realizing how deeply and pervasively sexism and misogyny infiltrate our lives and our world. It is the pain of impatience: impatience with others' obliviousness to the infiltration. It is the pain of anticipated toil: the toil ahead to put women into 51 percent of the positions in all spheres of public life so that eventually one woman with even half the qualifications of Mrs. Clinton will indeed be elected President of the United States of America.

We can take that pain and turn it totally inward, to the point where it exhausts us. Or we can take that pain and turn it outward, in the form of energy to fuel the changes we demand. As I have listened to Mrs. Clinton herself spend her time in the build up to being confirmed Secretary of State, I have witnessed a leader showing us how to do the latter. I do not know Mrs. Clinton personally, but from what I know of human nature and what I can glean from her odyssey since Denver, surely she has experienced some of the pain so many of her supporters feel today. I am also sure that, like all of us, she will always carry some measure of the pain within her. What makes Mrs. Clinton's leadership so extraordinary is that she exemplifies the power of pushing through the inner pain or going around it or using it to fuel continuing achievements.

If today you are among the hurt and the angry, remember that tomorrow (or the next day or the day on which you are ready), you will have a chance to take that hurt and anger and put it to use for full social justice for all people, including the 51 percent that are women.

Some pleasing surprises found today:

• a post over at Stray Dogs that Amble in: 51 Percent - "The New Women's Suffrage"
• donations from those who have recognized today with a contribution to 51 Percent
• newly discovered site to see: Madam Secretary

Reject trusteeship, forget about "normal politics"

"The basic cry of the [ANC Youth League] did not differ from the ANC's first constitution in 1912. But we were reaffirming and underscoring those original concerns, many of which had gone by the wayside. African nationalism was our battle cry, and our creed was the creation of one nation out of many tribes, the overthrow of white supremacy, and the establishment of truly democratic form of government. Our manifesto stated: "We believe that the national liberation of Africans will be achieved by Africans themselves. ...

The manifesto utterly rejected trusteeship, the idea that the white government somehow had African interests at heart."

Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom, p.99.

Reject trusteeship. This is the smartest phrase I have read in a long time when it comes to a fight to ending supremacy of a minority that works against the interests of a majority. Although Nelson Mandela was writing about the liberation struggle he and his compatriots waged against white supremacy in South Africa, the idea of rejecting trusteeship is going to be critical in the long walk to full autonomy for women (and anybody who is not a straight male) in our country.

Women need to appreciate that their liberation will be achieved by women themselves.

Consider each of three great emancipation/liberation struggles of the twentieth century: the fight for civil rights for blacks in the United States; the effort to end colonial rule and caste-oppression in India; and, most significantly for the post, the fight to bring democracy to South Africa. In every case there came a turning point, when the leaders of these struggles realized that they could no longer operate within a  paradigm of "normal politics". That is they realized that that for true social transformation to occur the emphasis had to be on transcendent politics, a willingness to fight from the outside, not from within.

None of these fights I just mentioned were fights directed toward ending misogyny or sexism ; women participated, but the struggles were not aimed at ending male supremacy; they were directed against other social ills and  led by men with some rather illiberal attitudes toward women. I'm not prepared to condemn these men - e.g. Martin Luther King, Jr., M.K. Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela - for their attitudes toward women. I prefer to learn from their experiences in bringing about major social change.

Mandela in particular is a source of knowledge and inspiration for anybody determined to see a vast social transformation, one in which an oppressed majority comes to the fore. Mandela's own development as a social and political thinker is a lesson in coming to understand true politics. I intend to continue to share his insights as guideposts for those of us who have found 2008-09 a time in which we realize that we cannot entrust the interests of women to preexisting institutions. We are starting almost from scratch.

I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. ...

I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered momements, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned our people. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead I found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.

 Long Walk To Freedom, p. 95.

Do these words resonate with you? If so you are getting ready to move beyond normal politics - for Mandela's "politicization" was in fact a rejection of the politics as usual of his time and place; he rejected tribalism in favor of African unification, he rejected incrementalism in favor of sweeping social reform; he demanded that the people whose oppression he sought to end become empowered as both a means and end of that goal.

Let us demand the same for women. We do not need breadcrumbs from either political party - we need not beg them to protect the already withered and watered down rights to reproductive freedom that are essential to women's autonomy; we have seen the futility of supporting their favored sons in the vain hope that they will avoid employing and highlighting those who degrade and belittle women; we have seen that they will tolerate anything from a straight male regardless of the insult bestowed on women or gay men.

To be continued...

Kagan and Johnsen: two interesting picks for top positions in the Department of Justice

President Elect Obama has announced the appointment of Elena Kagan as Solicitor General and Dawn E. Johnsen as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, two top posts at the Department of Justice. Both have excelled in the legal field, both in academia and government positions. Kagan has considerable administrative experience, having served as a successful dean of a notoriously difficult to manage institution - Harvard Law School.

Elena Kagan not only clerked for Thurgood Marshall, but she follows in his footsteps;  one of the stops in Marshall's distinguished career was as Solicitor General. (For information about the role of the Solicitor General - and a fun read - go here.)

Listen to Johnsen herself on the growth of the imperial presidency under George W. Bush and the appropriate role of the Office of Legal Counsel in ensuring that the president acts within Constitutionally assigned boundaries. Johnsen's opposition to secret law is particularly noteworthy.

Let us hope that Congress quickly confirms both these appointments; Johnsen's confirmation will merit special vigilance by liberals, because members of Congress who favor the repressive tactics of the Bush-Cheney administration will certainly be critical of this very outspoken advocate for civil liberties in a time when all too many people have been willing to see them curtailed.

Liberalism opposes absolutism

In current American discourse, liberal is all too often equated with Democrat and conservative with Republican. But there are relatively illiberal Democrats and relatively liberal Republicans. Liberalism is a brand of thought that long predates the existence of the United States of America and both of its current political parties, each of which has had episodes of illiberalism and contains strands of illiberalism today.

Although liberalism is usually seen as the dominant ideology of the Western democracies, with its roots in Enlightenment thought, there are many variations and hybrids of its doctrines. Nevertheless it is clear what liberalism is opposed to: namely, political absolutism in all its forms, be they monarchist, feudal, military, clerical, or communitarian. In this opposition it attempts to ensure that individuals and groups can resist any authoritarian demands. In practice, this has most commonly meant a split between (on the one hand) a public world and a private world where rights are defined, the most common of which are to private property, and (on the other) the free exercise of religion, speech, and association. [source]

Liberals traditionally resisted absolutism in social and civic life as well as politics directly, believing, along with John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of modern liberalism, in the value of experiments in living.

In opposing absolutism, liberalism places an emphasis on the autonomy of the individual. Autonomy here means the individual's ability for and right to self-direction constrained only by the need to permit similar autonomy for others. Liberalism is concept with a history in political theory and philosophy dating back at least to the Enlightenment. In the current political environment in the United States of America many people have lost track of the defining features of liberalism, and the particular strand of it that is American liberalism. The founders of this country were strongly influenced by European Enlightenment thought, and our Constitution bears that stamp.

It is entirely unsurprising that as liberals many liberals rejected Barack Obama as a Presidential candidate or find his performance as President-elect wanting. From the perspective of a strong liberal, Mr. Obama does not share, or does not share fully enough, liberalism's commitment to the realization of individual autonomy particularly in the face of powerful forces that tend to work against it. Some indications of Mr. Obama's illiberalism:

• His twenty year membership in a church whose pastor endorsed anti-Semites like Louis Farrakhan and preached doctrines favoring the use of terrorist violence against individual civilians.
• His willingness to disenfranchise the individuals who voted in Michigan's and Florida's primaries.
• His vote to provide immunity to companies that aided and abetted government eavesdropping and spying upon individual U.S. citizens.
• His refusal to object to mobocratic measures taken on his behalf that enabled him to claim the Democratic Party nomination (e.g. his silence on the Democratic Party's disregard for its own rules and procedures for selecting a nominee).
• His bent toward creating mechanisms that conflate the political with the civic and the social, particularly when the conflation advances his personal political identity (e.g. house parties to carry his personal movement forward under the banner of mybarackobama; the use of invented seals to collapse preexisting government institutions - e.g., the office of the president - with his own political machinery - e.g., "the office of the president-elect").
• His elevation to the spotlight of a woman-bashing, gay-hating cleric.

Liberalism does not mistake toleration (e.g. social and political freedom for woman-bashing gay hating clerics to practice their religion) for endorsement, tacit or otherwise. Liberalism does not short-circuit procedures meant to protect individual interests and rights in the name of a specific preferred outcome (e.g. finagling pre-established publicly promulgated procedures that, however inconveniently, failed to produce a nominee for the Democratic Party at the end of June).

Liberalism does not applaud the herd mentality.

"The majority, being satisfied with the ways of mankind as they now are (for it is they who make them what they are), cannot comprehend why those ways should not be good enough for everybody; and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with jealousy, as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for mankind." On Liberty, John Stuart Mill (1859), Chapter III, On Individuality as One of the Elements of Wellbeing

Barack Obama Martin Luther King Jr.; and the rest of us

I was asked today if I did not think I should be happy about President-elect Obama's election because he will be our first black president. My questioner was somebody who clearly is happy about President-elect Obama's presidency for precisely this reason. According to him Martin Luther King, Jr. would be similarly pleased.

Furthermore, according to my questioner, it is insulting to Dr. King's memory that I regard Dr. King as a teacher in my own quest to resist peer pressure, mobocracy, and authoritarianism in my own small, nascent efforts to seriously fight for the full civic and social standing of women in America and elsewhere.

In my conversation, I explained that I am extremely happy for those people of color, particularly black Americans, who feel more fully validated as Americans by living in a country led by a black person. (This post - just like the conversation - does not present an occasion to debate who counts as black or a person of color; such distinctions were out of order in the conversation. They would have been insulting to my questioner, who is black and would rightly point out that in most of this country most people have no problem saying who counts as such, despite the complex ways that individuals come to be seen as black or brown or white or whatever. I mean that: please do not use this post as an occasion to debate what it means to be black.) I then explained that beyond this very great happiness, the color of Mr. Obama's skin has nothing to do with whether the prospect of his presidency pleases me or dismays me. That was all that time permitted in this brief interlude of discussion during the day. But I have thought further on the matter.

With regard to Martin Luther King, Jr. I would not presume to surmise how he would have reacted to Mr. Obama. Dr. King was sometimes critical of other black leaders and nothing in his writings suggests that all black people are superior to all white people. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of a type of equality, a society in which the color of one's skin was neither cause for shame or pride and where people, including his own children, were judged by the content of their character. As Dr. King so famously noted this dream is an American dream, not a black dream or a white dream.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

To the extent that Barack Obama's election represents the realization of Dr. King's dream, his election is an awesome, mighty event.

Yet Dr. King was, as we all are, a person of his time. So in this speech, given in 1963, he does not single out women as group separate from men who need to be included in the new age of equality that he envisioned. He refers over and over to men, not to people, but that again was the language of his time. Confusing language, but the language of the time. King knew of hatred between black men and white men, between Jews and Gentiles, and between Protestants and Catholics, knew all too well how this hatred was so often used to justify inegalitarian treatment by one group toward the other. King rejected the hatred that drove such inegalitarianism.

I share with King a delight in the idea of a day when people will be judged by the content of their characters. I dream of a day that may come as more people come to realize that nobody has championed the cause of full civic and social standing for women in the face of hatred against them, a day when people are judged by the content of their character rather than the kind of genitalia they possess.

In 2008, I saw a man stand idly by en route to his winning the White House while his supporters called women who ran against him or on a ticket against him, "ho" and "c*nt". He stood idly by while members of the press intimated that the adult daughter of one his opponents was prostituting herself by campaigning for her mother. That he stood by so idly had nothing to with the color of his skin. Plenty of white men in positions of political power or prestige also stood idly by while this went on. Some women of all colors stood idly by as well.

I have gone on to see the man who won the White House include in his inauguration another man, one who preaches hatred of gay people, the doctrine of wifely submission, and the comparison of the exercise of a woman's Constitutional right to an abortion to an act of Nazism. I have seen him refuse to disassociate himself from a speechwriter who, however stupidly, evidently had a great time pretending to cop a feel of the future Secretary of State - something he would not have done, I suspect, were she a man whose cardboard cutout just happened to be at the party he was attending. Both the preacher and the speechwriter are men, white men, so skin color does not come into the hatred and disrespect of women indicated by either man's words or gestures.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was, as we all are, a person of his time. So I do not presume to know what he would make of a man who stood idly by while women who ran against him or his ticket were exposed to hate speech; or what he would make of the inclusion of a woman-bashing preacher in a Presidential inauguration; or the retention of a sophomorically sexist speechwriter on a President's staff. But I find nothing in King's life or writing that suggests I as a woman am in any way disrespecting him when I take him as a model of a person who staunchly refused to accept arbitrary inegalitarianism and saw it as an obstacle to liberty, particularly liberty as understood in the American tradition. So far, I have not seen from Barack Obama a commitment to the elimination of the arbitrary inegalitarianism in the way men and women, boys and girls, are treated in America or indeed the world today. Unlike Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama has not made the cornerstone of his life or his political career the elimination of arbitrary inegalitarianism of the sort that makes the legitimate pursuit of liberty impossible. So Barack Obama does not provide me with a model for how to fight the fights I think need fighting: the overcoming of hatred of women, the effort to have people see women as people deserving of their full and rightful place in American society and around the world.

Martin Luther King, Jr. does.