To the Editor:
A recent editorial entitled “GOP Candidates Should Attack Sexism, Not Wives,” discussed the social media war between Donald Trump and the SuperPAC Make America Awesome Again.
While we can have a conversation about the merits of attacking the appearance of candidates’ spouses, the piece omitted facts in order to revert to the over-used line “Republicans have betrayed women.” The introduction does state that it was an anti-Trump PAC that posted the GQ cover featuring Melania Trump to encourage voters to support Ted Cruz and that Ted Cruz denied his involvement in the posting of the photo.
However, the distinction ends there.
There is no mention of how it is illegal for candidates to control the actions of SuperPACS. The editorial claims the candidates should have called out the attacks, yet fails to report that Ted Cruz did precisely that.
In a tweet from March 24, Cruz said, “Donald, real men don’t attack women.” The next day on CNN, Cruz spokesperson Alice Stewart stated, “This is a sad state of affairs when we have someone who is running for president who makes derogatory and insulting comments, repeatedly, against women.” The piece omits these in order to get to the real point: The GOP is sexist, and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz exemplify this.
The editorial lists occasions where candidates’ families have been targeted and says that even today Hillary Clinton is called on “to atone for her husband’s alleged sexual impropriety.”
The vast majority of accusations regarding Bill leveled against Hillary do not call for her to take responsibility for his alleged actions. Rather, critics call on her to address statements like those of Juanita Broaddrick. Broaddrick tweeted on Jan. 6, “I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton … raped me and Hillary tried to silence me.” The emphasis is on how Hillary allegedly treated these women, especially following statements of “To every survivor of sexual assault … You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed.”
The piece then shifts back to the feud between Trump and Cruz, once again making no effort to distinguish between Ted Cruz and the anti-Trump PAC. In fact, it claims that Trump and Cruz are the two people capable of ending the attack, even though it has already been shown that it is against the law for a candidate to control content published from a SuperPAC.
The desperate efforts to paint Ted Cruz as sexist become evident in the next paragraph, where the author says his policies of rejecting mandated paid family leave, denying the wage gap and being pro-life prevent him from taking the moral high ground on the treatment of women, never mind that millions of women support these positions.
Claiming that by endorsing these positions, you can no longer take the moral high ground is another example of the identity politics the left claims to hate when it says, “The [presidental] race should be based on policy, not gender politics.”
I agree with this statement. That is why I am a conservative who supports the party that sees me as more than just a gender. I believe it is the left, not the GOP, who is out of touch, as it treats women as a special interest group that needs to be pandered to and acts as though the only things women care about are abortions and taxpayer-funded birth control.
Jordan Drischler
Senior Mechanical Engineering, Swanson School of Engineering
Class of 2016