What Mitt Romney Really Thinks Of Women

By Brian Dann

 

“We're going to have to have employers in the new economy…that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they're going to be anxious to hire women.”
 
Those were the words of Mitt Romney in the second presidential debate responding to a question about equal pay for women.  This is a sentence he said on national television with an audience of over 55 million people, and felt it was a perfectly OK statement to make.  Just in case you are reading this and saying to yourself, “Yea, what’s your point, so he wants a lot of women to be hired.”  No – that is not what he is saying.  He is saying that he is going to create so many jobs that employers will actually want to hire women! They will resort to hiring women.  There will not be enough men to go around so they will have to hire women.  Boy oh boy women, aren’t you lucky to have this man on your side? So in Mitt Romney’s world, which apparently is a lot like the show Mad Men, women get there fair shot only if there aren’t enough men to fill the jobs.  This says nothing about if they will be paid the same, just that they will get there shot since there won’t be enough men to fill all the slots.
 
In this same exchange Governor Romney also said, and I quote, “I recognized that if you're going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can't be here until 7 or 8 o'clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o'clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let's have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.” 
 
So now you may be saying to yourself, “Uh, what’s wrong with this? Romney’s being sensitive to the special needs of women in the workplace and the demands from their home life.” Let me enlighten Governor Romney and the rest of the GOP to the realities of the year 2012.  It is no longer the sole responsibility of women in the home to cook, clean, and take care of the children.  It is no longer the sole responsibility of women to have a hot meal on the table for when their husbands come home from a hard day at work.  Sometimes it is the husband who has these responsibilities and sometimes they are shared.  In a world of equality of the sexes these are not needs that should be reserved only for women but for both men and women, unless those needs are purely biological.  It is up to individual families to decide who does what roles in the home, which person makes dinner, who cleans the house, and if these roles will be shared or be done by one person.  The flexibility that Mr. Romney says he is so sensitive to should be afforded to both men and women so that every family has the opportunity to be able to balance work and family in a way that they see fit, not because it is a women’s place to cook, clean, take care of the kids, and blow there husband.  In addition the piece that Governor Romney also seems not to be sensitive to is that some families consist of a husband and a husband, so in Governor Romney’s world one can only assume that neither spouse, in this case, would be afforded the flexibility to balance work and family since he seems to think that this balance is only reserved for women.  Of course there is also the case of single fathers, are they afforded the sensitivity and flexibility that Governor Romney would afford to single mothers?  Not according to this statement.  According to this statement women must be treated differently than men because they have a certain place in the family and society that apparently the Governor learned from Leave It To Beaver.   Governor Romney goes on to enforce his position on this by stating that he wants employers to create “a flexible work schedule that gives women opportunities that they would otherwise not be able to afford.”  In 2012 this is not a women issue it is a human issue.  Families and roles have changed and these issues that the governor spoke about need to available to all workers regardless of their sex or sexual orientation.
 
It is clear that Governor Romney sees women differently than he does men.  He has made it clear that he does not support the Lilly Ledbetter act that guarantees equal pay for men and women, and if he does not support this he will not support future legislation.  It is clear that Governor Romney will do everything he can to defund Planned Parenthood making it harder for women to get the essential health care that low income women and women with no insurance desperately need.  It is clear that Governor Romney will put judges on the Supreme Court that will be committed to removing a women’s right to choose. It is clear that when Governor Romney repeals ObamaCare, as he promised to do, women will once again become a pre-existing condition and will again pay more for health insurance then men do.
   
Since I do not have an editor to answer to, and I do not have to be politically correct, I can say this without the fear of anyone censoring me.  Mitt Romney is an insensitive, pompous, chauvinistic, elitist asshole, who sees others as being below him, who will never see women as his equal, who cannot be trusted to maintain his position on any subject because at any moment he may changes his position to suit the situation.  But what I do know is this.  When Governor Romney is not on script, his true colors come out and his views on equality, women, and their role in society become crystal clear as they did in the second debate.
 
“We're going to have to have employers in the new economy…that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they're going to be anxious to hire women.”
 
I guess otherwise, they would only hire men?