If This Is a War on Women, Why Do I Feel Like I'm the Grenade?

The Washington Free Beacon reported today that despite President Obama’s “Republicans are waging a war against women” rhetoric the women on his staff are paid less than the men:

Female employees in the Obama White House make considerably less than their male colleagues, records show. According to the 2011 annual report on White House staff, female employees earned a median annual salary of $60,000, which was about 18 percent less than the median salary for male employees ($71,000). Calculating the median salary for each gender required some assumptions to be made based on the employee names. When unclear, every effort was taken to determine the appropriate gender.

That difference in annual salary is more than enough to pay for Sandra Fluke’s birth control if she were to go to law school three times (using her math)! This is par for the course for President Obama (pun intended) who paid men more than women when he was in the Senate (Senator McCain did pay women equally), as then Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin noted in a speech in October of 2008 (see the7 minute  mark):

  Following that speech from Governor Palin, the Obama campaign attempted to defend his record:

The Palin campaign cited press reports from last month and Senate records to back its claims on Obama’s pay to Senate staffers. The discrepancy, however, appears be that more top level staffers in Obama’s Senate office are men, and therefore have higher pay. The Obama campaign points to the many senior-level female staffers currently employed on the presidential campaign trial.

Nice try, guys, but why are more top level staffers men? Are women not capable of holding top level positions? The White House hasn’t responded yet to the latest news of their pay disparities, but I would imagine their argument is similar for his presidency.

 The hypocrisy is just as much of a problem as the issue itself as the president points fingers at everyone else while he is doing the same or worse himself. This is what he has done by jetting all over the country while condemning Americans for driving SUVs or while he and Mrs. Obama eat junk food while lecturing citizens about the need to eat healthy. This “war on women” is not an issue of policy, but of politics.  It is an election year after all. The politicization of this issue though demeans women, rather than empowers us on multiple levels.  By promoting this war on women in conjunction the discussion of the forced coverage of birth control, liberals belittle the intelligence of women by assuming we vote with our uterus, rather than our brain. Furthermore, it assumes that we don’t seek the personal economic empowerment needed to pay for our own birth control if our employer’s insurance doesn’t cover it.

 The war on women has in reality turned women into grenades in a partisan battle, and it is divisive. In addition to the class warfare that President Obama has waged throughout his presidency, most recently in his absurd claim that President Reagan would support the Buffett rule which would raise taxes on the very wealthy, he has tried to divide on racial lines and other “identity politics” groups.  Such rhetoric dilutes the liberty of the individual. Margaret Thatcher once said, “ [t]here is no such thing [as society]! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”  When people are divided into groups of society, their identity lies in that group and subsequently so does their liberty, or lack thereof, and they are not free to provide for themselves. Businesses are stymied by overbearing regulation which makes them less free to hire people. Unemployed individuals who could be hired by overregulated business don’t have the freedom and resources to provide for their families. Those with jobs have less financial freedom because of the increased cost of consumer products due to that overregulation, bad energy policy, and poor monetary policy that has devalued the dollar. This all happens when a political war is waged in the foreground, while the president’s economic illiteracy is pushed to the background.

 This war on women (or whoever is the identity politics flavor of the month) has turned women into grenades in a partisan battle, and the political war at large waged by our President has taken individual freedom hostage.

Crossposted here and here.