Wait - you think Gloria Steinem wrote this at the prompting of Hillary or Bill Clinton?

But I discount Congressmen as national-level or State-level politicians in this context. Not because of a lack of influence at the State or national level, but because we are talking about electability. Only a relatively small group of people vote for a Congressman vs. vote for a Senator or a President. Attributes such as atheism or homosexuality may not matter in an urban district of more liberal cities (such as Boston), but I think it will be a while before either an openly gay or an openly atheist politician will be able to be elected by an entire State or the U. S. as a whole.

are there any openly gay Senators or Governors?

Barney. Frank.

OK, not a “Senator” or “Governor,” but he is on the “national level,” and has been since 1981. He’s also a Committee Chair.

Dude! We did the same cartoon! That’s awesome!

LOL! Well, I guess it was a pretty obvious cartoon — but your Gloria was better drawn, needless to say. :-)

Maia, the condemnation of the racism implicit in this op-ed in the feminist blogosphere has been swift, but it hasn’t quite been universal.

As for Steinem… she talks a good game about sexism, unsurprisingly, but she’s completely tone-deaf about race issues, which makes her totally unqualified and inept at trying to compare the two. I like how she does some hand-waving about how it’s not a competition, then basically spouts “racism is taken more seriously than sexism, here are all these sexist problems… I apparently know hardly anything about racism, but does it cause these problems? I don’t think so!”

I think the topic of how racism and sexism differ IS worth talking about and it’s a shame that Steinem did such a ludicrously bad job of it. It’s noteworthy that these two statements would be considered light-years apart in polite society:

“I don’t know about voting for Clinton. I’m just not sure a woman president is a good idea… what if she acted like a woman in office?”

“I don’t know about voting for Obama. I’m just not sure a black president is a good idea… what if he acted like a black guy in office?”

Analyzing that discrepancy could reveal all sorts of interesting things about how race and gender are perceived and talked about in society. Because there are undoubtedly big differences that you could discuss in a way that doesn’t make women of color vanish, or whine about who has it harder. But she had to go and declare that this means you should vote for Clinton, that Clinton has a harder time, and that racism is taken more seriously. Way to oversimplify an issue into oblivion.

Depends. Out and gay, none. In the closet, ok, as long as they ran as Republicans on an anti-gay platform. Not that I’m thinking of any examples in particular.

But, again, an exception proving the rule.

Zero. As would their chances have been if they were atheist. In fact, I think the U.S. will elect a gay man as President before it’ll elect an atheist. Certainly there are openly gay politicians at various levels, although none at a State- or nation-wide level that I know of (are there any openly gay Senators or Governors?), but I have no knowledge of any openly atheist politicians at any level. I imagine one could get elected in some constituencies in the country, but it would be harder.

What’s Steinem’s problem, anyway? Is she trying to put down Obama to help support Clinton? What’s this all about?

Well, more specifically, we did different cartoons with slightly different takes on the same issue. But we had the same take on Steinem’s oneupmanship of suffering argument.

Good one, Charles: I too thought “Carol Mosley Braun, anyone?” I will give Steinem credit for recognizing that had Obama been a black woman, his chances would have been greatly diminished; but Steinem seems to think that the “woman” part is more significant here than the “black” part, utterly dismissing the numerous privileges Hillary Clinton has had access to by virtue of her race and class. Clinton, Obama and Mosley Braun are all exceptions to the main rule that funding and recruitment of politicians at both the local and national levels focuses heavily on white men.

Oh, and: Had either Obama or Clinton been gay, then what would their chances have been?

Yet what ultimately unnerves me is that Steinem’s column plays into a larger trend by media elites to pit white women against black men as a war of oppressed classes - the point of my cartoon.

That woman’s name is Carol Mosley-Braun, a lawyer with a child (Obama has two children) who served 8 years in the Illinois legislature (exactly the same as Obama) before being elected to the US senate for a single term (like Obama), and who then ran (with the additional experience of 2 years as ambassador to New Zealand and 3 years as a college professor) a respectable if unsuccessful presidential campaign (as respectable as Biden or Dodd ran this year).

I don’t think Mosley-Braun’s experience proves anything much about race or gender, but it is a bit funny and a bit embarrassing that Steinem wrote as though Mosley-Braun didn’t exist.

Only tangentially related, I thought this diary on dailykos about the ways in which Obama is required to be a deracinated candidate very interesting. It seems to me that it relates to what Steinem was writing about in the sense that Clinton is premitted to talk about gender in a way that Obama is not permitted to talk about race, which is an interesting flip side to the degree to which Clinton is openly mistreated by the press in explicitly sexist ways to a degree that Obama is not openly mistreated by the press in explicitly racist ways.