Americans never need to look far to find defenders of murderers or the insane.
Recently, the National Organization for Women (NOW) joined a small group of organizations championing the cause of Houston child-killer Andrea Pia Yates.
The Houston chapter of NOW took advantage of the opportunity to defend the executor of the untimely deaths of Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, and Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months, by organizing the Andrea Pia Yates Support Coalition to help defend the mentally ill mother facing capital murder charges for the drowning deaths of her five children.
What would cause any organization to latch onto Yates as the new poster woman for feminism?
Bereft of the national face of former president, Patricia Ireland NOW is left desperately searching for causes, issues, faces - anything to give the rudderless modern feminist movement a raison d'etre.
The Utah chapter of NOW seized the spotlight by featuring feminist Elizabeth Joseph, one of eight wives of Utah polygamist Alex Joseph. Advocating polygamy as the "ultimate feminist lifestyle," according to her speech given before the Utah NOW chapter, Joseph's expanded definition of a family fit perfectly with NOW's vague interpretation of parenting, which supports same-sex and single-parent households.
NOW is currently focused on urging CNN, burdened by dismal ratings in the cable news wars, to prevent the hiring of conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh as network commentator.
NOW appears willing to drag down fellow members of the liberal establishment as well, among them CNN - dubbed the "Clinton News Network" by some conservatives.
NOW's corrupted feminism is increasingly construed as a pejorative among most American women. With their popularity at an all time low, NOW managed to gather only 1000 members for their recent national conference and election, out of a proclaimed half million contributing members in the United States.
Something is to be said about the lost popularity of a feminist movement that defines fathers as ancillary and unnecessary to child-rearing, holds the term "family" as passé, and boycotts radio personality Dr. Laura Schlessinger, a favorite with the soccer mom set.
Last fall, at the age of 66, Ms. Magazine cofounder and archfeminist Gloria Steinem capitulated to her base instincts and decided to join the legions of "semi-non persons" - Steinem's term for married women. Steinem's marriage signals the fate of militant feminism on the decline and clearly out of the mainstream.
Pity that.
Feminism, especially the version avowed by NOW, is dead.
The underlying goals of feminism were grounded on economic empowerment and opportunity.
Recent female graduates in the work force have little to complain about in a marketplace where their earnings are now close to 98 percent of their male counterparts. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth corrects for factors such as age, education, occupation, and experience to obtain the 98 percent wage correlation which debunks the illusory 75 cents on the male dollar "wage gap" for female earnings trumpeted by NOW.
Having achieved much of this progress in the American marketplace and through the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the modern feminist movement has now had to resort to laying claim to the support of fringe issues.
Rather than addressing critical issues such as domestic violence or the corporate glass ceiling, NOW's new president Kim Gandy identified abortion as the number one concern of women. Distancing themselves from their sisters in the real world, NOW has steadily moved outside the views of mainstream America.
Along with the aging of the Baby Boomer generation, NOW will fade into obsolescence with all the other excesses of the Boomer Generation.
Now that's an untimely demise worth defending.
- Sandeep Rao