OPINION:Barack Obama this week gave us a moment of relief from the pervasive effects of old boys clubs
THERE WAS a boys club, of course, a band of ardent, jockeying disciples. But as his fame grew, the messiah was also surrounded by women and talked about women with great respect.
With his father far away, the golden boy was most influenced by his strong mother and the women in his inner circle.
I’m talking about the real messiah, not Barack Obama, although it applies to both.
Even as Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s Republican governor, signed legislation repealing a law that helped women by making wage discrimination easier to fight, Obama accessorised with women, trying to widen his 18-point gender gap in swing states.
At a women’s forum in the White House on Friday, the president got personal about his mother, grandmother, wife and daughters, noting: “For me, at least, it begins with the women who’ve shaped my life.”
Swaddled by women on stage, he bragged on Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton. “Women are not some monolithic bloc,” he said. “Women are not an interest group. You shouldn’t be treated that way. Women are over half this country and its workforce – not to mention 80 per cent of my household, if you count my mother-in-law – and I always count my mother-in-law.”
He even lamented women’s larger dry-cleaning bills.
It was a blessed moment of anima in a blistering week of GWOW. That’s not a Jersey Shore voluptuary, but the Global War On Women.
Saudi Arabia, which seemed to be inching ahead on women as ultra-Orthodox extremists in Israel fell backward, dropped its snail progress, refusing to sponsor women on its team for the London Olympics after intimating they could compete.
“Female sports activity has not existed, and there is no move thereto in this regard,” Prince Nawaf bin Faisal, the Saudi sports minister and president of the Saudi Olympic Committee, told reporters in Jeddah.
How sad that the US went to war against Saddam in 1991 – with female soldiers along – because he had invaded Kuwait and was threatening Saudi Arabia, and yet Saudi Arabia continued to throw blankets over women, banning gym classes for girls and sports for women, considering them “steps of the devil”, as one religious scholar put it.
I know the International Olympic Committee is another old boys club and that tyrannies are legitimised in the name of sport. But the IOC does have a charter that bans discrimination – and it did bar South Africa from the Games from 1970 to 1991 because of apartheid.
So why not resist the petro- dollars and kick out Saudi Arabia for gender apartheid? It could be part of the continuing penance to be paid for legitimising Hitler by granting him – and Leni Riefenstahl – the 1936 Games.
Augusta National Golf Club, which has kept its men-only policy long after giving up its black- caddies-only rule, should stop emulating the Saudis and award a green jacket and club membership to Virginia Rometty, the new chief of IBM, a Masters sponsor.
You know you’re in trouble when Rick Santorum is urging you to be more progressive on women.
“The thing about Augusta is, it’s not just another golf club,” said David Israel, who was a sports columnist at the Washington Star with me. “It is the most famous private golf club in the world.
“It should be leading and opening doors and minds. Instead, it chooses to venerate a venal and exclusionary past, an idyll of segregation. Revering its lost traditions is like wistfully remembering Lester Maddox’s axe handle.”
Rometty and other female executives should persuade their companies to cut connections with Augusta until equality blossoms like the course’s azaleas.
Finally, in the perverse pantheon of reactionary men in robes, we have God’s Rottweiler, Pope Benedict. He welcomed Easter by sitting on a throne and denouncing the “disobedience” of Catholic priests who want the decaying, ingrown institution that has sheltered so many abusive priests to let in some fresh air and allow female and married priests, as well as Holy Communion for Catholics who have remarried without an annulment.
“It seemed like a bitter statement,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.
“It further erodes, almost tragically, the respect for the papacy because it looks like what you want is institutional conformity rather than obedience to the Gospel.” The message of Jesus, after all, is not about exclusion, but inclusion.
Briggs said most Catholics in the US would never go along with retrogressive dictates of the church, like the one against artificial contraception. “God,” he noted dryly, “only had one son.”
The Rev Alberto Cutie, the handsome Miami priest who defected to become an Episcopal priest when he fell in love and married a woman from his parish, found the pope’s timing ironic.
“They say women can’t be priests because Jesus only called men to be apostles,” he said, “but the women close to Jesus were the first witnesses of the Resurrection.
“When the men were afraid and hidden, the women went to the tomb and said, ‘Jesus is risen!’ If Easter is the most important part of Christianity, the first to proclaim the message were women. Who could make more effective preachers?”
