Rush Limbaugh and Tony Snow: Feminist police

Yesterday when Condoleezza Rice appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to ask for money to fund the escalation in Iraq, Senator Barbara Boxer asked her,

Who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families. And I just want to bring us back to that fact.�

Rice (and the White House) claim Boxer was saying Rice wasn’t personally affected by the war because she’s a single, childless woman:

“I thought it was O.K. to be single,� Ms. Rice said. “I thought it was O.K. to not have children, and I thought you could still make good decisions on behalf of the country if you were single and didn’t have children.�

You’re right, Condi! It is! But if you really think it’s okay not to have or want children, you shouldn’t be working for an administration that wants to deny women at home and abroad access to family planning. Of course conservatives, who have been enacting anti-woman policies for years, are quick to seize the opportunity to call Boxer an anti-feminist:

“I don’t know if she was intentionally tacky,� Mr. Snow said in an interview on Fox News. “It’s a great leap backward for feminism.�

Thanks for the head’s up! Glad he’s letting us know who’s good for feminism and who isn’t. After all, he and his bosses have been nothing short of fanatical in their pursuit of women’s rights, and we should value their opinion on this matter. Rush Limbaugh managed to have an even crazier interpretation, deftly making this a nuanced discussion of race and gender:

“Here you have a rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch this, an African-American woman, right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries here,â€? Mr. Limbaugh said on his radio show.

Ha. Last time I checked, Condi Rice was a pretty rich chick herself. Boxer’s comments had nothing to do with race. And when did conservatives like Limbaugh become such ardent defenders of Martin Luther King Day?
They’re doing what they always accuse liberals of: making an unrelated story all about gender and race. Thing is, when we get upset about this stuff, the quotes are offensive — just ask Tony “Tar Baby” Snow. (See for yourself how Fox News is spinning Boxer’s comments. Completely ridiculous.)
Isn’t it obvious that conservatives are using a nonexistant confrontation between childless women and mothers to distract from the serious opposition Rice faced at the hearing — and from Bush’s flailing failings in Iraq?
As your typical defender of women who choose to be childless, I diligently searched Boxer’s comments for something that might piss me off. But I couldn’t see it. Maybe she could have said in a more straightforward manner, “Neither of us have immediate family members in Iraq,” without mentioning her kids. But really Boxer was just making a classic anti-war argument — one that chickenhawks have a hard time responding to — that the people who make the wars are totally out of touch with the people who pay the price.
I resent the fact that conservatives are playing feminist police as a way to distract us from the fact that they’ve killed a whole lot of people in Iraq and want the authorization to kill even more.