THE VAGINA VOTE

I have a son. I don’t have a daughter. I have a brother. I don’t have a sister. I don’t have a granddaughter. I have a couple of nephews, but not even one niece. So when it comes to the gender of the next president, if it’s the 45th man without a woman ever being nominated or elected, it really won’t affect me.

I don’t have a horse in the race, a dog in the hunt, skin in the game, or any other cliché you want to use.

But I’m a student of human nature and I have a great interest in how people think and why they behave the way they do, so I consider female Bernie Sanders supporters to be somewhat fascinating.

Let’s look at the age differential of liberal women voters. The young women, for the most part, are in Bernie’s corner, while the older women support Hillary. Perhaps the reason for this is that the geriatric group realizes it may not live long enough to see a female president of this land of the free and home of the brave. Hillary is their last shot at the brass ring.

Millennial women (ages 18-34) seem to feel they have all the time in the world, and they’re willing to wait for a less flawed candidate than Mrs. Clinton. Forty years from now, when there still hasn’t been a female in the Oval Office, they might change their tune.

Women are divided by their age groups. One demographic kicks the other to the curb. It was always baffling when older women professed to vote Republican, knowing that the GOP has an obsession with overturning Roe v. Wade and ending a woman’s right to choose an abortion for an unwanted pregnancy. Not only that, it wants to eliminate all birth control and replace sex education with abstinence education, something that has worked extremely well for Bristol Palin (insert smiley face here).

Perhaps older female Republicans felt that because their child-bearing years were behind them they didn’t have to contend with abortion or birth control, so the younger generation could fend for itself.

I heard a millennial woman on a radio talk show declare she was an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter. When asked who she would vote for if he didn’t get the nomination she said, “Rubio!”

Is she out of her mind? If this young lady gets impregnated as the result of a rape, Marco Rubio wants her to carry her rapist’s child to term. He doesn’t believe there should be exceptions for rape or incest.

About 10 years ago I was a member of the Board of Directors for the Worcester chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). One summer Sunday afternoon I was at a cookout and the ACLU came up in conversation. There was a 40-ish black man standing near the grill, and he piped up that he didn’t like my organization.

“How can you not like the ACLU?” I asked. “We’re fighting so that people like you don’t get stopped by the police for ‘Driving While Black.’”

He said, “Well, I’d want to know what my black brothers were doing to make them get stopped by the police.”

I almost fell over. I remember thinking that as a white guy I should be talking like him, and as a black man he should be sharing my opinion.

That’s how I feel now about the presidential gender issue between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. I should be supporting Bernie, and the liberal women I know should be on the Hillary bandwagon.

I know, I know. They’re not going to vote for someone just because she has a vagina. They’re going to vote for the best candidate, and if that person happens to have a penis, so be it.

But listen—the most poignant photograph in the seven years of the Obama presidency captures a little five-year-old Black kid who was at the White House and wanted to know if the president had the same kind of hair he did. So Barack Obama bent over double and let the kid touch his head, and the kid was overjoyed to find out their hair was the same.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/9290667/Story-behind-five-year-old-touching-Barack-Obamas-hair-in-the-Oval-Office-revealed.html

You can’t tell me that putting a woman in the White House wouldn’t have the same effect.

To paraphrase Vice-president Joe Biden, “Electing a president with a vagina would be a big f—ing deal.”

POSTSCRIPT: I have to wonder whether this blog would have been pulled if I was still associated with the Telegram & Gazette. I used the word “vagina” three times and the word “penis” once. Their censors may have considered that vocabulary “obscene,” but surely not as bad as the best column I ever wrote. That was in 2013. The topic was “cunnilingus.”

If enough readers request it, I’ll reprint that one (insert another smiley face here).

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