I couldn't help but wonder when I heard Republican congresswoman, Marsha Blackburn say on Sunday's Meet the Press that women don't want equal pay laws, they just want to be recognized as contributing, qualified workers by the companies that hire them, why conservative women are so depressingly willing to turn on their own.
You have to think that if as many African Americans had been prepared to betray each other in their fight for civil rights and equality as women seem prepared to do in ours, we'd still have slavery. Try as I might, I can't figure out the motivation.
I know conservatism subscribes to the principle that a woman's place is in the home, tending to the children and the hearth, but women like Republican legislators Marsha Blackburn, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Lisa Murkowski, Olympia Snow and Susan Collins are living proof that the conservative model is a fantasy. They are all working women who wouldn't accept for five seconds receiving lower pay than their male congressional counterparts, and yet each one of them voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2009.
And they are not alone. Whether it's in the workplace, the classroom, the playing field or the doctor's office, there is no shortage of women who are eager to undermine each other by undervaluing their own worth in the marketplace and ceding control of their lives to some omnipotent father figure.
What the payoff for this disloyalty is escapes me. I suppose for someone like Marsha Blackburn it's political advancement in a party that unapologetically views women as inferior, but is happy to be able to trot her out as proof that they don't. For other women, it may be a combination of religious and political beliefs or just the way they were brought up.
What I do know is that it has to end. The first thing we have to do is stop electing women like Marsha Blackburn who are independent, self-sufficient and liberated in their own lives but who consistently vote with their male colleagues to deny other women the opportunity to be any of those things. They view their admission to the boys club as a privlege and will do whatever it takes to stay. The Marsha Blackburns of this world feel no allegiance to their gender and no compunction about going on TV to explain why it's okay for women to remain underpaid, underinsured, underemployed, and under the thumb.