Late last week, radical feminist Gloria Steinem appeared on the CBS This Morning show to hawk her latest book. As part of her screed, she whined that after decades of mocking the word “feminist” by radio personality Rush Limbaugh, he had turned it into a “bad word” because the popular radio personality “talks about feminazis every day.”
CBS This Morning co-host Norah O’Donnell set the stage for Steinem’s rant against Limbaugh by pointing out that actress Meryl Streep doesn’t consider herself a feminist. She says she considers herself a “humanist” – a word popular with atheists and agnostics.
When asked why the word “feminist” now has a “bad connotation”, Steinem offered this fiction.
Most Americans actually identify themselves as feminists. “If people just go to the dictionary and discover that it means a person, male or female, who believes in the full equality of women and men then they do subscribe to it. And it is a majority now, which it didn’t used to be.
In other words, most people are “feminists” but they are just too dumb to know it.
Many believe Steinem finds support for her theory based on a poll conducted by the leftist website Vox, which revealed that:
“18% of respondents “identified as feminists” but “[e]ighty-five percent of people favored ‘equality for women,’ and 78 percent agreed that they believe in the ‘social, political, legal, and economic equality of the sexes.”’
Based on this characterization of what feminism means in general and for Steinem in particular is that 85% of Americans support her radical views on abortion which the she argues women “need” because it is a “sacrament.” (Editor’s note: 85% support by Americans for the notion of “abortion on demand” is a ridiculous conclusion and Steinem knows it.)
At the same time, Steinem argues that “violence against women” was the most important women’s issue today. CBS hosts did not ask her to elaborate on this view or explain why society doesn’t do more to stop the violence against unborn girls that die at the hands of the abortionist.
Instead, Steinem was allowed to rant on that:
“What is tied, I think, for first place is, first of all, violence against women. Because there is so much worldwide, whether it’s sexualized violence and more time or domestic violence like here, or, you know — I mean, there’s just so many… Because there is so much violence, for the first time that we know of, there are now fewer females on Earth than males.
So, you know, we really need to look at this and understand that when a country is violent against females it’s the biggest indicator that they will be militarily violent too. It needs to be part of our foreign policy.”
If she is right that there are less women on earth than males, one can only wonder why Steinem did not cite China’s “one child” policy in a culture that values boys over girls and that girls are not only aborted because they are girls, they are also aborted by force at the heave and heartless hand of government.
For his part, Rush Limbaugh responded to Gloria Steinem’s accusation that he turned the word “feminism” into a “bad word” by aligning it with his word “feminazi” because it “better explained what they (radical feminists) were all about.”
Limbaugh acknowledged that he turned the world “feminism” into a “bad word” because he exposed it for what it was. Quoting his radio show transcript, Limbaugh said:
“So, once again, your host, the harmless, lovable, little fuzzball, Rush Limbaugh, now blamed for destroying a word, ruining a word, ruining the definition of a word, feminism. But her definition is not even close to the way the feminazis use the entire feminist movement.”
“It was based in leftist ideology.” “It was based on men are predators and men are evil and men are men. It was designed to create a war between and against men and women.”
“All I did was expose it. That word “feminazi,” they never gotten over because that word actually better explained what they were all about. It rang so true.”
