online comment – The Progressive Midwesterner

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This will be my final blog post for the year 2015. I wish everyone a safe and happy 2016!

In the New Hampshire House of Representatives, a legislative chamber that has 400 seats and serves as the lower house of the state legislature of a state with slightly over 1.3 million people, you’re bound to find some interesting people serving as state legislators. One such interesting person is New Hampshire State Representative Amanda Bouldin (D-Manchester), who has earned national attention for criticizing a sexist Republican-backed bill that would prohibit women from going topless in public in New Hampshire:

Under current New Hampshire state law, both men and women may expose their nipples as they so please. Some Republicans want to change that. A recently proposed bill, sponsored exclusively by Republican men, would make it illegal for a woman to “purposely expos[e] the areola or nipple of her breast or breasts in a public place.” (The bill makes an exception for breastfeeding.) Men would still be permitted to expose their nipples in public with impunity.

In case you’re wondering what the areola is, it’s a donut-shaped area of skin immediately around each human nipple that is of a different color than most or all of the rest of a person’s skin.

Not surprisingly, Bouldin was not one bit happy about the hypocritical standard of banning women from exposing their breasts in public, while continuing to allow men to do so. So, she posted her opinion on Facebook, and at least two Republican state legislators responded with vile, sexist remarks.

One of the sexist Republican state legislators who confronted Bouldin online is Josh Moore (R-Merrimack), who essentially encouraged sexual assault:

…If it’s a woman’s natural inclination to pull her nipple out in public and you support that, than (sic) you should have no problem with a mans (sic) inclination to stare at it and grab it…

Grabbing a woman’s breasts without her consent is sexual assault, which is a criminal offense in every jurisdiction in the United States and something that nobody should encourage.

The other was Al Baldasaro (R-Londonderry), who essentially called Bouldin’s nipples ugly:

Amanada (sic), No disrespect, but your nipple would be the last one I would want to see…

If you’re calling a woman, or any part of her, ugly, you’re intending disrespect.

If Amanda Bouldin wants to go topless in public, that should be her choice and not anyone else’s. If Amanda Bouldin wants to wear a shirt, blouse, jacket, coat, or other type of top in public, that should be her choice and not anyone else’s. It’s worth noting that the sexist mindset of those Republicans isn’t all that different from the sexist mindset of Islamic fundamentalist men who think that women should be forced to wear clothing that completely covers their face. I’m glad that people like Amanda Bouldin are standing up and speaking out against sexist legislation like the New Hampshire Nipple Bill.

If you want to thank Ms. Bouldin for speaking out against the sexist hypocrisy in the New Hampshire Nipple Bill, here’s her Twitter page. Please be respectful to her!

The nearly-irrelevant Democratic National Committee (DNC) disinvited their own vice-chairwoman, U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), from tomorrow night’s Democratic presidential debate over the fact that she wants more than six Democratic presidential debates:

Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said she was disinvited from the first Democratic presidential primary debate in Nevada after she appeared on television and called for more face-offs.

Ms. Gabbard confirmed on Sunday that her chief of staff received a message last Tuesday from the chief of staff to Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the national committee, about her attendance at the debate. A day earlier, Ms. Gabbard had appeared on MSNBC and said there should be an increase beyond the current six sanctioned debates.

A person close to the committee who asked for anonymity to discuss internal discussions insisted, however, that Ms. Gabbard had not been disinvited. Instead, the person said, an aide to Ms. Wasserman Schultz expressed a desire to keep the focus on the candidates as the debate approached, rather than on a “distraction” that could divide the party, and suggested that if Ms. Gabbard could not do that, she should reconsider going.

The fact that Debbie Wasserman Schultz thinks that calling for more debates is a “distraction” proves that she is clearly out of touch with what most people in her party strongly believe…six presidential debates is simply not enough for the Democrats. Even worse, Wasserman Schultz is throwing her own party’s officials under the bus in a desperate attempt to remain at least somewhat politically relevant in this country.

Thankfully, Jeff Weaver, the campaign manager for Bernie Sanders’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, has a very interesting idea to get Gabbard in a spectator’s seat the debate:

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), the Democratic National Committee vice chair who said she was disinvited to the first Democratic debate, might wind up attending the Tuesday night event as a guest of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Sanders’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, said Monday on CNN’s “New Day” that Gabbard could use a ticket from the Vermont senator’s campaign.

“If she needs a ticket, have her give me a call,” Weaver said, adding, “I think we have a couple; we can give her one.”

Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s alienating allies and mismanagement of the DNC reminds me a lot of the mismanagement of the failed professional wresting promotion WCW circa 2000. In fact, near the end of WCW’s existence, some of WCW’s own wrestlers, most notably Scott Steiner (real name: Scott Rechsteiner), were publicly calling out WCW management for running the promotion in the ground:

Wasserman Schultz is trying to run the DNC like a bad professional wrestling promotion. That is most certainly not the way to run a political party, as the party risks losing voters, perhaps permanently, if Wasserman Schultz continues with her autocratic style of managing the Democratic Party.

I’ve found exactly one person who is defending Wasserman Schultz online, and this person, who is a member of the progressive website DailyKos, is using racist language to attack Bernie Sanders and his supporters:

The only people who have a problem with Wasserman-Schultz are Sanders supporters, and he’s not even a Democrat. Why would the Democrats get rid of a Democratic Party chairwoman because of the wishes of a non-Democrat and his all-white, all-upper-middle-class supporters? Wasserman-Schultz is the chairwoman of the entire party, and that includes African-Americans and Hispanics who by vast majorities support Hillary. We can’t cater to the white upper-middle-class here just because they yell louder and post more frequently on online blogs.

When Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s own supporters are race-baiting and spreading blatant lies about Bernie Sanders and his campaign (for starters, Bernie Sanders has many black, Hispanic, and poor supporters, and Sanders is a Democrat by virtue of his membership in the Senate Democratic caucus), it’s time for her to step down from the DNC chair.