Women Voting for Obama

The appeal of Obama for women is rooted in some of the structural dynamics of femininity, but at a deeper level, springs from a wounded feminism, specifically a suspicion of and alienation from masculinity. First, the maternal instinct seeks to care for the poor, weak and needy and looks to exercise this through the government. The appeal here of the Democrats is evident. Secondly, the feminine impulse is to include, welcome, and affirm everyone while the masculine, paternal instinct is more adept at boundaries, demands, standards, laws, conflict, and distinctions. A woman thinks more intensely with her heart and emotions and goes intuitively towards the person and that person's suffering. She is not equipped by nature and biology to distinguish abstractly, for instance, that criticism of an action, even if it offends the actor, is not hatred, but can be a form of love, albeit of a more masculine, paternal kind. So, we can understand that a femininity, alienated from the masculine, is drawn towards a tolerant, non-discriminating liberalism. Thirdly, single women especially voted overwhelmingly for Obama but women in general supported him because they are sympathetic to the dependency of women, abandoned by men, alone with children. Our society, oblivious to the value of subsidiarity, has progressively weakened all intermediary communities (family, Church, ethnic community, voluntary organizations, etc.) and increasing left the naked individual to the whims of the two mega-machines: the global corporation and the federal bureaucracy. Of these, the later is clearly more caring of the weak and needy, especially the woman alone with children. Fourthly, childbirth and sexuality are, for a woman, exquisitely delicate, sacred, protected and private. It is contrary to the feminine nature to battle in the public arena over these issues. Therefore, the default position of a femininity uninformed by complementary and countervailing masculine values, is to retreat to the private realm and abandon the public arena to the deconstructing militants. Lastly, an overwhelming majority of women have accepted the contraceptive view of sexuality that overwhelmed our culture in the late 1960s: that sex is not essentially oriented to union and conception within marriage, but is a personal, self-fulfilling, private and recreational activity; that it is necessary for happiness; that "protection" from its natural consequences in the form of contraception, sterilization and back-up abortion are natural human rights. This last dynamic, the need for "protection," is where we clearly see distrust of and resentment towards the masculine. The requirement (think Georgetown law student Sandra Fluck)that all women have access to such protection unveils a distrust of the male: a deep conviction that he will impregnate you and then abandon you and that a state that would protect the unborn is actually one that is hostile towards the mother, hypocritical, chauvinist and oppressive. Obama himself is a perfect icon of the emerging anti-male matriarchy of our culture. He is in so many ways an intelligent, pragmatic, and realistic politician: consider his move towards the middle in foreign policy and economics. But on issues about innocent life and gender he is absolutist and fundamentalist. He was unabashedly in favor of the legalization of partial-birth abortion. He is the product of a broken marriage and was raised by a cosmopolitan, anthropologist woman and he clearly inhaled her sense of abandonment by the father. All his father figures were themselves stuck in an adolescent rebellion against the father figure experienced as oppressive: Saul Alinsky, Reverend Wright and a string of others. So, we see that the Obama administration, rooted culturally in sterilized sexuality, abortion, and liberationally-reconstructed marriage, is at heart an expression of a femininity that has been abandoned and abused by men. It's most zealous advocates are themnselves promiscuous, unfaithful men who realize their lifestyle depends upon it: Bill Clinton, the Kennedys, John Kerry and the list goes on. But if the Democratic Party expresses a wounded, perverse feminism, the Republican Party is the opposite: a disfigured masculinity not fully appreciative of and generous to the feminine. To its credit it defends innocent life, marriage and religious liberty; but in economics it favors achievers and in foreign policy it swings between the quintessentially machismo extremes of aggressiveness and indifferent isolationism. From another viewpoint, the two parties are opposed versions of an insecure, ungenerous masculinity: the one aggressive, arrogant and selfish; the other impotent, castrated, indecisive and submissive to mother. At the deepest level, the conservative/liberal polarization of our cultural is the development of a Protestantism that had renounced both the feminine/maternal (Marian, consecrated life) and masculine/paternal (Petrine authority)dimensions of our Catholicity. Culturally, the current Democrat/Republican polarization is symptomatic of a deeper, sadder moral/spiritual/emotional divide: between man and woman. Furthermore, the depth and breath of this suspicion, resentment and hurt indicates that the culpability extends far beyond these obnoxious liberal celebrities mentioned above: the distrust of our women is the responsibility of all us men. Our women distrust us because we have failed to love them with the gentle but strong, faithful and sensitive, pure and courageous love shown by our Bridegroom sacrificially on His cross. This election, becomes then, an occasion for us men to examine our conscience and repent of our own failure to appreciate, affirm and protect the women in our lives.