|  Candace Talmadge Read Candace's bio and previous columns
May 8, 2009
One Woman Can Make a
Difference
What do Leah Burton, Melody
Townsel, Cynthia Sheehan, Anita Hill and the late Terri Schiavo have in
common?
In her own way, each
demonstrated that one woman can make a real difference. The first four dared
to speak truth to power, while the latter had a profound national impact
because religious conservatives exploited her personal tragedy and it ended
up backfiring big time.
Burton is the list of
honor’s most recent example. A fourth-generation native Alaskan and longtime
political activist now living in Washington State, she sent a letter to the
Alaska House Judiciary Committee after Gov. Sarah Palin nominated Wayne
Anthony Ross to be attorney general.
Familiar with Ross’s
background, Burton was horrified by Palin’s AG nominee, whom she says is
“the antithesis of a fair, impartial, competent attorney.” Her letter
recounted derogatory comments she heard Ross make back in 1991 about women,
gays, African-Americans and Native Alaskans (who also voiced strong
opposition to Ross’s nomination).
Another Alaskan stepped
forward with similar personal testimony, and one state senator took an
interest in Burton’s allegations and began looking into them. Soon dozens of
Ross opinion pieces from the 1980s and 1990s surfaced as additional evidence
of his far-right social views.
The result? For the first
time in Alaska history, a sitting governor’s executive office nominee was
voted down. For her troubles, Burton has been verbally attacked and
threatened repeatedly by Palin supporters and called a liar by Palin
herself.
Townsel, whom I know
personally, stepped into a similar political meat grinder back in 2005, when
she wrote to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee expressing her
negative experience with President George W. Bush’s nominee for U.N.
ambassador, John Bolton. Her letter received only cursory attention until it
was posted in full to a prominent liberal blog.
Then all hell broke loose,
and Bolton supporters made Townsel’s life miserable with death threats and
smears, such as claiming she was an unfit mother. She lost nervous clients
and a business partner, but she says she has no regrets and would speak out
again. “People know exactly who is he now,” Townsel says of Bolton. “That’s
my satisfaction.”
After Townsel’s letter
became widely known, prominent Americans like Colin Powell also expressed
public reservations over Bolton. The U.S. Senate declined to confirm him,
and Bush was forced into a recess appointment that legally could not last
beyond the December 2006 end of that session of Congress. It was one of the
few defeats of a Bush 43 nominee.
Sheehan was the mother of a
veteran killed in Iraq who made Bush’s political life awkward over the
summer of 2005 by camping out close to the president’s ranch in Crawford,
Texas, and demanding the answer to one simple question: What did my son
really die for? Her dogged and well-publicized persistence in trying to
obtain a personal meeting with Bush prompted a lot of other Americans to
begin asking the same thing.
Earlier that same year,
Schiavo, in a persistent vegetative state since 1990, made headlines after
her parents took their case to the U.S. Congress, even though Florida state
courts, over seven years, had sided with Schiavo’s husband in his quest to
end the artificial feeding that kept his wife’s body from dying. Americans
watched disgusted as the Republican Congress made a mockery of their
much-vaunted support for states’ rights and bowed to religious extremists.
Over a weekend, the Senate and House passed special legislation aimed at
keeping Schiavo on life support, and Bush rushed back to Washington to sign
it into law.
They could not find one
federal judge to enforce this outrageous law, and eventually Michael Schiavo
prevailed. The prestige of Bush and congressional Republicans took a big hit
over the entire sorry spectacle, and later that summer a hurricane named
Katrina polished it off for good.
Hill’s brush with notoriety
was in 1991, a different era. Her charges that President George H.W. Bush’s
Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas, harassed her sexually received
widespread media coverage and bitterly divided the nation. At the time of
the hearings, the majority sided with Thomas. Just one year later, public
opinion had switched markedly in Hill’s favor. She has kept her silence to
this day, but the controversy raised awareness of workplace sexual
discrimination and helped motivate more women to run for public office.
Agree with them or not,
it’s obvious that these and many other women have had their effect on public
life and discourse in this country. Perhaps that’s why they are so often
greeted with such bitter opposition from those who know the power of one
woman and don’t like it.
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