Except that it isn’t.

Some squeaky wheels over at the National Organization of Women don’t like the surviving Kennedy brother. My first reaction was to describe this as them getting their something-in-a-twist until I realized that such a comment would be wrongly interpreted as sexist, rather than innocently idiomatic.

Read it and weep.

Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy̢۪s endorsement of Hillary Clinton̢۪s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard. Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, the Family Leave and Medical Act to name a few. Women have buried their anger that his support for the compromises in No Child Left Behind and the Medicare bogus drug benefit brought us the passage of these flawed bills. We have thanked him for his ardent support of many civil rights bills, BUT women are always waiting in the wings.

And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton (they will of course say they support a woman president, just not “thisâ€Â one). ‘They’ are Howard Dean and Jim Dean (Yup! That’s Howard’s brother) who run DFA (that’s the group and list from the Dean campaign that we women helped start and grow). They are Alternet, Progressive Democrats of America, democrats.com, Kucinich lovers and all the other groups that take women’s money, say they’ll do feminist and women’s rights issues one of these days, and conveniently forget to mention women and children when they talk about poverty or human needs or America’s future or whatever.

This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability – indeed, our obligation – to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who ‘know what’s best for us.’

What would happen if the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People came out against Hillary Clinton supporters for being racist? Remember, blacks were disenfranchised a good half-century longer than women by most credible accounts.

Literacy tests and poll taxes weren’t “intermediate steps” for women’s suffrage the last time I checked.

Consider the flipside: Is it right to endorse a candidate based solely on her gender? How does The White House Project play into this?

Britain had a female prime minister in the ’80s, but they haven’t had one since. What long-term benefit will we gain from the short-term evil of voting based solely on gender, or race, for that matter?

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For both points of view, check out the links here, here and here. Beware angry, defensive rhetoric in most posts.