Word: abigail
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...date Abigail Adams--oops, sorry, she's dead...
...described feminist was, either. But my real interest in describing the misdirected efforts of Boyle and those like her is to defend those the Council did pick. In the centerfold of the most recent issue of Peninsula, we each selected the woman we thought deserved recognition. The winners were Abigail Adams, Mother Teresa, Maggie Gallagher and the United Daughters of the Confederacy...
Picking on Abigail Adams first, Mayo suggests that even though she's not the "submissive hausfrau" that the "lazy reader" would probably consider her to be, that's probably the only reason Council member Brent McGuire decided to choose her. Evidently playing the part of the "lazy reader" himself, Mayo ignores McGuire's explanation of why he chose Adams 300 years after her death, or even his praise of her strengths. What Mayo seems to focus on instead is the seeming contradiction that any strong female could "recognize the protective impulse in a man, [and] also invoke the name...
...then I grew up. When I made it out of the suburbs and into an urban Jesuit high school, I learned about things like poverty, civil rights and social responsibility. The world was more complicated than the stratified one the conservatives had invented for me. Abigail Adams has been dead for nearly three hundred years now; Mother Teresa does more for this world in one hour than Nixon, Reagan and Bush did all their lives...
Despite the cries of campus conservatives like Sebastian Conley's "Seth Lives" that Harvard doesn't want to understand conservatives, it's hard to believe that they're suffering too badly. All it takes to be a right-winger here is to rewrite history, to turn Abigail Adams into a submissive hausfrau and strip the Confederate Flag of all its racist overtones. To paraphrase Molly Ivins, afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable may have the charm of novelty, but it's not exactly courageous...