According to blogger and radio host Taylor Marsh, the answer is pretty clear. Monday's incident, in which John McCain volunteered his wife for a topless beauty contest at the Sturgis, South Dakota biker bash, is but one more instance of what Marsh sees as a pattern of sexist behavior from the Arizona Senator:
Hello, all of you anti Obama zealots, got misogyny? That's your man, John McCain, a where's Pakistan?, Sunni or Shia - who cares?, bomb-bomb-bomb Iran, Take my wife topless please, kind of guy.
You can add McCain offering up his wife for a topless contest to what John McCain once said about Hillary before he needed her votes.
"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father."
McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c**t."
"Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sign contently and to feebly ask,'Where is that marvelous ape?'"
He has consistently voted against measures to provide access to contraception and sex-education, and voted to approve anti-choice judges.
Planned Parenthood and NARAL have each given him a zero for his record on women's health issues. (The record dates back to his days in the House of Representatives, between 1983 and 1986, and carries through to his career in the U.S. Senate, which began in 1987.) Of the 130 congressional votes related to reproductive freedom that McCain has cast, 125 have been anti-choice, according to NARAL.
And while being anti-abortion doesn't mean you're necessarily anti-woman, many of the votes above had to do with contraception, including, as Frank Rich recently pointed out, an attempt "to terminate the federal family planning program that provides breast-cancer screenings ." As was recently witnessed on the campaign trail, while McCain has no problem with insurance plans funding Viagra, he gets a tad squeamish on the subject of birth control:
McCain, by the way, never did "get back" to the female reporter.
The other recent piece of legislation that speaks to McCain's priorities, was the defeated Senate measure designed to ensure equal pay in the workplace. McCain skipped the vote, but let it be known he wouldn't have given his support even if he had been in D.C.:
"I'm all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation is typical of what's being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits from all kinds of problems."


