Does McCain Have a Problem With Women?

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.

Marsh, a leading supporter of Clinton's bid for the nomination, goes on to list a few of McCain's off-color jokes about Hillary and Chelsea, including the one he told at a 1998 Washington dinner:

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father."

Marsh is by no means the only person accusing McCain of anti-women sentiments. Adherents of this view often cite the now-famous exchange between McCain and his wife during a campaign stop in 1992.
Cindy playfully chided John about his thinning hair. The Arizona Senator's response?

McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c**t."

Other foes have compiled their own greatest hits from McCain's past regarding his attitudes toward women, including his wife-beating quip to ABC's Jake Tapper, and his infamous rape joke delivered before the National League of Cities and Towns:

"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?'"

Of course, who among us hasn't told an untoward joke now and again? Perhaps even more illuminating about McCain's feelings about the "fairer sex" comes in his voting record:

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."

Never mind that the bill itself came about as a result of one of the many option-of-last-resort lawsuits filed each year from women who are systematically underpaid for doing precisely the same jobs as men. McCain's "less regulation" ethos should be viewed in light of the recent failures of free market self-regulation. Energy (Enron), and Banking (sub-prime mortgage crisis) come to mind.

A joke here or there or a single vote along the way may doesn't really prove that a person has a problem with the opposite sex. Down that path lies a rigidly PC society that we should all reject. But when you step back and look at the patterns evident in John McCain's behavior, it makes you wonder how this man has the audacity to hope that Senator Clinton's loyal female following will flock to his side.