This article from the Huffington Post today came out about Cari Christman’s comments on the Lily Ledbetter Equal Pay Act. She is the head of RedState Women, a Texas-based PAC focused on “rallying women for GOP gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott.”
In the video, she essentially says that women are “too busy” trying to create families and get a higher education to fight for equal pay. This message supports Greg Abbot’s stance on equal pay since, according to his competitor Wendy Davis, he fought vehemently against it during his tenure as Texas Attorney General.
I for one am not comfortable with what this message communicates. First of all, Christman denounces the legislation as “rhetoric” that offers no solutions, but isn’t able to come up with any viable solutions herself. Secondly, I’m extremely uncomfortable with a PAC dedicated to conservative women that does not believe in equal pay legislation. What are they trying to say about conservative women, or about women in general? This does not bode well to the rest of Abbott’s campaign, because I’m not sure how well this will play out among conservative career women.
Any thoughts?
To read the article, click on the above link or go here:
Head Of GOP Women’s PAC Flubs Equal Pay Question
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/17/head-of-gop-womens-pac-fl_n_4978650.html
Valencia Richardson 
Christman is implicitly stating that women are less fit for working (since they don’t deserve equal pay) and more fit for rearing and raising children and becoming homemakers (which they seem to be preoccupied with?). As you pointed out, it’s really troubling that these sentiments are coming from the head of what should be a women’s interest PAC. A lot of Christman’s rhetoric seems to echo ideas expressed by many leaders of evangelical right movements that have spoken out against marriage equality under the pretense of conventional gender roles, stating that women are more fit for raising children and homemaking than men and that men and women each have specific functions in the home. This kind of advocacy for “traditional gender roles” is dated, and it’s worrying that she seems to think that women are satisfied with making substantially less than their male counterparts as long as they have a kid or two or get a college degree of some sort. To me, it should make economic sense that, if you put in the same time and got the same degree as a man, you’d want it to be worth the same amount of money when you entered the workforce.
I completely agree. It’s also troubling because of how it makes conservative women look. Though I can hardly speak for them, I can say with confidence that there are plenty of working class women who are also conservatives and would like to get paid the same as their male counterparts. So when a conservative women’s interest PAC stands against pay equity, it makes the whole lot seem the same way. I just think that before they start speaking for conservative women they need to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Things like this make no sense. How can you run a campaign or political group based on this platform? If you don’t want equal pay that’s fine, but how is pushing for women to get equal pay a bad thing. Regardless of how you view gender roles if that’s even relevant, what does that have to do with equal pay? It’s just good business ethics to pay your employees the right amount of money. You’re definitely correct in saying this does not represent conservative women as a whole who I know would like equal pay. I think this post is a perfect example of how broken the political system is if there is a group against equal pay because the rival group is for it.
That last line was an inclination of mine as well. To be honest, I think that this group may only be supporting that cause because it’s a “republican view,” not because they actually are against equal pay. Groups tend to have this “stick together” mentality so that they can present a facade of unanimity. Even if there is dissent, no one wants it to appear like there is dissent, so they stick to the same values regardless of whether they want to or not.