Feminist icon Gloria Steinem famously said: “Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.”
But has anyone told Laphonza Butler?
She’s the latest victim of the Democratic Party’s tokenization racket, fated to replace a true lion of the left, the late California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
The press has met Gov. Gavin Newsom’s appointment of Butler with much fanfare, but precious little of its celebration centered on her leadership of the famed abortion-rights PAC EMILY’s List.
While her résumé and history of community activism may be the bulk of the story, it’s her race, gender and sexual orientation that make headlines.
It’s worth noting EMILY’s List was founded by second-wave feminist champions and Democratic Party powerhouses such as the fundraiser and activist Ellen Malcolm, former Texas Gov. Ann Richards and Donna Shalala, who served in both the Carter and Clinton administrations and headed up the Clinton Foundation.
Since the PAC’s inception in 1985, EMILY’s List’s mission has been to act as a money machine for Democratic women in favor of abortion rights who are seeking public office.
The group’s first feat was the election of Barbara Mikulski to the US Senate in 1987.
One of the first candidates to receive an EMILY’s List endorsement, Mikulski is widely known as the first Democratic woman elected to the Senate “in her own right,” meaning she was not appointed to the seat nor filled the seat of a deceased husband.
Just about a quarter-century since that celebrated victory, today’s president of EMILY’s List has been appointed to a Senate seat in a state she no longer resides in on the basis of her skin color, gender and sexual orientation.
With his appointment of Butler, Newsom summarily passed over Rep. Barbara Lee, a 25-year veteran of Congress who is already engaged in a highly contested Senate race for a seat opening up next year.
Despite urging from the Congressional Black Caucus in favor of Lee, Newsom opted for the more intersectional Laphonza Butler.
Not only is she black, gay and female, but she checks another important box, which reads “Top Political Consultant with Ties to Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris.”
If diversity is the strength of the Democratic Party, irony is a close second.
While EMILY’s List is known for making history by electing women “in their own right” to lead, in 2023 its leader has been elevated to federal office on the basis of phenotypical traits to bolster the presidential ambitions of a politically shrewd white male.
Not to mention at the expense of duly elected black female officeholders in California with higher aspirations.
I wonder what the foot soldiers of the feminist movement would say to women being paraded in the media as props by a graying Democratic establishment seeking to cash in on not only an appointee’s femaleness but apparently her queerness and blackness, too.
If power can be taken but not given, as Steinem proclaims, then what hope can be had for Sen. Laphonza Butler?
Surely a woman of her stature and experience knows she’s a pawn in Gavin Newsom’s grander game.
A woman whose mission is to help women win in their own right would surely bristle at the governor’s preemptive promises to pick a black woman and take offense at being reduced into a smaller pool of people based on color rather than qualification.
But perhaps Butler is happy to cash in on her clout as a California political insider to be revered as a symbol of the Democratic Party’s diversity-equity-and-inclusion matrix.
If Steinem is correct that the “process of the taking is empowerment in itself,” then the US Senate is about to have one less powerful woman in its ranks.
Taylor Walters is a journalist living at the Jersey Shore.
NEWS CREDIT
