The Obama for President campaign recently released a video they’re calling “Dreams of our Daughters,” a letter to the president from Erin Bilbray-Kohn, who waxes eloquent about the dreams and ambitions of her two daughters, six-year old Daisy and and 10-year old Caroline.
According to Bilbray-Kohn, Daisy and Caroline are disciplined and focused on careers as a dolphin doctor and a military officer.
But apparently they are not disciplined enough to avoid ruining their dreams with an unplanned pregnancy. Recall Barack Obama’s comment during the 2008 campaign that he wouldn’t want his daughters “punished with a baby.”
Bilbray-Kohn’s letter strikes the same chord.
Girls Are Capable of Self-Control
As a mother of four daughters and a grandmother of twelve granddaughters, I find the message in this campaign video highly offensive.
Women are capable of practically anything—including self-control. And if they want to be truly successful at whatever they choose, self-control is essential.
Why would we want to teach our daughters that it makes good sense to use discipline in choosing what to eat, getting enough exercise, doing homework, striving to be the best, but when it comes to sexual activity, the message is “Take a pill and do whatever you want”?
Would anyone think it made sense if we invented a pill that would counteract all the calories in ice cream and candy bars, and then told women, “Take this pill and eat all you want”? Why is discipline and moderation in the area of eating hailed as an ideal—note Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity—yet discipline in sexual practice is dismissed as impossible?
Girls should be taught to respect their bodies, their sexuality, and their fertility—not to medicate it out of the picture.
Women Don’t “Need” Birth Control
The message of the campaign video does not suggest that women should save sex for marriage. It does not even hint that women can exercise self-control over their sexual passions.
No, the clear message is that fertility must be treated as an unwanted medical condition. In fact, Bilbray-Kohn states that most women “need” birth control and that it is “as common in a woman’s medicine cabinet as cough medicine.”
Bilbray-Kohn wants Obama re-elected in 2012 to make sure her daughters can pursue their dreams and have free and easy access to birth control. If Daisy’s and Caroline’s dreams are entirely dependent on getting free birth control, then they have pretty shallow dreams, and their mother is failing miserably to teach them what it means to be a woman.
I find this “Dreams of our Daughters” campaign video patronizing and demeaning to women. If American women are as smart as liberals like to believe, they will be disgusted with this fundraising scheme.
