Lose the pomposity

As a woman voter concerned about all the relevant issues facing us in this year of the presidential election, I find it appalling that Gov. Sarah Palin, [author and political commentator] Ann Coulter, Elizabeth Hasselbach [former "Survivor" contestant and host of the "View"] and other conservative public and private women seek to attack women's rights to control their lives.

These conservative women have decidedly gained from all the hard work of their liberal counterparts. Look at Title IX [Equal Opportunity in Education Act]. Palin surely benefitted from the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s by being able to play high-school sports and being accepted as a television sportscaster and viable candidate for state and national office.

Coulter found acceptance as a political consultant when a generation before her found such acceptance tremendously difficult. And she can appear in public in a "little black dress" without recrimination.

Take a look at the "View." When, in previous years, have women been able to be so direct and involved with political issues with such wide influence?

There is something ethically wrong when conservative women cherry-pick rights that were hard-earned by the previous generation of women. They are arrogantly and disrespectfully slapping the face of those women who came before them. If these conservative women want it "all," they must acknowledge that all women, conservative or liberal, deserve all of the rights earned.

If not, they will find themselves turning back the national clock 500 years and feel the loss in their lives and the lives of their daughters. And who of us women really want to go back there?

Be liberal, conservative, apolitical, whatever. But don't use the hard-won efforts of other women that got you where you are to set back the causes of all women.

-- Karen Clay, Port Orchard