The Susan B. Anthony List, the anti-choice group that hosted Sarah Palin’s fundraiser speech attempting to redefine feminism, is now endorsing Sharron Angle, who won the Republican Senate primary in Nevada on Tuesday, as a “frontier feminist.”
Redefining movements is a specialty of the SBA List, which has distorted its namesake to claim she would have supported its infusion of religion into politics and its anti-choice position.
“No one more than Sharron Angle exemplifies frontier feminism — authentic, pro-life feminism that puts the ‘feminine’ back in the word. We are proud to put our political machine — built for the purpose of supporting women like Sharron — behind her race to beat Senator Harry Reid,” the group’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, said in a statement.
Frontier feminism? What’s that — carrying a .44 magnum and supporting privatization of Social Security and Medicare?
Or is frontier feminism the Proverbs 31 woman, which at Angle’s Southern Baptist church is the guiding principle for the women’s ministry? Proverbs 31 is an oft-cited verse by evangelicals to define the role of a “noble wife;” the Southern Baptist Convention demands in wifely “submission” and does not allow women to serve as clergy. One of Angle’s fellow members of Fellowship Community Church tells the New York Times, “she is a godly woman” who “has all the attributes of Jesus.”
OK, but is she a feminist?
Angle was the tea party favorite, and her record as a state assemblywoman points to a fondness for the stranger theories of the right — and religion. She once sponsored a bill, which didn’t pass, that would have required the “dissemination of information concerning the scientific link between induced abortion and increased rate of breast cancer,” a favorite false theory pushed by the anti-choice movement.
Angle — who has since scrubbed her campaign website — has also opposed the fluoridation of water based on age-old Bircher theories, and supported a drug treatment program run by the Church of Scientology. She also reportedly introduced celebrity Scientologists Kelly Preston and Jenna Elfman to Sen. John Ensign (a paragon of godly virtue!) to encourage him to sponsor legislation that would prohibit public schools from requiring students to take psychiatric drugs.
The SBA List took credit for unseating West Virginia Democrat Allen Mollohan, and plans to spend $6 million this election cycle to promote the candidacies of anti-choice candidates. It had endorsed Angle’s opponent, Sue Lowden, but endorsed Angle after she emerged the winner.
