Of grizzlies, women and the language of Southern politics

Mama grizzly season formally opened on Tuesday.

From California to South Carolina, in Democratic and Republican primaries, women candidates forced their way onto the November ballot — or at least within shouting distance.

In Arkansas, Democrat Blanche Lincoln successfully defended her U.S. Senate seat. Nevada Republicans picked tea party candidate Sharron Angle to confront Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Associated Press

In California, Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, will mount the Republican challenge to Democratic incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer — a contest with legendary possibilities. Meg Whitman will be the GOP candidate for governor.

Closest to home, in South Carolina, little-known state lawmaker Nikki Haley nearly leaped past a large field of male candidates to win the GOP nomination for governor without a runoff. She was backed by Gov. Mark Sanford’s ex-wife and the First Mama Grizzly herself, Sarah Palin.

It is South Carolina that may offer the clearest lesson for Georgia.

Ninety years after American women won the right to vote, the South isn’t quite sure what to make of female politicians.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, women — on average — make up a quarter of the nation’s 50 state assemblies. At 37 percent, conservative New Hampshire has the highest ratio of female state lawmakers.

In Georgia, women cast 19 percent of the votes in the Legislature. In Alabama, they cast 12 percent; in Mississippi, 14 percent; and in Haley’s South Carolina, 10 percent.

Because some Southern men are still not wholly comfortable with power in skirts, their language and their thinking suffer. They blunder across a verbal and tactical landscape.

For instance, Haley on Tuesday demonstrated that — short of a verified signature on a hotel registry — Republican, family-oriented voters are willing to ignore attacks on a female candidate’s chastity.

Statements from two gentlemen confessing to their own cad-like behavior don’t signify.

Likewise, South Carolina has taught us that it is poor form to ignore a woman’s membership in a Methodist church and refer to her as a “raghead” — just because her parents are immigrants from India.

We have had similar language problems in Georgia.

Karen Handel, the former secretary of state, is the only woman in the contest for governor.

Last week, the anti-abortion group Georgia Right to Life certified five of six Republican candidates — all except Handel, whom it singled out for special criticism.

Handel, who refers to herself as “pro-life,” supports the right to abortion in cases of rape or incest. GRTL acknowledges a right to abortion only when the life of the mother is at stake.

The anti-abortion group also criticized Handel, who is childless, for opposing restrictions that GRTL would like to see placed on in vitro fertilization in Georgia.

Fertility clinics sometime create more embryos than are needed for a single pregnancy. GRTL wants that stopped.

Handel disagrees. It is a legitimate topic for discussion. But GRTL president Dan Becker then added this in an interview:

“Someone’s desperate right to parenthood — because they’re infertile, they’re barren, whatever term you want to use — is an emotionally fraught subject that has our highest sympathy. But it should never be attempted to be addressed where a life is taken in the process.”

At the word “barren” — and all its harshness — tens of thousands of women in Georgia sucked in a collective breath.

Asked about his word choice, Becker later told a WSB-TV reporter that he had no comment. But off-record, he said — as the camera continued to roll — his remarks were taken out of context.

When it comes to sexual politics, the English language can be a minefield.

Yet, Handel also has produced evidence that women in politics can’t lay claim to unassailable pedestals.

On Monday, Marc Yeager, a former president of the Georgia Log Cabin Republicans — an organization for gay and lesbians within the GOP — produced what he said were e-mail exchanges from 2002 and 2003, between himself and Handel.

She was running for a district seat on the Fulton County Commission in 2002, and the chairmanship in 2003.

One e-mail had Handel embracing domestic partnership benefits for gay Fulton County employees. It is not a position popular within the confines of a statewide Republican primary, and Handel denies ever espousing it.

On Tuesday, she produced her 2002 campaign manager, who declared he was the author of the e-mail, down to the “fondly, Karen” at the bottom. Yeager isn’t buying the explanation. Neither are Handel’s male rivals.

Biologists don’t often write about the phenomenon in nature, but in politics, even grizzlies are vulnerable to self-inflicted wounds.

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