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Betty Ford Feminist

Betty Ford Memorial Service on Tuesday, July 12 2011

A private memorial service for America’s former first lady Betty Ford will take place tomorrow at St Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Palm Desert.

The service is by invitation only, for about 1,000 family members, dignitaries and guests. Former first lady Rosalynn Carter, journalist Cokie Roberts and former Betty Ford Center board member Geoffrey Mason will offer eulogies.

The public will be able to pay its respects to Ford at St. Margaret’s beginning at 5 p.m. through midnight. A motorcade carrying Ford’s body will leave St. Margaret’s at 9 a.m. Wednesday en route to Palm Springs International Airport, where Ford will be flown to Grand Rapids, Michigan for funeral services on Thursday morning, with burial later on the grounds of the Gerald R Ford Presidential Museum.

Dr. Alan Kiselstein, Betty Ford’s physician for the past 23 years, was with the former first lady when she died Friday at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage.“She was alert and communicative right up to the end,” said Kiselstein, 67, a doctor of internal medicine.

The word ‘feminist’ may be used more this week that at any time in the last 20 years. Betty Ford proudly called herself a feminist, fighting consistently for women’s rights and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

Returning American Women to Mayberry

Betty Ford died the week that presidential candidate Michele Bachmann signed The Family Leader Presidential Pledge. The media has made a major fuss over the clause claiming that a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised in a two-parent household than an African American child today.

The outcry was so severe that the group has amended the pledge, removing the language.

Not much — if anything — has been written about the pledge requiring the candidate to advance the recognition that robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to US demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security. 

Translated, in a Tea Party led, Michele Bachmann presidency, women WILL return home and they WILL make a robust number of babies. It is an American woman’s duty and a major objective of today’s Republican party.

What a staggering turnaround in public debate about the role of women in American society, from the days when Betty Ford marched on behalf of equal rights for American women.

As we are reminded every day in the public debate, there is no place for a conservative Republican woman like Betty Ford in today’s Republican party. At least not for Betty Ford’s voice and ideas. Many modern Republican women who seek one or two children are betraying their patriotic duty to God and country, according to the social conservatives like Bachmann.

We will pick up this debate more substantively in our eulogy to Betty Ford in tomorrow’s Sexual Politics.

Today we honor an American woman who loved her family, adored her husband, devoted herself to public service and equally to the cause of feminism and the advancement of American women onto a platform of life choices, rather than having the state dictate a woman’s proper role, as Bachmann has signed on to do.

This is an absurd twist on the conservative commitment to individual independence, a fact noted by Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico at the Conservative Leadership Conference in Las Vegas Saturday. 

“Government should not be involved in the bedrooms of consenting adults. I have always been a strong advocate of liberty and freedom from unnecessary government intervention into our lives,” he said in the written statement.

Tea Party Republicans are committed to getting government out of our lives in all but one aspect, and that is the control of women’s bodies. Here the state has an overwhelming interest in women being ‘incubators’ as former Representative Stupak calls us and Michelle Bachmann states loud and clear. 

There may be no better way to honor Betty Ford than by considering the wide vision she had for American women versus the tightly conscripted one in the eyes of America’s Tea Party and social conservatives movement.

More reading: Gary Johnson: Family Leader pledge gives Republicans a bad name Iowa Caucuses