Presenting feminist radical Gloria Steinem with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wednesday, President Obama said that Steinem “changed how women thought about themselves.” He also labeled her a “game-changer,” a “disrupter,” and a “champion noticer.” Obama stated, “She’s alert to all the ways, large and small, that women had been and, in some cases, continue to be treated unfairly just because they’re women… because of her work, across America and around the world, more women are afforded the respect and opportunities that they deserve.”
Obama did not mention Steinem’s disdain for heterosexual relationships (Steinem infamously remarked that “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”), marriage and childbearing (“you become a semi-non-person when you get married”), her love for abortion (on her own abortion: “I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life”), her advocacy for confusing gender boundaries for children (“We’ve begun to raise daughters like sons…but few have the courage to raise our sons more like daughters”), and sexual promiscuity (“A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after”).
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.