Democrats Want Feminist Museum on National Mall

Democrats are pushing to create a national women’s history museum which would be erected on the National Mall in Washington D.C. They are initially advocating a bill to create a commission to study the idea. However, critics say that it is just an excuse to advance a left-wing agenda.

The bill (H.R. 863) is sponsored by New York Democrat Carolyn Maloney and is supposedly meant to honor great American women throughout history.

Critics of the commission say that there is no provision in its charter to make sure that the subjects chosen for the museum will equally represent all American philosophies and principles.

One of those critics, Penny Young Nance the CEO of Concerned Women for America, worried that this museum would be just another way to indoctrinate children with leftist views.

“To indoctrinate American children, who visit the Nation’s capital, with leftist views is so distasteful that within this climate we respectfully decline our own museum,” Young said in an open letter to Congress. “We would prefer that students visit the other 19 Smithsonian museums and galleries to hear about women’s history than to have one that propagates a false narrative.”

The museum has its genesis online at the website The National Women’s History Museum (NWHM). But as Heritage Action points out, most of the women the website touts are those with reliably left-wing views.

Heritage Action recently wrote: 

…the NWHM would extol Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and a noted advocate of sterilization and eugenics. They reference “free love” enthusiast Victoria Woodhull, who equated marriage with “forced prostitution,” over 20 times. And of course, no tribute to progressivism would be complete without proper deference to Sandra Fluke, anti-life activist and supporter of federally funded contraception.

One of the museum’s honorees mentioned above, Margaret Sanger, is not only the founder of the abortion mill Planned Parenthood, but she considered African Americans to be an inferior race and advocated abortion as a way of keeping their numbers down.

As to funding, museum supporters claim that money for the project would come from private sector sources, but critics assume that tax dollars will flood into the project sooner rather than later only to “sustain an institution that perpetuates a one-sided and damaging narrative about the women’s movement in America.”

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Maloney, has a long history of feminist connections.

Recently, New York’s Gotham Magazine said Maloney thinks women work twice as hard as men but only get half the pay and in 2012 she received the “Fearless Trailblazer” of the year award from the Feminist Majority.

Also, in 2008 several feminist groups backed Maloney to take over Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat when the former First Lady quit the U.S. Senate to become Obama’s Secretary of State.

Maloney once endorsed powerful New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver even though she knew Silver helped engineer a once secret $103,000 settlement to quash a sexual harassment suit brought against a fellow Assemblyman.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com