Mediaite's Selective Reporting

I published on Sunday a piece titled “Motherhood is Political” for Mother’s Day. It was written to answer the question I’m so often asked: why are mothers so active in the grassroots conservative movement?

Later on that evening, I checked Twitter before bed and this had happened:

Martel claims she’s a libertarian. No libertarian I know claims personal offense at another’s opinion.

Obviously offensive, but apparently not enough for Mediaite to include the remarks in their hit piece on me.

When Larry O’Connor extended to us an invite to discuss it on his Sunday night show she tried walking back her remarks and has been trying to redefine them ever since. She also maintains that she was “making a joke” about Rand with the looter comment, but the context doesn’t support it, either in her statement or in Atlas Shrugged wherein looters were defined as people who sucked life out of others via government while providing nothing in return. She actually makes a novice mistake here and shows her cards: her belief that stay-at-home-mothers are equal to that of Rand’s looters shows that she does not place any value on mothering. Looters, by Rand’s definition, provided no value. Martel’s view on motherhood is an arbitrary point but one she mistakenly uses and promotes as objective fact.

Her belief that private household business arrangements should be subject to public evaluation also betrays any real claim to conservatism.

Here she’s at least willing to say that her opinion, by which she smears an entire class of women, may change over time. The presumption is that women who choose to stay home do so because they have no other options available to them or because they’re lazy. It’s an insult and stereotype of the Linda Hirshman variety.

Martel was fine at the show’s close but conveniently horrified two days after the show, but not by her behavior, not by the way in which she offended women online, or by her use ad hominem attacks and name-calling (apparently I’m a “drunk” because my husband made me a margarita after my sons were in bed, I’m “ignorant” because of my opinion and I’m “uneducated” because I don’t have an Ivy League degree), but because I said that she was acting like a “bitch.” Normally I don’t toss around the pejorative, but being that it was midnight and I was being yelled at on my Mother’s Day about motherhood by a self-involved single woman without children was over-the-top.

I repeatedly asked Martel why she found no problem with a family that, by choice or necessity, has to outsource childcare but has a problem if that family chooses to keep childcare in-house. The question remains unanswered.

Martel and Mediaite are simply trying to get attention from a non-story and attempting to save face by omitting all that which I have referenced. What was an ironically good-natured late night conversation that took place on the Internet was turned into a manufactured dispute. It’s ridiculous …

… especially so when Martel uses the pejorative herself at the end of O’Connor’s show:

[youtube yBB1n5XjDf4 nolink]

The only mistake made was that my attention was given to a website that routinely attacks conservative women (conservatives in general, really), whose White House correspondent routinely cusses at readers on the site (with the approval of Mediaite Editor Colby Hall, apparently) —

— with the belief that they would be professional enough to extend the courtesy of objectivity to this topic. (Context)

P.S. The comments at Mediaite on this are amazing.

*More perspective from Turncoat Diva.

** Bigs contributor Dan Riehl chimes in.