Pink Elephants

Pink Elephants
In a government where the battle for equal rights is steadily moving forward, the number of women in Congress is still smaller than it could be. Women such as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are certainly well-known, but how much do these political figures actually relate to the majority of women? With the 2010 midterm elections right around the corner, Betsy Reed, executive editor of The Nation, examines the issue of women in the Republican Party. Addressing the more liberal readers of The Nation in her October 18, 2010 article, “Sex and the GOP,” Reed attempts to convince readers of the irony that is the “GOP [Republican] Year of the Woman” (1).
She grabs the reader’s attention by introducing conservative women as the Republican Party sees them: tough women who will bring a fresh outlook. However, with so many liberal Republican women rejected in the primaries, the author suggests that putting the attention on conservative women is merely a marketing strategy designed to bring more votes to the Republican Party. For this reason, Reed argues that the majority of female voters are still represented unfairly despite the presence of women in Congress.
Reed’s argument is broken into three sections, allowing her to introduce the problem, provide some background, and analyze why it is an issue. In the first section, the author examines republican women who lost in order to give the reader an idea of what gender inequality looks like. She makes an example of women candidates Murkowski and Norton, both of which are liberal on abortion issues and lost with “little support from the party as they battled hard-right male challengers” (2). This section of “Sex and the GOP” is ineffective because it is based on three logical fallacies. The first fallacy makes it sound as if the two women were targeted purely because of their gender when other factors, such as their political views, were likely involved. Next, Reed suggests that the party should have stuck...