Rep. Gov. Sexist Comments On TV Outrages Women

Want to know why children are doing poorly at school? It’s those working moms, according to Mississippi’s Republican governor, who has ignited a heated debate with his claims, including his remark that it isn’t a mother’s place to teach a child to read. 

Yes, decline of education standards is linked to women in the workplace and women teaching children to read, according to Republican Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, driving his points into homes while interviewed on TV.

During a televised panel discussion Friday, Republican Gov. Phil Bryant quickly realised his controversial remarks would cause a backlash.  

He stood by his antiquated chauvinistic claims, as though really believing that women should not be educated [well, maybe just through high school is OK] and should not contribute to the world in any other way other than as a house maid and sex partner.

He was not trying to blame working women for children’s declining education, though, he later claimed.

Asked why American children’s test results had become ‘so mediocre’, he told the panel, hosted by the Washington Post: “Both parents started working, and the mom is in the work place. That’s not a bad thing. I’m going to get in trouble. I can just see – I can see the emails tomorrow. But now, both parents are working. They’re pursuing careers. It’s a great American story now – that women are in the work place.”

He went on to shock viewers by saying he didn’t believe it was the mother’s place to teach children to read.

He added that before women started working, there was a ‘loving, nurturing opportunity’ and both parents had a more time to devote to the family.

Equal opportunities for women began notably in the 1950s and 60s. The struggle for women to be accepted as equal in the workplace is epitomised in the successful TV series Mad Men, set during this period.

Before the womens’ liberation movement, the role for women was the matriarch, the mother and home-maker, cook, cleaner, house organizer, sex partner, nurse, entertainer.

“We’ve come a long way, baby” needs to be explained to Gov. Bryant – on his way out the door of the state capitol without a key.

With leadership like Bryant, no wonder Mississippi has a reputation of having the lowest ranked education system in the United States.

But not to worry, ladies, Phil Bryant’s got other plans that make children smart and well, according to the Jackson Tribune, contributing this last August about the oily man:

Come and listen to a story ’bout a man named Phil.

#A poor governor barely kept his state fed.

#Then one day, he was shinin’ up his boots.

#And up through the ground, he hoped, would come a bubblin’ crude.

#Oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea.

Bryant’s been hopin’ there’s oil in those them hills of northwest Mississippi.

At a meeting of the Southern States Energy Board July 27, Bryant and Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley announced the commission of a joint study of tar sands between the two states.

Sources: Washington Post, Jackson Tribune