Why do Democrats keep losing elections?

Well, according to Caitlin Flanagan's waste-of-last-page-space essay in this week's Time magazine, it's not because they can't seem to articulate a message and continually allow Republicans to direct the discourse–it's because Democrats are meanies to proud housewives like herself and their real families who are living the American dream, circa 1950s.

Flanagan sums it up in the not at all tired paraphrase, "It's the contempt, stupid."

"Here's why they're after me," she writes. "I have made a lifestyle choice that they can't stand, and I'm not cowering in the closet because of it."

It's not the Democratic Party as a whole Flanagan argues "rejects the family," but rather:

It's a small but very vocal minority, the Democratic pundits, who abhor what I represent because it doesn't fit the stereotypical image of the modern woman who has escaped from domestic prison. Fifty years ago, a stay-at-home mom who loved her husband would not automatically be assumed to be a Republican.

Oh, please. Like it or not, being a "housewife" today is a luxury. Any contempt that may be directed your way has nothing to do with malicious derision of your love for your traditional family–it's because you have the economic privilege to stay home, depend on someone else for your livelihood and publish self-justifying "essays about family life" to fill your surplus of time and bolster your self-esteem.

You didn't make some noble and reasoned "life choice" that's open to everyone–you got lucky to find yourself with the resources to make it possible to live a life in which your greatest worry is being mistaken for a Republican on your book tour.

And if that's how you can and prefer to live your life, more power to you in living the leisured dream–but your "stereotypical" contemporaries who are independent and attempting to accomplish things out in the world beyond their homes sure as hell don't have to respect you as an equal.

This, as I informed our fine campus women's center in the free-response e-mail survey they foolishly sent me yesterday, is why I most certainly would not consider myself a "feminist."

In the feminist illogic, all too often, anything a women does is good and right just because she's a woman, who must overcome so very much to carry on even the simplest tasks of daily life. Whatever happened to humanism, supporting anyone of any sex who is a decent person or does good things?

Feminists are the ones who can argue that stay-at-home moms and Harvard chick-lit plagiarists are just as worthy of attention, acclaim and monetary reward as someone like Mukhtaran Bibi, featured in the very same issue of Time as one of the year's 100 most influential people.

If you've never heard of her, she's the Pakistani woman whose story has been chronicled by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. She was gang-raped as institution-sanctioned punishment for an "honor crime" her brother committed, and instead of killing herself in shame as is customary, she took her attackers to court and used her compensation and donations from Times readers to start up a school for girls and a shelter, pretty much single- handedly challenging prevailing unjust social and legal norms and standing up to death threats and international leaders who want to silence her in the process.

Next to stories like hers, it's more than a little sickening to read a pompous, wealthy, militant housewife waste a guest column in one of the most widely read news magazines on earth whining about how her pompous, wealthy politicians aren't pandering directly enough to her values.

That's not constructive or praiseworthy–and far from being feminist or humanist, it's just plain childish.