Open letter to Senator McCain on his statement that women need more education to earn equal pay . . .

Senator McCain,

Your comments about women needing more education to earn salaries commensurate with those paid to men are simply . . . well . . . uneducated! Did you know that nationwide, women tend to be equally or more educated than the men in their own families?

Saying that women need more education to equal men is analogous to another very common abuse of women. Men have long blamed women for their own poor behavior toward them, something that happens all too frequently. You're putting the onus on the victim.

Women have been trained to take the blame for years, and men have been trained that they can often shift the blame for their actions to women. Women are scapegoats for all kinds of things. Generally speaking this is a fairly emotional process between individual people, with women being complicit in the deception, and willingly taking the onus upon themselves because they were not taught to set strong boundaries and respect themselves in their youth. This is a tragic situation but is being corrected in younger generations, thank goodness.

However this situation is worse, because we're talking about employers manipulating this sorry state of affairs for their own economic gain. There's an old saying: "Where there's muck, there's geldt." As in, where people are so powerless that they have no say in what they are paid for their labors, they will be paid the least amount the boss can get away with. Each worker that can be paid even a little less, means, over time, more money in the boss's bank account. This is not about education, it's about corporate greed - on any scale, small or large. It's deceitful, and it's cheating. And, Mr. McCain, you are supporting this miserly deception with your hateful and just plain wrong comments.

But this falls right in with the entire McCain outlook. You've proven that you are weak on human rights, soft on regulating big business, and that you basically represent more of the same old poop.

You've also shown that you would be happy to maroon our troops in Iraq for 100 years, while torturing gay members of the armed services by supporting the ridiculous "don't ask, don't tell" rule. No, I'm not gay, but I think it is abusive to force any person to hide their most basic nature from their fellow humans, as if it were in any way shameful.

I'm sorry to say this, but it looks like you are resting on your laurels as a soldier in the past, when you should be standing up and supporting those who are now soldiers. Information is coming out of Iraq suggesting that the same kinds of brutal things we did in Viet Nam are being done again in Iraq. Kids are coming home dead-eyed and damaged, from being made to do inhuman acts. (Take a look at http://www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier ) You're supporting the same old "Might is Right" garbage that allows an armed force to treat weaker people horribly, and seeks to justify this treatment. The fact is, however, that they do it because they can.

Which leads us right back to employers paying women less, just because they can. Why can they? Because senators like you refuse to legislate equal pay for women. Why do you, and they? Because it serves the economic interests of you and people who support you. It's not about education, it's not about rights. It's about money.