Oh, Newt. You're such an asshole:
STUDENT: Hi, Speaker, I’m Holly Flynn, a freshman at the college. Two details of your film really stood out to me. One was Phyllis Schlafly’s commentary. And the other was the characterization of women winning World War II as a negative image. So I’d like you to clarify your stance on womens’ rights. And I’d like to know what you’d do to ensure gender equality in the United States. Given that even today, women make 77 cents to every man’s dollar.
GINGRICH: Well, the latter is going to change dramatically in the next generation because more women are going to college than men. And they’re doing better than men and entering professions more than men. In fact, if anything, you’ll be here in fifteen years wondering what we’ll do about [male] inequality and male unemployment. Because the people who had the deepest decline of income are males who don’t go to college.
But Newt isn't just an asshole; he's also wrong. Let's put aside, for a moment, report after report about how the so-called "mancession" has impacted women and turned into a "womancession." Or how that wage gap he so casually dismisses is very real and exists in nearly every kind of profession. And it doesn't matter if more women than men are attending college because they're still getting paid less than men when they graduate.
But the striking thing here is that when asked to "clarify" his position on women's rights, Newt's got nothing. He can't even be bothered to offer the kind of platitudes that were so popular among the Mama Grizzly crowd just a year ago. He just flat-out tells us that his stance on women's rights consists of worrying about "male inequality." Which really does tell you everything you need to know.
