OPINION:
House Democrats did the right thing for the wrong reason. Last week, the House voted 204-216 against legislation authorizing the construction of a new American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
For Democrats, the sticking point was a clause in the bill limiting exhibits to “biological women.” They are outraged that the transgendered — men who think they are women — would be thus excluded, proving once again that their party is a captive to political correctness.
It’s one of those 80-20 cultural issues where slavish devotion ideology forces Democrats onto the 20% side, which helped them to lose the 2024 election.
A handful of Republican House members joined their Democratic colleagues in opposing the bill for practical rather than ideological reasons. Why do we need a museum celebrating gender, they asked? Women are amply represented in the Smithsonian’s 11 other museums on the National Mall. Amelia Earhart is rightly celebrated in the National Air and Space Museum, not for her sex, but for her contributions to aviation.
There’s also the very real concern that a women’s museum would be captured by feminists and used to lionize radicals such as abortion rights and eugenics advocate Margaret Sanger.
Over the past few decades, various Smithsonian museums have veered far to the left. An exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, which outraged veterans’ groups, accused America of being the aggressor and was overly sympathetic to the Japanese.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture had a fawning exhibit on 1960s Marxist agitator Angela Davis. Try to imagine the museum paying tribute to Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the second-longest serving justice, who has become the court’s leading champion of originalism.
In 2020, the same museum declared in an online portal meant for discussing race that ideas like hard work, individualism and the nuclear family were among the “aspects and assumptions of whiteness.”
Would the envisioned women’s museum define marriage and childbearing as sexist institutions designed to enslave women? Would it turn into a dreary recitation of real and imagined sexual oppression through the ages? Would there be a section on drag queens?
An American Women’s History Museum would be strewn with ideological minefields. Let Democrats have their victory, killing the project to defend transgender rights.
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