Earlier this year, The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker appeared on Greta Van Susteren’s MSNBC show “On The Record” as part of a panel discussing the Women’s March. To be clear, while the Women’s March was an amazing event for a host of reasons, this article is not about that March. It is about the unfortunate, inaccurate and sexist comments made by Ms. Parker while discussing the Women’s March. For some reason, Ms. Parker felt it appropriate to suddenly state, “men don’t have the attention span to pull something like this off.” (I am pretty sure Martin Luther King, Jr. was male, and I seem to remember him organizing some kind of March, but I digress.) When the rest of the panel expressed disagreement with her comment, Ms. Parker unfortunately doubled down by saying, “Well, you know…what [divorced] men do is just run off, get married again and have more kids.”
The fact that she was comfortable making these statements on national television says a lot by itself. Moreover, these comments are ultimately not helpful to the many men and women who are working very hard to achieve gender equality. To be clear, women have faced (and continue to face) their share of sexist comments. Those comments are as equally inaccurate and unhelpful as Ms. Parker’s comments about men during the Women’s March. This op-ed focuses on how Ms. Parker’s comments are indicative of a larger, systemic issue in our society, and that we must overcome that kind of divisive rhetoric for all our sakes.