An editor at The Huffington Post (HuffPo) is denouncing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for giving women a “slap in the face” by proposing they receive six weeks of paid maternity leave.
In a significant break with the Republican mold, the Trump campaign released a proposal Tuesday that calls for the federal government to guarantee six weeks of paid maternity leave for new mothers. The proposal, which also included tax breaks for stay-at-home mothers and childcare costs, was apparently concocted at the urging of Trump’s daughter Ivanka.
Regardless of how the proposal came about, HuffPo executive editor for business and technology Emily Peck says it’s utterly appalling and deeply sexist.
“Trump’s solution for struggling American families leaves out men,” Peck writes in a piece published Wednesday. “More than any other problem with the plan … omitting half the population is its profoundest and most revelatory flaw, confirming once again Trump’s antiquated, sexist and harmful worldview: Men work. Women do the child-raising. The end.”
Offering women six weeks of paid leave while they raise newborns, Peck says, isn’t really an advance but instead “rolls back decades of progress in work and in parenting in the U.S., where men have taken on more of the parenting work, and women slowly have become equals in the work world.” Peck says allowing only women to take maternity leave will get them slotted collectively into the “Mommy track” and hinder their long-term career prospects.
Peck even finds a convoluted way to accuse Trump of racism, without offering any justification for the assertion.
“The Trump scheme is really just a hazy fantasy in which white men drink scotch (or in Trump’s case, Diet Coke) all day at the office while a woman at home tends to all the details of life,” she says. “People of color were never quite included in the ‘traditional’ familial construct of stay-at-home mom and working dad.”
Peck’s intense denunciation of Trump isn’t as surprising once one looks at her writing history. Achieving gender parity for parental leave is something of an obsession for Peck, and she has written on the topic repeatedly over the years.
Like all other HuffPo articles on Trump, Peck’s piece ends with a non sequitur editor’s note denouncing him as “a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.”
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