The National bureau of NOW has issued a statement of support for Senator Kennedy

Jill over at Feministe and Ann at Feministing have already responded to the ham-handed "Betrayal" memo written and released by the head of NOW in New York State, Marcia Pappas.

Talk a living example of the "unhinged feminist" :

For more information contact: Marcia Pappas, 518-452-3944 - 518-469-2661

Senator Ted Kennedy Betrays Women by Not Standing for Hillary Clinton for President
Ultimate Betrayal Felt by Women Everywhere

ALBANY, NY (01/28/2008; 1101)(readMedia)-- Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard. Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, the Family Leave and Medical Act to name a few. Women have buried their anger that his support for the compromises in No Child Left Behind and the Medicare bogus drug benefit brought us the passage of these flawed bills. We have thanked him for his ardent support of many civil rights bills, BUT women are always waiting in the wings.

And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton (they will of course say they support a woman president, just not “this” one). “They” are Howard Dean and Jim Dean (Yup! That’s Howard’s brother) who run DFA (that’s the group and list from the Dean campaign that we women helped start and grow). They are Alternet, Progressive Democrats of America, democrats.com, Kucinich lovers and all the other groups that take women's money, say they’ll do feminist and women’s rights issues one of these days, and conveniently forget to mention women and children when they talk about poverty or human needs or America’s future or whatever.

This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability – indeed, our obligation - to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who “know what’s best for us.”

Jill has the total win of a rebuke :

Not only am I not a die-hard Clinton supporter,* but I work for Alternet, which is apparently on the release-writer’s Organizations to Kill list. I suppose I must have been psychologically gang-banged into whoring for the patriarchy — it’s the only possible explanation.

People tend to forget that Hillary and Bill Clinton come from the South. Christopher Hitchens, who has been flogging a book while flogging the Clintons, reminds us not only of that often forgotten fact. He also reminds us that it was Hillary who decided it would beneficial to hire then strategist to Jesse Helms, Dick Morris. Yes, Hillary Clinton hired the morally repellent Dick Morris, the PR & Marketing enabler of segregationist and white supremacist Jesse Helms.

This is why it is important for Third Wave Feminists to repudiate the pathetic rants of feminists like Pappas. It is important for especially the lighter skinned leaders of this new generation of feminists to call out the inherent racism of such remarks.

They need to do this because the old guard doesn't get it.

Too mired in their political correctness, they've learned to repressed their urge to overtly shoot the black man down. They intuitively know there would be a point of no return for them if they acknowledged that. So they've learned to cloak in gender-powered speech their racist biases.

And the Clintons have played those urges for all their worth.

The Clintonistas have succeeded in creating an "unelectable white man" by siphoning almost all establishment support away from John Edwards. Add a black man as the real contender for the nomination and you have enough to stir the white supremacist tendencies of the "over 45" female majority of the Democrats' primary voting base.

I am too old to be a third waver and too Puerto Rican to consider myself a feminist in US terms. Yet being a blogger has given me the chance to meet a lot of the leaders of this new wave of US feminism. They are part of the reason why after years of repudiating the term that identified me with the likes of a Gloria Steinem, I finally came to embrace the word.

Yes. The third wavers gave me the inspiration to call myself a feminist again. That's why Marcia Pappas doesn't speak for them.

For those who want her to know that, her phone numbers are at the top of her rant (518-452-3944 - 518-469-2661). Give her a call and let her know how you feel.

I certainly am going to give a good ring or two of my own.

H/T to Ben Smith's NY NOW : "Betrayal!"