Conservativism and Feminism Combined

Last night, Tammy Bruce tried to convince a small audience in Jerome Greene Hall that feminism and conservatism are not mutually exclusive.

In an event sponsored by the Columbia College Republicans, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and other equally diverse campus groups, Tammy Bruce delivered a lecture on the dangers of group politics and what she characterized as the hypocrisy of the leftist establishment. She also touched on a wide variety of current political issues, including abortion, AIDS, hate crime legislation, and, more locally, the possible return of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps to campus.

Bruce, an openly gay, pro-choice, pro-death penalty Democrat who voted for President Clinton twice and currently supports President Bush, is a woman none too fond of labels.

“I’m shunned by the gay community because I’m not the right kind of gay,” Bruce said. “I’m rejected by the feminist establishment for the same reasons.”

Bruce, once the president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, the National Organization for Women, claimed that leftist special interest groups promote conformity in the place of individualism, co-opt issues of importance, and exploit the very people they purport to protect. She characterized leftist politics as essentially collectivist and repressive.

“There is no room for dissent on the left,” said Bruce. “The moment you give into their framework, you surrender your individualism.”

Conversely, Bruce described today’s conservative movement as tolerant and supportive of the individual.

“The right demands that you be yourself,” said Bruce. “The right believes in succeeding on your own, being challenged and confronted.”

In her speech, Bruce also addressed many issues currently featured in the national political consciousness. Though she is adamantly pro-choice, she angrily lamented what she called the liberal movement’s glorification of abortion.

“Abortion is a failure of the feminist establishment,” Bruce said. “With every kind of birth control available in the world, abortion is not something to be proud of. If you need an abortion, you’ve failed.”

Bruce, once affiliated with ActUp, a gay rights group that promotes AIDS awareness, condemned today’s gay community for treating AIDS too lightly. After decrying the current “bareback movement,” the resurgence of unprotected sex among gay men, she said that she is ashamed that AIDS is still an issue.

Bruce went on to denounce hate crime legislation as inherently discriminatory.

“I refuse to have my life mean more than anyone else’s,” Bruce said. “America is not based on some crimes being worse than others, on some lives being more valuable than others. The civil rights movement began as a reaction to this problem.”

Broadening her focus, she even touched on the hotly contested issue of whether the ROTC should be allowed on campus. She said that the exclusion of the ROTC is no different from the exclusion of other on-campus groups.

Bruce, a native of Los Angeles, graduated from the University of Southern California. She is the author of The New Thought Police and The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values, a New York Times best seller. She served two years as a member of the National NOW board of directors and was the first openly gay women to host a mainstream talk-radio show, the “Tammy Bruce Show.”