President Obama handed out the 2013 Presidential Medals of Freedom November 20, and among the 16 honorees was aggressive feminist and abortion advocate Gloria Steinem (shown from 1995).
Established in 1963 by President Kennedy, the Presidential Medal of Freedom is supposedly the nation’s highest honor for a civilian, “presented to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”
Several days before receiving the award, Steinem told the National Press Club that she hoped the honor would reflect “the work of Margaret Sanger,” the Planned Parenthood founder notorious for advocating eugenics and birth control to control certain people, groups, and races. “I hope this is retroactive in honoring the work of Margaret Sanger,” said Steinem, as quoted by CNSNews.com. “I hope that she would celebrate this recognition that reproductive freedom is a human right at least as crucial as freedom of speech and that no government should dictate whether or when we have children,” Steinem said.
In 1921, Margaret Sanger wrote that as a birth control advocate she believed “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” A year later she would claim that “eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems.”
CNSNews noted that “as an activist for the women’s movement, Steinem, who founded Ms. magazine, has championed abortion on demand, sex education in schools and gay marriage…. Steinem praised Obama in her Press Club remarks, saying that no president understands ‘reproductive freedom’ like he does. ‘There’s no president in history from whose hand I would be more honored to receive this medal,’ Steinem said.”
Writing in the American Thinker, M. Catharine Evans reflected that it was fitting that Steinem, whom she described as a “self-proclaimed Marxist,” would receive the presidential medal from Obama. “The male-bashing, anti-family, anti-American Steinem beamed as the guy who voted three times against a partial-birth abortion ban while in the Illinois state Senate placed the medal around her neck,” Evans wrote.
Evans noted that the December 1971 debut issue of Steinem’s Ms. magazine “immediately went to work pushing abortion as the issue at the heart of the women’s movement. It featured fifty-three well-known U.S. women declaring they had undergone abortions despite state laws against the procedure.”
As he presented the Medal of Freedom to Steinem, Obama noted that in her writing, speaking, and activism the aggressive feminist and abortion advocate “awakened a vast and often skeptical public to problems like domestic violence, the lack of affordable child care, unfair hiring practices. And because of her work, across America and around the world, more women are afforded the respect and opportunities that they deserve.”
Evans wrote that like Barack Obama, “Gloria Steinem rejects the notion that all life is sacred. She set out to kill the maternal conscience by persuading women that killing their babies was nothing, and he legislated the attack on mothers and children to the fullest extent possible. She laid the groundwork; Obama brought it home.”
During his administration, Obama has presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a number of individuals whose “meritorious contributions” would arguably be considered dubious, including openly homosexual activist and socialist Bayard Rustin (this year), homosexual activist Harvey Milk (2009), and former President Bill Clinton (this year).
LifeNews.com noted that those Obama has honored with the medal who are also aggressively pro-abortion include:
• Ted Kennedy (2009), who throughout his U.S. Senate career consistently voted for abortion, including voting against a ban on late-term abortion.
• Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who not only promoted “an unlimited right to abortion throughout pregnancy during her tenure on the Supreme Court,” recalled LifeNews, but also “authored the high court decision that overturned state bans on partial-birth abortion. The Supreme Court had to go back, years later, and reverse her decision to allow the national partial-birth abortion ban to stand.”
• Lesbian tennis player Billie Jean King, who “joined the pro-abortion group Emily’s List in march 2007 to work for the presidential campaign of abortion advocate Hillary Clinton,” reported the pro-life news site.
In addition to Steinem, Rustin, and Clinton, this year’s Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients included baseball great Henry Aaron, Oprah Winfrey, former Sen. Richard Lugar, and late Space Shuttle astronaut Sally Ride.
