Bush has made several appointment during his term as president which have gone virtually unnoticed. They are more indicative of his real views and agenda than any speech ever could be.
Bush chose
Nancy Pfotenhauer, president and CEO of the right-wing Independent Women's Forum, to serve on the National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women. The IWF actively opposed the Violence Against Women Act. According to IWF's web site, "
The battered women's movement has outlived its useful beginnings."
Bush appointed
Wade Horn as assistant secretary for family support in the U.S. Health and Human Services Department. As president of the National Fatherhood Institute, Horn
said that low-income kids whose parents aren't married should be last in line for Head Start and other benefits. Horn tried to back away from tnese statements at his confirmation hearings. Then, after Horn's appointment, HHS began to offer special services to welfare recipients - if they agree to marry.
President Bush chose
Leon Kass, MD to head the President's Council of Bioethics. Kass has written,
"For the first time in human history, mature women by the tens of thousands live the entire decade of their twenties - their most fertile years - neither in the homes of their fathers nor in the homes of their husbands; unprotected, lonely, and out of sync with their inborn nature."
In June 2004, Bush re-appointed
Dr. W David Hager to the Food and Drug Administration's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. Hager has written about Christ's ability to heal women's illnesses and reportedly refused to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women. Hager was
the leading force behind the FDA's rejection of over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception, over the overwhelming recommendation of two FDA advisory panels.
The Senate in July 2004 approved Bush's nomination of
James Leon Holmes to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kansas. Bolmes, an anti-Abortion Rights activist, supports a Constitutional amendment to ban all abortions and said that
"concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami." Holmes has also spoken out against the separation of church and state, and co-wrote (with his wife) an article proclaiming that,
"The wife is to subordinate herself to the husband... and... place herself under the authority of the man." Holmes' views on women's rights can be summed up in his belief that supporting feminism ultimately contributes "to the culture of death."
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