Let’s (NOT) play the victimhood game
The N&O’s new legislature reporter Lauren Horsch — who most recently scribbled for the horridly leftist IndyWeek — is employing some of the same agitation tactics her former employer is so famous for. According to Lauren, it IS an outrage that the percentage of women who reside in North Carolina is much higher than the percentage of the General Assembly that happens to be female.
It can’t simply be the fact that many many women just aren’t interested in running for office. (*It can’t be that not so many have run. It’s GOT to be bigotry. GOT TO BE.*)
Lauren even hauls out Bev Perdue — who, by the way, is a horrible example to bring up if you are trying to convince the voters to elect more women — to try and illustrate her point.
If we follow the logic of Lauren and her fellow travelers, perhaps we need to do SOMETHING about the NFL and the NBA. As of July 2016, blacks made up 13.3% of the US population. In the 2014-2015 season, black players constituted 74.4% of the NBA. In 2016, 70 percent of the NFL’s players were black.
Let’s look at Jones Street. In the North Carolina Senate, 11 of the 15 Democrats are black. (One is of Indian descent.) That’s 73 percent of the Democrat Caucus in the Senate. In 2016, 46 percent of all North Carolina Democrats were black.
I don’t believe there is a significant number out there who say: “Hmmm, he’s a DUDE. I’m voting for him.”
(I have come across people who make candidate choices based on dumb things like, oh, the candidate shaking their hand at the grocery store, or the candidate being next-door neighbors and best buds with cousin Eddie.)
Name ID is probably the biggest thing voters key on. Many others also look to stands on the issues. 
Now, you KNOW Lauren and many of the others screaming about this, um, “outrage” would cringe mightily at the idea of voting for, say, Nicole Revels or Fern Shubert. (Two politically active women here in North Carolina who see things from the RIGHT side of the fence.) The word WOMEN to those people equals diehard allegiance to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand-and-without-apology and pretty much the entire text of Marx’s Communist Manifesto. (Just like the folks who blast Ben Carson, Herman Cain, and Clarence Thomas as not being sufficiently “black” because they view things from the RIGHT side of the fence.)
Candidates should be evaluated on ethics, talents and their stands on the issues. NOT biological traits they are born with.
The hiring at the N&O confirm its status as a leftwing propaganda sheet. Real journalists need not apply.
I happen to be a woman and happen to be a Representative in the NCGA.
Outrage? There are more women in the NCGA today than in History. Lauren does NOT speak for me or many of my other female colleagues.
Male or Female Representative? How about a qualified and great Representative? Gender has nothing to do with this job.
Representative Beverly G Boswell
I wrote a column in 2013: LIBERTY at what price? I would love to resubmit it to you in response to this woman with MIS- placed priorities.
The article covers women in the Navy’s roles BEFORE Equal Opportunity and the price the family has paid since, for the evolution of women seeking power and position.
I volunteered to serve in the Navy during the Vietnam years, BEFORE ‘equal opportunity’. Yet when I succeeded in being selected for the rank of Captain, I turned it down to enjoy the greatest challenge a woman could have: being WIFE, MOM, and HOMEMAKER. We are confronting the PROGRESSIVE’S war to destroy family and enable ‘government’ to raise our children. Women can do many things, but no one is better qualified, nor more important, than a mom to raise her own children.
Bonnie Dougherty
CDR, USN RET.