The indispensable Kathy G had a great post yesterday on John McCain's awful record on women's issues. But just one quibble: Kathy writes, "[T]he sorry truth of it is that John McCain started out as a far-right, Barry Goldwater-type conservative, and he's never strayed far from those origins." But actually, Barry Goldwater, unlike any iteration of McCain, was consistently pro-choice.
His first wife, Peggy, was a founder of Arizona Planned Parenthood. Their daughter had an abortion at age 20, with the full support of her dad. And Goldwater strongly supported Sandra Day O'Connor's bid for the Supreme Court, defending her against Republicans who believed she was too pro-choice for the position. At a press conference toward the end of his life, Goldwater said he would like to give the religious right a swift kick "below the hip." And unlike McCain, who rues the day he called Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance," Goldwater never retreated from that critique.
In other words, by the time of his death, Goldwater truly was a "maverick" within his own party when it came to reproductive freedom. With his 0 percent NARAL rating, John McCain isn't now, and never has been.
--Dana Goldstein
