Tim Kaine showed his true colors last week and The Richmond Times-Dispatch took notice. In a cabinet confirmation hearing for Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos, Kaine showed his sexist ways and asked her to explain a comment made by her husband years ago.
Check out this scathing review of his inappropriate line of questioning:
But one of Kaine’s questions in particular seemed out of place:
“You and your husband spoke at a conference a number of years ago, and your husband said — this was not attributed to you, but you were together at the conference, if what I read is correct — ‘The church has been displaced by the public school as the center for activity, the center of what goes on in the community.’ Thomas Jefferson didn’t view public education as contrary to or competitive with church or religion. Do you?”
How curious.
Kaine has been in the public eye for more than two decades. His wife, Anne Holton — who has been both a judge and the head of Virginia’s Department of Education — has been in the public eye perhaps even longer, given that her father, Gov. Linwood Holton, transferred her to a public school in the wake of desegregation.
In all that time, we don’t recall a single instance in which Holton was asked to answer for her husband’s views (or vice versa). Nor should she have been.
After all, a woman does not stop being an independent person when she gets married. She still does her own thinking, and need not subordinate her opinions to those of her husband. In fact, it seems rather sexist to imply otherwise.
So why did Kaine?