God help us and keep us and beam us out of here on a giant spaceship: Bernie Sanders has weighed in on Killer Mike and #uterusgate and now we’re going to have to fight about it some more. At a Sanders rally a few days ago, Mike quoted a feminist scholar saying “A uterus doesn’t qualify you to be president.” Sanders both agreed with the general premise Killer Mike was getting at, and dismissed the controversy around his comments as a “gotcha media game.”
Killer Mike was quoting a conversation he had with feminist anti-racist scholar Jane Elliott, who confirmed to Gawker that he’d quoted her accurately.
“No one has ever heard me say, ‘Hey guys, let’s stand together, vote for a man,” Sanders told reporters aboard his plane Thursday. “I would never do that, never have.”
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, arguably the history of this country has been people standing together to vote for men, and a demonstrated, historically-based awareness of that can’t hurt. On a third, nonexistent hand, this controversy remains drainingly stupid.
Via MSNBC, Sanders’ full comments:
“What Mike said essentially is that … people should not be voting for candidates based on their gender, but based on what they believe. I think that makes sense,” said Sanders, who has mounted an unexpectedly strong challenge against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“I don’t go around, no one has ever heard me say, ‘Hey guys, let’s stand together, vote for a man.’ I would never do that, never have.”
Sanders continued: “In a presidential race, we look at what a candidate stands for, and we vote for the candidate who we think could best serve our country.”
OK! Moving on, we hope.
Contact the author at anna.merlan@jezebel.com.
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Sanders during a rally at Morehouse College, February 16, 2016. Photo via AP Images