Last week, many leftist fake news outlets ranging from Jezebel to Mic cued their perennial outrage over a handful of female journalists being barred from the Speaker’s Lobby for wearing sleeveless dresses. One hot take from Mediate even blamed Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) for imposing these rules, implying that it was part of his continued campaign to make women look like objects.
However, as The Daily Wire‘s Aaron Bandler correctly pointed out, this dress code has been in place for decades and was also enforced by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). As Tiana Lowe of National Review wrote, this dress code also affects men to the same degree as it does to women:
If anything, the capricious enforcement of the rule is biased against reporters, and . . . well, men. In 95-degree heat with 90 percent humidity, a shirt, suit jacket, long pants, and a tie is indisputably more uncomfortable than a knee-length dress with sleeves. Representative Jim Mattox began protesting this requirement 38 years ago, back when Tip O’Neill, a Democrat, was speaker of the House.
The outrage toward the Speaker’s Lobby dress code reached new lows thanks to moronic leftist “comedian” and anti-Trump sycophant Chelsea Handler, who made a take so hot that it melted the steel beams on the Burj Khalifa:
Paul Ryan enforcing dress code in Speaker’s Lobby in the U.S. Capitol that bans women from showing their shoulders. Welcome to Abu Dhabi.
— Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) July 11, 2017
Abu Dhabi is the second most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a nation-state that treats women as second-class citizens, prevents women from possessing autonomy over their love lives, allows female genital mutilation, and makes it difficult for women to seek justice in sexual assault and rape cases for fear of being charged with having sexual relations outside of marriage. Handler apparently believes that a decades-long dress code meant to maintain professionalism in Congress is equitable to the treatment that women receive in the UAE.
It goes without saying that women in the United States are some of the freest individuals in the world and are protected under robust constitutional and civil rights including free speech, gun rights, due process, voting, and protections against discrimination. Handler apparently believes it is totally permissible to minimize the institutionalized misogyny in the UAE in order to score political points against Speaker Ryan and the Republicans, who are only maintaining the same dress code that has been imposed under Democrats and female Speakers of the House. It is insane to compare the two nations and their cultures on its face without completely disregarding the facts or manipulating your audience to justify malicious outrage toward your political opponents.
No wonder Donald Trump won the election with this kind of immense stupidity, not only from Chelsea Handler, but a significant proportion of the American Left.