Editor,

The Old Goats, a South Whidbey conservative group, hosted Republicans Rick Hannold and Tim Hazelo for their May meeting. Both are running to unseat Janet St. Clair from the Island County Board of Commissioners. The fact that Commissioner St. Clair was not invited to that meeting reveals plenty. It also gave Rick Hannold — who lost to St. Clair in 2018, I’ll remind you — space to demonize St. Clair in two ways, one misogynistic and the other superstitious:

First, he literally said that what the county commission needs is a man. So … in Hannold’s puny mind, being male is superior to being female. By his thinking, any man is categorically better than any female. I guess that is old goat thinking. It’s reprehensible to me.

To further reveal who he is, Hannold went on to call St. Clair an “evil woman.” Dismissing women as “evil“ has a long and deadly history. It returns us to the dark ages when menfolk exploited things they didn’t understand as mysterious, black magic, witchcraft, evil. Patriarchal zealots have literally burned people at the stake for being female. With a broad stroke to history I will say that while women were busy birthing and nursing babies, tending hearths and bandaging the war wounds of crusading menfolk, those menfolk chose to call female pursuits evil and women devils for having such knowledge and skill. Sadly, tendrils of this ignorance used to subjugate women wind themselves around us still. Women’s bodies, women’s voices, women’s power have been relegated to evil by people like Hannold, who stoop to superstition to thwart women’s very existence. Whether your life centers on a high-powered career or keeps you closer to children, home and hearth … make no mistake: patriarchal thinking seeks to control and demonize you for being female. Femaleness is a threat to male dominance.

Hannold engages in superstitious hysteria, publicly portraying a woman as evil for his own political gain. He flirts with dangerous history rather than considering the needs of contemporary Island County. It reveals his willingness to pander to misogyny and superstition in others.

I encourage you to ignore old goat thinking. Please vote for Janet St. Clair who has worked with integrity and great stamina for the people of Island County for four years. We benefit from her continued willingness to serve us, the planet, justice and democracy.

Susan Cyr

Langley