Democracy has failed us!

Apparently. Well, at least according to the Daily Tar Heel. The basic premise of the article “Student Congress lacks female representation” is that the current system (i.e. students electing representatives to Student Congress) is not truly representative because there aren’t enough women. This paragraph is especially instructive:

“Leaders say the way members are elected and the way individuals seek seats make the organization fail to demographically or ideologically represent the student body.”

Hum… “the way members are elected” is failing us. Let’s ponder this for a second. The campus is split up into districts based on geography: south campus, mid-campus, north campus, etc… Students electing their own representatives somehow fails to be representative demographically or ideologically? Apparently, they’re claiming the districts are gerrymandered to return more conservative, male representatives than otherwise would be. How is this possible? At a school that’s overwhelmingly liberal and over 3:2 female to male, I’m not sure this is even possible.

The “way individuals seek seats” is also a trouble spot. Yes, attending a meeting, collecting twenty signatures, and putting up posters to garner votes is really the cause of a lack of representation. Holding elections? Man, so biased in favor of conservative males.

So really, the underlying claim is that democracy is failing us. Which is absolutely absurd.

Now, let’s consider the reason why they think democracy is not truly representative: because there aren’t enough women in Congress. No reason is given as to how this possibly affects Congress negatively. As I tried to point out in the article, the business that Congress conducts doesn’t have a male versus female perspective.

When Bounce magazine approaches Congress requesting money for the eight issues they publish a year, there isn’t a male-female divide on how much money to provide. If the event or item is vital to the mission of the organization, Student Congress must appropriate funds to them. The business of Student Congress is fairly objective. It’s not as if the “half-plus-one” rule for funding publications is a male construction and the addition of more females would alter that. Or is that really what the DTH is arguing?

That would be highly ironic considering the fact that, for the past few decades, extremist feminists have been trying to whitewash the fact that there are differences in the sexes, so apparently the DTH is allowing that fact. But, still, left unsaid is what differences would actually be…