Opinion: Carl Paladino’s women problem -- there weren’t any women

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Whoa, whoa, whoa. The press is justifiably full of stories reporting New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino’s remarks about gay lifestyles -– but it’s left to the New York Post to tell me that female reporters and photographers were banned from Paladino’s appearance at a synagogue, where he made some of these remarks?

Religious reasons, the Post reported, barred women from covering the Paladino event at a synagogue in Brooklyn.

So, stop right there. Carl Paladino is apparently cool with the fact that representatives of more than half of the nation’s population are excluded from doing their jobs and covering an event featuring one of the two major parties’ candidates for governor of the nation’s third-most-populous state? Excluded female journalists, the Post reported, had to stay outside on the sidewalk, where they had insult added to injury when someone dumped water on them.

Think this doesn’t matter? Think again. Would Paladino have agreed to appear at an event at which the organizers had said, OK, but no black reporters allowed? No Latino journalists? Had that happened, Paladino would have had an even bigger self-made mess on his hands than he does now.

I couldn’t help but think of the National Press Club which, shamefully, represented something less than the ‘national’ press for decades, because it excluded women from membership until ... get ready for it ... 1971.

Even that commie clown Nikita Khrushchev realized that he couldn’t brag about equal opportunity for women in the Soviet Union and also practice discrimination abroad; in 1959, female reporters persuaded Khrushchev not to speak at the Press Club unless women were admitted. And so they were -– but only for that event.

Why would Carl Paladino -- who this spring sent out an e-mail of a video of a woman having sex with a horse, a move for which he later apologized -- evidently have no problem giving a speech at an event at a venue that allowed male journalists but excluded female journalists?

The L.A. Times has an update on the damage control in the matter.

-- Patt Morrison