Profile of Kim Gandy
By Lisa Makson
DiscoverTheNetworks.org
March 2005

·        President of National Organization for Women

·        Stated that the real “tyranny” against women was not in Saddam’s Iraq, but in the United States

·        Likened President Bush to Saddam Hussein

·        “To say you’re a feminist and to say you’re anti-choice is definitely a contradiction.”

Louisiana native Kim Gandy has been active at the state, local, and national levels of the National Organization for Women (NOW) since 1973 and is the group’s current president. She took over the reigns of NOW when Patricia Ireland stepped down in 2001 due to term limits. During her tenure, Gandy has shepherded NOW further along its path into the deep political left.

Gandy graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a BS in mathematics in 1973. Like Patricia Ireland, Gandy studied law after becoming involved with her local NOW chapter; she graduated from New Orleans’ Loyola University Law School in 1978. After graduation, Gandy served as a New Orleans senior assistant district attorney before opening a private practice where she specialized in women’s rights issues, which included domestic violence, sex and race discrimination, and lesbian-mother custody cases. During that time Gandy drafted several bills, such as Louisiana’s first Domestic Abuse Assistance Act and the Louisiana Child Support Enforcement Act. Gandy served three years as state NOW president in Louisiana, and was elected to NOW’s national board in 1982, taking up the executive vice president post in 1991.

Gandy currently resides in Washington, D.C. with her husband, Christopher “Kip” Lornell, an ethnomusicologist and part-time professor of Africana studies at George Washington University. She has two daughters: Elizabeth Cady Lornell (named after suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton) and Katherine Eleanor Gandy (named after former NOW board member Katherine Austin, former NOW President Eleanor Smeal, and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt).

During her 10-year tenure as NOW’s executive vice president, Gandy led the organization’s litigation, legislative and government relations agenda. She also lobbied hard against work requirements for female victims of domestic violence. “Work [requirements] would be like making her [the domestic violence victim] stand on a trap door,” Gandy said. Gandy has argued that any cuts to federal public assistance would only lead to more violence against women.

Under Gandy’s leadership, NOW has become more overtly political than feminist. Characterizing the U.S. war on Iraq as a thinly veiled quest for hegemony in the Middle East, Gandy opposes what she calls “the opportunistic use of fighting terrorism as an excuse for massive imperial expansion, for a war on Iraq, and for the continuation of unilateral policies in violation of international law.”

Despite the horrific realities of Saddam’s regime for Iraqi women who were brutalized, raped, and murdered by Saddam Hussein’s secret police, Gandy has equated the plight of American women to that of their Iraqi counterparts, noting that the real “tyranny” is right here in America. Condemning Gandy’s propaganda (and that of Gandy’s fellow radical feminists), columnist Tammy Bruce (a former president of NOW’s Los Angeles chapter) writes: “The feminist establishment’s political game with women’s lives is particularly disgraceful as they, of all interest groups, have a special duty to support ridding the world of Saddam. There are thousands of dead Iraqi women who know how you betray them, in the name of politics, in the name of hating George W. Bush, in the name of your own cynical political hypocrisy.”

Notwithstanding the misogynist impulses of Islamic terrorists, Gandy also opposes the U.S. government’s use of the Patriot Act as a means of thwarting their activities. She claims that the Act’s real purpose is to abrogate the First Amendment and “stifle political dissent.” However, Gandy fully supports using the Patriot Act “to protect women, doctors and [abortion] clinic staff from … [pro-life] ideological terrorists.”

Gandy uses her bully pulpit as NOW’s purportedly “non-partisan” president to act as a cheerleader for Democrats. For example, during Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, instead of chastising Clinton for his abuse of women, Gandy joined with other pro-Democrat feminist activists such as Feminist Majority’s Eleanor Smeal and Betty Friedan to demand that then-Speaker of the House Bob Livingston (R-La.) stop the trial, saying that “[e]very woman in this country needs” this “three-ring circus” to “stop.” For Gandy, the real abuser was “the conservative majority in Congress with their relentless attacks on women’s rights.”

Gandy continued her Democratic cheerleading during the 2000 presidential campaign, where she helped coach Al Gore on how to “reach the women of this country.” “When it comes to the issues that affect women’s lives,” said Gandy, “Vice President Gore has it all over Governor [George W.] Bush.”

Today Gandy consistently uses her NOW post to hector President Bush, of whom she has said the following:

·        “There is no question in the minds of all these huge women’s organizations that a Bush presidency would be a disaster for women.”

·        “[Y]esterday, when we protested the coronation (whoops – inauguration) of George W. Bush for a second term. . . ”

·        “The real terrorism is the Bush administration’s disregard for international law and destruction of civil liberties at home. This has become an issue of one dictator [Bush] versus another [Saddam Hussein].”

Gandy supports race- and gender-based preferences in employment and academia, as well as pro-abortion litmus tests for judicial appointments. For Gandy, the issue of abortion is also the primary litmus test that determines whether or not a woman is a feminist. “To say you’re a feminist and to say you’re anti-choice is definitely a contradiction,” Gandy asserts.

In a 2003 interview, Gandy expressed her burning desire to keep abortion legal, so that if her own children ever decided to abort a child, they would be able to. “I don't want to be part of the generation that won reproductive rights and then lost it before our daughters had that benefit,” said Gandy. “And I look at my two little girls. They’re seven and nine. And I know that I'm in this movement because I want to make sure that they will have choices.”

Although she favors the existence of all-women’s private colleges such as Wellesley and Smith, Gandy opposes single-sex education in public schools. Referring to the Bush Administration’s decision to permit single-sex public schools and classrooms, Gandy said: “Sex discrimination in the classroom or the workplace is shameful. . . . We tried separate-but-equal a long time ago and it didn’t work. . . . Segregation was wrong in the past – and it’s wrong now.” 

Though Gandy herself is married, she dismisses the notion that marriage is generally beneficial to women, especially poor women. “I think promoting marriage as a goal in and of itself is misguided,” she said. “The marriage movement is giving women the message that a bad husband and father is better than none at all. Single moms are being demonized. NOW is committed to exposing and organizing against this deliberate return to the days of unchallenged male control.”

As NOW president, one of Gandy’s top stated priorities is to prevent President Bush from “turning back the clock” on women’s rights. “[W]e see our health, our rights and our democracy teetering on the brink,” says Gandy. “This is a nation founded on the promise of liberty and equality. This is the country where generation after generation battled for inclusion in that promise. We hope and dream our daughters will grow up with clean air and water, a good education, full health care, freedom from bigotry, hatred and violence, and with equal access to the bounty of this country, without taking it from the pockets of the rest of the world. And all this in a world at peace. Our hard-won gains of the past thirty years are in jeopardy, as George W. Bush takes from the poor and gives to the rich, as he appoints judges determined to take away our rights and our choices, and as an increasingly loud and empowered backlash against women’s equality takes hold. The next four years are going to be tough, but fortunately, so are we.”