OPINION: The boys are back in town [Detroit Free Press]

Jan. 08--Democrats aren't the only people who have become a lot scarcer in Lansing in the year since Republicans seized control of all three branches of state government. Women, too, are vanishing from the state capital, or at least from elected office, at an alarming rate.

In 2006, when then-state Rep. Gretchen Whitmer was promoted to the state Senate in a special election, she became one of 12 female senators.

But that was the high-water mark for women in Michigan's upper chamber. Whitmer, a Democrat from East Lansing, is the Senate Minority Leader now, but just three of her 37 colleagues -- outstate Republicans Judy Emmons and Tonya Schuitmaker, and Ann Arbor Democrat Rebekah Warren -- are women.

It's a similar story in the state House, where women hold just 27 of 110 seats, down from 31 in the two legislative sessions from 1997 to 2001, and in the executive branch, where Secretary of State Ruth Johnson is the lone woman among the top four elected officeholders, down from two of four from 1995 to 2010.

Michigan, which once boasted a greater percentage of female legislators than all but 20 other states, now ranks 36th out of 50 -- its lowest ranking in 35 years.

I mention all of this because I suspect it has a lot to do with the embarrassing spectacle that took place this past week when state Sen. Rick Jones, a Lansing-area Republican who is arguably the least evolved lawmaker in either party, likened longtime Lansing public relations executive Kelly Rossman-McKinney to "a hooker" in the Michigan Information and Research Services' widely read Capital Capsule, a daily report on state government news.

Rossman-McKinney, a self-described "tough old broad" who has worked in both houses of the Legislature and three executive branch departments, has been a fixture in the state capital for decades. She's about as thin-skinned as a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and she says she figured Jones would swing back after she named him one of Lansing's Biggest Losers of 2011 in an another MIRS interview.

But Rossman-McKinney says she was stunned when Jones responded by asserting that "Kelly, like a 'hooker,' works for whichever client hires her." She says her anger intensified when an embarrassed Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville, R-Monroe, told her that Jones had made the unsavory comparison in an unsolicited e-mail dispatched over the objections of the Republican Senate Caucus staff.

"This was premeditated," Rossman-McKinney says. "And I'm a constituent in his district, for crying out loud."

Rossman-McKinney is a Democrat, but Jones routinely manages to offend women on both sides of the aisle. Last month, Michigan tea party leader Joan Fabiano filed a formal complaint with Richardville after Jones inquired in a Facebook posting whether Fabiano was on "head meds."

Senate Minority Leader Whitmer says Jones may be the Legislature's most notorious sexist, but asserts in a column prepared for Monday's online edition of the Free Press that "dismissive condescension and thinly veiled sexism" have become pervasive for her and other women in the male-dominated Senate.

Former state Rep. Maxine Berman, a Southfield Democrat who lampooned her male legislative colleagues in her 1994 memoir, "The Only Boobs in the House are Men," says that legislative term limits and the consequent decline of collegiality among legislators who are strangers to one another have exacerbated the capital's chronic sexism.

"Say what you want about the seniority system, but it forced caucus leaders to give important committee chairmanships to women," Berman said.

"Longtime legislators like (former Senate Insurance Committee Chair) Mary Brown earned the grudging respect of men in both parties because of their policy expertise," she added. "But with term limits, no one gets to know anyone else, and no one acquires policy expertise."

Whitmer says the only way to curb sexism is to elect a Legislature more representative of the state. "When a third of the people sitting in the caucus room with you are women, you maybe don't make that remark that's on your mind," she observes.

Unless, of course, you're Rick Jones.

After Richardville urged him to extend an olive branch to Rossman-McKinney, the Lansing lawmaker called the public relations executive and invited her to join him in a "polar plunge" at a Special Olympics event he's scheduled to participate in next month.

It wasn't contrition, exactly. But perhaps that's how Neanderthal men made nice to women they'd offended, before the invention of apologies and heated pools.

Contact Brian Dickerson: 313-222-6584 or [email protected]

___

(c)2012 the Detroit Free Press

Visit the Detroit Free Press at www.freep.com

Distributed by MCT Information Services