Was Yesterday’s Oversight Hearing Really ‘All-Male’?

Lachlan Markay / February 17, 2012

No. It’s that simple.

A number of House members and senators have been circulating this picture of the first panel from yesterday’s House Oversight Committee hearing, which featured five clergymen, decrying it as an “all-male hearing,” in the words of Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA). A number of Murray’s Senate colleagues, and numerous House members, echoed the falsehood.

In fact, as this picture shows, the hearing was not “all-male.”

The second panel to testify before the committee featured Dr. Laura Champion, medical director of Calvin College Health Services, and Dr. Allison Dabbs Garrett, senior vice-president for academic affairs at Oklahoma Christian University.

The incessant attempts by liberals to distract from the real issue of yesterday’s hearing – the constitutional problems in forcing employers to violate their own religious beliefs – prompted thoroughly fallacious claims that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who chairs the Oversight Committee, and other congressional Republicans, were conducting a “war on women.”

The argument is absurd on its face, but few of its supporting claims have been so thoroughly and demonstrably false as the notion that yesterday’s Oversight hearing featured testimony only from men.