Possibly news has reached you that Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Secretary of State and First Lady, is running for president for a second time. Although not the first woman to run for president (Shirley Chisholm! Victoria Woodhull! Gloria la Riva! Many more!), Clinton is generally considered the first female candidate for president with a solid chance of winning the election.
As a feminist website largely based in the United States, Hillary’s run is very clearly relevant to our interests and her campaign will likely produce a great deal of stuff to talk about for the next 1.5 years and/or millennia. This stuff is gonna be very complicated and also very important, and we’re lucky to have a team diverse enough to represent so many different views on American politics and culture to write about it all.
For the time being, we think that this is the best way to approach this topic and engender open dialogue: let each writer speak for themselves and only themselves. We don’t want our writers to feel inhibited by the possibility that their opinion will be treated as The Opinion of the world’s most popular independently-owned LGBT women’s website. Throughout our coverage, no single writer’s work will represent an official Autostraddle stance on her candidacy or policies; every writer has their own opinion and, unless otherwise stated, none of these opinions should be interpreted as Autostraddle’s or the Senior Editors’. These arguments should be evaluated and discussed on their own merit — we want to have conversations about the issues themselves rather than conversations about having conversations. However, we do have an overall liberal political stance in these parts, so you can expect the range of views expressed to remain primarily on the left wing, from the center-left to the radical left. But even within that spectrum, the opinions of our team are as wildly polarized and disparate as humanly possible. Our editorial standards aren’t changing — we won’t excuse irresponsible or bigoted reporting and this isn’t an absolution of accountability, rather it’s an encouragement of the most open dialogue possible. Cool?
In conclusion, Kate McKinnon is funny, I think we all agree on that.