Why do women condone Connemara inspections?

In 2005, a Connemara inspector made some comments to me about my horse that would have been considered racially biased and bigoted if she were speaking about a human.

I realized at the time that the newly instituted Connemara inspections in America were merely a polite way to go about removing diversity from the Connemara horse breed, a eugenics-type concept that has been decried the world over for humans since the fall of Hitler.

I’ve wondered how this discriminatory thinking took hold in a day and age when the world is becoming more diverse.

Perhaps I should have read the list of governing members for Ireland’s Connemara society. It currently is made up of 19 men and one woman.

By all accounts, America instituted Connemara inspections to please the Irish society, or, as we now know, to please a bunch of men.

The American Connemara Pony Society is run mostly by women.

The dominance of female officials in America is not surprising since women make up the bulk of horse owners in this country. The United States Equestrian Federation says 96 percent of its members are women (as of 2013).

I have asked myself many times why the women in America’s Connemara society went along with this pro-conformity, anti-diversity inspection plan, because women more than anyone should understand the negative consequences of discrimination and exclusion based on something irrelevant.

Perhaps Irene Dorner, 58, chief executive of HSBC USA and one of the few women who has breached the glass ceiling in finance, answered that question on April 2, 2013. She told The New York Times that even as she rose through the male ranks in her field, she focused on her own career and kept her head down rather than trying to change the status quo. She said diversity is not just a moral issue but also a good business decision.

So perhaps the American inspectors were keeping their head down and being obedient servants to the male Irish officials. It’s not the trail-blazing attitude I would have hoped for.

I was heartened to see that Hillary Clinton received worldwide coverage on April 5 when she said that equal rights and opportunities for women are “the unfinished business of the 21st century.” Here’s a woman who has never kept her head down. And what a role model for girls in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan who simply want to read, never mind run their country. Thank goodness those girls don’t look to Connemara inspectors as role models. They would think conformity and obedience to men was the norm.

Former President Bill Clinton also made the news on April 5, telling students interested in being entrepreneurs that they should have a social conscience as they pursued their goals.

Did anyone in the Connemara society consider social conscience?

Lack of social conscience led to the latest headache for Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell on April 9, 2013, when a tape was released of McConnell discussing with his staff ways to discredit possible Democratic opponent Ashley Judd. He wanted to make her out to be mentally unstable.

I still find this hard to believe, but the tape reveals him saying: “I assume most of you have played the, the game Whac-A-Mole?” This is the Whac-A-Mole period of the campaign…when anybody sticks their head up, do them out,” he said.

So he would rather kill his opponents figuratively rather than compete against them fairly?

In essence, that’s exactly what the Irish Connemara society has been doing. If inspectors can eliminate their competition at these inspections, they don’t need to test their horses’ skills against the competition when it counts.

In the end, a quote on “The Good Wife” moved me the most this month: “People who have something to brag about usually don’t brag.”

Exactly.

If you have a great horse, you don’t need to wave around your inspection gold seal. You don’t need to kill off your opponents before the competition. You don’t need to eliminate diversity.

You want the best of the best to show up at the competition so your win actually stands for something.

MSNBC contributor Jimmy Williams said the McConnell tape will likely not serve the senator well: “In the long term, history looks back on those sorts of things and judges them very poorly and very dimly.”

I wonder how history will judge inspectors who discriminate against Connemaras?