Conservative Women to Elle: Don't Call Us 'Baby Palins'

Fashion magazine Elle stepped out of its usual celebrity-workout-and-makeup-tips mold with a story about young conservative women — some of whom are as mad as mama grizzlies over its description of them as “Baby Palins.”

The article in Elle’s August issue, headlined “The Best and the Rightest,” profiles women such as Regis Giles, 20, whose website  GirlsJustWannaHaveGuns.com sells merchandise sporting gun-rights messages.

“My company stands for those girls who’ve decided to arm themselves with a gun that will pump lead into an attacker at 1,200 feet per second,” the article quotes Giles as saying. “I wanna see more headlines stating ‘Girl kills attacker with gun’ than ‘Girl found dead after being raped and choked to death.’”

The article, by journalist and author Nina Burleigh, also looks at Fox News personality S.E. Cupp, radio host Dana Loesch, Network of enlightened Women founder Karin Agness, and Women’s Forum director Carrie Lukas.

These conservative figures “share almost every goal of feminism” and yet “resist any effort to put advancing their fellow women front and center,” Burleigh writes.

Agness criticized the infantile comparison to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in her own article at National Review Online.

“While an interesting read, this article turns out to be less a commentary on conservative women and more an example of how conservative women are viewed by women on the left,” Agness wrote. “To them, we are all ‘Baby Palins.’”

Agness adds a historical perspective, writing: "I have never heard anyone claim to be a 'Baby Palin.' Of all the interviews in the article, no one self-identified as a 'Baby Palin.' In fact, S.E. Cupp and Dana Loesch both cited 9/11 as their inspiration to jump into the political debate, and I started the Network of enlightened Women (NeW) four years before Governor Sarah Palin hit the national stage. Palin is only mentioned five times in this almost 4,000-word article. Why then try to associate us with Palin, and create a unifying narrative around her?"