A male member of the Perry County District school board in Perryville, Missouri, recently made some incredibly sexist and disparaging remarks about a female board member, and now the board has voted to remove him.
Mark Gremaud told fellow board member Kathy Carron:
“Kathy, you are just a woman, the only thing you know is laying on your back with your legs in the air splayed.”
Yet despite Gremaud’s comments, some of the other members of the board attempted to defend him. Here’s what Jeff Weilbrecht said:
“I’m not saying Mark Gremaud is the perfect board member, I’m not saying I’m one either. I do ask that the rest of us stop and put our petty differences aside once and act like adults and accept that we have differences.”
Act like adults? You want everyone else to act like adults when you have a man on the board who resorts to schoolyard talk when he disagrees with a woman? Gimme a break.
Nancy Voelker, president of the Perry County District 32 Board of Education, would have no part of the victim blaming Weilbrecht attempted:
“I assure you that the comments for which Mr. Gremaud was censured were unprovoked. This is a fact uncontested by six members of the board. The discussion was not about teachers, students, farmers, or any other conjecture you may see on social media. We were discussing board procedures and board behaviors. Mrs. Carron’s statement was not directed to Mr. Gremaud, but was rather directed to the entire board. Mrs. Carron made a reasonable comment in a reasonable manner, before Mr. Gremaud’s unprovoked verbal attack.”
It has never been and it will never be acceptable to talk about women in the way Mark Gremaud did. What he said was degrading and a slap at women everywhere. If board members who want to defend this kind of crap think Gremaud was in the right, perhaps they too need to be removed from the board.
