For the past many years, women have been one of many groups specifically courted by politicians. This year, the push to obtain women’s votes continues as the health insurance/contraceptives controversy this spring and the Republican Party’s “War on Women” has reverberated down to the election set to take place in two weeks.

Indeed, we Americans seem to be obsessed by the point at which gender and politics intersect in public life. For whatever reason, we feel a need continually to discuss individual women not in terms of their own ideas, but as a group defined — literally — by the contours and organs of their bodies. Although a representative list of examples (to say nothing of a comprehensive one) would take more space than we are here allotted, these are a few choice examples.

Wednesday, this newspaper published a story with the headline “Current election shows importance of female voters.” Back in August, the Huffington Post published a story asserting that “Women’s Vote Battle Defines 2012 Presidential Election.” Early last month, the Christian Science Monitor published “Women for Mitt: why they say it’s Obama waging a ‘war on women.’” Last week, USA Today saw fit to highlight the results of a poll in this way: “Swing states poll: Women push Romney into lead.”

While it is important to understand the role of women in politics as individuals, it is detrimental to political discourse to discuss them in terms of their existence as women.

Call us idealists, but we believe that since politics is about ideas and not materialism, we ought to be gender-, race-, religion-, and class-blind. We ought to be blind, in fact, to any demographic differences and instead consider only the relation of one person’s ideas to another’s to another’s. Failing to do so makes all members of a group — in today’s case, women — the same.

They are not.

To state otherwise is to say that the fact that a person is a man, or a woman, or a Catholic, or a Protestant, or wealthy, or poor, or black, or white governs his or her conduct. It is to say that from one’s birth, one’s opinions and notions are determined rather than deliberated upon. In short, it denies the free will of individuals to make up our own minds.

There is a world of difference between politicians representing demographic groups that are part of their constituencies (which is to say, taking their perspective into account when making decisions) and doing their bidding. From this moment on, we ought to consider the merit of ideas as they relate to the whole political entity — country, state, county, town — rather than their relation to groups that are inherently biased against.