“The View” host Sara Haines offered a lengthy correction to comments she made on-air this week via her social media on Thursday, admitting that she conflated societal rules in Iran with rules in Afghanistan.
On Wednesday’s episode of the ABC talk show, the women got into a heated debate about whether marginalized communities — specifically women, Black people and members of the LGBTQ+ community — have it worse in the United States or Iran. While host Alyssa Farah Griffin argued that Iran’s strictness is “not even the same universe” as America, Whoopi pushed back.
As the discussion wore on, Haines chimed in to side with Farah Griffin, noting that women “are not doing well in Iran. They are not educated, they can’t own property.” But, the host amended that statement in her Instagram story on Thursday.
“Yesterday on the show, I spoke about the treatment of girls and women in Iran and misspoke by conflating the theocratic rule of the Ayatollah in Iran with the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan,” she wrote. “To clarify: girls and women in Afghanistan are currently banned from attending school, while in Iran, women do have access to education and make up a significant portion of university students.”
“When referencing education, I was speaking specifically about access under authoritarian regimes — not the capabilities or achievements of Iranian women,” she continued. “I want to be clear: I was not implying that women in Iran are uneducated or making any pejorative generalizations.”
To finish, Haines noted that the general point she was trying to make still stands.
“I would not want to be a woman living under the current regimes in either Iran or Afghanistan,” she wrote. “Despite their differences, both governments impose serious restrictions on women’s rights and freedoms.”
Generally, the hosts of “The View” tend to correct themselves in real time on the show, as they’re alerted to any errors they’ve made. On Wednesday’s episode of the show, Haines was cut off from finishing her point, and following a commercial break, the women got into discussing an entirely different topic.
“The View” airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on ABC.
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