At the end of her Oscar’s speech accepting Best Supporting Actress, Patricia Arquette made an impassioned plea for wage equality. It was rousing, she got Jennifer Lopez and Meryl Streep all excited, and she started a conversation about women’s rights. Her comments were particularly relevant to her industry in light of the Sony hack which revealed that Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams were paid much less in backend profits for American Hustle than their male costars. This is patently unfair, but we’re talking about large sums of money. Neither one of these women are suffering. Still, this is a fight that we can all support as women, and highly paid women should be paid as much, and offered as many advancements, as men. Full stop.

In her comments backstage following her win, Arquette kind of went off the rails a bit. She implied that LGBTQ rights advocates and people of color had not supported feminist and women’s issues to date and that it was time they did. Here’s some of what she said backstage, and you can see the video above. (That part comes in at 1:40.)

So the truth is, even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface, there are huge issues that are applied that really do affect women and it’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.

[via E! Online]

Maybe Arquette was all worked up from her win, and maybe she had a bad personal experience with friends not supporting her cause or something, and she’s overgeneralizing. That’s possible, and plus this is one of the most emotional moments of her life, she may have said some things she would regret when all the adrenaline dies down. Only on Twitter later, Arquette doubled down. Here are a few of her tweets on the matter and there’s much more on her Twitter feed.

I have long been an advocate for the rights of the #LBGT community. The question is why aren’t you an advocate for equality for ALL women?

— Patricia Arquette (@PattyArquette) February 23, 2015

Wage equality will help ALL women of all races in America. It will also help their children and society.

— Patricia Arquette (@PattyArquette) February 23, 2015

Guess which women are the most negatively effected in wage inequality? Women of color. #Equalpay for ALL women. Women stand together in this

— Patricia Arquette (@PattyArquette) February 23, 2015

I don’t care if people are pissed The truth is that wage inequality adversely effects women. pic.twitter.com/5tMjJXgbGz

— Patricia Arquette (@PattyArquette) February 24, 2015

My children are not living below the poverty line. That does’t mean I don’t care about the kids who are. DO YOU? Then help their moms.

— Patricia Arquette (@PattyArquette) February 24, 2015

This is a great cause and she’s right. Women make 77% of what men do, and it’s time that changed. I don’t think she should have called out the LGBT community or minorities for not supporting feminism, though. As Kaiser explained to me, she could have framed it as an issue of everyone fighting these important causes together, a kind of “Yes AND” approach instead of making it sound like we need to prioritizing our issues over others. We can be loud and visible without trying to one-up anyone and we can all fight together for each other’s basic rights.

Meanwhile the hacks at Fox news, particularly Stacey Dash, are trying to call out Arquette for daring to bring up this issue, which they don’t consider relevant. I’m not going to get into all that except to say that facts never get in the way of opinions at Fox News.

photo credit: WENN.com