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The Daily Kos attacks my questioning of women’s political equality
My blog entry addressing the question, “Is women’s political equality a good thing?”, which set off Mary Jackson’s attack on me at the New English Review, has now been picked up at The Daily Kos, the most popular liberal blog. The blogger, Shadan 7, quotes my remarks at length and concludes: “I have never seen a clearer example of the American Taliban put forth.” Naturally all the commenters agree.
How can one have debates with people who think that America circa 1789 or 1850 or 1910 was a Taliban-like regime? Don’t people see that this means hating our entire civilization prior to the women’s franchise?
However, there is one thing that the folks at The Daily Kos seem to understand correctly: my last name is not Summers.
- end of initial entry -
Ben W. writes:
The Daily Kos—what is a kos? Like in “cause?”
You can make me the scapegoat for this woman thing—The man-eating tiger email and the “not needing the Melanies as voices” remark set this thing off.
LA replies:
Yes, you started it all. But actually the real culprit is a woman I know who stated all these ideas to me a couple of years ago—and not with my tentativeness. She laid out how the woman’s vote turns women into a distinct interest group, so that politicians begin to look to ways to appeal to woman as a separate class instead of looking at the good of society as a whole. Also what she said to me is very close to the Nicholas Davidson quote I’ve put on the main page from his Introduction to de Bonald’s On Divorce.
Gintas writes:
“How can one have debates with people who think that America circa 1789 or 1850 or 1910 was a Taliban-like regime? Don’t people see that this means hating our entire civilization prior to the women’s franchise?”
You can’t; they really believe it; they really hate it. With a restless, driving, consuming energy and fire that comes not from love of country, but from hatred on a cosmic scale.
Dimitri writes:
Regarding phrase—“I have never seen a clearer example of the American Taliban put forth.”
They are not sincere, those guys. They know well the difference between America and Taliban. They are not attacking Taliban at their site, are they? And if and when it become safe, they will eagerly join Taliban.
Tim W. writes:
I doubt if the typical Kos poster has any real conception of what Western Civilization is, or what the Taliban is. It’s just common practice on the left to accuse anyone opposed to socially liberal policies of being identical to the Taliban. It sure beats actually debating issues on their merits. Oppose abortions during the ninth month of pregnancy? Taliban! Oppose public nudity during a “gay pride” parade? Taliban! Home school your kids so they won’t be exposed to lesbian bedtime stories? Taliban! Think Larry Flynt is a sleaze? Taliban!
The irony is, Kos also opposes war against the actual Taliban. And they favor open migration of Muslims into the West.
Whoever said you can’t have your cake and eat it, too, never met a liberal wingnut.
LA replies:
Yes—Taliban is just another mindless noise, like “fascist.” They don’t want to use “fascist” anymore because the “right” has appropriated it by calling serious Muslims “Islamo-fascists.” How can anyone stand living in such a mindless environment as the left now is?
An Indian living in the West writes:
I agree with your comment that their view of America pre-20th century as Taliban is proof of their stupidity. But this requires more elaboration.
All these liberals bloggers who together do not have the education or enlightenment that a Lincoln possessed at the age of 10 speak about “American Taliban.”
It is important to note that Lincoln and Washington were both opposed to giving women the vote. As indeed were most of the Founders (probably all). Are these blow-hards more enlightened than Lincoln? In fact, even Churchill had initial reservations about giving the vote to women—he only caved in under political pressure. One need not even get into what philosophers all the way from Plato through the ages would have had to say. Those men were not Taliban.
I think what is clear from that discourse is that the number of things considered “taboo” and completely off-limits increases with every generation in liberal democracy—this is combined with the inherent supposed moral superiority of the present liberal generation over all others which preceded it. This clownish response of the half-wits of the Daily Kos is a good example of that.
LA replies:
“…the number of things considered “taboo” and completely off-limits increases with every generation in liberal democracy…”
Or as I said in an article in 2000, “the realm of the politically incorrect keeps expanding to embrace more and more people, .” Steven Warshawsky writes:
I understand your position in this ongoing “kerfluffle over the women’s vote” (as you put it).
However, aren’t there real limits to your frequent counter-argument that people who reject your position must also be rejecting our nation’s history before women got the vote?
Logically, a generally good society (say, America circa 1800) certainly can support policies and engage in conduct that today we would consider wrong and immoral and unjustified (say, slavery, to use the most extreme example). No? It strikes me as self-evident that one can both condemn slavery in the harshest of terms and also, for example, recognize the Founding Fathers for the great men that they were. (Indeed, isn’t that the central issue that divides patriots and multiculturalists in their debate over how to teach our nation’s history?) Similarly, one can believe it is immoral to deny women the vote, while still cherishing our nation’s historical legacy.
It seems to me that you and your critics simply have a sharp disagreement over the relative immorality of (hypothetically) denying women the vote. You apparently don’t see the issue as terribly problematic, certainly not out of bounds for discussion. They do. Would their over-heated rhetoric sound more acceptable to you if the issue were slavery? Of course, I’m not equating slavery with non-voting. Rather, the point is that people can have legitimate disagreements over the “degree of evil” that attaches to certain policies and positions. The folks who object to your post obviously see the issue in much starker terms than you do. But appealing to the nation’s past practices, it seems to me, is no answer to their charges.
Yes, we have a glorious history that deserves to be honored. But that hardly means that everything about our history is honorable.
Thanks for considering my thoughts. I look forward to your reply.
LA replies:
We’re not talking about liberal conservatives like yourself, who see certain things in America’s past as blameworthy but still affirm America. We’re talking about the left, who call everything that is not leftist “fascism” and “Taliban,” and who respond to any positive statement about pre-1960 America with, “Yeah, and blacks were on the back of the bus then too!” Lincoln certainly used very strong moral language about slavery in his second inaugural, but even he would not have been like the left. So it’s not that there’s a limit to my argument; it’s that my argument is not directed at people like you and Lincoln.
Laura W. writes:
Remember what de Tocqueville said after he visited in the 1830s, when women were not even close to obtaining the vote: “I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: to the superiority of their women.” What a jerk! He was a delegate of the French Taliban visiting the American Taliban. What a low-life! Boy, I would love to give him my two cents. Didn’t he know women were nothing, na-da, before they could vote?
Larry, do you regret bringing this issue up?
LA replies:
Well, if you look at my original blog entry you’ll see that there was a certain apologetic or tentative quality when I introduced the subject, which was uncharacteristic of me. So even I recognized that this was going into possibly risky ground. But I am surprised that so many people have reacted with such vehemence to what is after all a reasonable question: is it true that women’s political equality pushes society in a socialist direction and weakens the spirit of liberty? If they think the answer is no, why don’t they make that argument, instead of treating me as a madman for bringing up the question? Do they actually feel threatened by a blogger raising these questions in a single blog entry, at a website that contains over 8,000 blog entries? Do they think there is the remotest possibility of the women’s vote being denied in modern America? They do not think that. Therefore their anger must be sparked by something else, namely the fact anyone would even suggest the possibility of a different order of society from the current one.
Remember, for liberals, there are only two possibilities: modern liberalism, and medieval darkness/Auschwitz/Taliban. They cannot imagine a moral and civilized state of society other than modern liberalism—unless of course we’re talking about a non-Western culture such as Islam, in which case the same liberals not only ignore the horrible and dehumanizing inequality of women under Islam but endlessly celebrate the Muslim religion and culture as superior to the West! How can this contradiction be explained? It can only be explained by the fact that liberals’ ultimate commitment is not to equality, as they claim, but to anything they perceive as tearing down the evil oppressive West. Ever-advancing equality—for women, for children, for the disabled, for criminals, for homosexuals, for transexuals, for unassimilated immigrants, for illegal aliens, for criminal aliens, for enemy aliens, for transexual criminal aliens seeking sex change operations at government expense—tears down the West, and obviously Islam also promises to tear down the West. This explains why liberals simultaneously (1) cry “Taliban” at someone who merely suggests that the West’s historic lack of the women’s franchise may not have been a bad thing, and (2) have absolutely no problem with polygamous Muslims immigrating en masse into the West. What is common to both positions is the hatred of the West as a historic civilization.
And as I have said before, if and when Islam reaches the point of taking power in the West, these same liberals, who today cry “American Taliban” at a traditional Western conservative like myself, will eagerly surrender to the Caliphate. See my January 2006 article, “Western liberals’ ultimate embrace of Islam,” and this follow-up from January 2007.
Jeff C. writes:
I was reading through the Daily Kos’s post about you and his comment, “I have never seen a clearer example of the American Taliban put forth” made me scoff…at first. It is certainly an enormous exaggeration, but hear me out.
You write: “I was suggesting that women’s vote tends to move modern society in a leftist direction. Is that true or not? There is impressionistic evidence that it is true, and there seems to be hard evidence that it is true as well. The influence of women on national politics is to feminize them, which means to feminize the men.” It seems obvious to me that unmarried women and especially unmarried women with children are generally liberals, and that liberalism undermines the fabric of Western Civilization which has been responsible for all of the achievements in the political, economic and technological spheres that we hold dear (although liberalism is also a product of Western Civilization). Their liberalism is almost certainly rooted in genetic differences between men and women, being caregivers and what have you. However, following your logic, why would we stop with women if we were to take away their vote?
- African Americans vote almost exclusively big-government statism; they have a culture of victimization and fail spectacularly in any fields not related to entertainment and music. The argument could be made that this is based in genetic differences as well: Africa is a huge mess and making no progress in any field. Why would they not be related? Would you want to take away their vote as well?
- The Jewish vote is almost exclusively leftist as well (90% voted Democrat in the last election). Probably their vast history of persecution makes them by habit or nature fear any attack on multiculturalism: It is deep-rooted and extremely difficult to change. Furthermore, they occupy many of the top seats in government, education, and business, and have a strong hand in shifting America to the left. Would you want to take away their vote as well?
- How about Mexican Americans? They also vote leftist and big-government because they have a culture that includes the following: mistrust of people outside the family, lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition; little use for education; and acceptance of poverty as a virtue necessary for entrance into heaven. Would you want to take away their vote as well? This is regards to legal immigrants.
- Or how about liberals in general? After all, they are the ones undermining Western society in the first place that allows Islam and socialism to spread their wings.
Ultimately what would be left, following the logic you employed, is a society that’s not a republic but rather a partial, limited democracy based on conservative, white values—namely the values you stand for, and everything else would be discriminated against based on race, gender or other attributes and have no political say. Hence, while not an American Taliban, which makes a mockery of the enormous differences between Christianity and Islam, definitely something that is quite authoritarian and almost assuredly wrong.
I think there must be a better way than the logic entailed above. The Constitution of the United States was enacted as a restrain on government itself; how about a restraint on the general population of the United States itself—namely, through education? An education that, at least partially, must be immutable, inscribed into something unchangeable (I don’t know what), so that it would teach a constant: Judeo/Christian values as the basic for the success of Western civilization. It would have to be rigorous and analytical, and then, and only then, would people be able to vote. Incidentally this would prescribe many of the people in the groups listed above from voting, but not everyone, which would strike me very much as unjust and racist. Now, I haven’t thought through this fully—I’ve just been brainstorming it over the past couple over hours—but surely it must be better than the logic employed before.
Note that I’ve kept Islam out of this conversation. Islam is diametrically opposed to Western values in its most basic form: not only is there no mainstream, moderate form of Islamic jurisprudence, but there cannot be one as you have said before because that would involve excising half of the Koran—which would make their religion not Islam. Hence, blanket statements can be applied against Muslims that cannot be applied against other groups.
LA replies:
Jeff C.’s question gets to the core of why I have repeatedly said that my treatment of the women’s vote issue is theoretical and tentative and is not a political platform. As I said at the “What’s Wrong with the World” website in my comment of August 12, 11:51 p.m., we cannot intelligently consider the question of the franchise apart from a specific form of society; a franchise that may make sense in one form of society will not make sense in another. The restriction of citizenship in fifth century B.C. Athens to pure Athenians made sense for Athens, a similar restriction would not make sense in highly diverse modern America. But then modern America may be breaking down because of an excess of diversity, in which case new forms of social organization may ultimately arise in which a more restrictive franchise may make sense.
Again, it is not possible to discuss intelligently the issue of the franchise apart from a particular society. As I have said over and over since this debate began, I have not advocated that the women’s vote be ended; nor have I had that thought; nor have I thought of removing the franchise of any ethnic group. (As Jeff rightly points out, Muslims are a special case.)
The only framework in which the discussion of the franchise can make sense is within the larger question, what is the best form of society? Or rather, what is the best form of society that is attainable by us, in the circumstances in which we live? Within such a theoretical context, the franchise question could be approached sensibly.
However, leaving aside the question of the franchise, I do believe that the ever-increasing presence of women in high public positions is not a good thing. And that’s something we could discuss further, at a later time.
Hannon writes:
You write: “How can anyone stand living in such a mindless environment as the left now is?” At this point, the question is how could they ever function outside that environment.
Michael B. writes from Sweden:
Now a very interesting thing seems to have occurred as a consequence of Kos picking up and running your comments. The fact that you have taken what to them is perceived as a “Taliban” stance, has forced them, no doubt because of the leftist contrarian reflex, to start actually criticising Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women. How’s that for irony?
Here are a few posts with an implied negative connotation vis a vis the way the Saudis treat their women:
“They would have women in the U.S. in burka’s”
“let’s just buy them all Burka’s and make them chattel once again and be done with it.”
and, “If he thinks American women are for one second going to begin living like women in Saudi Arabia then he has another think coming.”
Think about it. So now Islamic burkhas are bad? So now women are treated unfairly in the Islamic world? How often do we see Islamic attributes being associated negatively on the left? As I see it would have to take something that is viewed as a clear conservative support of a certain Islamic tradition, garb or what have you, to make it sufficiently “tainted” to at least end up in a sort of moral “limbo” where it becomes grey enough, by leftist standards, to be viewed, at least implicitly, in a negative manner. Consider the PC-centered, Islamophile environment of Kos. I view those reactions as a involuntary break from one of today’s major unstated leftist rules—never to criticise or mention the status of Muslim women. Mind you, I am interpreting this in the context of, say, things like the ongoing mainstreaming of Arab culture and its associated norms in schools where you now see multiculti teachers taking Saudi-funded “cultural outreach” trips to Saudi Arabia, glamorizing the veil, etc.
And don’t forget the unstated, but implied, assumption of the entire thread, something that ordinarily should be off limits for the left: That Taliban values are BAD. What are they really implying here? I still think this might tells us something about the leftist mindset that merits further exploration—that one possible avenue in which one would be able to force the left into conceding a fact that is normally suppressed is by pushing a kind of “contrarian button.” I see this kind of behavior among Swedish leftists quite a lot. Since the leftist rationale doesn’t operate by strict unitary logic this would, at least on the surface, seem like a relatively easy thing to accomplish. Although the challenge of course would be how to avoid using dishonesty saying anything untrue to provoke such a reaction. In any case this seemingly chronic contrarian reflex, the “contrarian slip” if you will, a real weakness of the mainstream leftist mentality.
Maybe this “leftist contrarian principle” could be of further use as a future analytical tool. Their reflex mechanisms usually run like Pavlovian clockwork. I’d love to see you expand on the idea.
Stephen R. writes:
Dear Lawrence Summers … wait, wait … I mean, Auster:
“Complaning that we don’t have national health care and aren’t spending enough on “education” … only are national issues because of this country’s rash experiment with women’s suffrage.”—Ann Coulter
Coulter commonly ridicules women’s suffrage but receives no attention. You, a la Summers, mildly put forth an unliberal question and incur feminism’s wrath.
If this leftist noise continues much longer Ann will be envious.
LA replies:
Well, she apparently only said it in the form of a joke; I said it more seriously. But still what astonishes me is that people have reacted the way I have when it is evident from the original entry that this is not a fully thought out position, but rather a tentative attempt to think through a problem, which is one of the things blogs are for. There is such an absence of my more usual authoritative or dogmatic tone in the entry. Yet the people on the left, plus Mary Jackson, take this “thinking out loud” effort by a blogger as though it were a definite position I was pushing, whereas they have never noticed much more radical things I’ve said in a much more assertive spirit.
Cindy L. writes:
I’m a woman who has made a career in the hard sciences. I chose this career because I wanted to surround myself with highly intelligent, rational thinkers and minimize my exposure to stupid and/or violent people (I chose my neighborhood for the same reasons). When we disagree, we disagree about ideas. Those who like each other often socialize together after business hours; the rest don’t; and ultimately, we all simply go home and lead our own lives. In short, we’re all smart enough to know how to get along with each other and make the business work (perhaps much the way the nation used to be when our national average IQ was higher and the population more homogeneous). Our office is also equally divided among men and women, so the population of women I’m exposed to is very different from the U.S. population of women at large. There are as many female stars in our office as men.
That being said, there is no way I could ascribe to the notion that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote simply on the basis of being women (although, as a scientist, I can hear you put forth that as a hypothetical and not go ballistic—unlike those nitwits at Kos and the like). I am probably more right-leaning than any man in our office and was like that from an early age—I worked for Nixon’s campaign as an 8th grader and have never voted for a Democrat; I recently contributed to Tancredo’s campaign if for no other reason than to give him positive feedback regarding his hard stances on Islam and illegal immigration, both of which I despise. I also recognize that I’d make a terrible soldier or world leader, no doubt because, for all my theoretical clear thinking, I’m not a man (or one of a small subset of women as would include Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir).
In a perfect world, I would support something along the lines that Jeff C. is suggesting; i.e., that voting be a privilege based on passing a rigorous test of knowledge and critical thinking skills, but would go further and state that it should also include paying a minimum in taxes. Those who couldn’t pass the test and/or don’t pay some minimum amount of taxes would not be allowed to vote. Of course, this would likely preclude majorities of several distinct groups in America from being able to vote—perhaps even the majority of women, but I don’t have a problem with that. I have a problem only when the threshold is based on something other than intelligence or pure reasoning ability; e.g., the person’s gender, race, etc. In short, I have a problem with a person not recognizing or acknowledging exceptions to otherwise broad but accurate generalizations. It’s like acknowledging that Newtonian physics provides a functional model on the broader level but that quantum mechanics is necessary at the molecular level.
LA replies:
Here’s an example where I would argue that exceptions should not be allowed. I do not believe that women should be integrated with men in the military academies, in military training, and in regular military units. Now, what if there were one woman who wanted to join the military who was completely atypical of women. She has upper body strength equal to that of men, she has an interest in military history equal to that of men, she has a gung-ho spirit equal to that of men. Should she be excluded, just because she’s a woman?
And my answer is yes, she should be excluded. Because the inclusion of just one woman would alter the entire institution of the military. There would have to be a different kind of uniform for her; different kind of regulation haircut for her; separate bathroom facilities; separate sleeping quarters, different treatment during basic training. Everything would have to be adjusted around her. The very character of military units as a group of men undifferentiated by sex differences would be ended. Plus, once one woman was admitted, the principle of admitting women into the regular military would be admitted, and the demand for more and more inclusion would never stop.
In short, it’s not just about individuals and individual qualifications. There are organic differences between men and women, and organic characteristics of institutions, that transcend the matter of individual rights and qualifications.
Similarly, the issue of the franchise is not just a matter of individual qualifications. It is a matter of the organic structure of the whole society. Before I go further, I once again remind any hyperventilating liberal readers out there that my argument here is hypothetical, because I am not advocating the end of the women’s suffrage in actually existing America and have no thought of doing so. But in a more traditional, family-centered society that we could imagine where women did not have the vote, the reason for women not having the vote would have nothing to do with their individual intelligence or their property. It would have to do with the society’s shared understanding of a natural differentiation of function of the sexes, namely that men govern in the public sphere, women govern in the private sphere. Once individual exceptions were made, that vision of the social good would be breached and would soon come to an end.
LA continues:
My above discussion should be understood in light of my frequently made point that if liberalism—meaning the rule of individual rights—is not to be destructive, it must be part of a social order that is not itself liberal. Meaning that in a well-ordered society, liberalism is not the ruling principle of the society, but is limited by non-liberal principles of the social good. (Here’s the article where I first made this point.)
For example, a purely liberal society admits all immigrant groups equally, regardless of how assimilable they are, because a liberal society makes equal freedom and non-discrimination its ruling principle. A more traditional society places limits on the non-discriminatory principle and says that immigrants will only be admitted who are culturally assimilable to the society.
A purely liberal society says that its ruling factor is individual equality, or, alternatively, individual merit. A traditionalist society has a vision of the good that transcends the rule of individual equality and places limits on its operation. This doesn’t mean that liberal principles of equality and freedom are banished; it means that they are not the ultimate dispositive principles, which they are under modern liberalism.
Solzhenitsyn made a similar point in his Harvard commencement address in 1978:
…[in early democracies, as] in American democracy at its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility….Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.
Laura W. writes:
I second Steven Warshawsky’s comment that we needn’t sympathize with the customs of our forebears just because they were a central part of our heritage. However, there is a beautiful idea behind the voting laws of the past: that the family’s public interests were indivisible. The family thought and acted as one.
Your comment that the reason for women not having the vote in a family-centered society can have “nothing to do with their individual intelligence or their property” gets to the heart of the matter. This is what is so very difficult for people today to grasp. We are brainwashed to believe that the inferior intelligence of women was assumed in the past and was the basis for the different functions of women. In truth, Western culture is one long glorious brief on behalf of the intelligence of its women. Suffrage was initially desired by women in the hope that it would protect their separate functions in the home. The opposite has occurred. The fight for women’s rights changed after that initial struggle. It became almost paranoiac, focused on an imaginary inferiority and confusing functions with ability and intelligence.
I am glad you brought up this whole issue even though the subtleties of the debate have been lost. No, the women’s vote will not be taken away, but understanding of the past on this one issue is of vital importance.
LA replies:
I thank Laura for this, and she has added a key point in favor of the male-only franchise of the past that I left out, that the “family’;;s public interests were indivisible.” Also she makes a profound point that because liberals see only the individual rights and are blind to the natural differentiation of social function, which is the real heart of the matter, they wrongly assume that the all-male franchise of the past was based on a belief in women’s inferiority. Instead of understanding and respecting the past of our own civilization, which is our root and origin, they turn it into a radioactive waste. They thus leave us with no past, and with only one obsessive object: ever more equality. Which is a search for the void.
Laura W. writes:
I finally read more of that thread at WWWtW. Truly excellent. Interesting, this was an issue that was begging for attention! At root, the discussion’s really not about the vote per se despite the many interesting comments on the franchise.
By the way, that comment from Mary Jackson that you don’t permit dissenting views at VFR was outrageous. She’s obviously not read it.
Gintas writes:
I asked my wife the other night (Monday) what she thought of the idea of revoking the vote for certain people, say…women. She didn’t like the idea, but she didn’t look at me with fear and loathing. She’s a sensible woman, and I could tell she was wondering what I was really getting at. I then asked, “what if I got a double vote: mine and yours?” She was OK with that idea, explaining, “I trust you.” She also liked the idea that I could have a vote weighted on the size of our family. Without my explaining what I was really getting at, she was willing to make concessions on her individual vote, but only in favor of our family.
John D. writes:
You wrote: “But I am surprised that so many people have reacted with such vehemence to what is after all a reasonable question: is it true that women’s political equality pushes society in a socialist direction and weakens the spirit of liberty? If they think the answer is no, why don’t they make that argument, instead of treating me as a madman for bringing up the question? Do they actually feel threatened by a blogger raising these questions in a single blog entry, at a website that contains over 8,000 blog entries?”
What you describe as vehemence has in actuality turned into vitriol regarding the question which you have proposed. One should have the assumption that the question becomes even more provocative when reinforced with some fairly sound reasoning, as in your entry “More on women’s vote and women’s liberalism.”
“We’re not talking about liberal conservatives like yourself, who see certain things in America’s past as blameworthy but still affirm America. We’re talking about the left, who call everything that is not leftist “fascism” and “Taliban,” and who respond to any positive statement about pre-1960 America with, “Yeah, and blacks were on the back of the bus then too!”
This is exactly what Steven Warshawsky posed. Is he a liberal-conservative or a leftist? Regarding his past few comments posted on this website, it makes me wonder.
You wrote: “However, leaving aside the question of the franchise, I do believe that the ever-increasing presence of women in high public positions is not a good thing. And that’s something we could discuss further, at a later time.”
See this.
Joyce L. writes:
I wanted to send a quick note to let you know I’ve enjoyed reading the discussion and commentary related to the issue of women’s political equality. It’s fascinating how what should be considered a legitimate question for discussion is instead a forbidden subject even to contemplate. (We all know it won’t change, but could it have been a turning point when it comes to the break down of the family, the cause of imbalance in gender roles within society and creating a trend toward powerful special interest groups?) Women being an interest group creates torn loyalties and it particularly empowers single women (who tend to not care as much about the longevity of society, but instead in expedient self-interest). I was quite proud of you for the willingness to take some heat for stirring this forbidden pot and seeing just how extreme the left is in wanting to forbid even the consideration that women’s equality may not have been in the long-term best interest of society. Thanks so much!
LA replies:
Joyce is the person from whom, a couple of years ago, I first heard some of specific ideas that I developed in the discussion that created all the controversy. I’m such a woman-hater that her ideas made a big impression on me and gestated in my mind until they were ready to come out. She is welcome to expand on this more if she likes.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 14, 2007 03:18 PM | Send
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