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Who says that women decide their votes on the basis of emotion and relationships?
Women say it. Consider this story in today’s New York Post:
A NEW ‘VIEW’ ON CLINTON
By GEOFF EARLE
November 20, 2007—WASHINGTON—Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the token Republican on ABC’s all-female gabfest “The View,” is warming to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candidacy, thanks to a friendly gesture by the presidential contender.
Hasselbeck, the wife of NFL quarterback Tim Hasselbeck and former “Survivor” contestant, gave birth to Taylor Thomas Hasselbeck 10 days ago and yesterday got a nice note from Clinton, who has appeared on the show.
Hasselbeck promptly e-mailed co-host Barbara Walters, who quoted her as saying Clinton’s gesture was “truly a most thoughtful and warm act. I may actually change my vote.”
Now, in quoting this story, I don’t mean to suggest that men do not sometimes base their votes on personal considerations rather than on a view of the public good. But can anyone imagine a man, not only changing his vote to the party he normally opposes because of a friendly note from a candidate belonging to that party, but making sure that this change of vote and the reason for it were announced on television?
- end of initial entry -
Laura W. writes:
A woman who is just ten days out of the delivery room is in no condition to be making public statements about anything nor is her thinking process representative of women at large.
Laura continues:
Is this how it’s going to work? Every time a woman says something idiotic, are you going to say, “See, they are too stupid to vote!”. I’m not saying there aren’t idiotic women, but it really isn’t the point.
LA replies:
I think a public statement by a public woman who is publicly identified as a Republican regarding her reasons for changing her vote to the Democratic party is fair matter for comment, don’t you? I wouldn’t have mentioned this if it hadn’t been something that really stood out. For Hasselbeck deliberately to send the message out on television, “I’m leaning toward switching my vote from the Republican to the Democratic party because Hillary Clinton sent me a nice note congratulating me on the birth of my baby,” is something to be remarked on in my opinion, and so I remarked on it.
Laura replies:
You said: “I think a public statement by a public woman who is publicly identified as a Republican regarding her reasons for changing her vote to the Democratic party is fair matter for comment, don’t you?”
Yes, it is. But, the idiotic comment of a woman who has just had a baby is not an argument for denying women the vote.
LA replies:
I was not making that one instance an argument for denying women the vote. I was not saying or suggesting: “This woman is silly, therefore women shouldn’t vote.” Rather I was treating that instance as a particular indication of a distinct feminine mentality—the same distinct feminine mentality which you also believe in, and which you see as the basis for believing that men and women naturally take care of distinct areas of life.
Also, if, as you say, women cannot be expected to behave reasonably for some period after they give birth, are you also saying that women should not be allowed to vote—or, for that matter, serve in public office—for some period after they give birth?
Maureen C. writes:
It’s irrational to think women’s irrationality and narcissistic emotions are any worse than men’s. No woman could have come up with a foreign policy more stupid, costly, and self-defeating than America’s over the past fifty years: Vietnam, Afghanistan (aka training Osama bin Ladin), Iraq—huge expenditures undertaken while vital infrastructure and institutions at home decayed. Women who voted against these foreign policy misadventures would have been construed at the time by misogynist philosophers as sappy women without a sense of realpolitik, but these women would have been RIGHT. Despite the pompous Henry Kissingers, power-mad Kennedys, and promiscous LBJs, these foreign wars WERE irrelevant to the real defense of the US—which would have been closing the U.S.’s Open Borders (to prevent cultural decline), invading Saudi Arabia (to effect regime change), Pakistan (to get rid of their nukes), or Iran (to deal a death blow to the mullahs).
It is immoral to deny women a status that is appropriate to her being made in God’s image. She has enough brains to make political decisions that will affect herself and/or her children; and she has a right to live in a society over which she has influence that is not brokered by vainglorious male politicians, such as the John Kerrys, Jimmy Carters, Al Sharptons, or Bill Clintons. She has the right to vote against Hillary Clinton (who turned her marriage into a mini-Tammany Hall).
To answer your stereotype about women’s brains: A woman’s beerdrinking, football-besotted husband is no better judge of politics than a sappy, sentimental woman.
LA writes:
Mary Jackson over at New English Review writes that “To support his contention that women—all women—should not vote, Lawrence Auster gives the example of a woman—one woman—who admitted to changing her mind” because of a friendly note from Hillary Clinton.
That is a misstatement of my blog entry.
The entry’s title asked: “Who says that women decide their votes on the basis of emotion and relationships?”
Then I answered the question: “Women say it.”
Then I copied the entire story from the New York Post. Then I commented that it would be hard to imagine a man advertising on tv the fact that he had switched to a different party solely because of a friendly note from a politician in that party.
That’s all I said.
Nowhere in the blog entry did I argue that the behavior of Hasselbeck means that women should not have the vote. The blog entry was presented as a piece of evidence for the assertion that women are more likely to base their vote on emotion and personal relationships than men. Now, there are lots of people who believe that women are more likely to base their vote on emotion and personal relationships than men, yet who do not therefore support the idea that women should be deprived of the vote.
I have argued that in a better designed political order the franchise would be restricted. I do NOT base that argument on the behavior of one or a few women.
Mary Jackson writes:
You wrote: “Then I answered the question: ‘Women say it.’”
Correction—one woman said it. One woman, shortly after giving birth. In any case, one solitary woman. Once.
If a man said something stupid on television, something like “I did not have sex with that woman,” would you be generalising about all men?
Hardly. And there’s no need to backpedal. If you think—albeit on the flimsiest of evidence—that women are incapable of rational thought, then say so, and follow it through to its logical conclusion: we shouldn’t have the vote. What you’re now saying—that despite our emotional and irrational nature we perhaps should be “allowed” to vote—makes no sense.
LA replies:
True, one woman said it, not all women. But I did not say “all women say it.” I said, “Women say it,” meaning at least some women. Now we know that Hasselbeck said it, and that she passed on the message to Barbara Walters, who in turn conveyed the message on The View, and presumably a fair portion of the millions of female fans of that program heard the message approvingly and thought, “Isn’t that nice.” Thus the statement was made in a mass public forum and (we can reasonably presume) was seen as normal and unobjectionable by a very large number of women. Therefore the attitude Hasselbeck expressed can be seen as representative of what a significant number of women—not necessarily all women—see as normative.
LA continues:
Also, Mary Jackson writes:
“If you think—albeit on the flimsiest of evidence—that women are incapable of rational thought, then say so, and follow it through to its logical conclusion: we shouldn’t have the vote.”
Where have I or anyone in this discussion said or implied that women are incapable of rational thought? The most that has been said is that women are more emotionally driven than men. Which is to say that they are less rational (more emotional = less rational) than men generally speaking. This is not the same thing as saying that women are incapable of rational thought.
Mary Jackson may be incapable of rational thought on this topic, and she may even be representative of most women on this topic, but I don’t think her irrationality that is on display here is representative of most women on every topic.
Dan M. writes:
That’s a funny echange you had there, with Laura, Maureen and Mary. Why did they misunderstand? I didn’t misunderstand. I think that it is rare today to find a woman that is not affected, at least subliminally, by feminism, just as it is rare to find someone not in some way tainted by liberalism simpliciter. Traditionalists hold that men and women are unequal. Even the women who implicitly recognize and hold to the truth of this get agitated when someone has the temerity to discuss it. They want to argue over the extent of the differences, and to minimize them. The upshot: we don’t have to quantify the differences exactly to know that illiberal and traditionalist (and hence sane) practice dictates that the differences are enough that women should not exercise the franchise.
But, having said that, must I now grovel and say how wonderful they are, and that many of my best friends are women, just as I must do when noting racial differences, to avoid being called a name? The bottom line is that your esteemed interlocutors have reacted like feminists to your post. Maureen and Mary accuse you of thinking women incapable of rational thought (Maureen implicitly and Mary explicitly.) Really, how tiresome.
Terry Morris writes:
Mary Jackson writes at New English Review:
“First, is it any better for the public good if a man keeps quiet about changing his vote for silly reasons?”
First of all, Mary, a rational person, upon entertaining such a question, would quickly answer it in the affirmative. As for everyone else, well…
In fact, a rational person would never have asked the question to begin with in rhetorical fashion as you have. The question may well have occured to a person capable of thinking rationally on the subjcet, but it would have been quickly discarded, and it certainly would not have been published. In other words, on this subject your rationality, Mary, is continually put in question by your emotionally based reasoning. Many of us have observed this characteristic as a trait more common to women than to men and this is where we’re coming from on this interesting topic.
If someone goes public with an announcement like the one LA cites in this entry, then this person most likely has one of two motives for doing so, either (a) she is intending to use her celebrity to affect the outcome of the general election by influencing her audience to vote one way or the other, or (b) she is just so emotional about the whole episode that she feels like she cannot not share it with others. In any event she has made a poor decision which has the potential of affecting the outcome of the election. Whereas, if someone else changes his mind for a silly reason, yet remains silent on the subject, keeping his decision within the confines of his own breast, he can only affect the outcome of the election with his one solitary vote.
This, by definition, is better for the public good, in answer to Mary’s question, than going public with one’s decision to change his vote for silly reasons. The question itself is a silly one, poorly framed and poorly thought out by someone apparently driven more by emotion in this case than someone who considers the question rationally. If Mary can’t see this (and obviously she couldn’t see it before publishing the silly question), then in this one particular at least, she may be said to be irrational. Does anyone see a pattern here?
For the record, Mary, I don’t think you’re incapable of thinking rationally on this subject. I just think you stubbornly choose not to.
Mary Jackson writes:
Lawrence Auster wrote:
“But I did not say ‘all women say it.’ I said, ‘Women say it,’ meaning at least some women. Now we know that Hasselbeck said it, and that she passed on the message to Barbara Walters, who in turn conveyed the message on The View, and presumably a fair portion of the millions of female fans of that program heard the message approvingly and thought, ‘Isn’t that nice.’ Thus the statement was made in a mass public forum and (we can reasonably presume) was seen as normal and unobjectionable by a very large number of women.”
Well, which is it? One woman, some women or all women? Only one woman can be verified as thinking it right to change her mind on the basis of a friendly note from a candidate. One woman. Once. She went on television—stupid, yes. Some women are stupid, as are some men. You presume, with no evidence whatsoever that “a fair portion of the millions of female fans of that program heard the message approvingly and thought, ‘Isn’t that nice.’” What proportion? What is the basis for your presumption? What about the men who watched the programme? Did they think ‘Isn’t that nice”, or are you presuming they didn’t? If you’re presuming they didn’t, why? What about the female fans who watched the programme and thought “What a silly woman”. Or are you presuming there weren’t any? If so, why? In all cases, what is the basis for any of your presumptions? And even if, by pure chance, your presumptions are correct, can you generalise from the female fans (but not the male fans!) of one show to the whole of the female population? Is it at all rational to do so?
Suppose a man had gone on television saying he would vote for George Bush because he supports a particular baseball team. This would be silly, but would it say anything at all about men in general, rather than this particular man?
When all is said and done, you’ve got one woman saying something silly once, and you’ve generalised irrationality to all women. And though you deny that this should be the basis for a restriction of the franchise, such a restriction would be the logical conclusion. Irrational, silly, emotional people shouldn’t have the vote. And if women (or men) are like that, perhaps they shouldn’t, but one American woman in 15 million (or so) does not prove the case.
LA replies:
Mary Jackson rejects the idea that Hasselbeck’s statement has any particular significance. For her (if I may identify her implicit assumption), the female sex consists of three billion individual females and therefore Hasselbeck’s announcment of her likely switch to Hillary Clinton represents no more than one three billionths of the collective thinking of the female sex, in other words, it’s of no significance at all. Mary Jackson entirely misses the representational impact of the statement.
The View is, I believe, the top all-female program on television (with the possible exception of Oprah), explicitly devoted to presenting the female point of view and directed at a female audience. Of the four current hosts, one is a Republican, and I believe she’s the first explicitly Republican host in the history of what has been a very liberal-leaning show. She’s the representative Republican on the most popular female program in America. So it wasn’t just any woman out of the three billion who took the unprecedented step of announcing on a national tv show that she was thinking of changing her vote to the party she officially opposes because a politician of that party sent her a warm personal note; it was sole and representative Republican female on the top female-oriented tv in the U.S. who did that. So I took it as both remarkable in itself and as indicative of the more personal and emotional approach that women take to politics as compared to men.
I’m not saying that all women or most women would react the way Hasselbeck did. I’m saying that what she did was done by a woman in a uniquely visible position, and that it reinforces the perception that this is the kind of behavior that we might expect of women but that it is much harder to imagine a man doing.
Try to picture Bill O’Reilly announcing on air, “I’m been opposing the Clintons for decades, but Hillary Clinton sent me such a sweet note the other day, and I’m so moved by it that I’m switching my allegiance to the Democratic party and voting for her for president.” Based on everything we know about human nature, it’s virtually inconceivable that a man would publicly say such a foppish thing as that. Because, coming from a man, it would be off the chart of foppishness. But, coming from a woman, it’s what our experience of life tells us may be unusual but still within the normal range of female behavior—and particularly within the range of the atrociously vain, silly, and empty-headed behavior that is common on The View.
But let’s say that I had been more precise in my initial statement that Mary Jackson criticized. Let’s say that instead of writing, “Women say it,” I had written:
“Here’s at least one woman who says it, echoed by one of the most famous women in America who read it for her on air, and presumably approved by millions more female fans, and reported positively in the media, and apparently not criticized by anyone, thus showing not only how women are more emotional, but showing how our society as a result of the victory of feminism is more and more adopting the female personalist approach to public matters.”
The greater precision as to number (saying “one woman” instead of “women”) would not have cleared up Mary Jackson’s problem with me, because I would still have been taking Hasselbeck’s statement as representative of women’s more personal and emotional approach to politics, and that is what Miss Jackson finds objectionable.
In anticipating the inevitable riposte that men are no prizes, I’m not saying that men are prizes. The West is now decadent, and the liberal idiocy and weakness of the men of the West dooms us. That would not suddenly change simply as a result of women being removed from political life. I have not suggested in any of these discussions that the women’s franchise is the leading or even a leading factor in the crisis of the West or that ending the franchise would save the West. I am saying that if we look at the whole picture, there are persuasive reasons telling us that feminism in general and women’s political equality in particular have a weakening effect on society, and that, over the long run, restricting the franchise and restoring some of the traditional distinctions between the sexes that have been lost (which could not happen without a restoration of traditional morality reining in the unrestrained individualism that now dominates us) would on balance create a stronger and more competent society, as well as a happier one.
I’d like to close with something Nicholas Davidson said in his introductory essay on Louis de Bonald’s On Divorce. Davidson said that we need to drop the current habit of dividing the world up into women’s questions, men’s questions, and children’s questions. “There are only social questions, which can only be answered in terms of society as a whole. Do you wish to help any of these groups? It can only be done by strengthening the bonds of society. To attempt specifically to help any of these groups necessarily corrodes those bonds, injures vital relationships, and so hurts those it purports to help.”
Terry Morris writes:
Mary, I acknowledge that when I addressed you last I made a couple of inconsistent statements concerning your rationality. Let me clear that up here by reiterating what I said in my last sentence of that response to you—I don’t think you’re incapable of thinking rationally on this subject, I just think you stubbornly choose not to. But even if that were the case in this instance, I wouldn’t generalize to your ability to think rationally as a whole.
That said, it would really be helpful to us in judging your rationality fairly and consistently if you’d apply your own statements consistently or not apply them at all—repeatedly saying that I or Mr. Auster or anyone else in this discussion has said that “women are irrational” does not make it so.—know what I mean?
As far as your question about generalizations goes, I already addressed it once when I said that many of us have observed these characteristics and tendencies to be more common (not unique or exclusive to) among women than men. The point being, we’re not generalizing from this one example to all women as you assert. To the contrary we’re saying here’s one example of what we’ve long since concluded based on what we’ve observed and noted about women over the years. This is really fairly obvious, isn’t it?
We can argue about whether it’s an appropriate example or not; that’s a legitimate point of discussion. What we can’t do is say that we’re generalizing to all women from this one example. You’re assuming that we’re generalizing from this solitary example then drawing conclusions on that assumption, when in fact, contrary to your stated belief, we’ve already drawn those conclusions based on what we’ve observed over long periods. So, the generalization was already established to our minds way before LA posted this entry. You can claim that the generalization is wrong, but not that we’ve generalized from this example.
LA continues:
To clarify further what I said above, the real issue is not the state of Hasselbeck’s personal thoughts and feelings or whether this expresses the view of one woman or ten million women. It’s about the fact that this statement was read on The View. That means it’s a statement that is considered normal and acceptable by our culture. Let’s remember that not everything is considered normal and acceptable by our culture. If Hasselbeck wanted to announce on the air that women shouldn’t have the vote or that Muslim and Hispanic immigration to America should stopped, that message would not have gotten on the air, or if it had, she would have been in trouble.
The fact that it was read on the air means our culture considers it normal and acceptable for a woman publicly associated with one party to change her vote to the other party on the basis of a friendly personal note from a presidential candidate of the other party. It may have been the act of one woman, but by being announced on The View it became a normative act. I don’t think the same standard would apply to a man. If a man had made a similar announcement on air it would be seen as an embarrassment. He would be the subject of ridicule.
The conclusion is that women are more likely to base their political positions on emotional and personal factors than men do, and that our culture accepts this.
Janet R., an Englishwoman who has long lived in Brazil, writes:
I am woman and have come to the conclusion that it would be better if women didn’t vote. I have a traditional marriage; my husband and I discuss and argue about all the important matters but in the end the final decision is his. Once he decided on a course of action that I may have disagreed with, I accept it and don’t argue anymore or try to undermine him in anyway . I always feel relieved because he has taken on himself the responsibility for the final outcome and more often that not he is right.
I have two characteristics that I probably share with many women that impede me from making wise decisions. I hate conflict and will do anything to preserve the peace; and I tend to idealise people and their motives . My husband is not afraid of fighting for what he believes is best for the family even if this makes him unpopular and his assessment of people is far more realistic than mine.
I broached the topic of limiting women’s right to vote at a meeting of an American Womens Bible reading society and I was almost lynched!
These women believe in the literal truthfulness of the Bible in terms of the 6 day creation but blithely disregard Genesis 16. To me this was further proof women’s irrationality. The one argument that I didn’t have an answer for was that Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t have been Prime Minister if women didn’t have the vote and I do regard Margaret Thatcher as the best English prime minister after Churchill.
By the way, it seems as though Australian women were largely responsible for the victory of the socialist Kevin Rudd. In Australia, as in Brazil, voting is obligatory which for me is a recipe for populism.
LA replies:
“I hate conflict and will do anything to preserve the peace…. My husband is not afraid of fighting for what he believes is best for the family even if this makes him unpopular…”
I think Janet has delineated very well a basic female characteristic that most people (if they are honest with themselves) will acknowledge is generally the case.
Terry Morris writes:
You wrote: “The conclusion is that women are more likely to base their political positions on emotional and personal factors than men do, and that our culture accepts this.”
That is an excellent summation of what this whole discussion boils down to at its fundamentals. In fact, I don’t even think this is a debatable point. I think it is so well established that our culture accepts this about women, no; that it not only accepts it, but embraces it and lauds it and even capitalizes on this well-known and established fundamental truth about the greater emotionalism of women as compared to men, that any argument leveled against this acknowledgment in negative terms as we’ve used, must resort to the casting of aspersions and false accusations and the like in order to gain any traction whatsoever, which is necessary to preserve the existing order of things.
This is probably the best explanation for why Mary Jackson incessantly says, on the flimsiest of evidence (a little Maryism there), that you’ve declared women to be irrational creatures. She has no other recourse in arguing her case for woman’s suffrage than laying down this false premise. If she can convince her audience (and herself?) that you’ve said women cannot think rationally, instead of what you’ve actually said—women are more emotionally driven than men—then that’s grounds enough for the out-of-hand dismissal of the whole idea of limiting the franchise on that basis.
Our society and culture accepts and embraces and lauds this fact about women, and even welcomes acknowledgment of and discussion on the topic so long as the discussion never ever broaches that which is wholly unacceptable. And that which is wholly unacceptable is to speak of a woman’s emotionalism in terms of it being detrimental to society via woman’s suffrage. That is simply not allowed in our culture. And our liberal culture will resort to anything and everything necessary to preserve that order of things.
I have a lot of additional questions on this that perhaps we can take up in the future: Can liberal dominance be maintained outside the influence of the emotional female vote? Can liberal dominance be displaced by a more conservative order absent the removal of the female franchise? Could liberal dominance have ever been established in the first place, in this country particularly, without the aid of the female vote? Also, are liberal men and liberal women equally disposed to make decisions based on emotions, or could it be that something more sinister is at work, generally speaking, with regard to men who advocate liberal policies as opposed to liberal women who are generally more sincere in their beliefs?
LA replies:
“If she can convince her audience … that you’ve said women cannot think rationally, instead of what you’ve actually said … then that’s grounds enough for the out-of-hand dismissal of the whole idea of limiting the franchise on that basis.”
Yes. It’s like Alan Colmes suggesting in my interview with him in 2006 that I “don’t regard Mexicans as human beings.” As I said to Colmes, of course I regard Mexicans as human beings, but I regard them as human beings who, coming here by the millions, are incompatible with our country and who ought to remain in their country. The liberals can never allow the immigration restrictionist position to be framed in accurate terms, because then instead of simply demonizing immigration restrictionists as Nazi types who are denying the humanity of others, the liberals would have to recognize that the restrictionists are making a reasonable proposition that may be true or false, and the liberals would have to debate that proposition with them on the merits.
It’s the same here. It’s much easier for liberals to say that I think women are incapable of thinking rationally, i.e., to say that I deny that women possess the sine qua non of humanity and thus that I am denying their humanity, than for the liberals to characterize my position accurately, namely that I believe (1) that women are naturally oriented to deal with life more in terms of personal relationships than in terms of impersonal principles; (2) that women are therefore significantly more likely to base their political positions on emotional and personal factors than men are; (3) that the women’s vote will therefore tend to result in a society’s political life and decisions being guided more and more by the kinds of personal and emotional considerations that are appropriate to decisions made in private life, instead of being guided by the impersonal factors that are appropriate to political life; and (4) that it is therefore a reasonable proposition that women should not have the vote.
Laura W. writes:
I generally agree that the emotionalism of women has had detrimental effects on politics, but I see its relation to the franchise issue differently from you and Terry Morris. I still object to your statement on Elizabeth Hasselbeck in light of the ongoing discussion of the female franchise.
I support the idea of a male-only franchise for reasons I stated before. Your argument that women should be denied the vote primarily because of their emotionalism isn’t persuasive to me. I think women are educable and could be taught to be less emotional in their political decisions and to more clearly see the ways in which they are being manipulated by political campaigns. The women’s franchise is relatively young and women can be brought to reflect on their handling of it.
If a society views a woman as too irrational to choose among political candidates than it also likely views women as too irrational to make many decisions, including financial and business decisions, even important domestic decisions. This view is not in keeping with the American tradition. Women were not denied the vote by America’s founders because they were widely viewed as too emotional to act in the larger world. After all, many women took on prodigious responsibilities. They ran businesses and farms and households while their husbands were away at war, off on whaling ships, or looking for homesteads. This nation would not have flourished if the women they left behind hadn’t been extremely capable—and hadn’t been viewed as extremely capable—of important rational decisions.
The founders denied the vote to women because that was in keeping with their Western tradition. But, how did they justify this tradition in their own minds given the degree to which the new nation relied on the hardiness, fortitude and decision-making of women? I would argue that they justified it on the ground that they saw the sphere of women as generally all-encompassing, as was the sphere of men. (That’s not to say they saw the sphere of women as purely emotional.) They also would have seen clearly the need for male leadership and aggression, and women would have clearly seen the need for this.
Many feminists are quite emotional about the emotionalism of women. They believe it will save the larger world from discord and strife. There is a grain of truth in this. The emotionalism of women is part of the backbone of civilization. It will save the world from considerable strife. But, I part with feminists in believing it will achieve this through the political leadership of women. It has power enough in its own domain, which is not just the cutesy sphere of “teeny, weeny babies,” as Maureen would have it, but a sphere that also requires many important, rational decisions. If a society doesn’t view women as generally capable of making important impersonal decisions, well, you get what you pay for: a lot of child-like women who are unable to make decisions. That’s never been America.
LA replies:
I did not say and did not at all mean to suggest that women generally are incapable of making important impersonal decisions.
Let’s put it this way. There are two modes of relating to reality: through impersonal principles, forces, and activities, and through personal relationships. Both men and woman use both modes. But in men the impersonal mode is primary, and the personal is secondary, while in women the personal mode is primary, and the impersonal is secondary.
And this is a valid basis for the historic differentiation of social function between the sexes that Laura supports.
Laura W. replies:
Yeah, but you could have come up with a better example than Elizabeth Hasselbeck! :) C’mon, there’s not many women who wouldn’t find your use of her as an example kind of insulting. She’s such an absurd extreme.
A good example is the way men and women approach the gay marriage issue. I think a lot of women agree to the legalization of gay marriage because they know and like someone who is gay and then think, “Gee, why shouldn’t he be allowed to get married? He’s a really nice guy. How would I feel if I couldn’t marry the person I loved?” Men would be less likely, though not incapable, of viewing an important political issue this way.
LA replies:
I still believe my point re Hasselbeck is valid, for all the reasons I’ve given. But given the amount of grief I’ve gotten on this, I would have phrased it differently.
Terry Morris writes:
I just wanted to commend you for your willingness to broach a topic that is very un-PC, even among conservatives, and to say that I’m personally very happy that you “phrased it” the way you did. There are very few places that I know of where a discussion like this could have ever taken place in today’s liberal dominated West, and most of those are very private venues. The amount of grief you’ve taken, in the grand scheme of things, may prove to be well worth it. I hope so, in your estimation, when you have time to think on it more.
Laura W. is really sharp and makes some excellent points. I don’t think I can agree with her completely in her point that women can be taught to handle the franchise better, but I’m more than willing to listen to anything further she has to say on the subject. Whenever she speaks, my ears perk up (Also, I think Belanne made some points similar to Laura’s in the actual franchise discussion).
LA replies:
I think Terry’s compliment to Laura would be a good place to let this discussion come to a peaceful and harmonious end.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 20, 2007 09:54 PM | Send
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