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| When's It Gonna End? | So's Your Father! |
by Christopher Chantrill
January 16, 2008 at 3:30 am
WHEN THE first woman to be a major party candidate for president wins her first presidential primary by playing the gender card it tells you something. The Romantics were right and the rationalists were wrong. Life really is all about feelings and not about reason.
That was a week ago. Now the first woman candidate for president is trading racial smears with her chief rival for the Democratic nomination.
The question that I would like to ask our women friends is this. Was it for this that women, inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, boldly emerged into the public square from out of the darkness of endless ages of oppression?
If so, whats the point?
I say this because there is much for a woman president to do. In many ways women are as oppressed and as marginalized today as they ever were in the Dark Ages of the patriarchy.
Today in our government schools little girls are forced to learn their lessons according to a unisex curriculum imposed and enforced by activist feminists. Mothers who would prefer a little less feminism and a little more education are out of luck.
Today in our society teenaged girls are encouraged to experiment with sex by educators and pressured to have sex by teenaged boys. Nobody seems to have the courage to tell the girls that they dont have to put up with this abuse.
Today in our society women in their twenties live under heavy social pressure to devote themselves to a career and un-devote themselves to marriage. The result is that in the prime of their sexuality and fertility they give away their favors to men for nothing. For this their grandmothers chained themselves to railings?
Today in our society thirtysomething women are frantically trying to get pregnant in their few remaining years of fertility. And thats if theyre lucky and havent got divorced.
Today in our society women of all ages are encouraged to divorce if their marriages arent up to snuff. Divorced women, of course, often dont get to have the number of children they want. They usually suffer significant economic hardship. And they dont really improve their lives through divorce.
Today in our society women of all ages are encouraged to channel their energies away from home and family in paid employment or in a career. But for most women the most important things in their lives are their relationships and their children.
Today when women get old they get bustled off into institutions. Their daughters are encouraged to fill their mature middle years with jobs and careers, and have been socialized to be too busy to care for their enfeebled parents. Older women, surviving often into their nineties, are very weak and very feeble. And very often they are very frightened.
Two words best describe the society that has marginalized its women in this way. Cruel and unjust.
In the name of womens liberation our society has chivvied women out of their homes and neighborhoods and the life that many women prefer: family, children and cooperative relationships with other women. Above all it has bullied them out of their instinctive culture of giving and helping and into full-time paid (and taxable) employment.
Meanwhile the first woman candidate for president is busy trading racial barbs with the first black candidate for president.
The odd thing is that the political party that has created this unjust world for women gets most of their support. The gender gap means that more women support the big government party than the limited government party.
John R. Lott has explained how this works in Womens suffrage over time, excerpted from his book Freedomnomics. Women are more risk averse than men, he writes, and since they have gotten the vote they have expressed their preference by voting for more government programs. Federal government spending started increasing in the 1920s when women got the vote and it has kept increasing ever since.
Women voted for big government because they were told that big government gave them security. But did it? Is it really true that big bureaucratic government with its one-size-fits-all top-down model can really provide better security and freedom from risk than a conservative society of family, church, neighborhood association, and mutual aid?
Conservatives would say: No. Big government creates big dependency. Women today face uncertainty and risks in their lives that they never faced when they created security for themselves in marriages that could not be easily terminated and when they controlled the social services of their communities because they were the social services of their communities.
Of course, women today do not face the privations that their grandmothers faced a century ago. But the biggest cause of poverty in women is still single parenthood.
The challenge to conservatives is clear. If we want to succeed in reforming big government we have to persuade women that big government means big risks for women.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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©2007 Christopher Chantrill