|
Carey Roberts probes and lampoons political
correctness. His work has been published frequently
in the Washington Times, Townhall.com,
LewRockwell.com, ifeminists.net, Intellectual
Conservative, and elsewhere. He is a staff reporter
for the New Media Network. You can contact him at
E-Mail.
Feminist Infiltration into
the Conservative Ranks?
It was one of those claims that only a feminist
could dream up: “A 2005 U.N. Population Fund
report found that 70% of married women in India
were victims of beatings or rape.” Despite the
lack of credibility of anything that comes from the
United Nations, this straight-faced claim actually
made its way into a front-page article last week in
the Washington Times.
That, despite the fact that the research shows
Indian women are the gender more likely to abuse.
Plus, no one could track down the UN report that
supposedly made the claim. [www.mediaradar.org/alert20061113.php
 ]
The Washington Times is certainly no feminist
rag. So what’s going on here?
In the wake of the November 7 electoral debacle,
conservatives are doing a lot of soul-searching.
Maybe it’s time to assess whether the feminist
ideology has been allowed to invidiously dilute the
conservative message.
There was a time, of course, when the
women’s movement held the moral high ground.
Susan B. Anthony not only championed women’s
right to vote, but also took a principled stand
against abortion.
But after Anthony died in 1906, her movement
fell under the sway of a group of neo-Marxist women
who dubbed themselves “feminists.” The
Misses of Misery asserted that everything that is
wrong in the world can be blamed on the vast
anti-woman conspiracy they call the patriarchy.
Here’s Gloria Steinem: “Overthrowing
capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow
the whole... patriarchy.”
For years, conservatives have underestimated the
dogged determination of the women’s libbers to
undermine everything that is good and right in our
society: the inviolability of life, sanctity of the
family, free speech, opportunities not quotas, law
based on due process, and limited role of
government.
Let’s be perfectly plain about it: Feminism
is the antithesis of everything conservatism stands
for.
Thankfully, some in the conservative ranks have
bravely spoken out against the rad-fem jihad,
including Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter, Laura
Schlessinger, Catherine Seipp, Kathryn Jean Lopez,
and Myrna Blyth.
But why are there only six, not 600 conservative
women on the list? And what about conservative men?
Are the conservative no-shows intimidated or merely
complacent? Why haven’t the mainstream
conservative organizations come out four-square
against radical feminism?
To be sure, one reason is that the conservative
movement has become beholden to the electoral
imperatives of the Republican party, fearing that
any criticism of feminism might stir a backlash on
election day. This fear is misplaced, however, as
only a quarter of American women call themselves
feminist, and 22% of women say that being called a
feminist would be an “insult.”
[www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2004/0811roberts.html
]
Another reason is that many conservative men
– especially politicians and newspaper editors
-- confuse ladies-first chivalry with becoming
water-carriers for the latest feminist
myth-de-jour.
It’s time that these guys wise-up to the
feminist bait-and-switch. These gals claim to be
the complete equals to men. But voice any doubts
about their ideology, and they lapse into a
pathetic cocoon of hurt feelings.
And then there are those ladies who claim to be
straight-laced conservatives, but bristle with an
anti-male hostility or spread poisonous gender
myths.
Take conservative columnist Suzanne Fields who
had the habit of making nasty asides about men.
Finally her readers objected en masse, their
letters appearing under an editorial headline that
took exception to Fields’ “Anti-Male
Diatribe.”
And then there’s marriage maven Maggie
Gallagher who never passes on the opportunity to
diss men. Once Gallagher claimed that,
“battering is largely a male prerogative, the
way a tiny fraction of evil men seek to control the
women they sleep with.”
Really, Mrs. Gallagher?
Try telling that to the family of Dennis
McGlothin of Peoria County, Ill., who last week was
run over and killed by his ex-wife Krystle. Just to
make her point, the woman also rammed his pickup
truck and smashed his windows.
This case is not an aberration. Psychologist
Renee McDonald has found that American wives are
twice as likely as their husbands to engage in
severe domestic violence. [www.smu.edu/experts/study-documents/family-violence-study-may2006.pdf
]
A few months ago Washington Times
editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden reflected on the
feminist opportunists who seize on military sex
scandals to push for women in front-line combat
positions. Prudent ridiculed the flat-footed
military brass as “Powerful men who know
better are unable to stand up to the stamp of
little feminist feet.”
It’s time that conservatives found the
moral courage and personal gumption to say
‘no’ to the latest feminist demands, lest
we bequeath to our children and grandchildren an
unruly and emasculated culture.
The Silence of the
Wedding Bells
Am I the only one who is worried about the collapse
of the traditional American family right before our
very eyes?
Census Bureau bureaucrats are not in the habit
of making apocalyptic pronouncements, but last year
Mark Mather reported that the “dramatic
decline” in the married population is
“one of the biggest demographic stories of the
past several decades.” Now, married couples
now account for a minority – 49.7% to be exact
– of all U.S. households.
The cause of this extraordinary demographic
shift is two-fold. First, Americans are getting
married only half as often as we used to. Second
since 1960, the share of divorced Americans rose
from 2% to 10%.
African-American communities have been
especially hard-hit. In 1960 four-fifths of all
Black families had fathers and mothers at home.
Three decades later, that number had plummeted to
38%.
As a result of the decline of marriage,
illegitimacy is on the upswing. Just last week the
National Center for Health Statistics announced
that almost four in 10 babies were born
out-of-wedlock in 2005.
All this is very bad news for kids, since
children raised only by mothers are more likely to
be poor, suffer from a host of behavioral and
academic problems, and get in trouble with the
law.
For sure, the great majority of young women say
they plan to get married and have kids some day. So
why has Cosmo replaced Bride magazine in the
supermarket check-out lines?
Some experts cite the “greater economic
independence of women,” as if a single mom
scraping by on a welfare check is what female
liberation is all about. Others argue that
Americans are simply delaying the age of marriage,
suggesting that women who are nervously watching
their biological clocks just need to be a little
more patient.
But there’s one fact that’s hard to
dispute: our country faces an acute shortage of
marriage-minded men.
Two years ago Barbara Whitehead and David
Popenoe of Rutgers University did a national survey
of single heterosexual men, ages 25-34. To
everyone’s shock, they found 22% of the men
declared no interest in finding their One and Only.
[marriage.rutgers.edu/Publications/SOOU/TEXTSOOU2004.htm
]
That means two million American women will likely
never see the inside of a wedding chapel.
Now, hooking-up is replacing that quaint
courtship ritual that used to be known as
“dating.” When Norval Glenn and Elizabeth
Marquardt surveyed college senior women, they found
that one-third of the women had been asked on fewer
than two dates.
And this past August the New York Times
ran a piece on “Facing Middle Age with No
Degree, and No Wife,” which revealed the
reluctance to wed runs especially deep in less
educated men.
There is overwhelming research that shows
marriage benefits both men and women in terms of
their financial and emotional well-being. Plus,
married folks live longer. So what do we need to do
to entice men back into the courtship ritual?
The Nasty Nellies have been giving marriage a
bum rap for years, so sadly there are no quick
fixes. But this is what we need to do.
First, we need to dispose of the boogeyman of
the patriarchal ogre lording over his beleaguered
wife. If that image was ever true, it certainly
doesn’t apply to any couple that I know of. In
fact, the reverse now seems to be more commonplace:
the harried, henpecked husband who’s hectored
to keep his feet off the furniture during the ball
game.
Second, we need to consider the effects of the
1992 Supreme Court’s Planned Parenthood v.
Casey decision that banned fathers from
participating in decisions to keep the unborn baby,
thus leaving them biologically disenfranchised.
Third, we’ve got to do more to help boys
excel academically. Trash the Title IX quotas,
provide special help for boys who are lagging, and
tell teachers to stop expecting boys to act like
girls.
Fourth, we need to do a major overhaul of our
nation’s domestic violence laws, which allow
any woman to plunder her husband’s assets and
steal his children by merely claiming
“abuse.”
And fifth, reform of our divorce laws is long
overdue, so fathers are encouraged to remain
involved in their children’s lives as parents,
not every-other-weekend visitors.
Sadly in low-income Black communities, marriage
is essentially a dead institution. And there are
groups in our country that now want to extend their
agenda of family destruction to society at
large.
The family is the very building block of a
civilized and prosperous society. What will it take
to bring back the exuberant peal of June wedding
bells?
Feminist Infiltration into
the Conservative Ranks?
It was one of those claims that only a feminist
could dream up: “A 2005 U.N. Population Fund
report found that 70% of married women in India
were victims of beatings or rape.” Despite the
lack of credibility of anything that comes from the
United Nations, this straight-faced claim actually
made its way into a front-page article last week in
the Washington Times.
That, despite the fact that the research shows
Indian women are the gender more likely to abuse.
Plus, no one could track down the UN report that
supposedly made the claim. [www.mediaradar.org/alert20061113.php
]
The Washington Times is certainly no
feminist rag. So what’s going on here?
In the wake of the November 7 electoral debacle,
conservatives are doing a lot of soul-searching.
Maybe it’s time to assess whether the feminist
ideology has been allowed to invidiously dilute the
conservative message.
There was a time, of course, when the
women’s movement held the moral high ground.
Susan B. Anthony not only championed women’s
right to vote, but also took a principled stand
against abortion.
But after Anthony died in 1906, her movement
fell under the sway of a group of neo-Marxist women
who dubbed themselves “feminists.” The
Misses of Misery asserted that everything that is
wrong in the world can be blamed on the vast
anti-woman conspiracy they call the patriarchy.
Here’s Gloria Steinem: “Overthrowing
capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow
the whole... patriarchy.”
For years, conservatives have underestimated the
dogged determination of the women’s libbers to
undermine everything that is good and right in our
society: the inviolability of life, sanctity of the
family, free speech, opportunities not quotas, law
based on due process, and limited role of
government.
Let’s be perfectly plain about it: Feminism
is the antithesis of everything conservatism stands
for.
Thankfully, some in the conservative ranks have
bravely spoken out against the rad-fem jihad,
including Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter, Laura
Schlessinger, Catherine Seipp, Kathryn Jean Lopez,
and Myrna Blyth.
But why are there only six, not 600 conservative
women on the list? And what about conservative men?
Are the conservative no-shows intimidated or merely
complacent? Why haven’t the mainstream
conservative organizations come out four-square
against radical feminism?
To be sure, one reason is that the conservative
movement has become beholden to the electoral
imperatives of the Republican party, fearing that
any criticism of feminism might stir a backlash on
election day. This fear is misplaced, however, as
only a quarter of American women call themselves
feminist, and 22% of women say that being called a
feminist would be an “insult.”
[www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2004/0811roberts.html
]
Another reason is that many conservative men
– especially politicians and newspaper editors
-- confuse ladies-first chivalry with becoming
water-carriers for the latest feminist
myth-de-jour.
It’s time that these guys wise-up to the
feminist bait-and-switch. These gals claim to be
the complete equals to men. But voice any doubts
about their ideology, and they lapse into a
pathetic cocoon of hurt feelings.
And then there are those ladies who claim to be
straight-laced conservatives, but bristle with an
anti-male hostility or spread poisonous gender
myths.
Take conservative columnist Suzanne Fields who
had the habit of making nasty asides about men.
Finally her readers objected en masse, their
letters appearing under an editorial headline that
took exception to Fields’ “Anti-Male
Diatribe.”
And then there’s marriage maven Maggie
Gallagher who never passes on the opportunity to
diss men. Once Gallagher claimed that,
“battering is largely a male prerogative, the
way a tiny fraction of evil men seek to control the
women they sleep with.”
Really, Mrs. Gallagher?
Try telling that to the family of Dennis
McGlothin of Peoria County, Ill., who last week was
run over and killed by his ex-wife Krystle. Just to
make her point, the woman also rammed his pickup
truck and smashed his windows.
This case is not an aberration. Psychologist
Renee McDonald has found that American wives are
twice as likely as their husbands to engage in
severe domestic violence. [www.smu.edu/experts/study-documents/family-violence-study-may2006.pdf
]
A few months ago Washington Times
editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden reflected on the
feminist opportunists who seize on military sex
scandals to push for women in front-line combat
positions. Prudent ridiculed the flat-footed
military brass as “Powerful men who know
better are unable to stand up to the stamp of
little feminist feet.”
It’s time that conservatives found the
moral courage and personal gumption to say
‘no’ to the latest feminist demands, lest
we bequeath to our children and grandchildren an
unruly and emasculated culture.
Fathers No Longer
Cost-Effective?
I’m not one who is prone to get misty-eyed,
but Tim Russert’s latest book did it.
Two years ago Russert penned a moving tribute to
his own father, Big Russ and Me, which
quickly became a New York Times best-seller.
Russert was inundated with so many poignant letters
that he decided to compile them into a sequel,
Wisdom of Our Fathers. Now that book has
become a run-away top-seller, as well.
There’s a message here: persons have an
enormous sense of gratitude for the many things
– big and small – that dad did for them.
I know, that’s exactly how I feel about my
father.
But there is a small yet influential group in
our society that views fatherhood as an anachronism
and a stubborn obstacle to their utopian vision of
the social welfare state. And they see divorce and
award of child custody to mothers as a
highly-effective ploy to achieve their goal.
When one million children experience divorce
each year, and when custody is awarded to mothers
in 85% of cases, you can see the scope of the
problem. If you want to scale down male influence
in a society, what better way than to bar fathers
from seeing their own sons and daughters?
So this past spring, Mitch Sanderson of Grand
Forks, North Dakota set out to make things better
for kids. He canvassed voters throughout the state,
collecting signatures for a measure on the November
ballot to promote shared parenting. The petition
stated that in the event of divorce, “each
parent would be entitled to joint legal and
physical custody unless first declared
unfit.”
One of Sanderson’s most vocal supporters
was grandmother Myrna Meidinger, who explained,
“If you don’t have shared parenting like
I went through, it’s hard to see your
grandkids.” Before long over 17,000 signatures
were gathered, proving that the shared parenting
idea enjoyed support throughout the state.
But what happened next is comprehensible only if
you remember the old saying, “Follow the
money.” Under federal regulations, states
stand to gain millions in federal incentives and
reimbursements by increasing their child support
rolls. If kids spend equal time with dad and mom,
child support payments are reduced accordingly.
So in July, Thomas Sullivan of the federal
Administration for Children and Families (the
gargantuan federal agency that runs our child
support apparatus) sent a letter to state senator
Tom Fisher. Since the measure would reduce federal
largesse by $70 million, citizens should vote
against the pro-child ballot initiative, Sullivan
argued.
Since when are green-visor bureaucrats allowed
to lobby state legislators?
As columnist Stephen Baskerville lamented,
“federal bureaucrats are now using
taxpayers’ money to strong-arm citizens from
democratic decisions that, by relieving a serious
social problem, threaten to render the bureaucrats
redundant.” [www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16538
]
Then North Dakota Human Services director Carol
Olson weighed in with the same Chicken-Little
message, raising the specter of federal cutbacks.
How could anyone so brazenly ignore the well-being
of children?
This catapulted Mitch Sanderson’s sleeper
initiative into the most-debated topic throughout
the state. Soon former governor Ed Schaeffer
announced his support for the shared parenting
measure.
Schaeffer also chastised the lawyer-dominated
state legislature for dragging its feet on the
issue. Remember, when divorcing couples litigate
high-priced child custody disputes, it’s the
lawyers who make out like bandits.
Proving Mr. Schaeffer’s point to be true,
the North Dakota bar association soon jumped into
the fray. The attorneys hastily assembled a front
organization known as the North Dakota Concerned
Citizens for Children’s Rights. Soon the group
was resorting to scare tactics such as the claim
that shared parenting would “dismantle the
current child support system.”
Huh?
Two years ago a similar ballot measure was
presented to the voters of Massachusetts, where 85%
of the electorate approved the idea.
But this time, the lawyers, social workers, and
others who profit from family break-up succeeded in
sowing enough confusion to tip the balance. This
past Tuesday, the shared parenting measure was
defeated by a 56% to 44% margin, thus dashing the
hopes of Mitch Sanderson, Myrna Meidinger, and the
many kids who, like the persons who wrote loving
tributes in Tim Russert’s book, long to see
their daddies.
Brock Chisolm, former head of the World Health
Organization, once admitted, “To achieve world
government, it is necessary to remove from the
minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to
family traditions, national patriotism, and
religious dogmas.” Men are often the
staunchest defenders of those democratic ideals, so
it only makes sense to marginalize males by any
means possible.
Usually the Lefties work their mischief behind
closed doors. But this time around, the rats came
scurrying out of the woodwork.
Bush Needs to Rein in
Feminist Operatives
If you should happen to telephone Ambassador John
Bolton’s office at the United Nations, chances
are good the person who answers your call will be
one Peggy Kerry. Does that name ring a bell?
Perhaps it should.
According to a July 27, 2004 article in the
Washington Times, Miss Kerry was the featured
speaker at an event sponsored by the NOW in
conjunction with the Democratic National
Convention. “And he has a secret weapon,”
Kerry boasted. “It seems to me that it’s
up to the women, because when women vote, Democrats
win.”
And which “he” was Miss Peggy’s
talking about? Why, brother John, of course.
Senator John Kerry, Democratic candidate for
president of the United States.
I’m certain that Miss Kerry is
well-qualified to work as a press aide. But really,
how can the State Department be so clueless as to
allow an avowed political and ideological foe of
President Bush to hold such a sensitive position?
Why not assign her to an understaffed consulate in,
say, Mozambique?
Tuesday night, President Bush’s Republican
party hemorrhaged blood all over the TV screen. The
Dems took control of the House of Representative
and registered solid gains in the Senate. But the
electoral losses certainly weren’t for Bush
failing to appease the rad-fems.
Under the Clinton two-for-the-price-of-one
presidency, a bevy of feminist-inspired programs
sprang up throughout the federal bureaucracy.
[www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2006/0531roberts.html
]
A decade later, most of those programs are going
stronger than ever, sucking up taxpayer money,
violating men’s civil rights, and destroying
families.
Remember Title IX, the well-meaning program that
Clinton appointee Norma Cantu turned into a rigid
quota system that shut down hundreds of men’s
sports teams? Just because Cantu was shown the door
doesn’t mean the buzz-saw was turned off.
Recently James Madison University in Virginia,
which has a student body that is 61% female,
announced its decision to cut 10 sports teams,
including wrestling, swimming, cross-country,
indoor and outdoor track, archery, and gymnastics.
Why? Even though 51% of all JMU student-athletes
are female, that wasn’t enough to satisfy the
bean-counters at the Department of Education.
[www.iwf.org/title_IX.asp
]
Taxpayer-funded abortions is another feminist
priority. Last year Bush Administration employees
had a field day awarding $265 million in grants and
contracts to Planned Parenthood. That tidy sum
allowed the group to perform nearly 250,000
abortions. And with its spare change, Planned
Parenthood filed lawsuits against bans on partial
birth abortions.
And then there were the bureaucrats at the
Administration for Children and Families (ACF) who
didn’t like the idea of divorced fathers
seeing their kids. So in direct violation of
federal ethics rules, they took it upon themselves
to tell the North Dakota legislators to defeat a
shared parenting initiative.
Their reasoning? It’s better to let
fatherless kids become drop-outs and juvenile
delinquents – that way the state can rake in
millions of federal welfare money.
Shame on ACF head Margo Bean for tolerating
these bureaucratic shenanigans.
To his credit, President Bush did manage to
shoehorn $150 million into last year’s welfare
reform law to promote marriage and fatherhood. But
that money will do little to stem the destructive
effects of Clinton time-bomb programs like the
Violence Against Women Act.
In most states, domestic violence is defined so
broadly that sending mental telepathic messages is
now considered be a form of harassment and worthy
of state intervention – remember the David
Letterman case? [www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/1228.html
]
These laws allow any half-witted welfare queen
to game the system. All she has to do is utter this
phrase: “Judge, I’m feeling afraid for my
safety.” No proof of injury or physical
violence is needed.
Presto! Those 7 words will get her man kicked
out of the house and excuse her from return-to-work
welfare requirements. Don’t worry that the
kids have now been deprived of their daddies, the
state will be there to provide.
All this puts the Department of Justice
feminists in high spirits, because with the stroke
of a judge’s pen, another family has been
dissolved, a patriarch has been de-throned, and the
statistics of “abused” women continue to
mount.
Of course, there’s an obvious solution to
this travesty – remove the perverse incentives
to lie. But then the N.O.W. lobby might accuse you
of being “anti-woman.”
One of these days, the G.O.P. will come to its
senses and realize that you can never appease the
Gender Guerillas. Kow-towing to the rad-fem agenda
is a losing political strategy. Mr. President,
it’s time to do some housecleaning.
Cleavage Candidates and
the Politics of Gender
This headline crossed my desk last week:
“Gubernatorial Hopeful Flashes for Cash!”
Below that exclamatory remark appeared a sketch of
well-endowed blond, her hands clutching the front
of a low-cut jacket.
This cheap thrill did not grace the pages of a
recent issue of Playboy magazine, nor was it the
come-on for a back-alley peep show.
No, this was the official campaign literature of
one Loretta Nall, libertarian candidate for the
governorship of Alabama. [www.nallforgovernor.com]
And three months ago Hillary Clinton appeared on
C-SPAN, this time with her formidable cleavage
peering through her tailored blue dress.
[theanchoressonline.com/2006/07/18/nothin-wrong-with-a-little-cleavage/
]
What is it about the Clintons and blue dresses,
anyway?
Whether these ladies’ natural assets put
them over the top in Tuesday’s elections, we
will soon find out. And clearly, women are leaving
their imprint on the modern political scene. That
impact can be explained in two words: psychology
and demography.
It’s no doubt true that men and women look
for different things in a candidate. Columnist
Allison Brown laid out the psychology this way:
“Women prefer to attach themselves to the
problems they want to solve. Men operate best while
maintaining a certain level of detachment, and
analyze problems based on rules, on thoughts as
opposed to feelings . . . In truth, women are
natural socialists. . . . Men, to put it simply,
are more independent in thought and action.”
[www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/brown6.html
]
So on July 7, 2004, presidential candidate John
Kerry bragged that his team had “better
vision, better ideas” and just as importantly,
“we’ve got better hair.” Somehow I
doubt that hairdo pitch was aimed at the
nation’s male electorate.
Then there’s the old saying about women who
can’t make up their minds. At one point in the
2004 election, women favored Kerry with a 17% point
lead. Two just months later that reversed itself,
with Bush enjoying a double-digit advantage among
the female electorate.
And other women remained undecided until the
very last minute, making them highly-courted
“swing” voters.
Women may have trouble making up their minds
because they don’t understand the issues.
Columnist Debbie Schlussel reports that the
University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy
Center has found men are consistently more
knowledgeable than women about candidates’
positions on a broad range of topics such as taxes
and gun control. Even on so-called
“women’s issues” such as education
and healthcare, men hold the edge.
In the past, politicos who wanted to salvage a
faltering campaign would carry their demagoguery to
low-income minorities. Now, it seems women who
haven’t studied up on the issues are being
targeted for the pandering.
This Tuesday, for example, Michigan voters will
decide on a ballot measure to ban arbitrary
preferences in state admissions and hiring. But a
Trotskyite fringe group called “By Any Means
Necessary” is now arguing the referendum would
send Birkenstock-clad women back to the kitchen and
deprive them of their constitutional right to watch
Oprah.
Oh, my.
The demographic profile of the American
electorate is even more revealing than
Hillary’s latest low-cut pantsuit.
Men die, on average, at the age of 75, while
women live to the ripe old age of 80. That means
there are 5.3 million more women than men in the
United States. In every state except one –
Alaska – the female electorate outnumbers the
men. So it comes as no surprise that Senator Ted
Stevens of Alaska has long been a strong advocate
for prostate cancer research.
In the 2004 presidential race, it was men who
handed George W. Bush his margin of victory. That
year 55% of males voted for the Republicans, while
48% of females gave the nod to Bush.
But pollsters pay far more attention to another
statistic -- men represented only 46% of the total
electorate that year.
As a result, vote-hungry candidates increasingly
pitch their message to females. And the political
discourse becomes increasingly trivialized –
remember when 17-year-old Laetitia Thompson asked
President Bill Clinton whether he wore boxers or
briefs?
And fewer men vote. So pols are even less likely
to listen to men’s concerns. It’s an
ever-worsening cycle that marginalizes men and is
bound to ultimately undermine America’s
economic, moral, and social fiber.
But there is a solution, and it doesn’t
require a million-dollar federal program, either.
LISTEN UP, GENTS. It’s your duty to get out on
November 7. Vote for the candidate of your choice,
but be sure to vote.
As far as Miss Nall, I would urge you to go back
to debating the issues. And keep your clothes on
– lest we begin to give hard-working strippers
a bad name.
The Feminization of
Poverty? There You Go Again, Hillary!
Some 20 years ago the feminist crusade ran out of
legitimate issues to address, so it did what any
smart advocacy group would do: fabricate new
injustices and outrages.
The gender wage gap? Well, that turned out to be
a fraud.
The glass ceiling? A fatuous exercise in
smoke-and-mirrors logic.
Then there’s the “feminization of
poverty” canard. Hillary Rodham Clinton has
been milking this one for years.
Back in 1995, HRC led the U.S. delegation to
China to attend the United Nations World Conference
on Women. There Hillary held forth on the economic
status of women, making the claim that “Women
are 70% of the world’s poor.”
And sure enough, Madame Hillary is at it again.
Two weeks ago, she spouted the “feminization
of poverty” cliché at her
husband’s conference on global challenges. No
doubt shedding crocodile tears, Clinton deplored
the fact that “Far too many women are stuck in
the cycle of poverty from which there is no
escape.”
During my life I’ve traveled far and wide,
visiting some of the most poverty-stricken regions
of the world. And I’ve never seen anything
that resembles a sex-based imbalance of
poverty.
Indeed, a 2000 document from the UN Economic and
Social Council had to admit, “Despite
observations on the ‘feminization of
poverty,’ for example, the methodologies for
measuring poverty among women respective to men are
still inadequate.”
A recent report from the UN Development Program
was even more pointed: “There is no evidence
of systematic over-representation of women among
the poor around the world.” [www.undp-povertycentre.org/newsletters/WorkingPaper20.pdf
]
And Alain Marcoux of the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization once ridiculed Hillary’s 70%
claim by noting the total implausibility of the
statistic “will teach us a lesson about using
illustrative figures for advocacy.”
So exactly where did the notion of the
“feminization of poverty” come from?
Not too long ago, men were the primary
breadwinners. Poor, middle-class, or rich, men were
the designated hitters to bring home a living
wage.
But then the Great Society came along.
Eligibility criteria for welfare programs either
required the man to leave the home, such AFDC, or
openly favored female recipients, such as the
Women, Infants, and Children program.
“Now listen carefully, class, to
today’s arithmetic quiz. Here it is: Take one
daddy, one mommy, and two children. Now subtract
the male breadwinner. What’s left over?
a) Financial ruin
b) Welfare dependency
c) Social decay
d) All the above
“Class, if you answered d) All the above,
you’re absolutely right!”
But the architects of the Great Society were
playing hooky that day.
So told they were unwelcome or unnecessary, men
gradually melted into the woodwork. And the Black
family, which had weathered the storms of the Great
Depression and two World Wars, began to
disintegrate. In 1960, the percentage of intact
African-American families with fathers and mothers
at home was 80%. By 1990, that number skidded to
38%. [www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2006/0315roberts.html
]
When economist Victor Fuchs of the National
Bureau of Economic Research combed through the
figures from the 1970s, he concluded:
“Statistical decomposition of the changes
shows that an increase in the proportion of women
in households without men was the principal source
of feminization of poverty.”
Translation: Divorce places a woman at risk of
becoming impoverished.
Fuchs went on to note, “between 1979 and
1984 poverty rates rose for both men and women, but
they rose relatively more rapidly for men.” So
according to Dr. Fuchs, the real crisis was the
masculinization, not feminization, of poverty.
“Miss Rodham, stop drawing pictures of
women in villages and start paying
attention!”
A few years ago sociologist Martha Gimenez
sagely observed that the feminization of poverty
myth only serves to fuel “conflict between men
and women, young and old, and white and
nonwhite.”
Therein lies the secret of cultural Marxism.
Cultural Marxists know they cannot topple
Western democratic societies with a direct assault.
Rather, they seek to undermine basic values, incite
gender conflict, and weaken institutions such as
the family. Gloria Steinem may have revealed more
than she intended when she remarked:
“Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us.
We must overthrow the whole...
patriarchy.”
When widespread divorce and social discord
ensue, the Gender Guerillas then blame the whole
mess on patriarchal society, leaving behind no
marks or fingerprints.
Think about it -- it’s the perfect crime.
That’s the genius of radical feminism.
Lies, Damn Lies and
Statistics at UNICEF
At first I assumed UNICEF director Ann Veneman had
been terribly misquoted.
This was the statement the media attributed to
her: “We know that women do about 66% of the
work in the world, they produce 50% of the food,
but earn 5% of the income and own 1% of the
property.” But then I checked, and that’s
what she had said. It was right on the UNICEF
website.
Veneman’s message was clear: Around the
world, men are lazy dolts who lord over their
down-trodden wives.
But I was a skeptical. So I called the UNICEF
press office and asked for the source of those
damning statistics. Press aide Kate Donovan
cheerfully reassured me that Veneman is “very
picky about her facts” and promised she’d
get back to me. She never did.
Google to the rescue. Many mouse-clicks later I
arrived at another UN web page devoted to the
Millenium Development Goals. [www.millenniumcampaign.org/site/pp.asp?c=grKVL2NLE&b=186382
]
Ah ha! -- right there on the page 2 was the
elusive quote, along with its source: Womankind
Worldwide.
So then I contacted Womankind Worldwide
[www.womankind.org.uk], asking for the
exact name of the source document. And here’s
the long-awaited response from a Julia Czastka:
“I can tell you that the facts given in this
quote are from the UN.”
Let’s see … Group A relies on Group B,
Group B bounces us over to Group C, and Group C
sends us back to Group A. In my neck of the woods,
that’s called recycling the trash. Ms.
Veneman, may we consider your statement a candidate
for the Phony Statistics Hall of Fame?
While I was perusing the UNICEF website, I
couldn’t help but notice some other
questionable claims.
A March 8 press release quoted Veneman as
saying, “Violence against women is the extreme
form of inequality.” So how does she reconcile
that statement with the UN’s World Report
Violence and Health, which showed 14% of men die
from violence-related causes, compared to only 7%
of women? Or the recent survey showing women are
twice as likely as men to initiate partner abuse?
[www.unh.edu/news/cj_nr/2006/may/em_060519male.cfm?type=n
]
And a 2005 News Note claims, “Violence in
the family affects mainly girls ...” Wrong
again, UNICEF.
According to a compilation of 172 studies by
Lytton and Romney, it’s boys who are
consistently subjected to more physical punishment
than girls. (This News Note also maligns the
traditional family, recklessly claiming that
“values promoted by the family … use
violence as their main tool.”)
Remember the Yiddish proverb, “A half-truth
is a whole lie”? If that is true, then UNICEF,
which now views the world through the lens of
patriarchal oppression, is immersed in a complete
and utter lie.
The UNICEF home page informs us,
“Women’s political power is
growing,” as if that’s somehow going help
kids get their tetanus shots and clean drinking
water. Its website recounts the woes of girls:
educational attainment, female circumcision, abuse,
and discrimination. It even has a newsletter called
Girls Too!
But nowhere does UNICEF admit to the inequities
facing boys: higher rates of suicide,
undernourishment, and low healthcare utilization.
Not a word about the 12-year-old lads forced into
armed combat, or kids sent off to become camel
jockeys in the Persian Gulf.
Remember, we’re talking about BOYS –
those impish lads who are made of snips and snails
and puppy dog tails. It’s those tykes who trek
through the woods in search of a handful of wilted
daisies to proudly present to their moms.
Over the last three years I have chronicled the
steady descent of UNICEF into the slough of gender
advocacy. These reports have documented how UNICEF
has systematically: boys [www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2003/0422roberts.html,
UNICEF has become the target of blistering
critiques. In 2004 the Catholic Family and Human
Rights Group charged, “Radical feminism has
come to define the current UNICEF.” Two years
ago the prestigious Lancet journal accused UNICEF
of “shamefully” failing to develop an
effective child survival strategy.
But the gals at UNICEF have turned a deaf ear on
their critics.
Last week the Heritage Foundation released an
analysis titled “The Status of United Nations
Reform.” Its sobering conclusion reads:
“There has been quite a bit of smoke on
reform, but very little fire … Without tying
reform to financial incentives, the sound and fury
of the current U.N. reform effort, as with past
efforts, will prove grossly insufficient.”
Ambassador Bolton, we need to make UNICEF the
first example of our towering resolve and moral
disgust.
© 2006 Carey Roberts
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