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Carey Roberts is a social commentator on
political correctness. He has been widely published
in newspapers and through the internet. You can
contact him at E-Mail.
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Another Scandal Brewing
at the U.N
Chivalrous Men and the
Victim-Princess Comple
Equality for Men and
Fathers - What a Concept!
Feminist Cover-Up Means
Billion-Dollar Taxpayer Shake-Down
Gender: Good
Riddance, Farewell
A Government Program
is No Substitute for a Bear-Hug
Hillary Plays the Female
Supremacist Card
Kofi's Resignation Won't
Cure the AIDS Epidemic
The Leftist-Feminist
Brief Against Nominee Roberts
Long Live the
Matriarchy!
Misandrist Marriage
Movement
Men: Stand Aside.
The Rad-Fems are Set to Win the Culture
War
New Catholic
Patriarch may Derail Hillary's White House
Plans
Orwellian State at the
UN Women's Conference
The Pink Pussy-cat Bares Her
Fangs
The Politics of Social
Destruction at the US
Pronouncement of
Bias at the Washington Post
Rape, Hysteria,
Redux
A Rash of Feminist Hate
Speech
The Rise of Big
Sister-ism
Senator Biden's Biggest
Lie
Soft Totalitarians on the
Loose at the UN
Something Amiss in the
United Nations' Gender Health Agenda
The Sun of Feminism Shines
Brightly in Socialist Europe
Supreme
Hysteria
Un-constitutional
VAWA Law Helped by a Propaganda
Ploy
Unequal Pay for Equal
Work?
VAWA Law Polarizes the
Sexes, Weakens the Family
VAWA: Making
Divorce Easy, Profitable and Fun
Whatever Happened to
Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice?
When the Sisterhood
Rules the World: Th Sad Tale of
UNICEF
Winner of the
Coveted 2004 Award for Political
Incorrectness
Bias Suit Reveals the
Truth Behind the 'Boy Crisis'
Six days after graduating from Milton High School,
Mickarl Thomas tragically died in a single-car
accident. Affectionately known as Mikey, he was the
co-captain of his Boston-area football team and the
only black male in his honors classes.
Growing up in a family with two sisters and no
father, Mikey had a strong need to hang out with
other African-American guys. It’s that old
thing about men needing to learn about masculinity
from other men.
As chance would have it, a few years later his
mother Carole, now a successful consultant, was
hired by the school to do a diversity assessment.
Her report acknowledged the sudden death of her son
and then pointedly noted, “The ultimate
question is finding a way to encourage black males
to succeed academically in a way that does not
demean the ethnic trust and respect they so
desperately need.” [www.miltonps.org/CCT%20Report/9_04+Milton+Report+Final.doc
 ]
But it turns out the problem of male achievement
at Milton H.S. is not limited to minorities.
Last month Doug Anglin, a white 17-year-old
senior at the school, filed a civil rights
complaint with the U.S. Department of Education.
His allegation: Milton High discriminates against
boys.
At his school, girls outnumber boys 2 to 1 on
the honor roll, and about 60% of Advanced Placement
students are female. Only 36% of teachers are men.
And in one class, students are expected to fancy up
their notebooks with glitter and feathers.
Ignoring the statistics and oblivious to the
heartfelt plea from the diversity consultant,
school administrators seem to view the “boy
problem” more as an inconvenience than a
crisis. In a recent Boston Globe interview, Milton
High principal John Drottar would only concede,
“We’re aware of it. We’re looking
into it.” [www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/01/26/schoolboys_bias_suit
]
Twenty years ago the boy crisis did not
exist.
True, boys didn’t do as well as girls in
reading and spelling, but they compensated for that
with higher science and math scores. Similar
numbers of men and women graduated from college.
All in all, things seemed pretty equal back
then.
But everything changed in 1992 when the American
Association for University Women released its
intellectually-dishonest, self-serving report, How
Schools Shortchange Girls. The document charged
that girls were treated as second-class citizens in
the nation’s schools, which made them suffer
from a crippling crisis of self-esteem.
But some had their doubts. One New York Times
reporter interviewed Diane Ravitch, former
assistant secretary of education. Ravitch shook up
the educational establishment when she revealed,
“The AAUW report was just completely wrong.
What was so bizarre is that it came out right at
the time that girls had just overtaken boys in
almost every area.”
Smarting under criticisms of bias, the AAUW
commissioned a second report in 1998 called Gender
Gaps: Where Schools Still Fail our Children. This
time the AAUW decided to come clean with the truth:
“National data indicate that girls
consistently earn either equivalent or higher
grades than boys in all subjects at all points in
their academic careers.”
But that admission could not undo the damage.
Because four years before that Congress had been
stampeded into passing the Gender Equity in
Education Act, which singled out girls as an
“under-served population.” The Act pumped
tens of millions of dollars into advocacy research
and feminist-inspired programs, all based on the
fraudulent claim that girls were lagging in an
all-encompassing patriarchal society.
This past week the front cover of Newsweek
magazine announced “The Boy Crisis.” The
article did not admit that boys are lagging because
our schools have been turned into feminist
re-education camps. Rather, we’re told the
problem is with male grey-matter, what Newsweek
dubs the “boy brain.”
But the boy brain theory doesn’t explain
why two decades ago, boys were doing just fine. And
why has the number of boys saying they don’t
like school sky-rocketed 71% from 1980 to 2001?
Well, that question stumped the Newsweek
reporters.
It’s one thing to acknowledge the God-given
neurological differences between the sexes. But
somehow the boy brain theory reminds me of the
KKK-types who once claimed that since the brains of
certain races were slightly smaller, those people
had puny intellects.
Four months from now Carole Thomas will
commemorate the ninth anniversary of the death of
her only son. Let’s hope we come to recognize
that Mikey’s story was not merely one of a
life brimming with promise that was cut short by a
terrible fate, but rather an object lesson in why
boys are falling behind in a glitter and feathers
world.
Women Who Make Things Worse
for Other Women
Who is harmed more by the radical feminist creed:
men or women? I have long believed that men are
more victimized. But after reading Kate
O’Beirne’s recent book, Women
Who Make the World Worse and how their radical
feminist assault is ruining our schools, families,
military and sports I’m beginning to
reconsider.
As editor of National Review Online,
O’Beirne showcases her formidable research and
writing skills in exposing how the feminist
movement has polarized relations between the sexes
and made life worse for most American women.
In my town, billboards feature a newly-engaged
woman showing off her sparkling diamond ring,
nearly shouting the words, “Yes, Yes, Yes,
Yes, YES!” Despite the fact that married women
are healthier, happier, and more
economically-secure than their single sisters,
feminists are hell-bent on obliterating this
bedrock institution.
Feminists want you to believe that the urge to
conceive and nurture children is a patriarchal
construction. Can you guess who came up with this
gem? “Motherly love ain’t everything it
has been cracked up to be. To some extent it’s
a myth that men have created to make women think
that they do this job to perfection.”
Yep, that comes to us by way Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, member of the U.S. Supreme Court.
And shame on all those stay-at-home moms who are
shirking their civic responsibility to
“contribute as professionals and community
activists,” according to University of Texas
professor Gretchen Ritter. Worse, “Full-time
mothering is also bad for children.” Why?
Ritter explains, “It teaches them that the
world is divided by gender.”
Child psychologist Sandra Scarr takes the
argument farther, claiming a child’s desire to
be with his mother is actually a psychiatric
disorder. Scarr calls it EMA Syndrome –
exclusive maternal attachment syndrome.
Ms. O’Beirne takes on the notion that women
should delay childbearing until after their careers
are established. She cites research that among
women earning more than $100,000, nearly half --
49% -- are childless. So much for having it
all.
But feminists are not satisfied to merely lay a
guilt trip on women who are contemplating marriage,
motherhood, and child-rearing. They patronize and
insult the intelligence of women by making the most
ludicrous of claims.
Like the old chestnut about the gender wage gap.
Feminists go around cherry-picking wage statistics
and then claim that society undervalues
women’s work.
O’Beirne shows little patience for such
loopy logic. “They sell women short. They hold
that women aren’t smart enough and tough
enough to flourish when given an equal chance to
compete with men,” O’Beirne thunders.
Then there’s the bogus statistic that men
commit 95% of all domestic violence. As a result,
former women’s studies professor Daphne Patai
notes that “years of exposure to
feminist-promoted scare statistics have succeeded
in imbuing many young women with a foreboding sense
of living under the constant threat of predatory
men.”
And that’s promoting female
self-empowerment?
There’s retired Air Force brigadier general
Wilma Vaught who argued for moving women into
direct combat: “There’s been an
acceptance of the fact that women…are in harms
way and they are being killed.” The families
of the nearly 40 female soldiers killed in Iraq no
doubt would find those words consoling.
The NRO editor goes on to quote this nihilistic
statement by representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) at
last year’s March for Women’s Lives:
“I have to march because my mother could not
have an abortion.” And Ms. Waters is supposed
to be a role model for smart, ambitious women?
And sometimes rad-fems come across as vindictive
shrews. A female dean at Vassar College who had
this to say about men falsely accused of rape:
“They have of a lot of pain, but it is not a
pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I
think it ideally initiates a process of
self-exploration.”
So after 30-plus years of liberation
feminista-style, are American women better off?
O’Beirne has serious doubts.
Now, thanks to the Sisterhood’s mantra that
men are redundant, many of the nation’s most
eligible bachelors – 22%, to be exact –
have turned their back on marriage, leaving
millions of women desperate to find a good man
who’s willing to commit. [marriage.rutgers.edu/Publications/SOOU/TEXTSOOU2004.htm
].
As a result of affirmative action programs,
professional women have been put under suspicion
that they owe their position to something other
than merit.
And the very fabric of maternal virtue has been
indelibly stained by the feminist message that
“the only thing a woman can do with a child is
abort.”
Throughout her 200-page exposé, Kate
O’Beirne shows how feminists have used
deception, manipulation, intimidation, and
old-fashioned propaganda to victimize men and women
alike.
Women
Who Make the World Worse and how their radical
feminist assault is ruining our schools, families,
military and sports – it’s the gutsy
and shocking must-read of the politically incorrect
for 2006.
Comic Relief from the
World Health Organization
Feeling a little bored, maybe suffering from
after-the-holiday blues? The World Health
Organization never fails to provide a moment of
levity in our otherwise hum-drum lives.
Take the AIDS epidemic. After all these years of
seeing the epidemic spread unchecked, I’m
beginning to wonder if the world health body views
AIDS as its stealth population control
strategy.
If that statement seems a bit harsh, consider
the WHO’s “safe sex” campaign which
pushes this Russian-roulette message: “Go
ahead and enjoy no-fault sex with multiple
partners, just so long as you use a condom.”
As we know, condoms fail 15% of the time.
[www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/1207roberts.html]
And if you want a real belly laugh, check out
the WHO Sex Work Toolkit, designed to make
prostitutes feel good about themselves as they
service their AIDS-infected clientele. Just in case
you were worried, the Toolkit comes with this
disclaimer: “In no event shall the World
Health Organization be liable for damages arising
from its use.” [who.arvkit.net/sw/en/index.jsp
]
Then there’s the malaria epidemic that
claims the lives of millions each year. Spraying
tiny amounts of DDT on the walls of houses is
highly effective in killing malaria-infected
mosquitoes. But the WHO won’t allow household
spraying because – you guessed it -- that
might offend the environmentalists.
And last July the WHO added two
abortion-inducing drugs – RU-486 and Mifrepex
– to its list of “essential
medicines.” At least WHO won’t have to
worry about providing so many vaccines and vitamin
pills to little kids.
Here’s the most recent laugh-getter from
the World Health Organization. Can you imagine the
world body doing a study that cherry-picks its
participants and relies on flawed methods in order
to reach a pre-determined conclusion?
That’s exactly what the WHO did with its
recent “Multi-Country Study on Women’s
Health and Domestic Violence Against Women.”
[www.who.int/gender/violence/who_multicountry_study/en/index.html
]
Every study I’ve seen shows that domestic
violence is an equal opportunity problem. Professor
Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire
interviewed over 8,000 men and women in 16
countries around the world. He found high rates of
assault “perpetrated by both male and female
students.” [pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID16.pdf]
And recent reports from Canada [www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/85-224-XIE/85-224-XIE2005000.pdf
] and Australia [www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17051698%255E1702,00.html
] likewise reveal that women are equally likely
to assault their male partners.
But that rendition of gender equality
didn’t sit too well with the lavender ladies
at WHO’s department of Gender, Women, and
Health. They solved that problem by designing a
study that – you guessed right again –
only interviewed females.
Then the WHO asked radical feminist
organizations around the world to conduct the
surveys. That’s like doing a study on
persons’ opinions about wearing animal fur,
and letting PETA run the show.
Since the interviewers knew nothing about how to
do surveys, they were put through a 3-week
indoctrination – er, training – program.
The training was based on a manual called
“Researching Violence Against Women”
[www.path.org/files/GBV_rvaw_front.pdf
],
which, not surprisingly, had very little to say
about domestic violence against men.
Of course they ensured the survey not ask any
questions whether the woman had ever injured her
husband or boyfriend – that might get a little
embarrassing. To top it off, they did a little
definitional hocus-pocus, absurdly claiming that
“abuse” is the same as
“violence.
To no one’s great surprise, the survey
found that there’s plenty domestic violence
around the world, and of course it’s those
brutish men who are at fault. Predictably the WHO
apparatchiks blamed it on the all-powerful
patriarchy: “Violence against women is both a
consequence and a cause of gender inequality,”
laments the report.
Then they got the boss to give a
headline-grabbing endorsement. “This study
shows that women are more at risk from violence at
home than in the street and this has serious
repercussions for women’s health,”
according to WHO director Lee Jong-wook.
Of course Dr. Jong-wook never mentioned that men
are twice as likely as women to die from
violence-related causes. That fact didn’t
quite fit into the punch-line.
As if that wasn’t enough, the WHO had the
arrogance and chutzpah to bill the fraudulent
survey as a “landmark study.”
[www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr62/en
]
It may be true that laughter is the best
medicine, but this time the joke’s on us --
the U.S. taxpayer.
In order to support this misguided comedy
routine, each year the United States sends the WHO
$95 million for assessed dues, and another $45
million for so-called “extra-budgetary”
contributions. That money is funneled through the
Office for Global Health Affairs in the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services. Eventually
your hard-earned money winds up in the Swiss bank
account of a UN bureaucracy that lacks fairness,
accountability, or intellectual honesty.
Winner of the Covented 2005
Award for Political Incorrectness
Leftists believe the Truth is an intellectual fraud
designed to prop up the existing
techno-patriarchal-capitalist power structure.
That’s why the neo-Coms will tell you with a
straight face that Saddam Hussein was a courageous
freedom fighter, and that the New York Times
usually gets the story right.
No wonder George Orwell once said, “In a
time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a
revolutionary act.”
This year three stalwart truth-tellers stood up
to a tsunami of prevarication to make the short
list for the 2005 Award for Political
Incorrectness.
Our second runner-up this year is…Michael
Kinsey, opinion-page editor of the Los Angeles
Times. You may recall last February when Susan
Estrich, former presidential campaign manager for
Michael Dukakis, threw a temper tantrum because
only a fraction of the LA Times op-eds were written
by women.
Mr. Kinsey curtly replied that if more female
editorialists wanted to be published in his
newspaper, then they would need to write better
articles. [www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0223roberts.html
]
Bravo, Mr. Kinsey.
The first runner-up is Mr. Ken Bode, ombudsman
for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Last
month Mr. Bode reviewed the PBS program Breaking
the Silence and concluded the incendiary show was
little more than an anti-father cant.
[www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/1214roberts.html
]
Well done, Mr. Bode.
And the winner of the 2005 Award for Political
Incorrectness is…(pan of vast audience with
expectant expressions)… Phyllis Schlafly.
This past year Mrs. Schlafly took on the federal
government’s deepening alliance with radical
feminism. In the process she debunked many of the
Left’s pet explanations for family break-down.
To do justice to Schlafly’s contributions, I
have quoted from several of her columns.
In January she started off the year with a
column about “Children Made Fatherless by
Family Courts.” The article revealed that
“fathers are systematically discriminated
against by family courts which nearly always award
physical custody to the mother even when the father
has committed no fault.” [www.eagleforum.org/column/2005/jan05/05-01-12.html
]
Schlafly continued in the same vein in her
February column about the “Fatherphobia of
Family Courts.” In that article she took
divorce courts to task for ignoring a
“mountain of social science research” by
failing to award joint physical custody to fathers.
[www.eagleforum.org/column/2005/feb05/05-02-02.html
]
In March she highlighted the plight of National
Guard Spc. Joe McNeilly who was called up for
service in Iraq. Upon completion of his tour of
duty, McNeilly was greeted with the news that a
family court, during his absence and without his
knowledge, had awarded full custody of his
10-year-old son to his mother. [www.eagleforum.org/column/2005/mar05/05-03-02.html
]
In May she turned up the heat, exposing how
“Federal Incentives Make Children
Fatherless.” Schlafly warned, “Follow the
money. The less time that non-custodial parents
(usually fathers) are permitted to be with their
children, the more child support they must pay into
the state fund, and the higher the federal bonus to
the states for collecting the money.”
[www.eagleforum.org/column/2005/may05/05-05-11.html
]
Mrs. Schlafly doesn’t mince words, does
she? And it only gets better.
In her June column on “How to Celebrate
Father’s Day,” Schlafly took aim at the
feminist Big Lie: “For 30 years, feminist
organizations and writers have propagated the myth
that women are victims of an oppressive patriarchal
society and that marriage is an inherently abusive
institution that makes wives second-class
citizens.” [www.eagleforum.org/column/2005/june05/05-06-15.html
]
Then beginning in July, Schlafly took on the
hotly-debated Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)
which came up before Congress this past fall for a
five-year renewal.
In “Time to Defund Feminist Pork,”
Schlafly wondered why the US Congress funnels
“a billion dollars a year of taxpayers' money
into the hands of radical feminists who use it to
preach their anti-marriage and anti-male ideology,
promote divorce, corrupt the family court system,
and engage in liberal political advocacy.”
[www.eagleforum.org/column/2005/july05/05-07-20.html
]
Mrs. Schlafly’s pièce de resistance
came in October. While our elected officials were
buckling under the feminist intimidation tactics,
Schlafly released an exposé with the
sizzling title, “Time to Defund Feminist Pork
– the Hate-Men Law.”
First Schlafly ridiculed the feminist urban
legends such as “a woman is beaten every 15
seconds” and Super Bowl Sunday is the
“biggest day of the year of violence against
women.” She deplored how VAWA rides
“roughshod over the constitutional rights of
men.”
Schlafly then scolded our elected officials in
Washington: “Shame on Members of Congress who
lack the courage to stand up to feminist
outrages.” [www.eagleforum.org/psr/2005/oct05/psroct05.html
]
For 30 years the Leftists have waged a tenacious
assault on society’s bedrock institutions,
including fatherhood and families. As the rest of
us silently stood by, feminists branded dads with
epithets such as deadbeat, abuser, and patriarchal
oppressor.
And now Phyllis Schlafly has shed the light of
truth on their evil scheme.
The Leftist-Feminist
Brief Against Nominee Roberts
President Bush surprised everyone, including wife
Laura, with his nomination of John Roberts to the
Supreme Court of the United States. It seems the
First Lady has been taking law classes during her
spare time, making her qualified to advise the
President on the importance of gender in judicial
selections. “I would really like him to name
another woman,” she explained on NBC’s
Today show.
Everyone from Sandra Day O’Connor to the
nattering nags at NOW had decided that the
now-vacated seat was destined to be filled by a
woman, regardless of her training, experience, or
judicial temperament.
Why? Because “something is lost when there
is only one female in the room,” according to
a weepy-eyed article in the Chicago Tribune. And
what is that unique “something”? The
article answers, it’s that “special bond
that mothers have with children.”
[www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0507210100jul21,1,3231904.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
]
That tender maternal bond no doubt explains why
Sandra O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg have
consistently voted to uphold abortion laws
throughout their Supreme Court careers.
Bush’s nomination of a white male
represents more than a slap in the face to the
affirmative action mentality. Mr. Roberts, you see,
does not believe that true meaning of the
Constitution lurks somewhere in the decrees of the
International Criminal Court. Rather, his approach
to interpreting the U.S. Constitution hews to the
notion of “What you see is what you
get”– WYSIWYG in computer parlance.
When the U.S. Constitution was drafted,
Americans were still smarting from the memory of
King George’s boot-heel tyranny. The bitter
after-taste of that experience compelled our
forefathers to strictly limit the powers of the
nascent federal government. And they did it right
up front, enumerating its responsibilities in
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
But the notion of enumerated powers of the
federal government has become eroded. And now
we’re paying the price. Look at the draconian
policies of government bureaucracies such as the
Office of Child Support Enforcement or Child
Protective Services, and you realize that’s
exactly what the delegates to the 1787
Constitutional Convention were seeking to
avoid.
Roberts’ constructionist views of the
Constitution represent a direct threat to the
Leftist creed, which seeks to highjack the federal
government in order to impose its classless,
genderless vision on the rest of us. To a Leftist,
individual differences are an anathema that need to
be rooted out by government fiat.
But it’s the feminist Left that’s
really having a hissy-fit. According to the
National Organization of Women, Roberts has long
promoted an “anti-woman, anti-civil rights,
and anti-worker agenda.”
This guy must really be a monster. Yes, just see
for yourself.
In a 1999 radio interview Roberts voiced his
opposition to the Violence Against Women Act:
“We have gotten to the point these days where
we think the only way we can show we’re
serious about a problem is if we pass a federal
law, whether it is the Violence Against Women Act
or anything else.” Obviously the Supreme Court
nominee doesn’t appreciate that Big Sister
government should be the cure-all for our social
ills.
In NCAA v. Smith, Roberts argued against Title
IX, the law that shuts down men’s athletic
teams because not enough women have been signing up
for synchronized swimming. What’s wrong with
imposing Soviet-style gender quotas on college
sports programs, so long as they bring about gender
equality?
But it’s Roberts’ discomfiture with
abortion that has most provoked the Sisterhood. As
Deputy Solicitor General, Roberts once argued in a
brief to the Supreme Court that “we continue
to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should
be overruled.”
Then there’s the matter of Roberts’
wife Jane, who served for four years as the
executive vice president of Feminists for Life, a
pro-life group. But folks are trying to pretend
that does not reflect in any way on nominee Mr.
Roberts’ views on abortion. Both John and Jane
are active members in their local Catholic
parish.
Years ago the feminist Left came to realize that
they would never achieve their socialistic goals if
they had to rely on normal democratic processes. So
their solution was to impose an abortion litmus
test on the nominations process, seize control of
the judiciary, and short-circuit the notion of
government of the people, by the people, and for
the people.
We should all be shedding crocodile tears over
the impeding demise of judicial activism and the
socialistic schemes that march under the red banner
of progressive government.
Chivalrous Men and the
Victim-Princess Complex
I recently came across an article sporting the
irresistible title, A Nation of Little Princesses.
Author Christopher Healy explores the archetype of
the princess, which he asserts “is one of the
longest-lived in all of literary history.”
[www.freepress.net/news/print.php?id=5557
]
My first reaction was to think,
“Here’s some Neanderthal guy trying to
peddle outdated gender stereotypes.” But Healy
points to the fact that the Disney Corporation has
assembled a Princess brand consisting of eight
animated film heroines including Cinderella, Snow
White, Pocahontas, Belle of Beauty of the Beast,
and others. In 2003 the Princess line racked up an
astonishing $2.5 billion in sales, up from a mere
$300 million in 2001.
And that’s just for starters.
“We’ve gone beyond the dress-up and toys,
and begun to look at the brand as a lifestyle,
filling out all the other things girls need in
life,” according to Mary Beech, Disney’s
director of franchise management. Things girls need
in life?
Healy, proud dad of a three-year-old girl, notes
with an equal mix of astonishment and horror,
“The ease and rapidity with which a princess
obsession can take hold of a young girl’s
psyche is mind-blowing.”
Eventually those little Jennifers and Bethanies
grow up, go to college, and enroll in their first
Women’s Studies course. There they learn that
the kiss by their Prince Charming really represents
non-consensual sexual assault, that Belle’s
Beast is a closet bodice-ripper, and that the fable
of the Princess talking to the Green Frog at the
side of the well is an allegory of serial rape.
But the Women’s Studies gurus explain they
can still make their dreams of tiaras and
sequin-studded dresses come true: “Join the
Sisterhood, and we’ll turn you into a real
princess!”
According to the feminist fable, women were kept
under heel for so many millennia that members of
the fairer sex need to play “catch-up.”
So now women should be the beneficiaries of an
ever-expanding array of legal protections,
government programs, commercial products, and
lifestyle options. That’s the Victim-Princess
Complex.
What princess who has just been betrayed by her
Handsome Green Frog could resist that offer?
Before long these Wicked Witches of the North
have cast a spell on their Little Pretties. These
young women soon graduate from college believing
that women are paid less for the same work, that
women were routinely excluded from medical
research, and a multitude of other tragedies that
have befallen womankind. Victimization has become a
mainstay of their self-identity.
It’s not just the feminist propaganda mill
that endlessly replays the woman-as-victim mantra.
Chivalrous men, acting out their fantasies of the
White Knight in Shining Armor, are guilty as
well.
Pick up a copy of your local newspaper and you
will see articles – usually written by male
reporters and columnists – that reinforce the
notion of the downtrodden female. Accounts of women
who are stressed-out, undervalued, and abused form
the staple of daily news reporting.
Recently I attended a conference where a speaker
blandly made the claim that 60 million women around
the world had “disappeared.” He
didn’t bother to offer any details or proof.
And he certainly didn’t say anything about men
who were never heard from again.
I imagine that catering to women’s
insecurities makes these men feel gallant and
proud. But chivalry is defined as being
“considerate and courteous to women.”
Slanting and distorting the truth –
that’s chicanery, not chivalry.
Yet there’s a downside to the
Princess-Victim Complex.
Myrna Blyth, former editor of Ladies Home
Journal, reveals how women’s magazines turn
female victimization into a hard sell for the
latest beauty products or weight control program.
Blyth decries how these magazines promote
“narcissism as an advanced evolutionary stage
of female liberation. Me, me, me, means you’re
finally free, free, free.”
But the problem goes beyond self-absorbed
narcissism.
In his Nation of Little Princesses article,
Christopher Healy quotes a father who observes,
“Well, that’s the magic of Disney:
It’s addictive. It’s like crack for
5-year-olds.”
So the Victim-Princess Complex begins to
resemble a dysfunctional habit in which the
negative feelings of being a victim require
ever-larger “fixes” for women to feel
good about themselves. And those fixes come with a
hefty price tag. Princesses “only find true
happiness once they’re married off with royal
expense accounts,” Healy laments.
These women are undoubtedly the most prosperous,
pampered, and protected group in the history of the
world. But they would still have you believe that
women aren’t getting a fair shake.
What is the truth of feminism? A fairytale come
true, or a royal deception that appeals to the most
primitive instincts of men and women alike?
Rape, Hysteria, Redux
Can you imagine the German Bundestag issuing a
formal apology for the Nazi atrocities, but then
leaving out the fact that Jews were the primary
victims?
Earlier this summer the U.S. Senate apologized
for its earlier failures to approve anti-lynching
legislation. The resolution was supported by
liberal senators such as Mary Landrieu of
Louisiana, Joe Biden of Delaware, and others.
The apology notes, “at least 4,742 people,
predominantly African-Americans, were reported
lynched in the United States between 1882 and
1968.”
The resolution is well-intentioned, but it
air-brushes out one essential fact: Virtually all
of the victims were male, many of whom were accused
of ravishing well-to-do white women.
Men so charged were summarily dragged away by
the mob and strung from a tree. Once the crowd had
gathered, men were stripped of their clothes and
their dignity. Many had their bodies riddled with
bullets. In the most gruesome cases, the men were
burned at the stake.
The hysteria that surrounded these incidents was
stoked by inflammatory headlines about “big
black brutes” and “monsters in human
form.” Newspaper articles featured caricatures
of Black men with insatiable sexual appetites for
white virgins. As Philip Dray notes in his book
At the Hands of Persons Unknown, “the
cumulative impression was of a world made
precarious by Negroes.”
The fear of marauding male predators reached a
fever pitch during the early part of the last
century. In 1910 Congress passed the White Slave
Traffic Act, which forbade the interstate transport
of white women “for the purpose of
prostitution or debauchery, or for any other
immoral purpose.”
That law was used to prosecute championship
boxer Jack Johnson for taking his white girlfriend,
Lucille Cameron, to Chicago for “immoral
purposes.” Even though the two soon married,
Johnson was convicted in 1913, but fled to Europe
to avoid serving time for a crime that he knew he
had not committed.
Rape hysteria became a flashpoint in
America’s broader race relations problems.
Those relations reached their nadir during the Red
Summer of 1919, when race riots broke out in more
than 20 cities.
In Washington DC, news of the sexual assault of
an officer’s wife triggered the spectacle of
hundreds of uniformed sailors and soldiers who
chased and beat Blacks, all within view of the US
Capitol building. The report later turned out to be
a hoax.
The slaying of innocent Black males continued
for many years.
One of those innocents was Emmett Till, who one
day pulled up to the grocery store in Money,
Mississippi. On a dare, he took the hand of the
cashier, a local beauty by the name of Carolyn
Bryant, and asked, “How about a date,
baby?” Mrs. Bryant was offended by the
overture and word soon reached her husband.
A week later, the mutilated body of Emmett Till
floated to the surface of the Tallahatchie River.
He had been shot through the right temple and his
skull had been struck with an ax.
That was August 1955. Emmett Till was 14 years
old.
In 1991 Clarence Thomas was nominated to the
Supreme Court. He came to the post with a Yale Law
School degree and broad legal experience. But then
he was ambushed by Anita Hill, who claimed that
Thomas had made sexually inappropriate remarks
several years before.
Smarting under the allegation, Thomas complained
to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was the
victim of “a high-tech lynching.” Mr.
Thomas was saying that the fear of male sexuality
that fueled the lynching of Black men decades
before was the same hysteria that now drove people
to obsess over Anita Hill’s over-blown
allegation.
On June 9, 2005 Sen. Joe Biden introduced the
Violence Against Women Act, a bill that aims to
thwart sexual and physical assaults of women. A
reading of the proposed law describes a world made
precarious by men. Sadly, the Act appeals to the
same chivalrous instincts as when the zealotry
surrounding virtuous womanhood swept our nation a
century ago.
Only four days later, on June 13, the Senate
expressed its “deepest sympathies and most
solemn regrets” to the victims of lynching and
their descendants.
And why did the Senate resolution forget to
mention men in its apology?
Because the last thing that presidential hopeful
Biden wants is for persons to draw historic
parallels between the Violence Against Women Act
which portends the widescale curtailment of
men’s civil liberties, and the injustices that
befell wrongly-accused Black men generations
ago.
Another Scandal Brewing
at the U.N.
In a long-awaited decision, President Bush finally
named tough-talking John Bolton as U.S. ambassador
to the United Nations. And not a day too soon, as
the U.N. General Assembly is set to reconvene in
September.
The problems at the United Nations are legion:
the Oil-for-Food scandal, the sexual escapades of
the U.N. peacekeepers, the laughingstock that the
Human Rights Commission has become, the U.N.’s
utter failure to stem the AIDS epidemic, and many
others.
But there’s another scandal that people are
trying to keep under wraps -- the fact that dozens
of agencies and offices sprinkled throughout the
vast U.N bureaucracy have become base camps for
ideological feminism.
Feminists view every human issue through the
lens of gender and power. So whatever the problem
-- poverty, disease, or a shortage of parking
spaces – the standard refrain of the
Sisterhood is “Down with the
patriarchy!”
At the U.N., benign male-bashing has become
distant memory. What now passes as normal feminist
discourse at the United Nations ranges from
outright gender prejudice to high-octane bigotry
that resembles an Andrea Dworkin rant.
The bias begins at the top. At a 2003
International Women’s Day observance, Louise
Frechette issued this categorical imperative:
“all our work for development -- from
agriculture to health....must focus on the needs
and priorities of women.” [www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2003/dsgsm189.doc.htm
]
But not men or children?
Ms. Frechette, by the way, is Deputy
Secretary-General of the United Nations and reports
directly to Kofi Annan.
Carol Bellamy, former UNICEF director, once made
a similar plea for Africa: “Women are the
lifeline of these southern African communities.
They put the food on the table, and they're the
ones that keep families going during such
crises.” As a consequence, according to the
UNICEF press release, “Women and children must
be at the center of response to Southern Africa's
humanitarian crisis.” [www.unicef.org/newsline/2003/03pr21southernafrica_printer.htm
]
Last December the UNAIDS published its report,
Women and AIDS. It is not possible to describe the
gender vilification that oozes from this document,
but suffice it say that it reads like a
master’s thesis from a Women’s Studies
program. [www.washtimes.com/commentary/20041205-123305-3151r.htm
]
The U.N. refugee program issued the following
plea on its website: “The United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees...One million women and
children...homeless, hungry, helpless...Their only
help is you.” (unhcr.org/
).
Does that mean men are never homeless, hungry,
and helpless? Or that their plight simply deserves
less sympathy?
When it comes to domestic violence, the U.N.
subjects men to the most pernicious stereotypes. It
has been shown that women are fully the equal of
men when it comes to partner aggression.
[www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
]
But the WHO report Violence and Health dismisses
that fact with this disingenuous remark:
“Where violence by women occurs, it is more
likely to be in the form of self-defense.”
[www5.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/main.cfm?p=0000000682
]
More disturbing is the casual way that the U.N.
regards the lives of men.
In years past, the rallying cry for the World
Health Organization was “Health for All.”
But now, the WHO’s goals have become somewhat
more modest: “Make Every Mother and Child
Count.” [www.who.int/whr/en/
]
Should we now conclude the lives of men no
longer count?
One WHO report offers this explanation why women
outlive men in countries around world: “as
many societies have undergone economic and
industrial development, a variety of social and
cultural factors have combined to allow women's
inherent biological advantage to emerge.”
[www.who.int/frh-whd/GandH/GHreport/gendertech.htm
]
“Inherent biological advantage”? I
thought a certain European war taught us a lesson
about the evil that lurks when persons make claims
about persons’ inborn genetic advantages.
In 2000 the U.N. Security Council passed
Resolution Number 1325 which makes the claim, never
supported by hard numbers, that, “civilians,
particularly women and children, account for the
vast majority of those adversely affected by armed
conflict.”[www.un.org/events/res_1325e.pdf
]
Apparently the Security Council had forgotten
about places like Srebrenica, Afghanistan, Rwanda,
Cambodia, and elsewhere where millions of innocent
civilian men were specifically targeted for
elimination. [www.gendercide.org/gendercide_and_genocide.html
]
The UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics
and Human Rights advocates that quality health care
and essential medicines be provided
“especially for the health of women.”
[portal.unesco.org/shs/en/file_download.php/11445d5a75d2306d7437f0626f35e1c1Draft_EN.pdf
]
So why not quality health care and essential
medicines for men?
Ignoring the life-and-death needs of men,
categorically blaming males for the woes of women,
and claiming women are a biologically-superior
species – these are the hallmarks of a
morally-bankrupt organization that is destined to
go the way of the League of Nations.
VAWA: Making
Divorce Easy, Profitable and Fun
Man-hating feminist Andrea Dworkin once admitted to
The New Republic, “Senators don't understand
the meaning of the legislation that they
pass.” Dworkin was referring to the Violence
Against Women Act (VAWA), a law that is now up for
reauthorization in the U.S. Congress.
In case you’re wondering, here’s the
meaning of VAWA: the Violence Against Women Act is
a $1 billion-a-year law that turns every marital
tiff into a hate crime against women.
The linchpin of the VAWA marriage wrecking-ball
is a series of state-level laws enacted at the
behest of local N.O.W. chapters. These laws define
“violence” in the broadest possible
terms. For example, the Illinois Domestic Violence
Act defines any action that causes a person to
experience “emotional distress” to fall
within its umbrella of abuse.
Then the VAWA propaganda mill revs up to bombard
women with a series of perverted messages that
amount to a how-to divorce manual:
1. Wife-battering is rampant, and “the
patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal
threat of violence in order to maintain
itself,” as Gloria Steinem once put it. And
since women are powerless, they are obviously
incapable of inflicting violence on their
partners.
2. Remain on constant alert for the dead
give-aways of impending domestic violence, such as,
“My partner acts one way in front of others,
and another way when we are alone.”
[www.aardvarc.org/dv/abusequiz.shtml
]
Yes, abusive men are lurking behind every bush.
3. If you think there’s a slight
possibility of being abused, call 911. That will
instantly bring a couple squad cars roaring to your
rescue. VAWA encourages police departments to
institute “mandatory arrest” policies, so
just huddle in the corner of the room and put on
your pouty face -- that will take care of it.
4. If a 911 call sounds too messy, get a
judicial protection order. Restraining orders are
the handy, “no-fuss” solution to the
problem of husbands who can’t remember to put
the seat down. If you don’t know how to do
this, a VAWA-funded Court Advocate will be there to
help you fill out the forms.
5. Once the bum is evicted, file a petition for
divorce and temporary custody of the kids. This is
by far the cheapest and sure-fire way to win
permanent custody and guarantee yourself many years
of tax-free child support payments.
6. If you have second thoughts about pursing the
domestic abuse case, don’t worry. Thanks to
VAWA, many state attorneys have implemented a
“no-drop” policy. That way you don’t
have to testify in the case, even if you know in
your heart that you started the whole incident.
7. If your house is getting run-down, check out
your local women’s shelter. Don’t worry,
they don’t ask for proof that you were
actually battered. You can get free room and board
while you start tallying up your child support
checks.
8. Finally, if you need help finding a good
divorce lawyer, VAWA-funded organizations such as
AARDVARC will connect you to pre-screened lawyers
in your area. [www.aardvarc.org
]
See girls, this is easier than you could have
imagined!
Recently Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) proposed that
VAWA be renewed for another five years – what
better way to nail down the feminist vote and steal
the Democratic nomination from Hillary? But this
time around Mr. Biden’s bamboozle is hitting
some unexpected snags.
Word is beginning to leak out that VAWA
represents a grotesque violation of men’s
civil rights. Worse, people are hearing that VAWA
is based on a bald-faced lie – that in truth,
women commit half of all domestic violence.
[www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0629roberts.html
]
Normally Senate hearings feature witnesses who
voice the full gamut of opinions. That’s
democracy at work. But at Tuesday’s Judiciary
Committee hearings, only hand-picked apparatchiks
who were willing to spout the VAWA party line were
invited to speak.
A few men who claimed to be DV victims had
requested to testify at the hearings, but they were
sent away since obviously they were liars. In
politically-correct society, only people who tell
the truth enjoy the right to free speech.
And in the House of Representatives, VAWA
operatives plan to skip the committee hearings
altogether. They plan to bundle VAWA into a larger
Department of Justice bill and steam-roller a floor
vote by the end of the month. That’s warp
speed by Washington standards.
Clearly, someone wants to keep the Senators and
Representatives from hearing the truth. Andrea
Dworkin was right. Our elected officials in
Washington don’t have a clue what the Violence
Against Women Act is really about.
Supreme Hysteria
The niggling nannies of N.O.W. fell into a swoon
last week, courtesy of Sandra Day
O’Connor’s July 1 announcement to give up
her seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Over the last
20 years O’Connor has provided the crucial
swing vote that kept the abortion issue in
play.
When Justice Harry Blackmun sat down to write
the majority opinion in the fateful Roe v. Wade
decision in 1973, he was confident that six other
Supreme Court justices would join him. Still, he
knew that proving that the right to abortion lurked
somewhere in the U.S. Constitution would be a
formidable test of his legal acumen.
First he had to hold that the Bill of Rights
enunciates a right to privacy. But the Bill of
Rights never mentions privacy rights.
So Blackmun posited that the right to privacy
could be extracted from the “penumbras and
emanations” of the Bill of Rights. Most people
have only the vaguest notion of what
“penumbras and emanations” mean, so that
was good.
In the end Blackmun came up with this
justification: “in varying contexts the Court
or individual justices have, indeed, found at least
the roots of that right.”
“Individual justices”? “At least
the roots”? Not even a second-year law student
could get away with that far-fetched reasoning --
but that’s what Justice Blackmun wrote.
And exactly how do privacy rights, whether they
exist or not, translate into the right to
abort?
Here Blackmun’s thinking became even more
obtuse, his logic more tortured. Blackmun finally
concluded that a woman who is deprived of the right
to kill is likely to suffer from
“psychological harm.”
So the landmark Roe v. Wade decision is not a
legal treatise based on sound principle or rigorous
logic. Roe really comes down to a chivalrous
exercise in emotional hand-holding for women who
are having second thoughts about their
pregnancy.
Abortionists know full well that Roe is
intellectually flawed, legally indefensible, and
morally repugnant. Given that, don’t expect to
hear much in the way of reasoned discourse and
sensible analysis over next few months.
So mark my words, a torrent of fear-mongering
mantras will become the rallying cry of the
rad-fems who want to stack the Supreme Court with
more left-leaning justices who believe in the need
for a “living, breathing
Constitution.”
Indeed, within hours of O’Connor’s
announcement, Sen. Ted Kennedy took to the senate
floor to issue this sharp-edged ultimatum: “If
the president abuses his power…then the
American people will insist that we oppose that
nominee, and we intend to do so.”
Note that Mr. Kennedy studiously avoided the
words “litmus test,”
“filibuster,” or “smear
campaign.” Those words don’t play very
well on the six o’clock news.
Over the July Fourth weekend, feminists flocked
to Tennessee, home base of Senate Majority Leader
Bill Frist, to try out their new applause lines.
Make note of these high-octane slogans, you will be
hearing them countless times over next few
months.
N.O.W. president Kim Gandy ridiculed President
Bush’s likely Supreme Court candidate as
“a hard-right extremist justice.” And
Feminist Majority head Eleanor Smeal warned Frist
to not “turn back the clock on women’s
rights.” [www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=9136
]
That same weekend, Senator Kennedy used almost
identical words in his Washington Post editorial:
“This process shouldn't just be about whether
the next justice would help roll back women's
rights by overturning Roe v. Wade, the law of the
land.” [www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/03/AR2005070301024.html
]
A quick check of feminist websites reveals a
similar foghorn of slash-and-burn rhetoric and
estrogen-driven hysteria.
The Feminist Majority issues this dire warning:
“If Roe is reversed, women will be returned to
the days of unsafe, back-alley abortions.” To
make sure the point isn’t lost, the FM website
adds an image of a wire coat hanger superimposed on
the Supreme Court building. Nice touch.
The National Abortion Rights Action League
features a picture of President Bush with this dark
warning: “Don’t let his choice end
yours.” That statement appears right under
this chiseled inscription: “Equal Justice
Under Law.” Equality, of course, is exactly
what fathers who have no say about the lives of
their unborn children are clamoring for.
And the website of the National Organization for
Women warns, “Justice O’Connor
Resigns…Women’s Lives on the Line.”
The N.O.W. doesn’t clarify, however, whether
this cautionary statement is meant to apply to the
lives of expectant mothers or of baby girls.
Undermining the integrity of the US
Constitution, applying a litmus test to Supreme
Court candidates, and kindling an atmosphere of
hysteria and fear – all this in the name of
protecting a woman’s right to kill.
Senator Biden's Biggest
Lie
Ol’ Joe Biden has been waiting 17 long years,
hoping the American public would forget.
Back in 1988 Mr. Biden was running against
George Dukakis for the Democratic presidential
nomination. But then it came to light that Mr.
Biden was lifting lines from the speeches of Robert
Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and others.
Where I come from, folks call that plagiarism.
That, along with other previous peccadilloes, drove
Biden from the nomination race. [www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/frenzy/biden.htm
]
Time erases all bad memories, as they say, and
now Mr. Biden is letting on that he wants to join
the 2008 presidential race.
But Mr. Biden has another stain on his ethical
resume’. This fib is far worse because it has
the potential to rend the very foundations of the
social order. For the last 15 years, Biden has been
saying that women, and only women, can suffer from
domestic violence.
Try telling that to the three young children of
Clayton Carter, who watched in horror as he was run
over by his wife with their Ford SUV. This past
week Marquetta Jordan pleaded guilty to voluntary
manslaughter in Washington DC.
And consider Herman Winslow, who was shot and
killed by Lena Driskell when their yearlong romance
came to an end. “I did it and I’d do it
again,” Driskell yelled when the police came
to her Atlanta home on June 10.
When women kill their husbands and
ex-boyfriends, the media never use the term,
“domestic violence.” That’s because
according to Mr. Biden, only men commit DV.
Clayton Carter and Herman Winslow are just two
of the 835,000 men who are assaulted each year by
their wives or girlfriends, according to Department
of Justice statistics. [www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/172837.pdf
]
Indeed, women are just as likely as men to
commit partner aggression, and men suffer 38% of
all DV-related injuries, according to the research.
[www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10989615&dopt=Abstract
]
But Biden’s silver-tongued oratory and
cloak room arm-twisting counted for more than the
truth, and in 1994 President Clinton signed the
first Violence Against Women Act into law. That
compelled the Department of Justice to create a new
bureaucracy, the Office on Violence Against
Women.
A lie is never static. A lie must always grow in
order to stay one step ahead of the skeptics.
So the billion-dollar-a-year VAWA has spawned
even more falsehoods. It wasn’t enough to say
that women were the exclusive victims of DV. Soon
we learned that violence against pregnant women was
the leading cause of birth defects, that half of
all homeless women are on the streets because of
partner violence, and other propaganda-like
factoids. [www.mincava.umn.edu/documents/factoid/factoid.html
]
Recently a hyperventilating Catherine MacKinnon,
law professor at the University of Michigan,
compared partner aggression to the tragedy of 9/11:
“Just like terrorist attacks, acts of violence
against women are carefully planned, targeted at
civilians, and driven by ideology.”
Eventually a lie becomes so bloated, so
distorted, and so grotesque that people begin to
have their doubts.
Indiana University law professor Linda Kelly
recently exposed the neo-Marxist underpinnings of
the DV industry. Kelley explained, “the
‘discovery’ of domestic violence is
rooted in the essential feminist tenet that society
is controlled by an all-encompassing patriarchal
structure.” [www.law.fsu.edu/journals/lawreview/downloads/304/kelly.pdf
]
Earlier this year the non-partisan National
Academy Science delivered this stinging critique of
VAWA-funded programs: “the design of
prevention and control strategies…frequently
is driven by ideology and stakeholder interests
rather than by plausible theories and scientific
evidence of cause.” [nap.edu/catalog/10849.html
]
Fox News columnist Wendy McElroy lambasted VAWA
as a “hand-me-down from the Clinton
administration based on gender myths, anti-male
bias and an infatuation with Big Government.”
[www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0112.html
]
And earlier this month columnist Phyllis
Schlafly offered this wish to America’s
fathers: “Congress can help us celebrate
Father’s Day this year by refusing to
reauthorize the costly VAWA boondoggle.”
[www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7713
]
For years the Democrats have clung to their
receding power base by playing on the fears and
vulnerabilities of racial minorities. Now the Dems
are misleading women with the same red-meat
rhetoric by saying they live under the constant
threat of being beaten and bloodied.
Thanks to DV-induced hysteria, laws make it
possible to evict husbands from their homes simply
on the word of the woman. So it’s no surprise
that so many eligible bachelors are refusing to
marry. And it’s no coincidence that single
women are far more likely than their married
counterparts to vote Democratic.
An ever-growing climate of fear, an
unaccountable federal bureaucracy, and a
fading-away of the institution of marriage -- all
that bodes well for Senator Biden’s
presidential aspirations.
The Politics of Social
Destruction at the US
Jan Fransen has come up with a new solution to the
old problem of population control: AIDS.
At a meeting of the United Nations Population
Fund, Fransen told his surprised audience that to
“increase mortality” was one way to limit
population growth in Africa. Fransen then made the
jocular comment that “AIDS was helping to do
the work of population control in Africa.”
[www.lifecoalition.com/UN4.html
]
With that mindset lurking at the UN, is it any
surprise that the global campaign to stem the
spread of AIDS has been a colossal failure?
Fed up with the shenanigans at the United
Nations, the US House of Representatives has now
issued an ultimatum to Kofi Annan. Implement 46
designated reforms by 2007, or else we’ll
slash the US dues payment by half. That would cost
the UN a cool $221 million.
Secretary-general Annan must contend with more
than long-standing corruption and inefficiency in
the sprawling UN bureaucracy. He must also deal
with the threat of an ideological take-over. And to
an organization prone to ideological excess,
that’s no joking matter.
First, a little background. Five years ago, the
UN unveiled its Millennium Development Goals. The
MDGs spell out eight strategies to lift the
world’s neediest out of grinding poverty. The
strategies include common-sense ideas such as
universal primary education, reducing child
mortality, and combating AIDS. [www.un.org/millenniumgoals/index.html
]
And two of the strategies were specifically
crafted to help women: improve maternal health, and
“promote gender equality and empower
women.” (No one bothered to explain what
“empowerment” meant, but it sounded good
at the time).
But mere equality wasn’t enough. Like
rapacious vultures, the radical feminists demanded
more. Predictably, they soon began to argue that
setting up abortion chop-shops in every town and
hamlet would be a necessary pre-condition to
achieving the Development Goals.
This past March the UN Economic and Social
Council convened a meeting to discuss the MDGs.
There Ms. France Donnay, chief of the Reproductive
Health Branch of the UN Population Fund, made the
claim that “reproductive health and rights are
at the core of life for every human
being.”
So first we’re told that AIDS is a viable
population control strategy. And now we learn that
in order to protect life, we must first kill the
innocent unborn. Jan Fransen and France Donnay make
for an impressive duo, n’est pas?
Taking its cue from the damsels of destruction,
last month the European Union released a report
pressuring the UN to expand abortion services.
According to its May 24 document, “The EU
further recognizes that the MDGs cannot be attained
without progress in achieving the Cairo goal of
universal sexual and reproductive health and
rights.”
Note the tell-tale words, “universal”
and “rights.” That means
government-financed abortions on demand for women
and teenage girls. And millions of
biologically-disenfranchised dads.
And there’s more to the story.
The fem-socialists at the UN have come up with a
diabolical strategy that goes by the chilling name,
“gender mainstreaming.” According to its
proponents, gender mainstreaming is “the
process of assessing the implications for women and
men of any planned action, including legislation,
policies or programs, in all areas and at all
levels.” [www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/pdf/e65237.pdf
]
The United Nations Development Fund for Women
(UNIFEM) is now proposing that gender mainstreaming
should become the “overarching framework”
for the Development Goals. But to the radical
feminist, gender equality is always about “Me,
Me, Me.”
So in practice, gender equality is just another
excuse to afford more legal preferences and
government programs for women. And gender
mainstreaming has become the Sisterhood’s ploy
to hijack the MDGs and turn them into another
platform to advance its destructive agenda.
As Janice Shaw Crouse of Concerned Women for
America warned, these militant radicals are hoping
the UN leadership will take their gender agenda and
“force it into the mainstream through
international programs and policies.”
[www.cwfa.org/articles/7655/BLI/nation/
]
So now the stage has been set for a show-down at
the UN headquarters in New York City. On September
14-16, delegates from around the world will gather
for the Millennium+5 Summit to gauge progress in
reaching the Development Goals. [www.un.org/ga/59/hl60_plenarymeeting.html
]
At that time, feminists are hoping to push through
their gender mainstreaming plan.
These Gender Warriors go about spreading
calumnies about the mistreatment of women at the
hands of selfish patriarchs. Their aim is to shame
and intimidate men so they eventually acquiesce to
their divisive and destructive agenda.
US House of Representatives, I hope you’re
taking note.
A Government Program
is No Substitute for a Bear-Hug
For the better part of the last 40 years, policy
experts and childrearing gurus relegated fathers to
the parental minor leagues. Dads were seen as
well-intentioned but inept Homer Simpsons who might
be able to teach junior how to swing a baseball
bat, but little else.
But kids see it differently. Mary Kay
Shanley’s book, When I Think About My Father,
recites these love-words from Amanda, age 6:
“At the end of the day when I go to bed, Daddy
tucks me in. We talk together about our day. He
reads me a story to help me sleep. We pray
together. That is my favorite part.”
Research confirms with Amanda’s endorsement
of fatherhood. It turns out that kids with hands-on
dads have greater levels of self-esteem and social
competence, get higher grades in school, and do
better on a broad range of social and psychological
indicators. Even in high-crime, inner-city
neighborhoods, over 90% of children who grow up in
two-parent families avoid becoming delinquents.
Sadly, government social welfare programs have a
dismal track record in this area. It’s not
that they have just ignored the essential role of
fathers. The problem is, they have offered
inducements to actually remove dads from the lives
of their kids.
This pattern can be traced back to the 1960s.
Under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, welfare
benefits came with a catch: first, kick dad out of
the house. As a result of this exclusionary
“man-in-the-house” rule, the number of
children growing up in fatherless homes rose
dramatically.
Before long, people began to notice that poor
fathers were “abandoning” their children.
So beginning in 1975, the Congress passed a series
of child support laws that targeted so-called
“deadbeat” dads.
The reforms may have been well-intentioned, but
they missed the mark on one key point: many
low-income dads couldn’t pay their child
support because they were on Skid Row. But that
fact didn’t stop the federal Office for Child
Support Enforcement, with a budget of $4 billion,
from hounding indigent fathers and sending
thousands to debtor’s jail each year.
[www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2004/0310roberts.html
]
But the government was not done with its task of
dismembering the traditional family.
In 1994 the Congress passed the Violence Against
Women Act, a $1 billion-a-year feminist windfall
that claims to combat domestic violence. One of
VAWA’s tools is the issuance of restraining
orders.
The dirty little secret that feminists never
like to admit is that they have stealthily
broadened the scope of violence. For example, the
National Victim Assistance Academy came up with
this all-encompassing definition: “Domestic
violence is a pattern of coercive behavior designed
to exert power and control over a person in an
intimate relationship through the use of
intimidating, threatening, harmful, or harassing
behavior.” [www.nvaa.org/assist/chapter9.html
]
As a result of this definitional
sleight-of-hand, “domestic violence becomes
whatever the woman says it is,” according to
columnist Phyllis Schlafly. [www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7713
]
So when these “battered” mothers seek
a restraining order, they also petition for divorce
and custody of the children. Once again, the kids
are left without a father.
The effects of these federal programs are
predictable -- and tragic. In 1960, five million
American children lived in fatherless homes. By
1980, that number more than doubled to 11 million.
And now, 16 million children live only with their
mothers.
The National Fatherhood Initiative issued this
sobering warning: “Children who live absent
their biological fathers are, on average, at least
two to three times more likely to be poor, to use
drugs, to experience educational, health,
emotional, and behavioral problems, to be victims
of child abuse, and to engage in criminal
behavior.”
So consider the 16 million boys and girls who go
to bed each night without getting a bear-hug from
daddy, and it’s easy to see why a 1999 Gallup
poll found that 72% of Americans believe that
“the physical absence of the father from the
home is the most significant problem facing
America.”
On Father’s Day, it’s traditional to
honor our fathers – those home-grown heroes
who sacrifice their moments of quiet reflection,
their comfort, and even their health to support and
protect their families. This coming Sunday I will
remember my own dad, thankful for all the good
times we spent together.
Perhaps this Father’s Day should also be a
day of reckoning. It’s time to ask, Why does
the US taxpayer continue to subsidize government
programs, to the tune of billions of dollars a
year, that end up separating fathers from their
families?
The Sun of Feminism Shines
Brightly in Socialist Europe
Despite the resounding rejection of the European
Constitution by French and Dutch voters, the fact
is, old Europe still genuflects at the altar of
socialism and collectivism. So it comes as no
surprise that feminism has taken root there as
readily as mushrooms sprouting on a pile of
barnyard manure.
Karl Marx taught that if women desired to free
themselves from the shackles of patriarchy, they
first had to wrest control over the means of
reproduction. Now birth rates in Europe have
plummeted, choking off the inflow of young workers
and imperiling the financial viability of the
social welfare state.
The situation is especially acute in Germany,
where the population is projected to decline from
the current level of 82 million to 70.8 million
persons by 2050. The fertility fall-off stems from
a disintegration of family relationships – 83%
of Germans say their main reason for not having
children is their inability to find a partner or
stable relationship. [news.yahoo.com/s/afp/germanypopulationeconomy
]
In Europe, gender equality programs march under
the flag of what the European Union bureaucrats
call “gender mainstreaming.”
So blithely ignoring its impending demographic
time-bomb, the German Ministry of Education and
Research has announced a new gender mainstreaming
program designed to entice even more women out of
the home and into the workforce. [www.bmbf.de/en/474.php
]
Advocates of gender mainstreaming claim they are
merely trying to promote equal rights for the
sexes. But in practice, this grand-sounding concept
doesn’t quite work out that way.
For example, men in Austria live 76 years, while
women enjoy a full 82 years of life. But that
six-year disparity in life expectancy didn’t
stop the government from establishing the
Bundesministerium fur Gesundheit und Frauen –
Ministry for Health and Women. [www.bmgf.gv.at
]
In Austria, some deaths apparently are more
equal than others.
In sun-drenched Spain, gender equality meant
passing a law that requires husbands to “share
domestic responsibilities and the care and
attention” of children. Like most countries,
the most laborious and dangerous occupations in
Spain are virtually all-male. One only hopes that
in this new era of gender enlightenment, the
Spanish senoras will soon be casting off their
mantas to help out as hod carriers and to work the
olive groves in the sweltering heat. [www.guardian.co.uk/spain/article/0,2763,1454802,00.html
]
In Norway it was announced that women compose
only 11% of members of corporate boards of
directors, those bastions of male power and
privilege. So minister Laila Daavoey recently
decreed that henceforth all companies would be
obliged to meet a 40% female board quota – or
else face closure. [www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12770128%255E1702,00.html
]
Once those companies shut down, I’m sure
the E.U. will be more than happy to subsidize the
checks for all those unemployed workers, male and
female.
But it’s Sweden where the Sisterhood has
made the most progress toward true gender equality.
There, almost half of the entire workforce and 45%
of the members of Parliament are female.
Given these signs of an imminent gender
paradise, one might expect the Swedish fems to
embrace the now-deposed patriarchs and break into a
heart-warming round of Kumbaya. But funny,
that’s not what happened.
One of the more colorful Swedish politicos is
one Gudrun Schyman, an alcoholic who got caught not
paying her taxes and was forced to resign as a
leader of the Left Party, the former Communist
Party of Sweden. Schyman apparently forgot that in
socialist societies, paying taxes is more
inevitable than death.
That scandal didn’t stop Schyman from
hatching her ultra-radical Feminist Initiative,
which is now threatening the coalition government
of the ruling Social Democrats. The FI’s
shrill manifesto makes Schyman sound a lot more
like David Duke than Mother Theresa. [www.transnational.org/forum/
meet/2005/Schyman_FeministInitiative.html
]
Early last month a group of Stockholm women put
the Feminist Initiative message to the test. One
night they showed up at a local strip club wielding
baseball bats and umbrellas. Police ended up
arresting 16 women after the melee. [www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=1393&date=20050508
]
And to think all these years, I had thought that
women were genetically incapable of inflicting
violence.
In 1620 a small band of Pilgrims fled Europe in
a pluckish effort to escape tyranny and secure
their religious freedom. That experience weighed
heavily on the minds of our nation’s
forefathers as they forged a new country based on
limited government, free markets, and individual
liberties.
Nearly 400 years later, a new totalitarianism is
blossoming in Europe. Under the seductive guise of
gender equality, this ideological tyranny resorts
to over-heated rhetoric, intrusive government, and
intimidation tactics.
Maybe Europe hasn’t progressed as far as
we’d like to think.
Equality for Men and
Fathers - What a Concept!
Bill May didn’t get into synchronized swimming
to make a political statement. “When I first
joined,” he once explained, “I thought,
‘This is a great sport and it’s
fun.’” But as things turned out, his
greatest barrier would not be a lack of talent.
Joining the sport at age 10, May endured
ridicule and strange looks for over 15 years.
Synchronized swimming, after all, is for girls. But
he succeeded in shrugging off the stereotypes and
eventually became recognized as one of the elite
synch swimmers in the country. In 2001 he swept the
first-place spots in the solo, duo, and team
categories at the Nationals in Texas.
But his career suffered a painful set-back when
the estrogen barrier slapped him down. Last summer
the U.S. Synchronized Swimming Federation decided
to not allow him to participate in the August
Olympics. Come and cheer the girls on to victory,
they said, but don’t dare jump into that pool.
[www.livingroom.org.au/olympics/archives/male_synchronized_swimmer_not_allowed_to_compete_in_olympics.php
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