Monthly Archives: April 2013

The hardcore  feminists, with their rigid orthodoxy when it comes to the “proper” way to refer to a lady, oops I meant “woman” hit the warpath again..   President Obama unwittingly walked into this fly trap of word choices, when he referred to Kamala Harris, CA’s attorney general as the “best-looking” attorney general in the country during a fundraising speech on April 4, 2013 (here).    One would think that after the Clinton years, where the prominent feminist mouthpieces found new and creative semantic contortions to salvage Bill Clinton  from the misogynist manure pile, their hypocrisy had reached its zenith.  They feverishly worked to convince people that his behavior was not  that of a “cad” (now there’s a word from the bygone days when “gentlemen” existed).  Instead, the fault rested with right-wing haters who exposed Clinton’s private conduct.  Now, President Obama for merely stating (what is obvious to any objective person ) that  Kamala Harris is a beautiful woman got that feminist hornet’s nest buzzing in outrage and of course, President Obama quickly apologized for his choice of words.    Despite the social conditioning from the feminist relics of the 60s, yes, people (and men in particular) still notice beautiful women and despite all the lip service to feminism, women spend plenty of time and money on their appearance and seeking male notice.  President Obama noticed what is obvious and the shrill feminist response should make rational people laugh these tired old feminist harpies off the national stage.  That a rather innocuous remark should illicit so much press and debate, demonstrates that the feminists will never be satisfied, as they keep demanding  an ever-widening array of concessions and adherence to their evolving “code” of what they deem acceptable “gender neutral” living.   Men and women really are not interchangeable parts in society, but on the serious sociological plane –  they will always be different and those differences should not be the cause of so much angst.

In the same week, a Princeton graduate, Susan Patton, came under fire for writing an article urging Princeton’s female students to seriously think about marriage and finding their catch (future spouse)  from the prospective pool of males who swim in the male undergraduate pond. (story here).  Once again a feminist furor arose.  How dare this woman suggest young women think about marriage, when career should be the defining role for these bright young women.  Of course, in perfect timing with this Princeton uproar and President Obama’s alleged “sexist comment”, comes Hillary Clinton droning on about how the clock is turning back for women in America, in a speech at the Women In The World summit, April 5th, in New York (here is a news report from the Washington Examiner).   Obviously she lives a life disconnected from the real world where many employers have shed full-time positions and opted to go with less of a benefit burden using part-time employees, as they await the full impact of Obamacare to hit their bottom line.  She’s yammering for equal pay and paid family and medical leave benefits in this depressing job climate.   Most women I know, unlike Chelsea and her friends that Hillary cites as her link to average women, want to keep the jobs they have, even if they are working well under their educational qualifications.

Frankly, many people, both men and women, seem pretty happy just to have a job these days and this clamor for more benefits comes from the mouths of out of touch wealthy women like Hillary, who have never had to struggle to make ends meet or struggle to maintain a home, care for their own children and work outside the home too.  Average women don’t have the luxury to sit in their ivory tower whining at symposiums about how much more the government should interfere in our daily lives; we do the best we can to manage our own homes, our own children and our own lives.  The more these agents of change have undermined traditional family values, the worse off way too many women are when it comes to finding a happy balance between family and career, with feminists at the ready to denigrate women who opt for less career and more family time.  Hillary’s advice is truly outdated, as thousands of young female college grads can’t find jobs and those who wasted money on degrees in useless fields like “women’s studies” face a very limited job pool and stiff competition in academia or think tanks that have use for that niche degree.  Perhaps college counselors should be advising young women on career paths where there is a real job in the real world upon graduation, instead of promulgating so many useless degree programs.  Forcing employers to pay full family and medical leave benefits, in addition to all the Obamacare demands will leave women with less jobs – in an already dismal job market.  It’s just the same tired old retreaded dogmatic feminist mantra, so they put their bras back on (thankfully) and young women are fully indoctrinated in feminist doublespeak, so when is enough “equality” ever enough?  For Hillary, it’s when she gets to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office (let me find a safe place to move when that happens), but for millions of other women, living life as a constant victim and as a combatant against manhood doesn’t hold any luster.  Most women want to get married and many even still want to have children, as part of their path to a happy fulfilled life.

Woe be it for me to point out, but despite the social engineering feminists of old, many smart young women still want to fall in love, get married and have kids.  How dare they yearn for more than smashing glass ceilings and blazing feminist trails that so animates these feminist relics and remains their same-old feminist chorus.    A man compliments a beautiful woman and the woman says thank-you – that should be the end of President Obama stating the obvious.  Kamala Harris is a beautiful woman.  Men complimenting women or treating them respectfully shouldn’t be the cause of a national debate on “sexism” and vice versa, a woman commenting about a handsome man shouldn’t cause a clamor.

From my viewpoint, I loved being a homemaker, which suited my strengths – taking care of people, baking, cooking, and I always liked domestic chores, even ironing.  And it provided many opportunities for me to do volunteer work in my kids schools and in our military community, which full-time working moms don’t have time for.  My parents pushed career choices and were all that is encouraging.  My Dad, who thought I should be a lawyer, was dismayed when I told him I didn’t want to do that and he asked me what career I wanted to pursue.  I told him that I want to be a homemaker and that is exactly what I did when the opportunity presented itself – best choice I ever made for me and my family honestly.  I respect women, like my sisters, who pursued careers and made some tough bargains to manage family and career obligations or my mother who took care of six children and still worked as a registered nurse at a local hospital, but we should be encouraging young women to respect different choices and to finally call a truce in this battle of the sexes.

Last night Bill O’Reilly launched into a tirade against his guest, Laura Ingraham, over some rumored feud between O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh over the gay marriage issue.   As rival, ultra-liberal network MSNBC defined the feud as Limbaugh commenting on  O’Reilly’s perceived flip-flop on gay marriage (here).  I watched O’Reilly ranting at Laura Ingraham and his rudeness at cutting her off  shocked me.  He repeatedly yelled that he is the one who embraces the enlightened position on gay marriage, citing he has always supported civil unions and thinks each state should decide the matter.  What struck me most was how he treated Ingraham, who has filled in as a guest host for O’Reilly many times over the years and been a frequent guest on his show.  His volatile emotional outburst got me thinking about how all these hot button political issues always rest on emotional appeals to “fairness” and being “open-minded”, where anyone opposed to the latest societal push leftward starts out already marginalized and pigeon-holed as a bigot.  Particularly telling was how two self-described devout Catholics, like O’Reilly and Ingraham argued over O’Reilly’s use of the phrase “thump the Bible”, a tactic which O’Reilly  castigated traditional marriage proponents for using.  Ingraham took offense to the term and based on the MSNBC piece, apparently Limbaugh commented on that too.  O’Reilly argued that the anti-gay marriage folks (supporters of traditional marriage) need to make a “secular” case against gay marriage (or maybe what’s really called for is a compelling argument for gay marriage).  O’Reilly condescendingly telling Ingraham that he was disappointed in her comments, demonstrates how these hot-button issues skid into emotionalism rather than serious debate.  O’Reilly wanted to make sure his audience knows he is “fair-minded”, making the debate about his enlightened views rather than seriously debating same-sex marriage.

Decades of legislation precede this latest push to redefine marriage, all wrapped up in tidy, “fair-minded” secular language.  If marriage is nothing more than a civil contract, then certainly same-sex marriage should not invoke much angst.  Legislation forces cultural change, leaving in its wake fractured social institutions and a growing number of morally-confused people.  Just a few examples to highlight my point, well, first last year Dr. Phil ran a show about a mother who wants the “right” to euthanize her severely-handicapped adult  children (here).  Dr. Phil and the mother framed the issue as putting these handicapped adults out of their suffering – an act of mercy.  The vast majority of the audience embraced the idea of murdering these two adults with severe disabilities.  Another “issue” that hit the news in recent years took the “viable fetus” argument off the table and in its place came the argument that between a woman and her doctor, should rest the decision to murder a child born from a botched abortion procedure.    That these issues are even up for debate demonstrates the slippery slope of the left’s march toward their utopian visions of a “fair” society, devoid of the constrictions of our narrow-minded, patriarchal forefathers visions of “equal protection under the law”.   And here’s a subject near and dear to my heart, our US military and the endless throes of integrating women and women’s issues on military planning and readiness.  We’ve witnessed a decade of  a cottage industry in the news business to promote and glorify moms deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq, pretending this is just peachy for all these children and that all these women have adequate long-term, 24 hour a day, childcare plans in place.  No one wants to look too closely at the reality of how children, especially very young children,  fare when their mother leaves them for a year.  It’s all wonderful, so don’t look askance at a mother abandoning  a baby, just smile and applaud these women who can have it all.  Juxtaposed next to these  happy human interest pieces are pieces like this Huffington Post article (here), citing that women in the military are twice as likely to divorce as their male counterparts.  Here’s a 2009 CNN piece on military children being at a high risk of psychological problems when parents deploy (here).

After being hit with the same-sex couple dying partner trope for years, even some conservatives like me felt my heartstrings being pulled and I relented and reluctantly moved toward a less rigid stand against “civil unions”.   No one wants to wear the bigot label, so the left’s relentless mainstreaming efforts work like magic over time and they know this.  Jonah Goldberg wrote  an excellent USA Today piece (here), where he explains how he feels about the gay marriage issue.  Goldberg approaches the issue assuming goodwill on both sides, which sure sounds nice and “fair”.  The only qualm for me rests on decades of experience watching how these cultural issues play out with political activists on the left.  Are they arguing for a chance to have cozy traditional marriages or are they intent of destroying the institution of marriage from within and turning it into a meaningless contract from which they can rewrite all laws pertaining to family matters in society?.  With one fell swoop do they intend to erase thousands of years of civilization’s lessons and remake society to their utopian vision?    Can religion, as O’Reilly argues, really be completely erased from the secular arguments or are the lessons gathered from religious teachings vital to our civic undertakings?  Do religious tenets of right and wrong form the basis of our laws?

Lots of questions left to ponder on the same-sex marriage issue and not much more than raucous political flame-throwing from both sides of the political spectrum.  The supreme irony lies with the left pushing free-love outside the confines of marriage for decades and now they’ve come back to wrestle the institution of marriage from the hands of religion entirely and under the new incantation, marriage will be “transformed” into some new institution.  That’s a certainty..  It wasn’t enough to urge women to abandon marriage as a evil remnant of our patriarchal bondage, now marriage is an institution that same sex couples aspire to, but oddly enough the left still isn’t too motivated to support heterosexual marriage.  Where are the left’s mouthpieces rallying for heterosexual marriage and purporting the virtues of marriage, if as they insist, marriage is a civil right now that must not be denied to same-sex couples?  Still here in the boonies waiting to figure out the devil in all these details.