The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Feminist ‘Success’ (Or, Never Bet Against the Gods of the Copybook Headings)

Posted on | July 1, 2017 | 2 Comments

“It is necessary to unite and fight to protect ourselves from exploitation as the world’s baby-makers.”
— Carol Hanisch, March 2014

“I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding . . . time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. . . . I don’t want a baby. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . . This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 2014

“Feminists don’t just hate men. They don’t just hate Republicans. Feminists hate the most helpless and innocent human lives. The road to feminism’s imagined utopia of ‘equality’ is paved with dead babies.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, April 2017

Feminism is a death cult. The feminist movement’s commitment to abortion as the essence of “women’s rights” tells you everything you need to know about their ideology. Consider, for example, how the feminist insistence on mandatory health insurance coverage for contraception catapulted Sandra Fluke into national notoriety in 2012, and became the basis of claim that Republicans were waging a “war on women.” As was demonstrated at the time, the cost of birth-control pills was less than $10 for a month’s supply, scarcely a major expense for Ms. Fluke and her fellow students at Georgetown University (annual tuition $50,547). However, Georgetown is a nominally Catholic institution and a loophole in ObamaCare had exempted (under a “conscience clause”) such institutions from the federal mandate that all health insurance must pay for contraception. Furthermore, now that Congress is wrangling with repealing and replacing ObamaCare, a major stumbling block is that conservative Republicans want to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood (the nation’s largest abortion provider) while Democrats and their feminist allies insist that this funding is sacrosanct.

Feminism is, and always has been, anti-marriage and anti-motherhood. You could cite a long list of feminists — from movement pioneers like Shulamith Firestone, Ti-Grace Atkinson and Gloria Steinem to such latter-day ideologues as Amanda Marcotte, Jaclyn Friedman and Meghan Murphy — without ever naming a woman who has given birth to a child.

This implacable hostility to motherhood, of course, is a logical consequence of feminism’s anti-male agenda. When the modern feminist movement first erupted in the late 1960s, their rhetoric involved condemnation of “male chauvinism” or “sexism.” Adapting the terminology of the civil rights movement (as opposition to “white supremacy”), feminists also used the phrase “male supremacy” to define their enemy. However, within a few years, the movement’s intellectual leadership substituted, as the preferred description of their ideological target, a term borrowed from anthropology, patriarchy. Originally coined (from the Greek words for “father” and “rule”) to refer to the primitive system of tribal authority under male elders, “patriarchy” was borrowed by feminists from the Communist Party co-founder Friedrich Engels, who used such phrases as “patriarchal order” and “the patriarchal family” in his 1884 treatise Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. As used by feminists, however, “patriarchy” means . . . well, just about anything a feminist doesn’t like. Yet if this word still has any actual meaning, then when the feminist denounces “patriarchy,” she especially intends to condemn men for their roles as fathers.

“Fatherhood, the exercise of men’s authority over women and children, is the position of men in the family,” feminists Jo Sutton and Scarlet Friedman wrote in 1979. “It is the means of instilling in the family members a recognition and acceptance of, and acquiescence to, male authority. . . . The end is political self-perpetuation, that is, the continuation and reproduction of male supremacy.”

We must observe that “male authority” and “male supremacy,” as used by feminists, are just synonyms for male influence. Ask any married father who much “authority” and “supremacy” he exercises within his family, and he will likely laugh at you. A happily married friend of mine, when invited recently to attend a social occasion, responded: “I don’t know. Let me check with the boss,” meaning his wife. That this friend is a retired military officer and a highly skilled professional in his civilian career, is of no consequence in terms of his “male authority” within his marriage. As far as his domestic and social life is concerned, he cannot act without his wife’s permission, or else risk her wrath, and this situation prevails in every marriage of long endurance with which I am familiar. Husbands refer to their wives as “boss” with both affection and irony, because no matter how much success and respect a man might obtain in his job, it counts for practically nothing on the home front. “If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy,” as the saying goes, and for feminists to denounce the family as an institution of “male supremacy” is a claim so counterfactual as to be quite nearly the opposite of reality. Their rhetoric, of course, conceals the actual purpose of feminism, namely the complete negation of male influence. Feminists do not actually seek equality, but rather advocate a totalitarian regime in which men have no rights at all, not even the right to speak in their own defense. In attacking fatherhood as “the exercise of men’s authority,” what feminists actually intend is to deprive men of any influence at all in the lives of their own offspring. In the feminist mind, males exist only as a caste of despised servants, assigned to work to pay child support and taxes for welfare programs: “Shut up and pay.” The fatherless family is the feminist ideal.

In practice, the “success” of feminism’s anti-male agenda has resulted in 40% of U.S. children being born to unmarried women, even while the feminist death-cult devotion to abortion and contraception greatly reduces the overall birth rate. Congratulations, feminists!

The number of women giving birth has been declining for years and just hit a historic low. If the trend continues . . . the country could face economic and cultural turmoil.
According to provisional 2016 population data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday, the number of births fell 1 percent from a year earlier, bringing the general fertility rate to 62.0 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. . . .
A country’s birthrate is among the most important measures of demographic health. The number needs to be within a certain range, called the “replacement level,” to keep a population stable so that it neither grows nor shrinks. If too low, there’s a danger that we wouldn’t be able to replace the aging workforce and have enough tax revenue to keep the economy stable.

When you start digging down into the CDC report (PDF), you discover that, despite the trendy belief that advances in reproductive technology will somehow solve this problem, particularly by enabling older women to become mothers, the data prove the demographic axiom that “fertility delayed is fertility denied.” The majority (55%) of babies are born to women under 30, whereas only 3% of U.S. births were to women 40 and older. The CDC report doesn’t provide adequate historical context for the lay reader to understand what is driving this trend, but in 1983 (the year I graduated college), the average age of first-time mothers was 23, whereas in 2014, the average first-time mother was 26. Keep in mind, however, that the average age of first-time mothers does not reflect the percentage of women who never have children — and childlessness has increased substantially in recent decades. Whereas in 1976, 10% of U.S. women ages 40-44 (i.e., born 1932-36) had never given birth, by 2006, this figure had doubled to 20% (for women born 1962-66). Furthermore, the percentage of childless women in the U.S. would have increased even more if not for immigration from high-fertility foreign countries. The percentage of U.S.-born women ages 40-50 who were childless in 2012 was 17%, whereas for immigrant women the number was 11%.

Thus, the paradoxical demographic result of feminist “success” is both (a) more childless women and (b) more fatherless children. Any student of this subject knows that unwed motherhood is a major contributing factor to  poverty (just FYI, 70% of black children in the U.S. are born to unmarried women), and that divorce almost always worsens the economic situation for mothers and their children. Insofar as feminists have been successful in their goal of destroying the marriage-based family, then, it is women and children who have suffered most as a result of this ideological war against “male authority.”

A skeptic might wonder if these demographic trends reflect some independent cultural or economic factor, rather than the influence of feminism (and the government policies advocated by feminists). In reply, I would ask the skeptic, “Where do feminists have the most influence?” The answer to that question is college and university campuses, where Title IX has had the effect of officially mandating discrimination against males, who are a despised minority (43%) of undergraduates. Male college students are routinely demonized by feminist faculty (e.g., “young, white, rich, clueless white males” who “think nothing of raping drunk girls at frat parties and snorting cocaine, cheating on exams, and threatening professors with physical violence”). Indoctrinated with this anti-male prejudice by their professors, female students spew hateful rhetoric about “imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy” (Oberlin College) or “capitalist imperialist white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy” (USC). It is therefore not surprising that among college-educated women ages 40-50, 20% are childless, compared to 11% of high-school dropouts.

 

Feminists believe that “marriage constitutes slavery for women” (Sheila Cronan, 1970), and therefore seek to “to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family” (Andrea Dworkin, 1974), because the only way women can avoid “forced motherhood and sexual slavery is escape from the patriarchal institution of marriage” (Alison Jaggar, 1988).

Most people are unaware of what the feminist agenda actually is because, when addressing the general public, feminists espouse bland slogans about “equality,” etc. When speaking amongst themselves, however, feminists express goals that are much more radical. This distinction between feminism’s public rhetoric (its exoteric discourse) and the anti-male ideology of the movement’s leadership (its esoteric doctrine) can best be shown by examining the content of university Women’s Studies courses. Consider for example, “Critical Approaches to Heterosexuality,” a freshman-level course taught at the University of California-Riverside by Professor Jane Ward. In the course syllabus, Professor Ward declares that the class is “organized around the argument that heterosexuality — as a system bound up with misogyny and reliant upon the gender binary — is ultimately unworkable.” Are the taxpayers of California, or the parents of students, aware of what is being taught at UC-Riverside?

Feminism is an anti-male/anti-heterosexual hate movement, masquerading as “social justice,” and what are the consequences of making feminist ideology the basis of public policy? Discrimination against male students in the education system is one obvious result, and the catastrophe caused by declining birth rates is another (cf., Jonathan V. Last’s What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster). It is when we examine the consequences as individual cases rather than statistical trends, however, that we can see where the feminist death-cult is leading us. Consider the story, for example, of a recent custody case in Tennessee:

In the first ruling of its kind in Tennessee, a judge has granted a woman the legal rights of a husband.
The ruling, issued [in May 2017], came as the state Legislature was pushing through a bill designed to stop Judge Greg McMillan of Fourth Circuit Court — and any other judge in Tennessee — from making that very decision, court records show.
McMillan penned approval of a divorce for same-sex couple Sabrina Witt and Erica Witt that includes designation of Erica Witt as the father of the couple’s daughter, conceived through artificial insemination.
Days later, Gov. Bill Haslam signed into law a bill inspired by the Witts’ case, the first in the state after a 2015 federal Supreme Court decision that conferred marital rights to same-sex couples. The state law ordered courts to give “natural meaning” to words such as mother and father.
Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III already had opined that judges would — and should — ignore the new law in such family law proceedings as divorce, custody and child support. The Legislature ignored the opinion.
Erica Witt and Sabrina Witt legally wed in April 2014 in the District of Columbia. They bought a home here and decided to have a child via artificial insemination from an anonymous donor.
Sabrina Witt bore a girl as a result in January 2015. Because Tennessee did not then recognize same-sex marriage as legal, Erica Witt’s name was not placed on the baby’s birth certificate.
When the U.S. Supreme Court gave gay people the right to marry and divorce in June 2015, their marriage became legal in Tennessee.
In February 2016, Sabrina Witt filed for divorce. Her lawyer, John Harber, argued that the law on custody rights in artificial-insemination cases in Tennessee used the term “husband.”
He said the natural meaning of that word is a man, so Erica Witt didn’t qualify. McMillan agreed.
But Erica Witt’s lawyer, Virginia Schwamm, filed a challenge to the constitutionality of the law since it was passed decades before the same-sex ruling and now runs afoul of it.
The Tennessee Legislature swung into action. The “natural meaning” bill was drafted to ban the legal labeling of a woman as a husband, and 53 legislators used a conservative legal group to try to step into the Witts’ divorce case. . . .
McMillan was having none of that. He refused in an April order to allow such an intervention, saying the Legislature needs to stay out of the court’s and the Witts’ business. . . .
Sara Sedgwick, senior counsel for the health care division of the office, urged McMillan in a brief to view the words “wife” and “husband” in a “gender-neutral” fashion. To do otherwise would be to violate constitutional law, particularly in light of the same-sex marriage decision, she wrote. . . .
Stripping away gender from the label of husband, McMillan said Erica Witt was a legal father with legal rights to see her daughter. She also has to pay child support.
“Erica Witt is a legal parent of the parties’ minor child,” McMillan wrote.

Let me point out the timeline here:

  1. April 2014: Erica and Sabrina marry in Washington, D.C., then move to Tennessee, where same-sex marriage is prohibited by the state constitution.
  2. January 2015: Sabrina gives birth in Tennessee to a girl conceived by artificial insemination.
  3. June 2015: The U.S. Supreme Court imposes same-sex marriage on Tennessee and the 33 other states where it was still illegal.
  4. February 2016: Sabrina files for divorce.

You see that this marriage lasted less than two years, and the baby girl at the center of this custody dispute was barely a year old when Sabrina filed for a divorce from Erica, just eight months after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling compelled Tennessee to recognize such marriages as legally valid. However, based on this rather brief relationship between Sabrina and Erica, a Tennessee judge has now declared that Erica has “legal rights” to Sabrina’s baby girl, who is not even biologically related to Erica, the ex-wife whom the court has now officially deemed the legal “father” of the child!

Do you see how feminist ideas of “equality” lead to this kind of madness? Do you see how, as a consequence of the political influence of feminism’s “gender-neutral” ideology, our society has now added to the trend of childless women and fatherless children a whole new category of misery and confusion in the form of lesbian divorce and custody battles over children conceived via artificial insemination from anonymous donors? Do you understand why I keep saying Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It?

In conclusion, we must invoke the poetry of Rudyard Kipling:

On the first Feminian Sandstones
We were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour
And ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children
And the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said:
“The Wages of Sin is Death.”

Never bet against the Gods of the Copybook Headings.



 

Category: Abortion, Contraceptive Culture, Marriage, Sex Trouble

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2 Responses to “Feminist ‘Success’ (Or, Never Bet Against the Gods of the Copybook Headings)”

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    July 4th, 2017 @ 7:30 pm

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