The NER debate on women’s political rights storms on

(Note: I’ve revised this entry since initially posting it.)

The thread at the New English Review concerning my apostasy, hypocrisy, insanity, meanness, and just plain awfulness in suggesting that women’s political rights may not on balance be a good thing for society has continued. Since sending my last, long comment a few days ago I have not participated. The funny thing is, the question whether woman’s political rights are beneficial is not one about which I have passionate or deeply convicted feelings. It’s a subject that I feel is a legitimate topic for discussion. What motivates me is not some agenda to take away the women’s vote, but rather my opposition to the way that our current view denies that there could be any legitimate reasons for a society not to give the vote to women, and thus grossly distorts our understanding of the past. For example, was the America of 1810—in which 90 percent of the population were involved in agriculture, and the family was an economic unit—an immoral, anti-woman society because woman did not then have the vote? That indeed is the unchallenged orthodox assumption today. Or were there very good and pressing reasons—which I’ve just alluded to—why women didn’t have the vote? And if the latter is the case, which I believe it obviously is, then isn’t the introduction of women’s political rights at least to some extent a function of a society’s stage of development, and thus a prudential matter, rather than a matter of a “non-negotiable” demand of absolute morality?

Further, it was not I who introduced my views on women’s rights into the NER thread; it was NER’s editor Mary Jackson who did that, in purportedly responding to my statements on Hirsi Ali and how best to combat the threat of Islam. Thus my interest in the NER thread does not concern the substance of the women’s rights issue (which is what is pre-occupying most of the participants), but rather (1) Jackson’s politically correct contention that my arguments concerning the negative effects of women’s political rights disqualifies all my opinions on all topics; and (2) her implication that only in the latest stage attained in the forward march of equality does society become civilized and moral, an attitude that radically alienates us from our own civilization and makes it impossible for us to defend it except in purely liberal terms.

The idea that the belief in equality as the highest good results in a society’s progressive self-cannibalization was explored in a VFR thread last March.

- end of initial entry -

Dimitri K. writes:

Jackson says you’re treating women as “less human,” but what she really means is that you’re treating them as “less serious.” And that is of course a personal insult for a female editor of a serious website.

LA replies:

There is no question that women on average are less serious about political matters than men.

M. Mason writes:

Well, if someone was finally going to stand up and simply point out the obvious with the bracing clarity of a statement like that, it was probably going to be you.

Oh oh… what’s that there in your inbox?

Incoming!!!

Tim W. writes:

People like Mary Jackson are zeitgeist conservatives. They may offer occasional weak resistance to the advancement of liberalism, but once liberals have won a particular battle, they surrender and concede that the turf is lost forever. After a while, they begin considering the liberal victory to be something conservatives can not only accept, but cherish. The zeitgeist totally overwhelms them.

For example, most conservatives today nominally oppose same sex “marriage.” But if the Supreme Court were to order nationwide same sex “marriage” via a Roe vs. Wade style fiat, many of them would simply concede and say there’s nothing we can do about it. After a year or two, they’d be calling for the GOP to drop support for traditional marriage from their platform. Within a decade, they’d be writing blogs in which they described traditional conservatives as “the monsters who once tried to keep loving people from marrying for no better reason than they were of the same sex.”

It reminds me of Senator Arlen Specter’s ludicrous definition of judicial conservatism: A judge is a conservative if he conserves liberal precedents.

LA replies:

Exactly. Tim has stated very well the explanation of mainstream conservatism I first heard from Rabbi Mayer Schiller many years ago.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 09, 2007 03:48 PM | Send