Ten or twelve years ago, could you have imagined we’d be legitimately concerned about women losing the right to choose and/or contraception access in 2006? Nah. Would’ve been preposterous.
As bad as things have gotten, though, one thing that we _really_ can’t imagine is a rollback of a woman’s right to vote. Right?
Well, Coulter sounded like a maniac but did manage to suggest it a few years ago, and as Echidne points out, now some Christian women actually suggest they be excluded from the voting populace so that they might be better Christians. Answering a blog questionnaire, homeschooling Christian mom of ten Carmon Friedrich offered this response:
If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt and politics, what would you do? Hoo-boy, this is where I get in trouble, and that starts with “T” and that rhymes with “P” and that stands for “pool.” I’d like to jump in a pool right now. Some may tell me to jump in a river for this one: I would remove women’s suffrage, and I might even consider making voting rights tied to property ownership.
That some wacko fundie women want women’s suffrage annhilated to appease their Patriarchs didn’t shock me. That any person alive would consider it the _one thing_ they would change about the world above all nearly sent me into a catatonic state. This Christian mother didn’t want to do away with discrimination or war or even godlessness. Nope. The one thing she would do for the world is take a woman’s right to vote away. Based on her property ownership addendum, I’m assuming she’d also favor outlawing property ownership for ladyfolk. Scrumptous.
If I could change one thing about the world, it wouldn’t even occur to me to take away anyone’s right to vote, no matter how much I hate them. How much loathing for her gender must this woman possess for this to be her #1 dream for the world?
Umm…. One of her hobbies is listed as “Civil War style dancing”… Need we say more?
And oh… Wait… is that…. is it… could it be….
HER FAMILY AND HER PLAYING “INDIANS”, or as she prefers to call them, “SAVAGES”?
http://buriedtreasurebooks.com/weblog/?page_id=1478
Ok, but you’re going to be upset when that magic pony isn’t submissive to your headship and starts voting to cancel yours out. Next thing you know, you’re working a 12 hour day to subsidize magic pony daycare and magic pony healthcare.
I am all in favor of the disenfranchisement of deluded, self-loathing assholes, if it means that much to them. They may, however, keep their hands the fuck off my rights.
The sexism of the comment is obvious, but don’t miss the class component. In the early days of the United States, states did have property requirements for voting rights, which by explicit design disenfranchised wage laborers and the poor. In the modern context, this would mean that only middle and ruling class people could vote, not workers.
I don’t know. I think an end to suffrage is a very positive desire for the world. Suffrage via famine, suffrage via war, suffrage via oppression…I say end it all! For women and men!
Holy shit, AIN?, that’s just horrendous:
The Miwoks were peaceful acorn gatherers, but my boys do have a way of getting on one’s nerves, and a massacre is sometimes the only thing that can bring them under control
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Daddy guards his precious treasures (the girls – surprised?)
Well it sure as heck shocked the shit out of me. Of all the things she could have gone for she wished for this. My first reaction was concern for the lady, she’s pining for learned helplessness, sounds like a textbook case and I’m in the mood for an intervention. Who’s with me?
People like that make me twitch. I think what just pisses me off the most is that while she’d love to take away my right to vote, she continues to exercise her right, with her husband’s approval and permission of course. You have to wonder what she will do if her husband is ever killed. Ask her sons for permission?
Damn these pesky rights of ours. We could really use less, don’t you find?
I feel kinda sorry for her . . . . . at least I would after I’d kicked the everloving shit out of her.
The fact that it’s the first thing she thought of makes it pretty obvious she’s on the receiving end on many a rant about this.
Which makes me wonder—do you think her husband lets her vote? How hard it must be for the conservative man to struggle with this one! On one hand, he thinks votes for women is evil, on the other hand, if she doesn’t vote, how can she cancel out some liberal harlot’s vote?
Which makes me wonder—do you think her husband lets her vote?
No doubt women’s suffrage is acceptable as long as they vote the way their husbands tell them to. WHICH SHE DOES.
If she doesn’t want to vote, that’s okay by me, but don’t touch my suffrage.
No doubt women’s suffrage is acceptable as long as they vote the way their husbands tell them to. WHICH SHE DOES.
Or else she spends a night in the box. Have an opinion other than the one God and your husband gave you? Night in the box. Have an inkling of a thought vaguely playing at your mind? Night in the box. Stray 50 feet from Dear Hubby’s presence? Night in the box.
You know, maybe this whole operant conditioning thing works both ways [/sarcasm].
[...] I bet the ultra-right wing wishes that one of their number, a woman, hadn’t said that her one wish in the world was that women wouldn’t have a right to vote…oh, and by the way, probably people who don’t own property shouldn’t be allowed, either. The story has already received a great deal of attention, and the Lizard Queen’s response is more polite than mine will be. [...]
This lady doesn’t just not want to vote — she wants the nations of the world to declare women, and non-property owning men non-persons and strip them of the rights of citizenship, thus returning the world to the safe, secure bounds of the early 19th century.
The comments are even better than the post. I particularly like this one: As for property ownership: I think thta the welfare state has become such a problem because of the ability of people to vote themselves largesse; property owners are often much more rooted and less likely to vote for politicians who advocate the theft of their property, thus creating a much more stable economy and society.
This one’s pretty clear: the self-interest of the landowner is for the good of all, while the self-interest of the guy sleeping in a hostel is laziness. Whatever is in the squire’s interest is in the Lord’s interest. QED. This is considerably worse than Atwood.
I figure with 50 years of these people dictating policy, North America will look like the poorer bits of Africa, while China builds solar-powered Martian colonies.
[...] via Punkass Marc comes this gem from the crazy-ass “Prairie Muffin” set: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt and politics, what would you do? Hoo-boy, this is where I get in trouble, and that starts with “T” and that rhymes with “P” and that stands for “pool.” I’d like to jump in a pool right now. Some may tell me to jump in a river for this one: I would remove women’s suffrage, and I might even consider making voting rights tied to property ownership. [...]
The class-franchise thing is *big* among the academic conservative movement – the likes of Russell Kirk and William “How deep is my closet” Buckley, and their admirers and intellectual heirs (many of whom, big surprise, overlap with the Straussians.) I first heard it to my astonishment some ten years ago, from a National Review and University Bookman subscriber (one of those Boomer ex-student-radical-pinkos who had Made It and now was happily yanking up the ladder, with the blessings of the falsely-humanitarian conservative Catholic intelligensia and their Orwellian talk of “rights” meaning only the right to do as they saw fit.)
The argument is that this is what the Founding Fathers (like the Athenians) believed (and if you’re a good American you can’t go against the Architects of Democracy, right?) but if you continue to argue, they will say that people take better care of things when they have a vested interest in them – you can’t argue with that b/c that’s one of the tenets of Holy Capitalism – and so for that reason, property owners are the best guardians of society, since they have a greater vested interest in keeping things safe and clean and well-repaired and no riotous mobs than we mere millhands in our tenements. (Being, as it were, a technoserf living in the old millhands’ tenements, this argument twangs a particular discord in my soul.)
It’s utter hogwash, of course: just look at Brazil now, or pre-Revolutionary France and Russia, or Mexico, or any other feudal society (whether overtly or nominally a democracy) where power is concentrated in the hands of a “benevolent” oligarchy and you will find rotting infrastructures and an increasingly beaten-down, deprived hoi polloi – and corresponding increases in violent crime and rioting and civil unrest, too – outside the gated communities and villas and haciendas. But lying about history is THE specialty of the conservative academic establishment.
That was at the point when I was becoming seriously disillusioned with the academic Catholic conservativism I had been raised to, and didn’t help reassure me a whit (I can’t remember if it was before or after the publication and response to the Bell Curve in National Review, which made me realize that yes, collectively we conservatives *are* racists, even if individual naive-ninnies among us aren’t (or don’t think we are) – and are oblivious to the code words and genteel bigotry hidden in plummy Connecticut oil-barons’ scions’ tones.)
Add to that that the speaker didn’t believe then that women should be paid equal to men, and that men “deserved” to be paid better because they had families to raise, while women would “waste” their job-training and experience by leaving to have babies, and I also realized that this person was saying, in code, that he didn’t think I should have the right to vote, because I shouldn’t make enough money to live on my own and buy a house with (which I didn’t then, don’t now, and never will, foreseeably) and that fact automatically made me less responsible and intelligent than the most corrupt crook living in a house purchased with his ill-gotten gains (we’d recently had a local guy taken away from his gated mini-mansion when it turned out that the funds to create the English Parkland effect came from insider trading.)
The arguments by colonized-mind women against women voting, btw, are *identical* to the ones made by anti-suffrage women over 100 years ago.
Honestly? This woman is a stupid joke. I’d take political advice from a cactus before I took it from her. If you’re asked what one thing you’d change about the world, and you DON’T answer “end war” or “end child poverty” or “end famine” or “cure all disease” or just plain “end suffering” – you are a narrow-minded moron with the intellect of a jar of mayo. No, lady, you shouldn’t vote, but not because of your XX chromosomes, because you are (in the words of a four-year-old child who is probably smarter than you) a STUPIDHEAD.
[...] Anyway, there’s also a casual call for Palestinian genocide from “The Queen of All Evil,” so named because “if conservatism is evil, she’s the queen!” [what if it’s not evil? does the magic slipper fall off?], but I guess she should ask her husband if it’s the right decision because her colleagues claim women shouldn’t even be allowed to vote. [...]