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Commentary

Christina Hoff Sommers explains feminist myth-making

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Christina Hoff Sommers
Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers

This story was sent to me by ECM, but I also saw posted at Dinocrat.com, Jennifer Roback Morse and Muddling Towards Maturity.

How reliable are the stories you read in women’s studies textbooks? Does violence against women really increase on Superbowl Sunday? Or is it just a ploy to create a made-up crisis to justify transferring wealth from taxpayers to feminists for research, social programs, etc.?

Excerpt:

One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack.

Lemon’s Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author.

…in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, “The March of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease.” Not true. When I recently read Zorza’s assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of Dimes, he replied, “That is a total error on the part of the author. There was no such study.” The myth started in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years.

Zorza also informs readers that “between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence.” Studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, indicate that the figure is closer to 1 percent.

Sommers is a Christian equality-feminist who writes against activist “gender” feminism. I have her first two books. She is a professional philosopher who understands men and tells the truth.

You can read more about what constitutes feminist research in this article by Rod Dreher.

Further study

My previous story on domestic violence showed that female-instigated DV is rising in Australia, and that rates of DV are similar in Canada and the UK.

Previously, I blogged about a new study that shows the importance of fathers to the development of children.

I also blogged about how government intrudes into the family and about the myth of “dead-beat Dads”. And about how the feminist state’s discrimination against male teachers is negatively impacting young men. And there is my series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage: Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.

Dr. Linda Kelly Hill
Dr. Linda Kelly Hill

Here is a related research paper by Dr. Linda Kelly, a professor of Law at Indiana University School of Law.

News

Round-up of news on Obama’s economic policies

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Tax policies that destroy traditional families

New taxes on married couples with intact families to subsidize out-of-wedlock births. (This is basically an incentive to not marry, by the way)

Hans Bader at the CEI’s blog reports: (H/T ECM)

Not content with repealing welfare reform through the job-killing stimulus package, and proposing a massive marriage penalty in the tax code, Obama and his Congressional allies are now planning to make married and widowed taxpayers subsidize benefits for which they are not eligible, such as payments to households with out-of-wedlock births. For example, they are pushing a bill that will allow even households that receive tens of thousands of dollars a year in child support to demand food stamps.

…Intact families, and widows, usually have every dollar they make considered in whether they qualify for food stamps. But under the Obama-backed proposal, unwed mothers, and divorced mothers, would not, since the child-support dollars they receive would be arbitrarily excluded.

Stop and think about what sorts of incentives this creates. What kind of man would be stupid enough to consider getting married and being a father to his own children? This is how Democrats destroy the family with tax policies, so that women with children depend on the state, and the state can in turn influence the way children are raised by getting them into day care, pre-K and government-run schools.

The goal is to prevent parents from influencing their own children with benighted traditional beliefs about traditional religion and morality. According to Democrats, that is the job of qualified public school teachers using approved teaching materials designed by experts like Kevin Jennings. And besides, the more children are raised without fathers, the more government jobs are created to deal with the fallout.

And there’s more:

The Obama-backed bill also increases the federal matching funds states receive for maximizing their collection of child support payments, giving them an incentive to artificially jack up child support obligations in order to reap federal money (as many states did in the aftermath of the 1988 Family Support Act), even if that means forcing fathers who have never missed a payment to pay much more than the actual cost of raising a child. I have previously written about how court-ordered child support payments generally exceed the actual cost of raising a child under most existing state child-support guidelines.

Democrat women that I know (single/divorced women and single/divorced mothers) are so mystified as to why men are not lining up to marry them. Maybe they should be thinking about the policies that they actually voted in favor of – they are not husband-friendly or father-friendly.

Democrat women think that they can crush the last drop of liberty and autonomy out of a man, and still expect him to love, protect and provide for women and children. Inexplicable. They want the security of the state and they don’t realize how it decreases the number of men willing to make commitments.

Home sales will require government approval

The Democrats cap-and-trade bill will require you to fix your house up to be eco-friendly, before you will be allowed to sell it. What? Global warming isn’t going to solve itself, you know…. Oh, wait!

CNSNews reports on what we can expect. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

The 1,400-page cap-and-trade legislation pushed through by House Democrats contains a new federal policy that residential, commercial, and government buildings be retrofitted to increase energy efficiency, leaving it up to the states to figure out exactly how to do that.

This means that homeowners, for example, could be required to retrofit their homes to meet federal “green” guidelines in order to sell their homes, if the cap-and-trade bill becomes law.

This is the first time since these subprime mortgage bank bailouts started that I’ve ever been happy about renting.

New Republican cap-and-trade TV ad

Here’s the new ad put out by Republicans to educate the public about the cap-and-trade bill that just passed the house. (H/T ECM)

Now that’s a great ad.

Why Democrats voted for Obama

Because they don’t know anything about economics!

The second one is from Nice Deb.

News

Honduras defies Obama-supported socialist dictator

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Background

The Honduran Constitution specifies that Presidents are only allowed to serve one-term. The current President Zeyala decided that things would be better if he were allowed to serve indefinitely. He tried to arrange a referendum to redo the Constitution so that he could serve a second term.

The Supreme Court declared that the Constitution does not allow the president to call a referendum, only the Congress can do that. So, they ordered the army to prevent the dictator from carrying out his plan to seize power anyway.

But Obama loves communist dictators. He would not side with the Iranian people against their Islamo-fascist dictator, and he will not side with the Honduran people against their communist dictator. It makes you wonder what Obama has against Constitutions, liberty, free market capitalism and limits on power, doesn’t it?

The latest

Obama’s UN representative introduced a resolution in the United Nations, along with other Marxist dictatorships in Venezuela and Bolivia, to support the Marxist dictator of Honduras.

The Hill reports: (H/T Gateway Pundit)

The U.S. co-sponsored a successful U.N. resolution supporting Honduras’s ousted leader Tuesday as Republicans began to speak out against the Obama administration’s condemnation of the overthrow.

Manuel Zelaya, who was arrested and forced into exile Sunday, addressed the U.N. General Assembly after the unanimous vote on the resolution sponsored in part by Bolivia, Mexico, Venezuela and the United States.

“The resolution that the United Nations has just adopted unanimously … expresses the indignation of the people of Honduras and the people worldwide,” said Zelaya, who began his speech by thanking Venezuela and Ecuador.

Obama even wants to speak with the exiled dictator:

…”I believe, if he — if he does come either today or tomorrow, that he will likely meet with officials from the State Department, some of whom, as I said, have been in contact,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in Tuesday’s briefing, repeating this when pressed by a reporter about whether Zelaya would meet with Obama.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has urged Zelaya to try to speak with Obama while in D.C., saying the American president’s support would “deliver a major blow” to Honduras’s interim government.

But the Republicans in Congress are siding with the Honduran people, and against socialist dictators:

“Manuel Zelaya trampled the Honduran Constitution by pushing for his illegal referendum to allow him to rule indefinitely, and by firing the top military official, General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, when he refused to comply with Zelaya’s unconstitutional orders,” Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) said in a statement to The Hill on Tuesday.

“There is little doubt that Zelaya, in his blatant power grab, has moved Honduras down a dangerous path toward less freedom, less security, and less prosperity. He consistently ignored the checks and balances which are essential to a democratic government.”

The referendum had been judged illegal by Honduras’s highest court and was opposed widely through political and military circles, including within Zelaya’s own party.

The Wall Street Journal reports: (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Hondurans are understandably afraid that, backed by Chávez agents and money, it could lead to similar antidemocratic subversion there. In Tegucigalpa yesterday, thousands demonstrated against Mr. Zelaya, and new deputy foreign minister Marta Lorena Casco told the crowd that “Chávez consumed Venezuela, then Bolivia, after that Ecuador and Nicaragua, but in Honduras that didn’t happen.”

It’s no accident that Mr. Chávez is now leading the charge to have Mr. Zelaya reinstated, and on Monday the Honduran traveled to a leftwing summit in Managua in one of Mr. Chávez’s planes. The U.N. and Organization of American States are also threatening the tiny nation with ostracism and other punishment if it doesn’t readmit him.

…As for the Obama Administration, it seems eager to “meddle” in Honduras in a way Mr. Obama claimed was counterproductive in Iran. Yet the stolen election in Iran was a far clearer subversion of democracy than the coup in Honduras. As a candidate, Mr. Obama often scored George W. Bush’s foreign policy by saying democracy requires more than an election — a free press, for example, civil society and the rule of law rather than rule by the mob. It’s a point worth recalling before Mr. Obama hands a political victory to the forces of chavismo in Latin America.

Meanwhile, the Honduran people marched in the streets against Obama and his communist dictator buddies, reports Gateway Pundit.

Hondurans protest against the unilateral meddling in their national affairs by Cowboy Socialist Obama
Hondurans protest against the unilateral meddling in their national affairs by Cowboy Socialist Barack Obama

Imagine what conservative Christian Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush would have done in a similar situation. They would have defended the rights and liberties of the people from the arbitrary power of socialist dictators. But they understood the value of liberty, democracy and human rights. They were prepared to take stands against the tyrannies of communism and fascism. They did not want to be loved by evil tyrants.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air notes that even the socialists at the New Republic are condemning Obama for neglecting the Honduran Constitution and the will of the people. (H/T Stop the ACLU)