Monthly Archives: March 2001

Kenyan President: Women Have ‘Little Minds’

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Daniel arap Moi, president of Kenya, made headlines in that African nation when he said that women were underachieving because they have “little minds.”

“You [women] can achieve more, can get more but because of your little minds, you cannot get what you are expected to get,” Moi said.

It didn’t help matters any that Moi chose to make his remarks at the opening of a regional women’s seminar in Nairobi.

Moi’s remarks were condemned and criticized by a wide range of leaders in Kenya from the head of the Catholic church to the chairman of the Law Society of Kenya.

Source:

Outrage at Moi remark. Joseph Warungu, The BBC, March 8, 2001.

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Lesbians for Bush

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Beth Elliott recently wrote a wonderfully provocative column for FrontPageMag.Com about lesbian and gay men supporting George W. Bush for president. Exit polls showed that 25 percent of voters who identified themselves as gay or lesbian voted for Bush.

The libertarian Elliott doesn’t find that result as odd at all. She writes,

One obvious explanation, one that runs counter to the assumptions of both left and right, is that many of us place higher importance on issues like the benefits of constitutional government over statism, or America’s safety in the world, or restoring honor and dignity to our highest institutions, than our particular parochial issues.

Moreover, Elliott contends that gay and lesbian activists need to be more consistent in the way they approach the state,

Ultimately, there is also the matter of following through on positions and applying them not just to ourselves but to others as well. Because we have decried government interference in our lives, and the harmful effects of derogatory stereotypes, it behooves us to be sensitive to similar legitimate complaints from religious conservatives.

Of course Elliott realizes there probably isn’t a lot of room for common ground with social conservatives who, in their own way, are every bit as statist as the Leftists Elliott deplores. Still, she writes, “Even an uneasy peace between conservatives and freedom-loving gay men and lesbians could tip the scales away from statism. We can certainly agree that would make our country a better and freer place for all of us.”

Source:

How gays and conservatives can work together. Beth Elliott, FrontPageMagazine.Com, February 12, 2001.

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Eliminating Abortion through Regulation

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The U.S. Supreme Court gave opponents of abortion a big shot in the arm in February when it refused to hear a challenge to abortion regulations in South Carolina. The Supreme Court’s decision will almost certainly open the floodgates of regulation directed at abortion providers.

Conservative opponents around the country have taken up a technique pioneered by liberal politicians — if you can’t outright ban something, simply regulate it to death. In the case that the Supreme Court refused to consider, a federal appeals court upheld South Carolina’s 27 pages worth of abortion regulations.

According to Reuters,

Among the many items covered by the regulation were airflow and temperature standards, hallway and doorway widths, making registered nurses assist in abortions, and requiring tests for sexually transmitted diseases.

The regulations also required that bathrooms be installed with alarm systems and that clinics give state inspectors access to patients’ medical records.

An article on WomensNet claims that South Carolina’s regulations could raise the cost of an abortion by as much as $368. Such regulations are currently pending in Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

Feminists will soon likely see their alliance with big government liberals rewarded by seeing onerous regulations drive abortion providers out of business.

Sources:

Justices reject abortion clinic rules appeal. Reuters, February 26, 2001.

Anti-choice tactics threaten abortion access. WomensNet, March 8, 2001.

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Austrian Women’s Minister Announces Men’s Division

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Austria’s new Women’s Minister made international headlines in October largely because the minister happens to be a man. Herbert Haupt was in the news again in February after he announced he would create a men’s division of the women’s ministry.

Haupt told reporters that women’s liberation movements had ended sexism against women in Austria and now it was men that were discriminated against. Haupt said that the men’s division would produce studies of mens-related issues.

Feminists were quick to fire back, with Social Democrat Martina Ludwig saying that, “instead of balancing out his deficits, he choose to swap women’s affairs for male affairs” and Green Member of Parliament Madelein Petrovic calling Haupt’s announcement “chauvinistic whining.”

The far right party that controls Austria is bad for both men and women, but it’s kind of amusing to see feminists get hot when somebody throws their own rhetoric back in their faces. Rather than pushing for departments and special rules that alternatively benefit one sex or the other, free thinking people should push for general principled rules that treat men and women equally.

Source:

Austria minister of women to fight for men. Jon Henley, The Guardian (UK), February 27, 2001.

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Statues vs. Women

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A couple weeks ago the Taliban, which controls about 80 percent of Afghanistan, announced that it would begin destroying statues and other artwork that were devoted to religions other than Islam. As the Taliban followed through on its promise, the outrage and coverage that this has garnered have been amazing. Everywhere I turns, it seems like I’m reading new articles or seeing new coverage of the story in newspapers, radio, and television. Protests were held around the world by people of many different religious faiths to protest the destruction.

Where was this intense level of coverage when the Taliban was stripping women of their basic human rights? When the Taliban executed several prostitutes recently, it garnered only a small mention in foreign newspapers and went largely unreported in the United States. Perhaps if the prostitutes could have somehow transformed themselves into statutes or works of art, Western media outlets would have found their story compelling.

The destruction of Buddhist religious icons is certainly deplorable, but so is the media’s habit of giving readers and viewers more information about the destruction of inanimate objects than the murder of human beings.

Source:

UN condemns statue destruction. The BBC, March 7, 2001.

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Will the Heather Mercer Case Help or Harm Women?

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When Heather Mercer won a $2 million judgment from Duke University, it was hailed as an important victory for women’s athletics. Instead it will likely shut the door for women who want to follow in Mercer’s footsteps.

Mercer wanted to be a kicker for Duke’s football team. She was given a tryout by the coach, but since her range was about 35-yards in practice, while a Division I school needs someone who can kick 45-yard field goals during a game, her coach cut her.

Mercer sued and a jury agreed that she had been discriminated against based on her sex. So why isn’t this a clear victory for women?

Because of the provisions of Title IX as they apply to sports. Under Title IX, if a school doesn’t have a women’s team in a given sport it must allow women to try out for the men’s team, with one important exception — contact sports are exempt from this rule.

That’s right, the current law is that if you allow a woman to try out to be a kicker on the football team and then cut her, she could potentially sue the university for sex discrimination as Mercer did. If you just tell the woman point blank, sorry football is a contact sport and the university doesn’t allow women to try out for such teams, the student has no recourse whatsoever.

The federal appeals court that allowed Mercer’s case to go to trial explicitly upheld the contact sports exemption writing, “we hold that where a university has allowed a member of the opposite sex to try out for a single-sex team in a contact sport, the university is, contrary to the holding of the district court, subject to Title IX and therefore prohibited from discriminating against that individual on the basis of his or her sex.”

The obvious reaction from universities seeing what happened in the Duke case will be to institute policies, either written or informal, to refuse try outs to women who want to participate on a men’s contact sport team.

In the end, Mercer’s legal victory will end up diminishing rather than enhancing women’s sports opportunities.

Source:

Sidelined! Kimberly Schuld, The Women’s Quraterly, Winter 2001.

Mercer v. Duke University. United States Court Of Appeals For The Fourth Circuit, No. 99-1014, Decided: July 12, 1999.

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Even Conservative Women Find “The Surrendered Wife” Nauseating

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I expected all of the liberal pundits to deplore The Surrendered Wife, but WorldNetDaily.Com’s Cynthia Grenier managed a pretty good dissection of the book in a recent column. Writing that, “I just about gagged as I began reading all these stories in the press about a new manual for women: ‘The Surrendered Wife’…”

Grenier reports that the book has sold about 100,000 copies, and you have to wonder about the sort of women (and men) who would find the book’s advice relevant to their lives. Taking her cue from author Laura Doyle’s suggestion that women should never attempt to correct men’s driving directions even if they miss the correct off-ramp on a highway and end up driving many miles out of their way, Grenier writes,

I can only wonder what in Heaven’s name any half way intelligent male would think on being allowed to drive miles and hours out of his way just to maintain his strong, manly image.

Grenier concludes her column with advice that applies equally well to men as well as women. “My advice: ‘Soften, yes; surrender, never.’” Now there’s some decent relationship advice.

Source:

What to do about the American wife?. Cynthia Grenier, WorldNetDaily, March 3, 2001.

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Judith Kleinfeld On the MIT Gender Discrimination Study

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Judith Kleinfeld recently wrote a column for The Christian Science Monitor summarizing her views and the recent Independent Women’s Forum study of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s sexual discrimination study.

MIT’s study claimed that the university had discriminated against female scientists, but on closer analysis the study was a political document devoid of any statistics or solid facts that would allow anyone to examine whether or not there had indeed been sex discrimination at MIT. As Kleinfeld writes,

Did MIT actually discriminate against its female faculty? Check out the study yourself at MIT’s web site (http://web.mit.edu/). You will notice an astonishing fact: MIT’s study is innocent of evidence of gender discrimination. Not an iota of data is offered to show that MIT treated its female faculty any differently from its male faculty.

Irrational self-flagellation — it’s not just for medieval monks anymore.

Source:

False solution on gender. Judith Kleinfeld, The Christian Science Monitor, February 27, 2001.

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Mary Daly and Boston College Reach Settlement, But Continue to Argue

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Feminist theologian Mary Daly recently reached a settlement with Boston College over her strange exit from teaching. For 25 years Daly had refused to allow men in her classroom, and to their discredit Boston College officials grudgingly accepted this arrangement.

But in 1999 a student threatened to sue Boston College if Daly refused to allow him in her classroom. When college officials informed Daly that her sexist policy was no longer tolerable, Daly said she’d rather retire than allow a man in her classroom.

Boston College took her at her word and announced that Daly had retired. Daly claimed she had never said she was retiring and sued Boston College for breach of contract.

And then things got even weirder. A few weeks before Daly’s case was to go to trial, Daly and her lawyer approached Boston College seeking a settlement. The college agreed and the two parties entered into a settlement which included a confidentiality clause — neither side was to discuss the terms of the settlement.

Except Daly and her lawyer apparently couldn’t resist getting in a dig at Boston College and put out a press release falsely claiming that Boston College had come to Daly seeking a settlement and proclaiming, “We are confident that, after hearing all of the testimony, the jury would have ruled in our favor and found that Professor Daly’s tenure rights and academic freedom had been trampled.”

Boston College was outraged by the breach of the settlement as well as the false claim that it, rather than Daly, had sought a settlement. The college threatened to sue Daly for violating the terms of the settlement, and Daly’s lawyer responded by issuing a retraction of the comments that admitted Daly had sought out the settlement.

Regardless of who did what, hopefully other college and universities will get the message that sex discrimination is simply intolerable at institutions of higher learning. Ironically Daly continues to insist that the principle of academic freedom gives her the right to discriminate based on sex in her classrooms. What a twisted view of academic freedom.

Source:

Suit settled, feminist and BC still arguing. Patricia Healy, Boston Globe, February 8, 2001.

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