Monthly Archives: October 2001

Should Americans Have More Babies for the Fatherland?

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Some Islamic extremists claim that the United States is doomed because of our cultural degeneration, best exemplified by the general toleration (if not formal legal sanction) of homosexuality and casual sexual relationships. Conservative author and columnist Maggie Gallagher agrees with much of this analysis, claiming that America’s biggest threat is its own internal cultural problems.

Gallagher writes,

Here is my best guess at honest self-examination: The Achilles’ heel of AmerEuropean civilization is our sexual culture, which even to many Americans looks not only deeply destructive, but ugly. Fatherless children, fragmented families, the demotion of sex into a product — these are the surface symptoms of an even deeper problem: a hollowing out of sexual meaning and purpose.

…

Sex has no deep-seated meaning, no public purpose beyond providing an enjoyable set of internal physical or emotional sensations. Sex is a consumer good. People who believe this end up having unstable marriages, fragmented families or no families at all.

Clearly social institutions still lag the advent of effective birth control and the ensuing sexual revolution it made possible, but to suggest that American and European civilizations are tottering on the edge of internal collapse is stretching this point into absurdity.

For Gallagher, the transformation of sex ties into another concern of conservative thinkers — the so called “depopulation bomb.” The 20th century saw a massive increase in the world’s population that affected pretty much every country of the world. Toward the end of the 20th century, however, the population of developed countries in Europe began to level off and, in countries such as Spain and Italy, the population actually began to decline. Today, the United States is the only developed nation whose population is still increasing, and a good deal of that increase is due to America’s relatively liberal immigration policies.

But in the developing world, population continues to grow, albeit at rates that continue to slow year by year. Some conservative columnists see an outright disaster in this trend of population decline in the developed world combined with large population increases in the developing world. Gallagher cites historian Paul Johnson who believes that the differing population growth rates of Islamic and Christian countries will inevitably lead to a clash between the two blocs.

Gallagher endorses this position, writing that,

For hundreds of years, traditional Islam has failed to produce a society that is attractive: regimes of secular corruption alternate with regimes of religious repression. But Islam remains a successful civilization because it fulfills the two minimum functions any culture must: It channels intense social energy of individuals into the two great sacrifices of self: war and babies. The children in Islamic societies suffer, and the women even more. But though individuals suffer, the family system itself works. The society perpetuates itself. …

The way forward is never the way back. Still, up until about 1970, Western civilization combined democracy, freedom, capitalism and neighborliness with a functioning family system. Who can now say the same?

This claim is even more absurd. Note that Gallagher first derides Americans and Europeans for not making necessary sacrifices for babies, but fails to note that many of the Muslim states she is referring to have dramatically failed their infants and children, with childhood mortality rates and other measures that would be considered intolerable if they persisted in the United States.

Similarly, while Gallagher claims that Islamic societies are mo re successful at perpetuating themselves, she forgets to mention that one of the things that Muslim extremists despise about the West is its culture that is steamrolling over traditional Islamic values, just as it steamrolled traditional Christian values. The emergence of Islamic extremism is simply the latest rebellion against the strongly individualist ideology that originated in the West and has been sweeping the globe over the past few centuries.

Source:

The Demographic Bomb. Maggie Gallagher, Yahoo!.Com, October 15, 2001.

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Pornography Is Just Like Terrorism — It Destroys a Society

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The Salt Lake Tribune ran a profile recently of a Utah group that calls itself Women for Decency. Formed earlier this year, the group campaigns against pornography, which its director, Janalyn Holt, seriously compared to the 9/11 terrorist attack. According to Holt,

The parallels between [smut and terror] are uncanny. Pornography destroys families. It’s not a one-time shot like an airplane flying into the World Trade Center. But little by little, blow by blow, it can be just as destructive. We are getting bombarded on all sides.

High on the list of pornographic publications that are terrorizing the United States are Better Homes & Gardens, which ran a Spiegel ad showing a woman leaning against a naked man, and, of course, women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan and In Style which are typically displayed at supermarket checkout counters. Women for Decency is participating in a nationwide campaign to persuade supermarkets to put covers in front of Cosmopolitan, Glamour and other magazines.

Women for Decency recently met with Utah’s porn czar, Paula Houston, who herself has been on the job for eight months now. What’s she been up to while drawing her $80,000 salary?

Aside from viewing a lot of pornography, Houston told the Associated Press that she’s fielded about 1,500 complaints about pornography. Most of the complaints, however, stem from advertisements and magazine covers. As an example, over 1,000 Utah residents signed an Internet petition against a Victoria’s Secret ad which featured a nude women strategically covering her breasts with her hands.

Legally, of course, Houston can’t do much about such vile filth, but like Women for Decency, she thinks that pornography kills families by spreading the idea that sex might occur outside of marriage,

It portrays a mindset that people buy into — of objectification, of not having a primary relationship. Pornography promotes free sex and that’s not good for marriages or families. I absolutely believe the only way to stem the tide is through grass roots efforts and understanding the law.

Meanwhile, Andrew McCullough, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, made the astute observation that, “She’s harmless enough, but it’s a terrible waste of taxpayer’s money. She is not doing anything important for society. She is making people feel good.”

Or, at least, trying to prevent people from feeling good.

Source:

Women uniting for war on porn. Mark Eddington, The Salt Lake Tribune, October 14, 2001.

After eight months, Utah’s ‘porn czar’ handles 1,500 complaints, instructs others on laws. Catherine S. Blake, The Associated Press, October 15, 2001.

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Ms. Magazine: Rush Limbaugh is “Like The Taliban”

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On its web site, Ms. Magazine recently posted an article in which it bizarrely compared Rush Limbaugh to the Taliban. The author of the article, Marcia Ann Gillespie, wrote,

No, they are not the Taliban. No, our internal terrorists aren’t named Osama bin Laden. Our homegrown terrorists have names like the Lambs of God and William Pierce (author of the Turner Diaries). And then there are the Jerry Falwells who clutch their holy books while spewing hate speech, blaming and damning and demonizing feminists and homosexuals for this assault on America. Or Rush Limbaugh who routinely and obscenely labels people who believe in the social, economic, and political equality of women and men — as the dictionary describes feminism — as “feminazis” on America’s airwaves. No, they are not the Taliban, but like the Taliban, the demonization and oppression of women to save us, or purify the race, or preserve the family, or uphold patriarchy is central tot heir beliefs. And like the Taliban, many of them use religion to justify their words and actions.

First, although he holds to some utterly disgusting views, it is a bit odd for Gillespie to label William Pierce a terrorist since he has never been convicted of an act of violence to my knowledge. Pierce certainly writes racist, inflammatory books and gives speeches that advocate violence, but as far as I know he’s never engaged in an act of violence or terrorism.

It was odd that Gillespie mentioned Limbaugh after first mentioning Falwell, because her comments about the radio commentator are just as absurd as were Falwell’s nutty claims that the terrorist attacks occurred because America had turned its back on God by allowing homosexuality and abortion.

Limbaugh is quite clear that “feminazi” applies to the leaders in the pro-abortion movement. Such euphemisms are repugnant, but Gillespie herself is engaging in precisely this tactic when she compares Limbaugh to the Taliban. Or, as kids on the playground might retort, takes one to know one.

The scary thing is that Gillespie refers to Limbaugh’s use of the term “feminazi” as obscene, which may just be rhetoric, but may actually be meant literally given that she characterizes Falwell’s comments as “hate speech.” It’s a bit incongruous to see someone decrying the Taliban while turning around and endorsing the idea of hate speech, which is much closer in accordance with the ideals of the Taliban than is Limbaugh’s euphemisms for abortion advocates.

Source:

Ms. responds to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Marcia Ann Gillespie, Ms. Magazine, undated editorial, 2001.

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Feminists and the War Against the Taliban

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In an op-ed piece for The Washington Post, Amy Holmes wonders why the National Organization for Women seems to be largely ignoring the United States’ war against the Taliban.

Holmes notes that NOW did put out a press release a few days ago quoting NOW Action Vice President Olga Vives saying, “In this time of national and global turmoil, the reasons we celebrate Coming Out Day are more visible and more important than ever,” but aside for demanding more money for Afghani refugee camps in Pakistan, NOW is silent about the U.S. attack on Afghanistan.

Which is weird since if you search on “Afghanistan” in NOW’s web search engine, you will find numerous press releases condemning the Taliban, including on urging the world to Stop the Abuse of Women and Girls in Afghanistan! But now that a Republican president is actually attempting to end the Taliban regime, there’s not a peep.

Holmes contrasts this with Eleanor Smeal and the Feminist Majority Foundation which maintains that “the United States has a unique obligation to end the Taliban’s atrocities toward women” and explicitly calls for the United States to remove the Taliban and replace it with a constitutional democracy which will guarantee the rights of women in Afghanistan. Though that may not be possible — although the Northern Alliance, the main threat to the Taliban, is certainly an improvement over the Taliban, they are hardly a group of liberal democratic constitutionalists.

Holmes doesn’t mention it, but the obvious question is whether or not NOW would maintain this weird silence over the war in Afghanistan had it been prosecuted by Bill Clinton or Al Gore. The few things NOW has released related to the terrorism attacks are meshed in with NOW’s theme of fighting George W. Bush and the Right. I suspect that for NOW giving Bush credit for trying a government run by misogynistic religious fanatics simply wouldn’t mesh very well with their theme that Bush is “like a vampire who will suck our rights away” as Patricia Ireland described him last October.

Source:

Feminism goes to battle. Amy Holmes, The Washington Post, October 14, 2001.

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Are Female Executives Too Tough?

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In August the New York Times ran a bizarre story about female executives attending a Silicon Valley program designed, essentially, to teach them to be less confrontational and more “lady like” at work. Called, Bully Broads, this is an absurd versions of corporate sexism.

The program is run by Jean A. Hollands of the Growth and Learning Center. Hollands is the author of the forthcoming book, Same Game, Different Rules: How to Get Ahead Without Being a Bully Broad, Ice Queen or Other ‘Ms. Understoods’, which advises women to ditch their assertive styles in favor of a softer, more appraoch (for example, she urges women to go ahead and cry at meetings if they feel so inclined).

Ron Steck, Hollands’ son-in-law and a vice president at the Growth and Leadership Center, gave the Times the bottom line about what the Center deals with. “With a male executive, there’s no expectation to be nice,” Steck said. “He has more permission to be an ass. But when women speak their minds, they’re seen as harsh.”

This is absurd. The problem here is not assertive women but corporate cultures at a company that expects different behaviors from male and female executives.

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Toughness has risks for women executives. Neela Banerjee, The New York Times, August 10, 2001.

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Does a Genetic Disorder Cause Some Anorexia Cases?

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A claim popularized by feminists is that anorexia (and other eating disorders) are caused by unhealthy media images of thin women. In the past decade this claim has been undermined by cross-cultural studies of societies with very different ideal female body images, but a recent Dutch survey is the first to provide any evidence that anorexia may have a genetic as well as psychological component.

American researchers began by studying mice who experience an eating disorder similar to anorexia. Research determined that the mice were deficient in a protein called agouti, which was involved in the formation of skin pigment. The substance had a second use, however — its presence in the brain was necessary to stimulate the mice to eat. Those mice who produced too little of this protein suffered from an anorexia-like eating disorder.

Dutch researchers then turned to human beings. Taking blood samples from 145 patients diagnosed with anorexia, the researchers found that 16 of the patients had genetic mutations of the gene that produces the agouti protein in human beings.

This follows up on earlier research that found high risks of anorexia in people whose relatives also suffered from the disorder. According to the BBC, studies of twins have shown that when one twin suffers from anorexia, the other twin has an extremely high 50 percent risk of suffering from anorexia as well. Having a family member who suffers from anorexia increases the risks of suffering from the disorder from 1 in 200 to 1 in 30.

Rather than being simplistically caused by images of thin females in the media, anorexia is turning out to be a very complex disorder with a number of likely factors contributing to its development.

Source:

Anorexia ‘has genetic basis’. Marlene Smits, The BBC, October 7, 2001.

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Man Arrested for Violating a Restraining Order At His Own Wedding

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In another example of the bizarrely inflexible nature of restraining orders, John Yount was recently arrested for violating a restraining order that Kim Schreckengost had obtained against Yount on January 18, 2001. Yount was arrested at the Meadville district court where he and Schreckengost had gone to get married.

Rather than getting married, Yount was instead arrested, charged with violating the restraining order by being in Schreckengost’s presence, and shipped off to a county jail to await prosecution.

Appearing before District Justice William Chisolm, Yount said that both he and his fiancee were under the impression that once she chose to spoke to Yount again, that the protection order was null and void. In fact, of course, not only is that not true, but in many jurisdictions such protection orders are enforced even when the person who applied for the order takes active measures to establish contact with the person the order is taken out against.

Or, as Judge Chisolm summarized the current state of the law, “I don’t think you understand, the fact is, it doesn’t matter what she does, you already violated the order.”

In this case, Yount served 11 days in a county jail for a previous violation of the restraining order, and at that time the order had been extended an additional six months. At his arraignment following the botched marriage attempt, Yount was warned that any attempts to contact his fiancee by phone from jail would result in additional charges for violating the restraining order.

In many jurisdictions, the application of restraining orders was long ago pushed passed any and all reasonable bounds, and it is an area of law that is in need of serious re-examination and reform.

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Man arrested at his wedding for violating PFA order filed by bride. Marianne Oberley-Orris, Meadville Tribune, September 27, 2001.

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Is Providing Fertility Information A “Scare Campaign”?

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Marjie Lundstrom wrote an op-ed a couple months ago about an odd effort by some feminists to restrict information about female reproductive health. They objected to an ad campaign sponsored by the American Infertility Association and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine to inform women about the difficulty in getting pregnant in their late 30s and 40s.

With text like, “Advancing age decreases your decreases your ability to have children,” the ad campaign was motivated by the high profile media cases of women who successfully conceive and bear children at relatively late ages. Although such stories seem rather common these days, the reality, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, is that the odds of becoming pregnant in any given month drop to 20 percent for women over 30 and a mere 5 percent for women over 40.

As Pamela Madsen of the American Infertility Association told Lundstrom, “I have to speak to women every day in their late 30s and early 40s whose biological clock has pretty much tickered out, and they’re asking, ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?’”

Thanks to technological advances, having children is possible now even for women 45 and up to have children, but usually only for people who can afford expensive fertility treatments and/or donated eggs.

The National Organization for Women was not pleased by the campaign. In a Newsweek article, NOW president Kim Gandy bizarrely ridiculed the idea that women could choose when to have children. According to Gandy,

The idea that you can choose what age you’ll be to have your children is a ludicrous proposition for most women, as though you can simply snap your fingers and say, “OK, I’m the right age,” and then have all the accouterments magically appear — the stable relationship, financial stability, life stability.

That is a very weird view of parenthood. Few people I know who are parents (including my wife and I) were foolish enough to wait until their lives were ideal before having children.

Source:

Should You Have Your Baby Now?. Claudia Kalb, Newsweek, August 13, 2001.

Fertility education is offending feminists. Marjie Lundstrom, Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, August 17, 2001.

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Mexico Overturns Law That Allowed Men to Claim Rape Vicitims ‘Provoked’ Them

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Women’s groups in the Mexican state of Chihuahua recently won an important victory when they pressured the state legislature into repealing a noxious law which had provided for lighter sentences for rape if the defendant could prove that the victim had “provoked” him.

The minimum sentence for rape had been four years, but the revision to the penal code set the minimum at only one year if the convicted rapist could prove that the victim had provoked the rape. This compared to the 6 year minimum sentence in Chihuahua for anyone convicted of cattle rustling.

The penal code had also been revised to reduce the minimum sentence from four years to six months for victims who were penetrated only with an object (which was an even more bizarre revision, in my opinion, than the provocation nonsense). That change was also overturned.

Jorge Ramirez Marin, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party which has an overwhelming majority in the Chihuahua legislature, claimed that the law had been misunderstood. Apparently the law was intended to curtail a perceived problem that women were charging their boyfriends with rape rather than admit to their parents that they were having premarital sex. Even if that’s accurate, however, it’s hard to see how a reduced sentence for rapes that were “provoked” would be a viable solution to such a problem.

Mexico’s national Congress had threatened to intervene if the Chihuahua legislature did not act.

Source:

Mexican lawmakers revoke law reducing penalties for rapists ‘provoked’ by women. Associated PRess, SEptember 19, 2001.

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Kansas State Senator: Women’s Suffrage Is a ‘Symptom’ of a Sick Society

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Kansas state senator Kay O’Connor, a Republican, made headlines last week for asserting that the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed women the right to vote, was a mistake.

O’Connor had been invited by the Johnson Count League of Women Voters to attend the league’s “Celebrate the Right to Vote” luncheon. Instead of accepting, O’Connor declined and added that, “You probably wouldn’t want me there because of what I would have to say.”

After word got out that O’Connor had reportedly told the league that she didn’t think the 19th Amendment was a good idea, O’Connor confirmed and clarified her views for the Associated Press. According to O’Connor,

We have a society that does tear families apart. I think the 19th amendment, while it’s not an evil in and of itself, is a symptom of something I don’t approve of.

…

The 19th Amendment is around because men weren’t doing their jobs, and I think that’s sad. I believe the man should be the head of the family. The woman should be the heart of the family.

This radical conservative view of women as little more than children to, at least ideally, be watched over by men is as bizarre as any of the radical feminist views of relations between the sexes. It is difficult to fathom how someone living in a liberal democracy in the 21st century could seriously hold such archaic ideas.

Source:

Women’s suffrage called ‘mistake’ by conservative Kansas politician. John Hanna, The Associated Press, September 29, 2001.

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