If your first reaction upon reading the title was “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!” or “Frrrpppkwiliq boahh boahh boahh!” or some variant of “%&*&^%$##!”, then you have discovered the meaning of sacrilegious. Congratulations! You hold an idea that you consider beyond possibility of all discussion—just as ideologues do. But you also hold at least one thing sacred—and this is in your favor. If it’s the right thing.
The fun of debates is what can be learnt, hence the form of the resolution. Taking the Pro side is the irrepressible Anne Barnhardt (whom we have been meeting regularly of late):
…Do you know when things really started to go — literally — to hell in this country? When women were given the right to vote seperate and apart from their husbands…
…Up until women’s suffrage, a man was the head of his marriage and his household, and his vote represented not just himself but his entire family, including his wife and his children. When men voted, they were conscious of the fact that they were voting not just for themselves and their own personal interests, but they were also charged with the responsibility of discerning and making the ultimate decision about what was in the best interests of their entire family…
As soon as the 19th amendment was passed, men were effectively castrated, and in many, many cases disenfranchised by their wives. No longer was the man the head of the household. No longer was he responsible for his wife. Now the wife was a “co-husband” at best, or a flat-out adversary at worst. The notion of a man making the final decision about what was best for his wife and family per his God-given vocation as husband and father was now over…
Women are made with a healthy, innate desire to be provided for and protected…women want someone or someTHING to take care of them. For this reason, women tend to lean socialist, and are generally in favor of the expansion of government when the government promises to “provide” for them.
Well, you get the idea. The Government has stepped in and became Man for Woman. What was the name of that woman in the Obama campaign that proves this? Julia? A woman now can “have as many fatherless children as she pleases” and Government will step in and care for them and the woman. There is no requirement family does so. Thus, in a very real way, “Fathering children no longer binds a man to a woman in any way.”
Barnhardt then says “Men didn’t vote to societally castrate themselves, and never would have.” But this is false: men did allow women’s suffrage by vote (in 1919)—and they did not have to. And you would have thought, after December 1917 when both houses of Congress passed a Constitutional amendment to ban alcohol, the result of a movement largely led by women, that they would have seen what was coming.
Banned alcohol? Pause to recall that the United States of America banned alcohol. Via Constitutional Amendment. Banned alcohol. By rewriting its founding document. This is insanity itself. Not the first lapse into darkness, nor the last, but an extremely telling one.
What is true is after female suffrage:
Many, many married couples quickly found themselves voting against one another. The man would tend to vote for the more conservative platform, and the woman would vote for the more socialist platform. When this happened, the effective result was the nullification of BOTH individuals’ votes. What this did was massively reduce the voting influence of the married household, and magnify the voting influence of the unmarried — and the unmarried tend to be younger, and thus more stupid, and thus vote for big government.
Our debate is merely theoretical, as all but the most ardent ideologue will understand. It is only the activist who would read these words and invoke the Slippery Slope and scream that our Democracy is imperiled.
No. As detailed many times on this blog, suffrage has only expanded, and will continue to expand, both in eligibility and in matters. We recede from the Republic and inch ever closer to a true Democracy. And no small debate on an obscure site at the far edge of the Internet will change this. So do please relax and try not to take any of this personally.
Letting women vote DID ruin everything. Everywhere it has been tried.
Most things ultimately cause more harm than good. Or at least a very big chunk of harm. Examples: TV – loads of vapid (and worse) programming. Automobiles – 40,000 deaths a year and traffic jams. The internet – misinformation and digital scams. Cell phones – Twitter. Call it a version of Murphy’s Law. Or social entropy. Or the true nature of a fallen world…
It’s easy. Women are biologically the scarce resource. Men have a innate tendency to grant them whatever they want (sometimes to please them, sometimes to avoid conflict). In addition to this innate tendency, men are raised by women. A woman was the first source of authority in our tender years, and we strove to please her. When we didn’t please her, we got shamed and felt bad. This leaves an imprint.
So, if nothing else happens, women are given more and more rights until society collapses. The only way to avoid that is having a patriarchal religion. If men know that giving their women something goes against their God, they would refrain from pleasing women all the time. So when Christianity became thinner in the West, more and more rights were given to women.
TL;DR When men don’t worship God, they worship sex.
Edited
Letting women vote lead to The View. ‘Nuf said.
The error can be traced back to letting anyone vote at all.
Mary Robertson Walsh, the mother of Henry James, Jr., and William James, and two lesser-known males, thought that instead of having one vote herself, that she was better employed to influence the votes of her husband and children. In theory, a woman could exercise in theory more than one vote, limited only by the number of male family members within her sphere.
It is not Ann who is crazy. She just makes people crazy by telling the truth.
We do seem to have suffered a feminization of our culture.
Not to mention the detrimental effect of single parent households headed by women.
Douglas A. Smith and G. Roger Jarjoura, “Social Structure and Criminal Victimization,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 25 [Feb., l988], “Criminologists have long used race and poverty as key variables for explaining crime rates. However, researchers at the University of Maryland find that when differences in family structure are taken into account, crime rates run much the same in rich and poor neighborhoods and among black, white, and Hispanic populations. In their study of over ll,000 urban residents of Florida, upstate New York, and Missouri, Professors Douglas A. Smith and G. Roger Jarjoura found that ‘the percentage of single-parent households with children between the ages of 12 and 20 is significantly associated with rates of violent crime and burglary.’ The UM team points out that ‘many studies that find a significant association between racial composition and crime rates have failed to control for community family structure and may mistakenly attribute to racial composition an effect that is actually due to the association between race and family structure.’ Drs. Smith and Jarjoura likewise criticize theories that attribute crime to poverty since when family structure is taken into account, ‘the effect of poverty on burglary rates becomes insignificant and slightly negative.’ “This new study should dispel illusions about curing the social effects of casual divorce and rampant illegitimacy through government programs that merely alleviate poverty or reduce racial prejudice.”
Relevant to the point is the following excerpt from an old post of Zippy’s:
“There are really just three basic questions here:
Does women’s suffrage in itself – that is, the actual voting patterns of women – affect abortion law?
Does the pervasive view that female suffrage is a matter of basic justice, as opposed to a prudential choice about governance over which reasonable people may disagree, affect abortion law (through everyone’s voting patterns, through judicial and regulatory decisions, and through literally millions of other everyday actions and considerations)?
If these things do affect abortion law, in what direction do they affect it?
The answers to these questions are obvious; and yet every fibre of the modern being resists acknowledging them. (That in itself, ironically, provides additional evidence of the effects that attitudes about womens’ suffrage are having on our culture and our polity).”
https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2012/11/17/blinders-full-of-women/
Democracy is the best way to get rid of bad politicians. How is the women vote changing that for worse?
No, defenestration is the best way to get rid of bad politicians.
For the purposes of this comment, assume the definition of “dumb voting” to be voting that works against the voter’s long term interest.
I don’t deny that there is a correlation between gender and dumb voting. However, there are many such correlations. For example, registration drives such as motor-voting has certainly dumbed-down the electorate, as has mail-in balloting. You can throw in just about any of the many voter turnout efforts to get the disinterested to the polls.
Union membership is also clearly correlated with dumb voting. Government employee union member’s votes work to bankrupt their employers, and teacher’s union member’s votes work to destroy the public education system.
There is a correlation between race and dumb voting. Blacks vote in large percentages for Democrats, who have worked tirelessly to destroy the black family.
There is a correlation between age and dumb voting, as illustrated by the recent youth fascination with socialism, which works to destroy the futures of those same youth.
And on and on and on. By my estimation, the correlation between gender and dumb voting is small potatoes in the universe of dumb voting.
@imnobody00
Excellent insights. Yes, women have a built-in domination advantage by being in control of raising children and seen as the weaker and better behaved sex. But as they try to become more like and compete with men ultimately they will lose. The Trump victory could be seen in that light. Women should stick to their knitten.
@acrickerchirps
That’s murder, or manslaughter, or at least attempt of said crimes. Since when is a policy based on criminal acts succesfull? That would make Communism the most succesfull policy in World history, with Fascism the runner-up, and plain stupidity being third.
Pingback: Outliers (#51) « Amerika
We aren’t governed by a regime of plain stupidity? You had me fooled.
When men voted, they were conscious of the fact that they were voting not just for themselves and their own personal interests, but they were also charged with the responsibility of discerning and making the ultimate decision about what was in the best interests of their entire family…
How did letting women vote lead men to discontinue voting in their family’s best interest? Why can’t women vote in their family’s best interest? Defective ladybrains, perhaps? How did Ann escape such a fate herself?
The notion of a man making the final decision about what was best for his wife and family per his God-given vocation as husband and father was now over
Oh so sad, men have to share decision making with their wives and daughters. Whatever will they do with themselves? Now he has an opportunity for something better, encouraging his wife and daughters to be better thinkers and smarter voters. If he actually knows his stuff maybe he can make 2 or more household votes for conservative causes? No, that’s just stupid..
Women are made with a healthy, innate desire to be provided for and protected…women want someone or someTHING to take care of them.
Perhaps this is Ann Barnhart’s desire, but many women can outgrow the “spoiled princess phase” and are happy to work and contribute to society and their family’s financial success as a morally and socially responsible partner.
Ann is an interesting case, in one column she says women want to be protected and in another (april 2015) she supports a rifle enthusiast’s idea “that men should force their women cut out the ‘sissy female [BS]’ and learn to use every weapon in his armory”. Gasp! Does that mean women can overcome their “innate desire” to be protected and take matters into their own hands? Can’t let that happen, can we? Goodness, she might shoot her husband’s testicles off defending her right to vote, castrating him yet again. Perhaps as with firearms, women can be taught to use a vote responsibly?
If Ann wants to give up her vote, she’s quite welcome to refrain, as a great many people do, every election but she’s in no position to make that choice for every woman. Not every woman is merely interested in “asserting her will on the public”, rather than vote for the well-being of society, as Ann contends, as though she can speak for millions of American women. The claim seems a likely projection of her own flaws, but she lacks the evidence to support anything more.
@Talon
“How did letting women vote lead men to discontinue voting in their family’s best interest?”
It didn’t. (You’re right.)
“Why can’t women vote in their family’s best interest?”
They can. And they darn well should. They should feel just as obligated as men in this regard.
“Oh so sad, men have to share decision making with their wives and daughters. Whatever will they do with themselves?”
Any good man knows that he and his wife are equals in decision making. A man who forces the hand of his wife by asserting his “male dominance” is an idiot and is violating the “terms and conditions” of his “God-given vocation as husband and father.”
“Now he has an opportunity for something better, encouraging his wife and daughters to be better thinkers and smarter voters. If he actually knows his stuff maybe he can make 2 or more household votes for conservative causes? No, that’s just stupid..”
Okay, so actually if we look at things logically, while you are right that a man can encourage his wife and daughters to be better thinkers and smarter voters, that isn’t necessarily going to make a difference in the end. While I agree that allowing women to vote increases the potential number of fully capable voters in favor of good policy or leadership, you have to take into account that the net influence of a single vote has been effectively cut in half (at least!) by taking into account millions more votes. If anything, allowing women to vote is diluting the influence of the vote of a united household. If a household of one man and six women was united before women’s suffrage, then their seven united votes after women’s suffrage will have NO NET DIFFERENCE than things before women suffrage. Maybe they have just put in seven whole votes for some good thing, but with women’s suffrage, you might get fifty more votes in opposition to that good thing. I’m not saying that women are corrupt and that they’ll always vote for the wrong thing, but I am saying that opening the door to more corrupt individuals to vote is doing society a disservice. The non-corrupt individuals had perhaps just as much a voice in their united household before women’s suffrage as they do now. If there were households unrighteously dominated by some alpha-male, then he is the one in error. We can’t blame men “at large” just because some men are idiots. Some women are idiots too. But I don’t want to make this all about men vs. women. My main point comes back to the family. Just do the math. Taking a dollar away from every family and giving each member *equally* a nickel isn’t helping families.
And I know not everyone is growing a family of their own, but before women’s suffrage, if a woman wanted to have a greater influence in society, then she could freely get married and convince her husband to vote for good things! And if she couldn’t convince her husband, then that sounds like an interpersonal marital issue, not a societal issue. She married the wrong man! It is a lie that back then, a woman who got married sacrificed her influence and hopes for improving the world. (Every influential person in history was born…to a woman.)
But now those whose interests are not focused on promoting the family have more power than ever before.
The reality is, by opening the door to split-households, and therefore increasing the influence of single people (who we can’t guarantee have the promotion of the family as one of their priorities), we’re diluting the influence of united families and good individuals, and therefore hurting society. It’s bad for men AND women.
While it is true that many derelict, single men were always given the vote in our nation’s history, that’s just a sad consequence of the system. Perhaps it was easier for the founders (especially considering the culture at the time) to just give men the vote because in their time, moral responsibilities of fatherhood were taken more seriously, and households were more united than they are today. Maybe their views of one vote per household were too idealistic, and flawed, but to me, a system with those flaws is better than the system that allows for the dividing the family today. It’s time we focus more on our responsibilities as members of families and less on our “rights” as individuals.
You’re brave for posting this .