Friday Reads: Hacks that Hate Women

Good Morning!

I’m going to try to try not to let the rant out quite yet.  But, wow,  these two guys really piss me off and I cannot figure for the life of me why ANYONE takes them seriously.  They belong in museums with the other prehistoric cave dwellers.   I hate to ruin your day by quoting Erick Erickson and Ross Douthat in one post.  But, sometimes you just have take them out and on.  I have never had a single nice word to say about either of them.  You’ll notice that nothing will stop that trend today.  So,  let’s start with the fat boy at FOX instead of the fat boy at NYT. I can’t even imagine what kind of hell realm their wives must experience daily.

Appearing on a Fox Business panel Wednesday evening, Fox contributor Erick Erickson suggested it is “anti-science” to reject the biological claim that men should be in the “dominant” role in the nuclear family.

This particular panel segment of Lou Dobbs Tonight took on a recent Pew study claiming that mothers are now the primary source of income in 40 percent of American households. Dobbs characterized the findings as “troubling” while panelist Juan Williams asserted that it indicates “something going terribly wrong in American society.”

Erickson added to that by suggesting female breadwinners are antithetical to biology:

“I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science. But liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology — when you look at the natural world — the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role.”

He continued on to lament that “We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complementary relationships in nuclear families, and it is tearing us apart.”

He concluded: “Having mom as primary bread winner is bad for kids and bad for marriage.”

Have you ever read anything so far removed from history, biology, or life as that? Amanda Marcotte dissects his tiny little brain that seems incapable of any thought that isn’t straight out of 1950s black and white family life that was shown in home ec classes to keep women thinking one man and one kitchen was the be-all and end-all of her life. The reality today is that 4 out of 10 households have female breadwinners.   Penguins must be spawn of  the devil in Erickson’s world.

Erickson must have this nifty scientific “fact” by studying the animals in the well-known academic text, The Berenstain Bears, which clearly shows Papa Bear going out and earning the money while Mama Bear stays at home and cooks the food for the cubs. Of course, in the actual natural world, bears don’t make money—plus there’s a lot of diversity in how animals raise their young. (In case you’re wondering, outside of the two weeks of maternity leave mothers take to nurse their babies, foxes embrace a fairly egalitarian approach to child rearing where both parents go out and get food for their young.) One thing, however, is certain: Other primates besides humans mostly shun the male-dominated monogamy that Erickson prefers, with most species living in large bands with lots of kinky partner swapping.

Needless to say, the utter destruction of social stability that these men predict from the growth of female independence is not borne out by the facts. The divorce rate is actually declining. The abortion rate is roughly what it was pre-Roe and is mostly in decline, in part because of all those women opting into the sole breadwinner lifestyle. The only man on this panel who got close to the facts in midst of the full-blown panic was Williams, who hinted at how this is more about men’s declining fortunes than women’s growing ones. It’s true that these new breadwinner stats are not all good news, but the real problem is that men earning less means less money overall for the average American home. What’s really hurting Americans isn’t female equality, but growing income inequality between the rich and everyone else. Pitting men against women is simply a distraction from the real economic issues facing us all.

Douthat’s pudgy little fingers typed out some earlier diatribe in the NYT.  Douthat belongs in the religious propaganda pages of The Catholic Voice. I’ve said this time and time again.  But, his insistence that “conservativism” is aligned with his religious dogma really gets old. It shows there is something seriously wrong with the people that run the NYT that they continue to give him space for this kind of drivel. Yes, folks.  The decline of Western civilization is because women just won’t get back in the home and do their thing and stop complaining about spitting out babies.  Barry Goldwater–and probably even Ronald Reagan–would take issue with every word here.

1) The core economic challenge facing the American experiment is not income inequality per se, but rather stratification and stagnation — weak mobility from the bottom of the income ladder and wage stagnation for the middle class. These challenges are bound up in a growing social crisis — a retreat from marriage, a weakening of religious and communal ties, a decline in workforce participation — that cannot be solved in Washington D.C. But economic and social policy can make a difference nonetheless, making family life more affordable, upward mobility more likely, and employment easier to find.

2) The existing welfare-state institutions we’ve inherited from the New Deal and the Great Society, however, often make these tasks harder rather than easier: Their exploding costs crowd out every other form of spending, require middle class tax increases and threaten to drag on economic growth; their tangled web of subsidies and credits and tax breaks often benefit the already-affluent and create perverse incentives for the poor, and the distortions created by the way they pay for health care, in particular, contribute mightily to the rising cost of health insurance and thus the stagnation of middle class incomes. So we don’t face a choice between streamlining the welfare state and making it more supportive of work and family; we should be doing both at once.

You just can read the implied disdain of thing not being like they are on Leave it to Beaver.  So Ericson, after probably being reminded of penguins and all the huge number of animals where the male is never even around except for breeding, insisted he was right. He says it’s the truth on his own stinker of a blog Red State, and that it’s not only a conspiracy by women but by GLBT who want to get married and raise children.

 Feminists and politicians on both sides of the aisle view these statements as insulting to single moms and antithetical to their support for gay marriage. What should be insulting to single moms is for society to tell them they can do it all and, in fact, will subsidize their doing it all. I know a number of wonderful, nurturing single mothers. They do as best they can. Most of them have wonderful children. But not one of them prefers to be a single mother.

His small little world has produced its truth.  He ignores that fact that most violence, child abuse and child sexual assault occurs in the sole family situations he worshipfully desires.  To put it in terms of no one wants to be a single mother when they are one is enough to make me want to hit him and puke at the same time.   He needs to be reminded that the traditional way of raising children is really extended families, children working instead of going to school or playing,  both parents work with children left to older children or the elderly.  I have never in my life read so much that just is so microscopically focused on a small period of time in human history that it is just freaking laughable.  However, it is hard to laugh because both of these asses wind up with audiences and they really don’t do deserve it.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?