Good Discussion Regarding Gender Neutrality but Avoidance of the Far Larger Issue

I posted some excerpts from this interview with Kate O'Beirne on her new book, "Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault is Ruining our Schools, Families, Military and Sports.

She had some very good answers in here to some critical issues such as one that has always puzzled me particularly, which is why these gender neutralized feminist Judges hate women who are mothers so much. Especially stay-at-home mothers, who have been losing their kids in great numbers due to gender neutral custody rulings in our courtrooms.

Unfortunately Kate O'Beirne (like many feminists actually) appears to have missed the more important point regarding this whole attempt to gender neutralize our society. Which is how can we admit that there are essential differences between men and women that will impact every facet of their lives including the military issue and NOT admit the same thing regarding the care, custody and control of our children? Which is a far larger issue for women since most of us (at least we used to anyway, until men starting pulling this custody war crap) will become mothers. Far fewer women enter the military. So if we are going to discuss gender neutral issues that impact people in our society, we need to start looking at the ones that impact far more of us and is NOT the military one.

Thus, using gender neutrality as a yardstick to cause women to lose their children is as wrong as it is to force women into front line military duty.

Same thing.

Our society cannot and should not continue the current trend of allowing millions of fit loving mothers to loss custody of their children for no good reason. Gender neutrality not being a sufficient one. I'm sorry but the best person to raise a child has already been decided (other then the rare cases where a mother is guilty of abuse or neglect) and that choice, burden, glory (whatever you wish to think of it as) rightfully belongs to a child's MOTHER. This issue was settled eons ago by God, evolution, nature, (whatever, take your pick) and the person chosen for the task of bearing, caring and raising the young of every species including our own is WOMAN as MOTHER...

Sorry for the ones who don't like this fact.

Any complaints take it up with God, Evolution, nature...whatever...

The state, unless PROVEN abuse or neglect is involved, should have NO right to force a mother into a courtroom to go through a whole dog and pony show having to prove she's the person who will always act in the best interest of her children.

That should be assumed to be the case unless someone has proof otherwise. Of course, the burden of proof (as it always was in the past) should be on the person who wishes custody to be transferred to them to prove a mother unfit. That is the standard we need to return to with a 'fit' mother automatically having custody.

As it always was in human history, not just here btw, but everywhere.

Always.

Since there is NO other society, NONE, including western society until recently, that believes men and women are equally invested in children (especially infants) and that fathers should have custody over a mother's objection. These are lies put out by mens and fathers rights groups and gender neutralized feminists trying to claim that women only recently were allowed custody of our children. The point of these lies is an attempt to imply women NEVER raised our own children, like this is a gift we received from men or feminists just recently in our history.

Actually the real truth is that historically most children were never in any custody. Divorce was rare and for the most part if abandonment or divorce did happen in the past, children were left in the defacto custody of their own mothers. Those few children in court-ordered custody or conservatorship were children who had estates or wealth of some kind which needed to be administered. Not your ordinary kid. As it appears that when kids are worth no money, the only person traditionally interested in them was their own mothers.

What has changed for western children is that today every child is worth something in either child support, tax benefits/credits, citizenship, or a whole assortment of public benefits. So now children are a prize to be won. I understand men are even beginning to fight now to get the WIC program name changed. So that a program orginally begun to benefit pre and post-partum women, infants and children (who are the ONLY ones who actually go through any trauma in a pregnancy/birth/nursing situation and needing extra nutrition due to this) now men want to begin getting food through WIC too...Although what men do during pregnancy, labor and delivery, or nursing an infant after the fact to actually justify getting extra food is beyond me. Anyway these benefits I've highlighted above and more flowing to someone for having the care, custody and control of a child are a recent historic development and explains the whole 'custody wars' phenomenon we are currently facing.

Remember this, women are not going to be willing to invest themselves in having any kids if they have to spent the next 18 years afterwards looking over the shoulder afraid they are going to be dragged into a custody hearing. Or have to face down some crazed gender neutralized feminist or fathers' rights supporter as a Judge.

So yes, Kate O'Beirne is correct, there are essential differences between men and women; however, we need to address ALL of them honestly. Not just cherry pick the ones that we wish to discuss, while ignoring the ones we don't.


"December 29, 2005, 8:19 a.m.
Women Who Make the World Worse
Kate O’Beirne calls feminists on their bad ideas.

Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez

"They talk "freedom of choice," but feminists are too contemptuous of dissenting women to allow them to choose freely how to live their lives without ridicule and disdain," Kate O'Beirne writes in her new book, Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports. And she would know. Having taken on some feminist stalwarts on Capitol Hill and the likes of Crossfire, Kate puts a final (or so we can hope) nail in feminism's coffin in her new book, calling their bad ideas out with facts and figures and good sense.

NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez recently talked to NR Washington Editor Kate O'Beirne about Women Who Make the World Worse.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Kate, knowing you and your reputation, I was not surprised to read that you were a traitor to your sex even in law school. Does wanting to see other women fail just come naturally to you?

Kate O'Beirne: Having been raised with three sisters and educated by women in a girls-only high school and all-female college, it was jarring to find myself labeled as a traitor to my sex. Some of my best friends were women! But I never believed that men and women were interchangeable, that marriage was a patriarchal plot, or that women's equality rested on abortion rights. So wanting to see feminists fail came naturally to me.

Lopez: You mentioned the influence of the women in your background. But does being the mother of boys make you especially sensitive to women who make male lives worse?

O'Beirne: The men in our lives can shape our views on the most destructive ideology afoot. I have long thought that if high-school boys had invited homely girls to the prom we might have been spared the feminist movement. We live with the destructive feminist agenda because the fathers or husbands of so many of them, including Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, and Jane Fonda, never failed to fail them. The views of these angry, abandoned women inform the modern women's movement.

Lopez: You write that "A battle was won when the ETA was defeated, but feminists went on to win the war." How did they win — it lost, for Pete's sake — and if they won why don't they act like winners?

O'Beirne: What feminists couldn't impose by constitutional amendment (thanks to Phyllis Schlafly) they have imposed through the schools, college faculties, and the culture, by judicial fiat and advocacy dressed up as legislation. Don't be fooled by their militant insistence that women's equality has been thwarted. These women are chronically dissatisfied and qualified for only one job: professional feminist. They are generously paid, largely by taxpayers, but also by corporations anxious to look good on "women's issues." The fact that American women are the most privileged women in the history of mankind (woops!) must be vehemently denied.

Because their goal of a sex-blind society is frustrated by biology (see my last chapter — "Mother Nature Is a Bitch"), feminists' schemes are increasingly coercive. In that sense, they are losers.

Lopez: Abortion gets the rap as the topic you can't bring up in polite company, but daycare is pretty incendiary too. Talk about day care's healthy and developmental drawbacks and you're mommy warring. But our reticence to talk about it is a problem, isn't it?

O'Beirne: Any discussion of day care's drawbacks invites the wrath of the child-care industry and their friends in the media. Proponents of the male model of career success for women and substitute care for young children — typically working mothers themselves — use subterfuge and censorship to thwart the free choices women make. As you'll learn in Chapter 2, "Day Care Good; Mother Bad," the propagandists don't just insist that day care benefits children, they see stay-at-home mothers as a timid and fearful lot whose full-time attention damages their children.

Lopez: Why do you raise questions about women in the military while we're at war? Don't we need every man or woman we can get in our overstretched military?

O'Beirne: In the lull of peacetime, regulations that kept women in uniform at a safe distance from combat were lifted. We are now paying the price and being made to think that our national defense rests on the ability to deploy teenage girls and single mothers. What a disgrace. In the name of a phony equality, the military shouldn't ask women to serve where they don't have an equal chance to survive. Experience with integrating the service academies and the great majority of military specialties has shown that women can't and don't meet the male physical standards. The institutionally self-confident Marine Corps hasn't integrated its basic training and has little trouble recruiting the kind of good men who recognize that women should be protected from physical threats.

Lopez: Has Hillary Clinton's work making the world worse only begun? Would a President Rodham Clinton unleash a destructive feminist nightmare on the world much worse than anything Geena Davis could ever portray?

O'Beirne: Oh boy. Hillary Clinton is a committed feminist. She's a true believer in the grievance agenda and promotes the myth of stunted progress for women's equality. She would reliably be one of the women who make the world worse by endorsing all of feminism's pet causes — strict sex quotas for college sports, "girl power" in our schools, the "epidemic" of domestic violence, abortion on demand (despite her phony rhetoric), universal, federally funded day care, enforced "equal pay for equal work" and women in combat. I have to lie down now."


http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/obeirne200512290819.asp


Again as I said earlier Kate O'Beirne and many others like her wish to pick and chose the things they like out of the whole gender neutral feminist-idea package. Sadly they remind me of many American Catholics. They want to just pick and chose what they like about religion (the elaborate masses making holidays meaningful, the church weddings and other ceremonies that bestow a deeper meaning on these personal-family events) meanwhile totally ignoring the rest they don't like (such as no pre-marital sex, no divorce or birth control, etc.,) yet think they are following church teachings and are a serious Catholic.

It's inconsistent and most of all, as Dr. Spock would say, it's illogical.

Thus, it's the same thing with gender neutrality. You cannot claim there are essential differences in humanity due to gender and then pick and chose the ones you like and say well in this area we'll all be the same, but in this we'll be different.

Sorry.