Obama’s “spread the wealth around” doesn’t mean only higher taxes on taxpayers and more handouts to non-taxpayers; more especially, it means transfers of financial goodies to the President’s political allies.
The American people were rightfully outraged when it became known that Senators Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson were rewarded for voting for Obamacare with hundreds of millions of dollars of benefits given uniquely to their states, Louisiana and Nebraska. Now we find that President Obama is paying off the feminists big-time for their support of his election.
When Obama presented his multi-trillion dollar budget, he declared with great fanfare that he was calling for a freeze in discretionary spending. Feminists immediately had a tantrum to complain that the freeze exempted funding for the military, intelligence, and homeland security.
Now we learn that all feminist programs and organizations will also be exempted from the freeze. Instead, they will get what White House spokesman Kate Bedingfield admits are “significant funding increases.”
A White House document entitled Opportunity and Progress for Women and Girls describes 15 federal programs that will receive increased funding to appease the feminists. Chief among them is the Violence Against Women project, which is targeted for a 22% increase, an extra $117 million more than current funding, which is already close to $1 billion a year. That earmark is a Joe Biden project known as feminist pork because the money goes right into the hands of radical feminist centers where they teach their anti-male, anti-marriage ideology, counsel women to get a divorce, and urge criminal prosecution against a man no matter how slight or unverified the alleged offense.
The Women and Girls document reveals that Obama’s budget would appropriate $50 million to give grants to incentivize the states to adopt paid family leave. That longtime feminist goal would be very costly to small business and result in a loss of jobs.
To please the feminists, other spending that will be exempted from Obama’s freeze includes an additional $400 million for the discretionary nutrition program for low-income women, and an increase of $10 million for family planning.
Of course, Obama’s budget will increase funding for daycare, one of the most favorite feminist objectives. Head Start, which already receives $9 billion a year, is scheduled for additional funding of nearly $1 billion, despite the fact that recent studies show that Head Start provides little or no beneficial results toward the stated goal of helping disadvantaged children catch up with other children.
Obama’s budget also provides an additional $1.6 billion for the Child Care and Development Fund as part of the reauthorization of government spending for daycare. The feminists believe that child care should be taken over by government in order to overcome society’s expectation that mothers should care for their own babies.
Obama’s budget increases funding for a new program to recruit undergraduate students from underrepresented groups in science and technology careers. The budget also increases funding for a special program to give women (instead of men) more jobs in academic science and engineering careers.
Obama’s State of the Union speech continued his pandering to the feminists. He said: “We are going to crack down on violations of equal-pay laws so that women get equal pay for an equal day’s work.” Equal pay for equal work has been U.S. law since 1963, so there’s nothing new about the law or its enforcement. Isn’t his Equal Employment Opportunity (EEOC) agency already cracking down against violations, and if not, why not?
Obama’s statement was just a throw-away line to feed the feminist myth that women are victims of employment discrimination. It was also designed to try to validate the false feminist slogan that women are paid only 77 cents for work that earns a dollar for men. That’s not true because equal pay ought to be paid for equal work, and most women don’t work as many hours or in as dangerous or unpleasant jobs as men. Women prefer inside work in air-conditioned offices.
Obama hasn’t yet gone as far as Norway, which passed a law requiring that women must comprise 40% of all companies’ corporate boards. U.S. feminists probably would like that rule; they pretend to see no hypocrisy in touting gender neutrality while demanding affirmative action for females.
Rush Limbaugh got it right when he commented on Obama’s State of the Union speech as “from the 1970s . . . totally clich�d.” Half of American women are in the workforce today, while male unemployment is setting new records.
Feminist Candidates Are ‘Unappealing’
Smarting from their surprise loss in the race to fill the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, the Democrats are throwing their candidate, Martha Coakley, under the bus. They blame her for running a poor campaign that made losers out of Barack Obama, the Democrats, their costly health care bill, and even Ted Kennedy in his grave.
Many reasons, of course, contributed to Scott Brown’s remarkable victory. However, the chief reason Coakley’s campaign didn’t connect with the voters is that she is a feminist, causing even a liberal female TV commentator to admit she is “unappealing.”
The feminists for years have had a stranglehold over the Democratic Party, enforcing their rule that every Democratic presidential candidate must pledge his fidelity to abortion with taxpayer funding. But abortion is only the first commandment of feminist ideology, and Martha Coakley revealed much, much more, so we can use her defeat as a teaching moment.
“Martha’s a really great candidate for everything that NOW stands for,” gushed Christina Knowles, director of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Coakley was, indeed, a really great advocate for NOW’s feminist ideology, but that did not attract the voters.
It was not so great when Coakley was disdainful about Scott Brown campaigning in the cold outside Fenway Park, the fabled home of the beloved Boston Red Sox. It was not so great when Coakley dismissed one of the biggest Red Sox stars as a “Yankee fan.”
Those comments fit the profile of feminists who have contempt for men’s sports and therefore have eliminated hundreds of men’s teams from college athletic programs under a misinterpretation of Title IX. Howard University even canceled both wrestling and baseball on the same day, giving double pleasure to the hateful feminists.
Boston University is the largest school in Boston, but it no longer has an NCAA baseball team. Nationwide, feminist opposition to anything masculine has forced the elimination of more than 450 wrestling teams.
Coakley insulted people with religious values by declaring that those who oppose abortion probably shouldn’t work in emergency rooms because an occasional patient might demand an immediate abortion. Feminists refuse to allow respect for a right of conscience because that might get in the way of their ideology that abortion is women’s premier right.
Feminists pretend they want all laws and behavior to be gender-neutral, with identical treatment of male and female (and other genders, whatever they are). But when it comes to domestic violence and child abuse, feminist ideology decrees that men are naturally batterers and women never lie so they don’t have to present evidence in order to convict a man.
As prosecutor, Coakley followed this pattern when she insisted on treating a falsely accused man worse than a falsely accused woman. As copiously detailed by Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal, Coakley persecuted the Amirault family for child abuse even after it became widely recognized that they had been imprisoned on false charges.
Although virtually everyone aware of the Amirault case recognized it to be as preposterous as the false allegation of rape against the Duke lacrosse players, Coakley insisted on continued incarceration of the Amirault brother in contrast with the release of his sister. Coakley insisted that when women are involved in child abuse cases, the real culprit is typically “a primary male offender.”
Eventually the falsely accused man, Gerald Amirault, was released by the extraordinary intervention of the Massachusetts parole board, considered the toughest in the nation. That followed an exhaustive investigation, but Coakley continued to pretend that he was somehow guilty.
Democratic Party leadership has shown that it cannot or will not stand up to the incoherent, man-hating attitude of feminists like Coakley. For example, after the feminists had a tantrum and demanded that the majority of jobs created by Obama’s Stimulus be given to women (instead of to shovel-ready jobs), even though most of those who lost jobs in this recession are men, President Obama dutifully acquiesced.
It’s no wonder that non-college-educated men voted overwhelmingly for Brown against Coakley by a massive 27-point margin. The Democrats are lucky enough to elect some feminists, but feminists are just too unappealing when running against a masculine man such as Scott Brown.
Brown’s driving a 2005 GMC pickup truck (which Obama sneered at) symbolized the elitism of Coakley, who drives a foreign car. While Coakley was sipping wine with drug and insurance company PAC representatives, Brown was shaking hands with the voters.
Male voters overwhelmingly pulled the lever for Scott Brown. Men are fed up with the feminist mindset and delivered a clear message in the Massachusetts election: give us a candidate who stands up to the feminists, and we will cross over from Democrat and Independent to elect a Republican.
Feminist Vendetta Against Men’s Sports
We were shocked to read a November report from the U.S. Army that 75% of America’s 17- to 24-year-olds are not eligible for military service, largely because they are poorly educated, involved in crime, or are physically unfit. According to this report titled Ready, Willing and Unable to Serve, 27% of young Americans can’t join the military because they are too fat, out of shape, can’t do push-ups or pull-ups, and can’t run.
The Obama Administration claims that the solution for this dilemma is to spend lots of money on Pre-K schooling, but that doesn’t pass the laugh test. A better remedy would be to terminate “Title-Nining,” the malicious anti-masculine weapon used by feminists to eliminate men’s sports in college and high school.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a federal law passed to prohibit discrimination “on the basis of sex” in schools and colleges. Its sponsors solemnly promised it would never result in quotas, so it seemed like a good law to assure women every educational opportunity.
The radical feminists saw Title IX as an opening to pursue their anti-male agenda. Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education created a three-point test for compliance with Title IX, one of which was that intercollegiate sports for males and females should be “proportionate” to college enrollment. That means, if half of the students taking academic classes are female, then half of the students playing on athletic teams must be female. The word “proportionate” is not in the law; the Education Department gave the word a newly created definition to force colleges to adopt quotas, which Title IX’s sponsors explicitly said would never happen.
This rule was and still is unfair and ridiculous because it’s a fact of human nature that female college students do not seek to play on athletic teams in anywhere near the percentage that male students do. For example, “re-entry” women (older women who return to college after their children are grown) surely aren’t going back to college to play soccer.
In the Clinton Administration, the feminists pursuing their anti-male agenda in the Education Department’s Civil Rights Office, essentially made “proportionate” the only test that matters for Title IX compliance by colleges that must cut their sports budgets. They used the power of the bureaucracy and activist judges to threaten college athletic departments. Colleges have every reason to fear lawsuits from failure to kowtow to feminist dictates. Losing a lawsuit means the college must pay the feminist lawyers’ attorneys’ fees and suffer adverse publicity.
Now that nearly 60% of students taking academic classes are female, 60% of students playing on athletic teams (and receiving athletic scholarships) must be female, and men’s teams by the hundreds have been abolished, especially sports at which men excel, many of them trophy-winning teams.
Title IX quotas forced the elimination of 467 college wrestling teams, a particular target of feminist anti-masculine ideology. This shows that Title IX is not about equalizing male-female funding, since wrestling is one of the least expensive sports. Other victims of Title Nining include men’s track and field and swimming. Title IX caused the elimination of all but 19 men’s college gymnastics teams, and even forced Howard University to cancel its baseball team.
This injustice hit us hard at the Olympics in Beijing. The Chinese (who are not restricted by feminist nonsense) won seven out of eight gold medals in men’s gymnastics, while our team failed to win a single gold medal in eight events.
In the Olympics, we compete against other countries that field their best athletes without regard to political correctness. Title IX disadvantages our country by denying opportunities to male athletes and pushing less talented women into sports just to get free college tuition, not because they are keen on sports.
Reducing opportunities for college sports is a powerful disincentive to men and is a major cause of the dramatic drop in male attendance. Why bother attending college if men can’t play the sport they love?
Since the feminists had their confrontation with Harvard President Larry Summers in 2005, they have also been Title Nining to force colleges to hire less math-qualified female professors instead of more qualified men. Funny thing, we don’t hear proposals to force universities to subsidize male professors to teach women’s studies.
Congress has amended Title IX numerous times to carve out exceptions to this gender-neutral law (exceptions for single-sex schools, colleges, seminaries, contact sports, fraternities, sororities, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, American Legion Girls State and Boys State, and Mother-Daughter and Father-Son school events). It’s time for another amendment to get rid of “proportionate” silliness in order to solve the problems of the much disliked 40-60 male-female ratio in colleges and also to graduate more students who are physically qualified for our volunteer military.
In order to get around the argument that this would result in illegal “sex discrimination” against women, the government could use two of the original three compliance criteria established by the pro-feminist Carter Administration: (a) responding to “the interest and abilities of the ‘underrepresented’ sex,” and (b) demonstrating that “the ‘underrepresented sex’ have been fully and effectively accommodated.” On college campuses today, men are clearly the “underrepresented” sex and are not being “fully and effectively accommodated.”
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced in November that it will investigate whether colleges illegally discriminate against women by admitting less qualified men. This is only the latest in a decades-long campaign by the feminist lobby to sell the false propaganda that girls are cheated all through the education system, K through 12.
Colleges used to have a male-female ratio of about 60-40 and, suddenly, we’ve discovered that it’s close to 40-60. Colleges don’t like this change; men don’t like it; women don’t like it; but the feminists are bragging about it and plan to use their clout in the government bureaucracy and in the Democratic Party to maintain it.
One of the causes for this dramatic shift is that colleges perceive applications by women to be better than those by men. Another cause seems to be that men don’t seem to be as eager to get a college education as women. We see the results in the granting of degrees. Women receive 58% of bachelor’s degrees in four-year colleges, 62% in community colleges, and graduate degrees are headed in the same direction.
Those who worry about the continuation of American exceptionalism are concerned because, if they have the courage to face reality, they know that women and men follow different career paths both in and after college. Many more men than women drop out before graduation, and women receive only about a fifth of bachelor’s degrees in engineering, physics, or computer science.
After college, men and women make different choices, too. Women don’t take the risks necessary for business start-ups or for business ownership, or choose the social isolation of technical laboratories, in anywhere near the proportion of men.
But why is it that women knock at the college admissions office with higher high-school grade-point averages, better essays, and even a bigger variety of extracurricular activities than men?
The Wall Street Journal calls this the “boy mystery” that “nobody has solved.” We should respond with the famous line attributed to Sherlock Holmes, it’s “elementary, my dear Watson.” We can even claim a double entendre for the word elementary. The reason is obvious, and the causes originated in elementary school.
The ultra-feminist American Association of University Women (AAUW) issued a report in 1992 called How Schools Shortchange Girls. It claimed “findings” that teachers focused their attention on boys, neglected girls, and discouraged girls from taking important math and science courses.
The AAUW report was a lie that started real discrimination against boys and young men plus government spending to address a non-existent problem. The AAUW report was fully debunked by researcher Christina Hoff Sommers, who proved that feminist claims that girls are shortchanged in school are “riddled with errors” and not “published in peer-reviewed professional journals.”
Elementary schools are not only ruled by females; they are dominated by feminists who make school unpleasant for boys from the get-go. Fewer than 10% of elementary school teachers are men, giving boys the distinct impression that school is not for them.
Elementary school teachers used to understand that boys will be boys, but teachers now look upon boys as just unruly girls. Feminists manifest hostility to males and to masculine traits such as competitiveness and aggressiveness, and instead reward typical female behaviors such as non-assertiveness and group cooperation.
Schools cannot make gender go away by pretending that boys do not have an innate masculinity, or by trying to suppress it with ridiculous zero-tolerance punishments, banning sports such as dodge ball and tag, and allowing only playground games without winners.
Five- and six-year-old boys are not as able or willing as little girls to sit quietly at a desk and do neat work with pencil and paper. Even worse is the appalling fact that first-grade kids are not taught how to read phonetically, and the assigned stories are mostly about topics of interest to girls not boys.
It’s no wonder that boys are more likely to have academic or behavior problems, repeat a grade, get suspended, be enrolled in special education programs, or become involved in drugs, alcohol or crime. Little boys make the calculation that school (and college) is not an environment where they want to remain.
The solution to the college 40-60 male-female problem is certainly not to let the feminist bureaucrats force colleges to admit an even higher percentage of women. One solution is for colleges to be told (by regulation or statute) that it is not illegal sex discrimination to maintain a 50-50 male-female ratio.
I’ve been explaining feminism, and refuting its fallacies, for many years. I’ve been hoping that some brave man would speak up against the stupidity of trying to move us all into a gender-neutral society. Finally, a man has done this; Dennis Prager tells how important it is for society to get boys to grow up to be good men. Males who don’t grow up are likely to do a lot of mischief, and women and society suffer.
Dennis Prager criticizes the feminist movement for trying to obsolete the ideals of masculinity and femininity. Traditional differences still exist almost only in sports and the military, and the feminists are trying to get rid of men’s sports and to make the military gender-neutral.
One of the worst aspects of this feminist attack on masculinity is that marriage is increasingly regarded as optional. The male ideal is no longer a married man, protecting and supporting his wife and their children.
Dennis Prager concludes that, when boys do not become men, women assume the man’s role. The feminists say that’s what they want, but all surveys show that women are not as happy as they were 40 years ago under the old rules of masculine and feminine identity.
