Women's suffrage was apparently bad for the US.

muravyets

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Yup. No war on women here. Democrats and liberals and socialists made it all up.


:Headbang:

Seriously, I sometimes wonder if they're just contemptible in their thinking or contemptuous of the thinking of their audience.
I sometimes wonder if they're kidding, if this has all been an elaborate practical joke.

I mean take the entire rightwing platform all together -- It's hard to find anyone they don't hate. They present, as proud as toddlers showing mommy their first poopy inside the toilet bowl, budget proposals that openly and specifically plan to stop feeding children and the poor and sick so that they can give that money to billionaires instead. They proclaim that women are too crazy to vote and should be overjoyed to have been chosen by God to be raped and made pregnant. It just goes on and on and on. They went from bigoted to corrupt to crazy and they seem finally to be reaching the limit of complete bullshit.
 

muravyets

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After a little thought, it occurred to me that:

The Republicans have been passing law after law that harms women.

Women, including Republican women, object to this.

If they can't vote, who cares?

***

In other words, maybe this is an attempt to neutralize women's protests over Republicans defunding federal child care programs and women and infant care programs and Title V Maternal and Child Health Care Services Block Grants, Virginia Republicans trying to pass a draconian vaginal probe law for abortion-seekers, Texas Republicans actually PASSING that law, Congressional Republicans holding domestic violence laws hostage, trying to redefine rape victims legally as "accusers", trying to legalize the murder of abortion doctors, eliminating funding for family planning for poor people, defunding Head Start, and more and more too depressing to enumerate.

Romney says the "GOP War on Women" is a campaign ploy invented by Obama's team.
Maybe they should have thought to get women's suffrage repealed before they started stripping us of the rest of our rights. As it is, we could still actually stop them from doing this. I have often said our only hope against these bastards is that they are as dumb as they are vicious.
 

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The consequences of women's suffrage have been a mixed bag. (One of them being Prohibition.) But that's true when you recognize any kind of civil rights; it's a moral imperative that you do so, but there's no guarantee people won't use their rights to do stuff you don't like.

Peterson's idiotic statements don't seem that far out, if you believe the Bible is the Word of God. Women are chattel; slavery is okay as long as you treat your slaves in a certain way; and Yahweh just might give you a greenlight on genocide. If somebody truly, fanatically believes in the Bible, this stuff isn't surprising.

Of course, if you're not of that religion, or not a Biblical literalist, that seems crazy, and goes against millennia of social progress. We're always hearing from idiots who think our system of laws is based on Biblical principles; the fact is, most of the real advances have taken us further away from the dictates of ancient holy books.

We live in a time when you can spout off the craziest bullshit you can think of, and still get an audience as if you were someone to be taken seriously. Until recently, I rarely heard something in the public arena that I thought genuinely qualified as misogyny; but lately, I've been hearing stuff that sounds like something from "The Screwfly Solution".
 

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Maybe they should have thought to get women's suffrage repealed before they started stripping us of the rest of our rights. As it is, we could still actually stop them from doing this. I have often said our only hope against these bastards is that they are as dumb as they are vicious.

Unfortunately, I don't think they are that dumb. Right now the right is trying to change the narrative to the "real" war on women being all the female fetuses that get aborted. There are bills in some state legislatures right now forbidding abortion based on sex discrimination.

There are a few cultures where this is practiced, and occasionally people from those cultures make it over to the U.S., but the causes are social and economic and relate to women being seen as lesser in society - less socially valuable, less economically productive, etc. Of course, seeing women as babymaking chattel who the male-dominated government needs to make reproductive decisions for is just a less extreme version of these same factors, but as long as this narrative aligns with yours and what's culturally acceptable to say or think at the moment, I think it'll work for you. (General "you.")

Peterson's idiotic statements don't seem that far out, if you believe the Bible is the Word of God. Women are chattel; slavery is okay as long as you treat your slaves in a certain way; and Yahweh just might give you a greenlight on genocide. If somebody truly, fanatically believes in the Bible, this stuff isn't surprising.

Of course, if you're not of that religion, or not a Biblical literalist, that seems crazy, and goes against millennia of social progress.

Good post, but I don't get these people. I've read the Bible (most of it, skipping the boring parts, and all the "begats," etc.) twice-ish. It's been a long time, but the impressions I got from it are more about forgiving people for their faults, loving your neighbor, not being greedy, not being prideful, stuff like that. Nothing Jesus ever said smacked of misogyny. Nothing Jesus ever said indicated that gay marriage was on the priority list. Not that I can recall, anyway.

The literalist stuff doesn't make sense to me. The most important books in the Bible are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, IMO. I mean, I love the Song of Solomon personally but I don't think it's really the point.
 

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Unfortunately, IMO, Christianity seems by and large to be more based on Paul's teachings than Jesus's. The New Testament itself contains only 4 books (the synoptic Gospels) which contain Jesus' words (e.g. Love thy neighbor, Golden Rule, turn the other cheek, etc.). However, it contains 13 (or 14 if he wrote Hebrews) with Paul's teachings (e.g. Women keep silent in the church, be submissive, not permitted to hold dominion over a man, slaves be obedient to your masters, etc.).

There's an indelible disconnect between what those two guys taught and, unfortunately, it seems the guy who started Christianity has had historically less impact on the doctrine of its more fundamentalist conservative followers. And, many current Republican and Tea Party politicians seem to be in that group, as is evidenced by their baleful social agenda.
 
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Xelebes

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Unfortunately, IMO, Christianity seems by and large to be more based on Paul's teachings than Jesus's. The New Testament itself contains only 4 books (the synoptic Gospels) which contain Jesus' words (e.g. Love thy neighbor, Golden Rule, turn the other cheek, etc.). However, it contains 13 (or 14 if he wrote Hebrews) with Paul's teachings (e.g. Women keep silent in the church, be submissive, not permitted to hold dominion over a man, slaves be obedient to your masters, etc.).

There's an indelible disconnect between what those two guys taught and, unfortunately, it seems the guy who started Christianity has had historically less impact on the doctrine of its more fundamentalist conservative followers. And, many current Republican and Tea Party politicians seem to be in that group, as is evidenced by their baleful social agenda.

My parents favourite book in the Bible was Romans because "it was the book that properly described a Christian."

The name of the book is Romans. . .
 

clintl

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A great deal of what made it into the New Testament was selected to serve the political purposes of Constantine. That's why there's so much Paul, and so little Jesus. Paul's teaching are much more in accord with the needs of absolute monarchs.
 

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My parents favourite book in the Bible was Romans because "it was the book that properly described a Christian."

The name of the book is Romans. . .

ROFL, the irony. Thanks for this.

A great deal of what made it into the New Testament was selected to serve the political purposes of Constantine. That's why there's so much Paul, and so little Jesus. Paul's teaching are much more in accord with the needs of absolute monarchs.

What I was thinking is that, perhaps, the moneyed interests have, over time, manipulated and distorted the message for the population for the sake of their ends. Jesus talks a few times explicitly about how greed is bad, right? Yet the rise of religious social conservatism was with Reagan, who called greed good.

I mean, people can see it in different ways that reflect their narratives - I'm not saying that you have to have liberal ideas of government to be a Christian or anything. But painting greed as a virtue and getting so bent out of shape in judging others' lifestyle choices seems directly antithetical to everything I remember Jesus ever talking about. Something about rich men and heaven and needles and camels? You're gonna obsess about a couple of lines about teh gay or the wimmins in boring chapters that barely get read and completely ignore the gist of the whole thing?
 

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Good post, but I don't get these people. I've read the Bible (most of it, skipping the boring parts, and all the "begats," etc.) twice-ish. It's been a long time, but the impressions I got from it are more about forgiving people for their faults, loving your neighbor, not being greedy, not being prideful, stuff like that. Nothing Jesus ever said smacked of misogyny. Nothing Jesus ever said indicated that gay marriage was on the priority list. Not that I can recall, anyway.

+1

Unfortunately, IMO, Christianity seems by and large to be more based on Paul's teachings than Jesus's. The New Testament itself contains only 4 books (the synoptic Gospels) which contain Jesus' words (e.g. Love thy neighbor, Golden Rule, turn the other cheek, etc.). However, it contains 13 (or 14 if he wrote Hebrews) with Paul's teachings (e.g. Women keep silent in the church, be submissive, not permitted to hold dominion over a man, slaves be obedient to your masters, etc.).

There's an indelible disconnect between what those two guys taught and, unfortunately, it seems the guy who started Christianity has had historically less impact on the doctrine of its more fundamentalist conservative followers. And, many current Republican and Tea Party politicians seem to be in that group, as is evidenced by their baleful social agenda.

+1


= double whammy!
 

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I mean take the entire rightwing platform all together -- It's hard to find anyone they don't hate. They present, as proud as toddlers showing mommy their first poopy inside the toilet bowl, budget proposals that openly and specifically plan to stop feeding children and the poor and sick so that they can give that money to billionaires instead. They proclaim that women are too crazy to vote and should be overjoyed to have been chosen by God to be raped and made pregnant. It just goes on and on and on. They went from bigoted to corrupt to crazy and they seem finally to be reaching the limit of complete bullshit.

Not so sure about the last statement, but I'm happy a guy as dumb as Sean Hannity has the platform to reveal these people on TV. I get the sense sometimes that way too many folks are of the opinion that these types are extinct, or at least, very rare. THEY AREN'T. They are everydamnwhere in this nation, and they have a big following. Just look at that NC preacher, Harris, who made news a week ago by advocating punching the queer of out four-year-olds, and got raucous laughter and applause from his churchful of acolytes.

caw
 

kayleamay

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Maybe not much. Maybe as much as the "amount" of Jesus in the New Testament.

If Republicans were passing legislation based on the tenure policies of the public school systems, that would almost make sense.

But, wait! They're not.
 

muravyets

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Not so sure about the last statement, but I'm happy a guy as dumb as Sean Hannity has the platform to reveal these people on TV. I get the sense sometimes that way too many folks are of the opinion that these types are extinct, or at least, very rare. THEY AREN'T. They are everydamnwhere in this nation, and they have a big following. Just look at that NC preacher, Harris, who made news a week ago by advocating punching the queer of out four-year-olds, and got raucous laughter and applause from his churchful of acolytes.

caw
I don't really think they've reached their limit, either. And I don't think they're joking. I only wish they were. What I meant was just that they've dropped any pretense at caring how their arguments sound. They are no longer dressing up their bullshit as anything else, not even gilding it with the thinnest coating of concern-trolling anymore.

I have always believed that these people represent a large minority in the US, and that they have been with us since colonial times. Not every colonist came here seeking freedom. Some came seeking a dominion of their own they could remake to their own specifications. There have always been people in the US who do not really believe in equality, who don't even really believe in democracy. But it was the democratic egalitarians who fought and won the revolution. These people's ideological forebears probably never would have rebelled against the British crown because they believed in the divine authority of kings. It is the Kingdom of Heaven, after all, not the Republic of Heaven, and if things are to be done on earth as they are in heaven, well...

So it was the opposition that set this nation up with a list of rules and rights that some very well established and connected people here never agreed with. I don't think it would be strange at all for like-minded people among later generations to have carried on the tradition. Fortunately for us until now, these people have always felt the main body of Americans as well as US law and government are their enemies -- their philosophical, political and spiritual enemies -- and in their alienation, they largely opted out of the whole political show. So in answer to the question posed earlier, they've always been here, but they only rarely open their mouths in public. Sadly, this is one of those rare times.
 

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I have always believed that these people represent a large minority in the US, and that they have been with us since colonial times. Not every colonist came here seeking freedom. Some came seeking a dominion of their own they could remake to their own specifications. There have always been people in the US who do not really believe in equality, who don't even really believe in democracy. But it was the democratic egalitarians who fought and won the revolution. These people's ideological forebears probably never would have rebelled against the British crown because they believed in the divine authority of kings. It is the Kingdom of Heaven, after all, not the Republic of Heaven, and if things are to be done on earth as they are in heaven, well...


Our first colonists were puritans. Or, as I call them: ABSOLUTELY RAVING NUTS. I've read their early writing and they're some of the most chillingly disturbed and creepy writings I've ever read because they absolutely believed every single thing they wrote down. Which is the scariest thing of all.

I still remember this account of a colonial woman whose house and town was sacked by Native Americans. She was kidnapped and taken prisoner and saw three of her children killed in-front of her one by one...and do you know what almost every single sentence ended with?

"And thus it happened due to God's will, praise god!"

And the creepy thing is the first in settlers always leave a disproportionately large impact on the culture of the area, with each succeeding wave of immigration having diminishing returns. Hence why Chinese food and bits of the Chinese languages have permeated our culture, but we don't have the same concept of filial piety (or whatever it is that modern China has now-a-days).

You can see this kind of puritanical thinking in our views on sex, punishment, and other sundry weirdness.

As my dad said, "Australia was lucky...they just got the convicts and thieves."
 

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Our first colonists were puritans. Or, as I call them: ABSOLUTELY RAVING NUTS. I've read their early writing and they're some of the most chillingly disturbed and creepy writings I've ever read because they absolutely believed every single thing they wrote down. Which is the scariest thing of all.

Well, but don't forget about the influence the Cavaliers had on the American Character.

It's really pretty amazing that we're STILL fighting the same culture wars, centuries later.
 

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Oooh, I haven't read that!

Right, I forgot to add this to my post: This is all stuff I learned in a literature class, mostly by reading poetry, essays, novellas and so on written by early Americans (ranging from early Puritans, Melville, and the half-mad, half-insane collection of anarchists, libertines, authoritarians and republicans who wrote our constitution).

So...grain of salt and all that.
 

muravyets

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Our first colonists were puritans. Or, as I call them: ABSOLUTELY RAVING NUTS. I've read their early writing and they're some of the most chillingly disturbed and creepy writings I've ever read because they absolutely believed every single thing they wrote down. Which is the scariest thing of all.

I still remember this account of a colonial woman whose house and town was sacked by Native Americans. She was kidnapped and taken prisoner and saw three of her children killed in-front of her one by one...and do you know what almost every single sentence ended with?

"And thus it happened due to God's will, praise god!"

And the creepy thing is the first in settlers always leave a disproportionately large impact on the culture of the area, with each succeeding wave of immigration having diminishing returns. Hence why Chinese food and bits of the Chinese languages have permeated our culture, but we don't have the same concept of filial piety (or whatever it is that modern China has now-a-days).

You can see this kind of puritanical thinking in our views on sex, punishment, and other sundry weirdness.

As my dad said, "Australia was lucky...they just got the convicts and thieves."
That's a bit over-simplified, but essentially, yeah, they're who I was talking about.

There were many shades of "Puritan" and "Calvinist." Technically, the Quakers are a spin-off of Calvinism and so are the Congregationalists who, nowadays, are one of the first American churches to marry same-sex couples, with or without state recognition, and are vanguards in the fight for civil rights for gays, women and immigrants (though they, too, have their conservatives who resist that liberalism). But such churches were never part of the Scarlet Letter set that you're referring to, not even back in the colonial day.

Amusing side note: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Salem-resident author of The Scarlet Letter, is a direct descendent of the Judge John Hathorne who tortured and hanged the victims of the Salem Witch Trials. Nathaniel may even have changed the spelling of his name because he was so disgusted by what his ancestor had done. Link. I've always interpreted Hawthorne's stories to be about the corrupting evil of hypocrisy, particularly The Scarlet Letter. Gosh, could that also be a consistent trend with people like the OP pastor, Rick Santorum, etc, etc, from the 17th century down to the present day, right alongside loud, public religiosity -- rampant hypocrisy that wraps itself in the mantle of God while tearing other people's lives apart for profit?

In any event, I agree with you about the impact of the founding culture on all that come later. We've always been a hard divide between progressive and regressive, and never the 'twain shall meet.
 

muravyets

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Well, but don't forget about the influence the Cavaliers had on the American Character.

It's really pretty amazing that we're STILL fighting the same culture wars, centuries later.
I'll have to read that one, too.

And Zoombie, if you have a lot of free time, try reading Kevin Phillips' The Cousins' Wars, about the same subject and linking it through to modern American politics. It's only the hugest book I've chipped away at in many a year -- hard slogging and far from perfect in presentation, but it does offer a lot of insight into the history. Here's NYT review of it.
 

Mharvey

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No the internet hasn't made them visible. The media has. Fox News gave him a platform to air his views, the newspapers are running with it.

It's like the American Idol effect. They're looking for anyone who is either extremely brilliant or mind-numbingly moronic to stick a microphone in front of and sing a song that will either entertain or offend people. So long as either happens, so do ratings. Ratings = Money.

Even addressing this imbecile's comments would be like scraping a wad of heavily chewed gum off the bottom of my boot with my barehand.
 
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RichardGarfinkle

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Well, but don't forget about the influence the Cavaliers had on the American Character.

It's really pretty amazing that we're STILL fighting the same culture wars, centuries later.

To add to this. Here's the charter for the Colony of Maryland. Notice that the planned use of the colony was feudal in structure.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/ma01.asp

By the way, the charter was, I gather drafted by the political philosopher John Locke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke
http://classicliberal.tripod.com/locke/
 

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In any event, I agree with you about the impact of the founding culture on all that come later. We've always been a hard divide between progressive and regressive, and never the 'twain shall meet.

Here's the scary part: The Puritans in their own minds ware progressive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritan

They actually valued personal belief (within acceptable narrow limits) as opposed to Monarchially imposed state beliefs. They still thought the state should enforce religious orthodoxy, but they believed in the right of the individual to read the Bible and form their own views.

Progressive and regressive are relative. Do you look forward thinking that things can be made better if you change certain aspects of them, or do you look back at earlier times and see what you think would be better if one returned to them.

Furthermore, even within these categories there is a broad spectrum of possibilities. Since progressive selects from possible futures every such future can be seen as progress. Since regress selects from real or imagined pasts, regress has a broad spectrum of possible choices as well.

I'm pretty progressive on most social issues, but
I'm regressive on many matters of architecture, painting, sculpture, and poetry.

To some extent I think that progressive and regressive are distractions. The thing that makes the preacher in the OP a !@#R#@#$$#@@%# isn't his regressiveness, it's his total disregard for the lives of the women he thinks should be returned to chattel status because they don't vote the way he wants them to.
 

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It's like the American Idol effect. They're looking for anyone who is either extremely brilliant or mind-numbingly moronic to stick a microphone in front of and sing a song that will either entertain or offend people. So long as either happens, so do ratings. Ratings = Money.

Even addressing this imbecile's comments would be like scraping a wad of heavily chewed gum off the bottom of my boot with my barehand.

There ya go!


As far as early US history, I researched the branch of my family that ended up in the land I now live on, and it's an early Quaker branch from right near the Jamestown settlement. I didn't know much about the Quakers, even though a local college has them as a mascot, lol (a Quaker school, not like Indian mascots).

Very locally, at least, the Quakers were outstanding against slavery. My Civil War-era relatives (one family) bought slaves to free them, which had to be downright dangerous in the South.

I'm basically just agreeing with muravyets, but it's interesting to see the tangible records leading to one's own history. I've had lots of friends go to the Quaker university, and I never knew the local history of the region.

We did marry a lot of cousins, though. My dad's side of the family is easy to research because of all of the religious cousin-marrying (Moravians did it, too, and that's my other heritage for Dad)! So much for that Southern stereotype ;)
 

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What I don't get is how he thinks this repeal of rights would come about without a really serious, and probably quite violent at times, fight.

I'm a non-confrontational, almost pacifistic woman, but my first reaction on reading that story the other day was "You can wrench my voting rights out of my cold dead hands, mister." I'm the third generation of woman in my family who was born and raised with the right to vote. In some families, women my age would be the fourth, or even fifth generation with that right. I can't imagine many women, even conservative women, would sign on to any repeal effort. Not to mention all the women in elected positions, who would be out of power suddenly.

Seriously, the longer I think about this guy, the more I wonder if perhaps he's not a candidate for jacket's with no sleeves and a room with padded walls. Because only someone with a seriously skewed view of reality would think this was even a possibility.

Maybe I'm too optimistic about my fellow ladies, though. I dunno.