On his show Thursday, anchor Lou Dobbs highlighted a new study showing that four in 10 households now have female, rather than male, breadwinners. One of Dobbs' guests, Erick Erickson, called it "anti-science" and said women should not be competing for a "dominant role" in a family. "Having moms as the primary breadwinner is bad for kids and bad for marriage," Erickson continued.I previously found emos on a list of people to repent. I am still not sure what they are.
Shockingly (not), those comments didn't sit well with Van Susteren, who has made a career out of speaking her mind on TV. "Have these men lost their minds? (and these are my colleagues??!! oh brother... maybe I need to have a little chat with them)," she wrote on her blog. "(Next thing they will have a segment to discuss eliminating women's right to vote?)"
Kelly went one step further and invited Erickson on her show to scold him on-air for his comments on the show and in a recent blog post. "I don't think I'm an emo-liberal and I don't describe myself as a feminist but I will tell you I was offended by your piece nonetheless. I didn't like what you wrote one bit and I do think you are judging people," she said.
Here are some retro opinions:
It appears to me that Megyn Kelly perfectly illustrates Erick Erickson’s point. Her behaviour is dominant, her looks are immodest, and her opinions are overly ‘emoliberal.’ According to Wikipedia, she is a ‘re-married’ Roman Catholic; so if there is no legal annulment of her church marriage, then her second marriage is not a real marriage, and her children are, sadly, extramarital children (or as would have been said two generations ago: bastards).That's right, the animal evidence because different species have different sex roles. The two species most closely related to humans, chimps and bonobos, are very different. There is a human nature argument, and it is informed by animal evidence, but it is trickier. Here is another report:
Given Kelly’s dominant behaviour, it is likely that her new boyfriend will have or develop traits of an absentee father; and given her immodest looks, it is likely that her children will be nurtured with a wrong conception of womanhood. In effect, their children will grow up with an unbalanced father and mother relationship. ...
The square-jawed, strangely robotic Erickson is pathetic against this harridan. His argument that sex differences are good because animals display them is very weak. He should have pointed not to the animal kingdom but to the rise of human beings out of it. Motherhood is not just a private affair, but a social institution that preserves a certain kind of human culture. By promoting the large-scale abandonment of it, mothers such as Kelly expose children who will never have private nannies and intelligent parents who can manage every crisis and cover over neglect with material luxury to immense harm.
Kelly also compared his "natural male dominance" theories to the pseudo-science used in the 1950s and '60s to oppose interracial marriage. "They said it was science and fact if you were the child of a black father and white mother or vice versa you were inferior and not set up for success. Tell that to Barack Obama."People keep making this interracial marriage analogy, but it is bogus. Scientists never said that such kids were inferior. I think that the concern was that the kids would not fit into either the white or black communities. Now multi-racial kids are used to sell Cheerios. A white mom makes breakfast for the kid while the black dad lies on the couch.
Kelly apparently has a nanny to raise her two small kids, and she is sensitive about her decision. She is offended that anyone would judge her for it.
I have no idea what the research says about the kids of rich parents who hire nannies. But the research does say that single moms make lousy parents and feminists make lousy wives. I post this to show that even the supposedly conservative Fox News has been infiltrated by women who resist maternal roles, and who go nuts about the suggestion that kids need their moms at home.
2 comments:
"...kids need their moms at home."
When the '50s gave way to the '60s and crew cuts and gray flannel gave way to long hair and blue jeans, the message I got wasn't that the uniform had changed, it was that there was no uniform, uniforms didn't matter.
Similarly, to me feminism didn't mean that women were just like men or better than men, it meant that people should be able to make their own lifestyle choices. So if a woman wants to be a Margaret Thatcher type and take over the nation or a corporation, you go girl (maybe that will be my daughter). And if a man wants to stay home taking care of a child, that's fine, too.
You should be arguing that children need both parents, not that women should stay in some preordained anthropological role.
P. S. A society in which wealthy families uniformly left their children with nannies was Victorian England and there's extensive literature on that.
I am not saying moms should stay home. As you say, lots of wealthy families have used nannies successfully. I am just amused at how defensive Kelly is about it.
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