While single herself, the always belligerent Ann Coulter seems to have a bit of a grudge against other single women — single mothers in particular. In a recent appearance on Fox and Friends, Coulter complained that the Democrats — and the media — were paying too much attention to what women think, and suggested that Romney could win the election without appealing to women — or at least to single women.
Ronald Reagan managed to win two landslides without winning the women’s vote, but it is as you say, it’s striking, it’s not the women’s vote generically, it is the single women’s vote. And that’s because single women look to the government to be their husbands and give them, you know, prenatal care, and preschool care, and kindergarten care, and school lunches.
Huh. Well, this might answer the central question in that National Review piece we discussed yesterday — why Romney isn’t getting 100% support from women, even though he’s the sort of rich guy alpha that evolutionary psychologists suggest is inherently appealing to “hypergamous” (i.e., golddigging) women. Turns out these women are already married to Obama!
The notion of government as a “substitute husband” is, of course, an old Men’s Rights trope. Warren Farrell devoted roughly a third of his Myth of Male Power — the 1993 tome from which the Men’sRights movement still gets most of its talking points — to explicating this particular theme. And it’s one that MRAs today return to again and again and again and again. (The notion of the “husband state” also, not coincidentally, played a role in the sprawling manifesto of mass killer Anders Breivik.)
As for Coulter, this isn’t the first time she’s singled out the single ladies. In a recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox, Coulter went after Obama and the Democrats for focusing on what she called the “stupid single women” vote. “And I would just say to stupid single women voters,” she added,
your husband will not be able to pay you child support. If Obamacare goes through and Obama is re-elected, you are talking about the total destruction of wealth in America. It is the end of America as we know it. …
Great, you will get free contraception; you won’t have to pay a $10 co-pay, but it will be the end of America. Think about that!
Coulter is so miffed that single women don’t like Republicans that she’d be willing to give up her own right to vote if it means these “stupid … women” wouldn’t be allowed to vote either. As she once famously explained,
If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women. It also makes the point, it is kind of embarrassing, the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame, that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘We’ll pay for health care and tuition and day care — and here, what else can we give you, soccer moms?’
Here’s a much more appealing take on single women. Well, honestly, it’s as terrifying as it is entertaining:
Ann Coulter? We’re really going after the low hanging fruit aren’t we?
13:36.
@tmason
They’re already doing this kind of stuff, they’re already pumping their money into offshore accounts to evade taxes, they’re already outsourcing jobs to foreign countries with laxer regulations, they’re already sitting on a crapton of money for no reason other than to say they have a lot of money, and their tax rates are minuscule so not raising their taxes is obviously not preventing that.
If they were taxed higher, maybe the money could be spent on more productive endeavors instead of them just hoarding it like they were Scroodge McDuck.
Tmason: I know several people who would have had much better childhoods if their parents had divorced. People who hate each other and are only staying together for the kids just set said kids up for lifetimes of guilt: ‘My parents hated each other and wouldn’t have stayed together if I hadn’t been born!’
Oh yeah, education and food and shelter and healthcare are such subjective needs. People just dream them up, they’re not real, objective needs.
Sounds to me like Tmason just resents society doing anything for its most vulnerable members … acting like, you know, an actual society instead of a bully club for the wealthy.
If one major goal of the family is to take care of the child why is it that we must have both parents working?
Because if only one works, they all starve (see above, re the stagnation of wages in the past 40 years.
Still trying to figure out how Tmason intends to eliminate single parents. Forced abortions/sterilization? Forced adoptions to Wholesome Heterosexual Couples? Forced marriage? Can’t think of that many other options.
tmason, go read this book before you make any more arguments here. It’s full of actual research and facts and stuff. Your library probably has it.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Way-Never-Were-Nostalgia/dp/0465090974/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345855903&sr=8-1&keywords=the+way+we+never+were
Other than her point about single mothers tending to vote for Dems you can’t find any one to one correlations.
Projecting again; sticking to a topic and avoiding “would you let kids starve?” questions is not hostile.
Show me where I said the rich shouldn’t be taxed or that they deserve their wealth, etc.
Again, marriage/house/other credits can’t be looked at the same:
(1) It is a shared credit to a married couple, so it is targeted for both partners.
(2) Most times it is a deduction on money they paid in taxes versus a simple payment from the government to the individual/family (such as food stamps) or a program.
(3) It is not something that requires a management overhead to maintain versus what is already there (the IRS).
That’s just the tip of the iceburg.
I ABSOLUTELY agree with you here…… problem I run into when pitching it to men is the addendum — that men should play an extremely active part of the child’s life, and not just for a few hours on the weekend, when their relationship with the child’s mother is still intact, not be all about the “shared parenting” only once the relationship with the mother has ended.
I’m going to assume you did not grow up on a farm. If you did, I’m going to tell you some things you already know:
(a) Farm work is not “easy.” It’s hard-ass labor, every inch of it. Growing food is not easy. Preserving it is not easy. Getting up a 3 a.m. because a sheep is in labor is not easy. Baling hay is not only “not easy,” it’s some of the hardest damn work there is. I’ve seen professional football players cry after a day of baling. (Not an exaggeration. I really have.)
(b) Farm work is frequently “outsourced” – sometimes to the neighbors, sometimes to employees, sometimes to the government. Any individual farm family relies on outside help at some point, whether it’s from the Johnson twins down the road helping to shear the sheep, from hiring workers to pick crops, from John Deere building a new tractor the farm purchases, or from the government cutting a check in cases of massive crop failure (we’re seeing a lot of these this year, because of the weather) or providing a free health clinic so that when little Jimmy steps on a rusty nail in the barn, he doesn’t die of tetanus.
(c) Farm work is not cheap. I’ve never known a farm family – including my own – that did not have at least one member working full-time outside the farm. Growing your own food and raising your own alpacas is great if you want food and alpaca yarn, but it’s useless if you need to buy equipment, medicine, toilet paper, or if you need any kind of services.
Whoa, I didn’t expect the whole book cover to show up, cool!
Also while you’re at it, go read this:
http://www.amazon.com/Catch-22-Anniversary-Edition-Joseph-Heller/dp/1451626657/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345856008&sr=8-1&keywords=catch+22
I’m back. And I don’t give a shit. Rosie the Riveter was a woman, and Mann is a Judasbitch castrated moose.
I think the only possibly response to that is “Fuck you, you fucking fuck” on behalf of my friends who are awesome single parents and are raising wonderful kids.
OK, so tmason, near as I can tell your primary point is that people are unable to provide for themselves given the structure of society. People should have more time to care about what they want, instead of having to work all the time just to barely stay even.
Ideally, it seems you want it that the median wage of a single worker would be enough to support a family. Thus one full time worker would support a family. OK.
So, assuming I understand that correctly, how exactly does this relate to Ann Coulter’s assertion that women shouldn’t vote? In addition, how do you intend to change the economic model we have now to support a living wage on a single income?
Your ”male role model boy scout” idea is what it is, but doesn’t really bear on your main point. As you yourself said, even a couple that is together both have to work, so that seems to be the primary problem.
Since when did I say that dads should be given a break?
That’d be projection, “the twisted spinster”. You keep lumping me in with the “MRAs” when I believe men should be more responsible.
Someone needs their shovel confiscated.
Also voting for the transphobic asshole to be sent to the Island.
I apologize for even bringing up my kid’s school lunches. All I was trying to say was this it’s not just single parents that use these services, but also married/partnered parents. I had no idea someone would make a big stink about it, or that I would be asked to justify enrolling in a program that our family qualifies for.
Am I the only one who gets the impression that Reynardine is just trying to be offensive for the sake of offensiveness?
That’s nice Reynardine. Keep up the good work of being such a colossal asshole.
@thebionicmommy
You have nothing to apologize for. It’s not your fault that trollboy is both politically clueless and dishonest enough to try to hide his agenda.
(1) Are we going to put policies in place that dictate to private entities what they can and cannot pay their employees?
Sort of. It’s called the tax code. Back in the bad old days of the 1950s, when Eisenhower (that noted liberal) was in office, the upper brackets were taxed at 85-90 percent. This disuaded companies from paying the CEO too much (though they got rich, just look at Romney’s father), because it was a gift to the gov’t they could use to do other things, like invest in new tooling, or paying workers; an incentive to keep skilled employees, or fund things like pensions (again, an incentive to keep employees; as well as a means to increase worker turnover, without putting older workers into a state of poverty/dependence on their children).
(2) If, say, we sidestep that and instead focus on raising taxes, what’s to stop companies from completely uprooting their headquarters and having their CEOs get paid and taking their capital elsewhere?
False dichotomy. One of the things we could do is forbid offshore havens. I have a paper (though I forget the URL, I downloaded the pdf) which estimates the hidden assets, kept from taxation by individuals in the US is not less than 27 trillion. That’s a lot of lost revenue. If the present dodge (as used by Apple) of keeping money offshore were prohibited, then the companies would have to either move to a different country, or pay the taxes. Since the US actually has one of the lowest corporate tax structures in the world, they aren’t going to move, even if they have to pay the taxes.
(3) If we then try a second sidestep and raise tariffs to prevent that, how will that affect international trade? Do we start tariff wars?
Answered in my response to your second point.
Oh castrated males are bad too? or were you referring to transwomen you transphobic piece of shit. Also I love allies who call women they don’t like slurs that have been used to oppress women for centuries.
The very act of the parents splitting up and one person not being there on a day to day basis is extremely disruptive. You’re looking at it from the parents perspective; what the child sees is daddy not home anymore and some strange man being nice.
That’s not what I recall. I recall a stepfather. I actually recall three of them, because my mother was really good at picking men who were good with her kids, but not so good with her.