Dinesh D’Souza’s backwards future wife on the evils of Women’s Suffrage

So good old Dinesh D’Souza — the right-wing culture warrior who hit it big this year with the film 2016: Obama’s America — evidently has a new fiancee. This has caused a big kerfuffle amongst some of D’Souza’s pals on the Christian right, because it turns out that he’s not quite unmarried at the moment, having only just filed for divorce from his current wife of twenty years. Oh, and his new gal pal – 29-year-old Denise Odie Joseph II —  is apparently also married.

Yesterday, D’Souza resigned his lucrative job as president of The King’s College, a small evangelical school in Manhattan (where he was reportedly paid a cool million bucks a year). His explanation for the whole adultery thing?

I had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced, even though in a state of separation and in divorce proceedings.

Yeah, how could a family-values-loving, highly paid president of an evangelical Christian college possibly be expected to know that getting engaged to someone while you’re still married might not go over so well in evangelical circles?

As a result of all the controversy, D’Souza says he and his beloved are “suspending” their engagement.

But enough about Dinesh. Let’s talk about his (possible) future wife. Despite the whole adultery thing, Joseph seems to think of herself as a bit of a crusader for “family  values” against the evil forces of liberalism and feminism.

Indeed, in one blog post earlier this year on Smart Girl Politics, she argued, amongst other things, that women’s suffrage was a terrible mistake. Well, “argued” might be stretching it: the post is a long, barely coherent, free-associational rant laced not only with internalized misogyny but with racism and homophobia to boot. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Beginning with a highly ironic paean to Rick Santorum as the only Republican in the primaries “to acknowledge … that the family unit is the cornerstone of American society,” Joseph then launched into a confusing and confused attack on what she called RINO – that is, Republican In Name Only – men who in her view haven’t been doing enough to keep their wives and daughters in check:

RINO Republicans are analogous to fathers who proudly proclaim their conservativeness at dinner parties or perhaps during early afternoon phone calls to El Rusbo’s show, but let their “independently-minded” wives … pump their teenagers full of birth control and encourage their daughters to live the lives for which their bra-burning foremothers fought so valiantly. …

RINO Dads are those guys who will sheepishly to proudly, fill out Republican ballots on Election Day while their wives openly mark their support for things like, “freedom of choice” and “freedom from poverty.” What most people don’t realize, and indeed what I didn’t realize until I blocked out the “madding crowd,” is that these women and their RINO men are like a vast national living history museum, pictographically illustrating exactly why the 19th Amendment was never the best idea ever and in fact, more closely resembles the greatest show on Earth. Think Ringling Bros. …

When our men cannot even remember the principled widespread women’s opposition to women’s suffrage because they never even learned about it in the first place, but can instantly recall which American president freed the slaves without also recalling the importance of his most seminal quote—“A house divided cannot stand,” our society is in trouble.

She quotes anti-suffragette Madeline Dahlgren (1871):

We believe that God has wisely and well adapted each sex to the proper performance of the duties of each. We believe our trusts to be as important and sacred as any that exist.

It is our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons who represent us at the ballot-box. Our fathers and husbands love us. Our sons are what we make them. We are content that they represent us in the corn-field, the battle-field and the ballot-box, and we them in the school-room, at the fireside, and at the cradle; believing our representation, even at the ballot-box, to be thus more full and impartial that it could possibly be were all women allowed to vote.

Evidently, while God doesn’t think women should vote, he has no problem with women writing barely coherent tirades about politics on a blog called Smart Girl Politics.

After a weird digression in which Joseph explains she will no longer shop at J Crew because one of the designers there paints her son’s fingernails pink, Joseph returns to her attack on the RINO dudes. She spices up her argument with some good old fashioned racism:

While RINO dads and men are often heard snickering about feminists around the water cooler, they do not realize that by virtue of being RINOs, they are complying with the same feminist/liberal system of social engineering they sneer at when manifested in more obvious forms like the black single-mother society. Believing themselves to be infinitely superior by virtue of being married and financially supporting their children, they do not realize that they are setting their own sons up to be the “playas” and their daughters up to be the “played.”

If they took a moment to actually listen to the music their children listened to, or a moment to look at the way their children dress, they would realize that they are going the way of black ghetto society. They would realize that by failing to do the job their foremothers cherished, their wives, who don’t even know enough to scoff at Madeline Dahlgren and who should be the proud, moral guardians of their homes, are leading their RINO (and real Republican civilization) to their inevitable demises.

This, for some reason, leads into an extended attack on the singer KeSha and the video for her song “Tik Tok,” after which she returns to the subject of RINO dads.

Apparently though her video father seems capable of amassing enough money to afford his family a comfortable lifestyle and manicured lawn, he is completely powerless against the will of his monstrous teenaged whore child. This video might as well be a Discovery Channel documentary on the behavior of that intriguing species known as the RINO Dad. Thank the Lord no man will ever expect Ke$ha to be the moral guardian of his home, seeing that her father’s generation seems to be the last marrying generation. And who can blame them? With Ke$has or watered-down versions to choose from, what man would want to voluntarily impregnate a woman? …

Perhaps Ke$ha’s father learned along the way that if he beat the hell out of Ke$ha like she deserves and then sent her to a convent, he would become a social pariah and end up in jail.

I guess “beating the hell” out of children is a family value?

After a bit more KeSha-inspired free association, Joseph returns to chronicling the coming apocalypse, and manages to produce this unholy muddle of a sentence:

From extreme vanity sizing to demands that magazine models (anorexic and unattractively thin models notwithstanding) look like the “real” (cuz I guess the rest of us don’t count) size 8 woman, who historically would measure in at a size 16 to 20, modern women of the West are on the apocalyptic “Wild Hunt” for the ideal and are leaving terrific characteristic destruction in its wake.

Then she follows up with this shorter but equally baffling sentence:

 As women spearhead the demise of the ideal, the alternative to hypocrisy, they spearhead the demise of social order as we know it and love it.

Then — perhaps unwisely, in light of her current situation with the still-married Mr. D’Souza — she returns to the importance of traditional family values, once again with a side order of racism:

Henceforth, all of us will be staring down the barrel of life in a hip hop video or government-funded project where no one makes pretenses about “what they be.” Where no one has to succumb to sin because sinning is the status quo and where no one need ridiculously pretend to be faithful because well, we would have wisely outgrown such primitive notions about nuclear families as individual economies. We would have outgrown capitalism itself because government entitlement spending would have to grow ten-fold to accommodate and assist the burgeoning hoards of single-mom children born of the scarred sons of divorce who accidentally inseminated their female sex partners, or couples who themselves participated in that modern American rite of passage we call divorce.

Huh. You mean that “rite of passage” that you and Mr. D’Souza will soon both be intimately familiar with?

After an extended  defense (I guess) of Sarah Palin, she winds up her attack on hypocritical “in name only” Republican dudes:

RINO Dads, the next time you see your daughter bounding (or sauntering) down the stairs in a pair of booty shorts with messages like “juicy” emblazoned on her backside, please stop her, turn her around, and force her to go upstairs and change.  As you march her room-ward, tell her why she can’t dress like this, school her on the consequences of her behavior.  Do it even if you were on your way to your man cave to watch x-rated content featuring teenaged-looking girls dancing around in booty shorts with messages like “juicy” emblazoned on their backsides. Do it for your daughter, yourself, society, the ideal, but most of all, do it because you now remember that hypocrisy has always been our last, best hope.

Apparently so.

Hat tip to Ed Brayton of Dispatches From the Culture Wars for unearthing this post from Ms. Joseph.