A Malicious Ideology

A word to the wise from Phyllis Schlafly: Them radical feminist dames is crooked as a barrel of snakes:

Radical feminists have devised a scheme to cash in on the flow of taxpayer money in a big way. Their good buddy, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., has just introduced Senate Bill 2279, called the International Violence Against Women Act.

Some of this money will go to "a certain type of women's organizations" (e.g., the Family Violence Prevention Fund). This exemplifies the shamefully narrow focus of the International Violence Against Women Act, which targets violence against women rather than fetuses or men or conservative Supreme Court nominees or Lasiorhinus krefftii, the Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat.

Radical feminists who would be the recipients of the act's awesome bureaucratic and money power are very selective about the kinds of violence they will target in 10 to 20 foreign countries. They have no interest in speaking up for the hundreds of thousands of unborn girls in China and India who are victims of sex-selection abortions.

Schlafly probably hasn't read the UNFPA's statement on gender-based violence, which specifically identifies prenatal sex selection as a form of "gender violence." Feministing recently had some not entirely complimentary things to say about the practice, too. The disagreement, of course, is over methodology. Schlafly wants to solve this problem, and most others, by banning all abortions now and forever. Most "radical feminists" would probably prefer to address the causes of prenatal sex selection, such as social structures that perpetuate the idea that women are inherently less valuable than men.

So far, we've learned that a bill intended to prevent violence against women will try to prevent violence against women by giving money to groups that try to prevent violence against women. And that feminists who support abortion rights aren't calling for a worldwide ban on abortion. We can be forgiven, I think, for feeling that Schlafly's hunt for logical inconsistencies has been a bit of a bust.

She's nothing if not persistent, though:

Feminist ideology about the goal of gender-neutrality and the absence of innate differences between males and females goes out the window when it comes to the subject of domestic violence. Feminist dogma is that the law should assume men are batterers and women are victims.

Just in case you doubt this, here's an example of gender neutrality going out the window, thanks to the "malicious ideology" of feminism:

Political correctness requires that the Illinois Bar Journal use gender-neutral words, but anyone familiar with this subject knows that "petitioner" overwhelmingly means wife and "respondent" means husband.

Yes, we do know that, don't we? (And isn't it odd how the people who dispute this fact tend to be perfectly comfortable with racial profiling?)

Having demonstrated that political correctness is the handperson of feminist ideology, because it demands the gender neutrality that feminist ideology rejects except when it doesn't, Schlafly points out that accusations of domestic violence can give one party - and it's usually going to be a woman, since the little minxes are clever enough to know that they're statistically more likely to suffer abuse - an "unfair advantage in divorce and child custody."

The possibility of this grave injustice - which is far more dangerous, you'll agree, than legally codifying the presumption that women are lying bitches who probably deserved whatever they got - is apparently what justifies Schlafly's headline: Feminists Abuse Domestic Violence Laws.

My brain hurts.

(Illustration via What Were They Thinking?)