A critical change
in the Left over the last few decades
has been the shift from the economic
to the social and increasingly the
sexual. What was once a semi-socialistic
attack on property and enterprise
has become a social and sexual attack
on the family, marriage and masculinity.
The consequences
are incalculable. No ideology in human
history has been potentially so invasive
of the private sphere of life as Feminism.
Communists had little respect for
privacy. Feminists have made it their
main target.
Like other radical
movements, only more so, Feminism’s
danger comes not so much from the
assault on freedom (which traditional
tyrannies also threaten) but specifically
from the attack on private life, especially
family life (which traditional dictatorships
usually leave alone). “Radical Feminism
is totalitarian because it denies
the individual a private space; every
private thought and action is public
and, therefore, political,” writes
Former Judge and Solicitor General
Robert H. Bork. “The party or the
movement claims the right to control
every aspect of life.”
The Left’s brilliant
move has been to clothe its attack
on the family as a defense of “women
and children.” Marian Wright Edelman
openly acknowledges she founded the
Children’s Defense Fund to push a
Leftist agenda: “I got the idea that
children might be a very effective
way to broaden the base for change.”
This climaxed in the Clinton Administration,
in which radical policy innovations
were invariably justified as “for
the children.” Using children to leverage
an expansion of state power by eliminating
family privacy is succinctly conveyed
in Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s
aphorism, “There is no such thing
as other people’s children.”
This nationalization
of the family under the guise of protecting
it leaves pro-family politicians in
a difficult position. One way out
is to join in the demonization of
those who literally embody the Feminists’
hated “patriarchy” - fathers. Relabeled
“deadbeat dads,” “batterers” and “pedophiles,”
fathers are now railroaded into jail
through methods one recent scholar,
writing in the RUTGERS LAW REVIEW,
calls a “due process fiasco” and Bryce
Christensen says is leading to a “police
state.”
Knee-jerk calls to
“get tough” on criminals have unintended
consequences when the penal apparatus
has been commandeered by ideologues
who redefine criminality to include
an assortment of gender offenses that
bear little relation to what most
Americans understand as crime.
The evolution of
the Justice Department’s Office of
Victims of Crime illustrates the deception.
Proceeding from President Ronald Reagan’s
1982 Task Force on Victims of Crime,
this agency has since been hijacked
by Feminists, and most of the “crimes”
have been redefined in Feminist terms.
By definition, the “victims” are all
women, the “perpetrators” are all
men and the “crimes” are mostly political:
sexual harassment, date “rape” (which
is seldom rape), domestic “violence”
(that is not violent), child abuse
(that may be ordinary parental discipline),
“stalking” (fathers trying to see
their children), and so forth.
Far from softening
the hard edges of male-dominated power
politics, Feminism has inserted calculations
of power into the most private corners
of life and subjected family life
to bureaucratic control. This is what
makes the dream of a more “caring”
public sphere through Feminism not
only naďve but dangerously utopian.
For as Feminists correctly pointed
out, the feminine functions were traditionally
private; politicizing the feminine
has therefore meant politicizing private
life. This is why the “totalitarian”
potential which Bork senses is already
being realized.
“All politics is on one level sexual
politics,” writes George Gilder. At
least sexual politics is the logical
culmination of all radical politics,
which is the politics that has defined
modern history. More than any other
threat, Feminism demands that the
next conservatism examine conservatives’
own reflexes and habits in a world
in which radical assumptions have
permeated well beyond the ranks of
Leftist ideologues. It demands that
a new conservative agenda challenges
not just this doctrine or that, but
the very concept of a politics defined
by ideologies, activists, organizations,
opinion-mongers, and a professional
political class for whom politics
is all-consuming (even when we agree
with them). The next conservatism
must try to recover a civic life of
citizens, householders, parents, churches
and synagogues, local communities,
and values that transcend political
calculation. Czech - dissident and
later President Vaclav Havel called
this “apolitical politics”: a world
where, contrary to Feminists and Communists
and all ideologues, the personal is
not political.
Stephen Baskerville is President of
the American Coalition for Fathers
and Children. The views expressed
are his own.
http://www.acfc.org/ |
