Tag: women’s rights

Kick Out the Cat Ladies

The Portly Politico26 Comments

Regular readers will know I have a strong, even pathological, anti-femite streak.  It’s perhaps ironic, as many of my readers are women, and I actually find most women quite charming and pleasant company.  That said, I can’t ignore how terrible things tend to go when women are in charge of anything more substantial than the local church bake sale or the PTA.

With the notable exceptions—and I have to mention them because women in particular don’t seem to understand the concept of “generalization“—women are not really suited for politics, governance, management, etc.  What they do really well, however, is act as the social glue that binds a community together.  Again, if you want your church bake sale to be a success or your PTA to hound delusional administrators, women are your best option.

If you want to direct grand strategy and pursue a sane domestic policy, leave it to the men.  Women in politics seem to boil down to “kill babies, give me free stuff!”  It was Republican women in South Carolina, for example, who blocked a total abortion ban in my State; all three of them were booted from the South Carolina Senate in their primary elections, leaving our State Senate blessedly free of female meddling.

Lately there’s been some hubbub over J.D. Vance’s past comments about women, particularly his claim that our country is being run by “childless cat ladies” and the “childless Left.”  National Review, the bastion of fake conservative handwringers, fumed simpishly over Vance’s comments, while not exactly addressing the substance of what he said.  After all, Vance said the unpopular part out loud—the cat ladies “are miserable in their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

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Alone

The Portly Politico47 Comments

It’s February, the Month of Love.  As such, it’s a good time to talk about relationships and such.

There was some speculation in the comments of this blog a few weeks ago about my relationship status.  Alys and Audre were discussing whether or not they should buy garish (they didn’t use that word, but I can only assume) hats for hypothetical nuptials.

Well, as these things do for a sensitive poet-warrior like yours portly, it all came crashing down—not with a bang (giggity), but a whimper.

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The Revival of Traditionalism?

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Milo Yiannopoulos posted a screen shot yesterday of an essay from The Atlantic reading “How the Coronavirus Will Send Us Back to the 1950s” (the piece, by Helen Lewis, is now called “The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism“—a silver lining to this pandemic, I suppose).  His caption reads, “HOLY SH[*]T YES PLEASE[.]”

The Lewis piece is the usual feminist hand-wringing about the disparate impact of the coronavirus on women.  Feminists always find a way to make global catastrophes about them, and not about everyone who is truly suffering.  The attitude seems to be, “yes, yes, people will die, but why do I have to make any sacrifices or trade-offs for the people I ostensibly love?”

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Delusional Crone (Almost) Divorces Husband over Trump

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If you’re ready for your blood pressure to spike before you even eat your cholesterol-thick breakfast, here’s an example of the delusional loonies on the Left:  a California woman (almost) divorced her husband because he voted for Trump.

This story is a bit old, as it dates back to early 2017, but it’s indicative of where our nation is.  It not only demonstrates the intense loyalty of the Left to their progressive dogma, but also how cheaply marriage is held.

The short version is thus:  73-year old Gayle McCormick threatened seriously to divorce her husband of twenty-two years when she found out he voted for Trump (ultimately, they merely separated permanently).

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Kabuki Theatre

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

This coming January, two theatrical events will occur:  I’m playing the role of “Brett,” the father of a drug-addicted son, in a play one of my former students wrote called Catching Icarus (the hook:  both acts take place in a Waffle House in South Carolina); and the Senate trial against President Trump will (allegedly) begin.

From the rehearsals I’ve been to so far, I can say that acting is difficult—and I get to spend most of the first act in a booth drinking coffee.  It takes a special kind of conviction (or delusion) to invest in a role, to become another person.

For congressional Democrats, they sure seem right at home on the political stage.  They are masters of the kabuki theatre of outrage.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Lazy Sunday XXXIV: The Desperate Search for Meaning Series

The Portly Politico47 Comments

Next to Halloween and Christmas, today is the most wonderful of the year—it’s the day that the clock falls back an hour!  Sure, that means I’ll never see the sun for the next few months, as I’ll spend the dwindling daylight hours inside a classroom, but at least I got an extra hour of sleep this morning.

This week saw a good bit of reflecting on what is important in life (like ghost stories), so I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on “The Desperate Search for Meaning” series of posts.  It will also help to aggregate those posts into one place.

  • “The Desperate Search for Meaning” – The post that started this impromptu series (and the subject of this week’s Flashback Friday featurette), this essay was about a New Age healer, Audrey Kitching, who exploited vulnerable women into working in slave-like conditions.  Kitching bamboozled these women with her gauzy, neo-spiritualist babble; her thin sense of meaning of belonging roped them in, as they desperately attempted to fill a void in their lives—and that doesn’t even include all the women who bought Kitching’s fraudulent products.  It’s a sad story, one I think is indicative of our times.
  • “The Desperate Search for Meaning, Part II” – This piece was about a crazy old lady who believes that cancer can be extruded from the body through a series of energy-channeling motions—at least on the surface.  The real focus was that, while this old loon was going through her bizarre ritual, she espoused a cult of death:  having babies is bad because of overpopulation.  It’s the religion of environmentalism, one of the several cults of modern progressivism.  It is a deadly ideology that is, essentially, anti-human.
  • “The Desperate Search for Meaning, Part III: Progressive Power Crystal” – This post looked at an LA Times piece on New Age spirituality, and how it was replacing traditional Christianity as the “faith” of young Americans.  That’s all tied up with progressivism’s imperial and totalitarian ambitions—all off these anti-Christian, anti-American movements are of a piece, serving similar ends.  As I write at the end of the post:

    “Even if our elites aren’t specifically Satanists, they’re certainly not Christians.  Their religion is progressivism, an jumble of ideologies that, at bottoms, rejects Christianity and its view of human nature.  Their gods are power and envy—just like Lucifer.”

  • “The Desperate Search for Meaning IV: Vanity” – This piece pulled from a sermon my pastor gave on Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books of the Bible.  Ecclesiastes is a work of philosophy, in which King Solomon examines his life and finds that all of his pursuits are, ultimately, meaningless:  he will die, and everything he experienced and built will eventually disappear.  Therefore, his only true meaning comes through God.  It’s the earliest form of Christian existentialism ever written (with apologies to Søren Kierkegaard).  It’s also a powerful reminder that this world, in which we are so involved, is fleeting.

That’s it for this Sunday.  Going back through this posts really makes my soul ache for the people that fall for New Age nonsense and neo-paganism.  Good thing I’ve found the One True Faith—the Southern branch of the Free Will Baptist denomination. 😀

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

TBT: Babes for Trump

The Portly Politico1 Comment

Blogging daily for nearly nine months now, I’ve started noticing some interesting little blips in my reader data.  I don’t get a ton of daily views as a rule, but I’m always intrigued by the pieces people read when I’m late getting up the daily post.

I’ve noticed lately that, for several days, this piece—“Babes for Trump“—keeps getting one view.  I don’t know why—I haven’t linked to it in awhile, and it was kind of a quick, throwaway piece.  I don’t have the kind of high-level WordPress account that lets me dig that deeply into the data, but I’m hoping someone just keeps Googling “hot Trump babes,” but who knows?

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The Desperate Search for Meaning, Part II

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A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about a New Age healer involved in a scam selling “healing crystals” and the like, and the women she employed.  Those women worked for this con artist with slavish devotion.  It was chilling how this Instagram thot used spirtualistic gobbledygook to influence those around her.

A similar example of women espousing dangerous ideas floated across my transom earlier this week.  Super controversial blog Chateau Heartiste shared a Tweet from James Woods.  Woods’s tweet features a video of two loons involved in some kind of energy channeling activity.  The older lady is delivering a discourse on overpopulation, telling women that having children is “not a good way” because it’s bad for the environment.  She also claims that the Earth can only support about one billion people (despite evidence to the contrary—we’re doing well enough with seven billion).

Next to the old crone is a younger women, who periodically toots—watch the video, and you’ll see how accurate that verb is—“That’s true!”  It’s creepy in that kind of unsettling, horror movie kind of way, like a scene where a disembodied child’s voice sings a nursery rhyme.

What’s even creepier is the death-centric, anti-life ideology that’s being espoused here.  Gavin McInnes played another clip from this New Age witch on a recent podcast, and explained that the women’s arm motions are a form of channeling, which these women believe pulls cancerous energy strands from their bodies.

My issue isn’t the alternative medicine (the old lady also calls Western medicine bad):  I’m open to all sorts of novel approaches to handling physical and mental illnesses, as I’m intellectually humble enough to know there are many things we still don’t understand.

Rather, my concern is that more and more women are falling for some seriously deadly notions.  “Don’t have children, it’s bad for the environment” inevitably leads to “let’s import Third World peasant cultures to keep Social Security solvent.”  It also deprives women of children.

I’m all for women having careers and being treated fairly in the workplace, etc., but let’s face it:  most women, whether they admit it or not, want to have children.  Children are a huge source of satisfaction and delight for women.  For every high-performing, Type-A go-getter like Nikki Haley (who does have children) or Angela Merkel (who does not), you probably have a thousand women who are (or would be) happiest raising children.

But what do I know?  I’m just a man.

Republicans Defend and Expand the Franchise

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Today in South Carolina, hundreds of thousands of voters will head to the polls to vote in either the Democratic or Republican primaries.  In the spirit of this time-honored and precious American right, I’d like to explore the Republican Party’s history of defending and expanding the franchise.

Democrats are fond of accusing Republicans of a “war on women” and of attempting to “silence minority voters.”  But a brief glance at the historical record suggests otherwise.

Republicans were key in pushing for the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which granted all men, regardless of race, the right to vote.  Ratified in 1870, the amendment immediately faced resistance in the heavily-Democratic South of the Reconstruction era.  Both white and black Republicans in the South faced persistent repression at the hands of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Redeemers, who used intimidation and even violence to prevent Republicans from voting.

In response, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Enforcement Acts, which included the Ku Klux Klan Act, in 1870-1871.  These acts made it a federal offense to suppress voters through violence or intimidation, and ensured Republican victories in a number of States in the post-bellum Deep South.

Fifty years after the ratification of the 15th Amendment, Republicans once again pushed to expand this franchise, this time through the longsuffering women’s suffrage movement.  The Republican-controlled government of Wyoming first extended the right to vote to women in all elections in 1869, and a number of States—mostly in the Old West—followed suit, but Democratic recalcitrance had stalled further efforts towards women’s suffrage in other States.

While progressive Democratic President Woodrow Wilson reluctantly came to support women’s suffrage as a wartime measure—after initially opposing giving women the right to vote—the major push for women’s suffrage was a Republican one.  The vote over ratification came down to a single Tennessee State legislator, Harry T. Burn, who cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of ratification—making Tennessee the required 36th State to ratify and, therefore, amend the Constitution—after his mother wrote to admonish him to “Hurray and vote for suffrage.  Don’t forget to be a good boy.”  The son dutifully complied, and women all over the nation gained the right to vote.

Democrats deride sensible voter ID laws and other attempts to clean up elections as insidious attempts to suppress minority voters, while steadfastly ignoring their own checkered past of overt, often violent, suppression.

Fortunately, the Republican Party has consistently stood firm against such suppression, expanding and protecting the franchise for millions more Americans.