A few days before Mother’s Day the Deseret News proclaimed, “The nation needs moral men to lead the conservative movement.”
We shouldn’t be calling on only men to lead anything anymore. Calls to leadership should be gender neutral going forward. At the very least. Why is this concept so hard?
The Deseret News piece was in response to the conservative party’s current leadership — Tucker Carlson, Stephen Crowder and Donald Trump. Oddly, the piece came on the heels of another opinion piece supporting the same male leader just weeks earlier.
Regardless, they’ve now decided these men aren’t moral enough and they want different men to lead the conservative movement. Moral ones.
The opinion piece decried the rise of these men and their popularity among conservatives. It admitted that “[m]en will never be perfect,” but by golly, “if conservatism fails to provide accountability for sexual Lotharios or casual misogyny it’s not clear what is left within the movement worthy of conserving.”
Indeed. What is left? It used to be that someone accused of sexual harassment and abuse the number of times Trump has been accused — and indeed found civilly liable — would have been disqualifying. But I digress.
After lamenting the moral relativism of the conservative movement in general, the opinion piece then blames women. Liberal feminism to be exact. Because of course it does. Women are always the culprit of men’s bad behavior.
The essay then gets unclear in a chicken/egg sort of way. The authors begrudgingly admit “plenty of women have had their professional and economic vistas expanded.” It also states, “too often the hidden costs of decimating social institutions … have fallen on the heads of poor and working class women and children, [who] suffer from the behavior of absent or unaccountable men seemingly unshackled from marriage, family and religious expectations.”
Did liberal feminism decimate the social institutions — i.e., family? Are the absent, unaccountable, and unshackled men a hidden cost of liberal feminism or a cause of it?
Or, did the absent, unaccountable and unshackled men decimate the family? Because to me, it seems more like the latter than the former. Cause and effect, and all that.
To be more plain, did the fact that mom went to work break up the family? Or did mom go to work because the family was broken?
I’m tired of being told liberal feminism is the root of all evil when the reason women went to work was to mop up the mess of men. And then when they got to work, they realized they liked it, they were treated better, it was nice to have their own money, and they wanted to stay.
To be clear, there have always been bad men (and bad women too). Liberal feminism didn’t birth bad men.
The Deseret News article decries a world where we glorify a man who boasts about sexually abusing women and another man whose abuse and bullying is spread over the media.
After noting these abuses, Deseret News has the audacity to say, “[t]he truth is, institutional breakdown has not freed women from bad men; it has simply lessened their opportunities for recourse[,]” thereby implying divorce isn’t the answer, because according to the Deseret News, “[w]omen are not empowered by independence from men.”
How absurd. Any woman who has been in an abusive marriage knows how wrong that statement is. Many women are empowered every day by the independence divorce provides. Empowerment includes personal safety, financial independence, emotional health, sexual autonomy, and many other aspects of everyday life, including the opportunity to find a better man. Sure, sometimes it takes time. And sometimes, some women don’t make it out. But most of the time it’s worth the effort, and my hope this Mother’s Day is that any woman who needs to make that choice to be empowered by independence is able to.
Why do I care? I’m annoyed they don’t even try to solve the problem about what to do about bad men. They want to “hold men accountable” by demonstrating that marriage is good for society. Great. Another message bill. Except for the woman in an abusive marriage. It’s not so helpful for her. Or her kids. What would they say to Melania Trump? Or Crowder’s wife? Stick it out? Maybe he’ll change?
A recent study found that single women aren’t marrying because they aren’t finding men who measure up. In other words, women have become more discerning. Education, jobs, money, and independence have helped women realize they don’t have to marry men in order to take care of themselves. So they’re marrying because they want to — not because they have to. That’s liberal feminism for you.
I would rather be wanted than needed anyway. But that’s just me.
Happy Mother’s Day.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Michelle Quist.
Michelle Quist is an attorney practicing in Salt Lake City.
