For Men, America is Like A Black Man Under Jim Crow

Jack Johnson marries Lucille

In an excellent column, Carey Roberts compares the contemporary hysteria and misplaced chivalry driving the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) with the White Slave Traffic Act passed by Congress in 1910.

The latter was a response to racist beliefs prevalent at the time that black men represented a threat to the sexual chastity of white women. The fact that Jack Johnson, a black man and the greatest and toughest boxer that ever lived, dated white women provided the impetus for the white men of Congress to act. Similarly, and perhaps more extremely, VAWA is based on the idea that all men, through an ill defined conspiracy called the patriarchy, represent a domestic physical threat to all women. Members of Congress again rise with chivalry to protect women.

Neither Act is based on reality. But, hysteria, hatred, and chivalry are powerful forces. One has to admire the political genius of gender feminists in their war against the phantasmal patriarchy. In their effort to eliminate traditional families and remake society, they have harnessed the desire of old white men to appear to be tough and protective of women. As a result, they achieve aims that are quite different from that of the underlying legislation: to batter men and fathers into a state of insecurity and fear of marriage. There does not appear to be much evidence that such a thing as a “patriarchy” exists, but the opportunity to curtail the civil rights and destroy the individual lives of men and fathers is apparently satisfaction enough.

Gender feminist deconstructionist social policy provides punishment without cause. Our current Congress implements this policy with debate more befitting the former Soviet Union than the world’s oldest democracy. But, one has to hand it to the sisterhood for being students of history. They understand the power of hysteria and the desire of men to feel they protect women.

I guess they learned something in the taxpayer funded madrassas they maintain on college campuses around the country.