One thing Halation, being relatively new to these parts, has yet to learn is that I write nothing without being able to back it up to at least some small degree. She calls what she apparently considered to be a bluff:
perhaps you can tell me: what rights have i lost? there are precious few modern writers i can find who oppose women’s suffrage, save those who propound the same overwrought fearmongering the ‘scholars’ are offering here – ‘because then the communists win! and then the terrorists win! plus they want to kill your babies!’
Very well, let’s list your supposedly unalienable rights. There is the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There are the Constitutionally enumerated Bill of Rights, including the rights to free speech, to a free press, to bear arms, to be secure in your person, houses, papers, and effects, the right to a speedy and public trial, the right of trial by jury, the right to not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, the right to not have private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
How have those rights fared since women received the “right” to vote.
1. The right to life is under siege, for unborn children, disabled children and the elderly.
2. The right to liberty is all but destroyed already.
3. You still have the right to pursue happiness.
4. The right to free speech has been eliminated by sexual harassment laws, hate crime laws, the FEC and campaign reform laws.
5. The right to a free press has been limited by campaign reform laws and the establishment of the FCC.
6. The right to bear arms has been significantly reduced by gun control laws.
7. The right to be secure in your person, houses, papers and effects has been eliminated by the drug laws, the airport laws, the IRS, etc.
8. The right to a public and speedy trial has been eliminated by the Patriot Act. Once declared an “enemy combatant” by a government official you can be held indefinitely.
9. The right to trial by jury has been eliminated by the family “courts”, the tax “courts” and the immigration “courts”, none of which even belong to the judicial branch but are simply executive-branch bureaucrats dressed up as judges.
10. The right to due process of law has been eliminated. See 9.
11. The right to not have your property taken except for justly compensated public use has been eliminated under Kelo.
Now, I believe it’s your turn to provide that list of the rights you’ve gained under the suffrage-enabled regime of the last 85 years? Still think it’s been a worthwhile trade?
the only thing i’ve been able to find bearing a passing resemblance to a sensical argument is the argument that, as voting is not a right, denying it someone is not taking away their rights, as such. this appears to be what you are arguing, and as i’ve said, you can make that argument, but make it honestly. stop making the issue about women in particular, for when you do, your arguments are based on the same logic of emotion you accuse those ghastly gashes the feminists of using.
What emotion? I’m not appealing to emotion at all. Voting is manifestly not a right, it was never intended to be a right, and and history reliably demonstrates that if basic human liberties are to be preserved in any quasi-democratic society, women cannot be granted the privilege of voting.
you’re calling for controlled rule by an elite. vox has said as much, but he says it rarely; usually he speaks more about the grave threat that is Woman. likely he does this because it’s more fun, because it gets him more listeners, and because doing so allows him to manipulate the emotions of those who despise women and who’d far prefer to see them with limited rights or no rights at all – civil or natural. the loss of rights is, to many, implied in the anti-suffrage logic, and that’s why they like it. thinking is hard. smugness is easy.
I am not calling for a rule by an elite, I am simply pointing out that an elite has always and will always rule. In the USA, we have been governed for the last 20 years by the members of two families, all three of whom attended the same small university. The opposing candidate in the last election also attended that same university, while the leading contender for the next eight years also belongs to one of those two families. And you still can’t see an elite? The question at hand is what sort of elite do you prefer, an honest one that rules openly or a covert one that rules by manipulation?
i’ve asked before, and i’ll ask yet again, and ask until i get an answer: how many of your readers here will have the vote, vox? readers, how many of you care? are you, like spacebunny, happy to give up your vote to take away mine?
First, liberty is not voting, halation. Millions of people around the world have freely given up their “right” to vote in order to move somewhere else where they can live in more freedom. As immigrants and non-citizens, they cannot vote, and yet they demonstrably go very far out of their way to trade that vote in pursuit of liberty.
The historic estimate for those permitted to vote by the Founding Fathers was around 20 percent. I suspect the ideal percentage is closer to 10 percent, which approximates that of the historical Athenian democracy, but removing the most centrophilic fifty-two percent or thereabouts from the voting rolls would certainly be satisfactory.
I find it tremendously amusing that people who profess to be horrified by my opposition to universal suffrage are unaware that the democratic ideals they claim to revere are rooted in systems more strictly limited than anything I’m advocating. That is only one of the many reasons I am untroubled by the opprobrium of the Oprah-watching masses.