What Equality Means

Andrew Klavan was on Glenn Beck Wednesday morning, talking about socialism, which he’d talked about the day before on his podcast. So I went to listen to the Tuesday podcast to hear what got Glenn Beck’s attention.

He talks about the death of Europe—after so many problems have been solved by capitalism. He has a better long way of saying it, but socialism essentially comes in and eats the bread produced by the freedom of capitalism. It takes about 70 years. So the instigators—who might not have known the future—don’t see it play out in its full disastrous tyranny. They maybe should have followed the logic through, but they don’t. The next generation has to suffer.

There’s not much of a pass you can give to those who can see world history and should know better from that, even if they don’t follow the full logic through to its conclusion.

For example, Bernie Sanders was alive to know of the millions murdered by communist regimes in the Soviet Union, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc. In fact, Klavan talks quite a bit about Nicaragua 

Klavan reminds us of a clip of Bernie Sanders in 1985 where he said, “Yeah, some people say it’s bad when they have bread lines in communist countries. They say it’s bad, but it’s good, because other places they’re starving. They’re starving, but only rich people eat.” As Klavan says, “That was after his trip to Nicaragua. That was in praise of Daniel Ortega, this clown who is now murdering his own people as they protest his communist tyranny,” which Klavan spends a chunk of his broadcast recounting, since Ortega has been shooting up Catholic churches to stop protesters from finding sanctuary for speaking out against his regime, which was always and ever supported by America’s Democrats).(praising both CBS's and Fox News's Brett Baier, who have been covering events there. 

Klavan points out more about Bernie:

At no point did Bernie Sanders, who, as I say “honeymooned” in the Soviet Union, which is a gesture of support for a country that murdered tens of millions of its own people, starved its own people in the street in order to bring about the perfect socialist utopia...—at no point has he ever said, “Something is wrong with my philosophy.”

He shares clips of both Bernie Sanders and, the young socialist candidate whom he calls Bernie’s “mini-me,” Alexadria Ocasio-Cortez, talking about all the things that are “rights” that ought to be paid for by the top 1% of earners. Because, while the “right-wing” goal is to beat them, so they don’t impose socialism on us and bring us to ruin—as has happened everywhere it’s ever tried, the “left-wing” goal is “equality.”

What does that mean? Well, that brings his to Klavan's latest episode of the "Leftese Dictionary: E Is For Equality," a short summary, with some rather fun visuals, which I found later on YouTube, so I could see it instead of just hear it. The summary is worth putting up on a poster where every old and newly minted socialist can read it over and over. So please enjoy this bit of education:

Feminism Turns Women into Bad Men

The last couple of posts (here and here) have been about women’s issues. I think I’ll make this a third in the series.

Feminism is an ideology at odds with the feminine. Feminism, in a misguided scree, declares that women can be men as well or better than men can be men.

There are many ways in which men and women are equal. Intelligence, according to IQ data, is essentially equal. Individuals differ. And interests differ. Women who enjoy math, engineering, and other left-brain-labeled fields do as well (sometimes better) in those fields as men who enjoy those things. And men who enjoy arts, humanities, social sciences, and other right-brain-labeled fields do as well (sometimes better) in those fields as women do. Nevertheless, a larger number of women gravitate toward the “right-brain” side, and a larger number of men gravitate toward the “left-brain” side.

But it’s a rare woman who makes a better physical laborer than a man. If you can’t carry a fire victim over your shoulder to rescue them, maybe firefighter isn’t the best career choice for you. Same for construction fields, heavy equipment operations, oil rig worker, or a lot of other physically tough jobs.

Some women flourish in STEM fields.
image from here

If you’re 5’4” and 120 lbs., you probably can’t lift a 100-lb. sack of grain as easily as a 6’ tall 190 lb. man. Fact of nature, like gravity, not worth fighting.

Should qualifying women be prevented? No. And in my lifetime (I’m upper 50s) they haven’t been. And during my lifetime, when they do equal work, they get equal pay.

Women are not lesser women, or less feminine, for pursuing something different from most women, nor are men lesser men, or less masculine, for pursuing something different from most men.

But women who pursue something to prove that women can do it too are not doing it to help women; they are doing it with the attitude that women’s choices are less valuable. This is what feminism does; it shames the feminine.

Women are biologically made to bear children, and most women naturally bond with those children and care deeply about their welfare, sacrificing time, energy, and resources for the good of her children.

But, consider the feminist attitude toward women who choose to stay home to raise their children—they’ve sold out their sisters. Consider the derisive feminist sneers against women who choose to have a large family.

Feminism has resulted in a cultural shift, from women who expected to spend some years, or adjust a career around, raising young children—to women expecting to work, and possibly limiting the number of children, and time for them, in favor of the career. The result is that economic adjustments practically require women to work in order to maintain the socioeconomic level of the previous generation. There are more amenities at that socioeconomic level than before—bigger homes, multiple cars, smart phones, multiple television, etc. Still, the expectation for women to work, even while children are young, adds considerable pressure to women’s lives.

The result is less choice and more pressure on women to do both what they feel the urge to do and what they feel the necessity to do—or to do just way too much, almost all of which is pressure more than pleasure.

As Jordan Peterson said in the interview we reviewed the other day, if you require equality of outcome—such as certain quotas of women in every field, or at every level—then you do that by taking away the choices women would make if left to choose for themselves. In other words, to get the outcomes feminism claims are for the good of society, that requires tyranny—more against women than men, although they’re plenty willing to tyrannize men as well.

There’s another cultural shift resulting from feminism that is not helping women. It is a biological fact that pregnancy results from heterosexual sex. Not every encounter, not every time. But pregnancy doesn’t come any other way (including in vitro fertilization, which puts together the sperm and egg, just not during a sexual encounter). And it’s always the woman who gets pregnant, never the man. That’s not a social construct; that’s not an invention of society. That is biological fact.

What is social is the support and partnering a husband provides to a wife when she is bearing his child. In a civilized world, sex outside of marriage is always wrong—because it puts the pregnant mother and her child at risk, both economically and physically. But in an uncivilized, savage world, men engage in casual sex, sometimes leaving a woman pregnant, and then failing to provide for her and the child, leaving them economically and physically vulnerable.

The man in this uncivilized situation could get away with casual sex without apparent consequence, leaving individuals and society as a whole to pay the price. The appropriate response would be for women individually and society as a whole to hold men accountable. Do not allow or participate in casual sex. Hold men socially and economically responsible when they act in this savage way.

Feminism looked at this savagery and said, “That’s not fair. We need to be allowed to have casual sex without consequence too.” Put another way: God is wrong to burden women with a baby. What can we do to overrule God? Birth control, to prevent consequences—or abortion, if the consequences start to show up.

Women are still biologically going to face pregnancy following sex. Encouraging women to engage in frequent, casual, promiscuous sex—because a man can—means there will be more frequent vulnerable situations for women and children. Meanwhile irresponsible men get more casual sex that they are not held accountable for.

Expectations change, so it is actually harder for a woman to enforce the expectation on a man that sex with her must only follow commitment. By giving in to feminist pressure to pretend to be a man—and not a good man, but an irresponsible man—she loses the expectation of respect for her body and soul that she had before feminism stepped in to “help.”

4D ultrasound at 12 weeks
image from here

And how does abortion help a woman? She is pressured to kill her child in order to maintain the façade that casual sex is what she does willingly, since she’s just as much of a man as any irresponsible male. She denies biology. And she denies the naturally feminine part of herself. And, if you believe in good and evil, right and wrong, she sacrifices her soul to kill her child, gaining nothing but fake masculinity in exchange.

Sex only after marriage has always worked better for families than sex outside of marriage. But there used to be serious social pressure on a man to step up and do his duty by marrying a woman he caused to be pregnant. Now the pressure is on the woman to do away with the child so it doesn’t look like she was entrapping a man into responsibilities he didn’t want.

There’s a piece from National Review that I came upon week (from 2016) on the damage legalizing—and mainstreaming—abortion has done. Here’s an image to grasp the numbers: 

In the 43 years since Roe v. Wade, there have been 59 million abortions. It’s hard even to grasp a number that big. Twenty years ago, someone told me that, if the names of all those lost babies were inscribed on a wall, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the wall would have to stretch for 50 miles. It’s 20 years later now, and that wall would have to stretch twice as far. But no names could be written on it; those babies had no names.

Author of the piece, Frederica Mathewes-Green, says this about the pressure to abort:

We had somehow bought the idea that abortion was necessary if women were going to rise in their professions and compete in the marketplace with men. But how had we come to agree that we will sacrifice our children, as the price of getting ahead? When does a man ever have to choose between his career and the life of his child?

We can use a rule of thumb, to tell whether something is anti-woman—or anti-feminine: If you have to deny who you really are and portray yourself as more man-like, that’s anti-woman.

If you’re a competitive person, go ahead and compete. But don’t force yourself to be hyper-competitive because some feminist says you ought to for the sake of women everywhere.

If you’re a high-energy force to be reckoned with (as a lot of women are), go ahead and be that. But if you’re gentle and nurturing, don’t force yourself to be someone you’re not just because some feminist says you ought to for the sake of women everywhere.

If you like STEM studies better than soft sciences or humanities, pursue those interests. But don’t force yourself to become an engineer because some feminist says you ought to for the sake of women everywhere.

If you love children—especially your own—and you’d rather give them a well-run family with a nurturing mother than push yourself to work overtime and get the next promotion, do what’s right for you and your family, rather than what some feminist says you ought to do for the sake of women everywhere.

If you want to have a committed, permanent relationship with a man who will support you and your children, growing with you to become a strong, loving family together (which offers a greater sense of joy than any career position), don’t give that up in favor of casual, irresponsible sex—the results of which you may end up feeling pressured to get rid of with an abortion—just because some feminist says you need to prove women can be like irresponsible men. That’s not doing anything good for the sake of women everywhere.

If you’re a woman, be yourself, and be a good woman. That is the best thing you can do for women everywhere.

If you’re a man, be yourself, and be a good man. That is the best thing you can do for both men and women everywhere.

Another Counterfeit

It would have been more insightful for me to have divided Monday’s post, Counterfeits, into two parts, with this being added as a third part. That would have made a neatly planned week of posts. Unfortunately, I don’t always organize that far ahead what I will say. So, less neatly, here is another example of a tyranny/southern-hemisphere counterfeit.

Equality

As Americans, we have practically born in us a sense of fairness and equality. We don’t have an aristocracy—a class of people who receive special privileges and immunity from various laws based on their parental heritage. We honor our government leader, our President (even the current one) based on the position. But we expect that person to be subject to the same laws as the rest of us. If he robs a bank, he goes to jail. If he murders his secretary, he suffers the weight of the law. If he lies before Congress, he is prosecuted for perjury.

That is what we mean by Blind Justice. The law doesn’t look to see who the accused is—what their wealth, position, race, religion, gender, ethnic heritage, or other special interest category may be—before weighing the evidence. We are equal before the law.

Blind Justice, Alabama
photo by Scott

We don’t have a class system—a stratified society based on arbitrary, permanent conditions. The concept of avoiding people who are beneath us seems unpleasantly foreign. We don’t call one another “uppity” for “trying to rise above our station.” Rather, we have the American Dream, where hard work and brains put to good use in a free marketplace offer the opportunity for rising above current conditions for anyone.

The southern hemisphere counterfeit for equality is something else altogether—equal outcome. “Leveling the playing field” is the lie. It is the claim that, if someone else has more than you do, it is because they had some unfair advantage, that their level of work and yours are irrelevant. There’s an unspoken claim that, just one time if we redistributed the wealth and started fresh from the same starting line, then everything would be fair.

But outcomes will always be different—because individuals are different. I used to see this clearly in relation to my children’s education. When we moved to our current school district, and I attempted to continue their gifted education, there was a lot of resistance from the teachers. They seemed to believe that every child deserved the same input from them. But if the goal of education is to help each child gain the education that will help them reach their potential, then every child’s education is different—customized. Some teachers seemed to think, if a child was already reading well and doing the required level of math, then the teachers' duty was done, and they could turn their attention to students still struggling.

That meant that bright students spent hours every day sitting around waiting, often bored, rather than engaged in learning. “Fairness” in this common classroom setting means paying attention to some students while ignoring others—in an effort to make the outcome of the education the same: the limit of the slowest learner.

The elementary school report card actually said, “performing at grade level” or “not performing at grade level.” When my daughter showed up there a couple of grade levels above her age in several subjects, the report card practically implied she was getting stupider by sitting in that classroom—and that was OK as long as she wasn’t slipping behind the slower learners. As a mama bear, I never said, “Oh well, I’m sure the professionals know best”; I got her the heck out of that non-learning environment and saw to her education myself. Some might say I unfairly unleveled the playing field.

Fairness in economics is likewise not holding some people back to keep anyone from getting ahead. Even if you could start everyone at the same level, some people work hard, use their creativity, save up resources to invest in capital improvements, and come out ahead before long.

You can see this historically in frontier America. Homesteaders would start out with a few tools and basic belongings. They would clear the land, build shelter, plant crops, raise animals, and move ahead, if they could, from subsistence to prosperity. Sometimes misfortune got in the way—a hailstorm, a fire, an accident, a drought. Sometimes a family would have to move on and start over multiple times. But eventually some people prospered. Was it because they were given an unfair slice of the overall economic pie, thus depriving otherwise deserving individuals? No. It was a combination of hard work, mental and physical, along with some good timing.

Equalizing outcomes isn’t about fairness; it’s about coveting, that last of the Ten Commandments that tells us it’s wrong to be jealous of our neighbor’s good fortune.

The southern hemisphere counterfeit of “equality” is about using the covetousness we’re trying to rid ourselves of, nurturing it, and using it to persuade us to give power to some entity that promises to take from someone we’re envious of. Maybe to give to us, maybe not—it’s often enough for them just to stick it to the person with more. And for doing so, they get an unequal portion of power/control over the people.

Which is better?

·         Subjecting ourselves to a controlling force that takes from the prosperous and uses the spoils as it chooses? (southern hemisphere controlled economy)

·         Allowing individuals to prosper from their hard work, ingenuity, and frugality, with the possibility that any of us, even all of us, can prosper? (northern hemisphere free enterprise)

Next time someone says it has to be equal or it isn’t fair, ask whether equal relates to equality before the law or equality of outcome. There’s a hemisphere of difference between the two.