>From: Michael S. Lorrey <retroman@turbont.net>
>> I've said it once and I'll say it again. A large number of women do not
>> regard freedom to be nearly as important as security. They will, by and
>> large, prefer to trade freedom for greater security and protection. <snip>
>>>The great erosion in
>> privacy and individual liberty in this century began after we granted
>> women the right to vote. To Kathryn and other women on the list who
>> probably take offense at this, I challenge you to prove me wrong.
I am fresh from a meeting of the Skeptical Society, so I'll stretch out my typing fingers here and have a go.
Where do I begin? Ah, yes.
I will leave aside Mssr. Lorrey's historical prediliction for posting inflammatory comments about women. Let us move on to a specific comment.
'...after we granted women the right to vote.' Ah, Michael, women were not granted the right to vote. Men did not wake up one morning and say, gee, let's give the little darlins a say in their own government. Women fought for it, for long, hard, and dangerous decades. They suffered imprisonment, crude forced feedings that are now classified as a form of torture, beatings by the U.S. Capitol police. Several women died in the process. It was the outcry over that forced feedings and other violence that led a recalcitrant Congress to sign the sufferage act, and they write it up in the history textbooks as a magnanimous act. Many excellent books have been written on the topic, if historical fact interests you.
Women are not libertarian? Nonsense. Women are on the cutting edge of every human rights movement in existence. They fight every day to keep their health clinics from being bombed, to keep restrictive contraceptive laws off our backs, to open doors in the sciences and technological fields. They lobby for increased parental control over schooling and for reduced taxes. Every day, women form their own companies, leap onto the Internet, trade stocks, take off into the wilderness.
Maybe they don't express it in the form of a particular political doctrine, but women apply libertarian ideals in a very practical sense in their own lives every day. We have to--for us, just to leave the house is the most radical libertarian act of all.
Thank you for the opportunity to affirm that today.
Kathryn Aegis