February 02, 2017
Source: Bigstock
What a genocidal racist Donald Trump is! Last week, as proof of his desire to rid the world of nonwhites, he resuscitated the so-called Mexico City Policy, which withholds U.S. funding from international NGOs that perform or promote abortions. And the same leftists who”ve accused Trump of being a genocidal white supremacist are now accusing him of forcing women of color in Third World countries to have more babies. Just let that sink in for a moment…leftists call Trump a white supremacist who hates Third World nonwhites, then they accuse him of upping the population of Third World nonwhites by taking away their “birth control.”
No one ever said leftists make sense.
Having lost the Great Meme War of 2016 (a.k.a. the presidential election), lefties decided to use Trump’s Mexico City Policy directive as a base from which to launch a volley of hip, edgy, progressive, and oh-so-clever memes. Because, you see, when Trump signed the order, he was surrounded by (drumroll), men! Men deciding the reproductive fate of women! And while many a fine meme was fired off, the prize must surely go to The Guardian‘s social and new formats editor, Martin Belam. The doughty young Belam took one look at the photo of Trump signing the “eradicate nonwhites by making more of them” order and, mustering all of the intellectual prowess that is expected from a social and new formats editor, brought forth the Holy Tweet, the one that shall forever define this critical moment in history:
As long as you live you”ll never see a photograph of 7 women signing legislation about what men can do with their reproductive organs.
I”ll give you a moment to allow your goose bumps to settle.
Within just a few days, the tweet had garnered over 343,000 “likes” and 266,000 retweets, and it was featured in The New York Times and dozens of other high-profile liberal papers. In this time of crisis, Martin Belam turned out to be the hero Gotham both needs and deserves.
Except…while, agreed, there is not to my knowledge a photo of seven women using the power of the law to take away the reproductive rights of men, you know what does exist in rather huge quantities? Photos of American women lining up to use the power of the law to regulate what men are allowed to drink. Now, I can understand if Belam, a Brit, is a little hazy on American history. So he might not know that the criminalization of alcohol was pushed by women as a punitive measure against men. It’s considered the first successful exercise of women’s political power in this country. Yes, the first thing American women did when they finally began to get political influence was lobby to take rights away from men. So excuse me if I”m not terribly impressed by Belam’s holier-than-thou “you”ll never see women do this” horseshit. Women have done worse, and right out of the gate. And here, Mr. Belam, are some pics to prove it (and here and here and here and here and here)…photo after photo of seven (or more) women lined up to push for legislation to tell men what they can and can”t put in their bodies.
What might seem odd to a progressive Brit like Belam is that in the late 19th century, alcohol prohibition was more important to women than the friggin” right to vote. In her review of American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition, historian Paula Baker plainly states: “Even before women gained the right to vote, the liquor question engaged their energies more than any other issue…. By the late nineteenth century, liquor was the premier women’s issue.” Additionally, she points out, “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), organized in 1874, became under the leadership of Frances Willard the largest single women’s group of the nineteenth century.”
Was there an anti-male element to the push for prohibition? Just ask one of the WCTU’s most vocal and violent stormtroopers, Carrie Nation, who once remarked, “Men are nicotine-soaked, beer-besmirched, whiskey-greased, red-eyed devils.” As attorney Erin Masson points out in a 1997 essay from the William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law, the WCTU became successful specifically because it sold prohibition not as a public health issue, but as a way to control the behavior of men.
Banning men from drinking booze was more important than voting rights? A bit nutty, sure. But that’s all in the past, right? Well, sort of. Amazingly, these days the good folks in the media and academia continue to defend the social justice warriors of the temperance movement. Those poor, oppressed women were just trying to make the world a better place by eliminating (as feminists say these days) “toxic masculinity”!
As Tufts University student Kristen Kuo and Harvard University student Chi Chi Nwodoh state on their “history of prohibition” website, women supported prohibition “in both violent and more subtle ways, thus causing both adults and children to see the benefits of abstaining from drinking.” You see? All that saloon-smashing and repressive law-passing was done only so that adults and children could benefit! Men had to have their rights curbed, because (Kuo and Nwodoh again) “[p]rior to prohibition, men would come home in a state of drunkenness and abuse their wife or children.” Lost your right to drink? Too bad, Stanley Kowalski, you asked for it.
PBS agrees: “Alcohol abuse (primarily by men) was wreaking havoc on the lives of many, particularly in an age when women had few legal rights and were utterly dependent on their husbands for sustenance and support.” The National Women’s History Museum goes further (and straight-out lies about prohibitionists seeking to limit rather than ban alcohol): “Temperance reformers sought to limit the consumption of alcohol by Americans. This issue resonated with many women because alcohol consumption often increased the frequency and severity of domestic violence and abuse. In addition, men would sometimes squander limited household finances on alcohol.” Not mincing words, David J. Hanson, professor of sociology at SUNY, writes on his website Alcohol Problems and Solutions: “The women leaders of temperance and prohibition were highly committed to promoting their vision of a better world.”
