With this kind of father, who needs to have enemies?
MARK SCOLFORO, ASSOCIATED PRESS: How would you tell a daughter or a granddaughter who, God forbid, would be the victim of a rape, to keep the child against her own will? Do you have a way to explain that?
SMITH: I lived something similar to that with my own family. She chose life, and I commend her for that. She knew my views. But, fortunately for me, I didn’t have to.. she chose they way I thought. No don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t rape.
SCOLFORO: Similar how?
SMITH: Uh, having a baby out of wedlock.
SCOLFORO: That’s similar to rape?
SMITH: No, no, no, but… put yourself in a father’s situation, yes. It is similar. But, back to the original, I’m pro-life, period.
My father’s only granddaughter was born to unmarried parents. Since he is a normal father and not a vicious idiot like Tom Smith, a guy who runs for political office in this country, my father celebrates the birth of his granddaughter as a result of a consensual and happy relationship between his daughter and her fiance. Of course, my father would have respected and supported any reproductive choice his daughters would have made. That’s because he sees us as human beings, not as property.
Todd Akin’s comments on rape have become a really good litmus test for jerkdom and many politicians are failing it every day. Let’s keep listening to them reveal their true colors.
Clarissa's Blog 
Everything from the father’s point of view is the definition of patriarchy. No wonder so many people can’t understand a perspective from another point of view, when that’s the way we’re brought up to see the world. I’ve had people totally erase my perspective from my own memoir in order to be able to see things only from my father’s point of view.
LikeLike
To me, what this guy says sounds completely insane. I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to grow up with him as a father. Brrrrr.
LikeLike
My father also sounded completely insane, when I hit puberty, which was around the time the regime changed from colonial to communist. I find that even insane paternalistic comments are read, by perhaps the majority of readers, but who knows, as if they were the expression of a father’s emotional duress in relation to intractable demeanor of various family members.
LikeLike
Did you notice how this guy honestly expects people to see him and any other father as the true victim of whatever happens to his daughter? This is precisely what I talked about in my definition of the patriarchy when parents compensate for their blighted lives by seeing children as an outgrowth of themselves, their own body part. The horror!!!
LikeLike
Yes, yes, but that’s not just the psychological structure that patriarchy takes, but its basic metaphysical structure as well. Everything centers around the father, in the same way as the Earth circles the Sun. Women are considered to be negative or shapeless, unless they get their true essence of being by conformity to patriarchal mores. Ultimately they must submit to a man to find their identity and redeem themselves from evil, which is a state of formlessness. The negative principle (woman) must submit to the positive principle (man), or else evil will ensue.
And, certainly, according to this formula, men are always and forever the perpetual “victims” of female recalcitrance. That is why so much pressure must be brought to bear “for their own good” and to “make them see reason”.
Otherwise, they will continue to afflict their harm on poor suffering men — men who just happen to be in power over them.
LikeLike
This makes me want to go and inflict harm.
LikeLike
Yeah. When I was doing battle with this nonsense over the years and wondering if I was really seeing the insanity for what it was, I thought that women who did see it clearly should simply take up arms.
LikeLike
“This makes me want to go and inflict harm.”
Same here. America’s always been a Daddy’s country, but we managed to tone it down by at least admiring women who were strong and independent (in a strictly patriarchy-defined way: masculine-acting, celibate or at least devoted to one guy, etc.). Now we’re slipping down into a more sentimental, sickly sort of patriarchy where woman are all helpless little girls and men are obsessed in a really unhealthy way with everything they do. The rise in popularity of country music is symptomatic of this: a main theme of a lot of country songs is the put-upon, fragile, suffering woman whose heart is always broken, or either who is the delicate, fragile, sweet inspiration to her Daddy/Lover. A particularly nauseating subset of this kind of song is the one that is actually a father singing about his daughter. It is impossible to listen to these songs (for me at least) without wanting a barf bag nearby. Look up “Butterfly Kisses” some time if you have need of purging.
(Note: there is still a type of country song about women who follow the older American patriarchal model of the sassy, feisty, pseudo-independent woman. Most of these songs are sung by women singers.)
LikeLike
LikeLike
If only this garbage were going to make a difference in anyone’s political choices, that could be a good thing to come out of it. But, the progressives will be horrified and won’t understand the women who support the radical right’s agenda. None of the conservatives will learn anything new because progressives will be so swept away in how obviously offensive and dangerous these moronic statements are.
Here’s another, by the way: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/paul-slansky-/paul-ryan-said-something-_b_1832377.html
LikeLike
But Romney has been losing the female vote massively. This is definitely good news.
Akin might now lose the election and if we raise a loud enough stink, so will this guy. These are two seats going straight to the side of the angels!
LikeLike
I wish that instead of critiquing the issue on a moral basis, we would start to critique it in terms of its metaphysics. Once right wing women understand the metaphysics and no longer feel it as a pull on an emotional and intuitive level — because they now intellectually understand the smoke and mirrors behind the game — many of them will leave it.
LikeLike
Why aren’t they leaving now? What is the emotional pull? Certainly, nobody can love this kind of father (like Smith) who hates you.
LikeLike
They’re not leaving, because metaphysics is very persuasive. Metaphysics doesn’t correspond to principles of reality, but they can seem to do so, if you have been brought up with them. If everyone around you acts as if these principles were true, your developing psyche becomes wired into viewing the world according to those in-built assumptions about the world and how it works.
That’s why nearly all my writing to date has been in the vein or making myself understand how these metaphysical assumptions work. The emotional pull is that they seem to describe reality as it actually is. I was brought up to think that males, men, were all-powerful, all-knowing and full of wisdom. Your self-esteem takes a hit when people whom you’ve defined this way, in your head, take a dislike to you. You then conclude, on the basis of these principles of metaphysics, that in their wisdom they’ve the detected nefarious aspects of your character. You end up applying the same principles they would use to attack you with, to yourself, and you feel emotionally depleted.
You need to build new neurological pathways in your mind so that you don’t need to blame yourself when someone all-wise and all-knowing condemns you, but that is extremely difficult to do, especially if you are in a situation where your attributes are continuously criticized. Then it’s like a sparring match where you are constantly facing bigger or multiple opponents. It’s emotionally easier to give in and admit that your opponents are right.
All of my writing has been an attempt not to give in.
LikeLike
But they don’t understand that that “love” is a kind of hate. It’s a hatred of what the daughter actually is or can be, and a “love” of a kind of impossibly ideal of what the daughter “should” be according to the narrow definitions of the patriarchal Ideal Female. We are raised to believe (despite our protestations to the contrary) that people are not adequate personalities in themselves, but instead have to conform to certain “role models” or Ideal Personalities. Thus the Good Daughter, the Good Mother, the Provider Dad, and so on.
By the way, asking the average American to understand anything that has to do with “metaphysics” is a losing proposition. Most Americans classify that as a Big Weird Word, something to do with the suspect and vaguely European (and therefore effeminate, thus to be avoided) academic arena. We pride ourselves on being Practical and Pragmatic and Doers Not Thinkers, which means we don’t have nothing to do with no eggheaded concepts like “metaphysics” whatever the hell that is, Verne did you ever hear tell of such a thing. You need to take another approach. My personal preference is baseball bat, but I’ve been told I’d get in trouble.
LikeLike
Ah! But I have no wish to educate Americans about anything at all. I certainly don’t NEED to take another approach. Poetic justice dictates that those who are embroiled, indeed boiled up to their eyeballs, in metaphysics, should continue to suffer and make it worse for themselves. Perhaps the solution to having bad relationships because of metaphysics is more metaphysics? American leaders could try being ever more rigid, controlling women at the level of biology, in order to correct the problems created by metaphysics by adding more metaphysics?
Metaphysics just means what isn’t real but is thought to be so. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp, but I don’t expect those who only have one avenue, and that is to make everything worse, to grasp it.
LikeLike
“Ah! But I have no wish to educate Americans about anything at all. I certainly don’t NEED to take another approach. Poetic justice dictates that those who are embroiled, indeed boiled up to their eyeballs, in metaphysics, should continue to suffer and make it worse for themselves. Perhaps the solution to having bad relationships because of metaphysics is more metaphysics? A”
– I agree with you, musteryou. If the American people do the impossible and end up electing Romney and Co, well, that’s their funeral. When Bush Jr. was elected for the second term, I said that if this is what the people want, they are entitled to suffer the consequences. So they did. I guess we will have to wait until people drink their full measure of smelly, runny fecal matter.
LikeLike
Yes. You can’t stop a train wreck. I’ve spoken to many Americans over the years and tried to explain that women are people. That was stupid of me, because what is self-evident doesn’t need to be explained, as if to a two-year old.
LikeLike
“That was stupid of me, because what is self-evident doesn’t need to be explained, as if to a two-year old.”
– But don’t you enjoy the stunned expressions on people’s faces when you share this stunning piece of news with them? I know I do. 🙂
I also especially love it when people see me, a chesty blonde angelic-looking person dressed in pink, and start being dismissive. Then I demolish them verbally in a very loud voice. Poor losers start cowering in the corner very soon.
If they are male, they for some reason immediately start offering me marriage. 🙂 I swear to God, it happens every time.
LikeLike
No, I’ve never had that precise sort of experience. I normally have to demonstrate to them though a kind of sparring technique that whatever “clever” skills they can bring against me, I can use against them, too. Patriarchal types hate to have their own weapons used against them. I have acquired knowledge of their whole weapons cache. Here are some of the weapons I have acquired from patriarchy and which may be used against patriarchy in turn:
1. You’re just expressing emotions. Emotions don’t mean anything to me, so I am free to ignore them.
2. You may have said something, but it has no meaning. Can you say it again, in a way that has meaning?
3. Perhaps there is something wrong with your sexuality if you think that way?
4. You seem to be nuts!
5. No, I still can’t quite grasp what you are getting at or why.
6. Are you trying to say this to fulfill your biological urges or reproductive whims? It seems rather narrow, and I cannot grasp it from my heights.
LikeLike
I was using the rhetorical “you” — perhaps I should have said “one needs to take another approach.” But basically I’m with you, I have no interest in educating grown people who have decided what they learned in K-12 was quite enough (if they learned anything in school at all) and have closed their minds tightly. Let them suffer the consequences of their actions.
Love your list of rejoinders to patriarchal jerks, by the way.
LikeLike
Yeah, I understood you were on my wavelength, but it is actually also true that when people don’t want to understand something, there is actually no way of putting the information that will actually get through to them. To refuse to understand something simple, which is that women are actually human beings, people will act like belligerent two-year olds and keep demanding more support and different ways of speaking in order to “understand” it. It’s best not to give in to these demands.
LikeLike
This is part of the plantation mentality of Republicans where people are property. New York state has an agreement with Corrections Corp. of America, a private prison company, where they guarantee a 90% occupancy. Incarceration is no longer rehabilitation or even punishment but merely a contractural obligation to supply a certain number of warm bodies – usually coloured – and the judical system obliges by inflicting disproportionate jail terms for minor offences. In Mississippi, black teenagers are sent to jail for disrespecting teachers in school. A bit OT but the same conceptional framework.
To be fair, Quebec considered women to be chatel (property) until 1960s so women could’t own property. I think that the important point is not that folks like Smith believe this but the mindset is an ongoing trend in parts of American society like the gradual decline of unions over the last thirty years and women will need permission from their husbands in twenty years for abortion or any other activities.
LikeLike
Somewhere, there is a parallel universe where everything the GOP says is true. Republicans are just inter-universal travelers who happen to be stuck in the wrong universe. It’s a lot nicer than the alternative, isn’t it?
LikeLike