Posted on 09/28/2001 10:18:55 AM PDT by gumbo
OLATHE, Kan. (AP) - A female state senator says if women's suffrage were being voted on today she would not support it, because the 19th Amendment was the start of a decades-long erosion of family values.
"I'm an old-fashioned woman," Sen. Kay O'Connor told The Kansas City Star. "Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women (today) we wouldn't have to vote."
Delores Furtado, co-president of the Johnson County League of Women Voters, had asked the 59-year-old Republican to the league's "Celebrate the Right to Vote" luncheon, and O'Connor responded: "You probably wouldn't want me there because of what I would have to say."
Furtado said she was shocked by O'Connor's view. As a state senator, Furtado said, "she is the beneficiary of a system she doesn't support."
O'Connor said she does vote. But she said she believes that if men had been protecting the best interests of women, then women would not be forced to cast ballots and serve in the Legislature. Instead, they could stay home, raise families and tend to domestic duties, she said.
The 19th amendment giving all U.S. women the right to vote was ratified in 1920. O'Connor said the amendment began a societal shift that eventually encouraged women to trade homemaker roles for careers.
She said she entered the workplace only because of her daughter was ill and medical bills were mounting.
O'Connor, of Olathe, was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1992 and won a Senate seat last year. She isn't worried if voters don't like her views.
"If I don't get re-elected, my only punishment is to go home to my husband and my roses and my children and my grandchildren," she said. "And if the trips to Topeka get to be too much and my husband asks me to quit, I would."
"Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women (today) we wouldn't have to vote."
Without the women's vote, we would've been spared two of our worst-ever presidents: Harding and Clinton!
Some have great stories, pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad. Just no one in this car. But, a lot of people, that's their story. Good times, noodle salad. What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you're that pissed that so many others had it good. -- Melvin (Jack Nicholson), As Good As It Gets
Perhaps the senator should consider giving thanks for having it so good, rather than making pronouncements about what men should do, and about what women shouldn't have the right to do.
An obsessive-compulsive writer (Melvin) is confronted by his gay neighbor's tragic beating, and begins stepping out of his usual routine by taking care of his neighbor's dog, getting the doctor-husband of his publicist to make a house call on his favorite waitress's ill son. He drives the neighbor and the waitress down to Baltimore so the neighbor can ask his parents for money for medical bills. Everyone is telling their sad tale on the drive. Melvin notes that all their frustration isn't that they all have their sad tales, but that so many others had such good lives, i.e., good times, noodle salad.
Ideally, the vote belongs, not to males, or to married males, but specifically to FATHERS, and only fathers of children living in intact families. This would have the effect of reducing the influence of the dissolute, those unfaithful to vows, the non-future-oriented. It would mean that political decisions would be made primarily by those with SONS--reducing the influence of those who might desire to send other people's sons into war. It would also decrease the influence in public life of both females and males who seek to use coercion to live at public expense.
What, pray tell, does women voting have to do with they could stay home, raise families and tend to domestic duties... These are incompatible? We can't do both? Yuck, yuck. Gag, gag.
The 19th amendment giving all U.S. women the right to vote was ratified in 1920. O'Connor said the amendment began a societal shift that eventually encouraged women to trade homemaker roles for careers.
Poppycock! Perhaps she should focus on the Equal Rights Amendment, Roe v. Wade, and the emergence of the radical Left-wing gang of Feminazis.
Some sort of political-issues IQ test would weed out the igits, both male and female, but this lady is completely off base.
Can't stand Jack Nicholson, first off; and any movie that starts with a gay person getting beat up sounds too Hollyweird-preachy to me.
Sounds good to me. My guess is, ironically, male voters would be far more likely to vote themselves into a war than would females. But that is perhaps as it should be.
Got a link to that? Sounds like a good read.
I'd second that, but unfortunately there are too many court rulings against the idea to make it realistic.
I guess women voters can't be blamed for Wilson -- though he certainly seems like one of the most femin-ized presidents ever.
And no doubt FDR did more lasting damage than Harding.
But I was just trying to think of lousy presidents whose election we can blame on the 'women's vote.' How about Kennedy?
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