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."
That's how Margaret Thatcher did it.
Look, if you want to tell me I can't vote next election, fine. But I also will stop paying taxes and obeying any laws that I don't get a say in.
How about we change it to only TAXPAYERS can vote?
Seems more like she's decrying the effects of it.
And there does seem to be a strong correlation between women's votes and, oh, say, pro-gun control, high-taxing pols getting elected.
FReeper women are sadly a small minority of American women.
And no, I'm not advocating a repeal of the 19th Amendment (though the thought is tempting).
But, you know what my response to them is.
And she is a crack shot, votes libertarian and thinks more logically than most reactionary chauvinists
round these parts.
The horror, the horror.
Seems to me that when that statement carries the social and emotional weight of unwed mothers something might begin to change.
Also seems to me that when fathers who abandon their children (deadbeat dads) effects us all the same as mothers who abandon their children then perhaps our idea of responsibility - as a society -will change.
Also seems to me that boys have as much a responsibility in the decision to make a baby as the girls. Doesn't seem likely the girls are doing this by themselves and to assign the girls the sole responsibility of choosing boys who will stick around smacks of something I hesitate to mention on this particular thread.
Boys want sex and power--they revel is "fooling" the girl; girls want babies and security. Boys don't get pregnant; girls do. Boys declare themselves non-fathers and walk away; girls, to declare themselves non-mothers, have to kill their babies.
Thus, the "unwed father" is not simply the male version of the same package of motives as an "unwed mother." Public policy that assumes that is doomed to failure.
(Before I get flamed: By "girl" and "boy" I mean, of course, the promiscuous, infantile boys and girls produced in government schools, not normal young people produced by truly human societies.)
No more foolish than the proposal women be disenfranchised
Well, first, there IS NO "proposal women be disenfranchised." You might want to read the article. First sentence says...
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.
Second, it's ABSURD to lump in pre-suffrage America with the Taliban. C'mon!
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