Women Should Not Have the Right to Vote, According to the Right

John DerbyshireOn his radio show, political personality Alan Colmes interviewed one of the regular columnists for the National Review, conservative author John Derbyshire. During the online interview Derbyshire stated that women's suffrage, which legally recognized the rights of women to vote in the United States, should be repealed and that the nation would be better off if women were not allowed to vote. 

Derbyshire went on to further state that the nation “got along” just fine for over “130 years” without allowing women to take part in the political process and that if women were not allowed to vote the conservative powers that be would be able to move in and take over the nation and move it in the “right” direction. In fact, Derbyshire is so against the equality of women that he has devoted an entire section of his book, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, to this outlandish and misogynist argument. 

In the section entitled “The Case Against Female Suffrage”, Derbyshire attempts to lay out a case supporting these preposterous idea that half of this nation's population should be denied the constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. His basic argument seems to be that the country survived just fine in the past before women could vote and now that the fairer sex has been allowed involvement in America's political process we have a Democratic President.

But surely he is the oddball, black sheep among the conservative movement, and they could not really believe that women should have their right to vote taken away, could they? One of conservative's town criers, Ann Coulter, made her desire for taking the right to vote away from women quite clear with the following statement in the New York Observer's October 2007 interview when she made the following statement:

“If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine, but I don't think it's going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women.”

Other right wing go-getters have espoused the blatant sexist rants as well, such as this clip of radio personality Rush Limbaugh who is speaking about a report on CNN Money about women and the economy which he discredits by saying that it was done by a “chick reporter” and later drops the sexist term again when he complains that “the whole culture has been chickafied” and responds to a statement that women should have more say in politics as “the scariest thing I have heard this week.” He then tries to claim that it is not sexist and defends Ann Coulter's previous statements on taking a woman's right to vote away.

Apparently someone forgot to tell Ann Coulter that she is supposed to be a woman too, isn't she? And the right's poster child, Sarah Palin who is perhaps one of the scariest people in the country and is nearly as insane as Glenn Beck, but she too is a woman as is Michelle Bachmann the hysterical right wing extremist in Congress.

So do those women have a right to vote? This seems to be bit of a twisted hypocrisy and it would seem that two years later, this view of women being too stupid to vote is still going strong with the right winged freedom hawks that accuse everyone else of being a fascist while they are trying to take away the rights of everyone who disagrees with them...ironic is it not?