Christina Hoff Sommers Rips Academic Feminists
"Feminist misinformation is pervasive."
So says Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In this article, she's once again taking on academic feminism in a few of its many guises (AEI, 6/29/09). Her first example is a law school textbook on domestic violence law edited by Professor Nancy K. D. Lemon. Sommers gets as far as the first page when she runs into this astonishing locution:
The history of women's abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. . . . The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man's right thumb. The law became commonly know as 'The Rule of Thumb.' These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe.
As Sommers points out, Romulus was a fictional character and the Rule of Thumb had nothing to do with men beating their wives, whatever fantasies to the contrary feminists may choose to indulge in. My favorite part, which Sommers doesn't mention, is the last sentence in which the writer claims that the English Common Law perpetuated traditions "in most of Europe." Uh, no it didn't. English Common Law governed England; the rest of Europe had its own set of laws and traditions.
As good as Sommers is at skewering this type of inanity, she gives these writers too much credit. The paragraph quoted above looks more like the effort of a mediocre high school student who waited to write a paper until the night before it was due. Romulus of Rome? Can't you just see a group of high school history teachers sitting around the teacher's lounge getting a laugh out of that one? I can.
The intellectual dishonesty of feminism has a long and sorry history. As Sommers points out, there are plenty of feminists whose scholarship is scrupulous. But there are plenty more who think nothing of producing the most slipshod work imaginable.
But here's another fact - if we didn't let them get away with it, they wouldn't do it. There was a time when American academia would have shouted this stuff down with derision.
There may have even been a time that journalists were actually expected to know what they were talking about and get their facts straight. So if someone claimed, as feminist watchdog Katherine Hanson actually did, that over four million women are killed every year by domestic violence (she was off by a factor of about 4,000) the writer or an editor might actually have checked up on the claim and refused to publish it when it turned out to be so wildly wrong.
And there might have been a time when Congress didn't just swallow hook, line and sinker claims of, for example, domestic violence advocates that are well-known to be wrong.
Sadly, it seems those times have passed.
|
| More from Robert Franklin, Esq.
Stumble It!
