By Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Clash Daily Contributor
Former comedian Al Franken is resigning his seat as a Minnesota senator. Multiple women accused him of sexual harassment. The most notorious incident was the photo of him groping a female journalist, while she slept.
In his resignation speech, he made this astonishing claim:
“I am proud that, during my time in the Senate, I have used my power to be a champion for women – and that I have earned a reputation as someone who respects the women I work alongside every day.”
No doubt, Franken is referring to his 100% pro-abortion voting record, as tabulated by both NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the independent site, Vote Smart.
I see no surprise here at all. Voting for abortion on demand, paid for if necessary by taxpayers, is only “pro-woman” in a most peculiar sense. It is “pro-women-deserve-to-have-as-much-sex-as-men-do-and-on-the-same-terms.” This is “equality,” you see.
Just one problem. Men don’t have babies, trans-activists to the contrary notwithstanding. For women to have sex on the same terms as men, they must get rid of the baby.
In a sane world, a man of any amount of wealth, power, and influence would understand that children need their own parents. People should only have sex with someone with whom they are willing to co-parent. Which means, be committed to for a lifetime. Which means, or used to mean, getting married. Preferably before the child is even conceived. This connection between sex, babies, and marriage used to be understood by all social classes.
Any sane person should realize that sex has different consequences for men than for women. But in our world, recognizing and making provision for these differences between men and women is discrimination against women. The ideologues of the Sexual Revolution insist that men and women are identical.
This is the real significance of Franken’s 100% pro-abortion voting record. It is not about “liberation” or “equality” for women. It never was. It is now, and always has been, about providing rich and powerful men sexual access to women’s bodies without having to face the natural consequences.
Men like Franken, Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer have plenty of money, power, and influence. Their privilege should not permit them to do whatever the hell they feel like, and face no consequences. But in our Sexual Revolutionary world, they generally do get to do whatever they want.
As long as they can keep all these pesky women from complaining about being used.
Why do women among the Elite classes put up with it? Delayed childbearing is the price of entry into the professions and elite jobs. Women who are highly placed in politics, law, and media cannot imagine how they would have the jobs they have, without abortion as a back-up for contraceptive failure. That is why so many women among Elites are completely committed to the Sexual Revolution. The fact that some women want their babies, doesn’t dawn on them. Neither does the possibility that some women want their babies’ father to be committed to them. Nor does the possibility that they themselves might be better off in a different, more respectful, more reality-based, sexual regime.
When Franken’s senate colleagues, male and female alike, claimed they agonized over asking him to step aside, you may safely assume they were calculating the political costs and benefits. The real impact on real women: not so much. And calling into question the underlying premises of the Sexual Revolution: absolutely out of the question.
Elites, male and female, in both parties, in business, law, media and academia, like the Sexual Revolution, just the way it is. Their current concern for victims of sexual assault and harassment is strictly for show, and will quickly fade. The men like an ideological system that presents them will a steady flow of willing sex partners. Elite men and women alike like a legal system that permits them to wipe out pregnancies, and hence excuse them from the “inconveniences” of parenthood.
Don’t be fooled by Senator Franken’s faux apologies and his colleagues’ faux outrage. He, and they, are only sorry he got caught.
Image: CC by 2.0; https://www.flickr.com/photos/56881272@N02/6761048993
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse is the Founder and President of the Ruth Institute, which is running the world’s only campaign to end family breakdown.
