Tea Party favorite Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) addressed a Women Impacting Nation meeting in Boca Raton, Fla., last week. According to Tanya Somanader of Thinkprogress.com, WIN's mission is to "educate and equip women with knowledge of God's truth" and "to support those who take a stand for those Judeo-Christian values upon which our country is founded." West used examples of "historical fiction" to instruct attendees on the proper role for American women — namely, to make strong men.
West first weaved the ancient society of Sparta — a culture that practiced eugenics and inspired Adolf Hitler — into an example of the role of women. "What made the Spartan men strong, it was the Spartan women," he said. "Because the Spartan women at the age of 9 gave up their male sons" to train for the army. West then exhorted conservative women to come forth and "lock shields" to "strengthen up the men who are going to the fight for you." Painting women's rights advocates as "women that have been neutering American men," West charged attendees to fight these apparent castrators who want to force male subservience.
West: "We need you to come in and lock shields, and strengthen up the men who are going to the fight for you. To let these other women know on the other side — these planned Parenthood women, the Code Pink women and all of these women that have been neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness — to let them know that we are not going to have our men become subservient. That's what we need you to do. Because if you don't, then the debt will continue to grow … deficits will continue to grow."
Allen West has clearly lost his mind, borrowing stories from the film 300 and representing it as "historical truth." Since so many of us are too lazy to read and find out facts for ourselves, then perhaps citing film references as historical truth works for this particular audience. How ironic is it that groups like WIN, who are only allowed to exist based on the social change spurred on by "liberals" and "liberal women," take that freedom and use it to attempt to turn back the clock on women's rights?
These are the same women who organize, strategize, plan and execute to promote their ideology, but would have us believe that they are subservient to the men in their lives. Yeah, OK. We suppose they are cut from the same cloth as those Republican women who work every day but spew rhetoric that women should stay at home.
As for West, perhaps he should find the line between reality and fiction. The reality of women's rights is that it has nothing to do with men. It is about helping women have equal access to all of the rights of society, not about castrating men.
We find it surprising that West, who has two daughters and a wife who earned an MBA and Ph.D., has such an archaic view of women and their role in society. We hope he wouldn't want his daughters to go out and reproduce at a young age to build armies, as opposed to getting a good Christian education. Shame on West for blaming women for the deficit, when it was a Congress full of men and male presidents who made decisions that have yielded these results.
Conservative men should stop blaming women for their failures in life. After all, if women have no value in the world other than to reproduce and do what men tell them to do, then how could that possibly be true?
Read more at Thinkprogress.com.
In other news: Stevie Wonder Inducted Into Apollo Hall of Fame.