University of Washington has given Phyllis Schafly an honorary degree. She was the strongest advocate against the Equal Rights Amendment, which was then not passed and has been a critic of the Feminist Movement.
The university's alumna are protesting that she received the degree, even to the point of boycotting graduation exercises.
When interviewed by the alumna on her views about the protest, she first of all criticised the protestors for having nothing better to do with their exessive amount of free time and implied they ought to be out working to pay their ways to college instead of having their parents or scholarships doing so. In light of her criticism of their activism, perhaps she should have been home baking cookies or cleaning the house instead of protesting the Equal Rights Amendment.
When questioned on one of her statements that Feminists want women to think that they can't succeed, she replied that women's courses teach women that marriage is unfair and that men are natural batterers. In the interview she implied that women are liars in cases of battering by a husband that ended in rape and use this as an excuse for divorce. I'm not sure about her knowledge of the legal process of divorce, but having been divorced myself, I know that it certainly does not require a rape indictment to acquire one.
There are some narrow focused teachings on feminism, but one need not even look to that to see that violence or the threat of it is one of the main solutions used by our punitive society, nation and males when they decide that behavior is not a choice, but should be enforced. Whether it be through physical violence, the threat of it or intimidation by words or implication, this is a very real condition that effects men, women and children.
On Shlafly's view that when one enters into the marriage contract that sex is an enforced right is an obvious misunderstanding of intimacy and a negation of human rights. Whether to have sex or not is the right for every human being to choose. Marriages are annuled if the marriage is not consumated and a divorce can occur if a couple's relationship erodes or fails to develop, but neither partner is obligated to provide sex if intimacy is lacking between them. If something is wrong in the relationship, sex is not owed, but the cause of the trouble must be pursued and hopefully corrected. Perhaps Shlafly's marriage was one ruled by contracts and duties, but to recommend that other unions should reduce the closest of relationships to a business debt is degrading.
Read the entire article here:
http://media.www.studlife.com/media/storage/paper337/news/2008/05/05/News/Students.Organize.To.Protest.Schlafly.Degree-3364820.shtml
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