A Peek Down the Slope
This article by Stanley Kurtz appeared only briefly at National Review Online. Mr. Kurtz is an expert on the modern issues surrounding marriage, with a special focus on Europe as a lesson for the United States. In this article, he reports on the politics of marriage in Sweden. I had always heard that Sweden is a very liberal country, but until reading this article I hadn’t realized just what that entails.
The article details the formation of a gender-oriented Feminist Initiative (“FI”) party, which broke away from Sweden’s Left party—to go further left. Kurtz says that the mainline feminists had been pushing an initiative to force the boards of publicly traded Swedish companies to be 25% female, but it seemed to be failing. So one of the farther left feminists, Gudrun Schyman, proposed something even more radical, which split the Left party and helped form FI:
A few months before Schyman bolted the Left party to form the Feminist Initiative, she had stirred up controversy by proposing a “man tax:” a tax leveled only on men, to help pay for the government’s extensive array of feminist-run shelters for battered women. Schyman’s “man tax” idea stirred outrage from more moderate commentators like Liza Marklund: “To declare that all men are guilty of all rapes, that all men are guilty of violence against women — that’s not just offensive and wrong; if the purpose is to get anywhere with this issue it’s just plain stupid.”
No doubt there are plenty of Women’s Studies professors in the US who would enthusiastically embrace such a proposal. Fortunately, they would be considered lunatics and pariahs. But not so in Sweden:
So long as the “man tax” and business-board quotas were the issue, Schyman’s promise to “break down the patriarchal order of power” through FI (the Feminist Initiative) enjoyed wide support. Early polling showed that five percent of the public would “definitely” vote for FI, and an amazing 20-25 percent said they would at least consider supporting FI. Numbers like that could easily have brought business-board quotas, a man-tax, and many other feminist proposals into law.
Predictably, the radicals wanted more. They wanted to change Sweden’s rape laws to produce more rape convictions. They wanted to force wage equality between jobs in which the workers are predominantly men or women. They wanted to force men to take paternity leave, on the assumption that this would make them do more household work—or push the children into state-run day care. They actually won an entitlement to lesbian couples for state-funded insemination, with the clear possibility that a child could have three parents. And the Miss Sweden pageant was canceled for the first time since 1952.
Then the mask slipped. Last summer saw the broadcast of a television documentary titled “The Gender War,” which showed just how bizarre the militant feminists really were. The most politically important segment featured Ireen von Wachenfeldt, chair of the government’s women’s shelters—the same shelters that FI had already proposed to fund with a special tax on men. Ms. von Wachenfeldt’s government agency had printed (and presumably distributed) excerpts from the SCUM Manifesto, which in its first sentence calls on “civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females . . . [to] destroy the male sex.” From Kurtz’s article:
SCUM goes on to say: “To call a man an animal is to flatter him: he’s a machine, a walking dildo.” Asked by the film-maker if she agreed, Von Wachenfeldt said, “Yes, man is an animal. Don’t you think so?”
This produced a fierce political backlash against the Feminist Initiative, but the radicals were slow to learn their lesson. After a bitter power struggle at its September 2005 convention, the group purged its “moderates” (by their standards) and went even further left: It elected as its leader a feminist professor known for calling women who sleep with men “traitors to their gender.” And the group emerged from its conference with a proposal to abolish marriage and replace it with domestic partnerships.
The group’s political influence collapsed shortly thereafter, mostly due to the documentary and some excesses at the group’s convention. (A line from one song performed at the convention was: “F***ing man, we’re going to chop you to bits.”) So the other liberal parties in Sweden will likely keep nibbling away at marriage, but its outright abolition isn’t on the political horizon—for now.
The small lesson here is that this is where the liberals in our country want to take us with their various assaults on marriage. And he’s right, of course. The slope really is slippery, and anyone who is paying attention can easily see where it leads.
The bigger lesson is that radicals of all stripes are never satisfied. Whether they’re radical on gender, the environment, animal rights, race, or Islam, the belief’s content matters less than its structure. They all want to destroy the world as it is to achieve whatever utopia they believe is just around the corner.
And there’s one bit of comfort: This story from Sweden is a reminder that the radicals do nearly as much damage to each other as they do to the rest of us. Of course, throwing people out of a political party is trivial compared Stalin’s purges, but the impulse and social dynamics are the same. The radicals always ultimately destroy themselves, but they cause an awful lot of misery in the meantime.