When the Homily is about Immunology

Marxists Feminist changed her tune

I love it! Her name was Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and I just read about her in an Op-Ed in one of the local rags here in Seattle. Of course, being a Seattle paper the Op-Ed would not have been carried if it did not at some level lament this Marxist feminist becoming a traditionalist catholic.

As a feminist, I regret that the answer on which Fox-Genovese eventually settled was a return to a clear-cut division of male and female family roles.

Eeeek, gasp....a difference between woman and men?!!??! Say it ain't so!

Anyway, intrigued by this woman's story I googled and found this interview with both Elizabeth and her husband Eugene. They certainly sound like my sort of people...bring out the bourbon and let us sit on the front porch for awhile. Here's some fun quotes from the interview:

TAE: In Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life, you refer to mothers who "work out of necessity." Are the yuppies who place their 3-month-olds in day care buying into the materialistic culture you often criticize?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: Of course they are. I have enough respect for freedom, and enough horror at the sanctimonious bullying that surrounds us, not to tell other people what to do. But yes, I think that some significant percentage of the yuppie career women who are putting their kids in day care at a very early age are driven by some combination of the consumer culture and a misguided sense that they have to be as busy as their husbands. The necessity is more psychological than material; it’s tragic.

...

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: In order to have greater specialization in sex roles, we need something that the elite, including the conservative elite, isn’t vocally, visibly giving us: a defense of marriage, especially where there are children, that really does make divorce more difficult. You can’t specialize in being a woman if he can walk out with his secretary, or young law associate, without ever looking back. That’s self-immolation.

We need social respect, and even support, for motherhood. We should have deductions for children, and less emphasis on deductions for child care and the earned income tax credit, which tend to support single mothers and working women at the expense of women who stay home.

...

TAE: You encouraged the Citadel’s legal team to ask expert witnesses for the opposition which they hated more, men or the South. Which was it?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: In a lot of ways the South has become a symbol of what the feminist elite doesn’t like about men. The driving thrust of that case was to destroy the Citadel as we know it. But beyond that, to deny to men single-sex education, even if it had to be denied to women as the price, because single-sex education just might help to train men to be better and more responsible men.

...

TAE: Are you a Southerner?

MR. GENOVESE: In some ways I have felt a Southerner all my life. My background is Sicilian: it’s all the same. But that doesn’t make me a real Southerner—just ask any real Southerner, no matter how gracious.

...

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: When you bring these issues of eugenics up to today’s debates, the contradictions in all of this are absolutely mesmerizing. Because it’d be a piece of cake to argue that radical pro-abortion and pro-right-to-die starts with your personal choice, and yet the next step is euthanasia, where who gets to choose is ambiguous. Not to mention sex selection and the obsession with amniocentesis: absolutely a new eugenics. The folks who push this, however, are the first to scream against any hint of biological base for racial difference, which in fact is extraordinarily suspect.

On the other hand, sex differences are real differences. So you have the contradiction of people who are defending the right of biologically fit individuals to shape who shall live and who shall die, which is very eugenicist, at the same time they are denying the significance of biological difference between the sexes.

...

TAE: Will women benefit if the courts bring us gay marriage?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: In my humble opinion, no one will benefit, and marriage as we have known it will virtually disappear from the face of the Earth. If we have same-sex marriage, we will have it on the grounds that marriage exists to provide financial benefits and personal gratification for individuals.

Same-sex marriage is the logical outcome of instrumental sex, sexual equality, equality in sexual pleasure between women and men, divorce and abortion at will. It reduces marriage to a matter of personal fulfillment or gratification, and contractual convenience. And the whole notion of marriage as founding families, the integral unit that binds society, will be lost.

TAE: Why does lesbianism occupy such a hallowed place in contemporary feminism?

MR. GENOVESE: They run the mimeograph machines.

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: And because it’s been able to take the moral high ground of anti-male purity. Feminist theory has to get more and more radical to justify its existence; if it simply merges with the mainstream, there’s no reason not to absorb women’s studies into other departments.

...

TAE: Novelist Walker Percy theorized that because the South is still somewhat influenced by Christianity, maybe this time the South will save the Union. Do you put any stock in that kind
of hopefulness?

MR. GENOVESE: I still threaten to run for governor of Georgia on a program of throwing the Yankees out, but much of the old folkways are going, along with the small towns, and the South is becoming more like the North. The problems that we are dealing with are now national.

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: More people do go to church down here. More people maintain contact with their relatives and their families, nuclear and extended, and more Southerners return home.


Ok, Sue, let's pack up we're headed back to Kentucky.