Twilight Sparkle,
The fact you dismiss certain women who voluntarily stay at home, raise a family, and support their husbands as "brainwashed" is insult to those women who do so. It would be just as insulting were you to call any African American "brainwashed" who was a conservative. Saying so implies that neither groups are intelligent enough to think for themselves, especially in a society in which both groups have had more social, economic, and political opportunity than in any other place or time in history. It is this attitude that all of any group of our society should think or act a certain way by definition of their biological or racial identity is the same thing you accuse those on the right of doing.
Do you mind if I field this?
Women who are voluntarily housewives are not necessarily brainwashed, and black conservatives are not necessarily brainwashed. Simfan is certainly not brainwashed. I don't know J.C. Watts, but he doesn't strike me as the brainwashed type. My aunt, who is the only person I know who regularly beats me at Scrabble and who spend a lot of her teen years with various Cold War-era government organizations trying to recruit her for various things but who instead decided to be a housewife, is...well, there were probably social pressures of the time involved in her decision-making process, but she is genuinely happy with the way her life is gone and now, at least, is certainly not brainwashed.
However!
Structurally, maybe not necessarily at the level of the individual woman or black person or gay person or poor person or member of an unpopular religion or whatever, the phenomenon of people really buying heart and soul into the
structural rhetoric that such things are
necessary features of the way things are supposed to be...smacks of something that is not exactly sound policy-making or free individual choice.
In related news, I seriously doubt that CaDan has served a day in his life, and even if he has Clarence as usual puts forth what we might call the 'old traditional-minded veteran' position (with which I do disagree, I should make clear) in a far more reasonable and articulate way.
