COMMENTARY | Can we all stop pretending that our country hasn't gone wackadoodle now? Please, can we? Because the insanity has gotten beyond difficult to take. We're treating our Constitution like a cafeteria plan, and it's not acceptable. No, wait, it's worse than not acceptable; it's downright un-American with a capital "U."
Fox News guest and Sean Hannity bud Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson has figured out the root of our problems, he claimed in a "sermon" delivered to the congregation of YouTube. He knows where we went wrong.
Giving women the right to vote.
Did I make that up? No I did not. I couldn't have I tried. Lucky for us wrongful voters with woman-brains, the kind Peterson claims can't deal with anything without, as Raw Story quoted, "freaking out," those crafty "evil-minded" suffragettes tricked men into turning women's right to vote into a constitutional amendment. Number 19, to be exact.
Passed nearly 100 years ago, in 1919; ratified in 1920.
Yes, Rev. Peterson, times were much better then. Especially for an African-American man such as yourself. Whose own right to vote was not completely guaranteed until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, despite the 15th Amendment ensuring the right for all men to vote, regardless of color or previous servitude, passed after the Civil War. You can thank the good-ole-days' good ole boy Jim Crow for that.
With slurry ineffectualness, Peterson says, when prompted by someone off camera, "there are some women out there who can make sound decisions, but most cannot," (@ about 1:05), a thought that is later followed, as Raw Story reports, with the statement that "women don't have love." Well, for him, that should not be so surprising. His anti-woman tirade is a good 12 minutes long.
So who wouldn't think he'd fit right in as a Fox News guest? Certainly not board member of Peterson's BOND organization, Hannity, who invited Peterson on his show to share his "outsight" ("insight" doesn't have an antonym, so I had to make one myself). The visit prompted a Facebook page calling for Hannity's resignation from the organization.
It would have gone well, if it wasn't for those darn meddling kids. Oops, I mean that darn meddling woman, Kristen Powers, who, even as a Fox News correspondent herself, took exception to being on the show with a man she called a misogynist.
That's right, this man is so out there on his views about women that he drove someone employed by Fox News to use the word misogynist.
These aren't his only views from the Land of the Not Quite Sane. Peterson has said that slavery was a good thing, and advocated "putting black people on the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working."
Yes, he did.
He also advocates for the right of men to hit women, a point that he clarified by saying "in self-defense" but he just as well could have said "as long as she deserves it."
So here we are, women and men who don't hate women. Here we are in this unfathomable place where views like Peterson's, outrageous statements based in lunacy, are treated as appropriate commentary for a news program. There's only one answer to a country that accepts any of his statements as a meaningful addition to political discourse.
It's time to break out the tinfoil hats.
