Repeal Women's Suffrage?

"[W]e must repeal the 19th Amendment. Yes, the one granting suffrage to women," writes Thomas Mitchell (pictured), editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "Because? Well, women are biased."

This was the core argument of a piece by Mitchell apparently intended to bait those whom he dismisses as "the politically correct." In his follow-up post, Mitchell explains that his call for revoking women's suffrage — a position he supports with denigrating stereotypes of women and unrelated polling results — was just a little joke.

For those still reeling from the text above, allow me to reiterate: the editor of an American newspaper with a circulation approaching 200,000 readers suggested revoking women's suffrage as a jab at feminists and our allies.

Almost as puzzling as Mitchell's conclusions are the arguments he offers in support. To back up the notion that women should be disenfranchised — because they are biased, he says — Mitchell cites a few polls revealing a difference between how men and women perceive various candidates vying to represent Nevada in the U.S. Senate. As far as I can tell, Mitchell's underlying assumption is that men are not biased. Because women poll differently than men, ergo, women must be biased.

In Mitchell's second post, he claims that his initial call for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment was intended to expose President Barack Obama's supporters as hypocrites. Here his argument seems to be that supporting the disenfranchisement of women is morally equivalent to the comments made by Larry Summers when he was president of Harvard University. So now that Summers serves in the Obama administration, Mitchell believes that this ill-advised comparison supports his notion that progressives are susceptible to the same charges we level at those endorsing racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory policies.

In his attempt to demonstrate ... I'm not sure what, Mitchell accidentally reveals two things. First, in triggering a vitriolic response, Mitchell lent credibility to the notion that there are indeed reactionary, extremist elements of American society (and his prior writings gave his readership no reason to discount his membership among them). And second, Mitchell's writing and thinking are so muddled that the responses he received questioning his intelligence probably convey more substance than you should expect from his next column.

I have to second Steve Benen's more restrained response to this contemptible stoking of the culture wars: "Remember, this guy runs a major[?] newspaper. The mind reels."

Photo credit: Boonerator