Libertarianism wouldn’t lead me to object to the Catholic church restricting the priesthood to men, or the Boy Scouts restricting membership to boys.

Minor quibble:

Priesthood to men who vow to remain celibate and are in good standing with the church, who have not transitioned from female to male.

Boy Scouts restricting membership to boys and men not known to be gay or bisexual. *

Spoofed in “Chuck and Larry” where one of them (the father of two) gets told “we won’t need you anymore, we’re full”, and the point is pushed to say that it is indeed his alleged homosexuality that’s the issue, and it wasn’t an issue before Chuck and Larry got married.

*I don’t know if the equivalent for girls also restricts it to straight girls or women only.

Of course. But I agree with Amp, it depends on the guy. I think largely, lower income men are raked across the coals more than higher income men - especially when it comes to % of income that goes to child support. But that’s a whole other discussion. And there is also discrimination against women, but I will go out on a limb (without any research or stats to back me up) and say by and large, I do have the impression that men who want and expect to be involved parents get shafted big time by the family court system in the US. In general, the family court system is pretty broken…

Intersections of inequality matter in any discussion, and the father’s rights in child custody/child support cases are no different. However, I would argue that it is the rigid gender role expectations that create this bias against fathers - the rigid gender role expectations that in so many other ways benefit men (they are better paid, more respected in the public eye, free from many mundane childcare and housework tasks, etc). These expectations bite ANY man in the ass if what he truly wants is to be an involved parent in his child’s life. (whether divorced or not, consider the crap my husband went through when he was a SAHD - stay at home dad - there were not Mommy and Me classes he could really attend because people are suspect of a man attending those with his child and really, it wouldn’t be the socially benficial experience it would be for another woman… the teasing he took from friends and family, the way my own family treated him because he wasn’t “providing” for his family - it was awful and had the roles been reversed it would not have happened to me at all).

Ultimately, I think it’s really hard for men to be involved fathers - they have an uphill battle - but it’s also highly rewarding. I really recommend “No Man’s Land” by… Karen…? Sorry, her name has left my mind, but the title is accurate - it’s an excellent bit of qualitative research on mostly middle class white men and their parenting styles. The reason that being an involved father is such an uphill battle though is largely due to the sexism and patriarchy that *usually* benefits men.

Emma Goldman is on my “Heroes” list, but I must disagree with her here. Anarcy is a contradiction in fact. With anarchy, there is nothing to prevent local or “private” tyranies of force. When states fail, when there is REAL anarchy, the result, regardless of time or place, is warlordism, which is hardly good for most women. When the attorneys that work in the domestic violence unit of my legal aid firm take on a client, we WANT the state to impose its will - AGAINST the abuser. Anarchy ALLOWS men’s homes to become their castles with them as the kings. (As long as they can defend it against invaders on their own.)

First, based on what I know of his other research, I do not trust Lott’s numbers unless confirmed by other researchers.

Next, state spending, by itself, is a horrid measure of degree of libertarianism, one heavily influenced by the fusionism I meantioned earlier. You could spend X amount of money preventing worker from crossing the border or paying beuracrats to administer wage and price controls. Or you could spend X amount of money on parks or libraries that individuals can use as they please. And did you get $X from a progressive individual income tax, a wage tax, a head tax, a sin tax, a food tax, a luxury tax, a land value tax, a progressive corporate tax, or toll fees? You could help the poor through a Land Value Tax whose proceeds are distributed as a basic income, or you could help the poor by raising the minimum wage. The rent-sharing scheme would show up as state spending while the minimum wage would not, but which is more freedom-oriented? Censorship laws are pretty cheap, too. You simply cannot say, as I have seen some libertarians say, that an overall 40% tax rate equals 60% freedom. The extent to which the method of tax collection compels work and the extent to which the way the money is spent extends or constricts freedom is important as well. In the years before adoption of the 19th Amendment, I would bet that the states that had extended the vote to women had on average, far fewer Jim Crow laws designed to keep blacks in de facto servitude and far fewer lynchings of anti-Jim Crow dissedents with implict state approval. But Jim Crow laws and privatised lynchings are pretty cheap from the state’s point of view, and do not make much of a dent on the state’s ledgers.

Can there be a discussion of gender based courtroom policies that may lead to a conclusion that fathers are discriminated against?

Sure, why not? (But I’m not saying I’d agree with that conclusion; I think the reality is much more complex. Some fathers are discriminated against, but so also are some mothers. And not all courtrooms are alike.)

Some of us are comfortable with the term anarcha-feminist. Don’t know you well enough to know if that fits you, but folks like emma goldman voltarine decleyre lucy parsons carol erlich carol moore had a lot to say about the state is a patriarchy that oppresses woman and other people. I agree with your points that the libertarian movement tended to be pretty obtuse about gender aspects of the struggle for liberty.

It is right and proper, from a libertarian perspective, to deny the franchise to groups systematically biased against liberalism, because this is likely to produce a more liberal government.

I so totally agree. I think the franchise should be denied to everyone who disagrees with Me.

Awesome! We can thus dispense with the democratic formality of voting “rights” and get down to allocating the franchise on some rational basis. I suggest that I should hold the vote, and can assign additional votes to people whom I approve of, on the rational basis that this will serve my interests admirably.

Hmmm….

I understand libertarians band together in common cause to ward off the forces of those who would intrude upon their autonomy. They call this common cause “government.” Alas, governments can be every bit as oppressive as the outsiders the libertarians seek to resist. What’s a libertarian to do? “Our salvation is the Equal Protection Clause, which requires the democratic majority to accept for themselves and their loved ones what they impose on you and me.” (Justice Antonin Scalia, Cruzan v. Missouri Dept. of Health, 1990). “There is no more effective practical guarantee against arbitrary and unreasonable government than to require that the principles of law which officials would impose upon a minority must be imposed generally.” (Justice Robert Jackson, concurring, REA vs. NY, 1949).

In short, I expect libertarians to advocate broad voting rights as a means of ensuring that their own voting rights would not be suspended. As Martin Niemoeller observed, “In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up.” I would expect real libertarians to be among the first to speak up.

A much better heuristic would be to deny the franchise to those who receive in the year preceding the election more from the government than they pay in taxes.

An interesting idea. But how to measure what people receive from government? Clearly among the biggest recipients of the government’s largess under the current administration are the wealthy: they get huge tax cuts as the government deficit explodes. But you can only measure that benefit relative to some earlier version of the tax code. Which version would be the right version from which to measure?

More generally, which of us do NOT receive more benefit than we pay in taxes? If you ever doubt the value of your citizenship, just take a cab somewhere and ask the driver where he’s from. I read the occasional report of some professional who paid a fortune to be smuggled out of, say, China and into the US. This individual loses his identify, his professional credentials, his family, all to enjoy the remaining fraction of his life struggling to understand a foreign tongue and foreign culture, constantly hiding from the INS - all to enjoy breathing American air. My US citizenship has afforded me vastly more benefit at vastly lower cost, but because I received it as a birthright I simply take it for granted.

If there were a free market for US citizenship, what price do you think citizenship would command? And would you sell? If not, then I conclude that you are receiving full payment for your tax dollars.

Thus, by my analysis of Brandon Berg’s standard, there’s be pretty much no one left to vote!

It is right and proper, from a libertarian perspective, to deny the franchise to groups systematically biased against liberalism, because this is likely to produce a more liberal government. Women are one such group, although their bias is relatively weak. Government employees and welfare recipients tend to be much more strongly biased against liberalism.

I’m not too big on denying the franchise to women, partly because their anti-liberal bias is fairly weak, and partly because it’s political poison. A much better heuristic would be to deny the franchise to those who receive in the year preceeding the election more from the government than they pay in taxes.

Decnavda:
The specific measure which Lott used was government spending at the state level, and how much it increased in states which extended the franchise to women prior to the 19th Amendment.

I think it’s fairly obvious that women (or at least single women) tend not to be as liberal as men on economic issues, but even on the issue of abortion, which is generally considered a “women’s issue,” every poll I’ve seen on the topic suggests that men are slightly more pro-choice than women are.

Many of the comments on this thread seem to be written by people who would be eager to set themselves up on that throne, to define “Feminist” once and for all, and to determine for sure who qualifies. Sadly perhaps (or, perhaps, fortunately for the rest of us) these people seem to disagree quite a bit amongst themselves, let alone with the rest of the world.

Like all Orthodoxies, the intricacies of the required beliefs become more and more impenetrable to those (few) people who care to try to figure it out.

I certainly don’t qualify as a good Feminist according to some of the people making the definitions here. But that doesn’t really bother me, as I reflect that that is true of nearly everyone. Like the Kingdom of Heaven, only a Very Few make the grade.

That’s not feminism at all or if it is it’s a very cconstricted view because it doesn’t do anything to address the basic social structures of oppression.

Everyone can have a chance, and you can still have pornography. Everyone can have a chance and you can still have prostitution of women both of which are institutionalized forms of misogyny.

It’s not a relevant question. Feminists insist that women have autonomy over our bodies. Feminists issues are focused on the material conditions of women’s lives.

Feminists seek a peaceful revolution and transformation of all societies towards liberating women which is not limited to simply maximizing women’s freedom in a misogynistic culture, but rather, it’s to dissolve the institutions in this society used to subordinate women as a class of people and thereby benefit from that subordination.