Clarence Darrow said, in his famous closing argument that saved Dr. Ossian Sweet and his family from a murder conviction,
“I am the last one to come here to stir up race hatred, or any other hatred. I do not believe in the law of hate. I may not be true to my ideals always, but I believe in the law of love, and I believe you can do nothing with hatred.”
Darrow was a progressive, you know, and sometimes a radical one. He was, after all, a great admirer of John Brown. A constant theme in his work, however, both in court and in his many debates and essays, was avoiding hatred, and seeking love. In another of his famous trial, in which he saved thrill-killer Nathan Leopold and Dickie Loeb from the gallows, he concluded his closing argument for mercy this way:
If I should succeed in saving these boys’ lives and do nothing for the progress of the law, I should feel sad, indeed. If I can succeed, my greatest reward and my greatest hope will be that I have done something for the tens of thousands of other boys, or the countless unfortunates who must tread the same road in blind childhood that these poor boys have trod, that I have done something to help human understanding, to temper justice with mercy, to overcome hate with love.
I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar Khayyam. It appealed to me as the highest that can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all:
“So I be written in the Book of Love,
Do not care about that Book above.
Erase my name or write it as you will,
So I be written in the Book of Love.“
But at some point, and relatively recently, wielding hate as a weapon has become a fetish of the Left that once styled itself in Darrow’s tradition. Even though today’s progressives and Democrats loudly deplore what they call “hate speech,” even to the point of insisting that speech they disapprove of is unprotected by the First Amendment, they are willing and eager to not only deploy the rhetoric of hate but to encourage hate in furtherance of their own agenda.
This is undeniable; mine is an objective observation. Donald Trump was defeated by four years of carefully cultivated (but still reckless and destructive) hate. (Not surprisingly, his supporters—and Trump himself—hated right back. Hate is like that.) As the year closed and a new one dawned, Lefist allies like Twitter, Facebook and the Big Tech companies escalated their campaign to silence opinions that their highly selective and biased definitions of “hate” required, while allowing other, equally inflammatory opinions from those with whom the metaphorically traveled ideologically (or who were the enemies of their enemies, as the saying goes.) As the New York Post said of Twitter, “All the evidence suggests Twitter doesn’t police according to any neutral standards, but with an eye on what bothers its woke workforce.”
On January 19, the latest entry in the category of approved woke bigotry and hate arrived. HarperCollins released “I Hate Men,” a recent French sensation by Pauline Harmange and translated by Natasha Lehrer. Gushes the Amazon blurb,
More than a banned book, the must-read on feminism, sexism and the patriarchy for every woman…Women, especially feminists and lesbians, have long been accused of hating men. Our instinct is to deny it at all costs. (After all, women have been burnt at the stake for admitting to less.) But what if mistrusting men, disliking men – and yes, maybe even hating men – is, in fact, a useful response to sexism? What if such a response offers a way out of oppression, a means of resistance? What if it even offers a path to joy, solidarity and sisterhood?
Hey, I never thought of that! What if bigotry makes you happy? Being happy is good, right?
I feel silly even having to point this out, but deciding that you hate a group of people, any group of people, based solely on their membership in that group and without regard for the character and actions of the individuals in that group, is not just unethical and wrong. It is intellectually indefensible, but more than that, it is the source of most of the violence and conflict in the world throughout history, and perhaps the primary reason the world cannot have peace and prosperity today.
It may be more socially acceptable in the Biden Era to brand all men as terrible—nobody has been banned from Facebook or Twittter for insisting they are—but hating all men is ethically indistinguishable from hating all women, haying all gays, hating transexuals, hating Jews, hating Muslims, hating the rich, hating the poor, hating whites, or hating blacks. There is no ethical or logical distinction: hatred toward all members of a group based on a single characteristic is wrong, and advocating such hate is wrong.
Yet in a fawning article about Harmange’s book in the Times never mentions the fact that the book is per se bigotry, though it does describe, as the author does, the work as misandry, which is a case of res ipsa loquitur. But misandry is reasonable because men deserve to be hated. That’s the book’s theory anyway, and the Times makes no effort to dispute it.
“Some women still believe that calling out men as a group does more harm than good,” Times gender reporter Laura Cappelle tells us. Well that’s encouraging! Some women actually believe that bigotry, blind prejudice and discrimination fueled by blind hate is harmful! I feel much better now. Not all woke women hate me without having met me.
Layers upon layers of dishonesty and hypocrisy. Whatever admirable goals they have or claim to have, modern progressives, unlike Clarence Darrow, do indeed believe in the law of hate, as long as its their hate.
Ethics Alarms 
I’m still struck by the report you cited that twenty-five percent of women under thirty (or some such relatively young age) identify as lesbian while only five percent of women fifty-five or older do so. Sometimes I think women pair up with other women because they simply find men too … challenging. Trust me, there are times I think living with another guy would be a hell of a lot easier than living with you know who. I remember my lesbian piano teacher and friend saying of a woman, “She’s not interested in taking a walk on the wild side.” I really think there’s a significant element of choice involved. It’s really optional. Certainly celebrity women and women politicians get woke points for being lesbians these days. I suppose heterosexuality is really no longer required for the survival of the species.
Can you imagine a New York or Paris publishing house taking on a book titled, “I Hate Women?”
“there are times I think living with another guy would be a hell of a lot easier than living with you know who.”
It’s colder than hell up here and AZ beckons OB; would I get the top bunk and my own loo…?
I mean, desperate times call for desperate measures, but kind of a horrifying prospect, isn’t it?
Well, this is because it is trendy. When I was in graduate school, some of my fellow students went to women’s college like Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, and Mount Holyoke. They told me that during student orientation, they were told that in college, they should experiment with new things, like lesbianism. They were told it was a choice, like becoming a vegetarian. They all needed to try it to see if they liked it. They were kind of pressured to and being a lesbian was got you what today would be called ‘social credit points’. Remember, this was decades ago. Imagine what they do now.
Caramba! That is truly amazing, MR. I bet the lesbian faculty women treated the student “body” as one big happy hunting ground.
When I attended the thirtieth or something reunion of the founding of the girls’ school across the street from my boys college (they’re long since merged), a friend who’d attended the girls’ school and graduated in the first graduating class (’72), said, aghast, after attending a number of the events held by subsequent class members, “I don’t remember us all being lesbians in my class.”
My college girlfriend came over to visit one day after class. She was all excited about androgyny. I guess she’d been reading about the Bloomsbury crowd. Needless to say, I had a hard time sharing her enthusiasm or even displaying any sympathy.
Fortunately, Mrs. OB ran out of scholarship money after a single semester at BU and picked up her BA at various schools over a number of years as we moved around the country getting established. But I doubt she’d have fallen for any of the baloney on offer at schools in the northeast if she had been able to attend.
I check in sometimes with a message board aimed at dating advice for women. More than one poster has lamented she wished she was attracted to other women, or declared she would just date women now, because her experience dating men has been so terrible.
This isn’t men’s fault, it’s the dating culture and system we’re operating in that puts well-meaning men and women in constant contact with the worst of their preferred sex. That’s a whole other article, but I’m sure there’s an element of this causing the trend you cited.
The Simpson’s take on this issue:
Cue Marge: ‘Oh Homie!’
This is to all who are getting into this “any woman (many women) can be lesbians if they want to” bag are confusing sexual liberty in today’s society with natural sexual-partner preference. It’s an easy generalization to fall into. Here’s another generalization, but one borne out by statistical evidence: you might even be able to transform your body to conform to another gender but you will still have the same sexual preference. Being lesbian (or gay) doesn’t come (nor do you, usually) just from wanting or from trying. The L and G of LGBT, by the way, are … different … in as many ways as straight girls and boys — we just got along better. Until the wicked woke women started up.
So, a little review of things that still affect us. (That’s everyone – you, me and the ones who aren’t sure.)
Traditionally — that is, not so many decades ago, and most definitely in my memory — men socialized mainly outside the home and had access to individual activity that included sexual satisfaction elsewhere, while women mainly stayed in the home and, if outside, had fewer opportunities for engaging in social, much less in, erotic exercise. Rremember? Women — of course — were supposed to have no (or far lower) need or desire for sexual activity. In a way, that’s true, though not lessening the equal strength of the desire. Fact was (and is) women’s emotions were often centered on their children for much of the time. It wasn’t a situation where there was some magical kind of extra feeling that wanted to share the exploration of one another’s genitals. When the need was there, women often tried to satisfy all of them, and damped down her own. She might cry on her friend’s shoulder, but it didn’t occur to most to peer under her dear friend’s skirt. It is a matter of fact that boys knew more about their own external genitalia ,,,, and as much as possible about girls’ as well, while .girls had almost no knowledge of their hidden female anatomy. (Most didn’t know how they got pregnant — many, it appears, still don’t, for that matter,) Some never learned they could have orgasmic pleasures because they were so traumatized by blood, they rarely touched themselves.
If you were born in the post-war baby boom your parents were still influenced (one way or another) by the 40s and considerable confusion was taking place: between diametrically opposing images like this:
that suddenly morphed into this:
Girls up to very recently, even before they were fueled by estrogen, were treated differently from boys. They had closer connections to their women friends. In this country, they were allowed, no, more, they were expected from childhood, to walk hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm, dance as couples (this was mandated in all the classes and even proms I remember seeing in school — one of my female cousins was assigned a smaller girl in class as her partner for the year… a misery for both of them), and have frequent sleepovers, hug and kiss each other, At the same time, during both decades, as before in history, any sign of overt sexual behavior between girls caused panic at school and in the family. Instead of allowing girls time to age out of their crushes on older girls – especially ones who liked sports or being “tomboys” or those who weren’t (yet) attractive or self-assured, not ready for boyfriends – once the label of :”lesbian”, whether or not it had any basis, became a public secret, it was a juggernaut. The family often moved away, the girl was punished, often brutally, including serial rape, to “teach her a lesson,” often leading to permanent injury. If the family had money, she could be “put away” as insane. The best that could happen would be that she coped by becoming sexualized – either actively attracting male partners or passively becoming doormats who enabled any abusive males in their lives.
Many of the latte would turn to other women for sex, later on. They were called lesbians then, and they called themselves lesbians or dykes or every other word that was laid on them. But they hadn’t necessarily started out that way. The option of being “straight” had been taken away from them. Many of them live sexually in their minds, in limbo.
We’re just beginning to learn what it was like through the 70s, not just for girls, but about how many boys and men well up through the 90s and declining very very slowly thereafter — those who had naturally high voices or a lisp or gentle movements — had their lives ruined, not because they were attracted to other males in the least, but just because they appeared feminine. Do you understand the difference? Do you remember some of them?
We’ll never know the total whose lives (and families) were crippled or destroyed by this fear of sex. It is a fear that so permeates this society still that the witless, woke women can get away with trying to shred the fabric of their own society, using the same moronic excuse as the BLM people — vengeance for terrible things that happened to Other People, long ago, coupled with a belief they deserve to have money and power they haven’t earned but are convinced they are owed. That’s what happens when groups of people are singled out for their differences, ANY differences, and individuals are persecuted (and some still prosecuted!) for, by nature, having been born into those groups.
Think about it, guys. Decide if you really believe that being a child, a tomboy or — horrors! — being an “effeminate” boy, or “trying out” intimacy with someone of the same sex just to be one of the the cliques (college age or not, doing something you don’t want to just because you are challenged is about as childish as you can get)…. is the same as being physically and psychologically committed. Or not. Do you really think you could have enjoyed “experimenting” — or been able achieve a climax at all? Really? And if you don’t know by now that there are more than you can know of either sex who can get by quite well within their gender and well under your “gaydar” (that’s what coming out TO others is about) — then you’ll just have to settle for being confused.
My information, by the way, comes from 14 years nursing (ten of them exclusively with AIDS patients in hosptal and in their homes, and 23 years of listening to callers and researching material for manuals to write for volunteers on national and local crisis lines. And a lifetime, at least since the age of 12, being, usually quite happily, being gay with best friends of both sexes.
My apology for the convoluted writing and errors in the comment above. It should have been a reworked as a rough draft. Next time, I won’t try covering a complex subject online in one go.
I’m going to clean it up, Penn. It’s a Comment of the Day. It’s important.
It’s up. I see what you were referring to, but it was easily fixed. If anything seems off, email me.
It’s long past time to end the barbaric human sacrifice of men through the male-only draft. Men are still the vast majority of war and workplace deaths. Concepts like chivalry, courtly love and gynocentrism create an acceptance of cultural misandry and male disposability. Male disposability, the human sacrifice of men on behalf of women and the state, should be illegal and should be punished as severely as war crimes. I don’t want to be viewed as disposable on behalf of women and the state and I don’t know why any man would. The age of the disposable male must come to an end.
But there is no draft, male-only or otherwise!
It exists, but it’s not active at the moment. Your comment is pretty shortsighted none the less. I was addressing male disposability as a whole, and your reply was to negate male disposability because the male only draft isn’t currently active. Millions upon millions of men’s lives have been sacrificed in combat on behalf of women and the state. It would appear you’re either unaware or being misleading. Men suffer worse life outcomes in nearly every measure, but women are always portrayed as the oppressed gender. As far as I know, in the past, men were socially conditioned to become women’s providers and protectors, lest they be deemed unworthy of women’s love and affection. Men were forced to serve in combat on behalf of women and the state, lest they be jailed and deemed cowards. Am I wrong?
No, “It’s long past time to end the barbaric human sacrifice of men through the male-only draft” was wrong, and you lose credibility points by shifting the goalposts to avoid accepting that you screwed up. The draft is, in fact, ended and has been for decade, so saying it’s past time to end it is a mistake. “It exists, but it’s not active at the moment” is nonsense. Burning at the stake “exists” too, by that standard.
Men chose to fight for the state and society: it has been women, not men, who were the primary advocates for allowing women in combat Women are portrayed as the oppressed gender because they were so for thousands of years, and in this country couldn’t vote until a hundred years ago, couldn’t run for office, couldn’t own property, and could be raped at will for much of our history.
Yes, you’re wrong.
Women aren’t the oppressed gender. Men suffer worse outcomes in nearly every measure of life satisfaction. Just because you say it, doesn’t make it so. There’s a lot of evidence, which I’m sure you ignore, that proves you wrong. Men have always been burdened with women’s weakness and cowardliness. You sound like a woman who hates men. You sound like a feminist man hater.
Women can fight and die on their own behalf. I certainly won’t do it for them. Men shouldn’t be socially conditioned and brainwashed by women, the state and the media to become women’s and the state’s human shields. If there are going to be quotas for women in the board room, then there had better be quotas for women to serve on the front lines. There have even been stipulations in conscription that sent unmarried or childless men to their deaths before married men with children. These are war crimes. One of the most horrific war crimes is when college students get deferments from serving, which is really the privileged class of men sending poor men to fight and die on their behalf.
Your internalized misandry is dripping with anger and hatred for men. The male only draft exists and men are brainwashed by women and the state to fight and die in combat for women’s rights and privileges over men. If they refuse, they’re jailed. These are horrendous war crimes and those that use men as human shields in this manner should be prosecuted and jailed for life.
You’re every man’s worst enemy. I certainly don’t want you making decisions on my behalf. You’re too busy genuflecting to your female gods to make any rational sense of the matter.
I repeat: Men chose to fight for the state and society: it has been women, not men, who were the primary advocates for allowing women in combat Women are portrayed as the oppressed gender because they were so for thousands of years, and in this country couldn’t vote until a hundred years ago, couldn’t run for office, couldn’t own property, and could be raped at will for much of our history.
These are historical facts; I’m not saying so, they are so. And your last paragraph is evidence of psychological problems.
You made your (ridiculous) position clear; It’s not worth arguing with you about it. Do better with the next topic, because you’re through with this one.