In the
wake of a cascade of articles from The
New York Times celebrating January’s Women’s March as a stirring symbol of
feminist empowerment – as demonstrated by pussy hats, profane placards, unhinged celebrity poetry, and the rejection of pro-life women – that same paper hit a new low in the blatant
bashing of American manhood.
The
Times’ Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed recently with the outrageous title “Husbands Are Deadlier Than Terrorists” in which he compared the relative risks
to Americans of “two critical issues: refugees and guns.” He concluded,
predictably, that terrorists slipping in among an influx of refugees are a
negligible threat, while guns are the pestilential scourge of our time.
His
intention was to delegitimize President Trump’s “morally repugnant” temporary
travel ban on seven Middle Eastern states linked to terrorism by arguing that
statistically, “ladders kill far more Americans than Muslim terrorists do. Same
with bathtubs. Ditto for stairs. And lightning.”
This is
hardly a convincing argument for shrugging off the threat of terrorism. Yes of
course, lots of things kill more Americans annually than terrorists do (especially
if you rule out the 9/11 attacks, which those like Kristof who wish to diminish
the threat always do): car accidents, cancer, crack cocaine, for example. But
we have a healthy respect for all those dangers and take every possible
precaution to diminish them; likewise, we should take any and every measure to
stem terrorism. It’s illogical and irresponsible to say that terrorism is a
manageable threat just because drunk drivers kill more of us. No one argues,
for example, that we shouldn’t do everything in our power to prevent home fires
just because diabetes takes more lives.
Gun
violence is an indisputably critical issue, and if that had been the extent of Kristof’s argument – that guns are a more
serious concern than Islamic terrorism – then that is a legitimate starting
point for a debate. But in pressing his point he overshoots the mark and makes
the same sort of broad-brush, offensive accusation that liberals like Kristof scold
others for making about all Muslims: “Above all, fear spouses,” he warns. “Husbands
are incomparably more deadly in America than jihadist terrorists.”
Not men, but husbands. Not gangbangers, drug addicts, the criminally insane, or
violent unmarried young males, but husbands.
Not strangers, boyfriends, baby daddies, or jealous exes, but husbands. What a perverse way to dismiss
the very real – and growing – danger of terrorism and to exaggerate gun
violence: by asserting that American husbands are the truly lethal threat.
They are
so deadly, he claims, because in this country they have “ready access” to
firearms – as if any man can pull into the neighborhood 7-11 and walk out with
some snacks and a Glock. Kristof makes no allowance for the fact that the most
serious threat from gun violence in this country is from the criminally insane,
gang members, and – ironically – jihadists
like those who massacred 14 people in San Bernardino in December 2015 and nearly
50 more in a Florida nightclub six months later.
Kristof cites
no statistics for Death by Husband and doesn’t even bother to distinguish between
husbands who commit violent gun crimes and husbands who are law-abiding gun
owners committed to protecting their
wives and children. For that matter, he doesn’t even distinguish between
husbands with guns and those without; it’s just, “Husbands are deadlier than
jihadists.”
He even
had the nerve to say that, “In other countries, brutish husbands put wives in
hospitals; in America, they put them in graves.” What a disgraceful smear of
American men. And apparently Kristof has
never heard about honor killings.
Is
husband-on-wife domestic violence a serious problem? Of course. But – borrowing
from the common argument that terrorists constitute only a tiny minority of
Muslims – only a small minority of husbands physically abuse their wives, and a
much smaller minority than that murder them with guns. It should go without
saying that any number of such
victims is too high, but the point is that the vast majority of husbands don’t
commit uxoricide. They are decent men who love their wives and families, work
hard to provide for them, and indeed would lay down their lives for them.
In our kneejerk cultural impulse to
show effusive support for women (not that there’s anything wrong with that, as
Seinfeld might say), we unfortunately have become correspondingly casual about culturally
demonizing men. In his ideological rush to minimize concerns about jihad and
maximize our fear of gun owners, the New
York Times’ Nicholas Kristof has unfairly – indeed, shamefully – mischaracterized
American husbands as the real enemy.
From Acculturated, 2/28/17
