There is nothing worse than being misunderstood except when it’s done intentionally. We all know that political operatives rarely act in good faith. That’s to be expected. But the constant assaults on who we are as a group gets exhausting. The left is never right about what we believe, how we act, or what motivates us. The most recent example was a tweet that went around claiming that conservative men force their wives to vote the same way they do.
“In most of the conservative households that I have known, the wife is expected and DEMANDED to vote the same way as her husband. Think I’m exaggerating or being sexist? Then you haven’t been in those households,” said some random brainwashed person. I think he’s exaggerating, and it isn’t because I haven’t been in those households, but because I have.
The benefit of being conservative in a hostile culture is that it forces you to get to know similarly aligned folks who share your beliefs. We even have secret codes to alert one another since being outspoken about your conservatism can get you into altercations with morons that no one has time for. Most conservatives I know are very low-key about politics, not out of fear, but out of the sheer exhaustion of dealing with idiots who don’t debate in good faith and can’t agree to disagree.
Most people on the left, on the other hand, feel completely free to be obnoxiously loud about their political beliefs because they operate under the assumption that everyone agrees with them due to the corporate virtue signaling, media collusion, academic infiltration, and Hollywood entertainment that echoes their political views from every available source.
Of course, they think they are the majority! They own every institution. So many of them feel justified in pretending that we don’t exist or mischaracterizing us as homophobic Nazi scum at every opportunity. They feel free to claim outrageous things about our marriages, our children, our character, and our lives. But it’s enough! It’s ignorance on steroids. I’ve never known this mystical conservative married couple that the accuser says is so prevalent. On the contrary, the conservative women I know are very outspoken, strong, secure women who would never put up with abuse. Many of them are gun owners.
The idea of these women I’ve known for years being told who to vote for under threat of some kind of implied violence by a spouse is absurd. But to make the point, I took a survey of my PJ Media co-workers to find out if this stereotype has ever been true for them. Here’s what they said:
“After work, I tell my wife what to make for dinner while I’m making us cocktails. Then I hand her hers while she pretends not to have heard me,” said Stephen Green. It doesn’t seem like Mrs. Green would take any direction about who to vote for from her husband very seriously.
“My dad was a conservative Democrat until Bill Clinton came along, after which he became a Republican. But he used to get mad at my mom for voting Republican,” said editor Chris Queen. “She always got a kick out of needling him with her GOP vote, and she has always thought for herself politically.”
“If I TOLD my Puerto Rican girlfriend how to vote she would TELL me where to go and what to do when I arrived,” replied Kevin Downey, Jr.
“My husband asks me who to vote for,” said Stacey Lennox. “We share values so, of course, [the fact that] we tend to vote alike might be the biggest DUH of all.”
“Since I do all the vetting of candidates, I hand the list to my husband,” said Gwendolyn Sims. “I’m pretty sure he votes the list, but I don’t check. He has never and would never demand I do anything including voting. Being an actual rocket scientist, he understands the value of voting Republican because it’s in the best interest of our family and pocketbook.”
Editor Athena Thorne said, “Thank God we’re not one of those miserable mixed marriages — we’re both Republicans. Thus, the only time we disagree on who to vote for is during a primary, because I’m farther right than he is. But because Mr. Thorne knows the Constitution and understands the way voting is supposed to work, he would never dream of telling anyone how to vote.”
“My wife was the one who helped flip me red,” said Lincoln Brown.
Mr. Fox and I have voted for different candidates as he is more libertarian than I am but it has never caused any sort of issue. We manage to be nice to one another despite our small political differences. We also made sure we were in agreement over most things before we got serious about dating.
My parents have been married for over fifty years, and you don’t get to fifty years of marriage by bullying your spouse into anything. My father tells this (wildly embellished) story of a time when he was doing something my mother did not like, and he says he woke up in the middle of the night with her standing over him with an iron skillet saying, “You have to sleep sometime, and if you do it again, you won’t wake up.” My mother denies his version, though there appears to be an agreement between them that involved some kind of iron skillet threat and whatever it was that he was doing. He stopped immediately.
Is it logical that a woman with those stones would feel obligated to cast a vote the same way as her husband? My parents always were in agreement politically because they made sure to pick a mate with the same values. The conservative couples I know put shared values very high on the list of qualities to look for in a partner. When you do that and don’t ignore massive differences in opinions imagining everything will work itself out because you’re “in love,” the chances of having squabbles over elections go way down.
But do you know who does destroy their marriages over politics? Democrats. And unlike the person who claimed it’s us with the bad marriages, I have evidence.
New York Magazine ran an overly emotional column full of salty tears about Democrat women leaving their husbands because they could not tolerate their votes for Trump. Hilariously titled, “Donald Trump is Destroying My Marriage” — with no sense of irony at all — several women confessed to tanking their marriages because of their severe intolerance.
One woman married a Republican and then became a far-left activist and left him even though he tolerated her complete shift in interests.
Geoffrey was absolutely shocked. He said, “Are you 1,000 percent certain?” I said, “I am.” I told him I really wanted to work on making the world a better place, and I didn’t feel I could do that within the confines of our marriage. He downloaded a divorce agreement, and we went to the notary public at the UPS store. The music playing — get this — was “Landslide,” by Fleetwood Mac, and “White Wedding,” by Billy Idol. I left feeling free, like in high school when your parents are out of town. I’d found a passion and wanted to spend all of my free time doing it. And that’s exactly what has happened.
“Sarah” actually left her husband, who was in alignment with her politics, because he wasn’t happy with her becoming a full-time political activist and choosing those interests over time with him and their children.
Politically my husband and I are completely aligned, but he was lonely. He felt I was always gone, and even when I was there, I was preoccupied. Whereas our kids don’t feel this as much. They often come with me and have tons of little activist kid friends. They know all the other activist women’s dog’s names. They know we go to basketball some nights and other nights to rallies or politicians’ offices.
That’s not how my husband wants to spend his time. He’d say, “Yeah, I love a strong woman. Everything she’s doing is badass, I’m super-proud of her. But I want her to do less of it.” For me, the fact that he’s so uninterested in what I’m doing has fundamentally changed the way I see our partnership.
“Samantha” destroyed her marriage to a like-minded Democrat by treating him like garbage when he disagreed with her about the allegations of sexual abuse against Brett Kavanaugh. This woman admitted that she refused to even hear his arguments.
Part of what causes fights is that I don’t want to hear his side, and he hates that. Mostly I tell him he needs to think about this more clearly before he talks to me about it, and then I walk away. I’ve heard his side for 30 years. I’m ready to hear new points of view. Change can’t happen if we keep talking about excusing behavior.
Her henpecked husband told the magazine about what he suffered.
I think a healthy marriage requires being deaf a little bit, and definitely a little bit of, Yes, dear. If I were to say something like, “Is it really disqualifying that Brett Kavanaugh was so drunk he took his pants off in front of Debbie Ramirez as a college freshman?” we’d really get into it. So that’s a good time to say, Yes, dear. The way I see it — and I don’t share this with her — is that sometimes she goes overboard in a way that she begins to lose credibility.
But these people who are destroying their own marriages think they’re the good guys, and then they turn around and say we have the bad marriages. Really? Well, we’re not divorced, for one. None of the conservative friends I have got divorced. We’re all on two decades or more of relationships that are very successful.
So perhaps the left should turn that finger back around and start asking themselves what’s going wrong in their relationships instead of making up things that aren’t happening in ours.