Why We Should All Get Along

Floor Speech

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Mr. DUNCAN of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, at the height of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky and other sex scandals years ago, I was speaking to an assembly program at Fort Loudon Middle School telling the students about my job.

During the question-answer session, in front of the approximately 1,000 students, one girl asked me if I had ever had an affair.

I told them no, I had not and that I bet that almost none of their fathers had either.

I have found over the years that the men who cannot be satisfied with and loyal to one woman are almost always repeat offenders with many women--such as President Clinton.

I have become concerned during all the publicity and controversy about Judge Kavanaugh that some young women may think all men are sexual predators in the worst meaning of those two words.

I really believe that the great majority--the overwhelming majority-- of men are good and kind people who have no desire to force themselves on anyone.

I believe that most women are good and kind people who do not want to be in an adversarial relationship with most men.

Men and women are different, and that does not imply that women should be held back in some way.

My wife and I have two daughters and two sons and now five granddaughters and four grandsons.

My biggest desire is for all of them to be wonderful at whatever they want to do.

But we all need to get along. We certainly don't need to be enemies.

In thinking about this relationhip between men and women, I include in the Record the following column by Suzanne Fields which was published in the September 27th edition of the Washington Times. The Disappearing `Man's Man Blues' By Suzanne Fields

My father was not very tall. But no man ever stood taller in my eyes than this particular Big Daddy. He was warm and playful, a man of character and the model for the men I would admire as I grew up. Daddy wasn't formally educated, having dropped out of school in the sixth grade after his mother and father, Jewish immigrants from Pinsk, told him he had to wear his older sister's hand-me-down shoes because they didn't have the money to buy him a pair of his own. He took a certain pride later in having graduated from the ``school of hard knocks.''

He was a man of his times, describing himself as a ``man's man.'' He became a sportsman of his era, hanging out with the sportswriters of the considerable number of newspapers in the Washington of those days. He promoted a world heavyweight championship at Griffith Stadium in 1942 between Joe Louis and Buddy Baer. According to contemporary feminist thinking, he was a male chauvinist who believed that men should earn the bread and women should bake it.

I wrote a book years ago about a father's influence on his daughter, titled ``Like Father, Like Daughter.'' He was the person of integrity I wanted to imitate as an adult, even if I didn't agree with all of his ideas. I further saw my parents in a loving marriage, reinforcing the idea that has lasted for many thousands of years, that men and women are different and that the difference, at its best, is what gives spice to life. The French famously celebrate it as ``Vive Ia difference.'' But now it's not fashionable to think of that difference as anything but a negative, to regard the male as an aggressor, and in the worst way. My father would be described as ``bad'' because he was not only a man, but a white man of privilege.

I've been thinking about my father a lot, with the newspapers and television screens awash in breaking stories about the evil that men do. Accusations from universities and now from high schools, some true and some not, tell of men who have wronged women. There's so much hatred manufactured against specific ``bad'' men that it's become fashionable, if not mandatory, to think of all men as evil.

The presumption of decency for men like my father and those of his times are lost in a chaos of angry assumptions about men who have resisted feminine pacification. Women from many different places in life, different experiences, are eager to show contempt for men as if they are guilty simply for having been born male. An unproven accusation of sexual aggression is considered ``credible'' merely for having been made, and men are told to stand up and shut up. Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii told men exactly that, that ``they have to shut up.'' (We still don't know what her male constituents think about that.)

The editor of a gender studies journal asks in an op-ed in The Washington Post, ``in this land of legislatively legitimated toxic masculinity, is it really so illogical to hate men?'' After cataloguing global realities where women are treated badly, from low pay to gun violence, Suzanna Danuta Walters, a professor at Northeastern University, says American men can only be #WithUs if they follow a rigorous prescription for passivity. Men must not run for office, decline opportunities to be in charge of anything, step away from power, and vote feminist. If they don't, ``we have every right to hate you.''

Her stunted attitude obviously doesn't reflect the attitudes of all women--there's still a lot of fraternizing with the enemy in the war between the sexes--but reflects the thinking of a large swath of vocal feminism. The turnaround of cultural assumptions is poisoning the relationships of a generation of men and women. Fox News interviewer Martha MacCallum struck a poignant note when she asked Brett Kavanaugh's wife, Ashley, how their daughters were dealing with the dreadful noise raised against their father. ``It's very difficult,'' she replied. ``But they know Brett.''

Many women know their fathers, their brothers, their husbands, lovers and friends, who live beyond the malicious male stereotypes, but find it ever more intimidating to speak out in defense of men unjustly accused. Men are presumed guilty when accused by a woman. Even asking for due process and fair play for men is asking for trouble.

I closed my book a generation ago with Loretta Lynn's country hymn to the fate of our fathers: ``They don't make 'em like my daddy anymore.'' But her message has been drowned by Helen Reddy's ``I am woman, hear me roar.'' When anger trumps love and hatred trumps reason, we all, female no less than male, pay for it.

Suzanne Fields is a columnist for The Washington Times and is nationally syndicated.

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