Here’s Stephen Moore, a rather prominent conservative chosen by Trump to serve on the Federal Reserve board, a fellow who has strong opinions on the importance of traditional marriage, husband as the breadwinner, wife as the mother and homemaker.
Moore has lamented the steady decline in US marriage numbers, asserting in an October 2014 article that “intact families” were important for the economy and criticising “those who cheer divorce as a form of women’s liberation”.
Concluding the article, he called for a “personal and national commitment to sturdy families” and strong parenting as part of a “culture of virtue” aimed at saving the American economy from what he called a path of decline.
Moore’s 2018 book Trumponomics, co-authored with the veteran economist Arthur Laffer, said many Americans felt “a sense of not being loved (tied to divorce and family breakup)” and argued this was one reason people should be required to work to receive money from government assistance programs.
He has frequently derided the views of the American left on cultural issues, claiming in a 2015 article published by the Christian Broadcasting Network that to liberals “if you support traditional marriage, you are a fascist”.
You would think a guy like that would be a dedicated husband and father, wouldn’t you? Setting an example and all that.
Nope.
The 2010 divorce filing from Moore’s wife said he had destroyed their marriage through adultery, after creating two accounts on the dating website Match.com and beginning an affair with a woman early in 2010.
Moore is said to have discussed the affair “openly and tastelessly” with his then wife, and to have said at one point: “I have two women, and what’s really bad is when they fight over you.” He also left evidence of the relationship around the home, the filing said.
Allison Moore said in the filing she had been a “good and dutiful wife” and quit her job to raise the couple’s three children, only to suffer infidelity and poor treatment from her husband.
There’s more. He has remarkable history of bad ideas.
“The women tennis pros don’t really want equal pay for equal work. They want equal pay for inferior work,” Moore wrote. He went on to claim that the real “injustice” was that female pros were paid, while men playing college tennis who could “beat them handily” were not.
“I’m a radical on this; I’d get rid of a lot of these child labor laws. I want people starting to work at 11, 12,” he said during the debate.
“The biggest problem I see in the economy over the last 25 years is what has happened to male earnings — for black males and white males, as well. They’ve been declining, and that is, I think, a big problem,” he said in a CNBC interview.
“I want everybody’s wages to rise, of course, but you know, people are talking about women’s earnings — they’ve risen,” Moore continued. “The problem, actually, has been the steady decline in male earnings, and I think we should pay attention to that, because I think that has very negative consequences for the economy and for society.”
“Colleges are places for rabble-rousing. For men to lose their boyhood innocence. To do stupid things. To stay out way too late drinking. To chase skirts. (At the University of Illinois, we used to say that the best thing about Sunday nights was sleeping alone.),” Moore wrote. “It’s all a time-tested rite of passage into adulthood. And the women seemed to survive just fine. If they were so oppressed and offended by drunken, lustful frat boys, why is it that on Friday nights they showed up in droves in tight skirts to the keg parties?”
“The NCAA has been touting this as example of how progressive they are. I see it as an obscenity,” Moore wrote. “Is there no area in life where men can take vacation from women? What’s next? Women invited to bachelor parties? Women in combat? (Oh yeah, they’ve done that already.)”
Moore’s solution? “No more women refs, no more women announcers, no more women beer venders, no women anything.” He did offer one caveat: “Women are permitted to participate, if and only if, they look like (sportscaster) Bonnie Bernstein. The fact that Bonnie knows nothing about basketball is entirely irrelevant.”
I think it’s kind of obvious that he has a deep contempt for women, and that his ideal of traditional roles for women is simply chattel slavery.
Well, it is very traditional.
Well of course it’s just standard issue socially conservative Republican. New Gingrich dumped his wife for a young congressional aide and served the divorce papers while she was in the hospital with cancer. Every time you hear about a member of congress or a preacher being caught with prostitutes (of either sex) you can bet he’s a conservative family values Christian. It’s okay though, they’re forgiven.
There is something more basic about Moore which is being left out; the guy is simply not intelligent. It’s not meant as a schoolyard insult, merely an objective observation. He’s a classic example of someone who has been educated WAY beyond the level of his intelligence.
Does anyone remember Dan Quayle and his platform of family values back in the 80’s? I remember Candice Bergen ripped him a new one when he criticized “Murphy Brown.”
I actually had women at my bachelor party since my older sister was my ‘best man’ (and still is). It was great, we spent 4 hours playing beach volleyball and then had pizza and beer as we all collapsed from exhaustion.
P.S. I have been to strip clubs a couple times and found them to be some of the most depressing places on the planet.
He’s right that men’s earnings have been declining, but totally wrong about the context and the cause. It’s not because women have been been getting slightly larger crumbs from a tiny slice of the pie. It’s because almost the entire pie has been stolen by a tiny minority of the ultrarich. Thank you, Ronald Reagan.
I doubt Moore was all that upset about “his women” fighting over him.
What I don’t understand is why would two women fight over such a man? He doesn’t sound like much of a prize.
So he sees fighting in a war as a “vacation” from women? I wonder what his service record looks like.
@8 thirdmill 301
“You take him!”
“No, you take him!”
And he’s gone.
@9 We both know the answer to that is no.