From Alan Colmes’ talk radio show, interviewing John Derbyshire of National Review about women voters: (thanks to Think Progress for the link)

“What is the case against female suffrage?” Colmes asked. “The conservative case against it is that women lean hard to the left,” Derbyshire responded nonsensically. “They want someone to nurture, they want someone to help raise their kids, and if men aren’t inclined to do it — and in the present days, they’re not much — then they’d like the state to do it for them.”

Colmes then pressed Derbyshire on whether women should have the right to vote. “Ah…” Derbyshire sighed, attempting to dodge the question initially. “I’m not putting forward a political program here,” he said. But then Derbyshire slowly began to open up:

DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I’ll say this – if it were to be, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.

COLMES: We’d be a better country if women didn’t vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don’t you think so?

COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.

DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here [laughing].

COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.

DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.”

Multiple points:
1)Disenfranchising people because they “lean hard to the left” or lean hard to the right for that matter isn’t grounds for taking away someone’s vote. At least outside of Stalinist Russia and similar nations (whom he apparently thinks have some good ideas. In one National Review column on his fear Chelsea Clinton will enter politics, he asserted that “all the great despotisms of the past — I’m not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble — recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin’s penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an “enemy of the people”. The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, “clan liability”. In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished “to the ninth degree”: that is, everyone in the offender’s own generation would be killed, and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed.” Though he assures us he doesn’t support the idea, he seems to devote a great deal of space to it).
2)Disenfranchising half of America’s voting population is not just by any means, and never will be, regardless of how they vote.
3)Does he actually have evidence that women vote the way he says they does? This has been a right-wing talking point for several years, but the evidence runs along the lines of “Well, ever since women voted, we’ve had a bigger welfare state.” Of course, we’ve also won World War II and put an end to segregation, and put a man on the moon, so by that logic all these things are due to women’s suffrage.
They’re not, of course; it’s an old, basic rule of logic that just because A comes after B doesn’t mean B causes A. But what has logic to do with right-wing pundits?

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