Terry Jeffrey writes in his Sept. 19 CNSNews.com column:
In November 1968, however, only 41.8 percent of American women 16 or older worked. By November 2008, that had grown to 59.4 percent.
By contrast, in November 1968, 77.6 percent of American men 16 or older worked. By November 2008, that had dropped to 67.3 percent.
As of August, only 64 percent of American men were working.
What happened? Why did the percentage of American women working climb while percentage of men declined?
Liberals might point to this as a sign of societal progress, the success of women’s liberation.
A better explanation may be this: Women are being driven into the American workforce — and men are being offered a way out — by the demise of the traditional family and the rise of paternalistic government.
So you’d think that Jeffrey would approve of women leaving the workforce, right? Wrong.
Jeffrey wrote in a June 1 CNS article:
The number of American women who are unemployed was 766,000 individuals greater in May 2012 than in January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
[…]
In January 2009, there were approximately 5,005,000 unemployed women in the United States, according to BLS. In May 2012, there were 5,771,000.When Obama took office in January 2009, the female civilian non-institutional population was 121,166,000. In May 2012, it hit 125,788,000—an increase of 4,622,000 since January 2012.
Three months ago, Jeffrey thought women leaving the workforce was a bad thing because he could blame it on Obama (despite the fact that the number of women not in the workforce has been steadily increasing for more than a decade). Now, Jeffrey is upset that women are working at all because it harms the “traditional family.”
This sort of embarrassing flip-flopping is what happens when you change your opinions based on who your political enemy is on a given day. Which tells us that Jeffrey is not quite the principled, moral person he portrays himself as.