An attempt this week by male Fox News pundits to address the family crisis in the United States was immediately harshly attacked by a female anchor on the “fair and balanced” network.
Lou Dobbs broached the subject of the family crisis in his show Thursday, citing a Pew study that found that women are the primary breadwinners in 40% of American families and saying that “we are watching society dissolve around us.”
Commentator Juan Williams agreed that the matter was of paramount importance, saying that something is “going terribly wrong in American society” and that there should be agreement on both Left and Right on this matter. "We're seeing the disintegration of marriage," he said, "and it's going to have inpact for generations to come."
Red State blog editor Erick Erickson said that science shows that men and women have “lost the ability to have complimentary relationships in nuclear families” and claimed that science points to male dominance as a recurrent natural phenomenon.
The men were clearly very upset about the issue, and were in agreement that it is greater importance than the subjects that are usually discussed in the news.
Fox's Megyn Kelly did not appear to share the men's views on the overriding importance of the issue, however, and was apparently more concerned that they had dared to point to intense female careerism as a possible problem. She immediately summoned Dobbs and Erickson for a dressing-down on her own show. Firing a salvo point-blank at Erickson, she demanded: “Who died and made you chief scientist?”. She admitted that studies showed that children who grew up in single parent households fared worse, on average, than those who grew up in two-parent homes, but insisted that studies point to no disadvantage to children of working mothers.
Kelly did not say whether these studies referred to children whose mothers and fathers both worked full time, nor did she address the possible connection between the high-powered female careerism promoted by the “feminist” movement, and the high divorce rates that are threatening to make marriage extinct in the U.S., and which tend to turn two-parent homes into single parent homes.
Erickson disputed the scientific validity of the studies cited by Kelly and noted that they could be politically biased. Both men were on the defensive in the interview, which highlighted the difficulty conservatives face in bringing the subject of the family crisis to public discussion, in the face of internal opposition from news personalities who are conservative on other issues, but decidedly liberal on this one.