Clean a toilet, save America

A shocking survey came out of the United Kingdom last year: 70 percent of women said they like doing housework. Oh the horrors.

"With many more women now working full-time as their family's sole breadwinner," notes the article, "a shift in gender roles might have been expected. But according to researchers, in the majority of British households it is still the women who do the chores, regardless of their working status. … While women for the most part said they enjoyed housework, the study found that those in their 20s and 30s were the most likely to buck this trend."

No surprise there, considering how younger women have been marinated in feminism over the last 30 years. "Must have been a man who came up with the results of that particular study," sneered a reader, "and he probably still has his mama wiping up right behind him."

Needless to say, statistics like this baffle and anger feminists. But it reinforces what I've always known: Most women like being keepers of the home. Even if they work. Even in these liberated times. Even if they call themselves feminists.

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The attitude that women should have progressed beyond cleaning toilets and mopping floors dates back to the early 1960s when feminists were doing anything and everything to eject women out of their domestic world and into the working world. Home was a prison. Homemakers were slaves. If you wanted a clean home, often the preferred solution was to hire domestic help (presumably a less liberated woman) to clean your toilets and mop your floors so you wouldn't have to soil your own fingers with your own dirt. You are woman, hear you roar.

That's why statistics like this British study – which surveyed the respectably large quantity of 25,000 adults – drives feminists nuts.

But I see these results as encouraging. Women who enjoy housework are obviously taking pride in the responsibility that comes from caring for their family. I see this survey as a much more significant issue than a woman's interest in her home. Personal responsibility inside the home often translates to personal responsibility outside the home.

One of the advantages the Founding Fathers enumerated for us in our natal documents (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights) is the right to govern ourselves with relatively few rules. Of course that's no longer the case – our lives are regulated to the nth degree – and because of that, we've forgotten what it's like to rule ourselves. Instead of voluntarily conforming to societal expectations of ethics and behavior, our lives are regulated by the elites. As a result, our personal behavior has degenerated to the point where we dress, act and speak in a language of victimhood and expect someone else to unquestioningly clean our toilets and support our lifestyles.

Free people tend to be people of high standards. They have to be. If a free person screws up, he must take the consequences for his actions. He doesn't have government agencies bailing him out of every difficulty or excusing his behavior on vague grounds of "victimhood."

But unfree people usually acquire low standards. Under the guise of (cough) "compassion," the government removes the consequences for our behavior. Without that critical self-governing feedback, our standards sink like a rock. When our impetus is taken away and we're told what to do, we lose the ability to self-govern. Victimhood becomes a way of life. No one wants to clean their own toilets any more, either literally or figuratively.

Feminists have spent decades convincing women they were victims of an evil oppressive patriarchy. We don't need men to support us when we have babies – single motherhood is empowering. We shouldn't lower ourselves to be keepers of the home – it's too demeaning. We shouldn't raise our own children – they get much better "socialization" skills in day care, don'cha know.

The lethal combination of feminism and government nannyhood has led to crisis levels in the breakdown of the traditional family, not just in America but everywhere. Unsurprisingly, this development – high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births – is applauded by such groups as the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which "declared that the breakdown of traditional families, far from being a 'crisis,' is actually a triumph for human rights" against "patriarchy." Or so said UNFPA representative Arie Hoekman at a 2009 colloquium held in Mexico City.

"In the eyes of conservative forces," said Mr. Hoekman, "these changes mean that the family is in crisis. In crisis? More than a crisis, we are in the presence of a weakening of the patriarchal structure, as a result of the disappearance of the economic base that sustains it and because of the rise of new values centered in the recognition of fundamental human rights."

Fundamental human rights? WHAT rights? You mean the "rights" of children to be raised in broken or dysfunctional homes? Or does he mean the "rights" of endless numbers of unmarried women to push out endless numbers of illegitimate babies who are supported by taxpayers? What kind of manufactured "rights" are these? And who pays for them? (Remember, resources that are forcibly removed from one person and given to another are not rights, they are entitlements.)

Leonardo Casco of the Pontifical Council for the Family said he wasn't surprised that the UNFPA was denying any problems. "They definitely have to deny that there is a crisis in the family, because they have created the crisis. … [UNFPA bureaucrats] have invented a series of new 'human rights' … with which they wish to justify all of their actions." [emphasis added]

Can you see how something as minor and seemingly lowly as scrubbing our own toilets and mopping our own floors has deeper repercussions than merely a clean house? Doing your own housework means accountability. It's a part of being responsible enough to have children within the bounds of holy wedlock and raising them yourself. It means accepting the trials and joys of self-determination rather than embracing the bonds of state dependence and slavery.

Until we are willing to accept the personal responsibility outlined in our founding documents, we will never recapture the greatness that we once had as a nation. And it can all start by a willingness and even joy in doing housework.