The first thing I did when I heard about this video was to check Erick Erickson’s Wikipedia page to see if he is married. The page doesn’t mention a wife, which gives me hope he is not. Otherwise I’d feel compelled to organize an intervention for the poor girl. But on watching it, I was even more appalled.

Most of the time, conservatives pooh-pooh the pay gap as a result of women’s “choice” to work less and attend to the home more. They’re not against equality, they assure us, but equality just naturally fails on its own because women make it so! That ruse lasted right up until the announcement that four out of ten households with children now have a female breadwinner. So how did Fox News respond? By gathering a panel of all male pundits to explain that, under no uncertain terms, the disappearance of male economic dominance signals the end of life as we know it.

Choice phrases tossed around, including from resident liberal Juan Williams: “disintegration of marriage,” “society dissolve around us,” and “something going terribly wrong in American society.” Then there’s Lou Dobbs, darkly intimating that women’s escape from economic dependence turns them into killers: “And those are the children who survive!” he exclaims at one point, in reference to all those money-grubbing ladies having abortions on their lunch break.

Here is a portion of Erickson’s contribution:

“I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science. But liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology — when you look at the natural world — the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role. We’re lost the ability to have complementary relationships … and it’s tearing us apart.”

I can think of a number of species, including primate species, that don’t fit Erickson’s notions of male dominance, but let’s go on … a big chunk of those primary breadwinner moms are never married or divorced. Having lived that life myself, I have no doubt that a large majority of those single moms would dearly love to have a decent man in their lives to help support them and raise those children. But while there are a lot of decent men out there, there are not nearly enough to go around, it seems. So, women end up raising children by themselves.

I propose convening a panel of women asking why so many of today’s men fail to abjectly at being husbands and fathers. Erick Erickson could be Exhibit A.