Women are complaining again, this just in from Lifetime Television ("Television for Women"!), which commissioned a poll of women voters recently. According to the summary provided by the Lifetime Television Web page, the top concerns of half or more of the respondents were: the "insufficient effort to cure breast cancer," gun control, medical benefits, child care, the rising cost of a college education, the connection between pollution and health risks, violence against women, and equal pay.

Nearly three-fourths believe it is more important for the government to shore up the Social Security Ponzi scheme than to bother with those silly tax cuts.

These could only be the poll results of people who have nothing to do with the creation of wealth. They sit at home waiting for their husbands to bring home the money, or toil away at little jobs dreamed up to assuage the egos of bourgeois women living in the suburbs. (I eagerly await such a station in life. But when I'm there, I won't forget how horrible -- horrible -- it was to wake up to an alarm clock, respond to bosses, and be responsible for my own rent.)

Consequently, the typical liberal woman's political calculus is based on budgeting, not earning. They have no idea how the money materializes and are not particularly interested. But they've got lots of opinions on how to spend it. They claim to be Republicans, because prissy women with college degrees associate Democrats with the dirty working class. But they are no more Republican than Bill Clinton. They adore Bill Clinton.

As a class, women have never borne collective responsibility for work, they have never had to store food for the winter, and they have not generated economic growth. (At least not by dint of hard work -- more by inspiration.)

Nor have women borne responsibility for electing Republican presidents. In every presidential election since 1944 but one (1964), men would have elected the Republican candidate. In 1980, men voted for Reagan over President Jimmy Carter by 53 percent to 38 percent. Women voters went for Reagan more than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory, splitting their vote about equally between Carter and Reagan.

What's a Republican presidential candidate to do?

First of all, Republicans should recognize that they can't fit a round peg into a square hole. It is impossible for a candidate to obtain the votes of the liberal women topping the Lifetime TV poll without becoming Bill Clinton -- in which case they will lose the votes of people with a capacity to engage in linear thinking and grasp logical connections.

Consider this item: Seventy percent of the women polled in the Lifetime survey claimed the country is not making "enough of an effort to find a cure for breast cancer."

Here are some statistics: Men get prostate cancer at a rate of about 147 cases per 100,000 men; women get breast cancer at a rate of 113 per 100,000 women. The mortality rate for breast cancer and prostate cancer is about the same. The federal government spends roughly four times as much on breast cancer research as on prostate cancer research.

Indeed, the money spent on breast cancer research has been constantly rising for at least six years. These figures do not include the hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for "breast cancer research" in such unusual places as the Defense Department's budget or the tens of millions spent on breast cancer research by the states. (In 1997, California spent more than $40 million on breast cancer research and zero dollars on prostate cancer research.)

In a further monument to self-interest, 85 percent of women in the Lifetime poll said they think discrimination against women in the workplace is still a problem, but only 57 percent think there is any problem with race relations. I love liberal women.

So the point is: Liberal suburban soccer moms are impervious to logic. One cannot cut taxes and reduce the size of government while simultaneously trying to satisfy women complaining about insufficient funding for child care and breast cancer research.

The good news is, one stiff November snowstorm and the Lifetime TV women aren't going to bother voting anyway. (I've never understood why Democrats are so fussy about global warming -- a temperate climate is the only way they can have any confidence of getting out the Democratic vote on election day.)

Moreover, Republican candidates ought to note that Reagan got more women to vote for him than George Bush or Bob Dole did -- more than Liddy Dole did, for that matter. (Of course, Reagan also got about 40 percent more of the men's vote than did Carter.) Oh yeah, and unlike Bush Sr. and the various Doles who keep running for president, Reagan won. Twice.

We've had close presidential elections before, but this one is emblematic of dangerous, unbridgeable and growing gaps among the American people. Some of this can be seen by examining a map showing U.S. counties won by George Bush and those won by Al Gore. In general, the densely populated counties along the East and West coasts, Midwestern counties mostly along the Mississippi River and a smattering of counties in the southwest were won by Gore. But if the election were to be decided by who won the greatest number of the nation's 3,142 counties, Bush would have bested Gore by at least 2,500 counties.

While who won how many counties is irrelevant to the presidential selection process, it says something about the degree of national polarization. What are the characteristics of counties won by Bush versus those won by Gore? The values, politics and religion of the counties in the southern, western and rural sections of the country, won by Bush are not like those in the mostly coastal, highly populated counties won by Gore. The Bush counties are: more conservative and respectful of traditional values, pro-life, and more religious, and they have less social pathology such as high crime, illegitimacy and deviancy. Counties won by Gore tend to be just the opposite.

By no means do Americans who voted for Bush enthusiastically and unequivocally support the values expressed in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, but they are not nearly as parasitic, interventionist and contemptuous of the principles of liberty as Gore supporters.

The constitutional provisions created by the Framers to protect us against the interventionist and parasitic classes have long been under siege and are severely weakened. The Bill of Rights, election of senators by state legislators and other protections against mob rule have been weakened or eliminated. Limitations on the power of the central government, through the enumerated powers and separation of power doctrines, have also been severely compromised. Constitutional protections against parasitic plunder, through its prohibition against direct taxation (no income tax), have been abolished.

A FAMOUS televison newswoman told this joke last month at a fund-raising dinner for a women's college: A woman needed a brain transplant. Her doctor said two brains were available, a woman's brain for $500 and a man's brain for $5,000. Why the big price difference? Answer: The woman's brain has been used.

Most in the audience laughed, but one man stood up and booed. What's wrong? asked a woman at his table. The man said, "Just substitute woman, black or Jew for 'man' in that joke, and tell me how it sounds."

At about the same time, American Greeting Cards launched an ad campaign in Newsweek, Life and other magazines. One ad featured a "Thelma and Louise" greeting card, pasted into the magazines, that said on the front: "Men are always whining about how we are suffocating them." The punch line inside the card was this: "Personally, I think if you can hear them whining, you're not pressing hard enough on the pillow."

The newswoman, who is a friend, seemed shocked when I phoned and raised questions about her joke. "The poor, sensitive white male," she said. A spokesman for the greeting card company saw nothing wrong with a humorous card about a woman killing a man. He faxed a statement saying the card had been pretested successfully, and besides, "We've heard no protests from consumers who are buying and using this card." But would American Greetings print a card with the sexes reversed, so the humor came from men joking about suffocating a woman? No, said the spokesman, because 85 percent to 90 percent of cards are bought by women. There is no market for a reverse card.

In truth, no man could get up at a fancy banquet and tell a joke about how stupid women are. And a greeting card joking about a woman's murder would be very unlikely, even if surveys showed that millions of males were eager to exchange lighthearted gender-killing greetings. The obvious is true: A sturdy double standard has emerged in the gender wars.

"There used to be a certain level of good-natured teasing between the sexes," says Christina Sommers, author of "Who Stole Feminism?" "Now even the most innocent remark about women will get you in trouble, but there's no limit at all to what you can say about men."

Men's rights groups phone me a lot, and I tell them my general position on these matters: The last thing we need in America is yet another victim group, this one made up seriously aggrieved males. But these groups do have an unmissable point about double standards. On the "Today" show last November, Katie Couric suddenly deviated from perkiness and asked a jilted bride, "Have you considered castration as an option?" Nobody seemed to object. Fred Hayward, a men's rights organizer, says: "Imagine the reaction if Matt Lauer had asked a jilted groom, 'Wouldn't you just like to rip her uterus out?'"

The double standard is rooted in identity politics and fashionable theories about victimization: Men as a group are oppressors; jokes that oppressors use to degrade the oppressed must be taken seriously and suppressed. Jokes by the oppressed against oppressors, however, are liberating and progressive. So while sexual harassment doctrine cracks down on the most harmless jokes about women, very hostile humor about men keeps expanding with almost no objections.

Until recently, for example, the 3M company put out post-it notes with the printed message: "Men have only two faults: everything they say and everything they do." Anti-male greeting cards are increasingly graphic, with some of the most hostile coming from Hallmark Cards' Shoebox Division.

(Sample: "Men are scum ... Excuse me. For a second there I was feeling generous.") JWR columnist Cathy Young sees a rising tide of male-bashing, including "All Men Are Bastards" and "Men We Love to Hate" calendars, and a resentful "It's-always-his-fault" attitude pervading women's magazines.

Commercial attempts to increase the amount of sexual antagonism in America are never a good idea. And if you keep attacking men as a group, they will eventually start acting as a group, something we should fervently avoid. But the worst impact of all the male-bashing is on the young.

Barbara Wilder-Smith, a teacher and researcher in the Boston area, was recently quoted in several newspapers on how deeply anti-male attitudes have affected the schools. When she made "Boys Are Good" T-shirts for boys in her class, all 10 of the female student teachers under her supervision objected to the message. (One, she said, was wearing a button saying "So many men, so little intelligence.")

"My son can't even wear the shirt out in his back yard," she said. "People see it and object strongly and shout things." On the other hand, she says, nobody objects when the girls wear shirts that say "Girls Rule" or when they taunt the boys with a chant that goes, "Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider; girls go to college to get more knowledge." Worse, she says, many adolescent boys object to the "Boys Are Good" shirts too, because they have come to accept the cultural message that something is seriously wrong with being a male.

"The time is ripe for people to think about the unspoken anti-male 'ism' in our colleges and schools," she says. And in the rest of the popular culture as well.

Finding Hope at Home

The decline of government schools lies in stark contrast to the bright ray of hope offered by the rising star of homeschooling.

If eight years of the Clinton regime have turned you into a pessimist about America’s future, perhaps a look at the awesome successes of the homeschool movement might turn you into an optimist. Ten years ago, few Americans knew anything about homeschooling. Today, with 12-year-old homeschooler George Thampy winning the National Spelling Bee, and second and third finalists also being homeschoolers, everybody now knows about homeschooling. The newspapers can’t get enough of it. Thampy also came in second in the National Geography Bee. And who can forget the ebullient Rebecca Sealfon, the homeschooler from Brooklyn who won the Spelling Bee in 1997. And this is just the beginning.

The homeschool movement is producing its first wave of graduates, and they are getting into the best universities and colleges in the nation. Even the military has changed its policies toward homeschoolers, who were previously classified as dropouts. According to the Washington Times, the Air Force enlisted 10 homeschoolers in 1998, but 200 in fiscal 1999. The Navy enlisted 23 in 1998, as compared to 1,050 in 1999. With the armed services hungry for literate recruits, they have finally recognized the talents and skills of homeschoolers.

Homeschoolers are also scoring impressively on the SAT and ACT college entrance exams, consistently outperforming their public school counterparts. This year, for example, homeschoolers scored an average of 22.8 on the ACT, while their public and private school counterparts scored an average of 21. As for the SAT, this year homeschoolers scored an average of 1,100, or 81 points above the national average of 1,019.

Freedom at Work

The most important thing to know about homeschooling is that it is educational freedom at work. And freedom produces better results than coercion. This country has gone so far down the road to socialism that most people have no idea what educational freedom means. What it means is freeing your family from the shackles of government education, and educating your children in conformity with your family’s religious and moral values.

But freeing yourself from a government institution like the public school is not only a cultural act, but a political one as well. For you’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to realize that the public schools are being used by Gramscian change agents to transform America into a totalitarian state. Those change agents want to remake America by capturing control of the youth. Just imagine the long-term political and cultural implications of denying them access!

The act of removing your child from the public school affects the most important statist institution in our society: the government education system. Statism requires compulsory government schooling if it is to succeed in brainwashing the children of the country, for it is the children who will make the future.

The government schools are creating millions of dysfunctional young adults without brain power, unfit to do anything that requires intellectual effort. Their source of stimuli is the television set and its statist messages. They are increasingly unable to understand or even defend the legacy of freedom we’ve inherited from our Founding Fathers. And their lack of academic skills relegates them to the bottom of American society. That is why our high-tech industries clamor to import technically skilled workers from abroad to fill the jobs that many young Americans cannot handle.

But through homeschooling (and other private alternatives), concerned parents are providing hope for the future. In the time span of less than a generation, homeschooling has grown from a small counter-cultural phenomenon to a vibrant mainstream movement consisting of an estimated 1.7 million homeschoolers. These homeschoolers will grow and blossom into independent-minded, well-educated, and skilled young adults who possess the values of their

parents, who will know how to read and write, multiply and divide, who will know the history of our country, and who

will exhibit a true love of freedom and the Constitution. If you want proof of this, simply attend a large homeschool convention and watch as parents go from vendor to vendor, poring over programs and books, choosing carefully what they want for their children. Watch the parents attending lectures and workshops, taking notes, buying tapes so that they can listen to the wisdom of the many wonderful speakers that lecture at these conventions.

As a participant in these activities, I’ve watched the homeschool movement grow by leaps and bounds. For example, 11 years ago, when the Massachusetts homeschool organization held its first convention in a church basement, about 300 people showed up. At the last convention in April 2000, which had to be held at the Worcester Convention Center because there wasn’t a hotel in the state large enough to accommodate the gathering, more than 3,000 people showed up. This same kind of growth is taking place nationwide. For example, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, there were 1,126 homeschoolers in Wisconsin in 1985. In 1998, the number was up to 18,712, an increase of 1,562 percent.

I have spoken at many large homeschooling conventions and what is truly amazing is the quality of the people who attend, the wonderful behavior of their youngsters, the dedication and devotion to learning, and their hunger for the values that made this country the freest and most successful in history. They love the Constitution and want to preserve it.

While there is a growing number of secular homeschoolers entering the movement, most homeschoolers strongly adhere to a God-centered worldview, whether they be Protestants, Catholics, or Mormons. (It should be noted that there is a small but growing number of Jewish homeschoolers.) Religion plays a very important part in the life of these families. They study the Bible, have family devotions, and (oftentimes) are members of churches where most of the congregation are also homeschoolers. They derive their inspiration from Deuteronomy, in which God commands parents to educate their children in the love and admonition of the Lord.

Great Results

I have been in the homes of many homeschoolers, and there you find a love of reading, a reverence for good literature, a love of knowledge, and an appreciation of art and music. Learning becomes the center of family life.

As for socialization, which is one issue government educators frequently use to browbeat homeschoolers, it is quite apparent that the family is a far better place to develop social skills than the public school. At home, members of the family learn that they have responsibilities and chores that must be done, and they have the time in which to do them, for homeschoolers own all of their own time. The typical public schooler, on the other hand, comes home after

a tiring, boring day confined in a school building and wants to relax and watch TV, listen to rock music in his or her bedroom, or hang out with friends at the mall. Getting the public schooler to pick up clothes or clean dishes becomes a struggle for parents who want to instill discipline in a child on the verge of rebellion. And rebellion is the result of the kind of socialization that goes on in public school.

At Columbine High School there was plenty of socialization, mainly of the wrong kind. And we all know the results — 12 students and a teacher dead, plus the suicide of the two students who carried out the massacre. But the Columbine tragedy has awakened a lot of parents. According to Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association, "the day after Columbine, our phones started ringing off the hook. People called us saying, ‘We really need to begin home schooling. We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and this is the straw that broke the camel’s back.’"

The Home School Legal Defense Association was founded in 1983 by Christian homeschooling lawyers to defend homeschoolers against state and local harassment. Since then, the legal climate for homeschooling has improved markedly. So has the public perception of homeschooling — thanks in large measure to the movement’s dramatic growth and its stunning success. And as a growing number of today’s homeschoolers come of age, many of them will undoubtedly contribute to the restoration of America.