Jill of the White Feather

In World War I, the Order of the White Feather was founded. It attempted to persuade young women to hand out white feathers to young men not in uniform. This was an attempt to shame the young men into enlisting, and subsequently giving their lives at places like Passchendaele and The Somme.

These women included pacifists but also early feminists and suffragettes like Emmeline Pankhurst. They lobbied for an involuntary draft along with the right to vote.

Even the proto-feminists of the time considered men disposable and were willing to use their sexual power to shame them into a misguided act of chivalry.

This is what comes to mind when I read the effluent from the mind of Jill Filipovic.

If your husband is willing to elect Trump, he either hates women or just does not care about them/you. Divorce him. https://t.co/CC8myhPd9o

— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) August 14, 2016

This is a shockingly cavalier attitude toward feminism's most toxic by-product: the no-fault divorce. Jill Filipovic, I'm willing to wager, is not familiar with the parental alienation that a child caught up in a divorce experiences. Her article focuses on two couples that represent her elite world-view, and the question whether they have children or not is unanswered.

Dr. Thomas Stossel is a hematologist and professor of Medicine at Harvard. His wife, Dr. Kerry Maguire, is a dentist and a director at Forsyth Institute in Cambridge. Their status clearly marks them as the cognitive and cultural elite, and thus inscrutable to outsiders. He was thinking about voting for Trump, but his wife gave him an ultimatum.

"If you vote for Trump, I will divorce you and move to Canada," she said. He should have speed-dialed her lawyer and handed her the phone.

Instead, he accepted the white feather and pinned it to his chest. He is planning to vote Libertarian.

The other couple interviewed for the article is Matt Latimer and Anna Sproul-Latimer. They are both literary agents in Washington, D.C. He recently wrote an article for the New York Times entitled, Mike Pence Should Get Donald Trump To Withraw. In other words, he is a #NeverTrump.

Did Jill Filipovic interview anybody for this story that aren't her close, personal friends?

Apparently Filipovic was on the receiving end of Twitter abuse after her provocative tweet. Muh mentions! She then tweeted, "Wow, really nothing like saying you shouldn't marry a Trump supporter to get sad fragile men into a Twitter rage." No, Jill, you used the "D" word. Advising a woman not to get married to someone for wrongthink is a far more defensible position.

So men, Jill has handed you a white feather. The question is, you're not sad and fragile, are you? You're not a coward, are you? Go and fight for her!