Thinking About Pence and Bill O'

Jewish World Review  "Last week, we spent six or seven days gawping at Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, for their supposedly bizarre or retro marriage rules. Pence, as even villagers in Bora Bora doubtless know by now, does not attend one­on­one dinners with women other than Karen, and he does not drink alcohol in social settings when Karen is not with him. 

"Progressives were by turns confused and disgusted. They assumed that this conveyed a primitive view of relations between men and women. Does he imagine that all women are sirens, some wondered, prone to turn an innocent dinner into an opportunity for sexual adventure? What a caveman view! Or was he so vain as to think himself an Adonis whom women would be unable to resist? Besides, this private rule between spouses represents a setback for women in the workplace. Don't most deals take place over dinner? Wouldn't women be the losers if all men had such rules? 

"Conservatives had a bracing time with rebuttal. Mike Pence's lieutenant governor was a woman! Avoiding "occasions of sin" isn't primitive; it's actually kind of elevated. Each couple may draw the line in a different place, but drawing lines around marriage is a very healthy impulse, not a weird one. In typically pithy fashion, Jonah Goldberg noted: "Elites say we have no right to judge adultery, but we have every right to judge couples who take steps to avoid it." 

"My own take on the Pence brouhaha is that feminists who demand respect for women should never disdain the honor that good men show their wives by their constancy. Extremism in defense of fidelity is no vice. " . . .