Switzerland didn’t adopt female suffrage until 1972.\u00a0 The ignorant sometimes chalk this up to institutional sexism.<\/p>\n
It’s untrue, at least directly.\u00a0 The Swiss’ belief was that voting was a right – for those who defended Switzerland.\u00a0 All Swiss men, at the time, served in the Swiss military; such service was a pre-condition of the franchise, on the theory that only those who were committed to defending Switzerland had a complete voice in running the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And women just didn’t serve in the military, back then.<\/p>\n
Now, I’m not advocating this for the US.\u00a0 No, not at all.<\/p>\n
But I do<\/em>\u00a0 think that “being aware of the world and the issues” is <\/em>an appropriate level of commitment to justify participation in our democratic process.\u00a0<\/p>\n And so – if you can’t be bothered to learn the issues beyond the simple buzz-phrases or memorizing names, then please <\/em>stay home and don’t pollute the electoral process with your ignorance.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is not a partisan statement, by the way.\u00a0 It applies to all sides of the aisle…<\/p>\n …although I think it’s fairly clear which party’s gone long on “unthinking, ignorant fealty”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Switzerland didn’t adopt female suffrage until 1972.\u00a0 The ignorant sometimes chalk this up to institutional sexism. It’s untrue, at least directly.\u00a0 The Swiss’ belief was that voting was a right – for those who defended Switzerland.\u00a0 All Swiss men, at the time, served in the Swiss military; such service was a pre-condition of the franchise, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}