This week’s newest off-the-wall right-wing assertion comes to us courtesy of Thomas Mitchell, editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Mr. Mitchell, you see, thinks women are too dumb and too biased to vote. 

His helpful suggestion?

Repeal the 19th amendment. 

People and candidates for public office should be judged on the basis of their ideas, stance on the issues, character, experience and integrity, not on the basis of age, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion or disability.

Therefore, we must repeal the 19th Amendment. Yes, the one granting suffrage to women. Because? Well, women are biased.

Here is the basis of Mr. Mitchell’s reasoning on this one.  (If you can’t follow it or don’t agree with him, you must, of course, be a woman.)

According to polls released last week, the majority of women voters in Nevada prefer Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in that state’s Senate race.  Men on the other hand, according to Mr. Mitchell (this is shocking so be prepared):

favored the attractive former beauty queen Sue Lowden over the graying Harry Reid by 22 points, while women shunned their gender mate, choosing Reid by a 2-point margin. Which proves women favor Democrats.

Mr. Mitchell continues:

In a head-to-head match among Reid, Lowden and Tea Party pretender Scott Ashjian, the men favored Lowden by 19 points over Reid and women picked Reid by a 3-point margin. Ashjian was in single digits.

Yes?  And…?  There has long been a “gender divide” in politics, something I am sure Mr. Mitchell in his far superior male wisdom must know.  In fact, I am sure I must have been told this by a man, because as a woman how else would I come by such information?

That divide arises out of the fact that, generally speaking, women perceive the Democratic party to be more concerned than Republicans about the health and well-being of families, health care, reproductive health, the environment, the poor and a lot of other issues with which we constantly trouble our silly little heads.  And clearly women in Nevada favor Mr. Reid for reasons that go beyond the mere sex of the candidate.  And here I thought that might indicate complex thinking!

But Mr. Mitchell has deduced that if women favor Democrats, they are biased. If men favor a Republican beauty queen (according to the descriptors used by Mr. Mitchell) they, of course, are not biased.  But by what motivation are men driven, in Mr. Mitchell’s theory? Looks and glamour only?  Surely not!

(For the record, Ms. Lowden also has been philanthropist, a former State Senator and chair of the state Republican Party, though in his unbiased assessment of women, Mr. Mitchell failed to mention any of these attributes.)

Mr. Mitchell takes it a step further.  The fact that women consistently favor Senator Reid is biased while the fact that men consistently favor any Republican candidate means they are consistent.

At least that is what Mr. Mitchell says:

[C]hange the Republican option from Lowden to former basketball star Danny Tarkanian and it is a different tale. Men still favored the Republican by 16 points and doubled their support by Ashjian to 15 points. Women, on the other hand, chose Reid by 16 points, proving they’d rather vote for a woman than a male Republican.

Men, concludes Mr. Mitchell, “are consistent. Women are fickle and biased.”

To prove his argument, he points to the fact that in the 3rd Congressional District race pitting Republican Dr. Joe Heck against Democratic incumbent Dina Titus, men went with Heck 58-36, while women leaned toward Titus 52-40.

Wow, we gals sure are fickle.

And not so smart, I guess.  I thought the meaning of fickle was “to be marked by lack of steadfastness, constancy, or stability;  given to erratic changeableness.”  I will have to look the term up in Mr. Mitchell’s old west version of the dictionary because Merriam-Webster surely is out-of-date.  Surely women being so consistently pro-Democrat and for Senator Reid must be fickle in a different universe than all those men who are consistently for one party, no matter which candidate.

And now I realize that that the “you-don’t-agree-with-me therefore-you-don’t-deserve-basic-rights” rhetoric of the far right, of anti-choicers and of others must be the exact right way to think, rather than just incredibly shallow circular reasoning.  After all, if we just agreed with all those people we wouldn’t be fickle and biased.

And really, if you think about it, repealing the 19th Amendment would help a whole lot of things, like making it easier for Congress, the states, the media, and the far right to run roughshod over women’s bodies with nary a complaint. 

I never thought of it that way.

Maybe we don’t deserve the right to vote after all.