Senate Hopeful Wants Home-Cooked Meals: Read Rant On Feminists

KANSAS CITY, MO — A Republican who hopes to unseat U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, envisions a world where men get a home-cooked meal dutifully prepared by their wives after a hard day's work. Courtland Sykes, who lives in the Kansas City suburb of Independence, posted his views about women’s rights on the campaign’s verified Facebook account.

Commenters pummeled Sykes with pearls of wisdom ripped from the string around 1950s fictional TV mom June Cleaver’s neck. Where, Kirsten Kruse wondered, “is your time machine?”

“I’m a veterinarian,” Teri Davenport Bragg wrote. “I'd be happy to have my practice and see my cat and dog patients (with their dirt, their hair, their parasites, their wounds, their dental disease, their anal glands ...) right on his kitchen table. Hell, I'd even let him help … I would even lovingly prepare his dinner on the counter next to my fecal sample microscope. And who KNOWS what would happen in the surgery suite aka the master bathroom. …”

Others, though, pointed out that the society Sykes envisions is a make-believe world like the one in which the fictional Cleaver family on the sitcom “Leave It To Beaver” lives.

“He is referring to a world and a time that never existed,” Beverly Hanson O’Malley wrote. “Women have ALWAYS worked and contributed to the family economy.”

Sykes's Facebook rant against feminism does seem tone-deaf in the #MeToo era, where hundreds of women — presumably in Missouri, too — have told stories of sexual harassment and assault, and are demanding parity in pay and equal opportunity free of discrimination.

Sykes lets loose on what he calls “radical feminism” in a Facebook post responding to a question about whether he favors women’s rights, Sykes said his fiancée, Chanel Rion, "has given me orders to favor them, so I'd better."

"I want to come home to a home cooked dinner at six every night, one that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives — think Norman Rockwell here and Gloria Steinem be damned," wrote Sykes, an Arkansas native who moved to Missouri in mid-2016 with Rion to start a family, according to his campaign website.

Sykes went on to say he doesn’t “buy into radical feminism’s crazed definition of womanhood” and that feminists “made it up to suit their own nasty, snake-filled heads.”

Modern women can be “anything they want, including traditional women — as millions are and millions more are fast becoming,” Sykes said, simplifying the results of the 2016 presidential election.

“Millennial voters despised Hillary and cost her the election (and they weren’t Russians),” he wrote. “I wonder why they despise her? One reason is they look at her personal life’s wreckage and didn’t want to become like her.”

The post goes on, claiming a “non-stop feminism campaign against manhood.”

“Men and women are different and gender-bending word games by a goofy nest of drugstore academics aren’t going to change anything — except the fantasy life of those confused people in ivory towers,” he wrote.

Sykes does claim in the end that he supports women’s rights, but with a caveat. His manifesto includes a rant presented here without editing:

“I want them to build home based enterprises and live in homes shared with good husbands and I don’t want them grow up into career obsessed banshees who forego home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the tops of a thousand tall buildings they are thinking they could have leaped over in a single bound — had men not ‘suppressing them.’ It’s just nuts. It always was.”

A Freedom Caucus supporter, Sykes is in lockstep with President Trump on issues such as the wall on the southern U.S. border and other immigration issues, and a vocal Second Amendment supporter, according to the campaign website.

He said he joined the U.S. Navy after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was deployed to the Middle East four times. He left the military in 2011.

Photo via Courtland Sykes for Senate 2018 campaign website.