Henry Olsen writes:

The Heritage Foundation has had a tough month. President Kevin Roberts’s decision to vigorously defend Tucker Carlson’s platforming of the noted anti-Semite and white nationalist Nick Fuentes has pushed the conservative think tank into a tailspin. One board member, the Princeton professor Robert George, resigned; a number of staff departed; and a task force to combat anti-Semitism severed its ties.

Yet Heritage’s problems are hardly limited to its handling of Fuentes. The think tank’s recent decision to hire Scott Yenor, a family-policy scholar, to lead the Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies poses serious questions about the institution’s beliefs concerning the equality of women in the workplace and perhaps even as citizens.

Yenor’s views are, to say the least, controversial. In a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, he labeled professional women “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” He has echoed the online right’s use of the term AWFLs (for “affluent white female liberals”) in his writing, and had to step down from an appointment as the chair of the University of West Florida’s board of trustees when it became clear that the Republican-controlled state Senate would not confirm him.

Yenor has also criticized prominent figures on the right, such as Megyn Kelly, the former Fox personality who now hosts a popular podcast. She argued that it was wrong for conservative men, when looking for a spouse, to prefer women who don’t work full-time. Yenor responded that that’s precisely what conservative men should do, contending that “the heroic feminine prioritizes motherhood and wifeliness and celebrates the men who make it possible.”

His rhetorical pugnacity, though, is merely a symptom of the challenge that he presents to the beleaguered Heritage Foundation. It’s his ideas, not just his words, that are the problem.

Yenor believes that employers should be legally permitted to discriminate against women in the workplace, and has advocated for legal changes that would allow businesses “to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage”—that is, denying women jobs solely on the basis of their sex or paying men more for performing the same job as women. He also believes that “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.” [Continue reading…]