Stephen Moore, Trump’s Federal Reserve Nominee, Withdraws After Sexist Columns Are Exposed

by Alessa ErawanMay 2, 2019, 2:58 pmDaily Digest, Homepage Slider, News, News Feed >

President Donald Trump‘s pick for governor of the Federal Reserve, Stephen Moore, has withdrawn from consideration after many Senate Republicans voiced concern over his past sexist comments.

Moore, the economic commentator and former Wall Street Journal editorialist, appeared on ABC’s This Week on Sunday to address the controversy.

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“They were humor columns but some of them weren’t funny so I am apologetic; I’m embarrassed by some of those things I wrote,” Moore told host George Stephanopoulos.

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Despite his defense, many are quick to point out that some of Moore’s statements raise questions regarding his actual views toward women. He has already been criticized by Democrats for his failure to pay more than $300,000 in child support to his former wife, Allison Moore, in 2013.

In 2000, one of Moore’s controversial articles was published in the Washington Examiner.

“Colleges are places for rabble-rousing. For men to lose their boyhood innocence. To do stupid things. To stay out way too late drinking. To chase skirts. (At the University of Illinois, we used to say that the best thing about Sunday nights was sleeping alone.) It’s all a time-tested rite of passage into adulthood. And the women seemed to survive just fine. If they were so oppressed and offended by drunken, lustful frat boys, why is it that on Friday nights they showed up in droves in tight skirts to the keg parties?” he wrote.

Several of his columns that were published in the early 2000s by the National Review, a conservative magazine, show his particular displeasure with women in sports.

In one 2002 column, he wrote:

How outrageous is this? This year they allowed a woman ref a men’s NCAA game. Liberals celebrate this breakthrough as a triumph for gender equity. The NCAA has been touting this as example of how progressive they are. I see it as an obscenity. Is there no area in life where men can take vacation from women? What’s next? Women invited to bachelor parties? Women in combat? (Oh yeah, they’ve done that already.)

Moore’s more recent writing has become a popular argument that many in the conservative media use to argue that rising wages for women could backfire on men and society.

“What are the implications of a society in which women earn more than men?” he wrote in a 2014 column. “We don’t really know, but it could be disruptive to family stability. If men aren’t the breadwinners, will women regard them as economically expendable? We saw what happened to family structure in low-income and black households when a welfare check took the place of a father’s paycheck. Divorce rates go up when men lose their jobs.”

Moore drew more criticism in 2017 when he passed along what he considered good advice from a leading corporate executive. The advice was to “never have a meeting with a woman without someone else in the room.”

Nominees for the governor of the Federal Reserve, the government body that decides the monetary policies that affect everyone in the country, usually have extensive experience in the world of monetary economics. Moore admitted to having no such experience, but urged others to see this inexperience as an asset.