Conservative and hard-Right, AM radio talk show host, Dennis Prager has often made
the claim that he constantly monitors the Internet for mentions of either his
name, or that of his non-accredited (and therefore, not-real) university, Prager
University-PragerU-for short, or both. To
my knowledge, he has not mentioned exactly how he performs this monitoring;
through bots or search alerts or some other way, and also to my knowledge, he
has not mentioned the results of these searches in a positive light: Instead,
Prager has only mentioned the results of these searches in a negative light.
Such was the case when, about a month or two ago, on his nationally
broadcast morning talk show, Prager railed against an article published on the liberal
and left-leaning website, Media Matters for America (MMFA), the author
of which referenced Prager’s apparent insistence that in any marriage, the wife
has “an obligation” to her husband to give him sex when he desires it, regardless
of how she feels about it, or as Prager wrote, “her mood”. The article in MMFA referenced a December,
2008 article, written by Prager on the conservative website, Townhall,
titled, “When
A Woman Isn’t in the Mood: Part II”.
Prager was nearly livid at the MMFA author’s insistence that
Prager had stated that wives have “an obligation” to give their husband sex,
regardless of their “mood”, because, Prager claimed, he had never actually stated
that doing so was an obligation.
That was not the first time I had heard Prager making the
same argument, for example, appearing on Fox News host, Tucker Carlson’s
evening conservative talk show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, in 2018,
and I had heard Prager complain before about this very same claim made against
him by other people. However, this last time, I was not working when I heard
Prager making this argument and as such, I was able to research the claims made
by Prager, specifically those he made about the more recent MMFA article and I found
several problems with not only his claims, but the way in which he made his
argument against the MMFA article and its author.
To begin, Prager started to read selected quotes from the
MMFA article, but, just before he did, he seemed to not know nor understand
who, or what, MMFA actually is, asking his off-air producer (something Prager
frequently does on his show), how big MMFA is, saying something to the effect
of his asking earnestly because he honestly did not know, seeming to claim that
he had never heard of MMFA. The problem
with that is that, if we, his audience are to take Prager at his word, then
according to him, he monitors the Internet for any mentions of his name or that
of his “university”, or both. The assumption
being, or course, that anytime such mentions occur, Prager would be made aware
of it. So, if Prager seems ignorant of
MMFA, then that is because he has never heard of them, or at the least, he has
never heard of them in regards to any mentions of his name or PragerU. The problem with that is that a quick search of
the very same Internet will eventually lead the searcher to MMFA’s very own
Dennis Prager webpage which
is actually two pages and lists seventeen articles dating back to at least
2010, mentioning either Prager or PragerU’s name. This realization results in one, or some
combination of the following conclusions: Prager does not actually monitor the
Internet for any mentions of his name or that of his “university”; he does
monitor the Internet, but somehow, any mentions of those two names in MMFA
escaped him; he does monitor the Internet, but does not know how to use
whatever system he might have in place to do so; he’s forgotten about any
mentions of those two names in MMFA or; he’s lying.
Prager then went on to read from the MMFA article, but,
shortly into his reading of the article, he stopped and noted to his audience
that the author never used any quotation marks in the article, telling his
audience that that is a sure sign that someone is lying or making things up out
of whole cloth. When I researched, and
found, the
article to which Prager was referring, I discovered two more problems with
Prager’s argument: the first was that, throughout the beginning of the article,
the author-as is custom with online articles-uses embedded hyperlinks to lead
readers to the sources of his information; the second problem was that, toward
the end of the article, the author does indeed use quotation marks. As before, this realization leads to one, or
some combination of the following conclusions: Prager does not understand the
purpose served by the use of embedded hyperlinks; he didn’t see the embedded
hyperlinks; he never actually read all, or even part of the MMFA article, or; he’s lying.
Finally, at the heart of all of this is Prager’s claim that
he “never” stated that a wife had “an obligation” to her husband to give him
sex, regardless of what she is feeling.
On a side note; the issue of “feelings” is an oft-beat upon drum by
Prager, claiming that feelings are the sole prevue of the Left and that basing
anything-any decision-on feelings is, in his words, “foolish”, and Prager
touches on that subject in the same article.
However, the following are Prager’s own words from that article:
(Note: all emphasis mine)
“In Part I, I made the argument that any woman who is
married to a good man and who wants a happy marriage ought to consent to
at least some form of sexual relations as much as possible.”
“In Part II, I advance the argument that a wife should do
so even when she is not in the mood for sexual relations. I am talking
about mood, not about times of emotional distress or illness.”
“The baby boom generation elevated feelings to a status
higher than codes of behavior. In determining how one ought to act, feelings,
not some code higher than one’s feelings, became decisive: “No shoulds, no
oughts.” In the case of sex, therefore, the only right time for a wife to have
sex with her husband is when she feels like having it. She never “should” have
it. But marriage and life are filled with “shoulds.””
“Thus, in the past generation we have witnessed the
demise of the concept of obligation in personal relations. We have been
nurtured in a culture of rights, not a culture of obligations. To many
women, especially among the best educated, the notion that a woman owes her
husband sex seems absurd, if not actually immoral. They have been taught that such
a sense of obligation renders her “property.” Of course, the very fact that
she can always say “no” -- and that this “no” must be honored -- renders the
“property” argument absurd. A woman is not “property” when she feels she owes
her husband conjugal relations. She is simply wise enough to recognize that marriages
based on mutual obligations -- as opposed to rights alone and certainly as
opposed to moods -- are likely to be the best marriages.”
So, on the one hand, Prager is correct in claiming that he
never actually directly stated that a wife has an obligation to her husband to
give him sex regardless of her feelings, but he does, however, frame the entire
subject within the greater idea of relational and personal obligations,
specifically in marital relations, especially when he wrote that, “marriage and
life are full of “shoulds”’. And so, on
the other hand, if Prager is not actually, categorically stating that wives
have such an obligation to their husband, he is, at the very least, heavily
implying, exactly that.
As someone who has a graduate degree, and, according to his biography on his own website, "holds an honorary doctorate of law from Pepperdine University", it would seem plausible that Prager would know and understand the difference between what he actually wrote and what he was arguing against on his radio show. It's often difficult for me to pinpoint what some conservatives are doing with their argumentation, but I contend that conservatism, and current Republican dogma, trace their roots to authoritarianism and as such, a key component to their argumentation is a heavy reliance upon what is known as, "argumentum ad ignorantiam", or an appeal to ignorance.
As i wrote earlier in this essay, I was not working the day I heard Prager make this particular claim, so I was able to research it. I firmly believe that, especially in the case of Right Wing Media (RWM)-a field dominated mostly by white men who self-identify as Christian, and to a lesser degree, Jewish-rely heavily upon the rhetoric of ethos in which their audience believes, on faith, everything that they say, or write. So, in this case, Prager-who attacks the Left on a near-hourly basis on his show-attacks a writer for, as I mentioned above, a liberal and left-leaning website, for writing the following sentence in her online article, "He’s compared a wife’s “obligation” to have sex with her husband whether she wants to or not to a man’s obligation to go to work even if he’s not in the mood." Please not only note her use of quotation marks (around an embedded hyperlink), but that their use has two potential uses: she is either directly quoting Prager (which she was doing); or that she was using the quotation marks to denote a deliberate misinterpretation of whatever was being quoted (which, I believe, she was not doing). Also note that the overall focus of the article was PragerU itself, not just Prager's essay-of which the MMFA author focused on only one part-and that her reference to that essay is literally, a 32-word sentence from within a near-15,000 word article. In this way, Prager's telling of the article paints a very different picture from the reality-and Prager must know this, therefore, standing firmly upon his platform of rhetorical ethos, Prager appeals to the ignorance of his audience.
And he is doing so deliberately.
The ultimate question is why is (or perhaps, more appropriately-and honestly-did he do) doing this? Because, if my theory about RWM's heavy reliance upon ethos as the source of their authority, then wouldn't misleading their audience-deliberately or not-undermine that ethos and their credibility? And, wouldn't they know this? If the answer to both of those questions is, yes, then the answer to the first question in this paragraph is that they-and he-are doing it on purpose and that purpose is to get their-and his-audience to believe every word that they say, without question. Or, as the chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, Republican Lamar Smith said, "Better to get your news directly from the President. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth."
