The Slatest

Today in Conservative Media: No, There’s Nothing Sexist About the House Dress Code

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, firmly adhering to his office’s dress code.

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A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.

Conservatives defended House rules banning women from baring their shoulders in the speaker’s lobby, which caused a stir after a reporter was denied entry for wearing a sleeveless dress. The Daily Wire’s Aaron Bandler:

It can be easy to see why some might be unaware of the required attire since there aren’t any public documents stating what specific articles of clothing are banned from the House, but typically workplaces have a dress code that employees need to follow. Some tend to have a stricter dress code than others. Requiring appropriate business attire in the House building for women and men is not some sort of Christian dystopian tyranny.

This episode is yet another example of feminists finding any little thing to be the object of their perpetual outrage.

“If anything, the capricious enforcement of the rule is biased against reporters, and … well, men,” National Review’s Tiana Lowe wrote. “In 95-degree heat with 90 percent humidity, a shirt, suit jacket, long pants, and a tie is indisputably more uncomfortable than a knee-length dress with sleeves.” Lowe, Bandler, and others defended House Speaker Paul Ryan from the charge that he bore responsibility for the dress code’s enforcement.

Others chimed in to endorse dress codes broadly speaking:

In other news:

Conservatives continued their defense of Donald Trump’s speech in Warsaw on Thursday. The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher wrote that the speech’s critics, particularly the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart, “despise their civilization”:

An American president, standing in the capital of a nation that suffered in the last century the domination of two tyrannies — Nazi and Communist — that tried to eradicate its culture, a nation whose Catholic faith kept its spirit alive and led to its rebirth — proclaims that there are things unique and valuable about Western civilization, and that we should remember those things, affirm them, and defend them.

The shocking thing here is that this is controversial at all. It shows how decadent we have become. …

Thank God that the deracinated, de-Christianized EU elite plan to integrate Turkey into the European Union did not work. And if I were a Turk, I would thank Allah for preserving my Islamic country from that fate too. Elites in both countries wish to deny the religious basis of their respective cultures, and pretend that we’re all a bunch of universalists. We’re not, and never will be.

National Review’s David French agreed. “Trump’s ‘sin’ here isn’t racism but rather calling out the false god of post–Cold War establishment utopianism,” he wrote. “The ideas that define and govern our nation come from a specific culture, and that culture comes from (and has defined) a specific place. The Founders were heirs to a specific intellectual and religious tradition — one that is both alien and superior to many competing cultures and faiths.”