Kelly grills Dobbs, Erickson

During a heated interview on Friday, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly blasted her colleagues Lou Dobbs and Erick Erickson for the controversial comments they made this week about women in the workplace.

Kelly brought on the two guests in response to the comments they made — while appearing on an all-male panel on Fox Business Network’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” — about a recent Pew study that showed women are the sole or primary breadwinner in four in ten households with children. Kelly played clips of Dobbs and Erickson’s respective comments from Wednesday night to introduce the segment, which featured Dobbs saying “we’re watching society dissolve around us” and Erickson’s line that “when you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role.”


“What makes you dominant and me submissive, and who died and made you scientist in chief?” Kelly said to Erickson.

( PHOTOS: The GOP, Fox political purge)

“What I meant by that was when you look throughout society and other animals the male of the species tends to be the protector and dominant one in that regard and we have gotten to a point in this country where you have a lot of feminists who think that the male and female roles are completely interchangeable, that there is no need for a man to support his family,” Erickson replied.

Kelly pushed back against his comment, noting that “there is data in the scientific community to suggest that children of homosexual couples who are happily married and are good parents, they are no worse than children of heterosexual couples, and there is plenty of data to suggest that children of working moms, as opposed to stay at home moms, wind up just as healthy and able to thrive in society than the children of stay at home mothers.”

Erickson said he disputed the data because “it’s been so self-selective.” Erickson said “the reality” is that women who choose to work instead of staying at home are hurting the family unit.

Kelly also turned it over to Dobbs, who kicked off his time by saying that “Erick is wrong about nature itself, the male is not always dominant” before launching into his own take on what’s happening to society because women are breadwinners in the family.

“For anyone, in any discussion, in any debate, on what is happening with women in the workplace, to ignore the fact that we have marriages breaking up, shattering in this society, and we know that that reduces by at least —”

“Why are you attributing that to women in the work force?” Kelly asked.

“Excuse me. Let me just finish what I’m saying, if I may, oh dominant one,” Dobbs said.

“Excuse me?” Kelly replied, as Erickson laughed.

Kelly also offered the two guests some historical insight, asking if they knew “in the 50s and 60s, there were huge, huge numbers of people who believed that the children of interracial marriages were inferior, were biologically inferior, and that is why it was illegal for some blacks and whites to marry in this country.”

“They said it was science, and it was fact,” she said. “If you were the child of a black father and a white mother or vice versa, you were inferior and you were not set up for success. Tell that to Barack Obama.”