Your description of "intellectually honest" is actually intellectually dishonest. In the United States, we generally understand the right to political autonomy

Your description of "intellectually honest" is actually intellectually dishonest. In the United States, we generally understand the right to political autonomy, and the right to vote in particular, to come from a citizen's existence as a citizen (which itself is derived from Enlightenment principles of inalienable human rights). There are nearly no philosophical exceptions to this and only a few pragmatic ones (e.g. age of majority). The question of women's suffrage is by itself a reasonable litmus test of whether someone is politically sensible and, by this measure, Mr. Thiel can be judged insensible. To judge Mr. Thiel as politically insensible on the basis of his opposition to women's suffrage is by definition intellectual honesty. Given the long history of philosophical, political, and jurisprudential consensus that produced the 19th Amendment, it is in fact intellectually dishonest to entertain the possibility that Mr. Thiel has a novel set of arguments that could justify the disenfranchisement of women as a class. People are justified in being skeptical of Thiel based on his radical assertion that women's suffrage is a mistake and they are behaving sensibly when they express wariness about other claims he might make based on his established predilection for asserting dangerous claims against the political autonomy of others. EDIT: grammar, readability.