OK, folks, we all know Faux News is chock full of sick f*cks, but the cat box king of the week is Red Eye’s Greg Gutfeld, who has a conniption over Ellen DeGeneres announcing on the air that she plans to marry Portia de Rossi. He thinks she needs to closet herself rather than declare her love for her partner — because it offends him in a manner that is akin to jawboning about taking a crap. Thanks to folks at Media Matters, we have the clip of this, ahem, turd.

During the May 20 edition of Fox News’ Red Eye, host Greg Gutfeld criticized Ellen DeGeneres for “announc[ing] on her show that she’s marrying the stunningly hot Portia de Rossi.” Gutfeld said: “As you know, seeing Ellen happy makes me happy, for everyone should be happy with the one they love, be they straight, gay, transgendered, bicurious, master, slave, S&M, or even Belgian — especially Belgian, those miserable bastards deserve it.” Later, Gutfeld added, “For me, public exhortations of love are no different than telling everyone how great your bowel movements are since switching to All-Bran — no one gives a [bleep] except you.”

Gutfeld’s comments were previously noted by Michelangelo Signorile on his blog, The Gist.

Mike also notes at his pad that E.D. Hill, subbing for Bill O’Reilly, had a guest on intimating Ellen’s joyous announcement will drive sponsors away.

The crazed guest, Laura Ries, an “advertising expert,” says there is a “danger” to Ellen talking about getting married. Hill ponders something she finds more interesting: “How did a 50-year-old woman get a 35-year-old woman?”

As someone at my pad noted,

[T]he elaborate preface about how “everyone deserves to be happy, whether [long list of increasingly outré sexual practices]” really sounds like a contemporary version of the old saw “I’m not prejudiced, some of my best friends are members of the group I’m about to denounce.”)

But I think it’s only plausible for him to bother to make these comments in a homophobic context. Every day people announce publicly that they’re going to get married. Why does this particular announcement result in a tirade? Even he couldn’t possibly actually believe that publicly announcing a marriage makes it unlikely to succeed (which is not to say that he doesn’t demonstrate a level of idiocy that makes it pretty hard to imagine him tying his shoes unassisted), and as Media Matters points out, he talks quite a bit about his wife.

So to follow it all up with “you don’t see me going on publicly about my marriage”–that’s not only false, but the lamest het move on the books. It makes me scream when I hear people say things like ‘why do they have to flaunt their sexuality [by innocuous behavior like holding hands in public]? You don’t hear me discussing my relations with my wife’–when they’ve just referred casually to their children.

Ellen’s announcement was benign and unremarkable other than the legal news that make it possible to marry; certainly everyone has seen all sorts of on-air proposals, discussions about spouses, and talk about being pregnant/having a baby by celebs, anchors, etc. Do you see anyone saying a morning anchor announcing she’s going to have a baby is flaunting the fact she had to boink her husband to get knocked up? Of course not.

Gutfeld rode the heterosupremacy horse onto the set of Red Eye and let it take a dump on the air.

You might recall that Gutfeld is the same guy who hurled every nasty slur you can imagine about pregnant transman Thomas Beatie. See that below the fold.
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The Republican stupid - it burns. From Kathleen Parker’s column at the WaPo:

Well, at least they didn’t kiss.

I was bracing myself for the lip lock Wednesday when John Edwards endorsed Barack Obama.

Don’t look at me. David “Mudcat” Saunders, Edwards’s former rural adviser, came up with the idea, saying Obama should kiss Edwards on the lips “to kill this 41-point loss,” referring to Hillary Clinton’s landslide victory in the West Virginia primary.

Instead, the two men exchanged a manly air-hug to commemorate the moment when Edwards threw Clinton under the upholstered sofa on his grandmama’s front porch.

Holy smoke, is the “Breck Girl” reference to the former NC senator going to make comeback? I leave it to Brad at Sadly, No to break this sh*t down.

It’s tough to list all the things that make this column so mind-crushingly stupid, but let’s give it a shot:

• Parker begins the column by calling Edwards and Obama fags.

• Then, not having the courage to stand by this novel and poignant insight, she claims that it wasn’t her idea to call them fags, but was instead the idea of one of Edwards’ advisers. But hey, they’re still gay homo fruits who like to take it up the homobutt.

• Next, she pulls out the oldest trick in the Wingnut Punditry Bible: she lectures us about what Real Americans think! Never mind that she’s spent her entire working life on the Wingnut Welfare circuit - she’s got her hand on the pulse of The People, baby!

• And what do Real Americans think, you ask? Why, they’re apparently super-duper happy about the state of the country! Even though, like, 85% of them are dissatisfied with the direction of the country. And even though Bush’s approval rating stands at a sterling 28%. And even though the Republicans just lost a goddamn seat in freaking Mississippi.

How come I don’t hear about this loving - ahem - male bonding:

Washington University students and faculty are in an uproar over the decision to award anti-gay, anti-feminist Eagle Forum fossil Phyllis Schlafly an honorary doctorate at its May 16 commencement ceremony. A Facebook group created to protest the move has over a thousand members.

Mary Ann Dzuback, the director of the women and gender studies department at Washington University agreed, said it was “grossly inappropriate” for the university to honor Schlafly with a degree.

“She’s spent her entire career speaking against women in the workforce and for them remaining in the home,” Dzuback said of Schlafly, who rose to prominence during the successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.

…The university issued a statement Sunday defending its decision, saying it — like many other universities — chooses to honor those “who have become a part of the broad public discourse on vital issues of the times.” The statement cited other controversial figures, such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whom the school has honored.

Steve Ralls of PFLAG National:

PFLAG and our St. Louis chapter are proud to join those on the ground in Missouri and call on school officials to do the right thing and, as executive director Jody Huckaby said today, “find a more suitable person to applaud.”

Steve also points out some of Mother Schlafly’s winning cultural touchstones:

On California’s SB-77, to protect GLBT students: The legislation “represent[s] a repudiation of 2,000 years of Christian moral teaching on human sexuality, marriage, and the family. The result is that California’s schools are now promoting behaviors and lifestyles that are physically and spiritually dangerous for children.”

On the idea of any protections for GLBT youth: “The bottom line is, don’t count on the courts to protect public school students from being subjected to the promotion of homosexuality.”

On sexual harassment laws: “Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women.”

Yeah. I think they could locate someone who isn’t terminally frozen in the dark ages.

That’s a damn big household

There’s times when “domestic dispute” fits the bill. There are many times when it doesn’t. It’s especially not a domestic dispute if the killer and murder victim don’t even live together (trigger warning):

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Ah, Birmingham’s in the news again as a result of the airing of 20/20’s experiment on public displays of affection by same-sex couples last Friday. We’re not talking about public sex, mind you, just arms around the shoulder and some nuzzling kind of thing. A male couple was stationed on a park bench at Five-Points with a camera rolling. Wouldn’t you know it — someone called 911 to complain about the PDA. The emergency?

Operator: “Birmingham Police operator 9283″

Caller: “We have a couple of men sitting out on the bench that have been kissing and drooling all over each other for the past hour or so. It’s not against the law, right?”

Operator: “Not to the best of my knowledge it’s not.”

Caller: “So there’s no complaint I could make or have?”

Operator: “I imagine you could complain if you like ma’am. We can always send an officer down there.”

Yes, they sent a patrol car down there, and the officer, after calling his superior (the Birmingham PD was in on the 20/20 experiment) backed down, but told the couple “Just don’t do that in public.”

The remarks of two Birmingham women passersby when 20/20 has a lesbian couple sit on the bench are predictable. That’s below the fold.
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Like a complete idiot, I didn’t think to take a picture, so here’s a picture of the cover

I’ve been a fan of Barry’s for a long time, so the thing I was looking forward to most about Stumptown Comics Fest was picking up the aborted-tree edition of Hereville. And it’s great, of course. If you’re in Portland, the second day of the Festival is tomorrow (at the Lloyd Center Doubletree), and if you’re not, and the story (girl meets sword) sounds intriguing (and it should), go order it from the web site - several editions are available.

State Rep. Sally Kern — how about this fine upstanding citizen of your state? Is he more or less of a threat to society than your average aggressive radical homosexual or everyday homosexual?

Michael Burgess, sheriff in Custer County, OK is a pious family man, he even offers a Sheriff’s prayer on his website. Unfortunately he needs a few prayers right now, as he is charged with abusing his authority by offering leniency to inmates in exchange for getting blown and laid.

Michael Burgess, sheriff in Custer County, Okla., since 1994, surrendered to state law enforcement agents Wednesday and appeared in district court to face 35 felony charges, including multiple counts of rape, forcible oral sodomy, bribery by a public official and perjury.

More details below the fold, including a snippet of Jesus’ General’s letter to Sally about the goings-on in her little slice of pious heaven.
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Oh, so that’s what happened to the economy (rolls eyes). I don’t know what to make of this. Given what women have had to deal with because of monthly hormonal surges, the idea that men are ruled by their hormones isn’t exactly a novel concept, but this kind stereotyping is useful…how?

The hormone that drives male aggression and sexual interest also seems able to boost short term success at finance. But what seems to start out well can turn bad, with elevated testosterone levels over several days possibly leading to irrational risk-taking, according to researchers at the University of Cambridge in England.

“If people want to get practical, it would be good for both banks and the financial system as a whole if we had more women and older men in the markets,” said John M. Coates, lead author of a study appearing in this week’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

OK — now this is worth a belly laugh…

Coates and Herbert’s study comes less than two weeks after U.S. researchers reported that young men shown erotic pictures were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such as a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler.

Money and women trigger the same brain area in men, those researchers said.

Take that and run with it…

Do you think the planned vigils and demonstrations are going to do anything to sway Benedict, or is this simply a matter of letting him know the dismay about his hateful rhetoric on key issues? (PageOneQ):

Gay Catholic activists, who plan to demonstrate Tuesday along the papal motorcade route in Washington, have compiled a list of statements by Benedict during his career which they consider hostile to gays and lesbians. These include forceful denunciations of gay marriage and of adoption rights for same-sex couples.

“He has issued some of the most hurtful and extreme rhetoric against our community of any religious leader in history, and we want to call him into account for the damage that he’s done,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA.

Duddy-Burke said she hopes the protests will be coupled with celebration of the gains made by gay Catholics in America in recent years. She cited the growing number of parishes welcoming openly gay members and the dozens of Catholic colleges that now have gay-straight alliances.

…For many American Catholics, the most distressing church-related issue of recent years has been clerical sex abuse. Thousands of molestation allegations have been filed against Catholic clergy, and dioceses have paid out more than $2 billion in claims since 1950.

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abuse by Priests, said his advocacy group would not be mollified even if the pope meets privately with abuse victims.

BTW, he’s not doing a stop in Boston, where the scandal exploded — imagine that?

Other Qs —
* What about churches that are welcoming to non-celibate gay parishioners - will there be a “crackdown”?
* Is it reasonable to expect any meaningful progressive change during this Pope’s reign?
* For Catholics out there, how do you reconcile Benedict’s positions with your faith?

I’m just tossing these out there for discussion. It’s clear that Prada Papa Ratzi’s arrival on U.S. soil will generate a lot of press, and a good amount of dismay among women, gays, health advocates who are promoting condom use to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS, and other progressive members of the Catholic community who believe that the conservative Benedict has hurt the church, particularly in light of the clergy sex abuse scandals.
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This perv has a rap sheet with 30 arrests for sex abuse, 13 for jostling and two for grand larceny, according to the NYPD, and his behavior is so compulsive that he was barely out of the clink before he started up with the sexual abuse again.

About two weeks after he was released from prison, Freddie Johnson boarded a crowded subway train in Manhattan and illegally rubbed up against a woman, authorities said.

It is a fairly common crime on subways in New York. But this was no common criminal. Johnson has been arrested a staggering 53 times — the majority for groping women on the subway, police and prosecutors said.

In his latest arrest, Johnson was being followed by plainclothes officers who recognized him from police photos, authorities said. He was charged with persistent sexual abuse, and if convicted this time, he could be sent away for life. The district attorney’s office branded him a “recidivist transit grinder” at a court hearing earlier this week.

But the fact that Johnson was roaming the subways in the first place has raised questions about how the state deals with the problem of repeat sex offenders. His case even drew the scorn of a newspaper editorial this week that labeled Johnson the “Subway Rat.”

I’m surprised this dick still has his wing-wang; surely if he rubbed up against my cousin, it would be swiss cheese by now.

My story of pervy subway behavior is below the fold.
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This is interesting. The show “Mob Logic” has found a pattern in their “man on the street” interviews—women, far far far more often than men, are afraid to express an opinion, defer to male companions, or don’t even really have a chance to defer since they get stepped on.

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OK, so this isn’t important “news” in the grand scheme of things, but WTF - Nipplegate? Now WWE man boobs are the cause of the fall of American civilization. Sigh. From Scott Maxwell’s column in the Orlando Sentinel:

Anybody who’s ever seen a professional wrestler knows their bodies don’t look like most folks’.

But the wrestlers featured on a massive sign in downtown Orlando look even more unusual. They’re missing nipples.

Yep. John Cena, Triple H, Randy Orton and even Big Show. All nipple-less.

…Even more unsettling is the fact that government is partly responsible for the missing areolas on the banner that hangs on the side of the Lynx office building, facing Interstate 4, and promotes this weekend’s WrestleMania.

…What happened, said a similarly uncomfortable city spokesman, Carson Chandler, was that city staffers asked the WWE and folks to create banners that weren’t too provocative. And somewhere along the way, the nipples were airbrushed out before the giant sign reached Orlando.

Yes, airbrushed . . . which at least means they didn’t involve hubcap-sized pasties.

Boy, I hope this quote was taken out of context. (Hat tip.)

Some insist it can be explained by basic biology. Feminist author Robin Morgan says men “stow their brains in their crotches. Women do seem to approach work differently. And women tend to regard sex differently. They like to at least like the person.”

There’s nothing about the quote that inclines me to think Morgan was speaking about biological imperatives or any evo psych nonsense that exists to justify “middle-aged professors sleeping with their younger graduate students.” But still, I’m wary of the language that shames sexual desire, or more importantly, credits certain kinds of sexual misbehavior to sexual desire, when I think a lot of it is about power desire. Women are as fully capable as men of letting our lusts overcome our reason, but that’s not what a lot of these scandals are about.

Let me elaborate. The article in question is a Newsweek piece about why female leaders don’t get caught up in sex scandals as often as male leaders. The most likely explanation, albeit the least conducive to essentialist sexist arguments, is that there are simply a lot less female leaders. Women do, after all, cheat almost as much as men, and so if every adultery turned into a sex scandal and representation was 50/50 in the halls of power, we’d see an equal number of women getting outed as adulterers. But I’m not going to dust off my hands and call it a day with that, because I think the Newsweek article does make a good point about the qualitative difference. Women have been outed for garden variety adulteries, but with men, it’s often about sex with prostitutes, interns, grooming the next younger wife while the current one is sick with cancer, etc.

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Wow, this is a telling little light shone into the anxious masculinity that defines the conservative “revolution”. (Via.) Apparently, Brett Favre teared up at his retirement press conference, an understandable action considering the high emotions that have to be flying as you end a career as prestigious as his. And Laura Ingraham, who knows her audience very well, decided this was a good opportunity to call Favre a woman.

“All these years, and I didn’t know there was a woman quarterback in the NFL.”

“Brett Favre…we’re watching this in the studio, obviously retiring from the NFL, great quarterback, handsome 38-year-old man, he gets up there and he does this press conference that was frankly one of the most embarrassing things I have ever seen.”

“That’s a great message for young boys. ‘Get up there and act like a girl and start blubbering like a baby.”

Then, in her best impersonation of a crying toddler with its favorite toy taken away, she wah-wah-wah’s while uttering in a mocking tone, “It’s about me, it was never about me, but it is about me, bla, bla, bla” before returning to her regular voice and stating, “I could not believe what I was seeing.”

Unfortunately, the reaction from too many sporting outlets has been, essentially, “Nuh-uh! He’s earned the right to cry a little without having his masculinity taken from him. And you’re not a woman, so there!” Which really isn’t probably going to hurt her feelings, because clearly she doesn’t think much of women to consider it an insult to call someone a woman.

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Thank you Keith. He used his Special Comment tonight to address this comment by 1984 VP nominee and former Clinton 2008 finance committee member Geraldine Ferraro:

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.

I discussed at length why I thought the Clinton campaign’s seeming death wish for their candidate and the party here. That campaign is so off the rails, so off message, awash in campaign tactics of yesteryear, the good-old-boy strategies that push buttons that make people jerk to toward that third rail of race — a place of extreme discomfort for most Americans of any color.

For more background if you haven’t watched the whole video, Ferraro went on a barnstorming media tour to defend her remarks, which only resulted in the emergence of past instances of saying much the same thing before (so it wasn’t off the cuff), something Keith addresses in full. MSNBC:

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I may not be a Clinton supporter, but when you have this level of misogyny floating out on the airwaves, all women are being slimed and it has to be called out. From the O’Reilly Factor, guest Marc Rudov, author of Under the Clitoral Hood: How to Crank Her Engine Without Cash, Booze, or Jumper Cables (no lie) said this:

O’REILLY: Tonight, we begin a brand new segment called, “He Said, She Said,” where we’ll deal with issues from a gender-based point of view. The segment will run every Friday, but we wanted to debut it tonight with a very provocative question: What is the downside of having a woman become president of the United States?

…RUDOV: You mean besides the PMS and the mood swings, right?

O’REILLY: But guys have mood swings, Marc. And you know —

RUDOV: Right.

O’REILLY: — they have other control issues, as we just heard with Governor Spitzer and we saw with various presidents. So come on now, let’s be fair.

RUDOV: Well, you know, I’m joking. Of course, the main problem I have is if a woman has a female agenda. If she doesn’t have a female agenda, if she just wants to be an executive for all the people, then all I care about is if she’s qualified. And I have no qualms about having a female president.

But if we take Hillary Clinton, she specifically does have a female agenda.

Is this akin to the Homosexual Agenda? Do any of you gals out there have a copy of the plan for world domination?

You can tell they’re happier, because these drawings are smiling. Case closed.

Anti-feminist blathers vs. science and facts today on Pandagon! I hate to keep hammering at this stuff, but the articles about how women are naturally simple-minded, inferior, and not cut out for being untied from the stove just keep on coming. If you perceive an uptick, as you should, I’m going to hypothesize that the point of bashing women non-stop in mainstream and conservative journals is aimed square at making people think that Hillary Clinton is crazy or incompetent, of which neither is true. Attack a candidate’s strengths—it’s an old war and campaign tactic, and Clinton’s strengths are her stability, her experience, her intelligence, and yes, the fact that she’s got a shot at being the first female President.

But not only are these articles hateful bullshit that hurts all women, not just Clinton, they’re also bullshit in the sense of not adhering to facts or truth. To start with, for your reading pleasure, I offer Media Matters’ shining takedown of the now-infamous Charlotte Allen piece about how women are so dumb. She offers baseless assertions and allusions to silly TV shows, but they offer you the facts.

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For the life of me I just don’t understand the thinking inside the Clinton campaign (and insided the heads of surrogates). Strong supporters of Clinton — please clue me in; I don’t know how the following developments make any sense in terms of political strategy that’s helpful to the candidate:

* Bill and Hillary continuing to promote the idea of a Clinton/Obama ticket with her at the top when she’s behind in delegate count;

* Promoting the idea of Obama as VP after spending time and money on ads to convince voters he’s not ready to answer the 3 AM phone call - why would she want someone she’s declared unqualified on the ticket?

* The assertion by Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson that somehow Obama could cross the imaginary 3AM-ready “threshhold” that Hillary has by the convention and thus be qualified for the VP slot.

More after the jump.
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Using this picture because I dig it.

The best part about being a voracious reader is the juxtapositions. Yesterday, while taking a blow-off day to be very sick, I laid on the couch and read through the most recent edition of Bitch, and I was impressed by an article by Jessica Wakeman called “Slap Happy” describing the practice of domestic discipline, which is something that really seems to have started with Christians who wish to return to an era where women were “managed” by their husbands through regular spankings. (The social acceptance of spanking women is something that seems to have disappeared so rapidly during the feminist era that it’s nearly forgotten that it was socially acceptable to the degree that images of men taking their wives or fiances over their knees and spanking them were on TV and in movies on occasion without too much fanfare up through the 50s.) But Wakeman isn’t interested in the fundamentalist Christians who want to return everyone to a Victorian era of gender roles that are mandated by law. She’s interested in the practice’s spread to couple that aren’t religious really and may even call themselves feminist.*

The article, and the whole issue really, are great and I’m not just saying that because they have the first review out of my book.** Wakeman lets the DD participants speak for themselves, but doesn’t fall into the “I’m okay, you’re okay” trap and lets that speaking-for-themselves make it very clear that these people are fucked the fuck up. DD is not BDSM, which is a sexual game, though some DD couples do also enjoy incorporating BDSM elements into their relationships. No, it seems that domestic discipline is a way of thwarting conflict in your relationship by assuming that every conflict or problem in the heterosexual relationship is the woman’s fault (because she’s childish, scattered, rebellious, whatever) and that it’s up to her man to discipline her. As Wakeman points out, it’s like The Surrendered Wife, except with spankings and time outs in the corner and women having to crawl over to their husbands or boyfriends on their hands and knees to beg forgiveness. There is no equality here; conflict appears to mainly and possibly always be solved by blaming the woman and wielding punishment. I failed to see how it’s much different from domestic violence, except that the women in this situation tend to minimize the conflict through stylizing the violence and submitting to it in a tacit exchange for their partners’ agreeing to have a limit on how much beating and abuse is handed out.

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That’s what TVNewser is reporting.

The official announcement, expected tomorrow, will include details about who will replace Tucker at 6pmET as well as other political programming additions. Sources say the network is going to beef up its schedule with more NBC News talent.

In recent days, Jossip, as well as other blogs, ratcheted up the talk that Tucker would be replaced “for a new project.” In its 33-month run, Carlson’s show has had two names, four time slots and multiple formats.

Alex Blaze of The Bilerico Project is spot-on:

Maybe MSNBC has realized that swinging to the Right to try and shake out Fox News for viewers isn’t a winning strategy. Or maybe they realized that at least half their commentators should accept the reality that white men aren’t oppressed. Or maybe they think that people don’t want to watch a bully wannabe talk about his fun days of beating up fags. Or maybe they got tired of his history of abusing the rules of logic, evidence, and reality.

Or how about this gem, questioning Barack Obama’s masculinity for having a book club:

…Carlson recently referred to Obama’s “rhetoric” as “kind of wimpy” and said that Obama “seems like kind of a wuss.” Carlson also said that Obama “sounds like a pothead.”

During the segment, Carlson discussed the book clubs with Geist, who claimed that “Obama has violated the trust of men everywhere,” and said: “It makes you wonder what he won’t compromise of himself. Are we going to have mani/pedi parties next? You know what I mean?“

It looks like we’ll still see more of the secure-in-his-masculinity Mr. Carlson on the campaign trail for all you fans out there.

So I’m reading yet another article (via) telling women to “focus” on getting married and having babies instead of a career, because the career can wait and the babies can’t, and it occurred to me that these routine articles are similar to the pressure-heavy, heavily photoshopped magazine covers and impossibly thin mannequins out there. Which is to say, women are being held to a standard that doesn’t actually exist in the real world, and only exists to make women insecure, wandering around wondering if they should be doing something different, but have no idea what it could be. With the impossible beauty standards, it goes like this: after dieting and exercise and buying a bunch of products, and hair styling, and fashion-buying, you still can’t look like that, because what you really need is to be a two-dimensional image that’s been worked over for hours in Photoshop. With the no-career-have-babies-now mentality, you’re being scolded for either behaving in a way that will save you from dependency, i.e. being scolded for being a full, responsible citizen of the sort Americans are supposed to be, or being scolded for not doing what you’re already doing, but just not enough.

This article is a perfect example.

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Slutty or sweet? Check her voter registration card.

For those lost in the doldrums of not having enough people to laugh at, I couldn’t recommend more this post at Right Wing News, titled “Blogging While Female: 5 Conservative Women Bloggers Talk About Gender Issues And The Blogosphere”. That was the second title chose, after the initial, more accurate one, “Five Sad Sacks Blow Smoke Up Your Extremely Tight Right Wing Asses” was deemed insufficiently dignified. To demonstrate how dignified the proceedings will be, the first woman up for, er, grabs, is Pam from Atlas Shrugs.

Pamela on feminism.

I don’t need equal rights….I’m already equal. I don’t need somebody telling me something that’s already a fact. All these women like Gloria Steinem, “Oh, we made it happen for you!” You didn’t make it happen for me. That whole movement…is rooted in Marxist-Leninist propaganda….I’m not a feminist, I’m an anti-feminist. I think it has hurt women enormously.

I think we can all agree that Pamela didn’t need the vote and education appears wasted on her, so no quarrel here that the way that feminism has helped her was probably an overall detriment to the nation.

You’ve gotten a lot of flack for a bikini vlog that you did. Do you want to talk about that?

Sure. It’s interesting to me that would become such a point of conversation, derision, what have you, when it was really so innocent.

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Republican operative Roger Stone formed a knee-slapping 527 to set the record straight about Hillary Clinton. It’s one thing to wonder about the level of misogyny in the GOP, but good old Roger, who prides himself with being the “youngest Watergate dirty trickster” just lays it on the line for us. Introducing Citizens United Not Timid. (TPM Muckraker):

It’s this simple: it’s all about the group’s acronym, which, used in conjunction with Hillary Clinton, is supposed to be irresistibly humorous. That is the beginning and the end of it. The group will not be running ads in any form and will not be making any robocalls. They’ll be making T-shirts. That’s it. You can buy them for $25 on their website:

…Stone is counting on T-shirt sales to further serve as “billboard education.” He figures the whole thing will end up taking on a viral nature, thanks to the yuks factor….

“The more people go to the site, the more people buy the T-shirts,” Stone explains…. “The more people buy the T-shirts, the more people wear the T-shirts. The more people wear the T-shirts, the more people are educated. Consequently, our mission has been achieved.” Though neither the word itself nor even the acronym is ever mentioned, “it’s one-word education. That’s our mission. No issues. No policy groups. No position papers. This is a simple committee with an unfortunate acronym….”

This sort of mind-numbing “He-Man Woman Haters Club” frat boy crotch-grabbing has been out of control this cycle. The fact is they want to run against Hillary Clinton precisely because this sort of misogyny can get a laugh with few repercussions. Argh. I want to rant on ad nauseum, but I have to go offline for a meeting. Folks, please rant for me about this BS.

I appreciate bean’s concern about the description of a woman’s body (or the parts therein) as a “factory” in a political environment where there’s powerful forces centered around making sure that women really are treated like baby factories that are properly owned and operated by their patriarchally appointed male guardians. It would be really easy to deliberately misread this cartoon in just such a manner. But I’ll admit, when I first saw the cartoon posted, my first thought was, “If all men could come around to thinking about women’s bodies in just this manner, there would be no anti-choice movement in the U.S.” What made the cartoon endearing and funny is how respectful the male figure is towards the female figure, in his own eccentric way. It’s startling, too, because we so rarely hear men openly frame women’s procreative powers as “neat” or using language that shows a full understanding that such powers belong to the women who hold them alone and not to anyone else.

Women’s bodies are pretty damn neat. Part of the reason I find myself drawn to writing so much about reproductive rights is because I think that women’s bodies are neat. It’s ironic that I don’t ever want to have children myself, but my attitude about it is roughly the same as my attitude towards scientists—I am mildly obsessed with admiring the whole shebang without feeling a need to get personally involved. I think biology is neat and human evolution is neat, and the ground zero of where all this begins—in the womb—is neat. I never want to have a baby, but upon learning that one theory about why women menstruate so damn much is that we have to get a jumpstart on building the placenta to nurse the giant brains of human beings, well, I was kind of awed and felt a lot better about dealing with my period, which is mainly experienced by me as a nuisance. But it’s a nuisance that evolved so I could have a giant brain, so that’s pretty fucking cool.

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Look at the kind of uplifting message that Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Bible Church delivers to his flock. (Seattle Pi Op-Ed):

Hutcherson has gotten headlines for his efforts to pressure Microsoft on gay issues. He has a right to his views — views he supports with texts from Scripture. Reasonable people can disagree over whether gay marriage is a good idea.

But Hutcherson goes beyond reasonable, at least to judge by the report of Seattle psychologist Valerie Tarico. Tarico, a former staffer at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, was raised in a fundamentalist church. In recent months, she has made it her business to attend services at many of the large, conservative churches in the Seattle area, including Hutcherson’s, to see what’s going on.

On a Sunday when Tarico was present, Hutcherson was preaching on gender roles. During his sermon, Hutcherson stated, “God hates soft men” and “God hates effeminate men.” Hutcherson went on to say, “If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I’d rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end.”

“That was a joke,” Hutcherson said Friday, when I asked him about the comment. But it’s not really funny, is it?

What it sounds like are the kinds of words that have paved the way for atrocities in such places as Serbia, Kosovo and Rwanda. You have to dehumanize somebody before you beat them up. Labeling some men as “soft” and “effeminate” and saying “God hates them” does that.

Ah, “Christianity” - what a feeling!

Past posts on Hutcherson are here.

It’s clear that there’s a serious problem out there that none of the involved parties — the MSM, the campaigns, the political establishment — want to discuss when it comes to race, gender, even religion and their impact on the presidential race — their bumbling roles.

Well-paid pundits pull “analysis” out of their posteriors during these primaries and caucuses and have nothing to back up their predictions (which usually end up wrong anyway). Political experts both in the campaigns, the pollsters and in the MSM really don’t know WTF they are chattering about, but they simply cannot admit it. You get the feeling when you watch that they think they know more than you do and want to project that all-knowing gravitas, but as we’ve seen, all that some of them have managed to do is look like jackasses over and over.

Why? This is an presidential election with so many firsts — a black man and a woman at the precipice of being a party’s nominee, a Mormon candidate, a former president campaigning for his wife — all the rules and standard operating procedures have gone out the window and you see serious on-air and in-print fumbling. There are desperate attempts to make sense of wide margins of victory that were not predicted (for Clinton or Obama), why John McCain’s campaign rose from the dead, or what role did anti-Mormonism play in Romney’s defeat. No one knows, and they cannot claim to know. There are no “experts” on this. Part of the mystery is that the voters are not behaving in predictable fashion, and the establishment doesn’t like unpredictability.

For spectators like me, it’s refreshing to see the chaos, as it provides ample entertainment to see pundits self-immolate on live TV. There’s so much freelancing and free association going on that is actually foot-in-mouth disease, as cultural and gender biases just tumble out. It’s fascinating, if painful. If only opportunities like these would turn into more self-reflection on the role of subjects that are avoided in polite company because it makes people uncomfortable. We have another example today…
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If I hate Clinton, will you like me better?

James Wolcott draws my attention to this kick-ass review by Susan Faludi* of this new book Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers. I was wanting to read this book, because I think it would be awesome having 30 different women talk about how Clinton’s achievements and the sexism that impedes her affects them personally, but unfortunately, it seems that only a handful of the writers went that way. According to Faludi’s review, far more common was the attempt to distance one’s (female) self from Clinton, perhaps in a pissing-in-the-wind hope that by doing so, you’ll escape the same pressures put on her. Same as why a prosecutor doesn’t necessarily want a bunch of women on a jury in a rape case—they’re just as likely to victim-blame as men, because they hope that by blaming the victim, they can somehow escape being the victim.

I’m not endorsing Clinton in the primary, but should she win, I’m behind her, and the sexist abuse of her has made me like her more, not less, because she prevails under it. To me, she’s a role model. Her willingness to stand by an adulterer is not something I hope to emulate, but it’s understandable, and in the grand scheme of her accomplishments, it strikes me as both a small thing and none of my business. It seems so straightforward, and yet Faludi reports that the dominant tone of the book is something like, “I just don’t like her, and I can’t explain it, probably because to do so would reveal how much misogyny I’ve internalized.” Faludi explains that this sort of opinion arises in a culture where young women can gain some semblance of power by becoming ciphers for the anti-female opinions of sexist men.

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The final nail in the coffin of the American marriage?

Via Jeff Fecke, I found this awesomely inept anti-feminist screed from Kathryn Jean Lopez. It’s all based on the tragic figure of Jason Bateman’s loser character in Juno. Lopez argues that his type—yuppie men who secretly wished they were punks, and lay all the blame for their lack of super-coolness on their yuppie wives who don’t labor under any illusions of being anything but what they are—is evidence for an epidemic of male refusal to embrace adult responsibilities. And who is responsible for this lack of male responsibility? Well, not men themselves, dummies! Anti-feminists may hate women, but they also have a searing contempt for men, which is reflected in Lopez’s unwillingness to even allow men the responsibility of being responsible.

No, of course women are to blame for men who are unwilling to take responsibility. Specifically the secret, all-powerful cadre called The Feminists. We all know the argument—men aren’t motivated to grow up and do icky girl stuff like get married and have children and hold down a full-time job on their own. No, they have to be bribed into it. You ladies have to sweeten the deal by offering dependence and submission. But never fear, men are like vending machines. You put submission and dependence in, ladies, and you’ll get devotion and responsibility back. So really, it’s all on you to “make” men be responsible.

Sax calls it “this weird new virus of apathy.” Not all young men have it, but enough that it shows in the stats. Colleges have gone from majority male to majority female in the last 50 years. And while most young women who enroll will graduate, most of their male counterparts won’t. Mark Loring has gone through the motions, got the job, got the bride. But he’s not satisfied and doesn’t know what to do in his beautiful home, with a successful wife who is happy with the life she’s made for herself (and, she hopes, for them both).

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I’ve received a few emails about the latest chapter in the “gays and Obama” saga, as it was learned that Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a local leader in Houston’s black community, Bush supporter, and senior pastor of Windsor Village United Methodist Church, will be campaigning in support of Barack Obama.

Caldwell said Saturday that he’s endorsing Obama’s presidential campaign because of the senator’s “character, confidence and courage.” He emphasized that his support is personal and not tied to his job as pastor of the large United Methodist church.

What’s not in this Houston Chronicle article is that part of the outreach of Windsor Village United Methodist Church includes an “ex-gay” ministry:

Metanoia Ministry We are pleased to announce the creation of “ The Way, The Truth and The Life”, a program created to provide Christ Centered instruction for those seeking freedom from homosexuality, lesbianism, prostitution, sex addiction and other habitual sins

…Since the fall of mankind in the Garden of Eden, men and women throughout the ages have attempted to fulfill these deep emotional needs outside a relationship with God. In doing this, sinful patterns of living were developed, preventing the fulfillment of these needs as God intended. If you desire to learn to live life as God designed it, you are invited to join “The Way, The Truth and The Life” program.

 The goal of the program is to provide:

1. Christian Coaching.

2. Support groups for ex-gays and those in the process of coming out of homosexuality.

3. Educational workshops.

4. Information for parents, family and friends.

The objective of the program is to assist participants in understanding that change is possible. In doing this, a safe, nurturing and accepting environment will be created whereby participants will be able to deal with issues without fear of judgment or rejection. Participants will be encouraged to exercise their faith in the saving, healing and delivering power of God through Jesus Christ, and to see themselves as God sees them.

OK. What does this look like to you –
A. Another example of the Obama campaign hypocrisy toward the gay community;
B. Triangulation with LGBTs to keep and gain socially conservative black votes;
C. A necessary evil to reach a large segment of a community that has been allowed to foment homophobia in its ranks;
D. Progress — proof that Obama’s public challenge the black community about its homophobia is wrong has not prevented pray-away-the-gay folks like Caldwell from endorsing and campaigning for him.
E. All of the above.

My thoughts below the fold.

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I’ve been seeing this op-ed by Gloria Steinem—where she says that she doesn’t want to create a victim Olympics about racism vs. sexism, and then proceeds to do it anyway—all over the place, and the take on it that I agree with the most is Jenn’s at Reappropriate. The op-ed was ill-advised and short-sighted. Sexism is a more powerful force than racism in America if you assume that the only expression of either is in the area of what people are willing to be blatant about on national TV during this specific Presidential campaign, sure. There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton is getting it worse than Barack Obama, but what if it were a race between Elizabeth Dole and Jesse Jackson? Suddenly, the tone would shift and the source of more of the inexcusable comments would be racism, I suspect.

But even allowing, and I do allow this, that people are more willing to speak sexism in public than racism, that doesn’t mean that you can make sweeping generalizations. The two are wildly different issues in this sense. Sexism requires a lot more individual oppression, because men and women are two genders that live together and share everything but gender—culture, race, language, class, homes, children, whatever. The use of sexist slurs is extremely critical to the perpetuating of women’s second class status, because the belief that women are inferior needs to permeate the air in every room in society to keep women from getting uppity. Clinton especially has become the national symbol of a lot of male fears that the bitch in your kitchen is getting uppity, and isn’t satisfied to define herself through her man anymore but wants credit for being herself. It’s something of a credit to the success of feminism that so many men with power are in a full-blown panic, because they really are facing tremendous loss of privilege in the most intimate areas of their lives.

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