Bringing Children Into The Workplace: Licia Ronzulli, Member Of The European Parliament

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Ampersand

We’ve been on and off discussing bringing babies into work, and that seems like a good enough excuse for posting these extremely adorable pictures of Italian MEP Licia Ronzulli and her daughter Vittoria Cerioli. Vittoria is now three years old, although obviously she’s not three in all of these photos.

Jane Martinson in The Guardian:

As a woman whose own children were forced to push increasingly desperate notes under the door to garner any attention whenever I worked from home, I realise that not everyone can copy Ronzulli. Or even want to. But, while not all of Ronzulli’s politics (nor indeed her liking for pink mobile phone covers) are to my taste, it’s refreshing to see what she has done. Most parents in less privileged positions are forced to lie about sick children or vital school meetings to bosses who are less than understanding. Ronzulli’s actions at least suggest that, instead of pretending they don’t exist or even closing the door to their entreatries, accepting the presence and involvement of children could be good for us all.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Baby & kid blogging, Class, poverty, labor, & related issues | Leave a comment  

“Choice For Men” Is Another Way Of Saying “Screw Children’s Interests”

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Ampersand

I don’t know who created it, but I’ve seen this table going around reddit and tumblr:

Maybe it’s hard to grasp because it’s not true?

First, it’s not “how it is” that if a woman wants an abortion, that means an abortion will happen. I wish it was, but in reality, pro-lifers have worked hard to put barriers (some legal, some practical) between women and abortion. (And that’s limiting discussion to the USA; in some other countries, abortion is outright banned.)

Secondly, it’s not true that “the rights of the child are untouched.” In scenario A, the child has the right to be financially supported by its father. In scenario B, the child does not. (The table doesn’t say whether or not child support is also going to be banned for non-custodial mothers, so I’m not sure if the born child still has the right to the financial support of its mother in the “how it should be” column.)

So what this table’s author is actually calling for is an increase in father’s rights at the expense of children’s rights.

This is particularly troublesome because research shows that child support laws provide an incentive for some men to use birth control. In the absence of any legal right of children for financial support from their fathers, some men will use birth control less (and some will be more likely to insist on “bareback” sex with their girlfriends), and the number of children born to single mothers will increase. (In contrast, there is no evidence that child support laws effect how likely women are to give birth; my guess is that the disadvantages of pregnancy already provide a strong disincentive for women but not men, so the child support effects are larger for men.) How are these children going to be supported, in “how it should be” land?

Third, in the status quo, the laws are equal – or at least, they should be. Both men and women should (in the feminist POV) have an absolute right to do anything they want to their own bodies to maximize their odds of having sex while avoiding reproduction. And both mothers and fathers are legally required to provide support for all their born children. That’s legal equality.

(It’s true that we don’t have biological equality. But that’s a sword that cuts both ways; there are massive advantages for men in being the sex that doesn’t get pregnant, which this table ignores.)

In this table’s proposed system, we also have legal equality, IF mothers are also allowed to opt out of supporting born children. But that legal equality comes at an enormous cost to children and society, because child poverty would be increased. I don’t think that’s a moral solution, unless we’re going to switch to a full-blown Swedish Socialist economy, in which child poverty is substantively solved through expensive government interventions.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Choice for Men | 30 Comments  

Section 1311: How The Supreme Court Could Still Trash Obamacare

Posted on December 8, 2013 by Ampersand

I think it’s likely that, in the future, “section 1311″ be as familiar a phrase to my people1 as “hanging chad.”

Michael Cannon and Jonathan Adler are leading the charge on this issue on the right. They write:

To advance the PPACA’s goal of expanding access to health insurance, Section 1311 directs states to establish health insurance “exchanges” where residents may purchase qualifying insurance plans. Section 1321 authorizes the federal government to create Exchanges where states do not.

Due in large part to the PPACA’s insurance regulations, qualifying health plans offered through the Exchanges will be rather expensive. Thus the Act authorizes tax credits that shift much of the cost of those plans to the federal government. Those tax credits trigger additional “cost-sharing” subsidies (which further shift costs to taxpayers) as well as penalties against employers under the law’s employer mandate.

The dispute is over whether the Act authorizes the IRS to provide tax credits only in Exchanges established by states (under Section 1311) or also in Exchanges established by the federal government (under Section 1321).

Samuel Bagenstos replies:

Cannon and Adler’s argument, taken up by Oklahoma in its lawsuit, is deeply flawed as a matter of law. Their basic argument is this: In Cannon’s words, the provision of the ACA that establishes premium tax credits “explicitly and laboriously restricts tax credits to those who buy health insurance in Exchanges ‘established by the State under section 1311.’ There is no parallel language – none whatsoever – granting eligibility through Exchanges established by the federal government (section 1321).”

But that is not quite right. Although the tax-credit provision twice uses the phrase “Exchange established by the State under section 1311,” see 26 U.S.C. § 36B(b)(2)(A), (c)(2)(A)(i), that phrase does not have the exclusionary meaning Cannon attributes to it. That is because Section 1321 (codified at 42 U.S.C. § 18041) makes clear that, when a state fails to set up an exchange, the federally-operated exchange will stand in the shoes of the state exchange for purposes of Section 1311. Thus, Section 1311 provides that “[e]ach State shall” set up an exchange by January 1, 2014. 42 U.S.C. § 18031(b)(1). Section 1321 provides that if a state “will not have any required Exchange operational” by then — that is, an exchange required by Section 1311 — then the federal government “shall (directly or through agreement with a not-for-profit entity) establish and operate such Exchange within the State.” 42 U.S.C. § 18041(c)(1) (emphasis added). “[S]uch Exchange” in Section 1321 clearly refers to the “required exchange” — that is, the Section 1311 exchange. When the federal government operates an exchange pursuant to Section 1321, then, it is not operating some wholly foreign entity; it is operating the state exchange that Section 1311 required the state to set up but that the state failed to create. Because Section 1321 provides that a federally-operated exchange will stand in the shoes of a state-operated exchange created by Section 1311, there is no basis for denying participants in federally-operated exchanges the same tax credits obtained by participants in state-operated exchanges.

The IRS’s interpretation of the ACA to extend premium subsidies to participants in both state- and federally-operated exchanges thus seems to me not merely a permissible one but also the most plausible reading of the statutory text.

If this issue has legal legs – and liberals who have predicted that the Courts would refuse to grant standing have already been proven wrong – then it will eventually wind up in the Supreme Court. If the Court rules that the IRS has no right to implement subsidies for the Federal exchanges, then that wouldn’t entirely destroy Obamacare, but it would significantly gut Obamacare.

The arguments on the merits are interesting (well, to me, anyway), and if you’re interested in reading up on that, I’ve provided a whole bunch of links at the bottom of the post.

In the end, a lot of the argument boils down to what the Senate intended; Cannon and Adler argue that Senators never intended for the federal exchanges to include access to subsidized insurance.

In the New Republic, Johnathan Cohn has the same reaction I did:

…the argument strikes me as even more preposterous than the original lawsuits challenging the law. No sentient being following the health care debate could argue, in good faith, that Obamacare’s architects intended for the federal government to set up exchanges without subsidies. It would completely subvert the law’s intent.

But the thing is, the Conservatives who are arguing that are completely capable of convincing themselves of that “in good faith,” just as they’re completely capable of believing that climate change is a myth propagated by a conspiracy of lying climatologists who hate modernism and wish to bring about a new stone age in America. There are some exceptions, but generally, the more intelligent a conservative is, the more he or she is capable of convincing themselves that genuinely ridiculous propositions are true.

To his credit, Cohn goes on to say:

Then again, I didn’t expect the last lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act to make it all the way to the Supreme Court, let alone come within one very narrow vote of succeeding. So what the heck do I know?

Kevin Drum says “over the past decade [the Supreme Court] has become almost completely politicized. In big cases, the justices simply decide what result they want and then write language justifying it. For that reason, I suspect that the purely legal arguments here don’t matter very much.”

I agree with that, to an extent. I think there are three things influencing what the Justices believe: 1) The substantive legal arguments, 2) the judge’s desired outcome, and 3) how badly does the judge desire that outcome?

So in a case like Bush v. Gore, where the judges wanted a particular outcome very intensely (because determining who won the election would determine who appointed the next batch of Supreme Court judges, which would in turn determine the Conservative majority’s legal legacy – and that matters to them far more than any other consideration), the five conservatives were willing to make genuinely ludicrous legal arguments in service of their desired outcome. But in other cases, with less at stake, arguments on the legal merits can carry more weight.

Furthermore, when we talk about “the judges desired outcome,” that desire isn’t only partisan. Judges desire partisan outcomes, but they also desire to be perceived as objective authorities, rather than perceived as partisan hacks. Roberts, as Chief Justice, wants not only himself as an individual but the Roberts Court as an institution to not be seen as an arm of the GOP. My guess is that Roberts didn’t overturn the ACA when he could is that he worried that openly destroying a sitting Democratic President’s primary political objective, based on novel legal arguments, would cement the impression that Roberts and his court, far from being wise and objective judges above the political muck, are just another grubby bunch of partisans.

Which brings us to where I disagree with Drum. Drum writes:

There’s a sense in which Chief Justice John Roberts “owns” Obamacare, since he was the swing vote that ruled it constitutional last year. Given this, how likely is it that a mere year or two later, he’ll be willing to cast a vote that cripples the law? Sure, this time around the legal case is different, but it still boils down to the same basic question: will the law go forward? Having already ruled once that it can, I’m not sure he’ll be open to letting opponents take a second bite at the same apple. Stripped to its core, conservative lawyers are pressuring Roberts to admit that he was wrong in 2012, and I’m not sure he’ll be willing to cave in to that pressure.

Of course, speculating what’s going on in any judge’s mind is a fool’s game. But so is blogging, so speculate I will. And we do know how John Roberts wishes to be seen by the public, because he told us so himself, during his confirmation hearings:

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.

The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. [...]

I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment. If I am confirmed, I will confront every case with an open mind. I will fully and fairly analyze the legal arguments that are presented. I will be open to the considered views of my colleagues on the bench. And I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. And I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.

It is unquestionable, looking at his record, that Roberts is a committed conservative. But he doesn’t want to be seen that way; he wants to be seen as without agenda, an umpire merely calling the balls and strikes without regard to his own desired outcomes.

So, contrary to Drum, I don’t think Roberts sees himself as owner and defender of the ACA. Rather, I think it will be very tempting for Roberts – who, in his own view, has now firmly established that he is NOT a partisan hack on the subject of Obamacare – to do whatever damage to the ACA he can. This will both be good for Robert’s desired image as a neutral umpire (“neutral” in the sense of being willing to be either pro- or anti- ACA), and also also good for his desire to have conservative outcomes on the Court.

There are also other factors at play, so maybe Roberts will again vote against gutting Obamacare. But I think Drum’s analysis overestimates by miles Robert’s incentive to defend Obamacare. If the five conservatives on the Court decide that the Senate clearly intended that subsidized health insurance would not be available on the Federal exchanges, I would be appalled – but not shocked.

*****************************

Further reading, from folks on all sides of the Section 1311 issue:

  1. Congressional Research Service: Legal Analysis of Availability of Premium Tax Credits in State and Federally Created Exchanges Pursuant to the ACA (note that this is a pdf link).
  2. Tax Credits In Federally Facilitated Exchanges Are Consistent With The Affordable Care Act’s Language And History – Health Affairs Blog
  3. Health Reform Law Makes Clear That Subsidies Will Be Available in States with Federally Operated Exchanges — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
  4. How the Court Case Against Obamacare Subsidies Stacks Up | RealClearPolitics
  5. ObamaCare’s Next Legal Challenge – Executive Branch Project
  6. The Illegal IRS Rule To Expand Tax Credits Under The PPACA: A Response To Timothy Jost – Health Affairs Blog
  7. Obamacare’s Next Bout: More Legal Challenges — The American Magazine
  8. Yes, the Federal Exchange Can Offer Premium Tax Credits : Health Reform Watch
  9. The Illegal IRS Rule on Health Insurance Exchanges – A Reply to Bagenstos | The Volokh Conspiracy
  10. Balkinization: The Legally Flawed Rearguard Challenge to Obamacare
  11. Obamacare Repeal Unlikely Now, Critics Are Trying to Cripple It | New Republic
  12. Disability Law: A Rejoinder to Michael Cannon Re the Rearguard Challenge to Obamacare
  13. First, Last, and Always, Obamacare is About Politics | Mother Jones. (I know I already quoted from this in my post, but Drum says quite a lot that I don’t quote or address.)

The cartoon at the top of the post is by the great Tom Toles.

  1. By “my people,” in this instance, I mean those of us who are addicted to watching the ins and outs of US politics, even though we’d be far better off as people if we engaged in some other activities instead. Need our fix. Need our fix. Gotta have our fix. Check for updates. [↩]
Posted in Supreme Court Issues | 1 Comment  

Scenes from Trans Policework: Working While Visibly Trans

Posted on December 6, 2013 by Grace Annam

I wrote most of this on Thanksgiving, but then life demanded that I do other things than finish it, until now. All names have been changed, for confidentiality.

—

There is a woman who lives in my city. Call her Nancy. Not too many years after I was sworn in, she was a teenager, hanging with a dicey crowd, occasionally getting in trouble, but never a bad kid. She was straightforward to a fault, very open. We got along fine, even when I had to tell her where the limit was (for instance, the limit on raucous shouting in the middle of the city at 02:00 in the morning). I saw a lot of her back then, and then occasionally over the years as she grew up a bit and settled down a bit. I haven’t seen her face-to-face for a few years.

Not too long ago, I was investigating a property dispute, and spoke with Nancy over the phone, identifying myself by rank and last name, as usual, and using my female voice, as always. I was in her area anyway, so I suggested that I swing by and meet her face-to-face, and I did.

I arrived a few minutes later. She caught sight of me, studied me with a polite smile for a second and then smiled broadly and said, “Hi! You know, I was a little confused, but I figured it out. You look good! How are you?”

I smiled. “Fine,” I said.

Her smile got even broader and in her characteristic straight-to-the-heart manner, she said, “Are you happier?”

I grinned. “Much,” I said. “I made it work for as long as I could, and when I had to make a change, I did.”

“Good!” she said. And we got down to business.

—

Awhile before that, I was dealing with an assault at another local business, one big enough to have its own security officers. At one point, I asked a question of one of them. We’ve known each other since before my transition. In smart paramilitary fashion, he replied with, “Yessir!” …and an instant later, said, “Ma’am, sorry”. I told him not to worry about it. A few minutes later, while I was waiting on a phone call, he told me that he thought that what I was doing was “incredibly brave”, and that he had tremendous respect for me because of it.

—

Not too long ago, I was called to cover a road hazard. Some garbage had fallen off of a truck, on a residential side-street. I spoke with a couple of the locals. The garbage was a bit nasty, and if we left it, neighborhood dogs would be spreading it in traffic, so we couldn’t leave it. At the same time, the plow crews from our Public Works department had gone home for rest and I didn’t want to call one in for something so minor. The locals seemed at a loss (and reluctant to handle the stuff), so I knocked on one door and borrowed a snow shovel. Another resident donated garbage bags. (I love the Stone Soup method of solving problems.) Once they saw me doing it, a couple of onlookers pitched in, and we got it cleaned up.

During one pause in the activity, one young man looking on said, “What’s your last name?” (I wear a name tag, but it was dark.) I told him. He smiled gently. He said, “I just want to say that I really admire what you’re doing. It takes a lot of guts to do that. I’ve watched your transition, and I think you’re awesome.”

“Thank you very much!” I said. “…you’ve, ah, been watching my transition, have you?” His eyes crinkled in amusement. He told me that he was trans himself, and he used to see me occasionally at [local business where my duties often take me], before he decided to leave after someone outed him and people started treating him differently.

—

In the first year of my career, I covered many domestics.  The victim in one case was particularly terrified, but still able to be articulate and detailed. The case had a big impact on me.  She also, unusually, addressed me reflexively and punctiliously as “Officer [Annam]”.

Recently, I stopped a car with a headlight out, and the driver turned out to be her.  I went through my usual spiel, and ultimately warned her on the headlight and wrote her a ticket for another minor offense.  After I gave her the ticket and I had answered her questions about it, she cocked her head and nodded a little for emphasis and said, “It’s good to see you again.”

“It’s good to see you, too,” I said, and meant it.

She said, “It used to be… [name close to my old name]?”

“[My old name],” I said, “but not anymore.”

“Now it’s…?”

“Grace.”

“That’s a beautiful name.”

“Thank you!”  I told her that I hoped that her evening got better from here on out (I much prefer not to salt a wound; I never issue a ticket and say, “Have a nice day.”). We pulled away.

—

A couple of weeks ago, a bouncer at a local bar, whom I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in my life, caught sight of me and stepped over to pump my hand, saying, “Grace! Good to see you!”

—

So today, Thanksgiving, I’m reflecting on encounters like these, as I work my overtime. I drive around looking for stranded motorists (because Thanksgiving comes with stranded motorists as a garden comes with surprise cultivars you never intended to plant). I eat lunch hoping we don’t have to arrest too many people in front of their families (because nothing says “The Holidays” to a cop like an alcohol-fueled, multi-generational domestic.) And in my free moments, I ponder.

These sorts of things are always nice to hear. They help me maintain my bulwark against the myriad daily corrosions which come with being trans in this society. These corrosions are not as frequent or harsh for me as they are for some; I have been astounded to find that on casual encounter, I’m not visibly trans. I get along fine, in that almost everyone says, “Ma’am”, over the phone or in person, and “she” in reference to me. I’m pretty sure that people who don’t know I’m trans take me as I am without thinking about it. (There’s no profit in asking. People who knew you before can’t know, either, so you would have to ask the question of total strangers, which is perhaps invasive and unkind, since everyone will get to see their reflexive reaction, instead of their best one. And you can never be sure if someone is trying to spare you, so the answer isn’t actually useful. And there is always the risk that the answer will be shredding.)

But plainly, I am visible in another way. I transitioned in place, without moving or changing jobs, and therefore many people know about me. How could they not? And those people talk to other people, and I’m a novelty; to people who haven’t given trans people significant thought before, I’m a walking contradiction. And for every gregarious bouncer there are no doubt several hundred who simply see me and take note without commenting to me. But of course they comment to each other. There’s an ethic that one does not out a trans person as trans without permission. There are many good reasons for this. But most of the public don’t know about that ethic, and if they did, most of them wouldn’t care, the same way they don’t care about discussing the details of someone’s messy divorce, or the fact that someone’s relative is being treated in a new an interesting way for that colon cancer. Nothing is confidential, in gossip, and anyway, perhaps it’s not really gossip when someone is asked how they met me and they laugh merrily and explain that it was when, and I’m quoting directly, “This tall, upright, very formal man gave me a ticket, and we all later learned that he, now she, was Grace.”

Transitioning in place does turn those crisp, black lines of medical confidentiality into great, billowing clouds of gray which no one navigates well. I’m resigned to the fact that people talk. Stealth is dead. I’m visible.

And contacts like these drive home for me what a subtle and powerful thing that is, to be visibly trans in this very public way, and just by doing that introducing people to whole new vistas of “Why not?” Once, I felt cowardly and ashamed that I could not advocate effectively for the rights of people like me. Now, I’ve stood up, and having stood up, I do this work whether I choose it or not, just by looking after my community. I feel enormously privileged to be able to do this work. On this day, when Americans contemplate the things we have to be thankful for, I’m thankful for that.

Grace

Posted in Gender and the Body, Transsexual and Transgender related issues | 10 Comments  

Cartoon: Ten Reasons We’re Against Unions!

Posted on December 3, 2013 by Ampersand

Script for this comic SelectShow
Posted in Cartooning & comics, Class, poverty, labor, & related issues | 46 Comments  

Gloria Steinem’s Presidential Medal of Freedom, Plus Should Firefighters Carry Or Drag

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Ampersand

Last week, President Obama awarded a whole bunch of people, including Gloria Steinem, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Cathy Young is unhappy with this development, because Steinem, Cathy says, represents the very worst of feminism.

What’s most striking about Cathy’s list of seven ways Steinem is just sooooooo awful is how incredibly petty a lot of the list is. Cathy’s implicit, ludicrous thesis is that it’s wrong to honor a public figure for their fifty-one year career if they’ve ever made a mistake.

Although Cathy calls for an end to “gender warriors,” is her own approach – one-sided as a prosecutor, nuanced as a jackhammer – going to lead to a better conversation? Does Cathy genuinely believe that Steinem has done nothing in fifty years that justifies honoring her?

I have mixed feelings about Steinem myself. She’s from a generation of white feminists that really didn’t grapple enough with racism, homophobia, and trans bigotry.1 And her anti-porn ideology led her to flirt with censorship, something I disagree strongly with (and said so often during the 80s and 90s, when feminist anti-porn censorship was, you know, a live issue). Worse, like many radical feminists, Steinem was taken in by “Satanic Ritual Abuse” hoaxes, and lent her celebrity and name to that disgusting cause. (Cathy calls Steinem out on both these matters, and I agree with her.)

But although there are legit criticisms to be made of Steinem, for the most part Cathy engages in criticisms that are wrong, petty, or both. Cathy writes:

In 1997, interviewed for John Stossel’s ABC News special, “Boys and Girls Are Different: Men, Women and the Sex Difference,” Steinem derided scientific research on sex differences in brain functioning as “anti-American crazy thinking.”

Actually, we have very little idea what Steinem was responding to when she said “anti-American crazy thinking,” because Stossel is famous for distorting through out of context quotes. Steinem’s quote might have been, as Cathy says, talking about all research on sex differences in brain functioning. Or maybe she was talking about all sex differences research, as Stossel claimed in his book, although in that book he (bizarrely) attributed the quote to Heritage’s Kate O’Beirne. Or maybe – to give Steinem the benefit of the doubt, something neither Stossel or Cathy cares to do – she was criticizing a particular study, not an entire field of study. We just don’t know, because (afaik) Stossel has never made the unedited footage public.

Cathy:

She also suggested that upper-body strength tests requiring firefighters to lift heavy loads were sexist. What about situations when firefighters have to carry injured or unconscious people out of burning buildings? Steinem insisted, with a straight face, that it was better to drag them, since “there’s less smoke down there.”

I love that phrase “with a straight face,” as if saying there’s less smoke near the floor is so profoundly ridiculous it doesn’t even require rebuttal, merely a sarcastic sneer. Cathy’s certainly not alone in believing that: Steinem’s statement that dragging is preferable to carrying has been brought up again and again and again by anti-feminists, and has become sort of a canonical example of what fools these feminists are.

From Wikipedia (emphasis added):

The technique was commonly used by firefighters to carry injured or unconscious people away from danger, but has been replaced in firefighting due to the drawback that smoke and heat are greater higher up, and may be fatal to the person being carried.[...]

Currently, the technique preferred in firefighting involves dragging a person by the shoulders or upper clothing in a supine position across the floor or ground. This uses the rescuer’s upper legs (the strongest muscles in the body) to push against the floor for leverage in order to pull the person towards an exit. This technique is also easier for rescuers who may be younger or of smaller size or stature. In addition, dragging, especially feet first, helps avoid stressing a potentially injured spine.

If you don’t believe Wikipedia, here’s Brenda Berkman, a career firefighter and Captain in the NYC fire department, discussing “the test” when her career began: (pdf link):

I decided to take the test and as Richard said, I trained very hard for the test, I was a marathon runner. I went out and chopped wood. I carried my husband up and down the stairs of our apartment building.

No joke – and of course you know in reality firefighters don’t put victims up on their shoulders and carry them around in fires. We drag them out, and usually more than one of us drags them out.

That’s one of only many things that were part of the then current New York City Fire Department tests that had absolutely nothing to do with the way that we perform the job of firefighting, and in many cases were just put in there because a bunch of guys sitting around a table thought, “Hm, you know, my daughter can run a mile in eight minutes, therefore we have to make the pass mark for the mile run seven minutes.” That was the way that the job validation was going on in 1975, 1976 when they were developing the first tests that women were going to be allowed to take.

(Emphasis added).

So Steinem was arguably correct in everything she said. But Cathy, and anti-feminists in general, can’t be bothered to do five seconds of Googling to find that out.

Cathy also says it’s wrong to honor Steinem because Steinem is supportive of men in theory, but refers to “actual” men as “dangerous brutes.” Cathy’s evidence:

In her 1992 book, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, Steinem writes, “The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home.”

That’s not really a very damning quote, is it? Note that Cathy doesn’t make the slightest attempt to refute Steinem’s quote; like the fireman’s carry, Cathy believes Steinem’s quote refutes itself.

But look at the quote in context (page 261). Steinem was talking about crime statistics. Shouldn’t Cathy have told her readers that?

Statistically, the man most likely to physically attack or even murder a woman is not a stranger, but someone to whom she is romantically attached. The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home.

Is Steinem right? It seems clear that American women – the subject of Steinem’s book – have little to fear from invading hostile forces. (That bit seems like overblown rhetoric, frankly.) But for the rest, Steinem seems on the money, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (pdf link):

• Females are generally murdered by people they know. In 64% of female homicide
cases in 2007, females were killed by a family member or intimate partner. In 2007, 24% of female homicide victims were killed by a spouse or ex-spouse; 21% were killed by a boyfriend or girlfriend; and 19% by another family member.

• In an additional 25% of cases in 2007, females were killed by others they knew. An estimated 10% of female murder victims were killed by a stranger.

Surely Cathy isn’t saying that Steinem is anti-male, and shouldn’t be honored, for correctly reporting uncontroversial crime statistics. Wait – that’s exactly what Cathy said. Oy.

By the way, as far as Google can tell, I am the first person on the entire internet to quote that “most dangerous situation for a woman” passage with context. The context-free version Cathy used is online thousands of times, nearly always in the writings of anti-feminists.

For instance, in Christina Hoff Sommers’ anti-feminist blockbuster Who Stole Feminism?, Sommers writes:

Gender feminist ideology holds that physical menace toward women is the norm. The cause of battered women has been a handy bandwagon for this creed. Gloria Steinem’s portrait of male-female intimacy under patriarchy is typical: “Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself…. The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home.”

Sommers took a partial sentence from page 259 of Steinem’s book, put it next to a sentence about crime statistics from page 261, and then pretended the two separate passages formed a single thought. Of course, all writers use ellipsis – but it’s dishonest to use ellipses to change the meaning, as Sommers does.2

Speaking of Sommers, Cathy cites Who Stole Feminism? on anorexia mortality:

Steinem’s dissemination of faux facts is not limited to distant history. In Revolution from Within, she asserts that 150,000 women and girls in the United States die from anorexia every year — multiplying the actual number by about 1,000. (As Christina Hoff Sommers documented in her 1994 book, Who Stole Feminism?, the claim of a 150,000 death toll was based on a feminist professor’s mangling of a statistic referring to anorexia sufferers.)

To recap: Cathy is now arguing that it’s inappropriate for Steinem to be honored for her fifty-year career of fighting for women’s rights and equality because on page 222 of a minor book written in 1992, Steinem quoted a statistic someone else had messed up.

Cathy again:

The same book discusses an alleged crisis in girls’ self-esteem based on a single shoddy study from the American Association of University Women.

Did Cathy actually read her link? The writer, Amy Salzman, doesn’t call the AAUW study “shoddy,” although she points out that the findings are stronger for appearance-based self-esteem than other areas. (Salzman also calls Christina Hoff Sommers’ critique of AAUW “bad science.”)

That aside, does Cathy seriously believe that because a 1992 book referred to a 1991 study by the AAUW that Cathy dislikes, it would be wrong for Gloria Steinem to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

What next – we can’t give Steinem the Medal of Freedom because big sunglasses?

Cathy goes on:

Steinem’s solidarity with women stops at the party line. In 1993, she flew to Texas to campaign against then-Senate candidate Kay Bailey Hutchison, a moderate pro-choice Republican, and slammed her as “a female impersonator.”

The “female impersonator” line was appalling, and transphobic. (Steinem recently apologized for her past support history of transphobia.)

But for the rest of it – what? Cathy seems to be saying believe that Steinem is required by feminism to judge candidates on their sex, rather than their political views. But feminism doesn’t require that sort of blatant sexism. In fact, if Steinem said what Cathy just said, Cathy would be the first to point out the sexism.

Cathy’s article is petty, poorly thought out, and substitutes sarcasm for argument. To say that it’s wrong to honor someone’s lifetime of achievement and activism because they quoted a bad statistic in 1992 shows only that Cathy, when it comes to feminism, lacks a sense of proportion.

Gloria Steinem is not someone I agree with on everything. She’s a radical feminist, and I’m a liberal feminist with dashes of socialist feminism, and basically it’s Judean People’s Front versus People’s Front of Judea time. But giving the Medal of Freedom to the most prominent living representative of feminism’s second wave seems appropriate. Steinem, unlike Cathy, seems to have a pretty healthy perspective on what this award means. As Steinem said of the award, “I’d be crazy if I didn’t understand that this was a medal for the entire women’s movement.”

  1. Actually, neither has the current generation of us. [↩]
  2. By the way, I just asked three very smart, well-educated feminists if they could say who wrote the book Revolution From Within. None of them had a clue, or had heard of the book. It’s a minor and largely forgotten work, among feminists. But because Christina Hoff Sommers had the book at her elbow for quote-mining while writing Who Stole Feminism?, the book – or, rather, a few selected out-of-context quotes from the book – perpetually lives on among anti-feminists. I think that’s hilarious. [↩]
Posted in Anti-feminists and their pals, Christina Hoff Sommers | 14 Comments  

How I Foiled A Criminal In The Very Midst Of His Dastardly Crime!

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Ampersand

Well, not so much “foiled” as “politely greeted.”

I got home at about 11:50pm tonight; as I was walking in our front door, I ran into a man I didn’t know walking out that same door, wheeling a bike.

This is not especially unusual; my housemates have friends who I don’t know, I often don’t recognize even people I’ve met several times, and Portlanders habitually bring their bikes indoors with them (for security and for dryness) when they visit a house.

I said something like “hi there!” and he – perfectly calm and friendly – said something like “Hi. Just heading out.” I walked in, he walked out, and my housemate Charles walked in from the kitchen at that moment. I asked Charles if he knew who that guy had been, and Charles, glancing over my shoulder, recognized his own bike being wheeled away and gave chase.

I ran out after Charles, and caught up with them on the sidewalk in front of the house; Charles had grabbed one end of the bike and they were having a tug-of-war, and Charles said “no fucking way, asshole.” The guy ran away at that point, and Charles and I brought the bike back indoors. Hanging off the bike’s rack was Sydney’s backpack, and in the backpack was my housemates stuff – Kim’s laptop, Kim’s e-cig, Jakes’s Playstation, and Sydney’s headphones. (All six items – bike, pack, ecig, laptop, playstation, headphones – had been in the TV room).

We also found an open window, leading into our TV room from the alley in back of the house. We called the cops, but the guy got clean away. The police advised us to lock our windows (good idea!), and to get curtains over the windows.

Oy! Second break-in in four months. That doesn’t mean anything, statistically – it’s not especially unlikely for two robberies to occur in the same year just by random chance – but still not a happy thing.

Note to self: Next time I run into someone in my house I don’t recognize, don’t assume that they’re here legitimately.

Posted in About the Bloggers | 9 Comments  

Javad Zarif’s Video Message: “There Is a Way Forward”

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I met Mr. Zarif some years ago, when he was Iran’s representative to the United Nations, though I am sure he would not remember me. He gave a presentation with a former and well-respected American diplomat, whose name now escapes me, about the difficulties of building trust between two nations that have distrusted each other for as long as Iran and the US. I was invited to the conference because of my work translating classical Persian poetry. What impressed me the most about Mr. Zarif’s talk was its honesty, and I am not talking about the kind of “honesty” that diplomats are able to effect when they need to. There was little to no dissimulation in his talk, and listening to and watching him in dialogue with his American co-presentor made obvious, to me at least, that he meant what he said.

None of which is to say that this video is anything other than the PR move that it is, though I think it is a smart one. There is, true, little substance here—unless you know something about Iran’s history and therefore get his references to the Iranian people’s history of standing up to tyranny (and I do not mean the Islamic Revolution, though that is arguably part of the same history)—but the change in rhetoric and posture is meaningful. And that is something worth noting.

Cross-posted.

Posted in Iran | Leave a comment  

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Ampersand

I don’t know who created this animation, but it’s lovely. I keep finding myself focusing on the nose shape morphing.

So: The 50th anniversary special. What did you think?

Posted in Popular (and unpopular) culture | 24 Comments  

Public Safety, Racial Awareness, and a Community College Class in Workplace Writing

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

“Can we talk about this email that the college sent out to all the students?” one of the men in my technical writing class asked me, staring at the laptop open on his desk. “I’m pretty sure you’d have given it an F if one of us had written it.”

I was a couple of minutes late and eager to get started on the work of the day, which was to begin the unit on technical and progress reports. I’d assigned an end-of-semester report as a final project, complete with charts and tables, and I wanted to make sure we covered that material before my students had to start writing. Still, what teacher passes up an opportunity to discuss a real-world application of classroom material, especially when that discussion is initiated by the students themselves? “Sure,” I said, “but did this email go only to students, or do I have in my inbox as well?”

“It’s the ‘Crime Alert’ that went out a couple of hours ago, so I assume you have it too.”

I did. In fact, I’d glanced at it in my office not an hour earlier, but I hadn’t actually read it. I sat down at my desk and pulled the Alert up on my iPad:

CRIME ALERT

A male student reports to Public Safety that on Monday, November 18th, 2013 at approximately 5:30 pm, he was approached on Duncan Avenue, in front of the bookstore, by two males who proceeded to knock him to the ground and take $10.00 from his pocket. The victim was walking by the bookstore when a light brown Nissan Maxima pulled up to him and a male, black exited the vehicle and started walking toward the victim. The victim started running and was chased by the male, black. The driver of the vehicle also exited and caught the victim and both assailants knocked the victim to the ground taking the $10.00.

The assailants are described as a light-skinned, male, black wearing a black hoodie with black pants; and a dark-skinned male, black wearing a black hoodie and light beige cargo pants. The vehicle was last seen heading south on Duncan Avenue. The victim was treated for a bruise to his left hand.

Please report any information on these individuals or any other suspicious behavior immediately to Public Safety.

Continue reading →

Posted in Education, Race, racism and related issues | 14 Comments