Truly Outrageous presents: The 31st Carnival of the Feminists!
The Nineteenth Floor presents: Disability Carnival #9
Righteous Sister Speaks presents: Erase Racism Carnival #9
Brownfemipower: The Women The World Requires
“…For our communities, death is not the ultimate fuck you–living is.” A bit under a year from now, I hope someone nominates this post for a 2007 “best post” Koufax. It’s that good. And also impossible to summarize, so just go read it.
Crooked Timber: Why Are Dutch Children The Happiest, Healthiest Kids In The Industrialized World?
The Agitator: Context For The SWAT Team Shooting Of Kathryne Johnson
I hope folks are reading The Agitator. One of his most frequent topics is how SWAT teams are now commonly being used for no-knock raids on homes where there’s no reason for heavily-armed no-knock raids; as a result, more and more people are dying, in most cases shot to death by police invaders who didn’t identify themselves, and whose over-the-top tactics introduce violence into non-violent situations.
This post is a stunning — and by no means complete — list of people who have been shot to death for no acceptable reason. Except in the rare case where someone shoots a police officer in self-defense, there is never any significant punishment for the killers.
I Shame The Matriarchy: My Ex-Husband’s Porn Addiction
Geek Monthly: Interview With Joss About The “Buffy Season Eight” Comic Book Series
Page four of the interview is especially interesting for feminist readers, but the whole interview makes me excited about the comic book. There is a minor spoiler about what Dawn’s been up to, though, so skip page 2 if you’d like to avoid that. Curtsy: Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty.
Alex Blase at Dkos: Gay-Bashing Is The Reason “Forcible Sodomy” and “Rape” Are Two Different Crimes
Rad Geek: How The U.S.’s Drug War Contributes To Starvation In Afghanistan
BlackProf.com: Jim Crow Laws Were The Tyranny Of The White Minority
African American-backed majoritarian governments controlled the South after the Civil War; while in power, they enacted strong civil rights laws and created a public education system. These policies were reversed, and segregation imposed, not because African Americans were a minority, destined to lose in the majoritarian political process, but rather through elimination of democratic politics and imposition of minority rule. African Americans and their white allies were stripped of their electoral majority through fraud, violence and illegal disenfranchisement.
News Story: Hybred Cars, Blind Pedestrians, Audible Signals and Noise Pollution
The Gimp Parade links to this article, which points out that hybrid cars — because they’re so quiet — are potentially dangerous to blind pedestrians.
The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum: Rosie Demonstrates What A Real Apology Looks Like
Indianz.com: Bureau of Indian Affairs Is A “Black Hole” For Tribes Wanting Land Placed In Trust
Extremely cool photo of migrating starlings in Algeria.
Shakespeare’s Sister: Jimmy Kimmel’s Anti-Transsexual Rant
SS links to a YouTube video. In the video, interviewing Rebecca Romijn (who plays a transsexual on Ugly Betty) Kimmel jokes about how he thinks transwomen are ugly and unfeminine, and jokes about a fictional character taking an axe to a transsexual. Romijn disagrees with him and says some of the right things, but I was longing to see her get angry and chew Kimmel out, and I was disappointed.
I’m unhappy with the cliched use of the transsexual villain plot-twist on Ugly Betty, which obviously feeds on ugly anti-trans stereotypes. But despite that I still love the show, and the writers are attempting to make Romijn’s character both fully developed and sympathetic to the audience.
Never Judge A Book By It’s Cover: Democrat women are ugly! Ha ha!
For Republicans, this sort of thing passes for wit. The pettiness and stupidity of this post is made even more pathetic by the blog’s name. (The joke in this post parallels the Jimmy Kimmel anti-trans bigotry linked to above, further proof that banal minds think alike.)
Newspaper Rock: Simpsons Episode Does A Good (But Not Flawless) Job Depicting American Indians
The Blind Bookworm: Ashley X And The Journalistic Challenge Of Writing About Disability
A lot of really interesting stuff here. Curtsy: The Gimp Parade.
Deltoid: Poll Shows That Most Americans Badly Underestimate Iraqi Death Toll
Dissident Voice: Palestinian Refugee Family, Including Children, Imprisoned In Texas; Daughter May Have Been Sexually Abused With Punative Body Cavity Search
Absolutely disgusting. After reading the above article, read the follow-up article as well. (Thanks to Ms. Xeno for the tip.)
Dispatches From The Culture War: Christian Group Objects To Wal-Mart Carrying Books For Queers
A Bird’s Nest: Reading The Anti-Feminist Blogs
Check out her follow-up post, as well.
The Republic Of T: Wealth, Inheritance, and Excluding Same-Sex Couples From Marriage
My Private Casbah: Feminism Shouldn’t Be An Excuse For Anti-Trans Prejudice
Bint criticizes the decision of a Canadian women’s center to discriminate against a transwoman volunteer. Shorter Bint: None of us will truly be free until all of us are free.
International Federation of Journalists Condemns US For Unprovoked Attack On Iraqi Journalists
As ePurbus Media points out, the total lack of coverage of this story — either to confirm or to debunk it — is very disturbing.
Daily Campus: If “Rape Drugs” Are Uncommon And It’s Drunk Women Being Raped, That’s Still Rape
If you run into a login wall, you can use: Login: alas@amptoons.com Password: alasablog
The American Prospect: How Fundamentalist Christians Think About Gays And “Recruitment”
Last fall, while doing some reporting in northeastern Kentucky, I was talking to two local activists (registered Democrats, no less!) about why they were trying to shut down anti-bullying training at the public high school. Their gripe? By teaching that homosexuality is normal, and that students shouldn’t harass their classmates because they’re gay, the training sought to recruit students into being gay.
Daily Mail: Article About Troop Of Fat Ballerinas
As Big Fat Blog correctly points out, the article contains some annoying and needless anti-fat cliches, but the dancers are great. I always love seeing good fat dancers. (That’s a photo of one of the dancers, to the right.)
Newshog: The Case Against Iran Is Extremely Weak
Eurozine: Interesting Interview With Martha Nussbaum
The end of the interview, which includes her (mostly positive) reflections on MacKinnon and Dworkin, might be particularly interesting to feminists. Curtsy: Feminist Law Professors.
LA Times: Al Sharpton’s Ancestors Were Enslaved By Family Of Strom Thurmond’s Ancestors
Holy shit. (Thanks to Bean for the tip.)
Cool Beans: Our bank donates to charity! Which charity is that? Just, y’know, “charity.”
Why Sadly, No! Will Never Be On My Blogroll
(Fortunately for them, I’m sure they couldn’t care less.)
Andrew Sullivan: Dildos, Penises, Anuses, and Texas Law, Oh My!
This is a link to an embedded youtube video. The entire thing (which includes comments from Molly Ivans) is pretty amusing, but the highlight is definitely a debate in the Texas legislature over a law making it illegal for a penis to ever touch an anus. I also liked the sex shop employee, standing in front of a display of at least 30 dildos, explaining that they don’t sell dildos. Curtsy: The Debate Link.
Angry Brown Butch: Race, Opposition to Equal Marriage Rights, And Homophobia
Slate: In Defense Of “Hooking Up,” The Latest Non-Crisis On Campus
Taking Steps: It Is Time For A Feminism Of The Monsterous
This is for the Lilim, because you forget that the next part after your co-opted icon parts ways with Adam and goes her own way is and she begat monsters, and she becomes terrifying. This is for the Gorgons and the vampires and the chimaeras, for Cybele and Baba Yaga, Hel and Ashtoreth, for Lamia and Scylla, for Kali and Kapo ‘ula-kina’u. This is for all of them with teeth.
It is time to look the monstrous in the eye. It is time. It is time to say that we are beautiful in our fierceness, and that we are our own. We are not the rejected of what we can never be. We are what we were meant to be. We are not pieces of wholes thrown together incorrectly. We are not mistakes.
YouTube: Man Testing Different Levels Of Dog Shock Collar
There’s probably something wrong with me, because I think this clip is hilarious. Via Damn Cool Pics.
My Private Casbah: Similarities Between Being A Person Of Color & A Person With Disabilities
Dispatches From The Culture Wars: The International Trend Towards Outlawing “Defamation of Religion.”
Scary stuff. Especially in light of Amanda and Melissa’s recent experiences.
Volokh Conspiracy: Yes, Athiests Are Capable Of Being Moral
For four decades, American women have entered the paid workforce–on men’s terms, not their own–yet we have done precious little as a society to restructure the workplace or family life. The consequence of this “stalled revolution,” a term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, is a profound “care deficit.” A broken healthcare system, which has left 47 million Americans without health coverage, means this care crisis is often a matter of life and death. Today the care crisis has replaced the feminine mystique as women’s “problem that has no name.” It is the elephant in the room–at home, at work and in national politics–gigantic but ignored.
Three decades after Congress passed comprehensive childcare legislation in 1971–Nixon vetoed it–childcare has simply dropped off the national agenda. And in the intervening years, the political atmosphere has only grown more hostile to the idea of using federal funds to subsidize the lives of working families. (Curtsy: Our Bodies Our Blog.
YouTube: Super Flexible Girl Competition.
Via Damn Cool Pics.
An Even Scarier Photoshop Retouching Site
Very disturbing, both because they specialize in photos of contestants in child beauty pageants, and because they’re not as skillful as the folks who do adult models, and as a result the retouched photos look even more artificial. Via a comment left on Pandagon (normally I’d credit the person who left the comment, but Pandagon’s down at the moment, so I can’t look it up).
Clay Cane: Gallery of Black Women On The Cover Of Vogue
Curtsy: Blackprofs.com
Spain Standardizes Women’s Clothing Sizes
Glenn Greenwald: When Foreign Policy Is Dominated By Men Wanting To Preserve Their Masculinity
Glenn doesn’t put things in those terms, but I think anyone watching politics through a feminist lens would find it impossible not to see idiotic machismo lurking behind a bunch of politiicans going on about the need to appear “strong” rather than “weak.”
Equality Loudoun: Anti-Gay Male Preacher Propositions Undercover Male Cop
2000 Bloggers: Photo Montage
Neat. Curtsy: DeviousDiva.
Slactivist: Biblical literalism, homosexuality and charging interest
New (to me) Blog: Muzzlewatch
“Tracking efforts to stifle open debate about US-Israeli foreign policy.”
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I also liked the sex shop employee, standing in front of a display of at least 30 dildos, explaining that they don’t sell dildos
Maybe they rented them.
The American Prospect: How Fundamentalist Christians Think About Gays And “Recruitment”
For one thing, this title says that all fundamentalist Christians think the way that a few people they talk about in the article do, which doesn’t seem supported by the evidence they’re quoting.
Secondly, I found this interesting:
By teaching that homosexuality is normal, and that students shouldn’t harass their classmates because they’re gay, the training sought to recruit students into being gay.
If – and I grant it’s not clear – the school was actually doing this, I’d object myself. For one thing, it’s not up to the school to indoctrinate the kids about the acceptability of particular sexual behavior (outside the issues of rape, etc.). But more importantly, if the school was actually doing this, what it would mean is that they’d be telling kids that they shouldn’t bully someone who isn’t “normal” because the particular basis for which they’re bullying the kid actually is normal. That’s wrong. What they should be teaching the kids is that whether or not someone is normal is immaterial. You don’t bully people. Period. Your judgement on whether someone is or is not normal isn’t and shouldn’t be part of the conversation.
I agree with Ron’s last paragraph, but do need to point out (again, in 2007) that homosexuality is about as much about “particular sexual behavior” as heterosexuality is. The school should not be indoctrinating children into heterosexuality either.
On a lighter note, I watched the dog collar video three times.
Bullying is a hot button with me. I was the smartest kid in every school I was ever in until college. I was very definitely not “normal”. And I paid for it, until around 8th grade when I jumped up from 5′ 6″ and 156 pounds to 5′ 10″ and 156 pounds one summer. When I got back to school, one of the bullies tried smacking me around and obtained quite a different result than he had been used to for the previous 7 years. The rest of them took note, and that was the end of that. But after having gone though things like getting dragged into a bathroom, thrown on the floor and getting pissed on for the basic crime of actually being the best at what school is for, I’m pretty sensitive to the bullying issue.
I remember one time that a teacher actually told the class before a test, with me sitting there, “I’m grading on a curve, but Ron’s grade won’t count – he’ll get his A, but it won’t be on the curve.” He was actually trying to take the heat off of me, so the rest of the kids wouldn’t blame me for pushing the rest of their grades down.
Equality Loudoun: Anti-Gay Male Preacher Propositions Undercover Male Cop
It’s a stereotype among gay rights advocates that people who actively oppose them have problems with their own sexuality that they’re trying to mask. And just like any other stereotype, it’s mostly complete bull$hit, but there are always some people who fit it.
Dispatches From The Culture Wars: The International Trend Towards Outlawing “Defamation of Religion.”
It seems that states that support this generally equate defamation of religion with criticism of their state religion. Defamation of religions that are not their own state religion doesn’t bother them at all, especially since lots of them have domestic policies that forbid expression of other religions and foreign policies that favor eradication of other religions and their adherents.
That Melissa and Amanda should have suffered the consequences they did for the actions they took doesn’t bother me at all. That they might suffer legal consequences for them would be an abomination.
Today’s exhibit A for why people find the idea that one can look to the UN or “international law” for the defense of human rights to be absurd.
Newshog: The Case Against Iran Is Extremely Weak
True. So far as it stands right now. Of course, the nature of intelligence is such that the more you reveal the details about it, the more you endanger your source and the more difficult it is to get more of it. That can be taken advantage of if you are trying to sell a lie as the truth, but it’s also applicable to intelligence that is the absolute truth. There may come a time when the Administration (regardless of whether it’s the current one or not) has absolute proof that Iran is supplying money, fighters and materials to the armed insurrection against Iraq’s government and will not be able to reveal the level of proof that would, for example, be required in a court of law.
What then? Remember, to say “the case is weak” in this context means that the case as presented to the public is weak. The case itself may well be very strong to those who are in a position to see the unfiltered intelligence. We don’t know. But the people in charge of such things have to act on what they know, not what they can tell us. That’s why there are members of Congress on the Intelligence committees, to take a look at this stuff and be an independent set of eyes from the Executive.
The case may be weak now. But be prepared for it to get a lot stronger. I personally figure that there are elements in Iran who are more than happy to try to foment a Shiite secession in Iraq. It will be harder to prove official approval/funding/participation by the Iranian government in such an effort. But at some point, if there is strong evidence of any kind of involvement by anyone in Iran in this, then Iraq will have to take steps to stop it.
Wow, Lynne/Renee does a brilliant re-transformation of herself on the My Private Casbah site.
Wow, Lynne/Renee does a brilliant re-transformation of herself on the My Private Casbah site.
It didn’t actually seem all that different.
Her rhetoric and style seems the same to me. The estrangement with Heart is a big difference from when I first met her; on the Ms. Boards, Lynne (as she called herself) was a very frequent ally of Heart’s.
Regarding the hybrid cars thing, I strongly suspect this is a problem with an expiration date – a far-off one, but nontheless present. Specifically, I suspect the problem is not that hybrid cars are quiet per se, but that they are quiet by comparison with gas cars. As more and more hybrids and pure-electric vehicles take to the roads, eventually noise pollution in general will go down to the point that the noise of gas cars won’t drown out the hybrids, and blind pedestrians won’t have problems picking them out.
I am sympathetic to the noise-pollution concerns of the manufacturers, assuming they’re genuine – perhaps a compromise wherein the signal only operated below a certain speed, an then tapered off when the car was slow enough not to be as dangerous (say, below 5 MPH)? Eventually, once hybrids dominated the roadways, the noisemakers could be shut off.
Thanks but I think it will be a while yet!
RonF: What schools should be teaching kids is that there are plenty of happy, healthy, functional, productive GLBT adults in the world. Ignoring that fact is de facto teaching that being queer is wrong, or at best something that’s too dirty to talk about at school. You don’t avoid the issue by not teaching that “homosexuality is normal”–the perspective you give kids by making the subject taboo is just as much indoctrination as teaching it’s not okay to hate someone because they’re queer is.
Teaching that bullying is bad regardless of how “normal” someone is or isn’t doesn’t have to exclude the possibility of also combating bullying of particularly vulnerable groups by destigmatizing those identities. The most successful approach to eliminating bullying is probably a combination of those two tactics.
that Volokh thread is amazingly disappointing, and downright depressing. everybody seems to go back and forth about whether or not atheists must necessarily be moral relativists, and it all just reads like a neverending stream of red-relativist-baiting; nobody seems to ask the question “what’s so bad about moral relativism, anyway?”.
seriously, why do people nearly always assume that the absence of an absolutist, objectivist standard of ethics means you have to be eeeevil!? ethics isn’t that black-and-white, and it really shouldn’t take that much critical thought to see the flaw in that particular assumption. it wasn’t too very hard for me, and i’m no genius.
heck, some people in that thread hold up utilitarianism as a good example of an atheistic, non-relativistic ethics. utilitarianism has given me the absolute creeps ever since i first read Brave New World, personally.
seriously, why do people nearly always assume that the absence of an absolutist, objectivist standard of ethics means you have to be eeeevil!?
Well, speaking personally, I don’t assume that absence to mean the automatic presence of evil. But the absence of the standard does require processing power from other people to parse; the loss of that handy shorthand for “I share your moral framework and by and large we both know where good and evil lie in that shared framework” is a burden on the audience.
That’s not much of a problem when it’s one-on-one; at that level of intercourse, there’s a lot of mutual processing that has to go on anyway as people feel out a relationship. When it’s one-to-many, it’s a bit more problematic; if, as a political candidate, you have to ask a million people to perform a fairly sophisticated bit of assessment and evaluation to reach the starting point, in terms of knowledge of the candidate’s value system, that other candidates can get to in a couple of words, then you’re at a substantial relative disadvantage.
To put it directly, tell me that candidate A and candidate B are both faithful and sincere Orthodox Jews, and in two seconds I now know a considerable amount about their moral philosophies. Tell me candidate A is an orthodox Jew, and that candidate B is an agnostic/atheist, and I have one piece of knowledge and one question mark.
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It strikes me as so bizarre that morality could ever be seen as solely the realm of the religious. How resolute and consistent can one be in an ethical system they got from a book (or, more often, got from someone else’s reading of a book)? I think of Abraham – the namesake of the Abrahamic traditions! – being all set to murder his son just because God told him to. How can a murder become not only ok, but even worthy of worship, depending on whose idea it was? And that’s without even getting into the question of how much the community of people who revere Abraham for his willingness to kill his walking, talking child overlaps with the community of people who would lock me up for putting my living, breathing self before a barely-formed clump of cells. But sure, atheists are the relativists.
(Nomen, I’m with you about both relativism and utilitarianism; to my thinking, only some pretty well thought-out morals can be fairly applied to the broad range of human experience with any real integrity, which I guess would fall under the category of ‘relativist thinking.’ In the above paragraph, relativism was basically shorthand for “inconsistency.”)
I hate to only comment on one link out of that lovely farm, but I need to pull my brain out of the intertubes now.
…except to add that the starling photo was absolutely stunning
How resolute and consistent can one be in an ethical system they got from a book (or, more often, got from someone else’s reading of a book)?
As resolute and consistent as one could be in an ethical system period, I should think.
With the exception of a relative handful of gifted individuals, pretty much everybody who has a coherent ethical system has derived it from ideas they’ve gotten in books, or from other people’s teachings. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
I can understand not putting Sadly No on your blogroll for that “offence”, but why do you keep genocide and torture advocates like Tacitus and Volokh on your blogroll?
That seems to me far more offensive than the occasional fat joke.
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Anacas, we can go back and forth about whether or not schools should be teaching that GLBT behavior is normal or acceptable or not in some other context. But the main point I was making is that in a discussion of bullying it should be explictly taught that whether or not someone is perceived as “normal” has nothing to do with bullying. In a anti-bullying class, what they should be saying is “I don’t care whether or not you think ‘x’ is normal or not – it doesn’t matter, so we’re not going to talk about it either way.” regardless of whether ‘x’ is race, physical appearance, sexual behavior, ethnicity, size, gender, intelligence, economic status, etc., etc.
Yes, but you see the -default- is that hereosexuality is “normal;” you don’t have to say it out loud; it’s evident by the overtly hetero behavior of the kids on campus, the teachers with their wedding rings, the tacit assumptions in everything from biology class to Spanish class (“Maria no le gustan chicos,” says asshat Spanish teacher, to general hilarity) to what’s in or isn’t the history books, to…
Look, it’s great that Little Light wants to be loud and proud of what she is but why is she defining herself as monstrous? Are you beautiful in your cobbled togetherness or are you what you were meant to be? Maybe coherence isn’t the point but I generally prefer it where possible
I also think that it is better to say ‘Don’t bully’ than to say ‘Don’t bully gays’. Calling a bully to task for bullying ‘a gay’ makes a point of their sexuality. I’m a heterosexual and I was bullied, but if I were gay I would appreciate being treated like the majority.
Belle, I don’t have a problem with differentiating childbearing unions from non-childbearing unions. I think it’s entirely fair and entirely appropriate. Producing a younger generation to succeed and support the older genertion is essential to our culture’s well-being. If I accept that non-childrearing is to be endowed with the same level of cultural honors and entitlements as childrearing, it is the same as saying that childrearing is of no particular value.
I am what I am, Retief. That happens to be something considered deviant by most people. I don’t see a conflict between acknowledging that notion–without shyness or fear or kid gloves–and embracing that life, deviant or no, anyway.
I don’t see a problem with making common cause with those who are defined as “monstrous” by society at large and taking that experience as a center of strength. I’d rather not build on a foundation of denial.
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Considering the individual that famously said that, it would be fair to say that we all stand on the shoulders of giants, even the exceptionally gifted among us.
Newton said that in a letter to a midget. He was being a twit when he wrote it, not trying to be humble.
It was a letter to Robert Hooke (a fellow scientist) who was not a little person. Newton may have been being a jerk (they didn’t get along) but he wasn’t bashing dwarfs.
Yes CJ and RonF, as you are both anti-gay, you would prefer that anti-bullying messages not mention homosexuality, instead going for a generic “bullying isn’t nice” message.
However, bullying tends to be focused around specific excuses: queer, nerd, ugly, smart, foreigner, etc. so it makes sense to address each of those reasons specifically as well as adding in the more general “oh, and don’t bully anyone, even if you aren’t doing it for one of these reasons.”
“Bullying isn’t nice” arguments are insufficient if bullies bullying on the basis of certain traits don’t see it as being the same as the rest of their bullying. Someone could easily understand the “bullying isn’t nice” line and accept it, but feel that because their parents say queers are evil, that queers should be punished.
Also, if part of the teaching involves role playing scenarios, then those scenarios need to include specific traits that bullies target, not just some generic target. If some traits are included (ner, ugly, foreigner, smart) but others are not, then that also sends a message on what traits it is still okay to use to target people to bully.
RonF:
Yeah, but Newton was talking about physics and math, which are really hard to build up from scratch. I don’t think there’s ever been a moral philosopher who’s done anything more than dress intuitions up in fancy clothes, so most sufficiently clever people can start from scratch and end up with something at least as good as what we’ve come to expect from the professionals. Which is to say, not very.
Brandon – gotta disagree. Physics and math are relatively easy to build up from scratch; you have a physical world to work with which provides you with empirical data that it’s hard to argue against. Philosophy is like building a house on quicksand; you have to do a REALLY good job of putting your pilings down, or whatever structure you assemble will collapse in the first stiff breeze.
There’s a reason that in physics and math we know a hell of a lot more than our ancestors could ever have imagined, whereas a resurrected Plato could take a few refresher courses and be pretty much caught up. Philosophy is hard.
Where you’re correct is that “sufficiently clever people can start from scratch and come up with something” – but the something won’t be much good.
Robert:
My point was that in the field of moral philosophy, nothing is much good. There are no giants for us to stand on. As far as I can tell, every moral philosopher, ever, has started from foundations which can be summarized, fairly, as “Hell, this sounds about right. Let’s run with it.” And some of them do a fairly good job of building on top of those foundations. But that’s something any reasonably clever person can do—just weed out the contradictions.
The trick, as you say, is building on solid foundations. But no one’s found those yet, so you might as well roll your own. What you get won’t be very good, but neither is anything else.
Yes CJ and RonF, as you are both anti-gay, you would prefer that anti-bullying messages not mention homosexuality, instead going for a generic “bullying isn’t nice” message.
I’m not anti-gay Charles. My views on culture, family and marriage has nothing to do with sexuality. Gays who seek to alter marriage are just one subset of a larger cultural trend to alter marriage that I am interested in foiling, a trend being advanced more by heterosexuals than gays. The trend is to change the definition of family from a union of people that share mutual and binding responsibility for their dependents and each other, to any constellation of adults who cares to share a bed, but don’t acknowledge any meaningful commitment to either each other or their dependents.
If you want your relationship to be such, fine, but it is of little use to society. If you live as such then you are properly labelled friends or lovers or roommates, and your value to society is that of friends or lovers or roommates. It is not made greater by assuming the label of a union that holds itself to a higher standard, any more than the true value of a 5-dollar chinese knockoff watch is increased by calling it a Rolex. You obtain an illusionary gleam of higher status, benefits for which you promise nothing in return, and a right to bring forth children into the world whom you assume no responsibility for. I don’t blame those who want that, who wouldn’t, but the price is you devalue what you covet, until the prestige of family is no greater than the prestige of roommate. And makes it useless as an institution for assuring the protection of society’s weakest and most dependent members.
As for the bullying, bullying and hate crimes are not the same thing. A bully looking for his victim du jour is not automatically a gay-basher just because his victim happens to be gay, and I would not do him the disservice of too-quickly tarring him as a homophobe. I would treat the bully of a gay boy the same as I would treat the bully of any other child, as a bully, until and unless I saw in his behavior a trend toward preferentially targetting gays.
You also imply I would use a limp, weak, oh be nice approach to bullying if it were a gay that were bullied. Not true.
CJ,
Claiming that same sex marriage is a part of this trend is absurd, and merely demonstrates that you have (at the best) no respect for gays and lesbians. Apparently, decades long relationships in which children are raised by two parents are ones in which no “meaningful commitment to each other or their dependents” is shown, so long as the partners in the relationship are of the same sex.
Why should bullies be protected from the “disservice” of being taught both that bullying is wrong and that the particular characteristic they were using to bully is normal and not a personal offense against them? If you merely object to the method of attack, often as not, you aren’t getting to the root of the problem.
And I paid for it, until around 8th grade when I jumped up from 5′ 6″ and 156 pounds to 5′ 10″ and 156 pounds one summer.
I know that has to be a mistype since the weight is exactly the same, but…. Geeze, your were a big’un regardless. In 8th grade I was 4’8″ and 55 lbs. I made it to 5’6″ around 10th grade, but I still haven’t made it to 156.
But us little people gotta use their brains. Bicycle chains and firebombs got the bullies off of my ass. And folks wonder why I am sympathetic to school shooters.
Understand me Charles, I make no claim against any individual, gay or straight, that they are definitey going to fail to discharge their responsibilities to their dependents if they have them, or that they are less likely to be reliable if they are gay, or that a lifetime contribution is less meaningful if they are gay. I am perfectly aware that gays and lesbians can be reliable parents.
It is you who fail to understand that from the libertarian perspective, it is not permitted that society require them to be reliable parents. Under the modern definition of family we are permitted to be as un-reliable as we like.
I object to much that I read on libertarian philosophy, not because I am a bastard, but because I see the libertarian menu as a salad bar of perks from which I can fill my plate with any entitlement I wish, and also a wastebasket into which I can dispose of any obligation I wish. If any of you disagree with the use to which I might put the rights you insist on giving me, I don’t mind. Your philosophies are so contradictory that you are incapable of agreeing with one another enough to stop me.
Does my wife give me as much sex as I would like? Does our child have temper tantrums than I find annoying? How unhappy that makes me. According to many liberals, it is my happiness that I should consider first in this equation. Thank you for thinking of me, I’ll be down the pub chatting up a nice, low-maintenance 19-year old.
Further, according to many, single women are perfectly capable of raising children alone with neither a man’s presence or support. Study after study shows (according to single-motherhood advocates) that children in single parent, single income environments don’t do any worse than other children, so again, thanks for thinking of me. The money I save on alimony will be used to show that 19-year old a very good time.
If you disagree with my assertion that my ex and her child can do just fine without my alimony, I’ll ask you to direct your displeasure to someone who cares. My esteemed fellow poster Lubu will give you a great argument in defense of the remarkable ability of single women to raise perfectly healthy children alone, so what’s your beef?
But, if you still insist they need help, I don’t mind if society kicks in to support them. Many liberals assert it is society’s obligation to guarantee quality of life regardless of our lifestyle choices. I don’t really understand why, all I understand is that if society supports my children it means my taxes go up by about a penny a year. Make it two cents. Send em to Princeton. No, no. Don’t thank me. Anything for family.
Perhaps you think this will all catch up to me? That my choices mean I’ll end up old, alone, having no one to attach value to me and care for me after my usefulness as a producer is ended? No. Some liberal will always be around to insist society support me, even if I’ve been nothing but a tapeworm in society’s bowels my whole life. I hope! Keep fighting the good fight Charles.
…
I aplogize for the above. I have been deliberately transparent about the abuses to which I could put what I read about here, and I don’t intend to do anything remotely like what I’ve just written, but if I did, I wouldn’t be so obvious about it. I would just quietly agree with the posters who lecture us that mild unhappiness with some minor feature of our spouse negates our obligations to them, agree with the posters that insist it is alright to swap sex partners into and out of our family life, agree with the posters who assert that single parents are perfectly adequate and self-sufficient family structures, agree with the posters that say society, whatever that is, and not ourselves, is obligated to be the guarantor of all our needs. And then avail myself of each asset as it best serves me, and dump each associated cost back onto society.
I maintain that as long as nothing I do can be proven to be directly and immediately harmful to someone else, your philosophy lacks the moral unity to stop me. The only way you could is through applying a conservative POV, and your own allies will shoot you down for me.
And I believe it begins to break down when you break the mother-father-child pyramid, for any but the most unequivocal of reasons (normally criminal). If blood is not a good enough to bind caregivers to their dependents, far less is the mercurial emotion of love.
Why should bullies be protected from the “disservice” of being taught both that bullying is wrong and that the particular characteristic they were using to bully is normal and not a personal offense against them?
I was not assuming that simply because an incident of bullying involved a gay victim, that the bully was motivated by hatred of gays. Should I start every investigation of a white bullying a black that it’s a race issue? But you’re right. I would query the bully about why he chose his victim, and if I find he was motivated by hatred of gays an not merely casting about for a vulnerable target, discussion of homophobia would then ensue.
CJ,
And the connection between that rant on the evils of a permissive society and same sex marriage is?
Oh right:
So are you as anti-adoption and anti-step parenting as you are anti-gay?
And the connection between that rant on the evils of a permissive society and same sex marriage is?
Passes over my absurd abuses of society saying ‘Why shoudn’t gays be allowed to do that too?’ Yeah, I got your number now Charles.
By insisting that the biological parent is unsuitable because there is no sexual attraction, you declare that your loyalty only lasts as long as your sexual attraction lasts. That’s some vow. For better or worse, in sickness and health, but if I don’t get a woody you’re on your own. Touching.
If a child loses a parent, either through an act of God or because we didn’t require this child’s original parents to (haha) support them, adoption and step parenting is clearly better than nothing. Not that either the adoptive or step parent has any more obligation than the original had. A child is, after all, really just an experiment in a lifestyle choice isn’t it? Pick one up, try one out. Free trial run with no obligations.
No CJ,
Gays and Lesbians already live in our permissive society. There is nothing about being able to get legally married that is about being able to participate more in the permissiveness of our society. Marriage remains a less permissive aspect of our society, even if it isn’t as restrictive as what you’d like. Allowing gays and lesbians access to the legal aspects of marriage (gays and lesbians already get religious marriages, disgusting to you though that may be) means allowing them to access to an institution that supports mutual support. Will some married gays then cheat on each other, abandon their children, etc, etc. Of course, but there is nothing to suggest that they will do so more if they are allowed access to legal marriage, nor is there anything to suggest that people like you will be more likely to do any of those things because gays and lesbians have access to legal marriage.
Your argument has no content. Same sex marriage is orthogonal to the permissiveness of society.
Oh, and this little tidbit:
Now you’re just getting pointlessly nasty. You are also (since you chose to use the second person) completely wrong. As it happens, you know absolutely nothing about my marriage or my sex life, so kindly go fuck yourself.
And let me return the favor.
Do you really believe that the most important attribute of a good parent is that they share 1/2 the genes of the child? That the relationship between the parents (not the sexual relationship, you moron) has no bearing on the quality of the parenting? That an anonymous sperm donor is automatically better suited to be a co-parent than that mother’s loving wife of ten years (or husband)?
I feel sorry for your children, who you believe you only need to stand by through thick and thin because they came from your seed. If you discover that your wife cuckolded you, would you abandon them tomorrow?
Forget adoption and step-parenting, those sad second class options that are incapable of producing loving parent-child relationships that last throughout the lives of parent and child (so you claim), how much time and energy do you spend on opposing in-vitro fertilization, egg donation, and sperm donation?
CJ,
Okay, both of us have now well crossed the line.
Respond or don’t as you please, but I’m done talking to you.
CJ: I have to agree with Charles.
Please go away and never post on “Alas” again.You’re banned from “Alas” until March 7th. After that time, you can return, but you’ll have to apologize to Charles.
I intended to attack society’s position on family law, because it permits parents to be delinquent without penalty. I never intended to accuse you of acting delinquently. It was wrong to use the word ‘you’ as I did. I meant that ‘hypothetically you could, hypothetically I could too’. I did not mean ‘I think you would’. On the contrary, I believe you are a loving man with high ideals.
So I apologize to you Charles.
Amp, I’m not sure if it was okay to apologize to Charles now, or if you need me to wait until the 7th.
[That was fine. See you on the 7th. –Amp]
CJ,
It was only the “I’ve got your number now, Charles” section that I took offense at.
Thanks for the apology, and sorry I baited you into getting banned (and sorry for the nasty comments about your imagined views towards your own children), particularly since Amp refuses to ever ban his housemates (me).
Apropos nothing, except that this is the most recent open thread, I thought I’d recommend this comment by Thomas (who used to be a relatively frequent commenter on Alas) on the relationship between rape and the view of sex as a commodity.
Thanks for the links.
I’ve been blogging on the Port of Seattle Police department email scandal where racist, sexist and sexually explicity emails were circulated by police officers andn was wondering if anyone knew of any other blogs writing on this subject.
This argument tires me. I’ll say though, I think there is a baby being thrown out with the bathwater somewhere. The last five generations of our family has been through immigration, crop failures, lost land, depressions and bombs being dropped on their heads and we’re still here, we still have our family identity, and our children have many relatives into whose lives they would fit as easily as a new pair of boots if we were to die tomorrow.
I wonder what our children would have today if a 60% divorce rate within 5 years was the standard in great-granddad’s day and they had passed that on to us instead? I think of our descendants three, four or five generations from now and wonder what they will have.
It’s too bad we argue. I like almost everything else I read on Alas.
Charles: I didn’t have your number.
Amp: it was generous of you to relent on the ban.
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