From a month-old press release from the Independent Women’s Forum website:

Brushing aside the happy spin of the IWF’s press release, it’s obvious this merger is bad news for nation’s leading anti-feminist think tank.

First of all, obviously the result of this will be to dilute the IWF’s message, and to leave the IWF’s management with less time for IWF-specific goals. There are only two reasons I can see for this. One, maybe the IWF management wants to “expand their portfolio” and put their fingers into more pies, which might be good for them but won’t be good for the IWF. (Kind of like the way that Joss Whedon’s decision to put more of his time into Angel and Firefly led to a noticeable decline in the quality of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

Since IWF chief Nancy Pfotenhauer has a background in economics, an anti-tax group like CSEF will be a natural fit for her. The IWF, meanwhile, is going to be saddled with less-than-fully-engaged leadership.

Alternatively, maybe the IWF has failed to raise enough funds to keep itself going, and IWF management felt they had no choice but to economize by merging with another organization. (Similar to the way Ms Magazine had no choice but to merge with FMF). If so, that’s obviously bad news for the IWF and for anti-feminism in general.

I don’t really see a third possible reason to merge - despite what the press release claims, CSEF’s “grassroots mobilizing,” which has specialized in capturing anti-tax resentment and anger, won’t be transferable to the IWF’s mission. Even among Republicans, few Americans resent feminism nearly as much as they resent paying taxes.

So what’s in the IWF’s future? I think this is the key sentence in the press release: “While IWF’s focus has been on a woman’s perspective on important issues, the partnership allows us to leverage each other’s strengths and build on each other’s successes.” This merger locks the IWF into being about providing “a woman’s perspective on important issues.” In other words, the IWF’s job is to provide op-eds and talking heads who will explain why the policy choices Bush and the Republicans make are good for women - rather than deciding for themselves which policies they’ll support. That’s a very different animal from being an organization about women’s issues.

This “focus” effectively locks the IWF out of ever disagreeing with the libertarian/republican consensus; if the IWF’s mission (what’s left of it) ever conflicts with mainstream conservative thought, it’s the mission that will have to give way. That of intellectual independence is, I think, a real problem for a think tank. (Not that the IWF ever displayed much intellectual independence in the first place, imo).

Bad news for anti-feminism; good news for feminists. Now let’s hope the IWF lingers for a long, long time, sucking away resources and preventing a new focal point for anti-feminism from emerging.

Make sure to check out Echidne of the Snakes, which has quickly leaped onto my list of must-read blogs. Funny, feminist commentary from one of the more obscure dieties - what more could you want?

Here’s a sample, from Echidne’s post on the glass ceiling:

Here’s the best passage from an otherwise forgettable Jonah Goldberg column on same-sex marriage:

Over on the Family Scholars Blog, David Blankenhorn “can’t let go of Katha Pollitt’s argument” for same-sex marriage.

Like many same-sex marriage adovcates, Pollitt argues that we don’t require straights to be able to reproduce in order to have legal marriage, so we shouldn’t require it for gays either.

David responds:

But David’s analogy misses Pollitt’s point, because Pollitt was making an argument about how we decide marriages are legal or not. Even if we grant David’s point - marriage is, in some fundamental sense, for procreation - it remains true that we don’t legally forbid infertile straights from marriage.

To extend David’s analogy, it’s certainly not the case that Buddhist Temples make it “a central goal… to help people know and love God.” Nor could Humanistic Jewish congregations like Kahal B’raira be described that way. But no one claims that the law should therefore legally discriminate against Buddhists and Humanistic Jews by refusing to grant their temples the same legal status given other, more traditional churches. “To help people know and love god” may be a central purpose of most churches, but it’s not a means for determining their access to equal legal rights as a church.

The anti-same-sex-marriage argument doesn’t merely state that marriage is “centrally about bearing and raising children.” It states that marriage is “centrally about bearing and raising children,” and therefore lesbians and gay men should be denied equality. It is that latter proposition that Pollitt was attacking; and that latter proposition is as indefensible as denying Buddhists equal rights because they don’t believe in god.

It’s not a huge surprise, but a Pew Research Center poll on gay marriage shows that opponants of same-sex marriage are motivated far more by religion than by a desire to protect children. (In contrast, the conservative intelligentsia tend to argue that it’s all about the children).

Of the people who oppose gay marriage, 28% said the main reason they object to same-sex marriage is “morally wrong / a sin / the Bible says.” Another 17% said it’s “against my religion.” On the other hand, only 6% mentioned children as the main reason to oppose gay marriage.

I’m writing this without reading it through a few times, without taking the time to do multiple drafts, without really planning out ahead of time what I’m going to say.

This is a post about September 11th, which I doubt you were expecting to read on Thanksgiving. No, there’s no connection between the two; tonight I just felt like I needed to write about something and this is what came to mind. September 11th (I hate calling it 9/11–that seems so television, so like a movie that someone’s trying to sell) is something that’s on my mind a lot but not always when I expect it to be. It’s never really on my mind when I think about the war in Iraq or the botched manhunt in Afghanistan or even when I’m thinking about George Bush and how much I don’t like him. To me, September 11th has very little connection with the current geo-political situation, little to do with terrorists, little to do with “this post-9/11 world” (that phrase which I have come to abhor more than any other; it’s like someone took something tragic and turned it into coin-phrase wankery by attempting to intellectualize it). September 11th, though, has everything to do with people.

This past September 11th, on the second anniversary of the attacks, I spent most of the day browsing around on blogs of all blushes looking for people’s accounts of where they were, what they were doing, what they thought about what had happened. I didn’t find nearly enough and yet I found too much. Too much of what I read was tying September 11th to today and why we should or shouldn’t be in Iraq or why George Bush is or is not Satan’s pawn. I suppose it’s inevitable that an event of that magnitude that has such an impact on the world situation would eventually become another political chip for the left/right battle, another talking point, another proof of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of this or that strategy… But that depresses me. I feel like sometimes when professional pundits and amateur pundits banter and scrap about terrorists and national security and such they view September 11th as a symbol–as though what happened was really and truely equivalent to the statuettes, the bumper stickers, the commemorative coins, and the Osama bin Laden voodoo dolls. The Twin Towers, like the Maine, like Pearl Harbor, like the Gulf of Tonkin, like the Lusitania, have become in their rubble a physical shorthand, a morse code dotted out in scattered wreckage and scarred bodies… Again, a symbol like a work of art, a famous speech, a long-dead relative, or an urban legend.

I guess this bothers me because, for me, September 11th was a deeply personal thing. Judging from the things that people wrote at the time and that people have written in the years since, it was a personal thing for a lot of people, and I guess it just annoys me when people take something personal and use it to reinforce their political views (and I say reinforce for a reason; I’ve yet to meet anyone who says “9/11 changed everything” who actually changed their political views much as a result of that thing that changed everything). When I read people’s posts and articles from the day the attacks happened I see a lot of the same stuff that was going through my head at the time: are the people I know okay? I heard a noise; what the fuck was that? Is this real?

When I think about September 11th I tend to think of myself as an office peon in the World Trade Centers or as one of the passengers on the flights. I don’t think of myself as a terrorist, or as a politician who had to make some big decisions, or as a firefighter or police officer who died trying to save other people… Okay, so sometimes a hero, but usually just myself in a situation similar to the situation I’m in now. A paper shuffler, an ex-college student, a regular guy. I think that’s why September 11th bothered me so much: because it’s so easy to picture myself as a victim in that situation. It’s harder, although not entirely beyond me, to picture myself as a victim of genocide in Africa or oppression under the Chinese government; it’s pretty easy to picture myself, exactly as I am in slacks and worn tennis shoes, on-board a plane or fetching a latté for my boss.

On September 11th, 2001 I was at college in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma about a twenty minute drive from the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. I’d been to the memorial there but wasn’t really affected by it; I was having problems with a girl at the time and spent most of the afternoon trying to get lost so that I could think. Months later, in September, I had actually gotten up on time and had a good chance of making it to my morning class for the first time in a week or two. I was in the cafeteria eating bacon and biscuits when someone mentioned that plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. The World Trade Center? Isn’t that in New York or something? Oh well, back to breakfast. A second plane hit so I decided to see what I could find out about it on the internet… Not surprisingly, the web was tangled.

There was only one television in the entire student center that was tuned to the news (CNN, I think) and I was the only person watching it when the second tower fell. I don’t recall clearly what I was thinking at the time… I was late for class, knew I couldn’t concentrate, didn’t want to go anyway, and was only vaguely aware that I’d just watched a couple thousand people die live on television. I knew it, but it hadn’t sunk in yet.

I spent the next few days in something of a daze, much like everyone else on campus, trying to be normal but getting freaked out at the oddest things, none of which I remember now. I am by nature prone to paranoia, though, so who knows. Maybe I was the only one who got nervous when cars backfired, jets flew overhead, and people I knew started to develop an us-or-them mentality. I was also freaked out by the fact that I knew who Osama bin Laden was while everyone else was learning how to spell his name and make up insults about him. In high school I knew a guy in forensics/speech-and-debate (where I had foolishly signed up for a political-themed event despite knowing nothing about politics and not really having a passion for it) who was obsessed with Osama bin Laden. He was a conservative-type who thought that Jesse Ventura was the future of politics (little did he know it was the whole cast of Predator) and that Osama bin Laden was the greatest threat to the United States since… I don’t know who since because everyone who wasn’t American seemed to be bad, but this guy, Matthew, knew a lot about Osama bin Laden. I thought that Matthew was a bit nutty in both his political views and his obsession with a terrorist leader, but I thought he must have been proud of himself when the shock of three thousand dead people wore off.

I get pissed off when I see the flags on people’s cars or when I see those damn “United We Stand” or “These Colours Don’t Run” bumper stickers. Why? Because it’s part of that whole symbolfication-of-dead-people thing that generally makes me mad. I can’t explain why it is that this bothers me. I’m sure that if I were a better writer, a more experienced person, had a more politically or socially oriented mind I could explain it… but I can’t. I just get mad when I see people from any place on the political spectrum use September 11th as a justification for anything, using the three thousand dead Americans as a number to drop into a speech.

I have a lot of faith in people, but whenever I hear a politician, be he/she George Bush, Atrios, Glenn Reynolds, or Carol Moseley-Braun… I think they’re fucking cheap opportunists. (Not in the sense that they’re having sexual relations with cheap opportunists, but you get my point…) This is probably because I’ve noticed that pundits and politicians only bring up Septemeber 11th as a point of proof in an argument.

So if I had to summarize myself, which I probably should if I’m going to end this post, I’d say that I’m still sore, and others I know are still sore, from being shocked by a tragedy that it’s so easy to relate to that I’m not quite ready to have phrases like “post-9/11 world” tossed around like “post-modernism” or “post-rock.” I’m not ready to have people play with my emotions because they think it’ll get them some votes. I’m not ready to tell people to take those flags down, because September 11th may have meant as much (and as little) to them as it did to me.

In other words: it’s a different world, but not that different, so let me mourn the tragic loss of human life before trying to prove your point with it.

And that’s the end of the rant, folks. Happy Thanksgiving.

Make sure to read The Disability Gulag, an article by disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson in this week’s New York Times Magazine.

The “gulag” referred to is the American disability care system; a system that assumes that people who are unable to care for themselves physically unassisted must also be stripped of the right to make decisions. Can you choose your own meals, your own schedule, your own assistants, your own hair style - your own life?

For many severely disabled people, the path of least resistance leads to institutional care, where they can live with little freedom of choice and at enourmous expense to taxpayers. Why is this what our system encourages?

One thing the activists are pushing for is the right to hire non-nursing care, and to have non-nurse care seen as valid (and thus qualified for Medicare coverage). Johnson argues is that nurses are often ruled by standard proceedures, rather than allowing patients to control their own care.

Back in March, incidentally, I blogged another article by Harriet Johnson, describing a debate between Johnson and philosophy professor Peter Singer, which is also terrific.

Who wants to see Sydney Quinn? I know you all do.
Read the rest of this entry »

In email, someone wrote:

Yes, because it’s a fundamental right. The Constitution is the appropriate place to spell out fundamental rights.

It’s true that the ERA was redundant (to a great extent) by the time it failed. However, that’s largely because the fight for the ERA led directly to a lot of good legislation being passed, which led to the ERA being redundant. That stuff might not have happened, or might not have happened as soon, without the ERA fight. Plus, legislation can be revoked far more easily than a Constitutional amendment.

Finally, I think that an explicit, spelled-out Constitutional right to sex equality would form a better basis for abortion rights than the non-explicit, non-spelled-out right to privacy that Roe rests on. (Of course, a constitutional right to privacy - or, better yet, to reproductive freedom for women - would also do the job. But the ERA actually came close to happening, unlike those other two).

In the comments to one of Amp’s posts there seems to be a bit of polite back and forth between some of the liberal and libertarian Alas readers. I have to say, I’ll probably disagree with libertarians to the bitter end but they’re my kind of conservatives. Actually, there are some Republican-type conservatives who are my type of conservative, but they seem to be getting more and more rare.

So what’s my type of conservative? People who will debate policy, ethics, and political philosophy without ever falling back on the excuse that their God told them so and that’s the way it is. It’s possible to argue with someone who says “the free market does a better job of predicting social needs than does the government,” but it’s just not possible to argue with someone who says “we should do X because God says so.”

Before I get accused of bad-mouthing people of faith (seeing as how I actually am one, it’d be pretty silly of me to bad-mouth them all in one fell swoop) I think there’s a nice overlap whereby a person’s politics can be influenced by their religious morals, but presuming to have a right to trod on anything in the name of religion is disgusting.

For instance, take the gay marriage debate. People who think that homosexuality is morally wrong can propose policies based on that, but I would expect them to offer evidence for their position that presents a basis for why people who don’t believe homosexuality to be morally wrong should be forced to conform to morals they don’t believe in. Perhaps they can offer statistics of death rates, or present a model for how society would be worsened by allowing gays to be married, but if there doesn’t seem to be an over-all social benefit to banning gay marriage I would think they would be capable of viewing it as a choice that people make like whether or not to drink beer, eat chocolate, not go to church on Sundays, or not believe in God; all of which are things that people of faith may or may not believe to be morally wrong and yet do not often advocate requiring by law. So being rational and recognizing that people have free will is great, even if you disagree with their choices and think they’ll be punished in the afterlife for them, but trying to force people to behave a certain way because you can is, in my opinion, morally wrong and damaging to society at large.

Thus I’m much more happy with libertarian-type conservatives than Republican-type conservatives.

I started writing this post about three weeks ago but was shortly thereafter pretty swamped with stuff and afflicted with a bad case of blogger’s burn, that curious state where you think that if you ever see another blog again you’ll throw your computer out the window. Thankfully, I’m over that and I’ve weaseled my way into some more free time (although the extended edition of The Two Towers may steal it all back) so here’s a new post. It may be either utterly irrelevant or groovily apropos. I’ll blog, you decide.

As you already know, the Massachusetts Supreme Court handed down a decision Tuesday in favour of gay marriage. I haven’t had an opportunity to read the entirety of the decision as of yet, but what I’ve seen so far looks remarkably like victory. It isn’t a total victory—the struggle goes on—but it sure does feel great, doesn’t it?

The President has issued a statement saying that he isn’t going to let any of those damn light-loafered liberals sodomize the sanctity of holy matrimony on his watch, or something to that effect. Other opponents of gay marriage have begun to pick at the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s ruling looking for a loophole or a paragraph written in invisible ink that, when decoded, says, “Just kidding! God hates fags and so do we!” Suffice to say, they haven’t been finding much; the ruling is pretty airtight from what I can tell.

One phrase I have seen tossed about, though, is this one:

Specifically, the interest seems to be in the phrasing “the Commonwealth may deny the protections, benefits, and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry” [emphasis added] as opposed to “the Commonwealth may not deny civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry.” The difference is enough that some opponents of gay marriage have latched on to this phrase as being a route to denying gays the right to marriage and instead establishing a new social institute of civil unions.

This is, of course, flagrant crap and desperation. On Monday many of these born-again fans of civil unions would have opposed them as vehemently as gay marriage.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen some liberals (too many, and I fear more if things get rough) who have latched on to this sudden shift in their opponents’ position and think that now would be a great time to push through a civil union bill. Such a bill, hypothetically, would appeal to opponents of gay marriage because civil unions are “unions” and not “marriages” and would appeal to gays because they want their relationships and lifestyle legitimized and legally sanctions, and hell, Howard Dean signed a civil union bill so it must be a good idea. It’d be a win-win situation!

This is, of course, flagrant crap and desperation. Civil unions are, as John Isbell nicely put it in the comments to Amp’s post, bullshit. I can think of a few other terms (despicable, immoral, a scam, et al.) but “bullshit” seems to cover it.

I’ve been amazed by the number of people on the left I’ve encountered who support civil unions. Some, I think, support them because they seem like the easiest way to get a theoretical step toward equality. Other liberals, I think, support civil unions because they think that civil unions aren’t any different from marriages, anyway, so why butt heads with the Republican party? The latter are wrong and the former need to realise that a civil union bill, while possibly easier to pass, would not advance the cause of equality any significant degree precisely because of the reasons that the latter group is wrong.

I don’t know where the idea came from that civil unions are equivalent to marriage. I suspect it comes from the way that people tend to define civil unions: “they’re a way by which homosexual couples would have the same legal rights as heterosexual couples.” That sounds reasonable but depending on how the bill is written—and here keep in mind that I am not a legal expert—if civil unions confer unto couples only the rights of marriage written into law then this opens new paths for discrimination. I’m not entirely certain which rights are guaranteed by law to currently married couples but it’s not hard to imagine expressions of prejudice that would be, if I may use the term, market-based. Business could exploit a key difference between civil unions and marriages: the fact that couples entering into a civil union would be issued certificates of civil union instead of certificates of marriage. Unless protections were written into the civil union bill to make it mandatory that these two certificates be considered equal in all situations (an unlikely protection if the bill were to be passed on a national scale) then this difference could be leveraged into a means of discriminating against same-sex couples.

Consider an example or two: a hotel starts offering special discounts on certain rooms to married couples, discount to be applied upon presentation of a marriage certificate; an airline or cruise line has a special deal for honeymooners doing to Hawaii, just bring your marriage certificate with you when you pick up your tickets; etc.

An argument could be made that similar types of discrimination did not occur after the legalization of miscegenation, but I don’t believe that the situations are entirely analogous because interracial couples who married are and were given marriage licenses that were no different from the ones issued to couples of the same race who married. So, if an interracial couple encountered a situation like one of those described above the only basis for the company’s different rates would be the racial make-up of the couple which would qualify as racial discrimination which can be prosecuted under the Constitution. However, no such Constitutional protection exists for non-heterosexuals so discrimination in the way I’ve described is, as I understand it, theoretically possible. I’m sure there’s a lawyer out there ready and willing to split words for a company that wanted to try.

I have to admit, though, that this discrimination-by-marriage-certificate thing sounds a bit too paranoid and dark-side-of-the-fifties to me. The real reason why anyone who is concerned about equality for everyone should oppose civil unions is, thankfully, much simpler than the potential for legal wrangling.

If the goal of enabling gays and lesbians to legally marry is not to legally bind them in long-term relationships nor to grant them certain previously ungranted rights but rather is to signal a greater acceptance of people with different sexual orientations as not being abnormal, substandard freaks but instead as being individuals worthy of respect and fair and equal treatment, then creating a social institution for them that is separate from the institutions established for heterosexuals is counter-productive. By making a different form of union—a separate form of union—especially for the reason on legislative expediency, one would only be sending a message that same-sex relationships are not normal, are not acceptable, and should be segregated from the relationships of so-called normal people. Civil unions would, in effect, reinforce prejudiced perceptions thus not making it any easier, and possibly making it harder in some ways, for non-heterosexual couples to be socially accepted. It’s much easier to dismiss gay marriages as not being “real” or “true” if in a very real, legal sense they’re not.

So both legally and socially, civil unions would not do much more than resurrect the old canard of “separate but equal” and apply it to a new group of people and a different situation.

Here’s hoping that the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision blows civil unions clean off the political landscape.

I’ve got to run and do some chores, but I wanted to post this section from the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision. It’s become clear that the anti-equality bigots (I’m sorry to use such language - some of the anti-equality bigots are people I respect and consider friends - but there are times when we should call a spade a spade) who oppose gay marriage have fallen on “marriage is about the children” as their last pretense at a rational reason to oppose gay marriage.

Anyhow, the Massachusetts court decision does a wonderful, succinct job destroying the anti-equality case. Although some of the argument is specific to Massachusetts law, much of it is generally applicable.
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So here’s the deal, as I understand it:

• The Supreme Court of Massachusetts has ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry is a violation of their rights - under the Massachusetts State Constitution. This means that the case can’t be appealed to the Supreme Court of the US, since the U.S. Supremes don’t have the authority to interpret state constitutions.

• Under the ruling, second-class citizenship measures like “civil unions” aren’t acceptable. It’s equality time, baby.
• But - the court didn’t enact it’s decision immediately. Instead, it gave the legislature six months to revise Massachusetts marriage law. The legislature is mostly anti-equality, so it’ll spend that six months looking for a loophole.
• The best loophole for the anti-equality folks is to revise the Massachusetts State Constitution to define marriage as “no gays allowed.” However, that would have to be done by statewide ballot – and unless they find a way to change the rules, the next opportunity for them to do that is 2006. So even if the anti-equalities go this route, there may end up being a year-and-a-half of legal gay marriage first.
• This means that gay marriage will most definitely be a live issue in the upcoming presidential election. Look for the Republican party to play to anti-equality sentiment a lot in their fundraising drives.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this, myself. On the one hand, I really think that these decisions are best made by the legislature, not by the courts. Court-driven social change can backfire - look at the way that Roe v Wade has energized the right-wing for decades (and arguably led to the defeat of the ERA). This decision - especially if the legislature doesn’t find a loophole - may lead to a vast increase in anti-equality, homophobic legislation around the country.

On the other hand, equality is good.

Links: Here’s the AP story. And here’s the Boston Globe story. And here’s the New York Times story. And here’s the decision in Microsoft Word format. And here it is again, in .pdf format.

I haven’t blogged a lot about my household, have I? I live in a large house with a bunch of my friends - there are seven of us, in total.

Except now it’s eight.

So welcome to our new housemate: Sydney Quinn Schlotte, daughter of my housemates Kim and Matt. All 20 inches, 7.74 pounds of her arrived last night (and it was about time!).

Although I know Kim felt that her pregnancy had gone on more than long enough, in some ways I’m going to miss living with Pregnant Lady. Not only does Pregnant Lady have various useful superpowers (the ability to leap very low objects in just a few hops, etc), but she makes conversations unique. Last week, I overheard Kim chattering merrily to two burley, nodding workmen (there to install our new furnace) about her cervix. That’s a memory that’ll still give me giggles years from now.

Gender is getting more complex, and interesting, every year. Transsexuals used to be understood as “a man stuck in a woman’s body” or vice versa. Happily, that understanding of transsexuality and transgenderism is being replaced in practice by an understanding infinitely richer and more interesting.

Jasperboi - a transgendered writer who recently came out as a “female-bodied man” - suggests the following componants of gender:

• Core identity (how you see yourself)

• Biological sex (the ‘official’ opinion of who you are)
• Sexual/romantic attractions (who you gravitate towards)
• Sexual/romantic attractiveness (who gravitates toward you)
• Gender expression (mannerisms, clothes, affinities, interests)
• Social perception (what conclusions people tend to make of you)

So for Jasper it lines up like this:

• Core identity Androgynous boy

• Biological sex Female (and yes I do know my karyotype, I’m a child of the 80s!)
• Sexual/romantic attractions Androgynous men, masculine gay men, feminine men, masculine women
• Sexual/romantic attractiveness Gay men, lesbian women, very young straight women
• Gender expression Androgynous pansy dandy butch
• Social perception ???????/sir/ma’am/pretty boy/butch lesbian/barely legal gay boy/?????

Mine is a great deal less interesting than Jasper’s; but if I’m honest with myself, I can see there’s more complexity there than I might have imagined:

• Core identity Male.

• Biological sex Male
• Sexual/romantic attractions Geeky women, butch women, talkative women
• Sexual/romantic attractiveness Straight women with a history of depression, older gay men
• Gender expression Pansy male
• Social perception People who meet me but don’t know me well assume I’m gay about half the time. On the phone and online, people often assume I’m a woman. But then again, a bunch of the time people percieve me as the straight guy I am.

I love Jasper’s list - it’s a good tool for reminding us how gender is a collaboration between our selves and how the world sees us, and how for some folks it’s a good deal more complex than male and female.

To Jasper’s list, I might add a catogory for expressing how strongly connected to my sex I feel. I remember, years ago, reading a pro-transsexual essays asking non-transsexuals to imagine waking up and your body was suddenly the other sex. “Wouldn’t that feel horribly wrong?,” the essay asked, assuming my answer would be “yes.” But my answer actually was, “I don’t think it would matter.”

Of course, I can’t know without trying - but having searched my feelings, I’m pretty sure that my body’s sex just isn’t an important part of my self-identity. When I hear some transsexuals talk about how important it is for them to have a particular sexed body, I’m sympathetic, but I’m also bewildered; I can’t imagine caring so much about something so (to me) irrelevant.

Actually, I’ve often fantasized that the world might be better if people now and then randomly woke up the opposite sex. It would sort a lot of silly problems right out. (Of course, if I did wake up female, I’d regret the pay cut. :-p )

Jasper goes on to say:

There’s lots more - read the whole post here.

The Curmudgeonly Clerk - currently guest-blogging at Crescat Sententia - disagrees with both myself and PG of En Banc regarding a parade in Florida, in which parade organizers kicked out Veterans for expressing “patriotically incorrect” opinions about the war on Iraq.

Wait, no, that’s not true. The Curmudgeonly Clerk didn’t disagree with me, or with PG, for the most part; he just made up some strawmen to disagree with. From CC’s post:

I entirely agree with all of that. And I never said or implied otherwise.

Of course the VFW is entirely within their rights to kick veterans out of their parade for expressing “patriotically incorrect” views. Of course this is an essential free speech right - just as newspaper editors have an essential free speech right to choose not to publish an article.

Nothing I or PG wrote can fairly be read as advocating forcing “the VFW to involuntarily adopt, associate with, or distribute a political or moral message with which it disagreed.” For CC to imply that either I or PG would advocate such a thing is unfair and untrue.

* * *

Here’s the thing.

The VFW, as a private group, has a first amendment right to organize a parade.

They also have a first amendment right to kick Veterans who state “patriotically incorrect” opinions out of their parade.

I in turn - as I’m sure CC would acknowledge - have a first amendment right to criticize the VFW for their decision.

CC apparently believes that if I utilize my first amendment right to criticize the VFW, I am advocating taking the VFW’s first amendment rights away. But CC is mistaken; just because I criticize how the VFW used their first amendment rights, it in no way follows that I think they shouldn’t have first amendment rights.

* * *

Unlearned Hand (also of En Banc) has also replied to CC. Unlearned attributes CC’s strawman reading to “the dangerous tunnel vision that comes from spending too much time with law and legal arguments.” Or, as the cliche goes, to someone holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

* * *

Also on Crescat Sententia, Will Baude - responding to Unlearned Hand’s response to CC - stages a defense of the parade organizer’s actions. (Unlearned Hand has also posted a response to Will, which I wholeheartedly endorse).

I’m afraid I’m unmoved. Baude points out that there are ways in which the parade organizers could sincerely believe that allowing a group called “Veterans Against the War” to march would be disrespectful to veterans.

I don’t question the organizer’s sincerity. I do question their views, and their methods.

Adina, in the comments to my previous post, stated it very well:

As I said earlier, I feel the parade was organized in bad faith; it’s not about honoring veterans, as it claims to be. It’s about honoring veterans with “patriotically correct” opinions.

Will writes “In other words, kicking people out of a parade because they don’t support what the parade does is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.”

I disagree. The reasonable thing for the parade’s organizers to do - if they really couldn’t abide a veteran’s parade which included a diversity of opinion - would have been to turn down the marchers when they applied to be in the parade. After all, it’s not difficult to infer what a group called “Veterans against the War” might stand for. How it is reasonable to accept their money and their application to march, only to kick them out once the parade had begun?

It’s not just that the organizers kicked out these veterans (although I find that bad enough); it also appears they went out of their way to do so in the most humiliating and hurtful manner imaginable. And that, to me, is not a “reasonable” act.

Nor do I accept Will’s implied assumption that using political ideology to select which veteran groups will or won’t be able to march in a parade honoring veterans is reasonable. Veterans are not being honored for their support of George Bush; they are being honored for their courage, and for the sacrifices they made for the sake of the nation. Since it is not reasonable to suppose that liberal veterans were not courageous and did not make sacrifices, I don’t think it’s reasonable for parade organizers to exclude people for expressing liberal views.

(Note that I am not denying that the VFW has a right to act in a way that I consider unreasonable.)

Will points out that the VFW didn’t kick out all anti-war Veterans, only those who spoke out. However, I don’t find “you can march with us, but if you disagree with our politics you better keep your damned mouth shut” to be a reasonable attitude.

On the contrary, I think that a better Veteran’s Day parade would want to honor all veterans for the sacrifice they made. And understanding and respecting that even honored veterans hold a diversity of views is, to my way of thinking, a far better way of honoring not only the veterans themselves, but of honoring the American ideals that veterans fought for.

POSTSCRIPT: Two further thoughts.

One, I should clarify that the title of this post - “Parade of Strawmen” - was a reference to CC’s post, not to Will’s.

Second, in my comments, The Arbitrary Aardvark wondered if the kicked-out veterans might have a breach of contract claim. I have no idea, but since so many bloggers of legal experts are watching this debate, I wonder if any of them have an opinion?

• John at Ludicrosity, unhappy with the pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy, divides the abortion dispute into nine overlapping perspectives. There are little things I disagree with (particularly a slam on Margaret Sanger which he doesn’t justify with links or evidence). On the whole, however, I think he does a good job.

• Mark Kleiman compares Rush Limbaugh to another drug user, sentenced to thirteen years in prison after her child was stillborn:
  Of course, it’s obvious that homeless people with borderline mental retardation ought to be held strictly accountable for their actions, unlike multimillionaires with logorrhea and strong political connections.
• “MINNEAPOLIS, MN - In a turn of events the 30-year-old characterized as ‘horrifying,’ Kevin Widmar announced Tuesday that his mother Lillian has discovered his weblog.” From The Onion, of course, and via Hot Buttered Death.
• Burgen King apologizes to a mom harassed for breast-feeding.
• Over on Open Source Politics, Earl Dunovant - who at night puts on a cape and mask and fights crime as Prometheus 6 - gives the idea that what Democrats dislike about Justice Brown is her race a beating.
• Someone in the Democratic party has a pretty good sense of humor - to see a child’s-book version of the judicial filibusters controversy, check out Republican Senators and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Night (it’s a pdf file). Via Prometheus 6.
• You should read this impressive Tacitus post about depression in the army. Definitely the best post I’ve read on any blog in a while.

  

• Rotten.com presents a copiously-illustrated essay of banned Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons, many of them quite racist. Even if you don’t want to read the whole thing, it’s entertaining just skimming through the pictures. Via scrubbles.net.

• Marine with spotless 8-year record forced to leave intelligence. Why? Because he’s a liberal. No, seriously. Is it just me, or do many Conservatives have an outright contempt for freedom of speech - not to mention for any soldier who actually served in the military? Via Orcinus, who feels this is a harbinger of worse to come.
• Drawing (to some degree) from her comments on this blog, Ms. Lauren at Feministe has written an excellent post discussing censorship and rape pornography. I don’t agree with Ms. Lauren entirely, but she makes a good case. She also links to an excellent Sex Roles article, providing an excellent “meta-analytic review of research that relates masculine ideology to sexual aggression.” (The link is down right now, but I’m posting it in the hope that it will recover.)
• Worster Album Covers Ever II. In case round one wasn’t enough for you. My favorite is “The Reverend in Rhythm.”
• Nathan Newman rightly demolishes the stupid whining of conservatives who claim to be oppressed by “PC” liberals on campus. Too many conservatives I met at PSU and UMASS were like this: whenever anyone criticized their views, they’d whine “I’ve been censored!” But conservatives who don’t speak because they fear criticism aren’t victims of PC thought police; they’re just cowards.
• There’s something charming about this obituary for Richard Pearson, the Washington Post’s obituary editor, who once said “Everyone dies in the first graph of my stories, but I console myself with the thought that there are relatively few complaints from people I write about.” (Via Boing Boing.)
• If that’s not enough death for you, then you should go explore GoodBye! The Journal of Contemporary Obituaries. Or, if you prefer your obituary writing in blog form (complete with hyperlinks), check out GoogObits. There’s hours of good browsing in them there death notices…
• Thankfully, Merriam-Webster has announced that they have no intention of removing “McJob” ( “a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement”) from the print version of their dictionary - even though they already removed it from the online version. Via Boing Boing.
• “Eros and Thanatos in L’affair Hilton.” A brilliant review of Paris Hilton’s sex tape, which is more of a cinematic masterpiece than you probably had imagined.
• Do you know the name of the first American servicewoman to die in Iraq? Probably not, because she didn’t happen to be white, blonde, and middle class. Trish Wilson has the details.
• Urban Legends for the 21st Century:
  …the babysitter was watching “Alias” when her cell phone played the first two verses of “Crazy In Love” by Beyonce Knowles. The babysitter dug the phone out of her bag to discover that she had received a text message reading:

  seria1_ki11a: im upstairs w/the chldrn youd betta come up MLOL*!!!!

  You should go read the whole thing. (Well, it gave me a giggle.).

• I’m one of over three hundred bloggers currently compiled on the “Bloggers’ Political Compass” (I’m near the bottom left, unsurprisingly). Oddly, us lefties have arranged ourselves in a fairly tight line, while on the right they’re spread out quite a bit more - perhaps because of the split between conservatives and libertarians.

  Still, we do all arrange ourselves more-or-less on a straight line, which suggests that the single-dimensional liberal/conservative scale has more descriptive power than I want it to.

The Terri Schiavo case continues to bother me - in particular, the question of precedent. The precedent that our most personal decisions - about reproduction, about designating our own guardians, about choosing our own families – can be arbitrarily decided by a public letter-writing campaign is awful. One of the most basic elements of freedom - that when it comes to extremely personal decisions of life, death, and family, people are allowed to make decisions that go against majority preferences - is under siege by right-wing Christians in Florida.

I think there’s a strong connection between the view that says that women must not make their own reproductive choices, and the view that Terri’s choice of Michael to make medical decisions when she shouldn’t be respected, and the view that lesbians and gay men must be forbidden an equal right to form families.

In all these case, what’s at issue is the right to make decisions that are contrary to the Christian right’s moral perspective. And while they’re happy enough to use the normal rule of law when it works in their favor (for instance, the current status quo forbidding equal marriage rights for lesbians and gays), they have no actual respect for democracy when it conflicts with what God tells them. The Light of Reason puts it well:

For these folks, it has nothing to do with if Terri’s husband was abusive or not; Michael Schiavo could have been beating Terri up five times a day, and the Christian right would still overwhelmingly support him if he were calling for Terri to be kept alive indefinitely.

I think the precedent set by this case, if “Terri’s law” isn’t struck down by the courts, is awful. It’s saying that when a family, or a court, makes a decision the Christian right doesn’t agree with, right-wing legislators and governors have the right to overturn that decision by fiat.

If Jeb Bush has the right to undo the court’s decision in this case, why doesn’t he have the right to do the same thing the next time a Florida court makes a decision the Christian right doesn’t like? Maybe an abortion rights decision. Maybe a decision recognizing a lesbian couple’s right to adopt. Anytime a court goes against the Christian right, the governor will simply overturn the decision.

That’s theocracy for you, folks.

(And before anyone compares this to obscenity law, let me assure you - I would not approve of a law allowing a governor to overturn individual court decisions on obscenity on a case-by-case basis, thus making the legal rulings of the courts subserviant to the whims of the executive. It’s the way Christian fundimentalists have shown their contempt for the checks and balances of U.S. democracy, that makes the Terri Schiavo case so offensive.)

I’m a bit late posting this, but what the heck. It’s a good op-ed from the Boston Globe describing how the PBA ban President Bush just signed would, if it became law, ban not just late-term abortions (as pro-lifers dishonestly claimed) but second-trimester abortions as well.

Carhart is exaggerating in the last sentence - but he’s certainly right that the PBA ban, as written, applies to much more than late-term abortions. Pro-lifers who claim otherwise are either liars or, more often, have been duped by their leadership.

Fortunately, the ban is unconstitutional, and several lower courts have ruled that it cannot be carried out. Unfortunately, the bill (or future bills like it) could be made constitutional with just one Bush appointment to the Supreme Court.

(Via The Light of Reason)

(My other posts on partial-birth abortion.)

This is pretty despicable.