We are just twenty days away from the end of the worst presidency of my lifetime — and I was born five months before Nixon resigned. It seems like only yesterday that Commander Guy was being sworn in, promising that our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity was at an end. Okay, that was The Onion, but never before and never again will a more accurate prediction of a presidency be written in a satirical newspaper. We have gone from a wealthy, popular, safe nation to one embroiled in two wars with an economy that is worse than at any time since the Great Depression. In the words of Dubya, heckuva job.

In celebration of the fact that our long national nightmare is almost over, I’m cataloging the twenty worst moments of the George W. Bush presidency. These are only the moments that actually happened between January 20, 2001 and January 20, 2009, so sorry, Brooks Brothers Riot fans. Some moments are very serious, some absurdly ridiculous, but all are a microcosm of the worst two-term presidency in American history. I’ll be counting down these twenty sublime moments between now and the inauguration of a president who isn’t horribly embarrassing. We hope.

#20: The Back Rub

There have been many cringe-worthy moments of the Bush presidency, but perhaps none as awful as the moment that the Decided decided to give Bundeskanzler Angela Merkel a bit of sugar.

Truly, I don’t know how that moment could get any more disturbingly uncomfortable. Maybe if Dubya had then spit on his hand and tousled Tony Blair’s hair; no, that would have just proved Bush to be insane. Instead, he proved to be That Guy, the one who doesn’t understand that boundaries exist for all of us, and that those boundaries usually involve our not wanting to be massaged by random passersby — especially, and this is important, if you happen to be the leader of one of the most powerful nations in Europe. Bush has done far worse things in his presidency, of course — they’re coming — but nothing was more purely embarrassing than this.

In a letter published in The New York Review of Books, David Kaiser of Just Detention International argues that we could significantly reduce prison rape, if we genuinely wanted to.

“Since 1980 the murder rate inside prisons has fallen more than 90 percent, which should give pause to those inclined to think that prisons are impossible to reform.” We could similarly reduce the incidence of rape in prison.

We know how. To some extent, stopping prisoner rape is simply an issue of better prison management. In facilities where the chief official cares about it, and ensures that his or her subordinates take it seriously, rates of sexual abuse go down dramatically. This is accomplished by, for example, providing vulnerable inmates with nonpunitive protective housing at their request, and establishing confidential complaint systems that encourage inmates to report sexual violence without increasing their risk of future assault or retaliation, from any party.

Perhaps the most important thing detention facilities can do is employ classification systems that effectively separate likely rape victims from likely sexual predators. This requires maintaining basic data about inmates; it also requires training staff to accurately assess incoming prisoners’ various levels of threat and vulnerability. Prisoners placed in protective custody must be segregated by security level. A maximum-security gang member and a sixteen-year-old first-time offender placed in an adult facility may both require extra protection; that does not mean they should be put in the same cell. Recent innovations in facility design are helpful, particularly the use of pod-shaped configurations of cells rather than the traditional rows. But no matter what the architecture, effective surveillance of inmates is essential, and meaningful rehabilitative programs such as GED courses—leading to the equivalent of a high school diploma—which used to be much more common in American prisons than they are now, have been shown to reduce all sorts of violence. [...]

Some policies that could reduce prisoner rape need funding. Legislators can help in other ways as well. Overcrowding makes it much more difficult for staff to meet their responsibilities, particularly of supervision. But overcrowding is close to inevitable if we lock people up at present rates. Offering treatment instead of incarceration to nonviolent drug offenders would by itself reduce prisoner rape enormously. In any case, we need laws that increase the independent oversight of detention facilities, and therefore their accountability. And Congress should repeal or at least substantially amend the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996, which as DeParle writes “has cut in half the number of inmates filing civil rights complaints,” and which makes it especially difficult for inmates to seek redress for sexual abuse.

This is an open thread; use it to post what you like, for as long as you like, with whomever you like. Self-linking is healthy and normal.

I ran across Pageofbats’ drawing on Flickr, and was very much taken with a series of beautiful black-and-white sketchbook drawings he’s posted. This one is called “In Heaven You Get All Your Old Dogs Back.”

In the New York Times, Charles Blow discusses a survey which found that most Christians in the US believe that even non-Christians can be saved:

So in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them.

And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.

I found that op-ed (pointed out in comments by Richard — thanks, Richard!) enormously cheering. A doctrine that says that God is good and just and intends to damn everyone who doesn’t come to the correct church is, frankly, ugly. The news that lots of the Christian majority is refusing to buy that doctrine is nothing but good.

I’ve never bought the idea that people — at least in a relatively free country — are helpless to resist accepting what their religion teaches them.¹ By and large, if you believe that Jews or Muslims or Hindu or atheists or queers aren’t equal — and “will be sent to Hell by a just God” is a form of considering people less than equal — then that means you’re bigoted against them. You may not be hateful, you may personally be a swell person who genuinely loves your sister and her Jewish wife, but the fact that you’re willing to accept such a doctrine as true, means that it’s acceptable to you.

So, I was very happy to read Blow’s op-ed. Plus, as a Jewish atheist, I’m morbidly curious to know who thinks that Jews and atheists can (and can’t) go to Heaven.

Unfortunately, once I looked at the numbers, I think Blow was wrong to say “nearly half thought atheists could go to heaven.” Blow may have been looking at the table on this page, which says 41%, which is “nearly half.” But that table is only considering the 70% of U.S. Christians who agreed that multiple religions “can lead to eternal life.” So the actual number of U.S. Christians who “thought that atheists could go to heaven” was 41% of 70% — or 29%.² Not even close to half.

I don’t blame Mr. Blow for his error; Pew presented the data so unclearly, I suspect they were trying to make Americans appear more tolerant than we really are.

Pew provided data on this matter for four groups: white evangelical, white mainline, black protestant, and white Catholic. In general, the White evangelicals believe in the most closed-off and exclusive Heaven, and Black protestants are nearly as exclusive in their beliefs. Catholics were the most liberal about who could go to Heaven, although mainline protestants weren’t far behind.³

All four groups agreed that atheists are the least likely group to get into Heaven, followed closely by Hindus and Muslims. Jews are seen as much more likely than other non-Christians to get into Heaven — but still not as likely as Christians.

So let’s look at the numbers.

JEWS
* 36% of white evangelicals think Jews can go to Heaven.
* 61% of white mainline protestants think Jews can go to Heaven.
* 37% of protestants at historically Black churches, think Jews can go to Heaven.
* 61% of white Catholics⁴ think Jews can go to Heaven.

ATHEISTS⁵
* 15% of white evangelicals think atheists can go to Heaven.
* 38% of white mainline protestants think atheists can go to Heaven.
* 39% of white Catholics⁴ think atheists can go to Heaven.

MUSLIMS
* 20% of white evangelicals think Muslims can go to Heaven.
* 46% of white mainline protestants think Muslims can go to Heaven.
* 34% of protestants at historically Black churches, think Muslims can go to Heaven.
* 49% of white Catholics⁴ think Muslims can go to Heaven.

CATHOLICS
* 43% of white evangelicals think Catholics can go to Heaven.
* 64% of white mainline protestants think Catholics can go to Heaven.
* 41% of protestants at historically Black churches, think Catholics can go to Heaven.

PROTESTANTS
* 66% of white Catholics⁴ think Protestants can go to Heaven.

The good news is that in every group — even among evangelicals — there are many believers in a universal heaven. Still, some of the findings — such as that among white evangelicals, only 20% say that a good Muslim can go to heaven — are distressing.

In comments, RonF wrote:

I belong to the Episcopal Church, which is about as “liberal” as it gets in Christianity. And even they make it real clear that it is faith, not works, that one’s salvation is dependent on. If people call themselves Christians and yet don’t understand that I’d have to say that either they’re not going to church much or they’re not listening while they’re there.

I have an alternative interpretation: Maybe some listen, and understand, but don’t agree. That’s what I hope.

1. There are exceptions, of course — minor children, for example, may not be free to disagree with their parents. And there are any number of abusive situations in which the person being abused lacks agency. (back)
2. Following Mr. Blow’s usage, I’m going to use “eternal life” and “Heaven” as interchangeable terms, because it’s a pain to type “eternal life” over and over and over and over. (back)
3. My spell-checker wants “Catholics” capitalized, but not “protestants.” I’m not sure why. (back)
4. Does not include Hispanic whites. (back) (back) (back) (back)
5. Pew didn’t list data on atheism for Black protestants. (back)

There is a new kind of poetry happening in NYC called The Poetry Brothel. The basic idea is that the poets are prostitutes and the patrons are johns who pay to have poetry read to them in private. There is also a featured performed, who is promoted in a tone recalling the promotion of burlesque, and the whole presentation in general, I think, is meant to recall the speakeasy’s of the prohibition era. Here is a review of the event. Some excerpts (I have eliminated some of the line breaks from the original):

The prostitute whispers, wets her lips and prepares to bare… her heart with a poem. Welcome to New York’s Poetry Brothel, where punters delve between the lines, not the sheets. At a weekend session in a Manhattan night club called the Zipper Factory the look was bona fide bordello. Literary ladies of the night flitted between intimate, candle-lit nooks, red lights and paintings of nudes. Some of the poetesses for sale sported retro-style garter belts and frilly knickers. One swanned about in a top hat and feather boa. But transactions at the Poetry Brothel are of the mind, not the body, and a moment with the catalogue, replete with pictures and whimsical descriptions, reveals what’s on offer.

The Madame — real name Stephanie Berger — came dressed for the part in low-cut dress, elbow-length black gloves and a peacock headdress. “I’d rather be in the bedroom hearing poetry than listening to some old man sitting on a chair on a stage,” she explained by the light of a guttering candle. One-on-one encounters, for which “clients” pay three to five dollars in addition to a 15 dollar entry fee and one free reading, took place upstairs. The “whores” read from their own material, much of which is free verse, making for intense, sometimes baffling performances.

…

But for those needing a break, the Poetry Brothel laid on flamenco guitarists, a fortune-teller, a blackjack table and a bar specializing in port and whisky[.] The young hedonists, most of them students, appear to have struck a surprisingly successful formula. “There just aren’t that many poetry readings where poets show a lot of cleavage,” said The Professor, otherwise known as Jennifer Michael Hecht, aged 43 and a real life professor at Manhattan’s New School. She teaches writing to many of the Brothel’s regulars and is proud of the result.

…

“It’s kind of like the Weimar Republic without the Nazis. At two in the morning you have 20- or 30-year-olds lying all over the place reading poetry,” she said.

…

The Madame promised that the Poetry Brothel welcomed all. “Many are young men with perhaps a secret interest in poems,” she murmured. “Just look at the menu. Get a recommendation. Or say you don’t care. Say: ‘I need poetry. I’m hungry.’”

On the Poetics Listserv to which I subscribe, there has been a mildly heated discussion of this. Here are some snippets (I have retained all original punctuation, etc.):

Ruth Lepson wrote: cooptation of poetry by capitalist objectification of women. not funny. to use a brothel as a metaphor is disgusting. I remember when Denise Levertov criticized a poet for using napalm as a metaphor for personal pain, saying you don’t know what it feels like & it’s much worse than the way you are characterizing it.

Adam Tobin wrote: Why is the capitalist exploitation of women at a brothel worse than, say, the capitalist exploitation of women at a Zipper Factory? It’s just a different kind of labor, no? Given that some artists are seemingly comfortable with capitalism, why should they not acknowledge it in the name of their ventures?

I understand, of course, that brothels have a particular history with a
particular kind of violence attached to it, but so do factories. Do you
direct the same righteous anger at Andy Warhol?

John Cunningham wrote: Political correctness be dammed, I like the idea of “Poetry Brothel”. Firstly, isn’t feminine or feminist poetry (whichever you prefer) spoken from the body. Secondly, here is a legally sanctioned place of ‘intercourse’ (the poetic kind, a.k.a. communication) where the practitioner are protected. For those of you who are speaking out against the body being used in commerce, why are you not speaking out against football or hockey where male bodies are being used in commerce? When you consider the damage that is done to the male body during that contact sport and the lingering effects of it in terms of permanent injury and disability such as arthritis and other diseases, isn’t this just as bad? Or is it that one affects women whereas the other affects men? If we’re going to get on a train, lets get on the right one - the one that carries both male and female on equal terms.

Gwyn Mcvay wrote: Omigod, you’re so right. I hurt in my anterior cruciate ligaments for all of those men FORCED or DECEIVED into collegiate and professional sports every year; BEATEN if they try to leave; often denied any other employment options in the case of being transgendered; not allowed to keep a PENNY of their earnings… oh wait.

First, I have to be honest and admit that I have not actually gone to The Poetry Brothel, so I cannot report firsthand on what it is like, and so what I am talking about here–as were most of the people on the Listserv–is the idea of it, and I confess to being of two minds about this. On the one hand, The Poetry Brothel strikes me as brilliant satire; on the other hand, I think it goes too far for precisely the reasons that Ruth Lepson articulated in her response. But maybe that’s what good satire is supposed to do; and yet, talking about it as satire implicitly ignores the fact that it is an ongoing event, where real people spend real money, which someone somewhere is collecting and using (for whatever purpose).

Any thoughts?

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

As you may recall, last week Dennis Prager wrote a long and tedious column about how women just don’t give up the nookie to their spouses enough, and how everyone would be happier if only women would stop worrying about whether they liked sex, and start just having it as part of their marital duties, because — and I think I speak for everything — there’s nothing hotter than having sex with someone who is doing so with the same excitement and joy that one brings to filling the dishwasher.

Anyhoo, Prager left off by threatening to continue his insane rant. Many of us hoped that disaster could be avoided, but alas, Prager has now followed through, writing a follow-up that is, remarkably, even more pointless. I’m not sure even where to begin, other than to say that I think it will soon become clear why Prager’s wives divorced him.

After a brief reminder that Prager actually has written things before, he launches right into the “eight reasons for a woman not to allow not being in the mood for sex to determine whether she denies her husband sex.” They begin in truly awesome fashion:

1. If most women wait until they are in the mood before making love with their husband, many women will be waiting a month or more until they next have sex. When most women are young, and for some older women, spontaneously getting in the mood to have sex with the man they love can easily occur. But for most women, for myriad reasons — female nature, childhood trauma, not feeling sexy, being preoccupied with some problem, fatigue after a day with the children and/or other work, just not being interested — there is little comparable to a man’s “out of nowhere,” and seemingly constant, desire for sex.

Wow. Just…wow.

Dennis — can I call you Dennis? — many of us have been in relationships. With women. Go figure. And you know what? Those women were, you know, in the mood more than once a year. I know, it’s crazy, but it’s true — women like sex. They like it a lot. Not being a woman, I can’t say for sure whether they like sex as much as men, but it’s pretty close, and frankly, I don’t know why we’d waste time arguing when we all could use that time to have sex.

Now, if your wife wants to have sex with you once a season, that is a sign that there’s something wrong in your relationship. Indeed, it’s a sign she might not be sexually attracted to you — because unless your wife is one of the small percentage of asexual Americans, for whom sex is simply not appealing, it’s vanishingly unlikely that your wife has not desired sex in a weekly span. If she doesn’t desire it with you, then there are problems in your relationship — but not the sort of problems that can be solved by insisting that she should just have desireless sex.

Prager really could just stop here — it’s pretty axiomatic that anyone who thinks women have no sex drives to speak of doesn’t so much understand anything about the human race, but he continues on:

2. Why would a loving, wise woman allow mood to determine whether or not she will give her husband one of the most important expressions of love she can show him? What else in life, of such significance, do we allow to be governed by mood?

Um…everything, Dennis. Everything. You think you don’t make decisions based on your emotions? Of course you do. You chose your job because you love to lecture and moralize — that’s an important decision, and one that clearly wasn’t made based on your actual talents.

Prager wants to make “mood” into something silly and frivolous. And sometimes, it is — I’ve had sex when I wasn’t “in the mood,” but wasn’t not in the mood either. I think everyone has. Nobody is rarin’ to go all the time, but sometimes, if your partner is interested, you decide to get interested, because even if you’re not that into it, you want your partner to be happy. If Prager had simply written that sentence and spared us the evolutionary psych bullcrap, he would have a point.

But there’s “not really into it” and “actively not desiring it,” and the fact is that those two moods are on a continuum. Emotions are not binary, discrete things, as anyone who has emotions can tell you. Should you occasionally indulge a partner when you’re not that excited, but you aren’t that opposed, either? Sure — and that holds whether we’re talking about sex or a trip to the local farmer’s market. But should you feel obligated to do something you really don’t want to do tonight? No — and again, that’s true of sex and farmer’s markets.

Of course, Prager manages to make this point more offensive:

What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.

Because, as everyone knows, sex is to women as work is to men. It’s a duty. A responsibility. Moreover, it’s what men and women want. Men want sex, women want fat stacks of cash. Quid pro quo, ladies, quid pro quo.

What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can — indeed, ought to — refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?

Because if I refuse to go to work, eventually I lose my house and die of starvation, whereas if my wife refuses to have sex with me, at worst she’s risking divorce. I’m glad we had this chat.

So what gives women the idea that they have the right not to want to have sex? The sixties, of course! The decade that keeps on giving (to conservatives) made women believe they actually have, I don’t know, bodily autonomy or some crap:

3. The baby boom generation elevated feelings to a status higher than codes of behavior. In determining how one ought to act, feelings, not some code higher than one’s feelings, became decisive: “No shoulds, no oughts.” In the case of sex, therefore, the only right time for a wife to have sex with her husband is when she feels like having it. She never “should” have it. But marriage and life are filled with “shoulds.”

Again, there’s “feels like having it” and “feels like having it.” Nobody — nobody — is saying that a relationship involves no compromise, ever. But compromise is a two-way street, and while it’s okay for partners to try to balance everyone’s needs — indeed, it’s requisite — it’s also important that partners take each other’s feelings into consideration. Again, I’d rather masturbate than have sex with someone who really didn’t want to, but was doing it out of pure obligation. And I really don’t understand people who feel differently.

4. Thus, in the past generation we have witnessed the demise of the concept of obligation in personal relations. We have been nurtured in a culture of rights, not a culture of obligations. To many women, especially among the best educated, the notion that a woman owes her husband sex seems absurd, if not actually immoral. They have been taught that such a sense of obligation renders her “property.” Of course, the very fact that she can always say “no” — and that this “no” must be honored — renders the “property” argument absurd. A woman is not “property” when she feels she owes her husband conjugal relations. She is simply wise enough to recognize that marriages based on mutual obligations — as opposed to rights alone and certainly as opposed to moods — are likely to be the best marriages.

A woman doesn’t owe her husband sex.

If things in a marriage are happening because they’re “owed,” then there’s been a breakdown in the relationship itself. Women in healthy relationships desire sex, as do men. There may be some variance as to how much, but that’s something to work through before getting married — which, might I note, is a strong argument for sex before marriage.

Prager notes that a woman can always say “no,” because even he won’t go so far as to advocate spousal rape, at least not overtly. But what he argues is that women can say no, but really shouldn’t, you know, ever. Sex should be an obligation, like mowing the lawn or balancing the checkbook — it’s not something you skip. That sex is qualitatively different than a chore never seems to have gotten through Prager’s skull. I can’t imagine why he’s divorced. Twice.

5. Partially in response to the historical denigration of women’s worth, since the 1960s, there has been an idealization of women and their feelings. So, if a husband is in the mood for sex and the wife is not, her feelings are deemed of greater significance — because women’s feelings are of more importance than men’s. One proof is that even if the roles are reversed — she is in the mood for sex and he is not — our sympathies again go to the woman and her feelings.

Okay, that’s just nonsensical. You know why women’s feelings tend to get more play? Because men are still told by Prager and his compadres that emotion is a silly thing that’s best stifled and ignored. Men are logical and rational, except when we are angry, but that’s totally okay. Oh, and men always want sex, because if you don’t, you’re either gay or a woman.

Women’s feelings come up more because the feminist movement recognized that feelings are not something to be ignored. Incidentally, feminism says that about men, too — men’s feelings are indeed valid. And if a mismatch in sexual compatibility leaves one partner feeling rejected, he or she has every right to that feeling — and every right to tell their partner of that feeling.

But of course, back in the first column, Prager said that men aren’t supposed to have to express their feelings, that women should just divine their knowledge of men from fat man skinny woman sitcoms and Dennis Prager columns, and that asking men to express their feelings is somehow wrong. Okay, fine. But if you don’t express your feelings, and your partner does, you can’t be surprised when your partner’s feelings get more discussion because — and this is important — your partner has no idea you feel that way.

In a healthy relationship, with open discussion, a partner can say, “you know, I really would like to have sex more often — I feel kind of rejected when you turn me down.” The other partner could respond to those feelings, both by reassuring and by talking about how to find a compromise that makes everyone happy. But that requires communication and honesty about emotions — something Prager says men should not be required to do. Because sex is important. Honesty and openness? Not so much.

6. Yet another outgrowth of ’60s thinking is the notion that it is “hypocritical” or wrong in some other way to act contrary to one’s feelings. One should always act, post-’60s theory teaches, consistent with one’s feelings. Therefore, many women believe that it would simply be wrong to have sex with their husband when they are not in the mood to. Of course, most women never regard it as hypocritical and rightly regard it as admirable when they meet their child’s or parent’s or friend’s needs when they are not in the mood to do so. They do what is right in those cases, rather than what their mood dictates. Why not apply this attitude to sex with one’s husband? Given how important it is to most husbands, isn’t the payoff — a happier, more communicative, and loving husband and a happier home — worth it?

You know, again and again, Prager shows that he really doesn’t understand sex, or love, or feelings, or the 1960s, or human beings. I really can’t even snark here.

7. Many contemporary women have an almost exclusively romantic notion of sex: It should always be mutually desired and equally satisfying or one should not engage in it. Therefore, if a couple engages in sexual relations when he wants it and she does not, the act is “dehumanizing” and “mechanical.” Now, ideally, every time a husband and wife have sex, they would equally desire it and equally enjoy it. But, given the different sexual natures of men and women, this cannot always be the case. If it is romance a woman seeks — and she has every reason to seek it — it would help her to realize how much more romantic her husband and her marriage are likely to be if he is not regularly denied sex, even of the non-romantic variety.

I’ll joint Prager up to this point — there’s a difference between Movie Sex and Real Sex, and it’s destructive. But not the way Prager thinks. In Movie Sex, both partners know everything about each other through psychic connections. Because they both read the script, they know exactly what to do to turn the other one on. Because they have stage hands, they have 10,000 candles burning around the sunken marble bathtub filled with rose petals in which they are expressing their softly-lit love for each other.

In real life, of course, sex is less scripted, and getting things right requires — I know, this is crazy — communication. Discussion. Talking about what works and what doesn’t. It can and should be good-natured discussion, but communication is going to need to happen.

And incidentally, being romantic? That’s something both partners should try if they want a good relationship. There’s nothing bad about showing your partner that you love them. And indeed, there’s nothing bad about doing that even if it doesn’t lead to sex.

All right, you ready for Prager’s big finish? Bring home the crazy:

8. In the rest of life, not just in marital sex, it is almost always a poor idea to allow feelings or mood to determine one’s behavior. Far wiser is to use behavior to shape one’s feelings. Act happy no matter what your mood and you will feel happier. Act loving and you will feel more loving. Act religious, no matter how deep your religious doubts, and you will feel more religious. Act generous even if you have a selfish nature, and you will end with a more a generous nature. With regard to virtually anything in life that is good for us, if we wait until we are in the mood to do it, we will wait too long.

Wow.

You know, if you “act happy,” that won’t make you happier. It’s true! Indeed, it may make you sadder, as you try to bottle up your feelings and show a façade that is at variance with what’s going on inside. If you “act religious,” that’s nice — but if there’s a God, I misdoubt that She would rather deal with an honest agnostic than someone who cloaks themselves in piety. If you “act generous,” you may feel more generous — but if you do so resentfully, you won’t feel more generous for long.

Indeed, there is something to be said for being honest with oneself about what one wants out of life, and how one feels — and acting that way.

The best solution to the problem of a wife not being in the mood is so simple that many women, after thinking about it, react with profound regret that they had not thought of it earlier in their marriage. As one bright and attractive woman in her 50s ruefully said to me, “Had I known this while I was married, he would never have divorced me.”

I don’t know if it’s true, but I do know this — if the bright, attractive woman’s husband never told her his feelings, she can’t be held responsible for being a mind-reader. If he never told her that he felt rejected, then she can’t be faulted for not knowing it. And indeed, we don’t know that he did feel rejected — we don’t know anything about this case, other than Prager’s neatly-plucked quote.

That solution is for a wife who loves her husband — if she doesn’t love him, mood is not the problem — to be guided by her mind, not her mood, in deciding whether to deny her husband sex.

Except a mood is part of the mind. We can’t separate the two. I know, “emotion” and “logic” are supposed to be separate things, but they aren’t. We all have one brain, and one brain only.

If her husband is a decent man — if he is not, nothing written here applies — a woman will be rewarded many times over outside the bedroom (and if her man is smart, inside the bedroom as well) with a happy, open, grateful, loving, and faithful husband. That is a prospect that should get any rational woman into the mood more often.

Because sex is not a desirable end for women, not really, but maybe they can use it as a carrot to get their guy to go to work and maybe watch the kids once a week.

Prager doesn’t understand women, not in the least — nor men, as far as I can tell. His columns might have some value for women who are unaware that humans are sexual creatures, but that value is more than swamped by their stubborn insistence that men will suffer silently, because that’s how men are.

Here’s an alternate solution: you need to be honest about your emotions. You need to be direct with your partners. You need to communicate your feelings. Those are your responsibilities. And they’re far more important than simply having sex whenever your partner wants it.

Prager seems to think that sex is owed in a relationship, but emotional honesty is not. That’s a recipe for disaster, no matter who is wanting sex and who is hiding their emotions. The fact is that a relationship only works as long as both partners can stay on the same page, and that can only happen if both partners are aware of where the other is. A relationship can handle disagreements about the amount of sex that should be had. A relationship can’t survive, however, if one or both partners is simply not showing enough interest in the relationship to take the time to express their feelings.

Richard Chappell writes:

Many are complaining that by reaching out to Rick Warren, Obama is offering a slap in the face to progressives. This is silly. Yes, Warren has badly screwed up views on social issues. Most Americans do. That doesn’t mean they must be shunned or demonized; it means that we need to do more to engage with them and bring them to their senses.

No matter the strength of our first-order disagreements, we should be able to ‘detach’ from these and treat each other with respect.

I don’t think anyone has suggested that Obama should not be civil and respectful of Warren. However, civility and respect don’t require honoring Warren in such a prominent way.

For those culture warriors who are shocked, just shocked, that Obama can bear to associate with evangelical conservatives, or who see such expressions of respect as somehow undermining his first-order commitment to liberalism, I can only ask: weren’t you paying attention? This is exactly what we want: a president who will advance solidly liberal policies, without demonizing or alienating conservative-leaning people. If we can leave off the tribalistic hating for just a moment, maybe some of ‘Them’ can even be brought around to our side.

It’s ironic that Richard calls for respectful discourse while condescendingly dismissing the concerns of tens of thousands of queers (and queer allies) as “tribalistic hating.”¹

In his comments, Richard writes:

In the meantime, let’s focus on the respect question: why, exactly, is civically honouring Warren an insult to those who disagree with him on policy matters?

But that’s not the question, because no one has claimed that honoring Warren is a fishslap in the face to everyone who has ever disagreed with Warren on a policy question. Rather, the insult has been most prominently taken by queer activists. (Feminists have also taken insult, but less loudly — more on this below.)

The question Richard should have asked is, why are queers and queer allies insulted that Obama is civically honouring Rick Warren?

And here are several answers:

1) Imagine that Rick Warren had been hitting me on the head with a hammer, and then Obama says “here, Rick, let me honor you symbolically with this gift of a slightly bigger hammer.” In this context, it makes perfect sense for me to be angry at Obama.

Warren hurts people — not progressives in general, but particular groups, most recently queer people in California. (Richard’s post obscures this important reality by talking about “a slap in the face to progressives”). By adding to Warren’s reputation as a moderate, central figure, Obama helps Warren hurt queer people. As Ezra Klein writes:

…calling the Warren issue “symbolic” is just a method of marginalizing minority discontent. Warren is not a symbolic figure. He’s a religious leader who mobilizes his flock and leverages his public influence in order to affect electoral outcomes. The most prominent example was the Proposition 8 ballot initiative — as opposed to, say, the Proposition 8 symbolic logo design contest — in California. Warren used his power and prestige instrumentally, not symbolically. And Obama is giving him more power, and more prestige, which he will, quite assuredly, deploy in an instrumental fashion.

2) I don’t like objections to “emotionalism.”

First of all, used to dismiss an argument in this way, the term come wrapped in a great deal of sexist/homophobic baggage.²

Secondly, the expectation that queers and queer allies “detach” and not react emotionally to Rick Warren, in the wake of the genuinely wrenching passage of Proposition 8,³ is unreasonable. Queer activists and allies have a right to be angry.⁴

3) “Asymmetry of passion,” to use Nate Silver’s phrase, is a legitimate political tactic. I think the LGBT community fears that if they’re mild and concede ground easily, Obama will abandon his commitments to them.

This fear is not unreasonable. Whatever Obama feels in his heart — and I doubt he’s personally a homophobe — as a politician he’s never been a champion of gay rights. He’s just a Democrat who has taken the minimum, politically necessary pro-gay positions to be a viable national Democrat.

And when the politically necessary position is to be anti-gay — by opposing equal marriage rights — then Obama is anti-gay.

My point isn’t that Obama is a bad person. He’s a politician, who like a politician responds to political reality. The more motive we give Obama to be pro-queer, the more pro-queer Obama will be. And “asymmetry of passion” may be the best tool the queer community has for putting pressure on Obama.

It’s interesting that — although there is a great deal of anger in the feminist community over Obama’s selection of the sexist, anti-choice Warren for this honor — that anger seems less intense than the rage over Warren’s anti-gay history in the queer community.⁵

Partly, that’s because Warren’s most recent major campaign (his advocacy of prop 8) was anti-queer rather than misogynistic.

But another reason is that feminists and pro-choicers are getting real policy substance from Obama, which mitigates the anger. Within the first month of an Obama administration — maybe the first week — the “global gag” rule will be history, and US funding for the UN Population Fund will be restored. Hillary Clinton will be secretary of state — which is a more than symbolic point, because Clinton has a long history of concern for women’s rights in foreign policy. There’s also widespread confidence that Obama’s eventual Supreme Court picks will be safely pro-choice.

In contrast, what are queer activists getting from Barack Obama? It doesn’t seem like the promised repeals of “don’t ask don’t tell” or DOMA are going to happen anytime soon. As far as I know, Obama hasn’t endorsed protections against anti-trans discrimination, and he certainly hasn’t signaled it being a legislative priority. And, of course, Obama is anti-equal-marriage.

I assume the outright discrimination against gays practiced by some in the Federal government under Bush, will not be as tolerated under Obama’s people. And I also trust that Obama, while formally anti-gay marriage, will refrain from pushing anti-gay “protection of marriage” laws and amendments. But the queer community wants more from Obama than just refraining from overt bigotry.

So when people say, in effect, “why make a big deal of this Rick Warren situation? It’s a purely symbolic gesture, and what we’re getting from Obama in policy is so much more substantive!,” they ignore that queer activists really aren’t getting much policy substance from Obama.

Queers have a history of being taken for granted, and sometimes betrayed, by Democrats (remember Bill Clinton’s radio ads boasting about having signed DOMA?). It’s not irrational for queers and queer allies to believe that noise and anger is the best chance we have of not being taken for granted, and betrayed, once again.

4) The case for reaching out to evangelicals isn’t as strong as Richard believes.

Richard writes:

There are a lot of well-meaning (if often misguided) evangelicals out there, and by reaching out to one of their most popular (and not hyper-partisan) pastors, Obama is creating the possibility that a lot of these folks might actually open their eyes, unblock their ears, and give him (and liberals more generally) a chance.

As Glenn Greenwald argues, Democrats have a long history of trying to reach out to evangelicals, including some notable cases of throwing queers under the bus, and the tactic has failed:

….Isn’t this exactly the same thing Democrats have been doing for the last two decades: namely, accommodating and compromising with the Right in the name of bipartisan harmony and a desire to avoid partisan and cultural conflicts? [...] I

Courting evangelicals was a particular priority of Bill Clinton from the start. [...] In 1996, Clinton signed into law the single most pernicious piece of anti-gay federal legislation ever passed — the Defense of Marriage Act — with overwhelming Democratic support in the Congress. Scorning the “Far Left,” especially on social issues, was a Clinton favorite. He is the inventor, after all, of the Sister Souljah technique. Bill Clinton was the ultimate non-ideological pragmatist. He was driven by the overriding desire to win over his opponents. [...]

Did any of that dilute the Right’s anger and resentments towards Democrats?

I understand the strategic argument in favor of honoring Rick Warren. But I think Obama, and Richard, overestimate the flexibility of the evangelical community. History suggests that evangelicals aren’t taken in by these tactics; they don’t want symbolic inclusion, they want policy victories. And if Obama doesn’t support evangelical policies, evangelicals won’t support Obama.

Elevating Warren, in the hope of buying some evangelical support, is taking a risk. But if the risk goes bad, the people hurt most won’t be mainstream, centrist Democrats like Obama; they will be queers and women.⁶ It therefore makes sense that mainstream, centrist Democrats are more eager to take this risk than queers activists and feminists are.

[Illustration of Rick Warren developed from "Rick Warren" by Kev/Null, used under a Creative Commons license.]

1. Is this negative use of “tribalistic” both racist and colonialist? It seems to me that it is, but I hesitated to bring it up because Richard might mistake it for me accusing him of racism. It’s racist in the same way that using the phrase “what a gyp” is racist; however, people of good will can thoughtlessly use these phrases without themselves being racist. The racism is in the society that normalizes these phrases, to the point that even anti-racist individuals use them without noticing. (back)
2. I am not accusing Richard of himself being a misogynist or a gay-hater in his heart. I am criticizing his word choice, not his essential character. (back)
3. There were several anti-gay ballot measures that passed in 2008, all of which sucked. But Prop 8 was more emotionally wrenching because we had a chance to win that fight. (back)
4. I predict someone is going to “gotcha!” me by saying that by this logic, I shouldn’t ask for civility in “Alas” comments. But the comments section of a blog is something that people can choose not to participate in, at no cost to themselves. The same is not true of national politics. (back)
5. I’m oversimplifying for the sake of clarity; there is enormous overlap between the feminist and queer activist communities, and of course individual reactions vary hugely within both communities. But although I’m oversimplifying, I think the tendencies I’m talking about are real. (back)
6. To be sure, these three categories — female, queer, centrist democrat — often overlap. (back)

From the department of “duh,” and via Quirkybird’s twitter feed:

Study: Tolerance Can Lower Gay Kids’ Suicide Risk

The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, found that the gay, lesbian and bisexual young adults and teens… [who] experienced high levels of rejection were nearly 8.5 times more likely to have attempted suicide. They were nearly six times more likely to report high levels of depression and almost 3.5 times more likely to use illegal drugs or engage in unprotected sex. That was compared with adolescents whose families may have felt uncomfortable with a gay kid, but were neutral or only mildly rejecting.

Because the level of rejection is hard to measure, Ryan looked at things like whether the parents tried to get their children to change their sexual orientation, or tried to stop them from being with other gay kids.

Nonetheless, this is important research — being able to tell parents that not accepting their children’s sexual orientation has been scientifically shown to be dangerous, may help encourage parents to change their behavior.

The article goes on to say that queer Latin@s, and especially boys, experience high levels of rejection for their sexual orientation.

At least one reader has taken issue with the title of my last post, so let me clarify. Via Glenn Greenwald, Marty Peretz hits the nail on the head:

So at 11:30 on Saturday morning, according to both the Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz, as well as the New York Times, 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message: do not fuck with the Jews.

You heard him.

Not Israelis. Not right-wing Israelis. Not right-wing Israelis in positions of political power. The Jews. Because, you know, the hive mind. We Jews love a good fight. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict isn’t complicated or nuanced; the attacks on Sderot don’t warrant a serious rethinking of military and political strategy. It all comes down to this: don’t fuck with the Jews! ‘Cause we’ll GETCHA!

This is my community.

This is not my community.

Are we clear?

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

Hey, you know what else is just that shocking? Virginity pledges don’t work:

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a “virginity pledge,” but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

So in news that’s unsurprising to anybody who hasn’t been living in a cave, virginity pledges a) don’t reduce sexual activity but b) do make sexual activity more risky. Hooray!

Now, a rational person, looking at this report, would say to themselves, “Self, I’ve gotta say, virginity pledges seem like a lose-lose proposition. They don’t stop sex, they just up the chances for people to become parents with venereal diseases.” But of course, virginity pledges have never been about reducing risky behavior or reducing pregnancy. They’ve been about slut-shaming and controlling female sexually. Of course, that’s not what they’ve been sold as, because most Americans aren’t interested in our sons and daughters being chaste; we’re interested in them not becoming fathers and mothers before they want to. Crazy us.

A (slightly modified for formatting purposes) email from ColorofChange.org:

A new report in The Nation, “Katrina’s Hidden Race War,” documents what many have claimed for years — for some Black New Orleanians the threat of being killed by White vigilantes in Katrina’s aftermath became a bigger threat than the storm itself.

After the storm, White vigilantes roamed Algiers Point shooting and, according to their own accounts, killing Black men at will– with no threat of a police response. For the last three years, the shootings and the police force’s role in them have been an open secret to many New Orleanians. To date, no one has been charged with a crime and law enforcement officials have refused to investigate.

The facts are finally seeing the light of day. Now we must demand action. Given Louisiana’s horrible record when it comes to criminal justice and Black folks, it’s the only path to justice.

You can help. Join us in calling on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Louisiana’s Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, and the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct a full investigation of these crimes and any police cover-up. It takes only a moment to add your voice and to invite your friends and family to do the same:

Sign the petition.

In the two weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the media created a climate of fear with trumped-up stories of Black lawlessness. Meanwhile, an armed group of White vigilantes took over the Algiers Point neighborhood in New Orleans and mercilessly hunted down Black people. “It was great!” said one vigilante. “It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.”

The Nation’s article tells the story of Donnell Herrington, Marcel Alexander, and Chris Collins — a group of friends who were attacked by shotgun-wielding White men as they entered Algiers Point on September 1, 2005. As they tried to escape, Herrington recalls, their attackers shouted, “Get him! Get that nigger!” He managed to get away. Alexander and Collins were told that they would be allowed to live on the condition that they told other Black folks not to come to Algiers Point. Herrington, shot in the neck, barely survived.

And there’s the story of Henry Glover, who didn’t survive after being shot by an unknown assailant. (“Body of Evidence,” The Nation, 12-18-2008.) Glover’s brother flagged down a stranger for help, and the two men brought Glover to a police station. But instead of receiving aid, they were beaten by officers while Henry Glover bled to death in the back seat of the stranger’s car. A police officer drove off in the car soon afterward. Both Glover’s body and the car were found burnt to cinders a week later. It took DNA analysis to identify the body.

Then there’s the story of White militiamen who tried to drive their Black neighbors from their homes. Reggie Bell, who lived just two blocks down the street from the vigilantes’ ringleader, was told at gunpoint, “We don’t want you around here. You loot, we shoot.” Later, another group of armed White men confronted him at his home, asking, “Whatcha still doing around here? We don’t want you around here. You gotta go.”

These are only a few of the stories of Black folks who were accosted in Algiers Point, and you can read more in The Nation. But unless you speak out, we may never learn the full extent of the violence. Journalists have encountered a wall of silence on the part of the authorities. The coroner had to be sued to turn over autopsy records. When he finally complied, the records were incomplete, with files on several suspicious deaths suddenly empty. The New Orleans police and the District Attorney repeatedly refused to talk to journalists about Algiers Point. And according to journalist A.C. Thompson, “the city has in nearly every case refused to investigate or prosecute people for assaults and murders committed in the wake of the storm.”

The Nation’s article is important, but it’s just a start. For more than three years now, these racist criminals have by their own admission gotten away with murder, while officials in New Orleans have systematically evaded any kind of accountability. We have to demand it.

Please join us in calling on state and federal officials to investigate these brutal attacks and the conduct of Orleans Parish law enforcement agencies, and please ask your friends and family to do the same.

Sign the petition.

I’ve complained that studies of weight loss diets have extremely forgiving definitions of “success.” Fatfu, in a terrific post that I only just now read (although it’s almost a year old), has a similar complaint. But she also whips out her calculator and tries to deduce one of Weight Watcher’s best-kept secrets — how many Weight Watchers clients lose weight over the long term?

38,000 people who reached goal weight per year sounds like a lot. But actually it turns out to be a really small number. I found a business article from back then that stated that Weight Watchers had 600,000 attendees in the U.S. in 1993. Divide 38,000 lifetime members per year into 600,000 and my calculator says that each year only about 6% of Weight Watchers members (give or take) reached their goal weight (presumably 94% failed).

Now before you get all impressed with Weight Watcher’s 6% success rate, let’s step back. For one thing, the successful 6% weren’t so fat in the first place. The 2001 study says that most were between a BMI of 25-30 (i.e. “overweight” but not “obese” - to use definitions I find silly). The 2007 abstract says the average starting BMI for that study was 27 - which is well below the average Weight Watchers participant. So in order to achieve goal weight the average lifetime member probably had to lose less than 10 lbs and would have to include a lot of people who had even less to lose. [...]

And what about the number we’re really looking for - how many people actually become “normal” weight long-term using Weight Watchers? It turns out only 3.9% of the golden 6% were still at or below goal weight after 5 years. By my calculations that means 3.9%*6.3% = 0.24% or about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years.

More recent numbers from Weight Watchers indicate that the rate might even be as high as 1 in a hundred. But that’s only after five years — and virtually all research on weight loss shows that “success” rates drop year after year. Just how low would the numbers be after seven years, or ten years? As Traci Mann wrote in an excellent American Psychologist article (pdf link) reviewing the evidence on dieting (hat tip to Fatfu):

Second, these losses are not maintained. As noted in one review, “It is only the rate of weight regain, not the fact of weight regain, that appears open to debate” (Garner & Wooley, 1991, p. 740). The more time that elapses between the end of a diet and the follow-up, the more weight is regained. [...]

Even in the studies with the longest follow-up times (of four or five years postdiet), the weight regain trajectories did not typically appear to level off (e.g., Hensrud, Weinsier, Darnell, & Hunter, 1994; Kramer, Jeffery, Forster, & Snell, 1989), suggesting that if participants were followed for even longer, their weight would continue to increase. It is important for policymakers to remember that weight regain does not necessarily end when researchers stop following study participants.

Dieting, for 99% or more of the people who try it, does not lead to long-term weight loss. Even the 1% who do lose weight, don’t typically lose enough weight to turn a fat person, into a person of average weight. So why is weight-loss dieting the advice given nearly all fat patients by their doctors?

Here’s something doctors don’t tell their patients: 41% of people who go on diets weigh more a few years after the diet, then they did before they began dieting.¹ Since I’m a blogger, not a scientist, I’ll go ahead and make the irresponsible comparison: Dieting is significantly more likely to cause long-term weight gain than weight loss. That’s a Surgeon General’s warning that should appear on every diet program and product on the market.

1. See page 224 of this article (pdf file). “Eight of the studies reported (or made it possible to compute) the percentage of participants who weighed more at follow-up than before they went on the diet. These rates averaged 41% and ranged from 29%… to 64%…” A few pages later: “From one third to two thirds of participants in diets will weigh more four to five years after the diet ends than they did before the diet began. This conclusion comes from studies that are biased toward showing successful weight loss… The true number may well be significantly higher.” (back)

Glenn Greenwald lists Politico’s “Top 10 political scoops of 2008“:

(1) Katie Couric’s interview of Sarah Palin (CBS)

(2) McCain can’t say how many homes he owns (Politico)

(3) Obama’s “bitter” comment (Huffington Post)

(4) Sarah Palin’s shopping spree (Politico)

(5) Turmoil in the Clinton camp (Washington Post and Atlantic — “The behind-the-scenes tension was captured by the reporters in one memorable exchange: ‘[Expletive] you!’ Ickes shouted. ‘[Expletive] you!’ Penn replied. ‘[Expletive] you!’ Ickes shouted again.”)

(6) Jeremiah Wright tapes (ABC News)

(7) The Pentagon’s military analyst program (NY Times)

(8) Bickering in the McCain camp (NY Times Magazine)

(9) John Edwards’ affair (National Enquirer)

(10) Powell endorses Obama (Meet the Press)

Number seven is certainly an important story (and one that got virtually no coverage on TV), but the rest is… Well, as Glenn says,

In fairness to Calderone and his comrades in the political press, our media currently covers a country that has very few substantial problems and an administration that is renowned around the world for being competent, honest, conventional and quite uncontroversial. In general, countries which enjoy great tranquility, prosperity, and stability — such as the U.S. today — can afford the luxury of fixating on the types of fun and trivial stories which comprise the list of top “scoops” heralded by Politico.

It’s not that all of these stories were meaningless and not worth reporting. Palin’s difficultly answering simple questions — and what it implied about her readiness to step into the Presidency — was relevant knowledge for voters to have, for instance. And a lot of these stories are irresistibly fun. But it shouldn’t be on anyone’s “top ten scoops” list. It wasn’t a “scoop” that they deserve credit and praise for — Katie Couric didn’t work to ferret that story out. Someone just turned a camera on.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of in-depth reporting about the election that didn’t happen — or that happened, but didn’t get picked up on in any consistent fashion. After all the debating talks about Afghanistan, how many Americans could find it on a map? How many Americans, after all this time, could even guess at if Iran’s government is Sunni or Shiite? How many know, even in broad outlines, the differences between McCain’s and Obama’s proposed health care plans are? There may also have been some torture going on somewhere, and maybe some war crimes covered up, and possibly a tiny twinge in our economic health, but you’d never know it from Politico’s top ten.

But of course, reporting like that won’t sell papers, or pull in eyeballs, the way simple and fun narratives will. I’m not sure that good reporting is possible, except in erratic sparks, in a profit-driven news model.

Two Israeli ad campaigns in recent years: “Israel: No one belongs here more than you” (”you” being the white middle-class American tourist) and “Israel: Not What You See in the News!” (paraphrased)

Number of Gazans dead today: at least 200

If you can’t figure out why this is unacceptable - if you insist on an eye-for-an-eye mentality, in which one Israeli eye is worth an infinite number of Palestinian eyes - then quite frankly, you’re a privileged fuck with no concept of how violence is perpetuated or what the phrase “human rights” actually means. (And will I delete your odious, bigoted comment? You bet.)

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

EDIT: Looks like Jeff and I posted our pieces at the same time.

EDIT #2: Matt points out the problem with my use of the phrase “an eye for an eye.” More explanation here.

Someday, one of the sides on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will wake up and realize that the eternal cycle of retaliatory violence isn’t working for either side.

Today is not that day:

Waves of Israeli airstrikes hit Hamas security facilities in Gaza on Saturday in a crushing response to the group’s rocket fire, killing more than 200 — the highest one-day toll in an Israeli military operation against Palestinians in decades.

Israeli military officials said the airstrikes, which went on into the night, were the start of what could be days or even months of an effort to force Hamas to end its rocket barrages into southern Israel. The operation could ultimately include ground forces, a senior Israeli security official said.

After the initial airstrikes, which Palestinian officials said also wounded at least 600, dozens of rockets struck southern Israel, where an emergency was declared. Thousands of Israelis hurried into bomb shelters amid the hail of rockets, including some longer-range models that reached farther north than ever before. One man was killed in the town of Netivot and four were wounded, one seriously.

The sad thing is that both sides can use this to make their argument. Israel’s “friends” can say that they were provoked into the attack, never mind that the attack was so disproportionate as to be ludicrous. The Palestinians’ “friends” can say that this proves that Palestinians need to continue their rocket attacks, never mind that common sense tells you that if you keep poking an angry bear with a pointy stick, it’s going to attack in a disproportionate way. And meanwhile, Israel is no closer to peaceful coexistence, and Palestine is no closer to having its own functional state, and innocent Israelis and Palestinians are caught in the crossfire.

I’ve long believed that America needs to be a friend to Israel, and being a friend to Israel means, you know, being a friend — and telling them that sometimes, their actions are counterproductive. This attack has already spawned retaliation from Hamas, which will spawn further retaliation from Israel, which will cause further retaliation from Hamas, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. Until one of the sides (or heck, both) wakes up and realizes this is madness, the madness will continue unabated.

Ballgame has a good point:

The notion that “Children GENERALLY do better with parents together” could be taken to mean that, out of the 100 families described above, children from the 80 non-divorcing families end up being mentally and emotionally healthier (as a group) than the children from the 20 divorcing families. That is very easy to believe. Indeed, there are any number of studies that show this, and these are the studies that are typically trotted out to misleadingly imply that divorce hurts children. In fact it’s just another rather banal observation that children from happy families do better than children from emotionally fraught ones, and hardly worth the price of a billboard. It’s almost like saying, “People with money are less likely to have difficulties making ends meet.”

But the other meaning of “Children GENERALLY do better with parents together” is quite different: namely, that the children in the 20 divorcing families would have been better off if those parents hadn’t gotten divorced. THAT notion is purely speculative as far as I know. I don’t know of any study that demonstrates this … indeed, I don’t know how any study could demonstrate it. There would be insurmountable practical and ethical issues: you’d have to do some kind of double blind study where couples considering divorce who have children would be permitted to divorce or compelled to stay together at random.

I’d also add that what “parents” means needs to be defined. If a child is being raised by a same-sex couple, would the people who put up the billboard say “great! The parents are still together!” or would they scowl and grumble that same-sex parents aren’t real parents? What about adoption? Etc, etc.

This is also the start of an experiment with a new moderation style for “Feminist Critics”: each post will now have two separate threads, one of which will be deemed “no hostility” and moderated appropriately, in the hope that more feminists will be willing to participate in discussions where we’re not attacked. (The change is due to Daran stepping down as moderator, because he’s enjoying his new relationship too much to waste time blogging.)

I don’t know if the new moderation style will work out — after all, the previous moderation style had the same good intentions, but wasn’t successful at retaining feminist comment-writers — but I hope it will.

Barack and Michelle Obama are the parents of two girls. This is not news to you; Sasha and Malia Obama are going to be the youngest kids in the White House since Amy Carter, and while Barack and Michelle deserve credit for keeping them reasonably seqestered from media scrutiny (because kids should be off-limits), they seem like decent kids from what anecdotes have come out.

That Sasha and Malia are girls, though, is relatively normal for the White House. For some reason — most likely random chance, given the small universe of people we’re talking about — presidents who’ve had kids in the White House have tended to have girls. Dubya had Jenna and Barbara (for a little while, anyway), Bill Clinton had Chelsea, Jimmy Carter had Amy. Gerry Ford had three older sons, but his daughter, Susan, was the only child left when he was in the white house. Dick Nixon had Trisha and Julie; you have to go back to John F. Kennedy, who had John-John and Caroline, to find a presidential son who was of the right age to grow up in the White House.

Of course, that doesn’t mean presidents haven’t had sons. Dubya’s dad obviously did, and so did Reagan and Ford. Kennedy did, and so did Eisenhower. It’s just that with the exception of Kennedy, the sons haven’t been quite at the right age to be White House kids.

Melissa McEwan puts forth a reasonable theory to explain this — men with daughters tend to be more feminist and better able to relate to women, and therefore better able to win the votes of women — but the truth is probably more prosaic. People who run for president tend to be at least in their 50s. At 47, Barack Obama will be the fifth-youngest president in American history. It’s simple math that the older you are, the older your children are likely to be. Ronald Reagan had sons, but given Reagan’s age when he took office, it’s unsurprising that those sons were grown-ups. Given that most of the men to serve as president in the past fifty years were older than 55 when they took office, it’s hardly a shock that a good chunk of them didn’t have kids in the White House. Of the six who will have as of January, one will have had a boy and a girl, two a girl who was an only child, two will have had two sisters, and one will have had one girl — but one with three older brothers. In other words, we’re hardly talking about anything other than an apparent statistical fluke.

Or maybe it’s just that boys suck, as Belinda Luscombe argues in the pages of Time:

So why no modern manlings in the east wing? I have a theory, born of careful historical analysis and solipsism: It’s impossible to be elected to the White House if you have young sons, because that would mean you have to campaign with them.

Campaigning and raising sons are mutually exclusive. Campaigning requires lots of travel, enormous amounts of time in the public eye and months and months of sitting down quietly listening to the same guy talking while wearing your good clothes. It’s like 11 straight months of being in church when you’re the preacher’s kid — with long car rides in between. It’s torture on adults, let alone children. But it’s worse for boys. Try this experiment: next month ask your son to be on his best behavior in front of other people, from now until November 2009. See how far you get.

To be fair, you won’t get very far asking a son to be good for nine months. Of course, you won’t get very far asking your daughter to be good for nine months, and anyone who thinks you will has obviously never met a little girl. Kids are kids — they do dumb things, act out from time to time, and generally misbehave. And that’s good, because they’re kids, and that’s how they learn what misbehaviors will get them in trouble and what misbehaviors won’t.

“Boys are generally more competitive, risk-taking and defiant, which makes them less manageable,” says Meg Meeker M.D., author of Boys Should be Boys and Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters. And the 24/7 scrutiny of the modern campaign makes every small risky and defiant act a public affair. So if you get a little bored of what dad’s saying, because he’s dad and you’ve heard it eleventy million times before, you end up here.

Yes, Andrew Giuliani was a rapscallion in that video, which I remember as being an endearing thing; certainly more endearing than the fact that a decade or so later, Andrew all-but-disowned his own father over Rudy’s serial infidelity and mistreatment of his mother. Certainly, of all the things that I think of as being embarassments to Rudy, his son being a kid when his son was a kid is at the bottom of the list.

The Obama campaign was noted for its discipline, its rigor and its self control: three things most young boys are not noted for. Of course, Obama didn’t take Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, everywhere he campaigned. But long fatherly absences may make the boys even more likely to be unhelpful. “If dad’s away on the campaign trail a lot, [boys'] tendencies towards defiance and impulsivity are exacerbated,” says Meeks.

Young girls, on the other hand, can be an asset to a candidate’s image. “There’s definitely something in the father daughter-relationship that makes being in the public eye much easier,” says Meeks. “Girls want to please their mothers and particularly their fathers. Their dads can take their daughters places and do things with them and the girls won’t act out.”

Oh, really? I see, so when my daughter refuses to listen to me and get her coat on, despite my telling her to do it seventy-five times, that’s her trying to please me? Don’t get me wrong, I have the best kid ever, but she’s more than capable of being defiant when she wants to be. So are the Obama kids. You may recall that when Barack Obama bought his informercial, he said Sasha’s first question was whether it would pre-empt Disney. Certainly, she wasn’t looking out for her dad’s welfare there; she was being an ordinary kid.

What the Obama campaign did with their children was to minimize their time in the spotlight; yes, Sasha and Malia would show up from time to time, but by and large, the campaign let them go to school and live reasonably normal lives. If the kids had been Sasha and Barack III, I suspect that the results would have been much the same — we would have seen the kids from time to time, they’d be cute, as kids are wont to be, we’d hear stories about the kids wanting a puppy when they got to the White House and occasionally playfully ribbing their dad — you know, exactly what we’ve heard thus far.

The simple truth is that boys aren’t beasts who are going to run amok at a minute provocation, any more than girls are perfect, pristine creatures who never raise their voices above mezzo-piano. Kids are kids — rambunctious, goofy kids. And they are more than capable of being beastly or pristine at any given time, just like adults. And that has nothing to do with gender.