Spartan Ethic Redux, Take Two

In case you haven't encountered it yet, there's an unpleasant graphic that was emailed around from a staffperson to the Tennessee GOP chair / state senator for Gallatin, Diane Black. One Sherri Goforth was responsible for the distribution.

Nashville is Talking has probably the choices initial responses.

I spoke with Sherri Goforth minutes ago to confirm she sent this email. She confirmed she had sent it and also said she had received a letter of reprimand from her superiors but said she will stay on the job.

When I asked her if she understood the controversial nature of the photo, Goforth would only say she felt very bad about accidentally sending it to the wrong list. When I gave her a second chance to address the controversial nature of the email, she again repeated that she only felt bad about sending it to the wrong list of people.

“I went on the wrong email and I inadvertently hit the wrong button,” Goforth told NIT. “I’m very sick about it, and it’s one of those things I can’t change or take back.”

Note the total indifference to - or perhaps celebration of - the impropriety of the image inherent in Ms. Goforth's non-apology. Note also the fault she perceives: it wasn't that she sent an offensive, racist image - it was that she sent an offensive, racist image to the wrong distribution list, delivering it to hypersensitive people without a sense of humour who obviously don't get the joke instead of the GOP in-crowd who'd think the image hilarious.

One more thing struck me reading through the noise on this incident. One of the comments at Nashville is Talking included this gem from a commenter calling itself Slimey:

First of all, this is not racism. Racism is the belief that one race is superior over another. This is plain and simple being stupid. Please people, stop calling this racism. Grow up! How many of you laugh during Blazin Saddles? Yet it’s full of racial innuendos and language. I don’t oppose the guy cause he’s black, it’s because he’s a socialist liberal.

Deconstructing for Slimey:

First off, the image. "OOH! A SPOOK! Visible only by the whites of its eyes (as opposed to the whites of the skins of the previous 43 MEN in the progression), here to rape your women / steal your stuff / take over your government." NEWSFLASH: that's what racism looks like.

Second, the "socialist liberal" bit. The US has moved quite far to the right on the political scale in global terms, so it all depends on one's position. To a Fascist, everything looks Socialist.

H/T Shakesville, BBWW et al.

The Inmates Take Charge Of The Asylum

Musing on this post by Mustang Bobby over at Bark Bark Woof Woof brought me to this realisation.

It's becoming more apparent to me that today's GOP as an organisation is little more than a collection of extreme rightwing crazies with a veneer of passable politics over the mess. It's a bit like finding the "priceless antique table" you bought is really a paper-thin layer of mahogany glued over termite-ridden pine planks.

We all thought that ShrubCo was an aberration, a convenient ignoramus to cover the party machinery underneath. But the more recent actions indicate that the Bush presidency may have been more symptomatic than was previously apparent. The flurry of recent stories of recent GOP stupidity is far more telling than the worst of Shrub's candid comments - it spotlights a wilfully ignorant, cantankerous, consciously obstructive organisation totally unwilling to examine even its own counterproductive methods in its scramble back up to the top. I'm wondering whether the more recent efforts, more reminiscent of scorched-earth combat tactics than any real attempt at governance, is the work of a group with no interest in the national welfare at all or simply that of a group too collectively stupid to care.

No matter what the cause for the misbehaviour of the party, however, it is clear that any attempt to gloss over this bad behaviour doesn't adhere all that well. McCain was persuaded to select perhaps the least competent candidate for running mate not a year ago. The RNC chair, Steele, even with his gaffes presents a more articulate, informed image than the voices drowning him out. And even the voices of relative sanity within the GOP (Powell et al) are sidelined by the noisiest of the loons.

Fifteen years ago, Gingrich and his Congressional allies presented at least an intelligent front to the populace behind which to hatch their schemes. The cracks through to the rotten substance beneath were beginning, but far more difficult to penetrate. Today the equation is nearly reversed: the damage below the surface is readily apparent and popping up in ever more debates, and the attempts to find some respectable platform or spokesperson to make the nutsery seem rational are failing on an increasingly spectacular scale.

Quote of the Day

Gee, I wonder what the (overwhelmingly Republican) surviving GM dealerships think about this?

From the comments on Steve Benen's delicious takedown of the wingnuts' calls to boycott General Motors.

Honourable mentions:

They're failures themselves, and failure is the only outcome they know how to produce.[1]

New Republican motto: If it's working, stop it![2]

1 - also from the boycott article comments
2 - from comments on Steve's shrewd take on the Republican insistence that, since the economy isn't collapsing as fast as it used to, things are going well enough to call off the recovery.

Democrat Pagan Party*

I suppose after years of the radical Left calling out the Republicans as God's Own Party - a moniker they have earned after decades of pandering to the Religious Right - it was inevitable. Former speaker Gingrich has branded any but God-fearing Republicans enemies of the United Christian States.

The headline for this post is not Gingrich's own. But the sentiment certainly is.

The sounds coming from the GOP - particularly the segment of the GOP still appealing to the XtianFundie set - are not new. We heard them in every philosophical debate that came to blows: the Christianity/Judaism split, the Catholic/Orthodox split, the Russian Orthodox on watching the fall of first Constantinople and then Kiev, the Cathars, the Papal Schism, the Reformation,... the list goes on. One of the reasons the Enlightenment was so powerful was that it ended the wars of the Reformation with the insistence that individual conscience was a private matter not worth warring over. It may not have stopped the Irish quite so quickly, but it certainly drowned the flames of religious conflict in Europe rather thoroughly.

Part of the Right's tactical playbook is Othering the opposition. If they can make otherwise reasonable policy proposals appear to be put forward by forces unlike the Good Americans they claim to represent, those proposals can be more easily dismissed. National health care? It's a wishy-washy quiche-eating European thing, not something a good red-blooded American would want. Environmental protection policies? They're a scam foisted on us by tree-huggers and foreign agents all out to destroy the US economy. Civil rights? They're a means for illegal immigrants and social deviants to overthrow American society. Every issue the Right sees comes complete in their eyes with an Other foisting it on the US.

Now Gingrich has given voice to a position the Xtian Right put forward some months back: Liberalism is not only UnAmerican, but UnChristian as well. The "Rediscovering God in America" tour is the means to the message.

I am not a citizen of the world. I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator. [...] I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history. We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism.

The only thing that saves Gingrich's bloviating from outright insanity is that, for many of the XtianFundie sects, only their particular flavor of Xtianity is "true," which conveniently disavows all of the mainstream Christian churches and effectively creates the impression of oppressed minority. But in holding that, these same sects relinquish any claim to spiritual community with the rest, and cannot claim "oppression of Christians" when those other denominations face adversity. Those not admitted by the Xtians in good times cannot be counted as in the fold in bad times.

Calling up paganism, however, as the demon for the new age, is simply preposterous. Paganism may be more visible today than fifty years ago, but most pagans are peaceful, live-and-let-live types disinterested in converting the planet, and resisting only the missionary zeal of the Xtians and not Xtianity itself. An organised pagan opposition to the other major faiths on the planet is a fantasy.

On the other hand, for a political philosophy that demands an organised intentional opponent, GOP-Xtianity is running out of forces to fight. Catholicism as an evil on a Protestant Earth went out the door ages ago, and Kennedy's election only nailed that coffin shut. The Eastern faiths - Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and the others - never presented much threat, as the early Asian American communities kept to themselves, and newer immigrants are as likely to be Christian as anything else. Shinto got spanked in World War II. Opposition to Judaism became nearly unspeakable after Nazi Germany. And Islam, long a favourite whipping boy of Christianity, has proved a poor choice of evils, as the resistance to US policies abroad have grown due to the prior [mal]administration's denunciation of Islam in the same breath as terrorism (as if the two were interchangeable), and as domestic flavours of Islam have proven to be far more mild-mannered than is necessary to brand them the Ultimate Evil. Even the no-faith-at-all Socialist label is failing to stick to the GOP's opponents as the ideals of a moderately socialist state become less unacceptable in the current economic climate.

So as the Xtian-Fundie subset of RightWingnuttia sets its sights on long-dead Druids or some other Great New Satan, the language it uses to incite the following shows just how its base has shrunk and how outdated its propaganda has become.

* H/T ThinkProgress and Washington Monthly, and to WM commenter Norwood Woman for the title.

Gotta Love Those Activist Judges

South Carolina's state supreme court is holding Gov. Sanford's feet to the fire and making him take the stimulus funds he swore he would refuse.

The state’s top court ruled unanimously Thursday that Gov. Mark Sanford must apply for the disputed $700 million in federal stimulus money.

The S.C. Supreme Court also took the rare step of issuing a writ of mandamus, which orders the governor to apply for the money.

Chief Justice Jean Toal and three of the four other justices — Donald Beatty, John Kittredge and John Waller — said a state law passed last month requires Sanford to apply for the money and doesn’t conflict with the federal law providing the stimulus funds.

“Under the constitution and laws of this State, the General Assembly is the sole entity with the power to appropriate funds, including federal funds,” the four justices wrote. “Therefore, the General Assembly has the authority to mandate that the Governor apply for federal funds which it has appropriated.”

In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Costa Pleicones said state lawmakers complied with an amendment of the federal law — proposed by U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn in response to Sanford’s refusal to accept the money — by adopting a concurrent resolution accepting the funds and passing a law designating how the money will be spent.

I do not understand how Sanford can sleep at night refusing dollars targeted for education, when his own state's system is in such disrepair according even to students like Casey Edwards (a plaintiff in the recent case) that it merited a documentary on the terrible conditions.

And since this is a South Carolina court, and presumably the product of GOP appointments, it'll be interesting to see how the RWNM tries to spin the decision.

H/T ThinkProgress - who have a similarly scathing take.

Fascist As An Epithet

Fox's FX network has (perhaps unsurprisingly) Sum of All Fears on tonight. Watching it, one gets a clearer idea why the Conservatists think "Fascist" is a useful insult to fling at the Left.

In the 1930s it was very difficult to make the US understand what a threat European Fascism truly was. Part of this was because there were and remain large German-American and Italian-American populations who have strong connections to the Fatherland. But part of it was cultural, and part a misreading of the national socialist economic engine as a revitalised capitalist instrument.

In 1933 the US was only sixty-odd years removed from the strife of the Civil War. Reconstruction was still fresh in the minds of Southerners, who had had to endure another two decades of a brutal recovery programme intended to keep the South defeated as much as the nation united. Successive waves of immigration had created communities of the recent arrivals easily targeted by earlier arrivals: Italian-American, Irish-American and other groups were only just achieving respectability after some very rough experiences in post-Civil-War US communities, and were still viewed negatively from the criminality spawned by Prohibition. The African American population, though legally free and guaranteed its rights, was still suppressed by Jim Crow legislation, and viewed by society as largely inferior. The makings of Fascist thought were very close to the US reality of the time: challenged nationalism, economic collapse, and populations of "undesirables" that made for easy scapegoats for the current set of ills offset by multiple northern European populations with strong ethnic identities.

Many US citizens had been supportive of Germany in the Great War. The US had only entered the conflict in response to to German U-boat warfare, which had claimed several US ships and many US lives in the years before US intervention. Sympathy ran high. When Hitler began Germany's industrial resurrection, many in the US cheered: Germany was "back on track." The Germans, for their part, while not making their activities truly secret, were very quiet about their less-savory activities, and the darkest exploits of the Nazi regime were years away from discovery. There were many in the West, including many major industrial figures, who were overtly supportive of the resurgent German industrial machine.

Ethnic identity, coupled with a revived apparently capitalist economy and a tacitly accepted faith in Caucasian superiority, blinded many to the threat Fascism presented the free world. It took six years of fighting, many lives, and the discovery of the concentration camps and the testimony of the incarcerated and their captors to bring to light the full horror. Part of the shock of the Nazi camps lay in the vivid, graphic proof that presumably civilized and humane Europeans could descend to such depths: the camps in Japan and China were more comprehinsible to the biased Western mind, but the Nazi facilities in Germany and Poland horrified on a cultural and ethnic level that layered onto the barbarism displayed there.

Fascism as a global threat perished with Nazi Germany. But that was in 1945, and the war crimes trials that followed were at once perceived as closure on the chapter and overshadowed by Soviet expansionism. Communism quickly replaced Fascism as the greatest global threat, and the details of the prior period were subsumed by the fears of the present.

Which brings us to today. We are now as many years removed from World War II as 1933 US was from the Civil War. The memories of that period are fading, and that fuzziness is compounded by the fact that, unlike the conflict in the 1860s, World War II was for the US a war fought on foreign soil. The daily reminders that face France, Germany, Italy and other nations directly affected by that war are absent here. The US has only the occasional WW2 memorial, which lists no name of any serviceperson lost in that conflict on US soil anywhere but plaques in DC and Hawaii.

Enter the storyteller and the studio. Clancy's thriller tells of a resurgent Fascist group that steals a nuclear weapon and sets it off in Baltimore, hoping to spark a conflict between the US and Russia from which a resurgent Fascism (centred in Germany and Austria from the plot's implications) could return to prominence. The problem with the film, however, is that none of the attendant horrors of a Fascist society are made clear. The only indicators of the origins of the plot are the accents of the major players. The villains never speak of the overall goals of Fascism: corporatist control of the state, systematic purging of "undesirable" or "racially impure" segments of society, the silencing of all dissent, and an oppressive state mechanism of surveillance and nearly-random arrest and "disappearance" of citizens.

Clancy, in his defense, probably assumes such things are common knowledge and sees no need to delve into any of that. Fascists are monsters out to destroy both East and West and remake both in their twisted image: this should be clear enough from the narrative. Fox, however, is far more nebulous in its treatment: the bad guys aren't all that distinct from the good ones: Dressler's, Fiore's and even Thorsen's characters aren't all that inhuman, and present remarkably "normal" faces to the world and to the audience, just as Schreiber's assasin Clark seems necessary and Cromwell's president Fowler doesn't seem especially liked or likable. It is easy, in the narrative, to confuse friend with foe, villain with deluded victim, hero with situational ally. Part of this is no doubt deliberate: it speaks to the difficulty in the modern world in identifying threats and makes for effective plot twists. But the net effect is the same as the rhetoric spinning now: simply screaming "Fascist" does not make the target Fascist - there needs to be substance to the charge to make it stick. Sum of All Fears fails to make the charge stick to any of the villains, depending solely on the symbology of the German accent and the swastika to make its points instead of delving into the political philosophy that made that particular combination so frightening.

The problem with Fascism is that even now there are schools of thought that, either through adherence to conviction in "Aryan" supremacy, through denial of the bases for the political philosophy, or through simple ethnic identification, play apologist for Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and the others that spawned that philosophy. The US, little affected by the worst aspects of the Third Reich, has a particularly poor frame of reference in this regard: the horrors were distant and perpetrated almost entirely on foreigners, removing them rather effectively from the consciousness of the US citizenry. Without that awareness or the reminders of those lost, the US lacks the immediacy of the knowledge that Europe sees on a near-daily basis: the bombed buildings preserved as symbols, the camps turned into park-like memorials, the fields of graves, and the plaques mounted on walls listing the names of those who lived there and were murdered by the Reich.

In turn, the US' ethnic diversity and continued immigration of new populations into the country give those who support Fascist thought fertile ground. The same vitriol Hitler aimed at Jews is used against Latinos, South and Southeast Asians - virtually any population perceived as taking jobs, damaging the economy and polluting the assumed ethnic homogeneity of the US population. The inhibitions on such thinking that Europe experiences today are largely absent because of the physical distance and the relative ignorance of the US populace.

Sum of All Fears plays on the fear the US is only now starting to shed. in 2002, when the film was produced, that fear was full-blown, and the film spoke to that. Whether the relative normality of the villains in the piece were intended to describe the facelessness of an unknown assailant, or a deliberate plot point to blur the distinctions between political philosophies, it definitely allows the Fascist to hide in plain sight, appearing as normal - and behaving as normally - as anyone around.

This is what the Conservatists are banking on when they accuse the Obama administration and its supporters of Fascism. The distance between the events of the '30s and '40s, the ethnic identification, and the lack of substance backing up the identification of Fascists with the full scope of that philosophy all enable those making the accusation to do so without having to back it up. The US does not recall the full horror of Nazism: the arrest and disappearance of whole population segments, the concentration camps used to dispose of them, the suppression of free speech – even free thought as Hitler Youth informed on its parents – and the other horrors are in full view of modern Europe every day, but notably absent from the Americas. Without those reminders, the US is left with the education system to teach each generation about the dangers of that philosophy, and after decades of public education policy more interested in basic arithmetic and reading skills than fuzzier subjects like History and Political Science, the knowledge the current US citizen has of that dark chapter in human history is at least questionable. The US understands that Fascism is somehow bad, but without direct exposure or careful study it has no clear understanding of why.

If the Conservatists are truly opposed to Fascism – which after the Bush maladministration is arguable – they may well be ignorant of the worst of its crimes, or that those crimes were a direct consequence of the teachings that spawned it. They are certainly counting on their audience's ignorance of those theories, yielding them the outrage against the bogeyman of the “Fascist” without comprehending the precise nature of the evil implied. Their ability to do so is facilitated both by this ignorance and such clever products as Sum of All Fears that paint their villains with the Fascist brush without bothering to layer on all the colours of that particular mindset or the fine strokes that made Fascism so different – and so horrific – from any other conservative nationalist school of thought.

Lipton v. G.I. Joe

Some people just don't know how how not to make enemies.

Tomorrow, tea baggers in Pittsburg, KS, plan to hold their protest at the Pittsburg State University Veterans Memorial Amphitheater. Speaking at that event will be Rep. Lynne Jenkins (R-KS). Veterans are expressing concerns at having a partisan event on this “hallowed ground“:

– “It’s everybody’s right to have a protest, but our complaint is that it’s at the Veterans Memorial. Most people think of the Veterans Memorial as a sacred place. It’s a place to reflect, to remember why we’re here today and the people who have sacrificed for that.” [Bob Torbett, director of the American Legion Riders and a member of the Kansas Patriot Guard]

– “I’m not so sure the Veterans Memorial is the appropriate place for a tax protest.” [Charles Heath, Commander of American Legion Post 64]

– “This is something that really upset me. The Veterans Memorial, as far as I’m concerned, is hallowed ground. To have a partisan, political ‘tea party’ there really offends my sensibilities.” [Bob Torbett, veteran of the Korean War]

Veterans have been a staunch Conservative bloc: ticking them off is unlikely to help matters.

Froming the Lanunage of The Constissuetion

The past few years have given us many priceless (if cringeworthy) moments from the Conservatists. It occurs to me that they don't really believe in representative democracy, are disinterested in the documents that created it no matter how often they cite them, and are enamoured of a totalitarian state so long as it does what they want.

In Iowa, for instance, we have a gubernatorial candidate who thinks that as governor he can override a state supreme court decision, and that doing so is right and proper. And related to the recent decision there, we have pundits that think that law is perpetual once written, and that judicial decisions that modify or reverse law are advisory and not compulsory.

We have the Conservatist pundit class, instead of "supporting the President" as they harped for the last eight years, doing their best to go for the jugular when the current administration is faced with its first international incident.

And we have multiple voices in the 'blogosphere that seem to think that DHS investigation and monitoring, while OK for Islamofascists, Liberals and other apparata of the New World Cryptomuslim Marxofascist Order, is horrifically unjust when directed at Far Right extremist groups.

At every point, the public policies the Conservatists embrace are produced by one particular governmental body - which, at that moment, the Conservatists demand be the only one listened to by lawmakers. Conversely, any governmental body that does something the Conservatists dislike is immediately proof of some vast effort to eliminate them - and therefore eligible for immediate and permanent dissolution.

The pattern evolving from this behaviour is one where the Conservatists display supreme unhappiness with representative democracy. The ideal they seek is one where any and all branches of government are staffed by strict adherents to their philosophy and advocates of its agenda. Agreement with this is, by their arguments, rational; disagreement is somehow worse than a lack of patriotism but not quite approaching outright blasphemy. A court decides a case not entirely in their favor? Oust those "activist judges." A legislature passes a law they don't like? Recall the legislators that voted for it, take the law to court, and protest about legislators "not doing the people's work." A referendum doesn't go the way they want? They failed - at "educating the people about the severity of the problem." In each case, it's not their cause that's the issue; it's that the various organs of civic authority don't act according to their very specific wishes, and that means that the system is somehow flawed.

The only system that would actually make these people happy, from these instances, is a totalitarian system tailored to their specific goals. A theocratic nation, created according to their precise ideals and run by strict adherents to their philosophy, is the only defensible political construct that would appease them.

There are two problems with this.

First, it's already been tried. In a place called Europe, a country coalesced that was called the Holy Roman Empire. It dictated acceptable behaviour, the beliefs of the populace, and held all accountable to a strict legal code based on the Teachings of the Church. The chief problem with this is that the Holy Roman Empire collapsed centuries ago, in no small part because the philosophical ancestors of the new Conservatists decided that the status quo was wrong, the Church was misleading people, and that the corruption inherent in the religiopolitical structure was intolerable. Somehow, though, they fail to see that the same cycle would be repeated - after much oppression of dissidents, suppression of the populace and erroneous philosophy inflicted on the people - in the governmental form that most accommodates their worldview.

Second, the only reason these people are able to spew this bile is because of a little thing called The Constitution. Freedom of speech, of assembly, and of worship are all guaranteed in that document. This was done precisely because their philosophical ancestors saw what had been done in other countries where the dissent the Conservatists now despise was suppressed, and sought to prevent such in the new government they were creating. Also, their own philosophy was once dissent in those very nations that influenced their predecessors, and was suppressed at least as ruthlessly as they would suppress dissent in their ideal nation. They would throw away the entire legacy of their nation in this misguided effort to "save" it.

The Conservatists insist, despite their behaviour, that they believe in the Constitution. But they treat it the same way they do Leviticus: they keep the Second Amendment the same way they tout Leviticus 18:22, and throw out all the rest since it doesn't suit their agenda.

H/T to The Phydeaux Speaks Experience for the title's inspiration.

Alexandrian Bonfire Redux

Andrew Sullivan has a telling transcript from a Teabagging event:

Woman: [Shouts] “Burn the books!” [applause]
Man: “I don’t think you were serious about that, were you?”
Woman: “I am too.”
Man: “Burn all the books?!”
Woman: “The ones in college, those, those brainwashing books.”
Man: “[laughs] Brainwashing books?”
Woman: “Yes.”
Man: “Which ones are those?”
Woman: “Like, the evolution crap, and, yeah...”

Wow. Just like all those anti-knowledge folks were supposed to have done.

Yet Another Reason The Right Hates Rail Transit

Because too many of their supporters misstake the railroad facilities for FEMA concentration camps for Conservatives.

C’mon Over, My Wife’s Away

There's been a lot of noise about the recent events in Iowa and Vermont, particularly from the Chicken Little School of Conservative Thinking. Steve Benen, Shakesville, BBWW, Box Turtle Bulletin and others have all covered it rather nicely.

It occurs to me, though, that there's a reason for the marriage issue is so big for the RWNM that's not being discussed all that much.

Living in SW Florida, I run into all sorts. One of the types I try to avoid is the "married but playful" kind: the ones that are stepping out on their spouses to indulge their preferences on the down-low. It's messy for them, it's uncomfortable for me and it's dishonest on both parts to carry on anything more than a one-night stand under those conditions. Quite frankly, I won't knowingly have anything to do with it. However, the number of folks I meet who do or will is startling.

The RWNM has long presented civil rights issues as a zero-sum game: more for you is less for me. The idea of an expanding set of civil rights - indeed, of rights in any sense - seems alien to them. They did this with civil rights based on race and sex, and they've done it more than a few times based on sexual identity.

In the SSM case, my hypothesis is this: many of the naysayers are acquainted with more than a few married couples who aren't straight, and legalisation of SSM would drive them to divorce their spouses and marry their partners.

This is offensive on a number of levels. I'll hit the chief ones that bother me: feel free to add your own in comments.

First, their position assumes that there are a lot of couples who married for convenience, respectability, and tax and insurance benefits. This perspective reduces those marriages to pure business contract: there's nothing "sacred" about getting married just to be added to your spouse's health insurance or to file joint tax returns. If SSM is legalised, these marriages will be shown up for the transactional relationships they are, and the arguments about the "sanctity of marriage" will instantly evaporate.

Second, the assumption that there are substantial numbers of couples who married for convenience and respectability undermines the arguments about "special rights" for a "small minority." There is an unstated assumption in the position that the actual number of people who would self-identify as LGBT if SSM were legalised is substantially higher than is either reflected in accepted sociological statistics or claimed by the naysayers - perhaps as high as 30-40%. The RWNM doesn't want to be seen as hostile to proportions that high - just look with the GOP has done to court the Hispanic vote in recent years - so numbers like that can't be allowed to see the light of day. So long as they can talk about a small number of "deviants" rather than a substantial minority of law-abiding LGBT citizens they can continue to whinge about the "special" and "excessive" demands of those LGBT citizens willing to make noise on behalf of the rest. If the numbers they fear become public, prior statements denouncing the LGBT movement as a tiny fringe of society seeking preferential treatment will be meaningless.

Third, the naysayers are expecting legalisation of SSM to produce an immediate uptick in the divorce rate as all those marriages of convenience adjust. Their assumption seems to be that this will be an immediate phenomenon. Again, they are failing to take into account that divorce is a messy business not undertaken lightly, that many of the marriages they think are jeopardised by the new laws are prone to dissolution not just because the new alternative is available, and that said marriages are taken so lightly that they are at risk in the first place. This puts yet another torpedo into the "sacred institution" meme simply because it implies that marriage is so fragile that it won't withstand expansion.

Fourth, there is the unspoken awareness that marriages of convenience are loveless, unhappy things foisted on these people in the name of respectability and social harmony. The numbers the anti-SSM voices fear, should they manifest, would spotlight their commitment to a cruel, oppressive social policy that demanded those in MOCs live lies just to be accepted. It might even be enough to cause a resounding backlash, and it would certainly encourage opposition to their other platform planks. The idea that marrying the person one prefers to have sex with produces happiness is no more true than marrying a person one prefers not to have sex with produces unhappiness: however, these people apparently fail to recognize that point.

Searching through my memory, I can recall perhaps three couples I have known who tied the knot for legal benefit, social respectability or camouflage for non-hetero behaviour. That's three (maybe) out of some hundreds of married people. I have, however, met many who cling to this "sanctity of marriage" argument - all the while indulging in extramarital recreations (and sometimes more serious involvements) and keeping it quiet. LGBT personal ads and Website profiles that demand "discretion" abound in the South and particularly in SW FL, which term I am learning is codespeak for "I'm hitched and playing on the side, but I don't want my spouse/employer/church to find out." I hardly think these same people would run to the courts to annul those marriages simply because they don't have to stay in them to claim the attendant legal or financial benefits. There may be a readjustment of sorts over time, but there won't be crowds beating down the divorce courts' doors the moment these laws are signed.

This, though, seems to be the likely calamity the anti-SSM lobbies fear: that all those people they know personally who are in some marriage of some sort of convenience would immediately ditch their present arrangements and swap them for the SSM they really desire. Should that happen, all the RWNM's rants about the Sanctity of the Institution of Marriage, the Needs of Teh Childern, the Special Rights Teh Gay Demands and other such memes would suddenly and forcefully ring hollow as all those people their positions drove to these MOCs were allowed to choose a more desirable legal alternative.

H/T to Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof for the title.

It Must Be The Altitude

Four stories out of Colorado (three via Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof) caught my eye today.

The first two are typical wingnut histrionics over Teh Sex and other yukky things. First comes state senator Scott Renfroe:

It all started with Republican Scott Renfroe of Greeley, who got some attention for comments he made Monday about a bill that extends health benefits to same-sex partners of state employees. It's "an abomination according to Scripture," Renfroe said, according to the Colorado Independent, to "[take] sins and [make] them to be legally OK.”

Renfroe -- apparently a magnanimous kind of guy -- was willing to admit that homosexuality isn't the only sin listed in the Bible. "I’m not saying this is the only sin that is out there. Obviously we have sin -- we have murder, we have, we have all sorts of sin, we have adultery, and we don’t make laws making those legal, and we would never think to make murder legal," he said.

I wonder how well Renfroe has read his Leviticus (since that's apparently what he's basing this on), and if so whether he thinks twice when he orders baby back ribs or fried shrimp, or when he shaves, or when he wears a poly/cotton blend shirt, or ...

Up next, Dave Schultheis, who for some reason thinks HIV testing of already pregnant women is somehow supportive of promiscuity:

Sexual promiscuity, we know, causes a lot of problems in our state, one of which, obviously, is the contraction of HIV. And we have other programs that deal with the negative consequences -- we put up part of our high schools where we allow students maybe 13 years old who put their child in a small daycare center there.

We do things continually to remove the negative consequences that take place from poor behavior and unacceptable behavior, quite frankly, and I don’t think that’s the role of this body.

His was the only opposing vote on the matter, by the way. I wonder if it occurs to him that pregnant women have had sex already to become pregnant in the first place, so the damage is, so to speak, already done. And the whole presumption that people should be stuck with the consequences their bad choices (which apparently includes children and/or incurable illnesses) is so hateful, misogynistic and downright unChristian as to turn one's stomach.

The third was the demise of the Rocky Mountain News. This, coupled with the imminent demise of the San Francisco Chronicle, is just one more indication of how badly off both the economy and actual journalism are right now.

The last one, however, is just priceless.

Last week a Denver bus driver, while helping two elderly passengers cross the street at their stop, was hit by a truck. He was badly injured, but the story implies that he is recovering.

The priceless part? His actions were so praiseworthy and commendable that the Colorado State Police took note - and cited him for jaywalking.

Of course, the CSP also cited the driver of the truck and the other guy who was helping out (even though he wasn't struck), and they're continuing to investigate (apparently whether to cite the two passengers who needed help in the first place), so I suppose evenhandedness here was the rule of the day.

Given stories like these, I just do not understand what it takes to live there.

A Matter Of Control

North Dakota is attempting an end-run around the vindication of women's rights originally assumed assured by Roe v Wade.

Liss and Misty at Shakesville each have masterful takedowns on the item: go read them here and here. Both of them have much more experience, and far more justification, pointing out the sexist narrow-mindedness of such legislation, than I. There is little that I could add to their righteous condemnation of this recent step.

My question is this:

In this age of plummeting state revenues, these idiots have just created a whole new de facto state social programme. Yet these same people are the ones that complain vociferously about state spending, and particularly state spending on social programmes like what the new legislation simply cries out to implement.

The RWNM cries constantly that public expenditure on social programmes is wrong. It is a waste of resources; it encourages bad behaviour; it rewards the least competent, the indolent, the abusers of the system - the unworthy, in short.

Now we have a mandate from the state of North Dakota to provide exactly what the RWNM claims to oppose: public scrutiny of what until now has been a very private situation. If "personhood" begins at conception, then all manner of potential crimes suddenly face the expectant. How does the State intend to fend off these offenses without implementing monitoring and enforcement regimens?

The simple answer is that the drafters of this legislation haven't thought that far; that this is simply a shaming mechanism to oppress the sexually active (particularly the sexually active woman) and maintain an outmoded and impractical notion of civic order. Prevention is not the goal. Rather, the intent is the exploitation of those caught in the newly legal web of impropriety in order to maintain their concepts of an ordered society.

There is, however, a possible, more complex answer. The parties behind the new law actually want this agenda pursued by the State. It is in keeping with the support of the now-vast Homeland Security apparatus and enhanced intelligence gathering: these efforts create a new observation state to intimidate dissent and encourage political and social orthodoxy.

The continued infiltration and eavesdropping on peaceful groups in the name of anti-terror efforts is harmonious with this new law. Through their invocation of national security, the intelligence agencies, DHS and local police forces enabled the observation of any group deemed "Unamerican:" groups so targeted included the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), antiwar activist groups and social equality advocates. By expanding the definition of "Unamerican" to include unintended pregnancy, the same groups that seek to re-form society to their perceived norms get one more weapon in their arsenal. And if doing so expands the public sphere that is a small price to pay, since now that expansion will fall under law enforcement and not social engineering.

If this sounds like a stretch, consider this: the same advocates of Amendment 2 in Florida and Proposition 8 in California, after assuring voters that these measures were not intended to strip rights from anyone, have commenced campaigns in both states to annul or revoke any benefits - public or private - for unmarried couples of any sexual persuasion under the provisions of the new laws, and are turning a blind eye to the rise in hate crimes that are accompanying their passage. Likewise, similar efforts as the North Dakota law have been used to run family planning out of other states and have encouraged practicing gynecologists to leave for less restrictive communities. And the national brouhaha that was the Terri Schaivo case proved that the Conservatives will eagerly engage whatever public bodies it deems necessary - along with all their attendant machinery - to achieve their goals. None of these are the actions of a group that values a hands-off public policy.

Of course, opposition to these moves is strong, so the likelihood of their success is low. But by pursuing these lines, those behind this push have made their goals clear: creation of a society aligned along their moral standards and criminalisation of any variation from those standards. These are not the values of a democracy.

Jumping The (Pool) Shark

... or, You Keep Using That Word, Part Two.

Apparently, a couple weeks back, a 'blogger penned a snarky little piece of satire stating that the administration was planning to replace the armed services oath's language swearing fealty to the Constitution with language swearing fealty to the President.

It was labeled satire. The byline was of a non-existent journalist. And the rest of the site is similarly smartly irreverent. It was clearly humour.

Some, apparently, either didn't get it, or didn't want to.

The label got left off and his bogus story was quickly copied and pasted on blogs, zapped around the country through chain e-mails, and discussed in YouTube commentaries. Many people didn't bother to verify it and responded with comments of outrage.

...

Some blogs were eventually corrected, or people posted comments that said the article was a fake, but others still carry the fake article. Brent Johnson, a radio host who posted the item on his Voice of Freedom blog, said he posted it without verifying it because "This is one of those stories where, if it is true, is so, so serious. It’s the kind of thing people need to know about in the chance it is true."

Before long the Digg website, YouTube, the Tree of Liberty 'blog, and various right-wing personalities had fallen for the fake story, trumpeting it in that "end of the world" tone as if it were true.

It's apparent from the article that more than a few still do not believe the article was not genuine.

I'm continually amazed that people who have shown a remarkable affinity to fascist governmental forms would be so quick to use the label of fascism as if it were a bad thing. Own your bias: don't be shy. When Communists, Immigrants and Unworthy Ethnic and Social Minorities are threatening your way of life, call them out in just those terms. It may not be as palatable to the rest of us, but it'll be far more accurate.

"You Keep Using That Word." *

Another example of how the far Right just doesn't get it.

One Jonathan Gardner, picking up on a Malkin talking point, seems to think that owning property equals slavery. Or something like that.

My favorite line:

I will never beg anyone for anything I can provide myself.

I suppose all those roads, law enforcement, schools and retirement assistance don't count. Oh, and good luck finding a job so you can go on providing for yourself.

H/T to Phydeaux.

* from The Princess Bride:

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.