That Lawrence Ray story is totally bizarre, starting with the phrase "moved into his daughter’s dormitory". Is that a thing? Do parents, or older people generally, live in students' dormitories now?
Wow, just got through reading that, and it's all legit crazy. To me, it's a reminder that abuse, whether it's of children or adults, is all about power, and if anybody insists on politicizing the question, I'd ask which political party seems to get a charge out of the exercise of power over vulnerable people, because that's the tendency that's going to attract the abusers.
I think one of the main reasons I find Dreher so endlessly amusing is every time he gnashes his teeth while pointing to some fresh civilizational “outrage” he claims is the height of decadence and will lead to civilizational collapse, I look at the same thing and think, “stop threatening me with a good time” lmao
More seriously, they are absolutely trying to equate a teacher acknowledging a student has two mommies or two daddies, or that the teacher themselves has a same-sex spouse, to child abuse and pornography. It is Anita Bryant 2.0, and anyone who hasn’t recognized by now that the Right starts with suppressing the most marginalized groups, and if they are successful works their way to literally everyone, needs to refresh their memories.
Yes, Anita Bryant- exactly right . This whole shtick dates back to Black & White TV. And it's the same old bunch of rubes getting riled up this year that got riled up in 1968. They'll be dead soon and seriously, nobody will give a shit who fucks who,how.
For obvious reasons I looked up the phrase "hoary Old Chestnut" . There's some bullshit explanation that it's a quote from some early nineteenth-century play that no one ever heard of. I doubt it. I did find out that "hoary" means white or gray or, possibly as a reference to white or gray hair, something old or out of date. I'll be honest, I was sort of thinking it was a " She doesn't exactly screw guys for money but if they want to help out with the bills she's fine with that " sort of thing.
I don't take much solace in contemplating the imminent deaths of the old right-wing assholes, because as time passes their juniors get older, more rightwing and bigger assholes.
The facility I work at has a relatively large seasonal staff - we are right at peak now ,say 130 people in building. We get a diverse group, Hardcore plant geeks, people just looking for a factory job. People who need to work part of the year but not all year and like the seasonal flexibility. We don't drug test so there's a following for that. All kinds of different people for all kinds of different reasons. We have high school kids working a couple of hours in the evening. Our custodian is a 78 year old pancreatic cancer survivor. People with degrees. High School dropouts. We used to pay shit and got a lot of heroin addicts. We started offering a decent wage with the pandemic and the quality of jobhunter drastically improved. All kinds of people .
Jeffrey, I swear that there are maybe 25 people with some sort of non traditional gender thing going on and it doesn't matter. Nobody really gives a shit. Everyone is pretty indifferent to the whole topic. The jobs are by nature ephemeral. Maybe it would be different if everyone did the same thing year round.
Suprises the hell out of me, really. It is kind of inspirational.
I don't tend to have a real charitable view of things ("worriedman" and all) This though, seems to be working out.
Maybe hoary derives from hoar frost, which is (I assume) arguably gray-white. If only there were some easily accessible repository of all knowledge we could look this up with with our fucking phones.
so using hoary old chestnut, is a Hoary Old Chestnut. Hoary probably relates to hoarfrost, which is a white coating of ice crystals formed by sublimation of atmospheric water vapor on a surface, not a cold, to you, woman, who will bang everyone else.
I think certain species of chestnut have fruits that covered in grey hairs as well as scary spines. And yes, as an archaic word itself [OE: hār "grey"], it's mostly used today to be something "archaic." Kind of fun.
Thanks to Manchin and Sinema - and every Republican Senator - we’re on a trajectory that won’t stop until they reinstitute slavery. Now, that’s Originalism! I wonder if Just-us Amy will mind giving up her suffrage?
The future of American slavery won’t be limited to Blacks. Our oligarch overlords will be happy to assume ownership of any employees driven into bankruptcy by school, medical, mortgage and credit card debt.
Slavery in the US was never limited to Black people,* Latine folx & Indigenous people were often enslaved. But yes, I can see a future where debt leads to fully-realized legal slavery.
* Pro tip: "Black" is an adjective of identity. It goes with a noun. The use of an adjective for identity alone or as in "the x" more than often carries a pejorative connotation. I'm not saying it's uncommon to use it this way, especially with peole over a certain age. But it could be more intentional.
This. It's taken a while to get to this point, and it's only recently we were able to determine the adjective of identity. (Example: my Yankee birth certificate says "Negro", capitalized. Although we're only two years apart, my spouse's Southern one says "colored", lower case.)
Gonna be interesting when Roe, Griswold, maybe Loving, et al, get reversed and the GOP ur-goal gets achieved: a federal state limited to national security/the MIC and enriching the sub-1% and all other rights relegated to state determination. It would or should follow that a state’s determination of a right should be absolute but I’ll bet that the GOP majority at SCOTUS will be able to transcend the rule of law and decide exactly what states can provide what rights.
I blame the dopers. When the states started ignoring federal law re: marijuana I assumed the next step would be ignoring federal law re: abortion, LGBTQetc rights (that is, human rights), federal environmental regs, and all the rest the individual states find inimical to the free exercise of their GG (godgiven) purpose.
My 2022 goal is to write more stuff that promotes the use of the term 'inimical'.
Fair enough, tho once states start refusing to enforce certain Fed laws, others will not be far behind.
Back when I was on the edge of law enforcement I signed onto the 'Enough With The Felony Convictions for a Few Grams of Weed' movement that was circulating in the cop community. Nothing ever came of it as near as I could see, until the states finally decided a couple decades later that weed is OK with them.
Well, the Constitutional point is that laws banning abortion are unconstitutional and such laws, generally if enforced the state can get sued and will lose. If the Roe precedent falls, then those state laws can be enforced with impunity in the Red States. This situation would not preclude Blue State from allowing abortion. At least until the Repubs take the Presidency, the House and the senate and pass a National "Fugitive Uterus" act. So abortion is almost the complete opposite of the drug law enforcement. That is if Roe is overturned. If Roe were somehow not overturned then the Red States might start enforcing their anti-abortion laws.
Maybe not? Suppose Roe gets overturned, lots and lots of people think, "Shit, they were really serious!" and decide that voting has consequences and they need to do it even in years not divisible by 4. Dems hold on to the House, even pick up a couple of seats in the Senate, and codify Roe v. Wade into law, so Brett n' Amy can't touch it. But that's just a start, we do the same thing with Griswold, Loving, etc. with laws at the federal level locking in these rights so the court can't take them away, hooray!
When a state bans fellatio, maybe we'll see some movement. I heard a Christian anti-{same-sex marriage} advocate c.2005 say they'd get around to it, but admitted that they knew that it wouldn't be popular and so they had to wait until the wider war were won.
See: not coming for Mischlings and the Jewish-descended, baptised, spouses of Christians who refused to divorce them until Victory Day. Even authoritarians sometimes have to pay _some_ attention to public opinion.
Just last week my Rightwing employer was telling me about the outrage OUTRAGE that his kids were being groomed by the gay agenda in school. "This is how they recruit, how they turn the kids gay," he said.
So I asked him: "Tell me--at what age do you think you could have been 'talked into' being gay?"
He got a weird look on his face before blurting out "Never!"
I said, "That's right. Because you're not gay. And for kids who are not gay, learning that gay people exist is not going to turn them gay. But for kids who are gay, maybe learning that they're not some sort of nature's freak weirdo will keep them from harming themselves."
To my delight, my boss actually calmed down about the whole "indoctrination" thing.
I think so. We've had similar conversations in the past. For example, a couple of years ago we were setting up a business deal with a gay couple. As time went by, he kept making speculative statements about their sex life. So I asked him if he thought about the sex life of any hetero couples he knew. He admitted that he didn't, and saw that it was kind of weird how he was fixating on these two guys. And he hasn't mentioned it since then.
He's eminently educable. but it takes getting him into situations where he has to think about why he's doing or thinking something.
I've had similar experiences with the RW staff I work with. Baby steps. I really, really, love how President Obama gave the term "teachable moment" a household name...
I think I posted this before but it bears repeating. Jesse Ventura was invited to the Republican Governors conference after his election as Minnesota’s governor as an independent. He was seated next to Sen. Trent Lott, known for his fabulous hair. The preacher’s “prayer” included a rant against choosing to be gay. Ventura, who wrestled in a pink boa, turned to Lott and said, “So, when did you choose?”
This. I've had similar conversations, albeit not as persuasive, with straight guys who think being gay is strictly a "life-style choice." Ask them, "so you mean, back in high school, you saw all those naked bodies in the gym and you thought to yourself "wow, these guys are HOT!" but you made a choice to resist the temptation of all that hot male action? You could have been gay but you -chose- not to?" and they get all flustered and angry and swear they've never had a gay thought in their macho lives.
Of course, they are beyond even considering that gayness is a legitimate lifestyle choice, too, but one stupid argument at a time.
There are an awful lot of men who have spent most of their lives desperately running away from the homoerotic thoughts they had in junior high and high school. I suspect Dreher is one of those men.
I suspect so, too. Like so many religious whack jobs, Dreher is an effing drama queen, never more than a portentious moment away from hysteria. He wrote a long time ago about the most traumatic event in his life when he was pantsed (or almost pantsed) by a bunch of bigger boys back in grammar school. Personally, I think his trauma came not from being humiliated by a bunch of boys, but his fear that they'd see his hard-on.
Remember, many of these people are Calvinists, so they simultaneously believe that 0.) modern culture is trying to turn their children into Hell-bound sinners and that 1.) who is Saved and who Damned was predetermined from the beginning of Time or before, and that it has _nothing_ to do with individual action—no individual is capable even of _really_ desiring to do good, and no amount they could do would merit their not being damned.
—on the other hand, pretty much all of the Trads would disagree with your boss, believing that _noöne_ were born anything but cis-heterosexual, but outside influences (and their Father the Devil) can make them so, likely anyone if they're so unlucky.
Joke c. 1965:
In a gay bar:
Man A: My mother made me a homosexual.
Man B: If I give her the wool, would she make one for _me_, too?
Wow, I never thought I'd have to be warned not to get out of the boat at your twitter feed. There are a large number of assholes aren't there? Or as I like to put it Assholes Abound. Or to quote Zappa: People suck.
Griswold is going away soon, and the Democrats cannot bring themselves to do what is needed to deal with the SC, that is increase it in size, because that would be well, just tacky.
Hell, even short of expanding the court, they had fifty years to codify Roe into law, and many times in that 50 year period when they held the trifecta, and yet they did nothing.
Being a big tent, they had many who thought abortion was icky and did the icky shuffle away from that legislation. Also, they probably thought precedents were binding on SCOTUS
Oh, I'm sure it's the case they didn't have the votes and that's why they never pursued it. It's just that Democrats often treat "we don't have the votes" as if it's written in stone, as if there's no way they could get the votes over time through the same sort of disciplined, patient effort that the anti-abortionists display.
And I don't think they could have believed that precedent would protect Roe, because I clearly remember Democratic candidates (and groups like Planned Parenthood and NARAL) loudly warning of the possibility of Roe going down, usually round about election time when they wanted some money. Not once did I hear a Democratic candidate or an abortion-rights group mention that Congress could actually do something to protect Roe (but I'm a poor listener, so maybe I missed that?)
IKR? But there are people - lots and lots of people! - who find his drama queen act energizing. It's a battle of Good vs. Evil! And here we are right in the middle of it! Like they're fighting on the outskirts of Kiev, but without, you know, any actual pain or risk. People are weird.
I'll play Little Miss Sunshine for a minute, and say that maybe it's a sign of progress? Once, the idea that a man could be fucking another adult man was The Worst Thing Ever, could get that man fired or even jailed. Now, because the majority of the population is fine with that and the homophobes can no longer get the reaction they want from "Look! It's a man! Who has sex with other men!" they've got to find some other trick to turn the dial up to 11. Connecting homosexuality to pedophilia (and yes, I know they always did that) is all they've got left, because they just can't get a reaction out of enough people if it's consenting adults.
First of all, I always upvote any comment containing the phrase "up to 11" as a matter of professional courtesy, so thanks for that.
Second, I remember a time (maybe 10-15 years ago, maybe more?) when the anti-LGBTQ groups (particularly those opposing same sex marriage) tried to push "gay sex is icky" as their primary talking point. "Tell people what those gays REALLY do and it will gross them out and they'll hate them!" they argued. What they failed to realize is that the sexual acts that they thought would disgust the normies were actually things that cis-gendered straight couples (even MARRIED couples!) did ALL THE TIME, because they were consenting adults and they thought those things were fun.
This demonstrated two realities: 1) the anti-LGBTQ people had no idea that what "counted" as healthy, positive, enjoyable sex varied greatly among the majority of Americans, and 2) they conflated sex and marriage. On that second point, there are married cis-gendered couples that have sex only rarely or never, just as there are same-sex couples who have sex rarely or never. It's almost as if the legal, psychological and societal benefits of marriage have little or nothing to do with sex. Imagine that!
I haven't run across the "gay sex is icky" argument in a while, so apparently it wasn't the slam dunk its proponents thought. Every now and then, some figure on the ultra-right such as Jim Hoft comes out as gay, and after the initial harrumphing dies down, no one cares because Hoft still writes the ultra-right crap his readers want to read, and they forget he's one of those hateful gays, because a little cognitive dissonance never hurt anyone, right?
So that leaves them with 1970s Anita Bryant-era arguments (which, sadly, I am old enough to remember from the first time) about gays "grooming" and "recruiting" kids.
If Dreher's worried about people who "care so much about the sexuality of kids", wait till he meets Dreher.
"Gay Florida Kindergarten Teacher Worries On MSNBC He Won’t Be Able To Share His Love Life With Kids Anymore" As if straight kindergarten teachers talked about fucking all the time and that was fine with everybody.
I know, right? Can anyone remember any instance of a teacher saying anything at all about their personal sexual lives while working as a teacher (I do not count post-retirement comments)? 'Cause I can't, and I schooled in Colorado and California, two of the states most likely to harbor the sorts of people for whom hot tubs and peacock feathers are staples of domestic life.
I still remember that feeling of shock when I saw one of my teachers in the grocery store, just the recognition that they eat was more than enough for me.
It's true, ever since they inducted me into their perverted "stick this thing into this one orifice in your body" cult, I haven't been able to stop! Sometimes two or even three times a day, it's never enough!
That's very kind of you to offer a prompt. I take back everything I ever said about you ;)
Nah, my main deal about anti-queer Xtns is that it's not deeply embedded in history: The few verses of the Tanakh that are used to justify LGBTQ exclusion or oppression were mistranslated. Jerome was a sex-negative cow. So was Paul (who is now thought to have had a same-sex companion). All of the them thought the world was ending immediately, and sex wasn't something that needed to be thought through.
What Church discourses existed about "sodomy" were mostly directed at monastic audiences (as well as originally generated in a Mediterranean world that was comfortable with same-sex desire). As the Western Middle Ages went forward, church writers had to tread lightly as (what we would call) bisexuality was not uncommon among the aristocracy, and no one really cared about the lower classes. Prosecutions for "sodomy" were exceedingly uncommon [and mostly politically motivated], more or less until the Inquisition in the 1500s.
[This doesn't mean that there wasn't invective: Old Norse records are filled with epithets & insults insinuating that a man was a "bottom."]
It's really the Puritans that bring strong anti-queer energy, along with strong sex-pleasure energy. We are their descendants.
I'll admit it, after Obergefell, i thought the gay marriage issue was settled, we had won, and "five years from now nobody's going to admit they were ever against gay marriage." You know, like what happened with interracial marriage.
Now I find out not even interracial marriage is settled.
With the rightwing it's like a game of whack-a-mole. Dreher himself was playing possum and calling marriage equality a done deal for years. But give them one opening -- like a 6-3 conservative SCOTUS -- and they come roaring back to void your marriage, control your body, and take away your contraceptives.
I don't know if any studies have been done on the subject, but if they were, I'm willing to bet all kinds of money that they would repeatedly show that Reichwing Republicans spend more time thinking about gay sex than actual gay people do.
It's a well-known psychological fact that the more you try *not* to think of elephants, the more you will think of them. Presumably applies to buttsecks as well.
“[The Satanic Temple] like to pretend that they don't really mean it, that they're just trolling right-wing Christians, but I don't buy it. They do mean it. This philosophy is being mainstreamed now....” -- Dreher
That is, they only pretend that their real agenda is to advance a kind of Trekkie-type humanism/civil libertarianism, and they're just dressing up as worshippers of the goat-headed Dark Lord; but if you look at their *real* philosophy, as displayed in their manifesto, you can plainly see the ominous truth that they make no secret of their... Trekkie-type humanism/civil libertarianism.
I can just imagine a STTOS episode in which the alien civilization has fallen prey to a paranoid religious cult which regards any display of difference (they would have kept the sex stuff allegorical only, of course) as dangerous heresy, with caning to death as the punishment. The title would have been “To Kiss the Rod,” maybe.
The thing that gets me about all this "hidden agenda" nonsense is that it's basically admitting that the things "they" are pursuing OPENLY aren't really that bad, and you have to go to the (conveniently) "hidden" part to get to anything that's actually bad.
It's like when someone tries the "slippery slope" argument with me, and I think, "Oh, so the thing you're against isn't really so bad after all, and we have to go three steps down the road to find something that MIGHT be bad? Thanks for letting me know!"
My wife is watching a Thai miniseries running now, about a young closeted gay man who marries a wealthy woman to try to keep his family from ruin. We were talking about how if the series had been made in the old days, like when we were growing up, the gay man would have been rewritten as a straight guy whose heartbreak is leaving his true love (the girl next door) behind to marry for money. And to think that this will now become the Florida version of the story as well.
The TeeVee is full of ads for Florida vacations, with the tagline, "A Florida vacation will take you exactly where you need to be." I had no idea that "where I need to be" is 1955, but who am I to argue with the TeeVee?
That Lawrence Ray story is totally bizarre, starting with the phrase "moved into his daughter’s dormitory". Is that a thing? Do parents, or older people generally, live in students' dormitories now?
Wow, just got through reading that, and it's all legit crazy. To me, it's a reminder that abuse, whether it's of children or adults, is all about power, and if anybody insists on politicizing the question, I'd ask which political party seems to get a charge out of the exercise of power over vulnerable people, because that's the tendency that's going to attract the abusers.
I think one of the main reasons I find Dreher so endlessly amusing is every time he gnashes his teeth while pointing to some fresh civilizational “outrage” he claims is the height of decadence and will lead to civilizational collapse, I look at the same thing and think, “stop threatening me with a good time” lmao
More seriously, they are absolutely trying to equate a teacher acknowledging a student has two mommies or two daddies, or that the teacher themselves has a same-sex spouse, to child abuse and pornography. It is Anita Bryant 2.0, and anyone who hasn’t recognized by now that the Right starts with suppressing the most marginalized groups, and if they are successful works their way to literally everyone, needs to refresh their memories.
Yes, Anita Bryant- exactly right . This whole shtick dates back to Black & White TV. And it's the same old bunch of rubes getting riled up this year that got riled up in 1968. They'll be dead soon and seriously, nobody will give a shit who fucks who,how.
For obvious reasons I looked up the phrase "hoary Old Chestnut" . There's some bullshit explanation that it's a quote from some early nineteenth-century play that no one ever heard of. I doubt it. I did find out that "hoary" means white or gray or, possibly as a reference to white or gray hair, something old or out of date. I'll be honest, I was sort of thinking it was a " She doesn't exactly screw guys for money but if they want to help out with the bills she's fine with that " sort of thing.
Not even haggling over the price...?
I don't take much solace in contemplating the imminent deaths of the old right-wing assholes, because as time passes their juniors get older, more rightwing and bigger assholes.
Nothing more depressing than seeing young Nazis, and realizing we're going to have to deal with this shit FOREVER.
Tomorrow Belongs To Me
They all think that so they fight amongst themselves. Baptists have the same problem.
I'm in the nursery business.
The facility I work at has a relatively large seasonal staff - we are right at peak now ,say 130 people in building. We get a diverse group, Hardcore plant geeks, people just looking for a factory job. People who need to work part of the year but not all year and like the seasonal flexibility. We don't drug test so there's a following for that. All kinds of different people for all kinds of different reasons. We have high school kids working a couple of hours in the evening. Our custodian is a 78 year old pancreatic cancer survivor. People with degrees. High School dropouts. We used to pay shit and got a lot of heroin addicts. We started offering a decent wage with the pandemic and the quality of jobhunter drastically improved. All kinds of people .
Jeffrey, I swear that there are maybe 25 people with some sort of non traditional gender thing going on and it doesn't matter. Nobody really gives a shit. Everyone is pretty indifferent to the whole topic. The jobs are by nature ephemeral. Maybe it would be different if everyone did the same thing year round.
Suprises the hell out of me, really. It is kind of inspirational.
I don't tend to have a real charitable view of things ("worriedman" and all) This though, seems to be working out.
Maybe hoary derives from hoar frost, which is (I assume) arguably gray-white. If only there were some easily accessible repository of all knowledge we could look this up with with our fucking phones.
so using hoary old chestnut, is a Hoary Old Chestnut. Hoary probably relates to hoarfrost, which is a white coating of ice crystals formed by sublimation of atmospheric water vapor on a surface, not a cold, to you, woman, who will bang everyone else.
I think certain species of chestnut have fruits that covered in grey hairs as well as scary spines. And yes, as an archaic word itself [OE: hār "grey"], it's mostly used today to be something "archaic." Kind of fun.
Hearted for correct spelling of 'grey'.
Thanks to Manchin and Sinema - and every Republican Senator - we’re on a trajectory that won’t stop until they reinstitute slavery. Now, that’s Originalism! I wonder if Just-us Amy will mind giving up her suffrage?
Yeah, and the whole flock of whities that claim slavery wasn't bad at all, to which one can only reply "OK, bud, you first."
The future of American slavery won’t be limited to Blacks. Our oligarch overlords will be happy to assume ownership of any employees driven into bankruptcy by school, medical, mortgage and credit card debt.
Slavery in the US was never limited to Black people,* Latine folx & Indigenous people were often enslaved. But yes, I can see a future where debt leads to fully-realized legal slavery.
* Pro tip: "Black" is an adjective of identity. It goes with a noun. The use of an adjective for identity alone or as in "the x" more than often carries a pejorative connotation. I'm not saying it's uncommon to use it this way, especially with peole over a certain age. But it could be more intentional.
This. It's taken a while to get to this point, and it's only recently we were able to determine the adjective of identity. (Example: my Yankee birth certificate says "Negro", capitalized. Although we're only two years apart, my spouse's Southern one says "colored", lower case.)
I've got an unbeatable comeback to that: "you know who defended slavery? DEMOCRATS!"
Among others, yes...
I choose my political party based on where they stood on the Free Silver question. That's why I vote Democrat.
'Cause who doesn't like Free Silver???
Bankers, apparently.
Neither a borrower nor a L. Enderbe
"Worse still is Rod Dreher"
No marks. Too obvious.
He's the worstest.
"Worsted" is Dreher in the past tense. "Dreher worsted again yesterday."
so...he had a close-textured surface with no nap?
Give me some wool, and I'll knit you a Rod.
All Wool And A Rod Long
My rod and my wool, they comfort...ah, forget it...he said, sheepishly...
Gonna be interesting when Roe, Griswold, maybe Loving, et al, get reversed and the GOP ur-goal gets achieved: a federal state limited to national security/the MIC and enriching the sub-1% and all other rights relegated to state determination. It would or should follow that a state’s determination of a right should be absolute but I’ll bet that the GOP majority at SCOTUS will be able to transcend the rule of law and decide exactly what states can provide what rights.
I blame the dopers. When the states started ignoring federal law re: marijuana I assumed the next step would be ignoring federal law re: abortion, LGBTQetc rights (that is, human rights), federal environmental regs, and all the rest the individual states find inimical to the free exercise of their GG (godgiven) purpose.
My 2022 goal is to write more stuff that promotes the use of the term 'inimical'.
My suggestion about "inimical" — just add lots of "imim" at the start.
Ex. iniminiminiminiminiminiminimical
I love typing 'minimum'...minunmiimiunuinmun
"aluminuminuminuminum" is fun, too, but only if you use the US pronunciation.
Someone say teachable moment?
The difference is drug laws are laws. Abortion and Gay Marriage, et alia are Constitutional rulings not Federal Laws
Fair enough, tho once states start refusing to enforce certain Fed laws, others will not be far behind.
Back when I was on the edge of law enforcement I signed onto the 'Enough With The Felony Convictions for a Few Grams of Weed' movement that was circulating in the cop community. Nothing ever came of it as near as I could see, until the states finally decided a couple decades later that weed is OK with them.
Well, the Constitutional point is that laws banning abortion are unconstitutional and such laws, generally if enforced the state can get sued and will lose. If the Roe precedent falls, then those state laws can be enforced with impunity in the Red States. This situation would not preclude Blue State from allowing abortion. At least until the Repubs take the Presidency, the House and the senate and pass a National "Fugitive Uterus" act. So abortion is almost the complete opposite of the drug law enforcement. That is if Roe is overturned. If Roe were somehow not overturned then the Red States might start enforcing their anti-abortion laws.
Maybe not? Suppose Roe gets overturned, lots and lots of people think, "Shit, they were really serious!" and decide that voting has consequences and they need to do it even in years not divisible by 4. Dems hold on to the House, even pick up a couple of seats in the Senate, and codify Roe v. Wade into law, so Brett n' Amy can't touch it. But that's just a start, we do the same thing with Griswold, Loving, etc. with laws at the federal level locking in these rights so the court can't take them away, hooray!
And a pony!
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Ponies ARE irresistible, but be strong!
Well, as the saying goes, "When the pony is irresistible, get on and enjoy it!"
No wait, I didn't mean it *that* way...
I'm placing the over/under for "Texas arrests a California woman who was visiting the state, because she'd had an abortion in California" at 6 years.
When a state bans fellatio, maybe we'll see some movement. I heard a Christian anti-{same-sex marriage} advocate c.2005 say they'd get around to it, but admitted that they knew that it wouldn't be popular and so they had to wait until the wider war were won.
See: not coming for Mischlings and the Jewish-descended, baptised, spouses of Christians who refused to divorce them until Victory Day. Even authoritarians sometimes have to pay _some_ attention to public opinion.
Just last week my Rightwing employer was telling me about the outrage OUTRAGE that his kids were being groomed by the gay agenda in school. "This is how they recruit, how they turn the kids gay," he said.
So I asked him: "Tell me--at what age do you think you could have been 'talked into' being gay?"
He got a weird look on his face before blurting out "Never!"
I said, "That's right. Because you're not gay. And for kids who are not gay, learning that gay people exist is not going to turn them gay. But for kids who are gay, maybe learning that they're not some sort of nature's freak weirdo will keep them from harming themselves."
To my delight, my boss actually calmed down about the whole "indoctrination" thing.
Well, for your sake I hope he did.
I think so. We've had similar conversations in the past. For example, a couple of years ago we were setting up a business deal with a gay couple. As time went by, he kept making speculative statements about their sex life. So I asked him if he thought about the sex life of any hetero couples he knew. He admitted that he didn't, and saw that it was kind of weird how he was fixating on these two guys. And he hasn't mentioned it since then.
He's eminently educable. but it takes getting him into situations where he has to think about why he's doing or thinking something.
I've had similar experiences with the RW staff I work with. Baby steps. I really, really, love how President Obama gave the term "teachable moment" a household name...
I think I posted this before but it bears repeating. Jesse Ventura was invited to the Republican Governors conference after his election as Minnesota’s governor as an independent. He was seated next to Sen. Trent Lott, known for his fabulous hair. The preacher’s “prayer” included a rant against choosing to be gay. Ventura, who wrestled in a pink boa, turned to Lott and said, “So, when did you choose?”
Good Jedi mind trick there. If I ever get the chance, I'll copy it.
This. I've had similar conversations, albeit not as persuasive, with straight guys who think being gay is strictly a "life-style choice." Ask them, "so you mean, back in high school, you saw all those naked bodies in the gym and you thought to yourself "wow, these guys are HOT!" but you made a choice to resist the temptation of all that hot male action? You could have been gay but you -chose- not to?" and they get all flustered and angry and swear they've never had a gay thought in their macho lives.
Of course, they are beyond even considering that gayness is a legitimate lifestyle choice, too, but one stupid argument at a time.
There are an awful lot of men who have spent most of their lives desperately running away from the homoerotic thoughts they had in junior high and high school. I suspect Dreher is one of those men.
I suspect so, too. Like so many religious whack jobs, Dreher is an effing drama queen, never more than a portentious moment away from hysteria. He wrote a long time ago about the most traumatic event in his life when he was pantsed (or almost pantsed) by a bunch of bigger boys back in grammar school. Personally, I think his trauma came not from being humiliated by a bunch of boys, but his fear that they'd see his hard-on.
Remember, many of these people are Calvinists, so they simultaneously believe that 0.) modern culture is trying to turn their children into Hell-bound sinners and that 1.) who is Saved and who Damned was predetermined from the beginning of Time or before, and that it has _nothing_ to do with individual action—no individual is capable even of _really_ desiring to do good, and no amount they could do would merit their not being damned.
—on the other hand, pretty much all of the Trads would disagree with your boss, believing that _noöne_ were born anything but cis-heterosexual, but outside influences (and their Father the Devil) can make them so, likely anyone if they're so unlucky.
Joke c. 1965:
In a gay bar:
Man A: My mother made me a homosexual.
Man B: If I give her the wool, would she make one for _me_, too?
No. But if you round up enough steel wool, she could knit you a stove.
Wow, I never thought I'd have to be warned not to get out of the boat at your twitter feed. There are a large number of assholes aren't there? Or as I like to put it Assholes Abound. Or to quote Zappa: People suck.
Griswold is going away soon, and the Democrats cannot bring themselves to do what is needed to deal with the SC, that is increase it in size, because that would be well, just tacky.
Hell, even short of expanding the court, they had fifty years to codify Roe into law, and many times in that 50 year period when they held the trifecta, and yet they did nothing.
Being a big tent, they had many who thought abortion was icky and did the icky shuffle away from that legislation. Also, they probably thought precedents were binding on SCOTUS
Oh, I'm sure it's the case they didn't have the votes and that's why they never pursued it. It's just that Democrats often treat "we don't have the votes" as if it's written in stone, as if there's no way they could get the votes over time through the same sort of disciplined, patient effort that the anti-abortionists display.
And I don't think they could have believed that precedent would protect Roe, because I clearly remember Democratic candidates (and groups like Planned Parenthood and NARAL) loudly warning of the possibility of Roe going down, usually round about election time when they wanted some money. Not once did I hear a Democratic candidate or an abortion-rights group mention that Congress could actually do something to protect Roe (but I'm a poor listener, so maybe I missed that?)
I remember Berger's opinion from Bowers contained the phrase "from time immemorial." That's their idea of precedent.
Dreher's incessant hysteria is exhausting.
He's like a constantly seething panic attack
IKR? But there are people - lots and lots of people! - who find his drama queen act energizing. It's a battle of Good vs. Evil! And here we are right in the middle of it! Like they're fighting on the outskirts of Kiev, but without, you know, any actual pain or risk. People are weird.
Grooming. Seriously? We all know what team the Youth Pastors play for...
"They have slipped the surly bounds of reality."
I'll be honest, I've paid for that privilege.
I used my hard earned money.
I'll play Little Miss Sunshine for a minute, and say that maybe it's a sign of progress? Once, the idea that a man could be fucking another adult man was The Worst Thing Ever, could get that man fired or even jailed. Now, because the majority of the population is fine with that and the homophobes can no longer get the reaction they want from "Look! It's a man! Who has sex with other men!" they've got to find some other trick to turn the dial up to 11. Connecting homosexuality to pedophilia (and yes, I know they always did that) is all they've got left, because they just can't get a reaction out of enough people if it's consenting adults.
First of all, I always upvote any comment containing the phrase "up to 11" as a matter of professional courtesy, so thanks for that.
Second, I remember a time (maybe 10-15 years ago, maybe more?) when the anti-LGBTQ groups (particularly those opposing same sex marriage) tried to push "gay sex is icky" as their primary talking point. "Tell people what those gays REALLY do and it will gross them out and they'll hate them!" they argued. What they failed to realize is that the sexual acts that they thought would disgust the normies were actually things that cis-gendered straight couples (even MARRIED couples!) did ALL THE TIME, because they were consenting adults and they thought those things were fun.
This demonstrated two realities: 1) the anti-LGBTQ people had no idea that what "counted" as healthy, positive, enjoyable sex varied greatly among the majority of Americans, and 2) they conflated sex and marriage. On that second point, there are married cis-gendered couples that have sex only rarely or never, just as there are same-sex couples who have sex rarely or never. It's almost as if the legal, psychological and societal benefits of marriage have little or nothing to do with sex. Imagine that!
I haven't run across the "gay sex is icky" argument in a while, so apparently it wasn't the slam dunk its proponents thought. Every now and then, some figure on the ultra-right such as Jim Hoft comes out as gay, and after the initial harrumphing dies down, no one cares because Hoft still writes the ultra-right crap his readers want to read, and they forget he's one of those hateful gays, because a little cognitive dissonance never hurt anyone, right?
So that leaves them with 1970s Anita Bryant-era arguments (which, sadly, I am old enough to remember from the first time) about gays "grooming" and "recruiting" kids.
A little cognitive dissonance is sheer torture and never hurt anyone.
https://edroso.substack.com/p/anitas-way?s=w
"They have slipped the surly bounds of reality."
"Bounds" or "bonds", either way, a phrase to conjugate with.
"And touched the... face ... of God." Um, yeah, I think it was definitely his face I touched.
I was told that might happen but I was disappointed.
You are a blind man, and God is the elephant
"Um... that's not my tail."
If Dreher's worried about people who "care so much about the sexuality of kids", wait till he meets Dreher.
"Gay Florida Kindergarten Teacher Worries On MSNBC He Won’t Be Able To Share His Love Life With Kids Anymore" As if straight kindergarten teachers talked about fucking all the time and that was fine with everybody.
I know, right? Can anyone remember any instance of a teacher saying anything at all about their personal sexual lives while working as a teacher (I do not count post-retirement comments)? 'Cause I can't, and I schooled in Colorado and California, two of the states most likely to harbor the sorts of people for whom hot tubs and peacock feathers are staples of domestic life.
"people for whom hot tubs"
Swingers, you mean?
You taught in Colorado? That's where I'm from -- went to school in Boulder & Longmont & then Lyons. Univ of Colordo alum.
Ha! "Was schooled"...
And dunno about the swingin' set, but can attest to the tubs, if not directly the feathers...
I still remember that feeling of shock when I saw one of my teachers in the grocery store, just the recognition that they eat was more than enough for me.
And he saw you, and from that point on he groomed you as a young eater of food. For shame.
It's true, ever since they inducted me into their perverted "stick this thing into this one orifice in your body" cult, I haven't been able to stop! Sometimes two or even three times a day, it's never enough!
I usually have lots to say. Today I'm just too sad about this all...
Can you maybe work up a medieval analogy? Seriously, there's probly lotsa* folx here who might be eager to read your insights.
*Relatively speaking...
Maybe feudalism on the way to slavery?
Resistance Is Feudal!
That's very kind of you to offer a prompt. I take back everything I ever said about you ;)
Nah, my main deal about anti-queer Xtns is that it's not deeply embedded in history: The few verses of the Tanakh that are used to justify LGBTQ exclusion or oppression were mistranslated. Jerome was a sex-negative cow. So was Paul (who is now thought to have had a same-sex companion). All of the them thought the world was ending immediately, and sex wasn't something that needed to be thought through.
What Church discourses existed about "sodomy" were mostly directed at monastic audiences (as well as originally generated in a Mediterranean world that was comfortable with same-sex desire). As the Western Middle Ages went forward, church writers had to tread lightly as (what we would call) bisexuality was not uncommon among the aristocracy, and no one really cared about the lower classes. Prosecutions for "sodomy" were exceedingly uncommon [and mostly politically motivated], more or less until the Inquisition in the 1500s.
[This doesn't mean that there wasn't invective: Old Norse records are filled with epithets & insults insinuating that a man was a "bottom."]
It's really the Puritans that bring strong anti-queer energy, along with strong sex-pleasure energy. We are their descendants.
"church writers had to tread lightly"
Ain't that always the way – heavy treads and heavenly heights don't mix.
Thanks for that. I'll remember it next time someone tries to scare me by warning that "We're going back to the Dark Ages."
You probably already know John Boswell's "Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe." Plenty in there to distress the Puritans.
I just wanna be the shop steward.
Solidarity Occasionally!
I'll admit it, after Obergefell, i thought the gay marriage issue was settled, we had won, and "five years from now nobody's going to admit they were ever against gay marriage." You know, like what happened with interracial marriage.
Now I find out not even interracial marriage is settled.
I still say, 50 years from now they're going to claim they invented LGBQ rights.
Well, they are the Party of Lincoln, after all.
"Lincoln? Party of 2? Lincoln?"
Their response to the pandemic shows they're really the Party of Donner
Pass.
With the rightwing it's like a game of whack-a-mole. Dreher himself was playing possum and calling marriage equality a done deal for years. But give them one opening -- like a 6-3 conservative SCOTUS -- and they come roaring back to void your marriage, control your body, and take away your contraceptives.
From my cold dead hand
Now you got it.
Well, if I got it I'll try not to spread it to anyone else.
I don't know if any studies have been done on the subject, but if they were, I'm willing to bet all kinds of money that they would repeatedly show that Reichwing Republicans spend more time thinking about gay sex than actual gay people do.
It's a well-known psychological fact that the more you try *not* to think of elephants, the more you will think of them. Presumably applies to buttsecks as well.
In Which The Party Of Child Molesters Has Thoughts About What Kind Of Sex Should Be Allowed
“[The Satanic Temple] like to pretend that they don't really mean it, that they're just trolling right-wing Christians, but I don't buy it. They do mean it. This philosophy is being mainstreamed now....” -- Dreher
That is, they only pretend that their real agenda is to advance a kind of Trekkie-type humanism/civil libertarianism, and they're just dressing up as worshippers of the goat-headed Dark Lord; but if you look at their *real* philosophy, as displayed in their manifesto, you can plainly see the ominous truth that they make no secret of their... Trekkie-type humanism/civil libertarianism.
I can just imagine a STTOS episode in which the alien civilization has fallen prey to a paranoid religious cult which regards any display of difference (they would have kept the sex stuff allegorical only, of course) as dangerous heresy, with caning to death as the punishment. The title would have been “To Kiss the Rod,” maybe.
The thing that gets me about all this "hidden agenda" nonsense is that it's basically admitting that the things "they" are pursuing OPENLY aren't really that bad, and you have to go to the (conveniently) "hidden" part to get to anything that's actually bad.
It's like when someone tries the "slippery slope" argument with me, and I think, "Oh, so the thing you're against isn't really so bad after all, and we have to go three steps down the road to find something that MIGHT be bad? Thanks for letting me know!"
My wife is watching a Thai miniseries running now, about a young closeted gay man who marries a wealthy woman to try to keep his family from ruin. We were talking about how if the series had been made in the old days, like when we were growing up, the gay man would have been rewritten as a straight guy whose heartbreak is leaving his true love (the girl next door) behind to marry for money. And to think that this will now become the Florida version of the story as well.
The TeeVee is full of ads for Florida vacations, with the tagline, "A Florida vacation will take you exactly where you need to be." I had no idea that "where I need to be" is 1955, but who am I to argue with the TeeVee?
Ma, SteveB's arguin' with the TeeVee agin!
I'll let you know when it starts to argue back.
I bet if Dreher and Son of Erick hooked up, they’d go good together.