I don’t fully understand why lame-ass Republican politicians have suddenly decided they need to pretend to be big fans of hip-hop that came out 20 years ago to prove they’re cool, but here we are. Gawker reports on the latest “I’m hip because in college I heard a rap song at a frat party” Republican politician, Trey Radel, and it’s pretty amazing how hard he struggles to try to sound like he knows what he’s talking about.

The money quote:

The first [song that represents my views on Washington] that I would have to refer to would be ‘Fight the Power,’ by Public Enemy. This is a song that… if you really get down to it, reflects the conservative message of having a heavy handed federal government… Chuck D of Public Enemy and I may disagree on certain philosophies of government, but I think at the end of the day— and this is where I take my love of hip hop music— where there have been issues and problems with either heavy handed law enforcement… or heavy handed government itself.

Yeah, Public Enemy! Definitely Republicans. That’s the ticket. There are so many lyrics in “Fight The Power” that reflect the Republican message so thoroughly, no wonder he had a hard time naming on specifically. So I thought I’d offer a selection, so you guys can vote on which one you think is the most evocative of modern Republican politics.

Share other hip-lyrics that you feel future Republican politicians should quote to show how much their favorite rappers are really conservatives at heart.

Yesterday, I mentioned as an aside the harassment campaign against feminist atheists conducted by a very small but very dedicated group of sexists whose two main complaints appear to be: 1) Sexual harassment is a holy right and conferences shouldn’t have policies banning it and 2) It should be verboten for feminists to discuss the overlap between secularism and feminism, and how to best use this overlap to achieve our mutual goals. By and large, I just block these assholes on Twitter, and frankly, they are so small in number that it only took about a dozen blockings until they went away completely.* I find them irritating, but absolutely not relevant people. They might as well be mad that I don’t believe their “abducted by aliens” story. Denying patriarchy and sexism is like other kinds of denialism, such as claiming that the Confederacy was about “states rights” and not slavery: Obviously irrational horseshit that should be studied from afar, but there’s no value in engaging with people who are so delusional.

That’s why I have mixed feelings about the Houston Chronicle covering the “controversy” over the existence of Women in Secularism. My concern is that the inevitable process of quoting people from “both sides” creates a false equivalence, much like having climate scientists “debate” global warming denialists creates the illusion that there’s a controversy, when in fact it’s more akin to a struggle between reasonable people and irrationalists with an agenda. You see that problem in this piece. The feminist voices are, by and large, mainstream voices of actual experts who are supported by the mainstream secularist community. The anti-feminists are fringe characters who run hate sites and have had the Southern Poverty Law Center look into them. There’s not an authentic conflict here, but more a story about how normal people going about important business are being harassed by fringe characters with nothing of value to say.

On the flip side, the reporter gives the haters enough rope to hang themselves.

 As Justin Vacula of Skeptic Ink Network said in response to another piece from conference speaker Amanda Marcotte, “I fail to see how refusing to believe in God leads to the ‘logical conclusion’ of abandoning the belief that women exist to serve men.”

Well, at least we know where he stands. I, for one, appreciate an anti-feminist who comes right out and says it. I do grow weary of those whose cowardice in the face of people’s repulsion towards them argue for female inferiority ellipitically.

(Via.)

Since you guys were batting around a troll who was absolutely rock solid sure that “fake geek girls” were out to get him, I thought I’d share with you this interesting piece from a guy who admits he used to think this way, but has gotten over it. A quote:

See how early the toxicity enters the equation? Without knowing it, geeky activity became my excuse, a shield from potential failures. It’s not my fault that I’m not meeting more people and learning social skills, it’s their fault for liking football instead of cool stuff like Star Trek. The only reason I can’t get a girlfriend is because none of them like what I do….

And so, when a boy sees a girl who’s just trying to share her love of geek stuff, he lashes out at her. She’s an indication that this wall of excuses he’s built up is total bullshit. Rather than sit back and untangle the web of flawed convictions he has, he’d rather attack the reminder of his own cowardice. You see this all the time when people’s belief structures are threatened by reality. Rather than incorporate new information, they attack and try to discredit it.

To an insecure geek guy, a genuine geek woman’s existence is saying “you have no excuse.” And boy are we invested in those excuses.

By no means is this writer trying to explain all misogyny this way, of course. It’s just one way that it develops. He’s certainly not trying to excuse it, either. His entire point is that men grab onto misogyny as a life raft to avoid looking at their own flaws and failures. It comes in various forms, but at the end of the day, it always comes back to trying to feel bigger and more powerful by telling yourself that not only are you superior to half the human race by birth, but that they exist, to quote Vacula, to “serve men”. And that you are free, therefore, to judge them strictly by their willingness to please you, and to treat them like garbage. And, if they fight back, then you are justified in your hatred of them. The writer, Lawrence Sonntag, is quite clear that this dynamic hurts women more than men, saying, “And for the women who have the courage to stand up to this garbage on a daily basis? Please, never think for one second that you deserve a fraction of it.” But he does make a good point that this kind of toxicity also infects its host, making their lives smaller and meaner and less joyous every day they dwell in this misogynist space. Certainly,  my interactions with misogynists have done nothing to dispel that notion.

*In contrast, I have to block a couple of anti-choicers screeching lies and invective at me on a slow day, and dozens when they have some bug up their ass about something that they inevitably don’t even understand. Seriously, blocking people on Twitter who refuse to engage in good faith is awesome, and I can’t recommend it enough. It turns a platform that can seem like a bunch of hateful noise into a space where interesting information and opinions are being exchanged. Social media works if you’re willing to do the work of pruning.

The woman in question is a data cruncher for a gaming company, and she objected to her CEO not only hanging this picture in their offices, but treating it practically as an object of worship, which he made his employees sign and hung in a central location.

So she had her friend Sam Kirk draw up another image, which she switched out for the above one.

She buckled down and waited for the usual excuse-making, double standard-defending, and of course, whining about how it’s “man-hating” to expect equal treatment in geek spaces. But luckily, none of that happened! Instead, most people were amused and the CEO even thanked her.

That was a brilliant prank. You called me on exactly the bullshit I need to be called on. I put up pictures of half-naked girls around the office all the time and I never think about it. I’m taking you and Sam to lunch. And after that, we’re going to hang both prints, side by side.

And that is what they did. Maybe not a perfect solution, but it certainly changes the impact of a half-naked lady poster to have a half-naked man poster next to it. Now the message is less, “This is a boy’s club” and more, “We laugh at ourselves here”.

I bring this up because I’m one of the speakers at Women in Secularism, which starts on Friday in D.C. (There’s still time to register, if you want to come!)  The very existence of this conference is threatening to a lot of people who either believe that women should remain a small minority in secular activism, that they should embrace the role of disempowered harassment objects, or that feminist ideas—i.e. the belief that women are equal human beings—have no place in secular spaces, despite the long history of secularism and feminism being intertwined. I’ve been made to understand that many of these folks have been upping their already obsessive levels of harassment and making threats of showing up simply to harass people for holding the offensive belief that women have something to contribute as people and not just as sex objects. So I wanted to remind people not to let those bastards get you down. They don’t speak for the majority. They exploit the anonymity of the internet to make themselves seem greater in number than they are, mainly by posting non-stop and having no life outside of being angry that feminists are engaged in secular activism. But as this story shows, the fuck-you-women-are-objects-n0t-people attitude is not inevitable, and conversations can actually be had and good faith does exist. So, a bit of optimism!

And come to Women in Secularism!

Why is it that so many technological innovations are immediately pounced upon by creepy dudes whose only thought is, “How can I use this to abuse and punish women for their continuing insistence that they are full human beings instead of walking sex toys that  I should be able to use how I like?” Most news coverage regarding drones is about the debate over their use as weapons, so you might not know that drones—which are basically just flying robots—are sold commercially and can be used for all sorts of stuff. Mostly as toys, frankly, but that’s okay. That’s mostly what smart phones are used for, and that’s a good thing, since fun is good.

Except, of course, the Creeps of America have decided to use them to spy on women in their homes. In Seattle, a woman reported to the media a confrontation with a man who kept flying a drone around her house, one that had a camera.

This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield. I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day. After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away. My husband went to talk to the man on the sidewalk outside our home who was operating the drone with a remote control, to ask him to not fly his drone near our home. The man insisted that it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows. He noted that the drone has a camera, which transmits images he viewed through a set of glasses. He purported to be doing “research”. We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom.

Now, there’s a lot of possibilities here, but the proliferation of men in parking lots and public transportation trying to get “creep shots” suggests that on the list of likely possibilities, that this guy is trying to win Reddit by getting the creepiest shot ranks high. Unfortunately, as Rebecca Rosen reports at The Atlantic, this is a legal gray area—this is a consistent problem when it comes to men forcing unwilling women into amateur porn—meaning that remedies outside of just legal prosecution of these assholes might have to be considered.

I know some of our readers here have been involved in groups like End Revenge Porn, so I encourage you to share your experiences fighting this shit in comments. In the aftermath of the Cleveland abductions, it appears we’re not actually going to have a national conversation about the widespread cultural problem of those men amongst us who assume that women they encounter are theirs for the taking. Of course, most creeps don’t take it to the lengths that Ariel Castro did, in no small part because they seem to be obsessed with figuring out what the laws are and taking as much as they feel they can without getting into legal trouble. But there’s a common underlying principle behind forcing women into “creep shot” porn and illegal actions like kidnapping and rape: It’s all about erasing a woman’s right to control her body and insisting that no, you get to use it for your sexual and sadistic kicks whether she likes it or not.

The law can only do so much. The only way to fix this problem is to see creeps of all levels for who they are, and not treat it like it’s a harmless problem right up until they break an actual law like trespassing, kidnapping, or sexual assault. Which means social shunning, outing of men who share creep shots online, and internet services being responsive to requests for swift removal of non-consenting porn.

New Orange Couch! Marc and I discuss the themes of dominance and submission, history repeating itself, and authenticity vs. substitution. My  Texas heart soared to see the overt allusions to The Last Picture Show.

For a person who works in creative, Don sure likes to think that the only route to power is destruction. How many people did he he try to obliterate and dominate, either directly or indirectly, this episode? Ted and Sylvia are the most obvious ones, but it’s clear that he’s also trying to squish Peggy and Arnie through his mind fucks of Ted and Sylvia. Despite seeming like a man not at home in the 60s, he actually is pretty well aligned with the destructive forces that worked through the culture at that time, forces we’re reminded of by Bobby Kennedy’s assassination.

On the “history repeats itself” front, Marc makes an interesting observation that just because people do the same thing over and over again doesn’t mean that they produce the same results. Both Kennedy brothers were shot by lone madmen, but one assassination led to the election of LBJ and the other to Richard Nixon, who I think we can safely say were very different men (though they both prosecuted the pointless Vietnam war). Don’s little dominance games fail to squish any of the people he struck out to squish. He tries to roll up Megan into the generic “wife” role that he stuck Betty with, but it’s hard to deny that they’re very different people. Don may want the rest of the world to accept that they’re just toys for him to play with, but they’re finally declining his offer.

That’s why I keep dwelling over the final shot of Don being oblivious to the Kennedy assassination while Megan is overwhelmed with emotion. Another character—I forget who—suggests that the assassinations are blending into each other at this point, and I think that’s what Don is basically suggesting by ignoring the TV. But Megan—who is pretty much always in the right whenever she conflicts with Don—is still honoring this tragedy as its own, unique tragedy that needs to be mourned just as surely as all the others. It’s not an indistinguishable stream of violence. Each assassination is different, with different reasons it happened and different results. It’s not naive to believe that, but it’s just the truth. What that means for Don, however, is hard to say. As hard, presumably, as it was for a bunch of liberal New Yorkers in 1968 to grasp that Nixon really, truly was going to win this one.

Thoughts? Opinions? Fantasies about how Don gets his well-deserved comeuppance?

I hope you all have been following the entire kerfuffle over the Heritage Foundation’s “researchers”, a man named Jason Richwine, who has been outed as a proponent of the idea that Hispanics are genetically inferior people born with a hardwired low IQ. The Heritage Foundation is playing the “how could we have ever known?!” card, but no one of any IQ is buying it, since he’s been on about this belief for a long time. Zack Beauchamp of Think Progress has a post up analyzing why conservatives keep circling back to this IQ horseshit, even though it’s unscientific and racist as all get-out. Well worth reading the whole thing, but an excerpt:

These spats don’t generally endear conservatism to the general public, so it’s not like this is a political move. So why is it that the right-of-center intelligentsia keeps coming back to this topic? I’d suggest two reasons: first, a link between race and IQ moots the moral imperative for public policy aimed at addressing systemic poverty; second, it allows conservatives to take up the mantle of disinterested, dispassionate intellectual they so love.

A chance to be disingenuous, preening fuckwits while also justifying the persistence of poverty? That shit attracts conservative blowhards like it was a half-off sale on relaxed fit pleated khakis.

My take on the whole thing is simple: It’s the only way out of the corner that conservatives have backed themselves into when it comes to persistent social inequalities. Like Zack says, conservatives start from the premise that the existence of poverty and the way that people of color suffer from it much more than white people cannot, by any means, be attributed to social pressures and public policy, because that would imply that we should change public policy to change these inequities. Nor can they just come out and say they like having an underclass to exploit for cheap labor, because that (still) sounds un-American. So they’re left with only one option: Blaming people of color themselves for these problems, by saying they somehow just aren’t hacking it in our totally fair meritocracy.

In other words, the only thing left is a blatantly racist argument. I know this causes all sorts of defensive whining and fussing, but stating that group X is inherently inferior to group Y is racism distilled. The usual defense of this is, “It’s not racist if it’s true!” Enter the IQ debate, an attempt to create some impressive-sounding psuedo-science they can pass off as facts. It’s not actually facts or science, but it sounds enough like it to bamboozle people. Or so they hope, anyway. Going after Hispanics this way really exposes this, because “Hispanic” has only been understood by Americans as a racial category for a few decades. Are they willing to state on the record that there’s a low-IQ gene that originated in Spain and that only Spanish people and those people worldwide who have Spanish heritage somewhere back there have it? I kind of hope they do, because if you’re being an asshole, why not go whole hog on it?

Hiding that wedding ring in between bouts of restricting birth control access is a straight man’s god-given right.

Via Roy, who reads National Review Online so the rest of us don’t have to, has an amusing post up about their reaction to Mark Sanford winning in South Carolina. Times like these tend to reveal the deep insecurity at the heart of modern conservatism. Stronger assholes would blow right past liberal accusations of hypocrisy aimed at those who want to pass laws controlling the sexual behavior of the rest of us while rewarding an obnoxious adulterer with a congressional seat. But no, they have to come up with a bunch of rationalizations that are rather boring in their transparency.

Or, that’s Jonah Goldberg’s role, anyway. What I thought was interesting about Roy’s post is that he found in the mix a true believer, some poor woman who actually seems to think that “family values” is a meaningful phrase and not just a dog whistle for endorsing straight male dominance. Hilary Towers writes:

Once upon a time in this country

Right off the bat you know that she’s not actually referring to the real past, but telling a fairy tale about an imagined past that never was.

Once upon a time in this country, moral integrity, emotional (and even spiritual) maturity, and a servant’s heart were considered important characteristics of public leaders. In Mark Sanford we find a case study in how far removed we’re becoming from that standard. When did abandoning one’s spouse and children for an extramarital affair become compatible with conservativism? Apologies are meaningless when they are followed by more of the same. Sanford describes himself as “one imperfect man saved by God’s grace.” But the problem with this win (and here is who South Carolina voters could have elected if they had put values first) isn’t that Sanford isn’t perfect. Marriage is hard, and every spouse has virtues and vices — defects of character with which they will struggle throughout their married lives. But marriages don’t “fall apart” as a result of falling in love with another person; they are all too often destroyed from within by a self-love that transcends marital bonds and spills over into every aspect of one’s existence. It is time for conservatives to publicly recognize the widespread phenomenon of spousal abandonment, and the system of “family law” that supports it, for what they both are — a national scandal.

She seems to actually believe this “family values” and “traditional marriage” horseshit conservatives pump out!

No, seriously, she is really concerned about this crap.

Look, I’ll give it to you straight: Republicans are absolutely, 100% hypocrites if you take their blather about marriage and family at face value. But you’re not supposed to take it at face value. We all understand, or most of us not named “Hilary Towers” do, that “marriage” and “family” are all code words the right uses to mean good, old-fashioned gay-bashing, lady-controlling, child-abusing patriarchy. Straight white men get a behavior exemption from their moralism and god-bothering, as long as they make sure to repeat the pious bullshit that is used strictly to justify stripping women of reproductive rights, stifling gay rights, and treating children like property instead of full human beings in their own right. Taking a mistress is not in violation of their actual, pro-patriarchy values. In fact, nothing says you’re a powerful man who runs things like being able to fuck whoever you want, regardless of who it hurts, while making other people’s lives miserable for their own private sexual choices. Even those that are made by us boring people who aren’t causing personal pain and suffering with our choices.

That’s why it’s hilarious to see Republicans try to pull out the various Democratic adulterers to make it “even” somehow. By and large, the Democrats aren’t trying to legally punish everyone else for fucking while reserving the right of hanky-panky for themselves. (There are always exceptions, sadly, but the overall theme of the Democratic party’s policies on sexual rights is, “You kids have fun.”) Liberals toss the word “hypocrite” around a lot regarding these cheatin’ conservatives, because it seems to be the only thing most of the media gives a shit about. But the real issue here is not that conservatives are hypocrites so much as they are trying to reinstall a system where rich straight white guys get to do whatever they want, and everyone else is fucked. Sadly, that’s a conversation people get all bunched up over discussing honestly, so I guess pointing out formal hypocrisy is what we’ve got to go with.

Save the dogs (and the women).

Sometimes I wonder if Cary Tennis is deliberately fucking with us with his advice column. I don’t know why people write him. The latest edition of his column has a letter that’s as horrifying as his response is glib. A bit of the letter:

I recently visited my best friend from college — we had not seen each other in three years and have been talking over Skype on a weekly basis until now. She is getting married on Friday to a monster I had the great displeasure of meeting this last week. On the first morning I was with her at her house, I noticed her 1-year-old dog had a problem with her eye, ear and back. I asked what happened and she responded, “I’m not going to lie, my fiancé beat the shit out of her.”

I was in shock. I didn’t know what to say to her until later in the afternoon when I said I was very concerned for her safety. She shrugged me off and said he has never been bad to her, he is very stressed at work, and then said, “That’s what battered women say, right?” When the violence occurred, she was not home — when she came home and found her dog blinded on one side and more than likely bleeding internally, she did not take her to the vet. Instead, she told her fiancé that if he ever hit the dog again, she would be gone. She has been afraid to seek help for the dog, who is obviously suffering.

The wedding is on Friday, and the letter writer tried to talk her friend out of it, with assistance from a domestic violence hotline. The woman, unsurprisingly, isn’t listening to reason. She says the boyfriend doesn’t beat her and made some excuses for this inexcusable violence against the dog. (My guess is he did it not because he’s “stressed at work”, but because with the guest list in, the flowers on their way, and the dress purchased, he figured the bride would feel she has to go through with the wedding. So he decided to test her boundaries by attacking her dog. If he is not already beating her, I predict it will start shortly after the wedding, possibly during the honeymoon. Increasing commitment often leads to escalating abuse, because abusers feel they can get away with more without losing the victim.) So the letter writer wants to know what to do. Should she call the bride’s mother and animal control?

Tennis does say she should make these calls, but then breezes past that quickly to tell her to—I’m not kidding—formally object at the wedding when the officiant asks if anyone objects. I’m guessing he hasn’t been to a wedding in a long time, or he’d know that most ceremonies these days don’t feature the officiant asking if people object. (It’s in some religious ceremonies, as a holdover from the era in at least English history where objections from people in the community could legally prevent a marriage.) But even if that’s in the ceremony, it’s more of a stunt than effective action. It’s more about making the letter writer feel righteous than anything else.

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of bystander intervention, and this is a perfect example of a situation where a single person, by taking action, can make a huge difference. This situation shows how abusers manipulate not just their victims, but everyone around them, in this case by using social norms about trying to resolve our differences pleasantly to manipulate the letter writer to avoid direct action. But what she needs to do is simple: 1) Summon the police. Not animal control, but the police. Animal abuse is a crime in most places, and this man could be arrested. If he is, that will do plenty to derail the impending wedding. 2) If the dog isn’t dead yet from internal bleeding, take it to the vet immediately. Regardless of how the police handle the call, the vet will have more advice on what to do next. That’s their job.

No more tip-toeing around this monster, letter writer! I know you’re afraid your friend will never speak to you again, but if she marries this guy, you can bet that she’ll stop talking to you anyway, because he’s going to start isolating her even more from her friends. That’s what abusers do: Make sure that their victims have little contact with family and friends, so that they don’t feel they have people to turn to if they want to leave.

As a side note, you all will not be surprised that there was universal sympathy in comment for the dog, but a lot of people were attacking the bride-to-be. Abused animals get more love than abused women, cuz misogyny. In response to the inevitable victim-blaming, I offer this video from Leslie Morgan Steiner, who explains why it was so hard to get out of an abusive relationship, and specifically why she went forward with a wedding even after learning her fiance was abusive:

If this dog can be a hero, so can you.

Like many of you, I’ve been amazed and fascinated by the story of these three women in Cleveland who got away from a kidnapper that held them for a decade. Of course, not much is known about what happened in all those years or how the kidnappers got away with it for so long, so everyone is mostly focusing on Charles Ramsey, the man who leapt to help one of the victims, Amanda Berry, when she called for help. For better or worse, most of the attention is due to his understandable exuberance and his eye for details (and sadly because of lurking class and racial prejudice), but there’s something important here that needs attention: Ramsey was able to help because he took violence against women seriously. By his own account, his initial impression was that the situations was “a domestic violence dispute”.

I’ll be blunt: Most of us, sadly, do not react to perceived domestic violence this way.  When we think what we’re seeing is domestic violence, most of us turn and look the other way, not because we approve of it, but because we still tend to think of it as “personal” business that we should stay out of. Often, we’re understandably afraid that intervening will put us in danger or that the victim will turn on us, because sadly that is often exactly what happens. So we look the other way.

For whatever reason, Charles Ramsey did not look the other way. He believed what he was seeing was domestic violence, which is understandable, since that’s exponentially more likely than a weird kidnapping scheme, and what 99.9% of us would also assume. He could have put his head down and said it wasn’t his business, but he didn’t. Maybe he was just in a particularly fearless state of mind. Maybe he’s just a more morally centered person than most of us.  I don’t know. But I do know this: Because of him, these women are safe. And even if it had been just an “ordinary” domestic violence situation, his intervention would have still likely resulted in preventing further or more drastic violence, at least on that day.

There’s been a lot of talk about the role of bystanders, especially male bystanders, in preventing sexual and domestic violence. Jackson Katz’s excellent video about this is well worth watching all 20 minutes of:

Ramsey couldn’t have known what he was witnessing when he sprung into action to help Berry get out of the house. He just helped her. We should all learn from him and vow to be a little less cowardly and a little more diligent when we see what we think is sexual or domestic abuse. Because it does matter, even if it’s just “ordinary” everyday violence that won’t make you a national hero.

Cheesy American evangelical culture, it seems, was a trend that swept America but now that people are beginning to realize it’s not a good look, they’re quietly putting it away and pretending in never happened. It’s like the Macarena, except hateful to women, gays, and science. Or that’s the argument being offered by Daniel D’Addario in Salon, in a piece about how Tim Tebow might be the last openly fundamentalist (which is what he really means, since there are openly evangelical celebrities who aren’t necessarily aligned with the Christian right) mainstream celebrity—and he just got shitcanned. (Already, you’re seeing whining about this from fundies who believe white Christians are an oppressed minority.) Part of the problem with the “brand” appears to be, you know, the hate issue. D’Addario quotes pastor John S. Dickerson, who is quite whiny about it:

“The culture has turned the corner, specifically on the conflict between the LGBT movement, if you call it a movement, and the evangelical movement, if you  call it a movement. Evangelicals have invited this, but they’re being typecast. The cultural view of the new America is that the biblical view of homosexual sex is backward, the stuff of cavemen or the Ku Klux Klan, ” Dickerson said. He noted that the recent ban on “reparative therapy” in California may sound a death knell for evangelicals’ influence.

Or perhaps its that fundamentalists seem wholly incapable of understanding how their weird, prudish bigotry sounds to people who aren’t immersed in their culture. For instance, in just this quote alone, you can tell that Dickerson is a first class asshole, even in you know nothing else about him. Let’s just count the infractions against basic human decency in this comment:

1. Claiming that the fate of an entire religious movement rests on their ability to make false claims that abusive reprogramming tactics constitute “therapy”. Sorry, but the government has a right to ban unsafe medical and psychological practices, even if you pretend they are “therapy”. You’re also not allowed to have “headship therapy” where women are beaten and emotionally abused until they learn to accept the doctrine of wifely submission, either.
2. Claiming that you’re being “typecast” and then playing exactly to type. Being accurately described is not typecasting. Just because you don’t like what you see in the mirror doesn’t mean the mirror is out to get you.
3. The phrase “the biblical view of homosexual sex” being bandied, as if the issue here was your right to privately disapprove of other people’s sexual practices, when in fact the issue here is that you’re trying to use the government to strip away people’s rights based on your arbitrary religious beliefs.
4. “if you call it a movement”: That’s the kind of blather you get from someone who is so busy acting the victim and arguing in bad faith that he employs those tactics even when it’s not necessary. You get the feeling he says things like, “Pass the salt, please, if you’re not too busy being the Bloomberg nanny-state police to do so.”

All that said, the Macarena still lives on at wedding receptions and fundamentalists aren’t going anywhere, even if they’re learning to tone it down a little in public. The right has mastered the art of periodic remodels of bigotry to make it seem more palatable, once the public figures out their game. Witness the evolution of racist tactics from open support of segregation to white flight to freakouts about “welfare queens” and whining that white people are victims of affirmative action. They’re in the remodeling stage right now, and I suspect we’re going to see a new face for the homophobia and misogyny rationalized by religion that marks American fundamentalism soon enough.