Pandagon

Georgia to gay parent - do not 'expose' kids to the homos

There's not much more you can say about a family court system that is this absurd. (PinkNews):

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The price of sanctimony addiction

Here's a story I rarely see much about on blogs, even though it seems to me that it goes into the file "Big Fucking Deal". There were a bunch of demonstrations on the border in Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, and Reynosa Tuesday, and more in Monterrey, all blocking traffic in some form, but in the border towns, they were blocking the bridges into the U.S. So, in my mind, it's a ploy to get some American media attention to a story that's flying mostly under the radar, and I suppose it worked, because my mom told me that they were covering it on Fox News. (And, in the grand tradition of grabbing every opportunity for racist hysteria that they get, it seems they were implying that the protests were riots.) It doesn't seem to take a lot of people to snarl traffic across the border---only 30 people, mostly women and children, were able to stop traffic for an hour on the Paso del Norte bridge, which I remember as being already a site of dead stopped traffic in the days before 9/11 gave them further excuses to beef up "security", and so my heart goes out to the innocent people, many who commute across that bridge every day for work, stuck in what must have been the mother of all traffic jams.

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Republican leaders throw constituents under the conservative bus - let the markets decide

I thought that maybe, just maybe that in the wake of the economic meltdown caused by Dear Leader and his GOP enablers on the Hill, that the Republican clowns on the Hill would not float this craptacular meme again, given the hundreds of thousands of jobless and ungodly number of people threatened with homelessness due to foreclosures.

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Movie director "get out of rape free" card works on public, not on courts

If you want your stomach turned this early in the morning---or even if you don't, but you want to read a fascinating account of the automatic nature of rape condoning in our culture---check out Bill Wyman's account of the whitewashing of Roman Polanski's crime of anally raping a 13-year-old, a crime that keeps him from returning to the U.S. (because he's running from justice), and a crime that he's trying to clear his name of, even though he admitted that he did it. In fact, there's absolutely no doubt whatsoever that he drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. When there's so little doubt about guilt regarding other crimes, there's rarely this sort of public hand-wringing about whether the guilty is really guilty, but we're talking rape and we're talking about our rape culture. A rape culture is a funhouse mirror version of the anti-choice culture's attitudes about abortion. Anti-choicers want abortion to be illegal with the three exceptions being health, rape, and me. Rape apologists, who still sadly dominate the discourse, think rape should basically be legal except for dark alleys, virgin daughters, and me. Even though every single rape apologist claims to oppose rape, they find ways to claim that rape isn't rape, even when the victim is 13, drugged, and pleading with you to stop as you rape her up the ass. Rape apologists in fact tend to see the victims as the real criminals, with some rape apologists suggesting mandatory criminal charges against victims if the prosecution can't find the defendant guilty, which is another way they agitate to legalize rape without coming out and saying so. If you can't report a crime, it's de facto legal.

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Another attempt to grant sperm more rights than women

The sperm-worshipping crowd managed to sneak in a victory almost under the radar yesterday when the state house of North Dakota passed what will probably prove to be a complete ban on abortion, and quite possibly on most female-controlled types of contraception. Because anti-choice nuts can't fucking breathe without lying, the assholes who did this are denying that's what they did.

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Buttars: Gays 'greatest threat to America'

This is pathetic. As we all know, part of the LDS defense for its support of Prop 8 was that it wasn't opposed to basic civil rights for gay and lesbian couples, it was just trying to "save marriage." How much do you want to bet that the Mormon Church leaned on state representatives to kill a bill that would eliminate discrimination in housing and employment, hospital visitation, partner medical decisions for a partner, and adoption?

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Where All The Cool People Are Not At

I'm not going to say there's anything racist about conservatives mocking a homeless black woman who's trying as hard as she can to get a home for herself and her family in troubled economic times, but oh my fucking god there is.

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The New York Post makes its case for a post-racial America

I'm glad we don't have to worry about racism any more. Sean Delonas created this unbelievable cartoon for the New York Post that clearly passed muster with the editors' desk. It portrays commentary on the stimulus bill ("They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill") using a bullet-ridden chimp on the pavement. Who do you think he's referring to?

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Bristol Palin, and feeding the base while starving the middle

Reading Rebecca Traister's article about the soon-to-be infamous Bristol Palin interview, I couldn't help but think the whole thing might be further evidence that Sarah Palin in the wave of the future for the Republicans, and thank the Disco Ball for it. The injection of the person of the pregnant Bristol Palin in the ongoing debates over sex and whether or not women are fully human was a divisive thing---it separated the wingnut base from the rest of us who don't have the energy or desire to obsess over forced pregnancy as the ideal way to get women in line. Bristol, to put it plainly, is red meat thrown to the base, and in such an obvious way that it served to horrify the rest of the nation. Abstinence-only had been sold to the country as a teenage pregnancy prevention program, but the right wing reaction to Bristol made it clear that it was a teenage pregnancy inducement program, and Bristol was the poster child for its intended effects. And what are those?

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Dog whistle evo psych

There's a couple of links I want to toss up tonight, because I think these are troubling indicators that armchair evo psych "theories" about how women are biologically inferior to men have become so ingrained in our consciousness, that half-baked pseudo-science evolutionary just-so stories don't have to be made up at all. Gender essentialist stories are now written, and the audience is free to assume that the measured trends are DNA-based and have no relationship to social conditioning at all. The first is this article about a kind of "no duh" bit of research that sounds like it has major methodology problems, even as it demonstrates something any random asshole on the street could have told you.

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Some headlines speak for themselves

Like this one, for example.

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