Pandagon

If you ever had any doubts that the concerns about "misandry" are not about actual man-hating, but an attempt to redefine female equality as anti-male, I present to you this Fox News segment that, while avoiding the silly word "misandry", basically pushes the message that all stories must have male heroes or else they are man-hating.

So Rand Paul, in an effort to turn the tide of negative publicity for his pandering to anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists, ran out and got a booster vaccination to show that he's not anti-vaccination, completely with brooding about how he's such a victim of "misreporting" known as "quoting him directly".

Rep. Aaron Schock is a Republican but he tries to set himself apart from the usual, as Tina Fey called them, "gray-faced" men with "two-dollar" haircuts that make up most of the Republican caucus: He's handsome, he works out, he's well-dressed, he likes to tango. And apparently he has the most gorgeous office on the Hill, as reported by Ben Terris of the Washington Post. But for some reason, Schock and his staff don't want you to know this and they, foolishly, think that they can suppress this information. After Terris stopped to admire the outside of Schock's office, which the front desk said was inspired by Downton Abbey, a "blond woman popped out of an inner office" and asked he wanted to see the rest.

Mike Huckabee, a con man who pretends to run for president in order to get rich without having to work too hard, was spouting some more nonsense about gay people and gay marriage on CNN over the weekend:

For those who are following the drama of Jonathan Chait's sloppily argued piece against "political correctness", I wrote a piece rebutting at Talking Points Memo. Since the discussions around these things tend to get flattened out with people assuming there are two completely opposing "camps", I had a lot of people trying to convince me that there are people out there who use a leftier-than-thou attitude as a cudgel to bully and control other people. There is no need to try to convince me of that. I've seen it. But I don't think Chait made that case, because he was too busy trying to silence and shame people whose main crime is talking about stuff that makes him uncomfortable. So my piece was on the irony of that, but I'll say no more as you should read it.

The war on crappy pop culture by the religious right creates so many mixed feelings for me. It's one thing when Mike Huckabee is taking pot shots at Beyoncé, because the man is so out of his league that it's pure, unadulterated joy in laughing at him. It's another thing entirely when, as mentioned yesterday, they're zeroing in on Fifty Shades of Grey. On one hand, their motives are worth mockery, as they are so clearly motivated by sex negativity. On the other hand, you don't want to make it sound like you're somehow fan-girling Fifty Shades.

A few months ago, the person behind the LifeSite Twitter account got really angry with me and we had some back-and-forth in which they repeatedly claimed that their website and the anti-abortion movement generally is not motivated by hostility to sex, but strictly about protecting embryonic life. This is, of course, a silly lie, but it was interesting to see how much they swore up and down that sex has nothing to do with their movement and they love sex and are in no way trying to stop you from having sex or enjoying sex.

Taking a break from the usual doom and gloom that comes with the territory of political writing to highlight a heart-warming tale out of the San Francisco that has been reported on by io9. (Graphic Policy had some early coverage, as well.)  A group called the Freedom Defense Initiative, which has been classified as a hate group in the UK, has been blanketing the big cities in the country with ads that characterize Muslims as savages and equating Muslims with Nazis and demanding that the U.S. adopt a formal policy of religious discrimination by refusing to send aid to majority-Muslim countries. As regular readers know, I'm no fan of religion, but this is all just a simple cover for racism, and that's all there is to it. Just as with all other religions, the majority of Muslims are peaceful and these ads are an attempt to stoke needless hate and conflict. If anyone is being like the Nazis here, it's the people who are sponsoring these ads, which are about singling out members of a religious minority for hate and oppression and making false accusations that these people are a subversive element out to destroy your society. Which is, last I checked, exactly the strategy that the Nazis used to justify their treatment of Jewish people.

While punishing the women of America for having sex is definitely priority #1 for the new Republican majority in both the Senate and the House, trying to deny that climate change is real because that's what they prefer to believe is right up there on the list of agenda items. It would be fascinating to do a psychological study on how so many congressional Republicans have come to the belief that what they wish were true should have more authority than actual facts on the ground. I suspect that the answers might have something to do with "white male privilege", but hey, let's not let the climate change debate turn into yet another idiotic Gamergate debacle.

The debacle over the Rolling Stone story about sexual assault at UVA has been really chewed over by people who are interested in pushing the idea that women routinely make up false accusations about rape to hurt and punish men. Nevermind that most of the stories told in that piece are solid enough and never mind that even the one iffy story---that of "Jackie"---still doesn't come anywhere close to the "false accusation" mode.* But while the Rolling Stone story fed the myth that rape accusations are a matter of vindictive women lying for the pleasure of hurting men, the terrible case that happened at Vanderbilt is a sad reminder that the real story is often one of a woman who is loving and trusting and has a sexual predator ready to exploit her basic decency.

For those who have a sick love of watching clueless Republicans shoot themselves in the foot, the battle over a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks is delicious stuff. In sum, some Republican women basically shamed the House into dropping the vote for the bill, mostly because they're worried it's going to kick off another "legitimate rape" debacle as male Republicans go on cable TV to brag about the bill and are asked to explain why they only allow for rape exceptions if the victims have reported to the police.

Look, I realize that the whole narrative about starting from the bottom and working your way up is a huge deal for politicians. (And Drake.) It's a classic for a reason, a way to identify both as the underdog and as a winner, so basically every sports movie ever made except for politics. Clinton did it. Obama did it. Even Romney tried and failed miserably to do it. But there was something about Joni Ernst's paean last night to deprivation in childhood that felt like it crossed the line to me.