Pandagon

Hollywood Reporter leaked a rumor that there's talks about a reboot of Xena: Warrior Princess. Lucy Lawless tweeted that it's "just a rumor" but hinted that it might be a little more by adding, "it's still in the wishful thinking stage." Sounds like fishing to me, so I went ahead and bit with a Slate piece about why I love this idea.

At this point, there is no doubt that the ongoing love for Donald Trump on display by the Republican base really says something about said base. Certainly, it makes it that much harder to buy the generous argument that the conservative base is a bunch of white people who have been manipulated through genius trickery into voting against their own economic interests, and makes it clear that we're looking at bullies who would rather burn the country to the ground than share it with people they hate for utterly irrational reasons.

The fallout from the Planned Parenthood video continues as Republicans posture about how they're going to "investigate" the organization, as though the one millionth harassing investigation they conduct is going to be the one that hits a jackpot. I hate even using the word "fallout", which sounds like a sincere reaction when all of this "outrage" is so calculated and so disingenuous it makes my teeth hurt, but whatever. "Fallout". Sure. Anger at Planned Parenthood instead of at the lying liars who put this video together. If anyone actually gave a hoot about corruption, their anger would be directed at Live Action and the "Center for Medical Progress" that they spun off for likely unsavory reasons.

It's a couple of weeks old, but I want to flag this incredibly important expose by Erica Hellerstein at ThinkProgress about how abstinence-only is still around and still being foisted on kids, despite being utterly discredited. Because abstinence-only is a right wing initiative, its proponents are totally immersed in right wing tactics, particularly the tactic of rebranding to fool people into thinking that you're not what you actually are. They started with "abstinence-focused", but now are shifting into an even more deceitful phrase, "evidence-based". (Indeed, "abstinence" is a rebranding effort itself, an attempt to make the concept of "chastity" sound more medical and less what it is, a religious concept.)

Abortion regret is not a thing. Repeat: Abortion regret is not a thing. A new study from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health shows that, contrary to anti-choice claims that women who get abortions regret the decision and spiral into depression because of it, abortion regret isn't actually a real thing. This is from a study examining women who both got an abortion and those who wanted one and didn't get it. Over 600 women who did get an abortion were asked, both immediately after the abortion and three years after the fact, how they feel about it. A full 95 percent reported that abortion was the right decision for them. Ninety-five percent.

Update: Gawker has more info suggesting that Pao was set up from the get-go to be a fall guy. If so, that is incredibly sleazy, as nothing was more predictable than that the Reddit community would be eager to believe the worst about a woman of color who had sued a previous employer for sex discrimination.

Man, Si Robertson* from Duck Dynasty really finds atheists threatening. A few months ago his brother fantasized about us being raped and murdered. Or, more to the point, about an atheist man watching his wife and daughters getting raped and murdered, because in Robertson's world, women don't have their own opinions but are merely extensions of their fathers and husbands. Now Si's pulling that trick of arguing that we don't really exist:

Apparently, much of the internet was abuzz with excitement over this brand new effort at policing women's speech: Telling them they say "just" too much. Ellen Peatry Leanse, writing for Business Insider, argued that using the word makes you seem weak and unconfident and you need to excise it from your vocabulary now to get the respect that men get. Because respect is all about the number of times you use "just" and not male privilege, okay?!

Last week, I wrote about how, in the face of the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage, a lot of conservatives are becoming more open about the underlying argument behind all that hand-wringing about "traditional marriage". Basically, their real concern is that people are going to stop seeing marriage as a miserable duty to be endured and instead start thinking that love, happiness, and companionship should be what marriage is about. The marriage-for-love mentality is no doubt especially threatening to some of your more sexist men. There's already a lot of fear that women prefer singleness to being with a man who isn't loving and supportive. That's what all that hand-wringing about single motherhood and singleness generally is about---anger that women might actually have standards and not just marry the first guy who will take them. The fear, then, is that same-sex marriage is a real turning point, where the marriage-for-love mentality will take such deep root that it will never be uprooted.

This op-ed by David Brooks titled "The Next Culture War", which asks social conservatives to drop all the sex policing stuff and instead do something like feed the poor, is topping the New York Times most-viewed and most-emailed lists. I'm guessing that is not because a bunch of religious conservatives are impressed by his argument and are forwarding it to their friends and family. No, I suspect this is all being driven by liberals who, in an attempt to show off how open-minded they are, are bending over backwards to show that they believe that religious conservatives are good people who are just misguided.

Right Wing Watch posted about Christian conservative activist Wayne Allyn Root---the same one who posited that Obama must have blackmailed Justice Roberts on the Obamacare decision---going on a radio show and positing that gay people are just going to be getting all divorced all the time. From their coverage:

Rand Paul has a Time op-ed where he digs into his family's roots as segregationist-types and argues that, rather than share marriage with the gays, it should be privatized. I debunk that argument at Slate, but didn't have the space to address this weird and pathetic attempt at a "gotcha" that Paul wedges in there:

Well, I was going to embed this Spotify playlist to celebrate the announcement that same-sex marriage is now the law across the land. But eh, can still click it and  play it: LGBT Anthems. It's a mix of all sorts of music, from hip-hop to rock to disco to even jazz, all chosen because it's anthemic and because it's put out by artists who are queer themselves. So no need for fucking Macklemore! Dance, party, it's Friday!