Pandagon

If you want illustrations of the concept of "gas-lighting" and how abusive men wield the stereotype that women are "crazy" in order to control, the internet has provided two whopping, holy-shit examples for your perusal this week. One comes courtesy of Jezebel, where the blogger Ellie Shechet found a woman on Ask Metafilter whose boyfriend got married to his "ex", lied to her about it, and tried to convince her that her fears about it were all in his head.

 who republished this piece from Medical Daily about a study, published in Social Psychology, that measured what most of us probably could tell you from experience: Men who feel "feminized" in some way tend to overcompensate by exaggerating their masculinity, often in ways that are outright negative.

Over the weekend, Ralph Reed's Faith & Freedom Coalition had a "Road to Majority" event in D.C., where Republican candidates did the usual pandering to fundamentalist Christians on issues like gays and abortion. But this year also marked the year that conservative Christians have decided to go all-out on their new strategy of arguing that up is down and black is white.

The New York Times reported this morning that Earl Holt---the leader of the white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens, that apparently had so much influence over Dylann Roof---donated thousands of dollars to various Republican politicians. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum all responded by trying to put some distance there, by either returning the money or giving it to charity.

Blame Atrios for flagging this hilariously self-deluded bit of wankery from Damon Linker at The Week taunting deliberately childless people. It's clear that Linker wants to make the argument that childless people are being selfish for not being as miserable as he is, but doesn't want to come out and say it quite like that, lest anyone get the impression that he regrets his choices and is jealous. So he embraces a strategy much loved by jealous hacks: Pretentious pseudo-intellectual wankery. And truly, y'all, it's an epic display. Few have ever reached the heights that Linker does when it comes to the art of sounding like a complete dumbass while assuming you sound really smart.

It's hard to know what to say in the wake of the Charleston church shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. There's no words, really, that will make it make sense. It's so terrible that even the usual suspects are dialing down the "nuh-uh!" responses that they whip out every time some horrible racist incident happens.

James Gardner at the Slice at TPM has a really interesting piece up about this small group of Mormon men who identify as "same-sex oriented" but are married to women. Some of them---though interestingly, not all---oppose gay marriage and have signed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court claiming that, if gay marriage is legalized, it would somehow hurt and delegitimize their marriages. The argument, like all variations of the "gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage" arguments, is illogical and muddled, probably because they can't come right out and say what they really mean. It's clear that the real reason same-sex marriage is threatening is because these men, despite swearing up and down that they love being married to women, really would prefer it if they could marry and have sex with someone of their gender. And if the court allows other men to have what they want but deny themselves, it will cause jealousy and strain marriages that are already fragile, as you might imagine.

The gradual move of anti-vaccination from being a "liberal" thing to its more comfortable home being a right wing obsession got a big boost this week in California. California's state legislature is liberal, very liberal, and they are moving quickly on the pro-vaccination front. And it was that blue state senate that passed a bill removing the "personal belief" exemptions from mandatory vaccination laws. That bill just got approved by a state assembly committee, and I expect it will pass the state assembly, as well. But what's really interesting is that the committee approval was a party-line vote, with Democrats all being for the vaccination bill and Republicans all opposing.

New video on Game of Thrones!

Updated to add: In the midst of the pleasures of ranting, I realize I was a little unclear. A lot of women who aren't waifish can pull off high-waisted or cropped clothes, because they make them work with their curves. The real problem is ubiquity, and the inability of those of us with differently shaped bodies to find clothes that work for us. Updated for clarity, to make it clear that the point is we need a variety of clothes so no one goes without.

So Megyn Kelly is whining about the "left-wing press" supposedly taking her comments out of context, comments where she was minimizing the McKinney pool party debacle. The reason she thinks it's unfair to see her comment, where she described the victim of a completely unwarranted cop assault as "no saint", as minimizing is because she engaged in some ass-covering where she said, "I'm not defending his actions, let me make that clear."

Yesterday, there was a blitz of news about how Jeb Bush, in 1995, openly called for public shaming of single mothers in his book nauseatingly and incorrectly titled Profiles in Character.