All posts tagged "Family Values"

Kudos to people who predicted that it was Gray Matter that was the final bit of business that Walt has before he dies!

An anti-choice group that calls itself Voices for Family Values claims to have raised enough signatures via petition to have a ban on all abortions after 20 weeks placed on the Albuquerque city ballot this fall. According to KRQE, Voices for Family Values turned in approximately 27,000 signatures to the city clerk on Thursday.

Niall Stanage has a piece up at Salon examining how David Vitter has managed to survive a rather comical sex scandal involving prostitutes and diaper-wearing. He makes a lot of good points about the situation in Louisiana and how Vitter is benefiting, but I think it's useful to think about why the scandal itself doesn't seem to hurt Vitter, when other Republicans---even ones who have straight sex like Mark Sanford and John Ensign---were so dramatically damaged by falling in the eyes of the "family values" crowd. Stanage addresses these specifics towards the end.

From Jessica comes the news that not only do 70% of Americans think that women should take their husband's name, 50% of them said, "Yeah, sure" if asked if it should be legally required. It gets worse!

For blatantly partisan reasons, I hope that H. Ross Perot makes a big stink out of the story of McCain's first wife. From what I understand of the wingnut mind, the people already wary of McCain will feel vindicated about using his POW status against him as evidence that he's not a real man, especially since his wife got into a terrible car accident while he was gone and Perot, a big POW advocate, paid for her medical bills. As Glenn Greenwald amply demonstrated in his book Great American Hypocrites, given the choice between a real war hero/veteran and one who plays pretend like George W. Bush or John Wayne, wingnuts will pick the latter every time. Pretend war heroes give you that juice of manly courage without all the messy realities. Real veterans are often regarded with suspicion, since it's assumed that having actually seen the reality of war, they might not be gung-ho about pretending it's a cross between a Hollywood movie and a sports event. Look at what's happened with McCain. Even though he's been a loyal asshole and supported torture, he's gotten a reputation as someone "weak", because he's actually been tortured, and it's assumed he's lost his taste for it. None of this applies to the larger population of Americans, though, who do think of genuine military service as an asset.