Drudge turns on the tired old police siren for breaking news—here it’s time to flip on the rainbow siren!
Now that the Florida governor’s found that “special someone,” you know, the adulteress he’s been allegedly boinking for sometime now, he’s making his “union” legal—something gay and lesbian couples in the Sunshine State cannot do. Obviously, Charlie Crist wants that McCain VP slot so badly he can taste it…
Gov. Charlie Crist, single for nearly three decades, on Thursday morning became engaged to his girlfriend of nine months, Carole Rome.
“She’s special in every way. She’s brilliant, beautiful and sweet. I’m very, very lucky,” Crist told the St. Petersburg Times in an exclusive interview.
Crist said he picked out the sapphire and diamond ring on Wednesday at the Gold and Diamond Center in St. Petersburg’s Northeast Shopping Center.
...And his engagement is likely to reverberate well beyond Florida because the popular governor is widely viewed as a contender to be likely Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s running mate. Not since Franklin Pierce picked William King to be his running mate in 1852 has America had a bachelor vice president.
Best wishes to the happy couple…I wonder if the McCain campaign will have a congratulatory press release out soon.
Click on the screenshot for the Sun-Sentinel video report. The anchor is so giddy. Oh, and the readership of the paper doesn’t buy this one either:
You know, I was hopeful. LaShawn Barber wrote a piece declaring (I thought) that fathers abandoning their children is a form of abuse. As the child of a single mother with a father who ran out, there was a constant, lingering doubt about my own self-worth that always played around the edges of my psyche, every so often wondering what was wrong with me that he left.
I should have known that would get blown out the fucking window.
As a 25-year-old, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing wrong was that he was and is an asshole. It is, however, a hell of a way to grow up, in no small part because there’s always the assumption on the behalf of others that something had to have been wrong with your mother, that something’s got to be wrong with you. True to form, this is exactly where Barber goes.
Despite what selfish and shameless adults think, children want fathers. They need fathers. They need masculine men in their lives who love them and would do anything to protect them, men who live with them, raise them, and sacrifice for them. Millions of children grow up without being loved or care for by the men who sired them. It makes me angry, bitterly so.
Oddly enough, most fatherless children aren’t the result of selfish and shameless adults, they’re the product of selfish and shameless fathers. Hence the “fatherless” aspect of the argument. Children of absentee fathers are not broken, simply hurt. We are not deficient, we are not flawed, and we manage to become perfectly functional, rational adults - we’ve even about to have a president to our advantage.
In Daniel Gilbert’s 2006 book “Stumbling on Happiness,” the Harvard professor of psychology looks at several studies and concludes that marital satisfaction decreases dramatically after the birth of the first child—and increases only when the last child has left home. He also ascertains that parents are happier grocery shopping and even sleeping than spending time with their kids. Other data cited by 2008’s “Gross National Happiness” author, Arthur C. Brooks, finds that parents are about 7 percentage points less likely to report being happy than the childless.
The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term “bundle of joy” may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. “Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,” says Florida State University’s Robin Simon, a sociology professor who’s conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. “In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.”
Holy smoke. The irony and hypocrisy meters just blew-the-f*ck up. Look at this from the
American Taliban
Traditional Values Coalition’s Lou Sheldon (a big fan of John McCain, btw), is aghast that a he’s not the only game in town in the whole church-state merger deal. Imposing Christianity is saving the country, when it’s Islamic law, all of a sudden it’s dangerous.
All over the United States, radical Muslims are pushing companies to bow to Islamic law known as Sharia. They are doing this under the guise of religious freedom, but the political and cultural ideology of Islam recognizes only Allah as the supreme ruler over the world.
...What Muslims are doing has been referred to as “creeping Sharia” – that is, getting companies, communities and states to change policies in order to force everyone to obey Sharia law, a totalitarian system of regulations that govern Islamic theocracies. Caribou coffee shops and Church’s Fried Chicken are Saudi-owned companies which operate and manage their employees based on Sharia principles.
In America, creeping Sharia is to be imposed by lawsuits and claims of ethnic or religious discrimination. Examples of creeping Sharia are becoming more and more frequent as radical Muslim groups such as the CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) and Muslim Brotherhood either create conflicts between Muslim employees and their employers or exploit such conflicts.
Did I miss the whole doodad about “Christian” pharmacists not filling legal prescriptions because of their beliefs, or the civil servants out in Cali who refused to marry same sex couples because of their religious convictions? Methinks Lou has a terminal case of theocratic envy.
TVC concludes its diatribe by saying “TVC will be publishing regular updates and special reports on the goals of Islam within the United States.”
One of the most dramatic changes in American life in the years since World War II involves the way we raise our children.
We used to do it ourselves. Now, convinced we have better things to do, many of us leave the job to others.
“Better things” including earning the money to feed and clothe them. Because we’re selfish like that.
Encouraging this flight from parenthood, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has proposed what he calls his “Zero to Five” plan. It is a collection of programs aimed at getting the government involved in the raising of your children from the moment they are born.
“The first part of my plan focuses on providing quality affordable early childhood education to every child in America,” Obama said in a November speech. “As president, I will launch a Children’s First Agenda that provides care, learning and support to families with children ages zero to five.”
“We’ll create Early Learning Grants to help states create a system of high-quality early care and education for all young children and their families,” he said. “And we’ll help more working parents find a safe, affordable place to leave their children during the day by improving the educational quality of our childcare programs and increasing the childcare tax credit.”
In the middle of the night, government stormtroopers will break into your home and give your child a pillow with proper lumbar support. And then never be heard from again…
Mythago sent me an article from the WSJ that has almost the proper mournful tone in presenting the facts that the well-groomed, professional middle class of women are not actually giving it all up to be trophy wives in the numbers suggested by hopeful trend writers in the past few years. The widespread, yucky fantasy that women are largely rejecting the lessons learned from The Feminine Mystique has no basis in reality. I suggest the fantasy will persist despite the evidence against it; clearly, there’s a lot of hope out there that it’s true, and I find that extremely creepy. Don’t the sort of men that hope to take competent professionals and turn them into dependent housewives small in number and giving off vibes of such creepiness that they’re easy to avoid? I guess not.
The author, Rachel Emma Silverman, suggests that it’s surprising that the numbers of women who return to work quickly after giving birth is surprising because anecdotal information swings the other way.
The study’s findings surprised me because they don’t gel with my personal experience. I have many well-educated, accomplished friends, all new moms, who have decided to stay at home with their kids rather than going back to their high-pressure jobs. In most cases, they have husbands who earn big bucks, are from places where the cost of living is low, or worked in high-stress jobs that they were never crazy about.
Often our own “anecdata” becomes more significant than large-scale studies in shaping our perceptions of what our peers are doing. Earlier this week, for example, I went to a playgroup near my home in Austin, Texas, and of the five moms there, all with babies under six months, I was the only one who was planning on returning to work. These moms were no slackers: One was a dentist, two were teachers and one had a high-powered marketing job. (To be sure, the only people who could attend a Monday, mid-day playgroup, were women who weren’t already working.)
Lindsay Beyerstein catches an important story—-an FTC lawsuit against CompuCredit Visa has revealed some of the unusual things that will get held against your credit rating. Oh, it’s not just your income or your borrowing history. Nope. You’re considered a credit risk if you travel more than to work and back and maybe occasionally to the mall, because if you get your tires retreaded, that’s held against you. Good citizens don’t have friends, family, or fun. But what’s really surprising is that if you go to marriage counseling, that’s a strike against you on the credit report.
The FTC claims that CompuCredit didn’t properly disclose that it monitored spending and cut credit lines if consumers used their cards at certain places. Among them: tire and retreading shops, massage parlors, bars, billiard halls, and marriage counseling offices.
Sadly, it actually makes a strange sort of sense. I’m going to bet the bean counters discovered that visiting a marriage counselor was strongly correlated to getting a divorce down the road, which of course can create all sorts of credit problems because of the expense of splitting one household into two. And because divorcing couples sometimes refuse to pay off outstanding debts, each accusing the other of having the responsibility for them. So they flag people who they have reason are a high risk for divorce and pre-emptively strike against customers before the divorce is even initiated.
This isn’t even a causation/correlation error, because they don’t care if marriage counseling doesn’t cause divorce. They’re just looking for any statistical correlation, so they can make educated guesses. If they found that banana eaters were likelier to divorce than non-banana-eaters, they’d probably punish you for buying bananas, too, even if they knew it was just a correlation that in no way implied causation. There’s an irony to this, in that discouraging marriage counseling probably just raises the divorce rate, but I’m assuming CompuCredit was trying to hide their analysis methods from the public and assumed therefore that it wouldn’t matter.
Still, this shows that we have a great rot in our society, with more and more of our economy being based on people being held to utterly unreasonable standards of living that mean you never live just to get by. Don’t have a social life, don’t do anything but go to work, don’t get married, don’t get divorced, etc. Insurance companies would love to exclude people who had more contact with people than was deemed strictly necessary to earn a paycheck to pay them, because the more hands you shake, the higher your likelihood of getting the flu. This is where we’re heading if we don’t do something about it.
The Obama campaign has tapped North Carolina as one of the states to air this ad; it’s been Red at the presidential level, but NC’s in play this time around. It will also run in Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia.
I’m Barack Obama.
America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life’s been blessed by both.
I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn’t have much money, but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up. Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country. Working hard without making excuses. Treating your neighbor as you’d like to be treated. It’s what guided me as I worked my way up – taking jobs and loans to make it through college.
It’s what led me to pass up Wall Street jobs and go to Chicago instead, helping neighborhoods devastated when steel plants closed.
That’s why I passed laws moving people from welfare to work, cut taxes for working families and extended health care for wounded troops who’d been neglected.
I approved this message because I’ll never forget those values, and if I have the honor of taking the oath of office as President, it will be with a deep and abiding faith in the country I love.
The interesting thing about this particular ad is that it emphasizes Senator Obama’s upbringing in Kansas and the Midwestern values of his family—illustrated by using photos of him with his white grandparents, relatives who have not been as prominently featured, for instance, as his wife and children.
It’s healthy at this time in the campaign to remind people out there being bombarded with slime efforts to evoke images of an “Afro-Leninist,” a Muslim terrorist, or a Black Radical Trojan Horse, when the real Barack Obama is part of a growing, vibrant mosaic in America. Not a post-racial America, but one with a population that is becoming harder to racially or ethnically categorize—and thus harder to politically divide.
We cling to the human need to place people in identity cubbyholes for our own comfort and defense, and I think it’s safe to say we’ve seen a lot of poisonous political strategy that preys on that, particularly regarding race this year. The images in the ad are satisfying because they are so self-correcting—or perhaps a better word might be recalibrating—by reminding us about the whole picture of Obama’s heritage.
That picture is what others would rather ignore or play down because it doesn’t fit their demonization playbook.
“On this day, one hundred and forty-three years ago, Union soldiers reached the final outposts of the Southwest with news that the Civil War had ended; that the words of Lincoln’s proclamation would be made real; that the very ideals of liberty, justice, and equal citizenship under the law embedded in the Constitution were closer to being fully realized. On Juneteenth, hundreds of thousands of Americans were delivered from bondage as America finally reclaimed her dignity.
“We pause to remember Juneteenth because it is a poignant reminder that words on a parchment are not always enough; that we the people must always be willing to do our part to ensure that all citizens, regardless of race, gender, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation are equal heirs to the boundless opportunity America has to offer.
“We pause to remember that our nation has made tremendous progress, but has many miles to go on the long march toward finally fulfilling the ideals of this country. When too many Americans go without affordable healthcare or a quality education; when neighborhoods unravel due to a housing market in crisis; when special interests hold their thumbs on the scale of opportunity; we have more work to do.
“Juneteenth is a day for celebration of freedom and family, but also a day that calls us all to rededicate ourselves to the convictions at the heart of our American experiment. It reminds us that with the work of each successive generation, we come closer to the realization of that more perfect union.”
It occurs to me upon reading this that the last movie I saw which mentioned condom use was Knocked Up. And they did it wrong.
As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers.
The main reason for the increase?
All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. “We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” the principal says, shaking his head.
How much of this is believable is arguable, but the popular culture argument marries nicely with this Townhall post, declaring that condoms can’t solve the pregnancy problem. It’s sort of like how food can’t solve the starvation problem.
Straight people shouldn’t be allowed to marry. That’s what I came to realize that Maggie Gallagher must believe after reading this article of hers, where she suggests that gay marriage isn’t really marriage because—-get this—-some gay couples are non-monogamous.
Less than a decade later, Eric Erbelding from the perch of his legally recognized Massachusetts gay marriage, is quite comfortable explaining to the New York Times that “Our rule is you can play around because, you know, you have to be practical.”
Eric elaborates why he think it works for gay men: “I think men view sex very differently than women. Men are pigs, they know that each other are pigs, so they can operate accordingly. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Still, Mr. Erbelding said, in what to the old-fashioned ear is the most astonishing single sentence in the whole piece: most married gay couples he knows are “for the most part monogamous, but for maybe a casual three-way.”
For the most part . . . except for the casual three-way?
But hey, if the word “marriage” can be redefined as a civil-rights imperative, why balk at lesser ideas like “monogamy” or “fidelity”?
It’s a landmark day as gay and lesbians couples will be able to marry in the Golden State starting at 5:01 PM PT. Here is a “California Marriage 101” primer. CBS has released a poll (full results here) on support for marriage equality:
* 30% say same-sex couples should be allowed to marry (this is the highest number since CBS News began asking this question in 2004, up from 21%).
* 60% believe that same-sex couples should be allowed to either marry or form civil unions. * 50% of Republicans are against either of these options.
* 40% in the western portion of the U.S. favor marriage equality
* The groups most in favor of marriage equality - those under age 30, liberals, Americans living in the west, and those who never go to church.
While the religious right pays lip service to family values embodied by marriage, here they are in action:
The Patrick family marches in Boston Pride
What a model for families to see—full
public
acceptance, support and love for a relative—and they happen to be the First Family of Massachusetts. Note to fundies - it doesn’t result in the earth opening up and swallowing Boston, no matter how much garbage the homo-haters at mAssResistance bleat. Underscore that message for the pious “pro-family” Alan Keyes, who threw his daughter out of the house when she decided to kick the closet door open.
In a ringing celebration, tens of thousands lined Boston’s streets for today’s annual Gay Pride parade, a festive march that featured Governor Deval Patrick and his 18-year-old daughter Katherine, who this week announced she is a lesbian.
The Patrick family, including First Lady Diane Patrick, drew resounding applause as they marched along Beacon Street past the State House to City Hall.
Patrick, who already enjoyed strong support among gays and lesbians for his strong support for gay marriage, has been hailed as a model of parental acceptance for his unconditional support for his daughter.
...“It proves he not only stands for something publicly, he exemplifies it in his own life,” said Lexi LaGuerre, a 30-year-old from Boston who watched the parade on Tremont Street in the South End with her grandmother. “I wouldn’t say most parents would react this way, so it’s a wonderful thing. Nobody wants their parents not to love them.”
“It’s fabulous,” agreed Wanic Polynice, 35, watching the parade arm-in-arm with his boyfriend, Sebastian Doremus. “It’s wonderful to see a father love his daughter like that. It’s beautiful.”
***
A father’s love—as well as parental love and responsibility, was the Father’s Day message in the speech delivered yesterday by Barack Obama:
Obama sounded a theme familiar from previous Father’s Day speeches in which he called on fathers to rise to their duties.
But the story of fatherhood—never a simple one for Obama, abandoned by his own father when he was very young—was especially poignant on Sunday.
...The theme of fatherly responsibility is important for Obama, especially now that he is the presumed Democratic nominee for the White House. While his dogma is decidedly liberal, his talk about personal responsibility crafts an appeal to religious conservatives and political centrists.
And while he clearly aims the message at Americans of all races, he has chosen more than once to broadcast that message from black churches.
The fact that he delivers these supportive but challenging messages to those in the pews of predominantly black houses of worship is a refreshing and remarkable event. It is something you don’t see white candidates doing for fear of appearing paternalistic or racist by hitting a third rail. That’s why in many ways we cannot yet be a post-racial society. If the same message cannot be delivered by any politician regardless of race, then we are not on equal footing and able to conduct the kinds of conversations necessary to put difficult social matters on the table.
The beauty of blogging is when you get a chance to make those connections that you’d otherwise forget right after they occur to you. Just such a connection happened for me this week. On this week’s podcast (listen today! subscribe!), I interviewed Sharon Camp, the CEO of the Guttmacher Institute, about recent research showing that a huge percentage (half) of women who are trying to avoid pregnancy in any given year because of inconsistent contraception use. A lot of the findings were pretty predictable stuff, like how women forget to take pills when they have life changes, or how problems with the method discourages use, such as when you hate condoms and find ways to justify skipping them. But what I found intriguing was that women’s ambivalence was cited as a major reason that women might have inconsistent contraception use.
Ambivalence: Nearly one in four women who are not trying to become pregnant say that they would be very pleased if they found out they were pregnant. Women who are the least motivated to avoid pregnancy are also the least likely to be using oral contraceptives or to be using the method consistently.
Listen to the interview; I press Sharon on this because I’m honestly confused. It’s not that some women are ambivalent and act out their ambivalence by screwing around with contraception, but that 25% of women are in this area. That’s a huge number, in my opinion, considering that ambivalence is such a strange thing to feel. I just thought people were more self-aware, and that the people who can’t make up their minds and screw around hoping that nature decides for them would be a small percentage. But nope, it’s a ton of people, women at least.
Luckily, there is an interview at Broadsheet now with a woman who, in my opinion, fits directly into this category of ambivalent contraception avoiders, and the interview is pretty enlightening as to her thought processes. As you can guess, my conclusion was that feminism has a lot of work to do in this area. It’s a matter of just common sense, but also a health issue, because planning to get pregnant and adjusting your habits with that plan in mind is healthier for the baby than just half-assing it and hoping that nature decides for you.
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.
I’m skeptical (as I think Nick is) that the whole story of what happened after McCain got back from Vietnam will hurt McCain in the “family values” department. If he was a woman, well yeah. Dumping the first spouse for one that has the money and connections to start your political career—-and who looks better on your arm as a trophy—-who you then denigrate with gendered insults would pretty much be the end of that woman’s career in politics. But since the phrase “family values” is a euphemism for “patriarchy”, I can expect this whole story of McCain’s adulteries and his trading the old model wife for a new, better-functioning one will not hurt him with the “family values” set. Most of those who are wary of him are wary because they think he’s secretly pro-choice or something. And with some of the “family values” set, McCain will be more likeable because he knows how to put a bitch into her place.
Drudge turns on the tired old police siren for breaking news—here it’s time to flip on the rainbow siren! Gov. Charlie Crist, single for nearly three decades, on Thursday morning became engaged to his girlfriend of nine months, Carole Rome.
You know, I was hopeful. LaShawn Barber wrote a piece declaring (I thought) that fathers 
Holy smoke. The irony and hypocrisy meters 
Gather ‘round real close-like, everyone. I’ve got a spooky story to tell you about the Government and the 
Straight people shouldn’t be allowed to marry. That’s what I came to realize that 
The beauty of blogging is when you get a chance to make those connections that you’d otherwise forget right after they occur to you. Just such a connection happened for me this week. 
For blatantly partisan reasons, I hope that