To add to the pile-on about Rick Warren, I have to add that Warren is another one of those wild misogynists who engages in a common form of Holocaust denial.  It’s not the traditional form we’re used to hearing about—-people who claim the Holocaust didn’t happen or that it wasn’t widespread—-but it is serious nonetheless, in no small part because it’s common and people who engage in it are taken seriously, as Rick Warren is. 

Attempting only to make abortions “rare” is not much different than saving some of the Jews during the Holocaust when all could be saved, according to megachurch pastor Rick Warren.

“Of course I want to reduce the number of abortions,” Warren told Beliefnet Editor-in-Chief Steven Waldman when asked if he was going to work with the Obama administration to achieve an abortion reduction agenda or if he thinks that the effort is a charade.

“But to me it is kind of a charade in that people say ‘We believe abortions should be safe and rare,’” he added.

“Don’t tell me it should be rare. That’s like saying on the Holocaust, ‘Well, maybe we could save 20 percent of the Jewish people in Poland and Germany and get them out and we should be satisfied with that,’” Warren said. “I’m not satisfied with that. I want the Holocaust ended.”

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The good news about Bush’s planned presidential library is that it’s going to be polluting Dallas and not Austin.  For awhile there, I was positively obsessed with the idea that Bush was going to going to set up here as a form of counter-programming to the Most Awesome Presidential Library* in the world, the LBJ Library at UT Austin. Luckily, he didn’t, and we can still hold our heads high.  No, he’s setting his library down at SMU, where it will be nestled in a wealthy, Republican neighborhood and safe from eggs and people flinging burned-out joints at it.  There’s also going to be a think tank, because if you’re going to name a library after Bush, why not pile on with the equally comical idea of thinking? 

But what’s so great is that Bush is having a hard time raising the money.

Yet, given the president’s current unpopularity, some Bush critics wonder whether the facility will turn out to be a historical white elephant. Fundraising for the project so far has been “very modest”, according to Dan Bartlett, a former Bush counsellor who is acting as a library spokesman.

Langdale said the president is intentionally waiting until he leaves office to start actively seeking out donors.

“The sceptics could be right: It might be a white elephant,” said Benjamin Hufbauer, an art history professor at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and an expert on presidential libraries. “But presidents don’t see it that way. ... Presidents see these as a foundation from which to build a new reputation. It’s just the right kind of elephant.”

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Anti-feminist women, I have to admit, fascinate me.  There’s something pathetic about being an anti-feminist woman, which seems to be mostly about sucking up in really transparent ways.  It’s cringe-worthy, and I wonder why anyone would sign up for that sort of humiliation, especially if they aren’t suffering from dramatically low levels of self-esteem.  But I saw this post at Feministing about the True Woman conference, and it was quite illuminating.  How does the conservative movement recruit women?  Well, you lie to them, of course.

This talk given by Mary Kassian is about convincing women that giving up equality will result in a fairyland of pure joy for them.  She literally presents “Leave It To Beaver” as if it were proof that the 1950s were a joyous, uncomplicated era where no one had any problems.  And then it’s one whopping lie after another.

Once married, a woman could normally count on her husband to financially support her and the children.

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Thank god for this Salon interview with Bill Ayers, which is quite possibly the only intelligent thing to come out of the disaster that was the McCain campaign pretending a) that Ayers is currently a terrorist b) that the Weather Underground is any kind of threat to us now c) that the Weather Underground has anything to do with Islamic terrorism d) that Ayers and Obama are best buddies and e) that modern politics should be about endlessly rehashing the 60s.  It’s a good interview—-Walter Shapiro and Bill Ayers are able to talk about their differences of opinion on the effects of radical action in the 60s without getting upset, even though it’s obvious this wound is still open and probably won’t heal as long as the people who remember that time are still alive and kicking.  Ayers is ambivalent about his participation in the Weather Underground—-obviously they were doing way too many drugs and hadn’t really thought about the ramifications of their behavior.  It’s farcical to think that you can set out to destroy property without running the extremely high risk that you’ll kill someone, and I don’t know if he’s really grappled with that fact as much as he should.  But he’s also right that their behavior was peaceful and moderate compared to the government’s behavior at the time. 

The problem with that, though, is when you start comparing yourself to the people you hate and using them as a benchmark for your behavior, it’s really easy to slip into paranoia and start rationalizing all sorts of fucked up shit.  To make it worse for people on the left, people on the right are pretty much in a perpetual projection and rationalization loop, as you have to be when your worldview is fundamentally based on oppression.  They don’t really need an excuse to make up all sorts of vile accusations about how evil liberals are, because in order to get to sleep every night, they have to invent an evil that keeps them from looking inside.  Homophobia is refashioned as “protecting the children/traditional marriage”.  Racism is made a tolerable philosophy by projecting violence, subversion, and sexual perversion onto the targeted group.  Sexism is justified by people who claim they’re “saving babies”, and once you have a rationalization like that, turning to violence to enforce your will becomes easier to rationalize as well.

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Matt’s right-—this article by Frank Rich that uses “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” as a reference point is a sobering reminder to those of us who were born after the 60s that the majority of Americans actually lived through those tumultuous times, which goes a long way to explain McCain’s baffling showing in the polls.  Because for all that McCain is supposedly so far behind, really this should be a blowout.  The Republicans have done pretty much everything they can to turn the public against them.  They suck away your tax dollars on a pet project war that turned into a clusterfuck, exactly as was predicted it would.  They’ve ushered in an economic crisis, the worst since the Great Depression.  The one thing people elected them to do in 2004, and trusted them to do—-shut down Islamic terrorism—-they not only didn’t do, but in fact they actively made the threat worse.  By all accounts, they shouldn’t even have a party anymore, they’ve fucked it up so badly. 

But Republicans hang in by re-fighting the 60s.  (And early 70s.) Which is rich, because as Dubya showed us, they’d really prefer to rebuild the 30s so they can do it “right” this time by turning most of the nation into a permanent underclass.  The Holy Grail of Republicanism is taking away programs that FDR founded, especially Social Security.  Re-fighting the 60s is a poor substitute for going straight to the source of liberalism in their eyes.  But most people living don’t remember the 30s, and even if they do, they take that past as unchangeable history, so Republicans are stuck re-fighting the 60s.  In the final days of the campaign season, the entire strategy of the Republican party campaigning can be summed up as, “Stoke fears that a certain class of people has been nurturing for 40 years.”  Elizabeth Dole busts out anxieties that have been alive since Time magazine put “Is God Dead?” on their cover in 1966.  The Norm Coleman campaign in Minnesota is mainly alive because they’ve been blanketing the airwaves with ads that suggest that Al Franken perhaps is a little soft on the issue of keeping women chained to the stove and pregnant.  And the McCain campaign’s argument has been reduced to, “Can you really believe we’re going to elect a black President?  Did I mention that he’s BLACK?!”

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Ezra’s eyes were opened to how much Republicans are controlled by anti-choice fanatics.  He lists a number of very conservative, more experienced potential Republican V.P. picks that McCain could have gone with, and then says:

And so instead we got Sarah Palin. Sometimes I don’t think it’s fully appreciated how constrained the GOP is by its pro-life orthodoxy.

It is confusing.  And it’s more confusing the more you fall for the lie that the anti-choice movement is about “life”, because the discussion of “when life begins”, while fun for some people to debate about on blogs is largely irrelevant to most voters, who are rightfully concerned about their actual lives more than about theoretical lives.  But I think it’s less confusing if you really, fundamentally believe that “abortion” is a stand-in issue for feminism itself, a way to turn feminism—-which was both a political movement and a social movement that’s somewhat out of the reach of policy-makers—-into a voting issue. Pro-choicers aren’t really single issue voters in the way that the anti-choice voting bloc is.  And that’s true even when you’re talking the biggest feminists out there.  We understand that feminism is a multi-faceted thing, and while it would be painful to do so, most of us would hold our nose and vote for an anti-choice Democrat over a nominally pro-choice Republican, especially if we can believe the former is more supportive of contraception access, equal pay, enforcing the VAWA, and of course the set of issues that most feminists care about that aren’t explicitly feminist, like creating and maintaining peace, and running a just, productive economy. 

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I have to recommend this recent episode of “This American Life” about two women who were switched in the hospital when they were born in 1951, and didn’t find out until 1994.  I tuned in, figuring it would be interesting to hear about the fallout from such a revelation, but what I wasn’t expecting was how this story would shift over from a “Whoda thunk it?”-type story to a fable about the lunacy of sexism and male domination.  Because one of the mothers knew what had happened from the day she got home from the hospital, but didn’t tell.  Knowing that all this heartache (and really, it’s distressing how much this upended the switched babies lives as adult women) could have been avoided if she’d just spoken up in 1951, the central mystery of the tale is why Mary Miller, the mother who knew, didn’t speak up.

The truth is uncomfortable, and really I think if it wasn’t so bald and if Mary Miller hadn’t been so insistent on it, the producers maybe would have downplayed it more, because the truth really has the potential to unnerve not only the participants in the program, but pretty much everyone who has female family members, especially older ones, that have to tip-toe their way through life, employing passive aggression and subterfuge, all to avoid the anger of men who don’t like women speaking up about pretty much anything.  The two families in this story are very different. The family that had no knowledge, the McDonalds, come across as a mainstream Midwestern 50s family—-church-going, but not religious, interested in athletics and school spirit, mildly indulgent to children without spoiling them.  The Millers come across much worse—-evangelical Christians with a whole passel of children they make sleep in one bed and who they discipline with the strap.  It’s unfortunate that the mother who figured it out belonged to the Miller family, because when she said something about it, her husband immediately dismissed her (probably in no small part out of habit), and she didn’t have any recourse because she couldn’t confront him on it.  So, she hid it until he mellowed on the subject and admitted she was right, 43 years later. 

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It’s hard to say what’s the best part of Sabotabby’s post about how recently declassified documents exposed a 70s-era spying program conducted by Mounties on feminist organizations, but the parts where the Mounties had to file reports on groups of women described as “uncombed” singing songs of sisterhood is up there.  But just read the whole thing.  I’m also impressed with this link she includes to the ever-fun crank Henry Makow on how blue jeans signal the fall of decent womanhood.  Not only will no one marry you if you say “fuck”, no one will marry you if you wear blue jeans, ladies. 

Favorite quotes:

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Okay, so I bought some T-shirts from a local store that makes them.  Basic goofy stuff—-a picture of a Moog synthesizer, an argyle design with some skeletons, a drawing of Iron Man by Daniel Johnston for Marc, and a T-shirt that cracked me up because I thought of it as a commentary on today’s downloaded music wars.  I thought someone made it up as a reminder of how these things come and go, and that the over-the-top nature of it pointed to a parody.

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Of all the memories of what a vile waste of space of a human being Jesse Helms was, this detail jumps out at me the most: That he taunted Senator Carol Moseley-Braun by whistling “Dixie” at her.  I think it’s because we’re so often piously told that the symbols of the Confederacy that are embraced by some wingnuts are about “heritage” and “history” and “pride”, you know, and not hatred of black people and a longing for a racial caste system or even slavery.  I love it when you get glimpses of evidence that people don’t believe their own bullshit.

OMFG. Echidne posted a link to blinkytreefrog, who found a book from about 1951 called “On Becoming A Woman”.  Which is very fortuitous, as the Human Life Alliance has put a PDF of their abstinence-only rags “Just For Girls” and “Just For Boys”, which are similar to this 1951 book to the degree that they could be plagiarists.  Except I think that woman-hating, sex-phobic nuts basically eat and shit this stuff, so it’s less plagiarism and more the fiber of their beings.  Shall we do a dance of comparison?

1951:

2008:

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Posted by Amanda Marcotte at 03:15 PM • (12) Comments