Culture Warriors category archive

White on white violence plagues public events.

Addendum, a Little Bit Later:

John Cole posts more news of white on white violence.

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*Learn more about the kindly old investigator.

John Aravosis considers the history that is obscured by “tradition.” A nugget:

. . . “traditionally” women were property; they pretty much belonged to their husband. And as property, they couldn’t inherit a dime. In the old days it was all about the kids. If you had a farm, or an empire, you needed a son to take over some day (to hell with the daughters). The wife was important as an incubator, and your daughters were relatively useless, unless you could sell one off and get a decent dowry in return.

So when you hear conservatives, like the National Review’s Mona Charen, talk about the traditional reason behind marriage — the children — she’s half speaking the truth. The traditional purpose of marriage was “male children.” Wives were tolerated as necessary, and little girls were mistakes.

Via Balloon Juice.

Daniel Ruth rounds of the right’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s inaction on gay marriage this week–an inaction that effectively ended bans on gay marriage in 30 states. A nugget:

Still, there was some good news. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has become a professional chattering-teeth talk show host, was so incensed over what he saw as a lack of proper breast-beating indignation from Republicans over the court’s decision not to take up the gay marriage issue that he threatened to leave the GOP. That makes him even more irrelevant than he already is. At least that got some crickets chirping.

Follow the link for more.

Stephen Colbert considers the recent Supreme Court decision to to hear appeals of lower court decisions overturning bans on gay marriage.

Below the fold because it may autoplay.

Read more »

The God of Hate always has followers, because hate sells.

Jessica Valenti wants parity.

As state after state strips women of their access to abortion and the US supreme court rules to strip women of access to contraception, it seems only fair that men should be “helped” in the same way that women have been “helped” all these years. Right? After all, the laws are said to be there to protect us, from ourselves, and we wouldn’t want men to feel left out.

So, before engaging in any sexual act that could lead to procreation, what if all men had to undergo years of male-centric, abstinence-only education to learn about the horrors and all-around grossness of male sexuality? And what if the standards for how we legislated male sexuality and what we taught about it were based on scientific data of the same quality as that which is applied to women?

Follow the link for some examples.

Werner Herzog’s Bear, history war correspondent, reports:

I am interested in examining exactly why the History Wars have returned with such vehemence. Most of it has to do with Tea Party conservatism, which was called something else back in the 1970s, but was still the same force opposing textbooks that dispensed with a hagiographic vision of the American past. Radical conservatism relies on a certain narrative of American history more than perhaps any other political movement. They constantly make appeals to the “Founders,” who they have transformed into divine figures who can do no wrong. America to them is a kind of tool for God’s will on earth, an “exceptional” nation bringing the light of freedom to the world.

The evangelical/fundamentalist flavoring of the Tea Party colors its historical vision. America can do no wrong, since it is divinely inspired. To point out any shortcomings, or how the Founders were not perfect and actually even fought with each other, is heresy.

Follow the link for the rest of the report.

Sometimes the American Taliban puts on its Sunday go to meeting clothes.

Cenk rips them off.

The rituals of the Nacerima Tribe.

Tony Norman.

Just read it.

Debunking de bunk.

The Seattle Times’s Danny Westneat remembers his time as a beat reported doing a weekly “police blotter” column. Despite the publicity, he suspects that, aside from the cover-up, pearl-clutching over the NFL’s abusive husbands and boyfriends may be obscuring a larger problem. A nugget:

. . . I came to call this my weekly domestic-violence tour.

Family fights, usually with a man attacking a woman, are the top reason people call police. They make up anywhere from 15 to 50 percent of what police do. Sifting through the weekly reports of South King County was a bruising tour of family dysfunction: shouting matches in the streets to fist fights to battering of children with canes to assaults with knives to, every so often, homicide.

Family violence was so routine it became background noise. I rarely put it in the crime blotter. Maybe this was a mistake, but there was too much. I could have filled the entire blotter every week solely with horrific accounts of men abusing women. I didn’t. I looked away.

(snip)

But the obsession with the NFL scandal is obscuring the real story: We are the ones who really have an epidemic of domestic-violence problems.