Culture Warriors category archive

It’s a parent thing.

Something about having kids causes people to forget what growing up was like.

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(Context.)

His phrasing is instructive, is it not?

Via Contradict Me.

Chauncey Devega explains.

Republican legislator claims to be unaware of the favorite fantasy of old white Republican men.

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) declined to take a position last week during a town hall meeting on whether transvaginal ultrasounds should be mandatory for women seeking abortions, saying he has never heard of the practice and couldn’t weigh in on it because “I haven’t had one.”

(snip)

Duffy has described himself as “100 percent prolife without exceptions” (though he also said “To qualify, I believe that if we have the life of a mother as an issue, the mother’s life takes priority, but we must make every effort to save the life of the child.”) Asked about one of the main goals for the pro-life movement, however, Duffy said he had not heard of transvaginal ultrasounds at all.

Yeah.

Right.

Via TPM.

A NASCAR driver who was suspended on Sunday for using a racial slur is explaining that he “didn’t think twice” about using the word because it “didn’t seem like a big deal.”

Hateful behavior doesn’t usually seem like such a big deal to the person doing the behaving, now, does it?

A pride of heteros.

Kavips has a theory:

. . . I notice that across the red states of the United States, primarily a bastion of fundamentalist conservative theocracy, the weather is changing. Basically, there is no rain…. Secondly I have noticed that the weather in Oklahoma is every year, corresponding more and more like those dry, hot , sandy climes on the other side of our planet, which coincidentally, are also occupied by a bastion of fundamentalist conservative theocracies, practicing something very similar to Oklahoma policy but over there it is called Shara (sic) Law…

Read the rest.

An Anglican priest speaks:

Via Delaware Liberal.

State rape remains a favorite fantasy of old white men.

Many years ago, I sat in the bar of the Midland Hotel in Chicago, which was my preferred roost in Chicago back when I was a road warrior. Near me, two Sears employees (the Sears Tower was about two blocks away) were talking about rumors of lay-offs.

As they paid their tab, one of them said, “No matter what, I won’t go back to Indiana.”

As near as I can tell, this sort of stuff explains why.

Chauncey Devega considers how a white university president could consider the “three-fiths” compromise (PDF) to be a model for our political discourse.

A nugget:

Here is the painful reality that many of those in the out-group, the less than privileged, the Other, the marginalized, and the like have not yet figured out: James Wagner does not care about you. His comments on slavery were not a personal dig, stab, or barb. Black folks, our legacy, personhood, and the like are quite simply not choices on the cognitive decision tree of men like him.

You/we/us are footnotes and outliers.

People of color–and likely women, gays and lesbians, the “disabled”, and other folks who are not “normal” by the narrow definitions of hetero-normative, able-bodied, Whiteness–are also non-factors in the worlds of the truly race and class privileged in American society.

Read the rest. It is one of Devega’s typically tightly-reasoned, lengthy, ascerbic posts.

Sign the petition.

Some of the language is a little strong.

Impolitic. Off-putting. Invective-like.

But not necessarily inaccurate.

State rape returns.

Republicans are trying again to feel up women vicariously.

Michigan Republicans have introduced a bill requiring all women to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound before obtaining an abortion, a move that rekindles last year’s firestorm when other GOP-led states were considering similar measures.

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Really, now, it’s about time, isn’t it?

Also, too.

Mark Morfords thinks that the divisive Republican electoral strategy of the “Culture Wars” is over, though he recognizes that there are still large enclaves of resistance and a long mopping-up process to come. A nugget:

Perhaps you’ve heard? Perhaps you’ve noticed? The infamous “culture wars” officially declared in the Reagan era and then hissed forth through the years by everyone from George W. Bush to Rick Warren, the Tea Party to groupthink megachurches, Rush Limbaugh’s giant mouth to Bill O’Reilly’s sad little book, Palin and Bachmann and Karl Rove, too, all ultimately landing with an inglorious splat on poor Rick “please don’t Google my last name” Santorum’s head, the culture wars of yore are essentially over.

And the Republicans lost.

We shall see.

Contraception, n.: Something right-wingers need to take to avoid having so many misconceptions.

H/T Susan for giving me permission to post this.

It’s not “black” history. It’s American history, as the Fayetteville Observer points out, after listing events scheduled in its area.

The list (of events–ed.) is long. Eventually, though, it comes back to a history stolen from us – all of us, of all colors – by antebellum shibboleths and Reconstruction-era revisionism, much of it still uncorrected because of a fear: Young minds can’t handle detailed discussion of U.S. history the way it actually happened.

That fiction has survived too long already. It isn’t “the children” who are being protected.

Thom wonders about the paradox.