Culture Warriors category archive

The Rude One shares his take on the Paula Deen situation.

It’s not what you’d expect (warning: rudeness).

Like Chauncey Devega, he is able to look beyond an instance of a specific racist slur and see larger issues.

Connie Schultz:

Meanwhile, down here on earth, every time I hear someone talk about how God hates homosexuality — that whole “love the sinner, hate the sin” malarkey — I think of my late mother, whose faith survived countless trials in her 62 years.

“Being a Christian means fixing yourself and helping others,” she used to say, “not the other way around.” That’s a lifetime of work summed up right there.

Sally Kalson comments on the Republican Party’s pervy preoccupation with lady parts. A nugget:

Unfortunately, religious conservatives have been allowed to assume a disproportionate influence over women’s health care, intruding on private decisions where they have no business and punishing women who don’t conform to their narrow, parochial views.

These Republican men, and they are mostly men, have spearheaded all manner of intrusions into women’s wombs, passing restrictions on the state level that gag doctors, shut down clinics, obstruct access to health care, harass those seeking legal abortions and even block coverage for contraceptives, which are used by almost every woman in the country at some point.

Read the whole thing.

More stuff you can’t make up.

I really don’t know what to make of this, other than it’s really creepy.

The townsfolk seem to be circling the wagons, but they are circling them in the wrong direction.

Anal rape with foreign objects of a teammate seems to me to go beyond simple hazing or schoolyard bullying.

A Christian school in Georgia is using the Bible to back up their decision that an 12-year-old girl should no longer be able to play football because the boys on the team could have “impure thoughts.”

Maddy Blythe had at least four sacks playing for Strong Rock Christian School’s team last year, but just this week, the school’s CEO told her that she would no longer be able to play.

I suspect that the boys are going to have all the impure thoughts they want, whether or not this little girl is playing football with them.

But, frankly, the more I see, the more I am convinced that the persons with the mostest impurest thoughts of all are those persons who loudly proclaim how Christian they are.

What was old is new again.

Connie Schultz remembers:

During this week’s library talk, a woman in the audience asked why Republicans continue to spew nonsense about abortion. “They don’t really believe this stuff, do they?” another woman said.

I responded by sharing a story from 1979, when I was editor of my college newspaper, the Daily Kent Stater. Shortly before the fall semester began, we found out that an administrator had derailed plans to distribute a brochure about birth control methods during freshman orientation.

We decided on several front pages to the topic. . . .

Thirty-four years later, I still recall one particular father’s call. “You listen here, young lady,” he shouted into the phone. “I will never let my daughter stick an IUD up her rectum.”

“Good for you,” I said, “’cause that’s not where it goes.”

In 1979, that father sounded like an uninformed loon.

Today, he could be a Republican member of Congress.

Elsewhere, Chauncey Devega rominates on the topic. Follow the link to read the rest; you’ll be glad you did:

Paula Deen’s fantasy of black and brown compliance, surrender, and subordination has connections to some of the country’s most ugly moments since the election of Barack Obama.

Birtherism, and Republican Joe Wilson’s unprecedented heckling of President Barack Obama during his State of the Union Address in 2009 is a parallel to Paula Deen’s fantasy.

Conspiranoid fantasies of Secession and a second Civil War are also part of this national derangement on the part of the White Right and Tea Party GOP. The murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, and how Republicans have rallied to Zimmerman’s defense, is a reflection of a foundational assumption that black people must always be subservient, and surrender to White authority–as well as those overly identified and enamored with it–in any circumstance.

Projecting forward, at the end of her saga Paula Deen will be forced to publicly apologize for her racism. In that moment, and keeping with script, she will also channel some tears in order to get back into the good graces of her fans.

Image via Contradict Me.

Mark Frauenfelder reports:

Here’s what happened, as my daughter described it in text messages to us: she was at the station where the TSA checks IDs. She said the officer was “glaring” at her and mumbling. She said, “Excuse me?” and he said, “You’re only 15, COVER YOURSELF!” in a hostile tone. She said she was shaken up by his abusive manner.

Frauenfelder says that he is pursuing this incident with TSA management.

There’s a picture at the link. I can be as much a dirty old man as the next guy, but I can’t see anything improper about the young lady’s outfit.

I have quoted my Freshman roommate before and it’s still true:

Give some people a flat hat and they think they rule the world.

Also, too.

Via AmericaBlog.

Republicans getting skeevier and skeevier.

Historiann has a blast from the past, complete with an echo from the now.

Wilkie Collins, in The Moonstone, Part 29:

Miss Clark affectionately reminds Mr. Franklin Blake that she is a Christian and that it is therefore quite impossible to offend her.

The self-styled “Christians” we have in the States seem to delight, no, wallow in, even seek out, offense.

Then, again, theirs is a religion of “an eye for an eye.”

I forget.

Is that in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John?

Oh, yeah, it was Hammurabi.

Dr. Jill McDevitt contemplates the effect of a role reversal.

It’s been a long time since I started my day with a bowl of cereal.

I am genetically blessed with low cholesterol, so one of my few little luxuries is a traditional breakfast with really good coffee (no payola here–I’m just a very satisfied customer; it’s one of those aforementioned luxuries which comes by UPS at regular intervals).

Nevertheless, I just might have to buy myself some Cheerios.

Laurie Essig reflects on the passing of Jean Stapleton and nostalgia for Archie Bunker’s fanstasy of the Good Old Days. A nugget:

But what no one watching the show (“All in the Family”–ed.) in the 1970s could have foreseen was that Archie’s side would not go the way of the dinosaurs. Instead, they would breathe new life into new generations. This “new nostalgia” is evident in many contemporary political movements, but it also a very clear part of contemporary love in the US.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., has some thoughts.

I missed this column, in which Leonard Pitts, Jr., discussed the Boy Scouts of America’s recent half-anatomied decision on allowing gay scouts. Pitts points out the essence of Republican Family Values: perpetuating privilege.

It is, of course, a mistake to seek logic here. This isn’t about logic, but about a conservative group doing what conservative groups always do when social change comes. Meaning, they bring up the rear, the caboose on the freedom train lurching belatedly to where the rest of us have already been.

It happened with racism, happened with sexism, happened with anti-Semitism, all of which conservatism loudly and proudly embraced long after the rest of us came to see them as evil and wrong.