Archive for November, 2008

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Florida Adoption Ban Ruled Unconstitutional: “These Children Are Thriving,� Says Judge

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 by Barry Deutsch

From Box Turtle Bulletin, some great news:

Miami-Date Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman has declared Florida’s gay adoption ban unconstitutional, saying, â€?It is clear that sexual orientation is not a predictor of a person’s ability to parent.â€? This ruling grants Frank Gill, a gay foster father in North Miami, the go-ahead to adopt two foster children he has been raising since 2004. The two children are ages 4 and 8, making Frank virtually the only parent the younger child has ever known.

Lawyers for the state of Florida immediately said they would appeal the ruling. During the hearings, attorneys for the state brought in so-called “expertsâ€? George Rekers and Walter Schumm, both of whom are closely associated with Paul Cameron. Rekers used his own particular brand of junk science to support the state’s position that gays should be barred from adopting, adding that he believed the ban should extend to Native Americans for the same reasons.

From the Orlando Sentinel:

“These children are thriving. These words we don’t often hear within these walls. That’s uncontroverted,” said Circuit Judge Cindy S. Lederman. “They’re a good family. They’re a family in every way except in the eyes of the law. These children have a right to permanency,” the judge said. “The only real permanency is adoption in the home where they are thriving. … There is no rational basis to preclude homosexuals from adopting.”

Posted in Ampersand | Comment

Toon: The Blame Game

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 by Mikhaela Reid


Click to enlarge

I’ll have more thoughts on Proposition 8 and all of this divide-and-conquer bullshit later.

In the meantime, Barry has three excellent roundups of links/posts/articles about the awful “blame black folks” meme and the nasty “black people are all homophobes” meme or the ridiculous “there’s a black vs. gay war” meme: “If you call me a faggot, I will call you a…”, “Two more posts on blaming the brown,” and “Prop 8: The Rush To Blame The Brown People.”

Posted in CWA, Media, The Boiling Point | Comment

Handful of transphobic protesters overwhelmed by counter-protest

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 by Barry Deutsch

Some good news, via Bean:

SILVERTON, Ore. (AP) – Four protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas were in Silverton yesterday to protest the election of the nation’s first openly transgender mayor.

They were overmatched by a large group of counter-protesters who rallied in support of the Mayor Stu Rasmussen.

Rasmussen has twice before been mayor of the small city. But he served those terms before his breast implants and before he started wearing dresses and 3-inch heels openly in public.

The protesters arrived with an assortment of signs, such as “God Hates You,” and “Barack Obama = Antichrist.”

But the town greeted the protesters with a festive counter-protest. More than 100 people paraded in the street and some men wore women’s clothing in a show of support for Rasmussen.

Posted in Ampersand | Comment

Fact-checking MRAs (episode 4,367 in a series)

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 by Barry Deutsch

MRA Robert Franklin writes:

New Teen Violence Report is 468 Pages Long–but the Word ‘Father’ Is Nowhere to be Found

[...] The report is 468 pages long, and as far as I can tell, the word “father� is nowhere to be found in it.

Wow, that is pretty surprising. Especially since it took me under a minute to find this in the report:

Absent Fathers

The vast majority of single parents in Canada are women, and there has been much speculation about the propensity of youth from lone-parent homes led by women to be involved in violence. Although the research and literature points to a strong correlation between violence involving youth and teenage parents, the findings are equivocal on the correlation between violence involving youth and the absence of a father generally.

Despite the lack of solid evidence, an increased presence of fathers, and particularly Black fathers, is often cited as a force….

While it is logical to work to have fathers be responsible parents, we cannot conclude that their absence from the home is, on its own, a source of the immediate risk factors for violence involving youth.

Apparently “as far as I can tell” doesn’t include a simple text search. Or skimming the headers.

UPDATE: Not long after I posted this, Robert’s post disappeared.

Posted in Ampersand | Comment

One of those “Americans Don’t Know Nothing� surveys

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 by Barry Deutsch

It’s 33 multiple-choice questions, mostly about basic US civics, but straying a bit into economics. You can take the quiz yourself by going here.

They gave the quiz to a representative sample of Americans (or at least, of Americans with phone service). 7!% of Americans got a failing grade (that is, answered fewer than 60% of the questions correctly). The average score was 49%.

A few quick points:

1) Although the report emphasizes that college doesn’t make much difference, the opposite seems to be true. Going by the numbers, the single factor most clearly associated with higher scores was education (Average score of people with doctorates: 72%. Average for those without a high school degree: 35%.)

2) Amusingly, people who told the surveyor that they had been elected to public office at some point, did slightly worse on the test than those who had never been elected to public office.

3) These sort of quizzes are often used to argue that the young people are stupid, but they rarely give the same test to all age groups. This one did, and found that age made very little difference; baby boomers (the highest average scorers) did only a few points better, on average, than the youngest group.

4) Talking about politics a lot is associated with higher scores, as is using the internet, so I’m sure “Alas” readers will kick ass on the test. Watching lots of TV is associated with lower scores. So is talking on the phone a lot.

Weirdly, the report’s discussion refers to phones as “passive electronic media.” How is talking on the phone passive?

5) Race had a noticible association with test scores; whites and multiracial respondents scored about 50%, while Asians, Latin@s and Blacks scored about 40%. Men scored a little better than women. My guess is that this reflects a mixture of education & school quality effects, language barriers for some respondents, and stereotype threat.

6) Disappointingly, there’s no relationship between knowing this stuff and politics (conservatives and liberals both got about the same scores).1 If every American could pass this test, would anything change?

7) 32/33, in case you’re wondering.2

I guess I’m supposed to be frightened or appalled or something by the low scores on this test, but really it just makes me feel sort of alienated from my culture. It’s a reminder that knowing stuff like this is a hobby, and one I don’t happen to share with most Americans.

  1. Although the report doesn’t give much detail, so maybe there is some relationship that’s not reported here.
  2. I missed the one about the anti-Federalists. Darn it.

Posted in Ampersand | Comment

Not the last safe target, not the last acceptable prejudice

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 by Barry Deutsch

Kevin Moore criticizes a slew of hacktacular cartoons about obesity and health. Needless to say, I agree with Kevin — and would even if he hadn’t quoted me extensively. (ahem).

(You should go read the whole post, if only to check out the incredibly awful Batman cartoon. Base-jumping? What the heck does that mean? And how long did it take most readers to recognize that the thing he’s standing on is a scale?)

But I do have one minor objection — a nit-pick, really, nothing more. Kevin writes:

As my friend and political cartoonist Barry Deutsch has pointed out many times, fat people are easy targets, perhaps the last “safe� target (along with the mentally ill and poor Southern whites) for comedians and other humorists to treat as an “other�, that slightly less-than-human category of people who deviate from The Norm and thus deserve mockery and marginalization.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never said that fat people are “the last safe target,” because I loathe that phrase.

Everyone thinks they’re the last safe target.

Just last week, I read MRA Glenn Sacks saying that “males are the only politically acceptable target.”1 This right-wing blogger claims that white people are the last “safe target.” This one2 thinks Sarah Palin, as a white conservative woman, was the “safe target.” No, wait — “the only safe target is the straight male”!

Of course, it’s not just anti-feminists and right-wingers who use the phrase — plenty of my allies use it too. Fat people are safe targets; the poor are safe targets; trans women are safe targets; undocumented immigrants are safe targets; black women are safe targets; and so on.

And let’s not forget the “last acceptable prejudice” — a distinction shared by Mormons, suburbanites, children with Down syndrome, Catholics, women, homosexuals, elderly people, rednecks, and probably a hundred others.

I completely agree with the general points made by many of these folks (pretty much all the ones on the left), but can we please stop using the “only safe target” and “last acceptable prejudice” framings? Taken literally, these phrases positively scream “oppression olympics!”, and they’re virtually never accurate.

  1. By the way, referring to men and boys as “males” is something that, according to some MRAs, is a sign of misandry, when feminists do it.
  2. Phrase (c) 2008 John McCain.

Posted in Ampersand | Comment

Your Cheap Shot of the Day

Monday, November 24th, 2008 by Kevin Moore

The NY Times reports that Alan Colmes will be leaving “Hannity & Colmes” to pursue other projects or spend time with his family or find his spine. That leaves open the fate of the show:

So what will happen to “Hannity & Colmes?â€? Sean Hannity, the popular conservative commentator, may become the sole host of the program….

In other words, nothing.

Posted in politics   Tagged: alan colmes, FOXNews, sean hannity   

Posted in In Contempt, Politics | Comment

Computer Trouble

Monday, November 24th, 2008 by Matt Bors

My computer is in the shop so I’ll be unable to update the site until next week. I’m down at Ye Olde Internet Cafe now.

Today’s comic can be seen here.

Enjoy your Turkey.

Posted in Idiot Box | Comment

new cartoon

Monday, November 24th, 2008 by Shannon Wheeler

Got a new cartoon up…

I had a blast drawing that water and the storm….

Check it out. Read it from the start.

Posted in How to Be Happy | Comment

Debating Rape Jokes

Monday, November 24th, 2008 by Barry Deutsch

[trigger warning]

Can rape jokes be funny? Megan at Jezebel argues they can be:

If we take sexual assault off the table of things we can laugh about or joke about, it’s just another way of saying: this is a different crime than any other crime, and so we can and must treat its victims differently than any other crime.

And, you know, fuck that. I got treated differently than any other crime victim once because of the kind of crime that I was the victim of. If I had been mugged, would the cops have been calling my friends and asking them how much I’d been drinking that night? If I had been only robbed, would it have mattered to the cops whether I’d told the guys I was out with that night that I was dating someone? If I had been shot walking out of the bar, would it have been anyone’s business if my friend thought that I was flirting or not? And if any of those crimes had been committed instead, would everyone be so horribly offended by me making jokes about it? It’s all part of the way in which society wants to treat me differently because of how I was victimized. Let’s treat sexual assaults like any other crime and tell some rape jokes. Cool?

In the course of her post, Megan talks about this Wanda Sykes routine:

…she’s making light of Kobe Bryant’s victim, who was raped after she went up to his hotel room at the ungodly hour of 2 in the morning. In fact, you could argue — and I am — that Wanda Sykes is poking fun of that victim for being, you know, stupid enough to get raped.

I didn’t even consider that interpretation until Megan suggested it. To me, Sykes’ joke seemed to be playing with how tragic/ludicrous it is that visiting a celebrity’s hotel room isn’t safe for a woman. (Men can visit a celebrity’s room to discuss his jump shot without worrying about being raped — and without being blamed for it if they are raped).

Disagreeing with Megan’s approach, Liss writes:

Except, here’s the thing: Public rape jokes have fuck-all to do with sexual assault survivors using humor to deal with their own sexual assaults.

Megan’s argument lacks some critical distinctions and exceptions: Public jokes and private jokes are not equivalent. Jokes for laughs and jokes for catharsis are very different animals. Jokes about rape made by men, who have a significantly lower chance of being raped, are not the same as jokes made by women, whose lives are qualitatively different from men’s because of their heightened chance of being raped. Jokes that minimize the severity and ubiquity of rape (e.g. prison rape jokes) perpetuate the rape culture; jokes that underline the severity and ubiquity of rape (e.g. Wanda Sykes’ detachable vagina bit) challenge the rape culture.

And even still, all rape jokes run the very real risk of triggering survivors who aren’t expecting rape jokes in their escapist entertainment. (Go figure.) Which underscores the inherent deficiency of the question “Is a rape joke ever funny?” It’s incomplete without a discussion of audience, intended or otherwise—and the audience for any rape joke potentially includes survivors who may not only find the joke decidedly unfunny, but also triggering.

I think Lissa interpreted the Sykes routine pretty much as I did (although she put it better than me, typically).

Asking if a rape joke is “funny” is besides the point, because “is this funny” and “is this problematic” are not the same question. As I’m pretty sure bell hooks points out somewhere, some jokes are offensive and funny. I think a better question for feminist analysis is the one Liss asks: does a rape joke (funny or not) perpetuate rape culture, or does it question rape culture?

And, finally, I think people should be careful to avoid turning discussions of humor into the politics of personal purity (just to be clear, Melissa didn’t do this, but it’s a mistake I’ve seen other feminists make in similar discussions). It’s worthwhile to subject humor to the kind of feminist analysis Melissa uses. But we shouldn’t give ourselves demerits for having laughed at the “wrong” joke, because the point of these discussion isn’t for each of us to gauge our own (or other people’s) level of feminist purity.

This is a feminist-only thread.

Posted in Ampersand | Comment

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