I, for one, welcome our new PoC overlords.

The data has come in, and it shows that only 49.6% of last year’s new babies were non-Hispanic white. If you’re like me, you look at those numbers, say “Oh. Okay,” and then go in for another workday in your office in which you are the only native Anglophone in your department. If you are a racist asshat, however, then you look at those numbers and start spraying turds all over the Internet which make me embarrassed to be counted as white.

If you want to see how bankrupt an idea white supremacy is, look no further than the spewings of white supremacists.

Concerned Women for America hate women in America. Hate ‘em.

Ever notice how pretty much every advocacy organization in this country which includes the word “family” in its name is focused on misogyny, homophobia and racism? If we see it in the plural form, then it might be okay, such as “healthy families” or “women and families,” but in singular, it’s nearly always bad news. Groups like Family Research Council are full of terrible proposals for women and children, and they keep repeating this word “family” to make horribleness sound nice.

The House GOP just passed a reauthorization of VAWA with all the good new stuff taken out.

In past years, VAWA enjoyed bipartisan support and garnered little controversy. This time around, however, top Religious Right groups have rallied against the bill due to the protections it would extend to immigrant, Native American, and LGBT victims of domestic abuse. These groups, including the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum, and the Southern Baptist Convention’sEthics and Religious Liberty Commission, made noise on Capitol Hill and are most directly responsible for the events that will unfold in the House today.

And…what do these people have to say? Concerned Women for America took the lead in writing to Senators:

We, the undersigned, representing millions of Americans nationwide, are writing today to oppose the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). This nice-sounding bill is deceitful because it destroys the family by obscuring real violence in order to promote the feminist agenda. […]

There is no denying the very real problem of violence against women and children. However, the programs promoted in VAWA are harmful for families. VAWA often encourages the demise of the family as a means to eliminate violence.

Further, this legislation continues to use overly broad definitions of domestic violence. These broad definitions actually squander the resources for victims of actual violence by failing to properly prioritize and assess victims. Victims who can show physical evidence of abuse should be our primary focus.

They use “family” to mean that it’s better for children to grow up watching Daddy beat Mommy to a pulp (and possibly put her in an early grave) than to help Mommy take the kids and get away from Daddy. Such situations often also involve violence on children, but I suppose it would be so much worse for children to grow up without their fathers:

In 1998, Johnson was arrested by the Perrysburg Police, again on domestic violence charges. According to the police report, Johnson provided a “very similar” account of the incident to that his wife Ofelia and 14-year-old son gave police. Both wife and son reported that Johnson had Ofelia Felix-Johnson in a wrist lock, and when the son attempted to stop Johnson from hurting his mother, Johnson put the son in a head lock such that he was “unable to breathe and was choking up food,” according to the police report. After the son broke free, the police report continues, Johnson “put his right hand around [the boy's] throat and pushed [him] against the wall with his back to the wall and choked [the boy] for about 5 seconds.”

Timothy Johnson is one of the people who signed the letter opposing the Senate’s version of VAWA. Yes, I’m sure a convicted wife-batterer and child-batterer would know all about the demise of families.

In a sane world, a phrase like “family values” would bring up a commitment to caring for your kids, loving your partner, being there for your siblings and taking care of your elderly parents and grandparents. In public policy discussions, “family values” should refer to policies that empower people to build and maintain healthy family relations, but there is no room for battering in a healthy family. Part of caring for your kids is not beating up their other parent. Part of caring for your kids is also raising them in an environment in which you, and they, are not subjected to violence.

To say it “destroys the family” to empower battered women to leave their abusers assumes that a family no longer exists if the husband and father is no longer in it. It assumes that upholding a man’s relationship to his wife and children—even if the relationship is a toxic one—is more important than allowing women and children to live without battering. If that’s what “family” means, then, fuck it: I’m promoting the Feminist Agenda. Concerned Women for America can go concern themselves right off a short pier.

 

Virginia Del. Robert G. Marshall calls the kettle black

Thorne-Begland was the only one of more than three dozen judicial nominees — including 10 others from the Richmond region — who was not elected to a judgeship following a marathon legislative session dominated by review of amendments to the two-year state budget proposed by Gov. Bob McDonnell.

And how, you may wonder, is Mr. Thorne-Begland uniquely unqualified among nominees for a judgeship in Virginia?

A number of conservative House Republicans with military backgrounds questioned Thorne-Begland’s decision to speak publicly about his sexual orientation while he was in the military and subject to its code of conduct.

“For me it’s not not about fear and bigotry and ignorance and so forth,” said  Del. L. Scott Lingamfelter, R-Prince William. ”It is very definitely about duty.”

In an email blast to supporters late last week, the Christian conservative Family Foundation questioned Thorne-Begland’s fitness for the bench given his support for gay marriage, which is not legal in Virginia. Thorne-Begland and his partner, Michael, live together and are raising twins.

Marshall, too had charged that Thorne-Begland pursued an “aggressive activist homosexual agenda.”

“Duty” here is code for “don’t make us uncomfortable.”

We can’t have a new judge who spoke out against DADT at the expense of his military career and who now raises twins openly with his partner. If you’re gay and pursuing a legal/judicial career in Virginia, you’d best stay in the closet.

But his nomination came under fire late last week, as the Family Foundation and Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Prince William, stoked fears that the 45-year-old attorney would allow his sexual orientation to influence his judicial decisions.

If you’re queer, and you might make judicial decisions that make life suck less for queer people, then according to Del. Marshall you are allowing your sexual orientation to influence your judicial decisions, and to him that is unacceptable. However, Del. Marshall doesn’t seem to consider that some might accuse him of allowing his bigotry to influence his legislative decisions, and in ways that would do a lot more damage than any “aggressive activist homosexual agenda.” Amanda Marcotte has more of his nonsense:

“Marriage is between one man and one woman, and the the applicant has represented himself in public in a relationship that we don’t recognize in Virginia,” Marshall said in an interview with WRIC, the ABC affiliate in Richmond.

Of course he’s just making shit up as he goes along. We don’t see him applying this “relationship propriety test” to people who are against marriage equality. I think he’s freaking out over the fact that support for civil marriage equality is shooting up like a rocket all over the country, and Tracy Thorne-Begland is a handy target for his anxiety.

Amazingly enough, not all teenagers are horrible people.

It would have been so nice to go the rest of my life without talking about Mitt Romney, but something is bugging me and I need to get it off my chest.

You may have heard that this happened, and Mittens is unsurprisingly having to deal with a lot of bad press. At first I wanted to make some keen insight into how his teenage assholery relates to his current persona as a stiff, awkward, emotion-deficient robot, but no, what’s really getting under my skin at the moment is all these Internet commenters saying things to the effect of, “Oh, what does it matter if he bullied some kid in high school? We all know he’s an asshole anyway, so who cares?” Even worse are the ones saying, “Everyone’s an asshole in high school.”

Gee, how do I answer this? How about:

NO.

Holding another kid down on the floor and going at him with a pair of scissors is not some trivial, “We all do stupid shit when we’re young” fit of adolescent indiscretion. What Romney did to the late John Lauber was an act of violence, and a terrifying one at that. I’m willing to discuss the culture at the place and time, and how Romney didn’t get to be that way all by himself, but if you think Romney’s behavior was just typical teenage-boy bullshit, then you must have run with a really bad crowd. I never did shit like that in high school (though I suppose the expectations are different for girls?), my brother didn’t act like that, and I had a whole lot of guy friends and classmates who, amazingly enough, managed to get through their high school years without acting like bullies. Anti-social behavior is not inevitable simply because a guy is between the ages of 13 and 20, and when a grown man is called out for having attacked another boy at his prep school, he should show some remorse. He should, at the very least, admit that what he did was shitty and that he’s not proud of it. Such a resounding lack of acknowledgment is especially terrifying in a man who has raised five sons.

Free us from the tyranny of low expectations.

*shhhhh!* Grown-ups are talking!

Oh, the self-obliviousness is overpowering:

While it’s great to listen to your kids’ ideas, there’s also a time when dads simply need to be dads. In this case, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage. Or that – as great as her friends may be – we know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview.
In this situation, it was the other way around. I guess we can be glad that Malia and Sasha aren’t younger, or perhaps today’s press conference might have been about appointing Dora the Explorer as Attorney General because of her success in stopping Swiper the Fox.

Sometimes dads should lead their family in the right ways of thinking. In this case, it would’ve been nice if the President would’ve been an actual leader and helped shape their thoughts instead of merely reflecting what many teenagers think after one too many episodes of Glee.

Bristol Palin, you are the very last person whose opinion is of any use to us on well-adjusted families or the roles of fathers. Oh, and your grammar is lousy. Please learn the third conditional before you use “would have” in another sentence, will you?

Seriously, though, Pres. Obama has forgotten more about how to be a good parent than you have ever learned. Your comfort zone is not a good place to be.

The Caucasian Race allowed Jodie Brunstetter to happen.

The latest argument against marriage equality: “Because white people need to breed more.”

Pam’s House Blend points us to Yes Weekly, which shows us…this:

MICHAEL:

“I had my back to her like this. She said, ‘The reason my husband my husband wrote Amendment 1 was because the Caucasian race is diminishing and we need to uh, reproduce.”

UNIDENTIFIED POLL WORKER: “(Mrs. Brunsetter said) … the Caucasian race is diminishing. ?The reason that’s a problem is that it was white people that founded this country.”

Meanwhile Mrs. Brunstetter is all like, “Sure, I said that, but if I said ‘Caucasian,’ it wasn’t about race! Why won’t you people leave me alone, with your gotcha questions and your ‘facts’!”

This may seem incoherent, as reading this exchange has cost me a couple dozen IQ points.

So…like…North Carolina needs a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality, because by barring same-sex couples from marriage, they’ll be able to force white people to have more kids, relative to people of color?

But…what? On what planet does that even begin to make sense?

ALL THE BABIES

Heh heh.

While the “every sperm is sacred” amendment is clever, I would like to propose something that can actually be enforced, and which would give the legislators in question a chance to put their love of children into practice. It would be an answer to this question here:

Between the years of 1907 and 2008, only 77 women have been elected to the Oklahoma state legislature, and currently less than 20 is serving out of a total 149. But who better to pass laws about women’s bodies than a group of men who will never have to worry about the consequences of their religious zealotry?

Who says they won’t have to worry about the consequences of their religious zealotry?

The next time a state legislature is frothing up one of these “defeat the scourge of women who are not perennially pregnant” bills, let’s attach an amendment that creates the following conditions:

1. The state will allow for Safe Haven dropoffs of infants up to 30 days. The state will similarly provide special shelters for homeless pregnant women and girls.

2. The state will release to the public the home addresses of all the state lawmakers who voted Yes on the bill.

3. All of those lawmakers’ homes will be considered Safe Haven zones for unwanted newborns AND special shelters for pregnant women and girls facing parental rejection, domestic violence and extreme poverty. Those homes will be held legally responsible for the safe placement of all newborns left at their doors and for the provision of shelter, food, clothing, medical care and protection from violent partners for all pregnant females seeking assistance.

You think babies are so awesome that women should be legally forced to gestate and birth indefinitely? They’ll be coming (both the women and the babies) to your doorstep. Have plenty of beds ready.

 

How did I not hear about this before?

Via Natalie Reed, I’m just now hearing about CeCe McDonald.

What.

The.

Fuck.

I’m trying to sign the petition, but change.org is having technical difficulties.

If you are not outraged on CeCe’s behalf, you are part of the problem.

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman hates illegal immigrants, especially pregnant women.

Gov. Heineman really does not want any “anchor babies” in his state:

Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman vetoed a proposal to restore Medicaid-funded prenatal care for illegal immigrants on Friday, but the initiative could still survive if the state legislature rejects his move next week.

And, what is his reasoning?

Heineman, who is anti-abortion, also said he had “grave concerns” that some funding could go to abortion provider Planned Parenthood and that Nebraska could become a sanctuary for illegal immigrants because no bordering states offered similar coverage.

Let’s go over that again: he’s vetoing Medicaid coverage for prenatal care for undocumented women, because Planned Parenthood provides prenatal care.

He doesn’t like abortion, but he also doesn’t want undocumented women having babies in his state, and he is afraid that if he does not join neighboring states in a race to the bottom, then additional money will end up with Planned Parenthood because they care about pregnant women and their eagerly awaited babies far more than Dave Heineman does.

 

Good news!

It’s uncomfortable to proclaim “good news!” over someone getting arrested, but this is long overdue:

“Just moments ago we spoke with Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, the sweet parents of Trayvon,” Angela Corey, the special prosecutor investigating the case, said at a news conference in Jacksonville. “They now know charges have been filed, and that George Zimmerman is in custody.”

Yes. Good. Angela Corey is getting the job done.