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.

Pastor Sean Harris is a horrible person who hates humanity.

Sometimes, they just let it all out for everyone to see:

Can I make it any clearer? Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? “You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male.”

The rules for girls are a bit more flexible, and yet somehow, even more fucked up:

And when your daughter starts acting too butch you reign her in. And you say, “Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.”

How do I put this?

This man hates people. He hates boys, he hates girls, he hates LGBTs, he hates straight people who don’t perfectly tow the gender line.

How do I come to that conclusion?

Because Pastor Harris’s diatribe is not affecting only gay people, or only children who belong to sexual minorities. If it did affect only those groups of people, that shouldn’t make it more acceptable, but to the extent that his congregants follow his advice, he is not encouraging abuse of JUST those kids who are growing up gay. He is encouraging abuse of ALL children. He is telling parents to berate, control and assault their children as soon as they deviate from gender norms, and you know what? We all do that. We all fail to meet our gender’s standards in some ways, because gender norms are socially constructed, subject to change, and arbitrary. All children will here and there do something that doesn’t exactly follow the rules of the gender marked on their birth certificate.

And here’s Pastor Sean Harris, instructing the parents in his congregation to beat their kids into behaving like socially approved, heterosexist boys and girls. He hates gay and lesbian children, he hates straight children, and he hates the adults they will grow up to be. Shame on him for parading his hatred from his pulpit, and shame on all those people who sit in those pews, laugh and nod along with his sermons, and pay his salary. They are all part of the problem.

(And it needs to be said: these same people almost inevitably believe that gay and lesbian couples are unfit to raise children. The irony is terrifying. Kill it, Mommies! Kill it with fire!)

American Nuns > Vatican

I think it’s time for a new schism.

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization which involves 80% of U.S. Catholic sisters, is having the hammer brought down on it by the Vatican for not being a pack of bigoted assholes. I wish that were an exaggeration:

The Vatican’s assessment, issued on Wednesday, said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

Yeah, I’ll bet they say things like, “A mother of four should not be left to die of pregnancy-related causes.”

The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care.

Yep. Women who support universal health care need to STFU, while old guys in fancy robes, who would rather let Americans die by the millions of preventable causes than tolerate birth control coverage, are the “authentic teachers of faith and morals.”

“I’m stunned,” said Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby founded by sisters. Her group was also cited in the Vatican document, along with the Leadership Conference, for focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping “silent” on abortion and same-sex marriage.

Oh, yes. Oh fucking yes. The nuns care too much about alleviating poverty, and not enough about demonizing gays or attacking women who think they get to control their reproduction.

Oddly enough, I don’t even recall Jesus saying anything about homosexuality or abortion. This is the guy who hung out with a bunch of single men and a woman of ill-repute. He did, however, have some strong opinions about how we treat the poor.

Sisters, you all are so much cooler than your church. Break away from those ridiculous bigots. Start your own religion: the Church of Actually Giving a Shit About Humanity. All the Catholics who are horrified at the Church for their homophobia, misogyny and support of child-raping priests but who keep making noises about “social justice” and “ritual” will have a better place to give their money and time. The ones who want their religion to be more focused on persecuting gays, letting pregnant women die, and preaching against using condoms to prevent the spread of HIV, can fend for themselves.

You’re better than they are, and they’re not even trying to hide how threatened they are by that. Let those assholes rot.

Wisconsin state Rep. Glenn Grothman hates women, but we knew that already.

There are some politicians in Wisconsin who don’t like to be told that pay discrimination is a problem that should be addressed by law. Therefore, Gov. Walker has recently repealed the Equal Pay Enforcement Act. I don’t really feel like talking about Gov. Walker, though. One of the major proponents of the repeal was Rep. Glenn Grothman, and what kind of stuff does he have to say about women being paid less than men for equal work?

“It’s an underreported problem, but a huge number of discrimination claims are baseless,” he says. “Most of them are filed by fired employees, and really today almost anybody is a protected class.”

Grothman to English: “Bitches be lyin’. They just want to punish their old bosses because they got fired. Also: political correctness.”

Whatever gaps exist, he insists, stem from women’s decision to prioritize childrearing over their careers. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.”

What he has to say about the vast majority of employees, who are not getting paid like lawyers and whose jobs do not regularly call on them to work 60 hours a week, is unknown.

He continues, “What you’ve got to look at, and Ann Coulter has looked at this, is you have to break it down by married and unmarried. Once you break it down by married and unmarried, the differential disappears.”

Yeah, he’s totally happy to listen to Ann Coulter, but…

A 2007 study by the American Association of University Women found that college-educated women earn only 80 percent as much as similarly educated men a year after graduation. Part of that is attributable to differences in life choices and family circumstances, but not all. “After accounting for college major, occupation, industry, sector, hours worked, workplace flexibility, experience, educational attainment, enrollment status, GPA, institution selectivity, age, race/ethnicity, region, marital status, and number of children, a 5 percent difference in the earnings of male and female college graduates one year after graduation was still unexplained,” it said. After 10 years in the workforce, there’s an unexplained 12 percent gap.

But that doesn’t mean anything because…

When I ran the numbers by him, he replied, “The American Association of University Women is a pretty liberal group.” Nor, he argued, does its conclusion take into account other factors, like “goals in life. You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.”

I’m not sure I understand what being “money-conscious” has to do with how much you’re getting paid by your employer. I’m sure it has an effect on savings, investments and such, but this is supposed to be about salary, relative to other workers in the field.

And besides, AAUW is a liberal group, so their data don’t count.

Grothman’s name sounds awfully familiar, though. Where have we heard of him before?

Right. This is where we’ve heard of him before.

Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend), a Republican in Wisconsin’s state senate, thinks that children from single parents are probably victims of child abuse.

Okay! There we have it. Women in Wisconsin can’t possibly be as ambitious or hard-working as their male colleagues, because they’re not thinking of becoming breadwinners some day. That’s what the men are for, amirite? You couldn’t expect to be a breadwinner some day, because that would mean you’re preparing for the possibility of single parenthood, and that would make you a shitty mom.

This is how it is in Glenn Grothman’s world: men are the providers. They’re the ones who pay the bills. Women are supposed to prioritize child-raising over salary-making, so if they do work outside the home, it’s just for fun and it’s not important to make sure their employers pay them appropriately. As for those women who do have to provide for their families and pay their bills, well they’ve obviously failed at life, so screw ‘em.

Jeff Sessions thinks the Dems FORCED him to show how much he hates women.

Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times has very nicely put together a handy round-up of people who hate women, as shown by their reactions to the latest renewal of the Violence Against Women Act. You’d think that protecting women from abusive, violent partners would be something that any politician would happily get behind, but this time, the Act includes some provisions that some GOP Senators and other defenders of Family Values just can’t stomach. The offending items include but are not limited to:

The legislation would continue existing grant programs to local law enforcement and battered women shelters, but would expand efforts to reach Indian tribes and rural areas. It would increase the availability of free legal assistance to victims of domestic violence, extend the definition of violence against women to include stalking, and provide training for civil and criminal court personnel to deal with families with a history of violence. It would also allow more battered illegal immigrants to claim temporary visas, and would include same-sex couples in programs for domestic violence.

Can you see where this is going?

Someone else who needs to go away

For a little while there, I was very happy in the state of never having to hear anything about She Who Must Not Be Given More Attention. And now she’s saying something absurd about how the first African-American POTUS wants to go back to the way things were pre-Civil War (yeah, I got nothin’), and she’s once again appearing in the online spaces which I like to visit. Why is she appearing again, you ask? Because trainwreck-loving left-leaning bloggers can’t look away. Not that I fault anyone for being a left-leaning blogger who enjoys a trainwreck here and there—I mean, hello, Pot and Kettle!—but why do we have to keep coming back to the same trainwreck over so many years?

Going to wash my brain out with some Cute Overload and LOLcats. Back in a bit.

Cough it up, Laurens County GOP. I demand a PDF.

The blogosphere is all a-buzz with some fresh nonsense from Republican politicians who wish to purge their ranks of embarrassing monkey business. They got the smackdown from the state GOP, but for a little while there, the GOP in Laurens County, SC was going to ask all Republican candidates to sign a pledge in which they would promise such things as:

–”A compassionate and moral approach to Teen Pregnancy”

–”A high regard for Unites States Sovereignty”

–Opposition to abortion under any circumstance

–Faithfulness to one’s spouse, who cannot be of the candidate’s gender

–Support of a balanced state and federal budget

–Candidates must have or currently abide by abstinence before marriage

–Candidates must not look at pornography

They also decided that candidates should be vetted by a committee to make sure they were properly adherent to the Code of Preoccupation with Private Parts. The committee never got a chance to assemble, as the state GOP told them it wasn’t happening, so the purity pledge isn’t going any further. It kind of leaves us to wonder how they were going to enforce a lot of it, either way. Things like balanced budgets and “support for U.S. sovereignty” (read: keep on blowing stuff up in Islamic countries) are policy matters, and the candidates’ adherence to those doctrines can be observed in the decisions they make while in office, but how do they know if any of their politicians are looking at porn?

In all seriousness, I actually kind of sympathize with the reasoning behind the pledge:

Smith got into a public fight with one of the county’s chief Republicans last summer, when Sheriff Ricky Chastain admitted to having a two-and-a-half year affair with a subordinate at the sheriff’s office. The woman sued him for sexual harassment, accusing the sheriff of driving her to get an abortion in a county-owned car. That lawsuit is still pending.

Smith called for Chastain to resign. He refused, and the issue appeared to have died down until the pledge was passed Feb. 28.

They’re trying to make sure this doesn’t happen again, and given their party’s platform, I think that makes sense. I don’t see how banning porn is going to help—if nothing else, every hour an official spends consuming porn is an hour that he’s not fucking his mistress and potentially getting her pregnant!—but I can see where they’re coming from in trying to weed out guys like Chastain.

Now that I’ve said that, I have a request to make of Lauren County:

Show us the full text of the pledge.

Yeah, you heard me. I read the fricking FAMiLY Leader Pledge, now I want to see your Orwellian word salad. I say Orwellian because I really want to hear you say, in so many words, what you think a “compassionate and moral approach to teen pregnancy” would look like. Please understand that my idea of “compassionate” tends not to match up very well with a social conservative’s idea of “moral.” Since we have to hear about this thing in the news, I would like to see it written out, and Google isn’t turning up anything that would answer my questions. Show us a PDF. We’re counting on you.

 

D.C. Archdiocese Competes in the Euphemism Olympics

Barbara Johnson is now endeavoring to have Father Marcel Guarnizo removed from his post at St. John Neumann Catholic church. She has good reason: at her mother’s funeral, Fr. Guarnizo denied her Communion because she is a lesbian, and walked out of the funeral while Johnson was delivering a eulogy. The family were left on their own for the burial.

Let’s go over that one more time:

1. Father Guarnizo denied Communion to the deceased woman’s daughter. Because she is a lesbian. He told her in so many words, right up at the altar with everyone watching.

“He put his hand over the body of Christ and looked at me and said, ‘I can’t give you Communion because you live with a woman, and in the eyes of the church, that is a sin,’ ” she recalled Tuesday.

2. Father Guarnizo abandoned the funeral midway through.

Family members said the priest left the altar while Johnson, 51, was delivering a eulogy and did not attend the burial or find another priest to be there.

This is, to say the very least, profoundly unprofessional behavior for a priest giving a funeral Mass. And how is the Archdiocese handling the matter? Actually not badly, but their language is just fascinating:

Late Tuesday, Johnson received a letter of apology from the Rev. Barry Knestout, one of the archdiocese’s highest-ranking administrators, who said the lack of “kindness” she and her family received “is a cause of great concern and personal regret to me.”

“I am sorry that what should have been a celebration of your mother’s life, in light of her faith in Jesus Christ, was overshadowed by a lack of pastoral sensitivity,” Knestout wrote. “I hope that healing and reconciliation with the Church might be possible for you and any others who were affected by this experience. In the meantime, I will offer Mass for the happy repose of your mother’s soul. May God bring you and your family comfort in your grief and hope in the Resurrection.”

Lack of “kindness”? Cause of “personal regret” to the administrator? Lack of “pastoral sensitivity”?

Archdiocese officials at first issued a short statement saying that the priest’s actions were against “policy” and that they would look into it as a personnel issue.

If Rev. Knestout is offering a redo of the funeral Mass for Barbara Johnson’s mother, that’s a good thing, but this is not merely about a shortage of “kindness” or “sensitivity.” Father Guarnizo tossed a monkey wrench into Mrs. Johnson’s funeral Mass and drove a wrecking ball into an already emotionally raw day for her family. That’s not just a question of “policy.” He was charged with a job and he did something very bad with it. If the D.C. Archdiocese wants to assure its parishioners that this will not be allowed to happen again, it’s quite simple: put Guarnizo out of a job. Tossing a bunch of watery corporate-speak at the Johnsons isn’t fooling anyone.

 

Monday Moron: Protect My Delicate Upper-Crust Frailness from Those Unwashed Brutes!

Via Pharyngula, some other delicate flower, this time a student at NYU, has really laid a steaming deuce in her bed. As much as I could complain about my Albanian high school kids who would have rather done just about anything except learn English, at least they kept their sense of entitlement to a level whose topography they understood. If that just came out as Greek, think of it like this: if you want to climb trees on someone else’s property, at least keep to a level from which you can safely climb down again on your own power. And then we have Sara Ackerman, who didn’t agree with Prof. Zaloom’s assignment of an ethnographic study of Occupy Wall Street protesters, and concluded with an ultimatum:

Lastly, I have over 1,000 friends on facebook, and if Professor Zaloom does not resign, or is not fired by 9 am tomorrow morning, I will publish every single email exchange we have had, on my facebook account.

You read that right. She wanted the professor to be out of a job, or else she would publish the professor’s emails to her Facebook feed.

The practical upshot is that Prof. Zaloom looks like an honest, reasonable educator who is still safely employed and Sara Ackerman looks like a caricature of rarefied, constantly threatened privilege. She sounds like she grew up in a household in which “delicate constitution” was a part of the daily vocabulary. She spent a few months as a thorn in her professor’s side, disrupting her classmates’ lessons, and now she has succeeded in embarrassing herself in front of a lot more than those 1,000 Facebook friends.

“I’m Rick Perry, and I fail at not parodying myself.”

Oh, now really.

Aside from the bald-faced lying like a cheap rug—no, Rick Perry, nobody is stopping you from openly celebrating Christmas! Just don’t do it in your capacity as a taxpayer-salaried public servant!—there’s the very not-subtle juxtaposition of “gays serving openly in the military” with the (fabricated) liberal encroachments on Christians’ freedom to worship. Once again cross-pollinating the Christian persecution complex with the majoritarian-American sense of entitlement, he’s transparently pitting his fellow travelers against The Rainbow Menace, making gay rights antithetical to freedom of religion.

I know that there are some people who will lap that shit up. The meme of gays as the enemy of Christians isn’t yet dead, but it’s putting him on the wrong side of history. For the younger generations—that is to say, those who will still be voting after Rick Perry and the rest of the GOP Clown Car bunch are dead—if you pit equality of civil rights for gays against Christianity, more and more people will chose the gays. Record numbers of Millennials are losing their religion because their churches have nothing to offer but hate.

Besides all that, it’s a crappy video. I could have chosen better background music. I do like the jacket, though. It’s very Jake Gyllenhaal meets Heath Ledger.