Category Archives: Men and Women

Relationships, Sex, Marriage, Love, Hate and Dating

New Years Resolutions From A Silly Place

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Now, for years, I called myself “Minnesota’s Best Feminist” – largely because it pissed lesser feminists off so much.

I’ve laid off the bit for a few years, now – not because it wasn’t true (like most fathers these days, I don’t want my daughter to be held back for any reason but her own merit or hard work, or lack thereof (and she has plenty of both).  I am what some academics would call a “Gender-Equity Feminist” – someone who believes in removing obstacles to female equality in law, which is the starting point of real equality in our society.  That’s as opposed to “Gender Identity Feminists”, who see feminism as something analogous to nationalism, an identity to be upheld against a hostile opposition.  I’m not one of those.

Most of American “feminism” in academia and “womens’ studies” programs and the media today is the latter – which is a sort of dumb irony; members of the most spoiled, cossetted community in America, academics and social thinkers, from most most spoiled and overweened generation of people in American history (Generation X and the Millennials, who are rapidly approaching the Baby Boom for sheer irritation factor), prattling about the hardships they face.

The WaPo recently ran a list of new years resolutions by a group of “feminists”.

Most of them are written in the curious, circular argot of the post-1990s humanities graduate student, clogged with circular, post-structural, deconstructionist language that is only intermittently interchangeable with standard English.

By the way, the drawings of the various thinkers involved were done by the author of the WaPo piece, Ruth Tam.

So as my service to you, I’m going to translate the statements into plain(ish) English.

Janet Mock Janet Mock, 31 | ‘Redefining Realness’ author and MSNBC’s ‘So Popular’ host | @JanetMock “All you white, urban, upper-middle-class women have seized “feminism”. I’m here to subdivide the turf! Stand back!”
Lux Alptraum Lux Alptraum, 32 | BinderCon co-founder | @luxalptraum “When I talk about “putting programs and policies in place to level the playing field”, you know what I mean is yet another social-service bureaucracy staffed with lots of people like me – because those Women’s Studies degrees aren’t exactly raking in the bucks, if you catch my drift”.
Leigh Stein Leigh Stein, 30 | BinderCon co-founder | @rhymeswithbee “While everyone that has any sort of public profile online gets harassed one way or another, I want to make harassing women a special, extra level of wrong. Sort of like ‘hate crime’”
Ai-Jen Poo Ai-jen Poo, 40 | National Domestic Workers Alliance director, Caring Across Generations co-director, created #dwdignity, #caringamerica, #womentogether | @aijenpoo “Hey, don’t let Lux Alptraum reel in all the swag! The political process…er, ‘feminism’, needs to provide jobs for my constituency, too!”
Elizabeth Nyamayaro Elizabeth Nyamayaro, 40 | Senior Advisor to Executive Director of UN Women, heads HeForShe campaign | @e_nyamayaro “It sure sounds like I’m asking for men to just siddown and shaddup, doesn’t it? There’s a reason for that…”
Jessica Pierce Jessica Pierce, 29 | Black Youth Project 100 National Co-Chair | @JFierce “Not only should one never waste a crisis, one must find a way to turn a crisis into power”
Charlene Carruthers Charlene Carruthers, 29 | Black Youth Project 100 National Coordinator | @CharleneCac [Actually, Ms. Carruthers wasn't especially satire-worthy; while I likely disagree, she says nothing especially outrageous]
Lindy West Lindy West, 32 | Writer, performer, I Believe You | It’s Not Your Fault founder and editor | @thelindywest “Free Speech, Schmee Schmeech. Women, while boundlessly strong, are fragile vessels that must be protected from the scrum of the marketplace of ideas, above and beyond current civil and criminal law. That’s right – you must both respect womens’ power and yet show us a level of deference that’d make the Victorians shake their heads with disgust. Also, why did Ruth Tam dislocate my mouth?”
Mikki Kendall Mikki Kendall, 38 | HoodFeminism.com co-editor, created #solidarityisforwhitewomen, #fasttailedgirls, #NotJustHello | @karnythia “Poor black men are the disproportionate victims of police brutality. That’s a lot of victimological mindshare we feminists are leaving on the table. Let’s get moving on that!”
Feminista Jones. Not making that up. Feminista Jones, 35 | Social Worker, writer, activist, created #YouOKSis and #NMOS14 | @FeministaJones “More marches now!”
Mia McKenzie Mia McKenzie, 38 | Award-Winning Writer, Black Girl Dangerous founder | @blackgirldanger “You know when I say ‘I want to see queer and trans people of color with radical social and political analyses dominate independent media by creating and growing our own platforms, so we can centralize and control our own narratives’ that I actually mean ‘I want to develop yet another left-wing noise machine that allows ‘us’ to lie with impunity, just like the Alliance for a Better Minnesota and Media Matters do’, right?”
Alexandra Brodsky Alexandra Brodsky, 24 | Know Your IX founding co-director; Feministing.com editor; The Feminist Utopia Project co-editor, Yale Law School student | @azbrodsky “Dealing with sexual violence via concepts of ‘male guilt until proven innocence’, ‘trial without representation’ and ‘mob justice’ have done so much for higher education; it’s time to bring them from the campus to the larger society!”
Patrice Cullors Patrisse Cullors, 31 | Dignity and Power Now executive director, co-created #BlackLivesMatter | @osope “I have something to say – but first, I’m gonna cut Ruth Tam for this drawing she did of me”
Alicia Garza Alicia Garza, 33 | National Domestic Workers Alliance Special Projects Director, co-created #BlackLivesMatter | @aliciagarza, @blklivesmatter “When I say stuff like ‘black women are the portals to the future’, I’m not being racist. Seriously.”
Opal Tometi Opal Tometi, 30 | Black Alliance for Just Immigration Executive Director, Co-Founder www.blacklivesmatter.com, co-created #BlackLivesMatter, #reunitehaitianfams, blackimmigration.net, reunitehaitianfamilies.com | @opalayo “When I went to the doctor, I told her ‘forget about the virus – treat the sneezing!’”
Briana Wu, whose nickname makes me feel stupid just writing it. Brianna Spacekat Wu, 35 | Giant Spacekat head of development | @spacekatgal “Just as Americans did at Omaha Beach and Selma, we need to mobilize our entire society against the plague of doughy, cheetoh-dust-flecked thirty-something game programmers sending hate male to female game programmers; that is the real plague!”

You hear that sound, gender-equity feminism? That’s a boat revving up, pulling a full load of Fonzie behind it.

Much Ado

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In 1992, I left the broadcasting industry.  There a lot of reasons; the culture of the industry was a holdover from the “Mad Men” legend in many, many ways; the radio industry in the 1980s and 1990s was an amazing throwback to a much more depraved era.  The culture of the industry…

…oh, who am I kidding?  I left radio because I was making $7/hour, was married,and had two kids and another one on the way.  I needed to make some money.

And after I left, not a single academic launched a single study.  Because there was a time that people entered, and left, industries because the change made sense to them; because the money was better; because their goals in life had changed since college; because they discovered engineering didn’t enthrall them like cooking did; just because they felt like a change in their lives.

That was then.

Notwithstanding the fact that technical studies majors – engineering, computer science and the like – are among the few academic areas where men still outnumber women in college, the LATimes is wondering why there are fewer women in the world of technology.

I’m not going to bother with a pullquote; the writer, a woman who went from the CBC to Wikimedia, cites the usual reasons; misogynistic men, pay gaps, lack of female role models in management, and so on.

The article misses two points, I think.

For starters?  Everyone leaves technology, eventually. And by “everyone”, I mean that eventually, some people decide that the romance has left the idea of sitting up and grinding out code for thirty hours at a shot; that they don’t get the same thrill out of slaving for months on a solution that gets vetoed by some marketing dweeb with a degree in political science; or they just decide that the things that excited them when they were 20 don’t have the same effect now.

Is it different for women?  I’d imagine so – as individuals.

But if women are leaving technology in droves for any reason different than men are, the LATimes article doesn’t explain it…

News Flash! Women Aren’t Idiots!

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The thing that always bothered me about the Democrat “War on Women” meme wasn’t so much that it was BS (there is no “rape culture”, women with the same credentials and experience are not paid less than men, there is no shortage of contraceptives and Republicans are actually the ones trying to get The Pill sold over the counter – a move Planned Parenthood opposes, since it’d cut into part of their, ahem, gravy train). 

No - it’s the fact that it assumes women are stupid.

The whole campaign springs from the same place as Thomas Franks’ idiotic “What’s The Matter With Kansas“, a book based around the ideal that people should vote for “their interests”, meaning “the party that gives you the most goodies”.  Which is, itself, a noxious but inevitable end-result of the fact that while conservatives see people as assets – individuals of boundless worth who via their existence are capable of creating things that are human, moral or financially good additions to our world and lives; liberals, on the other hand, see humans as liabilities.  And liabilities should seek to have their liability mitigated.   Kansans should vote for more subsidies.  Women should vote for someone who keeps spreading the salve on the sense of victimization they’re suppose to feel. 

It’s why the Obama Administration close to depict its prototype American woman in the form of “Julia“, the pathetic lifelong consumer, blowing hither and yon through her life from one government program to another:

To a liberal, people are liabilities.  Stupid incompetent liabilities whose existence without government is of no meaning.

Women, more so; to the left, women are liabilities those sole worth is measured in their “lady parts”. 

That’s why the news that women are turning on the Democrat Party’s  “poor victimized widdle wimmin” schtick is so un-farging-gardly sweet.

Of course, it’s pretty obvious when you compare the two sides’ women; prominent liberal women seem to have gotten to where they are as a result of their spouses (Hillary! Clinton, Arianna Huffington, Wendy Davis, John Kerry), or by pretending to be someone they’re not (Elizabeth Warren).   (The one exception I can think of is Jennifer Granholm – and she was a terrible governor, who left Rick Snyder a Bulgarian goat-rodeo to clean up). 

Conservative women?  I’m at a loss to think of a prominent conservative women who got to where they’re at for any reason other than being very smart, tough and capable (and moreso, having thicker skin than an M1 Abrams given the “conservative-shaming” that seems to so enthrall the American media; I’m at an even bigger loss to think of the name of the spouse of any prominent conservative woman, other than Todd Palin and Marcus Bachmann – and neither Sarah Palin nor Michele Bachmann depended on either of their spouses to get where they are today.  Nikki Haley?  Susanna Martinez?  Shall I keep going? 

As we slog through the final week of the campaign, the Obama Administration and Democrat candidates around the country are doubling and tripling down on the “war on women” meme.

And if the Democrats lose, and lose even bigger because the female vote deserted them (or should I say the unmarried female vote, since married women are more likely to vote Republican anyway), it’ll be a great sign for gender relations in this country…

…and a signal that only a gender-identity feminist, a U of M women’s studies major (but I repeat myself) or a Jezebel staff writer would be stupuid enough to miss.

It Could Happen To Anyone

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A couple of weeks ago, I was doing a piece about Tina Flint Smith, Minnesota’s first whore. Having someone like that in the office of lieutenant governor would serve to concentrate all of the power of the executive office…

… wait – did I just call Tina Flint Smith a whore?

Dang.  That’s bizarre.

Anyway – I was talking with a Republican friend about “Take Action Minnesota”, the community organizing group run by that door-to-door, bore-on-the-floor whore Greta Bergstrom.  The group has been working overtime…

…What?  Really?  I did?  I called her a “whore?” Not only that, but concocted a cutesy rhyme to set it all off?  Oh, not again.  How could that possibly happen?

Well, I guess it just goes to show you it could happen to anyone.

Accidents!  Who knew?

Or at least that’s what the media wants you to think about – I’m sure it’s just a coincidence – a Democrat saying it about South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (emphasis added):

FLORENCE, S.C. (CBS Charlotte) – Democratic gubernatorial candidate Vincet Sheheen is coming under fire for accidentally calling Gov. Nikki Haley a “whore” at a campaign event.

Sheheen was caught on video at an appearance in Florence last week stating “we are going to escort whore out the door” referring to Haley. His gaffe appeared to be a slip from the tongue and he quickly corrected himself stating “we’re going to escort her out the door.”

So Shaheen “accidentally” used a rhyming couplet, for which he corrected himself, before yukking it up with his peckerwood supporters?

But immediately after correcting himself, Sheheen has an almost gleeful interaction with the crowd and laughed at his gaffe. Video of the event has gone viral.

Who hasn’t had that happen, honestly?   

I’m imagining a world where the Democrat Party didn’t have a media “accidentally” serving as their Praetorian Guard.

Women’s Issues

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For almost a century, and especially in the past seventy years, the most dangerous thing to be in the Arab world has been a moderate.  Throughout the Middle East,  throughout the past generation or two, the first priority for Arab extremists – before even killing Jews – has been to eliminate or drive off all moderates. 

I bring it up not out of animus toward Arabs – don’t be an idiot – but to point out an area where American liberals act just like the PLO, Hezb’allah and Hamas. 

To the American liberal, the greatest enemy are the apostates; the women, blacks, Latinos, gays and other minorities that break with liberal dogma and vote conservative.

The left – as the National Review notes in an editorial earlier this week - is even baking it into the language:

The idea that there exists a meaningful subset of “women’s issues” has always failed to account for the fact that “women” is a category that in the American context contains both Condoleezza Rice and Rachel Maddow, both Republican governor Susana Martinez and Democratic gadfly Eva Longoria. Jeane Kirkpatrick was arguably the most powerful American woman of her time, and her issue was fighting totalitarianism at a time when Democrats were not much inclined to do so. Was that a women’s issue? It certainly was in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Germany . . .

One has to squint with some dishonest intent to conclude that the political tendency that represents women’s interests obviously is the one associated with Bill Clinton and Teddy Kennedy rather than the one associated with Margaret Thatcher and Nikki Haley.

That’s certainly charitable.

The Democrats’ attitude toward women — from the pity-party celebrity of Sandra Fluke to multi-millionaire Lena Dunham’s demands for subsidized birth-control pills — has always been based on a handful of strategies linguistically related to the word “patriarchy”: patronizing, patronage, paternalism, etc., something you would think that their feminist supporters might have noticed. But women, like African Americans and other minority groups, are for the Left a means to power, and the Democrats’ treatment of them is every bit as instrumentalist as was Bill Clinton’s treatment of the White House intern pool.

And some conservative feminist group needs to print this next graf - admittedly, in small type – on a t-shirt:

Meanwhile, the Democrats’ war on women — women who own or desire to own their own businesses, who are looking for decent jobs, who wish there were a way to get their children out of failing schools, who are concerned about the flood of illegal immigrants across our borders, who pay more in taxes than they do for housing or health care or for housing and health care combined, who own guns, who pay utility bills, who wish for credible responses to Ebola and the Islamic State, who resent being reduced to their genitals as a matter of political calculation — that war continues, as pitilessly and remorselessly as any Levantine jihad.

The whole thing is worth a read.

War, War, War

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SCENE:  Mitch BERG is having breakfast at the River Oasis Cafe in Stillwater. 

Avery LIBRELLE’s car, belching oily smoke, coasts to a halt outside the cafe.  LIBRELLE walks in, sees BERG, and sits down next to him.

LIBRELLE: Hey, Merg!  The War on Women is a real thing!

BERG:  Oh, hey, Avery.  Huh.   You don’t say.

LIBRELLE:  I do say.  It’s a fact.  Republicans want to shut down women’s access to Reproductive Health services and products.

BERG:  For starters, “reproductive health services” means “abortion”, which to about half the country means “killing babies”.  Say what you will about whether it’s a right, but there’s a legitimate discussion to be had about its morality and whether society should be condoning, much less paying for, it.  And evading that discussion by calling it “war!” is just intellectually craven. 

As to “goods”, the discussion is about whether business owners should be required to pay for goods and services that morally repel them.  Again, there’s a discussion to be had – and calling the discussion a “war” is intelletually cowardly.

So your “War on Women” is really a systematic avoidance of an adult conversation about two serious topics. 

LIBRELLE:  Hah!  The War on Women is a fact! 

BERG:  Well, lots of Democrats might want to leave the room before agreeing with you.   What we do have, on the one hand, is a “war” involving “representatives” of half the population objecting to being questioned about the moral implications of infanticide and the overrunning of other peoples’ religious freedom, and on the other hand half the population feminizing the education system to systematically oppress boys – even trying to turn boyhood itself into a pathology – or something to be un-selected in the reproductive process, a line of systematic oppression that has made the education system from kintergarten through college so hostile to boys that they only represent 40% of college students, which will have the long term effect of undercutting traditional male roles?   And of those boys who do go on to college being considered guilty until proven innocent of sexual assault on college campuses and other alleged sex crimes, along with the erosion of due process “protecting” people in such cases – no, even more due process, such as being presumed a rapist until you prove otherwise, being denied even the right to claim one’s innocence in front of campus “courts” that even kangaroos would disavow - and even being branded as a criminal even sooner , since college is apparently too late, in a system-wide series of policies and to bizarre double standards  that a cynic might say is designed to make (male) heterosexuality itself a crime.  And then going on into the work force, to be treated as guilty until proven innocent in employment sexual harassment cases, while it’s difficult for women to even be accused. And then going on, after all that, to maybe become a father, in a system that legally defrauds men “accused” of paternity and even those who disprove paternity, giving rise to an industry defrauding men and courts, or maybe even getting married, finding that divorce is much easier and more palatable to women because men are systematically denied rights in child custory litigation, and going on to see that the system ignores crimes committed against boys (remember the Nigerian schoolgirls?  How many celebrities did selfies with hashtags protesting the hundreds of Nigerian boys that have been not kidnapped but murdered by Boko Haram), and being abused for suggesting that maybe men’s rights need some attention, or even saying the war on men exists, then I need to ask you – who’s the actual war against?

LIBRELLE: …  [Slowly stands up, walks out, and drives away in a cloud of blue smoke]

[And SCENE]

The Failed War On Women

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The Democrat “War on Women” rhetoric was entirely calibrated to try to win the votes of white women (Obama already controlled non-white womens’ votes).

But for all the palaver?     It didn’t work.

Michael Medved in the NYTimes last week (with emphasis added):

A closer look at the numbers reveals that Mr. Obama’s success with the ladies actually stemmed from his well-known appeal to minority voters. In 2012, 72% of all women voters identified themselves as “white.” This subset preferred Mitt Romney by a crushing 14-point advantage, 56% to 42%. Though Democrats ratcheted up the women’s rhetoric in the run-up to Election Day, the party did poorly among the white women it sought to influence: The Republican advantage in this crucial segment of the electorate doubled to 14 points in 2012 from seven points in 2008. In the race against Mr. Romney, Obama carried the overall female vote—and with it the election—based solely on his success with the 28% of women voters who identified as nonwhite. He carried 76% of Latina women and a startling 96% of black women.

So for all of the left’s argling about racism being the only reason not to vote for Obama, it would seem that race is the only reason to vote for him, since Black and Latina women have fared among the worst of all during the Obameconomy.

As with every election since 2000, marriage matters:

The same discrepancy exists when considering marital status. In 2012, nearly 60% of female voters were married, and they preferred Mr. Romney by six points, 53% to 46%. Black and Latina women, on the other hand, are disproportionately represented among unmarried female voters, and they favored Mr. Obama by more than 2-to-1, 67% to 31%.

Read the whole thing.

And check a few of your assumptions about Democrat rhetoric.

The “Gender Gap”, Explained

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Example 1:  Take two electrical engineers;  both 32 years old, both in the industry at the same firm since graduating from the same college with the same BA BS in EEE.  One – not naming names here – has worked at the company the entire ten years.  The other – again, not naming names – has taken about a year of parental leave, and also spent about a year working part-time while their kids were little.    So between an engineer with ten years’ experience and one with in effect 8.5 years’ experience, who, all other things being equal should get paid more?

Example 2: Take two 25 year olds.  One became an oilfield worker – a field involving a lot of brutally hard work, dominated by men, and with perennial shortage of workers with immense demand (especially in North Dakota), driving up wages.  One went into social work – a field involving significant work, sometimes a state license, dominated by women, and a perennial glut of workers, driving down wages.  With all other things equal, who should get paid more?

Example 3: Take two accountants – one male, one female.  They have identical qualifications, identical experience, identical job reviews.  Who do you think makes more?  Statistically, the difference is within the realm of statistical noise, nationwide. 

Example 4:  Take a low-income couple. He works as a security guard, doing his best to pick up 50 hours a week to make ends meet.  To avoid having to pay daycare, she stays at home with the kids and is counting the days til their youngest is at kindergarten so she can get a temp office job, or a part-time job at Target.  This one’s a no-brainer, right? 

Example 5:  A female business analyst with ten years’ experience is working with a male business analyst working his first job.  Who makes more? 

Example 6: A brother and a sister – fraternal twins – graduate from high school.  He goes into car mechanics.  She goes into daycare.   

Now – compare the “men” in the above examples with the “Women”. In aggregate, the guys make about 50% more than the women.

Is it because the men in the five examples are benefitting from sexism?  Or because of the…:

  • Career choices each of them made:  Men are more likely to go into technical fields, highly-physically-demanding jobs that pay a premium, dangerous jobs that pay a premium, or to work while their spouses take time off or stay home. 
  • Life choices each of them made:  Women have babies.  That’s the way biology made the species – so sue us.  No, that’s a figure of speech.  But women are more likely to take time off from work to do it.  Should men be penalized for working while women are, well, not?   

This last cuts both ways, by the way; when my kids were little, I made a conscious choice to seek out jobs that offered flexibility in hours and schedules, so I could spend more time with them.  This pretty inevitably led to contracting, which gave me flexibility and decent money – but cut down the chances for linear, corporate “career advancement”.  Am I lagging behind other people in my “age cohort” in that career?  Probably not – I switched careers – but if I were still a technical writer, those years that I spent focusing on other things would probably have had me lagging.  (Technical writing, by the way, is a field where women make more than men, on average.  Why?  Because they’ve been doing it longer, and they dominate the field, and they tend to go into it for a career, as opposed to men (like me) who see it as a stepping-stone to elsewhere.  Not because female tech writers are sexists.  Although some are.  Oh, the stories I could tell  But won’t.  Because most tech writer stories are really really boring. 

Of course, the whole “gender wage gap” isn’t so much about facts as about waving a bloody shirt to try to shore up Democrat numbers in a year that’s looking very bad for them, and to draw attention away from the fact that this past five years have been little better for women, economically, than for African-Americans.

Pink On Blue

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

As women moved out of the kitchen and into the workforce, the Law of Supply and Demand came into play:

Everybody’s wages dropped.

Is the War on Women a case of Friendly Fire?

If we brought in millions of new immigrants, would the numbers get better or worse?

Joe Doakes

And if most of the immigrants were female, how much worse would it get?

Chivalry Is Deconstructed

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This woman is upset that a man didn’t help her lift her bag into the overhead compartment.  Is chivalry dead?

Well, honey, it’s like this:  a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, right?  If he offered to help, that would mean he’s assuming you can’t do it alone, that you’re not as Good as a Man.  That’s sexism and like all modern sensitive men, he abhors the thought of doing anything sexist.  A committed feminist, he’s standing there letting you be the strong and independent woman you are, lifting your own bag.  Sure, you helped another woman later, but that’s Grrrl Power and it’s okay because no men were involved so no female egos were bruised in the process.

Or possibly, he’s thinking this might be a teachable moment.  Everybody on that 6:00 a.m. flight is a business-person Just Like You.  They all packed their own bags.  They all shlepped their own bags aboard.  They all lifted their own bags.  The difference is: they put some thought into what they were packing.  They didn’t cram everything in their entire wardrobe into that bag.  They can lift theirs without help.  Perhaps he’s standing aside to give you the opportunity to make a life-changing discovery about yourself . . . that you need to organize your life better, plan ahead farther, pack less so you can lift your own bag without doing an Olympic event.  Could be he’s using Tough Love to help you to help yourself.  A bag-lifter is an enabler.  A bystander creates the opportunity for life-style changing.  Should you be sneering at a person who’s trying to help?

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s Not About You.  Maybe he’s got problems of his own, just as you have problems of your own.  He’s dealing with his.  You deal with yours.  As equals.  Powerfully.  Independently.  Alone.

Joe Doakes

A woman needs a man like a fish needs carry-on baggage.

The One You Love

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My wife and I went to Har Mar last weekend, to walk the mall. Yes, I am a mall-walker. Hey, it’s the only exercise she can get me to do, so it’s better than nothing.

An older man was sitting on a bench, people-watching. We recognized him as a guy who retired from my wife’s workplace last year. Effeminate mannerisms, trim physique, perfect hair: everyone assumed he was gay but so what, he’s a nice guy and he works hard. He never married, lived at home so he could care for his Mom until she died, and now he sits in the mall, alone.

The best argument the gay rights crowd advanced for normalizing their lifestyle was that everyone deserves to grow old with someone they love. I felt sad for him as my wife and I walked away, holding hands.

Of course, I recognize that “grow old with the one you love” is a slippery slope. There’s no reason “the one you love” must be limited. As an intellectual argument, it’s just as valid when applied to child brides, first cousins, man-boy love and probably other arrangements I’m too squeamish to wonder about. I accept that the fundamental organizational unit for any long-term stable society must be the nuclear family, lest it collapse in an orgy of self-indulgence. I’m not certain whether the next big push to expand marriage come from Muslims in plural marriages or feminists living alone with their cats; I am certain the next big push is coming.

But I still feel sorry for that man, sitting in the mall, alone.

If I were an ultra-orthodox Mormon, my ears would be perking up these days.

Match Made In Heaven

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A move has begun in Oklahoma to get the state out of the marriage business.  While the news story on the subject phrases it as “prohibiting marriage”, what the proposal would really do is end the practice of issuing government marriage licenses, and leave the institution of marriage – or whatever – to the individual.

If you wanted to marry in a church – provided the church recognizes your form of union – then mazel tov.   And if they don’t – or you’re just not that religious, anyway – then you would just write up a contract, and live by it.

Of course, this proposal will likely rile up both extremes; the extreme left has come to regard redefining marriage (in the eyes of the state, anyway) as its big victory; this would be removing the issue from the table, which would be a slap in the left’s face akin to turning the Stonewall Bar into a condo development.

Social conservatives – or at least the short-sighted ones – will howl like stuck cats, too; many of them see government as a vehicle for building society in their image, no less than the far left does.  But it is short-sighted; by getting marriage out of the public sphere, they can save the traditional version of it now that “let’s let government define our social mores” thing is backfiring badly.

By getting the state out of marriage, everybody wins; traditional marriage can sprout where it’s bloomed; “alternative” ideals of the institution can grow between whomever wants them.

Of course, the extreme left isn’t looking for a win-win.   And we’ll have to see about the social right.

But for now?  The idea is a brilliant one.

Rebranding

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama celebrated the 41st anniversary of Roe v. Wade with one curious omission – he never mentioned the word “abortion.”

Instead, he dwelt on access to health care, reproductive freedom, right to privacy, safe and healthy communities, opportunities to fulfill their dreams . . . what a snooze.  That same litany of mushy feel-good platitudes could roll across the Teleprompter any day of the week.  We’re here to talk about killing babies, something like 50 million of them since the decision was issued.  And according to Democrats, that’s a good thing. Fine, then say so.

It’s almost as if the President is afraid to speak the plain truth, for fear people will recoil from it.  Perhaps we haven’t been de-sensitized enough.  Might be time to recycle some Dead Baby jokes from my junior high school days.  Remember those?  Can’t remember the last time I heard a Dead Baby joke.  Perhaps with 50 million of them piled up, it’s not funny anymore.

Joe Doakes

One can hope.

How many Planned Parenthood executives does it take to change a light bulb?

None.  They just declare darkness a woman’s right.

Today’s Feminist Hero

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Wendy Davis – “Abortion Barbie”, the lefty pinup girl who shut down the Texas legislature with a screaming mob of ignorant infanticide buffs – will be campaigning for Al Franken on the “War on Womyn” slate.

Wendy Davis. Trophy wife, baby-death advocate, Al Franken supporter.

Her bio – the inevitable “nineteen year old single mother who worked her way through Harvard” – is the sort of “Strong Womyn!” narrative that seems to have been snatched from the Lifetime Network.

Oh, yeah – it’s fudged just a bit:

Davis was 21, not 19, when she was divorced. She lived only a few months in the family mobile home while separated from her husband before moving into an apartment with her daughter.

A single mother working two jobs, she met Jeff Davis, a lawyer 13 years older than her, married him and had a second daughter. He paid for her last two years at Texas Christian University and her time at Harvard Law School, and kept their two daughters while she was in Boston.

Hey, wait!  ”Trophy Wife” doesn’t fit the narrative!  What the…?

When they divorced in 2005, he was granted parental custody, and the girls stayed with him. Wendy Davis was directed to pay child support.

In a state where women can normally win custody after killing someone, that says something.  The first husband went on to run for office as a Republican.

Davis apparently gave her second husband the brown helmet the day after she graduated from Harvard.

Anyway – Abortion Barbie will be coming to Minnesota to campaign for Franken…

…unless she made that up, too.

Please, Al Franken campaign.  I beg of you.  Bring Abortion Barbie to Minnesota.  Feature her up at the podium with you.

Wendy Davis is the face of feminism today.

It’s Not Them. It’s You.

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Obama’s poll numbers are crashing – as in, post-Fallujah-George-W-Bush crashing.

He’s cratering fastest among women – who were, along with African-Americans, the lynchpin of both of his victories.

Tammy Bruce looks over Obama’s collapse among women:

The unfolding realities of Obamacare and its destruction of health insurance plans and personal, patient-doctor relationships confirm women’s fears that health insurance under Obamacare is not superior, but is quite inferior to health care they were free to choose before this regrettable law was in force. What women voted against in 2010 has come true, and we’re not happy about it. This may come as surprise to Mr. Obama and the people in his inner circle, but women’s health care involves more than sound bites and pithy one-liners.

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With all the bad news descending on Mr. Obama as a direct result of his high-handedness and deceit on Obamacare, surely nothing could come as a greater shock to him than that women, the one constituency he has relied on the most, other than blacks, refuse to be swindled out of their health care freedoms and to be used to help perpetrate this massive fraud on the American people.

Well, I for one will believe it when I see it.  In particular, single women who don’t have children are among the most querulously gullible liberals there are.   They fell for that “vote to protect your lady parts” bilge in epic numbers, after all.

But maybe there’s hope.

Our Person Of Either Gender Implementing The Rights And Responsibilities Of A Spouse And Parent, Who Art In Heaven…

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The big news at the Minnesota Continuing Legal Education Real Estate Institute was same-sex marriage passed this Summer and how does that affect spousal rights in Minnesota?

I thought the biggest laugh was this section of Minn. Stat. 517.201:

“Subd. 2.Rules of construction. When necessary to implement the rights and responsibilities of spouses or parents in a civil marriage between persons of the same sex under the laws of this state, including those that establish parentage presumptions based on a civil marriage, gender-specific terminology, such as “husband,” “wife,” “mother,” “father,” “widow,” “widower,” or similar terms, must be construed in a neutral manner to refer to a person of either gender.

Good news, Mitch, you are no longer a Husband or Father, you now are a person of either gender implementing the rights and responsibilities of a spouse and parent.

Frankly, I prefer “Interchangeable Marital Unit” or since we all know which role men are assigned in divorce court: “Cash Cow.”

Joe Doakes