Supremes to pope: you lose

The New York Times:

In a long-sought victory for the gay rights movement, the Supreme Courtruled on Friday that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in the 5 to 4 decision. He was joined by the court’s four more liberal justices.

As Eddie Tabash likes to say, it’s Justice Kennedy’s world and we all live in it. This time it worked out.

Scalia of course had to poop on the party.

In a second dissent, Justice Scalia mocked Justice Kennedy’s soaring language.

“The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic,” Justice Scalia wrote of his colleague’s work. “Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent.”

He’s just jealous.

The pope explains about marriage

The pope talked a bunch of awful shit on Sunday the 14th, the day after Rome’s gay pride march.

Addressing around 25,000 followers from the Diocese of Rome, the pope said the differences between men and women are fundamental and “an integral part of being human.”

Bullshit. People have all sorts of differences, of personality and temperament and kinds of talents and all sorts. The ones between women and men are not the only or the most special ones, and it’s certainly not the pope’s job to hype them. What does he know about it?!

The pontiff likened a long-lasting marriage to a good wine, in which a husband and wife make the most of their gender differences.

“They’re not scared of the differences!” the pope said. “What great richness this diversity is, a diversity which becomes complementary, but also reciprocal. It binds them, one to the other.”

[Read more…]

Push-up bras encouraged

Well at least we know that if we do see sexism anywhere we can point it out without repercussions.

Hahahahaha just kidding, no we don’t. Look what happened to Rose McGowan for instance.

Pushback against Hollywood sexism seems to have gotten Rose McGowan dropped from the talent agency Innovative Artists.

Late Wednesday, the actress and director wrote on Twitter that her agent fired her because she “spoke up” about Hollywood casting practices, adding the hashtag #BRINGIT. Last week, the actress had tweeted the casting notes from a movie whose star, she wrote, has a name that “rhymes with Madam Panhandler.”

[Read more…]

Ethel Lee Lance and Sharonda Coleman-Singleton

The first two funerals for the victims of the racist shootings in Charleston are being held today.

The services for Ethel Lee Lance and Sharonda Coleman-Singleton will both take place after viewings at Baptist churches in North Charleston.

Ms Lance, 70, worked for the church for 30 years and was a mother of five.

Abigail Darlington at the Charleston Post and Courier wrote a profile of Lance last week.

Ethel Lance loved to dress up and take her family to see performances at the Gaillard Municipal Auditorium when she wasn’t on duty there as a custodian.

[Read more…]

To clean up the mess

Best headline of the day:

Man arrested for pouring syrup on sidewalk

Only in Canada eh?

Police were called around 10 a.m. Thursday, and found a strange “unknown, sticky liquid” covering a four-foot area on the corner of Summers Lane downtown, police say.

A city road crew had to be called in to clean up the liquid. “They think it might’ve been a syrup — maybe maple syrup,” said city spokesperson Kelly Anderson. “But they don’t know for sure what it was.”

Well why didn’t they taste it?

Witnesses pointed out the man they said was responsible, and police arrested the 56-year-old for mischief. “He caused resources to have to be deployed to clean this stuff up,” said Const. Steve Welton.

City crews had to lay down “absorbent material” to clean up the mess, Anderson said.

I bet it was honey. I bet I know where the honey came from, too.

Ethics in journalism

Relevant.

Charles Seife ‏@cgseife 6 hours ago
I asked EU official @marcinmonko if he was the source of #timhunt Times “transcript,” and if he was recording/taking notes. (1/2)

His full response: “The document that the Times refers to is an internal report, not a verbatim transcript.” (2/2) #timhunt

Not a verbatim transcipt.

Guest post: Signaling ethical distance

Guest post by Josh Spokes

Reflexively voicing your “support for their right to choose this choice” actually serves a regressive, right-wing political project.

Have you ever noticed that the idea of “choice” and “agency” is only ever invoked to defend the right to enact stereotyped roles that have not only been culturally favored, but culturally enforced?

I’m serious—that’s really important and worth talking about. One only ever gets pushback about “defending their right to X” when the X is taking on a stereotyped role. [Read more…]

Guest post: Our choices are not made in a cultural vacuum

While I was writing that last post, Elsa Roberts was writing this one which she posted on Facebook. She gave me permission to republish it here.

Somewhere, somehow, responses in any community start to short circuit and we begin to rely too heavily on coded phrases as stand-ins for conversation and complexity, and reason and evidence. For example, because feminism is about enabling equity and with that comes the ability to choose sometimes that gets boiled down to “any choice a woman makes is feminist and can’t be criticized (or theoretically it could be but just try it and see how that works out in some circles).

That is fundamentally flawed and thoughtless way of examining something. When we boil things down to catch phrases and jargon we lose the ability to analyze thoughtfully and to consider all the evidence and context on the table.

One of the most pernicious and irritating examples of this for me is the one alluded to above, that if a woman chooses something that is “her choice” and critiquing it or judging it or thinking critically about it is almost automatically shaming or un-feminist. That is a really misguided supposition because our choices are influenced by many things and many of our choices are not going to be feminist or they will just have very little to do with feminism. [Read more…]

Choosy moms choose Jif

Feminism is not just about “choice” or “free choice.”

Thanks for the random observation, you’re thinking – but I keep hearing from people who seem to think it is…or rather, they seem to think it is when it comes to some issues but not others. They think it absolutely is when it comes to women doing videos for Playboy, but not so much when it comes to having 19 children and raising them to be warriors for god. There are some contentious areas where it’s trendy to say IT’S HER FREE CHOICE, END OF, and there are other contentious areas where it’s not trendy to say that.

Me, I avoid this troubling inconsistency by not claiming that CHOICE is a conversation-stopper, a judge’s gavel, a guaranteed winning argument.

But I actually have more substantive reasons for not claiming that, like the fact that choices are complicated and it’s not reasonable to assume that they’re all “free” in any meaningful way. Choices come from somewhere, and while there are degrees of constraint and influence and coercion, it’s pretty hard to figure out how any choice could be entirely free. (Cue free will debate here. Cue 500 thousand words of wrangling. There, that’s done.) If you have that in mind, it becomes a little absurd to try to claim that something like doing a Playboy video is a wholly free choice. If it’s really free, why would you want to do it at all? It’s not directly rewarding like food or sex, so why do it?

Note for the obtuse: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with doing a Playboy video. I’m saying “it’s her choice” is neither a slam dunk argument nor a feminist argument.