Whoa…Norma McCorvey confesses that it was all an act

Norma McCorvey, who fought for the right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade, and then flipped to crusade against abortion under the influence of evangelicals, flipped again before her death — she was bought and paid for by the Religious Right.

In the final third of director Nick Sweeney’s 79-minute documentary, featuring many end-of-life reflections from McCorvey—who grew up queer, poor, and was sexually abused by a family member her mother sent her to live with after leaving reform school—the former Jane Roe admits that her later turn to the anti-abortion camp as a born-again Christian was “all an act.”

“This is my deathbed confession,” she chuckles, sitting in a chair in her nursing home room, on oxygen. Sweeney asks McCorvey, “Did [the evangelicals] use you as a trophy?” “Of course,” she replies. “I was the Big Fish.” “Do you think you would say that you used them?” Sweeney responds. “Well,” says McCorvey, “I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say. That’s what I’d say.” She even gives an example of her scripted anti-abortion lines. “I’m a good actress,” she points out. “Of course, I’m not acting now.”

The two jackhole Christians who ran the scam are both horrified, but split: one because the end justifies the means, the other because he actually has some moral principles.

Reverend Schenck, the much more reasonable of the two evangelical leaders featured in the film, also watches the confession and is taken aback. But he’s not surprised, and easily corroborates, saying, “I had never heard her say anything like this… But I knew what we were doing. And there were times when I was sure she knew. And I wondered, Is she playing us? What I didn’t have the guts to say was, because I know damn well we’re playing her.” Reverend Schenck admits that McCorvey was “a target,” a “needy” person in need of love and protection, and that “as clergy,” people like Schenck and Benham were “used to those personalities” and thus easily able to exploit her weaknesses. He also confirms that she was “coached on what to say” in her anti-abortion speeches. Benham denies McCorvey was paid; Schenck insists she was, saying that “at a few points, she was actually on the payroll, as it were.” AKA Jane Roe finds documents disclosing at least $456,911 in “benevolent gifts” from the anti-abortion movement to McCorvey.

Reverend Benham then blurts out, “Yeah, but she chose to be used. That’s called work. That’s what you’re paid to be doing!” Schenck’s thinking is quite different: “For Christians like me, there is no more important or authoritative voice than Jesus,” he explains. “And he said, ‘What does it profit in the end if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul?’ When you do what we did to Norma, you lose your soul.”

In fact, Reverend Schenck underlines his own conversion, which took place in the last decade: “I still identify as an evangelical, but I like to think of myself as lovingly critical of my community. I guess in some ways I’d like to use whatever years I have remaining to undo the damage that I did and that many movement leaders did on the pro-life side. I used to think that Roe v. Wade would never be overturned. I think Roe v. Wade could be overturned now. And I think the result of that would be chaos and pain. And to impose that kind of crisis on a woman is unthinkable.”

Fortunately, the pro-choice cause does not rely on the bought testimony of individuals, but on the autonomy of all women.

Another professor embarrasses the professoriate

A university professor filed suit against his institution because it chastised him for inappropriate sexual behavior. He wasn’t fired, they just tut-tutted, put a black mark on his record, and told him not to do that anymore. He sued anyway, for his ego.

During a class in 2013, a psychology professor at George Mason University named Todd Kashdan told students he had once performed oral sex at a party, an anecdote he later said was meant to make a point about exhibitionism, according to findings from an internal school investigation and a federal lawsuit the professor filed against the university.

In 2016, Kashdan told graduate students gathered in his hot tub about a sexual experience he had in Europe, and in 2018, he went with graduate students to a strip club where he received a lap dance, the internal investigation found. The professor’s lawsuit said these incidents were misconstrued.

How is bragging about performing oral sex, his sexual experiences, and getting a lap dance in front of his students “misconstrued”? I’m mystified. Just going with students to a strip club seems like it’s crossing a line, and with all the rest, it’s hard to imagine how it could be “misconstrued”.

On top of all that, two former students also filed complaints about him with the university. He is baffled.

The professor, according to the suit, “was surprised to learn that the same women who had given him unsolicited praise for his teaching and research, and sought him out for assistance with academics and their careers, now alleged that he had created a ‘hostile environment.’ ”

Wow. He doesn’t understand that he’s a gatekeeper, that he holds the keys to future advancement in his students’ careers, and is so oblivious to the social workings of human minds that he can’t comprehend that people whose future he controls might flatter him to his face while resenting him?

Psychopaths. Psychopaths everywhere.

Yeesh, but anti-choicers are terrible people

The word from our regional Planned Parenthood is that quacks are using the COVID-19 epidemic as a pretext to shut down abortion services.

This is absurd. A pandemic is not a reason to shut down essential medical services. If I had a heart attack, would they give me a little voucher promising to send an ambulance in 3 weeks, if the stay-at-home orders have ended? (That’s about when Minnesota’s orders are scheduled to expire, although they may be extended further, if circumstances warrant.) Are grieving mothers with a dead fetus just supposed to “hold it” for a while? Are pregnant women with acute pyelonephritis or preeclampsia just supposed to take an aspirin and wait? Are the women who are not ready or capable of dealing with a child expected to hope that their desires change and their circumstances improve at some indefinite time in the future? During a pandemic and economic collapse?

Perhaps the fuckwits behind this lawsuit are hoping that women at the boundary of legal elective abortion are delayed long enough that they can compel them not to abort.

Of course, the clinic that is suing is providing bogus rationalizations.

In the lawsuit, AALFA Family Clinic cites concerns over the shortage of protective equipment during the COVID-19 outbreak as the primary concern. The pro-life group argues that forcing the clinics to use medication rather than surgery would conserve protective gear needed in the pandemic. They argue abortion clinics should be included under Governor Walz’s ban on elective procedures.

But these aren’t elective procedures! There’s a ticking clock at work here.

This is the relevant comment on AALFA Family Clinic.

This lawsuit is based on fantasy, not fact and has been filed by individuals who promote information and services that are medically inaccurate, deceptive and harmful.

That about sums it up. This lawsuit ought to be quickly thrown out…although my experience with lawsuits suggests it will instead drag on.

News from the hinterlands of despair

I haven’t been sleeping at all well lately — that’s an understatement. I tend to go to bed at around 10 or 10:30 when I can’t even keep my eyes open, and then wake up around 2 or 3am and try by force of will to shut them, which usually doesn’t work at all. If I’m lucky I might fall back asleep around 4 to lie in restless semi-unconsciousness until the fornicating birds shrieking outside my window wake me back up as the sun rises.

Sometimes I just give up and pull up the iPad to read in bed for a while. That’s often a bad outcome — last night, I’m just browsing in the dark and come across “We Are Living in a Failed State”. It’s about time we noticed. I knew we were doomed when Ronald Reagan started spewing that “shining city on a hill” nonsense, which meant our leaders were lying to us and to themselves, and setting up a ridiculous fdcade to conceal real problems that needed real solutions, and worse, were actually all about building an intolerant theocratic state. But at least now in 2020, with disaster all around us, a few people are awake enough to tear down the false front.

Every paragraph in the article is a laser that burns away the propaganda our government has accreted around itself.

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.

The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.

It’s not a perfect summary, though, because it omits one critical target. It fails to discuss the contribution our failed media is making to the problem. Rupert Murdoch is briefly mentioned in passing, but no analysis of American failure is complete without pinning media moguls to the dissecting tray and taking a scalpel to them. Our media is sensationalist and dishonest and backed up by the ruling class and their money; stories are only as good as the number of eyeballs and clicks they gather, which translates into advertiser money, which roots the media directly in filthy loam of capitalism.

For instance, right now the hot stories that dominate the media are tales of protesters descending on state capitols in their shiny $40,000 pickup trucks, waving guns and Confederate flags, and pretending to be true Workers, needing to have stay-at-home orders lifted so they can get back to work producing food and manufactured goods for the American People. Actually, they’re shady phonies who want to force service workers to get back into the hair salons and coffee shops to provide them with the luxuries they desire.

These events are sensationalized by the media by putting reporters into the midst of the mobs, where it looks like a mass movement. Step back a few feet, and you see them for what they are…small demonstrations by a scattering of 20 to 200 middle class nuts riled up by Fox News saying ignorant things. For context, think back to the Women’s Marches in 2017 — teeny-tiny Morris, Minnesota, population 5,000, had almost 300 people peacefully protesting in our streets, while the large cities had huge demonstrations of tens of thousands of people.

I don’t trust our media to recall events as far back as three years ago, let alone put current events in perspective.

But enough of the Atlantic, that middle of the road semi-liberal magazine for the comfortably middle-class, like me. You’d expect that kind of site to be full of horrified soft people. Let’s look at the Marine Corps Times, instead, where we can expect to find tough talk and gruff can-do assertiveness, right?

There we find “I’ve reported on war for years. I’m more afraid now than I’ve ever been.”.

For years I kept one eye on the hysteria and extremism that’s been brewing in America while I covered atrocities half a world away.

Now that I spend more time in the states covering the Rust Belt and Appalachia, I must admit: I’m more afraid now than I ever was in a war zone.

Let me be clear: I’m not afraid of being killed in a gun battle or bombing on American soil, although by the looks of some of those protesters with the semi-automatic, military-style weapons, they appear to be itching for armed insurrection. They may just be waiting for some supreme conspiracy theorist, like QAnon or the president, to give them the green light.

Warzone deaths, while horrible, can at least be instantaneous and painless.

Nowadays, I’m afraid that America’s demise, (not to mention my own), will be slow, agonizing and too much to bear.

The last four-plus years of U.S. happenings have been fraught with the kind of anti-intellectualism and hatred of “outsiders” I’ve seen peddled by inept, tinpot dictators the world over and those with cruel acumen to sustain their tyrannical rules.

I’ve seen some of what’s playing out in America in countries riddled with bullet holes and craters where suicide bombers drove into a crowded market. Before they were destroyed, some of them were pretty nice, stable places.

I’m afraid this hatred of reason and logic that pervades Trump’s daily televised rallies from the White House is just the beginning of our slow painful decay into one of those nations that “once was” much more than it is now.

I should have known. What I’ve seen of the American military, as filtered through my son’s perspective, is less macho swagger and more pragmatic planning for the worst. More cautious realism, at least as long as we don’t look at the higher echelons and the defense contractors (there’s another place where capitalism has poisoned the purpose of the military).

So far, this was great bedtime reading, just what I needed to make sure I wouldn’t get any sleep at all last night.

So I tried turning to the lighter side. David Futrelle is writing about…Andrew Anglin, Rape Gangs, Sex Slavery and Breeding Farms. Yeah, the Nazis are all excited about the prospect of a post-apocalyptic future in which true Aryans get to roam freely over the wasteland, killing the mud people and rounding up the women to work in breeding farms, all for the purposes of fun and to build an army of white men to kill Mexicans. He really hates Mexicans, for some reason which I don’t understand — all the Mexicans I’ve met have been lovely people. Meanwhile, white Americans are fantasizing about Aryan Rape Gangs — that’s what Anglin openly calls them — and enslaving white women.

It makes one almost wish that we had roaming gangs of warriors who would cut down anyone who calls themselves an “Aryan”, flaunts a swastika tattoo, or waves a Confederate flag. Or at least a Republic that openly condemn people who practice such antisocial, antihuman activities.

Oh, well. It was something after learning what horrible corruption and failure that our country has collapsed into to read something that says how much worse it could be. See! A ray of sunshine! We haven’t quite hit bottom yet!

How not to celebrate the Trans Day of Visibility

This is the day we’re supposed to increase awareness of discrimination against trans people, and I guess you could say that Governor Brad Little of Idaho is doing his part by increasing discrimination against trans people by publicly signing into law some discriminatory bills.

One measure, House Bill 500, is aimed at restricting transgender youth’s participation in sports. The other measure, House Bill 509, is aimed at banning transgender people from changing the gender marker on the their birth certificate.

Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement the signing of the legislation is “unacceptable, and a gross misuse of taxpayer funds and trust.”

“Idaho is leading the way in anti-transgender discrimination, and at a time when life is hard enough for everyone, Idaho’s elected leaders will be remembered for working to make their transgender residents’ lives even harder,” David said. “Shame on Gov. Little and the legislators who championed these heinous pieces of legislation.”

That’s not how you’re supposed to celebrate this day. It does make it obvious that Idaho is actively discriminating, though, so I guess that does spread the message.

Also…

HB 500, dubbed the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act,” requires college and public schools sports teams to be designed as male, female and co-ed — and any female athletic team “shall not be open to students of the male sex.”

In the event of a dispute, a student may be required to produce a physician’s statement to affirm her biological sex based on reproductive anatomy, normal endogenously produced levels of testosterone and an analysis of the student’s genetic makeup. That would effectively ban transgender athletes from participating in sports.

I am professionally a biologist, and Lord but I hate that phrase “biological sex”. What does it mean? Can you contrast it with “non-biological sex”? Right there in the criteria are multiple kinds of evidence…what do you do when reproductive anatomy says one thing, while chromosomes say another? Why do we discount what brain and behavior says?

Shame on Brad Little and whatever repulsive little puritanical Christian lobbyists pushed this bill through.

The University of Rochester gets stomped hard for sexual harassment, deservedly

Contemptible Skidmark, Ph.D.

Back in 2017, I wrote about this awful sexual harassment case at the University of Rochester that involved in particular, one professor, T. Florian Jaeger, who was egregiously out of line with students, but also involved an entire university administration that was outrageous in how it supported Jaeger against all reason. There was a lawsuit. There was a countersuit. It dragged on for years, but now, at last, there has been a settlement, in favor of the victims.

I feel for them, having just gone through a lesser suit that dragged us through the courts for an absurdly long time, and was finally settled just recently. There seems to be no such thing as a speedy trial in these civil suits.

One big difference, though, is that the University of Rochester settled for the amount of $9.4 million. We’re still struggling to pay off our legal debt.

One similarity is that we also retained the right to tell our story, and that does make a difference. UR has really taken a major and deserved hit here, and the whole sordid story is available online. It’s horrifying reading: Jaeger was worse than I imagined, the University was complicit, and the university president did everything he could to enable Jaeger and punish his victims.

Plaintiffs were surprised at the University’s tight embrace and protection of Jaeger and the intense retaliation campaign against them. They could not figure out why UR was so determined to support a serial sexual predator who had caused misery to students and colleagues.

Over time, however, it has become clear that the University’s approach to Jaeger and Plaintiffs fits into a broader pattern of University behavior. UR is a major force in Rochester, the largest private employer in upstate New York, and used to getting its way. Its president is a powerful figure, and after 12 years in office, Seligman has restructured the University to his liking. Faculty and administrators describe him as thin skinned, “someone who always thinks he’s the smartest person in the room,” and, as his tenure has extended, increasingly imperious. He has expanded the ranks of administrators and appointed people to top positions (many times without a search process) who, according to many faculty, will no longer stand up to him or tell him when he is making a mistake.

The settlement wouldn’t have been so large if the University of Rochester hadn’t opened itself up to guilt with it’s horrible behavior.

Jaeger’s behavior created a working environment that was severe, pervasive, intimidating, hostile, and offensive to Cantlon and other female employees in the department.

Through its failures and treatment of Cantlon and others who complained about sexual harassment and discrimination as adversaries, UR contributed to and exacerbated the hostile working environment for female employees. It gave license to its employees, including DeAngelis and other faculty, to treat Cantlon and other female employees, or employees associated with this group via their complaints, with hostility and disdain.

The hostile environment based on sex created a hostile and intimidating work environment for Cantlon and interfered with her ability to do her job to the point that she began to look for other work

There’s more. A lot more. This statement by the court is satisfactorily scathing, and also explains why this decision was so important.

The false statements made by UR, Seligman and Clark seriously call into question the Plaintiffs’ fitness for their profession. As academics and research scientists, the Plaintiffs must be seen to have integrity and to be utterly trustworthy. Honest and integrity are crucial characteristics in their profession for at least the following reasons:

a. Research scientists rely heavily on grants to fund their work. An applicant’s scientific integrity, a concept inextricably tied to honesty, must be beyond question. If a grant-making body thought that a researcher was capable of making up evidence – as UR has accused the Plaintiffs of doing – the grant-making body would never support that researcher.

b. Similarly, the scientific community and publishers must be able to trust in the integrity of the researcher’s work. If the researcher’s scientific integrity or honest is questionable, publishers are unlikely to select their work for publication and institutions are unlikely to invite that researcher to give talks or present at conferences. Publishing and presenting work are both essential components of any academic career.

c. Labs need high quality Ph.D. students and post-docs to contribute to faculty members’ research. Choosing a lab is a big decision for these students and post-docs – where they work and who they work for can have a profound effect on their own careers. They are unlikely to work in the lab of someone who is considered to be dishonest or to have a history of bullying others.

d. Serving on committees or in other leadership roles in departments or throughout the University is another key part of an academic career. These opportunities are key to obtaining leadership positions and building a good reputation. Failing to do any service for one’s department or university reflects poorly on an academic’s reputation and suitability for the profession. The Plaintiffs have been accused of dishonesty, bullying, and manipulation. They have been barred from serving on committees or as ombudspersons because they are not trusted to be honest and unbiased.

As academics and research scientists, honesty and integrity are essential to Plaintiffs’ professional success. Provost Clark, President Seligman, and UR knew this when each false statement referenced was made.

Despite winning the case (strictly speaking, they settled, the UR has not admitted guilt), this was not a happy outcome. The plaintiff’s careers were hurt, they had to leave and put down roots elsewhere, it had to have been agony having this hang over their heads for so long. They sacrificed to get this result.

The University of Rochester is going to have to cough up $9.4 million dollars. On top of that, who knows how many grants they’ve lost because of this action? They’ve definitely lost much of their prestige, their cognitive science program was climbing the rankings as one of the best in the nation. If one of my students was planning to apply there, I’d strongly urge them to consider any place other than UR.

T. Florian Jaeger is still employed at the university, and wasn’t targeted by the lawsuit at all. The piece of shit sailed through the whole thing without getting stepped on.

I don’t understand that at all.

Why does Chris Matthews still have a job?

He’s always been this way: unpleasant, obnoxious, poorly informed, and just generally been a grating presence on the news. I don’t know what segment of the population he’s supposed to appeal to — I don’t think he’s liked by either the right or the left — and Matthews has a serious misogyny issue.

This tendency to objectify women in his orbit has bled into his treatment of female politicians and candidates. He has repeatedly lusted over women in politics on air, including remarking in 2011 that there’s “something electric” and “very attractive” about the way former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin walks and moves, and noting in 2017 that acting attorney general Sally Yates is “attractive, obviously.” But he has reserved a particular contempt for the woman who made it closest to ascending the heights of American political power, Hillary Clinton, calling her “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “She-Devil.” The Cut obtained footage of him joking in early 2016, just before a live interview with then candidate Clinton, “where’s that Bill Cosby pill,” referring to the date-rape drug. In 2005, he openly wondered whether the troops would “take the orders” from a female president; after another interview, he pinched Clinton’s cheek; and in another, he suggested that she had only had so much political success because her husband had “messed around.” This evening anchor, in addition to everything else, has repeatedly challenged whether women are legitimate politicians or could be president at all. “I was thinking how hard it is for a woman to take on a job that’s always been held by men,” he said of Clinton in 2006.

When MSNBC was constantly being labeled as a left-leaning news channel, I just had to look at Chris Matthews to wonder what they were smoking.

I guess he’s been yanked from all of MSNBC’s election coverage, at last. Now they just need to fire him.

When a righteous cause enables unrighteous behavior

I don’t even want to touch this story, but it’s a real problem. An organization to fight sexual harassment and abuse in the scientific community, MeTooStem, is facing a major crisis. One of the founders, BethAnn McLaughlin, has regularly antagonized other members to the point that they’re having huge turnover problems.

BethAnn McLaughlin, a high-profile activist against harassment and abuse in academic science, is facing calls to resign from the organization she founded, MeTooSTEM. She herself has been a bully, recent MeTooSTEM volunteers say, and has not addressed criticisms that led to previous waves of resignations from the organization.

“While I have worked very closely with BethAnn over the last year or so, I can no longer support her leadership as she displays behavior patterns our organization has vowed to fight against,” Teresa Swanson, one of three members of MeTooSTEM’s leadership team, wrote in a message to The Chronicle.

This kind of thing arises every time too much power gets invested in a single individual at the head of an organization — all people suck in one way or another, and putting them in charge without significant checks on their behavior inevitably leads to fractures. We saw that in the atheist movement, where even informally making people figureheads led to ego clashes and dissent; I think we can see it in the centralization of power in the American government, too (although I would not compare McLaughlin to Trump at all). Authority needs to be distributed.

Although this is a good suggestion, too.

One well-known advocate, Kathryn B.H. Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, suggested that there never was any need for a formal MeTooSTEM organization in the first place. “It’s a movement. It never needed a nonprofit or a savior,” she tweeted.

Sometimes a hierarchy is just the wrong method to use. Although other methods have their drawbacks — see Occupy, for instance — you have to have a means compatible with the end you desire.