I cannot abide Gretchen Carlson, the awful co-host on the dumbest news show on Fox News, Fox & Friends, so I should be pleased that she has left her job…except that the reason takes all the joy out of it.

Carlson, who just announced that she was no longer working for Fox News on her Facebook page, alleges that she was fired because she rebuffed Ailes’s sexual advances. Carlson, who had spent 11 years at Fox News, alleges that her firing from Fox was a retaliatory move after she not only refused to have sex with Ailes, but also tried to challenge what she claims was unfair treatment from her male colleagues.

Among other things, Carlson alleges that Ailes told her last September that “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago.” Carlson also claims that Ailes instructed her to turn around on multiple occasions so he could ogle her posterior, while also requesting that she wear outfits that showed off her figure.

You know, this is the kind of behavior I expected of Fox News, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable.

Carlson also accuses Steve Doocy, the guy who has been vying with Brian Kilmeade for the title of the dumbest guy on the dumbest show on Fox News, of also harassing her. Who knew Fox News could get even uglier?

Carlson’s full complaint is available online (pdf).

Maybe every newspaper ought to adopt this editorial policy.

It’s yet another academic scandal, this time at the university where I was an undergrad, the University of Washington. A top virus researcher, Michael Katze, has been committing all kinds of inappropriate behavior.

In the summer of 2014, as Ebola ravaged West Africa and unleashed panic across the U.S., Michael Katze was a voice of reason. As head of one of the biggest virus labs in the country, he frequently appeared on TV news spots — sharply dressed, with his signature black glasses and deep tan — preaching calm in the face of fear.

But away from the cameras, the University of Washington lab in Seattle that Katze had led for nearly 30 years was descending into chaos. Over the next year, one of his most important collaborators severed its $1.2 million partnership. Employees left in droves. And a lab administrator filed charges accusing him of sexually harassing her and a colleague. In August 2015, the university banned Katze from entering his own lab.

This past January, a university investigation concluded that Katze, 66, had violated the school’s sexual harassment policies with both employees. A second investigation, by the university’s School of Medicine, determined that in the process, he had misused university resources for personal gain, including by asking an employee to do chores for him and solicit a prostitute. It recommended a comprehensive internal audit to determine how far this misuse of public funds went.

This was a guy who was rolling in grant money — he was sitting on top of $30 million in awards — and he acted like some petty pimp, doling out grant money explicitly for sexual favors. And no one noticed?

One of the employees was an administrator whom Katze had hired, at an unusually high salary, on the implicit condition that she submit to his sexual demands. He personally rewarded this woman, known as Mary Roe in some court documents, with “thousands or even tens of thousands” of dollars a year in cash and gifts, the investigation found.

The university found that Katze also sexually harassed another administrative employee, known as Jane Doe in court documents. According to the investigations, Katze asked her to clean his apartment, purchase marijuana and Percocet for him, email escorts and place personal ads for him, and “schedule his manicures, pedicures, haircuts, and hair lightening appointments.” Meanwhile, he joked about having sex with her, made sexual comments about her appearance, sent her sexually suggestive emails, and, on two occasions, tried while drunk to kiss or touch her

He’s still getting paid, but he’s lost his lab, his employees, and his grant money. I guess that’s good. But I still can’t imagine the lack of oversight that would allow such a sleaze to run rampant. There’s clearly a problem with Katze, but there’s also a problem in UW grants administration.

Mississippi passed a bad law. HB1523 said that employees of the state did not have to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples if they had a sincere belief that it was wrong, where those sincere beliefs were:

(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;

(b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and

(c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.

So if we assume those premises, those premises are legally valid because we’ve assumed them, and you don’t have to do the job you were hired to do if you don’t want to do the job you were hired to do. Tautology seems to be a way of life among good Christians.

Good news, though: a federal judge has ruled that Mississippi cannot do that. Start issuing those marriage licenses, clerks!

[Read more…]

The Supreme Court has overturned a restrictive Texas anti-abortion law.

In a dramatic ruling, the Supreme Court on Monday threw out a Texas abortion access law in a victory to supporters of abortion rights who argued it would have shuttered all but a handful of clinics in the state.

The 5-3 ruling is the most significant decision from the Supreme Court on abortion in two decades and could serve to deter other states from passing so-called “clinic shutdown” laws.

You can read the decision (pdf).

It feels funny to have a Supreme Court decision go the sensible, reasonable way.

This sounds terribly familiar.

The self-identified Men’s Rights Advocates just seemed eager to lay into someone they perceived as a liberal “value-signaler.” They targeted my masculinity and sexual orientation, labeling me a “cuck” and a “libfag.” Before I knew it, I was receiving multiple email notices that I’d been signed up for a variety of hardcore gay pornography services.

What did Jared Sexton do to deserve such hatred? He wrote up a factual account of his attendance at a Trump rally, and noted that a lot of the attendees were loud bigots.

It’s a curious phenomenon. I got exactly the same kind of response from Catholics, years ago, and then I got it from right-wing atheists, and then from “scientific” racists and fans of evolutionary psychology, and of course I get it from MRAs. What’s strange is how they all sound alike, and the tactics haven’t changed at all. Email death threats, rage with a common set of slurs, and oh yes, signing me up for gay porn. Do they even realize that that stuff doesn’t disturb me in the least? I might glance at it, be impressed with the remarkable muscle tone of their models, and trash it for lack of interest.

They occasionally come up with a new term, but it sweeps through the population so rapidly that it loses all impact. The latest example is “cuck”: one moment, no one is saying it, and then suddenly it’s ubiquitous among that certain group of people. For the record, I love the word “cuck”, because when someone uses it, it is an instant classifier. It’s like spotting a notochord in an embryo — you just snap your fingers and say, yep, phylum Chordata. I see “cuck”, I know instantly that it’s phylum Blustering-Asshole-Authoritarian-Obsessed-With-Controlling-Women.

But really, what’s sad is how uniform they all sound — like their personality has been excised and replaced with loud yelling, and their creativity has been obliterated with a cancer of buzzwords.