Last week Andrea sent me this link to some ramblings on abortion and libertarianism. For density of question-begging and bad-faith arguing per paragraph, it’s quite a feat; not since I read the op-eds at the university newspaper have I seen quite so many packed into such a small space. Let’s dig in:

Implication #1: If the fetus is accorded individual rights, then the aborting woman and anyone who assists her are murderers and must be subject to whatever penalty society metes out for that crime, up to and including capital punishment. The punishment should be applied to past abortions as there is no statute of limitation on murder. If anti-abortionists shy away from this conclusion, then they do not really consider abortion to be murder. Note: it does not matter that the woman didn’t view the fetus as a child; if her state of mind exonerates her, then it follows that a racist should be exonerated for killing blacks. “

Wendy misses the point of “no statute of limitations.” What this means is that, for some crimes, no amount of time having passed since its commission will prevent the culprit from being charged and tried. This is not the same as making a law retroactive, which is the notion with which McElroy conflates “statute of limitations.” If, say, Global Warming Wingnuts someday succeed in making it a criminal offense not to recycle newspapers, there is no way in a constitutional democracy, as it is currently understood, to charge people with that crime if they did it before the act was made criminal. I am unaware of any example of anyone trying to do this – if one exists, I hope someone posts info about it in the comments.
The attempt to say that if we charge racially motivated lynchers with murder, we ought to advocate charging women who have abortions with murder, is an amusing attempt to make pro-lifers scamper around the issue of race. I decline to do so. For those determined to find a parallel, though, I suggest that, whenever in the past we have collectively designated one group of humans as having less worth than others, the results have been a blot on our species. Better to err on the side of caution, one would think, if we’ve learned anything from history at all.
I have yet to meet a pro-lifer who wants abortionists or aborting women treated as if they have committed first degree murder. In fact, the most common thing I have heard expressed about them is the sentiment that they are harming themselves, often accompanied by prayers that they rehabilitate themselves, not only to prevent aborting more babies but also for their own sake. As to the women who have abortions, pro-lifers, who know far more about the consequences of abortion for all involved than the average non-committed person, tend to express deep sympathy and grief for these women, and run many programs to help them heal from their abortions.
The reality, too, is that ending a life carries with it a number of different penalties depending on a number of factors. Murder for hire, as a cold-blooded and inhumane act, usually carries the most harsh penalties; deliberate murder in the heat of passion less so; questionable killing in self-defense less still; and causing a death through thoughtlessness or carelessness, while still sometimes incurring a criminal conviction, tends to carry a light sentence. Almost all abortions fit in to one of the latter three categories. If we were, as a society, to criminalize abortion, there is no reason at all to assume that we would or should hand out the same sentences as we did to Paul Bernardo. If a drunk driver kills someone, we emphasize community service, education so the event is less likely to be repeated, and often therapy to address the underlying immaturity and poor judgement that led to the episode. If, and I stress if, we were to criminalize abortion, it strikes me that education and therapy would be the most appropriate response.
And we still have 8 more points to refute! Don’t worry, though; they’re all variations on the same two tired ideas. More to come.

It turns out that having unprotected sex (on camera) with people who have lots of other unprotected sex (on or off camera) puts you at higher risk of catching a sexually transmitted disease. Who knew?
“Health advocates are using this new disclosure as an opportunity to push for mandatory condoms in all porn shoots. The porn industry responds, collectively, “No.”” 
I’m all in favour of preventing STDs. But considering the incredible damage done by porn to our culture, our understanding of sexuality, our kids, and so on and so forth, well, I’m not sure doing everything exactly the same, but with a rubber on, is really the answer.

So, Letterman’s defense of his remarks about the sexual activities of the Palin women comes down to him asserting that he was referring to 18-year-old Bristol and not 14-year-old Willow. Why is this any better? Is it the fact that he was joking about statutory rape that was really the problem, or is it the contempt he showed for the entire family by taking his jokes in that direction in the first place?
In spite of the fact that Letterman’s behaviour was sexist, and that feminists have been entirely silent about it, in my opinion the really interesting issue in Palin-hatred is about class, not sex. The Palins, before her entry into politics, anyway, were solidly middle class – at the blue collar end, at that. She has a bit of an accent, one that isn’t associated with erudition and sophistication. They have a number of children that, for coastal elites, is awkwardly high. And they’re tacky enough actually to believe in and live their religion, as compared to just going to a beautiful building where the choir sings traditional songs, and not letting anything as silly as faith shape their behaviour. I’m waiting for a book about that. Any potential authors out there?
On a more politically relevant note, Palin denies that she’s a “frontrunner” for 2012, for what it’s worth. I kind of hope she isn’t a frontrunner- I think it will take something extraordinary for the current incumbent to lose the next election, and I don’t want to see her lose in 2012, because then her chances of getting the nomination in 2016 are slim. I’d like to see her stay as Governor, or perhaps become a Senator, keep building support and credibility and connections, and then run in 2016.

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Andrea adds: I still have faith (the hope for things as of yet unseen) that extraordinary things can happen. (“I think it will take something extraordinary for the current incumbent to lose the next election”). Call me a dreamer. And yet I too don’t believe Palin should be a frontrunner for 2012. I conclude that she was not ready for the vice presidential candidacy this last time round. She needs some time to get her head around the wily ways of the Hamptons set.

I firmly believe that decades from now, many theses will be written about the peculiar form of Palin Derangement Syndrome that keeps cropping up, even now, when she’s been effectively marginalized (until 2016, anyway.) Here, in a bit of what they would recognize as an ironic development if they were sufficiently self-aware, feminists are dealt a good dressing-down for their silence on Palin-bashing by white male classical scholar Victor Davis Hanson in The Corner:

Letterman attacked in crass sexual terms both Palin and her daughter: Two of the rhetorical cornerstones of the feminist movement used to be zero-tolerance for sexual slurs by men alleging promiscuity (“slutty flight-attendant look”), and jokes about something as serious as rape (e.g., Palin’s 14-year-old daughter “knocked up by Alex Rodriguez”). David Letterman, who has become ever more creepy in his dotage, on both counts proved a boor — and receives only silence?

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Brigitte disagrees some: I don’t believe Sarah Palin is marginalized, and certainly not until 2016. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking on my part, but I don’t think so. For the people who fear her (those who suffer from PDS), the future is bleak.

But it’s more than just fear. Some of this anti-Palin behaviour (much like anti-Bush behaviour except more vicious and sexually explicit) cannot be explained rationally. How do you explain feminists not rising to the defence of a 14-year-old girl when a powerful older man “jokes” about her like that?

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Andrea adds: Just this past weekend I was asked why I liked Sarah Palin so much, beyond the life factor. These friends–all exceptionally good people–gazing at me with faces filled with a mix of confusion and concern, actually, as in how on earth can our good friend Andrea feel this way? In return, I ask only this–what’s not to like?

David Hyde Pierce (Frasier’s brother Niles) is one of my favourite actors. I like him even more when I see interviews with him in which it’s clear how radically different he is from the effete, rarified character for whom he’s most known; he sells it so completely that it’s actually weird to hear him use contractions and wear jeans.
David Hyde Pierce is gay, has been with the same partner for slightly less time than I’ve been alive, and had a same sex marriage in the interval in California when they were permitted there. He’s now speaking out against Proposition 8, its supporters and the movement they represent:

I’ve been going because I had the experience of having this private thing suddenly dragged out into the public, and have people I don’t know take a vote,” he said. “It was a very angry-making feeling both in November when it was taken away from me and also this past Tuesday when I was sitting in front of my television wondering, ‘Gee, I hope it’s OK the Supreme Court thinks I’m married.’ Excuse me, it’s none of your business.””

The major fallacy here is the blurring of private and public. What a person does for sexual gratification, in his own home, is none of the public’s business (within the usual boundaries: consensual, adult, and so on.) Whether society chooses to confer special status upon a particular sort of sexual relationship is very much the public’s business. Andrea and I will shortly be unveiling an estimate of the financial cost to taxpayers of family breakdown; when more families collapse, they are more dependent upon government programs, and your tax bill goes up. That’s your business. But radically changing and eroding the family has many less crass and obvious consequences. Fatherlessness creates a climate that harms even children with active, present fathers. Rising illegitimacy rates mean that children are even less likely to have relationships with their fathers than if their parents had married and divorced. The lessening of the taboo against divorce, embodied most clearly in removing the need to show cause when petitioning for divorce, makes it far easier for one party to nullify a marriage than it was in the past. Children are most immediately influenced by the marriage and relationship of their parents but they are not insulated from the influence of the divorce of the people next door, the friend at school who effectively never had a father, the cousin who lives with a mother and a series of boyfriends. All of these influences make marriage writ large a shakier thing, and as with choices about drugs, education, gangs and almost everything else, the home environment is the single biggest influence but far from the only influence. So yes, what relationships we privilege are very much something the public should be voting on.
And because this always comes up in discussion of gay marriage and why some of us are opposed: it has nothing to do with liking or disliking gay people, individually or collectively. Just as being pro-life does not mean you dislike women, or fear women’s sexuality, or are repressed yourself, or any of the other ad hominems that come up with such tiring frequency. I haven’t discussed it with every other PWPL blogger, but I would bet every one of us knows someone who has had an abortion, and I doubt we love or like them less for it. On the contrary, while I oppose abortion in the abstract, when I am faced with a concrete instance of it when I learn that a friend had one, I feel not just sadness and revulsion at the act itself but also grief for my friend, who was hurting, made a choice she felt was the only one open to her, and continues to hurt to this day.

These aren’t perfect parallels, although it is very much in the Judeo-Christian tradition to separate our (and by implication God’s) condemnation of an act from our forgiveness and love for the actor. But pretending abortion empowers women to make women who’ve had abortions feel better about it is not fundamentally loving; it is dishonest and destructive. And so is describing the relationship between two men as “marriage,” no matter how much they might want it, no matter how much they love each other and are committed to each other, no matter how much their feelings are hurt by the lack of this social sanction.

Bristol Palin, who’s going to be the answer to a lot of trivia questions a decade from now, is on the front cover of People magazine. In it, she talks about how unglamorous life with a tiny baby is:

Girls need to imagine and picture their life with a screaming newborn baby and then think before they have sex,” she says of being a teenage mom. “Think about the consequences … If girls realized the consequences of sex, nobody would be having sex. Trust me. Nobody.”

I’m not sure she’s quite got the point here. If the message is that life with a screaming newborn baby can be stressful, well yes, that’s true. It’s equally unpleasant to be sleep-deprived and subject to nursing woes and diaper changes when not a teenager. And while having other adults around to share in the baby-care makes life easier, the basic hassle involved in the tending of small children is pretty standard, whether you’re a teenager, an adult, married, single, a stay at home mom, work outside the home, you name it.

Bristol Palin’s problem isn’t that she has a screaming newborn baby per se; it’s that she has this baby with whose father she’s already broken up, a not uncommon result of a high school romance; that she’s still totally dependent upon her parents and thus pretty much by definition not prepared to parent herself; and that she has none of the supports in place to help her cope and adjust that are more likely to be available when you are married and at least semi-autonomous before having children.

Don’t get me wrong, if “sex=screaming baby=no social life” stops kids in high school from having sex, more power to them. The thing is, to a certain extent, that equation holds true for adults too, not just teens. The issue isn’t how much work babies are, it’s how much more bearable the work is when you’ve got a husband and supportive family and a bit more maturity to fall back on.

And it’s a wee bit irresponsible for People to run a cover of a beautifully made up, slim and rested-looking Bristol in cap and gown, toting Tripp as an accessory. The text may read “don’t do this” but the sub-text is telling a different story.

Well, I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

Ever since Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? I’ve had a morbid fascination with dating shows. It’s kind of like the sick compulsion to eavesdrop on a couple having a fight at the next table in a restaurant, or the glee small children have when they can watch a sibling getting in trouble, except there are no innocent victims because everyone involved actually consented to going on a reality show, for crying out loud.

Anyway, the latest round got off to a rousing start last night. (I do laundry in front of pulp TV. When I’m not solving differential equations and stuff.) What’s peculiar about the show is that the “Bachelorette” in question was, a few short months ago, proclaiming her undying love for The Bachelor Jason (himself a reject from an earlier session of The B’ette, DeAnna, who was kicked to the curb by Brad … it’s like a daisy chain of moronic exhibitionists) and yet now proclaims herself ready for true love (plausible enough) and expecting to find it on TV.

The 30 men competing, for their part, signed up without even knowing who the lady in question would be. So they’re coming on this show, purporting to want to marry at the end of it, when they don’t even know who their prospective bride is.

I’ve long thought that the Harlequin-ization of our culture of relationships, in which The One will send electricity sizzling through you and provide you with emotional, sexual, intellectual, social and psychological satisfaction forever and ever, or else he’s not The One, is really harmful. Arranged marriages don’t strike me as that great either, but given the two extremes, I’d say a considered attempt to match yourself with someone of a compatible background, with shared values and goals and beliefs who wants a similar lifestyle, is more likely to lead to happiness than letting your hormones decide for you in a matter of days. Certainly you’re more likely to find lasting happiness with a kind and good person who shares the above, whom you grow to love profoundly, than with someone who has all the right pheromones but has a divergent outlook on life.

So is it kind of nice, that there are people out there willing to say “I want a long-term relationship, and finding someone who wants what I do is my goal” when they don’t even know what the other guy/girl will look like? Or are these just a bunch of fame-hounds looking for booze-fuelled hot tub action?

On second thought, don’t answer that.

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Andrea adds: Glad you added that last line, Rebecca. No answer from me then.

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Brigitte wonders: You fuel your hot tub with booze?

The recent discussion here about reclaiming words, the blind spot of orthodox feminists who favour all abortions except those conducted because the fetus is female, and why women are less prominent in the pro-life movement than in the pro-choice movement, are things I’ve been mulling over. One of the more powerful compulsory texts from my high school education was Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, the dramatization of Thomas More’s refusal to endorse Henry VIII’s divorce and marriage, which culminated in More’s execution. At one point More’s son-in-law suggests that More should falsely condemn a man who will contribute to More’s conviction, and More refuses, saying he would let the Devil himself go free if he had broken no laws, even though his son-in-law would rather break laws for the sake of a greater good. More asks him:

And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

I believe that the vast majority of abortion advocates think they are on the side of right; they are acting in good faith, even if they are choosing wilfull blindness, as increasingly they must as the age of viability is pushed further and further back. Because they interpret feminism as advancing the cause of women in a zero-sum game, the movement has become increasingly anti-male and anti-child, born and unborn.
Women and men need each other. A culture that demeans and disrespects men is as toxic as one that demeans and disrespects women. And a culture that holds any human life as worthless is capable of holding all human life as worthless.

This is what feminists have done: they have cut down the forests that could be protecting them. They raze the notions that sex ought to be linked to marriage and that both parents have an inviolable responsibility to their children; they deny that sex is intrinsically linked to procreation; they reject the very idea of differences between the sexes. And then they are horrified that abortion is used to cull unwanted daughters.

Abortion isn’t the only example. A welfare recipient in Germany was told last year that if she refused a job as a prostitute in a licensed brothel her benefits would be cut off, just as they would be if she had an offer to work as a waitress or office clerk and chose instead to stay on welfare. You cannot insist that prostitutes are empowered and not victims, that hiring someone to have sex with is no different than hiring someone to cut your hair, that “women and children first” is a nasty bit of patriarchy and not noble, and then be astonished at the idea of women being coerced by the state into prostitution. Taboos and mores about sex and life protect all of us, and when we strip some people of their protection, we end up making all of us more vulnerable.

I’ve been travelling and working a lot the last couple of weeks, and feel obliged to write a post on topics ranging from the profound to the embarrassingly silly. [Read more…]

This post is interesting. I’m certainly open to the idea that we can’t extrapolate our findings about insects too broadly to humans, and there is increasing evidence that girls can be just as promiscuous as boys, given the right social prompts.

What’s really mind-blowing, though, is the comments section, and the near-unanimous consensus that the rubes reporting 4 (for women) and 7 (for men) lifetime sexual partners must be either lying or hopeless prudes, because all the hipsters joining the discussion seem to have hit the double digits while still in high school.

Some sample comments (from the “clean” ones):
“I think they meant to say “Memorial Day weekend” instead of “lifetime”. Typo! ”
“LOL. I always wonder about me and my friends when I read those studies because I don’t know a single person – male or female – who have had fewer than 10 sexual partners. Most of my friends have 20+ sexual partners and we’re in our 20s so either we’re an extremely promiscuous bunch who is having sex for the rest of the country or the subjects of these studies are lying.”
“In NZ, the average age for girls is 15, and boys is 17, I believe. Also, I have heard of another study, that claims average no of partners for men is 8, and for women is 20. I’m going with culture, FTW!”
“an average of four in their lifetime? i had four this MONTH! aaugh! ”

Does anybody know – are the Amish accepting converts?

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Andrea adds: Actually, Rebecca, some of the Hawaiian Islands are uninhabited. No need to convert, and you could still use electricity and other modern amenities.