Republican Senator John Ensign of Nevada has announced he had an extramarital affair in 2008 with one of his own staffers, but he “deeply regrets” it and is “very sorry”. His wife claims that, as a result, their “marriage has become stronger”. (Good work, John!)

I don’t really give a shit. People’s sex lives are their own business. Getting caught up in conniptions over who somebody sleeps with is for people who get caught up in conniptions over who people sleep with. As far as I’m concerned, he’s got nothing to explain; I don’t make it my business to judge other people’s sex lives.

Which is what’s so delicious about this. Ensign does make it his business to judge other people’s sex lives. He was a leading critic of Clinton for doing the same thing he’s been doing now, and in fact demanded Clinton’s resignation. He also announced that Senator Larry Craig was “a disgrace” after he was caught soliciting gay sex in an airport men’s room; Ensign demanded Craig’s resignation at that time, also, just three months at most before Ensign himself began bonking one of his employees. Ensign, it goes without saying, has indicated he has no intention of resigning his own office.

And he is, of course, a complete asshole in every other respect as well - votes with the GOP 92% of the time, has 100% ratings from both anti-choice and anti-gay-rights organizations, supports Constitutional amendments against both flag “desecration” and marriage equality, promotes official mandatory prayer in schools, and on and on. One piece of extreme assholery I particular appreciate is this: he voted against adding coverage for more children under the SCHIP program, but in favor of providing SCHIP coverage to fetuses. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect illustration of Republican dipshit demagoguery.

So I’m torn between glee at seeing him twist in the wind and concern that this just perpetuates the tradition of making people’s private lives fodder for political posturing. Nobody needs to apologize to the public for an extramarital affair (his obligations to his wife are their business, and as she claims to believe it’s a net positive, well . . .). But assholes like Ensign need to apologize for being bluenose busybody prudes, and bigots, in general.

And so I propose the “Barney Frank Rule on Conservative Hypocrisy in General”. The “Frank Rule” is a rough consensus, proposed by Rep. Barney Frank, that many gay activists endorse regarding when it is appropriate to out gay conservatives who work against gay rights:

I think there’s a right to privacy. But the right to privacy should not be a right to hypocrisy. And people who want to demonize other people shouldn’t then be able to go home and close the door and do it themselves.

It can easily be generalized to criticism (not just the outing of perpetrators) of other forms of hypocrisy. And it provides a reasonable and fair way to respond to cases like Ensign’s. The issue isn’t whether he had an affair. It’s the fact that he uses his power to ruin lives and obstruct fundamental personal freedoms, and that he demands those same freedoms for himself while doing so.

The first is worse in impact, but the second both undermines his supposedly principled stance on the issues themselves, and ties him personally to the implicit position that such rules should not be imposed on “people who count”. The appropriate criticism of Ensign is not that he had an affair, and not even that he had an affair after criticizing others for having affairs, but that he signals, by his actions, that he regards his own policies as either meaningless political stunts or too harmful to be applied except to people he does not care about. One might also note that he apparently lacks the will to follow policies he seeks to impose on others by law or political pressure. This in no way lets non-hypocritical prudes and bigots off the hook, but it answers the question how to respond to the especially appalling spectacle of the use of other people’s private lives for political gain by people who indulge in the very behavior they punish in others.

The proper resolution - one that any decent person would have seen at once, and that Ensign now endorses by his own actions - is not to crack down harder on disapproved sex, but to leave other people’s sex lives the hell alone. And until prurient, finger-pointing conservative hypocrites are willing to extend the freedom and respect for privacy to everyone else that they demand in their own lives (their melodramatic public confessions notwithstanding), it’s fair game to make their lives the same tortured hunting ground of humiliation, exposure, and inquisition.

UPDATE: Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly ices the cake:

In 2004, the Nevada Republican lectured his colleagues, “Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded. For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation.”

And did I mention that Ensign is a longtime member of the Promise Keepers, a conservative evangelical group that promotes strong families and marriages?

TOTALLY HILARIOUS RANDOM OBSERVATION: The Washington Post lists Congressional voting records broken down by various categories (party, state, gender, etc.), including voting members’ astrological sign.

Good for him:

On reflection, I now realize that, completely apart from any debate over our respective rights and completely apart from our competing views on the merits of pseudonymous blogging, I have been uncharitable in my conduct towards the blogger who has used the pseudonym Publius. Earlier this evening, I sent him an e-mail setting forth my apology for my uncharitable conduct. As I stated in that e-mail, I realize that, unfortunately, it is impossible for me to undo my ill-considered disclosure of his identity. For that reason, I recognize that Publius may understandably regard my apology as inadequate.

The harm cannot be undone, so I do not think that we should forget what Whelan did. Since the damage was permanent, the blight should be as well. Whelan has lost the benefit of the doubt in similar circumstances in the future, I would argue. However, this is a full and total apology and appears to be sincere. Apologizing can be difficult, and Whelan chose to offer a real apology, not the kind of half-apology or “sorry if anyone chose to be offended” nonsense that we are too often subjected to these days. Whelan did the correct thing when doing the correct thing was difficult for him personally. He should be commended for that.

Publius has accepted the apology.

Publius, one of the most interesting bloggers around, put up a post a couple of days ago linking the Eugene Volkhoh’s strong refutation of one of Ed Whelan’s anti-Sotomayor talking points. Publius pointed out just how terrible Whelan’s reasoning was and pointed out that Whelan has a history of shoddy work when it comes to attacking his political opponents. Whelan then published Publius real name. Whelan is transparently attempting to bully Publius. He was incapable of dealing with the arguments that Publius and Volkhoh made and so he attempted to hurt at least one of the people who so thoroughly embarrassed him.

There are two reasons to identify someone who writes pseudonymously: they claim to be someone they are not and the claim has an overwhelming bearing on the credibility of their writing or to bully someone. Publius has claimed nothing that would have a deep bearing on his writing that was not true, and Whelan himself doesn’t even argue that Publius had. So that leaves bullying. In this country your boss can take away your job for anything political that you have ever said. In this country, people can and have tried to fire teachers for holding political opinions different than their own. In this country, people have attacked and even killed people for having political opinions different than their own. Some people have complicated family relationships and don’t want to cause family members pain or discomfort through their writing. Pseudonymous writers can protect themselves from those events and should be allowed to. The free expression fo dieas is perhpas the most important aspect of a strong democracy. If the law does not protect people of relatively less power, then they must find some other way to do so. By destroying that protection, people like Whelan are stating quite clearly that they hope for someone with power over Publius will punish him for the high crime of sowing up Ed Whelan. It is despicable, cowardly, and a direct assault on the free exchange of ideas.

And it proves Ed Whelan to be the hack and hitman Publius and others claimed him to be.

This has to be one of the oddest arguments I have ever heard:

Some opponents of a Shelby County measure meant to block job discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people said there’s little evidence that such discrimination actually happens.

So discrimination is okay if it only happens every once in a while? I am sure that those arguing tht would not feel the same if the question was a matter of discrimination based on religion. And they shouldn’t: even one person being discriminated against is too many. Arguing that it only happens a little bit so it doesn’t need to be outlawed is so unpersuasive and so illogical that one has to wonder if there are ulterier motives for not wanting to outlaw discrimination.

And while we are on the subject of discrimination, the irony of this almost killed me:

Constance Houston, 54, one of dozens of citizens who spoke at the County Commission meeting on Monday, said she’s against homosexuality on religious grounds but doubted gays are discriminated against.

“There’s no discrimination here in Memphis. None, whatsoever,” said Houston. She added that workers should keep their sexuality to themselves on the job. “Keep whatever you do in your bedroom,” she said.

I am sure there is no discrimination there. I am one hundred percent sure that she tells her heterosexual co-workers to shut up and “keep it in the bedroom” when they talk about the woman they just met or their kids’ ballet recital or how their idiot husband broke the lawn mower. I am sure she demands a complete and utter lack of human niceties from all she knows, gay or straight. After all, she knows there is no discrimination in Memphis.

“This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union,”
—– Bill O’Reilly on Dr. Tiller’s practice

This is what Dr. Tiller — and almost no one else — did:

In 1994 my wife and I found out that she was pregnant. The pregnancy was difficult and unusually uncomfortable but her doctor repeatedly told her things were fine. Sometime early in the 8th month my wife, an RN who at the time was working in an infertility clinic asked the Dr. she was working for what he thought of her discomfort. He examined her and said that he couldn’t be certain but thought that she might be having twins. We were thrilled and couldn’t wait to get a new sonogram that hopefully would confirm his thoughts. Two days later our joy was turned to unspeakable sadness when the new sonogram showed conjoined twins. Conjoined twins alone is not what was so difficult but the way they were joined meant that at best only one child would survive the surgery to separate them and the survivor would more than likely live a brief and painful life filled with surgery and organ transplants. We were advised that our options were to deliver into the world a child who’s life would be filled with horrible pain and suffering or fly out to Wichita Kansas and to terminate the pregnancy under the direction of Dr. George Tiller.

We made an informed decision to go to Kansas. One can only imagine the pain borne by a woman who happily carries a child for 8 months only to find out near the end of term that the children were not to be and that she had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy and go against everything she had been taught to believe was right. This was what my wife had to do. Dr. Tiller is a true American hero. The nightmare of our decision and the aftermath was only made bearable by the warmth and compassion of Dr. Tiller and his remarkable staff. Dr. Tiller understood that this decision was the most difficult thing that a woman could ever decide and he took the time to educate us and guide us along with the other two couples who at the time were being forced to make the same decision after discovering that they too were carrying children impacted by horrible fetal anomalies. I could describe in great detail the procedures and the pain and suffering that everyone is subjected to in these situations. However, that is not the point of the post. We can all imagine that this is not something that we would wish on anyone. The point is that the pain and suffering were only mitigated by the compassion and competence of Dr. George Tiller and his staff. We are all diminished today for a host of reasons but most of all because a man of great compassion and courage has been lost to the world.

Here is what else he did:

In 1980 I was pregnant with my first child. I had no insurance and couldn’t afford a doctors appointment until I was approved for a medical card.. Mom told Dr. Tiller and he brought me into his office where he examined me, free of charge. I can credit him with the very first picture taken of my son.

The last story I have to share is about my friends who could not have children. Dr. Tiller’s office worked with several attorneys in the Wichita area to provide adoption services for his patients who wanted this option. My friends have a 10 yr. old boy now, who is loved and adored.

The world is obviously better off without the people and procedures used to save this woman:

But a routine ultrasound on October 26–meant to be a time of great joy (my best friend came with us to the appointment–revealed terrible news: one of the twins had died, probably about a week before. We went from the ultrasound appointment to my obstetrician’s office and were met with even more grim news. My weight had spiked up about 18 pounds, my blood pressure was soaring, and I had protein in my urine.

It turned out that I was in full-blown preeclampsia. I was admitted to the hospital immediately.

After that, everything happened very quickly. I was put on medication (magnesium sulfate) in an attempt to treat the preeclampsia and save the remaining twin until he reached outside-the-womb viability–a mere two weeks away (I was just over 22 weeks pregnant). But I got much worse overnight; my blood pressure couldn’t be controlled, I had a massive headache and was vomiting uncontrollably. My kidneys shut down. I was moments away from seizures, coma, and death when the doctors came and told us the bad news: my remaining twin could not be saved. My pregnancy had to be terminated or both the baby and I would die.

You might, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, be able to imagine what it felt like to be my husband–to imagine being terrified of losing your children and your wife in one fell swoop. Ms. Clinton, you might be able to imagine lying in the hospital, so sick you barely feel any of what is happening, only knowing that the long-fought-for children you so desperately wanted are now both going to be dead.

Here’s the part of the story where choice comes in. I could, of course, have gone through induced labor and delivered my tiny twins. But my blood pressure was hovering around 165/120 (often going higher), even with treatment. Can you imagine what labor would have done to my body with blood pressure that high? My doctor recommended, and I agreed, that I undergo the much less stressful intact dilation and extraction procedure–what the “pro-life” forces often like to call a “partial birth abortion.” Of course, you being the smart and well-education politicians that you are know that there is NO medical procedure that is actually called a “partial birth abortion” so you know that there are several medical procedures that the “pro-life” movement put in that category, including the one that I had. Wait, I take that back–Mr. McCain, as you have been a staunch supporter of the Partial Birth Abortion ban you clearly were asleep in class when they discussed the actual procedures.

But I digress. My doctor refers to my procedure as the worst moment in his professional career. As I lay on the gurney, waiting for my procedure to start, I felt a gulf of grief and emptiness the like of which I have never known. I felt abandoned by God. I lay there, crying, alone, surrounded by doctors and nurses. You can’t imagine the sadness.

I was lucky. Are you surprised that I would say that? I was lucky because the partial-birth abortion ban was not yet in effect in October of 2004. If it had been, I would have been forced to undergo labor and delivery, no matter the risks to my health, and I might right now be either dead or so brain damaged I would be unable to type this.

My wife had sever preeclampsia with our first child, thugh we were obviously much more fortunate that this poor woman. Funny how saving the lives of women like this makes you a monster but killing the people who save the lives of women like this makes you pro-life.

For all their talk of life, some pro-life pundits and leaders like Bill O’Reilly and Randall Terry have no regard for life. They do not care if Dr. Tiller was assassinated, and they will not care if their next target also meets a similar end. If they did care, they would not choose to use the most horrific terminology possible:

But there’s no other person who bears as much responsibility for the characterization of Tiller as a savage on the loose, killing babies willy-nilly thanks to the collusion of would-be sophisticated cultural elites, a bought-and-paid-for governor and scofflaw secular journalists. Tiller’s name first appeared on “The Factor” on Feb. 25, 2005. Since then, O’Reilly and his guest hosts have brought up the doctor on 28 more episodes, including as recently as April 27 of this year. Almost invariably, Tiller is described as “Tiller the Baby Killer.”

Tiller, O’Reilly likes to say, “destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000.” He’s guilty of “Nazi stuff,” said O’Reilly on June 8, 2005; a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida, he suggested on March 15, 2006. “This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union,” said O’Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006.

They would not say that Tiller had it coming:

Terry: The point that must be emphasized over, and over, and over again: pro-life leaders and the pro-life movement are not responsible for George Tiller’s death. George Tiller was a mass-murder and, horrifically, he reaped what he sowed.

Q: So who is responsible …

Terry: The man who shot him is responsible …

Q: … because that makes it sound like you were saying that he [Tiller] is responsible.

Terry: The man who shot him is responsible.

Q: What did you mean by “he reaped what he sowed”?

Terry: He was a mass-murder. He sowed death. And then he reaped death in a horrifying way.

O’Reilly and Terry may not be legally responsible for Tiller’s death (though there are hints of connections between Operation Rescue and the killer) but they certainly morally culpable. Each man knowingly used terminology that clearly stated that Tiller was a monster undeserving of life and they knowingly used such rhetoric with an audience with a known tendency for violence:

In the U.S., violence directed toward abortion providers has killed at least 9 people, including 5 doctors, 2 clinic employees, a security guard, and a clinic escort.[4]

* March 10, 1993: Dr. David Gunn of Pensacola, Florida was fatally shot during a protest. He had been the subject of wanted-style posters distributed by Operation Rescue in the summer of the year before. Michael F. Griffin was found guilty of Dr. Gunn’s murder and was sentenced to life in prison.
* June 29, 1994: Dr. John Britton and James Barrett, a clinic escort, were both shot to death outside of another facility in Pensacola. Rev. Paul Jennings Hill was charged with the killings, received a death sentence, and was executed September 3, 2003.
* December 30, 1994: Two receptionists, Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols, were killed in two clinic attacks in Brookline, Massachusetts. John Salvi, who prior to his arrest was distributing pamphlets from Human Life International,[5] was arrested and confessed to the killings. He committed suicide in prison and guards found his body under his bed with a plastic garbage bag tied around his head. Salvi had also confessed to a non-lethal attack in Norfolk, Virginia days before the Brookline killings.
* January 29, 1998: Robert Sanderson, an off-duty police officer who worked as a security guard at an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, was killed when his workplace was bombed. Eric Robert Rudolph, who was also responsible for the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing, was charged with the crime and received two life sentences as a result.
* October 23, 1998: Dr. Barnett Slepian was shot to death at his home in Amherst, New York. His was the last in a series of similar shootings against providers in Canada and northern New York state which were all likely committed by James Kopp. Kopp was convicted of Dr. Slepian’s murder after finally being apprehended in France in 2001.
* May 31, 2009: Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed as he served as an usher at his church in Wichita, Kansas.[6]

A fifth doctor, George Patterson, was shot and killed in Mobile, Alabama on August 21, 1993, but it is uncertain whether his death was the direct result of his profession or rather a robbery.[7]

[edit] Attempted murder, assault, and threats

According to statistics gathered by the National Abortion Federation (NAF), an organization of abortion providers, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers.[8] The attempted murders were:[9][10][4]

* August 19, 1993: Dr. George Tiller was shot outside of an abortion facility in Wichita, Kansas. Shelley Shannon was charged with the crime and received an 31-year prison sentence.
* June 29, 1994: June Barret was shot in the same attack which claimed the lives of James Barrett, her husband, and Dr. John Britton.
* December 30, 1994: Five individuals were wounded in the same-day shootings which killed Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols.
* December 18, 1996: Dr. Calvin Jackson of New Orleans, Louisiana was stabbed 15 times, losing 4 pints of blood. Donald Cooper was charged with second-degree attempted murder and sentenced to 20 years.[11]
* October 28, 1997: Dr. David Gandell of Rochester, New York was injured by flying glass when a shot was fired through the window of his home.[12]
* January 29, 1998: Emily Lyons, a nurse, was severely injured in the bombing which also killed Robert Sanderson.

[edit] Anthrax threats

The first letters claiming to contain anthrax were mailed to U.S. clinics in October 1998, a few days after the Slepian shooting, and since then, there have been a total of 655 such bioterror threats made against abortion providers. None of the “anthrax” in these cases was real.[13][9]

* November 2001: After the genuine 2001 anthrax attacks, Clayton Waagner mailed hoax letters containing a white powder to 554 clinics. Waagner was convicted of 51 charges relating to the anthrax scare on December 3, 2003.

[edit] Arson, bombing, and property crime

According to NAF, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, property crimes committed against abortion providers have included 41 bombings, 173 arsons, 91 attempted bombings or arsons, 619 bomb threats, 1630 incidents of trespassing, 1264 incidents of vandalism, and 100 attacks with butyric acid (”stink bombs”).[8] The first clinic arson occurred in Oregon in March 1976 and the first bombing occurred in February 1978 in Ohio.[14] More recent incidents have included:[4]

* December 25, 1984: An abortion clinic and two physicians’ offices in Pensacola, Florida were bombed in the early morning of Christmas Day by a quartet of young people (Matt Goldsby, Jimmy Simmons, Kathy Simmons, Kaye Wiggins) who later called the bombings “a gift to Jesus on his birthday.”[15][16][17]
* October 1999: Martin Uphoff set fire to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, causing US$100 worth of damage. He was later sentenced to 60 months in prison.[18]
* May 28, 2000: An arson at a clinic in Concord, New Hampshire on resulted in damage estimated at US$20,000. The case remains unsolved.[19]
* September 30, 2000: A Catholic priest drove his car into the Northern Illinois Health Clinic after learning that the FDA had approved the drug RU-486. He pulled out an ax before being shot at by a security guard.[20]
* June 11, 2001: An unsolved bombing at a clinic in Tacoma, Washington destroyed a wall, resulting in US$6000 in damages. [18]
* July 4, 2005: A clinic Palm Beach, Florida was the target of an arson. The case remains open.[18]
* December 12, 2005: Patricia Hughes and Jeremy Dunahoe threw a Molotov cocktail at a clinic in Shreveport, Louisiana. The device missed the building and no damage was caused. In August 2006, Hughes was sentenced to six years in prison, and Dunahoe to one year. Hughes claimed the bomb was a “memorial lamp” for an abortion she had had there. [21]
* September 13, 2006 David McMenemy of Rochester Hills, Michigan crashed his car into the Edgerton Women’s Care Center in Davenport, Iowa. He then doused the lobby in gasoline and then started a fire. McMenemy committed these acts in the belief that the center was performing abortions, however Edgerton is not an abortion clinc.[22]
* April 25, 2007: A package left at a women’s health clinic in Austin, Texas contained an explosive device capable of inflicting serious injury or death. A bomb squad detonated the device after evacuating the building. Paul Ross Evans (who had a criminal record for armed robbery and theft) was found guilty of the crime. [23]
* May 9, 2007: An unidentified person deliberately set fire to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Virginia Beach, Virginia.[24]
* December 6, 2007: Chad Altman and Sergio Baca were arrested for the arson of Dr. Curtis Boyd’s clinic in Albuquerque. Altman’s girlfriend had scheduled an appointment for an abortion at the clinic. [25]
* January 22, 2009 Matthew L. Derosia, 32, who was reported to have had a history of mental illness [26]rammed a SUV into the front entrance of a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota.[27]

O’Reilly and Terry, at a minimum acted with a level of irresponsibility that no one would accept from a five year old. At worst, they displayed a deliberate disregard for the life of Tiller and their other targets, deliberately choosing to make a demon out of a man and not caring what happened to them. They my not have pulled the trigger, but their behavior shows no sign that they care that someone did.

A suspect was arrested only a few hours after the Tiller killing, and to absolutely no one’s surprise he’s a white male Christian with a long history of affiliation with the extreme fringe, anti-government and militia groups, and anti-abortion activism, including links to Operation Rescue.

---

Operation Rescue itself issued a statement condemning the murder, but, as several people pointed out, it was posted on their Web site right next to a graphics block with a picture of Dr. Tiller, labeling him “America’s Doctor of Death”.

Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry issued a statement claiming to regret the murder of Dr. Tiller because “he did not have time to prepare his soul to face God”, but saying nothing about the actual murder.

---

It’s interesting to recall the right wing’s panicked reaction to the recent “Homeland Security” report correctly noting that right-wing extremism is a common source of violence and terrorism in the US, and that single-issue extremists such as anti-choice fanatics are a particular danger. Right Wing Watch has a selection of choice quotes from Christian wingers condemning the report. It is presumed that none of them will issue statements noting that DHS was right all along.

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As for the issue of terrorism, it’s hard to be more stupid or mindless than Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom, but his is typical of right-wing commentary on the issue:

This was an act of terrorism, as well as of murder.

OK . . . good start.

It was no more or less an act of political assassination than any of the bombings advocated by Bill Ayers.

Well, it was obviously much less “an act of political assassination” inasmuch as the Weather bombings didn’t actually kill anyone (other than the people preparing the bombs), and it’s clear that the bombs that were set were designed not to (though the one that went off accidentally may have been, the ones actually used were not). That would seem to be a fairly obvious point of distinction between compared “acts of political assassination” - the “assassinations” where somebody dies are worse than the ones not intended to kill anybody that do not in fact kill anybody. Am I going too fast for you, Dan?

It was no more or less a violation of civil rights than the New Black Panther polling intimidation

Shooting a man to death in a terrorist act is “no more a violation of civil rights” than standing outside a polling place scowling while black? Exactly how entitled, oblivious, and ghoulishly indifferent to terrorism do you have to be to make a statement as maliciously stupid as that?

There is either one justice for all, or there is justice for none.

I have no idea what this means, and neither does Dan Collins.

Let’s ask ourselves whether there’s been a hate crime committed here. Has there?

Um, no. Does that help? “Hate crime” is legally defined as an ordinary crime motivated or heightened by prejudice. This was straightforward terrorism - it was political violence intended to deny women their rights and liberties by killing and intimidating those who work to guarantee them. It was the same sort of thing as killing schoolteachers in Afghanistan, or voter registrars in the US South. You can easily posit misogynist prejudice as a root cause, as it is in Afghanistan or as race prejudice was in the South, but the crime itself is simple terroristic murder.

If so, aren’t Islamists guilty of hate crimes?

Leaving aside the fact that “Islamist” is a made-up word that is only applied by critics to people they disapprove of, not an objectively-definable category, whether or not any such person is guilty of a hate crime would obviously depend on what they did, and why. Since he offers no examples or discussion, the question is unanswerable, but this claim can’t possibly be true of all “Islamists” if such people even exist.

It’s certainly true that many religious fanatics use terroristic violence as a means of promoting their causes - the entire history of Christian anti-abortion violence makes that clear. Timothy McVeigh is another example, as is the Christian militia movement. That’s not the same as “hate crimes”, but clarity of thought doesn’t seem to be Collins’s forte, so maybe this is what he is thinking of.

Should the fact that they commit such crimes largely against minority believers in their own countries be cause for more stringent sanctions and severer punishments?

Well, not under US law, since it doesn’t apply to foreign countries.

Do the continuous legal assaults on Sarah Palin constitute a hate crime?

Since they don’t constitute a crime at all, they can’t constitute a hate crime. Seriously, how can you be this stupid and be listened to? Or, more to the point I guess, where else but the American right wing could you do so?

---

As for the impact of this act of terrorism, the most obvious and immediate is that America has lost one of the few doctors who would openly and regularly provide service - under continuous threat to his own life, and unremitting legal and personal harassment - to women facing the most critical and harrowing needs. Hilzoy has assembled the heart-wrenching statements of patients who were personally treated by Dr. Tiller at times of terrible crisis, as well as one who was forced to suffer endlessly, at risk to her life, because she was denied the same liberty.  It’s an absolute must-read, and a crushing indictment of the vicious misogyny that drives the anti-choice movement and its terrorist wing.

NB: Normally we tolerate a lot on this blog, but I’ve been deleting comments from our resident obnoxious anti-choice troll because, frankly, I’m not in the mood at this time.

UPDATE [tgirsch]: Added a link to the suspect ID, since at least one commenter questioned KTK’s classification.

The news today reports that Dr. George Tiller of Kansas, a long-time target of continual legal and terrorist harassment because of his refusal to deny legal and safe late-term abortions to patients who needed them, was shot to death by an apparent terrorist while serving as an usher at his family church in Wichita. A suspect has been arrested but his identity has not been released. Tiller was one of the few providers of late-term abortion in his part of the country, and for years had been the target of harassment by Christian anti-choice groups, as well as a campaign of legal harassment by anti-choice Kansas prosecutor Phil Kline, who lost a series of legal battles, and his own re-election campaign, while attempting to bring empty charges against Tiller and  penalize his patients by invasions of their privacy. Just two months ago Tiller was resoundingly acquitted of all charges in a case originally instigated by Kline in an attempt to have Tiller’s medical license revoked. Today he was murdered. Apparently the misogynists think of the rule of law as just a tactic, not a principle.

This was the 8th or 9th terrorist killing of abortion clinic workers, continuing a decades-long campaign that has seen over a dozen more people survive attempted murders, as well as over 1,200 hoax anthrax poisonings, hundreds of real bombings and arsons (some of them fatal), thousands of cases of death threats and threatening or libelous letters, constant harassment of clinic staff and patients, harassment of staff and their families at their private homes, and uncountable acts of vandalism and other crimes. Dr. Tiller himself had survived a previous shooting by another anti-choice terrorist, yet continued to provide service to patients at the risk of his life for another 15 years.

It has to be said that, at this time, we don’t know exactly what the murderer’s motivation was, or what groups he may be affiliated with. But there’s no reason to be coy about it. Tiller has been a target of the anti-choice crusaders literally for decades. They have tried everything possible, including harassment, public villification, abuse of the law, and even attempted murder, to stop him before. And, as with every anti-abortion murder or attempted murder in the past, the perpetrators have always been conservative Christians, convinced that their religious beliefs justify terrorism. If this most recent murder, of someone openly targeted by terrorists and their supporters year after year, should somehow prove to be down to some unrelated cause, it would be a staggering coincidence. Nobody believes that. Anti-abortion violence is and always has been the product of Christian terrorists, and it has received widespread support from networks - sometimes informal, often well-organized - of other right-wing Christians who operate Web sites targeting women’s rights supports for death; circulate written manuals giving explicit instructions for methods of terrorism and violence; recruit and encourage terrorists using religious inducements; publicize, defend, and praise, in Christian terms, terrorists who commit murders or violence; and actively provide, food, money, shelter, and other support to Christian terrorists on the run after their crimes. Even if, as is almost unimaginably unlikely, this particular murder turns out to be unrelated to the ongoing Christian terrorism campaign against women’s health and liberty rights, it will certainly feed and encourage the terrorism network that has long existed.

As Matthew Yglesis points out quite correctly, Christian anti-woman violence has proven itself to be “a kind of terrorism that works“. The chilling effect of anti-choice terrorism on abortion service providers is quite real, and significant. In addition to the many doctors killed or injured, scores were coerced by threats of death against themselves and their families to sign public statements vowing to abandon their patients and refuse to continue providing services. The total number of provicers nationwide has declined steadily, and terrorism is undoubtedly a large part of the reason why.

For years this violence was ignored by the government, and the FBI seemed uninterested in catching the people responsible. (Most of the terrorists were caught by accident, and to this day only a handful of their active supporters have been prosecuted, though eventually the FBI did get a little more active.) In fact, it was almost never named for what it was - terrorism - the use or threat of violence to coerce behavior by non-combatants for political ends.

There is one thing different, now, however. The most recent previous anti-choice murder was pre-9/11. Today, people are less inclined to take that kind of thing lightly. And, after years of silent acquiescence, mainstream Christian groups did finally begin issuing statements of disapproval regarding Christian terrorism; some have already done so regarding the Tiller murder. Just as they were getting a good hate on for Muslim terrorists, it’s inconvenient for Christians to be reminded of Christian terrorism. The debate over torture by US personnel makes the issue a bit dicey, too - the torturers have been arguing that what they did is not really torture, but shooting people to death in a church is clearly over the line, so they’ve got to distance themselves from this one as fast as possible in order to maintain the pretense that “real” terrorism is not something we do. So the Christian terrorists are going to find themselves somewhat less well supported this time around, at least on the open level.

The real question is what the government will do about this. A clear-cut, open, terrorist murder on US soil, by undoubtedly a homegrown US terrorist, virtually undobutedly a right-wing Christian terrorist acting on religious impulses, right at the height of a much-ballyhooed “war on terror” also aimed at religious terrorists: are they going to let this go? Or are they going to come down on it the way they would if this were a Muslim or non-American killer?

Are they going to call it terrorism?

Are they going to make the link to the ongoing terrorist campaign that has been underway for almost 30 years?

Are they going to pressure the instigators to stop the harassment and incitement?

Are they going to charge the suspect with terrorism and treat the trial as a domestic security issue?

Are they going to acknowledge that US women are the specific and explicit targets of religious terrorism, motivated by misogyny and aversion to women’s sexuality, justified by right-wing Christian ideology, and culminating in wide-spread, long-standing organized violence and murder?

Are they going to act as if an all-out terrorist campaign aimed directly at the specific and personal liberties, and explicit legal rights, of more than half the population, and their supporters, is something that matters?

Are they going to acknowledge that the right-wing Christian politicians who have consistently used the legal system to impose cynical and disingenuous barriers to women’s rights and freedom are in fact carrying water for the terrorists who seek the same goals by other means?

At long last, is the government of the United States going to engage the campaign of terror against US women, even as it fights a manufactured and aimless “war on terror” in distant parts of the globe, and finally take an open and direct stand against those who use terrorism and violence to constrain women’s freedom, against those who cheer, encourage, and support the terrorists, and against their fellow travelers inside the system?

UPDATE, and SOME RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

RE-UPDATE: i was going to add the “random observations” here, but decided to move them to a separate post (above). Somehow the text wound up in both places. I blame the Republicans.

So some couple in San Diego, CA (a reasonably conservative town, by the way), has been hosting religious meetings in their home on a weekly basis for over 5 years, and was informed they were in violation of zoning laws for their neighborhood and would have to apply for a “Major Use Permit”. Naturally, whining about persecution was preferable, in their case, to obeying the same laws as everyone else, and so they called the compliant Fox News and announced that “I believe that our Founding Fathers would roll over in their grave” yada yada yada. Naturally also, Fox made no effort to describe what actually took place at the meetings, how many people were involved, or in what way they did or did not conform to zoning laws. And, again naturally, the winger media immediately reacted to this almost entirely content-free and one-sided story by declaring that “it’s not about the money, but about suppressing Christianity, which progressives see as an obstacle to their depraved objectives”, and that “in San Diego County your First Amendment right to freely exercise your religion may not go so far as hosting a small gathering”.

It should be noted that one obvious Google search takes you directly to the San Diego zoning board Web site, which helpfully explains that a “Major Use Permit” is a specifically-recognized addendum available for residential areas, which authorizes businesses, schools, churches, and similar non-residential operations involving large groups of people in such neighborhoods. All you have to do is apply for it.* Other stories make it clear these meetings involve an average of 15 people who park in the street and prompted complaints after one attendee hit a neighbor’s car while trying to maneuver in the crowded no-exit residential street. He’s basically running a small church in his home, and that’s exactly what the Major Use Permit is intended to regulate. If you check, I’m certain you’ll find that every regular church in the neighborhood already has one.

Now, let me say, briefly, that there is the potential for state encroachment on privacy here, including the freedom of religion, and that abuse of these kinds of regulations can be a mechanism for suppression of religion. (They have been, in places like China and Cuba, and that is a serious problem.) And let me state also that that’s horseshit in this case. America is filled with churches, most of them in residential neighborhoods. Nobody is putting up any barriers to being a right-wing preacher; they grow on trees. But just being a right-wing preacher doesn’t give you a free pass out of being a decent citizen. He’s inconveniencing his neighbors by doing something his neighborhood isn’t designed for and can’t easily accommodate. The city cannot prohibit religious exercise, but it can certainly require that anyone hosting an unusually large gathering - to say nothing of doing so, apparently, close to 300 times in succession over a period of years - takes steps to ensure that their neighbors can still reach their own houses and aren’t subject to property damage from one person’s refusal to comply with zoning laws. There is a recognized mechanism for this - he simply refuses to use it, and claims “being a Christian” as a get-out-of-zoning-board-free card.

And of course the wingers have found themselves another cause. They’re all martyrs to . . . the depraved objectives of the progressives of the San Diego Department of Public Land Use. Not one person on the right can bring themselves to just say “Yeah, we have zoning laws for a reason, and this guy’s pushing it. He ought to go before the board, find a way to work something out, and pay the same fee everyone else in his city has to pay to get a variance or open a public accommodation.” Taking other people into account, taking responsibility for the trouble you cause, obeying the law, and compromising are all somehow unthinkable, if you’re conservative, and especially if you’re religious. But why is anti-social behavior an issue of religious freedom? What does it say about the people, and their religion, who claim that it is?

It’s getting hard to keep track of all the imaginary right-wing suffering. If it’s not the War on Christmas, it’s the Attack of the Residential Zoning Variance Procedures. Crying over hangnails has become a point of pride on the religious right - and the less we take them seriously for it, the more injured they claim to be.

UPDATE: Apparently the county backed down, acknowledging that there is no clear line distinguishing private meetings from “religious assemblies” but that the latter category was intended more for actual church buildings, and agreeing to retract the zoning enforcement order and asking the pastor simply to find a way to ameliorate the parking issue. Predictably, the pastor and his lawyer continued to be assholes about it, refusing to make accommodations on parking and insisting that the county - which has issued hundreds of church permits and made no effort to enforce the zoning regulations on this one guy until complaints were received, as a result of a case in which one of his parishioners actually hit somebody’s car in the street - was merely making up the parking issue in an attempt to suppress religion. Another victory for the great and admirable contribution organized religion makes to our society.

* It’s not clear what the fees would be. The fee schedule is complicated, and there is little guidance as to what fees are required for specific projects. In this case, since they’re not doing construction, I would guess there would be a single fee for “Administrative Deviation” of $240, or “Minor Deviation” for $740. The “Standard Application” can be much higher, but it is obviously aimed at new construction projects. I will say the fees seem startlingly high.

So there’s a lot of commentary, and no doubt there will be more, about the just-released Gallup poll showing that people self-identifying as “pro-life” outnumber those calling themselves “pro-choice”, for the first time on record, and by a considerable margin. No doubt the wingers will be beside themselves, given the moral significance they attach to slogans and labels. There are a few things to be said about this, however.

First off, it doesn’t matter who call themselves what - bodily autonomy is a fundamental part of women’s freedom and moral independence, and must be protected regardless of public opinion. Laws trampling women’s freedom are unjustified no matter how many people support them. To the extent that the political balance shifts - or is even seen to shift - the legislative practicalities of safeguarding women’s status as citizens and full moral persons becomes complicated, but that is only a measure of the misogyny of a political system that puts some citizens’ freedom at the hazard of other citizens’ whims and prejudices.

Second, it’s interesting to note that, while the supposed balance between self-identifying pro- and anti-choicers has shifted, the same poll of the very same respondents shows almost no change in opinion on the broad spectrum of options regarding the legality of abortion. (It does show that those holding the extreme anti-freedom position - no abortions ever for anyone - slightly outnumber those holding a full pro-freedom position - abortion legal under all circumstances - also for the first time, and that in general attitudes toward women’s freedom have harshened slightly across each category, but those shifts are only a few percentage points.) So, what has changed is the labels people apply to themselves, not so much what they actually think in practical terms.

Regarding that shift in labels, it strikes me as odd. Gallup is a reputable pollster, and this is a periodical survey they have been doing at intervals for some time. I would normally accept their findings, but this one is clearly anomalous. A shift from 50% pro-choice/44% anti-choice to a balance of 42/51 the other way is a relative shift of 16% in just one year (i.e., the pro-choice position went from up by 7% to down by 9%). It dwarfs the year-to-year shifts at any other point since at least 1995 (the range shown on their graph), and probably longer. That requires an explanation.

The situation becomes more intriguing when you note that, as Gallup discovered:

The percentage of Republicans (including independents who lean Republican) calling themselves “pro-life” rose by 10 points over the past year, from 60% to 70%, while there has been essentially no change in the views of Democrats and Democratic leaners. . . . [A]ll of the increase in pro-life sentiment is seen among self-identified conservatives and moderates; the abortion views of political liberals have not changed.

So: right-wingers have not greatly changed their views on abortion in practical terms, but have shifted considerably toward explicitly identifying themselves as anti-choice. Hmmm . . .

I’ll tentatively float two hypotheses:

First, this is part of the winger backlash. The same sort of thing that is driving gun nuts to stockpile firearms and ammunition so they’ll have something Obama can pry from their cold dead hands, and which is driving anti-government morons to protest the fact that Obama is giving them a tax cut, is also driving anti-sex misogynists to stake out seemingly more-extreme positions on women’s rights: they’re terrified that they’re about to lose the thing that defines them politically, and they are ratcheting up their rhetoric both out of fear and in order to remain relevant. With right-wing and religious groups in a panic over the Republicans’ loss of Congress and the White House, and responding with ever-more-extremist rhetoric on abortion, the public has become superficially polarized. (In a country where you can get thousands of low-tax advocates to join a protest against their own tax cut just by giving it an idiotic name,it’s not surprising you can get misogynists to call themselves “pro-life” if you scream it at them enough.)

Second, this is also part of long-standing winger hypocrisy on abortion. They want to be morally righteous hardliners, but they don’t want major changes in abortion rights because they also avail themselves of that service in considerable (for Catholics, greater than average) numbers. As with many other public policy issues, conservatives retain their far-right rhetoric while gradually accommodating themselves to modern reality. (Remember when “civil unions” was the progressive option for gay rights?*) Now, apparently, among the group that say they are anti-choice, more than half favor legal abortion “under certain circumstances”.

This is not to minimize the importance of these kinds of data, or of shifts, even if only nominal (in the literal sense), between the two broad categories of opinion on women’s freedom. It matters not only that women have a legal right to abortion, but also that it is not constantly under siege by disingenuous and insidious restrictions, and that women are supported in choosing and exercising the options that are right for them. Public opinion is important to all those issues. And this reported shift in opinion, even if it is more superficial than it seems, is evidence both of the continuing right-wing backlash and of the continuing negligible status of women and their moral and civil liberties. The “certain circumstances” the pro-choice misogynists deign to approve are likely only the most restrictive cases, and the ones they find politically untenable.

Continuing to engage the fight for women’s true freedom, and a reasonable understanding of moral personhood and the assignment of legal rights, is more vital than ever as the backlash grows. I remain optimistic in the long term - reality cannot be evaded forever - but this is not good news in the immediate term, there’s no question about that. Fundamentally, and especially given how thin the poll results are on practical issues, I think little has changed. Given where things stood already, though, that’s hardly reason to be satisfied.

* Obama certainly does!

NB: Crossposted to Sufficient Scruples, my bioethics blog.

Man, I am lovin’ the right-wing crackup. It’s just a continuing parade of undiluted crazy, without the concentration camps, torture, and serial invasions. Suddenly, conservatives are fun again.

Today, Maggie Gallagher responds to a questioner noting that her gay marriage jihad is spiraling the drain, and asking “What am I missing?”:

Vaclav Havel mostly. “Truth and love wlll prevail over lies and hate.” On that basis Havel took on the Soviet empire. Where is that invincible empire now?

Ah, yes. Because gay marriage is an evil empire, the vast gulag of same-sex couples is the Soviet Union, Gallagher is Vaclav Havel, the Family Research Council is Solidarity, and James Dobson is Ronald Reagan shouting “Mr. Liberace, tear down this wedding reception! Your nose looks like Danny Thomas’s!” And, of course, legally prohibiting millions of people from marrying as they choose because, somehow, the survival of civilization depends on it, is “truth and love”. Good God, it’s a fucknut three-ring circus over there, and the show is just beginning!

The Vermont legislature just overrode it’s governor’s veto of the same-sex marriage bill that passed yesterday. Gay marriage is legal in Vermont!

Vermont has become the fourth state to legalize gay marriage — and the first to do so with a legislature’s vote.

The Legislature voted Tuesday to override Gov. Jim Douglas’ veto of a bill allowing gays and lesbians to marry. The vote was 23-5 to override in the state Senate and 100-49 to override in the House. Under Vermont law, two-thirds of each chamber had to vote for override.

The vote came nine years after Vermont adopted its first-in-the-nation civil unions law.

The one-vote margin came in part from a few Democratic legislators who had voted against the original bill but stated they voted to override the governor’s veto out of party unity, or, in one case, explicitly because he was trying to curry favor with party leaders. That’s pretty lame, but on the other hand it’s heartening, if almost shocking, to see the Democratic party pull together and actually get something done. The final vote to override was higher than the original vote to pass. Good going, VT Democratic leadership!

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Fisking anything from The Corner is like shooting very stupid fish in a barrel, but . . . I dunno . . . geez . . .

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The hapless Politico is finally catching up to 1982.

Michael Calderone has blown the lid off  “an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList”, in existence for a couple of years, where “several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes”. Continuing the liberal-conspiracy meme (the imbecilic and severely hair-deranged “Vox Popoli” claims that the existence of “JList” is the reason liberals complain about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” - they’re trying to cover their tracks!), Calderone notes the list was begun by Ezra Klein and includes as members a number of prominent liberals such as Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Toobin, and unnamed staffers of Huffington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, and so on. And he reports ominously that “there’s a ‘Fight Club’-style code of silence when it comes to discussing it for publication” and asks “do those debates really have to happen behind a veil of secrecy?”.

But the lame and whiny piece just demonstrates how characteristically clueless Calderone is. As he himself notes, at least three of his fellow “Politico” bloggers, including Ben Smith, are members of this group of supposed liberal puppetmasters, and one praises it strongly in Calderone’s own piece. And he mentions at least two other listservs in the same piece, without ever seeming to catch on to his own story: he has disovered the existence of private e-mail lists, a feature of the ‘Net from its earliest days. He still doesn’t seem to understand what JList is (he describes it as an “online meeting space”, but it’s obviously a listserv), and the fact that these sorts of things are fairly common also makes no impression on him.

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The news reports on the “you’re a fucking asshole” lawsuit (see previous post) were, naturally, filled with references to “the F-Bomb”.*

Could we knock this off, please?

Among the stupid and childish turns of phrase we have to put up with every day, this one particularly annoys me. I could sort of stand it when people talked about “the f-word”. Apparently there are people so wound up that somehow they can’t bear to hear a certain word - one that conveys a perfectly ordinary, and hardly rare, meaning - even when it is not used in the second-person pejorative sense. Whatever. If accommodating a sub-community of elementary-school librarians among us it what it takes to be left alone, so be it.

But however sensitive you may be, can any reasonably hearty adult really regard any word as a “bomb“? You’re telling me that speaking a word, even without offensive intent, is like dropping a bomb? Good God - suck it up a little. I’d hate to think what would happen if you encountered something that was actually physically harmful. (”Ahh! Ahh! I’ve got a neutron hangnail!” “OMG!! I opened this envelope and got a paper cut of mass destruction!!”) Jesus . . . you’re embarrassing.

Now, at this point, one might introduce the question of “the N-word”. Those who make it their business to be childishly offensive about race might like to claim that if the “F-Bomb” should be acceptable (or at least not a bomb), so should the “N-word”. To which I say: fuck you. The words don’t function in the same way, and they don’t carry the same impact. The f-word has never been a derogatory name for an entire class of people; it has never been a catch-all put-down used by one race to embellish, or even contribute to, its pervasive torture of another; it cannot evoke systematic degradation, despair, humiliation, and abuse - or threaten them. At worst, it’s an insult - perhaps unjustifiable in some circumstances, but not inherently a part of an overarching oppression that is in its every way and aspect unjustifiable. To employ the N-word is to invoke that oppression, and at least in part to make it real. To pretend that the one is the equivalent of the other is just part of the eliminationist strategy racists have been pursuing ever since the question of holding them accountable was seriously raised - it takes a quintessential tool of discrimination and turns it into a mere schoolyard epithet. For reasons of freedom of speech, I am not willing to criminalize either word, but I can recognize that one provokes a reaction that any normal person should be able to withstand, and the other invokes a harm that no person should be asked to.

But as for simple offense . . . well, offense, like so many things, is in the eyes (ears) of the beholder. And I want to be sensitive to offense, but at the same time there should be some breadth of room within which to let oneself loose in public without empowering every lilly-livered bluenose to demand that we burn the house to roast the pig for their personal delectation. We seem to have sprouted up a particularly prissy crop of whiners in recent years. Enough’s enough.

* Insert obligatory Rahm Emmanuel joke here.**

** I really don’t get the thing about Emmanuel and his supposed habit of swearing. Who gives a shit? (Clearly not me. But you knew that.) What’s odd about it is the way people can’t seem to say anything else about him. It’s one of those weird stereotypes that, somehow, become the only way a certain person ever gets seen, no matter how complex or accomplished they may be: Jackie Gleason was fat; Dean Martin drank a lot; Liberace was gay . . . . Now, that kind of childish titillation and narrow-mindedness is SOP for the GOP - it is essentially the only way they are capable of responding to or thinking about their opponents. (Ted Kennedy had an automobile accident . . . 40 years ago; Bill Clinton got laid . . . almost 10 years ago; Barney Frank is gay . . . .) But even Obama keeps making “Rahm swears a lot” jokes. I mean, even if you want to joke about him, can’t you at least come up with something interesting to say? Is there only one fact you even know about him? It seems to me another example of the stupidity and limited outlook that characterizes so much of politics, even among Democrats.

Surprising no one, some jackass Southern evangelical Christian congregation is behaving abominably - this time to one of their own former members, whom they drove out of their church with public persecution but still won’t leave alone.

Rebecca Hancock, a 49-year-old adult woman whom you think would be perfectly capable of making her own decisions, was, who knows why?, a member of the Grace Community Church in Jacksonville, FL. She also had a boyfriend. Worse, she mentioned the boyfriend to her “mentor” at the church, whom she foolishly believed was counseling her in confidence. The mentor demanded that she break off with her lover because they were havin’ some o’ that ol’ debbil sex, and hadn’t gotten the church’s okey-dokey on it first. Bizarrely, she did, in fact, break up with her boyfriend, ten times, but kept going back to him. She offered the lame excuse that “It was hard to give up somebody I love”, as if she expected anybody to believe nonsense like that.

When her mentor didn’t succeed in breaking up Hancock’s relationship, they called her aside at church one day, and a group of women from the church informed her that the mentor had told them all of the private details she had revealed in her counseling sessions, that they had been at her house monitoring her coming and going, and that she was a sinner and had to be punished by the church. When Hancock stopped going to the church to get away from the harassment and violations of her privacy, they began calling her at home. When she told them to stop calling, they sent her a letter announcing that unless she contacted them and agreed to “repent this sin”, meet with the church leaders, and accept their demands about her relationship, they were going to hold a public meeting to tell the entire church the private details of her life that she had entrusted to her mentor, call her names, and generally heap shit on her - all this after she had stopped attending the church months previously, and with her children, who still attend that church, in attendance at the meeting.

So, there’s only one thing to do:

OPEN LETTER TO THE ELDERS OF GRACE COMMUNITY CHURCH

19 December 2008

Elders of the Grace Community Church
10938 South Hood Road
Jacksonville, FL  32257

 

To Whom It Really Doesn’t Concern:

                It has come to my attention that your church has announced a ritual shaming ceremony directed against one of your former members (as reported by FoxNews online, 12/18/2008, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,469928,00.html). Specifically, Ms. Rebecca Hancock, who had spoken in confidence about her private life to a spiritual counselor from your church, while a member of that church, was confronted by a moral vigilante group of church members who had not been privy to her confidential sessions, and subjected to personal and insulting commentary regarding her private life. When she was informed that even further public humiliation and invasions of her privacy would be scheduled if she did not accede to your demands in respect of her personal relationships, she left the church to pursue her own private life on her own terms. Your church has now announced its planned public denunciation of Ms. Hancock’s life, and public commentary on her intimate relationships, in her absence and at a time when she no longer acknowledges any authority over her on your part.

                I am writing to inform you that I, also, have engaged in, and do today continue, whenever I get the, sadly rare, opportunity, to engage in intimate personal relationships of a highly lubricious and satisfying nature without the dubious benefit of, or the slightest regard for, any church’s sanctimonious sanctification. For this reason, and because decency prohibits any other stance in this instance, I would like to request that you denounce me also at your January 4, 2009, shaming session.

For your prurient delectation, and because it appears to be part of your ritual, you may announce to your congregation that I have, betimes and repeatedly and with great eagerness, engaged in, inter alia, frottage, panty-fondling, nipple play, oral sexual congress involving breasts and genitalia, manual stroking of the labia and clitoris and both shallow and deep penetration of the vagina with a range of speeds and degrees of pressure, external genital stimulation involving thighs, vulva, buttocks, breasts, lips, and incidental anatomical appurtenances, vaginal intercourse by way of what I like to regard as an abundant and creative variety of positions and techniques, and related practices; I have made occasional, tentative, and generally poorly received overtures to the anus, but remain optimistic. I have been the recipient of similar stimulatory activities, manual, oral, and genital, on the part of a range of sexual partners of varying ages, relationship statuses, and degrees of skill or enthusiasm. These practices have at times involved a small assortment of toys, appliances, contraceptive devices and/or edible substances. I also continue a life-long habit of obsessive masturbation. You can be sure I am, not merely unrepentant, but non-repentant to the extremest degree of indifference to your silly aversive obsessions, and thus fully deserving of expulsion from any even glancing degree of community with sex-negative perverts of your stripe.

                Of course, I am not actually a member of your church and, therefore, technically it is none of your damn business how I conduct my sex life. But the same consideration applies to Ms. Hancock, who has specifically demanded that you leave her alone, yet you continue to harass and humiliate her. I can ask for no less. You inform her that she “displays an insubordinate heart, which is puffed-up with conceit”. I can assure you I do so as well, though certain rather sharper adjectives also intrude themselves when I consider the bald-assed effrontery of your persecutory arrogance. Denying culpability for your own panty-sniffing vengefulness, you claim to Ms. Hancock that “you leave us with no other choice but to carry out the commands of Our Lord Jesus Christ”, which apparently call for deceiving women into revealing their sexual secrets, then publicly humiliating them with violations of the trust they had offered, and badgering them with the self-righteous sneering of their entire community until and after they flee their own church in despair. Truly, you are everything I expect Christians to be. I ask only to be treated with the same disgusted, bullying rejection. I am surely even more deserving than Ms. Hancock of such a relationship with your church, and believe me it is what I want.

                So, please, denounce me at your next meeting, and “shame” me with the revelation that I have had sexual relationships and do not regret them. For as long as you continue to treat people in this manner, let me be among them. It is the only decent thing.

                                                                                                Sincerely,

 

                                                                                                Kevin T. Keith

[signed and mailed, 12/19/2008]

Hat Tip: Hot Air

Man, they are insane over at National Review! I mean it literally - their minds don’t work normally. I usually think that’s just the inherent limitation of being a right-wing second-stringer (you’re already lower than a very low bar), but here I’m not even talking about their developmental team at The Corner - today NRO runs a feature piece by some professional abortion-myth peddler that simply takes a wig-out and keeps on flippin’. The reason Sarah Palin is a laughingstock, you see, is that . . . her critics all feel guilty about abortion.

[Digglah: Forget the baseball tie-ins. The Gibbering Abortion-Rights Exquisite Corpse Dadaesque Word Association Prize has now been retired.]

Here’s Kevin Burke explaining what everyone else pretty much figured needed no explanation:

Some of the very personal and often uncharitable criticism of vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her family may have a relationship to [the country's] collective grief, shame, and guilt from personal involvement in the abortion of an unborn child.

Right. The massive outpouring of largely political, fact-driven, and entirely reasonable criticism of a complete airhead who consistently offers an unrecognizably garbled version of basic constitutional principles affecting the job she is currently seeking, began her campaign for that job by stating she did not know what it entailed, invariably responds to the simplest substantive questions with idiotic evasions and irrelevancies, cites the most bizarrely tangential facts - often incorrectly - as evidence of her own preparedness for office, conducted personal vendettas in office and attempted to ban library books as mayor, has been cited by her own state’s attorney for abuse of authority as governor and is still under investigation for related transgressions, cannot name any Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade, cannot name any magazine or newspaper she herself reads (while claiming to read “all of them”), constantly infantalizes her office and her own supporters by filling public appearances with childish slogans, jargon, meaningless folksy expressions, and winking in lieu of answers to topical questions, campaigns almost exclusively by vague generalizations and character assassination, denies scientific consensus on environmental protection, global warming, and creationism, and adheres to extremist religious superstitions about witchcraft, “the apocalypse”, and God’s supposed direct intervention in her career and electoral campaign . . . is an expression of everyone’s personal feelings about . . . abortion.

What kind of a nut thinks so? The kind of nut who spends his life promoting the entirely made-up, and repeatedly scientifically disproven, myth of “post-abortion syndrome” - a supposed psychological malady that afflicts women who have had abortions (and now apparently the entire nation). It’s particularly an issue in Palin’s case, you see, because she has a child with Down Syndrome, but the majority of such pregnancies are aborted, so all those women are - he knows this - racked with guilt over the fact that Palin is a better woman and mother than they are. They attack her to assuage their own feelings of guilt and inadequacy. I’m not making this up (though, obviously, Burke is):

Seeing the Palin family, in a very visible public forum, with an uncompromising and public pro life philosophy arouses deeply repressed feelings in post abortive parents, as well as media members, counselors, health care professionals, politicians and others who promote abortion rights, especially the abortion of children with challenges such as Down Syndrome. These powerful repressed feelings of grief, guilt and shame can be deflected from the source of the wound (i.e., abortion) and projected onto an often uncharitable focus upon the trigger of these painful emotions…the Palin family.

Burke, by the way, is a founder of a Catholic anti-choice organization specifically dedicated to promoting the “post-abortion” myth. It’s his job to say nonsense like this. But it’s important to re-emphasize that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any of this is true - this Burke clown, and people like him, made this up and just keep saying it. The “post-abortion syndrome” lie has been disproven again and again, by multiple studies in different settings over a period of almost 30 years - there is simply no general phenomenon of depression or regret following abortion (though individual women have differing reactions, of course), and on average women who have had abortions are happier after having done so than they were before. As to whether people’s reactions to Palin have to do with guilt over abortion, he obviously can’t know that and it’s obviously insane. It makes as much sense as saying they love Obama because of feelings of guilt about suntan lotion. He made it up, and asserts it as fact because it serves his purpose. He’s been doing that for decades, shamelessly, in direct contravention of established evidence proving his statements to be lies, and with no evident regard for that fact.

What strikes me, more and more over the years, is the bizarre lengths the anti-woman crowd goes to to promote their false and absurd view of women, sex, and the world in general. They really do see everything as related to those topics. Archbishop Egan, in the risible and obnoxious essay cited in my last post on this topic, claims to hope for “one day, please God, when the stranglehold on public opinion in the United States has been released by the extremists for whom abortion is the center of their political and moral life”. Can he really be that un-self-aware? Is there anyone who better fits that description than people like him and Burke - for whom the merest mention (or photograph) of a fetus is grist for an unhinged and reality-free rant about abortion, in whose minds the entirely predictable failings of an absurdly unqualified political candidate are actually caused by a fictional product of abortion that they themselves made up out of whole cloth? (I guess Colin Powell, Christopher Buckley, Charles Fried, and Ken Adelman are all suffering from “post-abortion syndrome”.)

There is a kind of funhouse-mirror aspect to the ways these people’s minds work. Back in 1994, when the Edvard Munch painting The Scream was stolen from the Norwegian National Gallery, an anti-abortion group announced that they could get it returned if anti-abortion propaganda were shown on national television (in fact they had no connection to the incident and were just grandstanding). After 9-11, Jerry Falwell famously declared that “the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this  because God will not be mocked.” (It also turned out that gays, lesbians, feminists, and the ACLU were involved.) In 2006, a panel of Republicans in the Missouri State Legislature investigated the problem of illegal immigration (into Missouri?), and discovered it was the result of “the effects of 30 years of abortion.” It is a commonplace within the crypto-racist right that Western (i.e., white) societies are facing a “demographic bomb”, resulting from the different birthrates of white and non-white population groups, caused by abortion and birth control. Certain Catholic scholars, including John Noonan and Philip Rieff, have declared that abortion is itself the product of the “therapeutic culture” which seeks “wellness” (scare quotes always, please) rather than rule-following - sexual autonomy is for them a mental illness. The latest fad phrase among conservative thinkers is “the culture of death” - our entire society, or at least its progressive faction, is devoted to killing human beings, not because preserving biological life is not always the only goal in the healthcare setting, but as some sort of ideological principle in itself. Another fad phrase is “the contracepting culture” - society that accepts the horrors of sex with contraception (do you really think I’m making this up?). And of course, Sarah Palin declares that William Ayers, who helped bomb a number of government installations during an illegal war while causing no deaths, is a terrorist, but when questioned whether the bombers and shooters who murdered numerous people in legal abortion clinics were terrorists refused repeatedly to address the question.

It appears there simply isn’t any issue or circumstance, however far-fetched, that isn’t relevant to abortion; there isn’t any problem or trend, however dubious, that isn’t caused by abortion; there isn’t any need or difficulty, however unlikely, that can’t be solved by criminalizing sexual freedom. The bizarre obsession that leads to such thinking, and the contortions and delusions it requires to make such leaps while ignoring the glaring contradictions they entail, is difficult to grasp. It is simply very hard for a normal person - one who isn’t terrified by sex and obsessed with controlling and limiting other people’s sexual freedom - to imagine how this kind of thinking originates.

Make no mistake: this has nothing to do with taking a reasoned position on the appropriate balance of moral rights and interests between a pregnant woman and her fetus. This is simple full-gone loony craziness. These people make up absurd factual claims and baldly lie when they are refuted, hypothesize bizarre psychological projections upon those they disagree with, and obsessively posit - with dizzying certainty - the most tenuous and far-fetched links between virtually any event or phenomenon in the world and their consuming misogynist bete noir. They’re nuts. And these are the leaders - the thinkers - in the anti-choice movement. This is what the anti-choice movement is like when it’s not ranting at patients in front of health clinics or shooting doctors. This is what being anti-choice is like at its most subtle, sophisticated, and learned: bat-shit loony.

[NB: Crossposted to my bioethics blog Sufficient Scruples. I don't usually post that much about bioethics on this blog, but Lean Left is picked up by the aggregator Memeorandum, and my bioethics blog is not, so on topics where I think it's important to reach a wider audience, or to respond directly to posts from Memeorandum, I sometimes crosspost.]

Cardinal Egan, supremely obnoxious Catholic Archbishop of New York, has an essay up on some Web site, complete with the standard handwringing condescension and heart-tugging photos, declaiming how desperately we need to take control of women’s bodies and impose forced pregnancy as a matter of law and culture. Its contents are typical of this well-worn genre: a lame argument about whether a human fetus is a “human being”, willful elision of the difference between biological identity and moral status, sweeping moral declarations grounded on nothing but his unreflective certainty, and of course obligatory references to Hitler, Stalin, and Dred Scott.

The heart of this superficial and nonsensical (or perhaps it could be said: “a-sensical”) piece is a photograph of a 20-week fetus - a photograph which, Egan declares, proves by itself that abortion is wrong and it is utterly worthless to even consider the actual moral issues raised by the question.

Why, you might inquire, have I not delved into the opinion of philosophers and theologians about the matter? And even worse: Why have I not raised the usual questions about what a “human being” is, what a “person” is, what it means to be “living,” and such? People who write books and articles about abortion always concern themselves with these kinds of things. Even the justices of the Supreme Court who gave us “Roe v. Wade” address them. Why do I neglect philosophers and theologians? Why do I not get into defining “human being,” defining “person,” defining “living,” and the rest? Because, I respond, I am sound of mind and endowed with a fine set of eyes, into which I do not believe it is well to cast sand. I looked at the photograph, and I have no doubt about what I saw and what are the duties of a civilized society if what I saw is in danger of being killed by someone who wishes to kill it or, if you prefer, someone who “chooses” to kill it. In brief: I looked, and I know what I saw.

Why it is that the moral attack dogs of the right wing are always so eager to proclaim their own lack of comprehension I don’t know, but it is no longer surprising as a practical fact, and still less in light of the product of their “reasoning”. But ask yourself: who would take such idiocy seriously in any other context? On what moral issue would anyone seriously say “I saw a picture of an organism affected by this subject that moves me in some way, so I refuse to think about it carefully or read what the best thinkers on the subject have said, and that justifies both my unsupported, idiosyncratic religious beliefs about it and my intention to impose them on everyone else in the country!”? Who would seriously claim that not thinking about, reading about, or analyzing a serious problem could possibly produce a correct answer, or was a proper ground for imposing a solution to it as a matter of law and policy? Well, who but a religious right-winger?

But the lack of comprehension, and the vast evasions and logical gaps, Egan’s supposed “discussion” shows are par for the course, from this source and the anti-choice brigade in general. It’s hardly worth bothering with. What catches my eye in this piece - literally - is that photo, and the way it is used. Egan seems sincerely convinced that photos have moral meanings. (” Please do me the favor of looking at it carefully. . . . The matter becomes even clearer and simpler if you obtain from the National Geographic Society two extraordinary DVDs . . . entitled “In the Womb” . . . [and] “In the Womb—Multiples”.) Now, all activist groups use photographs to illustrate their causes, and to manipulate the viewer emotionally. But they usually do the courtesy of providing some sort of argument for their position. Egan declares that none is necessary - the fetuses in the photos almost literally speak for themselves. And that fact illustrates the most important thing about the anti-choice position.

To be anti-choice is, in a fundmental and particularly vicious way, to be anti-woman. It is to declare that women may have no control over their own bodies with respect to their reproductive functions, or over their entire lives as affected by those functions - and that society, invariably men, may declare to women in what circumstances they may make their own choices and follow their own paths in life, and in what circumstances those paths will be dictated to them against their wills. And, more practically, it is to put the life of every woman on earth, before and during her fertile years at least, and afterwards as a result of that earlier constraint, entirely and completely on a contingent basis, subject to conditions determined by others (men), and forever out of the control of the women themselves. Everything any woman does, wants, or plans for can be derailed in a moment by a trivial accident of biology - a condition that can be dealt with easily, safely, and cheaply by means that men choose to criminalize to prevent women from making their own choices about. There is nothing in any woman’s life that can be depended on or confidently planned for, because everything any women chooses can be disrupted or swept away, not by being pregnant, but by being pregnant and forced to remain so against her will, physically prevented, and prohibited by law, from acting on her own choices on that matter. And every woman who lives in a misogynist society, which is to say every woman in the world (with the only partial exception of women in pro-choice countries), must live with that knowledge every minute of every day - must know that anything she thinks about or plans for more than a few months into the future of her own life can only be hypothetical if men who hate her choose to make her their prisoner, by way of her own body.

To be anti-choice is to take women out of their own lives in a fundamental way. It is longstanding principle and practice of the right wing that women exist as functionaries for men - they are important insofar as they are fulfilling the roles that have been appointed to them as wives, mothers, sexual servants, housekeepers, purity symbols, or what have you, but they may not choose their roles for themselves, and they may not choose roles outside their position of inferiority to those who dictate those roles. (Slight exceptions are made for women who use their public positions to keep other women down.) Women’s lives, under misogyny, are tools for men’s comfort, and women are what men decide they will be. The anti-choice position takes this perspective to a sickeningly literal extreme. Invariably, anti-choice literature and arguments are focused entirely on the fetus. Indeed the degree of fetus-worship on the religious right is unsettling, and often very creepy. (One Catholic group stole aborted fetuses from a hospital, baptized them, and buried them in a religious ceremony in explicit violation of the instructions of the women who had aborted them. Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum and his wife took a miscarried fetus home in a box, named it, and made their other children hold it. Anti-stem-cell-research advocates paraded their own children before Congressional committees dressed in T-shirts reading “Former Embryo”.) Invariably, there is no mention of actual women in anti-choice discussions of abortion. Women are simply not part of the issue of abortion, for the right wing. Abortion, for them, is only and entirely a question of something happening to a fetus - which they invest with full moral standing for virtually incoherent reasons almost always grounded on sectarian religious beliefs - with no question at all of what it means for the woman who is pregnant against her wishes, a woman of actual moral standing, with a full life well underway, plans and projects hanging in the balance, moral interests to be taken into account, and moral agency of her own that should vest her with control of that life and those plans and projects. She literally does not exist, in almost any right-wing discussion of abortion.

And Egan, with his airily articulate photo, makes this ludicrously plain. The photograph of his morally magical fetus proves that the fetus is indeed magical in one way: it exists outside any woman’s uterus. The strangely pristine and carefully-arranged fetus in this picture floats against a plain backdrop with no hint that it should be connected to, let alone that it lives inside, the body of a thinking, feeling, reproductively mature woman actively engaged in her own life, with thoughts and desires about how that life should go and whether or not she chooses any particular path for it. (There is a hint of umbilical cord and the fetal side of the placenta, but of course they don’t attach to . . . anything.) The fetus that speaks so eloquently to Egan has no visible connection to the woman who could actually speak, and articulate her own decisions about her own body, if she existed at all, which she does not in the picture Egan says tells us everything we need to know about abortion. And when Egan contemptuously dismisses the concept of “person” with scare quotes, because it would “cast sand” into his eyes to consider the difference between this fetus and the actual person whose body it is living inside, that person whom Egan declares has no power to choose whether anyone or anything can live inside her own body, he again sets real persons at nought, in favor of the fetus whose interests (so to speak) stand unopposed by those of the non-existing woman it lives within.

It takes some trick to remove women from pregnancy, but the Catholic church has that one down pat. In his 1,300-word paen to forced pregnancy, unembarassed by any actual thinking, he manages never once, in any context, to use the word “woman”. He does, of course, work in “mother” - 10 times. Women, for Egan, do not exist - only mothers do. A pregnant woman is a mother - there is no distinction for Egan. She is certainly not a woman who faces a choice whether she wants to be a mother, or whether she will or can become a mother. And women who are not mothers, apparently, don’t exist at all - they simply live their lives knowing that nothing they choose or want can stand against their eventually becoming a “mother”, when Egan has decided that is what they are, whether or not they want to. Remarkably, fetuses do not exist for Egan, either: not a single use of that word. Every reference to the fetus employs the phrase “human being” (it appears alone 9 times; “innocent human being” 16 times). Egan has already embraced ignorance of the difference between “human being” and “moral person”, so perhaps he thinks he is saying something when he says that, but notice that “human being” is never used in reference to a woman (pregnant or otherwise). Only fetuses are human; only mothers are women, and women are only mothers; women are not human. That’s all you need to know about abortion.

Unless, of course, you take women seriously - seriously enough at least to notice that they exist, but more importantly seriously enough to acknowledge they are moral agents and have interests and values that demand respect in their own right. If you think women matter, and that women are part of the question of abortion, and if you are even passingly aware that women care about their own lives and the direction and contents of those lives, you might bother to put women into the equation, at the very least.

Or you could be a smarmy, anti-intellectual, contemptuously misogynist asshole. There’s plenty of company for you there.

[NB: Cross-posted a Sufficient Scruples, my bioethics blog.]

Yes, it’s Banned Books Week again - time to mourn, and to celebrate. It’s especially poignant that this year, Banned Books Week coincides with the date of the Vice Presidential Debate for Campaign 2008, one of whose participants, as almost her first act in elected office, tried to ban books in her city library.

The upside to Banned Books Week, as Nicole Belle points out in her lovely post linked above, is that it is as much a time to fight back against ignorance, intolerance, and the enemies of freedom of thought as it is to beware their perpetual campaign of oppression. We have seen in too many ways in recent years the dangers of complacency and an unfounded confidence in progressive values. It is important to remind and re-energize ourselves about the alternatives that constantly stalk us in politics, social policy, and our private lives. And looking on the upside, one of the delicious satisfactions of this year’s remembrance will be the chance to see the party of book-banning and the religious war on tolerance get their ass righteously handed to them at the polls, at long last. That’s going to be worth celebrating.

Until then, the usual suspects:

The most frequently challenged books of 2007

The following books were the most frequently challenged in 2007:

The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received a total of 420 challenges last year. A challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.  According to Judith F. Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom, the number of challenges reflects only incidents reported, and for each reported, four or five remain unreported.

The “10 Most Challenged Books of 2007” reflect a range of themes, and consist of the following titles:

1) “And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
[NB: A factually correct non-fiction book about a baby penguin parented by two male penguins. What is it with right-wingers and the penguins?]
Reasons: Anti-Ethnic, Sexism, Homosexuality, Anti-Family, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group

2) “The Chocolate War,” by Robert Cormier
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Violence

3) “Olive’s Ocean,” by Kevin Henkes
Reasons: Sexually Explicit and Offensive Language

4) “The Golden Compass,” by Philip Pullman
Reasons:  Religious Viewpoint

5) “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain
Reasons:  Racism

6) “The Color Purple,” by Alice Walker
Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language

7) “TTYL,” by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” by Maya Angelou
Reasons:  Sexually Explicit

9) “It’s Perfectly Normal,” by Robie Harris
Reasons:  Sex Education, Sexually Explicit

10) “The Perks of Being A Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons:  Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

From Google’s company blog:

Our position on California’s No on 8 campaign

As an Internet company, Google is an active participant in policy debates surrounding information access, technology and energy. Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions — Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all religions and no religion, straight and gay — we do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues. So when Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot, it was an unlikely question for Google to take an official company position on.

However, while there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

Posted by Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology

Good goin’, Google.