Framed

So That's Where Iran Is!

Fired

If her writing is any indication of her thought processes, it's clear that University of Toledo administrator Crystal Dixon is a bigot, a kook, and an intellectually deficient human being.  However, I have worked at two other northwest Ohio institutions of higher education, and I can say pretty confidently that if being a bigot, a kook and an intellectually deficient human being were grounds for termination, the faculties and staffs of both would be decimated.

Dixon, however, was recently fired from her post as an "interim associate vice president of human resources" at UT for writing a letter to the editor of the Toledo Free Press in which she laid her bigotry, kookiness and intellectual deficiency out for all to see:

As a Black woman who happens to be an alumnus of the University of Toledo's Graduate School, an employee and business owner, I take great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are "civil rights victims." Here's why. I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a Black woman. I am genetically and biologically a Black woman and very pleased to be so as my Creator intended. Daily, thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle evidenced by the growing population of PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex Gays) and Exodus International just to name a few. Frequently, the individuals report that the impetus to their change of heart and lifestyle was a transformative experience with God; a realization that their choice of same-sex practices wreaked havoc in their psychological and physical lives.

Following publication of her letter, she was fired--for doing nothing more than writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper and expressing her views. 

If Dixon can be fired from a public university for expressing her anti-gay opinion,  then any other employee could be sacked for expressing pro-gay sentiments--or for that matter, for expressing anything at all.  Things would be different, perhaps, if Dixon was an employee at will at a private institution.  However, if the First Amendment means anything, it means that agents of the state (such as the University of Toledo) are not allowed to punish employees for holding and expressing unpopular views.

It's uncomfortable for me to be on the same side of this matter as Rush Limbaugh, but this is not a liberal or conservative issue--it's a civil liberties issue.  Dixon plans to file suit against UT; I hope she succeeds.

Under God's Regime

Feminization

It's started already: the attempted feminization of Barack Obama.  The GOP smear machine and its fellow travelers in the mainstream media are already spreading the meme that Obama is a girly man. An insufficiently masculine (and therefore insufficiently American) male.  An effete, effeminate pretty boy who isn't tough enough to cope with America's adversaries.  A genderless alien.

Exhibit 1: Huckabee jokes about how  scared Obama would be if someone pointed a gun his way.  See, he's a nervous nellie, a wimp.  And of course sometimes a gun barrel is just a gun barrel, but the sexual connotations  of Obama diving for the floor, ass up, when confronted with a phallic weapon (presumably wielded by a Real American Man) are undeniably there.

Exhibit 2: Obama gives a speech criticizing McCain's foreign policy; McCain fires back, labeling it an "hysterical diatribe."  The female-specific roots of the word "hysterical" are obvious.

Exhibit 3: An truly repellent editorial today in the Washington Post by the white supremicist Kathleen Parker all but accuses Obama of being a cross-dressing faggot:

Well, at least they didn't kiss.

I was bracing myself for the lip lock Wednesday when John Edwards endorsed Barack Obama.

*  *  *

. . . the two men exchanged a manly air-hug to commemorate the moment . . .

*  *  *

Obama and Edwards make an attractive picture -- Ultra Brite cover boys of youth and glamour united against old men (and women) who worship the status quo. Obama -- the man who makes Chris Matthews feel a thrill up his leg -- wants to "do the Lord's work," lately pictured in front of a cross illuminated with vanity lights on a flier aimed at Kentucky voters, while Edwards wants to roll out the catapults and nuke the Coliseum.

*  *  *

Obama and Edwards look and talk pretty, but Clinton, unflinching and steely, exudes pure brawn. When the time comes to sit across from the likes of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a chill in the heart may beat a thrill up the leg.

There will be many more examples, I have no doubt--this is just what came down in the last 24 hours.  I doubt that's a coincidence; the GOP frat-boy attack network is disciplined and on-message.  I wrote about this almost a year ago, and it's still going on:

As documented in Stephen Ducat's book The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, the GOP has molded itself as the Party of Men.   The Party of Men fears and loathes the feminine. The worst insults it can come up with when describing the Democrats generally are coded representations of femininity--think of the right's obsession with John Edwards' hair and sexuality, little Mike Dukakis riding in that tank, John Kerry looking French, and Bill Clinton's pre-Monica caricature as a pussy-whipped girly-man.   As Greenwald might say, this mindset is similar to that of the Cool Kids in high school, casually and cruelly labeling the guys who aren't in their little group as fags.

When you can't win on issues, judgment or character, try testosterone.  This is part of what Obama calls the politics of distraction, but it's actually far more subtle and difficult to deflect than chatter about flag pins and sweetie comments.  I hope Obama is smart enough to figure out how to prevent his own wussification.

Hilarious

That Mike Huckabee--what a card!  Joking about someone pointing a gun at Barack Obama . . . I laughed til I cried.  As Smintheus notes:

This is about more than Mike Huckabee, with his bizarre habit of threatening to use violence in the political arena. This is about a Republican establishment that encourages, rewards, and lionizes those on the right who use threats of violence to expand the boundaries in public discourse of the "acceptable" demonization of Democrats. Where will it end?

Under God's Command

Rules

Let's see how the Clinton Rules apply to the names the Presidential candidates call women.

Obama calls a reporter and a factory worker "sweetie" and this is a big problem, fair game for analysis of his supposedly "paternalistic" attitude toward the middle class.

McCain calls his wife a "trollop" and a "cunt" and anyone who attempts to question the propriety of this is hustled out of the auditorium by police and Secret Service agents.

Seems fair to me.

It's Friday . . .

. . . and the streets are ours.  But you work all day and still can't pay the price of gasoline and meat.

Someone better get us out of this!

Under God's Thumb

Misquoted

McCain: Most Troops Will Be Home by 2013

Ah, now I understand McCain's remarks about American troops staying in Iraq for 100 years.

He was misquoted.

What McCain meant to say was that American troops will be staying in Iraq until he turns 100 years old.

Yay

Great news out of California today:

In a much-anticipated ruling issued Thursday, the California Supreme Court struck down the state's ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional.

This vindicates Mayor Gavin Newsome's courageous decision to buck California's so-called Defense of Marriage Act and issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.  Sometimes you have to do what seems like breaking the law to advance civil rights.  Martin Luther King would approve.

Here's the nut of the decision, which roots gay marriage firmly within a person's fundamental, individual, inalienable rights:

[W]e conclude that, under this state's Constitution, the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual's liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process.  These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish -- with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life -- an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage.  As past cases establish, the substantive right of two adults who share a loving relationship to join together to establish an officially recognized family of their own -- and, if the couple chooses, to raise children within that family -- constitutes a vitally important attribute of the fundamental interest in liberty and personal autonomy that the California Constitution secures to all persons for the benefit of both the individual and society.

Only one line in the news story today troubles me:

An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is likely. The federal high court has never addressed the question of same-sex marriage.

I don't see the federal jurisdiction here at all.  Marriage has always been a state, not a federal, matter.  However, given the current makeup of the high court and its willingness to find federal jurisdiction on other cases that have historically been matters of state law (see, e.g., Bush v. Gore), I'm not as confident as I'd like to be.  There will be battles ahead.

Then too, the drool-flecked pulpit-banger wing of the GOP is ramping up a campaign for a referendum on an amendment to California's constitution banning same-sex marriage.  That might well come down in November of this year, once again injecting the old Fear Of A Gay Planet fervor into the Presidential race.  Again: there will be battles ahead.

But for today, let's celebrate a victory for love and reason.

Teachers Get Mail

I've gotten letters kind of  like this, but never quite as baroque as this one.  Like they say, read the whole thing . . . but here are the highlights:

My Teacher,

I appreciate you taking your inconvenience to instruct us but I really had some problems in your class and I would like to explain them to you now. Every day I wanted to discuss with you about the way you grade my papers and the way you teach the class, but I could not because the things you say in class and your words disturb me so much I can not. You make me completely uncomfortable with the little things you say in the class like how you talk about television or how you talk about when you are grading our papers and trying to be fair.  You do not seem to care about our grades only that they are up to your too high standards and I can not talk to you because you make me completely uncomfortable.  For example, you say you will talk to us about our grades but you really will not because of how uncomfortable you make me feel with your words and what you say.

Welcome

Give me your tired, your poor . . . but not your lovelorn Italian law students:

He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

Oh well, it could have been worse for Mr. Salerno--he could have been involuntarily drugged by Immigration and Customs Enforcement:

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government's forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail," as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

It's amazing anyone even wants to come to Bush's America anymore.  And more worrisome to people like me who like to travel abroad is the question of at what point other countries will start treating Americans like we treat their citizens.

Wash U

I have two sons who will be entering college in just about 479 days, a fact that has imposed a considerable burden on Sue, our most excellent letter carrier.  Six days a week she staggers to our door and shoves a forest acre's worth of college catalogues, brochures, letters and postcards into our letter slot.   

Over the last year, Sue has delivered more mailings from Washington University in St. Louis than mailings from any other institution.  They send more almost every week, despite the fact that as far as I know, neither of my kids have ever expressed any interest in the school.  This long ago ceased to be flattering; it soon struck us as desperate, and eventually as pathetic.

Apparently the school's frantic efforts to be noticed are not confined to the admissions office there.  They've now decided to give an honorary degree to a famous person.  Yeah, that'll get them on more high school students' radar!  So who did Wash U choose to bestow with that honor?  A woman who has said things like this:

“The atomic bomb is a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God.”

“Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women, except in the rarest cases.”

“By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape.”

“Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions”

“The snowflakes that grace us at Christmastime typify the artistic beauty that bestows joy on all ages but, like an acid, evolution corrodes this inborn appreciation of beauty and falsely trains children to view themselves as mere animals no more worthy than dogs or cats.”

"It is long overdue for parents to realize they have the right and duty to protect our children against the intolerant evolutionists.”

“ERA means abortion funding, means homosexual privileges, means whatever else.”

"We are starting a movement in the state legislatures...to forbid the installation of clinics that dispense contraceptives."

"It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or sterility, or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or brain-damage [sic] baby even ten years later when she may be happily married. "

The woman is Phyllis Schlafly.

That's a name I hadn't heard in a couple decades at least.  Perhaps Wash U figures that age has detoxified her more noxious actions and pronouncements--but I think not.  It's a disgrace for an institution of higher education to honor someone so resolutely anti-intellectual, so committed to perpetuating inequality, so hypocritical, and so downright wacky as Phyllis Schlafy.

Kathy G. over at Crooked Timber sums up some of the highlights of Schlafly's career:

Early on Schlafly was a member in good standing of the John Birch Society. You know them—they were an organization of redhunters so freakishly obsessed and paranoid that they famously believed President Eisenhower was a “conscious agent” of the international communist conspiracy. Schlafly first became well-known for her slim 1964 volume—a pamphlet, really—supporting the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, A Choice Not An Echo. The book has been described as

a conspiracist theory in which the Republican Party was secretly controlled by elitist intellectuals dominated by members of the Bilderberger banking conference, whose policies were allegedly designed to usher in global communist conquest.

And yes, to be sure, in that book she didn’t explicitly identify those communist international bankers as Jews—but then again she didn’t have to, did she?

Later on, Schlafly’s conspiracy theories took more of a black helicopters, anti-UN, anti-”one-world government” flavor. In recent years, she has been identified as one of the leading proponents of conspiracy theories about the National American Union—the belief that “behind closed doors, the Bush administration has collaborated with the governments of Mexico and Canada to merge the three nations into one Socialist mega-state.”

Given her anti-intellectual conspiracy-mongering, it’s not surprising to learn that Schlafly rejects the theory of evolution and believes that creationism (or “intelligent design”) should be taught in schools. It must be said, though, that it is startling to read that she blames the Virginia Tech shootings on that school’s English department.

*  *  *

I can hardly believe that someone whose entire public career as a writer and speaker is littered with lies, smears, conspiracy theories, and shrill, ugly rhetoric would ever be rewarded with so high an honor as an honorary doctorate from a great university. But there are yet more reasons why every decent person should consider Phyllis Schlafly beyond the pale.

There is, for example, not just her style of argument, but the content of her political views. Which is very disturbing indeed.

Schlafly has always been an energetic proponent of the view that in America, nonwhites should not enjoy equal rights under the law. Here, for example, is what Wolfe has to say about the relationship between Schafly, the Goldwater-for-president boom, and the civil rights movement:

The origins of the Goldwater boom could be traced to a meeting between Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon in 1960 when, in return for Rockefeller’s support, Nixon agreed to endorse a civil rights plank calling for “aggressive action to remove the remaining vestiges of segregation or discrimination in all areas of national life.” This was too much for the right-wing activists from the South and Southwest, who were intent on taking over Abraham Lincoln’s party for their own bigoted ends. Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and conservatives such as Schlafly loved him for it. Conservatives maintained that their opposition to the Civil Rights Act was based on a preference for state’s rights over federal power, but no one, least of all their enthusiastic followers, was fooled. Conservatism was in large part a revolt by whites against the aspirations of blacks, and whatever success it enjoyed was a by-product of the backlash that it generated.

Her views on race remain unchanged, lo these many years later. Unsurprisingly, Schlafly (again quoting Wolfe here) “strongly” endorsed “Lee Atwater’s use of Willie Horton to scare voters away from Michael Dukakis.” She continues to be (Wolfe’s words) “anti-immigrant and hostile to minorities.” She has fairly recently, for example, described Mexican immigrants as “invaders” seeking to take control of America.

*  *  *

Schlafly has had a powerful, and entirely negative, influence on the political direction of this country, and on the tone of our political discourse. But there is no question that the thing she has been most famous for is being an antifeminist. Throughout her career, she has been given to such outrageous statements as “Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women, except in the rarest cases” and “By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape.” But she is best known for almost single-handedly stopping the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

Ah, yes.  I remember back in the day how Schafly claimed that passage of the ERA would lead to the abolition of gender-specific bathrooms--an utterly loopy pronouncement that still probably did more to galvanize opposition to the amendment than anything else.  I also remember her going around the country giving speeches to the effect that women should stay home and be homemakers.

I think it's good for universities to expose their students to liberal and conservative thought.  I abhor the PC conformity of many of our institutions of higher learning.  If Wash U wanted to honor a conservative, there are many people out there with whom I disagree about nearly everything but who are not kooks and bigots. 

Maybe this is all part and parcel off Wash U's aggressive direct mail campaign: both are designed to get the school noticed.  OK--I noticed.  Now stop recruiting my kids to come to an institution that honors no-nothingism, conspiracy theorists and hypocrites.

"Hang That Darky From a Tree!"

I don't know about you, but I am shocked--SHOCKED!--to discover that racism exists in the United States of America:

In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into "a horrible response," as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.

"The first person I encountered was like, 'I'll never vote for a black person,' " recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. "People just weren't receptive."

For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"

Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across "a lot of racism" when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people."

*  *  *

On Election Day in Kokomo, a group of black high school students were holding up Obama signs along U.S. 31, a major thoroughfare. As drivers cruised by, a number of them rolled down their windows and yelled out a common racial slur for African Americans, according to Obama campaign staffers.

Theoden: What can men do against such reckless hate?

Aragorn: Ride out with me. Ride out and meet them.