He's a Creep. He's a Weirdo.

 

Unearthed audio: JD Vance calls for a “federal response” to block women in red states from traveling to another state to get an abortion pic.twitter.com/t9YAbFuoPc

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) July 26, 2024

What the hell is he doing here? (Don. Jr. and Eric wanted dad to pick him.) He doesn't belong here. (But there's Silicon Valley money and Project 2025 backers behind him, so we will likely be seeing him for at least a minute more.) 

Yeah, JD may not be a sofaphile and maybe he isn't into dolphin porn, but he is a really weird guy. From a kind of racist take on stopping women from traveling to get an abortion, to being on board with tracking women's menstrual cycles--literally policing their bodies! to defending his unfortunate and weird "cat lady" comments in a way that is still unfortunate and weird, while taking a swipe at Jennifer Aniston, he's really shaping up to be one of the worst running mate choices imaginable.

He isn't really helping the Republican ticket, but it's sort of worse than that. He could be an active drag. In the voting sense--not in the George Santos sense. Except he has changed his names as many times as George Santos, so there's that.

Satan's Day Off

 

Misogynistic Christian fascist incel Nick Fuentes says that once he turns 30, he'll probably find himself a 16-year-old child bride: "Right when the milk is good, I want to start drinking the milk." pic.twitter.com/uM99D1YC07

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 17, 2023

I'm not sure how I want to go about this, but the idea that the right is incensed, just pure livid, about child abuse feels like ashes in the mouth.  I mean Matt Walsh is someone who doesn't care that the Catholic Church has priests who screw underage people:

It's only weird when it's gay, you guys. Adult males fucking underage females is not something he has a problem with. He's got issues with the idea of consent. That's a cockblock. 

This Rhetoric is Harmful and Misogynistic

 

JD Vance thinks parents should stay in violent marriages "for the sake of their kids." That's not just wrong, it's unbelievably dangerous. pic.twitter.com/aQnTGRCuNi

— Tim Ryan (@TimRyan) July 25, 2022

I'm not going to get into the argument of "Well, women can be abusers, too", because I really feel like what Vance is getting at here is women don't like their helpings of marital chastisement, so the little round heels use lawyers to slink away from their otherwise perfectly good homes. Homes, where, presumably, they would be raising their children in a much better environment with two parents than by trying to go it alone.

It's appalling that a supposedly educated man knows no better than this. I heard something some time ago that really stuck with me--it's better to be from a broken home than to live in a broken family. If a spouse is being abused, what are the odds the kids aren't absorbing the trauma of that, and being abused themselves? 

On the other side of Roe, we're already looking at homicide being the number one cause of maternal mortality, and the likelihood of it being due to intimate partner violence being really high. Staying together "for the kids" in a world where parents might not have planned for or wanted these kids feels like so much resentment and interpersonal aggression ready to happen in a world where resources aren't there for them.  But once the kids are here, should they have a loving, not-violent environment to grow up in? 

His answer that getting a divorce is too easy is a disgrace--what if getting your ass beat and your psyche trampled on the daily is something no human should have to suffer? What if no one deserves the threat of violence or even death as a part of their interactions in their own home, which should be a refuge and place of safety and comfort? What if raising a child with healthy boundaries and physical and emotional safety was more important than some arbitrary feelings about two parents in the home? 

We have child marriage and rapists being fathers in this country. We have families ripe for abusive relationships. And this fool wants to pontificate on whether maybe spouses should just put up with beatings? Fatherlessness is better than a monster for a father. 

I don't know if this is his true belief or something he's signifying for the hard-right evangelicals who believe the rod shouldn't be spared and the husband is the head of the house in some iron-clad spiritual way, but this view is unhealthy and misguided, and saying it out loud displays an unfitness for making decisions pertaining to other people's lives. 

He needs to lose. Tim Ryan should be the next US Senator from Ohio. 

Only 52

 

I screen capped the above Tweet and am linking it because I kind of think it will be deleted, but a Washington Post columnist just recently on Twitter said "Only 10% of girls even get their period. Only 52 girls under the age of 14 got abortions in Ohio last year--and 10 is a long way from 14." 

How many should there be before you give a shit? I wonder, when I see that. See, I know girls as young as five have conceived. Girls who are, say, eleven years old, have been forced to have caesarian births.  At 11 years of age.  Only 10% of girls under 11 even get their period. Only. Only 52 girls under the age of 14 got abortions in Ohio in 2021. 

Only 52--one a week, just in Ohio. Just in Ohio. This is a figure that doesn't look at the Ohio children whose families made them give birth. This is looking at just one state. 

And I don't even know what to do with "10 is a long way from 14." Like, in terms of the child's innocence? In terms of how fucked up it is that she was likely impregnated by a grown man? How does anyone say something like that--as if implying that 14 years olds ate capable of consent and bearing and parenting a child. 

It's still very fucked up and not right, at ten, or fourteen, or really ever for someone to experience a nonconsensual sexual experience. 

I'm trying to not wonder if McArdle even understands what kids are, she of the imagined school shooter kiddy pile-up. She didn't understand what assault rifles did then and doesn't understand what birth for a tween means now. Whether their pelvis can handle it, what it means for the future fertility of the child, whether it is traumatic, how the delivery is made (cut from hip to hip?) how the pregnant child processed the trauma of all of it. 

It's strange to see an argument that was supposed to make the situation of pregnant tweens seem less horrific only--only--hammer home how traumatic and wrong it actually is. And how strange the word "only" can seem when appended to a tragic number.

They Don't Care About Kids or Women

 

The sinister thing about the anti-abortion, anti-LGBT right is that they frame things in the most self-righteous way: It's for the safety of women! It's for the children! We're saving the unborn babies! The most vulnerable people of all!

And it's horseshit. I asked in a blog post recently, "What do you see?' regarding Proud Boys terrorizing a drag story hour and the types of laws that would mandate anatomical inspections for children's sports. Who is actually causing the harm? 

Now that Roe is overturned, we're seeing GOP lawmakers increasingly talking about passing laws that would remove any exceptions for abortion in the case of rape or incest, regardless of age.  They might, as AR Gov. Asa Hutchinson put it, prefer a different outcome than a minor child giving birth, but don't see it as something they have any desire to help prevent. 

So that is the sort of thing that absolutely will happen. Even in the case of a 10 year old, that might be prevented from even being taken to a state where such an abortion is legal. A 10 year old. A little kid.

Now, I know Republicans don't care about little kids--we've seen how they respond to even the mass shootings of little kids at Sandy Hook or Uvalde. They can talk about "grooming" with respects to simply learning LGBT people exist, but they are a little leery of talking about age of consent laws or ending child marriage, which is one way to put a fig leaf over child rape. And I don't hear a peep about parental rights for rapists out of them. 

They are fine with rapists becoming fathers, and being able to continue to victimize, even unto a second generation. 

That self-righteous "It's to make stronger families and save the children" bullshit should be punctured for the politically self-serving cruelty it is. We know it will cause harm because it already has been--that's why people fought for the right to reproductive care in the first place! 

They don't get to make noises about women and children when these are the results. It isn't about morality--it has always been control. 

UPDATE: So, apparently, Phillip Gunn, MS Speaker of the House, who as above noted, is fine with with 12 year-old incest victims giving birth, helped cover up the Southern Baptist sex abuse scandal because sometimes terrible things do happen to children, but wouldn't it be really terrible if something happened to the church that perpetuated their abuse?  Self-righteous piety--not protection of children. That's what we're looking at. 

Penn State--God Damn.

I've made my feelings known about this before, but there is a new story regarding how early the Penn State athletic department knew of Jerry Sandusky's child-raping exploits. They knew in the 70's.  Sandusky was finally put away for what he had done in the years 1994-2009. And I sort of thought that they slowly realized he was a liability and just let him go to be raping kids elsewhere after he retired--but it wasn't quite like that.

They knew early, and let him be a coach there for a good long while, and tried to cover things up for this monster all the time.  All the time. They knew. They didn't supervise him like a felon. They didn't suspend him until he got some kind of counseling. They didn't report him to the authorities. They failed in every single respect.

Except at winning football games. They totally won a lot of football games, and I guarantee you, they might have been able to do that much without a fucking child molester on the staff. I really think they could have. And for the sake of all the kids over the years, how the hell didn't they?

Reading, Writing, or Rapture?

I'm basically suspicious of the idea of homeschooling, folks. See, while a part of me wants to believe that the majority of homeschoolers just want their kids to receive a better education than the state can provide them, it seems to me that a part of that desire comes not only from a deep distrust of government and people who are different from oneself in the first place, but also a desire to exert a great deal of control over one's own children, in being the only conduit through which their worldview gets constructed. I feel like this is a dangerous thing, because the world is populated by many people with many conflicting interests and views. Getting only one filter for understanding the world isn't much better than getting a blindfold. I've mentioned before instances where this control over children denied them not just a complete education, but basically their lives. I can also point out that this distrust of outsiders is also sometimes a guard against being caught abusing children.

But the biggest thing I worry about is the idea that kids might not get any kind of education at all. That parents, with good intentions or bad, try their own idiosyncrasies out on their kids and adopt this method and that, and wind up with kids who aren't properly educated and aren't well-capable of taking on employment opportunities or caring for themselves. That sort of thing sounds like it could be guilt-ridden and hard to overcome, because the child so (un)educated might themselves be isolated by a distrust of formal learning opportunities to fix their educational deficits.

So, hearing that a "homeschooling" family wants to forgo any curriculum at all because they are waiting on the Rapture strikes me as appalling. That's abusive. We're working on two thousand years since the life of Jesus, and no man knows the hour or the day of his Coming again. So why in the heck wouldn't you want your kids to pick up a little knowledge in the meanwhile on the off-chance they might have use of some adult skills? Or just to keep themselves usefully busy? Or because knowing stuff is rewarding and interacting with the world is why we are actually here?

All I know is Rachel Dolezal Has Problems

I don't have a very good opinion of what Ms. Dolezal did, but I do think the sanest reaction I've read on this comes from Charles P. Pierce--there just isn't a lot of benefit in trying to piece together what her story "means" against the backdrop of "race in America" or some larger narrative about the extent to which an individual can choose their identity. Some of the kinder takes I've read assume that she has a kind of mental or emotional issue or trauma--although I think it's unfair to people who are struggling with their mental and emotional issues or personal traumas who do not engage in a damaging imposture regarding their personal narratives. It's also been pointed out that there was very little she had done as an ersatz black woman, that she could not have done as well as a white woman, whether it be acting as a civil rights advocate or a parent to black children, except with a difference of style. She traded being accused of being a poseur for being an actual fake.

Getting the Duggar Interview out of My System

Sometimes I really want to leave a particular story be and just stop blogging about it, but something about it won't let me--the Duggars are that way. I never had any interest in their reality show because I basically think reality tv is a sign, in and of itself, of a kind of unhealthy exhibitionism. What's the pull in watching the day-to-day doings of your friendly next-door conservative Christian fertility cultists? The most I could sniff about is that a reality show is inherently exploitative, and that, since many of the children are minors--they don't really have the ability to knowingly consent to having their family's business aired. That these kids are otherwise very highly sheltered from what I would think of as "the world" never struck me as being as obviously a problem.  It's a bit easy to assume that the Duggar parents, however, have some idea of what they're doing.

It's easy enough for me, not being a parent, to snipe. But the interview revealed certain things (Salon uses the term "horrifying"--which only seems sensational until you think about the context) that make me genuinely wonder what they think they are sheltering their children from. Because among the things they actually said out loud where people could hear is that they compared notes with other families and what Josh Duggar did wasn't that bad.

I am assuming they did not join a support group, where one might expect to find people with similar experiences, but they just happen to be around people who have their kids feeling up on each other. Their homeschooling mentor Bill Gothard was a serial sexual harasser and the law enforcement officer they turned to to give their son a stern talking-to was deep into the child porn.

Do these people know anyone with a healthy concept of sexual boundaries?

The Problem of Cheap Grace and the Duggar Defenders

Religion as a form of moral instruction has been a regular irritation of mine. I've written about the apologists who defended the Catholic Church in the face of the claims of widespread sexual abuse of children. In my mind, religion isn't worth a straw if, instead of relieving human misery, which we have enough of as limited and mortal beings with the ability to hurt ourselves and one another, it becomes an engine of human misery, driving people to be more inclined to wronging and harming others.

The defenders of Josh Duggar seem to me to be in the same vein. When confronted with the staggeringly wrong idea that if evolution is true, then somehow molesting one's sisters is ok, it's kind of hard to accept that people "guided" by religion have any idea what morality is at all. I am a product of evolution, and I would certainly not find that my being molested would be acceptable to me--and I would therefore not find it acceptable for others to be molested. The idea of reciprocity in this manner is called "the Golden Rule". Most major spiritual moral systems came up with something very like it. I find it hard to believe that a person supposedly educated in theology is unaware of this concept.  But I can easily find that someone who just has an economic axe to grind against evolution will bullshit on the subject. Because why worry about bearing false witness when mad creationist park scrilla is on the line? Eric Hovind is a little G in his world. He figures that the Big G in the sky will have his back.

So take the screed of Michael Seewald, the father-in-law of one of Josh Duggar's sisters, for what it is in invoking "grace". 

So, what is the ultimate answer? The answer is what Josh found and millions like him. He found forgiveness and cleansing from Jesus Christ. There are many of you that are reading these words right now having had thoughts and deeds no better than what Josh had and did. You are a sinner. You are a sinner by birth and choice. It is because of that corruption that is common to all that you have violated God’s holy commandments.

The All-American Girl Without Citizenship

Alecia Pennington, the young woman in the video posted above, has no way to document that she is a US citizen.  That's because it's the way her parents want it. This really sounds an awful lot to me like part of the very creepy "stay-at-home-girls" movement, where a girl is basically a part of her father's household and under his will until she is "given" in marriage to a suitable man. It's basically like Saudi Arabia without the veil. Without the ability to prove her citizenship, Alecia can't drive, vote, get a job or live a normal adult life. Her parents' exercise of their religion has basically left her like a guest-worker with a stolen passport in her own country--a slave to their intentions.

I was shocked to read that this kind of identification abuse is not that rare, and is viewed by some parents as being within their rights, because they view their children as property. That same kind of "ownership mentality" is revealed in anti-vaxxer parents (I would not be surprised if there was some considerable overlap, there). This is a prime example, though, of where so-called "religious freedom" has to stop--when the exercise actually impairs another person's freedom. It also shows how distrust of government in such "off-the-grid" households creates a disconnect from participation in the world--how "American" is it to raise children who can't prove they really are Americans?

To The Parents of Leelah Alcorn

I am deeply saddened to hear of the passing of your daughter, Leelah. I understand you are still in mourning over the death of your son, Joshua. It may take a lot of time for you to understand that the time to mourn Joshua's passing would have been far better done when your daughter, Leelah, was still alive.

What you needed to know was that your daughter, although assigned at birth by culture and genetics as male, had a medically-recognized condition called gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder. Mainstream science would have informed you that she needed to come to her own terms with her gender identity. Your religious "piety" tried to erase that from her, and you assisted that erasure of her feelings, experiences and choices until she saw no future at all so long as you were overriding her need to exist as her authentic self.

I am deeply saddened to inform you, because you are grown people, that her experience of herself was all she had. She did not know anything but a very real experience, to her, that she was a girl. A living girl. And being a girl is not wrong. It's unusual for a person with XY chromosome pairing, but unusual things do happen. You denied her that one thing she had--her experience of herself. She knew exactly who she was and what her situation was, and you never bothered to listen to her.

There's Outrage, and Then There's The Defense of the Indefensible...

I don't agree with Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh on very much, so I really don't follow them and don't blog about "OMG, this terrible thing some pundit said!" because really? What would be the point? They have a right to express their opinions, and while I can say they are dumb opinions or how I don't agree, it makes very little difference--except for this recent confluence of exquisitely grotesque pro-abuse and pro-rape comments that made me seriously wonder what the fuck they were about.

Just to start with Hannity--

Hannity explained that he was hit by his father as a child, and he turned out just fine.

"I got hit with a strap. Bam, bam, bam. And I have never been to a shrink. I will tell you that I deserved it," he said.

"I think he went far," Hannity then said about Peterson. "But I don’t want to see this guy get a felony, I don’t want to see this guy lose his job. He deserves parenting classes."

Hannity then took off his belt to demonstrate the technique.

There are a lot of people who were paddled or whipped as kids, firmly, not to excess, and who lived and did well for themselves. But boasting that one has never been to a shrink is not that same as saying one hasn't experienced after-effects of one's abuse, and there could be an argument made that the discipline Hannity received taught him to be a punch-down, kiss-up authoritarian personality who goes out of his way to excuse power and malign the underdog. Just saying. But there's a real disconnect when someone tries to excuse the switch-beating of a four year old child that leaves cuts in his legs and scrotum. That just isn't acceptable. If Hannity can't see that this is a question not about the ability of parents to discipline, but the extent to which they carry that discipline out, then I really wonder. Can't parents carry out loving discipline that isn't harmful, and instill values by living them? Is that so preposterous? (For the record I may have been spanked, by hand, once in my life, by my parents. Never an implement.)

Homophobia and The Religious Wrong

I couldn't resist clicking on this link at Huffington Post when it labelled an interview with Franklin Graham "One of the Most Homophobic Things We Have ever Seen".  In a world where batshit evangelicals assert that Disney movies and popular children's novels are out to turn people gay, and where hate-pimps like Scott Lively advocate the murder of LGBT people, you really have to go out of your way to be "the most homophobic" anything.  But I would say this is pretty gross:

 "Gays and lesbians cannot have children," Graham commented. When Funk pointed out that they could adopt, he retorted, "Yeah, they can recruit."

          He went on to imply that gay adoptions are tantamount to exploitation of children:

You can adopt a child into a marriage, but you can also recruit children into your cause. I believe in protecting children, OK? From exploitation, all exploitations.

During the interview, Graham insisted that he was simply speaking out the way his father once did, despite the unpopularity of his views.

And here is why I find that appalling:

 This straight couple is charged in the murder of a four year old boy because the mother alleges that she thought her child was gay.  She murdered her own small child. Because she thought he might be gay. 

Parent of the Year material, obviously.

The Disappearing Legacy of Joe Paterno

Earlier this week, just following the taking down of the statue of Joe Paterno on the Penn State campus, the legacy of former Penn State Head Coach Joe Paterno's legacy was further eroded with 111 of his team's wins vacated by the decision of the NCAA.  While this decision has been considered especially harsh by his supporters, I understand the reason why this was done.

The cover-up of Jerry Sandusky's child rape, which is what the failure of the responsible parties in the Penn State investigation to properly pursue the reporting against Sandusky amounts to, occurred because those parties involved, encouraged by Paterno, determined that exposing the child rapist would harm what really mattered to them--Penn State football.   It might have distracted from the games and the revenues. It might have discouraged alumni donors. It would have been the most horrible thing--

Except the most horrible thing was that this decision occurred with the full avoidance of acknowledging those who were really being harmed--the children being raped. The problem wasn't "Oh no! What happened to our football program!" but "Oh, why are these children being harmed? How can we stop this?"

Those children stood in the way of the reputation of Penn State football, and Paterno was happy to see them put in the shade. A decent person might have addressed the issue even at the cost of one or two winning seasons, maybe endured a brief drop in blue-chip athletic recruitment, but the team and the school would have recovered.

How long does it take for a child with no male role model, who found a father figure in Sandusky, only to be bent to his sick bullshit; how long: does it take for that person to recover?

Well, the fatherly Paterno never thought of that. There was a legacy to pursue. And it wasn't worth the cost. That is why this decision got made.

Now the clan Paterno can cry out that this decision defames the legacy of their patriarch.

Oh,wait! Did we somehow, in all this mishegas, forget the legacy of Joe Paterno?

Insert hollow, mocking laughter. Of course we didn't, and the NCAA didn't, and with any luck, future schools won't.  The legacy is a lesson, not about winning football games or making boys into great football players. It's about dealing with child fuckers. We should not allow child fuckers to roam about this world fucking children freely. We should be deeply concerned that anyone, anywhere, is slipping it to kids. And if you patiently ignore your local kiddie-fucker because you aren't human enough to put up with a little bustle in your hedgerow about rousting this pervert from your organization and helping him into a nice dank cell where he can't hurt anyone because "OMG TEH FOOSBALLZ!" maybe your legacy deserves to be disappeared.

Just saying.

Just a brief comment on the Penn State scandal/riots.

A riot broke out on Penn State campus when it was revealed that long-time coach and school institution Joe Paterno was fired in the fall-out of a horrendous pedophilia case. The crime that was ineffectually reported and, in the long run, virtually covered up, was a terrible breach of the responsibility that adults owe to children. It became known to several people on the staff of Penn State University, including football coach Joe Paterno and the university's president Graham Spanier, that Jerry Sandusky, a defensive coach for Penn State, had molested young boys. He was urged to "retire".

And that was that.  He was able to go on from there to go his merry way. His merry, probably child-raping way.

I'm not really a follower of college football, but I am a Pennsylvanian, so I definitely recognize the influence of Penn State football and the organization's legendary coach.  But I can't get beyond the horror of the claims against the former Penn State coach, Jerry Sandusky. The story of eight victims is just the stories of kids who we know about. The reality with serial abusers like this is there could be so many more. It just seems to me that if someone had any inkling of what this guy was doing, they would want it stopped then and there because of what he was capable of. But that didn't happen.

They passed the buck, is what it is. They got him out of the Penn State system so that when his abuse was ultimately exposed, he was well away from their business, and they could disavow it--except for the access he still had. Except, except, except--he would still be abusing boys.

Oregon Faith-healing cult negligently lets their kids die.

I've covered this cult before--I still can't understand how absolutely deranged by religion these idiots are. I still can not imagine how they could be so persuaded that any kind of God worth following would want them to let their kids die when they could be easily healed with medicine.



The baby in this picture is one of the more egregious examples of negligence--if you can see that picture, there is quite obviously a growth on that child's eye, and it is large enough to be very painful if you have any imagination. From the story it accompanies:

The Wylands were indicted within the past few days and probably will be arraigned next week, said Colleen Gilmartin, the deputy district attorney handling the custody case in juvenile court.

Under Oregon law, it is a crime for parents to intentionally and knowingly withhold necessary and adequate medical attention from their children. First-degree criminal mistreatment is a Class C felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

The Wylands and their church reject medical care in favor of faith-healing -- anointing with oil, laying on of hands, prayer and fasting. The parents testified at a juvenile court hearing last week that they never considered getting medical attention for Alayna.

According to court documents, Rebecca Wyland anointed Alayna with oil each time she changed the girl's diaper and wiped away the yellow discharge that seeped daily from the baby's left eye.

It is amazing that they could watch a child suffer and even face the possibility of this child being blinded or even dying, over seeking medical attention that was easily available and very effective. If I could even imagine a God (I know I've probably made this point before) that would damn my soul to Hell everlasting for wanting to ease the suffering of a child--so help me, I would be damned, without question, and I would in return curse a God that made us so fragile, and denied us any recourse but prayer and His whims. This is an obnoxious and unworthy God they must follow, that insists on death and pain and illness, and denies the remedies that people find just by wanting to look, through the scientific method.