Tuesday, November 03, 2009 - Posts
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When the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts legalized same-sex
marriage in 2003, the polls showed disapproval by a margin of 53
percent to 35 percent. After the ruling went into effect, legislators
geared up to reverse it by amending the state constitution. But two
years later, the poll numbers had flipped, and the backlash never came.
That's because reversing the court's ruling was a long process, not a
quick and hasty ballot initiative like the one that Maine passed in
Tuesday's election. In Maine, the law passed last May and never even
went into effect ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
I'm sorry, Rachael, but this story you linked about Abby Johnson's sudden conversion
from a Planned Parenthood director to an anti-choice fanatic has more
holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese after being used for target
practice. Johnson's story fits way too neatly into a bunch of easily
disproven anti-choice myths, the main one being that all it takes is
one glance at an ultrasound to cause someone to "realize" that hey!
abortion removes a fetus from your uterus. Pro-choicers already know
that. Johnson seems to be selling a story that's a tad too pat, too
close to what anti-choicers want to hear.
After all, your average person in the United States has
seen probably hundreds of sonograms in their lives, and most of them
show a fetus at gestational age well beyond the point that most women
get elective abortions. If you compare the ultrasound taken prior to an
elective abortion, the feeling is actually one of being underwhelmed,
because there's not much there compared to the ones we're used to
seeing. The anti-choice sentimental devices rely therefore on ignorance
more than illumination—their own mistaken understanding of what goes on
in an abortion clinic ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
There’s a funny spoof video up on Boing Boing
framed as a PSA of sorts in support of douchebag solidarity. It
features a handful of self-pegged douchebags, one pumping iron at the
gym, another riffing for the amusement of drink-dangling babes at a
bar, all waxing on about the persecution of the douches: “For too long
you’ve told us to shut the fuck up ... that people who are different
from me matter.” But because I evidently cannot take a joke (and this
may in fact make me a douchebag according to the video’s standards) my
first thought was: This is a grossly incorrect use of the word
“douchebag” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Just one small response to Hanna's excellent observations in today’s DoubleX discussion of an alternate universe in which Hillary had become President:
I can't resist disagreeing with her that the Obama marriage is
post-feminist. I don't think any marriage where one spouse is gone out
of the house to the extent that he was, and one spouse is left to raise
the small children and hold down the fort, and, oh yes, make the money
necessary for the mortgage payment, can be described as post-feminist.
At least not in the ideal sense. It may be a post-feminist marriage in
the sense that it's what a lot of women in her generation have
struggled with—albeit an extreme version—but it's not post-feminist in
the sense that it's the kind of set-up one would aspire to ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Hanna,
I am the product of the “simpler” '50s dating culture. My parents were
young, hot for each other, met their families' requirements of looks
(her) and potential earning capacity (him), and married at ages 19 and
20. Their union produced four children, lasted 20 years, and was a
nightmare for all concerned. So I do not share David Brooks’ nostalgia
for a time when dating had ‘guardrails.' I dated for decades in the
pre-cell phone era, and it wasn’t technology that gave me an ironic,
contingent feeling about my adventures. One of my male friends once
said to me, “Sometimes I think you deliberately go on bad dates just so
you have a story to tell” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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