It continually baffles me that not only are there lots of infertile couples desperate for a child, or an additional one, as well as couples desperate to adopt; yet there are huge barriers to adoption and millions of young women have abortions every year.  I’m not fond of the idea of government subsidies for carrying children to term, but I would probably get behind some sort of free-market solution; and probably anything is better than the current situation.  Yet many people my age are more concerned about where their styrofoam cup or plastic bottle might end up, because that might hypothetically hurt someone, or, heaven forbid, some polar bear, in a future generation.  That’s considered being conscientious and socially just and politically aware.

Also, nearly everyone spends their most fertile, and possibly most productive, years locked up in a government school of one sort of another (I think many of our universities receive enough funding to be considered government schools, especially the so-called private universities that often get more federal funds than the public ones).  Nearly always, one is being forced to work on something better learned on one’s own out of a goddamn book.  Then many go off to work for a corporation–also a government entity, depending on your definition, or the military, which is a government entity by any definition.  That’s also considered the responsible thing to do.  Then women and men alike spend their thirties racing against the clock.

Am I the only one who thinks that things are considerably backasswards?

In “Daddy Issues,” Dennis Perrin wonders why we offer our presidents not merely obedience but also filial piety:

What is it that makes Americans feel a family connection to the presidency? Yes, we are indoctrinated from birth about our unique goodness, our special qualities; and yes, the president is viewed as the father figure of American righteousness. But how much intellectual or emotional energy does it take to step back from this scenario and see it for the fable it is? If history is any guide, apparently a lot.

…Why should we, who have no real political or economic power, who must rent our lives from those who do, feel such familial ties to the imperial manager? Over ninety-nine percent of those Americans who wept for JFK didn’t know the man, yet most behaved as if a loved one had been suddenly yanked from existence. This illustrates not only the strength of the national myth, but the eagerness of consumers to embrace it.

An independent, critical mind can, with enough practice and conditioning, resist such authoritarian impulses. But there is no reward for such thinking, and certainly no major market. Obedience to the master narrative is required to advance professionally, most especially in politics. For the rest of us, acceptance is expected but not really necessary. Our opinions matter only to the degree a demographic needs defining, or a voting bloc catered to. Beyond that, what we think or how we react to events like assassinations is our own miserable business. You might have cried for JFK, but he sure as fuck didn’t cry for you.

This reminded me of an interview with the creators of Family Guy, available on Hulu, where Seth MacFarlane reveals that their most controversial joke of all time mocked the Kennedy assassination:

Family Guy – Censored Jokes (video)

Apparently Family Guy can get away with making envelope-pushing jokes about race and sex, as well as characters who are rapists and pedophiles, but not with jokes about JFK.   Not even “feminine hygiene” is as offensive!  Which in turn reminds me of Rachel Simmons’ complaint that the nation was more outraged by Kanye West’s interruption of Taylor Swift’s award ceremony than, say, the gang rape and beating of a 15-year-old in Richmond.  The message is clear:  don’t mess with the politico-celebrity class.  As Perrin notes, this rule is most rigorously enforced by the proles themselves.

Also see Gene Healy’s The Cult of the Presidency.  I’m also sure Arthur Silber has plenty to say about the dangerous implications of this phenomenon.

I learned of Watada’s release from the Army and Officer Hoh’s resignation the same day.  At first I was equally exhilarated by the stories, but then Hoh’s came to seem suspect.  As Arthur Silber more eloquently puts it, Watada is the genuine hero, while Hoh’s resignation lacks any underlying moral principles.

The main point of Hoh’s four-page resignation, which many commentators are fawning over, seems to be this:  that he is Not a Wussy.  (I’d put it in stronger terms, but I’m trying to keep this a family-friendly blog, for the 3-year-olds who might be reading.)  I’m surprised “Matthew Hoh – Totally Not a Wussy” wasn’t in the footer for each page.  As Silber did, I found the following passage the most indicative of this attitude:

“I’m not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love,” Hoh said. Although he said his time in Zabul was the “second-best job I’ve ever had,” his dominant experience is from the Marines, where many of his closest friends still serve.

“There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed,” he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. “I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys.”

Basically, Hoh is not against killing per se; he is thinking it unwise to continue in a “wasteful” war.  He is even willing to take a cut in pay and prestige to do it.  I haven’t looked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this got the career blogs humming in disapproval.  It seems few can fathom turning down a promotion.

Perhaps because his resignation lacks principle, he is getting the bulk of the media coverage.  Watada’s resistance and release is getting less play.  Is it because his stance is the more genuinely liberating  and therefore threatening one?

“I believe the only real God-given right we have is the freedom to choose,” Watada says. “And when we take that away from ourselves, then we put ourselves in an invisible prison that nobody else imposes on us except for ourselves. When you tell yourself again that you do have a choice–I could go to prison for it, I could be tortured, I could die for it, but I have that choice and I can make it–then that invisible prison kind of lifts off, and you feel free. I felt so free when I told myself that I have a choice.”

It is good to be reminded of this.  When we complain that the government is oppressing us, we concede that our freedom comes from the government.  That leaves us even less free than before.

(Is it trivial to point out that Watada could have faced capture and “prison,” “torture” and “death” if he’d remained in the Army?  Had he followed his conscience or not, he would have been in danger.  I am not trying to imply that his decision was entirely self-serving, only to underscore that the government was offering him a choice between threats abroad and threats at home.)

I read Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia when it was published 15 years ago, in 1994.  I reread some of it on Saturday night.  It was part of my futile never-ending quest to understand why and how some men exploit women and children and generally get to go on with their lives without consequences, as though it never happened.  The book includes the case of a teenage girl whom 4 boys  pulled into a car  while she was walking home alone.  3 of the 4 took turns raping her while laughing and joking, as well as declaring that she had “asked for it” by walking alone.

As it turns out, exactly as I was reading this, a 15-year-old girl in Richmond was being raped and beaten by as many as 10 of her her high school acquaintances, while 20 or more watched and laughed and even recorded the torture.  None were brave enough to intervene or even to sneak off and call police, though some grew bold enough to join in the raping.

From the comments on many of the articles on this particular attack, I find that many are blaming race and class, when they are not blaming the victim herself.  Yet the victim described in Reviving Ophelia was white and middle-class, and presumably her attackers were also.  And the attackers in the Polanski and Phillips cases were most solidly privileged, white entertainers.  (Both Roman Polanski and John Phillips are accused of drugging and raping their teenage victims, in Phillips’ case his own daughter.)  Polanski acted alone, but the media and his Hollywood supporters have generally filled in for the role of leering mob.

Many also blame porn, but I think it is at worst a symptom, not a disease.  Reviving Ophelia was published well before the internet was streaming pornography into everyone’s bedrooms.   Polanski’s case, as his defenders never tire of pointing out, is decades old.

The only truly common denominators are these:  that these children were raped by boys and men, and that someone has found a way to blame each of these women for being attacked.  Nothing can immunize these women from blame:  youth is not enough, being the attacker’s own daughter isn’t enough.  Even children, who can’t consent, are “asking for it,” in some cases presumably from their own fathers and friends.

I feel uneasy even pointing out that these were men who raped children.  I expect to be understood as a male-basher just for identifying the sex of those involved.  Yet many don’t hesitate to blame the victim, and implicitly all of womankind for their vulnerability.  Yes, I know, “victim” is not the politically correct word.  But nobody talks of “robbery survivors,” and I don’t want to imply that rape is some sort of routine trial for the strong to live through.

So, what to do?

The libertarians offer a very partial solution, which I do wholeheartedly support–the arming of women–but this is effective only against the small fraction of rapes which are committed by strangers.  Unfortunately it seems to be the only category of rape that libertarians and conservatives are routinely willing to acknowledge.  When they do acknowledge statistics showing that rape is widespread and perhaps worsening, they either:  deny them as paranoid concoctions of those harebrained feminists; or they blame the Sexual Revolution and the weakening of gender roles, which is, again, the fault of the feminists.

However, after reading Alternet’s “Why Do Men Catcall?” I suspect I’ve hit on some sort of solution of my own.  Feminists, always a problem, will probably object that it sounds too much like the stereotypical “woman’s intuition.”  But this is a step beyond, and far more impressive:  women merely have to attain psychic abilities.  This way, they will be able to detect whether or not a acquaintance, friend, date, relative, officer of the peace, or “liberating” soldier means them harm.  They will also be able to discern whether or not street harassment–itself often accompanied with joking and laughter–is merely harmless flattery, or will escalate into a brutal attack.  Since they are almost always blamed for their rapes, it is crucial that they develop these abilities.  (Abeer Qassim Hamza was harassed by soldiers for months before several finally decided to kill her and her family; her parents assumed they would “never attack a child.”)

I am not entirely being flip.  I’ve spent years trying to process the contradictory commands to women to “be careful,”  and nothing coherent has emerged, so I say:  attain supernatural mind-reading abilities!  Just be psychic, eliminate feminists, and girls can stop intruding upon others’ peace of mind with lurid stories of victimization.  The media’s got its hands full right now, what with the Richmond case and those of Polanski and Phillips.

Oh, but there’s this:  Reported Rapes hit 20-year low I further amend my conclusion:  become psychic, eliminate feminists, liberate technology.

By way of The Picket Line, I found this story:  Panel examines ‘war tax resistance’, where the hoary old “So are you against roads?” argument is resurrected in the comments.

The panel, “”The Power of the Purse: Women and War Tax Resistance,” was part of a four-day conference on tax resistance.  One of its speakers, Kathy Kelly, discussed the reasoning behind her convictions:

Kathy Kelly, who was sentenced to a year in federal prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites in 1988, said she came to the personal conviction that she would not support “bloody” government practices almost 30 years ago.

“There is no way, no how I would give my money to the Mafia, much less the IRS,” she said.

But her path isn’t for everyone, Kelly emphasized. Those who have families to consider, or who have been in the IRS system longer, could face stiffer penalties and heavier fines.

“We face a serious question about whether or not to continue to pour resources and productivity into military projects while we cannot meet human needs,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea to take that question seriously, as a personal question.”

And of course, in the comments (drumroll please), a formulation of the inevitable:  ”So, are you against roads too?”  One “Dinkledidder” writes:

Do these ladies have an issue with traveling on roads that are paved with tax-funded money? Did they receive an education at a public school? Do they have problems eating food or taking medicine that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration? I understand their stance as pacifists, I just find it hypocritical that they are willing to enjoy a free ride on the many other benefits that tax money provides.

What do I call this?  ”The Against Roads Fallacy”?  Driving on a taxpayer-funded road is taken as consent to funding it (it isn’t, for, generally speaking, no other roads are available); apparently it is also consent to participating in the American war machine as well, and everything else the government imposes on you and others.  What about the hypocrisy of those who want to expand government benefits for the sick and poor at home, but utterly ignore the lives being destroyed abroad–both funded by taxation?

Or is this just more of the “If You Don’t Like It, Why Don’t You Leave” fallacy? Well, there isn’t anywhere to go.

Speaking of which, I’ve had to defend The Seasteading Institute’s recently acquired nonprofit status against attacks that they are using “our” infrastructure to realize their goals, without paying taxes for them.  The irony is almost too deep to comment on.  They’re trying to create an option for leaving, which means they should have left already!  In other words, you’re totally free to build seasteads to live on in the ocean.  Try doing it with your bare hands out in the water.

So, to recap:  you consent to paying taxes by living in the United States (actually, you can’t dissent from paying them, which makes consent impossible).  You consent to using the tax-funded infrastructure, which by law is the only one available to you.  If you object to any part of that infrastructure, you are free to do exactly one thing, which is to give up everything.

Reminds me of the Onion spoof, Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village, where “Web users who choose to move to the desolate village are guaranteed an environment free from Google products and natural light from the sun.”  This is the illusion of choice offered to us.  You’re totally free to protest war, to opt out of the system.  This is only  so long as you also renounce, by Dinkledidder’s calculations, transit, education, food, medicine, and anything else necessary to life.  Do you feel free yet?  Have fun feeding yourself by the First Amendment.

Is this what they discuss on mainstream blogs?  The American Thinker tells us that maybe Obama isn’t as sweet as he seems, because he failed to properly defer to an older lady.  See if you can handle the awful truth:

Alice Palmer had been an Illinois state senator since 1991. In 1995 a U.S. congressional seat had become available and Ms. Palmer tossed her hat into the special election race. Barack Obama endorsed Palmer for Congress and she blessed him with an endorsement for the state seat she would leave open.

It was a simple plan: Palmer would go on to Washington and Obama would fill her seat in Illinois. The only problem was that Jesse Jackson Jr. would enter the congressional race and outspend Palmer almost two to one. After losing her congressional run, Palmer assumed that Obama would step aside and allow his elder to resume her post unchallenged.

But Barack Obama had no plans of stepping aside. That wasn’t the not-so-nice part. He certainly was entitled to stay in the Democratic primary. Convicted fraud artist, Tony Rezko raised over $15,000 for Obama’s campaign. That wasn’t the mean part either — though it was a little slimy. The not-so-nice part of Obama’s election victory was his treatment of Palmer. Obama had Palmer disqualified from the primary…[R]ather than leaving the outcome to the voters, Obama decided to take the matter into his own hands. He decided to use Chicago hardball tactics against Palmer. Obama had his team painstakingly examine each of the 1,580 signatures, searching for technicalities.

Obama was mean! To a lady! I’m shocked.  Shocked! Did you have any idea that those aspiring to positions of power might use anything but squeaky-clean tactics?  Like you, I never suspected.

But this is the sort of thing that captivates public attention, I suppose.  Is this all his opponents have got–breathless allegations that maybe he isn’t a nice guy?  If Obama kicked his new puppy on camera, it’d be all over the news outlets 24/7 for a week, and his popularity ratings would nosedive.  Actually, there’s an idea:  maybe he should try it if he decides to invade yet another country that hasn’t harmed us.  It would distract everyone from that.  Sort of like Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan to distract us from the Lewinsky trial, but backwards.

The American Thinker continues:

One by one, Obama’s ‘petitions guru’ [Ronald Davis] disqualified Palmer’s signatures for one reason or another. According to one local newspaper at the time: ‘Some of the problems include printing registered voters name [sic] instead of writing, a female voter got married after she registered to vote and signed her maiden name, registered voters signed the petitions but don’t live in the 13th district.’

At the end of the day, Obama disqualified enough signatures to kick Palmer out of the race. “While they were at it,” notes Freddoso, “Obama’s campaign got the other three candidates disqualified as well.”

Learning about the real Obama shatters the media-created image of Obama in an instant. Maybe, that’s why our brave journalists close their eyes, plug their ears and utter, “la, la, la, la.” Gee, Charlie, there’s a lot about him we don’t know.

In case you haven’t noticed, Mr. Kerley, Obama doesn’t tolerate opposition well. His treatment of Palmer is sort of consistent with his treatment of his current opponents. I can think of words to describe Obama, like controlling and authoritarian. But nice doesn’t come to mind; unless you’re only looking at the polished image.

How many years of experience do we have with polished images coming out of American PR machines?  Is it so difficult to process that “liking what a guy says” is as laughable as thinking him “someone you could have a beer with“?  And did you know that a guy hankering for the most powerful office in the world might be something other than humble and egalitarian?  How often does this need to be repeated?

UPDATE:  I have been alerted by Divia Melwani that this should be reposted on seathogs.com.

Self-indulgence alert.  You’ve been warned.  I’ll probably regret this post, or perhaps it is better reserved for a LiveJournal sort of thing, but:  why the hell do contemporary writers sound so much alike, whether they trade in fiction or nonfiction?

To prove my point I’ll excerpt a writer’s LiveJournal post:

Don’t just read because it will make you a better writer – although it will. Read because you love to read, you love stories of all shapes and sizes, you love the flow and rhythms and innovations of language, you love to learn stuff about people, you love to learn stuff about the world, you love to form relationships with individuals who don’t exist. Read because you love to write. Read because you love fiction and nonfiction and their pirate chests of treasures.

Does anyone know what this style of repetition is?   “Read because…” and “you love…” this and that.  Because it’s everywhere.  If you read a lot, as the above-quoted writer recommends, you might just be further immersing yourself in this style of writing.  It’ll just make it more difficult to reverse the damage later on.

“Stories of all shapes and sizes.”  Really?  Have any octagonal stories come down your pipeline lately?  Or stories shaped like a fatty?  What the hell does this even mean?  Everything I come across lately sounds like some sort of New Agey, Sunday School Obama speech.  (I guess that explains why it’s so widely used:  the public eats it up.)  At least she didn’t use the whole cliché:  ”all shapes, sizes, and colors.”

I’m sorry if this sounds like little more than an attack.  I know I’m leaving myself wide open (i.e., to charges of unrestrained snark, also irritatingly ubiquitous, according to some.)

Also, two words I want people to stop overusing:  ”rich” and “nourish.”  Just stop.

Well, this was frustrating.  Kerry Howley, Todd Seavey and Daniel McCarthy attempt to debate the importance of cultural values to libertarianism in November’s issue of reason:

Are Property Rights Enough? Should libertarians care about cultural values? A reason debate.

Howley writes:

It ought to seem obvious that a philosophy devoted to political liberty would concern itself with building a freedom-friendly culture. But the state-wary social conservative flinches when his libertarian friends celebrate the power of culture itself to liberate: the liberty of the pill, of pornography, of 600 channels where once there were three. The social conservative will refer to these wayward anti-statists as “cultural libertarians,” by which he means libertines. And it will always be in his interest to argue that the libertarian, qua libertarian, should stay mute on issues of culture.

Well, how far off the mark is our hypothetical social conservative?  Isn’t sexual and consumer hedonism properly described as a kind of libertinism?  From Wikipedia:  ”A libertine is one devoid of any restraints, especially one who ignores or even spurns accepted morals, and forms of behavior sanctioned by the larger society.”  The Oxford English Dictionary tell us that a libertine is “A man who is not restrained by moral law, esp. in his relations with the female sex,” or “Acknowledging no law in religion or morals; free-thinking; antinomian.”  I mean, why not call a spade a spade?  There are plenty of people who advocate sexual licentiousness, and only a fraction of them identify as libertarians.  If taking the Pill or channel surfing equated with libertarian activism, the movement wouldn’t be hurting so bad.

So I think Howley herself confuses liberty with libertarianism.  Also, I doubt that the conservative wants anyone to “stay mute on issues of culture.”  I mean, do they ever actually shut up about it?

In her introduction, I also think Howley is also overly optimistic about what development means for Chinese women:

“It was amazing to me how quickly she overturned the power structure within her family,” Leslie Chang writes in Factory Girls, her 2008 book on internal migration within China. Chang is marveling at Min, a 17-year-old who left her family farm to find work in a succession of factories in the rapidly urbanizing city of Dongguan. Had Min never left home, she would have been expected to marry a man from a nearby village, to bear his children, and to accept her place in a tradition that privileges husbands over wives. But months after Min found work in Dongguan, she was already advising her father on financial planning, directing her younger siblings to stay in school, and changing jobs without bothering to ask her parents’ permission.

Of course, in a horrible twist, this boost in freedom has also enabled women to destroy even more of their less-favored girl children.  From “The Daughter Deficit” in the New York Times:

It is rarely good to be female anywhere in the developing world today, but in India and China the situation is dire: in those countries, more than 1.5 million fewer girls are born each year than demographics would predict, and more girls die before they turn 5 than would be expected. (In China in 2007, there were 17.3 million births — and a million missing girls.) Millions more grow up stunted, physically and intellectually, because they are denied the health care and the education that their brothers receive.

Among policymakers, the conventional wisdom is that such selective brutality toward girls can be mitigated by two factors. One is development: surely the wealthier the home, the more educated the parents, the more plugged in to the modern economy, the more a family will invest in its girls. The other is focusing aid on women. The idea is that a mother who has more money, knowledge and authority in the family will direct her resources toward all her children’s health and education. She will fight for her girls.

Yet these strategies — though invaluable — underestimate the complexity of the situation in certain countries. To be sure, China and India are poor. But in both nations, girls are actually more likely to be missing in richer areas than in poorer ones, and in cities than in rural areas.

I haven’t read the book Howley cites, and so I can’t say if it covers this topic.  But suffice it to say that there are unintended consequences of even the most progressive, enlightened policies.  Cosmopolitanism alone won’t save us.

However, I think her example proves her point, albeit inadvertently.  Lifting the restrictions on commerce, seemingly the only goal of many libertarians, does not automatically equal liberation.  A cultural shift is also important.  Wealth without morals is exactly why we’re in the fix of spending billions to kill people who never harmed us, while the majority of Americans are too comfortable to care.

Seavey, as I just did, jumps on the sexual politics that Howley discusses, but he seems to be more interested in personally attacking her:

Howley is entitled to prefer whatever cultural norms she likes. We are in turn free to criticize, ridicule, and shun her.

Which he does, throughout the piece.  There’s more sarcasm than anything else:

Like countless young “Third Wave” feminists, Howley insists we see the specific, early-21st-century cultural agenda she’s pushing as a neutral blank slate, filled with endless possibilities and with no limitations on individuals and their boundless potential. By contrast, any conventions and cultural norms at odds with that vision are “walls,” like guard towers, seemingly backed by the threatening power of police truncheons.

The big question is why adherence to cultural norms is not itself an exercise of one’s freedom. Amish opponents of statism might think liberty grows more organically out of their highly traditional way of life than it does out of Howley’s just-do-it attitude. Meanwhile, fighting against social norms often includes opposition to such libertarian-approved bourgeois social norms as commerce and respect for property. Storefront-smashing anti-globalization activists are a good example of the dangerous paths that groovy cultural iconoclasm can take.

Hmm, I love the scare quotes around “Third Wave.”  I may be projecting, but I think you could sum up Seavey’s tone as “Hmm.  Pornography, eh?  Howley sounds like one of those dumb feminist sluts I’ve heard about.  Also, it sounds like she’s having more fun than I am.  I think I’ll take her down a peg.”  For one thing, Howley never calls herself a feminist in the piece; besides, the opinions of feminists, even “groovy” Third Wave ones,  on porn is highly divided.  Some of those feminists even have an uneasy alliance with the social conservatives that Howley derides and Seavey defends.

More importantly, it’s also extremely unfair that Seavey brings up “storefront-smashing anti-globalization activists” as an example of what happens when you take “cultural libertarianism” too far.  Obviously, if you’re smashing private property, you’ve already counted yourself out of the libertarian philosophy game.  But actually, I think this is where, among other places, Seavey concedes Howley’s main point.  And that point is not about sex, nor, as Seavey puts it, the coming of the “funky, libidinous, free-spirited, gender-neutral dance party,” (can I come?) but about the interrelationship between culture and liberty.

Does Seavey think our current situation of government oppression arose out of a vacuum?  Where did it come from, if not out of our culture?  Where would government get its authority if millions weren’t passively conceding to it?  The issues of consent and passivity are abundantly discussed in the libertarian literature:  the citizens outnumber their masters, so why on earth do they support the masters’ oppressive rule over them?  For God’s sake, yesterday I saw Kids’ Letters to Obama in a local lefty bookstore.  Like he’s freakin’ Santy Claus. (Actually, that would be preferable; Santa’s imaginary and therefore quite harmless, at least.)  The cultural indoctrination starts early, folks.  And we can see the results:  the adults are even less rational when it comes to seeing Obama as a magical year-long Christmas surprise.

Is all of this entirely irrelevant?  Or, since the culture wars are “endless” and therefore irrelevant, are we going to appeal to Science instead?  Is Seavey also going to defer to Science if it tells us that there are fundamental chemical differences between the brains of libertarians and adherents to the major political parties, or between pols and plebes?  How would he account for the fact that women once made up 5% of doctors and now represent closer to 50% of them, and that once there were none of them at all?  As he writes,

[Howley] mentions, for instance, that 5.5 percent of medical students, decades ago, “happened to have female bodies.” She concedes briefly that discrepancies in gender roles “may” result from psychological inclinations or voluntary behavior patterns rather than oppression, but she gives us no reason to believe that she has special skills enabling her to decide better than the rest of us when the sorting processes of society have yielded acceptably “free” results and when they have yielded unacceptably gendered ones. That’s why libertarians traditionally focus so much on the physical-coercion litmus test: Other tests are as hopelessly ambiguous as the bickering of democratic socialists.

True, neither Howley nor Seaver nor I can tell you when “society” has yielded us “acceptably free” results.  Does that mean we stop discussing it?

I think you should read the excellent article by economics professor Marc W. Herold, “Killing the Innocents to Save ‘Our Troops’” posted at the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) website. I feel compelled to warn you that it has extremely graphic photos of airstrike victims, and also that it mistakenly identifies Rep. Ron Paul as an Independent rather than a Republican.

Herold discusses in detail the minimal monetary value that the U.S. attaches to Afghan casualties, in terms of the wrongful death amounts awarded. And since the majority of those casualties are women and children, we find that gender and age as well as color matter:

U.S aerial strikes were a chosen way of minimizing U.S casualties at the expense of Afghan civilian deaths and injured. In other words, a conscious self-serving U.S decision was made to impose undue harm upon Afghan civilians. That is a war crime. Moreover, as I have long argued and documented, some 60-70 percent of Afghan civilians killed by U.S and NATO forces have been women and children ⁽¹⁹⁾. That is another war crime!

Oh well.  Let’s look on the bright side: at least with air strikes, the victims of wartime rape, also predominantly women and children, just get incinerated, not assaulted and then killed.

But of course, to oppose this war means to oppose women’s rights, at least from the perspective of domestic feminists and human rights organizations.  As Herold notes:

Other American commentators – the humanitarian interventionists on Afghanistan – including Human Rights Watch, Sarah Chayes, Harvard’s Carr Center, etc. – present a completely idyllic end-game where jolly Afghan farmers labor in cooperatives producing pomegranates or saffron for export and Afghan girls’ schools dot the countryside. This has nothing to do with reality and all with marketing/selling the war to the American general public.

I’d add Code Pink and the Feminist Majority Foundation to that list of embarrassments.  The FMF piece, authored by Eleanor Smeal, approvingly notes that the Afghans are progressing toward her ideals of equality:

In the last seven years, there have been some successes. In 2000, girls were not allowed to attend school. Last year, the U.N. reported that 6 million children attended school. More than a third were girls. 49% of health care workers are women. Women comprise 25% of civil service workers.

Women also represent the majority of the civilian casualties, but strangely enough, Smeal leaves this out.  And neither Herold nor Smeal address exactly how many of these women and girls are in increased danger of rape due to the region’s instability.  But this shouldn’t be too surprising, since FMF’s co-founder, Peg Yorkin, apparently approves of child rape, so long as the perpetrator is sufficiently talented and connected.  And who could be more connected than the USG? (To be fair, Yorkin did catch from her late producer husband a vicious case of Hollywood-itis, which leaves  its sufferers with a moral IQ less than that of Woody Allen’s.)

From the blog Queer Kids of Queer Parents Against Gay Marriage! (!), I share with you “Resist the Gay Marriage Agenda!“

There’s a lot in the post I don’t agree with, but I have spent the last decade puzzling over why gays want so badly to get into the marriage and military rackets, and it’s always a relief to find a little intellectual support here and there:

We’re seeing queer communities fractured as one model of family is being hailed and accepted as the norm, and we are seeing queer families and communities ignore and effectively work against groups who we see as natural allies, such as immigrant families, poor families, and families suffering from booming incarceration rates. We reject the idea that any relationship based on love should have to register with the state.  (Amen!  -me)

…Perhaps because the gay marriage movement has forgotten about the plurality and diversity of queer communities and queer activism, it has tried to gloss over its shortcomings by appropriating the struggles of other communities. We reject the notion that “gay is the new black,” that the fight for marriage equality is parallel to the fight for civil rights, that queer rights and rights for people of color are mutually exclusive.  We don’t believe that fighting for inclusion in marriage is the same as fighting to end segregation. …We would like to see a queer community that, rather than appropriating the narrative of the civil rights movement for its marriage equality campaign, takes an active role in exposing and protesting structural inequality and structural racism.

…The gay marriage agenda also supports the expansion of the army, seemingly forgetting about all of the ways that the army creates and maintains violence and power. The gay marriage agenda fights to abolish the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy, promoting the military’s policy and seeking inclusion. We’ve thought long and hard about this, and we can’t remember liking anything that the US military has done in a really long time. What we do remember is how the military mines places where poor people and people of color live, taking advantage of the lack of opportunities that exist for kids in those communities and convincing them to join the army. We think it’s time that queers fight the army and the wars it is engaged in instead of asking for permission to enter.

Michael Warner’s book The trouble with normal: sex, politics, and the ethics of queer life makes some points along these lines:  namely, why are sexual transgressors trying so damned hard to look normal and legitimate?  Isn’t that a way of rejecting and isolating these who are still considered illegitimate members of society?  In Warner’s words, this underclass is made up of the “sluts, prostitutes, trannies, club crawlers, and other lowlifes,” who are being ignored in favor of those who want weddings.

I’m not saying I fully agree with the Queer Kids of Queer Parents or with Warner, but these questions seem to have been utterly elided by the current boosters for gay marriage.  As the Queer Kids put it:

We’re not like everyone else.

Everywhere we turn, it seems like someone wants us to support gay marriage. From enthusiastic canvassers on the street to liberal professors in the academy, from gay lawyers to straight soccer moms, there’s someone smiling at us, eager to let us know how strongly they support our “right to marry,” waiting for what should be our easy affirmation. And there seems to be no space for us to resist the agenda that has been imposed upon us.