Steve Dyer

I have a theory I wanted to share about the Clippers owner and racist billionaire Donald Sterling.

He said that he doesn't mind if his much younger, very attractive girlfriend sleeps with black men, but doesn't want her to be photographed in public with them. At first this made no sense to me, but as I thought about why he would want such a situation, it became clear as day. Donald Sterling is a cuckold fetishist. It turns him on to think about (and probably watch) his girlfriend be fucked by black men, but he still has significant shame about it. He expresses that shame by not letting her appear in public with black men, lest his fetish become exposed. In other words, he wants his humiliation to be private, not public.

If you are so inclined, I humbly suggest that you out him. As a (half) black and kink-friendly man, I am regularly offended by otherwise decent people who allow racism to become entrenched in their sexual behavior. I have no problem with consensual D/s play, but I always feel a racist twinge when I see white men looking for "BBCs" or black bucks to fuck (often with a strong subtext of rape) their white wives.
It's utterly dehumanizing, and it comes as no surprise that these people can twist that cognitive dissonance into a very insidious kind of casual racism.

Rant over. Keep up the good work! I'm a huge fan, I have been for many years, and I can say without exaggeration that your work has changed my life. Thank you so much!!!

Half Black, Fully Pissed

My response after the jump...

Donald Sterling could be a cuckold—that was my gut reaction when I first heard about Sterling's racist remarks to his girlfriend. (Sterling's girlfriend just so happens to be "(half) black" herself.) Sterling doesn't care if his girlfriend fucks black dudes? He just doesn't want her posting pictures of herself with black dudes on her Instagram account? Things that make you go, "Hm... sounds kinda like a cuckold."

And here's what I tweeted on Saturday afternoon:

So.. this #Sterling asshole doesn't care if his GF fucks black guys? Just don't post photos to Instagram with black guys? Cuz he gets calls?
— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) April 26, 2014

Two thoughts: #Sterling gets off on the idea of his GF sleeping with black dudes. And his friends are even bigger racists than he is.
— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) April 26, 2014

It's not unheard of.... “@wonkinakilt: @fakedansavage Racism-frosted cuckold fetish?”
— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) April 26, 2014

Totally racist white guys who get off on their wives and girlfriends sleeping with black dudes? That's definitely a thing. So maybe it was Sterling's thing?

Jon Stewart seemed to think so too. The Daily Show host played the tape of Sterling urging his girlfriend to fuck black guys, if that's what she wants to do, and then protesting that he couldn't possibly be racist because he pays the black guys on his basketball team well enough that they can afford food, clothing, and shelter. Stewart characterized Sterling's feelings about black men this way: "I'm racist—but my dick and my wallet are not."

But then I listened to the tapes themselves...

I want you to love them—privately.... But why publicize it on the Instagram? And why bring it to my games? … You can sleep with them, you can bring them in, you can do whatever you want! The little I ask you is not to promote it [and] not to bring them to my games.

I’ve known [Magic Johnson] well, and he should be admired. And I’m just saying that it’s too bad you can’t admire him privately... Admire him, bring him here, feed him, fuck him, I don’t care! You can do anything. But don’t put him on an Instagram for the world to have to see, so they have to call me. And don’t bring him to my games. OK?

While the above excerpts read cuckoldy—cuckoldy as all hell—they didn't come across that way when you actually listened to the tapes. There's no salacious edge to Sterling's voice. There's no sense of lust or desire. And his girlfriend doesn't respond with, "Yeah, I know how much you like that!" Sterling never tells her that he's turned on by the idea of her fucking Magic Johnson. Quite the opposite: Sterling seems completely indifferent to who his girlfriend sleeps with when she's not with him—white dudes, black dudes, blue dudes, HIV+ dudes. (Johnson is HIV+, of course, so Sterling can't be faulted for being a pozphobe.) What comes across on the tape is, "I could give a shit what you do," which is not how cuckolds sound when they're talking to their wives or girlfriends about the other men they're fucking. Sterling sounds like a racist asshole in those tapes, for sure, but he doesn't sound like a sexually excited racist asshole.

I can see why your mind went there, HBFP, because that's immediately where my mind went. But I'm no longer in the cuckold camp.

As for the problematic/dehumanizing/angering nature of white cuckolds seeking out black men to fuck their wives... I hope you're still a fan, HBFP, after you read my advice to an otherwise progressive white dude struggling with the implications of his "objectifying and racist" cuckold fantasies. It's here.

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You know how after 9/11, before the jingoism and the bullshit, all you wanted to do was cry, and even The Onion couldn’t really make fun of what happened and just went full on poignant and wrote pieces about baking cakes and having your neighbors come over because you didn’t know what else to do? That’s pretty much how we feel about the botched execution in Oklahoma last night.

An Oklahoma inmate who was supposed to be executed Tuesday instead died of a heart attack after the execution was botched, state officials said.

Clayton Lockett’s execution Tuesday night was halted after about 20 minutes due to an issue with a vein, the Associated Press reported. Not long after Lockett was deemed unconscious from the first of three drugs, he began “writhing on the gurney,” according to the Associated Press. He was declared dead 43 minutes after the execution began.

You know what? That’s sort of a clinical account. It’s the “mistakes were made” version. Let’s read a little more about how this went down.

[Clayton] Lockett, 38, received the first dose of the three-drug cocktail at 6:23 p.m.

The drugs were midazolam, which causes unconsciousness; vecuronium bromide, which stops respiration; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. They are administered in that order. The state has said the procedure is meant to involve three doctors with hand-held syringes, injecting the drugs into IV lines in both the inmate’s arms.

At 6:33 p.m., 10 minutes after the execution began, a doctor said Lockett was unconscious. But three minutes later, Lockett began to nod and mumble and writhe, witnesses said. [...]

A spokesman for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections [...] confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that Lockett did not die immediately after the lethal injection was administered.

“The director did say that it appears that a vein [in Lockett's body] blew up or exploded, it collapsed, and the drugs were not getting into the system like they were supposed to,” spokesman Jerry Massie said.

Massie said that after the new injection was administered, the condemned man “was obviously showing some movement.”

“After several minutes, five minutes, he was not unconscious,” Massie said. “They made a decision to halt the execution, but at 7:06 he suffered a massive heart attack and expired.”

See? Honestly, what can we say except things like “I feel sick to my stomach” and “I am ashamed to live in America, a place that still does this to people” — both of which were things we actually said last night. Let’s take refuge in a little background lawsplaining for a bit.

One of the major reasons that we are currently treating inmates like guinea pigs is that the anti-death penalty movement has actually been remarkably successful in using good old capitalism to make killing harder.

Each time a state has found a new source for a drug to use in executions, Reprieve, an anti-death penalty organization based in London, in collaboration with death penalty lawyers in the United States, has used freedom of information laws, the local news media and the powers of persuasion to compel the drug’s manufacturer to cut off the supply.

However, because some people are terrible people who deserve no redemption in this life or the next (looking at you, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin) some states like Oklahoma responded to this by passing laws that explicitly said the names of the manufacturers of the drugs had to be kept secret to insulate them from any economic pressure and to ensure the state got to go on killing without interruption. This led to lawsuits by inmates — including Clayton Lockett — pointing out that sentencing someone to die by a means that was largely undiscoverable and had no safety or inspection controls built in whatsoever might actually be cruel and unusual punishment, which is a thing that we theoretically prohibit in America, even for people receiving the death penalty. And for people that want to show up and say things like “he got what he deserved because he did far worse blah blah blah” we will say to you “fuck you, read the goddamn constitution, because we are obliged, even if we choose to kill people, not to do so in a cruel and unusual fashion, because if we take that away we’re basically Idi Amin, assholes.”

Where were we? Oh, yeah, so the drug cocktail that was set to be pumped into Lockett’s veins was a complete fucking mystery, quality-control wise.

In March, Oklahoma [...] said it would instead use one of five possible drug combinations, including a two-drug cocktail of midazolam (a sedative) and hydromorphone (a pain killer). When states first proposed using those drugs in lethal injection mixes last year, defense lawyers and medical experts warned that inmates receiving them would essentially suffocate to death. Brushing aside these concerns, in January Ohio used the drugs to execute Dennis McGuire, who gasped and convulsed horribly for more than 10 minutes before taking a record 26 minutes to die. [...]

Oklahoma has since shifted course again and announced that it would use a three-drug combo that includes midazolam and pancuronium bromide. According to Madeline Cohen, an assistant federal public defender representing Charles Warner, the state claims that both drugs are being purchased from manufacturers rather than compounding pharmacies but wouldn’t provide any other information. The only known use of this drug combination for executions was in Florida in 2013, but Florida used five times the dose of midazolam that Oklahoma plans to use, meaning Lockett and Warner will essentially be human guinea pigs.

For a wee bit, based on this argument, the Supreme Court of Oklahoma stayed the execution of Lockett and another inmate scheduled to die yesterday, Charles Warner, while Fallin and the state GOP huffed and puffed and threatened to impeach the judges or just order the executions anyway. Then the OK Supremes abruptly reversed course and decided that the Mystery Death Injection was totally cool, so let’s go ahead.

Except it was not totally cool because of the whole part where it DID NOT WORK RIGHT and Lockett lived an agonizing 43 minutes after they started pushing the stuff into his veins. And we don’t actually know how he exactly died, because he suffered a massive heart attack, which could have been brought on from one of the three drugs, all of the drugs, one of the drugs coming from a batch of tainted or fucked-up drugs or many more depressing possibilities.

Look, America. We’re better than this. We’ve got to be better than this. We are not a people that should kill people in any state-sanctioned fashion (yes, drones too, please do not hijack the comments to talk about drones goddammit) and if we are awful enough to choose to do so, we really are obliged to do so in a fashion that doesn’t make them die of a heart attack only after an agonizing three quarters of an hour.

Here is Robert Patton, Oklahoma corrections chief, talking about the botched execution. Look at his face.

Justice Harry Blackmun who was as good, and as flawed, a human being as ever sat on the United States Supreme Court bench, was a death penalty supporter for most of his career, until he just couldn’t take it anymore. Couldn’t take the uncertainties inherent in the system, couldn’t be responsible for the arbitrary infliction of death, couldn’t couldn’t could not.

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored–indeed, I have struggled–along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies. [...] The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent, and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.

From this day forward, let us all tinker with the machinery of death no more. Please.

[Los Angeles Times/WaPo/ProPublica/Mother Jones/Callins v. Collins, Justice Blackmun dissenting]

3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri, the 2014 poetry winner, went from 11 copies to 81 copies (353 copies sold to date).

There is more here.

rubee:

sexhaver:

this picture is a lot funnier if you imagine this seal’s mouth is the black line between its whiskers instead of the one under them

I know that I am not the only Toast reader who was regularly scolded for sitting on the sidelines and reading a book during recess. It is when we enter a lively discussion about the dubious science/historical accuracy/ psychological validity of a beloved book series that I feel most connected to you all. So when Mallory brought up the topic—first through Twitter, and then on this very site—of the scientific basis of Animorphs, I couldn’t resist procrastinating just a little bit more on my dissertation to delve further into the idea.

I spotted one of the first Animorphs books on display at a Scholastic book fair (let’s pause for a moment to revel in the glorious memory of book fairs) and was immediately hooked.  Girls turning into dolphins? Someone had reached deep inside of me, plucked out my dearest fantasy, and bound it in a faux-lenticular Photoshop extravaganza. For a while, I managed to keep up with the series’ near-monthly releases. I experienced the cold panic of Tobias and Jake’s certain death when David moved to town and tried to destroy our fair heroes. I became so engrossed in a new release that I wandered off into a corner with it at Atlantic Book Warehouse and my mother had to page me over the intercom.

I never did manage to finish the series, but I read the majority of the non-ghostwritten books, including the outstanding Hork-Bajir Chronicles (sobbing quietly in my sleeping bag during a family camping trip) and the similarly exceptional Andalite Chronicles.

I hope that you, dear commentators, will fill in any details I have missed. Those of you who are well versed in the cognitive sciences (or philosophy or metaphysics) can also feel free to point out any errors in my reasoning.

In Mallory’s original post, she discussed a number of relevant and legitimate concerns, but I’m going to focus on the questions related to cognition. What exactly is Applegate insinuating about the nature of the mind and brain? The relationship between mind, brain, and body is a theme central to Animorphs. Humans and various aliens morph into other creatures, maintaining (occasionally tenuous) control of these new physical forms with their extant minds and communicating in the “universal mind symbols” of thought-speak (I’m not going to touch that one. Have at it, linguists). Yeerks—the baddies in the series—slither into the brains of others to control them directly, presumably through physiological mechanisms. In a multi-layered mindfuck, a Yeerk can control another individual with morphing capabilities, forcing that individual to morph and presumably wreak havoc or engage in other dastardly deeds. Query: Could an Animorph technically morph into a Yeerk, take a morph-enabled host, and proceed to morph into an entirely different creature? Minds on minds on minds.

This is all very well and good, especially if you are eleven years old and you really just want to get out of playing kickball or fantasize about Tobias and his 90’s bowl cut, ever-so-slightly tousled by his daily trip upside-down into the toilet bowl.  But I am now 25 years of age and have a master’s degree, so it’s time to up the level of scientific scrutiny. What is Animorphs really saying about the relationship between our thoughts and consciousness and the physical stuff that makes up our brains and bodies? Is Applegate a dualist? That is, does she believe that the mind somehow exists independent of or greater than our brain? That our consciousness, or soul, or our very essence, is greater than the sum of our meaty parts? Or is she a materialist: does she believe that our thoughts and sense of self emerge directly from our physical being, and that everything we think and feel is represented in our firing synapses and the interactions between our bodies and the world around us?

Let’s start with what the series gives us to work with. In book 10, The Android, Marco learns what happens to one’s body “ in morph” from his friendly alien compatriot, Ax.

<Ah. I am frightened, too. I don’t really like morphing tiny animals. I keep thinking about all the rest of my mass.>

<Your what?> I asked, not really caring. I was focused on the morphing ahead.

<My mass. When you morph something smaller than yourself, your body mass must go somewhere. So it goes into Zero-space. Zero-space is the space that ships travel through when they are going faster than light. It’s not very likely to happen, but sometimes a ship traveling in Z-space will intersect with a temporarily parked mass.>

This got my total, complete attention.

<A big wad of Marco in Zero-space,> I muttered. <Like hanging your butt out of a car window and waiting for a truck to come along and sideswipe it off.>

If we believe that the Animorphs universe subscribes to the laws of dualism, then the problem is a simple one. Even when Rachel morphs into an ant with a tiny ant brain, her mind still exists, perfectly intact and Amazonian, floating in the ether, controlling her actions, and planting the seeds of feminism in young girls everywhere (Question for discussion: Who is your feminist icon, Rachel or Cassie? Which one did you have a crush on?) Fans of the series will already spot an issue with this solution, however, particularly when it comes to morphs like the ant. Here’s Marco again, this time in book 5, the first time the gang tries out this morph:

<What’s the matter?> Tobias cried.

<I … I … I lost myself,> I said. <I was gone. I was lost. I didn’t even exist.>

<Get out of that morph!> Tobias said.

But I could hear the others now, snapping back into reality. Becoming again. Crying.

<What kind of creatures are these?> It was Ax. He sounded terrified. Terrified. <They have no self! I was lost! There was nothing to hold onto. They are not whole. They are only parts, like cells. Just pieces. What kind of foul creatures are these?>

<Listen. You guys morph back,> Tobias said. <This sucks. This isn’t right.>

<Hive,> Cassie said, sounding shattered. <They are social insects. Part of a colony. A hive. I should have guessed. I should have known. Ax is right. Each of us is only a part. Like a single cell within a human body.>

The fact that the Animorphs had to grapple with “animal instinct” suggests that that they don’t simply control animal bodies with their intact minds. In other words, one doesn’t control an animal body remotely, as if using a video game controller or pulling puppet strings from somewhere in Z-space.

These “animal instincts” are cognitive in nature, and sometimes complex higher-order cognitive processes at that. The instincts associated with dog and dolphin morphs relate directly to the animals’ dispositions (looking back, though, I find it surprising that all of the dolphin minds just wanted to goof off and play. I have to believe that any animal as intelligent as a dolphin is, on average, probably a huge asshole). With morphs like the ant, the shrew, or the flea, the Animorphs experience a lack of personality, independence, and drive. Applegate is suggesting that the physical animal brains impinge upon and transform the Animorphs’ very consciousness, altering who they are and how they respond. Thus, she does not seem to believe that the human mind exists completely independent of the brain.

So, is Applegate a materialist? Does she believe that the essential “Jake-ness” of Jake and “Tobias-ness” of Tobias, their personalities and thoughts and being, are contained in the meat of their human form (and particularly in their human brain)?

Applegate seems to make a distinction between the aforementioned “instincts,” which are automatic and relatively stable, and the stream-of-conscious experience of an intelligent human being. This potentially suggests some level of neural localization—that is, the idea that particular regions of the brain are “responsible” for different cognitive processes.

Neuroscientists know that this is at least somewhat true—when a patient has a lesion (from a stroke or head injury) on a particular part of the brain, she or he may lose a very specific ability, such as the ability to encode new memories, or speak out loud, or identify an object pictured one one’s left side but not one’s right. From neuroimaging studies, we know that certain neural regions become more active than others when a living human performs certain cognitive tasks. Converging evidence from these and other fields of study support neural localization. Perhaps Applegate is proposing that, while in morph, the Animorph’s human cortex (responsible for higher order cognitive processes like planning and decision-making, and for interpreting sensory input and coordinating movements) is grafted on the animal’s hindbrain. The limbic area, containing structures involved in motivation, fear processing, and fight-or-flight responses, is a little trickier to divide neatly. Wherever the division occurs, this theory would involve parts of the human brain in Z-space interfacing with parts of the animal brain through some kind of inter-dimensional connection.

The problem with this cosmic-brain-graft theory is that neural localization only takes us so far. There is no “consciousness region” of the brain (sorry, Francis Crick). The various parts of our brain are in constant conversation; our personalities, thoughts, and reactions emerge as the result of multiple brain regions working together. In reality, we are never, ever, using only 10% of our brain. In fact, even we are spacing out and ostensibly “doing nothing,” a variety of neural networks continue to activate.

One network in particular has even been associated quite robustly with the stream-of-consciousness style of thinking. And these networks develop slowly over the span of childhood and adolescence; you couldn’t attach two previously unacquainted brain parts and expect them to work together. (You CAN do F’d-up things like transplant mouse cortex onto kitten cortex, but it takes a bit longer than the two-hour morphing window). Plus, the morphing technology was designed with the Andalite brain in mind, and yet it transfers seamlessly to humans, a completely alien species (Evo-devo people: do Andalites and humans have a common ancestor? Further research reveals several bird-like species in the Andalite home world as well. Where is my Inter-Planetary Bering Strait Crossing Theory?).

Among the Animorph’s many animal morphs are several pretty intelligent species. The dog and the dolphin have been mentioned. Marco’s battle morph is a gorilla, which is capable of complex social interaction and possibly even language. A gorilla has a nice big squiggly neocortex, much like a human. In my mind, there is very little question that great apes possess something like self-awareness and consciousness. We do know that gorillas, and several other animals, recognize themselves in a mirror—which for whatever reason has become a benchmark for possessing consciousness. All this is to say that not only would we have to consider what parts of the Animorph brain are linked up to the animal, but also that some part of the animal brain has to be turned OFF. I have to give major props to the Andalites for developing such a sophisticated and sensitive technology.

This idea of turning OFF the animal consciousness seems to be one of the essential differences between the Yeerk’s biological ability and the Andalite’s technology (Something else to consider: did the Andalites harness the Yeerk’s biological ability to develop the benevolent mind control involved in morphing?). The technological off-switch is the second most important difference between the Yeerks and the Andalites; the first being, of course, that Yeerks are parasites who control the actual primary body of a creature, whereas Andalites essentially clone a creature and then hack into their brain.

I believe Applegate is implying that no clones were harmed in the making of the Animorphs. Somehow, the little blue box confers the ability to morph into the complete body of an animal (or human!), but with its sentience completely erased. In cognitive science, this sort of body-without-sentience is called a zombie (seriously). And here’s the thing: as the old thought experiment goes, if a zombie is physiologically indistinguishable from a non-zombie version of the same creature, the only possible explanation is that consciousness is dictated by a non-material phenomenon. In other words, where there’s a zombie, there’s dualism.

Unless of course:

1. The Andalite technology isn’t quite so benevolent, and the poor innocent minds are being suppressed, Yeerk-style, and watching in horror while the Animorphs innocently believe they are fighting for neural freedom.

2. If you captured someone in flagrante de-morph-o and sliced open their head, their brain would be somehow physically different. For all of the gross body horror Applegate gives us, this possibility is never mentioned, to my knowledge.

3. It’s all just a Ketran world-building video game, laws of physics be damned.

4. There is more freaky shit going on in Z-space, involving some sort of metaphysical space-time connection that our puny human brains cannot fathom. Which, okay, not to get all hard sci-fi on you right now, *pushes sweaty glasses up the bridge of nose* but that would be a total cop-out.

Alas, dear readers, I fear that I have no straight answer. Using the limited powers of my own brain-meat (I’m a materialist; in my book, the burden of proof is on the anti-physicalists), I fail to place Applegate solidly in one camp or the other. Based on our working knowledge of the human brain—which, granted, is still quite limited—I feel fairly confident that it would be impossible to Frankenstein together the morpher’s stream-of-conscious experience and the morphee’s instincts and brain-body interface. You can’t have your controlling-the-actions-of-a-new-body cake and eat it too. At the same time, however, morphing is a technology, not a superpower. The implication is that the Andalites worked within the physical laws of the universe to engineer it.  Then again, this is a universe in which the characters once time-traveled to the Cretaceous period and got eaten by dinosaurs.

So, now it’s your turn. What do you think? Try out a few of these theories. Your mileage may vary… unless you use a Z-space transponder. Hey-ohh! *Raises hand in the air for a triumphant high five*

Read more The Morphing Science of Animorphs at The Toast.

Excellent interview with George R. R. Martin at Rolling Stone:

How did you come up with the Wall?
The Wall predates anything else. I can trace back the inspiration for that to 1981. I was in England visiting a friend, and as we approached the border of England and Scotland, we stopped to see Hadrian’s Wall. I stood up there and I tried to imagine what it was like to be a Roman legionary, standing on this wall, looking at these distant hills. It was a very profound feeling. For the Romans at that time, this was the end of civilization; it was the end of the world. We know that there were Scots beyond the hills, but they didn’t know that. It could have been any kind of monster. It was the sense of this barrier against dark forces – it planted something in me. But when you write fantasy, everything is bigger and more colorful, so I took the Wall and made it three times as long and 700 feet high, and made it out of ice.

and some political economy:

A major concern in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones is power. Almost everybody – except maybe Daenerys, across the waters with her dragons – wields power badly.
Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?

In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I’ve tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don’t have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn’t make you a wise king.

iamunforgettable:

Look at hiS BUTT OMG

“Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you’ll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace.”
―Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

Tumblr Gets Deep (21 Pics)

multiplaying:

multiplaying:

so why does the flexed bicep emoji hands looks like a sloth

Attention, nerds! HBO and Amazon Prime have announced a power-sharing agreement that is much more exciting than the one happening halfway around the world, so pay no attention to Fatah and Hamas. If you have a subscription to Amazon’s extra-special-bonus soon-to-be-$99-a-year service Prime, starting May 21, you will be able to stream episodes of the shows that put the Premium in premium cable:

It means access to HBO will no longer be limited to cable or satellite provider packages, opening the door wide for the first time to cord-cutters who’ve doubtless been waiting for a deal like this to go down. It means you’ll be able to tap HBO with anything that currently supports Amazon’s Prime channel — set-tops, tablets, phones, game consoles, etc. — and gain access to whole swathes of HBO content (as well as free two-day shipping and Kindle library lending) for Amazon’s standard $99-per-year fee.

Bear in mind, if you’re not a member, that Prime content is free to Prime members; this isn’t HBO signing up to let Amazon charge you to watch these shows. Amazon says Prime members will have “unlimited streaming access.”

Perhaps Amazon acceded in order to make its rate hike more palatable to its consumers. Perhaps HBO did because it wanted to give younger people, who are increasingly likely to eschew cable altogether, an option beyond stealing their parents’ HBO Go passwords. Who cares! More Sopranos and The Wire and yes even Sex and the City, without which I would have nothing to discuss with other straight women. Your move, Showtime.

Suffragette: Susan B. Anthony, 1820-1906 (Social reformer, member of the Anti-Slavery Society, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association)
Hooray: “I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.”
Wait, What: “Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro; but with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”

Suffragette: Anna Howard Shaw, 1847-1919 (Physician, Methodist minister, president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, inspiration for an episode of 30 Rock)
Hooray: “Around me I saw women overworked and underpaid, doing men’s work at half men’s wages, not because their work was inferior, but because they were women.”
Wait, What: “You have put the ballot in the hands of your black men, thus making them political superiors of white women. Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political masters of their former mistresses!”

Suffragette: Belle Kearney, 1863-1939 (Orator, novelist, Mississippi state senator)
Hooray: “Equal pay for equal work.”
Wait, What: “The enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained, for upon unquestioned authority it is stated that in every southern State but one there are more educated women than all the illiterate voters, white and black, native and foreign, combined. As you probably know, of all the women in the South who can read and write, ten out of every eleven are white. When it comes to the proportion of property between the races, that of the white outweighs that of the black immeasurably.”

Suffragette: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815-1902 (Social activist, abolitionist, author)
Hooray: “The best protection any woman can have is courage.”
Wait, What: ”What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?”

Suffragette: Laura Clay, 1849-1940 (Founder of Kentucky’s first suffrage group)
Hooray: “Religious intolerance just now is abroad in the land. It is an evil passion of the heart which dies hard…This campaign is a call to every true American of whatever party to stand firmly for the principle of religious freedom.”
Wait, What: “The white men, reinforced by the educated white women, could ‘snow under’ the Negro vote in every State, and the white race would maintain its supremacy without corrupting or intimidating the Negroes.”

Suffragette: Frances Willard, 1839-1898 (Feminist lecturer, founder of the National Council of Women, anti-child abuse activist)
Hooray: “Politics is the place for woman.”
Wait, What: “Alien illiterates rule our cities today; the saloon is their palace, and the toddy stick their scepter. The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt.”

Suffragette: Carrie Chapman Catt, 1859-1947 (Founder of the League of Women Voters)
Hooray: “”There is one thing mightier than kings and armies”–aye, than Congresses and political parties–”the power of an idea when its time has come to move.” The time for woman suffrage has come. The woman’s hour has struck. If parties prefer to postpone action longer and thus do battle with this idea, they challenge the inevitable. The idea will not perish; the party which opposes it may. Every delay, every trick, every political dishonesty from now on will antagonize the women of the land more and more, and when the party or parties which have so delayed woman suffrage finally let it come, their sincerity will be doubted and their appeal to the new voters will be met with suspicion.”
Wait, What: “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.”

Suffragette: Rebecca Ann Latimer Felton, 1835-1930 (First woman to serve in the Senate)
Hooray: ”A Senator of the U.S., a woman, is still a sort of political joke with our masculine leaders in party politics…. But the trail has been blazed! The road is apparently rough—maybe rocky—but the trail has been located. It is an established fact. While it is also a romantic adventure, it will ever remain an historical precedent—never to be erased.”
Wait, What: ”I do not want to see a negro man walk to the polls and vote on who should handle my tax money, while I myself cannot vote at all…When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue—-if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts—-then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.”

Read more Suffragettes Who Sucked: White Supremacy And Women’s Rights at The Toast.

On “Meet The Press Yesterday,” David Gregory didn’t ask Jo Becker to defend her claim that the marriage equality revolution “began” in 2008  and was the triumph of Ted Olson and Chad Griffin over the countless activists who had allowed the issue to “languish in obscurity” for years. No surprise there – but a clue as to why Gregory has led MTP to epic lows in viewership.

Becker – amazingly – has stuck to a p.r. strategy that doesn’t even mention the controversy over her book – check out her Twitter feed here, where she simply won’t address it at all. You’d think that an author who wrote such a controversial book would engage the criticism – or link to it and respond forthrightly. But Becker just pretends that the controversy doesn’t exist! Or says she wrote a book that is utterly different than the one I’ve read. What does that tell you? In my view, it tells you that she has no defense, has no grasp on gay history, and cannot defend her own thesis. The book is as much a hagiography of a handful of late-comers to the cause as it is a brutal denigration of all those who came before. Why won’t she defend this argument in public?

Meanwhile, the man who relentlessly spun Bill Clinton’s signing of the Defense of Marriage Act, Richard Socarides, was interviewed for the book and covers for its distortions of history here. And Noah Feldman has a critical must-read on the ludicrous legal claims of the book. Money quote:

In order to take credit for results they didn’t achieve, based on the accomplishments of a movement to which they did not and do not belong, Boies and Olson and their media proxies need to marginalize and circumvent the real activists. But even that is not all. Their aim for credit has real-world consequences. Boies and Olson are seeking out new clients and actively trying to beat the gay-marriage movement’s own legal eagles to the courthouse in a mad rush to get credit for what they have already failed to achieve. In the course of doing so, they are engaging in high-risk legal behavior that could backfire on the whole movement.

Jonathan Capehart says that I have raised “a valid concern about how the history of the quest for marriage equality is being portrayed,” but like Socarides, he doesn’t really care. The juicy tidbits from a fawningly uncritical hagiography are worth it.

A couple of readers have also pointed out that, in the first page, Rosa Parks is described merely as a “black seamstress” who took a stand for justice one day in 1955 in a moment of clarity. Becker doesn’t seem to understand that Parks had been a civil rights activist for twelve years before the protest that made history, just as she seems oblivious to the notion that others had been doing what she describes as Chad Griffin’s unique civil rights work for twenty-five years before he came along.

If you want to read a film script for a Hollywood movie about the lone courage and insight of a couple of people who showed up at a civil rights movement a quarter century late and then claimed ownership of all of it, this is your book. A work of actual and informed journalism, let alone history, is yet to come.

(Photo: Jo Becker appears on “Meet the Press” on April 20, 2014. By William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images)

caskett-copop83:

This is like the cutest thing ever. It’s from the gif-set I reblogged.

Taking its first steps, and after successfully doing so, the chick goes “Yay!”

It’s so freaking cute.

I’m done venting. Promise. For a sane and reality-based short history of the marriage equality movement, check out this Buzzfeed piece from a year ago by Chris Geidner, the best reporter on gay politics online. For a more objective take on Becker, here’s a very solid, informed critique by Adam Teicholz. He helps you see better why Becker’s disparagement of the key men and women who made marriage equality is so offensive. Money quote:

It will be tempting for those on the outside to dismiss Sullivan’s critique (and those, to come, of the slighted activists who will surely line up to take potshots) as the infighting and backbiting of sore losers. They are not. I have no skin in the fight between factions; to the extent I have personal connections, they are on both sides. I know Evan and others at Freedom to Marry, and Ken Mehlman, whom Becker features prominently, is a friend. I believe that marriage would not have come to New York State in 2011 if it weren’t for Melhman’s savvy, and obstinacy. But there is simply no plausible case to be made that he, Griffin, Black, Olson, and Boies—as hardworking and smart as they are—are the protagonists of the gay-rights revolution.

He’s particularly sharp on how Becker/Griffin disses one of the most gifted political strategists of the movement, Tim Gill. Hank Plante notes how Becker’s attack on everyone in the movement apart from Griffin is just an extension of Griffin’s own contempt for the two decades of staggering progress that made his unseemly credit-grabbing possible:

Griffin’s group sued to keep [all the other gay groups] from intervening in the Prop. 8 case, with Griffin writing to them, “You have unrelentingly and unequivocally acted to undermine this case even before it was filed.  In light of this it is inconceivable that you would zealously and effectively litigate this case if you were successful in intervening.”

Now you can better see where Becker’s contempt for and ignorance of the marriage equality movement comes from. The staggering thing is that the man who sowed this division, who engineered this book, and who will continue to grab exclusive credit for marriage equality in the forthcoming HBO movie on the subject … is now the head of the biggest gay rights group in the country. How can he lead a movement he has now publicly announced his contempt for?

Meanwhile, I guess I should respond to this ad hominem by HRC’s former head, Elizabeth Birch. So some corrections: I’ve long noted that marriage equality predates Evan and me by decades in the US and by centuries across the world. An anthology I edited on the subject makes that quite clear. The graphic in the post she lambastes starts in 1970, for goodness’ sake. I only cited one book of mine in that post, the first best-seller in the world on marriage equality, translated into seven languages, and prompting a global debate on the question. I cited one article, which the Nation – and not as a compliment – touted as “the most influential essay of the decade in the gay rights movement.”

Birch substantively agrees with me that it was the Hawaii lawsuit that truly began the revolution in 1993 – not, as Becker’s book has it, Chad Griffin in 2008 -  but then repeats what she said at the time: there was no point in fighting for such an impossible goal, we should hope it goes away, the whole thing is a terrible distraction, we’ll get “slaughtered” if we go ahead, etc. So she effectively conveys what the internal fight was about at the time. Evan and I were eager to seize on any lawsuit to leverage it into headlines, to build the case. We knew there would be failures at first, and backlash soon after.

But Evan and I, unlike Elizabeth, believed that we would eventually win because our arguments were so strong, and that the issue had the potential to galvanize and recast the entire movement. I understand why this put her in a tough spot at the time, wanting us to be right, believing we were wrong, and therefore unwilling to put HRC behind a huge effort when the groundwork hadn’t been done. But for us, that was a Catch-22. If we didn’t grasp the issue, the groundwork would never be done. So why don’t we just get on with it, instead of remaining in a Clintonian defensive crouch? HRC’s subsequent deep unease with the issue was, of course, deeply frustrating to those of us who believed it was the key issue for our political and moral advance.

My most vivid memory of Elizabeth was when she, Evan and I testified in 1996 in Congress against the Defense of Marriage Act. We all knew we were going down in flames, but Evan and I were just amazed we had gotten the first Congressional hearing ever on marriage equality. You have to remember the very idea was regarded as completely absurd at the time. Our goal was to make this a national conversation – because it was a conversation in which we had unassailable arguments on our side – even if it meant an early bloodbath. Elizabeth was bristling with frustration that we were having a hearing at all. It was, she remarked, “Hell Week” for gay rights. She understandably did not want to preside over bloodbaths while head of the biggest gay rights organizations. It took many years before HRC even used the word “marriage” in its own literature.

My other vivid memory of Elizabeth was when, in a rare moment of outreach, she invited me to give a speech at HRC a couple years later, and I used the occasion to give my stump speech on marriage equality. Afterward, she came up to me and said she had changed her mind. “If we aim for the stars,” she said to me, “we could maybe reach the moon.” And that’s what indeed we did, and Griffin and Boies and Olson deserve kudos for sustaining the momentum of that journey. But it serves no one to pretend they started this thing or were in any way indispensable to it. And the embarrassment of HRC’s own awful record on the issue is not, I’d argue, irrelevant to this book. It would not exactly be the first time when local or independent actors make change possible, only to have HRC swoop in at the last minute and claim all the credit. That’s always been their mojo. And it’s why so many are so pissed off at them once again.

I’m with @sullydish on ridic @Jo_Becker story. We stand on shoulders of giants who fought 4 decades. She seems to have forgotten them.

— Jim Messina (@Messina2012) April 17, 2014

Politico’s Dylan Byers managed to get an email from Jo Becker on her book. Here’s what she sent back (and it’s the same response she gave to HuffPo):

Many people have contributed to the success the movement has experienced. I have the upmost [sic] respect for all the people who contributed to that success. My book was not meant to be a beginning-to-end-history of the movement. It’s about a particular group of people at an extraordinary moment in time, and I hope that people will be moved by their stories.

My italics. It’s interesting that rather than defend her insane core thesis, she just lies about it. She claims that her book never pretends to be a beginning-to-end history of the marriage equality movement. And yet the book starts thus:

This is how a revolution begins … It begins with a handsome bespectacled thirty-five year old political consultant named Chad Griffin … on election night 2008.

Does she think we cannot read? The title of the book is “Forcing The Spring.” Not plucking the fruits of autumn. And if you think I’m just grabbing a few sentences, here’s how Becker introduces Evan Wolfson, the architect of the entire movement, just pages after she begins her cringe-inducing hagiography of Griffin. She frames him as an old, out-of-touch obstructionist who just never got it, unlike Hollywood’s Dustin Lance Black (!):

Hours earlier, Black had been confronted in the hotel’s courtyard by Evan Wolfson, the fifty-two-year-old founder of a group called Freedom to Marry and the primary author of the cautious state-by-state strategy that the gay rights movement had been pursuing. Wolfson had berated the younger man over his Oscar speech, explaining as though to a willful but ignorant child his on-going twenty-five year plan to build support for marriage equality nationwide. Twenty-five years? Black had practically gasped.

Get the picture? Black had to shove the cautious, delaying, hide-bound oldie, Wolfson, out of the way for the “revolution” to “begin”.  And look at the contempt in the notion that he had spent a quarter century building support and winning equality in several states by 2008. The movement before then – which had achieved extraordinary results against enormous odds – was marked, Becker has a colleague of Griffin say, by “political ineptitude and dysfunction. It was filled with impassioned activists, but what it needed, she believed, was skilled political operators like Chad.” If that’s respecting those who contributed to the success of the movement, what would be disrespect? And if she truly respects those who contributed to the movement’s success, why did she not call us and ask for our perspectives? Evan Wolfson and Mary Bonauto – critical figures in this struggle – got one brief call each. I got none.

And as the book continues, this framework of dissing the people who did the real work only deepens:

Wolfson was quietly seething. The idea that this newcomer thought his strategy timid and incremental infuriated him … “Chad was saying ‘Oh my God, we are going to be loathed and hated.” … If Griffin and Black proceeded, they would do so in the face of the full-throated opposition of the gay rights community. It was not the best of outcomes, but neither was it a real deterrent. They did not need the gay establishment. They had already put in place an organization with the wherewithal to go it alone.

If you don’t recall the “full-throated opposition of the gay rights community” to the Perry case, you aren’t alone. I don’t either.

They got $3 million via David Geffen in an afternoon, after all. Is David not part of the gay rights establishment? Yes, there were divisions about the timing of such a move. But there always were with every legal case. Picking the right one in the right state with the right plaintiffs is a very difficult thing to get right in a moving landscape. Personally, I was thrilled by the case and said so at the time. But again, those who believed that Perry was not a panacea turned out to be correct, which guts the entire premise of Becker’s argument. The Perry case only affected California, and did not give us the federal breakthrough Griffin had promised. But for Becker, there was no marriage movement until Perry and Griffin.

She then ascribes to Griffin the idea that the marriage movement had to be bipartisan. Seriously. Griffin is quoted in the book as saying that Olson would go a long way “in terms of recasting same-sex marriage as a civil rights issue, rather than a partisan one.” Griffin and Becker seem utterly unaware that one of the remarkable features of the movement from the late 1980s onward was its bipartisan cast and its insistence on the civil rights rubric. Among the most aggressive advocates from the get-go were conservatives like me, Bawer, Rauch, or Log Cabin. And throughout the 1990s and 2000s, gay and straight Republicans and conservatives had risked careers and obloquy to make the conservative case. We were ridiculed as “Homocons” for our efforts. Yet again, in Becker’s telling, we didn’t exist. In fact, it was only after Griffin hired Olson, in Becker’s account, that the movement, including Evan, started “to borrow from Chad’s bipartisan playbook:”

Chad’s unique ability to leverage the legal proceedings into front-page attention and rebrand a cause that for years had largely languished in obscurity … had gone a long way to bringing the establishment gay rights community around.”

If you really believe that the marriage equality movement had languished in obscurity for years by 2008, then you might appreciate this book. If you woke up after a long sleep in 2009, and suffer from total memory loss, it makes some sort of sense. But if you know anything about the subject or any history before 2008 or know anyone in the movement before then or even now, this book is as absurd as it is stupid. And no lies and spin from Becker about what she actually wrote will change that.

When your premise is that the marriage equality revolution began in 2008, that the movement was only then re-branded around the themes of family values and toleration, that the subject had been languishing in obscurity before the gay “Rosa Parks” came on the scene, there are a few things that will necessarily not compute.

Look first of all at the polling on the question. No one can doubt that the actions of a handful of people in the highest regions of the Obama administration would never have happened without this long-sustained, widening and deepening support in the polls. Public persuasion and advocacy were absolutely indispensable to bringing the new majority about, and making cautious politicians capable of changing. So check out Gallup’s polling on the question over the last couple of decades:

In 1996, support was at 27 percent. By 2007, it was at 46 percent. It has since peaked at 53 percent in 2011 and 54 percent now. What Becker is arguing is that increasing the support by 8 percent after that early momentum was the only period that matters. The increase of 15 percent before that – in a far less propitious environment – was irrelevant, and in fact, proof that until the key figure of Chad Griffin arrived, nothing was really happening. I’d love to know how Becker can make that argument with a straight face. Or whether on her book tour, she will be confronted with the sheer perversity of that judgment. I also think it’s incumbent on Griffin to say whether that is his view of the matter as well. It sure sounds like it from Becker’s book.

Then there are the following bizarre consequences of her insane history. Among the heroes of her book are Joe Biden and Ken Mehlman.  Now just think about that for a moment. Biden voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 – by far the most damaging moment in the movement’s history. As Isaac Chotiner notes, the book’s fellatial account of Biden’s own pro-gay goodness rests on stories of his past that reveal that he had no issues with gay couples – even as he voted to rid them of any rights by voting for DOMA! This grotesque hypocrisy is glossed over in favor of letting Becker’s source spin his own past uncritically. Ditto with Obama. He was obviously bullshitting on this subject for years. Chotiner:

As was the case with Biden, Obama wants credit for holding a position he knows is wrong. That position also shows a certain contempt for voters, as if they couldn’t figure out that Obama is being dishonest and, of course, supports gay marriage.

As for Mehlman, WTF? He ran the Bush 2004 campaign that used the marriage equality movement to turn out the Republican Christianist base and ensure Bush’s re-election. Without that issue, Bush may well not have won Ohio, and John Kerry would have been president. Now, I was delighted at Mehlman’s metamorphosis and have long believed that we should welcome all converts and hunt no heretics in this cause. I gave him a platform on the Dish I was so happy with his reversal.

But when he is credited as a critical hero of the movement and Evan Wolfson is damned as an obstructionist, you are seriously in an alternative universe. When he is the star, and the large universe of Republicans, conservatives and libertarians who backed marriage equality long, long before Mehlman’s Damascene moment are airbrushed out of history, you can see why this toxic distortion of history is so troubling. The idea that recommending a female interviewer for Obama’s revelation is more important than the decades of legal, educational and political organizing that took place in the teeth of Mehlman’s own brutal attack on gay couples … well, it beggars belief.

Geidner notes another way in which Olson and Boies and Griffin conducted themselves differently than other parts of the movement. They got paid to the tune of $6 million, while previous legal support for marriage equality was almost always done pro bono:

The $6.4 million price tag runs in contrast to many other legal fights mounted by the LGBT community. Much of such “impact litigation” is brought by nonprofit legal groups like Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, which brought the case that one of its lawyers, Mary Bonauto, argued and led to marriage equality in Massachusetts. Other such litigation is brought by nonprofit groups working with outside private lawyers working without payment for their services — called pro bono — like Lambda Legal and Jenner & Block’s Paul Smith, who argued the 2003 case, Lawrence v. Texas, that ruled sodomy laws across the country unconstitutional.

As for the extraordinary fundraising required, it took one lunch with David Geffen and one phone call to Steven Bing to raise half of it in a few days – support that Griffin has long downplayed in his presentation of the case.

To be honest, writing these posts makes me a little sick. For decades, this kind of nasty internal spat was avoided, because all of us in this fight believed that the cause was far more important than our own divisions and egos. Evan and I – who labored together pretty much alone for years – had serious political and ideological differences. He is a full-bore liberal; and I am a small-c conservative. On the road, we’d hash stuff out on trains and green rooms – and we had a deep disagreement over strategy, with my preferring a gradualist, federalist and political approach, while he backed a strategic, national, legal campaign. But we never aired this in public; we both thought the issue was much bigger than either of us. It turned out we were both half-right, and I’m proud of our discipline. To have made so much progress with so little acrimony only to have such unity side-swiped by such an egregious, ugly and unprecedented attempt to claim total credit is terribly demoralizing. We owe Olson and Boies and Griffin gratitude for continuing the fight. If only they would at some point return the compliment – instead of using a credulous, ignorant reporter to describe this movement as theirs and theirs alone.

America’s favorite fake Indian, Senator Perfesser Lizbeth Warren, has written a new booky wook, squeeeeeeee, aaaaaah, ARE YOU GOING TO BUY IT, I KNOW ME TOO!! The book is called A Fighting Chance (buy it here, we get money), and the Boston Globe and The New Yorker already have reviews up if you want to read them. But will the Globe and the New Yorker join you in freaking out about this, oh my god it’s going to be so good? They will not, so we will now blockquote at you:

On her first day on the job, [former Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner — who Warren often disagreed with — took her out to lunch. When she showed up at his office, he presented her with a present: a cop’s hat.

Then they got into the back seat of an SUV that was driven by a security detail. Warren put her seat belt on; Geithner didn’t.

“Like a bossy third-grade teacher, I looked at him and said, ‘Put on your seat belt, Mr. Secretary,’ ” Warren writes. “Like a naughty kid, he looked back and said, ‘I don’t have to.’ ”

SASS FACTOR OF TEN, MADAM SENIOR SENATOR OF MASSACHUSETTS. We look forward to reading the slash fic in which Geithner and Lizzy Dubs just totally do it, right there in the SUV, with the Secret Service watching and everything. (We are not good at writing slash fic.) But also, Geithner “presented her with a present”? Unacceptable, especially when there’s a perfectly good thesaurus available to all Microsoft Encarta users.

That’s enough copyediting snark for today. Do you want more ambiguously sexual dialogue to snicker at?

“You’re jamming me, Elizabeth,” Obama said.

YEAH YOU ARE, SENATOR SEXYTIMES.

“He urged me not to overplay my hand,’’ she writes. “Got it.’’

Let it build…let it build…

There are also lines in here that will make progressives maybe begin to wonder, Hey, why for my favrit Senator Perfesser have most ‘spensive Senate race, how make? At one point, Elizabeth is up in the actual ivory tower that they have at Harvard, the one with all the champagne and Priuses inside, and she’s talking to LARRY SUMMERS:

“He teed it up this way: I had a choice. I could be an insider, or I could be an outsider,” Warren writes. Outsiders could say what they want, he told her, but people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders get more access to push their ideas to powerful people.

“But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders,” Summers told Warren, she writes. “I had been warned.”

“LARRY SUMMERS!?” groans every progressive in America, like the way the cowboys used to say “NEW YORK CITY!?” in that old salsa commercial. Yes indeedy, Larry “Derivatives Markets Will Police Themselves” Summers, though the Globe review hints that Summers is one of the antagonists of Warren’s book. “WHEW!” sighs every progressive in America, in all caps, just like that.

The important thing here is that this does not mean Elizabeth Warren is running for President. I mean, how could she have the time to run for President, she just wrote this book?

[A Fighting Chance]

Christian, Clueless

Alex Mack, The Secret World of Alex Mack 

Kat, 10 Things I Hate About You 

Gabriella, Brink!

Kirk Fogg, Legends of the Hidden Temple

Ellen, The Adventures of Pete & Pete

Benny, The Sandlot

Scully, The X-Files

Faith, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Denise Huxtable, The Cosby Show

Daria and Jane, Daria

Everyone, Practical Magic

Maya, Just Shoot Me

Deb, Empire Records

Edward Scissorhands, Edward Scissorhands

Ms. Frizzle, The Magic School Bus

Mulan, Mulan

Tank Girl, Tank Girl

Carmen Sandiego, Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?

Elisa Maza, Gargoyles

Thelma, Thelma and Louise

Olivia Benson, Law & Order: SVU

Nancy, The Craft

Gwen Stefani, Tragic Kingdom era

Dr. Quinn, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman 

Steve, Blue’s Clues

Jessie, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest

Rogue, X-Men

Monica, Love & Basketball

Gloria, White Men Can’t Jump

Read more Lesbian Style Icons of the 1990s Who Were Never Actually Lesbians at The Toast.

mangosmoothie7:

fileformat:

STOP

who fucking did this

Journalist Jo Becker has a new book out on the marriage equality movement. The revolution began, it appears, in 2008. And its Rosa Parks was a man you would be forgiven for knowing nothing about, Chad Griffin. Here’s how the book begins – and I swear I’m not making this up:

This is how a revolution begins. It begins when someone grows tired of standing idly by, waiting for history’s arc to bend toward justice, and instead decides to give it a swift shove. It begins when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in the segregated South. And in this story, it begins with a handsome, bespectacled thirty-five-year-old political consultant named Chad Griffin, in a spacious suite at the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco on election night 2008.

After that surreal opening, the book descends into more jaw-dropping distortion. For Becker, until the still-obscure Griffin came on the scene, the movement for marriage equality was a cause “that for years had largely languished in obscurity.” I really don’t know how to address that statement, because it is so wrong, so myopic and so ignorant it beggars belief that a respectable journalist could actually put it in print. Obscurity? Is Becker even aware of the history of this struggle at all? Throughout the 1990s, marriage equality had roiled the political landscape, dominated the national debate at times, re-framed and re-branded the entire gay movement, achieved intellectual heft, and key legal breakthroughs, such as the landmark Hawaii case that vaulted the entire subject from an idea to a reality. The man who actually started that revolution was Dan Foley, a straight man from the ACLU, who filed the key lawsuit. Foley does not make Becker’s index. Why would he? If the revolution only began in 2008, he is irrelevant. The courage and clarity it took to strike that first blow is nothing for Becker compared with that of two straight men, David Boies and Ted Olson, and one gay man, Chad Griffin, who swooped into the movement at the last moment and who were, not accidentally, Becker’s key sources for the entire tall tale.

The intellectual foundation of the movement is also non-existent in Becker’s book – before, wait for it!, Ken Mehlman and Ted Olson brought Republican credibility to the movement. Yes, that’s her claim. My own work – penning the first cover-story on the conservative case for marriage equality in 1989, a subsequent landmark re-imagining of the gay rights movement in 1993, and a best-selling book, Virtually Normal in 1995 – is entirely omitted from the book, along with the critical contributions from other conservatives and libertarians, from Jon Rauch and Bruce Bawer to John Corvino and Dale Carpenter. I suspect even Olson and Mehlman will reject Becker’s ludicrous thesis, if challenged on this point. But for Becker, all of this work contributed nothing but further obscurity. The astonishing achievement of turning what was once deemed a joke into a serious national cause and issue happened in the 1990s and then more emphatically after George W. Bush’s endorsement of the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004. But for Becker, an obscure late-comer, Griffin, had a “unique ability” to leverage legal cases into a political rallying cry. This is so wrong and so contemptuous of the people who really did do that work I am at a loss for words.

More staggeringly, the critical, indispensable role of Evan Wolfson in pioneering this cause is actually treated with active contempt in the book. He is ludicrously portrayed by Becker as an obstacle to change, a remnant of a previous generation, a man who had led the marriage movement nowhere. This is where the book becomes truly toxic and morally repellent. I’ve been a part of this movement for twenty-five years, either as an activist speaker/writer or as a close observer on this blog for the last decade and a half. What Becker writes about Evan and the movement is unconscionable, ignorant and profoundly wrong. Evan had the courage to create this movement, and empower it with legal rigor and strategy, when it was far, far less popular than it is now. Without him, quite simply, the movement would not exist for Griffin to now outrageously attempt to claim credit for. Yet this book sweeps Wolfson aside as an actual obstacle to progress because he was concerned that the Prop 8 case was a high-risk high-reward legal strategy that would not be the slam-dunk for national marriage equality that Boies and Olson believed it would be.

And here’s the thing: Evan was right about that. The Prop 8 case succeeded only in striking down California’s ban, and not changing the entire world, and it rested entirely on the legal and intellectual infrastructure Evan and I and others had been building for two decades. If Boies and Olson had been right, we would have federal marriage equality right now. But they weren’t and we don’t. Now I supported the case because I believed that it could add to the educational effort to expose the weakness of the arguments of those opposing equality – and – wh0 knows? – might even end marriage discrimination. But when I say “add”, I mean exactly that. Legal arguments take time to percolate up and about. And the Prop 8 case was deeply dependent on the cases that preceded it. It wasn’t a panacea, and was less potent than the Windsor case in changing America as a whole. So while I’m certainly no opponent of Boies and Olson, and was thrilled to have them on board,  it is simply bizarre to argue, as Becker does, that the marriage equality movement didn’t really exist until they and Griffin allegedly “re-branded” it.

Perhaps the most critical legal events in this long struggle took place in New England. Getting actual marriage equality in one state, Massachusetts – and then exporting it to an entire region – had always been our Holy Grail and was indispensable to our long-term success. There were many architects of that vision – but one stands out to anyone with any knowledge of the matter. That’s Mary Bonauto, the woman who won the right to marry in Vermont in 1997 (only to be foiled by the legislature), and who made marriage in Massachusetts happen. To quote Roberta Kaplan, who argued the Windsor case in front of the Supreme Court, “No gay person in this country would be married without Mary Bonauto.” Yet in Becker’s book, she too is shunted aside, and airbrushed out of history. In fact, any figure of any note apart from Boies and Olson and Griffin are excised in this book in Stalinist fashion as if they didn’t exist.

For me, then, the key question about this book is how on earth such a distorted and ahistorical and polemical attack on the architects of the marriage equality movement can have been written. Becker could have presented the material in this book merely as the experience of a few people who came very late to the movement – a small snapshot of the last few years through the eyes of a small group. But she doesn’t. She credits them with the entire movement, and treats all those before as obstacles to it. That’s such a distortion you have to wonder how it came about.

The answer, I think, is access-journalism. It’s clear from the notes in the book that an overwhelming amount of the material comes from the sources she embedded herself with. Other figures with real knowledge of the movement barely get a phone call. (Wolfson got one peremptory one late in the day; I got none.) In other words, this is access-journalism at its most uncritical and naive worst. There is no indication that Becker has any clue about anything that happened before 2008, and every indication that thereafter, she simply parroted the spin of those she had access to. And so the book is best seen not as as act of journalism, but as a public relations campaign by Boies, Olson and Griffin to claim credit for and even co-opt a movement they had nothing to do with until very recently. It’s telling that the Human Rights Campaign – an organization that opposed aggressive efforts to pioneer marriage equality until the early 2000s – is now sending out emails touting Becker’s book for its preposterous hagiography of its executive director. Money quote about the NYT magazine excerpt:

[It] details HRC President Chad Griffin’s pivotal role in guiding the Obama administration to publicly endorse marriage equality during the 2012 election cycle, including a conversation he had with Vice President Biden just days before his famed interview with David Gregory on “Meet the Press.” …

Griffin helped found the American Foundation for Equal Rights, recruited the bipartisan legal dream team of Ted Olson and David Boies, and challenged the discriminatory Proposition 8 in federal court—racking up momentous legal victories for the marriage equality movement.

Sure, Griffin (because of his ability to raise money) had access to Biden and asked the right question. Good for him. But Biden could easily have ducked it and Obama had long since decided to come out for equality before the election anyway, so the only proximate effect of this insider access was to accelerate the process. Other influences on the president – a beloved high school teacher, his kids, his reading, for example – are disregarded in order to cast Griffin as the key figure. The creaking of the narrative machinery to present this turn of events is so grating and breathless it all but discredits itself. And a remarkable coda to this hagiography is the fact that Griffin and Boies and Olson are actually sponsoring the author’s book party! And why would they not? A book that is essentially a stenography of their self-regard is something they should celebrate. Whether the NYT feels the same way about one of their reporters having her sources throw her a party is another matter.

The trouble with this kind of embedded journalism is not that what it details is an inaccurate portrayal of the situation from the viewpoint of the characters it is championing. It is the rank failure to inquire into any other views of the matter and to be informed about the history of the movement. It is the lazy, uninformed decision to buy the self-serving narrative of a few, interested sources as the objective narrative of history. Then you have the sales job: a decision to hype the book by claiming that these characters’ late-coming contributions to the effort somehow rescued a movement that was stalled. And, yes, that is emphatically the argument of the book – not just that Griffin helped things along but that all those before him, including the heroes who pioneered this struggle, were irrelevant losers and laggards. Whatever else this is, it is not reporting in any balanced or fair meaning of the word.

And of course it also raises a core question about Griffin. This book obviously reflects his own view of himself as the Rosa Parks of this movement. And that marks him as an extreme outlier in it. One thing that has characterized the marriage equality movement from the get-go has been a collective decision to give credit widely and broadly for a movement that began in the grass roots and succeeded because of some key figures but also thanks to tens of thousands of people, gay and straight, who stood up for equality in places far less welcoming than executive suites in San Francisco. No single individual has decided to claim personal credit for all this until now – let alone smear, insult and write out of history the vast coalition that made this possible. I’ve long supported Griffin’s welcome attempt to shift HRC from apathy to action on marriage. But the idea that he can now be hailed as the uniquely indispensable figure and all his predecessors and critical allies mocked as irrelevant is grotesque. He is in that sense a harbinger of something genuinely new. He has decided to coopt all the work done before him and alongside him as something he uniquely achieved by himself.

That’s not leading this movement. That’s an attack on its integrity, its countless authors, and its generosity of spirit. It will only divide this movement, rather than unite it. In fact, it already has.

(Photos: Nina Beck and Stacy Jolles of South Burlington celebrate during a press conference in South Burlington, Vt. Monday, Dec.20, 1997, after the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that gay couples must be granted the same benefits and protections given married couples of the opposite sex. By Alden Pellett/Liaison Agency/via Getty.

Evan Wolfson, founder and executive director of Freedom to Marry, and Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, talk before they testified during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on proposals to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (PL 104-199). By Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images.)

(Illustrations: The Atlantic Wire’s history of marriage equality. The cover of the first book to make an extended case for marriage equality, in 1995.)

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