Month: March 2012

Overconfidence

by digby

Greg Sargent has a good piece up about the political myopia of the Democrats toward the possibility that the Supreme Court conservatives would be hostile to Obamacare.

Many people have blamed Obama Solicitor General Donald Verrilli’s poor defense of the law for the sudden jeopardy Obamacare finds itself in, and there’s no denying he was unprepared to answer questions that we’ve known for months would be central to the case.

But there’s another explanation for the botched prediction: Simply put, Obamacare’s proponents, including those in the administration, badly misjudged, and were too overconfident about, the tone, attitude and approach that the court’s conservative bloc, particularly Justice Scalia, would take towards the administration’s arguments.

Keep in mind: Many observers, Obama officials included, spent weeks preedicting Scalia could be a key swing vote on the case. Lawyers defending the law wrote some of their briefs and opinions with an eye towards persuading Scalia. They consciously invoked Scalia’s own words from a 2005 opinion affirming Congress’s power to control local medical marijuana in hopes it signaled he might be open to the administration’s defense of the individual mandate.

This now looks like a terrible misjudgment. During oral arguments this week, Scalia invoked the broccoli argument to question the goverment’s case. He mocked the government’s position with a reference to the “cornhusker kickback, even though that’s not in the law. As Fried notes, this language is straight out of the Tea Party guerrilla manual that was written during the battle to prevent Obamacare from becoming law in the first place.

I’ve already said what I think of this: after Bush vs Gore, any Democrat who thought that verges on the puerile. Certainly this idea verges on political malpractice. And I have to also say that I think David’s assurance below that there would be a big uprising of progressives if this law is shot down is highly unlikely. I just don’t see the organizing function that makes that happen — and even if it does it won’t change anything as long as the balance of power rests with the Republicans.

This is how they think about this:

And this:

I wish I had more confidence that liberals would rise up en masse and demand single payer if Obamacare is struck down, but I just can’t imagine it happening. It would take a whole bunch of people who have health care (most of the country) taking to the streets and demanding it for others. At this point I think the middle class is battered and tired. The best case is that some states would manage to pass Romneycare in fits and starts.

But regardless of what happens, the administration’s “surprise” at conservative radicalism is starting to become something of a theme. Recall this observation in Rich Yeselsen’s review of Noam Scheiber’s book about the administration:

Scheiber’s narrative is lucid enough so that the reader can begin to question, along with the author, why several mistakes are made more than once, The White House trusts Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley time and again during sensitive negotiations long after he’s demonstrated his bad faith. The deficit fetish culminates in the ghastly 2011 effort by Obama’s new Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, and David Plouffe, his 2008 campaign manager, to increase the president’s credibility with independent voters by positioning him as a budget cutter—not only the “hoariest of Washington’s old saws,” Scheiber says, but an old saw dependent on the fantasy, even after the Tea Party ascendancy, that a deal can be cut with the Republicans.

How can this be? I’m willing to consider the idea that the Obama administration would be willing to do deficit cutting to benefit the 1% or that they refused to jail corrupt bankers because they were protecting the elites. But tanking your own signature legislation (that happens to benefit insurance companies?) None of the people at the top of the heap in the Democratic Party will ever have to worry about money on a personal basis, certainly not the president himself. So you’d have to believe that he is some kind of 1% martyr to think he would destroy his own legacy simply in order to help out the ruling class.

No, I don’t believe it. Sure, they may be corrupt whores for money for all I know, but that just isn’t adequate to explain this one. They really were that naive. In fact, my current belief is that the administration’s overriding problem is exactly what it seems to be — they constantly overestimate their own abilities and underestimate the opposition’s. Case in point:

Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., fears that these midterm elections are going to go the way of the 1994 midterms, when Democrats lost control of the House after a failed health care reform effort.

But, Berry told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the White House does not share his concerns.

“They just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’

No, this isn’t about corruption, it’s about believing your own hype instead of believing your eyes. The astonishing thing is that it’s continued even to this week. Thinking Antonin Scalia would vote to uphold Obamacare is simply delusional.

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Sticky mandate

by David Atkins

The third day of oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act saw many justices seem to take a dim view of the severability of the mandate from the rest of the Affordable Care Act. That in turn creates a real pickle for Scalia and his friends. Their choices are essentially these:

1) Vote to uphold the ACA, and thus the notion that the Federal Government can place a mandate on individual citizens to purchase a product offered by private companies;

2) Vote to uphold the rest of the ACA, but not the individual mandate–despite the fact that the pre-existing condition provision doesn’t really work without the mandate; or

3) Strike down the law in its entirety.

Nothing new there. But as any analyst worth their salt will note, the oral arguments are essentially window dressing for journalists, even as the Court has become much, much more political of late in its decision-making. The justices are wholly unlikely to make their decisions about the law based on the last three days; these decisions, like Bush v Gore and Citizens United, are going to made based on political calculations.

That’s where it gets tricky, even for the conservative jurists.

Option #1 to uphold the ACA would seem to be unlikely at first glance. Conservatives hate the law, hate the President, and have an incentive to deliver what they might consider a humiliating blow to the Administration. The notion that the federal government can compel private purchases also grates against the modern conservative ethic.

On the other hand, repealing the Affordable Care Act has become a major rallying cry for the conservative establishment, and one of the key arguments Republicans use to mobilize their base to elect them in 2012. It’s entirely probable that if the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, the mobilization effect will work in reverse. There will be a lot of angry people with pre-existing conditions, as well as a lot of angry youth under 26 and their parents. Progressives will work all the harder to pass single-payer healthcare in blue states, since it will have become clear that no federal solution to skyrocketing healthcare costs is in the offing. And it will mean that the only solution left on the table to resolve the issue would be some form of single-payer. Not that anything resembling single-payer would be passed now or anytime within the next 15 years–but eventually it would have to happen as the current Fox News audience dies away and Millennials become the adult voting majority. Politically, in both the short and long term, allowing the ACA to stand judicially is probably a conservative’s best bet.

Severing the mandate would appear to be the worst option of all. It would arguably create an even more progressive law unless the pre-existing condition section were stricken out. But to go down that path would require the Court to determine insofar as it can the workability of every single piece of the very lengthy bill–a prospect that Scalia compared to cruel and unusual punishment. It would also mean unprecedented activism on the part of the Court. It’s one thing to strike down the most contested and hard-fought legislative accomplishment perhaps in decades. That’s judicial activism enough. But it’s quite another for the Court to going through the law piece by piece to figure out what parts of it would work legislatively if the mandate were curtailed. It would put the Court in a fairly unprecedented position of actually and truly legislating from the bench, and we all know how conservatives supposedly feel about that.

At the end of the day, politics are going to be the deciding factor in what will likely be another 5-4 vote. The Court’s four staunch conservatives will need to vote against it to maintain credibility from their own base, even as unelected officials.

But I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the ACA will be upheld in the end, if for no other reason than that it doesn’t really serve the interests of anyone–from liberals to conservatives to the Justices themselves–to do otherwise.

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No injuries, no blood

by digby

When Nancy Grace is the one making sense you’ve got a problem:

If you managed to sit through that you saw Zimmerman’s good friend Mr Taffe say about 157 times that Zimmerman’s injuries, including a broken nose and a bloodied head from being pounded into the pavement, were consistent with self defense.

Oops, no blood anywhere, no sign of injury:

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(This is idiotic. When I put this up an hour ago it didn’t have the “exclusive” hiding the whole thing. Believe me, there’s nothing showing on the back of his head. Not that you’d know that now.)

Update: These unanswered questions about the case are truly disturbing. (They tagged Trayvon as a John Doe even though they had his ID?)

Sluts, Floozy Patches and God’s super glue

by digby

This piece over at Huffington Post about the lies the right wing tells about birth control is astonishing. But this one really takes the cake:

The odds that a woman who is raped will get pregnant are “one in millions and millions and millions,” said state Rep. Stephen Freind, R-Delaware County, the Legislature’s leading abortion foe.

The reason, Freind said, is that the traumatic experience of rape causes a woman to “secrete a certain secretion” that tends to kill sperm.

That’s a good one. I always admire that stuff that has absolutely no basis in reality.

I couldn’t help but recall this Jonah Goldberg gem from 2006:

JPod – I have to say I lean (not embrace, just lean) toward the view that some of “the crass commercialization” of birth control is a bit demeaning to women, or to us all. Maybe we’ve seen different commercials. But I’m thinking of the ones which tell young women that this pill will also clear up their unsightly blemishes. I’m also thinking of those ads for that patch that you can wear for months, and — implied by the ad — display them in provocative places so as to send a signal that you’re good to go. Who needs a Chinese letter tatooed on your lower back when you can flaunt your floozy-patch like tail feathers?

Rush isn’t the only one, is he? This meme has been out there for a while.

But I don’t think any of these examples rise to the level of sheer inanity of this one, from the man George W. Bush named as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, the office that oversees federally funded teenage pregnancy, family planning, and abstinence programs:

Forty percent of couples who live together break up before they marry and of the 60 percent that do marry, 40 percent of them divorce after 10 years. … So why do so many adults continue in a cycle of sex without a marriage commitment, cohabitation, and failed relationships? This perpetual cycle of misery is due largely to the role of oxytocin. The following is Dr. Keroack’s explanation of the cycle:

Emotional pain causes our bodies to produce an elevated level of endorphins which in turn lowers the level of oxytocin. Therefore, relationship failure leads to pain which leads to elevated endorphins which leads to lower oxytocin, the result of which is a lower ability to bond. Many in this increased state of emotional pain and lower oxytocin seek sex as a substitute for love, which inevitably leads to another failed relationship, and so on, the cycle continues.

There is hope for the weary brokenhearted, Dr. Keroack said, but it requires abstinence and plenty of time for healing.

Keroack’s fitting title for that novel presentation was “If I Only Had a Brain.” In an unpublished article that has become an established text of the abstinence movement, he wrote, “People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.” Keroack’s teaching on the role of “God’s ‘super-glue'” is accepted as irrefutable in an article titled Fornication and Oxytocin.

Dr. Keroack’s qualifications had been his job at one of those bogus crisis pregnancy “counselling” centers:

At Brandeis University’s 2002 Christian Awareness Week, Keroack presented the grim vision of human sexuality that he brings with him to the agency that directs the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs.

Eric Keroack, medical director of A Woman’s Concern Health Centers, a pro-life counseling organization, said sexual activity today is comparable to warfare.

“Sexual activity is a war zone,” he said. “What we have is this ongoing war. So we’re constantly coming up with better equipment,” he said, referring to contraceptive strategies and abortions.

“And the truth is that somewhere along the way people die in war,” Keroack added. He acknowledged that deaths from abortion-related complications are rare, but that “they die emotionally.”

Focus on the Family applauds Keroack’s use of ultrasound to influence women whom Keroack describes as “abortion vulnerable.” As medical director of five Boston-area crisis pregnancy centers, Keroack oversees ultrasound scans that he says help to provide “informed consent” for abortion procedures, even though their admitted purpose is to prevent those procedures from ever taking place.

[T]he odds that an unborn child will be brought to term, rather than aborted, can be very nearly inverted by an ultrasound examination, according to a study undertaken by A Woman’s Concern, a group of crisis-pregnancy centers in eastern Massachusetts. Before introducing routine ultrasound examinations for the women who visited their centers, A Woman’s Concern (AWC) found that 61 percent of the women classified by counselors as “abortion-vulnerable” would opt for abortion prior to an ultrasound examination, while 33.7 percent would choose to carry the pregnancy to term. Once ultrasound examinations were provided, 63.5 percent of the same “abortion-vulnerable” women decided to continue their pregnancies, and only 24.5 percent chose abortion.

Like most other CPCs, AWC was established to serve women who are alarmed by the prospect of pregnancy, and actively considering abortion. At the centers, trained counselors do their best to provide moral guidance and support to women who are often facing objectively horrific situations.

But in many cases, the best efforts of AWC counselors are not enough to change a woman’s mind. For the first several years of the organization’s existence, roughly two-thirds of the women who entered an AWC center planning to procure an abortion carried through with that plan.

The results of … ultrasound examinations, beginning in 2000, were so impressive that AWC soon adopted “the medical model” for all five centers. … The results of the ultrasound examination are assessed by AWC’s medical director, Dr. Eric Keroack, a board-certified ob/gyn.

For crisis-pregnancy centers, the AWC study suggests that investment in ultrasound equipment — and qualified medical personnel handle that equipment — could be the most effective way to drive down the number of abortions. Women facing problem pregnancies have no reason not to accept the offer of a free ultrasound test, and the results of that offer could be dramatic.

As detailed in the article quoted above, the AWC centers directed by Keroack delay women’s access to abortion care by suggesting to them that early miscarriages are common, that they could have an ectopic pregnancy or a blighted ovum, and that it would be best to wait a few weeks before making an appointment for an abortion: “For the CPC counselors, meanwhile, the extra two to three weeks provide another opportunity to persuade the woman that she should continue her pregnancy. And if the process calls for a follow-up ultrasound examination, there is one more opportunity for the mother to bond with her unborn child.”

This is so full of lies it would be easier to pull out the very few bits of the truth. The only thing for sure is that they caused grave damage to women who didn’t realize these creepy people were manipulating them into forced childbirth.

This fellow resigned from his post when it came to light that he’d been sued for malpractice and had very dicey credentials. But I think he made left his mark.

And yes, the right wing is so polluted with lies about birth control and abortion that they hardly even make sense. But then that’s the utility of not believing in science, isn’t it? You can believe whatever nonsense you want to.

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Florida’s notorious past

by digby

We were talking about the Trayvon Martin tragedy the other day and a friend pointed out that Sanford was only about 130 miles from the town of Rosewood, the site of the notorious Rosewood massacre:

Rosewood was a quiet, primarily black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Spurred by unsupported accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been beaten and possibly raped by a black drifter, white men from nearby towns lynched a Rosewood resident. When black citizens defended themselves against further attack, several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people, and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. Survivors hid for several days in nearby swamps and were evacuated by train and car to larger towns. Although state and local authorities were aware of the violence, they made no arrests for the activities in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by black residents during the attacks. None ever returned.

It turns out that Sanford Florida, where Trayvon was killed, has a history of its own:

[W]hen it comes to a history of fear, racism and violence, Sanford, Florida, has a particularly fraught past, one that traces right up to the night a month ago when an unarmed black kid was shot dead on one of its streets, and his killer went free.

Long before the live oaks and Spanish moss gave way to interstate highways and box stores, Sanford began as a citrus town in the 1870s, conceived by a New England tycoon. Henry Shelton Sanford, who had ingratiated himself to Abraham Lincoln and served as Lincoln’s ambassador to Belgium for eight years, had the town built by Swedish laborers. Though the citrus empire he dreamed of didn’t exactly flourish, Sanford proved instrumental to promoting trade with the Belgian-controlled territory of Congo—which included his vision of promoting Congo as a place to ship America’s freed blacks. The African locale, he said, represented an outlet “for the enterprise and ambition of our colored people in more congenial fields than politics.” A Congo peopled with African Americans could be “the ground to draw the gathering electricity from that black cloud spreading over the Southern states.”

The back-to-Congo movement never took off, but Sanford’s Florida hamlet did. In 1911, it absorbed the town of Goldsborough, an autonomous black community. The merger was hostile, according to local historian Francis Oliver. “[Sanford] never paid restitution to the people who lost their jobs and asked for money because they…no longer [had] jobs,” she said. “The mayor didn’t have a job, City Council people didn’t have a job, the postmistress didn’t have a job, the jailers didn’t have a job, the marshal didn’t have a job.”

That sense of alienation hung in the air for decades. Then Jackie Robinson entered the picture. Before he broke Major League Baseball’s race barrier in 1947, Robinson played for a Dodgers farm team in Sanford—but only briefly. His presence in spring training that year so incensed white residents that they accosted the mayor and demanded Robinson’s ouster. When the integrated team was physically prevented from taking the field, the Dodgers’ owner moved Robinson out of town for his own good. “The Robinsons were run out of Sanford, Florida, with threats of violence,” Robinson’s daughter would later say.

That could all be chalked up to ancient history if it weren’t for the numerous more recent instances of racism in the town.

None of this is to say that it hasn’t gotten better. But it’s also not hard to understand why 30,000 people came out in protest last week in the Trayvon case, many of them African American. Considering this history, the people of that area — of this country — have a right and an obligation to protest.

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If they talk like a duck …

by digby

And people keep telling me I’m all wet when I say that American politics are tribal. People’s accents are changing according to their political leanings:

Linguists have long known that mere exposure to new speech patterns isn’t always enough to cause people to adapt their own speech accordingly. Often, a “buy-in” is required; your own speech may shift depending on how much social affinity you feel for the speakers of these new patterns. This explains why, even within the Inland North Region, the spread hasn’t been uniform. For instance, African American speakers in the same region—or rural speakers for that matter—haven’t really warmed to the new-fangled vowels. But why is it that white city folk in Cleveland sound a whole lot like white people in Syracuse and Milwaukee, but a whole lot unlike their fellow Ohioans in Columbus, a short distance away?

Labov points out that the residents of the Inland North have long-standing differences with their neighbors to the south, who speak what’s known as the Midland dialect. The two groups originated from distinct groups of settlers; the Inland Northerners migrated west from New England, while the Midlanders originated in Pennsylvania via the Appalachian region. Historically, the two settlement streams typically found themselves with sharply diverging political views and voting habits, with the northerners aligning much more closely with agenerally being more liberal ideology.

Labov suggests that it’s these deep-seated political disagreements that create an invisible borderline barring the encroachment of Northern Cities Vowels. When he looked at the relationship between voting patterns by county over the last three Presidential elections and the degree to which speakers in these counties shifted their vowels, he found a tight correlation between the two. And the states that have participated in the vowel shift have also tended to resist implementing the death penalty.

Do vowel-shifters sound more liberal to modern ears? Yes, at least to some extent. Labov had students in Bloomington, Indiana, listen to a vowel-shifting speaker from Detroit and a non-vowel-shifter from Indianapolis. The students rated both speakers as equal in probable intelligence, education and trustworthiness. They also didn’t think they would have different attitudes about abortion (both speakers were female). But they did think the vowel-shifting speaker was more likely to be in favor of gun control and affirmative action.

Are we moving toward an era where Americans will speak discernibly red versus blue accents? It’s hard to say. Social identities are complex, and can be defined along a number of different dimensions like class, race, or ethnicity. Not everyone feels that politics are a part of their core identity. But I suspect that political ideology may become an anchor for accents to the extent that large social groups collectively identify themselves by their political beliefs. According to Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort, this is happening more and more as Americans voluntarily cluster themselves into homogenous, politically like-minded communities.

I think that’s fascinating. It’s quite obvious that conservatives respond very well to a Southern accent, which is logical. Their base is in the South. But apparently, it’s more complex than that. I think it’s another of the hueristics that allow us to recognize our tribal brethren, even if they don’t live near us. After all, humans have an amazing capacity to develop shorthand communication for survival.

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Hoodies and Hoods

by digby

Some people just don’t don’t understand proper etiquette:

Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) donned a hoodie and took to the House floor this morning to speak out against the murder of Travyon Martin, but was shouted down and removed from the floor by the Republican speaker pro tem for violating House rules prohibiting the wearing of hats.

As Rush spoke about the murder and racial profiling, he removed his suit jacket to reveal a grey hoodie, while saying, “just because someone wears a hoodie, [it] does not make them a hoodlum.” Rush flipped up the hood, put on a pair of sunglasses, and began reciting Bible verses, prompting Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS), acting as speaker, to bang his gavel and demand that Rush stop speaking. “The member is out of order,” Harper scolded. “The member is no longer recognized.”
“The chair will ask the Sargent of Arms to enforce the prohibition on decorum,” Harper said. “Members need to remove their hoods or leave the floor.”

Well that’s very true. It’s just plain impolite to wear your hood on the floor of the US Congress. After all, this fellow kindly removed his before he gave this speech:

And this gentleman politely left his in the cloakroom:

Why he even left it off while quoting the Grand Wizard of the KKK Nathan Bedford Forest at the podium:

Decorum is important. And if these fine Republicans aren’t allowed to wear their “hoodies” on the floor, then it’s only right that Bobby Rush shouldn’t be allowed to wear his. It’s important that the Congress of the United States remain dignified at all times.

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The Wingers and the War of the World

by digby

From the “America lost its mind after 9/11” files:

The FBI taught its agents that they could sometimes “bend or suspend the law” in their hunt for terrorists and criminals. Other FBI instructional material, discovered during a months-long review of FBI counterterrorism training, warned agents against shaking hands with “Asians” and said Arabs were prone to “Jekyll & Hyde temper tantrums.”

These are just some of the disturbing results of the FBI’s six-month review into how the Bureau trained its counterterrorism agents. That review, now complete, did not result in a single disciplinary action for any instructor. Nor did it mandate the retraining of any FBI agent exposed to what the Bureau concedes was inappropriate material. Nor did it look at any intelligence reports that might have been influenced by the training. All that has a powerful senator saying that the review represents a “failure to adequately address” the problem.

I remember Seymour Hersh’s stories that the Pentagon was showing “The Battle of Algiers” to the top brass and passing around a discredited book of nonsense from the 70s called “The Arab Mind.” It was one of the more embarrassing — and frightening — revelations of the early post 9/11 period. There is just no doubt that our nation’s leadership panicked.

Indeed, back in the day I used to write a lot about the “War of the Worlds” syndrome which had the US reacting as if we had been invaded by space aliens rather than the target of a terrorist attacks by a small band of human beings. It wasn’t a surprise to me that Spielberg would remake that film, and neither was the reaction of the right wing, which I wrote about at the time:

The FBI’s counterterrorism training review was prompted by a Danger Room series revealing the Bureau taught agents that “mainstream” Muslims were “violent“; that Islam made its followers want to commit “genocide“; and that an FBI intelligence analyst compared Islam to the Death Star from Star Wars. The review led the bureau to remove hundreds of pages of documents from its training course.

It wasn’t the liberals who were a bunch of pearl clutching nervous nellies after 9/11: it was the macho right wingers,the Pentagon and the police state authorities who lost their heads. And when you think about it it was far more frightening and dangerous than the attacks themselves.

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David Wong hits it out of the park on misogyny

by David Atkins

David Wong (alias of Jason Pargin) at Cracked has a tremendous and brutally honest explanation of misogyny in the modern world. Having grown up in a seriously patriarchal household with a great deal of misogyny among friends and family, I can state fairly unequivocally that most of what he writes hits very close to the mark. We both apparently also spend a fair amount of time browsing Free Republic, which provides a considerable insight into the unvarnished conservative American (usually male) mind.

Wong’s basic points boil down to mostly the same thing: men, especially those in more conservative cultures, are continually obsessed with winning over and impressing women. But conservative men also resent women for 1) supposedly “making” them do dumb things to impress them; 2) not being easily “won” enough; and 3) supposedly changing the rules of the game in which men have all the agency, and women have none.

Wong/Pargin takes on several aspects of this dynamic, but gets at something very central with this:

Do you see what I’m getting at? Go look outside. See those cars driving by? Every car being driven by a man was designed and built and bought and sold with you in mind. The only reason why small, fuel-efficient or electric cars don’t dominate the roads is because we want to look cool in our cars, to impress you.

Go look at a city skyline. All those skyscrapers? We built those to impress you, too. All those sports you see on TV? All of those guys learned to play purely because in school, playing sports gets you laid. All the music you hear on the radio? All of those guys learned to sing and play guitar because as a teenager, they figured out that absolutely nothing gets women out of their pants faster. It’s the same reason all of the actors got into acting.

All those wars we fight? Sure, at the upper levels, in the halls of political power, they have some complicated reasons for wanting some piece of land or access to some resource. But on the ground? Well, let me ask you this — historically, when an army takes over a city, what happens to the women there?

It’s all about you. All of it. All of civilization.

So where you see a world in which males dominate the boards of the Fortune 500, and own Congress, and sit at the head of all but a handful of the world’s nations, men see themselves as utterly helpless. Because all of those powerful people only became powerful because they heard that women like power.

This is really the heart of it, right here. This is why no amount of male domination will ever be enough, why no level of control or privilege or female submission will ever satisfy us. We can put you under a burqa, we can force you out of the workplace — it won’t matter. You’re still all we think about, and that gives you power over us. And we resent you for it.

That accurately describes most of the men I grew up around in deep red Riverside County. Men, especially conservative men, are terrified that if women are given the agency to do as they please, none of the attitudes and skills they’ve honed will be necessary or useful in attracting them/controlling them. The key to breaking this down is to convince these men that women actually have and deserve agency in their lives, and that there’s no need to take all these repressive steps toward domination.

It’s tough to do and it may take generations, but it’s a crucial step in societal evolution.

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