So Richard (DIck) Mourdock has a big sad ("it has been one of the toughest days of my life") about the very suggestion that just because (he believes, after he "struggled with it myself for a long time") God intends a rapist to get his victim pregnant that he therefore intends for the rapist to actually, you know, rape his victim.

Because, you know, he and his ilk also claim even if the father is a sinner God says his child is completely innocent and just as precious as any other life.

Oh really?

Let's see what his part of the Bible say about God's attitudes towards the offspring of guilty people:

(Exodus 34:6-7) - "Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loving kindness and truth; who keeps loving kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations."

Uh oh!

Not that we really expect Mourdock, Aiken, Ryan, or other nominally Christian extremists to be authentic, let alone consistent, about their respect for the Bible -- after all their entire political agenda involves the repeal of the Sermon on the Mount!  But if we take them at their word then they're stuck with only a few very ugly choices:

If God meant what he said in Exodus 34:6-7 (and elsewhere around the Old Testament) then He doesn't think a rapist's baby is all that innocent or worthy of protection after all.  In which case Mourock et. al are seriously misinterpreting what God wants, Or.

If God meant what he said but a rapist's baby doesn't fall under the Exodus 34:6-7 clause then God sort of necessarily really doesnt think a rapist is guilty of iniquity.  In which case Mourdock et. al are seriously misinterpreting what God wants.

If God really didn't mean what he said in Exodus 34:6-7, or, worse from their claimed position, he meant it but it's not that big a deal to ignore Him, then they're throwing open the Biblical-interpretation cafeteria door, in which case they need to explain... well... why we have to listen to them pulling the God card on any number of other issues... where, after all, they're generally far more at odds with the black and white text than are, oh, say, most liberals and progressives.

Personally I think there are plenty of other positive, uplifting, and non-getting-into-other-people's-business versions of Christian theology that don't require literal interpetations of every line of text.  Which considering Jesus' absolute and unambiguous condemnations of hypocrisy and empty piety ought to comfort Mourdock, Akin, Ryan, and their ilk enormously. 

But!

If they're going to keep insisting we adopt their spiteful, narrow, supersticious and suspiciously self-serving interpretations then... one way or another Mourdock is wrong that God both doesn't intend for a rapist to commit his crime but does intend him to impregnate his victim.

Seriously, gang.  If you're going to be a Christian in the first place you've got to see the Bible as more than a magic rattle you can shake any time you want to feel good about being a self-serving dick.

Note: I've been using the words "rape" and "rapist" in these last few posts because that's the language Mourdock, Akin, Ryan, and the rest insist on using.

While reading E.J. Graff's exploration of Republican attempts to justify their gut conviction that rape is bad but rape pregnancy is very, very good the following knee-jerk right-wing syllogisms popped into my head.

1. Pregnancy from rape is very good.  So good that the government should force victims to remain pregnant through live birth.
2. Rape, on the other hand, is very bad.  So bad that rapists should be executed.  Even, presumably, rapists who impregnate their victims.
3. Single motherhood, on the other hand, is also very bad.  So bad that every child should have both a mother and father.
4. ???
5. Republican policy success!

Each of the first three steps, above so obvious to these guys.  So obvious you can just see their earnest enthusiasm bubbling over.  You can practically understand their confusion and frustration that what's so obvious to them should not seem obvious to others.

Obviously something is missing.

What, er, conceivable argument can you put in line D that will square their little hippie-dippy feeling-good-matters-most circles with honesty, integrity, consistency, responsibility, or any of the other attributes these same guys used to accuse 60's-era hippies of lacking?

This post examines several sides of the collision of privacy and freedom to offend.  And comes to a conclusion that surprised me.

There's a lot of complex hand-wringing, celebration, and outrage making the rounds about the recent Gawker post that outed internet uber-troll Michael Brutsch, who for years has led an anonymous and wildly successful movement on Reddit and elsewhere to be as calculatingly cruel as possible to victims of previous crimes and other offences.

The hand wringers are pretty uniformly people who recognize Brutsch for the flaming fucking asshole he is... but who nevertheless feel conflicted about people's rights to a) post anonymously and b) retain a right to free speech.  Oh, and possibly c) a right to privacy.

There are others who feel that the mere nature of Brutsch's deplorability (and, seriously, the guy is utterly deplorable) deprives him of his rights to free speech and privacy.

And there are yet still others who feel that the very deplorability of Brutsch's "speech" (and again, seriously, his entire on-line presence revolved around creating, celebrating, and nurturing deplorability) somehow enshrines his rights to free speech and privacy.

Sorry, gang, there's no paradox, no cause for outrage, no cause for censorship, and definitely no cause for hand-wringing.

Instead it's a matter of standards.  Standards of decency.  Standards of deplorability too.

It is, of course, equally deplorable to either a) to offend sensibilities by encouraging others to jack off to photos of dead minor children as Michael Brutsch, operating under the pseduonym Violentacrez did, or b) to offend sensibilities by outing someone who posts anonymously on the internet, as Gawker Media did.

Sorry, on the hand-wringer-y side it's just true: if you're offended by one you should be offended by the other -- and thus people offended by outing Brutsch's "speech" must by definition be offended by Gawker outing him.

Similarly, sorry, on the censorship side it's just true: if you defend Brusch's right to post calculatingly deplorale "speech" on the internet then you by definition must defend Gawker Media for outing him.

And finally, sorry, on the free-speech side it's just true: if you agree that Brusch should have been outed for posting his deplorable speech then by definition you agree he should be able to post it.

If you think you can weasle out of it by picking one side or the other you're mistaken. (Well, while remaining a progressive anyway: conservatives do it with self-serving ease but that's why they disgust us.) If you think you need to wring your hands over it you're also mistaken.  (Well, while remaining progressive anyway: liberals do it with self-defeating ease but that's why so many of them disgust everyone else.)

Update: Other variations include

If you support censor Gawker for outing Brutsch you support censoring Brutsch

If you support taking revenge on Gawker for outing Brutsch you support taking revenge on Brutsch

In a Huffington Post, err, post hypothesizing about (white? western?) men's fascination with women's breasts Larry Young and Brian Alexander reference the old sociobiology canard about men. Something about the way they said it made me feel even more skeptical than usual. (Emphasis mine.)

But men aren't known for being particularly choosy about sex partners. After all, sperm is cheap. Since we don't get pregnant, and bear children, it doesn't cost us much to spread it around. If the main goal of sex -- evolutionarily speaking -- is to pass along one's genes, it would make more sense to have sex with as many women as possible, regardless of whether or not they looked like last month's Playmate.

Source: Huffington Post

Is this true? Are men really not particularly choosy about sex partners? Really?

And even if they are is it really because of biology?  Or is it maybe more about 

Are that many men completely indifferent about their even casual partner's unplanned, unwanted pregnancies?  Enough so that it can be tossed off as a blanket statement about all men?  Because under normal circumstances even the most desperately non-choosy men are generally pretty appalled to learn their current or erstwhile partner is "knocked up."  (That alone ought to scotch the whole "seed spreading" meme.)

I mention "normal circumstances" because there are circumstances of dislocation such as military or wage-seeking migrant separation where men don't appear to be as choosy, and there are circumstances where shame-driven alienation (religious/social strictures) or fear-driven alienation ("wide stanced" men in homophobic cultures) drive men to be less choosy.  But almost by definition those aren't the normal circumstances in which most men live most of their lives.  

I mean...

Look, if you lock men, or women, in confined quarters for months at a time they routinely start smearing the walls with their feces.  Yet somehow we don't make statements such as "men aren't known for being particularly choosy about where they smear their feces."  That's because, actually, under normal circumstances people are actually pretty well known for not smearing their feces.

And speaking of normal circumstances...

Really?

Really?

Men aren't particularly choosy?

Are you kidding me?  First of all, if men weren't particularly choosy then Cosmopolitan Magazine wouldn't have a circulation rate of three million would it?  If men weren't particularly choosy there would be no traditions of partnerless women behind stories or songs about "wallflowers" would there?  If men weren't particularly choosy there wouldn't be so much frickin' choosiness expressed in endless comments on various porn and not-so porn websites about how anyone short of utterly flawless doesn't measure up at all.  Nor would there be male-to-male putdowns like "I wouldn't fuck her with your dick."  Nor would you have other commenters on the right opining that they wouldn't want to have sex with, say, Hillary Clinton, or equally as bad there wouldn't be commenters on the left making similar judgments about, say, Ann Coulter.  Nor would there be so very many married women (especially women bloggers) so aching with frustration with their long-term partner's lack of libido that they blog or comment about it.

More importantly, nor would there have been the online post that inspired me to write "The limits of 'no means no'" which was about a woman's observation that the misogynist notion that "women have the power" in sexual relations applies only to those women who are asked!

Clue: in any given year, month, week, or day an enormous number of women are not being asked.

Anyway, I know, I know, it's part of the dominant paradigm to just "know" that men are the "sex class:"  reflexively, uncontrollably, and otherwise eternally obliged to seek sex at every opportunity and never to decline it.  And, being ingrained in the dominant paradigm it's almost impossible not to bake the assumption into even somewhat skeptical scientific discourse.

But...

But...

Is it true that men are not particularly choosy? Or do we just "know" it's true... so true we don't even bother to check.  (Or even so true we outright discard men from the data set if they don't fit the profile?!?!?)