Note: Trigger warnings are in order for this post about a potential hate crime with an uncomfortable twist.

Photo of graffiti at Ballard Skate Park by Flickr user Great Beyond. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Bad news from one of my local neighborhood's news blogs, My Ballard:

Just about two weeks ago, Tad and Cindy Anderson’s daughter, Tiva, was attacked with a baseball bat near the skate park at Ballard Commons Park. She suffered a serious head injury, but Tiva is expected to make a full physical recovery. However, her parents say she’s emotionally fragile since the attack.

...

“She has learning disabilities that can make it hard to interact with her, and she is transgender (biologically male but considers herself female and sometimes dresses that way),” the parents write in an email to neighbors. “It probably should have been obvious to us a long time ago, but this turns out to be a dangerous combination. Transgender people are the most likely to be harassed and Tiva is particularly vulnerable due to her limited social skills.”

...

The only thing the parents know is that the attacker is a white female, and they believe she may hang out around the skate park. “The female came up along side [of her] and told her, ‘I don’t want to see you around the skate bowl anymore,’” the police report states. “The female then struck [her] on the right side of the head with the baseball bat.”

Source: My Ballard Blog

The police aren't certain the attack was specifically because the victim is transgender, and in our neighborhood it's entirely possible it wasn't. In which case it would be, what? "Regular" bullying not of a trans kid but of a developmentally disabled girl? With a baseball bat? Either way not so great.

Photo of NZ Police Minister Judith Collins via stuff.co.nz

New Zealand blogger Maia says the recent earthquake seems to be giving the local justice department head an opportunity to further indulge in rape culture and, by extension, homophobia.

From the [New Zealand] Herald: Police Minister Judith Collins said the actions of looters was akin to “people who rob the dead”. She expected to see the judiciary throw the book at looters.

“I hope they go to jail for a long time – with a cellmate.”

Judith Collins introduced widespread double-bunking; she championed it in the media. When people who had actually done research suggested that it would lead to more prison rape and violence, she shrugged those statements off.

And now she’s telling us that, for her, abuse and violence between inmates is a feature of double-bunking, not a bug. She is not explicit, but we live in a culture where threats of rape in prison are common enough that she doesn’t need to finish the thought by telling us that the cellmate is large and called Bubba. By signalling that she thinks looters should be subject to rape and violence from their cell mates, she has acknowledged that her policy of introducing cellmates is responsible for increased rape and violence.

Source: Alas, a blog

This is pretty cool.  I'm glad she brought it up.

Few things identify rape culture quite like the assumption that it will be the new, the young, the white, the middle-class, the petty-criminals, or the white-collar criminals who will become the victims of prison rape when inmates are “doubled up” unsupervised in cells.

Similarly, few things identify rape culture quite like the assumption that if assertions like Collins’s are true then the prison system rewards, encourages, coddles, or even tacitly recruits those who really are prison rapists by providing them with more victims.

And finally, few things identify rape culture quite like the general failure of progressives to push back on the previous two assumptions.

While rates of rape and sexual assault seem to be in decline in the general population, prison rape remains a huge reservoir not only of future perpetrators but of current ones! And of current victims. Thanks so much for bringing this up and for making the connection so clearly.

Couple other little assumptions in there

• That only prisoners sexually assault or rape prisoners
• That only male prisoners sexually assault or rape fellow prisoners
• That (dreadful as it sounds) rape and sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to one in prison.
• That sex between prisoners is inevitably non-consensual, or that loneliness and isolation can never be so great that otherwise straight prisoners never seek or form intimate or sexual bonds with each other.

But the main thing is that New Zealand's senior police official thinks that "tough on crime" means incorporating prison rape into corrections policy rather than opposing or working to minimize it.  She's not alone.

Amanda Marcotte, again, about the ‘wingnut plan to build a “This is not a joke, I’ve spoken to a number of investors…“ plan to stick it to them Muslums and/or stick it to Liberals by building a “gay bar” next to the Cordoba House near Ground Zero.

Image via Amanda on FlickrI just have one thing to say.  Just because their kids set them up on Twitter doesn’t mean they’re computer literate, or they may have done the first thing that occurred to me, which is to look and see if there are any gay bars within the vicinity of the Cordoba House.  And lookie here, there are!

If you look at this picture, and you’re not too stupid to breathe (sorry, wingnuts!), you should immediately see two things that make this whole “let’s put a gay bar by the Cordoba House and see liberal heads explode!” wishful thinking look even stupider than it is on its surface: 1) There are three gay bars within .1 mile of the Cordoba House and 2) They are all as close or closer to the Cordoba House than the WTC is.
She said it here.

Kevin Drum figured out the same thing from his home office somewhere in suburban southern California.

An even better poke in the eye for allegedly more fiscally-responsible conservatives, the first commenter on Drum’s post said

I think it’s called “Dakota North” or something like that.

Anyway, my recollection is, it’s not exactly the, um, most hetero place in TriBeCa anyways. Hope [Greg] Gutfeld’s got a marketing budget.

One of the first rules of starting a new business is assessing market conditions, including competition, at your proposed site. In other words even if they weren’t homophobic, religiously intolerant toolbags Gutfield and the “number of investors” who are lining up are crap businessmen from the word go.

Update Different context but see also Matt Yglesias on prominent conservatives’ blunt incomprehension of standard business practice.

Photo by Flickr user figleaf.

Completely unmooring itself from culture, tradition, and Christian religion, modern conservatism has now declared that all English-language Bibles are too liberal for their pinched little right-wing Pharisee hearts. Now they want to their own, more politically-correct-for-them translation.

One of their many qualms? They object that Luke 23:34 never appeared in the original Bible and was planted there nearly 2000 years ago. Which probably has some kind of internal logic for them — they imagine themselves believers in Jesus; they can’t imagine forgiving anybody themselves; therefore the words the dying Jesus said in the Gospels about forgiving those who trespassed against him has to be some kind of socialist typo.

Sadly, if the words were inserted this was done as early as the 2nd Century AD, and the sentiment, if not the words, were echoed by other early Christian martyrs including St. Stephen. It’s always seemed enough of a stretch to claim conspirators planted a birth certificate and newspaper birth announcements for Barack Obama in Hawaii in the 1950s. It’s completely out of control to imagine those same conspirators getting to Iranaeus, or the authors of the Diatessaron. But some ‘wingers seem willing to give it a go.

Not to put too fine a point on it but the King James Bible wasn’t too liberal for my great grandfather. He, after all, didn’t just contribute to but edited The Fundamentals or The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth. Published between 1910 and 1915 the 99 essays in 12 volumes are widely considered the foundation of — and source of the name for — Christian fundamentalism.

(Above) Flyer pasted into the back of my great-grandfather’s working Bible indicating a series of sermons he was undertaking to publish under the title "Fundamental Truths." The publication later became the foundation of what came to be called Christian Fundamentalism.

For the record, and for ‘wingnuts so used to playing "gotcha" they’ve completely stopped thinking, "liberal in spirit" meant something very different in 1910, and while the flyer says he was from Booklyn he was only the minster in the largest church there. Wingnuts will be genuinely pleased to learn he was born in North Carolina, on his slave-owning parent’s pre-Civil War farm.

(Above) Page of my great-grandfather’s working Bible turned to St. Luke 23:34. On the opposite page are notes for a sermon he gave called "The Tragedy of the Cross." Contemporary conservatives dispute Luke 23:34 as too liberal (and also, I’m guessing, insufficiently anti-semetic) and so they’d like to strike this line from the Bible. Which is kind of ironic considering my great-grandfather doesn’t seem to have considered it the least bit problematic. Indeed, on the facing page it’s item #1 (“of prayer: ‘father forgive’”) in his notes on the sermon, a recitation of the classic seven sayings of Jesus on the cross.

The irony does not elude me that a sex blogger would be castigating conservative politicians for heresy, blasphemy, immorality, and rejecting the words out of Jesus’s mouth. And certainly I’d be a hypocrite if I waxed nostaligic for the sort of “the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it” theology that inspired the original fundamentalists. But this is too much.

It was bad enough a few years ago when at least locally some of the more conservative churches dropped all charitable outreach (what my grandparents called “good works”) because it conflicted with their political beliefs. That they now want to rewrite scripture itself to suit their ideology is perilous not only for their movements, and not only for their faith, but also for where they might be choosing to spend eternity.

Not to put too fine a point on it, if modern wingnuts have a problem with the Bible used by the original Fundamentalists they claim they’re only following maybe they need to think, hard, about exactly what their intentions really are. And where they’re leading.