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?

According to this morning's Seattle Times

The Vatican orthodoxy watchdog announced Wednesday a full-scale overhaul of the largest umbrella group for nuns in the United States, accusing the group of taking positions that undermine Roman Catholic teaching on the priesthood and homosexuality while promoting "certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith."

Would the Catholic Church ever consider chartering nuns to investigate and discipline priests and bishops for taking positions that also undermine Roman Catholic teachings on the priesthood and homosexuality while also promoting "certain misogynist and/or pedophilic themes incompatible with Catholic faith?"

No. They wouldn't because regardless of the merits the optics of giving an exclusive-to-women enterprise complete dominion over an exclusive-to-men one would seem arbitrary, capricious, unfair, punitive, and wrong. And probably sexist.

So why on this great blue marble does the Catholic Church think it's a good idea to give a skutload of men complete dominion over an order they themselves have restricted entirely to women?

Yes, yes, I'm aware that according to the Bishop's doctrines raping a woman or sodomizing a child is a repentable venal sin whereas saving a pregnant woman's life is an unrepentable mortal one. And so as a matter of degree one could accept the notion that reviewing the policies of nuns would be more in order than a similar review of policies for priests. (I'm not saying I'd rank them the same, just that on paper you could see differences in priority.)

And yes, I'm aware that since homosexuality in both sexes are considered wrong it could be completely coincidental that the Bishops chose first to review an order of nuns before a corresponding review of an order of priests. (I'm not saying I'd rank them the same, just that again on paper I could see how you might tackle one before tackling the other.)

What I don't get, however, is the batshit insane optics of appointing an all-male team to...

oversee the overhaul of [an organization of priests], which will include rewriting the group's statutes, reviewing all its plans and programs — including approving speakers — and ensuring the organization properly follows Catholic prayer and ritual.

How about, oh, maybe, if you think an overhaul is really needed, for the Church to appoint a team of priests and nuns to do the job?

I'm...

I'm trying to be fair here, and I'm obviously trying to limit the scope of my objections to a purely procedural level, but since it would stick in my craw if the Church appointed only nuns to crack down, hard, on American priests it similarly sticks in my craw that they're appointing only priests to crack down hard on nuns.

So... about allegations that the incontestible viscious email Montana Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull forwarded to what he must have imagined were like-minded friends after receiving it from his brother.

The implication of the joke is that Barack Obama was conceived during an event wherein his mother had sex not only with men of different races but with animals as well.

As per usual in these cases the judge doesn't like to think he's racist just for sending the email.

Ok.  Fine.  Let's say he's not a racist.

Heck, let's even say what if the joke itself isn't racist!

Let's say Cebul's family(!) joke went something like "Mom, how come your blood type is AB-positive and mine is A-positive?"  "Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!"

If stripped of all racial overtones would that mean it was suddenly an OK joke?

If Cebull actually wasn't a racist (instead of just one more "don't like to think of myself as a racist" racist) would that make it ok to pass something like that around?

I mean, I wonder if it might have been anything besides racist?

What's funny is that for weeks now huge chunks of the population has been up in arms about extremist assaults on women's health.  How funny, then, that a joke like this makes the round and all people want to talk about are its racist implications.

Oh, by the way?  All hypotheticals aside was the joke racist?  Oh yeah.  Were its authors and propagators racist?  Sure, that too.

It's just that it wasn't only racist.  There just aren't a lot of people talking about what else the kind of people who sent it around might be.

Hey, speaking of dogs...

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.
(From Arthur Conan Doyle's short story "Silver Blaze")

Hmm... sound familiar?

Pamela Haag begins a post with the following tidbit:

Like other local and state governments, Topeka, Kansas is in the grips of a dismal budget crisis. So this week, Topeka’s City Council did something desperate. They debated decriminalizing domestic violence--because the cost of prosecuting these cases, and other misdemeanors, is just too high. The county has already turned back 30 domestic violence cases since they stopped prosecuting them on September 8.

One of the problems with these stories is that it’s hard to believe that we’re actually hearing what we’re hearing. Sometimes I think the 20th century was all a dream, and we’ve awakened back in the 19th. Could civilization unravel so much that we rip up paved roads to save money—or revive wife-beating to save a buck? It sounds like a satirical Onion headline.

Source: Big Think Proxy

My first inclination post this with the title "Oh for heaven's sakes, part 3,776" or something like that. But the rest of Haag's post is too important to miss. It's an essay on the extremely narrow definitions of marriage extreme right-wing "traditionalists" like, naturally, Kansas governor Sam Brownback emphasize is their "marriage encouragement" policies.

It’s not heterosexual marriage generically that’s promoted in Kansas and elsewhere. It’s marriage of a particular (patriarchal) brand and a particular (gender-typed) sort.

...

Ironically, in the classes and states today that have the very lowest divorces rates—the educated, affluent middle class, that is, and uber-liberal Massachusetts—it’s precisely this sort of gender role flexibility that you’re likely to see. The community welcomes stay-at-home dads as well as stay-at-home moms. Dads and moms are likely to perform a variety of roles in marriage, from breadwinning to breadbaking and childrearing and nurturing. These precisely aren’t marriages of interdependence, but of overlapping, multi-tasking competencies. Still, the defense of marriage tends to trash career moms for ruining the family, and privilege distinct husband and wife roles

...

If a view doesn’t punch our own life in the face, then we think it can’t hurt us.

But marriage politics today aren’t just about opposition to same-sex marriage and homosexuality. No, they’re interested in your big, fat, straight wedding, too. Campaigns for traditional marriage support particular versions of heterosexual marriage. To paraphrase from Animal Farm, some marriages are more equal than others.

Yes, the initial snippet about effectively legalized wife (and husband) battering is shocking but Haag reminds us that it's just one tiny foray in a very long, quiet, and persistent campaign to and to re-enact Biblical, capital-P Patriarchy.

Having rather enjoyed I can't imagine why anyone would want to effectively repeal the second half of the 20th Century as well as the first tenth of the 21st, let alone why they'd want to force everyone else to go back. But they do.