Photo by American-Spectator-splainer Ben Stein by Flickr user murraystateuniversity. Used under a Creative Commons license.

According to his Wikipedia Entry Paul Bernardo, the Canadian boy scout, economics student, accountant, and Amway distributor(!!) benefitted from the same attitudes that asshole enabler and conservative performance artist Ben Stein wants us all to grant to the recently-arrested former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. (Emphasis mine.)

Investigation and release

Between May and September 1990, the police had submitted more than 130 suspects' samples for DNA testing when they received two reports that the person they were seeking was Paul Bernardo. The first, in June, had been called in by a bank employee. The second call was received from Tina Smirnis, the wife of one of the three Smirnis brothers who were among Bernardo's closest friends. Smirnis told the detectives that Bernardo "had been 'called in' on a previous rape investigation — once in December, 1987 - but he had never been interviewed." He frequently talked about his sex life to Smirnis and liked analingus, rough sex and anal sex.

Alex Smirnis' phrasing was awkward and stilted and consequently left the detectives unsure of whether to take him seriously. But after cross-checking several files the detectives decided to interview Bernardo. The interview, on November 20, 1990, lasted 35 minutes and Bernardo voluntarily gave samples for forensic testing. When the detectives asked Bernardo why he thought he was being investigated for the rapes, he admitted that he did resemble the composite. The detectives concluded that such a well-educated, well-adjusted, congenial young man couldn't be responsible for the vicious crimes; he "was far more credible than...Alex Smirnis who, with his awkward, strange way of speaking, might just be trying to collect the reward." Paul Bernado was released the following day.

Source: Bernardo's Wikipedia Entry

Oh well, as Ben Stein and his approving publishers at The American Spectator would no-doubt say, "Can anyone tell me any boy-scout/accountant/Amway guys who have been convicted of violent sex crimes?"

Although of course I'm sure he meant other than Paul Bernardo.

Hat tip Soren in comments

Figure 8. A GEICO advertising campaign featuring urbane cavemen posed this question: Who are you calling archaic? Archaeological evidence now shows that our species has always possessed the capacity for wide behavioral variability. (from the American Scientist article.)

John J. Shea, dismantling the idea that "archaic" Homo Sapiens were intrinsically less "advanced" than we are today, finds a really killer way to put it (emphasis mine.)

The hypothesis that there were skeletally modern-looking humans whose behavioral capacities differed significantly from our own is not supported by uniformitarian principles (explanations of the past based on studies of the present), by evolutionary theory or by archaeological evidence. There are no known populations of Homo sapiens with biologically constrained capacities for behavioral variability. Generations of anthropologists have sought in vain for such primitive people in every corner of the world and have consistently failed to find them. The parsimonious interpretation of this failure is that such humans do not exist.

Nor is there any reason to believe that behaviorally archaic Homo sapiens ever did exist. If there ever were significant numbers of Homo sapiens individuals with cognitive limitations on their capacity for behavioral variability, natural selection by intraspecific competition and predation would have quickly and ruthlessly winnowed them out. In the unforgiving Pleistocene environments in which our species evolved, reproductive isolation was the penalty for stupidity, and lions and wolves were its cure. In other words: No villages, no village idiots.

Source: American Scientist

Now what possible bearing could an article arguing (through an analysis of stone tool use over the last 200,000 years or so) that humans have been cognitively versatile, plastic, and otherwise "modern" almost since we became a distinct species have on a progressive sex, relationships, and gender blog?

Well, beside the obvious I mean.

It's a bit of a trick question but just in case, here's how Shea puts it

Dividing Homo sapiens into modern and archaic or premodern categories and invoking the evolution of behavioral modernity to explain the difference has never been a good idea. Like the now-discredited scientific concept of race, it reflects hierarchical and typological thinking about human variability that has no place in a truly scientific anthropology. Indeed, the concept of behavioral modernity can be said to be worse than wrong, because it is an obstacle to understanding. Time, energy and research funds that could have been spent investigating the sources of variability in particular behavioral strategies and testing hypotheses about them have been wasted arguing about behavioral modernity.

I... wonder if there might be other arenas where similarly hierarchical traditions might be interfering with our understanding of actual human behavior.  And what else we might be capable of.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon discusses exactly what kind of monster "pro-life" columnist Ross Douthat really is.  At the end of the day you get the strong impression that, like a lot of other "pro-life" assholes, his opposition to abortion and contraception are 100% about the annoying shortage of white babies available for adoption.  She begins with this snipped of Douthat's latest pro-forced-pregnancy screed OpEd in the New York Times (emphasis mine)

In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.

Source: New York Times

You'll notice in the last line that while his piece is nominally about how awful abortion is, his emphasis here isn't about abortion at all.  By definition the decline of pregnancies "relinquished" for adoption at birth weren't terminated!

Amanda correctly hands Douthat the toilet paper he needs to wipe his mouth

Well, obviously, having your life plans to have a baby thwarted is a humiliation no Caucasian should ever have to suffer. Clearly, there is only one solution, which is to return to an era where being a sexually active, unmarried woman was de facto criminalized so that your labor could be forcibly extracted from you to benefit people who do a much better job than you of keeping up appearances.

There’s a lot of human rights violations that Douthat glossed over in his chillingly inhumane euphemistic phrasing “this gap used to be bridged by adoption”.  By “bridged by adoption”, what he means is young white women (and some young black women, though there was less demand for their babies, and subsequently less forcing them into maternity homes) who turned up pregnant were forced to give birth to babies and forced into maternity homes where they were restrained and often subject to torturous behavior so they couldn’t resist when their babies were snatched from them against their wills.  He’s right that Roe v. Wade had a lot to do with turning this around, and it’s not just because women had an option to abort instead.  It’s also because once it was enshrined in law that even pregnant women have rights, it became harder to justify the existence of maternity homes and coercing women to give up babies.

This is why the concern for women’s mental health is such obvious bullshit.  Anti-choicers who blather about “post-abortion syndrome” have exactly no problem with reinstating a situation where women are put through the very real and often lifelong trauma of having a baby taken from you against your will.

Source: Pandagon

Got that right!  Having been a sex-ed peer counselor as a teenager I know and am still friends with a number of people, mostly but not all women, who were involved in teen pregnancies that ended in two of the three cases that Douthat deplores and the one he extolls.  One or two women of the many who had abortions in their teens say they think about what might have been, though most don't.  The one or two women who kept their babies (which was extremely rare in those days) are pretty darn happy they did.

The ones who were forced by society in general and their parents in particular to "relinquish" the babies they give birth to?  30 and 40 years later most are still trying to find the children Douthat would have gleefully torn from their arms at birth and sold through and adoption agency to "nice white couples" like... himself and his wife.

Did I mention Douthat's a monster?  Did you notice I didn't say "I think he's a monster?"  He's just a monster.  An inhuman, unfeeling, heartless, sick, woman-hating, avaricious, predatory, and (despite his protestations of nominal Christianity) godless monster.

Because unless you're just evil then if you're going to work as tirelessly against contraception as Douthat and his coven do, and if you're genuinely interested in alternatives to pregnancy termination, then the biggest possible cause for celebration on the planet would be the increase in "unwed" mother's ability to keep and raise their own infants to adulthood.  And the way to do that, of course, is to alter society so that women in need can have the support they need early on, and the opportunities for education, for work, and for decent, equal wages for equal time worked, such that they... and often their equally "unwed" partners... can provide for their own children.  The big difference since the 1970s?  We've made changes to society.  And if major shitheads like Ross Douthat would stop working to actually thwart the process we could do even more.

To Douthat, though, and to far too many others of his festering ilk, a young woman selfishly raising her own children (surprisingly often in conjunction with her equally young partner, by the way) rather than "relinquishing" them to people like himself is a far larger tragedy than abortion.

Fuck him.  Him and the horse he rode up on.

And just to be clear, I'm not knocking adoption per se.  To name just one instance where I think adoption can work out well: a good person and a good friend I hardly see anymore adopted two genuinely wonderful children from a mom who really, seriously couldn't support them.  (Being a good person my friend keeps the birth mother as involved as she can safely allow.)

But here's the thing about that: the adoptions took place because the mother needed it, and her children needed it, not because the adopting family "needed" them or otherwise wanted to.

Douthat's case isn't about what children, or even "unwed" mothers need.  At all!  Notice how meticulously he parses the statistics of race in his lamentation.  There are, as we probably all know, entirely too many children who need... sometimes badly need adoption -- far more than the ostensible "demand" for adoptees.  The only problem... and for Douthat the only problem!... is that there aren't enough available white adoptees... born of "prime breeding stock" young, healthy, suburban teenageers from whom they can be forcibly taken away.  And sold.  Into the families of white-skinned but black-hearted fuckers like Douthat's.

---

Oh yeah.  One more thing.  One possible area where Douthat and I might possibly intersect -- though I think saying "common ground" would be way too strong a term.  While Douthat's obviously 100% fine with families that force their younger members to throw their babies away into to the adoption industry's maw, in the past he's expressed concern that sometimes families, or partners, will pressure young women to have abortions they'd rather not have.  Since, unlike Douthat, I'm strongly pro-choice I agree that a pregnant woman's choice should be honored, deferred to, and, especially, supported. A woman who doesn't want to either terminate her pregnancy or surrender her baby shouldn't have to!

Sheesh!  It shouldn't be hard to get that across to someone with even a tiny little brain.  And Douthat doesn't have a tiny brain.  Quite the opposite in fact.  That something as simple as honoring choice should easily percolate but doesn't is further evidence of exactly what kind of monster he really is.

Update: See also Jill Filipovic's take.  Read the whole thing (the first paragraph's great.)  I especially liked this though: "It’s also absolutely true that birth control has decreased the pool of potentially adoptable babies. I suppose in Douthat’s world, that’s a bad thing too, since any control over your reproduction is suspect. But for most of us, being able to prevent pregnancies we don’t want is a net gain."

So this weekend at a local community-service fair this weekend I ran across two great organizations everyone else might already know about but I didn’t.

BABES Network logo

First, the YWCA sponsors a group called Babes Network, “a sisterhood of women facing HIV together since 1989.” BABES network is Seattle based peer support group. Their mission is to reduce isolation and stigma and to promote empowerment and quality of life for women and families dealing with HIV. So much of what we hear about “women with HIV/AIDS” presents them as passive, inevitably as victims (unless maybe they’re IV drug users), probably straight, probably poor and poorly educated, and generally as living and dying somewhere far away like the Ukraine or sub-Saharan Africa, and so on. This just… might be because despite all the stigma, and despite the terrible impact of HIV once the transition to AIDS is complete, there’s no real way to know if either the presentable young woman at a reference desk, or the shambling elderly woman she might be assisting is HIV positive. And so one tends to assume they aren’t. In fact both might have it. And yet, invisibility isn’t quite the same thing as non-existent.

—-

The old quip “on the internet nobody can hear you scream” comes with its own little helping of privilege. Another invisible-in-plain-sight demograhic is served by the Abused Deaf Women’s Advocacy Services or ADWAS.org which “provides comprehensive services to Deaf and Deaf-Blind victims/survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and stalking. ADWAS believes that violence is a learned behavior and envisions a world where violence is not tolerated.” They also started in Seattle, in 1986, and have spread to 20 communities around the U.S.