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Well that was pretty quick. Melissa McEwen at Shakesville posted the late Mary Daly’s popular “origin of the word sin” quote by way of eulogy an early feminist icon. And, despite multiple apologies, promptly got threadjacked by accusations of transphobia. Enough so that another blogger at the site closed comments on the post.

The bone of contention being Daly’s evident transphobia. Which isn’t terribly widely know — little-known enough, for instance, to have caught the generally hyper-inclusive McEwen off guard.

If I have the main 70’s era categories of feminism that would have been current in Daly’s ascendancy she was a gender essentialist and not a gender equalitarian. That essentialism was a pretty big deal and one that, I’m pretty sure, is pretty incompatible with sympathy for the transsexual and transgendered.

Yes, you might argue, perfectly reasonably as many trans people do, that the real “essence” of one’s sex is determined by identity and not chromosomes. But that’s not going to carry a lot of weight with anyone who believes that, say, by its very nature the Y chromosome is irretrievably degenerate or that the planet needs to be “decontaminated” of individuals with that defect.

With that understanding transphobia is 100% consistent with gender essentialism. Racism and genocide would be consistent with antagonism towards gender equalitarianism. To an essentialist like Daly a man using plastic surgery and testosterone suppressing drugs to “pass” as a woman would be as viscerally offensive as a person of color using plastic surgery and melanin-suppressing drugs to “pass” as white would be to David Duke

That said, regardless of her motivation for analyzing the gendered status quo one can still learn from her analysis of its structure and flaws. Enough so to say she was a significant figure in gender politics independent of her essentialism. You might not want to touch most of her proposed solutions with a 10-foot pole, but one can learn from her analysis. And draw one’s own, non-essentialist, non-exclusivist conclusions.

Adam B of Daily Kos has a good rundown of why Ted Olson and David Boies could win the Federal-level challenge to California’s odious Proposition 8 I mentioned the other day.

So you’ve no doubt read by now that Ted Olson — former Solicitor General of the United States, lead attorney for Governor Bush in Bush v Gore and [something] in the Arkansas Project — is now involved in trying to strike down Prop 8.  And many of you, I know, are assuming he’s somehow trying to shipwreck the cause of gay rights.  

I don’t think so.  First of all, his co-counsel in the matter is David Boies, who represented Al Gore in Bush v. Gore and whose liberal credentials are impeccable.  This is a bipartisan effort, and while I think it’s certainly an extension of existing law, it’s not an unreasonable one to seek from the Supreme Court as presently constituted.  Here’s why.

Read all about it here.

The rest is good reading. He explains why the seemingly narrow, minimal, seemingly “harmless” language of Prop 8 might make it easier to beat under Federal Equal Protection Clause standards. There are at least three major prior Supreme Court decisions that make it very clear that animosity towards stigmatized groups is absolutely unconstitutional.

...consider the Prop. 8 question this way: is there a rational basis for the citizens of a state to withdraw the term “marriage” from its legal description of same-sex unions — and only from same-sex unions — when such a move seems solely to be motivated by the desire to stigmatize such couples compared to straight couples? In a way, Prop. 8 would have been more constitutional had it withdrawn more than the name “marriage” from same-sex unions and withdrawn concrete rights as well — because then the state could argue for some cause-and-effect linkage in the amendment in demonstrating its preference for opposite-sex unions. Now, it’s only about stigma and animus.

And in a not-entirely-heartening conclusion he lists a number of reasons why, no matter how the Court eventually rules, they can make things quite a bit better but no matter how much animosity certain Justices might feel they can’t make it any worse.

Good reading.

Lia of Rogue Reverend says

Nate Phelps is the son of the infamous Fred Phelps, the awful (pardon my french) ASSHAT pastor of the website God Hates Fags. I’m not linking to his site. This really struck me:

Yet when my father turned his instructive fist on my mother, I instinctively felt internal conflict. For me, it was intuitively wrong that a 6 foot 2, 250 pound man be allowed to beat up a woman barely half his size. But we dared not intervene or even question his actions, because his behavior was sanctioned by god.

In one instance, as my father was stalking our mother at the top of the stairs, she stumbled and started to fall. Reaching out to catch herself she ripped her arm out of the socket. My father refused to let her get medical treatment to repair the damaged muscles and tendons. In subsequent, years when he was angry with her, he would inevitably grab for that injured arm. On a few occasions he managed to get hold of it and re-injure it.

I’ve always known instinctively that Fred Phelps is a bad person. But to hear his son tell the tale, it is even more horrific. There is something about this mix of power, anger, and religion that kills me the most.

She said it here.

While I can sympathize with his sentiment it’s always seemed like Marx was mistaken to say “Religion is a crutch.” But also while I can sympathize with the sentiment it’s also seemed like the religious wag was mistaken to reply “But humanity has a broken leg.”

Because you can’t lean on faith, no more than you can lean on love or sex or place or privilege or (goodness knows!) gender or any institution. Nor are we born in damage or injury or sin such that we must be mended or healed or blessed before we can lead good lives.

Whatever the words of his text, Reverend Phelps, surely as pious a man as any in intention and, especially, longing, has preached that sermon all his life with his life: you can not lean on faith as if it were a crutch because it will break your leg. And dislocate your partner’s arm! And immiserate the lives of those you scorn, and those you shun, and those you mock, and those you drive from faith by your example!

Scott Adams of Dilbert.com Blog proposes a startling hypothesis… that among other things would confirm a lot of data about the demographics in vibrant vs. stagnant parts of the U.S. economy.

Single people are free to take more economic risks than married people. It makes me wonder if there is a correlation between the average age of marriage in a particular area and its economy.

My hypothesis is that places where marriage happens early, by custom or religion, will also be the places with the slowest rate of development. In such places there might be fewer entrepreneurs and everyone would take fewer risks.

...

Name three vibrant entrepreneurial countries where people also marry young.

Read the quote in context here.

It’s often proposed that creative people are drawn to more ethnic, gender, orientation, and lifestyle tolerant, and more just generally culturally diverse areas and that the resulting concentrations of creativity leads to increased innovation, which leads to increased prosperity, which leads to an influx of more creative people, rinse and repeat.

This is said to be one of the reasons places like New York, the Bay Area, and Seattle appear to thrive while infrastructurally equivalent places like Cleveland, Phoenix, or Houston. (Interesting counterexample would be the Provo Valley in Utah, which is suitable for socially conservative but intellectually/technologically agile people can land.)

I can’t put my finger on a specific citation but see for-instance on tolerance for immigration. Other studies, books, and articles extend the thesis to the economic benefits of tolerance for gender, orientation, cultural, and educational diversity.

Anyway, Adams’ suggestion adds another layer: not only are creative people drawn to such nexuses, because they can afford to take the risks and ride out the ups and downs of intellectual ferment they don’t just benefit from it they help sustain it.