Monthly Archives: May 2012

Everybody will support same-sex marriage by 2030

May 14, 2012 – 12:36 pm

OK, everybody may be an exaggeration. Let’s just say every politician of any significance: every presidential candidate, every governor, every member of congress, and the leadership of every party in every house of every state legislature.

Two charts tell you all you need to know about the politics of same-sex marriage. First, it has long-term momentum:

Second, it has the most inexorable kind of momentum there is: generational. Each day a few more supporters turn 18 and a few more opponents die. That’s how it’s going to be for a long, long time.

Explain it to the kids. That’s why President Obama explained his own change of heart this way:

Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose parents are same-sex couples. There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table and we’re talking about their friends and their parents. And Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. It doesn’t make sense to them and, frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.

This is how taboos fall. One generation genuinely believes in the taboo. The next follows it out of habit, but can’t defend it. And finally there’s a generation that challenges: The kids ask “Why?” and their parents have no answer.

Many of those parents will stay stuck in their ways, but politicians can’t afford to. They have to follow the majority, even if it goes against what they’ve stood for in the past.

We’ve seen this happen before.

Race and the Owens-Louis kids. When Jesse Owens won Olympic gold in Munich in 1936, and then Joe Louis defended his boxing title against Max Schmeling in a sold-out Yankee Stadium in 1938, the rooting wasn’t black vs. white. It was America vs. Nazi Germany.

To many of the white American kids who listened to those two events on the radio, it only made sense to let Jackie Robinson play major league baseball in 1947, and later, to start breaking down color barriers all across society.

When Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? raised the interracial marriage taboo in 1967, the Owens-Louis kids were the generation in between the Tracy-Hepburn parents and their Sidney-Poitier-dating daughter. They knew interracial marriage was still beyond the pale. Most of them would never consider it themselves. But they couldn’t explain why.

When the Owens-Louis generation reached middle age in the 1970s, segregationist politicians had to capitulate. In 1963 George Wallace could pledge “segregation forever”. In 1970 he successfully ran a race-baiting campaign for governor. But by 1979 he was saying, “I was wrong. Those days are over and they ought to be over.”

The 1970s didn’t end racism — racists can still dog-whistle and use code words — but they ended the days when a politician could stake out an openly racist position and hope to win on it, even in Alabama.

Today, the Owens-Louis kids are the old folks, and returning to Jim Crow is as unthinkable as returning to slavery. Whenever same-sex marriage proponents are allowed to make the link to interracial marriage, the argument is over. No public figure will defend banning interracial marriage — a practice that was controversial even to talk about in 1967.

The Willow-Tara generation. In its acceptance of gays and lesbians, sports has trailed the culture rather than leading it. The characters who changed our thinking about homosexuality are more likely to be fictional ones we met through TV and movies.

In the late 1970s, it was edgy for Jack even to pretend to be gay on Three’s Company. Gay and lesbian minor characters started appearing on dramas like Hill Street Blues in the 1980s. Tom Hanks won an Oscar for his starring role as a sympathetic gay character in Philadelphia in 1993. From 1998-2006 Will and Grace (cited by Vice President Biden) centered on a gay man’s friendship with a straight woman.

I decided to symbolize this generation with a fictional same-sex couple almost exactly the age of the oldest Millennials: Willow and Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose relationship began right around the turn of the millennium.

Earlier pop-culture characters got viewers sympathizing with the problems of gay and lesbian individuals and their same-sex relationships. But for most of two seasons Willow and Tara raised a different question: What if there is no problem? What if two people of the same gender meet and fall in love and are happy together?

Like Willow and Tara, the oldest Millennials are about 50 years younger than the Owens-Louis kids. So as a guess, let’s set the 2020s as the decade of capitulation on gay rights: Every major politician will either leave the business or have a change-of-heart by 2030. Even conservatives, even in the Bible Belt.

Remember the Dixiecrats. Does that seem unthinkable? What about Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and younger politicians who seem eager to follow their lead? But what about Strom Thurmond, who during his Dixiecrat presidential campaign of 1948 said:

that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

In 1971 Senator Thurmond integrated his staff, and in 1983 he voted to honor Martin Luther King with a federal holiday. The sincerity of his transformation may be dubious, but he had to make it.

Biden first. The leading edge of gay-rights capitulation is in the Northeast and among Democrats. So it’s no coincidence that President Obama was put on the spot by Vice President Biden. Whatever happens in 2012, Biden is looking down the road to the Democratic primaries of 2016. No way a Democrat with an ambivalent gay-rights position wins in New Hampshire (where same-sex marriage is already legal) in 2016.

Politicians can read trend lines. If you hope to win statewide office in the Northeast or in California in 2020 — or anywhere in 2030 — you can’t be against same-sex marriage. The question isn’t whether you’ll change, it’s when.

The ancient ship Homophobia has had a long run, but it is going down. While it may take years to sink completely, no politician wants to go down with it. Those with any sense are already checking the exits and plotting their departure.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (12)

77 cents, part II: What if secretaries became programmers?

May 14, 2012 – 12:05 pm

When I was a kid in the 1960s, wage discrimination against women wasn’t something you had to ferret out with statistics.

My grade school was owned by the Lutheran church my family belonged to, and the congregation had to approve  the teachers’ salaries each year. So everyone knew that Male Teacher and Female Teacher were two different professions with different pay scales. If we hired a man and a woman straight out of the same Lutheran teachers’ college, we’d pay the man significantly more.

Everyone knew why: Male teachers (even if currently single) would need to support a family, while women (even if currently childless) taught either before or after their real profession, which was raising children.

That kind of thinking hung on longer in religious workplaces than elsewhere, but it wasn’t uncommon. Men made more than women, even if they were doing the same job. It was out in the open because nobody was ashamed of it.

Today, such overt separate-pay-scale discrimination is both illegal and socially unacceptable, so remaining wage discrimination (if any) must be hidden. That’s why we do statistics.

Last week I verified that at the grossest level, women still make less. In 2011, women working full time made 82 cents for every dollar made by men working full time. (The often-quoted 77 cents figure is a year older and figured slightly differently, which tells you something about the sensitivity of the calculations. In what follows I’ve been careful not to mix data from different sources. Everything comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics table that leads to the 82-cent estimate.)

But why do women make less? Is it for reasons we can all live with, or is the pay gap an injustice that needs fixing? Several reasons are frequently offered, together with explanations why we can live with those reasons. (Never forget that those are two separate conversations. Even if the whole pay gap could be boiled down to something as simple as “Girls don’t like math”, we’d still need to discuss whether that’s a problem we can or should fix.)

For each proposed reason, there’s a study proving that it’s not the whole story. Today I want to look at one of the most popular explanations of the pay gap: Women choose lower-paying professions. In other words, the overall averages compare female special education teachers to male aerospace engineers. No surprise who makes more.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has a study “The Gender Wage Gap by Occupation” proving that occupational segregation (as they call it) is not the whole story. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers from 2011 (the same ones in that 82-cent calculation), they list the 20 most popular occupations (out of around 400 listed by the BLS) for men and for women. Four occupations are on both lists, and six more are too segregated (i.e., construction worker, teacher assistant) to provide a reliable estimate of the minority gender’s earnings.

In the 30 remaining occupations, men make more in 28, and the other two are low-pay occupations where the female advantage is small: Female “stock clerks and order fillers” make $1.03 for every male dollar, and female “bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks” make $1.003. On the other pan of the scale, men have huge margins in high-pay occupations like “financial manager” (where women make 66 cents on the male dollar) and “chief executive” (69 cents).

So clearly, occupational segregation isn’t the whole story of the wage gap. But here’s the more interesting question: Granted that it isn’t the whole story, how big a part is it?

Maybe there’s a study that answers that question, but I didn’t find it. So I crunched some numbers myself. I started with the numbers in Table 1 and Table 2 of the IWPR report, restricting my attention to the 30 comparable occupations.

Eliminating the duplicate occupations and totaling up, we’ve got 18.4 million men making a total of $16.4 billion per week ($892 each) and 20.9 million women making $15.0 billion per week ($715 each), or about 80 cents on the dollar. So these 30 occupations are slightly better than average for both men ($832 overall) and women ($684), with women making almost the same relative wage (80 cents on the dollar) as in the total survey (82 cents).

To understand what I did next, imagine that there are only two occupations: male-dominated “software developers” and female-dominated “secretaries and administrative assistants”. (These are two of the 30 from the IWPR study.)

 occupation  # men  men $  # women  women $
 software  812  $1606  179  $1388
 office  84  $757  2059  $651
 Total/average  896  $1526  2238  $710

(The number of workers is in thousands.) So our miniature, two-occupation economy (call it “2-Job World”) employs 3,134,000 people (896,000 men and 2,238,000 women) and has a total weekly payroll of  $2.96 billion ($1.37 billion to men, $1.59 billion to women). Overall, its men average $1526 per week and its women $710. So the unfortunate women of 2-Job World make only 46 cents for every dollar a man makes, even though they make 86 cents on the dollar in each occupation. (That’s why I picked those two for my example.)

Amateur economists in 2-Job World — there are no professional economists, that would be a third job — could analyze their pay gap by constructing two counter-factual models. In each model, each occupation maintains the same the total number of jobs and the same total payroll, but women move towards equality in two different ways.

In 2-Job World Fantasy #1, the ratio of men and women in each profession equalizes. Overall, 29% of the workers are men. So in Fantasy #1, 29% of workers in each occupation are men. But the wage gap within each occupation stays the same: 86 cents on the dollar. That changes the table to look like this:

 occupation  # men  men $  # women  women $
 software  283  $1735  708  $1499
 office  613  $728  1530  $626
 Total/average  896  $1046  2238  $902

Basically, bringing lower-paid women into software allowed us to raise salaries in general, while bringing higher-paid men into the secretarial pool forced us to cut salaries there. But now we have an economy where there is no occupational segregation, and women make (surprise) 86 cents on the dollar.

In 2-Job World Fantasy #2, we leave everybody in their current job, but equalize pay within the occupations, so everybody makes the average salary for their occupation. That gives a table like this:

 occupation  # men  men $  # women  women $
 software  812  $1567  179  $1567
 office  84  $655  2059  $655
 Total/average  896  $1481  2238  $728

And here you wind up with women making 50 cents on the male dollar. You’ve only nudged the pay gap by 4 cents.

(I know what some of you are thinking: Where’s the extra 10 cents? Shouldn’t the 4 cents from equalizing pay and the 40 cents from equalizing occupational segregation add up to 2-Job World’s whole 54 cent pay gap? Congratulations, you have just discovered non-linearity. Equalizing pay in the already-desegregated world of Fantasy #1 would have a 14-cent effect, while it only has a 4-cent effect in the original 2-Job World.)

So 2-Job World looks like some people’s intuition about our whole economy: The big money is in getting women to become programmers instead of secretaries.

But when I applied the same two fantasies to the more representative 30-Job World, it came out exactly the other way. In 30-Job World (where women make 80 cents on the dollar), Fantasy #1 (desegregating the occupations) only gets us a 3-cent gain to 83 cents.

But Fantasy #2 (where both men and women make the average salary for their occupations) raises women’s relative pay to 92 cents. It gains women 12 cents rather than 3 cents.

So at least in 30-Job World, getting equal pay within each occupation turns out to be about four times more important than getting equal representation within the occupations.

Why? While programmers and secretaries are part of 30-Job World, the bigger effect comes from occupations that are already fairly well integrated, but men just make more, like retail sales supervisors: about 1.3 million men and 1.0 million women, but the women make 79 cents on the dollar.

Is that how things work in the overall economy (400+ Job World, if you use the BLS categories)? I’m not ready to say that yet. But until I see a better analysis, I’m going to be very skeptical of anybody who claims the wage gap is even largely due to women’s choice of professions. I’d be surprised if it ultimately explained more than a nickel of the gap.

Technical notes:

If you need to see for yourself, I’ve posted the larger tables: 30-Job World Actual, 30-Job World Fantasy #1, 30-Job World Fantasy #2.

I anticipate this objection: When I eliminated the 6 occupations where there wasn’t a large enough sample to get a good estimate of one gender’s wages, I disposed of exactly the occupations where desegregation would make a difference.

Strange things happen when you put those occupations back in, and they work backwards from what the objector might expect. Five of the six are male-dominated working-class jobs. When you lump them together, they pay less than even the female average in 30-Job World.

So the main effect is to pull the male average down, which gets the wage ratio in 36-Job World up to 83 cents. From there, Fantasy #2 gets you to 94 cents. Fantasy #1 is hard to apply (because you don’t know what to pay the minority gender). But if you equalize even further (just for those 6 occupations) by paying the minority gender the overall occupational average , you only get up to 84 cents — higher than in 30-Job World Fantasy #1, but showing a smaller improvement over 36-Job World Actual.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (3)

Does Romney’s bullying matter? and other short notes

May 14, 2012 – 11:43 am

The second most-talked-about story of the week was the Washington Post’s report on Mitt Romney’s days at the exclusive Cranbrook prep school, and in particular on his bullying of a gay underclassman.

The biggest debate was around whether anyone should care. Liberals hate the attempts to make scandals out of Obama’s distant past. Isn’t this the same kind of hit piece?

Not entirely. It’s much better sourced than the typical Obama-went-to-a-madrassah story. The sources are named; they were Romney’s classmates; and one of them was his best friend and roommate. Hit pieces come from people who are rewriting history to make themselves look good. Mitt’s roommate knows he’s making himself look bad. He’s telling the story because he feels bad; he’s regretted his role in the bullying incident ever since it happened.

But even if the WaPo’s story is 100% accurate, why should we care? It was a long time ago. Don’t we all have high school memories that make us cringe?

After telling his own high school cringe story, Steve Almond says that’s exactly the problem: Romney shows no signs of cringing. He says he doesn’t remember, that “I did some stupid things in high school, and obviously if I hurt anyone by virtue of that, I would be very sorry for it and apologize for it.”

I would be sorry, if I hurt anyone (like a bunch of my friends remember me doing).

A few weeks ago in The Narratives of November, I talked about the stories that each campaign is trying to establish in the minds of voters. Incidents like this only matter politically if they find a place in those stories. Like the dog on the roof incident and “I like being able to fire people“, this one does.

Mitt Romney’s policies, like Republican policies in general, impose sacrifice and suffering on Americans who are already down on their luck: people who need food stamps, unemployment benefits, or help paying for medical care. You can spin that two ways. Positively, Romney is a decisive leader making tough choices in difficult times. Or negatively, he just doesn’t care.

It matters a lot which way that spin goes. In the 1980s, was Romney the business visionary who realized how corporate America needed to change? Or was he the vulture capitalist who gave no thought to the lives and communities he might wreck? Today, is he the grown-up in the room, who overcomes his sentimental reactions to do what needs to be done? Or is there nothing to overcome, because he has no feelings for anyone but himself, his family, and his super-wealthy peers?

If he can’t even respond to the WaPo story with something as simple as: “I’ve felt bad about that incident for years, and I wish John were still around so I could apologize to him face-to-face”, then the he-doesn’t-care spin gets a big boost.

A real mom lays out what she really wants:

Obama’s support of same-sex marriage is brave, but it’s not in the same league with LBJ’s speech supporting the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Bad as Johnson’s delivery was, I always tear up when he gets to this:

Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

Maurice Sendak’s last interview with Stephen Colbert was a good way to go out.

Paul Krugman predicts the endgame in the long-running Euro crisis.

Just as the Mayan calendar starts running out, somebody finds another Mayan calendar.

Or from the Left: “Obama caves on high-fructose corn syrup.”

Senator Richard Lugar was never exactly a moderate, but at least he would listen sometimes and think about the national interest rather than his party’s interest. His message after losing a primary to a Tea Party challenger:

Ideology cannot be a substitute for a determination to think for yourself.

A very sophisticated quiz to help you figure out which party lines up with your views. I came out Green, probably because it doesn’t ask: “Do you want to vote for somebody who has a chance to win?”

Salon looks at the cost of college and concludes: As government spends less on higher education, students have to spend more. And what government does spend is more and more likely to get siphoned off by exploitive for-profit institutions.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Tagged , | Comments (1)

The Door to Recovery

May 7, 2012 – 1:35 pm

All through the Depression influential voices warned about the dangers of excessive government spending, and as a result the job-creation programs of the New Deal were always far too small, given the depth of the slump. What the threat of war did was to finally silence the voices of fiscal conservatism, opening the door for recovery.

– Paul Krugman, End This Depression Now (2012)

In this week’s sift:

  • 77 Cents. Who’s right about how much money women make and why?
  • Gays Need Not Apply. Richard Grenell’s resignation tells us that the Religious Right has Mitt Romney on a very short leash.
  • Where the Jobs Are and other short notes. A great chart compares the Bush and Obama recoveries. The biggest difference between them is in government jobs — up for Bush, down for Obama.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Jesus Shrugged — why Ayn Rand and Christianity don’t mix got 357 views. It was another good week for short notes; Bad Arguments and other short notes was viewed 191 times. 41 of those viewers clicked yourlogicalfallacyis.com, making it the week’s most-clicked link.
  • Book recommendation of the week. Probably I’ll say more about this next week, but Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now is an excellent book. Nothing he says will surprise Krugman’s regular readers — or regular Sift readers, for that matter: He thinks the economy is suffering a failure of demand, which can be solved by more government stimulus spending, easy money by the Fed, and raising the inflation target to 4%. But it’s good to see all the pieces of Krugman’s view laid out end-to-end. He makes his case very clearly, and directly answers all the objections your friends are likely to raise.
By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

77 Cents

May 7, 2012 – 1:27 pm

Last week I linked to a sexist exchange on Meet the Press where Alex Castellanos all but pinched Rachel Maddow’s cheek and told her she’s cute when she’s angry. (He didn’t quite go that far, but it would have been a logical next step.)

Lots of people (including Rachel herself Monday evening) came back to that argument (probably making it one of the most widely viewed MTP segments in some while), asking the proper now-that-the-dust-has-settled question: Forget how outrageous Castellanos’ manner was or how well Maddow responded – who was right?

Context. The subject was the political gender gap, and Rachel was arguing that it is based on policy rather than image. Romney can’t win over women voters just by giving his wife a more prominent role in the campaign or sending other female surrogates out to campaign for him, because his policies give women good reasons not to like him.

To support that point, she brought up gender inequality in the workplace: Women make less than men. President Obama pushed and signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, making it easier for women to sue for workplace discrimination. Romney won’t say whether he would have signed that bill or not. (But he has promised not to try to repeal it.) So in terms of substantive policy, what is Romney’s plan for ending gender discrimination in the workplace?

She didn’t get that far. As soon as she said “Women in this economy still make 77 cents on the dollar for what men make” Castellanos interrupted, saying “there are reasons” why women make less than men. When asked specifically, “Do women make less than men for the same work?” he answered “No.”

So who’s right? I find this kind of discussion hard to follow on TV, where it’s so easy for each side to talk past the other, shifting the argument to a slightly different issue rather than directly refuting or admitting the point just made by the other side. But now that I’m sitting at my computer, with time on my side and Google and Wikipedia strapped onto my utility belt, who’s right?

First observation: Who’s right about what?

The argument has one major issue in the background: Do women face workplace discrimination? Several similar-but-not-identical factual questions relate to that issue:

  • On average, do working women make less money that working men? This one is easy, and the answer is yes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that men working fulltime in 2011 averaged $832 a week, while women working fulltime made $684 – 82 cents on the dollar. (The 77 cents number came from 2010 and was based on annual earnings rather than weekly. I’m not completely sure why that makes a difference.) In general, things have been slowly equalizing; the weekly-earnings number was 62 cents in 1979.
  • Do women make less money than men for the same quantity and quality of the same work? This is a tougher question, because how do you define “same quantity and quality”? For any two workers, you can almost always find some difference in their qualifications or duties or output. The question is whether we’re talking about legitimate distinctions or ones dreamed up after-the-fact to justify discrimination. It seems undeniable that some women make less for the same quantity and quality of the same work – Lilly Ledbetter, for example. If this never happened, Romney could cheerfully support the Fair Pay Act knowing that it makes no actual difference.
  • How much of the pay gap between men and women is due to discrimination? This has come to be the center of the debate, and it’s what I wanted to focus on, but I can’t because the research either wasn’t as clear or as easy to find as I wanted. So I offer an IOU: I’ll get back to it next week after I’ve had more time to sift through the numbers.

Here’s what I’m looking for: The insidious thing about this argument is that pay-gap-due-to-discrimination is not something you can measure directly. All you can do is start with the 82 cents on the dollar and see how much of that deficit you can attribute to some legitimate cause. After you allow for everything reasonable you can think of, you can say with some confidence that the rest of the pay gap is unreasonable.

So what I’d like to find is a study that chips away: X cents is due to men and women being in different professions. Y cents is due to women entering high-paying professions recently and so still being relatively younger than their male colleagues. Z cents comes from having less seniority because they interrupted their careers to have children. And so on, leading to D cents that is inexplicable unless employers discriminate.

I can find pieces of that, but I’ll hold them for next week in hopes of painting a clearer picture.

In the remainder of this post, I’d like to knock off some side-issues.

The just-so story. On Meet the Press, Castellanos made this argument: If the 77 cents thing were true, then

every greedy businessman in America would hire only women, save 25% and be hugely profitable.

Let me turn that logic back on itself: If Castellanos’ argument were true, then there would never have been any wage discrimination in America against any group ever.

All through the 1930s, any greedy owner of a major league baseball team could have hired can’t-miss stars like Satchell Paige or Josh Gibson for peanuts. (Gibson, the “black Babe Ruth” died at 35, three months before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. Paige arrived in the majors in 1948, well past his prime. At age 47, he was still good enough to pitch in the 1953 All-Star game.)

No owners did. Why? You’d have to ask them. But discrimination does happen. It can’t be dismissed with a just-so story about capitalism.

Are statistics the whole story? If gender discrimination happens at all, it’s wrong and should be illegal, independent of whether it happens often enough to affect the averages. Since when do we decide moral issues by statistics? (Compare: Pro-life activists are not mollified by the fact that partial-birth abortions are an insignificant percentage of all abortions.)

What’s reasonable? Kevin Drum was all over this point: A lot of what is considered a “reasonable” explanation of the pay gap is just discrimination by a different name.

When all’s said and done, women are punished financially in three different ways: because “women’s jobs” have historically paid less than jobs dominated by men; because women are expected to take time off when they have children, which reduces their seniority; and because even when they’re in the same job with the same amount of experience, they get paid less than men. All of these things are part of the pay gap. Whether you call all three of them “discrimination” is more a matter of taste than anything else.

What’s a problem? As Kevin pointed out, many women interrupt their careers for children. For the moment, leave aside the question of whether men’s careers should be equally disrupted. I just want to point out that there was a time in American history when large numbers of men had their careers disrupted: World War II.

When they came back from the war, our country decided that those interrupted careers were a problem, and something should be done about it. Hence, the G.I. Bill of Rights, which paid for millions of returning servicemen to go to college or get some other kind of training.

When women come back to the workforce after raising children, though, they’re on their own. That’s a kind of discrimination right there.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (9)

Gays Need Not Apply

May 7, 2012 – 11:41 am

Richard Grenell is gay. Here’s the signal his appointment as Mitt Romney’s foreign policy spokesman was supposed to send:

When Grenell’s appointment was announced last month, most observers took it as a sign that Romney was starting to move to the center to win moderate and independent voters in November, a welcome change after a Republican primary process often dominated by religious-right candidates such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum.

Foreign-policy-wise, Grenell is a Bush-administration guy with impeccable neo-conservative credentials. So if anything, his appointment made the substance of the Romney campaign even more conservative.

But Grenell is gay. (Did I mention that already?) So he symbolized that Romney isn’t totally under the thumb of the Religious Right.

But then the Religious Right looked under its thumb and said, “Where’s Mitt?”

The reaction of the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is worth watching, because if I just describe it you’ll think I’m exaggerating.

Fischer says this very slowly, so his radio listeners can appreciate just how beyond the pale the situation is:

Richard Grenell is an out, loud, and proud homosexual. And he is now the face of the Romney campaign on national security and foreign policy.

Horrors! Fischer begins by discussing Grenell’s advocacy of same-sex marriage in New York state (which I suppose could become a foreign policy issue if New York secedes from the Union) and then goes off on how homosexuals want to change the marriage laws, but

they don’t actually care about getting married … because they are not about commitment. Homosexuals are about short-lived relationships and frequent anonymous sexual encounters. … Now whether Grenell indulges in that, I don’t know.

Ignorance is never a reason to stay silent, though, so Fischer launches into a minute-long rant about gay promiscuity in general. You know: up to 1000 sexual partners, men having sex in public parks and restrooms, and so on. And then suddenly we’re talking about Grenell again. The segue goes like this:

This is endemic in the homosexual community: these random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters. And that becomes a serious issue when we’re talking about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as a spokesman for national security and foreign policy.

Finely honed logic like that may be why Fischer’s lead was followed by other theocrats like Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer. And then not-specifically-religious voices like National Review and Daily Caller weighed in against Grenell.

For two weeks — even when the issue-of-the-day was a national security thing like the killing of Osama bin Laden —  Romney kept Grenell in the closet (which kind of nullifies the whole “spokesman” thing) and waited for the storm to blow over. The campaign claims they wanted him to stay, but when Grenell was instructed not to speak during a national-security conference call he had organized, it was too much. He resigned.

Fischer was triumphant:

This is a huge win…. I will flat-out guarantee you [Romney] is not going to make this mistake again. There is no way in the world that Mitt Romney is going to put a homosexual activist in any position of importance in his campaign.

He’s probably right. Mitt learned his lesson — and so should moderate swing voters.

The key to the art of flip-flopping is convincing people that you were lying to the other guy; your true heart is in what you’re saying now. As he heads towards the general election, Romney needs to be retiring severely conservative Mitt and taking Massachusetts moderate Mitt out of mothballs. Because … you know (shrug, wink), you have to say a bunch of crazy shit to get nominated. That was then; this is now.

The theocrats aren’t going to go along with that. And it doesn’t matter which version of Romney holds his true heart, as long as he wears a dog collar and the likes of Bryan Fischer hold a very short leash.

If that’s the case in a general election campaign, when swing voters have the most leverage, won’t it be even more true after Inauguration Day?

And finally, Romney’s willingness to be dominated raises an authentic foreign policy question that even the theocrats should be asking. Bring it home, Bryan Fischer:

if Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, coopted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me? I don’t think Romney is realizing the doubts that this begins to raise about his leadership.

At last, Bryan, you and I can agree on something.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Where the Jobs Are and other short notes

May 7, 2012 – 11:24 am

Here’s a comparison between the Bush recovery of 2003-2005 and the Obama recovery of 2010-2012. The original author’s three circles emphasize these points:

  • The Bush recovery was aided by an increase in government jobs, while government has been the biggest job-losing sector during the Obama recovery. (Didn’t see that coming, did you?)
  • The sector where the Bush recovery had its second-biggest advantage was construction. These were largely housing-bubble jobs.
  • The Obama recovery shows a sizable gain in manufacturing jobs, which was a losing sector during the Bush recovery.

Balkinization’s Jonathan Hafetz comments on an appeals court ruling that John Yoo can’t be sued for his role in the conspiracy to torture American citizens, because his torture-justifying legal opinion wasn’t “beyond debate” at the time he wrote it.

The “debate” over torture, such as it was at the time, was largely manufactured by John Yoo and others precisely to engage in conduct that the law prohibited. The court thus takes what might be described as part of a conspiracy to commit torture as the reason to insulate those responsible from liability.

Click for a larger version:

Guilt-by-association is a variant of the ad hominem fallacy:

This Sarah Palin BBQ has a big mouth and smoke coming out of her head. Who says sculptors don’t do realism any more?

Media Matters does a great job of tracing the spread of a bogus story: the claim that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was about to legalize necrophilia for bereaved husbands.

When it comes to making serious issues both amusing and understandable, Cracked’s David Wong is getting right up there with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. His latest: 5 Ways to Spot a B. S. political story in under 10 seconds.

Henry Aaron was the intellectual godfather of Paul Ryan’s plan to replace Medicare with vouchers for private health insurance. Now he thinks it’s a bad idea.

When Ezra Klein questioned the wisdom of Mitt Romney reassembling Bush’s economic team and re-proposing his policies, he thought he didn’t need to remind everyone how bad the Bush years were for the economy. He was wrong.

Nicholas Kristof doesn’t usually go off over nothing. If he’s worried about endocrine disruptors, maybe we all should be.

Canada, always more sensible than the U.S., is doing away with the penny.

In 2009, three terrorist wannabees planned to put homemade bombs on the New York subway at rush hour. They were serious — collected stuff to make the bombs, picked targets, and so on.

They got arrested before they hurt anybody, were held in ordinary jails, and charged with breaking actual laws passed by Congress. The ringleader was convicted Tuesday in the same federal court in Brooklyn that any other federal offender might see. (His two friends pleaded guilty — without torture — and testified against him.) He faces the possibility of a life sentence in the same kind of penitentiary any other criminal would go to.

Somebody want to explain the Gitmo military tribunal thing again? We needed to circumvent the whole American system of justice because …

Funny or Die lets Republican women tell us where they want government: Not in their banks or their classrooms — in their vaginas.

I think it was Picasso who said, “Photoshop is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” Original Patrick Stewart knighthood photo here.

Two popular novelists joined opposite sides of the partisan divide this week. Stephen King minced no words in his Daily Beast op-ed pleading for higher taxes on the rich: “Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!”

Meanwhile, Orson Scott Card wrote in favor of a North Carolina constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage (which is already illegal in North Carolina).

No, legalizing gay marriage is not about making it possible for gay people to become couples.

It’s about giving the left the power to force anti-religious values on our children. Once they legalize gay marriage, it will be the bludgeon they use to make sure that it becomes illegal to teach traditional values in the schools.

… The left is at war with the family, and they want control of our children’s education. That’s what those signs on the lawns are about.

I’m not making this up – it’s already happening wherever the left has complete control of education.

Regular Sift readers can easily guess that I found the King piece delicious and the Card piece horrifying. But I’m sure one reader comment is being echoed by partisans on both sides:

It’s too bad when an author I like just goes off the deep end.

Remember: Books don’t get to choose their authors. If you like the Dark Tower or Ender novels, they haven’t changed.

This is too true:

This week the moon was unusually big and bright, due to the full moon occurring at the closest point in the moon’s orbit. Here’s how it looked in Morega, CA.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Comments (5)