Women are busy!

NPR ran a story earlier this week looking at how Republican women in Texas were trying to fend off Democratic attacks.  One of the leaders is queried on the equal pay issue and her response is just awesome(ly bad):

Here’s Christman being interviewed on the ABC affiliate in Dallas.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: What’s the solution then, do you think, for equal pay then, Cari?

CHRISTMAN: Well, if you look at it, women are extremely busy. We lead busy lives, whether working professionally, whether we’re working from home and times are extremely busy. It’s just that it’s a busy cycle for women and we’ve got a lot to juggle and so… [emphasis mine]

Women are too busy to care about equal pay?  What?!  This Palin-esque incoherence says it all.

Photo of the day

As a FB friend said yesterday, “this wins the internet today.”  From the Post:

Courtesy Rachel Davis Fine Arts – Two squirrels shake hands before starting their boxing match.This is part of a set of taxidermied squirrels depicting a boxing match, stuffed in England. They were part of the Goodyear Tire collection auctioned in September 2013.

Gay marriage = inter-racial marriage?

Loved this Connor Friedersdorf post on gay marriage.  Pretty much my sentiments exactly:

Liberals generally think of themselves as proponents of tolerance, pluralism, and diversity. Some liberals are also eager to stigmatize and punish opponents of gay marriage. Is that a betrayal of their values? If so, these liberals tend to argue, it is no more problematic than the decision to exclude white supremacists from polite society. As an email correspondent put it, if you object to a boycott against a tech company whose CEO gave $1,000 to the Proposition 8 campaign, “I guess you find the Montgomery Bus Boycott objectionable as well. If not, you might want to come up with a better rationalization for why you’ve chosen to give aid and comfort to those who would deprive gay people of basic rights available to others.” 

In Slate, Will Oremus made a stronger version of the argument…. “But this is different. Opposing gay marriage in America today is not akin to opposing tax hikes or even the war in Afghanistan. It’s more akin to opposing interracial marriage: It bespeaks a conviction that some people do not deserve the same basic rights as others.” …

My position has always been that civil unions are not enough—that gays ought to have full marriage equality. But the pro-civil-union, anti-gay-marriage faction is instructive. Opposition to interracial marriage never included a large contingency that was happy to endorse the legality of black men and white women having sex with one another, living together, raising children together, and sharing domestic-partner benefits as long as they didn’t call it a marriage.

Does that clarify the inaptness of the comparison? …

To justify stigmatizing folks he disagrees with on gay marriage in a way he’d never stigmatize antagonists on “tax hikes or even the war in Afghanistan,” Oremus claims he’s identified a special case. He thinks gay-marriage opponents are different, because they believe “that some people do not deserve the same basic rights as others.”

That’s ostensibly his red line. And many on his side of the argument make similar claims. Yet I find their outrage curiously, unwittingly selective.

Proponents of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen believe “that some people do not deserve the same basic rights as others.” Advocates of deporting illegal immigrants believe “that some people do not deserve the same basic rights as others.” Advocates of spying on Muslim Americans believe “that some people do not deserve the same rights as others.” Indefinite-detention apologists believe “that some people do not deserve the same rights as others.” On a weekly basis, I write about all sorts of civil-libertarian causes, foreign and domestic. Let me assure everyone that there is no end to policies implicitly or explicitly premised on the notion “that some people do not deserve the same rights as others.” If that’s the standard, why are gay-marriage opponents the only ones being stigmatized? [emphasis mine]

I know decent well-meaning people who do not think gay marriage should be legal.  In my experience they are nowhere near the moral equivalent of unrepentant racists.  I think advocating for gay marriage is a worthy and moral cause.  That said (and I think I’m going to get serious pushback for this), I think on some level people (especially liberals) really want to feel like they are part of something big and important and a movement.  The Civil Rights movement is over (regardless of whether it’s work is done or not) and I think a lot of liberals probably like to feel like this is their Civil Rights movement.  And again, not that it’s an unworthy cause, but I’m not going to apologize for arguing that the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s was dealing with another whole level of wrongness and discrimination:

But it’s not credible to argue that they’re in the same moral category as the bigots who sustained Jim Crow, or that the narrow right they’d withhold has done similar harm and thus warrants the same response (even if you believe, as I do, that withholding the name marriage is wrong andharmful).

Yes, it is tough not having full legal equality, but the lack of a right to legally marry strikes me as a long way from the pervasive and crushing second-class citizenship that comprised Black life for the vast majority of our country’s history and I don’t think it does anybody any favors to pretend they are on the same level.