Month: May 2012

Support for Maryland's marriage equality referendum is up 12 points. The reason:

The movement over the last two months can be explained almost entirely by a major shift in opinion about same-sex marriage among black voters. Previously 56% said they would vote against the new law with only 39% planning to uphold it. Those numbers have now almost completely flipped, with 55% of African Americans planning to vote for the law and only 36% now opposed.

The result is that current polling shows marriage equality leading in the referendum polls by 57 – 37 percent. Now we know polls have over-read support for marriage equality in the past – but 20 points is a very big margin to overcome.

The magnitude of what Obama has done is getting more and more tangible. He has gone from JFK to LBJ on civil rights in three years. And bridging the divide between gays and African-Americans will help both communities, and especially those who are gay and black. This kind of defusing of polarization is what many of us hoped for in Obama. On this issue, he has delivered. And how.

Several readers recommend the redheaded anthem by Tim Minchim:

Another writes:

According to my English ginger friends, the redhead vendetta is a holdover from all the Viking raids. Vikings showed up every few years, did terrible things, ran off … and then nine months later a crop of redheaded infants show up. Guilt by association! Is it true? No idea. But that's what they told me, and given they're follicle-carrying members of the oppressed party, I'll go with that explanation.

Another is offended by the thread:

As a redheaded, freckled male, I just want you to know how much of a hypocrite you are on bullying gays versus redheads (and yes, this regular reference to South Park is bullying).

You described Dharun Ravi's attempts to publically humiliate his roommate as "a bigoted online hazing" and a "sick prank", and that he was "he was cruel, he was out of line, he was homophobic".  Here's your take on Romney's bullying of a kid with long hair, thought to be gay: "being privileged and conformist requires actual punishment of the marginalized and under-privileged; that you pick on younger, weaker boys, not older ones; and that you psychologically traumatize the victim by permanently marking his body.  And this matters because today these attacks on gay kids drive many to suicide, others to despair; they wreck lives and self-esteem."

I doubt you've even considered that exactly the same thing can be said about bullying redheads.  I can't find a single instance of condemnation of the bullying of redheads on your blog that isn't followed by a glib remark and a wink and a nudge towards that awful South Park episode. My early school years were a living hell, and I thought about suicide on a regular basis.  I experienced assaults similar to the one Romney carried out, and I would go to bed at night praying that I would wake up with brown hair and unfreckled skin, like all the other kids in my class.  My two favorite epithets were "firecrotch" and that I was a "disease".  I can only imagine how bad it is for kids now with that episode out.  You're clear-eyed and sober about what gay kids go through, but dismissive and jocular about redheads.

San Francisco, California, 1.21 pm

"The claim that gays should be barred from conservative activism is not only bigoted but is a bipartisan view. The intolerant assault comes from the far right, who object to Republicans who are gay, and the far left, who object to gays being Republicans. When the extremists on both sides are the only ones speaking up, the majority suffers," - Richard Grenell, WSJ.

(Hat tip: IGF)

TPM provides a useful timeline on the IPO. Ryan Chittum chides Facebook for apparently giving big investors a heads up:

Regardless of whether anyone committed a crime, much less gets charged for one (don’t hold your breath), this ugly episode has shown very clearly how Wall Street, tech companies, and the venture capitalists who back them have been trying to inflate another bubble to enrich themselves. 

David Futrelle hopes that the IPO will bring reforms:

[T]he furor over what looks an awful lot like insider trading could lead to regulatory reforms designed to thwart this kind of favoritism. In many ways the most appalling thing about the reports of Facebook’s early tipoffs to big investors is that what they did may have been perfectly legal – if morally and ethically dubious. In the Wall Street Journal, Ronald Barusch argues that regulators will have to move to close that loophole. “Look for new regulation where the role of the underwriting firms’ analysts is more formalized and all prospective investors have equal access to it,” he writes.

Zackary Karabell isn't ready to write off Facebook itself:

There are certainly those saying that the bungled offering shows that Facebook itself is a house of cards, a sign of a new New Economy bubble that has seen a variety of high-priced IPOs of popular but revenue-challenged companies go public at high valuation: Zynga, Pandora, and so on. But that is at the very least premature. Stock performance is not necessarily–or these days even usually—an indicator of corporate health or management acumen. Facebook’s shares sank below an offering price that was way too aggressive and is settling at about where it should have been before the process entered the maelstrom of Wall Street.

Felix Salmon observes:

[T]he winners in this whole game were you and I: the quiet skeptical masses who simply sat back and watched the farce unfold. In the game of Facebook IPO, it turns out, the only winning move was not to play.

The Mormon reader who fact-checked my post on Mormon history responds to the reader who highlighted a bigoted passage from the Book of Mormon:

The "blunt" reader who quoted First Nephi chapter 12, verse 23 is right that the verse represents a racist world view, and indeed this verse and the two or three others like it were often used by Mormons in the 19th and 20th centuries to justify hostile racist practices towards Native Americans, driven in part by a fight over the limited resources of the Great Basin, in part by the general racism of Anglo-American society from which most Mormons came. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism includes an overview of the complex relationship between Mormons, the Mormon Church, and Native peoples, from the first mission venture in 1830-31 mentioned by another reader to a mid-20th century effort to build bridges led by eventual Church president Spencer Kimball.

The Nephites, the main actors in the Book of Mormon and the ones the text attributes as writing it, had a major superiority complex vis-à-vis the surrounding population (whom they refer to with the catch-all Lamanites). The racism evident in their writings wasn't as much of an issue to large swaths of earlier generations of Mormons, who had their own racial blind spots and therefore used it as justification, but the Nephites' racial pride was part of their undoing and eventual destruction. (Midway through the narrative, a Lamanite prophet named Samuel tells the Nephites of Jesus Christ's impending birth on the other side of the world. When Christ visits the society after his resurrection, he questions the Nephites on why they failed to include Samuel's prophecies in their writings and rebukes them for the omission, telling them to fix it.)

My wife and I teach the teenage Sunday school class in our congregation, and we present the Nephites' racism as a warning and a collective sin of theirs that we must avoid. We repeatedly stress a different verse: "he inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile." This take on the text can't be too far out of the mainstream: the higher-ups who supervise us every Sunday haven't complained.

Mormonism changes from generation to generation; sometimes those changes are quite fast. That's part of being Mormon, and part of what gives me hope that someday women will have an equal place in the Church hierarchy, that we'll find a better, more supportive attitude toward LGBT individuals, and that we'll expand our efforts to provide clean drinking water and alternative energy in places in need. If Mitt was a Mormon like Joanna Brooks, perhaps I'd consider voting for him, but my personal take on his brand of Mormonism would be another post entirely.

I'm sorry if this is too far into the weeds for you, but when my fellow Dish fan suggested that I haven't read my own book of scripture, never mind thought about it in a historically critical way, gosh golly gee whiz, I couldn't let that stand.

Another writes:

And just to toss in, on the subject of racism and the real obsession with dark skin in the very foundations of the Mormon church, John Aravosis dug up this:

"You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind….Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings. This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin." (Journal of Discourses, vol. 7, p. 290)

"In our first settlement in Missouri, it was said by our enemies that we intended to tamper with the slaves, not that we had any idea of the kind, for such a thing never entered our minds. We knew that the children of Ham were to be the "servant of servants," and no power under heaven could hinder it, so long as the Lord would permit them to welter under the curse and those were known to be our religious views concerning them." (Journal of Discourses, vol. 2, p. 172).

"Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so." (Journal of Discourses, vol. 10, p. 110).

I wonder what Brigham Young would make of a Barack Obama. I don't want to know.

Another protests:

Over the course of this thread, I've seen a lot of people quoting Mormon texts to explain that Mormons are inherently racist. Have you guys, uh, seen the regular Bible? If you're not familiar, it's full of all kinds of stuff about how cool slavery is and how awful homosexuality is. So why does Obama and pretty much every other Christian get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to literalism but not Romney?

I'm sure you must have gotten other emails in this regard, but it's an angle I haven't seen you discuss. I know your involvement with your religion is quite different from Romney's with his, but your faith is clearly a big part of who you are, and I'm curious to see where you draw the distinction.

Some economists expected the double-dip recession in Britain to be revised out of existence with more accurate numbers. But the revised figures actually show a sharper contraction in the first three months of this year, with GDP dropping 0.3 percent, the same rate of contraction as Spain.

The current British recession is now much longer than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Does Obama's record look so terrible in comparison?

Pimping himself out to Serbian nationalists.

They're about Richard Dawkins, but the description has legs:

To use an intellect like his to lambast Young Earth Creationists is like shooting dairy cows with heat-seeking missiles. It’s not sporting, it’s not clever, but it is very funny, and it serves a social purpose.