All posts tagged Brett Kavanaugh

Not #ThemToo

I’m flabbergasted. Why did the Kavanaugh hearings convince so many GOP women of a certain age that past sexual harassment was no longer cause for prosecution?

Here’s what we know. The Economist is reporting from its YouGov survey. Between November 2017 and September 2018, the percentage of female Trump voters over age 65 who believe “men who sexually harassed women 20 years ago should keep their jobs today” leaped from about 30% to near 80%.

What gives?

The article suggests a couple of explanations. Perhaps this group of mature women worries about the professional status of their grown sons. They don’t want teenage peccadillos held against their “boys” in their adult careers. But that would apply equally to female Clinton voters of the same age, and that group has swerved in the opposite direction.

Or, The Economist wonders, do older GOP women have a “we survived it, so will you” attitude toward sexual harassment? Something we might call MMSS (Mad Men Survivor Syndrome)? That seems equally sketchy to this reporter. Even if some Trump voters feel that way, it doesn’t seem like it would be enough to push the needle so far.

Finally, The Economist suggests that this demographic is merely parroting the attitudes of their domineering husbands. They cite one observer from the Midwest who reported watching GOP husbands filling in ballots for their wives as well. Could that really be such a widespread phenomenon? And, even if so, why were the numbers so different as recently as November 2017?

In the end, none of the explanations offered make sense to me. They don’t adequately explain why so many GOP voters embraced this “water-under-the-bridge” attitude toward sexual harassment.

Any suggestions out there? Any GOP-voting women have a better explanation for us?

3 Comments

by Adam Laats on January 19, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in In the News, Teaching Sex and Sexuality

Tagged Brett Kavanaugh, Metoo, sexual harassment

Posted by Adam Laats on January 19, 2019

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2019/01/19/not-themtoo/

I Am Out of Whack

I’m absolutely flummoxed. New poll numbers reported in The Economist make me wonder how I got so out of whack with what most people are thinking. Am I missing something?

Here’s what we know: According to The Economist,

this year-long storm of allegations, confessions and firings has actually made Americans more sceptical [sic–wacky Brits] about sexual harassment.

With only one categorical exception, it appears the respondents in the Economist poll tend to feel more suspicious today about women who complain about sexual harassment than they did last year. Only Clinton voters, that is, are more likely today to think that twenty-year-old harassment accusations are worth acting upon. And even those Clinton voters are more likely now to think that false accusations are a bigger problem than unreported assaults, and that women’s complaints cause more problems than they solve.

Can I really be this out of touch with majority opinion? In my imagination, at least, the last year has provided a public coming-to-terms with the dangers and demons of sexual harassment. It has forced all of us to reckon with old demons of frat-boy antics and glib sexual aggression.

But unless I’m reading this wrong, my sense of how my fellow Americans are feeling is not even close to reality. Can someone please explain this to me?

1.) How is it possible that more people are more suspicious of women’s accusations than of men’s aggressive actions? And

2.) What was it in the past year that made people feel this way?

5 Comments

by Adam Laats on October 26, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in In the News, Required Reading, Teaching Sex and Sexuality

Tagged Brett Kavanaugh, Metoo, Sexual assault, sexual harassment

Posted by Adam Laats on October 26, 2018

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2018/10/26/i-am-out-of-whack/

Blue State Blues? Kavanaugh Is Nothing New…

HT: LC

Feeling blue about the Kavanaugh confirmation? Me, too. But let’s not join the goofs who keep saying that this is some sort of unprecedented act of naked partisanship. Let’s not listen to writers like this who call Justice Kavanaugh “patient zero” spreading “virulent political fevers” to a once-staid SCOTUS. We don’t have to dip far into SCOTUS history—we don’t even have to mention the words “Warren” or “Watergate”—to notice that Kavanaugh’s brand of bare-knuckled political judgeship has a long and ugly backstory.

The cars were different, but the anger was the same…

As I found over and over again in the research for my book about twentieth-century conservatism, SCOTUS debates have never been polite or gentlemanly. Just ask Earl Warren, a perennial punching bag for the Birchers and their conservative friends.

Chief Justice Warren might have been the most prominent, but he was far from the only lightning-rod of controversy in recent SCOTUS history. Fewer people these days might remember the trials and tribulations of Justice William O. “Wild Bill” Douglas.

Were the attacks on Justice Douglas temperate? Polite? Bi-partisan?

Consider the following: On the floor of the US House of Representatives, for example, future President Gerald Ford initiated impeachment proceedings against Justice Douglas on April 15, 1970. According to the New York Times, Representative Ford accused Douglas of writing “hard-core pornography,” of pushing “hippie-yippie style revolution.” Douglas, Ford charged, was connected to organized crime and deserved to be kicked to the curb due to Douglas’s connections “with some of the most unsavory and notorious elements in American society.”

Porn, gangsters, and hippie-yippies…

Not polite. Not bi-partisan. And, like more famous elements of the Nixon era, not at all disinterested. The New York Times speculated that the real reason for the impeachment proceedings against Justice Douglas was payback for Congressional rejections of other Nixon judicial appointees.

So I, for one, will continue to be bummed by the rancor and contumely expressed during the Kavanaugh hearings. I continue to feel dismayed by Mitch McConnell’s naked power-grab in the non-confirmation of Merrick Garland. I am outraged by the thought of a stolen SCOTUS majority and I will work to elect anti-Trump, anti-Kavanaugh representatives and senators.

But I can’t pretend that this sort of ugliness has not been part and parcel of SCOTUS politics for a long time.

9 Comments

by Adam Laats on October 9, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in In the News

Tagged Brett Kavanaugh, Conservatism, Earl Warren, Gerald Ford, SCOTUS, William O. Douglas

Posted by Adam Laats on October 9, 2018

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2018/10/09/blue-state-blues-kavanaugh-is-nothing-new/

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

Lynching creationists, confirming judges, and much more. Here are a few of the stories that marched across our desk this week:

Creationist school board candidate runs a terrible ad, at FA.

???

Sam Wineburg: New media literacy law won’t work, at WaPo.

Jon Shields on the decline of the conservative professoriate, at NA.

if one wants to be exposed to a broad spectrum of political ideas, it is still far better to attend Notre Dame or Baylor than Berkeley or Cornell.

More spoof articles get accepted by academic journals, at NR. HT: MM

a call for awareness into the different ways dogs are treated on the basis of their gender and queering behaviors, and the chronic and perennial rape emergency dog parks pose to female dogs.

Is this “Sokal-squared” experiment a triumph or a travesty? At CHE.

Kavanaugh Karamazov? Comparing the trials of Brett and Dimitri at PD.

Trials are not the place for working out our social grievances and anxieties.

Call Obi-Wan: The US Navy now has real ray-guns. At Cosmos.

>>pew pew<<

Did Common Core change teacher behavior? Larry Cuban says kinda.

Professor under fire for hateful comments about the Kavanaugh hearings, at IHE.

If a professor preaches hate in a forest and there’s no one around to hear it, should he still be fired? Here at ILYBYGTH.

Does this flyer count as “liberal indoctrination” by a public-school teacher? At PI.

Civics ed? Or sinister indoctrination?

Taxpayers fund a school field trip to the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, at LHL.

Mitch McConnell as Hindenburg, a “gravedigger of democracy,” at NYRB.

What’s the big IDEA with this fast-expanding charter network? At Chalkbeat.

Why should we be saddened by a school success story? At ILYBYGTH.

Ah, fresh air! A pop history of baby cages at GH.

You can forget those “free-range” child-rearing practices…

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

October already…feeling spooooky. Here are some articles that caught our attention this past week:

Our lead story this week: Asuza Pacific University on a LGBTQ+ roller coaster:

First they changed their policy on homosexuality. Romance was in, but sex still out, at CT.
Pundits called on donors to pull their funds. See Rod Dreher at AC.
So they changed it back, at CP.
Why can’t schools change? I look at the history here at ILYBYGTH.

Creepy prep schools and the future of the Supreme Court, at The Atlantic.

Does going to an elite prep school have ANYTHING to do with all this mess?

Will this school-integration plan work? At T74.

Researcher claims Protestantism still promotes schooling, at Phys.org.

Improving schools by improving lives, or vice versa? At Chalkbeat.

many policies with a shot at changing the experience of low-income students in school don’t have anything to do with the schools themselves.

Coleman Report redux? The history of the school/poverty debate, here at ILYBYGTH.

Principal out after planning to “embarrass” a student who reported sexual assault, at WaPo.

Keeping a “Nazi” student after Charlottesville, at IHE.

He has a right to pursue his education at a state institution. . . . He’s a Nazi — it doesn’t mean he doesn’t get to have an education.

Should the school have kicked him out?

Higher Ed as a Weapon

Looks like the tradition continues. As the Brett Kavanaugh hearings sweep over Washington DC like a brushfire, Liberty University is back to its old 1970s tactics. Turns out clean-cut well-dressed conservative Christian students are a potent political weapon.

From Jack Jenkins…

Here’s what we know: Jack Jenkins has reported that two Liberty University busses pulled up to the Kavanaugh hearings this morning. Presumably, Jerry Falwell Jr. is pulling a few pages from his dad’s political playbook.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Jerry Falwell Sr. was fond of using Liberty University students to twist arms on Capitol Hill. Most famously, he sent his “I Love America” bus tour around to various state houses to sing and dance about America.

The goal was to attract attention to Falwell’s conservative policy plans. He hoped to get headlines and push politicians to get on the Liberty bus. Politically, that is.

That wasn’t all.

I didn’t have room to include much of this in Fundamentalist U, but Falwell Sr. employed students as smiling lobbyists. In early 1980, for example, he had students hand-deliver his “95 theses for the 1980s” to US Representatives.

La la la…we love Americaaaaa

Charles F. Bennett, of Florida’s 3^rd district, told Falwell that Bennett was delighted to receive the information directly from a

Fine young Christian student.

And Carroll Hubbard, of Kentucky’s 1^st district, wrote to Falwell to say that he was posting the 95 theses on his desk. As Rep. Hubbard put it,

You are an inspiration to my family and me. 2 Chronicles 7:14.

For Jerry Falwell Jr., then, sending busloads of students to support Judge Kavanaugh is anything but a surprise.

2 Comments

by Adam Laats on September 27, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Higher (Power) Education, In the News

Tagged Brett Kavanaugh, Jack Jenkins, Jerry Falwell, Jerry Falwell Jr., Liberty University

Posted by Adam Laats on September 27, 2018

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2018/09/27/higher-ed-as-a-weapon/

Abortion Storm Clouds

Historians shudder a lot these days. But nothing has made me more nervous than this: Life-or-death moral imperatives are being tied to states and regions. We’ve seen this before and it led to the most horrific war in American history.

We’ve been divided along moral and geographic lines before…

We don’t want to be hyperbolic or hysterical. The historical precedent, though, is clear and alarming. In the years before the 1860 presidential election, major parties like the Democrats and Whigs tended to have support in both North and South. In that crucial contest, though, the regions divided cleanly and ominously.

With the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to SCOTUS, we’re seeing worrying trends. In my home state, for example, Governor Cuomo has pledged to take steps to preserve abortion rights in case a new SCOTUS overturns Roe v. Wade.

At the same time, as Bill Scher has pointed out, sixteen other states already have laws on the books that ban abortion. If SCOTUS were to overturn Roe v. Wade, those states would become “Life States,” while places like New York and California would become “Rainbow” or “Freedom” states.

The Center for Reproductive Rights has put together a map of what the country might look like. In a scarily similar way to 1860, we see a clear geographic divide between states that would allow abortion and states that would ban it.

CPR’s 2018 divisions…

What will happen? No one knows, least of all historians. The precedent, however, of tying a fundamental value to a geographic entity is alarming.

2 Comments

by Adam Laats on July 17, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in In the News

Tagged Abortion, Brett Kavanaugh, Roe v Wade, SCOTUS

Posted by Adam Laats on July 17, 2018

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2018/07/17/abortion-storm-clouds/

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

SCOTUS, flags, and dino-riding grandpas…it was quite a week here in the ILYBYGTH International offices. Here are some of the stories that caught our eye:

Can campus art disrespect the flag? Kansas says no, at IHE.