The Republic of T.

And, no, this two-part series isn’t about that Bachmann story. It’s not about being the submissive wife of a gay husband, but about how gay husbands undermine submissive wifeliness.

Submissive Wives & Gay Husbands

You’ve probably saw this coming already, if the title of this post is what drew you in to begin with. Part of the threat of same-sex marriage is that it both calls biblical gender roles into question, and undermines complimentarity.

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Not that it’s going to matter much to Michelle Bachmann…

In 2006, Bachmann said her husband had told her to get a post-doctorate degree in tax law. “Tax law? I hate taxes,” she continued. “Why should I go into something like that? But the lord says, be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands.’”

Asked about the comment by CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell Sunday, Bachmann reaffirmed that to her, “submission means respect, mutual respect.”

“I respect my husband, he respects me,” she said. “We have been married 33 years, we have a great marriage…and respecting each other, listening to each other is what that means.”

O’Donnell asked Bachmann if she would use a different word in retrospect.

“You know, I guess it depends on what word people are used to, but respect is really what it means,” Bachmann replied.

“Do you think submissive means subservient?” O’Donnell asked.

“Not to us,” Bachmann said. “To us it means respect. We respect each other, we listen to each other, we love each other and that is what it means.”

But… Well… Here.

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I’d love to make this a daily or weekly feature, but that depends largely upon how often I come across these things in my daily reading. That said, I’ll post ‘em when I find ‘em.

That said, this week turned out to be rich in WTF moments. And I don’t mean “Winning the Future”.

WTF

Example Sentences:

Boyfriend: I’ve decided to quit school and move to France.
Girlfriend: When?
Boyfriend: Tomorrow morning.
Girlfriend: WTF?

When our teacher told us we had a test tomorrow worth 75%, I was like “WTF“?!

WTF is going on?

Note:

WTF is often used when one is confused and angry

Thankfully, they’re all available on YouTube. The only question is: Which order should I post them in? From worst to weirdest? Or weirdest to worst?

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I grew up a skinny, effeminate, non-athletic, black gay boy in the south … during the Reagan era.

That’s what I sometimes tell people when they ask my about what growing up was like for me. Those who get it, and most do, give me a wide-eyed look, and ask “How did you survive?”

I ask myself that sometimes, because I know a lot boys like me didn’t. Boys like Kirk Murphy.

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What is it with white, male conservatives and Michelle Obama.

File this under, “Not much room to talk.”

Rush Limbaugh called Michelle Obama a hypocrite on his Monday show, saying that, while the First Lady advocates healthy eating, she “doesn’t look like [she] follows her own…dietary advice” and would never be put on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue.

Limbaugh was reacting to a report from Colorado which mentioned that Obama ate ribs at a restaurant during her skiing holiday there this past weekend. He said this was evidence of Obama’s hypocrisy around food.

Obama’s campaign to curb obesity and promote healthy eating has become a bête noire for many conservatives, who have cast it as an example of big government overreach. Last week, a controversial cartoon depicted Obama as overweight and binging on hamburgers even as she talked about eating healthy foods.

What follows is almost too easy, and to obvious. Still, it must be done.

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It’s Valentine’s day, and Gay.Com has posted a cute slideshow of 25 vintage photos of gay & lesbian couples.

Vintage_Gay_Couples Gays and lesbians have been around since the dawn of time, but many of us only think of same-gender couples in a post-Stonewall world. It’s almost as if they couldn’t possibly exist in public before that era and stayed hidden in the shadows—the two women "friends" who (sadly) never married so they lived together, or the rich man and his attaché who kept to themselves in that big house down the block. However, some mystery person is changing that concept. Buzzfeed found a number of photos from a Tumblr post that no longer exists. Fortunately, the Buzzfeed page does, so we were able to take the 25 fantastic shots and compile them for you in this incredible slide show.

It’s cute, and somewhat diverse. Not all of the couples pictured are white gay men. But, I got curious and started searching for other images.

I found a kind of treasure trove of vintage photos of black gay male couples.

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Via Matt Yglesias comes this interesting bit from Ann Friedman on straight men and support networks.

From an early age, most women are socialized to be more nurturing and relationship-oriented than men, so perhaps this isn’t surprising. My guess is that homophobia also plays a huge role. Men are taught to perceive intimacy with other men as gay. You can see it in trend stories about "man-dates" and movies about male friendship, which often veer pretty quickly from depictions of platonic affection to defensive homophobia. There’s even a social stigma attached to cross-gender friendships. Just ask Slate‘s Juliet Lapidos and her best friend, Jeff. Or me and my bestie Josh. (No, he’s not gay. No, I’m not gay. No, we’ve never dated. Yes, we are super tight.) If all of these relationships are socially off-limits, who’s a man to befriend?

I thought about this gender gap in support networks when I read the Times article about Jared Loughner. For all of the explanations that have been offered for his actions — a culture that glorifies violence, easy access to guns, poor access to mental health care — Loughner’s lack of a strong emotional and social support network has not been a prominent part of the post-tragedy narrative. It’s been taken as a given that this young man was a loner. We’ve come to expect that perpetrators of headline-dominating acts of violence will be young, single, heterosexual men like Loughner.

There are consequences to the fact that many men don’t have the social support they need and deserve. I think this is changing as our societal understanding of gender evolves. But it’s changing slowly. I, for one, can’t wait until bromance is not just a punchline but a part of every dude’s life.

As a gay man, I find myself on both sides of this one.

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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. George W. Bush might have been slightly better president if he’d listened to the women in his family. That’s become even more evident, now that he’s safely out of office, and some of the women in the family are more free to speak their minds.

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I wonder what Lena Horne would say to Miss USA Rima Fakih.

Much has been written and will be written about Fakih’s pageant win. Not being a big fan of beauty pageants, I didn’t watch this one. So, my thoughts about it are pretty simple: Obviously, she met all the qualifications to participate in the competition, and lacking an ability to read the minds of the judges I can only assume she met and likely exceeded their standards for beauty and poise, and thus beat out her opponents. Leave her alone and let her enjoy her year-long reign.

On one hand it seems silly — given the unresolved fate of financial reform, the BP oil disaster, and any number of issues — that so much attention is being given to the outcome of the outcome of a beauty pageant. On the other hand, after while it made perfect sense to me. Because I thought of Lena Horne.

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I haven’t been following the Winter Olympics very close, except for perusing the news photos and figuring out who the hottest athletes are. (No, I don’t need to see they play to figure that out, if you know what I mean.) but I have been following the “controversy” regarding Johnny Weir.

The Associated Press reports that two broadcasters are under fire for derogatory comments made about the former world champion.

One commentator from French-language broadcaster RDS said Weir hurts figure skating’s image, while another said the skater should be made to take a gender test. The Quebec Gay and Lesbian Council has demanded a public apology from RDS, calling the remarks “outrageous” and “homophobic.”

Weir’s agent, Tara Modlin, says Weir knows about the comments, but he’s made no public response as of yet.

The Dish Rag thinks the much buzzed-about skater will most likely ignore the nasty comments and forge ahead with his plans to start his own fashion line (much to the French commentators’ dismay, we’re guessing) after the Olympics wrap up.

Well, he didn’t ignore it, and I’m glad he didn’t. Because I just became a big Johnny Weir fan.
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NOTE: TRIGGER WARNING, VIDEO BELOW DEPICTS GRAPHIC RAPE SCENE FROM A MOVIE.

WTF is wrong with people? How do you just watch a rape?

Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com

For more than two hours on a dark Saturday night, as many as 20 people watched or took part as a 15-year-old California girl was allegedly gang raped and beaten outside a high school homecoming dance, authorities said.

As hundreds of students gathered in the school gym, outside in a dimly lit alley where the victim was allegedly raped, police say witnesses took photos. Others laughed.

“As people announced over time that this was going on, more people came to see, and some actually participated,” Lt. Mark Gagan of the Richmond Police Department told CNN.

The witnesses failed to report the crime to law enforcement, Gagan said. The victim remained hospitalized in stable condition. Police arrested five suspects and more arrests were expected.

So why didn’t anyone come forward?

How? How do you do it? How do you watch? How do you laugh? How do you take pictures? How do you announce it and invite others to come and see?

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Talk about “desperate housewives.” This AlterNet article brings to mind something I’d noticed before. In even the most progressive households, the lion’s share of the housework and childcare falls to the woman.

But anyway you measure it, statistically speaking, women do about twice as much housework as men, even in relationships where the woman works outside of the home and the man doesn’t.

The disparity might be fine if women benefited from it more than men. Or if, somehow, reclaiming cleaning as important women’s work (without getting anything in return) advanced feminism. But in both cases, the opposite is true.

The disparity might be fine if women benefited from it more than men. Or if, somehow, reclaiming cleaning as important women’s work (without getting anything in return) advanced feminism. But in both cases, the opposite is true.

Men benefit from relationships more than women, according to Michael Kimmel, author of Guyland, and professor of sociology at SUNY Stony Brook, because the current distribution of domestic labor means that when men marry, they tend to gain a chef and a laundress, among other things. Married men are happier, live longer, have lower rates of illness, and are less likely to be treated by a therapist than their unmarried brothers, but married women have lower rates of happiness than unmarried women, and more likely to need medical treatments and therapy.

Granted, we’ve come a long way from the idealized 1950s version of housework and gender roles. Though it’s argued to be a hoax, this heavily circulated “Good Wife’s Guide” is a pretty good “condensation of the worst of this particular ‘joy through subservience’ era”, as one writer at Snopes.Com described it.

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I don’t know about you but “sorry” doesn’t begin to cut it

Chris Brown has publicly apologised for attacking his ex-girlfriend Rihanna.

In a two-minute video on his website, the R&B star said “I thought it was time that you heard directly from me that I am sorry”.

He says he is seeking help and wants to live his life as a role model, saying: “I wish I had the chance to live those few moments again”.

Chris Brown pleaded guilty to assault after he was arrested the night before the Grammy awards in February.

Not when we’re talking about this.

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I was probably an annoying person to have around if you were watching the Sotomayor confirmation hearings. I was so frustrated listening to them that I couldn’t help … um … talking back to the television. There is, after all, only so much the mind can take before it explodes.

At least, that’s true of my mind. As for the minds of some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, last week was like a crash course of what I’ve often referred to as "self-evasion of the mind."

It was some time before I recognized “self evasion of the mind” as the act of contorting the mind so as not to have to see or acknowledge what is obvious to anyone who simply looks.

It’s a phrase I learned from an admired college professor, and I’ve since expanded my understand of it to include contorting the mind in order that one may continue to hold conflicting views or beliefs, or engage in behavior that is diametrically opposed to your stated beliefs.

Basically, it’s amounts to working very hard at not having a clue. Or, in the case of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, working overtime at not having a clue.

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The debate over health care reform has taken a particularly worrisome turn. Suddenly we’re in a place where passing something kind of like reform may be more important than getting to reform itself. In the name of "compromise" and in interest of getting something passed, we could get a health reform bill that helps fewer people than originally intended, and preserve more of the status quo than almost anyone wants.

For minorities low income families and individuals, that means more of the kind of disparities — in access to care, quality of care, and health outcomes — that are all too common in our present health care system. The 2008 National Health Care Qualities & Disparities report spells out some of these disparities, including: higher rates of disease, access to care, and lack of routine care and prevention.

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When Dr. George Tiller was murdered, it immediately occurred to me to write the series I’ve been publishing all this week. That’s because my first thoughts were of the women who faced heartbreaking choices after getting devastating news late into what were often very much wanted pregnancies. What choices would they have now that there was one less doctor who offered the procedure they need? What options does the other side offer?

The point I tried to make in the series was that opponents of legal abortion have not offered these women any alternative, except one. The other point I wanted to make was one that I remembered from a previous post that actually inspired the series posted this week.

Talk is cheap, and easy. So is telling people where they should be than meeting them where they are. So is taking away the choices of some families, rather than looking at the realities of all families and changing in order to help all families, whatever their circumstances. It’s easier, and simpler, to see that help as “rewarding” them for “immoral” choices, rather than choosing to help all families in order to help – and heal – our whole society. It’s easier not to see helping “them” as helping us, because it doesn’t require us to change.

That’s the intentional choice we’re making. Still.

Anyway, after writing the series, I wanted repost the piece that inspired it. So here it is.

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In the previous post, I wrote that neither posthumous abortion rights icon Gerri Santoro or the anonymous nine-year-old raped and impregnated by her father are representative of the women who sought Dr. Tiller’s services, or who seek late-term abortion in general. It’ safe to presume that neither of them wanted to be pregnant, each for her own reasons. Opponents of legalized abortion in all case would have both of them give birth.

There’s no way I know of to come up with exact numbers, but many of the women who sought Dr. Tiller’s services, and who seek late-term abortion in general, seem to be women who very much want to be pregnant, but found out well into their pregnancies that there were severe complications, as Dr. Tiller himself pointed out in a 1991 interview.

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In the course of researching another post, I came across some events that weren’t on the the abortion-related violence timeline I posted earlier. So, I’ve updated the timeline and shared it below.

Further updates will follow as I find events to add to the timeline.

(WARNING: IMAGES BELOW FOLD NSFW, DISTURBING, POTENTIAL TRIGGER.)

In the previous post, I wrote:

What is the saying? “When God closes a door, he opens a window”? How many windows are there?

…The Doctors Tiller — father and son — like Hearn and others, are in the business of keeping a window open, up against people who are dedicated to eliminating windows.

What the politics of the right means is a life without windows for many of us. Just as they drive people like Dr. Hearn away from windows, their politics drives them to board up the windows that might otherwise be available when life closes other doors, for those of us whose lives don’t fit into the narrow opening they leave — the narrow window they leave open, after boarding up all the others.

It’s worth noting that Tiller’s murder took place just a week shy of the 45th anniversary of the death of a woman for whom all windows and doors out of her desperate situation were firmly closed.

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Lately, I’ve become interested in timelines, and their usefulness in helping to create a kind of narrative. So, when I saw the AP list of abortion-related violence, after Dr. Tiller’s murder, I thought it would make a good timeline.

But then it seemed to be missing something.

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