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Linktastic

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Some things worth reading:

Shakespeare’s Sister on how gay-bashing is pervasive yet strangely invisible.

Helena Silverstein and Wayne Fishman have an article up in The American Prospect that sheds light on just how useless the judicial bypass procedure that theoretically allows minors seeking abortions in parental-notification states is in practice.

Take the New Yorker’s Bush Quiz. Via Punkass Marc.

Punkass Marc also has a post about that article in the NYTimes about men who’ve stopped looking for work because they don’t want to take a job that’s “beneath” them — yet are perfectly happy when their wives do so to support the family. (Ann at Feministing gives it her treatment). Oh, and a lot of them aren’t doing any housework, either.

Speaking of unequal housework burdens, Rebecca Traister in Salon has a piece about the never-ending Second Shift.

Also in Salon, Michelle Goldberg takes a look at the efforts to shut down the last abortion clinic in Mississippi.

Are You a Toxic Parent? — and why everyone loves a good Parent-from-Hell tale.

Tiffany at Blackfeminism comes out as a straight woman . . . and has some reservations about doing so.

Bitch, Ph.D. on the recent ordination of several women priests in defiance of the Vatican.

The battle for creationism in the classroom still isn’t over in Kansas. Though I suspect that it will be once college acceptance rates start going down and property values soon follow. PZ Myers has more.

Speaking of property values, Amanda has a post about the coming economic disaster that will surely follow the collapse of the housing market — and which has already started in the form of predatory debt collection practices, as Sheelzebub reports here.

9 thoughts on Linktastic

  1. About that “Toxic Parents” thing — I still don’t understand why adults willing to supervise alcohol consumption at their high schooler’s parties are evil. Or, for that matter, why parents who introduce their children to alcohol at appropriate ages and actually teach them to drink responsibly are considered evil.

    My experience with this may be small, but of the eighty kids in my small-town parish high school, there were five or six of us whose parents had the foresight to teach us about the dangers of alcohol and supervise our first forays into drinking. Guess which students drank the least and refused to succumb to peer pressure to get hammered. Guess which ones actually knew their limits and could say, “No, I better not have another.” Guess which ones never got into accidents because they had a few too many and got behind the wheel of a car.

    I am glad my folks didn’t buy into the “If I don’t see it it’s not happening” bull. They were smart enough to know that I’d be exposed to it sooner or later and, armed with those assumptions, they sought to teach me how to handle myself around alcohol. I don’t think anyone has any business telling them off for having been Bad Parents for their policies on drinking.

    And on a totally different note: I never thought I could be proud of some Catholics, but those churches are awesome. Go Mothers!

  2. I was gonna read the Broadsheet “Second Shift” thing, but right after I got off work I took the time to do the laundry, wash the dishes, clean the kitchen counters, sweep and mop the floors, disinfect the garbage cans, clean the bathroom counter and sink, scour the tub, fix the ceiling light, tidy the living room…and now it’s time for bed.

    Sigh…

  3. . . .men who’ve stopped looking for work because they don’t want to take a job that’s “beneath” them — yet are perfectly happy when their wives do so to support the family . . . Oh, and a lot of them aren’t doing any housework, either.

    Bob was a pioneer in this field. He really was ahead of his time.

  4. I agree with Sara completely. That article bothered me a great deal precisely because it seemed to have no moral compass beyond “deviations from what is considered ‘normal’ are bad.” Drinking, sex, drunk-driving, pot, meth, drugs in general, failing out of school, at age 14, 16, 17–all are lumped into the general category of deviance, without any real attempt to analyze what exactly (if anything) is bad about each.

  5. I was going to bring up some good points about the Toxic Parent article, but another Sara has beat me to most of them. Curses.

    To add to what she and PLN have said, I would also pitch in that this article is so incredibly ethnocentric it makes my brain hurt. Different cultures have different rules and thoughts on alcohol. The exact thing that they are castigating parents for doing in this article is what Italian parents are praised for, both of which are different from how other cultures handle alcohol. There is a strong undercurrent of “our way is the only way to raise healthy kids and other ways are EEEEEVIL”.

    And speaking of evil, I would never be able to sign off on that wacky parent statement because of (4) I will not allow or serve alcohol, tobacco or other drugs in my home or on my property. I figure my drugs on my property are my business. And as a person who wholeheartedly opposes the War on Pot, I can’t in good conscionce sign off on a “drugs are also EEEEEVIL” statement.

    I’m also confused about its vaugeness. Does signing this mean that I never have any alcohol in the home? Cuz that is not gonna happen. I’m not going to give up my fuzzy navels or glasses of white wine with dinner. I’m going to serve alcohol in my home to my family including my kids. I’m not going to sign off on something that implies that a glass of merlot is also EEEEVIL.

    And I bet you $20 that Nancy Murray will be the annoying bitch mom calling her kids RA to check up on them or argueing with the Registrars office when her kid doesn’t get into the college classes they want. And I bet that her kids go f*cking nuts when they go to college, I’ve seen it a hundred times. Especially the 17 year old who still has to call her parents to see if she can have friends over unsupervised? Good lord, does this girl know how to cut her own meat? She is either going to become a party girl alcoholic or be the judgemental girl in your dorm who tsks at you for having your boyfriend over. Her roommate in college will be in a for real treat with her. Congratulations Nancy, you’ve managed to raise an obnoxious judgemental twit with no useful social skills and no understanding of difference in any way, shape, or form.

  6. One by one, as Elysian hymns poured from the speakers, Benham produced the texts of objectionable Supreme Court decisions. He started with 1947’s Everson v. Board of Education, the case where Justice Hugo Black wrote, “In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between Church and State.” He went on to decisions outlawing school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading. As each decision was introduced, a man sounded a shofar. Benham shouted denunciations and asked the kids to rip up the pages and throw them onto the grill. Someone pounded a bass drum.

    Benham then produced a rainbow gay flag. As he lamented the way homosexuals “stole the colors of the rainbow,” several men in attendance grabbed pieces of it and ripped it to shreds. Then he held up a paperback copy of the Koran and said, “We have one more issue that we must deal with. With this issue we have three choices. We can either kill them, be killed by them, or we can convert them to Christ.” Several cheers went up in the crowd, and then, after several more minutes of preaching, Benham began to tear the Koran apart. He offered pieces of the book to the men in the crowd — hands seemed to reach out from all directions to take them — and they destroyed the pages further, throwing the scraps onto the grill.

    Standing before the assembly, Benham, a sturdy Texan with sun-cured skin, short brown hair, and the hearty manner of a high school football coach, cried out, “What is happening in Jackson today is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany!”

    My thoughts exactly.

  8. Those parents are “toxic?” Europe must be one toxic place. Sheesh.

    I mean, you’d think the article would distinguish between, say, leaving your kids in the house for the weekend with 3 kegs of beer (bad) vs. encouraging your kids to do their experimentation in safe and semi-suprevised environments (good).

    There’s nothing a parent can do to really stop their kids from having sex or drinking beer. But you can deter them from having unprotected sex by buying them BC. You can keep them from drinking and driving by buying them beer at home. You can teach them the difference between “buzzed” and “barfing.”

    Sigh. Toxic my ass.

  9. I was going to comment on the Toxic Parent article, but: what everyone else said (especially the commentor who mentioned that the parents who introduced their kids not just to drinking but to the concept of RESPONSIBLE drinking; there’s a difference between “mm, have fun, try not to get your stomach pumped again, honey” and “have fun but in moderation.” I hate this stupid all-or-nothing culture–see also: food, sex).

    Though I will add one thing: this would all be so much easier if the drinking age were just fucking 16. At LEAST back down to 18. Oy.

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