"I feel like I just won the Academy Award. If an artist can offend so many people that he has to go to prison..."

"... to protect society, that's really saying something. Most shock artists dream of this kind of attention, without the prison part."

Ira Isaacs, sentenced last month by a federal judge — this is in the United States— for 4 years, for violating obscenity law. The Huffington Post — considered a liberal website, and, again, this is in the United States — began its article about the sentencing with a joke: "Looks like someone's career went down the toilet." (The movies included the simulated consumption of feces.)

There is no shame anymore. And yet there still are obscenity trials. Absurd.

I'm finding this story now because I happened across an account to the trial in an article published last March at Reason.com: "Porn So Icky That It Can't Be Obscene" (by Jacob Sullum), describing the argument made at trial, which describes the argument made by Isaacs's lawyer:

"My intent is to be a shock artist in the movies I made," [Isaacs] testified, "to challenge the viewer in thinking about art differently... to think about things they'd never thought about before." Similarly, [his lawyer Roger] Diamond argued that the films have political value as a protest against the government's arbitrary limits on expression, illustrating the "reality that we may not have the total freedom the rest of the world thinks we have."

Sullum wrote:

I will be impressed if Isaacs, who faces a possible penalty of 20 years in prison, can pull off this feat of legal jujitsu, transforming the very qualities that make his movies objectionable into their redeeming value — especially since at least some of the jurors... found the evidence against him literally unwatchable. But if the jurors want to blame someone for making them sit through this assault on their sensibilities, they should not blame Isaacs. They should blame the Justice Department, which initiated the case during the Bush administration, and the Supreme Court, which established the absurdly subjective test they are now supposed to apply. Will they take seriously Isaacs' references to Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, and Piero Manzoni, or will they dismiss his artistic name dropping as a desperate attempt to give his masturbation aids a high-minded purpose?

But here's some up-to-date news from 2 days ago: Minutes before Isaacs was to turn himself in to the  federal Bureau of Prisons, Isaacs go a call from his lawyer saying "don't go." The judge had approved his motion for bail pending appeal.

Isaacs told XBIZ that today's events were so surreal he had felt like he was in an episode of the "Twilight Zone" or a Quentin Tarantino movie....

"Last night, I was thinking it would be my last night of freedom," he said. "I really thought that this would be it; that I would be sleeping in prison the following night... and that would continue for a very long time."

We'll see what happens in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and — if we're lucky — the Supreme Court.

Fighting over posters... it's like something that would happen in a dorm room

But it happened in the Wisconsin legislative assembly.

"This is a sham," cried Brett Hulsey.

I read that aloud and Meade went "Sham! Sham! Sham!" — which is amusing if you know your Wisconsin protest references. (If you don't, look at this and this and this.)

It's not just Phil Mickelson — plenty of high-income athletes want out of California taxes.

Mickelson was just the one who was PR-deaf enough to let us know how he feels.

Why do you think Tiger Woods lives in Florida?

In November, voters in California approved a ballot measure raising the top rate on income over $1 million to 13.3% (the increase applies retroactively to last year). ... Mr. Woods grossed $56.4 million in 2012. As a Floridian, he will keep about $7.5 million that he otherwise would have owed to the state of California. His net tax savings over his 16-year career come to about $100 million. Mr. Mickelson last year earned $60.7 million. Paying the 13.3% California rate, he will owe the state $8 million.

That takes Mickelson down to $52.7 million, putting him behind Woods, when he was ahead of him on the money list. Aggravating! (I know, I'm failing to take account of the way state taxes are a deduction on your federal income taxes and everything else that affects after-tax income.)

The benefit of living in a state without an income tax can be diminished by the "jock tax" that states impose on money earned by athletes when they're playing or training in the state. (Luckily for baseball players, spring training is in no-tax Florida or low-tax Arizona.) But in sports like tennis and golf where athletes can train anywhere in the world, a preponderance happen to migrate to states without an income tax.

These celebs — with their endorsements — need good PR, as the Mickelson slip proved. State tax proponents could get proactive and actively shame the sports stars who live in Florida without an adequate cover story. 

For instance, Serena and Venus Williams grew up in Compton, Calif., but moved with their father to Florida in the early 1990s.

Aggressive prosecution #2: Internet activist driven to suicide.

The Wall Street Journal delves into the prosecution of Aaron Swartz:

Mr. Swartz's lawyer, Elliot Peters, first discussed a possible plea bargain with Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann last fall. In an interview Sunday, he said he was told at the time that Mr. Swartz would need to plead guilty to every count, and the government would insist on prison time....

With the government's position hardening, Mr. Swartz realized that he would have to face a costly, painful and public trial....

He knew what he was doing was criminal, and he was a very intelligent man who chose to do it anyway and conceived of what he was doing as actively virtuous. Wouldn't a public trial serve his purposes in critiquing the laws he opposed and arguing for the liberation of the data files he tried to set free? (I'm picturing Swartz as a bit like those animal rights activists who steal into a mink farm and open all the cages. They believe that they are serving a call of morality higher than the interests embodied in the law they willingly violate.) It's civil disobedience, which — in classic form — demands that you take the law's punishment. That's part of the acted-out argument that the law is immoral.

"It was too hard for him to ask for the help and make that part of his life go public," [his girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman] said. "One of the things he felt most difficult to fathom was asking people for money."

His crime was about making more information freely public, and yet he cringed at publicity about his own plight, even where his plight was something he invited into his life and believed in as an especially good thing to do. Why the shame? Why not expose yourself as a martyr to laws you oppose?

Swartz's girlfriend and family released a statement saying: "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy.... It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." Understandably, they want to infuse their loss with meaning. But did the prosecutors go wrong?

The Massachusetts U.S. attorney's office declined to comment Sunday, saying it wanted to respect the family's privacy. But in a news release from July 2011, when the charges in the case were announced, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said, "Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar."...

The government indicated it might only seek seven years at trial, and was willing to bargain that down to six to eight months in exchange for a guilty plea, a person familiar with the matter said. But Mr. Swartz didn't want to do jail time.

"I think Aaron was frightened and bewildered that they'd taken this incredibly hard line against him," said Mr. Peters, his lawyer. "He didn't want to go to jail. He didn't want to be a felon."

But he knowingly and willingly committed numerous felonies, did he not? I'm not hearing the lawyer say that Swartz didn't do what the prosecutors said he did. The argument was that the law ought to be different. If you break the laws as a way to make that argument, how is the prosecutor supposed to respond? Your argument is to the public and to the legislators.

To say he didn't want to be a felon is to express a wish about the past. And it's a wish that wasn't even true. Swartz wanted to be a felon who eludes prosecution. Who gets that wish in a system of law? The intelligent, educated, nice-looking, good guy with lovely friends and family? The person who credibly threatens self-murder? The activist capable of articulating why the crime he committed should not be a crime? 

The Clinton clot plot thickens... or thins... with anti-coagulants.

So we were just talking about the oddities of the Clinton clot story. We noted that no sooner was it said that Hillary Clinton would testify, as Secretary of State, on the Benghazi attack, than there came an announcement that Hillary Clinton had entered the hospital with a blood clot. The coincidence raised suspicions of an effort to engineer an evasion of this testimony.

And we weren't told where the clot was, which is a crucial bit of information when assessing how serious this health scare is. Clinton had recently suffered a head injury, which makes one think the new problem would also be located in the head, but she'd also had a blood clot in her leg years ago, which makes that alternative seem plausible. If the clot were in the leg, withholding that information suggests a strategic choice to incline the public to view the problem as  more serious than it really was.

Later, Clinton's doctors released a statement saying that the clot was in a vein inside her skull, and that she's "making excellent progress" and likely to "make a full recovery." The Washington Post repeats the information that she's being treated with anticoagulants. You may remember that the analysis I discussed at that first link contained the assertion that "anticoagulation is never given to persons with clots around the brain." But that WaPo story says: "The conventional treatment is an anticoagulant drug for at least six months."

I know some of my readers are doctors. Can you help us out with that inconsistency about the anticoagulants? [ADDED: Here's what Dr. Pogo says. And here's some useful detail. I think the crucial distinction is whether the clot is in the brain or in the space between the brain and the skull.]

And, by the way, I've gotten some pushback in email and on the web, saying that it was "shameful" and "appalling" for me to tie Clinton's health problems to a possible intent to avoid testifying about Benghazi. Let me tell you that a core motivation to my blogging — and I've been going at this for 9 years now — is to stand tough against people who try to cut off debate with this kind of shaming. So I'm glad that this performance of outrage was directed at me. I know it when I see it, and it fires me up. You want silence? You want backing down? You want me not to dare say a thing like that? That's how you want to control political debate in the United States? Thanks for reminding me once again how deeply I hate that and for giving me an (easy) opportunity to model courage for the more timid people out there who are cowed by the fear of shaming.

ADDED: Here's something I would dearly love to do with this blog: I want to make it so that emotive, intimidating outrage like that backfires. I want people to learn that they can't get away with empty assertions like "I am aghast" or "You are despicable." You have to give reasons for what you think. Even if you really feel those feelings. And, of course, many of these hack writers don't actually feel the feelings they scribble about. They just don't want to have to talk about the actual issue. They want to make it something that everyone feels they'd better not talk about. But that should be a loud signal: We need to talk about it!

And let's get back to basics: What we need to talk about is Benghazi.

"Are gun owners now going to be stigmatized like sex offenders?"

Asks TalkLeft.

I think it's an attempt at intimidation. I wonder if any of those whose addresses were published are immediate family members of federal officials or employees, and covered by 18 USC Section 119, which prohibits publishing home addresses for intimidation. Or if the internet publication of home addresses of gun owners can be considered cyber stalking, cyber-bullying, harassment or invasion of privacy under state laws? Just because the information is available under a FOIA request, does that mean it can be publicly disseminated? I'm sure they checked with their lawyers and felt like they were on safe ground, but I hope somebody sues them.

This incident reminds me of the mailings that went out last spring showing the names and addresses of residents in one's neighborhood and whether they'd voted in recent elections. At the time, I called it "incredibly creepy":

This is an effort to shame and pressure people about voting, and it is truly despicable. Your vote is private, you have a right not to vote, and anyone who tries to shame and harass you about it is violating your privacy, and the assumption that I will become active in shaming and pressuring my neighbors is repugnant. 

In a second post on that topic, a commenter, The Drill SGT, pointed to some social science research on the effectiveness of manipulating social pressure with this sort of information about what neighbors are doing. Apparently, if this sort of thing works, they'll be plenty more of it.

Get ready.

"At News Conference, Reporters Skip Past Gun Control and Face Instant Criticism."

The reporters wanted to get back to the fiscal cliff.

Is it "unbelievable" and "shameful" that the press corps wanted to talk about the fiscal cliff? Or has the Newtown massacre been a diversion from the fiscal cliff?

I use the word "diversion" here with circumspection. The word connotes amusement and entertainment, and the murder of children is terrible and serious. Nevertheless, our fixation on something is not immunize from criticism on the ground the thing we are focused on is terrible and serious. Our fascination with it may be morbid and prurient.

This is the 4th definition of the word "diversion" in the OED: "The turning away of the thoughts, attention, etc., from fatiguing or sad occupations, with implication of pleasurable excitement; distraction, recreation, amusement, entertainment."

What is the fatiguing/sad occupation and what is functioning as a diversion? The media and the American public were energized by the massacre and spurred into to producing/consuming copious media. Politicians, including and especially the President, seized the opportunity to demagogue massacre.

So I would honor the professionalism of the press corps in dragging our attention back to the fatiguing and sad occupation of attending to the federal budget.

AFL-CIO organization sends insultingly infantilizing "report card."

Look. They expect us to identify with these "cute" children:


(Enlarge.)

We're not children. We don't like to be spoken to as if we are children. And we don't like the use of children in politics. And the photographer did a particularly bad job at cute-ifying those children, whose expression has nothing to do with the way kids feel about 1. report cars and 2. whether adults are voting.

At least the organization refrained from naming and shaming the neighbors, which is what some other groups do.



You can't tell from the return address what politics underlie this mailing, but it's easy enough to find it in Wikipedia:

Working America is an allied organization of the AFL-CIO which works to build alliances among non-union working people. Working America is a nonpartisan, non-profit organization which provides workers who are not union members input into the policies, goals, and legislative efforts of the AFL-CIO.

I'm sure they chose Meade as a recipient based on our zip code.

"Self-reliance — the new edgy lifestyle for the trendsetters among America’s youth?"

Glenn Reynolds asks in a NY Post column.

In today’s culture of immediate reward, a work ethic centering on self-discipline and the ability to defer gratification is almost, to use a favorite term of the avant-garde, transgressive. Hmm: With so much of our economy and politics now based on the absence of those characteristics, maybe it really is a bit transgressive.

He's looking at a new reality show — "Princess" — that makes entertainment out of forcing young women how to live within their means. And he's comparing it to pornography, which isn't exciting anymore. Supposedly. Despite the big "Shades of Grey" trend (which he mentions).

Could self-reliance become trendy? Maybe if it's imposed on some annoyingly bratty girl on television, but self-reliance is a low-profile matter in real life. It's about not getting noticed, not asking for help. Pornography is truly exciting when it interacts with shame. That's why the word transgression comes into play. There used to be shame in taking advantage of handouts and welfare, and people would apply themselves quite seriously to the tasks of remaining independent — staying off "the dole," as people used to say.

These days, half of Americans are getting government benefits. We've gotten comfortable leaning on each other, and where's the shame? People feel entitled, and we don't want to lose what we have, even if we perceive that what we're depending on might be/must be collapsing. But even if we did feel shame about our dependence, becoming independent would not be the escape from shame that one feels from pornography. When a person escapes shame through pornography, he is going ahead and indulging in the things that were the cause of shame. In the analogy, it's dependence on others that would be the source of the shame, and avoiding that dependence would be refraining from doing that which you're ashamed of. So quite aside from the present-day absence of shame, the analogy doesn't work.

You can't get to excitement and edginess unless you transgress — you move toward the behavior you were ashamed of. It might nevertheless — and for different reasons — feel beautifully rewarding to behave so well that you don't suffer from shame. But let's be clear about the analogy: self-reliance corresponds to chastity.

Why are you so selfish?

If you're on the left, you're sensitive about that aren't you? Well, then...

Got a birthday, anniversary, or wedding coming up?

Let your friends know how important this election is to you—register with Obama 2012, and ask for a donation in lieu of a gift. It’s a great way to support the President on your big day. Plus, it’s a gift that we can all appreciate—and goes a lot further than a gravy bowl.

Setting up and sharing your registry page is easy—so get started today.

It's the Obama Event Registry, and I know they are making fun of it over at Hot Air and Instapundit and all those right-wing places that attract the greedy sort of person who doesn't know what it means to truly bleed deep in your heart for the poor and suffering people of the world to whom Barack Obama will minister in his second term when he is finally free of the bonds of the electoral system. It is time to sacrifice — and to display to your friends and family how much you sacrifice — for the betterment of humankind. And if any of them are receiving presents for their wedding/anniversary/birthday, may they feel the shame and, in their weakness, may they know that you are a finer, truer liberal than they.

Top 5 Wisconsin Protests That In Retrospect Sound Like Pro-Walker Protests Against the Protests.

5. "Shame!"

4. "Recall Walker." (Yes, we recall him very well... and like him.)

3. "What's Disgusting?

2. "Don't Stop Believing."



1. "This is what democracy looks like."

The "inescapable shame of being a storyteller."

An enactment of shame, by Jonathan Franzen:



Via David Haglund, who proceeds to further shame Franzen.

Should students who party on Cinco de Mayo be shamed for their ethnic insensitivity?

That's what's going on here in Madison.

“It was a good opportunity,” said [a UW-Madison student who designed a Cinco de Mifflin T-shirt, "Mifflin" being the name of the location of an annual block party dating back to 1969.] "People have been calling it ‘Cinco de Drinko’ for the last four years and they’re very much relating it to a drinking holiday anyway.”

Eunji Kang, another student and shirt designer, said that “it’s part of American culture” to drink alcohol while celebrating holidays.

Other students are disappointed by the misappropriation of Mexican culture. The organization Badgers Against Racism formed over ongoing conversations between students concerned with the lack of cultural sensitivity on campus.

Racism?!

“As members of the UW-Madison community we strive to create a learning environment that promotes social justice education, cultural awareness, and respect,” the group said in a statement obtained by The Daily Cardinal. “We should be able to participate in traditions like Mifflin without promoting stereotypes that dehumanize our peers.”

What's the stereotype? The only stereotype I see is UW students as drinking and partying too much. And (other) UW students getting all censorious and political.

IN THE COMMENTS: Don't Tread 2012 said...

Acro-observation:

Badgers
Against
Racism

In the spirit of race-baiting, the first round is on me.

I know. I noticed that too, and when I read your comment, I thought maybe it's a satire, and I took it seriously. I went back and reread the article. Is this really dry humor? But taking into account the context — Madison, Wisconsin — no, it's real. I'd love to be wrong!

Once mothers — labeled "refrigerator mothers" — were blamed for autism in their children.

It seems so cruel and retrograde now, but:

In the absence of any biomedical explanation for what causes autism after the telltale symptoms were first described by scientists, Bruno Bettelheim, a University of Chicago professor and child development specialist, and other leading psychoanalysts championed the notion that autism was the product of mothers who were cold, distant and rejecting, thus deprived of the chance to "bond properly". The theory was embraced by the medical establishment and went largely unchallenged into the mid-1960s, but its effects have lingered into the 21st century....

As embarrassing and offensive as that sounds to us today, here comes a new way to blame mothers for autism. Ironically, it's refrigerator-related. NPR reports:

A new study in the journal Pediatrics suggests that moms who are obese or have diabetes are more likely to have a child with autism or another developmental problem....

Obesity was the most common risk factor, affecting more than 20 percent of mothers with an autistic child. Also, obesity increases the risk that a woman will have diabetes during pregnancy, and can also increase the risk for high blood pressure.

"Obesity really affects the mother's physiology aside from the fact that she's carrying around a lot of extra weight," Hertz-Picciotto says....

"We're talking about a fetal brain that could be suffering from a lack of oxygen," she says.

Guilt up again, mothers. It might be your fault. Maybe. Just in case...

So it's clearly a good idea for women who are overweight or obese to try to slim down before becoming pregnant, Hertz-Picciotto says.

I love how they don't really need to prove anything. Just establish a correlation, and then, why not add more pressure on women to do something we've been leaning on them to do for other reasons anyway? You already know you need to lose weight, so here's a good one: If you have an autistic child after you failed to lose weight, people will always be able to think maybe, just maybe, she did that to her child.

Refrigerator mother.

One year ago at the Wisconsin protests: "Shame, shame, shame... Where is the shame?"

"Is it in wearing a gray hoodie under a tailored blazer, a little black derby hat, and a smelled-a-fart expression while carrying a pre-printed 'SHAME' sign when the guy marching after you is wearing a windbreaker and carrying a handmade 'TAX the RICH' sign?"

Is it in carrying a 3D representation of the governor's bare ass while being followed by a blanketed-up old woman in a wheelchair against whom is propped a gigantic "SHAME" sign?

Is it in wheeling around an old woman against whom is propped a gigantic "SHAME" sign and sticking mylar pinwheels into her blankets?

Is it in marching — while holding, instead of sign, a take-out coffee — while a woman holds up a "SHAME!" sign and you (apparently) supervise a child who is bearing a handmade "InaPPropriate Boob" sign which depicts (presumably) Scott Walker being directed toward a blazing fire.

Where is the shame? Is it in my photography and my questions? Should I be ashamed to see alternate meanings in the "SHAME" signs the Wisconsin protesters display proudly?

Rep. Kelda Helen Roys, D-Madison, proposed the requirement that "a state legislator... be in the room to act as the official 'state shamer.'"

It's Wisconsin, where the legislature is one big theatrical stage:

[A new bill] requires physicians, under the threat of a felony charge, to speak privately with a woman seeking an abortion to determine whether she had been "coerced" and to conduct an exam before providing abortion-inducing drugs....

Roys proposed that since Republicans want to use doctors to perform a "shaming lecture," that a state legislator also be required to be in the room to act as the official "state shamer."

The GOP legislature also passed a bill permitting abstinence-only sex education in public schools. Roys "facetiously proposed amendments to also give schools discretion on whether to teach the 'science of germs' and the 'theory of gravity.'"

There you have it: the comic stylings of Kelda Helen Roys. Roys, unlike the rest of us, has the opportunity to make jokes via the legislative process.

"The political reaction to 'slut' was opportunistic, of course, but it worked with a lot of women..."

"... because — apparently, even in this age of sexual liberation and 'slut pride' — women are still somehow deeply affected by charges of wanton and undiscriminating sexual behavior," writes Glenn Reynolds, looking at the conflicts under the surface of sex-positive feminism.

This might even account for the importance of the contraceptive issue, because mandated contraceptive coverage may be seen as representing not just a modest monetary benefit, but also perhaps some sort of societal validation. I would have thought that a strong independent woman wouldn’t need a stamp of societal approval for her choices, but apparently I would have been wrong. I leave it to the evolutionary-psych folks to work out why the “slut” charge retains such power in liberated times.

Apparently, however, it is especially wrong to “slut-shame” even though lefties feel no compunction about shaming people regarding other personal choices — from not recycling to owning an SUV to, worst of all, being a Republican. As I say, there’s something more going on here. And if the “shaming” part of slut-shaming isn’t bad, because shaming is fine in other contexts, then it must be the “slut” part.

Who did the shaming? Conservatives, including Rush Limbaugh, were characterizing sex as nothing more lowly than private recreational activity. The idea was: You have to pay for that yourself. It was the other side that seized upon that argument and imposed a new, politically motivated interpretation on it, that the woman was shamed. The wounded woman — wounded in the "war on women" — should then seek succor in the arms of the Democratic Party, who would care for what are health needs (not recreational supplies!).

Realistically, this should be a policy debate about insurance coverage, but minds must be manipulated, so competing templates are offered. What should a woman prefer, to be thought of as a strong free agent, doing what she chooses, with the government as far from her sex life as possible or a government that sees her as vulnerable, easily wounded, and in need of protection and support?

One answer is: I'm for whichever side gives me $1,000. That's what's really frightening.

"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

An H.L. Mencken quote from 1916.

Now, here's something Rush Limbaugh said yesterday. He was talking about Sandra Fluke, "a student at Georgetown Law, who admits to having so much sex that she can't afford it anymore." Fluke is a woman who testified last week at an unofficial hearing (set up by Nancy Pelosi) in support of requiring health insurance coverage for birth control, even for those who get their health insurance from institutions affiliated with religions that see birth control as sinful. Opponents of that requirement had crafted their argument around respect for religious belief, and before Rush's loud voice took over, they seemed to want us to think about the exalted religious feeling underlying the objection to birth control. But Rush dragged our attention to the spectacle of a woman having sex, over and over — 3 times a day! — and she wants us "to pay for it." Heh heh. Wants us to pay for it?!! So she's a slut! A prostitute!

When [President Obama telephoned Fluke and] asked her if she's okay, she said that Obama told her that she should tell her parents they should be proud. (pause) Okay, I'm button [sic] my lip on that one.  The president tells Sandra Fluke (chuckling), 30-year-old Sandra Fluke, that her parents should be proud.  Okay.  Let me ask you a question.  I might be surprised at the answer I would get to this question.  Your daughter appears before a congressional committee and says she's having so much sex, she can't pay for it and wants a new welfare program to pay for it. Would you be proud?  I don't know about you, but I'd be embarrassed.  I'd disconnect the phone. I'd go into hiding and hope the media didn't find me.  See, everybody forgets what starts this, or what started this whole thing. Or maybe they don't! Maybe that's normal behavior on the left now, for all I know.

If that were your daughter, you should be ashamed. Shame! She's having so much sex. Shame. 3 times a day. Wants to get paid. Shame. That's Rush's theme. He can't let it go. That's where he found the resonance with the audience he imagines as he speaks. Who are those listeners? They're not those people on the left. (Who knows what "normal behavior" for them is now?) But his audience, he knows how to talk to them, and he's sounding the theme of shame — shame for the woman who openly enjoys her sexuality. Rush is plying the audience, playing on their haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. So much sex!

Now, I know he's also got the small government theme in there. "We" shouldn't have to pay for it. There shouldn't be "a new welfare program" for it. That's distorted. It's not a welfare program funded by taxpayers. It's an insurance regulation that will have some effect on insurance premiums. That's a conservative theme that resonates with listeners who don't worry about how much sex other people are having. But he doesn't bother to get the conservative argument straight. He has to distort it so it works with his joking about prostitution, and he's only talking about it in connection to sex — that very, very frequent sex that somebody else is having.

And whatever happened to religion? I mean religion as the exalted aspiration toward God, the theme that other Republicans had worked so hard to refine and articulate before Rush's big voice drowned them out. Now, the connection to religion seems to be about the old sexual Puritanism. This is a theme that makes many modern American women suspect that what people like Rush are really about is preserving the body's uncontrolled sexual function for the purpose of subordinating women. How dare women seize the power to disconnect sexuality from the consequences God built in!

But it is fundamental to women's freedom that we have the ability to decide for ourselves when our bodies will go through pregnancy and bear children. At some point, society ought to intervene to protect a developing child, and we will argue until doomsday about exactly where that point is, but it is nevertheless crucial to the equality of women that we control our bodies' reproductive function. There are in this world societies that appropriate the reproductive function and use it as a means of intimidating and punishing women who might act upon sexual desire, but that is not the United States, not since quite a long time ago. Now, we could become a society like that, and I suspect some of Rush's listeners, if not Rush himself, love that idea.

Yes, yes, no one is currently proposing taking away birth control. The debate is about who pays for it. Of course. But the political effort to channel public opinion reaches more deeply into the human mind. Politicians make choices about what emotions to stimulate. The Republican Party and the Republican candidates seem to have decided that their emotional theme would be freedom of religion. That might elegantly balance the Democratic Party's theme of reproductive freedom. And then Rush lumbered into the spotlight and spouted about sex. Sex! The women are having too much sex! Sex, sex, sex, all the time, 3 times a day! Sex!

In the long comments thread on yesterday's post about Limbaugh and Fluke, Mark O said:

This is part of a wonderfully orchestrated maneuver to distract the voters from Obama's economic failures to something nearly irrelevant.

And I said:

Nice of Rush to sit in on Obama's orchestra.

"To those Christians who have venomously and vomitously cursed the Court family..."

"... and threatened bodily harm and assassination: In His name, I forgive you.... To those in the executive and legislative branches of government who have demagogued this case for their own political goals: You should be ashamed of yourselves...."

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, writing an order approving a settlement in a school prayer case.

Protesters chant "Shame! Shame!" after Gov. Walker reads the MLK Day proclamation.

Shame, indeed.