"Prominent Conservative Women" or "Ideology Bends to Reality – Longterm"

The problem with sexism (one of the problems with sexism) is that it is impractical. If you want a conservative woman as your flag bearer you're going to have to deal with the fact that she isn't going to be living the conservative life style, because it is an impossible life style for prominent women to lead. A women should be attractive and young, but such a woman should have a family and be taking care of them. Yeah, Sarah Palin has lots of kids, but she's not the one taking care of them, she's not 'mothering' them in the conventional sense of the word.

Sarah Palin makes me happy. I dislike all of her positions (or at least all of her positions that I know of) and I even dislike all that I know of her personally. I vehemently hope that she will lose the general election and that the ideology that she espouses loses, both in November and long term. However, I'm thrilled that she is part of the national discourse, I think it immensely useful for feminist goals.

The current single largest barrier (not to diminish a variety of other barriers also present) to equality in the United States is the presumption of women as primary caretakers. Being a primary caretaker for children is extremely time consuming and for years at a time a full time occupation. It's also one of those things that while very difficult to do very well is simple to perform to a minimum level. (Like cooking actually). There are no special skills or training required. (I'd argue the need for heroic patience and large doses of empathy but it's all mostly debatable). A group of people (a class if you will) that is presumed to have a job that requires minimum skills, a lot of time, and no pay during some of the most productive years of a person's life, with a similar part time job in later years, is handicapped in the ability to achieve financial security or excess and great achievements of any kind. This is simple logic, if you do A you can't do B at the same time, if you don't do B now the total B that you do decreases.

Today, a substantial portion of society thinks women should have economic and political equality with men. Often, even men who espouse this view will not be eager to shoulder more work in the childcare department, this is, unfortunately, simply rational behavior on their part. However, as the view that women should be seen in political life permeates society and even conservatives feel the need to have women representing them, the basic incompatibility of the full time caretaker model (especially with the multiple children far right conservatives would have all of us have) with a competitive career becomes inescapable.

Sarah Palin, whatever else she is or isn't, is not the primary caretaker for her young children. The simple, brutal calculus of time does not allow it. Someone else is doing the majority of the diaper changes, the majority of the rocking to sleep or quite, the monitoring that the baby doesn't fall out or the toddler doesn't eat something toxic, and all that. I don't think there is anything wrong with this. I just want more women to have that choice, without facing shame or obstacles.

Rich women have always been able to break conventions, when the stars aligned just right in family connections and talent. There have always been exceptions and they have rarely done much for women as a group. Conservatives (and lets be fair, human beings) have always had a large tolerance for hypocrisy (maybe even a taste for it?). Sarah Palin though, is not particularly rich (though she is certainly well off) or terribly well connected (as far as I can tell). So, I think it a good sign. Queen Elizabeth didn't do much for society's view of women. No one women can or will. But there must be a critical mass, a time when there are enough women to point to and say “hey, she did this, and you think she's a good person, a good woman, why can't I?” that it will make a difference.

None of this will stop conservatives from trying to shame and tar liberal women by saying they're bad mothers and bad women for not being primary caretakers or for being outspoken or ambitious but the more Sarah Palins there are the more ammunition we have to go “R U Serious? Really?” And every non prominent conservative that votes for Palin is endorsing her lifestyle and though he may see no contradiction in his 'values' and his vote for Palin eventually these contradictions will seep through.

It makes the conservative arguments harder, and sooner or later they are abandoned. The overtone window moves.

We Are Not the Same

The United States of America has participated in torture. The President and high level administrators have explicitly discussed and authorized torture. This is objective truth. Some people are shocked by this, some outraged, and others ... aren't. Most everyone I regularly read online has written, more then once, on the implications of these actions, has written about the horror of it and decried the lack of outrage in the public. The media is blamed for the lack of outrage. Lack of information is blamed.

Lately, I've been realizing something much worse is at play.

The majority of Americans simply don't think torture is immoral.

People, politicians, bloggers, we the people, talk about morals, about morality all the time. The problem is we almost never bother to define what we mean.

It is conventional to pretend that we all share the same morals.

We don't.

We don't. It's hard to understand this. Hard to believe it. When I speak with an acquaintance that I like, whose intelligence I admire, who I am inclined to think of as a good person, a nice person and realize that he doesn't think there is anything wrong with the government torturing people for information and that it isn't because he's unaware of what that means, not that he hasn't thought about this, but simply genuinely doesn't share my morals it's a shock.

Reality has to be faced and dealt with. We don't have the American public we wish we did, we have the public that is. Any strategy for change has to take that into account. If it makes me sick to know that people around me, that the people of my country don't have a problem with torture, that's my problem.

We can't do anything by assuming people have morals they don't have.

Yes, there are international norms against torture. Other countries have these morals. Yes, in theory our cultural revulsion towards the Nazis, towards terrorists, towards the Spanish Inquisition, are theoretically based on their actions, genocide, torture, civilian deaths. In practice that revulsion is based on a cultural norm that says those people are 'evil'. In practice the American people are willing to accept torture and civilian deaths. I'll concede that genocide is considered by the public to be immoral. Never mind that actual genocide, both historical (Native Americans) and current (in the Congo) gets almost no attention (there is at least the excuse of distance and non interest, hard to buy that with current actions that involve our government, our responsibility in a democracy).

It's worth appealing to people's morality still. We can try to convince people. We can try to shame people. We have to appeal to people's other sensiblities. But it has to be done with intelligence. Those of us who think torture is wrong, immoral, unethical and destructive to the victim, the torturer, and the institutions behind the torturer are in the minority. We better figure out a way to live with that.

History and Myself

Mostly, I'm a liberal up and down the line, whichever line you happen to be looking at.

I have my few areas of difference, I'm vaguely against gun control, for example.

However, it is my emotions that on occasion don't match the far left I'm politically part of.   To summarize a difficult to articulate conflict between my gut and my brain.

"Most liberals never lost sight of the potential for evil in big government.  They have consistently opposed government power in matters of personal and political belief.  LIberals are not unconcerned with economic liberty, but they have come to believe that the common good requires that social justice be given a higher priority than absolute economic freedom. Conservative are-and always have been-on the other side of both questions. They are much more prone than liberals to limiting personal and political liberties, but they place the freedom of an individual to do as he pleases in the economic realm at the top of their concerns.  Social justice has held a lower priority for conservatives, from the days of Alexander Hamilton when they favored strong government as a means of protecting their economic privileges to the days of Ronald Reagan when they see government as an instrument of social justice and therefore a threat to their economic position." Robert L. Mcelvaine

I like the above quote.  I agree with it.

Alexander Hamilton was always my favorite historical figure and the one I had a crush on. 

Sex Drive

It’s an accepted assumption in our culture that men have a stronger sex drive then women do. I don’t think that’s true, partly because other cultures see women as the sexual and uncontrolled ones and partly from simple anecdotal, frustrated observation of how our culture refuses to acknowledge women’s sexual desires and artificially conflates all of men’s romantic desires to sex.

Men certainly talk more about sex in our culture then women do. But there is an obvious explanation for it and it isn’t nature.

My groups of friends are, generally speaking, socially liberal and very accepting of me in particular. They’ve taken all sorts of weirdness from me in stride but I’ve found that often even very different friends will be similarly uncomfortable if I talk about sex too much. More specifically if I talk about sexual desire too much. And I don’t even talk about sex all that often!

Strangely, talking with other women about sex in terms of what their partners want seems to be more acceptable then talking about what they want. I think this has the interesting effect of making women think they are strange (or sluts) if they do think about wanting sex.

I’ve personally known about (i.e. not urban legends) several women who have either divorced or seriously considered divorce from their husbands because they weren’t having as much sex as they wanted.

On the other side, there is a cultural perception that all men want is sex. Obviously, this isn’t accurate either, not only do many men want romantic connection and love but some have a low libido and much less of an interest in sex then our culture says is normal. (A little bit of a side issue but this study is great in showing that teenage boys are, surprise, surprise, human beings who are perfectly capable of complex emotion beyond lust, love for example).

In practice, surely many people have realized during their life times that there is a wide variety of sex drives in both men and women and pay little attention to the stereotype, but I think the cultural narrative is still harmful.

This post was inspired by one of those women I mentioned above. I think a loving relationship between two people with widely differing sex drives is a tragedy that is often without a really good solution.

The stereotypes create expectations and depression in those that don’t fit them and prevent people from being more open in thinking about such potential problems.

I do think we’ve made progress in acknowledging that women have sexual desires but I’m not at all sure that we’ve made progress in acknowledging that men can have little sexual desire or have desires that aren’t sexual.

The Protect America Act

The Senate has passed a reauthorization of PAA that makes virtually everything about the famous illegal wiretapping program by NSA (the one Congress was screaming about not so long ago) legal and closes all options for prosecuting anyone over the past illegalities. The House has hung up the Act in Congress for now because of the telecom immunity provision but there is no real question that the other provisions of the Protect America Act will become law in the near future.

The PAA makes it legal for the government to listen in to any conversation without a warrant as long as one of the participants is physically outside the Unites States.

Anything that deals with the power of the government over civilians is an exercise of balancing opposing needs and considerations, it should also be about caution and narrow tailoring.

There are two discussions that should be going on when we are discussing the expansion of government powers and I am furious that only one of them is happening.

The first discussion is the balancing of the competing interests of security and civil rights. This is very much a subjective decision. It depends on how severe you think the threat to our safety is and how severe the threat to our privacy. It depends on how much you value security when compared to privacy. There is definitely room for debate and argument and analysis in this question but eventually it pretty much comes down to a gut decision. I don’t mind people debating or screaming at each other about whether they value safety or privacy and whether the other side is advocating the destruction of our lives or our society. However, this debate is not the only debate we should be having!

The second question, in many ways the more important question, is, once you accept that the balance between security and privacy is X (fill in your own preferred position here, or your enemies) the question is how to go about satisfying to the desired maximum the safety consideration while safeguarding our rights as much as possible. Once we decide we need to do Y to be safe by all means lets set about accomplishing the objective of Y. (Ex: NSA needs to be able to place a wiretap on people they think might be working for Al Queda within 24 hours, lets figure out a process that lets them do that legally.) However, what reason is there not to go about doing Y in such a way as to minimize any damage to our rights? (Ex: Warrants after the fact. Notification after the fact. Briefing of Congress at certain intervals, etc.) Why is the question presented by the Bush administration and the Republicans the binary one of not valuing or accomplishing Y and writing a blank check? No matter what Y is (unless it is unfettered absolute power) there is room for oversight and checks.

There can be reasonable disagreement on the first question. I can see how people might have different preferences on the balance between security and civil rights and I can acknowledge these people as well intentioned reasonable individuals without frothing at the mouth. People who are unwilling to discuss and work on the second question and shut down all discussion of it by yelling “We’re all going to die! Y is important! Don’t you understand!” make me froth at the mouth.

I can think of no justifiable reason to not work on including oversight and safeguards into any new rights we want to give the government. I cannot think of any motivation for the people who oppose such except a naked desire to seize and abuse power.

No one is interested in us not being safe. But blank checks are not the best ways of achieving that. There is even reason to believe that blank checks make for less effective law enforcement/intelligence gathering.

And that’s why the PAA is a lousy law, not only because it allows wiretapping of a certain kind but because it gives us no way to make sure the NSA is complying with PAA.

There is also a distinct possibility that the PAA is unconstitutional on the merits, but that’s a subject for another post.