feminist blogs

I have a deep and abiding love for XKCD, as do all right-thinking people. And so I’m pleased to point you over to the latest installment, which has the most brutally correct take on Nice Guys™ that I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. The punch line is too good to spoil, though people familiar with the Nice Guy™ can probably guess.

Let’s face it, things are not going very well for right-wing radio these days. Rush Limbaugh has been reduced to a national laughingstock, while Sean Hannity is best known for simply repeating talking points handed to him by the RNC. Where is the innovation? The fight? The good ol’-fashioned hatred that will sustain the righties into a new era?

Well, my fellow Minnesotans can puff our chests up with pride, because we’ve got a budding right-wing radio superstar right here in our own backyard, broadcasting daily at KTLK-FM.

Minnesotans know KTLK as the radio station that made the head-scratching decision to abandon reasonable talk and go to an all-right-wing-nonsense-all-the-time format right before the collapse of the Republican party. With the aforementioned Limbaugh and Hannity, along with Jason “North Carolina is Infinitely Superior to Minnesota, What With its Low Taxes and Family Values, Which is Why I’m Getting the Hell Out of There and Coming Back to the Cities” Lewis, KTLK is the sort of radio dinosaur that would have been really popular in 1994, but now languishes down with KOOL-108 (the oldies station) in the ratings.

But Chris Baker aims to change all that. The new morning drive host and Texas import is making a name for himself nationally, and doing it the old-fashioned way: by saying crazy crap.

You may remember Baker from his previous assertion that basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson had faked testing positive for HIV, because as everyone remembers, in the early 1990s nothing was cooler than pretending to have AIDS. Now, most radio hosts would kill to have just one crazy statement like that, driving the ratings and whipping up conservative resentment of multimillionaire basketball players who have spent their retirement building up the poorer areas of Los Angeles through investment. But not Chris! No, he’s just getting started.

According to the George Soros-controlled Media Matters, in his brief time in Minneapolis Baker has:

• Said that the murder of transwoman Latiesha Green was the media’s fault, saying, “I believe the media and the rest of the enablers out there, they have this guy’s [sic] blood on their hands because they create this false sense of reality and they enable people who need serious psychological counseling.” Because nothing says Liberal Media Conspiracy like the argument that people should be able to live their lives without being shot.
• Said, “I don’t think homeless people should vote. Frankly. In fact, I have to be very honest. I’m not that excited about women voting, to be honest.” Honestly!
• Suggested his gal Sarah Palin “shoulda had a little cleavage going” during her debate with Joe Biden. (Thank goodness she didn’t, it could have killed Rich Lowry.) Baker continued to show the kind of not-sexism that the GOP showered upon their veep, saying “[S]how your stuff, you know what I’m saying? Use all your assets….By the way, I noticed a panty line on her. … When they turned to walk to the podium, I saw a panty line.”
• Said of Code Pink protesters, “I’ll tell you, though, in the speech — the best part of the speech was when those Code Pink nuts — another bunch that ought to have all their tubes tied. All right? I can’t stand these Code Pink broads.”
• Called Thomas Beatie, the transman who has become pregnant twice, a “mutilated lesbian.”
• And while he didn’t say it himself, he promoted a video of a pastor who called Barack Obama’s mother “trash” for having a child with a black man.

Heckuva guy, huh? He also, just for the record, argued for the use of ax handles and machine guns against RNC protesters who, as far as I can tell, broke a window at Macy’s and…well, that’s it. Misogynistic, transphobic, racist — I assume homophobic, since it really is part and parcel of that worldview.

Of course, Baker is hardly alone in using sexism and hate to sell his agenda — it’s pretty much expected on the right. But for a guy to do so much in such a short time…well, it’s inspiring to all the hatchet men and haters on the right. Baker has set a high bar for his fellow wingnuts to clear. And I shudder to think what he’ll do next. Because while I suspect Baker doesn’t believe half the stuff that comes out of his mouth, we all know that a lot of his listeners do — and Baker has given the thumbs-up to violence against women and transpeople, given the green light to attacking liberal protesters. He’s opened the door to a lot of hate and evil. But that’s what the best right-wing talkers do, now, isn’t it?

Julie the Girl Detective has a thoughtful post right below this one about the American Thanksgiving mythos, the enduring myth that Sarah Josepha Hale¹ created in the pages of Godey’s Ladies Book.

You should read the whole thing, but this is the question I wanted to respond to:

I’m all for a harvest festival that allows me the time to see friends and family living 400 miles away, but why do we have to perpetuate such a pernicious falsehood? What justification is there for this?

I’d like to posit an answer: It’s because we’re guilty as sin, and we know it.

By “we,” of course, I’m referring to white Americans, the folks who came up with the myth that the Wôpanâak and the Pilgrims were fast friends, working together to build a nation. It flatters us to think that we were welcomed by the indigenous peoples of this land, makes us feel like it was okay that we took it from them, piece by bloody piece, inch by bloody inch, body by bloody body. After all, they invited us in — they were asking for it.

The genocide of native peoples is hardly a unique event in human history — there have been many genocides in our past, and there will be more in our future — but it’s our genocide. This isn’t the slaughter of the Armenians or the Holocaust. This is death we caused, through disease and war and deprivation. This is land we ethnically cleansed, from sea to shining sea. This land is not yours nor mine; it was theirs. I write this on Lakota land.

The first recorded Thanksgiving in American history was in Connecticut Colony in 1637, celebrating the end of the Pequot War, and the genocide of the Pequot tribe. Those few Pequot who survived that war were either sold into slavery or fled into diaspora. But we don’t celebrate that because we’re not proud of that history. Like slavery, it is an indelible stain on our nation’s soul, one that nothing can ever erase.

This is why we cling to the myth — because we don’t want to believe our great-great-great-grandparents were murderers of a kind with the Nazis or the Hutus. We want to believe that our forbearers were good people, people who were kind to those with different skin and different languages than theirs. We want to believe that our ancestors were generous people, people who shared their bounty with others. We want to believe that our nation really was founded to be the shining city on a hill that Mather said it was.

But our nation was not founded by demigods. It was founded by people just as prone to prejudice and hate as we are today — only without the intervening four hundred years of wisdom we have gained just to get to the point where most of us believe genocide is evil — with the occasional exception.

We do ourselves no favors by clinging to the myth; believing our forebearers were good people who just happened to take over a mysteriously empty North America allows us to continue to hate immigrants, allows us to ignore the death toll in Iraq, allows us to continue believing that People Like Us are somehow superior to Other People. Better to accept that our ancestors, like all peoples’ ancestors, were flawed, and capable of the same kinds of evil that we ourselves would be capable of if not for one hundred years of concerted efforts by goo-goo liberals to drive home the point that genocide is evil. Accepting that would allow us to recognize the hatred in ourselves, and to work to eliminate it. But that’s hard, and uncomfortable. Much easier to simply hold to the fiction that there was a time, long ago, when Native Americans and American colonists sat down and broke bread together over a hearty meal, thankful for the bounty and for each other’s company. It’s a nice story, and unlike the genocide that followed the Puritan colonization, it never happened. And that makes all the difference.

1. Along with Thanksgiving, she is also the creator of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

So it’s Black Friday! How are you celebrating? In Long Island, they’re celebrating by killing Wal-Mart workers:

A Wal-Mart worker has died after being trampled by a throng of unruly shoppers shortly after the Long Island store opened Friday, police said. Unconfirmed reports said a pregnant woman also miscarried as the crowd rushed in.

Nassau County police said the 34-year-old Wal-Mart worker was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead at about 6 a.m. ET, an hour after the store opened.

A police statement said a throng of shoppers “physically broke down the doors, knocking him to the ground.” The exact cause of death “will be determined by the medical examiner’s office,” the police stated.

A 28-year-old pregnant woman was also taken to the hospital, after evidently miscarrying.

UPDATE: Thanks to Charles Brubaker in comments for alerting us that the inital reports of a miscarriage were false.

Glenn Reynolds writes the stupidest thing he’s ever written, even dumber than his Iraq War touchdown dance on his own 20-yard-line. It turns out, you see, that There Can Be Only One.

Am I talking of the Highlander? The Fifth Cylon? No, I’m talking out the one important black person that can exist for all of American history:

I feel a little sorry for Martin Luther King — his enormous accomplishments got less attention than they deserved because of the cult of Malcolm X, and now he’s being eclipsed by Barack Obama. Though I suppose he’d be perfectly okay with that.

Yeah, that Martin Luther Whatever guy, who’s ever heard anything about him? It’s not like the guy has a national holiday or anything.

Now, we can go on and on about the utter stupidity of Reynolds pretending that W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman are now totally unimportant thanks to Obama’s victory; indeed, we can go further and note how insane it is that Reynolds would think Du Bois, Douglas, King, Malcolm X, Tubman, and the several million other African-Americans who worked for equality through our nation’s long and bitter racial history would see Obama’s victory as anything other than a positive outcome of their work. And certainly, I think everyone, including Barack Obama, would view Martin Luther King, Jr., as one of the three or four most influential Americans of the twentieth century, and one of the ten most influential in our nation’s history. He got his holiday for a reason — not that Reynolds’ allies wanted him to.

But Reynolds’ world view is of a piece with the dribblings of Mark “The Human” Steyn, who just doesn’t like that his kid is learning about the darkies:

A few months back, my little boy came home from Second Grade and said to me, “Guess what we learned today?” I said: “Rosa Parks.” He said: “How did you know that?” I said: “Because it’s always Rosa Parks.” And, if you don’t learn it in the context of any broader historical narrative, it’s just a story about municipal transit seating arrangements.

Teaching only the warts is a terrible thing to do to young children. At its extreme it leads to those British Taliban captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan: Subjects of the Crown who’d been raised in English schools and taught only that the country to which they owed their nominal allegiance was the source of all the racism, oppression, colonialism, and imperialism in the world. Why be surprised that a proportion of the alumni of such a system would look elsewhere for their sense of identity?

But, even in its more benign form, warts-only education leaves a big hole where one’s cultural inheritance should be.

Wow. So much to unpack. First off, let me remind Mark that he’s a Canadian; whose cultural heritage are we talking about? But the hoser’s point would be dumb even if he could trace his roots back to the Mayflower.

My daughter, who’s in first grade, learned about Rosa Parks. She didn’t learn about Parks absent context; she learned that she defied a rule that said she couldn’t go where she wanted because of the color of her skin. When my daughter mentioned learning about Parks, I amplified the lesson, telling her how in some places in that time, the color of your skin dictated which schools you went to, which restaurants you could patronize, even what bathrooms you used. I told her that this was horribly wrong, and that American heroes like Parks stood up to that system, and that they made our country a better place.

This is, of course, what Steyn misses in this — Rosa Parks’ story is told precisely because it is heroic. Martin Luther King, Jr. is revered precisely because he was a national hero. We learn about our country’s sins — slavery, the genocide of native peoples, the long period where women were denied the vote — and we learn that even in the face of the worst our country could do, that ordinary Americans still stood up and fought for justice.

Our country has done great things. Among them are the great things we did to heal our own self-inflicted wounds. I’m grateful for all the men and women of all races who have worked to make ours what the founders called A More Perfect Union. Far from being beside the point, they are the point of this endeavor, the people who were empowered by the ideals of the Founding Fathers to speak out against our nation’s failings and by opposing, end them. That is the greatness of America, and it is a greatness that is belittled by ignoring it in favor of bland triumphalism.

I don’t know if this is just posturing, but whether it is or isn’t, it’s wrong:

Democrat Al Franken suffered a setback Wednesday when the state Canvassing Board unanimously turned down his campaign’s request to include rejected absentee ballots in the U.S. Senate recount, prompting a Franken attorney to threaten to go all the way to Washington if necessary to get them considered.

“Whether it is at the county level, before the Canvassing Board, before the courts or before the United States Senate, we don’t know yet. But we remain confident these votes will be counted,” said Marc Elias, the campaign’s lead recount attorney, who added that he won’t appeal the board’s decision.

Court? Fine. This was always going to end up in Minnesota’s courts, no matter who won. But the Senate? Sorry, Marc, but you’ve lost me.

The U.S. Senate does have the power to overturn the decision of the state government, and seat the “losing” candidate. But such power should be excercised only in extreme circumstances, such as obvious fraud that a state is willfully ignoring. If Norm Coleman had shown up at Ramsey County with 1500 ballots that all happened to be for him, and it was all caught on tape, and the GOP machine managed to keep it out of the courts, it would be a legitimate use of the Senate’s power to deny Coleman his seat, and seat Al Franken instead.

But that’s not what’s happening here. The process has thus far been pretty transparent; on philosophical grounds I disagree with the Canvassing Board’s decision not to look at absentee ballots, but the board’s decision was based on their not having authority to do so, which is certainly a fair reading of the law, even if it’s one I disagree with. Franken can now appeal to Minnesota’s courts and even to the Federal courts to adjudicate the matter, and that’s exactly what he should do. Indeed, had the Canvassing Board made the opposite decision, it would be entirely right for Coleman to seek redress through the courts; that’s what courts are there for.

But while courts and the Canvassing Board will have to adjudicate the rules and the ballot challenges, there’s nothing indicating that the process has been anything but absolutely and totally fair to this point. Yes, both sides are filing frivolous challenges, but that’s an artifact of the system that’s unlikely to change. But frivolous challenges will, presumably, be ignored once things get to the Canvassing Board. The challenges are being made fairly and openly, however, and the process has been transparent.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I’m backing the process here. So far, the process has functioned as it was designed to, and while I hope that when all is said and done, Al Franken wins, I hope he does so legitimately. It will do the DFL and the national Democratic Party no good to ram Franken through the Senate. It will appear to be what it is — a naked power grab, one that will do far more harm to Democrats’ ability to lead than merely having 58 senators will. I urge the Franken camp and the Majority Leader to back off — now. Let the system work. And when it’s done working, respect the outcome. Because while the system isn’t perfect, Minnesota’s is better than most. And as a Minnesotan, I’ll accept Norm Coleman winning by four of my fellow citizens’ votes long before I’ll accept Franken being seated on a 58-41 party-line vote. The former is democracy; the latter is anything but.

Ah, the Christmas Variety Special. Once a staple of the holiday season, it’s largely gone the way of the Dodo. And that’s too bad; while they’re goofy and overly-earnest, they’re also campy and hilarious. Of course, that usually goes hand-in-hand. And really, it’s hard to do them truly campy and hilarious on purpose.

Thank the Gods for Stephen Colbert, then, whose Christmas special — with an emphasis on “Christmas” — hits exactly the right notes. It has a sense of humor about itself, whether having Toby Keith singing an over-the-top-even-for-Toby-Keith song about Santa dropping nuclear bombs on non-Christians, Willie Nelson talking about the fourth wise man’s gift of pot to the baby Jesus, or Feith singing about your prayer being important to angels, and how they’ll deal with your prayer in the order it was received, the special has all the hallmarks of the worst/best holiday specials. Of course John Legend happens to also be a forest ranger who just happens to drop by Colbert’s cabin to sing about nutmeg, if you know what I’m saying. Of course John Stewart drops by to offer Colbert the opportunity to celebrate Chanukah. Of course seemingly every guest ends up under the mistletoe, with Colbert saying, “well, this is awkward.” Of course Elvis Costello ends up singing “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” in a bear suit. Why? They just do.

And the show features perhaps the best holiday song since “The Chanukah Song,” in Colbert’s “Another Christmas Song”:

That’s good stuff right there.

So thanks, Stephen, for your instant classic; I’m looking forward to seeing how you top it next year. Or perhaps we could have John Stewart instead,with his Chanukah special. Either way, congratulations: you’ve produced a Christmas special that does not suck.

Last week, hands were wrung and tsks were tsked over the potential $25 billion dollar bailout of GM, Chrysler, and Ford. Sure, directly and indirectly the U.S. auto industry employs about 4.5 million people. But the companies, we were told, might not be worth saving. They hadn’t built the green cars that Americans wouldn’t buy until suddenly gasoline got expensive. They dared to pay their employees decent salaries with good benefits — which is ridiculous; good salaries and good benefits aren’t for blue color workers! And they’d made some bad decisions, like counting on the financial system not to collapse. How could we possibly give them $25 billion dollars?

Now, don’t get me wrong; one could argue that a $25 billion bailout for the auto industry was wrong in normal times. One could argue that we don’t give billions of dollars to private entities just because they’re really big and their failure would be painful. Of course, one’s argument would pretty much be blown up by this news:

Federal regulators approved a radical plan to stabilize Citigroup in an arrangement in which the government could soak up billions of dollars in losses at the struggling bank, the government announced late Sunday night.

The complex plan calls for the government to back about $306 billion in loans and securities and directly invest about $20 billion in the company. The plan, emerging after a harrowing week in the financial markets, is the government’s third effort in three months to contain the deepening economic crisis and may set the precedent for other multibillion-dollar financial rescues.

Yes, that’s right: you and I just spent $20 billion for a stake in Citigroup, and we’re on the hook for over a quarter of a trillion dollars more. Citigroup employs 300,000 people.

Now, don’t get me wrong — the failure of Citigroup would be a very bad thing, and it may be worth the money to keep it afloat. But how can we seriously argue that Ford, GM, and Chrysler are terrible companies that need to go under while we’re shoveling a trillion dollars into the financial services sector? How can we argue $25 billion for three companies that keep at least one major metropolitan area from collapse is foolish, but $20 billion for one bank is not?

The auto industry has made plenty of stupid mistakes. So has the finance industry. But the latter has received its money, no questions asked, while the former is still being raked over the coals, and probably won’t get anything until the Democrats take power in January. Why is that? Could it be that the auto industry employs blue collar workers, while the banking industry employs Muffy and Biff’s nephew Chet, who went to all the right schools? I don’t doubt it. For all the talk of employees making $30 an hour at the Ford plant, we still haven’t heard a true accounting of the employees of the financial industry who made millions moving paper around, until it turned out the actual paper was the most valuable part of the transaction. And for all our worry about what will happen to our financial services sector, perhaps some worry about our industrial sector is in order.

If nothing else, it’s time for everyone to admit that we are not operating in a normal economy. Interest rates are essentially at zero, and the credit markets are still locked. The only source of liquidity right now is the federal government’s ability to print money. Is that a great long-term strategy? Folks, right now it’s all that’s keeping us from going into a depression. So while it’s important to get strings attached to these deals (heck, yeah, Detroit should use part of their money for greening the industry), it’s also important to get deals done. Or we can simply let the market sort it out — but that means letting it sort it out for the white collar kids who went to Harvard and Columbia as well as the blue collar kids from Flint. If we’re unwilling to let the former group fail, we shouldn’t be willing to let the latter group, either.

Poor Prof. Alexander McPherson. A professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California at Irvine, McPherson was recently denied his academic freedom.

How, you ask, did that happen? Was he told what he had to teach in the classroom? Harrangued about work he’s published? Told that his public support for John McCain was going to get him fired? No, nothing so benign. McPherson was told that he had to attend a mandatory sexual harassment seminar along with all other employees of UC Irvine.

Clearly, he is all about sticking it to the man:

Four years ago, the governor signed Assembly Bill 1825 into law, requiring all California employers with more than 50 people to provide sexual harassment training for each of their employees. The University of California raised no objection and submitted to its authority.

But I didn’t. I am a professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at UC Irvine, and I have consistently refused, on principle, to participate in the sexual harassment training that the state and my employers seem to think is so important.

Because when your employer tells you that you are required to attend a seminar as a condition of your employment, that’s completely optional, as many unemployed people can tell you.

For a while, it didn’t seem to matter much that I had refused. I (and fellow scofflaws) were periodically notified that we were not in compliance, and we were advised to get with the program like everybody else. Then the university began warning me that my supervisory responsibilities would be taken away if I did not promptly comply.

Last month, the university finally followed through, sending me a letter announcing that my laboratory and the students I oversaw were to be immediately turned over to other university officials and faculty. I continued to refuse to take sexual harassment training, and do so now.

Now, at this point, everyone who’s ever been employed by anyone is pretty much saying to themselves, “Well, duh.” I mean, all of us have been shepherded into pointless meetings on everything from ergonomics to the new 401(k) plan to why our health plan costs just jumped 43,000 percent. And when they’re mandatory, you go. You may grumble that you have better things to do; sometimes those better things are work, and sometimes it’s talking fantasy football, but whatever. You go, because the entity that’s paying you for your time has decided that for this particular hour, this is how you are going to use your time.

In this case, it’s not even McPherson’s employer saying this; it’s the people of California, through their duly elected representatives. And McPherson isn’t even part of an independent company that could argue their rights to promote harassment in the workplace are being infringed; McPherson works for the State of California. He is out of legs, arms, and any other body parts to stand on, and should probably just go to the damn seminar.

But he’s taking a bold, brave stand:

am not normally confrontational, so I sought to find a means to resolve the conflict. I proposed the following: I would take the training if the university would provide me with a brief, written statement absolving me of any suspicion, guilt or complicity regarding sexual harassment. I wanted any possible stigma removed. “Fulfilling this requirement,” said the statement I asked them to approve, “in no way implies, suggests or indicates that the university currently has any reason to believe that Professor McPherson has ever sexually harassed any student or any person under his supervision during his 30-year career with the University of California.”

The university, however, declined to provide me with any such statement, which poses the question: Why not? It is a completely innocuous, unobjectionable statement that they should have been willing to write for any faculty member whose record is as free of stain as is my own. The immediate reply of the administration was that if I didn’t comply with the law, I would be placed on unpaid leave.

Well, yeah. If my boss asks me to come to a meeting, and I tell her that I will, but only if she signs a statement saying the company does not know anything about me stealing a gross of paper clips, my guess is that not only won’t she sign, but she’ll ask me why it’s so important that I sign — and begin auditing the supply cabinet.

I’m not saying that McPherson has in fact been harassing students. But it is weird how he wants administrative cover about it, especially since he hasn’t been brought into this seminar because he’s harassing students. Indeed, he’s in the same basic seminar that every single middle-sized and bigger employer in California is running. It doesn’t get any less selective than that.

So why is it he’s so concerned that he’s somehow been singled out? And why is he so afraid to go?

So why am I am being so inflexible on this issue? Why not simply take the training and be done with it?

Yeah, that’s what I asked.

There are several reasons.

First of all, I believe the training is a disgraceful sham. As far as I can tell from my colleagues, it is worthless, a childish piece of theater, an insult to anyone with a respectable IQ, primarily designed to relieve the university of liability in the case of lawsuits. I have not been shown any evidence that this training will discourage a harasser or aid in alerting the faculty to the presence of harassment.

And he should know, because…er, he just knows it won’t be helpful. Especially since he hasn’t been through the training, and knows nothing about it. And he’s going to stand firm on this by demanding that his employer defy the law of his state, because he doesn’t like it.

Guess what, binky? There are all sorts of laws of questionable value out there, from the laws criminalizing marijuana to the recently passed repeal of basic human rights for gay and lesbian couples. If you don’t like them, though, you work to change the law. You can disobey the law too — but you can’t be surprised when it turns out that the punishments the law spelled out are applied to you.

What’s more, the state, acting through the university, is trying to coerce and bully me into doing something I find repugnant and offensive. I find it offensive not only because of the insinuations it carries and the potential stigma it implies, but also because I am being required to do it for political reasons. The fact is that there is a vocal political/cultural interest group promoting this silliness as part of a politically correct agenda that I don’t particularly agree with.

Shorter Alexander McPherson: the world was better when you could tell a freshman that her tits looked nice, and that she could guarantee herself an A if she’d just do one little thing for him.

I’m sorry, Professor, if that seems like I’m stigmatizing you. But you’re the one who’s so afraid of being told what normal adults should know — that demeaning and disrespecting people because of their gender is wrong — that you won’t even be in the same room as someone saying so. The “politically correct” argument against sexual harassment is simply that sexual harassment is wrong. If you disagree with that message, the implication is obvious. At the very least, you don’t see anything wrong with sexual harassment.

The imposition of training that has a political cast violates my academic freedom and my rights as a tenured professor. The university has already nullified my right to supervise my laboratory and the students I teach. It has threatened my livelihood and, ultimately, my position at the university. This for failing to submit to mock training in sexual harassment, a requirement that was never a condition of my employment at the University of California 30 years ago, nor when I came to UCI 11 years ago.

And therefore, nothing can ever change.

Look, Professor, things have changed a lot in 30 years. In 1978, it was still considered perfectly appropriate for the boys’ club to leer at women in the workplace. And some of the men who came of age at that time — i.e., you — never grew up past that point.

That’s why we have seminars like this — to let you know that 2008 is not 1978, and these things aren’t okay. Are sexual harassment seminars perfect? Of course not. But they’re taking a strong stand that says women in the workplace — and in your case, the workplace is also a school — deserve equal respect and dignity, that they should not be treated worse because of their gender.

So what’s wrong with that? Even if you think the seminar’s hokey at times, why don’t you agree with its basic premise — that women are equal?

The question contains the answer, of course.

Interestingly, I have received many letters of encouragement — about 25% of them from women. The comments have been rich with words like “demeaning,” “oppressive,” “politically driven” and “indoctrination.” Other phrases included “unctuous twaddle” and “sanctimonious half-wits.”

I’m not surprised that some women are praising this — like Dr. Helen, who naturally loves this column, there are always some who are willing to throw others under the bus to be the “good kind of girl.”

But I’m sorry, I’ve been through sexual harassment seminars. And while they were at time eye-rollingly earnest, I’ve never seen them as demeaning. I don’t harass women, though — and frankly, view it as important that I not do so inadvertently. I view that as important because I know too many of my fellow men have harassed women in the workplace for decades before I got there, and that only by my being willing to work to undo their sins can men like me help to level the playing field.

McPherson closes with a line that shows that for all his education, he has no clue what he’s talking about:

Sexual harassment is a politically charged issue. The people of California have granted no authority to the state to impose narrow political and cultural opinions on individual citizens.

Except they have; you even cited the exact bill, Assembly Bill 1825, which was passed by the duly elected representatives of the citizens of  the state, and signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The people of California have given that authority to the state, and said that they do in fact want the state to be tolerant of women’s rights in the workplace. Perhaps that will change some day; given that California, as we all know, has a pretty viable initiative and referendum system, McPherson could be working to get this bill’s repeal on the ballot.

But of course, such an attempt would fail, because we don’t think that women are second-class citizens, at least not so much as we once did. And while there are far too many holdovers, most of us don’t see much wrong with asking people to learn to work with others in a respectful manner. There’s a word for people who do: sexists. Which is exactly what McPherson is. And exactly why it’s good for the students at UC Irvine that he’s losing his supervisory position over this. Because I wouldn’t want my daughter working with a sexist professor. Indeed, I don’t want anyone’s daughter — or anyone’s son — working with him. Any man who would put hatred of women at such a great level of import is a person all of us are better off ignoring.

(Scott, Jill, and Megan have more.)

 

According to the New York Times, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., is going to be Barack Obama’s Secretary of State:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has decided to give up her Senate seat and accept the position of secretary of state, making her the public face around the world for the administration of the man who beat her for the Democratic presidential nomination, two confidants said Friday.

The apparent accord between perhaps the two leading figures in the Democratic Party climaxed a week-long drama that riveted the nation’s capital.

Mrs. Clinton came to her decision after additional discussion with President-elect Barack Obama about the nature of her role and his plans for foreign policy, said one of the confidants, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the situation.

Mr. Obama’s office told reporters on Thursday that the nomination is “on track” but this is the first word from the Clinton camp that she has decided.

“She’s ready,” the confidant said, adding that Mrs. Clinton was reassured after talking again with Mr. Obama because their first meeting in Chicago last week “was so general.” The purpose of the follow-up talk, he noted, was not to extract particular concessions but “just getting comfortable” with the idea of working together.

A second Clinton associate confirmed that her camp believes they have a done deal. Senior Obama advisers said Friday morning that the offer had not been formally accepted and no announcement would be made until after Thanksgiving. But they said they were convinced that the nascent alliance was ready to be sealed.

As I said before, I think Clinton’s a savvy pick by Obama; Clinton is certainly qualified for the job, and would be perhaps the highest-profile appointment to the position since Woodrow Wilson tapped William Jennings Bryan for the job.

The potential for “drama” has been far overplayed by the media, which desires nothing more than a return to the good ol’ days of the 1990s, when they could have fun attacking the Clintons and pretending that there were no actual issues worth worrying about. Clinton is a smart politician, and she knows that the quickest way out of the Obama administration is to start freelancing. Will Clinton challenge Obama when it comes to foreign policy? I certainly hope so. Obama needs to get differing perspectives from his foreign policy team. Joe Biden will have one position, Hillary Clinton another, and Gen. Jim Jones (ret.), who’s expected to become Obama’s National Security Advisor, will stake out still a different position. Good! We got in trouble over the past eight years because we had a president who surrounded himself with sycophants and yes-women who enabled a disastrous and dangerous war. The one obstacle to it left after the end of Bush’s first term.

Having a group of heterogeneous advisors is good for the country. And kudos to Obama for realizing that. I feel quite positive about the direction our country will be heading, precisely because Obama does not appear to be so insecure as to need people to support his ego.