Atomic Nerds

Yesterday was normal derby practice. But Wait! There’s a boot camp this weekend. So today was bonus work. Have I mentioned I never had wheels on my feet for anything more than 15 minutes before in my life until I started skating in like June? Today was supposed to be boot camp runner running a light evaluation.

Which turned out to mean an hour or so at Stingray’s Sprint Speed and lots of getting up from fall work, followed by a sucker punch as a wheel check sent me flying to land straight on my solar plexus.

And she really really wants the refs at tomorrow’s 9 am (which I didn’t know they *had* a nine in the morning on Saturdays) to 2 pm training fest. Because it’s good to have big guys in the mix for hitting drills and blocking drills for… uh… reasons.

Look, I know I’m pretty low on the totem pole for skating skills, but when the lion is waving to everybody else “Hey! That zeeb is the slow weak one! Let’s fuck it up!” I’m not entirely on board with the plan.

Please donate generously to the Prostate Cancer Foundation in my memory.

Honestly I’m kinda surprised this one took this long to crop up. From commenter George:

What’s the going rate for the Humungous picture from Blogarado 2?

I have to admit I’m a bit conflicted. As this was done for a private gathering of trusted friends, I’ve a strong impulse to keep the scope of exposure limited to that group. On the other hand, I genuinely believe in what we’re working towards with this fundraiser, and if people are crazy enough to want to see me in a banana hammock that showing my ass will help raise some awareness and funds for the Prostate Cancer Foundation, I’m fairly torn. If nothing else, the notion of that getup being used for good feels kind of like saving a drowning child with an inflatable sex toy. Sure, the kid is better off, but… um…. well maybe if it wasn’t so slippery and she’d been able to get a grip on it sooner…

Yeah.

So here’s the deal. Lord Humungus is on the table, but it’s going to be pretty steep. Additionally, this isn’t going to be a “Hit X and THE WHOLE WORLD SHALL JUST WALK AWAY” kind of set up. Forward a copy of your receipt for $75 or more to nerdsatomic at gmail dot com, and I will send you a tasteless selection of Lord Humungus photographs from Blogorado. For donations of $100 or more, I will additionally include video demonstrating that it is very difficult to aim a large .44 magnum with one hand with a colander bungee-corded to your face. I’d request that if anybody is crazy enough to pony up at these levels, to please not spread them hither and yon (besides, that kills the incentive for anyone else to donate at these “you’re kidding me” levels), but obviously that’s not something I’ll have control of. Basically if you’re philanthropic enough to kick in that kind of scratch, I think “don’t be a dick” is one that’d be pretty easy.

So. Any takers?

Manipulator of muscles ChristinaLMT has jumped first on the request bandwagon.

How about a pic of you in a kilt with TANK THE ADORABLE? And you have to SMILE in the picture.

And putting her money where her mouth is up front already kicked in a nice pile of cabbage. Hmm, let’s see. A generous donation for something I was already planning on running? I think we can make this one happen for what’s already on the table.

Not to worry, Ms. LMT will be getting the un-altered version privately. Thank you for the contribution, Christina.

Now as for the rest of you, I like what I’m seeing. We’ve gone from just $25 on Monday to within spitting distance of 50% of the goal. Thank you all, now let’s keep it up. You can use this link to donate to the Prostate Cancer Foundation. And I’m still taking requests. There’s not a lot off the table here either, so use your imaginations.

Don’t worry, we’re not transitioning into upkilt.com or anything. No, I just wanted to point a few things out.

1. My portable magic elf box has a sound file of LabRat in one of the later Vicious Circle recordings proclaiming “Oh for fuck’s sake” which plays whenever it receives an email. This is because…

2. I hate getting email.

3. The Prostate Cancer Foundation helpfully sends me an email any time someone makes a donation, even just a onefive dollar donation. (Corrected Via Perl’s…uh…thoughtful experiment. )

So if I ever wrote something that pissed you right off, here’s your chance to annoy me right back.

Cave Stingray here with Kilted to Kick Cancer. Greg and I have been crunching some numbers here, and so far we’ve had a grand total of- what’s the, ah, actual number Greg? Uh-huh? Got it. One donation. One person hates prostate cancer out of the lot of you.

Ok, leaving Cave Johnson mode, this ain’t gonna cut it. If I aim to raise $500 for the Prostate Cancer Foundation (that right there is the link you can donate at) we’re gonna have to step things up a little. Now I know sitemeter wildly under-reports visits, but according to it, somewhere between 449 and 499 of you per day aren’t donating. According to the handy actual bandwidth logs the new digs provide, y’all in the last week have seen five gigs worth of text data flow out from this little corner of the web, and we’re only up to twenty five bucks.

So I’m going to shamelessly steal from Ambo Driver hisself. What’s it gonna take to open up those wallets, folks? You name the picture, post, inane stunt, then we talk turkey, y’all drum up some cash, and I make it happen. We’re working for charity here, so I want to put up some means-something numbers on this, but I am perfectly willing to whore myself out to do it.

Hell, you folks know what I’ll do if I think it’s a good cause. Remember, I don’t see a cent of your tax deductable donation, it goes straight to the research organization. You can donate here. Now post some ideas in comments and let’s put on our cancer kickin’ kilts and kick some cancer!

Alternate title, which was just too long: “You know when people ask anti-rape protestors who’s actually in favor of rape? Well…”

So, there was a thing that went down while we were dark, that I wanted to write about at the time but was Overtaken By Events.

The Catholic Register decided to do an interview with Friar Benedict Groeschel, in which the subject of sexual abuse of children came up, and on which he had interesting opinions. Those opinions were so interesting the Register has since taken down the interview and replaced with a bunch of apologies. Given that, I can only quote from other responses to the original. I’m pretty bummed about that, because I wanted to analyze the original more thoroughly; everyone has quoted the same few lines, but really the whole thing was incredibly problematic. Oh well. Anyway, here’s the lengthiest quote I could get, from Sullivan’s response:

People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath. But that’s not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer … It’s not so hard to see — a kid looking for a father and didn’t have his own — and they won’t be planning to get into heavy-duty sex, but almost romantic, embracing, kissing, perhaps sleeping but not having intercourse or anything like that.

It’s an understandable thing … there are the relatively rare cases where a priest is involved in a homosexual way with a minor. I think the statistic I read recently in a secular psychology review was about 2%. Would that be true of other clergy? Would it be true of doctors, lawyers, coaches?

Here’s this poor guy — [Penn State football coach Jerry] Sandusky — it went on for years. Interesting: Why didn’t anyone say anything? Apparently, a number of kids knew about it and didn’t break the ice. Well, you know, until recent years, people did not register in their minds that it was a crime. It was a moral failure, scandalous; but they didn’t think of it in terms of legal things.

That’s right, y’all. Considering the case of Jerry Sandusky, his primary sympathy seems to be for Sandusky. You remember him, he’s the dude who was anally raping ten year old boys. Poor dude!

Now, the thing that everyone has focused primarily on is the most obvious thing, the thing the Catholic Register apologized for and Groeschel apologized for and the people defending him (yes, he has defenders, and I’ll get to them specifically in a bit here), is for blaming the victims for causing their own rape by “seducing” their attacker. Which, yes, that’s incredibly fucking awful, it should not be necessary to spell out that even if a kid actually threw themselves at you screaming “HAVE SEX WITH ME”*, it’s still the adult’s absolute moral responsibility to refuse. In no small part because inappropriate sexual behavior in children is almost always a huge red flag for past or ongoing sexual abuse; taking this hypothetical child up on it is volunteering to be their next abuser rather than helping them, which, y’know, clergy are theoretically all about. There’s no grey, there’s no “legitimate”, there’s no modifier: having sex with someone unable to truly consent, like a minor under your authority, is just-plain-rape. (Just because I KNOW I’m gonna get someone in comments going on about sexy teenagers and varying ages of consent, Ozy points out in her own article that the average ages of the molestation victims in the Catholic sexual abuse scandal being 11-14, with the youngest being three- not 14-18.)

The thing that really catches my eye about Groeschel’s original statements is how much reduction of responsibility he consistently applies to the rapists. First it’s, “I bet those kids are seducing those poor priests, who are maybe having nervous breakdowns.” (I know psychological stress makes ME much more likely to accept sexual offers from prepubescents.) Then we get weird “things get romantic, but not planning on heavy-duty.” (Thanks, that’s not screamingly inappropriate at all to compare a mentor-mentee relationship to a teenie romance, I feel better now.) Then it’s, “the clergy aren’t so bad, I bet other professions are doing it too!”. (Just the sort of logic you like to see in someone in the business of ultimate moral authority, that.) Then the highly creepy Penn State bit where apparently it was all on the kids to report that poor Jerry was having problems. (Why didn’t anyone say anything? Maybe because of an institutional culture with more sympathy and support for the rapist than their victims. Would you know anything about that, Friar?) Then as the cherry on top, apparently it’s kind of outrageous and extreme that this is an actual CRIME and not just an unfortunate “moral failing”. Man, cheating on your wife is legally okay, but fucking kids isn’t, what a restrictive world we live in today.

Another theme that leaps out is the idea, which is very much echoed in both the Catholic Register and Friars of Renewal apologies and the huffy defensed linked above, is the idea that in order for it to be justifiable to condemn someone for their actions, they had to set out and plan to do something awful and really meant to be awful. Sandusky probably didn’t get up in the morning and go “Nyaharhar, I’m gonna scar me some boys for life today”, so that makes his doing it more okay and more understandable. A priest might not have set out to rape that three year old in their fetching little pair of PullUps, so throwing him in jail over it is just kind of harsh. Friar Groeschel is old and starting to get a bit dotty and has been acting not himself, so he said a bunch of stuff excusing rapists and blaming child rape victims, he probably didn’t really mean to do that.

To put it bluntly: Who fucking cares and why do you think this is relevant to the morality of their action? If you do something awful, it was an awful thing and your moral responsibility for it doesn’t diminish a whit if you didn’t set out to specifically be awful that day. It’s awfulness rests on the scope of its awful effects, not the mindset of the person committing those actions. This also applies to all the “BUT HE’S A GOOD MAN SEE HERE HE’S DONE ALL THOSE GOOD THINGS”. Which, no. If you are a good person and you do something monstrous, there’s no balance scale there, you cease to be a good person and your good deeds have no bearing on the monstrousness of your actions and the monstrosity of you they reflect. If you want to not be a monster you have to stop doing monstrous things and then work your ass off to atone for the effects, not produce your good deeds chitty. Even then sometimes there’s no going back; I’m pretty sure no amount of Salvation Army time served could have made Hitler not-a-monster.

I have to quote the Catholic League defense, it’s a doozy:

In a recent interview, he hypothesized how a young person (14, 16 or 18, as he put it) could conceivably take advantage of a priest who was having a nervous breakdown. He also referred to Jerry Sandusky, the disgraced Penn State football coach, as “this poor guy.” For these remarks, and related comments, he is now being labeled as a defender of child abuse.

The accusation is scurrilous. In the same interview, Groeschel emphatically said that priests who are sexual abusers “have to leave.” His reference to Sandusky was exactly the way a priest-psychologist might be expected to speak: “poor guy” conveys sympathy for his maladies—it is not a defense of his behavior! Indeed, Groeschel asked, “Why didn’t anyone say anything?”

YOU GUYS THEY WERE HYPOTHETICAL CHILDREN WHAT ARE YOU GETTING WORKED UP ABOUT. >:( (The children who were actually sexually abused in the actual Catholic child sex abuse scandal were very damn much not hypothetical.) Also he TOTALLY SAID abusers who were actively abusing “had to leave”, how can you say he’s defending child abuse?! Plus he of course has sympathy for the rapist! Those victims should have totally reported him so he could get help!

Actually, his position on molesting priests beyond this interview where apparently age and injury turned him into a completely different person who suddenly has no idea that rape is all that bad isn’t impossible to determine, because during the time the abuse that turned into such a scandal was happening he was part of the heirarchy that handled misbehaving priests, so he has actions, not just words, on his record. Actions like using his position as a psychologist to help put molesting priests back into a position to abuse. So maybe his stance isn’t so difficult to puzzle out from just “one little interview”. (Actually, searching Groeschel’s name on Bishop Accountability for more than just that article is quite informative**.)

The fact that the person who interviewed Groeschel, and the editorial staff of the Catholic Register, couldn’t figure out there was anything wrong with what he was saying also speaks, in letters that are ten feet high and flashing red, to an institutional culture that perpetuated and is still perpetuating a climate that excuses and protects predators. This is why the abuse scandal seems neverending: because, on an institutional level, they still believe that rape of those under their care and authority isn’t such a big deal and should really be a rather private affair between the rapist, the victim, and maybe the rapist’s therapist.

*File under “hell of a lot less likely than the adult interpreting affection or even just their own attraction as seduction”.

**Here’s a particularly telling one when it comes to his attitude toward the victims.

Now that the server drama is sorted out, it’s time to turn to more serious matters. And for once I do mean serious instead of my usual sarcasm such as describing my job as serious. This is serious as in cancer.

Every October finds the U.S. awash in pink ribbons as the Komen foundation fights against breast cancer. This is a good thing. Unfortunately, other cancers do not have attractive boobies to help draw attention. Let’s face it, it’s hard to do anything but snicker when presented with a pair of nuts, or the south end of the food chute, but testicular and prostate cancers kill more men per year than breast cancer kills women, but receive only a fraction of the research funding.

So, with the help of Ambulance Driver extraordinaire Kelly Grayson, it is once again as the post title says, time to get kilted to kick cancer. Throughout September, I will be wearing a kilt at every opportunity to use the frightening power of my pale computer-dork legs to encourage people to donate to the Prostate Cancer Foundation such that medical research can procure a bigger stick with which to hit this problem.

“Oh, sure. Butt cancer. Yeah yeah, I’ll put that on the to-do list along with flossing,” you may say. Think again. One in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. If you’re male, that means that out of you, your dad, your wife’s dad, your brother, your son, and your buddy, one of those six people will have to endure radiation, or other treatments that amount to killing you very carefully and stopping at just the right time, or a full removal of the prostate, or die. Nearly 34,000 men across the country will in fact die from this in 2012.

For full disclosure, if you didn’t already wander over and check Kelly’s site, there is a contest on this to see who can fundraise the most, and while I would love a crack at those prize packages, that’s not my goal. Most readers here read a handful of other bloggers who are also involved, so as long as you donate somewhere I’m happy. Last year we as a group raised about 12,000 in 3-ish weeks. This year with a full month (minus a handful for me because our hosting was a — [rant redacted]) the goal is $50,000, or roughly 20 cents per prostate cancer diagnosis for the year. All contributions go directly to the charities; the only benefit I get out of this is the improvements in treatment and diagnosis your donation will help bring about. My personal goal for the year is to raise $500, but you all know how I love overkill.

Men, if you’re over 40, hie thee to a doctor and get yourself checked. Ladies, if your man is over 40, berate him about the head or head analog until he does. And all of you, please donate generously at this link.

It’s September, and it’s on.

I would have learned it four days ago, but I was busy this weekend, and I like my internet kerfuffles a few days stale, like the bread you make puddings and strata out of. Either way, the source of my education was a CNN column by someone named Joe Peacock on the imminent cultural threat of attractive women in Joe Peacock’s domain who might not be as into stuff as Joe Peacock is, as well as the commentary stemming from the predictably extensive reaction. Most of what I learned is from the original Peacock piece, though I got additional education from various comments.

- Actually being paid for sex, being paid for being sexually attractive in connection with a product, and getting attention for being attractive are all pretty much the same thing: whoring.

- Men automatically ranking women on a numbered scale of attractiveness is just a normal regular thing because of caveman biology, but attractive women only paying sexual attention to men they themselves find attractive is damn near a hate crime.

- Apparently Olivia Munn existing and having a career is such a terrible thing that people on the internet will actually use “because Olivia Munn” as some sort of commonly recognized shorthand for the tragedy that is whores (see first point) in geekdom.

- A woman getting more attention than her attractiveness number objectively warrants is terrible.

- Women will spend up to thousands of dollars and up to hundreds of hours of work, with up to a whole year in advance commitment, planning, and preparation, for the primary purpose of going to major cons to be attractive at people they have no intention of paying sexual attention to. This is self-evidently the height of pleasurable activity.

- Being only sort of into something and interacting socially with people who are more into it than you is a horrific trick you’re playing on them. I’m glad I learned this before I interacted socially with any more shooters, punks, or science fiction fans; think of the damage prevented.

- Geeky men are never attractive. Sexual interest in them by women is always a feigned ploy to gain pure ego gratification.

- Your attractiveness and interests are fixed traits determined in junior high school. Any attempt to venture beyond these boundaries in adulthood are a loathsome act of treason and manipulation.

- Geek culture is defined by alienation and outsiderhood, which is why CNN considers it culturally relevant enough to have a dedicated column about.

- People deliberately and with malice aforethought seeking to sell things to geeks for money are evil, particularly in a universe in which Hollywood spends squidillions of dollars on making giant, lovingly constructed comic book movie franchises. People who attempt to use sex to sell things to people who habitually rank strange women on numerical scales are particularly evil, akin to feeding Superman a dish of Kryptonite stew.

- Having attractive female friends is the new having gay friends, which was the new having black friends.

- It’s okay to be a female geek, with no necessity to pass litmus tests not to be considered a whore, if you are ugly. (This is not as comforting as it sounds like it must be.)

- Feeling alienated and picked on for your intense pop culture issues as a child was an awful experience, which is why having any of those interests achieve mainstream cultural popularity is the most traumatic thing that could happen to you now. (Things that were never popular in mainstream culture, apparently: Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek, video games, Lord of the Rings, cartoons.)

- It is possible to be aware of Fat, Ugly, or Slutty and to complain about women who go around being attractive at men and getting attention from them they don’t really deserve with no hint of felt cognitive dissonance.

- Also, if you’re a girl, and you play video games, and you aren’t ugly, and you get sexual attention from geeky men out of proportion to how you stack up against really hot girls, you should expect to get misogynistic threats and insults for doing so. Because you’re pretty much just as bad.

- Not being sexually interested in someone who shares interests you have at least lightly, yet resents you virulently for attracting them, is probably about finding those interests gross if indulged in any less moderation.

I’d go fret over the exact messages my t-shirts send and angst about my number and whether I really deserved any of the thousands of social interactions I’ve had with people who shared interests I had passionately or moderately or barely, but I’ve decided my answer to the quandaries raised is “holy shit I’m not in junior high anymore, and I don’t have to care.”

So I’ve so far managed to avoid ever commenting on anything related to Elevatorgate, which blew way the hell up on a lot of blogs I sometimes read and sometimes lurk in comments at, but nowhere all that close to home, and blew up in ways that were really ridiculously huge, and seems to get real stupid real fast everywhere it’s discussed. Including at Popehat, where I regarded the initial post as too reasonable to have issue with and therefore exploded in the comments.

So I recognize I’m basically failing as a pattern-recognizing organism in remarking on anything at all related, but apparently one repeated trend in discussions (other than the mass insanity) bothers me enough to do the internet equivalent of going in the bathroom, turning off the lights, and saying “Candyman” five times.

That trend is this: someone brings up Schrodinger’s Rapist, some people get REALLY REALLY OFFENDED by Schrodinger’s rapist, and things immediately devolve into a flamefit back and forth between “THIS IS NAKED BIGOTRY AGAINST MEN” vs “STOP BEING ENTITLED PIGS”.

The thing is, the basic premise of Schrodinger’s Rapist is true. Every woman I know has the idea of assault in general and sexual assault in particular ingrained in some way into the fabric of her life and routines in little rules like the blogger describes. Don’t go walking alone/without dogs at night, always make a first date/meeting somewhere public, always make sure someone knows where you’ve gone if going out with a new guy, etc. etc. Everyone follows rules basically like them; lock your doors, fasten your seatbelt, the friendly Nigerian who sent you an e-mail about the great financial opportunity probably isn’t telling the truth. The post itself goes pretty far in hammering down “BECAUSE A STRANGE MAN MIGHT BE A SEXUAL PREDATOR”, which is in fact the reason for the little rules, but most women that aren’t recovering from having been actually assaulted and possibly having PTSD aren’t explicitly thinking like that anymore than someone who gets into their car and buckles their seatbelt is thinking about all the maniacs on the road and how they might kill him. (Or, for this audience, any more than someone who showers, shaves, dresses, and puts on their carry pistol is thinking about how he or she might have to shoot someone in the grocery store.)

What it’s actually more like is that the question “If (unknown guy interacting with) asks for sex/proposes step toward sex, and I say no, what happens” is always somewhere in there, buried many layers down or closer to the surface depending on the interaction. 99% of the time this is a nonissue because strange men aren’t interacting or aren’t interacting in a remotely sexual manner or the answer is “I say no and then nothing remarkable even could happen unless he’s a raving psychopath, and I don’t see any drool and bloodstains on his shirt”. Raving psychopaths aren’t really what women are concerned about, since they are very rare; the guy they are actually concerned about is the one that just can’t seem to hear the word “no” without assuming it’s either only tangentially relevant or a negotiable point that he just needs a harder sell to answer.

In an elevator, the answer to “what happens if” isn’t a given anymore, and late at night/early in the morning when not many people are around, and the guy being maybe drunk, raises the alert level more. That’s why it’s “creepy”- as in creates a sense of potential threat- in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with how good-looking a guy is or how awkward he is. (Awkward guys with bad social skills are perfectly capable of ignoring “no”, and so are good-looking guys.) Not every or perhaps even most women would experience actual fear, but “this is a bad situation I would like to leave as soon as possible”- yeah, sure. Or even just “offputting”. Which is probably not the goal of anyone hitting on a woman unless he’s doing it to mess with her* instead of actually date/sleep with her consensually.

“Don’t hit on women in elevators late at night, it’s kinda creepy” isn’t akin to “don’t hit on women ever”, or “don’t be male in case someone finds that threatening”, it’s more akin to “don’t stand inside strangers’ personal space”, “don’t approach a stranger on the street with three of your friends when he’s alone and ask for the time”, “while they’re otherwise alone in a dark parking garage is a bad time to approach a stranger for any reason”. Basic courtesies for interacting with strangers comfortably most of us don’t need to be told about because they’re on everyone’s radar.

*Yes, some men do this. It’s another context that most guys don’t really think of because it’s not a thing that happens to them nor a thing that would ever occur to them to do.

So it seems recently a Michigan representative got thrown off the floor for using language too salty for the sensibilities of the House.

The offending word was “vagina”. No, seriously. The one that gets, like, a couple of titters when it’s used in health class in front of schoolchildren. The actual anatomical term for that part of a woman’s reproductive anatomy that is surrounded by the vulva and terminates at the cervix, through which penises and semen enter and babies exit some time later. This is not a slangy nickname, let alone an offensive slangy nickname like “cunt” or “gash”, it’s the actual proper term for the body part.

The context for this entire episode was a speech given by Rep. Lisa Brown in opposition to a proposed bill that would, among other things, ban all abortions after 20 weeks. In the course of a longer speech pointing out among other things that anyone who would institute a flat ban on abortions after 20 weeks has not really thought through some of the medical realities of pregnancy, she concluded:

And finally, Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means ‘no.’

OK. Unquestionably a barb, a goad if you will, perhaps even an insult that might not have been appropriate*, but politics isn’t a tea ceremony. There are rough edges and thrown elbows and in days of yore the occasional savage beatdown. The roughness and occasional crudeness of politics was in fact advanced in days gone by as an argument for why women shouldn’t be allowed to participate, and not in the sense that they were going to frighten the men.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating and she was just thrown off for some sort of “no directly insulting the Speaker, also shut up my god you’re annoying” reason, here is a quote from one of the other representatives:

“‘What she said was offensive,” said Rep. Mike Callton, R-Nashville. ‘It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.’

I see.

A glance at his campaign biography indicates that Mike Callton is married, to a woman, and has children, which means that unless a paternity test is failed somewhere down the road that Mike Callton must have interacted with a vagina at some point after his birth, in front of a woman no less. (This also brings to mind the horrifying question of what Mike thinks an appropriate term for the place he must have put his penis at least once is. My imagination is unhelpfully volunteering “vajajay.”)

His Wikipedia page reveals the rather more mind-bending factoid that Mike Callton has a biology degree, which I have difficulty imagining he obtained without ever learning what the proper anatomical term for the bit of a mammal that leads up to the uterus and opens to the world is.

There is, of course, always the depressing option that he thinks vaginas are inherently dirty things that must never be mentioned even in front of people who have to endure the burden of owning one, of course.

Either way, I feel fairly certain that if he, or any other member of the House, is unable to hear the word “vagina” or contemplate its existence without a fainting couch, they sure as fuck should not be allowed to write legislation affecting them.

*It wins over exactly no opponents but the stripe of pro-lifer who appears to be under the impression that women carry babies around in little suitcases under their dresses and not inside their bodies, which can get pretty full-contact gruesome even when nothing is technically all that wrong and the baby is fine, let alone when it is and it’s not, is pretty irritating.

ETA: Actually, two female representatives were barred from the floor, one of which wasn’t told why. Both women were trying to introduce an amendment to the legislation expanding the proposed new regulations on abortion to vasectomy. If trying to make a point through bill edits and amendments is somehow considered unnecessary roughness in legislature, it must be a very, very new development.