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#WeJustNeedToPee

Gov. Mike Pence weasels

Bart Hester weasels

Glenn Beck worries that gay people will put Christians in concentration camps

First the cake, then the forced bestiality

Amazing

NRA host claims victims, not perpetrators, bear the responsibility to stop rape

Gavin McInnes

Andrea Tantaros says something gross

Blaming crime against pregnant women on abortion

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Lynn Paltrow will be one to explain the Purvi Patel case in Indiana. Indiana is also the focus of a backlash against conservatives oppressing in the guise of “religious freedom,” and conservative rhetoric on rape is getting uglier.

Transgender activist Michael Hughes is doing a selfie project, under the hashtag #WeJustNeedToPee, where he photographs himself in women’s rooms, something he would be forced to do if a bill that would require people to use bathrooms corresponding with their birth gender assignment was to pass into law. In the photos, he stands with women in the bathroom, showing how absurd it is to think this is the correct bathroom for him, a hefty and bearded dude. He explained his process on MSNBC.

• Hughes *

The fact that he has to go to such lengths to make his presences in the women’s room safe shows, I think, what trans folks are up against and why these bills are so dangerous.

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Most people like saying “I told you so,” but these days, I positively hate it. I’ve long said that if Hobby Lobby was successful in their bid to use “religious freedom” as a cover story to deny their employees contraception coverage, then it was just going to be game on for the religious right. And I’ve been proven right by the situation in Indiana, where Gov. Mike Pence signed a law that, no matter how much he denies it, was clearly intended to give business owners broad rights to discriminate against gay people. That’s the bad news. The good news is, as I’m sure listeners are aware, the reaction has been swift and widespread, with celebrities and other politicians calling for boycotts of the state and politicians weaseling around trying to defend this law and making themselves look like complete asses doing it. Here are a couple of my favorites.

Mike Pence himself:

• gay 1 *

This goes on for roughly forever, with George Stephanopoulos begging Pence to give him a straight yes or no answer and Pence refusing and trying to recite talking points to dodge the issue. And here’s this weasel, state Sen. Bart Hester (R-AR), trying to avoid admitting anything regarding a similar Arkansas bill to ABC’s Jake Tapper.

• gay 2 *

And so one and so forth. It’s Schrodinger’s discrimination: They claim the law simultaneously does and does not allow someone to deny service based on sexual orientation. Obviously, no one is fooled by this two-step, least of all the conservative base. On the contrary, in conservative media the message is loud and clear: Unless they get a legal right to cite “religion” as the excuse in order to discriminate against people, then the end of the world is near. Glenn Beck went off on how either you allow people to refuse to let gay people sit at their lunch counter, or you might as well put them in concentration camps.

• gay 3 *

It is worth pointing out that this law he’s defending, much like the Jim Crow laws against black people that it is modeled upon, is actually about promoting segregation. The point is to allow people to say “we don’t serve your kind around here.” Despite all his let’s-all-hug-it-out rhetoric, he is actually promoting straight up segregation and defending the rights of bigots to treat gay people in this hateful, othering way he claims to oppose. In addition, as is usual with conservatives making Nazi analogies, they have it completely backwards. Nazis weren’t a bunch of gay people putting conservative Christians in camps. On the contrary, the Nazis put gay people in the camps. This is hardly unknown or obscure information.

Pat Robertson’s reaction was even more hysterical.

• gay 4 *

That he equates oral sex with bestiality tells you all you need to know about where he’s coming from. I barely feel I need to refute this, but let’s have at it: He’s projecting. The reality is it’s the Christian right that is trying to force you to conform to their sexual mores, ones that are so strict that even they don’t follow them. For years, they tried to force gay people to either be straight or give up on sex entirely through government force. The bans against sodomy were overturned a mere 12 years ago and it looks like the Supreme Court is about to overturn bans on gay marriage. So now they’re shifting tactics, looking to private business. I don’t know how successful the tactic will be, but the clear intent is to make it so miserable to be gay because people keep refusing your business that you leave the community. As more gay people relocate to rural and suburban areas, this could be a real problem and it is about more than simply getting another florist for your wedding.

But Robertson sounds calm next to Matthew Hagee, who whipped out the end-of-the-human-race card.

• gay 5 *

That’s right. If gay marriage is legalized, no one will ever be allowed to have heterosexual intercourse again. That is by far the most logical thing I’ve ever heard in my life. In all seriousness, I often think the primary reason gay rights have advanced as quickly as they have in recent years is the opposition is simply incapable of coming up with an argument that isn’t just hilariously bad. They all sound like people who have never left the house and learned everything they know about human interaction from 50s-era picture books. But mommy, how could you get a baby in your tummy without being married? It’s a mystery, it surely is.

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Interview

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As the debate over campus rape rages on, I’ve noticed that conservatives seem to be getting a little bolder and more mean-spirited towards rape victims. Rape has always been an odd issue to discuss publicly, because the conservative opponents of anti-rape activism are never going to come out and say they are pro-rape. There’s always a lot of face-pulling over how they agree that rape is a very serious crime. But, of course, once the formalities are over, their purpose is in arguing against treating it as a serious crime, by trying to define many rapes as not-rapes, blaming the victims and treating them like they’re hysterical, trying to turn the debate into a discussion about their own hobby horse, which is their opposition to women’s sexual freedom, or treating accused rapists like they’re the real victims here. That’s always been the case, but mostly conservatives have tried to couch these arguments so they don’t sound too indifferent to rape or too quick to blame the victim. But recently, the hostile rhetoric aimed at rape victims and their advocates is really getting uglier.

This was particularly obvious when the podcast host for the NRA’s news feed, Cam Edwards, went on one of the ugliest victim-blaming rants I’ve ever heard, all in service of trying to bully people into buying more guns. He’s denouncing the campus paper for objecting to the NRA’s marketing push to get guns legalized on campus, which wouldn’t prevent any crime but might help sell more guns.

• rape 1 *

And this is exactly why feminists have been speaking out about this. While this guy is claiming that he’s all about trying to help women, when say that the rape is the fault of the victim’s because she failed in her duty to protect herself, that’s basically legalizing rape. I realize that he doesn’t think of it that way, but that’s the logical result of saying the burden of preventing a crime, i.e. the responsibility for the crime, belongs to the victim, not the perpetrator. And thus, if you are raped and you don’t have a gun or can’t reach your gun or your rapist uses your gun against you, then you will be told it was your fault and you must have secretly wanted it because you didn’t do enough to stop it.

We need to blame rapists for rape.

That prevents rape in two ways. First of all, if a wannabe rapist knows that the victim will be blamed and he will get away with it, he’s more likely to rape. Because, duh, he knows that she’ll be blamed. Two, if a rape does happen, if we blame the victim, then the rapist will be free. Most of them rape again, which research has repeatedly shown. The only way to stop rape is to create consequences for rapists. And while the NRA wants those consequences to be profitable for the gun manufacturers that support them, shooting rapists is really a substandard alternative to holding them accountable. I’ll add one more thing: If you believe that a rape is the victim’s fault when she doesn’t shoot her rapist, odds are you will continue to believe it was her fault if she does shoot the rapist. Which means that on top of being attacked, victims will often face malicious charges of murder. Bad idea.

But victim-blaming to sell guns is just one flavor of misogyny I’ve seen recently. Gavin McInnes of Fox News was also victim-blaming to push his anger at young women for having fun and being sexually liberated. He was angry at women for enjoying spring break.

• rape 2 *

McInnes started Vice magazine. When he was young, he was Mr. Partying and Craziness. He was a nasty bigot then, but it’s funny to me that now that he’s middle aged and those hot young women treat him like he’s invisible, so now he’s decided they need to cover up and stay at home and never have any fun or it’s their fault if they get raped. Dude, we all get older. You don’t have to bust out the rape card on the young’uns because you’re bitter about aging.

Now we’ve heard the victim-blaming, so it’s time for talking about how, when it comes to rape, accused rapists are the real victims here. Courtesy of Andrea Tantaros of Fox News.

• rape 3 *

It’s telling that Tantaros thinks that coming down hard on rape is a war on young men. Only if you think either rape is not a big deal or that most young men do it, or some combination of both. In reality, and I will also speak slowly, rape is a hate crime against women. Most men are not misogynist bigots who will rape if they get a chance. And anyone who equates the war on rape with a war on men is implying that men are inherently rapists. So who’s the man-hater, again?

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, God kills babies to punish you for killing embryos edition. Recently, a pregnant woman in Colorado was brutally attacked by a woman who cut out her baby with the intention of passing it off as her own. Gordon Klingenschmitt, a state representative in Colorado, responded by making it about abortion.

• Klingenschmitt *

Classy. The baby died, and if you think this is about “life,” then his ramblings are nonsensical. But I don’t see it that way. I think anti-choice is rooted in misogyny. And because of this, it makes sense that he would think that women are being punished for their defiance and feminism by having God inflict violent abuse on them.