And I’ll just let you guess the rest

And I’ll just let you guess the rest March 16, 2015

• The unbreakable Boze Herrington writes for The Guardian: “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a tender portrayal of cult survivors like me.”

• Franklin Graham: still awful. He wouldn’t be spouting such nasty stuff on TV if his father was still alive.

Screen shot 2015-03-16 at 12.35.56 PM• “Words are inadequate for me to say how honored I was to be the recipient of the Margaret Sanger Award. This award will remain among my most cherished possessions.” — The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 1966.

• Congratulations to Dianna E. Anderson for reaching a vital milestone with the evangelical audience. You haven’t really arrived until Christianity Today officially denounces you as a danger to the morals of the youth. It’s a bit of a perfunctory, fill-in-the-blanks piece of hand-wringing, with CT’s patented faux-lamentation, always “more in sadness than in anger.” But they spelled her name right and the Streisand effect will, happily, help to spread the word about Anderson’s book, and that’s all good.

For those keeping score at home, this article also marks a key milestone for the important critique of evangelical purity culture being made by Anderson and dozens of other whipsmart young Christian women. The review abandons any attempt to defend purity culture against this critique, opting instead for the old dismissal-by-concession trick — the preferred strategy of those seeking a softer landing after having utterly lost the argument. Reviewer Gina Dalfonzo repeatedly refers to the “widely documented problems” of purity culture and its “faulty teaching” — hand-waving away the substance of this critique as old news that she hopes readers won’t pay any further attention to. It’s the attempt to shift directly from ignoring an argument in the hopes that it will go away to conceding the argument in the hopes that it will go away.

But it’s not going away.

• “When women hate men, we hurt their feelings. When men hate women, they kill us.”

• Remember the horrifying story from last year of two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin who allegedly stabbed a classmate 19 times in a delusional attempt to please the fictional monster Slenderman? Well, now the story has gotten worse. The state of Wisconsin has declared that it, too, believes in fictional monsters. The two young suspects will be tried as adults.

There is no such thing as Slenderman. There is no such thing as a 12-year-old adult. Every judge and prosecutor who has ever sought to try a juvenile “as an adult” winds up echoing every awful thing that every statutory rapist has ever said. It’s absurd nonsense. No law or legal authority allows a court to magically declare that a 12-year-old is not a 12-year-old.

• Cyndi Lauper 10,000; Family Research Council 0.

 

 


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