More smart people saying smart things

Ezra Klein: “What Mitt Romney Doesn’t Get About Responsibility”

The thing about not having much money is you have to take much more responsibility for your life. You can’t pay people to watch your kids or clean your house or fix your meals. You can’t necessarily afford a car or a washing machine or a home in a good school district. That’s what money buys you: goods and services that make your life easier.

… The problem is that [Romney] doesn’t seem to realize how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car, or the agonizing choices faced by families in which both parents work and a child falls ill. The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.

Leah Libresco: “Ave atque vale, Jen McCreight”

This isn’t a Jen-specific problem. A lot of women writers have been targeted in the same way Jen has, and in a way pretty much no male bloggers are. It’s disgusting and it’s unacceptable. Jen may need to step back for a while for her safety, but she’s given atheist women and all feminists a pretty big gift: a framework to continue the fight in her absence and a reminder of why it needs fighting.

Sarah Moon: “Esther, Mark Driscoll, and using rape to control women”

The book of Esther contains a powerful message. Women disobeying men and saving the world. Women asserting their bodily autonomy. Women who are brave and strong and active and anything but submissive. It’s a message so powerful that some male Christian leaders have to undermine it because it threatens the control that they have over women.

Craig M. Watts: “Covetous Leaders: How the Religious Right Gets It Exactly Wrong”

We do, indeed, need to be wary of covetous leaders. But covetous leaders are not the politicians who call for the over-privileged to pay more taxes so the poor and weak will stand a chance of staying out of abject poverty and still others will be less likely of falling into bankruptcy. Rather the covetous leaders are the ones who materially benefit from the policies they advance as they protect the interests of the rich. Too many on the religious right are looking in exactly the wrong direction for covetous leaders to chastise.