Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 787

I was wrong about millennials: I’m so sorry I believed the lazy — and wrong — media stereotypes

Just want to say a quick sorry. Seriously, a real apology, to all the millennials whose feelings I might have hurt by making the villain of my recent novel, “The Knockoff,” a caricature of the misguided millennial stereotype.

Every generation has its scapegoats. Generation X had its slackers, those scruffy but strangely sexy characters of “Reality Bites.” Boomers had their hippies and the “Me generation.” Every generation contains top-notch thinkers and doers and creators while simultaneously housing dullards, dimwits and jerks. It’s absurd to ascribe personality traits to an entire generation, but with the label of millennial that is exactly what we have done.

When we think of millennials we think of a homogenous collection rather than a nuanced assemblage of different groups. For this reason, we’ve managed to disparage millions of individuals, loosely born between the years of 1980 and 2000 (the age range varies; the span of age for millennials is so wide that millennials can actually have millennial babies) as selfish and entitled. We censoriously call these people “children,” even though most of them are legal adults.

An article in Time magazine claimed “seventy-one percent of American adults think of 18- to 29-year-olds — millennials, basically — as ‘selfish,’ and 65% of us think of them as ‘entitled.’” Time cited data from a Reason-Rupe poll.

Less than a year ago I was at a conference of travel marketers. An entire presentation was dedicated to calling out the so-called millennials as being selfish, lazy and unwilling to spend money. Wait, what? Then why are all of you trying so desperately to capture their brand loyalty.

I’ve had colleagues brush off all brash and inappropriate behavior by employees under the age of 30. “They’re just millennials. What can we do?”

We need to stop using “millennial” as a catch-all.

“The Knockoff” was a nuanced satire of the tech domination of the media industry that caricatured some very specific individuals who happened to fall into what we would classify as a millennial. It also contained characters who were aged 25, but were kind and caring, entrepreneurial, respectful and selfless.

I’ve received so much fan mail from millennial women who tell me they loved the book, but they wanted to know one thing: Do I really think their entire generation is evil? Do I think they’re all like Eve?

No! For starters, I am 35, which makes me millennial-ish. And the truth is that some of the most hard-working people I know fall into the so-called millennial category.

Fareed Zakaria made a similar statement for The Atlantic last year, saying, “In the time I have spent on college campuses, I have found students to be thoughtful, interesting, and stimulating. The Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, who has spent much more time teaching college students, has written in the same vein.”

The so-called millennial generation comes in all shapes, sizes and personality types, with various drives and passions. They are likely a little quicker with new technology than the generation that came before them, but not always. I’ve met plenty of millennials who completely shun social media as an invasion of their privacy.

One of the most evil (and, frankly, most fun) fictional characters I’ve written was this so-called millennial archetype Eve —an upwardly mobile twenty-something Harvard Business School graduate who sets out to displace her forty-something boss Imogen Tate when their print magazine becomes an app.

In hindsight, even I went too far in using the term millennial as a catch-all. I wrote that “Millennials, their new target demographic, lived in a tough world. They came of age in the shadow of 9/11. The job market was dismal when they graduated from college and even worse when they came out of grad school. They wanted to consume content that was funny and optimistic and demanded a maximum investment of two minutes. They didn’t languidly browse through magazines for hours. They swiped, they liked, they tapped, they shared. Most important, they didn’t care if content was branded as long as it made them LOL.”

Our protagonist, Imogen Tate, even posts complaints about her new junior employer on a message board called TechBitch, which receives regular complaints like the ones below:

“My boss talks to me while she pees.”

“Our CMO goes around the office braiding everyone’s hair whether they like it or not.”

“My twenty-six-year-old CEO rolls her eyes every time I tell her I have to leave early (at seven!) to have dinner with my kids.”

“My boss doesn’t know who Duran Duran is.”

“Make sure to tell your millennial employees they are great…every single day.”

Making Eve a selfish and entitled brat and labeling her a millennial was an easy way to capitalize on our society’s generalization of an entire generation. It was too easy and I’m sorry.

When I was the managing editor of Yahoo Travel, one of my junior editors didn’t know who Duran Duran was either. I took great pleasure in explaining to her the central differences between Simon LeBon and John Taylor. She was also one of the hardest-working individuals I know. She arrived to work earlier than the rest of us and left later. She graciously taught me to use Snapchat. And she was a millennial.

Show me a millennial who is lazy and selfish and I’ll show you one who works 14-hour days in an effort to make a real difference in the world.

Four years ago I was introduced to a young woman named Katlyn Grasso who was then in college at the University of Pennsylvania. She politely and dutifully asked my advice on building a network of strong, supportive, entrepreneurial women. She has since become the founder and CEO of GenHERation, a female empowerment network for high school girls. She was awarded grants from the University of Pennsylvania and from NBCUniversal for her leadership series and she’d been featured on numerous young-women-to-watch lists.

Katlyn is a millennial.

On the flip side, a second young woman recently asked me to meet for coffee. She’d quit her job because her boss “didn’t get her.” She thought about training to be a yoga instructor but she didn’t like getting up early in the morning. “Can you tell me what to do with my life?” she asked me next, as though I were a Buddha and by rubbing my belly she’d receive all of life’s answers.

This young lady was a millennial too.

They come in all shapes and sizes.

Captain America’s freedom fail: How the powerful few justify answering only to themselves

“If we can’t accept limitations, we’re boundaryless, we’re no better than the bad guys.”

So says Iron Man (aka Tony Stark) in “Captain America: Civil War,” perhaps one of the most politically nuanced films ever released as a tentpole in a blockbuster franchise. This is a movie with a distinct social message, one that merits detailed analysis, but in order for that to happen I’ll need to give away key plot points from the film. As a result, major spoilers follow this paragraph.

Back to Stark: “Captain America: Civil War” tells the story of an international agreement known as the Sokovia Accords that requires superheroes to register with the government and operate only “when” and “if” a United Nations panel deems it necessary. Captain America (aka Steve Rogers) immediately opposes this on the grounds that it violates their civil liberties, while Iron Man supports it because he believes that (as another character puts it) “victory at the expense of the innocent is no victory at all.” Because superheroes often cause significant loss of life and property, the argument for accountability makes a great deal of sense — indeed, it’s practically self-evident. Yet by the end of “Captain America: Civil War,” the plot has decisively sided with Captain America and forced Iron Man to come around to his position … in this writer’s opinion, incorrectly so.

This isn’t to say that “Captain America: Civil War” is a bad film. Very much to the contrary, it is one of the best movies to ever come out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, balancing engaging action set pieces and witty dialogue with intelligent character studies and ethical debates. Due to its political content and numerous superhero characters, it invites comparison to “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” particularly when the latter discussed how “in a democracy good is a conversation, not a unilateral decision.” Unlike “BvS,” however, the new “Captain America” is well-written and a lot of fun, which makes it much easier to recommend to casual moviegoing audiences.

It also does a commendable job of giving Iron Man’s point of view a fair shake. At one point, the android Vision (who sides with Iron Man) rebuts Captain America by pointing out that “Our very strength incites challenge. Challenge incites conflict. And conflict… breeds catastrophe. Supervision is not something to be dismissed out of hand.” What’s more, there is an unavoidable democratic logic to the Sokovia Accords, which is based on the premise that superheroes must be held to the same legal standards as non-superpowered human beings. There are unsettling real-world implications to arguing that “super” people should be allowed to change the world as they see fit without being accountable for the harm caused by their actions, even if said harm is unintentional (such as when we see Scarlet Witch accidentally blow up a building in Nigeria). When Captain America insists that “I know we’re not perfect, but the safest hands are still our own,” he actually flies in the face of the spirit of democracy, subordinating the will of the people to a belief in his own superior virtue.

Nevertheless, the movie winds up siding with him, and not only because his name is in the title. Obviously the superhero genre itself can’t exist if its characters are forced to report to the government like glorified police officers, so there are practical reasons for the Marvel movies to maintain a comparatively anarchic universe. On a more profound level, though, “Captain America: Civil War” is the product of a culture that has been given excellent reasons to distrust state authority. Once the government gains power over superheroes, it quickly deprives them of their civil liberties, denying the arrested superheroes legal counsel, interning Scarlet Witch without trial, and ordering the assassination of a character (the Winter Soldier) whose innocence would save his life if only his civil liberties were being respected. Even when the government acts justly — such as when we see it imprison Falcon, Hawkeye, Ant Man and Scarlet Witch, all of whom are undoubtedly guilty of breaking the law — it’s still discomfiting to see this in action. We know these characters, we like them, and we recognize their good intentions, so it’s painful to see them treated like criminals instead of heroes.

Nevertheless, if they existed in the real world, they would be criminals, so when Iron Man switches his views after seeing them incarcerated, the change of heart seems short-sighted rather than noble. It’s understandable why he would feel sympathy for his friends, of course, but by opposing government oversight simply because he feels badly for them, he forgets that just because he knows them and the audience (in a sense) knows them doesn’t mean that the billions of denizens in the Marvel Cinematic Universe know them on the same personal level. They are, and remain, unelected and unaccountable — and thanks to Iron Man’s assistance in helping them escape at the end, remain that way.

It’s worth noting that, when I saw this movie with my friends, two of us wound up getting involved in a heated debate on its political message immediately after the screening. One of them firmly sided with Captain America and the other had a decidedly mixed view on the film’s political subtext, but both had deep reservations about the amount of power exercised by the state in this film. My theory is that, because our generation has seen our government violate individual liberties on a regular basis (from the war on drugs and NSA spying to law enforcement persecution of racial minorities), there is an instinctive distrust of state authority that is entirely reasonable. When my friends Adam and Jorge identify with Captain America’s rhetoric on individual rights being the foundation of true justice, they’re applying lessons that we have far too often seen be disregarded with terrible consequences. It is entirely possible for intelligent and well-intentioned individuals to see the world the way that Captain America does here.

The regrettable thing about “Captain America: Civil War” is that, instead of allowing Iron Man to remain resolute in his convictions as well, it forces him to give way so that the plot can move forward. While our world doesn’t have superhumans, it has many individuals who wield disproportionate power over the rest of us because of unearned privileges — wealth, or being part of an empowered racial or gender group, for example. If we are going to create a free and just world, these concentrations of social and economic power need to be confronted and remedied, and just as a Captain America must exist to remind us that their individual rights matter too, so too is an Iron Man required to remind us that the freedom of the whole is infringed when the few can make themselves unaccountable to the rest. If “Captain America: Civil War” had been a truly insightful movie, it would have aimed to strike a balance between both of these perspectives. By ultimately siding with Captain America over Iron Man, it implicitly delegitimizes a valid and important perspective.

“‘The Lion King’ is an extraordinarily sexual film”: Inside the fascinating, misunderstood world of furries

Furries are adults who assume creative/fantasy identities and dress up in fur suits. They are often ridiculed for their behavior, which is, by and large, assumed to be sexual. The new documentary, “Fursonas,” available on VOD now, attempts to demystify members of this subculture by—ahem—fleshing them out as humans.

Directed by Dominic Rodriguez (himself a furry, a wolf named Video), the film introduces characters like Diezel, who found his inner furry by working as a mascot; Skye, who enjoys the friendship and dance competitions at furry conventions; Freya, a mother who hopes her young daughter will find the same appreciation she does in costume; Bandit, who sees furry-dom as a way to memorialize his dog; and Grix and Quad, a gay couple who are equally comfortable in suit and out.

Then there is Uncle Kage, a chairman at furry conventions, who manages the way furries talk to and are represented by the media. He criticizes Boomer, a furry whose outfit is made of paper, not fur, and who went to the extreme of trying to legally change his name to Boomer the Dog, which is also the name of his favorite TV show/character; Chew Fox, whose appearance on “The Tyra Banks Show” discussed a furry taboo (apparently being a furry is like being in Fight Club); and Varka, who provides sex toys to furries, but is now fursona non grata at conventions.

“Fursonas” gives these men, women and animals an opportunity to express their thoughts about perception, tolerance and rejection. Salon spoke with Rodriguez about his film, his fur fetish and this fascinating subculture.

“Fursonas” attempts to debunk the myths about furries. Why do you think there is such curiosity, or misunderstanding regarding this subculture?

I think that when Uncle Kage was on a panel at a convention (Anthrocon), there was an insightful comment about the media, who came and pried into the underbelly about furry meetings being about sex. Because of defensiveness in the community and that attitude, there is more of a stigma. There’s a reaction from the community that thinks that the media is out to get us. That’s why we have to share all these other sides of furries. Being a furry is a positive beautiful thing in furries’ lives. People who aren’t furries want answers. They don’t understand something that they aren’t a part of.

How did you get the approval to make this documentary?

It was not approved by Anthrocon. The Anthrocon media policy is that if you are going to shoot [footage] there, you have to show the finished film to the board of directors. They recommend changes, and if you don’t make those changes you have to take that Anthrocon footage out. We didn’t, because we disagree with that policy. It’s against the rule, but it’s not against the law. We’re not looking to make the furries or the convention look bad. Scenes of Uncle Kage at the convention are available on YouTube for free. We weren’t sneaking around; we wanted to show what was right in front of our faces.

What were your criteria for the Fursonas you showcase in the film?

At first it was about finding people who would talk to me. I didn’t know anybody in the community. I reached out to people with costumes. Not everyone has a fur suit. I think the costumes are cinematic, and that the furries who wear them are passionate. They invest money and time in their suits and I wanted to talk to passionate people. I sent out 100 emails, half the people responded, and half of them spoke to me. I traveled to meet folks, but Boomer lives 20 minutes from my house. I wanted to get diversity. I didn’t know much about these people and their lives until I met them. People like Chew Fox, Varka and Uncle Kage were more people I sought out because I wanted to tell their story. 

What observations do you have about why people become furries? Is it infantilization? Fantasy/role playing by unleashing the inner animal? Is it a mask to increase confidence? Is it a sexual fetish? Or all of the above?

For many people it incorporates all of the above. But for plenty of furries it is one of the above. There is enough of a sexual component to the fandom it can’t be ignored, but I don’t know how many people are into it sexually. That is not something that people are comfortable talking about. Which is totally fair. There is an innocence brought to it because of the silliness of putting on a costume, running around and having adventures. There was never a scene in the film where we explain why this person does it. It’s not about the why, it’s about the who. It was important to get to know the people. I don’t have any definitive answer.

How did you become a furry, and what have your experiences been?

For me, I was interested in this since I was 12. I thought so much about what made me a furry. My experience is just my experience. It’s not reflective of all experiences. I feel like it has something to do with growing up with the Internet and being obsessed with movies and cartoons. “The Lion King” is an extraordinarily sexual film. When I found furry porn, that was it for me. It’s really beautiful. When I think of the question “Can porn be art?” I think furry porn is the answer. You humanize it and bring it into emotion. Videos of people fucking takes the humanity away. For me being a furry started as a fetish. I don’t know why anthropomorphized anatomy does it for me. As I worked on the movie, I got more into the scene and there are so many aspects that I enjoy. I wasn’t into fur suits at first, and then, when I met Grix, he owned that character and made it approachable and fun. There was nothing awkward about that, and that inspired me to get a fur suit. 

What can you say about the difficulties of “coming out” as a furry, which is addressed in “Fursonas?”

When you ask, “How do you come out to your parents as a furry?”—you don’t have to. I understand why people want to be honest with themselves. I feel like I didn’t choose this. That’s how deep it runs for me. That’s why people feel the need to come out. It’s so in line with their identity. I’m lucky—I have a really awesome family. They have been supportive of me talking about these things. But not everyone has supportive people around them. I understand how Diezel might feel, keeping his furry life separate from his work life. The movie is important to show people expressing themselves, but also acknowledge the difficulties of that situation.

“I hate to bring this up,” as Uncle Kage says journalists will ask, “but what is all this about sex in fur suits?” Were you tempted to depict sex scenes with furries?

I think that is part of the fun for me as a director and revealing things to the audience that has preconceived notions, and playing with those. Someone says a line and it puts the image in your head. But I didn’t want to hold back, so I needed to show the indulgence of Varka with the cum lube. That’s my money shot. 

There has been controversy in the furry community over Chew Fox’s appearance on “The Tyra Banks Show.” She said something that was harmful to the community, but truthful for her. What are your thoughts on what she did?

I think that Chew Fox was not trying to hurt anyone. The most important thing was her being honest about herself. People will say she was trying to throw us under the bus. I don’t agree with that at all. I’ve had to go into the media and now talk about being a furry. I’m now very self-aware. I wouldn’t go on the “Tyra Banks Show.” It’s an exploitative treatment of its subjects. Boomer made a point about that there is no bad media. No matter what it is, there is some truth coming through. So when he goes on “Dr. Phil,” it’s more about him being on the show. “They can do what they want,” he says, “It’s me coming through, there is some truth coming through.” Many furries have responded well, and there’s a difference between how [they and] non-furries respond. A furry who interviewed me thinks Chew Fox was delighting in upsetting furries, and that’s wasn’t obvious to me at all.

How do you think your film will play with furry and non-furry audiences?

I wanted to make something furries and non-furries can get something out of. As far as who is going to accept furries, if you’re going to watch it to laugh at them, I hope you will be moved by these stories. But there are people you will never convince, and that’s fine. I’m more interested in furries’ reactions. It’s played well with non-furry audiences. It’s meant to be about more than this community and where they are right now. I’m interested to see how it will play with furries because we’re all passionate about being furries. I was terrified when I showed the film at a recent furry convention, but so far, all the furry screenings have been extremely positive experiences. It has provoked thoughtful discussion. We’re having conversations, and dialogue is positive.

Welcome to the dark side, Mr. Trump: Dick Cheney says he’ll support the billionaire in the general election

Add Dick Cheney to the list of Republicans who will support Donald Trump’s presidential bid. The former vice president and Darth Vader admirer told CNN on Friday that he will support his party’s nominee, as he says he always has.

Cheney’s announcement comes soon after other Republican elder statesmen, including Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush, announced they would not attend the Republican National Convention this summer, highlighting tensions within the party fueled by Trump’s rise. Former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, both of whom Cheney served under, reportedly will not endorse Trump or comment on his campaign.

Lindsey Graham, who has been one of Trump’s harshest Republican critics, told CNN he was surprised at Cheney’s announcement. “Dick Cheney’s a great man,” Graham said. “We see the world a lot alike when it comes to foreign policy. I can understand when people want to support the nominee of the Republican Party. I would like to be able to do that, but I just can’t.”

In February, Cheney criticized Trump for “sounding like a liberal Democrat” after Trump accused Cheney and George W. Bush of lying about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Despite these harsh words, in the same interview Cheney emphasized his loyalty to his party and said he would support the Republican nominee.

Joe Paterno failed even more kids: His legacy is still a staggering refusal to stand up for abuse victims

I don’t know there’s an afterlife, or if we are held accountable in it for our misdeeds on earth, but there sure are days when it’s hard not to hope that there’s some kind of cosmic justice being meted out somewhere for guys like Joe Paterno. Because while his life ended in 2012, apparently the full extent of his moral accountability is still being calculated.

In new court papers this week in a lawsuit between Penn State and insurance company Pennsylvania Manufacturer’s Association, Philadelphia County judge Gary Glazer asserts that the former College Football Hall of Famer knew a full twelve years earlier than previously alleged that his Penn State colleague Jerry Sandusky had been accused of sexually abusing children. He writes, “PMA claims Sandusky committed several acts of molestation early in his career at PSU: in 1976, a child allegedly reported to PSU’s Head Football Coach Joseph Paterno, that he (the child) was sexually molested by Sandusky.”

Paterno was fired in the fall of 2011, after revelations that Sandusky had molested several boys who were involved in his Second Mile program for youth. The timeline of Sandusky’s actions has been repeatedly adjusted — and pushed earlier and earlier — over the ensuing years. The original linchpin of the case was a 2009 investigation of incidents involving a then-teenaged boy who claimed Sandusky has molested him over the course of years, beginning when he was ten. That trail led to other allegations, including a mother’s 1998 report to state police that Sandusky had molested her then 12 year-old son in a locker room shower. Sandusky admitted to showering with the boy and “hugging” him, and promised not to do it again. As the New York Times reported in 2011, “In the end, no prosecution was undertaken. The child welfare agency did not take action. And, according to prosecutors, the commander of the university’s campus police force told his detective, Ronald Schreffler, to close the case.”

Sandusky is now serving to 30 to 60 years in prison “on 45 convictions of raping, abusing and assaulting 10 boys” — and continues to face allegations of even more abuses. Last year, another former Second Mile participant came forward to claim he’d been abused by Sandusky in 1988. And in Glazer’s decision this week — which he formed based on still-sealed depositions from alleged victims — he writes, “In 1987, a PSU Assistant Coach is alleged to have witnessed inappropriate contact between Sandusky and a child at a PSU facility; in 1988, another PSU Assistant Coach reportedly witnessed sexual contact between Sandusky and a child; and also in 1988, a child’s report of his molestation by Sandusky was allegedly referred to PSU’s Athletic Director.” To put this in context, if true, Paterno still got to hang on to his prestigious job, working with someone who is now a convicted child rapist, for another 35 years after that earliest report. 

The timeframe of what Sandusky did — and who knew about what and when — forms the basis of the suit to determine who should be financially accountable in victim lawsuits. As PennLive explains, “The insurance case involves big money for Penn State, which hopes to be reimbursed for most of the $60 million-plus it has paid in recent years to settle nearly 30 civil claims pertaining to abuse by Sandusky.”

It’s true that Paterno is not around to address these claims that go back forty years. But it’s also boggling that there can be any ambiguity that Joe Paterno failed the children whom his colleague preyed upon, and he failed them spectacularly and for a long time. It may never be proven definitively when he made a choice, but he made a choice. And yet, writer David Jones on Friday mused, “Demonize or deify: Will latest Paterno allegation change anyone’s opinion?” and wondered if Paterno “fully recognized Sandusky’s horrors and actively camouflaged them to protect his program or was simply a befuddled and single-minded old man who dismissed them with some degree of negligence, as did good men within the Catholic Church amid their priest scandals.”

And elsewhere, PennLive reports that “Parts of Penn State nation still are deeply divided over questions like whether Paterno was wrongly fired in the wake of Sandusky’s November 2011 arrest, and whether the coach’s Beaver Stadium statue — taken down in the summer of 2012 — should be reinstalled there or somewhere else on the campus.” You’ve got to be kidding me.

This was a man who at the very least did not respond to former Penn State quarterback Mike McQueary’s 2001 report to him that, in Paterno’s own words, McQueary had seen “a mature person who was fondling, whatever you might call it — I’m not sure what the term would be — a young boy” by calling  the police or even immediately contacting his supervisor, because, “It was a Saturday morning and I didn’t want to interfere with their weekends.” Can anyone ever still believe a guy like that should be deified? That he deserves statues? I’ll say this — he deserves to not be forgotten. He deserves to be remembered for every single thing he did — and didn’t do.

Kansas fundamentalist group tied to Duggars tries to force teens to get hitched

Happy news for a Friday: Once in awhile, the good guys win. This time the victory is over a scary fundamentalist cult, usually called “Quiverfull,” that has been making unfortunate inroads in recent years in spreading its alarming message of extreme patriarchy, where women aren’t allowed to use birth control and have no real rights, and are instead expected to live a life of complete submission to male authority. The famous Duggar family, which has seemingly innumerable shows on TLC, has been surprisingly successful at shining up the public image of this miserable cult, even though they have recently had a setback with the revelation that the eldest son, Josh Duggar, molested his sisters as a kid.

Wednesday, writer Vyckie Garrison, who escaped the Quiverfull lifestyle herself some years ago, wrote a piece for Raw Story exposing the plans of some Quiverfull devotees to hold a retreat in Wichita, Kansas for the purpose of parents finding people to marry their children off to. Yes, in America in the 21st century, these folks were going to get together to force marriages for their children. Marriages those children aren’t really going to have much, if any, say about.

“Quiverfull patriarch, Vaughn Ohlman, who runs a website promoting early, “fruitful” marriage for Truly True Christian™ children,” Garrison writes, “has announced plans for a “Get Them Married!” retreat where fundamentalist fathers will find, and TAKE, suitably submissive young brides to bear many babies for their adolescent sons.”

There can be no real doubt that the intention of this event was arranged marriages for teenagers. On his website, Ohlman argues that “marriage (in order to be timely and to accomplish its purposes) ought to happen before the age of twenty for almost everyone.” While denying that he would marry girls of 12 off, he argues that once her breasts develop and her body is “physically mature enough to handle” childbirth “without damage”, it’s time for her to marry.

And as for how much say the kids have in this matter, read this passage from Ohlman’s site:

Scripture speaks of the father of the son “taking a wife” for his son, and the father of the bride “giving” her to her husband (Jeremiah 29: 6; Judges 21: 7; Ezra 9:12; Nehemiah 10: 30; 1 Corinthians 7:36-38). It gives example after example of young women being given to young men, without the young woman even being consulted, and often, in some of the most Godly marriages in Scripture, the young man is not consulted….

Then, the son or daughter, must “consent” to the marriage—but it is very important to realize that this type of “consent” is the kind of obedient consent we see in the examples of Adam, Eve, Isaac, Rebecca, and Christ. It is consent where the son or daughter, realizing that their father has bound them and then submits to the covenant as binding, recognizing the good gift their father has given them.

They’re allowed to say yes but they can’t say no. Which is to say that his version of “consent” is not consent at all.

After Garrison wrote her piece, apparently many readers started calling the Salvation Army, which had rented out the space to Ohlman for his retreat. Upon discovering they were about to play host to an event centered around arranging marriages for teenagers, the Salvation Army pulled the plug.

“The Salvation Army has denied a request by the Let Them Marry organization to conduct its event at Camp Hiawatha,” the Salvation Army explained in a statement. “Our decision is based upon our long-standing concern for the welfare of children.”

Now Ohlman and his Quiverfull crew are feeling the heat. “Note: Contrary to vicious internet rumors we do not support or in any way condone child sexual activity of any sort, child marriage, or any other illegal activity,” his website reads at the top. “Nor do we support or condone forced marriages. We believe that parents should NOT seek a spouse for a child where that child has not actively sought for the parents to do so.”

There is reason to be skeptical of these disclaimers, however. The claim that the child is supposed “actively” seek marriage first, for instance, doesn’t comport with the rest of Ohlman’s website.

For instance, in his FAQ, Ohlman says that “when they are of an age where marriage is appropriate for them,” a child’s father “should agree with another father as to their betrothal”. Only after the fathers agree to the marriage, the father “should again go to his own child to assure himself of their integrity of purpose before announcing their new betrothed spouse to them.”

The language is deliberately flowery, but the meaning is clear enough: Fathers decide unilaterally for children when they marry and to who. Ideally, while the children are still minors and have very little power to resist, to boot.

As for the legality of this, Ohlman’s doing a little tap-dance with this. In the state of Kansas, there is no age requirement to marry if your parents give you permission to do so.  So if the folks in his Quiverfull cult want to marry a 14-year-old to an 18-year-old, so long as the parents of the 14-year-old give “permission”, then it’s legal.

(Kansas needs to fix that, I’m thinking.)

The cancellation of this event is a victory, but sadly, it’s a small one. The sad truth is there are  not enough safeguards in place to keep abusive religious fundamentalists like Ohlman and his followers from treating children like this. Yes, forced marriage is illegal, but we’re talking about minor adolescents here. The fact that they formally “consent” means very little, when they know that saying no is not an option.

These are kids who are usually homeschooled and kept separate from the rest of the world. They don’t have a lot of options if they reject their parents’ teachings: Few places to go, no real way to make a living. This event should be a wake-up call about how serious this situation is, and there needs to be more direct interference to keep these folks from pushing underage teenagers into arranged marriages.

 

Our awful elites gutted America. Now they dare ring alarms about Trump, Sanders — and cast themselves as saviors

This week, on the night of the Indiana primary, I read one of the most loathsome political screeds it has been my misfortune to encounter.

It was an alarm bell raised by Andrew Sullivan, arguably the greatest hypocrite of the Bush era, on par with his partner in many crimes Christopher Hitchens (remember “Islamofascism?”). Sullivan proclaims that the election of Trump would be an “extinction-level” event. Well, perhaps it will be.

But the extinction Sullivan is most worried about is clearly that of his own breed of callous elites, who could care less about normal human beings who do not have decent jobs and who live in crappy housing and who are so desperate to find a way out of the trap that even someone like Trump starts sounding rational to them.

Now this panic alert, designed to get us in line behind Hillary, is raised by the man who ended The New Republic as we knew it (which then went on to end and then end again), promoting racist and imperialist dogma during his reign at the magazine in the 1990s, and then, with his finger in the wind (which to him and that other arch-hypocrite Hitchens meant being like George Orwell), turned into one of the biggest shills for the war on terror, the Iraq war, the whole works, all the while denouncing the fifth column within our ranks. This so-called journalist, who has no record of liberal consistency, who keeps shifting to whoever holds moral power at any given moment, is scaring us about the mortal threat that is Trump.

No, the danger is the elites, who have made such a joke of the democratic process, who have so perverted and rotted it from within, that the entire edifice is crumbling (to the consternation of the elites). Both parties are in terminal decline after forty years of ignoring the travails of the average worker (the Republicans admit they’re in the intensive care unit, while the Democrats calling for Sanders to quit already have yet to come around to admitting that they might have the flu), and voters on both right and left have at last—and this is a breath of relief—stopped caring about the cultural distractions that have kept the elites in power. No, they want their jobs back, even if it means building a wall, keeping Muslims out, deporting the illegals, and starting trade wars with China and Japan—because what else did the elites give them, they’re still opposing a living wage!

Sullivan comes right out and says it: it’s all because of too much democracy, the same bugbear elites on both sides have been offended by since the “crisis of excess democracy” in the mid-1970s, the same lament that Sullivan’s masters in the ivory tower, Samuel P. Huntington and others, have been leveling ever since they made it their job to put the exuberance of the late sixties and early seventies to rest once and for all. So they engineered the neoliberal revolution, where the “qualified” elites are firmly in charge, and the only way to get ahead is not democratic (or individualist) unpredictability—and who is a greater exemplar of unpredictability than Trump?—but elite planning, a certain coldhearted “rationality” that is as efficient as any totalitarian system ever was in sidelining those who do not have what it takes to succeed.

So, the problem, according to all the elites, is too much democracy. Thank you Andrew Sullivan, a Harvard humanities education—all that Plato you read!—was hardly ever put to worse use in the four-hundred-year annals of the institution.

You, Andrew Sullivan, and the Democratic party flacks who want the Bernie supporters to throw our lot behind the most compromised Democratic candidate of all time, Hillary Clinton, and you, who are so worried about the wall and the ban on Muslims and the attack on civil liberties, will you please tell us who started it all?

You did!

You’ve all now, the elite punditocracy on either spectrum, suddenly become nostalgic for George W. Bush, because he didn’t—well, not always—use the crude and blatant vocabulary that Trump deploys to demonize Mexicans and Arabs and Muslims and foreigners. But Bush is the one who actually implemented, with your full support, plans to surveil, discriminate against (in immigration proceedings), and impose a de facto bar on Muslims from the “wrong countries” that is still, under Barack Obama, a severe disability on Muslims who may want to emigrate to this country.

Where were you elites when Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic party elite spoke as one with Republicans on endlessly strengthening border security, on the need to mercilessly enforce immigration laws, on imposing such punitive measures against potential legalization that it becomes possible only in theory not in reality?

The natural conclusion of these ideas is the literal wall, but Trump didn’t start it, he’s only putting the finishing touches on the discourse that you elites, on both sides, have inflamed for twenty-plus years. Bill Clinton started the demonization of immigrants—legal immigrants were made ineligible for benefits—for the first time since the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965. Bill Clinton ended welfare, tapping into racist discourse about African Americans, and permanently unmoored millions of people from the social safety net. No, Trump didn’t start any of it, Paul Begala and Karl Rove, representing both parties, and the elite interests they represent, poisoned the discourse.

Elites on both sides insisted on not addressing the root causes of economic dissatisfaction, hence the long-foreseen rise of Trump. Paul Krugman, a Hillary acolyte, is nothing more than a neoliberal, whose prescriptions always stay strictly within orthodox parameters. Yet he was construed as some sort of a liberal lion during the Bush and Obama years. Not for him any of Bernie’s “radical” measures to ensure economic justice and fairness. Oh no, we have to stay within the orthodoxies of the economics profession. Now he’s all offended about Trump!

The worst offenders of all are the American left’s cultural warriors, who daily wage some new battle over some imagined cultural offense, which has nothing to do with the lives of normal people but only the highly tuned sensibilities of those in the academic, publishing, and media ecospheres.

The Hillary supporters have the authoritarian mentality of small property owners. They are the mirror image of the “realist” Trump supporters, the difference being that the Trump supporters fall below the median income level, and are distressed and insecure, while the Hillary supporters stand above the median income level, and are prosperous but still insecure.

To manipulate them, the Democratic and Republican elites have both played a double game for forty years and have gotten away with it. They have incrementally yet quite comprehensively seized all economic and political power for themselves. They have perverted free media and even such basics of the democratic process as voting and accountability in elections. Elites on both sides have collaborated to engineer a revolution of economic decline for the working person, until the situation has reached unbearable proportions. The stock market may be doing well, and unemployment may theoretically be low, but people can’t afford housing and food, they can’t pay back student loans and other debts, their lives, wherever they live in this transformed country, are full of such misery that there is not a single word that an establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush says that makes sense to them.

This time, I truly believe, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them. When they did have a difference to choose from—i.e., the clear progressive choice, Bernie over Hillary, who consistently demonstrates beating Trump by double the margins Hillary does—the elites went for Hillary, even though she poses the greater risk of inaugurating Trump as president. And now you want us to listen to your panic alarms?

The game, for the elites, is over. This is true no matter what happens with the Sanders campaign. The Republican party as we have known it since the Reagan consensus (dating back to 1976) is over. The Democratic party doesn’t know it yet, but Bill Clinton’s neoliberalism (and what followed in his wake with complicity with Bush junior, and the continuation of Bush junior’s imperialist policies with Barack Obama) is also over, or well on its way to being over. The elites are in a cataclysmic state of panic, they don’t know whether to look right or left, they have no idea what to do with Trump, they don’t know what to do with the Bernie diehards, they have no idea how to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

And these same elites, both liberal and conservative, these same journalists and celebrities, became quite comfortable with Bush once the war on terror was on. They’ll get used to Trump too, his level of fascist escalation will soon be presented by The Times and other institutions as something our democracy can handle, just as they continually assured us during those eight years of gloom that our democracy could easily take care of Bush. We, the citizens, don’t need to get our hands dirty with implementing checks and balances, the elites will do it on our behalf. Soon, once he starts talking to the elites, you won’t even be that afraid of Trump. Wait, he’s the one who wants to make America great again, and what’s so wrong with that?

The election of Trump would end the Republican party as we know it, but more refreshingly it would also end the Democratic party as we know it. The limits of the academic left’s distracting cultural discourse in keeping economic dissatisfaction in check would be fully exposed. Trump threatens the stability of the fearmongering discourse of Sullivan and his like. The threat to their monopoly of discourse is the real reason for the panic.

Oh, and Hillary, good luck fighting Trump with your poll-tested reactions. Your calculated “offenses” against his offensiveness against women or minorities or Muslims are going to be as successful as the sixteen Republicans who’ve already tried it. You won’t be able to take on Trump because you do not speak the truth, you speak only elite mumbo-jumbo. Trump doesn’t speak the truth either, but he’s responding to something in the air that has an element of truth, and you don’t even go that far, you speak to a state of affairs—a meritocratic, democratic, pluralist America—that doesn’t even exist.

Donald Trump suddenly turns on Joe Scarborough: “Not much power or insight!”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to get rid of “Morning Joe” anytime soon. Despite he’s most shameless attempts, host Joe Scarborough does not appear likely to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick.

Much has been written about the more uncomfortably cozy relationship between the MSNBC host and the “presumptive” Republican presidential nominee, on-air and off.

“Mika and I certainly understand you’re really angry, because we called this first,” Scarborough smugly stated in March, running a montage of his past vaguely prescient remarks lauding the former reality TV star’s political skills.

“We saw it coming,” his co-host Mika Brezenski recently echoed. “We got it right.”

“Everybody else was stupid, and they were wrong every single day. We were right,” Scarborough, the fleece aficionado,  asserted.

But after it had become absolutely evident that Trump would, in fact, be the Republican presidential nominee, after his last remaining rivals lost in Indiana on Tuesday, Scarborough took on a more reserved tone about Trump’s impending candidacy.

“I was surprised and disappointed yesterday, [that] he stuck by the Muslim ban,” Scarborough said on MSNBC Thursday. “That’s a loser — it’s a loser with the majority of Americans, and you’ve got Republicans like me. I just — I’m not going to vote for him.”

This pledge to suddenly abandon his preferred presidential candidate coming the same morning guest and Hollywood director Rob Reiner chewed out the entire “Morning Joe” crew for failing to hold Trump accountable during their fawning coverage.

“We have to ask those tough second, third and fourth tier questions,” the comedian insisted of the hosts, pointing out that that their three hour political gabfest is “a talk show” and “not hard news.”

“The show part of it is getting bigger and bigger — where show business and news have blurred,” Reiner argued.

On Friday, Trump responded in-kind, on Twitter:

Joe Scarborough initially endorsed Jeb Bush and Jeb crashed, then John Kasich and that didn't work. Not much power or insight!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 6, 2016

I hear @JoeNBC of rapidly fading @Morning_Joe is pushing hard for a third party candidate to run. This will guarantee a Crooked Hillary win.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 6, 2016

Scarborough wasted little time tweeting out a frantic defense of his show:

https://twitter.com/JoeNBC/status/728...

"Rapidly fading?" Umm…we are enjoying our best ratings ever. Lots of luck, fella. https://t.co/DVsBHctzgd

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) May 6, 2016

London to elect first Muslim mayor of major Western city: Labour’s Sadiq Khan to unseat Conservative

Sadiq Khan is set to become the first Muslim mayor of a major Western city.

The Labour Party lawmaker won the election by a sizeable margin on Friday, defeating Conservative opponent Zac Goldsmith, the son of a billionaire business tycoon.

Khan, who is from a working-class Pakistani immigrant family, will be unseating Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson, who has ruled for eight years.

Incumbent Mayor Johnson is notorious for his libertarian, pro-corporate views, whereas Khan sits at the center-left, on the social democratic wing of the Labour Party.

Khan is to the right of and has attacked popular new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has been characterized as the Bernie Sanders of Britain, yet is to the left of the neoliberal Blairite wing of the party.

Despite their political differences, Corbyn congratulated Khan on Friday, writing that he can’t “wait to work with you to create a London that is fair for all,” using the slogan “Yes we Khan.”

Congratulations @SadiqKhan. Can't wait to work with you to create a London that is fair for all! #YesWeKhan pic.twitter.com/FqRjfY1xNT

— Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) May 6, 2016

Scholar Tony Travers told the Guardian that Khan is “the first Muslim mayor of a major Western city, certainly in Europe.” (Rotterdam, Netherlands and Calgary, Canada have Muslim mayors, but both are significantly smaller than capital cities like London.)

At a time when Islamophobia, racism and xenophobia are on the rise in Europe and the U.S., supporters say Khan’s victory is a positive sign.

Labour won roughly 44 percent of the vote in the assembly elections, while the Conservatives won 35 percent. A majority is needed in order to form a government, and Labour could potentially join with the Green Party, which won 6 percent, as well as the Women’s Equality Party, which won 2 percent, and the Respect Party and Cannabis is Safer than Alcohol Party, each of which won 1 percent.

British national radio station LBC noted that, because of the prominence of left-wing votes, it is mathematically “impossible” for Sadiq Khan to be beaten in the election.

It is now mathemetically impossible for Sadiq Khan to be beaten by Zac Goldsmith in the contest to become London Mayor.

— LBC Breaking (@lbcbreaking) May 6, 2016

Khan’s Conservative opponent, Zac Goldsmith, ran what was widely panned as a dirty campaign. As Salon previously reported, when Goldsmith fell behind in the polls, he began exploiting racist, Islamophobic stereotypes and tried to associate Khan with an extremist imam who turned out to actually be a Tory.

Former Conservative Party Chair Sayeeda Warsi wrote that Goldsmith’s “appalling dog whistle campaign for #LondonMayor2016 lost us the election, our reputation & credibility on issues of race and religion.”

Our appalling dog whistle campaign for #LondonMayor2016 lost us the election, our reputation & credibility on issues of race and religion.

— Sayeeda Warsi (@SayeedaWarsi) May 6, 2016

Andrew Boff, the Conservative group leader on the Greater London Assembly, condemned Goldsmith’s tactics, calling them “outrageous.”

Local BuzzFeed reporter Jim Waterson said city hall was “full of Tories saying they’re disgusted with him.”

Any London Conservatives who *do* want to defend Zac Goldsmith's campaign? City Hall just full of Tories saying they're disgusted with him.

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) May 6, 2016

The opponents’ backgrounds could hardly have been more different.

Goldsmith, the son of billionaire business tycoon James Goldsmith, went to elite schools with some of the U.K.’s most powerful politicians, including Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson, with whom he remains friends.

Khan comes from a working-class Pakistani immigrant family, and is the fifth of eight children. His father worked as a bus driver and his mother as a seamstress.

In 2005, Khan was elected into Parliament. As a lawmaker representing Tooting, London, he established himself as an outspoken critic of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, particularly on foreign policy.

The turnout in London for the assembly elections was 45.6 percent, a 7.6 percent increase since 2012.

Louis CK gets off the grid: The comedian says he’s quitting the internet for his kids

Louis CK has told us before how much hates Twitter, but now he’s taking his stance on technology a step further. In an appearance on TBS’s Conan on Thursday, the comic told Conan O’Brien that he’s quit the internet, “for now.”

He explained that he did it for his daughter, who “dies inside” every time he interrupts his time with her to look at his phone. “It’s a horrible abandonment,” he joked.

Louis says he had his daughter set a passcode that locks him off the internet on his phone. With his newfound freedom, he’s found himself approaching strangers to ask questions he’d normally type into Google and reading books again, like “Pride & Prejudice.”

Louis, who has two children, then shared a note from his daughter thanking him for making the change. “I think people should know that it has an impact on your kids if you stop looking at the stupid internet,” he said.

Watch the full clip below: