Republicans' Telling Sexual Fantasies

As numerous posts over the years have noted, the great majority of political sex scandals involve Republicans, including "family values" Republicans caught in same sex scandals (think GOP Senator Larry Craig or former Virginia 2nd district GOP Congressman Ed Schrock for starters).  At the same time, numerous reports find that the highest Internet porn usage is in the Bible Belt.  What's going on?  I've always believed that both phenomenon were a function of the repressive political and religious atmospheres in which the right wing types live: they are supposed to be monogamist who wouldn't even dare "lust in their hearts" over anyone but their spouse.  Yet, in reality, they want to have forbidden sex - seemingly lots of it.  A new study which looked at sexual fantasies of Republicans and Democrats seems to bear out this view of Republicans longing for "forbidden sex."  Less sexually repressed Democrats have far less longing for sex that involves infidelity.  A piece in Politico looks at the findings.  Here are some excerpts:

I surveyed 4,175 adult Americans from all 50 states about what turns them on and published the findings in a book entitled Tell Me What You Want. As part of this survey, participants were given a list of hundreds of different people, places and things that might be a turn-on. For each one, they reported on how frequently they fantasized about it.

I learned a lot about the nature of sexual desire in modern America, but one of the more intriguing things I uncovered was the political divide in our fantasy worlds.

While self-identified Republicans and self-identified Democrats reported fantasizing with the same average frequency—several times per week—I found that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to fantasize about a range of activities that involve sex outside of marriage. Think things like infidelity, orgies and partner swapping, from 70s-style “key parties” to modern-day forms of swinging. Republicans also reported more fantasies with voyeuristic themes, including visiting strip clubs and practicing something known as “cuckolding,” which involves watching one’s partner have sex with someone else.

As I argue in Tell Me What You Want, the supersized sexual appeal that non-monogamous and voyeuristic acts hold for Republicans likely stems from the fact that sex outside of marriage and multi-partner sex are huge no-nos in a political party that continues to make “traditional marriage” one of the cornerstones of its official platform and regularly funnels federal funds toward abstinence-only sex education. Nothing makes us want to try something like being told you can’t do it. This is why taboos, no matter what they are, often become turn-ons.

The appeal of the taboo stems from a long-standing principle of psychology known as reactance—which stipulates that when our freedom is threatened and we’re told we can’t do something, we want to do it even more. Many a parent has discovered this principle and used it to their benefit in shaping their children’s behavior through reverse psychology: Frame the desired act as something your child isn’t allowed to do and you just might get what you want.

To be sure, sexual fantasies have complex origins. They aren’t just a product of our political affiliation and what we’re told we can’t or shouldn’t do—there are myriad other factors that contribute to why we develop the turn-ons that we do. But my research suggests that politics certainly seems to play some role.

Following [Sarah] Palin, the next most frequently mentioned politicians in Republicans’ fantasies were John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Nikki Haley. . . .  (Note that my data were collected in 2014 and 2015 before the Trump presidency began and only into the early days of his campaign. At that time, I only received one fantasy about Donald Trump in the entire dataset.)

Again, it was nice to see my analysis about sexually repressed Republicans - and by extension, Christofascists - borne out.

16 States Want Gays to Be Exempt from Civil Rights Protections

Anti-LGBT animus is alive and well 16 states - most in the South/Bible Belt - except for Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska and Maine (thanks to its lunatic GOP governor) - where the attorneys general have filed briefs urging the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that companies can fire workers based on their sexual orientation and gender identity without violating federal workplace discrimination laws.  The goal is the reversal of the EEOC position that firing gays or transgender is all about sex and sexuality and, therefore, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is applicable.  The filing is motivated by Jeff Session's Justice Department position that ‘sex’ under the terms of Title VII does not mean anything other than biological status as determined at birth which is in direct opposition to the EEOC position.  As Joe Jervis notes, the brief was co-authored by Nebraska Deputy Attorney General David Bydalek, formerly policy director of the vociferously anti-gay Nebraska affiliate of Focus On The Family.  One can only hope that progressive corporations and businesses take not and avoid these states.  Here are highlights from Bloomberg:

A group of 16 states urged the U.S. Supreme Court Aug. 23 to rule that companies can fire workers based on their sexual orientation and gender identity without violating federal workplace discrimination law.

The states, led by Nebraska Attorney General David Bydalek, asked the justices to overturn an appeals court decision against a Michigan funeral home that fired a transgender worker. They said Congress didn’t intend the ban on sex discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to cover bias against lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender employees.

“The States’ purpose is to note that ‘sex’ under the plain terms of Title VII does not mean anything other than biological status,” Bydalek wrote.

The friend-of-the-court brief is the latest development in a legal debate that has divided courts and exposed a rift within the Trump administration. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says LGBT bias already is banned, but the Justice Department disagrees.

The EEOC successfully sued on behalf of Aimee Stephens, who was fired from her job at R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes after telling a supervisor she was transitioning to a woman. But the agency must get the Justice Department’s approval if it wants to participate in the case at the Supreme Court level.

A total of 13 Republican attorneys general, including those representing Texas, Alabama, Kansas, and Utah, signed on to the brief. Three GOP governors— Matthew Bevin (Kentucky), Paul LePage (Maine), and Phil Bryant (Mississippi)—also joined in the court filing.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide in the coming months whether to take up the case. It’s also been asked to consider two other cases testing whether sexual orientation bias is a form of sex discrimination banned under the existing law.

Laws in 20 states and Washington, D.C., directly ban employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. That includes bans in Utah and Maine.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 2017 became the first federal appeals court in the country to conclude that transgender bias is a form of sex discrimination under Title VII when it said Harris Funeral Homes violated the law by firing Stephens.

How a Porn Star Became More Credible Than Trump

A piece in Vanity Fair takes a look at why Stormy Daniels is viewed by many as more credible than Donald Trump (I never give him the title "president" since it diminishes the office).  True, Trump is a pathological liar and lies about countless things where only someone brain dead and utterly incurious would know in a heartbeat - or after a quick Google search - that the words flowing from Trump's lips are complete lies or, at best, half truths.  Instead, the piece suggests that porn and porn performers have become more respectable and that as a consequence stigma that once might have destroyed Daniels' credibility has greatly abated.   Indeed, the Bible Belt has the highest use of Internet porn.  Here are article highlights and I'd like to know what readers think:

It wasn’t so long ago that the sort of person who made their livelihood by starring in a film called Sexbots: Programmed for Pleasure, or who staged a nationwide strip-club tour under the banner “Make America Horny Again,” would have had some serious credibility issues. Yet ever since she emerged as a fetching national figure, Stephanie Clifford, the adult-film actress and exotic dancer known as Stormy Daniels, has resoundingly appeared more credible than [Trump]the president. It’s the result, certainly, of Trump’s own complications with honesty, . . . . And it also has something to do with Clifford’s sangfroid as a canny, press-savvy entrepreneur and entertainer.

She seemed preternaturally collected during her much-hyped appearance on 60 Minutes. Indeed, after federal agents raided the office and hotel room of Michael Cohen, who offered Clifford $130,000 in hush money, it is [Trump] the president who has seemed ruffled and the porn star who seems demure. One presumes they will both be watching her appearance on The View on Tuesday.

But Clifford’s credibility also owes to a less obvious transformation that took place during the 1990s, when the culture, if inadvertently, was beginning to normalize porn. Long considered a medium that degraded women, exploited actors, and de-valued sexual intimacy, pornography began gaining mainstream traction in the 1980s. It became inexpensive and ubiquitous thanks to videotapes, cable, satellite, pay-per-view, and CD-ROMs, developing into a multi-billion-dollar industry.

After the introduction of the World Wide Web, in 1991, a new boom followed: online porn, which opened the kimono to every age, demo, geographic region, and kink. And with a culturally progressive president occupying the White House, porn prosecutions—which had been on the rise under Ronald Reagan—virtually dried up.

At the same time, baby boomers were coming of age, and many of them, children of the counterculture, considered porn a form of pop-culture camp. The guy and gal next door suddenly realized that they, too, could make a career for a while by getting down and dirty in front of a video camera.

The 90s was also a period of peak erotic indulgence and adult entertainment. Massage parlors and “spas”—fronts for sexual favors—set up shop in suburban strip malls. Several thousand gentleman’s clubs, many of them decidedly upscale, operated across the heartland. The stories and struggles of exotic dancers, adult-film performers, escorts, and sex workers—who were often socially and economically disadvantaged to begin with—surfaced in the press and on the screen.

Which is another way of saying that Clifford’s stock-in-trade had become rather ho-hum—a career so common that it would not disqualify someone like her from comporting (or posing for pictures) with a future president—a man whose name until recently graced Atlantic City’s Taj Mahal, once home to a strip club.

All of this occurred against the backdrop of the tabloidization of the news. In the 80s and 90s, news items that involved infidelity, crime, violence, or graphic footage were referred to, among America’s editors and news directors, as sexy. . . . . Meanwhile, TV newsmagazines and supermarket tabloids were turning the nocturnal exploits of public personalities into addictive serials.

And now, of course, Clifford seems almost a conventional player in a Trump-era news cycle that has brought us Anthony Scaramucci, Don King, and the Mnuchins taking selfies at the U.S. Mint. During these crazy days, a scandal with a porn star is at least a crisis [Trump] with precedent.

Add to all of this Trump's own sleazy escapades and serial adulteries, and perhaps the author is on to something. 

Hypocrisy Alert: Trump Administration Pushes Abstinence-Only Education

Coincidence?  Not at all.

A serial adulterer who has boasted about sexually assaulting women occupies the White House thanks to evangelical Christians. So what are these "godly folk" pushing?  Abstinence only sex education which study after study have found NOT to work.  Indeed, industrial nations with science based comprehensive sex education programs have far lower teen pregnancy rates than the United States.  Likewise, states with the most comprehensive, fact based sex education programs have far lower teen pregnancy rates than deep red states in the so-called Bible belt which has the highest teen pregnancy rate and the highest divorce rate  - and the highest usage of Internet pornography - which suggests that evangelicals ought to be worrying more about their own sex lives (and that of their "dear leader") than those of others.  The idiocy and hypocrisy is off the charts.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this batshitry (I have edited out the false term "social conservatives):

Abstinence-only sex education — long-championed by [Christian extremists] social conservatives — is reemerging as the preferred approach during the Trump administration, a political era in which there's increasing attention to the alleged past sexual activity of its leader.

[Christian extremists] Social conservatives at the Department of Health and Human Services say the current White House is more supportive of abstinence education than the Obama administration.

In addition to allocating millions of dollars to programs that encourage teens to abstain from sex, groups seeking Title X federal family planning funds are being asked to place a “meaningful emphasis” on “the benefits of avoiding sex” in their sex education and to avoid programs that “normalize sexual risk behaviors.”

But data shows that teens are having sex less and that the teen pregnancy rate has declined, arguably in part because of the more comprehensive sex education programs of the Obama era.

Births among Hispanic and black teens have dropped by nearly half since 2006, according to the CDC.

And the most recent report from the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the teen birthrate in the United States is at a record low, dropping below 25 births per 1,000 teen females for the first time since the government began collecting consistent data on births to teens ages 15 to 19.

Perhaps support for abstinence-only education is in part rooted in what is happening in the communities of [Christian extremists] social conservatives. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof said:

“When evangelical kids have sex, they’re less likely to use birth control — and that may be a reason (along with lower abortion rates) that red states have high teen birthrates.

Nine of the 10 states with the highest teen birthrates voted Republican in 2016. And nine of the 10 states with the lowest teen birthrates voted Democratic.”

[T]he 10 states with the highest teen birthrates are: Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Texas, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Mexico, West Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee. President Trump won in all those states except New Mexico.

Despite the interest in teens' sex lives from some affiliated with [Christian extremist] socially conservative groups, others from those same organizations appear to have little concern about the sex life of the president they support.

Robert Jeffress, who also is one of Trump’s most high-profile faith advisers, told Fox News: “Evangelicals still believe in the commandment: Thou shalt not have sex with a porn star. However, whether this president violated that commandment or not is totally irrelevant to our support of him.”

Trump has failed to be a strong leader when it comes to morals, especially sexual ethics. In addition to reports about his infidelity, nearly 20 women have accused the president of sexual misconduct.

It is far past time that the deceptive term "social conservatives" cease being used by the media.  These groups and their followers need to be accurately called what they are, Christian extremists.  As for their claims of moral superiority, their loyalty to Trump underscores their utter hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy.  Give me a moral atheist any day over a "godly Christians."

Blue States Practice the Family Values Red States Pretend to Preach

One of the ironies - and signs of the sick hypocrisy of the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who dominate politics in so-called  red states - is that red states have some of the highest levels of societal dysfunction in the country: highest teen pregnancies, the most child marriages, highest divorce rate, highest poverty levels, etc.  Meanwhile, red states also have the highest Internet porn usage and levels of prostitution.  In contrast, the blue states - godless states controlled by Satan if one believes the rants of Christofascist - have nowhere near the levels of societal dysfunction.  Stated another way, the majority of residents of blue states practice the family values the evangelicals claim to support while it is the evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians who most frequently trash true family values.  A column in the New York Times looks at the role reversal of who actually puts so-called family values into practice.  Here are excerpts:

As we watch Roy Moore thumping his Bible to defend himself from accusations of child molestation, let me toss out a verbal hand grenade: To some degree, liberals practice the values that conservatives preach.

This is complicated terrain with lots of exceptions, and the recent scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Al Franken underscore that liberals can be skunks as much as anyone else. Yet if one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it’s striking that conservatives champion “family values” even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast, people in blue states don’t trumpet these family values but often seem to do a better job living them.

[O]f 32 states, those with the highest percentage of high school students who say they have had sex are Mississippi, Delaware, West Virginia, Alabama and Arkansas. All but Delaware voted Republican in the last presidential election.

Meanwhile, the five states with the lowest proportion of high school students who have had sex were New York, California, Maryland, Nebraska and Connecticut. All but Nebraska voted Democratic.

When evangelical kids have sex, they’re less likely to use birth control — and that may be a reason (along with lower abortion rates) that red states have high teen birthrates. Nine of the 10 states with the highest teen birthrates voted Republican in 2016. And nine of the 10 states with the lowest teen birthrates voted Democratic.

“Red regions of the country have higher teen pregnancy rates, more shotgun marriages and lower average ages at marriage and first birth,” Naomi Cahn and June Carbone wrote in their important 2010 book, “Red Families v. Blue Families.”

“Blue family values bristle at restrictions on sexuality, insistence on marriage or the stigmatization of single parents. Their secret, however, is that they encourage their children to simultaneously combine public tolerance with private discipline, and their children then overwhelmingly choose to raise their own children within two-parent families.”

Liberals, in other words, may be wary of strict moral codes, but they want to make damn sure that their own kids don’t have babies while in high school. It helps that they believe in comprehensive sex education and reliable birth control.

[T]he dozen states with the highest rates of child marriage, all voted Republican in 2016.  “Child marriage is happening at an alarming rate across the U.S., but available marriage-license data show more parents, judges and clerks in red states than in blue states seem comfortable with this human-rights abuse,” said Fraidy Reiss, founder of Unchained at Last, a nonprofit that fights child marriage.

Divorce rates show a similar pattern: They tend to be higher in red states than in blue states, with Arkansas highest of all. “Individual religious conservatism is positively related to individual divorce risk,” according to a 50-state study reported in the American Journal of Sociology.

Then there’s adultery and prostitution. One large international survey found that the largest group of customers on Ashley Madison, the dating website for married people, were evangelical Christians. And a major 2013 study found that men in the Houston and Kansas City metro areas were the most likely to call sex ads, while men in San Francisco and Baltimore were the least likely to.

[S]tatistical analysis suggests that religious conservatives end up divorcing partly because they marry early, are less likely to go to college and are disproportionately poor.

So the deeper problem seems to be the political choices that conservatives make, underinvesting in public education and social services (including contraception). This underinvestment leaves red states poorer and less educated — and thus prone to a fraying of the social fabric.

Liberals and conservatives alike don’t want kids pregnant at 16, and we almost all seek committed marriages that last. It’s worth noting that Bible-thumping blowhards like Roy Moore don’t help achieve those values, while investments in education and family planning do.

Here in Virginia, if one contrasts the conservative Christian/Republican areas of Southwest Virginia with the much more liberal so-called urban crescent, similar finds result.  The areas whining about family values practice them the least and are the most socially dysfunction.  Pretend piety in the pews does not translate into practice in everyday life.

How the Bible Belt Lost God and found Trump

This past week and through tomorrow, many self-styled evangelical Christians have been attending church services for Holy Week and tomorrow will be engaging in acts of outward piety and wearing their religiosity on their sleeves. Don't be fooled by the outward displays.  81% of these same people voted for a serial adultery and sexual aggressor, not to mention narcissist and pathological liar.  Just as telling, they support the GOP agenda to destroy the social safety net and throw millions off of health insurance. In short, they are the antithesis of the true Gospel message.  So why does the media continue to treat them with deference and undeserved respect?  A piece in the Financial Times looks at how evangelical Christians have basically discarded their faith other than outward trappings of church going and protestations of religiosity and piety.  In practice, these people make the Pharisees of the Bible look like upstanding, charity-filled philanthropists.  Here's the money quote on their hypocrisy:

A Pew Research Center study in 2015 found that evangelical Protestants in the US were more likely to be divorced or separated than Catholics, Jews, Muslims or atheists.

“Jesus says four times in four different places: do not divorce,” Flynt says. “Does divorce bother evangelicals? No, absolutely not. Does adultery bother evangelicals? No, not really, because if so they wouldn’t have voted for Donald Trump. So what bothers them? Abortion and same-sex marriage. Beyond that, there’s no longer an agenda.” 

Read the entire article which holds few punches.  As I have said often, I no longer call myself a Christian.  I want NOTHING to do with these foul and toxic hypocrites.  A third of Millennials seem similarly inclined as they have walked away from organized religion.  

Trump Internet Trolls Upset Over Gutting of Online Privacy

I'm less than thrilled with the Republican move to gut online privacy protections put in place under the Obama administration.   Der Trumpenführer has promised to sign the GOP passed legislation. Some have argued that the move will be a boon for the FBI.  Meanwhile Verizon, Comcast and others will be racking in the cash.  Ironically, some Trump supporters are up in arms and, if you think about it, rightly so.  All those Trump supporters frequently white supremacist websites will have their data tracked and sold.  Even more humorous is that fact that all the evangelical Christians in the South - you know, the anti-LGBT "godly folk" who use more Internet porn than anyone else - will likewise have their Internet usage tracked and sold (one can only hope they get some "interesting" marketing materials mailed to them via the Postal Service!).  Lastly, there are the true political trolls at sites like Free Republic and other wacko right wing sites who will similarly be tracked.  As Think Progress reports, many of these deplorables are not happy.  Here are excerpts:

Of all the constituencies that supported Donald Trump last November—working class white voters; anti-establishmentarians; the Ku Klux Klan—perhaps none displayed more unwavering, unyielding loyalty than his army of online trolls.

You know the ones: the Pepe-loving, hashtag-tweeting deplorables. They weaponized memes the way political operatives typically weaponize phone banks, and their effectiveness was rewarded by the loving embrace of Donald Trump himself, who bent over backwards to engage with the internet’s most vile users.

Even as some voters began expressing remorse for entrusting a misogynistic failed businessman with improving their health care and saving jobs, Trump’s army of trolls—on 4chan, on gab.ai, and, most notably, on the r/The_Donald subreddit—remained steadfast.

At least, until this week.

Earlier this week, Republicans muscled a bill through Congress that strips away Obama-era protections on users’ online privacy, opening the door for internet service providers to begin selling their customers’ private information to the highest bidder. Everything from a user’s location to their shopping habits to their browsing history will be on the menu.

For a group of people whose cretinous online behavior is predicated on remaining largely anonymous, such a disruption would be unwelcome to say the least. And the fact that the Trump administration has vowed to sign such a bill into law has proven to be a very triggering turn of events.

Now, users in Donald Trump’s online safe spaces are cycling through all seven stages of grief.

But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, a scam artist who bilked hundreds of people by creating a fraudulent university atop a charter of “trust me, I got this.” Is it any wonder, then, that some Trump supporters still assume the president knows what he’s doing, even when all the evidence suggests otherwise?

These folks wanted "deregulation" and that's what they are getting.  Sometimes one needs to be careful what they wish for.  Before it's over, these folks may realize they brought a nightmare on themselves. 

Taking the South's Pathologies Nationwide

I have lived in the South for more than 2/3's of my lifetime at this point although, thankfully, the Hampton Roads area of Virginia becomes a little less Southern with each passing day in part because of the constant rotation of military members and their families through the area.   Alabama and Texas where I also lived in the past and much of the rest of the region are akin to someone with a significant case of bi-polar disorder who refuses to remain on their medications.  Some days one sees sweetness and light and graciousness and others one sees racism and bigotry and the embrace of ignorance that is downright chilling.  Some southerners live in a fantasy world where they are akin to the Saxon nobles in Ivanhoe resisting the Norman ascendancy.  Others embody the worse elements of the Klan and/or religious extremism. Despite its proclaimed religiosity, the Bible Belt has the highest teen pregnancy rates, the highest Internet porn usage, and the highest divorce rate.  Education levels also are among the lowest in the nation.  Now, Donald Trump and the Republican Party want to spread this dysfunction nationwide.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this disturbing prospect.  Here are highlights:  

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in Mississippi or Alabama? Well if the GOP has its way, you’ll get the chance to find out.

That’s because Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, through the executive branch leadership now being assembled and the legislative priorities they have laid out, are preparing to take the economic, political, and social arrangements of the South and spread them across the country.

The desire to southernize the entire United States is not new, and in some ways it’s been happening for a while, at least where Republicans have control of government. But now that Republicans have complete control in Washington, they’re going to try to accelerate and deepen that process. Let’s look at it piece by piece:

The Southern economic model. The first and most far-reaching component of this project is to take the Southern economic model national. The foundation of that model is the elimination of collective bargaining and the destruction of the labor unions that are able to negotiate higher wages and better benefits for workers. The Southern model replaces the North’s high-wage, unionized manufacturing with a low-wage, low-benefit version that has succeeded in drawing many factories southward. Southern states have lured companies with gigantic tax breaks and the promise of a powerless and desperate workforce. The result is often more jobs in those Southern states, but worse jobs. . . . multiple forces including the crippling of unions and the emergence of Walmart as the nation’s largest retailer have acted to pull wages and benefits across the country down toward the South’s level.

Yesterday we learned that Trump will nominate Andrew Puzder, the CEO of the fast-food company CKE Restaurant Holdings, to be Secretary of Labor. . . . . Puzder is an ardent opponent of minimum wage increases, expanded overtime pay, paid sick leave, health coverage for workers, and collective bargaining. While he’s toiling at the Labor Department for the interests of corporations, Republicans will almost certainly try to pass a federal “right to work” law — the kind now in force in states across the South — as part of their effort to destroy labor unions once and for all.

The Southern health care model. The Republicans’ first legislative priority is to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and while we don’t yet know what form that repeal (or its replacement) will take, the people most vulnerable are the estimated 12 million who would lose the coverage they gained because of the law’s expansion of Medicaid. Nineteen states refused to accept that expansion, preferring to keep their poor citizens uninsured . . . . the largest group of states was in the South: 10 of the 11 states of the Confederacy (Louisiana being the sole exception) refused the Medicaid expansion. 

The Southern education model. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is not an educator or education administrator; using her wealth as the wife of an heir to the Amway fortune, she has devoted her efforts to essentially trying to destroy public education in her home state of Michigan and in America more generally. DeVos advocates for vouchers that can be used at private and religious schools, and for the expansion of for-profit charter schools with as little oversight as possible. . . . . it’s a system that is particularly strong in the South, where not only charter schools (which have support in many places) but private vouchers (which have far less support) are prevalent.

The Southern civil rights model. For his Attorney General, Trump picked Alabama’s Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, named for the president of the Confederacy and a Confederate general. Sessions was rejected by the Senate in the 1980s for a judgeship because of his history of what these days we call “racially charged” comments. His most famous case as a prosecutor involved his unsuccessful prosecution of a former aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom Sessions went after for helping elderly African-Americans to vote absentee. While we don’t know exactly what Sessions’ agenda is, it’s a fair bet that vigorous enforcement of civil rights protections will not be high on his list.

In addition, Republicans will almost certainly be taking their voter suppression crusade national, especially given how successful it has been in putting up voting barriers to African-Americans, Latinos, and other people who might cast ballots for Democrats. Look for federal versions of voter ID laws, limits on early voting, and bans on same-day registration.

The Southern abortion rights model. As I’ve explained, not only are Republican eager to overturn Roe v. Wade; even with that precedent intact they may try to pass federal laws that make the whole country like the South when it comes to abortion. That would mean that it’s technically legal to get one, even as a series of onerous laws targeting both abortion providers and the women who seek abortions make them extraordinarily difficult to obtain.

The Southern environmental model. Trump has named Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, in a clear sign that he believes the first two words of the agency’s name are no longer operative. This too could represent a nationalization of what prevails in the South, where officials in Republican-dominated states see environmental protection as essentially a nuisance for corporations and the most pressing environmental question is how many wells we can drill.

During the 2016 campaign, some commentators noted that Donald Trump’s rhetoric bore a disturbing resemblance to the backlash to Reconstruction a century and a half ago. Now, as one constitutional scholar recently told this blog, it’s not unreasonable to expect “the beginning of the end of the Second Reconstruction.”

Think of what is worse for the majority of Americans and that more or less sums up the Trump/Republican agenda.  The wealthy and large corporations will thrive, but the rest of us not so much.  

The Mormon Church's "War on Pornography"

Gail Dines - Mormon ally

Recently, I noted that an effort was underway in Utah to outlaw pornography - even though Utah has the highest rate of  subscriptions to Internet porn sites in the nation.  Shortly thereafter, an op-ed appeared in the Washington Post that sought to argue that pornography is a "public health crisis" supposedly because porn encourages violence against women, etc.   It turns out that one needs to hear the rest of the story as Paul Harvey used to say.  The author of the op-ed, Gail Dines, is described in a piece in The Atlantic as a self-identifying radical feminist and “anti-porn advocate,” who sees male aggression under ever bush (admittedly, being gay, I don't exactly watch straight porn, but Dines' claims in the piece struck me as more than a bit extreme).  Moreover, she has been in league with the Mormon Church and its political puppets. Here are excerpts fro the piece in The Atlantic which looks at the bizarre alliance of these unlikely forces:

To sociologist Gail Dines, a self-identifying radical feminist and “anti-porn advocate,” these findings added to a body of evidence that she deemed conclusive. Dines believes that non-coercive pornography cannot exist in a capitalist society, where sex-based media will always lead to an industry that becomes a violent manifestation of structural inequalities. In The Washington Postthis weekend, Dines wrote a column that spread widely: “Is Porn Immoral? That Doesn’t Matter: It’s a Public-Health Crisis.” The divisive proclamation was occasioned by a bill passed last month in Utah declaring pornography to be “a public-health crisis.” The bill, like the phrase, traces back to Dines, who has spoken and lectured on the evils of pornography around the world. Dines made the same argument to legislators in the U.S. Capitol Building, at an anti-pornography summit. There she reached an unlikely confederate, a Republican state senator from Utah named Todd Weiler. A blonde, 48-year-old divorce attorney, Weiler returned to his home state to champion the bill. When the text of the bill made it to the Internet, Weiler recalls, it “went viral” and he was “immediately inundated with criticism.” This was, in part, over contentious claims being presented as simple fact, like “WHEREAS, pornography use is linked to lessening desire in young men to marry, dissatisfaction in marriage, and infidelity.” For facts and science, the senator directs me to a Utah-based group called Fight the New Drug. (The new drug is pornography.) The group’s “Facts” page offers much in the way of terse declarative aphorisms; such facts as “Porn hates families,” “Porn leaves you lonely,” and “Porn addiction escalates.”  The group denies a formal affiliation with the Mormon church, though as journalist Samantha Allen notes, its founders are all Mormon, and its facts rely on claims from Mormon author Donald Hilton’s He Restoreth My Soul: Understanding and Breaking the Chemical and Spiritual Chains of Pornography through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Olson and company sell the ideological argument as a “just the facts” approach. Less transparent than an openly ideology-driven strategy, the just-the-facts approach is rather a just-some-of-the-facts approach. Comparisons of drugs and porn have proven less clear-cut than suggested by the intuitive leap that all dopamine-based reward systems must be different degrees of the same thing. While drug abuse is perennially among the leading drivers of morbidity and mortality, the American Academy of Psychiatry has repeatedly deemed evidence insufficient that sex and porn addiction be recognized as mental disorders.  [R]esearcher Nicole Prause . . . found in another study that watching pornography did not seem to kill love, but rather increased people’s likelihood of being aroused by other media, and increased the desire for sex with their partners. The journalist Maria Konnikova recounted last year in Aeon that when Danish criminologist Berl Kutchinsky charted sexual aggression in the two decades after Denmark and Sweden legalized pornography, the crimes did not increase in step with pornography distribution, but actually declined. This suggested to him that pornography was an outlet for sexual expression less than a driver of problematic real-world behavior.  While Dines and others cite many correlations between pornography consumption and negative health outcomes, the causal relationship is rarely explicit. Making that leap is especially tenuous when studies rely on subjects recalling and reporting information about taboo behaviors and thoughts, a notoriously unreliable approach.

In my personal view, what really causes porn use is sexual dysfunction stemming from religious brainwashing that makes normal human sexuality into something vile and dirty that must be repressed. The resulting self-hate and sexual repression are the real triggers for porn use and fulfilling relationships.  Look no farther than the Catholic priesthood or the Bible Belt with its high divorce rate, high teen pregnancy rate, and volumes of false piety to see the fruits of psyche killing religious dogma.   

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Utah’s Hypocritical War on Porn

A favorite pass time of mine on this blog is focusing on hypocrisy.  Nowhere does hypocrisy intersect more than with conservative strains of religion and politicians who sell their souls to religious zealots and extremists.  Typically, hypocrisy is at its highest in the Bible Belt where despite feigned religiosity, one finds the highest divorce rates, the most teen pregnancies, the highest effort to slash the social safety net, and high Internet porn usage.  But there is another state where one sees similar hypocrisy: Utah, home of the Mormon Church where Internet porn usage is off the charts.  Like political whores elsewhere, Utah politicians have launched a campaign to save the states sexually repressed and sexually frustrated citizens from themselves waging war on Internet porn.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the rank hypocrisy.  Here are excerpts:

In a unanimous vote, the Utah House of Representatives passed a resolution this week branding pornography a public health hazard; a crisis its citizens need to be protected from.

The resolution calls for “education, prevention, research, and policy change at the community and societal level in order to address the pornography epidemic that is harming the people of our state and nation,” but does not offer any solutions. This from a state that ranked number one in online porn subscriptions, according to a 2009 Harvard study.

Renowned New York City sex therapist Dr. Stephen Snyder says the availability of internet porn is not any more of a problem than other socioeconomic issues Americans today face, including stagnant middle class wages and the continued decline of the two-parent household. “Any time you put limits on what can be communicated about sex, you increase the potential for sexual shame—which let’s face it, is already pretty high for most Americans even under the best of circumstances,” says Dr. Snyder. “And whenever you increase sexual shame, you’re going to see an increase in compulsive sexual activity, whether it's compulsive porn use or any other kind. Shame is rocket fuel for compulsions.”

The heavily-Mormon state seems to have a love-hate relationship with pornography, and a sense of shame over it as well. Here, the desire for porn has also birthed a plethora of anti-porn groups to combat the evils of consumption. On March 12^th, the Utah Coalition Against Pornography held its 14^th annual conference in Salt Lake City. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the LDS church, was one of its keynote speakers—and likened porn to the plague.

“Pornography ought to be seen like a public health crisis; like a war; like an infectious, fatal epidemic; like a moral plague on the body politic that is maiming the lives of our citizens,” said Holland . Concerned for future generations, anti-pornography groups like the Utah-based non-profit, Fight the New Drug lecture at high schools on pornography’s so-called deleterious effects. Unfortunately, no one seems to be lecturing about STDs at these same high schools. Are the perceived dangers of pornography worse than the threat of STDs?

In lieu of sex-ed, most of Utah’s schools continue to offer abstinence-only programs and prohibit public school teachers from encouraging contraceptives, which could be why chlamydia was the most frequently reported communicable disease in Utah in 2011. Two-thirds of those cases were among 15 to 24 year olds.

However, Utah Senator Todd Weiler isn’t advocating for the expansion of sex-ed. He instead wants policies that further protect underage consumers from pornography, admitting in the resolution he’s spearheaded that “exposure to pornography often serves as childrens’ and youths’ sex education and shapes their sexual templates.” Porn should not fill those educational voids abstinence-only programs create, but in the absence of information, unfortunately, it does. When kids have questions no one will answer they don’t head for a stack of well-worn encyclopedias—they search for it online.

“People like to preach their religious ideologies about family values, saving the kids, and making sure they still have good moral fiber which they say porn destroys, but I could make the same argument for social media,” says adult actor Derrick Pierce. “Those same kids that are told sex is bad, don’t do it, it’s only for reproduction, when those kids get older and figure out they can make their own choices, they do and they make them tenfold because they want to know what all the fuss is about.”

Weiler’s resolution is “a half-measure and a diva-esque attempt to grab headlines” says award winning adult performer and director, Tanya Tate. “If Weiler were truly committed, he would look at Harvard’s 2009 study that found Utah’s religious residents were the nation’s top consumers of online porn and work on religion and the reason it drives so many in his home state to explore porn,” says Tate.
  

Is "Sex Addiction" a Myth?

It seems that so many times when a right wing, "family values" Republican or a member of the professional Christian crowd gets caught in a sex scandal, they immediately claim to suffer from "sex addiction" and run off to some loony "Christian" ministry to get "cured."  Nasty pig Josh Duggar is but one recent example.  But does "sex addiction" really exist?  A piece in Salon noted that it is NOT in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Yet the godly folk and their political whores in the GOP seem to use it constantly as an excuse for their bad behavior. Too me, the real truth may be that those who use the excuse are merely masking their rebellion from sexually obsessed conservative religious dogma and constantly repressed sexual urges that find little outlet except via porn or adulterous affairs (or molestation of altar boys if one is a Catholic priest).  Here are highlights from the piece:

Porn addiction does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And yet the label seems to pop up everywhere. There are counselors who warn against the addictive nature of pornography. Anti-porn advocates have been quick to blame the industry for the degradation of human relationships. And others have begun advertising treatment plans to remedy the “disorder.”

There are individuals who lose hours — even days — to pornography. There are also a number of individuals who have spent all their money on porn products and escorts. That’s a real problem. Compulsive behavior patterns are a real problem. And those consumed by them need professional help.

What’s curious, however, is that these individuals don’t seem to make up the majority of self-identifying “porn addicts” out there.

Joshua Grubbs of Case Western has been examining the concept of porn addiction for the past five years. He told AlterNet, “I noticed that people, particularly religious people, were really quick to use the addiction label. They were really fast to say, ‘I’m an addict, I’m an addict, I’m addicted to this. I can’t control myself.’ And I started to think, ‘Well, something’s not adding up.’”

He added, “You know how hard it is to convince [an addict] that they have a problem? They don’t just come out and say, ‘Oh, I’m an addict.’ They don’t do that until they’re in recovery.”

So when are these labels most likely to come up? And by whom are they assigned? Some experts suggest that the concepts of “porn addiction” and “sex addiction” are used to explain away behaviors condemned by socially (and sexually) conservative societies. Think about celebrities like David Duchovny and Tiger Woods, and what led them to come forward with their “addictions.” Dr. Mark Griffith writes, “It becomes a problem only when you’re discovered.”

Grubbs suggests most self-identifying “porn addicts” simply don’t meet a clinical criteria.
In January 2015, he published research finding that religiosity tended to be more closely related to porn addiction than porn consumption itself.

“Porn addiction, sex addiction are so closely related to religious and moral beliefs about sexuality,” Grubbs says. “If you’re coming from a religious tradition that says that indulging sexual desires outside the confines of heterosexual committed marriage is wrong, any sexual impulse that you have that doesn’t fit that prescribed criteria is going to produce guilt and distress.

“Conceptually, it would make sense that it’s easier to say ‘I’m an addict’ than to say that what I believe about sex is maybe not the healthiest belief.”

[W]e went to Amazon to check out its selection of books on “porn addiction.” No fewer than 404 results popped up in the Religion & Spirituality category. Less than half that number appeared in the Psychology & Counseling section.

Grubbs and his team found that the “psychological distress” caused by porn addiction relates to the label itself, not the material it refers to. According to his research, identifying as a porn addict was likely to bring on feelings of depression, anxiety, anger and distress. Porn use itself had no “reliable relationship” to these symptoms.

Clinical psychologist David Ley, author of “The Myth of Sex Addiction,” told AlterNet in an email, “Decades of research shows that sex and porn are not addictive. Instead, the notion of porn addiction reflects people’s moral and social fears of sex.”

Grubbs says, “Ideally what we’re doing now will help people change their approach to treatment. Just because someone identifies as a porn addict doesn’t necessarily mean you need to treat them like an addict. You need to treat them like someone who is experiencing a lot of self-stigma.” 

I continue to view deep ultra conservative religiosity as a form of mental illness. Claims of "sex addiction" might be better described as symptoms of "post-traumatic church syndrome" since the real root cause of the guilt and anxiety is insane religious brainwashing.