They start small, but then they grow

Back around 2005/2006, I noticed a couple of small, inconsequential right-wing blogs arguing that it was a terrible mistake to give women the vote. I noticed, but didn’t think it merited comment. After all, on the Internet, you can find someone proposing any conceivable theory, and these were hardly major players.
But just a few years later, the idea that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote had gone mainstream on the right.
Then a couple of years back, I read a right-wing minister’s screed (no links handy) about how God decreed that women should suffer in childbirth, ergo taking epidurals is against the will of God. This was worth commenting on (in a past blog post) because it fits into the religious right’s general distaste for women, but still I thought of it as a fringe view.
Not so much.
I suspect that as with Todd Akin‘s belief rape won’t get women pregnant, the apparent spread of these beliefs is illusory. It’s more likely that they were always there and they’re just coming more into view, a combination of the right wing’s surging ever rightwards and it’s desperate push-back against a world where male privilege is slowly shrinking (very slowly, but shrink it does).
Check out the slacktivist link, which asks the excellent question—if women have to endure childbirth in pain, why don’t the same Christians condemn men for not literally sweating to bring forth food from the soil.
•Right-wingers also freak out because Obama actually mentioned income inequality as a problem.
•I thought recent talk of the Post Office offering banking services was just a desperate way to improve its situation. But it sounds like it’s a good alternative to check-cashing stores and payday loans for people who can’t afford bank fees.
•A look at how Native Americans on one reservation think about the Washington Redskins team name.
•Apparently businesses that cater to the 1 percent are thriving. Businesses that cater to the little people? Doing poorer. There’s actually a book I read on this topic (but I forget the title) discussing how the middle ground between cheap crap and luxury goods is dwindling as retailer have to target either the very poor or the very rich.
•Gun advocate John Lott built an entire book around a survey he can’t prove he ever made. But in the world of punditry, he’s still taken seriously.
•The net neutrality battle continues. In other Internet news, Kansas legislators continue their fight against government-provided Internet services.
•Digby links to a great piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the meaning of the Obama presidency.
•A conservative explains “leftist culture” killed Philip Seymour Hoffman. Of course, this is standard fare; just recently I read a post explaining capitalism isn’t the reason Hollywood makes oversexed, overviolent movies, it’s liberalism! And a right-wing writer back in the late eighties once wrote that fraud and financial corruption on Wall Street was clearly the fault of liberalism for rejecting moral standards! So there. I’ll take the heat.