I am relieved – the Rockettes don’t have to perform at Trump’s coronation inauguration if they won’t want to. Unlike some women in show business, they get to say No to Donnie from Queens.

Within hours of confirming plans to appear at the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, the Radio City Rockettes were plunged into a maelstrom of social-media outrage Friday amidreports that the performers were contractually obligated to dance at the ceremony or lose their jobs.

But as the day wore on, both the Madison Square Garden Company, which manages the Rockettes, and their union, the American Guild of Variety Artists, said that any of the dancers could opt out of the Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony in Washington.

Good. It’s only fair, frankly. The guy is a professed enemy of women, who brags to other men about his freedom to grab women by the pussy and get away with it because he is a “star.” Self-respecting women naturally don’t want to be involved in celebrating his increase in stardom.

“For a Rockette to be considered for an event, they must voluntarily sign up and are never told they have to perform at a particular event, including the inaugural,” the statement read. “It is always their choice.”

The statement also said that, among the dancers, Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 in Washington has been a popular opportunity: “In fact, for the coming inauguration, we had more Rockettes request to participate than we have slots available. We eagerly await the inaugural celebrations.” Nonetheless, the company did not respond to further inquiries or make any Rockettes available for interviews.

Despite these assurances, many of the dancers may feel under pressure to perform. Much of the fear and confusion could be traced to an email sent Thursday night by the Guild to some of the dancers.

“If you are full time, you are obligated,” said that message, which was forwarded to The Times. “Doing the best performance to reflect an American institution which has been here for over 90 years is your job. I hope this pulls into focus the bottom line on this work.”

Ah, that’s quite a “union.”

The pressure to perform in the inauguration ceremonies will likely vary based on the circumstances of each individual Rockette, according to a performer who spent five years with the company.

Heather Lang, a contemporary dancer who left the Rockettes in 2009, said in a phone interview that there are about 12 full-time dancers within the current company who perform in both winter and spring shows. They are a minority of the company, which has about 80 Rockettes. All the dancers were seasonal until about a year ago.

Ms. Lang, 35, said that, for both full-time and seasonal dancers, there is fear of jeopardizing their future employment, and compromising their standing in the eyes of James L. Dolan, the executive chairman of the Madison Square Garden Company, and his executives, if they complain or try to bow out.

So the only people performing for Trump’s coronation are people who more or less have to.

In between commenting on Twitter about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and addressing business conflicts of interest within his family, the president-elect took time on Thursday evening to assure the nation that he did not want A-list celebrities attending his inauguration.

Sure, Donnie from Queens. We totally believe you.

This is how we live now – an adviser to the next president saying grossly racist and malevolent things in public.

Carl Paladino, a former Republican nominee for governor of New York and an adviser to president-elect Trump, included the death of President Obama and “return” of first lady Michelle Obama to Africa on his list of things he wanted for 2017.

Paladino was responding to a survey by an alternative weekly magazine, Artvoice.

Asked what he would like to happen in 2017, he said he hopes that “Obama catches mad cow disease” and dies after having relations with a Hereford, a type of cow. Asked what he would most like to see go, Paladino responded that Michelle Obama would “return to being male” and be “let loose” in Zimbabwe.

Full exchange:

Artvoice: What would you most like to happen in 2017?

Carl Paladino: Obama catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Herford. He dies before his trial and is buried in a cow pasture next to Valerie Jarret, who died weeks prior, after being convicted of sedition and treason, when a Jihady cell mate mistook her for being a nice person and decapitated her.

Artvoice: What would you most like to see go in 2017?

Carl Paladino: Michelle Obama. I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.

What a nice nice nice man he must be.

Paladino assured the Washington Post that what he said was in no way racist.

“It has nothing to do with race,” Paladino said. “That’s the typical stance of the press when they can’t otherwise defend the acts of the person being attacked.”

“It’s about 2 progressive elitist ingrates who have hated their country so badly and destroyed its fabric in so many respects in 8 years,” he added.

Elitist. Right. One the child of working class parents, the other the child of middle class parents; neither of them the child of rich parents.

You know…they did what Republicans profess to value: they studied, they did well in school, they went to excellent universities and law schools. They climbed the ladder. That’s what people are supposed to do in Republican world. The possibility (for a few) of doing that is what makes our grotesque levels of income inequality and wealth inequality tolerable, according to Republicans. So why do people like Paladino call them elitists when they get the educations but don’t abandon their roots?

Who knows. Expecting coherence from a Republican of this type is expecting a unicorn driving a bus.

Paladino has repeatedly over the years attacked Obama privately and publicly — including pushing the falsehood that Obama is Muslim. During his gubernatorial race, Paladino was accused of sending graphically racist and sexist emails — some of them concerning Obama — to his circle of friends. Paladino never denied sending the emails but called them a “smear.”

This is Trump world. Get used to it.

In a statement, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat,  slammed Paladino for a “long history of racist and incendiary comments.”

“Carl Paladino, a Republican Party official from Western New York, made racist, ugly and reprehensible remarks about President Obama and the First Lady Michelle Obama,” Cuomo said. “While most New Yorkers know Mr. Paladino is not to be taken seriously, as his erratic behavior defies any rational analysis and he has no credibility, his words are still jarring.”

He has no credibility but he’s an adviser to the next president.

A “queer” woman explains why she hates lesbians so much.

Some years ago, a close friend and I developed a not-so-subtle code for queer women too basic for our tastes: We’d make an “L” with our thumbs and forefingers against our foreheads, like the loser sign that was popular when we were in middle school. In this case, the “L” stood for lesbian.

We, too, were lesbians—generally speaking. But the women my friend and I mocked (and trust, I am duly shamed by this memory) were what we’d call “capital-L lesbians.” We were urban-dwelling and queer-identified and in our 20s; the other women came from the suburbs, skewed older, and were, we presumed, unversed in queer politics. We traveled in circles of dapper butches and subversive femmes; the other women either easily passed as straight or dressed generically sporty in cargo shorts and flip-flips. A woman in this category was clearly down with the assimilationist, trans-exclusive politics of the likes of the Human Rights Campaign. She was the kind of dyke for whom the laughably niche Cosmopolitan lesbian-sex tip “tug on her ponytail” might actually apply.

I don’t “trust,” actually – I don’t think she is duly shamed by what she’s saying. I don’t think she grasps at all that a politics that is viewed as “assimilationist” and unhip before it’s had time to draw a breath is a politics that will never get anywhere. I don’t think she grasps that she too will cease to be in her 20s and thus become an L for loser to the new cohort of Hippest Of All. I don’t think she realizes how stupid and counterproductive it is to judge politics by the criteria of style or hippitude.

In other words, we shared a common sexual orientation, but little, if any, cultural affiliation. In the space between “lesbian” and “queer,” my friend and I located a world of difference in politics, gender presentation, and cosmopolitanism. Some of our resistance to the term lesbian arose, no doubt, from internalized homophobic notions of lesbians as unfashionable, uncultured homebodies. We were convinced that our cool clothes and enlightened, radical paradigm made us something other than lesbians, a label chosen by progenitors who lived in a simpler time with stricter gender boundaries. But with a time-honored label comes history and meaning; by leaving lesbian behind, we were rejecting, in part, a strong identity and legacy that we might have claimed as our own.

No shit. But how pathetic that she ever thought otherwise. How pathetic that she thought of lesbians as the tame boring conformist conservatives, as if lesbians had stopped being doubly marginalized and become the privileged marginalizers. How pathetic that she has that much internalized misogyny to go with the internalized homophobia (and doesn’t even mention it).

Cultural connotations aside, the main reason my friend and I felt (and still feel) more comfortable with queer than lesbian was practical: The word lesbian, insofar as it means a woman who is primarily attracted to women, does not correctly describe our reality. My personal queer community comprises cisgender and transgender women; transgender men and transmasculine people; and people who identify as non-binary or genderqueer. One friend told me queer works better for her and her female spouse because lesbian implies a kind of sameness she doesn’t see in her relationship or those of her peers. In her circles, as in mine, most romantic partnerships lean butch-femme or involve at least one trans or genderqueer person. Many of us have had or are currently enmeshed in sexual or romantic relationships with people who aren’t women. Using lesbian to refer to my queer sphere (e.g. “She’s hosting a lesbian potluck!”) excludes many people I consider my peers. In most young, urban queer communities, at least, lesbian, in its implication of a cisgender woman to cisgender woman arrangement, is both inaccurate and gauche.

Right? Aren’t “cisgender women” just the worst?

She goes on in that way for many many paragraphs, alternately belaboring the obvious and brandishing her superior wokeness.

Oh well. So people on the left need to come up with a new politics every five years or so, while demonizing everyone who isn’t finished with the old politics yet – it’s worked well so far, right?

Right?

There’s a video. There’s always a video.

Anis Amri was killed in a suburb of Milan after he shot a cop.

Hours after the shootout, the Islamic State-linked news agency, Amaq, released a video that purports to show Amri swearing allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State.

Speaking in a black-hooded windbreaker on an iron bridge with white railing and scrawled graffiti, he called on Muslims in Europe to rise up and strike at “crusaders.”

“God willing, we will slaughter you like pigs,” he said in the video, whose date and location was not given.

Yeah that’s nice – a god who endorses murdering random people “like pigs.”

He added, “to my brothers everywhere, fight for the sake of Allah. Protect our religion. Everyone can do this in their own way. People who can fight should fight, even in Europe.”

For the sake of Allah, protect the religion – by slaughtering random people like pigs. What a lovely conception of a supernatural daddy-figure.

The Hill reports that Trump said Michelle Obama didn’t mean it when she mentioned a hope deficit.

“We have tremendous hope, and we have tremendous promise and tremendous potential,” Trump said in Mobile, Ala., on the final stop of his “thank you” tour.

“And I actually think she made that statement not meaning it the way it came out,” Trump continued about Obama.

She was nice when he went to visit them that one time, and sat there looking like an overgrown child about to throw a tantrum. He said she couldn’t have been nicer. No doubt, Donnie from Queens, because she’s adult like that, but that doesn’t mean she thinks you’re a good future president or a good human being.

She had some things to say about Trump when the Access Hollywood tape came out. Remember that speech? I certainly do. She’s not impressed by a president-elect who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, and getting away with it because he’s a “star.”

Michelle Obama told Oprah Winfrey during an interview earlier this week that the Obama administration achieved the hope it promised during the campaign.

“Because we feel the difference now,” she said. “See, now, we’re feeling what not having hope feels like.”

Trump responded Saturday, predicting “tremendous hope” in the nation’s future.

“And beyond hope, we have such potential. This country has such potential. You watch, it’s going to be so special. Things are going to happen like you haven’t seen happen in many many decades,” he said.

The stupidity of the man is mind-boggling.

Currently in Trump –

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes

Stupid and dangerous.

He’s itching to use them. He said so during the campaign. There’s nothing in him that would tell him no, mustn’t do that. He wants to, so he will.

The American Humanist Association on the Religious Freedom Act:

The American Humanist Association lobbied both Democrats and Republicans for inclusive language in HR 1150 that would recognize the rights of humanists, atheists and other nonreligious individuals, in addition to defending theistic religious minorities. The Act states that “the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is understood to protect theistic and non-theistic beliefs as well as the right not to profess or practice any religion.” The Act also condemns “specific targeting of non-theists, humanists, and atheists because of their beliefs” and attempts to forcibly compel “non-believers or non-theists to recant their beliefs or to convert.”

There’s an ambiguity in that last sentence, thanks to a word that could be a verb or a noun and works either way. It’s not “the Act condemns and attempts” but “the Act condemns targeting and it condemns attempts to compel.” Replacing “attempts” with “efforts” would have solved that problem.

The persecution of openly humanist and atheist writers has become an area of increasing concern especially after the string of murders of secular bloggers and publishers by religious extremists in Bangladesh. The American Humanist Association, along with other international advocates for religious freedom, have also been critical of the flogging of secular writers in Saudi Arabia, as well as a Saudi law that equates atheism with terrorism.

“Legislators are finally recognizing the human dignity of humanists and granting the nontheistic community the same protections and respect that have been given to religious communities,” said Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association. “With the increasing global persecution of humanists and atheists at the hands of religious authoritarians, we’re proud that Congress and the US Department of State are standing for the liberty of all people, both religious and non-religious,” Speckhardt added, in reference to findings from the recent release of the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s 2016 Freedom of Thought report.

“A historic piece of legislation that for the first time in our nation’s history recognizes non-theists, the International Religious Freedom Act is the result of extensive advocacy efforts from the humanist community and the support of our religious allies,” said Matthew Bulger, legislative director of the American Humanist Association. “Religious freedom for all people, theists and non-theists, is an American value we must protect.”

It’s far from a universal American value though. A great many people really do think everyone should be required or at least heavily pressured to have some form of supernatural belief. They mostly don’t come after us with machetes, but they don’t like or trust us.

Obama signed a newly fortified international religious freedom act last Friday, and for the first time ever it included us pesky no religion-havers.

“The new law has some really interesting language in it,” said Caroline Mala Corbin, professor of law at the University of Miami. “It takes an expansive view of religious liberty, saying freedom of religion is not just about the right to practice religion. It is also about the right to have your own views about religion including being agnostic and atheistic.”

You’d think that would be obvious, wouldn’t you – that freedom of religion would include refusal of and dissent from religion. It’s not much of a freedom if you’re not allowed to reject the whole idea.

The new version of the law, named for a former Virginia congressman who championed its original version, specifically extends protection to atheists as well.

“(T)he freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is understood to protect theistic and non-theistic beliefs,” the act states for the first time, “and the right not to profess or practice any religion.”

Somebody please tell Trump that we have the right not to say “Merry Christmas.”

It also condemns “specific targeting of non-theists, humanists, and atheists because of their beliefs,” and enables the State Department to target “non-state actors” against religious freedom, like the Islamic State group, Boko Haram and other extra-government groups.

The new law has been heralded by both Christians and atheists. Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called the legislation “a vital step toward protecting conscience freedom for millions of the world’s most vulnerable, most oppressed people,” while Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association, called it “a significant step toward full acceptance and inclusion for non-religious individuals.”

…

The AHA and other nontheist groups like American Atheists and Center for Inquiry have lobbied Congress on behalf of imprisoned and persecuted atheists in Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and elsewhere for several years.

Atheists in those countries have faced imprisonment, lashings and execution, sometimes at the hands of violent mobs. In September, a Saudi man was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for professing his atheism via Twitter.

And in Bangladesh a string of atheist writers were brutally murdered, mostly by men wielding machetes.

Corbin said the new language in the IRFA could influence how U.S. courts regard atheists at home. All Americans are protected by the First Amendment, she said, but “there has always been controversy about the degree to which they (atheists) should be protected. This law makes clear they are to be protected to the same extent” as religious believers.

Corbin also links the president’s signing of this act to another first.

“President Obama was the first president to explicitly acknowledge nonbelievers in his inaugural address, so this seems to fit into his legacy vis-a-vis nonbelievers,” she said. “What the next administration is going to do with this law and nonbelievers is a completely different question.”

Marginalize and attack us as much as possible, I would think. Trump isn’t obviously a believer himself, but he’s happy to suck up to religious fanatics if they suck up to him first. Anything to be an oppressive bullying reactionary.

Tom Tomorrow on living in a post-truth world:

That’s two out of the eight. The full strip.

Let’s read Giles Fraser’s Comment is Free piece that inspired Jesus and Mo. It is, predictably, retrograde in the extreme.

This week a doctor from north London was telling me about one of his patients, a lad of 20 who has lived in the borough of Hackney all his life. He was born here and grew up here. And he’s a bright boy – yet he speaks only a few very rudimentary words of English. The language he speaks at home and at school is Yiddish. Some may be appalled by the insularity of the community in which this young man was raised. But I admire it. In particular, I admire the resilience of a community that seeks to maintain its distinctiveness and recognises, quite rightly, that assimilation into the broader culture would mean the gradual dilution, and the eventual extinction, of its own way of life. It is no surprise to me that the ultra orthodox are thriving, with high birth rates and predictions that they will be constitute a majority of the Jewish population within 20 years. They have refused assimilation.

Notice the way he simply assumes, without argument, that “its own way of life” is good – that he doesn’t pause even to consider the possibility that it’s a way of life that is better for some of its members than others, or that it’s one that just plain frankly oppresses most of its members. There are such ways of life, but Giles Fraser ignores that obvious fact.

Then notice his ludicrous equation of “thriving” with a high birth rate and nothing else. What he means is that the ultra orthodox are increasing in number. It’s possible to have a high birth rate without thriving – and indeed for most people the higher the birth rate the less thriving there is.

Then notice his complete refusal to consider that the “lad” of 20 who lives in London but doesn’t speak English might be missing out on something.

It adds immeasurably to the richness and diversity of how life is apprehended that not everyone sees the world in the same way. It is mind-expanding to be challenged by those who commit to another way of life. What a miserably grey one-dimensional place it would be if the dominant model of middle-of-the-road liberal secular capitalism became the only acceptable way of living.

Blah blah blah blah. Easy for him – he’s not the kind of person who would be a lesser being in some of those other ways of life. I’m a woman, and I’m happy to have done without the colorful multi-dimensional life I would have had in a fanatical insular religious community, which is obviously the only kind Fraser is talking about. Hooray for miserably grey one-dimensional liberal secularism! And I suppose even miserably grey one-dimensional liberal secular capitalism, if the capitalism could be a lot more tempered with social concerns.

How does an insular religious community get high birth rates? By preventing women from doing anything other than bear and raise children. What about women who would like to do something else, in addition or instead? Nothing; they don’t have that choice; they don’t get a vote; they are subject to the rule of men. Hey it’s colorful, it’s traditional, it’s not assimilationist!

And Giles Fraser is a putz.

The new Jesus and Mo:

The inspiration was Giles Fraser.

Jesus and Mo on Patreon.