Man has deep thoughts on ethics – deep Catholic thoughts on ethics.

My husband and I are in the process of surrogacy. Friends know we're trying to find a carrier. Thread.

— Brandon Ambrosino (@BrandonAmbro) July 12, 2019

A carrier. A carrier. As if that’s all it is, like carrying a bag of groceries.

I am getting my PhD from a Catholic theology program in ethics. I understand that there are many, many factors to consider from an ethical perspective. Andy and I talk and think about them all the time.

— Brandon Ambrosino (@BrandonAmbro) July 12, 2019

And yet all this constant thinking somehow doesn’t deliver up the thought that he shouldn’t refer to the prospective baby’s mother as a “carrier.”

"Why would you USE women to carry your child?" Every woman who carries a child for any couple is a blessing and should be celebrated. But the word "use" isn't correct when we consider how highly compensated most carriers are, and the fact that many claim to ENJOY being pregnant.

— Brandon Ambrosino (@BrandonAmbro) July 12, 2019

But it’s not just carrying that gestating women do. It’s far from just that. First of all she contributes the egg. The baby is hers as well as the father’s. I know it must be painful for same-sex couples that they can’t conceive together, but that’s just how it is, and calling the mother “the carrier” doesn’t change that.

And it doesn’t end with the egg, obviously. That “carrying” includes nourishing the baby for nine months, sharing her entire body with the baby, living with the baby at all times. That’s a big deal.

Then there’s the giving birth part. I understand it’s not entirely painless.

Calling a woman who does that for someone else a “carrier” is dumbfoundingly insulting.

“Ethcis” my ass.

Fascist president in action. (Yes literal fascist. This kind of open demonization of the press is right out of The Big Book of How to Fascist.)

TRUMP on the New York Times: "They have phony sources. They don't even have sources. They write whatever they want … what they do is a tremendous disservice to this country. They are truly the enemy of the people, I'll tell you that. They are the enemy of the people." pic.twitter.com/1QXu8ljpiJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2019

A lot of people are passing around this bit of genius:

HOW IS IT HALFWAY THROUGH 2019 AND SO MANY PEOPLE STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT "CISGENDER" MEANS?! IT'S NOT A SLUR. IT JUST MEANS YOU IDENTIFY WITH THE SEX YOU WERE ASSIGNED AT BIRTH. THAT'S IT. IT'S GONNA BE OKAY, CIS PEOPLE. IT'S A FLIPPING WORD. USE IT. DEAL WITH IT. IT'S FINE.

— Lauren Rankin (@laurenarankin) July 12, 2019

Would you like to try our Lobster Special today?

All-caps all you like, but that doesn’t magically make your claims true.

“Cis” just means you identify with the sex you were assigned at birth, she tells us. Yes, we know, and that’s why we reject the word. I don’t “identify with the sex I was assigned at birth.” I just am it, that’s all. It’s simply a fact. I don’t “identify with” it or embrace it or glory in it or anything else along those lines, I just have the humdrum normal awareness of the fact of it. It is what it is, as we so often hear about pretty much everything except what sex we are. It is what it is. We’re vertebrates, we’re mammals, we’re primates, we’re great apes. Those are all names, or labels, of course, but the criteria for them are specific and well known. What sex we are is like that. It’s not subjective, it’s not a feeling, it’s not like the soul, it’s not Spiritual.

I don’t identify with it, and I wasn’t “assigned” it. I understand that it’s A FLIPPING WORD but all words are that, and we’re allowed to say some of them are inaccurate or tendentious or venomous or any number of other things that cause us to reject them. We’re not required to call ourselves cis or to agree with the confused ideology that tries to impose the word on all of us. Shouting in all caps ain’t gonna change that.

Another successful theft of athletic glory:

Kiwi weightlifter Laurel Hubbard has won gold at the Pacific Games in Samoa…

Hubbard, a transgender athlete who is trying to qualify for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, won gold medals at Apia’s Faleata Sports Complex to become the Oceania senior champion, the Commonwealth senior champion, and the Pacific Games senior champion.

The 41-year-old won with a total lift of 268kg in the women’s 87kg category on Saturday. Samoans Feagaiga Stowers and Iuniana Sipaia took home silver and bronze with respective lifts of 261kg and 255kg.

In other words a 41-year-old man competed against women in weight-lifting and thus stole a gold medal from Feagaiga Stowers and a silver medal from Iuniana Sipaia. And the story carefully says nothing about that – the story carefully pretends it’s all perfectly normal and fair and what everyone wants.

Hubbard wants to be on New Zealand’s Olympics team in 2020. These competitions are a necessary path to that. If Hubbard gets a place on the team that will mean a woman loses her place to him.

https://twitter.com/nzolympics/status/1149879157465108483

The 439 people talking about this are not doing so with warm congratulations for “Laurel” Hubbard.

Many are pointing out the non-celebratory demeanor of Stowers and Sipaia. The woman who should have been there for winning the bronze is not shown.

That doesn’t sound like a good plan.

It’s hard to overstate how insane, and how obviously illegal, this is.

Many men, women, and children will suffer horribly if it goes into effect.

We’re all overwhelmed with legal news but this is a *BFD* that deserves widespread attention, condemnation, and resistance. https://t.co/frrg55dcJe

— Joshua Matz (@JoshuaMatz8) July 12, 2019

Guatemala is a country people are fleeing from.

From @NewYorker: “More people are leaving Guatemala now than any other country in the northern triangle of Central America. Rampant poverty, entrenched political corruption, urban crime, and the effects of climate change have made large swath.”

— Joshua Matz (@JoshuaMatz8) July 13, 2019

Reading the UN Dispatch piece:

This is a guest post from Eric Schwartz,  the president of Refugees International. He previously served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration

In a particularly egregious violation of law and common decency, the Trump White House is pressing U.S. diplomats to negotiate a “safe third country agreement” with Guatemala. This is a terrible idea which, if implemented, will put the lives of thousands of Central Americans at great risk. It is a violation so serious, that as a former assistant Secretary of State in charge of implementing refugee and migration policies,  I took the unusual step of writing a letter to the State Department’s Acting Legal Adviser Marik String, urging he and his office cease involvement in efforts to secure the agreement.

Homework assignment: explain how Canada and Guatemala differ as places offering safe refuge to asylum seekers.

A safe third country agreement is an exercise in responsibility-sharing between two governments on the handling of asylum claims, and the United States currently has only one such agreement—with the government of Canada. Under the arrangement, asylum seekers from any part of the world who enter Canada but then travel to the United States to seek asylum may be returned to Canada for asylum adjudications. Conversely, those who enter the United States and then travel to Canada to seek asylum may be returned to the United States. In other words, the agreement ensures that the asylum seeker’s claim is considered in the country that the asylum seeker has entered first.

People from south of Guatemala mostly go through Guatemala to get here, so the Trump people are playing gotcha.

[F]orcing asylum seekers into Guatemala would almost certainly run afoul of both U.S. and international refugee law, which specify that an asylum seeker may only be transported to a place where his or her “life or freedom would not be threatened on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” In fact, it is reasonable to expect that individuals being forced into Guatemala pursuant to a safe third country agreement would constitute a particularly vulnerable social group subject to grave risks at the hands of gangs and other criminal elements. Concerns on this score result from the extraordinarily high rates of crime, including homicide, in Guatemala, gang violence, and—perhaps most significantly—the absence of capacity of the government of Guatemala to provide even a modicum of services or security for returned asylum seekers—who would likely be in highly vulnerable situations for extended periods.

Which is why many asylum seekers are seeking asylum from Guatemala. Sending asylum seekers there would be like sending people who are fleeing an erupting volcano to the vicinity of a different erupting volcano.

Oh those zany wacky folks at Border Patrol. They’re at it again.

An unofficial commemorative coin has been circulating among Border Patrol agents at the U.S./Mexico border, mocking the task of caring for migrant children and other duties that have fallen to agents as families cross into the U.S.

On the front, the coin declares “KEEP THE CARAVANS COMING” under an image of a massive parade of people carrying a Honduran flag — a caricature of the “caravan” from last fall, which started in Honduras and attracted thousands of people as it moved north. (While the caravan included many women and children, the only visible figures on the coin appear to be adult men.)

The coin’s reverse side features the Border Patrol logo and three illustrations: a Border Patrol agent bottle-feeding an infant; an agent fingerprinting a teen boy wearing a backwards baseball cap; and a U.S. Border Patrol van. The text along the edge reads “FEEDING ** PROCESSING ** HOSPITAL ** TRANSPORT.”

Dara Lind/Pro Publica

People who have received or seen the coins

said the coins were promoted via the secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol officials that, as ProPublica recently detailed, included racist and violent posts.

The coin is part of a tradition of unofficial “challenge coins” — which generally outnumber official ones — which are common in the military and law enforcement as a way for members to celebrate achievements and build camaraderie.

But outside observers found this particular coin anything but harmless.

When you build camaraderie by mocking desperate people seeking asylum, you’re doing it the wrong way.

It turns out there’s a cost to internalized misogyny. Who could have predicted that?

The author is anonymous, fortunately.

I am 24, and have always been self-conscious of how I looked “down there”. Not enough to put me off having sex and I never had complaints, but it was always in the back of my mind that my labia were on the larger side. I’d previously had cosmetic surgery on my ears, which went well, and figured that labiaplasty could also boost my confidence.

“On the larger side” compared to what? The women in porn? Who makes these rules? Who decided that chopping off bits of the genitalia should be medicalized into the official-sounding “labiaplasty”? What is wrong with people?

So she skipped out and had it done.

Straight away, I knew something wasn’t right. Instead of a reduction, it was clear that my labia had been completely removed. That first week was the worst of my life. I cried several times a day, and even considered suicide. The enormity of my decision sunk in – I could hardly walk and even sitting down was a struggle.

Now she’s terrified of ever having sex again.

Yep, internalized misogyny definitely extracts a price.

Susan Matthews at the Times Higher on Sally Hines’s Is Gender Fluid?: A Primer for the 21st Century:

Hines is interested in two different questions. Can an individual change their gender identity? And is the categorisation of biological sex really fluid?

Her key idea (drawn from Thomas Laqueur) is that binary sex difference is a cultural construction, cemented in the Enlightenment to underpin gender differences. From Anne Fausto-Sterling, Hines takes the claim that the existence of intersex people undermines the concept of binary sex differences. Cordelia Fine’s work allows her to argue that most claims for binary sex differences in the brain derive from cultural bias. What’s new is not the idea of gender fluidity but the claim that biological sex is a spectrum.

Most 20th-century feminists thought of gender as a social construction that lay outside the self, a kind of false consciousness that the individual could reject. Everything changed when gender found its place deep inside the self as, in Hines’ words, the “core part of who people know themselves to be”.

So is the anti-feminism plain enough yet? If gender finds its place deep inside the self then why bother with feminism at all? Why not just let everyone choose to be either dominant or subordinate and let it go at that?

In the new model, gender paradoxically becomes less fluid. Transgender is “an umbrella term describing people whose innate gender identity or gender expression is different to the sex they were assigned at birth”. Borrowing the language of intersex, sex is “assigned” whereas gender is “innate”.

Sex is mere superstructure, mere dross, while gender is the soul.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Yes but if you switch the labels that changes everything.

The scene, an upscale RESTAURANT. ALAINA HYPE LEVITATE is shown to her seat. A WAITER fills her water glass and offers AHL a menu.

AHL: That’s okay, I know what I’m ordering. I’ll have the lobster special and a glass of the house white, please.

W: An excellent choice! Coming right up.

A few moments later, the WAITER returns with a glass of milk, and what looks very much like a plate of mashed potatoes.

W. Here you go, the special with house white.

AHL. Where’s the lobster?

W. It’s right there on the plate.

AHL. That looks very much like a plate of mashed potatoes.

W. This is what you ordered, the “Lobster Special.”

AHL. But that isn’t a lobster. I’ve had lobster before, and unless it’s buried under the potatoes, there is no lobster on this plate. (Digging with fork). Nope, nada, zilch. This is NOT lobster.

W. I assure you it is. It’s our speciality; nobody else prepares them quite the way we do.

AHL. Well I’m sure that everyone else is using actual lobster.

W. Well, I don’t know about the recipes used in other establishments, but ours is renowned for its bold, transgressive presentation. Cruelty free, too.

AHL. Only if you ignore the disappointment of those expecting, you know, LOBSTER!

W. (In full flight now) Our chef has gone beyond the mere shape and appearance of “lobster.”.Some people are so hung up on extraneous, picayune details-

AHL. The complete absence of lobster is not a DETAIL when you’ve ordered “lobster.”

W. -which channels their expectations and narrows the realm of possibility-

AHL. I EXPECTED LOBSTER!

W. Some people figure that lobster can only be one way. They’re stereoyping. Others are put off by the “big bug on a plate ” look . They’re lobster-phobic. Our Chef goes beyond both those who have particular expectations and those who are fearful of that expectation.

AHL. Your so-called “lobster ” was dug out of the ground and probably hasn’t even seen so much as a photograph of an ocean.

W. Oh, so you’re a biological determinist!

AHL. I”M A LOBSTER SHY OF A MEAL!

Out from the kitchen comes the CHEF.

C. Is there a problem?

AHL. (Pointing to the plate) THIS? THIS IS NOT LOBSTER!

C Oh, but it is. It came out of a bin. The label on the bin says “Lobster.” So, this is lobster.

AHL. Lobsters don’t come in bins.

W. Ours do.

AHL. SHUT UP! (WAITER withdraws to kitchen, muttering).

C. Great big bin. Big Label. Big red letters. L-O-B-S-T-E-R.

AHL. (Trying to speak calmly, but it’s clearly a struggle) I don’t care how big the bin is. I don’t care how big the label, or the size and colour of its lettering. I don’t care what the label says, the label on the bin doesn’t change what’s in the bin!

C. Nothing’s changed, it’s always been lobster. It’s on the bin. Big label.

Everyone likes our lobster. It’s won awards!

AHL. (Pointing at plate) This is potato. P-O-T-A-T-O. Mashed potato. Not lobster, L-O-B-S-T-E-R. It doesn’t matter if you carve them into the shape of a lobster, or put them into a great big bin with a great big label, or call them by another name. They will ALWAYS be POTATOS. They will NEVER be LOBSTERS.

C. Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s call it “mock lobster.” Better than lobster really, because it’s vegan.

AHL. You can call it bloody “mock alligator,” or “mock bicycle” or “mock otter” or bloody “mock POLAND,” but it’s still mashed POTATO!

C. You’d be surprised at how many genes are common between potatos, lobsters, and otters. To a visitor from another planet, they’d all be close cousins.

AHL. I’M not from another planet and I can distinctly tell the differences between all those things, and I’m not seeing a lot of lobster in the general vicinity. There’s a lot less lobster than I was led to believe I was going to be encountering. I see no crustaceans of any kind whatsoever on this plate or on this table.

C. You didn’t read the menu, did you.

AHL. I knew I wanted lobster. It’s on the sign outside.

W. (coming back from the kitchen with LOBSTER bin, brandishing a scoop of what looks very much like mashed potatos). On the bin, too.

AHL. SHUT UP! (turning to CHEF) Lobster is lobster!

C. Well, obviously your concept of “lobster” is really restricting and narrow, when it’s really a broad spectrum. Quite fluid, really. Delicious, too. Go ahead, have a bite!

AHL. You can’t just redefine “lobster.” A lobster is a particular creature. How the HELL can it be a “fluid spectrum?”

C. How do you know it isn’t? You’d never seen a vegan mock lobster until today, had you? Our lobster is not confined to your confining label. It yearns to be FREE, to be what it’s always wanted and felt itself to be!

AHL. Well it’s all mock and no lobster.

C Don’t forget the vegan part.

AHL. A lobster is an animal and can’t be VEGAN!

C. But there’s some right in front of you on your plate! You’re just too attached to your narrow dictionary definition “lobsterism” to admit it!

AHL. AAAARRRGH! I’ve HAD ENOUGH. I’m LEAVING. (AHL stomps out, muttering.)

W. (indicating plate of mock vegan lobster) Did you want a doggy bag?

W. (Turning to CHEF) You know at this rate, we’re never going to use up those potatoes.

C. Yeah, but isn’t this fun?

W. Sure! It’s a blast! It doesn’t help generate repeat customers, though. (Drinking from the glass of milk, then holding it up to the light, admiringly) Pity. She didn’t even get to the “house white.”

C Ha! Well at least it is actually white. (motions to the kitchen) C’mon It’s almost close. We’d better clean up.

WAITER and CHEF go back into the kitchen. The LOBSTER bin, which had been set down on the now vacated table, shudders and shakes as a huge LOBSTER starts to climb out of it…

Once in awhile Twitter will show me completely random tweets, from people I don’t follow and don’t want to follow, so occasionally I see a wack tweet I didn’t even go looking for. Like:

When we ran our big piece on abortion, a lot of conservatives took issue with an editor’s note where I said men can get pregnant. Happy to present those fucks with this feature on men who have gotten abortions & how the health care system fails them: https://t.co/ppx7l4GwBS

— Alana Hope Levinson (@alanalevinson) July 11, 2019

Oh yeah, it’s only conservatives who dispute the claim that men can get pregnant. Definitely.

So I followed the link.

The subhead:

Pregnancy is still believed to be something only a woman will experience, but trans men and non-binary people can and do get pregnant too

Language games. Stupid language games. Pregnancy isn’t believed to be a woman-only thing, it simply is a woman-only thing. The gotcha has no got. Yes of course trans men i.e. women who call themselves men can get pregnant too, because they are women. Yes of course “non-binary people” can get pregnant if they are women. “Trans men” and “non-binary people” are just labels, and they don’t change the underlying reality. The fact that people have come up with new labels such as “trans men” and “non-binary people” does not change mammalian biology.

The article is not an improvement on the subhead.

Washington’s army seized the airports, and the kidney is in the heart.

Donald Trump surprised the medical community on Wednesday afternoon, when he claimed “the kidney has a very special place in the heart”.

Speaking as he announced a government plan to tackle kidney disease, Trump went on an extended riff about the efforts of specialists.

“You’ve worked so hard on the kidney. Very special. The kidney has a very special place in the heart. It’s an incredible thing,” Trump gushed.

See this is what happens when you get someone whose brain is disintegrating rapidly and who loves to hear himself talk. He generates words, just words, whatever words he can clutch as they float past, and since most of his words have disappeared as his brain melts, you get these repetitions. Speshul. The kidney is speshul. Speshul is the kidney.

So then you get it accidentally bounced into the heart.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Speaking of McKinnon…

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1149288615949819904

“says the cis white man”…says the white man. Says the white man who loves nothing better than to talk over, chastise, shout at, and bully women. “Rachel” McKinnon who steals medals from female athletes does not get to use his trans status to pretend to be many categories below white men on the Ladder of Privilege.

This is a must-watch from the WPUK Fair Play event yesterday.

Excellent video from one of the women who competed against Rachel McKinnon.
She’s an athlete and orthopaedic surgeon & examined evidence informing IOC rules. https://t.co/2lacfdsYq2

— Amy Eileen Hamm (@preta_6) July 10, 2019

She’s the one on McKinnon’s left.

One law for the rich, and another for everyone else.

Convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein never once checked in with city cops in the eight-plus years since a Manhattan judge ordered him to do so every 90 days — and the NYPD says it’s fine with that.

After being labeled a worst-of-the-worst, Level 3 sex offender in 2011, Epstein should have reported in person to verify his address 34 times before he was arrested Saturday on federal child sex-trafficking charges.

But hey. He’s rich. He’s white. He’s a man. Capeesh?

Violating requirements of the state’s 1996 Sex Offender Registration Act — including checking in with law enforcement — is a felony punishable by up to four years in prison for a first offense.

Subsequent violations carry a sentence of up to seven years each.

The police and the prosecutors are both saying “No it’s their fault.”

The NYPD cop assigned to monitor Epstein has repeatedly complained to Vance’s Sex Crimes Unit that Epstein wasn’t in compliance, according to a source familiar with the matter.

But prosecutors told the cop to merely send Epstein a letter reminding him of his reporting requirement.

A Vance spokesman denied that allegation, saying “the NYPD — which is the agency responsible for monitoring SORA compliance — has repeatedly told us that Mr. Epstein was in full compliance with the law.”

Has anybody checked in with Law and Order SVU?

Emoluments? What emoluments?? I don’t see any emoluments; do you see any emoluments???

A constitutional challenge to President Trump’s continued ownership of his businesses has been ordered dismissed by a federal appeals court.

The case was brought by the attorneys general of Washington, D.C., and Maryland, arguing that Trump had violated the domestic and foreign emoluments clauses of the U.S. Constitution by accepting money from state and foreign governments via his Washington hotel and business empire.

A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled unanimously that the attorneys general did not have the standing to bring the lawsuit and instructed a lower court to dismiss the lawsuit.

Judge Paul Niemeyer wrote in the opinion: “The District and Maryland’s interest in enforcing the Emoluments Clauses is so attenuated and abstract that their prosecution of this case readily provokes the question of whether this action against the President is an appropriate use of the courts, which were created to resolve real cases and controversies between the parties.”

And the emoluments case is not real because…erm…

All three of the judges were appointed by Republican presidents.

This case is not the only emoluments challenge against President Trump. Another federal court is still considering a lawsuit brought by Democratic members of Congress.

…

Racine and Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh issued a joint statement that said the panel of judges “got it wrong,” and that they will continue to pursue their legal options.

They said the court “failed to acknowledge the most extraordinary circumstance of all: President Trump is brazenly profiting from the Office of the President in ways that no other President in history ever imagined and that the founders expressly sought — in the Constitution — to prohibit,” Frosh and Racine wrote.

The pair said they would continue their legal efforts to “hold President Trump accountable” for what they viewed as his violation of the emoluments clauses.

Checks and balances: do we even have any?

Fired for refusing to call a man “madam”? Sounds very Monty Python, doesn’t it.

Dr David Mackereth, 56, claims he was sacked as a disability benefits assessor by the Department of Work and Pensions over his religious beliefs.

The father-of-four alleges he was asked in a conversation with a line manager: “If you have a man six foot tall with a beard who says he wants to be addressed as ‘she’ and ‘Mrs’, would you do that?”

Well you can’t address people as “she,” can you. That’s a minor point, I know, but it gets so annoying seeing this confusion so often.

A hearing in Birmingham was told how Dr Mackereth believes transgenderism is a “delusional belief” and an ideology “which I disbelieve and detest”.

In a statement admitted into evidence, he told the court: “If you believe in gender fluidity, gender is no more than one’s own fantasy about oneself.”

And the thing about that is that one’s own fantasy about oneself is of interest only to oneself and should never, ever be forced on other people. We know some people just can’t get enough of talking about themselves, but there’s a limit to what they can force on the rest of us.

The DWP argues that Dr Mackereth’s views are in breach of the 2010 Equality Act. APM, the recruitment company who hired the medic, is also being sued for religious discrimination.

The company claims that the doctor’s beliefs “are not compatible with human dignity”.

Really? What if people started claiming to be horses or bicycles or daffodils or Poland? What does treating people’s lies about themselves as truth have to do with human dignity? What about the human dignity of people forced to lie about others?

The Telegraph mixes a whole bunch of nonsense about Christian beliefs into it, but that seems entirely beside the point to me.