“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Amanda Marcotte: Sorry, Fox Business Network, but feminists shouldn’t see Nancy Reagan as a “role model”
Nancy Reagan lived her life glorifying women’s submission, so I suppose she’d be happy to know that Fox Business Network is using her death as an opportunity to bash feminism. Host Trish Regan went on a rant arguing that Reagan, who openly and unabashedly believed that a woman’s place was serving her husband, was somehow a better feminist than all those meanie women who think that women are equal to men. Pshaw, what kind of feminism is that compared to the “feminism” that treats women as appendages to their husbands?
“With the passing away of Nancy Reagan, the world has lost a woman who was a great American, and a great role model for all of us, especially women,” Regan sneered, in full umbrage mode. “I remember as a kid hearing some of the criticism against her, that she was too old fashioned, not a modern woman, someone who just lived in her husband’s shadow.”
Well, yeah. I mean, Nancy Reagan didn’t exactly hide that this is exactly who she was. She openly and unashamedly went out of her way to downplay her own intelligence and influence, so her husband’s star would shine brighter in comparison. She was so committed to the idea that a wife’s place is in the home that she actually apologized for the one time she took paid work after she married Ronald. It’s weird to “defend” someone by getting mad at other people for describing her dearly held beliefs for what they were.
Scott Lemieux: How the supreme court learned to love gay couples
VL v EL, a ruling handed down by the supreme court on Monday, is not a highly publicized blockbuster. But it’s an important sign of progress for gay and lesbian rights nonetheless. The court quickly dismissed the Alabama supreme court’s attempts to deny parental rights to a same-sex couple. This is the latest example of a fundamental transformation in the rights granted to LGBT people in the United States, with the supreme court shifting from a major barrier to progress to a major instrument progress for gay and lesbian rights. [..]
The quick, unanimous dismissal of the Alabama court, therefore, is important. Even the justices who dissented from the Obergefell ruling were not willing to let Alabama obstruct the rights of same-sex parents, helping to ensure that same-sex couples will have equal parental rights in practice and not just on paper.
This also represents a sea change in how the supreme court has affected the rights of same-sex parents. Some people have dismissed the importance of the supreme court striking down bans on “sodomy” in the 2003 landmark Lawrence v Texas on the grounds that by then such bans were largely symbolic. And it’s true that bans on “sodomy” were rarely directly enforced against consensual private partners. (Ironically, the two plaintiffs in Lawrence almost certainly never had sex with each other.) But this misses the point. The 1986 supreme court decision upholding bans on consensual “sodomy” had far-reaching implications in areas like family law. If same-sex partners could be outright forbidden from having sex with each other, many state courts reasoned, then they could certainly be denied parental rights.
Those days, fortunately, are over. In less than 30 years, the supreme court has changed from being an ally of opponents of the rights of same-sex parents to a strong ally of same-sex parents. This is important progress for basic human rights.
Andrew Levison: Will Trump Send Working-Class Whites to the Democrats?
Democrats have regularly argued that, with a robust populist pitch, winning back white working-class voters could be within reach.
In 2016, there is evidence that, with the impact of Donald J. Trump on the race, that could actually happen.
In the past, Republicans could appeal to both more tolerant and intolerant white working-class voters through “dog whistles.” But if Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee, his open appeal to racial and xenophobic sentiments — calling for the deportation of Latino immigrants, barring Muslims from entering the country and flirting with white supremacists — could push at least some part of the tolerant sector to the Democratic side.
Meanwhile, Democrats are going after that more tolerant sector with a progressive populism initially and charismatically championed by Bernie Sanders but increasingly advocated by Hillary Clinton as well.
Michael T. Klare: Energy Wars of Attrition
Three and a half years ago, the International Energy Agency (IEA) triggered headlines around the world by predicting that the United States would overtake Saudi Arabia to become the world’s leading oil producer by 2020 and, together with Canada, would become a net exporter of oil around 2030. Overnight, a new strain of American energy triumphalism appeared and experts began speaking of “Saudi America,” a reinvigorated U.S.A. animated by copious streams of oil and natural gas, much of it obtained through the then-pioneering technique of hydro-fracking. “This is a real energy revolution,” the Wall Street Journal crowed in an editorial heralding the IEA pronouncement.
The most immediate effect of this “revolution,” its boosters proclaimed, would be to banish any likelihood of a “peak” in world oil production and subsequent petroleum scarcity. The peak oil theorists, who flourished in the early years of the twenty-first century, warned that global output was likely to reach its maximum attainable level in the near future, possibly as early as 2012, and then commence an irreversible decline as the major reserves of energy were tapped dry. The proponents of this outlook did not, however, foresee the coming of hydro-fracking and the exploitation of previously inaccessible reserves of oil and natural gas in underground shale formations.
Howard Fineman: Canada’s New Prime Minister Is The Exact Opposite Of Donald Trump
Politics can seem so uplifting, humane and decent when explained by the new Canadian prime minister, a 44-year-old blue-blooded boxer, former drama teacher and environmental activist named Justin Trudeau.
Spend a day in Canada with Trudeau, and you wonder how two rather similar countries — the U.S. and its northern neighbor — have developed such utterly different public cultures.
True, Toronto had a hate-filled drunk named Rob Ford as its mayor not too long ago, but he was the exception that proves the rule in generally open-minded, welcoming Canada.
The U.S., by contrast, has Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio competing like schoolyard bullies to see who can be more antagonistic toward the 7 billion people on the planet who are not Americans citizens.
The son of Pierre Trudeau, the legendary Quebecer who led Canada in the ’60s and ’70s, Trudeau exudes a confidence about his country’s role as a sober balancing wheel to the xenophobia, name-calling and perpetual war-making of its half-brother to the south.
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