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Fannie's Room

Political, Social, and Homo Writings for Which the First Amendment May or May Not Have Been Intended
By Fannie

Post Frequency: 2.9/day

Last Entry: October 26, 2020 at 10:02:01

Over-Used Adjective Alert

Posted on July 23, 2010
I don't think as many things are as phenomenal as people claim.Overheard the other day:"These wafer cookies are phenommmenal!"No. Sorry, but aside from an cherub taking a dump on one, there is just nothing about the essence of a wafer cookie that would make it all that remarkable...

Breaking: It's Rude To Assume Procreation Goes With Marriage

Posted on July 22, 2010
I don't usually click on dorkwad pop articles like this one about offensive things not to say at people's weddings, but out of curiosity I did the other day. Whereas "marriage defenders" like Chuck Cooper seek to inform society that procreation is the "central purpose" of marriage for all people, in the above-referenced article we learn that it is actually quite rude both to assume and then to ask when newlyweds are going to have a baby...

Constructing Manliness as Authenticity

Posted on July 21, 2010
As if taken directly from a Butch Pornstache column, John Kass writing in the Chicago Tribune takes a moment to stroke the manly phallus of hypermasculinity. To begin, yes, I'm well aware that it is intended to be light-hearted. I critique these Real Man circle jerks because they often serve as a cover for commenters to vent their homophobia and misogyny under the guise of celebrating masculinity, whilst simultaneously framing manly men as societal victims...

NOM Takes Psychic Act on the Road!

Posted on July 20, 2010
The National Organization for [Heterosexual] Marriage (NOM) has embarked on a sad project called "NOM Marriage Tour 2010: One Man, One Woman," complete with a bus plastered with smiling stock photos of racially-diverse heterosexually-headed families. Although organizing is what these people do for a living, this tour seems to be managing to attract no more than 100 supporters at each of its various stops...

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Conservative Christian Humor

Posted on July 19, 2010
I saw this first at Good As You. Far-right "news" source WorldNetDaily has posted a video of the remarkably unfunny "comedian" DJ Dolce (I'm not going to send traffic to WND but you can access the video at G-A-Y). In it, she says:"...Speaking of whiners, Democrats are still complaining that someone used the 'n-word' in reference to Obama and the 'f-word' in reference to Barney Frank...

A Crappy Tea-Party Victim Narrative

Posted on July 16, 2010
[Note: This post contains 6 of the 7 George Carlin dirty words you can't say on television, which some, consequently, also find offensive. Just so that's out there.]So, I've been following this NAACP/Tea Party hub-ub with mild interest. Only mild interest because while the Tea Partiers annoy me, that annoyance is not significantly greater than my annoyance with Democrats or Republicans...

He Comes Bering Schadenfreude

Posted on July 15, 2010
"In fact, everything we encounter in this world with our six senses is an inkblot test. You see what you are thinking and feeling, seldom what you are looking at."-Shiqin So, Emily Nagoski, a woman with a relatively small wordpress blog, wrote a post about misogyny she saw in male evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering's article in popular science magazine Scientific American...

Narratives of Fear in the Gay Culture Wars

Posted on July 14, 2010
[Cross-posted at Our Big Gayborhood]The other day I analyzed Doe v. Reed, the Supreme Court case rejecting a group's claim that revealing the names of anti-gay referendum signers violated the First Amendment. Relatedly, if you remember, anti-same-sex marriage groups successfully convinced the US Supreme Court to disallow cameras in the Prop 8 trial on the grounds that their already-well-known experts might be harassed...

DOMA Case #2: Massachusetts v. Health and Human Services

Posted on July 13, 2010
Yesterday, we looked at the Gill DOMA case. Today, I have a few items of note about the companion case, Massachusetts v. Health and Human Services (PDF), that also found part of DOMA unconstitutional. Whereas Gill was an Equal Protection case, this case rests on Massachusetts' argument that DOMA is an unconstitutional federal intrusion into marriage, an area of state authority (the Gill case briefly touched upon this issue as well)...

DOMA Rundown: Gill v. Office of Personnel Management

Posted on July 12, 2010
A federal judge in Massachusetts has ruled that the section of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that defines marriage as "only a legal union between one man and one woman" is unconstitutional. (PDF) The effect of DOMA, if you remember, is to prohibit the federal government from granting same-sex couples any of the federal benefits of legal marriage, even if these couples are legally married in a particular state...

Save Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

Posted on July 09, 2010
Via shakesville, I encourage readers to take action for Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old Iranian mother of two children, who has been sentenced to death by stoning under Sharia law for adultery.No word on whether her partner in crime is likewise sentenced to death...

Wherein I Belatedly Ruin Fun on Independence Day

Posted on July 08, 2010
Via the AP: "Library of Congress officials say Thomas Jefferson made a Freudian slip while penning a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence.In an early draft of the document Jefferson referred to the American population as 'subjects,' replacing that term with the word 'citizens,' which he then used frequently throughout the final draft...

Texas GOP: Turning Gays Into Illegal Aliens

Posted on July 07, 2010
The Texas Republican Party has released its platform. Its archaic provisions regarding homosexuality have been getting a lot of talk lately, and while the anti-gay lifestyles of Texas Republicans fall squarely into the No Surprise There bucket of Bozo the Clown's grand prize game, the extremity of this group's vision for America is rather startling...

Because Regular Computers Are For Men

Posted on July 06, 2010
Apparently, Samsung is targeting its new netbook to the ladies. Because women, who deviate from the human norm of the category "male," are unable to use regular netbooks, this one will have special lady-friendly perks like being "super-light" and having "tiny features...

Fun With Contradictions

Posted on July 06, 2010
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church #239. "[God] is neither man nor woman: he is God." First, note the contradiction contained in that authoritative sentence. In a rational world, that sort of glaring blind spot would make logical folks question the validity of everything else the utterer of such an absurdity says about god...

It Depends On How You Define "Any"

Posted on July 02, 2010
When Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, she barred the military from recruiting through the office of career services, in accordance with Harvard's policy of "shunning prospective employers who discriminate based on sexual orientation...

On Re-Centering Men in Conversations About Gender-Based Violence

Posted on July 01, 2010
[Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault]While male athletes have been playing their Very Important Sport Game that "unites the world," a South African doctor concerned about the increased likelihood of male-on-female sexual assault that this game will bring with it has created an anti-rape condom for women to test during the World Cup: "The anti-rape condom, called 'Rape-aXe,' features rows of jagged hooks designed to attach to a man's penis during penetration...

Schools For "Children": On Framing (or Not) Gender Issues

Posted on June 30, 2010
My short post from the other day inspired several interesting comments regarding the alienation and frustration that many feel upon hearing the so-called "generic he" in reference to both men and women. In reading these comments, I was then inspired to comment upon writer Lilian Nattel's observation whilst doing research for her (excellent) book The River Midnight: "I'd read about 'children' only to discover what was meant was boys...

The Glass Ceiling: Dude Gets Creative With Cause and Effect

Posted on June 29, 2010
Writing in The Sacramento Bee, Bruce Maiman recently explained why that pesky glass ceiling for ladies in the workplace persists and why men don't take women seriously. The problem, he says, is women. Observe: "Two weeks straight and two stories about two fights involving women going for the top two jobs in California: First there was Carly Fiorina's hairgate...

Doe v. Reed: On Seeking the Special Privilege of Civic Cowardice

Posted on June 28, 2010
Last week, the Supreme Court held that laws requiring the disclosure of the names of those who sign referendum petitions does not violate the First Amendment (Doe v. Reed). For some background on what brought this case about, Washington allows its citizens to challenge state laws by petioning the secretary of state via referendum containing voter signatures and their addresses...

On Intuition

Posted on June 25, 2010
Perhaps my greatest annoyance with respect to the Culture Wars is the reliance on "common sense" to justify biases, opinions, and points of view. Rarely does common sense allow us to transcend such things, but only further entrench them using the premise that one's intuitive common sense is always right...

Standard of Review in Perry v. Schwarzenegger

Posted on June 24, 2010
This post is the finale of my brief series on the Prop 8 Trial closing arguments. On Tuesday, I took a look at Ted Olson's arguments for the equality side and yesterday I examined Chuck Cooper's arguments for the "marriage defenders."Moving on to the standard of review issue, it will be helpful to examine Romer v...

A Rundown of Cooper's "Marriage Defense" Prop 8 Closing Arguments

Posted on June 23, 2010
Yesterday, I provided a brief summary of Ted Olson's closing argument in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. Today is where things get fun, as we turn our attention to "marriage defense" attorney Chuck Cooper's closing argument [PDF]. Cooper begins, right away asserting: "The New York Court of Appeals, your Honor, observed in 2006 that until quite recently it was an accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived in any society in which marriage existed that there could be marriage only between participants of different sex...

A Rundown of Olson's "Equality" Prop 8 Closing Arguments

Posted on June 22, 2010
Prior to closing arguments in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, popularly known as "The Prop 8 Trial," Judge Vaughn R. Walker issued a series of questions for each side to answer in closing arguments. [As a note of term usage, I will refer to the pro-Prop 8 side, which is the side opposing same-sex marriage, as the "marriage defense" side...

Trying To Be Angered By Ross Douthat's Latest, But Really Just Bored

Posted on June 21, 2010
Apparently, a dude by the name of Ross Douthat has mansplained feminism to the readers of the Times. After his uninspired claim that the US is now a matriarchy because "all major female candidates won" the recent primaries whilst, mind you, 21.8% of Congress is female, he opines:"What Tuesday?s results demonstrated, convincingly, is that America is now a country where social conservatives are as comfortable as liberals with the idea of women in high office...

A Handy Equation for Ladies in the Workplace

Posted on June 18, 2010
I was going to write a post today, but my posts this week were pretty long, so fuck it. What Twisty said:"Public women should be X amount feminine, X amount motherly, X amount hot, X amount beautiful, X amount young, X amount confident, X amount helpless, X amount exotic, X amount educated, X amount intelligent (required: the last two values < the men in the office), X amount gay (the last value almost always = 0)...

Dude Just Tells It Like It Is Without Knowing WTF He's Talking About, Part 4,222,153

Posted on June 17, 2010
Yesterday, I posted a link to The Lesbian Family Study and provided an overview of it. Today, I will examine a response that our trusty anti-gay friend Playful Walrus wrote to an article about this study. To reiterate, let's note that his response isn't to the study itself, but to an article about the study...

The Lesbian Family Study- A Quick Review

Posted on June 16, 2010
It's been entertaining to see "marriage defenders" scramble to try to discredit the recent study showing children of lesbian parents have better outcomes than other children. The findings throw a wrench in their "common sense" ideology wherein there is no way on earth two same-sex parents could be good for kids...

Florida Gunman Targets Only Women, Media Fails to Ask Why

Posted on June 15, 2010
[Trigger Warning: Hate Crimes]Well damned if today's post doesn't correlate nicely with this post from last week.Via Echidne, who aptly examined media responses to this act, another man has apparently gone on another entitled, violent rampage targeting only women...

The Usual

Posted on June 14, 2010
"It was only when I heard a prayer that said 'she' instead of 'he,' when I heard God called 'mother' instead of 'father,' that I realized how much translating I had to do when I sat in church, how much energy I spent wondering if I was included, how much I longed for theological language I could see myself in...

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