This is the second part in our four part discussion of the US Supreme Court's October 2019 term, recently concluded. Perhaps the most eagerly awaited of the decisions that SCOTUS released late in the October 2019 term was its interpretation of the Civil Rights Act, encompassing within the scope of that act the prohibition of a discharge of a homosexual or transgender person from employment on account of that identity. The decision is captioned Bostock v. Clayton County . Gerald Bostock was a coordinator of child welfare services for Clayton County, Georgia, a county of roughly a quarter million population. Justice Gorsuch wrote the opinion for the majority (six). This itself was a body blow to the religious conservatives who are a critical part of President Trump's political support. Many of those folks have long held the view that, "no, Trump is no great shakes as a human being, but at least he will deliver for us on judicial nominations." Gorsuch's opi...
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Carrie Jenkins is a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia who has built a reputation in the philosophy of romance and relationships. She is a defender of polyamory, the view that the maintenance of intimate relationships with more than one partner is a moral and appropriate life style. This is always defended with the proviso that the partners are not kept secret from one another. After all, polyamorous person who allows him/herself to be thought to be a monogamous person by any of the partners is of course, a cheater and a skunk -- I don't understand Jenkins to dispute that. Anyway, there is some question as to whether Jenkins is to a sufficient extent a lover of the practice of scholarly rigor. There is, fittingly, a triangular story here. I learned of the recent dust-up about Jenkins from Brian Leiter's blog. Leiter himself holds to a philosophical position I like to think of as "Menshevik." He is an old school leftist who see social ...
Bess Levin, for more than ten years the guiding genius behind the Wall Street gossip blog and humor rag Dealbreaker, is leaving that post. This is a good time for a moment of silence. On Friday, October 28, Bess broke the news to the world under the headline, “Housekeeping: This Is One of My Last Posts for Dealbreaker.” She’s moving to Vanity Fair’s The Hive. Props to VF, but it won’t be the same. Dealbreaker during Levin’s tenure has with some regularity turned its sharp and often sex-obsessed lens on the world of alpha seekers. Recent efforts include the Thornton McEnery post about Pete Muller, manager of a $5 billion quant fund firm, and musician on the side, who has composed a little ditty about Ken Griffin’s post-divorce sex life. Highland Hijinks Bess’ own recent writing includes an item this September about Joshua Terry’s lawsuit against Highland Capital. The story consisted of three equal parts. From bottom to ...
Funny Story. SLATE recently ran an interview with Peggy Orenstein, the author of GIRLS AND SEX, a meditation on the messages young women, especially educated young women from at least relatively affluent backgrounds, receive from popular culture today. At one point in the interview, Orenstein is commenting on how mainstream Hollywood movies -- not porn, not even necessarily R rated movies -- treat sex. There's a standard scene in many romcoms where the male and female protagonists rip half of each other's clothes off, then they have (under covers) simulated sex for a few seconds, then the point has been made and the movie moves on. Orenstein then says, "maybe 30, 40 years ago, that shorthand would have been seen less often. Probably, actually, you wouldn’t have seen it at all. You would have seen kissing, and then you get the Hays Code or whatever." Or at least that's what she tried to say. Here's the funny bit. In the first transcription ...
Now people seem to be working to figure out the difference between Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal. Caitlyn felt like a woman trapped in a man's body, and is now "out" as a woman, with the help of surgery, drugs, and a world-famous photographer. Rachel appears to have "felt" black, estranged from her Causasian family, and trapped in the body you see in this photo -- the carrot-haired and quite light-skinned woman in the center of the back row. Are the two cases similar or different in terms of what judgment (if any) rational observers can make about them? If they are different, is either of them to be judged to have done anything dishonest or even imprudent? Well, let me not weigh in on such matters. I argue about no one's identity except my own -- and not that either, if I can help it. I simply observe that the animated sitcom SOUTH PARK covered this ground long before it was news. The character Kyle Br...