I know I say this all the time but it will never stop being weird to me that, when I first started looking into this, I thought I was telling people, "Guess what? Kids aren't getting kidnapped and trafficked in the US!" that I thought I was telling people great news and I wasn't.

https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/2001758029906063516

On the whole, people get *absolutely furious* if you tell them that no one is after their children.
I think it's probably a natural outgrowth of the shock of cognitive dissonance or the fear that someone with paradigm-breaking information is trying to get one over on you,

Last thought on this.
I think there is a difference between victim blaming and discussing empowerment that can help prevent abuse.
If you tell someone who has been a victim of a romance scam, "here are some tools that you can use to reverse-image lookup, here are some common

https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/2000697334892503479

tactics and stories that scammers use to take advantage of people, if you're going to date online, this is how you do it" -- this is not victim blaming.
In the same way, setting a norm that you absolutely can and should say no to your pastor sometimes, that a woman who submits

Okay, let’s actually break this apart.
First: the idea that consent cannot exist across authority lines is not unique to the church. It also exists at your therapist or doctor’s office. It also exists at your workplace.
So if we say that actually people can freely consent to sex

https://twitter.com/jamesdpeavy/status/2000631138520555597

with their pastors, we’re actually making an exception for clergy. It’s not controversial that your psychiatrist should lose his license if he tries to have sex with you.
Second, the analogy of a crime is flawed for two reasons.
One reason is that there is a meaningful

So, I want to be really careful how I put this, because the thing I actually do have empathy for is the fact that facing wrongdoing done by a close friend or family member is incredibly difficult and it's of course a traumatizing experience. I don't blame someone for struggling

https://twitter.com/LABC222/status/1999962088530382885

with that.
Second, I want to really reframe the question that's posed here. "If what my dad did was understood as abuse, that would have been devastating for our family."
The obvious thing to say here is that even if that's true, there's more than one family impacted here and

In the end the only real argument TPUSA has about this essay is that "religious freedom" means that Christians should have a special privilege to opt out of any assignment and write a Bible study instead.
Which is what this student did.
She didn't answer the prompt, she didn't

https://twitter.com/UofOklahoma/status/1995186884704690262

use any relevant sources, and she didn't write an academic essay.
Which is why she failed.
The knock on effects of arguing that Christians should not be expected to follow rubrics, syllabi, assignment instructions, and so on if they feel led to turn in a

The Baby Formula Challenge: Laura’s Version.
I recreated the test on my lunch. This is what I got.
The standards of the test were the same as the church formula challenge. The person on the phone must have a plan for how to get me a can of baby formula by the end of the conversation. They cannot hang up, ask how I got this number or why I am calling, refer me to any other organizations (even if they support them), or explain that they need to talk to their supervisors. A passing grade is one conversation,

There is a widespread belief in evangelical churches that women can buy male character and leadership on layaway.
Let me explain what I mean.
When men are being hateful, rude, lazy, passive, nutty, and generally awful and particularly to women, you might hear women say “hey, when you do that you drive women away. Stop it.”
Then the response is, “if women would stop taking leadership roles, stop being in public, stop being in charge, stop having jobs, marry and have babies and stay home with kids, then men wouldn’t be like this!”
And this is psychotic.

Not to overpronounce based on one election, but I think some reasonable internet-versus-election hypotheses.
Here are some things I don't believe turn out midterm voters and probablynot even four-year voters.
1) "We can't exclude the groypers/redpill/manosphere/Nazis/etc." Sure you can. They're creepy freaks and they don't have any friends in real life. You can totally ignore them. There's not even that many and the ones that exist are useless.
2) "People want to see politicians getting along." No, they don't. You might, if you work in DC.

So, my read on the Allie Beth Stuckey TPSUSA thing, if anyone saw her getting chewed out.
I think this is where the evangelical movement trying to get men in the door at all costs has gotten us. The new ideal of the evangelical man is a little boy.
The problem with audience chasing and specifically chasing a young male audience is pretty clear now. If you look at the landscape of right wing and evangelical media for men right now, it's increasingly looking like a race to the bottom. People have figured out you can get more listeners than the other

Okay, here's why I don't like A Little Life.
I think it is incredibly frustrating when a book set in contemporary America shows a distinct lack of awareness of "how things work."
Especially if you're going to be telling a graphic, ostensibly believable story.
There's a lot of

https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/1983318609566019752

sequences in A Little Life that sound like the author had a vague awareness of how things work but didn't bother to look stuff up.
That's lazy at best, but if you're trying to portray real social problems it almost gets cruel.
For example:
Yanagihara knows that kids in foster

I’m not even saying this in a mean way, I’m just saying this in a cultural way.
This is not what retired evangelicals are like.
White American evangelical culture highly values self reliance and independence, or at least the performance of it.
White evangelical grandmas

https://twitter.com/resisfertile/status/1972975944307511719

didn’t grow up with other women in church taking care of their kids. They would balk at the idea they should start now.
Go to any big white evangelical church in the US and start asking the retirees if they will regularly drop in and provide cleaning and childcare to

You know, one positive things I actually can say about Kirk is I can't imagine that he would want a database of people to track people who failed to praise him effusively enough after his death on pain of losing their livelihoods.

https://twitter.com/NathanJRobinson/status/1967280294282907803

I actually don't think threatening people into complimenting him was the kind of thing he invested his time in.
The witch hunt, if you look at the posts, has fully moved into trying to get people fired for insufficient grief or suspected insincerity when they say things

I don’t like bringing this up because we don’t know who did it and it doesn’t excuse violence either way.
But Kirk got his start by making a list of private citizens for supports to harass.
Remember the professor watch list?
I strongly favor civil dialogue but I truly am

https://twitter.com/realdailywire/status/1966238479005954530

struggling to think of a single person who has consistently modeled it.
I think the fantasy is much more along the lines of “monopolized chaos.” The dream of the day where WE are doing the attacking, but no defending.
That’s not peace. That’s not civility.

1/So, thinking about the economic news/price increases, and how this will impact how people see Trump.
My honest answer is "it won't."
I was definitely one of those people who followed all the NYT think pieces about trying to get out of my bubble and build bridges in 2016. It's been ten years. At this point, I think there's only three kinds of people who still really like Trump.
I’m not talking about low information, low participation voters who voted for him in Arkansas and didn’t really think about it because they didn’t think it mattered.

I think one odd aspect of Christian apologia for passages about wives in the NT that rankle is that we actually really overplay the oppression of women in the first century outside of Christian contexts.
It's obviously not entirely wrong but there's still a fair amount of data showing women doing things like initiating divorces, arranging their own marriages, and managing their own financial affairs.
In my last article I tried to not overly play the role of the "Rome apologist" but I do think a flattening narrative doesn't really serve anyone well.

So, two things to note.
1) When you look at the full context, there's a curtain in front of her. The guys don't know what she looks like. That's not a variable here either way.
2) The comments of "women have been lied to their whole life about what men want, we don't care about

https://twitter.com/FearedBuck/status/1955635262169723144

their hobbies or interests" are, I really hope, representative of Twitter guys only, because that is grim.
If you aren't interested in your girlfriend's hobbies, job, or interests... then what do you care about?
"Does it vagina?" Yes, I'm sure she vaginas, but also if your plan

I also think it's worth noting that whatever you're calling "Christianity" in the US basically rolls over completely every 10-15 years.
When I was a kid *the* Christian hangup was the objectification of women on TV and ads that sexualized them.
Now it's that women aren't

https://twitter.com/WalshFreedom/status/1954170962238193950

sexualized enough.
See also the frantic effort to eradicate dating in the 2000s, now replaced with the fear that boys aren't getting enough sex.

One historical myth I think has surprisingly long legs is the idea that for most of human history marriage was between a very young girl and a much older man.
We kinda get that idea laundered to us even through fantasy (Game of Thrones did this a lot) but the reality is just way more complicated in the west.
Yes, in the Roman Empire, you do see some urban records of older men marrying younger girls, but that was usually in contexts where those men's primary sources of income were estates they owned that were run by slaves or lending.

First, this story is horrible.
Second, I think what's even stranger about Trump is that in Trump's case, people usually have to repent on his behalf.
Trump can't actually bring himself to say "I did something awful but Jesus forgives me," so someone like Franklin Graham

https://twitter.com/RancidGinger/status/1948177785052385520

has to go out and say "Trump did something awful but he's so incredibly sorry and has asked Jesus for healing and cleansing." Then Trump strenuously denies he ever did such a thing if he's ever asked about it.
This has happened like nine times.
And, it's more than enough for MAGA

Off the top of my head, here's a list of ideas in Eddington that Eddington is 100 percent right about.
1) Some people who think they aren't racist, are racist and just haven't thought about it yet (A number of supposedly enlightened characters are incredibly quick to blame the

https://twitter.com/MadisonRaeGun/status/1946053876484043066

town's only black guy for a murder.)
2) People who are more interested in personal gain than their convictions are extremely easy to draw into and out of ideological movements (Brian goes from performative protestor to right wing politician).
3) More societal change is driven by

Another thing about the Mary-Joseph thing as I'm blogging about it.
One of the arguments I've also seen flying around is that men would usually be older than their wives in the ancient world, so the idea of Joseph being an old/older man is historically plausible.
1) Sort of. The pattern of girls marrying men ten-fifteen years older than them tended to be more of an urban phenomenon. In rural areas, though, wives and kids are workers. There's not really a normal rural channel to go work into your 30s and save up for a house so you can take