Do you ever think about the fact that the US has created and legitimized a system of institutionalized inequality by funding schools through property taxes? That basically a child’s education is only as good as the value of the property in their neighborhood. Funny how education is so often viewed as an equalizing factor when there is nothing equal about it.
I really don’t care if I’ve already reblogged this
Because this needs to be reblogged….
I remember learning this for the first time as an adult. I had grown up thinking education was the great playing field leveler. So I was so furious to find out how very much it wasn’t anything of the kind.
This is a big part of why you’ll often see rich white people fussing about school district lines, because they hate the idea that their money is going towards the education of poor children.
“being gay and conservative is hard” good. hope it’s shitty being a literal traitor to your community
this is my single most controversial post on this site, every republican that comes into contact with it crytypes at me
i houuhg.t tthe lgb tcommuniy was ll li..inclusiv,ee what do yo umeaan i i C..an’t Be racais tandd .. hatte poor ppeople????? .so muuch for te ;;htoleerant l lefft
You seriously have never met an intelligent conservative in your life, have you?
One, single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter
supports Trump—and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s
authoritarianism.
That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have
been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations.
And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American
electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible
that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow.
My finding is the result of a national poll I conducted in the last
five days of December under the auspices of the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, sampling 1,800 registered voters across the
country and the political spectrum. Running a standard statistical
analysis, I found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and
religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred
candidate. Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically
significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the
former was far more significant than the latter.
Authoritarianism is not a new, untested concept in the American
electorate. Since the rise of Nazi Germany, it has been one of the most
widely studied ideas in social science. While its causes are still
debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians
obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond
aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. From
pledging to “make America great again” by building a wall on the border
to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United
States, Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations.
Not all authoritarians are Republicans by any means; in national
surveys since 1992, many authoritarians have also self-identified as
independents and Democrats. And in the 2008 Democratic primary, the
political scientist Marc Hetherington found that authoritarianism
mattered more than income, ideology, gender, age and education in
predicting whether voters preferred Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama.
But Hetherington has also found, based on 14 years of polling, that
authoritarians have steadily moved from the Democratic to the Republican
Party over time. He hypothesizes that the trend began decades ago, as
Democrats embraced civil rights, gay rights, employment protections and
other political positions valuing freedom and equality. In my poll
results, authoritarianism was not a statistically significant factor in
the Democratic primary race, at least not so far, but it does appear to
be playing an important role on the Republican side. Indeed, 49 percent
of likely Republican primary voters I surveyed score in the top quarter
of the authoritarian scale—more than twice as many as Democratic voters.
Political pollsters have missed this key component of Trump’s support
because they simply don’t include questions about authoritarianism in
their polls. In addition to the typical battery of demographic, horse
race, thermometer-scale and policy questions, my poll asked a set of
four simple survey questions that political scientists have employed
since 1992 to measure inclination toward authoritarianism. These
questions pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the
voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or
self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious.
Respondents who pick the first option in each of these questions are
strongly authoritarian.
Based on these questions, Trump was the only candidate—Republican or
Democrat—whose support among authoritarians was statistically
significant.
So what does this mean for the election? It doesn’t just help us
understand what motivates Trump’s backers—it suggests that his support
isn’t capped. In a statistical analysis of the polling results, I found
that Trump has alreadycaptured 43 percent of Republican primary
voters who are strong authoritarians, and 37 percent of Republican
authoritarians overall. A majority of Republican authoritarians in my
poll also strongly supported Trump’s proposals to deport 11 million
illegal immigrants, prohibit Muslims from entering the United States,
shutter mosques and establish a nationwide database that track Muslims.
And in a general election, Trump’s strongman rhetoric will surely
appeal to some of the 39 percent of independents in my poll who identify
as authoritarians and the 17 percent of self-identified Democrats who
are strong authoritarians.
What’s more, the number of Americans worried about the threat of
terrorism is growing. In 2011, Hetherington published research finding
that non-authoritarians respond to the perception of threat by behaving
more like authoritarians. More fear and more threats—of the kind we’ve
seen recently in the San Bernardino and Paris terrorist attacks—mean
more voters are susceptible to Trump’s message about protecting
Americans. In my survey, 52 percent of those voters expressing the most
fear that another terrorist attack will occur in the United States in
the next 12 months were non-authoritarians—ripe targets for Trump’s
message.
Take activated authoritarians from across the partisan spectrum and
the growing cadre of threatened non-authoritarians, then add them to the
base of Republican general election voters, and the potential electoral
path to a Trump presidency becomes clearer.
So, those who say a Trump presidency “can’t happen here” should check
their conventional wisdom at the door. The candidate has confounded
conventional expectations this primary season because those expectations
are based on an oversimplified caricature of the electorate in general
and his supporters in particular. Conditions are ripe for an
authoritarian leader to emerge. Trump is seizing the opportunity. And
the institutions—from the Republican Party to the press—that are
supposed to guard against what James Madison called “the infection of
violent passions” among the people have either been cowed by Trump’s
bluster or are asleep on the job.
It is time for those who would appeal to our better angels to take
his insurgency seriously and stop dismissing his supporters as a small
band of the dispossessed. Trump support is firmly rooted in American
authoritarianism and, once awakened, it is a force to be reckoned with.
That means it’s also time for political pollsters to take
authoritarianism seriously and begin measuring it in their polls.
Not entirely willingly, mind. I was young, religious, and I made
the naïve mistake in thinking that all Christians were like the ones I had
encountered at my home church: warm, tolerant, kind. I fell in love, and we did
what young, hormonal Christian teenagers did: rushed into a marriage.
I realized my mistake almost immediately, but it took far
too long to get out.
Personally, I endured abuse at the hands of my new husband—mental,
physical, sexual, economic, emotional. You name it, he did it. Brutal is an
understatement. He systematically broke me down until I was a shell of a human
being. I’m still dealing with the emotional fallout and physical side effects,
and I probably will be for another decade at least.
That’s personally, but let’s talk his family. Because he was
an extreme case, yes, but he was raised with the idea that women existed to
keep their mouths shut and their legs open. I spit out two children faster than
I could whip my head, because birth control wasn’t part of god’s grand plan for
my life. I was fulfilling my purpose as a mother, and wasn’t that great? My
husband didn’t want the first baby. He wanted me for himself, see? Abortion was
unthinkable, but he fully expected to carry a baby—my baby—to term, then give
it away.
Keeping him was my first rebellion. Keeping the next one was
my second.
In the time I belonged to that family, I watched my
mother-in-law endure the same, though less extreme mistreatment. I watched every
young female family member be groped by the family patriarch. “That’s just how
it is.” I was shamed for making a fuss about it. I watched an older cousin try to sexually assault my teenage
sister-in-law and she was the one who
felt ashamed. We women made family dinners while the men sat on their asses. My
husband and I lived with his parents for a short time. She and I would go to
work each morning—an hour each way—with our husbands sitting in their robes in
the living room, playing video games. When we returned hours later, weary,
exhausted, they hadn’t moved. The standard greeting? “What’s for dinner.”
That’s his family, and yes, some families are sexist, but let’s
talk about church. That’s where all of this is validated, encouraged, taught. Imagine
my shock, when I went to my new husbands’ family church and encountered muted
xenophobia and racism, a heavy dose of homophobia, and some damned overt sexism
(see above.)
Equal roles, but different. Sound familiar? This is still
being taught to little girls today.
In church, I listened with quiet disgust as pastors preached
about how awful my sister—one of the gays—was. I piped up and asked how that
sexual sin was any different than the two young church kids who’d just been
caught “in a bad way”, soon to expect their first baby. Sexual sin is sexual
sin, isn’t it? I sure did get an earful for that one. We did church boycotts:
Disney, Target. Every Sunday School class: Job, cookies, and lets pray God
saves the moos-lims before they all come over and blow us up. We revered
people with white savior complexes who went to be jesus’s hands and feet and
save the poor, helpless Africans.
Hate and ignorance, wrapped up in the holy Scripture.
Hallelujah.
Meanwhile, I endured this abuse. This abuse, and every door
slammed in my face as my husband hit me, tortured me. “Stay true to your vows,”
the pastor would say. “You have communication issues,” our sister-in-law
would tell us. My mother-in-law: “Linds, you just have to accept it. Love is a
choice.”
“But what about the part where it says that husbands are to
love their wives like Christ loves the church?” I asked.
My brother in law, joking: “This is why women aren’t
supposed to speak in church.”
This America is alive and kicking, kids. It’s never gone away; it’s just been lurking,
behind closed doors. “Pass the casual racism and meat loaf, would you? And get
me a glass of water while you’re up. Ketchup, too.” What I’m scared about,
truly, is that I know this. And these ideas are now validated. Now mainstream. Almost
50% of our population believes this is
a good idea.
“It’s our time to take America back.”
What in the hell, if they’ve been saying these things behind
closed doors, and if they believe them In The Name Of God—what in the hell are
they going to say in the open, now? What in the hell are they going to do?
The 50s are revered as the aspirational yester-year, days
gone by. Progress, as we call it, is godlessness to them. We, the godless libs,
took Jesus out of schools. We’ve gone wrong ever since.
This is the America people want back, and that’s my first
fear.
The second is this:
I got out. And I’m terrified that this, my success story,
won’t happen anymore.
I’m the rare statistic. I un-brainwashed and educated myself.
I got counseling (against every Christian advice) to treat severe post-partum
depression. In the process of becoming a healthier person, I realized
what a goddamn mess I was.
It took three tries and a pastor-pseudo-therapist legitimately
telling me, “You know if he hits you again, Linds, I’m going to have to tell
you to leave.”
All regretful, like it was bad news.
“Why should I stick around and wait for it to happen again?”
I asked.
He didn’t have an answer. I left the next week.
It took a few boldfaced lies (it’s temporary, it’s just a separation), and a few miracles, and a
large support system of family and friends who all but plucked me out of that
hell.
For leaving? My price was excommunication. From his family,
our friends, our church. I am the heathen who Divorced my Husband and broke our
home. In that entire city, only three people talk to me now.
(No loss, but it took a long time to recognize that.)
I never, ever would have made it on my own. I had two small children,
a new job that barely paid a living wage, and I was, as I’ve said, a shell of a
human being. I left him and went straight to the human services office. Without
subsidized childcare, healthcare, and food supplements, we would have starved
or been homeless. It never would have been possible.
These are the services that will probably be cut first.
How will anyone in my situation ever be able to leave? They
won’t. Not to mention federal funding for shelters, crisis counseling for
families, healthcare for abused women, and legal services for domestic violence
victims. Throw in a court system that doesn’t value women, and a cultural mentality
that believes what happens behind closed doors should stay behind closed doors… What hope do abused, trapped women have? None in hell.
If this is what makes America great again, I want out. I’ve
been there, done that, and I’m never, ever doing it again.
You’ll take it back over my cold, lifeless body.
This is the dark, dirty secret of Amerika: Women are not free.
Signal boost the hell out of this!
^ The services that Republicans most want to cut aid to are the ones that do the most to help women break free of the brainwashing, control and abuse of disgusting, hateful male fascists
I am willing to say that mostly they are just being obstructionist… but those first two… for them this was personal.
They do have a reason they voted against the bill change. It’s not a good reason, to be clear, but it is a justification not rooted in approval of bestiality.
Here’s the thing: bestiality is already illegal in Louisiana.
This new bill definitely strengthens the law, elaborates on what is illegal conduct (such as the procuring of animals for sexual purposes), and…and here’s the kicker…
Separates out the bestiality-is-illegal section of the law from the sodomy-is-illegal section. They used to be in the same paragraph, now the sodomy-is-illegal paragraph stands alone and a whole new paragraph (with subparagraphs) is there for bestiality.
To be clear, the sodomy-is-illegal parts themselves are null and void and have been since 2003 (Lawrence v. Texas, US Supreme Court). But they’re still on the books.
These ten Republicans are concerned that separating out the bestiality parts from the sodomy parts will make it easier to clean up and eliminate the sodomy provision altogether, and they don’t want to do that. (Again, that would only matter if Lawrence was invalidated somehow. But, well, they could believe that’s possible, too.)
So, yeah. They don’t want to change the law to expand on the illegality of bestiality specifically because that would make it feasible for a future change in law to eliminate a nonfunctional, homophobic section.
wupacing 