On Washing Machines and Republicans

Kids hugging Minnesota governor Tim Walz after he signs a bill to provide free school lunches for all kids. Image source.

Here's a recent post from Adam Lee, More washing machines in schools, please, about washing machines in schools. It mentions schools in New York City and other US cities which have washing machines that students can use, and how this can be extremely helpful for students whose families aren't able to wash their clothes (maybe because they're homeless, for example). There are schools where a significant fraction of students frequently miss school because they don't have clean clothes. The post quotes an article which gives some statistics about the difference it can make if the school provides washing machines- "Similarly, in 2017, a Kansas City public school reported that only 46% of students were meeting the requirement to attend school 90% of the time. After installing a washing machine, this figure shot up to 84%."

My first thought, when I read this, was, wow this is great! If this helps people, then schools should totally do it! I never would have thought of this- I had no idea there were students who were missing school because of laundry. But if this helps, then society should provide washing machines.

My second thought was, I grew up in a conservative Christian environment where most people were Republican, and I just KNOW that my "Republican role models" would NOT like this. Oh, I KNOW that some of the good people who were my role models growing up would totally scoff at this and think it was absurd. I want to unpack the reasons why.

Basically, the Republican belief was that parents are supposed to be responsible and take care of their kids' needs. Parents are supposed to make sure their kids have clean clothes. And if some parents are failing at that, now these liberals are butting in and saying "oh we feel so BADDDD for them! It's so SADDDD! The government should do it!" Utterly ridiculous. People are failing to be good responsible parents, and liberals are saying "that's okay, no need to take responsibility and be good parents! We'll just make this another task for our bloated, meddling government to take on! We'll just make the good responsible taxpayers pay for it!"

(This is what Republicans believed back when I was a teenager. Now the Republican party has turned into a nakedly racist personality cult around Trump. I won't even try to explain that.)

The thing I was missing, back then, when I heard Republican-leaning adults say things like that, was the fact that some people really are poor/homeless, and it's not simply a matter of "they're lazy and irresponsible." It's about structural disadvantages. It's not something they can easily change by "being responsible." They really are in that situation, and it doesn't help to say "here are all the things you should have done differently in your life." What if, instead, we actually help them?

I have more examples.

Back in 2012, I was telling someone about Libby Anne's viral post, How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement. This post is fantastic; you should read it. It's about how Libby Anne was "pro-life" because she genuinely did want to save unborn babies, but then she found out that the "pro-life" movement wasn't actually doing the things that have been proven to reduce the abortion rate. Things like making sure everyone has access to birth control and good sex ed. The "pro-life" side was actually fighting against those things!

One thing that she mentioned in her post was that sometimes pregnant people have abortions because they don't have the financial resources to take care of a baby. They would prefer to keep the baby, but they look at the reality of how much everything costs- medical expenses for giving birth, daycare, etc- and it's just not reasonable. If the government made sure that everyone had prenatal care, if the government paid the hospital costs for giving birth, if the government paid for daycare- that would reduce the abortion rate.

I was telling someone about this, someone who was "pro-life" and tended to vote Republican, and she laughed at the idea that the government should pay for health care for pregnant people, and for daycare. To her, it was just utterly absurd, laughable. Making the good responsible taxpayers pay these high costs- daycare is expensive!- just because some people aren't responsible enough to avoid pregnancy if they're not financially ready to have a kid. So ridiculous, wanting the government to swoop in and solve everyone's problems, instead of teaching people to be responsible and take care of themselves. Making the government huge, adding more and more expensive government programs, so people can be lazy and the government will do everything for them. Ridiculous.

And another time, someone was showing me the hospital bill from a family member who had had surgery. The numbers on this bill were ridiculous, a few thousand dollars here or there for little minor things, in addition to the huge costs for the surgery itself. And at the bottom of the page, it added up to an astronomical number- and then it showed what part the insurance paid for, and what part the patient had to pay for, and fortunately the patient's part was pretty small and not a problem. (They told me that actually, the insurance doesn't even pay what this bill says the insurance should pay- the insurance company will negotiate with the hospital and come to a smaller number. So basically all the numbers are fake.)

So, they told me, this is why it's so important for everyone to have health insurance. Can you imagine if this family member didn't have health insurance, and literally had to pay those amounts? Gosh.

They said "this is why it's so important for everyone to have health insurance", and I felt like... wait, don't we oppose that? They didn't mean it like "this is why our society should have universal health care, so it's not possible for someone to be in a situation where they're sick, they're recovering from surgery, and on top of that they have to pay tens of thousands of dollars." They meant, "see, when you are an adult, you will have to learn how insurance works, and make sure you buy good insurance for yourself- see, this is what can happen to people who don't have insurance. Every adult should know about this and take responsibility to make sure it doesn't happen to their family. That's the way it is."

And do you remember in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for president, and a video leaked where he said:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

And also:

[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

When this leaked, it was a huge thing. People were so angry about it. 

And I was confused... I couldn't understand why people were so angry, because... I thought, yeah, this pretty much is what we as Republicans believe. I have heard "Republican role models" state it this directly. Yes, I have. I didn't know such remarks would be such a scandal. They were very much in the normal range of things I often heard normal Republicans say. "People vote Democrat just because the government gives them free stuff," etc.

I remember back then, I read a blog post about Romney's "47%" comments, and the blogger said, "I do believe people are entitled to food, health care, and housing. These are basic needs, and society has a responsibility to make sure everyone's basic needs are met."

All of this, all these examples about Republicans not wanting the government to spend money on meeting people's basic needs, all of them come down to this question: What is the purpose of government?

Long ago, when I was growing up in a conservative environment, I guess I would have answered like this: Well, a society needs to have a government, to build the things that are needed for a functional society but aren't cost-effective for people to build on their own. For example, roads. You have to have roads. If the government doesn't build roads, what are you gonna do, build your own road every time you want to go somewhere? No, that doesn't make any sense, there should be a society-wide organizational structure that handles things like that.

Things that kind of run in the background, that you take for granted as parts of a functional society. Roads, libraries, police, public schools, standards about how medicines get approval to be sold, standards about cleanliness in restaurant kitchens, laws against murder, you know, things like that.

Here's what doesn't make sense about this perspective: Basically, it views everything the government is *already doing* as normal things the government needs to do. Having the government pay for libraries is fine because the government is already doing that, and we feel that it's normal and not "too much government." And public schools- can you imagine if public schools didn't exist, and there was a movement of people saying "government should pay for schools for all children"- can you imagine what the Republican response would be to that? They would think it was absurd, that it was way too expensive, and people should "take responsibility" and not have kids if they don't have the money to send them to private schools. But since public schools already exist and we all feel this is normal, I've never heard any of my "Republican role models" say they shouldn't exist. I went to a public school. Yeah there was a lot of complaining about how public schools are teaching sex ed, and evolution, etc, but I never heard anyone say the entire public school model is bad.

But anyway, that's more or less how I viewed the purpose of government back then. Just do the minimum-level things that need to be done to have a society.

If someone suggested "hey, what if the government starts this new program that helps this or that group of people?" I would have said, well, maybe, but that's not really the government's role. You shouldn't add government programs to help people just because you want to be nice. That's not really how it's supposed to work. And besides, then you have to raise taxes- the people who don't need the new program will be disproportionately paying for it, and that's not fair.

Back when I had that mindset, one of the things that challenged it was this: I read an article about poor people being drug-tested before they could get food stamps. And this article said, actually it would be cheaper for the government to just give them all food stamps regardless. Doing the drug testing and the paperwork is an extra government expense which outweighs the amount of money the government is saving by denying benefits to people who don't pass the drug tests.

Hmm, interesting! So if our concern was mainly about how it's not fair for the people who don't need help to be paying taxes to benefit poor people, well, then don't require drug testing for people who get food stamps. Save the taxpayers money!

And then there were studies about how government programs can actually save money for the government in the long run. For example, the government pays for public schools, and then in the long run you get a society where everyone is educated, and the economy is more productive, which benefits the government. The government pays for vaccines for children, and then in the long run you get less sickness and a more productive workforce. And so on.

So, hmm, one might say, even though the "purpose" of government isn't to help people, maybe the government should do things to help people, if those things benefit the government and good responsible taxpayers in the long run.

And maybe you could even take it a step farther and say "If the government pays for this, even if it doesn't result in 'greater productivity' that you can measure in dollars, it gives everyone the benefit of living in a society which provides for everyone's basic needs." I want the US to be that kind of society. 

This whole line of reasoning is based on the idea that the government is "supposed to" just do a few minimal things to set up a society, but isn't "supposed to" have a goal of helping people. But what if we view this completely differently?

What if we view it like this: We have a structure which has the power to make policies which can really help a lot of people. We have the ability to create a society where everyone's basic needs are met. A government is big enough that it's actually capable of doing this. So, let's do it! 

I don't know if that's the "purpose" of government, but hey, since government exists, we have the means to make society so much better, so let's do it!

What if it's not just about creating a society where people kinda sorta have the opportunity to make a good life for themselves, and if they don't it's their own fault for not "taking responsibility"? What if we really had a "safety net"? What if we made sure that, no matter what, everyone had access to food?

Sometimes I think about how amazing modern medicine is. How, 100 years ago, if you had this or that medical problem, you would die from it, but nowadays we have treatment and you get better and it's no big deal. And here's my question: If we discover an amazing new cure for some disease (or other medical problem), does it mean "now we can have a society where no one has this disease"? Or does it mean "now if you have enough money, then you can pay to be cured, but if you're poor then tough luck"? Sometimes I imagine kids in history class learning, "This society discovered a cure for this horrible disease. But, they only let rich people have the cure." And the kids would all be like "oh goodness, that's terrible!"

I started this blog post by linking to Adam Lee's blog- let's go back to that. In his post, he discusses school lunch debt, and he says:

It’s obscene that there’s such a thing as school lunch debt. Only a mind so warped by capitalism that it’s lost all its morals could conceive of something so sick and cruel. The occasional feel-good stories about donors paying off lunch debt don’t disguise the fact that it shouldn’t exist in the first place.

I have to admit, this isn't intuitive to me. I don't feel appalled at the concept of school lunch debt. My intuition is more like "well to get food, you have to pay for it." So, for anyone coming from that background, let me talk about the logic behind "It's obscene that there's such a thing as school lunch debt."

These are children, whose families are too poor to afford food. Society should not stand by and let this happen. This is a judgment on our society. Allowing children to accumulate debt, for food. Society should give them the food for free. And "society" means the government, because the government is able to collect taxes from everyone, and thereby spread the costs out fairly.

A society which allows children to accumulate school lunch debt, rather than giving them food for free- that's awful.

But the typical Republican answer to this is "yes, we should give money to help poor people. But it should be charities or private individuals doing it, not the government. That's not the government's job."

My take on where this argument is coming from- and I can't speak for the motivations of everyone who uses it, but generally this is the way I've viewed it- is this: Giving money to help others should be a choice, which can serve as a kind of indicator about whether you're a moral person or not. In church, there are sermons about how you should give money, God commands you to give money, it's a sin to not give money, etc- and in some sense people want it to be this way, rather than the government automatically taxing everyone's paycheck and so removing the elements of choice and sin.

What if the government raised taxes and then gave food to everyone who can't afford it? Well, that takes away rich people's opportunity to feel like "wow I'm such a good person because I decided to donate some money to feed people." When Republicans say "that's not the government's job," I take that to mean "there should exist people who don't have enough money to meet their basic needs, as a test for us, so we can step up and prove we are good moral people, by giving them some money." So the important thing is not to actually solve the problem and ensure everyone's needs are met, but to lift up some role models among the population of rich people, to praise them for being such good people because they donate money.

If the government taxes you more and then feeds people, well, nobody's going to admire you for your generosity, because it wasn't your choice to give the money.

(Very interesting, though, that these are the same people who oppose marriage equality- ie, the "sin" of being gay-married isn't something people should get to have a "choice" on, unlike the "sin" of not being generous.)

Also, the "it's not the government's job" argument treats caring for poor people as a sort of optional extra thing that very very good moral people do, rather than a bare-minimum-level obligation. And the donor can require the recipients to jump through hoops to prove that they "deserve" help. It's based on the idea that the normal state of the world- the way it should be- is that people "take responsibility" and don't need help, and then if there are some people who made bad choices, it's their own fault, they deserve to be poor, but we feel some pity for them, so we'll give them some money, and maybe require them to show they're grateful and they're taking steps toward "being responsible" before they can get the money.

But what if it was like this instead: What if "the way it should be" is that society is obligated to give money to poor people, to make sure everyone's needs are met? What if it was just normal that kids at school get free lunch? What if we didn't think of these things as "charity" but as something that people are entitled to?

Maybe people say "that's not the government's job" and sure, maybe, in some theoretical world where you have abstract discussions about "the government's job"... But if the government can actually get things done, more effectively than private charity can, doesn't it make sense for the government to do it?

Really weird how apparently "making sure this actually get done" is less important than "making sure the government doesn't do something that's not its correct role."

And here is where Republicans will bring up the argument "government programs are inefficient." I don't know enough details about this to know how good of an argument it is- I'm sure that yes you can find plenty of examples of government programs being inefficient or wasteful. But what matters is the results. If the government is able to, say, provide health care to everyone, even if it does so "inefficiently", isn't that better than an ad-hoc network of gofundmes? 

I don't know the details about how it would work, how to pay for it- obviously you can't just indiscriminately fund every program anyone suggests- but my point is, let's dream big. Let's imagine a society which really does a good job of helping everyone, and then let's take a look at what practical steps could help get closer to that. The Republican approach is more like, let's not even consider funding new government programs, because we already know it will screw up the economy, and reward people for being lazy- let's just not change anything, we already know the effects will be bad, even without thinking about any actual policies or doing any actual math.

Maybe the key difference is that Democrats are making policy based on the question "how can we make society better?" and Republicans are basing it on the question "how can we make society the way it SHOULD be?" Ie, people should go to college, and get married, and have kids- so make policies which encourage and reward those things. Make people do what they're supposed to do.

So, these are my thoughts on Republican opposition to government programs giving people "free stuff." There is an overall framework to this ideology which makes logical sense- it's about Republican views on how people "should" live and how society "should" be and what the government "should" do. If you grow up in an environment where everyone believes that, and you don't have access to information about what life is actually like for poor people in the US, then sure, it makes sense that you would believe that. 

But if you listen to people, and learn about how poverty and structural inequality actually work, how it's not just a matter of being "irresponsible"- and how much of a difference it can make if the government steps in to help them... We have the power to do a lot of good and improve society. Let's do it.

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Related:

My Republican Role Models 

Christian Nationalism / Faith Without Works Is Dead

Blogaround

1. Egypt is certified malaria-free by WHO (October 20, via) This is great!

2. Lauren Stratford, The Survivor Who Never Was (October 15) "True change cannot be built on falsehoods, and people who try to do so create more victims, not fewer."

3. China’s Solution for Trash-Strewn Mountains: Robot Dog Porters (October 24) "The four-legged robots could be seen trotting up and down the steps of Mount Tai, or Taishan, in eastern China’s Shandong province last weekend, often laden with huge bags of garbage, sparking amusement among the hordes of tourists at the site."

Also from Sixth Tone: What’s Chinese for ‘Midwest Nice’? (October 24) LOLLL oh this is so real. You text with customer service on Taobao (Chinese shopping app) and they constantly call you "qin" [亲]. A dictionary will tell you this means "dear"- and I have seen plenty of Chinese people using "dear" in English the way they use "qin", which just sounds odd, like "Dear, can you bring in these documents next week?"- but I've always felt like it shouldn't be understood as "dear" but more like a polite title you use in administrative sorts of interactions. Loved reading this article about how Chinese people also find it weird to be called "qin" on Taobao all the time.

And also: Signs of Unity: Can China’s Deaf Community Find a Common Language? (October 28) "China’s large size, coupled with a history of sign language use dating back at least 1,500 years, have made China’s sign languages especially fragmented."

4. Former envoy says Americans in Canada ‘could determine’ next president (October 20) Love this! Americans living abroad, VOTE VOTE VOTE!

5. Nazi shit (intra ecclesiam nulla salus) (October 23) "'Round them up and put them in camps' is unadorned Nazi shit. It just is. There’s no way of qualifying or caviling or weaseling out of that. 'Round them up and put them in camps' is the essence of the thing itself."

6. What NOT To Say To People Trapped In The MAGA Cult (October 24) "One day he’ll be gone [hopefully very soon] and you’ll need to be there to help them process what happened and perhaps find a way back to sanity."

7. Police and poll workers train for possible election threats (October 24) 

8. American Airlines fined $50 million for its treatment of passengers with disabilities (October 23) "Duckworth said airlines routinely damage her own wheelchairs and others. In fact, Duckworth says they broke 892 wheelchairs in a single month last year. 'Imagine if the American public saw that the airlines broke 892 pairs of legs in a single month. There would be hue and cry, but there hasn't been.'"

9. Biden apologizes for forced Native American boarding school policy that caused abuse and deaths of children (October 26) "President Joe Biden delivered an apology Friday for a United States policy that forcibly separated generations of indigenous children from their families for more than 150 years and sent them to federally backed boarding schools for forced assimilation."

10. MAGA’s Closing Argument: Dad’s Coming Home (October 28) "The core MAGA message is that all these problems are really one problem: The world feels wrong now, because people don’t know how to behave."

11. Your Fave Is Problematic Politics (October 18) "This is an annoying approach to media analysis. It is a batshit approach to getting people to vote for a candidate."

12. Relatable: AOC Doesn't Want Four More Years Of Waking Up To Trump's Bullsh*t (October 29) "We should not have to live that way again. We shouldn’t have to wake up every morning and think “OK, what’s it gonna be today?” Our elected officials shouldn’t be spending their time crafting responses to everything he says or does, only for no one to even remember what they were the next day because the next day we’re onto another horrible thing."

13. Many state abortion bans include exceptions for rape. How often are they granted? (October 26, via) "Bertram Roberts says she’s never seen anyone in that state get an exemption — for any reason, let alone rape."

14. New Acquisitions: 1933 and the Definition of Fascism (October 25) "Indeed, an unprecedented number of Donald Trump’s closest, handpicked aides and advisors have refused to endorse him, many warning publicly that Trump was a danger to democracy. It is rare for any advisor or official so close to the president to refuse to endorse them; nearly half of Trump’s have so refused."

15. 《目标是宝可梦大师》中文版MV 腾格尔 (October 26) For fun, here's a Chinese song about pokemon!

"Color Taste Texture" (a cookbook for autistics/ anyone with food aversions)

Book cover for "Color Taste Texture."

I very much enjoyed reading Color Taste Texture: Recipes for Picky Eaters, Those with Food Aversion, and Anyone Who's Ever Cringed at Food [affiliate link], by Matthew Broberg-Moffitt. The author is autistic, and according to their twitter, uses he/she/they pronouns. I'm also autistic, and I think this book is great from an autistic perspective, but it can benefit lots of people even beyond that. Anyone who is "picky" or has food aversions. (For example, the book mentions that it's common to have food aversions during pregnancy. TRUE FACTS.)

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I love the overall idea of this book

In the beginning pages of this book, Broberg-Moffitt says that there is lots of advice out there about how to "trick" picky eaters into eating things, but this is NOT their approach. No. Instead, their approach relies on thinking carefully about what specific aspects of the food you are averse to. For example, do you not like the taste of onions, or the texture? And then finding ways to work with those aversions/preferences so that you have food that you do like. 

It's fine to eat the same thing all the time, as long as you're getting enough nutrition and calories! Don't force people to try things they don't like!

I love this. I feel like I don't need the recipes in this book, but I'm really glad I read this because of its overall philosophy. Instead of feeling like you're supposed to "get over" your food aversions, or feeling like they're just silly things that you shouldn't expect other people to take seriously, this book advises that we should treat them as serious things and work with them. If you don't like to eat xyz, then let's find a way for you to eat a healthy diet which doesn't include xyz. This is great!

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Discussing individual tastes/colors/textures and how to cook food to attain these tastes/colors/textures

There is a chapter on tastes, which goes through the different tastes (sweet, bitter, etc) and gives tips for small ways you can modify your cooking process in order to give the food more of that kind of taste. 

Similarly, there is a chapter on color, which lists different colors and gives tips for how to change the food into that color without affecting the overall taste. (You could use food coloring if you want, but this book gives ideas which don't use food coloring.) For example, if your kid really wants to eat yellow food, you can add a little bit of turmeric.

Maybe it seems a little strange to care about the food's color- if the taste is the same, what does it matter? But, yeah, it matters. If the food tastes fine but it looks disgusting, then it totally makes sense that people would be too grossed out to enjoy it. Slight changes to the color can make a difference.

And there's a chapter on texture, and how to achieve certain textures when cooking. In particular, autistic people often prefer soft or smooth textures, because every bite is basically the same. You're not suddenly going to bite into something weird. *shudder*

Temperature is also important! Maybe you don't like cold food, maybe it just feels gross to you to eat cold food. That matters! Don't eat cold food then!

And the book discusses what to do if you can't stand the sound of people chewing. The book gives various suggestions- and one of the suggestions is to let the food-averse person eat alone. You might think that's not acceptable because the "ideal" is to have a nice family meal together- but if the food-averse person really really can't stand the sound of people chewing, so family meals are unpleasant for them, then you should consider the option of letting them eat alone.

In practical terms, in my own life, I don't feel I need to implement any of these suggestions. But I think the author's way of thinking is very valuable here. Instead of expecting autistic people and picky eaters to "get over it", they should think about what could make it better for them, and do that. Are there certain tastes/colors/textures you prefer? Well let's cook food that incorporates those, then.

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Recipes

About one third of this book is the discussion of practical tips to achieve certain tastes/textures/etc when cooking (as I described above), and the remaining two thirds is recipes. I just sorta skimmed the recipes; I personally don't feel that I need them. 

As I was reading this, I was thinking to myself "well, I don't really have food aversions" but actually I do. It's just that as an adult, being a "picky eater" is treated as less of a big deal, because *I* do the grocery shopping, and I just don't buy things that I don't like.

I really have "gotten over" a lot of my food aversions, though, compared to when I was a child. I don't really know how, I guess they just faded away. But, I don't like meat that has fat in it, and I don't like eating meat where you have to spit out the bones, or eating fruit where you have to spit out the seeds and skin. (Food that requires you to spit out bones/seeds is common in China. Blah. I avoid it as much as I can.)

I sometimes feel like I have to "protect" myself from food I'm eating, like kinda have to cringe away from it and not think about it as I eat it. Like there's an equilibrium between how hungry I am and how weirded out I am by the food. (Anybody else feel this way?) Eating just enough that hunger is not bothering me anymore, and then after that point I just can't. I mean, for foods I genuinely like, of course I don't have to do that, but sometimes I'm at some fast food place and there aren't any good options so I just eat a little, until I'm too repulsed to eat any more.

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Quotes

A few quotes I LOVED:

• "I'm a classically trained chef who has never worked in the food industry because some food is just gross." (p 1)
• "If your kid only eats chicken fingers and mashed potatoes and absolutely refuses anything else, make them the best chicken fingers and mashed potatoes. If they are getting adequate nutrition and calories, this cookbook isn't going to try to force anything else on them." (p 2)
• "Not wanting your food to touch is, frankly, logical." (p 45)

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Conclusion

This book is great because it's about how to actually work with food aversions and cook something that people will like, rather than forcing them to "get over it."

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Related:

“Easy” Jobs and “Hard” Jobs

Blogaround

VOTE!

If you are a US citizen, then make a plan and vote!

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1. Trump's Recreating Actual Racist History Not Just Remaking 'The Purge' (October 1) "Aaron Rupar compared Trump’s call for extrajudicial police violence to the German Kristallnacht or the 'Night of Broken Glass' when Nazis led a violent riot against Jews as German authorities stood and watched. Nazi paramilitary forces ransacked Jewish homes, hospitals and schools. They destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. More than 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps."

2. Canceling subscriptions has to be as easy as signing up, the FTC says in a new rule (October 16) Wow this is great. This is revolutionary.

3. We Need To Get Junk Science Out of Courtrooms (2023) "Isn’t it outrageous that we have lay jurors that are relied upon to distinguish nonsense from sense in criminal courts where life and liberty is at stake? There’s no federal oversight. There’s isn’t something like the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] where consumer products like toothpaste and aspirin are tested for their safety before they’re used by the general public, because we care about the reliability of those products. We care more about the reliability of mouthwash in this country than we do about forensic sciences that are used to sentence people to death and to life in prison."

4. The Weaver Bird Dilemma: Creationism’s Struggle with Diversity (October 7) "This striking bird, with its enormous tail, builds a very different type of nest compared to the Southern Masked Weaver. Yet according to most YEC classifications, these birds would be considered part of the same 'created kind.'"

5. Musk offers voters $1 million a day to sign PAC petition backing the Constitution. Is that legal? (October 21) 

6. Missouri AG in abortion pill lawsuit argues fewer teen pregnancies hurt state financially (October 22) Yes, really, they are really arguing this in a court case. I don't even know what to make of this, because it goes against the typical "pro-life" talking points about "if you didn't want a baby, you shouldn't have had sex"- presumably abstinence would also "hurt" the states of Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho by reducing the teen pregnancy rate. It's like... instead of a "pregnancy is the punishment for having sex" "pro-life" argument, it's more along the lines of "women [and teenage girls] should be required to have sex and then required to have babies." ??? I haven't seen "pro-life" people making this argument before. (Though I suppose it's kind of implicitly there in all the "pro-life" hand-wringing over low birth rates.)

7. On Univision, ordinary citizens step in for cowardly journalists (October 18) "Why didn't Trump have a ready answer to this question? Why hasn't he been asked this before? Why haven't journalists asked him this every time he makes his terrifying calls for mass deportation? How can we be less than 20 days from the election, and Trump doesn't even have a pretense of an answer to the most fundamental effect of his most frequently stated policy?"

8. Targeted Advertising: Good or evil? (October 22) "So if failed advertisements are the worst kind, then you must prefer targeted advertising, right?"

My Republican Role Models

Sticker that says "VOTE". Image source.

I grew up in a conservative Christian environment, so I implicitly understood that it was "right" to vote Republican. But I was always skeptical of political parties in general, and when I was old enough to vote, I believed that I needed to research every candidate for myself, and make an informed decision on each one, rather than just voting Republican or just voting Democrat. I figured that in general, doing this research would result in me voting for Republican candidates, because my views fit with the Republican party- but I should do the research anyway and not follow a political party.

At one point, I was listening to what different candidates said about climate change. And it seemed that the evidence very clearly supported one side. Scientists were all saying that climate change is real and is caused by big industries putting carbon into the atmosphere, and we need to take action to limit this, or else the earth will become warmer, sea levels will rise, and it will be a disaster. The Democratic party agrees with the scientists on this. The Republican party, on the other hand... seemed to think everything was fine? All the scientists were pointing to the evidence, and Republican politicians just kind of ... said it wasn't true, but didn't go into any detail beyond that. They didn't seem to be making much of an effort to actually respond to what the scientists were saying.

I felt like... I wanted to be on the Republican side of this issue, but I saw the evidence and I didn't have an answer for it. But, I thought, Republican leaders think climate change isn't real, and they're responsible adults who surely must be well-informed about this, because their actual job is to know about the issues and make good decisions about them. Right? So even though *I* don't have an answer to argue against all the scientists who are warning us about climate change, I can be reassured by the fact that Republican politicians think it's not real, and surely they have good reasons for that.

So my Republican role models let me go along with what I wanted to believe, without me doing the work of thinking through what the reality was and what kind of policies would be best to address it. It was just... I don't want to believe this, and the existence of supposedly "responsible adults" who don't believe it means that it's reasonable for me to do so too.

(I think my mistake was believing that it was their job to be well-informed and make decisions that benefit society as a whole.)

Similar thing with minimum wage laws. What I had heard from Republican role models was, Democrats are saying "oh we feel so bad for these people who work minimum wage jobs and are trying to raise a family on that, oh it's so saddddd, we want to help them, we should raise the minimum wage" and they want to be nice and help people, but it's so short-sighted and will be bad in the long run. If you raise the minimum wage, it's going to mess up the whole economy. Republicans were the ones being realistic and making sure the economy would continue to work correctly. Democrats were just making decisions based on feeling sad for those people who made bad decisions. You can't run a country that way! Besides, you're not supposed to be able to earn a living wage at a minimum-wage job. Minimum wage jobs are just for students working part-time before they start their real career.

That's what I had always heard. Then, one day when I was in college, I happened upon an article about a city which had increased its minimum wage and their economy was basically fine. All those doom-and-gloom predictions about how it would mess up the whole economy didn't happen at all. And I thought, wow, this is great news! This is awesome! So we totally should raise the minimum wage, because it helps people and it doesn't ruin the economy! 

Surely when my Republican role models hear about that, they'll want to raise the minimum wage too. Right?

Eventually I started to realize... these sophisticated-sounding talking points about how climate change isn't real, and raising the minimum wage would be horrible for the economy, and so on- are these just flimsy justifications for doing what we selfishly want to do? Voters and politicians who personally benefit from certain policies, even though those policies are not fair to everyone, and don't help society. Is it really just "business owners want to make more money, and don't want to pay their employees a living wage, and so they're going to go ahead and do that because they have enough power to make policies that say they can"? Is that what's really going on, this preschool-level morality of just doing things that benefit yourself, and not caring about how it's unfair to other people? 

I really thought that responsible adults don't do that. Or, sure, some adults do, but it's very obvious to everyone that that's "corruption" and it's wrong.

And I don't necessarily think that believing "we can't raise the minimum wage because it would ruin the whole economy" makes someone a bad person. Maybe they heard that Republican talking point, and didn't think much about it, didn't think to challenge it because emotionally they just didn't like the idea of raising the minimum wage. They're scared of change, and so they feel relieved when they hear some analyst saying "well this is just the way the math works, it would mess up the whole economy." I can relate to that. 

You should still be held accountable for your lack of awareness of how your fear is driving you to support a policy that harms people- but you're not a bad person.

Or maybe they really wish that society could raise the minimum wage, maybe they hear about families who are struggling because their income is low, and they really have compassion for them and wish something could be done- but they believe that a government policy to raise the minimum wage wouldn't actually help, because Republicans said so. Yeah, I mean, I understand that- I understand being in an environment where all you hear is one viewpoint, and you have no idea that other arguments even exist.

The real test is this: If someone thinks "we can't raise the minimum wage because it would mess up the whole economy" and then you show them an article about a city which raised the minimum wage and nothing disastrous happened (like this one for example), how do they respond? Do they leap on to it- "What?! Oh my goodness, tell me more! This is great news! Was there anything unique about this situation, which prevented those predicted economic disasters from happening? Let's think about how to replicate this in other places! HUGE IF TRUE!" Or do they ignore it, or even act like they don't *want* it to be true?

Another example: I received my absentee ballot for an election one year, and it included a proposal that I could vote "yes" or "no" on. The proposal was something like this: "Equal Rights Amendment: This proposal will make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender or pregnancy status."

So, that sounds good, the way it's written there, but you should always do your research to see what it's actually about. Maybe the way they wrote it on the ballot doesn't give the whole picture. So I looked it up online, and found a Democrat statement on it, which went something like this: "We support this proposal because we think it's wrong to discriminate on the basis of gender or pregnancy status." Very straightforward, very "duh"- equal rights are obviously a good thing, so that's why we should support this.

And the Republican statement on it: "We don't support this proposal because the way it is written is too vague, and we think it could maybe be used to allow late-term abortion." I read that and I was like "???" What do they mean, it's too vague? What do they mean, it "could" allow late-term abortion? Is there any substance to this, or do they just feel uncomfortable with the term "equal rights" and are casting about for an excuse to vote against it?

Imagine a young person coming from a conservative background, who has internalized the idea that it's suspect when Democrats put forward a policy about "equal rights", though they can't necessarily explain why they feel that way. This young person can't put together a coherent argument for why something called "equal rights amendment" would be bad, but it just kind of... feels like the kind of thing they shouldn't support. It feels liberal. And so they look to their Republican role models, to offer an argument about why it's reasonable to not support an "equal rights amendment." And the Republican role models give this statement, about how "oh it's kinda vague and something something abortion"- is that supposed to convince anybody? Or is it just, like... "oh good, I didn't want to support this, but I didn't have a good reason, but at least I know there is a good reason out there (even though the Republican side hasn't articulated it in a way that makes sense to me), so I can be assured that it's okay for me to vote against this."

Another example: One day, years ago, as I was walking around on my college campus, I happened across a protest about the Darfur genocide. The protesters were trying to get people to sign a petition about it. I recognized one of them; she was in one of my classes, and so she started talking to me about the Darfur genocide, and asking me to sign the petition.

I felt like... if it's true that this is happening, then of course I oppose it. Of course genocide is bad. But taking a stand on this feels like the kind of thing that my Republican role models wouldn't do. I can't explain why, but it feels liberal, and so I don't want to get involved. Maybe if I talked to some well-informed Republicans, they would be able to explain why the situation was much more complicated than "it's a genocide, obviously that's terrible, let's protest against it."

I didn't want to sign her petition, but I didn't have a good answer when she asked why not, so eventually I just scribbled something and kinda pretended I was signing my name. Honestly, my worry was that I was going to find out later that the protesters had completely misrepresented the situation, and that I had actually signed my name to something bad. Like, of course if there really is a genocide, I want to oppose it- but I felt that my Republican role models might know what the real truth was, and that it wasn't actually what the protesters were saying.

I mean, thinking about it now, it would have been reasonable for me to say "this is the first I'm hearing about this, I want to take some time to read more about it before I have an opinion." Always a good idea to fact-check! At the same time, I understand why a protester wouldn't like that answer, and would see it as an excuse made by people who don't care about others.

It depends on whether you're actually going to go off and read about it on your own, and then take action, or if you just feel like "this protest makes me uncomfortable, I want to get away from it" and then you don't think about it again after that.

Outsourcing your thinking to "Republican role models." Feeling like you can't really explain the reasons you support certain political ideas, but there are serious adults who hold these positions, and surely they have good reasons because that's their job.

To some extent, though, don't I do the same thing now? Now I follow a lot of progressive/liberal/feminist/queer people online, and sometimes there are situations where it seems like everyone dislikes something, but I don't understand why, but I just kind of go along with them and vaguely dislike it too.

I guess the key is, don't go along with other people's opinions on an issue if they don't give you a reason that actually makes sense to you. If it's about something that's not that important, then it's fine if you don't really have an opinion. No one has time to form an opinion on everything. But definitely avoid situations where you're like "I support this position, even though I don't understand why, but I have to in order to be a good feminist." Instead, ask more questions. 

But, at the same time, yeah there will definitely be people on the internet reacting badly to someone "asking questions" rather than just holding the "correct" opinion they're supposed to hold. (I remember seeing an internet thread one time, where someone was asking "does 'trans woman' means they were a woman and changed to a man, or they were a man and changed to a woman?" just genuinely trying to understand the terminology, and someone else kept angrily replying "Trans women are women!" Not helpful! Btw the answer is, a trans woman is "a man who changed to a woman" but you shouldn't phrase it that way because it's oversimplified to the point of being offensive.) But they react this way because there really are people "asking questions" in bad faith, trying to argue rather than really understand. So, uh, that's a problem.

This phenomenon of not looking into issues yourself (either because it's impossible to have time to have an opinion on everything, or because emotionally you just want to believe something) and just going along with what other people say because they seem like "reasonable adults"- this is related to the Overton window. The Overton window is the range of ideas that are seen as okay for a reasonable person to hold. People talk about "shifting the Overton window"- this means taking an idea that is seen by society as so "out there" that it's not even considered as a real possibility, and talking about it a lot, so that eventually people will think of it as an idea that is normal for people to hold (even though most people may not agree with it), and then from there it can progress to convincing more people and being an actual policy.

Whatever's in the Democrat and Republican party platforms, regardless of whether you agree with them or not, you recognize that those policy positions are held by many "normal people." And this was not a good thing for me when I was younger and trying to figure out my own views, because I believed that if there were "Republican role models" who held some opinion, then there must be good reasons behind it. For example, denying the reality of climate change. Yes, there are *reasons*- politicians getting donations from the oil industry, for example- but not *good reasons*, not reasons along the lines of "here's why this position benefits society."

News shows would bring in 2 "experts" to discuss climate change. 1 of them would be a scientist who said climate change was real. The other would be a climate change denier. And it communicates the idea that- how should I put this- that it's okay to be a climate change denier. Regardless of how their "debate" goes, it sends the message that there are normal and reasonable people who don't believe climate change is real. 

The thing is, though... there are "normal and reasonable people who don't believe climate change is real." There are people who are normal people, good people, who generally vote Republican and so they tend to believe the typical Republican talking points, about climate change and other issues. Or at least, back when I was in college and voting for the first time, that was the status of the Republican party. Now it's a personality cult around Trump, and I just cannot fathom why anyone would vote for him... I can't bring myself to believe "there are normal and reasonable people" voting for him.

Is it bad that I'm viewing 60-ish million Americans as so "out there" that it's impossible for me to relate to them?

Is it bad that I'm viewing 81% of the white American evangelical church- which is literally the subculture I come from- as so "out there" it's impossible for me to relate to them?

Is it better to use a strategy of "these ideas are so ridiculous, we shouldn't even legitimize them by talking about them" or "the only way we can reach these people is if we really understand the reasons why they believe this"? Well, it depends who you're talking to, and what your goal is.

I remember there were people I followed on the internet in 2016, who made it a point to continually note that what Trump was doing was "not normal." This wasn't just typical politician behavior- he is something different, and we should be appalled over and over at how wrong and how offensive his behavior is. Over and over, every time he did something that just a few years before would have been seen as so over-the-top, offensive, career-ending... and his supporters and the media just kinda went along with it, as if it was just normal politician behavior. Some people I followed on the internet would remind us all, "this is not normal."

The thing is now, 8 years later, it basically is normal now.

I did something similar back then- I refused to use his name; I called him the orange antichrist, because it was so shocking how evangelicals were getting in line behind a man who broke all the moral principles they supposedly cared about. And I didn't want to say his name because I viewed him as so beyond-the-pale that we shouldn't even be talking about him.

I still think it's beyond-the-pale to support him. But I've stopped doing the thing where I don't say his name. Kinda wish I could go back to doing that, actually... but now he feels like a normal part of politics, rather than something that will soon go away if we all just stubbornly refuse to acknowledge it.

Anyway, what was I saying? The Overton window. So you don't want to legitimize bad ideas by setting up a discussion about them. But at the same time, if those bad ideas are never addressed, their followers will literally not know that there exist good arguments against them. I used to be a young-earth creationist, and I always saw people treating young-earth creationism like it was so ridiculous they shouldn't even bother responding to it- and that gave me the impression that creationist arguments were so good that those evolutionists couldn't respond to us at all, and the only way for evolutionists to fight back against us was to cover up our evidence and say nothing about it.

I'm not a creationist any more. And it was a while after I stopped being a creationist that I found this site- An Index to Creationist Claims - and I was astounded. Whoever put this site together really knows what they're doing. They truly understand creationism, and they wrote good responses to all the common creationist talking points. Wow. I had no idea anybody had answers like this. This would have been life-changing if I had had access to something like this back then.

My point is, you avoid talking about some "extreme" ideas because you don't want to give legitimacy to them in the eyes of the public, but for people who already hold those ideas, that strategy just makes them even more certain that they're right and you have no counterarguments at all.

Same thing with being "pro-life." In the environment where I grew up, everybody was "pro-life." I never heard any pro-choice arguments that meaningfully addressed my "pro-life" ideology. Sure, I knew pro-choice people were saying "my body my choice"- but that didn't do anything for me because hey it's not about your body, it's about your unborn baby's body. And pro-choice people were saying this was about women's rights, but that didn't mean anything to me either, because I felt abortion was only relevant to those "bad" women who had unmarried sex, not women in general. I totally could not imagine how anyone could be pro-choice.

And then I went to college, and it seemed that everyone was pro-choice. And some of them had very strong opinions about it. And I was so confused, I could not understand how anyone could be pro-choice, but I didn't feel like I could ask anyone about it, because they viewed "pro-life" people as so incredibly wrong- they would probably get angry rather than put together an argument that actually connected with ideas I could understand.

(I have written some blog posts which explain my own pro-choice beliefs: What Pregnancy Taught Me About Being Pro-Choice and Why I Am Pro-Choice.)

So I would say, on the question of whether to treat other people's opinions like they're so ridiculous they're not even worth discussing: It depends what your goal is. If your goal is to convince people, then you do need to learn the actual reasons for their beliefs. You need to understand how someone could believe those things. But, you're not required to do that. Maybe you have a different goal- like supporting people who are hurt by those bad beliefs.

And one more thing I want to say about voting: Voting is kind of a unique thing in that you can just vote for whoever you want, without needing to explain yourself or give a good reason for it. You have the right, and your vote counts, regardless of whether you articulate a "good reason." And in the past I sort of saw it as... "here are the candidates, I'm confused about how to choose one, but I thought about it a long time and really thought about what's important to me, and I picked one, and maybe I don't even know exactly why I feel one candidate is better than the other, and I'd be too embarrassed to stand up and try to explain my vote to other people, but there it is, it's my right." A personal thing, a confidential thing... a thing where your voice still counts even if you don't know what you'd say to people who would hate your voting choices.

Maybe that's how it is for people who aren't well-informed about politics? I don't feel that way now at all; I'm very confident about voting for Kamala Harris. My #1 issue is I support American democracy, and the Republican party just, uh, doesn't anymore??? Never thought that would be something a major political candidate would oppose. We all remember January 6. Why are people still voting for this guy?

The phenomenon of just going along with what other people ("role models") believe... to some extent it's unavoidable, because nobody has the time to research every issue. But it's a problem if it allows you to feel justified in your positions which are motivated by your own selfishness/fears/biases. I think all of us are susceptible to this; it's not related to being a Republican or being a Democrat.

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Related: 

I'm just wondering what happened to the Republican party

"This Doesn't Make Sense, But It Must Be Right" 

That Time I Voted For Obama ... Plus a Bunch of Republicans

I'm concerned that there's still an argument to be made for "pro-life" policies where women die

Blogaround

1. Pennsylvania school boards up window openings that allowed views into its gender-neutral bathrooms (October 5) "Such openings weren’t installed in any of the school’s non-gender-neutral bathrooms." What on EARTH.

2. Where the moral obligation ends (October 7) "Daily Wire influencer and abuse-victim doxxer Megan Basham begrudgingly allows that Jesus calls us to love our neighbors, but then says, 'Ah, but who is my neighbor?'" This whole post is SPOT ON.

Also from the Slacktivist: Do you want plagues? Because that’s how you get plagues (October 10) "The Pharaoh in the biblical story of Exodus — the Pharaoh whose disobedient oppression of immigrants echoes throughout the entire canon of scripture — chose to “get tough on immigration” because he became obsessed with something very much like the racist “Great Replacement Theory” that has been actively supported by anti-immigrant white evangelicals for the past decade. “‘Look,’ he said to his people, ‘the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous'” (Exodus 1:9-10, and also the Republican Party Platform and Project 2025)."

And: ‘Where you don’t want to look’ (October 15) "In anti-abortion politics, decisions are taken away from those closest and most affected by them. Those decisions, instead, are mandated by those farthest removed from the facts and the impacts, by people unaffected and unrelated to them, for whom such decisions are abstractions based on false witness and hostile, vicious false assumptions about those directly involved."

3. Rudy Giuliani’s Daughter: Trump Took My Dad From Me. Please Don’t Let Him Take Our Country Too (September 30, via) "But if you zoom out, Trump being the president was the worst thing that ever happened to my dad, to my family, and to our nation’s modern history. The consequences will only be more severe—and irreversible— a second time around."

4. Fast Crimes at Lambda School (June 18, via) "Austen thought he could fake it 'till he made it. He lied about students getting jobs, the success of the company, and he even lied about being homeless."

5. Duracell PowerCheck: A genius idea which didn't last that long (October 9. 16-minute video) Wow, I remember when batteries had these little white dots that you could press really hard to see if the battery was good or not.

6. Republican lawsuits target rules for overseas voters, but those ballots are already sent (October 14) BOOOOOO. "'It’s not the case that anyone in the world can apply for a ballot. They still have to demonstrate they are an eligible American citizen,' she said." Yes, OBVIOUSLY.

7. Remember When Russian Pop Duo t.A.T.u Pretended To Be Lesbians? (October 10) Well I don't think I ever heard their music, but I do remember Focus on the Family clutching their pearls about it.

8. CIDABM (October 9) From xkcd.

9. Is the food in the fridge still good? California wants to end the guessing game (October 2, via) "It will require the use of 'Best if Used By' label to signal peak quality and 'Use By' label for product safety, an approach recommended by federal agencies." This sounds like a great idea. My personal philosophy toward expiration dates is, food doesn't suddenly go bad right on that date, there must be some sort of range. And the expiration date is picked such that assuming a normal distribution, you can say with a high probability that the food is okay. So, not a big deal if you're past the expiration date and the food looks fine.

(My husband is totally the opposite!)

Interestingly, in China, packaged food is stamped with the production date, and then it will also say how long it is good for (12 months, 18 months, etc) and then you have to add them yourself. And for fresh things like bread or meat, usually they will have a sticker that says the production date and use-by date.

10. Buoyed by his party and the press, a raging Trump goes full Hitler (October 13) I'm really worried about this.

11. Europa Clipper - Cool! That was launched by NASA on October 14.

12. Nature Study Reveals the Deadly Danger of Anti-Trans Laws (October 15) "They found that in the first year after a state introduced anti-trans laws, the number of teens between 13 and 17 attempting suicide jumped significantly compared to other states."

"The Red Tent" (this bible fanfic is great)

Book cover for "The Red Tent."

[this review contains spoilers for "The Red Tent"]

I read The Red Tent [affiliate link] by Anita Diamant. This is a bible fanfic narrated by Dinah, daughter of Jacob. It tells the story of Jacob's 4 wives- Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah- and their children, giving a "woman's perspective" on this story from the bible.

I love this book. Here's my review of it:

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Fleshing out a whole world

The main thing that this book does is to portray a whole realistic world which contains ideas and practices that we know were common in bible times, but may be hard for us to imagine because they are so different from our modern world. 

Some examples:

• Polygamy. What would society be like, if it was normal for a man to have multiple wives? How would people view that? 
• Women dying in childbirth. Babies dying at birth. We know that these things used to be very common, but it's so different from how we live now, thanks to modern medicine. What was it like for women back then, when these tragedies were common? In this book, many of the characters work as midwives, and you see their thoughts on the risk of death during childbirth, and how they handle it.

The book does a good job of showing how issues like these would have effects on many aspects of people's lives and the way they viewed the world. I think for me, if I try to imagine something like polygamy (ie, what if men could have multiple wives, but women could only have 1 husband), I imagine a society that is basically the same as ours but with that 1 difference- but no, that's not how it would be. There would be so many differences, in how people viewed gender, marriage, sex, etc, in a society that viewed polygamy as normal.

This is a fictional story, so we can't necessarily take it to mean "this really is how they viewed marriage back then"- but it does the worldbuilding in a plausible way, much better than whatever I was imagining upon hearing the definition of polygamy, for example.

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Polytheism

In this book, the women in Jacob's family worship many gods, and this is talked about like it's totally normal. Sometimes, in the book, Dinah tells us about Jacob's God, whose name is El, and some ways he is different from other gods. Not in a good way, though- mainly he is more harsh than other gods.

In the bible, it says that Rachel stole her father Laban's "household gods" when Jacob's family left Laban. This always confused me, when I read that bible story- why would Rachel steal these idols? Don't all the "good guys" in the bible believe in the "correct" god, and therefore wouldn't have any interest in idols?

But in "The Red Tent," the women really do believe in the gods represented by Laban's idols. They are nervous about their journey back to Jacob's homeland, and they feel that if they bring the idols with them, the gods will protect them.

This also makes Genesis 35:2 make more sense- "So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, 'Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you, and purify yourselves and change your clothes.'" When I read that verse, when I was a kid, I always wondered what it was talking about. Why would Jacob tell them to get rid of their "foreign gods"? Of course they don't have foreign gods- is he just saying that as a formality? But I think, instead, we should take that verse to mean that members of Jacob's family did worship other gods besides Jacob's god. (And maybe that they should have been allowed the freedom to do so- isn't it kind of wrong that Jacob forces them to stop?)

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Women's roles and men's roles

In this book, the women live very separate lives from the men. And, it turns out, that makes sense, in a world where women often die in childbirth, and babies often die. In that kind of world, in order to have enough children to maintain the population, most women do need to have their whole adult lives dominated by pregnancy and breastfeeding. Not only breastfeeding your own baby; if another woman in your household dies giving birth, maybe you have to breastfeed her baby too.

There are a few women in the book who are independent and have careers of their own, but that is only because they are unmarried, or because their children have already grown up.

The interesting thing is, the book shows the wives all working together to raise each other's kids. From a patriarchal perspective, a big deal is always made about who someone's father is- but it was the women who actually did the work of caring for the babies and little children. Not just the mother, but the other wives. It's likely that a child has a closer relationship with their father's other wives than with their actual father. Rachel and Leah were both Jacob's wives, and they fought over his affection, but in the practical day-to-day stuff, they had to work together. This is an interesting dynamic.

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Wife vs slave

[content note for rape and abuse]

In this book, the categories "wife" and "slave" are sort of blurred. Both of them mean "a person you're legally allowed to have sex with" and the other details beyond that- details about how well a man treats his wife or slave- sort of exist along a whole spectrum without an obvious dividing line.

In "The Red Tent", Laban (father of Rachel and Leah) has a wife/slave named Ruti, and everyone knows he is regularly beating and raping her. But no one does anything about it; they act like "that's just the way it is." (At one point, Ruti is pregnant and asks the other women for help getting an abortion- that's the only thing they ever do to help her.)

But there are other couples in this book where the man treats the woman decently. Where the man cares about the woman's pleasure during sex, and they both enjoy sex. And it's kind of like... a woman might end up with a man who cares about her and treats her well, or she might end up with an abuser, and it's just luck of the draw, there's no way a woman can really have any control over this. You hope you end up with a decent man, but if you don't, well, *shrug* that's just the way it is.

Hope you think about that any time anyone tries to make an argument about "the biblical definition of marriage"!

Also, the characters in this book don't seem to have any concept of monogamy being the "ideal." Some men have 1 wife, some men have several wives, some men are having sex with their slaves, and all of these are just kind of seen as normal. There's no sense that monogamy is "better" or that monogamy is "the way it should be."

(Again, this is fiction, so we shouldn't take this to mean that actually *was* how people thought back then. Maybe it was, but we'd have to do more research to find out. Don't just rely on what we see in this fictional book. What I'm saying is, this feels plausible and fits with what the bible says.)

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There are sex scenes in this book

[content note: explicit sex scenes]

So, Jacob has 4 wives- Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah. (Oh, Bilhah and Zilpah are slaves, by the way.) Each of them has sex with Jacob, and the book talks about what the experience was like for each of them.

And, beyond that, a lot of things about women's lives in this society were related to sexual things that men did to them, so it makes sense that the book would describe that.

The sex scenes are like... they're explicit enough that you understand what's going on if you generally understand what sex is, but euphemistic enough that you'll be completely confused if you're sheltered and "pure." I actually hate that; I really care a lot about the sheltered-and-pure demographic, and it really bothers me how parts of this book are not accessible for them.

Let me give you an example. Here's Leah and Jacob's wedding night:

"It was not fully dark inside the tent. He [Jacob] saw my [Leah's] face and showed no surprise. He was breathing heavily. He took off the rest of my clothes, removing first the mantle from my shoulders, untying my girdle, and then helping me as I stepped out of my robes. I was naked before him. My mother told me my husband would only lift up my robes and enter me still wearing his. But I was uncovered, and then, in a moment, so was he, his sex pointing at me. It looked like a faceless asherah! This was such a hilarious idea, I might have laughed out loud had I been able to breathe.

"But I was afraid. I sank to the blanket, and he moved quickly to my side. He stroked my hands and he touched my cheek, and then he was on top of me. I was afraid. But I remembered my mother's counsel, and opened my hands and my feet, and listened to the sound of my breath instead of his.

"Jacob was good to me. He was slow to enter me the first time, but he finished so quickly I barely had time to calm down before he fell still and heavy upon me, like a dead man, for what seemed like hours. Then his hands came to life. They wandered over my face, through my hair, and then, oh, on my breasts and belly, to my legs and my sex, which he explored with the lightest touch. It was the touch of a mother tracing the inner ear of her newborn child, a feeling so sweet I smiled. He looked at my pleasure, and nodded. We both laughed." And then Jacob spoke tenderly to his first wife.

My first reaction on reading this was, if I had read this book years ago, when I was in my early 20's and "pure", for example, I would have had no idea what it was talking about. Yes, I knew the dictionary definition of "intercourse" but I didn't know anything else about the actual practical mechanics of sex. I would have had no idea what these people were doing.

Yes, if I had read this back when I was "pure", I would have hypothesized that perhaps what was going on with the "enter me" bit was the dictionary definition of intercourse. But I would have rejected that hypothesis, because I would have felt that the other details being described in the passage didn't really match. If 2 people were doing the dictionary definition of intercourse, they wouldn't talk about it in this way, they wouldn't feel this way about it. I would have concluded that it must be describing something more mysterious and intangible.

To help out readers of my blog who are very sheltered/naive and can't make any sense out of what this part of the book is saying, I'll link to the Scarleteen glossary entry for "penis-in-vagina intercourse" [content note, explicit NSFW language at that link]. When the book says "enter me" that's what it means. You may find this unbelievable, but really, that *is* what it means.

And then towards the end of the passage, when Jacob is touching Leah and it uses the word "pleasure" I honestly can't tell if that means she had an orgasm or not. Sometimes "pleasure" is a euphemism for orgasm. If you're confused about the mechanics here, here's the Scarleteen glossary entry for "manual sex" and a Scarleteen post about how women can orgasm *not* through intercourse.

I understand what this part of "The Red Tent" is talking about because I have experience having sex and also reading explicit sexy fanfiction. I am extremely disturbed by the assumption that the reader should have experience with things like that, otherwise they'll just be completely lost when they try to read the sex scenes in this book.

I found myself wishing the book would just come right out and SAY what these characters are doing, rather than assuming the reader already knows the basic structure of what hetero sex is like, and then all the book needs to do is add a layer on top to describe some small details about how it played out for this specific couple. I want this to be MORE explicit.

But then, I realized something else: When I was all naive and "pure" and didn't know how sex worked, if I had come across an explicit description of people having sex, I would have had a very strong reflex reaction to turn away from it, block it out, I cannot read this because it's BAD. That comes from purity culture ideology; I believed that if I knew more details about sex, I might become interested in it, and then it's a slippery slope to doing all kinds of horribly sinful sexual things. So, good and pure girls are ideally supposed to not know any details at all about how sex works. Besides, you know, the dictionary definition of intercourse. Flee from temptation. 

And even after I didn't believe in purity culture any more, the visceral reflex reaction was still there. Sort of being overwhelmed at the wrongness of... like... a penis existing, without anyone trying to euphemistically hide its existence. If I had tried to read a sex scene that spells it all out in detail, I wouldn't have been able to do it. The urge to block it out and get away from it. You know what, if I had tried to read the sex scenes in "The Red Tent", which describe sex without using explicit words like "penis," I still wouldn't have been able to do it. It still would have been too explicit, and I would have felt it was wrong to read about it. Not necessarily "wrong" as in "purity culture says this is a sin", but even after rejecting purity culture, I still had a deep feeling of wrongness about being exposed to the concept of how sex actually works, in practical terms.

So... I don't know what would be best for the "too sheltered to know how sex works" crowd. At first I thought the sex scenes should be more explicit, but now I feel like that's bad too.

So don't take this as me saying what the book should have done differently. ("She wants there to be porn in this book?") I'm not giving advice. LOLLLL imagine me giving advice about how to write sex scenes. Mostly what I'm saying is, I don't understand the logic behind vaguely-written sex scenes. I'm so confused about this.

It seems like this book is not interested in describing the exact mechanics of what the characters did, but instead, talking about how they felt and what their relationship was like. Ohhh, I just realized that's literally the reason the author did NOT make the sex scenes more explicit. (Also, ohhh, if the reader is a child who doesn't know what sex is, the actual intention in writing sex scenes so vaguely is that the reader is NOT supposed to understand it.) Because the book isn't supposed to be about that; it's supposed to be about how the characters feel and how they interact with each other.

I think what we're supposed to get from this passage- I'm gonna take a stab at this even though I am asexual af, which means I have a lot of difficulty matching up specific sexual actions with what feelings are seen as "normal" to have about them- I think what we're supposed to get from this passage is this: Jacob is a decent sexual partner. He wants his wife to feel good and have an orgasm. Jacob still takes the lead- they're not equals; she doesn't really know what's going on, and she just has to go along with whatever he does, but I think most modern readers see that as normal and not a bad thing (???) as long as he leads her along with kindness and care. And there was never any option of *not* having penis-in-vagina sex on their wedding night. The basic structure of what they're doing is they're going to have penis-in-vagina sex, and that's not open for discussion (I think most people don't register this as a problem though) and within that framework, he is kind to Leah and cares about how she feels, so he is a good sexual partner.

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Bilhah and Reuben

In the bible, Jacob marries both Leah and Rachel. Leah has a slave named Zilpah, and Rachel has a slave named Bilhah. Leah and Rachel fight over Jacob's affection, and it's a big deal how Leah gives birth to several sons, while Rachel is unable to have children at all. So Rachel tells Jacob to have sex with Bilhah, so Bilhah can get pregnant and the child will "count" as Rachel's.

In the bible, Bilhah gets pregnant twice, and has 2 sons: Dan and Naphtali. In "The Red Tent" this happens differently (we'll talk more about the differences in a minute). Bilhah only has 1 child, Dan. (In "The Red Tent," Naphtali is Leah's son.) And then after that, Jacob doesn't have sex with Bilhah again.

Later, in "The Red Tent," Dinah describes how Jacob's son Reuben is spending a lot of time with Bilhah, and they seem to like each other. This subplot is meant to shed some light on Genesis 35:22, "While Israel [Jacob] was living in that region, Reuben went in and slept with his father’s concubine Bilhah, and Israel heard of it."

I love this, actually. I ship Bilhah and Reuben.

When I was a kid, and I read the bible, and I read that Reuben had sex with Bilhah, his father's wife, I was like "oh gross, that's bad and wrong, she had already had sex with Jacob, so she's supposed to be with Jacob." From a purity-culture perspective, it's disgusting if someone has sex with one partner, and then at some other point in their life, they have sex with some other partner. (And the bible definitely frames it like Reuben did something wrong.)

But the way it's portrayed in "The Red Tent"... Bilhah was a slave, and Rachel used her. Jacob goes along with it, and he's decent toward her during sex, so good for him I guess, but Bilhah never had a choice. And even though she had sex with Jacob, and she gives birth to his child, and she's called his "wife" (again, the blurriness between "wife" and "slave"), there's not really any relationship between Bilhah and Jacob. Why shouldn't she go find someone else who actually cares about her? Reuben cares about her- you know what, I'm happy for them.

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Things that happened differently in "The Red Tent" than in the bible

Okay I LOVE the fact that some things happened differently in "The Red Tent" than in the bible. I interpret this as saying that the bible was written by men who sometimes got things wrong because they didn't pay attention to the women.

I would say, if you're a bible nerd, the most important difference is the issue of Bilhah having 2 sons or 1 son. In the bible, the sons of Jacob are as follows:

Leah's sons:
Reuben
Simeon
Levi
Judah
Issachar
Zebulun
(also 1 daughter, Dinah)

Rachel's sons:
Joseph
Benjamin

Zilpah's sons:
Gad
Asher

Bilhah's sons:
Dan
Naphtali

(Jacob has 12 sons and 1 daughter.)

In "The Red Tent," there is 1 small difference: Naphtali's mother is Leah, not Bilhah. I know the author did this intentionally- there's no way you can write a fanfic about the wives of Jacob and *accidentally* get a detail like this wrong. And this comes up several times in the book, the fact that Naphtali is Leah's son. This isn't a mistake; the author, Diamant, meant to do it.

For a bible nerd like me, this is a really big deal. This is the biggest difference between the bible and "The Red Tent." The 12 sons of Jacob are important because they become the 12 tribes of Israel; it's a big deal if the bible gets the origin of one of the tribes completely wrong. Also, the number of children that each of the wives has plays a huge role in the conflict between Rachel and Leah, as the bible tells it. This is a big deal.

If you're not a bible nerd and you didn't really know about those details, the biggest difference between the bible and "The Red Tent" is what happened to Dinah. In the bible, there is only 1 story about Dinah, in Genesis 34. Here's what happens in the bible's version of it: Dinah is raped by a man named Shechem, who then wants to marry her and asks for her father Jacob's permission. Jacob's sons aren't happy about this, so they tell him that they will only agree to the marriage if Shechem and all the other men in his city are circumcised. (Here's a [NSFW] link to Mayo Clinic if you're too pure to know what that means.) Jacob's God requires men to be circumcised, so all of the men in Jacob's household already are. Shechem agrees to this. He and all the men in his city get circumcised. Then, while all the men are still in pain, Dinah's brothers Simeon and Levi attack the city and kill all the men, including Shechem. Then the rest of Dinah's brothers come and loot the city and take the women and children as captives.

In "The Red Tent," Dinah was not raped. It's very much consensual, and they are in love. After her brothers come and kill her husband (and the other men in the city), she is beside herself with anger. She feels like no one in her family cares about her, and she runs away.

The way I interpret this is, the author is saying that the bible records this incident as rape because Dinah's consent wasn't what mattered. Her father and brothers didn't consent to it, therefore it was seen as rape. How messed-up is that.

---

Hey, what's up with Christians and the story of Dinah?

In all my years as a good churchgoing evangelical, I don't think I ever heard a sermon or Sunday school lesson about the story of Dinah. (I do remember one time the boys in the youth group were talking about this story and giggling endlessly over the whole circumcision aspect.) So while I haven't heard a standard evangelical response to this story in particular, I do know the response to other bible stories where the great role models do horrific things: they weren't perfect. (For example, Abraham has sex with Hagar, a slave- well, Abraham wasn't perfect. David rapes Bathsheba and murders her husband, well, David wasn't perfect. They weren't perfect because of these small incidents, but don't think about those too much- mainly they were great bible heroes, roles models we should learn from.)

Simeon and Levi murdered all the men in the whole town. Well, they weren't perfect.

I can't believe I have to say this, but: There is a BIG DIFFERENCE between "not perfect" and "murdered all the men in the town." If you're not perfect, that's fine. If you murder all the men in a town, oh my GOD, what the heck, you should go to jail.

And Christians who view the bible as lessons for us about how we should live... they read these horrible stories and say "well this is an example of what we should NOT do" and just move on like it doesn't matter, like it's just a slight aberration from the main theme of "here are some great role models we should imitate."

In "The Red Tent," the incident recorded in Genesis 34 is the turning point of Dinah's whole life. She is so angry at Simeon and Levi. She never forgives them. Of course she doesn't! Seeing how devastating this was to her, how it affected her for the rest of her life... the typical Christian response "well they weren't perfect" is so wrong, so disproportionate to what we are actually talking about. They murdered all the men in the town. 

(Yes, I realize that the bible tells the story as a rape, so if we take the bible's version of events as true, then Simeon and Levi were rescuing Dinah from her rapist, so that's a very different thing than murdering her husband just because they happen to not like him. Still, though, the other men in the town had nothing to do with it- definitely was wrong to kill them!)

And, actually, if you pay attention when you read the bible, you see that there were some consequences, that the story doesn't just move on like it doesn't matter. At the end of Genesis 34, Jacob tells Simeon and Levi that he isn't happy with what they did, because what if other nearby people hear about it and attack Jacob's family. And in Genesis 49, when Jacob gives "blessings" to his sons, he says that Simeon and Levi were violent, and that this is a bad thing. This is likely referring to what happened with Dinah. Still, though, none of this is really the right level of response when someone murders all the men in a town.

Why DON'T we talk about this story in church? Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are the patriarchs of Israel, we talk about them a lot, why don't we ever talk about "hey remember the time when Jacob's son's murdered/enslaved a whole town?" Seems like that should be a bigger deal.

---

I'm really curious about this being a bestseller

This book was published in 1997 and was apparently a bestseller. When I was in the US and I was reading it, there were a few times that people told me they had heard of it before. I was really surprised- bible fanfiction is the kind of obscure niche content that I'm into, but I wouldn't expect people *in general* to be interested in it. Was there some big cultural moment in 1997 when everyone was talking about the 4 wives of Jacob?

Did this book cause controversy among evangelical Christians when it came out? I remember when "The DaVinci Code" came out and evangelicals were all up in arms about how it was an attack on Christianity, how it was so harmful because it didn't agree with the bible. I can easily see evangelicals starting a similar culture war over "The Red Tent."

First of all, the biggest reason evangelicals would hate it, is that some things in this book happened differently than in the bible. The book is saying that the bible got some things wrong, oh let's clutch our pearls over this terrible attack on the inerrancy of scripture.

Second, "The Red Tent" shows Jacob's family members worshiping many gods, and viewing this as normal. The book mentions Jacob's God but isn't that interested in him. There's no message about Jacob's God being better than other gods; there's no point at which the reader is supposed to think "this character is having problems because they don't believe in the right God." The book is just not about that at all, and from an evangelical perspective, that's not acceptable.

Third, the polygamy, the abuse, the way women are treated in this book. Evangelicals have this weird fantasy that "the biblical definition of marriage" is "1 man, 1 woman" and this gets trotted out to justify discrimination against queer people, single mothers, and anyone else whose family doesn't fit this ideal structure that the bible supposedly presents to us. Evangelicals will tell you that yeah sure there's a lot of polygamy in the bible, but the bible makes it clear that's not how it SHOULD be. 

Well, "The Red Tent" gives a realistic portrayal of a society which had as much polygamy and slavery as is described in the bible, and it's so far from modern evangelicals' fantasies about "the biblical definition of marriage." It's very clear that women are not treated well in this book- it makes it very hard to argue "we need to go back to how marriage and gender roles were understood in the bible."

Fourth, the sex scenes.

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Conclusion

I had a great time reading this book. You should definitely read it if you like bible fanfic which tells a bit of a different story than what the bible says. The biggest strength of this book is that it creates a whole world, which is so different from ours but the book makes it feel like something we can understand and relate to. It's hard for me to imagine what it would be like if most people believed in many gods, if polygamy was normal, if slavery was normal, if women frequently died in childbirth, etc, but this book does a good job of imagining it.

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Related:

Womanist Midrash 

Mary's Choice 

Bathsheba's Son 

Love Wins (an Ezra fanfic) 

Strange Fire