Salt City Sinner

posted on 4/26/2015 by the Salt City Sinner Content Warning: Post contains references to rape Believe it or not, your beloved Sinner generally prefers to give people the benefit of the doubt regarding their motives. This has become more difficult of late, given that the most recent strategy that dominant groups have been deploying is to drape themselves in the cloak of imagined victimhood, magically transforming Christians (who make up 80% of the population in the United States) into a persecuted minority , or white people (who have a virtual monopoly on political, economic, and cultural power) into beleaguered souls who need or deserve a “ white history month ” or “ National Association for the Advancement of White People .” As laughable as these examples are, this type of persecutor-in-persecuted-clothing shtick is becoming a force to be reckoned with in American politics. If this strategy and social media had both been around in the 1960s, your average Alabama diner owner wo...

posted on 4/14/2013 by the Salt City Sinner Yesterday marked the third annual Salt Lake SlutWalk, a   rally and protest  devoted to women’s issues in Utah – particularly, issues pertaining to sexual violence. The first SlutWalk started in Toronto in 2011 in response to a particularly ass-headed police officer's suggestion that women avoid rape by not dressing like "sluts," and the events have merrily metastasized over our humble continent and elsewhere since then. The event draws its name from both the practice of slut-shaming (best   defined  here for brevity’s sake as disparaging a woman for being sexually active) and for the all-too-commonplace occurrence of people excusing away rape by claiming that a woman’s “provocative” clothing or actions means that she “was asking for it.” Violence against women in Utah is a serious   thing : one third of the homicides committed in 2011 were domestic-violence-related, and almost half of separated or divorced...

posted 4/7/2013 by the Salt City Sinner In a previous   post  about creative right-wing lies about the Violence Against Women Act and why it's totally not a psychotic fringe opinion or symptom of mental illness to oppose it, I mentioned the term rightwashing, which I defined as "a sub-type of spin; it is the art and science of taking reactionary, right-wing stances and attempting to render them more palatable through misdirection and, often, outright lies." In addition to opposition to VAWA, a second example of rightwashing is busily churning away right now, and in a state both proximate to Utah and near and dear to my heart -- Colorado! Colorado, you see, has recently come down with a bad case of common sense. The once proudly red Centennial State has in the last few years legalized weed ("Rocky mountain high," as they say) and gay marriage and contributed its electoral votes to the Democrat Usurper In Chief. Colorado can now add a reasonable, effe...

posted 3/10/2013 by the Salt City Sinner (Spoiler alert: no, they have not jumped the shark. A fetid little conspiracy clearing-house like WND does not jump the shark. The stupider and crazier they get, the more childish delight and wonderment they elicit in their target audience.) It has been an interesting couple of months for those dedicated souls still hugging the right-most lane of American politics. Despite repeated and full-throated (and often pompously public) prayers to the Magic Nazarene to dash the machinations of Kenyan Marxist Usurper-in-Chief Barry Soetero Hussein, Mitt Romney got a final   swift kick to the nuggets  that left them smarting, and dangling somewhere in the neighborhood of his earlobes. You can name any number of variables that came into play in the great GOP wipeout of 2012, but one factor -- a subfactor of the "demographics" explanation -- was certainly the well-publicized Republican treatment of women and women's issues. The neand...

Posted 8/27/12 by Law Nerd. (tl;dr summary for our philistine readers: see title--constitution/SCOTUS says) My apologies to any readers who for some bizarre reason were looking forward to another of my legal rants after my last . I graduated, then studied and sat for the Vermont bar exam, and I offer no further excuse above that. I have sprouted knobbly little legal wings, and hope to be a fledgling attorney in a few months. Results are out in September.  Job as "not-yet-licensed junior associate to whom all your difficult cases are belong" begins in one week. Unless you've been living under a bridge and growing troll-like protuberances, you've heard of Rep. Todd Akin's (R-MO) recent shenanigans in the world of reproductive rights.  Specifically, I refer to Rep. Akins' " misogynist claptrap ," in which the Senate-hopeful attempted to distinguish legitimate rape (from what I know not, though we did   later learn  that he actually meant "...