What Atrios Said

I think may be scariest when it comes to gun nuts (for whom it undoubtedly holds true).

The Weird Marriage and Taxes Thing

Good rulings by SCOTUS on gay marriage bills brings up tax issues again.  I understand the desire to modify taxes based on single/married mostly for political purposes, but in the end I really don't think it makes sense.

We should have only one category--the equivalent of single--and everyone would file.  So if a married couple only has one working person, the other person could file a return with zero income.  Yes, this would mean that a rich couple with one person pulling in a couple million $ could have the other spouse collecting a few thousand in tax rebates, and they may pay less than now, but that couple would be paying more than a couple with both people working and each bringing in half (same total income).  So long as the change is paired with rate increases I have no problem with this.  (Note: as an alternative wealthy couples could probably reduce tax burden by having the working spouse "pay" the non-working spouse some fraction of their income.)

LGBTQ Moving Up, Women Still Second Class

More and more, gay marriage is being seen as perfectly acceptable, and it is legal in more and more places.  That's great, and about time (things are actually moving faster than attitudes toward interracial marriage which didn't gain majority approval until the mid 90's). Yet it's still ok to treat women as second class in far too many ways and places.

Articles like the wank-tacular Dylan Byers piece effectively shortened at Lawers Guns and Money are still being published, and reading the comments (actual piece and a few other sties that commented on it) it is clear that many people think the treatment is exactly the same as men get because, I presume, they had a boss sometime that was a man that they said mean things about.

You see similar things with respect to equal pay.  Equal pay day was a couple weeks back.  Go to any (popular) blog or news site that has an article talking about gender equity largely on the basis of the pay gap, and read the comments.  It so frequently turns into a discussion about whether the pay gap is "really" that big, and what other things are going on, and "women are really advantaged because...[preferential hiring or something]", and "men are the only ones you can reject/fire/not promote without consequences", and lots of other, often spite filled commentary.

I myself complain just about every time the pay gap is released/pointed to.  I do this because 1. I find the statistics problematic and 2. use of it tends to shut down or sidetrack conversation. Really, though, I probably shouldn't harp on people who get into this, not the least because I actually am aware that a serious problem exists and I understand why the pay gap number is useful in many/most cases.

For all the complaining that [right-wing] white men do about how they are the only people that are discriminated against anymore, in the real world about the only -ism that you can use in public without being shunned/shamed is sexism.  It happens in newspapers, on tv, in workplaces, in academic environments...everywhere.

Weird Question

I should certainly watch/listen to what Sarah and Suzie have to say here first, but the very question is weird to put it nicely. Even with the very dramatic change in public opinion on gay marriage, abortion is still more popular (and depending on how the question is phrased, it is much more popular).  On top of that, there are some pretty good reasons why opinion on abortion wouldn't change much over time: while there really isn't any coherent reason to be opposed to gay marriage, there is to abortion (I may disagree with it, but the reasoning is sound).

The better question is that why, with abortion being more popular with the public, are politicians so hesitant to get behind it?  And why, in particular, do nominally pro-choice Democrats keep giving in to the Neanderthal position on the issue? (That is probably not fair, I would guess that Neanderthals would be far more sympathetic to women's authority over their own bodies than are most Republicans.)