Monday Reads: Let’s get Cheeky!!!

Bums IIII by Paul Kindersley

Good Day Sky Dancers!

One of the problems that I’ve always had with sportsball is–even with strong unions– the owner/athlete paradigm is such a throwback to the relationship between the Roman Empire and all that slave jazz. The New Orleans Super Dome just got sold to Ceasar’s from Las Vegas, so now we have a new tacky thing to deal with while Golddigging Widow Gail Bensen gets to up her $4.3 billion net worth.  I only wish that cities or teams could own their own franchise.

I’m not thrilled with the Olympics either, which usually is framed with similar relationships between the rules and the athletes. Also, there’s usually someone in charge of women’s wear that either hates women or is overly interested in their body parts. I’ve always been a big fan of Pink, but I’m even more a fan now for this action.  This is from the UK Guardian: “Tokyo 2020: Pink offers to pay the fine for Norwegian women’s volleyball team. The ‘Get The Party Started’ singer said the European Handball Federation should be fined ‘for their sexism’”

Singer and songwriter Pink has offered to pay off the fine for the Norwegian women’s handball players who refused to wear bikini bottoms for their match against Spain at the European Beach Handball Championships last week.

The European Handball Federation (EHF) fined the team $1,765 (£1,283), or about $176 for each player, asserting that the women competed in “improper clothing” when they picked shorts rather than the mandated bikini bottoms.

Male players, meanwhile, are permitted to wear shorts no longer than four inches above the knee.

The 41-year-old music artist tweeted she was “proud” of the team for “protesting the very sexist rules about their ‘uniform’” and that the EHF “should be fined for their sexism.”

“Good on ya, ladies. I’ll be happy to pay your fines for you. Keep it up,” she wrote.

Women athletes must wear bikini bottoms with a close fit and cut on an upward angle towards the top of the leg, according to the International Handball Federation’s rules. “The side width must be of a maximum of 10 centimetres,” the rules say.

Some of the worst people are having a fit about The Cleveland Indians being renamed The Cleveland Guardians.  After all, isn’t it an American tradition to diminish the humanity and culture of Native Americans? If you can stand it, This is what the Trumperz said via The Hill.  Oh, and the most disliked Senator ever–Ted Cruz– is at it too.  This is a look at what the Deplorables of the country think about the name change.

Big Batty Gal by Elizabeth Prentis

The rules are always weird when it comes to women. Here’s the Daily Beast with this headline: “A Key Trump Witness Is Being Muzzled Over Her Custody Battle. Jennifer Weisselberg is the only person willing to speak publicly about Trump employees accepting untaxed corporate perks instead of salary. She’s been ordered to keep quiet.”   I only wish they could gag order Trumperz.

As the New York criminal investigation into the Trump Organization deepens, a parallel battle is quietly playing out in the city’s family court, where lawyers are trying to muzzle one of the government’s key witnesses—and cast doubt over her mental health.

Jennifer Weisselberg, the ex-wife of Trump employee Barry Weisselberg—and former daughter-in-law of one of Trump’s closest business confidants, Allen Weisselberg—has told investigators that executives at the Trump Organization were rewarded with untaxed perks.

Her documents and grand jury testimony were crucial to last month’s indictment of her former father-in-law, the corporation’s chief financial officer. And she has repeatedly explained to journalists how the tuition for her children’s private school was an untaxed corporate gift paid in lieu of salary.

But all the while, she’s said these things at great personal risk; since March 19, Jennifer Weisselberg has been under a judge’s gag order to shut her up.

“Defendant, Jennifer Weisselberg, shall refrain from having any discussions or interviews whatsoever with the press about the parties’ children… the custody proceeding… or her motivation for giving interviews insofar as it concerns the children,” reads the order, signed by New York County Supreme Court Justice Lori S. Sattler.

But if she can’t talk to journalists about her children—or even her “motivation” for speaking to journalists—then she can’t explain to the public how the Trump Organization allegedly broke the law. And she’s the only person who witnessed these alleged crimes and is willing to speak publicly.

The gag order does not limit her from speaking to investigators. But three sources familiar with the divorce proceedings describe the gag order as part of a broader campaign of witness intimidation. Attorneys separately representing her ex-husband and children have repeatedly demanded court-mandated mental evaluations and drug tests for Jennifer Weisselberg. And these sources say these orders smear her character ahead of a potential criminal trial where she would be expected to testify against the company.

Bum 2 by MC Llamas

The rules are different for many of us. David French writes this for The Dispatch: “Structural Racism Isn’t Wokeness, It’s Reality. Christians must not deny the full consequences of centuries of intentional, racist harm.”

I’m not going to address the church’s procedural disputes. (Though I will note that it is contrary to basic principles of religious liberty to ask an arm of the state—a judge—to intervene in matters of church governance.) I am going to deal head-on with the prime underlying complaint that has triggered outrage and national media coverage of a struggle for control in one of America’s largest and most influential churches. The charge against Platt and his team can be summed up in one word: wokeness.

The congregants object to what they perceive as a pastoral embrace of critical race theory, and they assert that the Bible alone contains teaching sufficient to address America’s race problems. You can read the comprehensive complaint against Platt and his team here and the allegations of teaching or advocating CRT here.

Without restating all the contents of these lengthy documents, they include complaints that Platt and his MBC colleague pastor Mike Kelsey marched in a Christian black lives matter march and that Kelsey has endorsed the “CRT concepts” of “systemic racism” and “white privilege.” They also condemn Platt for this comment, which argues that the absence of overt prejudice doesn’t absolve one of the problems of racism and racialization:

A disparity exists. We can’t deny this. These are not opinions—they’re facts. It matters in our country whether one is white or black. Now, we don’t want it to matter, which is why I think we try to convince ourselves it doesn’t matter. We think to ourselves, “I don’t hold prejudices toward black or white people, so racism is not my problem.” But this is where we need to see that racialization is our problem. It’s all of our problem. We subtly, almost unknowingly, contribute to it.

The dissenters argue that the “solution to the ‘race’ problem in America is more Bible, not more sociology books. It is not the Bible plus a secular reading list, but sola scriptura.” It’s not just unwise to rely on secular scholarship to address American racism, they argue: It’s unbiblical.

This argument echoes tenets of the secular right-wing consensus on race—that racism exists only when there is individual malign intent, that remedies for racism should be limited to imposing consequences on individual racists, and that there is no intergenerational obligation to remedy historic injustice (“I’m not responsible for my ancestors’ sins”).

Under this mode of thinking, the concept of “equality under the law”—as mandated by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act—is both necessary and largely sufficient to address the causes and consequences of centuries of slavery followed by generations of Jim Crow.

But on the core issues of American racism, Platt is biblically and historically right, and it’s his detractors who are biblically and historically wrong. These “conservatives” have placed a secular political frame around an issue with profound religious significance. They’ve thus not just abandoned the whole counsel of scripture, they’ve even contradicted a core component of the secular conservatism they claim to uphold.

Venue Insomnia by Xu Yang

Somehow it’s okay for children of color to experience racism, but it’s wrong for children of certain wipipo to learn about it. Seriously, what’s that all about?  Here’s John Oliver explaining redlining and gerrymandering in his usual adroit way via the AV club.

The recent Republican push toward state-mandated literal whitewashing of American history to remove all that pesky racism and genocide has seen a lot of not-willfully-ignorant people stepping up to the historical plate. On Sunday, it was John Oliver’s turn at bat. His extra-long Last Week Tonight return from hiatus saw the reliably funny, research-supplied, and pissed-off Brit doing an especially comprehensive job of examining yet another area where white Americans’ perceptions of their history (and the inarguable and deeply inconvenient facts thereof) are skewed, predictably, in favor of said white people’s self-satisfied need to do nothing.

In his piece on housing discrimination, Oliver, as is his way, plucked out one representative case from which to expand his argument that the institutionalized bigotry in home ownership continues to undermine the potential of Black prosperity. In this case, Oliver’s pick of a depressingly voluminous litter came from Bruce’s Beach in Manhattan, California. That’s where a black couple’s valuable beachfront property was seized by the now-wealthy town, but only after even the most strenuous efforts of the local Ku Klux Klan failed to terrorize Willa and Charles Bruce from their legal residence. As Oliver put it in summarizing the way that the actions of government and cross-burning yahoos’ to disenfranchise Black Americans have always gone hand in soot-covered glove, “Sure, the vigilante racists are spooky, but you’ve really gotta worry when the motherfuckers with advanced degrees show up.”

Just to channel his most skeptical (and whitest) viewers for a moment, Oliver asked what’s to be done about this generations-old racist swindle, anyway? After all, didn’t Manhattan put up a nice plaque about how it stole a Black family’s land and put out a proclamation condemning the act but pointedly not apologizing? What more do the millions of Black Americans legally denied their chance top own property and accumulate wealth at the same rate as their white co-citizens want? (Psst, it rhymes with “steparations,” and Oliver asked his more historically clued in viewers to keep the answer under their hats until his wrap-up.)

So, thank you for coming to my Ted Rant on why we keep having to deal with this shit.

You may view more art and the ones I’ve posted today from The Guardian‘s: “The cheek of it: artists celebrate the bottom – in pictures.”

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?