Percentage reporting having had an extramarital affair by gender: 1991-2012

This week in Right Wing Asshatery, our favorite Christian Sociologist Marky Mark Regnerus argued that gay marriage will indeed destroy straight marriages by making them like Dan Savage. Yes, gay normativity of monogamishness will make men want to stray from the true path of monogamy and explore! It seems likely that this will make us all lustful cockmonsters. And why not the women? Well, you sillies, of course not the women. Women hate sex and they only have sex to get the enchanted gratitude from their soft patriarch! Duh! So, I wonder, is any of this true? We all know that America has become totally gay, we love gays, and we hate Christians. So, this must have caused men and not women to run out and have affairs, right? Well, let’s just see. Above is the trend in self reported extramarital affairs from the 1991-2012 GSS. As you can see, in the early 1990s men were about twice as likely to report extramarital sex, and fewer than one in ten women reported having had an affair. Jump forward to the Gay 21st Century, and you can see….oh wait. Men are pretty much unchanged, some random fluctuation upward followed by a downturn, and they sit just over 20%–not far from where they were two decades ago. Women, however, have increased their extramarital sex by 50%,  those sluts! Now, the gap between women and men has actually SHRUNK, because of the gays? Maybe women just don’t quite wanna wait around for their limp patriarchs’ enchanted gratitude for all of their baby birthing and house cleaning and shit like that? Maybe the gays made the women want to have sex?

Trend in acceptability of homsexuality and extramarital sex: 1973-2012 GSS

Or maybe Christian sociology is just full of shit? The acceptance of homosexuality has nothing to do with the acceptance of infidelity, and GSS data from the last 40 years show that quite clearly. Above is the trend in the belief that extramarital sex and homosexuality are sometimes ok–not “always wrong.” You can see the two are about the same until Bill Clinton was not having very good sex for Monica Lewinsky, which made everyone love gays while continuing to loathe extramarital sex. Indeed, in the 40 years of the GSS, Americans have actually become LESS accepting of extramarital sex, while becoming dramatically MORE accepting of homosexuality. So, yes, Christian Sociology is simply full of shit.

I wanna fuck you like an animal. .

The talented and gracious Editrix at Wonkette obliged me with a guest post…..

http://wonkette.com/518227/lets-all-laugh-at-the-christianist-sociologists-with-an-actual-sociologist-who-is-not-dumb

And we are so fucked. I remember dancing with glee when Lisa Keister and I got $12k from Russell Sage, and we didn’t really expect it even though the main grant person in charge was a former student of mine. In contrast, these Christianists can snap their fingers and get $100k, and for a real proposal it is not out of the question to get $5 million or more.  Regenerus got almost a million dollars for a handjob. And the rest of us….we fight for the nothing that is social scientific funding. It’s no wonder that many prominent sociologists have been sucking up to the religious right!

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2013/summer/suspect-science#.UaaempzugXW

In the wake of all the Regnerus nonsense, it was good to see the Southern Poverty Law Center navigate to the critical scientific end of the debate, and do a much more thorough job of examining the key issues than any other outlet has done. The  conspiracy mongering that has plagued much of the reporting on what Regnerus did, how he did, why he did it, who helped him, and what that says about the social sciences has not been helpful, and it has smeared the professional reputations of blameless people like Jim Wright (and me) and tarnished the reputation of Social Science Research. The vitriol and harassment, mostly now coming from a handful of clueless LGBT activists, is so severe that if it does not desist really soon, I’m taking legal action and I’m sure Elsevier is probably ready to do the same. So, lawyer up, assholes.

I really appreciated Evelyn Schlatter’s interview and work on the project. It is a very good thing that SPLC has figured out that the real problem runs way beyond the specifics of this single incident. The big picture issue is that people like Regnerus, Wilcox, Smith, etc have had a golden shower of funding for all of their careers, all of it coming from right wing Christian foundations. It’s given them exclusive access to data collection, massive levels of research assistance, travel money, conference money, summer salary, and whatever they need to further their right wing agenda. This isn’t about the funding agencies dictating what researchers find, it’s about ideologue researchers being cultivated from the time that they are undergraduates, and then being rewarded for their fealty to radical right wing Christianity with millions of dollars in grant money. Evelyn did a great job of making sure that came through.

Oh, you got a fellowship! Bend Over!!!!!!

A lot of bloviation is occurring on how the IRS actually did its job and scrutinized the applications for new tax-exempt organizations. Turns out that hit the conservative motherfuckers a bit hard, since they have a lot of astro-turf, and they falsely represent their political involvement.

But, those are just corporations, being scrutinized based on the criteria for corporations to continue to exist without paying taxes (and benefiting from myriad tax breaks). No real humans were actually investigated by the IRS, only fraudulant political organizations.

The politicization of the IRS began in the second half of the Reagan presidency. Most of the efforts were directed against young people starting their careers. The targets were people–real people— who held ” lucrative” scholarships at research universities. Raygun was at war with those pointy headed intellectuals, and so he thought of this as a means of accomplishing “stereo divestment”, as if us graduate students used our grants to buy electronic equipment. For those too young, that was a reference to the anti-Apartheid movement, which sought to move university money away from corporations that sponsored the racist regime in South Africa (I was once the president  of the anti-Apartheid group at the University of Tulsa).

At the beginning of his second term, Raygun sicced his IRS goons on everyone and anyone who received a fellowship, no matter how small. I had won two essay contests my senior year ($1500), and then my fellowship at Duke was also service free. I wound up paying almost as much in penalties as I won for the essay contests, and had an additional $1500 tax bill added to two years of graduate funding. The war on education was mounted by Raygun, and he did a great job of making sure that anyone who wanted to succeed would suffer. I was audited three years in a row, starting in 1989, backdated to the 1987 tax year. During most of the period I was an undergraduate or graduate student making almost nothing, and I was married with a kid to boot. I was targeted for audits for three years because the IRS was directed to harass college students on fellowships. Raygun wanted to squeeze us for what little we had, while relieving his fat cat donors from their “tax burden.”

You like this MOOC?!

Once upon a time I was a teaching-award-winning professor at Vanderbilt University. I won a student-selected teaching award from the graduating class of 1994—in my first four years of teaching at Vanderbilt the students selected me as one of the top 10 all-time professors. My teaching evaluations were always at least a half a point above the department mean for courses at that level (except for those two courses in demography, which were only average), and my grade point averages were always more than half a point below the departmental average. None of my colleagues wanted to teach introduction to sociology, particularly not pre-tenure, because the students were vicious in their evaluations. I taught packed courses of around 60 students in my “core” courses on intro and American Social Movements. In my last section of intro, I had 60 students and received a perfect 5.0 score in my teaching evaluations. The last lecture ended on the same sentence I ended the first lecture in the class (when all of the students were thinking “who is this idiot and why doesn’t he dress nicer?”). “Well, as far as I can tell. I don’t know. I’m not sure what sociology is, anyway.” The class applauded. Students were crying. Granted, they knew it was my last lecture at Vanderbilt, but it was intro, it’s not like these were my grad students or something. I could have been a MOOCER!!!!!!

Yeah, right. Let’s get this shit straight. The whole MOOC bullshit is predicated on the idea that the “great lecturers” at top universities are somehow more able to teach to the masses, and will democratize knowledge by providing the same education for people at Southeast Missouri State that is available at Harvard, MIT, and the like. Bullshit. Like any crap ass MOOC, my own MOOC–based on the most popular and highly evaluated social science course at a top university with considerable teaching focus—would be an absolute disaster. “Wow, who is that crazy guy on the computer, and why is he using such big words?” “Who is this Marx guy, and why did he want to fuck Feuerbach? Is that an analogy? What’s an analogy.” The bottom line is my courses worked because the students were required to read primary texts from Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Blau, Emerson, and Marcuse (that was just exam 1….out of four). They were expected to read these works in advance of my lecture, and they had the capacity to do so—even if many of them often did not. I never had a textbook at Vanderbilt, and the substantive sections of my introductory course were purely based on my lecture notes on topics like “family” “criminology” “race and ethnicity” “gender” and the like. In the substantive sections, students were required to read articles from recent top-tier journals—generally American Sociological Review and Social Forces (AJS charged extra for “courspacks” after the Kinko’s decision, so I didn’t use things from AJS after 1993 or so). There were no multiple guess exams, only short and long-answer essays. I graded all of the exams myself for most of the course I taught, and in 10 years there were only three graduate students I trusted to evaluate my students: Mary Karpos, Chris Mowery, and Candi Batton.

So, how many students at your average Cal State at Bumbfuck, CUNY in the hood, Southwesteasternnorthern Texas State, or Southern Illinois are actually able to prepare  for understanding a lecture on Marx or Weber or Durkheim delivered by an eloquent lecturer who is shooting above the bow? How many can read current articles from top sociological journals, or pay attention and take notes on additional lecture material not covered in those articles?  Let me give you a straight answer, about 2%. While virtually 100% of Vanderbilt students were in a position to learn from what I did, only about 2% of SIU students would be able to excel at that level of pedagogy, and maybe another 10% would be able to merely survive with a C or a D. My Intro class at Vanderbilt would be a 400-level course here, and I’d have to adjust the curve.  And, I was actually in the classroom at Vanderbilt. A real, live human being who expected them to show up for my lectures and exams. If we MOOC it, then the small fraction of students who might have a legitimate shot of passing my course would be further disadvantaged by only basically watching the lectures on glorified television. Telecourses, we used to call them back in the Junior College Days. They were a miserable failure.

I can’t think of a worse idea than to make glorified internet telecourses from the courses taught by top teachers at elite universities. These are of no value to the students, and simply will do what all research shows that they are doing—causing most students to fail, underachieve, and lose interest in education.

Sexism is dead, I can feel it.

I was just trying to get a bead on a few issues, and lamenting my inability to get a good measure of racial threat for a paper I’m working on showing the impact of conservative movements and propaganda on public opinion. But, alas, racism and sexism are so OVER. Everyone knows that nobody is a racist or sexist. We do NOT need to be asking people if they would vote for a NEGRO for President or if they would vote for a Woman (who does not have a penis), or if they think that those Africans have gone too far in pushing for Civil Rights. Fuck Civil Rights. This is America! Hell Yah! And, in American Social Science we are much more concerned with how Christianity is helping your mental health, or whether or not your one true god is more like a man or a muffin, or anything, anything but standard questions about racism and sexism. So, for most items, they simply  stopped asking. Nearly 10% of respondents thought there should be laws against interracial marriage in 2002 (down from nearly 40% in 1972) but somehow this seemed to justify eliminating the item entirely….rather than seeing if support might have rebounded, or tracking the continued support for racist laws among certain groups in the population. Similarly, the GSS has not asked whether or not women should take care of the home instead of the country since 1998—when over 15% wanted women home, barefoot and preggers. Just because opinions are no longer a majority or near-majority does not make them sociologically irrelevant. Their concentration in certain geographic, occupational, and cultural realms make make these prejudices quite influential for social life. It is a bad move to stop tracking these basic indicators of racism and sexism, just so people with grants can ask other questions. And what questions are they asking? Where are they getting their funding? Oh, gee.

I love living in Carbondale, and like many college towns throughout our great nation the public schools are fabulous. The teachers are wonderful, the administration is sane, and the school system supports the arts and music. My son Jackson plays trumpet in the 4th grade  band, and today was their big year end concert. In attendance were not only the director of the school of music, and the chairs of the SIU departments of women’s studies, foreign languages, chemistry, sociology, and faculty from many other departments who had children singing and playing instruments, but also gaggles of fully veiled Saudi women and their husbands, graduate students from all over the world, heavily tattooed local Anglo s, average white Midwesterners who work as staff at the college or around town, numerous Latin American families, and a large contingent of quite diverse African Americans—ranging from school teachers, coaches, and professionals to people barely scraping by on the margins and working in fast food joints, if they can. The Carbondale city schools are “majority minority”, and everyone made an effort to watch our kids sing and play.

Carbondale has a fairly uncommon solution to segregration issues—rather than use busing to desegregate the schools, everyone simply goes to the same school and they reduced the number of grades in the schools. It is fucking brilliant! Kindergarten and first are at one school, second and third at another, fourth and fifth at yet another….so ALL of the kids are in the same school, and there aren’t huge age differentials so all of the kids can be friends. Jackson is the nicest boy in the world, so he’s friends with everyone, no matter who they are. But, his special friend is really Madeleine, whose parents are regular working class Carbondale people and we sat with them at the concert. Next to us were Miguel’s two mommies , one of whom is the Spanish immersion teacher at the K-1 school (I coached Miguel in soccer, and he’s been friends with Jackson since they were toddlers at the SIU Child Development Labs daycare. In front of us were Ajawhn’s parents, one of Jackson’s other close friends. But the room was filled with rich and poor, black, white, and brown. And we listened to a patriotic themed musical program. No less than five Middle Eastern  kids were in the 5th grade band/orchestra playing “My Country Tis” and “God Bless America”, while their gleeful parents captured the action on their video cameras and ipads.

Normally, a program like this would have made me want to vomit. It was all Americana, and patriotic songs. I mean, Jesus fuck! They did  “God Bless America”?! But, somehow, in this crowd, it seemed more poignant. God bless America. I don’t believe in gods, but I do believe in America. I really do. In every corny way possible. I’ve mostly become cynical and blighted and focused on how we’ve completely lost track. But, god damn it, I believe in America. And what I saw today is what America is and should be. A bunch of fucking kids singing about hope and equality and democracy. One group of classes even put the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution to song. I’ll defer to Professor Benyas on the musical merits, but it was inspiring to watch this group of kids from diverse backgrounds praise the ideals that have kept our nation together and brought slow progress towards realizing those ideals. And, I thought mostly about how important this was for those children and their parents from other nations, particularly the students from Islamic backgrounds. It was a celebration of us, and you are us. I hope they all fucking stay and become Americans, every god damned one of them.

This machine kills fascists….

Idiot, Asshole, Whore

Since Jim Inhofe is now peddling the idea that the communist socialist islamic homosexual state is buying up all of the ammo so god fearing Christians will be defenseless, I thought it appropriate to resurrect this….

I’ll never forget the first time I met Jim Inhofe. It was emblematic of everything he stands for. I was playing a soccer match on an Oklahoma select team (Green Country United) against the national champion u-12 club team from Sweden, Skanor Falsterbo, punctuated during the pre-game and halftime of a Tulsa Roughnecks game (I think they were playing the Chicago Sting, captained by the Italian great Chinaglia). Inhofe had never even seen a soccer game, and of course his pasty ass kids never played the game–which was quite hot in Tulsa, mostly driven by the large ethnic populations from the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Latin America (you know, Iranian rednecks and shit). Tulsa had the best team in the NASL, and we won the Soccer Bowl if not that year, the year after (I can’t remember). The Roughneck’s secret was a bunch of super strong Yugoslavian guys, and  the Iranian great Iraj Danifard. Most teams were using all their salary to pay old retirees like Chinaglia, Beckenbauer, and Pele (who is a nice guy, I’ve met him twice…another story), and the rest of their rosters never measured up.

It was 105f in Tulsa, and probably pushing 120 on the astroturf field at Skelly Stadium. The Swedish kids were dying, and we were able to hang with them that game. I played central midfield and had a couple of game saving assists and two good shots on goal. Our old German coach, Walter Schnorr, did an awesome job of keeping us fresh against the much superior Swedes. After a substitution, I get back to the bench fucking dying, and it’s full. On the bench sat Tulsa Mayor, Jim Inhofe, and a couple of his worthless loser kids. So, either we were supposed to stand, or what, sit on the 125 degree astroturf? So some fuckhead and his kids could spectate at a game they’d never even seen, even though this joker was mayor of the town whose professional team was averaging 20,000 spectators per game, and was poised to win the premiere championship of the sport in the USA…..I actually told one of his loser kids to move over, and I just sat down in a pile of sweat right next to him, and then all those worthless fucking pansy ass Republicans got up and left (eewwww, Daddy, some dirty smelly Iranian kid just sat down next to me!!!! Ewwwww!!!). Fuckheads. We tied Skanor Falsterbo in that game, though they kicked our asses in the second game of the series.

Ah, but Inhofe wasn’t finished. After bankrupting a mid-sized insurance firm, he became a high priced whore for the oil industry. This enabled him to move on from being a failed mayor and a failed businessman and into the U.S. House of Representatives. Inhofe never met an issue he wouldn’t sell out on. You wanna Christian Right dipshit? Inhofe’s your man!!! Of course, Inhofe has no real bone fides for right wing Christianity. He is a non-practicing Presbyterian. You need someone who will deny global warming? Inhofe’s your man!!! The guy is pure sleaze. He’s mostly portrayed as being  the dumbest person in the Senate; and, while that may be true, people don’t get the main issue. He’s a whore. He doesn’t care if what he says is false and ridiculous. It’s what he’s being paid to say. So, it doesn’t  matter that the entire planet is making fun of him.  Ain’t this boogie a mess? The crux of the biscuit, is the apostrophe.

I have to make a confession, I have never liked Brittany Griner. She may be greatest female basketball player that the world has seen, with the kind of promise that Sheryle Swoopes had when she graduated from Texas Tech. She is a profoundly talented athlete, capable of dominating competition even at the highest level. It remains to be seen if she can remain healthy and fulfill her potential at the next level, but there is no questioning Griner’s exceptional dominance of college basketball. I’ve always followed the women’s game. Duke always had great teams, and my old training buddy and former student/advisee  Christian Foster was the son of Jim Foster, the coach of the Vanderbilt women’s team, and now the head coach at Ohio State. Jim is a good person and a great coach, and his teams have been successful.

I didn’t hate Griner because she was a dirty, physical player—which she is. She has gone so far as to  punch an opponent and break her nose in an NCAA game—and received only a one game suspension from Baylor, and none from the NCAA. I can’t imagine a male player getting away with that, frankly. But, it wasn’t so much that. The reason why I have always loathed Brittany Griner is that she played for Baylor. Baylor is one of the dirtiest NCAA sports programs. It is an virtually all-white Southern Baptist school that has invested heavily in basketball and football, with predictably scandalous results. Baylor is one of the intellectual centers for the Christian Right, promoting radical right wing Christianity across their entire curriculum, and supporting radical conservative intellectuals while indoctrinating students to further their cause. The current President is Ken Starr, the former special prosecutor in charge of investigating blow jobs—and the Defender of Proposition 8 in front of the California Supreme Court. I absolutely loathe Baylor and everything that they stand for. Had Griner played for Tennessee or Ohio State, I might have a jersey with her name on it (she isn’t Duke or Stanford material (sorry, kid)). Indeed, even at Baylor, they shunt all of the jocks into some bullshit “general studies” track, and that is what Griner will be awarded a degree in, perhaps.

Not surprisingly, following Sheryl Swoopes and many top stars in women’s basketball and other sports, Griner is a lesbian and recently came out of the closet, matter-of-factly, in an interview with Sports Illustrated. In that and subsequent interviews she suggests that she has always been up front and comfortable about who she is. Of course, she is only now coming out of the closet as she is leaving Baylor, and has signed a lucrative professional contract and an endorsement contract with Nike. I applaud her success, and I’m glad that Nike is willing to put their money towards the best athletes in their sports.  But the Baylor thing still leaves me wanting more from Griner. It’s simply not true that her sexuality didn’t matter at Baylor, and I wonder what top officials at Baylor Athletics are now saying and doing regarding her announcement. This is, after all, a school that doesn’t even allow gay and lesbian organizations on campus, and counts among its faculty some of the staunchest opponents of civil rights for GLBT persons. Indeed, about half or more of the Sociology department at Baylor signed a statement supporting Mark Regnerus’ bullshit study denigrating gay parents.

What does the current Women’s coach at Baylor have to say about their greatest star ever?

What Does Ken Starr have to say about Brittany Griner’s coming out?

Do they all think she’s going to hell? Do they want an entrance questionnaire to make sure that no more gays or lesbians join their sports teams? I mean, if you hate gays and don’t support their “choices” then maybe you shouldn’t win championships using their talents.

For Griner, she’s a kid, but it’d still be nice if she’d come out of the closet about what things were really like at Baylor. She can’t really be so clueless, can she?

Support for Marijuana Legalization 1972-2012 GSS

Nothing ends a bad week like 420, and this year it was certainly a welcome close to a horrible week. Americans became more accepting of marijuana legalization after the dark ages of Just Say No, sometime when it became clear that Bill inhaled and had sex with that woman. It’s just ridiculous. Every President for the last two decades is a former marijuana smoker. The huge leap in public opinion between 2008 and 2010 was a bit of an eyebrow raiser, though. And, indeed, the 2012 GSS found opinion stable, rather than trending towards legalization. The 2010 sampling frame may have hit some hot spots of legalization fervor, but it seems clear that nearly half of Americans support legalization.

Legalization support by age:: 2012 GSS

Of course, support for legalization has varied by age/cohort, and real cohort differences are quite apparent. The Just Say no generation lags behind the youngest cohorts, while the majority of baby boomers (45-60 in 2012) support legalization. Opposition remains high among the olds, but they will die soon.