S E Cupp is wrong about so many things… this time, equality

You folks might remember S. E. Cupp as FOX News’ token atheist, who claims to be godless but “doesn’t hate God”. You might remember her as Sarah Cupp, who I’m guessing doesn’t like to be called Sarah because she bears more than a passing resemblance to Sarah Palin both in politics and in appearance.

Now, you have a new reason to remember her: she thinks achieving gender or racial equality in places like the Secret Service is “quota mongering” and therefore wrong. Considering the nature of the current Secret Service scandal, stemming as it does from a monoculture of men evidently steeped in their gender roles, this strikes me as amazingly tone-deaf. But if there’s anything S E Cupp excels at, it’s ignoring all situational nuance. She IS a Conservative after all.

Seriously, were these guys the “best for the job”, if they’re incapable of doing the job because they’re too busy employing then not paying prostitutes their fair wages? I’d bet having a woman in that security detail might have precluded that kind of nonsense. Or made the woman the target of their toxic masculinity, I suppose. But at least then that woman would have recourse from her abuse! (And yes, obtaining consent under false pretenses is abuse — more specifically, rape.)

Besides all this, where’s she getting the idea that women trying to eke out a living in Colombia by trading sex for money are somehow morally wrong, ignoring even the very real possibility that they’re not doing it voluntarily? That kind of anti-sex rhetoric is the stuff we feminists get routinely accused of, and it sure as hell shouldn’t fly when that rhetoric comes from anti-feminists either.

Hat tip to Mediaite.

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S E Cupp is wrong about so many things… this time, equality
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27 thoughts on “S E Cupp is wrong about so many things… this time, equality

  1. 2

    She’s supposedly an atheist, who then wrote a book all about how terrible it is that liberals, secularism, and atheism are all tearing away at religion in public and how religion is all so wonderful and needed in society.

    She’s the atheist that Fox brings out when want an someone to apologize for the latest drummed up controversy by saying “No, you’re right, atheists just need to be quiet and let the religious do whatever they want.”

  2. 6

    Cupp has described herself as an “atheist who hopes to be a believer some day”.

    I submit she as much an atheist as Jeffrey Dahlmer was a vegetarian. She’s a theist who just chooses not to affiliate herself with a particular religion.

  3. Leo
    7

    My suspicions about S.E. Cupp match those of d cwilson. Though I have at least seen her recognize a “God of the gaps” argument on Hannity once. Still, it’s hard to get a clear read on her, especially since I don’t watch her except for when someone posts something about her, which is rare.

    Otherwise, isn’t it ironic that she speaks about “quota mongering” when she is, as Jason suggests, FOX News’s token atheist?

    I’ll give Cupp some credit (very little) for pointing out that women are not necessarily more moral than men (from what I could gather over the cross-talk). But, yeah, it would seem the best people for the job may not be getting hired. And, sure, it may be true that there are more men out there who are qualified than women, but a roughly 1 to 9 women-to-men ratio? Seriously, that does not seem right. If it were maybe down to a 1 to 2 ratio, I’d start being less concerned.

  4. 8

    It would be interesting to hear from the president/vice president/republican candidates/their families, since their lives actually depend on protection from the secret service, about whether they’d be comfortable with females being present on the service.

    As for equality, where exactly does equality exist, except for in theoretical constructs i.e “before the law”?

  5. 9

    vandelay;

    Given that there exist female police officers and FBI agents, I’d say that there really shouldn’t be a lot of professional difference between the sexes in doing what Secret Service officers do.

    I know that if I were depending on them for my life, I’d not care what their sex was, as long as they’d had the same training and therefor the same abilities in carrying out their duties.

  6. 10

    RW Ahrens:

    Would you say that your relationship with the police is not the same as the president’s family’s relationship with the Secret Service?

  7. 11

    Another thing is that this incident reveals some serious problems in the Secret Service at a management level. Such shenanigans should never have been tolerated, female agents present or not, as it opens a huge opportunity for blackmail of an active duty agent, which is just about the biggest nightmare for a security team to deal with.

    I would agree that the presence of females probably would have kept the lid on, but the very fact that such a thing would be needed to “keep the lid on” is a damning indictment of S.S. management – not to mention the professionalism of the agents involved!

    The Secret Service was right to replace the entire team – as heads were not where they should have been – on the job of arranging for the security of the POTUS, not an easy task in the best of circumstances.

  8. 12

    Would you say that your relationship with the police is not the same as the president’s family’s relationship with the Secret Service?

    Not relavent. The point is the professionalism, knowledge and abilities of the two professions are such that if one can have female officers in one, there is no reason not to have them in another.

  9. 13

    -RW Ahrens

    Does your family have a history of targeted assassinations or threats of the same?

    If it did, would you or would you not prefer that the top 0.01 per cent of competent security officials were looking after your family’s safety?

    If so, what percentage of the top 0.01 per cent do you suspect are occupied by females?

    If the answer is zero, or functionally equivalent to the same, would you actively push for females to occupy positions on your family’s security detail?

  10. 14

    @VAndelay 13
    What reason do you have for supposing that none of the top 0.01 of bodyguards are female? The Canadian, French, Australian, Isreali and AFAICT Russian protective services for their heads of state all include female agents. I had difficulty obtaining this information for other similar details due to language barriers. I doubt that you can claim with a straight face that our heads of state are in greater danger of assassination than those of Israel and Russia, so what exactly is your point, other than random misogyny?

  11. 15

    @Dalillama
    If you don’t mind i’d like to hear some actual answers to my questions before responding to yours.

    I’ll also re-ask my earlier question: Where exactly does equality exist, except for in theoretical constructs i.e “before the law”?

  12. 16

    Given that there exist female police officers and FBI agents, I’d say that there really shouldn’t be a lot of professional difference between the sexes in doing what Secret Service officers do.

    More to the point, there are female Secret Service agents as well. If I’m in a position where some nut might take a shot at me and there are people whose job it is to jump in front of the bullet, I’m not going to worry about what kind of genitals they have.

  13. 17

    What exactly do you intend by that question? As currently phrased, it is meaningless, and therefore unanswerable. Furthermore, your entire line of questioning earlier is extremely disingenuous, and engages in the burden of proof fallacy. Specifically, if you wish to claim that women are not represented in the “top .01% of bodyguards,” that is a positive claim for which you need to present evidence. If you are not making that claim, then your questions are entirely pointless. Incidentally, given that there are less than a quarter of a million professional bodyguards on the planet, the top .01% of them means 2 people, and that’s not much of a security team regardless of their gender. You may want to choose a less hyperbolic number for your future strawmen.

  14. 18

    Leo:

    My suspicions about S.E. Cupp match those of d cwilson. Though I have at least seen her recognize a “God of the gaps” argument on Hannity once. Still, it’s hard to get a clear read on her, especially since I don’t watch her except for when someone posts something about her, which is rare.

    My read on her is that her role on Fox is similar to that of any of the Fox democrats: When the issue of atheism comes up, she is expected to half-heartedly put forth the weakest arguments possible and then quietly concede defeat to the superior intellect of the theists.

    Otherwise, her comments on Fox are virtually indistinguishable from any of the other rightwing pundits.

  15. 19

    Secret Service are security personnel, not just professional bodyguards, which would significantly expand that sample size. By the way, where did you get the number of 250,000 professional bodyguards worldwide?

    I also never claimed that women are not necessarily represented in the top .01 per cent. I only asked, if you and your family were under threat of targeted assassination and your security were dependant upon the top .01 per cent of the world’s security personnel, do you think that women would be among them, and assuming not, would you then be comfortable with bringing them into that service?

    These are very simple, very genuine questions.

    As for what I intend by the question re: equality, I intend to ask exactly what the question asks. I’ll ask it again in a slightly different way. Can you point to any material example of actual equality existing between any two individuals, let alone the sexes, without pointing to theoretical examples i.e. as espoused in constitutions?

  16. 20

    While the probability that you are a troll is rapidly approaching unity, I will attempt once more to engage you in an honest discussion.

    an you point to any material example of actual equality existing between any two individuals, let alone the sexes, without pointing to theoretical examples i.e. as espoused in constitutions?

    What’s your point? What is the purpose of this question? Do you believe that you have come up with some clever new conundrum here? Of course different individuals have different capacities and aptitudes, but that is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

    … and assuming not, would you then be comfortable with bringing them into that service?

    Where is this assumption coming from? Why are you introducing this into the conversation?

    By the way, where did you get the number of 250,000 professional bodyguards worldwide?

    That is a rough number, I worked from this interview with the heads of a private bodyguard firm as I don’t have access to the trade publications that might have better numbers. That’s ~100,000 private bodyguards. Then I took an average of the size of the government protective details I mentioned above, multiplied by the 35 countries I found that had such organizaions, and got ~70,000. I added about a 50% fudge factor because my numbers were shaky. As to security personnel, that’s a category so broad as to be useless in this context, as it includes everything from mall cops to the CIA, and most of the things under that umbrella are meaningless from a personal security standpoint.

  17. 21

    If your definition of a “troll” is someone who you disagree with, then that is probably what I am. And if you, or anyone else here, are so paranoid as to completely avoid answering the simplest of questions, then there’s no reason to continue. Good day.

  18. 22

    No, I think you’re the one flouncing after refusing to answer questions, vandelay. Do you generally do that as soon as someone calls troll on your tactics? Because that’s actually pretty well a tell that you’re arguing disingenuously.

  19. 23

    If your style here is to refuse to answer questions before posing your own while immediately questioning the motives of the question-asker then there’s simply no reason to discuss anything. It’s not to anyone’s benefit.

  20. F
    25

    Answers:

    If so, what percentage of the top 0.01 per cent do you suspect are occupied by females?

    Not nearly as many as there should be. People don’t get to the “top positions” based on real merit as much as they should. But if you are asking “what intrinsic (not based on who actually has a “top job”, but who is actually good enough for it) percentage of top security protective detail professionals are women, it would still be less than half as women are discouraged from the profession from cradle to grave, and those who are in it probably have to spend extra time defending and proving themselves which could be spent on improving their skills (or shortchanging prostitutes, whatever).

    I’ll also re-ask my earlier question: Where exactly does equality exist, except for in theoretical constructs i.e “before the law”?

    No one. But the divisions hardly fall on gender-based lines as you are implying. Try again.

    Here’s a gimme so you don’t go away empty-handed: The only time I’ve found a form of affirmative action to be less than sensible is when lowering an absolute requirement only for women. Such as height or lifting capability requirements for firefighters. If the requirements were not sensible in the first place, they should be lowered for women and men.

  21. 26

    Refusing to stick the flounce after insisting that other people answer vague and weasel-worded questions before being allowed to ask for clarifications which would expose those questions more explicitly as vague and weasel-worded. Troll twofer!

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