You know, I’ve been keeping a list of those who need to take a ride in the tumbrels, but all the challenge and fun is going out of it. The scoundrels keep standing up and proudly volunteering! Take Peter Schiff, please — he just blithely walked into an interview for the Daily Show and started talking out of his ass — what fun is it to get a confession out of the parasites when they think they’re gloating?

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Obama mentioned that women make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men. You know what that means? Cue the jerks making bogus statistical arguments to make the gap go away — in this case, wouldn’t you know it, Christina Hoff Sommers.

What is wrong and embarrassing is the President of the United States reciting a massively discredited factoid. The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents.

“When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration” is code for “I’m going to make excuses to justify the difference” — it’s not that the average woman is going to find herself 23% richer when Sommers is done, it’s just that she’s going to unthinkingly apply some fudge factors to the numbers to tell us that a yearly income of $23,000 is actually the same as $30,000. And of course there are people who will seriously believe that.

But she gives the game away in that paragraph. The 23 cent gender gap is actually real, because it’s an overall measure of the average man’s and woman’s earnings — Obama wasn’t wrong at all, he just wasn’t respecting anti-feminists’ dishonest manipulation of the data. When we appreciate that total earnings are a result of multiple factors, if we catalog all those factors and then dismiss all the ones that show discriminatory patterns of reward in society, then we can explain the difference as fair and natural.

So what factors does she list as contributing to women’s lower income?

• Men and women differ in their college majors. Does she stop and ask why? Why are women more likely to major in social work than engineering? Why should women be less likely to enter engineering? I know women who are engineers, physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists — it’s not as if breasts get in the way of doing factor analysis, or as if a penis makes one incapable of caring about human beings.

• The professions favored by women pay less well than the professions favored by men. Does she stop and ask why? Why are social workers paid less than engineers? Why should we consider social work less important than engineering? In Sommers’ list of majors and their average earnings, does even give the briefest consideration to the curious fact that most of the top ten most remunerative professions are men dominated, while most of the bottom ten least remunerative professions are women dominated?^* No, not in the slightest.

  Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones. In the pursuit of happiness, men and women appear to take different paths.

  Even if we take that as a given (I don’t; I think social pressures push people into jobs they may not desire as much as Sommers thinks), it leaves unanswered the big question: why does society reward “people-free” jobs more than it does caring ones?

There is a point to working out all the contributing factors to average income: it’s to identify where the inequities are being generated, so that we can correct them and reward people fairly for their work. Not to Christina Hoff Sommers, though:

Much of the wage gap can be explained away by simply taking account of college majors.

That says so much. She’s looking for ways to explain away the differences. She’s not looking for answers, or ways to more fairly treat human beings, or any understanding of the very real economic differences between men and women. Here’s a shorter Christina Hoff Sommers: women get paid less because their work is less valuable.

And she isn’t even aware of how profoundly sexist her entire rationalization is.

What if we lived in a world where equal education and training and investment in preparing for a job led to jobs where the pay was equal? A social worker with a masters degree and ten years of experience should be getting roughly the same pay as an engineer with a masters degree and ten years experience, in a just world. We should appreciate that we need functional communities about as much as we need bridges and pipelines.

And why shouldn’t some men find social work a better fit to their personality than engineering? Or what are women with an aptitude for engineering doing in jobs that don’t fit their personality — because peer pressure tells women that math aptitude is manly?

Grr. Every time I read anything by Sommers, I come away appalled at how superficial and self-serving her analyses are. She’s a true champion of the status quo.

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^*By the way, she uses a really sneaky tactic in her lists: for the richest professions, she tells us what percent are men; for the poorest professions, she tells us what percent are women. The numbers may be perfectly accurate, but you can tell exactly how she wants to bias our perception of them.

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Actually, I’m always appalled at any position taken by the anti-feminists — they rarely think in any way beyond justifying their prior views. This comic catches that attitude perfectly.

In case you’re baffled, here’s a guide to courteous conversation and GLAAD’s style guide. It’s not hard. Try not to break the conventions, now that you know what they are.

So last night I watch Twelve Years a Slave, and this morning I get up to see a tweet from @chebutykin linking to this letter:

Whoa. You mean racism didn’t end after the civil war? I guess there’s a reason we still need a Martin Luther King Day to remind us of the struggle. I notice some things never change on the Right: the random Capitalization, the ALL CAPS (we await technology to enable random font changes), the draping of themselves in True Americanism, the poor grammar, the absence of the Oxford Comma, and, oh yeah, the implicit hate

It reminds me of how virulent anti-communism was (and still is) in this country, that just howling how much you hate the commies was sufficient cover to excuse racism, oppression, tyranny, and violence — and I’ll note that even now, the racist haters justify their contempt for MLK by accusing him incessantly of communist ties.

I can think of quite a few things more deadly — more sinister — to American Democracy than those three fundamentally defunct ideologies: how about patriotism, piety, and inequity? In fact, all the things the Ku Klux Klan stood for were inherent corruptions of the Enlightenment ideals (fitfully and poorly implemented) that were driving forces behind the founding of this country, and those same corruptions continue to be major factors in the ideology of the Republican party.

I’m also sad to see that that letter came from Seattle, where I grew up, which I remember as a liberal part of the country, a blue-collar town that was a hotbed of labor unions and Wobblies. But there was also always a dark undercurrent of racism there: farmers of Japanese descent could tell you stories, that’s for sure, and the labor movement focused and inspired some of the nastier elements of the far right, as Jeff Sharlet explains:

…Sharlet relates how Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant, founded the Fellowship (the organization now known as the Family) in Seattle in 1935, in direct response to a wave of militant strikes along the West Coast. First regionally and then nationally, business leaders rallied to Vereide’s prayer circles as a way to inject a new spirit of purpose and unity into their fight against organized labor and the New Deal. With the Cold War, Vereide’s “International Christian Leadership” spread to western Europe, notably West Germany, where it helped to rehabilitate a number of former Nazis into anticommunist respectability. (Sharlet describes Vereide’s relationship with fascism as “weirdly ambivalent”. He cultivated Nazi sympathizers Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh and recruited at least one genuine fascist, Merwin K. Hart, to the Fellowship board, but was ultimately more at home with conservative Republicans than far right rabble rousers such as Father Coughlin.) In the 1960s, Coe succeeded Vereide as organizational leader and made two important changes: Following the trajectory of U.S. Cold War policy, he shifted the Fellowship’s international focus away from Europe toward Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and he took the organization “underground,” moving it out of the public eye as much as possible, as a protective measure against sixties radicalism and upheaval.

Of course, David Neiwert is also an invaluable investigator of the darkness gnawing at the Pacific Northwest.

This country has allowed the voices and attitudes represented by that KKK letter — attitudes that were spawned by a vicious reaction to a rising tide of liberal, egalitarian thought — to drown out the ideals of America. Those ideals were better represented by the radical revolutionary Martin Luther King than by rich Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley moguls. Those ideals are too often forgotten. This day is a day when we should all remind ourselves of that which we oppose and what we should be fostering, a world where all human beings have equal opportunity and dignity. Read King’s “Where Do We Go From Here?” speech to remind yourselves of what we ought to aspire to.

In other words, "Your whole structure (Yes) must be changed." [applause] A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them and make them things. (Speak) And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. (Yes) And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. (Yes) [applause]

What I’m saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, "America, you must be born again!" [applause] (Oh yes)

And so, I conclude by saying today that we have a task, and let us go out with a divine dissatisfaction. (Yes)

Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. (All right)

Let us be dissatisfied (Yes) until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. (Yes sir)

Let us be dissatisfied (Yes) until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.

Let us be dissatisfied (Yes) until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history (Yes), and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home.

Let us be dissatisfied (Yes) until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality integrated education.

Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.

Let us be dissatisfied (All right) until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not on the basis of the color of their skin. (Yeah) Let us be dissatisfied. [applause]

Let us be dissatisfied (Well) until every state capitol (Yes) will be housed by a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy, and who will walk humbly with his God.

Let us be dissatisfied [applause] until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. (Yes)

Let us be dissatisfied (Yes) until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together (Yes), and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid.

Let us be dissatisfied (Yes), and men will recognize that out of one blood (Yes) God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. (Speak sir)

Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, "White Power!" when nobody will shout, "Black Power!" but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power. [applause]

The bits about God I can do without, but make no mistake, I agree entirely with the larger theme of that speech. Now if only a person of prominence could express those values unreservedly without being gunned down by the powers of ignorance and oppression…if only those values were represented in Congress…if only…