The Handbook of the Mount Saint Charles Academy, a Christian school, starts well.

Mount Saint Charles Academy admits students of any race, color, national origin or ethnic background to all rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin or ethnic background in the administration of educational policies, loan programs, and athletic or other school administered programs.

Notice anything missing? Nothing about sexual orientation, and nothing about transgender…oh, wait. They do have a statement on that last one.

Mount Saint Charles Academy is unable to make accommodations for transgender students. Therefore, MSC does not accept transgender students nor is MSC able to continue to enroll students who identify as transgender.

What special accommodations do you need to make for transgender students? Do they have special plumbing? It seems to me that transgender students are able to use the facilities they already have for men and women in the school, so this is a very strange restriction.

You know, if you lack something you need to support a set of your students, the right answer is to fix your facilities; the easy answer is to kick out those students. But that’s also the wrong answer.

Especially when your handbook babbles about the compassion of Christ.

A little story from a big city hospital:

“When you work on the east side of our hospital, psychiatric patients are a dime a dozen,” he said.

But this patient is different. She’s put together. She’s lucid. She’s got an incision.

A group crowded around the computer to see her x-ray.

“Embedded in the right side of her flank is a small metallic object only a little bit larger than a grain of rice,” he said. “But it’s there. It’s unequivocally there. She has a tracker in her. And no one was speaking for like five seconds — and in a busy ER that’s saying something.”

It turns out this 20-something woman was being pimped out by her boyfriend, forced to sell herself for sex and hand him the money.

Yeah, some days, you start to see the virtues of extinction.

Vyckie Garrison has a terrifying post about the enforcers of Biblical patriarchy: the women who tell other women to serve men.

Admittedly, the public face of Quiverfull (also known as “Complementarity”) is overwhelmingly male: John Piper of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, John MacArthur of Grace to You ministries, Dennis Rainey, radio host of Family Life Today, mega-church Pastor David Platt, who is president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board and author of “Counter Culture” which calls on women to ditch feminism in favor of wifely submission, Voddie Baucham, author of “What He Must Be If He Wants To Marry My Daughter,” Scott Brown of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches (in which “family integrated” is code words for Quiverfull), “Kill The Gays” pastor, Kevin Swanson, the “pissing pastor,” Steve Anderson, and so so many more.

But honestly, no sensible woman would give these misogynistic jerks the time of day if it weren’t for the influence of dedicated Christian female mentors: the “older women” of Titus 2 whom the apostle Paul charged to “teach the younger women” to be obedient keepers at home.

I listened to about a minute of the saccharine-sweet, praise-god lecturing of Nancy Campbell and could take no more. Spare me.

I did laugh at one of Garrison’s explanations for why women actually fall for this patriarchal crap: They’re married to losers. How weak must a man be if he has to invoke the aid of the imaginary all-powerful ruler of the universe to make his marriage viable?

By the way, Garrison’s daughter has a heritable bone disease called Hereditary Multiple Exostosis, and she’s asking for help. That looks like a good cause. She sure can’t expect God to help her out.

Case #5623 out of uncountable myriads:

I really want to hear more from this knowledgable fellow, “all-because-we-fell-in-love”. I’d like to know where he thinks the penis goes in, or where the baby comes out. I’d also like to know where he gets the confidence to lecture women on their genitalia when he knows essentially nothing about them.

I have caught him in a gross error. He notices that MRA Paul Elam detests faux feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, and makes an erroneous generalization.

I turns out that Elam is one of the very few carbon-based life forms in this sector of the galaxy to actually believe that Sommers, who’s devoted most of her career to bashing feminists, actually is the feminist she pretends to be.

This is incorrect. A great many carbon-based life forms actually enthusiastically present Sommers as the very model of a modern feminist, and are disingenuously dumbfounded if you explain to them that she’s actually an anti-feminist. Unfortunately, that list of carbon-based life forms includes surprisingly many high-profile atheists, including Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins.

I think criticizing Futrelle instantly qualifies me for an official MRA membership card, doesn’t it?

This ignorant fundamentalist boxer, Manny Pacquiao, made a comment about gays being worse than animals and deserving of those biblical punishments (he’s lost big endorsements over it, too). But I do rather like Dave Bautista’s taciturn reaction.

Drax is very literal-minded, but empathic at the same time.

It’s a surprisingly fraught issue, and it may get worse. The South Dakota legislature wants to pass House Bill 1008. The Republicans there seem to be obsessed with who is using the bathroom.

FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to restrict access to certain restrooms and locker rooms in public schools.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA:
Section 1. That chapter 13-24 be amended by adding a NEW SECTION to read:
The term, biological sex, as used in this Act, means the physical condition of being male or female as determined by a person’s chromosomes and identified at birth by a person’s anatomy.
Section 2. That the code be amended by adding a NEW SECTION to read:
Every restroom, locker room, and shower room located in a public elementary or secondary school that is designated for student use and is accessible by multiple students at the same time shall be designated for and used only by students of the same biological sex. In addition, any public school student participating in a school sponsored activity off school premises which includes being in a state of undress in the presence of other students shall use those rooms designated for and used only by students of the same biological sex.

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I’m beginning to feel like an anomaly, because somehow I’ve gotten through 30+ years of teaching without ever groping a student. Harassing students seems to be a common thing. Now Science reports on a big case of sexual misconduct in the field of anthropology, a field that has had reports of problems before.

Although the most recent high-profile cases of sexual harassment in science have arisen in astronomy and biology, many researchers say paleoanthropology also has been rife with sexual misconduct for decades. Fieldwork, often in remote places, can throw senior male faculty and young female students together in situations where the rules about appropriate behavior can be stretched to the breaking point. Senior women report years of unwanted sexual attention in the field, at meetings, and on campus. A widely cited anonymous survey of anthropologists and other field scientists, called the SAFE study and published in July 2014 in PLOS ONE, reported that 64% of the 666 respondents had experienced some sort of sexual harassment, from comments to physical contact, while doing fieldwork.

Even a few years ago, the research assistant might not even have aired her complaint, as few women—or men—felt emboldened to speak out about harassment. Of the 139 respondents in the SAFE study who said they experienced unwanted physical contact, only 37 had reported it. Those who remained silent may have feared retaliation. Senior paleoanthropologists control access to field sites and fossils, write letters of recommendation, and might end up as reviewers on papers or grant proposals. “The potential for [senior scientists] to make a phone call and kill a careermaking paper feels very real,” says Leslea Hlusko, a paleontologist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley.

You should also read Rebecca Ackermann’s personal account of what it’s like to be targeted for harassment.

This is a gigantic problem for science. It’s not just a few people here and there — it’s pervasive across all disciplines, and it means we’ve lost an unknown number of excellent researchers over the years for an arbitrary reason that only benefits abusers.

The Minnesota Republic is another of those fringey conservative student newspapers that get surprisingly well funded by the Republicans, and aren’t at all representative of the campus as a whole. This one is on the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota, and they get enough money that they’re bringing in a couple of well-known speakers to discuss an issue of concern.

That issue is feminism.

And to discuss it, they’re flying in two people. Guess who? Hint: they’re not well-informed experts. They have more of a reputation as anti-feminist ideologues. Try to come up with the two worst names you can imagine.

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