Posts by Sara Robinson

Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies.

More Clarity About Abuse, Intermarriage, Child Breeders, and the Fundamentalist Church of Later Day Saints
Posted by Sara Robinson, Orcinus on April 25, 2008 at 2:51 PM.

So far, the wall-to-wall news coverage of the state of Texas's raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints compound in Eldorado, TX has been focused on just a couple of narratives. The first, of course, is the state's dogged and thorough -- and long overdue -- attempt to prove that the church's young women have been systemically sexually abused by the men of the group; and that this abuse is not just rare, but rather an inherent and accepted feature of the group's social order.

The other is the cultural curiosity of the sect's women in general. We see them, looking like they just walked out of the 1890s in their bizarre high hairdos, pastel prairie dresses, and sturdy shoes, and wonder how such a group of fossils (let alone tens of thousands of them) could still exist in modern America. It makes for great TV; but I often look at these women (most of whom have never watched TV in their lives), and feel like they're lambs being dragged out in front of media wolves they've never learned to recognize or fear. In a world when all of us seem to be in permanent rehearsal for our own 15 minutes of fame, these women are so unprepared for all this that they're downright fascinating.

These are the two current storylines the media is focused on -- at least, so far. In time, though, if the reporters and investigators stick around, they might find other things to talk about. A careful reading of Daphne Bramham's excellent The Secret Lives of Saints reveals that there are plenty of other questions we should be asking about the FLDS -- and months worth of stories we're not hearing about right now, but which need to be discussed and generally understood if the country is going to deal with the group appropriately and effectively.

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Are FLDS Women Brainwashed?
Posted by Sara Robinson, Orcinus on April 18, 2008 at 10:41 AM.

I've spent the day wrangling with a post (which will probably turn into several posts) about the FLDS raid in Eldorado, TX. Oddly, last week's events occured while I had my nose buried in the best new book on the subject of the FLDS since Jon Krakauer's bestselling Under the Banner of Heaven came out in 2003, so I've got a lot of fresh and deep perspective on the matter -- too much, in fact, to be wrestled down into one coherent post.

Over dinner, I'd just about decided that the only way to deal with the overload was to chip away at the story in short blats over the next few days, which will attempt to put some new context to these events. And then I got an e-mail from Pastor Dan Schultz of Street Prophets, containing ample proof of just how badly that context is needed now that the media talking heads are all holding forth on this story.

Dan pointed me to the second most inane thing ABC News has produced today (the first, of course, being Charlie Gibson's and George Stephanopoulos' performance at the Pennsylvania debates) -- an odd little story by Emily Friedman asking "experts" whether or not FLDS wives are "brainwashed."

Between hysterical sobs, the women of the Yearning for Zion Ranch in rural Texas tearily pleaded Monday for the return of their children from state custody, but at the mere turn of a phrase, those tears mysteriously, uniformly stopped.

When conversations with reporters shifted away from the 416 children in state custody toward touchier subjects surrounding the mysterious religious sect, the overflowing emotions were quickly replaced with blank stares and terse replies.

Clad in conservative prairie dresses, hair back in buns and tight braids, the women stuck to monotone, emotionless responses in declining to answer reporters' questions concerning allegations of plural marriages and sexual assault within the sect.

Asked whether 14- and 15-year-old girls get married on the compound, a tight-lipped woman who would only give her first name, Marilyn, gave what appeared to be a rehearsed response.

"We are talking about our children now," she said, shaking her head, unwilling to stray from the subject of her children.

The shift to blank-faced denial was jarring in both its immediacy and consistency. Not a single one strayed from the script, an impressive display of solidarity, if a bit peculiar to the outsiders granted unprecedented access to the members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

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A Rundown Of Our Economic Woes
Posted by Evan Robinson on April 15, 2008 at 4:21 AM.

Originally at Group News Blog

They call Economics "the dismal science". If you've ever taken a basic econ class, you'll know why. The assumptions upon which economics are built are known to be faulty (people do not act "rationally" as defined by economists), the conclusions are often depressing, many of the important questions are left unasked, and the ability of economists to agree on how the world works (or an economy works) is extremely limited. These problems notwithstanding, we spend an appalling amount of time thinking about the economy, worrying about the economy, trying to effect the economy, trying to predict the economy, and generally obsessed with the economy.

So let's take a look at a few current "conditions"

Pricing the War

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes suggest that the Iraq War is going to cost $3 trillion or even more. You can see the current direct costs of the war for the US, states, towns, or congressional districts at the National Priorities Project.

The Economist weighs in, largely with quotes from others, so I won't quote it. But check out this blog entry by Robert Reich.

According to the St. Petersburg Times, "Barack Obama says the war costs each household about $100 per month." Here's the math:

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The Real McCain on Race and Immigration
Posted by Sara Robinson, Group News Blog on April 10, 2008 at 9:47 AM.

Our buddy Cliff Schecter has been hard to miss the past couple days. The buzz over his forthcoming book, The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn't, has been heard even beyond the sheltered garden of liberal blogdom, and is now hitting the mainstream media with the thunder of an oncoming B-52.

And well it should. Cliff's got a hell of a tale to tell. Actually, perusing my advance copy, he's got several of them. His indelicacy in chewing out his wife -- you know, the one whose large personal fortune has made McCain's career possible -- and calling her the c-word in front of reporters is the story all over the front pages right now. But there's more. Much more.

The larger point that runs throughout Cliff's book is that Senator Straight Talk has a long record of being anything but. On any issue you can name, he's hemmed and hawed and twisted himself around to fit whatever group he was currying favor with (or taking funding from) on any given day. (That, in the end, is why conservatives don't trust him, and nobody else should, either.) And that habit absolutely extends to his record where issues like race and immigration are concerned.

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Feminists Unite to Combat Chris Matthews' Sexism
Posted by Sara Robinson, Group News Blog on January 17, 2008 at 1:13 PM.

UPDATE: Chris Matthews has issued an apology for his sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton.

Note to Chris Matthews: Any desperate hope you may have had that this whole ugly sexism business would just blow over -- well, just give it up now. Because it's not going away. And if a lot of really angry and powerful women have their way, it won't go away until you do.

The presidents of Feminist Majority, NOW, The National Women's Political Caucus, and the Women's Media Center have teamed up to send a rather pointed letter to NBC president Steve Capus (the same guy, it turns out, who canned Imus just last April on similar grounds -- he's probably having deja vu all over again right now), which lays out the case that Matthews deserves nothing much more than the right to keep Imus company on the too-neanderthal-for-prime-time bench:

Dear Mr. Capus:

During the controversy surrounding Don Imus' racist and sexist remarks this past spring, you acknowledged that, with Imus, "there have been any number of other comments that have been enormously hurtful to far too many people. And my feeling is that ... there should not be a place for that on MSNBC. This is about trust. It's about reputation. It's about doing what's right."

We commend your acknowlegement that NBC has a responsibility to demand appropriate conduct and dialogue in its programming. That is why we are writing to you concerning comments made by Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball, that demonstrate a larger pattern of overt sexism when discussing women.

During an appearance on the January 9 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, Matthews said of Senator Hillary Clinton, "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around" and that "[s]he didn't win there [New York] on her merits." Matthews has referred to Clinton as a "she devil," compared her to a "strip-teaser" and called her "witchy." He has referred to men who support her as "castratos in the eunuch chorus." He has suggested Clinton is not "a convincing mom" and said "modern women" like Clinton are unacceptable to "Midwest guys."

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US Medical System: The Worst in 19 Industrialized Nations
Posted by Evan Robinson, Group News Blog on January 10, 2008 at 6:40 AM.

Reuters reports on a study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, authored by Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee, published in Health Affairs, a peer-reviewed journal:

France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.

The study abstract:

We compared trends in deaths considered amenable to health care before age seventy-five between 1997 - 98 and 2002 - 03 in the United States and in eighteen other industrialized countries. Such deaths account, on average, for 23 percent of total mortality under age seventy-five among males and 32 percent among females. The decline in amenable mortality in all countries averaged 16 percent over this period. The United States was an outlier, with a decline of only 4 percent. If the United States could reduce amenable mortality to the average rate achieved in the three top-performing countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year by the end of the study period.

One hundred thousand deaths per year. You'd think Mike Huckabee would be all over this, after his statement about requiring immigrants for labor because we've been aborting people for 35 years:

Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce," the former Arkansas governor said. "It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.

One hundred thousand deaths per year. We need immigrants because of aborted fetuses, but there's no need to stop killing 100,000 people unnecessarily because we don't have universal health care:

"I think health care in the U.S. is pretty good if you have access. But if you don't, I think that's the main problem, isn't it?" Nolte said in a telephone interview.

I have a little experience with universal health care, because I've lived in Canada for four years. It's taken me almost that long to stop asking people, "Have you seen a doctor for that?" when they talk about a health problem. Canadians look at you funny if you ask them that.

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White Supremacist Leader Insists Ron Paul Is Racist
Posted by Sara Robinson, Orcinus on December 28, 2007 at 6:11 AM.

Well, don't say we didn't warn you about Ron Paul's friends.

Here's American National Socialist Workers Party leader Bill White, coming out big for Paul on the far-right Vanguard News Network site on December 20:

Comrades:

I have kept quiet about the Ron Paul campaign for a while, because I didn't see any need to say anything that would cause any trouble. However, reading the latest release from his campaign spokesman, I am compelled to tell the truth about Ron Paul's extensive involvement in white nationalism.

Both Congressman Paul and his aides regularly meet with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, the Institute for Historic Review, and others at the Tara Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, usually on Wednesdays. This is part of a dinner that was originally organized by Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis and Joe Sobran, and has since been mostly taken over by the Council of Conservative Citizens.

I have attended these dinners, seen Paul and his aides there, and been invited to his offices in Washington to discuss policy.

For his spokesman to call white racialism a "small ideology" and claim white activists are "wasting their money" trying to influence Paul is ridiculous. Paul is a white nationalist of the Stormfront type who has always kept his racial views and his views about world Judaism quiet because of his political position.

I don't know that it is necessarily good for Paul to "expose" this. However, he really is someone with extensive ties to white nationalism and for him to deny that in the belief he will be more respectable by denying it is outrageous -- and I hate seeing people in the press who denounce racialism merely because they think it is not fashionable.

Bill White, Commander

American National Socialist Workers Party

Obviously, this isn't what Paul's supporters want to hear. (The reactions from the VNN commentors ranged from "Some one ban this piece of shit for the no outing rule" to "I know alot of white supremacist involved in the Ron Paul campaign. I wish he would not shun away from his true supporters. I will stick with him till the ened but he shouldn't act like a typical politiician" to "This motherfucker needs a special bullet." Yes, the unique spelling is all their very own; follow the link above and read the threads for more holiday joy in this vein.) While White is hardly the most reliable reporter on any subject, his testament to Paul's racist credentials does tend to corroborate what Dave and I have been telling you all along: Paul's got longstanding connections to the looniest loonies on the loony right. You may not be able to hear the dog-whistle code in his speeches, but they sure as hell hear it loud and clear.

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MoveOn Sets Its Sights on Facebook Privacy Violations
Posted by Sara Robinson, Group News Blog on November 23, 2007 at 12:00 PM.

This post, written by Sara Robinson, originally appeared on Group News Blog

Bill O'Reilly can howl all he wants about the "war on Christmas." But Facebook has leaped several parsecs ahead of him, making itself into a Grinch so big that the good Dr. Seuss himself would have been gobstopped by the sheer evil magnitude of it all.

How did Facebook manage this? Simply by spoiling the surprise for everybody.

In recent weeks, Facebook has implemented this new "feature" called Beacon. Beacon keeps track of purchases made through businesses that have contracted with Facebook for this service. If you buy a movie ticket through Fandango, or a rental from Blockbuster, Beacon sends around a note to your friends, so everybody will know you went to see American Gangster, or rented Sicko.

This is pernicious enough -- does my conservative boss really need to know I spent Saturday night watching No End In Sight? -- but from a privacy standpoint, it wouldn't be quite so much so if you were given the chance to opt in or out of using Beacon. But, of course, you're not. What you get is a very tiny Javascript link with every purchase -- and a short window of time to click it if you don't want this transaction broadcast to your entire Facebook network. If you don't click that link, your business becomes everybody's business.

And worse: there is no global opt-out on this. You can't just go somewhere that will allow you to bow out of this intrusive feature once and for all. You've got to catch that tiny link and remember to click it -- every single time.

The privacy nightmares are endless -- and already happening. One man quoted in a MoveOn press release said:

"It's easy to picture serious consequences: A college student buying a ticket to Brokeback Mountain and his homophobic football teammates finding out on Facebook. Or a battered woman buying a ticket to see Violence Behind Closed Doors when she told her husband she's working an extra shift. Or a not-so-friendly employer learning a staffer has bought a ticket to a screening of Living With AIDS."

But the real brunt of this is a far more common experience that's not nearly so frightening, though far more universal: Facebook is telling people what you bought them for Christmas.

Say you go, unawares, to some business that's made this deal with Facebook, and buy your honey that gorgeous jacket he's been eyeing. Or that expensive Beatles boxed set for your nephew. Or or or. And your Facebook account dutifully puts out the notice to everyone in your network -- including said nephew (and yes, I have a nephew on my Facebook account) -- that "Sara bought a Beatles boxed set from Amazon."

Well, now, that sort of spoils the surprise, doesn't it? But it's already happened. And is happening. Don't let it happen to you.

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Young People Rejecting Christianity, Have Perception of Religion as Homophobic
Posted by Sara Robinson on October 10, 2007 at 5:31 AM.

This post, written by Sara Robinson, originally appeared on Orcinus

I've been saying for a while now that the religious right in America finally and firmly jumped the shark over the past few years. But now that that big ol' shark's behind them, there's another bunch of critters looming ahead that may prove to be even more damning. It's that whole big flock of chickens that are finally coming home to roost.

I don't know how long they thought they were going to go on that way, all self-righteous and judgmental, blaming homosexuals and feminists for everything from 9/11 to the price of gas, ignoring the interests of the poor in favor of those of big business, and dismissing any kind of environmental stewardship as nothing more than a way to waste time until the Rapture comes. Clearly, the didn't see anything at all wrong with elevating the most spiteful and amoral among them as their national spokespeople, and rewarding them in direct proportion to the heat of their rhetoric. No, these folks were on fire (we're still not sure if it was Jesus or heartburn), and they weren't afraid to let their bilious light shine on the TV, in the streets, all the way to the White House. They did their best to set it high above the rest of the culture, where none of the rest of us could miss it if we wanted to.

And now, a new study reveals that young Americans, both inside and outside Christianity, have indeed taken note of this righteous spectacle-- and a large and growing majority of them are absolutely revolted by what they've seen.

A study released last week by the Barna Group, a reputable Evangelical research and polling firm, found that under-30s -- both Christian and non-Christian -- are strikingly more critical of Christianity than their peers were just a decade ago. According to the summary report, Barna pollster David Kinnaman found that the opinions of non-Christians, in particular, had slid like a rock in that time frame. Ten years ago, "the vast majority" of non-Christians had generally favorable views of Christianity. Now, that number stands at just 16%. When asked specifically about Evangelicals, the number are even worse: only 3% of non-Christian Millennials have positive associations with Evangelicals. Among the Boomers, it's eight times higher.

When Kinnaman asked senior pastors if they were seeing this too, half of them told him that, yes, they are finding their work to be an uphill battle -- "because people are increasingly hostile and negative toward Christianity." And his research bore this out. When he ranked young non-Christians' most common perceptions of Christianity, nine of the 12 most common attributes they named were negative ones. According to the study, "Common negative perceptions include that present-day Christianity is judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), old-fashioned (78%), and too involved in politics (75%)."

And this wasn't just ignorance talking. The people interviewed had an average of five Christian friends. Eighty percent of them had spent at least six months attending church themselves in the past; and half of them had considered becoming Christian, but rejected it. Familiarity with the faith, it appears, has bred quite a bit of contempt:

"As we probed why young people had come to such conclusions, I was surprised how much their perceptions were rooted in specific stories and personal interactions with Christians and in churches. When they labeled Christians as judgmental this was not merely spiritual defensiveness. It was frequently the result of truly 'unChristian' experiences. We discovered that the descriptions that young people offered of Christianity were more thoughtful, nuanced, and experiential than expected."

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