JONATHAN TURLEY

Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger

Roy Blount, Jr.—author, humorist, poet, reporter, performer, and frequent guest on Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!—once wrote the following:

The local groceries are all out of broccoli,

Loccoli.

It’s a terse rhyming couplet that probably expresses the way many people feel about the green cruciferous vegetable. I don’t know how Antonin Scalia feels about eating broccoli—but I do know that the nutritious vegetable has been getting a lot of press lately due to remarks that the Justice made about it and the health care mandate during the recent Supreme Court hearings on the Affordable Care Act:

“Could you define the market — everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food,” Scalia said, discussing a hypothetical. “Therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.”

He added, “Does that expand your ability to, to issue mandates to the people?”

Some journalists and bloggers believe that Justice Scalia didn’t come up with that bad broccoli analogy on his own. They think he may be echoing GOP and conservative media talking points on the ACA.

Continue reading ‘The Case of the Cruciferous Vegetable, the Cornhusker Kickback, Justice Scalia, Right-Wing Talking Points, and the Affordable Care Act’

Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger

Back in 2007, Christopher Hitchens penned an article for Vanity Fair titled Why Women Aren’t Funny. In it he wrote:

Men are overawed, not to say terrified, by the ability of women to produce babies. (Asked by a lady intellectual to summarize the differences between the sexes, another bishop responded, “Madam, I cannot conceive.”) It gives women an unchallengeable authority. And one of the earliest origins of humor that we know about is its role in the mockery of authority. Irony itself has been called “the glory of slaves.” So you could argue that when men get together to be funny and do not expect women to be there, or in on the joke, they are really playing truant and implicitly conceding who is really the boss…

If I am correct about this, which I am, then the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women. Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates.

So—according to Hitchens—women are really “the bosses” because they are the baby makers. Men are the funny ones because they mock the authority of women who have wombs…and, therefore, the power! Who knew?

I get it. I think this explains why so many men in the GOP these days are proposing reproductive legislation.  These male vagina vigilantes—“uterati” is what I call them—must believe that their extreme legislation will give them (the funny guys) authority over women (the humorless baby makers). They’re trying to gain authority over the opposite sex by taking control of contraception…and women’s bodies.

Continue reading ‘Sarcasm and the Vagina Vigilantes…or Who’s Funny Now?: Yucking It Up in the Battle of the Sexes’