Every time I read an article that quotes her, I first think, “Well, she’s pretty young, isn’t she? She’ll probably mature a little and think differently. What is she, like twenty-two, twenty-three, something like that?” And then I head over to Wikipedia to be reminded that, no, she’s actually thirty-five.

I think it comes down to that in tech, your bosses cannot imagine making a stupid mistake like that and believe (correctly) that only gross incompetence could cause someone to do that. So they don’t tolerate it. I’m pretty sure that every one of these police chiefs who hire guys like this look at the situation and go,…

She is (was?) an indie author. A lot of them have very passionate followings but they’re not anywhere close to being bestsellers or anything. There are some indie authors I love, that I absolutely will read anything they put out, but who are not remotely household names and whose obituaries would probably only be read…

If I’m reading it correctly, he said this back in May, before a lot of people had figured out just how bad banning abortion would be. It’s only just now coming to light. I would imagine that he’s probably regretting saying these things. But, hey, turns out saying the politically expedient thing you don’t believe…

After Roe was overturned, a female relative said to me, “I know this is going to make me sound really naive, but I guess I didn’t know that supreme court decisions could just be overturned like that. I thought once the supreme court ruled, that was pretty much it.” This relative isn’t stupid, just deeply, deeply…

The number of people under 40 I know who are on the fence about marriage is really high. Something like this would likely push most of them off the fence onto the side of “Not on your life”, and take a whole bunch of additional folks from “Yeah, I’d like to get married” to “Fuck you, no.”

Lots of people say, “Oh, people get divorced too easily these days. They change spouses like they change socks!” Except when it’s their sister or their friend or their son getting a divorce, they’re like, “Well, you know, they really tried but it was just wrong from the start” or “You know, after the death of his…

I know someone whose parents split just after she left home. She realized that they had been staying together just for her. She said the idea that all those miserable years when they very clearly disliked each other was all for her “benefit” kind of messed her up for a while. It made it feel like all those fights were…

Even if he’s not beating the kids, watching somebody hit your mom is either going to be upsetting or it’s going to seriously warp your view of the world. Likely both. Watching one of your parents get abused is a form of abuse in and of itself.

All right, Conservatives, your current position is that gay people shouldn’t be able to get married and straight people shouldn’t be able to get divorced. You guys make me tired.

That’s the funny thing. I’ve heard plenty of people say things like this about divorce, that people get divorced too quickly or too easily “these days”, but then it’s their friend or their sister or their son getting divorced and suddenly it’s different. Suddenly, “You gotta understand, they really did try everything…

That’s the really maddening thing. I might respect them a little if they were taking the fight to their own, if they were really reading men the riot act. “How dare you leave your wife just because things are hard? How dare you break your marriage vows just because you think you could be with someone younger or…

People have asked them, and they just say, “Well, it’s terrible but there’s no reason to kill a baby over it and God has a plan and isn’t it terrible that Democrats want to raise taxes?” And because many (most?) Republican voters spend their time in the closed news ecosystem of Fox News, OANN, Breitbart, et. al.,…

There are a shocking number of religious Americans who believe in literal demon possession. I grew up in an evangelical community and while my parents did not believe in insane things like that, so many of my friends’ parents would just casually suggest exorcism for what were clearly medical conditions. In the high…

If the producers hired her not only because she could write but because she had claimed to have had experiences that would give her insight into the characters and plots, then, yeah, it’s an employment issue. A lot of writers rooms are staffed with people who have specific experiences relevant to the show’s…

So, what happened in the Lawrence case that eventually overturned statutes criminalizing gay sex: A guy was mad that his ex-boyfriend was seeing someone else, so he called the cops and said that there was a man in the new boyfriend’s apartment with a gun (basically, SWATted him). When the cops got there, there was…

Purity culture screwed up a lot of people I know. More than one woman I grew up with in the church wound up unmarried largely because their relationship to sex and their body just left them completely unable to even contemplate a sexual relationship. It’s kind of heartbreaking.

A friend of mine and her husband are both religious. My friend said that when she and her husband got married, more than one member of the church told them, “When you get married, put a nickel in a jar every time you have sex for the first year. After the first year, take a nickel out every time you have sex. You’ll…

Yeah, it’s basically, Do you want them to learn it from educators with an emphasis on health and safety, or do you want to learn it from porn. Because those are your options. I’m not kidding. There’s an internet full of readily available porn and even “good, Christian boys and girls” are going to find it, and they’re…

I’m a little too old to have read the Harry Potter books when they came out, so I’m just getting around to reading them with my kids now and there are a lot of uncomfortable things in them. The fat shaming alone is really bad. I had to stop a couple of times to kind of point it out and make clear that I disagreed with…