Day 2 of right-wing-jerks attempting to enforce gender roles through their TV screens watching broadasts from the DNC. (Here's Day 1.)
This time it was because 17-year-old Gus Walz cried during his dad's speech. I figured they'd go after him for it, and that was before I knew the kid was neurodivergent. Then I dreaded it even more, remembering their Dear Leader's take on people with any kind of disability.
I heard the first rabid word salad just after waking up this morning, and then another an hour or so later, the first from a national figure and the other from a Wisconsin radio host. Neither is worth calling direct attention to, and they were predictable, unfortunately.
These people wouldn't understand an honest emotion if it stood up and hugged them.
On BlueSky, Adam Serwer posted:
The attacks you’re seeing on the Harris and Walz families from the online right are reflective of a different ideological orientation towards family as mere objects that are meant to reflect the greatness of the husband and father, not people with their own lives and emotions.
A person called Dr. Heck responded with multiple comments:
When they say “family values” they mean something completely different than what that phrase might seem to communicate.
This is a system where a good, proper, family is one in which: The husband/father is The Head as ordained by God. His wife and children submit to him to show their godliness. Financial success and a perfect family are proof of God’s blessings.
The flip side is that a family that diverges from this model — whether a wife that isn’t submissive or a child that isn’t “perfect” — is proof that God has not blessed them. And maybe it shows that they’re not even Real Christians. It’s a very toxic worldview
When their own kids diverge in some way — whether literal neural divergence, or gender nonconformity of any type — watch out.
Lyz Lenz has probably written about this in her critiques of evangelical families and marriages, maybe in her book God Land or in her newsletter/Substack. And of course it fits with George Lakoff's description of the Strong Father worldview. In a nutshell, Layoff writes, conservatives believe in a "strict father" morality, while liberals adhere to a "nurturant parent" morality, and it frames their entire politics about leadership.
Walz is the essence of a nurturant parent, which is what people have been responding to when they post memes about him helping to fix a tire, push you out of a snow bank, or just being a good football coach. As someone who grew up with a who was father pretty low on the nurturing scale, I find it appealing.
It's interesting, though, that it was not an aspect of Walz that was emphasized in Minnesota during his statewide runs. I guess I vaguely knew he'd been a coach in Mankato. The teacher part was clearer. I do remember hearing about the Gay Straight Alliance advising (especially an interview with the student involved), but I think that was all during one of his runs for Congress — probably in 2012 when we had a ballot initiative to vote on, not when during one of his runs for governor. The message was generally: he's middle of the road, represented a "red" district but has come around on guns since Sandy Hook and support Democratic issues, was in the National Guard… He's electable compared to the more progressive woman candidate who was the one talking about the politics of joy.
Maybe it was obvious to all of us — compared to the covid-denying-zombie* Republicans ran against him in 2022 and the empty-suit candidate* from 2018 — so it didn't need to be emphasized. When you're on a national stage, you get packaged more than on the state level so it can be picked up by the swarming media in a way that works most easily ("Coach Walz"), and that's what has been happening with Walz.
It's okay, just a bit... weird.
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* 2022: Scott Jensen, 2018: Jeff Johnson. Can you get names more boring than those? But they are an advantage in Minnesota. I have a hypothesis about our elections, which is that if you have an obvious Scandinavian last name on a ballot (Johnson is the best one), you have a guaranteed floor of 10% no matter who you are. We've had married women who had taken their husband's ethnic last names reinsert their birth names in order to put something like Anderson onto a ballot. The smart woman never changes her name, or has two last names/hyphenates: there's another case of a double-named Anderson, for instance.
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