Conservative Fascists:  Link to a website offering you the opportunity to view a ½ hour long video that will inform you that there is no Constitutional basis for Judges to interpret law, that gay people can change if they get hit with enough doses of Jesus, and that if gays are allowed to marry, your grandchildren will one day demand to know how you let the world become such a terrible place.

Liberal Fascists: Link to Wikipedia’s entry about Linda Hirshman, who I just saw on the Colbert report last night, saying that women have a duty to other women and society to stay in the workforce, no matter how much they might like to stay home for a few years and raise their children, they don’t have the right to choose what they want.  To summarize that she said, being a full-time mom is such an odious and onerous job (children are burdensome and distasteful apparently), that it is wrong for one woman to do it, because then all women will have to do it, so we should make the men do it instead.

Instead, women should use their intelligence and abilities to do complex, rewarding jobs that fulfill them as people, and where they will be appreciated.

Um. 

I’ve held a LOT of jobs.  None of them have been as interesting, complex, and utilized as many of my capacities at once as trying to be the best mom possible.  Also, while my co-workers seemed to appreciate me, none were half so appreciative as my kids are.  Of the projects I’ve worked on, my kids are the only ones that are still “in play”.  All of the others have been abandoned by the management, or ruled obsolete and replaced.  Of all the projects I will work on in the future, my kids are the only ones I can expect to outlive me.

Also, where would the working moms who rely on me for emergency child care be if I had a job in an office?  Or the occasional friend (or husband) who gets in over their head and needs to sub-contract work in order to get their jobs done and make time for their families?  And by "subcontract" I mean show up and stuff envelopes for free, proofread, decorate offices for office parties, fill in teaching for classes while they attend marriage classes or recover from surgery, be an actor in silly benefit dinners so they can fund their NGO, etc.)    Although someone recently paid me a generous hourly wage, so there's that too...

My life, my mind, my family, my choice.  ‘nuff said.

So, looking at the two, though…Even though Linda actually pushes rhetoric that denies my right to do as I like with my life and my capacities…I’m more scared of the homophobes.  Linda is a has-been relic, a retiree trying to recapture her glory days when it looked like she could actually re-create the world in her own ideological image.  Nobody important is going to listen to her.  (I’ve only known one other person who uses her rhetoric in real life…and he’s a socio-path who eventually harms and alienates everyone in his life)

The Homophobes are an actual, well-funded political movement, and they are just as much a threat to every normal, thinking person as they are to those gays and lesbians they are going on about.