I used to live about a 5 minute walk from Harvard Square.  My neighborhood was populated mostly by Harvard, MIT, or Boston University staff and faculty so you can imagine the “vibe” there.  (Lots of graying ponytails on the men and a total and utter disdain for haircare products of any type, including combs, on the part of the women).  But even there I never thought I’d hear the argument that a woman is not a woman because she can have babies. But I was wrong, because it takes a Harvard grad discussing Sarah Palin to make essentially that argument.

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party’s cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.

So this is what we’ve come to, where one Wendy Doniger (M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University; D.Phil., Oxford University) can make that argument?  Well, Wendy, what’s your argument?  That because you’re an obese lesbian and don’t make “lots and lots of babies” that you’re a woman?

This is what passes for logic and argumentation now? Really?  I mean, do I oversell?  Is it not the end of her logic train to posit that because Sarah Palin has five kids she doesn’t understand women and therefore doesn’t speak for women?  OMFG.  Really?

Great argument.  Suuuuuuper genius.

This is a woman who has never held a working class job in her life (have any idea how long it takes to get two PhDs?) and then implies that only she and her ilk understand the real needs of “working class women.”  Good grief.

Now, get this, the title of this piece is, “All Beliefs Welcome, Unless They are Forced on Others.” I gather that Ms. Doniger can only title her screed thus because she lacks any sense of irony.

And as for religion, I’d love to know precisely how the Good Lord conveyed to her so clearly his intention to destroy the environment (global warming, she thinks, is not the work of human hands, so it must be the work of You Know Who)…

Ummm, you know, it could be that Palin believes global warming is due to cyclical sunspot activity.  You know that would be a view based on science.  Are you now saying, Ms. Doniger, that God animates all science?  Stop the presses, that would be (excuse the pun) a revelation.

One of the tenets of many major religions is that one cannot truly know what is in the heart, or mind, of another.  So here Ms. Doniger demonstrates that she is either Carnac the Magnificent, an atheist, or she doesn’t believe any of that BS she spent 10 years of her life studying.  How does she know what Sarah Palin really thinks?  She doesn’t.  She’s just building a strawman and burning it down.  I’m sure it’s great fun, but it does not constitute a serious argument.  But, can anyone expert “serious” from a Harvard grad anymore?  Really?

Joe Biden’s views are most relevant to the question at hand, since, as a Catholic, he shares much of Palin’s embryological theology: he believes life begins at conception. But he has gone out of his way to insist that he would not impose his personal views on others, and has indeed voted against curtailing abortion rights and against criminalizing abortion. That is the right answer. It’s in the Constitution. It’s not in the Bible, or the Qu’ran, or the Bhagavad Gita. It’s in the mother-lovin’ Constitution.

So your argument is that, about a week after being named as Vice Presidential candidate she hasn’t issued a statement that she’s not going to impose her views on others?  I mean – that’s your beef?  You are upset she hasn’t taken the time out up to this point to reassure you of her goals?  Ummm…I think Governor Pailn is a little busy right now, but she’ll get right to it, I’m sure.

Why do I suspect that if Palin did that tomorrow Doniger would construct some other reason to write another poorly argued screed?

But also note that here, noted Constitutional law expert Wendy Doniger, continues the well-worn and utterly threadbare argument that abortion rights are in the Constitution.  They’re not, nor is there a “penumbra or emanation” which covers it.  But don’t let a more nuanced discussion get in the way of your high dudgeon.  By all means, rail on – ignorantly.

About the time I moved into Cambridge I lost all respect for a Harvard degrees.  Not because the folks there aren’t smart.  They are, in many cases, too smart for their own good.  It’s that they’re so smart they believe due to that they now have a permanent dispensation to never, ever, consider another point of view or even construct a logical argument.  Their attitude is that even if their logic is wrong, their beliefs are right and that trumps all.  These folks rant about the exact same kind of hubris they attribute to George W. Bush, and then remain completely blind to it when they exhibit it themselves.

These are my betters?  Puh-leeeze.

In this article you see proof positive of where that kind of hubris leads.  Not pretty.

Like I said, not pretty.

Oh? Was that an unfair “lookist” jab?   Perhaps a “heteronormative” put-down?  Yeah. It was. About as fair as the 700 words of gibberish I had to wade though this morning – meaning, not fair at all.

Update: A timely piece by Maimon Schwarzschild.  Via Glenn

Updated Update:  Jonah says it better.