Some days, it's going to be pretty hard to choose, because there are oh so many right-wing whores at the Boston Globe. But today's whore is Brian McGrory, who wrote a particularly asinine column Friday about the Larry Summers flap. Summers, the Harvard president, asked a very stupid question recently about whether women are somehow biologically disadvantaged when it comes to math and science. McGrory, who's obviously been reading the Bill O'Reilly Republican media whore talking points handbook, is shocked (shocked I tell you!) that people were offended by this.
To see why such a question is offensive, let's imagine how a portion of McGrory's column would read if you used, let's say, the word "blacks" where he uses the word "women," and where he discusses men in general, we could focus on "white men." For example:
"What did Summers do? He addressed the obvious, that blacks have a harder time achieving success in math and science careers than white men. And he posed a thorny question: Are blacks somehow innately, meaning biologically, inferior to white men in these fields?"
It's still a technically true statement, right? I mean, it's literally true that there are both fewer women, and fewer black people generally, than there are white men in the very loose category of "math and science careers" (assuming we're defining this category as including jobs such as engineering jobs). But when you phrase it the way I have here, you can see that the very question of whether black people are "biologically inferior" is racist. So too is the question of whether women are "biologically inferior." But at the Globe, it's like the 1950s (hell, the 1920s) never ended. Any obnoxious right-wing bullshit is acceptable to publish, as long as it's criticizing alleged "political correctness."
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