OK, wow. This morning, when I read TPM's coverage of the fact that the White House is considering a military tribunal for the KSM trial, my worst socialized and internalized responses bubbled up to consciousness.
As a male in his mid-30s in American society, I was privy growing up to hearing all kinds of derogative ways to describe other males who did not quite live up to the standard of manly masculine manliness. I am politically correct enough now to know NOT to list all of those here, so let's just say that a lot those ways involve allusions to, for example, flowers, dancers, felines, and homosexuals.
So.
There is an absolutely enormous body of research in social psychology underscoring the validity and influence of implicit attitudes -- latent cognitive associations and stereotypes that we hold and make, developed through socialization processes and activated through everyday interactions.
Which is to say that I don't feel particularly guilty about having those conditioned reactions to the story. What the White House is purportedly considering for the KSM trial -- moving it out of the US criminal court system and back into a military tribunal -- is, to put it bluntly, weak.
But it took David Kurtz on the TPM front page to call it out in gendered and less politically correct terms...
Looks like being Obama's attorney general requires putting your manhood in a blind trust.
Note that I am not posting this because I am particularly offended. I just thought this was an interesting example of socialization failure. I imagine that whereas I am disgusted by this story, Kurtz must be absolutely beside himself with frustration to let drop the usual PC-filter most newsies try to maintain at least in the abstract.