I was with you until I wasn't

The first Carolina Panthers game I attended was in 1996, the team's first season in what we now call Bank of America Stadium (the team having played its inaugural season at Clemson University). My mom took me to what was also my first NFL game, vs. the 49ers, and the still-infant Panthers killed Steve Young & Co. 23-7 on their way to an undefeated-at-home season. I can honestly say that if this one game hadn't happened the way it did, I might never have gotten into football.

The then-NFC West rivalry between the Panthers and 49ers got ugly over the next few years, with the 49ers signing a disgruntled Kevin Greene and George Seifert sabotaging the Panthers as one of the worst head coaches in history as revenge. (OK, maybe not actually... but 1-15 is certainly something.)

Then the league realigned, and the Panthers went to the NFC South, and just like that, we stopped going to war against the first real rival of my nascent sports fanhood. And I actually missed it.

Which is part of the reason why I both agree and disagree with Bill Simmons' proposal to realign the NFL yet again in order to keep both conferences' West divisions from pissing off fans every year in the playoffs - the NFC being a worse offender than the AFC in the 32-team era. I'm totally for an 8- or 9-game threshold for a playoff spot. But...

I just love Simmons to death, but he has a tendency not to think things through before he puts them in a column, at least when it comes to football (still not his native territory). For starters, you can't move Carolina to a division where it's the only warm-weather team. (Miami - I know. I don't care.) It was over 90 degrees here on the first day of fall, for crying out loud. And, while his realignment may be more tight geographically, it kills several long-standing league rivalries.

Which brings me to my earlier point. It sucked to transition from hating the 49ers all year long to suddenly not playing them but once every few years. But newborns didn't even make it to kindergarten during the life of that rivalry. If it sucked for me, how much more would it suck for, say, Philly fans who only get to play Dallas once in a blue moon? Both NY teams in the same division, really? Oh, I get it. Simmons gets his childhood dream conference, with the Colts out of the Patriots' way and Carolina as cannon fodder.

And yes, historical rivalries matter. As much as some of us love football, the NFL's purpose is to entertain. And it's a hell of a lot more fun to beat the team and fans that you have to face twice a year, every year, and who compete with you for playoff slots. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say. And contempt breeds ticket and jersey sales.

I respect him for spit-balling, though. Just... get your head out of your head, man.

You're the one with the crisis of conscience

There's an episode of "Law & Order" where a young woman commits a savage murder, shows zero remorse at first and then is born again while in jail (a la Karla Faye Tucker). She'd be a classic death penalty case if it weren't for the apparently genuine religious conversion. Various church groups file suit on her behalf, arguing that her newfound Christianity should earn her a commutation into a life sentence. While ADA Jack McCoy struggles with the precedent this sets, his assistant Jamie Ross tells him, "You're the one with the crisis of conscience. I'm against the death penalty."

That's the kind of answer I would've given at one point. I am still opposed to capital punishment very generally, but I also recognize that there really are true monsters out there who commit crimes for which there's only one justified punishment. So I suppose I would say I oppose the death penalty applied capriciously. It should be reserved for those - thankfully very rare - monsters.

But I also get frustrated with the "law and order" "tough on crime" types who think there's a one-size-fits-all solution to every problem. It's a fact that there are disparities in the way the death penalty is applied, particularly with regard to race. It's a fact that rich murderers typically don't end up on death row (or in prison, for that matter). It's fact that innocent people have been sentenced to death. You can't be a proponent of capital punishment and not acknowledge that the system needs work.

I hadn't heard of Teresa Lewis before today. Lewis was executed earlier tonight in Virginia, the first woman put to death there in nearly a century, after being convicted of the murder-for-hire of her husband and step-son. Her defenders argued that she wasn't mentally competant, and that she wasn't really the ringleader of the crime. If true, either is a good reason to commute her sentence.

But "she's a woman" isn't a good reason. "She's a Christian now" isn't a good reason. Neither are fair reasons, because they can't be applied equitably to everyone on death row in Virginia. (Or nationwide, but this is a state-by-state thing.)

Do people who find religion in prison and become Muslims, or Jews, or members of the Church of Body Modification, also get this consideration? No? Then pardoning a Christian just for being a Christian is unfair and unconstitutional.

The "but she's a woman" people really get me, though. Either women are full citizens with all the rights and responsibilities that implies, or it's 1900 again. We can't have both. Treating women - even murderers - as though their lives are more valuable than any of the men on death row doesn't make any sense to me.

In which I put Baby in a corner

I’m terrible at headlines, but I was just overflowing with ideas for a re-cap of the premiere of “Dancing With the Stars.” Like, Where the Hell Do They Find These People?, or, Dancing With the Stars: I’ve Never Watched this Show Before, or, Dancing With the Stars: the Stuff That Happened After “House.”

That last one is accurate, by the way. I intended to forgo my “DWTS” initiation for a “House”-“The Event”-“Hawaii Five-O” line-up, but the first few minutes of “The Event” were so incomprehensible – don’t make me keep up with your 20 minutes ago/three days ago/13 months ago timeline when a) I don’t know who any of you people are, and b) I’m trying to paint my toenails – so I said, screw it, let’s watch Bristol Palin cha-cha.

Unfortunately, I missed Palin’s dance, tuning in just in time to see the judges announce her scores while her partner groped her. While I question how going on national television is supposed to help her protect her privacy, hopefully this will be a good experience for her. Maybe she can meet a non-dirtball to date.

Palin danced to – I wish I were making this up – “Mama Told Me Not to Come.” I don’t think I was prepared for the fact that “DWTS” is apparently the most painfully obvious show in the history of television. Seriously, “Queen for a Day” was more subtle. They even did the whole “OMG, it’s so funny when old people say f***” schtik with Florence Henderson, and I thought Betty White decommissioned that one some time ago.

And then there was Jennifer Grey.

I’m well aware that I’m apparently the only person in America who thought the “Dirty Dancing” references were inappropriate and even crass, but hear me out: whoever chose “These Arms of Mine” (her partner? The producers? Who usually does this?) was being blatantly manipulative. Given that Patrick Swayze died almost exactly a year ago and Grey recently had a cancer scare of her own, I can totally understand her getting emotional.

But … Does it occur to anyone else that Swayze has an actual family, one whose connection to him just *might* be a little stronger than a co-star from 25 years ago who didn’t really get along with him? (Remember the iconic scene where Baby and Johnny are rehearsing, and she keeps cracking up because he’s tickling her, and his face says, “I swear to the ghost of Fred Astaire, if you do that one more time you’re getting put through the nearest wall”? Yeah, Swayze wasn’t acting.)

Question for more frequent viewers: are the judges always this arbitrary? So Palin and Grey (maybe other contestants, too, but I was watching House and Cuddy do nasty things, so I can’t be sure) can base their entire routines around concepts so self-referential that an average toddler could figure them out, but The Situation does one Tony Moreno-style thrust, and suddenly he’s not stretching himself enough as an artist? This is the guy from “Jersey Shore” on five days of rehearsal after spending the last several weeks probably watching Ron and Sammi break up over and over – what exactly were they expecting?

Maybe my expectations were skewed by the training-montage clip, in which Sitch pretty much couldn’t count to four, but I thought he was great. And I thought the judges were WAY too hard on him. It’s not like he threw his partner into the audience or anything. Yes, I have a strong “Jersey Shore” bias. And yes, I voted for the Situation.

Unless Sitch gets voted off (in which case this will be my first AND last episode of “DWTS”), I’m going to have to get used to this whole “results episode” thing. Why can’t they have the results at the end of the show like a normal game show – excuse me, reality show? Is it really that frakking complicated?

This one might surprise you

I don't care if Christine O'Donnell dabbled in witchcraft or told people they shouldn't masterbate 15 years ago when she was younger than I am now. I do care that the "why you should vote for me" section of her website is one page with no links to any supporting or more detailed material.

Plenty of people spend their younger years searching for the belief system or lifestyle that's right for them, and most of us moderate as we grow older and more experienced. If you're going to bash O'Donnell, do it because her policy ideas are shallow and uninformed, not because of something she said on TV back when "Friends" was still funny.

Ain’t I a woman?

I’m not really sure what I just watched here.

This is a trailer for a new documentary about the so-called rise of women in the conservative movement – which I suppose you could more accurately call the increased influence of women in conservative politics and culture over the last 40 years or so. That in itself is curious… Didn’t Democrats nominate a female vice presidential candidate back in 1984? Aren’t the majority of female office-holders in this country Democrats? So why are we suddenly fascinated with the women that a gasping-to-death conservative movement is *finally* letting have a seat at the table?

That’s topic for another post. What I really don’t understand about Phyllis Schafly, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and even the popular motivational speaker Sarah Palin is this: It’s totally possible for a woman to be a political or social conservative, and even pro-woman. It’s patently illogical for a political or social conservative to claim feminism, or at least to claim that they’re better for women than any other political party.

I’m not talking about “what’s good for me personally” feminism. I’m talking about “what’s good for women as a whole” feminism. It’s blazing bullshit for an individual woman to be privileged enough to get a first-class education, be able-bodied enough to look good on TV, have a husband willing to watch the kids while you travel the world giving speeches, and then actively work against other women getting equal pay, having child care and being able to get student loans.

It’s this mixing of politics and culture-war horseshit that gets me. When I elect, say, a Senator, I care how she or he will vote when funding for Social Security conflicts with funding for a new fighter plane. I could give two purple shits what she thinks I should be teaching my future children about premarital sex.

But that mixing is exactly what some of the women in this trailer appear to be doing when they talk about how The Feminists™ have destroyed What it Means to Be a Woman. What the hell does THAT mean? Being a mother is a political act? What about being a father? Anything?

I’m a woman. I frakking LOVE being a woman, too. And I love men just about as much as I love being a woman. Every day, when I leave from the house I bought by myself when I was 25 and head to my job, I know how much I owe to the women who went before me. I know how different my professional life is from my mother’s or grandmother’s when each was my age. I know I didn’t do any of this alone.

I know that I can go to work dressed like a woman, and not (to quote Harrison Ford in “Working Girl”) like a woman thinks a man would dress if he were a woman, and still be taken seriously. I can direct a meeting full of men and take for granted that they’ll listen to me, because I outrank them. I can (though I choose not to at this point) do all that and still be a wife and/or mother. And the reason I can do all that is because of the work of feminists, not “mama bears” or whatever the frak they call themselves.

You know what else? My male co-worker can bring in his five-year-old son for an hour or so when his child care falls through, and it’s not an issue. That’s also thanks to feminism.

Seriously, what the hell is this “real woman” crap, and why the hell would I want to vote for someone who presumes to put me in a box that she’s defined for me? Especially when she serves an ideology that STILL uses gendered slurs to critique women it disapproves of?

And don’t even get me started on that “I’m not a victim” crap. Just because you acknowledge that there are systemic decks stacked against you (like, say, legal marital rape) doesn’t mean you submit to those systemic problems. Um, doesn’t the fact that we are calling out gender, race or class prejudice mean we ARE NOT submitting to them?

When hear the Schaflys and the Coulters and the Malkins and even the Palins talk, I flash back to middle school. I can’t be the only one who had several female classmates that had just discovered sexism, but whose “I’m just as good as you” quieted when the teacher needed someone to move something heavy, only to turn into “but I’m a girl, I can’t carry that, WAAAH!”

Look, feminism isn’t easy. If women want to demand that we’re treated as full human beings, that means we have to give up our pretty-princess-on-a-pedestal status. And, while some days I’d love to not have to worry about my retirement or cleaning the gutters or balancing the checkbook, it’s worth it to have control over my own life. It also means that I have a responsibility to pull other people – men and women – up behind me, not knock down the ladder I just climbed up.

You don’t get to claim that you’re pro-woman when you’re nominated for high office and then cry “skirt!” when it’s time to carry the proverbial overhead projector. You don’t get to claim with a straight face that having a functioning uterus makes you better at budgeting or writing legislation. And you really, really don’t get to tell me how to be a woman. I’ve been one for 30 years now. I’m good, thanks.

RIP, Dr. Bennell

Kevin McCarthy died over the weekend at age 96. He's probably the most famous for playing the lead, Dr. Miles Bennell, in the 1956 film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," and I'll always love that movie.

And I'll always brag that, technically, I co-starred with him in his last movie, "Wesley," which shot here in N.C. in 2007. Sure, we never met because we were on-set weeks apart. And sure, I was an extra who lucked into one line of dialogue. But... technically.

The NFL did not pee in your cornflakes

Fair warning: I’m on fire tonight, kids.

It started when I got called a hypocrite for supporting pro football with my TV ratings and occasional ticket dollars. It got worse when Jezebel mocked the reduction in Ben Roethlisberger’s suspension. And, as I’ve thought about all those things at the same time I’m counting the minutes to the first kickoff this weekend, I got full-on pissed off on behalf of the NFL.

Let’s break it down.

Am I a hypocrite for helping shore up an organization of people who get paid millions for playing a game and executives who earn billions owning and selling the teams that employ those players? Nope. Sorry, but no. I have zero problem with someone earning what the market will bear in exchange for an in-demand skill, which in this case is one that most will only be able to practice for a short time at great physical sacrifice (which I’ve written about). A skill, by the way, that's a hell of a lot more useful to society than the Wall Street skunks who apparently only exist to crash our economy, collect my tax dollars and then sit on them... but I'll get to them later.

Does it suck that these same players are often exploited in college? Yes – so blame the supposed institutions of higher education who’ve willingly turned themselves into football factories. Is it BS that the base pay for an NFL rookie is more than, say, an elementary school teacher will earn in a lifetime? Of course – but whose fault is that? Unless you can come up with a way to pay every teacher $100,000 grand a year without raising your precious taxes, you need to either a) accept market realities, or b) stop calling me a socialist. Put your money where you’d like to think your mouth is.

Am I a hypocrite because all pro athletes are “thugs”? Please. The NFL heavily promotes service opportunities to its players and even to fans. For every player you’ve read about on the police blotter, I could name you 10 who are putting their money and time to good use in their communities. Sure, some of them are probably motivated by PR. But that doesn’t change the fact that they are doing that good work.

Which brings me to Ben. (Sorry, not typing out his last name again.) Ben’s gone from being my favorite NFL player to the top of my shit list, where he’s probably going stay for the foreseeable future. First of all, I’m sick to death of talking about The Incident, and I will personally punch your dog in the face while you watch if you pretend for one second that you have more moral authority to talk about this than I do. I love Jezebel to pieces, but this was not cool.

Roger Goodell said from the beginning that Ben would get a four-to-six game suspension, which was pretty much universally interpreted as four games with an option for another two if Ben did something to piss off Goodell. He didn’t, and Goodell “reduced” the suspension to four games, at a greater financial cost to Ben than most actual convicted rapists would get. And, though I have opinions about what happened in that bathroom influenced by my own biases – Ben wasn’t convicted of rape. He wasn’t even charged.

Remember how many rapists go to prison? About six percent. So, unlike with Ben, there are 94 of 100 rapists whose names you’ll never know. Is there anyone currently alive on the planet who will ever do shots with Ben ever again? Doubtful. And that – that right there – is more justice than most rape victims will ever get.

That’s not the NFL’s fault. Take it up with the idiot cops in Georgia if you think Ben should be in jail now. Then after that, call up the law enforcement agencies who’ve got tens of thousands of rape kits collecting dust on shelves, still unprocessed. And maybe drop a line to the elected officials who don’t seem to think rape is that big a deal.

That’s really what’s pissing me off the most. If you wanted to make a list of people and institutions who need to answer for something, pro sports would be pretty frakking far down on the list. They’re entertainment. What about the corporations who’ve gotten hundreds of billions in public money, but whom the president is now having to bribe to do R&D on their own products? The CEO of Goldman Sachs got a $9 million stock bonus last year. The CEO of JP Morgan got $17 million. The NFL’s highest-paid player, Peyton Manning, made just over $30 million, but half of that was from endorsements (yay capitalism!) and not one damned penny from public bailouts.

So, come Sunday, I’ll come home from church and plan to watch roughly 10 hours straight of NFL football. Then Monday, and probably Tuesday, too, I will spend my entire lunch hour reading game recaps and poring over stats. I will relish every second. Because I frakking love football, and no one’s going to make me feel bad about that.