I held off commenting about this particular facet of the Loughner saga, because it seemed to be just me and the Jezebel staffers, and you know what they say about feminists and their endless outrage. But now a respectable Y-chromosome bearer has spoken out, as Tom Scocca at Slate wonders if “Maybe Jared Loughner Was a Bigot, After All“:
Now, via the New York Times, there’s word that there was more going on in Jared Loughner’s headspace than odd-colored dreamscapes and cryptic theories about grammar. Before his attack on Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Loughner “grew contemptuous of women in power.” Bank tellers were afraid of him, the Times reports, because of the “aggressive, often sexist things he said, including asserting that women should not be allowed to hold positions of power or authority.”
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These bits of information appear in the 17th and 90th paragraphs of the Times story, a story dedicated to the thesis that the facts surrounding Loughner are “a curlicue of contradictory moments open to broad interpretation.”…
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Maybe the accumulated evidence is contradictory if you’re trying to classify Loughner as an orthodox left-wing nut or an orthodox right-wing nut. But his membership in the anti-woman wing seems clear. Or is misogyny—even homicidal misogyny—too unremarkable for anyone to dwell on it?