The Door to the Last Alternative Slams Shut

Well, there I was in the Spring of 1981, basically up the creek without a boat, let alone a paddle.  I was finishing up my BA in history, I didn't have a teaching certificate, and I couldn't afford grad school.  Lovely.  But I had one ace left up my sleeve, or so I thought.  I nailed my first round Foreign Service exam and had a happy facility for languages, so I figured either State or the CIA would pick me up.  So off I went to Germany, and after a couple of weeks of acclimatizing, off I went to the US embassy in Bonn to meet with a man from USAID (which meant he was on the TO&E chart under State but was actually CIA; bases covered).  He noted off the bat that Utah State was not on the normal list of colleges they recruited from, at least not for nontechnical positions (STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM), he would look at me for my language skills.  He then asked where I had gone on my mission.  I said I wasn't LDS.  I could see it on his face as he mentally ran my application packet through a shredder.  (I've often wondered since if he was really that bad at maintaining a poker face or if he was deliberately giving me the signal.  Another thing I'll never know.)  The only reason I had gotten through the door was because they had thought I was Mormon.

The letter arrived a couple of weeks later.  They thought I was a fine specimen, but they had no room at the inn at the moment, although they would certainly keep my application on file.  Read, "You aren't Ivy League, you aren't LDS, we might be able to use you as an occasional asset sometime, but we will never let you into the company."  My ace had been trumped, and now I was stuck with law school.

More Cluelessness from the Reich Wing

I've already had one go at Brian McCoy (formerly an attorney in the Tacoma area, currently a resident of Riverton, and typical BYU grad) for an anti-transgender rant he got the Washington State Bar to publish (It wasn't his first phobe letter to the Bar.  He had a major rant against gay rights published in August 2007.).  Now he's back, and again he isn't alone.  In the November NWLawyer, our new Bar president committed the egregious sin of saying she was no lady and did not want to be.  In the February NWLawyer, McCoy comes riding to the rescue of what he views as proper female behavior.  It's standard, BYU fare that models women from a hybridization of a Jane Austen novel and "A Handmaid's Tale."  Then in the March NWLawyer, Barbara Jo Sylvester (another Tacoma attorney and active in the Calvary Community Church of Sumner) piles on with more of the same, showing that Evangelicals and Mormons actually do agree on one goal: the second-class position of women.  And both of them ignore or thoroughly straw-man Ms. Haynes's argument.  They both take the "There's nothing wrong with being a gentleman, so there's nothing wrong with being a lady" tack.  Talk about your false equivalents.  There is nothing about the statement "Act like a gentleman" that is code for "Know your place and stay in it."  On the other hand, that is exactly what "Act like a lady" is code for, and that was Ms. Haynes's point.  Neither response actually addresses that point, employing instead the usual Religious Reich barrage of bogus outrage it directs at anyone it perceives as a threat to its continued use of state power to coerce the rest of us.