What do Sally Kern and Arianna Huffington have in common?

I went out to the Red Cup on Friday night, brain dead and feeling like I'd been hit by a truck, so I could hear the band 13 Seeds. It was excellent and amazing, though I was certainly too tired after a grueling day at work to give you description of exactly why I'm saying that. They have a new CD. You should check it out.

Somewhere toward the end of the performance, a man named Rob Marlett stood up. One of the band members introduced him, and he gave a little speech. He's a Democrat, challenging Republican Sally Kern in the November election for the District 84 seat in the Oklahoma State House of Representatives. And I stood up and applauded for him, not because I know much about him, but because I wanted to give the guy some credit for taking her on.

You remember Sally Kern, of course. Back in March, she was addressing a small gathering of like-minded right-wing Republicans when she made some statements that ignited a nation-wide controversy.

Here is the crucial part of her speech, as quoted by the Associated Press at the time. "The homosexual agenda is destroying this nation. Studies show that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted, you know, more than a few decades. I honestly think it's the biggest threat that our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat." (I know the AP said this, because I quoted it in an email to a friend at the time. You can find more background material on this episode, and more of Ms. Kern's bizarre exploits at Wikipedia.)

I am certainly grateful to Mr. Marlett for taking on this campaign. And I think it would be an excellent idea to get Ms. Kern out of the Oklahoma Legislature. Yet, I often find myself feeling hesitant when progressive activists target Ms. Kern for her anti-gay attitudes. As obnoxious as she is, I feel that several important issues end up being ignored.

For one thing, in addition to attacking lesbians and gay men, she attacked the entire religion of Islam and all of its adherents. It wasn't that she criticized it or offered disagreements with some of its tenets. She described the existence Islam as a threat to the well-being and safety of US citizens. This seems like a direct attack on the freedom of religion that supposedly helps to make this a free country.

For another thing, Kern's reference to the threat of "terrorism," needs to be questioned. The criminal attacks in New York and Washington in September 2001 were abhorent. But the so-called War on Terror that followed those attacks has been used to justify the invasion Afghanistan and Iraq. It has been used to excuse torture of "enemy combatants" and to attack the civil liberties of US citizens, and to divert scare resources away from dealing with other serious social and economic programs.

But more than that, the ideology underlying Kern's views has not been examined.

The central theme of this self-appointed "cultural warrior" seems to be that gay people are a threat to "the family." Before we toss this view away as ridiculous, we need to understand what sort of family Sally Kern is defending.

It's not just a family that consists of a husband and wife and their biological children (no other types of families need apply). It's a patriarchal family, one which is ruled by the man, in which the wife and children defer to his judgment.This particular type of family is understood by fundamentalist Christians to be the bedrock on which all of society rests.

This was the same argument used to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, and before that, the right of women to vote. (Given this, Sally Kern's position as a state legislator is ironic, to say the least.)

What Rep. Kern and her allies seem to fear is that given other options, many people will not choose the patriarchal model for families. If society is based on that family model, then society as a whole is threatened.

But at its best, the United States is actually a pluralistic society that provides a place for people with very little common ground to coexist in peace. We are not going to achieve a nation in which everyone shares the same values any time soon. We are going to continue to have deep and difficult differences that can't be patched over easily.

How do we deal with that? Left, right, and center, many activists fall prey to the temptation to blur the disagreements that exist. Thus, it's tempting to single out Sally Kern as a practitioner of hate speech. It's much harder to have an honest discussion about the world view that underlies what she says.

The Religious Right may be past its prime. Its number of adherents may be shrinking. But it is still an important force in US politics and social life. Unfortunately, Sally Kern is not an aberration. She represents a real constituency.

There is always some fool woman who is ready and eager to defend the patriarchal way of doing things. (Remember ita Anita Bryant?) There are always lots of progressive people out there who want to make fun of that poor figurehead, while ignoring the underlying patriarchal reality.

I want to stop talking about the figureheads. I want to talk about the patriarchy.

Which brings me to the second part of this story. The patriarchy is a complicated beast with more than one face.

There is the moralistic, authoritarian patriarchy that thrives on squelching diversity. Then there is the fun-loving patriarchy that thrives on photos of Olympic women's beach volleyball.

This morning I made the mistake of poking around through some old links in my web browser, and on accident I discovered that the Huffington Post was featuring a slideshow of the U.S. women's beach volleyball team.

Women in all sorts of sports at the Olympics are wearing scanty little outfits that appear designed to show off as much of their bodies as possible. Men competing in the same sport are wearing outfits that expose much less skin. Even I have seen enough of the Olympics to notice that.

Apparently, the US women's beach volleyball team wore especially skimpy outfits. Apparently, the beach volleyball competition was much less about any pretense of athletic excellence, and much more about the display of conventionally attractive female bodies in conventionally titillating poses. At least, that was the impression I got from listening to Scott Simon and Daniel Schorr discuss this sport on National Public Radio on Saturday morning. It wasn't what they said, it was how they said it. I could hear the leer in their voices.

And then, this morning, I noticed the existence of that slideshow on Huffington Post. And saw some of the comments from the supposedly liberal men who had taken the time to page through the whole thing. (I could see the leer in their words.) I could have posted my own comment if I'd been willing to register with the site. But I wasn't willing to do that. I wasn't willing to add to their credibility as a supposedly serious alternative to the mainstream media.

Well, darn it, women are certainly beautiful, aren't we? But there is really a big freaking difference between appreciating a woman's beauty and treating her body as a commodity. Appreciating a woman's sexual attractiveness is completely different from treating her as an object to be bought, sold, consumed.

Real appreciation has something to do with perceiving that inner fire that illuminates and animates the body. It also has something to do with seeing the beauty in all the shapes, sizes, colors, and ages that the female body might have.

The phony leering thing that makes sex and women's bodies nasty is the product of the unholy marriage of patriarchy and capitalism.

Most of the nice liberal men who are doing the leering in this case would probably condemn Sally Kern for her bigotry. That disappoints me, but doesn't really surprise me.

The thing I'm still scratching my head over is how this crap ended up on a web site started by a woman who is theoretically challenging the world view of the mainstream media.