Cooper's Eye on the Left: Next up for sexual politics?

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders answers questions during a daily media briefing in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders answers questions during a daily media briefing in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House.

You light up my life

A 33-year-old British woman has announced her engagement to a 90-year-old.

OK, that's a little May-December-ish, but it gets weirder. The 90-year-old is a chandelier she bought on eBay.

To seal the engagement, Amanda Liberty, who calls her object-focused sexuality a "natural orientation," hung an engagement ring on the light fixture.

"You can't control who you fall in love with," she told Caters News Agency, "and things just went from there. I couldn't stop thinking about her and how beautiful she was - she has such a beautiful shape, and I could feel really amazing energy coming from her."

Lest you think the infatuation is just a flame, Liberty said she previously had been in an "open relationship" with the 24 other antique chandeliers she already owns. And while she loves "kissing and cuddling" the new light of her life, she, um, prefers to snuggle with another lamp, Jewel, more often. Fortunately, she says, "none of my chandeliers are jealous of each other."

Before taking up with artificial luminaries, she had been in a relationship with a drum kit and had a crush on the Statue of Liberty (perhaps from which she took her name).

Unless we miss our guess, even as you read this, a left-wing politician is writing a law so this legally might happen in the United States.

Handler needs a handler

Comedian Chelsea Handler should have been Kathy Griffin-ed last week.

After calling White House press secretary Sarah Sanders a whore one day, she had to evacuate her home and blamed President Donald Trump for the fires scorching Southern California a couple of days later.

Earlier this year, Griffin was photographed with a facsimile severed head of the president. That stunt promptly got her fired from several gigs, removed from commercial endorsements, and she recently whined that she was having difficulty finding work.

Handler opened her week's salvo with her criticism of Sanders, the daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

"That harlot that they're dressing up and trolloping out every day?" she said. "I mean, one day she has no makeup on at all, the next she has 6-foot-long eyelashes, she's got cleavage and summer whore lipstick all over her face. Can you believe what they turned her into? A proper trollop."

Then came the wildfires that sent her packing.

"Just evacuated my house," she tweeted. "It's like Donald Trump is setting the world on fire. Literally and figuratively. Stay safe everyone. Dark times."

Beware ... crosses

A pro-life group at Miami University of Ohio was told earlier this fall it had to post trigger warnings before erecting small crosses representing the number of lives lost to abortions since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973.

Annually, Students for Life sets up its Cemetery of the Innocents on the Central Quad of the campus, but this year its organization president was told the group would have to post signs ahead of the display because the display might cause "emotional trauma" or would have to discuss "less harmful" ways of making its point.

Since the display was a free speech issue, the organization sought counsel, and Alliance Defending Freedom sued the university on its behalf.

"No university official has the authority to censor student speech simply because of how someone might respond to it," ADF legal counsel Travis Barham said in a news release. "The First Amendment secures the freedom of all students to participate in the marketplace of ideas, and it prohibits university officials from imposing trigger warnings that restrict what some students can say to spare the feelings of others."

Once the suit was filed, the university said - ha, ha, ha - it was all just an "unfortunate misunderstanding," that "all Miami University students and student organizations have First Amendment rights to free speech" and - heh, heh - "does not require trigger warnings."

So ... Arby's is out?

Vegetarianism is a feminist act, a Pennsylvania State University sociology professor says.

Anne DeLessio-Parson explains in the most recent issue of the Journal of Feminist Geography that vegetarians contribute to the - we guess desired - destabilization of the gender binary. In other words, the more one gets into eschewing meat, the less one sees gender as two distinct, opposite masculine and feminine forms.

"The decision to become vegetarian does not itself destabilize gender," she writes, "but the subsequent social interactions between vegetarian and meat-eater demand gender enactment - or resistance.

"Refusing meat therefore presents opportunities, in each social interaction, for the binary to be called into question," DeLessio-Parson says, noting that women, for example, may not consider dating men who eat meat, while male vegetarians might end up spending more time in the kitchen as opposed to outside on the grill, all actions which can destabilize gender norms.

Based on her research in Argentina, she told Campus Reform, men in Argentina "still have these very hegemonic masculinity traits" but male vegetarians "seem more egalitarian and respectful" and "more open about talking about how sexism exists."

Vegetarianism, DeLessio-Parson insists, can drive social change.

"If we can pay more attention to what we put in our bodies ... we can create a better sense of peace in the world," she says. "Vegetarianism is a part of that."

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