The reaction here seems quite over the top. This issue is so clearly a non-issue. It's a combination of some women being fans of a good television show and wanting to acknowledge their caring for one another. I thought sisterhood among women was a good thing.

And the term "arrogant Mormon swine," while probably intended to describe a hypothetical individual rather than an entire religion, is a very unfortunate turn of phrase that comes off very, very badly.

On the one hand, I think we are projecting a whole lot onto this guy's life based on very little information. We don't know what happened to his first wife. We don't know why he married a much younger second wife. We don't know what his relationship is like with his older children. We don't know whether he is actually grumpy like this on a regular basis with his younger children, or whether he was blowing off some pent up steam. We don't know. All we know is that he has a few rather understandable hangups and some less flattering habits (and we don't?) that he is sharing with the public for whatever reason.

Isn't this so very true of Father's Day, for many of us with absent or abusive fathers, that we see our own father rearing his head around every corner, embodied by countless other, mostly innocent, men? That has been my experience, at least, and I'll admit when I read this rather unpleasant article I felt a lot angrier at the author than I think his words actually merited, because on Father's Day I have a lot more anger floating around waiting for a target than I usually do.

On the other hand, I did expect something a bit more interesting from a Salon cover story. With "family" the rallying cry of conservative culture warriors the nation over (sometimes echoed by our more liberal politicos, mostly in unconvincing fashion), our "celebrate parents" holidays are so ideologically loaded. We could take the opportunity of a day like Father's Day to expand our notion of fatherhood, to challenge it's patriarchal past while examining what fatherhood looks like in a more equitable society, or to look at fatherhood cross-culturally. We could hear from a man raising kids with another man. We could hear from step parents. Single fathers. Stay-at-home Dads. Men who have decided not to reproduce. We could talk about the immigrant fathers who are being torn away from their children by American officials on a regular basis at our borders. Or the fathers of some of the children locked away in our facility for "illegals" in Texas. We could examine the relationship between fatherhood and technology -- the IVF experience from a man's point of view, for instance. Or the Iraqi fathers struggling to raise children in the war zone we have made of their country. Or fathers on extended deployment fighting that war.

I'm not saying these ideas are golden, but sheesh, they would have been better than the article I just read, whose main point seems to be "I am not always overjoyed to be a parent." Well, duh. That may be a tad revolutionary for a woman to say (nurturing and maternal instinct and all that being assumed traits that are leveled against us on a regular basis in reproductive rights debates and discussions of evolutionary psychology, for example). But even that has been pretty well gone over by now. And we have a pretty longstanding (and not very flattering to men) cultural script for the grumpy, reluctant husband and father, I think. Did we really need to hear from this boring old stereotype again?

I cringe a bit every time I hear "Hillary" instead of Clinton. I do think it is diminutive. But I understand first that she is trying to differentiate herself from her husband and second that she is fashioning herself as a brand. Given her rather stuffy image, I can see how she might embrace the diminutive whenever possible. She's not the first to do it: plenty of folks liked "Ike" when "Eisenhower" was an unmanageable and uncomfortably German sounding name.

I think, however, that in the end this will backfire for her. Perhaps it's a deficit of imagination on my part, but I find it very hard to envision a President "Hillary" representing our nation at a G-8 summit or delivering a State of the Union address. I can't conceive of a President "Hillary" Memorial Library or a statue of "Hillary" gracing the lawns of the capitol. If she's going to embrace the diminutive to brand herself for the election, she's going to have to make sure it doesn't keep its grip on her long after she's ready for it go away. And given that women start out with a disadvantage in that arena, it seems quite a gamble indeed to me.