still sick. but still thinking about stuff - like, how john stossel secretly hates families

my bovine-like immune system ain't what it used to be. this is my second day home from work because of a little germ!

but all is not lost. my nasal congestion has made me think about things like why i'm lucky to be able to tell my boss "I'mb sick. I hab to go homb" and she nods and says, "Yeah, you sound like crap" and i can come home and check email from home and also know this is a paid sick day. and other folks aren't so lucky when the situation is certainly more important than a head cold.

fulminating in my brain since before thanksgiving is a little rant about an article john stossel posted on that conservative site, townhall.com, about his co-worker's (elizabeth vargas) return to work and her subsequent report on the mommy wars and how hard it is to be a working mother. (why won't i link to his article? because i hate that website and if you wanna look for it, be my guest. i've given you all the pertinent information you need to google.)

first - no shit, elizabeth. welcome to the world of almost 60% of the workforce - who also don't make your whopping salary.

second - john stossel, as much as he says he respects his coworker, basically says to working families 'sucks to be you!'

he can't see why it should be the responsibility of an employer or government to (this is a rough paraphrase) to make balancing work and home life easier when it was that woman's choice to have a family anyway. so all those things like paid family leave, day care, flex time, increased EITC? forget it. you never shoulda had that family.

it's the old manichean divide, so black and white and unyielding:
your family vs. your job

i read this article before i got on the plane to canada and it stuck like a bad meal in my gut. all i kept thinking was, does john stossel only know really well-off working like women like elizabeth vargas? in all his righteous muckraking, hasn't he come across women who make, say, in the low thirties? because personal choice or not, the consequence of making working people (not just women) choose between being their company's bitch and having some kind of personal life are dire.

i mean, don't we give our companies enough? the average american worker works more than anyone in the world. we work longer hours (1877 hrs vs. an avg. french 1562 hrs) with one american in three working a 50+ work week, take less paid vacation (the avg. american takes 4-10 days vs. the avg. swiss 30+), and we work for less and less benefits (ever wonder where your vision plan went? or do you have to make a choice between your eyes or your teeth?) and the benefits we do have don't seem to trickle down as far as they used to (1 in five american adults are in poverty and almost 45 million are without health insurance.)

the naysayers among you may have a point - our productivity seems to be slacking off but maybe that's because we're too scared we'll get fired to take some fracking time off to rest up!

meanwhile, our corporate entities seem to be doing rather well.

but for john stossel and all the other MarketNinjas, who cares that the average american worker needs more to just hold their head above water? that's the market! in order to survive, the corporation chooses to exploit you and you choose to be exploited by it by participating in it, family be damned.

(and it's funny that these are the townhall guys who are also always beating their manly stoical breasts about family values and tradition. if it was all up to them we'd still have child labor in place - 'they CHOOSE to be stuck in that chimney at six years old!'

rather smugly, norway's christian democratic minister for children & families says: "Americans like to talk about family values. We have decided to do more than talk; we use our tax revenues to pay for family values." yeah, i know. they're taxed at an exorbitant rate. but the point is no one is rushing to copy our way of working because it's nuts and bad for society!)

so, if we're given the manichean choice of work or family, who do we choose? we can't quit work or we won't be able to feed our families; we can't abandon our families because that's just shitty.

by not taking seriously the personal needs of the workforce, it seems that's what folks like john stossel and his corporate friends seem to want.


...
(of course there is a third option. it's a 5-letter word that begins with U and ends with N but that's for dusty blue collar people - not clean white collar people like us with masters degrees and shit, huh?

ooh, here's another word: 8 letters and begins with O and ends with IZE. but you're right; if we do that then our company might not like us anymore. because they, you know, aren't really that bad and we have to look at things from their point of view! and they truly have our best interests at heart. cuz that's what corporations do. take care of their workers.)

blearg: home sick

like a kid in elementary school, i'm home sick today. i never get sick. maybe a head cold or a tonsil thing but not the kind of sick where i have to leave the office early (ok, i left at five but i didn't feel good about it!) and then go straight to bed.

(where i promptly dreamed all night that the canadian prime minister was fake and no one knew but me and my roommate and no one would believe us and the canadian secret police were after us.)

so after asking my roomie what one does when they're sick (it entails bundling up and watching tv surrounded by vitamins and tea and romance novels) i think i'm all set for a wonderful, rainy, gray day on the couch under a comforter.

let's all call in sick, ok?

more than a test

this is a pull quote about the No Child Left Behind program from the times article below:

But the evidence is becoming difficult to ignore: when educators do succeed at educating poor minority students up to national standards of proficiency, they invariably use methods that are radically different and more intensive than those employed in most American public schools. So as the No Child Left Behind law comes up for reauthorization next year, Americans are facing an increasingly stark choice: is the nation really committed to guaranteeing that all of the country’s students will succeed to the same high level? And if so, how hard are we willing to work, and what resources are we willing to commit, to achieve that goal?

i was talking about this very thing with my roomie while drinking a whole bottle of wine wednesday night, which may explain my loose grip on reality. i said, 'no one is really serious about education reform. we know what works - we've seen all those programs about education innovations, the best performing charter schools, the curricula that works and leads to college enrollment. if people were serious, they'd scrap everything and take those best practices and make. it. work. if mayor daley is so broken up about chicago's schools, then why isn't he telling CPS to create a Montessori model in every classroom?'

roomie said, 'it costs too much. no one will do it. it's too expensive.'

so we've acknowledged that our public school system is not living up to its standards, and we've honestly tried all the dinky little stop-gaps to solve it (salaries, testing standards, private management, etc.) and nothing has changed.

are the folks in charge of our educational system really that lazy?

What It Takes to Make a Student - New York Times

how do you say 'turkey' in french?

all the goings on lately have been exhausting so roomie and i are going to montreal for the thanksgiving holiday.

pray for safe travels and have a great thanksgiving, everyone!

(feel free to post any ventings and rantings about going home for the holidays here. i won't mind and it'll give me something to read when i get back.)

to whoever doesn't 'get it.'

a list, in light of the Michael Richards/Kramer and UCLA student taser thing:

1. when talking about the use of the N-word, let's have a basic understanding that no one should be using it.

2. yes, some black folk use it. not all of us like that but that doesn't mean everyone gets to.

3. (similarly, yes, some gay folk also use the f-word when they speak with/about one another, but that's not going to make it ok for me to say it. it's bad manners.)

4. (just the way it's bad manners to whine about why certain people get to do certain things that seem naughty and you can't. you just can't. deal with it. if you're burning with a desire to say a naughty word and you're mad that people will think you're a racist if you do, then you have a problem.)

4.5. (and if you ask if that's fair - what are you, five?)

5. and besides, that's not the point. whether or not you are a racist is not the point. who cares if you're a racist? i don't - i'm not friends with racists and i personally prefer not to have anything to do with one.

6. the point is, Richards used it in a really really problematic way. you get a few racial demerits for saying the N-word but you flunk the whole test when you start referencing lynching.

7. and that's what's ugly. when we use the word racism *properly* we are to understand that there's a whole history and cultural tradition supporting it and giving it life; we understand that history isn't in the past - it's now, it's flowing forward, everything we do make us part of it and we inform it just as we're informed by it. history and cultural/social practice make racism real and Richards basically sickened himself and his audience when he vomited that history all over the stage that night.

8. this history claim - does this mean that we don't recognize other histories? i.e., the history of the english oppression of the irish, the spanish decimation of the native american and the indigenous? no way. but that's not the context of this particular conversation. it would be great if the folks that don't 'get it' also wanted to talk about other imperialisms and colonialisms and how they inform our contemporary culture and make our current race relations so frakking complicated.

9. but we all know that's not what you want to talk about, do you? it's funny how some you rhetorically grab onto the history thing and get all upset - 'what about this oppression or that oppression? are you saying that only black people have suffered, only black people have suffered oppression??' no, brother. let's talk about other people's suffering and oppression. i'd love to; if we did then we'd see that us black folk aren't just whining 'victim' every time someone uses the N-word. but be honest. history ain't on your side. you don't really want to go there.

10. but if you do, maybe we can talk about this guy from UCLA (my alma mater!) who totally got tasered for refusing to show school ID and told some campus police to frak off. let's talk about that.

awesome: another man who doesn't know his ovary from his scrotal sac

salon's Broadsheet has an awesome heads up about the guy who's about to be in charge of contraception access and family planning education/policy. sort of like the vet (i.e., dr. dolittle) who was slated to become the head of Women's Issues at the FDA, this new guy is a treat.

he's a pal of leslie unruh, the author of the South Dakota universal abortion ban legislation. (which was defeated.)
he's a schill for the notoriously 'light on scientific accuracy' abstinence-only crowd for the christian right. (which doesn't work.)
(want his bio? check out talk2action's research here.)
he runs a string of those so-called crisis pregnancy centers in massachusets.

and his biggest claim to fame?
he thinks:

sex causes people to go through oxytocin withdrawal which in turn prevents people from bonding in relationships. Seriously.

[Keroack] explained that oxytocin is released during positive social interaction, massage, hugs, “trust” encounters, and sexual intercourse. “It promotes bonding by reducing fear and anxiety in social settings, increasing trust and trustworthiness, reducing stress and pain, and decreasing social aggression,” he said.

But apparently if you’ve had sex with too many people you use up all that oxytocin: "People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.” Hear that? Too many sexual partners and you’ll never love again!

(basic science: while it's true that oxytocin plays a major role during labor, breastfeeding and is released into the bloodstream during orgasm - as vasopressin is released in males - and that it does seem to enable trust and ease social anxiety, his basic premise that sexual promiscuity will use up 'too much' and your ability to form bonds with another person will diminish is bullshit - at least not for biological reasons. the number of partners shouldn't matter. if oxytocin levels were subject to fluctuation because of orgasm/sexual intercourse then it would be instance that mattered, not the number of partners.

and what a wonderful, discerning little chemical it would be! if all this was true, then it would also follow that oxytocin is able to distinguish between sex with a marital partner and sex with an extra-marital partner, would it not? genius little chemical!

anyway, oxytocin doesn't 'run out'. if that was the case, every time a woman gave birth she'd be capable of less bonding with each successive child - not to mention that with each instance of sex with her partner, over time, she'd be less able to maintain that bond. see? illogical bullshit.

and doesn't he know that oxytocin now comes in pill or nasal spray? no one has to suffer low bonding!)

this total ignoramus is going to be in charge of a government program for women's sexual health. monday is his first day. nice.

does george w. bush know ANY qualified people??

gasp! a woman's in charge!

i'd like to start collecting all the punditry around pelosi and her gender. i'd really like to start looking at the public discourse surrounding our first female speaker of the house because i'm curious to see how the public constructs a woman who wields real political power now.

will she be 'shrill'?
will she 'intimidate men' and 'will men be unable to relate to her'?
will she be 'emotional'?
'ball busting'?
'a barn burner'?
'man hating'?
'almost masculine in her abilities'?
'a fishwife'?
a 'bitch'?

or will she be...good at her job?

to read:
Pelosi ready for House helm, battle over issues - CNN.com
as well as this over at BlogHer
i'll post more feminist posts on pelosi when i find them. it's gonna a fascinating two years.

who is my neighbor? ted haggard.

although the haggard story broke late last week, i've avoided writing about it for a few reasons. one, it's way too easy to go for the easy ironic joke; two, i wasn't quite sure if i even believed the story (and, believe me, i'm not exactly a haggard fan); three, the whole situation sort of seemed cheap.

the downfall of a preacher is a sad thing. i've seen my own father go through two church splits (we were Baptists, after all) and it was difficult to watch a ministry dissolve right before my eyes, along with the trust that once existed between a man and his congregation. i don't think any kind of ministry really recovers from something like that. because of the intense and intimate nature of a pastor's call, the sudden divestment seems like betrayal and a waste of all those previous years. in my father's case, the ground shifted due to an overly ambitious assistant pastor (such a cliche, isn't it?) with a secret of his own to hide and my father stepped down rather than be embroiled in an long, undignified fight with a once close friend who seemed to think he deserved something he didn't earn. though my father looked ahead with something like optimism, the whole ordeal was hard on him, the family and the folks who left with us. for me and my sister, we saw an ugly picture of church politics and greed. we saw the ugly underbelly of our church laid wide open and we turned away from it as fast as we could.

for haggard, it wasn't his own congregation that betrayed him but what he called his own 'dark nature.' perhaps. i wonder which is the greater sin - haggard's still shadowy liaison with jones or his lying about what led to that liaison for all this time? or is it all of a piece? i was going to ask if it's possible to run from our 'natures' but that's what christianity teaches, doesn't it? we put off the old nature and, behold, we are all made new creatures. i guess there's happy, shiny NEW and then there's the rest of us - let's welcome Haggard among us - who are Newish. we're relatively shiny but with a few spots of tarnishing here and there.

what should a progressive christian do in this case? when a combatant in the culture wars has fallen, a great big arrow sticking out of his back, what should the progressive church person do? most of the commentary around has focused on the 'hypocrisy' of ted haggard. it's more than hypocrisy; if he's actually gay, lobbying for legislation that will outlaw the lives of other americans simply because of who they love, then that's internalized homophobia, that's self-loathing. and that's so much sadder than hypocrisy.

there are clever posts to be written about the limitations of christian celebrity, the futility of living with secrets, the double edged sword of judgment, the end of privacy, the muted pleas for forgiveness from the evangelicals when it's one of their own who fall but its absence when it's anyone else, but i won't write those. (though i could!) instead i just think about how sad it is. sad that a guy was brought low simply because the idea of being christian and gay was inconceivable.

to read:
The Revealer: Haggard's Downfall as well as the nerve article he mentions (the roll up of christian men's self-help books has a pretty good analysis of the imagery and language defining christian masculinity. personally, braveheart does nothing for me.)

update:
haggard's restoration team lost dobson. guess all that tarnished christianity was just too much.

calling all writers: anthology submissions

a grad student from Indiana University approached me about submitting a piece of creative nonfiction to her proposed anthology. i've decided to do it and thought i'd pass on the news to the other women out there who write about their religious upbringing. the call is below. (please pay attention to the guidelines - she's looking for women writers!)
...

call for submissions
I'm currently soliciting creative nonfiction for an anthology; its working title is Growing Up Churched: Young Women Writers on Life, Faith, and Being Raised Evangelical. I'm looking for personal essays in the 3000-5000 word range, narratives centered around this theme. Please pass this call for submissions on to any writers you may know who might be interested in contributing to this project.

I'm looking for essays about growing up evangelical that break the mold. Most of the memoirs out there about growing up evangelical either end up fitting the formulas "wasn't life awful and, boy, I'm glad I escaped the church" or "wasn't life awful and, boy, I'm glad Jesus saved me." I want essays that don't fit these formulas, that tell surprising, fresh, unique stories. My hope is these essays will be both narrative and reflective in some way, whether they're funny or disturbing or grateful or angry. Also, a lot of writing about evangelicals focuses on men, hence the gender bias for this project.

A note – I'm working with a loose definition of "evangelical" here. If a writer grew up Mennonite or Reformed or Methodist or encountered evangelicalism later than childhood, her work might still fit this anthology. The more diverse the stories, the better!

Writers: If you're interested in the anthology and have an essay that you think might work, send it to me ASAP by e-mail at growingupchurched@gmail.com. I'd love to look at your piece and see whether it might fit into this project. If you're interested in contributing the project, but don't have anything on paper, drop me a line to let me know. Then send me a draft of your essay by December 31, 2006 (New Year's Eve). This date is going to be the preliminary deadline for submissions.

And please, please do pass this message on to any writers you think might be interested.

In sum, here are the basic guidelines:

Personal essays in the 3000-5000 word range about growing up female and evangelical.
Contributors should be in their 20's or 30's.
Deadline: December 31, 2006.
Send the essays to me by e-mail at growingupchurched@gmail.com

More information and updates will be online at http://growingupchurched.blogspot.com.

an indecent proposal: if not sex, then how about this...?

have you heard?

as the human sexuality timeline shortens between When We Used to Have Sex and When Sex is Bad in All Forms, apparently the federal gov has decided to be papa to teens AND adults: they want to spend federal dollars on telling adults to not have sex.

the moral reach of our government has now reached a complete, infantilizing low.

is spending federal dollars to tell already sexually active adults to stop being sexually active really the BEST use of our government's budget? what else would they like to spend dollars on - telling us to brush our teeth, eat our veggies, and look both ways before we cross the street?

figleaf has an excellent idea. since uncle sam hates the idea of us gettin' busy, maybe he'll be cool with us touching our private places in pleasurable ways, instead. i'm pretty sure that masturbation counts as abstinence so perhaps the gals at tulip will be able to apply for some of that federal money to promote an 'abstinent' yet pleasurable lifestyle. you think?

(unless killing pleasure is the point. gasp!)

it's a thought...a Green candidate for gov!

Green Party vs. the goliaths | Chicago Tribune

the blagojevich/topinka ads are turning my stomach. can't a girl watch 'dancing with the stars' in peace? apparently not. (

and while we're at it, why doesn't the GOP just come out and call poor tammy duckworth a 'legless satan worshipper'? it'd cut through all the crap and make their ads so much more interesting.)

so my gaze turns toward a candidate who's been running so far under the radar, when i mentioned him at a work meeting, my very politically astute coworkers went, 'Err?' ralph nader pissed me off but i think i could probably go for a Green governor. and if you check out his profile, rich whitney doesn't sound totally crazy. ok, his gun policy is weird, but i can overlook that. i'm from los angeles.

(my rubric for political candidates is quite simple - don't sound like a nutbag.)

change has to start somewhere, right?

the past: bill can keep it

i don't know about you but when oprah had bill o'reilly on her show, i almost went blind. i mean, ok, she can have any sexual harrassing, falafel sniffing pervert whe wants on the show - but do we really have to look him seriously in the eye like *he's* the model of traditional values??

anyway, hearing everyone on that show bandy the term 'traditional values' vs. 'values that aren't traditional, never will be and will destroy life as we know it' (no, bill's not hysterical at all), as if these binary oppositions actually existed in a historical context, got me thinking.

while i like myth as a literary form, i've never much liked it as a structure for social behavior or law. so i went to borders yesterday and bought a stack of books i can barely afford and one of them was this:

The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap: Stephanie Coontz

traditional values, or what we assume is a common cultural 'sense' have never been so. they've never been natural things, things that just spring up like flowers. there is a Will, an Ideology, behind this world of ours. and bill doesn't want us to look at Ideology (or, rather, those hidden interests that guide these mythical 'traditional' values.) he wants us all to choose a side without even questioning the terms we're using.

no thanks.

and, besides, when was the past ever good for brown people? bill says he doesn't want to live in a world without traditional values; he'd rather live in a mythical bucolic past where everything was 'good.' but here's news - it wasn't good for everyone. what past is he talking about? is he talking about 1959? 1859? 1759? 1659? 'cause i can pretty much guarantee that life sucked hard, all the way back, if you weren't white, straight, male and rich.

anyway, i bring up this book because the amazon page has a neato feature that lets you look at its bibliography which is a great source list for women's history, historiography, some social studies and some really solid feminist academic texts. read books, people! you'll learn stuff!

disgusting

while you're reading this article, you have two distinctly different reactions.

first, you'll snort with disbelieving laughter when you read things like:

Last year, Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one.
"Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when Congress wasn't in session, hoping that no one would show," recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. "But we got a pretty good turnout anyway."

Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and walked out.

funny, huh? funny that our only check against authortarianism and executive excess, our congress, doesn't even respect the rules of our democracy.

then, after you're done choking on your disbelieving laughter, you'll start to get angry. very very angry. who do these people think they are??

It is clear that the same Congress that put a drooling child-chaser like Mark Foley in charge of a House caucus on child exploitation also named Cunningham, a man who can barely write his own name in the ground with a stick, to a similarly appropriate position. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the former chairman of the House Subcommittee on Human Intelligence Analysis and Counterintelligence:
"As truth will come out and you will find out how liablest [sic] you have & will be. Not once did you list the positives. Education Man of the Year...hospital funding, jobs, Hiway [sic] funding, border security, Megans law my bill, Tuna Dolfin [sic] my bill...and every time you wanted an expert on the wars who did you call. No Marcus you write About how I died."
How liablest you have & will be? What the fuck does that even mean? This guy sat on the Appropriations Committee for years -- no wonder Congress couldn't pass any spending bills!

then, you'll feel a great big heave of disgust.
disgust at our pork-laden public officials, disgust at the ruins of our congress, disgust at our president for enabling these turdy, ignorant psychopaths and, especially, disgust at our craven mainstream media who can't seem to muster any muckraking instinct if their over-bloated lives depended on it. what the hell ever happened to 'the public's right to know'?!

it's a long article but it's worth every single pukey detail.

Rolling Stone : COVER STORY: Time to Go! Inside the Worst Congress Ever

our reproductive battles from the eyes of the brits

from the guardian article:

This is America's abortion debate in its purest, most distilled form: yes or no. There is no province for doubt. Should a woman be compelled to carry a baby to term when doctors tell her it will be born with no brain? Should a pregnant woman forgo potentially life-saving medical treatment for the sake of the baby she is carrying? Should a woman be forced to give birth to a child conceived in rape? Yes, yes and yes, says Leslee Unruh, the guiding light of South Dakota's anti-abortion activists. She has devoted her life to ending abortion, driven by her own guilt at having a termination as a young woman.

when i started teaching, my pedagogy instructors always said, 'if you want discussion, avoid questions that can only elicit a yes/no answer.' so i'd like to rewrite those questions the guardian says our ongoing reproductive health battles prompt:

What are the ethics of forcing a mother to forgo potentially life-saving medical treatment for the sake of the baby she's carrying?
Why should a woman be forced to give birth to a child conceived in rape?
Why should a woman carry to term a baby who won't have a brain?

of course unruh will say yes to easy 'yes/no' questions (so would we on the pro-choice side). but wouldn't it be interesting to hear her answers to the above questions? wouldn't those questions also enrich the discussions on the pro-choice side?

i think so.

America's abortion battlefield | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

if we're so empowered, why don't we vote?

do you want to do something for these upcoming mid term elections?
are you looking for a way to contribute?
do you live in the suburbs of chicago?

then click here.

the ywca metropolitan chicago and citizen action illinois are working together to try and make sure as many single women as possible, in the north and northwest suburbs, make it to the voting booth on nov 7.

why single women? because we have one of the lowest voter rates around. 20 million registered single women in the 2004 elections could have made a significant difference - but they never made it into the voting booth. we need to change that.

if you live in the surrounding glen ellyn area, any time will do - 90 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours.

(and, yeah, i'm not exactly a disinterested party here.)

moving on

it's never good to stay in one place for too long.

you begin to go over the same ground, the same complaints, the same scenery. the environment loses its sharp color and your brain begins to fuzz down until all the sharp little questions start sounding the same.

and that's what has happened with me and my blogs. i've had them for 4-5 years now and it's time for a change. the sharp little questions i had when i started them are still there: how does a modern woman navigate being a feminist christian, how does a progressive woman of color interact with her world while not hiding from it? will i ever find a progressive guy who doesn't hate the idea of church and who won't annoy the crap out of me? where is my perfect black pair of pants? and if the christian conservative wants to mold the world in their image so much, why not just do what the amish folk do and live on a farm somewhere where they can create their world to their heart's content?

so i still have these questions but is this the right way? is ChurchGal the right way for me to explore and convey what it's like for a woman like me and even provide a space for other women like me?

i read an excerpt from barak obama's new book, The Audacity of Hope, while in the bathroom this morning. he briefly described the defensiveness he felt while battling the kooky alan keyes. (i call him kooky, not obama.) and i know what he's talking about. he defends a pro-choice position, he defends the civil rights of gays and keyes says he's not a Believer. is that what our intellectual exchange has come to? 'you don't believe the exact thing i believe so you don't have faith. you express your struggles so you don't have faith. you've admitted you've had sex, so you're a whore and don't have faith.'

it makes me want to give every self-righteous person who passes by a great big 'fuck you' finger. but that's not the right response either.

i don't want to indulge in these little playground smackdowns anymore. they're tiresome and beneath a good many of us. so what's the new ground i want to explore? where should i go next with ChurchGal?

i don't know.
but it has to be forward.

blurred lines: church/state articles in nytimes

this is the first article in the series about the eroding lines between church and state - and how it benefits some faith-based organizations across all denominations.

As Exemptions Grow, Religion Outweighs Regulation - New York Times

and this is the second article, about employee's rights while working for religious organizations.

(i'm in the middle of monstrous fundraising at National Non Profit, so this is about as analytical as i'll get this week.)

crimes against girls

it's only recently that the shooting crimes in colorado and pennsylvania are beginning to be seen through the lens of gender.

while these crimes fall, indeed, into the genre of 'school shootings' these two particular events are also crimes of assault against girls and, in the colorado case, sexual assault against girls. (because of the tubes of lubricant he carried, the man who shot the girls in pennsylvania also intended some kind of sexual assault against his victims, but probably ran out of time before he could commit it.)

now, there will be people who will try to mitigate these criminals by saying that they were either mentally disturbed or already had a history of child predation - that it's too extreme to call this crimes against girls.

but that's what i call it. i call it misogyny taken to its extreme. some have even gone further than that to call it 'male terrorism.' i won't be distracted by arguments over rhetoric. but what that rhetoric describes is hateful, disgusting and should be called what it is: hatred against women.

here's a lengthy excerpt from a post i ran across today, The Ugliest Men in America:

These kinds of crimes are rare, of course, even if the rapid succession in which these events happens suggests a sort of epidemic. Most people will never have to face people like these. However, I believe that the attitudes and pathologies that underlie such incredible viciousness are widely dispersed throughout our culture. These assaults are, in many ways, the acute manifestation of two chronic, interlinked social problems: misogyny and male inadequacy.

First, allow me to explain what I mean by misogyny. I’m not talking about sexism, which is the belief that the essential characteristics of one particular sex render it superior or inferior to the other in some regard, but instead about a related, but altogether more malevolent phenomenon. A misogynist doesn’t just believe that women are inferior to men, he believes that they are dangerous, hateful, sinister, wicked, inhuman and frightening. Women, to the misogynist, are necessary and desired objects that have to be controlled, whether by manipulation, by threat, or by outright violence. People disagree on what provokes this awful mindset in certain men, but I tend to believe that it’s the result of upbringing and psychology, not something that’s dispersed by the media. In other words, I think men learn to be woman-haters by watching their fathers and uncles and friends hate women, I don’t think they learn it from the movies or from rap lyrics. The latter can play a supportive role in the misogynist’s development, though.

Where the main fault of our society lies, I feel, is in its failure to separate misogyny from masculinity. Machismo, as it is presently formulated, is a shameful thing, more of a peacock performance than a real ethos. Macho is pretending to be strong and independent when you’re really fearful and weak. Macho is dominating through force and winning respect through intimidation. It’s a sick parody of masculinity. Only the feeblest psyches need to hide behind violence and ruthlessness, but our culture allows for and often valorizes these vicious weaklings. A healthier society would be better able to distinguish a true man from a tantruming child, a man of honor from a worthless, domineering thug.

i'm reminded of what i wrote about the girls gone wild guy, the american soldiers who raped a 14-yr old iraqi girl and then killed her and almost all of her family, and the comment i left about the MRM movement that led to Patriarch saying he wanted to hold me down, hit me in my face and shave my head.

misogyny leading to violence against women.

soothing

after a hard week at work (yes, it's only wednesday) there is nothing i like more than to zone out. i especially like zoning out when the political news of the day gives me gas. so in recognition of the CMOS going online with a subscription, here's their Q&A section, where you can zone out while pondering the correct usage of its.

Chicago Manual of Style - Q&A

(i saw its used three times incorrectly today and it drove me nuts.)

hide that diaphragm, ladies.

i think i just got heartburn.

no longer just a hidden paranoia amongst the pro-choice, the new evangelical 'war' on contraception has finally broken the surface. i knew it would happen.

i love all the space given to the anti-family planning side while the pro-family planning side is given just a few inches toward the end, legitimizing the idea that people (mostly women) shouldn't have the right to use contraception.

Abortion foes' new rallying point | Chicago Tribune

so.
all those married ladies on the pill or using the sponge, diaphragm or IUD? forget it.
all those married guys who don't want to get a vasectomy and so use condoms? too bad.
everyone else who doesn't want to get pregnant (for various reasons) and who don't believe the same as others about the place of sex in a relationship (or out of one)? yeah, too bad.

sex is only for married folks, people. the fundies have said so.
and now they're going to FORCE you to be celibate.

whether you like it or not.
...

update: want some stats on men, the 'male pill' and their usage of contraception? here's something from planned parenthood -

Ask Dr. Cullins: Birth Control

Q: How soon will it be before there's a pill for men?
A: There are still years to go, although there seem to be breakthroughs in the research every once in a while. Finding a safe and effective way to keep a man from producing millions of sperm a day has proven to be more difficult than it is to keep a woman from producing one egg a month.
However long it takes, it will be worthwhile. Men are very willing to take responsibility for birth control, even though there are comparatively few options for them. In fact, men now take responsibility for more than a third of all contraception. More than 20 percent of all couples who use contraception rely on the condom. Nearly 11 percent rely on vasectomy. Three percent rely on withdrawal. And more than two percent rely on periodic abstinence.