Please. With a newborn in the family everyone loses a little sleep. But the Bride carries the heaviest burden of nursing every two to three hours. And since today is going to be a glorious life-affirming, celebratory day, I’ll make this post brief.
TN in its infinite wisdom has voted “YES on 1” which was an anti-choice, anti-women ballot initiative. The question was deliberately confusing, and ads by religious PACs made it seem like a reasonable option.
However, in the future elected officials now have more power to legislate what we women can do, or not do with our bodies. We may be made to wait longer for an abortion, make multiple visits to a doctor, and even watch an ultrasound or succumb to an invasive pelvic sonogram. TN cannot overturn our right to seek reproductive care, but the GOP can now chip away at our ability to access it with more TRAP laws.
With more and more women in medicine and politics, this state just may be first for music but last in recruiting young people in science and technology fields. Just another result of apathetic young voters, or is this a sign of the times?
Did you know that Thomas Jefferson was the first President to propose and use ballot initiatives while WE the people are voting for our elected officials? And next week, for the first time since the killing of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, CT between the ages of 6 and 7, the state of Washington will have 2 questions on the ballot about guns.
Initiative 594 would require all firearm sales, including those at gun shows and conducted online, to be predicated on a background check of the buyer. Initiative 591, however, would disallow background checks for gun purchases unless explicitly required by the federal government. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/16/us-usa-firearm-measures-idUSBREA3F1XL20140416
62% of voters in that state favor expanding background checks according to polls, but since they can vote on both questions it may be confusing. Will Washington be the fifth state to close the gun show loophole, along with New York, Connecticut, Colorado and Delaware? Considering the most recent school shooting in Marysville, it is a timely question.
When we were young, we had fire drills in school. An alarm would go off and everybody had to proceed calmly towards the door, file into the hallway one by one in a straight line and convene outside in the parking lot. Teachers counted heads to make sure everyone was present and accounted for. They tell me we had atomic bomb drills too, hiding under our desks, but I don’t remember those. I do remember filing upstairs at Sacred Heart School for our first dose of a newfangled Polio vaccine
But today teachers and students are practicing what to do should a person with a gun walk through their front doors. It’s conveniently called a “Lockdown Drill.” Think about that for a second, our children are taking time out of their day to play hide and seek in a pretend scenario with a crazed maniac.
In this Washington Post article a teacher talks about having to keep her 4 and 5 year old students hidden and quiet in a classroom closet for 13 minutes! 13 minutes…”16 tiny bodies sitting crisscross applesauce, hands in laps, plus two adults…Instead of controlling guns and inconveniencing those who would use them, we are rounding up and silencing a generation of schoolchildren, and terrifying those who care for them. We are giving away precious time to teach and learn while we cower in fear.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rehearsing-for-death-a-pre-k-teacher-on-the-trouble-with-lockdown-drills/2014/10/28/4ab456ea-5eb2-11e4-9f3a-7e28799e0549_story.html
She has a point, a very valid point. Instead of rehearsing for death WE the people should start screaming. I was sickened to learn that three states have ballot initiatives to try and curtail a woman’s ability to choose to have a child. TRAP laws and Personhood amendments galore, our glorious, religious right/wing/nuts would love to have government by and for WE the people control our sexual and reproductive health. But, hey keep your hands off our guns! They would rather have our teachers and children terrorized in school – and believe you me, WE are more likely to be gunned down outside a school in this country – than propose universal background checks for gun owners. How sick and sad is that.
A ratio of 3 to 1, three states against choice to one that is trying to tackle gun violence. After Newtown, President Obama said “Shame on us,” if this tragedy doesn’t result in new gun laws. Shame on us indeed.
I teach in a country awash in weaponry. Maybe that moment I stood alone in my classroom was when I was closest to the truth. In 13 minutes, according to my gruesome and involuntary mental calculus, a single gunman with his effortlessly obtained XM15-E2S rifle and 26 rounds in each of two additional magazines could potentially kill 78 of us.
If you happen to be one of those people, you know the kind that think feminism isn’t an issue anymore, that’s it’s been taken over by Lesbians, that it’s so over, well think again. Did you hear the news this morning about the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella? Apparently he thinks women in his company should just trust in Karma. Don’t ask your boss for a raise ladies, just trust in The Man Karma to make it happen.
Caitlin Moran doesn’t trust anybody to make her life happen, except herself. She’s an irreverent comic, a Times UK columnist and a best-selling novelist who also happens to be a die-hard feminist. Not exactly sure when she first caught my attention, but it may have been a brilliant essay about why safe and legal abortions should be part and parcel of every country. Her writing spares no one. Her latest book, “How to Build a Girl,” is a coming of age tale:
“I want to be a self-made woman. I want to conjure myself out of every sparkling, fast-moving thing I can see,” she declares, “I want to be the creator of me. I’m gonna begat myself.” First, she’ll change her name. This, then, is how to build a girl: find a cause; identify your image; let nothing stand in your way.” http://www.npr.org/2014/09/29/350891370/novelist-caitlin-moran-wryly-shows-how-to-build-a-girl
In this Youtube interview, and don’t forget she might swear, filmed last month in Canada, she lets it all hang out, literally. She admonishes girls to do three things regularly: 1) go on long, country walks, 2) masturbate frequently, and 3) start a revolution! You can see where this video is going with its warning. She snorts when someone asks her the age-old question about childcare, and asks does anyone ask a man interviewing for a job about childcare? Then gamely suggests that editors should make male columnists write about childcare.
Moran’s pearl of an idea is that in order to change our patriarchal culture we have got to use Art – writing, media, painting, film – to make it Cool. Marching around with placards and petitions, arguments at town hall meetings are all well and good, but once we see Dr Who kissing the bisexual Captain Jack Harkness, well then the younger generation says that’s alright! On our side of the pond, I think Ellen DeGeneres’ show is partly responsible for the fast pace of the marriage equality movement.
Moran wrote her book about girl-building because when she was 16 she wished she’d had a book like this. Today, a 17 year old girl won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Pakistani child advocate Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the face for believing that girls should have every right to an education as boys, has certainly let nothing stand in her way. Shining her light on the deplorable conditions of child slavery and work in her country, she has started a revolution! Malala is deliberate in her cause, even as a Pakistani womens’ rights lawyer was executed by her government last week. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29564935
So as headlines like, “Mother of Three Heads up BBC” are still cranked out by old white men, and an American CEO can tell his female employees they should not ask for a raise, the popular media backlash to Western corporations is telling. We are all laughing, Isn’t that funny? But in Malala’s world, the Muslim world, women are not laughing. “Overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land, according to a worldwide survey by the Pew Research Center. But many supporters of sharia say it should apply only to their country’s Muslim population.” http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-overview/
Just try to imagine if that “17 (18,19??) Kids and Counting” crazy Quivering Christian movement were the law of our land. I know, I’d get pretty profane and stop laughing too.
Thousands always gather to watch our newest citizens swear an oath of allegiance to these United States; red and blue, right and left unite in our collective pride for once. And as Iraq was dissolving into tribal warfare, trying desperately to sustain its very early gestational stage of freedom, I thought about the bigger picture. How we didn’t achieve true independence in 1776, well not ALL of us did,
We had to fight our own bloody Civil War and then survive the tumultuous 60s, and we are still voting one state at a time for marriage equality in 2014.
And while the keynote speaker, David Rubenstein, co-founder and CEO of the Carlyle Group, read an amusing email he received from TJ himself, it was his list of famous immigrants that caught my attention; Albert Einstein, YoYoMa, Kissinger, Madeline Albright, etc and I couldn’t help but think about the buses of women and children that have faced angry mobs in California, and the refugee camps we’ve set up along border states.
Still, what other country our size manages to allow and contain so much dissent, along with a free press? How will history tell this American immigration story? It turns out Mr Rubenstein graduated the same year as Bob from Duke University. I asked Bob if he thought he’d been a frat boy in 1970. The Yearbook that year was divided in two, one for the Greeks and one for the Geeks (Hippies).
And as I stood there with my little flag and my hand in its splint, I thought about the Supreme’s latest Hobby Lobby ruling. In 1967 when I was in college, doctors were not allowed to write prescriptions for that newfangled birth control pill if you were unmarried. And today, your boss can determine your reproductive destiny because SCOTUS has ruled in favor of corporations over women. And it has once again softened the line between church and state, and we know what Mr Jefferson would say about that!
No, I’m not talking about a Bush presidency. And I’m not talking about being over the “hump” which was what we called the age of forty, before we knew better. What needs to be seriously talked about is that Roe vs Wade turned 41 last week, and nobody mentioned it.
Except this writer, Caitlin Moran, the best selling author of “How to be a Woman,” who absolutely gets it! She wrote an article for The UK Times titled, “Why is Abortion Under Threat Again?” She reminds us that world-wide, 40 Million women seek abortion services every year, and that these women do not “…have abortions recklessly.” Moran continues to say that Europe seems to be blindly following suit with America in trying to restrict access to reproductive health for its citizens, citing a law passed at the end of last year in Spain that would restrict a women’s right to an abortion.
Following recent controversial abortion restrictions across America, it seems two otherwise progressive, First World countries are now framing abortion as some relatively recent, morally licentious activity that blew in on the same wind as disco, homosexuality and Dallas, and which must now – in more sore, sober and reflective times – be curtailed once more. The only abortions are these modish, legal abortions, and now they must be stopped. http://ge.tt/3cnPGjD1/v/0
Rolling Stone has an article in this month’s issue titled “The Stealth War on Abortion,” that illuminates some of the incremental, state by state restrictions that GOP legislators have been passing long before Wendy Davis stood her ground in Texas. I’ve certainly talked about them here, the TRAP laws and personhood bills, from time to time. The “War on Women” is alive and well folks. The party that dismisses government as abusive and overbearing just loves to get into our panties.http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-stealth-war-on-abortion-20140115
What I like about Moran’s take is her historical and global perspective. We women have been trying to abort for just about as long as Neanderthals mated with Homo Sapiens. Before we tried coat hangers, candles and blood letting with leeches, there was “…pennyroyal, tansy, (and) hellebore. Silphium was the remedy of the Ancient Greeks – the main export of Cyrene, demand for silphium was so huge that it was harvested into extinction, but not before its image was imprinted onto Cyrenian coinage.”
Today half of the 40 Million abortions are performed safely and legally, but half are illegal. Think about that. Here’s the kicker, many who abort illegally end up dying – from sepsis most likely. That means about 47,000 women die annually around the world. Some of that can be connected to that 41st President and his son #43 who tied global aid to women’s health clinics that would not perform abortions…yes, religious zealots writing international policy. That’s just the way it is, everybody thinks they have God on their side.
The problem is impoverished women around the world are suffering. If we stop to consider that one in every three women we meet have had an abortion – 1 of every 3 – we may find ourselves thinking differently about choice. I’m glad the Right to Lifers have stopped killing physicians, but we need to have more men and women stand up for our right to choose. And young women in particular, we cannot go back to the back alleys.
We lost an hour on the clock this morning, and if the polls prove to be true, the whole country will be watching VA turn blue on Tuesday. I don’t know about your state, but we’ve been flooded with phone calls and TV ads to get out the vote in this off-year election for Governor, and it’s become apparent that Democrat Terry McAuliffe holds a double digit lead among women against his anti-choice, pro-gun, climate change denier Tea Party opponent, Ken Cuccinelli.
While McAuliffe is ahead in all the public opinion polls and while he and his allies have greatly outraised and outspent Cuccinelli and the outside groups backing the GOP candidate, this is expected to be a low-turnout, off-year election which tends to trend older and slightly more conservative.http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/30/how-close-is-the-race-for-governor-of-virginia/
But in addition to voting for Governor, we also have a few down-ballot boxes to tick; on Tuesday Virginia elects two other statewide officers, Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General. In addition, some other delegates to the state house are busy trying to defend their majority. With over a two to one margin, it’s unlikely the Republicans will lose the house.
Still, we Dems just might win the top trifecta of seats in VA, thanks to women voters. Which would mean we’d never have to suffer another humiliating vaginal probe ultrasound bill, or personhood bill, or a bill that adds exorbitant regulations and building requirements for reproductive health care clinics, or a bill that will try to tell doctors where they can practice….thereby changing our purple mountain’s majesty deep blue. Or maybe orange?
I’m in love with two women. There, I said it. One is a widow, 83 years old, who studied mathematics and worked at IBM, and the other is a single mom, 50 years old, who graduated from Harvard law School.
Largely because of Edith Windsor, the Rosa Parks in the fight for Marriage Equality, our nation is one step closer to that goal. It is already the law in France, and now California will have to re-legalize same-sex marriage. Can Virginia be far behind? Windsor is a feisty senior citizen, who got a bill in the mail from the IRS that made her mad.
“Plaintiff Edith Windsor is an 83 year old resident of New York, who legally married her same-sex partner of over 40 years, Thea, in Canada in 2007. The State of New York recognized their marriage, but the United States government did not. Sadly, Edith’s wife, Thea, died in 2009. When Thea died, her estate was forced to pay $363,000 in estate taxes that would not have been assessed if Thea and Edith were not a lesbian couple.” http://www.marriageequality.org/Federal-cases-DOMA
In United States v Windsor, SCOTUS struck down DOMA as you’ve probably heard, saying that it was unconstitutional to discriminate against one group of people because of the gender of their partner in marriage. I particularly liked this phrase: “…(DOMA’s) effect to disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.” Then they turned around and threw out Prop 8 in California! Well done SCOTUS!
I’m thinking of a second career as a wedding planner in San Francisco. Hey, I managed to make the magic happen on a mountain in an apple orchard! Well, with a lot of help.
Because I’m on the Twittisphere, I followed along in real time on her filibuster in pink sneakers. The NYT called her a “Fashion icon” on the Hill, but she is so much more than a pretty face. What guts, what glory! I could not stand for nearly 13 hours without a potty break. The GOP in the lone star state, those anti-choice politicians so affectionately called “Gynoticians” because of their untiring need to legislate a woman’s body, were trying to sneak in a crippling blow of TRAP bills that would have closed most of the Planned Parenthood clinics in the state. Go ahead you idiot Govenor, try to reconvene and pass those bills. I’m sure there will be people spilling out all over your state house. We women love our bodies enough to fight for them.
We usually know when and how we get pregnant. We know what a rape kit does and does not do. We don’t like to undergo unnecessary and unwanted vaginal probes anywhere and at any time. And yes, we usually know who we love right from the start. Our knees get weak and our hearts start racing, and before you know it we’ve got a ring on our finger – or a brooch – as Edith and Thea had to hide their relationship. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/26/edith-windsor-thea-spyer-doma
The government may stop disparaging and injuring women now.
It’s a weekend for sales. It’s a weekend for barbeque. And it’s a weekend to remember our fallen soldiers; only this time instead of waxing on about our military might, and the bravery exhibited by countless men and women in uniform, I thought I’d take a different tack.
I have to say I’m a bit embarrassed by: 1) the crop of sexual harassment charges popping up in all forms; 2) I’m super-shocked at the continuing hunger strike that is going on at Gitmo. But now I have to think that the pint-sized para-militray operation known as the Boy Scouts of America is taking one tiny step in the right direction. So it came as a bit of a shock to read that 3) Justice Antonin Scalia, a weekend scout leader for decades, has resigned!
“Some of the happiest memories of my adult life have been as a scoutmaster. Huddling under blankets around the campfire, and so forth. But now, all of that has been ruined.Ruined.” http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2013/05/scalia-resigns-post-as-scoutmaster.html
Let me be clear. I always wanted to be a Brownie. My foster mom didn’t drive, so it was a given that I couldn’t join those coveted ranks and wear that precious uniform with the beauty pageant-like ribbon decorating my chest. I had to sit in sacred Heart Church, in the noxious maroon uniform of Catholic school girls everywhere, bow-tied tight, and just watch as the Brownie troop entered, marching in time, stage to the right of Mary Mother of God. It was unnerving.
And except for finding out that the youngest little Girl Scouts now have a troop called “Princesses” in Cville, I’m delighted to find out that this largest of all organizations dedicated to All-Things-Girl has always had an all-inclusive policy when it comes to their members’ sexuality: “Girl Scouts of the USA and its local councils and troops value diversity and inclusiveness and do not discriminate or recruit on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, national origin, or physical or developmental disability,” reads a statement on the organization’s blog. http://www.advocate.com/youth/2012/12/19/3-big-differences-boy-scouts-versus-girl-scouts
Hurray for Girl Power! Now, I’m not sure about that SCOTUS article, since it did seem rather tongue in cheek. But if Scalia did resign, well that is his right. I personally, on this chilly May morning, couldn’t imagine cuddling with him around any campfire, ever!
Thank you President Obama for having the courage to send out the message that this war on terror is not sustainable. That our military needs to be focusing on other things, and that terrorists throughout the world are better caught by intelligent spying and good old fashioned police work. Self-radicalizing nut jobs are becoming much more of an issue world-wide. If a soldier can be hacked to death in broad daylight in a London suburb, why did it not surprise me that a woman, who is a cub scout leader, talked him out of killing anyone else? She said it was better her, than her child who was on the bus with her. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2329236/Woolwich-attack–Moment-heroic-woman-tries-remonstrate-knife-wielding-soldier-killer-police-arrived-scene.html
Women are making history left and right. Today Rosie Napravnik, a 25 year old Jersey girl, may just be the first woman jockey to win the Kentucky Derby. When she started out as a teenager, she was told to list herself as “A R Napravnik” in 2005. “A trainer suggested that listing so as not to advertise she was female and perhaps diminish her opportunities to get mounts. He said, ‘We can’t let anybody know that you’re a girl.'” Even after Julie Krone won a Triple Crown race in 1993 by finishing first at the Belmont Stakes; Rosie still had to go all Victor Victoria. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/jockey-rosie-napravnik-aims-to-be-first-female-jockey-to-win-kentucky-derby-aboard-mylute/2013/05/03/c0320c98-b3c1-11e2-9fb1-62de9581c946_story.html
And for another first, an American woman has landed on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List. Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur) was a Black Panther and later a leader in the Black Liberation Army. In 1979 she fled to Cuba after making a daring prison escape. She was serving a life sentence for her involvement in a police officer’s death on the NJ Turnpike. “The FBI is offering a reward of up to $1m (£640,000) for information leading to her capture, while the state of New Jersey is separately offering another $1m. FBI agent Aaron Ford said that the agency would ‘pursue justice, no matter how long it takes.'” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22397295
I’m figuring she must be a grandmother by now. In her defense, Chesimard argued that she was shot with her hands up in the air, and so she didn’t – or couldn’t – pull the trigger. The medical evidence seemed to validate her view of that fateful traffic stop. She was shot in the right arm and collarbone: “Dr. David Spain, a pathologist from Brookdale Community College, testified that her bullet scars as well as X-rays supported her claim that her arms were raised, and that there was “no conceivable way” the first bullet could have hit Shakur’s clavicle if her arm was down.” Still, in NJ to be an accomplice in a shooting is enough to be found guilty.
So all my feminist hackles have been raised this week, a first running in the Derby and a first to run from the law… and live. And I thought I’d share a chuckle from an editor at Upworthy, a talented young writer I’ve started to follow on twitter. Rebecca Eisenberg writes a blog called “Never Sarcastic.” She tweeted
I’ve had enough of the General failures – old men and their sexual peccadillos. Hamas and Gaza are in the news this morning. Could the fragile MidEast peace crumble; what would it look like, to have Israel and Palestine peacefully co-exist? I’m becoming more and more of a pacifist, deploring war of any kind and for any reason. I’ve followed the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt via Facebook. But yesterday comments turned ugly, anti-semitic diatribes quoting wikipedia articles about which tribe actually owns their sacred land. Luckily, this morning by way of an Atlantic article, I found a different Facebook page, “Teach me how to drive so I can protect myself.” https://www.facebook.com/pages/Teach-me-how-to-drive-so-I-can-protect-myself/132205866854879?ref=ts&fref=ts
A 32 year old IT consultant, Manal al-Sharif, started this page after deciding she should be able to drive a car around her home country of Saudi Arabia. She posted a video of herself ranting away while driving about the utter ridiculousness of this ban on women drivers. She was arrested, then released. Her Facebook page had 12,000 fans, and now it has 8,019 – hmmm, I wonder who’s been censoring her readership? Although well educated women in Saudi Arabia are not finding any jobs, simply because of their gender, female lawyers have recently been allowed to practice in the kingdom. Change is coming, just not fast enough for some.
Here is a video about the freedom project in the Arab world. It is poignant, it is timely and it asks us to think about what choices we might have if we were born in Japan, or Mexico. The arbitrary nature of life on earth; we sometimes forget how our opinions have been formed over years of culture and family like a smooth stone. When old men send the young to war, over boundaries, over religion, over oil, what if we were all to stand strong and say, “No.” This is the existential crisis of our time. We women need to drive that conversation.
MountainMornings 