Haiti and Chomsky

This is important.

Read this.

Let's Do This!

Sarah Palin is back, the Stupak Amendment (and the Republican Party) may further limit abortion access for all women, and I just saw Pray the Devil Back to Hell and am fired up about collective action and the power that women have.

WSC revival?

Great Job Everyone!

this is.... absurd....

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Antiabortion Advocate Appointed to Senior Position at HHS

Jon O'Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, issued the following statement today about the appointment of Alexia Kelley to be Director of Faith-based and Community Partnerships at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Alexia Kelley, co-founder and former executive director of the antichoice organization, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG), was today appointed to be Director of Faith-based and Community Partnerships at the Department of Health and Human Services. Ms. Kelley's appointment is a defeat for reason and logic and calls into question whether President Obama's administration is serious about reducing the need for abortion. And, while it may not gain many headlines, the impact and significance of this appointment should not go unnoticed.

"If Ms. Kelley had been appointed to another position in the administration, there might be less reason for concern. However, the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for providing and expanding access to key sexual and reproductive health services. As such, we need those working in HHS to rely on evidence-based methods to reduce the need for abortion. We need them to believe in men and women's capacity to make moral decisions about their own lives. Unfortunately, as seen from her work at CACG, Ms. Kelley does not fit the bill.

"A look into Alexia Kelley's leadership of CACG reveals a vehement antichoice stance that is focused on reducing the number of, not the need for, abortions. In voter's guides the organization Kelley led characterized abortion as akin to war or torture. You can learn more about Catholics in Alliance here .

"From the beginning, Alexia Kelley directed CACG to ignore the question of access to abortion and reframe the debate in terms of reducing the number of abortions-although polls consistently show that the majority of Catholics support abortion rights. This language around reducing the number of abortions should be a huge red flag to anyone who believes in and seeks to defend a woman's right to choose. While evidence-based prevention methods can go a long way towards reducing the need for abortion, some women will always need access to safe and legal abortion and we must recognize that and ensure public policies support that access.

"Alexia Kelley is on record with her support for restrictions on access to abortion, despite her organization's efforts to avoid the question of legalization at every turn. In an audio press conference prior to the 2008 election, Ms. Kelley agreed with other speakers who spoke out in favor of restrictions on abortion, saying, "Catholics in Alliance supports these restrictions as well."

"Under Kelley's leadership, CACG used flawed economic data to support anti-poverty measures as a means to reduce the number of abortions. While such measures are obviously beneficial for many reasons, poverty reduction will not by itself reduce the need for abortion. As Ms. Kelley's group opposed evidence-based prevention methods such as contraception and comprehensive sexuality education, its "abortion reduction" rhetoric is simply a newly packaged antiabortion message.

"Rhetoric around "finding common ground" (or common good, as Ms Kelley would have it) and "reducing the need for abortion" has framed the abortion debate for the past few months. While this rhetoric and subsequent efforts may indeed help to move us past the culture wars over abortion and contraception, it is dangerous when these efforts devolve into an abandonment of ideals. In appointing an antichoice advocate to a key position in HHS we are seeing crucial principles abandoned-principles upon which so many men and women rely to lead healthy lives."

This appointment raises a lot of questions about the role HHS will take in the future on relevant topics such as increasing the availability of Emergency Contraception. While Ms. Kelly's title seems to indicate that her role will be somewhat benign, I think the author is rightly concerned with her involvement in HHS and her ability to influence not only the message HHS sends but also the partnerships they enter into and the organizations they seeks guidance from.

Is this really Choice?

This touches on many topics from our last discussion:

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Abortion Doctor Assasinated

photo of Dr. George Tiller, shot to death this morning at church
Read story here.

Sonia Sotomayor

Matthew Cavanaugh/European Pressphoto Agency

I was excited to hear that Obama's short list for Supreme Court nominees included only women (others included Elena Kagan, Janet Napolitano, and Diane P. Wood) ! Two out of nine is still not great- but a step in the right direction.
2 articles I found helpful on the nominee:
From RH Reality Check: Fair & Balanced:Weighing Sotomayor's Opinions
New York Times bio: Sotomayor, A Trailblazer and a Dreamer

Evidence suggests having daughters makes parents more feminist...

From FiveThirtyEight:

Having Daughters Rather Than Sons Makes You More Liberal

Interesting Excerpts:

The authors' key finding is that support for policies designed to address gender equity is greater among parents with daughters. This result emerges particularly strongly for fathers.

This is very interesting:

By collecting data on the voting records of US congressmen, Washington (2004) is able to go beyond this. She provides persuasive evidence that congressmen with female children tend to vote liberally on reproductive rights issues such as teen access to contraceptives. In a revision, Washington (2008) argues for a wider result, namely, that the congressmen vote more liberally on a range of issues such as working families flexibility and tax-free education.

URBAN BICYCLE ADVENTURE!!!!

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Help women in disaster areas. Cruise Philly on a 2-wheeled adventure.
All levels of riders welcome.

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Defining Male and Female

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Jennifer Finney Boylan writes of switching from being a man to being a woman after marrying a woman. She asks:

Is My Marriage Gay?

Legal scholars can (and have) devoted themselves to the ultimately frustrating task of defining “male” and “female” as entities fixed and unmoving. A better use of their time, however, might be to focus on accepting the elusiveness of gender — and to celebrate it. Whether a marriage like mine is a same-sex marriage or some other kind is hardly the point. What matters is that my spouse and I love each other, and that our legal union has been a good thing — for us, for our children and for our community.

Look how confusing it can get!

A lawyer for the transgendered plaintiff in the Littleton case noted the absurdity of the country’s gender laws as they pertain to marriage: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

don't ask don't tell

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Feminist Novelist Marilyn French Dies

Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Salon remembers French:

On May 2, feminist writer and theorist Marilyn French died at the age of 79. Not someone to shy away from a challenge, French once declared, "My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world."

French, who was born in Brooklyn, NY, first gained notoriety with her 1977 debut novel, "The Women's Room," which follows the character, Mira Ward, an American housewife in the 1950s, on her path to feminist awakening. Although a single line has lingered longest, "All men are rapists, and that's all they are" -- spoken by a character whose daughter has been gang-raped (not by French herself, though it has often been falsely attributed as such) -- The Guardian describes the book's deeper impact: "The novel spoke not just to French's contemporaries but also their daughters, who passed it hand to hand with the same enthusiasm they had shown four years earlier for Erica Jong's upbeat feminist novel, 'Fear of Flying.'"

continue reading

Gloria Steinem talks to the New York Times about "The Women's Room", written by French in 1977:

Gloria Steinem, a close friend, compared the impact of the book on the discussion surrounding women’s rights to the one that Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” had had on racial equality 25 years earlier.

“It was about the lives of women who were supposed to live the lives of their husbands, supposed to marry an identity rather than become one themselves, to live secondary lives,” Ms. Steinem said in an interview Sunday. “It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy.”

continue reading

The Rape Kit Problem

From Kristof's Op-Ed today in the NYT:

Stunningly often, the rape kit isn’t tested at all because it’s not deemed a priority. If it is tested, this happens at such a lackadaisical pace that it may be a year or more before there are results (if expedited, results are technically possible in a week).

So while we have breakthrough DNA technologies to find culprits and exculpate innocent suspects, we aren’t using them properly — and those who work in this field believe the reason is an underlying doubt about the seriousness of some rape cases. In short, this isn’t justice; it’s indifference.

continue reading...

Protest

Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images, for the New York Times

This is very inspiring and moving to see women speak out, even with so much against them:

Afghan Women Protest New Law on Home Life

Nicole Richie...

...has a message about the Congo!

Anyone else wish Seth Rogan would go away?

After cringing and not laughing my way through "Knocked Up," this certainly doesn't surprise me:

Seth Rogan's date (rape) movie

(I realize Seth Rogan doesn't make these movies, but he certainly likes to place himself in the roles).

This Week in The Nation

Zina Saunders for The Nation

The Nation had several articles this week that may interest:

When Culture Trumps Law
More on Brazil and abortion laws and culture

Mad About Michelle
a feminist response to common perceptions of the First Lady (past & present)

Warlord Politics
More information on the ever-complicated conflict(s) in the Dem. Rep. of Congo & Rwanda

Legalized Rape in Afghanistan

AP (Afghan women pray for justice and security of the country during a gathering to mark the International Women's Day in Kabul)

Critics Assail Law that "Legalizes Rape"
from Yahoo News

from the article:

"As long as the husband is not traveling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night," Article 132 of the law says. "Unless the wife is ill or has any kind of illness that intercourse could aggravate, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband."

Guilty Pleasures

In addition to Perez Hilton and Philebrity (and a few 'real news' sources, like NYT and Morning News), I have Jezebel chiseled into the list of blogs I read daily via Google Reader. Today they posted about femicide in the Congo and the link between Western cell-phone addiction and the continuing crisis the nation faces. Though I felt moved and incredibly enriched following the recent WSC Congo teach-in, I also felt positively helpless. So, I'm relieved to see a news outlet with such an expansive and active readership spread the message about the crisis. Hopefully there's more of this to come!