Sen. Campfield, what the fuck did I JUST say about not wanting to write about you any more?

It is becoming more and more clear that Stacey Campfield is the sort of man who should not be in a position of authority over an amoeba, much less any more complex life-forms.  Check out this breathtakingly condescending and ableist response to a constituent of his, who emailed to criticize his recent legislative grandstanding:

Telisha Cobb:  Senator Campfield, I am writing to you today as a mother, active citizen, and born and raised Tennessean.  You are an embarrassment to our great state.  Folks all over the country and here in Tennessee are looking at the bills you are proposing in shock.  They are the most ignorant and morally lacking legislation that could be proposed this year.  It is clear that you are targeting homosexuals and low-income families with hogwash legislation.  You need to search your heart, your values and your Christianity to find a better way to represent us as a whole.  We will do everything in our power to make sure you are not here in 2014.  There are numerous grass roots parties that are making their voices heard.

Stacey Campfield:  You seem to have some serious, deep anger issues.  Have you ever thought about therapy?  I hear they are doing some wonderful things with medications these days.

What.  The.  Unholy.  Fuck.

Her email was simple, direct, dignified, and professional, a simple statement of "This stuff you're doing is Very Not Okay.  Stop it."  And to this, he thought it was acceptable to, in essence, tell her that she's crazy for disagreeing with him and should be medicated until she agrees?

Which is reprehensible in and of itself, but then you get into all the ways that a powerful white man telling a woman (of color?  I would guess so from the pictures I found but I don't know if she identifies as such) that she's "angry" and needs therapy or medications draws on a whole history of pathologizing women's anger and dissent as a major avenue of structural misogyny, and it gets about 100000x uglier.

Kitten, you seem to have forgotten how this whole elected-representative-thing works.  You are not the lord of your own little fiefdom by virtue of having been elected.  You are a representative - that is, you are there to represent the people who elected you.  And if they feel you are doing a poor job of representing them, they have every right in the world to tell you so and demand that you shape the fuck up, because while elected official/voter doesn't quite analogize with an employer/employee situation, it's close enough, and YOU ARE NOT THE EMPLOYER.  You are the worker.  And your bosses are hauling your ass in for a performance review and/or write-up for failure to adequately perform your job duties.  Which makes it absurdly inappropriate to sass them and display this kind of condescendingly rude attitude.  When the people who gave you your job call you on the carpet for wasting company time and resources on being an asshole, you listen up and change your ways, or your ass is out on the curb.

For someone who is an official in a democratic system of government, you have an awful lot of contempt for citizen input, which is one of the core mechanisms by which any sort of democracy operates.  Somehow I'm thinking you'd do better playing God on your own little private island somewhere.  Why don't you go try that instead of trying to play God here the U.S.?

And by the way, Stacey?  Yeah, they are doing some pretty amazing things with medications.  I'm on some of them and they've fucking changed my life.

But I still think you're a reprehensible shitbag with the morals of a bloodsucking insect, and my opinion and anger are in no way invalidated by the medication I take.

Fuck off back to the cesspit you crawled out of, you suppurating anal sore.

That angry enough for you?

MY UTERUS IS SO FUCKING METAL

Conservatives keep finding new ways to surprise and delight/horrify me.  It's pretty impressive, to be honest.  Today's hilaritragic dose of "Excuse me, in which reality do you live?  It sounds like a fascinating place to visit!" comes from Kevin Swanson of Generations Radio, a conservative Christian radio show based out of Colorado Springs:

[S]cientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery [have] compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

A stick-figure comic of a political rally.  One figure in the crowd holds up a large sign reading [citation needed] in the style of Wikipedia's superscript notation of incomplete sources.

DEAD BABY GRAVEYARD WOMB is going to be the name of my death metal band, you guys.  I just can't let a name like that go to waste.  Either that, or the title of my memoirs.  Maybe both.  It sounds like the title of a Dethklok album, doesn't it? 

Nathan Explosion: This is metal... for [dead fetuses].
Skwisgaar Skwigelf: [dead fetuses] don't gots no good music to listen to.
William Murderface: Yeah, it's true.

Props to Mr. Hyperbole for working in the phrase "dead babies" or "little babies" three times in five sentences, I guess.  Repetition, repetition, repetition.  Say it over and over again and people will eventually believe it. 

Congratulations, Kevin Swanson.  Your hard-on for incredibly, absurdly inaccurate "science" and attempts to wring the most emotionally-compelling/viscerally disgusting insults out of it have, like vegangelicals and the "bloodmouths" thing, flopped so hard you've actually created a sweet new term for us to describe just how hardcore and metal our bodies are.

Thanks bro!

Rep. Mike Kelly Thinks No-Copay BC Is Like Pearl Harbor and 9/11

From the "I couldn't make this shit up if I tried" files, via RHRC, this fucking stunner of a quote from Rep. Mike Kelly (R-eprehensible):

"I know in your mind, you can think of the times America was attacked," he said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. "One is Dec. 7, that's Pearl Harbor Day. The other is Sept. 11, and that's the day the terrorists attacked. I want you to remember Aug. 1, 2012, the attack on our religious freedom. That is a day that will live in infamy, along with those other dates."

Day.
That will live.
In infamy.
Like Pearl Harbor
And 9/11
Days when hundreds of people were violently killed
And wars were begun from those attacks that killed thousands more.

The ability of people who have health insurance to access hormonal birth control without paying anything out-of-pocket for it is equivalent to MILITARY ATTACKS THAT STARTED WARS?

Go
Drink
Motor oil
and hydrochloric acid
you miserable
insufferable
PRICK.

I suggest we tell him exactly how we feel about this bullshit.  Drop him an email here (use zip code 16002-3805 to bypass the "only in my district" crap), and this page has the phone and fax numbers for all his offices.  Oh, also here's his Twitter (though it hasn't been used in months, it seems) and his Facebook, where the conversation is rather more lively regarding his absurd remarks.

Fly, my pretties.

The Miter Mafia and HHS, Part II

I didn't title the first part as Part I only because I didn't realize I would be writing a Part II.  The problem is, I wrote my first post about the 5 pages of "summary" at the start of their 21-page whinefest, hit publish...and then I kept reading.  And there is far too much fuckery in there to keep to myself.

This is why you read me: I'm the gift that keeps on giving!

So, my original post was about what I got out of pages 1-5.  Yes.  A whole post about just the first 5 pages.  Now.  Picking up on page 6...

"Indeed, for individuals with a conscientious objection to contraceptive coverage, the ANPRM actually exacerbates the problem.  In its February 10 rule, the Administration proposed to have insurers “offer contraceptive coverage directly to the employer’s plan participants (and their beneficiaries) who desire it."  The ANPRM,however, no longer uses the language of “offer,” which allows for the possibility of acceptance or rejection.  Instead, HHS would now require insurers or third-party administrators simply to “provide this coverage automatically to participants and beneficiaries covered under the organization’s plan (for example, without an application or enrollment process), and protect the privacy of participants and beneficiaries covered under the plan who use contraceptive services.” 

As a result, women will have less freedom, not more.  They will not have the freedom to decline such coverage.  They will not have the freedom to keep their own minor children from being offered “free” and “private” contraceptive services and related “education and counseling” without their consent.  Thus, the mandate now poses a threat to the rights not only of employers, religious and secular, but of parents as well.  It is even proposed that this intervention into the family may be delegated to “private, non-profit organization[s]”potentially including groups such as Planned Parenthood, which may volunteer for the task.

Restriction is Freedom!  Up is Down!  Right is Left!  Making something available without requiring you to A: have prior knowledge that it exists, and B: jump through hoops to get it, is TAKING AWAY OUR FREEDOM, LADIES!  (As usual, the Church refuses to acknowledge cis women who can't get pregnant, trans women, trans men, and everyone else not a fertile cis lady who will use birth control specifically to keep her uterus empty.)

They are being willfully obtuse about the difference between "automatic coverage" and "taking advantage of coverage provided", of course.  Yes, everyone will be automatically covered, but it's not like the insurance companies are going to show up at your doorstep and force packets of the Pill into your hands.  Being covered by this rule is a passive state that doesn't affect you in any way, unless you choose to access these services.  Hell, I'm sure they'd be thrilled if nobody used the coverage, as that means less money spent on providing it.  As I understand Catholic doctrine, the sin is *using* birth control, not simply *having access* to it.  So this objection is purely spurious, not that I expected anything better from the MM's spin machine.

And what is this fuckery about minor children?  We are talking about health plans provided to employees and, in some cases, college students.  All of whom are adults.

If they're talking about the minor children of the employees who may be covered as dependents on their parents' plan, well...again I will point out that it's a passive coverage.  Considering that most kids don't exactly get individual mail notifying them of their coverage under their parents' health insurance, how exactly are they going to know A: that it's covered, and B: even if they know that (which would most likely be because of the giant shit fit the MM is throwing over this rule in the first place), how to go about accessing it?  Again, this is not a situation where PP employees are going to climb through your child's bedroom window and deliver the Pill by the bucketload.  They're kicking up stink over a, while possible, extremely implausible occurrence.

Next up, page 8, where they express their dissatisfaction with the definition of "religious organization" (which we all know they want to mean "any organization with a religious person running it, no matter the purpose and scope of their work or who they serve or hire"):

Reduced to its simplest terms, an organization is “religious,” in the Administration’s view, only if it is insular, while organizations with a missionary or public outreach are deemed insufficiently “religious” to qualify for the exemption.  We are free to worship our God, but not to serve our neighbor.

Bzzzzzzzt!  Thanks for playing, try again never.  This is their usual bullshit of "any restriction in any way of how we do our public service stuff, even if it's for the protection of said public we're "serving", even simply removing government contracts or money from the equation and leaving us to do it on our own, is OPPRESSING OUR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM!"

Y'all are absolutely free to both worship your god and serve your neighbor.  You just can't use worshiping your god as a shield for discrimination in how you serve your neighbor (or how you treat the secular personnel you hire to help you serve your neighbor).  There's a difference.

Okay, now, stop eating and drinking and cover your keyboards, everyone, this next one had me making extremely undignified sounds at my desk.  Page 12, regarding the fact that the insurer would still be providing the objectionable services using premiums the employer paid to them:

One might ask how this is any different from paying salary to an employee who then uses that salary toward purposes the employer believes to be intrinsically evil.  

WHAT DID I TELL YOU?!?!  DID I NOT SAY THEY WOULD MAKE EXACTLY THIS ARGUMENT?!  DID I FUCKING CALL IT OR WHAT?!

Ahem.  What I mean to say is, lol they are making the exact argument I - and probably many other people - fully expected them to fall back on in order to take the next step in exerting religious control over nonreligious people simply because those nonreligious people happen to depend on the religious people for an income to live off of.  They're currently only using it as an analogy for the relationship between the employer and the insurer that provides the "intrinsically evil" care, but that tells us they do believe the two to be equivalent.  So given that, how long before they start applying that argument directly?

Continuing shortly thereafter on page 13, the MM begins making up new "rights" for themselves, as they are so often wont to do...

One can suppress religion not only by making conscientious objectors actively cooperate with what they see as evil, but also by depriving them of the right (a right that others continue to exercise) to support what they see as good.  Those who favor contraceptive coverage will retain the right they have always had as employers to provide a health plan consistent with their values.  Objecting religious organizations will lose that right, because any plan they offer will be amended by others so that the practical outcome for employees is exactly the same as if the organization had no such objection.  

Yeah, that's...really not what's going on here.  Not even a little bit.  Employers do not have any "right" to "provide a health plan consistent with their values".  What they have is a legal obligation to provide a health plan to their employees, without discriminating in that coverage.  Y'all are making this up.  This "right" is pulled *right* (u c wat i did thar?) out of your collective ass.

And you notice, dear readers, that they're not even baww'ing about their precious pennies funding it at this point.  They're just upset because the practical outcome for employees is not within their control.  That they cannot literally force their employees to abide by their moral rules or force them to pay out the ass for the privilege of self-determination to go outside the purview of the church's control.  They are revealing perhaps more than they think they are, when they make this objection.  They've just admitted that no matter what kind of compromise we offer, it will never be okay unless they can completely bar their employees access to family planning of any kind, without regard for the employee's moral rules on the subject.  They really do believe that employing a person entitles you to control over that person, including in extremely personal areas of their life, if it's because "Jesus said so".

They then try to pretzel-logic their way into arguing that there's no point in providing contraceptive services for free like this anyway, because either it's the government trying to "convince" employees of religious organizations to use contraception they weren't already using, or just relieving the financial burden on those who already use them and pay out of pocket for it, in which case the savings that are supposed to go to paying for the coverage, which are intended to come from costs like childbirth and well-baby care that won't be necessary if more people have access to contraception, won't be there to support it.

The Administration’s assumption under Goal 2 [to fund the coverage with savings on birth/well-baby costs] is that the employees of objecting employers were not already using contraceptives.  If, for example, they already were paying for contraceptives with their own financial resources, there would be no reduction in births from making those contraceptives “free.”  (The only thing to which this would “increase access” is whatever the employees will now purchase with the money they no longer spend on contraception—and that could be almost anything.)  Yet in earlier rulemaking, the Administration tried to justify its narrow and discriminatory definition of an exempt “religious employer” by arguing that any broader class of religious organizations probably has many employees who have no objection to contraception and so will not be seriously impacted by the mandate. The Administration faces a dilemma on this point.  Is it trying to change these employees’ reproductive behavior, or not?  That is, does it assume that its policy will chiefly influence employees of religious employers to increase their use of contraception by removing perceived cost barriers, or that it will merely reduce the out-of-pocket cost of contraception for employees who already use it? If the former, it intrudes into the right of employees and their families to take account of the teaching of their faith without undue influence from government.  If the latter, the policy may produce no “savings” that can be applied toward helping to offset the costs of contraceptive coverage, because it is chiefly being applied to people who already accept and use contraceptives anyway. In the very cases where the contraceptive coverage is “free”—that is, where its costs are offset by “savings” in other areas—the Administration would achieve this goal by undermining a far more important freedom.

So they're again taking the very broad stance - you know, the one that can't even remotely be repackaged as being about "religious freedom" - that contraception should not be universally covered at all.

They're also making an extremely flawed assumption - namely, that employees of religious organizations which do not offer contraceptive coverage will be able to afford contraception outside that coverage and will have done so in every case.  Some can.  Some do.  Some are able to access other resources, like Planned Parenthood, which can help them access low-cost contraception.  But it is the height of naivete (and no more than I would expect from a bunch of celibate old cis men pontificating from on high) to assume that anyone in this country who wants contraception will have it with or without insurance to help them pay for it.

Not to mention, that people who manage to make whatever sacrifices in order to be safe from unintended pregnancy (or, y'know, to control any of the half a dozen conditions that hormonal birth control helps with...?), may be giving up almost anything to make that work.  Like better food - or enough food.  Clothes for the kids they already have.  The ability to live in a safer part of town.  The MM made that argument themselves, in the above quote, only they meant it to sound scary - who KNOWS what else those godless fucks might be doing with that money??? - rather than reasonable - who knows what those people might be doing without in order to have this?

And at last, we have reached the end of this coal train of bullshit, finishing on a summary note that reemphasizes their misunderstanding of the terms "health care" and "preventative care" by insisting that contraception is neither, and at the last brings it back to trying to make things about their freedom to impose their will on those around them, while disappearing the freedoms and lives of those most affected by this whole fiasco:

The final rule continues to keep in place a regulation that defines as “preventive health care” drugs, devices, and procedures that render a woman temporarily or permanently infertile, and that may be associated with serious adverse health outcomes.  We believe that this mandate is unjust and unlawful—it is bad health policy, and because it entails an element of government coercion against conscience, it creates a religious freedom problem.  

Similarly to the related issue of abortion, this problem comes down to a fundamental clash of freedoms: when the freedoms and rights of two different entities are in mutual opposition to one another, something has to give.  Someone has to come out on top.  Someone has to have the 51%, the tie-breaker vote.  And as usual, the Miter Mafia would see the individual freedom and lives of people with uteruses subsumed to the will of the Church.

Fuck.  These.  Assholes.  I cannot say this clearly enough.  The Miter Mafia is worming its way further and further into the lawmaking and regulation activities of an explicitly secular government which governs a population comprising many different faiths and often, no faith at all.

THIS IS NOT OKAY.

And I can only hope that the Obama administration and HSS have the spine to stand up to them and tell them exactly where they can shove their notions of Catholic moral supremacy.

Q.Q Harder, Miter Mafia. Your Tears Are Delicious.

Or, How Many Condescending and Belittling Synonyms for "complain" Do I Have In My Vocabulary?*

The Miter Mafia (which is what I'll be using to refer to the Catholic hierarchy from now on, to distinguish between my ire at the Church as a sociopolitical corporation as opposed to blaming the Catholic faithful as a whole) has submitted 21 pages (PDF) of crying about the fact that the government wants to make contraception available to people who want it, to the HHS's official notice of rule change regarding the the "contraception compromise".  Remember, the shitty insurance-company workaround the Obama administration offered to salve the Miter Mafia's hurt fee-fees when they threw their shit fit and held whole cis-male-only Congressional panels to discuss how the idea of people being able to access low-cost or free contraception was making their boners very sad?

Basically, they're still whining about the fact that contraception was not completely removed from the list of mandated preventative services.  (They also include "education and counseling" as part of contraceptive services.  So not only do they want to deny us access to ways to control our fertility, they want to keep us completely in the dark about the fact that said options exist and how they work!)

Failing that, they're stomping their little feetses because the exemption criteria weren't reworked to their specifications.  (Never has there been an organization in this world with more hubris than the Miter Mafia, truly.  In a country with an explicit separation of church and state, where you are far from the only religious organization, what on earth could possibly make you think you get to be the one to dictate the terms of exemption or inclusion from religiously-referential regulations??)  They believe that restricting the exemption to religious organizations is too narrow.  They want any person, or organization headed by a person, who believes that birth control is dirtybadwrong to be able to deny their employees coverage for it.  This is, of course, perfectly in line with their ongoing attempts to widen "conscience clause" protections to an absurd extreme such that bus drivers can refuse to continue their route if they believe a passenger is going to an abortion clinic, nurses can refuse to interact in any way with abortion patients even for mundane things like processing paperwork or checking vitals after the fact, and pharmacists can deny medication to stop bleeding if they think it's because the person had an abortion: they really do believe that nobody should ever have to do anything even tenuously connected with Teh Badz (abortion and b/c), even if that thing is extremely indirect AND within the bounds of something they have consciously chosen to do.  Like, say, being a pharmacist, or a nurse, or a bus driver, or owning/running a company that employs people who may or may not share your beliefs.

And then there's the pouting that the compromise is just Not Good Enough Anyway So You Should Just Rescind The Rule Completely, because it still allows employees to access contraception, even in a way that bypasses the employer, because the employer-provided insurance plan acts as the "conduit" by which access is gained, and thus the employer is tainted by association or some bullshit like that.

It is literally not enough, and will literally never be enough, for them, until they are able to make completely certain that every single person who needs contraceptive services has to go to completely independent third-party agencies for it, and pay full price out of pocket.  And I would not be particularly surprised if they argued against even that, on the basis that the out-of-pocket cost was paid out of wages earned from an employer, so the employer should be able to veto an employee's decision to use their money that way if that employer doesn't want their wages to go to such things.

And of course, they want to force us all to rely on third-party services and pay out-of-pocket while we're still in the middle of a recession, as they oversee giant cuts and defunding efforts to the sorts of places that offer that kind of care.

This is nothing more nor less than an attempt to forcibly impose their moral beliefs on contraception on the entire country, with a series of targeted workarounds that don't directly challenge established law and precedent, but which would have the effect they want anyway.  (Sound familiar?)  Restrict access to contraception on employer-provided health plans --> Expand conscience protections so any employer anywhere for any reason can choose to bar access --> Defund the organizations that help subsidize those (expensive) costs for those who don't have money to burn --> Millions of people completely unable to access contraception and therefore forced to live by the moral dictates of a religion they may or may not subscribe to which teaches that all contraception is bad --> Continue/increase the Church's immense power over the secular world and nonbelievers --> Profit!

(Oh and for bonus fuckery points they describe birth control as "not health care" because it "[disrupts] the healthy functioning of the human reproductive system".  So if you're not conceiving, it ain't healthy.  MOAR BABIES FOR EVERYONE!  I wonder how they can describe as "healthy functioning" the pregnancies that endanger people's lives?)

What Rush Has *Not* Apologized For - And It's Not What You Think

It's all over the everywhere, this Rush controversy, sweeping up even those people who hadn't ever paid much attention to his outrageous racism and sexism before.*  And in an unusual twist for these sorts of situations, Rush's "apology" to Ms. Fluke has actually been seen and shown for the total non-apology that it is.  Which is pretty cool.

But most of the criticism I'm seeing about his nonpology is that he apologized "for the words" but not the sentiment, and/or that he called them "poorly chosen" even though he repeated the statement several times over the course of a few days, which rather gives the lie to any protestation that they were chosen in haste and he just hadn't thought it through, oops.  Which are absolutely valid criticisms of his piss-poor half-assed attempt to shut his critics up "apology", by all means.

What I haven't seen much of, on the other hand, are the aspects of the whole controversy and subsequent nonpology that I actually found to be far more insulting, infuriating, and offensive than the slut/prostitute/poor word choice bit.

Firstly, everyone is talking about the fact that he apologized very specifically for those two words.  Nobody seems to have mentioned his complete lack of an apology for the demand for a sex tape, as if having a hand in subsidizing someone's birth control (no matter how far removed - it's not like you pay your taxes by handing over $50 to the pharmacist and then hand the bag of contraceptives to the person taking them) entitles one to turn them into a porn star against their will.  Honestly, of the two parts of his horrible spew of misogyny, I found Rush's demand for a sex tape posted on the internet to be far more offensive, far cruder and far more vitriolic than calling Ms. Fluke a slut and a prostitute, because of the way it framed and highlighted the "women's sexuality as public property" trope that is foundational to rape culture.  Where is the apology for that?  Where is the outrage that he hasn't apologized for it?

Secondly, I have seen surprisingly little commentary** that repudiates his assertion that he, as a taxpayer, was paying for Ms. Fluke's contraceptive medication in the first place, the premise on which his testerical little rant was based.  Because it's flat out bullshit - bullshit that he actually reiterates in his nonpology, no less!  "I personally do not agree that American citizens should pay for these social activities. What happened to personal responsibility and accountability?"  Except that Fluke's testimony was not even remotely about being on taxpayer-subsidized insurance like Medicaid or any such assistance program that would mean taxpayer funds buying her contraceptives.  It was about private insurance that she and other students were paying into through their fees to the university.  That's their money, and the organization's money, not taxpayer money!  So his whole premise for demanding she produce porn for his enjoyment, as punishment for the audacity to want to protect herself from pregnancy***, was fallacious from the first word onward.

I'm glad Rush is finally getting the backlash he has so richly deserved for so long.  I'm frustrated that it took this long, that it only finally happened when he called a white woman a prostitute and not, say, when he called the First Lady of the United States "uppity", and that even in this backlash many people are allowing a goodly chunk of his true fuckery to go unacknowledged and unexamined.  So please, I am asking everyone who reads this: the next time you get into a conversation with someone - or an argument, or a screaming match, whatever, I'm not picky - about this, please, don't just argue that it was wrong to call Fluke a slut and a prostitute.  Remember that those words are only about a third of the real problem here, and bring these other issues to light for other people as well.

*Which says a lot about our priorities, as a country and in particular the media's priorities in never really covering his more outrageous racist attacks, often against women of color, up to and including the First Lady (calling her "uppity", speculating on her "authentic slave blood", etc), enough to ever provoke this kind of backlash.


**Lol.  So pretty much as soon as I finish writing this and hit queue to publish it tomorrow, I come across this on my tumblr dashboard.  Okay, so not everyone is letting him get away with the lie within the lie, which is good - but I've been following this since it broke, and this is literally the first I've seen of someone calling it out, so.  I still stand by my assertion that there's very little commentary calling out that aspect of it.


***Her testimony wasn't even about using birth control for contraceptive purposes, anyway - nor was it even specifically about her own experiences needing contraception.  It was a compilation of stories of other women she'd spoken to, about using it to control PCOS and other medical conditions that have nothing to do with having sex and not getting pregnant.  Moar fallacies!  Moar lies!  Bullshit for everyone!

South Dakota Requires Doctors Be Psychic, Divine Patient's Future Before Providing Abortion Services

Not quite - not yet, anyway - but that's pretty much where they're going.  (And I wanted to have fun with an Onion-style headline, so nyah.)

Remember that terrible South Dakota law, which was injunctioned (can that be a verb?) almost as soon as it passed, that required people seeking abortions to receive biased "counseling" from unlicensed pseudo-clinics renowned for their lies, misinformation, and manipulative tactics?

Well, they're amending it this session, and there's slightly-less-worse news, and ridiculous news.

The slightly-less-worse is that they're implementing a requirement that the counselors people will be forced to see at crisis pregnancy centers be licensed.  So at the very least, it won't just be a random volunteer spending an hour telling the pregnant person they're going to Hell and they need to go live with a good Christian family and give their baby up for adoption.  It'll be a licensed counselor condescending to and shaming them for choosing not to continue their pregnancy!  Isn't that much better?

The flat-out ridiculous is the whole new section on pre-abortion physician counseling.  The pregnant person must have a consultation appointment with the doctor who will be doing the abortion, and the doctor must, according to the new amendment to the law, probe into their religious beliefs and personal views, their mental health conditions, and precisely how difficult they found the decision to abort, in order to create a profile of "risk factors for adverse psychological reaction" (one of which is simply "being under the age of 22", for bonus age discrimination points).  Maybe it's just me, but I really don't expect to have to explain my theosophy on the universe when I go to the doctor to access a medical procedure, you know?  The whole thing sets up a nearly-impossible standard of attitude and history for people seeking abortions to meet.  Now, not only do you need to be pregnant and not want to be, and also receive counseling, you need to disclose your religious beliefs, and convince your doctor that it was totally an easy decision, in order to "qualify".

Oh, and all this information?  Goes on a form that is to be entered into the person's permanent medical record.  Cause I know I totally want details on my religion and decision-making process to be part of my medical records.  That's absolutely where it all belongs.  Right?

It's like South Dakota is taking the usual paternalism of anti-choice ideology and turning it up to 11.  Now your doctor is supposed to discourage you from getting an abortion, if you so much as found the decision hard to make.  Have these people ever lived?  Because life is full of difficult decisions, and a decision being a hard one to make doesn't necessarily make it wrong.  Why is it so impossible to treat pregnant people as though they are capable of making their own decisions without the intervention of multiple people pointing out every possible downfall and flaw of what they've chosen to do?  You cannot swaddle and coddle people from every possible consequence of their choices, and for a party that regularly decries "nanny-state"-ism, this is the absolute epitome of that kind of intrusive "caretaking" from the government.

Or in other words, it is the ultimate in concern-trolling.  "Here, let's make absolutely certain you're not in any way ever going to regret this, by putting eight billion onerous burdens on you and making you jump through a dozen hoops at every turn, just to make sure you've really thought about it and are really, really, really, really, really, really, really sure that this is what you want."

Hence why I said, in the title, that it won't be long before the GOP is trying to demand that doctors peer into the future and know for sure that an abortion won't in any way negatively impact the pregnant person's life, before providing services to them.  Because gods forbid people be free to make their own mistakes or hard choices, if those mistakes or hard choices include exercising control over their reproductive lives.  That just wouldn't be Freedom.

More Fun With We The People

Call me a glutton for punishment, but I do still occasionally sign petitions on the White House's We The People site - mostly for the frustratainment* value when I get silly non-responses like these:

On a petition calling on the White House to support changing the national motto back from "In God We Trust" to E Pluribus Unum (which was the de facto motto prior to the 1950's, McCarthyism, and Godless Commies as the Face of Evil), in order to promote actual inclusivity of all Americans over monotheistic-deistic-religious-supremacy:  "Lol shut up we only mention nonbelievers in speeches as a token acknowledgment, we aren't actually going to do anything to reflect that you are also Americans and that a religious motto referring to capital-G singular God might not represent the actual breadth of belief/non-belief in this country.  Hurrah for religion in the public square!"

On a petition calling on the IRS to reconsider automatic tax-exempt status for churches: "Lalala we can't hear you we like churches the end."

On a petition asking the White House to officially recognize the Occupy movement and acknowledge their grievances against corporate greed as legitimate: "Yeah whatever Obama mentioned you dirty hippies in a press conference, what more do you want?  BTW banks and financial sector are our BFFs and we made a video for you that helps spin our pandering to Wall Street more effectively."

On a petition against the overreaching "anti-piracy" internet suppression bills: "We have to protect the rights and innovations of businesses!  Individuals?  What are those?  Bipartisan!  All sides!  If you have a better idea, why don't you fix it yourself?"

Oh, Obama Administration.  Never change, you status-quo-loving bipartisan-browbeater you.  (Only kidding!  Please, dear gods, CHANGE.  Stop running the government you wish you had and start dealing with the realities of the government you do have!  Actually stand up for actual progressives!  Stop pandering to people who will never vote for you!)

Question for the audience:  Is there enough lol in the lolsobbiness to keep signing petitions and posting responses?  Or am I the only one finding these funny and I should stop boring you with them?  Yay, an excuse to play around with polls!

Should I keep signing petitions on We The People and reporting the results?

And if you ever want to bring a petition to my attention, please, feel free to email me (address in the sidebar) or @ me on Twitter, @WitchWords.

*As in, it would be frustrating, if I were taking it seriously/expecting actual progress from it.  But now that I've written it off as meaningless bread-and-circuses sideshow, it becomes entertaining in a lolsobby sort of way.

On "We the People" and Token Participation

We the People, the White House's new website dedicated to "[providing] a new way to petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country," has been around long enough now to actually send out responses to many of the initial petitions set up on the site - 26 official responses have been uploaded to the site and emailed to the signers of the petitions they were replying to. 

And they have, to a one, been useless, campaign-speak restatements of the Administration's official positions on the issues the petitions covered.  Not a single one has actually offered commitment to action.  All they have done is reaffirm the Administration's positions on things and offer detailed justification for why they hold the positions they hold.

For example, the response to the petitions which asked for removal of the phrase "In God We Trust" from the currency and removal of "Under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, we (I had signed both of these, go figure) received a patronizing restatement of the Obama campaign's usual "God is in the mix" platitudes, echoing right-wing talking points about how such "generic" (HA!) references to religion are simply recognizing the "important role religion plays" in this country and therefore, fuck you, we don't really care what you think.  The petition to retain 6-day mail delivery from the USPS received an in-depth explanation (and possibly spin job, I don't know this issue well enough to gauge the accuracy of the statements they make), titled "A Balanced Approach to Reforming the Postal Service" (oh, goody, more artificial "balance", gods know we don't get enough of that in the President's usual speeches), of how insolvent the USPS apparently is and exactly how they'll be transitioning down to 5-day delivery in 2013, because fuck you, we don't really care what you think.  And just a few days ago I received by email the Administration's response to a petition to abolish the TSA and spend their budget on homeland security measures that *actually work*, citing their 70% undercover-test failure rate and its Constitutional abuses of American citizens; it was a long, useless bullet-pointed list that could be summarized as, in essence, "BUT THE TERRORISTS WOULD WIN!", because fuck your Constitutional rights, we don't care what you think.  Check out the "responses" page for more useless replies (each links back to its originating petition(s) at the bottom of the response as well) if you want to have some frustrating fun with it.

Allow me to go on a personal tangent here.  For about five months while I was living in Tennessee, my then-girlfriend got me a job working with her at an inbound call center.  It was a shitty job, but the reason this silliness with the We the People site is bringing it to mind is because it absolutely epitomized the cold, sanitized, vaguely-ironic feeling of Corporate Cares (or rather, wants its automatons to think it cares) so well.  There was the monthly "employee appreciation day" for those of us in the call center, which you would think was a nice thing, right?  Except it consisted of the designated HR drone pushing a cart up and down the aisles of cubicles, giving each of us some cheap plastic trinket - keychains or some other nonsense - and allowing us to pick a piece of candy from the bowl on the cart.  We all rolled our eyes about it, and one day she - who was studying industrial-organizational psychology in college at the time, and who would often explain to me the principles of her classes as applied to our shared workplace - explained to me how shitty token rewards like that, as opposed to gaining even a meager token amount of loyalty from the employees in return, actually do more harm than good.  Because calling something a "reward" or "bonus", then having the reward in question be something painfully token, is not only insufficient as a reward, it's insulting, because it's basically rubbing their nose in how little you think of them. 

The We the People website?  Is a cheap mass-produced plastic sandal on a keyring and a stale miniature Twix.  It makes grand claims and promises about the First Amendment and the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances, saying "We created We the People because we want to hear from you."  But when you actually try to participate, they send you away with a patronizing pat on the head and a "There, there, dear, run along now." Which is worse than if they'd never made the offer of petitioning and being heard, offering us a reward that turns out to be no reward at all.

I'm not the only one who's noticed, either.  One of the newest petitions on the site is a petition to "Remove the word "petition" from this website as it is misleading and untruthful. Instead, use, "Request an Explanation."" 

If you happen to be in the US, I highly recommend signing it.  We all know what the response will be, but I think it would be deliciously meta to have their "response" to this particular "petition" be yet another explanation.

Women for Obama? Not This Woman.

Apparently the campaign season has reached the point where it's time to start specific outreach, for I had an email land in my inbox last week that frankly took my breath away with its audacity:

As I have traveled across the country, I have had the privilege of meeting incredible women from all walks of life. From young women paying their own way through college, to moms working the extra shift to keep food on the table, to women struggling to make ends meet during retirement.

We talk about their bills, their children -- how they're constantly striving to strike that balance between work and family. And no matter what kind of challenges they're facing, they don't complain. They just work harder.

This is what we do as women. We persevere. Because no matter our ages, backgrounds, or stations in life, we are determined to leave a better world for our children and give them opportunities we never even dreamed of.

Women have always been the heart of the Obama organization. We make up nearly half of the American workforce and are the majority of students in America's colleges and universities. We're the primary caregivers for our children and seniors. We're the heads of households and workplaces across the country.

And right now, it's time for us all to dig deep, step up, and keep building this campaign together: person by person, discussion by discussion.

Today, we are officially launching Women for Obama -- and I am incredibly honored to be serving as its chair. This is a special group dedicated to growing this campaign from the ground up. Because we know better than anyone that movements for real and lasting change have got to start at the grassroots -- and they're sustained by the relationships we develop with one another. Together, that's what we're going to do -- build relationships with supporters, new and old, and grow this campaign -- one woman at a time.

I wanted to ask you myself if you'll sign on to join us.

The stories of the incredible women I meet serve as a constant reminder of why we're all here: because American families all around the country are facing very real problems. They're balancing mortgage payments and utilities bills with full-time jobs and raising children. They're struggling to make ends meet while still trying to put money aside to send their kids to college one day.

Barack understands these issues because he's lived them. He was raised by a single mother who struggled to put herself through school and pay the bills. When she needed help, Barack's grandmother stepped in, waking up every morning before dawn to take a bus to her job at a bank. And even though she worked hard and was good at what she did, she ultimately hit a glass ceiling and was passed over for promotions time and again because she was a woman.

So Barack knows what it means when a family struggles. He knows what it means when someone doesn't have a chance to fulfill their potential. And today, as a father, he knows what it means to want your daughters to grow up with no limits on their dreams.

That's why, since taking office, he's worked tirelessly to make sure every child and every family gets a fair shake.

The historic health reform he passed is making sure every American family gets the quality and affordable care they need to stay healthy. The crucial investments he's made in our students and workers -- raising the standards in our public schools and building out job-training programs at community colleges -- are investments in our country's economic future. And the very first bill he signed into law -- the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act -- will help make it easier for women to get equal pay for equal work, because he knows that women's success in this economy is the key to families' success in this economy.

But we have so much more to do. And, as women and supporters of this campaign, we need to keep showing up -- and we need to keep fighting the good fight.

So I'm asking you to join me, and women all across the country who support this movement. I'm asking you to say you're ready to work.

Join Women for Obama, and help us grow this organization:

http://my.barackobama.com/Women-for-Obama

Thank you for being a part of this,

Michelle

How. DARE. You.  An administration that has used my rights as a bargaining chip, willingly trading away protections for the most vulnerable among us in order to pander to Blue Dog Democrats, and stood silently by, watching, without so much as a quiet cough of discomfort or awkwardness as a tidal wave of anti-choice legislation swept this country, now wants to approach me as a woman and ask me to sign on to campaign for them?

With all due respect, y'all can go fuck yourselves with something spiky.

This whole letter rubs me the wrong way, from the sisterhood-y tone to the "that's what women do, persevere (but without complaining because to be a woman is to work and be silent and consigned to the shadows while your labor keeps everyone going apparently)" to centering the message about "FOR THE CHILDREN BECAUSE ALL WOMEN ARE MOTHERS OR AT THE VERY LEAST MATERNALLY-INCLINED TO PROTECT TEH PRESHUS CHILDRENZ".

Pointing to the Lily Ledbetter Act wins you no points, given that it's been said by those involved that it was pretty much a done deal already before Obama took office, and it doesn't even do what the administration is always claiming it does, and yet it's always proudly trotted out as the main show pony in these appeals to women as a voting bloc.  Help for students is good, definitely, and there will be women among those students benefiting, but the tone of it has that FOR THE CHILDRENZ feel that's really turning me off about all this.  And touting the health care insurance reform, in which the administration started in the middle and compromised to the right, including ceding ground on the issue of federal funding for abortions for people on Medicaid by issuing an executive order reinforcing the Hyde Amendment to appease DINOs in exchange for their votes on the legislation, in a letter appealing to women to throw their support to the administration's campaigns, is a whole new level of audacity. 

We're talking about a President who has repeatedly deliberately used right-wing framing in talking about reproductive choice, whose Equality Day Proclamation had not even the tiniest mention of reproductive freedom, who traded away poor women's reproductive freedom in order to get his precious health care insurance reform, who staffed his administration with known misogynist fuckwits, whose PR rep couldn't even manage a simple statement on the Republican war on women at the state level without epic mansplaining and dancing around the topic, who even when his administration does actually work to protect freedom of choice remains absolutely silent about it as if wanting to keep things hushed up, and who is even now openly considering caving to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and allowing them to discriminate against women in their employ at Catholic hospitals and schools the nation over because they've got their shorts in a wad about "insufficient" conscience protections that will require that the insurance they offer to employees cover contraception care among other preventative services.*

And after all of this, you have the unmitigated temerity to appeal to me not simply as a voter, but specifically as a woman?  

I do not even remotely begin to have enough middle fingers with which to salute in response.

When y'all are ready to actually stand with us beyond LILLYLEDBETTERLILLYLEDBETTERLILLYLEDBETTER, let me know and we'll talk.  Until then, keep your patronizing schtick to yourselves.

*I realize the bulk of my links in this paragraph all go to various posts on the same blog; I also realize that some people will take that to mean I didn't have any other sources and can be disregarded on these claims.  I use these links for three reasons: one, because I know the blog and its tags well enough that I could find the information I was after fairly quickly; two, because all the posts are well-written and well-sourced with further links you can read for more information; and three, because I love Shakesville and am always happy to send people over there.  Please don't mistake this choice for a lack of supporting data elsewhere, I simply pull from the places I know well and have access to.

"Just"...Stop.

"Just have it and give it up for adoption."  Because pregnancy and childbirth are totally safe and easy and free of cost, and don't totally change your body and life forever no matter what happens to the child after you give birth, right?

"Just stop taking everything so personally/expecting perfection from yourself/thinking about things so much."  I wish I could, but see, I have this brain that kinda doesn't let me stop doing those things.  What, you think I *like* being obsessively miserable and hating myself for every tiny failure in my entire lifetime?  Does that sound like fun to you or something?

"Just eat healthier and exercise more."  I've never thought of that before!  How incredibly simple!  Except that I can't afford much produce, don't like or know how to cook more than the couple meals I eat all the time, can't force myself to enjoy vegetables despite trying and trying, and dislike the taste of water.  Oh, also I have chronic back problems and low energy and am cripplingly self-conscious about exercising in front of other people, so any exercise I have to do has to be low-to-no-impact, easy, and something I can do in my house while my partner is at work, without boring the crap out of me.

JUST: (adv.) merely, simply.

I hate this word.  It minimizes.  It trivializes.  "Just" do this, or that.  It tells me the person speaking thinks the action should be easy.  It ignores circumstances and individual capabilities in favor of a normative narrative of what "everyone" should be able to do.  It also implies a moral judgment - the speaker obviously believes the course of action is not only easy, by their own arbitrary standards (usually heavily influenced by society's standards, of course), but the *right* thing to do.  It erases conflicting emotions and tells you the choice should be easy, and therefore being conflicted about it is wrong.  It invalidates peoples' feelings and experiences. 

From a stranger or ideological opponent, it's sneering, condescending.  From a loved one, it's even more damaging, a slap in the face.  It is the worst word, a metric fuckton of condescension, patronization, minimization, trivialization, all wrapped up in four innocent letters.

So please.  If you are ever tempted to 'splain someone's situation and the course of action you think they should take by saying "just do X", DON'T.  No matter how obvious the solution seems to you.  Just don't.  Step back, think about why they might not have done that yet, and find a way to offer advice - IF they asked for it in the first place, which in my experience the object of this unfortunate phrase usually didn't - that doesn't imply that the person is stupid for how they've handled themselves and their situation so far.  Respect their decisionmaking process.  Try giving them the benefit of the doubt - try assuming that they *do* know what they're doing, and that they *do* have reasons for handling things the way they have. 

But for the love of all that was, is, and ever will be..."Just" stop.

Feel free to add and vent about other "just" experiences you've had to deal with in comments.

Phobia != Bigotry

You may have noticed that my posts of late do not use the terms homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, etc. anymore*.  Basically, I was informed that terms using the -phobia suffix, despite being in wide popular use, conflate mental illness with bigotry and violence, give inappropriate credibility to the "gay panic" or "trans panic" defenses when straight/cis people commit violence against queer/trans people, and, much like calling Glenn Beck or Michele Bachmann "crazy", smear people with actual phobias by appropriating their disability to describe despicable attitudes and people.

Terms like heterosexism (replacing homophobia), cissexism (replacing transphobia), monosexism (replacing biphobia), and Islamobigotry/anti-Islam bigotry (replacing Islamophobia), aren't all that hard to introduce to one's lexicon and convert to general use.  Certainly no harder than learning not to use "lame", or "crazy", or other ableist slurs.  I like them additionally because they put the focus back on the dominant/oppressive side of the dichotomy by clearly noting who the problem is right there in the word.

But even if all the other reasons were wrong**, it would still be better to change from -phobia language, because it makes it a lot harder for asshats to pull shit like this.

For many people “homophobia” is actually about “having a fear of being accused of being bigoted, prejudiced or discriminating against homosexual people”. This fear, which is increasingly common, causes people to take a defensive posture in order to avoid attracting disapproval or adverse publicity. ... For people who don’t hate, dislike or fear gay people, but simply believe that sex between people who are not married (including all sex between those of the same sex) is morally wrong, we need a new term. I’d like to propose the term “homoskeptic” - a term that is not yet in common use and hence arguably open to (re)definition.

Using -phobia language leaves a nice little loophole for the bigots to exploit.  They can say "I don't fear gay people!" and thus deflect critique off into speculation of their *real* feelings about teh gayz, diverting attention from the oppression and bigotry they're perpetuating. It allows this jackass to turn the fear-connotation of using -phobia around and twist it into the Good Christian's fear of The Gay Mafia and their notorious jackbooted enforcers.  It lets him pose bigots as the victim and their ideology as reasonable, not a phobia, but simply skepticism, which is a healthy quality, right?

But the last lol came from a comment to the post on NOM's blog, by commenter Anonygrl:

I would like to suggest that people who don't hate or fear African Americans but simply think that they are morally inferior should be called afroskeptics. And people who don't hate or fear women but think that they just shouldn't get paid the same as men or have control of their own bodies should be gynoskeptics.
No matter what you call yourselves, if you are doing so to justify denying rights to another group (and that is what you are doing with homosexuals) then the correct term you should be using is bigot.

Word.

*If you have seen me slip up in this, please do let me know, either in comments or via email, and I will change it.
**However, they are not wrong, and this will not be up for debate here.  Additional commentary on the harms of -phobia language may be found here and here if you want or need further reading on the subject.

Your Rights End Where Mine Begin

How is this a difficult concept to grasp?  I would think it would be pretty simple.  Your right to do something ends where my right not to have my life interfered with in some way begins.

But apparently this guy doesn't get the idea.  This preacher went to a local DMV in a town in Southern California one morning before it opened, and began reading the Bible and preaching to the people standing in line waiting for the office to open.  After being asked to stop by a security guard and refusing, he, and the two elders of his church who had come with him, were arrested for trespassing and interfering with a public business.  (Personally, I think he should have been cited for public nuisance, but that's just me.)

Cue, of course, the whining of the Poor! Persecuted! Christians! about how the ebil gub'mint is coming for their Bibles and soon it will be illegal to be Christian in this country.  One of the linked articles is headlined, not kidding, "Christians Arrested for Reading the Bible in Public".  Which, while technically factually correct, conveys rather a different message than what actually happened, which was that they were arrested for proselytizing, at a captive audience, on government property.

It gets better, of course.  In the end, the three jackasses weren't actually charged, and now they're suing the state for infringement on their religious freedom and free speech rights!

What is this I don't even.  Look, dudes, your right to free speech and freedom of religion does not include the right to harass people waiting in line at the goddamn DMV.  That's just not how it fucking works.  And no, as one of the linked bloggers claimed, the people in line couldn't "just" go away and come back when it opened.  Have you been to a California DMV lately?  If you don't have an appointment and you arrive after it opens, expect to wait at least an hour before you even TALK to anyone, and gods help you if there are more forms to fill out, because yes, they will make you wait through the line AGAIN to bring the forms back up (unless you get a really nice DMV person; they're out there, they really are.  Sometimes.).  So the only way to get in and out quickly, if you wanted to do anything else with your day or if you have an appointment or have to work later, is to get there at least half an hour before they open and wait in the pre-opening line.  It's completely unfair to force people to choose between coming back later and thus spending twice as long at the DMV, and listening to you force your religion on them. 

Your right to share your religion ends where their right to do business with the DMV without suffering religious harassment begins.  Because that's what public preaching to a captive audience is: religious harassment.  You give them no choice in whether to listen to you or not - that being the definition of a captive audience - and force them to listen to your religious dogma, which they may or may not share.  That is not what is meant by either "freedom of religion" or "freedom of speech".  You are absolutely, completely and totally making up out of whole cloth this imagined "right" to proselytize in this manner.  It does not exist.  Period the end.

(I can't decide if my lolsob is more lol or more sob at this; referring to captive audiences as "organic congregations" is just...just...words fail me.  Fuck, I hope that was supposed to be a joke...)

Damn Indigenous People, Wanting Their Stuff Back!

Time for another round of Privileged People in Comments on the Internet!

A museum in Rouen, France is giving back some Maori skulls to be returned to New Zealand and buried.  The giving back of indigenous peoples' stolen shit - especially human remains, bunch of grave-robbing fucks that European colonial powers so often were - is to be commended.

However, in comments there's a ridiculous "debate" going on about under what circumstances things should be returned to the cultures from which they were stolen, with an extremely strong "How dare they try to take back what we rightfully stole?" vibe going on. Several commenters were happy to 'splain how we can give the occasional skull or body back for reburial without having to give back the rest of their stuff:

I'm thinking the best compromise would be for France to rewrite their policy on returning artifacts to differentiate between human remains and other artifacts. ... That would let people honor their dead ancestors and treat/bury their remains respectfully without emptying France's museums and research collections.

Um, why should we be against the emptying of France's museums of stolen artifacts?  Because the museums have some kind of *right* to the artifacts of other cultures stolen during imperialist expansions, so long as they're not human remains?  Fuck that noise.  I get that the point of museums is to allow ordinary people to have exposure to cultures and experiences beyond their everyday reach.  But you know?  Technology is a very cool thing.  We can make reproductions, have multimedia presentations, all kinds of interesting ways we can give people the experience of a thing from another culture, without having to have the actual stolen item in question there for people to look at. 

Maybe a better compromise would be that human remains would be "loaned" back to their native nations under the conditions that they be buried in keeping with the traditional burial rites either of the dead's era or of the current norm for what would likely be their descendants and if the conditions weren't met (the bodies weren't reburied promptly or properly or maintained inadequately) then France would be able to claim them back. That would make it so that people that felt like their ancestors were being denied a proper burial or their culture was being disrespected by the remains being displayed would be able to be pleased, but the nations that just wanted money makers for their own museums and specimens for their own researchers wouldn't be encouraged to take back remains. [emphasis mine]

Oh the horror!  Those selfish cultures, wanting to be the ones to make money off the display of their own artifacts!  The only thing worse than that, of course, is researchers wanting to be able to study their own ancient cultures!  Apparently, if you are a formerly-colonized culture who had a bunch of your history stolen by zealous white archaeologists, the ONLY ACCEPTABLE REASON to want those things back is for reburial.  Otherwise, France (and other colonial powers) is perfectly entitled to profit from and perform research studies on the things they rightfully stole, and to want those tourism dollars for your own economy is just selfish.

If we can teach children not to take things that aren't theirs, and tell them to give things back if they do succumb to temptation...why can't we act on these morals as adults, when it comes to the ancient treasures of whole other cultures? 

A Tale of Two Conversations

I was thinking about stuff this morning, and thought I'd share.  Enjoy.

It was about two years ago, when I was first coming to anti-disablism activism - albeit only in the most minor of language-based ways - that I decided to stop using "lame" as a pejorative.  After a month or two, it felt natural, and I'd begun to develop the instinctive flinch response to hearing other people use it like I had already had with terms like "retard" or "bitch" or the n-word.  It was around that time that two conversations took place.

Conversation A was with a young (20 at the time), cis, white, hetero, currently-able-bodied man I know.  We were hanging out, and talking about something - probably politics, knowing us - and he said something like "Ugh, that's so lame."  I flinched, and decided to speak up.  "You know that's kind of offensive, right?" I asked.  "Could you please not say that around me?"  He looked at me, clearly startled and affronted by my implying that he was doing something Wrong.  "No it's not," he replied.  I blinked a couple of times.  Um, I'm the one who actually studies and reads about and writes about and lives immersed in various kinds of anti-_ism activism, so who is he to be correcting me about something like that? I thought.  Silly me, I should have known the answer was "a Very Privileged Dude", duh.  But I argued back.  "Yes, it is.  It's like using "that's so gay", which I know you've stopped doing because it's wrong.  Same kind of thing.  Saying "that's lame" is prejudice against disabled people the same way as "that's gay" is prejudice against queer people."  And he argued back, too.  "No, it's not!  It's not the same thing at all."  And on it went, both of us getting quite loud and impassioned, I insisting that dammit you should probably be listening to someone who actually works with -ism stuff, please, and he insisting that he wasn't being -ist at all and I was just being oversensitive.  I finally dropped it, he still uses the word to this day, and I just quietly flinch and let it pass.

Conversation B was with another young (25 at the time), cis, white, hetero, currently-able-bodied man I know.  As we were driving somewhere one day, he sympathized with me describing some annoying situation by saying, "Oh, that's lame, I'm sorry."  I flinched, and took a deep breath and said, "Using "lame" that way is really offensive actually.  Can you not use it please?"  He looked surprised, and said, "Oh, I'm sorry.  I didn't know.  Um, could you suggest other words I could use instead?"  And the request for alternatives wasn't made in a demanding "educate me nao!" kind of way or anything.  It was simply that he trusted my judgment and vocabulary skills and hoped I might have advice for him on what to replace it with.  So we brainstormed alternatives for awhile, came up with several, and I only heard him use it once or twice more - swiftly self-corrected each time - before he'd fully eliminated the phrase from his speech. 

Two men, very alike in terms of privilegedness and upbringing.  Two very similar conversations centered around the same request and the same word.  And yet where one was stubborn and got all privilege-denying about it, the other was willing to learn and change.  So I guess my question is...For the love of all the gods, why can't most call-outs happen like Conversation B?  Where one person says, "Hey, you did this thing that is wrong/offensive/oppressive/bad," and the other person says, "I'm sorry, I won't do it again.  Do you have any advice or education you would like to offer while we're talking about it?" (While remaining open to the possibility that the answer may just be "No", of course)  How hard can this possibly fucking be, that it never just goes like that? 

For the record, here's how it ended: Dude A and I are still close, but I don't feel entirely safe around him and I have to be careful what topics come up when we're talking.  And it erodes our relationship a little every time something like this comes up.  Dude B is my best friend, around whom I feel entirely safe and respected, and our relationship is strengthened every time something like this comes up.

So, privileged people*: which Dude would you rather be?  Keep that in mind in your interactions with less-privileged people or allies. 

*Which really means basically everyone, cause most people have privilege on at least one axis.  Being oppressed on one axis doesn't negate your privilege on others. *cough*DanSavage*cough*

Stubborn Privilege and Trigger Warnings: The SexGenderBody Fiasco

[TW on all links to sexgenderbody for potentially-triggering material with no warning (I don't know what they've posted since writing this), and a really shitty privilege-heavy attitude on why they refuse to use them]

I'm not, myself, particularly big on tumblr.  At least not yet.  I have one, and I follow a few of my twiends who have tumblrs, but that's the extent of it so far.  However, as y'all may know, I am quite a fan of Twitter and spend a shit-ton of time on there (@WitchWords, if anyone cares).  I find a lot of interesting reading material, often stuff I blog about, via links people post on Twitter.  I used to get a lot of these from the @sexgenderbody Twitter account, which is linked to the sexgenderbody tumblog, which is as far as I can tell is curated and moderated by Arvan Reese, who founded it and the associated blog.  (I used to think there was no more awkward word for "collection of crap on the internet" than "blog".  I was wrong.  There's "tumblog".)

Sexgenderbody's tagline is "A direct, honest and respectful conversation about sex, gender and body."  They post links to blog posts and tumblr posts and images having to do with, you guessed it, sex, gender, and the body.  My content has shown up in the sexgenderbody feed a few times, and I've really enjoyed some of the stuff I have found by clicking through on items in their Twitter feed.  There was a bit of a furor over the inconsistent use of trigger warnings on the tumblr awhile back, and Arvan posted a big long justification that basically boiled down to "I don't object to them but I won't add them either."  I only skimmed it at the time, as I wasn't following them on tumblr and only click through on perhaps a third of the links they post to Twitter, if that, so I'd never come across anything egregiously triggering to me that lacked a warning.  It wasn't a big deal to me at the time.  Rereading it now, it basically comes off as a hugely privilege-denying wankfest of "If you don't like it close the browser," with a side order of "let's conflate offensive with triggering and post topless pics of men and women to prove our point!"  Also, "well with a name like sexgenderbody, you should expect to see NSFW stuff in the feed, I don't know why you're so upset."  Honestly, that article alone could feed creation of about four different PDDs.

I say I "used to" get blog fodder from them, because as of today I've unfollowed and blocked them on Twitter, and if I can figure out how to do it on tumblr (I'm still learning!) I'll be blocking them there, too.

Yesterday, one of the things they posted was [TW: self-harm, open wounds, blood] an image of a patch of medium-tone flesh with the word "DYSPHORIA" carved into it, still bleeding.  [END TW]  Several people used the "ask" thing on tumblr to request a trigger warning be placed on the image, since such a graphic depiction of self-harm could be *really* triggering to people.  Well, since their tagline says they're interested in "respectful" discussion, they immediately apologized and fixed it, right?

Lolno.  The first person to ask for a trigger warning - very politely, I might add - got this reply:

I’m not about to put a trigger warning on someone else’s body. If the OP put a trigger, I’ve included that. But it’s not *my* place to make someone else’s body a trigger.

...Whut.  What the fuck does "make someone else's body a trigger" even mean?  Adding a TW isn't "[making] someone else's body a trigger."  It's a triggery image whether it's got the actual TW on it or not.  All an actual TW would do is help keep people from being ambushed by a disturbing image that might trigger them into anything, from a few minutes of deep focused breathing and needing to look at pictures of kittens for awhile to calm down, to sitting in a corner shaking and crying all day, to attempting fucking suicide.  Why is the "respect" apparently all reserved for the person who posted it in the first place, and not the people who could have moments/afternoons/days/weeks/etc totally fucked up by seeing it without warning? 

But it got worse.  When someone replied saying it wasn't about making someone's body a trigger, but about the welfare of people reading who could be harmed, adding that they do self-harm sometimes and wouldn't want to trigger people, Arvan replied

"I respect your experience.  You should unsubscribe from this feed and take care of yourself - always.  Take care of yourself."

1: No, you don't.  If you did, you'd take two fucking seconds and put a fucking TW on it.  2: It's hard to "take care of yourself" by unsubscribing AFTER being triggered by something like this.  Saying "just unsubscribe" after the fact is singularly unhelpful.  

At that point, the responses of "this is not a "respectful discussion"" started pouring in. 

queeroctopus:

I think it's about time you changed your description. Your utter refusal to listen to anyone who finds some of the images triggering is NOT evidence of a 'respectful conversation' about anything. It would require very little effort on your part to put cuts or content warnings. And your reasons for refusal are ignorant. it is not shaming to put a content warning on cutting. It is, however, shaming to those of us with triggers to act like the existence of our triggers are somehow shaming people.

 whatfreshhellisthis:

You seem to misunderstand what triggers are for. ... It's not to protect people's sensibilities, or to censor content. It is a tool to help protect people with disabilities.
Refusing to put trigger warnings on content is incredibly ableist as you are excluding or directly harming people with those triggers.
This isn't a discussion.
Refusing to put trigger warnings is ableist, and is absolutely not, even slightly, respectful.

Those two and at least two others got a copy-pasted response of "We are not going to alter our behavior or language.  If this site or policy triggers you, please unfollow."  Way to engage your critics, Arvan! 

Well, of course people started to get angry.  Which, as so many privileged people* do, Arvan took as proof that zie was in the right because, y'know, you all are being so mean and disrespectful and angry at me!  And as we all know, being angry automatically means you forfeit the discussion and the calm person wins.

I'm not going to quote the rest of the answers Arvan gave to everyone's objections, cause this post is already long enough as it is.  Suffice to say, if you want a blood-pressure-spike-inducing read, click through on the sexgenderbody tumblr link I provided up top, and scroll through the first page.  On that page alone, I was able to check off the following bingo squares:

• Requesting trigger warnings is linguistic oppression!
• I'm not responsible for your emotions (Direct quote: "All of us need to be responsible for our triggers.")
• If you might be triggered, stay off the internet. (Not kidding, that's a near-direct quote)
• Calling me ___-ist is calling names!  Now who's the bad guy?
• Commenting anonymously means I don't have to take you seriously
• You're taking my words out of context
• Who are you to judge what's -ist and what's not?
• You're bullying me! (Also a near-direct quote)

For fuck's sake, that's almost a double bingo.  And throughout it all was the constant thread of "But if I put a trigger warning on that photo it would be mean/discriminatory/disrespectful/judging to the person in the photo!"

I genuinely don't understand the reasoning behind that.  Nobody who asked for trigger warnings was in any way trying to harm or condemn the OP.  A trigger warning on something is not a condemnation, nor a judgment.  It's a reflection of reality in a world filled with trauma survivors, and a courtesy to people who have already suffered to try not to add to their suffering further.  This is not, was not, has never been about the person in the photo.  It is about being a decent fucking human being.  It is about the photo itself and being responsible for the media one disseminates.  It is not about the person in it, or the person who took it, or the person who posted it.  It is about those who may see it.  Arvan is putting the spotlight squarely on the wrong person's feelings here.  (Why does that sound familiar?  Oh, right.  Rape culture.  Victim-blaming.  Whose feelings are important [the privileged person, in this case, Arvan*] and whose feelings can be discounted [the person actually being harmed].  This is a calculation we've all seen played out innumerable times.)

To repeatedly deny requests for trigger warnings on a photo like that one - I mean, shit, I'm not particularly easily triggered despite a history of self-harm in my own life, but that one was enough to make me take deep breaths and run through my "this is now, not then, you don't have to do that anymore" mental spiel to stay calm - is the height of rudeness and disconcern for your audience.  Arvan Reese of sexgenderbody has, in effect, told all hir readers, "I do not give a shit about you.  My intellectual high horse and misunderstanding of trigger warnings as censorship is more important than making sure the people who enjoy my tumblr aren't triggered into potentially killing themselves.  I think people with histories of trauma and neuroatypical people don't belong on the internet because their need for warnings before potentially triggery content inconveniences the rest of us.  People with trigger issues should be able to snap out of it and control their reactions, or else they just need to miss out on vast swathes of potentially-excellent content because typing two words at the top of a post is against my principles."

Well, Arvan, in that case, fuck you too.  

And if you're pissed off after reading all that, and just need a righteous fucking rant about it, check this shit out.  14 instances of fuck in 5 paragraphs.  Fuck yes.  Also, here is an excellent post about what being triggered can really do to someone, and here's a very thorough explanation of how forcing marginalized people to constantly defend their access to discussions about their issues reinforces their oppressions.

*I posit Arvan as "privileged" in the sense of not suffering debilitating triggered episodes versus those who could be truly harmed by a triggered episode, because while zie claims to have triggers of hir own in one of hir responses to a calling-out post, I almost doubt it; I kind of think someone who has genuinely experienced being triggered as opposed to being offended or upset by a photo of something would understand that triggering isn't something you can "be responsible for".  Zie's certainly acting like a PDD in this exchange, anyway.  My referring to hir as "privileged" is a specific reference to the privileged/oppressed pair of not needing trigger warnings/needing trigger warnings.  It is not meant to invalidate hir experiences of oppression on whatever other axes zie may experience.