Sorry, all. Meant to be back posting on Tuesday, but it's been a shitty week. It seems I take longer to recuperate after a socially-intense four-day trip than I thought? Yeah anyway. Giving myself through the weekend for genuine mental health time (as opposed to flogging myself for not posting OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING CHECKING TUMBLR FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME TODAY YOU HAVE POSTS TO WRITE - strangely enough, that doesn't actually help me recover faster) and will hopefully be back in full form come Monday.
(Of course, now that I've said this, tomorrow will be awesome and I'll be posting left right and center and be able to queue posts for all through next week by Sunday night. Because that's just how my life is right now. >.< /self-pity)
Love and light, hope everyone has an awesome weekend. See you Monday.
6.03.2011
5.25.2011
Don't burn the place down while I'm gone!
I'm headed down to SoCal this weekend for my cousin's wedding. Sadly, there will be no open bar. (It's a Mormon wedding.) But it means I'll be gone from Thursday morning through to Monday night. No new posts while I'm away, and apologies if I'm slow responding to comments, since I'm not taking my laptop, just my phone.
Enjoy the holiday weekend, darlings! I'll see y'all next week. Try not to burn the place down while I'm gone, ok kids? ;-)
Enjoy the holiday weekend, darlings! I'll see y'all next week. Try not to burn the place down while I'm gone, ok kids? ;-)
San Francisco's Circumcision Ban
The City of San Francisco will have on its next ballot a measure that would ban circumcisions performed on minors in that jurisdiction. There is nothing in the proposed language that would allow for religious exemptions for Jewish or Muslim families wishing to circumcise their sons for religious reasons.
The legal blogs are all over this, discussing it in terms of both parental rights and religious rights. (It's honestly pretty dense reading, I didn't get through all of it, and they reference quite a number of other cases. But here's a good roundup for the curious.) I had declared myself cautiously in favor of the ban in conversations with friends/family, but in the ensuing discussions, I discovered I actually felt far stronger about it than I'd thought.
It still bothers me a little that there's no religious exemption. Being of a minority faith which is still struggling in many ways to be treated fairly under the law, I find the idea of laws that ban a practice originating in a particular religion to be troubling.
On the other hand, the vast majority of circumcisions in the U.S. are not done for religious reasons, but for reasons like "not looking different," or "so he looks like his father," or "just because that's what's done." Given that circumcision offers only minimal, mostly potential health benefits (the US Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend routine circumcision) and is generally a cosmetic procedure, why is it acceptable for parents to choose such an intimate bodily modification for an infant incapable of consent? When a mother was featured on TV last week for having had her 8-year-old daughter given Botox injections, there was a righteously outraged wave of condemnation. How can we logically condemn one parent for having a minimally-invasive, semi-permanent (Botox injections fade after about six months, IIRC) cosmetic procedure done on a child, while accepting a much more intimate and absolutely permanent *surgical* cosmetic procedure performed on days-old infants without comment?
And I even find it harder and harder to advocate for a religious exemption, the more I consider it. Those who would have female "circumcision" - more accurately described as female genital mutilation - performed on their children are not permitted to do so (it's legally banned in California, at least), deep-held cultural values notwithstanding. Which makes it logically inconsistent to advocate upholding the ban on FGM without exception, while wanting a religious exemption for a circumcision ban.
So I suppose in the end, it comes to this: I don't believe parents should be making permanently-body-altering decisions for their children, period. I don't care what religion the parents hew to, or what their cultural beliefs dictate they do to their kids. It's unethical, to perform such procedures on those too young to independently decide for themselves. If people choose to have body modifications made as adults, that's their prerogative. If you want to get circumcised, go for it. Have fun. But something like that should require active, informed consent, and an infant is absolutely incapable of giving such.
What do you think? I'd like to hear other perspectives on this.
The legal blogs are all over this, discussing it in terms of both parental rights and religious rights. (It's honestly pretty dense reading, I didn't get through all of it, and they reference quite a number of other cases. But here's a good roundup for the curious.) I had declared myself cautiously in favor of the ban in conversations with friends/family, but in the ensuing discussions, I discovered I actually felt far stronger about it than I'd thought.
It still bothers me a little that there's no religious exemption. Being of a minority faith which is still struggling in many ways to be treated fairly under the law, I find the idea of laws that ban a practice originating in a particular religion to be troubling.
On the other hand, the vast majority of circumcisions in the U.S. are not done for religious reasons, but for reasons like "not looking different," or "so he looks like his father," or "just because that's what's done." Given that circumcision offers only minimal, mostly potential health benefits (the US Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend routine circumcision) and is generally a cosmetic procedure, why is it acceptable for parents to choose such an intimate bodily modification for an infant incapable of consent? When a mother was featured on TV last week for having had her 8-year-old daughter given Botox injections, there was a righteously outraged wave of condemnation. How can we logically condemn one parent for having a minimally-invasive, semi-permanent (Botox injections fade after about six months, IIRC) cosmetic procedure done on a child, while accepting a much more intimate and absolutely permanent *surgical* cosmetic procedure performed on days-old infants without comment?
And I even find it harder and harder to advocate for a religious exemption, the more I consider it. Those who would have female "circumcision" - more accurately described as female genital mutilation - performed on their children are not permitted to do so (it's legally banned in California, at least), deep-held cultural values notwithstanding. Which makes it logically inconsistent to advocate upholding the ban on FGM without exception, while wanting a religious exemption for a circumcision ban.
So I suppose in the end, it comes to this: I don't believe parents should be making permanently-body-altering decisions for their children, period. I don't care what religion the parents hew to, or what their cultural beliefs dictate they do to their kids. It's unethical, to perform such procedures on those too young to independently decide for themselves. If people choose to have body modifications made as adults, that's their prerogative. If you want to get circumcised, go for it. Have fun. But something like that should require active, informed consent, and an infant is absolutely incapable of giving such.
What do you think? I'd like to hear other perspectives on this.
5.24.2011
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...)
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!
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...)
Brown v Plata: The Humanity Of Prisoners
To put it bluntly, California's justice/prison system is utterly, completely broken. Thanks to what is widely acknowledged as the most draconian three-strikes law (on your third conviction of a felony, the sentence is life imprisonment, period, no exceptions) in the nation, our prisons are overloaded with mostly-nonviolent offenders, most of them convicted of various drug possession or sale offenses. The state prison system was built to house around 80,000 prisoners; it currently houses nearly 150,000. Overcrowding of such epic proportions, combined with constant budget cuts, has led to a situation in which "on average, an inmate in one of California's prisons needlessly dies every six to seven days due to constitutional deficiencies in the medical delivery system."
SCOTUS has now stepped in with a ruling yesterday, Brown v Plata, which holds that the level of overcrowding and resulting deficiencies in care violate the 8th Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That's how bad it is. The document describes unthinkable, mass-storage conditions, like cramming 200 prisoners into a gymnasium supervised by only two or three officers. It's just horrifying.
It made me remember a project I did, years ago in college, about health-care delivery systems in the prison system. (I took a course on "structures in clinical health care" or something like that as an "Oh, shit, I need credits." sort of elective thing.) The rates of Hep C were unthinkable, treatment was scarce, prisoners who were entering more or less healthy were leaving with lifelong diseases that the system had neither bothered to prevent nor treat. I was horrified to read about the complete disregard with which prisoners in my state were being treated - or rather, not treated.
And yet I remember a conversation with a coworker and a customer and I on a slow day last year, still fresh in my mind, where the customer was griping about how "those damn prisoners get organ transplants paid for by my tax dollars," and "they get better medical care than I do." And I said, first of all, that's not true, at least in this state; the medical care in our prison system is awful-to-nonexistent. But that aside, why shouldn't prisoners receive necessary medical care? We're not talking about cosmetic boob jobs here, we're talking about necessary-to-survive medications and operations and other forms of care. At which point my coworker jumped in and sided with the customer, saying that it's just not fair and they fucked up so they don't deserve anything (heavily paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it).
And I think of the criminal-in-chief of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio, too. His tent cities in the desert and his chain gangs, and how strangely, and horrifyingly, he has remained in power for nearly twenty years now. That people defend him, and reelect him, over and over, because his awful human rights abuses are "only" against prisoners (and immigrants, and anybody non-white, really) and they "deserve" it.
Why is this okay? Why is it commonly accepted that being convicted of a crime - without knowing what the crime was, mind you. People end up in prison for rape and murder, yes, but also for drug possession or other nonviolent offenses, and I hope people aren't trying to make those out to be equally bad - means you deserve whatever kind of treatment those in power dish out? Do we really want a culture where one bad decision is enough to completely strip a person of hir humanity, hir rights to decency and a certain minimum standard of treatment? I'm sure it's only a coincidence that these views coincide with a "justice" system that is heavily racist, so most of the time when one talks about "prisoners" it's also a sort of code for "lower-class PoC", right? /sarcasm
I can understand being angry at the fact that, for many people, prison healthcare *is* actually better than what we can access on the outside. It's galling to know that while I, having never committed a crime, struggle along without access to any healthcare at all, people who have committed crimes are having their health care paid for on the state's dime. So I get that envy and anger, I really do. But I don't think the solution is to heap further abuse on the prison population. It's not their fault our government has shitty priorities. When there is an inequality between haves and have-nots, the solution is not to tear down those who have, it's to raise up those who have not. And you know, maybe if we provided universal healthcare and a living wage and decent educational opportunities, not only would the people on the outside not have to be jealous of medical care afforded to prisoners, a lot of people in prison, who turned to the least-worst path available to them despite the illegality of that path, might not *be* in prison in the first place.
SCOTUS has now stepped in with a ruling yesterday, Brown v Plata, which holds that the level of overcrowding and resulting deficiencies in care violate the 8th Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That's how bad it is. The document describes unthinkable, mass-storage conditions, like cramming 200 prisoners into a gymnasium supervised by only two or three officers. It's just horrifying.
It made me remember a project I did, years ago in college, about health-care delivery systems in the prison system. (I took a course on "structures in clinical health care" or something like that as an "Oh, shit, I need credits." sort of elective thing.) The rates of Hep C were unthinkable, treatment was scarce, prisoners who were entering more or less healthy were leaving with lifelong diseases that the system had neither bothered to prevent nor treat. I was horrified to read about the complete disregard with which prisoners in my state were being treated - or rather, not treated.
And yet I remember a conversation with a coworker and a customer and I on a slow day last year, still fresh in my mind, where the customer was griping about how "those damn prisoners get organ transplants paid for by my tax dollars," and "they get better medical care than I do." And I said, first of all, that's not true, at least in this state; the medical care in our prison system is awful-to-nonexistent. But that aside, why shouldn't prisoners receive necessary medical care? We're not talking about cosmetic boob jobs here, we're talking about necessary-to-survive medications and operations and other forms of care. At which point my coworker jumped in and sided with the customer, saying that it's just not fair and they fucked up so they don't deserve anything (heavily paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it).
And I think of the criminal-in-chief of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio, too. His tent cities in the desert and his chain gangs, and how strangely, and horrifyingly, he has remained in power for nearly twenty years now. That people defend him, and reelect him, over and over, because his awful human rights abuses are "only" against prisoners (and immigrants, and anybody non-white, really) and they "deserve" it.
Why is this okay? Why is it commonly accepted that being convicted of a crime - without knowing what the crime was, mind you. People end up in prison for rape and murder, yes, but also for drug possession or other nonviolent offenses, and I hope people aren't trying to make those out to be equally bad - means you deserve whatever kind of treatment those in power dish out? Do we really want a culture where one bad decision is enough to completely strip a person of hir humanity, hir rights to decency and a certain minimum standard of treatment? I'm sure it's only a coincidence that these views coincide with a "justice" system that is heavily racist, so most of the time when one talks about "prisoners" it's also a sort of code for "lower-class PoC", right? /sarcasm
I can understand being angry at the fact that, for many people, prison healthcare *is* actually better than what we can access on the outside. It's galling to know that while I, having never committed a crime, struggle along without access to any healthcare at all, people who have committed crimes are having their health care paid for on the state's dime. So I get that envy and anger, I really do. But I don't think the solution is to heap further abuse on the prison population. It's not their fault our government has shitty priorities. When there is an inequality between haves and have-nots, the solution is not to tear down those who have, it's to raise up those who have not. And you know, maybe if we provided universal healthcare and a living wage and decent educational opportunities, not only would the people on the outside not have to be jealous of medical care afforded to prisoners, a lot of people in prison, who turned to the least-worst path available to them despite the illegality of that path, might not *be* in prison in the first place.
5.21.2011
Scott Walker: Privatize ALL The Things!
(For those not familiar with the "___ ALL the things!" joke, I direct your attention here.)
Scott Walker, Wisconsin's asshole-in-chief, best known for his lying scumbag tactics* during the union-busting fight a couple months ago, is back hard at work on his job of undercutting the government's ability to provide services. This time, it's through an expansion of the proven-to-be-a-failure school vouchers program in the state, while simultaneously cutting funding for public schools. No, seriously. Studies and testing have shown that the students in the voucher program actually did *worse* than their counterparts in public school. And yet Walker wants to cut funding to the better-performing program and pump public funds into the worse-performing program.
But it gets better! Not only does he want to cut funding and expand the failed voucher program, he wants to exempt voucher students from the testing and studies that revealed the program's failure!
Dear Republicans: You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts. The proper response to a study showing that your pet project isn't working like you insisted it would, is not to say "Well FINE then, we just WON'T STUDY IT ANYMORE, OKAY? (But let's give more money to it anyway.)"
*Sealing protesters inside the Capitol building, calling in the police, sheriff dept, and even the National fucking Guard to try to intimidate protesters, insisting the union-busting bill (I typed that "union-busting bull" the first time. Ahem, paging Freud.) was absolutely! necessary! for the budget! during this time of fiscal! crisis! and then, when it became clear that wasn't going to fly, blatantly violating procedural rules and forcing through a vote on the union-busting as a separate bill in less than 5 minutes in a secret meeting, among other abuses of power.
Scott Walker, Wisconsin's asshole-in-chief, best known for his lying scumbag tactics* during the union-busting fight a couple months ago, is back hard at work on his job of undercutting the government's ability to provide services. This time, it's through an expansion of the proven-to-be-a-failure school vouchers program in the state, while simultaneously cutting funding for public schools. No, seriously. Studies and testing have shown that the students in the voucher program actually did *worse* than their counterparts in public school. And yet Walker wants to cut funding to the better-performing program and pump public funds into the worse-performing program.
But it gets better! Not only does he want to cut funding and expand the failed voucher program, he wants to exempt voucher students from the testing and studies that revealed the program's failure!
Dear Republicans: You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts. The proper response to a study showing that your pet project isn't working like you insisted it would, is not to say "Well FINE then, we just WON'T STUDY IT ANYMORE, OKAY? (But let's give more money to it anyway.)"
*Sealing protesters inside the Capitol building, calling in the police, sheriff dept, and even the National fucking Guard to try to intimidate protesters, insisting the union-busting bill (I typed that "union-busting bull" the first time. Ahem, paging Freud.) was absolutely! necessary! for the budget! during this time of fiscal! crisis! and then, when it became clear that wasn't going to fly, blatantly violating procedural rules and forcing through a vote on the union-busting as a separate bill in less than 5 minutes in a secret meeting, among other abuses of power.
5.19.2011
Bryan Fischer's Godwin on Steroids
"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."- Godwin's Law, the main corollary of which is that the first person to invoke a Nazi comparison loses by forfeit. I also use it as a verb, as in "to Godwin a discussion".
If we were holding to that standard, Bryan Fischer (and indeed the whole Teabagger movement) would have lost the debate by Godwinning long ago. However, on Tuesday Fischer, as he does with so many things, cranked the Godwin up to 11 with this epic screed [TW gratuitous Nazi comparisons and vicious anti-gay fearmongering]:
I mean, ladies and gentlemen, they are Nazis. Homosexual activists, when it comes to freedom of speech, are Nazis. When it comes to freedom of religion, they are Nazis. ... Ladies and gentlemen, they are Nazis. Do not be under any illusions about what homosexual activists will do with your freedoms and your religion if they have the opportunity. They'll do the same thing to you that the Nazis did to their opponents in Nazi Germany.Wow. Just...wow. I mean, SIX instances of the word Nazi in six sentences. Clearly Fischer means business. Srs bizness. Of the bearing-no-resemblance-to-reality-or-logic variety.
The AFA yet again tried to get its pet runaway train under control; of course, since it was on his radio show, they couldn't just edit it like they do to his blog posts. So instead, they simply removed the video from their archive. Unfortunately, as I keep trying to remind people, once you're on the internet as having said something, it's on the record forever, no matter how much deleting or redacting you try to do.
Of course, Fischer didn't help matters by going on another unhinged rant Wednesday about DADT, how the "homosexual lobby" (immaculately decorated, natch) is "just like the Nazis", and how any soldier who "[says] a word of complaint about homosexual behavior" will be, I'm not even fucking kidding, "sent to a reeducation camp ... to get your brain washed ... you're not getting out of that room until you crumble and admit you support sexual deviancy ... that's where it's going in the military."
How long before AFA finally wises up and drops this fuckbag like a ton of bricks? How long before right-wing politicians stop appearing on his show? Why the fuck is anyone fucking legitimizing such raw hatred and bigotry?
5.18.2011
Congressional Republicans: Still Looking For Jobs In Uteruses
In contrast to their purported focus on the revitalizing the economy and creating jobs, Congressional Republicans continue to make the intimate details of uteruses and the decisions of those who have them their top priorities. For bonus hypocrisy points, this attack comes in the form of an overriding federal-level piece of legislation designed to standardize [lack-of-]access laws across state borders, yet is proposed by a member of the party which loves squawking about states' rights when it comes to things like gun control and health insurance regulations.
So what is it they want to restrict this time?
Minors' access to abortion services*. This new bill, proposed by Republican senator John Boozman (AR) and five co-sponsors, would institute a nationwide requirement of parental notification before a minor may get an abortion. According to the text of the bill, this means both parents, via certified mail with delivery receipt and "restricted delivery" (meaning the named recipient must be the one to sign for it; some quick googling tells me that means each notification would cost about $10, plus time for a staffer to handle the mailings and such), and a 4-day waiting period between notification and the abortion itself. It would also require that, if the parent chooses to seek a court order preventing the abortion, the court issue an injunction against it, disallowing the abortion "until the issue has been adjudicated and the judgment is final." How long does that take? Anyone more familiar with court proceedings than I? The bill also mandates a $1 million fine and 10 years imprisonment for any doctor found in violation. There is a medical-emergency clause, and one for "clear and convincing evidence" of parental abuse - which as I read that, leaves it basically up to the doctor to determine what constitutes "convincing evidence" - but none for rape or molestation by someone other than the parent, not even a judicial-bypass option.
[TW: mention of hypothetical rape and forced pregnancy scenario]
So. Imagine a teenage girl, let's say 17. Old enough to make her own decisions for the most part, in her senior year of high school, applying to colleges, all that fun stuff. Mere months from crossing that mystical line that transforms one from a legal child to a legal adult overnight. She is in a relationship, and her boyfriend rapes her. (Sadly, this is not at all a far-fetched scenario; 24% of teens in dating relationships have experienced sexual violence therein.) She broke up with him, but doesn't want to accuse him, for any one of a number of reasons. Because she still loves him, or because she's ashamed, or her parents are deeply religious and would punish her for it, or she's seen the gauntlet survivors are forced to traverse in the public eye in this culture and wants no part of it. For whatever reason, she doesn't feel she can or should report him. But a few weeks later, she discovers she's pregnant. Now what? Being pregnant doesn't magically make her ready to report him, or willing to talk to her parents about what happened if she wasn't before.
As things currently stand, she might live in a place that permits minors access to abortion services without requiring parental involvement. If she doesn't, she might be lucky enough to live close to a border with a state that does, and/or have the resources and time to make it possible to cross to another state to access a legal abortion.
And that is precisely the scenario Boozman and his cronies want to prevent, as they outright admit. By god, there will be no crossing of borders to obtain services! Those services will be the same level of inaccessible no matter where you try to go!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the major point of our system of governance, as a collection of semi-autonomous states able to make our own laws on a number of issues, largely about the ability to go somewhere else if you didn't like the laws of your area? Isn't that what state-level opponents of legal abortion like to claim, as they slowly tighten the noose? That if you don't like it you can go somewhere else where the laws are more permissive? And now this explicit attempt to make that impossible. Hypocrites; color me shocked.
Anyway, if this law passes, the girl of a few paragraphs ago will have no option. She will either have to accuse her rapist and face the victim-blaming gauntlet, or let everyone think she's irresponsible and face the judge-and-shame-pregnant-teens gauntlet. And if her parents so choose, they can force her to bear her rapist's child and there is not a damn thing she can do about it no matter where she goes. In what world is this a moral thing to do to someone?
Or another scenario. A teen gets pregnant via consensual intercourse when the condom breaks. Zie wants an abortion. Zie lives with hir mother, but hir father disappeared years ago and nobody has any idea where he went. With no forwarding address and the requirement being that both parents are notified via mail, what is this teen supposed to do? Again I'll point out that there is no provision for judicial bypass, as most parental-notification bills include. If a minor cannot locate and notify *both* hir parents, there is no recourse, and zie will be forced to have the baby or resort to illegal and unsafe abortion methods. Congratulations, Boozman: your fucked-up law could end up killing the pregnant person and, you do realize this, yes? The fetus in that case dies too.
I'll also add that (as has been pointed out many times before) by anti-choice logic on this issue, parents should be able to force pregnant teens to abort, too. If the parent can step in and make the decision about what to do with the pregnancy, irrespective of the teen's decision, well...that sword cuts both ways. Of course we all know pro-forced-birthers would be up in arms if a parent ever tried to use their parental override that way (and rightfully so; remember, pro-choice is not pro-abortion, and we respect the right of the pregnant person to decide, so *any* overriding of that in any direction is bad in our eyes), but again: Hypocrites.
Color me shocked.
*Typical Republican politics, to target the least powerful; first the poor via H.R. 3 and associated legislation, now minors.
So what is it they want to restrict this time?
Minors' access to abortion services*. This new bill, proposed by Republican senator John Boozman (AR) and five co-sponsors, would institute a nationwide requirement of parental notification before a minor may get an abortion. According to the text of the bill, this means both parents, via certified mail with delivery receipt and "restricted delivery" (meaning the named recipient must be the one to sign for it; some quick googling tells me that means each notification would cost about $10, plus time for a staffer to handle the mailings and such), and a 4-day waiting period between notification and the abortion itself. It would also require that, if the parent chooses to seek a court order preventing the abortion, the court issue an injunction against it, disallowing the abortion "until the issue has been adjudicated and the judgment is final." How long does that take? Anyone more familiar with court proceedings than I? The bill also mandates a $1 million fine and 10 years imprisonment for any doctor found in violation. There is a medical-emergency clause, and one for "clear and convincing evidence" of parental abuse - which as I read that, leaves it basically up to the doctor to determine what constitutes "convincing evidence" - but none for rape or molestation by someone other than the parent, not even a judicial-bypass option.
[TW: mention of hypothetical rape and forced pregnancy scenario]
So. Imagine a teenage girl, let's say 17. Old enough to make her own decisions for the most part, in her senior year of high school, applying to colleges, all that fun stuff. Mere months from crossing that mystical line that transforms one from a legal child to a legal adult overnight. She is in a relationship, and her boyfriend rapes her. (Sadly, this is not at all a far-fetched scenario; 24% of teens in dating relationships have experienced sexual violence therein.) She broke up with him, but doesn't want to accuse him, for any one of a number of reasons. Because she still loves him, or because she's ashamed, or her parents are deeply religious and would punish her for it, or she's seen the gauntlet survivors are forced to traverse in the public eye in this culture and wants no part of it. For whatever reason, she doesn't feel she can or should report him. But a few weeks later, she discovers she's pregnant. Now what? Being pregnant doesn't magically make her ready to report him, or willing to talk to her parents about what happened if she wasn't before.
As things currently stand, she might live in a place that permits minors access to abortion services without requiring parental involvement. If she doesn't, she might be lucky enough to live close to a border with a state that does, and/or have the resources and time to make it possible to cross to another state to access a legal abortion.
And that is precisely the scenario Boozman and his cronies want to prevent, as they outright admit. By god, there will be no crossing of borders to obtain services! Those services will be the same level of inaccessible no matter where you try to go!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the major point of our system of governance, as a collection of semi-autonomous states able to make our own laws on a number of issues, largely about the ability to go somewhere else if you didn't like the laws of your area? Isn't that what state-level opponents of legal abortion like to claim, as they slowly tighten the noose? That if you don't like it you can go somewhere else where the laws are more permissive? And now this explicit attempt to make that impossible. Hypocrites; color me shocked.
Anyway, if this law passes, the girl of a few paragraphs ago will have no option. She will either have to accuse her rapist and face the victim-blaming gauntlet, or let everyone think she's irresponsible and face the judge-and-shame-pregnant-teens gauntlet. And if her parents so choose, they can force her to bear her rapist's child and there is not a damn thing she can do about it no matter where she goes. In what world is this a moral thing to do to someone?
Or another scenario. A teen gets pregnant via consensual intercourse when the condom breaks. Zie wants an abortion. Zie lives with hir mother, but hir father disappeared years ago and nobody has any idea where he went. With no forwarding address and the requirement being that both parents are notified via mail, what is this teen supposed to do? Again I'll point out that there is no provision for judicial bypass, as most parental-notification bills include. If a minor cannot locate and notify *both* hir parents, there is no recourse, and zie will be forced to have the baby or resort to illegal and unsafe abortion methods. Congratulations, Boozman: your fucked-up law could end up killing the pregnant person and, you do realize this, yes? The fetus in that case dies too.
I'll also add that (as has been pointed out many times before) by anti-choice logic on this issue, parents should be able to force pregnant teens to abort, too. If the parent can step in and make the decision about what to do with the pregnancy, irrespective of the teen's decision, well...that sword cuts both ways. Of course we all know pro-forced-birthers would be up in arms if a parent ever tried to use their parental override that way (and rightfully so; remember, pro-choice is not pro-abortion, and we respect the right of the pregnant person to decide, so *any* overriding of that in any direction is bad in our eyes), but again: Hypocrites.
Color me shocked.
*Typical Republican politics, to target the least powerful; first the poor via H.R. 3 and associated legislation, now minors.
Florida's Blaine Amendment Repeal
Florida's legislature is in the midst of repealing the Blaine Amendment, an amendment to their state constitution which bars state financial support of any religious denomination or institution. They want to repeal it because it was originally rooted in anti-Catholic bigotry, and proponents of the repeal are upset that it means the state can't let funds go to religiously-affiliated hospitals, schools, and adoption agencies. The new law would read:
The idea behind allowing government funding to go to private, religiously-affiliated organizations seems to be based in avoiding redundancy and waste by simply funneling state/federal dollars to subsidize the religious hospitals, instead of having to keep open a competing public hospital in the same region. But it's not a 1-to-1 conversion; government money handed to Catholic hospitals does not perform the same function that money would provide for if it were kept for a public hospital. Witness official Catholic hospital policy that would rather let a woman die than perform an abortion to save her life, so long as a fetal heartbeat is present. And I remember when I was in college, in Santa Cruz, and the hue and cry that went up when it was exposed that the only hospital nearby, without crossing the mountains to go into San Jose, was a Catholic hospital that refused to provide emergency contraception to rape victims. Also a recent ruling in Washington state that a Catholic hospital is not bound to abide by the same employment non-discrimination laws as other businesses in the state. Taxpayer money does not function the same when funneled to a religious organization, as it would if it were spent to support a public hospital. And I fail to see why taxpayer dollars should go to subsidize services only selectively provided, according to the religious strictures of one particular religion to which not everyone in the demographic they're supposed to be serving is beholden. Why should my healthcare options be restricted according to Catholic dogma, simply because I have the poor luck to live in an area where the only hospital is a Catholic hospital? I'm not Catholic.
So. Acknowledging a history of anti-Catholic bias? Good step! Religious freedom! Etc! But using that as a reason to spend taxpayer money supporting predominantly Catholic institutions that do not actually provide all the same services as the public equivalent would? Bad! Very bad! And especially sucky for low-income areas without a lot of mobility, which is where Catholic hospitals are often to be found, and from which most people don't have the capacity to venture further afield in search of actually-comprehensive medical care!
Except to the extent required by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, neither the government nor any agent of the government may deny to any individual or entity the benefits of any program, funding, or other support on the basis of religious identity or belief.And is justified by a three-page-long list of "WHEREAS"es, like this one:
WHEREAS, religiously affiliated hospitals, schools, adoption agencies, and other benevolent institutions have been of longstanding service to the people of Florida and have provided numerous services to those in need, andWhich is all well and good, but the problem is, if an organization wants taxpayer money, they need to chuck their religious restrictions at the door and provide all the same services as the public schools/hospitals/adoption agencies. This includes adoptions by same-sex couples (where that's legal, anyway; I seem to recall Florida passed a law against it, but I also seem to recall it was challenged in court, and don't remember the outcome?), adherence to scientific standards in school curricula (this means no creationism), and providing reproductive services like contraception and necessary abortions (at a minimum). And religiously-based public service organizations are quite often loathe to do this.
The idea behind allowing government funding to go to private, religiously-affiliated organizations seems to be based in avoiding redundancy and waste by simply funneling state/federal dollars to subsidize the religious hospitals, instead of having to keep open a competing public hospital in the same region. But it's not a 1-to-1 conversion; government money handed to Catholic hospitals does not perform the same function that money would provide for if it were kept for a public hospital. Witness official Catholic hospital policy that would rather let a woman die than perform an abortion to save her life, so long as a fetal heartbeat is present. And I remember when I was in college, in Santa Cruz, and the hue and cry that went up when it was exposed that the only hospital nearby, without crossing the mountains to go into San Jose, was a Catholic hospital that refused to provide emergency contraception to rape victims. Also a recent ruling in Washington state that a Catholic hospital is not bound to abide by the same employment non-discrimination laws as other businesses in the state. Taxpayer money does not function the same when funneled to a religious organization, as it would if it were spent to support a public hospital. And I fail to see why taxpayer dollars should go to subsidize services only selectively provided, according to the religious strictures of one particular religion to which not everyone in the demographic they're supposed to be serving is beholden. Why should my healthcare options be restricted according to Catholic dogma, simply because I have the poor luck to live in an area where the only hospital is a Catholic hospital? I'm not Catholic.
So. Acknowledging a history of anti-Catholic bias? Good step! Religious freedom! Etc! But using that as a reason to spend taxpayer money supporting predominantly Catholic institutions that do not actually provide all the same services as the public equivalent would? Bad! Very bad! And especially sucky for low-income areas without a lot of mobility, which is where Catholic hospitals are often to be found, and from which most people don't have the capacity to venture further afield in search of actually-comprehensive medical care!
5.16.2011
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:
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 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?
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