Tell Gov. Brown: No Repeal of Hayden Law!

Over the past few years, austerity measures have been the go-to "fix" (I put that in scare quotes because austerity fixes fucking nothing and we all know it) for budget deficit crises at all levels of government in this country.  Services for vulnerable populations have been slashed left, right, and center.  Disability services.  Subsidized health insurance services.  Reproductive health care services.  Food banks.  When the going gets tough, fuck over the poor and those in need, seems to be the theory.

This week, I heard about another cut about to go into place here in California, that would harm a population that hadn't occurred to me to worry about yet.

Shelter animals.

Governor Brown has said he wants to repeal a 1998 shelter-reform law, called the Hayden Law, that among other things mandated that county-run shelters hold onto animals for six days after being brought in before they could be euthanized, instead of the previous 72 hours.  The reform also required that shelters structure their open hours to include after-work and weekend times - or, if they were a small staff, make "by appointment" times available outside of normal work hours - so that (when combined with the six day minimum holding time) people who had lost a pet but who also worked a day job would actually be able to come and claim their animals before they were put to sleep.  To quote from the Facebook page of Sutter's Friends, a group dedicated to stopping the repeal:

What is at risk in the proposed repeal? Permanent loss of the requirement to provide prompt and necessary veterinary care. Permanent loss of the requirement to hold animals for an extended period to increase opportunites for redemption and adoption. Permanent loss of the requirement to post lost and found lists. And, among other things, permanent loss of the requirement to provide care for animals other than cats and dogs, such as rabbits, hamsters, and other animals commonly kept as pets.

This is a topic near and dear to me.  Every animal but one that I've bonded to - either belonging to me, my family, or close friends - has been a shelter animal.  Ozz and I just adopted our first in December, and we specifically chose to look for our new family member at the county shelter instead of the no-kill alternatives so that we could help in some small way to increase the survival rate there.  Kalika, our family's first dog, a golden retriever from the county shelter.  Kelly Anne, another golden, from a private rescue organization.  Diablo and Cielle, my mom's two cats, from a different private rescue org.  Amee, my ex's Siamese cat, from the county shelter.  Isis, my ex's and his brother's cat (and sort of mine, too, for awhile), from a shelter in Tennessee.  And now, Mara, Ozz's and my cat, from the county shelter.  And we plan to continue adopting from the shelter when we're ready to expand our family.

Local animal shelters can be an invaluable resource for saving animals' lives, from strays to runaway or lost pets - but they are all too often where animals' lives end, too.  The Hayden Law helped tilt that balance a bit more toward saving.  Jerry Brown's repeal would tilt it back toward death, and while I realize CA's budget situation is fairly desperate, I somehow don't get the feeling that euthanizing more shelter animals is going to be the linchpin on which a balanced budget would turn.

So I'm asking my readers to lift a small teaspoon in support of the Hayden Law.  Petitions against Gov. Brown's proposed repeal may be found and signed here and here; if you're on Facebook, "like" Sutter's Friends to stay on top of updates.

It's the humans' fault that there are so many homeless domestic-breed animals in the world to begin with; the least we can do is try to kill as few of them for the sake of our irresponsibility as possible.

No, he did not "ask for an open relationship"

It seems we have yet another Republican Sexual Hypocrite in Newt Gingrich.  The interview with his ex-wife (video autoplays at link) has been all over the place, and while I am all for calling out RSHs on their hypocrisy, loudly and repeatedly (look, if you're going to run on a platform of "family values", you should probably have some yourself, y'know?), I am really not okay with the way it's being reported by most news outlets.

Newt Gingrich did not "ask for an open relationship."  He had an affair - he cheated on his wife, who had thought they were having a monogamous relationship - and then asked his wife to immediately get over it and accept that he was going to continue having said affair while remaining married to her.  That is not the same thing.  Not even a little bit.

See, I have had a partner ask me for an open relationship before.  The difference between a partner asking for an open relationship, and what Newt did, is that when my then-boyfriend approached me to talk about an open relationship, he did it BEFORE HE SLEPT WITH SOMEONE ELSE.  He came to me and said he had an interest in trying non-monogamy in a relationship (which we'd talked about a little bit before, so it came as no huge surprise) and he had met someone he was interested in pursuing this with, and he wanted to know how I would feel about that.  We talked, I agreed to give it a try, and when after a couple weeks I realize I just couldn't handle it with where we were at in our relationship, I told him, and he broke things off with her.  (We later gave it another shot, and the three of us ended up in a triad relationship, anyway.  All's well that ends well, I guess?)

That is how you do an open relationship.  Not "cheat for years, then admit to it and be like "but I don't want to have to choose between you so I'm just gonna keep fucking you both.  That's cool, right?""

I'm just sick of seeing headlines, articles, and comments, all moralizing and disapproving about Newt's "request for an open relationship" as if that's what's wrong with this situation.  Because it isn't.  Open relationships can be done ethically and with full knowing consent of all involved parties (although admittedly, if your relationship is non-normative in structure, you should probably not be spending a great deal of time and energy judging, condemning, and trying to make discrimination against those of different non-normative relationships even more prevalent and enforced in law), and in an ideal world, having requested an open relationship in a prior situation wouldn't be some sordid mark against you in the public eye.  But the media is presenting this in a way that conflates open relationships with cheating, which is disingenuous and flat-out incorrect.

Newt Gingrich cheated, then tried to weasel out of it.  He did not ask for an open relationship, in any meaningful sense of the phrase.  Period.

This Is A Real Question That Has Really Been Asked, For Realsies

For the "I could not make this shit up even if I tried" files, a judge in Delaware has asked:

"Is the Lord's Prayer Christian?"

Just...go ahead and let that sink in for a minute.  Read the question again if you need to.  I'll wait.

We are talking here about the Lord's Prayer, one of the most recognizable of the standard-issue Christian prayers, shared in some form or other across nearly all denominations, one of the first prayers Christian children learn - both Ozz, raised Catholic, and I, raised Methodist, can rattle it off without thinking, even now, a decade out of our respective Christian upbringings.  And they are asking if it is specifically a Christian prayer, or if it could be considered "generic" and "not advancing a specific faith".

Are.  You.  Fucking.  Kidding me?

How is this even a question?

The context of it, if you don't want to click through, is a case on whether the legislative prayer used to open sessions of Sussex County Council meetings is Constitutional or not.  They apparently open their sessions with a recitation of the Lord's Prayer.  Legislative prayer has been certified by the Supreme Court as Constitutional so long as it does not advance any particular faith; Sussex County's lawyers are arguing that the Lord's Prayer is "generic", so therefore, it should be considered Constitutional.

More specifically, when questioned on whether the Lord's Prayer is specifically Christian, one of the attorneys for Sussex County replied that "[Jesus] was not offering a Christian prayer in the Christian tradition because no Christian tradition existed."

...

...............

Whut.

So you're talking about a very specific prayer, laid out by the founder of your religion, lifted word-for-word from passages in the holy book of your religion (Matthew 6:9-13; Luke 11:2-4)...but you want to claim it's "not a Christian prayer" because at the time that your founder uttered it the religion had not actually been formed yet?

I just can't even believe they're arguing this with a straight face in a court of law.  Nor can I believe that the judge has said it might be "a difficult case" because there is no mention of Jesus by name, as if that's the final arbiter of whether or not a prayer is Christian in nature.  If it's taken from your scriptures, used in your churches (and only in your churches, as I can't think of any other religious group that uses the Lord's Prayer, ever), I don't care if it explicitly names a deity or not, it's a Christian prayer.

But hey, if that's the logic we're using here, perhaps I should see if I can get my local City Council to start opening legislative sessions with the Charge of the Goddess.  It names, like, ten deities - that's more inclusive than the Lord's Prayer! - and obviously that means it's not advancing any one deity and therefore should be totally cool as a "generic" prayer that "doesn't advance any particular religion", amirite?

Caturday!

Happy Birthday, and also happy one-month-of-new-home day, to SWHNYBN, who has in fact been named:

Lady Mara McNibbon, Duchess of the Laundry Pile, is not amused.

Here, have a video of her playing one of her favorite games, "Tear up Daddy's arms while suspended in midair", with Ozz.

Video description: Ozz, a tall, heavyset white man with long brown hair and a goatee, holding Mara, a petite white-calico-tabby cat with one arm.  She is busily chewing on his fingers as he holds her suspended over his arm. You can hear me behind the camera laughing at the two of them.  Suddenly Mara stops and lifts her head to look in my direction with a surprised "Who me?" expression.  I giggle and say "Oh hai, sweetie", then "Oh, no, back to chewing on Daddy's hand." as she decides nomming his hand is more interesting.  He extends his arm to me, Mara still dangling and chewing on him, like he's going to hand her to me.  "Ack, no, do not hand that to me.  It's all teeth."  He pulls her back to his chest; "Yeah, she can keep chewing on you, that's fine."  He turns and tries to set his little bundle of teeth on the couch, but as soon as she hits the cushion she whips around onto her back and grabs his arm with all four legs, pulling him down to keep nomming.  "Well, apparently putting it down doesn't work."  She starts trying to climb her way up his arm with front paws and teeth; he shakes her off.  Undeterred, she pounces at his hand again.  They wrestle a little bit more, until he gets a hand under her and scoops her up off the couch so she's dangling in midair again, which fazes her not even a little.  I laugh again, and she looks up startled right at the camera, then abruptly calms down and lets herself be tucked under Ozz's arm like a furry little football as I say "I guess we're done then."  Fin.

Hope everyone's having an awesome weekend!

To The "Pro-Life Feminist" On Tumblr Today

(Prompted by a small back-and-forth between an anti-abortion "feminist" and myself on Tumblr yesterday and today, consisting of these three posts.)

I snarked at you earlier.  I was a mocking asshole, because that's sort of my style in discussions like this.  I make no apology for it, either.  But I want you to understand the seriousness underlying my snark and rudeness:

You use these certain arguments against abortion; you say that "it's a serious decision" and talk about abortion as "killing one's child" and how abortions not in the case of rape or dangerous health risks are "just a choice, like buying a new purse at the mall" and so on - but when called out, you try to escape responsibility by disclaiming it as "just your opinion" because you, unlike those other anti-choicers, are realistic enough to understand what criminalizing abortion would do, and therefore you don't support making abortion illegal (so therefore I, and other pro-choicers and real feminists, should shut up and leave you alone because you're not trying to have it banned so it's okay, as if criminalization were the only real problem with the anti-choice movement).

The problem with that is that your arguments are exactly the kinds of arguments, exactly the kind of language that gets used by those who do support and actively work toward making abortion illegal.  "It's a serious decision" justifies burdensome waiting periods which necessitate multiple appointments, thus raising the costs of abortion (including travel and accommodation, because nearly 90% of counties in the US don't have an abortion provider so most people have to travel to obtain one) well out of reach for many low-income people, and invasive, propaganda-based "[hyper-, mis-]informed consent" laws designed to scare, guilt, shame, or otherwise emotionally manipulate pregnant people into continuing their pregnancy.  Sensationalizing abortion as "the right to kill my baby" is, well, basically the whole justification for the anti-choice movement, which is not only seeking to completely ban abortion, but would like to take on hormonal birth control as well; specifically, though, that kind of phrasing gets used to push extremist "fetal personhood" measures, which are well-documented to be epic fuckery.  Minimizing and dismissing voluntarily-chosen abortions by comparing it to the frivolous purchase of accessories reinforces right-wing talking points to nurture the stereotype of people who seek abortions as airheaded sluts who fuck a dozen people and then pop in to the clinic for a quickie abortion between brunch and a manicure - and lest you claim that stereotypes are no big deal, they help to push public opinion toward favoring criminalization, creating a more hospitable social climate for those anti-choicers who do want to see abortion made illegal.

Shorter version of that paragraph: Even if you don't support criminalizing abortion, when you say things like this, you are aiding and abetting those who do.

I speak to you as a person who has used her constitutional right to reproductive self-determination before, and would again if the situation came up again.  I speak as someone who is so horrified and sickened by the thought of being forced - and being pressured is nearly the same thing, it's just enforced by social sanction instead of legal penalties - to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term that I would literally rather die than have my body commandeered and used against me that way.  And when you say these things to me, I don't care that they're only your personal belief and you would never have them brought into law to rule over me, because I live in a country where every day I see and hear people who WOULD have those beliefs legislated onto my body against my will speaking the EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS that you are using.  When you argue their talking points, using their language, you present yourself to me as one of Them: an enemy, not an ally.

You speak in concert with those who would take my rights away, who would render me only a passenger in my own flesh, subordinated to the needs of an invader I didn't want and didn't ask for, forced to risk my life and health to give it birth.  The distinction of whether or not you would support them in their criminalization efforts is functionally irrelevant to me, because when you parrot their arguments and pass it along, you are another voice for their side - especially if you don't explicitly lay out your beliefs on legislative solutions in contrast to theirs when you speak or write about it.  Simply put, you are strengthening their position.  You are giving them social sanction, making it easier for them to do the work of criminalization, whether you agree with them in that or not.

And I will never be willing to acknowledge the label of feminist when it is worn by someone who, even indirectly, supports the anti-choice movement.  You are, at best, a badly misguided fauxminist; at worst, a colluder actively perpetuating our oppression.  You are not, in any sense of the word, a feminist.

Would somebody put a stake through this thing's heart, already?

We have killed it three times already, and it simply will not stay dead!  Via RHRealityCheck, I hear that the zombie parental notification bill is back in California again, after defeats in 2005, 2006, and 2008, for another round.  Two different versions of the bill (one of which would require a 48-hour waiting period between notification and procedure, the other of which would not) are now circulating petitions to gather signatures in the hopes of making it to the ballot for 2012.

This particular fight is, in a strange way, dear to my heart, as it was the scene of my first involvement in a political campaign as an adult, back in 2005 - the first demonstration I ever went to was coordinated through the Santa Cruz Planned Parenthood against Prop 73, the first phone banking effort I took part in was also through them for the same issue.  It brings up good memories, but at the same time, it's annoying to see an issue I first fought for as a rosy-cheeked behbeh activist still in my teens, coming up again.

Admittedly, pro-choicers in CA sort of knew this would happen; the initiative has been funded each time by a wealthy conservative newspaper owner in SoCal who has publicly vowed to keep trying until it passes, and he's renewed that commitment after every defeat.  (Gee, must be nice to have money enough to throw at a failing proposition year after year - voter initiatives don't come cheap, especially if they get sufficient publicity to turn truly contentious.)  It does, however, mean the rights of young Californians will be continually at risk, until Mr. Holman either dies, or gets bored of it, or gets the message and goes away.

I would be surprised to see this bill fail to get enough signatures, since it's managed to multiple times before and this time, it's riding a surge wave of anti-choice momentum from the past year.  Most likely, it will end up on the ballot, meaning another campaign, more money and time and effort spent on simply trying to hold the crumbling battlements against the unending anti-choice onslaught.

Well, I'll be there.  Again.  And to my readers in California - or anywhere else, if you have the means to remotely assist - I hope to see you there, on the front lines.

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.

B for Brouhaha

Dear Obama Campaign: Why do you keep sending me emails requesting my support, while making it exceedingly clear that you are not interested in or willing to support me in turn?  Remember my outrage at your "women for Obama" message a few weeks ago, and how frustrated I was at being appealed to "as a woman" even as women's health issues had taken a backseat/been actively thrown under the bus by this administration multiple high-profile times in the past three years?

Consider that frustration cranked up to 11, after the HHS overrode the FDA's decision to allow Plan B to be purchased without restriction, out on store shelves, and you explicitly supported the move, even to the point of using your daughters as justification for a blatantly political election-year ploy.  Remember when you promised that the decisions of your administration would be based on sound science, evidence, and fact - with the implied comparison to ideologically-driven right-wingers?  I certainly do.  So do these Senators.  And I'm genuinely curious what bullshit y'all are going to pull out of your ass to justify your decision to go against what the experts decided based on actual science and research.

Much has been said about The Eleven-Year-Old, and the use of this fear-and-emotion-based appeal has been thoroughly deconstructed already, so I won't say much - only that if you would rather see a child forced to bear a child than allow her a modicum of control over her circumstances, your priorities are seriously fucked up.  Actual abortion or bearing a child at that age are both far more physically difficult/dangerous than a medication which studies have shown to be quite safe, anyway.

The thing is, this overruling doesn't just affect The Eleven-Year-Old.  It also affects teens as old as fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen.  Are you seriously telling me that a sixteen-year-old is mature enough to drive a car - hundreds of pounds of metal moving at high speed, quite capable of killing and maiming if misused or mistakes are made! - but not mature enough to take a medication properly, whether it's because of a broken condom or to protect themself after being raped?  What the fuck kind of logic is that?

And then there's the much-less-mentioned half of the overruling.  The part that would have moved Plan B out from behind the pharmacy counter and onto the shelves.

Allow me to rephrase that: it would have moved Plan B out from behind the gatekeeping of pharmacists, many of whom are anti-choice, and, in some places, legally protected in their choice to deny people access to certain medications because it upsets their delicate fee-fees.  A grown-ass person can be in need of emergency contraception and still be told "No" simply because the pharmacist doesn't like it - and depending on where they are, there may not be a damn thing to be done about it.  Allowing Plan B to be stocked on regular shelves with other medications would have removed this (gigantic, horrible) barrier between grown people and the medication they need, much less teens or children.  That's the other thing y'all chose to block.  You not only told young people "We don't think you should be allowed to control your reproduction without the okay of the adults around you", you also told pregnancy-capable people everywhere "We don't think your need to access emergency contraception is important enough to make it available to you without going through a gatekeeper." 

Well, Obama administration, don't say you weren't warned when your core base gets tired of you pulling shenanigans like this and refuses to come out and vote for you next year.  When your percentages are dropping among blocs like women and pro-choicers, core Dem constituencies...you have only yourselves to blame.

If you can't beat them, take credit for what they forced you to do!

Via Calitics, it seems Anthem Blue Cross (one of the health-insurance giants) is running an ad touting "100% free annual checkups" that they "offer".

A full-page ad from a magazine, showing a smiling doctor using a stethoscope on his patient; text reads "Anthem Blue Cross Free Annual Checkups" with further copy below explaining how "annual checkups help keep you healthy and that's why Anthem Blue Cross covers them at 'no extra cost to you'."

Well, this is awkward.  Because those free checkups that they're talking about like it's some kind of magnanimous caring gesture on their part to take care of their customers?  It's actually a requirement, part of one of the more popular provisions in Obama's health insurance reform bill that requires insurance companies to cover preventative care with no copay or other upfront cost to the patient.  And it's a requirement that the insurance companies, including Blue Cross, fought viciously against. 

Which makes it more than a little duplicitous to, once it turns out to be very popular with the unwashed masses, run big ol' ads saying "HEY LOOK HOW NICE WE ARE TO COVER THIS PREVENTATIVE CARE FOR YOU please ignore the fact that we had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing so".

But I suppose, in this era of Faux News and Tea Party absurdity, it's perfectly logical to attempt to reap public goodwill by pretending it was your idea all along.  After all, depending on where people get their news, all they know about "Obamacare" is that it's for commies and something about death panels.

Of course, we all know the "liberal media" won't bother to call them out on it.  And thus, the cycle of misinformation continues...

Apologies for my absence, but LOOK IT'S AN ADORABLE KITTY!

Sorry I've been away, dearloves!  It's a bit of a long story, but the short version is, I enlisted my mom's help to do some massive decluttering and housecleaning, which took a full week of working every day at least half the day, starting the day after Thanksgiving and going through the next weekend (I swear, I think we hauled at least two dozen black trash bags of stuff out of this place, between trash and Goodwill donations!).  The reason?  Ozz and I decided to get a kitty, talked to our landlord about altering our no-pets lease, and the end result of all this work (the house needed to be made safe for a kitteh; there was far too much clutter and junk in corners that a cat could get into trouble with and which could've hid spiders or other nasties) came home with us Wednesday night:

She-Who-Has-Not-Yet-Been-Named, a mostly-white calico cat w/orange-brown and grey tabby patches, curled up on the bed with her front paws over her tiny little face

She's almost a year old but still quite petite, with a purr like a good-sized motor that starts up as soon as you touch her or sometimes even talk to her.  She's a snuggler, too:

SWHNYBN laying on her back across my lap, sleeping with her head pillowed on my arm and a paw resting on my laptop while I tried to work around her

My fiance Ozz, laying down and smiling at the camera with SWHNYBN draped across his chest looking half-asleep

So!  There's my excuse for being gone the past couple weeks.  And a very cute little excuse she is, too.  As she settles in and my routine re-stabilizes, expect to start hearing from me again - I have Things To Say about Obama's Plan B fuckery, the bullying of a Pagan child by his teachers, and a potential "atheist license plate tax" in Georgia, among other things.  Hope everyone's holiday season (if you are celebrating anything this time of year, anyway) is going well thus far! 

PS: I am perfectly open to doing regular or semi-regular Doses of Cute, now that I have a subject, but I don't want to spam y'all with cat pictures if you're not interested.  Would you be interested?  Let me know in comments!