into the “I think abortion adoption (shit I’ve been typing the word abortion so much lately with the troll infestation that I goofed. Fuckles)is a necessary evil” category

Forcing a woman into adoption is just as evil as forcing a woman into motherhood or forcing a woman into having an abortion.

It’s not really a choice when you’re not given another option, is it?

to the party lines in the healthcare debate:

Republicans: Let them eat cake if they are healthy and can afford cake in the private market.

Democrats: We were going to have cake, but now it looks like bread and water for everyone. Well not everyone, some people will still have cake. But those who never had cake will be required to buy bread and water at cake prices.

ETA:

Single payer advocate: Screw cake AND bread and water- we can’t live on that. We want our meat and veggies!

Go read this post on anthropomorphizing and gender.

Are you back yet?

So I’ve been thinking long and hard about why it is that dude-bros need to turn sex and reproduction into a battle where they win by sticking it in. What could have sparked the original idea, what was making early dude-bros feel so rotten that they turned sex into a contest between the sexes? And why are those same dude-bros sooooo upset now that modern science has given women greater ability to control reproduction.

An ex of mine used to say that he was 100 percent positive that the people who are screamingly anti-abortion are that way because if abortion had been an option for their mothers, they never would have been born. I think he was close-ish. But once you’ve been born you no longer have to worry about how you got here, it’s impractical. I think it’s more that they can’t stand the idea someone else, someone female, is in charge of deciding if their dna gets passed on. And honestly, if someone said “God says you should submit to me, cook my dinners, wash my socks, give me blow jobs and have my babies” what reasonable woman with any kind of other option would agree? Sure, maybe a woman might have a much regretted one-night stand, or even a brief fling. Even I dated a Republican once. But you don’t go having babies with those people if you can avoid it.

And I think it’s really telling that those same manly-men forced birthers never go after the men who get women pregnant. I have never, in the thousand and thousands of hours that I have argued this point, seen one single forced birther say that anything should be done about the male half of the pregnancy equation. Not one single suggestion (outside of the occasional “he should marry her and claim his shiny pussy prize!” which is just MORE punishment for the woman with a life of domestic slavery).

And that’s because they think the dudes who get women knocked up against their will are the winners. They have a problem hating on dudes who do the thing they want to do.

Of course, this is not all dudes. Even the Kid’s deadbeat, domestically violent, crazy stalker of a dad was pro-choice and *seemed* decent enough in the beginning that I had his kid, though one of the first things I asked myself when the stick turned blue is “can you do this parenting thing by yourself, cause you’re probably going to?”.

But as time and evolution marches on, and women gain ground in financial independence and body autonomy and science means that not every sex act equals child birth and not every child birth means a serious risk of death, and parenting alone no longer means social pariah status, those old school dude bros have fewer and fewer options for procreating. They either have to change their ways to bemore competetive, or fight tooth and nail to keep women desperate enough to choose them.

They have to look at sex as a war. Sad thing is though, no one wants to have a baby with their enemy. So their whole game plan for passing on their dna actually works to their own disadvantage.

But evolution marches on, and dudes with dna that makes them more adaptable, changeable, affable to women’s needs will be more likely to have their genes passed on. And dudes without that ability will find their lines dying out.

That is your hopeful thought of the day.

Best. Line. Ever. In. A. TV. Show!

It seems that we (ok not we- but troll d’jour) need(s) a 101 post on hate.

Like I said about misogyny before– if it was just your simple, garden variety of hate, like some people have for brussel sprouts or like I have for walking barefoot on grass, then it would be easy to deal with.

But misogyny, racism, homophobia, ableism, etc. are not simple forms of hate. With simple hate- you avoid the things you hate. I wear flip flops in the park, for example. But with whatever flavor of bigotry (and isn’t it interesting how people generally aren’t just one flavor of bigot) it’s not just a matter of avoiding things that that they hate. Troll d’jour, for example, keeps coming to this blog and commenting. Bigotry is hatred coupled with a need to control or demean, or prejudice plus power- which is the sociologists’ definition. (People who use dictionary definitions of different flavors of bigotry are almost always using that very narrow, inaccurate definition to somehow prove that they aren’t whatever definition they are using).

I hate walking barefoot in the grass. But I don’t hate grass. I don’t feel the need to rip up all the grass in the world or limit the ability of grass to grow unrestricted. I don’t hate all grass for making me feel uncomfortable or icky. I don’t make jokes at the expense of grass, talking about how it lazily it lies there waiting for someone to come water it. It’s not slutty grass cause it will let just anybody walk all over it, it wasn’t asking to be mowed by letting itself get all tall. I don’t hate people who like walking barefoot in the grass. I don’t tell grass to go back where it came from.

If I did any of those things, I’d be looked at pretty funny. But bigots do those things all the time, and they think their hatred isn’t even hatred. It’s common sense or just how things are or even a command from god. They don’t understand that doing things like trying to control women’s bodies by outlawing medical procedures or forcing them to change their names upon marriage is just as ridiculous as if I went and said that grass can only be grown in 2 foot square patches (so that I can always step over the patch) away from the public view. If i said it was unnatural for two different kinds of grass to cross breed I’d be as bigoted as people who say it’s unnatural for two people of the same sex to marry.

But bigotry is hate plus a need to control or demean.

If you think there is ever any situation where a woman forfeits control of her own body, whether it’s during pregnancy, or because she wore her skirt too short or had a drink at a bar and was raped, or if she marries and has to get a new name, then you are a misogynist. If you’ve ever seriously used the word feminazi- you’re a misogynist.

If you have ever used the words “lame” or “retarded” as an insult or whined about ADA requirements, (or any number of other things, my abelist repertoire is sadly lacking)you’re an abelist.

If you think that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry, or raise children or if you’ve ever called a transgendered person a “he/she” or an “it” or if you think that gay sex is a sin, you’re a homophobe.

If you use the term “illegal immigrant” and honestly think that a person’s mere existence on one side of a border is a crime, you’re a racist. If you think that racial stereotypes exist for a reason, you’re a racist. If you think there is such a thing as reverse racism, you’re a racist.

If you want to control or demean people based on an intrinsic trait that they cannot control, then you are a bigot. It doesn’t matter if you THINK that your intentions are not to control or demean or to hate. Bigotry does not require intention.

And truthfully, I couldn’t care less if you hate me. I do get seriously pissed off when you try to control me or insult me because of that hate. If all the haters did was cut themselves off from the things they hate, then bigotry would be like walking barefoot in grass.

So read this

Are you back?

I never married. I never will. I could have gotten married a couple of times, but I’m totally a candidate for runaway bride status.

So my name has always been my name. And it always will be (unless I meet a dashing Cary grant type whose last name happens to be Bennett. Then I *might* consider changing my name just so I could be Lizzie Bennett. Same is true if the dude’s last name is Darcy.)

But the Kid has his dad’s last name. 14 years and $40k in unpaid child support later, and I regret that decision. But wevs. It’s the Kid’s name now.

But I have never been Mrs. Kid’slastname. And i live in an urban, progressive, West Coast city. There are lots of unmarried people with kids or divorced/remarried people with kids. Enough that no one should automatically assume that kids and parents share the same name. I know only a couple of kids that have the same last names as their moms, and at least 2 of those kids have moms with hyphenated names.

So it pisses me off to nooooooo end when people call me Mrs. Kid’slastname. Especially school people, who are sitting there with my name right in front of them, either in an email or on a form. Kid had a counselor last year who flat out refused to get my name right, and was so pissed off when I got mad about it that he called me Ms. Notexactlyyourlastnamebutcloseenough after that.

It is disrespect to refuse to knowledge someone’s proper name, whether it’s a woman with a different name from her kids or a person with a hard to pronounce (foreign) name or a person transitioning from one gender to another. A name is important. Things don’t exist to us until we name them and refusing to use someone’s name is a way of wiping out their existence.

The Kid is a dork, a video game playing, fantasy book reading, dungeons and dragons dork.

I am fine with this. I was a popular, non-dorky teenager. It benefited me very little in the real world (except that home was so bad- I figured the universe was giving me a break by making school and friends easier).

But it does mean I get to have a lot of uncomfortable discussions about how video games perpetuate racism and sexism in the real world.

Example #1:

Kid flops into a chair and sighs.

Me: What up dude?

Kid: I just died in my game. I have to go back and start ALL OVER.

Me: Sorry monkey.

Kid: Next time though, I’m going to play as a girl. Girls have it easier in the game.

Me: Oh really. How do girls have it easier?

Kid: Well there is this guy that steals your car, and you have to pay him a lot of money if you want it back. But if you’re a girl, you can uhm, uh, have sex with him and get your car back.

Me: You do realize that is not having sex right. You realize that is rape. He’s forcing her to have sex with him.

Kid: Yes. (slinks off).

Me: you know we are going to have to finish this discussion at some point.

Kid: Yes.

Example 2:

Kid: So in this game, this guy gets a rash on his little tribal

Me: You mean his junior member?

Kid: Yeah, but he calls it his little tribal

(conversation goes on about all the many euphemism for penis)

Kid: so the guy goes to the doctor in the game. And the doctor performs some painful test and then tells the guy that he needs to use this cream to clear it up. But the guy, Nanuk, doesn’t trust the doctor because the doctor hurt him, so he decided to use a witch doctor’s cure instead and covers his little tribal in oil and lights it on fire.

Me: Oh dude, that’s horrible.

Kid: I know

Me: and it’s also racist.

Kid: Oh no- in the game there are no races, just tribes.

Me: Something can be not racist inside the game, but it is racist outside the game. Remember that thing about the girl and the car thief?

Kid: Yes.

Me: You know that same thing happened to me in real life. It didn’t feel like “Oh bonus! I get my shit back and all I have to do is fuck this asshole”.

Kid: what happened?

Me: Well we were in the middle of moving. I gave all my money to this guy with a truck to move our stuff for us. He got everything we owned into the truck, then backed me into a corner and said to either give him more money or fuck him.

Kid: What did you do?

Me: Well I used you as an excuse. I told him I couldn’t with you there, and for him just to wait until later. Fortunately I knew where his mom lived, and when i told her that he had all my stuff, she got mad and laid into him. If it hadn’t been for her, you wouldn’t have any of your baby pictures.

I don’t want to ban you from playing video games. I don’t think that would help.
But I do want you to see this stuff. I want you to understand what happens in real life when you treat someone as dumb for being tribal or treat rape as sex. I want you to recognize it when you see it.

Kid: I get it. What’s inside the game isn’t what’s outside the game.

Me: Well that’s a start.

When the Kid was little and having a tantrum or doing something to cause problems, I would stop him ans ask “Is what you’re doing helping or hurting?”

I find myself wishing I could sit large parts of the population down at the moment and ask them the same thing.

For example- do you really think death threats are helpful? (Jezebel link disclaimer)

And with so many horrible things happening in the world, is spending time worrying about the state of the presidential ween more helpful than spending time worrying about rising unemployment?

In the middle of all this, a woman who was kidnapped 18 years ago (just a few miles from my home at the time) is finally free from the wankstain who kept her as a rape slave. Yay! In the mean time 9 women are missing in North Carolina and no one gives a damn and I post about a missing girl and the only comments are either crickets chirping or racist drivel. Is that helping or hurting?

And people are bringing guns to town hall meetings and wishing the president harm. Is that helping or hurting?

The Kid got the concept at 4 years old. The people in the stories above are grown ups who would rather cause harm and (as Wonder put it so well, once upon a time) “stand there in their wrongness and be wrong” than do something useful or helpful or good or kind or thoughtful.

It makes me sad and angry and embarrassed to be part of this planet, all at once.

I wrote in an email today that “white privilege means not having to do much while still feeling righteous”. I’m part of that problem. I don’t do enough.

But I want to do more. White privilege also means that white people are more likely to listen when I speak. So I will speak, or in this case- copy and paste.

Black and brown children are way more likely than white children to be taken from their mothers by “the system” and we are the system. Just like we treat poverty as a criminal act, we treat blackness and browness as criminal acts, and judge parents of color with much harsher lenses than we use for white parents.

This is an action item. Do something. Repost this, show up. Don’t think that just “not being a racist” is enough. It’s not. This is someone’s baby girl who is missing. This is a mother who feels the loss of that child like it’s a missing limb. If you’re a parent and you’ve ever had that panicked moment where a kid wanders off in the grocery store- imagine if that feeling went on for 6 months or longer.

Where Is Aniysah?

From Document the Silence:

On March 3rd, 2009 six year old Aniysah was taken from her mother’s arms and thrown into a legal shuffle of unaccountability, instability and discrimination. There were no records verifying that she would be taken to a safe living environment or that she was enrolled in school. Questions about her health and well-being went unanswered. That was 150 days ago. To date, Aniysah remains lost in the legal system. A system where black and brown children go missing everyday. A system where black mothers like Aniysah’s are often left to fend for themselves in a brutal, dogged battle just to make sure their children are safe.

It’s time to hold the legal system accountable. Document the Silence asks that you join them in the “Where’s Aniysah?” campaign by posting information about this case on your blogs, online social networks and throughout your community. You can find out more about this campaign to stand against injustices against our children in the legal system by visiting the Document the Silence website .

Where’s Aniysah? What you can do!

* Show up! – Are you going to be in the NYcity area August 24th? Come to Aniysah’s court date and show the judge and the law guardian you care! Even if you can’t make it, invite your friends who can! The deets:The next court date is August 24th, 2009 at 11AM and the address is :IDV PartCourtroom E-123, Annex BuildingJustice Fernando M. CamachoQueens County IDV Court,Queens County Supreme CourtCriminal Term 125-01 Queens BlvdKew Gardens, New York 11415

* Spread the word!- send this website out to everyone you know. tell them why this is important. post to your facebook account. forward on your many list serves. post Aniysah’s mom youtube clip on your facebook page. write a blog about her story. email everyone you know and don’t know.

* Speak up! – do you know of other children of color who have been lost in the legal shuffle? Let’s document the silence of court sanctioned kidnapping that is happening to black and brown women and children across the country! email us at beboldbered@gmail.com and we will add your story to the website.

Via Elle Phd

A few metric shit ton of random, rambling thoughts

I don’t think Jesus said anything about passing laws to punish people who disagreed with him. Actually, I’m pretty sure that his entire message was about striving individually to be better people. I’m pretty sure he said to leave the judgment up to him. The old testament is pretty confusing with it’s weird contradictory rules about what you can eat and the types of fabrics you could wear and how to properly stone your wife, but Jesus was pretty clear. He was all “be good to each other, and I’ll take care of the naughty/nice list”.

But aside from the Quakers and the UU- I don’t see much of that attitude in Christianity.

I’m not unlearned about religion. Sure, I’ve never read the Koran so my knowledge of Islam is a bit lacking, and everything I know about Hinduism or Jainism or Shintoism is less than I know about quantum mechanics . But when I was little I went with my grandma to the Kingdom Hall. She was a Jehovah’s Witness. Even as a little kid, I thought their rules were pretty dumb. Why wouldn’t god want you to celebrate your birthday or play sports? But I got to wear shiny shoes and new dresses and go out to lunch afterwards.

I went to a baptist summer bible camp. It was cheap daycare while mom was working, and they had good snacks. But it still seemed pretty fake to me.

By the time I hit high school, I was in full religious experimentation mode. There was the summer I was a Buddhist. I still use the meditation stuff when i can’t sleep, and I can sit still with my eyes closed and my breath slowed for 8 hours. But 15 year olds have social lives, and boys and friends and things to distract them. I figured my middle path involved less meditation and more keggers at the reservoir.

Not much later (16, 17 maybe) I discovered wicca. Ohhhhhhhh a religion where girls aren’t considered 2nd class (true for Judeo-Christian faiths and Buddhism). But I am not a nature girl. Not even a little. And again, the ritual of the thing seemed so false, just like baptisms.

I toyed with the idea of Zoroastrianism. I like their funeral rituals. I seriously considered marrying a sikh, but their ideas of equality don’t exactly translate into real life action.

What kept popping up is the idea that if you are good- if you say the right prayers (or spells) or believed the right way, then god or the universe or whatever would have your back. That good would come of believing the right way and there would be justice or fairness or something that came out of it. What also kept popping up was the way that women were treated as less than, in everything but wicca. I couldn’t imagine how there could be any sort of supreme being who would automatically subject one half of the population to greater hardships just because of a piece of flesh.

And that’s a big one, but it’s not the biggest reason why I just don’t buy it. I don’t believe the world is just. I don’t believe that people get what they deserve. I don’t believe that some cosmic entity is up there balancing the scales. I don’t believe in kharma. I think terrible people get away with horrible things all the time, while good people get punished for uncontrollable things like race or sex or class or physical ability or sexual preference. And I think that those who believe that you get what you deserve make the lives of those at the bottom worse.

I do believe in striving for a better, more just, world. I believe that if we are here for any reason, it’s for that. It is to prove that we can do better for everyone. If there was any one philosophy I had to pick, religious or otherwise- I’d say I’m a Rawlsian. I believe people are more important than ideas. I believe it’s easy, too easy, to kill for an idea, for a religion, for a belief, for a country. I see a lot of calls to killing in religion. I believe that you should never trust any group who puts their ideas above the welfare of actual people, whether that group is PETA or Operation Rescue.

But back to Jesus, since that seems to be the dominant flavor of religious types I get around here.

Jesus was cool. A dear friend of mine, a brilliant, beautiful, brainy gay man, once wrote a poem about how he and Jesus could totally hang out, if Jesus’ followers weren’t so hell-bent on stoning gay men to death. I see that, we’ve all seen it. The hypocrisy, the purposeful misreading of the bible, the claims to faith without any examination.

Jesus said some good stuff. The whole rich men/ eye of the needle stuff is good. It’s not because having money is bad- it’s because the actions required to get and keep money are sinful. You have to ignore the suffering of others to do it. The whole stone throwing thing- also good. But as we see with his followers, they aren’t ready to put down their own stones yet. There are too many of us harlots for them, I suppose.

And it keeps getting repeated in comments around here- but “know them by their fruits” is one that Christians like to throw at others, but I haven’t seen them using it on themselves much. I see a lot of hate, a lot of judgment, a lot of fake “god bless” coupled with embarrassingly bad logic. But not a lot of evaluating their own deeds for rottenness.

And then I go back to my days with Grandma at the Kingdom Hall. Now the women in my family may have a tendency to be bat-shit crazy, but also really damn smart. When I asked grandma why Witnesses didn’t vote, she quoted the “render unto Caesar” line to me. She explained that law making and politicking had nothing to do with Jesus. He was the one and final judge and that making laws on earth was bad because Jesus already told us all how to act.

Now- I vote. But I’m not Christian. And i don’t have a problem with Christians voting. But I do think it’s hypocritical and wrong in the eyes of Jesus for Christians to try and force their views on everyone else through the law or the government. (Do they think they get bonus points or gold stars in heaven for most number of non-believers oppressed by the church?) And I think it’s wrong in a Rawlsian sense to limit individual liberty to a specific religion.

And with that- I have to end my philosophical ramblings for the evening.