VOD: How anti-abortion legislation hurts all women (including the pro-life)

When a fetus’s rights are protected before that of the mother, all women are threatened.  Women have been forced to submit to unwanted medical procedures and surgery all in the name of protecting life.

VOD: Prop 8 legislates discrimination

As I noted a few days ago, some day attempts to ban gay marriage will someday seem as absurd as banning interracial marriage.  . . The “Vote No” campaign has released a video to that point:

Blackmail only works if you think you’re doing something wrong

California’s Proposition 8 is probably one of the most followed pieces of legislation on the ballot next month. Nearly $60 million in donations have poured into campaigns fighting for and against the elimination of the right of homosexuals to marry.

Towards the end of last week, proponents contacted businesses that donated money to the opposition, demanding equal donations. . . or else.  Those seeking to ban gay marriage threatened to publish the names of all businesses making financial contributions to the campaign against Prop 8.

“Make a donation of a like amount to ProtectMarriage.com which will help us correct this error,” reads the letter. “Were you to elect not to donate comparably, it would be a clear indication that you are in opposition to traditional marriage. … The names of any companies and organizations that choose not to donate in like manner to ProtectMarriage.com but have given to Equality California will be published.”

The campaign to “vote no” is supported by companies like Apple and Google, who support equal rights for their homosexual and heterosexual employees.  Even the California Teacher’s Union is encouraging voters to strike down the discriminatory change to California’s Constitution.

That the hate mongers believe businesses fear being outed for their support of the campaign to strike down Prop 8 shows how out of touch they are.   The reason people want to see that Proposition struck down is because it discriminates against a minority group in California.  They’re not ashamed of their support; they’re proud to be taking a stand against what they view as a colossal wrong.

Article XI, Section 12 of California’s Constitution reads:

No contract of marriage, if otherwise duly made, shall be invalidated for want of conformity to the requirements of any religious sect.

Condemning homosexual marriage is based on moral leanings rooted in religion, thus violating the spirit of the California Constitution.  The state government covers civil marriage, religious marriage is up to your place of religious practice.

Some day in the not too distant future, banning gay marriage is going to seem as bizarre as legislating against interracial marriage.

VOD: Vote no on Prop 8 in California

They say imitation is the finest form of flattery. . . Those Mac v. PC ad sparked lots of parallel ads on other topics.  Below is a new web ad encouraging California voters to vote NO on Prop 8, and amendment to deny homosexuals the right to marry.

Alternately, we have the walk a mile in my shoes approach.

Personally, I’m kind of over the Mac v. PC ad format.

VOD: Using reverse psychology — DON’T VOTE — to get out the vote

I love this video.  The celebrities aren’t taking a stance on any issue in particular.  Instead, they press the importance of voting, period.

A bunch of celebrities are demanding that you don’t vote because voting is stupid. No one cares about education, health care, abortion, polar bears, the economy, etc.

But then celebrity after celebrity point out that what you care about might matter.  From social security to Darfur to the AIDS crisis at home and abroad, the 2nd ammendment, war on drugs. “This is really only about your future.”

They remind you that you need to REGISTER to vote and insist they’ll wait for you to register before moving on.

It’s completely non-partisan, but it reminds people of the issues at stake (regardless of the position you take on those issues), the need to register (the deadline is October 4th in some states) and the necessity of voting.

And of course, they ask you to take the message viral and share it with 5 friends.

PS. Maybe it leans left. But much of Hollywood is pretty liberal. The point is non partisan — vote!

Tim Wise: This is Your Nation On White Privilege

Jill over at Writes Like She Talks recommends that bloggers “spread Tim Wise’s article, ‘This is Your Nation on White Privilege,’ far and wide.”

I’m happy to help the cause.

This election season has demonstrated the profound double standards in our country in regards to gendered personality traits, qualifications, character, and experience.  Obama’s March speech on race is just the tip of the ice berg in terms of conversations that need to be had about how our race defines us and what privileges and challenges our genetic makeup hands us.

Whether or not you plan to vote for Barack Obama in November, we need to acknowledge that all Americans aren’t equal, yet.  The repeated and prolonged attacks on Barack Obama throughout the primary and general election periods are not just about politics.  Every challenge made of Sarah Palin’s qualifications can’t simply be written off as sexism and sour grapes over a personable Phyllis Schlafly 2.0.

There’s this false notion that nearly 150 years after slavery was outlawed in America, that race is no longer an issue.  Throughout the country ballot wars are raged against the continuation of affirmative action in employment and education systems.  People insist that the sins of their fathers, are not their own.    Sadly, the civil rights movement of the 1960s shifted our culture some, but not enough.

Here are a few of  Tim Wise’s observations on white privilege:

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

…

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”

…White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was “Alaska first,” and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you’re black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she’s being disrespectful.

Click through for the full piece. Your thoughts?  Pass it on.

so much news, so little time

Here are some worthwhile stories for you, if you’re aren’t already experiencing media overload

Eat Everything You Want and Stay Thin — the problem is that I don’t want zucchini and garden salads, I want chocolate cake.

Tired of listening to the pro-lifers yammer. . . let them chew on this one.

Here’s a woman tumbling about her experience having an abortion

Race not the reason behind Obama’s less than impressive polling against McCain

Why John McCain is going to win in November – read this when excessively calm, so that you’ll only be mildly agitated when done.

Part 1 of a rebuttal to Thomas’s pro-life commentary on Brazen Careerist

Yesterday, Milena Thomas posted about the hypocrisy of a vegan choosing to abort a pregnancy.  One of the most difficult decisions women make is what to do when faced with an unintended pregnancy.  It’s not like women don’t realize that terminating a pregnancy prevents the gestation of what ultimately culminates in a new life.   Women know full well the weight of the decision they’re making and have to live with; having an abortion is not like getting your haircut on a whim.  There are lot of factors to weigh.  And however a woman chooses to come to terms with that decision is unique to her and should be without judgement.

Thomas would have you believe that a woman who chooses to terminate a pregnancy is broken in some way.

My understanding has always been that a woman who drives herself to such a decision has been befallen by tragedy. Either suffering from severe medical complications, detrimental effects of poor decision-making, or horribly, being violated. I’ve always felt that a woman who chooses abortion has hit a low in her life, led to her choice through complex social and personal beliefs. I don’t feel I could do anything but lament for her and hope she gets the help she needs.

I would argue that abortion is as old as pregnancy and serves as the most primitive means of population control.  It allowed/s a woman to choose to be (or not to be) a parent.

Much as we don’t want to admit to our lowly status as part of the Animal Kingdom (we share 93% of our DNA with monkeys), terminating an unauspicious pregnancy fits with the basic instincts of animals.  How often do we read of cubs taken away from their mother at a zoo because she killed previous cubs and litters? Infanticide is common across the animal kingdom when conditions are not favorable for the upbringing of young.

infanticide has been reported among mice and ground squirrels, bears and deer, prairie dogs and foxes, fish and dwarf mongooses and wasps and bumblebees and dung beetles. . . lion[s]. . . red howlers of Venezuela, the gorillas of Rwanda, and the blue monkeys of Uganda . . . lemurs. . .

In the early 1970s, Harvard grad student Sarah Hrdy spent the summer in India observing the behavior of indigenous monkeys, Hanuman langurs. Fed by humans, the langurs overpopulated their terrain, which led to crowding and acts of infanticide by both genders.  The males seemed to kill the young not genetically bound to them, as a means of trying to ensure the success of their own progeny.

Her “outsider male” infanticide, she realized, was clearly not the only kind of adaptive strategy practiced in the animal world. A mother might resort to infanticide if she didn’t have the resources to raise all her children. Adults might also kill the infants of strangers simply for food or to eliminate the competition for limited resources.

Historically, humans have participated in infanticide.  In Ancient Greece, unhealthy babies were left to die from exposure outside the boundaries of communities.   A woman wasn’t deemed pregnant until she announced her pregnancy, allowing women the freedom to plan the size of their families and the frequency of new births.  Family planning was so embraced in ancient North Africa, that a plant known for its contraceptive properties made its way onto the back of coins, sort of an early public service announcement to prevent unintended pregnancies.  (The plant was so heavily used; it was driven to extinction.)  Imagine condom pictures on the back of nickels!

While ancient societies moved away from infanticide, abortificients continued to allow women to terminate a pregnancy long before it became a viable life.  Thus, to this day, women can plan their families on their own time line, and not be held a slave to their reproductive organs, by using contraceptives (in the best case scenario) and abortion (in the worst).   Today, 98% of American women will use birth control for some part of their lives, and one in three will likely have an abortion.

Pregnancy termination is an incredibly difficult and complex decision for women.  International research on the reasons behind women’s decisions find the choice to be incredibly layered.   In the US, for instance, a 1988 study showed women averaged nearly 4 reasons for choosing to terminate, “with 63% reporting 3-5 and 13% reporting 6-9. Only 7% of women in that study gave just one reason for obtaining an abortion.”  A 1998 synthesis of 32 studies conducted in 27 countries found (emphasis mine):

Worldwide, the most commonly reported reason women cite for having an abortion is to postpone or stop childbearing. The second most common reason—socioeconomic concerns—includes disruption of education or employment; lack of support from the father; desire to provide schooling for existing children; and poverty, unemployment or inability to afford additional children. In addition, relationship problems with a husband or partner and a woman’s perception that she is too young constitute other important categories of reasons. Women’s characteristics are associated with their reasons for having an abortion: With few exceptions, older women and married women are the most likely to identify limiting childbearing as their main reason for abortion.

Women who don’t want children, probably aren’t going to make the best parents if forced to carry to term.

Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion. (Guttmacher)

Most women are either happy with the news of pregnancy, or eventually shift to acceptance.  Some simply aren’t ready or don’t want to be mothers.  What kind of childhood would a baby brought into the world by a distinterested and disengaged parent(s) have?

As for socioeconomic concerns, can you fault a woman for recognizing she can’t afford a baby? The staples of the first year of a baby’s life run average $10,000 (from diapers and formula to furniture and onesies), and the cost of raising a child through the age of 18 can run between $125,000-$250,000).  There’s a certain stigma to life on welfare, so it seems that allowing a woman to pursue and education and career that would provide her with the finances to fund the life of a child, in a way deemed acceptable to the holier-than-though in society, might prove to be a good stage prior to parenting.  Also,  60% of women who seek to terminate a pregnancy already have one or more children at home. Such a woman is making the hard choice to provide the highest quality of life for the children she already birthed.

Relationship problems and immaturity.  Carrying a fetus to term is not going to make  dealing with relationship issues simpler. In fact, it’s likely to complicate the relationship further.  And to recognize that one is not mature enough to be a parent. . . both are responsible assessments of one’s situation.  And having a child in those instances also don’t seem favorable to a positive long term outcome.

Women choose to terminate a pregnancy because conditions for childrearing are NOT OPTIMAL in their specific case.  That decision isn’t the sign a damaged woman, but one responding to her most basic instincts that gestating life in that time and space isn’t going to yield the best outcome possible for all parties involved.

While pro-lifers are quick to point out that plenty of couples who can’t have children of their own would adopt the children born in lieu of termination prior to viability, I ask why there are more than 500,000 children in US foster care, without permanent homes?  Would we forcibly add another million children to the system per year, knowing that just 1/10th of those 500,000 today will be adopted by the end of the year?

From its earliest days, the decision to terminate a pregnancy is made by women determined to bring life into this world, only when it’s most likely to thrive.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of my rebuttal, which will cover why abstinence isn’t as good for you as regular sex.

Checking your 4th amendment rights at the border

photo by denverjeffrey

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment IV, Bill of Rights, United States Constitution

I’m hardly a constitutional scholar, but it seems pretty clear that the government doesn’t get to search your stuff without a damned good reason.  And after watching the explanation as to why you should never talk to the police without a lawyer even in you believe you’re snow white and free of crime, I don’t understand why more people are kicking up a sh*t storm about Homeland Security’s flagrant violation of our fourth amendment.

That’s not true; I do understand. We’re cowering in a corner, hoping to not be the one chosen for tasering by power crazed government authorities this week.  With 25 million Americans expected to travel overseas this summer, you might need to rethink what you pack.

For more than 18 months now, Homeland Security has been intermittently seizing the electronics of Americans re-entering the nation to cruise through their Blackberry data and person files on their laptops. While some border agents perform these searches in front of the products’ owners; others retain the items to copy the hard drives and data sets for later review, telling travelers the information will be deleted after being reviewed.  (After the last 8 years, do you trust the government?).

“Right now, [DHS] seems to believe that it can hold anything it wants from your laptop, BlackBerry, or cellphone indefinitely,” says Susan Gurley, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives in Alexandria, Va. “There are no limits on what they can do with it or whether they can share it with any third party.” (Christian Science Monitor)

Imagine your laptop being seized and held for several MONTHS.  The official line is that these searches weed out terrorist and child pornographers.  How many wannabe terrorists and child porn fetishists has Homeland Security caught in the last 18 months?  I haven’t heard about any arrests, have you?

The blanket policy covers most of the electronics and documentation you could possibly to travel with.

The policies cover “any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form,” including hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover “all papers and other written documentation,” including books, pamphlets and “written materials commonly referred to as ‘pocket trash’ or ‘pocket litter.’ “

Given our reliance on electronics in the business word, blanket access to our private files is incredibly dangerous and a violation of our privacy.

“A laptop can hold [the equivalent of] a major university’s library: It can contain your full life,” says Peter Swire, a professor of law at Ohio State University in Columbus. “The government’s never gotten to search your entire life, so this is unprecedented in scale what the government can get.” (Christian Science Monitor)

Accordingly, some Americans are starting to question the reach, and point out protections against searching one’s intellectual property without cause. Afterall, Homeland Security doesn’t have the authority to intercept first class mail.

A policy that allows for “random seizures” of your private property is practically an invitation to further harass people on the government’s sh*t list, which is pretty much anyone who stands up for the Constitution and human rights.  With the terror watch list cruising past one million names, the latest search mandate perpetuates the instilling of fear among American citizens, who might otherwise question the increasing infringement of American civil liberties.

Professor Duane of Regent University points out that there are roughly10,000 laws Americans can be prosecuted for breaking.  Are you absolutely positive you haven’t inadvertently broken one?  One that can be traced back to you?  Do you have a single pirated song on your iPod?.  And, if you’re a budding Naomi Wolf or Vincent Bugliosi, that stray track might be enough to get you arrested, and serve as warning to your activist compatriots.  Even better if you’re a nobody, because then the US government can make an example of you quickly and without a prolonged legal battle most Americans can’t afford.

What can you do? Daily Kos offers a number of suggestions:

• Sign the petition, demanding an assessment of this policy’s effects on American privacy guaranteed by the constitution.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation tells you which elected representatives you can contact to voice your opinion.
• Tell you elected representatives to support H.R. 6702, the Securing our Borders and our Data Act, which precludes searches sans suspicion and demands the regulation of how data will be reviewed and stored by Homeland Security.

In the interim, Machinist blogger Denise Caruso shares a computer security expert Mark Seiden’s suggestion to protect your data.

“Leave everything on a server, encrypted.” That way you don’t have to carry it across the border, and as long as you know you’ll have a network connection, you can get to it once you get where you’re going. This protects travelers not only from overzealous customs agents, but makes losing a laptop or having it stolen a mere inconvenience, rather than a security nightmare.

Feminist Daily News hacked?

I’ve subscribed to the Feminist Majority’s Feminist Daily News RSS Feed for quite a while.  A little after 5pm Thursday evening, the image of part of what I would assume is a late term aborted fetus ( I can’t say I’ve every actually stumbled upon one) came through with the note “Not a human, just a fetus. How long until we justify killing the old, the sick, any person without a champion?”

I was initially very confused — did the Feminist Majority change their platform midafternoon?
Then I realized, something was very wrong here. It definitely is a post that belongs on a pro-life feed. Clicking on the hyperlink took me to a dead page.

So I called the LA office, which was still open.   Not knowing who to ask for, I explained the situation to the person who answered the phone.  There was much gasping on her end; I forwarded her a copy.

I suspect there will be some note of explanation coming from the Feminist Majority today.

In the future, I hope they police their passwords and computer networks a wee bit better.

And to the pro-life “activist” likely behind this image sent to thousands of Feminist Majority supporters: how about you try and be a bit more realistic.  Per a 2000 survey by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, late term abortions count for less than 1/5 of 1% of abortions in the US, typically in cases of major medical issues.   Using the image of a later term aborted fetus hyperbolizes abortion.  That outcome is an extreme image meant to shock and disturb, but it doesn’t portray the reality of virtually every woman who has an abortion in this country.

UPDATE: no follow up from the Feminist Majority.  But the the picture is still in my feed.