11.02.07
Posted in arrrrgh, law, outrage, patriotism, politics, sexuality, women at 9:55 am by Hanne Blank
From today’s Kaiser Family Foundation’s daily Women’s Health Report:
Exhibit A:
A House-Senate conference committee on Thursday approved a fiscal year 2008 appropriations measure that would include a $27.8 million increase in funding of abstinence education programs, CQ Today reports. The legislation combines a Labor-HHS-Education spending bill (HR 3043) with a spending bill for the Department of Veterans Affairs and military construction (HR 2642) (Wayne, CQ Today, 11/1).
Exhibit B:
Sixty-seven percent of U.S. adults favor allowing public schools to provide contraceptives to students, including 37% who favor providing them only to children whose parents have consented and 30% who favor providing them to all students who ask, according to a recently released Associated Press-Ipsos poll, the AP/Columbus Dispatch reports.
The poll, taken from Oct. 23 to Oct. 25, found that minorities, older and lower-income people are most likely to prefer requiring parental consent, while those who support no restrictions primarily are younger and from urban or suburban areas. People who oppose providing birth control at school are more likely to be white and higher-income earners. The majority of respondents said young people should have access to birth control either beginning at age 16 or age 18, compared with one-third who chose age 15 or younger.
The poll also showed that 51% of people believe sex education and birth control are more effective ways to reduce teen pregnancies than emphasizing abstinence and morality, compared with 46% who prefer moral and abstinence messages. About 64% of minorities and 47% of whites consider sex education and birth control the most effective method. Nearly seven in 10 white evangelicals said they prefer abstinence, as well as about 50% of Catholics and Protestants. About 62% of all people surveyed believe providing birth control reduces the number of teen pregnancies.
… The survey involved telephone interviews with 1,004 adults.
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05.23.07
Posted in outrage, patriotism, politics at 7:14 am by Hanne Blank
Any of y’all read National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 or Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20? Came out from the White House in May?
No?
Can’t say I blame you, it’s a pile of some of the most deliberately obfuscatory governmental gobbledygook I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m a person who reads federal “abstinence education” policy for laughs.
Even if you haven’t read it, though, you should know what it says. Because it says, in far more words, that if something happens that the President considers sufficiently catastrophic — let’s say a big earthquake, or another Katrina-esque storm, or even an actual attack on a domestic target (launched by whomever… no reason we have to look outside our own borders for terrorists, natch, says the woman who was living in the greater Baltimore/DC area during the period of the Beltway Sniper shootings…) — the President may arrogate unto himself sole responsibility for the entire Federal government.
Not just his usual branch of it. The whole shebang. Supreme Court. State Department. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. Coast Guard. Post Office. IRS. FEMA. The FAA. FDA. EPA. CDC/NIH. Even the Capitol Hill cafeterias. All Your Freedom Fries Are Belong To Us.
Additionally, in such an event, the President becomes the agent responsible “for ensuring constitutional government.”
I won’t speculate on whether or not the current administration has the integrity necessary to refrain from creating a suitable incident. After all, the nature of such an event is so deliberately undefined that they’d hardly have to. I mean, really, Gay Pride marches could just about constitute a terrorist crisis by the terms of this legislation.
(You, over there? Please pass this box of tissue back to the sobbing Constitutional Law professor in the back row. It is a nasty shock.)
A quick and dirty rundown of the newly-signed law can be found here: http://progressive.org/mag_wx051807
The text of the directive itself can be read here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html
Do you wonder why none of the news media have been covering this story? I sure the hell do. I think I’m going to find some time today or tomorrow to write and call my local newspapers and my local TV news, and to drop a line to CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS news, as well as the BBC and CBC.
Because Bush may not be King just yet. But it wouldn’t take much, now, would it?
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11.17.06
Posted in arrrrgh, outrage, patriotism, politics, women at 12:34 pm by Hanne Blank
… in the Bu$h administration, it seems, to hand-pick for administrative appointment the precise kind of people who will be the biggest prickliest possible burrs under the saddle of reasonable egalitarianism. The harder they are for anyone else to remove from their hand-picked posts, the better, too, so that the burrs will stay in place as long as possible, and for the remainder of the Shrubidency at the very least.
The latest in this long and infuriating list is a guy named Eric Keroac. You’ve probably never heard of him before. (That’s another Bush hallmark: if you pick people no one knows, it’s less likely that people will have reasons to complain about them. Except, er, not in this case, that’s for sure.) Here’s a little bit of what the WaPo has to say about Eric Keroack [Link]:
The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as “demeaning to women.”
Eric Keroack, medical director for A Woman’s Concern, a nonprofit group based in Dorchester, Mass., will become deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the next two weeks, department spokeswoman Christina Pearson said yesterday.
Keroack, an obstetrician-gynecologist, will advise Secretary Mike Leavitt on matters such as reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy. He will oversee $283 million in annual family-planning grants that, according to HHS, are “designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons.”
The appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation, was the latest provocative personnel move by the White House since Democrats won control of Congress in this month’s midterm elections. President Bush last week pushed the Senate to confirm John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations and this week renominated six candidates for appellate court judgeships who have previously been blocked by lawmakers. Democrats said the moves belie Bush’s post-election promises of bipartisanship.
The Keroack appointment angered many family-planning advocates, who noted that A Woman’s Concern supports sexual abstinence until marriage, opposes contraception and does not distribute information promoting birth control at its six centers in eastern Massachusetts.
“A Woman’s Concern is persuaded that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness,” the group’s Web site says.
You know what’s really demeaning to women? Assuming that not having any voluntary control whatsoever over their fertility ennobles them.
You know the address to write to about this, right? 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C., 20500.
I always have the feeling I should be using really short words when I send nastygrams to Shrub, but have yet to actually give in to the temptation. You do as you will on that score. But do be a good patriot and write and tell Mr. Bush that he’s making a wrong choice, won’t you? The wellbeing of your fellow countrywomen is on the line.
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11.08.06
Posted in good things, patriotism, politics at 9:49 am by Hanne Blank
Or at least guardedly optimistic:
- My mayor’s gonna be the new Governor, and dammit, I think that’s a pretty good thing.
- My current governor’s gonna need a new job, and dammit, I think that’s a really good thing.
- Ben Cardin also won, in Maryland, and while I kinda felt that voting for the Senate race was one of those moments where you hold your nose and pick the one who makes you puke the least, I’m damn glad we got a Dem in there.
- Nancy Pelosi’s new job. HOLY MOLEY! How exciting is that?
- Rick Santorum’s new job, whatever it may end up being. (Dare we hope he will become a spokesperson for K-Y Jelly?)
- The people of South Dakota are a sensible, sane people. Reproductive freedom cookies for everyone! (Surely these are made by the Girl Scouts?)
- Ditto the people of Arizona. (They get delicious gay cookies, which are, as everyone knows, fabulous.)
- And Missouri, for voting as they did on their stem cell research bill. (Stem cell cookies? Maybe we’d better stick with fabulous gay cookies for Missouri too.)
- Props to my home state of Ohio for electing Sherrod Brown.
- The smell of democracy in the morning. Seriously, I know that nothing’s any better than it was yesterday when I went to bed, we’re still nipple-deep in Bush’s shit and it’s going to take a long hard slog to even start to put some of it to rights. But the fact that things went as well as they did yesterday gives me hope. By things going as well as they did, I don’t even mean the Democratic victories so much as the fact that they were permitted to happen, that the system either a) isn’t so completely corrupt and Bu$hco doesn’t have such an eldritch Cthulhu-tentacled pervasive grip on the whole system that the elections could be completely stolen or rigged across the board (which was a very real fear for me and many other people) or b) even Bu$hco has some shred of decency that prevented it from doing the great big bad ugly Wrong Thing that so many of us worried they might be doing.Don’t get me wrong. I’ll still be watching like a hawk. I’ll still be doing activism, and writing letters, and running my mouth, and writing books with the intent of changing the world for the better. (So should you.) But I feel a little less despondent about my country this morning than I did last night. And that’s something.
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10.31.06
Posted in arrrrgh, outrage, patriotism, politics, sexuality, women at 11:59 am by Hanne Blank
… because that day is creeping closer and closer.
I wanted it to just be some crazy Hallowe’en stunt, but it seems not. Courtesy of the Kaiser Daily Women’s Health Policy Report:
Newly revised federal guidelines have expanded the scope of the $50 million Title V abstinence education grant program to include unmarried adults up to age 29, USA Today reports (Jayson, USA Today, 10/31). …According to Wade Horn, HHS assistant secretary for children and families, the revised guidelines for 2007 are aimed at people ages 19 to 29 because recent data show that more unmarried women in that age group are having children. “We wanted to remind states they could use these funds not only to target adolescents,” Horn said. The revised guidelines stipulate that states applying for the grants are “to identify groups … most likely to bear children out of wedlock, targeting adolescents and/or adults within the 12- through 29-year-old age range.” (Kaiser Daily Women’s Health Policy Report, 10/27).
Yes, that’s right. Abstinence-only sex education is being encouraged not only for public-school-aged students (no, I will not say “public-school-aged children” because for a bunch of reasons, I do not think that’s an appropriate term to use when referring to adolescents — and neither does the U.S. government, apparently, since they think high school is old enough to expect students to sign up as part of the Junior ROTC and learn how to be good little soldiers for the Shrubbian jihad) but for people who are legal adults, technically entitled to the freedoms of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The official rationale is that single women under the age of 30 are having more children out of wedlock.
(Shock, horror, general alarum. General failure to notice that everywhere else in the industrialized world, women are increasingly choosing to bear at least their first child as unmarried women. This is particularly true in northern Europe. In Sweden, for example, 70% of cohabiting couples who have a child have the child first, then marry within five years of the child’s birth. I note that Sweden is still trundling along just fine, churning out those cunning little flat-pack Ikea dining room sets just like anything. And interestingly enough, Sweden is officially a Protestant country.)
The real rationale is that the Shrubbian jihad isn’t only being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, folks, it’s being fought right here at home and one of its goals is to bring your lives in line with someone else’s patriarchal repressive fundamentalist Christian version of where, how, and with whom you should be having a sex life.
If you live in one of the states that accepts Title V, Section 510b funding — and unless you live in California, Maine, New Hampshire, or Pennsylvania, you do — get off your duff and start writing some snarly letters to your congresscritters. I would, personally, suggest that when you do, you call for the firing of HHS assistant secretary Wade Horn, who may be only a figurehead but still needs a swift Doc Marten to the buttcheek for form’s sake if nothing else. Regardless of where you live, letters to your congresscritters and to Mike Leavitt, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services are definitely in order (the HHS address is: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services · 200 Independence Avenue, S.W. · Washington, D.C. 20201).
I have never been a fan of abstinence-only “sex education.” It is one of the few things for which I will never forgive Bill Clinton (the legislation that provides funding for it was first enacted during his administration, in 1996). But there is a big honking line between directing your tiresome (and ineffective, and inaccurate, and po-faced, and hypocritical, and farfetched, and…) propaganda at minors in public schools, where state governments do indeed have the right to require whatever curricula they deem appropriate are taught, and deciding that it is appropriate to go out and flail the same tiresome bullshit at legal adults.
The federal government has no business telling you what you can and cannot do with your consenting adult genitals. They want very badly to change this. This is how they’re getting their foot into your bedroom door.
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