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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11.15.06
Posted in arrrrgh, culture, politics, relationships, sexuality at 9:12 am by Hanne Blank
I confess that I was somewhat surprised to see, as I opened my morning e-mail of the day’s headlines from the Washington Post, that “3 Christian Groups Move To Condemn Gay Sex” was, for some reason, considered to be news. [Link]
Naturally, because I am apparently a well-trained little monkey who cannot physically prevent myself from clicking on any link in which the words “gay sex” appear, I decided to go look at the article. Whereupon I discovered that, in a stunning volte-face, the Catholic Church has decided to (yawn) reaffirm its institutional condemnation of same-sex nookie, yet apparently feels that this is not in any way contradictory to the spirit of inclusivity. “The truth is always welcoming,” quoth Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli of New Jersey.
Well, when the truth is that homosexual liaisons — particularly between men — have been an unspoken staple of Church life in and out of the monastery for oh, at least a millennium and a half now, I guess I can see how it might be welcoming in a sorta secret handshake kind of way. (From what I understand from the few folks I know who’ve spent long periods within the resolutely homosocial Catholic clerical establishment, that’s not necessarily too far off.)
And not in any way to equate homosexuality and pederasty, but, er, doesn’t it strike anyone else as being just a wee tiny bit disingenuous for the Church to come out waggling its big cartoon finger (hi, Anne!) at The Gay when it continues to protect its own altar-boy-buggerers? Are we to assume that what they really mean is that consensual homosexual sex between adults is capital-W Wrong, but sex between an ordained member of the Catholic clergy and a child below the legal age of consent is A-OK?
(There’s a transubstantiation joke in there somewhere, but damned if I’ve had enough caffeine yet to be able to make it.)
Oh, also, it seems that Baptists from North Carolina are down on sodomy, and the Presbyterians in Pittsburgh are about to go after one of their ministers for marrying a lesbian couple. You know how the Presbyterians get. (Scottish. Which explains a great deal. As a friend recently explained, in Scotland you can’t go encouraging fornication. Because that might lead to dancing.)
Methinks the clergy doth protest too much, really. Not necessarily that they’re all secretly queer, though some of them probably are. But these sorts of “we’re still against The Gay, you know” statements surely do smack of the rantings of a discomfited old codger shaking his fist at those dang young people, out there hooting and hollering and wearing tight trousers and doing God knows what all… that no one else is finding in the slightest bit remarkable any more.
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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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10.18.06
Posted in culture, links, outrage, patriotism, politics, relationships, sexuality, shiny at 9:56 am by Hanne Blank
Did you know that next year, the laws will change to make it necessary to have a passport to go between the USA and various nearby countries (Canada, for one), for travel that formerly did not require a passport? NYT reports that “The State Department proposed creating a wallet-size passport that Americans could use to travel to Bermuda, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. The card, which would include radio frequency coding to link it to a database of biographical data and a photograph, would be used when a new rule goes into effect next year requiring a passport for travel to those countries.”
Righty-o, then. RFID for personal ID, incidentally, has been noted to be a source of significant problems including massive potential for privacy breaches. Security expert Bruce Schneier seems fairly satisfied with the encryption/protections the USDept of State is planning to implement in its RFID for passports (or what they have indicated they will be planning, at any rate), but if you’re not as sanguine as Bruce is maybe you wanna get the fullsize passport now.
Not, of course, that this’ll keep them from RFID’ing your passport when you have to get it renewed down the line, but perhaps it will keep you from being a guinea pig for the first-gen version. Again, if you care. Which you might or might not.
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Shrub’s megalomania took a giant step forward yesterday when in the first wholesale revision to NASA/space policy in ten years, he decided that all your space is belong to us.
(Yes, I know it’s “base,” not “space,” but that doesn’t work here, see?)
Quoth the WaPo, “President Bush has signed a new National Space Policy that rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S. flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone ‘hostile to U.S. interests.’ ” (Link) Well done to you, George, and while I don’t think you have to worry about Al Quaeda sending up a manned explorer any time soon, I wish you good luck keeping, say, China from launching spacecraft if they damn well want to.
Whadda maroon. Someone needs to sit him down and make him watch all of TOS Star Trek. Possibly Clockwork Orange-style. ‘Cause clearly a childhood of Tom Swift and His Gigantic Space Ray of Obliterational Righteousness ‘n’ Doom has gotten far too deep into what passes for his brain. (Or has he been reading those drecky books about life apres-Armageddon that I always see heaped on the remainder table at CostCo? I can’t tell any more. Clearly he is suffering some 2-D/3-D conflict of some sort, since he’s not dealing in the World As We Know It, but what the source of his 2-D delusions is I know not.) Surely Gene Roddenberry would not object to his work being used for conscientious reprogramming purposes.
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And as your reward for reading the depressing news links, go play with this: Altar-Ations, a lovely little bit of interactive media educational art that manages to be funny, insightful, and scathing all at the same time. Brava Juliet for pulling this together.
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