Fight the Lies!

Read about it here.

“Quiverfull: Shunned From God’s Army” — Me on Television and My New Quiverfull Blog

Go here.

NJ4 UPDATE: RENATE HILL HAS WON HER APPEAL

Go here.

Request for Support for Jessica Valenti

Hello again,

I’m not sure you remember me, but I’m working for the news and politics show MobLogic.  Today, we have an interview up with Jessica Valenti, feminist blogger (Feministing.com) and writer.
http://www.moblogic.tv/video/2008/06/17/jessica-valenti/

In the interview, Jessica shines as a smart, intelligent feminist (of course), but our comments today have been…well…horrific.  As a feminist myself, I’m starting to feel my hope for our country fade.

Anyway, I was wondering if you could pass this plea along to anyone on the side of equality to even out the scale on our comment board. 

Thanks for giving me your time, as always.  I hope we can fight internet misogyny, but today, I’m not so sure.

Amanda Elend

Open Letter to PBS: Why Didn’t You Film the “Carrier” Rape Stops?

I was disappointed that Carrier did not cover a basic fact of military life:  when sailors move from port to port, they visit bars and brothels and rape the bodies of sexually enslaved women and girls.   In its homeport, San Diego, sailors from the Nimitz rape the prostituted bodies of girls in that city and in Tijuana.  These girls are subject to the harshness of the sex industry which treats women like modern-day slaves; girls are held in debt bondage, pimp-controlled, trafficked.  Tijuana is in fact a ‘corridor’ city:  girls are ‘broken’ there before being shipped to U.S. markets.   To make them submissive, the girls are subjected to gang rapes, beatings, starvation, being filmed for porn to degrade them, along with psychological terror tactics.  This is the norm of what happens to prostituted beings.  These are the broken bodies sailors buy and use. 

Read the rest at the new Women’s Space blog address.

Ninth Circuit Chief Justice Kozinsky: Presiding Over Controversial Porn Trial, Caught With Porn on His Own Website (Warning, May Trigger)

Now here is a dude.

Ronald Reagan appointee Alex Kozinski,  Chief Justice of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, has been presiding over the criminal obscenity trial of Ira Isaacs, who insists with a straight face that his hardcore bestiality and defecation porn,  in which he sometimes “stars”, is “art.”   Kozinski is a conservative Republican but a staunch defender of “free speech.”  When he learned, for example, that the Pasadena Appeals Court had installed filters banning pornography, he led a successful effort to have the filters removed.  His buddy Ira Isaacs undoubtedly believed Kozinski having been assigned to preside over his obscenity trial was a stroke of luck.

Read the rest at the new Women’s Space.

The 15th Carnival of Radical Feminists is UP!

At Rage Against the Man-Chine!   And once again, it’s early!  Check it out, Nine Deuce has done a fantastic job!  If you want to talk about it on my blog, however, you have to go to the new place.  :p 

Heart

Smackdown Time for Max Hardcore: Jury Finds Paul Little Guilty on 10 Counts of Criminal Obscenity

WARNING — GRAPHIC — MAY TRIGGER

Of pornographer Paul Little’s (”Max Hardcore’s) penchant for making films, for example, depicting ”actresses” who hold themselves out to be 12 years old vomiting after being orally raped, followed by the rapist urinating on them, or being forced to drink urine and vomit, Hardcore’s attorney, Jeffrey Douglas, argued:

[The offensiveness of the videos] is the politically incorrect depiction and relationship with women. That is the actual evidence of serious political value.

Read the rest at Women’s Space’s new address.

Obama’s Candidacy in Light of the Longest Revolution

We have our first viable black candidate running for President of the United States on the Democratic party ticket — a man.

When will we have our first viable woman candidate running for President of the United States?

Will it be eight years?  Sixteen years?  Twenty-four or so?  Fifty?  A century? 

Continue reading at Women’s Space at our new address.

Women’s Space Has Moved!

Go here.

Heart

More Paula Gunn Allen: Healing in a World Gone Coyote

In the United States, where milk and honey cost little enough, where private serenity is prized above all things by the wealthy, privileged and well-washed, where tension, intensity, passion, and the concomitant loss of self-possession are detested, the idea that your attitudes and behaviors vis a vis your body are your politics and your spirituality, may seem strange.  Moreover, when I suggest that passion — whether it be emotional, muscular, sexual or intellectual — IS spirituality, the idea might seem even stranger.  In the United States of the privileged, going to ashrams and centers to meditate on how to be in one’s immediate experience, on how to be successful at serenity when the entire planet is overwrought, tense, far indeed from serene, the idea that connected spirituality consists in accepting overwroughtness, tension, yes, and violence, may seem not only strange but downright dangerous.  The patriarchs have long taught the Western peoples that violence is sin, that tension is the opposite of spiritual life, that the overwrought are denied enlightenment.  But we must remember that those who preached and taught serenity and peacefulness were teaching the oppressed how to act — docile slaves who deeply accept their place and do not recognize that in their anguish lies also their redemption, their liberation, are not likely to disturb the tranquility of the ruling class.  Members of the ruling class are, of course, utterly tranquil.  Why not?  As long as those upon whose labor and pain their serenity rests don’t upset the apple cart, as long as they can make the rules for human behavior — in its inner as well as outer dimensions — they can be tranquil indeed ad can focus their attention on reaching nirvanic bliss, transcendence, or divine peace and love.

And yet, the time for tranquility, if there ever was a time for it, is not now.  Now we have only to look, to listen, to our beloved planet to see that tranquility is not the best word to describe her condition.  Her volcanic passions, her hurricance storms of temper, her tremblings and shakings, her thrashings and lashings indicate that something other than serenity is going on.   And after careful consideration, it must occur to the sensitive observer that congruence with self, which must be congruence with spirit, which must therefore be congruence with the planet, requires something more active than serenity, tranquility or inner peace.

Our planet, my beloved, is in crisis; this, of course, we all know.  We, many of us, think that her crisis is caused by men, or White people or capitalism or industrialism or loss of spiritual vision, or social turmoil, or war, or psychic disease.  For the most part, we do not recognize that the reason for her state is that she is entering upon a great initiation — she is becoming someone else.  Our  planet, my darling, is gone coyote, heyoka, and it is our great honor to attend her passage rites.  She is giving birth to her new consciousness of herself and her relatoinship to the other vast intelligences, other holy beings, in her universe. 

…We are each and all a part of her, an expression of her essential being.  We are each a small fragment that is not the whole but that, perforce, reflects in our inner self, our outer behavior, our expressions and relationships and institutions, her self, her behaviors, her expressions and relationships, her forms and structures.  We humans and our relatives the other creatures are integral expressions of her thought and being.  We are not her, but we take our being from her, and in her being we have being, as in her life we have life.  As she is, so are we.

In this time of her emergence as one of the sacred planets in the Grandmother galaxy, we necessarily experience, each of us in our own specific way, our share or form of her experience, her form.  As the initiation nears completion we are caught in the throes of her wailings and contractions, her muscular, circulatory and neurologic destabilization.  We should recognize that her longing for the culmination of the initiatory process is at present nearly as intense as her longing to remain as she was before…and our longing for a new world that the completion of the great ceremony will bring, almost as great as our longing to remain in the systems familiar to us for a very long time, correspond.  Her longing for completion is great, as is ours; our longing to remain as we have been, our fear that we will not survive the transition, that we will fail to enter the new age, our terror at ourselves becoming transformed, mutated, unrecognizable to ourselves and all we have known, correspond to her longing to remain as she has been, her fear that she will fail the tests as they arise for her, her terror at becoming new, unrecognizable to herself and to all she has known.

What can we do in times such as these?  We can rejoice that she will soon be counted among the blessed.  That we, her feathers, talons, beak, eyes, have come crying and singing, lamenting and laughing, to this vast climacteric.

I am speaking of all womankind, of all mankind.  And of more.  I am speaking of all our relatives, the four-leggeds, the wingeds, the crawlers; of the plants and seasons, the winds, thunders, and rains, the rivers, lakes and streams, the pebbles, rocks and mountains, the spirits, the holy people, and the Gods and Goddesses — of all the intelligences, all the beings.  I am speaking even of the tiniest, those no one can see; and of the vastest, the planets and stars.  Together you and I and they and she are moving with increasing rapidity and under ever  increasing pressure towards transformation.

Now, now is the time when mother becomes grandmother, when daughter becomes mother, when the dead live again and walk once again in her ways.  …I have said this is the time of her initiation, of her new birth.  I could also say it is the time of her mutation, for transformation means to change form; I could also say it is the climacteric, when the beloved planet goes through menopause and takes her place among the wise women planets that dance among the stars.

…What can we do, rejoicing and honoring, to show our respect?  We can heal.  We can cherish our being– our petulances and rages, our anguishes and griefs, our disabilities and strengths, our desires and passions, our pleasures and delights.  We can, willingly and recognizing the fullness of her abundance, which includes scarcity and muchness, enter inside ourselves to seek and find her, who is our own dear body, our own dear flesh.  For the body is not the dwelling place of the spirit — it is the spirit.  It is not a tomb, it is life itself.  And even as it withers and dies, it is born; even as it is renewed and reborn, it dies.

Think: How many times each day do you habitually deny and deprive her in your flesh, in your physicality?  How often do you willfully prevent her from moving or resting, from eating or drinking what she requests, from eliminating wastes or taking breath?  How many times do you order your body to produce enzymes and hormones to further your social image, your “identity,” your emotional comfort, regardless of your actual situation and hers?  How many of her gifts do you spurn, how much of her abundance do you deny?  How often do you interpret disease as wrong, suffering as abnormal, physical imperatives as troublesome, cravings as failures, deprivation and denial of appetite as the right thing to do?  In how many ways do you refuse to experience your vulnerability, your frailty, your mortality?  How often do you refuse these expressions of the life force of the Mother in  your lovers, your friends, your society?  How often do you find yourself interpreting sickness, weakness, aging, fatness, physical differences as pitiful, contemptible, avoidable, a violation of social norm or spiritual accomplishment?  How much of your life is devoted to avoiding any and/or all of these? 

The mortal body is a tree; it is holy in whatever condition; it is truth and myth because it has so many potential conditions; because of its possibilities, it is sacred and profane; most of all, it is your most precious talisman, your own connection to her.  Healing the self means honoring and recognizing the body, accepting rather than denying all the turmoil its existence brings, welcoming the woes and anguish flesh is subject to, cherishing its multitudinous forms and seasons, its unfailing ability to known and be, to grow and wither, to live and die, to mutate, to change.  Healing the self means committing ourselves to a wholehearted willingness to be what and how we are — beings frail and fragile, strong and passionate, neurotic and balanced, diseased and whole, partial and complete, stingy and generous, safe and dangerous, twisted and straight, storm-tossed and quiescent, bound and free.

What can we do to be politically  useful, spiritually mature attendants in this transformation we are privileged to participate in?  Find out by asking as many trees as you meet how to be a tree.  Our Mother, in her form known as Sophia, was long ago said to be a tree, the great tree of life.  Listen to what they wrote down from the song she gave them.

I have grown tall as a cedar on Lebanon
as a cypress on Mount Hermon
I have grown tall as a palm in Engedi
as the rose bushes of Jericho;
as a fine olive on the plain,
as a plain tree I have grown tall.
I have exhaled perfume like cinnamon and acacia;
I have breathed out a scent like choice myrrh,
like galbanum, onzcha and stacte,
like the smoke of incenes in the tabernacle.
I have spread my branches like a terebinth,
and my branches are glorious and graceful.
I am like a vine putting out graceful shoots,
my blossoms bear the fruit of glory and wealth.
Approach me, you who desire me,
and take your fill of my fruits.

–Paula Gunn Allen, from The Woman I Love Is A Planet; The Planet I Love Is A Tree, in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, Eds., 1990

Paula Gunn Allen (Oct. 24, 1939-May 29, 2008)

In November of 1991, my Laguna mother died of cancer.  Or, at least, that’s what they put on her death certificate.  She had oat cell cancer of the lung, a kind of cancer that is unlikely to kill its host quickly, particularly when the person is elderly.  But she accepted the treatments that Western doctors offered — chemotherapy and radiation — and the cancer metastasized to her brain. More chemo, more radiation.  She died– whether of the disease or of the cure, we’ll never know.  It is presently fashionable to point out that cancer of any sort was almost unheard of until after World War II, when it became all too ordinary.

In a special report on February 28, 1993, CNN told the story of a doctor who, seeing a single case of lung cancer in 1936, called in several students.  He wanted them to observe this “rare disase [they] might never see again.”  It was ten years before he saw another case, the report went on, and of course, the incidence has risen precipitously since.  CNN blamed the rise in lung cancer and other “smoking-related diseases” on the huge amounts of cigarettes the GIs toted in their C ration packs.  Not a word was said about the increase of cancer in relationship to the Bomb, nuclear testing, or the horrifying proliferation of nuclear waste all over the country…

You see, blaming the victim is an old patriarchal game; it fits quite neatly into disinformation systems and possesses the even neater potential of terrorization, social control and mind warp.  Held in its sway, we become not only each other’s policemen and enemies, but our own. 

…according to the New Mexico Tumor Registry in 1976, Native Americans in New Mexico did not contract lung cancer.  Nor is it a fluke that the New Mexico Cancer Control project, for which I worked for a time, refused to deal with radiation, toxic waste, asbestos mining — all demonstrably implicated in carcinogenesis — though they were avidly engaged in an antismoking campaign as a major aspect of what they were pleased to call their “cancer prevention program.”…

The advent of patriarchy signaled its determination to dominate the vast power of the Sun.  From Goddess, she became god (Egypt, India, Persia, Europe, Mayaland) or she was subject to the mediation of emporor (Japan, Peru) and shaman/priest (Cherokee, Keres, Natchez, Lakota).  During the millenia of her usurpation, men attempted to subject her to their will.  Finally she blasted forth, furious at their presumption, ripping apart earth and sky with her pain and rage.

Unfortunately, those who have prayed for enlightenment over the millennia haven’t bargained for the devastating fact of light.  They have wanted the bright, the powerful, the  utterly overwhelming, the male…Why now complain? The supplicants have been answered with the blinding, deafening whirlwind that is the face and voice of the Great Mystery when it is aroused.

We have for all too long loathed the shade–shadows, night, the darkness of the Moon.  We have found the shadows so repugnant, the darkness so repulsive, that we have given the Goddess only three parts — maiden, mother and crone — thoroughly repressing the fourth, that of mystery…Chaos, the Grandmother of all that is, now comes among us, just as we discover that she is the source of all order and that she is infinitely generative, infinitely fecund.  It is as the old ones have told:  the name of the Female Principle is “Thought,” and she is more fundamental and varied than time and space….

Faced with the terror of our situation vis a vis the sacred, perhaps we can learn what we so urgently need to know:  the powers that inform our universe must be treated with respect.  The transformational process is sacred and is to be approached cautiously, humbly, and in awareness of its actual nature.  At the very least, perhaps we will realize that it is futile to imagine ourselves as threatening the Earth’s survival, when the truth is quite otherwise.  Should we attempt to nuke the planet, we can be sure she alone will survive.

I die, but the earth remains forever.
Beautiful earth, you alone remain
Wonderful earth, you remain forever.

–Kowa Death Song

– Paula Gunn Allen, from her introduction to Gossips, Gorgons & Crones, The Fates of the Earth, by Jane Caputi, 1993.

Paula Gunn Allen crossed over yesterday, of lung cancer.  She was 69.   Of mixed Laguna, Sioux, Scottish, and Lebanese-American descent, she grew up in a village in New Mexico which bordered the Laguna Pueblo reservation, and identified most closely with the people she grew up with.   Gunn Allen received her PhD from the University of New Mexico.  Her book The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions,  captured the attention of academia in the United States and laid the foundation for Native American women’s studies.  She was a writer and a poet and wrote often of Spider Woman and Corn Maiden, imagery which is central to all women’s studies and to feminism today.

Recent years have been years of struggle for Gunn Allen.  Having managed to buy a trailer, she lost it and everything she had in a fire in 2007.  She was underinsured.  She lost her trailer just after she had made the last payment on it and as she was being treated for lung cancer.

One reason I was looking forward to going to last year’s Hullaballoo was, Paula Gunn Allen would be speaking.  In the end she could not make it for health reasons.  She  epitomized the best of the revolutionary spirit and work of the women’s liberation movement in the United States.  She was a giant.

Paula Gunn Allen was a lesbian.  It seems fitting to finish with this poem::

dykes remind me of indians
like indians dykes
are supposed to die out
or forget
or drink all the time
or shatter
go away
to nowhere
to remember what will happen
if they dont

they dont
anyway
even though it
happens
and they remember
they dont

because the moon remembers
because so does the sun
because so do the stars
remember
and the persistent stubborn
grass
of the earth

From “Some Like Indians Endure,”
Paula Gunn Allen

Rest in peace, my sister.  You gave us all so much. 

Heart

Hat tip to bfp and, via bfp, to Joy Harjo for word that Gunn Allen has passed on. 

Link

20th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Are Tonight!

Tonight will be the 20th annual Lambda Literary Awards. This is the big celebration of all the best authors in the LGBT community. There are over 100 books in nomination, and it will be a gala event in West Hollywood, California.

I’m in heaven already thinking about all the organization that went into the event, the red carpets, the elegant setting, the sheer excitement of being surrounded by the best and the brightest!!

My favorite part of the lesbian and gay community is about our authors as visionaries. I’ll be in heaven as my partner of over 30 years is up for an award.  Just being nominated is a great honor.

The goal of Lambda is to make sure our authors are supported, because they mainstream still shunts our work aside, or simply doesn’t publish it or distribute it. Lesbian themed books are simply not published.

So I’ll let you know how it all goes. Since we are in Hollywood, they will be filming the entire event, so it should be broadcast somewhere on cable or the Internet.

I’ve been reading as many nominated books as possible, as I will be in heaven surrounded by all the best and brightest lesbian academics, poets, artists, historians and novelists. I believe the most realistic portrayal of lesbian life today has always been in books. It is one of our longest and most sacred traditions: the life of the mind, the literary giants of our world.

Rest assured that I will have camera in hand, and I’m writing fan letters to authors now! More later…

While most people are movie star fans, I am a fan of authors! I’ve long loved all our little lesbian presses, magazines and books. Now we are making major inroads and young lesbian academics are taking even the elite universities by storm! We have arrived!!!

Via Satsuma, and thanks!  A list of nominees for this year’s awards can be found here.

UPDATE: The 14th Carnival of Radical Feminists is Up! Deadline for Submissions for the 15th Carnival is June 11!

At Maggie’s Metawatershed.

It looks spectacular, Maggie!

***
I’m reposting this announcement because I was so slack in updating the Blog Carnival page this time, also my various announcements here, and the 14th Carnival is not to be missed!

The next Carnival of Radical Feminists is at Nine Deuce’s place, Rage Against the Man-chine. Get your submissions in by Wednesday, June 11. You can submit as many posts as you like, and it’s fine to submit your own posts.

If you’d like to host a carnival, e-mail me.  We have openings beginning in August. 

Heart

Help Tami Out!

From Tami:

Hey blog sisters!
 
I am flirting with a blog post idea exploring the differing expectations faced by women of varying cultures and how those ingrained expectations affect our views of feminism/women’s equality. I wonder if you can help me out by answering the following questions:
 
When you were growing up, what was the vision of personal success that was relayed to you by your family? Did your gender play into it? (For instance, were you expected to marry and have children by age 30? Be a stay-at-home mom? Work?)
 
Did you view those expectations as constricting?
 
What kind of role models were the female family members closest to you? (Was your mom very traditional? Was she married or a single parent? Was she a feminist trailblazer?)
 
What generation are you a part of? (Boomer, GenX, Millenial?)
 
What is your race/nationality?
 
I have a theory about how we come to define ourselves as women and how we relate to the movement for female equality. I’m curious to learn whether my theory stands up to reality.
 
Thanks in advance for your input.
 
One other thing, I’d like to hear from a cross-section of women–not just black, GenXers like me. Please pass this along to other women. They are welcome to send their replies to this e-mail.

Womensspace, Migrating

I am finally taking the plunge and and have begun the process of moving my blog to my own server.   It isn’t simple or quick, it is complicated and time-consuming!  I just thought I’d let everyone know it’s in the works.  When it’s all done, we’ll be much better off comments-wise especially.  I’ll be able to have all of the new comments and the posts they belong to listed in the sidebar, for one thing, instead of the paltry 15 comments allowed now which causes lots of good comments to go unread.  There are a lots of other good features and reasons to move my blog. 

Just wanted to let everyone know what’s going on.  This blog won’t disappear and I’ll keep posting and approving comments and will post the link to the new Womensspace once it’s ready.  I’m going to try to move all of the old posts and comments to the new blog.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to, but I’m going to try!

Note:  They say on WP.com that you can export your blog and then just import it into your new blog and you think, “Oh, that should be easy!”   What they don’t tell you is, you can’t import more than 16MB.  I have 32MB to import.  You also can’t import your design features, theme,  widgets and so on,  you have to do all that stuff manually, find plug-ins, download stuff, copy and paste, upload stuff, argh.

But in the end, it will be much nicer. 

Heart

 

Hillary Rodham Clinton and the (Real) Assassination Talk

________________

 

MAY 4–A Louisiana college student has been charged with threatening the life of Hillary Clinton, whom the man said he would kill when she visited Baton Rouge. Richard Wargo, a 19-year-old Louisiana State University freshman, was arrested yesterday after he allegedly told a fellow student that he wanted to commit an act of terrorism and wanted to know if the classmate was interested in participating. The planned terror act, Wargo told the other student last month, would be a “national event” and mentioned Clinton’s name when asked if it was politically motivated, according to the below search warrant. Clinton is scheduled to speak tomorrow in Baton Rouge in connection with the National Conference of Black Mayors gathering. When Wargo’s classmate told him that an attack on Clinton would make her even more popular, he responded, according to the warrant, “True, but have you ever heard of a dead president?” Wargo, a physics major, was arrested after his classmate yesterday contacted university police and reported his statements. During a search last night of Wargo’s dormitory room, investigators seized a laptop computer, cell phone, and several containers of marijuana, according to an inventory sheet. Charged with terrorizing and an arson rap, Wago is being held on $1 million bond at the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office, where the mug shot at right was taken. (3 pages)

Link to Smoking Gun

My earlier post about this

Assassination Talk, A Real Assassination Plot (Targeting Hillary Clinton), Clinton’s Comment

Not long ago, a couple of weeks, I guess, I had a premonition.  I’m not given to this kind of thing and don’t recall a time that I have ever publicly talked about the very few premonitions I have had in my life.  What I “saw” was disturbing, frightening to me and intense enough that I pulled my car over to the side of the road to collect myself and to offer immediate prayers on behalf of Hillary Clinton.  When I got home, I lit candles for her, continued to think about her and pray for her and to honor her according to my own spiritual inclinations and traditions.

I told only one other person about this premonition until yesterday, when the pundits went wild with a comment Clinton made.  The context was the way she is being pressured to drop out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.  She said in an interview with the Argus Leader newspaper editorial board::

My husband (Bill Clinton) did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary, somewhere in the middle of June, right?  We all remember, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California, I don’t understand it.”

She apologized for making this statement, which was twisted into a pretzel by pundits and made to be all about what I don’t believe it was ever about.

I understand why she might have said this.  I think she was remembering that Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated in June while he was campaigning for President, meaning although he was losing, he was still on the campaign trail and was not being besieged with demands that he drop out (as she has been).  She was likely thinking about this in part because last week,  Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with a brain tumor and will not live much more than a year, if that; the Kennedys, whom Clinton has known and worked alongside for decades by now, were on her mind in other words. 

There’s another reason she might have had assassination attempts on her mind.  In May 2007,  a 19-year-old Louisiana State University student was arrested and held on $1 million bond for planning a “terrorist attack” on Clinton.  At least one other person was involved.  The plan was discovered when Clinton was in Baton Rouge campaigning.   [Updated:  This incident occurred a year ago, not this May as I originally thought.  To me, that makes things much worse.  This happened a year ago?  And never made it out of local news? ]

I’d say it makes sense, therefore, that Clinton thinks about assassination attempts.

I don’t know why there has been so little in the news about this.  I found local coverage of the plot and arrest this morning because I was looking for more information about the latest supposed offensive commentary.   It’s possible that the Clinton campaign or Clinton herself did not want widespread coverage for very good reasons having to do with her own safety and well-being.  It’s also possible many journalists are feeling reticent to talk about what happened, for the same reason.  There are too many Americans who are violent.

But I think this is information that provides some important context for Clinton’s statement.  I think what pundits are doing with what Clinton said is inexcusable, as so much media coverage and punditry in these campaigns have been inexcusable, despicable, so much so that I can barely bring myself to follow the campaigns especially recently. 

It seems to me that there is so little perspective around the campaigns right now.   Responses to every new incident or possibly-offensive statement or event are  consistently over the top and out of control.

We are talking about good and decent people here who are running for the Democratic nomination: public servants,  responsible citizens, beloved by friends and family and those in their intimate circles, dedicated.  They deserve all of the support we can offer to them, all the good will we can provide to them, no matter who we will vote for to be the next President of the United States.   I wish I got the idea far more often than I do that the people who are making the most noise about the candidates ever actually think about them in this way, as human beings, valuable, decent, and especially, so, so vulnerable, taking great risks for what they believe in, laying their lives on the line every day.  This should matter and should factor in, always, to what is said about them publicly, whether by individual citizens, bloggers or journalists.  It scares me that in general,  it doesn’t seem to.

Comments severely moderated.  If I don’t like what you write,  I won’t approve it, even if I like you.

 

Shoes (Warning, May Trigger)

“These women were shunned by two eras,” Yang says. “When they were young, footbinding was already forbidden, so they bound their feet in secret. When the Communist era came, production methods changed. They had to do farming work, and again they were shunned.”

Wang Lifen, above, now 79, was just seven years old when her mother started binding her feet: breaking her toes and binding them underneath the sole of the foot with bandages. After her mother died, Wang carried on, breaking the arch of her own foot to force her toes and heel ever closer. Now 79, Wang no longer remembers the pain.

“Because I bound my own feet, I could manipulate them more gently until the bones were broken. Young bones are soft, and break more easily,” she says.

At that time, bound feet were a status symbol, the only way for a woman to marry into money. In Wang’s case, her in-laws had demanded the matchmaker find their son a wife with tiny feet. It was only after the wedding, when she finally met her husband for the first time, that she discovered he was an opium addict. With a life encompassing bound feet and an opium-addict husband, she’s a remnant from another age. That’s how author Yang Yang, who’s written a book about them, sees these women.

Link

Another woman, with a history like Wang Lifen’s.

Catharine A. MacKinnon to Receive Honorary Doctorate from Hebrew University

Leading international human rights advocate Prof. Catharine MacKinnon is to receive an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in recognition of her work in advancing gender equality. She will receive the honor at the opening Convocation of the 71st meeting of the University’s Board of Governors, on Sunday 1 June 2008.  

According to Hebrew University President Prof. Menachem Magidor, the degree is being awarded to her “in deep recognition of her important and pioneering contribution to equality between the sexes and human rights, and in thanks to her warm friendship with the Hebrew University.”

 

Prof. Catharine MacKinnon is a pioneering lawyer of international renown, a leader in feminist jurisprudence and an international human rights advocate. She has broken new ground in gender equality in both international and constitutional law. Her insights on the legal concept of equality have transformed legal and philosophical thinking of sexual harassment, pornography, free speech and international law.

 

She has represented Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities since 1992, winning with a damage award of $745 million in August 2000. Their case, Kadic v. Karadzic, first recognized rape as an act of genocide.

 

Prof. MacKinnon is a professor of law at the University of Michigan and has taught at the universities of Yale, Chicago, Stanford and Columbia. She is the author of 11 books and numerous articles that form the basis of feminist legal dialogue, and is among one of the most quoted lawyers in the English language.

 

On Thursday, May 29, Prof. MacKinnon will participate in a conference on ‘Women’s Status, Men’s States’, under the auspices of the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University and the Minerva Center for Human Rights. The conference will take place in the Ezequiel Liwerant -Fomento Mexico Hall on Mount Scopus campus from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

 

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