feminist blogs

(Via Lew Rockwell 2008-05-09: Young Heretics vs. the Flag Religion.)

I spent my first few years of school in a Montessori co-op school with a large contingent of aging New Leftists and burned-out hippie types among the parents. But after that it was all government schools, and, as far as I can remember, every government school I ever attended started business each day with the Pledge of Allegiance. I started having problems with the Pledge around the time I got to junior high school; I didn’t like being expected to chant out one nation, under God, and I figured it violated my religious liberty, so I stopped saying that. In high school I refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance at all, and I usually wouldn’t stand up, either, unless I felt like someone in the room was eyeing me. It’s not that I was trying to make some kind of anarchist protest; I was a fairly boring sort of Democratic Party-identified state Leftist for most of the time I was in high school, and didn’t become an anarchist until after I spent a couple years kicking around more radical forms of Leftism in college. But even then I considered the whole ritual Strength-Through-Unity exercise stifling and creepy, and I didn’t want to participate. So I feel a lot of personal, not just political, solidarity for these three teenagers in western Minnesota:

Three small-town eighth-graders were suspended for not standing at the start of the school day Thursday for the Pledge of Allegiance.

My son wasn’t being defiant against America, said Kim Dahl, mother of one of the students, Brandt, who attends Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton Junior High School in western Minnesota. She said her son offered no reason for sitting.

Brandt told the Fargo Forum that Thursday’s one-day in-school suspension, was kind of dumb because I didn’t do anything wrong. It should be the people’s choice.

Kim Dahl said the punishment didn’t fit the crime. If they wanted to know why he didn’t stand, they should’ve made him write a paper.

—Paul Walsh, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribue (2008-05-09): Principal who punished 3 who sat pledge foresees policy rewording

I understand the desire to try to protect your son from abuse in a case that’s sure to draw the howling attention of the Patriotic Correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade. But, in all honesty, what would it matter if he were being defiant against America? Everyone’s got the right their convictions and nobody should be forced to participate in theo-nationalist rituals that violate their conscience. I also understand the desire to try to get a lighter punishment for your kid when the school is so clearly throwing its weight around in an attempt to bully and intimidate through a heavy punishment. But, in all honesty, what possible justification could there be for forcing this kid to take on extra academic work or to explain himself any further than he cares to do so freely?

She said that Brandt has not been standing all year, and all of a sudden it became an in-school suspension.

The district today is defending the punishments. The school’s handbook says all students are required to stand but are not obligated to recite the pledge. The same is true for all four schools in the district, a school official said.

These three [students] didn’t, and they got caught, said Mel Olson, the district’s community education director. He said he backs the punishment, being a veteran and a United States of America citizen, absolutely. Olson served in the Marines in Japan during the Vietnam War.

—Paul Walsh, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribue (2008-05-09): Principal who punished 3 who sat pledge foresees policy rewording

Another thin-skinned Veteran Against Individual Freedom, I guess, who has nothing better to do with his time than rant and cry about how nobody gives the military and its obsessive flag protocol the respect they allegedly deserve.

One of the things that makes me happy to see is that there is vigorous debate in the comments section on this story, with many posts from people who condemn the school’s actions (and the very idea of forcing children to recite a pledge of loyalty to the federal government on a daily basis), with reasonable argument and also, at times, with the ridicule and withering sarcasm that this asinine school administration deserves. The only thing there that’s irritating is the number of people who feel compelled to say things like, Oh, I think that everybody ought to jump up and shout Sir, yes Sir! when it comes time to say the Pledge, but I’m not sure that it’s really right to force people…. Whatever your personal views about flag protocol may be, this is an argument that can and should be made without doffing your hat to Patriotic Correctness.

As for the commenters who have posted in defense of the school’s actions, they’ve offered three different sorts of arguments, each one of which is beneath contempt. In order of increasing outrageousness, here are some examples of each.

First, there’s the standard Patriotic Correctness argument, along with several direct invocations of love it or leave it, some bizarre non sequiturs about caring about the Constitution (which is nowhere mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance, has nothing to say about the Pledge or about flag protocol, and seems to mean absolutely nothing in the mouths of the people citing it except as a synecdoche for the authority of the United States federal government), and the usual long litany of demands for unearned respect in return for unasked-for services. The idea here is that the kids ought to be punished for daring to hold, or at least to express, anything other than glassy-eyed unquestioning loyalty to the federal government of the United States of America:

Out of respect for our country..

Its really not that hard to stand up and show some respect- not merely for the flag, but for the values that the flag represents: liberty, justice, and truth. Yes, this is a free country, but that also means that these families are free to leave if they cannot respect our nation.

—olin157 @ 9 May 2008, 10:07 AM

And:

Snot Nosed Brats

These snot nosed brats should not only stand but they should gladly participate in the pledge. At a minimum they should obey the rules of the school which means get off you rear and stand. You don’t have to harm your little sensibilities by actually pledging allegiance to the only country you have, just stand up for goodness sake. The school was right, ACLU and these punks are legally wrong.

—seanintucson @ 9 May 2008, 12:21 PM

Not to mention:

Idol Worship?

Are you people serious? It has nothing to do with the sort. You are not idolizing anything by standing up during the pledge. Hey, you don’t have to say it, the all powerful Supreme Court has brought that commandment down, if you will. Have we forgotten so soon what the Standard represents? Have you Baby-Boomers forgotten your parents who fought to raise that same flag during WWII? How about the current generation, your grandparents fought for it in WWII or Korea, parents in Vietnam and your friends now in Iraq and Afghanistan. I AM a current soldier, not retired, and HAVE served two tours in Baghdad. I truly believe you have the right to free speech, which is why you can go ahead and not say the pledge, but for the sake of my brethren who have fallen and those in the past who have died, show THEM the respect they deserve. Parents, you need to be teaching that this country isn’t about the government, but the people, and the people who formed it. This country’s freedom has, and is, constantly being paid for with the lives of its fighting men and women. While you may have the luxury of sitting back and saying its a free speech thing, just remember who gave you that same free speech.

—SGT_M on May. 9, 08 at 12:26 PM

I should pause to note that my father was indeed in the Army in Vietnam, and my father’s father was in the Army in Korea. The claim that either my father, or my father’s father, fought for free speech, or this country’s freedom, is absurd. Neither the North Korean government nor the North Vietnamese government, let alone the occupied countries of South Korea and South Vietnam, ever posed any threat to free speech or freedom in the United States of America. They did nothing in the Army to give me free speech because freedom of speech in the U.S. was not at risk in the first place.

The claim that either my father or my grandfather fought to raise a damned flag on the other side of the world is also absurd. The reason that my father and his father were in the Army is because the federal government sent each of them a letter announcing that if he did not join the Army, he would be arrested and thrown in prison. I’ll be damned if I sit around and listen to some sanctimonious volunteer soldier talk about how the United States Army, which conscripted both my father and my grandfather against their will, deserves my respect and gratitude for guarding individual freedom during the wars on Korea and Vietnam

As for the statement Parents, you need to be teaching that this country isn’t about the government, but the people, and the people who formed it, I’m inclined to agree, but I think the upshot is not quite what SGT_M takes the upshot to be. And I certainly don’t know what any of it has to do with standing during the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge of Allegiance is not about the country, much less about the people; it’s about loyalty to the government, and it says so right at the beginning:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

And to the republic, for which it stands.

Anyway.

For the second argument, there’s the These snot-nosed punks got no respect line. This is, honestly, even worse than the belligerent appeals to American theo-nationalism, because, as disgusting as the latter is, the former involves singling out harmless kids for sneering speculation on their motivations and character. And also because they are is no longer attacking a difference of view and an exercise of liberty because they think something more important (love of the government and its symbols, or whatever) overrides it, but rather attacking difference and liberty just as such, because these teenagers are acting like free human beings instead of doing as they’re told by the wise and powerful authorities. Thus:

Respect!

Even if you do not like the Pledge of Allegiance for what ever reason. You should respect others who care and stand! The lack of respect is the main part of our trouble in this rough times.

—hussman02 @ 9 May 2008 10:05AM

And:

If it’s a school rule and he doesn’t have an answer as to why he didn’t stand - then he clearly is just being obstinate. I can’t believe a parent would support their kid in this situation!!!

—Cartert1 @ 9 May 2008, 9:55 AM

And:

$10 says these are pain-in-the-rear kids with pain-in-the-rear parents that hover around their kids and never make any acknowledgment that their kids could ever do anything wrong. If these kids were formally and legitimately protesting the United States they should not have been punished, but the tenor of the article suggests they are just smart asses and that they did not have any political/personal convictions when they sat out the pledge.

—pipress1487 @ 9 May 2008, 10:23 AM

I don’t think that Brandt Dahl’s statement that I didn’t do anything wrong. It should be the people’s choice. suggests they are just smart asses without any political/personal convictions. But suppose this were true. Then so what? Freedom of speech and expression don’t depend on you having something to say that fits some highly stylized model of formal and legitimate protest. The chief value of freedom of association just is being able to be a lazy smart-ass and live your ordinary life as you see fit, rather than spending your time protesting and fighting an overbearing, invasive government. While the right to speak out against injustices is vitally important, what’s even more important, and in fact what makes the right to speak out against injustices as vitally important as it is, is the right to just be left the hell alone and not be subjected to the officious demands of busybodies and blowhards on your time and energy.

If these kids are just trying to be pains in the ass over a ritual that they find stupid and tiresome, I support them and salute them. I can think of no better reason to refuse to participate.

The third, and worst, of the arguments seems (surprisingly, for me, anyway) to be the most common: the idea that even if the school policy is unjustified, and even if schools oughtn’t force students to stand, and even if the kids have got a legitimate beef with the school board, it does not matter, because they broke The Rules, and you got to punish anybody who steps out of line, even if they had a perfectly good reason to object. Now it’s no longer a matter of attacking them for having the wrong beliefs about public political devotion, and no longer a matter of attacking them for being thoughtless or not following orders that the authorities had good reason to hand down. It’s a matter of attacking them for not subordinating their own considered judgment and obeying orders which are admittedly arbitrary and perhaps even wrong in themselves. (If you have some free time and a high tolerance for pain, feel free to count the number of times that people repeat, verbatim, the phrase rules are rules.)

Thus:

he wasn’t protesting.

he didn’t have a reason why he didn’t stand, he just didn’t want to! what happens when mom and dad have house rules that he doesn’t want to follow? should they force him to follow their rules? life is full of rules that different people think are pointless, it just depends on whose ox is being gored. so now he’s learning that he doesn’t really need reasons for his actions, just whether he wants to do it or not. and we wonder why our youth have become so complacent today!

—K_Zemlicka @ 9 May 2008, 10:37 AM

And (all-caps is from the original):

RULES ARE MEANT TO BE FOLLOWED!

RULES ARE RULES, FOLLOWED THEM OR YOU’LL DEAL WITH CONSEQUENCES. BOTTOM LINE ! THAT CHILD DESERVED IT, I BETCHA HE’LL STAND NEXT TIME.

—securpo on 9 May 2008, 10:43 AM

Of course, there are two kinds of consequences in this world. There are the natural consequences of an action, and then there are the artificial consequences that people attach to an action by their chosen responses. In this case the only natural consequence of not standing for the Pledge is getting to spend a minute longer sitting rather than standing. The consequences that these three teenagers are being forced to deal with are better described as the choice of school administrators to flip out and try to make teenagers suffer in the name of Old Glory. In any case, statist logic aside, the fact that school administrators flip out when you don’t obey this stupid policy can hardly be used as a justification for their flipping out, without making your argument do doughnuts around the parking lot.

And then there’s this:

I find it interesting that the school has a policy that students must stand during the Pledge. But, policy is policy and rules are rules, so I agree that the students should be punished. I do think it’s an anti-patriotic policy though and standing for the Pledge would be made more meaningful if kids are allowed to do it through free will.

—ttepley @ 9 May 2008, 10:28 AM

In other words, God forbid that anyone should sit down when there are rules to be followed. Students should be punished for refusing to co-operate with a policy which you yourself believe to be foolish and wrong, because rules and authority need no rational justification, and indeed can defy any rational justification, and they ought to be obeyed nevertheless.

And then there’s this:

My son wasn’t being defiant against America

My son wasn’t being defiant against America, said Kim Dahl, mother of one of the students, Brandt, who attends Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton Junior High School in western Minnesota. Yet The school’s handbook says all students are required to stand but are not obligated to recite the pledge. So her son wasn’t being defiant against America, but defiant to the school policy itself. Ignorance is not a justifiable defense.

—pizann0 9 May 2008, 12:12 PM

I can’t stand flag creeps. I think that kind of belligerent theo-nationalism is absurd, contemptible, and dangerous. But what’s even worse than those who believe that every individual conscience should be turned towards a servile worship of the State, are those who believe that whatever your individual conscience is turned towards, you damn well ought to ignore it and follow the rules, because being defiant to authority is itself a mortal sin, whatever that authority may be and however pointless or wrong may be the rules that they are trying to impose. Where the complaint is not that they ought to be worshipping the one true God, but rather that they had damn well better bow down, no matter what may be before them at the altar.

Incidentally, the state ACLU says that punishing these students is against the rules, as set out in the U.S. Constitution and in rulings by the Supreme Court. I don’t care, and neither should anybody else.

See also:

• GT 2008-03-09: The purpose of government schools is to train your children to love the government.
• GT 2007-12-03: Veterans Against Individual Freedom
• GT 2006-06-14: Festive occasions
• GT 2005-03-09: The Most Depressing Photograph in the World

Woman fights back against rapist, mob sexually assaults her. UConn. Trigger warning.

Every man involved in the assault must be identified, and their names so publicized that they cannot apply for a job or an apartment without their role in this sexual violence coming up. UConn must hold them accountable. If the school does not condemn this, it condones it.

You already knew that Chicago patrol cops are planning to carry M4 assault rifles in the inner city and Springfield, Massachusetts cops plan to switch to black, military-style uniforms in the inner city in order to restore a sense of fear.

But wait, there’s more.

In Tulare County, California, the county sheriff’s office has formed a new, dedicated Gang Unit to engage in saturation patrols of the south end of town, to pull over suspicious cars (any guess on what color suspicious drivers are likely to be), get in the faces of suspect young men (any guess on what the color of those faces will be?), and generally to make sure that certain members of the public are afraid to use public spaces. By putting more heavily-armed police officers on the streets, they claim to be taking weapons off the streets. Gang Unit mouthpiece Sergeant Harold Liles says that the purpose of all this letting them know we are here, and the streets belong to us.

In Wilmington, Delaware, a new charter school is in the planning stages. It will enroll as many as 600 inner-city high school students — or rather, Cadets — for training in jobs for the front lines in the Nation’s [sic] homeland security. The Academy will require its teenaged cadets to wear uniforms, give them extensive physical training during and after school, offer homeland security training as an after-school activity, and offer a choice of vocational curricula ranging from SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) through prison guard, water rescue, paramedic, fireman, professional demolition and emergency response operator.

Meanwhile, in the great northwest, Montana Highway Patrol used to carry M14 rifles in the trunks of their patrol cars in case of an emergency. Soon they will all be carrying AR-15 assault rifles strapped to the front seat of the car. Montana Highway Patrol mouthpiece Jerril Ren says that For the most part, they’re trying to make them [high-powered assault rifles] more readily available to the officer and said that the higher-powered guns were necessary for now-common tactical situations.

The Palm Beach County, Florida sheriff’s office is now training and arming regular cops on the beat with AR-15 assault rifles.

Inner-city patrol cops in Miami have also been carrying assault rifles for the past few months, at the behest of city Police Chief John Timoney.

Johnson City, Tennessee patrol cops were already armed with handguns and shotguns. Now they have started a new weapons program to ensure that at least some patrol cops are carrying other, special weapons on every patrol shift. They won’t say in public what those weapons are or how many they are putting onto the streets.

The Washington County, Tennessee sheriff’s office just got a grant from the federal government to arm their patrol cops with AR-15 assault rifles.

And if you’re wondering why all these stories have suddenly hit the news so close to each other, over just the last month, in so many different cities and counties, my suspicion is that you’ve got the answer right there: the United States federal government, which spent the past 30 years or so involving itself in state and local law enforcement agencies through the use of tax-funded training, grants, and equipment sales for paramilitary SWAT teams and anti-terrorism task forces, now seems to be making use of those same grants to more heavily arm and more thoroughly militarize ordinary patrol cops on the highway, in the inner city, and in rural sheriff’s offices.

Do you feel safer now?

See also:

• GT 2008-04-28: Is it just me or is the water in this pot getting a little hotter?
• GT 2007-10-13: Gangsters in Blue
• GT 2008-02-18: Cops are here to protect you.
• GT 2008-04-25: We need government cops because private protection forces would be accountable to the powerful and well-connected instead of being accountable to the people.
• GT 2007-11-27: Law and Orders #3: John Gardner of the Utah Highway Patrol tasers Jared Massey in front of his family for questioning why he was pulled over

Washington University announced last week that they are giving Phyllis Schlafly, professional anti-feminist, an honorary doctorate degree. The release calls Schlafly "a national leader of the conservative movement." What they fail to mention however, is that she is also an anti-feminist leader who believes married women can't be raped ("By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don't think you can call it rape."), that there should be bans on women working in nontraditional fields (like construction work or firefighting), and - oh yeah - that the ERA is dangerous.

I guess it should come as no surprise then that professional misogynist Chris Matthews is actually set to give the university's commencement address before Schlafly is honored.

Thankfully, the Washington University community is fighting back.

Students have set up a Facebook group, “No honorary doctorate for anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly,” with over 1100 members at last count.

Several postings suggested that students boycott fund raising drives by the university to protest the honor for Schlafly. The group’s information states: “Do her views fit with the future the men and women of Wash U’s graduating class see for themselves and their peers? Probably not. Then why honor her with them? Wouldn’t having someone like her in the midst of Wash U’s female graduates be incongruous at best, offensive at worst?”

Mary Ann Dzuback, director of women’s and gender studies at Washington University, and an associate professor of education and history, said that professors were stunned and angered to learn of the planned honor last week. “The university has completely disregarded the concerns about anybody who cares about full and equal rights for women, who cares about the intellectual quality of feminist debate, and who cares about women’s desire to enter the work force,” Dzuback said.

Dzuback went onto say that she wouldn't be against Schlafly being invited to lecture at the school, but that honoring her is something quite different: “This tells the world that this administration thinks so highly of the honoree that they give her the highest degrees the university can give, the highest degree of respect. And that is deeply troubling...This is a woman who has spent her whole career arguing against full rights for women." Nice message to send the female student body, right?

Some students who emailed me (thanks all!) about this, are encouraging folks to email Chancellor Wrighton and Jane Stone, coordinator of the Board of Trustees. If any Washington University students out there want to keep us updated, we'd be grateful!

Since September, three University of Georgia professors have resigned amid sexual harassment complaints; the administration was faulted for not responding quickly enough. So what better speaker to bring in for UGA's graduation ceremony than U.S Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas?

The university announced Friday that Thomas would be the commencement speaker, setting off rounds of angry and frustrated e-mails between faculty members. Thomas, a Georgia native, faced a bitterly contested confirmation process for his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1991 after his former employee, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment.

Some faculty members said they were outraged that the university would ask Thomas to speak when UGA has been facing criticism that administrators have been slow to address sexual harassment complaints filed against faculty members.

"What a slap in the face this is to everyone who has been working to bring to light the realities of sexual harassment, and to establish appropriate methods and offices for addressing this significant problem on our campus," Chris Cuomo, director of UGA's Institute for Women's Studies, told The Red & Black student newspaper.

Via Think Progress.

There are some kinds of shame that are prevalent in our culture and they shouldn’t be. No one should be ashamed of his or her sexual orientation. No one over 18 should be ashamed of consensual sex, or having a baby, or choosing not to have one. No one should be ashamed of healthy expressions of sexuality or of any expression of sex in art. These are Puritanical values out of step with the rest of Western culture and it’s time to let them go.

On the other hand, shame can serve a purpose. It tells us that what we are doing is wrong, and hopefully it makes us less likely to do it. It can make someone aware that what they are doing isn’t something that should be memorialized on You Tube. It should kick in when you have just shown the world, on film, that you are an asshole. This is the shame I’m talking about. Psychologists call this a Super Ego. Some call it good parenting. I call it increasingly rare, and that scares me.

I recently posted a video, from You Tube, in which an Australian journalist makes absolute jack asses of some apparently average Americans. They were embarrassing, but a commenter pointed out the truly disturbing aspect - none of them was ashamed or embarrassed at their own poor education. Americans are not only stupid, we appear to be quite content with that fact.

This is largely the result of the bizarro shift in cultural values that is known as the Reagan Administration. Lies became good business, greed became good, and stupid became macho. Reagan was already suffering from Alzheimer’s when he was in office - I told people at the time to wait and see, that in years to come, long after he was out of office, they’d announce that he had it. I hate to say I told you so, but I did. It was SO obvious that he had no concept half the time what he was saying. People worshiped him and still do. (Usually not the people who had to drop out of college because he slashed the student loans, btw - as with many things Republican, it’s mostly true of the rich people. ) Reagan was a pretend cowboy - he played one in the movies, you know - and cowboys didn’t care about sissy stuff like readin’ and ritin’ and ‘rithmatic. I blame Reagan for the fact that people on TV, including journalists and media professionals, can’t conjugate a verb. If I hear one more person say they “had went” somewhere, I’m going hurt somebody. I won’t have to wait long.

Stupid is what the adults are, and that’s bad enough, but their kids are something far worse - sociopaths. As Whoopi Goldberg said in a recent comedy special: “They have raised BARBARIANS!” Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I have a tag for my posts called “generation of sociopaths.” You’ll see it at the bottom of this post, for example. I know I’m getting old, and people have been bemoaning the younger generation since ancient Greece, but this is something new. This is different. Kids aren’t just undisciplined or wild - they’re sub-human. Human beings feel empathy for others. We feel guilty when we do something wrong. If we do something wrong, we tend to hide it rather than advertise it. That’s not true for an alarming number of today’s kids.

Case in point: Florida recently saw a case where 6 girls and 2 boys conspired to beat a young girl so it could be taped and posted on You Tube. They picked their victim, Victoria, because, they claim, she said something “unfriendly” about them when they went into the restaurant she worked in, but they taped it so they could show it on You Tube and be “popular.” Knocked into unconsciousness at the outset and continuously beaten by the 6 girls for half an hour, poor Victoria has lost the sight in one eye and part of her hearing. The news is continually showing the video, and it is disgusting. Note that they don’t just show it once, they keep running it over and over while they talk about it. I actually heard people saying the girls might not be too badly punished because it was a first offense.

So far, they have been charged as adults with kidnapping and misdemeanor battery. They could face life in prison. Not nearly enough, as far as I’m concerned, but here’s my point: they never seem to have thought that beating up another girl was a bad idea. This was planned, and video cameras set up around the room to catch the action. When the girl was unconscious, they kept hitting her. Get that? The sight of an unconscious person, whom they had just knocked out, didn’t slow them down. No remorse. No empathy. No little bell in their head going “ding, ding, ding - this is not a good idea!” They didn’t have the instinct to stop. They didn’t have an emotional response to her suffering. They were so proud of what they had done they uploaded the video to You Tube to brag about it. It apparently never occurred to them that this was a CRIME. That, my friends, is the textbook definition of sociopathy.

So, why am I connecting this to stupid Americans? I believe the two issues are intimately entwined. An uneducated person might feel empathy, but not necessarily know how to foster its development in a child. They might not know that their teenager shouldn’t have access to social networking sites like You Tube, or even know what You Tube is. I’m a firm believer that if you want to raise a kid, you need to be smarter than she is. That’s not the case in most families I see. How do 8 people conspire to do something like this and none of their parents knew anything was up? Are you going to tell me that 8 sets of parents didn’t know their kids were this fucked up? Stupid.

Isn’t anyone afraid of their parents anymore? If I had done something like this when I was young the police would have been the least of my worries. I’d be afraid my mom would find out, and there was no wrath greater than the wrath of Mom. I wasn’t particularly concerned about being “cool,” and I went out of my way to avoid cliques of any kind. If I did do something wrong, I wouldn’t advertise it. I’d know that putting something on the internet is like making a global confession. But then, I’d also know that fighting is wrong, and a planned team assault is nothing to be proud of. If anything, it’s cowardly. 6 on 1 makes the 6 look weak, stupid and incapable of independent thought. Three qualities I think makes them ripe for life in prison. These kids are in their mid-to-late teens. They aren’t going to grow a conscience at this point - they’re a done deal. The only choice society has is to lock them away with other equally damaged people and let them victimize each other. We’re producing so many damaged people that we’re going to have to legalize marijuana just to make room for them. I’d much rather my kid smoke a little weed than commit an assault.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. These kids have spent half their lives with a pResident who is a war criminal. With an administration that conspired to torture people in violation of international law. They probably can’t remember a fair election, if they even know what an election is. I’d bet money none of them could find Iraq on a map. I don’t see any Rhodes Scholars coming out of this crew.

OMFG! I’m watching Bill Maher and he’s saying this is not a big deal! That it’s “kids being kids!” What an asshole. I used to like him, but I’m reconsidering that. He thinks the film is funny! Ugh. I'll never think he's funny again.

I have nothing more to say. This country is going to hell and nobody cares.

A publicly financed database at Johns Hopkins University — the largest reproductive health database in the world — censored the word “abortion” from its searches. Why? To avoid having their funding pulled in the current anti-choice, pro-censorship climate. RH Reality Check was on top of this one from the beginning, so check out their coverage; their outcry was key in getting the search restored. Our Bodies Our Blog has more.

The censorship blocked more than 25,000 searches. And this is one more example of how the Global Gag Rule not only impedes health care access and threatens women’s lives, but violates are very basic values of education, access to information and free speech:

Under a Reagan-era policy revived by President Bush in 2001, USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform abortions, or that “actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.”

A librarian at the University of California at San Francisco noticed the new censorship on Monday, while carrying out a routine research request on behalf of academics and researchers at the university. The search term had functioned properly as of January.

Puzzled, she contacted the manager of the database, Johns Hopkins’ Debbie Dickson, who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding.

“We recently made all abortion terms stop words,” Dickson wrote in a note to Gloria Won, the UCSF medical center librarian making the inquiry. “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”

After outcry from activists, the word “abortion” has been restored as a search term. There are a lot of morals to this story — the degree to which anti-choicers are willing to go to push their ideological agenda; the invisibility of women’s health concerns; the topsy-turvy world we’re living in when reproductive health funding is contingent on pretending abortion doesn’t exist — but I think my favorite lesson is the one we should have all learned in primary school: Don’t piss off the librarian.

I have very little to say about this article, other than:

1. Talking about condoms and safer sex is not the same thing as demonizing abstinence, and if you’re under that impression, I sure hope that you were a legacy admission to Harvard, because otherwise that’s just embarrassing.

2. You look dumb when you complain that “there is just one lifestyle that doesn’t get recognition” and that’s abstinence. Abstinence gets recognition to the tune of more than $140 million in federal funding every year. Abstinence is discussed constantly. It is brought up in every single sex ed program. It is the subject of Congressional investigations and debates. It is studied by researchers. It is discussed in the classroom, in churches, in homes, in the news, and on blogs. Abstinence-until-marriage is discussed perhaps more than any other lifestyle choice made my less than five percent of the population.

3. You look even dumber when you complain about how mean and alienating the comprehensive sex ed folks are, and then you say stuff like pre-marital sex “deeply compromises human dignity” and leads to “personal unhappiness and social harm.” I can recognize that it is hard to remain abstinent, especially in the face of a very sexualized culture. I appreciate and applaud the personal strength of individuals who decide abstinence in the best choice for them. But what I can’t support is the constant attacks on sexually active people. People who have sex do not feel a constant need to tell abstinent people that their human dignity has been compromised, or that they’re dirty, or that they are secretly unhappy, or that they’re headed for total life ruin. I can understand how abstinent people may feel like society regards them as freaks because it seems like everyone else is having sex, but, statistically, most adults do have sex before marriage. It doesn’t mean you’re a freak if you don’t, but it does mean you’re making a different choice than 95 percent of the population. You can’t really expect that the choices made by the overwhelming majority won’t be normalized; you can, however, expect that your choices be recognized and respected. Unfortunately, the most vocal abstinence crusaders don’t do that. They instead choose to tell the rest of us that we’re making bad decisions and that we’re compromising our dignity as human beings. That’s far more fucked up and judgmental than anything I’ve ever heard a sexually active person say about abstinent folks.

4. You are not Ghandi or Nelson Mandela for choosing not to have sex.

5. I’m glad you’ve given this a feminist analysis, and I think there are feminist reasons for making your own sexual choices, including abstinence. But thinking that dudes are going to talk about you in the locker room and believing that oral sex is “disgusting” are not great justifications for the no-sex stance. First, if you think all men are dogs who are going to do the locker-room play-by-play, what makes you want to marry one? And why do you think that your guy will change from scum into a prince the day he puts a ring on your finger? Second, what makes you think that the constant “Don’t think about sex!” message will actually make people not think about sex? It’s the old “pink elephant” game, isn’t it? Third, if your abstinence is based in feminist theory about controlling your own body and not giving it over to men, why are you against masturbation? Fourth, could you please just stop pretending that your abstinence is based in feminism and secularism? It’s pretty clear that it’s not, and your anti-masturbation stance isn’t the only clue. If your choices are religiously motivated, that’s fine — but you really don’t need to co-opt other movements to try to trick other people out of a condom-lovin’ fuck.

6. When you’re a dude who authors an article like this and you end it with a competition between the virgin and the whore and then conclude with a quote saying “most guys out there would rather end up with a girl like Janie [the virgin],” you do all involved a disservice.

Perhaps we should be focusing on the fear-mongering and outright lying on behalf of anti-choicers. Amanda tackles the hypocrisy of Wright’s critics — the same people who attack him for repeating inaccurate messages about HIV/AIDS were the primary architects of Bush’s anti-science, deadly HIV/AIDS policies abroad.

And while Wright’s conspiracy theories about where HIV came from are a little whacked out, when you know the history of medical experimentation on people of color, you can understand his paranoia a little better. Heck, even today, people of color tend to receive medical care from lower-skilled professionals, and are more likely to be “teaching subjects” than white people.

None of that is to say that his statements about HIV are correct. But Wright is only Obama’s pastor, and he has never been invited to influence policy — unlike, say, Jerry Thacker, a man who called AIDS a “gay plague” and homosexuality a “death style” and was rewarded with a nomination from President Bush to serve on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS.

And the mainstream anti-choice movement spreads all kinds of lies about HIV/AIDS and other diseases — except they don’t keep it in the pulpit, they bring it into the classroom. A large anti-choice website — prolife.com — “warns” people about condoms, implying that HIV can penetrate microscopic holes in latex and flat-out stating that condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission 31% of the time. The site also says that “one out of every three teenage couples using condoms will become pregnant each year.” They further falsely claim that all STDs can be spread without exchanging body fluids:

STDs are frequently passed through “skin to skin” contact even when condoms are used. This can happen because the bacterial or viral germs that cause many serious STDs (such as human papillomavirus, chlamydia, herpes, and syphilis) do not infect just one place on your body. They may infect anywhere in the male or female genital areas.

So, even if the virus or bacteria isn’t passed through tears or holes in the condom itself, you can still get diseases because condoms don’t cover or protect all areas of the genital region. That means condoms don’t prevent many of the STD infections that take place during sexual contact.

This is what young people are learning from “pro-life” groups. And anti-choice groups are being well-funded by federal abstinence-only dollars to teach this kind of BS in the public school classroom.

But, yes, let’s be upset that Rev. Wright made a ridiculous statement about the origins of HIV to his church. After all, that will have absolutely no effect at all on what people do when it comes to HIV/AIDS prevention, but it’s a tasty news tidbit to bandy about in an effort to make Obama look like a run-of-the-mill crazy/paranoid/racially-divisive black man. Why would the mainstream media take a step back from the headline du jour and instead worry about the millions of people here and abroad who are being told that condoms don’t work to prevent HIV? After all, that won’t have any negative public health consequences, right?