feminist blogs

FLDS founding patriarch Rulon Jeffs with his last two wives — sisters Edna and Mary Fischer — on their wedding day. He received the pair as a 90th birthday present.

The recent raid on a fundamentalist Mormon sect in Texas has been all over the news, and it’s a tragedy from all angles — sad that it happened in the first place, sad that there are hundreds of children with no place to go, sad that only the women and girls are having their faces shown on TV while the men who exploited them maintain some privacy. But as Sara Robinson points out, there’s a lot more to the story than just the headlines about polygamy — this is about a right-wing cult’s ability to completely separate itself from the rule of law and the protections and oversights that our society is supposed to afford all its citizens.

The FLDS had its own hospitals, which it used as tools of social control:

FLDS communities put a priority on providing as much health care inside the community as possible, so they’re not dependent on outside medical professionals. (To this end, pregnant mothers have often been sent to Hildale or Bountiful in their last months, so they can be attended by the FLDS midwives there.) Hildale/Colorado City has its own hospital — built partly with public funds — that has employed only doctors and nurses who have pledged their first loyalty to the Prophet.

As a result, the group’s women and children get much of their primary care from people who feel no accountability to established medical standards of practice, state record-keeping requirements, or any of the existing mandated reporter laws. (Most people in these communities have no idea these laws even exist.) The spotty record-keeping that results is why the state of Texas has made the wise decision to do DNA testing on all the kids: it cannot be taken for granted that their birth certificates are accurate (or, in some places, exist at all).

The FLDS has also co-opted mental health services into another form of wife abuse. In Hildale/Colorado City, FLDS doctors have proven quite willing to declare unhappy women crazy. Daphne Bramham found that up to a third of FLDS women are on anti-depressants; and that women who are express acute dissatisfaction with the life have often been committed to mental hospitals in Arizona by the community’s doctors. According to Bramham, the fear of being labeled insane and shut away in an institution is one of the most potent threats the community has used to keep women in their place.

And their own police and court system:

Much of the power of the prophets has been drawn from the fact that they historically controlled both the cops and the courts that served the Hildale/Colorado City area. Though these were officially chartered law enforcement agencies and nominally public courts, they weren’t concerned with civil law. Instead, their task was to enforce the law according to the FLDS and its Prophet. The people in these communities had no effective recourse to the laws the rest of us live under. They could be arrested, fined, jailed, and have their property seized by nominally “official” cops and courts, acting under full authority of civil government, for violating church laws.

And women who tried to escape were dragged right back to their families, or to the hospital for a mental health examination.

There’s not even oversight for the dead:

These communities also bury their own dead (and at least one has its own crematorium), which opens the way to record-keeping anomalies with death certificates — and ensures that no questions will ever be asked, and no autopsies will ever be performed. Given the genetic instability and volatile control issues within this group, it may not be wise for them to have the means to dispose of dead bodies without official oversight. We need to be asking questions about who’s in their cemeteries and crematoria, how they got there, and what kinds of records are being kept.

Lots of disturbing stuff. Read it all.

Or just a cat lady?

In a good but mis-titled article, Steven Stark comments on the deep weirdness of the current movement to get Hillary to quit:

It is, in truth, an argument virtually without precedent in modern political history, at least at this stage of such a close race. And while it does have its origins in an effort to preserve party unity, it also has its roots in an odd and vitriolic crusade to purge the Clintons and hand the nomination to a candidate who has yet, after all, to win a single large state’s primary (other than his own), let alone the nomination.

The fact is that, until now, candidates have rarely, if ever, faced such a concerted movement (featuring prominent names, such as Bill Richardson, and a column in Slate titled “The Hillary Deathwatch”), urging them to drop out before their rival has clinched the nomination. To review the history:

• In 1988, Jesse Jackson took his hopeless campaign against winner Michael Dukakis all the way to the convention, often to great media praise.

• In 1980, Ted Kennedy carried his run against Jimmy Carter all the way to the convention, even though it was clear he had been routed.

• In 1976, Ronald Reagan contested the “inevitability” of Gerald Ford all the way to the convention. Few, then or since, have ever thought to criticize Reagan’s failure to step aside and let Ford assume the mantle.

• Also in 1976, three candidates — Mo Udall, Jerry Brown, and Frank Church — ran against Jimmy Carter all the way through the final primaries, even though Carter seemed more than likely to be the eventual nominee.

• Even in 1960, Lyndon Johnson and Adlai Stevenson fought the “certain” nomination of John F. Kennedy all the way to the convention floor.

In fact, until this year, it’s been an axiom of American politics that candidates are allowed to pursue their runs until they decide to drop out — which is usually, by the way, when they run out of money. Even Mike Huckabee kept running against John McCain in this campaign long after it was obvious he had no hope of winning the GOP nod.

Okay, class, who can tell me what all those candidates had in common? Starts with a p…..

That’s right! Penis! Yes, all candidates with penises have the right to compete.

Clearly the rules are different for penis-less lady candidates:

Yet in one of the tightest races in modern history — before the opponent has come close to clearly clinching the nomination, before a number of voters have been given the chance to have their voices heard, and when Clinton still has a chance, albeit a slim one, to win the prize, she is continually vilified for failing to see the light and bow out. What gives?

I know! I know! Pick me!

…Clinton is being held to a different standard than virtually any other candidate in history. That’s being driven by Clinton fatigue, but it’s also being driven by a concerted campaign that examines every action the Clintons take and somehow finds the basest, most self-serving motivation for its existence. Thus, in this case, when Clinton is simply doing what everyone else has always done, she’s constantly attacked as an obsessed and crazed egomaniac, bent on self-aggrandizement at the expense of her party. Is there a fair amount of sexism in the way she’s being asked to get out of the way so a man can have the job? You be the judge.

No, there’s not a fair amount of sexism. There’s a huge amount of sexism, both conscious and unconscious. All this talk of Clinton fatigue is bullshit — in 2004 the party was wishing they could re-nominate Big Dog after his speech at the convention. What’s going on now is that lay-deez aren’t supposed to reach for power, and those who do are evil unnatural witches who consort with demons, eat babies for breakfast, and fuck ponies for fun.

Can anybody name me a single über-powerful woman in the entire history of Western civilization who hasn’t been vilified as a freak of nature? (And if you’re thinking Elizabeth I, think again. She was constantly whispered about and her whole “Virgin Queen” shtick was a canny counter-move to replace the usual sex-fiend demonization of strong women with an almost equally unnatural asexual image.)

But there’s also this:

Finally, there have been others who have observed how the Obama campaign resembles a religious movement (in both its positive and negative aspects). Thus, we have the growing messianism of Obama supporters — both on the Web and in the media — whose comments seem to convey the strong impression that it’s time for everyone to participate in the coronation of the chosen one.

The religious fanaticism surrounding Obama is utterly antithetical to democracy. The children (biologically and/or mentally) who worship him don’t think of Barry as a candidate for office in a representative government; they think of him as a Messiah. How dare anyone oppose Him? And that the person opposing him is an Evil Mommy just makes it worse, because Mommies aren’t supposed to compete! Mommies are supposed to sacrifice everything so their babies can be happy. Evil Mommy! Evil!

In yesterday’s New York Times magazine there was a fantastic article by Noah Feldman titled ‘Why Shariah?’ in which he examines the history and current rise in popular support for the Islamic legal tradition, Shariah. As a future lawyer I have become increasingly interested in learning more about Shariah. I will openly admit I know very little, but that seems to be the problem cited by both Feldman as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Feldman’s piece does a good job of synthesizing it for the public.

I first became interested in learning about Shariah courts while attending a law reform conference that included lawyers from Zanzibar (an island off the coast of Tanganyika – when the two former colonies were united they were re-named the Republic of Tanzania). While the mainland is heavily Christian, Zanzibar is over 90% Muslim. While discussing gender law with two lawyers from Zanzibar I learned that the island has Shariah courts that rule over family law issues, including divorce. According to these lawyers, Shariah courts gave women more power because a woman could initiate divorce without her husband’s consent.
(more…)

This time around, the attack comes from Tim Russert. Josh is right — it is the MSM version of email smear campaigns. Obama handled it with grace, but damn if I don’t want to kick reporters sometimes.

In my fantasyland, public figures attached to progressive causes would not run away from certain adjectives just because the Republicans have been very good at saying them with a sneer. And they would especially not do so when the adjective, in fact, fits. Behold Amy Sullivan, whose mission in life is to get Democrats to talk nice to the white evangelicals (even as more and more Americans run from organized religion):

You’re pro-choice. Does that interfere with being an evangelical?

Well, I don’t like the [pro-choice] label. I guess the reason I wrote about abortion the way I did in the book is because I have serious moral concerns about abortion, but I don’t believe that it should be illegal. And that puts me in the vast majority of Americans. But unfortunately, there’s no label for us.

Actually, Amy, there is a label for you: Pro-Choice. You wouldn’t choose to have an abortion, but you don’t want to make it illegal because other women might make other choices. See how easy that was? By the way, you’ve been hanging out with Will Saletan, haven’t you?

There’s really no argument about whether it would be a good thing to reduce the abortion rate. That’s been something that’s been standard policy with the choice groups in addition to everyone else for decades. The problem is, I’ve been talking to these folks for a long, long time, and they say, “Of course we want to reduce abortion! Don’t people know that?” And I say, “No, they don’t know that. And you don’t get any credit for it if people only hear you talking about a right to choose.”….

And so the people Democrats need to speak to are those people in the middle who are kind of queasy about abortion but who don’t want to see it outlawed. Democrats never mention reducing the abortion rate or the rate of unplanned pregnancies, and so they lose that opportunity to reach out to voters who are less sure about their position on abortion.

Um, you have heard of “Safe, legal and rare,” right? Democrats aren’t exactly running around talking up abortion on demand up to the moment before birth, as some of the trolls around these parts would have it.

In other quarters, would it kill Democrats to start embracing the “liberal” label again proudly instead of running away from it? And even if you don’t want to reclaim it right now, maybe just, you know, stop trying to define it away?

But what do I know? I live in a fantasyland.

Interesting study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:

More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a new survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The report, titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” depicts a highly fluid and diverse national religious life. If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations.

What’s interesting about this is that most Americans who call themselves religious probably couldn’t tell you much about the actual beliefs their church or denomination subscribes to, which probably makes it easier to jump from church to church. And in some cases, the churches deliberately play down the more intolerant aspects of their faith in order to attract members who are driven by a need to belong, not a need to subscribe to a strict Pentecostal theology or scary Apocalyptic revenge fantasies (yes, I’m looking at you, Rick Warren). Though I’m sure that there are people for whom the consigning-all-those-other-sinners-to-hell (because we are godly and we are saved) bit is the main attraction.

And then there’s the Catholic church, which is what I left. And lookee here:

The percentage of Catholics in the American population has held steady for decades at about 25 percent. But that masks a precipitous decline in native-born Catholics. The proportion has been bolstered by the large influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, the survey found.

The Catholic Church has lost more adherents than any other group: about one-third of respondents raised Catholic said they no longer identified as such. Based on the data, the survey showed, “this means that roughly 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.”

That means there are about as many ex-Catholics than there are, say, Southern Baptists. I don’t suppose that the fact that the Pope and the Bishops, theoretically celibates all, are out there telling Catholics not to use birth control, and how to vote, and all kinds of fun things like that, has anything to do with it. Losing one-third — ONE THIRD! — of cradle Catholics is a pretty big deal. It would be interesting to find out how many of them left after the Church began its rightward lurch under JPII after many years of liberalization, cracking down on liberation theologists, stopping cold the expansion of the role of women in the Church, and reinvigorating the office of the Inquisition (which was Papa Ratzi’s last job). I’ve often thought that JPII shrunk the Church to the point where little other than abortion and regulating female sexuality* is its focus.

Another interesting finding is that the religiously unaffiliated have been growing, although those that do not belong to a particular religious affiliation are not necessarily nonbelievers:

In the 1980s, the General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center indicated that from 5 percent to 8 percent of the population described itself as unaffiliated with a particular religion.

In the Pew survey 7.3 percent of the adult population said they were unaffiliated with a faith as children. That segment increases to 16.1 percent of the population in adulthood, the survey found. The unaffiliated are largely under 50 and male. “Nearly one-in-five men say they have no formal religious affiliation, compared with roughly 13 percent of women,” the survey said.

The rise of the unaffiliated does not mean that Americans are becoming less religious, however. Contrary to assumptions that most of the unaffiliated are atheists or agnostics, most described their religion “as nothing in particular.” Pew researchers said that later projects would delve more deeply into the beliefs and practices of the unaffiliated and would try to determine if they remain so as they age.

Thoughts? Does this bode well for the country?

_____________
* Regulating male sexuality? Only when they’re gay. Or when they’re priests who get caught, but that’s blamed on either Teh Gay or on the wanton temptingness of 12-year-old boys.

via Ecdysiasm I came across this op/ed in the Seattle Times that illustrates pretty damn well why feminism cannot be separated from other gender-justice issues, and why women’s rights will never be fully realized until we also get rid of narrow masculine rolls and homophobia. The op/ed starts out discussing the new “men’s movements” in conservative churches, aimed at re-establishing masculine roles as a way to deal with what church leaders perceive as a masculinity crisis. The result?

Personally, I have no problem with the effort to make church work better for men or challenging men to step up and do something with their lives. I do have a problem with it when it means, as it sometimes does, putting down women or insisting women play only secondary roles in church or family. And I have a big problem with the guy emphasis when it relies on making gay men objects of derision and ridicule.

Such appears to be the case in remarks made by Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland. Hutcherson has gotten headlines for his efforts to pressure Microsoft on gay issues. He has a right to his views — views he supports with texts from Scripture. Reasonable people can disagree over whether gay marriage is a good idea.

But Hutcherson goes beyond reasonable, at least to judge by the report of Seattle psychologist Valerie Tarico. Tarico, a former staffer at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, was raised in a fundamentalist church. In recent months, she has made it her business to attend services at many of the large, conservative churches in the Seattle area, including Hutcherson’s, to see what’s going on.

On a Sunday when Tarico was present, Hutcherson was preaching on gender roles. During his sermon, Hutcherson stated, “God hates soft men” and “God hates effeminate men.” Hutcherson went on to say, “If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I’d rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end.”

Emphasis mine. Unsurprisingly, Hutcherson later defended himself by saying that it was a joke.

There is something very, very wrong with a masculinity premised on violence. There is something very, very wrong with a masculinity that sees femaleness as so insulting that men should react with full outrage if someone treats them like a “woman” by holding the door.

Hutcherson’s misogyny and his homophobia are not separate issues. He doesn’t just dislike homosexuality for the sake of it; he dislikes LGBT people because being queer challenges traditional gender roles. If penises and vaginas were just body parts without superiority attached to one or the other, and if sex was just an attribute like any other, two women pursuing a romantic relationship wouldn’t matter all that much. Two men getting married wouldn’t be any bigger a deal than a man marrying a woman. A person saying that their genitals don’t match their understanding of themselves, and taking steps to change that, wouldn’t be a threat to the social order.

These are not separate issues. And yet there are far, far more people in this country (and perhaps even reading this blog) who support women’s rights, but not gay rights or trans rights or the full destruction of traditional gender roles. Hopefully, comments like Hutcherson’s will at least help to convince more feminist-leaning moderates and progressives that all of us have a dog in this fight.

Democrats may be against wars that kill millions, in favor poverty alleviation, and supportive of international policies that save millions more, but so long as they don’t think women should be forced into continuing pregnancies, they’re going to Hell. And you’re going with them if you vote for Obama or Clinton:

Now the bishops have raised the stakes: It’s not only lawmakers and candidates who risk damnation, 98 percent of the U.S. bishops agreed last November, but the voters who put them in office. “It is important to be clear,” the bishops said in a 44-page statement titled “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” “that the political choices faced by citizens[emphasis added] not only have an impact on general peace and prosperity but also may affect the individual’s salvation.” Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, chairman of the committee that drafted the statement, put those high-minded sentiments into plain English earlier this month. Support for a candidate who “espouses policies that are gravely immoral” is possible “only under exceptional circumstances that are hard to imagine,” he told the Cathedral Club of Brooklyn.

And apparently the Church couldn’t just condemn progressive voters; it had to compare them to Nazis:

“In our country we have, for the most part, allowed the party of death and the court system it has produced to eliminate, since 1973, upwards of 40 million of our fellow citizens without allowing them to see the light of day,” wrote Rockford, Ill., Bishop Thomas Doran in 2006. “No doubt, we shall soon outstrip the Nazis in doing human beings to death.” He continued, “We know . . . that adherents of one political party would place us squarely on the road to suicide as a people.”

I’m sure that the many people whose family members were killed, tortured and/or imprisoned in the Holocaust appreciate having their suffering compared with a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy. And given that many of those people live in the United States, and certainly some of them vote Democrat, I’m sure they’re thrilled to hear that they’re just like Nazis.

I’m also sure that all the people who are suffering and dying as a result of our international policies (preemptive war, “pro-life” health care, etc) will be just thrilled to hear that God is on the GOP side.

A parade participant in the Vilnius Uzgavenes holiday celebration.

Not really sure what to say about this one, other than Sweet Jesus, I didn’t realize Borat was a documentary.

During Carnival - or Uzgavenes, as it is known in Lithuania - Catholics from around the world congregate for a feast of foods prohibited during Lent. The festival usually involves a parade or circus, with attendees in masks and costumes. But in Vilnius - commonly known to Jews as Vilna - participants traditionally dress and act “as Jews,” a feat that generally calls for masks with grotesque features, beards and visible ear locks and that is often accompanied by peddling and by stereotypically Jewish speech.

Perhaps even more shockingly, the “festivities” extend beyond the parade itself and into a Halloween-style trick-or-treating. When Simonas Gurevicius, the 26-year-old executive director of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, opened the door to his house during last year’s Uzgavenes, he was greeted by two children dressed in horns and tails, reciting a song that translates as, “We’re the little Lithuanian Jews/We want blintzes and coffee/If you don’t have blintzes/Give us some of your money.” (It rhymes in Lithuanian.)

Not content to stick only to anti-Semitism, religious bigots in Vilnius also target the Roma population. Roma, also known as “gypsies,” are favorite punching bags all over Europe; Vilnius is apparently no exception to the disturbingly popular anti-Roma sentiments.

The Roma do not fare better. Participants who masquerade as “Gypsies” wear gaudy makeup, hold babies and ask bystanders for money.

Last Friday, Vilnius’s Center of Ethnic Activity hosted an exhibition of Uzgavenes masks and screened archival footage of past celebrations. Masks of Jews were displayed between those of witches and animals, and shown with no apparent compunction to cultural delegates from Latvia and Denmark. In a video shot in Vilnius last year, a man dressed as a Jew carrying a briefcase full of toilet paper haggled with cab drivers as he led a group of people made up as beasts through the streets.

“From my point of view,” said Svetlana Novopolskaja, director of the Roma Community Centre of Vilnius, “Lithuanians like to dress as Roma, like their music and habits, but don’t like Roma as people. They accept them as personages from fairy tales - as hobbits, for example - and are surprised and afraid when they meet real Roma.”

Ethnologist Inga Krisciuniene, who works at the Centre of Ethnic Activity, led the event, explained how she believed that in earlier times, Jews and Gypsies dressed alike. Revelers wore the same mask on Uzgavenes to depict them, so that the characters were distinguishable only by performers’ actions. When asked whether it could be seen as offensive to mock these minorities, Krisciuniene replied, “No one has ever complained.” The intent, she said, is humorous.

“Besides,” she added, “it’s true that Gypsies steal.”

In other words, “It’s just a joke! Except it’s true.” Charming.

Thanks to Nicholas for pointing me to this story.