No shock here

Bush thinks women should have more options when it comes to reproductive choice – that’s what he said in the second debate. So why is his team taking them away?

From today’s NYTimes:

“Tucked into the $388 billion budget measure just approved by the House and Senate is a sweeping provision that has nothing to do with the task Congress had at hand - providing money for the government. In essence, it tells health care companies, hospitals and insurance companies they are free to ignore Roe v. Wade and state and local laws and regulations currently on the books to make certain that women's access to reproductive health services includes access to abortion.”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/opinion/23tue2.html)

I’m being disingenuous here, of course. I know he doesn’t think women should have more options. And I know exactly what his team is up to. Fewer choices for women, not more.

Moving the clock on women’s rights back.

And, as Mouse Words (http://mousewords.blogspot.com/2004/11/under-guise-of-protecting-family-we.html#comments) and Infinite Stitch (http://stitch.blogs.com/the_infinite_stitch/2004/11/gop_we_want_mor.html#comments), among others, have pointed out, trying to cram every family in America into the same Fundamentalist mold –

And why?

Because the Christian Right (or, more specifically, I suspect, certain Christian Right White Males) are terrified of the Other – of anyone who is not precisely, exactly like them.

Unfortunately, as reading their websites makes clear, this includes their own wives, daughters, and minor children.

It’s the same terror that caused the Victorians to build the workhouses, the same phobia that makes certain Right Wing politicians babble about orphanages and welfare mothers having crack babies, it’s never pretty, and it’s totally irrational, and it really shouldn’t be shaping our public policy.

Rrrrr

I've been having a really bad week.

Not the worst week ever, mind you. Plenty of people are having worse ones. So I shouldn't whine. And I won't. But it's why I haven't been posting.

Here's a joke -- the only thing that made me laugh all week -- sent to me by my Republican brother. Thanks, brother!

So this guy is driving through D.C. and it's a really bad traffid jam. He's at a dead stop for like an hour, hour and a half. Finally a traffic cop comes by, and the guy rolls down his window.

"What's up, officer?"

"Oh," the cop says, "the President's outside the White House, threatening to douse himself with gasoline, set himself on fire. He's all depressed 'cause no one will believe him about why the tax cuts aren't working and why the war in Iraq is costing so much and why the deficit is so big...so we're taking up a collection."

"Oh, yeah?" says the driver. "How much you got so far?"

"About four gallons," says the cop. "But lots of people are still siphoning."

God talks to George

Or tries to anyway...

http://blacksheepchristian.blogspot.com/2004/10/and-now-for-something-completely.html#comments

Which also explains a lot of things....

The Great Society

Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorite blogs, Bitch, Ph.D.

It’s what I’ve always wanted to say, in detail, to all those folk who like to say, so sweetly, “The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats believe in taking handouts from society and Republicans believe in standing on your own two feet.”

Professor B. takes them on in detail, explaining why they’re wrong, in detail (which they are, of course – not about that being the difference: wrong about anyone in this country, or any country, standing on his own two feet), and goes on to explain why it’s a good thing that we have a functioning society (d’oh, I know, but you would be surprised how many people need that explained to them).

This is just a bit of the post; go read the whole thing.

[A mother] needs laws about rat poison so that if the bakery has had rats in the dumpster and has put poison out in the alley (which, you know, safe enough, because no one eats things they find in an alley) and someone walks through the alley and tracks some rat poison onto the sidewalk and the kid drops her cookie and then picks it back up and takes a bite while the mom is putting the cake in the car, the cookie will taste nasty and the kid will spit it back out. So, I think we do all depend on other people, and we are part of the larger society, even if we're pretty independent. And I, for one, don't like the idea of kids dying of massive internal bleeding, and I'm willing to have maybe one quarter of one cent of my annual tax dollar go to whatever regulation gets put in place to make rat poison taste bad. ( http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/)

Why Christians Can't Read

One thing that has constantly puzzled me about Far-Right Republican Christians is how they can call themselves Christians and then live as they live, and act as they act.

That is, given that they are meant to be followers of Christ, an interesting fellow who is famous for saying such things as “Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and follow me,” and “If someone steals your coat, give him your shirt too,” and “You cannot serve both God and wealth,” and “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” and “Judge not lest ye also be judge," where do they get off driving Hummers, and get all snotty about welfare, and supporting the death penality, and bombing the hell out of Iraq?


Well, Steve Almond has an essay that attempts to explain what he thinks might be up, and he’s pretty convincing:

It’s (a) the salad bar approach to the Bible that these Church Christians are so famous for – by which I mean, they haven’t actually read their own text (as usual, which is how one of them, as quoted on The Poor Man (http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/003489.html) a few days ago, could think that the Bible says “to thine own self be true,” as well as how my students, every semester, fall for my little joke, “As it says in the Bible, “God helps him who helps himself.”)

And it’s (b) misreading, because Christians –Fundamentalist Christians, at least -- can’t read. And why can’t they read? Because they can’t think. And why can’t they think? Because their culture actively discourages independent, critical thought.

First off, from infancy, they are taught to obey authority instantly and unquestioningly*;

Second, a main tenet of their religion is the surrender of their free will to someone else’s – God’s, in the ideal sense, but often, in the real sense, to that of some preacher or commanding officer;

And finally, their main institution, the fundamentalist church, is actively opposed to critical thinking, and makes no bones about it. The reasons behind this are transparent: their text and tenets will not stand up to critical, empirical challenge, and they know it.

In any case, read this article by Steve Almond. It’s interesting and enlightening:

http://www.killingthebuddha.com/damn_nation/gospel_dubya.htm

It also, if Almond is right, explains a great deal that is apparently contradictory about the Religious Right.

Doesn’t do us any good, mind you. We’re still stuck with them. But you know me and my fierce belief in the enlightenment doctrine: the first step in fixing something is figuring out how it works.

* As in this example from the charming site, “The Loving Art of Spanking,” about why you should beat your child into submission for thinking for herself: “If my six year old daughter is told to bring all the dishes off the table into the kitchen and she brings all but the water glasses, that is not obedience, however promptly it was carried out. She may figure someone else should help her. She may decide it would be handy to leave the glasses so they are available for the next meal. She may think a lot of things to justify herself, but 90% obedience is disobedience” (http://www.patriarch.com/spanking.html).

Sorry Everybody

In case you haven't seen it already:

http://www.sorryeverybody.com/

Freeing Iraq

This is from the site Picasso Dreams: from an interview with a soldier from Iraq.
(http://karmakat.typepad.com/picasso_dreams/)

Former Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey: “As far as I’m concerned, the real war did not begin until they saw us murdering innocent civilians,” he said. “I mean, they were witnessing their loved ones being murdered by US Marines. It’s kind of hard to tell someone that they are being liberated when they just saw their child shot or lost their husband or grandmother.”

And it’s exactly what I’m talking about.

And all the folk who voted for Bush because he’s a stand-up guy who has liberated those Iraqi citizens need to go take a look at some of the photographs of those dead Iraqi kids and those dead Iraqi brothers and mothers and husbands and tell me just how liberated they think those people feel right now. (Photographs available at http://fallujapictures.blogspot.com/)


Or grateful they think their families feel right now either.

Here's something I'm buying

To celebrate the new era we have moved into:

http://www.cafepress.com/bridezilla/156657

Solutions to World Problems

Whales are dying of cancer, the Bush administration is changing the rules so that the EPA can “be free to approve pesticides without consulting wildlife agencies to determine if the chemical might harm plants and animals protected by the Endangered Species Act”
( http://www.acsonline.org/issues/conservationRpts/Conservation0409.html)
Global warming is killing the krill in the ocean (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23913-2004Nov3.html), which I don’t have to tell you folks who aren’t of the Jesus-Can-Mend-The-World-He-Doesn't-Need-Our-Help camp is extremely bad news, and this guy?

This guy thinks the whole problem is we just don’t have enough conservative professors in the universities.

(http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=56a4b06e77oshwaiq5psszuc2gti5neb)

Cause, you know, if we just had more professors who believes in two parent families teaching in the women studies programs – or more people opposed to affirmative action teaching in the sociology programs – or more people who thought non-European literature was crap teaching in the literature programs – why, we’d have no problems at all!

And why don’t we have more conservatives on campus?

Rank discrimination!

Liberal hiring committees won’t hire conservatives! That’s why!

It’s got nothing to do with them being refusing to learn the texts in their field! It’s got nothing to do with them being jerks! It’s got nothing to do with them being (for example, to speak for a particular conservative on this particular campus) offensively sexist.

Heavens no. Must be discriminatory hiring practices on the part of liberals.

Maybe we should start an affirmative action program or something.

Braking for Grief

I took my kid to the dentist yesterday.

And she was an excellent dentist, let me say that up front. I was could not have been more impressed with this dentist. The kid went in terrified and came out eager to go back next Thursday and get her next filling. The kid never had a moment’s anxiety and suffered very little pain – this despite getting her first root canal, at age six.

(Did I mention Fort Smith has no fluoride in its water? Because that would be, you know, government interference in our lives or a huge tax burden or something – hell, I don’t know. We’ve been brushing and flossing and feeding her fluoridated water from Wal-Mart, but apparently it’s not enough.)

Anyway: what I started to say. She’s an excellent dentist, but she is, like all dentists in Fort Smith, a fundamentalist Christian.

Why every single dentist in Fort Smith is a fundamentalist Christian I cannot tell you. Maybe it’s just demographics. But they are. They pipe Christian music into their waiting room, they have little Jesus wallpaper designs, the dental technicians have conversations about how they’ll choose their new homes by prayer: “We’ll live where the Lord leads us,” one said to the other was she was working on the kid’s jaw yesterday.

What got me, though, what got to me, was how celebratory they were about Falluja.

They were acting like it was some football game.

They were giggly and cheerful and all hi-fiving each other, and I’m trying to gain some perspective and say, okay, all right, maybe they’re just thinking this means our guys get to come home sooner – but I just can’t get my head to the place where you could call yourself a follower of Christ and still think it would be okay to say Yay, yippee, we’re killing a whole bunch of people, we’re burning people alive, we’re slaughtering folks, hee hee, it’s great.

And then there’s Mr. Falwell, who says we should call on Jesus himself to bless it:

http://www.baptiststandard.com/postnuke/index.php?module=htmlpages&func=display&pid=2518

(Via Infinite Stitch, who is doing her usual brilliant work: http://stitch.blogs.com/the_infinite_stitch/)


I’ve decided I want to get myself a bumper sticker made: WARNING: I BRAKE FOR GRIEF.

Because I’m going to need it, living in this country over the next four years.

This Just In

W is for Women My Ass

According to an email I just got, George Junior is appointing Dr. David Hager to:

“Head up the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA)
Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee.
The committee has not met for more than two years,
during which time its charter lapsed.
As a result, the Bush Administration is tasked with
filling all eleven positions with new members. "

The email goes on to say:

"This position does not require Congressional approval. The FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs
Advisory Committee makes crucial decisions on matters relating to drugs used in
the practice of obstetrics, gynecology and related specialties, including hormone therapy,
contraception, treatment for infertility, and medical alternatives to surgical procedures
for sterilization and pregnancy termination."


You’ll remember Dr. Hager as the author of the thrilling book As Jesus Cared for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now.

He’s the pro-life OB/GYN who is famous for refusing to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women, and for suggesting to women suffering from PMS that they should pray their symptoms away. He also believes the birth control pill is abortion: which, technically, it is, since it keeps the fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus.

This is a key point, btw, folks. Because if you think the religious right is going to stop at overturning Roe V Wade, you need to take a look at this guy. He believes the Pill causes abortions.

You know what else, under this definition, causes abortions? Do you know what else, in other words, if this guy and his ilk, had his way, would be illegal?

IUDs. Depo shots. Any kind of birth control that relies on hormones. Any kind of birth control that relies on keeping a fertilized egg from attaching to the womb.

What sort of birth control does that leave? Condoms. Which fail something like 80% of the time. Abstinence. Which fails something like 50% of the time. And sterilization. Which works, but is, very often, a one-way road.

This is the sort of guy George Junior is putting in charge of women’s health. Women’s choices. This is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been expecting.

If you’re as worried about it as I am, let him know: e-mail to president@whitehouse.gov

Not that he’ll listen, mind you.

Faith-Based Folks

I spent Saturday doing community service at the Montessori school, raking leaves and picking up trash*, in lovely November weather, sunny and cold, and I’m feeling better now.

Here’s what I had been thinking: that it was hopeless. Junior had been elected by Faith-based voters. Being that they were Faith-based, we were doomed. Faith-based electors do not learn from experience – they can’t. They are not like empirical-thinkers.

You and I – that is, if you are, like I am, dedicated to the enlightenment doctrine and the empirical world – you and I believe that we should base our decisions on this world here, on what happens here.

That is, we should watch what happens in this world here, base our conclusions on what is happening here, and change our behavior accordingly.

To take a specific example: sex education. Right now two kinds of sex education are being taught in most public education systems: abstinence-only and abstinence-based.

Abstinence-only (the kind the Fundamentalists insist is the only kind we should use) teaches only about abstinence. The only thing it has to say about contraception – at all – is that it doesn’t work. (That’s right. It doesn’t work, ever: that’s what these classes tell kids. That’s all the teachers in these classes are allowed to tell kids.) This is the sort of sex-education that gets taught in Texas and most other Southern states – except in Arkansas, let me hastily add, where we teach no sex education at all, nor any driver’s ed either, which is why we have such a high death rate among our teens. I get ten or fifteen essays a semester about How My Best Friend Died On the Highway, and of course half my students have babies.

Abstinence-based sex-education, on the other hand, stresses that abstinence is the best way to go about it, and gives the student all the reasons why having sex before marriage is a really bad idea, but then goes on to teach the student about the various forms of contraception, how to obtain them, how to use them, and what they will and won’t do.

Guess which form of sex-education works best at prevent the spread of STDs and results in a lower rate of abortion and teen pregnancy?

Better than that, guess which method results in children have their first sexual encounter at a later age?

But faith-based folk aren’t interested in looking at the data that show that abstinence-based sex education works better than abstinence-only. They also aren’t interested in the evidence that shows that the abortion rates have gone up during George Junior’s presidency.

They are only interested in the knowledge, which they already have, that sex before marriage is wrong, that contraception is wrong, and that the only way to teach sex education, therefore, is to tell people that.

How do they know these two things? Through revealed knowledge.

These folk know what they know because Jesus Told Them So.

It’s on their bumper stickers – go check.

“God said it. I believe it. That settles it.”

Except, of course, none of them actually have a clue what God said – none of them have actually read the Bible. That’s why they think the Bible think abortion is wrong, when there isn’t a word in the Bible about abortion. (Just for fun, here's for citations on that: http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_bibl.htm) That’s also why they think Jesus is for capital punishment and killing Iraqis – all those verses in the Sermon on the Mount about slaughtering your enemies and killing those who had done wrong to you.

No, they don’t have a clue what’s actually in their text. (Which, by the way, actually does require them to pay attention empirical evidence. Check out Matthew 7.20: by their fruits you shall know them. Jesus actually did require them to be empirical thinkers. But of course that's way too hard.)

So what they are substituting for God’s revealed knowledge is Some Guy’s revealed knowledge – Some Guy – usually their preacher, or, in this case, George Junior himself, assures them that he has the Word from God, and –

They believe it. That settles it.

No further data needed.

Who cares if abstinence actually does have a failure rate – if, that is, kids turn out, surprise, surprise, to be not very good at not having sex?

Who cares if giving tax cuts to the rich turns out not to stimulate the economy?

Who cares if global warming actually does turn out to be happening?

Who cares if dumping mercury into the ecosystem actually does turn out to have a really bad effect on our children?

Who cares if two or three companies owning all the media systems in the United States has a really bad effect on free speech in this country?

Who cares if the Patriot Act smashes our civil liberties?

Who cares if destroying a woman’s access to education, family planning, and economic independence virtually guarantees her children will suffer a higher rate of poverty?

George said it would be fine. They believe it. That settles it.

In which case nothing that happens over the next four years – or the next forty – is going to make any difference.

In which case my beautiful little daughter, who is so brilliant it would make your eyes sting, who knew the words mythological and excessive and persuasive when she was three years old (and the word fuck, too, okay, I admit it), who’s a little Aikido warrior and wants to be either a paleontologist or mama or an English professor or a snowball maker, is heading straight for an American Taliban.

This is all what I had been thinking on Friday.

But on Saturday I cheered up a little.

Because the Revealed-Knowledge thinkers aren’t all of the 51% of American voters who elected this faith-based president. (And I do think he is a revealed-knowledge, faith-based operator, and I do think that is exactly what’s wrong with him, and anyone who has voted for him thinking he’s anything else needs a bitch-slap, in my humble opinion.) I think, probably, I was speculating, hopefully, well, probably, no more than 15 to 20% of his base is made up of that sort of thinker.

Anyway, that’s what I was wistfully hoping, on Saturday, raking leaves.

It made me feel better then.



*Speaking of which, what is up with littering these days? When I was a kid, it was one of the seven deadly sins. These days people thinking nothing of it. I saw a student on campus last week toss an empty soda can on the ground five feet from a trash can. And when another student called her on it, she sneered and said, “That’s why I pay for groundskeepers.” I also see kids at the local parks throwing their candy wrappers on the ground: their parents don’t say a word to them. I blame Republicans. Specifically, the Ann Coulter type of Republican, who believe that God gave them the Earth not to take care of, but to rape. Coulter’s exact quote: "God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"---Hannity & Colmes, 6/20/01.

Dealing with the Disaster

So you know the classic stages of dealing with disaster – denial, bargaining, anger, despair, acceptance?

I was in denial briefly. Went around telling everyone Wednesday morning that it wasn’t over yet, even though I knew it was.

Skipped bargaining entirely. Skipped anger entirely.

Can’t seem to get out of despair.

The thing is, it’s not Kerry that lost on Tuesday. It’s the Enlightenment Doctrine. The Wingers didn’t vote against the Left. They voted against Empiricism. They voted against science. They voted against humanism.

They want Theism. They want revealed knowledge. They want Jesus Land. (See this link for the only thing that has made me truly laugh in the past two days http://kenlayne.com/2004/11/jesusland.html .)

And Bush has no plans for uniting this country. He’s making that clear already. Flush with vindication, he’s charging ahead. What’s left for us on the left? You know, the people who think that the truth is something you find through reason and actual education, that the best cure for bad speech is more speech, and that fixing things is better than bombing the hell out of them?

I don’t know. Keep talking. The best cure for bad speech is more speech. Keep teaching. The truth will set us free. If he is wrong – and he is wrong – don’t we have to trust that everyone will see that eventually?

I suppose we just have to hope that there will be enough of our country left when Bushco is done with it for it to matter. Maybe there will be. It doesn’t look good at the moment.

I’m still in despair, mind you, so don’t mind me.

Noah's Flood

Here’s some more of what we have to look forward to under the Bush Theocracy.

The National Parks Service is being compelled, by the Bush Administration, to sell a book called The Grand Canyon: A Different View, by Tom Vail, which explains “how the park’s central feature developed on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale.” It’s a bit of creationist propaganda, which claims that “the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces.”

The NPS does not want to sell this book, has objected (http://www.peer.org/press/524.html) to being forced to do so, and points out, rightly, that selling this sort of anti-intellectual claptrap runs contrary to its mission – its mission being to increase the scientific knowledge of its visitors.

Bushco’s response? Tough noogie.

Because this document does not run contrary to Bushco’s mission. Which is not a mission to Mars, or to advance knowledge, or to educate children, or to make life better in America, or any other soft soap Bushco has been peddling these past few years.

Theocracy. That’s what Bushco is after.

And you can't have theocracy without an ignorant populace, now can you?

Trying for Silver Linings

Trying to look for bright sides, here in Arkansas, and not having much luck.

Like: Bush can only have four more years.

Like: At least now we don’t have to watch the Wingers go after Kerry like rabid weasels for the next eight years.

Like: At least the train wreck that’s coming will be all their fault.

None of this cheers me up.

My fellow liberal professor, who is pregnant and therefore cannot self-medicate, went home last night to watch the West Wing and pretend that the world was sane; I went home and drank a great deal of beer and watched The Day After Tomorrow. Began laughing savagely at the moment when the Winger VP looked into the camera and said, “I was wrong.”

Like that would ever happen.

Because you know when the train wreck comes – and I hope I am wrong about this, I hope that somehow we avoid the wreck the Wingers are doing everything they can to bring about – but you know when it does come, not a single damn one of them will step up to the plate and admit that they made a mistake, that they brought it on, that they caused it to happen.

No. Hell no. It’ll be like this deficit, like these lost jobs, like 9-11, like the quagmire of Iraq.
It’ll all be someone else’s fault. It’ll be because the silly liberals are all traitors. It'll be because gays are sleeping together, because feminists are working outside the home, because schools are teaching evolution. It’ll be God’s will.

It’ll be any damn thing except that George Bush and the people George Bush put in power and the people half of this nation voted for, for “moral” reasons, did not do their jobs right.

Because, you know, they can’t be wrong. Can they?

Not when God is telling them what to do.

Could someone mail me some Xanax please? Like, you know, a boatload full?