Concerned Women for America -- Honest!

Okay, there are some targets one should not pick on – as its says in the Torah, you don’t go tripping a blind guy, or making fun of total morons – but these women from the CWA are stepping up to the plate, and even if they are too ignorant to live, that makes’em fair game in my book.

In this essay, and I use the word loosely, Rachel Mafaffey and Eva Arl attempt to explain to us why mothers really ought to stay home with their children. (http://www.cwfa.org/articledisplay.asp?id=6606&department=BLI&categoryid=commentary)

Let me note, for the record, that while I don’t see any pressing need for mothers to spend all their time at home with their children, or home-school them, or sew all their clothing, and make all their own bread, and preserve all their own fruit, meanwhile running a successful business out of the garage, if women want to do that sort of thing, it is perfectly cool with me. Because (here’s the deal, Ms. Mafaffey and Ms. Arl) that’s what feminism is actually about: women get to do whatever it is they want to do with their own lives.

Can I repeat that one time?

Feminism means that a woman’s life is her life. It means her body is her body. She gets to decide what to do with both of those things. If she decides she wants to spend her life raising a passel of kids, that’s her decision. If she decides she wants to be a professor of anatomy, that’s cool too. If she wants to be a stripper, a law professor, a snowboarder, a rock star, a veterinary assistant, whatever. It’s up to her. <-- This is the actual feminist position.

Ms. Mafaffey and Ms. Arl, however, in their essay, state the traditional anti-Feminist strawman position:

“Feminists tell us that we don't need a man to be successful and that traditional marriage is the ultimate oppressor of women. Groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW) claim women need a career to be fulfilled. To them, it is demeaning for women to care for their babies, and therefore we should reject the roles of wife and mother for work outside the home.”

Okay. What feminists said that? Can you cite them? It may be true that feminists mainly agree that women don’t need “a man to be successful” – but come now, Ms. Mafaffey and Ms. Arl. Are you going to argue that women do need men to be successful? That without a man in her life a woman cannot be counted as succeeding?

And, depending on how you’re defining “traditional marriage,” the second part of your claim may or may not be something a feminist at some point may have said.

But everything after that is just balderdash made up about feminists by groups such as the CWA.

And that paragraph is just the one of the many problems with this essay.

Take, for example, their dubious assumption that women are working outside the home in order to “be fulfilled.”

Take that claim and tell it to the woman that fill my classrooms – the ones working 36 hours a week at Wal-Mart and Goody’s and Wendy’s. Ask them just how fulfilled they are, when they get home to their passel of children every night, and how happy they are about their “choice” to work outside the home.

No, Ms. Mafaffey and Ms. Arl, despite what you have learned from Dr. Laura and from your minister and whoever else it was, most women aren't working to "be fulfilled" or because they are evil, selfish critters, or because the feminists have brainwashed them into thinking it will make them happy, or because they hate babies or whatever. Most women work for the same reason most men work, you idiots: because they need the money.

Here's an idea: Why don't the two of you get a job one time, earn yourselves few bucks, and buy yourselves a clue?

Just a suggestion, mind you.

Yer all Big Liberals Over There!

Not that many of us aren't liberal, here at the university -- but we aren't, in fact, all liberals; and those of us who are liberal aren't liberal because we're sheep, you know. We're liberal because we've read widely and deeply and have thought about things, have evaluate ideas and have decided to be liberals.

Others of us -- like the guy in the office next to mine, for instance, who runs the campus rifle club, and some of the folks over in economics and a few in History -- have read widely and deeply and have thought about things, have evaluate ideas and have decided to be conservative, or libertarian, or socialist, or whatever.

But the folks at American Enterprise Institute aren't, of course, much interested in what's actually happening on campuses in America. They're interested in what they can sell. And George Will, among others, is perfectly happy to help them sell it, citing their study in his column in the Washington Post recently, (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15606-2004Nov26.html) as well as agreeing with Lakoff, the guy who thinks we just need more professors on campus who favor two-parent families (because, you know, most of us liberals hate two-parent families) and think non-Western literature is crap.

But here's a rebuttal of their flawed study that does an excellent job of showing exactly why George Will is an idiot for buying this soap job:
( http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V13/23/plissner-m.html)

Well, he's not an idiot. I shouldn't say that. He's a patsy. He wants to believe that the Evil Liberals are Taking Over the Universities.

So he's happy to read a study that confirms his Worldview.

Now why he wants to believe that, I don't know.

Maybe because it makes him feel better about his memories of all the professors he was not smarter than in school? Maybe because he feels inferior about his relative lack of graduate degrees?

Who knows. Whatever it is, it doesn't excuse this sort of sloppy thinking.

Hey, You Voted for Him

Remember how proud he was of all that Pell Grant money he had given out, so that all those lucky duckies who had lost their jobs to outsourcing, or you know, whatever, could go back to community colleges and retrain to be, well, surgical techs (and make six bucks an hour)?

Now that King George II is in, and doesn't have to worry about getting your smelly little vote, you can wave bye-bye to that money:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/11/23/us_aid_for_college_students_slashed?mode=PF

Color me really shocked.

More Fun from Georgia

So a high school principal in Georgia -- yep, the same Georgia where they're putting stickers on the textbooks advising their high school students that evolution (or evil-ution, as they like to pronounce it here in Arkansas) is "just a theory" -- got on the intercom and read his students what he thought was a very clever poem (what I guess he thought was a poem) which no doubt his minister or his brother in law the deacon or some other buddy emailed him. Then he was all surprised when a number of parents objected. Here's the link to the news story (http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/news/state/10299352.htm)

This school-prayer crowd puzzles me. First off, their own guy was against public prayer. Says so right there in their own text -- Matthew 6:6: "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." Not: "Get you to a a public school, and gather ye round a flagpole, and pray ye in public for the edification of the unbelievers, verily, with much outcry ye shall do it!"

Second, and more importantly, there are no rules against praying in public schools. Little Wyatt can pray all he wants in school (though he can't obstruct the hallways while he's doing it). Sallie Mae can read her little New Testament to her heart's content (so long as she's not doing it during biology class). What can't happen is the Principal of the school, being a paid agent of the state, cannot lead the school in prayer, or organize a Bible session that has as its aim leading people to Christ: because if he did that, then he would be, as an agent of the state, endorsing a particular religion: saying that that religion was the true and correct one.

Christians obviously would not want him doing that if he were, say, a Wiccan, or a Muslim, or a Jew -- teaching their children to pray to, say, Allah, now, would they?

Why can they not see that those of us who don't worship Mr. Jesus would not want our children being forced to pray to their God?

Well, because they don't see us as real, actual people, of course. I do know that. It just really makes me nuts at times.

Anyway, here's the text of the poem our obtuse principal in Georgia read, which the urban legend site Snopes( ttp://www.snopes.com/language/document/newpray.htm )can give you the history of:


THE NEW SCHOOL PRAYER

Now I sit me down in school
Where praying is against the rule
For this great nation under God
Finds mention of Him very odd.

If Scripture now the class recites,
It violates the Bill of Rights.
And anytime my head I bow
Becomes a Federal matter now.

Our hair can be purple,
orange or green,
That's no offense;
it's a freedom scene.

The law is specific,
the law is precise.
Prayers spoken aloud
are a serious vice.

For praying in a public hall
Might offend someone with no faith at all.
In silence alone we must meditate,
God's name is prohibited by the state.

We're allowed to cuss and dress like freaks,
And pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks.
They've outlawed guns, but FIRST the Bible.
To quote the Good Book makes me liable.

We can elect a pregnant Senior Queen,
And the 'unwed daddy,' our Senior King.
It's "inappropriate" to teach right from wrong,
We're taught that such "judgments" do not belong.

We can get our condoms and birth controls,
Study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles.
But the Ten Commandments are not allowed,
No word of God must reach this crowd.

It's scary here I must confess,
When chaos reigns the school's a mess.
So, Lord, this silent plea I make:
Should I be shot; My soul please take!
Amen

(Among other things, it's offensive because it's such a REALLY bad poem!)

Flea over at One Good Thing (http://buggydoo.blogspot.com) has some thoughts on Mr. Falwell's little joke about the National Order of Witches( http://mediamatters.org/items/200411230011).

She's also designed some teeshirts to go with his joke. Cool teeshirts, much cooler than his joke, and she's donating 10% of the profits to NOW (the actual NOW), so I think we all ought to go buy some, especially those of us who know wiccans:

http://www.cafepress.com/buggydoo

And even those who don't and who just really don't like Falwell and his ilk.

They'll make great Winterfair, Hannukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Solstice gifts.

Go and buy!

Just a Theory

Here's a link for those of you in Cobb County, Georgia, and certain counties in Kansas and Wisconsin and Utah and other fine places in these United States where local school boards have decided that kiddies ought to be made aware that evolution is, after all, just a theory. (It's Cobb County, as I recall, that is compelling schools to put stickers on their science books saying that evolution is just a theory. Other places are doing other charming things. )

Anyway, here's the link, for those of you who would like to fight back:

http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/textbookdisclaimers/

More Fine News

And more fine news: Christian Pharmacists who won’t give women birth control pills because, you know, Jesus wants them to have babies. And states that have made such behavior legal.

(http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=710&u=/usatoday/20041109/pl_usatoday/druggistsrefusetogiveoutpill&printer=1)

And of course this is no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to the Right-to-Lifers.
From the article:

“We have always understood that the battles about abortion were just the tip of a larger ideological iceberg, and that it's really birth control that they're after also," says Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood (news - web sites) Federation of America.

"The explosion in the number of legislative initiatives and the number of individuals who are just saying, 'We're not going to fill that prescription for you because we don't believe in it' is astonishing," she said.”

True Knowledge

So I take the kid to Aikido last night.

As I mentioned previously, it's been a rough week. In fact, it's been a rough month. We've not been making it to Aikido much. But we made it last night. The kid's dojo has three sensei, and the senior one was teaching last night, the one I like best; and most importantly of all, the idiot woman who spends the whole time talking on the cell to her idiot relatives was not there, so I could get some serious reading done during class time -- but I didn't.

Because it was nice to just sit in the balcony over the dojo and watch the five to seven year olds in the giant dojo in their tiny ghis doing their Aikido stances and rolls and throws while the giant sensei treated them so seriously and the rain pounded down outside and just be there then for while and not have to be anywhere else.

Then the sensei said something I liked*: he said, "When you have the black belt, only then are you really ready to learn."

All the kids in this class, of course, just have white belts. (The very first belt in Aikido.) Don't know if they knew what he meant.

But I did. It's exactly what Socrates meant when he went around Athens telling people he didn't know a goddamn thing, and what Jesus meant when he said you had to be like a child if you wanted to get to heaven and what the Chinese meant when they said when you reach the foot of the mountain more mountains appear and what I mean when I tell my students that having a Ph.D. only means you know how much there is to find out.

Or -- as my best professor in graduate school taught me, one cold November day sort of like this one -- the best attitude for anyone, when confronted with the knowledge that he or she does not understand something, is that of the Zen student: "I approach you seeking knowledge."

It's an attitude more of us out here in America need to adopt, I'm thinking.

*Actually he said several cool things, another one being that sensei, which I had always thought meant teacher, actually means one who goes before. It was an enlightening evening, altogether.

Hey!

Well, this http://www.andrewsullivan.com/ clears a lot of things up: Apparently Andrew Sullivan has sleep apnea.

"This is what early morning is like? The sleep study was fascinating. They basically stick electrodes all over your head and body, connect them to a little forest of wires, put you in a strange room, fix a remote camera directly on you and then tell you ... to go to sleep. Thank God for Ambien. And then half-way through the night, the nurse comes in and puts this big mask over your nose and mouth. The mask blows a steady stream of air into your nasal passages and throat, and they can regulate the pressure remotely, depending on how your readings are. It really wasn't that uncomfortable. And I have no idea what my readings were or what my diagnosis is. The nurse isn't allowed to say. But he did hint that if I didn't have sleep apnea, he wouldn't be putting a mask on me at 1 am."

For those of you who aren't familiar with sleep apnea, it's a condition where the victim stops breathing at night, sometimes for hundreds of times a night, depriving the brain of both oxygen and deep sleep. It can cause deep grogginess during the day, along with impaired thinking and judgment.

So there you go.

Maybe we should get other Republican males in for sleep studies right quick?

The World According to Us

One of my students brought me this:

http://www.msxnet.org/humour/america

Be Fruitful and Multiply, You Sinner!

As Pandagon (http://www.pandagon.net/ ) points out, the “moral outrage” of this article is just comical. (http://www.gender-news.com/other.php?id=23)

Of people who don’t want to have children, this writer claims: “That worldview is sick, but more and more common,” and “Christians must recognize that this rebellion against parenthood represents nothing less than an absolute revolt against God's design,” and “[w]illful barrenness and chosen childlessness must be named as moral rebellion.”

I could get angry at the Far Right Christians for their hatred of gays and feminists. But now they’re going after people who chose not to have kids? That’s their new target? People who don’t want pre-schoolers? People who would rather have a pair of pugs than six or seven babies? This is a sin now?

Well, yes. Apparently in Far Right land it is.

I’m laughing now. Let’s hope in a year or two we all still will be. Let’s hope, in other word, this isn’t the harbinger of what’s to come.

Because we are getting quite a lot of “birth control is abortion noise” out there on the fringe. Add that to this “people who don’t want kids are sinners” noise and we start to end up in a scary place.

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/)