Show Your Support for Equality
Equality California, on behalf of its members, challenged Prop 8 in the California Supreme Court. On March 5 their case will be heard and we all know that activism of any kind that hopes to stomp out bigotry and ignorance is fueled heavily by its supporters. Equality California is asking every every advocate for equality to come out in a big way–by adding your name to publicly show your support for the freedom to marry as well as to protect minorities from having their equality put up for a popular vote. Your name will scroll along with the 34,302 other advocates for equality on the main page of www.eqca.org.
Attorneys at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Lambda Legal, ACLU, Munger Tolles, Olsen LLP, as well as the Law Office of David C. Codell have all worked tirelessly for equality and now is the time to show our support for our fellow humans who all deserve equal rights no matter who they love.
Take a minute and add your name at www.eqca.org/addyourname
PETA Dresses Up As KKK
Does this outfit remind you of anything? PETA will stop at nothing to push its agenda no matter who it marginalizes, no matter who it hurts.
“Crowds gawked at a table set up outside Madison Square Garden on Monday afternoon, where People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was protesting the start of the Westminster Kennel Club show. PETA contends that the American Kennel Club promotes pure-breeding of dogs that is harmful to their health.
“Welcome AKC Members,” read a banner hanging from the table — with AKC crossed out and KKK written above it. Two PETA protesters dressed as Ku Klux Klan members, while other volunteers handed out brochures that read: “The KKK and the AKC: BFF?”
“Obviously it’s an uncomfortable comparison,” PETA spokesman Michael McGraw said.
But the AKC is trying to create a “master race,” he added. “It’s a very apt comparison.”
The amount of insensitivity it takes to dress up like the KKK and attempt to draw a link between the breeding of animals to the terror that blacks have lived with for generations can only be described as the audacity of whiteness. It mattered not to these ignorant over privileged fools, that seeing people dressed like this in a public place could be terribly triggering to POC.
This is not going to be the kind of post were I try to make a larger connection to social injustices faced by people of colour. The mock KKK uniform that they are wearing stands for itself. Human Beings are also animals and continually performing wilder and wilder stunts in which the most vulnerable members of society are targeted could hardly be called ethical.
The KKK is a terrorist organization. It has murdered, stalked, raped, abused and committed so many violations against humanity that I could not possibly list them. This is what PETA wants to be associated with. In some ways they are not far off the mark because they are an organization that is built on nothing other than hatred. Their actions reveal a hatred of POC, women, and transgendered people.
PETA has been called out time and time again on their behaviour but they are so blinded by their various privileges that they cannot or will not see the damage that their actions cause.
I can barely think rationally because I am so fucking incensed. Seriously FUCK YOU PETA. Never will I contribute a single dollar to your cause. I believe in preventing cruelty against animals but not at the cost of dehumanizing the weakest members of society.
Each one of these little campaigns that PETA runs does more harm to their cause than good. When people think of animal rights they think of PETA and immediately get turned off. Who wants to associate themselves with a movement that continually creates the vulnerable as “other.” What this campaign tells me, is that to PETA I am less than a dog.
I simply have no words. Time and time again we are told that we have moved into a post racial society. We are supposedly equal and if only blacks could let go of the past and forgive all, things would be better. How the fuck can I even consider forgetting what was done to my ancestors, when day after day I have to be reminded that at any moment whiteness can decide that I am not worthy of any respect?
Cross Posted From Womanist Musings
Don’t Divorce Us!
I am such a follower and not even a timely follower at that. I am sure that most of you have already seen (and cried during) this video done by the Courage Campaign but I have watched it several times and still cannot get over just how much this video touched me and wanted to share it with all of you. If you’ve seen it before, share your thoughts in the comment section and if you haven’t, you should most definitely watch it.
If you’ve been following recent “Prop 8 events” you know that on December 19. 2008, Ken Starr and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund filed legal briefs seeking to invalidate the 18,000 same-sex marriages that were conducted between May and November in California.
On March 5, 2008, the California Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments that will decide the fate of Prop 8. The legal challenge of this ballot initiative is brought forth by groups like the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union.
While there is so much cruelty and hate in the world, are there really so many people out there who are offended by love? 18,000 couples publicly and lawfully committed their lives to each other in California between May and November. 18,000 couples were finally given a right that they should have been given so long ago. In a world with so much hate, 18,000 couples have found each other and simply want the same rights as other couples and to tell them that they are not worthy of that right is so completely backwards and fueled by nothing but ignorance and bigotry.
Go sign this petition and tell the Supreme Court to invalidate Prop 8.
Lastly, I apologize for my absence from blogging but would really like to thank Renee of Womanist Musings for filling in the gap on here over the past few days.
The Invisible Mother
In feminist circles there is often commentary regarding our shared experiences as women. What is ignored is that though certain situations are similar based solely in gender, quite often we experience them differently when there is a race or class intersection. As mothers our capacity to love our children is boundless, but this is not nearly the universalizing experience as presented by most forms of media, or mainstream feminism. All mothers are not created equal. For the middle/upper class white woman, with her mini van and Prada purses there are plenty of visible representations of positive motherhood. If however you are a woman of color, the erasure in the discourse of motherhood is totalizing.
Women of color are not constructed as mothers; they are presented as irresponsible breeders who did not have the decency not to burden society with their offspring. Their right to reproduce is continually challenged because a capitalist economy does not encourage production without an obvious profit. The reality of the situation is, if a child grows in a poor household despite the pull yourself up by the boots rhetoric, they are most likely to grow into poor adults trapped by a system that has refused to give them equal opportunity from birth.
The mother/breeder binary is readily obvious in most parenting magazines. The stories are often written by white women of the privileged class, while the lived experiences of women of color are absent from the pages. Despite the courage and strength of will that is necessary to raise a child, when you exist as a marginalized body your stories are not deemed compelling, or marketable. Women of color are meant to serve as “mothers helpers,” not exist as actual mothers.
As the elite rush off to mommy and me gatherings in between scheduling for their high intensity careers, what is ignored is that the option to pursue such a range of possibility only exists because of the ability to exploit another woman. Poor so-called third world women who are often separated from their families function as an invisible support staff, permitting women of the privileged class to announce that yes Virginia, we can have it all.
These elite women are often presented by feminism as having benefiting from the legacy of women’s organizing struggles. The question then becomes, was it the goal to emancipate all women, or endow women of a certain class and race with the ability to exploit in the same fashion as white males? While Betty Friedan was writing about the gilded cage, women of color where already employed within the homes as domestic servants to white women that claimed to be imprisoned. For some it was the drudgery of domestic labour to feed their families, and for others it was a prison of the intellect.
Women of colour have experienced motherhood in unique ways. For the elite pregnancy often meant a time of reduced labour, but for the slave physical labour continued on in the fields. The faith and confidence with which a white mother bonded with her child was not accorded to the black female slave, at any moment her precious child could be sold away from her forever.
Even at the end of slavery, social workers continued the trend of destroying familial links for people of color. Native children were often stolen from their parents in what was considered benign friendship. The wombs that bore them were considered unfit to raise them. Their intuitive ways were not considered acceptable in a society that now encouraged scientific home management. What was this but the brutal repression of a culture in the name of uplifting a race?
Black families underwent the same sort of relocation plans. After a day of cooking and cleaning in white homes, when black women returned to their own family settings they were often too exhausted to provide the same form of care that they had given the white children under their charge. Often angry from the ill treatment and the daily debasement at the hands of her white employers, her children in whose name she daily laboured bore the brunt of her frustrations in the form of physical and mental abuse. Instead of seeking to diminish the responsibilities of these women, or search for a common bond based in their shared humanity, social workers removed black children from their mothers and placed them in the foster care system. In The biography of Malcolm X he relates the pain of being separated from his siblings and his mother after the murder of his father. Dick Gregory has also spoken openly of the harassment of his mother by social workers under the guise of child safety.
A poor working/under class mother of color faces the stigmatizations of gender, class and race; therefore their prescriptions on the idealized family unit could never be applicable. Deciding that one is an unfit mother for being unable to provide a home with heat, or a cupboard that is always stocked with the finest possible nutritional elements is not a reflection of motherhood, rather it is a physical testimony to the imbalanced racist, patriarchal, capitalist state, that seeks to profit from the exploitation and marginalization of poor women of color. That these social workers who invaded the spaces of women of color could not acknowledge the ways in which the very system that provided their employment created the living conditions at which they were so aghast, is a sign of unacknowledged white privilege. Whiteness will not see its own culpability in maintaining the hierarchy that has served to support the politics of so –called benign aid.
The white woman as expert on motherhood continued to be a model that was maintained. When we examine the sterilization of Indigenous women and Black women, the reason offered was to save us from our own biology. Unlike the pure sexuality that has been constructed for white women, women of color could not be trusted to choose when reproduction was appropriate and desirable. It was often theorized that we were overcome by our supposedly natural hyper sexuality. In many cases the women were denied informed consent and were sterilized against their will. Since reproduction is tied to womanhood in many Indigenous tribes, not only was the ability to become a mother removed but so was their female identity. To this very day many Indigenous women go without vital medical treatment for fear that their bodies will be violated once again by the medical establishment.
The purposeful sterilization of women along race and class lines amounts to a form of genocide. Programs like this were endorsed by women like Margaret Sanger. While the ability to choose is of paramount importance in the life of a woman as it endows her with agency in terms of reproduction and autonomy over her own body, such standards were not universally applied. The children of women of color were deemed a plague upon society for conditions that were not of their own making. Instead of examining the social markers like race, class and gender that lead to the issues that poor children of color face, sterilization was employed as the great equalizer. This was clearly an erroneous policy, as wealth and race advantage does not endow the body with anymore maternal instinct than destitution and race.
The demonization of poor mothers continues to this day. That the system is inherently imbalanced is not considered in the effort to justify the supposed failings of mothers of color as naturally occurring. When representative LaBruzzo offered one thousand dollars to women as a reward for submitting to sterilization this represented yet another attempt on the part of the elite white bourgeoisie to attack the poor and bodies of color. Eugenics has always been aimed at the most vulnerable members of society. When one considers his connection with David Duke the intention to secure white supremacy behind this proposal can hardly be denied. While his suggestion was attacked by the media, his ability to even offer it as a solution to the problems that are faced by poor women of color, is predicated on the historical disavowal of the legitimacy of our motherhood.
Our child rearing efforts are only noteworthy when they are performed in the maintenance of white supremacy. When mammy nurtures the white children under her care, though infantilized, she is considered a necessary cog for the maintenance of functional reproduction. In the ultimate form of betrayal she will one day witness the white children she was forced to nurture, instead of the fruit of her womb due to economic and racial disenfranchisement, apply their unearned racial privilege to her. In the end despite her efforts mammy is despised by all.
From the moment black women set foot in America in chains the entire experience of our motherhood and femininity has been complicated by the desire of whites to assert a hierarchy in which we are firmly located at the bottom. From mammy to jezebel to sapphire our roles continue to be constructed in complete absence of any recognition of our shared humanity. Sojourner Truth once famously asked ain’t I a woman, and today her daughters are still waiting on a response.
Cross Posted From Womanist Musings
To “Stimulate” the Economy is to Increase Spending
The purpose of the much-debated stimulus bill is pretty self-explanatory, or so you would think. However, as we have all seen through the waves this bill has been through, there are some politicians who know what a stimulus bill is and what it entails and then there are some that just do not. They just don’t get it, can’t wrap their minds around it and whether they are simply trying to be clever by changing the word usage around a little for the public or are just simply “lapsed” when it comes to common sense has yet to be determined.
The amount of jobs that have been lost in January alone were a whopping 598,000. That is the most amount of jobs we have seen lost in a single month in 35 years. Are we ready to admit we’re in a depression now? Hell, some people won’t even admit we’re in a recession but in my opinion, we are way past that; this is a depression. The Great Great Depression, perhaps? The Greatest Depression? Only time will tell.
Obviously, since the number of jobs lost month-to-month is rapidly increasing and we are seeing the worst economic meltdown since The Great Depression, we need help. This country’s financial stability has already crumbled and going down along with it, is all of us. While there are some who want to see this country’s people get back on their feet, or at least give them the opportunity to stop drowning in debt, there are some that simply do not care. Hell, they don’t believe that there is anything wrong with this country or the “financial situation” we’re in. While some may call a person who believes that nothing is wrong with their country patriotic, I’m going to just come right out and say it, they are completely out of touch with reality and are up to their eyeballs in denial.
To stimulate the economy is to increase spending. The stimulus bill is made to increase spending. Here’s how it works just in case you need further explanation:
Give people money. Those people will take that money and spend it. The money that those people spend will go back into the economy. When more and more people spend money, the money put back into the economy grows. And grows. And grows. When the government passed the bailout, we all had pretty much the same reaction–Why weren’t we given any money “just because?” I am willing to bet that the people who have lost their jobs over the past several months and who find themselves thinking at night before they go to sleep if they are going to be able to feed their families that week or if they are going to have electricity next month would not go out and buy themselves a $50 million jet or go on extravagant vacations. Just sayin’…
So as we all know, the current financial status of the country has grown into an urgent crisis and demands the attention of our elected officials. However, while we have a president who has made it a point to focus on fixing our economy, he as well as this country and the future of this country have had a few roadblocks along the way and they all point to Republicans. (Were you surprised?)
The word “crisis” in itself means hurry the fuck up in the most PC terms ever. Got it? Hurry the fuck up because we’re hanging on by a thread here. So what’s the problem? President Obama has made several efforts to satisfy the urgency of the country but many Republicans are urging us all to take a time out. There’s no rush, no need to hurry, just sit back and relax… on presumably your $50 million jet. This stimulus bill is being called the most important bill in history but the reason why it is so important is because it is so greatly needed, yet the mantra of the Republican party as a whole is to slow down, that there is no need to hurry because if the bill is rushed, it will be wrong. So to get this straight, the bailout plan was urgent and needed to be passed immediately to help financial institutions and like-minded cronies (and we all found out where that money really went) but a bill that will help the people as well as the country as a whole must be mulled over and put off because really, what’s the rush?
For more absolutely fabulous commentary on the stimulus bill, which the Republicans haven’t caught on to the point of, check out Rachel Maddow below because honestly, I can’t say it any better than she did:
Absolute best part:
“If you are wrong, from here on out, you should lose the argument and you should lose your political potency. Form a flat-earthers club or something, where you talk enthusiastically to each other about your made-up economic ideas that aren’t based in reality. But get out of the way of the people who are actually trying to save the country.”
Sex-Positivity
I'm passionate about sex-positivity and believe every sexual being should have the freedom to explore their sexuality safely and without condemnation. I even lost my ad network after my refusal to censor myself after reviewing feminist porn.So if you're in the market for sex toys, porn, books, etc. take a look at the retailers below, all of which are feminist-friendly.
Out Campaign
The OUT Campaign allows individuals to let others know they are not alone. It can also be a nice way of opening a conversation and help to demolish the negative stereotypes of atheists. Let the world know that we are not about to go away and that we are not going to allow those that would condemn us to push us into the shadows.
