September 2006 – Page 4

Self-Image

Srl pointed me to this NYT magazine article about “corrective” surgery performed on intersex children. srl introduced it as “not directly relevant” to the question of fear and hatred of, as az put it, “people whose physical bodies trouble their socially visible gender, or sex.” I’m not so sure.* I think there are some common forces behind, say, the unwillingness to acknowledge people like Robert Eads and the need to alter people like Chase before they can be accepted. Both groups represent “trouble,” and that trouble must be resolved for the sake of group integrity and comfort.

The United States: Protecting, Valuing Women World-Wide

There’s apparently quite an issue brewing over whether or not we should allow female soldiers in combat — despite the fact that female soldiers already are in combat, and are being killed and injured regularly. Of course, the current administration is ignoring their deaths and injuries, just like they’re ingoring the deaths and injuries suffered by male soldiers. And if that ain’t equality, ladies, I don’t know what is.

Women are doing pretty much everything men are doing in Iraq, but getting a fraction of the credit for it. And some people are still arguing that we’re too small or too emotionally weak to be proper soliders, when the women on the ground are proving that they’re just as capable as they need to be.

While this discussion is happening in the background of the war, women continue to do their day to day jobs on the front lines. And civilian women in “liberated” Afghanistan face injury and death for trying to exercise their most basic rights.

Two gunmen on a motorbike killed the provincial director of Afghanistan’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs outside her home Monday in apparent retribution for her efforts to help educate women, officials said.
…
Ahmed-jan was known for being an active proponent of women’s rights in this former Taliban stronghold, a region where insurgents have turned increasingly violent the last several months.

Her secretary said one of Ahmed-jan’s most successful projects was running trade schools. ”She was always trying her best to improve education for women,” Abdullah Khan said.

In Kandahar alone, Ahmed-jan had opened six schools where almost 1,000 women learned how to bake and sell their goods at market. She had also opened tailoring schools for women, and clothes made there found their way to Western markets, Khan said.

All the burdens, and a fraction of the rights. When women are laying down their lives — or having their lives stripped away from them — it’s about time to offer them a little more respect, and allow them equal rights, freedoms and liberties.

I believe we’ve just gone down the rabbit hole

Follow the bouncing ball: a group of fake abortion clinics are suing a group of real abortion clinics, claiming that the real abortion clinics were posing as fake abortion clinics to lure pregnant women to have abortions.

I’ll let LifeSiteNews explain it to you:

WHITE PLAINS, NY, September 21, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Yesterday, Expectant Mother Care-EMC FrontLine Pregnancy Centers filed suit against “Dr. Emily’s” abortion clinic with sites in the Bronx and downtown Brooklyn citing evidence of deceptive advertising practices.

“EMC is taking the lead in countering a truly deceptive abortion advertiser which pretends to be an alternative to abortion agency advertising under pro-life ad categories in New York City yellow pages,” said Chris Slattery, founder and president of EMC, operator of 15 pro-life crisis pregnancy counseling centers and medical clinics in New York City and suburbs.

“To aggressively compete against pro-life centers, we’re seen three NY abortion clinics pose as alternative centers to lure confused women who might be seeking help and support, into abortion clinics to possibly undergo abortions they may not want,” Slattery added.

“In a year when unfounded charges of deceptive advertising are flying against pro-life alternative to abortion groups from abortion industry advocates like Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the National Abortion Federation, we filed a sixteen-count complaint supported by affidavits alleging deceptive acts and practices in the conduct of an abortion clinic’s business in violation of N.Y. General Business Law 349,” Slattery said.

EMC is seeking an order from the New York Satte Supreme Court in Westchester County preliminarily enjoining the defendant from submitting any “Abortion Alternatives” advertising and compelling it to withdraw any such advertising it may already have submitted. EMC also seeks, at the conclusion of the case, a permanent injunction and the damages that are statutorily authorized.

Yes, my head hurts, too.

Is it me, or does this whole thing have a hint of “I’m rubber, you’re glue” to it? Amanda wrote about the deceptive practices of “crisis pregnancy centers” several months ago. The web site for Dr. Emily’s is pretty straightforward, what with the multiple references to abortion on its web page. The website for EMC is a little more cagey. They state the following:

EMC serves sexually-active young girls or women of any age, pregnant or not, who are in need of pregnancy help or are considering abortion, or are hurting from abortion.

EMC’s goals are to encourage expectant moms to choose motherhood, and either marriage, adoption, or self-sufficiency, and to turn toward chaste lifestyles. EMC strives to offer high-quality pre-natal care and in the future pediatrics, through physician partnerships, on-site at most of its centers.

Interestingly, they also include an entire page of links to stories about NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer’s fight against deceptive practices and advertising of crisis pregnancy centers — much like those Amanda documented. There’s also a page where defenders of the centers speak out; a page of articles about New York City’s requirement that medical residents at city hospitals receive abortion training; and a page showing the dark, shadowy connection between NARAL and Spitzer.

Oh, and a page about the importance of sonograms to crisis pregnancy centers (“If they just knew that they were carrying babeeeez, they’d change their minds!”).

And while I don’t have a Westchester phone book handy, neither this search nor this search turns up Dr. Emily’s listed under “abortion alternatives,” but there are several crisis pregnancy centers listed with names that just might deceive a pregnant woman into believing that they offer abortion there (such as “Accurate Abortion Information,” which is listed separately from “Pregnancy Resource Ctr” at the same address).

So, here’s what I think is going on: Yellow Pages publisher misfiles listing for Dr. Emily’s clinic, and crisis pregnancy centers, feeling embattled because Spitzer is going after their deceptive practices (an investigation by Rep. Henry Waxman found that 87 percent of CPCs provided false, misleading or medically inaccurate information about abortion), jump on the opportunity to slam a legitimate abortion provider for — well, what, exactly, I’m not sure. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dr. Emily’s provides counseling about alternatives to abortion, so a listing under “abortion alternatives” isn’t exactly deceptive.

H/T: Lindsay.

Bonus find while looking for the web sites above: Dawn Eden is both geographically challenged and a liar. No, Dawn, College Point is not part of Flushing, no matter how hard you wish it to be so.

UPDATE: While reading the Dawn Eden link, I came across this bit of information from commenter Sunny Chapman:

Crisis Pregnancy Centers all over the country have been investigated and/or sued for various forms of deceptive practices. One of the most common was listing themselves in telephone directories in the abortion clinic or abortion services category. States attorneys general in every state had to file suits against CPCs to get them to stop this practice and now pregnancy crisis centers advertise under “abortion alternatives” in the New York phone book(and elsewhere), rather than in the “abortion services” section, in compliance with consent decrees signed with two former state attorneys general, Robert Abrams in 1987 and Dennis Vacco in 1995. However, they still manage to sneak into the abortion services category online, as we see.

Well, this explains why this group was so het up over a phone book listing, doesn’t it?

Jesus Camp: A Review

As promised, I saw Jesus Camp yesterday, and now I have thoughts. I’ll warn you beforehand, though, that I’ll probably get into details about particular scenes, and if you feel like that will spoil the movie for you, then stop reading now.

Legal News

A federal judge in Brooklyn has granted class action status to a suit against cigarette manufacturers accusing the tobacco companies of a cynically and falsely marketing “light” cigarettes as a lower-risk alternative to full-bore cigarettes, all the while knowing that the risks were about the same.

In arguing last week for the class certification, plaintiff attorney Michael D. Hausfeld said the manufacturers hoped to “move markets” with a cynical marketing strategy promoting light cigarettes as a lower-risk alternative to regular cigarettes, even though their own internal documents showed they knew the risks were about the same.

“They understood that they were selling death,” he said. The question, he added, was “how to disguise it. … They put on ‘lights.'”

Hausfeld told the judge that an analysis by plaintiffs’ expert witnesses concluded more than 90 percent of the smokers in the potential class purchased light cigarettes over the past three decades based on health concerns, as opposed to taste or other factors. A separate study found that smokers, had they known the truth about the health risks, would have expected discounts of 50 to 80 percent per pack, part of the basis for a demand for between $120 billion and $200 billion in damages, he said.

The lawyer noted that because the suit was filed under civil provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, those damages could be automatically tripled, up to a staggering $600 billion.

Class actions allow for a vast universe of related claims like these (there are expected to be tens of thousands of class members) to be dealt with at the same time by litigating a representative case and then applying the results to the class. This is just a first step, though; now the fun stuff begins, which means we’ll be hearing about the internal memos showing that the companies knew all about the relative risks of light cigarettes.

Cigarette cases for individual smokers haven’t been very effective historically because after a certain point, everybody knew that smoking was bad for you and caused cancer. But in a case like this, where there was fraud and deception — and possibly collusion among the various companies, which probably explains the RICO claims (RICO statutes are meant to deal with organized crime) — individual smokers couldn’t possibly know all the risks, because they were hidden.

I’ll also be interested to see a breakdown of the list of class members. Dollars to doughnuts the list is mostly female, since “light” is one of those marketing concepts aimed directly at women’s insecurities.

No, thank you, George W. Bush, for making us all less safe

Filed under “no shit“:

The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

Fabulous.

A Pro-Life Policy I Can Support

Because at its heart, it’s pro-choice too.

Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.), who opposes abortion rights, on Wednesday is scheduled to announce he is introducing a bill that would aim to reduce the number of abortions by establishing health care- and child care-related programs to support pregnant women, Roll Call reports. The measure — called the Pregnant Women Support Act — is modeled after Democrats for Life of America’s “95-10 Initiative,” which aims to reduce the U.S. abortion rate by 95% over the next 10 years. According to Roll Call, another bill (HR 6067) — which was introduced last week by Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who opposes abortion rights, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who supports abortion rights — also is modeled in part on the 95-10 Initiative (Yanchin, Roll Call, 9/20). Ryan and DeLauro’s bill would require states to cover contraceptives for women with incomes of up to 200% of the federal poverty level, establish grants for sex education programs and require programs with a focus on abstinence to include thorough instruction on contraceptives. The measure, which includes 20 initiatives, also would increase funding for health care for low-income women with children, provide no-cost visits from nurses to teens and women who have given birth for the first time, expand a tax credit for adoption and fund child care services for parents in college.

I’m not a big fan of the anti-choice plank of the Democratic party, but I can support those who are personally pro-life but don’t think that their views should be legislated on all of us. And I can certainly back measures like this one, which help women to have a wider variety of choices at hand.

Pity the poor Christian terrorists

The premise is this: Three Christian terrorists were tried and convicted of their crimes in Indonesian courts. Michelle Malkin does not like this one bit, because Lord knows that only Muslims can be terrorists, and there were some irregularities in their trials. Indeed, this is clearly Christian persecution! I mean, these folks were convicted of masterminding the massacre of 200 Muslims — clearly, it’s the poor Jesus-loving souls who are being mistreated here for being brought to trial.

She is very, VERY upset that the International Criminal Court isn’t stepping in to fix this miscarriage of justice — what about the rights of these terrorists? I mean, what kind of nation will just imprison or kill people suspected of terorrorism without giving them a fair trial?

Oh, the posts just write themselves sometimes. Michelle Malkin is truly the conservative gift that keeps on giving.

The Most Frightening Thing You Will Read Today

Why is the Iraqi reconstruction a miserable failure? See here.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans — restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O’Beirne’s office in the Pentagon.

To pass muster with O’Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn’t need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O’Beirne’s staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .

Many of those chosen by O’Beirne’s office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.

And we wonder why that country is falling apart.

What Goes Up, Must Come Down

Presenting Sir Isaac Mewton.

Thalia serves him.