October 2007 – Page 16

Girl assaulted over dropped birthday cake

A middle-school girl had her wrist broken by a security guard after she dropped a piece of birthday cake and didn’t clean it up to his liking. In the process of arresting her and breaking her wrist, he called her a “nappy head.” When her mother protested, she was arrested too. A student who videotaped the incident on a cellphone was also arrested.

You can reach school officials at the follow email addresses:

The Palmdale Superintendent, David Vierra at bettyv@avhsd.org (secretary’s email)

Palmdale Mayor, James C. Ledford Jr. at jledford@cityofpalmdale.org

Palmdale Mayor Pro Tem Mike Dispenza at mdispenza@cityofpalmdale.org

Palmdale Councilmember Steven D. Hofbauer at shofbauer@cityofpalmdale.org

Palmdale Councilmember Stephen Knight at steveknight@cityofpalmdale.org

Palmdale Councilmember Tom Lackey at TomLackey@cityofpalmdale.org

Palmdale Stephen H. Williams at swilliams@cityofpalmdale.org

Email all of them at once: bettyv@avhsd.org; jledford@cityofpalmdale.org; mdispenza@cityofpalmdale.org; shofbauer@cityofpalmdale.org; steveknight@cityofpalmdale.org; TomLackey@cityofpalmdale.org; swilliams@cityofpalmdale.org

Oh No a WoC PhD has details, including more contact information for the school.

Thanks to Trina for the link.

Radiohead = Awesome

They’re selling their album online and letting buyers decide what to pay for it.

The Obesity Epidemic, in pictures

Kate Harding puts together a collection of photos complete with each individual’s height, weight and BMI. And it’s a real eye-opener.

The point of the collection is to challenge our ideas of what “overweight” and “obese” look like, and the photo set certainly does that. I also found myself cringing at each photo heading, wherein women were labeled “normal,” “underweight,” “overweight,” “obese,” or “morbidly obese.” Seeing those tags put on individual women with actual faces and bodies really illustrates how damaging and harmful they can be (beyond just inaccurate) — what does “overweight” even mean, anyway? I calculated my own BMI and at 20.9 I fall pretty smack dab in the center of the “normal” range. But I look at my own body and I don’t think that I’m more “normal” than any of the women in those pictures; and in my own context of a family full of thin people, I often feel (and, compared to them, look) “overweight.” Compared to my sixteen-year-old self, I feel huge. I expect that as I get older and my metabolism slows down, I’ll get a little bigger; I suspect when I come back from Germany and I’m eating a more balanced diet and working out again, I’ll be smaller. Yet the BMI doesn’t account for age or bone density or muscle mass — should I be the same BMI at 16 that I am at 35? At 50? At 70? Right now, when I’m not working out at all (unless you count walking 20 minutes to and from school, which I don’t) and I’m not eating particularly well (pasta and beer is not a balanced diet) and when my body is getting all soft, should my BMI be higher than it is when I’m going to the gym every day and eating better and I’m more toned and I have better cardio strength and I can feel that I’m healthier? Because, well, it’s not. Should I have a better insurance plan because I’m more “normal” than a person with a higher BMI but a better health history?

The one-size-fits-all BMI model does nothing to combat the “obesity epidemic.” Instead, it compromises individually-tailored health care, helps only insurance companies, and frames obesity as an individual issue instead of a collective and complicated problem that has less to do with fat and more to do with access to health care and healthy food (and a good number of other factors). Actually looking at images of “obese” people helps to combat a lot of the internal prejudices that we hold against that word, and against people who are assigned into that category.

One of the most interesting things about the photo gallery is how many of the images show women in action — running, in athletic clothes, outdoors, etc. I assume that women submitted photos of themselves in situations where they think their bodies look good. It’s heartening that so many women feel good about their bodies when those bodies are in motion, and when they are acting instead of posing.

Why blame feminism for this?

Katha Pollitt’s got a piece up at TPM Cafe discussing her new book and, in particular, Toni Bentley’s bizarre “vagina dentata intellectualis” attack on it in the New York Times Book Review. It’s an interesting post, and it’s part of a larger discussion that will take place about the book this week at TPM Cafe, featuring posts by Amanda Marcotte, Jessica Valenti and Garance Franke-Ruta, but I think Pollitt kind of goes astray when she apparently blames Bentley’s review on feminism:

Most of the controversy around Learning to Drive has been around the title story and especially its followup, “Webstalker,’ which are about a painful breakup and its aftermath. As in the other essays, I aimed to put close together sadness and comedy, high diction and low, the romantic and the reflective. It’s not for me to say if I achieved those effects– but that was the idea. What has really floored me, I must say, is that the book is controversial. I thought I was writing about experiences that are shared by many, if not indeed most people, including men. Who doesn’t have areas of incompetence and fear — mechanical stuff for me, maybe foreign languages, or I dunno, cooking, for you? Who hasn’t been hurt in love? And not just young people, either, thank you very much.

This, as I see it, is the pass to which we have come. Women can write about shooting heroin and being sex workers and spending years zoned out on prozac and having nervous breakdowns and hating other women and lord knows what else and that’s okay by feminism, as indeed it should be. But writing that you didn’t learn to drive for years and years out of technophobia and overreliance on men? Loving a man unwisely and feeling terrible for more than a long weekend when he left? Writing about how another person really got to you and how you even, OMG, googled him and the other women in his life rather a lot for a while, which is basically all that happens in “Webstalker”? Oh, that is so unfeminist–and from a longtime feminist political columnist too! That really undermines all our progress. Now we’ll never get the ERA.

Has feminism really become such a brittle, defensive, live-for-your-resume, never-let-them-see-you-cry kind of thing? If that’s true, and I hope it isn’t, the backlashers have truly won. They’ve gotten women to censor themselves to save society the trouble. Feminism, after all, was supposed to enlarge our sense of women’s humanity, in all its messiness and contradiction and individual truth; it was supposed to connect women to each other, and to men, in more honest ways. It wasn’t supposed to be yet another standard of perfection, a mask. Because look where that leads: In one way or another, every woman will inevitably fall short of the feminist-stalwart ideal, as every man falls short of the winner-take-all competitive capitalist ideal that is masculinity. If a writer censors herself to keep up the good name of womanhood, it is most unlikely people with a low opinion of women will be impressed. All that will happen is that other women think that they are alone in what are, in fact, common experiences. This is the roundabout the women’s movement was supposed to help us get out of!

I think Pollitt’s conflating (or at least failing to draw a bright line between) a couple of things here. First, there’s Bentley’s attack on her and her book. Considering that Bentley is best known for an “erotic memoir” about submission to anal sex being the key to her pearly gates or somesuch, and that the review itself is rife with antifeminism, it hardly seems fair to attribute Bentley’s review to some kind of brittle feminism. That’s sort of like attributing stripper-pole parties and Girls Gone Wild to feminism (and in particular, to Third Wave feminism). It’s particularly unfair when you consider the fact that this is the second book of Pollitt’s to receive this kind of treatment in the NYTBR — her last book was also reviewed by a lightweight, Ana Marie Cox, with a connection to butt sex and an apparent axe to grind about feminism. Frankly, I think the modus operandi of the NYTBR is to discredit Pollitt and feminism by treating them with disdain and assigning women who are trying very hard to please the boys to review her books.

But then you do have that brittle, backlashy, unclear-on-the-concept-of-what-the-personal-is-political-really-means sort of reaction to a feminist writer/leader being less-than-perfectly-feminist in her personal life. I don’t think that comes out of the same place as Bentley’s vicious review at all, but I do think it’s worth talking about, because the subject keeps rearing its ugly head. All too often, I’ve seen “the personal is political” raised to criticize someone for the choices she makes, whether those choices involve wearing makeup, shaving, getting married, having kids, staying home with the kids, having certain kinds of sex, doing sex work, having plastic surgery, getting a puppy, what have you. And always, the people who pop up declaring that “That’s not very feminist!” deny that they’re trying to shut anyone up, that they’re trying to criticize the person and not the choice. But that’s exactly what they’re doing. If we can’t speak about our own lives and our own choices with honesty, without having to worry that someone will freak the fuck out about how harmful our lives are to other women, how are we to move forward? How are we to, at the end of the day, live our lives the way we want to? To separate out what we really want from what we’re being pressured to do — whether that pressure comes from the patriarchy or from people who are excessively concerned with what message the patriarchy takes away from our choices?

Samhita is awesome

Check out this slide show with the fantastic Feministing contributor. It’s fabulous.

Very cautious optimism

In the first day of its new term, the Supreme Court has declined to review two decisions involving religion, meaning that the decisions of the lower courts stand.

In one case, a variety of religious groups challenged New York’s Women’s Health and Wellness Act, which required employers to provide birth-control coverage (as well as breast cancer screening and other female-centric health care) in its prescription and health plans. The only exceptions were churches and religious groups whose primary purpose was religious. Catholic Charities, among other groups, sued to invalidate the law, but the New York Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) ruled that because Catholic Charities’ function was not primarily religious, and hired people who were not Catholic and therefore did not ostensibly share the anti-contraceptive beliefs of the Catholic Church, they were not covered by the exception and had to comply with the law.

The New York law contains an exemption for churches, seminaries and other institutions with a mainly religious mission that primarily serve followers of that religion. Catholic Charities and the other groups sought the exemption, but they hire and serve people of different faiths.

New York’s highest court ruled last year that the groups had to comply with the law. The 6-0 decision by the state Court of Appeals hinged on the determination that the groups are essentially social service agencies, not churches.

The Court has rejected a challenge to a similar law in California in the past. The Supreme Court will often not disturb cases which come up through the state courts if they turn on questions of state, rather than federal, constitutional law (though I haven’t yet read this decision, so I don’t know if that’s what it was based on) Scott has more.

In the other, the Court let stand a decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals holding that public libraries were entitled to deny evangelical groups’ requests to hold religious services in the public library.

In the library case, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had ruled that public libraries can block religious groups like the Faith Center Church Evangelistic Ministries from worshipping in public meeting rooms.

The Contra Costa library system in the San Francisco Bay area allows groups to use its facilities for educational, cultural and community-related programs.

“Although religious worship is an important institution in any community, we disagree that anything remotely community-related must therefore be granted access to the Antioch Library meeting room,” the appeals court concluded in a 2-1 decision.

Allowing worship services would amount to having taxpayers subsidize religious exercises, argued the Contra Costa County, Calif., Library Board, which operated the facility in Antioch, Calif.

There’s always a chance that the Court may review a case like this later, if other Circuits start coming out the other way, but for now, this is the law in the Ninth Circuit, which covers California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Hawaii, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Which is a nice victory for secularism.

Throwing the T overboard to save the LGB

There’s an ongoing debate in progressive and LGBT communities about whether or not Congress should pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill that would make it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

Yes, that’s right: Unless you live in a state with very good anti-discrimination legislation, your employer can terminate you for the sole offense of being gay, lesbian or transgender. And there’s no federal law against it.

Bush will likely veto the bill, but it’s nonetheless an important step. Progressives, though, are divided over a revised version of the bill that omits gender identity from the protected classes. So, should ENDA pass, you can no longer be terminated from your job because you’re gay. But you can be terminated for being transgender, or for not conforming to a traditionally gendered appearance. Rep. Barney Frank, who is openly gay, says that Congress should pass ENDA anyway, and that “it would be a grave error to let this opportunity to pass a sexual orientation nondiscrimination bill go forward, not simply because it is one of the most important advances we’ll have made in securing civil rights for Americans in decades, but because moving forward on this bill now will also better serve the ultimate goal of including people who are transgender than simply accepting total defeat today.”

It’s a compelling point, and all-or-nothing activism has its problems. But I find Pam’s argument more convincing:

Anyone who regularly reads the Blend knows that I generally fall into the pragmatist camp on many issues, including marriage equality, and know full well that political strategy and policy advancement is as important as purist activism. However, as a minority within a minority within a minority (female, black, lesbian), for me this one issue is a no-brainer — I know what it is like to be marginalized by more than one of the groups I inhabit.

To think that the decision to dump T protections is based on the fact that we should help the largest group of marginalized folks at the expense of a subset is horrible, particularly when proposed so quickly by our own — and allies on the Hill. A trans-inclusive ENDA would have been a symbolic vote, given Bush would veto it anyway, yet Ts were sold out in a flash because, in the minds of some, the floor debate, which will be contentious at any time given the kind of tactics the religious right uses, is too frightening. Just incredible. Leadership without a spine.

She also includes this bit from Michaelangelo Signorile, which I think gets to the heart of the issue:

Even though we believe marriage is the goal we herald civil union gains as an interim measure. But that doesn’t wash: Whether it’s marriage or civil unions it’s still for all of us and not just some of us. (Or did I miss the part where some genius said, Let’s pass civil unions for lesbians first and come back to the gay men later, since lesbians might be less threatening than gay men?) Incremetalism does not mean cutting out whole groups of people.

Another comparison I’ve seen from those who support dropping gender identity from the bill is that their action is similar to the supposedly pragmatic activists during the black civil rights movement who understood that they needed to start small and grow — they started with employment, and then moved on to housing and public accommodations in later years. That, again, is a disingenuous comparison…African-Americans did not say, Hey, let’s put forth a bill to protect all the light-skinned blacks — those who can pass and are less threatening to whites — and we’ll come back to the blackest of the black later. And make no mistake: the trannies are the queerest of the queer; they are the ones who need protections more than anyone else.

Regarding all the high-minded pledges from various people who say we will come back for the transgendered and make sure we add them later: We have seen an unfortunate history of leaving people behind within this movement, I’m sorry to remind you. Soon after the onset of the HIV drug cocktail, for example, many middle class gay white men went back to their lives (including, among many, having unprotected sex, and fetishing it on “bareback” sites) while HIV ravages other communities in this country and much of the rest of the planet. The political will within the gay community in America to help those other communities has all but died. (Oh, and do I also need to point out that the promise to come back for the trannies was made in New York when its gay rights bill was passed? That was five years ago, and they’re still waiting.)

Pragmatism matters. But throwing an entire group of people under the bus because it’s politically expedient is not an option. And as Pam emphasizes, this bill is largely symbolic. If Democrats can’t even get it together for a bill that has no chance of becoming law, how are they going to get the job done when they actually have power?

Can you imagine if a group of Christians got together and made a photograph advertising their upcoming rally, and in that photo they deliberately went out of their way to tick off homosexuals?

What do you think would happen? Do you think the mainstream media would cover it? Do you think Katie Couric, Chris Matthews, Swill Maher and the other liberal curmudgeons would wade in and condemn the Christians and call ‘em haters…meanies…or…or…something?

Month: October 2007