The Senate and House voted to approve an increase in the Minimum Wage, finally. The good news is that the increase will help working women – especially all those single mothers – who are struggling to get by. Now that’s family values.
Empowered Women Still Terrifying
… At least to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Three female journalists who are also feminist activists have been arrested for trying to attend a workshop on journalism in India. Trying to attend, because they never got to: they were arrested at the airport.
“The arrest of these online journalists demonstrates President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s security and ideological paranoia which prompts him to ban all contact between journalists and foreign organizations and media,” said Reporters Without Borders (RSF), adding that the incident reveals “the fear that the women’s rights movement produces within the regime.” The three journalists are members of the Women’s Cultural Center, which runs a “One Million Signatures” campaign aimed at repealing Iran’s sexist laws. Recently, the campaign’s website was reportedly blocked by Iranian authorities, according to the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders.
Good thing they’ve got a kick-ass lawyer.
Dammit.
Molly Ivins died tonight after being defeated by her third go-round with breast cancer. She left the hospital to die at home. She was 62.
I have three women in my life right now who are undergoing biopsies on breast tissue. A fourth just had hers metastasize into lung cancer.
I don’t know what else to say.
I saw Molly Ivins speak once, at a Nation event. She was funny, she was smart, & she was a genuine populist. But she was also a bona fide political journalist. To lose a woman of her age, her experience, her seniority, when there are so few women working in political journalism… it’s such a loss, more gigantic than we can know right now. How long does it take for a woman like her to achieve the level of respect she got? A very, very long time.
Her final column is here. A bunch of her other columns are here.
But you know, what you want to do in her memory is raise some hell, or, in her own words:
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
Stupid White Folks
Okay, this is just astonishing. I figure they win the Stupid White Folks of the Year Award, and as far as I can tell, that’s been pretty hotly contested lately. But I think these folks went above & beyond the call of duty. Sheesh.
Five Questions With… Richard M. Juang
Although Richard M. Juang is an otherwise studious English professor, I came to know him through my participation with the NCTE Board of Advisors, and increasingly found him to be gentle and smart as a whip. We got to sit down and talk recently at First Event, where he agreed to answer my Five Questions.
(1) Tell me about the impetus that lead to writing Transgender Rights. Why now? Why you, Paisley Currah, and Shannon Price Minter?
Transgender Rights helps create a discussion of the concrete issues faced by transgender people and communities. Our contributors have all written in an accessible way, while also respecting the need for complex in-depth thought, whether the topic is employment, family law, health care, poverty, or hate crimes. We also provide two important primary documents and commentaries on them: the International Bill of Gender Rights and an important decision from the Colombian Constitutional Court concerning an intersex child. Both have important implications for thinking about how one articulates the right of gender self-determination in law. We wanted to create a single volume that would let students, activists, attorneys, and policy-makers think about transgender civil rights issues, history, and political activism well beyond Transgender 101.
One of the things the book doesn’t do is get bogged down in a lot of debate about how to define “transgender” or about what transgender identity “means”; we wanted to break sharply away from that tendency in scholarly writing. Instead, we wanted to make available a well-informed overview about the legal and political reality that transgender people live in.
Oddly enough, Shannon, Paisley and I each did graduate work in a different field at Cornell University in Ithaca NY. (Apparently, a small town in upstate New York is a good place to create transgender activists!) The book represents a cross-disciplinary collaboration where, although we had common goals for the book, we also had different perspectives. The result was that, as editors, we were able to stay alert to the fact that the transgender movement is diverse and has many different priorities and types of activism.
Why I’m Pro Choice
Today is Blog for Choice Day.
There is one reason and one reason only: because if abortion is illegal, women with money & power & connections will be able to have them still, and poor women with no power & access to pay for blackmarket services will not. While there are significant disparities of access and care with abortion legal, it is nothing like what it would be if it weren’t legal.
Abortion will not go away. It has always been with us. That said, holding men/boys responsible for children they father would be a good start. Getting honest sex education to teenagers and adults would be great. Free and easily-accessible birth control would go a long way toward preventing abortions. Dealing with the fact that people have sex – priceless.
Blog for Choice Day is 1/22
& Yes, I’ll be participating!Brother Outsider NYC Screening
The Brecht Forum & the War Resisters League here in NYC are screening Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin this Friday, 1/19, 8PM.
I’ll be in Boston or I’d be there. I cannot recommend this film highly enough. Bayard Rustin was one of the organizers of the March on Washington, but was asked to take a public backseat as he was a known homosexual (& a communist, but that’s a whole other story). He was a really remarkable individual & the film is an excellent chronicle of his life.
There’s a bunch of other cool political films (though i’m sad to have missed the one about Dorothy Day, who is a hero of mine).
http://www.warresisters.org/filmfestival.htm for all the info.
The More You Know…
… the more your attitudes change.
MLK Jr.
In honor & celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and work today, I thought I’d dig up some of his influences. Everyone is aware of Gandhi’s impact on King, I think, but less known is that the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr was also an influence. Niebuhr is sometimes credited with the Serenity Prayer even though there are versions of it that existed before his time; he may only have put it into the form we know now. King himself best expresses how Niebuhr influenced him:
“Moreover, Niebuhr has extraordinary insight into human nature, especially the behavior of nations and social groups. He is keenly aware of the complexity of human motives and of the relation between morality and power. His theology is a persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man’s existence. These elements in Niebuhr’s thinking helped me to recognize the illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature and the dangers of a false idealism. While I still believed in man’s potential for good, Niebuhr made me realize his potential for evil as well. Moreover, Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man’s social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil.”
To demonstrate one aspect of what King is referring to, Niebuhr once wrote:
“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
That said, it was Niebuhr’s thinking on both pacificism & justice that helped King fine-tune his singular response to injustice – and for that we’re all thankful.