Tag: colleges & teaching

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Sliding Backwards

(from The Feminist Majority Foundation)

The Supreme Court handed down this morning a 5-4 ruling that requires the elimination of integration plans at elementary and secondary public schools.

The decision was made in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, et al. and Meredith, Custodial Parent and Next Friend of McDonald v. Jefferson County Bd. Of Ed et al, two cases brought by parents with schoolchildren in Seattle, Washington and Louisville, Kentucky. Federal appeals courts previously upheld integration plans in both school systems after parents sued. The Bush administration threw its political weight behind the parents.

In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “There is a cruel irony in The Chief Justice’s reliance on our decision in Brown v. Board of Education… The Chief Justice rewrites the history of one of this Court’s most important decisions.” Justice Stevens, who has served on the Supreme Court longer than any other current justice, concluded his dissent, writing, “It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.”

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Frustrating.

This Washington Post article about women & voting, sent to me by MichelleNYC, is so frustrating & depressing:

Worse, women consistently score 10 to 20 percentage points lower than men on studies of political knowledge, regardless of their education or income level. Studies dating to 1997 have shown that fewer women than men can name their senator, or know one First Amendment right. They even know less about the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade than men do.

So ladies, please read more politics. Idealism and character do not political change bring.

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Next Time No Strings, Please

Another governor – this time Governor Strickland of Ohio – has given the Feds back the abstinence-only strings-attached sex education money.

That’s six states now, & the fifth (Wisconsin) only refused the impractical funding a few weeks ago.

So now there’s the other 44 to work on. Write your governor and tell him to return funding that denies a state the right to teach sex education in the way that we decide is most appropriate for our kids.

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Better Logic

The good news is that Louise Slaughter (D, NY) reintroduced the Prevention First Act:

“I am proud to reintroduce this bill which serves as an innovative and comprehensive approach to protecting women’s reproductive health, decreasing the spread of STDs, and reducing the number of unintended pregnancies,” Rep. Slaughter said of the bill in a Senate press release. “If we want to reduce the number of abortions in this country, the methodology is clear — empower women to prevent unintended pregnancies through education and access to contraception.”

Sounds reasonable, but considering yesterday’s news, I’m going to guess it won’t pass. There really are some people in this country who think the only answer is abstinence.

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Revolution at Harvard

Congrats to Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard University – first in a 371 year history.

National Organization for Women (NOW) President Kim Gandy said of the announcement, “NOW is so pleased that Harvard will finally have a female president — and it has only taken them 371 years. Larry Summers, we couldn’t have done it without you.”

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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.

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Dr. Keith

We taped an episode of the Dr. Keith show last week, and I’ve been sorting out my thoughts since then. I found the experience exhausting. From all reports (Donna, my sister, another friend) we were good. But some days it’s hard to consider the toll that’s paid.

I’m not sure yet what that toll is exactly, but it feels something like a distilled version of all the other work we do for college audiences & at trans conferences except the audience is so different: at one point during the taping I looked at a woman in the audience whose jaw was literally hanging agape.

It doesn’t help that I’ve replayed it all a million times in my head, hoping I said things that make sense. Before that I worried for days beforehand about whether I could really get something across of what this life is like for both the partner and the trans person. It’d be nice to be able to shut off my brain, to stop wondering what the whole show will be like, since we weren’t on alone: we had the company of a trans man & his ex as well as an intersex person.

Overall, I liked Dr. Keith’s take: his general tone was one of “Wow, that’s one hell of a hand you’ve been dealt,” and although the show was a little too anatomically-focused for me, people DO want to know about body mods and I think it was handled about as well as it could have been. It couldn’t have been thorough – transition, transgender, and intersex are a lot to cover in an hour – but it wasn’t sensational.

So I can only wait to see what the rest of you think. It should air before mid-March, and of course I’ll post info about the airdate as soon as I get it.

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Not A Passing Grade

The US was ranked 66th in women’s political empowerment, of 115 countries, because we’ve never had a female president and because only 15% of congressional positions are held by women.

Overall we were ranked 22nd, and we were 65th on educational attainment:

While fewer girls are enrolled in elementary school in the US, women far outnumber men in enrollment at the secondary and tertiary levels.

I’m sure it’s not a big surprise to anyone that the Nordic countries scored best, but considering recent news from Darfur and Afghanistan, I’ll stay put, thanks.

The World Economic Forum has the report available in .pdf format.

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School’s Out (for Afghan Girls)

I don’t know about anyone else, but I remember hearing a lot of palaver about how it was so cool that we were getting the Taliban out of Afghanistan so that those girls could go to school (& so that women wouldn’t be stoned to death & other fucked up things).

But wow, while the administration’s been buggering themselves about Iraq, it turns out that the Taliban are bombing girls’ schools to keep them from attending – losing ground they gained for a few years only to see it being hacked away again.

The United Nations estimates that every single day a girls’ school in Afghanistan is burned down or a female teacher killed.

Imagine.