family

Ouch!

‘My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does.’

Her story is a harrowing one -- not because of John McCain -- he just didn't want to be there for it.

[Hat tip to a Twittering blogdiva]

The Gaurdian has an article that starts off:

No wonder Iceland has the happiest people on earth

Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation.

Of course. Can't have women outside of the home.

But a high birthrate doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. High divorce rate could be an indication of fewer unhappy marriages.

And we all know now that societies with more women participating not just in the workplace but in management thrive more than other societies.

So what's the "something wrong" here?

'That is not something to be proud of,' said Oddny, with a brisk smile, 'but the fact is that Icelanders don't stay in lousy relationships. They just leave.' And the reason they can do so is that society, starting with the parents and grandparents, does not stigmatise them for making that choice. Icelanders are the least hung-up people in the world. Thus the incentive, for example, 'to stay together for the sake of the kids' does not exist. The kids will be just fine, because the family will rally round them and, likely as not, the parents will continue to have a civilised relationship, based on the usually automatic understanding that custody for the children will be shared.

Reykjavic, Iceland, May 2008: City Councillor Oddny Sturludottir tells us why Iceland is the best place in the World. Photograph: Ari Magg
The comfort of knowing that, come what may, the future for the children is safe also helps explain why Icelandic women, modern as they are (Iceland elected the world's first female president, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, a single mother, 28 years ago), persist in the ancient habit of bearing children very young. 'Not unwanted teen pregnancies, you understand,' said Oddny, 'but women of 21, 22 who willingly have children, very often while they are still at university.' At a British university a pregnant student would be an oddity; in Iceland, even at the business-oriented Reykjavik University, it is not only common to see pregnant girls in the student cafeteria, you see them breast-feeding, too. 'You extend your studies by a year, so what?' said Oddny. 'No way do you think when you have a kid at 22, "Oh my God, my life is over!" Definitely not! It is considered stupid here to wait till 38 to have a child. We think it's healthy to have lots of kids. All babies are welcome.'

All the more so because if you are in a job the state gives you nine months on fully paid child leave, to be split among the mother and the father as they so please. 'This means that employers know a man they hire is just as likely as a woman to take time off to look after a baby,' explained Svafa Grönfeldt, currently rector of Reykjavik University, previously a very high-powered executive. 'Paternity leave is the thing that made the difference for women's equality in this country.'

Hmmm.... Maybe progressive values are actually good for children?

Imagine this happening in this country.

One of the main conservative leaders who fought successfully to scare politicians away from the Equal Rights Amendment has now revealed some of her underlying thinking, including -- incredibly -- the notion that husbands have carte blanche when it comes to raping their wives.

"By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don't think you can call it rape," she said.

That's right, honey. Say "I do" and open your legs 'till death do you part.

She also seems to be oblivious to the changing world around her.

One came when Schlafly asserted women should not be permitted to do jobs traditionally held by men, such as firefighter, soldier or construction worker, because of their "inherent physical inferiority."

"Women in combat are a hazard to other people around them," she said. "They aren't tall enough to see out of the trucks, they're not strong enough to carry their buddy off the battlefield if he's wounded, and they can't bark out orders loudly enough for everyone to hear."

Never mind that women are taller and stronger today than before, thanks to less socially imposed norms of yore, such as the undernourishment of girls and the frowning on women participating in sports.

Besides, making grandiose generalizations based on sex when it comes to who's permitted to do what is a ridiculous claim, and politically is more in line with fascism than the old-line Goldwater conservatism that espouses small government and leaving people alone.

In summary, it seems that the woman who tried to claim that feminism was a victim mindset has completely swallowed whole a pathologically victim-oriented view of the world, where women are soooooo inferior that we should all just shut up, cook dinner and get on our backs for men.

Bucking pressure from the radical wingnut contingent that runs so strong in down there, Texas Governor Rick Perry decided to get sensible about cervical cancer prevention:

By issuing an executive order, Perry apparently sidesteps opposition in the Legislature from conservatives and parents' rights groups who fear such a requirement would condone premarital sex and interfere with the way parents raise their children.

Beginning in September 2008, girls entering the sixth grade — meaning, generally, girls ages 11 and 12 — will have to get Gardasil, Merck & Co.'s new vaccine against strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV.

Perry, a conservative Christian who opposes abortion and stem-cell research using embryonic cells, counts on the religious right for his political base. But he has said the cervical cancer vaccine is no different from the one that protects children against polio.

This of course goes against the fundamentalist orthodox thinking that claims girls need the spectre of cervical cancer in order to keep their legs closed and wait until marriage before having sex. Of course, they don't consider flaws in their logic, such as child molestation, rape and other ways that even "good little girls" could get cervical cancer.

The federal government approved Gardasil in June, and a government advisory panel has recommended that all girls get the shots at 11 and 12, before they are likely to be sexually active.

The New Jersey-based drug company could generate billions in sales if Gardasil — at $360 for the three-shot regimen — were made mandatory across the country. Most insurance companies now cover the vaccine, which has been shown to have no serious side effects.

--that is, except for agitated wingnut phobias of anything to do with women's health, especially when it comes to those sexual organs that supposedly got Man kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

And that makes Governor Perry's act so un-radical it's almost shocking.

Then again, it's almost difficult to be a "radical" conservative when conservatives are even claiming that condoms cause cancer.

The FDA has shocked me. After stonewalling their own doctors and scientists, the politicians in the agency have decided to act rationally, perhaps as a ploy to help the Republicans you've seen frothing at the mouth over the past two years whenever they talk about sex to seem more reasonable.

It's a partial victory:

Girls 17 and younger still will need a doctor's note to buy the pills, called Plan B, the
Food and Drug Administration told manufacturer Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc.

The compromise decision is a partial victory for women's advocacy and medical groups that say eliminating sales restrictions could cut in half the nation's 3 million annual unplanned pregnancies.

The pills are a concentrated dose of the same drug found in many regular birth-control pills. When a woman takes the pills within 72 hours of unprotected sex, they can lower the risk of pregnancy by up to 89 percent. If she already is pregnant, the pills have no effect.

I hope the nutters out there will note that last sentence. The fact is that Plan B prevents conception. With this "morning after" pill, there is no abortion at all. It's not even an issue.

What's at issue for Plan B opponents is whether the man's sperm can claim dibs on a woman's body, even if they're just wiggling around in there without fertilizing an egg (conception), without even an egg's being there to be fertilized. It's one of the most absurd arguments for patriarchal privilege out there.

Of course, we can expect the nutters to continue to distort and lie about Plan B. Anything that gives women power over their own bodies is bad, according to them. Just wait. You'll see them all over cable news today (if you can stomach watching that crap).

The fear and unreason is already out there:

Bravo folks! let's give our kids one more reason to have sex like rabbits!

"Yeah, it's much better to have pregnancy as punishment! And kids will have sex because the girl will then get to take a pill!"

Don't worry, though. It seems that most people see the positive side. This could reduce the number of aborted pregnancies significantly. That should be good news for everybody.

They called it the Reagan Revolution. I meet intelligent and articulate people who cannot remember America before Reagan.

Steven Colbert interviewed a young conservative woman who wants to go back to the "old days" and she looks longingly back to a by-gone era. But that era that she describes was an era of Democratic Presidents and liberal reform.

The conservative nostalgia is based on an era with mainly Democrats in the White House and Congresses largely control by the Democrats. From 1932 until Ronald Reagan, the only two elected Republicans Presidents were Eisenhower and Nixon - Nixon who resigned in disgrace and had Ford fill out the remainder of the term. The rest were all Democrats in the Presidency with a largely Democrat Congress.

So the nostalgia that conservatives wax poetic about has nothing to do with the "Reagan Revolution," except in the sense of the nostalgia.

Reagan was old enough to by my grandfather, or great-grandfather to people in their 20s. People in the era of Reagans own youth had memories of growing up in the Great Depression. These were hard times and the Democrats came to power because economic times were bad. Rightly or wrongly the bad economic times were blamed on the Republicans and they were voted out.

America became powerful and great during an unprecedented era of government involvement and regulation.

The Reagan vision of America before Nixon/Ford/Carter does not square with the fact that for almost 50 years, the Democrats' vision of America is the one that made America what it was. The conservatives think that by reversing all the Democrat/liberal policies and programs that this will make America what it once was.

The halcyon days were not achieved by Republican policies.

GWB, our President, is not in a Great Depression scenario, but clearly the economy is not what it once was.

We got a glimpse of what Democrats can do - and Clinton (a rather conservative Democrat) was able to bring fiscal responsibility and move the government into the black.

from Talk to Action

We all have heard South Dakota State Senator Bill Napoli's description of a woman who might qualify for an abortion under the rigid strictures of South Dakota's draconian abortion law – an exemption now immortalized as the Sodomized Virgin Exception.

Bob Nelson, a contributor to the Rapid City Journal's Mount Blogmore, considers the plight of those young women less fortunate.

It was an easy rape, she said
(Though not the way she hoped to wed)
The stones were sharp against her head,
(Not her dream of a bridal bed)
And the dress he tore as he thrust her down
was not her idea of a wedding gown.

But really, it was not complex.
Just some simple brutal sex.
And though her young life had other plans
She would bear the child of the gentleman.
And try to love each smile and dimple,
And be thankful that the rape was simple.
And thank the men who made her free.
Simple men like Napoli.

No thanks are necessary, little lady. It was their simple pleasure. As Napoli himself says, "If I, as a legislator, can make life better, really help somebody, that's a wonderful feeling."

from Talk to Action

While the Bible that many South Dakotans are substituting for the Constitution these days maintains that "her price is far above rubies," those same people have decreed that the worth of any woman, no matter how virtuous, plummets at "that point in time when a male human sperm penetrates the zona pellucida of a female human ovum." From that moment forward, not only her body, her hopes and her dreams, but sometimes -- despite the hollow promise of a tacked-on provision allowing "a medical procedure designed or intended to prevent the death of a pregnant mother" – even her very life can be forfeit.

Equality under the law surely is an American value. Who, if they had the facts, would support a law that results in subjugation? Perhaps the oppressor might vote for such a law, but not those who are disadvantaged by the law. Yet, in the United States, women have not yet had the political will to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Its language is simple.

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

It outlaws sexism.

And yet, the amendment is still not part of the United States Constitution.

Women are governed by a set of laws that have evolved over time, which stem from issues around human reproduction. The sexual organ difference between men and women has led to two sets of laws and rights.

The megablogs, such as Daily Kos, Boomantribune, and mydd, are advancing an argument that the issue of women's reproductive rights is not important, and that if a Democrat wants to restrict a woman's rights, that is okay since women's reproductive rights are not as important as electing a certain slate of candidates.

If I chose to support another candidate, who supports women's reproductive rights, but who is not of the "correct" slate of candidates, I risk being accused of being a traitor and deserter of the cause. But what cause, pray tell?

Why would I care about a candidate who doesn't care about me? It's as simple as that and the machinations of megablogs like Daily Kos, Boomantribune, and mydd, come off as flummery - I am urged to vote against my own interests because it is in my interests. Huh?

The Democrats, of late, have abandoned women's rights as an issue as the Democrats swing ever rightward. I ask myself, why should I join this made race to nowhere, whose only promise is oblivion? Either way, the Democrats will lose. The megblogs tell us there will be few Democrats in power; fewer Democratic bodies in Congress. But that's one price I am not going to pay, no matter how many elections it might win, for in the end, the Democrats will have struck a bargain to win an election, only to find out that they have sold their souls.

Today is the day. Time for you to celebrate the love of your life. Time to indulge in romance. Time to be with your honey and do all sorts of silly and wonderful and embarrassing and lusty and heartfelt things with each other.

Or not.

Time to buy that chocolate. Time to get that perfect card. Time to pick up that three-dozen roses. (Diamonds are forever, boys!) Time to lavish your sweetheart with stuff.

Or not.

Today is the day to blog about it. Valentine's Day and you.

(The Blog Awards particulars are here.)