Short rant on issues involving women.

Okay. So first, it was the leaked HHS memo that could lead to classifying chemical contraceptives as abortifacents and give pharmacists who refuse to fill those prescriptions protection under conscience rules, and then came the arrest of a woman for killing her child by allegedly severing her umbilical cord in utero. Which would involve managing to poke something sharp up her cervix, navigate the amniotic sac and fluid, and sever the cord. And not bleed out from the severing, or the subsequent miscarriage. Even in the rare condition where the umbilical cord poked through into the vagina, the probability that the child was already dead and miscarried, or would need significant medical help to survive. The arrest was based on the fact that the woman seemed emotional and was apologizing for the child being dead.

Then came another article about Purity Balls... you know, the ceremonies that fetishise a young girl's virginity, try to guilt her into abstinence until marriage, and reduce her to an object, the property of her father and her future husband. Those things. I’m detecting a trend. It has apparently come back into some fashionable vogue to try and return to the way we never were, where Men were Men (and there were no such things as homosexuals, only sinful sodomites, and we don’t talk about them), Women were Property, totally subservient to their husbands and mistresses of cooking, cleaning, and childbearing, Daughters were only worth their bride price and needing to be sold off to the appropriate son for political or financial purposes and all of them virgins, because Everyone Knows that sex before marriage was Wrong and meant that all sorts of icky diseases would inevitably find you... or the daughter would have to mysteriously go see an aunt for a few months, and then would return from her illness, and Boys Would Be Boys.

While I’m probably guilty of it some myself, it would be nice to knock down the prevailing assumption that men somehow know what’s better for women than women do. (Says the male blogger writing about women’s issues) Gone are the days where daughters were valuable financial assets to be married off and sons were valuable financial assets to attract other people’s daughters with. For the most part, while the concept of marrying for love rather than economic stability is new, it is the dominant mode of today’s society. In fact, it is possible now for a couple to remain unmarried for significant stretches of time and stay economically afloat. In this new society, while the idea of women being virgins is still important for some religious beliefs, there is no compelling government interest in the matter, considering the current widespread availability of contraceptive chemicals and barriers that can protect both against birth and against the transmission of diseases. With proper education on their use, it should be theoretically possible for any woman to enjoy her life the way she wants to, whether abstaining from sex for her own personal reasons or engaging in as much risk-reduced sex as possible.

Under that reasoning, the current government’s policy on women’s health and reproductive rights is well away from where it should be. Setting aside all the other functions that they have in addition to the stated one, if religious ideas about purity and virginity are the only reasons why people continue to oppose widespread education and use about birth control, then chemical birth control methods should be legal, regardless of whether one defines conception at fertilization or implantation. Grabs like these as attempts to control women and try to keep them as objects should be whipped solidly and sent back from whence they came.

Oh, and we could stand to get rid of advertisements that purport women are revenge-obsessed bitches, especially when menstruating, too. Thanks.

The potentially good stuff - 22 July 2008

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood - the clouds have returned, after a stint of sun and heat, and the temperature is chilling out a bit in the mornings. It’s nice weather here, and I fully expect it to start raining again sometime soon, even if it doesn’t until August or September.

Let’s play. Also, for those of you who are new to the journal over the course of the last half-solar revolution or so, please, introduce yourselves and tell me how you found me. While I don’t have any high ratings in any Kevin Bacon or other type of game to connect to celebrities (unless you’re going for John Williams or a small smattering of anime and American tokusatsu actors, where you can finish the chain through me...), it’s always interesting to find out how people find what is, on balance, a wholly unremarkable blip in the vast sea of the Internet.

Internationally, CNS is either trying to paint all Muslims as inflexible or the UK government as ineffective against the Muslim horde with a piece talking about how the UK's government initiative to establish scholarly circles in the UK that can talk authoritatively about Islam is not getting buy-in. The government is trying to provide good alternatives to extremist ideologies, which draws criticism as “attacking Islam”, apparently. If this is the same program described by the Daily Mail as instructing public school students in Islamic traditions and Islamic school students getting lessons on citizenship, then it looks like a good attempt to get the various cultural groups talking to each other. Of course, then we’ll have the complaints and insinuations that this is just another way for Muslims to creep their influence in so they can take over and turn the UK into a fundamentalist Islamic state.

After telling Senator Obama it’s what he has to do to understand what’s going on, and that he couldn’t make any sort of policy pronouncements without it, the McCain campaign is trying hard to squelch the positive surge Senator Obama is getting from his visit to Iraq, including claiming that he as right about Iraq first and releasing an attack ad claiming that Senator Obama and the Democrats are to blame for higher fuel prices. Senator McCain would also love for voters feeling that Senator Obama isn't ready for the Commander-in-Chief role to continue, a tack that Robet Novak thinks that McCain can win on, should the election be a referendum on Obama, or European governmental skepticism of Senator Obama to extend to the people here.

The candidacy of Barack Obama produces several sets of opinions. First, it was “Will Barack Obama be dismissed or have to deal with accusations that his racial background qualifies or disqualifies him in the people’s mind, before they’ve actually listened to him?” Because only The Shadow knows what lurks in the hearts of men, we’ve tried to get at other questions that may illuminate this first one. The primary season helped some with that, too. As things are, Lawrence Bobo thinks that a President Obama would be a great success for relations, even though it will not be the final victory and the birth of the post-racial society. Shelby Steele takes a more cynical route, believing that both sides will use a President Obama to bury further progress on race relations , and Musings & Migraines is less enthusiastic, pointing out the Senator's willing repetition of "It will all get better when black people get married and stay married before having kids" on a Father’s Days speech, and the Senator’s support for leveraging churches as agents of social change. Similarly, Musings and Migraines is not to happy about David Brooks' insistence that people now have to change to get out of the recession, with the implications that they put themselves there through making bad choices over the objections of their wiser counterparts. The Professor sees this claptrap as essentially the Obama campaign party line, and that rather than trying to address issues that generate these scenarios or the need for people to engage in self-destructive behavior, morality and capitalism will merge at the right point and bury the actual problem. A problem that bradhicks suggests was generated by the abysmal failure of Phil Gramm's experiment in deregulating the economy, because he failed to account for the reality that the market has no time to correct itself and weed out cheaters and those who hurt their consumers and competition.

Elsewhere, the WSJ thinks Iran deserves sticks, not carrots, and hasn’t done anything to credibly convince the West they’re changing, while also suggesting that lowering taxes is the way to make the rich pay more in taxes, because the rich already pay too much and will start hiding their money if tax rates go up, claiming Al Gore's plans to get the country off of petroleum won't work, William McGurn expectantly waiting for the positive press of people who fought and captured those claimed to be terrorists, thinking that they deserve to be praised for their attempts to make us safer, imperfect that they may be. What, you mean we should applaud those who remixed a personal conveyance platform into a swifter way of deploying police forces? Or, as Ann Marlowe writes, those trying to apply Iraq lessons to Afghanistan?

Technology pokes its head above ground with an exoskeleton that helps the paralyzed walk in action, some frame-to-comic frame comparisons on Watchmen, an expensive coffee machine with which Starbucks hopes to try and save itself, and COPA getting smacked down again by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. I hate CIPA with a phenomenal vengeance, but if I had to deal with COPA as well, there probably wouldn’t be Internet access at public libraries, because everyone would have to register themselves to look at anything not suitable for a four-year old. Not only that, but those without an age-verification mechanism like a credit card would be out in the cold. And who would willingly give over something like that to every website that had actual information? Kick COPA out the door and don’t try to defend it any more, please.

And last for tonight - the difficulty of communication between people who have lots of specialized language, steampunk-style wallpaper, and the seven best national parks for visiting old-growth forests. So, now that we’ve rolled the ball back and forth, let’s go take a nap.