Today marks a day where gay couples in California are legally allowed to marry! Read the CNN article on this as well as an article on them over at NOW. My favorite part about this is listed in this quote:

Lesbian rights activists Del Martin, 87, and Phyllis Lyon, 84, were the first same-sex couple to receive a marriage license in San Francisco on Monday, with Mayor Gavin Newsom presiding over their wedding ceremony. [emphasis mine]

True love has finally reigned.

I am completely horrified by PETA’s latest campaign. Recently PETA grabbed a couple of interns put them in bathing suits, slathered blood all over them and placed them in what appears to be giant shrink wrapped containers like the kind you find your meat in at the grocery store. I don’t know what bothers me, their methods for celebrating vegetarian week and getting the message across about how meat is murder (and their lack of concern for their interns) or the flagrant portrayal of violence against women. Here’s the link to the story at CommercialAppeal.com.

Image by Mike Brown / The Commercial Appeal

H/T Feministing

Father’s day is always an interesting day for me because it’s  full of a lot of emotions.  The father who raised me is not my biological father, and although I feel as if he tried his best with me, I think there was a lot of room for improvement in how our relationship evolved.  I found out about my biological father when I was 16 years old and that threw me for a loop.  I had always sensed that something wasn’t as normal as I was made to believe it was, but having this confirmed shook me off my foundations and made me search for who I really was.  Should this have made a difference?  No, I don’t think it should and I think in a lot of ways finding out the truth made me search deeper for the true meaning of what marriage and parenting was really supposed to be like.

I know my mom tried her best with me.  I know that she kept the truth from me out of love for me and out of wanting me to have a normal family life, but I think that this information should not have been kept from me.  I think that finding out the truth was more hurtful to my self-esteem then had I just been told this from the very beginning.  I idolized the man who was my biological father, even though I had been told that he had, for all intents and purposes, abandoned me and my mother.  

The issue of parenting is a very complex thing because as I am currently a custodial stepmother, I understand that there are many different circumstances that lead to one of the parents not being a part of their child’s life, whether it’s because of choice, out of infidelity and loyalty to another, out of extreme circumstances where the state takes your children away for one reason or another, whatever the case may be.  I have witnessed first hand the struggles that a woman faces when raising children on her own as my mother and adoptive father divorced when I was 15, to watching my boyfriend raise his son on his own before we all moved in together and became a family, and I have to say that women have it so much harder.  It’s harder for a woman to find a descent job to support her family than it is for a man.  It’s hard to find that balance of work/family life when you’re a single parent, and it’s no wonder that single parents, women in particular, are usually part of the lower classes or lower middle classes.  

My mother put on a good front.  She raised us as a middle class family with low class funds.  Somehow my mother found a way to always make ends meet, probably with the help of my grandfather who always has been a big part of my life until his death close to 3 years ago.  I never went without but I did learn early on the value of a dollar and started working the moment I was old enough to work.  This was her struggle throughout my entire childhood.

Why do I make this sound as if my mother had always been a single parent?  My father worked hard all the time.  When he first married my mother he was still in college and worked full-time as well, so we hardly saw him.  Then after he graduated, he helped his father with the family business and that drained him of all the time he had as well.  The weekends were his time to relax and rightfully so, but we spent most of our days with my mother.  She’s the one who drove us to school, drove us to ballet,  Boy Scout meetings, softball/baseball practices, cheerleading practices, birthday parties, and every other activity that me and my brothers were a part of.  My dad participated when he could but he normally couldn’t.

This is another problem that I feel is plaguing our society.  I would call him an absentee father, but not completely as he was there some of the time but not most of the time like I would have liked him to be.  This seems to be a problem with some of the lower classes where both parents are together, especially during a recession like the one this country is going through now because the fathers seem to be working harder to make ends meet, as are the mothers, but the mothers always seem to make time for their children.  Is this because of the gender stereotypes plaguing our societies?  Is this what “the other side” claims as being the reason why women don’t make more money in the workforce than they should and is this their justification for things being the way they are?  These are all random questions that pop in my head from time to time when I consider my history and the current state of our societies and women.

I believe in equality.  I believe that a man and a woman should be equal participants in their child’s life.  I’m not saying that this is the only way it should be because this would be an ignorant statement as there are many other factors to take into consideration.  What I am saying is that if a couple is together and they have a great relationship, and both parties work, then they should both find a way to equally be a part of their child’s life.

In a separate but equal issue, I was reading CNN’s latest on Obama’s speech at the Apostolic Church of God where he addresses the black fathers who have not been a part of their child’s life and tells them basically that they need to take responsibility for their children.  His father apparently left when he was 2 years old, and I know at that age it has to be incredibly rough to know your father, idolize your father, and then have him leave your life, so I’m sure he’s speaking from the heart when he makes these statements.  I know from experience that not having a father be a big part of your life can lead to a lot of emotional problems, especially when it comes to your self-esteem and self worth, and I don’t mean this in the sense of say like to lesbian couples raising a child.  I mean this in the sense of having a father in your life and he’s either an absentee like my father was or just flat out abandons you.  This can go either way though because I see the same issues I had in my stepson because of how little his mother is in his life.  If there is a child/parent relationship that has already been established, having that changed or allowing other problems to interfere so the relationship can not evolve into a truly substantive relationship can cause a lot of psychological damage to the child.  Even a divorce is a hard thing for a child to cope with, but if you still take an active role in the life of your child, that trauma can be lessened and the relationship can still evolve.

I’m sure there are many different situations that I’m leaving out but I’m hoping that by this little article that I’m writing, I would hope that it has made some people at least consider the relationship they have with their child and if they can, make a little extra effort to nourish their relationship with their child to ensure themselves that their child will be healthy, happy, and sane.

I was out with the family today and we decided to stop for lunch at a fast food restaurant. While we where there, there was an elderly couple that was pretty chatty with us. At one point the couple decides to go so the man gets up and starts helping the woman up. She starts to get up from her seat in the booth and starts huffing and complaining as if it was really hard for her to perform these movements. She looks at us and says, “I fell recently and cracked some ribs.” We all oohed at her and apologized to her for her bad fortune. The man-who was standing behind her-summoned to us jokingly that he had hit her, as if saying that’s why she was hurt. The motion was something like what a punch to the ribs would look like and I began wondering: when did joking about beating the woman you’re with become okay?

I didn’t think his gesture was funny at all and the fact that he had to hide this from her led me to think that he felt the same way, but I feel that it’s these kinds of jokes that makes it seem as if it’s okay to do these kinds of things to a woman. I was with my 10 year old step{son} and I had to wonder if the fact that this man was joking about this act made him think that it was okay to beat on a woman; that it’s all fun and games. These are not the types of things that should be taught to the younger generations of boys because we don’t want to neutralize them as to how this truly is a problem and it leads to a cycle of violence that they don’t need to be a part of so I feel that making these kinds of jokes, even innocently, can be very harmful for the men in the future and it just shouldn’t be done.

These are the top 10 reasons why I’m voting for Obama come November. This is taken directly from MoveOn.org and people need to know that McCain is not who he says he is.

• John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has “evolved,” yet he’s continued to oppose key civil rights laws.
• According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.”
• His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.
• McCain opposes a woman’s right to choose. He said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.”
• The Children’s Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children’s health care bill last year, then defended Bush’s veto of the bill.
• He’s one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a “second job” and skip their vacations.
• Many of McCain’s fellow Republican senators say he’s too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”
• McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates
• McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his “spiritual guide,” Rod Parsley, believes America’s founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a “false religion.” McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church “the Antichrist” and a “false cult.”
• He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0—yes, zero—from the League of Conservation Voters last year.

McCain has so far done nothing but try to smear Obama’s name, is taking cheap shots now at Michelle, and is lying through his teeth to everyone just so he can be elected. I was reading on CNN.com how the McCain camp feels that Michelle Obama is fair game, which is understandable in a way because it’s part of politics and the public life, but it kind of seems to me that since Hillary is no longer in the running and they have this momentum to bash women at every corner, now they’re going to take cheap shots at Michelle simply because they feel she may be an easy target. It’s a low maneuver to try to not only get people to vote for him but to see if they could catch Obama off guard and say, “See! That’s why he shouldn’t be our next president! It’s gotten so bad that Obama had to start a Fight the Smears web site to get the truth out there because there are so many lies circling that this is probably one of the best venues he has to clear his name.

I hope all the Clinton supporters think about all this when they decide who they will vote for come November.

While in class tonight, we were talking about violence against women, and one of my classmates brought up the fact that since the economy has taken a downturn, they’ve been noticing crime increasing. I have too. Lately you can’t turn on the news without hearing about who’s robbing who, who shot who and for what, things of that nature.

Now, here’s my thinking-and please tell me if I’m totally off in my train of thought-being that being employed and being the “bread winner” is traditionally something associated with masculinity and manhood in general, I’m curious if because of the recession we’re going through if the amount of violence against women has increased. Are men finding other ways to emasculate themselves by beating on their wives when they get upset or perpetrating acts of violence against women out of anger, frustration, feelings of inadequacy as a man?

Chew on this little topic and let’s discuss.

 

 

-4 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Poor (Failure) Take the test!

I think it’s all the cursing, working, and nagging.

 

Because it gets me through the day…

I’m a bit disturbed by the views some feminists are taking to Hillary conceding. I just read an article where Koryne Horbel, the founder of the DFL Feminist Caucus started passing around a petition to women for them to pledge to write in Hillary’s name come November instead of voting for Obama.

“I don’t care,” Horbal said of the possibility that the move might cost Obama votes. She said she also would not be bothered if the write-in campaign indirectly helped elect John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. “Let McCain clean it up for four years, and then we can have Hillary run again,” she said. [emphasis mine]

Let McCain clean it up??? What he’s going to “clean up” will be what he considers problems in society that go against HIS morals. In other words, he’s going to “clean up” Roe vs. Wade by seating pro-life Supreme Court Justices, he’s going to “clean up” by making it harder and harder for women to get their birth control, he’s going to “clean up” all our rights, and I think that this is a very dangerous stance to take. Jack Tapper ant ABC News Senior National Correspondent had this to say:

It’s fairly irrefutable that should there be a Supreme Court vacancy in the next four years, which there probably will be, McCain will appoint a Justice who in all likelihood will be the final vote to overturn Roe v Wade.

I’m not making a value judgment here on that — it’s just a fact. It’s one of the reasons why many conservatives will vote for McCain, whom they dislike on several other issues.

So how do these feminists reconcile that?

I too would love to know what Koryne is going to do then. How will she justify what’s been done to women’s rights? We need to remember that we are here to vote for the person who is best qualified to handle the issues that hit close to home, whether that means you have to chose from the lesser of two evils or not. The thing to remember -especially in politics- is that not everyone touches on all of the issues perfectly. There will be some disagreements and plenty of room for discussion, but when you have someone like McCain who is just flat out anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-everything, you can’t just stand there and say, “I don’t care” because you have to care. There are a lot more important things at stake then the fact that your preferred candidate was not chosen.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Hill, I would have loved to see her in office, and I think this country is in desperate need for a woman in the office, but the nation is also in need for a black man to be in office as well. I don’t want to turn this into a black man vs. white woman debate, but either way the country is due for the change that either of these two scenarios will bring, and it’s really disturbing to me that someone can be so narrow minded as to publicly declare, “I don’t care…let McCain clean up the mess for the next four years” without taking into consideration that there are bigger issues at stake. I think this quote pretty much sums up exactly how I feel (from The Same Rowdy Crowd)

But here she is, saying “You have to do what you have to do.” And, from the other side, so am I. I admire people who stand on principle. Come November, one of us is likely to do harm to some of the things we believe in, in service to other things we believe in.

Things aren’t black and white, are they?

(h/t The Feminist Underground)

I’ve heard plenty of stories of the use of coat hangers before Roe vs. Wade. I’ve heard stories about the atrocious things that women would put themselves through in order to have an abortion and how unsafe it was. We’ve even seen things like this in popular movies like Dirty Dancing regarding the dangers of abortions and how you couldn’t trust abortionists at times because their reasons for being abortionists were shady at best. You never knew if they were doing it for the right reasons, if they cared about your life, anything. In that movie as well, we saw how certain classes and certain people viewed abortion and viewed the type of women who got abortions.

Well, the New York Times did a great article by a retired gynecologist during this time, and it puts the facts out there of how horrible it was that these women were desperate enough to endanger their lives simply to not be pregnant.

I am a retired gynecologist, in my mid-80s. My early formal training in my specialty was spent in New York City, from 1948 to 1953, in two of the city’s large municipal hospitals.

There I saw and treated almost every complication of illegal abortion that one could conjure, done either by the patient herself or by an abortionist — often unknowing, unskilled and probably uncaring. Yet the patient never told us who did the work, or where and under what conditions it was performed. She was in dire need of our help to complete the process or, as frequently was the case, to correct what damage might have been done.[emphasis mine]

The patient also did not explain why she had attempted the abortion, and we did not ask. This was a decision she made for herself, and the reasons were hers alone. Yet this much was clear: The woman had put herself at total risk, and literally did not know whether she would live or die.

If dying seemed like a better option than living simply because you became pregnant, there had to be a very good, valid reason for them to want an abortion, but the government did not feel that this was appropriate for whatever their reasons may be, whether it be a way of controlling women and what they do, or it’s a way forcing their morals on others when it’s not their place.

However, not simply coat hangers were used.

Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion — darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.

[...]

The worst case I saw, and one I hope no one else will ever have to face, was that of a nurse who was admitted with what looked like a partly delivered umbilical cord. Yet as soon as we examined her, we realized that what we thought was the cord was in fact part of her intestine, which had been hooked and torn by whatever implement had been used in the abortion. It took six hours of surgery to remove the infected uterus and ovaries and repair the part of the bowel that was still functional.

I can’t imagine the desperation a woman has to be in for her to do this to herself, to insert these items inside of her in order to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy.

What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such. [emphasis mine]

In other words, this essentially allowed doctors to treat women and human beings who can think for themselves and make their own decisions, especially when it came to their bodies and their reproductive rights. We were no longer viewed as animals incapable of free thought and I’d like it to remain this way, for my sake and for my future daughters-should I have one- sake.

[Via New York Times]

Today, I am proud to be a democrat. I am proud to be a woman. I am proud to be watching history in the making. I sat here and watched Hillary’s concession speech on CNN and I felt proud because for the first time in the history of the United States we had the decision to either elect a woman or a black man to run for presidency. For the first time ever we have a black man running to be president of the United States. This is a moment that I am proud to be able to see, and I am proud to be able to share the importance of it with my stepson and explain to him what a big deal this is and how this is going to open him up for many choices in the future. I’ve been saying from the very beginning that should Hillary not win I would vote for Obama, because regardless of what the differences between them is, and regardless of how I feel about him personally, the issues are still there and they will not away easily and we need to tell the government about how we feel about this issues. The biggest way we could tell the government is to vote for the person that addresses these issues and promises to change the way the government is controlling our rights.

McCain, I feel, will be the worst person to run this country. Allowing him to serve a term would be the equivalent of giving Bush a third term. He’s wishy-washy. He has no enthusiasm for what his issues are, he goes up at to the podiums to make his speeches and I fall asleep. There’s no chemistry, no passion, nothing. He’s like a wet fish. Obama has passion.

I have to comment about something because after her speech they were interviewing random people on the floor and they were all saying that if Obama would not pick Hillary as his running mate, they were not going to vote for him, and I’ve heard rumors of people not going to vote at all because they don’t want to have to vote for the lesser of two evils. I have this to tell them: YOU’RE STUPID! Barrack Obama believes in basically the same issues that Hillary believed in. Both Hillary and Obama are about instituting social change in our country that has already been crippled by a president who’s more concerned about his pride, his ego, and his pockets, then the real issues at hand, and I see the same thing in McCain.

Here’s McCain on the Ellen Degeneres show. Watch and I’ll comment below.

This man starts off as saying that he feels a contract is ok between people of the same sex, but what gets me is what is the different between said contract and actual marriage? Why not just go ahead and say “I agree with gay marriage”? In truth, you can’t force the church to allow this, and that’s their decision as a private, religious institution, I just won’t support that religious institution. Simple. But when it comes to the government, if they’re willing to allow “contracts” that give gay couples the same rights as married couples, just go ahead and call it a “marriage” already, because that’s what it is. At this point it’s just a play on words. Even after Ellen made some incredibly good points to him on how segregated his thoughts are, he stands by his point but almost embarassingly. This is not a man who stands by his convictions.

McCain was just here in Miami talking about conserving the Everglades, but he’s the one that voted against fund