(Note: I didn’t add the music video itself, even though it’s been released, because I think that the imagery of the video is potentially at odds with certain elements of the song that I want to discuss below.  Plus, this link has the lyrics attached)

Now, as a self-avowed feminist, I have a love-hate relationship with Eminem.  He’s wicked talented, and I love most of his music — it’s complex and thought-provoking.  On the other hand, he’s written a lot of songs about violence toward women — specifically, against his ex-wife Kim — and some of these fantasies are pretty horrific.  One particularly notorious song, “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” is narrated to the speaker’s infant daughter as he describes how he murdered her mother and has stuffed her corpse in the trunk of his car.

But I want to leave that aside, because I’m not really writing about Eminem.  I’m writing about the issues which this song addresses, and about how our culture is dealing with them right now, and about my own experiences with them, and how we really need to change the dialog around these issues, because young women are not being served by our current attitude.

Essentially, what I want to argue is that we have it backwards.  We are telling girls that they are valued by the wrong things — and in the process, are telling them that they’re not valuable at all.  And it’s difficult to discuss, because of course if I were to ask you right now, “Should a girl value her virginity or her life more highly?” — well, there’s almost no one who would say that virginity is more valuable.  Not if they know that they’re being judged on their response.

But that’s not really what our culture says.  And by “our culture” do I mean the secular evil culture that’s constantly trying to tempt us away from the right path?

Oh, goodness, do I ever wish that was what I was talking about.

This is just an introduction — I can’t possibly say everything I want to about the topics of female sexuality, rape, domestic violence, and all the awful things that go along with those subjects in a single post.  So join me next week for Chastity and Violence week, where I’ll be posting several different essays that I’ve had in the works for a while, all on the same subjects, and organized around this theme.

Five days, five essays, five appallingly triggering topics.

Don’t get scared on me now.

And really, whatever your feelings might be toward gay marriage, you have to admit that something really big happened yesterday.  Judge Walker’s decision will, very likely, have ripples all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.  This may very well be the beginning of a federal case which will once and for all declare the legality (or illegality) of gay marriage in this country (and let’s face it, the U.S.S.C. ain’t gonna keep their hands off it, not now).  This may very well be the beginning of our generation’s landmark case — our Roe v. Wade, our Brown vs. B. of E., our Dred Scott.  Whichever side you fall on, you have to admit that this country will never, ever be the same.

You’re either excited or terrified right now.

Let’s forget all of that for a second if we can, though.

I’m seeing a lot of the same type of criticism coming from many of my pro-8 friends.  (For clarification, “pro-8″ is the same as “anti-same-sex-marriage” — it’s just a lot easier to type, and I’m going to take advantage of that fact.)

For the sake of fair-and-balancedness, I’ll cite the words of Tim Wildmon, President of the American Family Association, a major supporter of Prop. 8:

“It’s inexcusable for [Judge Walker] to deprive the citizens of California of their right to govern themselves, and cavalierly trash the will of over seven million voters. This case never should even have entered his courtroom.”

Essentially, the argument boils down to this:

America is a democracy.  A democracy is run by the will of the people.  The will of the people dictated that gay marriage is not legal.  Therefore, a federal judge has no right to overturn the will of the people, and America has ceased to be a democracy.  (This argument is often, though not always, served with a heaping helping of “The Founding Fathers are weeping from their perch in Heaven.”)

Again, as I’ve said many times before on this blog, and will say many times again, I don’t care what your political affiliation is.  I don’t care if you believe that same-sex marriage should continue to be illegal in this country (though I might debate you).  All I care about is that you make an intelligent and well-reasoned argument which takes the facts into consideration.  And this argument, my friends, is not well-reasoned.

First things first.  America is not, nor has it ever been, a democracy.  Democracy is a nice word, and it’s a great rallying cry to stand behind.  It motivates people to vote and get involved, because it implies that the people have all the power.  It’s necessary to America’s governmental system that people stay involved and vote, though that isn’t the only mechanism by which the country operates.  Therefore, it’s often useful to refer to America as a democracy, as a motivational device, to make sure that there’s a decent turnout to the polls at even the minor, boring elections.

But pure democracy is a very bad idea.  The majority is not exactly the sharpest crayon in the box on most issues.  The majority has done, said, and thought some remarkably stupid things.  The majority doesn’t have the time, inclination, or attention span to become experts in law, public policy, political theory, and all the other things that go into intelligent and well-informed policy writing.  And nobody knew this better than the writers of the Constitution.

Most people learned in their high school Government class that the U.S. Government has 3 branches of power, and that these 3 branches of power all operate under a system of “checks-and-balances.”  The President is able to check the power of the Congress by power of veto.  The U.S. Supreme Court is able to check the President by evaluating laws which he signs into power and voiding actions which he takes without the ratification of Congress.  The Courts are checked by I-forget-right-now.  (Like I said — busy day yesterday.)  My textbook had a cool little graphic which explained it.

This is not, strictly speaking, accurate.  There are 3 branches of government codified in the Constitution, to be sure, but the U.S. operates with a system of 4 checks-and-balances.  The 4th, of course, being the will of the people.  This is why, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court is appointed and not elected — because the will of the people cannot have absolute sway.  This is also why all laws codified by democratic election are subject to challenge and repeal via the federal courts.

As I mentioned earlier in my list of landmark cases, there is a grand and noble tradition in this country of repealing the will of the people via judicial order.  Were it not for judicial order, public schools and the military would both still be segregated.  Women would be ineligible for the same pay scale and benefits as men.  Non-whites would be ineligible for the same pay scale and benefits as whites, for that matter.  The country would be a far uglier and more unequal place.  Moreover, public opinion still might not have changed.

It is, after all, the typical narrative that the civil rights movement/feminist movement/whatever only gained steam after the group which was being discriminated against won the hearts and minds of the majority, and America spoke as with one voice and declared that we did not want to discriminate any more.  But that’s not the real narrative.  In fact, the courts — and sometimes other branches of the federal government — most often led the way and overturned the will of the people in order to promote the common good.  (See: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Executive Order to Integrate the Military (1948).)  Public opinion only began to change after we’d gotten the message from “activist” judges that prejudice was no longer what the cool (and powerful) kids were doing.

Phew.  1k words in and I need to wrap this up.

The point is, judicial review is good — great, in fact.  Our country would not be the wonderful, free, equal place that it is today without the phenomenon of judicial review.  Judicial review has played a major role in turning America into a bastion of freedom, and has inspired not only Americans, but people around the world, to check their preconceptions about what is right and wrong and take a stand for equality.

Again, I don’t care which side of the debate you come down on.  There are plenty of arguments for why America should not legalize same-sex marriage (though after following Perry v. Schwarzenegger et al. for 10 months I’m not so sure that there are many strong ones anymore).

But I do care that people be responsible and informed citizens.  I do care that they know at least the rudiments of how their government works, and that they vote accordingly.  I do care that the public debate put the brakes on this downward spiral into rhetoric and hate that we’ve been following, and start to climb back towards decency and the common welfare.

So please, for the good of the nation: give judicial review the respect it deserves.

Removing the 14th Amendment from the Constitution.

It began with an irrational panic, fueled — as most irrational panics seem to be these days — by ill-informed lawmakers who don’t even know the tenets of the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold, much less any of the rest of the laws of this country.  They referred to the imaginary phenomenon in shorthand as “anchor babies,” and while the concept has been around for a while it’s recently reaching new heights in the national discourse — specifically, as the latest of many justifications for why Arizona’s new SB 1070 needs to exist.

The concept is basically this.  Pregnant Mexican women, seeking to exploit our country’s 14th Amendment (which states that any person born on U.S. soil is an American citizen), cross the border illegally and give birth to their children.  The mothers then have the right to live in this country indefinitely, because the 14th Amendment also extends right of citizenship to any relative whatsoever of any American citizen living or dead.

(That was a joke.)

In fact, leaving “anchor babies” is completely impossible according to 8 USC 1204 (INA 2224), the specific section of our country’s federal policy regarding the non-citizen parents of citizen children.  There is simply no provision for parents to be automatically granted citizenship, amnesty, green cards, or what-have-you by virtue of having a citizen child in the United States.  Amnesty and citizenship rest, as they have always rested, with the U.S. Attorney General’s office on an individual case-by-case basis.  Now, may the Attorney General extend amnesty as he sees fit?  Sure.  Might he be persuaded to do so for the benefit of “family unity”?  Of course.

But for many Republicans, including Sen. Lindsay Graham, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, co-sponsor of SB 1070, that’s not good enough.

Earlier this week, Sen. McConnell suggested that Congress “ought to take a look at” the 14th Amendment.  In addition, legislation suggesting that the 14th Amendment be repealed or otherwise rendered ineffective has been slowly building up steam in the Senate, with new legislation being sponsored by 93 different public officials.  According to this new piece of legislation, being born in the U.S. will no longer automatically qualify any individual for U.S. citizenship.

Of course, no one is actually suggesting any new standards, because what would our government be if not deliberately vague and fearmongering?  But the irony of this particular measure is that it would, if enacted, disqualify most members of the current U.S. government from continuing to serve in public office.

See, the 14th Amendment doesn’t exclusively deal with citizenship.  It is also our current basis for determining most of the basic functions of our government.  As Orly Taitz will never let this country forget, one of the primary qualifications for holding U.S. public office (particularly the Presidency) is a very specific type of U.S. citizenship — that is, the President must have been born on U.S. soil.  Requirements for Senate and House are less stringent, but still require Senators and Representatives to be U.S. citizens for a minimum period.  The majority of U.S. public officials — of U.S. citizens, period — have obtained U.S. citizenship under the provision of the 14th Amendment.  There is no further rigmarole your parents had to go through, at the hospital where you were born, than simply proving that you were born on U.S.-owned soil — a fairly easy task all things considered.  So if the section of the 14th Amendment which automatically grants citizenship to all babies born on U.S. soil is repealed or rendered ineffective via statute, then nearly the entire population of the U.S. — including the very U.S. Senators who want to sign this bill into law — will be disenfranchised.  Illegal immigrants on the very soil they are trying to (cough) “protect.”

I’ll leave aside for a moment the fact that, according to U.S. Border Patrol statistics, the Mexico-America border is less porous than it’s been since 1975.

I’m going to leave aside for a moment the fact that racial issues keep on intruding into this whole debate, despite the fact that none of the sponsors of these bills believe themselves to be racist.  (The 14th Amendment, for those who don’t know — and I am looking straight at you, Sen. McConnell — was signed into law during Reconstruction, as part of the program to extend citizenship to non-whites.)

I’m just going to say that this bill is, quite possibly, the dumbest bill ever to gain any sort of following whatsoever in the history of the U.S. Senate.  Whatever the safety of our country and security of our borders may be worth, it certainly isn’t worth disenfranchising everyone in the country except the naturalized immigrants.

But also, I really don’t have another option.  When I was interviewing with my current building manager about living in my current apartment, she looked at me and said very seriously that she wanted to give me a front unit that faced the street, because I didn’t look like the sort of person who would hang laundry up on the balcony.

Well, I wasn’t.  But if I had been, I would have been either evicted or moved to a back unit, or severely harassed at the least.  Why?  Because I’m bringing down the look of the building.

I have to admit, I didn’t give it a second thought at the time.  But lately, the question of hanging up one’s clothes to dry is being reintroduced into the national debate over how to be green.  (Hint: it ain’t exactly easy.)

The argument being made by many environmental activists is that it’s safer for the environment to dry your clothes in the sun.  They want to be able to encourage people to begin using clotheslines as an alternative laundry system, and reserve their dryers for occasional use — or give them up altogether.

The problem with this is that, much like my building manager, most homeowners’ associations and similar organizations have banned clotheslines outright.  Why’s that?

Because they make the neighborhood look poor.

And here’s where the politics of environmentalism gets interesting.

Modern Westerners (American and European alike) have gotten used to a lot of conveniences — conveniences which are all, frankly, quite modern.  In fact, the home and its technologies are modernizing at a rate unheard of until about 70 years ago.  But like most of modern technology, home technologies can also be a marker of status.  This, for example, is why Jell-O and aspic were so popular 50 or so years ago, despite being relatively disgusting foods.  (Dried cow hoofs, people.  Come on.)  Making gelatin requires a refrigerator, which was expensive, which was a status symbol because most people couldn’t afford it.  Same with big cars, washer/dryers, in fact most of the daily-use objects which are to blame for the current condition of our planet.

Nowadays, access to washers and dryers is pretty ubiquitous.  Most people have either a personal washer/dryer, or a laundromat nearby.  It’s not really much of a status thing anymore, in the literal sense that only people who are of high status can afford them.  But because technologies are evolving at this very high rate, most homeowners still think of clotheslines as indicative of poverty.  No one would ever advertise the fact that they didn’t have a dryer; it’s just too-too declasse.

There’s a lot of this kind of discrimination still going on.  A lot of jobs won’t hire me if I don’t own my own car — because what kind of loser chooses to bike?  A lot of buildings won’t allow for bikes to be parked in front of buildings or stored on balconies.  And of course, it’s illegal in many neighborhoods to use a clothesline or other alternative washer/dryer methods.  According to current estimates, over 50 million homes in the U.S. are affected by clothesline bans, mostly in wealthy neighborhoods — ironically, the neighborhoods which are often best able to absorb the extra time and effort costs which green homemaking requires.

A documentary is coming out which addresses this issue, called “Drying for Freedom.”  They’ve disabled embedding on the trailer, but here’s the link on Youtube:

Here’s the news story:

Religious, homophobic hate surges in LA County

It’s funny (except for not) because it’s the exact opposite of what the Prop. 8 supporters have claimed is happening.  Recently, Prop. 8′s defense have blocked multiple proposals regarding the federal case — from allowing the trial to be broadcast (which is admittedly atypical) to allowing the names of Prop. 8 supporters and campaigners against domestic partnership rights to be released to the closed court (which is entirely atypical — one might say it borders on the illegal in fact).  The argument they’ve used to accomplish this is that they have good reason to expect violence, intimidation, and other generally unpleasant things from their opponents.

Sadly, the Supreme Court apparently doesn’t read the news.

Far from an increase in violence against Prop. 8 supporters, there has been an increase in violence from Prop. 8 supporters toward queer (or presumed queer) individuals.  As if they’re emboldened by their success, and press onward to…what?

Now, I know that not all, or even most, of Prop. 8′s supporters would ever violently attack a gay person just for being gay, just like I’m aware that not all or even most abortion opponents would murder a man in cold blood in his church.  However, the same phenomenon seems to have occurred in each of these cases, and I’m equally concerned about both.  Namely, the fact that the groups to which the violent offenders claim to belong are circling the wagons around them rather than openly condemning them.  By circling the wagons, I mean continuing to paint the people who agree with them as victims rather than victimizers.

It’s official at this point: the people who oppose gay marriage are victims of nothing.  There has never been a successful case in the U.S. which prevented a religious figure from condemning homosexuality from the pulpit.  Parents have never lost the right to transfer their child to a different school, remove them from school, or have their child skip a day because homosexuality was being actively promoted in their classrooms.  (Nota bene, parents: This is different from being taught that homosexuals exist.) No clergyperson has ever been forced to perform a gay marriage against his or her religious beliefs, nor has a church or other religious building been forced to open its doors to a gay ceremony.  And finally, there has never in any reported statistic (that I’ve been able to find – please, if I’m wrong, find the journalistic sources to refute me) been a hate crime against someone because they opposed gay marriage.

There has, however, been a significant year-to-year increase in hate crimes against gay people.  And note well, my conservative friends: by “hate crime” I don’t mean “saying that homosexuality is wrong.”  I mean unprovoked violence against a person, solely and expressly because that person is or appears to be a homosexual.

For a group of people who claim that they are helping America take the moral high ground, this is frankly disgusting.  I’m not insisting that the supporters of Prop. 8 acknowledge and publicly denounce every single hate crime — of course not.  What I’m insisting is that they reconnect themselves with reality, and stop abusing their soapbox by loudly and repeatedly claiming the opposite.  The self-victimizing has finally gone beyond the point of being simply laughable and become reprehensible.

Frank Schaeffer, son of Francis Schaeffer, one of the prime movers of the modern American evangelical movement, talks about the horrifying language being used in a variety of contexts — from defending Scott Roeder to t-shirts encouraging the public to assassinate Obama — to justify violence and murder by quoting Bible verses out of context.

Here’s another one too (couldn’t embed it):

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#34004795

Then they came for the illegal immigrants, and I cheered them on, because they are taking jobs away from real hard-working Americans.

Then they came for the gays, and I cheered them on, because gay marriage is an abomination before God, and America needs to be a Christian nation, not a nation where people can do whatever they believe is right.

Then they came for me, and the whole rest of the world was cheering them on.

I’ve mentioned here before (and I’m not the only person mentioning it either) that insurance companies routinely discriminate against women simply for being…well, women.  The natural workings of the female body — menstruation, menopause, and particularly childbirth — are viewed, by a large number of insurance companies, as illnesses.  That is, if your body doesn’t work like a man’s body, then your body is abnormal and can be denied basic treatment.  It’s no longer a matter of covering Viagra and not birth control.  It’s a matter of covering Viagra and not childbirth or pediatric care.  And if none of this was horrible enough, watch this video:

Did you catch that?

She was being required to get herself sterilized, out of her own pocket (because of course, having no insurance means no co-pay), in order to even qualify.  And it gets better: since she would need to deliver her 3rd child via C-section, she and her husband can’t have a third child (which they were planning to do).  The insurance companies are taking away her family’s reproductive autonomy for no reason whatsoever!

Insurance companies don’t deserve any sort of consideration from the government.  They are unregulated, unreasonable, and outright hostile to the vast majority of the American public.  They treat health like a Good Ol’ Boys club.  And we should not continue to tolerate it, for any reason at all — especially not based on misinformation, lies, and the unwillingness to do one’s own research on the issue.

First off, here’s the link:

Illustrated BMI Categories

The first thing I’ll say, is that I’m fascinated by the sudden introduction of non-scientific-sounding language when it comes to “normal.”  It’s kind of amazing the psychological effect that word has.  I can process “underweight,” “overweight” and “obese” just fine — those all have to do with one’s weight, which is measurable, quanitifiable, and specific.  But normal?  Not even “of normal weight.”  Just “normal.”  Well, that can mean a host of different things — be they physical, psychological, emotional, behavioral, sartorial…the list goes on.  There are fat people, thin people, and normal people.  What this implies, of course, is that there is something fundamentally abnormal about being a person who is outside of a specific, and definitely not mathematically normal, range of physical proportions.  And we see this in the way we talk about overweight and underweight people in other contexts — underweight people generally are assumed to have eating disorders, overweight people are straight-up morally reprehensible, gluttonous and lacking in maturity and self-control.  Even something as allegedly medical and scientific as BMI is unable to escape from the judgmental language of “normality” — and scientists should know better than to describe the minority of the population as normal in any case.

But the other, and far, far more important point, is that BMI is totally arbitrary.  Some of the “obese” people are obviously not fat — they are proportioned on larger scale, sure, but they’re not fat.  Some of the “underweight” people are also not too thin — they look perfectly normal and healthy.  Of particular interest are the one or two people — shown in active, athletic situations — who are classified as being “at death’s door” (in the joking language of the person putting together the slide show).  Clearly, these women are living relatively healthy lifestyles — they’re athletes, they’re active, they’re certainly much more active than I am at least!  (Curse my full-time student status and desk job…)  But because they’re “fat,” then they are obviously about to die, because their weight is — and this is vital — solely the result of the bad and unhealthy choices they make.

I’m also interested in the difference between the ways men and women are classified — and particularly, the few women who are photographed with children or babies.  BMI measures particular distributions of body fat — and despite the fact that they ask you for your gender when they do the calculation, the formula for men and women isn’t all that different.  So what about pregnancy, which necessitates the accumulation of fat on the body (and incidentally makes it more difficult, on a metabolic level, to shed body fat)?  What about the fact that women tend to retain more fat, in order to support breastfeeding?  What about the fact that we have two giant bags of fat hanging off the front of our torsos at all times?  Sorry, not accounted for, ladies: your boobs are hot, but you look fat in them.

Every time I hear about the “obesity epidemic” in America, or listen to idiots like Karl Lagerfeld whine about how no one wants to look at a big woman, or watch my poor darling (completely sexy) friend *name redacted* wear herself out spending hours and hours at the gym, where she will never lose a pound because she doesn’t have a pound to spare on her body, just so that “someone will want to date her someday”…  I think of this slideshow, and sigh for humanity.  Or maybe just Americanity.

Oh, and for the record, my BMI is “morbidly obese.”  I’m recommended to lose over 60 pounds, and the BMI calculator predicts that I won’t survive another five years of completely stagnant weight.    I don’t buy it though; I am one sexy beast.