Work in progress…

Everything will be functioning nicely soon!

Discrimination laws now protecting those who refuse to do their jobs!

Bush wants to make it illegal to discriminate against someone to work at a federally funded health clinics because they refuse to perform services abortions or distribute medications birth control pills and information about birth control, abortions, or emergency contraception. Last I checked, if you refuse to do those things at a health clinic, you are not performing your essential job function to provide thorough medical care.

This is not an issue of can’t, it is an issue of won’t.

You don’t want to work at the clinic to prevent teen pregnancy: you want to work at the clinic to disseminate your harmful beliefs. Go find a fucking church to preach at or something, because a federally funded health clinic is not the place.

Bush also wants to redefine abortion to include: “any of the various procedures - including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action - that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.” Before or after implantation? ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY? If it is before implantation, you are not pregnant, so you cannot have an abortion. You have to be WITH CHILD before you can have a medical procedure to be WITHOUT CHILD.

Now go register to vote for Barack “I don’t support your right to privacy” Obama so we don’t get stuck with John “I’d rather give up my left testicle than allow a woman access to birth control and abortions” McCain. You have to pick the best of both evils, and in this case, it is definitely Obama.

Murderers and rapists in the military

My local paper did a four part story titled “Suspect Soldiers” where they looked into the lives and pasts of the men and women serving in the war. This final segment examines military recruiting practices with a fine microscope, and for good reason: soldiers convicted of crimes before enlisting in the armed forces later committed crimes (sometimes the same crimes) while they were at war.

MIDLAND, TEXAS — Private First Class Steven D. Green, accused of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdering her family, entered the Army with a criminal record for minor offenses that included possession of drug paraphernalia.

But a yearlong examination by The Sacramento Bee found that Green’s court record was not the worst among former and current Midland residents applying for the military since the Iraq war began, and he’s not the only one to later be charged with committing offenses in the military. [...]

Among those who enlisted was a man with a history of inpatient treatment for mental illness and others with records of drug possession, assault, theft and illegally carrying weapons. At least 10 had outstanding charges, fines or sentences when they applied for military service.

When Green applied for the Army in 2005, a court record noted that he owed outstanding fines and “must contact court immediately.” The following year in Iraq, Green drank before going to a house he’d previously visited, where he emerged from a room to tell fellow soldiers, “I just killed them. All are dead,” according to an affidavit from an FBI agent.

Green was discharged from the Army “due to a personality disorder,” the affidavit says. He subsequently was charged by a federal court in Kentucky with murdering and sexually assaulting Abeer Kassem Hamza Al-Janabi and killing her parents and sibling. Two months ago, Green’s attorneys notified prosecutors that they may use insanity as a defense.

Now, I know the military will just about take anybody, especially these days, but when you look at the statistics the Bee uncovered, it kind of makes you wonder. Are the Marines recruiting petty criminals and training them to become better criminals? They did it with Lee Harvey Oswald, and they are doing it now with similarly serious consequences.

None of the recently recruited Marines have murdered any Americans (yet) - and certainly not Presidents - which is probably the reason such antics are getting very little publicity. They are killing (and raping) “the enemy” in Iraq: something many Americans shockingly still support. These disgusting military recruitment practices really need to stop.

Image courtesy of The Sacramento Bee.

Defense claims suspect “extraordinarily large”, couldn’t rape 13 y/o girl

This has got to be one of the most ridiculous defenses in a rape trial that I have ever heard, emphasis mine:

The attorney representing a Lansdale man in a high-profile rape case wants a mold made of his client’s penis to prove to jurors that he couldn’t have committed the crime.

Attorney Marvin Gold wants Montgomery County prison officials to give Ronald A. McDade, 33, the privacy and a special kit to make a cast of his genitalia before he’s tried on charges that he raped a 13-year-old girl in January.

Gold said McDade’s accuser didn’t suffer injuries consistent with someone who had been assaulted by his client, whom he described as a “freak of nature” who is “extraordinarily large.”

Prosecutor Todd Stephens called the request an outlandish attempt to create a sideshow. [...]

Gold said he came up with the idea for the mold on his own after learning about the extent of the girl’s injuries. He said they weren’t as serious as one would expect.

Gold said he plans to show the mold to the jury to bolster his case that the girl should have had more injuries.

Stephens said he’s unaware of any medical experts who would testify that every rape victim suffers injuries.

Gold initially received permission from Judge Paul W. Tressler to take a camera and yard stick into prison to photograph his client.

“While I was in the process of making arrangements, it occurred to me, wouldn’t it be better if I had a three-dimensional, life-size casting?” Gold said.

The prison refused to comply with the request, and on Thursday Stephens filed a motion opposing it as well.

Gold said McDade is “embarrassed” about the possibility of having to get a mold of himself, but “he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison.”

Ok, seriously? You want to make a cast of your penis to prove to the jury that the 13-YEAR-OLD victim’s injuries were inconsistent with the size of your gigantic penis? You’ve got to be kidding me. While I’m sure there is some correlation between penis size and vaginal/anal injury in consensual intercourse, the act of rape does not require a large (or small) penis to cause severe injuries: a rapist causes emotional and physical damage even with the smallest penis in the land. If this is the rape suspect’s only defense, I’m going to have to side with the victim here and say GUILTY. Especially when the suspect is awaiting trial for luring a young girl into his car less than a year ago.

Who is to say that the rape victim should have had more injuries in order for this to be her attacker? I get that defense attorneys still find it fairly easily to attack the victim and blame her for being raped, but to say that she’s lying and that the wrong person has been arrested because of his penis size and her “lack” of injuries, now that’s just hateful. What kinds of injuries of the defense expecting? Permanent damage to vaginal tissue? Tearing? Shredding? Scars? Did it ever occur to the defense attorney that his expectations were over exaggerated and completely off base? The prosecution agrees with me on that one:

Stephens said he’s unaware of any medical experts who would testify that every rape victim suffers injuries.

Not every rape victim suffers from physical injuries, but many of them do. Focusing on her lack of vaginal injuries is like focusing on the lack of evidence in an embezzlement case. Just because it is not there, or it isn’t what you expected, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

If a judge grants his request, that opens a floodgate for rapists and their defense attorneys. “No, your honor, my client could not have raped that woman because his penis is too small to have caused such severe vaginal injuries.”

I’m pretty sure that all defense attorneys are scum, but this one has to be a real gem. Requesting permission to photograph and measure your client’s penis is a little out there, but then having the epiphany to create a three-dimensional model of it? That’s one sick bastard, let me tell you.

Generation Entitlement? Yes.

Via Anna:

Younger women arrive at a new office pumped up on Suze Orman and you-go-girl self-empowerment, and are quickly deflated by the necessary drudgery of copying and collating. Older women, who have paid their dues dealing with sexism and grunt work for decades, are chagrined that younger women assume they can just show up and take over. Commence an intergenerational clash.

Paula Bruno, the 43-year-old founder of a financial blog for women called Chicks and Balances, has noticed this dynamic developing more frequently. “There’s this influx of young women who don’t understand all the baby steps necessary in order to make it to the top,” she says. “I’m glad they have confidence, but boy do I wish they also had the savvy to realize that they can be pretty offensive to the veterans when they clearly don’t expect to play by the rules.”

I don’t agree with everything Courtney Martin says in this article. Our generation is, actually, quite entitled - at least in the way this article claims we are. The millennials (born in the 1980s to 2000s) are go-getters: they have the skills, knowledge, and ambition to get it done, so of course they grunt and groan when they are placed in positions much below their caliber because of their limited experience or age. It’d be like trying to run for President when you’ve only been a Senator for one term… Opps.

Yes, this is an intergenerational conflict, but it not what Martin claims it is. She puts all of the burden on the younger generation’s ambition, and not on the lack of communication between generations. The problem is the older generation doesn’t understand the younger generation can do so much more, and that they want to do so much more because they have the skills, expectations, etc. The younger generation doesn’t understand that the older generation expects them to put in their dues before they can get the good assignments, positions, etc: they feel entitled because they have a fancy degree and were told by their parents that they could do anything they wanted.

So, yes, there is a sense of entitlement on the younger generation’s part, but there is also a skewed perspective on what your job requires of you, and what is expected of you as someone entering the workforce for the first time.

Justifying the anger of the older generation by saying they had to fight through grunt work, etc, to get where they are today is totally unfeminist. Working women have been fighting to make the workplace safer and more beneficial to women for decades, and not just because they wanted it better for them, but because they wanted it better for themselves, and future workers. The problem is, of course, they’re threatened by a 22 y/o fresh out of college who knows who to work 3 operating systems, manually code web pages, dabble in graphic design, put together a decent article for the company newsletter, handle registration for events, control travel arrangements, AND copy, fax, print, and scan. Oh, and she can do it all in half the time.

While you can justify some of the jealous or anger on the younger generation’s aptitude with technology, that’s not always true. You can’t make the generalization that every older woman is not good at computers while their younger counterparts are. I have met 50 y/o computer genii and 21 y/os who can’t even find the on button. It’s not an age gap that causes the differences in technology, it’s the individual and whether they are willing to adapt to new technologies, and whether or not they like to use computers.

That financial blogger she quotes is a moron. Last time I checked, doing work above your pay grade, but within your skill level (and with permission), was not “against the rules”, it just makes people uncomfortable because you’re willing to do more work for less pay, making them and their big salary disposable. Unless you’re coming to work naked and doing that, I don’t see a rule violation here. And, the last time I inquired, doing an extra project to prove you have skills was not verboten: it was good business sense.

The only part of the article that is based on research actually holds a lot of truth, and explains why millenials (not just female ones) have difficult entering the workforce after college:

Jean Twenge, a psychologist and professor at San Diego State University, explains the mentality of 20-somethings in the workforce in her book Generation Me as wildly ambitious, not great at taking criticism, hungry for praise, and constantly craving flexibility. In other words, all that self-esteem education has had the nasty side effect of making younger women seem too big for their Blahniks.

Besides Martin’s snarky remark and incorrectly based assumptions, that paragraph is spot on.

When trained correctly, a millenial worker can be the best person on your team. When you pair that ambition with a nasty attitude, they can be the bane of your existence.

“Victim or Vixen?” The world’s worst headline for a news story about a famous pedophile.

Now, this article is supposed to be about the debate as to whether or not the alleged victim is actually the person shown on the R. Kelly child pornography sex tape, but the author of it decided to go for a catchy hook line, rather than starting the story off with what it was really about: R. Kelly is a pedophile, and he got caught on camera, but nobody is certain  who the victim was. I’m not even going to go into the fact that the article should be about the fact that R. Kelly is at trial for many counts of child pornography and not the victim’s identity.

She’s been described over several weeks of testimony as a Christian singer and a point guard, a participant in three-way sex and as the goddaughter to one of the music industry’s biggest stars.

As far as opening lines go, that’s pretty catchy. Sex! Scandal! Three-ways! Christianity! And then you read the next sentence, and you start to wonder what this article is really about:

Even the family of the alleged victim in the R. Kelly child pornography trial doesn’t seem to agree about her, especially about whether she’s on a 27-minute sex tape that could send the R&B star to prison for up to 15 year if convicted.

Continuing on with the story, they make it sound like the victim is on trial, rather than a pedophile:

Prosecutors say she was as young as 13 when the tape was made. Now 23, the woman has been identified at the trial. She has not spoken publicly about the case.

Prosecutors said they would not ask the alleged victim to testify. The defense hasn’t said whether they will, though Kelly attorney Sam Adam Jr. asked jurors in opening statements why prosecutors chose not to call her.

“One answer,” he said, his voice booming. “One: It’s not her on that tape.”

Let me say this now before my head explodes: it shouldn’t matter whether or not it is her on the tape. R. Kelly is at trial for having sex with a minor, and if the prosecution can prove that without being sure of the victim’s identity, then he should be convicted.

Not once does the entire article mention the word “pedophile”, which I find extremely shocking since the alleged victim was 13 at the time the tape was made, making her just on the cusp of puberty, which in the medical sense of the word, would make R. Kelly a pedophile.

So we can call (potential) child sexual abuse victims “vixens”, but we can’t call their attackers pedophiles?

Rebecca Walker calls Clinton supporters “reverse-sexists”

Rebecca Walker really just wants me to hate her, doesn’t she? I feel like she’s playing an immature game where she pisses off feminists across the globe in a desperate plea for attention and wealth. Here’s a tip: you’ll never be your mother, so just let it go. Alice Walker is a far better writer, and a much more likable person overall. On the bonus side, Alice Walker doesn’t hate feminism and blame it for everything she sees wrong with the world.

After her ridiculous article for the Daily Mail where she blamed feminism for women’s lack of babies, she found a way back into the media spotlight by publishing an article on CNN calling Clinton’s female supporters “reverse-sexists.”

But with a Democratic house divided, now is the time for healing, and this can only happen if Hillary’s staunch female supporters let go of the reverse-sexist ideology that women are inherently better, wiser, and more compassionate leaders.

They will have to acknowledge that sometimes the best woman for the job is actually a man — if it’s the right man. Obama’s vote against the war, marriage to his female mentor, outstanding record on reproductive choice and a host of other progressive issues, and his uncanny ability to inspire people all over the world suggest he’s just that.

It is time to turn the page on myopic gender-based Feminism and concede that while patriarchy is real, so is female greed, dishonesty and corruptibility.

I really thought we’d gotten over this whole thing about women voting for Clinton because she was a woman, and black men and women voting for Obama because he was African American, but apparently Rebecca Walker doesn’t agree with me. While I’m sure some women voted for Clinton because she was a woman and some African Americans voted for Obama because he was, I’m sure the majority of them were motivated by their political views, and not their similarity to their candidate of choice, whether it be race or gender. I really thought the feminist movement came to terms with this awhile ago: people are so shallow and stupid as to vote for the candidate that matches their personal identification, and accusing them of doing so is downright offensive and patronizing.

I didn’t even need to get to the need of the article where she admits to being an Obama supporter before I figured out that she was one. It’s almost like she’s trying to prove to the world just how bad-ass of a feminist she is by saying “see, look at me, I rose above the female greed and voted for the male candidate!”, as if that somehow makes her better than the feminist women who voted for Clinton.

I’m sorry, but where is her feminist solidarity? Does she really think she is so much more superior than the women who voted for Clinton because she didn’t engage in “reverse-sexism?” For a woman who is striving to encourage empowerment of individuals across the lines of race, gender, etc, she really doesn’t think highly of her fellow women.

She accuses women of voting for Clinton simply because of gender, but pens no response to the men who have voted for her, harking back to the stereotype that men are logical thinkers, and women are irrational and emotional. Why is it acceptable to call women out for voting for Clinton, but say nothing to the men who did? Were all women who voted for Clinton motivated by her gender, and the men motivated by her political views and campaign promises? If she’s going to continue playing such an immature game of blaming feminism for society’s problems, maybe she should make the jump and find a way to blame feminism for all the white men and women who voted for McCain, as well as all of the African Americans who were blinded by their race and voted for Obama.

But she won’t. And you know why? Rebecca Walker hates the feminist movement and she hates empowered women. She blames it for everything that was wrong with her childhood, and she blames it for her terrible relationship with her mother. Why not blame it for her ambivalence regarding motherhood, or the way women voted in 2008? One can only imagine what else she’ll find to blame feminism for. Higher clothing prices because we dare to demand non-sweatshop clothing? Global warming because feminism encouraged us to be the women we wanted to be, so we used aerosol hairspray and put a hole in the o-zone layer? Really, Rebecca, let it go.

Hating the feminist movement from the inside does nothing to increase its effectiveness, no matter how you try to mask your hatred of other women and the movement.

And BY THE WAY, there is no such thing as “reverse-sexism.” Sexism is discrimination based on gender, and while more women have to deal with sexism on a daily basis than men, it can cross gender boundaries and create problems for men as well.

Via Feministe.

Discounting your biological clock: is feminism to blame, or are you an idiot?

I’m going to go with a huge resounding no, but some people seem to think that feminism has convinced women that their careers are more important than children, and that women are losing out on motherhood because of it. I’m more inclined to believe this is people blaming feminism for their poor decision making skills. Rebecca Walker, child of Alice Walker, wrote the most god awful article I’ve ever seen, where she effectively blames feminism for her bad relationship with her mother, and for all the problems women are having when they try to conceive later in life:

Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They’ve missed the opportunity and they’re bereft.

Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women’s movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them - as I have learned to my cost. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations.

Now, see, this is what bothers me. Feminism has not told women to forgo having babies in favor of their careers. It has suggested that they take their careers into consideration when planning a family - and this is not a suggestion they have made only to women, they have made their suggestion to everyone. As with many other movements, the ideal is not necessarily executed properly when practiced by the masses.

In the end, it really does come down to make a choice: taking the time off to have a baby in the middle of your career and risking the loss of promotions, etc, or waiting until you’ve reached your goal and then taking the time off, risking that you won’t be able to have a baby. No matter how equal our society becomes, this will still be an issue for women that isn’t necessarily one for men. Feminism hasn’t forced women to wait until they are 40 to have children, it has simply made them realize that children do not have to come first. Their marriage, career, or other aspect of their life can come before children, as long as they have had the common sense to plan it out ahead of time.

Of course, that’s a totally different situation than deciding to have a child at 42 when you never wanted one before.

Via Feministe.

Women 2.0

According to market researchers at Sony Ericsson, women spend more on electronics every year than they do on shoes. I’m glad some technology companies are finally getting the point that simply making something pink or slapping a flower on something crappy (like a Motorola Razr) does not automatically mean that women will buy it. I care more about the specs on my next laptop than I do about buying a year’s worth of shoes, but I’m a slightly skewed sample.

It is worth noting that they did compare electronics purchases to shoe purchases, which means we still have a long way to go until women can shake the Imelda Marcos stereotype.

Via Switched.

Case update: Missouri makes cyber-harassment illegal

Missouri lawmakers are finally helping the law catch up with society: as a result of the Megan Meier suicide, lawmakers passed a bill to make cyber-harassment illegal. From the LA Times:

Responding to the suicide of a Missouri teenager who was teased over the Internet, state lawmakers Friday gave final approval to a bill making cyber-harassment illegal.

The measure updates state laws to keep pace with technology by removing the requirement that the communication be written or over the telephone. Supporters say the bill will cover harassment from computers, text messages and other electronic devices.

The measure now goes to Republican Gov. Matt Blunt for his signature. He issued a statement praising lawmakers:

“Social networking sites and technology have opened a new door for criminals and bullies to prey on their victims. These protections ensure that our laws now have the protections and penalties needed to safeguard Missourians from Internet harassment.”

Many of the bill’s provisions came from a gubernatorial task force that studied Internet harassment after reports last fall on details of Megan Meier’s suicide. Police say Megan, 13, hanged herself in 2006 after being deceived on MySpace.

This makes me much happier. While I was glad to see Lori Drew indicted, I think she should be indicted for what she did rather than the only charge someone could find to stick her with. I personally hope she rots in jail, either for cyber-harassment, or 3 counts of whatever it was they figured out could stick.