Syndicate and Hague

I was already a little twisted over the article that ran in the Star Tribune about U of MN’s president Bob Bruininks this weekend. Then I looked at my student account for the coming school year and nearly had a heart attack. Tuition went up $353/semester ($706 a year) for graduate students, making annual tuition alone over $10,000 per year. Tuition for undergraduates went up to $550/year and is pushing $10,000 per year.

I know I’ve talked about this before, but the sticker shock of my upcoming degree combined with an uncomfortably cheerleading Strib article and the sadness I have looking at my undergraduate alma mater (and employer and place where I’m getting my PhD) become further and further out of reach for average Minnesotans is pretty profound.

The article was already sour to me when it stated that “Bruininks also would not back down when clerical workers walked off the job a year ago, and the strike fell apart.” Summing up what happened last year in those few words that favored the administration was inaccurate at best. The pay scales at the University as we strive ever further towards that “top three” designation are, as in corporate America, increasingly skewed. Faculty in certain schools make incredible salaries. Whether or not the salaries are deserved/necessary is a point of ambivalence for me–I see both the pros and cons–but to essentially put the workers at the University “in their place” while lavishing senior administrators and plenty of faculty with six figure incomes and assorted perks is, in my opinion, simply immoral.

Anyone who works in academia long enough knows that the quest for “top three” status isn’t about the University’s undergraduate education. It’s about securing grants, having top notch graduate programs, doing groundbreaking research…and all of those are good things, in my opinion. However, there is that pesky reality that we are also supposed to educate thousands of new undergraduate students every year.

The naive undergrads who commented on the Strib article think this quest for glory has been done for them, but that’s just not in evidence. We still rely heavily on graduate students and adjuncts to handle undergraduate courses and I don’t see that changing.

As for the idea that the U should be an elite institution and the people who cannot get in (nevermind that the article didn’t exactly address students who can get in, but cannot see how to finance such a hefty price tag), I’m again ambivalent. If you want the U to be the “pinnacle” of public university education in Minnesota, I’m not necessarily opposed to that. But we’d better damn well get our priorities straight. The U can be a fantastic school and an affordable school, if we decide that it should be.

While I whine a bit about the amount I’m going to have to put in for my graduate degree, I’m not actually very broken up about graduate tuition rates. Graduate school is nice, it certainly gets you places a BA/BS doesn’t, it tends to bump your pay up, but it’s just not necessary that masses of Minnesotans get masters degrees and PhDs.

However, pinnacle or not, the kids of Minnesota should have access to the U. They shouldn’t be priced out of an education here. The people of this state have a vested interest in an educated workforce and our student populations should have affordable access to everything from the community colleges to the state universities to the University. It’s really that simple.

Hey! Did you hear? Russia and Georgia are pretty much at war. There had been a build up of Russian troops in South Ossetia and then all hell broke loose. This is what the Georgian prez had to say about it:

Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, said Russia’s ambitions were even more extensive. He declared that Georgia was in a state of war, and said in an interview that Russia was planning to seize ports and an oil pipeline and to overthrow his government.
(NY Times)

Gosh, you might say, I don’t even know where Georgia is in relation to Russia! Well, I’m here to help with that.

Sadly, the U.S. has no moral authority to say anything the Russians need to take seriously. How can this not make you laugh?

The Bush administration said it would seek a resolution from the United Nations Security Council condemning Russian military actions in Georgia.
(NY Times)

UN Security Council, eh? Well. We’ve always cared so much about what they think.

As one top adviser described the argument, Mr. Bush must decide ”whether to go it alone or go to the U.N.” with one final if largely symbolic effort to force Mr. Hussein to re-admit arms inspectors, who left Iraq three and a half years ago.

…

Secretary General Kofi Annan seemed to confirm those fears at a news conference today in Botswana, when he said, ”The U.N. is not agitating for military action” against Iraq.

China and Russia, which both have veto power in the Security Council, oppose military action. France, which also holds a veto, has demanded a Security Council vote and has made it clear it would oppose military action without evidence of an imminent threat from Iraq.
(NY Times, 2002)

And now,

The Russians issued an ultimatum to Georgian forces to disarm or face attack, and proceeded to occupy government buildings there, the Georgians said.

And the South Ossetia conflict also appeared to have widened, with Georgia accusing Russia of capturing the town of Gori in central Georgia.
(BBC)

Sooooo…wait…I did promise to tell you why everyone should STFU about John Edwards, didn’t I? Yeah, that was kind of a bait and switch. But not really, because the lack of reporting (outside more “global” news outlets) on this conflict is partially because the news fucking sucks. They spend a ridiculous amount of time going over the details of Edwards’s affair, and nothing on a war breaking out.

But here are my thoughts about Edwards:

It was dumb. But is an affair really our business? My philosophy on sexual ‘improprieties’ is that if it’s personal, it’s your own business, but if you spend your days as a moral crusader trying to invade other peoples’ bedrooms, then it’s public business. I think it’s a bit melodramatic to say, as Andrea Mitchell did on Countdown on Friday, that Edwards’s public service career is over. And, by extension, Elizabeth Edwards’s.

Do you hear that? That is the sound of my eyes rolling so far into the back of my head that they snapped whatever attaches them to my body.

Did affairs affect the careers of John McCain (HuffPo, LA Times)? Newt Gingrich (See below? Did toe-tapping in a Minneapolis airport destroy Larry Craig? What about David Vitter going to a prostitute?

Nope. They hung onto office.

A taste of Gingrich’s affair:

But the most notorious of them all is undoubtedly Gingrich, who ran for Congress in 1978 on the slogan, “Let Our Family Represent Your Family.” (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair’s Gail Sheehy: “We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, ‘I never slept with her.’” Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.
(Washington Monthly)

How about the criminal behavior of other Republicans (Well, Vitter is in this group as well) Here’s a list from Kos. I’ll give you some highlights (links to sources are found on the page I just linked to).

• John Bolton: George W. Bush’s latest Ambassador to United Nations. Corroborated allegations that Mr. Bolton’s first wife, Christina Bolton, was forced to engage in group sex have not been refuted by the State Department.
• Robert Bauman, Republican congressman and anti-gay activist from Maryland, was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy he picked up at a gay bar.
• Bob Barr, Republican Congressman from Georgia. Sponsored the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, saying “The flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality are licking at the very foundation of our society, the family unit.” Was married three times. Paid for his second wife’s abortion. Failed to pay child support to the children of his first two wives and while married to his third and present wife was photographed licking whipped cream off of strippers at his inaugural party.
• Jon Grunseth, Republican businessman and candidate for Minnesota governor, withdrew his candidacy after allegations surfaced that he went swimming in the nude with four underage girls, including his daughter, and tried to grope one. “I’ve made some mistakes” he said.
• Newt Gingrich, Republican from Georgia, married three times. Gingrich campaign worker Anne Manning admitted that she gave Newt oral sex while he was still married to his first wife. Informed one wife he was filing for divorce while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer treatments.
• Henry Hyde, Republican Congressman from Illinois, Judge who oversaw Clinton’s impeachment proceedings, prominent opponent of reproductive rights, who had an extramarital affair with a woman who was married and had three children, during the course of which she and her husband were divorced.
• Bob Livingston, former Congressman (R-La.), Speaker of the House; resigned from the House in the wake of revelations about his past adultery — at the same time he was leading calls for impeachment of President Clinton.
• Jeff Miller, (R-Cleveland), Senate Republican Caucus Chairman in Tennessee and the sponsor of Tennessee’s Marriage Protection act, getting divorced (as of April 2005) because of an affair he was having with an office aide. Miller described the Tennessee Marriage Protection Act as a means of preserving the sanctity of marriage. He opposed an amendment, however, which stated that “Adultery is deemed to be a threat to the institution of marriage and contrary to public policy in Tennessee.”
• John Peterson, Congressman (R-Pa), accused of sexual harassment and creation of a hostile work environment by six women. Peterson has refused to admit a crime, saying only “I may have been an excessive hugger.”
• Jim West, Spokane Mayor. Supported a bill, which failed, would have barred gays and lesbians from working in schools, day-care centers and some state agencies. Voted to bar the state from distributing pamphlets telling people how to protect themselves from AIDS. Proposed that “any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person” among teens be criminalized. Had a sexual affair with an 18 year old boy.

And then there’s the stuff that crops up on a daily basis.

• Missouri state Rep. Scott Muschany, R-Frontenac, was indicted today in connection with a reported sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl on May 17, the day after this year’s Legislative session ended.
• Yesterday afternoon, Allen was sentenced on a misdemeanor count of solicitation for prostitution (in lay terms: they done punished him for trying to blow that guy in the potty room).
• The complaint, filed by Clearfield police Chief Jeffrey Rhone and signed by [District Attorney] Shaw, accuses Walker of using his cell phone to videotape a former girlfriend in an intimate moment with another man on Aug. 25, 2007. The complaint also alleges that he had contact with her on two other occasions, despite being told by a police officer on Aug. 25 that he should avoid further contact and that charges were pending.

As I’m sure you could tell, I could go on and on and on and on and on.

All I’m saying is: I don’t care who the hell you sleep with unless you go around making homophobic statements/legislating things like Defense of Marriage Acts/trying to outlaw abortion/promoting abstinence-only education/acting like a puritan freak about sex.

By the way–have you heard there’s a war a-brewin?

Not to be crass, but seriously, all y’all libertarians and Republicans can go screw yourselves. Live on an island where you don’t care about the society you live in. Tear each other to pieces in some Lord of the Flies fantasyland where the strong survive and blah blah blah.

This is a note I might otherwise post on my Twitter feed. A 140 character WTF, but this is serious.

First, I’ll tell you why I’m beyond outraged. The Star Tribune wrote today that police and fire calls may start to be billed to the recipients of said services in Duluth.

Let me quote from the article:

Duluth city administrators are considering charging fees to property owners and drivers for police and fire responses.

City spokesman Jeff Papas says the amount of the fees haven’t been set yet.

If the Duluth City Council agrees to charge fees, it would then set an amount. The council could vote July 28.

Papas says the city is looking into whether it can charge different fees for residents and nonresidents. If so, fire and vehicle extraction fees would apply to everyone, but only nonresidents would pay to have accidents investigated.

Papas says the fees could bring in an extra $100,000 per year for the city facing a $4.5 million deficit.

Screed ahead.

If our economy/society is in such shambles that we can’t provide basic rescue and protection services to ourselves based on a shared pool of resources, we have a problem.

And here is the problem we face in general. Since the 1980s, certain members of our society have been reaping the tremendous benefits of deregulation, while society itself is cracking under the weight of economic and structural disrepair that has happened with the abandonment of checks and balances on the free market.

Laissez faire economic policy is a dumb idea. The fairy tale that what is good for “the market” is good for the society is preposterous. The current crisis with foreclosures is a fantastic example. “The market” drove up prices and encouraged greedy and corrupt mortgage brokers to get home buyers/refinancers to sign on with loans they had no perceivable way of paying off.

Why would they do this? Huge, huge commission. The bigger the “sale,” the bigger the haul. Lack of oversight and regulation allowed this to continue on a grand scale. There were home buyers/refinancers who made greedy/bad decisions, but if you read the personal stories that have been reported, some were just outright deceived.

Conned. Conned because a lot of people were making a lot of money.

And what happens to the people who really profited on this? They lose a tiny percentage of their ghastly wealth? That’s hardly punishment for hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes and the destruction that wreaks on neighborhoods.

But forget that. We could talk about deregulation of mining, all those cranes that keep crashing down and killing people, the airline industry.

Deregulation=no oversight. No oversight=no one to call you out on fraud.

And now we’re in a situation where a city in this great state, and this is a great state, is considering charging for basic rescue and protection.

Minnesota is not perfect, but we used to value our communities. We knew that in order to have a functional state with a good quality of life, you had to invest in the society. We are responsible for the quality of our communities and neighborhoods.

If there’s no money, raise taxes. Forget this “fee-based” Republican crap. We are a society. We stand together or else we will fall apart. Hardly any of us could afford as a single household to create the kind of life that we have when we combine our resources. It is beyond my personal comprehension that people can ignore this simple fact.

I could scream right now, I’m so frustrated. Our physical infrastructure is disintegrating, and now our rescue/protection infrastructure is something we might have to consider the cost of the charges against the benefits of getting help.

Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Raise the damned income tax. Taxes are your obligation to the society in which you live.

Know what’s worse than taxes? A society where no one is accountable. Make people pay for rescue/protection services and some will opt out. You’d better hope those people don’t live next door to you if it happens.

This is a very quick hit on the first part of a two part series in the Minnesota Daily on the survey of what students value and what they perceive the University as valuing and the difference between them.

Students at the University of Minnesota currently pay $3,750 per semester in tuition, $324.10 in student fees, and a $500 “University fee.” This brings the grand total of one semester of education at a land grant, state-funded university to a whopping $4574.10 per semester.

That is $9,148.20 per year before books and course-related expenses.

As a Minnesotan, I find this abhorrent. Tuition has nearly doubled since I graduated in 1999 and, as I’m sure you all know, incomes have not.

Strategic planning or not, big grant funding for research or not, it is the responsibility of the University to provide quality undergraduate education to our students and there is a pervasive problem at all institutions of higher education where intelligent, fantastic researchers are expected to teach courses but not expected to develop competency (to say nothing of expertise) in pedagogy (teaching).

This is a long-running problem. Teaching doesn’t bring in money, research does. The University needs money……and thus the cycle continues. Research gets priority over teaching.

The administration can spin things however they want. I went to the University as an undergraduate, so did many of my friends, we have all come to the same conclusions the undergraduates who were surveyed did.

Just as I am sick of Tony Perkins and the bile of the Family Research Council that he runs, I am sick of the people on my side of the aisle who castigate the GLBT folks who have been working to win the right to get married because they see it as too normative.

Feministing highlighted an article off of Alternet by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore that just succeeded in irritating the hell out of me. I’m just going to paste the quotes in and dissect as we go. Have fun! If you get bored, check out this week’s Savage Love, in which Dan Savage reams some straight people who plan on getting married but are relationship idiots because Tony Perkins tormented him. (That’s all Perkins knows how to do.) Or you could watch Stephen Colbert undercut Perkins on The Colbert Report from last night. So those are your other options. On to me tormenting fellow lefties!

Sycamore begins by saying that she flat out doesn’t support gay marriage and, to illustrate why, says:

Gay marriage does nothing to address fundamental problems of inequality. What is needed is universal access to basic necessities like housing, health care, food, and the benefits now obtained through citizenship (like the right to stay in this country)…

Nope. It sure doesn’t address those things. When you start with sweeping expectations like that in an essay, it’s pretty impossible to argue. And yet…I continue.

Legalized gay marriage means only that certain people in a specific type of long-term, monogamous relationship sanctioned by a state contract might be able to access benefits. While marriage could confer inclusion under a spouse’s health-care policy, it does nothing to provide such a policy. Marriage might ensure hospital visitation rights, but not for anyone without a spouse. Marriage may allow for inheritance rights between spouses, but what if there is nothing to inherit?

Now, I hate to be nitpicky (no I don’t), but you don’t actually have to be monogamous–straight or gay–to get married. You just have to pick someone as primary partner. Other than that, there’s nothing Sycamore says here that is inherently wrong, but the inverse argument doesn’t really help. I mean, what if there is something to inherit? What if there is a health policy that can be provided? An argument that bases itself on absence isn’t very meaningful.

For a long time, queers have married straight friends for citizenship or health care, but this has never been enshrined as “progress.” The majority of queers — single or coupled (but not desiring marriage), monogamous or polyamorous, jobless or marginally employed — would remain excluded from the much-touted benefits of legalized gay marriage.

Dude. Marrying straight friends has been what is known as “working the system.” Of course it isn’t progress. It reaffirms the double standard of what relationships are worth. As for the “majority of queers” remaining excluded from marriage benefits…how is she coming up with what constitutes a majority? Who does she consider queer? I’m in no way saying that marriage is a saving grace for the queer community, but let’s stop throwing around vague quantitative terms. Give me numbers, even rounded ones. I’d also argue that jobless and marginally employed folks wouldn’t necessarily not benefit–especially if their spouses were employed…

And let’s not forget the history of marriage as a legal method for keeping property within specific dynasties (property that originally included women and slaves). In fact, marriage still exists as a central venue for spousal and child abuse — there’s a reason divorce is so popular, and suicide attempts among queer teens so prevalent.

Marriage=venue for abuse=queer teen suicide. The leaps in logic here, ignoring the complete lack of data correlating these things…just, wow. Queer teens are harassed, are a part of society where queer relationships are denigrated, and are made to feel alienated by the larger culture. This happens with/without married parents. Show me data that says that queer teen suicide is predominantly taking place in households with married parents and I’ll eat my words. But right now…dumping bad things into a paragraph together doesn’t make an argument.

Also? Bringing up the history of marriage? The Family Research Council does that too. Moving on.

In fact, the push for gay marriage has shifted advocacy away from essential services like HIV education, AIDS health care, drug treatment, domestic violence prevention, and homeless care — all crucial needs for far more queers than marriage could ever be.

Agree/disagree. In the absence of the push for gay marriage, would these things be getting addressed better? I’m not entirely sure I buy that argument.

You know, I have a number of friends who have worked hard over the course of years and years to deal with domestic/sexual violence and the only constant I’ve seen in terms of funding is eternal crisis. There is never enough money, they are always overworked, severely underpaid, and stressed to an extraordinary point. Also, a lot of these things rely on grants in addition to private donation. Grants aren’t on the menu for marriage advocates, so that money isn’t even in the picture.

I can’t say for sure that resources aren’t being diverted, but I question whether a=b.

The spectacle around gay marriage draws attention away from critical issues — like ending U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, stopping massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the country, and challenging the never-ending assault on anyone living outside of conventional norms.

True that. But I’m afraid that arguing that we’re doing ourselves a disservice by drawing attention to ourselves is defeatist. There will always be more “pressing” issues (homelessness, war, etc.) than exclusively queer rights. And I’m talking about more than marriage here. Someone will always be able to argue that something like war trumps civil rights. But just because you can make the argument doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

While many straight people are reaping the benefits of gay liberation and discovering new ways of loving, lusting for and caring for one another, the gay marriage movement is busy fighting for a 1950s model of white-picket fence “we’re just like you” normalcy. And that’s no reason to celebrate.

Oh, come on! That’s how it ends? The trite “if you want something they have, you’re vanilla and boring and not one of us” line? Ugh.

Look, whether or not marriage is personally something I want or not, I think it’s terribly presumptuous to ask queer/GLBT people to identify as transgressive. There’s nothing wrong with monogamy, there’s nothing wrong with having a primary partner if you sleep with more than one person, and there’s nothing wrong with consenting adults figuring out their relationships however they’d like. My problem is with any of us forcing our values on the others.

Marriage is not the solution, but in a society where the very question of whether or not GLBT people should be allowed into the club sends our entire society into a manic episode, it’s not something to be so easily dismissed.

Back when I had a customer service job and had to interact with random people when I was younger, I found that a fake wedding ring made my life a million times easier. If some idiot hit on me and I said I had a boyfriend, it didn’t even dent his game–if I said I was married, it was usually over. Despite the problems marriage has in our society, it still carries with it a level of respect for the relationship that you just don’t get otherwise. It’s a big deal, culturally, and to pretend that it and all the privilege it gets you are some minor irrelevancy in the face of Big Problems like homelessness, war, etc…well, that’s just naive. Or willfully ignorant.

Be warned: listening to this will make you upset.

But listen to it and email her. Via Blogactive.

Give Oklahoma representative Sally Kern a ring/email:
(405) 557-7348
sallykern@okhouse.gov

In the last week, there have been two “memoirs” whose authors have been outed as more than just embellishing the truth. In both situations, we have something that would be cast one way as fiction–but when passed off as memoir, these works become harmful.

First, and less publicized, was a Holocaust memoir:

A best-selling Holocaust memoir has been revealed to be a fake. The author was never trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Neither was she adopted by wolves who protected her from the Nazis, nor did she trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents or kill a German soldier in self-defense. She wasn’t even Jewish, The Associated Press reported. Misha Defonseca, 71, right, a Belgian writer living in Dudley, Mass., about 60 miles southwest of Boston, admitted through her lawyers last week that her book, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” translated into 18 language and adapted for the French feature film “Surviving With Wolves,” was a fantasy.

This just tears me. Once you decide to alter the world a narrative lives in, you need to take responsibility for it. What are the reasons to masquerade a fictional tale as memoir? For someone like James Frey, it was that juicy memoirs get published–so he added more than embellishments to his story. That, to me, is harmless enough–also a laugh at the publishing industry. You know, ‘you wouldn’t publish my fiction so I fictionalized my memoir and it sold like crazy, jerks.’ Or something to that effect.

But fictionalizing a memoir about the Holocaust? On what planet is that a good idea? It’s one thing for a writer to write a fictional memoir, quite another to write a fictional memoir and pass it off as real.

Then there was Margaret B. Jones. You know, a half-white, half-American Indian raised in poverty in the foster system who was enmeshed in gangs and drugs. Er. Wait. No, that’s Margaret Seltzer. The white, well-off girl who was raised by her biological family. Potato, potahto.

Jones, 33, admitted to the Times that her memoir was fully fabricated. Many of the experiences recounted in the book, she told the newspaper, were based on the experiences of friends she had met while doing anti-gang outreach in Los Angeles.

“For whatever reason, I was really torn, and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” she told the paper.

I call bullshit. Memoirs are profitable business right now–if you expose yourself and you’re interesting enough…well…you get book deals and movies. Let’s ignore, for the purposes of this blog post, that there are tricky details that happen whenever you try to represent others’ voices (because I think creative people have every right to step out of their lives and into others’ in their work).

Instead, let’s rant:

Margaret–you wanted to give the people you wrote about a voice? Why didn’t you write a biography, a memoir of your time doing gang outreach, an essay, a book about the gangs, a fictional world of the gangs inspired by the real world? Same goes for you, Misha. You wanted to publish, you wanted money, you didn’t want to give voice to anyone. You fetishized and capitalized on the pain and hard lives of others and you SUCK.

I want to reinforce again that I think writers should write what suits their fancy. And if you want to write a fake memoir because it seems to fit what you want the work to do–go ahead, but it better be shelved on the fiction shelves (meaning: you say you wrote a memoir of a fictional character - or a character inspired by a real person(s)). Dammit.

I have to tell you, I still don’t know who I want for president. I’m still irritated with Obama over the Reagan comment.

However, you really should watch this speech. The religious thing makes me a little uncomfortable, but that’s not entirely relevant to the message. It’s worth the 34 minutes of your time.

So, today is Blog for Choice Day and…well…I’m blogging for choice. (Confession: I wrote this yesterday, but I knew I wouldn’t have time to write a thoughtful post today.)

I could rail against Mike Huckabee for his radical views on abortion.

I could attack the predatory Crisis Pregnancy Centers, which manipulative anti-choicers are setting up next to Planned Parenthoods (coming to you soon at the Highland Park one in St. Paul, by the way) in order to confuse women trying to go to PP.

I could talk about the violence against Planned Parenthood clinics, abstinence only education, which promotes falsehoods about sex, including: view the cited sources

• Do condoms make sexual activity moral? Legal? Healthy?
• AIDS can be transmitted by skin-to-skin contact.
• A young man’s natural desire for sex is already strong due to testosterone…females are becoming culturally conditioned to fantasize about sex as well.
• A guy who wants to respect girls is distracted by sexy clothes and remembers her for one thing. Is it fair that guys are turned on by their senses and women by their hearts?

But I think this last choice sums it up best: “Abortion is not the best choice…because it unfairly penalizes the baby for the bad decision the baby’s parents made.”

The crusade against a woman’s right to choose isn’t about saving babies. It’s structured on a paradigm of punishment and misogyny. An unplanned pregnancy is punishment for a slut. Women are victims and only acquiesce to the potency of male desire. Women are unable to understand their choices; abortion is too weighty a decision for a woman to make.

This is the crux of it.

And, you know, it boggles my mind that many straight women don’t view this battle as more crucial. Sans something terrible happening, I’m never going to get pregnant by accident. On a completely personal level, and without any thought to the larger scheme of things, it doesn’t matter for my body whether or not abortion is legal.

However, this issue isn’t about unplanned pregnancy. It’s about control of women and our lives. The same legislators who rant about abstinence-only education and how abortion should be illegal are ones who vote against social safety-net programs that help children after they’re born. It’s such a simple and blatant form of hypocrisy that I’m surprised people don’t see it.

What’s more, the personal opposition often takes a back seat to the realities of life. The NY Times took a look at real women, many of whom oppose the right to choose, who still chose to terminate pregnancy. It’s a great article. Under din of abortion debate…

Anyway, finally, take a look at this video that asks people whether women should go to jail for having abortions.

My talented friend over at Kinemapoetics, posted a well-argued piece about the problem of non-profit administrators drinking the Kool-Aid of “our staff does important work, so they should expect less pay.”

He sums it up better than I ever have and I give him mad props. Read All pigs are created equal but some are more equal, and other pigs work for nonprofits where they aren’t paid the value of their labor.

I adore my friends. I am so lucky to have such thoughtful, smart people in my life.