Extreme Right

Let me just come out and say this right off the bat : We need more black and latina feminists on TV tearing into the right wing's forced pregnancy frame to reproductive rights.

I had the honor again to participate in Melissa Long's livecasting from the conventions. In the first one at the DNC we barely spoke of women's issues. Ironically here in St. Paul and with Palin's nomination the discussion was almost exclusively about her and about women's rights.

Which is why am being very candid about the need to put more colored feminists into these traditional media settings. Our perspectives on reproductive and women's rights are not filtered necessarily through the need to curtail our ability to have children as much as having the right to not have the government control our bodies by claiming surrogate ownership.

Which is why it is outrageous to me that someone as young and seemingly intelligent as Amanda Carpenter from Town Hall will go on wailing about how Palin is being vilified for not aborting her Down Syndrome child.

Is she serious?!?!

Still basking in the glow of victory in New York City, a victory that was earned by the feminist-loving, GLBT-positive, new labor rising grassroots of New York state, I was going to hop into an article about John Edwards political courage. Instead I woke up to this :

Edwards’s Bloggers Cross the Line, Critic Says - New York Times:

The Catholic League, a conservative religious group, is demanding that Mr. Edwards dismiss the two, Amanda Marcotte of the Pandagon blog site and Melissa McEwan, who writes on her blog, Shakespeare’s Sister, for expressing anti-Catholic opinions.

Mr. Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, is among the leading Democratic presidential candidates.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, said in a statement on Tuesday, “John Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots.”

Mr. Edwards’s spokeswoman, Jennifer Palmieri, said Tuesday night that the campaign was weighing the fate of the two bloggers.

The Washington Post has the AP arcile that is the obvious "fair and balanced" source the Grey Lady does not acknowledge using for their article.

John Edwards is not new to the dirty tactics of the extreme Republican right in this country. He had a front-row seat to the Swiftboat Veteran's smear campaign of John Kerry, a campaign so out-of-control that it has become a verb and part of the political lexicon of this country.

What is galling about this particular campaign is that it is being done by bashing two of the most courageouly outspoken feminist bloggers in this country : Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister.

And make no mistake about it : this controversy has nothing to do with my blog sisters. No. This controversy is being created by extremist religious hypocrites like Bill Donohue of the Catholic League because John Edwards scares them with his political courage.

The Donohues of the extreme right go out of their way to push views on choice and homosexuality that are completely against the mainstream views of their base. They do so because it has been effective in the past to scare politicians into wearing their political leashes.

John Edwards hiring of Marcotte and McEwan sends them a strong message of how he will not wear that leash for the sake of political power.

Especially when it so goes against the mainstream.

Jessica has all the details over at Feministing:

Hold on to your hats. I hear from a little birdie that the Bush administration has hired Dr. Eric Keroack to oversee Title X funding—the only federal program devoted entirely to family planning and reproductive health.

Keroack, who is currently the medical director of a Massachusetts pregnancy crisis center (you know, the folks that lie to women), will be the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs.

Keroack is not only a well-known anti-choicer, he’s also a major proponent of abstinence-only education…and when I say proponent, I mean fucking insane person.

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Do women across the United States a favor: if you have a blog, please write this up and link to Jessica. If you don't have a blog, please do yourself a favor and use our "send this post" feature to blast the information to your email lists.

Last but not least, please use our buttons to recommend this post at Digg.Com, Reddit.com and all the bookmarking services we are linked to. If you have an account, make sure you also give Jessica a shoutout at Netscape.com.

What started as a longish email reply about the scandal that has led to the resignation of US Rep (Fl-R) Mark Foley is turning out into a full fledged post. The conversations I have been having with other people is about how this story is being framed.

I've been hearing the word "pedophile" and now the moniker "predatorgate" thrown around with much gusto by Democrats. The problem is, it has been also intertwined with the words "homosexual".

See, Mark Foley was a self-hating semi-closeted gay man who happens to have also had a fondness for stalking young pages all around Capitol Hill. The worse part? Dennis Hastert, Tom Delay and other republicans knew about it. For years. About five years to be exact. They did nothing about.

Yet because "pedophile" and "predator" are in collusion with "gay", this whole framing makes me nervous.

Queer activists, like my friend Michael Rogers of BlogActive, work hard to report on the enemies within their communities. That a man like Mark Foley could spend 19 years in a committed relationship with another man yet push forward the Defense of Marriage Act is just incredible. Without Michael's investigative reports we wouldn't have the background information necessary for making informed assessments on creeps like Foley.

Gripped by a fear that a secret conspiracy of evil doers killed children, destroyed food supplies, and, eventually would cause the destruction of civilization, the battle against terror used any means necessary to extract information from those it suspected of practicing evil. Torture was the order of the day.



Why? Well, because torture led to the highest form of truth—which was not evidence, but rather, confession. Hundreds of years of legal theories had led to the imposition of Roman law, in which the words forced from the lips of wrongdoers equaled justice, because justice was getting at the truth, and, once truth had been extracted, further evil could be prevented. 

And so, torture led to moments like this:

Many  hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent must I die.

Charles Krauthammer would no doubt have been pleased had he witnessed the methods used to extract Junius’s confession. As Junius tells it:

For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head and—God pity him—bethinks him of something. I will tell you how it has gone with me. When I was the first time put to the torure, Dr. Braun, Dr. Kotzendorffer, and two strange doctors were there. Then Dr. Braun asks me, “Kinsman, how come you here??? I answer, “Through falsehood, through misfortune.?? “Hear, you,?? he says, “you are a witch; will you confess it voluntarily? If not, we’ll bring in witnesses and the executioner for you.?? I said, “I am no witch; I have a pure conscience in the matter; if there a thousand witnesses, I am not anxious, but I’ll gladly hear the witnesses.?? Now the chancellor’s son was set before me … and afterward Hoppfens Elsse. She had seen me dance on Haupts-moor … I answered: “I have never renounced God, and will never do it—God graciously keep me from it. I’ll rather bear whatever I must.?? And then came also—God in highest heaven have mercy—the executioner, and put the thumb-screws on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see by my writing … Thereafter they first stripped me, bound my hands behind me, an drew me up in the torture. [strappado] Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony…

Democrats only need to win 15 more House seats to take back the House. That's out of 40 surprisingly close races. Well, the Republicans have all but conceded one of those races, meaning Democrats only have to win 14 more.

White Supremicists are often too close for comfort to the Republican Party. Virginia Senator Allen, for example, is clearly a bit too much of a racist for my taste, leading me to donate to and advocate for Democratic candidate for the Senate, Jim Webb. But Republicans in general don't necessarily LIKE being associated with white supremicists. Witness the Republican candidate for AZ-8 Congressional seat: Randy Graf is well connected with white supremicists and has now been endorsed by former Grand Wizard of the KKK (and former Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, U.S. House, governor of Louisiana and twice for president of the United States) David Duke. This was too much even for the Republican Party, leading them to do the right thing and pull out all support for Graf.

Here's a statement from the DCCC on this:

I couldn't have better news. The Republicans have withdrawn all of their financial support in the pivotal race in Arizona's 8th Congressional District, all but conceding defeat in a race that we had targeted.

In West Virginia thre is a cohabitation law, which makes it a misdemeanor for unmarried people to "lewdly and lasciviously associate" and live together. This law is being challenged by a lawsuit, filed by the ACLU on behalf of an inmate whose parole was delayed because of his plan to cohabit with his fiance.

Well, I have lewdly and lasciviously associated and lived together with women before I was married. And enjoyed it very much, thank you. And I considered it none of the government's business that I did so. However, I always had the option of marrying who ever I wanted to lewdly and lasciviously associate with.

Since gays are not allowed the same right to marry eachother that I have, this cohabitation law seems to clearly discriminate against gays, preventing them from lewdly and lasciviously associating with eachother legally.

But really, the fundamental question here is what business is it of the government to care who lewdly and lasciviously associates with who? When will we get the governmemt out of our bedrooms? Oh, yeah. When we get rid of Republican control over our government.

Planned Parenthood is fighting the South Dakota ban on abortion and they are asking you to host or attend a potluck fundraiser for choice.

Potluck House Parties will be held across the country to raise money and build awareness for the campaign to defeat the abortion ban in South Dakota.

Sign up to host a Potluck for South Dakota with your friends and family!

Use their online tools to create, manage and promote your potluck.

The host whose potluck raises the most money will win a Newman’s Own gift basket and a trip to New York City to meet Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards!

Or you can find a potluck near you to attend.