women's rights

DFL Women's Hall of Fame Luncheon
May 31, 2008
11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m
St Paul Hotel
St Paul

Event info: Al Franken will be attending this event celebrating this year's honorees into the DFL Women's Hall of Fame. For more information, email womenshalloffame_at_yahoo.com

Women Winning Annual Luncheon
May 14, 2008
11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Milwaukee Depot
Minneapolis

Event info: Franni and Thomasin Franken will be attending this event supporting Minnesota Women's Campaign Fund. Keynote Speaker: Katty Kay. For more information, email info_at_mnwcf.org.

Three things to make note of before we start wading into this blog entry together, folks...

But you know what? For those in the audience who've been wondering WTF a guy like me is doing posting to feminist blogs, this is a significant chunk of the backstory for that. So make of it what you will.

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One of the things that really, really chaps my ass is what a small percentage of the people bloviating away about abortions, on both the right and the left sides of the fence, actually have any first-hand experience with them.

I'm sorry, SCOTUS. And I'm sorry, Fux News Channel. But... if you ain't been there done that, then you can't know. You just can't fucking know.

Yesterday Bill Richardson vetoed legislation that would have made Gardasil vaccination of 6 year-old girls compulsory. Here's the story :

"While everyone recognizes the benefits of this vaccine, there is insufficient time to educate parents, schools and health care providers," he said.

The measure would have taken effect June 15, requiring girls entering sixth grade this fall to be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, before they enter public or private school.

The bill would have allowed parents to opt out of the vaccination requirement.

Merck, the company that produces Gardasil, needed a homerun drug after the legal mess and PR nightmare of the Vioxx cases. The company lost a $235 million lawsuit for knowingly suppressing documentation about the potential lethal cardiovascular effects of Vioxx and for "tweaking" clinical studies evidence to support their false claims of safety.

The company knew as far back as 2000 the painkillers could kill people with cardiovascular problems but it took them a warning from the FDA, requests for new trials by American Heart Association, the National Stroke Association, the Arthritis Foundation and 4,000 lawsuits for the company to conduct another round of clinical trials that would further the minimum of testing they submitted to the FDA in order to get their drug approved.

On September 30, 2004 Merck finally pulled the drug off the market after the second round of trials did confirm Vioxx was not safe. In 2005 they lost the landmark Ernst v. Merck product liability case --which granted a record $253 million in damages to the plaintiff. The company's stock fell almost 8% minutes after the verdict and, given the drug accounted for 10% of the company's revenue, Merck has been losing since 2004 a record $2.5 billion annually in revenue.

I see the world largely through the prism of women's lives, our rights and our issues. It's not, in anyway, at the exclusion of men, but I believe no matter what the struggles men have are, women are always trying to catch up, as it were. Many things have helped shape who I am today but none of them moreso than who I spent my first 51 years of life with, Sister, my only sibling. She was and continues to be the most powerful influence I've had.

There are many other women who have been changed my life in significant ways. One of these women is Lorraine, she teaches me things I've either forgotten or have never known about women. She brings the past of who women are and have been and blends it with the present, it's a gift of eloquence and sharing of knowledge I appreciate more than I can say.

That I have been invited to be a frontpager at Culture Kitchen is humbling and an honor. I thank Lorraine and Liza for that and will try my hardest to be worthy of their confidence in my writing and also in who I am, as a woman, as an American and a citizen of the world at large.

As a way to introduce myself, as a telling of how I became a Democrat and why I hold the present leaders of this party's feet to the fire is because they can do better, they must do better, they keep saying they are trying, it's time they understand it's not in the trying, it's in the doing that counts.

I posted this on Blue House Diaries, in response to a comment Lorraine made. The original comment has been added to here.

Strega, [aka Lorraine], I'm so pissed off about all of this I haven't found the words yet to fully say what is in my heart and in my head, let's just say, for now, I find others to be equally complicit in this.

John Edwards should have refused to accept Amanda's resignation. She could have gone ahead and resigned, of course, but the fact that Edwards accepted it is so in keeping with the Democratic Party leadership not saying a goddamned, fucking word about this war against women for 6+ fuckingass years. Politics above women, campaigns above women, elections above women, they keep resigning us to the back burner, why, could it possibly be because they view our rights, our issues, as too hot to handle, so afraid they will run into the exact shit that the rightwing brought to bear?

My vote, YES, and if that is indeed true, what the fuck does that say about what kind of president he will be? Where the fuck will women's rights play in an administration that does not, forcefully and relentlessly, state that they will not accept a resignation of a woman that is being forced out of the fold of a political campaign by the fuckingass rightwing that has been doing this for decades?

Edwards could have been the person who stood up to them, he should have yelled and screamed from his bloody pulpit, we will not give into such slander. Edwards, and Elizabeth, should have found their convictions and stood solidly behind them.

At around six years old, I rode a hospital elevator with George Wallace. His legs had been destroyed by a failed assassination attempt and hunkered down in his wheelchair, he seemed like a nice old man. But when we got off the elevator, Mama said he was a bad man who didn't like black people. I really couldn't reconcile that smiling face with badness. If I remember correctly, he touched my hand. But Mama didn't believe he had changed for the better. History says he did, but history says a lot of things. One thing is for sure: someone shot him. Can't dispute that.

Now I sit here and I think about another historical figure: Martin Luther King, first and foremost a preacher before he was a political activist. King and Wallace are forever tied together, perhaps not just in their struggle against each other, but also in their love of God. Both quoted the bible frequently and lived what they considered a rightous life. And this makes me uncomfortable about what side Martin Luther King would favor today regarding gay rights, women's rights, and abortion. I know some of you are gonna wanna whip my ass, but I wonder if he would support any of the other issues besides racial equality that we on this site favor.

I believe in God and an afterlife but I think I am allergic to organized religion, except for the study of it. My brother and I are 2 out of 5.5 southerners never to be baptized. In the much of the south and a great deal of the black community, life centers around the church or a jail cell. I saw a lot of people come and go from both places, baptized or not. I don't know if this heavily influenced my politics; I guess so. I certainly don't come from the usual progressive family setting. My parents are not artist elites. They are very intelligent and creative but they always worked hard. Growing up, my dad lived in a southern ghetto in one room with 11 kids; my mother lived a rural life, so the empathy for poverty and the underdog ran strong in our house. Rules were made to be broken and mean people slapped (only when the occasion arose, of course). But I grew up believing that all people deserved a fair shot and backgrounds were not used to judge. This is how my parents said it.