Month: February 2013

You probably didn’t know that more than one million New York City workers, mostly low wage workers, lack paid sick days, with the largest concentrations in food service, retail and health care. Or that nearly one in four workers reports that they have lost a job or were told they would lose their job if they took time off due to personal or family illness. Or that half of working moms miss work when a child gets sick. Of these, half lose pay when they take this time off.

But it’s because of injustices like these that New Yorkers, and everyone, really, needs paid sick days. And that’s why New Yorkers are demanding a a paid sick days bill, which would allow workers to earn five paid sick days a year, which employees could use to recover from illness, seek preventive care, or care for an ill family member. The bill has support from the majority of the City Council.

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Besides earning Jennifer Lawrence a well-deserved Oscar for Best Actress, Silver Linings Playbook was robbed at last night’s Academy Awards. The Academy wasted an opportunity to honor a film that dealt with mental illness in a nuanced, realistic, sensitive and engaging way.

Let’s look at the important categories SLP was up for.

Editing: the award went to Argo. If Argo deserved to win for anything it was definitely editing. So, I wasn’t that upset. The film was superbly edited. Props.

Best Actor: the award went to Daniel Day Lewis. I was rooting for Bradley Cooper, but you could hardly say he was robbed. DDL did an exceptional job at becoming Lincoln. Still, given that DDL has now won three Academy Awards for best actor, breaking a record, it would have been nice of Cooper to win just won. But nobody every said life or the Academy was fair.

[…]

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An Indiana school district has suspended Diana Medley a teacher who lobbied for an LGBTQ-free prom. In all fairness, you could always just choose to be straight and then you could go to the prom, since sexual orientation is a decision and choice, according to Medley. “I believe that it was life circumstances and they chose to be that way,” Medley told NBC affiliate,WTWO. “Homosexual students come to me with their problems, and I don’t agree with them, but I care about them. It’s the same thing with my special needs kids, I think God puts everyone in our lives for a reason.”  When asked if LGBTQ people have a purpose in life, she responded,  “No I honestly don’t. Sorry, but I don’t. I don’t understand it. A gay person isn’t going to come up and make some change unless it’s to realize that it was a choice and they’re choosing God.” So, God  puts the gays in our lives for a reason, but the gays don’t serve any purpose. That seems like a contradiction but that’s because it’s hard for most of us to grasp the genius that is Diana Medley.

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U 486 is a non-surgical early abortion medication that comes in the form of a pill and is generally used to end a pregnancy up to 10 weeks from a woman’s last period. So, naturally, a bill, approved by Indiana’s state Senate Health and Provider Services Committee on Wednesday, would require clinics to conduct trans-vaginal ultrasounds on women both before and after dispensing the pill.  Senate Bill 371 passed by a vote of 7 to 5, and will next be voted on by the full state Senate. Specifically, the bill would require women to be presented with the sound and image of the fetal heartbeat before the abortion and to return for another ultrasound to ensure that she is no longer pregnant.

The bill makes no medical sense, whatsoever, and is a clear attempt to discourage women from taking RU 486, by adding two unnecessary trips to an abortion clinic and two unnecessary uncomfortable procedures to it. Dr. Anne Davis, the consulting medical director for Physicians for Reproductive Health, explained,

“[a woman who has taken RU 486] can do a blood test at any local facility after an abortion to show that the hormone levels are going down as they should, there’s no medical reason to make her drive back to the abortion clinic and go through another ultrasound…. This is yet another onerous, medically unnecessary barrier.”

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What we can learn from Marco Rubio’s dry mouth and government.

Last week we blogged about Obama’s opposition to the Boy Scouts ban on LGBT people. The Boy Scouts of America was supposed to vote on the ban last Wednesday, but announced that it would delay their decision until May. Ellen DeGeneres was none-too-pleased with the decision to punt the issue. In this moving and funny monologue, she sarcastically sympathizes with the Boy Scouts, saying “If the Boy Scouts start treating gays equally, they’re going to become the first group to do it — after the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard, all of the United Kingdom and Cher.”

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In 1993, U.S. Senator Joseph Biden and the majority staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee conclude a three‐year investigation into the causes and effects of violence against women. In his introduction to the report, Senator Biden states, “Through this process, I have become convinced that violence against women reflects as much a failure of our nation’s collective moral imagination as it does the failure of our nation’s laws and  regulations. We are helpless to change the course of this violence unless, and until, we achieve a national consensus that it deserves our profound public outrage.”

President Clinton signs the Violence Against Women Act into law on September 13, 1994. The Act strengthens laws against sexual assault, domestic violence, and stalking and provides much-needed funding for prevention, prosecution, and victim services efforts. The Act also established the Office on Violence Against Women within the Department of Justice.

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Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rosa Parks. On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, leading to a a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would help spark the civil rights movement. Today, the U.S. Postal Service issued a Rosa Parks stamp in her honor.

In a pre-Superbowl interview President Obama came out against the Boy Scouts of America’s ban on “gays.” CBS’s Scott Pelley said, “next week the board of the Boy Scouts of America is going to vote on whether to end their national ban on gays in scouting. Should scouting be open to the gays?” And Obama’s response was unequivocal: “Yes.” When asked, “why so,” Obama explained,

“My attitude is that gays and lesbians should have access and opportunity the same way everybody else does, in every institution and walk of life. And The Scouts are a great institution that are promoting young people and exposing them to opportunities and leadership that will serve people for the rest of their lives. And I think nobody should be barred from that.”

But not everyone is as committed to, like, equality, fairness, opportunity and access. Guess who hearts the ban against gay membership! I’ll give you a hint. They’re both named Rick. […]

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Malala Yousufzai, the 15-year fearless blogger and advocate for girls’ education from Pakistan survived two more surgeries over the weekend. In October Taliban militants stormed her school van, yelled her name and shot her in the head. On Sunday, doctors attached a titanium plate to her skull and implanted a cochlear device to to her left ear so she can hear. Malala’s doctor has said she has no long-lasting brain injuries and won’t require any more operations. “I’m happy that both of the operations are successful…. I can walk a little bit and I’m feeling better,” Yousufzai said from her hospital bed in Birmingham, England.

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