Month: May 2013

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen! The state that brought you the chain-gang enforcing Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, the “show me your papers” immigration law, and racial profiling is proud to present its latest hit: a law prohibiting sex and raced-based abortion, based on lies and stereotypes about black and Asian women. Well, Arizona signed the law back in 2011, but it’s in the news again because the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Arizona filed a lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of the NAACP of Maricopa County and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF) challenging the law.

The law prohibits abortions based on the sex or race of the fetus or embryo, and makes it a felony to knowingly perform or provide financing for an abortion sought because of the race or sex of the fetus or a parent’s race. The maximum punishment if convicted is 3.5 years in prison. The woman and doctor must also sign an affidavit stating the reason the woman wants an abortion has nothing to do with the race or sex of the embryo or fetus.

The Republicans (no surprise there) who introduced the bill claim they were motivated by the epidemic of gender and race-based abortion occurring in Arizona. The worst thing about this epidemic is that, well, it doesn’t exist.

Read more at Policymic

Sunday, Angelina Jolie’s aunt, Debbie Martin,  died of breast cancer at the age of 61. Martin was the younger sister of Jolie’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died of ovarian cancer in 2007 at 56. Jolie’s genetic disposition towards breast cancer and ovarian cancer, due to the presence of the defective BRCA1 gene, motivated the actress to have a preventative double mastectomy. She also plans to have both of her ovaries removed.

Jolie is not the only celebrity who has gone through a double mastectomy. Here are five others.

Christina Applegate

In 2008, when she was 36, Christina Applegate was diagnosed with breast cancer. The daughter of a breast cancer survivor, Applegate planned to treat the cancer, which had not spread beyond her left breast, with radiation. But after a test revealed that she had the BRCA1 gene, she decided to have a double mastectomy. Applegate explained, “It just seemed like, ‘I don’t want to have to deal with this again. I don’t want to keep putting that stuff in my body. I just want to be done with this.’ And I was just going to let them go.”

Sharon Osbourne

Sharon Osbourne was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2002 when she was 49. She underwent chemotherapy and had a foot of her colon removed. She then founded the Sharon Osbourne Colon Cancer Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. In 2012, Osbourne learned she had the BRCA1 gene and opted for a double mastectomy, though she didn’t have breast cancer. “As soon as I found out I had the breast cancer gene, I thought, ‘The odds are not in my favor’,” Osbcourne reflected. “I’ve had cancer before and I didn’t want to live under that cloud. I decided to just take everything off, and had a double mastectomy.”

[…]

Read more at Care2

Anthony Weiner announced he was running for mayor on Wednesday. And a poll has him coming in second, after City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Of course, haters gonna hate and when Andrew Cuomo was asked how he would respond if Weiner won the mayor’s race, he said: “Shame on us.” In fact, the real shame is that Weiner resigned from congress, after Democrats, in typical fashion, threw him under the bus and called for him to step down. The real shame is when right wing politicians condemn and attempt to control the sex lives of others, especially when they engage in sexual behavior they would publicly scorn. This should be the real scandal. But sadly, it never is.

Don’t get me wrong. What Weiner did — sexting with women other than his wife and accidentally tweeting a sexual message he meant to DM — was stupid. Just as what Bill Clinton in The Oval Office was stupid. And Weiner’s denying sexting with women was dishonest. Just as Clinton’s denial of having “sexual relations with that woman” was dishonest.

But what Anthony Weiner did not warrant a resignation. Just as what Bill Clinton did didn’t warrant impeachment. What warrants impeachment is something like the Iran-Contras affair, in which the Reagan Administration sold weapons to Iran, violating an arms embargo, to fund the right wing murderous Contras in Nicaragua, violating a congressional amendment which specifically prohibited funding this counter-insurgency group. What is impeachable is lying about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq to trick people into supporting an unjust war. The Contras terrorized countless civilians and killed at least 30,000. The War in Iraq claimed the lives of as many as 650,000 Iraqis and nearly 5,000 Americans. But neither Reagan nor Bush ever faced the threat of impeachment. (Though, to his credit, Weiner did vote yes on a bill to impeach Bush over lying about WMDs.)

Read more at Medium

The right wing loves to pathologize homosexuality and portray LGBT people as sick. The great irony is that the right’s homophobic policies and depictions are what actually have negative effects on the psychological well-being of the LGBT community.

In an NPR interview Tuesday morning, Mark Hatzenbuehler, a psychologist at Columbia University who studies the health effects of social policies, explained that bans on same-sex marriage have a negative effect of LGBT people’s mental health, while legalization of same-sex marriage has a positive one. Hatzenbuehler reviewed date collected by the National Institutes of Health, which surveyed the mental health of 43,093 Americans before several same-sex marriage bans went into effect. The NIH followed up after the marriage bans and re-interviewed 34,653 of the original subjects.

Hatzenbuehler, along with his colleagues Katie McLaughlin, Katherine Keyes and Deborah Hasinfound that, “Lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals who lived in the states that banned same-sex marriage experienced a significant increase in psychiatric disorders… There was a 37% increase in mood disorders … a 42% increase in alcohol-use disorders, and — I think really strikingly — a 248% increase in generalized anxiety disorders.” […]

Read more at Policymic

As was noted in yesterday’s Daily Feminist Cheat Sheet, Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) launched a great social media initiative on Tuesday, taking on gender-based hate on Facebook. Specifically, WAM and other great organizations are “calling on Facebook users to contact advertisers whose ads on Facebook appear next to content that targets women for violence, to ask these companies to withdraw from advertising on Facebook until you take the above actions to ban gender-based hate speech on your site.”  Several companies have responded to the#FBrape campaign and are considering pulling their ads. […]

Read more at Feministing

A 22-year-old woman in El Salvador, whose pseudonym is Beatriz, is currently in the hospital, waiting for an abortion that could save her life. Her doctors want to terminate her pregnancy. So, why haven’t they? Because they fear being prosecuted under El Salvador’s laws, which prohibit abortion in all cases with no exceptions for rape, incest, the health of the mother or the life of the mother. You can sign the Care2 petition asking El Salvador’s Supreme Court to guarantee that Beatriz and her doctors will not be prosecuted for undergoing and performing a life-saving procedure here. Sadly, El Salvador isn’t the only country to ban abortion in all cases with no exceptions whatsoever. Here are the five countries that do.

Chile

In 1967, Chile legalized abortion when it was necessary to save the mother’s life. In 1989 President Augusto Pinochet (Right Wing Dictator and egregious human rights offender) made abortion illegal under all circumstances. Pinochet is long gone, yet his draconian abortion laws remain in effect. In 2006, President Michelle Bachelet authorized government distribution of the morning-after pill to women 14 and older. Two years later, however, Chile’s Constitutional Tribunal ended this program.

El Salvador

In 1998, the government of El Salvador passed a new penal code banning all abortions without exception. An earlier law allowed abortions in cases of threats to the health or life of the woman, rape, incest or severe fetal abnormality. A 1999 constitutional amendment defined a human being from the moment of conception. An estimated 628 women have been imprisoned since the 1998 law was enacted for having abortions. Twenty-four of these women were indicted for “aggravated murder” after an abortion, or even after a miscarriage or stillbirth. If doctors find evidence of an abortion, they must report their patients to the police. Women seeking medical help after a botched abortion have been handcuffed to their hospital beds. For obvious reasons, it is unknown how many illegal abortions have been performed. But attempts to self-induce abortions are the second highest cause of maternal mortality in the country.

[…]

Read more at Care2

On May 31, 2009, Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider in Wichita, Kansas was at church, serving as an usher during the Sunday morning service. Anti-choice zealot Scott Roeder shot Tiller through the eye and killed him. Roeder, who publicly confessed to the crime, was convicted of murder. Now Roeder is accused of threatening Julie Burkhart, executive director of the non-profit group Trust Women,which reopened Dr. Tiller’s shuttered clinic in April of this year.

The charge is the result of a recorded phone conversation between Roeder and David Leach, an abortion opponent from Des Moines, Iowa, posted on YouTube last month that as of Wednesday had gotten 629 views. In it, Leach is heard saying that if someone shot Burkhart, like Roeder shot Tiller it would be “a blessing to the babies.” Roeder laughed, agreed and said, ”To walk in there and reopen a clinic, a murder mill where a man was stopped, it’s almost like putting a target on your back — saying, “Well, let’s see if you can shoot me.”

Read more at Feministing

How one badass woman took on the comic industry’s sexism and won.

Given this whole war on women thing, it’s rare that I write about something that makes me or you, dear reader, feel good. But sometimes, just sometimes, “you find people” as Corky St. Clair says — people who have inspiring stories with happy endings.

In a guest post at The Hawkeye Initiative, an anonymous employee at Hawken developer Meteor Entertainment talks about how much she loves her job. There’s only one thing she can’t stand: a poster.

Our CEO loves this picture. It is to all appearances his favorite piece of comic art for the game. He had it blown up poster-sized, framed, and displayed on the out-facing wall of his office. There, it looms over the front room like a ship’s figurehead. It is the first thing workers and visitors see when they enter the building and the last thing they see when they leave. This little lady’s undermeats have been the open- and close- parens to my work world for the last six months.

The anonymous woman goes on to explain why she hates the poster so much:

How, you ask, can I stay mad at a sweet young belle who has so obviously taken a break from her important welding to offer me a piping hot cup of coffee and/or a vigorous hand job? (And probably, given her apparent safety consciousness, simultaneously?) If you don’t already know the answer, you might want to check out things like #1ReasonWhy, and the Bechdel Test, and also this, and this, and this and this, and all these other things. (And while we’re talking you should check out this other bullshit right here.)

Read more at Medium

Here’s a round up of some of this week’s more homophobic, racist, misogynist, sexist, and general insane rants. I apologize in advance to any bigots I’ve overlooked.

1. Standing By the N-Word, 100%!

When an NAACP official urged the Kansas Board of Education to ensure that students were learning about African American history, white board member Steve Roberts responded the way any of us would: by defending the use of the N-word. Addressing Ben Scott, the president of the Topeka NAACP, Roberts, an elected (Republican) board member, complained that school standards were “too politically correct,” especially around the use of the slur. He lamented the falsity that New York City had banned the use of the “N-word.” Really, New York passed a non-binding resolution calling for a moratorium on the slur. He then pointed out that Martin Luther King Jr. himself had used the word in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. He wrapped up by saying:

“We have to push the frontiers of political correctness and do what’s right … And so, if I were to use it clinically, I would almost use a test to see what the effect on Twitter would be. ‘That Roberts guy said n*gger at the state school board meeting, and he said it as, it’s probably the ugliest word in our vocabulary. It’s an ugly repugnant absolutely horrific word that we should rise above… But I did get it out there … and I appreciate the opportunity to do that in a politically correct setting.” […]

2. Legalized Abortions Are Responsible For School Shootings

Speaking at a commencement address at the University of Mary, Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.)said, “Forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned abortion on demand. And we wonder why our culture sees school shootings so often.” […]

[…]

Read more at Policymic