Ladies, who says we can’t have it all? Who says we have to choose between carrying our child and carrying our loaded firearm? Certainly not Melody Lauer, an Iowa mother of three and gun owner who is offering a “Babywearing and Carrying” class to moms (and some dads) who want to pack some heat and pack on the kid at the same time.
Lauer is uniquely qualified for this course, thanks to a strong background in both guns and attachment parenting. After receiving her firearm instructor credentials through the NRA, the Harvard of gun education, she worked in sales and as an instructor at gun stores and shooting ranges. Lauer has also, at the same time, worked at an “attachment-parenting center” that teaches childbirth, babywearing, and breastfeeding classes.
1. In less than a year, Israel could be attacked by the government of Iran, which is irrational, ISIS-like and Nazi-like, and determined to wipe out Israel.
2. European Jews should move to Israel, where they would be safe and sound.
So, which one is Bibi lying about?
During his campaign speech to the U.S. Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged the U.S. to stop the current deal being negotiated with Iran, a deal in which, “the foremost sponsor of global terrorism could be weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons and this with full international legitimacy.” Under the current negotiation, Netanyahu claimed, “Thousands of centrifuges used to enrich uranium would be left spinning…. Because Iran’s nuclear program would be left largely intact, Iran’s break-out time would be very short — about a year by U.S. assessment, even shorter by Israel’s.”
Iran is also, according to Bibi, a total irrational actor, comparable to the Nazis and ISIS, and bent on Israel’s destruction. So, it’s not really clear how any deal would work.
But the even larger inconsistency (to speak charitably) is that Israel is somehow a safe haven for Jews. Following the deadly shooting near a Copenhagen synagogue, and the killing of four Jews in a Kosher market in Paris, Netanyahu said, “This wave of attacks is expected to continue, as well as murderous anti-Semitic attacks. Jews deserve security in every country, but we say to our Jewish brothers and sisters, Israel is your home.” (The opportunism and insensitivity were not lost on Jews and Jewish leaders.)
Senator Barbara Mikulski made history as being the longest-serving woman in Congress, the first woman Democrat elected in her own right, and the first woman to wear pants on the Senate floor. On Monday, she announced her plans to retire in an appropriately badass fashion.
The Democrat from Maryland was a social worker and community organizer before she entered politics to become a member of Congress in 1975 and a Senator in 1986. She is known for her unapologetically liberal positions and has had the honor of being smeared (unsuccessfully) by her Republican opponent for her associations with a radical feminist lesbian.
Well, this makes for a nice juxtaposition. A judge ruled that a woman has no right to sue her employer for firing her over her marital problems. But, at the same time, a Creationist non-profit has already sued the state of Kentucky for not subsidizing their Noah’s Ark replica or letting them discriminate against non-Christians.
Alyce Conlon was a spiritual director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, an organization that ministers to college students in Michigan. In 2011, she told her bosses about problems she was having in her marriage and confided that she was considering divorce. Her bosses, asking themselves What Would Jesus do, no doubt, put her on leave, first paid, then unpaid. A year later, having not achieved marital harmony and bliss, she was fired. The next month, her husband divorced her.
Conlon tried to sue IVCF because, she claimed, the organization did not fire two male employees they knew had divorced their wives. But the 6th Circuit Court ruled that she did not have the right to sue because federal discrimination laws do not apply to religious leaders at religious institutions. U.S. Circuit Judge Alice Batchelder wrote that, “The government cannot dictate to a religious organization who its spiritual leaders would be.” IVCF, Batchelder wrote, “believes in the sanctity of marriage and desires that all married employees honor their marriage vows,” and thus has the right to “consider the impact of any separation/divorce on colleagues, students, faculty and donors.”
In an age of terrible, hyperbolic, trivializing analogies, it takes a special one to really stand out. Here are the best, or worst, examples of terrible comparisons from the week.
Black people… they’re just like zoo animals. Benjamin Cole, a top advisor to Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) wrote the following about two Black people he saw outside of his Washington DC apartment: “So apparently the closing of the National Zoo has forced the animals to conduct their mating rituals on my street.” Cole, the former Baptist pastor and energy industry spokesman is not just a brilliant anthropologist/ zoologist/ racist, but a sharp political aid, because he posted these thoughts on Facebook. See other racist gems from Cole, here. Shock accepted Cole’s resignation on Thursday. So, we are now back to living in that post-racial world in which Rosa Parks ended racism and the President is Black.
The Supreme Court refused to consider the case of Angela Ames, a woman who was forced to quit her job because she needed to breastfeed, deciding that firing a woman for breastfeeding isn’t discrimination because men can lactate. The argument may sound progressive and inclusive, but
it’s the total opposite.
Image via Wikipedia
When Angela Ames returned to work at the Nationwide Insurance Company after her maternity leave, she found another employee’s belongings in her workspace. She needed to pump breast milk for her child but was denied access to the lactation room because the company needed three days to process the paperwork. Unfortunately, nobody had bothered telling Ames about this lengthy lactation-room-admissions policy before she came back to work. She tried to express milk in a “wellness room,” but it was occupied. By this point, Ames, who had been unable to express her milk, was in pain and had started leaking. When she asked her supervisor where she could pump, he responded, “Just go home to be with your babies.” And then, like the chivalrous, selfless prince that he is, dictated her letter of resignation.
Ames tried to sue over what seems to be obvious pregnancy and gender discrimination. But in March 2014, the Eighth Circuit Court decided that she had not met the legal burden of showing that her treatment was so bad that any reasonable person would have resigned. Because, a reasonable person would totally tolerate the humiliation of having someone else’s stuff in their workspace, being denied access to a place she can nurse, being in pain and leaking, being told to go be with their babies, and then having their letter of resignation written for them.
But here’s the kicker! The Eighth Circuit was refusing to overturn an earlier decision, which also sided with Nationwide in 2012. This ruling said that if Ames had, indeed, been fired over her needing to breastfeed, that wouldn’t constitute pregnancy-related discrimination, anyway. Want to know why? Because you don’t have to be pregnant to lactate. Nor do you have to be a woman. As the Court wrote in its decision, “It is a scientific fact that even men have milk ducts and the hormones responsible for milk production.”
Now, this may sound like a progressive inclusive point. But let’s not kid ourselves. This is about refusing to recognize blatant discrimination, not about challenging the gender binary. As the ACLU’s Galen Sherwin wrote on Monday,
Sherwin also points out that finding loopholes to justify discrimination has a long and rich history.
The court’s reasoning in this case echoes old Supreme Court pronouncements that discriminating against pregnant women at work isn’t sex discrimination because both men and women can be non-pregnant. Congress long ago rejected this ridiculous reasoning when it passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. It’s disheartening to see it resurface again.
As Sherwin also explains, this case,
shines a harsh light on the multi-layered workings of structural discrimination: Workplace policies that don’t make space for the realities of pregnancy and motherhood, employers’ entrenched sex stereotypes and implicit bias, and courts that — despite decades-old legal protections — still manage to turn a blind eye to the pervasive discrimination faced every day by working women.
This isn’t just sanctioned discrimination. This is institutionalized.
Happy 110th birthday, Ayn Rand! Born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum, in Saint Petersburg, Rand wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, founded Objectivism, and helped give rise to the Libertarian and Tea Party movements, though she would certainly be mortified to see some of the people (i.e. all the religious ones) who her attribute their political beliefs to her ideology. To celebrate the guru of selfishness, let us look at scary quotes which range from denouncing altruism as evil to warning against female presidents.
1. It’s not that I dislike altruism, it’s just that it’s evil. During an interview, Mike Wallace said, “You say that you do not like the altruism by which we live.” Rand responded by correcting him ever so slightly: “I will say that, ‘I don’t like’ is too weak a word. I consider it evil.”
File these stories under “This week in Justice Delayed/ relative progress/ baby steps/ Black Lives Matter a Little” news: a Black woman who never should have been convicted for firing a warning shot to scare off an abusive husband is “allowed” to serve the rest of her sentence at home under house arrest. And a judge threw out the convictions of 9 Black men who had sat at an all white lunch counter in Rock Hill, South Carolina in 1961.
Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in jail for shooting a wall and harming nobody. She was attempting to scare off her abusive then-husband, Rico Gray, who had admitted to and against whom she had a restraining order. Thinking he was not at home, Alexander went to their former house to get some belongings. The two got into an argument and, according to Alexander, Gray threatened her. Gray corroborates Alexander’s story: “I was in a rage. I called her a whore and bitch and … I told her … if I can’t have you, nobody going to have you,” he said, in a deposition. When Alexander retreated into the bathroom, Gray tried to break the door. She ran into the garage, but couldn’t leave because it was locked. She came back with a registered gun, which she legally owned, and yelled at him to leave. Gray recalls, “I told her … I ain’t going nowhere, and so I started walking toward her … I was cursing and all that … and she shot in the air.” Gray himself understands why Alexander fired the warning shot:
In case you missed President Obama’s amazing ad-libbed zinger of a comeback from this week’s State of The Union Address, here it is presented in its true essence: a music video.
When President Obama said, “I have no more campaigns to run,” some Republicans cheer and clapped. And without missing a beat, our commander in chief said, “I know, because I won both of them.” LIKE A BOSS!
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! To celebrate, let’s honor the currently sitting politicians who voted against making this day a federal or state holiday!
First, some background. Congressman John Conyers, (D-MI) first introduced legislation for a Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday on April 8, 1968, four days after he was killed. When Conyers brought the bill to the floor in November 1979, it failed by five votes. A bill was finally passed in 1983 and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, who only signed it because his veto would have been over-ridden.
So, let’s take a look at the politicians who are still in office and who voted against honoring Dr. King through a federal holiday.
katiehalper.com 