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A drawing, which was so controversial it had to be covered up, is now on full display at a library in New Jersey. So, why would the Newark Library display an art work that depicts oral sex?

Because the piece, by renowned African-American artist Kara Walker, is, like so much of her other work, an exploration of race, gender, sexuality and violence. The title of the piece, “The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos,” (a reference to Martin Luther King’s more optimistic quote “The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, but It Bends Toward Justice”) says as much. The drawing is consistent with Walker’s style and content, as Paul Sternberger, an associate art history professor at Rutgers-Newark, explains:

“For many years she has been exploring themes of race, gender and oppression, often in a quasi-historical context… Often those themes include violent and sexually charged imagery…. That’s what she does…. It’s frightening.”

The piece, which was put up in November, depicts the era of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and contains violent imagery and images of the KKK. But the aspect that most found so disturbing was that of a white man pushing the head of a naked black woman, whose back is to us, into his groin. Kendell Willis, a library services employee, recalls, “I didn’t notice it at first…. Then I looked up and was blown away.” Willis sent Library Director Wilma Grey an e-mail complaining about the art work.

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The right loves to try to co-opt Martin Luther King Jr. and portray Planned Parenthood as racist. But an inconvenient fact is that MLK and Planned Parenthood had an excellent relationship. He would, no doubt, be horrified by the modern day attacks on contraception.

As early as 1957, Dr. King expressed his support of birth control in an advice column he wrote for Ebony Magazine. One woman wrote in to him:

Question: We have seven children and another one is on the way. Our four-room apartment is bursting at the seams and living space in Harlem is at a premium. I have suggested to my husband that we practice birth control, but he says that when God thinks we have enough children, He will put a stop to it. I’ve tried to reason with him, but he says that birth control is sinful. Is he right?

King responded by writing,

I do not think it is correct to argue that birth control is sinful. It is a serious mistake to suppose that it is a religious act to allow nature to have its way in the sex life. The truth is that the natural order is given us, not as an absolute finality, but as something to be guided and controlled. In the case of birth control the real question at issue is that between rational control and resort to chance. Another thing that must be said is that changes in social and economic conditions make smaller families desirable, if not necessary. As you suggest, the limited quarters available in our large cities and the high cost of living preclude such large families as were common a century or so ago. A final consideration is that women must be considered as more than “breeding machines.” It is true that the primary obligation of the woman is that of motherhood, but an intelligent mother wants it to be a responsible motherhood-a motherhood to which she has given her consent, not a motherhood due to impulse and to chance. And this means birth control in some form. All of these factors, seem to me, to make birth control rationally and morally justifiable.

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It’s kind of incredible that today will mark the first time that a woman delivers a prayer at a presidential inauguration. But Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers and a civil rights organizer in her own right, is the perfect woman for the job, especially for an inauguration coinciding with Martin Luther King Day.

Raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Evers-Williams met Medgar Evers, an upperclassman, Army veteran, and football player on her first day of college at Alcorn A&M, and they married the following year. Medgar was already a member of the NAACP and helped raise Myrlie’s consciousness and eschew white standards of beauty:

“He’s the one who told me to stop biting my bottom lip and to be proud of my large lips…. It was he who told me to stop straightening my hair and be proud of my kinky hair. It was Medgar who told me to stop using bleach on my face to be lighter and to be proud of my Blackness.”

In 1954, Medgar became the Mississippi state field secretary for the NAACP and Myrlie worked as his secretary. As a team they organized voter registration drives and civil rights demonstrations and fought to desegregate schools. They both knew the dangers they faced for their work. Mrylie and Medgar spoke in code over the phone and trained their children to dive to the ground if they heard strange noises (in case there were snipers).

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Newark Mayor Cory Booker appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show to promote his jewelry line, the Caliber collection, which melts seized guns and turns them into bracelets. Each bracelet has “Newark” and the gun’s serial number etched into it. According to the website.

The Caliber Collection is made up of metal from 250 guns and bullet casings seized by the Newark Police Department. The result is a series of pieces that embody the gun’s transformation from a destructive weapon to a powerful symbol of renewal. A portion of the proceeds from each sale is used to fund future Gun Buyback Amnesty programs in Newark. It is our hope that this will be a model that we can roll out in other cities across the nation.

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Loyal Jezebel readers/ most people will have seen the charming NRA video which stays really classy by going after Obama’s children and calling the President an “elitist hypocrite.” Well, they released another video (because they are real auters of le cinema) in which they call Obama a “HYPOCRITE” again, for saying, in an interview with David Gregory, that he was “skeptical” that having armed guards in schools was the “only solution,” when “the school Obama’s daughters attend has 11 armed guards.” The only problem is the school, Sidwell Friends, has zero, not 11 armed guards. It has confirmed that their security officers do not carry guns. And while they have 11 people in their security department, as the Washington Post points out, “Five are listed as “special police officer,” while two are listed as ‘on call special police officer,’ which presumably means they do not work full-time. The directory also lists two weekend shift supervisors, one security officer and the chief of security.” So it’s not like the school is crawling with security officers.

So where does this erroneous information come from? As a screenshot (see above) from the video demonstrates, it comes from a December 24th article published on… wait for it… Breitbart.com.

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OMG. Amazing, incredible news! Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, Stephen Colbert’s sister, is declaring herself a candidate in the South Carolina special election to be held in May to fill Tim Scott’s open House seat. Senator Tim Scott is the crazy Tea Partier former congressman who was tapped by crazy Tea Partier current Governor Nikki Haley to the fill seat left empty when Crazy Tea Partier Jim DeMint retired from The Senate to go work at the Heritage Foundation. Phew. OK. If Colbert-Busch (who, unlike her brother, pronounces the “T” at the end of her name) wins the Democratic primary, she would most likely face Republican Mark Sanford, who himself resigned back in 2009 after disappearing for five days while “hiking the Appalachian trail” of his mistress in Argentina. Colbert-Busch will file her paperwork on Tuesday.

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If conservatives like sex, they sure need to do a better job of showing it. And it’s not just lefty feminists like myself who think that.

A woman at a panel held Wednesday night by the right-wing Independent Women’s Forum on how to reach out to woman had the same take. Leslie Paige, 55, who works for an advocacy group promoting smaller government, had her mind on bigger things when she took the mic and said, “I just want to say one small word and the word is sex.” Paige explained that college-aged women see Republicans as “a bunch of prudish, anti-sex, anti-reproductive freedom people.” So Paige has a brilliant suggestion for combatting the image problem: bumper stickers that say “We Like Sex Too.” The room went silent for a second, but then broke into a round of applause and hoots.

Great! Now we can all go home. Not really. The problem that Paige doesn’t get is that this isn’t an image problem. This is a content problem. I’m happy that conservatives enjoy sex, but that doesn’t mean the policies they and their party support aren’t “anti-reproductive freedom.” And if Paige doesn’t think the conservative movement and the GOP isn’t in opposition to reproductive freedom, she’s in denial.

And she’s not the only one who thinks “De Nile” is a river in Egypt, if you get my “drift” (doy! Two puns in ONE sentence). The Independent Women’s forum panelists pretended contraception was totes not an issue for conservatives. As Talking Points Memo reports,

When prodded by audience questions, the panelists said that contraception was a non-issue. As [conservative blogger Mollie ] Hemingway put it, contraception was thought up by Democrats who found it tested well in focus groups despite being a completely settled issue. Her response was to urge Republicans to respond with their own accusations that are “just as crazy,” something like, “they’re stealing your hot dogs!”

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First Kathryn Bigelow was attacked by douchebag maximus Bret Easton Ellis who tweeted, with his signature nuance and misogyny, “Kathryn Bigelow would be considered a mildly interesting film-maker if she was a man but since she’s a very hot woman she’s really overrated.” Then, on a more substantive level, senatorswrote a letter expressing their “deep disappointment” with the film, which they called a “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information” that led to bin Laden’s capture. The Center for Constitutional Rights and Human Rights Watch also criticizedthe film. At the New York Times Frank Bruni called the film “the political conundrum of the year, a far, far cry from the rousing piece of pro-Obama propaganda that some conservatives feared it would be.” And the film’s Washington DC premiere was met with a political protest.

Wednesday, Bigelow penned an op-ed in her own defense, in which she made clear her stance on torture:

First of all: I support every American’s 1st Amendment right to create works of art and speak their conscience without government interference or harassment. As a lifelong pacifist, I support all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind.

But I do wonder if some of the sentiments alternately expressed about the film might be more appropriately directed at those who instituted and ordered these U.S. policies, as opposed to a motion picture that brings the story to the screen.

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We all know that regularly, uh, ejecting our feces is part of being healthy. But did you know that receiving a fecal transplant couldsave your life? Well, it can, according to a new study conducted in the Netherlands and published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Before going further, let’s address the huge elephant in the bathroom. What the hell is fecal transplantation? Plainly speaking, it’s putting one person’s shit into the body of another person. In modern medicine, according to the New York Times,

It involves diluting stool with a liquid, like salt water, and then pumping it into the intestinal tract via an enema, a colonoscope or a tube run through the nose into the stomach or small intestine.

I know what you’re thinking. It sounds divine! But it can also save your life if you are suffering from an infection caused by a bacteria called Clostridium difficile, or C. difficile, for short. C. difficile infections are caused by antibiotics which kill off healthy gut bacteria, and leave people susceptible to the dangerous bacteria, which is extremely prevalent in hospitals. The treatment is usually more antibiotics, but sometimes those don’t work and patients relapse. The symptoms include severe diarrhea, vomiting and fever. The infection can be lethal and kills 14,000 people a year in the United States. Each year, over 300.000 hospital patients contract the bacteria and the number of cases in and out of hospitals could be as high as three million. More than $1 billion a year is spent on treatment costs.

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You can sleep a little more soundly tonight, knowing that most people aren’t batshit crazy. Here are the important take-aways from a Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday.

• 63% of Americans don’t want to overturn Roe v Wade (yay!)
• Not surprisingly, 74% of Democrats don’t want to overturn Roe v Wade.
• Even among Republicans, a higher percentage is pro Roe (48%) than anti Roe (46%).
• Most religious groups support Roe v Wade.
• 76% of Protestants, 65% of black Protestants and 63% of Catholics are pro Roe.
• Seven in 10 Americans with no religious affiliation “say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.”
• And don’t even get me started on the Jews*! Oy! Nearly 9 out of 10 agree “abortion should be legal in all or most cases.”

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