yonmei

04:53 pm: Why We Need Government
From Log of Smallship One - Passionate and Confused, via lexin:

We need some sort of central organisation whose job is to spend the money we pay to it on the things that we need. Not to make money, not to be profitable, not to be competitive in the fucking free market. We need a fucking government. And it needs to be responsible for the post office, and the maintenance of the water supply, and the same for gas, and electricity, and the fucking railways and the fucking roads and the provision of houses for people to fucking well live in. All the rest we can work out for ourselves. I'll even let them off the telephones, since that seems to be working all right at the moment, but for the things I have listed we need a body that will provide them because it has NO FUCKING CHOICE but to provide them. Because that is what it's FOR.

Yes.

I don't want an independent Scotland, as I said here, because basically I like being part of the union - but I am glad we have the Scottish Parliament to be a devolutionary bulwark against some of the madder floods of the bloody Thatcherite philosophy that's been bleeding acid over UK government since 1979.

Tags: evil british politics, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, scottish politics

10:55 pm: Verb Noire: new small press is hopeful


(Update: this is very cool. I just donated 1% of what they figured they needed as startup money (it worked out to just over £12 in real money) and when I reload the page, I get to see my contribution added to the amount.)

Also looking for readers and story submissions.



Tags: powerful speech vs. powerless silence, racefail 09

04:06 pm: How To Handle A Homophobe


Good advice for people whose friends are bigots, any flavour:

You know a few. Don't try to tell me you don't. And you even get along with some of them, because many homophobes have other fine qualities which make them hard workers, good friends, and charming dinner guests. So there may be a couple lurking around in your party. If they rear their ugly heads, it is your responsibility as the host to gently push their snouts back into the mud and filth from which they have truculently emerged.

The rebuff should match in tone, severity and intensity the nature of the offense. If your guest has committed an accidental heinosity out of thoughtlessness or ignorance--for instance, saying, "Oh, why didn't you bring your wife along?" to Alan after he mentions that he's married, simply pointing out the error politely is the most appropriate response. After that, the response elevates with the level of intentional offensiveness. A sample graduated scale is appended below:

"Y'know, I don't see why they think they should be able to get married just like normal people."
- "Well, Joe Bob, there are some folks who would say the same about rednecks like yourself."

"So these two lesbians walk into a bar..."
- "So these 50 bigots walk into the Republican convention..."

"Why should we fund AIDS research when it's clearly God's judgment on revolting perverts?"
- "I'm sorry, did you not see the NO ASSHOLES sign as you came in? I displayed it clearly above the door..."

"Sorry, I can't sit next to him, faggots make me sick."
- "Well, I'm afraid the only way I can accomodate your disability is by hog-tying you and tossing you out into the barn, where you will eventually be able to enjoy the dinner when it arrives in the form of pig slop."

Now, these responses may appear rude to you, but remember that your guest was rude first. Your job as host is to provide a pleasant and relaxing atmosphere for your guests, and if one of your guests is making it impossible for you to do that, well, it's polite to take him out behind the woodshed and give him a good hiding. Metaphorically speaking. Most 'phobes who trumpet this sort of swill do so because they assume no one will mind. If you make it clear that you do mind and you are offended, ten to one says your guest will back down and apologize. It's probably too much to hope for to think that this may also cause your 'phobe to reevaluate his opinion of gay people, but at least you can probably get him to shut up for the duration of the party. If not, it's hog-tyin' and eatin' slop in the barn for him. This is your party, and you'll tie if you want to. (From A Straight Person's Guide To Gay Etiquette, by the Plaid Adder)

Or, as another participant in the discussion said: "I think the big question of this particular imbroglio isn't "How do white folk write CoC well?" but 'HOLY SHIT did she really just SAY that?'"

Tags: howls of rage, imagine better, let's all be outcasts together, powerful speech vs. powerless silence

07:25 pm: The Sarah Palin Meme: Free People Read Freely
In the US, it's Banned Books Week. This is the ALA's list for top 100 Banned/Challenged Books in 2000-2007. "Out of 3,869 challenges reported to or recorded by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, as compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom does not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges. Research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported."

And, in the US, the Republican nominee for Vice President is someone who actively tried to have books banned from her local public library: "While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla [1996–2002] she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day." - Letter About Palin

Usual rules:

If it's bold, I've read it.
If it's italicised, I've read part of it.
If it's underlined, I'd like to read it.
If it's strikethrough, I don't want to read it - but feel strongly that my dislike doesn't mean other people shouldn't be able to make that decision for themselves.

( The ALA's 100 Most-Banned Books List 2000-2007 )

Tags: angry queer, big read, books are what i read, evil american politics, evil awful mondays, harry potter, imagine better, let's all be outcasts together, lists, meme, outcasts should stick together, powerful speech vs. powerless silence

11:30 am: I Officially Hate Adobe
Also, people who make use of Flash when they don't have to. Which, if you ask me, they never do.

I've given up on trying not to have Flash installed on my computer, because so many websites use it for every little damn thing. Even the site stats Wordpress provides come with pretty graphs in Flash.

Well. New install of Firefox needed for my work computer, okay: done. New install of Flash needed for my work computer *sigh* Okay, will do...

...can't. Every time I try to install Flash, it comes up with an error message saying "No, you need Firefox". There is no means of telling it that I have Firefox, that the exe install file that is telling me smugly "no, you need Firefox" was downloaded using Firefox: it simply says "You need Firefox before I can install" and sits there, doing nowt. You can't report the error anywhere: you can't alter the install program: you just have to delete it and do without Flash.

There's nothing helpful about this on the Adobe site. Obviously, they don't have a support e-mail to contact: you can register and ask on the discussion boards from other users, but frankly I hate those: also, since I have Firefox, the problem must be that Adobe Flash is looking for a specific directory name, and it's probably still looking for Firefox v2 and I have v3, so the only solution is to wait until someone at Adobe realises, behind their wall of non-communication, that in the outside world people using Firefox v3 cannot install Flash.

Tags: computer disasters, just my life really, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, venting, wanting to fire people for being stupid

03:57 pm: Three gifts of words
One reason why I love words so much is that words can, unlike any other form of art or making, be made and kept by the maker, given to others and still remain the maker's, shared with still others by the recipient and still remain the same gift, enhanced by being given.

First, I found (via Feministe's great Sunday tradition of shameless self-promotion), this poem: "Don’t write a poem about rape" by Julie Buffaloe-Yoder, first published by Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women in summer 1992. I don't want to quote from the poem: I want you, if you can bear it, to go there and read it all. (And thank you, hysperia, for linking to it.)

Here's part of the background of how it came to be written:

During my second year as an undergrad, someone very close to me was raped. It was a horrific experience, complete with guns, knives, and torture, like a scene from a Law & Order SVU episode. She was, needless to say, quite emotionally scarred.

A few years later, I wrote a poem about it and submitted it to a literary journal. I received an unbelievable response from the editor. He took the time to type a six page, single spaced letter in which he ranted about how he would never, ever publish a poem about rape, because he was so tired of hearing women cry and moan about the subject. In his opinion, women who get raped usually “have it coming,” because of the provocative way they dress or act around men. In his words, he was “sick of wenchy women poets who are always bashing men.”

Then there's two excerpts from a recent speech by an author I thought I was familiar with:

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

I read that, and, knowing who the author was, was dumbstruck: because yes. Suddenly, I want to read her next book.

I stopped and thought about it, and did some other stuff, and then went on to read the rest, thinking that she could not possibly have anything to say that would resonate with me more than what she had already said, but, further down, after she spoke about her work with Amnesty International:

"If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."

That would be J. K. Rowling, speaking at the Commencement Address to Harvard, June 2008.

Because, yes.

Tags: Pötterdämmerung, books are what i read, imagine better, poetry, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, write write write

05:39 pm: Memorial Day: Kaija Seifert
I'm just reminded: today's a day to remember Kaija Seifert, a US soldier who was killed in Iraq.

"Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation's service." - www.usmemorialday.org.

This month a federal appeals court has reinstated the legal challenge made by Margaret Witt (formerly of the USAF) to the constitutionality of the U.S. military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Too late for Kaija Seifert, and for others who died in the closet. But a hopeful sign, nonetheless.

Tags: evil american politics, howls of rage, kaija seifert, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, war

11:28 am: Overheard in the Forest Cafe: and thoughts about the hierarchy of equality
Man, furiously: "And now a court says I can't see my kids!"
Other man, sympathetically: "Mumble mumble, rough, mumble, man, mumble rhubarb rhubarb."
Man, furiously explaining: "There's an exclusion order! If I go near them I could get arrested! My own kids!"
Other man, still sympathetically: "Mumble mumble rhubarb rhubarb."
Man, even more furiously: "And I've still got to pay! Why the hell do I have to pay if I can't see my kids!"
Other man, still sympathetically though his mumbles were getting shorter and shorter: "Mumble rhubarb."
Me, cravenly: *silence*

I was standing at the computer, and the two men were sitting at the table behind me (or possibly, going through the Free Shop stuff, I didn't turn to see).

What is an exclusion order? (from Shelter):

An exclusion order is a court order that suspends the right of a married person, civil partner or cohabitee to live in the family home. You can apply for an exclusion order if your spouse or partner has done or is threatening to do something that has harmed or would harm you or your children either physically or mentally. This will probably need to be more than one isolated incident that was out of character. It can be difficult to get an exclusion order and it will depend on your individual circumstances.

I don't want to say anything like "The courts don't make mistakes!" etc, but the fact is: there is a strong principle in the UK, in European law in general, that a parent has not just the right but the obligation to get to spend time with his kids. (I say "his" advisedly: mothers, having usually been the primary caretakers from birth, and in general remaining so even after a relationship splits, won't usually have the same difficulties in exercising this obligation.)

Courts don't serve an exclusion order lightly. If the man had been served with an exclusion order it was probably because he had, more than once, turned up at the family home since he and his partner split, and terrified the hell out of her and the children - terrified at least, and possibly struck his ex-partner or their children. The police had probably been called, at least once, to get him to leave. Or it could be worse. And given the way this man was behaving in the Forest, yelling and scaring his ex and his children seemed certain, and the rage in his voice made it more certain.

I wouldn't ordinarily even have considered joining in a conversation that I was not included in, but the Forest is one of those places where you can. But as the only things I would have had to say would have been on the lines of "Yes, you still have to support your children because their legal right to your support isn't tied to or affected by your legal right to see them, which it sounds like you've voided by your own fault" the main reason I didn't say any of that was because I was chickenshit.

There are seven equality strands (six recognised, but seven ought to be): race/ethnicity, religion/belief, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and poverty.

( And while there are individual differences, individual circumstances, it is surprising how consistent we are in Western culture about what order it's acceptable to be openly prejudiced: poverty, age, gender identity, disability, sexual orientation, gender, religion, race. )

Having sorted all this out in my head - and I will accept agreement, disagreement, re-ordering, shuffling, in comments - looking at my list, which is based on "what I feel the situation to be in Scotland at this time", I notice that it's very strongly based on legislation and law enforcement. It's been illegal since 1975 to incite hatred on the grounds of race; anti-sectarianism has been strongly enforced in Scotland, both socially and legally, precisely because Protestant and Catholic have been (and are) big issues for so long. (Edinburgh and Glasgow, and other cities in Scotland, have a city football team for the Protestants, a city football team for the Catholics, and if the city's big enough, a third team for - as a Catholic fan of Partick Thistle told me - the ones who don't like getting beaten up.)

There is no legislation banning incitement of hatred against people for their gender or their sexual orientation or their disability. (There might be in England and Wales soon, for sexual orientation at least, but there isn't in Scotland, nor likely to be.) There is a kind of fumbling recognition that it's not a good thing, expressed in some local authority guidelines and government language, but no legislation.

Not only is there no legislation about it, it's actually considered a positively good thing for children to be harassed/bullied about their gender identity, because of course children need to learn to conform.

No one talks about the problem of inciting hatred against people because of their income level at all. Contempt for people on a low income is considered, perhaps not positively good, but perfectly normal.

Which is worth thinking about, when considering if legislation will "make a difference". Eventually it will, though expecting instant results is not something that happens. A generation or two who grow up under the new legislation grow up at least knowing that it's unacceptable to express such hatred. Which is a step in itself, as I think anyone would agree who has ever been made uncomfortable by open expression of prejudice by someone who sees nothing wrong with it...

Tags: evil british politics, i am a feminist, outcasts should stick together, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, scottish politics, working at the forest

08:46 pm: Justice is not achieved with e-petitions
Hwaet! Give ear to!

This afternoon a friend sent to my work address (I think hoping I might use my work resources to publicise it) an e-petition that begins:

Outrage in South Africa

Last week a 3 year old girl in South Africa was beaten and raped. She is still alive. The man responsible was released on bail yesterday. He is walking the streets. If you are too busy to read this then just sign your name and forward this on.

The Government is planning to close the child protection unit and this is a petition against it. This is a very important petition. It is an essential part of the justice system for children. You may have already heard that there's a myth in South Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. (Note: that part is perfectly damnably true.)

The younger the virgin, the more potent the cure. This has led to an epidemic of rapes by infected males, with the correspondent infection of innocent kids. Many have died in these cruel rapes. Recently in Cape Town , a 9-month-old baby was raped by 6 men. Please think about that for a moment. The child abuse situation is now reaching catastrophic proportions and if we don't do something, then who will? Kindly add your name to the bottom of the list and please pass this on to as many people as you know.

If you are signature no.: 1000 - please forward the mail-list to c h i l d p r o t e c t p c a @ s a p s . o r g . z a

There are 643 names on the copy that reached me, beginning with a name in Australia.

When this e-mail arrived, I glanced it over, and thought my usual think: E-petitions are no good, why do people keep forwarding them? and a less-usual think, because I was at work: I should look this up and see if I can publicise it, or if I can't, suggest better ways to the friend who sent it to me. A Facebook group, I thought. Something.

This specific kind of petition, where the author asks you to add your name and forward it to "everyone you know" is a kind of viral meme. It can be worthwhile in drawing attention to a specific issue (as with the Afghan women petition of a few years ago), but actually regarding it as a petition to be sent to an e-mail address where "someone" will do something about it is pointless: an e-mail petition of this kind is regarded about as highly as a blank sheet of paper, and the influx of e-mails to the e-mail address given will, soon or late, mean that e-mail address has to be shut down due to overload.

This, however, is a more treacherous kind of petition; it's a hoax. As I found in five minutes googling, this is a known hoax that's been circulating on the Internet for at least eighteen months. The Child Protection Unit in South Africa is not being closed down: it's being expanded, restructured, and renamed the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit. (The e-mail address given is not a valid police address.)

There is a grain of awful truth in the e-mail.

The Virgin Cure belief isn't specific to South Africa - in fact, it may have come to southern Africa with European colonists in the 19th century:

The myth of the Virgin Cure has a rich and culturally diverse history stretching back to 16th century Europe, and more prominently to be found in 19th century Victorian England, where, in spite of the emphasis on morality, rectitude and family values, there existed a widespread belief, that sexual intercourse with a virgin was a cure for syphilis, gonorrhea, [and other STD's]. (HIV/AIDS, the stats, the virgin cure and infant rape)

The phenomenon of infant rape in South Africa is very real:

"In our culture, as a woman, you don't say no to a man. Sex is not open for discussion," [Rose Tamae, a survivor of gang rape] says.
"So they think they can do as they like.
"In a place like Orange Farm, where most people are unemployed, and the women have to go looking for work far away, often the children are left at home in the care of men, or strangers.
"They are vulnerable. In one case a little girl was being given food in return for sex, and she didn't want to go home empty-handed to her mother, who had Aids and was sick. " (BBC)

But though rape reporting to the police is on the rise, the actual figures of rape may not be, and may not be connected with the "Virgin Cure" phenomenon:

Dr Jewkes and two of her collaborators, Dr Lorna Martin (Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, University of Cape Town) and Ms Loveday Penn-Kekana (Centre for Health Policy, University of the Witwatersrand) believe other factors are to blame for these violent acts.
"The idea that having sex with a virgin cleanses you of AIDS does exist in South Africa and there have been reported cases of this as a motivating factor for child rape, but the predominant evidence suggests that this is infrequently the case," Dr Jewkes says. She quotes Mr Luke Lamprecht, the manager of the Teddy Bear Clinic in Johannesburg, which is the referral point for all child sex abuse cases in the metropolis. According to him, he has only seen one child rape case where the perpetrator believed the myth. This happened some 4 years ago - and the child's mother agreed that the HIV-positive man could rape her 4-year-old in exchange for cash.
"According to another report on child rape which investigated injury patterns, management and outcomes, there was a 1% sero-conversion rate.* This was, for most cases, in the absence of anti-retroviral therapy and therefore suggests that this myth is not an important cause of rape. If it had been, in view of the extensive injuries common in child rape, a higher rate of sero-conversion would be expected," says Dr Jewkes. (The 'virgin myth' and child rape in South Africa)

These are horrors. There are real things people can do: get involved with your local World AIDS Day event; donate to the AIDS Foundation of South Africa; read more about AIDS in Africa; support Rape Crisis NGOs in South Africa (the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust is one of the oldest and does work around the country as well as in Cape Town); if you live in the UK, you can support Community H. E. A. R. T, a UK charity that supports "Health Education And Reconstruction Training" in South Africa: if you live elsewhere, you can find a similar charity based in your country. These are useful things to do. Forwarding an e-mail petition isn't going to do a damn thing, ever, even when it's actually factually true.

(On the other hand, I wouldn't want to discourage you from e-mailing Pope Rat at benedictxvi@vatican.va, or ringing him at the Vatican Switchboard (+39.06.6982) or even writing to him at Vatican City (you will have to address the envelope "His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, 00120 Via del Pellegrino, Citta del Vaticano": I imagine envelopes sent to Pope Rat or That Nazi Bastard just get weeded out at the sorting office): and asking him why the Catholic Church is spending more resources to oppose condoms in Africa than it is on opposing the lie of the Virgin Cure.)

Tags: evil religious politics, feminism, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, venting

11:39 pm: "Catholics refuse abortions with anguish"
When I read in the Guardian about Catholic schools in Northern Ireland shutting down Amnesty International letter-writing groups, I wrote a long-ish response (too long to be a letter) and thought about trying to reduce it to the 50-100 words or so that would have stood a chance of being published. But, I thought, probably I'm too late, there will be several such letters already in (in my experience of letter-writing to the Guardian, it's best to have composed and sent your letter by lunchtime the day of publication) and besides, reducing that spluttering wordage to publishable length felt too exhausting.

Someone did respond, though, and not briefly. His letter is entitled Catholics refuse abortions with anguish. There are two ways that could be intended, and given that this argument is all about Amnesty's decision to support the victims of rape and incest, developed with reference to the mass violations in war zones such as Darfur and Congo, you might think that it's by a Catholic woman explaining that as a Catholic she refused an abortion with anguish.

No, of course not. (Catholic women are, according to statistics from the US, as likely to abort an unwanted pregnancy as women of other Christian denominations: more likely to need an abortion, given their religion's rigid opposition to birth control: and are, doctrinally speaking, actually sinning less if they avoid contraception and just have an abortion whenever they need one.) Nor is this from a Northern Ireland Catholic who is actually affected by the decision to ban Amnesty International from NI schools. Nor from someone living in Darfur and the Congo. No, this is from a man living in Congleton, Cheshire. He writes:

I just cannot express the anger I feel at the unfair diatribe by Zoe Williams against Catholics who are taking a stand against Amnesty International (Faith schools should not be tax-funded, and here's why, September 19).

Nevertheless, he's going to try.

It was a Catholic who founded Amnesty

True. However, had he had any interest in the historical roots of Amnesty, he would know it had its roots in the Communist Party and in Quakerism as much, if not more so, than Catholicism.

it has been supported throughout its whole existence by the Catholic church worldwide, down to every local parish

Actually, the Catholic Church has always opposed Amnesty when Amnesty supports a woman's right to choose.

and only now that Amnesty has decided to support abortion has the church withdrawn its support.

Amnesty has decided that in certain limited circumstances - which fall well short of the legal status of abortion in this country - the denial of abortion to women who have been raped will be regarded as a human rights issue which Amnesty International will support. For example:

• In Guanajuato, Mexico, Human Rights Watch interviewed a woman who had been sexually abused by her father at least since the age of six – and who also faced criminal charges for “incest.” She had two children as the result of these rapes. The official legal record from her complaint against her father in 2002 reads: Then my father took me to a hostel.... He penetrated me, and it hurt a lot when he penetrated me. I cried and I said to my father that it hurt a lot.... I want to declare that I don’t want to have the child that I am expecting, because I will not be able to love it. Because it is my father’s, I will not be able to love it. (The authorities did not authorize a legal abortion.) (cite)
  
• 24-year-old Marija, an ethnic Croat virgin living in northern Bosnia ..... For two months she was held in a Serb brothel-camp and raped daily by five or six men. Captured during an afternoon walk near her village in northern Bosnia last autumn, Marija was imprisoned in a small room in a house in Obudovac and abused each evening by Serb irregulars. From other rooms she could hear the screams of other women, but never saw them. When she was released in a prisoner exchange earlier this month, she was pregnant. cite (She was able to get an abortion.)
  
• [Congo] Later the man [who raped me] came to my house. He found my parents there and he threatened them. So, my parents sent me to live with other family members. Then I realised that I was pregnant. When my parents found out, they chased me away. They told me that they couldn't take care of the baby as they were already having difficulties. I was very worried. Now I live with a neighbour who has a distant relationship with my mother. It is a life of suffering there. We eat with difficulty, even to find soap is difficult. It is hard. I regret I will have a baby soon. I have nothing to eat and to clothe it with. I was raped against my will. It is terrible because it isn't just me affected by this. There are many girls who visit me who also say that they are suffering. cite

</ul>
Amnesty International decided formally, in April this year, that from now on the denial of abortion to women made pregnant through rape/incest, and especially when rape is made use of as a war crime, would be treated as a human rights issue. The response of the Catholic Church was immediate and definite: they withdrew support from AI, and - as we see in NI - this decision is even trickling down to kids in Catholic schools who form Amnesty letter-writing groups to support prisoners of conscience.

The writer of this letter to Guardian claims:

And why? Not because it is indifferent to the awful sufferings of women made pregnant through rape or lack of birth-control facilities, but because it faces an almighty dilemma. Is the child in the womb a human being or not? Does it become one at some stage in the pregnancy or is it one from the moment of conception? And as we do not know the answer, can abortion be justifiable?

The assertion that if a fetus is to be regarded as a human being from conception that means abortion is not justifiable is rank illogic. My rights as a human being do not include the right to make use of another human being against their will. Termination of pregnancy remains justifable, if the pregnant woman can justify it, at any point during pregnancy: there is no point during pregnancy when a woman ceases to be human or loses her human rights.

To claim that the Catholic church is "not indifferent" to the sufferings of a 16-year-old girl, raped by her father for ten years, desperate for an abortion because "I will not be able to love it", or "not indifferent" to a girl rejected by her family because she is unmarried and pregnant from rape, is about as believable as their claim that they oppose equal human rights for LGBT people because they "love the sinner".

(Cardinal O'Brien celebrated the New Year in 2006 with a sermon preached about the awful moral degeneration of permitting two men to imitate marriage by having a civil partnership: I never liked The Herald so well as when they responded with an editorial inquiring of the Cardinal exactly what moral degeneration he thought was being imposed on society by giving a man the legal right to be with his dying partner in hospital, and what business it was of the Cardinal when these were civil partnerships, not religious? Since then the Cardinal has continued to demonstrate his "love" for LGBT people by accusing same-sex parents of being morally equivalent to child molestors. I am not joking or exaggerating. And this is what Catholics call "loving the sinner".)

It is a frightful problem not even addressed, let alone resolved, by Ms Williams blithely stating she is "happy ... to defend the right to abortion to all women everywhere at any time". If the foetus or child in the womb is a human being, has it no rights, not even that most basic right, to life?

Again, see above. If I am dying of liver failure, and it turns out this man is a perfect match, do I then have the right to have him tied down on an operating table and half his liver cut out - to his possible death - because I have the "right to life"? I used to be a blood donor: I stopped after ten years because the vein in one arm had collapsed and no donation was possible, and the other one would (apparently) go too after a while. I have B- blood, and no infections: I was a useful blood donor. Nevertheless, I had the right to decide for myself when to start being a blood donor, and I had the right to decide for myself when to stop. The notion that it's a "frightful problem" whether or not to deny that right to a woman (far from ignoring that problem, Zoe Williams noted the difference in the death rates between countries where abortion is legal, and countries where abortion is not). Oh, wait: this man wasn't interested in whether or not women die when legal abortion is denied...

There isn't a single Catholic doctor or nurse anywhere who refuses to assist in an abortion in the circumstances Zoe Williams describes without intense pain and anguish.

You know, when you read of teachers (in the bad old days when teachers were allowed to beat schoolchildren) claiming that "this hurts me more than it hurts you" as they prepared to beat the crap out of some small kid with a length of rattan cane, it really is, in a mordant and nasty kind of way, sort of funny. Not if you were the kid who was about to be beaten, but at a distance in time... well, yeah. It's sort of funny.

I looked up a number of sites to find examples to quote for this journal post. The more I read, and thought of this man claiming that what the doctor or the nurse feels is intense pain and anguish, when they refuse to help one of these women - I feel sick. I feel incredulous and sick and angry that this man thinks that it's the trained medical personnel who are willing to let a woman die or suffer horribly, a woman who has already suffered intense pain and anguish - but it's the doctor or the nurse who deserves our compassion, says this man: it's the Catholics who are refusing for the sake of a doctrinal belief that a pregnant woman is an incubator and only the fetus has human rights who deserve our compassion? I may vomit. I won't, because my keyboard will seize up.

But wait, there's more.

And that is because they - Catholic doctors, nurses, nuns, brothers, paramedics and priests - have been devoting their lives for centuries to founding hospitals and clinics for the poor of this world. Their history is absolutely heroic, their contribution indescribable, their dedication unsurpassed.

Actually, in the specific area he's talking about: I do not consider it "heroic" to decide that you would rather let a woman suffer and die than oppose the Church to which you belong; I find the Catholic church's contribution perfectly describable, and so did Zoe Williams, and so have many AIDS activists combating the anti-condom propaganda spread by priests: and the "dedication" of a doctor or a nurse who put their religion above the needs of their patients is easily surpassed by any doctor or nurse who would, professionally, put the health and wellbeing of their patients first.

I would love to see Zoe Williams spend a few months in their company - in the dangerous war-torn jungles of the Congo, or the dry and bitter plains of the Sudan, or the jobless impoverished townships of Mugabe's Zimbabwe - and come back and tell us then what she thinks of the Catholics she writes about with such contempt.

I doubt that he would change his mind merely faced with the actual victims of rape whom he dismisses with such indifference for their sufferings and such concern for their doctors, any more than I think Zoe Williams would suddenly discover that it's the Catholic medical personnel who deny these women abortions who really deserve her compassion and respect, as this man seems to think she would. So I would like to transform this man into a woman, and put him into a hotel room in Mexico, or rape cell in Croatia, or an undefended village in the Congo, and have him raped and made pregnant, and let him consider whether he himself has no right to human life, but is only an incubator for the fetus conceived of rape.

Tags: evil religious politics, howls of rage, i am an angry feminist, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, war

02:44 pm: Powerful speech vs. powerless silence
Whenever I'm out for a walk with Catmunk, every so often, something happens. He may be talking or I am: but he goes silent. His eyes widen. He's staring very hard. If I follow his gaze, I sometimes register who's caught his attention, but more often than not, I don't. (Hello, yes, lesbian.) If he's very excited and I really don't see, he'll shift a little from foot to foot and tug unobtrusively at my hand and make tiny nods with his chin, trying not to be obvious about it. Then the object of his lusts passes out of his field of vision, and he sighs, eyes return to normal, he grins or giggles at himself, and we go back to talking about what we were talking about. Very occasionally the man he's noticed notices Catmunk staring at him and grins back. Mostly, though, the man appears oblivious, and is intended to remain so: Catmunk certainly isn't trying to attract the man's attention.

Whenever I'm out for a walk by myself, once in a while, something happens: a man whistles or yells something. It's loud and overt and intended to catch my attention. I go into hyperalert mode, my hand goes to my mobile phone, I stare directly ahead and pretend I neither heard nor saw. Once - just once, when the whistler was in a car and the car got halted at traffic lights just ahead of me - I crossed the road, paused in front of the car with the whistler, and spat full on the bonnet. (What I really wanted to do was kick the car or scratch the paint, but spitting struck me as less risky.) Then I ran - heard a car door opening behind me: got into a shop and stayed in the shop, hidden at the back, pretending to look at the tins of processed peas and cat food on the shelves, until I'd heard the traffic lights change and the car had to be on its way. But that is the only time I ever remember being able to give vent to the anger that filled me. The anger is born of fear: I am afraid because while wolf-whistling/yelling is just (my guess) men showing off to their buds how heterosexual they are, this is the first stage of a showing-off process that ends in gang rape. And while I'm reasonably confident that I can run or fight or at least call the police from my mobile before any individual man can attack me, I'm not so confident if outnumbered.

Online is a different matter: regulars will remember jassa, who succeeded in shutting down three RSS feeds of this journal by his spam - and LJ Abuse were unwilling to enforce the TOS on jassa. But jassa isn't the worst. I'm not going to write about the very worst, because it was a good many years ago and I prefer not to link this online identity to that one in any way: but the second worst. Back when the anti-breastfeeding fight was happening on Livejournal, I was by chance in a very public position as opposing LJ Abuse's anti-breastfeeding stance. On one of the journal posts I made about the issue, I got two comments that included truly horrific pics - both from registered users of livejournal, both ugly and threatening. I reported both to LJ Abuse, who did nothing. A few days after LJ Abuse had suspended my account for continuing to use a default icon that transgressed their new rule that women's bodies are obscene, I was finally e-mailed about the threats I had reported: the LJ Abuse member who contacted me said that in order to "allow" LJ Abuse to follow up on the obscene threats I had reported, I would have to have my journal unsuspended so that they could see the comments.

I pointed out that LJ Abuse could themselves quite easily temporarily unsuspend my journal and check out the comments, and deal with the commenters however they saw fit, then re-suspend my journal. But this LJ Abuse chose not to do: evidently they saw the few pixels of areola visible on my default icon as more of a threat to good order on Livejournal than any obscene threats could be.

Nothing has happened to me as bad as what happened to Kathy Sierra, who recently had to cancel going to a conference because men who hate her have been posting sexual death threats. But it is both interesting and disillusioning that so many men have been responding to what happened to Kathy Sierra - or any of half a dozen other bloggers I can think of, all female, who had their lives and livelihood threatened by men who hate women and want to put women in fear. I am not aware of any male blogger who has suffered in this way.

On a thread at Pandagon, a male blogger asked "Well, what can I do - beyond the negative of never wolf-whistling or cat-calling?" (We'd already discussed ways in which men who find themselves alone on the street at night with a woman can avoid putting her in fear: crossing the street so that he's not walking behind her, falling back, etc.) "What can I do if I see another man doing that?"

Someone suggested - and other women agreed - that one thing a man can do is say to a man who wolfwhistles - "Hey man, not cool" - or some other (any other) casual phrase that denigrates that behaviour. It's done for male solidarity, for male approval, in the presumption that women are available objects and any man is free to harass: so yes, make clear that, as a man, you do not share that presumption, you resist that solidarity, you do not grant that approval.

So how did some male bloggers react to what happened to Kathy Sierra? Well - some at least (this particular post was inspired by John Scalzi's response) reacted with horror. Not to what happened to Sierra. With horror to the idea that anyone might expect them to curtail their own speech privileges, still less that they should curtail the speech privileges of others. (See reactions of all too many pundits to a certain US radio host called Don Imus...)

The blogger code of conduct is another response to what happened to Sierra: an invitation to bloggers to stand up and say "Hey man, not cool." Which invitation, Scalzi has declined, with much (his self-description) eye-rolling and shrugged-off "hey man, my site, free speech!" His response to my comment pointing out who he was siding with was that this was "just about the stupidest thing anyone's said on this site in good long time" and that just because he was declining to stand up against those who terrorize women online, I shouldn't say he was doing that, because that was stupid, and would I go say those stupid things somewhere else.

So I have...

Tags: powerful speech vs. powerless silence

07:57 pm: According to Roy Hattersley, I'm a savage
Roy Hattersley writes:

Melissa Dear of the Family Planning Association argues that further study is not necessary because "only a small minority of women have an abortion after 20 weeks ... and for those there are good reasons". One of those reasons is, in her estimation, the fact that the prospective mothers "may not have realised that they were pregnant". How can that possibly be a justification for killing a potential, or an actual, human being?

The other day, as part of a radio discussion, a young lady raised the question of a child conceived by rape. Surely, she said, no one could argue against an abortion - no matter how late the date - in such circumstances. The logic of her argument is as disturbing as her lack of respect for life. I give her credit for not demanding the execution of the rapist. If she does not propose capital punishment for the perpetrator of the horrible crime, how can she justify the death penalty for one of its victims? The rational conclusion is desperately hard on the woman who has been violated. But unless the preservation of life comes first, we are savages. [See regendered for an alternate view.]

The reason that immediately leaps to my mind why a rape victim might not seek an abortion because she didn't realise she was pregnant until (according to Roy Hattersley's standards) it was "too late", is because she's a very young girl. A thirteen-year-old, a fourteen-year-old. Even an eleven-year-old. But, to Roy, only a savage would say a rape victim should have an abortion - savages like the people who run Human Rights Watch in Mexico, or like the Eastern Health Board in Ireland.

Tags: feminism, powerful speech vs. powerless silence

12:07 pm: "No Pity. No Shame. No Silence."
pickled_ginger's post got me to post mine.

"It's about breaking the rules that make sexual violence and other abuse unthinkable, so many people refuse to think; that make it unspeakable, so many people refuse to hear or to speak; that make abuse unstoppable."

I agree. And yet I have not wanted to take part in this meme, not because the story is so bad, but because it's not.

Look, my story is not some deep-hidden tale of unspeakable violence. It's almost silly, and it wasn't especially traumatic, but this is what happened to me when I was about 14-15:

( cut for length )

Tags: i am an angry feminist, just my life really, powerful speech vs. powerless silence