If evolution depended on Obama we’d still be swinging from trees.

President Barack Obama’s gay marriage statement is expected to bring him a surge in donations.

In one respect, it’s about time. Barack Obama’s totally unsurprising acknowledgment that he favors the legalization of gay marriage – long delayed, then suddenly accelerated after Joe Biden jumped the gun – means that the president has finally caught up to what he told an Illinois newspaper 16 years ago.

“I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages,” the young candidate held, in 1996. On Wednesday, at the White House, he finally said about the same thing.

Perhaps, the vice-president did Obama a service: by rushing in, and by summoning the morning show host Robin Roberts down to Washington with the urgency of a country veterinarian at a calf birthing, the president looked braver than he ought after his years of kind-of, sort-of, not-really, wink-wink triangulation. But hedging as he had throughout his first term, while cabinet members and Democratic bigwigs jumped in front of him, had begun to obscure the major accomplishments Obama should get more credit for. Last year, he instructed Eric Holder, the attorney general, to end Justice Department support for the Defense of Marriage Act (Doma), which denies federal benefits to married gay couples. It was a far more consequential decision that the one he made this week – and yet, by not going on the record as himself in favor of gay marriage, he got only a fraction of the credit he deserved.

So, Obama has, belatedly, come out of the closet as a defender of equality. But the reaction – hosannas, banner headlines, tone-deaf invocations of “We shall overcome” – reveals more than anything how gay rights in the United States have become wholly contiguous with the marriage equality movement, and how gesture and affirmation matter more than action and justice. Nothing substantive has changed from last week to this one, but that didn’t stop one New York Times columnist from mawkishly appending the hashtag #historymade to a tweet celebrating the move. In a way, it feels a bit like Obama’s 2008 victory itself: electing a black president was “change”, and the image of racial progress crowded out the true inequalities that blacks continue to endure.

Of course, the president’s support has value – I myself was waiting for it. The president is the head of the body politic, and the more public and more widespread that support for gay marriage becomes in America, the more likely it is that the US supreme court and its swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, will strike the final blow for equality when Perry v Brown, or another case, finally reaches their docket. It was public sentiment, not any change in the practice of jurisprudence, that led the court to reverse itself on the constitutionality of sodomy laws when it decided Lawrence v Texas in 2003. (Even many gay people don’t realize, though, that we won Lawrence not because the justices said gays are equal to straights; they ruled that all Americans have a right to privacy in sexual conduct. The court has never, not once, deemed gays a class worthy of “strict scrutiny”, the highest level of equal protection.)

Public sentiment counts. When the justices finally hear arguments on marriage, it’ll be much easier to make the right call if most Americans, from the president down, want to hear as much.

But marriage isn’t everything. As with women and with racial minorities, gays in America continue to suffer from harassment, hate crimes, religious intolerance and a host of other inequities, which marriage cannot alleviate. Gays can be fired from their jobs without cause in a majority of the states, and the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act has still, shockingly, not become law after two decades of trying. Suicide rates among gays are far higher than the average; homelessness is, too. Men who have sex with men also face the harrowing resurgence of HIV/Aids over the last decade; yet, gays of my generation, who came of age long after the first phase of the epidemic, mostly see Aids as either a historical phenomenon or a sub-Saharan one.

Today, however, one and only one gay rights issue has crowded out all others. To such a degree that when we finally, inevitably, win the right to wed, gay advocacy may lose much of its momentum or peter into nothingness.

I don’t mean to minimize marriage. It matters tremendously. But it matters because of its public, national character, not because of the small-scale, individualist assertions of the largely upper-class mainstream marriage movement. Nancy Cott, author of the book Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation and a lead witness in Perry, has shown that the marriage in America, far from the eternal institution that homophobes imagine, has mutated considerably – but it has done so along with our understanding of citizenship and public life.

Even before the American Revolution, the colonists rejected Anglican tradition, in which the church oversaw questions of matrimony, and established marriage as a civil and not religious institution. In the 19th century, states used marriage laws as punitive instruments to discriminate against disfavored minorities, especially Asian immigrants on the west coast.

But as conceptions of citizenship matured in the 20th century, marriage laws did, too. Married women, who once had no legal independence separate from their husbands, won the right to own property or enter contracts under their own names. Interracial couples, of whom Barack Obama’s parents were one, won the right to marry in any state in the 1960s. Other disadvantaged populations, from prisoners to the mentally disabled, have latterly been guaranteed the right to marry.

So, marriage is not just a nice private affair to which gay people want admission. It is a bedrock constitutional right, and perhaps the most basic sign of equality in this country.

The history of marriage in America helps explain why Obama erred in believing (or so he says) that civil unions, which supposedly guarantee the protections of a marriage contract without the name, were good enough for gays. Other countries have implemented parallel institutions, such as Britain’s civil partnership or France’s PACS; but in the United States, only marriage is marriage, and nothing else will do. And more radical gays, who reject the entire institution of marriage or see homosexuality and monogamy as incompatible (a position to which I’m hardly unsympathetic), should remember that the bridal chorus from Lohengrin and the Crate & Barrel registry are not really what’s at issue here.

The question is not, as Biden said last week, “Who do you love?” The question is: “Who is American?”

Yet, if little of the rhetoric around marriage equality concerns the stuff of marriage rights – taxes, inheritance, social security, immigration – even less of it expresses this civic character of the institution. Instead, arguments for same-sex marriage in America have taken on a perturbing libertarian strain: the government has no business in my private affairs; my marriage has no effect on yours. You can hear this in the outrageous refrain “If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married” – a blinkered and fantastically antisocial understanding of the value of marriage, as if the intolerance of homophobes was hopelessly permanent, rather than something we should all be working to change.

And when the movement for gay equality reduces itself to an isolationist platform, you can be sure of what comes after. Sooner or later, gays will win the right to marry in the United States. It is a certainty. But discrimination, intolerance, disease: these will be with us for a while, and if we make marriage into mere private affirmation rather than public endeavor, it’s hard to see how we can combat these other scourges together, once the weddings are over; in fact, it’s hard to see that the word “together” will signify anything at all.

The president is getting a lot of credit this week for striking a blow for equality. But if marriage is the only battle we win, that will not be any equality worth the name.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/13/gay-americans-risk-mistaking-marriage-equality?CMP=twt_fd

Speaking of the Habit of Freedom…

“We Are All Nuns”
By Mary E. Hunt

When it comes to the Vatican’s crackdown on women religious, I believe it’s time to declare that for the purpose of this struggle: we are all nuns.

The mandate by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to reform the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) via the appointment of an Archbishop Delegate to bring the nuns back in line—below and behind the bishops—has outraged those who respect its rich legacy.

If you can spell Catholic, you are probably asking: how dare they go after 57,000 dedicated women whose median age is well over 70 and who work tirelessly for a more just world? How dare the very men who preside over a Church in utter disgrace due to sexual misconduct and cover-ups by bishops try to distract from their own problems by creating new ones for women religious?

While this story is focused on nuns, it doesn’t stop there. Flowery medieval rhetoric by the Vatican about the nuns’ “special place in the Church,” and the fiction that religious women have “full participation in all aspects of the Church’s life” (while ordination is still for men only—come on!) make the dictum especially pernicious.

But it’s really about all of the laity, especially women, who see the world in terms of needs we can fulfill, not power we can hold; of radical equality, not hierarchy; of the many, not the few.

Delicate Souls
So, what happened?
Apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back was the collaboration of the Catholic social justice lobby NETWORK, founded forty years ago by 47 nuns from two dozen communities, and the Catholic Hospital Association in supporting the Obamacare.

More progressive feminist Catholics, myself included, rued the fact that the plan did not cover the full spectrum of reproductive health care—including abortion. Nevertheless, the pragmatic nuns offered bona fide Catholic support for the proposal as written, over and against the US bishops who, to this writing, continue to oppose the legislation because it includes coverage for contraception without enough exemptions to satisfy them.

The fact that members of Congress took the nuns to be normatively Catholic, or at least as Catholic as the bishops, was just more than the delicate souls in Rome could stand.
This latest mandate to reform the LCWR—indeed to put it out of business—has been in the works for years. In a process that began in 2008, the “doctrinal assessment,” as it is known, was aimed at investigating the “serious doctrinal problems which affect many in Consecrated Life.” In the face of wars in several parts of the world, ecological crises throughout the planet, and severe economic injustice, it is morally embarrassing that the Vatican chooses to spend its time on such trivia. But given that the result is aimed at some of the very people whose lives are dedicated to peacemaking, Earth enhancement, and economic sharing, it is worth clarifying what is at stake.

The crux of the matter, as it were, is that most of the nuns, like many Catholics, have matured beyond the Vatican’s imaginings. The notion that postmodern Catholics assent to “the doctrine of the faith that has been revealed by God in Jesus Christ, presented in written form in the divinely inspired Scriptures, and handed on in the Apostolic Tradition under the guidance of the Church’s Magisterium,” (or, simply, the fathers know best) is simply ludicrous. As one observer asked me, “What Bible do they read?”

The truth is, most Catholics no longer look to Rome for guidance on our personal lives, or anyone else’s. Nor do we live within the narrow confines of a cultic Christianity, or, as women, accept male leadership and priestly ministry as if theirs were God-given and ours were not.

Click here to continue.

h/t Murphy

Hasn’t Obama always taken credit for the successes of others, and blamed others for his failures? I’m sure many others have noticed that every vote getting step Teh Once has taken seems to boomerrang back fast and furious and explode in his face. Too bad. So Sad. It sucks to be Obama.

New CIA Memo Reveals Admiral, Not Obama, In Charge of bin Laden Raid; No “Gutsy Call” Was Ever Made
Posted by Aurelius at 10:25 PM

“With the one year anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death less than one week away, the Obama Administration has been spiking the football for all its worth. The narrative that we have been told since May 1, 2011 is that President Obama made the call to kill bin Laden, with one aide even going so far as to say President Obama’s action was “one of the … gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory.”

The White House has run with this, milking bin Laden’s death for everything its worth. It’s even to the point where if go to “gutsycall.com,” your browser will automatically direct you to barackobama.com.

Honestly, if the final decisions were up to President Obama, and no other President would have even considered carrying out the raid that killed bin Laden, the President should have the right to use bin Laden’s death any way he sees fit. The problem is that the so-called “gutsy call” never existed. Putting aside the fact that any President with Mr. Obama’s intelligence information would have made the same call, a new memo released yesterday that Mr. Obama did not make the “final” call, nor was it terribly gutsy. Instead, it shows that the President merely authorized the possibility for going to Abbottabad… and left everything else up to Admiral William McRaven.

You can see the memo below, which was written by then-CIA head Leon Panetta (you can click on the image for better quality):

The memo reads:

“Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1 [Abbottabad Compound 1]. The decision is to proceed with the assault.

The timing, operational decision making and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the President. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the President for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and if he is not there, to get out. Those instructions were conveyed to Admiral McRaven at approximately 10:45 am.”

In other words, everything from when to go in, what to do, and how to do it were all up to Admiral McRaven. The President played practically no role in bin Laden’s death other than being aware of it and allowing it… if bin Laden was indeed there. It wasn’t gutsy in the least, but one of Mr. Obama’s trademark non-committal commitments. If bin Laden wasn’t there and everything went south, he could have easily pointed to the memo and said, “Gee, I told them to get out if he wasn’t there!” Instead, bin Laden was there and the President took all the credit that he possibly could.

But there was no gutsy call. And there never was unless it was made by Admiral McRaven.”

Meanwhile,

Obama campaign’s bin Laden ad omits Romney clarification on key quote

President Obama’s campaign is hammering a Mitt Romney quote from five years ago to suggest — quite strongly — that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee would not have had the guts to approve the Usama bin Laden raid if he were president.

This is the quote the campaign is using: “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”

But here’s what Romney also said of bin Laden, when clarifying that comment just a few days later: “He will die.”

The “heaven-and-earth” quote is not a new revelation. Romney was challenged on that statement in 2007 during the Republican primary battle, and the former Massachusetts governor subsequently amended his remarks.

But the Obama campaign, which is standing by its controversial bin Laden ad in the face of withering GOP criticism, continues to omit reference to the rest of what Romney said about the fate bin Laden deserved.

The original quote came from an April 2007 interview with the Associated Press. Romney said in that interview he backs a broad strategy to defeat Islamic jihadists and that it’s “not worth moving heaven and earth” for one person. Romney said catching bin Laden would make the country safer by a “small percentage” — he added, a “very insignificant increase in safety.” Romney’s argument was that somebody else would replace bin Laden at the helm of Al Qaeda.

None other than Sen. John McCain, the 2008 GOP nominee who is now defending Romney on the issue, criticized him for the April 2007 statement.

But at an MSNBC debate in May 2007, Romney gave a new explanation.

“Of course we get Usama bin Laden and track him wherever he has to go, and make sure he pays for the outrage he exacted upon America,” Romney said.

Asked if that meant moving heaven and earth, Romney said: “We’ll move everything to get him. But I don’t want to buy into the Democratic pitch that this is all about one person. … It’s more than Usama bin Laden. But he is going to pay, and he will die.”

Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs, speaking Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” conceded that Romney might hold a different position than his “heaven-and-earth” quote implied, though he made no reference to Romney’s 2007 debate comments.

“Maybe the comments he made a few years ago he admits are wrong, or he’s flip-flopped on yet another issue,” Gibbs said Sunday.

Gibbs described the message in the latest Obama campaign web video as “fair game,” and continued to question whether Romney would have approved the mission.

In that video, Bill Clinton praises Obama for his leadership in reviewing and approving the bin Laden raid, which was carried out nearly one year ago. The video then turns to the Romney quote and questions whether he would have shown the same leadership.

Republicans excoriated Obama for the ad. Romney adviser Ed Gillespie told “Meet the Press” that the president had taken a unifying moment for the country and turned it into a “divisive, partisan, political attack.”

Personally, I can’t help but be reminded of the scene in The Color Purple where Celie casts her Power toward Albert:

Celie: I curse you. Until you do right by me everything you think about is gonna crumble!

Albert: Who you think you is? You can curse nobody. Look at you. You’re black, you’re poor, you’re ugly, you’re a woman, you’re nothing at all!

Celie: Until you do right by me, everything you even think about gonna fail!

Hillary's speech at TIME's "100 Most Influential…" gala.

“The TIME 100″, the magazine’s 8th annual list honoring the 100 most influential people in the world.

To celebrate the release of the list, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered the gala’s keynote address. Approximately 350 people attended the gala, including world leaders, politicians, business leaders, entertainers and philanthropists. Notable guests included Chelsea Handler, Jeremy Lin, Governor Andrew Cuomo, Claire Danes, Matt Lauer, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Cardinal Dolan.

Above, the video of Hillary’s remarks. Below, the transcript.
(“As it is above, so it is below.”)

Remarks at the TIME 100 Gala
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State
Lincoln Center, New York, NY, April 24, 2012

Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you and welcome to my announcement to run for president of Malta. (Laughter.) I am so delighted to be here in New York in the United States of America at this event, and I want to thank Rick Stengel and everyone at TIME for bringing together this remarkable group of people and for including me as well. Truth be told, as Richard just mentioned, I did invite him to travel with me to all those countries, including Libya, just after the revolution, and it was, frankly, a transparent ploy to make the TIME 100 list. (Laughter.) So if you ever want to make the list again, or for the first time, just follow that example.

We’re here in the greatest city in the world, and I’m delighted that TIME has included two of the newest residents: Jeremy Lin and Tim Tebow. And for both of them, I’m sure they will have already discovered what a welcoming, exciting place New York is. And if you want any advice, if you need a little help getting your bearings, I’ve put together some ideas for a Listening Tour – and if you just travel around, you’ll hear all kinds of things from New Yorkers. And for me it was a great experience representing this exciting state.

Now, there’s a lot to be done tonight, but there’s not really a lot of room for more than one internet meme sensation, so I’m afraid that Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin really take the cake here. Speaking of New York though, I was delighted to see that our wonderful Governor Andrew Cuomo is on the TIME 100 list, along with others like Marco Rubio. And the two of them and I have ended up on some other lists this past couple of months. (Laughter.) And I assume it’s their keen interest in foreign policy that brings us together. But for me, looking through this list and looking at that exciting video depiction of everyone, I just want to say how impressed and grateful I am.

TIME has honored so many national and global leaders; you couldn’t possibly acknowledge every one. There’s many I haven’t had a chance to meet yet – I was sort of hoping Kim Jong-un would show up. (Laughter.) I don’t think he’s here but if you catch sight of him, let me know. We’re still trying to figure out what he’s all about. (Laughter.)

But I do want to give a shout-out to Angela Merkel and Dilma Rousseff and Portia Miller, Christine Lagarde, who are also on this list and prove once again that you actually can run the world in heels and pantsuits. (Applause.) Because the day is over when women leaders could only aspire to a supporting role. And by the way, I think we may have just found Kristen Wiig’s next movie. She can call it: “Bridesmaids No Longer.” (Laughter.)

I am – just excited to have the chance to say a few semi-serious words. Because aside from the dictators – and I am not talking about my friend Harvey – (laughter) – this is a truly remarkable list with so many distinguished leaders, artists, and activists, people who are on the front lines across the globe, whether it’s fighting AIDS in India, corruption in Russia, gender-based violence in Pakistan. And I am personally pleased at how many courageous women are on the list this year.

Now what does this actually mean, besides a fabulous evening in one of the great spots of New York? You’ve been deemed as influential. And I think it means that, at least according to TIME and the process they went through, people are inspired by your grace and your grit, moved by your refusal to give up even when the challenges appear insurmountable, motivated by your focus on solving problems that actually matter in people’s lives, showing us all what it means to work hard, to innovate, to advance our common humanity, to lead.

And the challenges that so many of you and others who couldn’t be with us tonight take on every day – conflict and persecution, corruption and poverty, hunger and disease – go directly to the security and prosperity of this country and all countries.

Today a flu in Canton can become an epidemic in Chicago. Or a protest in Cairo can reverberate to Calcutta causing economic and political shockwaves. And we know too well the destruction that an extremist cell in Karachi or Kandahar can cause. The world has changed – technology and globalization have made nearly every country and community interdependent and interconnected; citizens and non-state actors like NGOs, corporations, cartels are increasingly influencing international affairs for good or for ill. And the challenges we face have become so complex, so fast-moving, so cross-cutting that no one nation can hope to solve them alone. So how we practice foreign policy needs to change as well.

And when President Obama asked me to be Secretary of State, people were asking, “Is America still up to the job of leading in this rapidly changing world?” And we faced two wars, an economy in free-fall, diplomacy had been deemphasized, our traditional alliances were fraying, the international system the United States had helped to build and defend looked increasingly obsolete.

So the President set a clear objective to secure and advance America’s global leadership in the 21st Century. And to achieve that goal, we could no longer rely primarily on military solutions or on a go-it-alone approach. We needed to expand our thinking and our horizons, to use every tool in the proverbial tool box, every asset, every partner, in an integrated approach. And that meant breaking out of old bureaucratic silos, engaging with emerging powers, and most importantly, as Rick said, with people themselves, not just governments. It also meant harnessing market forces to help solve strategic problems, finding new partners in the private sector. In short, we needed to change the way we did business from top to bottom. And we called this new approach: “Smart Power.”

And it’s been more than three years now. By the time I finish next January, I guess I’ll have traveled a million miles, visited more than 100 countries. And I know a couple of things. One, the world remains a dangerous place, but I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished. We have integrated the three pillars of American foreign policy: diplomacy, development, and defense. And we have worked hard to restore America’s standing, especially by repairing alliances and deepening relationships, and paying a lot of attention to the so-called rising powers. And also putting together coalitions to do things like protect civilians in Libya, or to try to, through pressure and sanctions, influence behavior in Iran. Putting people at the center of our foreign policy, especially those long pushed to the margins like women and young people, religious and ethnic minorities, the LGBT community, civil society. That was important because we want to make clear that America’s values of inclusivity and democracy, of fairness and equality of opportunity really were at the core of who we are and who we will be. So we determined to make innovation and partnerships the foundation of what we did.

And America’s global leadership is not a birthright. It has to be earned by each successive generation. So putting the common good ahead of narrow interests is what I think is not just a nice thing to do, but essential. And that’s as true at home as it is abroad. To be innovative, integrated, visionary, it’s all critical to the kind of future we want.

And there is no substitute for American leadership. I feel it everywhere I travel, every time that big blue and white plane with the words United States of America on the side touches down in another country. And yes, I appreciate greatly our military and material might. But at bottom it is our values and our commitment to fairness and justice, freedom and democracy that has set us apart and hopefully, God-willing, will always set us apart. It’s what makes American leadership so exceptional.

So let me leave you with just one final thought. Because as much as the world changes, this will always be true: Sometimes nations must be willing to do what is right no matter the odds or the costs. We must be prepared to act strongly and decisively, with every tool and, even occasionally, weapon at our disposal.

Some of you might have seen that photograph from the White House Situation Room on the day Usama bin Ladin was killed. And I’m often asked: What was going through my mind during that very long, tense day? And first, I remembered all the people here in New York who I had gotten to know, who I was privileged to represent in the Senate, and how much they, and we, deserved justice for our loved ones. And I thought about America and how important it was to protect our country from another attack. And I prayed for the safety of those brave men, those Navy SEALS risking their lives on that moonless Pakistani night.

So America will not only continue to lead, we will do so because we must. It’s who we are. It’s in our DNA. And I want to be sure that as I finish off my term as Secretary of State, and eventually get to a point where I can put my feet up and actually enjoy just being a citizen again, there’s a lot of work still to be done. There’s not a moment to lose.

And as I head off to another country and go on to all the meetings that I’ll be having, I will have the privilege to meet people like those we honor tonight. I will have the privilege to see firsthand what they are doing to advance freedom and opportunity to stand up to injustice, and I will know that America needs to be on their side. We need to continue doing what America does best: solving problems, standing for our values, and making it clear that the future will be just as exciting, filled with potential, as we have enjoyed a past that has given so many of us the opportunities that we sometimes take for granted, but which we are privileged to have as we gather here tonight.

So we need your help to continue this mission, this human mission. And next year when the editors of TIME begin putting together their list, I hope that they, and we, will find a world perhaps a little more peaceful, more prosperous, and more free.

And thanks to all of you for your contributions in making that so. Thank you all. Goodnight. (Applause.)

[Transcript from: http://govne.ws/item/Secretary-s-Remarks-Remarks-at-the-TIME-100-Gala ]

Dirty Words on Clean Skin: The Real War on Women
Posted on March 27, 2012 by Anita Finlay (“Ani”)

In 2008, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama waged an epic battle for the presidential nomination that captured the imagination and hopes of millions, but the joy of watching a qualified woman vie for the presidency was marred by newsmen and pundits calling Hillary Clinton a hellish housewife, Nurse Ratched, she-devil and bitch. What I witnessed made the bile rise in my throat from such a deep place, I had to get off the sidelines and take action. I transformed from actor and fearful news junkie to determined campaign grunt and citizen journalist.

DIRTY WORDS ON CLEAN SKIN is my shocking exposé about the real war on women…who’s buying, who’s selling, and why they get away with it.

That war is waged daily by mainstream media, party backstabbers, opposing politicians, advertisers and lowbrow comedians on high powered television shows – all of whom miss no opportunity to degrade and marginalize; reducing women to body parts, wardrobe choices and vocal tics.

The quality and preparedness of Hillary Clinton was continually obscured by the bread and circuses of distraction and character assassination. To a greater or lesser degree, these are tactics with which all females running for office have become acquainted. We say the sky’s the limit for women in this country, but the reality was quite different when we were presented with a test case.

For sixteen years, polls have named Hillary Clinton America’s most admired woman, yet when it counted, she was depicted as a vile harpy standing in the way of history. From The New York Times to the `, she is being encouraged to once again stand for the Presidency, yet any prescription offered to a woman attempting to break the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” will be worthless without an honest discussion of those responsible and their methods.

That discussion has yet to take place…
In her recent WaPo article, Twenty Years On, ‘Year of the Woman’ Fades, Karen Tumulty offers many reasons why women have not attained anything approaching parity in political representation, after female membership in the House and Senate doubled in 1992:

“…They made their presence felt beyond Capitol Hill, with the passage of legislation that made the workplace more family-friendly, that directed more medical research to women’s health issues and that made the criminal justice system more responsive to domestic violence.”

Women now represent 16.8% of Congress. We have now hit a plateau, Tumulty says. Another way of putting it is stagnation. The treatment received by Hillary Clinton, who won more votes than any candidate in Primary history, and Sarah Palin, only the second woman to get on a presidential ticket, served as horrifying cautionary tales rather than encouragement. Why would more qualified women run for higher office when a misogynist gauntlet awaits them?

2008 is the year misogyny was made cool. Four years later, the verbal and visual assaults against women continue unchecked. The culprits may surprise you. The facts will shock you.

DIRTY WORDS ON CLEAN SKIN transcends party politics and goes far beyond the treatment of one woman to examine the cost of denying equal respect to all women.

DIRTY WORDS ON CLEAN SKIN is available for purchase today on Amazon and on Kindle as well. The official book launch will be April 24th. I am so pleased to make it available early for my readers. You have encouraged me, taught me to stand up, to make an argument, and most of all, to understand that my principles are more important than being liked.

I am grateful to you all. Thank you so much for your support of my work!

Dirty Words on Clean Skin by Anita Finlay — Website Launch!
Posted on April 9, 2012 by Anita Finlay (“Ani”)
In an election year, we can be sure of two things: First, the incumbent and his opponent are going to pander to groups where their poll numbers need shoring up. Second, we can count on the mainstream media to function as the de facto PR firm for their favored son, further ginning up whatever problem said politician avers we need to solve, coincidentally ensuring his re-election. In this case, that favored son is President Obama.

The current pandering is aimed squarely at the hearts and minds of women. First, we had the contraceptive debate designed to whip us into a frenzy and now, suddenly, and as if it had not occurred to anyone else before him, the President deigns to tell us women we are not cookie cutter people and need to be dealt with as individuals. Will this political pander work? Of course it will. If I’d learned anything in 2008, it is that women have an endless capacity to settle for crumbs rather than standing up to claim the cake. That is the only way we could have witnessed the more qualified female candidate dragged through the mud, only to watch Ms. Magazine offer up a cover photo of Mr. Obama and declare, “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like.”

The real war on women is something entirely different than we are led to believe. It cannot be contained in soundbites and certainly will not be explained in worthy fashion by someone who advantaged himself at every turn by the sexist rhetoric that was used to take down his worthy primary opponent. In the name of changing the narrative and reclaiming the debate, my book Dirty Words On Clean Skin asks us all to examine the daily media and political brainwashing that deliberately shames, marginalizes and abuses women. I am so pleased to launch my website to further this cause…please help it to go viral!

Also on the website is a video that shares more information about the book — and why it advantages all of us to get involved:

Please visit my site at www.AnitaFinlay.com.

DIRTY WORDS ON CLEAN SKIN is now available for purchase on Amazon, and is also available on Kindle!

Thank you very much for your support of my work!

Go here for more at the Texts from Hillary website:

http://textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com/archive

A Poet of Unswerving Vision at the Forefront of Feminism
By MARGALIT FOX

Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82.

The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, with which she had lived for most of her adult life, her family said.

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.

She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.

For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets.

All this helped ensure Ms. Rich’s continued relevance long after she burst genteelly onto the scene as a Radcliffe senior in the early 1950s.

Her constellation of honors includes a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1994 and a National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for “Diving Into the Wreck.” That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork.

In the title poem, Ms. Rich uses the metaphor of a dive into dark, unfathomable waters to plumb the depths of women’s experience:

I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently about the wreck
we dive into the hold. …
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Ms. Rich was far too seasoned a campaigner to think that verse alone could change entrenched social institutions. “Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy,” she said in an acceptance speech to the National Book Foundation in 2006, on receiving its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. “Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard.”

But at the same time, as she made resoundingly clear in interviews, in public lectures and in her work, Ms. Rich saw poetry as a keen-edged beacon by which women’s lives — and women’s consciousness — could be illuminated.

She was never supposed to have turned out as she did.

Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore on May 16, 1929. Her father, Arnold Rice Rich, a doctor and assimilated Jew, was an authority on tuberculosis who taught at Johns Hopkins University. Her mother, Helen Gravely Jones Rich, a Christian, was a pianist and composer who, cleaving to social norms of the day, forsook her career to marry and have children. Adrienne was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

Theirs was a bookish household, and Adrienne, as she said afterward, was groomed by her father to be a literary prodigy. He encouraged her to write poetry when she was still a child, and she steeped herself in the poets in his library — all men, she later ruefully observed. But those men gave her the formalist grounding that let her make her mark when she was still very young.

When Ms. Rich was in her last year at Radcliffe (she received a bachelor’s degree in English there in 1951), W. H. Auden chose her first collection, “A Change of World,” for publication in the Yale Younger Poets series, a signal honor. Released in 1951, the book, with its sober mien, dutiful meter and scrupulous rhymes, was praised by reviewers for its impeccable command of form.

She had learned the lessons of her father’s library well, or so it seemed. For even in this volume Ms. Rich had begun, with subtle subversion, to push against a time-honored thematic constraint — the proscription on making poetry out of the soul-numbing dailiness of women’s lives.

A poem in the collection, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” depicting a woman at her needlework and reprinted here in full, is concerned with precisely this:

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Once mastered, poetry’s formalist rigors gave Ms. Rich something to rebel against, and by her third collection, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” published by Harper & Row, she had pretty well exploded them. That volume appeared in 1963, a watershed moment in women’s letters: “The Feminine Mystique” was also published that year.

In the collection’s title poem, Ms. Rich chronicles the pulverizing onus of traditional married life. It opens this way:

You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time. …
Your mind now, mouldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact.

Though the book horrified some critics, it sealed Ms. Rich’s national reputation.

She knew the strain of domestic duty firsthand. In 1953 Ms. Rich had married a Harvard economist, Alfred Haskell Conrad, and by the time she was 30 she was the mother of three small boys. When Professor Conrad took a job at the City College of New York, the family moved to New York City, where Ms. Rich became active in the civil rights and antiwar movements.

By 1970, partly because she had begun, inwardly, to acknowledge her erotic love of women, Ms. Rich and her husband had grown estranged. That autumn, he died of a gunshot wound to the head; the death was ruled a suicide. To the end of her life, Ms. Rich rarely spoke of it.

Ms. Rich effectively came out as a lesbian in 1976, with the publication of “Twenty-One Love Poems,” whose subject matter — sexual love between women — was still considered disarming and dangerous. In the years that followed her poetry and prose ranged over her increasing self-identification as a Jewish woman, the Holocaust and the struggles of black women.

Ms. Rich’s other volumes of poetry include “The Dream of a Common Language” (1978), “A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far” (1981), “The Fact of a Doorframe” (1984), “An Atlas of the Difficult World” (1991) and, most recently, “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve,” published last year.

Her prose includes the essay collections “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” (1979); “Blood, Bread, and Poetry” (1986); an influential essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” published as a slender volume in 1981; and the nonfiction book “Of Woman Born” (1976), which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct.

For Ms. Rich, the getting of literary awards was itself a political act to be reckoned with. On sharing the National Book Award for poetry in 1974 (the other recipient that year was Allen Ginsberg), she declined to accept it on her own behalf. Instead, she appeared onstage with two of that year’s finalists, the poets Audre Lorde and Alice Walker; the three of them accepted the award on behalf of all women.

In 1997, in a widely reported act, Ms. Rich declined the National Medal of Arts, the United States government’s highest award bestowed upon artists. In a letter to Jane Alexander, then chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which administers the award, she expressed her dismay, amid the “increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice,” that the government had chosen to honor “a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

Art, Ms. Rich added, “means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”

Ms. Rich’s other laurels — and these she did accept — include the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

She taught widely, including at Columbia, Brandeis, Rutgers, Cornell and Stanford Universities.

Ms. Rich’s survivors include her partner of more than 30 years, the writer Michelle Cliff; three sons, David, Pablo and Jacob, from her marriage to Professor Conrad; a sister, Cynthia Rich; and two grandchildren.

For all her verbal prowess, for all her prolific output, Ms. Rich retained a dexterous command of the plain, pithy utterance. In a 1984 speech she summed up her reason for writing — and, by loud unspoken implication, her reason for being — in just seven words.

What she and her sisters-in-arms were fighting to achieve, she said, was simply this: “the creation of a society without domination.”

Reprinted from:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/books/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at-82.html

These men were asked to testify before Congress about a potential ban on coverage of birth control for women. Look long enough at this photo (and think about the fact that these men are being empowered by our Congress to judge us as sluts and sinners and to withhold access to medicine and health care based on their view of us on the Slut Meter) until you are angry enough to do something about it.

I can only hope that the sheer insanity of some of these cavemen is becoming obvious enough to women that we will wake up and put a stake through the undead hearts of vampires like Santorum, Friess, and Issa. As always, shame on obama for opening this Hell Mouth with no intention of actually combatting the demons who poured out. His only craven purpose was to weaken Romney, not to protect women’s civil rights or improve our access to safe, affordable health care. It’s actually gone beyond an attack on the civil rights of women. We are now faced with serious threats to our bodies — reproductive disorders, syndromes, and diseases are extremely serious and common. Undiagnosed and untreated, they will sterilize, scar, and KILL women and girls. I’m not even talking about unplanned pregnancy here. I’m talking about endometriosis, PCOS, and HPV. I’m talking about lumps in breasts that become cancer. I’m talking about hormonal imbalances and diabetes.

How DARE a failed politician like Santorum presume to dictate the terms of intercourse and how much importance we can place on pleasure during sex in order to avoid sinning (gag) in HIS god’s eyes? Is this guy for real? If he was a teacher in my daughter’s school I’d report him as an obvious pervert and possible pedophile. Come on Catholics, don’t be fooled by obama’s ploy to send you running into this nutjob’s arms.

How DARE a chairperson of a Congressional committee NOT ALLOW women to testify on our own behalf about the effects of limiting our access to routine health care?

How DARE the state of Virginia contemplate passing a law requiring rape victims to be re-raped by a technician with a probe simply to guilt them into not terminating a pregnancy caused by their rapist?

How DARE Santorum’s sugar daddy get on national TV and wax reminiscent about the good old days when women had to literally clench their knees together to avoid rape and pregnancy?

Said billionaire Santorum funder Foster Friess on on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell: “On this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it’s so inexpensive. You know, back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”

**********  Pumapac PROWL *********

1. Call Rep. Darrell Issa’s office now and ask him how DARE he bar women from testifying to OUR Congress about a matter that profoundly affects our health and well-being, not even to mention our Constitutionally granted CIVIL RIGHTS?? Dial 202-225-3906. 

Send him an email HERE. Use a zip codefrom California’s 49th Congressional district to get through the filter (92587, 92590, 92591):

Dear Rep. Issa,
How dare you exclude women from testifying on our own behalf about legislation that would have a profound effect on our health and well-being? I am a woman — I vote, and I will work with other women and our friends and families to defeat your woman-hating agenda.
Sincerely, your name.

Email the Governor of Virginia. Use the address: 500 Ivy Ave, Charlottesville VA 22903 and  Violet Socks’ letter as a template:

Dear Governor McDonnell:
It’s my understanding that you have said you will sign HB462, the bill mandating that women seeking abortions be subjected to object rape with a vaginal probe.
Please understand that if you sign this bill, I and other women in Virginia will ensure that you will forever be known as “Rapist McDonnell.” We will work tirelessly to block your political ambitions FOREVER and to make sure that your complicity in the state-mandated object rape of Virginia citizens is never forgotten.
Sincerely, Your Name.

Pumas, don’t let the bastards get away with this. And don’t forget who started this war on our bodies and our rights.

Photograph by Eugene Richards, from his book "Dorchester Days"

And now Senator Scott Brown, who hopefully will soon be replaced by Elizabeth Warren but don’t hold your breath, is sponsoring a “bill that would allow employers and insurers to limit specific health care coverage, including contraception, based on religious or moral objections.”

As yttik said in comments downstairs:

“It is disturbing, but the truth of the matter is that Obama gave him his legitimacy, Obama handed him the moral upper hand. Santorum is no longer a nut job, he’s now a fierce defender of the first amendment. He’s no longer a neanderthal, he’s a fierce advocate for the Catholic church and a Supreme Court in which half the members are Catholic. And contraception is no longer about women’s rights, now it’s about religious freedom and the Constitution. Santorum had a constituency of about 8%, Obama promoted him to a frontrunner with a 3 state sweep.

People, including Republicans and Catholics, don’t like to be told what to do. Catholic orgs were providing BC coverage in their policies. 28 states already mandate it. It was a non issue. But tell people that they HAVE to do something and even if they are already doing it, they’ll resist. It’s human nature. Women get screwed, but Obama eventually gets his talking point, “the right wants to ban your birth control!”

Amen. When I said the obama “attack” on the Catholic church was craven political theater, I was right. The scope of the catastrophe obama has unleashed is breathtaking. Sarah Palin supports birth control. Every last Republican, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Catholic woman in the United States uses birth control and all of their male partners depend on their using birth control in order to plan the size and timing of their families. Contraception is NOT controversial in this country. Not even in devoutly religious or ultra-conservative families and communities. Only a radical fringe minority of people choose to follow a church ban on contraception. Couples who sincerely and legitimately chose abstinence until marriage use birth control. Women who are activist pro-lifers use birth control. Evangelical Christians and devout Jews use birth control. Republicans, Libertarians, Michigan militia-women, Catholic school teachers, and Bible thumping creationists use birth control.

Elizabeth Warren had major momentum to beat Brown in November. She would become one of only 17 women in the Senate (there have only been 39 women Senators EVER in our history). Watch that momentum slide to a mind-numbing CRAWL now that Brown has taken the gun obama handed to him to blow her away.

There are a LOT of Catholics in Massachusetts. Thank you very fucking much obama for making Scott Brown the champion of “religious freedom” in Massachusetts, you scumbag.*

This is serious. obama doesn’t care that his Catholic baiting may destroy the election chances of brave women candidates like Warren and others in close races. He only cares about elevating Santorum in order to either weaken Romney or (even better!) face the Bronze Age culture warrior Santorum in November.

When Komen pulled its funding from Planned Parenthood last month, American women responded with more than $3 million in donations in less than a week. I’m going to Elizabeth Warren’s site to donate right now and send the message that obama, Scott Brown, Rick Santorum, and the rest of the men who will soon be pouring through the floodgates obama opened to limit access to health care and contraception for my daughters and yours can KISS MY ASS.

* A scumbag is a crude term for a used condom. Viagra, condoms, and vasectomies will still be covered under the bill Brown is sponsoring. Natch.

Violet’s analysis is 100% correct:

“But with contraception, Obama has acknowledged that it’s a special thing that can be denied on the basis of religious liberty. He has carved it away from the rest of the pack of treatments and medications, and put it over in a special class.

A special class that has only one other member: abortion.

This is precisely what feminists have been warning about for years. It doesn’t matter that Obama has provided a practical workaround so that women can still get pills; the moral and legal ground has shifted. Female contraception has been marked, called out, made negotiable.”

This is scary and true. Scary because, as I said last week, obama’s craven, cynical game playing with women’s civil rights has helped legitimize the candidacy of this certifiably crazy fucking nutjob:

“One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea … Many in the Christian faith have said, “Well, that’s okay … contraception’s okay.”

It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, for purposes that are, yes, conjugal … but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen. We take any part of that out, we diminish the act. And if you can take one part out that’s not for purposes of procreation, that’s not one of the reasons, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women, so why can’t you take other parts of that out? And all of a sudden, it becomes deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure.”
– Rick Santorum, candidate for President, October 18, 2011
(h/t Miq2xu) 

A recent poll shows Santorum edging out Romney among Republican voters. There can be no misunderstanding here: RICK SANTORUM IS A CAVEMAN FUCKING FREAK who should have no forum, no public stage anywhere anytime in a free country like ours, where individual liberty for all citizens is ENSHRINED IN OUR GOD DAMNED CONSTITUTION.

FUCK YOU Rick Santorum. And FUCK YOU obama for using women’s civil rights as a game piece in order to elevate this weaselly, creepy fucking fucker.