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Sometimes there is a absence of reasonable discussion when it comes to the topic of abortion. The lack of solid empirical grounding for arguments leads to some rather wild and wooly debates. The Guttmacher institute has a new section called “Are you in the Know?” about women’s health and abortion.
Safer than childbirth, funny you never hear the anti-choice loons mention this fun little fact.
The scare tactics anti-choicer nutters usually resort to include the specious post abortion syndrome and other such nonsense. Cherry picking facts is nothing new for the fetus fetish crowd as their crusade against women has little time for intellectual honesty.
Sometimes I get asked by the faithful as to why I advocate so strongly against religion. It is hard to know where to start sometimes, but sadly incidents like what is happening in Minnesota at Anoka High School makes it all to easy.
Religion promotes intolerance, hatred and bigotry. It is a poison of the mind, an affliction that can turn off the parts of us that make caring, altruistic human beings. What has gone on in Anoka High School is reprehensible as teachers following religiously influenced “policy” allowed homophobic bullying to happen.
“Brittany was a low-voiced, stocky girl who dressed in baggy jeans and her dad’s Marine Corps sweatshirts. By age 13, she’d been taunted as a “cunt” and “cock muncher” long before such words had made much sense. When she told administrators about the abuse, they were strangely unresponsive, even though bullying was a subject often discussed in school-board meetings. The district maintained a comprehensive five-page anti-bullying policy, and held diversity trainings on racial and gender sensitivity. Yet when it came to Brittany’s harassment, school officials usually told her to ignore it, always glossing over the sexually charged insults. Like the time Brittany had complained about being called a “fat dyke”: The school’s principal, looking pained, had suggested Brittany prepare herself for the next round of teasing with snappy comebacks – “I can lose the weight, but you’re stuck with your ugly face” – never acknowledging she had been called a “dyke.” As though that part was OK. As though the fact that Brittany was bisexual made her fair game.“
Here is a quick test. If you do not already disagree with the course the principal is taking then you need to reexamine your position on bigotry and homophobia because not acknowledging it when it happens is the same as tacitly condoning it.
“Like Brittany, eighth-grader Samantha Johnson was a husky tomboy too, outgoing with a big smile and a silly streak to match Brittany’s own. Sam was also bullied for her look – short hair, dark clothing, lack of girly affect – but she merrily shrugged off the abuse. When Sam’s volleyball teammates’ taunting got rough – barring her from the girls’ locker room, yelling, “You’re a guy!” – she simply stopped going to practice. After school, Sam would encourage Brittany to join her in privately mocking their 
tormentors, and the girls would parade around Brittany’s house speaking in Valley Girl squeals, wearing bras over their shirts, collapsing in laughter. They’d become as close as sisters in the year since Sam had moved from North Dakota following her parents’ divorce, and Sam had quickly become Brittany’s beacon. Sam was even helping to start a Gay Straight Alliance club, as a safe haven for misfits like them, although the club’s progress was stalled by the school district that, among other things, was queasy about the club’s flagrant use of the word “gay.” Religious conservatives have called GSAs “sex clubs,” and sure enough, the local religious right loudly objected to them. “This is an assault on moral standards,” read one recent letter to the community paper. “Let’s stop this dangerous nonsense before it’s too late and more young boys and girls are encouraged to ‘come out’ and practice their ‘gayness’ right in their own school’s homosexual club.“
How dare they indeed, try to make a safe harbour to weather the storm of insults, intolerance and bigotry. Having a safe place might actually give these poor sinners hope. But fuck that idea, these children need to learn that what they are feeling (and who they are) is dirty and wrong, that they will burn in hell for their “crimes”. People who argue that christianity is a base for grounding one’s ethics need to find the moral virtue in driving homosexual children to suicide.
“”This isn’t something you kid about, Brittany,” her mom scolded, snatching the kitchen cordless and taking it down the hall to call the Johnsons. A minute later she returned, her face a mask of shock and terror. “Honey, I’m so sorry. We’re too late,” she said tonelessly as Brittany’s knees buckled; 13-year-old Sam had climbed into the bathtub after school and shot herself in the mouth with her own hunting rifle. No one at school had seen her suicide coming.”
Bullshit. If you allow bullying at your school this is what happens. So when you see it, stop it. If you’re not actively working to stop bullying then you are also part of the problem.
“Against this supercharged backdrop, the Anoka-Hennepin school district finds itself in the spotlight not only for the sheer number of suicides but because it is accused of having contributed to the death toll by cultivating an extreme anti-gay climate. “LGBTQ students don’t feel safe at school,” says Anoka Middle School for the Arts teacher Jefferson Fietek, using the acronym for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning. “They’re made to feel ashamed of who they are. They’re bullied. And there’s no one to stand up for them, because teachers are afraid of being fired.”
When teachers roll over and let the religious right start dictating ‘morality’ your not teaching anymore, just facilitating and amplifying religiously sponsored hatred and bigotry.
“For years, the area has also bred a deep strain of religious conservatism. At churches like First Baptist Church of Anoka, parishioners believe that homosexuality is a form of mental illness caused by family dysfunction, childhood trauma and exposure to pornography – a perversion curable through intensive therapy. It’s a point of view shared by their congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who has called homosexuality a form of “sexual dysfunction” that amounts to “personal enslavement.”
Insanity according to the Church can also be cured by trepanning to let out the evil spirits. When religious bullshit is not called for what it is, people get hurt. Observe the slide of this school board toward the Dark Ages.
“When the Anoka-Hennepin district’s sex-ed curriculum came up for re-evaluation in 1994, Anderson and four like-minded parents managed to get on the review committee. They argued that any form of gay tolerance in school is actually an insidious means of promoting homosexuality – that openly discussing the matter would encourage kids to try it, turning straight kids gay.”
Insidious. O Projection, how I doth love thee. If you cannot breach the secular school system from the outside, corrupt it from within. Are you getting that New Testament feel good jesus burn…I know I certainly am. Pandering to the deluded in this case results in school policy that encourages bigotry and hatred.
“Anoka-Hennepin staff, in the course of their professional duties, shall remain neutral on matters regarding sexual orientation including but not limited to student-led discussions.
It quickly became known as the “neutrality” policy. No one could figure out what it meant. “What is ‘neutral’?” asks instructor Merrick-Lockett. “Teachers are constantly asking, ‘Do you think I could get in trouble for this? Could I get fired for that?’ So a lot of teachers sidestep it. “
See what happens when you capitulate to fundamental christian demands. Fertile ground to plant the seeds of hate in the minds of children.
“The silence of adults was deafening. At Blaine High School, says alum Justin Anderson, “I would hear people calling people ‘fags’ all the time without it being addressed. Teachers just didn’t respond.” In Andover High School, when 10th-grader Sam Pinilla was pushed to the ground by three kids calling him a “faggot,” he saw a teacher nearby who did nothing to stop the assault. At Anoka High School, a 10th-grade girl became so upset at being mocked as a “lesbo” and a “sinner” – in earshot of teachers – that she complained to an associate principal, who counseled her to “lay low”; the girl would later attempt suicide. At Anoka Middle School for the Arts, after Kyle Rooker was urinated upon from above in a boys’ bathroom stall, an associate principal told him, “It was probably water.” Jackson Middle School seventh-grader Dylon Frei was passed notes saying, “Get out of this town, fag”; when a teacher intercepted one such note, she simply threw it away.”
Not addressing homophobia and homophobic bullying when it occurs is the same as condoning it. Laying low is NEVER a strategy when dealing with bigotry, in each and every case it needs to be addressed and explicitly stated that that level of discourse has no place in society, even less in a school. School needs to be a safe place, not a religious quagmire of bigoted hatred.
This is the loving christian religion – when laid bare to critical scrutiny we see the unctuously fetid purulence of religion for what it is: Intolerance, bigotry and the unabashed hatred of people based on the rantings of goat-herders some two thousand years ago. And the religious want, no… expect my respect when it comes to their worldview?
Are you fraking kidding me?
Religion has no place in the 21st century. We know better. The sooner we can put this delusional based way of thinking in the past the better.
Tom's - Made in China under human unfriendly conditions, oh but you're helping the poor, honest!
“There are two reasons for every action. The good reason… and the real reason.”
-J.P. Morgan
Did you ever want to consume AND feel good about helping others all at the same time? Companies like Tom’s shoes take White Liberal Guilt and build a empire on the fuzzy feel good notion of helping others just by buying their brand of shoes. Hey, what could be wrong with getting shoes and having another pair donated to a needy person elsewhere on the globe? The notion of BOGO or “buy one, give one” is a cagey play by Tom’s as it exploits our altruistic instincts; we want to be good generous people, we want to be seen as people that help. It is a nice feeling, but should nice feelings escape critical examination? Of course not, especially when the noxious tentacles of greed are wrapped firmly around our feel-good assumptions about a product or service.
NEWSFLASH – The poor of the world do not need more shoes! Sustainable jobs, debt forgiveness, clean water (etc.) – hell yes, but shoes, unless they are edible are far down the frakking list. Worse, the shoe donations may be strangling the local economy, denying jobs and economic prosperity for the local people who sell and make shoes. Consider the case of Haiti and what Alanna Shaikh, a global health professional, has to say about donating goods such as shoes –
“Don’t donate goods. Donating stuff instead of money is a serious problem in emergency relief. Only the people on the ground know what’s actually necessary; those of us in the rest of the world can only guess. Some things, like summer clothes and expired medicines are going to be worthless in Haiti. Other stuff, like warm clothes and bottled water may be helpful to some people in some specific ways. Separating the useful from the useless takes manpower that can be doing more important work. It’s far better to give money so that organizations can buy the things they know they need.
Some people like to donate goods instead of cash because they worry that cash won’t be used in a way that helps the needy. If that’s you, I have two points. 1) Why are you donating to an organization you don’t trust? 2) What’s to stop them from selling your donated item and using the money for whatever they want?
After Hurricane Mitch in 1998, Honduras was flooded with shipments of donated goods. They clogged ports, overwhelmed military transport, and made it nearly impossible for relief agencies to ship in the things they really needed. Those donations did harm, not good. Expired drugs had to be carefully disposed of. Inappropriate donations had to be transported away and discarded. All of this wasted time and money.”
Whoops. So donating goods to people is the wrong way to go about things as we do not actually know about the conditions other people are facing and what their needs are. But hey, our feel good intentions make us feel good. Way to go us! Of course this feeling (as misplaced and misguided as it is) is cloyingly pandered to, the profits do not lie. The sheer amount of philanthropic tripe is something to behold, if you have just refurbished your irony meter, then check out the official website to see all you can do to market and sell more TOM’s shoes with your time. (bleh – then go here for a take down of the whole shoe fiasco)
So you are wasting (have wasted) your money on overpriced shoes (they cost anywhere from 2 to 5 dollars to make) because you bought into the advertising that played on your altruistic impulses. Get educated so it does not happen again, and when you are feeling the need to help others, you will do so effectively instead of padding the pocketbooks of corporate entity. Kelsey Timmerman states the problem succinctly:
“The problem isn’t that people don’t have shoes. It’s that they don’t have the means to buy shoes -The problem isn’t shoelessness. The problem is poverty.“
Oh, and recently another First World Problem has rocked the blogosphere – A Tom’s knock off, BoB’s is just copycatting their AWESOME idea so you consumers should like ‘totally not’ support those rip-off artists. *sproing!* Oh dammit all to hell, I just had my irony meter fixed.
Ethics are what make people stand against tyranny. Saying “no” to the crowd is one of the most difficult challenges we face as social animals. Bradley Manning had the courage to make an ethical stand, we all possess similar characteristics, we just choose to dismiss these ethical impulses. When we do so, our the moral fabric of our society degrades.
“Washington, DC – Private Bradley Manning was just 22 years old when he allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of US State Department cables and video evidence of war crimes to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. For that act of courage that revealed to the world the true face of the American empire, he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.”
Making an ethical stand always has consequences; I’m surprised Mr.Manning has not been executed yet for his actions. The international media, not heard in the US of course, is picking up the story and telling a significantly different narrative than what the White House would like you to believe.
“All one needs to know about American justice is that if he had murdered civilians and desecrated their corpses – if he had the moral capacity to commit war crimes, not the audacity to expose them – he’d be better off today.”
Not exactly good for the recruiting posters.
“Indeed, if Manning had merely murdered the nameless, faceless “other”, as his Army colleagues on the notorious Afghan “Kill Team” did, he would not have had his right to a speedy trial blatantly violated. If Manning had intentionally killed unarmed civilians, posed for pictures with their dead bodies and slashed their fingers off as souvenirs, he would not have had his guilt publicly pronounced by his own commander-in-chief, President Barack Obama, months before he so much as saw the inside of a military court. If he had killed poor foreigners instead of exposing their deaths, he might even stand a chance of getting out of prison while still a young man.”
War brings a different set of rules to the table, but we in the West would like to think that we possess some noble spirit that sets us apart from the rest. Yo-ho, it is they who are savages, the brutes who kill indiscriminately. What bullocks.
“This isn’t really a head-scratching development. While killing unarmed civilians for sport may not be officially sanctioned policy, it doesn’t threaten the functioning of the war machine as much as a soldier standing up and refusing to be complicit in mass murder. From the perspective of a Washington establishment much more concerned with maintaining hegemony than its humanity, the former – murder – is much less troubling a precedent than the latter.
And so the US government is making an example of Manning, lest any other cogs in the machine start thinking about listening to their consciences instead of their commanders.”
The mirroring of foreign policy onto this case bears further investigation. The bullshite you here about the domino theory and the various red-scares starts with the implicit assumption that the “threat of a good-example” must be quashed at all costs. The illegal terrorist war waged by the United States on Nicaragua is a prime example of a country using resources for its people instead of the multinationals. Raises the poor a few steps out of abject poverty is the “good example” that must be utterly destroyed so “stability” can be restored. Stability being shorthand for globalized corporate control. Focusing on the individual case of Mr.Manning we can observe the same pattern.
Manning’s actions speak of a human conscience, a sense that what was going on was horribly wrong and it needed to stop. Acting on his conscience as a decent human being, Manning took action. Having people empathically relate to official enemies is a big no no in the armed forces, you might start questioning the rational, as such, of what you’re doing there and that, gentle readers, is not allowed.
“Had Manning – instead of exposing the crime – been the one pulling the trigger in the US Apache helicopter that in 2007 murdered at least a dozen unarmed people in Baghdad, he wouldn’t be facing any legal consequences for his actions. Had Manning authorised a 2009 missile strike in Yemen that killed 14 women and 21 children, instead of releasing the State Department cable that acknowledges responsibility for the killings, we wouldn’t even know his name.
But Manning didn’t kill anybody. Rather, he was outraged by the killing he saw all around him and angered at the complicity of his higher-ups who weren’t prepared to do a damn thing about. So, the system having failed to ensure accountability, Manning took it upon himself to share the inconvenient facts his government was withholding from the world.
“I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy”, he explained in a chat with hacker-turned-informant Adrian Lamo. As an Army intelligence analyst, Manning witnessed firsthand the American empire in action – and it changed him. “I don’t believe in good guys versus bad guys anymore”, he lamented, “only a plethora of states acting in self-interest”.
Transparency, accountability, responsibility are all hallmarks of a functioning democracy. The people of a democracy have the right to know what is being done in their name.
“Confronted with the reality of institutional evil, Manning risked his career – and his freedom – in order to expose everything from mass murder and child rape in Afghanistan to US support for brutal dictators across North Africa and the Middle East. His actions were heroic, and Amnesty International has even credited them as the spark for with jump-starting the Arab Spring. And yet a president who proclaims his commitment to transparency while on the campaign trail is determined to go down as the one whose administration mentally tortured, prosecuted and jailed the most famous whistle-blower in half-a-century.”
Officially we want heroes from war, but what we really get are ‘made-men’ who, with the consent of the state, parrot the institutional truths back to the public to keep them in the dark. Outside of the borders of the USA, the notion of ‘defending freedom’ has a much different definition, one much closer to the harsh truth that Bradly Manning chose to share.
Manning said,”I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy”. – Perhaps if the American public could share a similar sentiment democracy might begin to flourish once again in the USA.
Do you still think there are absolute morals? QS may persuade you otherwise as he tackles the arguments for god based on the existence of morality. As a side benefit he also does a wonderful job of explaining the is/ought problem. Grab a coffee as this vid weights in at 17 minutes, but I assure you it is 17 minutes well spent if you value intellectual edification.
Betting on infinity is a tough choice to justify. Pascal tried and failed… will you?
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