Sky is Falling

Women In Charge

2007-03-23T14:11:00.000-04:00

Well's it's only three months into this new Democratically (and female) lead Congress and we've got the environment on the agenda and exiting the Iraqi war as a priority on the agenda. Rock on, ladies.

Did you see the great gavel moment when Al Gore testified about global warming? Sen. Barbara Boxer, the committee chair, told Sen. Inhofe the deal when he tried, unsuccessfully to set the rules of debate at the testimony. She's got your gavel right here, Sen. Inhofe.

I wonder what the next nine months will bring...stay tuned...

Legalized Prostitution?

2007-02-05T21:18:00.000-05:00

I bet that got your attention, didn't it. One of our college friends had a dog that would tilt her head in that way dogs do whenever someone said "legalized prostitution?" She didn't do it for other words, regardless of the order in which they were arranged or similar intonation.

I heard something on the radio the other day that made me think of it. The report I heard was talking about an interesting occurrence in Turkey. Or I think it was Turkey. It may have been Greece - I wish I could find it! Prostitution is legal in Turkey (and in Greece) - and it seems that some of these illegal trade rings have been 'exposed' by their customers. As men in (Turkey/Greece) are used to visiting women who chose prositution as their profession, they are rather incensed when they encounter women that are not in the trade by choice. I found that interesting.

Now, the odds of legalizing prostitution in certain areas of this country are pretty slim (think about it - what congressperson do you know wants to yell "Save the whores!" at their pep rally?), but I actually think it would be a healthy thing to do: allow women who prefer the 'escort' business to legalize their business, while continuing to go after the underground ops. Nevada's approach (linked below) could be considered an example.

The whole scene surrounding prostitution in this country is so seedy: it's under the carpet in the corner on the fringes. While I don't want sex front and center in everyone's face, I'm a realist: people have sex, they like sex, and they're willing to pay for it. Even if you argue that "you should only have sex with your spouse" (as an abstinence measure touted as particularly effective in curbing AIDS), I think it must be acknowledged that there are a hell of a lot of single people out there that will not be content getting action only from their own hands. It's just life. Be pious about it if you want to, but it flies in the face of human nature and how life works.

I want women to be safe. I want women to be healthy. I want women to feel they deserve both things. I also think some women choose to be escorts or strippers or prostitutes because they want to. More, I think, choose to be those things because they feel they have to (it's the money). And unfortunately, there seem to be a growing number of women from whom the choice has been stripped entirely.

The demand for a sex trade is there, has always been there, and will continue to be there. Continue to advocate abstinence, continue to teach youngsters whatever you will about family values, and how to use condoms, and whatever else you think people need to know to prevent the spread of AIDS and other STDs - but make prostitution legal so that those practice the trade (in the first two cases) can do so without fearing for their life or being futher victims of physical or emotional abuse. Awareness about legal prostitution may also, as has been seen in (Turkey/Greece) lately, help to expose human trafficing rings involving those women involuntarily forced into the trade.

Not more feminisim ... [ealasaid.com: 2006]
I found this entry out in the blogosphere, and it actually sums up my view:
A woman brought here under false pretenses and forced into prostitution has a world of problems. I am against that, hands down. Why? Not because I'm against men paying for sex, but because I'm against slavery. Women forced into prostitution don't see a dime of the money the men hand over. That's abuse, sure. That's wrong. Wrong.

But I am pro-prostitution insofar as I'm pro-shitjobs in general. I think it should be illegal for pimps to treat their employees like slaves, the same way it's illegal for McDonalds bosses to treat their employees like slaves. That is the injustice there: that many prostitutes are treated badly and some are actually in slavery. Not the fact that a horny guy brings some dough and offers it to a woman willing to have sex with him. We should fight to make the "choice" so many women have an actual, real choice.
Prostitution in Nevada [wikipedia]
Greece Now: Human Traffic [www.greece-now.org: 2001]
FBI urges human traffic co-operation [news.bbc.co.uk: 2001]

The Deadliest Month

2006-10-30T09:50:00.000-05:00

War's toll...the deadliest month yet. I think these photos in the New York Times should be posted on every politician's wall...to remind them of the human toll, here at home and abroad. And to every voter, a reminder of what "staying the course" really means. What keeping George Bush's brethren in office might mean for our future. More of the same, regardless of what you call it.

Grr. That gay marriage ammendment thing, again?

2006-06-07T00:29:00.000-04:00

I seriously wish this gay marriage "issue" would dry up and go away. To the state (or the federal government), a "marriage" is used to track property (or, more specifically, the taxes associated with that property). In some cases, you might think it used to track offspring, but the birth parents of the child really don't matter - the government just wants to know who paid for the kid that year.

If the hang up is over the M-word - then let the church (mosque/synagogue/temple/etc.) have it. In the eyes of the state/federal government, every married couple would be part of a recognized civil union. Who did and who didn't have a proper church wedding would be as much a mystery as it is now. (If you really want to take that thought out for awhile, why stop at two people? Why can't unions be used to identify and manage people that co-habitate? The paperwork would be a bear, for sure, but there are instances, like sibilings living together throughout adulthood or multi-generational homes, where a definition of a civil union beyond the current two-adult flavor might make sense.

What I find concerning, perhaps alarming - certainly offensive, is the elitism that forms the primary anti-gay marriage argument: "I'm married, and I'm doing something that (my personal) God tells me is right. They're doing something that (my personal) God tells me is wrong." Followed by either, "If they say they're married, it will make my marriage worth less," or "They are abnormal and don't deserve to be married (like I am)." Parentheticals are (pretty obviously) my own addition to the general gist of their tirade.

A quick skim of the history of marriage as a social construct shows vacillation surrounding the role of government when dealing with marriages (or not, as the case may be).

It is my opinion that either: a) the federal government should separate the concepts of marriage and civil unions at the federal level, where civil unions then become the focus of interaction with families (tax returns and whatnot); or b) the federal government shuts the hell up and lets the courts do what is right (not right by a particular flavor of God, but right by people and their civil liberties).

Digital Rights and "the worst bill you never heard of

2006-06-06T23:08:00.000-04:00

Section 115 Reform Act (SIRA) of 2006 will be before congress this week, as mentioned in the following 6 June Slashdot post:

AWhiteFlame writes "IPAction.org is reporting on a section of the Reform Act of 2006 [ipaction.org]... From the article: 'This will be a busy week in the House ... [they will be] considering the Section 115 Reform Act of 2006 (SIRA). Never heard of SIRA? ... Simply put, SIRA fundamentally redefines copyright and fair use in the digital world. It would require all incidental copies of music to be licensed separately from the originating copy. Even copies of songs that are cached in your computer's memory or buffered over a network would need yet another license.'"

- The Worst Bill You've Never Heard Of [slashdot.org]

There is, of course, another side to the story. The US Copyright Office has their own synopsis:

The draft legislation reflects an understanding and appreciation of the many difficulties facing the music industry today with respect to the digital environment... The most critical and time-sensitive issue is the current unavailability of an efficient and reliable mechanism whereby legitimate music services are able to clear all of the rights they need to make large numbers of musical works quickly available by an ever-evolving number of digital means while ensuring that the copyright holders are fairly compensated.

- Section 115 Reform Act (SIRA) of 2006 [copyright.gov]

Liberals and Jihadism

2006-05-26T18:35:00.000-04:00

My husband and I were reading today's Wall Street Journal this morning, and he pointed my attention to a review of Peter Beinart's book, "The Good Fight", by Fred Siegel ("A Direction for Democrats" on W5, for those with hard copy that might want to look). I quote here from the last few paragraphs:

Today's jihadism is the expression of an imperialist imperative that is part of Islam itself, reaching back more than a millennium. It is not a manifestation of poor living conditions.

The reality is that there are no good choices when a major world religion appropriates whole countries or peoples on behalf of a radical, "holy" agenda...

- Fred Siegel, review of The Good Fight, by Peter Beinart, The Wall Street Journal, 26 May 2006, 5(W).

I felt that this particular snippet echoed what I was trying to express in my previous post.

Cockeyed calls for action and the impotence of the knee-jerk response

2006-05-14T10:18:00.000-04:00

I received one of these impassioned emails in my inbox the other day:

America Wake Up!

That's what we think we heard on the 11th of September 2001 and maybe it was, but I think it should have been "Get Out of Bed!" In fact, I think the alarm clock has been buzzing since 1979 and we have continued to hit the snooze button and roll over for a few more minutes of peaceful sleep since then.
It was a cool fall day in November 1979 in a country going through a religious and political upheaval when a group of Iranian students attacked and seized the American Embassy in Tehran. This seizure was an outright attack on American soil; it was an attack that held the world's most powerful country hostage and paralyzed a Presidency. The attack on this sovereign US embassy set the stage for the events to follow for the next 23 years.
[...]
- America Wake Up! [snopes.com]

I find a few things interesting about this email: it's been circulating via chain-email since 2003; of all the urban legend pieces I've seen, this is one of the few that actually has some basis in truth. What bothers me about it is how the events are presented. Yes, the embassy in Tehran was attacked in 1979, and yes, it constituted an attack on (or perhaps a repudiation of?) Western culture in general, and American culture in particular.

Embassies are special cases: they are not subject to local law, yet they are still part of the host nation (Diplomatic mission/Embassy, Extraterritoriality [wikipedia.org]). The blatantly hostile actions against the Embassy in Iran was certainly counter to all established customs of international diplomacy. But there is more to it than that (isn't there always?)

This was the time when Iran was hovering on the verge of revolution, and the US was caught with its finger in the pudding: Iran Hostage Crisis [wikipedia.org]. The email claims that Iran has been making war on the US since 1979, but it fails to mention that we've been meddling in their business (and in the business of Iraq, for that matter, as we played them against each other) for far longer than that. I think it could be argued that we are now sleeping in the bed we made.

What bothers me the most, is this:

America has to "Get out of Bed" and act decisively now. America has changed forever. We have to be ready to pay the price and make the sacrifice to ensure our way of life continues. We cannot afford to hit the Snooze Button again and roll over and go back to sleep. We have to make the terrorists know that in the words of Admiral Yamamoto after the attack on Pearl Harbor "that all they have done is to awaken a sleeping giant."

It seems to shout "Death to the infidels!" and that is, of course, precisely what they are yelling to their comrades. How is diplomacy possible in an atmosphere of such absolutism? Are we not, by yelling thus, being just as fanatical? Can't we acknowledge the unlikelihood of all Iranians feeling that way? It seems more likely to me that the population of a nation would be silent in response to a dominant group that happens to a) be in charge, b) be armed to the teeth, and c) have apparently no qualms about questioning, terrorizing, and/or executing its own citizens. You want to talk about a culture of fear? (Perform a search, for example, on 'execution Iran', or perhaps 'stoning Iran', you'll get the idea).

I dislike any comparison being made between any country (not the least of which is the one I call my own) and one led by a fanatical fundamentalist regime. That includes the use, by any government, of terms that leave only two options (white/black, good/evil, right/wrong). Absolutist language divides, it foments hate and discord. "United we stand, divided we fall" - nationalistic language binds together a nation ("Kill the infidels!") at the expense of the global community.

You can most likely discern that I'm a peace-lover. I don't see any positive outcome from attacking terrorists - I see only more guns, more bombs, more outrage, more hate. The root of the problem: None of us, especially those of us that are more secular in nature, really have any idea how to combat the primal overtones present in the flavor of Jihad that fanatical terrorists espouse.

References/resources (this is not a proclamation of support, it is merely a list of places/things I visited or found noteworthy en route):

wikipedia.org
- The complex definition of Jihad
- Of particular interest, this side discussion: Jihad as Holy War
History of Iran [iranchamber.com]
A Memoir for a different perspective:
Reading Lolita In Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Azar Nafisi) [amazon.com]
Jihad Watch [jihadwatch.org] - in the "About Robert Spencer" section of this site:
Q: What can we do about this threat?
RS: Many things, but what we must do above all is remain true to our principles of freedom and equality of rights and dignity for all. These ideas and related ones are what set us apart from global jihadists. If we discard them in order to fight the jihadists, we risk erasing the distinction between the two camps.

Darfur 101

2006-05-08T23:29:00.000-04:00

Darfur, Darfur, Darfur. Are you sick of hearing it? Probably not, because no one's talking about it. The New York Times' (2006 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary...congratulations, sir!) Nicholas Kristof is, thank goodness. He's talked a great deal about it. I think the reason I know about it is because of Nicholas Kristof.

Honestly, at first, I didn't want to know about it. It was too tragic, too painful, too unreal, too far away. I was too busy, too tired, too...lazy to take the time to read what he wrote. But he's a persistent guy, that Kristof. He got to me. It got to me. Once you understand it, it will get to you, too. It's genocide. How can it not?

Mr. Kristof said that the CBS Evening News devoted a whole two minutes to Darfur in 2005. Two! Did you see it? Did you blink? I would like to know what the time commitment was for American Idol or Jessica Simpson...but I digress.

The point is, perhaps we need a primer on Darfur. If we know more about it, if someone can demystify that whole quagmire for us, maybe we can make an informed decision and take action.

Well someone did just that. An English professor/activist/Leukemia patient did. A busy guy. He took the time to do this, so I thought I'd take the time to post it here.

Darfur 101 [tnr.com]
Eric Reeves [sudanreeves.org]

Stop Genocide Grassroots Organizations:
Save Darfur [savedarfur.org]
Genocide Intervention Network [genocideintervention.net]

The Brainwashing of America

2005-07-06T22:47:00.000-04:00

But it seems, sadly, that the flame of liberty is dying here in the homeland just as the torch is sputtering to life in other countries. And no, I don't mean Iraq.

Watch your .. Blog

2005-03-08T14:05:00.000-05:00

The Repercussions of Blogging [slashdot.org]

hende_jman writes "How much should you be allowed to say in a public blog? There's an article on CNN that looks at different situations in which people have been fired for blogging about their company. The main issue brought seems not to be one of a lack of trust (blogs, after all, are most often public), but rather a lack of policy outlining repercussions for negative blogging about one's company."

Blog-linked firings prompt calls for better policies [cnn.com]

*sigh*

Thank goodness for slashdot commentary.

Re:Remember when... (Score:5, Insightful)
by Leo McGarry (843676) Alter Relationship on Sunday March 06, @07:55PM (#11861907)

You are allowed to say whatever you want, and if your employer doesn't like it, he's allowed to fire you.

Freedom of speech, as the saying goes, does not mean freedom from consequences.

Blogging changes nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
by EmbeddedJanitor (597831) Alter Relationship on Sunday March 06, @10:23PM (#11862626)

What you should and should not say is not changed by blogging. There is no real difference to making a public statement by any means, including blogging, newspapers, TV etc.

Isn't that obvious? I mean, hello?

Reading this stuff just sort of aggravates me. I really don't think most people understand the difference. Your freedom to act like an idiot does not excuse your behavior - you still acted like an idiot. You reap what you sow, lunkhead!

What Menken knew...

2004-11-24T19:10:00.000-05:00

Just in case we thought we didn't see this one coming...

Wisdom of Mencken [sandhill.typepad.com]

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

Show me the money

2004-07-01T16:52:00.000-04:00

Republicans Name 62 Who Raised Big Money [washingtonpost.com]

A number of the Super Rangers have been favorably treated by the Bush administration.
The Federal Communications Commission has allowed A. Jerrold Perenchio, chairman and chief executive of Univision, to significantly expand his holdings in Hispanic media outlets, by approving the merger last year of Univision Communications Inc. and Hispanic Broadcasting Corp. President Bush appointed William O. DeWitt Jr. to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

[...]

The dominant industry among the Super Rangers, according to Public Citizen, was finance, insurance and real estate, which produced more than a third of the mega-bundlers. Lawyers were second, followed by energy and natural resources company executives, construction company executives, and communications and electronics company executives.

wonder why that would be...

New feminism, and new activism

2004-06-07T13:49:00.000-04:00

The transcript of Barbara Ehrenreich's commencement speech to the 2004 Barnard Commencement is below.

I'd thought something similar myself, but I couldn't put it into words...

Barnard Commencement 2004
Speech by Barbara Ehrenreich

It is a total thrill to share this day with you today. I really feel honored to participate. How many of you are parents of graduates? What I'm really curious about is how you managed to get here today, after paying all that money for tuition -- Greyhound bus? I put two kids thru Ivy League myself, which meant I had to hitchhike to their commencement ceremonies.

I had another speech prepared for today -- all about the cost of college and how the doors to higher education are closing to all but the wealthy. It was a good speech -- lots of laugh lines -- but 2 weeks ago something came along that wiped the smile right off my face. You know, you saw them too -- the photographs of American soldiers sadistically humiliating and abusing detainees in Iraq.

These photos turned my stomach -- yours too, I'm sure. But they did something else to me: they broke my heart. I had no illusions about the United States mission in Iraq, but it turns out that I did have some illusions about women.

There was the photo of Specialist Sabrina Harman smiling an impish little smile and giving the thumbs sign from behind a pile of naked Iraqi men -- as if to say, "Hi mom, here I am in Abu Ghraib!"

We've gone from the banality of evil... to the cuteness of evil.

There was the photo of Private First Class Lynndie England dragging a naked Iraqi man on a leash. She's cute too, in those cool cammy pants and high boots. He's grimacing in pain. If you were doing PR for al Qaeda, you couldn't have staged a better picture to galvanize misogynist Islamic fundamentalists around the world.

And never underestimate the misogyny of the real enemy, which was never the Iraqis; it was and should be the Al Qaeda-type fundamentalist extremists: Two weeks ago in eastern Afghanistan, suspected Taliban members (I thought we had defeated them, but never mind) ... poisoned three little girls for the crime of going to school. That seems to be the attitude in that camp: In the case of women, better dead than well-read.

But here in these photos from Abu Ghraib, you have every Islamic fundamentalist stereotype of Western culture -- all nicely arranged in one hideous image -- imperial arrogance, sexual depravity ... and gender equality.

Now we don't know whether women were encouraged to partcipate. All we know is they didn't say no. Of the 7 US soldiers now charged with the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 3 are women: Harman, England and Megan Ambuhl.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so shocked.

Certainly not about the existence of abuse. Reports of this and similar abuse have been leaking out of Guantanamo and immigrant detention centers in NYC for over a year We know, if we've been paying attention, that similar kinds of abuse, including sexual humiliation, are not unusal in our own vast US prison system.

We know too, that good people can do terrible things under the right circumstances. This is what psychologist Stanley Milgram found in his famous experiments in the 1960s. Sabrina and Lynndie are not congenitally evil people. They are working class women who wanted to go to college and knew the military as the quickest way in that direction. Once they got in, they wanted to fit in.

And I shouldn't be surprised either because I never believed that women are innately less aggressive than men. I have argued this repeatedly - once with the famously macho anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. When he kept insisting that women are just too nice and incapable of combat, I answered him the best way I could: I asked him if he wanted to step outside...

I have supported full opportunity for women within the military, in part because -- with rising tuition -- it's one of the few options around for low-income young people.

I opposed the first Gulf War in 1991, but at the same time I was proud of our servicewomen and delighted that their presence irked their Saudi hosts.

Secretly, I hoped that the presence of women would eventually change the military, making it more respectful of other people and their cultures, more capable of genuine peace keeping.

That's what I thought, but I don't think that any more.

A lot of things died with those photos.

The last moral justification for the war with Iraq died with those photos. First the justification was the supposed weapons of mass destruction. Then it was the supposed links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden -- those links were never found either. So the final justification was that we had removed an evil dictator who tortured his own people. As recently as April 30, George Bush exulted that the torture chambers of Iraq were no longer operating.

Well, it turns out they were just operating under different management. We didn't displace Saddam Hussein; we replaced him.

And when you throw in the similar abuses in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, in immigrant detention centers and US prisons, you see that we have created a spreading regime of torture -- an empire of pain.

But there's another thing that died for me in the last couple of weeks -- a certain kind of feminism or, perhaps I should say, a certain kind of feminist naivete.
It was a kind of feminism that saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims, and male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice. Maybe this sort of feminism made more sense in the 1970s. Certainly it seemed to make sense when we learned about the rape camps in Bosnia in the early 90s. There was a lot of talk about women then -- I remember because I was in the discussions -- about rape as an instrument of war and even war as an extension of rape.
I didn't agree, but I didn't disagree very loudly either. There seemed to be at least some reason to believe that male sexual sadism may somehow be deeply connected to our species' tragic propensity for violence.

That was before we had seen female sexual sadism in action.

But it's not just the theory of this naïve feminism that was wrong. So was its strategy and vision for change. That strategy and vision for change rested on the assumption, implicit or stated outright, that women are morally superior to men. We had a lot of debates over whether it was biology or conditioning that made women superior- or maybe the experience of being a woman in a sexist culture. But the assumption of superiority was beyond debate. After all, women do most of the caring work in our culture, and in polls are consistently less inclined toward war than men.

Now I'm not the only one wrestling with that assumption today. Here's Mary Jo Melone, a columnist in the St. Petersburg Times, writing on May 7:

"I can't get this picture of [Pfc. Lynndie] England out of my head because this is not how women are expected to behave. Feminism taught me 30 years ago that not only had women gotten a raw deal from men, but that we were morally superior to them."

Now the implication of this assumption was that all we had to do to make the world a better place -- kinder, less violent, more just -- was to assimilate into what had been, for so many centuries, the world of men. We would fight so that women could become the CEOs, the senators, the generals, the judges and opinion-makers -- because that was really the only fight we had to undertake. Because once they gained power and authority, once they had achieved a critical mass within the institutions of society, women would naturally work for change.

That's what we thought, even if we thought it unconsciously. And the most profound thing I have to say to you today, as a group of brilliant young women poised to enter the world -- is that it's just not true.

You can't even argue, in the case of Abu Ghraib, that the problem was that there just weren't ENOUGH women in the military hierarchy to stop the abuses.

The prison was directed by a woman, General Janis Karpinski.

The top US intelligence official in Iraq, who was also responsible for reviewing the status of detainees prior to their release, was a woman, Major Gen. Barbara Fast.

And the US official ultimately responsible for the managing the occupation of Iraq since last October was Condoleezza Rice.

What we have learned, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience; menstrual periods are not the foundation of morality.

This does not mean gender equality isn't worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. And I will keep fighting for it as long as I live.

Gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world.

What I have finally come to understand, sadly and irreversibly, is that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of moral superiority on the part of women is a lazy and self-indulgent form of feminism.

Self-indulgent because it assumes that a victory for a woman -- whether a diploma, a promotion, a right to serve alongside men in the military -- is ipso facto -- by its very nature -- a victory for humanity.

And lazy because it assumes that we have only one struggle -- the struggle for gender equality -- when in fact we have many more. The struggles for peace, for social justice and against imperialist and racist arrogance ... cannot, I am truly sorry to say, be folded into the struggle for gender equality.

Women do not change institutions simply just by assimilating into them. But -- and this is the "but" on which all my hopes hinge -- a CERTAIN KIND of woman can still do that -- and this is where you come in.

We need a kind of woman who can say NO, not just to the date rapist or overly persistent boyfriend, but to the military or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself.

We need a kind of woman who doesn't want to be one of the boys when the boys are acting like sadists or fools.

And we need a kind of woman who isn't trying to assimilate, but to infiltrate -- and subvert the institutions she goes into.

YOU can be those women. And as the brightest and best educated women of your generation, you better be.

First, because our nation is in such terrible trouble -- hated worldwide, and not just by the fundamentalist fanatics. My version of patriotism is simple: When the powerful no longer act responsibly, then it is our responsibility to take the power away from them.

You have to become tough-minded activists for change because the entire feminist project is also in terrible trouble worldwide. That project, which is minimally about the achievement of equality with men, is threatened by fundamentalisms of all kinds -- Christian as well as Islamic.

But we cannot successfully confront that threat without a moral vision that goes beyond gender equality. To cite an old -- and far from naïve -- feminist saying: "If you think equality is the goal, your standards are too low."

It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts.

It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.

I'm counting on you. I want YOU to be the face of American women that the world sees -- not those of Sabrina or Megan or Lynndie or Condoleezza.

Don't let me down. Take your hard-won diplomas, your knowledge and your talents and go out there and RAISE HELL!

Is this a Christian Nation or not?

2004-05-06T00:42:00.000-04:00

It's a question that comes up often. Is this nation "Christian"? Were our founding fathers?

This is addressed well in a piece called, Were the Founding Fathers of the United States Christians?.

The author, James Watkins, says the following:

Note:

I am a subscriber to the Apostles' Creed (I've had a "subscription" since second grade). I would love to document that the most prominant Founding Fathers were orthodox Christians.

However, I'm also a journalist who is committed to being an OAF (Objective, Accurate, and Fair), so I have only included quotes where I could find at least two collaborating, reliable sources.

I find this admirable, and I think he's done a good job of presenting things as they were. I think it's ironic that he gets bashed for it in comments like this one:

I have to commend you for tackling a controversial topic like the faith of our Founders. I also commend you for soliciting feed-back, so here it comes. I got the impression that I was going to read investigative reporting, but I'm afraid it came across as advocacy for the side that claims they were not Christian. Some call it "card stacking" -- telling only one side of an issue.

I find it humorous - how can the author be telling only one side when he presents the independent and varied beliefs of some of the most notable founders?

Whether or not there was a "Christian" (broad-brush term) majority among the founding fathers isn't ultimately relevant, in my opinion. What is relevant, is that they recognized and mandated, in spite of their beliefs or because of them, that this should be a secular nation, with a clear delineation between church and state. An issue that I believe is mistakenly made murky by confusion over the origin of morals. Some say that morals come from the church - that without a church, without a God, there is no way to know right from wrong. I fundamentally reject this, for the simple and obvious reason that man has been questioning the meaning of "right", "wrong", "truth", "good" and "evil" separately from religion or faith, i.e. philosophy and ethics.

References

From (the albeit biased) atheism.about.com:

From wikipedia.org:

Finally...

2004-04-22T00:17:00.000-04:00

I wish I could transcribe Bill Maher's interview with Jay Leno [nbc.com] tonight. Whether you like the man or not, he had some great comments.

One was that somehow, being an intelligent, nuanced person has become bad for a candidate (i.e. Kerry). "Bush knows one thing. We don't know what that thing is yet, but he knows one thing."

"Last time, it was you know - Gore and Bush, Coke and Pepsi, no difference, lets vote for Nader. Little did we know, we were choosing between Coke and Jesus-juice."

Data privacy overseas

2003-10-24T11:31:00.000-04:00

From Slashdot :

Transcriber Threatens Release of Medical Records

An unpaid Pakistani transcriber threatened to release medical records of patients at UCSF Medical Center on the internet. The article notes: 'U.S. laws maintain strict standards to protect patients' medical data. But those laws are virtually unenforceable overseas ... Most frightening, UCSF was unaware that its records were being sent overseas. The article traces their path backward through a chain of three different subcontractors.