SB 72

SB 72 was passed in Ohio yesterday. Gov Kasich is expected to sign it into law.

This bill ... I can't get over this bill. When I first heard about it, I got hung up on the section that said a woman can't have an abortion even if she'll kill herself if she doesn't.

don't believe me? Here's the text.

2) No abortion shall be considered necessary under division (B)(1)(b) of this section on the basis of a claim or diagnosis that the pregnant woman will engage in conduct that would result in the pregnant woman's death or a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman or based on any reason related to the woman's mental health.

This is law! This isn't genital mutilation, or genocide, or women unable to leave their homes, but this is forcing women into situations that will only end in devastation. This? This is the ultimate extremism. It isn't loud and out there, and the devastation it causes will be hauntingly quiet, tucked into the shadows, cowed in shame. This bill will kill women, there just won't be bells and whistles to go with it.

SB 72 passed and I just don't even know what to say.

war of extremism

Could we please stop the nonsense that nothing bad and worthy of talking about is happening to women in the United States? The idea that women in the United States are not seeing a war of extremism raged on them simply because the wars raged on women in other parts of the world are far more concrete is absurd.

Case 1, from Richard Dawkins on pharyngula:

Dear Muslima Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with. [...] And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin!

Case 2: Miranda Flint at South Dakota Politics

His version of extremism has nothing to do with car bombs or global terrorism. Nor does it have anything to do with female genital mutilation or the problem of gendercide. It doesn’t even have anything to do with greenhouse gasses.

Case 3: Justin Timberlake, a soldier, and Mila Kunis, at oh, everywhere, just google it.

Denying women access to health care is extremism. The idea that several Presidential candidates not only think this is okay, but seem open to the idea that the progress of women should be reversed, is also extremism. The fact that a woman can make an innocuous request not to be accosted in an elevator and then accused of over-reacting, is extremism. A man putting a woman into a situation where it is impossible for her to say no without severe negative consequences? You guessed it, extremism.

All in different forms, but the notion that extremism only occupies one form - one that is violent and easy to identify, is patently wrong, and the sooner we stop thinking like that, the sooner we stop all forms of extremism.

e-verify

Quick! Prove to me you have the legal right to work in these United States, in order to correct an e-verify false-negative.

Drivers license? Are you kidding me? Those things are handed out like candy and don't prove anything.

SS card? Not actually proof of identity. I know, right?

Birth certificate? Well, now we're getting somewhere. Wait. You changed your name? This seems fishy to me ... got anything else?

Passport? Excellent! justsolongasitisnotexpired.

Now. Let's play a game. How many Americans do you think have passports? Don't look it up, that's cheating. Give up? GOA put it at about 28% as of 2008. That's about 86 million passports for 305 million people. The labor force is about 153 million. Applying the same stats, that means about 43 million of the labor force has a passport. Sounds okay, doesn't it? And that's actually assuming that none of those passports have expired. Expired passports don't prove identity. Hell, even with the new outrageous Voter ID proposed amendment, an expired ID counts.

So, AT BEST, less than a third of the current US labor force can prove that they actually can work in the United States. It's a crime not to be able to, for whatever ridiculous reason It's also a crime, fyi, not to change your address w/in 30 days of a move, but under Voter ID, you can still use that as proof of identity, and oh yeah, y'know, VOTE. Under E-verify, an expired passport [or other ID, I am assuming] makes you a criminal. Okay, well, you're not technically a criminal, you just can't prove you're not.

As with Voter ID - these are some really interesting parallels I might have to post about later - the people with the least amount of resources and agency are going to be the ones most negatively affected by this.

And if that weren't enough ...

Let's keep playing a game, okay?
This, I am going to steal directly from Dan Crawford @ Angry Bear

When E-Verify finds an inconsistency between a name and that person's work authorization, it issues a "tentative nonconfirmation" (TNC), after which an employee has several days to contact SSA or DHS to correct the error or risk losing their job. Unfortunately, a significant number of these TNCs are issued in error. (Errors are usually due to clerical mistakes from inputting data, especially with hard-to-spell names or ones that have been hyphenated or changed, as well as errors by the workers themselves when filling out government forms.) In 2010, of the 16 million E-verify queries by employers, 128,000 (0.8 percent of the total) required the employee to go to SSA or call DHS to fix the problem. Of those 0.8 percent errors, 0.3 percent were discovered to be in error and were later corrected. But 0.5 percent -- over half of all errors -- were falsely issued "final nonconfirmations," essentially forcing their employer to wrongly fire them. 0.3 percent may not sound like very many, but with a total American workforce of 154 million, that translates to over 770,000 jobs lost.

That's ... impressive. That is, in fact, beyond impressive. And not in a good way.

Someone tell me why we're even DEBATING e-verify. Someone else please tell me why we thought it was a good idea to make it a crime to not be able to work. I'm pretty sure those rotting fields in Georgia wouldn't be rotting if that weren't the case. In fact, I'm not just pretty sure - I'm goddamned sure there would be oodles of blueberries if it wasn't criminal not to be able to work.

the republic of south sudan

There is a new country in the world, right at this very moment. I find it fascinating that we can have mapped the world entire, and yet new countries can spring forth. This country, like so many of her sisters, was sprung forth from the ashes of violence and hatred, brought on by a scramble for Africa that ignored any and all cultural, ethnic, and religious divides.

But from the peace the people got to choose their own destiny, and they chose independence, a way to move on to a continued peace and a free peoples.

Happy Birthday, South Sudan. Hope it's all you dream it'll be, and more.

"Almost-rape" and consequential silences.

trigger warning: rape

"Keep your head down, don't say anything, get through this. After all, you don't want a reputation." - Advice from my mother on how to work with a man that I stopped from raping a friend of mine.

When Timothy raped me, I had no problems letting anyone who asked what I happened. On the other hand, when Timothy raped me, I had a piece of paper saying he couldn't come within 500 feet of me. This time, there were no calls to the police, nothing formal and legal ever filed, no protection of the truth except by its witness. No, I didn't call the police, I was too busy physically preventing a man from attacking an incapacitated woman. Believe me when I say that during those moments, it was not an option. Thus the greyest of grey areas was entered, the realm of the 'almost rape'.

He didn't actually rape her, but I can see how haunted she is by it. How she avoids events he might be at, how she sits in the corner of the bar to keep an eye on the door to make sure he doesn't 'happen' upon the very same bar; and the subtle hauntings that I can't figure out how to describe, but they're there in the thin layers of vulnerability that sit just under her skin.

It was supposed to be a party, that night. It was supposed to be a party, but the mixers weren't very good, and they ran out of beer fast, so I wasn't really drinking. It was supposed to be a party and it took me a while to figure out what happened, why the bedroom door had latched closed with such finality. It was supposed to be a party, our overlapping circles, social and work both. It was supposed to be a party. Instead it was night of hard choices and even harder consequences.

One of the choices was the silences I chose to keep, the decision on my part not to call the police, and the consequence of him still falling in those overlapping circles. He showed up at the place I'm interning and I hadn't spoken to him in months, but it felt exactly like the day after that party, with the choices hanging in the air between us, and the slow, steady panic of not knowing what to do.

Keep my head down, keep that silence, hold those consequences. Right?

What Stephen Colbert Learned From My Mother

Okay, so maybe he didn't. But I knew her first and they both taught me a lot about standing for people who have no power.


As a kid, we were forbidden from buying or receiving Nike products. Because Nike was going through a lot of bad press about the policies and conditions that were applied at their overseas plants. It definitely wasn't the only company to so egregiously violate the human rights of their workers, but it was the most public, and my mother decided the best way to take a stand was to boycott their products, even if it was only one family in a sea of over 250 million. I remember in the seventh grade ~1997, Nike really taking off, and kids drawing the famous Nike swoosh over everything; you couldn't walk twenty feet in my middle school without seeing it on a backpack, a shoe, a binder, a notebook, or even etched into the stalls in the bathroom. It was a fad that I wasn't allowed to participate it, for reasons I didn't fully comprehend, other than my mother saw them as human rights abusers and refused to allow their product into her home.

As I entered high school, I took on her view after learning more about the use of child workers and the horrid working conditions they were forced to live in. Several of my classmates told me 'at least these kids have income they can take home, would you rather their families have nothing?' which is a rather fallacious argument, as I'd rather these kids' parents be able to learn a human wage and these kids be able to have a childhood, and no kid should be forced to work under horrid conditions to make ends meet for their family. Trying to twist it any other way is trying to justify why it's okay in any way, shape, or form for these children to endure what they are.

About 2001, Nike came out and admitted that they'd messed up and used child labour. They then went a step further and said they weren't sure how to end the practice, or if they'd be able to. One step forward, two steps back. Shortly after that, my mother came home with a pair of Nike shoes and I was horrified. She proudly proclaimed that she wasn't going to, but they were 'only $5,' which to her, was apparently the right price for undermining her entire value system, and pretending that some fairness had been applied to society. I'm incredibly lucky that she didn't do this when I was far more impressionable and hadn't made up my own mind that sometimes quiet protests are the only protests that we can take.

The idea that morality is fluid, and that ideas can be put the test came hard with the release of a book called Nobodies, which details the use of American slave labor in today's national and global economy. I'd always known about migrant workers, and the conditions that they lived in, but Nobodies go after specific examples - oranges in Florida to steel in Oklahoma to even 'made in USA' products that aren't really made in USA and are made under terrible working conditions. And then how does one quietly protest? Boycott the entire world, even the USA? Everything becomes so overwhelming with quiet protests, moral indignation that isn't voiced to anyone, and the act of nothing changing.

Enter Stephen Colbert, who took what my mother taught me and went a step further. Only he did it with migrant workers. And he sat in front of the US Congress and gave voice to people who have no power. Anyone, I suppose, could have gone and did what he did, and then testified about his experiences, but he had a way to give voice and he didn't sit quietly by it. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm sure Colbert enjoys a Georgia peach in August, and the strawberries that roll out in June are to just die for, and in between, he eats his salad as a part of his balanced diet. Then again, I could be wrong. Maybe Stephen Colbert has been quietly boycotting produce - that's not the point. The point is that he took his moral outrage and gave it voice. And in doing so, he - if only for a moment - gave voice to the powerless.

Which brings me to Mario*, who is not a orange picker in Florida, or a steel worker in Oklahoma, or a migrant worker across the agricultural US. Instead he cleans the big-box stores, like Cub foods and Target, and the fact that his working for them isn't even a little bit ironic makes me sad. It's sad that it's not even the slightest ironic that stores whose products are secured with unethical labor practices allow their stores to be cleaned by companies whose labor practices are unethical as well. It's also outrageous, and demonstrable affront to the idea that we are a free society. Mario worked for a cleaning company that has no union organization, and whose workers have no power in how they are treated. All these workers want is a code of conduct that would provide really simple, basic things. Things like job security, and a fair wage. I said Mario worked. That's because Mario was [illegally] fired for trying to secure this code of conduct.

$5 is definitely too high of a price to pretend that we are indeed a free and fair society.


*You can read more about Mario and others struggles with cleaning companies and big-box stores here: http://ctul.net/

Me and my father vs the packers and bears.

The Packers just defeated the Bears and made the playoffs. The birthday letter to my father last year was about football and chasms, and 16 weeks, and trying to stand on the same piece of a plane for a few moments. And the Packers made the playoffs and the rift between us is larger than it's been in a very long time.

I feel like a failure.

I can't call him and talk to him because something would be my fault and we couldn't go back from there. So, a lot of things are my fault. Things I can't really talk about. Things that come with stamps of failure on them. Lies he doesn't even know about. I don't know when this got so hard. I struggled with the letter this past year, it took me a few days to figure out what I wanted to start saying, and a few more to figure out how to say it, and even then, I restarted the letter about a dozen times before just rolling with it. And then it was football season, and election season, and angry phone calls and passive-aggressive emails and the chasm growing wider and wider. and and and. I wish I could say 'and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow' but all I have are the ands and no idea what anything about tomorrow will be.

Except a wider and deeper distance between me and my father.