Southern Baptists attempt to save denomination by going incognito
The webpage of Louisburg Southern Baptist Church reads: “We are still SBC; we still believe in inerrancy; we still cherish our seminaries and mission bodies: We changed our name from Louisburg Southern Baptist Church to Eastside Church of the Cross.”
What happened in Louisburg, Kansas is not an anomaly, but a growing trend.
Wikipedia describes the trend this way: A recent trend (most common among megachurches and those embracing the "seeker movement") is to eliminate "Baptist" from the church name, as it is perceived to be a "barrier" to reaching persons who have negative views of Baptists, whether they be of a different church background or none. These churches typically include the word "Community" or other non-religious or denominational terms in their church name.
Why are the Southern Baptists suddenly reluctant to use their own name? Simply put, it’s a marketing decision. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has been embroiled in controversy and declining in membership for the last decade. The longstanding doctrine of church autonomy and personal autonomy (known as soul competency) has been replaced with social and political messages of intolerance and top-down Catholic-style micromanagement.
Take, for example, the issue of women in the pastorate. While the SBC has always had issues with sexism, individual churches were historically allowed to call their own pastors. As a result, many SBC churches were led by women in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.
In the year 2000, SBC leadership pulled out all the stops to eliminate these women. Married missionaries were forced to sign a statement recognizing the husbands as the true missionaries while the wives were just their underlings; couples who refused lost their funding. The SBC also stripped female chaplains of endorsement – but only those who were ordained. Although the SBC banned female pastors nine years ago, at this late date the purge continues with attacks on First Baptist Church of Decatur, pastored by Julie Pennington-Russell. FBC Decatur has been warned that unless they fire their pastor, they will be ousted from the Georgia Baptist Convention.
As a response to this religious fascism by the SBC, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) began to grow. The CBF is not a convention like the SBC. Emphasizing the freedom of every church and every individual, the CBF commits not to exercise creedal or papal authority over the network of churches that fund and endorse the organization. Many local churches, including First Baptist Church of Ringgold and First Baptist Church of Chattanooga, split their funding between the two organizations, allowing individual church members to designate which one they prefer to support.
Other churches pulled out of the SBC entirely – including the First Baptist Church of Greenville, S.C., whose founder William B. Johnson was the first president of the SBC in 1845 and is considered the father of the denomination. Pastor Harvey Clemons explained the church’s break with the SBC this way: “After about 150 years of the Southern Baptist Convention having unity in diversity, it's become a fundamentalist organization, more concerned with creedalism and politics, and we're not. When they added the statement to the Baptist Faith and Message about submissive women, it was just one more in a long series of incidents.”
Attempts at reviving the denomination include renaming old churches and misnaming new churches. Locally, north Georgia has seen the emergence of a number of misnamed Baptist churches. The Church at Catoosa may be the largest local SBC church hiding behind a non-denominational name. Although the church readily admits SBC affiliation when asked, the word “Baptist” does not appear on the website.
The newest undercover Baptist church around here is Origin Church, which uses the slogans, “For people who don’t go” and “No perfect people allowed.” Through MySpace and FaceBook, Origin stealthily targets people who have no intention of setting foot inside a Baptist church. Origin meets in the Ringgold Depot, offers free Starbucks coffee and does not use the word Baptist. Affiliation is sketchy, noticeably absent from their literature but not from the pastorate. A quick phone call receives a “yes and no” answer. They have gone back to the original Baptist message (None of us is worthy, but God loves us anyway) even as they ditch the Baptist name.
Is it really revolutionary and forward-thinking to pretend to be someone you’re not? Or, to put it more accurately, is it okay to pretend not to be someone you are? To the church-hunter who has already disavowed the Baptist denomination, it may seem like a bait-and-switch.
What’s wrong with being a Southern Baptist church? As a Nazarene, I could write a bullet list of points on which I strongly disagree with the SBC. Nevertheless, I think Southern Baptists should be proud to be Southern Baptists. If you cannot be proud of your faith, either disavow it or reform it. Don’t pretend to be above it, burying the truth somewhere down in your fine print.
The Bible tells us that by faith, our father Abraham was able to “call the things that were not as though they were.” It never says to call the things that were, as if they weren’t.
What I love best about Baptists is their humility. As a writer with a deep interest in religion and a healthy dose of skepticism, I have criticized many organizations and denominations in print. The Catholics ignore me; apparently I have not made the Pope’s radar. The Mormons threaten my business. The racists threaten my person. The Baptists inevitably respond with, “Wow, you are so right” and “I’m going to preach about this Sunday.”
This humility is what makes Baptists unique in the land. Their religious language for it is “the total depravity of man.” They read the same Bible I read, but their emphasis is a little different. They focus on the distance between God and humans – our complete inability to ever get it right. We can never reach God in the heavens; yet God reached down to us, becoming one of us and dying a sinner’s death.
The Baptist message is beautiful and important. I ask my Baptist friends not to lose sight of who you are, and why we need you. Give up the political agendas that don’t further your mission, but don’t give up your name. Grow out of the antiquated ideas about who is fit for ministry (because your writings teach that no one is fit, save through Christ), but don’t forget your heritage.
If you don’t like how the Baptist denomination is perceived, change the organization instead of the name. Be more inclusive. Get back to your roots and remember that no one is worthy of Christ – not even white, middle class, red-blooded, English-speaking American males who cut their teeth on the church pew. Reclaim the message and the mission that God set before you. Then you can be proud to put the Baptist name back on the signs.
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Monday, June 8, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
100 years of celebrating women
Happy International Women's Day!
Determined, feisty suffragettes celebrated the first National Women’s Day one hundred years ago, on February 28, 1909. Within a few years, the observance went global and became International Women’s Day, celebrated around the world on March 8th of every year.
In a host of countries around the world, International Women’s Day is now an official holiday with flowers and small gifts. The United States designates the entire month of March as Women’s History Month. This year, the theme for International Women’s day is “Women and men united to end violence against women and girls.”
The subject has never been more apropos. According to the National Institute of Justice, one in four women will experience domestic violence during her lifetime. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 1.3 million women per year are victims of sexual assault here in the United States, with an annual cost exceeding $5.8 billion per year.
Intimate partner violence recently exploded into the national focus when R&B crooner Chris Brown was arrested for beating, threatening, and choking pop star Rihanna nearly to death. Chat groups and news forums continue to crackle with the usual tired arguments: Why didn’t she leave him before this? Why is she silent now? Do some women want to be abused?
It is an easy thing to state that battered women should leave their partners. Of course they should, if and when they can do so safely. Yet when we focus on the actions or inactions of the victims, we overlook the most important aspect of these cases. Men should not hit women. The epidemic of domestic violence will never be resolved until we stop asking why women are there, and instead begin to ask why some men brutalize those they profess to love.
We are frustrated that Rihanna has not spoken out to repudiate Chris Brown and by extension condemn dating violence. Perhaps we forget that she is only twenty years old, did not ask to be in this situation, and never stated a desire to become the new face of domestic violence. As badly as we may want her to condemn Chris Brown and testify against him, the girl is probably scared to death. A few days ago, this man bit her, punched her, and choked her to the point of passing out. Now he walks around as a free man, simply because he has money. Who can blame his victim for lying low and playing nice?
Unfortunately, the maximum penalty for announcing your intent to kill a woman and then choking her unconscious appears to be four years. And who wants to place bets on whether a wealthy celebrity will receive the maximum sentence? Judging from the OJ fiasco, America will be lucky if Chris Brown is even found guilty.
So many people are calling Rihanna stupid for being with the wrong man. How stupid then is our society to allow over a million women a year to be thus treated, with only a slap on the wrist for those men found guilty of crimes against their own wives and lovers? Here in developed, “civilized” America, women are beaten into submission every day. Over a million women live in fear. Over a million women curb their actions, their words and even their thoughts to avoid retaliation.
We say “They should leave!” and yet society does almost nothing to assist women in leaving safely. 75% of intimate partner murders take place during or after the breakup. Most battered women do leave their abusive partners, but in doing so they encounter enormous risks as well as facing poverty and homelessness and risking the loss of their children.
That doesn’t mean battered women should stay. It means society should assist women in leaving safely. One avenue of assuring women’s safety is to lock up abusers until their obsession has passed. Courts regularly issue restraining orders instead, proving themselves far more “stupid” than the women we love to blame. If a man is willing to ignore a universal taboo against hitting women, will he not also ignore a little piece of paper telling him to stay away? Telling an abuser to stay away from his victim is as effective as telling a wolf to stay away from sheep. She is his prey. He will not stop of his own accord. Neither will he stop simply because she breaks up with him. If we want abusive men to stop attacking women, then we as a society must forcibly stop them. That’s what jails are for.
Those who say Rihanna will die if she goes back to Chris Brown have an excellent point. But she may also die if she breaks up with him, thanks to the low value America puts on the safety of women. For this reason, we have no right to judge Rihanna. While the whole world watches, she is on her own to work this out.
Meanwhile, invisible to the paparazzi and gossip rags, women who are less famous and less wealthy than Rihanna suffer in silence.
Determined, feisty suffragettes celebrated the first National Women’s Day one hundred years ago, on February 28, 1909. Within a few years, the observance went global and became International Women’s Day, celebrated around the world on March 8th of every year.
In a host of countries around the world, International Women’s Day is now an official holiday with flowers and small gifts. The United States designates the entire month of March as Women’s History Month. This year, the theme for International Women’s day is “Women and men united to end violence against women and girls.”
The subject has never been more apropos. According to the National Institute of Justice, one in four women will experience domestic violence during her lifetime. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 1.3 million women per year are victims of sexual assault here in the United States, with an annual cost exceeding $5.8 billion per year.
Intimate partner violence recently exploded into the national focus when R&B crooner Chris Brown was arrested for beating, threatening, and choking pop star Rihanna nearly to death. Chat groups and news forums continue to crackle with the usual tired arguments: Why didn’t she leave him before this? Why is she silent now? Do some women want to be abused?
It is an easy thing to state that battered women should leave their partners. Of course they should, if and when they can do so safely. Yet when we focus on the actions or inactions of the victims, we overlook the most important aspect of these cases. Men should not hit women. The epidemic of domestic violence will never be resolved until we stop asking why women are there, and instead begin to ask why some men brutalize those they profess to love.
We are frustrated that Rihanna has not spoken out to repudiate Chris Brown and by extension condemn dating violence. Perhaps we forget that she is only twenty years old, did not ask to be in this situation, and never stated a desire to become the new face of domestic violence. As badly as we may want her to condemn Chris Brown and testify against him, the girl is probably scared to death. A few days ago, this man bit her, punched her, and choked her to the point of passing out. Now he walks around as a free man, simply because he has money. Who can blame his victim for lying low and playing nice?
Unfortunately, the maximum penalty for announcing your intent to kill a woman and then choking her unconscious appears to be four years. And who wants to place bets on whether a wealthy celebrity will receive the maximum sentence? Judging from the OJ fiasco, America will be lucky if Chris Brown is even found guilty.
So many people are calling Rihanna stupid for being with the wrong man. How stupid then is our society to allow over a million women a year to be thus treated, with only a slap on the wrist for those men found guilty of crimes against their own wives and lovers? Here in developed, “civilized” America, women are beaten into submission every day. Over a million women live in fear. Over a million women curb their actions, their words and even their thoughts to avoid retaliation.
We say “They should leave!” and yet society does almost nothing to assist women in leaving safely. 75% of intimate partner murders take place during or after the breakup. Most battered women do leave their abusive partners, but in doing so they encounter enormous risks as well as facing poverty and homelessness and risking the loss of their children.
That doesn’t mean battered women should stay. It means society should assist women in leaving safely. One avenue of assuring women’s safety is to lock up abusers until their obsession has passed. Courts regularly issue restraining orders instead, proving themselves far more “stupid” than the women we love to blame. If a man is willing to ignore a universal taboo against hitting women, will he not also ignore a little piece of paper telling him to stay away? Telling an abuser to stay away from his victim is as effective as telling a wolf to stay away from sheep. She is his prey. He will not stop of his own accord. Neither will he stop simply because she breaks up with him. If we want abusive men to stop attacking women, then we as a society must forcibly stop them. That’s what jails are for.
Those who say Rihanna will die if she goes back to Chris Brown have an excellent point. But she may also die if she breaks up with him, thanks to the low value America puts on the safety of women. For this reason, we have no right to judge Rihanna. While the whole world watches, she is on her own to work this out.
Meanwhile, invisible to the paparazzi and gossip rags, women who are less famous and less wealthy than Rihanna suffer in silence.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Palin Pros and Cons
Several readers have asked me to weigh in on the selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as Senator John McCain’s vice presidential running mate. The way I see it, there are pros and cons to the Palin pick.
PRO – She’s a woman. Over 50% of voters are women, and we are seriously underrepresented in American government.
CON – She’s against women. Palin is part of the most extremist anti-woman platform the Republicans have put forth in years. These Republicans are on the warpath, trying to limit access to ordinary contraceptive methods like the birth control pill, which the majority of American women depend on at some point in their lives. Palin is right in with this crowd, going on record to state that she is against abortion even in the case of rape or incest.
PRO – The restoration of a female to this election could appeal to some voters who are disillusioned over Hillary’s primary loss.
CON – Palin is no Hillary Clinton. Palin’s resume is so thin, it actually includes her high school basketball “career.” She is a one-term governor of the 4th smallest state by population, and before that she was the mayor of a town smaller than Fort Oglethorpe. Most Americans only heard of her last week. She is best known as the bee-hived governor who was almost Miss Alaska. She has no experience outside the state, much less with foreign affairs. According to the New York Times, Palin only got her passport in July, 2007. Even then, she did not visit Iraq as she has claimed.
By contrast, Hillary Clinton is a serious, seasoned political leader known all around the world. It’s not just the age difference. Since her twenties, Clinton has been featured in publications like Life Magazine. She attracted attention not for beauty pageants but for historic accomplishments, like being the first Wellesley student to deliver the commencement address and using that opportunity to criticize the senator who spoke just before she did.
While Republicans hail Palin as a reformer, it is Clinton who is a true crusader. Hillary was a force to be reckoned with even before she teamed up with Bill. In the late sixties, she fought for civil rights, and in the seventies she helped impeach Richard Nixon. In the eighties, while Palin was strutting down the runway in a bikini, Clinton was fighting for education reform in Arkansas and being named Mother of the Year for the second time.
As First Lady for two terms in the nineties, Clinton was so active in domestic and foreign affairs that critics printed bumper stickers reading “Impeach the President and her husband, too.”
Clinton’s greatest obstacle is being ahead of her time. Consider her bid to reform healthcare. As First Lady she was unable to make it happen, but that plan is now integral to the Democratic platform. That’s what reformers do; they change the way we think about the world. Simply challenging an incumbent in your own party doesn’t make you a reformer.
The differences go beyond education and experience; Palin opposes everything Hillary Clinton stands for – health care, education, individual freedoms, and economic security for the middle class.
McCain must think women are stupid. He hopes to win Clinton supporters simply by adding a woman to his ticket. Some men may believe that all females are interchangeable; women know better.
PRO – Palin is a Washington outsider. After 8 years of Republican corruption, lies, and unjust war, many Americans are looking outside the Capitol for a fresh leader without ties, allegiances and debts.
CON – She is not just an outsider; she has absolutely no national experience. Republicans try to brush this away by pointing out that Obama has never been a governor and therefore has no “executive” experience – but the same can be said for McCain. If Palin is more qualified than Obama, then she is also more qualified than McCain. The Republicans need to reverse their ticket! The truth is, Sarah Palin is the least experienced candidate put forth in recent history. The presidency is far too important to risk on a loose cannon like McCain and a complete unknown like Palin.
PRO – A short resume means less baggage . . . right?
CON – For a politician with such a short history, Palin has been remarkably quick to immerse herself in scandalous abuses of power. Currently she is under investigation for trying to force the firing of her ex-brother-in-law as a favor to her sister.
As governor of Alaska (population comparable to Atlanta or Memphis), she has held her hand out for plenty of pork. Palin claims she opposed the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” Not true. Support for the bridge was part of her campaign platform. She only gave up on it after Washington turned against the project. Then she canceled the bridge, but kept most of the money for other projects. Although she claims she opposes earmarks, she has requested more per capita than any other governor.
While requesting federal dollars to study the mating habits of crabs, Palin used her line-item veto power to slash important funding for education and teen pregnancy prevention. She opposes teaching teens about condoms in spite of statistical and now personal evidence that “abstinence only” education has poor results.
Palin has an interesting strategy on changing Alaska’s status as the rape capital of America: Discourage victims from reporting. Under Mayor Palin, Wasilla women who reported rape had to pay for the cost of the forensic exam, reportedly a charge of $300-1,200. Charging women who report sex crimes is a sure way to reduce rape – well, rape reports, anyway.
PRO – Palin is an avid outdoorswoman, giving her a tough, not-afraid-to-get-her-hands-dirty image.
CON – Sarah Palin’s hands are a little too dirty. Palin wants to turn the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge into a private oil field for her corporate buddies.
Hunting does not always translate into caring about the environment or its inhabitants. Palin scoffs at global warming even as scientists document the shrinking of the ice caps and drowning of polar bears. Not that Palin cares about polar bears; she actually sued the Bush administration to have them taken off the endangered species list.
Wolves have fared no better under her watch. Until the program was stopped by a state judge, Palin was offering wolf hunters $150 for every hacked-off front foreleg they brought in.
PRO – The selection of a female vice presidential candidate is a historical first for the Republican Party. Finally, the Republicans have entered the 20th century. That’s not a typo. The press seems to have forgotten that Democrats met that milestone last century when Walter Mondale selected Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in 1984. The Republicans are, finally, playing catch-up.
CON – In choosing Palin, John McCain passed over a long line of more qualified Republican leaders. If he wanted a female running mate, why not Kay Bailey Hutchison? Hutchison served as state treasurer of Texas before starting her fifteen years in the Senate. She is the most senior female Republican Senator, with a great deal of experience and responsibility.
Or how about Olympia Snowe? Snowe is the first woman who ever served in both houses, both in the state and nationally, and one of the first to serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee. She was named one of America’s top senators by Time Magazine, and holds a 79% approval rating in her home state of Maine. Snowe is as powerful as she is popular. She chairs the subcommittee that oversees the Navy and Marine Corps and also serves on the Finance Committee. In 35 years, Olympia Snowe has never lost an election.
With choices like Hutchison and Snowe (and Condoleeza Rice, and the list goes on), why did McCain choose a political newbie from the sticks? The answer is clear to hard-working women in all sorts of careers who have watched a younger, less qualified woman soar past them to assume positions at the top. It’s an old gimmick, really: Put a token female near the top to placate the other women in the organization. Just make sure it’s a woman who will fully support the good ol’ boys, without caring what happens to us other women, or our children, or our world.
PRO – She’s a woman. Over 50% of voters are women, and we are seriously underrepresented in American government.
CON – She’s against women. Palin is part of the most extremist anti-woman platform the Republicans have put forth in years. These Republicans are on the warpath, trying to limit access to ordinary contraceptive methods like the birth control pill, which the majority of American women depend on at some point in their lives. Palin is right in with this crowd, going on record to state that she is against abortion even in the case of rape or incest.
PRO – The restoration of a female to this election could appeal to some voters who are disillusioned over Hillary’s primary loss.
CON – Palin is no Hillary Clinton. Palin’s resume is so thin, it actually includes her high school basketball “career.” She is a one-term governor of the 4th smallest state by population, and before that she was the mayor of a town smaller than Fort Oglethorpe. Most Americans only heard of her last week. She is best known as the bee-hived governor who was almost Miss Alaska. She has no experience outside the state, much less with foreign affairs. According to the New York Times, Palin only got her passport in July, 2007. Even then, she did not visit Iraq as she has claimed.
By contrast, Hillary Clinton is a serious, seasoned political leader known all around the world. It’s not just the age difference. Since her twenties, Clinton has been featured in publications like Life Magazine. She attracted attention not for beauty pageants but for historic accomplishments, like being the first Wellesley student to deliver the commencement address and using that opportunity to criticize the senator who spoke just before she did.
While Republicans hail Palin as a reformer, it is Clinton who is a true crusader. Hillary was a force to be reckoned with even before she teamed up with Bill. In the late sixties, she fought for civil rights, and in the seventies she helped impeach Richard Nixon. In the eighties, while Palin was strutting down the runway in a bikini, Clinton was fighting for education reform in Arkansas and being named Mother of the Year for the second time.
As First Lady for two terms in the nineties, Clinton was so active in domestic and foreign affairs that critics printed bumper stickers reading “Impeach the President and her husband, too.”
Clinton’s greatest obstacle is being ahead of her time. Consider her bid to reform healthcare. As First Lady she was unable to make it happen, but that plan is now integral to the Democratic platform. That’s what reformers do; they change the way we think about the world. Simply challenging an incumbent in your own party doesn’t make you a reformer.
The differences go beyond education and experience; Palin opposes everything Hillary Clinton stands for – health care, education, individual freedoms, and economic security for the middle class.
McCain must think women are stupid. He hopes to win Clinton supporters simply by adding a woman to his ticket. Some men may believe that all females are interchangeable; women know better.
PRO – Palin is a Washington outsider. After 8 years of Republican corruption, lies, and unjust war, many Americans are looking outside the Capitol for a fresh leader without ties, allegiances and debts.
CON – She is not just an outsider; she has absolutely no national experience. Republicans try to brush this away by pointing out that Obama has never been a governor and therefore has no “executive” experience – but the same can be said for McCain. If Palin is more qualified than Obama, then she is also more qualified than McCain. The Republicans need to reverse their ticket! The truth is, Sarah Palin is the least experienced candidate put forth in recent history. The presidency is far too important to risk on a loose cannon like McCain and a complete unknown like Palin.
PRO – A short resume means less baggage . . . right?
CON – For a politician with such a short history, Palin has been remarkably quick to immerse herself in scandalous abuses of power. Currently she is under investigation for trying to force the firing of her ex-brother-in-law as a favor to her sister.
As governor of Alaska (population comparable to Atlanta or Memphis), she has held her hand out for plenty of pork. Palin claims she opposed the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” Not true. Support for the bridge was part of her campaign platform. She only gave up on it after Washington turned against the project. Then she canceled the bridge, but kept most of the money for other projects. Although she claims she opposes earmarks, she has requested more per capita than any other governor.
While requesting federal dollars to study the mating habits of crabs, Palin used her line-item veto power to slash important funding for education and teen pregnancy prevention. She opposes teaching teens about condoms in spite of statistical and now personal evidence that “abstinence only” education has poor results.
Palin has an interesting strategy on changing Alaska’s status as the rape capital of America: Discourage victims from reporting. Under Mayor Palin, Wasilla women who reported rape had to pay for the cost of the forensic exam, reportedly a charge of $300-1,200. Charging women who report sex crimes is a sure way to reduce rape – well, rape reports, anyway.
PRO – Palin is an avid outdoorswoman, giving her a tough, not-afraid-to-get-her-hands-dirty image.
CON – Sarah Palin’s hands are a little too dirty. Palin wants to turn the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge into a private oil field for her corporate buddies.
Hunting does not always translate into caring about the environment or its inhabitants. Palin scoffs at global warming even as scientists document the shrinking of the ice caps and drowning of polar bears. Not that Palin cares about polar bears; she actually sued the Bush administration to have them taken off the endangered species list.
Wolves have fared no better under her watch. Until the program was stopped by a state judge, Palin was offering wolf hunters $150 for every hacked-off front foreleg they brought in.
PRO – The selection of a female vice presidential candidate is a historical first for the Republican Party. Finally, the Republicans have entered the 20th century. That’s not a typo. The press seems to have forgotten that Democrats met that milestone last century when Walter Mondale selected Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in 1984. The Republicans are, finally, playing catch-up.
CON – In choosing Palin, John McCain passed over a long line of more qualified Republican leaders. If he wanted a female running mate, why not Kay Bailey Hutchison? Hutchison served as state treasurer of Texas before starting her fifteen years in the Senate. She is the most senior female Republican Senator, with a great deal of experience and responsibility.
Or how about Olympia Snowe? Snowe is the first woman who ever served in both houses, both in the state and nationally, and one of the first to serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee. She was named one of America’s top senators by Time Magazine, and holds a 79% approval rating in her home state of Maine. Snowe is as powerful as she is popular. She chairs the subcommittee that oversees the Navy and Marine Corps and also serves on the Finance Committee. In 35 years, Olympia Snowe has never lost an election.
With choices like Hutchison and Snowe (and Condoleeza Rice, and the list goes on), why did McCain choose a political newbie from the sticks? The answer is clear to hard-working women in all sorts of careers who have watched a younger, less qualified woman soar past them to assume positions at the top. It’s an old gimmick, really: Put a token female near the top to placate the other women in the organization. Just make sure it’s a woman who will fully support the good ol’ boys, without caring what happens to us other women, or our children, or our world.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Let them run
The past few weeks have been very interesting for runners of all kinds. An athlete who could not run was carried. An athlete who can run was finally told he could. And in politics, Hillary Clinton was barraged with yet more calls to stop running.
Over 200,000 viewers enjoyed the YouTube video of Western Oregon University athlete Sara Tucholsky’s first home run. In a game against Central Washington University, Tucholsky hit the ball over the fence. At first base, she tore a ligament in her knee. When the umpire mistakenly ruled that one of her own team members could not run the bases for her, two Central Washington players picked her up and carried her around the bases. All over the blogosphere, Mallory Holtman and Liz Wallace are heralded as heroes for the selfless act that cost them the game but won them a place in our hearts -- and an entry on Wikipedia.
In other sports victories, double amputee Oscar Pistorius won the right to compete for a spot in the Olympics. Pistorius was born without fibulas (the long thin bones that run from knee to ankle.) Surgeons amputated both his legs below the knee when he was eleven months old. Running on special carbon-fiber blades, Pistorius holds the 400-meter Paralympic word record at 46.56 seconds.
Pistorius is not quite there yet; the qualifying requirement for the 400-meter event in Beijing is 45.55 seconds. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) had barred Pistorius from all able-bodied competition including the Olympics, considering his carbon-fiber running blades a “mechanical advantage” over other runners. Their fear was not that he would fail, but that he might succeed.
If Pistorius makes the cut, he will not be the first Paralympian to qualify for the Olympics. Natalie du Toit, a swimmer from South Africa, qualified for the 2008 Olympics on May 3rd. Du Toit was already competing internationally when she lost her left leg in a motorcycle accident. Du Toit swims without a prosthetic, so fairness was never questioned. A poem on her wall states, “It is not a disgrace not to reach for the stars, But it is a disgrace not to have stars to reach for.”
Like Du Toit, Hillary Clinton is a person who is not easily contented by merely having stars out there. Both women are driven to win. In either case, a win represents far more than a personal victory. Clinton is hardly disabled in the political arena – indeed, America would be hard-pressed to come up with any candidate who is sharper, more well-known, or more qualified to lead our country than Hillary Clinton. Yet, in the political arena, merely being female is still a gigantic perception liability, almost like an athlete competing without a limb.
Throughout Clinton’s campaign, this column has recorded and analyzed a steady stream of media misogyny used to smear the senator and former first lady. While much of the onslaught is presented as humor, it is notable that comic references to Clinton’s sex are invariably negative, and frequently downright hateful.
Since Obama first became a serious challenger, pundits have called for Clinton to drop out of the race. As Clinton’s campaign noted, the drop out cries followed Clinton’s victories, not Obama’s. Clinton had become like the runner on carbon-fiber blades, and much of society wanted to deny her the right to even be a contender – not because she could not win, but because she just might.
Obama now commands a strong lead, but a Clinton nomination is still mathematically possible. Why should the Democratic nomination be ended prematurely? Some Democrats want to end it so the Democratic Party can unify against John McCain. Yet polls show that Clinton is a stronger candidate against McCain. Democrats may shoot themselves in the foot by trying to silence their best candidate.
Quitting now would not only mean giving up the nomination. It would also represent an enormous loss to women everywhere. What woman has not been pressured with these same tactics to “just go home?” Month after month, women continue to hear that they cannot “have it all” (i.e. family and career), even as the majority of American women continue to do just that. We are inundated with magazine articles, Internet essays and news items telling us that women are “opting out” and just going home in large numbers. The facts prove otherwise, but it does not stop the media from feeding the guilt complex carried by working mothers and discouraging us with claims that we cannot succeed.
Being female is still a disadvantage in many fields. Where women have made inroads, they still do not receive the same wages and honors accorded to men. The more education and training a woman has, the less likely she is to earn as much as her peers. The wage gap between male and female physicians, for example, is much greater than the wage gap between male and female cashiers.
Oddly, many feminists are among those calling for Hillary to pull out of the race. The Democratic contest has opened a generational divide between older and younger feminists. Younger feminists are apt to say that the gender of the candidate is completely immaterial, so long as he or she supports feminism.
Older feminists recognize a troubling historical parallel. In the 1800’s, the feminist movement was strong and suffragettes were closer than ever to their goal of votes for women. Many suffragettes were also abolitionists, and were willing to temporarily lay aside the cause of votes for women in order to fight slavery. After the Civil War, the feminist movement spent a great deal of energy and resources fighting for the rights of black men, including the right to vote. As a result, black men received the right to vote fifty years before women.
At a campaign stop in Kentucky, Hillary Clinton responds to those who urge her to quit. “You don’t stop democracy in its tracks. You don’t tell some states that they can’t vote and other states that have already had the opportunity that they’re somehow more important. I want everybody to vote and everybody to help pick our next president.”
So run for all you’re worth. Run in your dark pantsuit. Run on your carbon-fiber blades. Run till the wind in your ears drowns out the incessant whining of those who tell you to go home. They’re only afraid that somehow, against the odds, you just might win.
Over 200,000 viewers enjoyed the YouTube video of Western Oregon University athlete Sara Tucholsky’s first home run. In a game against Central Washington University, Tucholsky hit the ball over the fence. At first base, she tore a ligament in her knee. When the umpire mistakenly ruled that one of her own team members could not run the bases for her, two Central Washington players picked her up and carried her around the bases. All over the blogosphere, Mallory Holtman and Liz Wallace are heralded as heroes for the selfless act that cost them the game but won them a place in our hearts -- and an entry on Wikipedia.
In other sports victories, double amputee Oscar Pistorius won the right to compete for a spot in the Olympics. Pistorius was born without fibulas (the long thin bones that run from knee to ankle.) Surgeons amputated both his legs below the knee when he was eleven months old. Running on special carbon-fiber blades, Pistorius holds the 400-meter Paralympic word record at 46.56 seconds.
Pistorius is not quite there yet; the qualifying requirement for the 400-meter event in Beijing is 45.55 seconds. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) had barred Pistorius from all able-bodied competition including the Olympics, considering his carbon-fiber running blades a “mechanical advantage” over other runners. Their fear was not that he would fail, but that he might succeed.
If Pistorius makes the cut, he will not be the first Paralympian to qualify for the Olympics. Natalie du Toit, a swimmer from South Africa, qualified for the 2008 Olympics on May 3rd. Du Toit was already competing internationally when she lost her left leg in a motorcycle accident. Du Toit swims without a prosthetic, so fairness was never questioned. A poem on her wall states, “It is not a disgrace not to reach for the stars, But it is a disgrace not to have stars to reach for.”
Like Du Toit, Hillary Clinton is a person who is not easily contented by merely having stars out there. Both women are driven to win. In either case, a win represents far more than a personal victory. Clinton is hardly disabled in the political arena – indeed, America would be hard-pressed to come up with any candidate who is sharper, more well-known, or more qualified to lead our country than Hillary Clinton. Yet, in the political arena, merely being female is still a gigantic perception liability, almost like an athlete competing without a limb.
Throughout Clinton’s campaign, this column has recorded and analyzed a steady stream of media misogyny used to smear the senator and former first lady. While much of the onslaught is presented as humor, it is notable that comic references to Clinton’s sex are invariably negative, and frequently downright hateful.
Since Obama first became a serious challenger, pundits have called for Clinton to drop out of the race. As Clinton’s campaign noted, the drop out cries followed Clinton’s victories, not Obama’s. Clinton had become like the runner on carbon-fiber blades, and much of society wanted to deny her the right to even be a contender – not because she could not win, but because she just might.
Obama now commands a strong lead, but a Clinton nomination is still mathematically possible. Why should the Democratic nomination be ended prematurely? Some Democrats want to end it so the Democratic Party can unify against John McCain. Yet polls show that Clinton is a stronger candidate against McCain. Democrats may shoot themselves in the foot by trying to silence their best candidate.
Quitting now would not only mean giving up the nomination. It would also represent an enormous loss to women everywhere. What woman has not been pressured with these same tactics to “just go home?” Month after month, women continue to hear that they cannot “have it all” (i.e. family and career), even as the majority of American women continue to do just that. We are inundated with magazine articles, Internet essays and news items telling us that women are “opting out” and just going home in large numbers. The facts prove otherwise, but it does not stop the media from feeding the guilt complex carried by working mothers and discouraging us with claims that we cannot succeed.
Being female is still a disadvantage in many fields. Where women have made inroads, they still do not receive the same wages and honors accorded to men. The more education and training a woman has, the less likely she is to earn as much as her peers. The wage gap between male and female physicians, for example, is much greater than the wage gap between male and female cashiers.
Oddly, many feminists are among those calling for Hillary to pull out of the race. The Democratic contest has opened a generational divide between older and younger feminists. Younger feminists are apt to say that the gender of the candidate is completely immaterial, so long as he or she supports feminism.
Older feminists recognize a troubling historical parallel. In the 1800’s, the feminist movement was strong and suffragettes were closer than ever to their goal of votes for women. Many suffragettes were also abolitionists, and were willing to temporarily lay aside the cause of votes for women in order to fight slavery. After the Civil War, the feminist movement spent a great deal of energy and resources fighting for the rights of black men, including the right to vote. As a result, black men received the right to vote fifty years before women.
At a campaign stop in Kentucky, Hillary Clinton responds to those who urge her to quit. “You don’t stop democracy in its tracks. You don’t tell some states that they can’t vote and other states that have already had the opportunity that they’re somehow more important. I want everybody to vote and everybody to help pick our next president.”
So run for all you’re worth. Run in your dark pantsuit. Run on your carbon-fiber blades. Run till the wind in your ears drowns out the incessant whining of those who tell you to go home. They’re only afraid that somehow, against the odds, you just might win.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Northwest Georgia Breastfeeding Coalition hosts international expert:
Breastfeeding is normal, formula is inferior, and birth makes the difference
Nurses and lactation consultants from all over the southeast convened in Dalton last week to hear the latest in breastfeeding technology from renowned expert Diane Weissinger, MS, IBCLC.
According to Weissinger, the “breast is best” tagline is a disservice to women and babies. Such slogans suggest that formula-feeding is the norm and breastfeeding is something better than the norm. Formula companies often state that breastfeeding is “the ideal.” Of course, something that is ideal is lofty but usually unattainable. None of us would claim to be ideal parents, for example. By calling breastfeeding ideal, they suggest that it is a lofty, unattainable goal.
Wiessinger says, "The truth is, breastfeeding is nothing more than normal. Artificial feeding, which is neither the same nor superior, is therefore deficient, incomplete, and inferior. These are difficult words, but they have an appropriate place in our vocabulary."
How often are we reminded that breastfeeding is simply normal? Every mammal species on the planet uses mammary glands to nurture its offspring. This is one of the defining characteristics that classifies humans as mammals. By choosing not to feed our infants in the normal way, we expose them to many known and unknown risks.
Wiessinger says there are about 13,000 studies that show problems with formula feeding. These studies are typically pitched as pro-breastfeeding (as if formula were the norm) rather than anti-formula. Thus, the experts tell us that breastfeeding reduces obesity or respiratory infections or earaches. Instead, they should simply state that formula increases obesity, respiratory infections and earaches. Likewise, breastfeeding does not reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS); formula increases the risk of SIDS.
Instead of emphasizing only the benefits of breastfeeding, professionals should stress the risks of artificial feeding. Despite the “more like breastmilk” ads, formula-feeding remains distinctly inferior to breastfeeding in every aspect. Formula not only increases the risk of diseases and disorders; it also fails to adequately nurture the brain, resulting in a lower IQ. Further, formula-feeding does not foster the maternal-infant bond the way breastfeeding does, because the hormone cycle is broken.
Breastfeeding is the physiological standard for human babies. Formula-feeding is not even second best. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) formula is only a distant fourth. WHO urges that all babies be breastfed by their mothers. In cases where this is impossible, the second best alternative is to feed the baby the mother’s pumped milk. As a third best alternative, babies should be fed breastmilk from another human mother. Only in cases where human milk is impossible or the baby cannot digest breastmilk (such as with galactosemia), should formula even be considered.
If formula feeding is so inferior, why aren’t American doctors and health authorities warning of the dangers? Most will say, “We don’t want to make women feel guilty.” Yet they have no problem making mothers feel guilty for smoking around the baby, or for placing a sleeping baby on his tummy.
Instead of warning parents about the risks of formula feeding, hospitals hand out formula samples, literature and advertising gifts. They receive kick-backs from formula companies in the form of pens, notepads, and other items. While hospitals shrug off these gifts as meaningless trinkets that do not affect their work, Diane Weissinger asks why formula companies would spend huge sums of money on this advertising, if it did not work?
In return for the goodies and the donuts, the hospital sends the company’s formula marketing literature and samples home with every mother in a logo-branded diaper bag. Even those women who plan to exclusively breastfeed get the bag. The diaper bag and its contents send a clear message that the experts at the hospital approve of formula. This tacit endorsement undermines breastfeeding promotion. Research shows that women who receive the bag are more likely to resort to formula once they get home, and 93% select the formula brand associated with the bag. Obviously, the strategy works.
The diaper bags are not the only way the medical community colludes with formula manufacturers. According to Weissinger, the delivery room procedures of most hospitals unwittingly work to undermine breastfeeding long before the baby takes its first breath.
Weissinger stumbled onto the birth-breast connection while studying the nursing behavior of animals. Weissinger was an animal behaviorist before she became a renowned lactation consultant. It was this background that inspired her to put together a talk on the breastfeeding and parenting lessons that can be learned by observing other mammals. Initially she intended to cover topics like how mammal babies find the nipple on their own, how mammal mothers never look at a clock before nursing the babies, and how animals wean naturally with no formal plan.
As Weissinger prepared the material, she was inevitably drawn to the distinctions between mothers who bond with and care for their infants, and those who do not. In every mammal species, she discovered that mothers who are deprived of their chosen place, time and sensations during the birth process have difficulty bonding and breastfeeding. Mammal bonding is adversely affected if birth is too hard – and if birth is too easy. The babies are even at risk if the birth is too clean.
Whether the mammal studied is a terrier, a horse, or a rat, any interference with the birth risks the breastfeeding relationship. Interference might include something as benign as the presence of an outsider, or as radical as cesarean delivery. Veterinarians who must surgically remove a baby animal go to great lengths to normalize the experience by allowing as much labor as possible, placing the placenta with the mother she wakes, and leaving the newborns in an untouched state. They understand the risks.
Human beings are mammals. Because we are more intelligent than most other mammals, human parents will usually continue to care for a child no matter how it comes into the world. Yet, according to Diane Weissinger, medical birth is robbing mothers and babies of the easy, instinctive breastfeeding experience that results from normal birth.
Modern hospital birth generally involves an epidural. Wiessinger equates a long epidural to drinking fourteen cans of soda. Excess fluid swells the woman’s tissues, including her breasts and nipples, which makes latching on more difficult. The epidural also slows down her milk, increasing the risk of jaundice and early supplements for the baby – two responses that increase the risk of early weaning.
The epidural drugs affect the baby as well as the mother. Since breastfeeding is primarily the baby’s job, newborns need to be awake and aware. Drugged babies have more difficulty recognizing and attaching to the breast, more sucking problems, and more bonding problems. Poor initial sucking may result in nipple damage – which is not a nice event in a place filled with unfamiliar and sometimes antibiotic-resistant germs.
Wiessinger says, “Mothers in our culture haven’t given birth since the early part of the 20th century. And no mammal who has birth taken from her goes on to nurse easily, or even to mother easily. It’s not the breastfeeding that’s the problem. It’s the birth!”
-- Jeannie Babb Taylor
http://www.jeanniebabbtaylor.com/
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Misogyny in America
A culture of violence against women
If you think females have achieved equality in the United States, just scan the headlines sometime. Misogyny is alive and well. Consider the marine who raped his female comrade, then killed her and buried her in his back yard to avoid a paternity test.
Consider also the husband who stabbed his wife and then burned his own house, killing her along with their four children.
In Florida, police say a man beat his four-month-old daughter Ariana to death on Christmas day. His motive? He wanted a son, not a daughter.
Another man tossed four babies from a bridge after arguing with his wife. On national news, the mother sobbed, “Why didn’t he kill me instead of the children? It’s too much hurting.” She recognized that she was the true target of his heinous actions.
Other hateful men strike more directly, killing women they know and profess to love, or even strangers. As women’s bodies turn up in parks, ponds and parked cars across the southeast, new questions are being raised about old missing persons files.
Whenever the topic of domestic violence comes up, some ill-informed person will inevitably drone, “If the women don’t like it, why do they stay?”
The answer is easy: They don’t stay. The majority of battered women try to escape their abusers as the violence escalates. Most are successful in time. Some women end up in body bags, and others are made to disappear forever.
Part of the problem is that we, as a society, are always asking the wrong question. We should not ask why victims are abused; we should ask why abusers do what they do.
Why do some men feel it is their privilege to exercise control over the woman they profess to love? Why do some men rape and kill women? For that matter, why do some men feel they have the right to forward sexist emails, harass their female co-workers, or try to intimidate female columnists?
Abuse thrives on power inequities. That’s why female-on-male violence and child-on-parent violence are not nearly as common as wife battering and child abuse. We live in a society where most women experience lifelong power inequities.
Economically, men’s earnings still overshadow women’s. Many women are dependent on their husband’s incomes, particularly when women bear the brunt of childcare. Economic inequity places abused women at a disadvantage, as they find themselves weighing safety against homelessness. For the children’s sake, many women stay in relationships that make them prisoners in their own homes.
Biology determines that most marriages involve physical inequity. Men are, on average, taller and stronger and possess a greater percentage of muscle mass than their wives. In a healthy marriage, the physical difference leads to feelings of protectiveness. In an abusive marriage, the weaknesses of the smaller partner are exploited to incite fear and maintain control.
Violence against women is a crime. The law books say so, but society is slow to let go of a paradigm so ingrained in the culture. For women to be safe and equal in America, changes must occur in every facet of society.
Law enforcement must change. Authorities must arrest – and charge and sentence – men who hit, punch, choke, trap, kick, or yank women about the hair. These actions are not privileges included with the marriage license. These actions are crimes, and should be prosecuted every time. The prosecution initiative should not be on the shoulders of the victim, who often caves in to the abuser out of fear.
Policemen who attack or threaten women should be subject to stronger sentences. If a man does not protect women from violence (including his own), then society must not trust him with a badge and a gun. The abusive cop’s crime is double, because he violates his oath of office and his vow of marriage simultaneously. The woman’s fear is also doubled, knowing that such men have resources and training to track her down if she tries to escape, and the opportunity to destroy evidence and cover their own tracks.
Parents must change. We must teach our children that the secret to a successful marriage is in applying the Golden Rule: Treat others like you want to be treated. Parents must teach it, and more importantly, model it every day. Let children see that marriage problems are resolved through consensus, not one-upmanship. Romance is created by putting your beloved on a pedestal, not establishing power inequities where “might makes right.”
Parenting itself must change. Children who are subjected to violence in the home frequently grow up to participate in violence dramas of their own. Parents must learn gentle parenting techniques to guide children without inadvertently teaching them violent tactics or damaging their self-esteem.
Hollywood must change. Violence against women is glorified nightly in every cinema and most every home in America. Shows like Criminal Minds and Killer Instinct almost invariably focus on the glamorized murder of a woman. Another generation of young people is being raised to believe that violence against women is titillating entertainment. Until TV changes, just turn it off.
Churches must change. Many pastors teach that the man has “final say” and that wives should obey husbands. Such sermons typically close with a word about husbands being kind, but the connection cannot be missed: Spiritualizing manhood sets women up for abuse by establishing an eternal and church-ordained power inequity.
The president of Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary stands as a not-so-shining example of such white-washed misogyny. Ten years ago, when the Atlanta Journal Constitution asked Paige Patterson about women, he replied, “Everyone should own at least one.”
Perhaps he wasn’t joking. Patterson became the architect of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention at the turn of the millennium. Under Patterson’s leadership, the conservatives succeeded in stripping ordained female chaplains of their endorsement. They sought to replace the “priesthood of the believer” doctrine with husbands being priests of their wives. They forced missionaries to agree to male-over-female marriages or else give up their funding.
After Paige Patterson became president of the Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS), he fired a theology professor just for being female. Dr. Sheri Klouda, PhD, earned her degree at SWBTS and taught Hebrew there prior to Patterson’s gender discrimination. Patterson claims he has a right to discriminate against women, since SWBTS is a religious institution. Klouda responded by filing suit in federal court.
What does this have to do with domestic violence? Everything. Those who strip women of their status and financial means are also happy to subject them to other forms of abuse. Patterson himself was caught on tape telling other pastors that he never condones divorce – and rarely even separation or seeking of help -- for victims of marital violence.
In that transcript, Patterson shares an example in which he advised a battered wife to stay with her husband. He told her to submit to the man, to pray for him, and to get ready for the violence to increase. Patterson said he was “happy” when the woman came back to his church with two black eyes, because her husband also came.
All of these attitudes contribute to a culture of violence against women. We cannot expect abused women to solve the problem any more than we would expect children to solve the problem of child abuse, or pets to solve the problem of animal cruelty. Those of us who are free and strong must intervene to help victims.
To help or receive help in northwest Georgia, contact the Family Crisis Center at (706) 375-7630. In other areas, call 1-800-799-SAFE or TTY 1-800-787-3224.
Jeannie Babb Taylor
www.JeannieBabbTaylor.com
If you think females have achieved equality in the United States, just scan the headlines sometime. Misogyny is alive and well. Consider the marine who raped his female comrade, then killed her and buried her in his back yard to avoid a paternity test.
Consider also the husband who stabbed his wife and then burned his own house, killing her along with their four children.
In Florida, police say a man beat his four-month-old daughter Ariana to death on Christmas day. His motive? He wanted a son, not a daughter.
Another man tossed four babies from a bridge after arguing with his wife. On national news, the mother sobbed, “Why didn’t he kill me instead of the children? It’s too much hurting.” She recognized that she was the true target of his heinous actions.
Other hateful men strike more directly, killing women they know and profess to love, or even strangers. As women’s bodies turn up in parks, ponds and parked cars across the southeast, new questions are being raised about old missing persons files.
Whenever the topic of domestic violence comes up, some ill-informed person will inevitably drone, “If the women don’t like it, why do they stay?”
The answer is easy: They don’t stay. The majority of battered women try to escape their abusers as the violence escalates. Most are successful in time. Some women end up in body bags, and others are made to disappear forever.
Part of the problem is that we, as a society, are always asking the wrong question. We should not ask why victims are abused; we should ask why abusers do what they do.
Why do some men feel it is their privilege to exercise control over the woman they profess to love? Why do some men rape and kill women? For that matter, why do some men feel they have the right to forward sexist emails, harass their female co-workers, or try to intimidate female columnists?
Abuse thrives on power inequities. That’s why female-on-male violence and child-on-parent violence are not nearly as common as wife battering and child abuse. We live in a society where most women experience lifelong power inequities.
Economically, men’s earnings still overshadow women’s. Many women are dependent on their husband’s incomes, particularly when women bear the brunt of childcare. Economic inequity places abused women at a disadvantage, as they find themselves weighing safety against homelessness. For the children’s sake, many women stay in relationships that make them prisoners in their own homes.
Biology determines that most marriages involve physical inequity. Men are, on average, taller and stronger and possess a greater percentage of muscle mass than their wives. In a healthy marriage, the physical difference leads to feelings of protectiveness. In an abusive marriage, the weaknesses of the smaller partner are exploited to incite fear and maintain control.
Violence against women is a crime. The law books say so, but society is slow to let go of a paradigm so ingrained in the culture. For women to be safe and equal in America, changes must occur in every facet of society.
Law enforcement must change. Authorities must arrest – and charge and sentence – men who hit, punch, choke, trap, kick, or yank women about the hair. These actions are not privileges included with the marriage license. These actions are crimes, and should be prosecuted every time. The prosecution initiative should not be on the shoulders of the victim, who often caves in to the abuser out of fear.
Policemen who attack or threaten women should be subject to stronger sentences. If a man does not protect women from violence (including his own), then society must not trust him with a badge and a gun. The abusive cop’s crime is double, because he violates his oath of office and his vow of marriage simultaneously. The woman’s fear is also doubled, knowing that such men have resources and training to track her down if she tries to escape, and the opportunity to destroy evidence and cover their own tracks.
Parents must change. We must teach our children that the secret to a successful marriage is in applying the Golden Rule: Treat others like you want to be treated. Parents must teach it, and more importantly, model it every day. Let children see that marriage problems are resolved through consensus, not one-upmanship. Romance is created by putting your beloved on a pedestal, not establishing power inequities where “might makes right.”
Parenting itself must change. Children who are subjected to violence in the home frequently grow up to participate in violence dramas of their own. Parents must learn gentle parenting techniques to guide children without inadvertently teaching them violent tactics or damaging their self-esteem.
Hollywood must change. Violence against women is glorified nightly in every cinema and most every home in America. Shows like Criminal Minds and Killer Instinct almost invariably focus on the glamorized murder of a woman. Another generation of young people is being raised to believe that violence against women is titillating entertainment. Until TV changes, just turn it off.
Churches must change. Many pastors teach that the man has “final say” and that wives should obey husbands. Such sermons typically close with a word about husbands being kind, but the connection cannot be missed: Spiritualizing manhood sets women up for abuse by establishing an eternal and church-ordained power inequity.
The president of Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary stands as a not-so-shining example of such white-washed misogyny. Ten years ago, when the Atlanta Journal Constitution asked Paige Patterson about women, he replied, “Everyone should own at least one.”
Perhaps he wasn’t joking. Patterson became the architect of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention at the turn of the millennium. Under Patterson’s leadership, the conservatives succeeded in stripping ordained female chaplains of their endorsement. They sought to replace the “priesthood of the believer” doctrine with husbands being priests of their wives. They forced missionaries to agree to male-over-female marriages or else give up their funding.
After Paige Patterson became president of the Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS), he fired a theology professor just for being female. Dr. Sheri Klouda, PhD, earned her degree at SWBTS and taught Hebrew there prior to Patterson’s gender discrimination. Patterson claims he has a right to discriminate against women, since SWBTS is a religious institution. Klouda responded by filing suit in federal court.
What does this have to do with domestic violence? Everything. Those who strip women of their status and financial means are also happy to subject them to other forms of abuse. Patterson himself was caught on tape telling other pastors that he never condones divorce – and rarely even separation or seeking of help -- for victims of marital violence.
In that transcript, Patterson shares an example in which he advised a battered wife to stay with her husband. He told her to submit to the man, to pray for him, and to get ready for the violence to increase. Patterson said he was “happy” when the woman came back to his church with two black eyes, because her husband also came.
All of these attitudes contribute to a culture of violence against women. We cannot expect abused women to solve the problem any more than we would expect children to solve the problem of child abuse, or pets to solve the problem of animal cruelty. Those of us who are free and strong must intervene to help victims.
To help or receive help in northwest Georgia, contact the Family Crisis Center at (706) 375-7630. In other areas, call 1-800-799-SAFE or TTY 1-800-787-3224.
Jeannie Babb Taylor
www.JeannieBabbTaylor.com
Monday, February 25, 2008
ACOG says homebirth is a fashionable trend
Pregnant women read the writing on the wall
A few years ago I noticed a sign on the wall at a local women’s clinic. It stated “Our doctors will no longer perform VBAC.”
The sign made me laugh. VBAC stands for vaginal birth after cesarean. Since the doctors in that practice were males, it was difficult to imagine them performing a vaginal birth. Doctors do not perform vaginal births. Pregnant women do.
For women with past c-sections, the sign is not funny at all. This prohibition jettisons women’s rights back to the 1950’s when the mantra was “Once a cesarean, always a cesarean.” Women are being robbed of a fundamental childbirth choice, even though studies confirm the safety of VBAC for most women.
Healthy People 2010 urges doctors to cut the cesarean rate in half, from over 30% down to 15% by 2010. According to Dr. Marsden Wagner, former director of women’s and children’s health for the World Health Organization, international studies show that the optimal cesarean rate for a country is 10-15%. “If the rate is below 10 percent, maternal mortality goes up,” he said. “If it’s over 15 percent, maternal mortality goes up.”
In fact, a study published in the February 13, 2007 issue of the Canadian Medical Association journal reported that women undergoing planned c-sections are three times more likely to die.
Cesarean section is major abdominal surgery. It exposes the mother to increased risks of infection, hemorrhage, anesthesia complication, organ damage, scar tissue, secondary infertility, postpartum depression, maternal-infant bonding complications, breastfeeding difficulties and death. Is it any wonder maternal deaths are on the rise here in the US?
Cesarean section subjects infants to increased risk as well. In November, the British Medical Journal published a study showing that the risk of neonatal death was 70% higher for surgically delivered babies than for normal deliveries.
The International Cesarean Network (ICAN) advises pregnant women that they have the right to refuse any medical treatment, including cesarean section. But how can a woman with a previous c-section refuse surgery when no physician around will attend a VBAC?
Obstetricians have pushed pregnant women into a corner. Some women are weighing their options: Unnecessary surgery vs. homebirth.
Homebirth is relatively rare these days. In 1900, 95% of babies were born at home. Since 1955, that number has hovered somewhere around 1%. Yet the practice persists, not only among VBAC-seekers, but also among women who were unhappy with previous vaginal birth experiences in the hospital, and even among some first-time mothers.
Homebirth is gaining recognition within the mainstream as the result of Ricki Lake’s highly acclaimed documentary “The Business of Being Born.” The movie focuses on the profiteering that goes on in the birth industry at the expense of mothers and babies, and offers a look at how empowering and thrilling natural birth can be.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) is striking back. On February 6, 2008, ACOG published a press release condemning homebirth. What the statement leaves unwritten is that every homebirth represents an economic loss of thousands of dollars for doctors and hospitals. After all, ACOG is essentially a trade union for the OBGYN industry. An anti-homebirth statement from ACOG is like an anti-tap water statement from Pierrer.
Taking a swipe at Ricki Lake, ACOG says, “Childbirth decisions should not be dictated or influenced by what's fashionable, trendy, or the latest cause célèbre.”
Calling homebirth “fashionable” or “trendy” is laughable. Hospital birth is the recent historical trend. Babies have been born in homes for thousands of years. Women birthed them, and women caught them, and women nursed them.
In fact, if ACOG members would cast their myopic gaze across the Atlantic, they would find that European births are primarily attended by midwives. One third of Dutch babies are born in their own homes. Or if they peered across the Pacific, they would find that 70% of Japanese births are attended by midwifes, often in dedicated birth houses or in private homes.
The CIA states that babies are more likely to survive in 41 other countries than in the United States. Babies fare better in South Korea and Cuba than here. The safest places to be born are Singapore, Sweden, Japan and Hong Kong, followed by a long list of European countries.
Are US newborn deaths the result of over-medicated birth, c-section, or lack of health care? Take your pick. Countries where babies are less likely to die typically offer universal healthcare and home midwifery.
ACOG seems more concerned with evoking emotion than delivering facts. Consider this statement: “Choosing to deliver a baby at home, however, is to place the process of giving birth over the goal of having a healthy baby.” Translation: Homebirthers are selfish mothers who put their babies at risk.
Does ACOG at least support their contention with scientific data? Perhaps a study actually showing that hospital birth is safer? Not a chance. The studies, in fact, offer the opposite conclusion: Uncomplicated pregnancies end just as well at home.
In fact, US hospitals aren’t doing so well. Our country has the highest rate of cesarean sections, and the second worse newborn death rate in the developed world.
According to the 2007 State of the World’s Mothers report, “The United States has more neonatologists and neonatal intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, but its newborn [death] rate is higher than any of those countries.”
All ACOG can say about studies is: “It should be emphasized that studies comparing the safety and outcome of births in hospitals with those occurring in other settings in the US are limited and have not been scientifically rigorous.” In other words, the studies do not support ACOG’s contention that hospital birth is safer – which makes it completely irresponsible for them to assert that homebirthers have misplaced their priorities.
ACOG has apparently done enough market research to determine one of the factors drawing some women to homebirth: America’s soaring cesarean rate. The obstetricians have a response to this, too: “Multiple factors are responsible for the current cesarean rate, but emerging contributors include maternal choice and the rising tide of high-risk pregnancies due to maternal age, overweight, obesity and diabetes.”
Translation: “The only reason we’re cutting 1/3 of American mothers is because they’re old, they’re fat, they’re lazy and they want to be cut.” These doctors refuse to take responsibility for America’s outlandish c-section rate, even though the rate varies widely between practices and is lower in natural (drug-free) labors where women are allowed to eat, drink, and move around.
The ACOG statement even addresses VBAC, stating that women with cesarean scars are more prone to uterine rupture and thus VBAC should always take place in a hospital, never in a home. Anyone smell a rat? It’s dishonest to say VBAC should be hospital-bound and obstetrician-supervised, when obstetricians and hospitals refuse to participate.
Whoever penned the ACOG statement needs a crash-course in marketing. Obstetricians will find they are unable to shame homebirthing women back into the maternity ward. Given a choice between fat & lazy vs. selfish, we prefer to selfishly protect the precious lives of our little ones.
A few years ago I noticed a sign on the wall at a local women’s clinic. It stated “Our doctors will no longer perform VBAC.”
The sign made me laugh. VBAC stands for vaginal birth after cesarean. Since the doctors in that practice were males, it was difficult to imagine them performing a vaginal birth. Doctors do not perform vaginal births. Pregnant women do.
For women with past c-sections, the sign is not funny at all. This prohibition jettisons women’s rights back to the 1950’s when the mantra was “Once a cesarean, always a cesarean.” Women are being robbed of a fundamental childbirth choice, even though studies confirm the safety of VBAC for most women.
Healthy People 2010 urges doctors to cut the cesarean rate in half, from over 30% down to 15% by 2010. According to Dr. Marsden Wagner, former director of women’s and children’s health for the World Health Organization, international studies show that the optimal cesarean rate for a country is 10-15%. “If the rate is below 10 percent, maternal mortality goes up,” he said. “If it’s over 15 percent, maternal mortality goes up.”
In fact, a study published in the February 13, 2007 issue of the Canadian Medical Association journal reported that women undergoing planned c-sections are three times more likely to die.
Cesarean section is major abdominal surgery. It exposes the mother to increased risks of infection, hemorrhage, anesthesia complication, organ damage, scar tissue, secondary infertility, postpartum depression, maternal-infant bonding complications, breastfeeding difficulties and death. Is it any wonder maternal deaths are on the rise here in the US?
Cesarean section subjects infants to increased risk as well. In November, the British Medical Journal published a study showing that the risk of neonatal death was 70% higher for surgically delivered babies than for normal deliveries.
The International Cesarean Network (ICAN) advises pregnant women that they have the right to refuse any medical treatment, including cesarean section. But how can a woman with a previous c-section refuse surgery when no physician around will attend a VBAC?
Obstetricians have pushed pregnant women into a corner. Some women are weighing their options: Unnecessary surgery vs. homebirth.
Homebirth is relatively rare these days. In 1900, 95% of babies were born at home. Since 1955, that number has hovered somewhere around 1%. Yet the practice persists, not only among VBAC-seekers, but also among women who were unhappy with previous vaginal birth experiences in the hospital, and even among some first-time mothers.
Homebirth is gaining recognition within the mainstream as the result of Ricki Lake’s highly acclaimed documentary “The Business of Being Born.” The movie focuses on the profiteering that goes on in the birth industry at the expense of mothers and babies, and offers a look at how empowering and thrilling natural birth can be.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) is striking back. On February 6, 2008, ACOG published a press release condemning homebirth. What the statement leaves unwritten is that every homebirth represents an economic loss of thousands of dollars for doctors and hospitals. After all, ACOG is essentially a trade union for the OBGYN industry. An anti-homebirth statement from ACOG is like an anti-tap water statement from Pierrer.
Taking a swipe at Ricki Lake, ACOG says, “Childbirth decisions should not be dictated or influenced by what's fashionable, trendy, or the latest cause célèbre.”
Calling homebirth “fashionable” or “trendy” is laughable. Hospital birth is the recent historical trend. Babies have been born in homes for thousands of years. Women birthed them, and women caught them, and women nursed them.
In fact, if ACOG members would cast their myopic gaze across the Atlantic, they would find that European births are primarily attended by midwives. One third of Dutch babies are born in their own homes. Or if they peered across the Pacific, they would find that 70% of Japanese births are attended by midwifes, often in dedicated birth houses or in private homes.
The CIA states that babies are more likely to survive in 41 other countries than in the United States. Babies fare better in South Korea and Cuba than here. The safest places to be born are Singapore, Sweden, Japan and Hong Kong, followed by a long list of European countries.
Are US newborn deaths the result of over-medicated birth, c-section, or lack of health care? Take your pick. Countries where babies are less likely to die typically offer universal healthcare and home midwifery.
ACOG seems more concerned with evoking emotion than delivering facts. Consider this statement: “Choosing to deliver a baby at home, however, is to place the process of giving birth over the goal of having a healthy baby.” Translation: Homebirthers are selfish mothers who put their babies at risk.
Does ACOG at least support their contention with scientific data? Perhaps a study actually showing that hospital birth is safer? Not a chance. The studies, in fact, offer the opposite conclusion: Uncomplicated pregnancies end just as well at home.
In fact, US hospitals aren’t doing so well. Our country has the highest rate of cesarean sections, and the second worse newborn death rate in the developed world.
According to the 2007 State of the World’s Mothers report, “The United States has more neonatologists and neonatal intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, but its newborn [death] rate is higher than any of those countries.”
All ACOG can say about studies is: “It should be emphasized that studies comparing the safety and outcome of births in hospitals with those occurring in other settings in the US are limited and have not been scientifically rigorous.” In other words, the studies do not support ACOG’s contention that hospital birth is safer – which makes it completely irresponsible for them to assert that homebirthers have misplaced their priorities.
ACOG has apparently done enough market research to determine one of the factors drawing some women to homebirth: America’s soaring cesarean rate. The obstetricians have a response to this, too: “Multiple factors are responsible for the current cesarean rate, but emerging contributors include maternal choice and the rising tide of high-risk pregnancies due to maternal age, overweight, obesity and diabetes.”
Translation: “The only reason we’re cutting 1/3 of American mothers is because they’re old, they’re fat, they’re lazy and they want to be cut.” These doctors refuse to take responsibility for America’s outlandish c-section rate, even though the rate varies widely between practices and is lower in natural (drug-free) labors where women are allowed to eat, drink, and move around.
The ACOG statement even addresses VBAC, stating that women with cesarean scars are more prone to uterine rupture and thus VBAC should always take place in a hospital, never in a home. Anyone smell a rat? It’s dishonest to say VBAC should be hospital-bound and obstetrician-supervised, when obstetricians and hospitals refuse to participate.
Whoever penned the ACOG statement needs a crash-course in marketing. Obstetricians will find they are unable to shame homebirthing women back into the maternity ward. Given a choice between fat & lazy vs. selfish, we prefer to selfishly protect the precious lives of our little ones.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Who’s crying in their coffee now?
Media attempt to manipulate the election fails – this time
Just before the New Hampshire primary, the media was abuzz with the claim that Hillary Clinton was coming unraveled. Multiple sources claimed she had been crying. One columnist called it a “weepfest” while others speculated that it may be a calculated attempt to “cry her way to the White House.”
Most pundits said she was finished. AP writers even claimed to have inside information that she was planning a pull-out. Every story implied she was crying over her loss in Iowa and impending loss in New Hampshire.
Being the curious sort, I went to You-Tube for the video clip. She was not even talking about Iowa or New Hampshire. She did express herself passionately. At one point her voice, hoarse from campaigning, quavered a bit.
But there was not a single tear shed. How does one have a “weepfest” without tears? Yet this moment of perceived weakness was recounted and embellished in the media as they gloated over Clinton’s supposed political burial.
As the New Hampshire primary votes were counted, it was interesting to watch the news reports roll into Yahoo News and CNN. As Clinton took the lead, the AP article was updated to state that Clinton and Obama were “dueling for New Hampshire” -- yet it continued to claim she was considering dropping out. As her lead grew, reporters kept claiming the race was neck-and-neck.
When the New Hampshire primary was over, CNN put it like this: “Clinton wins back women, narrowly takes New Hampshire.” Actually, Clinton earned a higher percentage of votes in New Hampshire than Obama earned in Iowa.
Seems to me the pundits and reporters were intent on taking the woman candidate down. They presented to the world a caricature of Hillary Clinton crying in her coffee while her campaign team whispered about withdrawal. They believed, like all good Republicans, that if you repeat a story over and over, it becomes true. They hoped that voters would not cast their ballot for a “loser.”
When Clinton won New Hampshire, the pundits could not say “We were wrong.” They certainly would not admit “We misled the public.” So they had to say, “Wow, look what we did! We made all those silly women voters feel so sorry for Hillary Clinton that they actually voted for her!”
I have some news for the news people: Your projections were wrong. Hillary Clinton was always popular in New Hampshire. The primary voters did not cast a sympathy vote. They cast their votes based on a concept called issues.
In fact, exit polls showed that the greatest Clinton voting gap was not between men and women. It was between women with jobs and women without jobs. Women who are currently looking for work voted for Senator Clinton in faith that she can turn the economy around and strengthen the job market.
Although female voters were significant, Clinton was also favored among certain other groups, including college-educated voters of both sexes and voters over forty.
Hillary Clinton is well-respected among party Democrats. Democrats are well aware of Senator Clinton’s work. We know better than to believe the biased media that paints her as super-liberal or overly divisive. Clinton has a history of reaching across the aisle and getting things done. She is a known quantity. She’s a safe bet. In states where primary voting is limited to the parties, a strong Clinton showing is expected.
Radio preachers and Republicans always lament “the liberal media.” I’d like to know where this so-called liberal media can be found? You can’t tune the radio without coming across a horde of ranting, slobbering right-wing extremists, yet it is nearly impossible to find a left-leaning speaker.
Television and the air waves are owned, dominated, and narrated by conservatives. They falsely divide Democratic voters into groups, claiming “Obama will win the black vote” and “Hillary will win the woman vote.” Neither blacks nor women vote as a block – and if they did, it would create a real problem. Over half of black voters happen to be women. A fair number of female voters happen to be black.
The American media is not liberal. What we have is a sexist media that will prognosticate endlessly about Hillary Clinton’s hair, cleavage, laughter, voice, tears, clothes – anything that can be used to remotely suggest that women are something ‘other.’
Commentators make sexist remarks without impunity. Imus was publicly reprimanded for making racist comments toward female athletes, but what if those players had been white? Chattanooga radio personalities make sexist comments about female athletes, lamenting that they cannot watch sexy, half-clad models on the court rather than muscular women who know how to handle a ball. Few listeners complain, so long as race is not mentioned.
You would never hear the pundits discuss how well Obama meets their stereotypical perceptions of bi-racial men -- Not the same way Clinton’s femininity has been picked apart. That’s not to say that racism is not a major barrier in American life and politics, but at least it has been consigned to the whisper campaign. Woman-hating is still a public and accepted American pastime. Unfortunately, the media is no exception.
Media Matters has launched a campaign against MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews for his sexist remarks toward Clinton. His comments include referrals to Clinton as a "she devil," an “uppity woman” and a "strip-teaser." He called male Clinton supporters "castratos in the eunuch chorus." Other times he has called Senator Clinton "Madame Defarge,” a Charles Dickens character who spent her time knitting a register of people she wanted dead. On four occasions Matthews has depicted Clinton as a woman who wants to smother a baby in a crib – the baby, of course, being Senator Obama.
Chris Matthews and Rush Limbaugh both refer to Senator Clinton as "Nurse Ratched." Nurse Ratched is the sadistic woman who terrorizes mental patients in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Intelligent voters make their choice based on the issues that are important to them, not media caricatures. I, for one, will vote my conscience.
copyright Jeannie Babb Taylor
http://www.jeanniebabbtaylor.com/
Just before the New Hampshire primary, the media was abuzz with the claim that Hillary Clinton was coming unraveled. Multiple sources claimed she had been crying. One columnist called it a “weepfest” while others speculated that it may be a calculated attempt to “cry her way to the White House.”
Most pundits said she was finished. AP writers even claimed to have inside information that she was planning a pull-out. Every story implied she was crying over her loss in Iowa and impending loss in New Hampshire.
Being the curious sort, I went to You-Tube for the video clip. She was not even talking about Iowa or New Hampshire. She did express herself passionately. At one point her voice, hoarse from campaigning, quavered a bit.
But there was not a single tear shed. How does one have a “weepfest” without tears? Yet this moment of perceived weakness was recounted and embellished in the media as they gloated over Clinton’s supposed political burial.
As the New Hampshire primary votes were counted, it was interesting to watch the news reports roll into Yahoo News and CNN. As Clinton took the lead, the AP article was updated to state that Clinton and Obama were “dueling for New Hampshire” -- yet it continued to claim she was considering dropping out. As her lead grew, reporters kept claiming the race was neck-and-neck.
When the New Hampshire primary was over, CNN put it like this: “Clinton wins back women, narrowly takes New Hampshire.” Actually, Clinton earned a higher percentage of votes in New Hampshire than Obama earned in Iowa.
Seems to me the pundits and reporters were intent on taking the woman candidate down. They presented to the world a caricature of Hillary Clinton crying in her coffee while her campaign team whispered about withdrawal. They believed, like all good Republicans, that if you repeat a story over and over, it becomes true. They hoped that voters would not cast their ballot for a “loser.”
When Clinton won New Hampshire, the pundits could not say “We were wrong.” They certainly would not admit “We misled the public.” So they had to say, “Wow, look what we did! We made all those silly women voters feel so sorry for Hillary Clinton that they actually voted for her!”
I have some news for the news people: Your projections were wrong. Hillary Clinton was always popular in New Hampshire. The primary voters did not cast a sympathy vote. They cast their votes based on a concept called issues.
In fact, exit polls showed that the greatest Clinton voting gap was not between men and women. It was between women with jobs and women without jobs. Women who are currently looking for work voted for Senator Clinton in faith that she can turn the economy around and strengthen the job market.
Although female voters were significant, Clinton was also favored among certain other groups, including college-educated voters of both sexes and voters over forty.
Hillary Clinton is well-respected among party Democrats. Democrats are well aware of Senator Clinton’s work. We know better than to believe the biased media that paints her as super-liberal or overly divisive. Clinton has a history of reaching across the aisle and getting things done. She is a known quantity. She’s a safe bet. In states where primary voting is limited to the parties, a strong Clinton showing is expected.
Radio preachers and Republicans always lament “the liberal media.” I’d like to know where this so-called liberal media can be found? You can’t tune the radio without coming across a horde of ranting, slobbering right-wing extremists, yet it is nearly impossible to find a left-leaning speaker.
Television and the air waves are owned, dominated, and narrated by conservatives. They falsely divide Democratic voters into groups, claiming “Obama will win the black vote” and “Hillary will win the woman vote.” Neither blacks nor women vote as a block – and if they did, it would create a real problem. Over half of black voters happen to be women. A fair number of female voters happen to be black.
The American media is not liberal. What we have is a sexist media that will prognosticate endlessly about Hillary Clinton’s hair, cleavage, laughter, voice, tears, clothes – anything that can be used to remotely suggest that women are something ‘other.’
Commentators make sexist remarks without impunity. Imus was publicly reprimanded for making racist comments toward female athletes, but what if those players had been white? Chattanooga radio personalities make sexist comments about female athletes, lamenting that they cannot watch sexy, half-clad models on the court rather than muscular women who know how to handle a ball. Few listeners complain, so long as race is not mentioned.
You would never hear the pundits discuss how well Obama meets their stereotypical perceptions of bi-racial men -- Not the same way Clinton’s femininity has been picked apart. That’s not to say that racism is not a major barrier in American life and politics, but at least it has been consigned to the whisper campaign. Woman-hating is still a public and accepted American pastime. Unfortunately, the media is no exception.
Media Matters has launched a campaign against MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews for his sexist remarks toward Clinton. His comments include referrals to Clinton as a "she devil," an “uppity woman” and a "strip-teaser." He called male Clinton supporters "castratos in the eunuch chorus." Other times he has called Senator Clinton "Madame Defarge,” a Charles Dickens character who spent her time knitting a register of people she wanted dead. On four occasions Matthews has depicted Clinton as a woman who wants to smother a baby in a crib – the baby, of course, being Senator Obama.
Chris Matthews and Rush Limbaugh both refer to Senator Clinton as "Nurse Ratched." Nurse Ratched is the sadistic woman who terrorizes mental patients in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Intelligent voters make their choice based on the issues that are important to them, not media caricatures. I, for one, will vote my conscience.
copyright Jeannie Babb Taylor
http://www.jeanniebabbtaylor.com/
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Racism, sexism and representation
Primary picks to make your vote count in 2008
Several readers have requested my primary picks. Here they are, from numerous angles and with a humorous twist.
If I were a super-conservative religious male (Christian, Muslim or otherwise) who believes that men are created in God’s image and women are lesser beings, I’d vote for Mike Huckabee. I’d sing hymns in my head while standing in line, and whisper “Amen” when I put my hand on the TV screen. On the way home, I would buy six months worth of groceries in anticipation of the 23% “Fair Tax” to come.
If I were a rich libertarian who wants to tell other Americans that their education and health care are none of my concern, I’d vote for Ron Paul. I would still have to stop for groceries on the way home. I would especially stock up on medicines, meats and other FDA-approved goods. There is no telling what toxins might be added once Ron Paul eliminates the FDA and gives us back our “health freedom.”
If I were the head of a powerful and corrupt corporation, I would vote for Mitt Romney. He’d be someone I could work with -- someone who understands that the bottom line is far more important than the lives of a few babies or the long-term health of women. Romney understands that government is just another form of business.
If I were a secretly gay conservative male bent on suppressing the lifestyles of openly gay liberal males, I’d vote for Rudy Giuliani. With his quick flip-flop from supporting Gay Pride to suddenly endorsing a marriage amendment, it is obvious he has no real scruples and will comply with whatever his handlers say on the matter. I’d try to remember to remove my lipstick before going the polls, and make sure my slip was not showing.
If I were a war-hawk with a T-shirt reading, “Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out,” I’d vote for John McCain. I’d invest some money in Dyancorp and Halliburton. Then I’d send my son to Canada, knowing that McCain has stated he does not mind if the troops are in Iraq for a hundred, a thousand, a million or even ten million years.
If my greatest concern were the economy or healthcare – perhaps as a plant worker, a school teacher, a parent, an honest business owner or just a middle-class American struggling to pay the bills on time -- I would vote for a Democrat. Any Democrat I liked.
Then I would breathe a big sigh of relief, confident that if Democrats win the economy will soon improve and taxes will be held at bay. Democrats are historically much better at managing the national budget, and they don’t tax things like groceries and medical bills.
I’d go home with a smile on my face, knowing that soon our borders will be secure and the government will be targeting the corporations who bus in illegal workers – not raiding and breaking up families. I would feel relieved that our men and women in uniform will soon be coming home – with solid veteran’s benefits when they return. I’d take my family out to eat, hopeful that my candidate will win and the American economy will at last begin to recover from eight devastating years of Bush.
The differences between the top three Democratic candidates are slim. Barack Obama, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are all intelligent people with a solid history of serving Americans. I would be honored to cast my vote for any of them.
The differences between the Republican candidates are greater, and the chasm between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is gaping wider every day. Republicans want to kill, and Democrats want to heal. Republicans want to squeeze the life out of the American lower and middle class, while Democrats want to salvage the economy and strengthen the middle class. Most Republicans want to expand and escalate the war in the Middle East. Democrats want to bring ‘em home.
On February 5th, Georgia voters have the opportunity to make history. We can help put the first black person or the first woman on the national ballot. People of color are underrepresented in American government, as are women.
Women comprise the majority of voters, but only 16% of Congress. No female presidential candidate has ever before appeared on the national ballot for either major party.
Point this out to some Republicans and they will act like they’re vaguely sorry they didn’t think of it first. “It’s not that I’m against a woman president,” they’ll say, “just not THAT WOMAN.”
Very few can give a substantive reason for opposing Hillary Clinton. More common are knee-jerk reactions based on mischaracterizations or outright lies. Republicans frequently characterize Clinton as a super-divisive liberal, but anyone who follows her actual votes and agendas sees a very different picture. Clinton is a moderate.
Then there is the so-called “Clinton Body Count” that has been regurgitated from the 1990s and is re-circling the Internet. This piece of work claims to be a list of all the people who have died “mysteriously” because of their connections to the Clintons. The connection may be tenuous (such as Bill’s chiropractor’s mother, or a person who once lived in Arkansas) and the mysterious death usually is not mysterious at all. Nonetheless, it’s good fodder for fools who say “I got it in an email, so it must be true.”
Sadly, the United States is far behind the times in granting women full access to the government. Other countries have had women in the highest office as far back as the sixties. Great Britain has had Margaret Thatcher, India had Indira Ghandi, and Israel had Golda Meir. Pakistan, Turkey and Bangldesh are all Muslim countries that have placed women at the helm. This short list does not even touch on the extensive list of women who have ruled as royals, stretching from pre-history to modern times.
Who could have imagined that America would cross into the new millennium and journalists would still be asking, “Is America ready for a woman in the White House?”
We should ask ourselves how satisfied we are with the male who has been in office the last seven years. If we elect another man like Bush, we can expect four more years like the last seven.
Hardly anyone favors a candidate solely on sex or skin color. Such traits illicit more votes against than for. Yet there are many people who consider Clinton’s sex and Obama’s color an important part of who they are and how they will lead. All else being equal, many women (and indeed some men) prefer a female candidate. Likewise, many people consider Obama’s skin tone a perk rather than a liability.
What do you call it when a woman votes for Hillary Clinton because she’s female, or a black person prefers Obama because of the color of his skin? It’s called representation.
Jeannie Babb Taylor
www.JeannieBabbTaylor.com
Several readers have requested my primary picks. Here they are, from numerous angles and with a humorous twist.
If I were a super-conservative religious male (Christian, Muslim or otherwise) who believes that men are created in God’s image and women are lesser beings, I’d vote for Mike Huckabee. I’d sing hymns in my head while standing in line, and whisper “Amen” when I put my hand on the TV screen. On the way home, I would buy six months worth of groceries in anticipation of the 23% “Fair Tax” to come.
If I were a rich libertarian who wants to tell other Americans that their education and health care are none of my concern, I’d vote for Ron Paul. I would still have to stop for groceries on the way home. I would especially stock up on medicines, meats and other FDA-approved goods. There is no telling what toxins might be added once Ron Paul eliminates the FDA and gives us back our “health freedom.”
If I were the head of a powerful and corrupt corporation, I would vote for Mitt Romney. He’d be someone I could work with -- someone who understands that the bottom line is far more important than the lives of a few babies or the long-term health of women. Romney understands that government is just another form of business.
If I were a secretly gay conservative male bent on suppressing the lifestyles of openly gay liberal males, I’d vote for Rudy Giuliani. With his quick flip-flop from supporting Gay Pride to suddenly endorsing a marriage amendment, it is obvious he has no real scruples and will comply with whatever his handlers say on the matter. I’d try to remember to remove my lipstick before going the polls, and make sure my slip was not showing.
If I were a war-hawk with a T-shirt reading, “Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out,” I’d vote for John McCain. I’d invest some money in Dyancorp and Halliburton. Then I’d send my son to Canada, knowing that McCain has stated he does not mind if the troops are in Iraq for a hundred, a thousand, a million or even ten million years.
If my greatest concern were the economy or healthcare – perhaps as a plant worker, a school teacher, a parent, an honest business owner or just a middle-class American struggling to pay the bills on time -- I would vote for a Democrat. Any Democrat I liked.
Then I would breathe a big sigh of relief, confident that if Democrats win the economy will soon improve and taxes will be held at bay. Democrats are historically much better at managing the national budget, and they don’t tax things like groceries and medical bills.
I’d go home with a smile on my face, knowing that soon our borders will be secure and the government will be targeting the corporations who bus in illegal workers – not raiding and breaking up families. I would feel relieved that our men and women in uniform will soon be coming home – with solid veteran’s benefits when they return. I’d take my family out to eat, hopeful that my candidate will win and the American economy will at last begin to recover from eight devastating years of Bush.
The differences between the top three Democratic candidates are slim. Barack Obama, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are all intelligent people with a solid history of serving Americans. I would be honored to cast my vote for any of them.
The differences between the Republican candidates are greater, and the chasm between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is gaping wider every day. Republicans want to kill, and Democrats want to heal. Republicans want to squeeze the life out of the American lower and middle class, while Democrats want to salvage the economy and strengthen the middle class. Most Republicans want to expand and escalate the war in the Middle East. Democrats want to bring ‘em home.
On February 5th, Georgia voters have the opportunity to make history. We can help put the first black person or the first woman on the national ballot. People of color are underrepresented in American government, as are women.
Women comprise the majority of voters, but only 16% of Congress. No female presidential candidate has ever before appeared on the national ballot for either major party.
Point this out to some Republicans and they will act like they’re vaguely sorry they didn’t think of it first. “It’s not that I’m against a woman president,” they’ll say, “just not THAT WOMAN.”
Very few can give a substantive reason for opposing Hillary Clinton. More common are knee-jerk reactions based on mischaracterizations or outright lies. Republicans frequently characterize Clinton as a super-divisive liberal, but anyone who follows her actual votes and agendas sees a very different picture. Clinton is a moderate.
Then there is the so-called “Clinton Body Count” that has been regurgitated from the 1990s and is re-circling the Internet. This piece of work claims to be a list of all the people who have died “mysteriously” because of their connections to the Clintons. The connection may be tenuous (such as Bill’s chiropractor’s mother, or a person who once lived in Arkansas) and the mysterious death usually is not mysterious at all. Nonetheless, it’s good fodder for fools who say “I got it in an email, so it must be true.”
Sadly, the United States is far behind the times in granting women full access to the government. Other countries have had women in the highest office as far back as the sixties. Great Britain has had Margaret Thatcher, India had Indira Ghandi, and Israel had Golda Meir. Pakistan, Turkey and Bangldesh are all Muslim countries that have placed women at the helm. This short list does not even touch on the extensive list of women who have ruled as royals, stretching from pre-history to modern times.
Who could have imagined that America would cross into the new millennium and journalists would still be asking, “Is America ready for a woman in the White House?”
We should ask ourselves how satisfied we are with the male who has been in office the last seven years. If we elect another man like Bush, we can expect four more years like the last seven.
Hardly anyone favors a candidate solely on sex or skin color. Such traits illicit more votes against than for. Yet there are many people who consider Clinton’s sex and Obama’s color an important part of who they are and how they will lead. All else being equal, many women (and indeed some men) prefer a female candidate. Likewise, many people consider Obama’s skin tone a perk rather than a liability.
What do you call it when a woman votes for Hillary Clinton because she’s female, or a black person prefers Obama because of the color of his skin? It’s called representation.
Jeannie Babb Taylor
www.JeannieBabbTaylor.com
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
It's called democracy
A group of men sat down to fire off a letter to some politicians who were overstepping their bounds. Searching for the perfect phrase, Benjamin Franklin borrowed the words of his Italian friend, Phillip Mazzei. He wrote, “All men are created equal.”
The Declaration of Independence was not merely a letter from a colony to her mother country. It was a rallying cry for justice to the oppressed. What is remarkable is that the men who wrote it were hardly oppressed. These individuals had in fact enjoyed the privilege of money and status, both in England and in colonial America. It was their own rights they were laying down. In declaring independence from England, they were not so much seeking equality as offering it.
Some speculate that they did not fully appreciate the import of their statement. Did they really understand that some of their own offspring would find these very words used against them, to dismiss their black slaves and scatter their fortunes?
Did any of them guess that their granddaughters would someday see their own destiny in these documents and demand the right to vote? We can only guess.
The women’s movement and the abolitionist movement were born in that pen stroke, but it would be over a hundred years before every American adult acquired voting rights. It would be even longer before non-white children were granted equal access to education. Women are still not guaranteed equal rights under the law.
Since the framers of America first put pen to paper, our country has continued toward the dream of democracy – but the progress is not linear. There are fits and starts. Certain forces propel us forward, even as certain constraints yank us backward. At the heart of those opposite pressures, there is always a vision – a vision for democracy, or a vision for elitism and inequality.
We see these opposing forces on local, state, and national levels. Locally, the forces of progress want to see our counties and municipalities grow, expand and move forward. We want our children to have theatre opportunities. We want the student who drops out of school because of poverty or pregnancy to have another chance through GED programs. We want abundant libraries, strong health departments, and adequately funded fire and police departments.
Then there are the conservative curmudgeons. They would prefer to play politics with the futures of our police officers and firefighters, tax the YMCA, and de-fund the learning center. They especially hate every vestige of fine arts or culture, such as the Colonnade, Catoosa County’s theatre and banquet hall. They talk about stripping the Colonnade of funds, but the gleam in their eye makes me think they would prefer to burn it to the ground.
They do not appreciate the value these entities bring to our community, and they certainly do not think that ten or twenty dollars of their property taxes should go to support such a thing! After all, they can afford a private gym. They don’t use the library or the health department and they certainly have no need for a learning center.
The same divide exists at the state level. From the time of the Reconstruction until the turn of the Millennium, Democrats lead Georgians to greater freedom and greater opportunity. Democrats worked to make Georgia a leader among the Southern states. They brought rural regions into the modern era through the power of electricity. They built health departments and hospitals. They supported local governments and focused resources on education. Democrats instituted the HOPE Scholarship, and they fight every year to protect it from Republican raids.
As a result of these efforts, economic opportunities abounded, education improved and was offered to all, and average Georgians began to live the American Dream. They finished school. They bought homes. They found rewarding work. They started businesses.
For a while, the forces of progress propelled Georgia forward. As a result, our strong schools and good job market lured more people to the state. These people brought their own ideas, including their own politics. Soon the tide turned and Republicans were in control of Georgia for the first time since Reconstruction. Ever the enemies of progress, Republican leaders cut funds for education, tossed children off PeachCare, brought back gerrymandering, and passed laws to take away the homes of the elderly on Medicaid.
The contrast between democracy and the GOP is seen clearly at the national level. If you’re not sure what the Republican vision is, just take a look at the places where they have forcibly taken control. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan. Their vision resembles oligarchy more than democracy. A few powerful people or corporations reign over a huge population of poverty-ridden little people with no hope, no future, and no opportunity.
You can predict the Republican stance on most any issue simply by asking, “Who does this policy benefit, Big Business or the common citizen?” At every turn, the GOP protects the interests of “the haves” at the expense of “the have-nots.”
It’s not that Republican leaders hate the poor. Actually, they love poor people – the same way hawks love crunchy little squirrels. They need a steady supply of desperate families to rent their slums, take out their high-interest payday loans, supply property for their foreclosure mills, and otherwise support Republican nobility.
But we Democrats have a different vision for America. We can imagine living in a land where no child ever dies from an abscessed tooth. We believe that the heritage of every American child should include healthcare, education and opportunity – not national debt, trade deficits and lead-tainted toys.
It is because of this vision Democrats founded the Department of Education and the school lunch program. Democrats also implemented the State Children’s Health Insurance (SCHIP) program that provides health care for millions of children -- and Democrats continue to fight valiantly for the program in the face of repeated vetoes by President Bush.
It was the Democrats who instituted Medicare and Social Security to provide a safety net for the elderly and the disabled. Democrats launched the GI Bill to provide educational and economic opportunities to returning servicemen. Democrats also started Medicaid, interest-free student loans, and low-interest home loans.
Democrats instituted the minimum wage. Under Republican national leadership, the minimum wage stagnated for ten years, even as the cost of living soared. Only when the balance of power tipped back to democracy did the working poor find relief through a Democrat-lead minimum wage increase.
Democrats have always been the ones to stand up to social injustice, demand political accountability, champion education and healthcare, regulate the industry giants who would exploit children for profit, fight for the common people, and balance the checkbook. Democracy made this country great.
We believe in government of the people, by the people, and for the people. We stand with Benjamin Franklin and say “all men are created equal.” Republicans may call us “socialists” or “communists” for such ideals, but we remember that we are in good company. No new label is needed for the sentiment that Benjamin Franklin expressed. It’s called democracy.
The Declaration of Independence was not merely a letter from a colony to her mother country. It was a rallying cry for justice to the oppressed. What is remarkable is that the men who wrote it were hardly oppressed. These individuals had in fact enjoyed the privilege of money and status, both in England and in colonial America. It was their own rights they were laying down. In declaring independence from England, they were not so much seeking equality as offering it.
Some speculate that they did not fully appreciate the import of their statement. Did they really understand that some of their own offspring would find these very words used against them, to dismiss their black slaves and scatter their fortunes?
Did any of them guess that their granddaughters would someday see their own destiny in these documents and demand the right to vote? We can only guess.
The women’s movement and the abolitionist movement were born in that pen stroke, but it would be over a hundred years before every American adult acquired voting rights. It would be even longer before non-white children were granted equal access to education. Women are still not guaranteed equal rights under the law.
Since the framers of America first put pen to paper, our country has continued toward the dream of democracy – but the progress is not linear. There are fits and starts. Certain forces propel us forward, even as certain constraints yank us backward. At the heart of those opposite pressures, there is always a vision – a vision for democracy, or a vision for elitism and inequality.
We see these opposing forces on local, state, and national levels. Locally, the forces of progress want to see our counties and municipalities grow, expand and move forward. We want our children to have theatre opportunities. We want the student who drops out of school because of poverty or pregnancy to have another chance through GED programs. We want abundant libraries, strong health departments, and adequately funded fire and police departments.
Then there are the conservative curmudgeons. They would prefer to play politics with the futures of our police officers and firefighters, tax the YMCA, and de-fund the learning center. They especially hate every vestige of fine arts or culture, such as the Colonnade, Catoosa County’s theatre and banquet hall. They talk about stripping the Colonnade of funds, but the gleam in their eye makes me think they would prefer to burn it to the ground.
They do not appreciate the value these entities bring to our community, and they certainly do not think that ten or twenty dollars of their property taxes should go to support such a thing! After all, they can afford a private gym. They don’t use the library or the health department and they certainly have no need for a learning center.
The same divide exists at the state level. From the time of the Reconstruction until the turn of the Millennium, Democrats lead Georgians to greater freedom and greater opportunity. Democrats worked to make Georgia a leader among the Southern states. They brought rural regions into the modern era through the power of electricity. They built health departments and hospitals. They supported local governments and focused resources on education. Democrats instituted the HOPE Scholarship, and they fight every year to protect it from Republican raids.
As a result of these efforts, economic opportunities abounded, education improved and was offered to all, and average Georgians began to live the American Dream. They finished school. They bought homes. They found rewarding work. They started businesses.
For a while, the forces of progress propelled Georgia forward. As a result, our strong schools and good job market lured more people to the state. These people brought their own ideas, including their own politics. Soon the tide turned and Republicans were in control of Georgia for the first time since Reconstruction. Ever the enemies of progress, Republican leaders cut funds for education, tossed children off PeachCare, brought back gerrymandering, and passed laws to take away the homes of the elderly on Medicaid.
The contrast between democracy and the GOP is seen clearly at the national level. If you’re not sure what the Republican vision is, just take a look at the places where they have forcibly taken control. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan. Their vision resembles oligarchy more than democracy. A few powerful people or corporations reign over a huge population of poverty-ridden little people with no hope, no future, and no opportunity.
You can predict the Republican stance on most any issue simply by asking, “Who does this policy benefit, Big Business or the common citizen?” At every turn, the GOP protects the interests of “the haves” at the expense of “the have-nots.”
It’s not that Republican leaders hate the poor. Actually, they love poor people – the same way hawks love crunchy little squirrels. They need a steady supply of desperate families to rent their slums, take out their high-interest payday loans, supply property for their foreclosure mills, and otherwise support Republican nobility.
But we Democrats have a different vision for America. We can imagine living in a land where no child ever dies from an abscessed tooth. We believe that the heritage of every American child should include healthcare, education and opportunity – not national debt, trade deficits and lead-tainted toys.
It is because of this vision Democrats founded the Department of Education and the school lunch program. Democrats also implemented the State Children’s Health Insurance (SCHIP) program that provides health care for millions of children -- and Democrats continue to fight valiantly for the program in the face of repeated vetoes by President Bush.
It was the Democrats who instituted Medicare and Social Security to provide a safety net for the elderly and the disabled. Democrats launched the GI Bill to provide educational and economic opportunities to returning servicemen. Democrats also started Medicaid, interest-free student loans, and low-interest home loans.
Democrats instituted the minimum wage. Under Republican national leadership, the minimum wage stagnated for ten years, even as the cost of living soared. Only when the balance of power tipped back to democracy did the working poor find relief through a Democrat-lead minimum wage increase.
Democrats have always been the ones to stand up to social injustice, demand political accountability, champion education and healthcare, regulate the industry giants who would exploit children for profit, fight for the common people, and balance the checkbook. Democracy made this country great.
We believe in government of the people, by the people, and for the people. We stand with Benjamin Franklin and say “all men are created equal.” Republicans may call us “socialists” or “communists” for such ideals, but we remember that we are in good company. No new label is needed for the sentiment that Benjamin Franklin expressed. It’s called democracy.
Monday, October 1, 2007
The problem with breastfeeding
What if doctors discovered a substance so potent, it could prevent dozens of diseases and even reduce the risk of cancer? What if these benefits extended not only to those who partake of this amazing substance, but also those who serve it? If a pharmaceutical company had developed it, it would be a billion-dollar industry. Breast milk, though, is free. Without a visible profit stream, it also lacks a marketing team.
Numerous studies show that breastfeeding reduces cancer risks for both givers and receivers – yet the American Cancer Society (ACS) has no campaign statement on the importance of breastfeeding. One huge study (147,000 participants) found that American women could cut their breast cancer risk by 33% by increasing the lifetime average of breastfeeding from three months to thirty months, which is the worldwide average. The ACS concluded that significantly increasing breastfeeding duration was “unrealistic” and instead continues to focus on mammograms, cancer prevention drugs and other methods that put money in the pockets of physician groups and pharmaceutical companies.
Although breastfeeding has been shown to reduce sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) risk by as much as 55%, the National Institute for Child Health (NICH) invests virtually nothing in breastfeeding education. Instead, the NICH organized the “Back to Sleep” campaign encouraging parents to put babies to bed on their backs. The first corporate sponsor of the Back to Sleep campaign was Gerber, a formula and baby food manufacturer. Is it any surprise there is no financial backing to promote breastfeeding as a SIDS prevention tool?
Breastfeeding contributes significantly to child health. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) breastfeeding is “as important to preventive pediatric health care as promoting immunizations, car seat use, and proper infant sleep position.” Yet a recent AAP survey found that 45 percent of pediatricians who responded see formula-feeding and breast-feeding as equally acceptable. Once again, we can follow the money to understand this phenomenon. Doctors receive numerous samples, perks, and gifts from formula companies – a practice condemned by the World Health Organization (WHO.)
Formula makers are forced to give lip service to the superiority of breastfeeding. Yet these companies spend millions of dollars per year tripping up new mothers. They have inroads at the obstetrician’s office, the hospitals where babies are born, and the pediatrician’s office. Formula makers ensure that every mother goes home with a couple of cans of formula, so it will be available in the middle of the night when the baby is crying, she is exhausted from lack of sleep and she is vulnerable to the insecurities American society has pressed on her day after day. The result? Even though 70% of mothers start breastfeeding, within a few months the statistics have flipped. Only 11.3% of babies are still exclusively breastfed at six months.
It is difficult to blame American mothers for the failure to breastfeed, when everything is stacked against mothers from the start. Unlike women in most other developed countries, American women receive no paid maternity leave. Only those on welfare receive a stipend to carry them through the first months of mothering. Women who support themselves are forced to return to work, where it is often impossible to bring an infant, and pumping opportunities may be few and far between, with unsanitary conditions.
Rep Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) recently introduced the Breastfeeding Promotion Act of 2007. The bill amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect breastfeeding women from workplace discrimination. It also gives employers a tax credit of up to $10,000 per year to provide employees with equipment, dedicated space and consultation for pumping breastmilk. The bill establishes standards for breast pumps, and creates tax breaks for women who purchase breast pumps in order to maintain employment.
Maloney says, “I have heard many horror stories of women who were fired for trying to figure out a way to express milk at work. My bill clarifies the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to protect breastfeeding under federal civil rights law, ensuring that women cannot be fired or discriminated against in the workplace for expressing (pumping) milk, or breastfeeding during breaks or lunch time.”
At least the welfare moms have the chance to stay home and breastfeed – after all, their babies comprise the most high-risk population of infants in terms of health problems, asthma, failure to thrive and learning disabilities. Yet the formula-makers find these mothers, too. Government programs take away one of the incentives for breastfeeding by shelling out $600 million per year to put low-income infants on the bottle. Taxpayers also foot the bill for the increased healthcare cost of these children.
The U.S. government has certainly been slow to recognize the fountain of youth. Reagan and the first Bush both refused to ratify the World Health Organization’s breastfeeding code, designed to protect new mothers from formula makers’ guerilla marketing tactics. The code was not recognized by the U.S. until Clinton signed it in 1994, and it is still not enforced.
Recently, a handful of individual states sought to enforce the code. They especially want to stop hospital formula marketing, because once a baby receives a bottle, the mother and baby are confronted with a whole host of problems including nipple confusion and inadequate milk supply. If successful breastfeeding is not established within the first few days, formula-makers are practically guaranteed a new customer.
In Massachusetts, it was Governor Mitt Romney who struck down a ban on hospital marketing. Less than two weeks later, Romney announced that he had secured the construction of a $66 million pharmaceutical plant in Devens, Massachusetts. The plant is owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb, the largest formula manufacturer in the world.
Outside the U.S., things are no better. Nestle actually targets babies in developing countries, where breastfeeding has the greatest potential for good. Babies are routinely hooked on formula in third world hospitals and sent home without ever establishing breastfeeding. Back in the village, families soon discover that the cost of buying formula is higher than their entire wage.
As a result of Nestle’s tactics, sub-Saharan African has a breastfeeding rate of only 32%; Asia, 35%; Indonesia, 39%, Vietnam, 19%, and Thailand, 5%. According to WHO and UNICEF, approximately 1.5 million babies die each year because they were started on formula instead of breast milk.
American women who breastfeed should expect resistance from a society that depicts over-sized breasts on magazine covers and billboards, yet rejects the breast’s highest function. Numerous polls show that the majority of Americans are comfortable seeing women breastfeed in public; yet, a few shrill voices continue to insist that it is improper.
American women have been harassed or thrown out of libraries, restaurants and public parks for the simple act of breastfeeding. One woman was even expelled from a Vermont Delta Freedom flight for breastfeeding her child, resulting in nurse-ins at Delta counters across the nation.
Most recently, comedian Bill Maher praised Appleby’s for discriminating against a nursing mother, asserting that women who breastfeed in public are lazy and narcissistic. Maher’s other comments, which are too crude to be printed in the county paper, illustrate that what bothers some people about breastfeeding isn’t that it is perceived as sexual, but rather that it is not. Hooters, wet T-shirt contests and Playboy magazines are just fine with people like Maher, who believe that breasts are not for babies, but for men.
Although doctors agree that “breast is best,” their own licensing board does not follow their recommendations. Breastfeeding mother and aspiring doctor Sophie Currier had to sue the National Board of Medical Examiners for the right to take pumping breaks during her nine-hour licensing exam. In typical anti-feminist fashion, the judge told Sophie she would just have to take the exam when her child was older and finished breastfeeding. She would have lost her residency in clinical pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and derailed her career. Sophie appealed the decision, and won.
The “problem” with breastfeeding is that it lacks a corporate profit stream. It profits mothers and babies tremendously. It profits families, the government and tax payers. The USDA estimates that $3.6 million in healthcare costs could be saved if more U.S. babies were breastfed. Unfortunately, nothing much happens in America unless it lines the pocket of a corporation. WHO cares about breastfeeding, but corporate America never will.
We live in a culture that despises human bodily fluids – even as we feed our children cow’s milk and use pregnant mare urine (Premarin) to balance menopausal hormones. Canadian researchers are even developing medicines based on genetically-engineered pig semen. The market for animal fluids continues to grow, because there is a profit stream associated with it. If formula companies maintain control of doctors and legislators, a day may come when humans are no longer classified as mammals. Mammals, after all, are defined as animals that have hair and suckle their young.
Numerous studies show that breastfeeding reduces cancer risks for both givers and receivers – yet the American Cancer Society (ACS) has no campaign statement on the importance of breastfeeding. One huge study (147,000 participants) found that American women could cut their breast cancer risk by 33% by increasing the lifetime average of breastfeeding from three months to thirty months, which is the worldwide average. The ACS concluded that significantly increasing breastfeeding duration was “unrealistic” and instead continues to focus on mammograms, cancer prevention drugs and other methods that put money in the pockets of physician groups and pharmaceutical companies.
Although breastfeeding has been shown to reduce sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) risk by as much as 55%, the National Institute for Child Health (NICH) invests virtually nothing in breastfeeding education. Instead, the NICH organized the “Back to Sleep” campaign encouraging parents to put babies to bed on their backs. The first corporate sponsor of the Back to Sleep campaign was Gerber, a formula and baby food manufacturer. Is it any surprise there is no financial backing to promote breastfeeding as a SIDS prevention tool?
Breastfeeding contributes significantly to child health. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) breastfeeding is “as important to preventive pediatric health care as promoting immunizations, car seat use, and proper infant sleep position.” Yet a recent AAP survey found that 45 percent of pediatricians who responded see formula-feeding and breast-feeding as equally acceptable. Once again, we can follow the money to understand this phenomenon. Doctors receive numerous samples, perks, and gifts from formula companies – a practice condemned by the World Health Organization (WHO.)
Formula makers are forced to give lip service to the superiority of breastfeeding. Yet these companies spend millions of dollars per year tripping up new mothers. They have inroads at the obstetrician’s office, the hospitals where babies are born, and the pediatrician’s office. Formula makers ensure that every mother goes home with a couple of cans of formula, so it will be available in the middle of the night when the baby is crying, she is exhausted from lack of sleep and she is vulnerable to the insecurities American society has pressed on her day after day. The result? Even though 70% of mothers start breastfeeding, within a few months the statistics have flipped. Only 11.3% of babies are still exclusively breastfed at six months.
It is difficult to blame American mothers for the failure to breastfeed, when everything is stacked against mothers from the start. Unlike women in most other developed countries, American women receive no paid maternity leave. Only those on welfare receive a stipend to carry them through the first months of mothering. Women who support themselves are forced to return to work, where it is often impossible to bring an infant, and pumping opportunities may be few and far between, with unsanitary conditions.
Rep Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) recently introduced the Breastfeeding Promotion Act of 2007. The bill amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect breastfeeding women from workplace discrimination. It also gives employers a tax credit of up to $10,000 per year to provide employees with equipment, dedicated space and consultation for pumping breastmilk. The bill establishes standards for breast pumps, and creates tax breaks for women who purchase breast pumps in order to maintain employment.
Maloney says, “I have heard many horror stories of women who were fired for trying to figure out a way to express milk at work. My bill clarifies the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to protect breastfeeding under federal civil rights law, ensuring that women cannot be fired or discriminated against in the workplace for expressing (pumping) milk, or breastfeeding during breaks or lunch time.”
At least the welfare moms have the chance to stay home and breastfeed – after all, their babies comprise the most high-risk population of infants in terms of health problems, asthma, failure to thrive and learning disabilities. Yet the formula-makers find these mothers, too. Government programs take away one of the incentives for breastfeeding by shelling out $600 million per year to put low-income infants on the bottle. Taxpayers also foot the bill for the increased healthcare cost of these children.
The U.S. government has certainly been slow to recognize the fountain of youth. Reagan and the first Bush both refused to ratify the World Health Organization’s breastfeeding code, designed to protect new mothers from formula makers’ guerilla marketing tactics. The code was not recognized by the U.S. until Clinton signed it in 1994, and it is still not enforced.
Recently, a handful of individual states sought to enforce the code. They especially want to stop hospital formula marketing, because once a baby receives a bottle, the mother and baby are confronted with a whole host of problems including nipple confusion and inadequate milk supply. If successful breastfeeding is not established within the first few days, formula-makers are practically guaranteed a new customer.
In Massachusetts, it was Governor Mitt Romney who struck down a ban on hospital marketing. Less than two weeks later, Romney announced that he had secured the construction of a $66 million pharmaceutical plant in Devens, Massachusetts. The plant is owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb, the largest formula manufacturer in the world.
Outside the U.S., things are no better. Nestle actually targets babies in developing countries, where breastfeeding has the greatest potential for good. Babies are routinely hooked on formula in third world hospitals and sent home without ever establishing breastfeeding. Back in the village, families soon discover that the cost of buying formula is higher than their entire wage.
As a result of Nestle’s tactics, sub-Saharan African has a breastfeeding rate of only 32%; Asia, 35%; Indonesia, 39%, Vietnam, 19%, and Thailand, 5%. According to WHO and UNICEF, approximately 1.5 million babies die each year because they were started on formula instead of breast milk.
American women who breastfeed should expect resistance from a society that depicts over-sized breasts on magazine covers and billboards, yet rejects the breast’s highest function. Numerous polls show that the majority of Americans are comfortable seeing women breastfeed in public; yet, a few shrill voices continue to insist that it is improper.
American women have been harassed or thrown out of libraries, restaurants and public parks for the simple act of breastfeeding. One woman was even expelled from a Vermont Delta Freedom flight for breastfeeding her child, resulting in nurse-ins at Delta counters across the nation.
Most recently, comedian Bill Maher praised Appleby’s for discriminating against a nursing mother, asserting that women who breastfeed in public are lazy and narcissistic. Maher’s other comments, which are too crude to be printed in the county paper, illustrate that what bothers some people about breastfeeding isn’t that it is perceived as sexual, but rather that it is not. Hooters, wet T-shirt contests and Playboy magazines are just fine with people like Maher, who believe that breasts are not for babies, but for men.
Although doctors agree that “breast is best,” their own licensing board does not follow their recommendations. Breastfeeding mother and aspiring doctor Sophie Currier had to sue the National Board of Medical Examiners for the right to take pumping breaks during her nine-hour licensing exam. In typical anti-feminist fashion, the judge told Sophie she would just have to take the exam when her child was older and finished breastfeeding. She would have lost her residency in clinical pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and derailed her career. Sophie appealed the decision, and won.
The “problem” with breastfeeding is that it lacks a corporate profit stream. It profits mothers and babies tremendously. It profits families, the government and tax payers. The USDA estimates that $3.6 million in healthcare costs could be saved if more U.S. babies were breastfed. Unfortunately, nothing much happens in America unless it lines the pocket of a corporation. WHO cares about breastfeeding, but corporate America never will.
We live in a culture that despises human bodily fluids – even as we feed our children cow’s milk and use pregnant mare urine (Premarin) to balance menopausal hormones. Canadian researchers are even developing medicines based on genetically-engineered pig semen. The market for animal fluids continues to grow, because there is a profit stream associated with it. If formula companies maintain control of doctors and legislators, a day may come when humans are no longer classified as mammals. Mammals, after all, are defined as animals that have hair and suckle their young.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
An open letter to Christian pastors
Pastors, have you ever preached a sermon against domestic violence? Odds are, you haven’t. I’ve listened to approximately 4,000 sermons and have yet to hear a pastor condemn domestic violence from the pulpit.
Southern preachers prefer to pontificate on matters like abortion and homosexuality. Sometimes they rail against feminism. On occasion they preach against pornography, using the occasion to slam churchwomen over immodest attire. In every denomination, pastors preach often enough on tithing, and never fail to pass the plate. Yet they fail at addressing an issue faced by approximately one fourth of their congregation.
Recently a wildly popular pastor shoved the problem of Christian violence into the spotlight when he choked, kicked and stomped his wife in the parking lot of an Atlanta hotel. In the South, beating your wife may or may not be a crime. Records show that the most common law enforcement response to domestic violence is “separating the parties.” Victims rarely press charges because they fear reprisal. Law enforcement rarely presses their own charges (though they could and should), essentially treating wife-beating as a “victimless crime.”
Bishop Thomas W. Weeks, III crossed the line that even Georgia will not tolerate: He was wearing shoes when he kicked his wife. That’s a felony. Besides that, he committed the acts publicly and on video surveillance tape. He also threatened to kill her, which is another Georgia felony.
The abused wife, Prophetess Juanita Bynum, is an internationally acclaimed televangelist and best-selling author who empowers Christian women with her preaching. Church members say that couple of weeks before the attack, Weeks announced that Bynum would no longer be preaching at the church they founded.
Bynum is pressing charges against Weeks and seeking to end the marriage. Attorneys for Weeks say he will contest the divorce on the grounds that she was cruel. The strangest part of this story is not that the man who kicked and stomped his wife is contesting the divorce or fighting the charges; that happens all the time. What is so bizarre is where this man was just a few days after the beating: He was behind his pulpit telling his congregation that the devil made him do it.
Finally, a preacher is talking about domestic violence! If only his congregation had responded with a resounding movement down the aisle – and right out the church door. No one should sit under the teaching of a wife-beater. The elders should have stripped this man of his title and never let him behind the pulpit again.
T. D. Jakes, the famous televangelist who helped bring Bynum to power, condemned violence against women in a written statement two weeks after the attack. He pointed out that every day, four American men murder their wives or girlfriends, resulting in 1,400 deaths per year. That’s an FBI statistic. He also mentioned that over half a million cases of intimate assault are reported each year. Most cases go unreported. According to the most conservative estimates, between 2,000,000 and 4,000,000 women are battered each year. In 1990, the U.S. had 3,800 shelters for animals, and only 1,500 shelters for battered women.
Other Christian leaders even try to blame the victims. Christian author Gillis Triplett claims that there are thirteen traits common to abused wives, including “THEY LOVE THE DRAMA!” (Emphasis his.) Evangelical leaders John MacArthur and James Dobson have both gone on record stating that women must be careful not to “provoke” abuse. In the 1996 printing of “Love Must Be Tough,” Dobson told a story about a woman who was physically beaten by her husband. Dobson concluded that the woman “baited” her husband to hit her so that she could show off her black eye, which he calls her “prize.”
Following the advice and example of such leaders, thousands of pastors regularly dismiss domestic violence and send women back into dangerous situations. With “saving the marriage” as the highest aim, these pastors seek to prevent divorce at all costs. Women receive the subtle message that their pain – or even their lives -- are not as important as keeping the marriage intact.
One woman told a victims’ support group how she took her children and fled the state in fear of her life. Her church responded by sending her a letter of ex-communication.
In the introduction to her new book "Woman Submit! Christians & Domestic Violence,” Jocylen Andersen states that "The practice of hiding, ignoring, and even perpetuating the emotional and physical abuse of women is ... rampant within evangelical Christian fellowships and as slow as our legal systems have been in dealing with violence against women by their husbands, the church has been even slower." The Christian wife abuse cover-up is every bit as evil as the Catholic sex abuse cover-up.
Christian leaders set the stage for domestic violence by perpetuating pop-culture stereotypes of femininity and masculinity. T. D. Jakes claims in his book “Woman, Thou Art Loosed” that all women were created to fulfill the vision of some man. Jakes bases his gender theology solely on the physical characteristics of male and female genitalia, insisting that all women are “receivers” and all men are “givers.” This false dichotomy breaks down quickly when one considers that female sexuality includes giving birth and giving milk. More importantly, Jakes deviates from Scripture in claiming that women and men must operate like their genitalia in every facet of life.
John MacArthur also does his part to set the stage for female subjugation. He calls the women’s movement “Satanic.” In a sermon called “God’s Design for a Successful Marriage: The Role of the Wife” MacArthur blames working women for everything from smog to prison overcrowding. As an antidote, he offers this quote from Charles Haddon Spurgeon on the disposition of a godly wife toward her husband: “He is her little world, her paradise, her choice treasure. She is glad to sink her individuality in him.”
Finally, consider Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Patterson recently dismissed Hebrew professor Sheri Klouda, simply because she was female. He claims the Bible does not allow women to instruct men. Patterson then launched a new major at the seminary: Homemaking. Only women are allowed to take these courses, which focus on childcare, cooking and sewing -- as well as a woman’s role in marriage. The courses are taught by Patterson’s wife, who is the only surviving female in the school’s 42-person theology faculty.
Considering Patterson’s view of women, we should not be surprised at his response to domestic violence. Participating in a panel on “How Submission Works in Practice,” Patterson tells abused wives to do three things: Pray for their husbands, submit to them, and “elevate” them. He admits that this advice sometimes leads to beatings, but also claims that the men eventually get saved. Apparently, it’s only the men that matter.
Pastors who truly want to help people and save marriages should stop attacking feminism. Instead, teach couples never to hit, choke, kick, threaten or verbally batter their spouse. Preach against domestic violence from your pulpit. Help abuse victims to escape their batterers – permanently. Encourage them to press charges so that justice can be served.
Pastors, if you want to defend marriage, set an example of a loving relationship. Instruct couples to live in a way that makes their spouse want to stay with them. It really does not take a six-tape series to teach the number one tool of a successful marriage: the golden rule.
Southern preachers prefer to pontificate on matters like abortion and homosexuality. Sometimes they rail against feminism. On occasion they preach against pornography, using the occasion to slam churchwomen over immodest attire. In every denomination, pastors preach often enough on tithing, and never fail to pass the plate. Yet they fail at addressing an issue faced by approximately one fourth of their congregation.
Recently a wildly popular pastor shoved the problem of Christian violence into the spotlight when he choked, kicked and stomped his wife in the parking lot of an Atlanta hotel. In the South, beating your wife may or may not be a crime. Records show that the most common law enforcement response to domestic violence is “separating the parties.” Victims rarely press charges because they fear reprisal. Law enforcement rarely presses their own charges (though they could and should), essentially treating wife-beating as a “victimless crime.”
Bishop Thomas W. Weeks, III crossed the line that even Georgia will not tolerate: He was wearing shoes when he kicked his wife. That’s a felony. Besides that, he committed the acts publicly and on video surveillance tape. He also threatened to kill her, which is another Georgia felony.
The abused wife, Prophetess Juanita Bynum, is an internationally acclaimed televangelist and best-selling author who empowers Christian women with her preaching. Church members say that couple of weeks before the attack, Weeks announced that Bynum would no longer be preaching at the church they founded.
Bynum is pressing charges against Weeks and seeking to end the marriage. Attorneys for Weeks say he will contest the divorce on the grounds that she was cruel. The strangest part of this story is not that the man who kicked and stomped his wife is contesting the divorce or fighting the charges; that happens all the time. What is so bizarre is where this man was just a few days after the beating: He was behind his pulpit telling his congregation that the devil made him do it.
Finally, a preacher is talking about domestic violence! If only his congregation had responded with a resounding movement down the aisle – and right out the church door. No one should sit under the teaching of a wife-beater. The elders should have stripped this man of his title and never let him behind the pulpit again.
T. D. Jakes, the famous televangelist who helped bring Bynum to power, condemned violence against women in a written statement two weeks after the attack. He pointed out that every day, four American men murder their wives or girlfriends, resulting in 1,400 deaths per year. That’s an FBI statistic. He also mentioned that over half a million cases of intimate assault are reported each year. Most cases go unreported. According to the most conservative estimates, between 2,000,000 and 4,000,000 women are battered each year. In 1990, the U.S. had 3,800 shelters for animals, and only 1,500 shelters for battered women.
Other Christian leaders even try to blame the victims. Christian author Gillis Triplett claims that there are thirteen traits common to abused wives, including “THEY LOVE THE DRAMA!” (Emphasis his.) Evangelical leaders John MacArthur and James Dobson have both gone on record stating that women must be careful not to “provoke” abuse. In the 1996 printing of “Love Must Be Tough,” Dobson told a story about a woman who was physically beaten by her husband. Dobson concluded that the woman “baited” her husband to hit her so that she could show off her black eye, which he calls her “prize.”
Following the advice and example of such leaders, thousands of pastors regularly dismiss domestic violence and send women back into dangerous situations. With “saving the marriage” as the highest aim, these pastors seek to prevent divorce at all costs. Women receive the subtle message that their pain – or even their lives -- are not as important as keeping the marriage intact.
One woman told a victims’ support group how she took her children and fled the state in fear of her life. Her church responded by sending her a letter of ex-communication.
In the introduction to her new book "Woman Submit! Christians & Domestic Violence,” Jocylen Andersen states that "The practice of hiding, ignoring, and even perpetuating the emotional and physical abuse of women is ... rampant within evangelical Christian fellowships and as slow as our legal systems have been in dealing with violence against women by their husbands, the church has been even slower." The Christian wife abuse cover-up is every bit as evil as the Catholic sex abuse cover-up.
Christian leaders set the stage for domestic violence by perpetuating pop-culture stereotypes of femininity and masculinity. T. D. Jakes claims in his book “Woman, Thou Art Loosed” that all women were created to fulfill the vision of some man. Jakes bases his gender theology solely on the physical characteristics of male and female genitalia, insisting that all women are “receivers” and all men are “givers.” This false dichotomy breaks down quickly when one considers that female sexuality includes giving birth and giving milk. More importantly, Jakes deviates from Scripture in claiming that women and men must operate like their genitalia in every facet of life.
John MacArthur also does his part to set the stage for female subjugation. He calls the women’s movement “Satanic.” In a sermon called “God’s Design for a Successful Marriage: The Role of the Wife” MacArthur blames working women for everything from smog to prison overcrowding. As an antidote, he offers this quote from Charles Haddon Spurgeon on the disposition of a godly wife toward her husband: “He is her little world, her paradise, her choice treasure. She is glad to sink her individuality in him.”
Finally, consider Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Patterson recently dismissed Hebrew professor Sheri Klouda, simply because she was female. He claims the Bible does not allow women to instruct men. Patterson then launched a new major at the seminary: Homemaking. Only women are allowed to take these courses, which focus on childcare, cooking and sewing -- as well as a woman’s role in marriage. The courses are taught by Patterson’s wife, who is the only surviving female in the school’s 42-person theology faculty.
Considering Patterson’s view of women, we should not be surprised at his response to domestic violence. Participating in a panel on “How Submission Works in Practice,” Patterson tells abused wives to do three things: Pray for their husbands, submit to them, and “elevate” them. He admits that this advice sometimes leads to beatings, but also claims that the men eventually get saved. Apparently, it’s only the men that matter.
Pastors who truly want to help people and save marriages should stop attacking feminism. Instead, teach couples never to hit, choke, kick, threaten or verbally batter their spouse. Preach against domestic violence from your pulpit. Help abuse victims to escape their batterers – permanently. Encourage them to press charges so that justice can be served.
Pastors, if you want to defend marriage, set an example of a loving relationship. Instruct couples to live in a way that makes their spouse want to stay with them. It really does not take a six-tape series to teach the number one tool of a successful marriage: the golden rule.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Animals for the ethical treatment of people
Earlier this summer, a 5-year-old child with Down’s syndrome was reported missing. Hours later her body was found. Authorities charged the girl’s mother with involuntary manslaughter. But wait – this little girl was not killed by her mother. She was mauled to death by the neighbor’s dog.
With Michael Vick’s dog-fighting scandal fresh in the news, animal activists are pushing for laws to protect pit bulls. But what about laws to protect humans – especially children – from vicious animals?
PETA wants people to treat animals better. Where is AETP, Animals for the Ethical Treatment of People? Is there a Lassie or a Benji out there somewhere who will advocate for children? We need such an advocate, because the human public seems more interested in protecting the vicious dogs.
In Paducah a six-year-old boy was mauled by a neighbor’s Alaskan malamute. The boy is recovering. Community response? People fought over the dog, begging authorities not to euthanize it. They said he deserved “a second chance.” A second chance to do what? Make a clean kill next time?
About the same time, a child in Niagara Falls, New York was bitten in the face by a repeat offender. The shepherd mix had bitten another child just two weeks earlier.
The public did respond when Kaitlyn Hassard’s retriever choked her to death with her neck scarf: Over 300 people wanted to adopt the killer dog. If it had been the 6-year-old girl in trouble, how many families would have begged to adopt her? (Hint: Ask social services how many “older” children wait indefinitely on their adoption lists.) Many pet-owners were outraged that the dog was put up for adoption at all, insisting that the girl’s mother was at fault. “She should have never taken her eyes off her that kid for a minute.” Of course, they say the same thing every time a pit bull tears a little child’s face off.
Dozens of news stories each year report on small children disfigured or fatally mauled by such dogs. Invariably, the owner states the behavior was “totally out of character” and the dog was always gentle till now. Does it not occur to these pet owners that “out of character” behavior is very much in character for certain animals?
Pit bulls are not teddy bears, after all. These are large creatures with sharp fangs set in powerful jaws. They are bred to kill. Every fiber of their being is designer-engineered to clamp down on a throat and shake until the victim stops struggling. You can train some of them to act nice most of the time – much as a lion can be tamed – but the killer instinct is there, just beneath the surface, like a trip wire waiting to be triggered.
After the attack comes the tug-of-war between officials who want to destroy the dangerous animal, and the bleeding heart animal lovers who want to “rehabilitate” the animal or (more likely) proclaim its innocence while blaming the mother. If a dog ever harms one of my sweet babies, this will not be an issue. Instead, the two groups can haggle over disposal of the remains.
Ontario banned ownership of pit bulls after a toddler was attacked by three pit bulls that leapt a fence to tear into him. The rescue required half a dozen people and four of them, including both the boy’s parents, required hospitalization. The ban made sense to the province’s attorney general Michael Bryant, who said, “Just as we wouldn’t let a great white shark in a swimming pool, maybe we shouldn’t have these animals on the civilized streets.”
Some counties and one state (Virginia) actually have a vicious dog registry. If officials know where these dangerous animals are, why not destroy them before they can hurt anyone? These animals are desired because of their killer tendencies, not in spite of them. That’s why breeders breed them, that’s why people buy them, and we ought to just admit it.
Absurdly, families increasingly adopt a vicious breed and then domesticate it to play with children. According to a study by Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People, just three breeds are responsible for 74% of all attacks. Pit bulls top the list, followed by rottweilers, then German shepherds. The Centers for Disease Control says pit bulls kill three times as many people as rottweilers.
In over two-thirds of the cases Clifton studied, the very first known dangerous behavior of the animal proved to be fatal or life-threatening. Dogs bite 4.7 million people annually, and 800,000 dog bites require medical attention. In fact, dogs are the second leading cause of emergency room visits by children.
The majority of offending dogs bite someone at their own home or another familiar place. These dogs aren’t defending the home place, either; 77% are attacking their human family or close friends of the family.
According to the National Canine Research Council, fatal dog attacks are on the rise, having doubled in the last five years. Meanwhile, America seems to have lost all reason when it comes to pets. Dear Abby recently had to advise a reader that, no, it is not okay to shut your 2-year-old alone in a room so the boyfriend’s aggressive dog “Crusher” can roam the house. People have birthday parties for their dogs. They buy RVs so they can take them on vacation, and dress them in Halloween costumes. Some dogs have better health insurance than Georgia’s children.
In local papers, the pet food scandal gets far more press than the proliferation of lead in children’s toys and vinyl lunch boxes. Baby formula recalls are rarely mentioned in the paper, even when deadly bacteria is discovered in cans of fake breast milk. Week after week, we read how China is poisoning our pets. Does anyone care that they are poisoning our children? How easily we shrug off a host of companies committing fraud against children, including corporate giants like toxic-toy Mattel, and the formula-maker Nestle who is responsible for killing a million babies per year. Apparently, they can take our children. Just don’t hurt Fido!
Getting back to Michael Vick, it is interesting to note the extreme responses of the public, the press and even the NFL. Sure, his actions were heinous. But is dog-fighting really a worse crime than assaulting and stalking women? So many professional athletes have been accused of domestic violence that we have long since lost count. Their coaches have been known to bail them out of jail and put them on the field the very next day.
Bobby Chinourd – one of the few athletes actually to be convicted – was sentenced to just one year for terrorizing and threatening to kill his wife. The judge let him serve the sentence in 3-month increments during the off-season, not wanting to limit his time on the field. When Kobe Bryant was accused of raping a woman in a hotel, he received a tremendous outpouring of sympathy and support. Even Rae Curruth, who paid someone to kill his pregnant girlfriend, did not elicit the public outrage aimed at Michael Vick.
When Hawaii quarterback Raphel Cherry was convicted of strangling his wife, head coach June Jones responded, "It just makes you sick for him and his family.” What makes me sick is that athletes who mistreat women garner more sympathy than an athlete who mistreated dogs. Our culture values animals more highly than women and children.
I like dogs. My family still laughs at how I spent one childhood summer living in a cardboard box on the porch because I didn’t want to be away from my mutt Old Yellar. I cried for two days when Old Yellar was struck by a car and died, and I have cried over several dogs since then. I won’t argue with the concept that all dogs go to heaven. I just think some should go sooner than others.
With Michael Vick’s dog-fighting scandal fresh in the news, animal activists are pushing for laws to protect pit bulls. But what about laws to protect humans – especially children – from vicious animals?
PETA wants people to treat animals better. Where is AETP, Animals for the Ethical Treatment of People? Is there a Lassie or a Benji out there somewhere who will advocate for children? We need such an advocate, because the human public seems more interested in protecting the vicious dogs.
In Paducah a six-year-old boy was mauled by a neighbor’s Alaskan malamute. The boy is recovering. Community response? People fought over the dog, begging authorities not to euthanize it. They said he deserved “a second chance.” A second chance to do what? Make a clean kill next time?
About the same time, a child in Niagara Falls, New York was bitten in the face by a repeat offender. The shepherd mix had bitten another child just two weeks earlier.
The public did respond when Kaitlyn Hassard’s retriever choked her to death with her neck scarf: Over 300 people wanted to adopt the killer dog. If it had been the 6-year-old girl in trouble, how many families would have begged to adopt her? (Hint: Ask social services how many “older” children wait indefinitely on their adoption lists.) Many pet-owners were outraged that the dog was put up for adoption at all, insisting that the girl’s mother was at fault. “She should have never taken her eyes off her that kid for a minute.” Of course, they say the same thing every time a pit bull tears a little child’s face off.
Dozens of news stories each year report on small children disfigured or fatally mauled by such dogs. Invariably, the owner states the behavior was “totally out of character” and the dog was always gentle till now. Does it not occur to these pet owners that “out of character” behavior is very much in character for certain animals?
Pit bulls are not teddy bears, after all. These are large creatures with sharp fangs set in powerful jaws. They are bred to kill. Every fiber of their being is designer-engineered to clamp down on a throat and shake until the victim stops struggling. You can train some of them to act nice most of the time – much as a lion can be tamed – but the killer instinct is there, just beneath the surface, like a trip wire waiting to be triggered.
After the attack comes the tug-of-war between officials who want to destroy the dangerous animal, and the bleeding heart animal lovers who want to “rehabilitate” the animal or (more likely) proclaim its innocence while blaming the mother. If a dog ever harms one of my sweet babies, this will not be an issue. Instead, the two groups can haggle over disposal of the remains.
Ontario banned ownership of pit bulls after a toddler was attacked by three pit bulls that leapt a fence to tear into him. The rescue required half a dozen people and four of them, including both the boy’s parents, required hospitalization. The ban made sense to the province’s attorney general Michael Bryant, who said, “Just as we wouldn’t let a great white shark in a swimming pool, maybe we shouldn’t have these animals on the civilized streets.”
Some counties and one state (Virginia) actually have a vicious dog registry. If officials know where these dangerous animals are, why not destroy them before they can hurt anyone? These animals are desired because of their killer tendencies, not in spite of them. That’s why breeders breed them, that’s why people buy them, and we ought to just admit it.
Absurdly, families increasingly adopt a vicious breed and then domesticate it to play with children. According to a study by Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People, just three breeds are responsible for 74% of all attacks. Pit bulls top the list, followed by rottweilers, then German shepherds. The Centers for Disease Control says pit bulls kill three times as many people as rottweilers.
In over two-thirds of the cases Clifton studied, the very first known dangerous behavior of the animal proved to be fatal or life-threatening. Dogs bite 4.7 million people annually, and 800,000 dog bites require medical attention. In fact, dogs are the second leading cause of emergency room visits by children.
The majority of offending dogs bite someone at their own home or another familiar place. These dogs aren’t defending the home place, either; 77% are attacking their human family or close friends of the family.
According to the National Canine Research Council, fatal dog attacks are on the rise, having doubled in the last five years. Meanwhile, America seems to have lost all reason when it comes to pets. Dear Abby recently had to advise a reader that, no, it is not okay to shut your 2-year-old alone in a room so the boyfriend’s aggressive dog “Crusher” can roam the house. People have birthday parties for their dogs. They buy RVs so they can take them on vacation, and dress them in Halloween costumes. Some dogs have better health insurance than Georgia’s children.
In local papers, the pet food scandal gets far more press than the proliferation of lead in children’s toys and vinyl lunch boxes. Baby formula recalls are rarely mentioned in the paper, even when deadly bacteria is discovered in cans of fake breast milk. Week after week, we read how China is poisoning our pets. Does anyone care that they are poisoning our children? How easily we shrug off a host of companies committing fraud against children, including corporate giants like toxic-toy Mattel, and the formula-maker Nestle who is responsible for killing a million babies per year. Apparently, they can take our children. Just don’t hurt Fido!
Getting back to Michael Vick, it is interesting to note the extreme responses of the public, the press and even the NFL. Sure, his actions were heinous. But is dog-fighting really a worse crime than assaulting and stalking women? So many professional athletes have been accused of domestic violence that we have long since lost count. Their coaches have been known to bail them out of jail and put them on the field the very next day.
Bobby Chinourd – one of the few athletes actually to be convicted – was sentenced to just one year for terrorizing and threatening to kill his wife. The judge let him serve the sentence in 3-month increments during the off-season, not wanting to limit his time on the field. When Kobe Bryant was accused of raping a woman in a hotel, he received a tremendous outpouring of sympathy and support. Even Rae Curruth, who paid someone to kill his pregnant girlfriend, did not elicit the public outrage aimed at Michael Vick.
When Hawaii quarterback Raphel Cherry was convicted of strangling his wife, head coach June Jones responded, "It just makes you sick for him and his family.” What makes me sick is that athletes who mistreat women garner more sympathy than an athlete who mistreated dogs. Our culture values animals more highly than women and children.
I like dogs. My family still laughs at how I spent one childhood summer living in a cardboard box on the porch because I didn’t want to be away from my mutt Old Yellar. I cried for two days when Old Yellar was struck by a car and died, and I have cried over several dogs since then. I won’t argue with the concept that all dogs go to heaven. I just think some should go sooner than others.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Are we there yet?
All the way from north Georgia to Boston, my four-year-old Christianna punctuated the hours with, “Are we there yet?”
“No, baby,” we’d answer, “we’re not there yet.” Then we’d pull out the map to offer the children another geography lesson. As we sailed up I-81, I began to consider the philosophical implications of my little girl’s question, “Are we there yet?”
It has never occurred to Christianna that she lives in a world where being female will often count against her. She hasn’t yet learned about women like Susan B. Anthony who had to fight the male establishment for decades so that someday women would be able to vote. She does not know that voting is still the only right constitutionally guaranteed to women today.
Christianna sees Mommy excel in the business world and bring home a good paycheck. She doesn’t know that in America, the average woman earns only 70 cents on the dollar compared to men with the same qualifications. She does not know the top three questions women are asked in job interviews: Are you married? Do you have children? Who’s going to take care of your children while you work? She doesn’t know that answering these questions “wrong” means a lower paycheck, or none at all.
When Mommy ran for office, it did not strike Christianna as unusual. She has not yet noticed that the government is owned by men, with less than 20% representation by women. She does not understand what people mean when they dismiss Hillary Clinton with “America is not ready for a woman.” (I’m not sure I understand the meaning of that comment myself.)
Christianna sees her home-educated sisters play soccer and hockey along with the boys. She doesn’t know that around the country, schools give much greater emphasis and funding to boys’ sports than girls’. She doesn’t have a clue what Title IX is, or just how many loopholes allow schools and communities to keep funneling most of the dollars and scholarship opportunities to the boys. She hasn’t heard that Georgia public schools now have the legal option to simply close their doors to female students – making Title IX a moot point.
Christianna is growing up in a home where Mommy and Daddy treat each other with respect and make decisions jointly. She hasn’t yet learned that many women in America face sexism in their own homes. She doesn’t know that women are more likely to be physically attacked or murdered by husbands than by strangers. She doesn’t know that women who report domestic violence often receive no help at all.
At church, Christianna receives most of her spiritual instruction from female teachers. She doesn’t know that radio preachers and best-selling authors claim women dishonor God when they teach the Bible. She hasn’t heard of “complementarians” like Wayne Grudum and John MacArthur who say that men and women are not equal before God. She hasn’t heard them dismiss her favorite Bible heroines Deborah and Miriam as aberrations used to shame men.
Christianna isn’t aware that many church denominations are shoving women backward to the days before the light of Christian feminism. She hasn’t heard of Baptist chaplains stripped of their endorsement just for being female. She doesn’t know about the missionaries who lost their funding because they refused to sign a statement of belief that men are above their wives.
Christianna lives in a safe haven where women are respected, honored and given opportunity to succeed. Soon enough she will discover the hazards of being female. She’ll find out that she has to work longer and harder to succeed – and that people of both sexes will despise her when she does.
“Are we there yet?”
“No, baby, we’re not there yet . . .”
“No, baby,” we’d answer, “we’re not there yet.” Then we’d pull out the map to offer the children another geography lesson. As we sailed up I-81, I began to consider the philosophical implications of my little girl’s question, “Are we there yet?”
It has never occurred to Christianna that she lives in a world where being female will often count against her. She hasn’t yet learned about women like Susan B. Anthony who had to fight the male establishment for decades so that someday women would be able to vote. She does not know that voting is still the only right constitutionally guaranteed to women today.
Christianna sees Mommy excel in the business world and bring home a good paycheck. She doesn’t know that in America, the average woman earns only 70 cents on the dollar compared to men with the same qualifications. She does not know the top three questions women are asked in job interviews: Are you married? Do you have children? Who’s going to take care of your children while you work? She doesn’t know that answering these questions “wrong” means a lower paycheck, or none at all.
When Mommy ran for office, it did not strike Christianna as unusual. She has not yet noticed that the government is owned by men, with less than 20% representation by women. She does not understand what people mean when they dismiss Hillary Clinton with “America is not ready for a woman.” (I’m not sure I understand the meaning of that comment myself.)
Christianna sees her home-educated sisters play soccer and hockey along with the boys. She doesn’t know that around the country, schools give much greater emphasis and funding to boys’ sports than girls’. She doesn’t have a clue what Title IX is, or just how many loopholes allow schools and communities to keep funneling most of the dollars and scholarship opportunities to the boys. She hasn’t heard that Georgia public schools now have the legal option to simply close their doors to female students – making Title IX a moot point.
Christianna is growing up in a home where Mommy and Daddy treat each other with respect and make decisions jointly. She hasn’t yet learned that many women in America face sexism in their own homes. She doesn’t know that women are more likely to be physically attacked or murdered by husbands than by strangers. She doesn’t know that women who report domestic violence often receive no help at all.
At church, Christianna receives most of her spiritual instruction from female teachers. She doesn’t know that radio preachers and best-selling authors claim women dishonor God when they teach the Bible. She hasn’t heard of “complementarians” like Wayne Grudum and John MacArthur who say that men and women are not equal before God. She hasn’t heard them dismiss her favorite Bible heroines Deborah and Miriam as aberrations used to shame men.
Christianna isn’t aware that many church denominations are shoving women backward to the days before the light of Christian feminism. She hasn’t heard of Baptist chaplains stripped of their endorsement just for being female. She doesn’t know about the missionaries who lost their funding because they refused to sign a statement of belief that men are above their wives.
Christianna lives in a safe haven where women are respected, honored and given opportunity to succeed. Soon enough she will discover the hazards of being female. She’ll find out that she has to work longer and harder to succeed – and that people of both sexes will despise her when she does.
“Are we there yet?”
“No, baby, we’re not there yet . . .”
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