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Posts filed under Feminism

Pro-Life Terrorism

Incompetent pro-life terrorism, to be specific.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — An eyewitness tells fire authorities about two hooded persons who broke a window and threw a gas can into an abortion clicnic that caught fire Thursday night.

Local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies are investigating a fire at the office of Curtis Boyd, M.D., an abortion provider in Albuquerque.

The fire occurred at Dr. Boyd’s clinic at 801 Encino Place near the University of New Mexico hospital around 11:30 p.m. Thursday.

Albuquerque Fire Department said a witness saw two persons in hooded jackets break a window on the west side of the clinic. The witness called out to them. The two hooded persons then moved to another window on the building’s south side and threw a gas can into the building and a small fire started at that point. The two persons drove away in a square black van.

After several hours of investigating, AFD confirmed that the witness saw an arson in progress. AFD is working closely with ATF and FBI on this case.

According to a statement from the National Abortion Federation, there have been seven murders, 17 attempted murders, 41 bombings, 100 butyric acid attacks, 656 anthrax threats, and 175 arsons against abortion providers since 1977, including Thursday’s Albuquerque incident.

The clinic incurred severe fire damage to one room and smoke damage throughout, but crews say the building is not a total loss. No one was inside at the time. Staff at the clinic is still answering the phone and seeing patients at another undisclosed location.

— KOAT Albequerque (2007-12-07): Eyewitness Accounts Confirm Arson In Abortion Clinic Fire

Meanwhile, peaceful pro-lifers who thank God that nobody was injured (why? aren’t they mass murderers?) will not speculate on why the building was damaged by fire, but they will lament that the fire has in no way diminished Boyd’s enthusiasm for the practice.

The abortion rights movement is in a more precarious position than we sometimes realize. We have spent too long defending an ever-shrinking number of clinics against the repeated harassment, blockades and guerrilla violence of antis. What we desperately need is a forward strategy of building more clinics, along the lines of the courageous efforts to open a new abortion clinic in Aurora, Illinois. The only way to win against this kind of opposition is to give them so many targets that it won’t make much of a difference to lose any given one.

(Via Jill @ feminste 2007-12-10: More Anti-Choice Terrorism.)

Over My Shoulder #38: Yael Tamir, “Siding with the Underdogs” in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

Here’s the rules:

  1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

  2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

  3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from Yael Tamir’s essay, Siding with the Underdogs, in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, an anthology based on the title essay by Susan Moller Okin.

Why do group rights serve best the interests of those members of society who are powerful and conservative? To begin with, the notion of group rights as it is often used in the current debate presupposes that the group is a unified agent. Rights are bestowed upon the group in order to preserve its tradition and defend its interests. Identifying the tradition and the interests of the group becomes a precondition for realizing these rights. Consequently, internal schisms and disagreements are perceived as a threat to the ability of the group to protect its rights. Group leaders are therefore motivated to foster unanimity, or at least an appearance of unanimity, even at the cost of internal oppression.

Attempts to achieve unanimity are particularly dangerous in those communities which lack formal, democratic decision-making processes. Under such circumstances it is the elderly of the tribe, members of councils of sages, who determine the groups’ norms and interests. Members of such bodies are commonly men, who endorse a rather orthodox point of view. Social norms and institutions place these individuals within a dominant position, and group rights consolidate this position even further. Granting nondemocratic communities group rights thus amounts to siding with the privileged and the powerful against those who are powerless, oppressed, and marginalized, with the traditionalists (often even the reactionary) against the nonconformists, the reformers, and the dissenters.

The conservative nature of group rights is reinforced by the justifications adduced in their defense. The group is granted rights in order to preserve its culture, language, tradition. These are described, by most defenders of group rights, in nostalgic, nonrealistic terms. They are depicted as authentic, unique, even natural. Those who attempt to consolidate the conservative way of doing things are therefore portrayed as loyal defenders of the group, those who strive for social transformation and cultural reformers are perceived as agents of assimilation who betray the group and its tradition. The former are depicted as virtuous individuals who dedicate themselves to the common good; the latter are suspected of being motivated by narrow self-interest–of giving priority to short-term preferences for personal comfort and prosperity over long-term commitments to the welfare of the community.

Agents of social and cultural change are portrayed as feeble-minded individuals who are tempted by the material affluence of the surrounding society, as those who sell their soul to an external devil in exchange for some glittering beads. It therefore seems legitimate to criticize, scorn, even persecute them. This is the fate of Reform Jews who are often portrayed by the Orthodox establishment as irresponsible, weak-minded, pleasure-seeking individuals who wish to escape the burden of Judaism in order to adopt a less demanding lifestyle. Reform Jews, Orthodox argue, are swayed by the external (and superficial) beauty of Christian architecture and ceremonies. The reforms they offer are seen as grounded in mimicry, as an attempt to be like the Gentiles rather than as a call to reevaluate Judaism and offer ways in which it can answer the needs and challenges of modernity. Reform Judaism is therefore portrayed as a threat to the survival of Judaism rather than as an attempt to save it.

The use of the term survival in the context of the debate over group rights is common, yet alarming. It misdescribes what is at stake, intensifying the cost of change and fostering the belief that any violation of social and religious norms, any reform of traditional institutions and the group’s customary ways of life, endangers its existence and must therefore be rejected.

Moreover, it intentionally obscures the distinction between two kinds of communal destruction: the first results from external pressures exhorted by nonmembers; the second, from the desire of members of the community. It is clear why we ought to protect a community and its members in cases of the first kind, but should we protect a community also against the preferences of its own members? Is it just, or desirable, to allow those who aspire to preserve the communal tradition–often members of the dominant and privileged elite–to force others who have grown indifferent or even hostile to this tradition to adhere to that tradition?

Obviously, defenders of group rights who use the term survival to denote cultural continuity tend to give priority to this end over and above individual rights. Charles Taylor’s discussion of the Canadian case demonstrates this order of priorities: It is axiomatic for the Quebec government that the survival and flourishing of French culture in Quebec is a good …. It is not just a matter of having the French language available for those who might choose it …. Policies aimed at survival actively seek to create members of the community, for instance, in their assuring that future generations continue to identify as French speakers.

It should be clear by now that in the Canadian case, as well as in the debate between Orthodox and Reform Judaism, the term survival refers not to the actual survival of the community or its members but to the survival of the traditional way of life. It is used to justify the taking of extreme measures, including disregard for individual rights and forceful suspension of internal criticism, for the sake of preventing change. But is there a reason to prevent a particular way of life from undergoing change? Should one protect a community against cultural revisions or reforms, even radical ones, if these are accepted by its members? The answer to the above question depends on the motivations one may have for protecting cultures or traditions.

An approach that is grounded in the right of individuals to pursue their lives the way they see fit must support individuals who wish to reform their tradition and change their lifestyle as much as it ought to support individuals who wish to retain their traditional way of life. It must be attentive to the kind of life plans individuals adopt and pursue, without prejuding in favor of conservative options. It should therefore defend individuals against pressures to conform and protect their choices to reform their tradition or even exit the community altogether. The opposite is true for an approach that is motivated by the desire to defend endangered cultures. Such an approach must favor conservative forces over reformist ones, even at the price of harming some individual interests. Obviously multiculturalism that is grounded in the former approach is friendly to feminism, while that which is grounded in the latter is not.

–Yael Tamir (1999), Siding with the Underdogs, in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

Lazy linking on liberatory learning

Three good recent articles on learning and unschooling in the home:

  • David Friedman (2007-12-04): Home Unschooling: Theory

    Our approach starts with the fact that I went to a good private school, my wife to a good suburban public school, and both of us remember being bored most of the time; while we learned some things in school, large parts of our education occurred elsewhere, from books, parents, friends, projects. It continues with some observations about the standard model of K-12 schooling, public and private:

    1. That model implicitly assumes that, out of the enormous body of human knowledge, there is some subset that everyone should study and that is large enough to fill most of thirteen years of schooling. That assumption is clearly false. Being able to read and do arithmetic is important for almost everyone. Beyond that, it is hard to think of any particular subject which there is a good reason for everyone to study, easy to think of many subjects outside the standard curriculum which there are good reasons for some people to study.

    2. It implicitly assumes that the main way in which one should learn is by having someone else tell you what you are going to study this week, what you should learn about it, and your then doing so.

      ….

    3. A related assumption is that you learn about a subject by having someone else decide what is true and then feed it to you. That is a very dangerous policy in the real world and not entirely safe even in school–many of us remember examples of false information presented to us by teachers or textbooks as true. A better policy is to go out looking for information and assembling it yourself.

  • David Friedman (2007-12-04): Home Unschooling: Practice

    When our daughter was about ten there was a class, lasting somewhat over a year, in math. It started assuming the students knew nothing, ended with the early stages of algebra. That is pretty much all of the formal instruction either of them had. In addition, we required them to learn the multiplication tables, which are useful to know but boring to learn. That, I think, was the closest thing to compulsory learning in their education.

    How did they get educated? They both read a lot, and although some of the books they read were children’s books, pretty early they were also reading books intended for adults. … But the largest part of their education, after reading, is probably conversation. We talk at meals. We talk when putting one or the other of them to bed. …

    What is the result? Our daughter will enter college knowing much more about economics, evolutionary biology, music, renaissance dance, and how to write than most of her fellow students, probably less about physics, biology, world history, except where it intersects historical novels she has read or subjects that interest her. She will know much more than most of them about how to educate herself. And why.

  • Heart @ Women’s Space/The Margins (2007-12-05): Raised in the Revolution: Radical Women Homeschooling Boys

    There are quite a number of youngsters being homeschooled in progressive families, including by radical feminists and lesbian feminists. I have been homeschooling for 24 years now; my two youngest, Sol, 12, and Maggie, 9, are still being homeschooled and have never gone to a regular school. It's an interesting thing, raising children away from the sexism, racism, classism, lesbophobia, and other destructively socializing influences of school kids and school hierarchies of all kinds, with a commitment to seeing to it that your children spend time with with others who are being raised as they are. V's son, shown in the video, goes to Brother Sun camp at the Festival every year, a camp for boys ages 5-10 years. My daughter, Maggie, goes to Gaia girls each August. In settings like this, children raised in the revolution find encouragement and support.

    V has graciously given her permission for the posting of this video. I will allow comments but want to remind everyone that V is a real person to me, a member of a women's community I value. I'd ask you to keep that in mind in commenting. V's son, Parker, is giving a report about his friend, Alix Olson, also a member of the Michfest community. Watch it all the way through the different "takes" — I think you'll enjoy it!

    None of us involved really knows what the results of this quiet revolution we have undertaken will be. But, that is the way with all revolutions– they take on lives of their own which are outside of any individual's immediate control. I do find reason to feel hopeful about the potential for change in the world which resides in this particular revolution, for so many reasons. I am about to blog its dark side, as I have before, but before I do, I wanted to post this.

Culture of Life

There are still plenty of shopping days left to buy the perfect Happy birthday, Jesus! gift for all the fetus-guerrilla-warfare enthusiasts (or the neo-surrealists) in your family:

(Via Jessica @ feministing 2007-12-05.)

Day of Remembrance

Wear a white ribbon.

Today is the 12th day of 2007’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. It is also the anniversary of the Montreal massacre. On 6 December 1989, 18 years ago today, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. He murdered them because they were women. He stormed an engineering classroom carrying a gun, then he ordered the men to leave. He opened fire on the women, screaming I hate feminists as he shot. Then he moved through the building, still shooting, always at women, killing a total of 14 women and injuring 8 before he ended the terror by shooting himself.

6 December is a day of remembrance for the women who were killed. They were:

  • Geneviève Bergeron, aged 21
  • Hélène Colgan, 23
  • Nathalie Croteau, 23
  • Barbara Daigneault, 22
  • Anne-Marie Edward, 21
  • Maud Haviernick, 29
  • Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31
  • Maryse Leclair, 23
  • Annie St.-Arneault, 23
  • Michèle Richard, 21
  • Maryse Laganière, 25
  • Anne-Marie Lemay, 22
  • Sonia Pelletier, 28; and
  • Annie Turcotte, aged 21

GT 2004-12-06: The Montreal Massacre:

The Montreal Massacre was horrifying and shocking. But we also have to remember that it’s less unusual than we all think. Yes, it’s a terrible freak event that some madman massacred women he had never even met because of his sociopathic hatred. But every day women are raped, beaten, and killed by men–and it’s usually not by strangers, but by men they know and thought they could trust. They are attacked just because they are women–because the men who assault them believe that they have the right to control women’s lives and their sexual choices, and to hurt them or force them if they don’t agree. By conservative estimates, one out of every four women is raped or beaten by an intimate partner sometime in her life. Take a moment to think about that. How much it is. What it means for the women who are attacked. What it means for all women who live in the shadow of that threat.

Today is a day to remember fourteen innocent women who died at the hands of a self-conscious gender terrorist. Like most days of remembrance, it should also be a day of action. I mean practical action.. And I mean radical action. I mean standing up and taking concrete steps toward the end to violence against women in all of its forms. Without excuses. Without exceptions. Without limits. And without apologies.

I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent.

— Andrea Dworkin (1983), I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape

The same is true of every form of everyday gender terrorism: stalking, beating, confinement, forced labor, rape, murder. How could we face Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Maria Klucznik, Maryse Leclair, Annie St.-Arneault, Michèle Richard, Maryse Laganière, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, and Annie Turcotte, and tell them we did anything less?

Take some time to keep the 14 women who were killed in the Montreal massacre in your thoughts. If there is a vigil today in your community (1, 2), attend it. Speak out in memory for the women who died, and against the pervasive regime of systematic male violence against women. If you are a member of other movements (as many of my readers are members of the libertarian, anarchist, or anti-authoritarian Left movements), use today to bring a strong feminist voice to your comrades in those movements, to speak out on how any comprehensive human liberation must include the end of systematic violence against women. If you don’t know enough to speak out, make an effort today to learn more (1, 2, 3, 4). Make a contribution to your local battered women’s shelter. Find a local group that works to end domestic violence or rape or any other form of violence against women, and ask them what you can do as a volunteer or as a supporter to help them in their efforts. Don’t worry about what’s radical or reformist; think about what kind of concrete action can concretely undermine violence against women, starting today.

Feminists should remember that while we often don’t take ourselves very seriously, the men around us often do. I think that the way we can honor these women who were executed, for crimes that they may or may not have committed–which is to say, for political crimes–is to commit every crime for which they were executed, crimes against male supremacy, crimes against the right to rape, crimes against the male ownership of women, crimes against the male monopoly of public space and public discourse. We have to stop men from hurting women in everyday life, in ordinary life, in the home, in the bed, in the street, and in the engineering school. We have to take public power away from men whether they like it or not and no matter what they do. If we have to fight back with arms, then we have to fight back with arms. One way or another we have to disarm men. We have to be the women who stand between men and the women they want to hurt. We have to end the impunity of men, which is what they have, for hurting women in all the ways they systematically do hurt us.

–Andrea Dworkin (1990): Mass Murder in Montreal, Life and Death, 105–114.

As Jennifer Barrigar writes:

Every year I make a point of explaining that I’m pointing the finger at a sexist patriarchal misogynist society rather than individual men. This year I choose not to do that. The time for assigning blame is so far in the past (if indeed there ever was such a time), and that conversation takes us nowhere. This is the time for action, for change. Remember Parliament’s 1991 enactment of the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women — the glorious moment when every single womyn in the House stood together and claimed this Day of Remembrance. Remember what we can and do accomplish — all of us — when we work together. It is time to demand change, and to act on that demand. Let’s break the cycle of violence, and let’s do it now.

Remember. Mourn. Act.

Elsewhere:

Further reading:

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