official state media for a secessionist republic of one
Feminism
The Equal Rights Amendment has been re-Introduced in Congress. Rock on. Here’s hoping that (1) it actually gets through this time, (2) it doesn’t paralyze NOW into a one-issue group for the next several years, and (3) Phyllis Schlafly stays in her cave for the duration. The ACLU‘s heavy-handed self-congratulations patting itself on the back over its feminist record is rather hypocritical, but that is another post entirely….
While trying to find a webbed version of FAIR‘s excellent expose of the Boston Globe’s hypocrisy on the David Horowitz saga (they blasted student editors for censoring
Horowitz–a feat that is, in fact, impossible, as I have remarked before … and then they themselves refused an ad from an environmental group which criticized Staples), I accidentally stumbled across a great essay of FAIR‘s Women’s Desk back from 1993, Erasing Rape: Media Hype an Attack on Sexual-Assault Research. It’s a skillful refutation of Katie Roiphe’s hatchet job on Mary Koss’s research on acquaintence rape… nothing much new for those of us who have kept track of the research on sexual violence for a while, but definitely a good summary of the criticisms Roiphe (and nearly everyone else who objects to the Koss research) uses, and the reasons why these criticisms are full of it.
Good articles on feminist topics on Salon are few and far between, but this one was a really excellent analysis of some of the dynamics of the erosion of support for abortion rights, and how both the Clinton administration’s feel-good liberalism, and generational politics within big repro rights groups like NOW and NARAL have helped shut young women (and boys) out of pro-choice organizing and fighting for the pro-choice message.
On the other hand, the Feminist Majority Foundation has done some very interesting work on the more specific dynamics of this change: support for legalized abortion (as opposed to taking up politicized labels like pro-choice
) has been making slow but steady progress over the past few decades, but support for anti-choice restrictions on abortions have also been growing in popularity. Not too surprising given the intense organizing that the anti-abortion Right has been putting into the chipping away
tactics to limit access to abortion as much as possible.
More for the In a Stunning Development
file: an internal audit commissioned by Chief Charles Ramsey, it has been found that 10% of the officers on the D.C. police force have sent e-mail containing hate slurs, including ethnic and racial slurs, sexually inappropriate content and offensive comments about homosexuals.
Some of the e-mails also included content about illegal drug use by officers, sexual activity on the job, and evidence of racial profiling. Malcolm X once said that white hatemongers had traded in the hoods and sheets — well, some of them have traded in the hoods and sheets — and taken up blue uniforms. The sad thing is how often the news continues to prove him right.