official state media for a secessionist republic of one
Politics
For any readers I may have in Michigan: A while ago I ran across the page for Women Outraged by Michigan Bureaucracy (WOMB), an active pro-choice group spearheaded by Flint feminists. They’re doing work around the Michigan state government’s hostility towards abortion access, as well as general feminist organizing. Check them out!
The End of Free is a weblog chronicling the dying of free/ad-supported content and the transition to fee services "and beyond." (Here’s hoping that the beyond includes a good micropayment scheme in the very near future, because if it keeps going the way of subscription services, the prospects are grim.
Over the course of a year, a pastor at an Alabama church sexually exploited a 14-year-old girl who was entrusted to his class for adolescents for sexual abstinence. [LegalVote]. The church was warned repeatedly: first about his use of his position at a former church to gain sexual favors from other women, and then directly confronted with a lewd e-mail that he had sent to the young woman. But they refused to investigate or reconsider his position. When he was finally caught kissing the girl, he was dismissed and has been convicted of statutory rape. Due to their irresponsible refusal to investigate the pastor when they were warned, the mother has sued the church on charges of negligence.
The church, disgustingly, is planning to fight in court and will not take accountability. They claim they have no responsibility for the actions of their employee, even though they were repeatedly warned about his predatory behavior, and then they argue this as a defense: "Anne P. lives with a single mother, and there is some likelihood that the girl was exposed to promiscuity at home that may have prompted her to seek out a voluntary sexual relationship with the youth minister."
Um. What the hell? First of all, this is overt victim-blaming. We have enough child molestors making the bullshit claim that the children "initiated" and asked to be fucked by a grown man. Do we need a church to take up the same bullshit argument on their behalf? Second, it’s absolutely irrelevant. What part of "statutory rape" do they not understand? The pastor’s sexual relationship with the girl was a crime no matter what the situation was, and the church has a responsibility to look into the allegations that he abused his position in the church for sexual favors. The insults they are hurling against the girl and her mother are simply prejudicial, irrelevant bullshit.
LegalVote is asking for your opinion on the case. I’ve added my own comments below.
The D. Church’s behavior was clearly irresponsible and horrendously negligent. As an institution trusted with the care of children the Church MUST take every effort to investigate the background of members who would be spending time with children in order to protect its children’s safety. Yet rather than taking careful responsibility, D. Church has a history of employing sexually manipulative and predatory men in this position–while Rev. S. did not commit the kind of grave sexual abuse that Rev. D. did, he clearly saw his position as a safe place from which to try to manipulate women into sexual encounters.
D. Church was warned about Rev. D’s past sexually manipulative behavior. Sexual relationships with adult women certainly aren’t the same as statutory rape of a 14 year old young woman, but it does reveal a history of abusing his situation to manipulate women into sexual encounters. Even worse, they were confronted with direct evidence that he was sexually exploiting Anne P. Yet they did not even investigate the charges. I understand that they cannot simply take action without an investigation, but to not even begin the investigation is unconscionable.
Furthermore, I was disgusted to see what D. Church considers to be a defense: “Anne P. lives with a single mother, and there is some likelihood that the girl was exposed to promiscuity at home that may have prompted her to seek out a voluntary sexual relationship with the youth minister.” This is nothing more but the same old revolting blaming of the victim that has happened over and over again in sexual abuse cases. What part of "statutory rape" does D. Church not understand? It is Anne P.’s fault that Rev. D. abused his position of trust and power to manipulate and sexually exploit her, and the disgusting suggestion that D. Church is any less accountable because they think she might have been "asking for it" is revolting.
Furthermore, the mother’s failure to act may be reason for pursuing a claim of negligent child endangerment against the mother… but it is not any reason to absolve D. Church of its accountability for ignoring the sexually predatory behavior of its trusted employees.
D. Church should take accountability for its failure to act and the damage that has inflicted on one young woman. If they attempt to fight this in court, particularly on the basis of their revolting victim-blaming arguments, they will only further continue their pattern of revolting negligence and refusal to take accountability.
(link provided courtesy of one angry girl)
Domestic Violence: endorsed by dipshit porn stars
The Klan: endorsed by dipshit frat boys
The day after I had a perfectly lovely evening watching the vigilante-feminist classic Girls Town, and on what had been a perfectly good morning of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, I had my day ruined by this. It is such a fucking insult to the simple decency and intelligence of humankind that I can barely convince myself that it is real and not some kind of ill-conceived feminist parody. James Doolin of Dallas has set up Wife-Beaters.com T-shirts, an online catalogue selling white undershirts (often called wifebeaters
) with the words Wife Beater
across the breast of the shirt. The festive website features a posed background image of a man spanking a woman in his wife beater
shirt, Prodigy’s song Smack My Bitch Up
blaring in the background, a Wife Beater Hall of Fame
including celebrity batterers, rapists, and murderers such as Ike Turner, Mike Tyson, John Wayne Bobbit, and O.J. Simpson. I wish to God I were making this up—as added jokes
Doolin offers a Lil’ Beater
shirt for infants, and offers a special rewarding convicted batterers: he will send a second shirt at half price if you enclose proof of a domestic violence offense you committed.
Look, I know this dipshit is trying to be provocative. I know that he’s exploiting controversy to sell his dumb-assed product. But what the fuck is wrong with him that he could possibly even begin to think this is remotely amusing? Listen, in the United States there are three times more shelters for animals than there are for battered women. One out of every four women will suffer partner violence in her lifetime. The overwhelming majority of murders, stalkings, rapes, assaults, and all other forms of violence against women are committed by their partners or spouses. I have seen domestic violence inflicted on too many people I love—a friend’s sister was sent to the emergency room by her stepfather beating the shit out of her; in my own family, a cousin and aunt of mine were viciously beaten by a motherfucker who thought wife beating
was not a big deal. And Doolin thinks that this is all hy-larious? Look, bucko, not everything is a joke. This shit has a very real, blood-soaked, meaning. And I wish I had some words other than inarticulate swearing to express how horrendous, how enraging this is. I’m sure it’s really fucking funny to you, Doolin. We’ll see how funny it is when it’s someone you love in the emergency room.
Take action! Write James Doolin at his oh-so-droll e-mail address bruised@wife-beaters.com and let him know exactly what you think of him. Then, go to StopFamilyViolence for what you can do to help stop domestic violence. Finally, if you have any money, please consider contributing to the Alabama Coalition Against Domestic Violence or your own state’s chapter of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence so that they can continue to do their life-saving work in providing safehouses for battered women.
The national board of Beta Theta Pi has announced that it will be suspending and indefinitely dissolving its Auburn chapter [link courtesy of the ever-awesome Max] in response to the fracas over racist hate imagery at the local chapter’s Halloween party. Delta Sigma Phi’s Auburn chapter remains under investigation for possible further action by their national board. In addition, individual members and both chapters may face disciplinary proceedings by the University for discriminatory harassment and violation of alcohol policies.
I should say this. I have been really sharply rhetorical so far in my stories and discussions of this most recent incident. I think the callous, racist cruelty and the horrifying nature of the images demands it. But I do want to say that I am not blind to the human element of this whole event, and it saddens me that many young men’s lives may be permanently knocked back, as a result of what they surely thought of not as racism or any kind of conscious malice, but just a lark, a stupid good time.
I don’t just say this because I know people in the Auburn fraternity system who are not the sloped-brow, amoral, reactionary meatheads that the Greeks’ history on Auburn’s campus might lead you to believe they would have to be–although this is definitely true; I have friends in the fraternity system who neither have nor want any part of that mindset. I also say it because I really regret that the meatheads that were directly involved will probably never understand just what they did wrong. They will understand that they did some dumb things that got them caught. And they may look back and grumble at the P.C. Thought Police Bastards who ruined their college career. But will they ever understand that there really was a very deep cut of wilful cruelty in what they did? They didn’t put on those costumes in order to be malicious racists (although I believe that there was certainly some overt malice involved). They put them on to have a roguish bit of fun, that old irreverant frat boy panache. Meaningless images of MTV gangstas and some documentary on the Klan they saw in school or on the History channel–trivial, ultimately, like the whole flux of images across our consciousness. Anything can be funny, right? If you don’t really go out and attack Black people, the images don’t mean anything, do they?
But words, images, costumes, historical scripts do mean something; they mean a hell of a lot. The images and rituals, the signs of white supremacist brutality in this country have a meaning, a meaning they are rooted to by centuries of blood and chains. But we live in an age in which the detached image and the spectacle is omnipresent, and yet the prevailing laid-back liberal ideology tells us that we have no reason to care, indeed, that if we do care it’s a sign of pretentiousness, humorlessness, a general need to lighten the hell up. And it’s slowly, surely killing our conscience, eating away at the possibility of being moral agents. Which has what to do with frat boys in Klan robes? I really fear that this soul-killing laid-back liberalism, the impetus behind the costumes in the first place, will also cripple the boys at Beta and Delta Sig from ever understanding what they did wrong, the cutting cruelty that they were willing to ignore in order to have a laugh. Just as much as their hate party outrages me against them, what it means also saddens me for them.
Nevertheless, I don’t hesitate to say that they must receive the harshest sanctions from the University, and I maintain that the fraternity system as a whole must be re-examined and challenged for the rather disgusting and reactionary culture that it helps maintain. I firmly believe that every time a frat house is bulldozed, an angel gets its wings.