(Thanks to Colleen of The Feminist Blog for pointing this one out)

The state government in Texas has passed a law requiring equitable coverage for contraception in health insurance plans [NOW]. It joins 15 other states in requiring health insurance providers to not discriminate against contraceptive devices in their prescription benefit plans, and makes another stride in making women’s health care more accessible and affordable. Sadly, a similar law failed in the Alabama state legislature. Oh well: we’ll organize more, we’ll come back stronger, and this time we will win.

According to FindYourSpot, I should be living in Little Rock, Arkansas. I’m not entirely sure how it came up with that, but OK. Its following recommendations of Baltimore, Maryland and Sacramento, California were somewhat more explicable. However, no matter how many quizzes may tell me to, I will never ever ever live in New Orleans. Ever. I think it’s a serious methodological flaw of this quiz that it didn’t have a question to the effect of Do you have any objections to living in a festering, filthy cesspool of a city built on a swamp? Because this is an important factor in eliminating cities such as New Orleans and Houston from consideration.

Jason Mallory, an awesome boy from Fort Worth that I met at Southern Girls Convention, tipped me off to a Left/Progressive journal in Bryan/College Station (home of Texas A&M) that published a good article of his on the rape of men in prison. I was doubly pleased to read the rest of Touchstone and find an article once again blasting the historical and political attempts to whitewash the Confederacy and pretend like the Civil War had nothing much to do with slavery. (It was all about states’ rights! States’ rights to… to… to have states’ rights!)

For further reading:

• GT 5/28/2001 More on pro-Confederate revisionism and the Confederate constitution
• 3/16/2001 Anti-Southern Bigotry and Elitist Yankee Faux Liberals

The Dallas Observer has an interesting profile on Paul Kerr, a gringo leader in the immigrant amnesty movement. Last year he organized the largest street demonstration in Dallas’s history, with about 10,000 rallying to downtown Dallas for immediate amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

Not to pursue my unhealthy obsession with David Horowitz further, but I found a note on IndyMedia about an excellent article on Horowitz and the Myth of the Radical University.

Thanks to conservative author David Horowitz’s recent lecture at the University of Texas, I have new hope for radical political organizing on campus.

Many of us on the faculty with left/progressive values have felt rather isolated on what we all thought was a conservative campus. But it turns out that all this time we’ve been working in a nest of left-wing radicals who have over-run the place, leaving conservatives cowering in silence.

At least that’s Horowitz’s analysis. University faculties around the country, including UT, are skewed far to the left as a result of conservative professors being systematically purged, according to Horowitz, a one-time leftist turned right-winger.

My colleagues and I are hoping Horowitz will help us find where all these radicals are hiding; more company would be nice.

After doing activist work both in a staunchly liberal small liberal arts college in Michigan, and in a big, heavily conservative university in Alabama, I can only say Amen! to someone actually taking the time to point out that, contrary to popular opine, The fact, however, is that the typical American university is dominated by centrist to moderately conservative faculty members and administrators, with steady movement to the right in the past two decades.