Posts Tagged ‘women’
Republicans and Catholic bishops embrace each other in opposing women’s rights
The bishop knows where to send the check…
The Democratic-led Senate is expected to reject as early as Thursday a largely symbolic Republican challenge to a White House rule guaranteeing free birth control for women who work for religiously affiliated employers.
Even Senate defeat of the legislation would allow Republican lawmakers to take a stand in a rancorous election year debate over a policy that is vehemently opposed by social conservatives and Roman Catholic bishops…
The Department of Health and Human Services announced in January that employers including those with religious affiliations — such as universities, charities and hospitals — would have to provide free birth control coverage for women enrolled in their health plans. Church employees are exempt from the rule…
The birth control coverage requirement infuriated Catholic leaders…who think they have a right to overrule civil law in America…
Roy Blunt’s bill would exempt employers from providing health benefits that conflict with “beliefs and moral convictions.” Anyone standing in line to watch Congress explain their “beliefs and moral conviction”?
Democrats including California Senator Barbara Boxer denounced the measure as too broad, saying it could allow potentially any employer to deny additional types of health insurance coverage on moral grounds.
It’s only been about a day since the last time I said this: I realize Christianity may hold the copyright on hypocrisy; but, today’s Republicans – with appropriate aid from the Kool Aid Party – have perfected the process.
Now we get to witness temporary nutball unity between the 14th Century and the 19th Century in an attempt to turn this nation into a theocracy.
Why do Republicans hate women?
This post is a year old. Republicans haven’t gotten better. Their goals have retreated further into darkness and hatred.
Here is a list of misogynist bills introduced by Republicans in the past two weeks showing what they want for women.
1) Rape: Republicans are actually trying to redefine rape to exclude drugging a women and raping her, or getting her drunk and raping her. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven’t the language is still out there.
2) More Rape. A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to “accuser.” But victims of other crimes, like robbery, would remain “victims.” Apparently in Georgia if a women is raped, she isn’t really – is just an annoying accuser. Which means the rapist is not really a criminal.
3) Murder. In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder anyone who injures or threatens a fetus, including a doctor who provides abortion care and the mother. He denies it has anything to do with abortion so I guess it is aimed at makingit OK for a husband or boyfriend to kill his partner if he thinks she might injure the fetus- like in a car accident, or he just doesn’t like her anymore.
4) Starvation. Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids. But payments to corporations to not grow food to keep prices up is still in the budget.
5) Death. In Congress, Republicans have proposed a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life (so she and fetus die.)
Women now a majority of new priests – in the Church of England
More female priests are joining the Church of England than male ones for the first time ever, it can be disclosed as it takes another step towards the introduction of women bishops.
Official figures show that 290 women were ordained in 2010, the most recent year for which figures are available. By contrast, just 273 men entered the priesthood.
The watershed moment comes less than 20 years since the Church first allowed women to be priests, in the face of opposition from Anglo-Catholics and conservative evangelicals who believe that only men can be church leaders…
Sally Barnes, spokesman for the campaign group Women And The Church, said: “The figures are very good news. They show the increasing numbers of women whose vocations are being recognised, accepted and valued by the Church.”
But detailed breakdown of the figures, published in The Church of England Yearbook 2012, shows that most of the new women priests are “self-supporting” rather than having full-time clergy jobs…
The figures on ordination come on the eve of another critical meeting of the Church of England’s governing body, the General Synod.
The week-long gathering in Church House, Westminster, will hear four debates on the draft legislation to introduce women bishops…
Meanwhile new divisions are opening in the Church over whether or not clergy should be able to bless civil partnerships or support full gay marriage.
Anyone send a copy of the memo to the Pope?
Countries making abortions illegal guarantee one thing — higher abortion rates!
Abortion rates are higher in countries where the procedure is illegal and nearly half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe, with the vast majority in developing countries, a new study concludes.
Experts couldn’t say whether more liberal laws led to fewer procedures, but said good access to birth control in those countries resulted in fewer unwanted pregnancies.
The global abortion rate remained virtually unchanged from 2003 to 2008, at about 28 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, a total of about 43.8 million abortions, according to the study. The rate had previously been dropping since 1995.
About 47,000 women died from unsafe abortions in 2008, and another 8.5 million women had serious medical complications. Almost all unsafe abortions were in developing countries, where family planning and contraceptive programs have mostly levelled off.
If the holier-than-thou Kool Aid Party gets its way, we can continue adding numbers of American women to that sum.
Egyptian court bans forced virginity tests by military
An Egyptian court has ordered a halt to forced virginity tests on female detainees in military prisons.
The case…was filed by Samira Ibrahim, a woman who said the army forced her to undergo a virginity test in March after she was arrested during a protest in central Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
Human rights organisations say that there have been many other such tests by the military…
Al Jazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal, reporting from Cairo, said the verdict was cheered by hundreds who had gathered inside the courtroom to hear the ruling read out.
“Today’s verdict to ban any form of virginity test [in military prisons] will be seen by many as vindication for their criticism of the military over the past few months,” our correspondent said…
On January 3, one soldier is to face court martial in the case of the so-called virginity tests, charged with “public indecency and not following orders”…
On March 9, army officers violently cleared Cairo’s Tahrir Square and held at least 18 women in detention. Women said they were beaten, given electric shocks, subjected to strip searches while being photographed by male soldiers, then forced to submit to “virginity tests” and threatened with prostitution charges.
Overdue. But, then – there’s a lot that’s overdue in Egypt. Most of which is just as criminal as this brutal treatment of women.
Recession and more contributes to slowing population growth rate
The population of the United States grew this year at its slowest rate since the 1940s…as the gloomy economy continued to depress births and immigration fell to its lowest level since 1991…
And just maybe a few other factors like reflecting upon opportunity, choices in general?
The population grew by 2.8 million people from April 2010 to July 2011, according to the bureau’s new estimates. The annual increase, about 0.7 percent when calculated for the year that ended in July 2011, was the smallest since 1945, when the population fell by 0.3 percent in the last year of World War II.
“The nation’s overall growth rate is now at its lowest point since before the baby boom,” the Census Bureau director, Robert M. Groves, said in a statement…Underlying the modest growth was an immigration level that was the lowest in 20 years…slowed substantially when the housing market collapsed, and the jobs associated with its boom that were popular among immigrants disappeared…
A lagging birth rate also contributed. Births in the United States declined precipitously during the recession and its aftermath, down by 7.3 percent from 2007 to 2010, according to Kenneth M. Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. There were slightly over four million births in the year that ended in July, the lowest since 1999.
Economic trauma tends to depress births. In the Great Depression, the birth rate fell by a third, Mr. Johnson said. It is unclear whether the current dip means that births are being delayed or that they are foregone, as they were in the Depression, he said.
In a particularly striking measure of economic distress, birth rates among Hispanics, who are concentrated in states hardest hit by the economic downturn, like Florida and Arizona, declined by 17 percent from 2007 to 2010, Mr. Johnson said. That is compared with a 3.8 percent decline for whites and a 6.7 percent decline for blacks. Rates dropped most sharply among young Hispanics, down by 23 percent for women ages 20 to 24 between 2007 and 2010.
Or – one might hope – sufficient education about everything from equal opportunities in a macho culture to the addition of birth control and abortion to a woman’s choices may have sufficiently affected women in the Hispanic population to bring the birth rate more in line with previous immigrant populations – after a generation or two. Certainly, a greater likelihood than Catholic ideology in the Hispanic community reversing what are normal processes among incomers unto the 2nd and 3rd generations of citizenship.
It’s about 70 years since my father’s extended family confronted the parish priest who took the occasion of my grandfather’s funeral to berate him and his brothers and sisters for not being good Catholics – like their father. After all, none of them had more than 2 children – yet they came from a family of 7. The 2nd generation in Anglophone North America had learned about birth control and our priest was pissed!
I doubt if he was any happier when my father waited till the funeral was over and done – and then told the priest to take his church and archaic rules and stick them where the sun don’t shine. And the whole family walked away from that church.
Study debunked that men think about sex every 7 seconds!
Men may think about sex more often than women do, but a new study suggests that men also think about other biological needs, such as eating and sleep, more frequently than women do, as well.
And the research discredits the persistent stereotype that men think about sex every seven seconds, which would amount to more than 8,000 thoughts about sex in 16 waking hours. In the study, the median number of young men’s thought about sex stood at almost 19 times per day. Young women in the study reported a median of nearly 10 thoughts about sex per day.
As a group, the men also thought about food almost 18 times per day and sleep almost 11 times per day, compared to women’s median number of thoughts about eating and sleep, at nearly 15 times and about 8 1/2 times, respectively…
“If you had to know one thing about a person to best predict how often they would be thinking about sex, you’d be better off knowing their emotional orientation toward sexuality, as opposed to knowing whether they were male or female,” said Terri Fisher, professor of psychology at Ohio State University’s Mansfield campus and lead author of the study. “Frequency of thinking about sex is related to variables beyond one’s biological sex…”
Before the thought-tracking began, the participants completed a number of questionnaires. These included a sexual opinion survey to measure a positive or negative emotional orientation toward sexuality (erotophilia vs. erotophobia); a sociosexual orientation inventory measuring attitudes about sex and tracking sexual behavior and levels of desire; a social desirability scale to measure respondents’ tendency to try to appear socially acceptable; and an eating habits questionnaire and sleepiness scale. They also were asked to estimate how many times in an average day that they thought about sleeping, eating and sex…
And when all of those thoughts were taken into account in the statistical analysis, the difference between men and women in their average number of daily thoughts about sex wasn’t considered any larger than the gender differences between thoughts about sleep or thoughts about food.
I joke that I don’t differentiate much between food and sex. Folks always chuckle – for the wrong reason. They think I mean food is as important as sex when what I mean is that sex is as important as food. 
NYC threatens to close bus service that makes women sit in back
New York City authorities said they will shut down a city bus service run by Orthodox Jews if the group doesn’t stop making women sit at the back of the bus.
The Private Transportation Corp, which operates the city’s public B110 bus under a franchise arrangement, has come under criticism following publicity about its practice of making women give up their seats in the front to promote Hasidic customs of gender separation.
New York City’s Department of Transportation spokesman Scott Gastel said the agency’s executive director Anne Koenig has asked the company to respond to the allegations and was waiting to hear back…If such a violation is found, the franchise could be revoked, the DOT said in a statement…
A student reporter at Columbia University in New York published a story about a woman told by other riders to give up her seat in the front. Other news organizations then sent reporters who encountered similar situations…
Cripes. This franchise is 38 years old. No one noticed? No one complained before now?
Sorry; but, I find that hard to believe. Can there really be an overwhelming number of women in Brooklyn who rode that bus line and never noticed anything this backward going on?
Judge rules artist can paint on totally nude women after dark
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
An artist arrested for applying body paint to a nude model in New York’s Times Square will have charges against him dropped if his models strip naked only after dark, according to a court agreement.
Police arrested Andy Golub, 45, in July and charged him with violating public exposure and lewdness laws. He has been painting nude models for about three years.
Golub’s lawyer, Ronald Kuby, argued that New York laws do not prohibit public nudity in the name of art, and a compromise was reached that was the basis of the court ruling. Under the agreement, “he is permitted to paint bare breasts any time, anywhere, but the G-strings have to stay on until daylight goes out,” Kuby said after a hearing in Manhattan criminal court…
Golub, of Nyack, New York, said he likes to paint nude models because their bodies have energy and dynamism that he finds lacking in canvas.
“I feel that when I do live body painting it’s a good thing, a positive thing,” he said.
Charges against Golub will be dropped in six months if he abides by the terms of the agreement and is not arrested again. Charges against Karla Storie, a model from Texas arrested with him, will be dismissed if she too is not arrested again in the next six months.
Golub said he was planning to return to criminal court today and paint a nude model in a park near the courthouse. After the sun sets.
Pic of the Day
Click on photo for many more examples
note: a certain amount of nudity
