U.S. eyes proposal to draft women, raise cut off age to 34

WASHINGTON – The chief of the U.S. Selective Service System has proposed registering women for the military draft and requiring that young Americans regularly inform the government about whether they have training in niche specialties needed in the armed services.

The proposal, which the agency’s acting director Lewis Brodsky presented to senior Pentagon officials just before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, also seeks to extend the age of draft registration to 34, up from 25.

Please note that this would not only keep my younger brother Gary eligible for the draft, but make my sister Stacy and my brother Scott eligible as well. Let’s all keep this in mind when voting tomorrow.

Continue ReadingU.S. eyes proposal to draft women, raise cut off age to 34

Texas Pharmacist Refuses Pill for Rape Victim

From the Washington Post:

DENTON, Texas – About 40 people gathered outside an Eckerd pharmacy Monday, protesting what they said was a decision to deny a rape victim a prescription for the morning-after pill.

A spokesman for the Florida-based company confirmed that Eckerd has taken disciplinary action in response to an incident at the store.

“Apparently there was a request for a prescription to be filled and the prescription was denied based on a moral or ethical decision made by the pharmacist, and that’s not in accordance with our corporate policy,” said Joan Gallagher, vice president of communications for Largo, Fla.-based Eckerd Corp.

Needless to say, having been in the position of this rape victim at one time in my life, something like this just terrifies me.

Continue ReadingTexas Pharmacist Refuses Pill for Rape Victim

Nutjobs write to Judge in Kobe Bryant Case

The Smoking Gun: The People Speak: Letters To Kobe Judge

AUGUST 22–Everyone seems to have an opinion about the Kobe Bryant matter–and some people have decided to share theirs with the Colorado judge presiding over the NBA star’s case. Below you’ll find several kooky letters sent to Eagle County District Court Judge Frederick Gannett. TSG’s favorite is a missive from a Texas man pleading for the judge’s autograph–we’re guessing that’ll leave him just two clerks and a bailiff short of a complete set. (5 pages)

I’m so frightened at some of the ideas floating around in people’s heads. But it doesn’t surprise me, I guess. Rape is the only crime in this country where the victim is put on trial instead of the perpetrator. Imagine if you got mugged downtown, and during the trial for your mugger, you had to get up on the stand and explain why you were walking on that street at that time.

Continue ReadingNutjobs write to Judge in Kobe Bryant Case

The Magdalene Sisters Documentary

I wrote a few months back about the Magdelene Laundries – In Mid-20th Century Ireland (until the last one closed in 1996), the Catholic Church ran commercial laundries, run by nuns, that were essentially prisons for wayward girls, who were deposited there by their families when they became pregnant, got in trouble or otherwise upset society.

The story of these prisons is now being told in a British documentary, Sex in a Cold Climate by Steven Humphries, and was then made into an award-winning (but denounced by the Catholic Church, big surprise) movie, The Magdalene Sisters by Peter Mullens, which is currently playing in the United States. I happened to run across an interesting article about the movie in Slate, and it occurred to me that, had I been born a few years earlier and in the wrong country, I would have been one of those girls.

Continue ReadingThe Magdalene Sisters Documentary

King of Swaziland: Women don’t wear pants in Swaziland

The King of Swaziland
The King of Swaziland

The King of Swaziland blames women wearing pants for everything.

This fucker is the same age as I am. Mswati III (born Makhosetive; 19 April 1968) is the king (Swazi: Ngwenyama, Ingwenyama yemaSwati) of Eswatini and head of the Swazi royal family. Look at this fucker.

Swazi king blames trousers for all world’s ills
MBABANE – Swaziland’s absolute monarch has singled out women wearing trousers as the cause of the world’s ills in a state radio sermon that also condemned human rights as an “abomination before God”.

The Times of Swaziland reported that the monarch, who reigns supreme in the landlocked country run by palace appointees and where opposition parties are banned, went on to criticise the human rights movement.

“What rights? God created people, and He gave them their roles in society. You cannot change what God has created. This is an abomination before God,” the king told an audience of conservative church leaders.

Women on the streets of capital Mbabane were not impressed.

“The king says I am the cause of the world’s problems because of my outfit.

Never mind terrorism, government corruption, poverty and disease, it’s me and my pants.

I reject that,” said Thob’sile Dlamini.

Mswati is Africa’s last absolute monarch.

He is currently married to nine wives, with a wedding pending for wife number 10, and has chosen an additional fiancee after reviewing videos of topless maidens performing a traditional Reed Dance ceremony. – Nampa-Reuters

This is not the first time Swaziland’s leaders have made these sorts of statements. Quote from the Prime Minister from UPI in 1984:

Women, don’t wear pants in Swaziland
MBABANE, Swaziland — Swaziland, one of Africa’s most traditional and conservative nations, has urged women to wear modest clothing and know their place in society.

Prime Minister Prince Bhekimpi Dlamini, addressing Parliament Tuesday, called for the banning of see-through blouses, mini skirts and women’s trousers.

He also took a swipe at Women’s Liberation as the work of extremists.

‘Women who have such clothing should throw them away and buy decent clothing to wear in public,’ Bhekimpi said. ‘Such clothing is unacceptable to the Swazi nation.

‘Although Swaziland wants its women to progress in all sectors of institutional life, they must respect their place as women.’

Informed sources in Mbabane said there was deep resentment at the prime minister’s remarks among young Swazi women who favor jeans rather than traditional tribal clothes.

‘But nobody has come out openly to criticize the government. It’s a heavy issue here,’ one source said.

Under the late King Sobhuza II, who died in 1982, Swaziland cautiously adopted some facets of Western life while honoring the tribal traditions of one of Africa’s oldest kingdoms.

If Swaziland introduces legislation outlawing revealing and Western clothes, it will be following the example of Malawi where a Victorian moral code inculcated by President-for-life Hastings Banda frowns on mini skirts, jeans and men with long hair.

2022-03-12 Update:

This mother fucker is still in charge of their country.

Continue ReadingKing of Swaziland: Women don’t wear pants in Swaziland

Feminism 201: The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), affirming the equal application of the U.S. Constitution to both females and males, is still not a part of the U. S. Constitution. The ERA has been ratified by 35 of the necessary 38 states. When three more states vote yes, the ERA might become the 28th Amendment.

The ERA was written in 1923 by Alice Paul, suffragist leader and founder of the National Woman’s Party.” She and the NWP considered the ERA to be the next necessary step after the 19th Amendment (Woman Suffrage) in guaranteeing “equal justice under law” to all citizens.”

The ERA was introduced into every session of Congress between 1923 and 1972, when it was passed and sent to the states for ratification. The seven-year time limit in the ERA’s proposing clause was extended by Congress to June 30, 1982, but at the deadline, the ERA had been ratified by 35 states , leaving it three states short of the 38 required for ratification. It has been reintroduced into every Congress since that time.

The 15 states that have not ratified the ERA are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.

Alice Paul

Continue ReadingFeminism 201: The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

The Magdalene Laundries and the Catholic Church

The Catholic Church has a lot more to answer for than abuse of altar boys. For years the Catholic Church in Ireland enslaved young women in “Magdalene laundries” run by convents, where they were unpaid prisoners forced to work their entire lives for the Church. The last of these laundries closed in 1996.

Ireland’s Dirty Laundry
Wounds Still Fresh For Thousands of Women Enslaved by the Catholic Church
By Hilary Brown and Matt McGarry

C O R K, Ireland, Jan. 26
— A sudden spate of TV exposés, docudramas and a major motion picture have brought to light one of the most shocking episodes in the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland — the existence of the now-notorious “Magdalene laundries,” a sanctified form of slavery.

Operated by the Sisters of the Magdalene Order, the laundries were virtual slave labor camps for generations of young girls thought to be unfit to live in Irish society.

Girls who had become pregnant, even from rape, girls who were illegitimate, or orphaned, or just plain simple-minded, girls who were too pretty and therefore in “moral danger” all ran the risk of being locked up and put to work, without pay, in profit-making, convent laundries, to “wash away their sins.”

They were completely cut off from their families, and many lost touch with them forever.

Stripped of their identities, the girls were given numbers instead of names. They were forbidden to speak, except to pray. If they broke any rule or tried to escape, the nuns beat them over the head with heavy iron keys, put them into solitary confinement or shipped them off to a mental hospital.

Over a period of 150 years, an estimated 30,000 women were forced into this brutal penance, carried out in secret, behind high convent walls.

Towards the end of the 20th century, the laundries began to close, as the power of the Church in Ireland diminished and as social attitudes became less puritanical. Incredibly, the last Magdalene laundry to shut down was in 1996.

‘We Were the Living Dead’

Mary Norris, 69, was committed to a convent laundry in Cork for two years. An articulate, intelligent woman, she was transferred from an orphanage at age 15 because she was “disobedient.” Her number was 30.

On one occasion, she said, the nuns actually ordered the girls to pray for those held in Soviet prison camps, a bitter irony, as she considers the convent laundries “an Irish gulag.”

Though it was clearly very painful for her, she took us around the convent — now abandoned — where she had suffered so much.

“In the winter, it was freezing cold, and in the summer, it was like the desert, it was so hot with the steam,” she said. “We were the living dead. We weren’t treated as human beings, as individuals. We were just part of the workforce. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Guilt by Illegitimacy

Sadie Williams, 64, spent a total of four years in two different convent laundries. She was 14 when she was virtually kidnapped by two women who had determined that she was “in moral danger.” Williams liked to take a walk in the evenings, after working all day at a bed and breakfast in Dublin. She said the women considered her much too attractive to stay out of trouble.

She was only 14 when she ended up in a convent laundry outside town as “Number 100,” and locked into a cell each night. She says she almost never saw daylight.

“Oh, it was dreadful,” she said. “I cried and cried all the time, and kept asking why, why wasn’t I getting out. And I would write begging letters to my mother. When I finally got out, she was already dead and buried three years. But I was never told, even though I was writing, still writing letters to her.”

She has since learned that the nuns stopped all her mail. Her mother wasn’t married, so Sadie was considered to be guilty of the sin of illegitimacy.

No Apology

There have been no direct reparations from the Irish Catholic Church to the tens of thousands of women it used as slave labor. Nor has there been a formal apology. It’s not even known how many victims of the Magdalene laundries are still alive: they are not organized, and many don’t want to talk about this terrible part of their past.

Very few Churchmen in Ireland will comment on the scandal. An exception is Willie Walsh, the Bishop of Killaloe. Over a cup of tea in his residence, he said that it is “a source of pain and shame.”

“These girls were rejected by society, and the Church in some way thought it was giving refuge to these girls,” he says. “I suppose … the Magdalene laundries was in some instances a form of slavery.”

The Rev. Patrick O’Donovan is more outspoken.

“It’s an appalling scandal,” he says. “You could compare them to concentration camps. … The nuns thought they were doing good. … They didn’t realize the damage they were doing.”

Mary Norris has campaigned to have a simple memorial built in the convent where she was held. Thirty names are engraved on a simple headstone; dating from 1876 to 1973. Some women spent their entire lives in these institutions. Having been cut off from their families, they had nowhere to go.

Norris says she no longer hates the nuns who oppressed her. “If I hated them,” she says, “they’d still be winning. They’d still have control over me.”

Continue ReadingThe Magdalene Laundries and the Catholic Church

Catholic Priests Abused Women, Too

According to a Salon article [Devout and defiled: While male victims of predatory priests dominate the headlines, abused girls and women suffer in silence], statistics show that half of the victims of sexual abuse at the hands of priests are women; something I’ve been saying all along. Which means that the the sex abuse scandal with the church was not the fault of gay people, as the Catholic Church claims, but the fault of the Church itself, who kept secret all the abuse for so many years.

Abuse survivors, along with their attorneys and psychologists, say that sexism and social conditioning, magnified many times over within the Catholic Church, have led to the trivialization of harm suffered by women who have come forward to finally report abuse by priests. At the same time, these same factors have caused women to be ashamed — and keep silent — about their experiences.

“There’s no question that abuse of women [by priests] has been vastly underreported,” says A.W. Richard Sipe, a former priest and psychotherapist who has studied priests’ sex lives for more than 30 years. “There’s a tremendous bias against women in the U.S. — and the world — and a tremendous callousness about sexual abuse against women.”

No secular organization has statistics on the total number of people abused by priests; the most complete numbers are held by church officials, who aren’t sharing. But attorneys and survivor networks estimate that from one-third to over a half of all victims of sexually abusive priests are women. And criminal cases filed in the last year in Los Angeles County involve approximately the same number of male and female victims.

A key quote about why we hear so much about the abuse of boys:

“Women and girls are every bit as much at risk as boys and men,” says Schoener. “But the sexual abuse of a boy is treated far more seriously, and is considered a far worse offense. Men are regarded as too strong to be victims; their victimization is somehow more shocking to the public. Women are expected to put up with more.”

“To begin with, women appear less likely to report abuse, says Schoener. The shame of sexual abuse is similar for both genders, but women tend to be “trashed” by church officials and supporters as being seductresses, he says. “We have seen girls as young as 10 portrayed as sirens.” Reporting sex abuse also tends to have more serious ramifications for a woman’s marriage.”

Continue ReadingCatholic Priests Abused Women, Too

Anti-Women’s Suffrage Buttons

Under the heading of “HOLY CRAP!” :Check out the price on this eBay auction. Now I know that women’s right to vote memorabilia does go for a lot of money, in general, but I’ve never seen anything like this.

UPDATE: since the item is no longer there, more info: the object was a simple lapel button from the early 1900s, and it was an anti-women’s suffrage button. The auction price was over $3,000. Part of this was because some universities were attempting to purchase it for their historical archives.

It’s sort of shocking to read some of the anti-women’s suffrage materials; try to check them out on eBay or on the internet. It’s tough to remember there was a time with this sort of thing was said out loud by people in public.

But when you think about it in the context of today’s issues, specifically gay rights, you start to recognize the same sort of bigotry. I tried to collect some of these items and managed to get a few postcards, but the cost of them is so high on eBay that they were tough to collect.

Continue ReadingAnti-Women’s Suffrage Buttons

Honor Killings

Every day, I find more stuff out about the world I live in, that pisses me off.

National Geographic — Thousands of Women Killed for Family “Honor”
Hundreds, if not thousands, of women are murdered by their families each year in the name of family “honor.” It’s difficult to get precise numbers on the phenomenon of honor killing; the murders frequently go unreported, the perpetrators unpunished, and the concept of family honor justifies the act in the eyes of some societies.

Most honor killings occur in countries where the concept of women as a vessel of the family reputation predominates, said Marsha Freemen, director of International Women’s Rights Action Watch at the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

Reports submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights show that honor killings have occurred in Bangladesh, Great Britain, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Sweden, Turkey, and Uganda. In countries not submitting reports to the UN, the practice was condoned under the rule of the fundamentalist Taliban government in Afghanistan, and has been reported in Iraq and Iran.
But while honor killings have elicited considerable attention and outrage, human rights activists argue that they should be regarded as part of a much larger problem of violence against women.

Continue ReadingHonor Killings