April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

Debra

Browser for the Better

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Ok so this has more to do with America than Canada but feeding the hungry is never a bad thing!

IE in some recognition of the horrors of IE6 especially for todays needs and the real horror of hunger, are teaming up to help feed those in need.

Microsoft Corp. and Feeding America are joining forces to fight hunger in the United States through the “Browser for the Better” campaign. For every completed download of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s Browser for the Better campaign (running today through Aug. 8, 2009*) will donate the financial equivalent of eight meals to Feeding America’s network of 206 local food banks, which supplies food to more than 25 million Americans each year.

Browser for the Better

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves

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The Vatican has launched an inquisition enquiry into American nuns. These uppity women are getting out of control and actually helping people.

Sister Kathy Stein, of the Sisters of St Joseph of Carondelet, is executive director of Thomas House, a shelter for homeless families in Garden Grove in Orange County, California.

Thomas House, with its 16 apartments in a secure compound, its language and parenting classes, its food bank and its activities for children, is a secular organisation with no formal link to the Church.

Sister Kathy has never worn a habit, and moved out of the convent long ago to live among the people she serves.

But she says the Church need have no worry about the way she meets her religious calling.

“I would see it as a reason for hope that our message of love and respect and concern for people is expanding beyond the walls of a Catholic institution… that we are able to bring God’s word to people by who we are and how we minister to them,” she said.

Sister Mary says the Vatican hierarchy inhabits a very different world, and could not expect to impose its own idea of religious life on the culture inhabited by American nuns.

“The culture encourages everyone to be very tolerant and open-minded,” she said.

“To imagine that a dictum sent by somebody we don’t know who lives very far away would take hold in this culture, to imagine that, is really a stretch.”

Could this be the same distance that allows a man who will never worry about his life being endangered or altered through pregnancy to decide that a women never has any right to an abortion even to save her life?

Read the whole article at the BBC

Feminists Less Hostile Toward Men than Non-Feminists

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A small study conducted at the University of Houston has found what I have found from anecdotal research for years, non-feminist women actually harbour more animosity toward men than feminists do.

Our work finds that, indeed, non-feminists believe in traditional gender roles such as men being breadwinners and women being caregivers. At the same time, these non-feminists actually appear to resent the confines of the traditional roles they advocate, which presents a paradox for women and men in traditional heterosexual relationships.

more on the study here and lots of info in the comments

“Freedom and Democracy Can’t be Donated”

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Title from RAWA’s website. “RAWA believes that freedom and democracy can’t be donated; it is the duty of the people of a country to fight and achieve these values.”

Both the US and Canada have stated among that high among their purpose for being in Afghanistan is to win freedom for the women there. The Feminist Majority Foundation in the States supports this. However, RAWA an organization of women who risk their very lives to fight for women’s rights, and who being women in the country in question would know best what they need, are very much against further war action.

Waging war does not lead to the liberation of women anywhere. Women always disproportionately suffer the effects of war, and to think that women’s rights can be won with bullets and bloodshed is a position dangerous in its naïveté. The Feminist Majority should know this instinctively.

Here are the facts: After the invasion, Americans received reports that newly liberated women had cast off their burquas and gone back to work. Those reports were mythmaking and propaganda. Aside from a small number of women in Kabul, life for Afghan women since the fall of the Taliban has remained the same or become much worse.

Under the Taliban, women were confined to their homes. They were not allowed to work or attend school. They were poor and without rights. They had no access to clean water or medical care, and they were forced into marriages, often as children.

Today, women in the vast majority of Afghanistan live in precisely the same conditions, with one notable difference: they are surrounded by war. The conflict outside their doorsteps endangers their lives and those of their families. It does not bring them rights in the household or in public, and it confines them even further to the prison of their own homes. Military escalation is just going to bring more tragedy to the women of Afghanistan.

Source

As feminists we know that war hurts women the most and that any thought of it being for the betterment of women is usually at best naive [witness the treatment of women in Nicaragua]. So while it saddens and sickens us to see the way women are being abused and denied their humanity, we must not make the mistake of thinking that bringing war and more violence is going to make things any better. Instead of telling the women of Afghanistan what they need, instead of worsening their living conditions and killing their friends, neighbours and children, why don’t we ask them what they need?

See also:
The Huffington Post
RAWA-Let’s rise against the war crimes of US and its fundamentalist lackeys!
RAWA – ‘US air-raid kills over 100 civilians in Farah’ – Warning Graphic Reality of War

The Terminator: California Governer Cuts Shelter Funding by 100%

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Apparently missing his acting career, Schwarzeneger has made good on his promise to come back and has done so in the cheapest way. In an effort to prove that governments can run without taxes he has eliminated funding for domestic violence shelters.

The shelter in Madera County has announced it will cease operations, while, in nearby Kings County, the future is precarious.

Cooper said the timing couldn’t be worse as rising unemployment and the recession have caused calls for assistance to nearly double at the Visalia facility, run by Family Services of Tulare County. She said counselors are most alarmed by increases in domestic violence, homicides and murder-suicides that illustrate the recession can truly be deadly for some trapped in a cycle of domestic abuse.

Normally referred to as battered women’s shelters, the programs provide 24-hour transportation, counseling and a safe haven for victims of domestic abuse ›both female and male ‘›who fear for their safety. Children outnumber adults at Tulare County’s facility by a ratio of 3-to-1.

The shelter even offers a school with a credentialed teacher for the time school-aged residents are at the facility, which can be as long as 60 days.

Source

Women in need of shelter will now instead receive these lovely T-shirts

Lovely parting gifts for those looking for shelter
Lovely parting gifts for those looking for shelter

“Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time”

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Well had to clear off a few cobwebs but otherwise the blog seems to be standing.

I can’t believe this weather first it rains then it pours then it thunderstorms then it rains again. The sun came out and it was still raining. Must be monsoon season.

Shona Holmes is making the rounds lying for the GOP. A commentator after this article backs her up. One never knows if it is just your garden variety moron or a plant but re his assertion “In Canada, I was put on a year-long waiting list to see a knee specialist.” Either he really doesn’t need it badly or has the same relation to the truth Holmes has. My husband got a referral from the local clinic and was in seeing the surgeon within two weeks. When he has the arrangements made and is ready to go for surgery it will be 3 months from decision to procedure.

I’ve seen 3 specialists within the last year and quite the opposite from being denied procedures I have put a couple off while I consider if I want to undergo them.

When we took my son to emerg with a scare he saw a ped within an hour and the emerg was packed that day.

Our system may not be perfect but one only has to look to dentistry to see how private health care would work.

To support our health care system visit the Canadian Health Care Coalition

* sorry for the rambling post.