Speak your mind even if your voice shakes
by Debra
I don’t know what to write today to introduce you to this video.
It covers many subjects and it is of course up to the viewer to make their own interpretation.
If you think the voices sound familiar, it is Judy Collins and Joan Baez.
*some images are graphic*
For some reason the embedded player was cutting out half way through, it is fine on the youtube site.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqewiVEemww
by Debra
The let women die law abortion ban has not even officially passed and yet it is already taking lives.
After 19-year-old Jazmina Bojorge bled to death in early November at a public hospital in the Nicaraguan capital due to complications from pregnancy, her family appeared on local television and tearfully accused doctors of delaying her treatment for fear of being prosecuted under the nation’s abortion ban.
Bojorge, five months pregnant, arrived at the hospital with painful, premature contractions. After staying the night, she was sent to a different medical center for an ultrasound because hospital equipment was inadequate. Doctors tried to stop the contractions, but they were unsuccessful and the fetus died. Efforts to induce labor to expel the fetus failed and Bojorge went into shock. Her placenta had separated from the uterine wall and her uterus filled with blood. She died two days after arriving at the hospital.It was Bojorge’s second pregnancy. She left a young son behind.
Poor women in particular will suffer from this law as the better off will be able to travel or to attend private clinics.
n a nation where 8 of 10 people struggle to live on less than $2 a day, poor women with limited access to maternal health care will be most vulnerable, say activists and health workers.
“Women who can only go to public health services will die,” said Blandon, of Ipas.
Surely it is preferable to save a woman’s life than to leave her young child/ren motherless.
“The new penal code doesn’t just go against basic human rights: It goes against fundamental principles of humanity,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, the Washington-based director of the Americas for Human Rights Watch, headquartered in New York.
Those involved in the religious effort to deny women their rights are still saddened by the loss of life.
“It is a prosperous business,” said Max Padilla, a Catholic activist who helped organize a lobbying effort and massive public demonstration in favor of the ban. “Now the people involved in that business are defending their livelihoods, presenting false cases.”
For women who still have the choice of birth control and the luck that their method doesn’t fail, not getting pregnant seems to be the answer to this law.
In May, Chevez had an emergency therapeutic abortion two months into her pregnancy when doctors discovered the fetus was forming outside the uterus and had ruptured a fallopian tube, causing severe internal bleeding.
“I would like to try again, but I’m afraid to get pregnant. That operation saved my life,” Chevez, 28, a swimming teacher, said in an interview at her home in Leon, where she lives with her two children, 9 and 11, from a previous marriage, and her second husband. Her husband wants a child, she said. “But he is afraid of losing me.”
Women will still demand control of their bodies. It may be through illegal abortion, it may be through suicide, it may be through methods of birth control, but all women deserve, want and have a right to control their reproduction.
You are a human being. You have rights inherent in that reality. You have dignity and worth that exists prior to law. ~Lyn Beth Neylon
by Debra
A sad and frightening tale at AlterNet today,
Though there are no exact figures for the size of the movement, the number of families that identify as Quiverfull is likely in the thousands to low tens of thousands. Its word-of-mouth growth can be traced back to conservative Protestant critiques of contraception — adherents consider all birth control, even natural family planning (the rhythm method), to be the province of prostitutes — and the growing belief among evangelicals that the decision of mainstream Protestant churches in the 1950s to approve contraception for married couples led directly to the sexual revolution and then Roe v. Wade.
“Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice,” write the Hesses. Or, as Mary Pride, in another of the movement’s founding texts, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, puts it, “My body is not my own.” This rebuttal of the feminist health text Our Bodies, Ourselves is deliberate. Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They’re domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women’s liberation: contraception, women’s careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order.
Pride argues that feminism is a religion in its own right, one that is inherently incompatible with Christianity. “Christians have accepted feminists’ ‘moderate’ demands for family planning and careers while rejecting the ‘radical’ side of feminism — meaning lesbianism and abortion,” writes Pride. “What most do not see is that one demand leads to the other. Feminism is a totally self-consistent system aimed at rejecting God’s role for women. Those who adopt any part of its lifestyle can’t help picking up its philosophy.” “Family planning,” Pride argues, “is the mother of abortion. A generation had to be indoctrinated in the ideal of planning children around personal convenience before abortion could be popular.”
In a nutshell the group thinks women should have as many children as they possibly can in an effort to create soldiers for god and overthrow the feminist, heathen, liberal society they so fear.
It is their belief that god will provide. That if women are submissive all good will come to them and their husbands will care for and never leave them.
Oh and no need to take care of this earthly sphere for god has a new home prepared for the faithful.
I wish it were possible to force feed history. It is not that long ago women were submissive regardless if through choice or by law.
Cases of spousal abuse were not less, rape was not less, single mothers were really not less just better hidden.
Women worked!!
Yes there is the great romantic novel of how women merely lazed the days away, happily content in her role as mother and wife.
The reality being that any woman of a certain class was trained in certain skills to be a good companion and social climber.
All other women made do as they could working as domestics, laundresses, wet nurses, prostitutes, bar maids, anything that might keep body and soul together.
Children were raised by older children, were taken to orphanages, were abandoned were raised in workhouses and were lost to poverty and disease.
There was nothing romantic about their lives. God sent no armies of angles to comfort the children as their bellies swelled with hunger, no angles comforted mothers trying to provide for their children as their bodies ached from their daily labours. No angles kept the fibers and dust out of the lungs of women working in the mills. God provided no comfort for those women beaten and raped by husbands and who had no recourse for the damage done. God’s priests provided no comfort sending these women home and telling them to be better more submissive wives in order to prevent further abuse.
“My body is not my own.”
A scary thought. A feeling one has when undergoing severe abuse or rape. The only way to deal with is to disassociate
It is interesting to me that these women fear feminism, fear autonomy, fear the right to make their own decisions and fear being left.
It is as if they do not realize that women living under full control of a patriarchy have much more to fear.
The children have much to fear also, being seen as future brood mares of cannon fodder.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal
by Debra
After seeing this quote pasted into a story about Canadian citizens being brought home from Lebanon
His appearance came on the same day that the White House warned it had evidence that Syria, Iran and Hezbollah are trying to destabilize and overthrow Lebanon’s government.
Echoing the U.S. warning, the minister said Lebanon could again erupt into violence.
“Hezbollah are a terrorist organization armed to the teeth. They are like the Taliban on steroids,” he said. “They are a very dangerous organization.”
I decided to educate myself a little more on the Hezbollah.
The Dominion has a very informative article
Interestingly, both Jean Chretien and Bill Graham, then Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs respectively, resisted placing Hezbollah on the terrorist list. Chretien met with Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, in Beirut in October 2002. On November 28, a new set of groups was banned–and Hezbollah was still not among them. Irwin Cotler denounced the omission as “inexplicable and, given their [Hezbollah’s] murderous ideology, unconscionable.”
B’nai Brith responded the next day, on November 29, with a press conference in which they announced a lawsuit against the government, brought on the grounds that the government was failing to protect Canadians by refusing to ban Hezbollah.
The following day, November 30, the National Post picked up a story from the Washington Times claiming that, at a Beirut rally, Nasrallah had condoned and encouraged suicide bombing. Nasrallah was alleged to have said: “Suicide bombings should be exported outside Palestine”; and “I encourage Palestinians to take suicide bombings worldwide, don’t be shy about it.”
Two weeks later, after going to Beirut to investigate, CBC journalist Neil MacDonald exposed the story as a fabrication.
snip
MacDonald reported on CBC on December 11 that, “Ottawa now knows that the Nasrallah quotes in the Washington Times about exporting suicide attacks were almost certainly never uttered.”
However, the alleged comments by Nasrallah had already received enough attention to force the government’s hand; a special Cabinet committee meeting was held the evening of December 10, 2002, in which it was decided to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. The Canada Gazette, official newspaper of the government, reported, “The change has been made on the basis of the close connection between the organization as a whole and the Hezbollah External Security Organization, and the recent statement by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, encouraging suicide bombings.”
by Debra
Poland debates constitutional change that could increase abortion restrictions
How nice that there are people who think they should make the decision as to what another person does with their body.
In researching wage disparity it often comes up that given the same set of circumstances women and mens wages are fairly equal. Well forcing women to bear children pretty much eliminates the choice to have a similar set of circumstances.
The same people that argue for these laws also fight to make contraception illegal and consider rape a womans fault.
It is big news right now that a Muslim cleric preached that ‘loose’ women are at fault for rape, but make no mistake that same message has rung from the pulpits of Christian churches and they bear equal blame and responsibility for the messages they are giving the sons and daughters of their congregations.
The people also want to do away with welfare programs, daycare programs, advocacy programs. How exactly are these children to be raised?
What kind of life if any is that 11 year old pregnant through incest going to have? What school will she attend? Who will care for the child? How will you piece her body and psyche back together?
How do you look a woman in the face whose pregnancy is killing her and tell her that because her disease is caused by pregnancy you do not value her life and will not treat her? How do you tell any other children she might have that they will no longer have a mother because some people thought they had the right to legislate her to literal death?
At what point do we recognize that this is not a right to fetal life issue, but a full fledged war on women? A war which seeks to have a womans life under the full and total control of those making the laws and running the country and you can be damned sure that given this course none of those people will be women.
by Debra
It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones. (Luke (ch. XVII, v. 2)
Apparently on that Christ and today’s church would disagree.
Deliver Us From Evil is a film that chronicles the abuses by Father Oliver O’Grady.
He was the closest thing to God they knew. Bob Jyono can still picture the priest he and his wife, Maria, called Ollie, a family friend who often spent the night in their Lodi home, saying his morning prayers with a Bible in his hands.
“And all during the night, he’s molesting my daughter — not molesting, raping her! — at 5 years old,” wails Jyono in “Deliver Us From Evil.” It’s a devastating documentary about Oliver O’Grady, the notorious pedophile priest who sexually abused children, including a 9-month-old baby, in a string of Central California towns for 20 years — and the Catholic bishops who moved him from parish to unsuspecting parish, allegedly covering up his crimes.
The church knew what he was doing and at one point helped him avoid prosecution by telling the police they would move him somewhere there were no children a complete falsehood. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.(perhaps that does not cover lying to protect a pedophile)
Father O’Grady is decidedly unrepentant;
He wears a sly smile as he says what arouses him: “How about children in swimsuits? I’d say, yeah. How about children in underwear? I’d say, yeah. How about children naked? Uh-huh, yeah.”
And the church of course is praying for the hearts and souls of those he hurt. Denouncing him as evil, thanking those who brought his heinous crimes to light…or not..
The film also points to the culpability of church officials, like Mahony, who has been named in numerous civil suits by victims of priestly abuse. “They banked on our silence and our shame,” Jyono said. “That’s how they got away with it for so long.”
snip
In a phone interview with The Chronicle, Tamberg said, “Everyone should be saddened by the kind of emotional and spiritual devastation that these kind of child molesters can wreak on individuals and families. That said, this movie is incredibly biased and omits many facts that would’ve changed the assumption the movie makes.”
The movie, Tamberg added, “is chock full of attorneys and expert witnesses who make millions of dollars every year in abuse litigation against the church. It’s a big advertisement for them.”
What facts could change the assumption that the church knew full well of his activities and allowed them to occur?
Maybe this fact?
The leaked Vatican document proves that under his papacy his deputy Cardinal Radzinger reissued the Vatican directive “Solicitacciones Criminale” of Pope John XXIII instructing Roman Catholic bishops to protect sex pervert pedophile and homosexual and lesbian pedophile priests and nuns at the expense of not protecting the little children whom these criminal perverts destroy. The directive also instructs the protection of clergy who have sex with animals.
Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Black and yellow, red and white
They’re all precious in His sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world…but the church not so much…
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