So Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure today announced that they will no longer give any funding to Planned Parenthood.

This funding allowed Planned Parenthood to provide breast examinations and referrals for mammography and ultrasound to patients at their health centers, patients who were able to be seen and treated at Planned Parenthood regardless of income or insurance, because of Planned Parenthood’s sliding scale fees and commitment to treating as many people as possible.

In the aftermath of this, which has turned into a flurry of opinion and counter-opinion, deleted comments on Komen’s Facebook wall, and a tweetstorm of epic proportion, some salient points worth consideration:

While pressuring Komen to reverse this decision is an option (and there is already an online petition going for that purpose) it seems unlikely to be effective. I am decidedly pessimistic about Komen walking back from this precipice.

Komen has said that this decision arose from a new policy of not funding any organization that is under government investigation. Since Planned Parenthood was already under investigation when the policy was changed, it’s pretty clear that the policy was targeting PP.

Moreover, this Komen policy and the subsequent de-funding came quickly behind the hiring ofKaren Handelas Komen’s Senior Vice President for Public Policy. Those in Georgia recall that in 2010 Handel ran for governor of Georgiawith a extremelyanti-choice platform. This woman is responsible for policy decisions for Komen, and she is clearly opposed to Planned Parenthood.

And we cannot forget that the founder of Komen, Nancy Brinker, has long been tied to thehighest ranks of Republican politics.

Komen didn’t cave to external pressure from the right wing, because the right wing is intrinsic to the executive power structure of Komen.

Those who rely upon Planned Parenthood as their health provider, who still need breast examinations, who still need funded referrals when there is an issue, well, they’re collateral damage in a culture war that begin more than 30 years ago and has always had its sights set not just on Planned Parenthood but any organization that supported or affiliated with them.

So where do we go from here?

Well we give Komen the business. We email (news@komen.org), we tweet (@komenforthecure), we call (972-701-2168). We absolutely refuse to donate, not directly, not by buying pink ribbon festooned (andpinkwashed) products, not by sponsoring someone for a 5K or a 3 day walk. So long as Komen plays politics with human lives, they should not see another single penny of our money.

But more importantly,farmore importantly,we do donate to Planned Parenthood, we goover and abovethe money that they will lose because of Komen, we get every penny we can to Planned Parenthood to ensure thatno onewill go without a needed cancer screening, no one’s life will be placed at risk because of where they get their medical care.

Planned Parenthood — and its clients, by extension — must be our primary concern and our primary focus. The political battle will always be there, it can be put on hold for a while. The patients whose care is hanging in the balance cannot wait.

We must keep our focus, we must redouble our commitment, we must step into the breech.

Join me in making a tax-deductible donation to Planned Parenthood right now.

[via:amaditalks]

What It Means to be a Conservative Candidate

(Source: samflowers, via political-cartoons)

(Source: karbarkalediscope, via theponderingplaidlezz)

Check out the IKEA advert that has Italian conservatives in a tizzy for suggesting two guys holding hands constitutes a family.

The attack on the reproductive right of women these days is despicable and dangerous. As Kate Sheppard notes at MotherJones.com, this measure proposed by South Dakota’s legislature would allow for “justifiable homicide” of abortion providers if it means prevent harm to a fetus. Sheppard reports:

South Dakota’s legislature is strongly tilted against abortion rights, which makes passing restrictions fairly easy. Just 19 of 70 House members and 5 of the 35 state senators are Democrats—and many of the Democrats also oppose abortion rights.

The law that would legalize killing abortion providers is just one of several measures under consideration in the state that would create more obstacles for a woman seeking an abortion. Another proposed law, House Bill 1217, would force women to undergo counseling at a Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) before they can obtain an abortion. CPCs are not regulated and are generally run by anti-abortion Christian groups and staffed by volunteers—not doctors or nurses—with the goal of discouraging women from having abortions.

+ here

What is actually not said but floats around this piece from Raw Story that critiques the major parties’ policy similarities is a conceit that the Democratic Party is a left wing political party. Despite the tremendous number of progressives wedded to the Democratic Party, they are not the driving political force within the party as evidenced by the highly compromised, progressivesque healthcare and finance reform legislation passed by Democrat-controlled Congress. Rather, the Democratic Establishment is very much centrist, moderate in socially liberal values (for example, Democrats as a party do not support marriage equality; instead, they support civil unions with equal federal privileges), and very much on board with economic liberalism particularly since Clinton, which oversaw NAFTA and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Many writers have already scribed their pieces on how President Obama himself is not a progressive either, but in fact a centrist-pragmatist. Today’s Democrats are certainly not FDR or his New Deal Democrats.

It’s an odd delusion that many progressive Democrats have about the party as well as Republicans and Conservatives. For the Right and a majority of the GOP, “liberal” is synonymous with “Democrat”; and more than a handful of occasions have progressive Democrats assumed I was a Democrat because I identified myself as a “liberal” or “progressive.” It appears that the ones who know better are the Democratic centrists who bad mouth the “professional left,” tell progressives to “fuck off” or to “stop whining.”

Compared on a global scale, Democrats are very much a center-right political party. Even a Canadian friend said to me once, “Your ‘Left’ is still pretty ‘Right’ to us.”

The point is to take off the blinders and really know what your party stands for. I wonder when was the last time most progressive Democrats actually read the Democratic Party platform. They should, of course, continue to support Democratic candidates who have proven their progressive metal, but why maintain delusions about what the party is and stands for when it’s out there to be read?

The problem with the argument against so-called ‘illegal immigration is that it is grounded in racism and shear capitalistic hypocrisy and is simply a political argument used to stir up voters. First, we know that ‘Mexicans’ were kicked off the very land U.S. Americans are currently trying to keep them off. Second, it is true that many Mexicans may cross the border to work in the U.S. and private U.S. citizen and businesses hire them, because their labor is cheaper, not to mention the benefits that one who is ‘undocumented’ is not required to receive. The politicians that take a stance against people ‘illegally’ entering the U.S. are only feeding on the sentiment of the citizenry that was forced on the citizens by the very politicians running for offices and those politicians, such as John McCain, who came before them. They WANT the Mexicans in the U.S. as an easily accessible source for cheap labor. They just want you (conservatives) to think they do not so that they can get votes. Oh, Meg Whitman is no different. She wanted the cheap labor, got it, and denounced the very practice of which she participated. Hypocrite.

Those who are not pursuing a career in politics argue against immigration because they either do not understand economics and how the economy works or are racist. Mexicans ARE NOT ‘taking our jobs’. As with the many immigrants into the U.S. from the last century, they arrive and create their own jobs. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many continental-born Americans who are housekeepers. And, just as with the past few centuries, other-than-white means other-than-right. The Black (wo)man, red (wo)man, yellow (wo)man, and (wo)brown man have always been detested by the white man since even before the stealing of the land that makes up and founding of this country. Most of these feelings toward the aforementioned groups are now systemic and are holdovers from earlier times. Plus, white people read these studies that say whites will no longer be the majority in a few decades, and they get scared. The only solution they can think of, subconsciously, is to get rid other the fastest growing ethnic group of the nation, Hispanic and Latino.

Amplify’d from news.yahoo.com

In California, illegal housekeepers are no shock

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – If most California voters seem to have shrugged off the controversy over Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s illegal immigrant housekeeper, it may be because so many of the state’s residents have been in Whitman’s shoes.

Mexico native Nicky Diaz surfaced last week to claim that former eBay chief Whitman and her husband, Dr. Griff Harsh, knowingly employed her illegally for nine years and treated her poorly.

“Everybody has a housekeeper that’s illegal,” Sue McDanel, a retired schoolteacher, told Reuters in dismissing the furor.

According to the most recent Pew Hispanic Center estimates, there are about 1.8 million illegal immigrants working in California, representing more than 9 percent of the state’s labor force.

McDanel, interviewed outside a Lowe’s home improvement store south of Los Angeles, said over 15 years she never inquired about her housekeeper’s immigration status.

“She’s a good person and a good worker and I trust her with my house and my stuff and everything,” she said.

California’s largest public employees’ union seized on the claims by Diaz, funding a Spanish-language TV spot that refers to Whitman’s calls for employer accountability and calls her two-faced.

“She is a hypocrite because I listened to her on the last campaign and she spoke poorly of Hispanics, and now she’s changed her politics,” salesman Marvin Montero said in Spanish when he was interviewed by Reuters.

Read more at news.yahoo.com

 See this Amp at http://bit.ly/b1mfA6

[via:uneducatedgenius]

by Daniel W.K. Lee

Another version of this essay was published in the September 23, 2010 issue of MetroWeekly under the title “Don’t Ask, Just Tell.” Below is the complete version.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the gay community’s commitment to New Left principles (that was the soil from which the Gay Liberation movement emerged) would splinter as gays became more mainstream—or perhaps more specifically—became visible in mass media and a coveted consumer market. As a whole, we gays have come to take our politics for granted: by and large, no longer are we street protesters and meeting organizers; instead, we do our activism through consumerism (buy this to support this and that cause), or use the Internet as a gay rights echo chamber (tweet one’s way to the “activist” moniker). Moreover, the gay political battlefield has never looked more strange than it does now with not just the usual Left forces and the Log Cabin Republicans, but also those stranger-than-strange gay teapartiers and über-Conservatives like those at GOProud, who openly embraced the racial scapegoating, classism, patriarchy, war-mongering, (basically all the things gay liberationists set out to end), and their pundits (Ann Coulter for one). But gay Conservatives aren’t the only ones who have internalized and then externalized the racism, misogyny, and militarism antithetical to our movement’s New Left roots; the “gay mainstream” has done so too in two very different ways.

First, it might be surprising to some, or many, to see our fight against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—which once repealed, would give LGB (no “T” here because nowhere do we talk about transgender people in the military in discussions regarding DADT) the ability to serve in the military openly has the same-sex-lovin’ homos and bisexuals that they are—would probably not have been of much interest in our political forefathers of the late Sixties and early Seventies. To them, DADT would have been a short-sighted battle for a right that supports militarism. We cannot fool ourselves into thinking that letting LGB’s openly serve will transform the military as a site of contempt for the feminine in men and the masculine in women. Serving openly won’t transform gender in the military anymore than out gays and lesbians have revolutionized in Western civil society; that is to say, gender deviation is still gender deviation, and not a socially acceptable expression of one’s place on the gender continuum. On the contrary, traditional gender norms are further legitimized with our rubber stamp in our current battle for our right to kill with fatigues on. Which leads to another reason why repeal of DADT isn’t as progressive as we’d like to think: anti-war, peace-loving progressive impulses must somehow be reconciled with the liberty to participate in the military-industrial complex and war machine and the occupation of foreign lands, military abuses and war crimes, and the billions of dollars funneled into “defense” at the expense of building a better American society.

Second, and perhaps more insidious, is how gays, specifically gay men, have unapologetically become sexual racists, gender purists, and enforcers of a gay male body culture (that is on par with the oppressive beauty myth that women have had to deal with for decades) as manifested in the phrase, “No fats, No femmes, No Asians.” We gay men have seen it, or used it (or a variation of it) in endless personal profiles, but nonetheless, the disqualifying mantra is the un-critical acceptance of racial, gender, and body-biases often “naturalized” or rationalized with the subsequent phrase, “Just a preference.”

But it isn’t “just a preference,” because why one is attracted to what one is attracted to wasn’t written into his DNA, nor has he lived in a social vacuum since the day of his birth. We come to our desires because of a profound socialization process. People are taught to value one thing over another throughout our early lives. When parents say things like, “Boys don’t cry,” “Good is in the light, and evil in the dark,” or when you are habitually exposed to certain kinds of bodies deemed attractive, the messages a person receives from those cues are internalized. How our brain negotiates those messages is part of the process of forming our “preferences.” A “preference” for “straight-acting” men is not like Athena bursting out of Zeus’s brain: it emerges in part because of how you evaluated femininity – its meanings, its associations and how one has eroticized and associated body-types and behaviors with masculinity or “straight-acting-ness.” Likewise, racial preferences aren’t in-born. They are formed and entangled with associations about gender, body-type, and behaviors that have been racialized and evaluated.

I once challenged a guy who told me he wasn’t into Asian men. I asked him why was that? He said was more into beefier men. I said, there are many beefy Asian and especially Pacific Islander men. He said he liked hairy men. Certainly a bit more difficult to find, but there are hairier Asian men out there who are also beefy. So why make a blanket disqualifying statement like “I’m not attracted to Asian men” based on racialized assumptions on Asian male bodies when more accurately, his preference is toward hairy and beefy men. To say, “No Asians” would foreclose the possibility of finding a hairy, beefy, Asian man that one could really find attractive.  The absolute refusal to deconstruct those racial biases and to declare “No Asians,” “No Blacks,” or whomever is sexual racism, and so many gays looking for love or a hook up aren’t even embarrassed about it.

Gaysian men ourselves are not impervious to the self-contempt that would allow us also write, “No Asians. I’m not sticky*” on our profiles. I have heard so many gay Asian men express total mortification to the idea of dating or having sex with another Asian man, and also declare their almost exclusive desire for white men is “just a preference.” Again, it isn’t and it’s to our own detriment to not question why one has dismissed entire racial groups from romantic and sexual possibilities. We gaysians cannot bemoan our exclusion from the territories of “hot gayness” if we practice the same kinds of sexual-racial exclusions.

Our sexuality and our sexual desires are not static. Someone who claims to only be into “butch” men could very well find himself unbearably attracted to a more effeminate man. Perhaps not as feasible, but not impossible. And that’s the point: it isn’t impossible, so why go shutting out the possibilities with inane, broad stroke disqualifiers?

Above all though, this is a call to re-align our politics and our personal lives.  It is hypocritical to say one is totally against racial or gender discrimination meanwhile your Manhunt profile says, “Be a man. If I wanted to be with a woman, I’d be with a real woman” or “No Black men. Just a preference.” But if you’re an unabashed racist, a femininity-hater, or a body fascist, then be my guest and declare all your prohibitions. Just don’t be shocked if you’re called out for being an asshole.


*“sticky” refers to the term “sticky rice,” which is when two queer Asian men get together.

(Above, Gay Power graffiti in Washington Square Park, 1970. Photo credit: Ellen Shumsky)

Writer Will Wilkinson deconstructs the notion of a cohesive American identity and American-ness that is consistently used by conservatives to brow beat and divide for socio-political gain:

…Americans certainly aren’t “a people” in the sense that the Japanese, the Kurds, or the Jews are a people. There is no American ethnicity; the U.S. is a resolutely multicultural (and multilingual) country. The usual idea is that American identity is creedal, or organized around a distinctively American set of ideas and values.

[…]

Take the belief in individual freedom. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as freedom from all non-defensive physical force and fraud. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as implying roughly equal voice in the democratic process, which straightforwardly requires the redistribution of resources and state regulation of spending on political speech. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as a condition of robust autonomy or self-governance that requires universal government-financed education and a minimum of material resources necessary to ensure that individuals are able actually to exercise their liberty and are not caged-in by necessity. And none of these are the conception of individual liberty that prevailed among the Founders. Anyway, there was heated disagreement among the Founders, too. Some them took the ideal of individual freedom to be consistent with chattel slavery while others correctly found human bondage obviously at odds with liberty. Some defended a robust conception of freedom of conscience while others wished to ban the practice of certain religions for freedom’s sake. And so on.

Not only do appeals to the values of the Founders fail to settle anything, many such appeals are simply ignorant of what this or that Founder actually believed.

[…]

[I]ts [sic] misguided to appeal to the American creed as the basis of the American identity of the American people. There are multiple conceptions of American creed equally consistent with American history. That’s why movements to glorify, elevate, and honor a particular conception of American identity based on a particular conception of the American creed necessarily marginalize equally or more historically plausible conceptions and therefore tend to suggest that citizens who favor those conceptions are less or even un-American. It seems pretty clear to me that this is exactly how the conservative politics of American identity works.

…I guess I don’t think it’s entirely preposterous for Americans to see themselves as a people. But any conception of the American creed sufficiently general to encompass most widespread American conceptions of individual freedom, equality, tolerance and so on is going to be so general that it will do very little to distinguish American identity from, say, Canadian identity. And that’s clearly not what Glenn Beck or the staff of National Review have in mind when they talk about American values, promote a conception of American identity, or encourage Americans to see themselves as a people…

The conservative conception of American identity is so selective and so specific that it tends to suggest to its adherents that many (maybe even most!) Americans aren’t real Americans, or are Americans who betray real American ideals. Birther and Muslim Obama memes crudely reify the logical upshot of the right’s fixation on its favored version of American identity. Most conservatives don’t need to believe that Obama is literally an un-American non-Christian. They’re just content to nod along with Glenn Beck when he implies, or outright asserts, that a guy who adheres to a mundane version of liberal politics slightly to the right of the typical “This American Life” fan is hell-bent on destroying the special Americaness of America.

(source)