"the terrible toll gay marriage has on fact-checking"

Another funny video, via Feministing and c/o Stephen Colbert. I promise I'll write a more substantial post soon!

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Don't Ask Don't Tell
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Religion

"I'm an independent diva, but I still kinda need ya."

A hilarious send-up of all those "Single Ladies"-esque songs and music videos that have become popular recently.



Via Salon.

Pro-Life and Order

Friday night my partner was on the couch watching television and I was only half listening from my study when strains of virulent pro-life rhetoric reached my ears. Was she watching FOX news? No. She was, in fact, watching the most recent episode of Law and Order in which a late-term abortion doctor is murdered and almost the entire episode is spent trying to convince the viewer that the murder might have sort of maybe been justified except for that niggling little detail that murder is illegal. Sure, the doctor's murderer is found guilty in the end, but not before pro-choice ideologies have been (speciously) rendered flawed and amoral. Cops and lawyers alike engaging in debates about reproductive rights and the "right to life" is all fine and good, but graphic descriptions of the murdered doctor stabbing a newly-born infant in the back of the neck with scissors during a botched abortion, offered as evidence of abortion's immorality... Noooooo, not heavy-handed at all. Or are we to believe that all abortion doctors are perfectly willing and capable of stabbing living infants to death? Not to mention that the way evidence was presented (and misrepresented) in this episode didn't even make sense. It was the most preachy thing I've seen on television for a long time and clearly the writers/creators/producers were more concerned with making their points (still not entirely clear) than telling a good story. I was thoroughly disappointed. And aghast.

Kate Harding over at Salon does a great job of breaking down the episode point-for-point. And, since I only saw the latter half of the episode (its train wreck-like quality bringing me out from my study to sit stunned on the couch), I'll leave the rest of the critique to her:

On Friday night's "Law & Order," the abortion debate was represented by two separate, yet equally important, groups: The anti-choicers, who believe fetuses' rights trump women's, and the pseudo-pro-choicers, who are conveniently persuaded to agree with them by the end of the episode.

That sound? It's my head exploding.

Despite the usual "This story is fiction, any resemblance, blah blah blah" disclaimer, the episode was blatantly "ripped from the headlines" about Dr. George Tiller's assassination by an anti-choice activist in May. Our fictional victim, Dr. Bening, is a late-term abortion provider who's already survived one attempt on his life and is shot to death at his church, just as Dr. Tiller was. But in an episode titled "Dignity," Tiller's memory, remaining late-term abortion providers, and women who choose to terminate pregnancies are afforded none. The writers made a weak pretense of "balance" by having two of the series regulars -- Detective Lupo and Assistant D.A. Rubirosa -- espouse pro-choice views, but both are ultimately shamed into thinking they just might be wrong. See how even-handed?

Click here to read the rest.

A Woman is Not a Pre-Existing Condition

Thought this might be of interest in the midst of the health-care debate:

Part 674 in an infinite-part series about how the GOP is attempting to become a cadre of evil super-villains

H/T Feministe

USPS honors a first-wave feminist hero

Somehow I completely missed this: in June of this year the US Postal Service issued a new stamp honoring African American feminist activist Anna Julia Cooper. Born into slavery in 1858, Cooper went on to get both a BA and an MA from Oberlin University and, in 1925 at age 67, she became only the fourth African American woman to receive her PhD--from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. She was an incredible woman, and I think it's fantastic that the Postal Service is honoring her as part of their Black Heritage series:

(you can buy the stamp here)

In 1893, Cooper gave an address at the World's Congress of Representative Women in Chicago. Entitled "Women's Cause is One and Universal," her speech rivals some of the best oratories in the 19th, 20th and 21st century. Here's an excerpt:

The higher fruits of civilization can not be extemporized, neither can they be developed normally, in the brief space of thirty years. It requires the long and painful growth of generations. Yet all through the darkest pe¬riod of the colored women's oppression in this country her yet unwritten history is full of heroic struggle, a struggle against fearful and overwhelming odds, that often ended in a horrible death, to maintain and protect that which woman holds dearer than life. The painful, patient, and silent toil of mothers to gain a free simple title to the bodies of their daughters, the de¬spairing fight, as of an entrapped tigress, to keep hallowed their own persons, would furnish material for epics. That more went down under the flood than stemmed the current is not extraordinary. The majority of our women are not heroines but I do not know that a majority of any race of women are heroines. It is enough for me to know that while in the eyes of the highest tribunal in America she was deemed no more than a chattel, an irresponsible thing, a dull block, to be drawn hither or thither at the volition of an owner, the Afro American woman maintained ideals of womanhood unshamed by any ever conceived. Resting or fermenting in untutored minds, such ideals could not claim a hearing at the bar of the nation. The white woman could least plead for her own emancipation; the black woman, doubly enslaved, could but suffer and struggle and be silent. I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history, and there her destiny evolving.

You can read the rest of Anna Julia Cooper's speech here.

Cooper died in 1964 during the height of the Civil Rights movement and at the incredible age of 105! She's a total inspiration.

Sidewalks are more interesting than gay rights

Sadly, since I moved into the Mountain time zone last year, my formerly-deemed must-see viewing of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report has dwindled from four times a week to the occasional episode on Hulu and clips here and there when I can find the time. The reason? By some ridiculous whim of the programmers here, these shows air at midnight and 12:30am instead of the much more respectable East Coast times of 11 and 11:30pm. Why? I have no idea. But I do know that most nights that's just too late for me...well, if I actually expect to be productive the next day. So while I can't catch all the great Jon Stewart moments when they happen, sometimes other lovely people post clips that just must be shared:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Queer and Loathing in D.C.
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

H/T to Appetite for Equal Rights.

Nip/Tuck is sewin' up the perfect woman

Not that I've seen more than an episode or two of FX's Nip/Tuck or think of it as a bastion of feminist virtues, but still, is this really necessary?



There are just too many problems here to name them all: from the perfect (white) woman being sewn together by two (white) men and a group of stiletto-and-bustier-clad Asian women working in what looks like a very antiseptic sweatshop and the disturbing interplay of sexualized imagery with scalpels and needles to the outright ogling of the perfectly-constructed faceless woman by the two male protagonists at the end of the ad. Talk about the male gaze and the deconstructed, dis-empowered female body!

I realize all these themes fit in quite seamlessly (no pun intended) with the show, but that still doesn't mean this promo doesn't bug the shit out of me.

Nobel Peace Prize

Today NY Times headline reads "In Surprise, Nobel Peace Prize to Obama for Diplomacy"

I have to admit I'm very confused. Not upset, just confused. The article mitigates that a bit, but still...

What do you all think?