Personhood Provocateurs in North Dakota

Photo of North Dakotan Badlands by Flickr user JJSchad, used under a Creative Commons license. This somewhat gratuitous picture is included lest you think North Dakota boasts nothing but snow and gophers and pro-life zealots.

North Dakota's new "personhood" law, which made it halfway through the legislative process on Tuesday, may no longer be the reproductive folly du jour, but it's still preoccupying me. Why would my home state even consider such a silly law - one that, much like Colorado's failed Proposition 48 last fall, could criminalize not just abortion but also most forms of birth control, IVF, and even normal miscarriage and menstruation? How the heck did this happen?

My husband said to me, "Curb your patriotism." But it's not just loyalty that's got me wondering. North Dakotans are churchgoing and God-fearing, yes; but they're also deeply pragmatic. Or at least they used to be when I lived there.

That's not just childish nostalgia speaking, by the way. Not even the abortion controversy has historically negated North Dakotan's basic pragmatism. Faye Ginsburg's wonderful ethnography, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community looked at activists on both (or actually, all!) sides of the issue in Fargo during the 1980s. While she found plenty of drama and conflict, she also found that activists of all stripes shared a basic set of values regarding family and women as nurturers.

Perhaps the growing season in North Dakota is just too short for extremism to thrive.

Leslie Unruh, you say? Nope. She belongs to South Dakota.

So what planet did HB 1576 come from? How did a bunch of part-time legislators dream up the idea of conferring legal personhood on fertilized eggs even prior to implantation? Because that's what the text of the bill does:

[F]or purposes of interpretation of the constitution and laws of North Dakota, it is the intent of the legislative assembly that an individual, a person, when the context indicates that a reference to an individual is intended, or a human being includes any organism with the genome of homo sapiens.

If this language is eerily reminiscent of the Colorado referendum, that's because this is not an indigenous product of North Dakota. It's written and promoted by the same people who brought us the Colorado foolishness.

In other words, the Colorado referendum wasn't a one-off. It has spawned an apparently new tentacle of the pro-life movement, Personhood USA, whose ultimate aim is to pass "personhood" laws in as many states as possible, ultimately setting up a judicial confrontation with Roe v. Wade. Here's their call to arms:

The fight for life is raging nationwide right now like never before and we wish to thank you for your conscientious decision to support every preborn child's right to life. We are Personhood USA and our goal is simple: Together, we will glorify Jesus and then stop the dehumanizing of and destruction of preborn people.

The organizers that got personhood on the ballot in Colorado, would like to help in North Dakota as well. By getting personhood on the ballot, we force the question that the pro-death side does not want to answer, "when does life begin"?

Personhood USA claims grassroots support, and I have no doubt that North Dakota has its fair share of pro-lifers (even if the North Dakota League for Life's website is pretty rinky-dink and years out of date). Here's how Personhood USA describes its campaign in North Dakota:

"North Dakotans have gotten used to cold temperatures like -44 degrees, but they haven't gotten used to child-killing. We applaud and support their efforts to protect every baby by love and by law," commented Cal Zastrow, who, along with his family, worked on the North Dakota bill on the grassroots level.

Reading this, you might reasonably believe that Cal Zastrow is part of a burgeoning pro-life movement among North Dakotans. That's the implication, right? But Zastrow would be a mighty unusual name among all those grandchildren of Germans and Norwegians. So I couldn't resist googling Cal Zastrow. He's from Michigan - two states over! No, Personhood USA didn't lie about this; it just used the term "grassroots" to insinuate. Here's how Michigan Citizens for Life describes him:

Cal Zastrow resides in Kawkawlin [Michigan] with his wife, Trish, where they homeschool their children. They are missionaries to the preborn who speak in churches, schools, and on the streets. Cal trains pro-life activists and conducts seminars to make the killing of preborn children unthinkable and unavailable through peaceful means.

Ordinarily I include links to groups like this just for substantiation, not because I think you need to waste any time going there, but Cal Zastrow has a such a dorky, douchey picture that he's worth a visit if you're in a snarky mood. Also, maybe you'll discover WTF it means to be a missionary to the preborn. I'm still mystified.

So the success of the personhood bill in North Dakota depended crucially on the work of a provocateur from out of state.

I have to admit, though, that the bill's sponsor, Dan Ruby, is a completely homegrown zealot who claimed "This language is not as aggressive as the direct ban legislation that I've proposed in the past." Nor can I claim that the 51 legislators who voted for the bill (against 41 opponents) were bussed in from out of state.

What are the prospect for this bill actually becoming law? According to Kay Steiger at RH Reality Check, the bill's introduction caught Planned Parenthood - the only pro-choice group with any presence in North Dakota - by surprise. That surely won't still be the case when it comes before the state senate in a few weeks. At that point, Tim Stanley, senior director of government and public affairs for Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, hopes for a better outcome:

The personhood bill will go on to the state Senate by the end of the week, and Stanley says it is likely not to be voted on until the end of the legislature's session, in April. Stanley believes that ultimately North Dakotans may not want to draw national attention with a challenge to Roe. If the bill does pass, Planned Parenthood's affiliate will begin reaching out to the medical and religious community to begin building a coalition of support to fight the measure.

"My experience had been that this legislature is grounded in reality, as opposed to some other legislatures," Stanley said. "South Dakota is not the most rational legislature when it comes to this kind of stuff. They're known as being slightly out there and willing to take those high-profile risks to fight this fight. My feeling is that North Dakota is just slightly more reticent to do that. To their credit they're not a state that looks [for] and seeks undue attention."

(Source: RH Reality Check)

See, North Dakota doesn't just have the prettier badlands, it also has a more level-headed legislature than South Dakota. And again - Dan Ruby is no Leslee Unruh! I'm hoping the state senate is rational enough to realize how ruinous it would be to litigate the "personhood bill" all the way to the Supreme Court, as required by the bill's second paragraph.

But even assuming this bill dies before the tulips are blooming in Bismarck, Personhood USA won't stop its quest. According the the American Life League, similar "personhood" legislation is pending in 15 other states. Even if there's good reason to be relatively sanguine about the North Dakota state senate stopping this foolish bill, odds are good that it will pass somehow, somewhere, and ultimately land in the laps of the SCOTUS.

Another ominous aspect of this: the "personhood" movement is trying to shift the discourse. To some extent, they're already succeeding. Just look at how RH Reality Check and I are both repeatedly referring to the bill and the movement within their frame: "personhood." Repeat it often enough, and people may start believing that a fertilized egg is indeed a person.

A Sweeter Gig than Wall Street Tycoon

"Money" by FLickr user TW Collins, used under a Creative Commons license.

So the poor Wall-Street fat-cats are wincing at a $500,000 pay cap? They just picked the wrong job. A recent article in the Columbus Dispatch reported that the presidents of Ohio's public universities and their senior henchmen advisers won't see pay cuts this year - although unionized state employees are staring down a six percent cut:

According to figures compiled by the Associated Press, the 154 individuals at Ohio's 14 four-year public institutions made a combined $34.6 million last year.

They were led by Ohio State University President Gordon Gee, the highest paid public university president in America. He makes $775,008 a year before bonuses. [My emphasis. WTF does he make after bonuses??!!]

A 6 percent pay cut akin to what Strickland is seeking from unionized agency workers would amount to a $2 million savings if applied to university presidents and other top university officials.

My own university's president makes less than $400,000, a comparatively penurious sum. Of that, $85,000 came from this year's raise alone (about a 30% increase on his previous base). Elsewhere in Ohio, Miami University's president is foregoing his $68,000 performance bonus. No word of anything similar happening here.

Instead, my university has hired a headhunting firm to control the search for our next provost. According to the Athens News, the headhunters will be paid a quarter of the new hire's first-year salary. The outgoing provost makes $264,000. Administrators are not typically hired at lower salaries than their predecessors, so my university will likely shell out over $65,000.

For that amount they could hire:

• one well-paid assistant professor
• one-and-a-half instructors at my current level
• five people working under my former conditions as an adjunct
• or a scant one-fifth of our current president.

I guess they need a headhunter because there just aren't any smart, ambitious university administrators willing to work for less than half a million, and so none would apply. They'd all waltz off to Wall Street instead. Hey, times are tough all over.

In Praise of Love and Limited Government

Why aren't we talking about the denial of same-sex marriage as a form of unwarranted governmental intrusion into people's private love lives? If the state is going to sponsor the institution of marriage in the first place, why on earth should it be allowed to discriminate? I do not understand why the Equal Protection Clause (14th Amendment) doesn't prohibit this discrimination. I'm still waiting for someone to explain it to me.

I may be a radical pinko ailurophilic feminist, but doggone it, here's a place for limited government. It seems like my political ilk ought to be able to make common cause with conservatives and libertarians on this issue.

And what could be more intrusive than forcibly divorcing people who've already lawfully wedded? All those couples in California who married in that golden summer and fall of marriage equality? I saw this at Shakesville and wept:



(Video by the Courage Campaign; go here to sign their petition in favor of same-sex marriage rights in California.)

In her commentary at Shakesville, Melissa McEwan remarked that she'd once lived in fear of her husband running afoul of the INS, and so she had an inkling of how it feels for the state to hold veto power over one's love affairs. Her story resonated with me. I've written about how INS officials and even customs inspectors have held my marriage briefly hostage at the U.S. border - just for giggles.

Of course, those were only transient incidents. I've enjoyed heteronormative privilege my whole life. I would've had a helluva time importing my furrin husband if he'd been my furrin girlfriend instead. While the Sungold-as-lesbian part of that scenario is hypothetical, the quandary is not. Grad school friends of mine had all sort of legal hassles, just because they were same-sex but, um, heteronational, so to speak.

Oh, and I didn't know until now who was spearheading the campaign for mass forced divorce in California. Doesn't it just figure! Our friend Ken Starr, hollowing out our privacy rights since 1998! And don't assume being hetero-anything will protect you from his wrath ...

Within a Whisker of Martial Law

Wow. Apparently Bush or his henchpersons threatened martial law last October while pushing their economic "rescue" package. Here's how The Political Cat reports it:

Later on down the line, we find (Surprise! NOT!) that the League of Incompetent EvilMen actually threatened our elected congresscritters with martial law if they didn't approve the bailout of Wall Street and its legions of fat, slobbering, greedy bankers. Pig man, pig man.

(This little gem is buried in the midst of a nice long rant featuring the best financial meltdown LOLcat ever, so go read the whole thing.)

TPC's source for this is the Santa Monica Mirror:

On October 3, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) stated on the floor of the House of Representatives that “a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no [on the $700 billion Wall Street bailout bill].” Under National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51), the president has sole discretion to invoke martial law in case of a "catastrophic emergency" defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.”

Full implementation of martial law would include the invocation of a series of executive orders (10990-11921) which entail government control of all modes of transportation, communication, utilities, food, health, education, and welfare functions. The statutes also allow for the mobilization of civilians into work brigades, the relocation of communities, and control over all U.S. financial institutions.

Now, I don't think it would have actually come to actual martial law. I think Bush and his evil cronies would have blinked. Then again, maybe I'm indulging in what Cornel West would call optimism rather than hope: the dogged wish that the world will be just fine, despite evidence to the contrary.

Regardless, I'm outraged but sadly unsurprised that at a time when we needed sober deliberation and smart policymaking, we instead got scare tactics. Imagine if FDR had pushed through the New Deal with the threat of bayonets.

No wonder the bankers got umpteen billions with no strings attached. No wonder they got to hand out kajillions in year-end bonuses to the same bozos who wrecked the world's economy.

I harbor no illusions that the new administration is going to fix everything. I was pretty frustrated at how Obama birth control funding under the bus last week. However, it looks as though it's going to be packed into the big budget bill, so I'm withholding judgment for now. I'm less forgiving about Obama's vote on the FISA debacle last summer; he's gonna have to prove his rhetoric about transparency and the rule of law before I drop that old grudge.

No matter what, though, I think we can be pretty confident that Obama won't throw a hissy fit and threaten martial law when he doesn't get his way.

Pistol-Packin' Professoriate

"The Pink Mafia," photo by Flickr user Dunechaser, used under a Creative Commons license. Gotta love how the Lego people grin dementedly while wielding their guns.

This came via the faculty email list a couple of weeks ago, thanks to an moment of impressively poor judgment on the part of the colleague who forwarded it. You've surely heard of penis spam; well, this was pistol spam. (And yes, sometimes a pistol is just a pistol.)

I spoke to you on the phone about a week ago about hosting a seminar for faculty members to teach them the basics of firearm safety and to have them actually handle a firearm at a private range just out side of Athens. I am an NRA certified pistol instructor and personal protection in the home instructor. If you need to see proof of my credentials I can bring them by you office. I will attach a flier that you can send around to other faculty and let them know what is happening. The reason for the class is basic firearm safety and knowledge. No prior experience will be necessary for anyone to take part in the class and I will not charge anything for the class except the price of the ammunition they will be shooting. For insurance reasons I have to have them shoot factory ammunition as apposed to reloaded ammunition that is assembled at home.

At the time, I just thought this was snark-worthy. I tried to picture me and my equally nice-and-nerdy colleagues out on the shooting range. The scene was an unholy mix of camouflage and tweed. I tried to imagine myself as Agent Scully in the X-Files, mixing braininess and a killer aim. It was no good. My imagination was failing me.

But here's where the humor ends. Now, I'm wondering if this email was not just a poor student trying to recruit customers with a free sample, but instead the opening salvo in an arms race. And I don't mean that metaphorically. At Alternet, Lilian Segura describes how gun-rights groups are lobbying for students to bear arms:

A flurry of news stories earlier this year reported a pioneering solution proposed to the rash of recent campus shootings: instead of redoubling efforts to enforce the whole "gun-free school zone" thing -- a quaint little notion from, like the 1980s -- why not change the rules to let students bring more guns onto college campuses?

A few answers leapt to mind -- binge drinking, drug use, close living quarters in a high-pressure environment -- but for awhile, it seemed like the idea was catching on. In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007, in which 32 people were killed, several states began considering legislation to expand the right to carry a concealed weapon onto college campuses.

Fortunately, as Segura reports, these concealed-carry laws have failed in fifteen states, including some pretty gun-friendly ones: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington. Utah is alone in having such a law. Ohio is considering one, and while my adopted state does plenty of goofy things, I can't imagine it'll allow guns on campus.

But I also don't suppose that'll be the end of the story. Segura says that a new group called Students for Concealed Carry on Campus claims 35,000 members. I'm wondering, now, if our local student offering free shooting lessons was one of them.

I'm no absolutist on guns. I come from a family of hunters and while I personally don't hanker to shoot critters, I won't tell others they should't. (It sure beats factory farming.) I think most people are responsible gun owners, although there was that time my dad shot a hole in the floor of his office ...

But on campus? As a women's studies professor, I didn't immediately connect the student concealed-carry movement with the Virginia Tech massacre (though that's probably most people's main association). My first thought was: We don't need another Montreal Massacre. In that attack at Montreal's École Polytechnique, fourteen people were killed and another fourteen injured in the name of "fighting feminism." Just last week was its nineteenth anniversary. If there were ever a reprise, a women's studies classroom would be an awfully convenient target.

Update December 10, 10:00 p.m.: In comments, Hesperia emphasizes that fourteen women - engineering students - were shot and killed. For the sake of readers who don't remember that event, I should have made that clear. They were targeted specifically because of the shooter's hatred of women in general and feminists in particular. I'm not at all sure that there's any basis for assuming all women engineers are also feminists, but hey, if you're a misogynist embarking on a hate crime, logic is probably not your strong suit. Similarly, most students in a women's studies class typically don't identify as feminists, but symbolically that might not matter to a potential attacker.

Laboring by the Insurance Clock

I'm feeling taciturn and mildly mopey today because I have a nasty sinus headache and the Tiger (who has tonsillitis) just yakked up his lunch. So, from the department of "it could be way worse" comes this news about how the recession is stranding people without health care. The New York Times (via Broadsheet) reports that when the Archway cookie factory in Ashland, Ohio (yes, Ohio again!) went belly-up two months ago, it left its employees stuck without health insurance.

While no one has died (yet) as a result, the company's irresponsibility made it shockingly hard for one baby to find its way into the world, as the Times recounts:

[Starla] Darling, who was pregnant when her insurance ran out, worked at Archway for eight years, and her father, Franklin J. Phillips, worked there for 24 years.

“When I heard that I was losing my insurance,” she said, “I was scared. I remember that the bill for my son’s delivery in 2005 was about $9,000, and I knew I would never be able to pay that by myself.”

So Ms. Darling asked her midwife to induce labor two days before her health insurance expired.

“I was determined that we were getting this baby out, and it was going to be paid for,” said Ms. Darling, who was interviewed at her home here as she cradled the infant in her arms.

As it turned out, the insurance company denied her claim, leaving Ms. Darling with more than $17,000 in medical bills.

I couldn't fathom how Starla Darling could be left stranded with those bills if she was still insured. It turns out the company misinformed her - or to put it bluntly, Archway lied. The Mansfield News Journal connects the dots:

On Oct. 4, [Darling] received a certified letter stating that, as of two days from then, she would no longer have a job or health insurance.

Darling says she asked and doctors agreed induce labor the next day, before the insurance expired Oct. 6.

After seven hours, with doctors about to send her home because the effort to induce was not taking, she began hemorrhaging.

"My placenta tore away from the wall and both the baby and I were literally inches away from death," she said. "We were rushed into emergency C-section, with both of us hanging tight to our lives."

Darling said doctors had to cut her open with no time to administer pain medications. Afterward, she learned her health insurance had already expired, despite the certified letter. Archway had stopped paying its part for employee health insurance months prior.

"Apparently, employees were paying their share of health insurance, but it has been reported that the company had not been paying since June," Meghan Dubyak, a spokeswoman for U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, told the News Journal on Friday.

Ugh. It's one thing for a company to slide into bankruptcy; it's quite another to lie to your employees. Also, can I just note that the credit crunch only began in September, not June? Archway had a problem for a good long time before credit froze up. It obviously had other mismanagement issues.

Former Archway employees are really stuck. Most can't afford COBRA coverage anyway on their meager unemployment benefits. But even if they could, their former employer's actions have rendered them ineligible. The Wall Street Journal gives more detail (via Michael Panzner at Daily Markets):

Archway was self-insured — and when it filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 6, there wasn’t enough money in its coffers to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of outstanding health-care claims along with all its other debts.

Workers weren’t eligible for Cobra, a federal act that gives certain laid-off employees the right to temporarily continue health-care coverage at group rates. That’s because Cobra doesn’t apply when a company terminates its insurance plan.

This story is disgusting from start to finish. About the only thing Archway is not culpable for is the hemorrhage Darling experienced. To the best of my knowledge, induction of labor is not a particular risk factor for placental abruption.

Otherwise, Darling's story and those of her co-workers (follow the links above for those other stories) demonstrate why health insurance desperately needs to be de-coupled from employment. Insurance costs are bleeding employers (and indirectly, their employees, whose wages are depressed when premiums rise). As Archway's "ethics" show, a few employers can't be trusted to make their employees' health a priority in hard times. Most perniciously, as the recession/depression deepens, the number of uninsured is going to skyrocket.

Hearts of Stone

This is just so wrong and terrible in so many different ways:

A 13-year-old girl who said she had been raped was stoned to death in Somalia after being accused of adultery by Islamic militants, a human rights group said.

Dozens of men stoned Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow to death Oct. 27 in a stadium packed with 1,000 spectators in the southern port city of Kismayo, Amnesty International and Somali media reported, citing witnesses. The Islamic militia in charge of Kismayo had accused her of adultery after she reported that three men had raped her, the rights group said.

(Source: Huffington Post)

Let's take apart this atrocity one piece at a time:

• The girl was thirteen.
• She was apparently already married, otherwise the charge would not have been adultery but fornication or similar.
• She was raped. At age thirteen.
• Her story was not believed. This accords with Shariah law, which automatically considers a man's word more credible than a woman's.
  
• She was sentenced to death.
• Authorities allowed the sentence to be carried out.
• The execution was performed in a particularly brutal way.
• Her death was cheered on by a crowd of 1000 spectators.

Of course, Somalia is a mess. There's no rule of law. Various factions are fighting each other.

Even so. If anyone is wondering why feminism hasn't withered away, here's one compelling reason.

And lest we're tempted to "Other" this atrocity and ascribe it to the "backwardness" of other nations and religions: Thirteen-year-olds are raped in the United States every day. Women's basic credibility was challenged in American rape trials until very recently. By this, I don't mean that the accused was (rightly) presumed innocent, but that the accuser was presumed to be a crazy vindictive lying slut until proven otherwise. Even today, victims of sexual assault too often find themselves having to defend their sexual histories in court.

Oh, and don't forget: Even though my country is not ruled by extremist militias, we've still allowed the rule of law to be hollowed out over the past seven years. We have plenty of our own, home-grown (Christian) fundamentalists who believe women deserve punishment for expressing their sexuality (preferably, in the form of a baby, though disease will do the trick, too). And among the rich and privileged countries, we stand alone in employing the death penalty.

Charting Palin's Debating Style

This is the most awesome flowchart since James Brundage's graphic depiction of sex and the penitentials (no, not that kind of graphic).

Thanks to adennak at the Daily Kos for parsing the impenetrable, clarifying the unintelligible, and charting the directionless:

(Click on the chart if you need to embiggen it.)

Sadly, even with addenak's marvelous cheat sheet, I still don't know WTF this means:

"Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be all, end all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet, so those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period." (Via Steve Crandell at the HuffPost, who questions whether the finger attached to this logic and syntax belongs anywhere near the button.) (Oh, and she's back to saying "nukular" again - channeling Dubya, I suppose.)

Hugo Chavez with Lipstick

Photo by Flickr user Christina007, used under a Creative Commons license.

I'm trying to figure out how Sarah Palin's approach to redistributing oil wealth differs from the approach Hugo Chavez has taken in Venezuela. Here's Palin's philosophy on this, according to an Alaskan reader of Andrew Sullivan:

If you want to dig more deeply into Sarah Palin's economic theory -- or lack thereof -- I think you will find that while she espouses the free market, she has adopted a quasi-socialist and populist belief in the commons. One of her champions is former Gov. Walter Hickel, who has argued that commonly owned resources should be developed for the maximum benefit of the people -- and that this system of economic organization represents a new paradigm for states and nations. ...

In Alaska's case, that means no individual ownership of mineral rights, which has led to the idea that government surpluses should be distributed to "the people" as direct handouts. Hence the recent $1,200 "energy dividend" given to all Alaskans. It has also resulted in the Permanent Fund Dividend, the direct payout to Alaskans every year from what was originally conceived as a rainy day account set aside for when Alaska's oil wealth runs out.

I'll grant there's one real difference between Palin's policy and "twenty-first-century socialism" as practiced by Chavez. While he has invested petrodollars in education and programs to combat poverty, Palin put the money directly into people's pockets.

But it's still redistribution. It's still extracting money from corporations and transferring wealth to citizens. It's still a universe removed from the rampant free markets that right-wing Republicans normally espouse. I personally think redistribution is important in a just society; I'm just pointing out that on this point, Palin is out of step with her party. She's closer to Hugo Chavez than to Grover Norquist.

Palin is also not so dissimilar to Chavez in her approach to governance. They're both self-styled reformers with a my-way-or-the-highway attitude. They both seem allergic to scrutiny and criticism. They both claim transparency while achieving just the opposite. They both consolidate their party by intimidating their opponents.

So why is only Chavez accused of being an anti-democratic communist? Granted, Palin's a lot prettier than him. But here you see him embracing a fashion point that Palin has long known: Holding a small child as an accessary can really soften that autocratic look.

Photo posted on Flickr by Presidencia de la Republica del Ecuador, used under a Creative Commons license.

Now Chavez just needs to learn how to pick a flattering shade of lipstick.

Echoes of Dubya in the Alaskan Wilderness

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

Quick follow-up to my last post on Tina Fey's wonderful Sarah Palin send-up (and also my earlier fretting on what seems to be her willful ignorance of foreign policy).

James Fallows at the Atlantic cogently analyzes why Palin is clueless about the Bush Doctrine and why this should rob us of our sleep:

How could she not know this? For the same reason I don't know anything about European football/soccer standings, player trades, or intrigue. I am not interested enough. And she evidently has not been interested enough even to follow the news of foreign affairs during the Bush era.

A further point. The truly toxic combination of traits GW Bush brought to decision making was:

1) Ignorance
2) Lack of curiosity
3) "Decisiveness"

That is, he was not broadly informed to begin with (point 1). He did not seek out new information (#2); but he nonetheless prided himself (#3) on making broad, bold decisions quickly, and then sticking to them to show resoluteness.

We don't know for sure about #2 for Palin yet -- she could be a sponge-like absorber of information. But we know about #1 and we can guess, from her demeanor about #3. Most of all we know something about the person who put her in this untenable role.

(My emphasis. Read his whole commentary here.)

Now, I did follow European soccer when I lived in Germany, and it's great fun - but only if you're willing and able to invest some effort in it. Otherwise, you're left with a sea of furrin names that don't mean much. Same for furrin policy. But darn it, virtually everyone I know who's involved in local politics has more of a clue about the Bush Doctrine than Sarah Palin does.

That, to me, is pretty strong evidence that Palin suffers from congenital lack of curiosity about foreign affairs. Seems to me that Fallows really underplays his second point. His third point - about "decisiveness" - is pretty well illustrated by Palin's approach to preterm labor. If you object that this was a "personal" arena and thus no predictor of how "resolute" she'd be as president, please recall her "I did not blink" mantra in the Charlie Gibson interview.

Fallows could've also added a fourth similarity to GW Bush: Palin's penchant for cronyism, secrecy, and intimidation, as reported in the New York Times. Apparently her attempt to fire the Wasilla public librarian was only her warm-up act. And Troopergate is only the most publicized manifestation of her Nixonian qualities.

All of this adds up to someone who I wouldn't want on my local school board, much less a heartberat away from being Leader of the Free World. The only person I trust less, at this point, is the guy who picked her.

Preemptive Ignorance

I don't know if it's just the weather or if it's the wretched political climate, but I'm feeling too droopy to write anything. By now you've probably heard that in her ABC interview last night, Sarah Palin showed she didn't know WTF the "Bush Doctrine" refers to. Here she is, displaying her ignorance.



The problem is, you can hardly go after a candidate for their ignorance without a nasty bumerang effect. Too many Americans are ignorant, themselves, and they'll identify and sympathize. It seems to make no difference that John McCain can't tell Shiite from Sunni. And Palin's cluelessness about the Bush Doctrine's "justification" of preemptive warfare is unlikely to bother anyone except nerds like me who weren't going to vote for her anyway.

Penis Spam, Not Even Close to Barely Legal Edition

This, in my junk mail box:

Miley Cyrus was shocked at the size of my tool when we started getting it on ...

Eeeeeeeeeeew.

I'm Not En-Raptured

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

A few days ago, I raised questions about Sarah Palin's religious beliefs. I basically consider people's faith a private matter - unless it impinges significantly on how they would shape policy. So Joe Biden personally believes life begins at conception; he personally has serious qualms about abortion; yet he wouldn't stop others from choosing abortion. I'm fine with that. When making policy, he keeps his convictions in the personal realm, recognizing the religious pluralism of American society.

Sarah Palin is on record as believing that God favors certain pipeline projects (not to mention certain wars in Mesopotamia). She sees direct her faith as directly applicable to the public realm.

This isn't surprising in light of reports that came out this week about Palin's home church. Now, people aren't responsible for everything their pastor says. I'm not going to apply a totally different standard to her than I did to Barack Obama when his former pastor, Reverend Wright, made some highly impolitic remarks.

I do think Palin needs to respond to this, however. Writing in Alternet, Bruce Wilson reports:

Sarah Palin's churches are actively involved in a resurgent movement that was declared heretical by the Assemblies of God in 1949. This is the same 'Spiritual Warfare' movement that was featured in the award winning movie, "Jesus Camp," which showed young children being trained to do battle for the Lord. At least three of four of Palin's churches are involved with major organizations and leaders of this movement, which is referred to as The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit or the New Apostolic Reformation. The movement is training a young "Joel's Army" to take dominion over the United States and the world.

Along with her entire family, Sarah Palin was re-baptized at twelve at the Wasilla Assembly of God in Wasilla, Alaska and she attended the church from the time she was ten until 2002: over two and 1/2 decades. Sarah Palin's extensive pattern of association with the Wasilla Assembly of God has continued nearly up to the day she was picked by Senator John McCain as a vice-presidential running mate.

Palin's dedication to the Wasilla church is indicated by a Saturday, September 7, 2008, McClatchy news service story detailing possibly improper use of state travel funds by Palin for a trip she made to Wasilla, Alaska to attend, on June 8, 2008, both a Wasilla Assembly of God "Masters Commission" graduation ceremony and also a multi-church Wasilla area event known as "One Lord Sunday."

At the latter event, Palin and Alaska LT Governor Scott Parnell were publicly blessed, onstage before an estimated crowd of 6,000, through the "laying on of hands" by Wasilla Assembly of God's Head Pastor Ed Kalnins whose sermons espouse such theological concepts as the possession of geographic territories by demonic spirits and the inter-generational transmission of family "curses". Palin has also been blessed, or "anointed", by an African cleric, prominent in the Third Wave movement, who has repeatedly visited the Wasilla Assembly of God and claims to have effected positive, dramatic social change in a Kenyan town by driving out a "spirit of witchcraft."

(See also this version at the Huffington Post.)

Again, none of this indicates directly what Palin herself believes. Even her appearance on stage at her home church doesn't mean she agrees with every particular of Reverend Kalnins' theology. (I'll admit that seeing video Wilson provides of them sharing a stage is pretty suggestive, however.)

Everything Wilson writes about the Third Wave is consistent with scholarship that I'm intimately familiar with. (I translated a 15,000-word book chapter on the Pentecostal movement a few months back.) Spiritual Warfare is a real and growing movement. Lots of Pentecostal and Charismatic worshipers sincerely believe in the efficacy of demons, curses, and exorcisms. While blending these ideas with a belief in witchcraft is particularly common in Africa, the difference between witches and demons is mighty slender.

I, for one, would prefer political leaders who don't fear demons. Who can separate the secular from the sacred. Who haven't bought stock in Armageddon. And who don't believe in the Basement Cat.

The Rubble of History

Watching the Republican National Convention, the image that keeps haunting me is Paul Klee's Angelus Novus. This is the figure that Walter Benjamin called the angel of history - blown ever forward by the winds of time, face turned perpetually toward the past, watching the rubble of human "progress" pile up behind him:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

(Walter Benjamin's ninth thesis from his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," cited in Wikipedia - yeah, I'm that lazy. Wikipedia claims fair use of this reproduction of Klee's Angelus Novus, and so do I.)

Of course, it's not the convention itself that calls forth the angel of history. It's the repeated references to danger and terror and 9/11. It's the memory of the avoidable human wreckage piled upon the ruins of the Twin Towers in the seven years since. And it's the very real fear that we as a country might not be wise enough to recognize the rubble for which we're culpable, nor strong enough to turn and face forward into the wind.

Cross a Border, Squander Your Privacy Rights

Are you traveling across any international borders this summer? Is your laptop along for the ride? Does it contain any sensitive information: banking or other personal financial data, medical records, left-of-center political screeds? Or might your browser history reveal that you've been reading NC-17 rated blogs?

If you answered yes and yes - or if you give a crap about the dismantling of rights and liberties in the Land of Freedom - you might want to know what the WaPo is reporting:

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ...

Civil liberties and business travel groups have pressed the government to disclose its procedures as an increasing number of international travelers have reported that their laptops, cellphones and other digital devices had been taken -- for months, in at least one case -- and their contents examined.

The policies state that officers may "detain" laptops "for a reasonable period of time" to "review and analyze information." This may take place "absent individualized suspicion."

The policies cover "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form," including hard drives, flash drives, cellphones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover "all papers and other written documentation," including books, pamphlets and "written materials commonly referred to as 'pocket trash' or 'pocket litter.'"

(Read the rest at the Washington Post.)

So, you basically forfeit your entire right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure as soon as you commit the un-American act of visiting another country.

The WaPo also reports that one of my personal heroes, Russ Feingold, is working on legislation that would circumscribe the Department of Homeland Insecurity's power to rifle through your books, laptop, and chewing gum wrappers. However, the current guidelines have been upheld by one of the nation's most liberal courts of appeal, the 9th Circuit. This makes me wonder how you could craft a law that would withstand the inevitable DHS legal challenges.

Realistically, you, my dear readers, are not likely to get caught in this net. Nor am I. But in my experience, border guards have unlimited power, and a few seem to get drunk on it. About a decade ago, well before 9/11, an INS guard at JFK questioned my husband's green card with no cause whatsoever. He took sadistic pleasure in growling, "I could send you over to investigations!" (He didn't do it, probably because my husband refused to show that he was annoyed or flustered.)

Another time, my little family of four all had to go through the "suspicious people" line upon re-entry because the airline had omitted us from the computerized flight manifest. No, we didn't get searched, but I was grilled by the customs officer.

Him (frowning): So you're married.
Me: Yes.
Him (not ironically): So why do you have a different name than your husband?
Me (smiling too politely): I kept my name for professional reasons.
Him (with mounting hostility): What do you do, professionally?
Me (quaking by now): I teach at a university. I'm a historian.

Lucky for me, he stopped his interrogation before I was forced to cough up my women's studies credentials. I had the feeling that would've triggered a serious luggage search. I was so not going to explain that the real reason I kept my name was to rebel against the patriarchal history of marriage.

Maybe this guy was just a jerk who thinks it's great sport to make the "feminazis" sweat. Maybe he got his rocks off even more when he realized I was an egghead, thus an obvious member of the academic Fifth Column. More charitably, he might have been making sure that our marriage was legit - never mind that our sons resemble their dad as closely as if he'd spawned them through parthenogenesis. But let's be real. For a customs official, sniffing out sham marriages isn't part of his ambit.

And these are the people we're supposed to trust not to abuse their ever-widening authority?

If visible feminist sympathies make me suspicious, maybe even a potential gender jihadist (!), Homeland Insecurity would have a field day with the contents of my computer. Besides my tax returns, extensive medical information, and personal emails, my laptop also holds hundreds of articles on feminist topics. And then there are the books I've packed for this trip:

• Martha McCaughey's The Caveman Mystique (a feminist critique of ev psych, thus all about sex and violence)
• Elaine Pagels' Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (heretical as well as feminist)
• Evelyn Fox Keller's Reflections on Gender and Science (ditto!)
• Rachel Maines' The Technology of Orgasm (potentially obscene?)
• Kathleen Bogles' Hooking Up (ditto again)

Geez. I guess I'm more seditious than I thought.

The Child Bride Who Got Away

Here's a sort of bookend to the story of Aisha that had me riled up yesterday. Today I read a BBC news report by Rachid Sekkai on an eight-year-old girl in Yemen who has gotten her marriage annulled. Alleging that her twentysomething husband beat her, the girl, Nojoud Mohammed Ali, took a taxi on her own to a judge's office, sued for annulment - and won.

The BBC said the husband denied beating her but admitted to having consummated the marriage, apparently in defiance of Yemeni custom and maybe in violation of the law (though the report is unclear on the latter point):

Although it has no legal minimum age for marriage, the wife is only allowed to live with her husband once she has reached puberty.
(Source: BBC News)

Ain't no way an eight-year-old is that developed, especially in a poor country! Nojoud had consented to the marriage, but not to the way things actually went down:

Nojoud told the court she had signed the marriage contract two-and-a-half months ago on the understanding she would stay in her parents' house until she was 18.

"But a week after signing, my mother and father forced me to go and live with him." ...

Her father, Mohammad Ali Al-Ahdal told the court he felt obliged to marry off his daughter after receiving repeated threats from the would-be husband and his entourage.

He said was frightened because his oldest daughter had been kidnapped several years earlier and had been forced to marry her abductor.
(Source: BBC News)

Of course, we don't know how truthful her father is being. If the family is poor enough, the prospect of one less mouth to feed might make marriage look like a bargain for everyone but the young girl. But presumably he told a story that was at least plausible. And if the rule of law is that weak in Yemen, it's hard to imagine the human rights situation improving markedly - neither for girls nor for anyone else.

Note, too, the horrific notion of female purity and family honor that forced Nojoud's older sister to marry a man who was her kidnapper. And that's not all. Since honor was at stake, that man presumably also raped her. Even if he didn't actually do it, that's what the men of her family assumed. Otherwise, he wouldn't have had to marry her.

But there's some cause for hope. Nojoud found a lawyer eager to take on her case. She landed a sympathetic judge. Her uncle was willing to take her in and protect her. And she's now back in school. Primary school. Like the eight-year-old girls in my son's second-grade class.

Photos of Yemeni girls by Flickr user Richard Messenger, used under a Creative Commons license. Presumably they aren't child brides.

And It Won't Make You Blind, Either

Photo of a geyser in Iceland by Flickr user Benzpics63, used under a Creative Commons license.

Ben Harder, science journalist at U.S. News and World Report, is calling out the major news services for recycling a five-year-old study on prostate cancer as if it were fresh news. He's right to criticize their sloppy reporting, of course. He was wrong, however, to suggest that the study is dubious just because it's not brand-new. Given the study's content, I hope that the screw-up in reporting will give it more exposure than it might otherwise get. When I read about it a few months ago, my reaction was: Wow, this is news that helps men take their health into their own hands, if you'll forgive a bad pun. So why isn't it already common knowledge?

What a group of Australian scientists found is this: Masturbation may offer protection against prostate cancer. And actually, not just masturbation but any sexual activity resulting in ejaculation. The group, headed by Dr. Graham Giles, found that men in their twenties who ejaculated at least seven times per week reduced their risk of prostate cancer by one-third compared to those who ejaculated fewer than three times per week. That's a remarkable figure.

The explanation Dr. Giles offered when the study was published in 2003 makes intuitive sense to me, even if it's still somewhat speculative. Basically, to use a rather unfortunate plumbing metaphor, he suggested that the pipes stay cleaner and healthier when flushed out regularly:

Our research indicates that there is no association between prostate cancer and the number of sexual partners, which argues against infection as a cause of prostate cancer in the Australian population.

We also found no association between maximum number of ejaculations in a 24 hour period and prostate cancer. Therefore, it is not men's ability to ejaculate that seems to be important.

While it is generally accepted that prostate cancer is a hormone dependent cancer, apart from age and family history, its causes are poorly understood.

For this reason, our explanations are fairly speculative - one possible reason for the protective effects of ejaculation may be that frequent ejaculation prevents carcinogens building up in the prostatic ducts.

If the ducts are flushed out, there may be less build up and damage to the cells that line them.

Ben Harder did find one subsequent study, published in 2004, that strikingly corroborated the Australians' findings. That study found:

Each increment of 3 ejaculations per week across a lifetime was associated with a 19% (95% CI, 7%-30%) decrease in risk of organ-confined prostate cancer.

Its lead author, Dr. Michael Leitzmann, told Harder he's certain no further work has been done on this topic. Why???

These studies found a free, simple, and fun way a man can protect himself against a cancer that strikes one in five men. Yet I'll bet more adult men are aware of other habits that protect against prostate cancer, such as drinking tea and eating tomatoes. As a gal who calls herself Sungold, I'm unabashedly pro-tomato; but why should tomatoes get all the press while the benefits of ejaculation are ignored?

I can only think our deep cultural ambivalence about sex is to blame. That would explain why this news failed to make a splash five years ago. And that also accounts for the dearth of follow-up studies, which mirrors the shameful underfunding of research on prostate cancer in general. This anti-sex mindset is also deeply anti-scientific, preoccupied with ideas about purity that date all the way back to Leviticus.

Artwork by Flickr user adamrice, used under a Creative Commons license.

(In case you can't read the quotation from Leviticus 15:16-17 in the image above: "And if any man's seed of copulation go out from him, then he shall wash all his flesh in water, and be unclean until the even. And every garment, and every skin, whereon is the seed of copulation, shall be washed with water, and be unclean until the even.")

If it seems like I'm making too much of this, check out this comment, copied verbatim from Harder's blog:

how can anyone condone masterbation? in the Bible it is widely and worldly known as a sin! you will be sending people straight to hell.

Unfortunately, it's also "widely and worldly known" that this is the brand of thinking that brought anti-condom AIDS education to Africa, sees cervical cancer as the just wages of sin, and believes comprehensive sex education causes teenage pregnancy. In this worldview, a few million excess cases of prostate cancer might seem like a cheap sacrifice in creating a moral dystopia where the only pleasure is feeling holier-than-thou.

The Children of Abu Graib

This is not an atrocity blog. I promise this sort of thing won't become a daily feature. But I spent a long while crying about this today, and then I decided to turn those tears into outraged action. Since I can't singlehandedly shut down Abu Ghraib, I can only write about it - and urge y'all to vote for candidates who seem likely to shutter that hellhole forever.

In the not-quite-latest New Yorker, there's a profile of Sabrina Harman, the woman who took most of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos, that's as insightful as it is chilling. The authors, Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, use extensive interviews with Harman and several of her fellow MPs to illuminate how a bunch of young people who mostly just wanted to subsidize their college education gradually became inured to torture. Or nearly so; it turns out that Harman's pictures were motivated by a mixture of macabre fascination, gallows humor, and a partly-inchoate awareness that she was partaking in atrocities that needed to be documented.

The whole article is long and upsetting but very much worth your time. For me, the most upsetting part is Harman's comments about children being held in Abu Ghraib. Yep, that's right - kids as young as ten were locked up, generally in order to coerce confessions from their fathers.

You may be asking: Wait, don't you mean Saddam's Abu Ghraib? Well, yes, Saddam also imprisoned and raped family members to extract confessions. But guess what: We didn't just take over his prison, we took over some of his most heinous tactics.

Gourevitch and Morris write:

It was easier to be nice to the women and children on Tier 1B [than to the adult male prisoners], but, Harman said, “It was kind of sad that they even had to be there.” The youngest prisoner on the tier was just ten years old—“a little kid,” she said. “He could have fit through the bars, he was so little.” Like a number of the other kids and of the women there, he was being held as a pawn in the military’s effort to capture or break his father.

Harman enjoyed spending time with the kids. She let them out to run around the tier in a pack, kicking a soccer ball, and she enlisted them to help sweep the tier and distribute meals—special privileges, reserved only for the most favored prisoners on the M.I. block. “They were fun,” she said. “They made the time go by faster.” She didn’t like seeing children in prison “for no reason, just because of who your father was,” but she didn’t dwell on that. What was the point? “You can’t feel because you’ll just go crazy, so you just kind of blow it off,” Harman said. “You can only make their stay a little bit acceptable, I guess. You give them all the candy from the M.R.E.s to make their time go by better. But there’s only so much you can do or so much you can feel.”

But even this account plays down the horror of it, though the article otherwise doesn't pull many punches. Since Gourevitch and Morris have kindly posted some of their primary source material at the New Yorker online, you can read in the interview transcript that the ball playing petered out as the prison grew increasingly overcrowded. Said Harman:

It got filled up pretty fast, so fast that we couldn’t take the children out anymore and they had to stay in their cells. We used to let them out and play ball with them. Like, just let them out in the tier and locked the main lock, like the main door so they couldn’t get out. And we’d have like 20 kids just running around and we couldn’t do it anymore because these other prisoners were coming in. These…We had people that were crazy and we had people that were just causing problems and we just couldn’t let them out because you don’t want them talking to these other people or passing them notes or corrupting the kids. So we had to keep the kids inside also. So it was pretty much like they were also being interrogated pretty much because they were in a cell. Maybe if you were one of the lucky ones, you would get out for like a half hour to help pass around food or go take your shower, or if you want a cold shower. But it was getting really crowded.
(Read the rest of Harman's comments on the children.)

We had people that were crazy. Yeah, I know she means prisoners who'd snapped, but what about her direct superiors, who put Harman and the other MPs into a situation without any training, apparently precisely so they wouldn't know that they were being ordered and encouraged to violate U.S. military and international law on the treatment of prisons? What about their superiors - all the way up to and including Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush?

I do recall Sy Hersh referring to women and children being raped in Abu Ghraib shortly after the first torture photos became public, but I had no clue that their detention was a systematic, long-term practice as opposed to a few isolated incidents. And I'm one of the people who's paying attention, most of the time. (For a round-up of the "old news" on this, see this American Leftist post from July 2004 and also Hersh's comments as reported in Salon's War Room.)

What I want to know - and what I can't figure out, despite having googled it like crazy - is this: Are children still being held in U.S. military and CIA prisons today?

Maybe we'll get an answer to this from the New Yorker article's co-author, Errol Morris, who has directed a documentary on Abu Ghraib, S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, that won a jury prize at the Berlinale and is scheduled for release in the U.S. later this month. Or maybe, like so much else about this war, we won't know the answer even when the historians get their say.

One thing I do know for sure: Holding family members hostage to extract a prisoner's confession violates international law. Our next president better know this, too.

The State of our Statements Is, ummm, Strong

... if by strong you mean - in a brilliant Orwellian twist - weak.

Today the president of my esteemed university delivered his State of the University address, proclaiming some great news: "I am very happy to report to you today that the state of our university is strong."

Yeah.

If by fiscally strong, you mean that we haven't yet heard what academic programs will be slashed to stanch the hemorrhaging budget.

If by academically strong, you mean that the university's leadership has promised that faculty salaries will rise to match our peer institutions' - but not delivered on this - and some of our brightest professors are being lured away by competitive salaries elsewhere.

If by athletically strong, you that mean our handsomely paid football coach hasn't been busted for DUI since the end of 2005.

If by ethically strong, you mean that administrators' awkward efforts to spin the publicity around a plagiarism case have now spawned civil litigation.

If by equitably strong, you mean that adjunct instructors with Ph.D.s earn $5000 in gross pay over three months with no access to health insurance for teaching two courses per quarter (a half-time position), numerous janitors have been laid off, and administrators continue to receive handsome annual raises.

If by democratically strong, you mean that the provost has not signed a single resolution sent to her by the Faculty Senate since the middle of spring 2007.

Say, this strength meme really rocks. All the embattled autocrats are grooving on it! I haven't heard if Putin has picked up on it yet, but it's been a constant drumbeat in Dubya's State of the Union addresses since 2002, as the Daily Show found out. (The player may be very slow to load, sorry 'bout that.)



In that Orwellian vein, I could sure use a limp shot of weak whiskey.

Image of OU President Roderick McDavis from his official university bio.