This has really been crazy week in politics. The American political system was in turmoil all week and, of course, the saga that leads up to the election played out like an episode of Dallas. Well, maybe not Dallas. I guess we need a new prime time soap opera called “DC.” I just thought I’d summarize a few choice headlines from the week.

1. Bill Clinton Goes Off on Fox News: I’m sure most of you have seen this by now. It was rather remarkable; last time I saw him that ticked he was saying, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman…Ms. Lewinsky.” Conservatives tried to spin the interview as an “angry Clinton is out of control” moment and liberals were just happy that a Democrat finally showed some backbone and didn’t kowtow to Bush. My favorite headline about this story is this one–”Angry white man meets the smirk“. I’m not necessarily thrilled with the content of the article, but I had to laugh at how the “smirk” has taken such a prominent role in contemporary politics. President Bush has perfected it. While some debated the smirk, others asked whether or not the “blow-up” was orchestrated.

2. Virginia Senate Race–Racist vs. Misogynist: Jim Webb, the Democrat, has a nice history of assailing women in the military. I watched the debate between him and George Allen on Meet the Press. You can watch the debate in its entirety here. The gender question comes up 30 minutes into the discussion. Webb refuses to denounce his 1979 statements, but he did admit that he regrets, saying the Naval Academy is a “horny woman’s dream.” However, it’s not just 1979, as recently as 1997 he made similar comments. He very half heartedly backs down (ever so slightly), from his earlier position. Of course, Allen is no better. He opposed gender integration at VMI, but he admits in the Meet the Press interview that he was wrong. While Webb has a “women problem,” Allen has a racism problem. He called an Indian American man macaca, and said “welcome to America.” Apparently, macaca is a racial slur (one I was not familiar with), but I think the “welcome to America” comment leaves no doubt about his views. But it isn’t just the macaca issue that brings out his bigotry. Allen also revealed his anti-Semitism when he was caught by surprise and was apparently offended that someone “discovered” his Jewish roots. In the process, he declared his love for ham sandwhiches, to prove that he is not Jewish. The most recent racist gaffe for Allen includes the revelation that Allen used the N-word in college. It’s not like Jim Webb is much better. He has called affirmative action state sponsored racism (check the Meet the Press interview) and goes on to revise his position ever so slightly to say that not only African Americans should benefit from affirmative action and that poor white “cultures” should also be included. So I guess poor white people and Blacks should get affirmative action, but Latinos, Asians, and American Indians should not. It looks like the people of VA have a great choice.

3. Woodward Releases Book on Bush Denial–Bush Denies Denial: Ok, I couldn’t really find an article of Bush directly denying anything about the book, but his press secretary did call the book cotton candy. Apparently, the book also lays out the internal conflict in the administration, making the White House look like an episode of Survivor with alliances and backstabbing.

4. New York Attorney General Candidate Tries to Wiretap Husband: This New York Attorney General Candidate has a big problem–her husband. Seems that she thought he was cheating on her, so she decided to enlist former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik to wiretap her husband’s boat. The feds intercepted the conversation and have launched an investigation into the legality of this. I didn’t know that it was illegal to eavesdrop on your spouse, and I have heard conflicting reports about whether or not this would have been legal to do. Personally, I would not think this was a big deal if it was an isolated event, but legal woes, including jail time, have followed the husband for years. When you read this time line provided by the local newspaper, Jeanine Pirro doesn’t exactly come out smelling like roses either.

5. Florida Congressman Resigns After Sending Sexually Suggestive Emails to Underage Page: Yes, just when you though the Dateline catch a predator series was over……OK, I’m just joking. Dateline didn’t catch this guy online, but somebody did, and his email reads just like one of those “Dateline Catch A Predator” chatlogs. What makes this case even more absurd is that this guy served on the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus. He even proposed legislation that would crack down on child sex offenders.

I’m sure there are some other great political stories out there this week that I missed. Please do share them in the comments section. I thought these rather salacious stories read more like National Enquirer headlines. What if anything do you think this crazy week in government says about the state of the American political landscape?

The end of the day on Sunday is the deadline for the Fifth Big Fat Carnival, to be hosted by I Hate People. Please use this form to submit favorite fat-positive and anti-sizism posts, either that you have written yourself, or that you’ve come across in your browsings. Soopermouse’s suggested theme is “Daily living with fat, in dignity,” but as usual off-theme submissions are also welcome.

Also, we need a host for the sixth big fat carnival (to appear the first week of December), so please leave a comment or drop me an email if you’d like to do that. (Or any future BFC, for that matter).

My month of Alas blogging seems to have expired already. Many thanks to Amp for the invitation, and to everyone else for welcoming me and engaging in conversation with me. It wasn’t all pretty, but they were all discussions I wanted to have and learn from. Which I did. I am.

Remember to check out that first ever Disability Blog Carnival at Penny’s on October 12. Or submit something yourself by October 9.

And stop by my site sometime, will ya? Thanks again.

I love doing these slumgullions, but with the first Disability Blog Carnival coming up at Disability Studies, Temple U. I may focus here more on non-blog slumgullionish stuff. Or maybe there will be so much disability blogging I can gather the leftovers here. We’ll see how it goes.

• Mark Boatman at Nodakwheeler had planned to escape the South Dakota nursing home he was stuck in (because of the state’s lack of funding for in-home care) last May, but it didn’t go as planned. Happily, he has recently made a successful break and is enjoying his freedom in Montana.

• In “Born that way,” Third Culture Kid(s) makes a connection between racial outsiderness and being born with a disability.

• Neonatal Doc writes about the reasons prospective parents give (or tell themselves) when they decide to abort a fetus with birth defects. The comments are long and varied, as well. Via Grand Rounds 3.1

• Suzuki unveils prototype fuel cell electric wheelchair. Um, I think it looks like a uncomfortable tinker toy, but it is interesting.

• The online poetry journal Slope presents an American Sign Language Poetry Special Edition. Be sure to watch the video of “Flying Words.” The poetry is pretty cool too.

• Lisa Ferris at A Letter to My Children tells the long and winding tale of making friends at a church when everyone seems uncomfortable with her disability:

People just wouldn’t talk to me. It is one of those things that is hard to put your finger on. Like there are a thousand little ways that people disregard you. And if you looked at each one, you may not think it is a big deal, and some individuals may have even had a very legitimate excuse that has nothing to do with you, but when you put them all together over time…you can only conclude that a large number of people really don’t have any interest in getting to know you. I asked people out for coffee and I got turned down every time. I would go up to people and talk and they would make a hasty exit. Once this woman came up and talked to me and I was fiddling around with my hearing aid from having been using the FM system. I said, “I’m sorry, my hearing aid wasn’t working and I didn’t get all that you said.” She said, “So you just let me go on talking when you couldn’t hear me?” I said I got the gist of what she said but I might have missed some things. She made a hasty exit and has never talked to me again. I have even said hi to her by name and she doesn’t even say hi back. I used to go home from church after this stuff would happen again and again and just feel like crap. Part of it was just asking myself what I was doing wrong or that was so awful? If the Unitarian Universalist can’t deal with me, who can?

• I’m eager to hear all kinds of opinions on this: “Right-wing disability” video.

• Pambazuka News covers the problems of sexual violence for disabled women in Kenya.

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade
Check there for more comments

In the middle of an excellent links post, Natasha at Pacific Views wrote a response to one of my posts. Her response is short enough to quote in full:

Ampersand [...] complains that even if Hugo Chavez isn’t anti-Semitic, he embraces woman-hating Iran.

In response to that last, I’ll point again to this article about college enrollment and professional careers for Iranian women, which says that “since the 1979 Revolution: Iran’s Islamic government has managed to convince even traditional rural families that it is safe to send their daughters away from home to study.” I will paraphrase Amp’s commentary of the other day to say that the freedoms to walk outside your house without a scarf on, to have your testimony in court valued equal to a man’s and work without having to secure permission are important, but not the only measures of freedom. While their legal structure reflects a backlash against a rapid and forced modernization that forbade the wearing of religious garb in public, leaving many hardline Muslim women feeling confined to their homes, the movement of their society and real achievements of many women there point to the possibility of reform and a systemic lack of will to revert to a Saudi-style society where women are virtual non-persons. Iran’s laws are years behind their public sentiment, something I can’t say regarding my own country and the Bill of Rights, about African countries where many women get the choice by dint of social norms and economic oppression of being either wives or prostitutes, of Asian countries where the birth of a daughter is typically considered a sad day for a family, of the many countries where girls are routinely sold as child prostitutes to provide for their brothers. There are worse things in the world than having to wear a scarf, even if it’s not something I would choose to do.

Natasha is someone whose views I respect a lot; until I have time to do more research, consider me “on the fence” on this question.

I’ve been called up for jury duty at the county court level. This is the second time in three years that this supposedly random process has chosen me, though my parents have never in their lives been called to serve. I was summoned twice in my 13 years in Arizona too.

Here’s how it generally works: A summons in the mail notifies the recipient that she must serve unless she qualifies for specific exemptions. There’s a questionnaire where she verifies she’s a U.S. citizen, has never been charged with or convicted of a felony, and doesn’t have a disability that would interfere with serving. To each she answers “yes” or “no.” “Yes” to the question about disability requires verification by a doctor, of course.

Every time (four times now), I’ve answered the disability question with a write-in of “maybe.” Is there reliable public transit to get a person with a wheelchair to the courthouse? Is the courthouse wheelchair accessible? Are the courtroom, the jury box, and the restrooms that the jurors use accessible too? Will my personal attendant or nurse remain available to me? Will I be treated respectfully if I need accommodations not immediately available? I figure I’m not the wildcard in this equation.

Marta Russell, author of Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract, wrote about her summons to jury duty in 2002. After some adventures with parking, elevator access, and building security, it was time for a little ableist attitude from a jury administrator:

Those of us who have been using wheelchairs for some time know the routine. No matter where you choose to place yourself you will be told that you are in the way and asked to move. It took about ten minutes but an administrator was soon by my side telling me I was blocking traffic and suggested that I “move over there” pointing to a table against the opposite wall.

There were people using that table to fill out forms so I mentioned that I would be in the way there too. Why is it that some people do not like to be “upped” by a person using a wheelchair? She certainly did not like it and denied that there was anyone using the table even though three persons were in plain sight at the table at that very moment!

As I went towards the table she went over and grabbed the table, then dragged it off into another area. Plainly agitated she came back over to me and asked in a patronizing tone “Is that enough room?”

My wheelchair is about 26 inches wide, the table was about 5 feet long. Agitated myself, I retorted that if the room had been designed to accommodate a wheelchair and had integrated seating, she would not be having this problem now, would she?

Russell’s experience is hardly the most dramatic. George Lane, of the Supreme Court case Tennessee v. Lane, had once crawled out of his wheelchair and up a flight of stairs to reach a second-floor courtroom in Tennessee. When he refused to repeat the process on a different day, he was arrested for failure to appear. (Tennessee v. Lane, itself, is about whether or not a plaintiff can sue a state for damages under the ADA’s Title II.)

Lane was a defendant in a criminal case, but access issues remain the same. Well, in fact, it’s even more important that a defendant be able to attend his own trial, isn’t it?

As for me, my “maybe” means I made it through that initial screening and must wait for my notice of what day I phone the courthouse. At that point, my jury pool group may or may not be required to come to the courthouse that day. I’m on call for this process through the end of 2006.

I could have opted out easily, I believe. There’s the chance that writing “I use a ventilator” instead of “maybe,” or “state-paid nurse will accompany me” would have been enough to get me passed over, but I’m interested in the process, if a little jaded about how welcome I might be to participate.

Being accepted onto a jury would considerably complicate this life I’m starting to adjust to, but I’m following through. Why exactly? First, there’s nothing about my disability that interferes with my ability to make judgments in a courtroom even though there’s a presumption in the disability question that I will be a problem citizen. I come with hired staff to help me. I should be good enough if they look at me with an open mind, eh?

And second, since a doctor’s note to opt out (assuming I needed to) can cost an office visit and money to acquire, there’s an inequality to the initial screening that I object to. Receiving a summons in the mail does not cost most people anything (at the initial stage — salary loss is a whole other thing), they should be fully prepared to accommodate me when I show up. And fairly assess me like everyone else.

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade
Check there for more comments

In my previous post, I argued that feminist reforms to the text of rape laws won’t, by themselves, lead to large differences in how rape is treated by the justice system. This is because the people who make the justice system happen will resist changes they believe are wrong.

There’s another limitation of the criminal justice system for addressing rape: The law requires - and should require - an offender to be proved guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt” before punishing him (or her) for any crime, including rape. This is not something I want to change.

However, a significant number of rapists are friends, boyfriends or spouses of their victims. These rapes often happen without any physical evidence to distinguish rape from consent, leaving the jury (or judge) with the task of deciding guilt or innocence based on the competing words of the accused and the complainant. If a rapist is a convincing liar, then even a very feminist jury may feel that he is not guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and so will not convict.

Also, although the law has to consider rape a bright line - either an act was legally rape, or it wasn’t - in real life rape is better described as a spectrum. Consider this post by Biting Beaver, in which she describes a fifteen year old girl out on a date:

She says “No” again; he withdraws ALL affection, maybe even scooting to the end of the couch. He seems sullen and frustrated. He may even argue with her, “What’s the big deal?” he asks, “Why are you being a tease?” he says accusatorily. She begins to doubt herself and feels guilt about her actions. She apologizes to him, he kisses her again and soon he’s at her zipper once more. She flinches and sighs heavily, “I don’t know if I’m ready” she says plaintively, “What?” he asks her; “Don’t you love me?”

The girl bites her bottom lip, in a flash of anger and frustration she stands up to leave. He grabs her arm, “Oh baby, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you mad” he says. She looks at him again and quickly it goes through her mind that she doesn’t really know where she’d go anyway. She lied to her parents; they think she’s over at a friend’s house. She has no car, how is she going to get anywhere? She can’t tell her parents and she doesn’t want to try to call her girlfriend who may or may not have a car. She knows that she’ll just make her boyfriend angry at her even if she DID do that. What if he kicks her out? She lied to be there and if she goes back home she’ll get in trouble for lying. In a flash she decides to sit back down.

An hour later, after more approach and retreat and more pushing his hand away, she gives in.

She goes home the next day, troubled, depressed, and unable to concentrate. She has been raped and her emotions and reactions are the same as any other rape victim, but she has no recourse.

Even many feminists, me included, would hesitate to describe the situation Biting Beaver describes as “rape” (although I wouldn’t hesitate to describe the way the boy in her example acts as disgusting, wrong, and worthy of punishment). I think this is partly because most people - including most feminists - think of rape as an either/or, black-or-white question. As Biting Beaver argues, rape is more accurately seen as the end of a spectrum. Here’s an image of the spectrum, adapted from this graphic which was created by Soopermouse.

At the black end of the spectrum is a perfect lack of consent, in which the victim lacked all agency; at the red end is fully consensual sex. In between we find cases such as the ones Biting Beaver describes, in which coercion and pressure is unfairly used to make someone “consent” to sex. Instead of asking “was this rape or not?,” the question Biting Beaver’s post brings up is “were there rape-like elements to this encounter? Were there degrees of unfair coercion and pressure?”

But our legal system is not set up to recognize a spectrum of consent; because courts and juries have a need for certainty, laws are written to create bright lines and black-and-white contrasts. The situation that Biting Beaver describes is a terrible injustice, but it’s one that the courts may not ever be able to address. But just because something can’t be addressed in a courtroom doesn’t mean that it isn’t reprehensible; nor does it mean that no injustice has been done.

Mary Koss, an academic and feminist activist who has spent her career studying rape, in recent years has been working on “restorative justice” as a means of providing justice to victims of sexual assault and rape. Here’s part of a brochure for Restore, a program Koss helped create that specializes in restorative justice for sexual offenses:

Restorative justice is not perfect justice; but in many cases restorative justice may be more useful for victims. This would include cases that the regular courts cannot prosecute, either because they’re too distant from the “perfect lack of consent” end of the spectrum, or because they’re “she said / he said” cases that are unlikely to be resolved in an adversarial justice system. It might also include cases that the regular justice system might be able to address, but without bringing as much satisfaction to the victim as restorative justice can.

Discussing restorative justice in greater detail is beyond the scope of this blog post, but interested readers can check out the Restore website for more information.

[Comments for this post are reserved for feminist and pro-feminist posters only. If you don't think you'll fit into Amp's conception of "feminist and pro-feminist," you may leave comments instead at the crosspost on Creative Destruction.]

One thing I’ve been meaning to post about for a while is why I think reforming rape and sexual assault laws, while worthwhile, is unlikely to cause an increase in rapists being convicted and imprisoned. I was reminded of this while I was reading a recent law journal article by Corey Rayburn entitled “To Catch A Sex Thief.”¹ From the article’s introduction:

While every trial has elements of theater, rape and sexual assault cases are unique because they emphasize the gender performances of the accuser and the accused. Complainants who testify are not just recounting the events of the alleged rape. They are also defining the essential parts of their gender roles for the jury. Every statement, mannerism, action, and emotion of the accuser on the witness stand relays information about her gender to the jury. If the jurors deem a performance too emotional, they may assume the accuser is stereotypically hysterical and unreliable. If, however, she appears cold and calculating, the jury may believe she is a “gold-digger” using the criminal trial as a prequel to a lucrative civil suit. If she shows too much anger (as though it were possible for someone who has been raped to be “too angry”), the jury may see vengeance as her motive for “crying rape.” Which predefined gender roles the jury assigns the accuser and accused during the trial are important in determining whose story the jury will ultimately believe.

At its core, a criminal rape trial taps into the linguistically and culturally founded beliefs of the jury in order to reach a desired outcome. In most cases of “simple rape,” as Susan Estrich has labeled acquaintance rape, the defense attempts to access certain meta-narratives about sex and rape to convince the jury that the alleged rape event was really consensual sex. These rape myths and the rhetoric of rape and sex, not statutory rules and procedures, are the critical pivot points for shaping the jury’s decision. The trial itself is like a play where the actors and their agents fight to define the roles and script utilizing these meta-narratives. As Stephen Schulhofer has written, “[s]ocial attitudes are tenacious, and they can easily nullify the theories and doctrines found in the law books. The story of failed [rape law] reforms is in part a story about the overriding importance of culture, about the seeming irrelevance of law.”

There’s a crowd of independent actors standing in between a rapist and the inside of a prison cell, and any one of them has the ability to make sure that the rapist never sees the cell. The cops who perform the arrest - or choose not to. The supervisor cop at the station, who can order the (alleged) rapist let go. The prosecutor, who can decide not to bring the rapist to trial - or to do so only on a lesser charge. The grand jury. The jury. The judge.

If the written law moves in a direction that strikes any of this crowd people as unfair or unjust, that person can resist by finding excuses not to implement the law as written. This is why the frequent suggestion (often from conservatives) that sentencing for rape be made “tougher,” or be made a capital offense, is a bad idea. If the sentence for rape is harsh enough so that many people see the sentence itself as unjust (”you can’t put a boy in jail for 30 years just because he went a little too far”), the result will be that fewer rapists will be convicted of rape.

So it’s important to seek a middle ground - a punishment not so light that it makes a mockery out of rape, but not so tough that the people who make our justice system work will be loathe to find anyone guilty of rape.

Similarly, with rape law reform. Feminists have been right to reform rape laws over the past few decades so that rapes that previously were in effect legal - such as spousal rape and many acquaintance rapes - can be prosecuted. Feminists have also been right to push for reforms like so-called “rape shield” laws, which in theory reduce the ability of defense attorneys to use rape trials to humiliate the victim and put the victim on trial.

More from Corey Rayburn’s article:

A person who is on the witness stand telling her story of rape does not just have to convince the jury that she is telling the truth. Instead, because of the desensitization effect, she has to compete with every movie, television program, book, magazine, newspaper, and website depicting rape or consensual sex that any of the twelve jurors has ever seen. If her story does not measure up to the jury’s high standards as constructed by years of mass media inculcation of rape imagery, then the defendant will walk free. Each fictionalized account of rape normalizes and naturalizes rape in a way that makes potential jurors numb from the repetitive experiences.[...]

The images of the especially graphic and shocking rapes in mass media create a standard that is too high for most accusers to meet in front of a jury already confronted with conflicting accounts of an alleged rape event. A jury who hears about a run-of-the-mill simple rape where the accuser was intoxicated is likely to shrug at the details of the complainant’s story. The jurors have heard it all before, but with more shocking details, more horrifying tidbits, and, if through movie or television, with an accompanying audio/video record. The accuser cannot inject extra details like the movie-of-the-week screenwriter. She cannot ask the makeup artist to paint on extra bruises before her big entrance. And she certainly cannot ask the director to have the defendant portrayed in an uglier light to highlight his evil nature. Rather, the accuser’s story is limited by what she remembers and what she told the police when she first reported her rape. Any variation from that story will hurt her credibility and will likely ruin a chance for conviction. (210) And yet, with her heavy burden of performance, if she does not improve her story, a conviction is unlikely because of the jury’s desensitization to her rather mundane rape narrative. [...]

When a rape is recounted through oral testimony, with limited physical evidence, it is likely to underwhelm a jury that has heard much better stories and seen more convincing accounts of rape. The fact that television or movie rapes may have been fictional does not mean a jury’s conception of rape is not actively shaped by them. As discussed earlier, fictional accounts can be more powerful because they are dramatized and sensationalized. Furthermore, the fictional accounts often lack the uncertainty and nuance that jurors often confront in rape trials.

The defense can also take advantage of the intersection of the desensitization of rape and the roles ascribed to the accuser. A story that portrays the accuser as a money-grubber becomes more potent if the victim’s injuries are minor and her tale not particularly lurid. The jury can be convinced that the accuser has simply decided to take financial advantage of unpleasant sex or that she is using the rape complaint out of regret for having sex with the defendant. If the details of the alleged rape are not shocking, the defense can easily dovetail the regret story with the facts of the case. As the defense capitalizes on the intersections of these narratives, the accuser’s burden of performance becomes heavier.

As I said before, I am in favor of many feminist reforms to rape laws. But that’s only half of the reform that’s required for real change in how the legal system treats rape. The other reform that has to take place isn’t the letter of the law, but in the minds of the people who implement the law. And since the people who implement the law include jury members, in effect what needs to be transformed is how every American thinks about rape - which in turn requires changing how the media presents rape. Until enough Americans begin to think about rape differently, then the people who make the law happen will resist legal changes to rape laws, rather than implementing them.

Of course, I hope that the more that Americans change their thoughts about rape and sex in a more feminist direction, the less rape will happen, and the less we’ll need the justice system to address rape. However, even in a more feminist society, there will still be some rape victims, and the criminal justice system has severe limitations when it comes to providing justice to rape victims. I’ll discuss this more in a future post.

[Comments for this post are reserved for feminist and pro-feminist posters only. If you don't think you'll fit into Amp's conception of "feminist and pro-feminist," you may leave comments instead at the crosspost on Creative Destruction.]

1. “To catch a sex thief: the burden of performance in rape and sexual assault trials,” by Corey Rayburn, Columbia Journal of Gender & Law, June 2006, Pg. 437 ,Vol. 15, No. 2. (back)

Comments are working again.

It’s all a bit mysterious to me, since I don’t know what went wrong or what fixed it. I’ll update this post if I ever get a clue. But in the meanwhile, it’s good that comments are working.

UPDATE: It turns out that the server was overloaded - they restarted Apache and cleaned the MySQL tables and that did the trick. I’ll try to prevent this happening in the future.

The third fifth Big Fat Carnival, to be hosted by I Hate People, is approaching, but we’re weirdly low on submissions this time! Oh, no! The humiliation! How will we ever be able to face the other Carnivals at the Carnival Sock-Hop?

But we can save the Big Fat Carnival! Please use this form to submit excellent fat-positive and anti-sizism posts, either that you have written yourself, or that you’ve come across in your browsings. Soopermouse’s suggested theme is “Daily living with fat, in dignity,” but as usual off-theme submissions are happily accepted! (Submission deadline is the end of the day on Sunday, October 1st). And if other fat-positive and allied bloggers could link to or reprint this call for submissions, I’d really appreciate it. :-)

Thanks!

In a previous post, I asked “Alas” readers about the translation controversy regarding Chavez and antisemitism. In the comments, Elana, who is a professional Spanish translator, said the real issue is “do references to ‘Christ killers’ and ‘gold and silver’ have the same connotations in their culture as they do in ours?”

Since then, I’ve come across an article which convincingly suggests that “Christ-killers” does not have the same antisemitic connotation in Venezuela. The article was originally printed in the Forward, an American Jewish magazine that I think is generally credible.

Here are the most relevant bits (emphasis added by me):

The Venezuelan Jewish community leadership and several major American Jewish groups are accusing the Simon Wiesenthal Center of rushing to judgment by charging Venezuela’s leftist president, Hugo Chavez, with making antisemitic remarks.

Officials of the leading organization of Venezuelan Jewry were preparing a letter this week to the center, complaining that it had misinterpreted Chavez’s words and had failed to consult with them before attacking the Venezuelan president. [...]

Both the AJCommittee and the American Jewish Congress seconded the Venezuelan community’s view that Chavez’s comments were not aimed at Jews. All three groups said he was aiming his barbs at the white oligarchy that has dominated the region since the colonial era, pointing to his reference to Bolivar as the clearest evidence of his intent.

One official noted that Latin America’s so-called Liberation Theology has long depicted Jesus as a socialist and consequently speaks of gentile business elites as “Christ-killers.”

So it appears that the strong case for Chavez being an antisemite is based at least in part upon an unfair translation.

There are also translation controversies regarding antisemitism and the statements of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran; the arguments and counter-arguments are described in this Wikipedia article. To me, criticism of Ahmadinejad for antisemitism seems - if not absolutely certain - on much firmer ground than similar criticism of Chavez. On the other hand, like Y-Love at Jewschool, I do see Ahmadinejad’s explicit separation of “zionism” and “Jews” as a potentially positive step.

So why am I bringing Ahmadinejad up? Because Chavez has praised Ahmadinejad publicly (that’s the two of them pictured together on the right). (It’s notable that Venezuelan Jewish leaders have expressed “outrage” at the friendly relations with Ahmadinejad).

People have argued over if Ahmadinejad’s statements are anti-semitic - did he really call for Israel to be wiped off the map, or did he just call for the current Israeli government to be replaced? There is, however, no doubt at all that Iran’s policies are deeply anti-woman. In a woman’s enews article, Jennifer Fasulo points out that “moments like this show just how little women’s lives matter in the world of nationalist politics.”

There is no excuse for declaring solidarity with a theocratic regime that treats women like sub-humans. By embracing Ahmadinejad, Chavez is adding steam to the growing and dangerous alliance between left-wing and right-wing anti-imperialism.

In this equation, the only thing that matters is opposition to U.S. military power. Women’s rights, worker’s rights, student’s rights–the things that are supposed to matter to socialists, progressives and people of conscience–be damned.

Chavez appears not to have noticed that the current government of Iran has turned Iran into a country where gender apartheid and hatred of women are enshrined in law.
Regime of Violent Repression

This is a country where women are stoned to death for the “crime” of adultery, buried up to their necks and pelted in the face and head with stones until they die, where women have no right to divorce or child custody, are legally forced to veil under threat of physical beating or imprisonment, can’t travel without the permission of a husband or father, where their testimony in a court of law is considered half that of a man, and where political dissent of any kind, for women and men, is punishable by imprisonment, often torture and death.

This is the government that Chavez compares to his own as a “heroic nation,” one which he even deems “revolutionary.” [...]

For 27 years women have resisted and defied the [Iranian] regime’s persecution of them, often at great risk to their lives. Along with an inspiring women’s movement, there are strong, secular workers and student movements, all of them opposing not only the Islamic Republic, but also U.S. threats of military attacks and sanctions on Iran.

How can Chavez–a declared socialist and defender of the downtrodden–align himself with the leader of such a reactionary regime, rather than the inspiring socialist and feminist movements which are fighting against it?

Fasulo’s entire article is well worth reading.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. At the time I'm posting this, comments at "Alas" are borked, but the comments at Creative Destruction are still working.]

Penny Richards at Disability Studies, Temple, U., has decided it’s time for the Disability Blog Carnival to begin. She’s been posting monthly crip blog roundups, and the last one was both amazing and impressively long. And remember Goldfish’s Blog Against Disablism Day? That one-time event ended up involving well over one hundred bloggers. So I think this is long overdue.

Generally, the carnival will be about disability, disability studies, and disability rights. Hopefully, people from a variety of backgrounds and disability experiences will jump in to participate.

The first carnival will be held on Thursday, October 12 at Disability Studies, Temple U. Deadline for submissions is Monday, October 9. It’s already been noted that submission through the blog carnival site is problematic for those using screen-readers because of the CAPTCHA thingy, so contact Penny at her site to submit or ask further questions. Or to host a future carnival.

I’m hosting the following one, October 26, at The Gimp Parade, and I’ll be posting details soon about that.

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade
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I’m sorry, I didn’t hate Zack Braff’s movie Garden State. It was sweet and wistful and funny. Sure, it wasn’t The Greatest Movie Of All Time, but it certainly didn’t deserve a heaping double-scoop of contempt from Slate.

The Slate article has good laugh lines, but some of its criticisms are bewildering:

Braff also uses pop songs as a cheat, an easy way to heighten the emotional impact of otherwise unremarkable moments. The music in Garden State is so load-bearing that the movie becomes ridiculous if you swap in different tunes—if you don’t believe me, check this out.

The link leads to a YouTube video in which whatever sensitive alt-rock piece was originally in a scene from Garden State is swapped with a hip-hop song. It reminds me of Mad Libs - yes, it’s funny, but it’s not a meaningful criticism. We’ve demonstrated that swapping a song chosen to match the emotional tenor of the scene with one chosen to conflict with it changes the scene. Big deal.

I’m also bewildered by the claim that using music to successfully convey meaning and emotion to the audience is bad.

The Slate critic - who praises Braff’s sit-com Scrubs - is of the “how dare you have artistic ambitions - don’t you know your place?” school of thought:

Instead of focusing on the one thing he’s good at, Braff is quitting Scrubs after this season to focus on his film career. His rumored upcoming projects reveal two possible career paths. The first: the leading role in a Fletch remake. The second: starring in, writing, directing, and producing a remake of a Danish Dogme film about a woman whose husband gets paralyzed in a car accident. Please, Zach, leave paralysis to Lars von Trier. Chevy Chase—now there’s a guy you should look up to.

Yes, because what the world really needs is a Fletch remake, rather than someone attempting to do something that has ambitions of being good.

In the comments of Pandagon, “The J Train” calls Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State a “vagina ex machina” character, which she defines as “the beautiful, together, inexplicably single woman who just seems to fall out of the sky in front of the protagonist. See also Kirsten Dunst, Elizabethtown.”¹That, I think, is a much more on-target criticism than grousing about a movie director incorporating pop music he loves into his film. The Portman character was embarrassing, not so much a character as a girlfriend-shaped blob pulled out of a prop closet so that Braff had something to play his romance scenes against. Portman was aggressively cute! cute! cute! all movie long, but Braff’s script didn’t give her much to play. (And although it’s too long since I’ve seen it for me to be sure, I don’t think Garden State passes the Mo Movie Measure either).

Finally, it’s annoying that Braff — who owes his career to the willingness of producers to cast someone without cookie-cutter movie-star looks — didn’t show a similar daring when he cast the parts in Garden State. Maybe he’ll improve in his future movies.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. Right now, the comments on "Alas" are broken, so today is a good day to leave comments at Creative Destruction.]

1. There are also penis ex machinas - see the veterinarian character on Gray’s Anatomy, for instance. (back)

Sorry, folks - the “Alas” comments aren’t working, and I don’t know why. This appears to be a recurrence of the comments problems we were having at the end of August. I’ve emailed someone smart and asked him to take a look at the problem; hopefully it’ll be short-lived this time.

1. Ebogjonson (via Prometheus 6) has this humorous/serious flow chart for people who want to put blackface on their blogs. It won’t fit all on your screen at one time, but if you follow the arrows you’ll figure it out.

2. Harlow’s Monkey has a follow-up to my transracial adoption post. She adds several other frames for TRA stories in mass media.

3. C.N. Le has a good post on retaining graduate students from racial and ethnic minority groups. This post sheds light on the important issue of campus and departmental climate and other issued related to retention. Often, professors have the “numerical critical mass perspective” where the entire focus is on increasing the number of students of color who enroll. Faculty members often forget that the problem is not only getting people in the door, but getting them through the program. It may surprise people to know where some of the best departments for graduating students of color are located. In 2004 Washington State University, which is located in a rural nearly all white area, was honored for it’s record by the American Sociological Association for its record in graduating students of color (I think they have fallen off in recent years, but at one point they had an amazing record.). The University of Utah is another place that seems to do well at recruiting and retaining minority faculty members; I have been particularly impressed with how many African American, Latino, and Asian sociologists are there (not all in sociology, but nevertheless at the university). One other sociology department that I think has a surprising number of African American graduate students is the University of Nebraska Lincoln, and they seem to be doing a decent job of retaining these students since at least three of the Black sociologists I have met from there are now graduates. Many departments use the excuse–”we are just not located in an area where a lot on minority students would want to be.” I’m absolutley sure that this does make a difference, but this also becomes a sort of lame excuse not to work to keep departments and Universities racially diverse.

4. Another Conflict Theorist has a great post on Barbaro and the extraordinary efforts to save him. The post is a fabulous dose of sarcasm and critical theory.

5. Feminist Allies has a good post, whose comments were highjacked by men’s rights activists, about what men can do to be perceived as non-threatening.

It’s weird to find myself agreeing with right-wingers, but this:

“I certainly hope that Hillary is the candidate,” [Jerry] Falwell said, according to the recording. “She has $300 million so far. But I hope she’s the candidate. Because nothing will energize my [constituency] like Hillary Clinton.”

Cheers and laughter filled the room as Falwell continued: “If Lucifer ran, he wouldn’t.”

It’s a joke. I’ve made pretty much the same joke myself, frankly - and it’s more a slam on Falwell’s followers than on Hillary.

Oh, and as for Chavez - look, he clearly didn’t mean to say that Bush is literally the immortal avatar of evil, a fallen angel, etc. That would be insane. He just meant that he thinks Bush is incredibly evil. This is hardly an uncommon or shocking opinion nowadays.

I was going to close with a snarky comment about it making more sense to hate Chavez for his antisemitism, but then I ran across this blog, claiming that Chavez’s famous antisemitic statement was actually a case of malicious mistranslation. Any Spanish-reading “Alas” readers who can clear up this question in comments, please do.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where we're all compared to Lucifer on alternate Tuesdays. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

I’ve completely swiped these links from the sidebar at Official Shrub.com, and from Lake Desire’s list at New Game Plus.

• White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack
  This is Peggy McIntosh’s original article, which inspired the other lists. There’s a number of interesting discussions of this list on the women’s studies listserv archive.
• Able-Bodied Privilege
• Average Sized Person Privilege
• Being Poor Is…
  This one isn’t actually in the “privilege checklist” format, but I think it fits in.
• The Black Male Privileges Checklist
• Christian Privilege
• The Costs of American Privilege
  Okay, this one isn’t even a list. But as Lake Desire says, let’s shoehorn it in here so that American privilege will at least get a mention.
• Daily Effects of Straight Priviliege
• Heterosexual Privilege
• The Invisibility of Class Privilege (pdf link)
• The Male Privilege Checklist
  My own contribution to the trend; probably the most-read piece I’ve ever written (or, in this case, compiled).
• Non-Poor Privilege Checklist
• Non-Trans Privilege Checklist
• Privilege to Game
  Lake Desire’s list of how privilege, gaming and boycotts intersect
• Social Class Privilege – Beyond Ethnicity, Gender, and Religion (.pdf link)
• We Can’t Be Equal While…
  Not really a “privilege” list, but similar enough in spirit that I wanted to include it. One thing I like about this list is that it includes ways that sexism harms both sexes.

I’m hoping that the comments to this post can be used to interactively keep this post up-to-date. So if you know of a link that you think is relevant to this post, or if you notice that one of these links has died, please leave a comment.

UPDATE: Maia has a critique.

From a notice on a disability listserv:

I am forwarding this on behalf of Feminist Response in Disability Activism (FRIDA), a newly established feminist disability rights organization based in Chicago, founded by a collective of highly skilled and committed disability rights community organizers.

On August 3, 2006, F.R.I.D.A (Feminist Response in Disability Activism) held a Town Hall meeting in Chicago for women with disabilities. One of the issues that emerged from the Town Hall was the fact that many women with disabilities living in nursing homes and institutions are:

1. Not provided with pads and tampons (even though this is required by federal regulations mandating that nursing homes provide certain supplies for residents on Medicaid or Medicare, including sanitary napkins and related supplies);

2. Told they have to buy pads and tampons out of the $30 they receive monthly from their SSI allowance (yep, the rest of their money - $603/month – goes to the nursing home and institution);

3. Not allowed to leave the facility to purchase the pads and tampons due to a “level policy” recently instituted in many Chicago nursing homes that prohibits residents from going on “family visits or independent passes” unless several strict requirements are met; and

4. As a result, some nursing home/institution staff are forcibly suppressing the periods of women with disabilities through continual DepoProvera and other methods so staff don’t have to “deal with the mess.”

DOES THIS INFURIATE YOU?

It should! Access to feminine products is a fundamental aspect of reproductive choice!

WANNA DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?
THEN JOIN THE PAD PATROL/TAMPONS FOR JUSTICE PROJECT!
SEND US YOUR TAMPONS AND PADS!

You can help by donating a box of pads or tampons to the F.R.I.D.A. Pad Patrol. We will make sure the items get into the hands of the women with disabilities who need them.

FRIDA can also take checks or cash to pay for these items; checks should be made out to FRIDA with a note for “pads and tampons”.

Send your pads/tampons to:

F.R.I.D.A. Pad Patrol Distribution Center
C/o Sarah Triano, Access Living
614 W. Roosevelt Road
Chicago, IL 60607

Know a woman with a disability who is being denied access to pads/tampons? Then send her our way and we’ll set her up!

At the FRIDA website, they explain why this isn’t simply a matter to be put to legal action:

In response to some questions about the Pad Patrol, FRIDA is fully aware that in cases where nursing homes or institutions fail to provide sanitary napkins as dictated by federal law, legal recourse is necessary in case where informal negotiation is not successful. We are in full agreement that systemic change is the only way to ensure long term justice. We do, however, feel that systemic change can be achieved on multiple levels. Some folks have asked whether, in distributing sanitary napkins and tampons to nursing homes, we would enable the nursing homes to continue evading the law.

Our viewpoint is as follows… First, in conducting outreach for a pad drive (which has reached as far as Australia) we are exposing a problem in a system, a problem that many feel a personal connection to. Anyone would be shocked by the idea that someone would have to blow their whole allowance on sanitary napkins or else sit in a crust of their own blood. Add to that the fact that showers are often regulated and you must bathe on a schedule. Sometimes, by relating to something so graphically everyday, we can push awareness of the problem to a critical mass of public opinion.

Second, the larger problem beyond the lack of sanitary napkins and the suppression of periods is the entire system of nursing homes and institutions in which so many people with disabilities become trapped. While the average person will be shocked by the pad issue, they will hopefully also learn a little to care about the wider problems of institutionalization. FRIDA feels, as does ADAPT and many other groups, that we would much prefer to live in our own homes with community supports for our needs, rather than in nursing homes, institutions or group homes. In the end, we see that a feminist issue is really a human issue.

Third, and maybe most pragmatically, the woman who is having her period in 3 days cannot wait for a lawsuit to be settled in five years. There is a final question which FRIDA needs to answer to the public, and that is whether this problem really exists, and whether there are women who are willing to speak out about this issue. There are in fact such women but at this time their identities are protected by confidentiality. FRIDA is working to identify women who are willing to speak out. If you or someone you know is willing to testify and let people know what’s really going on with women’s rights in nursing homes and institutions, get in touch….

More contact information available at the FRIDA site.

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade
Check there for more comments

My aunt and uncle visited from Wyoming today and I showed them the drawings and pictures their daughter’s third-grade students sent me last Spring. There are two series of letters since I replied once and then they all wrote back, practicing their cursive and sharing weird stories, silly jokes, and curiosity about my life. Most of the letters begin “Dear Cousin Kay,” which is sweet and cracks me up.

To their first set of questions, I explained how I get help with dressing and using the toilet. I answered questions about my favorite sport, team, color, children’s book and all that. Also, that’s what my self-portrait was all about. My favorite poem of the many the kids sent was this one by Gunnar:

Roses are red,
violets are blue,
I bet anyone would take a bullet for you.

Scary, yet sweet, right?

I replied to every disability-related question they posed and their second set of letters showed more curiosity.

“How do you get the tube down your throat?”

“How do you get into your scooter?”

“Did you know some electric chairs are run by movements of eyeballs?”

And this one:

“Is your life hard or super-hard?”

For some reason, that last always makes me think of this lovely little encounter I had in a grocery store in Tempe, Arizona, years ago. I was just a couple blocks from my apartment, shopping early so the short ride home in the heat wouldn’t spoil anything, when a woman stepped toward me.

She had a little girl with her, about three, and the mother said, “Excuse me, do you mind if I take a moment with you to explain to my daughter about your scooter? She’s curious about it.”

The girl stood shyly nearby, trading wide-eyed looks with me.

“Um, okay.”

The woman squatted so we were all about the same height, tapped a finger very gently on the top edge of the metal basket that hangs at the front of my scooter, and told her daughter how some people don’t use their legs or need to sit when they’re tired but still have things to do. She noted that the scooter was a very good thing because it helped me get around.

It was a very brief encounter. The mother didn’t intrude further by asking me to answer questions or explain about myself. She let her daughter look for a heartbeat or two, we traded smiles all around, then she thanked me and we all moved on. The little girl looked back at me a few times, then they were gone.

This one encounter stands opposed to the dozens and dozens where I’ve heard a parent shush a child’s question or cover their pointing finger as they want to know what the deal is with me. Those parents ducked their heads in embarrassment, or a few gave me a “sorry about that” smile. All left the impression that I should not be talked about or approached.

“Is your life hard or super-hard?”

I have no idea how to answer that simply. I’d never say “super-hard,” though to be fair, I know at least one family member who would say “super-hard” because of their relationship to me. But somehow I love the question. Maybe because by itself it says so much.

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade
Check for more comments there

Tim at Balloon Juice quotes from news stories (one, two):

Torture in Iraq may be worse now than it was under Saddam Hussein, with militias, terrorist groups and government forces disregarding rules on the humane treatment of prisoners, the U.N. anti-torture chief said Thursday. [...]

A report by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq’s Human Rights office cited worrying evidence of torture, unlawful detentions, growth of sectarian militias and death squads, and a rise in “honor killings” of women. [...]

According to the U.N. report, the number of Iraqi civilians killed in July and August hit 6,599, a record-high that is far greater than initial estimates suggested, the U.N. report said Wednesday. [...]

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat [...]

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

And from a report quoted on Liberty & Power:

A confidential Pentagon assessment finds that an overwhelming majority of Iraq’s Sunni Muslims support the insurgency that has been fighting against U.S. troops and the Iraqi government, ABC News has learned.

Officials won’t say how the assessment was made but found that support for the insurgency has never been higher, with approximately 75 percent of the country’s Sunni Muslims in agreement.

When the Pentagon started surveying Iraqi public opinion in 2003, Sunni support for the insurgents stood at approximately 14 percent.

As Daran points out (one two), male Iraqis - mostly non-combatants - are being slaughtered and abused in Iraq, by both insurgents and US forces.

[According to the Lancet study of deaths among Iraqis,] the plurality of the causalties were adult men. The next largest group was boys. There were more boys killed than female adults and children put together. Males accounted for nearly three quarters of the deaths.

As I’ve blogged about before, the decline in women’s freedoms has been enormous. From Iraqi blogger Riverbend:

For me, June marked the first month I don’t dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf. I don’t wear a hijab usually, but it’s no longer possible to drive around Baghdad without one. It’s just not a good idea. (Take note that when I say ‘drive’ I actually mean ‘sit in the back seat of the car’- I haven’t driven for the longest time.) Going around bare-headed in a car or in the street also puts the family members with you in danger. You risk hearing something you don’t want to hear and then the father or the brother or cousin or uncle can’t just sit by and let it happen. I haven’t driven for the longest time. If you’re a female, you risk being attacked.

I look at my older clothes- the jeans and t-shirts and colorful skirts- and it’s like I’m studying a wardrobe from another country, another lifetime.

From an op-ed by Bonnie Erbe:

A new poll of leaders of Iraqi women’s-rights groups finds that women were treated better and their civil rights were more secure under deposed President Saddam Hussein than under the faltering and increasingly sectarian U.S.-installed government.

The war advocates will, of course, claim everything is fine. Violence in Iraq is “just a comma” in a future history book, according to President Bush. (As the Carpetbagger says, Bush’s comma is a spectacular achievement in denial of responsibility; there is no presidential failure, however awesome, which can’t be excused as “just a comma” with a long enough historical view. As John Maynard Keynes sarcastically pointed out, in the long run, we’re all dead.) Norman Podhoretz, editor of the conservative magazine Commentary, argues that even the intensity of violence in Iraq proves democratization is going well:

…The terrible violence being perpetrated by the terrorists of the so-called “insurgency”… is in itself a tribute to the enormous strides that have been made in democratizing the country. If this murderous collection of diehard Sunni Baathists and vengeful Shiite militias, together with their allies inside the government, agreed that democratization had already failed, would they be waging so desperate a campaign to defeat it? And if democratization in Iraq posed no threat to the other despotisms in the region, would those regimes be sending jihadists and material support to the “insurgency” there?

At the point when attacks on Iraqis and Americans are seen as proof that things are going well, is there any possible scenario which can be described as going badly? (A reader at Crooked Timber aptly referred to the above as “sane-people-baiting.”)

Tim at Balloon Juice writes:

I could imagine an argument that things are going through a bad spell right now, just like I could imagine arguing that space aliens will have pity on us and relieve the 2nd Marine Regiment in Fallujah. Things can get better and they can get worse. Hypothetical arguments can go both ways. Right now things look pretty bad and no reason in the world exists to think that they cannot get worse.

Tim is right on the mark: Anything short of Heaven could be said to have “prospects to improve”; in fact, the more horrible a situation is, the more evident the potential for improvement.

The question is, given the truly astonishing record of being wrong war advocates have so far compiled, why should we trust their judgment that improvement is just around the corner? These are the people who thought we’d be greeted with cheers and flowers. War advocates have said “improvement is just around the corner” for over three years; when Saddam’s sons were killed, when Saddam was captured, when elections were held, over and over.

You’ve heard of the boy who cried wolf? War advocates are the boy who cried “improvement!” The war hawks have proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they can no more successfully judge what’s around the corner in Iraq than they can flap their arms and fly around the moon. A Iraq war hawk is like a baseball player who has struck out 20 times in a row claiming that if he gets just one more chance, he’ll hit a home run. And when he strikes out for the 21st time, he won’t learn a thing; he’ll just move on to claiming that he’ll surely hit a home run the 22nd time, the 23rd, the 24th, etc etc..

How many pathetic failures, leading to the violent deaths, rapes and maimings of thousands of Iraqis — and of US soldiers — should Bush’s Iraq policy get before it loses all credibility?

Podhoretz points out that three elections have been held. Elections are great. But political freedom - the freedom to vote, which Iraqis allegedly have (never mind the ways in which the elections were less than ideally democratic) - is not the only freedom in the world, nor the only one that matters. If I am free to vote but not to walk the streets, I am not substantively free. If I am free to vote but the political system lacks the will to protect me from being kidnapped, raped and sold into sexual slavery, I am not substantively free. If my odds of being violently killed are high enough so I live in perpetual fear, I am not substantively free.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]