People who promote “traditional” marriage, and oppose official support for or recognition of other family forms, are often the same people who worry about the relatively low fertility rates in the US and other wealthy nations.

The blog Demography Matters quotes from a newspaper article, about attitudes towards motherhood in Germany — attitudes that too many cultural conservatives in the United States share.

Unbeknownst to most outsiders, Germany is the most difficult place in Western Europe to be a working mother, with a deeply ingrained culture of machismo that expects women to give up their lives once they have children.

The ideology itself was Ms. Hoffritz’s biggest barrier. When she talked about her frustrations, her friends and relatives openly denounced her as a rabenmutter – literally “raven mother,” a woman who abandons her children, like the mythic ravens throwing their chicks from the nest. It is a term routinely applied to working mothers in Germany.

“When I got pregnant, even though I’d had a career for 20 years, everyone expected me to drop my job forever, to take care of my son and not do anything else all day for the rest of my life, and they got angry when I said otherwise,” she says. “Friends just thought I should be a full-time mom.”

This attitude, unsurprisingly, discourages women from having children. A new study by Jean-Marie Le Goff compares higher-fertility France with lower-fertility Germany:

Women in France, Le Goff argues, have access to a whole variety of family structures, from the traditional nuclear marriage family to a family marked by cohabitation to single motherhood, with a relatively long tradition of recognizing the responsibilities of parents towards their children regardless of their legal status, with the idea of mothers working outside of the home not only being accepted but supported by any number subsidies to parents to affordable and accessible day care. In West Germany, social and policy norms tend to support traditional family structures. The result? In France, people are childbearing age are split between two sectors, one defined by marriage relationships and the other defined by cohabitation relationships. On the other side of the Rhine, people of childbearing age are split between people who have children and people who don’t. Katja Köppen’s Second Births in Western Germany and France (Demographic Research 14.14) further points out that whereas Frenchwomen seem to enjoy an institutional structure that encourages motherhood and there isn’t a contradiction between high levels of education–hence employment–and fertility, there is such a contradiction in western Germany, with government spending priorities in the latter country being directed towards the support of traditional families. It’s not too much of a surprise, then, that the German Federal Statistics Office reports that [the number] of childless women is rising, particularly in the former West Germany.

Personally, I don’t care if fertility in the US goes down or up; I suspect any deficit in our population caused by declining births can be made up for by increased immigration. But those who are concerned about fertility rates, should consider supporting, rather than denigrating, alternative family forms.

(Curtsy to Economic Woman.)

You know, California Assemb. Mike Duvall, R-Yorba Linda, shouldn’t be mocked and ridiculed for carrying on an affair with two different lobbyists. He should be ridiculed for talking about it with all the savoir-faire of a 14-year-old relating something he’d once heard about girls from his brother’s friend’s cousin. Warning, the language could be NSFW, and all of is is not safe for your lunch:

For those of you not able to watch the video — or those of you who don’t want to hear a crusty assemblyman telling his buddy how he totally nailed these two hot chix — and he’s telling the total truth, swear — here’s the key part:

“She wears little eye-patch underwear,” said Duvall, who is married with two 
children. “So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And
 so, we had made love Wednesday–a lot! And so she’ll, she’s all, ‘I am going 
up and down the stairs, and you’re dripping out of me!’ So messy!”

Duvall has, of course, gone into seclusion, where he’ll presumably pray away his horrible indescretions. Of course, aside from the propriety of cheating on both your wife and your mistress, there’s also the fact that at least one of the women is a lobbyist for a major utility, and Duvall just happens to serve as Vice Chair of the Utilities and Commerce Committee. I’m sure he’s able to keep those things totally separate, of course.

Incidentally — and this will shock you — Duvall was a strong proponent of Proposition 8. He signed an amicus brief to the California Supreme Court defending the vote. And in his most recent constituent newsletter, Duvall says, “Roughly 11,000 gay couples have been ‘married’ in California since the State Supreme Court overturned Prop 22. [...] As a supporter of Prop 8, I will be among the state legislators committed to defending California voters’ definition of marriage.” According to the Orange County Weekly, the conservative Capitol Resource Institute said of Duvall, “For the last two years, he has voted time and time again to protect and preserve family values in California.”

Of course, protecting family values in his own family is more difficult.

Now, I know, it’s easy to note the rank hypocrisy of an official trying to keep loving, committed people from marrying while he’s carrying on multiple affairs. But I think we should feel sorry for Mike Duvall. I mean, it’s clear his marriage was wrecked by gay marriage. I’m sure he never would have cheated on his wife and then cheated on his mistress if gay people couldn’t get married.

Whisper whisper

What’s that? Really? Okay. Sorry, folks, but I’ve just been told that Duvall was carrying these affairs on after Proposition 8 passed. Hmm. Maybe outlawing gay marriage won’t make straight marriage better.

Who’d'a thunk it?

UPDATE: As Micah noted in comments, you can now call him former Assemb. Michael D. Duvall.

Found this good report on Al Jazeera English.

Last Sunday, sitting on the steps next to my container garden outside my Long Beach apartment, I heard a group of people singing in the next building. I thought of the seder I’d had a couple of nights before; my friends and I had sung the Ma Nishtana, which I only learned a few years ago and forget every year. Only two of the guests remembered the melody at first, but it only took a line or two for it to come back to the rest of us. I wondered if the neighbors could hear us. I’ve never had an anti-Semitic incident in this neighborhood, so I thought it’d be kind of cool if on the other side of our open windows, people were listening to us sing.

I watched families walking in and out of apartments, carrying children, greeting relatives. I smiled as I listened to the singing. Then I realized it wasn’t a hymn or some other Easter song - they were all singing a pop song. Blink 182 or something.

Oh. Well, it was still nice to hear singing. Yellow jackets buzzed around my bacopas. My bean seedlings were just starting to twine around the railing, and my lavender was blooming like the world was going to end.

***

According to the Slingshot Collective, “the modern world is the ugliest, saddest, dirtiest, and most stressful and dangerous place humans have ever created.” I don’t know if it’s the ugliest, the saddest, or the est of any of those other things, but many parts of it certainly are ugly and sad. I was thinking about that quote, along with various discussions I’ve witnessed about the “lack” of white American culture - whiteness as negative space - and white Americans’ need to appropriate more exotic cultures, when I tested a theory out on my husband: that the United States has one of the shallowest national cultures on the planet. Read the rest of this entry »

A few months after my boys were born I stumbled across a message board for twin moms, I really started to enjoy the tips and the sense of community that I gained from reading and posting on the site.  One of the things I enjoyed most was the forum for breastfeeding mothers, which gave me a strong sense of belonging and encouragement, and at that time, I needed encouragement.  Breastfeeding was and is a struggle for me.  I don’t know how things would be different if I was trying to feed only one baby, but I know breastfeeding two babies is one of the hardest things I have done.  While the Mommy message board is a great source of support for breastfeeding, it’s also a place where many of the most contentious elements of motherhood and womanhood are laid bare.  Sometimes it’s the stereotypical Mommy Wars– women in the paid labor force and women not in the paid labor force– but one of the more contentious debates is the bottle vs. breast debate.

As Hugo points out one subset of the Mommy Wars, is the “boob wars”:

And I’ve become aware of what might, for lack of a better term, be called the “boob war” — a sub-conflict within the larger “Mommy War” that continues to rage, exasperating and frightening and dividing women. And into this fight comes a bombshell article in the new Atlantic Monthly: Hanna Rosin’s The Case Against Breastfeeding. More on the article later. (Cap taps, belatedly and with apologies, to Rod Dreher and to Scott.)

The term “Mommy Wars” generally refers to the public and private debates, common among the middle and upper-middle classes of the developed world, about what makes a “good” mother. For years, the chief front in these wars has been the battle over daycare and work outside the home, though other conflicts rage in areas like nutrition and natural childbirth….

I read the Rosin piece; someone posted it on the twin Mommy board.  I felt a great deal of sympathy for the mother who posted it.  She said it helped her to feel less guilt about not breastfeeding, and from that point a discussion ensued with many formula feeding mother’s talking about how they feel that breastfeeding mothers are looking upon them unfavorably.

I’ll be frank; I don’t like the article, but there is one part of the article that stands out as true to me¹ :

In her critique of the awareness campaign, Joan Wolf, a women’s-studies professor at Texas A&M University, chalks up the overzealous ads to a new ethic of “total motherhood.” Mothers these days are expected to “optimize every dimension of children’s lives,” she writes. Choices are often presented as the mother’s selfish desires versus the baby’s needs.

I have a great deal of empathy with mothers today who are striving to mother under a mothering ideology that demands perfection.  What I also find fascinating is how both breastfeeding and formula feeding mothers really have the same underlying feelings; both groups feeling that their decision on infant feeding is not respected.  Anytime these kinds of issues come up the Mommy board mantra is “do what works for you” “don’t judge each other’s parenting.”  The down side is that this places limitations on honest communications between these mothers, and the upside is that mother’s, who are already operating under ideology that demands parenting perfection, feel validated.

Nevertheless, topics like this are hotly contested on Mommy boards, and one thing I find most fascinating is that many Mommies blame each other, not the dominant ideology.  Here’s how I respond to the debate over this article on the Mommy board:

Women’s “choices” are often very heavily scrutinized, I wouldn’t say it’s primarily from women but from the entire society, and the hidden radical feminist in me says it’s because women as a class are not truly free. Every behavior that we engage in is held to a different set of standards than our male counterparts, and as you say we damned if we do and damned if we don’t. The can be extended to the abortion debate, the SAHM (stay at home mom) vs. working mom debate, debates over women and domestic violence, debates over women and plastic surgery, debates over hormone replacement therapy, and the list could go on and on. And I guess what bothers me is that we consistently divide women into dichotomies–e.i. virgins/w*hores, good girls and bad girls, bi*ches and nice girls. Thus, all of our behaviors are viewed in this context. I use the term choices loosely because I think that society convinces us that we have more choices than we really do. So many of our behaviors (or “choices”) occur in a societal context where we are so heavily scrutinized that our freedom is limited. It’s limited by peer pressure, it’s limited by sexism; it’s limited by patriarchal ideology; it’s limited by bottom line capitalism; it’s limited by racism; it’s limited by poverty; and I’m sure I could come up with a host of other factors that tell us “choices” are not just personal decisions.

Unfortunately this is where this crabs in a barrel problem comes in because we all feel heavily scrutinized but rather than blaming the social system that creates this mess we blame each other, and no matter what our so called “choice,” the constraints on our full personhood are still there.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also say that constraints on mothering are radically different in diverse groups of women.  For example, the breastfeeding vs. formula feeding debate has much different meaning for middle and upper income white women living in the US than it does for poor women of color in developing countries.  The the structures of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationhood operate simultaneously.

I’m not one who think women all have to tow the line and agree with each other, but what gets lost in translation is how social forces much greater than us shape our “choices” to formula feed, breastfeed, or combo feed our kids.

1. I have several critiques of the Atlantic Monthly article that I would like to touch on in another post. (back)

Ballgame has a good point:

The notion that “Children GENERALLY do better with parents together” could be taken to mean that, out of the 100 families described above, children from the 80 non-divorcing families end up being mentally and emotionally healthier (as a group) than the children from the 20 divorcing families. That is very easy to believe. Indeed, there are any number of studies that show this, and these are the studies that are typically trotted out to misleadingly imply that divorce hurts children. In fact it’s just another rather banal observation that children from happy families do better than children from emotionally fraught ones, and hardly worth the price of a billboard. It’s almost like saying, “People with money are less likely to have difficulties making ends meet.”

But the other meaning of “Children GENERALLY do better with parents together” is quite different: namely, that the children in the 20 divorcing families would have been better off if those parents hadn’t gotten divorced. THAT notion is purely speculative as far as I know. I don’t know of any study that demonstrates this … indeed, I don’t know how any study could demonstrate it. There would be insurmountable practical and ethical issues: you’d have to do some kind of double blind study where couples considering divorce who have children would be permitted to divorce or compelled to stay together at random.

I’d also add that what “parents” means needs to be defined. If a child is being raised by a same-sex couple, would the people who put up the billboard say “great! The parents are still together!” or would they scowl and grumble that same-sex parents aren’t real parents? What about adoption? Etc, etc.

This is also the start of an experiment with a new moderation style for “Feminist Critics”: each post will now have two separate threads, one of which will be deemed “no hostility” and moderated appropriately, in the hope that more feminists will be willing to participate in discussions where we’re not attacked. (The change is due to Daran stepping down as moderator, because he’s enjoying his new relationship too much to waste time blogging.)

I don’t know if the new moderation style will work out — after all, the previous moderation style had the same good intentions, but wasn’t successful at retaining feminist comment-writers — but I hope it will.

I like reading this story and hoping that somewhere, perhaps in a better world than ours, Rick Warren’s head has exploded.

A pair of gay penguins thrown out of their zoo colony for repeat- edly stealing eggs have been given some of their own to look after following a protest by animal rights groups.

Last month the birds were segregated after they were caught placing stones at the feet of parents before waddling away with their eggs.

But angry visitors to Polar Land in Harbin, northern China, complained it wasn’t fair to stop the couple from becoming surrogate fathers and urged zoo bosses to give them a chance.

In response, zookeepers gave the pair two eggs laid by an inexperienced first-time mother.

‘We decided to give them two eggs from another couple whose hatching ability had been poor and they’ve turned out to be the best parents in the whole zoo,’ said one of the keepers.

‘It’s very encouraging and if this works out well we will try to arrange for them to become real parents themselves with artificial insemination.’

Not the first time this has come up.

From Box Turtle Bulletin, some great news:

Miami-Date Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman has declared Florida’s gay adoption ban unconstitutional, saying, ”It is clear that sexual orientation is not a predictor of a person’s ability to parent.” This ruling grants Frank Gill, a gay foster father in North Miami, the go-ahead to adopt two foster children he has been raising since 2004. The two children are ages 4 and 8, making Frank virtually the only parent the younger child has ever known.

Lawyers for the state of Florida immediately said they would appeal the ruling. During the hearings, attorneys for the state brought in so-called “experts” George Rekers and Walter Schumm, both of whom are closely associated with Paul Cameron. Rekers used his own particular brand of junk science to support the state’s position that gays should be barred from adopting, adding that he believed the ban should extend to Native Americans for the same reasons.

From the Orlando Sentinel:

“These children are thriving. These words we don’t often hear within these walls. That’s uncontroverted,” said Circuit Judge Cindy S. Lederman. “They’re a good family. They’re a family in every way except in the eyes of the law. These children have a right to permanency,” the judge said. “The only real permanency is adoption in the home where they are thriving. … There is no rational basis to preclude homosexuals from adopting.”

MRA Robert Franklin writes:

New Teen Violence Report is 468 Pages Long–but the Word ‘Father’ Is Nowhere to be Found

[...] The report is 468 pages long, and as far as I can tell, the word “father” is nowhere to be found in it.

Wow, that is pretty surprising. Especially since it took me under a minute to find this in the report:

Absent Fathers

The vast majority of single parents in Canada are women, and there has been much speculation about the propensity of youth from lone-parent homes led by women to be involved in violence. Although the research and literature points to a strong correlation between violence involving youth and teenage parents, the findings are equivocal on the correlation between violence involving youth and the absence of a father generally.

Despite the lack of solid evidence, an increased presence of fathers, and particularly Black fathers, is often cited as a force….

While it is logical to work to have fathers be responsible parents, we cannot conclude that their absence from the home is, on its own, a source of the immediate risk factors for violence involving youth.

Apparently “as far as I can tell” doesn’t include a simple text search. Or skimming the headers.

UPDATE: Not long after I posted this, Robert’s post disappeared.

UPDATE 2 (Nov. 28): The post has reappeared, updated and corrected. For the record, I actually have no objection to people editing and revising their posts, as long as significant changes are noted (as they are in this case).

Over the past 2 months I’ve been inundated with baby care. My life has revolved mainly around feeding and diapering 2 little ones, so needless to say I haven’t had much time to blog, but I promise I haven’t given up blogging. I haven’t checked my email or my site, so if you wrote me, I’m just now getting it.

A few weeks after the little guys were born I pledged that I would get back to blogging when they started sleeping through the night–that hasn’t happened yet. But I figure I can put up a couple posts a week until they actually sleep more than 3 hours at a time.

In the meanwhile, here are a few pictures from their first week. The first picture is of Eli in the hospital. We spiked his hair. I think it helps to get a perspective of how big/small they where when you look at them next to their Daddy’s hands. Like most babies, they lost weight in the first few days of life, but what’s more amazing is how much they have grown since then. In this picture, Eli weighed around 7 lbs, and in the picture at the bottom Mark weighs a little less than 6lbs. They were really big for twins, and I admittedly was really happy when I looked at them in the nursery and they didn’t look any different from the singleton babies. That was a great relief for me, because, being a mom of twins, I was at a greater risk for pregnancy related complications, which lingered in the back of my mind throughout the whole pregnancy. I was very fortunate to give birth at 38 weeks and have two big boys. I’ll add more recent pictures over the next few weeks.

And finally, Daddy, Babies, and Mommy want to thank everyone for their well wishes.

Are we gonna do this? Really? We are?

Okay, then, let’s do this.

John Edwards is a putz, and he should have been better to his wife. There are marriages where partners are allowed, even encouraged to cheat, but both of the Edwardses have said directly that theirs is not one of them, and I have no reason to disbelieve them. If you promise your spouse fidelity, you owe your spouse fidelity, and if you cannot give that to them, you owe it to your spouse to leave, so that they can find someone who can.

So John Edwards is an idiot, and I agree with Kathy G., it surprises and disappoints me, though perhaps it shouldn’t.

But John Edwards doesn’t need to atone to me. Nor to Kathy G., nor to noted man-goat sex enthusiast Mickey Kaus. Edwards’ sin was against his wife and his children, and it is to them he will have to explain himself. It is to them he owes his apology. It is their forgiveness he will have to seek, and their decision on whether to grant it. Allegedly, he already sought their forgiveness in 2006, and received it; whether this changes that is between him and them.

John Edwards made a dumb mistake, one which, were I married to him, would probably lead to my filing divorce papers. But I’m not married to him. I don’t know him, not really. What I do know of him tells me that he’s still a man who has a great passion for making this country a better place, one who believes in a nation where the gap between the haves and have-nots actually shrinks for once. He would still be a good Attorney General, still a good Secretary of Labor, indeed, still a good President.

John Edwards has committed no sin against the American people, and he owes us no explanation of his actions. It is, to put it bluntly, irrelevant whether George W. Bush is faithful as the day is long; he’s still a lousy president. It is, to put it directly, irrelevant that Bill Clinton cheated on his wife; he’s still, on balance, a good president. It matters not whether Al Gore is faithful to Tipper, or Barack Obama to Michelle, or Hillary Clinton to Bill, or John McCain to Cindy. You and I are not a party to their marriages. You and I have no stake in whether they are faithful or not. It’s between them and their families, and it’s none of our business.

A politician’s worth is judged not by how faithful they are, and their personal lives are not good predictors of their professional skill. A politician owes it to their constituents to work to make our country the best country it can be. I’m not voting against John McCain because he’s a serial philanderer, I’m voting against him because I believe his policies, such as they are, are bad for the country. I’m not voting for Barack Obama because by all accounts he’s been faithful to his wife, I’m voting for him because I believe that on balance, his policies will be good for the country. If tomorrow I discovered that Barack was a cheater and McCain had been unfairly tarred, it wouldn’t change my vote, because I’m not picking a husband, I’m picking a president.

John Edwards may be a bad husband. But I have seen nothing that would convince me he’d be a bad cabinet official. If something comes to light indicating he was an ethically challenged senator, let me know. Until then, I think John should go talk to Elizabeth and his children, and seek a way forward for all of them, be it together or apart. Only they can decide.

And I think the rest of us should butt out, and give them their privacy.

Hey folks it’s Rachel.  I figured I’d give everyone an update.

Yes, my posting has been limited lately. I’m slowly getting prepared for the babies, and then we had some computer trouble last week, so needless to say I’ve been preoccupied with other things.

I’ve been really lucky because I haven’t had any major problems. I’ve also had a total of zero contractions, no high blood pressure, no diabetes, and no other common pregnancy problems. My doctor did suggest taking time off from work at 34 weeks. I think that is fairly standard with twins since twin pregnancies are generally more taxing on the body than singleton pregnancies. Fortunately, my semester ended right at that time, so I didn’t have to worry about going to my job. It was just the right time to stop because I really can’t be on my feet for more than 10-15 minutes without having back, hip, and buttock pain.

The babies are doing well. Since “discordance,” which is basically large differences in size or growth of multiples, is a potential problem I have to get them measured every 3 weeks. I get an ultrasound, and the neonatalogist and ultrasound tech measure their size, heart rate, amniotic fluid, and several other measures of health and growth. At 33 weeks and a half weeks, they weighed 5lbs. 1oz. each. I was happy to see that their sizes are the same because baby A was getting ahead of baby B, but B finally caught up. At this rate, I may have two 7lb. babies. That’s not big for a single baby, but it’s pretty big for twins–I just keeping thinking, “My body will likely be carrying 14lbs. of baby.” The seem to be dropping, and right now they have their heads down, so I may be able to push both of them out without a C-section.

Unless they want to come sooner, I’ll probably be delivering them at 38 weeks.

While I think Barack Obama has done a good job walking the tightrope of racial politics in America, I get the feeling that he is heavily constrained by racism and racial stereotypes. This was one of my reactions to the now famous speech–it is always important to think about what is, and is NOT being said. For the record, I think the speech was good as a political speech, but as a speech about race in American it was so heavily constrained by the politics of racism that there were some important points that Obama omitted. Furthermore, the reactions to the speech steer discussion in some unfortunate directions, which is where most of my critique lies. Now before anybody gets upset at me for saying this, I don’t blame Obama for the subsequent discussion of his speech.  My critiques are not about the man as an individual, they are about racism and racial politics in America.

Let me start with some things I agreed with and liked about the speech. Obama (and the speech writers because I’m sure there were some) asserted that we don’t talk openly and honestly about race in America.  I think that is true–people either tend to deny the realities of racism and or they exaggerate, stereotype, or misrepresent when it comes to our differences.

I also agree that history has created a great deal of racial baggage that we carry around with us as people.  Moreover, there is an acknowledgement in the “speech on race” that these effects linger in the form of institutional racism.  Check out these few paragraphs (I referenced the text from Daily Kos.):

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point.  As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried.  In fact, it isn’t even past.”  We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country.  But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations.  That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened.  And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up.  They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.  What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination.  That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future.  Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.  For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.  That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends.  But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table.  At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

With the exception of the comment about welfare policy, which echoes Ronald Regan, I think these are pretty bold statements for a politician to make.  Of course, they are not quite as bold when they are framed as products of past discrimination rather than products of both past and present discrimination, but given the conservative nature of political discourse, I can live with it.

A Few Critiques of the Speech and Reactions to It 

The comment about Obama’s white grandmother has been pulled apart and parsed by pundits, most of whom don’t have a clue about the dynamics of interracial families.  Later, in discussing this speech Obama described his grandmother as the “typical white person” and the same pundits went crazy. These pundits expect people to be racially consistent and they cringe at the idea of whiteness being discussed in any way that is not exceptional¹.  In the pundits’ minds, people can’t change their racial views over time, and they can’t hold contradictory views.  In reality, that’s exactly how people are when it comes to race.  I highly suspect that Obama’s grandmother is typical of most whites in her generation–they grew up with racial segregation both legalized and informal segregation as the norm and didn’t much question it.  Furthermore, intermarriage was illegal in many states during the much of his grandmother’s lifetime.  Although Obama has never spoken about his white grandparents reaction to his parents marriage and his birth, we know from surveys that during the early 1970s the vast majority of whites opposed interracial marriage and this opposition was still very strong even into the 1990s, when whites were asked about a family member intermarrying.  So it would be the least bit surprising if she had negative views of interracial relationships and black people.  It’s pretty clear that, like many white relatives of interracial couples and biracial people, Obama’s grandmother loved him and cared for him, and she held stereotypical views of black men.  That should not be hard to believe because it is the norm in many mixed race families, and in many people in general.

What bothered me about this part of the speech and the subsequent discussion of the racial dynamics of Obama’s family life is that I got the distinct impression that the underlying message Obama and some of his supporters were trying to convey was, “Hey, don’t forget; I’m/he’s white too” or “I’m/he’s not as black as you think I am/he is.”  To me that was a really sad revelation about the current state of racial politics in this country.

What made this worse was when it devolved into a common stereotype of mixed race people that I have discussed in the past (here and in papers I have presented at conferences).  The myth involves the belief that mixed race people are 1) signs of progress and 2) potential saviors who will somehow liberate us from racism because they understand “both worlds.”  On numerous occasions, people have treated Obama in this way.  They have viewed his mixed race heritage as something that bestows him with supernatural abilities, specifically the ability to transcend race and heal old racial wounds.  Having a mixed race family doesn’t not necessarily give an individual a special understanding of race, and being monoracial doesn’t preclude someone from being able to united diverse groups and develop an understanding of what it is like to be from “another race.”

I don’t totally blame Obama for reminding people that his mother is white–that is politics.  Obviously, his campaign thinks it will help him, and they are probably right about that.  I just don’t like the handful of narratives that we have developed about interracial families and mixed race people.  While the old narratives about tragic mulattos, the one drop rule, and sexually adventurous interracial couples are misguided, some of our new narratives–”the best of both worlds” and “the supernatural biracial uniter” are also misguided.

In the next post on the Obama speech, I’ll address two other problems I had with the speech and the reactions to it.  The 2 critiques/points are related to the following points 1) Are white “resentments” and black “anger” really equivalents?  Does the two way street anaology really work?  2) Why does “Working Class” mean white in our political discourse?  And what does it say that we single out white working class resentment (racism)?

1. Do you think they would have been mad if he described her as the “exceptional white person” rather than the “typical white person”? (back)

Once upon a time, social scientists showed that couples who lived together before marrying, were more likely to divorce than couples who didn’t live together until marrying. This was true in Europe, Canada and the USA.

This surprised a bunch of people, and seemed to disprove the “try it on before you buy it” theory of marriage.

This did, however, greatly please those social conservatives who prefer to go though life in a constant panic, screaming “the marriage rates are falling! The marriage rates are falling!” They felt this proved their theory that sex without God’s blessing introduces some sort of intrinsic rot into marriages and made them more likely failures.

Then the shacking up effect seemed to go away in some of Europe. For instance, a social scientist showed that although it used to be the case that shacking up made divorce more likely in Denmark, once shacking up became more commonplace, it stopped having any relationship with divorce. Couples who shacked up before marrying were no more likely to get divorced than couples who lived apart until the wedding.

This supports the theory that when shacking up is a radical, unusual thing to do, the people who self-select into shacking up are also the people who, due to their unconventional preferences, are less likely to remain married.

Now shacking up has become the norm in the USA; slightly over half of all American women live with someone before they get married. And the most recent data (.pdf link) shows that Americans who shack up before marrying aren’t more likely to get divorced.

This seems to put the kibosh on the “living in sin = doomed to divorce” theory.

Oh, and Americans getting married for the first time have a 33% chance of getting divorced someday — not “over half,” as is often claimed. In fact, the US divorce rate is lower than it’s been in decades — and it’s lowest of all in Massachusetts, home of same-sex marriage. Wait, wasn’t same-sex marriage supposed to destroy marriage rates?

For more discussion, see Pandagon.

Curtsy: Ezra Klein, Marginal Revolution.

In case you haven’t noticed, my blogging has been lighter than usual since October. Well the main reason for that has been because I’m pregnant. I told my co-bloggers, so they wouldn’t think I was abandoning the site..

Now that I’m in just out of month 4, I’m finally happy to report that my life doesn’t revolve around the fear of throwing up on strangers. :) For a while, from months 2-4, I was battling morning sickness, and the usual first trimester sleepiness. I’m still concerned about a few things like the fact that at almost 19 weeks I weigh the same as I did when I got pregnant. In fact, one of the most fascinating things about pregnancy is the way it has altered my eating habits and my metabolism. When I was in the throws of morning sickness, for some unknown reason the more unhealthy the food the more likely it was to stay down. I’ve never eaten so many McDonald’s Big Mac’s in my life. What’s even funnier is the fact that I ate that kind of food and lost 6 pounds. I felt like I couldn’t possibly eat enough food to maintain my weight, and I was even more shocked when I read that I was supposed to eat 2600 calories a day (300 extra calories per fetus). I’ve always been a person who loves eating and food, and by medical standards I’m in the overweight category, but suddenly, I didn’t want to eat, and these two little fetuses were performing liposuction on my thighs and butt. My husband kept joking about the fact that I had the incredible shrinking booty, which he thought was bad and my mother and brother thought was great. (Now, there’s a cultural difference if there ever was one–West African ideas about booty beauty and White American ideas about booty beauty.) Fortunately, I’ve gained my 6 pounds back, but I seem to be stuck right at the same weight. I promise I’ll write more about this since it really seems to be the one issue that is bothering me the most–I keep wondering how I’m going to gain 30 lbs in 20 weeks.¹

Of course, I’m going to write about the pregnancy because there are so many juicy issues. The gender issues are obvious, but other issues like body image (which I alluded to above), medicalization, racism, and the rampant classism/materialism that surrounds birth and children. I already have some good stories to tell already, so be prepared. Plus, when the little ones are born, I’ll even have some baby blogging to do.

1. For those who don’t know the weight gain recommendation for twins is higher, but doctors also seem to be all over the place in terms of what they suggest. My OBGYN suggested a 44lb weight gain for a woman of my height who is of average weight. Since I’m overweight, she suggested 30-35 lbs. (back)

I still read various “marriage movement” blogs, out of habit and because it’s easier for me to walk on the treadmill if I can read something that pisses me off. A few have posted references to this story from Britland:

The harrowing story of twins who were separated at birth and married each other without realising they were brother and sister was revealed today. [...] The couple’s plight was revealed by the former Liberal Democrat MP Lord Alton, who is fighting for children to have greater rights to know the identity of their biological parents.

The peer, who raised the twins’ story during a House of Lords debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, said: “I learned of this heartbreaking story from the High Court judge who dealt with the case.

As Heresy Corner argues, it seems likely that Lord Alton either made the story up (purposely or through mishearing) or credulously fell for an urban myth.

Lord Alton told the House of Lords that he had learned of the case from the judge who decided it. Later, pressed by the Sun, he admitted that the judge he spoke to might only have been “familiar” with the case. To date, no judge has come forward, even off the record, to confirm having had such a conversation with the noble lord. The senior Family Division judge stated, on the record, that he was unaware of any such case. In any event, annulment cases normally only reach the High Court when there are complex financial issues at stake, or the legality of the marriage is in real dispute. Neither is likely to have been the case here.

(I agree with Alton, by the way, that children should “have greater rights to know the identity of their biological parents.” But there are legitimate reasons to favor that policy; no need to drag in the scary campfire stories.)

Great article in Mother Jones by Elizabeth Larson, whose daughter was adopted from Guatemala.

For those of you who don’t know, there’s been a lot of pushback against the “saving children from the benighted countries they were born in” narrative, led by those who were adopted.

The article covers much too much ground for me to sum up, so I’ll just quote the article’s comments on open adoption.

“One of the ways that wrongdoers hide their child-laundering schemes is by the closed-adoption system,” says David Smolin, a law professor who’s written extensively on corruption in transnational adoption. He and his wife adopted two sisters from India only to find out that they had been stolen from their birth family. Last March, a Utah adoption agency was indicted in an alleged fraud scheme involving 81 Samoan children whose parents were told that they were sending their children away to take advantage of opportunities in the United States—that there would be letters, photos, and visits, and that the children would return when they turned 18.

Openness, Smolin notes, would also make it harder for parents to think of adoptions as “rescuing” children. “There are cultural reasons why people give up children for adoption,” he says. “But when you have a situation where money alone, in relatively small quantities, would allow the birth family to keep the child—under current law you are allowed to take the child and spend $30,000 when $200 would be enough to avoid the relinquishment.”

As it stands, families who have forged relationships with birth parents often find it impossible to turn their backs on their economic needs. Some send a monthly stipend; others pay for the education of their child’s siblings, help finance businesses, or buy computers or cell phones to make it easier to stay in touch. And while all this is legal once the adoption is finalized, it’s a lot messier than writing a check for Save the Children. “We need to be careful what kind of impression that makes with other people in the village or area,” says Linh Song, the president of Ethica, a nonprofit organization that advocates for transparent adoptions worldwide. “Will they receive aid if their child is sent abroad?”

If you’re interested in reading further about Transnational Adoptions, there are a bunch of excellent blogs that write about this issue. Harlow’s Monkey is a great place to start, both because the blog is excellent and for the blogroll.

I have been home, laid up with a severe case of gout, and so I have had the time to work on this more than in the recent past. I have been gratified, really gratified, by the responses. Thank you.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

What first attracted me to Maria was the way she had no reservations about saying she didn’t like Walt Whitman’s poetry, even though our freshman-year literature professor had made Walt Whitman’s work central to the course. When I told her one day as we were walking out of class that I admired her honesty, she smiled, said something about how most literature professors had more hot air in them than substance and walked off to wherever she had to go next. A few days later, when I saw her sitting in front of the library, the hello I stopped to say grew into an hour-long chat, and after that, for the next two months or so, we met a couple of times per week at a table in the back corner of the Rainy Night House Cafe, where we sat for hours drinking tea, eating bagels and talking. One afternoon, just as we were getting up to leave, Maria said she’d been given a bottle of good wine as a gift, and she asked if I’d like to come to her room that evening to help her drink it. I said I would.

She was already a couple of glasses ahead of me when I arrived, and while I played catch-up our talk turned to a subject I was surprised to realize we’d never before discussed, love and relationships. We circled the question of our own budding involvement warily, letting it drop in and out of the conversation, each of us waiting for the other to risk saying, or doing, something first. Then Maria asked me, “Richard, do you like your body?”

“Yes,” I answered, more because I couldn’t imagine saying no than because I’d ever really thought about it. “Why?”

She got down from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me. “No, I mean do you really like your body?”

“Yes,” I said again, but before I could ask her how she felt about hers, she leaned forward and asked her question even more emphatically, “You know, are you truly satisfied with every part of your body?”

A small edge of anger sharpened my voice, “What are you talking about?”

Maria smiled to herself, put her hand warmly on my knee and said, “Well, do you think you, you know, measure up?”

Finally, I understood, and I felt a little foolish for not having caught on sooner, but it had never occurred to me that a woman might actually ask this question. I had, as I imagine most young men do at one time or another, taken a ruler to my penis to see how big it was; and I would be lying if I said I did not think about how I might compare to other men or wonder if what I had heard about the relationship between penis size and sexual prowess and attractiveness to women were true; but so far the only girlfriend who’d ever seen me completely naked had been Jennifer, and while she had told me a story about a guy she’d been with whose penis had been so small that she laughed when she saw it, something she deeply regretted, she had never said anything to me about how big, or small, I was.

So Maria’s question, once I understood what it meant, not only took me by surprise; it also confused me. Looking back, I can smile thinking that perhaps the question was an honest one that she had asked at precisely the wrong moment. At the time, however, what I felt was a shift in the subtext of what was happening between us from the mutuality of friendship and what might come next to the adversarial stance of performer and critic. Anything I said–yes, no, maybe, let’s find out–felt like it would be a picking up of the gauntlet she’d thrown down, which I wasn’t interested in doing. On the other hand, to say nothing felt like it would be to lose my chance to be with her, and I really wanted to be with her, so I decided to buy time by turning the tables. “I don’t know. Do you measure up?”

Maria’s face changed immediately. The gently mocking expression with which she’d been waiting for my response vanished, and she searched my face with eyes that were suddenly sad and deeply suspicious. She kept her hand on my knee until she found, or didn’t find, what she was looking for, and then, so softly that I almost couldn’t hear her, she said, “Sometimes.”

Maria got up and went back to her chair. We talked a while longer, trying to recapture the easy banter from earlier in the evening, but we couldn’t. Maria was suddenly unable to look me in the eye, and when I finally stood up to leave, all she did was wave a silent good-bye from where she was sitting. We saw each other on campus a few times after that, but never said more than hello, and Maria had only once to turn and walk the other way as I approached for me to understand that she didn’t want to talk to me again.

When I went home at the end of the semester, I asked the only woman I could think to ask about what had happened between Maria and myself, my mother. This may seem strange to some people, but I’ve always been able to talk with my mother about sex, and I figured I could count on her to give me a straight answer. I was wrong.

“The size of a man’s ego,” my mother told me after I had finished my story, “can be measured by the size of his penis.” To illustrate her point, she related a story about a man who tried to pick her up in a bar she’d gone to with her friends. At first, she refused him politely, but as he grew more and more insistent, she grew more and more annoyed until, finally, having had enough, loudly, so that all the people around them could hear, she offered him the following challenge. If he had a “baseball bat” between his legs, she’d be his for the night. If he didn’t, he should just leave her alone. The man protested that he’d “never had any complaints,” but my mother slapped her palm on the bar and told him that if he had what it would take to have her, she wanted to see it right then and there. If he didn’t…enough said.

Needless to say, the man walked away.

“Only small men,” my mother’s one suggested that this was her final word on the subject, “say that size doesn’t matter.”

I don’t remember anything else about that conversation, except that I understood her story to have been a cautionary tale, her point being that I should not become like the man in the bar. How precisely that point related to my failed evening with Maria was unclear, nor, at least as far as I remember, did my mother do anything to try to make it clear. Now, of course, I can see both in my mother’s story itself, and in the fact that she thought it was an appropriate answer to my question about what had happened with Maria, her own anger at men, and I know enough about my mother’s life to know that this anger is justified, more than justified in fact. I did not know this back then, however; nor did I know it five or so year earlier, when I was sixteen, and she and I were sitting after dinner, either Passover or Thanksgiving, at the dining room table in my grandmother’s apartment and I am telling her about the one and only time I remember my father trying to talk to me about sex, which had happened earlier that day.

We were walking from the restaurant where he’d taken me for lunch to the subway where I would catch the train to my grandmother’s. He put his arm around my shoulder, leaned his head in towards mine and asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

I told him no, which was a lie.

“Well,” he responded, “you will soon, and once you start dating, you’re going to run into situations you won’t know how to handle.” He moved a few steps ahead, turned to face me, searched my eyes to make sure I knew what he was talking about. “I just want you to know you can call me.”

“I know,” I said, and the look of relief on his face as he quickly changed the subject to how I was doing in school made me want to laugh out loud. There was no way he could’ve known that I’d already lost my virginity, but knowing that he didn’t know–even though my first experience of intercourse had not been at all a positive one–and realizing how easy it had been to deceive him, made me feel superior, and it was this feeling of superiority that I brought to the table when I told my mother the story. I did not have a good relationship with my father at the time. In fact, I saw him as something of a buffoon, and laughing at his buffoonery–my mother shared this image of him–was one of the ways she and I bonded. This time, however, instead of engendering mutual laughter at my father’s ineptitude, my story opened up a divide between me and my mother that I had never felt before.

“Next time,” my mother was laughing–but the smile on her face was a thin line of contempt, and when she leans forward to tap the polished nail of her right index finger in rhythmic emphasis on the wooden surface of the dining room table, her eyes smolder–”Next time, tell your father you don’t have such problems. Tell him you wear a steel jockstrap. Besides, what does he think he’s going to teach you anyway. You probably know more than he does already.” She laughs again, and I laugh with her, though I am laughing more because I think she expects it than because I think what she’s just said is really funny. Something in her tone, something in the meaning of what she said, made me very uneasy, though I could not name what it was.

///

Fast forward about fifteen years or so. I am in my early thirties and sitting with my father in a very fancy steakhouse in New York’s financial district. It’s the first time we’ve seen each other since my brother’s funeral about ten year earlier, and we are seeing each other only because I have sought my father out. I want answers to questions I have had for a very long time about my parents, about myself, about why my father never tried to get in touch with me and more. We talk for a very long time, and I learn a lot that I did not know, but two pieces of what I learned are especially relevant here. First, I learned that my parents got married because my mother was pregnant with me. My father said that he approached her with the idea of getting an abortion, but she said no. I don’t know why she said no, but this was 1961, before Roe v. Wade, and so it may have been simply that she was afraid of the risks involved in getting an illegal abortion. Whatever her reasons, she and my father decided, once abortion had been ruled out, to get married. They didn’t really love each other, and so, especially knowing them as I do now, I did not find it at all surprising when my father told me that my mother decided she wanted a divorce just a couple of years after I was born.

The second thing I learned came in response to my asking why my father thought my mother was still so angry at him, even though they had been divorced for nearly thirty years. I once tried to ask my mother the same question. This is the conversation we had, as I recorded it in my journal later that day. In response to my asking why she was still so angry at my father, my mother said, “I’m not angry at him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I think I’m more angry at myself.”

“Why?”

“For talking myself into marrying him in the first place.”

“Why did you marry him?”

“I though I was in love.”

“You thought?”

“Well, I convinced myself…”

“And?”

“And that’s why I married him.”

“Why’d you get divorced?”

“He bothered me.”

“He bothered you?”

“He annoyed me.”

“In what way?”

“He couldn’t hold up his end of a conversation.”

“What do you mean?”

“He always talked in circles.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he would talk about the same thing over and over again, constantly repeating himself, circling back over the same idea like a vulture waiting to descend on a carcass. Then you’d point him in another direction, and he’d do the same thing with that topic. It was infuriating.”

“What kind of a father was he?” It was a question I’d never asked before.

“I don’t think he was much of a father at all, either before or after the divorce.”

“Okay, but what kind of a father was he?”

My mother paused to think, “Well, he did change your diapers; I have to give him that. And he played with you guys—”

I reminded her that I’d seen the pictures of him feeding me and suggest that, at least as a father, it didn’t sound like he was too bad.

“But I was always the disciplinarian,” she told me, pausing again and sighing, “I guess I just didn’t have much respect for him.”

When I ask my father the same question, he tells me about how, not long after he’d moved out of our apartment–which is ironically just a couple of blocks from where I live now–but before their divorce was final, he called my mother to ask if he could come over and talk, to see if they could work things out. She said okay, but once he got there, everything went wrong. He would not go into the details of what happened, though. All he would say was, “Something happened that shouldn’t have happened.” Even when I pressed him to tell me what he meant, all he would do was repeat those words. “Something happened that shouldn’t have happened.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “And, you know, Richard, your mother was the kind of woman who could goad a guy into it.”

Clearly, in other words, whether it was rape or some other form of assault, my father did some sort of violence to my mother. When he told me that, a lot of things began to fall into place, not only her comment about the steel jockstrap, with its allusion to the idea of a chastity belt, but other things my mother used to say to me as well.

If you look quickly at a picture of my father when he was younger, and if you didn’t already know you were looking at him, you might think you were looking at me. We look that much alike, and the resemblance made my mother very uncomfortable. “Grow your beard,” she started telling me almost as soon as hair appeared on my face, “You remind me too much of your father.” Even when I was well into my late twenties and early thirties, my mother sometimes has difficulty with my clean-shaven appearance. Once she even threatened—her tone was joking of course—to exclude me from a family portrait she was planning unless I grew my beard back. I didn’t; the portrait never materialized.

Now, I of course don’t know if the portrait really never materialized because I didn’t grow my beard back, but it is in my memory a telling coincidence that represents the stance my mother, as a parent and as a woman, took towards me, as a child and as a man (or a boy becoming a man), throughout most of the early years of my life: She did not want me to grow up to be like my father, not only in terms of the character traits she found so objectionable in him, but in terms of my body as well. Once I hit puberty, I was, I was becoming, I would eventually be, physically, sexually, a man, a man who looked very much like his father. She did not want to face me across the gender gap my growing up would inevitably open up between us. A man was what I had no choice but to become, and yet a man was precisely what my mother did not want me to be.

From the Daily Mail:

A woman who became pregnant after a one-night stand yesterday won the right to keep the existence of her baby a secret from its father.

In a landmark decision, three Appeal Court judges agreed that the 20-year-old single mother has “the ultimate veto” over whom should be told about the child, who is being put up for adoption.

Describing the case as “on any view extraordinary”, Lord Justice Thorpe ruled there was no justification for “breaking open the mother’s secret”.

And Lady Justice Arden said this was not a violation of the father’s rights to family life under the Human Rights Act because he had no rights to be violated.

The mother, who cannot be identified by order of the court, had kept her pregnancy hidden from her family, colleagues and the father.

She gave birth five months ago and left the baby girl, known only as E, in hospital shortly afterwards.

When she asked for the child to be put up for adoption, a county court ordered that her parents and the father should be told to give them the opportunity to apply to adopt.

But yesterday, the judges decided the father had no rights over the child, who is now in foster care, because “he was only a one-night stand”.

And they banned the local authority and guardian from taking any steps to identify him or telling him about his daughter.

What an appalling ruling.

I can imagine individual cases in which a court might justifiably rule to keep a born child secret from her father; for instance, if there was compelling evidence that an particular father, if informed, would be physically dangerous to the mother or the child. But from what’s said in this article, in this case there seems to be no justification for not informing the father and giving him the opportunity to raise his daughter.

This ruling contributes to sexism, by implicitly reinforcing the idea that men cannot be responsible for the upbringing of children. It also creates a short road to the conclusion that fathers of children conceived in one-night-stands shouldn’t have responsibilities to their offspring.

I hope this ruling doesn’t stand.

Last year I posted the story of Katelyn Kampf. Her parents kidnapped her in an attempt to force her to have an abortion. The parents were upset that Katelyn, who is white, was going to have give birth to a child whose father was black.

According to media reports, Katelyn is unhappy with the relatively light sentence that they received for the kidnapping. Fortunately, Stephanie has been keeping up with the story, or I would have never seen it. Unfortunately, the family is still torn apart by the terrible actions of the Kampf parents:

In a plea agreement with the district attorney’s office, reached over Katelyn Kampf’s objections, her parents pled guilty to misdemeanor assault charges and disorderly conduct. Felony kidnapping charges were dropped, and the Kampfs will not serve any jail time.

In court, her father Nicholas Kampf said, “The whole experience has been a sad ordeal. We as a family have lost so much … I am sorry.”

Lola Kampf also read from a prepared statement: “We have all made some bad choices in the past, and we will have to live with them. But we must believe with our hearts and soul that time will heal the wounds they have caused.”

But there was little evidence of any healing today. Neither one of the Kampf parents looked at their daughter or new grandson during the hour-long hearing. And Katelyn Kampf left the courtroom, crying, shortly after her parents arrived. She returned but then broke down and buried her face in her hands as she listened to her mother speak.

After the hearing, she explained her reaction, saying, “Even though she had done so many horrible things to me, I always looked up to her. I mean, she was my mom, you know.”

It’s hard not to have sympathy for Katelyn Kampf and her child. Not only does she have horrible parents, but she doesn’t have much help from the her child’s father. He is facing deportation to South Africa because he is an immigrant with a felony conviction. Furthermore, part of the conditions of the parent’s sentence is that they have counseling with their daughter. She still doesn’t want to be in the same room with them and who can blame her.

It is really sad to see cases like this where parents hatred of another race is stronger than their love for their own children. Sounds like another high profile case from last week.