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Confronting the Religious Right

by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff
published in Off Our Backs, Winter 2007 issue, Women and Fundamentalisms

“Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds; the better deal. They see that the streets are cold and that the women on them are tired, sick and bruised…They see no way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in the world of men... Right wing women are not wrong…Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. …They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female-animal, not human; they do what they have to do to survive.”
--Andrea Dworkin in Right-Wing Women

The date was July 4, 1994. I was a magazine publisher, the mother of nine children, ages 3-22, the sole support of my family. Over a period of several months, I had separated from my abusive husband of nearly two decades, left my church, filed for divorce, and I had begun seeing someone new. I was finished with conservative Christianity and Bible literalism. I intended to leave it behind and to move on with my life.

Two weeks prior I had kept a speaking commitment made months earlier to keynote a conference in Columbus, Ohio. Five thousand women attended my keynote speech. I went on to present five additional workshops over a long weekend to appreciative audiences, and flew home.

On this day I was hearing from the chair of the organization which had sponsored the conference that should not have kept my commitment to speak. The organizer, a man I had met for the first time in Columbus, had been contacted by my ex-husband and ex-pastor, who told him I was divorcing “without grounds”, was involved in “unrepentant adultery”, and that I was “walking in darkness”. Armed with this information, the organizer, my ex-pastor, and my ex-husband had contacted leaders of a number of national organizations on the Religious Right - Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Fund and Patrick Henry College and one-time candidate for Lt. Governor of Virginia, officials with James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, editors and publishers of four periodicals, and other national leaders and public figures. Together they had concocted a performance plan by way of which I might be able to redeem myself for the sin of having kept my commitment to speak. The issue was not the workshops I presented; they had gone well. The issue was that a woman who is divorcing “without grounds” and who is committing adultery is not qualified to speak publicly or to write for publication.

My magazine publishing business was always a sole proprietorship. It was never connected with any church or religious organization. It began in 1989 as a ‘zine created at my kitchen table on a Selectric typewriter, photocopied, and mailed to 17 subscribers. By the summer of 1994, it had become a full-color glossy publication reaching 50,000 people internationally, 11 months per year. Several weekends out of the year, I traveled to speak at various events across the country. I had never advertised; my subscribers, columnists and advertisers had come to me by and large by word of mouth.

So to say I was surprised by the call I received on Independence Day, 1994, would be to grossly understate. I listened in stunned silence as the stranger on the other end of the line set forth his demands. In the days to come I was to:

Return my honorarium

Write a letter of apology to my ex-husband, my ex-pastor, my subscribers and a laundry list of leaders on the Religious Right
Fire my attorney
Withdraw my restraining order against my ex-husband
Stop divorce proceedings
Stop dating
Cease publishing
Cease writing for publication
Cease speaking publicly
Agree never to defend myself
Turn over my bank accounts to my ex-pastor
Agree never to go out alone
Give up my post office box
Give up my internet service
Agree to fly across the country with my ex-husband for two weeks of Christian marriage counseling

If I failed to comply, a letter of discipline and censure would be first read to the assembled congregation of the church I had left months earlier and would then be circulated and published nationally.

I did not comply.

My caller, my ex-pastor, ex-husband, and leaders I’ve named, as well as others, then made good on their threats. A letter of discipline turning me “over to Satan for the destruction of my flesh” was read at the assembled meeting of a church I had left three months prior. My subscribers, advertisers, columnists and others were contacted and told I was under church discipline, that I would no longer be publishing, and that they should sever any business relationship they had with me. Over the weeks and months to come, subscription cancellations and demands for refunds rolled in, columnists quit, advertisers canceled ads and demanded refunds. In short order, I found myself unable to fulfill subscriptions, to publish, or to support my family of seven children still at home, the youngest only 3 years old. My house and land went into foreclosure. My car burned to the ground in a mysterious fire. Strange men showed up at my house wanting to “pray” with me, despite my having kept my address secret. I felt under siege. I was under siege. I was shunned by all of my long-time friends and acquaintances.

I had feared as I contemplated my divorce that something like this might happen to me. As it all unfolded, and over the ensuing months and years, I realized that what had happened to me might well be a portent of things to come for American women in a societal and cultural context in which the Religious Right has gained such power over women’s lives. Thirty years ago women, as a result of feminist hard work and activism, could count on being able to buy birth control at any local drugstore without difficulty, could seek abortions without fear of harassment or intimidation, could file for divorce, obtain protective orders, and seek refuge from abusive partners in shelters with complete confidence that they would be protected, would be safe, and would be believed.

Today, pharmacists can and do refuse to fulfill subscriptions for birth control and emergency birth control on the basis of their own religious beliefs. Large numbers of women’s clinics which formerly provided reproductive services and abortions to women have closed their doors. Protesters intimidate and harass staff, doctors and patients of clinics which still operate, and some doctors and staff have been shot and killed by anti-abortion terrorists. In South Dakota, where a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade in the form of anti-abortion legislation was passed recently (and rejected by voters in the November 2006 elections), then-Attorney General Phillip Kline, under the aegis of looking for evidence of rape or incest, sought and received a court order allowing him access to private medical records of South Dakota girls who had had abortions. Contents of these records were, in short order, leaked to Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, who made reference to them on national television.

Increasingly, domestic violence shelters, once owned and staffed almost solely by feminist women, are owned and run by church organizations and “faith-based” groups which are as interested in saving women’s souls as in saving their lives. In these “shelters,” services can be contingent upon attendance at religious meetings. “Character curriculum” programs developed by fundamentalist Christians and teaching religious values are now used in public schools across the country and “abstinence education” has is replacing sex education.

Increasingly, women are being “disciplined,” even excommunicated, publicly shamed and humiliated, their lives turned upside down by churches and church organizations for being unsubmissive or “disobedient” to their husbands, for refusing to have sex every time their husband wants to have it, for seeking jobs outside the home, sending their children to public schools, using birth control, speaking out about abuse, leaving their husbands, filing for divorce, even for attempting to leave their churches. If they manage to leave husbands and/or churches, they struggle to survive. Having been stay-at-home mothers, told birth control was sinful, they often have little to no employment history and many children to care for. If they search for employment, they will be without recent experience and without references, because their entire community has shunned them. No one will care for their children or support them in any other way: the goal is to withdraw all support so that women will be forced back into the church, back to their husbands.

How is it that the Religious Right has been able to assume so much control over the lives of women? How is it that Christian theonomists - those Christians who believe that the Bible should be the law of the land and civil government should be headed by conservative Christians only - have come to have so much power in the United States and have achieved so many of their goals in such a short time?

To read the rest of this article, order the Women and Fundamentalisms issue of Off Our Backs .

Manhood and Moral Waivers

by Robin Morgan, The Women's Media Center, courtesy of the Global Sisterhood Network

Her birthday is August 19, her death day March 12.

We cannot let this crime, too, pass into oblivion.

When news surfaced that GIs allegedly stalked, terrorized, gang-raped, and killed an Iraqi woman, the U.S. tried minimizing this latest atrocity by our troops—claiming the victim was age 25 or even 50, implying a rape-murder is less horrific if the victim is an older woman. Now, Article 32 hearings—the military equivalent of a grand jury—have ended at Camp Liberty, a U.S. base in Iraq (U.S. troops are exempt from Iraqi prosecution). In September, a general will rule whether the accused should be court-martialed. The defense already pleads post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): in four months preceding the crime, 17 of the accused GIs’ battalion were killed; their company, Bravo, suffered eight combat deaths.

But as the U.S. spun the victim’s identity, investigators knew her name: Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi.

Abeer means “fragrance of flowers.” She was 14 years old.

The soldiers noticed her at a checkpoint. They stalked her after one or more of them expressed his intention to rape her. On March 12, after playing cards while slugging whisky mixed with a high-energy drink and practicing their golf swings, they changed into black civvies and burst into Abeer’s home in Mahmoudiya, a town 50 miles south of Baghdad. They killed her mother Fikhriya, father Qassim, and five-year-old sister Hadeel with bullets to the forehead, and “took turns” raping Abeer. Finally, they murdered her, drenched the bodies with kerosene, and lit them on fire to destroy the evidence. Then the GIs grilled chicken wings.
Read entire article

The Rape of the "Hadji Girl"

by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, Women's Space, July 4, 2006

A couple of weeks ago there was a highly-publicized controversy over a video which appeared on UTube of a U.S. Marine performing a song entitled Hadji Girl. The song had been performed before thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq who could be heard wildly cheering and laughing in the background. Its lyrics were as follows:

Hadji Girl

I was out in the sands of Iraq
And we were under attack
And I, well, I didn’t know where to go.

And the first thing that I could see was
Everybody’s favorite Burger King
So I threw open the door and I hit the floor.

Then suddenly to my surprise
I looked up and I saw her eyes
And I knew it was love at first sight.

And she said…
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
Hadji girl, I can’t understand what you’re saying.

And she said…
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
Hadji girl, I love you anyway.

Then she said that she wanted me to see.
She wanted me to go meet her family
But I, well, I couldn’t figure out how to say no.

Cause I don’t speak Arabic.

So, she took me down an old dirt trail.
And she pulled up to a side shanty
And she threw open the door and I hit the floor.

Cause her brother and her father shouted…
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
They pulled out their AKs so I could see

And they said…
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
(with humorous emphasis:)
So I grabbed her little sister, and pulled her in front of me.

As the bullets began to fly
The blood sprayed from between her eyes
And then I laughed maniacally

Then I hid behind the TV
And I locked and loaded my M-16
And I blew those little f*ckers to eternity.

And I said…
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
They should have known they were f*ckin’ with a Marine.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the song and performance, as did the Marine Corps, announcing an intention to investigate, and the guy who wrote it and performed it apologized. And “explained.” See, he said, and his defenders said, and the defenders of all the wildly screaming and laughing troops in the audience said, and Michelle Malkin said, it wasn’t really about Marines killing civilians, no, no, it was about “insurgents” tricking Marines, using beautiful girls to lure them into traps and ambushes. But the Marines in the song outwitted them by making sure the blood spurted from between the decoy’s eyes instead of theirs! Don’t you get the humor? It was a joke! I mean, the chorus of the song came from a movie made by the creators of South Park. You people have no sense of humor.

Today 15-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza is dead, having been raped and burned by soldiers after her family had been shot by them.

According to this article the soldiers who murdered her had been sexually harrassing her (described as “making advances” towards her) every day as she passed through a checkpoint they manned. She was scared and had told her mother about it several times, and her mother had spoken with friends and even asked whether her daughter could stay with them.

It is so transparent. It is so obvious.

Abeer Qasim Hamza made the fatal errror of refusing the “advances” of Marines. She had to have known, said they, that she was hot. She had to have known, said they, what she was doing, sashaying through that checkpoint every day. And she turned them down. Ignored them. Rejected them. Acted like she was scared. Who the hell did she think she was? What. They were there all the way from the United States to defend her and her family, and she thought she could get away with that kind of bullshit?

After they raped her and killed her family, they blamed it on “insurgents.” And in their minds, that wasn’t really a lie. In fact, to men under male heterosupremacy, beautiful women who refuse their advances are always ”insurgents.” They are deceivers, evil vixens, jezebels, dangerous, and deadly, decoys scheming to lure them into traps. They deserve to be raped. They deserve to die.

I’m not surprised by this; it makes perfect sense to me. It will make perfect sense to any honest and clear-thinking woman who has experienced this same murderous hatred at the hands of a man she has spurned or ignored (something most women have experienced sometime or other.) I don’t think any of the men who did this were personality-disordered. I think they were men under male heterosupremacy who had the opportunity of a lifetime: the opportunity to get away with raping and killing and getting revenge against a beautiful young girl who had rejected them.

What disturbs me, and scares me, are all the Americans, including women, who defended this song, defended this performance, and bought the public explanations - thousands and thousands of them. All the Americans who thought this song was funny.

What disturbs me and scares me are all the Americans who will suggest this is some anomaly, who will chalk this atrocity up to ”personality disorders.” All of male heterosupremacy is personality disordered. It is soul sick with a sickness unto death. These young men just danced what was choreographed for them.

Sources: Hijabi Madness, The Guardian, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Hadji Girl Video, Hadji Girl Lyrics

Cecilia Fire Thunder Impeached

by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, Women's Space, July 4, 2006

Cecilia Fire Thunder believes that stopping sexual violence, domestic assault and incest - and caring for its victims -needs to rise to the top of the political agenda on the Pine Ridge reservation. On June 30, she was impeached.

Ceciilia Fire Thunder’s impeachment hearing was held June 29, 2006, and on June 30, she was impeached. She was suspended as chairman of the Oglala Sioux Nation following her public statement that despite South Dakota’s abortion ban, abortions could be performed on reservation land. The reason the tribal council gave for suspending her was that she had solicited donations for the Sacred Choices Wellness Center intending to offer abortions there. Fire Thunder says she never solicited those donations and I believe her. I think some of them probably were sent to her in response to posts written by white feminists bloggers.

According to an article published on June 28 in the Indian Country Times the actual conflicts and issues around these events have been obscured by feminist bloggers and by the Christian Right as well. I urge you to carefully read this article for yourself. According to Fire Thunder and other women present during the interview with Indian Country Times, 87 percent of women on the Oglala Sioux reservation have been sexually abused, many of them as children. Fire Thunder calls the molestation and incest of children “sexual deviancy,” rape the “ultimate subjugation” and says the extent of the problem on the reservation is revealed by women in drug and alcohol treatment, many of whom describe bearing the children of their male relatives. She says abortion rights, girls’ and women’s sovereignty over their own bodies, are critical and essential for these rape victims.

But not all the women on the Pine Ridge Reservation agree; more significantly, the tribal council does not agree. The council has issued a statement opposing abortion. Women leaders in the tribe are calling for a vote on abortion and want the vote limited to women only. They say that many women support Fire Thunder and would vote for her, but do not want to speak out now, given the intensity of the conflict.

According to the article:

Norma Rendon, who works in a domestic violence shelter run by the nonprofit Canleska Inc., spoke scornfully of the men, including some tribal council members who have been quoted in the local newspapers, for talking about women’s business.

‘’I may not be for abortion,'’ Rendon said. ‘’I had six children. I raised all six by myself without any kind of financial or emotional support. But I can’t make that choice for other women.'’.

Former tribal council member Deb Rooks-Cook, whose father was once tribal chairman, remembered calling on the council to take a stand against sexual violence 20 years ago..

But he told her not to expect any response. She remembered him saying, ‘’You’re talking to the perpetrators.'’.

...Fire Thunder said she is spending time in prayer and seeking guidance in anticipation of her June 30 impeachment hearing. She acknowledged that her term has been tumultuous, though other leaders say there are people who would criticize Fire Thunder for issues as innocuous as the color of shoes she might wear on a given day. .

…Fire Thunder said she was inspired to speak out against South Dakota’s abortion ban by Tex Hall, the former National Congress of the American Indian president, who in 1999 brought the organization’s first resolution against domestic violence. Fire Thunder remembered tears filling her eyes as Hall, in his customary cowboy hat and boots, expressed outrage over the abuse of women and children.

She was left with the belief that national Indian leaders must acknowledge abuse if communities are going to end it. More than that, she talks about the need for recognition of ‘’women’s sovereignty,'’ which is the right of women to make decisions for their own bodies..

‘’We’re in the middle of a quiet revolution,'’ Fire Thunder said. ‘’And it’s awful painful.'’

Read the entire article here .

Many thanks to Rich Leader of Adonis Mirror for sending this link to me.

Feminist on Father's Day

by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, Women's Space

I wrote this article several weeks ago. After I'd written it, I felt uncomfortable and nervous-- as though I were guilty of some grave violation, as though I'd breached a boundary it is always wrong to breach. Over the past few weeks I have thought a lot, both about this article and the feelings it has evoked in me. Although I have the deepest respect and admiration for both my mother and father and love them dearly, I have realized if I were to write and publish an article like this about mothers, it would be far less uncomfortable for me than it is to write and publish this article about fathers. The societal taboos around criticism of fathers and requiring that we reverence our fathers and remain silent about abusive fathers runs deep in all of us. But I believe this article is one that needs to be published, and so I am publishing it-- discomfort and all. CLS

Unlike Mother's Day, Father's Day historically had nothing to do with politics or resistance. There is no stirring "Father's Day Proclamation" penned by an inspiring father-leader calling warmakers to lay down their arms and to convene in the interests of peace and the end of violence. There are no demands, as with the original Mother's Day Proclamation of 1970, that wives refrain from coming to their husbands "reeking of carnage," nor is there a record of American fathers expressing concern and empathy for the children of fathers from other nations. The idea of Father's Day was not the idea of a father at all. It was the idea of a woman who might be the first father's rights advocate. Upon hearing her pastor's Sunday sermon about the newly-proclaimed Mother's Day in the early 1900s, Sonora Dodd thought about her father, a widower who had raised her and her five brothers and sisters, and decided if a Mother's Day celebration were in order, a Father's Day celebration also ought to be in order.

Father's Day was not officially proclaimed a national holiday until 1966 under the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson and wasn't enacted into law until 1972 under the Nixon Administration. (The Mother's Day Proclamation was penned in 1870 and was not made an official holiday until 1940.) Father's Day is now as commercialized as Mother's Day is, of course. All are expected to remember the family patriarchs with a card, a tie, a phone call, some fishing tackle, under penalty of being viewed as disrespectful, lazy or ungrateful. Pastors across the country deliver sermons about the fatherhood of the divine patriarch and about the responsibilities of fathers, usually to "provide" and "protect". And millions of children, old and young, stand before supermarket card racks reading card after card, searching in vain for an appropriate card for a man who may have abandoned or all but abandoned them, who could not be bothered to care for them, who may have abused them, molested, assaulted, incested them, whose pornography they may have stumbled across when they were young, who may have battered or otherwise harmed their mothers.

Each year the U.S. Census Bureau issues special Mother's Day and Father's Day press releases. It's intriguing, the differences between these publications. While there are paragraphs in each having to do with the giving of cards, there is a breakdown of the card-buyers only as pertains to fathers, where we learn that only 50 percent of all Father's Day cards are actually purchased by sons and/or daughters, with the remainder purchased by wives or bought for grandfathers, sons, brothers, uncles or "someone special." On the other hand, we're told that Mother's Day is the third-largest card-sending occasion, with 150 million cards sent each year, but there is no breakdown as to who the card-senders are (or are not). Maybe we all know that whatever cards are bought for mothers are bought by their children. Maybe we are supposed to feel guilty about the children who don't buy cards for their fathers. I think there are good reasons many children don't.

"... in het couples where both parents work, only 6 percent of married fathers provide primary care for their grade-school age children, and only 20 percent provide primary care for preschoolers."

According to the U.S. Census press releases, 81 percent of women 40-44 years old are mothers. There is no comparable estimate as to how many men are fathers. I am interested, for now, in establishing that by far, most women become mothers. Moving on, according to the releases, 80 percent of mothers ages 15-44 whose last birth was 12 or more years ago, are in the labor force. Fifty-one percent of mothers in the work force returned to work within four months of their child's birth. We find no similar information for fathers– no information about how many fathers whose last child was born 12 or more years ago are in the labor force, or about how many fathers returned to work within four months of their child's birth. Well, we all pretty much know that the fact of children's births do not really factor into the working lives of far and away most fathers– ever.

We learn that 18 percent of single parents living with children are men, for a total of 2.3 million single fathers, and that of that number, 16 percent live in the home of a relative or a nonrelative. By contrast, 10 million single mothers live with children under 18 years old, up from three million in 1970. No information is provided as to their living arrangements or incomes; what we can ascertain (but only by sifting through paragraph upon paragraph of irrelevance), is that 10 million single mothers is quite a few more than 2.3 million single fathers, many of the latter of whom seem to be living with family or new girlfriends.

We learn that in het couples where both parents work, only 6 percent of married fathers provide primary care for their grade-school age children, and only 20 percent provide primary care for preschoolers.

Where both parents work, but different shifts, fathers were expansive enough to provide 32 percent of the care for their preschoolers during the time their mother was working. Where fathers worked only part-time to the mothers' full-time, a whopping 38 percent of them were actually willing to be the primary source of their preschoolers' care, again while the mothers were working. Where fathers weren't employed at all and mothers were the sole providers for the family, 52 percent of unemployed dads were actually willing to care for their own kids while mom worked. Imagine that. I wonder what the rest of these fathers were doing while the mothers were working and the kids were being cared for by somebody besides them?

"What the (U.S. Census Press Release) doesn't actually calculate or quantify or report is what we all know and don't actually need to be told: that mothers take care of and raise the country's children."

The Mother's Day press release provides us with all sorts of useless trivia: what month and day of the week are most popular for giving birth, the most popular names for babies by year, and so on. What it doesn't actually calculate or quantify or report is what we all know and don't actually need to be told: that mothers take care of and raise the country's children. Mothers also pay for care when they are working ($92.00 per week average for working moms with at least one child). Mothers are taking care of the country's children in overwhelming numbers, even when they are married to their children's fathers, and even when the children's fathers are not employed. Meanwhile, many among the comparatively small number of single fathers seem to have been able to make other arrangements– to move in with relatives or others. And of the small number of single fathers, 22 percent have an annual income of over $50,000 annually.

The Mother's Report says nothing at all about child support, but the Father's Report emphasizes that 84 percent of child-support providers are men, who provide $3,600 annually, average. There is no figure for how many fathers do not provide child support at all; there is only this breakdown as to those who actually do provide child support. On average those fathers pay a whopping $300 per month for the care of their children.

These facts of life have not, however, interfered with the penchant of some fathers to take advantage of Father's Day to air their grievances against such grave injustices as I've described above. The first "equal rights for men" rally, sponsored by the "Boston Chapter of the Coalition of Free Men," "Fathers United for Equal Justice," "Children of Divorce," and the "National Congress for Men" under the leadership of "Men's Rights, Inc." was staged on Father's Day 1982 in an event designed to link fathers' rights with Father's Day. Last year, both Trish Wilson and Feministing blogged about the number of newspapers which published articles about Father's Rights on Mother's Day. Citing to a father's rights article by Susan Dominus which Feministing had blogged about, Wilson wrote that she had been interviewed by Dominus for the article, but Dominus did not include anything Wilson had written to her in her finished article, including information Wilson provided about the numerous assault, battery, and kidnapping convictions against fathers' rights "leaders" named in Dominus's article. Meanwhile, Rachel at Women's Health News cites to a recent report from the Center for Health Studies which reveals that a full 44 percent of women report being victims of "intimate partner" violence in their lives, "intimate partner violence" defined as having experienced physical abuse, forced sex, unwanted sexual contact, threats/anger, and or controlling behavior. Even if you reject "threats/anger" as abuse (I do not), 92.3 percent of women who said they experienced threats and anger also experienced another form of abuse, as did 82.3 percent of those reporting "controlling behavior," (for those who do not believe controlling behavior alone is abuse. I believe it is.)

"Forty-plus years post-Second Wave...both Father's and Mother's Day have become occasions for the promotion of anti-woman, anti-mother media ops and actions by father's and men's rights groups and their apologists. 40 years post-Second Wave, fathers' sons and daughters wrestle with, and grieve, their treatment at the hands of their fathers."

Forty-plus years post-Second Wave, these behaviors I've listed remain the rule and not the exception. 40 years post-Second Wave, both Father's and Mother's Day have become occasions for the promotion of anti-woman, anti-mother media ops and actions by father's and men's rights groups and their apologists. 40 years post-Second Wave, fathers' sons and daughters wrestle with, and grieve, their treatment at the hands of their fathers.

All of this being so, why are so many of us — those of us who grew up with fathers of the pre-Second Wave era, those of us who grew up with fathers of the post-Second Wave era — celebrating "Father's Day"? Those of us who have had the good fortune to be loved by good fathers are fully able to honor our fathers every day of every year if we like, in any way we choose, as we will, because that's what relationship is about– it is about mutuality, honor, care and respect flowing from years and years of the same between two people; it isn't necessary to make it a societal mandate. Cultural and societal pressure to "honor" fathers who have, in large numbers, hurt mothers and their children, and continue to, are immoral, obscene and wrong. Given what is true about fathers and mothers, maybe it is time to make Father's Day, as Mother's Day was, originally, a call to resistance and revolutionary change.


Sources

North County Times
Mother's Day U.S. Census Press Release
Father's Day U.S. Census Press Release
New York Times

Somali Women Voting

Somalia: Of America, the CIA, Warlords and Women

by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, Women's Space

Yesterday and today the American and international media have been reporting that the CIA has been supporting warlords in Somalia. This is nothing new; the U.S. is behaving the way we always behave: we find terrorists in a country who will advance our agenda to fight the terrorists in a country who won't. We give them guns, money and drugs, and we teach them how to torture people. Here are a few of so many examples I could list:

Iran

In the 1950s the U.S., via the CIA, supported the Shah of Iran in the deposing of a popular leader who nationalized the one Iranian oil company, British Petroleum. The Shah's security forces brutalized Iranians with torture techniques learned from the CIA to the point that Amnesty International described Iran, in 1979, as the nation with the "worst human rights record on the planet". Ultimately, driven by resentment and bitterness towards the U.S. for its ongoing support of the Shah, the Iranian people overthrew him and installed a fundamentalist Islamic leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. It is really the U.S. which is responsible for igniting Islamic revolution in the Middle East, and with it the expansion of Islamic fundamentalist Sharia laws and the repression of a burgeoning feminist resistance and movement.

Chile

In the 1970s, disgraced and eventually all-but-impeached Republican President Richard Nixon, hysterical over the election of the beloved socialist physician, Salvador Allende, ordered the CIA to create a "coup environment" in Chile, which it did, funding terrorists and fascists who eventually assassinated Allende and replaced him with the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, under whose regime torture of "dissidents" was an everyday event, with Chile becoming a haven for expatriated Nazis, and making the U.S. responsible for destroying what had been the oldest functioning democracy in South America. In the course of that destruction, Pinochet criminalized abortion, normalized domestic violence as a family value (a common saying during his regime was, "He who loves you, beats you,") and used rape and sexual violence as torture against thousands and thousands of Chilean women and girls.

Afghanistan

In the 1970s, the CIA funneled $5-6 billion dollars to Islamic groups in Afghanistan, including a group led by Osama bin Laden to support resistance to Soviet invasion. This support included providing sensitive weapons technology to Islamic extremists which was eventually used in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Today the Soviet Union no longer exists, more than one million Afghan people are dead, the warlords the CIA funded are fighting violent turf wars, and the country is ruled by Islamic fundamentalists. For Afghan women, this has meant being denied "educations (all girls' schools were closed down), the right to work (all women were ordered to remain in their houses, and employers were threatened with dire consequences for (hiring) female employees), the right to travel (no woman could venture out of the house alone and unaccompanied by a prescribed male member of the woman's immediate family), the right to health (no woman could see a male doctor, family planning was outlawed, women could not be operated upon by a surgical team containing a male member), the right to legal recourse (a woman's testimony was worth half a man's testimony; a woman could not petition the court directly -- this had to be done through a prescribed male member of her immediate family), the right to recreation (all women's recreational and sporting facilities had been banned, women singers could not sing lest their female voices 'corrupt' males, etc.), the right to being human (they could not show their faces in public to male strangers, they could not wear bright-colored clothing, they could not wear make-up, they could only appear outside their houses clad head to foot in shapeless bags called burqas, they could not wear shoes with heels that click (lest the clicking sound of their feet corrupt males), they could not travel in private vehicles with male passengers, they did not have the right to raise their voices when talking in public, they could not laugh loud as it lures males into corruption, etc."

Now we are hearing that the CIA has been providing support to Somali warlords using the excuse that Al Qaeda terrorists might be lurking in Somalia. According to news reports, however, to date no Al Qaeda operatives have been found. But this week, Islamic fundamentalists took control of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Once again, Somali hatred of the U.S. for its support of brutal warlords who have used rape, sexual violence, torture and brutality as weapons results in their support of Islamic fundamentalist militia who might at least drive out the U.S. I predict that the U.S. will now justify stepping up its intervention and support of the warlords as part of its ongoing "war on terror," even though it is America's own support of terrorists which has provoked Somali resistance and support of fundamentalist militia! Or it will begin attempting to negotiate a deal with the new fundamentalist regime. According to the Christian Science Monitor, via Sokari of Black Looks, 5,000 people demonstrated against the U.S.-funded warlord militia last Friday in Mogadishu.

According to a report entitled Highlighting Violence Against Women in Somalia:

"Somalia is a prime example of how women become the main victims of violence in conflict-ridden areas. Violence against women in the form of rape, torture, looting and forced displacement is tools of war for the humiliation and control of communities living in certain areas.

"The governmental instability has ensured that Somalia continually fails to interact with the African Commission regarding political, social or economical affairs. To date, Somalia remains one of the countries refusing to sign the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

Male dominance is an accepted norm in Somalia, and women are consistently undermined within society. The patriarchal Somali culture regards violence against women (VAW) on a family basis to be a private matter. Research conducted by UNICEF highlights the alarming reality that the physical punishment of women within family homes is not considered to be a violation by Somali communities...

"Rape is common, and fear is widespread, but due to the impunity created by male dominance, perpetrators of sexual harassment are rarely punished. To safeguard the family's honour, some girls are forced to marry the men who raped them. In other cases, 'blood compensation' is given to the family of the victim (usually in the form of livestock or money). This never reaches the girl, but instead is handed to the male elders of the family, most commonly the father...

"Official authorities, regardless of their responsibilities, constantly abuse the rights of women, and women in detention centres are often raped by custodians.

"Of a total 694 cases of violations of women's rights carried out in the past 6 months, 36 cases have been fully investigated. All the rest remain pending and no investigation has been done. Research was conducted into the victims of sexual assault in Somalia, and of those involved in the research, 60% were physically harmed, 20% died as a result of the assault, and a further 10% committed suicide. More than half of the perpetrators were never found, and of those charged, many suffered no consequences. Even though many cases of rape are confirmed, the majority of the population still deny its existence...

"98% of Somali women continue to be circumcised, with 90% of those being subjected to the Pharaonic (also called Infibulation) method."

But according to Sokari, in December 2004, twenty Somali women's organizations for and on behalf of the women of Somalia issued a Statement of Appeal as follows:

Statement and Appeal of Somali Women December 2004: Appeal of the Somali Women contrary to being denied their rights on the decisions of the future of their nation

The Somali Women, who before and after the years of Independence have taken an active participation in the construction of their nation; who have demonstrated a concrete capability in the last 14 years of war and inter-clan conflict; have alone carried a great burden previously shared with men.

Even though they have taken responsibility and participated in saving the Somali people throughout such a difficult period, they have been denied those rights of political participation, because these have been based on Clan structure.

As is well known, the Charter forming the institutional building process prescribed a minimum 12% of Parliamentary Members to be allotted to women. This position did not satisfy the initial demands of women which were for the 25% but was accepted because of the desire of the Somali Women who wanted a government after so many years of crisis and bloodshed. ...

... It is, however, sad how all important responsibilities have fallen on the shoulders of women during the years of conflict only to be denied political rights during the creation of the political decision making process. We send an appeal to heed the discourse of President Abdullahi Yusuf, who has said Somali Women will cover important positions of Minister and Vice-minister, and will see these applied irrespective of clans saying.

We the Women organizations of IIDA (Women's Development Organization), SBWA (Shabelle Business Women Association), HINNA, DALLAALO, WARDO, ALLAMAGAN, KALSAN, DIJHRO, COGWO,

The Women who have struggled for peace, appeal to the President and the Prime Minister of the Transitional Federal Government to:

1. Assign significant Ministries, as well as important coffers in the Government to responsible women so as to reflect the important positions of women in Somali society

2. Apply the article of the charter concerning the minimum representation (12%) to which the Somali Woman has a Right;

3. Consult Women for everything which concerns them, not their clan, since the clans do not permit women representatives;

4. Apply Women representation in the Government off not less than 25%, in view of the fact that the minimum representation of the Women in the Parliament was meant to be 12%, which was reduced to only 8% in the end and this 8% now represents their respective clans;

5. Allow CMC (Coordination and Monitoring Committee) Commission include representatives of the Somali Civil Society, especially Women, because the Members of Civil Society who have been invited to Eldoret on the basis of their clans, now act as representative of their clans in the Parliament.

We conclude urging the Somali Transitional Federal Government and the International Community, especially IGAD and those friends of the Somali Nation and Peoples, that one must not put aside such an important constituent part of society (approximately estimated at 60%), which has, in addition demonstrated of being capable to run the country's economy.
Source: Marian's Blog via Sokari

What will happen to these women now? Will their brutalization by U.S.-CIA-backed warlords be replaced by the brutalization of Islamic fundamentalism and Sharia law? Who is listening to the women? Who is publicizing their appeal or their plight? U.S. involvement in Somalia is not about a "war on terror," and the response of the Somalian people is not a defense of terrorism. It is a resistance to the kind of U.S. involvement which invariably and relentlessly regards the lives and bodies of women as the necessary sacrifices in the advance of agendas which have given us Pinochet, Osama bin Laden, the Shah of Iran, Gen. Joseph Mobutu of Zaire, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier of Haiti, and many more, and with them, endless brutality, torture, and sexual violence against women.

I demand that the U.S. withdraw its support of warlords in Somalia. I demand that instead of sending money to warlords, the U.S. send money to the twenty women's organizations which signed that appeal. I demand that the U.S. media stop acting as a propaganda tool for the Bush regime. I demand, for god's sake, that somebody listen to the women.

Sources

Women4Peace
IPAS
Memoria Y Justicia
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
Yahoo News
Christian Science Monitor
Black Looks
AGENDA
Marian's Blog
CIA Watch

Save Nazanin

Nazanin's case will be reviewed by the Supreme Court this week. If the death sentence is upheld, she may be executed very shortly after.

On January 3, 2006, Nazanin was sentenced to death for murder by an Iran court. According to the Iranian daily Etemaad 17-year-old Nazanin and her niece had been spending some time in a park west of Tehran with their boyfriends, when three men started harassing them. The girls` boyfriends fled from the scene, leaving them helpless behind. The men pushed Nazanin and her niece down on the ground and tried to rape them, and to protect herself, she took out a knife from her pocket and stabbed one of the men in the hand. The girls tried to escape, but the men overtook them, and at this point, Nazanin stabbed one of the other men in the chest, which eventually killed him. According to the newspaper, she broke down in tears when she told the court: "I wanted to defend myself and my niece. I did not want to kill that boy. At the heat of the moment I did not know what to do because no one came to our help." Nevertheless, the court sentenced her to death by hanging.

Act now! Go here to learn what you can do to petition authorities to spare Nazanin's life.

What Zuma Won and What South Africa Lost

by Coleen Lowe Morna, Global Sisterhood Network, May 16, 2006

It is ironic that as South Africans celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Constitution this week, a young woman who dared to lay a charge of rape against the man who would be president prepared to surrender that most basic of rights: her citizenship.

Former deputy president Jacob Zuma may have won his case, but what have we as South Africans lost? Much, unfortunately, in the campaign that had just begun to gather momentum post apartheid to recognise the right of women who feel they have been violated to speak out.

While Zuma, who has shown no remorse in a case that at the very least leaves him guilty of adultery and irresponsible behaviour, repositions himself to lead, a young woman whose troubled sexual past dates back to her years in exile is forced into hiding. What would her father - Zuma's comrade-in-arms, who died in a car crash during the struggle - have to say? It fell on an old school judge to hear the case because, much as we have become a nation of principle, none of the more senior black judges wanted to handle the case. Judge Willem van der Merwe is no doubt a learned man and his judgment must be respected. At the same time it must raise questions about just how transformed the legal system really is. One has to start by understanding that rape is not just another crime. It is often about hugely disproportionate power relations between a victim under every conceivable societal pressure to drop the case; an accused with access to money, influence and power; and a criminal justice system that is at best unfriendly; at worst obstructionist.

Man made laws on sexual offences - those current in South Africa included - have been designed to paint women as temptresses; throw into question their intentions (the so called "cautionary rule") and place an excessive burden of proof on complainants to show beyond "reasonable doubt" both lack of consent and "intent" to rape on the part of the accused. These laws have also allowed judges to dredge up a complainant's past sexual history to prove patterns of behaviour that could discredit the allegations.

The judge, who claimed to have read the South African Law Commission research and the upcoming Sexual Offences Bill on more enlightened approaches, said he became stumped when trying to understand why the complainant would make such an allegation, knowing the consequences, if in fact nothing had happened. The explanation, he claimed, could only be found by digging up the past and establishing that she had a history of crying wolf.

This line of argument is weak and outmoded. It is especially galling that the judge allowed evidence extending well below the age of consent (when by law any sexual intercourse by an adult with a child is statutory rape) to be admitted as evidence. That much of this should have come from a private diary, without the consent of its owner, and that the judge apparently had no ethical concerns about such conduct is deeply disturbing.

In buying into the defense line about the seductive powers of a kanga worn without underwear and dismissing the psychologist's evidence that it is possible to freeze during rape, especially with someone you know, the judge reinforced the prevailing notions that women "invite" such experiences and that unless you scream the house down (even if you know the assailant) your case is doomed.

But this case goes well beyond legal technicalities. It is fundamentally about the tests of leadership in our new democracy. While finding Zuma "not guilty" the judge chided him for having sexual intercourse with a friend's daughter many years his junior, and for the "inexcusable" fact that he had unprotected sex with an HIV positive woman. Does such a man deserve to lead South Africa?

In the immediate context, this case and the weaknesses in the criminal justice system that it has revealed should prompt us to pass the Sexual Offences Bill (ten years in the making) that tightens the definition of consent and limits the admissibility of various types of evidence, especially those relating to ones sexual past.

Police bungling in the Zuma case again points to the need to strengthen investigations, one of the many loopholes in sexual offenses cases, only 7% of which result in convictions in the regular courts.

The case should also give added impetus to the National Action Plan to end Gender Violence endorsed by a broad cross section of South Africans last week under the banner: "Ten years later: making the constitution work for women and children." This should be the real yardstick of success over the coming decade.
Colleen Lowe Morna is Executive Director of Gender Links. This article is part of the GL Opinion and Commentary Service.)

Gender and Power in African Contexts

by Amina Mama, a Plenary Address delivered at the Nordic Africa Institute Conference, Beyond Identity: Rethinking Power in Africa, Uspsala, October 4-7, 2001

The Englishword identity is closely linked to others -- the notions of integrity and security. I would like to suggest that much of what we are grouping under the dubious rubric of "identity politics" is actually about popular struggles for material redistribution and justice, and related desires for existential integrity and security. Put simply, poverty is probably the worst threat to integrity and security worldwide. It is a threat that cannot be adequately addressed through the cultural lip-service strategy of recognition and celebration, because poverty, and its offspring insecurity and loss of integrity, are all matters of global and local political economy, matters that demand redistribution and justice...

Identity is all about power and resistance, subjection and citizenship, action and reaction. I would suggest that rather than simply passing over identity in order to rethink power, we need to profoundly rethink identity if we are to begin to comprehend the meaning of power....

All identities are gendered, perhaps dangerously so...How is it then that some postcolonial theorists choose to ignore the relevance of gender to our understanding of national identity and nationalism...Equally problematic are those who would deny that gender has any relevance to matters authentically African by inventing an imaginary precolonial community in which gender did not exist...yet there is ample evidence to suggest that gender, in all its diverse manifestations, has long been one of the central organising principles of African societies, past and present. ...

...within women's movements, perhaps because of their widespread adherence to participatory democratic organisational practices, we can discern the emergence of new and more challenging identities. Here we find women-people intent on creating autonomous spaces in which to work at elaborating and developing their own individual and collective agency, women who dare to differ and sabotage the patriarchal precendents of received "identitypolitics" being reproduced by the old regime.

At the present time, if we choose to look beyond the sinister machinations of the late capitalism and listen beyond the battle cries of powerful men, we will hear the quietly persistent challenge articulated by women.
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Mothers Militant: Mothers Day as Resistance

By Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff
May 14, 2006, Women’s Space

The women responsible for the holiday we know as Mother’s Day did not celebrate the day as it is celebrated in the United States. The day as they envisioned and conceived it had nothing to do with telephone calls from children, flowers, candy, or dinners out. It had nothing to do with the mothers and grandmothers with the most children and grandchildren being recognized with carnations and ribbons during church meetings. It wasn’t about Hallmark cards or Hallmark moments.

The women most responsible for Mother’s Day were radicals; feminist revolutionaries. Julia Ward Howe, who penned the Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870, was an abolitionist, sharing leadership of the movement with the likes of William Lloyd Garrison, William Cullen Bryant, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was a playwright, a poet and a mother of six who once wrote of her abusive marriage under a pen name when her husband forbade her to publish. She was a peace activist who worked tirelessly for an end to war and for healing the wounds of war which were suffered by civilians and soldiers alike. She was a woman who began to see and understand the parallels between the institution of slavery in the United States and the enslavement of the people of women.

"The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel." --Julia Ward Howe

Julia Ward Howe struggled as we struggle today in an oppressive marriage in which her husband threatened that if she divorced him - as she tried to do and wanted to do - he would maintain custody of their youngest two children. Chattel to her husband, as were all wives in the 1800s, Howe’s husband controlled her inheritance, using this power he had over her to withhold the money which would have allowed her freedom and independence to engage in the political work which gave her life meaning.

If we understand the reality of Howe’s life, then what she wrote in her Mother’s Day Proclamation takes on new meaning for us. When Howe writes, “Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage for caresses and applause,” she writes not only of the reality of mothers in bondage to their husbands throughout history, she writes of her own very private and personal bondage - and hell -- as well.

Mother’s Day was originally of Anna Reeves Jarvis’s idea. Jarvis had been a peace activist during the Civil War, devoting herself to healing the wounds and horrors of war for soldiers and their families on both sides. Jarvis called the very first “mother’s days,” “Mothers’ Work Days,” days set aside to improve sanitation during a time when more soldiers in the Civil War were dying from disease and infection than from the wounds of battle.

It was the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s, following on the heels of the devastation of the Civil War, which moved Julia Ward Howe to begin a one-woman international peace crusade inaugurated by her Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870. In 1872 she traveled to Europe hoping to promote an International Women’s Peace Conference, but established peace organizations there would not allow her to speak publicly because she was a woman. She rented her own hall and conducted her own meetings, but her attempts failed. She returned to the U.S. and promoted Mother’s Day as a day as a festival of peace; her initiative was successful and resulted in a June 2 Mother’s Day celebration in major cities which lasted 30 years. It was a day in which mothers and grandmothers united to oppose violence and war, a day in which they demanded that men lay down their weapons and work for a peaceful new world.

Mother’s Day lasted only for a short time in its conception as a day of revolution and resistance. When the elder Ann Jarvis died, her daughter began a campaign to revision Mother’s Day as a holiday honoring the individual sacrifices of mothers for their families. The younger Jarvis’s efforts found favor with Woodrow Wilson’s relentlessly anti-Women’s Suffrage administration, and in 1913, Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May Mother’s Day, without any reference to the reason for which it was envisioned by the elder Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe.

What if we were to reject the mockery which has been made of Howe’s proclamation and this day, in favor of returning to our foremothers’ revolutionary militance and dedication to the building of a new world, for our children and grandchildren, for all people?

Today Mother’s Day in the U.S. is a billion-dollar industry dedicated to sentimentalizing and romanticizing motherhood as patriarchally envisioned, all the while the Bush Administration, patriarchal religion, and conservative ideologues in general wage war on mothers by way of forced motherhood, denying them access to contraceptives and abortion, criminalizing them and penalizing them for such things as breastfeeding in public, for their health problems, disabilities, and impoverishment, for their victimization by abusive partners, and for rejecting the abuses of technobirth in favor of birthing their own way, attended by midwives. Today’s Mother’s Day, instead of being a day of resistance to all forms of violence, war, and tyranny, is a day set aside for the perpetuation and repetition of platitudes, meaningless gestures, and consumerism. It is a mockery of the revolutionary vision and work of the women who conceived it.

Howe is remembered in male supremacist history as the writer of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, but that song was written just as Howe began her public work and before the burgeoning of her own feminist consciousness. Later she would write:

“"During the first two thirds of my life, I looked to the masculine idea of character as the only true one. I sought its inspiration, and referred my merits and demerits to its judicial verdict. . . . The new domain now made clear to me was that of true womanhood-woman no longer in her ancillary relation to her opposite, man, but in her direct relation to the divine plan and purpose, as a free agent, fully sharing with man every human right and every human responsibility. This discovery was like the addition of a new continent to the map of the world, or of a new testament to the old ordinances”

It was in this spirit that Howe penned her Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870. What might our communities, nation, our world, look like, were mothers and grandmothers to re-member what our herstory, which has been dis-membered by male supremacists? What if we were to reject the mockery which has been made of Howe’s proclamation and this day, in favor of returning to our foremothers’ revolutionary militance and dedication to the building of a new world, for our children and grandchildren, for all people? What if we seized this day, taking the opportunity it affords us to remind our children, grandchildren, friends, relatives, all who will listen of the vision of the women whose work originally inspired this day. What if we read the true Mother’s Day Proclamation to our families and then told them the story of life of the woman who wrote it?

Mother's Day Proclamation of 1870 “Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears! Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, "Disarm, Disarm!" The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail & commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesars but of God. In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”

Copyright 2006-2010, Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, Women's Space

Animal Mothers: Maternal They Aren't

by Natalie Angier, May 9, 2006,

As much as we may like to believe that mother animals are designed to nurture and protect their young, to fight to the death, if need be, to keep their offspring alive, in fact, nature abounds with mothers that defy the standard maternal script in a raft of macabre ways. There are mothers that zestily eat their young and mothers that drink their young's blood. Mothers that pit one young against the other in a fight to the death and mothers that raise one set of their babies on the flesh of their siblings. Read more

There Is a Fury Building Up Across India

by Arundhati Roy & Shoma Chaudhuri, The Hindu via Countercurrents

"I believe [the Narmada Dam issue] contains a microcosm of the universe. I think it contains a profound argument about everything – power, powerlessness, deceit, greed, politics, ethics, rights and entitlements. For example, is it right to divert rivers and grow water-intensive crops like sugar cane and wheat in a desert ecology? Look at the disaster the Indira Gandhi canal is wreaking in Rajasthan. To me, understanding the Narmada issue is the key to understanding how the world works. The beauty of the argument is that it isn’t human-centric. It’s also about things that most political ideologies leave out. Vital issues – rivers, estuaries, earth, mountains, deserts, crops, forests, fish. And about human things that most environmental ideologies leave out. It touches a raw nerve, so you have people who know very little about it, people who admit that they know very little and don’t care to find out, coming out with passionate opinions.
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Give Us Your Huddled Masses But Not Your Battered Women

by William Fisher, CountercurrentsApril 29, 2006

Should the U.S. congress reach agreement on an immigration bill, it is unlikely to include one of the simpler issues in this complex debate: granting asylum to battered women.
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May Day 2006
A Declaration on Behalf of Blue Planet Mother Earth

from the Grandmother Councils and Clan Mothers of Great Turtle Island

via Elk Looks Back, Clan Mother, Deer Clan, Mazatepelt
via FieryHawk, HP
via The Global Sisterhood Network, April 30, 2006

With full presence and the power to love we
Declare our responsibilities as Women of dignity
To Behold our Earth as Mother.

Recognizing Women are Life Givers and Water Bearers:

We recognize Sovereign lands and the language of the many cultures of Great Turtle Island.

We bind spiritual responsibility to Men and Women to discuss before acting aggressions upon the Earth with weapons of destruction, manipulations of borders, and natural resources

and imposing environmental heath hazards to incite a world plague and to annihilate the balance of natural elements, leaving our Blue Planet uninhabitable for the present and future generations of all living matter.

We issue and rule the removal of hierarchal, patriarchal democracy, in place of Sovereignty

Peace making councils by Women of Authority to be respected by Men of family and communities whose responsibilities are to serve and protect with Honor and Peaceful keeping.

By our mutual decree:

We impose the end of Pornography, Rape and Crimes against Blue Planet Mother Earth, her children, women and our children

No government shall be influenced or weaponized by religious evangelism.

By our Clans and Councils of the Great Turtle Island to the World we represent

Integrating education through our inherent cultural wisdom, elder respect and plant and food medicines through sustainable ecology.

Healthy Planet, Healthy Governance, Healthy Communities, Healthy Children.

The Bodies of Women for Oil

by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, Women's Space

The U.S. State Department is prematurely recalling U.S. Ambassador Reno Harnish from Azerbaijan following the murder of a former embassy translator, Zarifa Dzhabieva, 48, in her apartment on April 6. She had been stabbed 30 times. Dzhabieva, 48, had been questioned in the course of an FBI investigation into the U.S. Embassy's possible involvement in aiding and abetting the issuing of visas and forged documents to Azerbaijan women and girls destined for the U.S. sex trade.

The U.S. State Department is prematurely recalling U.S. Ambassador Reno Harnish from Azerbaijan following the murder of a former embassy translator, Zarifa Dzhabieva, 48, in her apartment on April 6. She had been stabbed 30 times. Dzhabieva, 48, had been questioned in the course of an FBI investigation into the U.S. Embassy's possible involvement in aiding and abetting the issuing of visas and forged documents to Azerbaijani women and girls destined for the U.S. sex trade. None of Dzhabieva's valuables were touched, and she had $20,000 in her bank account, but her apartment was ransacked, suggesting her killers were looking for something. Dzhabieva was reported to have been present at confidential talks hosted by Harnish prior to her early and recent retirement from embassy work.

Well, Harnish's mission in Azerbaijan appears to have largely been accomplished.

Alex Peshkov, who emigrated from Arkhangelsk in 2002 and who is a staff writer for Massachusetts newspaper, The Republican, writes about the days before a recent parliamentary election -- part of Azerbaijan's move in the direction of democratizing -- when president Ilham Aliyev (who inherited his position from his father in a flawed election), fearing he would lose to the opposition, accused key government officials of conspiring to stage a coup and detained them. Among the detained were the former head of the Azerbaijani Academy of Sciences, the former ministers of economic development, health and finance, and the head of the largest oil company, as well. Within days nearly 500 candidates were forced into "voluntary" withdrawal from the election or were deprived of their victory by a court decision. When the opposition leader, Rasul Guliyev, who had been in exile in the U.S., attempted to return to Azerbaijan for the elections, he was arrested in the Ukraine at the request of the Azerbaijani government. The U.S. then celebrated these "election" results and openly congratulated the president. More recently Aliyev has been invited to meet with Bush administration officials to discuss, among other things, oil reserves and, yes, possible sanctions or war on Iran.

Harnish is said to have masterminded the pre-election project and this is why.

A few months before the election, Azerbaijan celebrated the official opening of the U.S.-backed crude oil pipeline linking the Caspian Sea basin to the Mediterranean, constructed to bypass Russia and Iran and to extract the world's biggest untapped fossil fuel resource. The construction of this pipeline may also have something to do with the fact that Azerbaijan has been the only predominantly Muslim country which has supported the war on Iraq and contributed to the coalition assisting the forces of the Iraqi interim government.

And undoubtedly, the construction of this pipeline and the deal Azerbaijan cut with the U.S. to become a "key ally" in the war on Iraq had something to do with why the U.S. has consistently turned a blind eye to corruption, election fraud, human rights violations, murders of independent journalists, the violent suppression of mass protests, and reprisals against opposition in Azerbaijan, while publicly denouncing similar dictators like Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who only have potatoes to sell and cannot offer the U.S. oil reserves.

To cut the deals which it is necessary to cut in order to hoard what is left of the diminishing supply of the earth's fossil fuels for U.S. use, or to retain strategic allies against all and any who would threaten those resources, it looks as though it is now also necessary for the U.S. to cut deals with sex traffickers, who now operate an estimated 200 or more organized European crime syndicates, active in 58 countries, comprising a thriving multinational corporation in the business of buying and selling girls and women as sex slaves to the United States.

To cut the deals which it is necessary to cut in order to hoard what is left of the diminishing supply of the earth's fossil fuels for U.S. use, or to retain strategic allies against all and any who would threaten those resources, it looks as though it is now also necessary for the U.S. to cut deals with sex traffickers, who now operate an estimated 200 or more organized European crime syndicates, active in 58 countries, comprising a thriving multinational corporation in the business of buying and selling girls and women as sex slaves to the United States. Like all multinationals, this one is well-funded, well-organized, influential and well-connected, including with government officials and ambassadors and those in a position to grant visas and other documents. In light of the Bush Administration's priority of controlling oil in, and consolidating power over, the Middle East, other important goals must be sacrificed-- goals like encouraging and protecting democratic elections. Goals like ending trafficking in women.

The United Nations sanctimoniously condemns this slavery, even as its own personnel are implicated in it. Condoleeza Rice sanctimoniously condemns Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko as "Europe's last dictator" even as Bush invites Azerbaijan's dictator Ilham Aliyev to the White House to chat about oil, Iraq and Iran. And both the U.N. and the Bush Administration condemn sex trafficking while their own officials are implicated in it, participate in it, and cut their deals, whether with small-time traffickers or trafficking kingpins. Always, women are the pawns, the sacrifices, whether they die in war, whether they are bought and sold as sex slaves, or murdered to cover up the racketeering of U.S. government officials.

Diplomatic sources say Reno Harnish will be appointed to a post in the US Ecology and Ministry and will be engaged in global problems as well as fight against bird flu. According to U.S. officials, his work in Azerbaijan is complete.


Sources

Feminist Peace Network
The Massachusetts Republican
The New York Times
Eurasia Insight
Szirine Magazine
United Press International
Azernews
Pravda

UPDATE:
Iran Ambassador: US Wants to Use Azerbajaini Territories to Launch War on Iraq

Read here

Earth Day: 2006

It's all connected:
Wangari Maathai on Earth Day 2006:

“The planet does not belong to those in power,” said Maathai, the first environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize. “It is a gift to all of us, not only a source of profound beauty but the sustenance for all life. And each one of us can help conserve and protect the Earth.

“Celebrating Earth Day can remind us of the sacredness of this gift and of life itself,” she said. “Acknowledging the sacred gift of life with respect and gratitude should also remind us that conflict is not inevitable, that each one of us can do something to bring health and peace to our planet.”

“By honoring me in 2004 with the Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognized that environmental action and peace are connected,” said Maathai, Kenya’s assistant minister of the environment.
Read

"There is Something About Juarez"
Argentine Experts Study Juarez Murder Remains

400 Women Murdered, Sexually Tortured in Border Town Since 1993; Officials Apathetic? Or Protecting the Killers?
Teresa Braine for Women's E-News

In late March, Irma Monreal Jaime was given proof that her daughter Esmeralda had been killed in the wave of mysterious and notorious slayings that have claimed hundreds of women since 1993 in the border city of Juarez.

Monreal received an analysis of dental records by state authorities, identifying Esmeralda's body as one of eight that were dumped in a former cotton field in a busy area of Juarez in 2001.

"I'm a bit more tranquil, a bit more at peace," says Monreal.

But she is not yet fully accepting that the remains are that of her daughter. Once she does that, the investigation of the remains will be closed, and she wants to be certain.

Like a number of other families who don't entirely trust the Mexican identification process, she is waiting until May, when results are due from DNA tests being conducted by a team of Argentine forensic experts.

The team--which gained fame by using advanced DNA-study techniques to identify people killed in Argentina's "dirty war" of the 1970s--is studying the remains of about 60 women, including those believed to be of Esmeralda, for either first-time identification or to verify previous identifications by state authorities.

...The murders have continued. Twenty-two females, including an infant, were killed in 2005, according to Amigos de las Mujeres de Juarez (Friends of the Women of Juarez), a Las Cruces, N.M., advocacy group for victims' families that was formed in 2001. So have killings of people involved in the cases.

In January, a prominent human rights lawyer, Sergio Dante Almaraz, was shot to death in broad daylight in downtown Juarez. Dante had defended two bus drivers who claimed they were tortured into confessing to the murders of the eight women found in the cotton field, which today is marked by eight pink crosses bearing the names of those found there. The attorney's murder remains unsolved.

For years Chavez, victims' families and other advocates have been fighting to get the cases investigated, accusing the investigating authorities of complicity in the crimes when nothing was done.

...In February, a report by the Mexican government enraged relatives and advocates hoping for something approaching an explanation.

"We didn't think it would be such an insubstantial report. It's an embarrassment," Chavez says. "They didn't want to do anything more than issue reports to appease the international organizations."

The report attributed the Juarez slayings to cultural and social violence against women throughout the country; Juarez ranks fourth among Mexican cities in the number of women murdered, the report noted. After three government reports over the past two years failed to generate action, victims' families and advocates had not held out much hope that this one would break new ground. But they were enraged at the complete dismissal of what they say is the central issue: a lack of regard by the authorities for the victims and the potential for a cover-up.

"It's not a competition," says Monreal, referring to the report's remarks about the number of female homicides being even higher in other parts of Mexico. She says victims' families are more concerned about the failure of investigations and high-level appointees to get to the bottom of murders that have generated allegations of complicity among the investigators' ranks. "There is no justice, there is nothing."

"For years the officials in Chihuahua and Mexico have been trying to minimize and manipulate numbers," says Sally Meisenhelder, a co-founder of Amigos de las Mujeres de Juarez.

What gets lost in the report, says Laurie Freeman, Mexico specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank in the U.S. capital, is "the possibility that there's some kind of organized element behind some of the killings--not all of the killings--and that the perpetrators may have links to and be protected by state officials. There is something different about Juarez."

Read Story Here

Decorated Lesbian Air Force Major Challenges Military Policy

by Tan Vinh, April 13, 2006 in The Seattle Times

A decorated McChord Air Force Base major, who was once featured in a national recruiting pamphlet, sued the military Wednesday after she was suspended for being a lesbian. Expecting her commanding officer to dismiss her after 19 years of service, Margaret Witt, a flight nurse from Spokane, filed an injunction in U.S. District Court in Seattle seeking to prevent her discharge. Witt's case is one of two active lawsuits, both with local ties, that challenge the constitutionality of the military's ban on openly gay personnel, under a policy known as "don't ask, don't tell." In Boston, a federal court is hearing a case involving a dozen service members, including three from Washington, who want their jobs back. Read Article

Interview with Catherine A. MacKinnon: Are Women Human?

April 12, 2005, The Guardian

Catherine A. MacKinnon talks with The Guardian about her soon-to-be-released book, Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues

Of all the provocative passages in Catharine MacKinnon's new book Are Women Human? the following hit me hardest. She writes: "[T]he fact that the law of rape protects rapists and is written from their point of view to guarantee impunity for most rapes is officially regarded as a violation of the law of sex equality, national or international, by virtually nobody."

Are you suggesting that rape law enshrines rapists' points of view, I ask MacKinnon? "Yes, in a couple of senses. The most obvious sense is that most rapists are men and most legislators are men and most judges are men and the law of rape was created when women weren't even allowed to vote. So that means not that all the people who wrote it were rapists, but that they are a member of the group who do [rape] and who do for reasons that they share in common even with those who don't, namely masculinity and their identification with masculine norms and in particular being the people who initiate sex and being the people who socially experience themselves as being affirmed by aggressive initiation of sexual interaction." She takes a well-earned breath.

Why does MacKinnon matter? She is undeniably one of feminism's most significant figures, a ferociously tough-minded lawyer and academic who has sought to use the law to clamp down on sexual harassment and pornography. She's a bracing woman, who calls her philosophy "feminism unmodified" and thinks wimpish guff such as post-feminism does women no good at all. Many hate her for this. Camille Paglia, for instance, charges that MacKinnon and her late collaborator Andrea Dworkin are responsible for "totalitarian excesses" in sexual harassment regulations and that their "nightmarish sexual delusions" have invaded American workplaces and schools and warped their views on pornography. Naomi Wolf branded her a "victim feminist". "Victim feminism," claims Wolf, "urges women to identify with powerlessness, even at the expense of taking responsibility for the power they do possess." In The Morning After, Katie Roiphe wrote that MacKinnon had an "image of woman as child" and attacked her for allegedly portraying all women as potential victims and all men as potential predators. Others have called her a fascist proponent of sexual correctness. Some have put words in her mouth - notably the claim that she thinks all heterosexual intercourse is rape: she does not. Some think she is right and that until sex inequality is tackled legally as MacKinnon proposes, women will continue to be raped, murdered and served up as masturbation fantasies for men. I couldn't wait to meet her.

We are sitting in a 15th-floor hotel cafe overlooking London. I suffer from vertigo and so MacKinnon has kindly suggested that I sit facing her rather than the plummet to my death. But I still feel dizzy from confronting the chasm that she has opened up in the relations between men and women. If I have ever felt affirmed by aggressive initiation of sexual interaction (and I doubt this), I will not today. I'd prefer smelling salts. MacKinnon, by contrast, looks a little like Tippi Hedren and seems vexingly imperturbable and more sartorially put together in her green silk trousers and other designer duds than anyone who has just flown across the Atlantic to publicise a book has a right to be. Continue reading

Seattle
April 10, 2006

"You can vote this...up or down; quite frankly, it doesn't make any difference to me. I think you are acting as people of your class and tradition have always acted. And you know what? It won't matter, because we've survived much worse than this. Back when I was in school, we had a saying that if things didn't go the way you liked them in the classroom, we'd meet you outside at 3:15. And so, white males of the world, it is now 3:15. I represent the majority of people on this planet who are women, the majority of people on this planet who are of color, and you cannot have your sovereignty any longer. Why? Because I say so!"
--Monica Faith Stewart, black legislator from Chicago, in the Illinois legislative galleries immediately following the defeat of the ERA, June 22, 1982

When Feminist Leadership is Oxymoronic

by Aletha, The Freesoil Party
in Women's Space

Free Soil has a novel view of running for office. If a woman thinks she can make more sense than the President, she ought to have an opportunity to try to demonstrate that, at least in a legislature...It may be harder, require stronger nerve to run for office as a feminist revolutionary... The rules of this system are backward, crafted to favor the top of the food chain, compound imbalance. While typical politicians make noise about reform but lack the courage or will to challenge the system, women can run as representatives who will, a new breed of politicians who dare represent the interests of real people, not special interest campaign contributors currying favors.

Skeptical observers of the current political landscape may disdain all politicians as sold out shadows jockeying for popularity and pork barrel, or for the few a bit idealistic, a place at the table to bring up a protest once in awhile. Questioning established dogma behind political reality is not on the agenda of any party media gives credence, beyond possible spoiler role. That is left to independent thinkers. Being outside the mainstream is a sign of potential, but no guarantee, of being more representative of the best interests of the people, or true to stated intentions and principles.

There is a significant difference between trying to lead people and representing the best interests of the people. The Free Soil Party is modeled on representing women, not men leading women around by the hook of threatened reproductive choice while serving the agenda of promoting business as usual and going out of their way to sound tough on terrorism and crime. Women require no less than fair representation, not a new hero to the rescue from the latest band of obnoxious crooks running things. Hero worship is nothing new, or feminist.

Leadership can come in many forms, historically litered with maniacs, knaves, tyrants. Feminism is not about leaders and followers, rather women innovating ways of looking at reality. Women can forge any combination of radical versatile rebellious idealistic skeptical wild innovative thoughtful trailblazing deep empathetic intuitive sensible visionary passionate intrepid audacious dreamer practical compassionate ingenious and so on feminist revolutionary, all outside limits of conventional standards of leadership. This perspective means feminists are all in unique ways leaders outside the box imposed by convention, so feminist leader in the conventional sense is an oxymoron, a popular feminist chosen by mass media to target for attack, hoping to pigeonhole feminism into has been irrelevance. Leadership shows its ugly side when spin masters spin it into a campaign issue. What passes for leadership in this fog of propaganda is patriotic bluster, USA is number one belligerence. Substance and honesty are unrealistic to expect in this high stakes game of who can be made to appear best qualified to wage this undefinable unwinnable war.

There are significant distinctions between having principles and believing in dogma. Solid principles are more like sound ideas, in that where they apply they make sense, rationally and intuitively, while dogma must appeal to faith in ancient male wisdom claiming to know the way to interpret reality. Faith misplaced will lead one nowhere, but some seem content with that. Ignorant bliss may be silly, but is relatively harmless compared to ignorant strength, the support network of tyranny. It is always possible to educate, but until ignorant people choose to pull the wool off their eyes they will not realize they have been had. Politicians are for the most part political con artists, thriving on ignorant people believing what they hear from their favorite voices, while dismissing contrary ideas and information casually, as a matter of indifference or contempt, as mere prattling of irrelevant impractical dreamers. Continue reading

Chicago Women's Liberation
Union Poster, 1970-1983

Pro-Life Nation

by Jack Hitt, New York Times

In El Salvador, the law is clear: the woman is a felon and must be prosecuted...In the event that the woman's illegal abortion went badly and the doctors have to perform a hysterectomy, then the uterus is sent to the Forensic Institute, where the government's doctors analyze it and retain custody of her uterus as evidence against her.

"In El Salvador, the law is clear: the woman is a felon and must be prosecuted. ...(After) a report comes in from a doctor or a hospital that a woman has arrived who is suspected of having had an abortion, and after the police are dispatched, investigators start procuring evidence of the crime. In that first stage, Tópez has 72 hours to make the case to a justice of the peace that there should be a further investigation. If enough evidence is collected, she presents the case before a magistrate to get authorization for a full criminal trial before a judge.

...As they do in any investigation, the police collect evidence by interviewing everyone who knows the accused and by seizing her medical records. But they must also visit the scene of the crime, which, following the logic of the law, often means the woman's vagina.

"Yes, we sometimes call doctors from the Forensic Institute to do a pelvic exam," Tópez said, referring to the nation's main forensic lab, "and we ask them to document lacerations or any evidence such as cuts or a perforated uterus." In other words, if the suspicions of the patient's doctor are not conclusive enough, then in that initial 72-hour period, a forensic doctor can legally conduct a separate search of the crime scene...

In the event that the woman's illegal abortion went badly and the doctors have to perform a hysterectomy, then the uterus is sent to the Forensic Institute, where the government's doctors analyze it and retain custody of her uterus as evidence against her."
Read entire article here (free registration required)

Echidne Responds: "...All this smelled familiar to me, and I realized that this is what many books and interviews of the pre-abortion era described. A kind of numb, unquestioning powerlessness of women, where real power is replaced by either legal rules or private rituals, where power is invisible ...

The second thought was about how to define a person in this story and how to assign value. My feminist eyes immediately spotted that men had only a small role to play in the story, despite the fact that those who made these punitive laws are probably almost solely male, and despite the fact that the church which supports these laws is totally dominated by men.
Read Echidne's entire Fetal Rights post here


Tennessee Guerilla Women Respond: "Search warrants for vaginas, women chained to beds in intensive care units for the crime of abortion, laws that protect the fetus even when the life of the woman is at risk, women imprisoned for 30 to 50 years for the crime of abortion, the complete criminalization of abortion -- it sounds like the Handmaiden's Tale. But it's reality in El Salvador today, a utopian nation in the eyes of South Dakota lawmakers and rightwingers everywhere.
Read A Right-Wing Utopia: Pro-Life Nation

Chicago Women's Liberation
Union Poster, 1970-1983

South Africa's Anita Hill Moment:
Trial of Former Deputy President Jacob Zuma forces South Africa to Confront Rape

by Abraham McLaughlin, Christian Science Monitor

The country's former deputy president, Jacob Zuma, who aims to become president, is on trial for raping an HIV-positive family friend. And the case is playing out in the headlines before a polarized nation.

Back in 1991, Ms. Hill's allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas put sexual harassment in America's national spotlight. Likewise, the current case against Mr. Zuma is forcing South Africa to confront key elements of a culture of rape so pervasive that, on average, one woman is raped in this country every 26 seconds, according to People Opposing Women Abuse, a women's group here. It's one of the highest rape rates in the world.

With swirling issues of male power and women's rights, "the Jacob Zuma trial shows up all of our shortcomings in a very uncomfortable way," says Judith February of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. "It's a very uncomfortable moment for us." Yet the national discussion the case is sparking could be transformative. "The more people speak out" in support of rape-related justice, as some prominent figures have been doing, says Ms. February, "the more women will be encouraged" to begin to see rape as unacceptable.

Zuma's 31-year-old accuser says he attacked her last November while she slept in his guest room. Zuma's defense team highlights that this isn't the first time she has made rape charges. She says she's been raped at least three times before, the first as a 5-year-old while her parents were in exile during apartheid. In a later incident with a pastor, she apparently withdrew rape charges...

But there's a basic dynamic at work in this conservative, patriarchal society: "Men are in control," says February. Zuma, for instance, apparently approached the accuser's mother and offered to build a fence around her home as part of a deal to resolve the situation quietly. Such low-profile arrangements are common.

Furthermore, there's a tendency to downplay cases like this one, i