Mexico City just became the first in Latin America to approve same-sex marriage.
More responses to the abortion compromise in the Senate bill, from RH Reality Check and Cynthia Nixon.
Jill from Feministe gives her thoughts on the health care reform bill--and argues we can't afford to kill it.
In the spending bill that Obama signed into law last week was also a provision "prohibiting defense contractors from restricting their employees' abilities to take workplace discrimination, battery, and sexual assault cases to court. The measure was inspired by Jamie Leigh Jones, who was gang-raped by her co-workers while working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad." Via Think Progress
A new order from the head general in Iraq makes getting pregnant or impregnating a soldier while on duty an offense punishable by court martial. He says those pregnant via sexual assault will not be punished but questions remain about the ethics of such a policy.
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some good news:
http://www.arabianbusiness.com/576174-83-of-young-saudi-men-want-women-to-be-able-to-work
We talk on here all the time about how reluctant people are to embrace the label of "Feminist". In many parts of this country, people are reluctant to embrace the label of "Liberal" for the same reason.
And until both of those stigmas are thrown aside, we'll have Stupak/Nelson and we'll have a deeply flawed health care reform measure.
I'd like to see a longer post on that last item about military policy in Iraq, maybe from Courtney, wasn't she following military issues?
Isn't it an interesting conundrum? (Let's take sexual assault out of the picture, because that's a whole different can of worms. Let's just talk both accidental and intentional pregnancy following consenting sexual activity.) Of course, the military shouldn't be allowed to punish women for making reproductive choices.
But alternately, I know that pregnancy is a problem for the military. Basically, people don't want to get deployed, they want to be at home. Some women, ethical or not, have been responding to this by getting pregnant to both avoid deployment or to get sent home while on deployment. Being deployed surely sucks, for a lot of people. But if you join the military, you sign up for that. That's the way the military works - based on discipline and order. And women have fought hard to be treated equally in that environment. So what's the solution for the military to enforce the discipline they need to ensure the standing army that they deploy stays deployed?
I guess part of the question to me is how big is the problem? Is it just a handful of deployed women that don't want to be there coming back due to intentional pregnancies? Or is it actually affecting our force readiness over there? Remember for every woman returned to the US, the military has to re-deploy another soldier to take her place. Is it right to cause this? And how to you prove that a woman became intentionally pregnant in order to end their deployment versus accidentally pregnant due to either an assault or failure in birth control?
Obviously the extreme would require mandatory birth control for all those deployed. But is that right? I would say no. But the military does require mandatory vaccines and other health care prior to deployment. Is birth control really any different?
I don't know what the answer is.. besides to encourage female soldiers to be more responsible about preventing pregnancy while deployed, but not punish them if they don't. Or maybe the threat to punish is enough to discourage intentional pregnancies among the deployed.
The military is an interesting culture. But this decision is clearly a PR nightmare.
Once again, I have to wonder how the "victim of sexual assault" provision would work in real-world practice. As the Jamie Leigh Jones story shows, the justice system isn't exactly nimble and quick-moving when it comes to rape and sexual assault.
But the rape rate in the US Army is high, reporting is low and so is punishment for rapists. They have a bad record of treating rape seriously and even treats victims like the criminals, how can they be trusted with making exceptions for rape victims when they get pregnant?
Also, abortion is banned from overseas military hospitals, so this will only put the pressure on for women to seek risky home abortions.
Well, Mexico has finally
made same sex marriage legal.
Something tells me that
still won't change any
attitudes though
Yay for Mexico City!
In regards to the policy about pregnancies in Iraq, I don't see the problem. Its not about taking into consideration whether someone got pregnant because they wanted to go home or not get deployed, or whether their birth control failed, because they are there on a mission. They knew when signing up what that entailed and many people deployed signed up after 9/11 when this whole craziness already started. When you're deployed, it is explicitly clear that now is not the time for sex; many of my male friends simply say you just have to turn yourself off for 7-whatever months. I'm not too clear on Army since I don't know many in that branch, but I'm just saying, being deployed is pretty much you acknowledging that now is not the time for sex or romantic endeavors because you have something important to do. How ridiculous would it be to be pregnant and deployed? You can't have a kid in a war zone, and the war zone there is everywhere.
Yes, it sucks that women's reproductive choices and I see that, but as the article says, military has always been held to stricter standards than general population.
No one claiming we should kill the healthcare bill is ever allowed to smugly denounce someone else's privilege again.
http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/12/deans_blind_spot.php
I'm happy for the Mexico City decision, but still bummed at what happened in Buenos Aires. (And as a New Yorker, I'm still mighty pissed in general.) Sigh...
-L