Grow Up! "Vagina" is not a "bad" word!

Unbelievable.  Michigan House Republicans  "prohibited state Rep. Lisa Brown from speaking on the floor Thursday after she ended a speech Wednesday against a bill restricting abortions by referencing her female anatomy." She used the word vagina.

What? Is the Michigan House full of middle-schoolers who snicker at words that refer to female anatomy?

See the story here: "Lawmaker Barred from Speaking Over 'Vagina' Comment," Detroit News, 14 June 2012, reported by Chad Livengood.

And you can listen to her words here: "Rep. Lisa Brown speaks out against House attack on women's health."

More here:  from the Detroit Free Press

I'm getting really tired of these Neanderthal attitudes towards women's bodies.

Afghani Heroine

After 9/11, the Bush administration went after the Taliban in Afghanistan who had sheltered Osama bin Laden and had provided support for Al-Qaeda. But then the administration took its eye off the ball and aggressively pushed for war in Iraq. When we first realized that the Bush administration was leading the U.S. into war with Iraq, my husband and I were aghast. I remember Tom jumping up and yelling at the television: "We're abandoning Afghanistan! We haven't finished the job!" Indeed. Now, after millions of Iraqis have fled their country, and Shiites have cleared out Sunni neighborhoods, and Iraq is still in shambles (despite the "surge"--which even General Petreaus warns not to call "victory"), our leaders are pushing for new forces in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has returned with a vengeance.

While our gaze was shifted elsewhere, the Afghani people worked hard to put their country back together. Professional women who had been subjugated under Taliban rule, unable to practice their professions as teachers, doctors, shop keepers, police officers, resurrected their old roles even as they continued to face great obstacles. Malalai Kakar was one of those women.

Malalai Kakar was a mother of six and in her late 40s when she was murdered this week by Taliban forces. She had joined the Kandahar police force in 1982, where her father and brother were also police officers. However, Kakar had been forced to give up her job when the Taliban took over the country. When the Taliban regime was defeated, she was given her original job as an investigator for the Kandahar Police Department, focusing on crimes against women and children. Nonetheless, she often received death threats; she had to choose her route to work carefully. Now she is dead, and her fifteen-year-old son, the driver of the car on which the Taliban opened fire, is critically injured.

Women such as Malalai Kakar remind us that the fight for women's rights is far from over around the world. These women face danger every day doing the work they feel called to do, following their dreams, insisting on being treated with dignity and respect. We must honor these women who courageously face such horrifying obstacles every day. We cannot forget them. We cannot abandon their cause--and ours.

Ten-Year-Old "Consents" to Rape?!

I haven't posted lately because I've been busy with projects and because I've been rather dispirited over the news. Nothing seems to change. The Democrats are in the majority in the House and Senate, yet they seem to be only weakly challenging the administration. There are a few lone voices--voices we've heard all along--but the Democratic leadership capitulates too easily to the fear of being negatively branded by Republican propagandists sometime in the future: fear of being called unpatriotic or weak on terror or [fill in the blank]. . . .

But more on that in the future.

Having earlier posted on the horror of Saudi Arabian attitudes toward women who are raped, I would be remiss if I didn't bring to your attention two recent news items that I found through Broadsheet, stories that remind me all too vividly that sexual oppression and hateful, violent attitudes toward women are not limited to one culture. I hate to sound like a throw-back to the 70s, but, by god, are we progressing at all in our attitudes toward women? The first article is about a rape case in Australia: a ten-year-old girl was gang-raped, and the judge in the case did not send the perpetrators to jail because the girl "probably consented" to the rape. What ten-year-old consents to rape?

The second story is of a young woman from Houston, Texas, who was gang-raped by her colleagues in Baghdad, all of whom worked for Halliburton/KBR. After complaining about the rapes, she was kept under guard in a shipping container. After a sympathetic guard loaned her a cell phone, the woman called her father, who contacted the State Department. People were then sent to release her from the shipping container. Since then Halliburton/KBR and the State Department have worked to cover up the case, evidently. According to what the young woman told ABC News, Army doctors examined her and found evidence of rape--anally and vaginally--but--surprise!--the rape kit disappeared after being turned over to KBR security.

Ah, the vanishing rape kit act! In the 1980s, one of my aunts was raped in Dayton, Texas, and Liberty County officials lost her rape kit, too--very conveniently as they were accusing her of making up her story of her attack. When her experience became locally public, several women called her to describe similar experiences they had had with Dayton and Liberty County police.

Just as I was counting my blessings as a woman that I didn't live in an oppressive culture that holds women guilty for being raped, I am reminded that not too far beneath the surface, similar attitudes lurk in my own culture. When are we going to win this war?

No Rights for Women

These are our "friends" in the Middle East: A nineteen-year-old Saudi woman who was gang raped has been penalized with 200 lashes and 6 months in prison after she appealed her case. Her lawyer had his license revoked and was suspended from the case. The rapists received jail sentences, but their victim was also punished, for being in a car with a male who was not a relative! What a justice system! Here is another article on the story.

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