miss_chance, posts by tag: politics - LiveJournal

Dear Senator,

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, S. 2043, is a blatant attack on health care. I urge you to staunchly oppose this bill. I understand that birth control is a complicated issue for you both personally and professionally. I understand that you must weigh both the views of your constituents, and your own, personal spiritual beliefs.

I cannot speak for the latter, but as a constituent let me be perfectly clear about this:

The US government does not have any place protecting the views of any one religion over the individual freedoms of all women. You may debate whether you believe the government can or should mandate health care at all, but within the context and framework that we in Massachusetts especially, and we in the US in general have established, the government has a vested interest and obligation to protect employees and ensure they have proper renumeration and support in access to basic health care. Debate the question of health-care access as a whole separately. As long as we do have government regulations regarding health-care access, however, those regulations must not favor one religion or spiritual belief system over another.

You may or may not, personally, believe that a woman should have access to birth control or abortion services. Will all due respect, Senator, this is not your place. You do not have a uterus. There are no bills being debated that discuss my personal and spiritual views toward your prostates. If reproductive health services are outside of a person's religious believes than that individual will make appropriate choices regarding such care.

In as long as the government has ANY legislation regarding access to health care, it is absolutely inappropriate for the religious views of persons other than the receiver of that care to be considered. Employers do not get to decide if their taxes should support foreign wars. They do not get to decide if their health care provides services to which they are personally opposed.

This is not an appropriate place for your own, or for an employer's own feelings or convictions. It would only ever become an issue is an employer held one set of religious beliefs and the employee held an alternate one. In that case it is not up to the employer or Congress to over-step their bounds into the actions of the individuals.


I strongly urge you to reject the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, S. 2043.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Groupon has four television commercial out right now that are the focus of a lot of discussion and controversy. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can watch them on Groupon's site, but before you do it's worth noting that these commercials aired *without* the key piece of information you get when you watch them there. Notably, while each commercial makes gross mocking light of a serious social issue, glibly cutting off a presentation of that issue to point to an only tangentially related Groupon deal, what visitors to Groupon's website learn is that in fact the company is offering matching donations up to $100,000 to each of the four organizations mocked.

Here are the ads, presented with their "donate now" buttons on Groupon's website.

http://savethemoney.groupon.com/

Personally I was shocked and horrified by the one we watched as a household last night while discussing the ads (and before we knew about the charitable side of the campaign). Reading a little deeper I learned the back story.

So my question is, does knowing that Groupon is also raising money for the issues being mocked make the ads more okay? Do they still cross the line in a way that's unacceptable (if they did initially for you?) Are they cleverly, slyly mocking our own tendencies toward shallow consumption to shock us into action, as has been suggested by supporters? Are they making intelligent commentary on how we spend our energy and money, and saying that, yes, even I who purport to support all of these causes, do, in fact, get psyched by a good deal at a local restaurant... and that that's actually fine as long as I'm *also* helping to support those causes? Or are they just too cynical, too glib, too mean? Do they miss the mark entirely? And, again, does their matching funds campaigns mitigate or alter your feelings about this? Does the apparent strategy of "shocking the blogosphere into discovering for them/our selves the charitable drive" read as a brilliant move to focus more on the charity? or as a "too clever by half" maneuver that deflects too much of the the attention from the causes to the company?

Did you know about these ads before now? Did you also know about the matching funds campaign? How likely are you to contribute to these causes through Groupon's "deals" (thus compelling Groupon to contribute more in matching funds)?

Yay Warshak v US!
[copied from inkedandkinked to spread the good news]

In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.


Given the fundamental similarities between email and traditional forms of communication [like postal mail and telephone calls], it would defy common sense to afford emails lesser Fourth Amendment protection.... It follows that email requires strong protection under the Fourth Amendment; otherwise the Fourth Amendment would prove an ineffective guardian of private communication, an essential purpose it has long been recognized to serve.... [T]he police may not storm the post office and intercept a letter, and they are likewise forbidden from using the phone system to make a clandestine recording of a telephone call--unless they get a warrant, that is. It only stands to reason that, if government agents compel an ISP to surrender the contents of a subscriber's emails, those agents have thereby conducted a Fourth Amendment search, which necessitates compliance with the warrant requirement....





See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010…

I'm delighted to read all the commentary on my previous post regarding the "Shop Local" proclamations that are being made this holiday season. The many voices are teasing out some of the complicated issues that have been swirling around in my head, and in many cases voicing them better than I've been able to, or such that I can think about them in a new light. Thank you. If you are interested in the questions and issues raised, that post is the place to comment.

This post is more tongue-in-cheek, and mostly just for fun, though you have the potential the win the Whole Wide Internet if you succeed:

OK! New Challenge: Summarize a sophisticated approach for nuanced and sensitive navigation of the local and global economies. Your sound-bite should educate and elucidate as well as provide a clear mandate.

It should also fit on a bumper sticker using 40 characters or fewer. Ready... set... Speak!

Shop Local? It sounds good to me, but, wait?

I live in a community where there is nearly universal access to health care, schools, clean water (though many of my neighbors choose to spurn it for bottled water anyway), and numerous public assistance programs. Though clearly there are still those in dire need in my community, I still find myself wondering: if I focus my dollars primarily on my local economy, am I turning my back on the global community? Am I playing in to nationalistic, provincial biases of caring for "us" and ignoring "them," when "they," the workers in developing nations, rely on exports to wealthier countries for their very survival? Do I perpetuate a system of global economic injustice by ignoring those whom we exploit for our raw materials for our "local" economy? Is my local community any more deserving than the global community? Are we the ones in most need?

I'm feeling a little queasy about the current fervor for plaid-washing that keeps my first-world prosperity close at hand, keeps me focused on the difficulties of my local economic conditions and hides from me the bigger picture. What about supporting and developing the markets and distribution conduits for independent artists and craftspeople from Haiti, Guatemala, Zimbabwe and around the world whom I can't see?

Discuss?

(Contradictory opinions and ideas welcome! Just keep it civil, please; trolls and flames deleted and banned)

A friend of mine recently pointed me toward Rebecca Puhl, and recommended I google her; so I did.

I found "Stigma and Discrimination in Weight Management and Obesity," Brownell, Pohl, 2003 to be particularly interesting reading, and thought some of you might share my interest. I believe I read a NYT article about their work not long after it initially came out, but had never gone back and found the source.

We have been studying bias and discrimination in obesity for four years and have found striking results. Clear discrimination against overweight people has been documented in three areas: education, health care, and employment. The reason for this appears to be very strong anti-fat attitudes. For example, 28% of teachers in one study1 said that becoming obese is the worst thing that can happen to a person; 24% of nurses said they are 'repulsed' by obese persons; and, controlling for income and grades, parents provide less college support for their overweight children than for their thin children. [emphasis mine]

...
It is important to note that the stigma of obesity is somewhat unique from that of other marginalized groups, in that obese people internalize societal anti-fat and pro-thin biases. Obese people agree with society's assessment that an imperfect body represents an imperfect person.

dpolicar posted a thought so beautiful on his LJ that I've decided to repost it here in its entirety to share:

They've already lost

So, for a good chunk of the last day or so, I've been pretty damn livid about the Constance McMillen case.

For those of you who haven't been following it, the short form: she is an Itawamba Agricultural High School student in Itawamba, Mississippi; IAHS refused to let her attend the senior prom with her date; a judge ruled that this violated her civil rights; the school board reversed itself and held an official prom to which Constance was invited; the parents held a simultaneous private party which all but a half-dozen or so students (including Constance and two learning-disabled classmates, who weren't invited to the private party) attended instead.

And yeah, yeah, I know, the parents have every right to throw a private party, and to invite/exclude whoever they want to, and the students have every right to choose where to go. Absolutely. They are entirely within their rights, and I support them having those rights.

They are also mean and petty and infuriate me.

So I'm trying to remind myself that when you get right down to it, what is actually remarkable about this case isn't that these students were ostracized by their community... that happens all the time. What's remarkable about this case is that a judge ruled that this violated her civil rights, and that she ended up getting support from all over the country.

The news here is not that there are bigots in Itawamba, Mississippi.
There have always been bigots, there and elsewhere.
The news here is that the bigots in this particular town are noteworthy for being bigots.

I keep reminding myself that they've already lost... we're just living through the transition.

Which of course doesn't make the sense of despair, or of fury, any less powerful.
But I find that it helps me avoid succumbing to it.

Thank you, Dave, for that insight. It does, in fact, make my dismay less powerful and my hope and optimism stronger.

Well, that was easy. I joined the "Mass Equality" group on Facebook, and was sent a reminder today to send a letter to my reps to urge them to put the 1913 law to vote in the House before the legistative break. What I *love* about tEh Int0rwebs, is how activism can be made easy for me. Click through a link, add my name, and send the pre-fab letter. Cool... but because it's so easy to do each prefab letter is discounted in how seriously it's taken by the rep. in question. It's better to personalize the letter, even if just a little.

Here's the letter as I sent it, with the personalized bits in plain text:

I am writing to urge you to support repealing the so-called "1913 law" that prohibits same-sex couples from outside Massachusetts from coming to the Commonwealth to get married before the Legislative session ends on July 31.

I feel quite strongly that my heterosexual marriage is made far more meaningful when the right to join in matrimony is extended equally to *all* citizens. Playing political power games with such a basic human relationship is cruel, heartless, and just plain mean.

With California now joining Massachusetts as the second state to legalize same-sex marriage, and with other states like Rhode Island and, now, New York, recognizing the marriages of same-sex couples from outside their borders, now is the time for Massachusetts to finish the job we started and give full recognition to all same-sex couples who wish to get married here in the Commonwealth.

In addition, in order for Massachusetts to reap some of economic benefits of couples from all over the country traveling here to marry, the legislature should repeal the so-called "1913 law" and attach an emergency preamble so that the repeal takes effect immediately.

It's so rare and beautiful when two people find each other... why be petty about their sex?

Remember that sage and timeless advice:
"Don't be cruel, to a heart that's true."

-Sincerely $REALNAME