How did I not hear about this before?

Via Natalie Reed, I’m just now hearing about CeCe McDonald.

What.

The.

Fuck.

I’m trying to sign the petition, but change.org is having technical difficulties.

If you are not outraged on CeCe’s behalf, you are part of the problem.

American Nuns > Vatican

I think it’s time for a new schism.

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization which involves 80% of U.S. Catholic sisters, is having the hammer brought down on it by the Vatican for not being a pack of bigoted assholes. I wish that were an exaggeration:

The Vatican’s assessment, issued on Wednesday, said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

Yeah, I’ll bet they say things like, “A mother of four should not be left to die of pregnancy-related causes.”

The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care.

Yep. Women who support universal health care need to STFU, while old guys in fancy robes, who would rather let Americans die by the millions of preventable causes than tolerate birth control coverage, are the “authentic teachers of faith and morals.”

“I’m stunned,” said Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby founded by sisters. Her group was also cited in the Vatican document, along with the Leadership Conference, for focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping “silent” on abortion and same-sex marriage.

Oh, yes. Oh fucking yes. The nuns care too much about alleviating poverty, and not enough about demonizing gays or attacking women who think they get to control their reproduction.

Oddly enough, I don’t even recall Jesus saying anything about homosexuality or abortion. This is the guy who hung out with a bunch of single men and a woman of ill-repute. He did, however, have some strong opinions about how we treat the poor.

Sisters, you all are so much cooler than your church. Break away from those ridiculous bigots. Start your own religion: the Church of Actually Giving a Shit About Humanity. All the Catholics who are horrified at the Church for their homophobia, misogyny and support of child-raping priests but who keep making noises about “social justice” and “ritual” will have a better place to give their money and time. The ones who want their religion to be more focused on persecuting gays, letting pregnant women die, and preaching against using condoms to prevent the spread of HIV, can fend for themselves.

You’re better than they are, and they’re not even trying to hide how threatened they are by that. Let those assholes rot.

Wisconsin state Rep. Don Pridemore hates women. Hates ‘em.

The background is that a couple of state legislators in Wisconsin are sponsoring a bill that would focus on single parents in educational campaigns about child abuse. It does not, as the headline says, “label single parenthood as child abuse,” but it does take a good idea (public awareness of child abuse) and turn it into an offensive waste of public funds by dragging the communication in a direction that will do nothing to decrease child abuse but quite a lot to increase demonization of single parents.

This is what we’re dealing with:

Section 1. 48.982 (2) (g) 2. of the statutes is amended to read:
48.982 (2) (g) 2. Promote statewide educational and public awareness campaigns and materials for the purpose of developing public awareness of the problems of child abuse and neglect. In promoting those campaigns and materials, the board shall emphasize nonmarital parenthood as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.

 

WTF, Retreat at Twin Lakes?

The “suspicious” person who was shot and killed by the neighborhood watch captain was a 17-year-old boy who had just bought some candy for his younger brother.

Chief Bill Lee of the Sanford Police Department on Thursday evening said the account given by Martin’s family and attorney is correct, that Zimmerman saw the young man walking home from the store. He said that Zimmerman did indeed call 911 and report a suspicious person, and that he was told not to follow him.

“For some reason he felt that Trayvon, the way that he was walking or appeared seemed suspicious to him,” Lee said. “He called this in and at one part of this initial call [the dispatcher] recommends him not to follow Trayvon. A police officer is on the way at that point.”

Lee said that Zimmerman instead followed Martin.

“I believe that Mr. Zimmerman was trying to, by his account, find an address to give the officers and also trying to keep Trayvon in eyesight.”

Zimmerman told the police that Martin noticed that he was being followed and asked, “what’s your problem?”

That’s when a physical confrontation ensued, Lee said. And moments later, Martin was shot.

Lee said that Zimmerman has a legal permit to carry the weapon used in the shooting, and that he told police that he shot Martin in self-defense.

I guess the lesson here is that if you’re an African-American teenager whose father lives in a gated community, do not go to visit your father at his home. If you must visit your father, do not think about leaving the house after dark. You will be considered “suspicious,” you may be followed, and if you argue about being put under this scrutiny, you may be shot. The shooter will continue to be in charge of the neighborhood watch, and he will be allowed to continue carrying a loaded gun. Your presence in the neighborhood will be considered “out of place” and will accordingly be reported.

 

The bruised and battered elephant in the emergency room.

There is a new study in Pediatrics by Dr. John Leventhal of Yale University on child abuse in the U.S.; it’s not a comprehensive study of all abused children, only the cases that end up requiring hospitalization due to severity of injuries. Cassie Murdoch at Jezebel rounds up coverage of the study, and shares with us that such injuries include, but are not limited to:

For the most part, children arrived with abusive head trauma, fractures, burns, abdominal injuries and bruises. Their hospitalizations cost the U.S. about $73.8 million and lasted almost twice as long compared to children who were hospitalized with other kinds of injuries.

Dr. Leventhal offers us further insight into the context of abuse:

Based on data from the 2006 Kids’ Inpatient Database, the last such numbers available, Leventhal’s team found that six out of every 100,000 children under 18 were hospitalized with injuries ranging from burns to wounds to brain injuries and bone fractures.

The children spent an average of one week in the hospital; 300 of them died.

The rate of abuse was highest among children under one, particularly if they were covered by Medicaid, the government’s health insurance for the poor. One out of every 752 of those infants landed in the hospital due to maltreatment.

“Medicaid is just a marker of poverty, and poverty leads to stress,” said Leventhal, who is the medical director of the Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital Child Abuse Program.

Last year, a study from four U.S. states showed a clear spike in abusive brain injuries following the financial crash in late 2007, a finding researchers chalked up to the added pressure on parents.

In that study, too, toddlers appeared to be at higher risk. That led researchers to suggest the maltreatment might have been triggered by crying.

Brain injuries in children do not spike following a financial crash for no reason. One may conclude from Dr. Leventhal’s data that child abuse is for the most part not a matter of parents being horrible inhuman monsters, but of parents being overwhelmed. What might be done about this?

So Dr. Leventhal proposes we act to stop abuse in the same way we’ve worked to stop SIDS: “We need a national campaign related to child abuse where every parent is reminded that kids can get injured.” Another probably even more effective option would be to send public health workers to do home visits with new parents to offer support and advice, a practice that is already common in a lot of European countries.

 
I don’t disagree with either of those ideas, but I have something else to suggest.

It makes me really angry to know that there are so many parents who are so unprepared and stressed out that they can’t deal with a crying infant without pummeling the poor baby, and yet we still have to fight so hard for our right to control our fertility. There is something seriously fucked up about a widespread cultural movement that says our nation really needs more babies born to people who aren’t ready for babies but has nothing to offer in how to take better care of the kids we have.

Want to prevent child abuse? There’s no substitute for family planning.

Mr. Stewart, you are under arrest for letting your friend be a stalker, a junkie and an idiot.

Sarah McKinley is all over the news for asking a 911 dispatcher’s permission to shoot the bastard who was breaking into her home. CBS has the details on the crime itself. News OK has more info on her life. All the news sources are going with the story that the perps were targeting McKinley’s home with the goal of stealing her very recently-deceased husband’s painkillers, but to be honest, I think they were after more than just the drugs. They may have been looking for drugs, and reasonably assumed that since Kenneth McKinley had just died of lung cancer, there probably would be some prescription painkillers in the house, but I think it wasn’t just the drugs:

Though McKinley didn’t piece things together until after the shooting, she’d had several strange run-ins with 24-year-old Justin Shane Martin. According to CBS News, her mother says that about two years ago, she noticed Martin following McKinley around at a rodeo. Recently the two bumped into each other at a convenience store, and on the night of her husband’s funeral he showed up to her door and introduced himself as a neighbor, but McKinley didn’t let him in. In the past month McKinley had started locking her doors because she thought someone had moved things around in her home, but her mother thought she was imagining things due to the stress of her husband’s illness.

Also? Four of her dogs turned up dead within the last month. I think we can take her word for it that they didn’t just die in the cold.

Martin and Stewart may very well have been a couple of junkies looking for a fix, but it also sounds like Martin was stalking Sarah McKinley for quite some time before he and Stewart showed up at her mobile home with knives. If she hadn’t shot him, I suspect Justin Shane Martin would have done considerably worse to Sarah than just steal her late husband’s pain meds.

The practical upshot is that since they did not wait for her to take the baby and visit her mother before they paid her a visit, Justin Shane Martin is dead by her shotgun, Sarah McKinley is recognized as having acted in fully lawful self-defense, and Dustin Louis Stewart is being tried for his accomplice’s murder. The logic of the charges is basically that it’s not Sarah McKinley’s fault that she shot Martin when he busted through her door with a hunting knife in hand, it’s Martin’s and Stewart’s fault for fucking with the wrong 18-year-old widowed mother. Since Martin is dead, they can’t very well charge him with anything, so they’re charging Stewart for having participated in a crime that he should have known could have gotten someone killed.

Now, Universe? Can you please stop throwing shit at Sarah McKinley? Can you let her and the baby just have a year in which no door has to be barricaded with a couch? I think she’s had enough for at least a few decades.

He ran into my knife ten times!

Anna North at Jezebel shares the details of Candice Smith’s frankly fascinating account of the events that led up to her being fired for committing statutory rape on a 14-year-old boy at the group home where she worked.

In Ms. Smith’s own words:

I treated these kids like my own children. Then one of them forced himself on me.

I was thunderstruck at the time. Horrified. How could this broken, hurt child have betrayed all the trust and love I’d given to him? How would I ever be able to tell anyone? Shocked and terrified of losing my job and freedom, I told no one. [...] I should have, because it happened again. And again. And again. And again. For three months this child forced himself on me, demanded I bring him cigarettes and alcohol, that I hand over my credit cards (I managed to get him to take money instead). He threatened me constantly, said he would “make me sorry,” “make all my money disappear.” He told me he’d steal my car, told me he thought about how much he wanted to kill me… and I just disappeared.

North continues:

Then, she says, “the kid soured on me — I wouldn’t give a report that another kid had “tried to kill him” because that wasn’t the case — and because I didn’t give this kid his way, he said we’d been having ‘consensual sex.’”

If you just read that and are now thinking her story doesn’t pass the smell test, you’re not alone. You’re in very numerous company.

Guilty of having a working uterus

The Guardian outlines some of the ways a woman in various parts of America can be charged with murder:

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby’s death – they charged her with the “depraved-heart murder” of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.

She failed to prevent pregnancy while addicted to cocaine and then she failed to quit cocaine while pregnant. Ergo, the stillbirth of her child must be seen not as a tragic, spontaneous physiological event, but as a crime that earns her a life sentence.

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.

Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

If you’re pregnant in Indiana, you’d better not have any mental health problems. This is also the state which is now trying its darnedest to defund Planned Parenthood, so really, just try not to have a working uterus in Indiana unless your life is totally stable and baby-ready.

Racism * (male insecurity + womb control) = Dennis Prager

There is just so, incredibly much stupid here that I can’t even hope to take it all on at once. Truthticker listened to Dennis Prager say this so that we don’t have to:

The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many democrats have acknowledged the horrific consequences of the welfare state on the black community. It has rendered vast numbers of black males unnecessary to black females who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to their husbands. In effect, these women took the state as their husband. Whereas in the past, women sought out men for financial support, the welfare state enables women to stay single and get support from the government.

It’s like a whole pack of little Stupid goblins are all trying to jump into my brain at once, but they don’t all fit through the door so they’re stuck and I don’t know which one to let in first.

Jesse Taylor at Pandagon has already dealt with at least a couple of the little beasties:

It’s a painful phenomenon, this glut of well-employed men yearning to take care of their children but barred by the overwhelming appeal of several hundred dollars a month in temporary benefits.

So, there’s that. There’s also the little goblin of Welfare Dependency Doesn’t Happen to White Folks (its alter ego is But It’s Different When Black Folks Do It), its snot-nosed little brother They’re Having More Kids to Get More Welfare, their cousin It’s Black Women’s Fault When Black Men Don’t Stick Around, and their Pied Piper of Stupid figure, Everything Would Be Fine If Men Controlled the Family.

While all those little demons fight to be the first one though the door, I’m going to focus on this yearning for the good old days when women sought out men for financial support. Prager seems awfully invested in the idea that women should be financially dependent on men, first and foremost. The idea that maybe some women would like to be able to provide for themselves and their kids on their own power, or that they might like to pursue and develop relationships with men because they love the men as individuals, just doesn’t come into the picture. Either women need men to pay the bills, or we just shun them altogether. Running through all this yearning for the good old days when single mothers and their kids were left to starve, of course, is the assumption that it’s not a valid family unless there’s a man in charge. It all adds up to this idea that “the black community” (because they all march in perfect lockstep) would be so much better off if the government would just let those uppity bitches and their bastard spawn starve.

They’ll pass the “Third World America” bill any day now.

Yeah, yeah, we get it, assholes, you hate women:

In a 251 to 175 vote this evening, 16 anti-choice Democrats joined every House Republican present in passing H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act.

And by “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion,” they mean things like, D.C. cannot use its own Medicaid funds to pay for abortion procedures, and that women cannot use their HSAs, itemized deductions, or tax credits to pay for abortions, and that any woman who presumes to use her pre-tax income to pay for an abortion needs to explain herself to the IRS.

The bill is not likely to make it through the Senate, and even in that unlikely event it still won’t make it past Pres. Obama’s veto pen, but in a way, it has still made its point. The House GOP would rather put its energy into drafting and voting on a bill that shows how much contempt they have for women who don’t want to live and die at the mercy of sperm and egg, than address the issues of, say, the economy, the environment, the educational system, the wars we’re fighting, etc.

However, since their response to the environment is “Drill, baby, drill!”, to the wars is to keep occupying Iraq until the second coming of Christ (I’m not even exaggerating here, truth to tell), to the economy is to keep cutting taxes on the people who can most afford to pay taxes, and then they want to balance the budget by gutting education and slashing aid programs that benefit the needy children they so strenuously demand that women produce, you know, perhaps they’re so gung-ho to make women’s lives between menarche and menopause as difficult as possible because they really have nothing else to say. They can’t give us better jobs, better healthcare, better schools, safer streets, better access to nutritious food, cleaner air, or bring the troops home, but they can demand more babies. They can demand that we create more vulnerable human beings to compete for jobs and take the pressure off corporations to pay their employees a living wage. They need those babies to grow up to become cannon fodder because we’re not getting out of Iraq or Afghanistan. Education is a privilege reserved for kids born to families that can pay for schooling. As for those youngsters who can’t find jobs and can’t make it into the military; well, we have prisons for that. Keeping more prisoners means we need more guards, and that means more jobs, so win-win!