Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors in the USA who performed late abortions, was shot and killed while attending church this morning.
"The chilling fact of Dr. Tiller's death comes after years of being terrorized: he'd been shot before (in both arms); had his clinic bombed, flooded and vandalized; received decades of death threats; wild lawsuits; and was the unfortunate target of conservative media that hounded him. He'd also been stabbed--and went back to work the next day." -Anna Clark for RH Reality Check
Personally, I just want to say condolences to Mrs. Tiller, Dr. Tiller's family and friends with hope and love for the people affected by and organizing for reproductive justice and abortion rights.
We may be entering scary times. Much love to all you out there.
30.5.09
29.4.09
Deadly Intersections- by pattrice jones
From the blog, superweed.
The Huffington Post reports that Glen Beck and other conservative media personalities are blaming undocumented immigrants from Mexico for the spread of swine flu into the United States. Given that the true vector — tourists returning from Mexican vacations — has been widely publicized, there’s no way to read this other than as racism and jingoism.
It’s easy to laugh off Glen Beck tearfully portraying flu-weakened residents of Mexico City rushing to cross a border hundreds of miles away, but the potential repercussions are not so funny. What if people in the U.S. do start dying of swine flu and Glen Beck fans swarm out to beat up Mexicans in retaliation?
Here’s another problem: As long as people are fired up about allegedly infectious “illegal immigrants,” they’re not looking at the true source of the problem: factory farming.
This is an example of what feminist scholars call the “intersection of oppressions.” When different kinds of oppression intersect, they tend to compound and fortify each other, sometimes leading to hybrid forms of oppression, just as different strains of flu virus can comingle and mutate to create a more virulent and intractable disease.
In this case, racism and national chauvinism are shields for speciesism and environmental despoliation. Even if this particular pandemic panic fizzles out, the problem of virus mutation on factory farms will remain. Many virologists and public health experts believe it’s a matter of “not if but when” an influenza pandemic will strike. By not looking at factory farms, we not only leave literally billions of animals in anguish but also neglect a public health crisis that, when it hits, will fall most heavily on people living in poverty. Which, because people of color represent a disproportionate share of people living in poverty, brings us back to racism.
See how it works?
We’ve seen this before with disease, most notably with HIV/AIDS. First, prejudice against low-income injection drug users kept public health officials from investigating the epidemic of “junkie pneumonia” in the 1970s. As I wrote back in 1992:
Here’s how I imagine things would have been different if such an investigation had occurred back in the 1970s: (1) researchers would have discovered the HIV virus and its routes of transmission many years before they did, and (2) this earlier discovery would have saved many lives now lost; (3) no one would have wasted energy on inane and homophobic concepts such as GRID (Gay-Related Immuno-Deficiency - the first name given to the syndrome now called AIDS); (4) otherwise rational researchers would not have investigated “the gay lifestyle” as a potential causal factor; (5) the media would not have been able to label AIDS as “the gay disease;” and (6) increased anti-gay violence would not have resulted.
And, of course, besides inhibiting scientific research and sparking gay-bashing, the homophobic designation of AIDS as a “gay disease” made straight people, including the sexual partners of injection drug users, initially resistant to AIDS-prevention education. While HIV transmission rates declined among gay men, they shot up among people living in poverty and especially among heterosexual women of color.
See how it works? Gay men of all races were hurt by the racism that led doctors to ignore junkie pneumonia. Then straight women of color were hurt by the homophobia that branded AIDS as a “gay disease.”
It gets deeper. We now know that HIV (human immodeficiency virus) evolved from SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus) in much the same way that the flu virus now sickening people evolved from swine and bird viruses, initially making the jump to people in Africa. But, given the same kind of invective we’re seeing now about swine flu, anti-racist activists were understandably skeptical of and justifiably worried about the repercussions of an African origin of AIDS. Thus racism made the quest to understand the evolution of a virus a political powder keg.
It gets deeper. Stereotyped associations of Africans and monkeys combined with the taint of sexual perversity attached to AIDS by virtue of its imagined association with homosexuality, leading to truly sick racist depictions of AIDS originating in bestiality. This made many of us even more unwilling to even consider the possibility that HIV evolved from SIV in Africa. I’ll admit that, at the time, I was one of the ones arguing that we ought to just quit trying to figure out where HIV came from and concentrate on arresting its spread.
Let’s break it down. In fact, what happened was that SIV got into human bloodstreams easily and regularly because people who hunt and butcher primates for what’s known as “bush meat” get scratched and cut in the process. The blood of the butchered animal gets into the cuts and scratches, setting the stage for the comingling of viruses. This is just one more instance of animal diseases making the jump to people because of our penchant for killing and eating members of other species. But we couldn’t see that because of the psychedelic kaleidescope of racist-speciesist and homophobic imagery swirling around HIV/AIDS.
Sweep that away, and we could look, perhaps productively, at how the exploitation of animals always turns back to bite us. We could look not only at zoonoses (animal-based diseases) but also at how the construction of the category “animal” as an inferior creature without rights creates the circumstances that allow us to “dehumanize” people in order to exploit them. We could look, perhaps productively, at the poverty and environmental despoliation that lead people to go into the bush looking for chimps to butcher for meat.
To solve big problems, we have to be able to look dispassionately at all of the facts. But intersecting oppressions makes it difficult to look at some connections.
26.4.09
More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN for The New York Times
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Two months after the local atheist organization here put up a billboard saying “Don’t Believe in God? You Are Not Alone,” the group’s 13 board members met in Laura and Alex Kasman’s living room to grapple with the fallout.
Loretta Haskell, a board member of the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, is also a church musician. “I am not one of the humanists who feels that religion is a bad thing,” she said.
The problem was not that the group, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, had attracted an outpouring of hostility. It was the opposite. An overflow audience of more than 100 had showed up for their most recent public symposium, and the board members discussed whether it was time to find a larger place.
And now parents were coming out of the woodwork asking for family-oriented programs where they could meet like-minded nonbelievers.
“Is everyone in favor of sponsoring a picnic for humanists with families?” asked the board president, Jonathan Lamb, a 27-year-old meteorologist, eliciting a chorus of “ayes.”
More than ever, America’s atheists are linking up and speaking out — even here in South Carolina, home to Bob Jones University, blue laws and a legislature that last year unanimously approved a Christian license plate embossed with a cross, a stained glass window and the words “I Believe” (a move blocked by a judge and now headed for trial).
They are connecting on the Internet, holding meet-ups in bars, advertising on billboards and buses, volunteering at food pantries and picking up roadside trash, earning atheist groups recognition on adopt-a-highway signs.
They liken their strategy to that of the gay-rights movement, which lifted off when closeted members of a scorned minority decided to go public.
“It’s not about carrying banners or protesting,” said Herb Silverman, a math professor at the College of Charleston who founded the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, which has about 150 members on the coast of the Carolinas. “The most important thing is coming out of the closet.”
Polls show that the ranks of atheists are growing. The American Religious Identification Survey, a major study released last month, found that those who claimed “no religion” were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states in the last 18 years.
Nationally, the “nones” in the population nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008 from 8 percent in 1990. In South Carolina, they more than tripled, to 10 percent from 3 percent. Not all the “nones” are necessarily committed atheists or agnostics, but they make up a pool of potential supporters.
Local and national atheist organizations have flourished in recent years, fed by outrage over the Bush administration’s embrace of the religious right. A spate of best-selling books on atheism also popularized the notion that nonbelief is not just an argument but a cause, like environmentalism or muscular dystrophy.
Ten national organizations that variously identify themselves as atheists, humanists, freethinkers and others who go without God have recently united to form the Secular Coalition for America, of which Mr. Silverman is president. These groups, once rivals, are now pooling resources to lobby in Washington for separation of church and state.
A wave of donations, some in the millions of dollars, has enabled the hiring of more paid professional organizers, said Fred Edwords, a longtime atheist leader who directs an umbrella group, the United Coalition of Reason, which plans to spawn 20 local groups around the country in the next year.
Despite changing attitudes, polls continue to show that atheists are ranked lower than any other minority or religious group when Americans are asked whether they would vote for or approve of their child marrying a member of that group.
Over lunch with some new atheist joiners at a downtown Charleston restaurant serving shrimp and grits, one young mother said that her husband was afraid to allow her to go public as an atheist because employers would refuse to hire him.
But another member, Beverly Long, a retired school administrator who now teaches education at the Citadel, said that when she first moved to Charleston from Toronto in 2001, “the first question people asked me was, What church do you belong to?” Ms. Long attended Wednesday dinners at a Methodist church, for the social interaction, but never felt at home. Since her youth, she had doubted the existence of God but did not discuss her views with others.
Ms. Long found the secular humanists through a newspaper advertisement and attended a meeting. Now, she is ready to go public, she said, especially after doing some genealogical research recently. “I had ancestors who fought in the American Revolution so I could speak my mind,” she said.
Until recent years, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry were local pariahs. Mr. Silverman — whose specialty license plate, one of many offered by the state, says “In Reason We Trust” — was invited to give the invocation at the Charleston City Council once, but half the council members walked out. The local chapter of Habitat for Humanity would not let the Secular Humanists volunteer to build houses wearing T-shirts that said “Non Prophet Organization,” he said.
When their billboard went up in January, with their Web site address displayed prominently, they expected hate mail.
“But most of the e-mails were grateful,” said Laura Kasman, an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina.
The board members meeting in the Kasmans’ living room were an unlikely mix that included a gift store owner, a builder, a grandmother, a retired nursing professor, a retired Navy officer, an administrator at a primate sanctuary and a church musician. They are also diverse in their attitudes toward religion.
Loretta Haskell, the church musician, said: “I did struggle at one point as to whether or not I should be making music in churches, given my position on things. But at the same time I like using my music to move people, to give them comfort. And what I’ve found is, I am not one of the humanists who feels that religion is a bad thing.”
The group has had mixed reactions to President Obama, who acknowledged nonbelievers in his inauguration speech. “I sent him a thank-you note,” Ms. Kasman said. But Sharon Fratepietro, who is married to Mr. Silverman, said, “It seemed like one long religious ceremony, with a moment of lip service.”
Part of what is giving the movement momentum is the proliferation of groups on college campuses. The Secular Student Alliance now has 146 chapters, up from 42 in 2003.
At the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, 19 students showed up for a recent evening meeting of the “Pastafarians,” named for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — a popular spoof on religion dreamed up by an opponent of intelligent design, the idea that living organisms are so complex that the best explanation is that a higher intelligence designed them.
Andrew Cederdahl, the group’s co-founder, asked for volunteers for the local food bank and for a coming debate with a nearby Christian college. Then Mr. Cederdahl opened the floor to members to tell their “coming out stories.”
Andrew Morency, who attended a Christian high school, said that when he got to college and studied evolutionary biology he decided that “creationists lie.”
Josh Streetman, who once attended the very Christian college that the Pastafarians were about to debate, said he knew the Bible too well to be sure that Scripture is true. Like Mr. Streetman, many of the other students at the meeting were highly literate in the Bible and religious history.
In keeping with the new generation of atheist evangelists, the Pastafarian leaders say that their goal is not confrontation, or even winning converts, but changing the public’s stereotype of atheists. A favorite Pastafarian activity is to gather at a busy crossroads on campus with a sign offering “Free Hugs” from “Your Friendly Neighborhood Atheist.”
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Two months after the local atheist organization here put up a billboard saying “Don’t Believe in God? You Are Not Alone,” the group’s 13 board members met in Laura and Alex Kasman’s living room to grapple with the fallout.
Loretta Haskell, a board member of the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, is also a church musician. “I am not one of the humanists who feels that religion is a bad thing,” she said.
The problem was not that the group, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, had attracted an outpouring of hostility. It was the opposite. An overflow audience of more than 100 had showed up for their most recent public symposium, and the board members discussed whether it was time to find a larger place.
And now parents were coming out of the woodwork asking for family-oriented programs where they could meet like-minded nonbelievers.
“Is everyone in favor of sponsoring a picnic for humanists with families?” asked the board president, Jonathan Lamb, a 27-year-old meteorologist, eliciting a chorus of “ayes.”
More than ever, America’s atheists are linking up and speaking out — even here in South Carolina, home to Bob Jones University, blue laws and a legislature that last year unanimously approved a Christian license plate embossed with a cross, a stained glass window and the words “I Believe” (a move blocked by a judge and now headed for trial).
They are connecting on the Internet, holding meet-ups in bars, advertising on billboards and buses, volunteering at food pantries and picking up roadside trash, earning atheist groups recognition on adopt-a-highway signs.
They liken their strategy to that of the gay-rights movement, which lifted off when closeted members of a scorned minority decided to go public.
“It’s not about carrying banners or protesting,” said Herb Silverman, a math professor at the College of Charleston who founded the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, which has about 150 members on the coast of the Carolinas. “The most important thing is coming out of the closet.”
Polls show that the ranks of atheists are growing. The American Religious Identification Survey, a major study released last month, found that those who claimed “no religion” were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states in the last 18 years.
Nationally, the “nones” in the population nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008 from 8 percent in 1990. In South Carolina, they more than tripled, to 10 percent from 3 percent. Not all the “nones” are necessarily committed atheists or agnostics, but they make up a pool of potential supporters.
Local and national atheist organizations have flourished in recent years, fed by outrage over the Bush administration’s embrace of the religious right. A spate of best-selling books on atheism also popularized the notion that nonbelief is not just an argument but a cause, like environmentalism or muscular dystrophy.
Ten national organizations that variously identify themselves as atheists, humanists, freethinkers and others who go without God have recently united to form the Secular Coalition for America, of which Mr. Silverman is president. These groups, once rivals, are now pooling resources to lobby in Washington for separation of church and state.
A wave of donations, some in the millions of dollars, has enabled the hiring of more paid professional organizers, said Fred Edwords, a longtime atheist leader who directs an umbrella group, the United Coalition of Reason, which plans to spawn 20 local groups around the country in the next year.
Despite changing attitudes, polls continue to show that atheists are ranked lower than any other minority or religious group when Americans are asked whether they would vote for or approve of their child marrying a member of that group.
Over lunch with some new atheist joiners at a downtown Charleston restaurant serving shrimp and grits, one young mother said that her husband was afraid to allow her to go public as an atheist because employers would refuse to hire him.
But another member, Beverly Long, a retired school administrator who now teaches education at the Citadel, said that when she first moved to Charleston from Toronto in 2001, “the first question people asked me was, What church do you belong to?” Ms. Long attended Wednesday dinners at a Methodist church, for the social interaction, but never felt at home. Since her youth, she had doubted the existence of God but did not discuss her views with others.
Ms. Long found the secular humanists through a newspaper advertisement and attended a meeting. Now, she is ready to go public, she said, especially after doing some genealogical research recently. “I had ancestors who fought in the American Revolution so I could speak my mind,” she said.
Until recent years, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry were local pariahs. Mr. Silverman — whose specialty license plate, one of many offered by the state, says “In Reason We Trust” — was invited to give the invocation at the Charleston City Council once, but half the council members walked out. The local chapter of Habitat for Humanity would not let the Secular Humanists volunteer to build houses wearing T-shirts that said “Non Prophet Organization,” he said.
When their billboard went up in January, with their Web site address displayed prominently, they expected hate mail.
“But most of the e-mails were grateful,” said Laura Kasman, an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina.
The board members meeting in the Kasmans’ living room were an unlikely mix that included a gift store owner, a builder, a grandmother, a retired nursing professor, a retired Navy officer, an administrator at a primate sanctuary and a church musician. They are also diverse in their attitudes toward religion.
Loretta Haskell, the church musician, said: “I did struggle at one point as to whether or not I should be making music in churches, given my position on things. But at the same time I like using my music to move people, to give them comfort. And what I’ve found is, I am not one of the humanists who feels that religion is a bad thing.”
The group has had mixed reactions to President Obama, who acknowledged nonbelievers in his inauguration speech. “I sent him a thank-you note,” Ms. Kasman said. But Sharon Fratepietro, who is married to Mr. Silverman, said, “It seemed like one long religious ceremony, with a moment of lip service.”
Part of what is giving the movement momentum is the proliferation of groups on college campuses. The Secular Student Alliance now has 146 chapters, up from 42 in 2003.
At the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, 19 students showed up for a recent evening meeting of the “Pastafarians,” named for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — a popular spoof on religion dreamed up by an opponent of intelligent design, the idea that living organisms are so complex that the best explanation is that a higher intelligence designed them.
Andrew Cederdahl, the group’s co-founder, asked for volunteers for the local food bank and for a coming debate with a nearby Christian college. Then Mr. Cederdahl opened the floor to members to tell their “coming out stories.”
Andrew Morency, who attended a Christian high school, said that when he got to college and studied evolutionary biology he decided that “creationists lie.”
Josh Streetman, who once attended the very Christian college that the Pastafarians were about to debate, said he knew the Bible too well to be sure that Scripture is true. Like Mr. Streetman, many of the other students at the meeting were highly literate in the Bible and religious history.
In keeping with the new generation of atheist evangelists, the Pastafarian leaders say that their goal is not confrontation, or even winning converts, but changing the public’s stereotype of atheists. A favorite Pastafarian activity is to gather at a busy crossroads on campus with a sign offering “Free Hugs” from “Your Friendly Neighborhood Atheist.”
23.4.09
22.4.09
Happy Earth Day!
"Earth Day is the first completely international and universal holiday that the world has ever known. Every other holiday was tied to one place, or some political or special event. This day is tied to Earth itself, and to the place Earth in the whole solar system."
-Margaret Mead
-Margaret Mead
19.4.09
Helping Women Reach Their Potential in Math
This New York Times Article is now member-only, so here's the full text! By Tanya Mohn
THE explanations vary, but the fact remains: Many women are not reaching their full potential in math, and that can hold them back in the job market. Allannah Thomas is working to change that through Helicon, a nonprofit group in New York specializing in math instruction for low-income women.
“You’ll get better jobs, better pay, more interesting work and have a future” by improving math skills, Ms. Thomas recently told a group of two dozen women. She was about to review fractions, mixed numbers and other basics to help them with tests for job training programs. The class was part of a program at Nontraditional Employment for Women, which trains women for skilled jobs in construction and other industries.
Ms. Thomas formed Helicon in 1999 to address a lack of math proficiency among low-income women. As the sole instructor, she has taught more than 5,000 women (and many men, too) about basics of bookkeeping and has helped them prepare for G.E.D. tests. She has instructed prospective retail workers about percentages, for example, and offered other industry-specific math for job seekers who hope to work as bank tellers or in health care.
Her clients include trade unions, job training and placement organizations, social service agencies and hospitals. She also teaches many classes pro bono.
Nationwide, women are underrepresented in many jobs that require strong math skills. Women comprise only 13.5 percent of workers in architecture and engineering occupations, and only 2.5 percent in construction-related occupations, according to 2008 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Beth Casey, professor of applied developmental and educational psychology at Boston College, who studies gender differences in math, says research suggests that boys start to gain a small advantage in math in middle-school years, and that the advantage increases in high school, though by smaller amounts in recent years.
Gender differences are greater in math that depends more on spatial reasoning, such as geometry, measurement and calculus, Dr. Casey said. This may affect job choice, with men more likely than women to enter fields like engineering and carpentry.
The reason that men and women differ in math skills is a matter of debate. It is not a clear-cut issue, as biological and environmental factors interact, Dr. Casey said. “Women are not universally worse than males in math,” she said.
What often holds girls back is self-confidence; it drops sharply in middle school and is considered a reason that so many women don’t choose math-related fields, she said. [Emphasis mine]But “many girls and women have the potential to improve their spatial skills to the point of being very successful" in fields that require those abilities, she said.
Ms. Thomas first observed these issues as a high school math teacher two decades ago. And when she worked in a variety of social service jobs in the 1990s, she came into contact with many women who struggled with math, which prompted her to start Helicon.
While working in social services, she met women who wanted to start or expand businesses; some who could breeze through the verbal part of business plans were stymied by the math sections in market research and fiscal analyses. Other women — nurses’ aides and home health care workers who hoped to become nurses — often had their dreams dashed by an inability to do the math required for training entrance exams. (Test takers might be asked to convert adult doses of medicine to various doses for children, based on their weight, for example.) And she saw women who had difficulty with the math section of the G.E.D. test compared with the other sections. In New York, women’s failure rate on the math section is consistently higher than men’s, according to data from the state Department of Education.
In her current work, she says she has found that while individual abilities vary, almost everyone can improve. She recounted how several years ago, a woman whose math skills were at a fourth-grade level came to one of her classes. After taking an eight-week intensive review of basic math and several other math prep classes, she got a score of 98 percent on the entrance test for Carpenters’ Union, Local 608 — the highest in the class, Ms. Thomas said.
Ms. Thomas’s style of teaching has been called math boot camp because it emphasizes traditional basics: memorization of multiplication tables, for example, and the use of timed quizzes and tests. By mastering fundamentals in rote learning, she said, math becomes second nature and inspires confidence.
One former student, Roselyn Colón, 31, of the Bronx, said: “If her first attempt doesn’t work, she tries other strategies until you learn it.” Another former student, Heather McHale, 36, of Queens, said, “She’s old school. You do it again and again until it sticks.”
Both women took several of Ms. Thomas’s classes last year and in September became apprentices in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 3, making $11 an hour with yearly raises. After a five-and-a-half-year apprenticeship, they will earn about $47 an hour, they said. .
SOME women who take the classes have strong math skills that may just need polishing. One of Ms. Thomas’s former students, Matilde Santana, 45, of Queens, said, “I was pretty strong in math,” but hadn’t used some of the skills for about 20 years. She worked in the fashion industry for 13 years, but was unemployed for two before taking Ms. Thomas’s classes a few years ago.
She has worked at Consolidated Edison since September 2006 as a general utility worker and was promoted in March. “I strongly believe if I had not taken her course,” the situation would have been completely different, Ms. Santana said.
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