Category Archive

I had the radio on for a few minutes today, long enough to hear part of a talk show where the host was interviewing some cat from the Freedom From Religion Foundation.  Now, I didn’t listen for very long because I can think of few things more tedious than a conversation between a religious conservative who thinks religion is an important part of public life and an atheist who thinks religion is the most destructive force in public life.  I suppose someone has to have those conversations.  I’m just glad it isn’t me, and I’m glad my radio has an “off” button.

But it reminded me that I’ve been missing the atheists at the Moonstruck Chocolate Cafe as of late.  They used to meet the last Wednesday of every month, but they haven’t been there for a while.  I was curious, so I went looking for them on the internet, and I found out that they now rotate their meeting locations.  I know you’re all as relieved as I was to learn that the group hasn’t split up; they’re just broadening their horizons.  Maybe they’re collectively trying to lose weight, too, who knows?  Anyway, it’s too bad.  I’ll kind of miss them.  I mean, I could never get much writing done while they were in the cafe because, you know, of all the talking.  Groups of people tend to talk.  But at least their conversations were interesting–to me, anyway.  Because you don’t often see a bunch of atheists getting together to share their secular-ness.

So I guess the PC term for atheist is “Freethinker.”  That term sort of makes me roll my eyes, but as Freethinkers have been rolling their eyes at the likes of me for centuries, I’ll just suck it up and deal.  So these Freethinkers in our fair suburban city have started a community to support secularist people living and raising families in a society greatly influenced by religious beliefs.  I think this is very smart of them.  I for one don’t know how I would get by without my religious community.  All spiritual issues aside, religious communities are very handy things to have, for the purposes of making friends and finding babysitters and receiving practical support in times of need.  Also, they give you something to do.  But you don’t see a lot of atheist get-togethers, you know?  Not like the churches, which are always having barbecues and hosting AA meetings and whatnot.  Probably because a) there aren’t as many atheists as there are non-atheists, and therefore, b) atheists have a hard time finding each other, because c) if you find it difficult being an atheist in a non-atheist world, are you really going to bring up the subject in polite company?  I wouldn’t.

The atheists at my chocolate cafe were talking about starting a school, last I heard.  I think this is an excellent idea.  This country needs more Freethinkers united for a common good.  I hope to see many Freethinker schools and homeless shelters and 4-H clubs as time goes by.  Because once the Freethinkers have carved out their collective niche in society, they can stop boo-hooing about how alone they feel in their rationality.  Sorry, couldn’t resist.  Seriously, though, organized Freethinkers can only mean more competition in the marketplace of ideas.  And that’s good for everyone, wouldn’t you agree?

It was interesting to hear the atheists Freethinkers discuss their obstacles when it comes to forming these coalitions and completing ambitious programs.  As one of them said, churches wield great power over religious people because they can always threaten you with hell if you don’t do what they say.  (I’m paraphrasing.  I promise you the Freethinker said it nicer.)  Religious people have the threat of eternal punishment and the promise of eternal reward for doing x, y or z.  This Freethinker also said, “Even in groups of atheists, you have people waiting to be told what to do.  They’re not all rude and obnoxious like me.”  (Haha.  We all laughed at his self-deprecating remark.  Who says the godless have no sense of humor?  Not you.  Not anymore.)

They talked about the unique opportunity atheists have to promote greater awareness of a reason-based worldview and how this would not be accomplished by sitting around kvetching about religion, but by doing things that are affirmative and positive.  People are turned off when you ridicule others and oversimplify their beliefs.  Atheists need to attract people in more positive ways.  At this point I marveled at how much like a missionary training session this meeting was turning out to be.  Well, that’s the way you do it when you’re in a movement.  What do you expect?

Then somebody said, “Well, I’m ready for a eulogy.  Who wants to pray?”  And we all laughed again, because atheists praying is pretty ironic.

They didn’t pray.  Instead they made arrangements to meet again and wished each other Reasonspeed.  Or something like that.

So I’ll be missing them, my Freethinking, cocoa-swilling brethren (and sistren).  I hope that they find success in their endeavors, but I do wonder how they will overcome the inertia that plagues all too many human beings who otherwise have the best of intentions.  Someone at the meeting said that
only 1 percent interested in non-religious philosophy seek out others and get involved in organization, and that atheists need to figure out why this is. Religious organizations have the whole carrot-stick/heaven-hell routine, and people fall into line.  Seriously, if other religious people are like me and the religious people I know personally, the flesh is often weak–but where the flesh is weak, the spirit is willing to open up the can of whoop-a** known as Crushing Guilt and keep wailing until the flesh stops making Baby Jesus cry.  (Or, you know…Abraham, or somebody…depending on your faith tradition.)

Not that people without religion don’t have guilt, but where are their guilt enablers?  Well, perhaps Freethinkers are so awesome, they don’t need guilt enablers.  Maybe all they need is Barack Obama.  (But what if they’re Republicans?  Children could be left behind!)  As the self-deprecating Freethinker said, “All we have is reason.”  Is reason enough?

So this weekend I took part in a discussion on the Brain, Child website about this essay in the Winter 2008 issue, “Relieving Myself,” by Heather Caliri.  Caliri is a writer in San Diego (she also has a blog, which as of this moment I have not yet perused, but here’s the link for your pleasure).  Caliri wrote about her experiences with Elimination Communication (EC), or diaper-free parenting.  The philosophy, in a nutshell, is this:  parents don’t need to depend on diapers, but they can learn to read and respond to their babies’ subtle cues and thus teach their children to have a sense of their own elimination needs and never endure conventional toilet-training hell.

I’ll be honest with you, kids:  the first time I heard about EC, around the time my last baby was born, my reaction was, “You have got to be effing kidding me.”  (Truly spoken like the woman who personally kicked Kimberly-Clark’s stock through the roof.)  My second thought was that it must be awesome for the people who have the patience for such things, but I would never be one of those parents.  And you, dear readers, know from careful study of this blog that I am still not one of those parents (and never will be).  (I once mentioned something to my step-mother about diaper-free parenting; her response was, “And what are you supposed to do with your other 20 minutes a day?”  Haha.  Good one, step-mom.  I thought she was being generous!)  However, I was intrigued by Caliri’s essay because she was clearly not out to persuade anyone else to use EC, merely documenting her own experience, and I thought it was a very insightful, often humorous piece about the nutty stuff we do in the name of good parenting.  (Not that EC is inherently nutty, but one can drive oneself nuts with any aspect of parenting.)

I wasn’t entirely surprised, though, that one of the first comments on the discussion page was a slam on Caliri’s hygiene standards and etiquette.  Not to give anything away (Sugar Daddy, avert your eyes because there’s a plot spoiler ahead!), but in the final scene Caliri is in a restaurant bathroom with her baby, Lucy, who proceeds to pee in the restroom sink.  This has some stylistic resonance, if you’ve invested in the preceding narrative, but some people evidently thought it was just really gross. 

Myself, I would be lying if I claimed not to have my own thoughts along the line of, “That’s not something you expect to see in a public restroom (if you’re lucky).”  However, my reaction was mitigated by the following:

1.  It was a baby.

2.  There was running water, not to mention a nearby soap dispenser.

3.  After nearly ten years of up-close-and-personal interaction with human waste, not to mention the three years I spent in the People’s Republic of Eugene, there is little that actually shocks me anymore.

4.  It’s not like it was my sink.

Just kidding on that last one.  Actually, if Caliri were visiting my home and wanted permission to let her baby relieve herself in my bathroom sink, I could hardly refuse her on grounds that my bathroom sink is a holy shrine to cleanliness.  But seriously, the fact that I was physically removed from the situation certainly allowed me the emotional distance to take the episode in stride.  After all, I’d already survived an earlier scene where Caliri let Lucy do her business by the outside wall of a neighborhood apartment building, sans smelling salts.  I actually thought that lifestyle choice a tad more gauche, maybe because I’ve lived in apartment buildings in neighborhoods where people had issues with personal boundaries.  But also because I couldn’t envision Caliri hosing the stucco off after the fact.  (Certainly not without a handy soap dispenser.)  However, no one else on the discussion board mentioned the wall-peeing, only the sink-peeing and how beyond-the-pale it was.

Ordinarily I don’t enjoy being a de facto defender of public urination–not any more than the ACLU enjoys defending those awful neo-Nazis, I’m sure–but my sympathies were with Caliri because she’d written a really interesting essay about an issue much larger than toileting, and her point was getting lost in the collective condemnation of her bathroom manners.  Sure, maybe a baby peeing in a public sink is uncool.  I won’t try to argue otherwise, because, you know, it’s not a choice I would make.  (Then again, trying to save the world one less diaper at a time is obviously not a choice I’ve ever made either.)  But I didn’t think it was fair to make that one part of the essay the centerpiece of the conversation, when the article was not about the relative merits of EC, but about Caliri’s own parental hangups and how she got over them.  I thought that, as a writer, Caliri would appreciate some feedback on something other than her choice to let the baby pee in the sink. 

Alas, ’twas not to be, because people were really, very put-off by the sink-peeing, and also by BC editor Jennifer Niesslein tsk-tsking them for harping on it and making it personal.  That led to some people wondering if they were supposed to all pretend they agreed with someone instead of giving their honest opinion(s), and whether tolerance only went one way at Brain, Child–also, whether we were all privileged, self-absorbed white women and whether we were going to silence women’s voices for the sake of niceness.  Valid questions, all of them, but in the meantime, poor Caliri’s article was not really being discussed; it was her personal character that was on trial.  It made me very grateful that my essay for Brain, Child never made it into the online content.  (Not that there was any sink-peeing in that one.  Maybe a little nose-picking, but that might not have been in the final edit.) 

I’m pretty much done with that discussion, edifying as it was, but some lingering questions remain (for me), so I will put them to you, gentle readers:

1.  Am I “out of the mainstream” because my objections to public sink-peeing have more to do with decorum than public health?  (I dunno, baby pee + running water + soap = ?)  In other words, am I just gross?

2.  Do women, as one BC commenter said, equate hard-hitting commentary with rudeness?  Do we wish to “make sure everybody ‘feels comfortable’ at the expense of dialogue”?

And for the sake of science,

3.  Do you prefer your dialogue hard-hitting, or comfortable?  Are you by any chance a woman?

I’ve been meaning to blog about this story out of McMinnville, Oregon, for quite some time, but I haven’t because it makes me so angry and because anger tends to make me verbose, I just haven’t had time.  There is a lot more to the story than the above linked article includes, but in a nutshell, two seventh-grade boys in McMinnville are being prosecuted for swatting girls’ bottoms at their school.  Originally the the district attorney, Bradley Berry, charged them with several felony counts of sex abuse.  They were arrested, went to jail (enduring the attendant humiliations thereof, e.g. strip searches), and hauled into court in shackles.  The felony charges have since been dropped, but there are still several misdemeanor sex abuse charges against them, all imprisonable and registerable offenses–”registerable” meaning that they would be required to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives. 

My first question here is “What the hell goes on in McMinnville?”  Not actual sex abuse, apparently, because they obviously have enough time on their hands to pursue frivolous cases like this one.  Now, I don’t believe schools should look the other way while the boy students slap the buttocks of the girl students.  Buttocks should not be swatted with impunity on school grounds.  That’s just inappropriate.  Such behavior should be subject to discipline of the school and the parental variety.  Any chuckling thereover should be done privately and with due discretion.  But seriously, folks–sex abuse?  Criminal investigation?  Prison time?  Lifetime sex-offender registry?  Really?

I can appreciate the embarrassment and discomfort suffered by a girl whose bottom was touched without her express permission.  Goodness knows I hope to raise my own sons with a greater sense of decorum and chivalry.  I also don’t want any punks slapping my girls’ butts, whether they ask for it or not.  But I also don’t want to raise any of my children in a world that confuses immature, hormone-informed horseplay among children with sex abuse.  My husband has already informed me that if this had been the environment when he was growing up, he would be rotting in prison.  Nothing my husband tells me about his youth gives me particular hope for the future.  But I digress. 

DA Berry says that his office takes sexual abuse of children very seriously, but this can’t possibly be true.  If it were true, he’d be spending some taxpayer dollars putting actual predators behind bars instead of prosecuting two ill-mannered teenage boys.  (For what it’s worth, this informally-organized “Butt-Slap Day” had male and female participants slapping one another’s butts, but all of the alleged victims, i.e. those who complained about said butt-slapping, were female.)  He wouldn’t be forcing them to undergo psychosexual evaluations, characterizing them as perverts for engaging in behavior that, while rude and undesirable, falls well within the boundaries of normal for adolescent boys. 

I’m not trying to excuse what the boys did.  What I think is especially sad is that instead of being able to use this incident as an opportunity to give their sons some lessons in gentlemanly deportment, the parents have been forced to defend them and their actions against overzealous prosecution.  What will the boys learn from this experience, except that they are the victims?  Probably they won’t be slapping any more girls’ butts, but most likely their restraint will be due less to an enhanced respect for others’ personal space than an appreciation of, and resentment over, the fact that they are helpless at the hands of nutjobs in high places. 

* This case is scheduled to have a hearing this afternoon, at which time the remaining charges could possibly be dropped. 

So I just read the new Newsweek article on Angelina Jolie.  I have to say, I don’t have strong feelings about most celebrities.  All I can say about Angelina Jolie is that I admire her humanitarian work and the fact that she actually does something worthy of attention besides be a beautiful movie star–and also, that she is one of the most stunningly gorgeous women I’ve ever seen.  I don’t think my husband shares my admiration in that last respect.  I seem to recall that he thinks Angelina Jolie smells bad.  But be that as it may, I don’t have particularly strong feelings about her being a gorgeous humanitarian, except for the general “good for her” sentiment.  So I almost didn’t read the Newsweek article because I think Newsweek has too many articles about celebrities.  But I was nursing the baby and I didn’t feel like reading about Gaza because, obviously, I am a hypocrite.  So I read about Angelina Jolie.

And you know what?  I came away from the experience being much more impressed with Angelina Jolie as a human being.  At the same time, however, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at how over-the-top Angelina Jolie-loving it was.  Seriously, is this woman just Mother Theresa and Gandhi and Joan of Arc and Jesus all rolled into one superhumanly attractive package?  I expect the author will be founding Church of the Immaculate Angelina Jolie sometime in the near future.  And if that is the case, do you think people will still complain about separation of church and state?  Just wondering.

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So President Bush says we need to start building nuclear power plants again.  You know what I say to that?  Bring it on, Thermoman!

Truly, I have never understood the American left’s squeamishness about nuclear power, in light of the fact that the French have been using nuclear power with great success for many years.  I thought everything the French did was right.  The French have the right ideas about war, sex, family leave, affordable child care, underage drinking, and how many vacation days you need per year–but the one thing they’re wrong about is nuclear power.  And possibly Jerry Lewis.  I’m sure I wouldn’t know.  I’m a Republican.

I know what you’re thinking.  “Sure, Madhousewife, it’s all well and good that you want to Frenchify the country with that nuclear power, but are you willing to let them build one of those radioactive deals in your back yard?  HMMMMMM?”

Honestly?  After being told that my children’s autism was probably caused by everything from immunizations to cord-clamping to lavender-scented baby soap to whole grains–I’m just not that scared of anything anymore.  Maybe a little radioactivity would be good for us.  And we could all afford air-conditioning!  Everyone wins!

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Ordinarily I like to do these things in threes, but I have laundry calling me.  Happy Thursday.

So today marks the first day of TV Turn-off Week, and my children’s school is again pressuring us to observe this period of Lent by sending home their little slips of paper whereupon we should mark the days our child(ren) do not watch television and which we mustn’t forget to turn in to the school at the end of the week so that…actually, I forget why we need to turn it back in.  There might be some kind of certificate involved.  Whatever.  It isn’t that I disdain the worthy goal of watching less (or no) television.  I think television is a cesspool.  It’s degraded our culture and our public discourse.  All people, including myself, should watch less television, except for those people who are already watching no television.  They should continue to watch the same amount of television, i..e. none, because it’s impossible to watch less than none.  Unless twenty minutes of vigorous aerobic activity counts as less than none, in which case they should do that, too.  Unless they have a physical impairment that prevents them from engaging in aerobic activity, in which case they should read a book or switch to diet soda or something.  I don’t care.

Obviously, TV Turn-off Week is not mandatory.  It’s merely a suggestion, coming from the the folks at the Center for Screen-Time Awareness–an enthusiastic, guilt-inducing suggestion, sure, but you know me, I have no problem with guilt trips, even when they’re laid on thick, even when they’re laid on me.  Guilt is a powerful motivator.  (Also underrated:  Fear of Hellfire.)  I don’t think certificates do much of anything, but I guess I’m not opposed to those, either–except all that paperwork does have an environmental impact, so never mind.  Screw certificates!  This is what bugs me–and I admit that it’s pretty lame, as irritants go, but here it is anyway:

It’s all well and good for the school to throw its support behind TV Turn-off Week, but I wish there were more to it than merely not participating in one particular activity (make that “activity”).  It’s always good to abstain from TV, but I don’t know that it does much good to make a big deal out of abstaining from TV unless you take note of how the abstinence affects how you live.  I’d prefer it if they asked kids to write down what they do with their time during a typical week, then ask them to do it again during TV Turn-off Week (when, theoretically, they would not be watching any–or as much–TV).  That would make it seem like more of a learning experience rather than just another deprivation.  As it is, I’m somewhat annoyed by the “rules” of the game (according to the literature our school gave us).  Nothing on a television set is kosher, be it broadcast or videotape/DVD or whatever.  Movies watched in a movie theater are okay, though–not because big-screen-movie-watching is any less passive than little-screen-movie-watching, but because this is TV Turn-off Week, not Movie Theater Avoidance Week.  As for video games and recreational computer usage goes, “Ask your parents.”  Oh, you bet they will.

So my son already hates this idea, which is funny because he doesn’t watch that much television in the first place.  Just telling him he can’t do something, though, makes him want to do it more.  Then there’s Elvis, who, while he’s certainly cut down on his Monsters, Inc. habit, still has to watch some little-screen entertainment during the day or I will go freaking nuts.  (He doesn’t play video games or use computers recreationally, and taking him to a movie theater would be Missing The Point Entirely.)  To be sure, his Non-TV-Watching Activity Log would be sport lots of interesting pastimes, most of them involving sharp objects, sticky food substances, and that giant mudhole in the backyard–but as the responsible adult in the house, I take the liberty of deciding when his dance card is full, if you catch my meaning.

Anyway, I think TV Turn-off Week is more properly observed during May sweeps.  People who turn their TV’s off in April are wusses!

But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,–Matthew 23:5

‘Twas a moderate kerfuffle recently when Portland Police Chief Rosie Sizer suggested dropping the college requirement for entry-level police officers.  Her reasoning was that they needed to expand their applicant pool, and more specifically, that they wanted to get more minority and female applicants.  Well, a few people got huffy over the suggestion that lowering standards leads to more minorities and women (though fewer people seem to have a problem with this concept when it’s taken for granted rather than explicitly stated–but that’s neither here nor there).  Mostly, though, people were put off by the idea that police officers don’t need college educations.  Police work is apparently just too hard and complicated for someone with only a high school diploma.

Well, I learn something new every day.  I had no idea police academy applicants were required to have a college education, in Oregon or elsewhere.  I knew that many police officers did have college educations, but I didn’t realize it was required.  Actually, in Portland applicants are only required to have a two-year associate’s degree.  That’s because they have already lowered the educational requirements once before, in the 1990’s, I think.  No offense to our boys (and girls) in blue, but this just rather boggles my mind.  I understand, I think, the complexities of police work.  I just can’t imagine that college would teach you thing one about them.  It seems to me that while police officers require specialized training–and perhaps more of that than they currently receive–requiring a bachelor’s degree is a little overkill. 

Most police bureaus that require applicants to be college educated require only a two-year degree, or comparable number of college credits, and while this seems to me a reasonable requirement, I don’t know that it should be absolutely necessary.  I don’t say this because I think cops are just a bunch of big lugs with guns.  I say it because I think our society has blown the intrinsic value of a college education completely out of proportion.

It’s true that these days you “have” to have a college degree to get a decent job, but that isn’t because college has become more relevant to real life but because people have come to equate “college-educated” not only with “smart” but also “competent.”  That a person was able to get through four years of college and emerge triumphant does say something about that person–but one could probably say the same thing about a person without requiring them to take out thousands of dollars in loans and spend hundreds of hours studying things that not only don’t interest them but serve no practical purpose in terms of their career goals.  I understand the value of a liberal arts education.  I favor a liberal arts education for all people.  I just think it wouldn’t be the end of the world if people got that liberal arts background in, say, high school, and then were free to start their adult lives and pursue meaningful careers right away, without having to jump through the college hoop first.  Unless, of course, they want to.

There was an excellent article in Forbes magazine a few months ago about this very subject.  When I first read this article, I thought, “Well, it’s about freaking time someone else besides me said this!”  (Specifically, someone with the cache to write an article for Forbes magazine.)  I have long believed that a college education, while it does have intrinsic value, is not valuable for everyone. 

And, no, I’m not talking about the unwashed masses who don’t need Shakespeare in order to bus tables or drive long-haul trucks more effectively.  I’m talking about people like my sister, who has frequently lamented that she was not “smart” enough to go to college and hence is “only” a licensed cosmetologist.  Never mind the fact that she actually has a marketable skill that has enabled her to earn money for her family while providing full-time care for her children.  Never mind that she has enough brains and organizational skills to run a profitable scrapbooking business in addition to her home salon.  These days the conventional wisdom is if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, you’re automatically a lesser job candidate (and dumb for not going to college).

I’m talking about people like my high school chum Mark, one of those graduating-with-honors types who did well on his SAT and seemed destined for a successful college career–because that’s what good students did.  He ended up at UCLA, his first choice.  Unfortunately, it turned out that he hated college and had absolutely no idea what he wanted to major in.  After five or six years he ended up with a bachelor’s in economics–I think.  It doesn’t really matter because today he makes furniture.  He’s good at it, and he likes it, and he did not need to suffer through five-plus years of college to get where he is now.  I reckon if he had it to do over again, he would opt to go straight into an apprenticeship rather than languish several years studying and writing papers and taking tests on things he had no interest in and which ultimately served him no practical purpose.

It isn’t that a college education has to have a direct bearing on your future career in order to be valuable.  It’s that you have to get something out of it in order for it to be valuable, and a person ought to be able to bypass college and not be made to feel like he’s wasting his intelligence, or worse, his life.  Obviously some careers require (quite properly) several years of post-secondary education.  Most skilled jobs require some formal training (sometimes necessarily beyond high school), but do they really have to require a four-year liberal arts degree on top of it all? 

I enjoyed college, and it enriched my life tremendously.  I still think, though, that the education proved more relevant to my current stint as a mother and housewife (”The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven”) than it did to my brief career as a journalist.  One of my best friends has a master’s degree in journalism.  She works in public relations.  I’ve never taken a journalism class in my life, but I got a job temping (the destiny for many an English major who opted not to go into teaching) at a newspaper and ended up writing for it.  Everything I know about journalism and the publishing business I learned on the job, and I could have just as easily learned it straight out of high school as I did after college.  Not (necessarily) because any trained monkey could do it, but because I was bright and had good writing skills.  I’m sure I could have learned many of the same things by majoring in journalism, but who cares?  Or rather, why should anyone care?

A while back there was an article in the Oregonian about the pros and cons of public toilets.  Apparently Portland is considering putting in some fancy, hi-tech public potties downtown, so that visitors will stop pretending to be customers at Nordstrom’s just so they can pee.  The newspaper article was about all the problems that Seattle has been having with its public toilets, which they’re (vague, impersonal “they”) are thinking of tearing out because they’ve just turned out to be more trouble than they’re worth.  (”They” in this instance being the toilets, not the nebulous powers-that-be–although it might properly refer to both.  Who knows?  I’m not from Seattle.)

I won’t detail all those problems.  You can use your imaginations.  Suffice it to say that downtown Seattle has apparently seen an increase in human waste on its fair streets, not to mention more vandalism and oh yeah, crime.  (Then there’s that little issue of the automatic doors malfunctioning on occasion.  Let’s say I’m happy to be a fake Nordstrom’s customer in Portland.)

This article did manage to surprise me in one respect.  I had no idea that

Seventy years ago, clean, comfortable and well-marked, public toilets dotted streets in every major American city. But urban decay, crime and shifting budget priorities took them away. In 1945, New York City’s subways had 1,676 restrooms. By the end of the century, 78 remained.

Seventy-eight!  Who knew there were that many public toilets in New York City? 

I’m joking.  What surprised me is that there were ever so many public toilets to begin with.  To me it just seemed a no-brainer that public toilets would inevitably bring crime and filth.  In the words of Sid the Sloth, “Humans.  Are.  Disgusting.”  If city planners were tempting the basest elements of society with their shiny, convenient outhouses, it must have been because people had gotten dumber.  I dunno, maybe I figured citizens in the ’40s could just hold it better than contemporary folks.  (They were the Greatest Generation, after all.)  But no, apparently people in the ’40s were just more civilized and genteel.  (And you thought senior citizens were just cranky because they had no prescription drug coverage.)

So then I thought, gee, what has changed since 1945?  There are more homeless people on the streets now, and there is more drug use and hence more crime (at least that is the conventional wisdom, or was the last time I checked).  And I wondered, what would it take to make the public safe for public toilets again?  Any thoughts, armchair sociologists?

My favorite part of the article was where they pointed out that Americans are prissier than people in other countries, who don’t insist on so much privacy when they do their business.  Which is, I guess, why all their drug deals go down in those hip, flashy discos you see on Alias, instead of in the public loos.  So it’s true.  We really are tackier.

I sometimes listen to Laura Ingraham’s radio show, not because I particularly enjoy it (eh), but because it’s on right before Dennis Prager on the same station.  Up to now I have been largely indifferent to her as a talk show host and as a political commentator.  Today I caught the last hour of her show, and she was talking about America Ferrera’s comment at the Film Independent’s Spirit Awards ceremony.  During one of those inane chit-chats presenters have with each other before announcing the award already, Zach Braff asked America if she had anything in common with the country she was named for and she said, “America is supposedly the land of the free–or at least it will be in 2008.”  (Ha ha–get it?)  Whatever. 

So this annoyed Laura Ingraham, who went off on America Ferrera, saying something along the lines of yes, America is the land of the free, it’s the land where fat and ugly people can star in their own TV shows.  Then she went on to say that America (Ferrera) should stick to commenting on things like Shoney’s breakfast buffet.  (And subsequently apologized for any unintended implication that there was anything wrong with Shoney’s or the people who ate there.)  I’m sorry I don’t have Laura Ingraham’s exact words, but I promise you I gave you the exact flavor of them. 

Just a few things:

1.  This is just over-the-top rude.  

2.  America Ferrera is neither fat nor ugly.  Supposedly her character on Ugly Betty is–(don’t know, haven’t watched it, heard it was very funny)–but Laura Ingraham definitely didn’t say our country was a place where a perfectly attractive young woman can play a fat and ugly person on TV. 

3.  If America Ferrera were fat and ugly, this is totally irrelevant to what she said to Zach Braff, or what she implied about the current administration. 

4.  Why does a negative reaction to something a woman says or does have to involve a personal attack on her appearance?  If Laura Ingraham wanted to say America Ferrera was dumb and didn’t make very good jokes, that would have been less despicable.  Men get called dumb all the time.  It’s a lazy argument, and it’s insulting, but not quite as lazy and insulting as “You’re ugly.” 

“I think George Bush is a bad president.” 
“Oh yeah?  Well, you’re ugly!” 

“Bill Clinton made unwanted sexual advances toward me.”
“Yeah, right.  You’re ugly!”

“Section 102.112, Florida Statutes, provides that the county canvassing board must certify the county returns by 5 PM on the 7th day following the general election. The performance of this duty is mandatory; there are no exceptions provided in the law.”
“You’re ugly!  And who the hell does your make-up?”

I won’t even go into all the lovely comments that have been made about Hillary Clinton over the last 15 years.  There are just too many to choose from.

With the exception of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, I can’t recall any instances of men getting this same treatment.  Yes, they have their looks cariactured by political cartoonists, but that’s different.  People walk up to mall kiosks and pay someone to cariacture their looks all the time.  Is it really too much to expect that you can state an opinion or make a bad joke and not be called ugly?   Even when people call a man dumb, it’s usually accompanied by a pertinent explanation of how exactly the cat is dumb.  There is no connection between someone’s political beliefs (or false assertions) and her appearance.  When you call your opponent ugly, it is just gratuitously mean and immature.  I expect this sort of thing from Ann Coulter–no, wait, I take that back.  I expect Ann Coulter to be gratuitously mean but also funny.*  Laura Ingraham was mean and not funny and not clever this morning.  I officially don’t like her.

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* Speaking of Ann Coulter, in her book Slander the big svelte hypocrite took liberals to task for this very behavior (insulting a woman’s looks).  She said something about it being horrible or horrific, and then a few short years later we find her snarking over Cindy Sheehan’s thighs.  (Wait, that sounds kinky.  Never mind.)  So much for the high road.

So apparently it was a slow news day in Portland yesterday, because this article on teenagers “freak” dancing took the front page:

On Saturday nights, teens from across the Portland area wait 45 minutes to enter the Beaverton Masonic Temple to dance. In one line, boys sport sunglasses and hoodies. Girls, wearing tank tops and short shorts, shake from the cold in the other line.

But it’s worth it because they can dance how they want to.

Gone are the arms around the boy’s neck, while his hands nervously hold her waist. Instead, on the dance floor at the Masonic Temple, teens grind against one another to the tunes of pounding hip-hop under strobe lights that make their movements seem to last a little longer. Girls bend over, hands on the floor, and shake their bottoms against the boys behind them. Teens line up in groups, grinding pelvis to pelvis.

When Justin Timberlake sings “I’ll let you whip me if I misbehave” in “SexyBack,” boys, on cue, spank the girl in front of them.

Teens are boycotting school dances because uptight school officials can’t stomach the sight of people who are legally children simulating sex in public.  Some things do indeed never change.  Parents and teachers can be such squares.

But the teenagers who attend the dances defend their moves.

“Parents need to realize we don’t mean it sexually,” says Michelle Gleason, an Aloha High School junior. “We’re just having fun.”

They relate their parents’ complaints to every era’s battles between parents and their children over style, freedom and expression.

“The style of dancing changes,” Gleason says, “but parents have always done the same thing.”

Yes, parents are still doing the same thing, but I don’t know that the kids are.  Madhousewife is old and not remotely hip; she does not claim to “get” what the kids are into these days.  (Indeed, she didn’t always get what the kids were into in her day.)  But it seems to me that if you’re grinding your bodies against each other and don’t mean it in a sexual way, you might be doing it wrong. 

Really, has any generation heretofore been so confused?

This is my favorite part of the article:

Kris Martin, the founder of the Blackboard Music dances at the Masonic Temple, is … starting to think the dancing is too raunchy. He would like to see less dirty dancing, but he understands why kids do it.

“If kids knew how to dance, if they knew something beyond freak dancing, they would do it,” he says. “The boys dance like this because it’s the only way they know how. With the girl turned away from them, she can’t see them looking like an idiot when they dance.”

As my husband said, “It’s understandable why teenagers fornicate.  If you don’t have stylish clothes, it’s easier to just be naked.”  (Yes, he did use the word fornicate.  Got a problem with that, squares?)

I’m just old-fashioned enough to think that schools might not be doing their jobs if they’re not forcing students to go underground with their filthy Patrick Swayze-and-Jennifer-Grey ways, but what really troubles me is that these kids are either a) really shamefully disingenuous, or b) really shamefully confused about what sex is like.  (If they were inclined to dance in a “sexual” way, how would they go about it?  Has sex really changed that much since I started having it?  Maybe I don’t want to know the answer.)  Either way, I fear for the future of human sexuality.

So Tyra Banks is supposed to be fat now.  Do you know that I was only dimly aware of who Tyra Banks was before she allegedly got fat?  Anyway, I’m always interested in famous ladies getting fat because usually it’s famous ladies getting thin that’s on all the tabloids.  So how fat is Tyra Banks now?  Well, according to my sources, she is 5′10″ and weighs 161 pounds.  Hm.

Okay.  I’m 5′7″ and for a few months after Girlfriend was born, I weighed 161 pounds.  If Tyra Banks is fat at 5′10″ and 161 pounds, then I must have been morbidly obese.  Why didn’t my doctor say anything???  I’m so glad I lost all that baby weight and can go back to just being fat again.  I’m also glad to know I have a body that’s as good as a (former) supermodel’s.  Yay.

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Are our senators effing morons?That’s the question I must ask when they spend all this time working on passage of a nonbinding resolution opposing Pres. Bush’s troop-buildup plan.  I can appreciate arguments against the war and against the troop buildup; I’m not trying to impugn anyone’s love of country or whatever.  I just don’t see the point of this nonbinding resolution.  If you oppose the troop buildup, you should, oh, I don’t know, maybe not fund it?  If you think the war in Iraq is unwinnable, perhaps you should bring the troops home without delay.  What on earth do you need a nonbinding resolution officially opposing the troop buildup for?

Dear Enemies,

Just a note to let you all know that even though we’re still in Iraq and have no intention of taking any meaningful action to end the war, we are firmly against sending more troops.  Not so firmly, of course, that we will actually stop the troops from being sent anyway, but you know what we mean.  Just wanted to be clear that as far as we’re concerned, it’s just a matter of time before you can claim victory.  Meanwhile, try not to blow up any more of our guys than you have to.  Thanks!

Love, John Warner, Chuck Hegel et al

Reefreakingdiculous.

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Update on yesterday’s post:  Princess Zurg’s play date has been rescheduled for this afternoon.  Her friend’s mother works crazy hours, never sleeps, etc., and she just plain forgot about the date.  (She was working yesterday afternoon, which was why I couldn’t reach her.)  Anyway, she apologized profusely, and PZ is fine now–unless, of course, a meteor strikes the earth and we have to cancel this one, too.

There’s a popular saying that goes, “If you’re a conservative in your twenties, you have no heart.  If you’re not a conservative in your thirties, you have no brains.”  It’s frequently attributed to Winston Churchill, but I don’t know that he ever actually said it.  I don’t really care, because it’s actually a popular saying only among two groups of people:  those who were liberal in their twenties and conservative in their thirties, and those who have always been conservative and aren’t offended by the implication that they’re heartless. 

I belong to the first group, but I’m not fond of the saying.  I didn’t like it in my brainless twenties, and I don’t like it in my heartless thirties.  Looking back on my twenties, I’m not terribly proud of my track record as a humanitarian, even though I had all the so-called bleeding-heart ideals.  Actually, I have a hard time thinking of them as ideals anymore.  They were more like fantasies.  That’s painful to say, but heck, I’m heartless now, so I can take it. 

The interesting thing is that as my opinions have been re-shaped by experience and a healthy dose of reality, I am still frequently accused of being an idealist.  The truth is that I feel more like an idealist now than I ever did before, and as much as humanity depresses me sometimes, I’m more hopeful about the future than I’ve ever been in my life.  I recognize that my hope is based on a religious faith, so–being incapable of purging the cynicism that’s flowed through my veins since childhood–I’m not terribly optimistic about persuading others to share that faith.  My evangelistic streak is sadly deficient.

One episode from my twenties that I cannot export from my consciousness, no matter how hard I’ve tried, happened while I was working as an editorial assistant at my old newspaper.  As the low (wo)man on the totem pole, I edited a column called “Helping Hands,” which consisted of a series of short blurbs on volunteer opportunities in the community.  It ran on Saturdays, if we had space.  And because I was the low (wo)man on the totem pole, I was also in charge of fielding calls from individuals who wanted to be profiled in the Helping Hands columns, to solicit donations from the community. 

This isn’t unheard of in the newspaper business–it’s called a human interest story, and we’ve all seen stories like that in the newspaper.  Unfortunately, stories of that nature weren’t in my domain, nor were they in the domain of my department, which was the Lifestyles section.  Stories about plucky orphans with cancer who needed bone marrow transplants usually fell to reporters in Metro.  But the reporters in Metro were too busy to listen to every sob story in the naked city, so such phone calls inevitably found their way back to me, the person in charge of telling people in crisis that we were terribly sorry but we just couldn’t help them.  We were a newspaper, not a welfare office.  (I wasn’t supposed to say that last part out loud.)

There was one caller that made my job extremely unpleasant.  She was an older woman, a diabetic, who had myriad medical and financial issues, the most pressing of which was that her refrigerator wasn’t working properly and she had no place to safely store her insulin.  She called every Monday.  If I wasn’t in, she left a message.  If I didn’t respond, she’d call again on Tuesday.  She didn’t take I’m-terribly-sorry-but-we-can’t-help-you for an answer.  When I came back to work after my honeymoon, there was a message from her, informing me that while I was off galavanting, she had spent the weekend in the hospital.  She just wanted me to know that.

I talked about this woman several times to my editor, who said that yes, this was indeed sad, but you know, there are organizations out there for helping people in her situation, and the newspaper just isn’t the appropriate institution to render assistance of this kind.  She did not, however, offer to explain this personally to the poor sick woman who was stalking me and my stupid column. 

That I’ve forgotten this woman’s name is no great mystery.  I didn’t like her.  I felt sorry for her.  I felt frustrated over my inability to think of a way to help her, even if it wasn’t, technically, my job.  But she wasn’t one of those unfortunate souls that just endear themselves to you.  She was a mean, cranky pain in the neck, and every time she called to inform me that she’d lived to see another Saturday (no thanks to me) in which her plight did not appear in the Helping Hands column and that she hoped I could sleep at night because she certainly wouldn’t be able to if she were in my place, I found myself wishing that she would just go ahead and die already.  Not a pretty moment for the bleeding-heart liberal or the self-professed Christian, but that’s how it was.

Because I don’t like feeling guilty, and I certainly dislike feeling unrighteous, I felt obligated to help, but I was young and inexperienced in poverty management.  If I didn’t know where this lady was supposed to turn for assistance, why should she?  The few paltry ideas I had did not pan out–one was a dead end, and the others I just didn’t follow up on.  I was pre-occupied with other things, like so many of us are.  One Monday she called, and when I heard her voice, I laid the receiver on my desk and continued working.  A few minutes later I picked the phone back up and dropped it in the cradle.  I would never hear from her again, but at the moment I was too relieved to be ashamed of myself.

In an ideal world, every diabetic would have a working refrigerator to keep her insulin in.  We don’t live in an ideal world, of course.  People have needs, and the needy are not always sympathetic creatures.  In fact, they’re frequently not.  It shouldn’t matter.  Just because you’re mean and cranky doesn’t mean you should die alone.  Everyone I spoke to about this woman said the same thing:  that there were programs and organizations out there for helping people in her situation–weren’t there?  In my most frustrated moments, I would wonder, didn’t this woman have any family?  Friends?  Concerned neighbors?  A church?  Any sort of community she could turn to for support?  Obviously not.  When you’re calling a snot-nosed editorial assistant at the local paper to vent spleen about how no one cares about you, you obviously have no one else to turn to.  And whose fault is that?

The following is an excerpt from an op-ed piece in today’s Oregonian by Oregon superintendent of public instruction Susan Castillo:

We’ve all heard “All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten.”  This simple truth, that kindergarten is fundamental to lifelong learning, made author Robert Fulghum a multimillionaire.

In Oregon, the title would be “Half of What I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”–because only about 15 percent of our students are in full-day programs. [...]

Research, and the experience of other states, has shown that full-day kindergarten builds academic and social readiness for first grade.  In addition, these gains last throughout the early school years.  [...]

Full-day kindergarten is also a wise long-term investment.  If America is going to keep its competitive edge in the 21st century as technology and globalization transform the world we live in, we need to support education.

Of course, we need to invest more in our high schools, community colleges and universities, but if you really want to increase the number of engineers in the pipeline, you need to introduce kids to math and science when they’re 5 and 6.

Okay, where to begin.  I’m rather at a loss for words.  I just don’t know how many ways I can say it.

It’s.  KINDERGARTEN!

Let me make it clear from the outset:  I understand that many children start school at a disadvantage.  I also understand that our public school system in Oregon (and many other states) has serious problems.  My life is not so sheltered that I am oblivious to the struggles that people outside my small bubble face.

I happen to be a big fan of public education–at least in theory.  In practice I see way too many knuckleheaded educators who think the key to long-term success is cramming mass quantities of book-learning down kids’ throats at the earliest possible age.  (That and a personal computer in every kindergarten teacher’s lap.  Preferably an iBook.)  When Princess Zurg started kindergarten, her school was starting a new “intensive kindergarten” program for students who were “at risk.”  Understand that by “at risk” they did not mean at risk of winding up in prison by the third grade or at risk of going to bed hungry every night or at risk of flunking out of school before they hit puberty.  They meant “at risk” of not being able to read when they entered first grade.

Remember when they didn’t even start teaching kids to read until first grade?  If you’re younger than I am, probably not.  But for years and years and years that was standard practice.  Children didn’t used to go to kindergarten at all.  Those who did spent most of their time in the sandbox and eating paste.  Many of them started first grade not knowing their ABC’s.  And yet, by some miracle, most not only learned how to read but also graduated from high school, got jobs, and lived very successful lives.  (And hold on to your hats, kids–some of them…were even bottle-fed.  True story.  God’s witness.)

When I told a friend about PZ’s school’s “intensive kindergarten,” she said, “Well, they probably figure that these at-risk children are better off spending the day in kindergarten than at home or the day care center.”  She assumed that “at-risk” implied some kind of serious neglect, but this was hardly the case.  At that time we lived in an area that had a lot of low-income and Spanish-speaking families.  But low income and Spanish as a first language are not forms of neglect.  Also, while nearly all of the Spanish-speaking students qualified for “intensive kindergarten” intervention, most of the students who qualified were not Spanish-speaking.  PZ was one of only three kindergarten students who did not qualify for intensive kindergarten.  I talked to some parents of children who did qualify.  They were upset that their five-year-olds who had never attended any kind of school before were suddenly being thrust into a six-hour day of intensive academic training.  What part of “they’re five” did the school not understand?

Five-year-olds do not need to know how to read.  It’s nice if five-year-olds can read, but it’s not necessary.  Princess Zurg could read at five.  Has Princess Zurg been more successful in school than the children at her kindergarten who couldn’t read?  I think not.  PZ has yet to master the stuff that Robert Fulghum considers the key to success in life itself.  Stuff like “share everything.”  “Play fair.”  “Don’t hit people.”  “Clean up your own mess.”  Not a word in there about knowing how to read or do long division.  Nothing about “mouse skills.”  None of the stuff that usually comes up when people talk about preparing our kids for “competing in today’s global economy.”

Seriously.  Seriously, people.  Your five-year-olds do not have to worry about competing in today’s global economy.  They.  Are.  Children.  They need to eat a good breakfast and brush their teeth.  They don’t need to spend all freaking day in school.  They don’t need more instructional time.  They need more free time to discover things on their own.  They need more recess.  They don’t need their own computers.  They don’t need the burden of our nation’s economy on their shoulders before they’ve even entered the first grade.

If America is going to “keep its competitive edge,” it needs to have an educated workforce.  And it is so important for kids to start well.  But “starting well” has more to do with Robert Fulghum’s kindergarten curriculum than with No Child Left Behind.  (Do not get me started.  I am already worked up.)  Intensifying math and science instruction at age five (or six) is not going to increase the number of engineers “in the pipeline”–not if students are burnt out on school before they’re old enough to learn the stuff they need to know to be “competitive” later on in life.  I am sick to death of this attitude that the primary years of grammar school are your destiny.  Actually, I’m sick to death of this attitude that school itself is the primary factor in how well you do in life.

My older sister didn’t learn to read well until the fifth grade.  Did it damage her self-esteem and shake her academic self-confidence?  Absolutely.  She’s felt intellectually inferior her whole life.  Is she intellectually inferior?  No.  Did she drop out of school?  No.  She reads perfectly fine now and has her own business and runs her home with way more efficiency than her college-educated sister.  Her family has been through some financial struggles, to be sure.  But so have lots of other families I know–families where both parents went to college, some got Ph.D.’s and all of whom are in debt up to their eyeballs.  (My sister, incidentally, is not up to her eyeballs in debt because, despite the fact that she never had intensive kindergarten, she learned enough math to know that you don’t spend more than you earn.  How she managed that feat, heaven only knows.)  There is more to success in life than getting good grades in school.  There’s definitely more than getting good grades in kindergarten.  Freaking.  Kindergarten.  I’m sorry, but I can’t stop saying it!

I am beginning to understand why Idaho elected a homeschooler as its superintendent of schools.  Maybe there’s hope for that state after all.

There’s only one reason for a five-year-old to be in school all day:  he has no place else to go.  And if a five-year-old has no place else to go but school, he has bigger problems than math and science can solve.   I am 100 percent in favor of funding education.  I am 100 percent in favor of supporting families and helping parents support their children.  I am ZERO percent in favor of this ridiculous hand-wringing over not having enough five-year-olds in school continuously between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.  It’s stupid.  What part of “they’re five” do people not understand?

EDIT: 

I do think full-day kindergarten is a fine option–some children are ready for full-day school (especially if they’ve been in pre-school a couple years) and as several of you have pointed out, it’s convenient for parents who have to work all day (public school being much cheaper than childcare, for one thing)–but I’m against making it the standard.  And I’m totally against the notion that it makes for smarter, more successful (and “competitive”) human beings because that just isn’t true.  It’s not the program I hate–it’s the lies!

Respect for the office of the President of the United States–regardless of the individual who holds it–has declined sharply over the last, I dunno, thirty years.  It started with Nixon, fell off a little more with Reagan, and really hit an all-time low with Clinton.  I saw it in the way people responded to Ronald Reagan’s funeral, an occasion which should have inspired some decorum.  I understand lots of people didn’t care for his administration–rich people having money, Iran-Contra, homosexuals dying of AIDS, etc.–but instead of just letting the man rest in peace for a few days, some people just couldn’t resist poking him with the proverbial stick and pointing out that here he was dead and still deficit-spending.  I also saw it in the way some conservative commentators responded to President Bush and Former President Bush joining the lovefest that was the dedication of Bill Clinton’s library.  As if it would have been real classy to, say, not show up, or criticize his foreign policy, or, I dunno, tell Monica Lewinsky jokes.  I mean, come on, people.  He’s out of office and he can’t run again.  Just calm down already.

But I think we have finally hit rock bottom with this new movie, Death of a President, a fictional documentary–or could we call it a speculative documentary?  or a speculative-fiction documentary?–about the 2007 assassination of George W. Bush.  In our defense, it isn’t an American film.  It was made by a British dude for the BBC.  (Interesting to note that he didn’t choose to depict the assassination of Bush’s celebrated “lapdog,” Tony Blair–but then, I think that might have gotten him into some sort of legal trouble over there.  Ever spend time in a British gaol?  ::Shudder::  Actually, I just like having an excuse to type “gaol.”)  But the critical reception has been disheartening.  It tends toward something along the lines of, “Well, it’s not like he’s advocating the assassination of the President.”  Which is quite true–I mean, I think that’s pretty much illegal everywhere–but it strikes me as a somewhat lame rationalization.  I don’t think it would be in especially good taste to make a film chronicling an alternate history in the wake of a Clinton assassination (especially since it would be made by right-wing Republicans, who are notorious for their lack of artistic flair*), and he’s not even in office anymore.  I think that given the volatility of the current situation, it is even less cool to make a film about a future assassination of a sitting POTUS.  I can’t fully articulate it, but it just strikes me as offensive and wrong.

I must admit, though, that my reaction is almost entirely intellectual.  What strikes me about this film’s existence is that it doesn’t outrage me.  I know I seem even-keeled most of the time (no comments from the peanut gallery, please), but I am rather given to outrage and moral indignation.  I just need the right trigger, if you’ll pardon the expression.  (Don’t hurt me, NSA.  I’m on your side!)  I really don’t like the idea of this movie, although it’s certainly intriguing from an artistic standpoint–and that’s just my point.  The strongest condemnation that comes to mind readily is that it just seems gratuitously rude.  But I think I should be feeling more than that.  I’m an old-fashioned kind of gal, and respect for the presidential office is an old-fashioned notion.  Maybe I look at this crap and think, well, it’s just par for the course.  The world’s going to hell in a handbag anyway, so what’s a little Presidential-assassination cinema?  Just a drop in the bucket of sewer refuse that is modern political discourse.  Oh look, there’s my moral indignation.  So that’s where I put it.  Whew.  I thought I lost you.

What do you all think?  The flick’s not in wide release, but do you have to see it before rendering an opinion on its premise?  I’m curious.

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* Also, their casting choices would be limited to Bruce Willis, Kelsey Grammer and Bo Derek, none of whom would make a convincing Bill Clinton.  Unless they could get Arnold to come out of retirement–you know, since he’s constitutionally forbidden to be President in real life–in which case, that might conceivably be awesome.  Except for the whole bad-taste thing, of course.  Except that Arnold would never let himself get assassinated, so that really would be an interesting premise.  Never mind.

I read a story in the Oregonian this morning about a man who just pleaded guilty to beating his girlfriend (the mother of his daughter) to death.  The woman’s autopsy showed signs of severe abuse over the last year. 

 At the sentencing hearing, the woman’s parents made statements.  The defendant also made a statement, in which he said he was glad to be foregoing a trial so that he wouldn’t have to spend three or four years in the county jail.  He also told the woman’s parents that they needed to accept responsibility for failing to protect their daughter from him.  He accused them of “backing out of her life.” 

So long as he’s pointing the finger at people who didn’t brutally murder the mother of his child, I don’t know why he doesn’t blame his dead girlfriend for not keeping herself away from him.  Indeed, she didn’t demonstrate such hot parenting skills herself when she chose to procreate with him and expose her daughter to such a twisted model of family life.  But that would be blaming the victim.  For some reason, blaming the victims who are still alive is so much less gauche.

I can’t dispute that this murderer’s message to the parents is a horrible thing to say to people who have lost a loved one.  I would be less than honest, though, if I claimed that a similar thought never crept into my head.  To my credit, I suppose, I dismissed it as that natural but immoral tendency to psychologically protect ourselves against the possibility that our own children will ever come to harm.  Who knows why this women hooked up with this cretin?  I certainly don’t know what lengths her parents did or did not go to encourage her to leave him, to advocate for her safety.  I do know that they didn’t break her jaw or strangle her, so we shouldn’t be too harsh on them.

Why should we treat a grown woman like a child and wonder where her parents were when she was getting the crap kicked out of her?  For the record, this woman’s parents lived in another state and didn’t approve of their daughter’s relationship with the murderer.  Disapproved seems such an inadequate strategy in hindsight, but what should they have done instead?  Sued for custody of their granddaughter, perhaps, but beyond that, I don’t know.

So that story is effed-up.  Just another anecdote from the world where people don’t live or think in ways that make sense.  My own mother was a victim of domestic violence (by her first husband, not my father), but she left when she got pregnant–moved back in with her parents, actually.  Why didn’t she stay?  Because she was stronger or smarter than the average woman?  I don’t think so.  I think she just wanted to live.  And she trusted her parents to help her do that.  Who knows what this poor dead woman wanted or how she thought she might get it.

Why is this sticking in my brain today?  I assure you I do not suspect an epidemic of people thinking like this murdering SOB and holding parents and homicide victims responsible for the tragedies that befall them.  I am just reminded of the political ads I saw last night about Measure 43, Oregon’s proposed parental-notification abortion law.

The pro-notification ad:  A teenager is chatting on her cell-phone with her mother, who is at work (a nice blue-collar waittressing job).  The girl tells her mother she’s at the library, but she’s really at an abortion clinic.  She sounds like she wants to tell her mother something, but she insists that everything’s fine and she’s just checking in.  When they hang up, the mother looks perplexed and worried.  The girl looks nervous and sad.  (Her boyfriend, who is at the abortion clinic with her, also looks less than thrilled, but mostly looks like he just doesn’t have a job.)

The ad is somewhat manipulative.  The girl is frequently shot from a distance, with a tray of surgical tools in the foreground.  All that’s missing is a creepy guy in a white coat, snapping on plastic gloves, smirking.  With drill sounds in the background.  (What is the drill for?  I don’t know, but it would be scary.)  The take-home message is, “This could be your daughter, caring and concerned parent–scared, confused, and for all intents and purposes, alone.”  It’s a persuasive argument.  It’s hard to imagine any teen girl finding out she’s pregnant and saying, “Awesome!  I so can’t wait to tell Mom and Dad!”  It’s easy to imagine a teen girl choosing a secret abortion because she’s embarrassed or she doesn’t want to disappoint her parents or whatever. 

It’s also easy to imagine a teen girl choosing a secret abortion because she lives in an abusive home environment and fears for her safety if her abusive parents discover the truth.  This is where the anti-43 ad gets manipulative, since it claims that the measure makes no exceptions for rape or incest.  In order to bypass the parental notification requirement, a girl must have a private hearing with an administrative law judge, which–as the anti-43 ad points out–can be a bureaucratic nightmare for anyone, but especially for a scared and confused teenage girl.  (I mean, rape is bad enough, but dear God, spare us the bureaucrats.  Have these conservative Christians no mercy?)

This debate is only superficially about the welfare of pregnant teenagers.  Since Roe v. Wade, the public ethics discussion on abortion has been effectively surrendered to the extremists.  Measures like 43 are largely symbolic for both sides, but no one wants to admit it. 

People against parental notification are fond of saying that you can’t force good communication between parents and their children.  In other words, if your daughter won’t tell you she’s pregnant and she ends up having an abortion, it’s your own fault.  Don’t ask the state to do the job you failed at.  They invoke the image of a frightened teenager seeking an illegal and unsafe abortion rather than risking abuse (or, in some cases, discomfort) from her parents.  That’s a scary image.  You don’t want your daughter to die, God forbid, just because she didn’t trust you. 

An equally scary image (for most parents, as most parents support notification laws) is a teenager undergoing an abortion alone–possibly an abortion she doesn’t really want, but that she is choosing because her boyfriend wants her to have one–just because she doesn’t trust her parents, parents who may in fact be perfectly trustworthy.  (Contrary to what some would have you believe, most parents in our culture don’t beat their daughters and throw them out of the house upon learning of their pregnancies.  No, not even in evangelical Christian households.)  Just as parents are notorious for underestimating the amount of trouble their kids can get into, teenagers are notorious for underestimating their parents’ love and compassion. 

True, you can’t enforce healthy family relationships by law.  Not any more than you can force grown women to abandon destructive and dangerous relationships.  The real question is what our default position will be–that parents are part of the problem or that they are part of the solution?

Brad Pitt announced a while back that he and Angelina Jolie wouldn’t be getting married until same-sex couples are allowed to marry legally in the U.S.  Donald Trump recently commented on this announcement:

“Maybe he’s just come up with an excellent way to stay a bachelor. It makes him look really concerned about the plight of other people. Yet at the same time, he doesn’t have to get married. This guy is smarter than I thought.”

As always, I appreciate the Donald’s insight, but I think he’s a little off in this case.  I think Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have no intention of ever getting married, and they’re getting sick of everyone asking them about it, so this is their socially-conscious way of saying, “When hell freezes over.  Hey, wanna buy a picture of our baby?”

It’s not even that original, because some other movie star said the same thing–I think it was Charlize Theron, but I’m not sure and I’m too lazy to google it.  Whatever.  I don’t feel personally invested in whether or not Brad Pitt or Charlize Theron marries anybody in the first place, but I don’t buy their little solidarity-with-our-gay-brothers-and-sisters line.  I think it’s lame. 

Really, what a meaningless, nonsensical gesture.  Even more ridiculous than Gloria Steinem saying she wouldn’t marry until the ERA passed.  (Sometime around age 60 she realized that it was never going to pass, and figured that, having already enhanced her feminist image with the whole “vote pro-choice, get one free grope” proclamation, tying the knot in defiance of her previous vow would make her even more progressive.)  At least Gloria could argue that she was rejecting marriage because it was personally disadvantageous to her as a woman (describing it as a perfect institution for “one-and-a-half people”).  Straight people boycotting marriage until gay people can get married just doesn’t make any sense.  Is Brad Pitt going to stop eating until all the hungry people in the world are fed?  Is he going to stop using public toilets until the line for the ladies’ room gets shorter?  How deep does his empathy run?

I don’t know, perhaps gay people really are getting all dewy-eyed over Brad Pitt feeling their pain.  I just don’t get it.  If this were the ’50s, would Brad Pitt announce that he was no longer going to vote until all the Jim Crow laws were repealed?  How does not getting married help same-sex couples one iota?  Oh dear, no one’s getting married anymore!  The bridal boutiques are going out of business and ruining the economy!  We must lobby Congress and get those discriminatory laws repealed before our entire society collapses!

Stupid.

Speaking of marriage, though–almost ten years after Sugar Daddy and I wed, just as easy and carefree as if we were tossing styrofoam drink cups out our car window on the highway, with no regard for the suffering of others–I have learned something new about my husband.  To wit, he doesn’t like Asian pears.  I know.  What’s that about?  Some friends of ours have an Asian pear tree in their yard, and they gave us a whole bag of Asian pears, but SD didn’t eat any of them because he “doesn’t care for them.” 

How is it possible that any husband of mine does not enjoy Asian pears?  He might say it’s possible in the same respect that I happen not to like olives.  But that makes no sense because olives are DEE-SGUS-TING, whilst Asian pears are a perfectly delicious food.  One of those mysteries of life, I suppose.  Anyway, Princess Zurg and I ate all the Asian pears, and now I miss them.  That’s all.  I just had to share that with somebody, because my husband doesn’t understand.

Just to make sure there are no misunderstandings of yesterday’s blog post, I want you all to know that I am not philosophically opposed to colleges and universities providing sexual health resources to their students, even if that means distributing free condoms in the school’s colors.  I think that last thing is silly, but if that’s the way schools want to run things, bully for them.  The only thing I object to is characterizing this micro-management as “treating students like adults.” 

I don’t care how old you are, or what your maturity level is–if someone wants to give you free condoms specifically because (s)he’s afraid you wouldn’t use them otherwise, that person is not treating you like an adult.  That person is treating you like you’re an irresponsible kid, and I have some more news for you:  If the only reason you’re not using a condom is because someone hasn’t offered you one on a silver platter at no charge, you ARE an irresponsible kid.  Congratulations!  You’re also an idiot.  Now don’t drink and drive.

Some of you may think it naive of me to assume that the vast majority of 18-year-olds have at least a basic understanding of sex and its attendant risks.  I admit that I lead a sheltered life, so I need it explained to me how ANYONE who lives in the United States in the year 2006 can reach the age of 18 and NOT know these things.  I’m not even talking about anything as complicated as sperm fertilizing egg or the anatomically correct names for female reproductive parts.  I’m saying I would be astonished beyond all my means of expressing it if every freshman entering college this year didn’t understand at least the following:

1.  That there’s this thing called sex, and it involves those parts of your body covered (ideally) by a bathing suit

2.  That sex is far and away the leading case of pregnancy

3.  That unpleasant diseases can be spread via sexual contact

4.  That there are means of preventing or minimizing the risk of pregnancy and unpleasant diseases

5.  That there are means of learning what those means may be

That’s all.  No fancy Kama Sutra/Taking Charge of Your Fertility stuff.  Just old-fashioned common knowledge, with a side order of common sense.

I don’t doubt that most parents don’t talk to their kids about sex.  Mine didn’t talk to me.  I also don’t doubt that many schools have sub-par sex education programs.  Perhaps there still exist schools that have no sex education programs.  I’m sure lots of 18-year-olds have received misinformation from their peers.  I just don’t believe they’ve received so little correct information–if only by osmosis–that we can’t hold them responsible for their own choices.  That’s what adulthood means.  I’m not talking about high-minded notions of maturity.  I’m talking about accountability–the proposition that no matter how stupid and immature you are, you are responsible for the decisions you make.  That’s adulthood.  That’s treating someone like an adult.

I’ve never seen any compelling evidence for the argument that young people have unprotected sex because they don’t have access to condoms or don’t know what condoms are for.  I think young people have unprotected sex for the same reason older people have unprotected sex:  because they’d rather risk the consequences than think about them.  Young people are especially into that whole “spontaneity” thing because they think they’re invincible.  But this is not an ignorance problem so much as an impulse-control problem.

Centusceolis made the point that young people don’t have a lot of experience with freedom until they leave home.  This is true, but it isn’t really the problem.  The problem is that young people don’t have a lot of experience with responsibility.  Or, as my husband put it, “The problem is not an abysmal lack of sex ed in the schools, but an abysmal lack of life ed.“

I would fully support a movement to require all high school seniors to pass a “life skills” course before they could graduate.  It would involve stuff like learning how to balance a checkbook, how interest works, how to get a job, and how to find a doctor or a Planned Parenthood or a freaking public library if you want to know what sex is all about.  They could have field trips to the local drugstore and walk down the family planning aisle.  Read the backs of the boxes, kids–you’re bound to put two and two together eventually.

Because the consequences can be so dire, and because luck is such a big factor in deciding who “pays” for ill-considered actions and who “gets away with it,” it’s tempting to try to remove as much of the risk factor as possible.  Which is fine, if that’s the strategy you want to use.  Just don’t delude yourself into thinking that you’re initiating kids into adulthood.  Adults aren’t entitled to that much coddling.  And real adults don’t want it.

Trojan has released its first “Sexual Health Report Card,” and Oregon State University gets high marks.  (Hat tip:  Steve Duin of the Oregonian.)  It ranks fifth in a survey of 100 universities, which were graded on availability of condoms, contraceptives, testing, outreach, advice and sexual assault services.  (I don’t know about that last one.  Is that what the kids are calling it these days?)

Each school received a grade-point average.  Yale got a 4.0 (psh–what do you expect from those overachievers?), and OSU got a 3.4 (not bad for a school that ranks 87th on Washington Monthly’s school rankings), while University of Oregon got a 1.3 (quack quack!).  UO is where SD went to grad school, of course, during which I had two of our four children.  Just imagine, if we’d gone to OSU, Mister Bubby and Elvis might never have been born–and SD’s Ph.D. wouldn’t be worth the condom it was printed on.  But I digress.

Brigham Young University finished dead last, scoring failing grades in every category.  I have only two words for that.  Go Cougs!

BYU is one of the 76 schools surveyed that doesn’t provide free condoms.  (The students don’t really need them.  Guys on that campus only want one thing:  a wife.)  OSU is one of 24 campuses that does offer free condoms, thanks to student fees (woo-hoo!).  Campus health educator Malinda Shell says, “Part of our job is to make safer sex exciting.  We try to make things a little more interesting for students who are sexually active.”  Which is why OSU’s condoms are orange and black.  “You can show your school spirit at all times.”

UO’s director of health promotion, Paula Staight, says, “In college, we’re about risk reduction and harm reduction and not about abstinence.  The students are 18.  They’re adults.  We treat them as such.”

I’m going to pause the blog here and let you all read that last paragraph again.  Got it?  Okay, I’ll go ahead then.

Ahem.

“Adults” know how to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.  They’ve either had the birds and bees talk with their folks, taken sex ed in high school, watched a very special episode of Boy Meets World, or they’ve read a book or Cosmo article or two.  “Adults” are mature enough to take responsibility for their own sexual health.  They don’t walk around like horny doofuses, oblivious to what causes that swelling in their midsection or the burning sensation when they urinate.  “Adults” also understand that sex has emotional and psychological dimensions to it, with attendant issues that cannot be addressed by contraceptives and HIV testing.  And, most importantly–

“ADULTS” CAN BUY THEIR OWN FREAKING CONDOMS!!!

And here’s another newsflash, Jethro:  If you think the youngsters need university bureaucracy to make sex more interesting, you’ve been in academia way too long. 

Have you heard (or read) about this?

GreenStone Media Launches Talk Programming for Women

Susan Ness, GreenStone’s President and CEO, says, “This is radio that is designed to help women navigate all aspects of their lives – from current events to balancing work and family, to healthcare and education – we’re providing an inviting place to relax and enjoy insightful and engaging discussion without turning people off.”

Does anybody else remember the old Phil Donahue show?  For most of the years he was on TV, he did shows about complex and controversial political and social issues.  He did a lot of “hard news” topics, such as global politics and the like .  His audience was almost entirely women.  He was buried, of course, by Oprah.  But I remember when Oprah won the Emmy for best daytime talk show, or whatever, she thanked Donahue for his pioneer work, for believing that women really were interested in more than just fashion and the usual fluffy entertainments usually peddled to women.

Since I haven’t watched her show in about fifteen years, I consulted the web site to see what Oprah is talking about these days.  A sampling:

“Tell us about YOUR FAVORITE PIZZA place!”

“Are you a WEIGHT LOSS SUCCESS story?”

“Do You Want To Meet a Hot Celebrity?”

“Stuck in the Middle of a Decorating Project?”

“Have You Let Yourself Go?”

To be fair, Oprah is also doing shows about bullying, divorce and getting older.  But still, I’m not seeing anything about Iraq, national security, or Medicare reform–I’m just picking topics out of the air here, stuff I imagine old Phil would be talking about if Oprah had never moved to Chicago and gone into broadcasting.  Of course, Oprah is Oprah and not Donahue; she has her own style.  Her program appeals to millions of women.  Most of the men I know would rather stick themselves in the eye with hot pokers than watch Oprah.

I find Oprah’s show more appealing than a hot poker in the eye.  I mean, don’t get me wrong–I’m a girl, and I appreciate a good makeover show as much as the next person (provided the next person’s also a girl).  But in general shows like Oprah’s don’t interest me.  I’m more interested in the so-called “women’s topics” than men are, but I don’t want to meet a hot celebrity or talk about decorating or how people lose weight.  That just doesn’t engage me. 

I listen to talk radio because they talk about serious stuff that’s going on in the world.  (They talk about fringe leftist movements sometimes, too, but you know, we all need a little ear candy from time to time.)  I rather enjoy the debate aspect.  I feel that my talk radio needs are already being served fairly well.  I’m not sure what a “talk network for women” would offer, unless it’s anything like Oxygen and Lifetime’s “television for women.”  Not to be overly cynical, but usually when they try to make stuff more “appealing to women,” they end up making it much less substantive and a lot more–well, a lot dumber, frankly.

So there’s this new study that Dan the Theologian alluded to yesterday (too far back in the archives for me to dig up, sorry) that concludes that men are, on average, more intelligent than women.  Michael Medved also discussed this study on his talk show yesterday.  Several women called in to take issue with the study’s conclusions.  Shocking, I know.  On a side note, here’s a little tip if you want to come off as an intelligent woman:  don’t cite the fact that you and your daughter or sister or whoever are really good at math and science, so this study must be baloney.  You and all the women you know aren’t a scientific sample.  But back to the topic at hand–I don’t know if this study is right or wrong, and I actually think that I don’t care.  It really makes no nevermind to me how the average or mean intelligence of women stacks up to the average or mean intelligence of men.  Men and women are still individuals.  If females do in fact have less innate intelligence when it comes to math, that isn’t an excuse for not teaching females math.  For one thing, some females certainly are good at math.  More importantly, though, even a person who does not have a talent for math can learn to do math competently.  That person will never become a mathematician or make great contributions in the world of math, but she (or he) can become smarter by working harder at things that don’t come easily to them. 

I’m not a brilliant mathematics student myself.  I did enjoy math while I was in school.  When I was a senior in college, my calculus professor introduced me to his wife by saying, “This is Mad.  She’s one of my best students.  She could have been a math major.”  Well, he flattered me.  I’m not sure he was right, but if he had told me as much when I was, say, a sophomore, I would definitely have pursued math with greater vigor than I did.  Still, I would venture to say that I’m better at math than most of the men I know–provided those men aren’t engineers.  Which would exclude most of the men I know, so never mind.  Let’s say I would venture to say that I’m better at math than the average man, if only because I’ve worked harder at it. 

What does this have to do with Oprah or talk radio?  Even I wouldn’t listen to a radio program about math (though it might be more interesting than a show about women who’ve let themselves go).  But Michael Medved’s assertion was that, given that the topics for “women’s programming” are generally much less substantive than those for general (or “male-centric”) programming, women who are interested in substantive topics–and hard stuff, like math–must be the exception rather than the rule.  He acknowledged that he himself was married to such an exceptional woman (who unfortunately was not around to offer her take on the subject).  I know my husband also considers me an exceptional woman in many aspects, which I haven’t always found necessarily flattering.  When women in general are belittled, it’s hard for an individual woman not to feel belittled herself.  On the other hand, I can’t stand most of what passes for “women’s programming.”  It’s just so…dumb.  Are most women really not interested in moving out of the “women’s news” ghetto?

Watch this space for a snide remark from my husband about GFCI.

In President Bush’s 9/11 speech on Monday, he said  that he believes all humans have a natural yearning to be free.  Dennis Prager said he wasn’t sure this was true.  After all, the Israelites were only out in the desert for a couple days before they started complaining to Moses that they had it better in Egypt.  Let’s say that Moses story isn’t true.  I still think it’s debatable whether humans really have a natural yearning for freedom.

I think the right to be free is a natural right, in that God created us free and we should be free.  I also believe that since true happiness requires taking responsibility for your own life, and truly taking responsibility requires freedom, then we can only be happy insofar as we embrace our own freedom.  That said, while I think some human beings naturally desire to be free, I don’t think all human beings instinctively want freedom.  In my observation, even Americans only desire freedom so long as it involves minimal risks.  It’s all “give me liberty or give me death” until someone has to pay a doctor bill or plan his retirement.

Of course, we’re talking about competing values, freedom versus security.  Every sane person has to make compromises to achieve a healthy balance between the two.  That some people can tolerate more freedom that others does not by itself disprove that people naturally desire freedom.  I think I come down on the side that says freedom is ultimately more valuable than security, but humans are more naturally drawn to security, which is why freedom is a value that must be inculcated in people. 

What do you think?

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Meanwhile, on The View Rosie O’Donnell, that great political commentator, responded to President Bush’s speech by criticizing his foreign policy, particularly the war in Iraq.  Among other things, she said, “You’ll never bring peace at the hands of war.”

This is one of those platitudes that sounds really profound when you first hear it.  Then you turn thirteen, and suddenly it just isn’t as deep as you once thought.

It’s one thing to beleive that war is wrong.  I recently read about a study that indicated a majority–something like 67 percent–of evangelical Christians believe war is “always wrong.”  I believe that war is always bad, but sometimes it is a necessary evil.  I respect that others reason differently–as John Kerry might put it, I deeply, deeply respect that point of view–even if I can’t embrace the conclusion that war is always wrong.  But believing war is wrong is different from believing that war is ineffective.  If you say war is wrong, I think, fine, you have different values than I have.  If you say, “War never solves anything,” I think you must be kidding me.

It’s hard to imagine how a problem like Nazism would have been solved without fighting a war.  I hate to be one of those people always bringing up Hitler with respect to the current conflict, so let’s leave the current conflict aside and just focus on Hitler the isolated madman of history.  When some evil person wants to take over the world, you’re going to be hard-pressed to stop him without using the force of violence.  The only alternative solution I can think of is divine intervention, but if you don’t believe in divine intervention, you’re pretty much stuck between Hitler and war.  I know which one I’d choose, even if it was wrong.

I remember watching Hotel Rwanda, the scenes of Hutus rounding up Tutsis and indiscriminately slaughtering them, and turning to my husband and saying, “You know what these people could use?  Guns.”  (Some U.S. military guns would have been particularly useful in that situation, but since armchair foreign policy is always easier than the real thing, we won’t go there.  Not today, anyway.) 

Perhaps you might argue that responding to violence with more violence just perpetuates the cycle, but the fact is, you can eschew violence all you want, but you can’t make others eschew it if they don’t want to.  Rosie O’Donnell says the human species needs to rise above war and violence.  I think that’s a good idea, but I wonder how that’s going to happen when nature dictates that people who are willing to kill other people almost always outlive people who aren’t willing to kill other people.  I guess, for 67 percent of evangelical Christians, that’s where Jesus comes in.

What do you think?

So I was reading this post at Modestly Yours about the feminism of modesty, which led me to this post at Everyday Mommy, which led me to a host of other blogs discussing the issue of modest clothing for young girls.  Modestly Yours and Everyday Mommy are more or less preaching to the choir, but on the other blogs there was slightly more controversy regarding the Moms for Modesty Mission Statement (created by Everyday Mommy).  This is the mission statement in full:

Moms for Modesty Mission Statement

• As a Mom for Modesty I believe in common-sense modesty for girls and young women. 
• I believe in refraining from sexualizing our girls and young women. 
• I believe that it is unwise and unfair to taunt boys and young men by permitting my daughter(s) to dress in an immodest manner.
• I believe that true beauty comes from within and I strive to teach my daughter(s) this truth.
• I will loyally shop at retailers that provide girls’ and young womens clothing that is modest, affordable and stylish.

Now, nearly everyone agreed in their comments that clothing options for girls and young women have gotten ridiculous.  Everyone draws her own line, but there are some items that any reasonable adult would consider inappropriate for a teenager, let alone a little girl.  So the issue isn’t people’s differing standards of modesty.  Some people objected to the term “modesty” itself, preferring the word “dignity” instead.  To me it’s tomayto-tomahto, but I could see their point.  Moms for Dignity isn’t alliterative, but I suppose it could work if it had to.

More people took issue with the assertion that “it is unwise and unfair to taunt boys and young men by permitting my daughter(s) to dress in an immodest manner,” as though a female should be held responsible for whatever response a male has to her mode of dress.  While it isn’t a plank I would have included in my own Mom-for-Modesty Manifesto, I don’t think it was intended to mean that girls and women are necessarily responsible for what men choose to think or do, but it is an acknowledgment that men, being the visually-oriented creatures that they are, don’t necessarily choose every last one of their responses.  They’re only human, after all.  As the mother of girls, I expect men to behave decently regardless of what my daughter’s wearing when she leaves the house.  As the mother of boys, however, I wish some young ladies out there would show some mercy in the wardrobe department.  I mean, there’s a reason the word gentleman is considered a compliment; there is a degree of difficulty involved.  I think I would strike this statement in any case because I think it detracts from the main message, which is “we don’t want to dress our girls in hoochie-chic.”

Of course, we also want our boys to dress with dignity, but you just don’t see a lot of boy slutwear out there.  One might ask why, but I’ll leave that to the philosophers.  Or you all. 

Tell me your impression of the Moms for Modesty Mission Statement.  I go to church with women who caution against putting your baby in a sleeveless onesie, so don’t tell me about the kooks you know.  No, on second thought, DO tell me about the kooks you know because I love a good kook story.  But I’m more interested in a) how you feel about the word “modesty” and what connotations you think it has, and b) whether you’re generally sympathetic to or opposed to the Moms for Modesty cause.

Note:  I expect there will be a number of dudes who are opposed to a reduction in the number of chicks in skimpy outfits walking around in public.  You’re welcome to comment, too.  Just so long as you know how predictable you are.

As for myself, I am most distressed by the “attitude” shirts they sell for little girls–like the one that says, “1.  I want it.  2.  You buy it for me.  3.  Any questions?”  Or any of a hundred shirts that sport the message that girls are spoiled little princesses who want all your money.  It’s true, but it’s hardly an attitude that needs to be validated by their clothing.   I also find it interesting that while stores stop selling sweaters and coats in February, sleeveless garments and short skirts are available all year round.  Why is that?  And why can’t I buy a fan in August?  Just curious.

Read this article.  Here’s an excerpt:

Park Day School is throwing out gender boundaries.

Teachers at the private Oakland elementary school have stopped asking the children to line up according to sex when walking to and from class. They now let boys play girls and girls play boys in skits. And there’s a unisex bathroom.

Admissions director Flo Hodes is even a little apologetic that she still balances classes by gender.

Park Day’s gender-neutral metamorphosis happened over the past few years, as applications trickled in for kindergartners who didn’t fit on either side of the gender line. One girl enrolled as a boy, and there were other children who didn’t dress or act in gender-typical ways. Last year the school hired a consultant to help the staff accommodate these new students.

“We had to ask ourselves, what is gender for young children?” Hodes said. “It’s coming up more and more.”

Park Day’s staff members are among a growing number of educators and parents who are acknowledging gender variance in very young children. Aurora School, another private elementary school in Oakland, also is seeing children who are “gender fluid” and hired a clinical psychologist to conduct staff training.

Children with gender variant behaviors feel intensely that they want to look and act like the other sex. They prefer toys and activities typical of the opposi