Alas, a Blog

• In Tennessee, a gay dad is ordered by a court to not expose his son to “the gay lifestyle,” whatever that may be. On the bright side, a lower court’s decision to send the father to jail for coming out to his son has been overturned on appeal. (Thanks to reader Tor for the tip). Boy, those blue states really are more tolorant!
• Trish Wilson points out that folks in bible-belt states are just as likely to get divorced as anyone else. Kinda pokes a hole in the theory that divorce would go down if only more people were fervently anti-divorce.
• Tim Wise makes a convincing case that Marcus Dixon, who is black, is in prison for having consensual sex with his white girlfriend. Wise argues that this reflects badly on cross-racial adoption, because white parents can’t teach their black children enough fear and distrust of the justice system to prevent those children from being railroaded. (My summary is an oversimplification; I recommend reading the whole thing.)
  Don’t misunderstand. I’m not suggesting the Joneses were wrong to take Marcus in. Nor am I saying that white parents should never adopt or become guardians for black children or other children of color. I am only saying that before white parents decide to “rescue” black and brown children from homes they consider dysfunctional (and which may well be), perhaps they could take a moment to consider their own dysfunction: the kind that doesn?t manifest itself in terms of poverty or daily neighborhood violence perhaps, but which manifests as ignorance, as a Pollyanna-like optimism about the power of love alone, and an uncritical trust in America – the kind most people of color long ago learned to temper with caution.

  For while Marcus Dixon is first and foremost a victim of an overzealous prosecutor playing to white fears, and a racist father of the girl with whom he had sex, he is also the victim of white naivet’ and good intentions.

  Well, maybe. It’s an interesting point. But then again, I can’t help but notice that black children of black parents get railroaded by the cops and DAs all the time, too.

• Sara at Diotima is the last person I’d expect to launch a defense of Martha Burke, which just goes to show that the world is full of surprises. Amy Philips had taken offense because Burke wrote that “some women” don’t recognize the discrimination they experience. Burke, Amy wrote, “doesn’t speak for me, and that I’d feel much less oppressed if she’d shut up and let me speak for myself.” Sara responds:
  But if one allowed the truth about women to be defined merely by adding up women’s subjective experiences, you could never make any judgments about when things are bad for women. After all, women also fought suffrage and other legal changes that brought equality to women; their personal experiences shouldn’t have been allowed to paralyze the women’s movement because they were just wrong. So while I remain in more or less complete disagreement with Martha Burk’s specific agenda, I don’t really find anything objectionable in the principle that there are women who are unaware of the problems that women face.
• This Armed Liberal post on gay marriage – “Why I Support Gay Marriage, and Why I Will Never Be Angry at Those Who Do Not” – is excellent, both for its plea for mutual civility and for his real-life-based explanation of why “gays should just rely on private contracts” isn’t an answer.
• Mad Magazine makes fun of George Bush. Hey, I’d buy one. Via Marshmallows & Bile.
• Carpe Datum has a good so-called-liberal-press post, pointing out that this opening paragraph would never, ever appear in the mainstream press:
  For a brief time during his speech on Sunday, President Bush seemed to be hewing to a New Year’s resolution to stick more carefully to the facts on taxes, the budget and more. But old habits die hard.

  Yet virtually the same paragraph opens an AP news story about Democrats and no one blinks.

• Here’s an interesting article in Haaretz about American feministJudith Butler in Israel. Butler is best known as a gender theorist – both for her theory that gender is created by everyone doing drag, and for her famously inaccessible writing style – but I hadn’t realized she was also an active critic of Israel.
• Echidne of the Snakes has been rockin’ lately. Two of my recent favorites: her discussion of college admissions (why are folks who oppose affirmative action for minorities okay with affirmative action for whites legacy admissions?), and her post about the wage gap.
• So I was reading an Expository Magazine review of a quilting exhibition, which thankfully included lots of pictures. I was particularly impressed by “Improvisation,” by Judith Reilly (who I assume is not the same Judith Reilly who starred in Night of the Living Dead).

  

  A bit of searching turned up Reilly’s website, which has many more quilt reproductions. All of them are too darned small, however.

• A CNN story, “Where Do Cancelled TV Shows Go?” I was particularly struck by the last paragraph, about a creator whose grateful for “pirating,” since without illegal copies the network would prevent his work from ever being seen by anyone. Thank goodness creators are protected by copyright law!
• Amptoons comments alumni John Isbell is posting on Open Source Politics again: A brief discussion of the second amendment, and a poem about experiences of racism. Check ’em out.
• Amy at The Fifty Minute Hour has an excellent post about the Drug War and U.S. foreign policy (the specific example she’s using is Ghana).
  In the end, the problem is that we’ve set up a situation where Ghana and other countries like it can’t win. They have little choice but to take our money, because their only alternative is to keep scraping by and never have the chance to improve their country. But we’ve given them no viable, sustainable alternative to drug production to keep them going in the long term. We’re asking them to give up their most profitable export, but we’ve cut off most other options for trade. We flood markets, both in Ghana and in nations who might trade with them, with subsidized agricultural staples, making farming a profitless option. We refuse to support infrastructure development, because new roads and faster transportation make drug trading easier too, and our first priority is to stop marijuana production, not to make Ghana better off. If we were to focus on bringing Ghana and other African nations into the global economy, growing pot would become less attractive, but we’re not willing to make our primary goal ancillary, even if it would work better in the long run. After all, we have to take a “hard line” against a plant that has never killed anyone and has kept its producers from being stuck in poverty forever. We’re sacrificing real principles, like helping the poor and improving the quality of life for millions of people, in favor of made up principles, like stopping people from ingesting psychotropic substances. Ghana will get its money, but that money will never help the people of Ghana so long as the government has to use it to destroy what may be their best chance at escaping poverty.

  Read the whole thing.

• The Village Voice has an article about the lack of female writers (both reviewed and reviewing) at the New York Times Book Review. What’s sad is the Times is apparently much better than its peers (although the Voice article doesn’t mention this). The Times Book Review apparently has 33% female bylines; other liberal intellectual mags, like The New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, would have to increase female bylines enormously to reach a one-third level. (Via Intl-News.com).
• I don’t normally respond to emailed requests for links, but Intl-News.com is actually doing a good job collecting and updating news story links. Check it out.
• Ironic headline of the month: A pro-life news website complains that “Biased reporting on Abortion-Breast Cancer Link Still A Problem.” In other news, O.J. complains that the murder rate is too high. Via After Abortion.
• Just when you thought there was nothing to like about Joe Lieberman, he goes and proposes improvements to US Domestic Violence law. I particularly like his proposals for making restraining orders more available and effective, and for helping abused women financially. Via Diotima, who is suspicious of Lieberman’s motives.

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