My life is scraping wallpaper off walls…

Which does not leave much time for web-surfing.

Nonetheless, here are a few things I’ve read that you might want to read too.

• Regarding the same sex marriage (SSM) debate, John Snead points out this heart-wrentching article, which goes to the heart of the SSM debate: Should lesbian and gay couples have an equal right to form legally recognized families?
  I am a widow. The law doesn’t say so. My tax form doesn’t say so; neither do any of the countless forms that I fill out that include marital status say so. But every time I check off the box that says single I want to scream and white it out and write, “widow”. But I am a Lesbian who has lost her female partner so in most places I am not accorded the status of “widow”. When it came time to settle my partner’s estate, I was a class D beneficiary — no relationship what so-ever-a roommate, a friend, the lady next door.

  It does not seem to matter that we lived in a monogamous loving relationship for 31 years or that we co-parented 3 wonderful children. It does not seem to matter that those children have severe developmental disabilities… after all I am not a legal widow anymore than I was a legal wife or a legal co-parent.

• Camassia has written a good response to my earlier thoughts on gender roles.
  Part of what Eve is arguing for, I think, is that we’re going to have gendered ideals anyway, so we should make them benevolent ones. Ampersand seems to be rebelling against the whole idea, seeing that a ideal always means a hierarchy based on how well you achieve that ideal. I sympathize with Ampersand but I incline towards Eve’s fatalism. In my school days, in Northern California in the ’70s and ’80s, the children were really a lot more intolerant than the adults, so I don’t think they learned it from them. Short of divine intervention, I don’t see anything stopping human social climbing. (Probably one reason I keep seeking divine intervetion!) But on the other hand, the society we live in today probably would have seemed impossibly egalitarian in the feudal past, so maybe I’m too pessimistic.
• Open Source Politics has a good post on the ridiculous “partial birth abortion ban.”
  If this ban becomes law, it will remove medical judgment completely. The House of Representatives has decided, against the advice of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, that D&X is never medically necessary.

  Of course it isn’t medically necessary — almost always, if you can do a D&X, you can do a D&E. The problem is that D&X sometimes is medically preferable, when it poses less danger to the patient than the alternative procedure does.

  I would point out, however, that it’s not at all clear that the ban limits itself to banning D&X abortions, although the pro-life leadership is selling the ban that way.

• Remember Afghanistan? We went to war to free Afghanistan. Check out this short op-ed in the Times.
  rom some of the most desperate corners of Afghanistan, about 45 brave women have embarked on a cause that hardly seems on Washington’s powerful radar. President Bush’s speech to the United Nations yesterday barely mentioned Afghanistan’s struggle to build what he calls a “decent and just society.” Yet recently, these Afghan women endured great risk in that very cause. They traveled to Kandahar, now considered a dangerous city, deep in Taliban territory. There, they crafted an extraordinary document they have called the Afghan Women’s Bill of Rights.

  The document sets somewhat different priorities than the American Bill of Rights adopted more than 200 years ago. For Afghan women, the first amendment would guarantee an education. Then came health care, personal security and support of widows. Freedom of speech was number five, followed by freedom to vote, with a guarantee of constitutional rights to “widows, disabled women and orphans” coming much later.

• DIF Wallpaper Stripper is, in my opinion, the single best invention ever. Just thought I’d mention.

.