Link Farm and Open Thread: Creepy Golf edition

Update: Links # 5 and #11 have now been fixed.

Post as you will shall be the only law.

Self-linking is encouraged, because it’s blogging with someone you love.

* * *

  1. Kentucky court denies rights to lesbian co-parent. Because allowing a co-mother to be ripped away from her child won’t be harmful to the child at all, right?
  2. Ugly Betty and Affirmative Action.
  3. “State’s rights” wasn’t always just a fig leaf to promote White supremacy over Black people. Sometimes, it was used to promote White supremacy over Native Americans too.
  4. Social Class, Rape, and Intimate Partner Violence.
  5. Does a flight attendant deserve ten years in prison because she gave her hair stylist discounted plane tickets in exchange for hair care, and unbeknownst to her, he was a drug dealer?
  6. God Hates Figs. Awesome.
  7. The US Army took a prostetic leg away from a prisoner and forced him to stand. You know the reason they hate us? Because we’ve earned their hatred, that’s why.
  8. Good policy idea: subsidize people trading in old clunkers for new, cleaner-running cars.
  9. Homeless taking over foreclosed homes. Excellent.
  10. The economic crisis is all the fault of left-wing intellectuals.
  11. Renee discusses “This Is Why You’re Fat” site.
  12. Does racism end the death penalty? No, but the price tag might.
  13. Little Light is missing living in the country. Not political, but lovely writing.
  14. Mental Health and Promescuity.

Oh, and here’s a weird/creepy/gross animated video (via Boing Boing).

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106 Responses to Link Farm and Open Thread: Creepy Golf edition

  1. 101
    chingona says:

    I am 100% sure that PG is not in support of discrimination against pregnant women. I’ll eat my hat if I’m wrong. (I am not, either.)

    I felt pretty confident with my presumption that that wasn’t the case. That said …

    FMLA applies equally to fathers and to mothers. The leave requirement isn’t based (primarily) on pregnancy as disability or childbirth as injury. It’s mostly based on the need to care for a family member (new baby), and applies equally to father and mothers and to adopted and biological children, including children who are adopted when they are older.

    Employers may not be completely irrational to worry more about women, but I think they greatly exaggerate the costs of hiring women of childbearing age, especially given that most women who can even afford to take their full 12-weeks are professional women who don’t have that many kids over their working life, and really downplay the more generalized risk of any employee needing leave for any one of the many situations covered by FMLA. I work in a field that employs a lot of women, and in the three years and a half years I’ve been with my current employer, I’ve seen more people take FMLA for non-birth/child related reasons than for having kids. Pregnancy might be the first thing that springs to mind when people think of FMLA, but frankly, I would be surprised if an actuarial analysis of it showed that women taking leave to have kids costs companies more than other types of leave (though I’ll admit I’m extrapolating from experience and anecdote here). There’s rational (I can dream up a decent-sounding justification for my prejudice), and then there’s rational (an analysis of the facts bears out that doing the right thing will cost me more than not doing the right thing). I don’t think it’s clear or obvious that not hiring women falls in the latter and not the former category.

    I don’t disagree that the way our current system distributes the costs is not ideal (and believe it or not, I’m not even unsympathetic to employers – it is disruptive when someone has to go on leave), but my own experience (based on some time spent neck deep in HR files for something work-related) is that the part of FMLA that really drives employers up the wall isn’t women having kids but people with chronic conditions who are allowed to take “intermittent” leave – basically working part-time for an extended period of time but on a schedule completely of their own devising.

  2. 102
    chingona says:

    It’s not particularly relevant to the points any of us are making, but just to clarify something:

    PG wrote: “I pointed out that pregnancy is different from the other situations you noted, in that it is foreseeable and generally planned (at least of pregnancies that are carried to term).”

    A lot of pregnancies carried to term are not planned.

    From Guttmacher Institute:

    Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion. Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion.

    If I’m doing my math right, that means 37 percent of all pregnancies that are carried to term are not planned. That’s a pretty big percentage. Like I said, it doesn’t really change any of the arguments here, and you might even think it’s inexcusable that so many people are so bad at using contraception, but nonetheless, there it is.

  3. 103
    PG says:

    I would be surprised if an actuarial analysis of it showed that women taking leave to have kids costs companies more than other types of leave (though I’ll admit I’m extrapolating from experience and anecdote here).

    I feel certain that if you divide leave into “Pregnancy and Post-Partum Leave” and “All Other Leave,” the second category will be much larger than the first. However, this misses the point I was making about the difference between pregnancy/postpartum and all other medical reasons for leave: one is experienced only by women of a certain age and is foreseeable, while the others are possible for everyone and aren’t foreseeable. An employer will have a hard time predicting which employees will be in car accidents, or get cancer or depression, or have sick family members. It is far more predictable which employees will get pregnant and take postpartum leave.

    The aspect of FMLA I’ve heard get criticized most is that it’s too easy for people to fake the need for leave altogether. Fraud and abuse under the FMLA, which often includes intermittent leave, is becoming a significant area of employment law. Fraud and abuse certainly don’t apply to pregnancy/ postpartum leave — hard to fake a newborn — but again, how much can an employer predict at the point of hiring which employees are likely to be liars?

  4. 104
    chingona says:

    Though the more I think about it (and I’ll try to give it a rest after this comment), I still don’t see how the fact that pregnancy can be and often is planned makes it more rational for employers to discriminate against women. If an employee is pregnant, it’s always going to be a female employee, but that would be true whether pregnancy was planned or not planned. That pregnancy can be planned doesn’t make any given woman more or less likely to have a kid, and it makes it more likely that some of your employees will have no children and most of your employees will have very few children. So that pregnancy can be planned is completely irrelevant. The only relevant issue is that it’s women who get pregnant, which is mitigated under FMLA by the fact that the leave is available equally to new mothers and new fathers.

  5. 105
    chingona says:

    However, this misses the point I was making about the difference between pregnancy/postpartum and all other medical reasons for leave: one is experienced only by women of a certain age and is foreseeable, while the others are possible for everyone and aren’t foreseeable.

    But again, new fathers also are eligible for 12 weeks of unpaid leave. (And now I’m really giving it a rest.)

  6. 106
    Sailorman says:

    chingona Writes:
    April 1st, 2009 at 10:28 am

    Though the more I think about it (and I’ll try to give it a rest after this comment), I still don’t see how the fact that pregnancy can be and often is planned makes it more rational for employers to discriminate against women. If an employee is pregnant, it’s always going to be a female employee, but that would be true whether pregnancy was planned or not planned. That pregnancy can be planned doesn’t make any given woman more or less likely to have a kid, and it makes it more likely that some of your employees will have no children and most of your employees will have very few children. So that pregnancy can be planned is completely irrelevant. The only relevant issue is that it’s women who get pregnant, which is mitigated under FMLA by the fact that the leave is available equally to new mothers and new fathers.

    If pregnancy is controlled, AND if pregnancy results in employers taking (possibly illegal) action against the women involved, AND if women want to rationally avoid those costs… then the only people who will become pregnant are those who are willing to trade off income for pregnancy. IOW, those women who “really value their jobs” (snark intended) will remain childless.

    OTOH, if pregnancy is uncontrolled, then the above is not true.