Dear Sisters -

I write this from a place of love, and a desire for the prostituted to fully seen and known by radical feminism. This is not so for now.

Let me say loud and clear, the vast majority of radical feminists either through experience or from their hearts are completely behind abolition of prostitution, and fully back the Nordic Approach.

That is fabulous, and I deeply proud to be with and by you.

What saddened me, is that are words and language is used sometimes with no credit, or even in the worse scenarios – our language is re-claimed or stolen. and made that out it all thought of by non-prostituted women.

We are mined for our experiences and ways of seeing the wider picture – but rarely are we allowed leadership roles in the battle against the sex trade.

This keeps us as sub-humans – we are used as examples, we are made pets, we are kept as “victims” who must be spoken over.

This is hard to say – for like most exited women I am a radical feminist, it was the only real route to finding freedom for most of us.

But daily, there are small parts of radical feminism that betrayed the prostituted class.

Read the entire post here at Rebecca’s place.  Just excellent.  Rock on, sister, deep respect.

 [Note:  I apologize for the length of this post, but I deeply and sincerely believe this is worth everyone's time to read.  -- Heart]

At this point, if I think about it in too much depth, I will melt in my tears… I came here to promote love. I came all the way from California to introduce myself so you could see with your own eyes what a gay Christian looks like. I left my young son to do this. I wish to be recognized as a sister in Christ. I have been a Christian all my life.” – Jillian Nye, 29, Soulforce Equality Rider

If you would like to gain insights and understanding as to the shape of things to come should the Religious Right/Patriarchy Movement/Quiverfull/Christian Reconstruction movement achieve its ends,  if you care about the future of this nation and of the entire world, please, please educate yourself by watching the video I’ve posted above and by reading what I have to say here and clicking on the links.

The Work of Soulforce

As part of its ongoing practice of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience to lesbophobia, homophobia and transphobia, and its work to end oppression of lesbian, gay and transpersons, Soulforce, an organization of devout lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Christians has just completed its 2007 “Equality Rides” across the United States, carried out in the nonviolent tradition of the Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights era, and inspired by the teachings of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and Jesus of  Nazareth.  In the course of the “Equality Rides,” 50 young adults on two routes, traveling in buses, visited 32  Christian colleges and universities whose policies were discriminatory.  Typically, the Equality Riders spent two days at each university engaging campus communities in panel discussions, campus-wide forums, and informal interactions as well as in times of worship, potlucks, and fundraisers.    Sometimes the 2007 Equality Riders were graciously welcomed and discussions went reasonably well.  Sometimes the Riders’ buses were defaced with graffiti,  they were told they were not allowed to set foot on campus at all, and if they walked onto campus anyway, peacefully, they were arrested.  During last year’s Equality Ride, Riders were arrested at Brigham Young University, Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, at West Point, at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, at Oral Roberts University and Pat Robertson’s Regent University.   Over the course of this year’s Equality Rides there were 40 arrests.

Soulforce focuses on Christian universities in the belief that  at this time in history, religion is the primary source of false and inflammatory misinformation about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people.   Their belief, consistent with the teachings of Gandhi, is that they have a moral obligation to refuse to cooperate with evil and to confront the lies of religion with the truth.

Patrick Henry College

Of particular interest to me is the  Equality Riders’ visit to Patrick Henry College, the college established by Michael Farris, the attorney who worked with the defendants in the lawsuit I brought against the Religious Right.(1)

Michael Farris was a leader in the homeschooling community during the same years I was a leader, in the early ’90s.  Sometimes we shared speakers’ tables at conferences where we were both speaking.  Although I had been introduced to Farris, and he certainly knew who I was — I spoke throughout the country and published a national magazine which was widely read by homeschooling parents, and we were both Washingtonians – he never spoke to me, greeted me, or acknowledged my existence or my now-ex-husband’s existence, even when we were seated at the same dinner table, as we were at a conference in Colorado in 1993.  I didn’t know what to make of this, but Farris seemed rude and arrogant to me.   His reputation for losing his temper and acting out when he didn’t get his way was well-known, a reputation which has turned out to be well-deserved, given, for example, the recent walk-out of one-third of the faculty of the college he heads  and Farris’s treatment of the resigned professors,

In particular I recall Farris’s presentation in Dallas, Texas in April of 1994.   I am, in general, an energetic and engaging speaker, and by the time I am done speaking, my audiences are encouraged and inspired.   My presentation in Dallas was no different, so the effect of Farris’s presentation, which followed mine, on the audience was striking.  Farris spent his alotted time telling conference participants how afraid they should be of their many enemies,  invoking God’s judgments and commands, and eventually telling his by-then intimidated (and vulnerable-feeling) listeners that they were under such heavy attack, they needed protection,  –  his, of course, which they could buy for a hefty sum, renewable annually.

In fact, by 1990, homeschooling was legal in all 50 states, and homeschoolers did not need Farris’s or anyone’s protection in order to homeschool in peace and safety.  But protection was not what Farris’s HSLDA was actually about; in reality, it was  about lobbying legislators and amassing Congressional and public support for conservative, right-wing legislation and causes by using, manipulating and bragging about its by now sizable membership base of fearful and psychologically dependent homeschooling parents, most of them committed ideologically to the importance of submitting to “leaders” and “authorities.”  Under Farris’s watch, as I wrote in an article in a recent issue of Off Our Backs, Farris opened Patrick Henry College in 2000.

Eighty-five percent of its students had been homeschooled; the available majors were political science and liberal arts.  Between 2000 and 2004, 22 Republican legislators employed Patrick Henry College students as interns.  One of those interns eventually worked as a paid staff member for Karl Rove.   When Bush signed legislation banning late-term abortions, Farris was one of five prominent conservative Christians invited to be present at the White House.   Though Patrick Henry is a tiny college, averaging 240 students, during some years it has supplied nearly 10 percent of the 100 total White House intern positions.   Farris has used his access to the President and to the Republican legislature and his commitment to ending the separation of church and state, along with the support of his homeschool constituency, to push for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage , to oppose the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child  and the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women , to work for the elimination of the tax penalty on marriage , and to support John Ashcroft (whose wife sits on the board of Patrick Henry college) in his appointment to Attorney General. (2)

 Soulforce at Patrick Henry College

Soulforce Equality Riders at Patrick Henry College facing 50 or more law enforcement officers called in to guard PHC and to arrest any member of Soulforce who set foot on campus.  The yellow sign reads, “Call for Open Dialogue.”

It makes sense that Patrick Henry College would be on Soulforce’s 2007 Equality Ride list.  PHC’s response to Soulforce’s request for dialog, while not particularly surprising to me, is disturbing, sobering and instructive and deserves to be widely disseminated and analyzed.  Having received Soulforce’s invitation to discussion and dialogue on the PHC campus, PHC’s first and immediate response was a hardy and resounding, “No.”  Its next response was to contact law enforcement — lots and lots of law enforcement.  The number of police officers surrounding Patrick Henry’s campus on the day Soulforce arrived was equal to or greater than the total number of Equality Riders.  PHC locked down its campus the day of the scheduled Equality Riders action; nobody but staff and students and invited guests were allowed on campus property.  The only communication to which PHC would agree was a debate, off campus, on the “Marriage Protection Amendment” to the Constitution, which, true to form, Farris and other HSLDA attorneys and staff have, via tortuous and disingenuous reasoning and logic attempted to make a homeschooling issue.

But  Soulforce wasn’t there at PHC to debate the Marriage Protection Amendment, so called.  As one Equality Rider in the video above said, simply and eloquently, “Human rights are not a debate.”

Equality Riders went to Patrick Henry College on the day appointed despite the threats and hostility, a band of human beings of the kind near and dear to my heart– infidels, rebels,  smart, courageous, eloquent, with integrity, and passion, and above all a commitment to dignity and full  human rights for themselves, for all people.  They carried placards inviting PHC students to “dialogue,” inviting them to dinner off campus at the White Palace.  They sang Christian songs.  They were kind, gracious, honest and loving.  Watching them on video, I was so touched, I broke down and wept and have been weeping off and on writing this blog post.  The Equality Riders were completely nonviolent and peaceable.  When they were not allowed onto the grounds of PHC, consistent with their conviction, as nonviolent resisters, that to cooperate with evil is immoral, two Equality Riders walked onto the campus of Patrick Henry College, carrying invitations to dinner.  They were arrested and taken to jail.

Analysis

The press release issued about these events by Patrick Henry College would be hilarious if it were not issued in all sincerity, if it were not real.  Farris is the man who drafted the Religious Freedoms Restoration Act which  was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress when it was written in 1993, and which, had it not ultimately been declared unconstitutional by the courts, would have tiered human and civil rights in favor of religious citizens.   He was the Republican candidate, at one time, for Lt. Governor of Virginia.  Farris has been a frequent invitee to the Bush White House and was one of the invited guests for the Bush signing, together with much pomp and circumstance, of the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act.  And yet to read PHC’s press release, Farris, his rich, and powerful, and multiple institutions and organizations,  his thousands and millions of primarily white, Republican supporters with their thousands and millions of white, Republican dollars are somehow persecuted victims, oppressed and marginalized by these 50 young Christian Equality Riders intent on… dinner at the White Palace in town?  Conversation with students and faculty?  The press release is a textbook example of lesbophobia and homophobia which again, would be hilarious if this were Saturday Night Live or the Onion, but these guys are for real, dangerously, dangerously for real:

This is nothing less than a systematic effort by the homosexual movement to shut down that dissenting voice, to silence those who would reserve the right to call homosexuality what it is – immoral. Neutralizing Christian colleges’ freedom of speech to uphold biblical convictions on sexual morality is a fundamental battlefront in the culture war, with Soulforce’s ultimate aim to achieve blanket cultural and governmental sanction for homosexuality. Patrick Henry College is resolved to hold the line against their invasive coercion.

Uninvited, often trespassing illegally, the group imposes itself on to Christian campuses in hopes of engaging students in suggestive discussions about sex. By their own admission, organizers hope to indoctrinate young Christians to notions that God’s Word is supportive of the “gay” lifestyle, or that it remains morally mute on a subject about which the Bible actually has much to say, on behaviors it explicitly labels sin.

In its third year, the Soulforce Equality Ride has generated ample coverage of tactics it uses to infiltrate colleges like Notre Dame, Liberty University, Regent University, Oklahoma Baptist University, and many others. They can involve trespassing on to campuses, staging protests and waving signs (such as “We support the gay and lesbian students at Liberty University,”) and holding impromptu “worship services,” with activists quoting Scripture and singing Christian songs. If allowed, they have disrupted classes, libraries, and lunchrooms, and, in a growing number of cases, provoke police intervention and arrests. Soulforce as an organization presents itself as religiously motivated and ecumenical in character. The organization’s founders, its key leaders and many of its activist members present themselves as being emphatically Christian. In their literature and throughout their website, they portray themselves as being more deeply committed to the Bible than others. By claiming the authority of Christ and the Scriptures in their advocacy, speaking in the name of Christ and the Bible what is directly contrary to Christ and the Bible, they fall into the category of false teachers. Providing a platform for false teaching on the PHC campus is unacceptable.

Who, after all, can stand against this “silencing” and “coercive” onslaught of 50 Christian young people!  Notre Dame trembles against their … commitment to the Bible!   Men, stand your ground!  Hold that line!  If we have a discussion or go to dinner, what might be next!   And what can lurk behind a request to “disrupt classes” with dialog!

Notice the egregious and relentless twisting and distortion of facts in a way that results in what can only be described as propaganda, something which is very familiar to those of us who have watched, and been victimized by, Farris over the years.  The Equality Riders become “trespassers,” rather than the guests they could have been had PHC actually behaved in an ethical Christian way.  Hospitality is required of Christians whether it is to the stranger or to the sister and brother.  The Equality Riders were not “false teachers,” they weren’t teachers at all, they were young people, asking for some time, asking to be heard.  The request to meet and discuss issues, their standing in a line outside police barricades singing Christian songs, the press release characterizes these as “invasive coercion” in what can only be described as a willful blindness to the power disparities obvious to any thinking person:  these are 50 young people,  most of them poor, all of whom have signed on to rejecting the amassing of wealth, all of them disenfranchised, marginalized and oppressed because they are lesbians, gay or transgender persons, addressing a university backed by all of the money and influence and power of the Religious Right, and yet they are described as ”invasive and coercive.”

 Which, of the above men, has power, the man being arrested, Josh Polycarpe, left, or Michael Farris, on the right?  Who has influence?  Who is  being “coercive”?  Whose ideas and behaviors are “invasive”?  Who is the “false teacher”?

The distortions-cum-propaganda are important because they pass for the truth and are understood by millions on the Religious Right, by conservatives, by too many reporters to be truth.  They are important because they are published by Farris and men like him– people who have political influence and power, ”power” defined as possessing the capacity to make what you want to happen, happen in the real world.  This is something that clearly the Soulforce young people did not have.  They went straight to jail for daring to say what Michael Farris and others at his college did not want to hear.   In the meantime, Michael Farris and his associates pretend they have been victimized.

Most discouraging to me is that in the publicity over the Equality Riders and the arrests, the Religious Right and lesbophobes, homophobes and transphobes everywhere unite once again around their favorite scapegoats.  It doesn’t seem to occur to them that in all likelihood, 10 percent of the students and staff at PHC, at least, experience attractions to, have had or are having romantic relationships with people of their own sex.  It doesn’t apparently occur to them that 10 percent, at least, of the children in their own, often gigantic, families are going to have same-sex attractions and may have or may have had same sex relationships.  To this, they make themselves blind.

Soulforce is Engaged in Activism Consistent with Historic Feminism

One reason I object to the dismissive and derogatory term “godbags” used for religious people is, the Soulforce Equality Riders are, in fact, conservative Christians on the risky, scary, fraught-with-danger front lines, engaged in a fight that is central to the destruction of male supremacy, and they are deserving of the support of feminist and progressive people everywhere, therefore, whose goal this is.  Dismissing these freedom fighters as “godbags” hurts us all and deprives us all of the opportunity to support them in the work they are uniquely suited to do.   They are confronting male supremacy at its root, at the heart of it, in a way outsiders cannot.   People should not have to leave their faith communities in order for feminists  and progressive people to take seriously the work they do which benefits all people.

Where male dominance and female submission are ordained by God, as the Religious Right believes they are, and all other institutions  and relationships are governed by these same notions of male power and female submission, what will happen if males reject traditional masculine roles, as gay men do?  If females reject traditional feminine roles, as lesbians do? And if transgender persons blur the boundaries of gender such that transgressions of stereotypical roles cannot be punished?  If these columns crumble, the building falls.

In order to survive and maintain its influence in society and culture, the Religious Right must forbid and teach against same sex relationships, it must make these relationships illegal, must punish them, must even view them as punishable by death, as the Christian Reconstructionists do,  because if same sex relationships become acceptable and common, then male supremacy  – in the home, the church, the world — is threatened.   Women who do not need, want or depend on men in any way for intimate relationships or for anything at all,  men who reject traditional sex roles and masculinity in favor of loving relationships with other men, threaten male heterosupremacist power, which requires traditional male and female roles and essentialist and binary notions of gender in order to continue.  Where male dominance and female submission are ordained by God, as the Religious Right believes they are, and all other institutions  and relationships are governed by these same notions of male power and female submission, what will happen if males reject traditional masculine roles, as gay men do?  If females reject traditional feminine roles, as lesbians do? And if transgender persons blur the boundaries of gender such that transgressions of stereotypical roles cannot be punished?  If these columns crumble, the building falls.

Underneath the rhetoric, the propaganda, the sermonizing and theology, this is the fear.  It is a legitimate fear for those who find their safety in the rigid and dogmatic binaries of patriarchal religion.   For those of us dedicated to human and civil rights for all people, it is a legitimate goal and hope, and those on the front lines, as Soulforce is, deserve our encouragement and support.

———–

(1)  In 1994 I sued eight organizations on the Religious Right in Federal Court for  conspiracy to restrain trade in violation of the Lanham Act, for violations of the Washington Consumer Protection Act, and for several other causes of action.  The defendants publicly, nationally excommunicated me, then via a conspiracy, destroyed my publication in ways from which they profited financially.  I won my case in 1998 and was awarded a large judgment.  Michael Farris was not a defendant because I did not become aware of the extent of his involvement with the defendants until discovery in my case was almost completed and adding him as a defendant would have been too costly.  He was a columnist and legal advisor to one of the defendants in my lawsuit, and provided counsel as to how the defendants should proceed in my national excommunication.

(2)  Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff (me), Confronting the Religious Right,  Off Our Backs, Women and Fundamentalism issue, available for purchase as a back issue.

Heart

This is the board of directors of “Jam’iat e nesvan e vatan-khah“, a women’s rights association in Tehran (1923-1933).  These women are the great-grandmothers and great-great grandmothers of the women of today’s Iranian Women’s Movement, one of the most inspiring movements for human rights of this generation. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

I am one of those people who are against including children in protests at times of revolutions, children should stay home, especially in cities like Homs and Idleb. But the children martyred last night in Karm El-Zeitoun were home, and that did not protect them, it rather killed them. Yesterday regime army bombed the neighborhood of Karm El- Zeitoun in the city of Homs and destroyed several buildings, two whole streets were evacuated, and 27 civilians killed, many were injured…

The names of children killed by the regime in Karm El-Zeitoun Massacre 26-1-2012 are:

1-Waed Hamsho
2-Sana’ Akrah
3-Najem Akrah
4-Samira Bahader
5-Sidra Bahader
6-Abdel Ghani Bahader
7-Kinana Akara
8-Ali Akrah

The above is an excerpt from iconic Syrian Blogger Razan Ghazzawi‘s February 13 blog post.  Ghazzawi, who was born in the United States, has been blogging courageously under her own name since 2009 and has been arrested in the past.  As of today she has been arrested again, for what she’s been writing, along with human rights activist Mazen Darwish, who heads the Syrian Center for Media and Free Expression.  Women bloggers put human, human faces on the horror of war.  There were not just “eight children killed” in “fighting in Syria.”  The children whose names are written here were killed by the Syrian regime.  For atrocities like this to end, ever, the dead must have faces and names.

Anyone giving information to international media or international NGOs may be targeted,” said Soazig Dollet, Middle East and North Africa researcher for Reporters Without Borders. She said in the past, arrested Syrian journalists have been interrogated, tortured and kept in solitary confinement. (More here)

Learn about the war in Syria here.

Heart

I represent the morbid side of the women’s movement. …Robin Morgan calls it “atrocity work.”  And that’s pretty much what it is. I deal with what happens to women in the normal course of women’s lives all over this planet:  the normal stuff that is abusive, society at large.

…The women’s movement is  like other political movements in one important way.  Every political movement is committed to the belief that there are certain kinds of pain that people should not have to endure.  They are unnecessary.  They are gratuitous.  They are not part of the God-given order.  They are not biologically inevitable.  They are acts of human will.  They are acts done by some human beings to other human beings.

…[The women's movement] is a movement against human suffering.  There is no way to be a feminist and to forget that.  If you are a feminist, and if you have forgotten that our purpose is to end the suffering of countless unnamed and invisible women from the crimes committed against them — and yes, we may also end the suffering of men who are committing the crimes, yes, we probably think we can — then  your feminism is hollow and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t count.  This is a movement against suffering.  So in between the lines when you hear people say that this is a movement for freedom, for justice, for equality — and all of that is entirely and deeply true — you must remember that we are trying to eliminate suffering too.  Freedom, justice and equality have become slogan words, Madison Avenue words, so has revolution.  Nobody tries to sell suffering: in America, suffering is barely acknowledged.  Suffering does not fit into the advertising scheme of things as a goal for a happy American.  So it is a good measure of your own commitment to understand that in the end, in the end, the positives that we are searching for have to be measured against the true condition of women that we know and that we understand.  …

One of the things the women’s movement does is to make you feel pain.  You feel your own pain, the  pain of other women, the pain of sisters whose lives you can barely imagine.  You have to have a lot of courage to accept that if you commit yourself, over the long term, not just for three months, not just for a year, not for two years, but for a lifetime, to feminism, to the women’s movement, that you are going to live with a lot of pain.  …Be prepared for all the people who tell you that it’s your problem,  it’s not a social problem, why are you so bitter, what’s wrong with you?  …underneath that is always the presumption that the rape was delusional, the battery did not happen, the economic hardship is your own unfortunate personal failing.  Hold onto the fact that that is not true:  it has never been true.

…Many women rebel against feminism because many women think we are the ones insisting that their full human uniqueness cannot be expressed because they are women.  We are the bringers of the terrible message.  We found this out by  being women in the world.  We want to change it.  This is not a condition imposed by a political movement.  This is a condition imposed by male supremacy…Sometimes, though, the political movement against male supremacy is confused with male supremacy itself, as if we’re the ones who are telling you, “because you are women, you’re going to have to do this and this and this.”  We’re reporters.  We’re telling you that because you are women, you live in this world I’m describing, and that the only way to do anything about it is to take some political responsibility for its existence and to work collectively together, which never means the abandonment of your integrity as individuals.  It also never means the abandonment of common sense or common decency.  If it does there is something wrong with the way you are going about organizing against what it is that is upsetting you and making you angry and exploiting you and hurting you.

There is nothing that feminists want more than to become irrelevant.  We want the end of the exploitation of women; but as long as there is rape — as long as there is rape — there is not going to be any peace or justice or equality or freedom.  You are not going to become what you want to become or who you want to become.  You are not going to live in the world you want to live in.  And so you have to organize an agenda…My agenda is everything I can think of, everything I can think of doing, all the time:  movement, movement, physical and intellectual and political confrontations with power.  You have to write the picket signs, march, scream, yell, write the fucking letters.  It’s your responsibility to yourselves and to other women.

There is one thing that is not practical, and it’s the thing I believe in most, and that is the importance of vision in the midst of what has to be done, never forgetting for one minute the world that you really want to live in and how you want to live in it and what it means to you and how much you care about it — what you want for yourselves and what you want for the people you love.  Everywhere in this country now people are told to be complacent because change is impossible.  Change is not impossible.  It is not impossible.  Many things have to be changed in the world.  It is time to change the condition of women, finally and absolutely and for all time.

–Andrea Dworkin from a speech given April 8, 1983, at Hamilton College in New York, in Letters from a War Zone– Writings 1976-1989,  image from here.

“The most obvious and promising sign of the new agriculture is the leadership that women are taking in the movement.  Women have always played the key role in farming but at least in the last two centuries in America, they have rarely gotten credit for it. Farming is a man’s world, American culture wants to believe, and, as is true of all culturally-treasured myths, no amount of plain everyday evidence to the contrary matters..

“Farm Journal felt the best way to handle the situation was to have a Farmer’s Wife section to appeal to the women with recipes and folksy charm about farm life. The real hardcore business of farming went in the front of the magazine. Amazingly, no one seemed to see the dreadful prejudice on display. I asked one time what would happen if we put a section in the back of the magazine designated as The Farmer’s Husband. All the men editors laughed, thinking that as usual I was making jokes. The women editors did not laugh.” 

Link

• As community caretakers, mothers, and resource stewards, women often feel the impacts of pollution and contamination most directly, retaining contaminants in their breast and body tissue, experiencing endocrine disruption, and bearing children with birth defects.
• Approximately 70% of the world’s uranium deposits are located on the lands of indigenous peoples. Navajo in Church Rock and Crownpoint, New Mexico, are victims of the nation’s worst radioactive uranium spill – in 1979, a liquid uranium tailings dam was breached and 100 million gallons of radioactive liquid spilled into Navajo waterways.
• Over 60% of African Americans and Hispanic Americans and half of all Native Americans live in communities with unregulated toxic waste sites.
• …Studies conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the University of Michigan have shown that minority and low-income communities in the U.S. have consistently been selected in greatly disproportionate numbers as sites for chemical factories, landfills, and incinerators…
• The Navajo Nation exports 1200% more energy than it uses, especially from coal – the Nation is home to the largest coal strip mine in the United States.  It is estimated that some 18,000 Navajo homes do not have electricity.

More

“It was a mistake that most everyone made in the early days. When mammography was new and breast cancer had not yet become a discussion for the dinner table, it really did seem like all it would take to stop breast cancer was awareness and vigilant screening. The thing about the false narrative is that it makes intuitive sense—a tumor starts as one rogue cell that grows out of control, eventually becoming a palpable tumor that gets bigger and bigger until it escapes its local environment and becomes metastatic, when it can kill you. And this story has a grain of truth to it—it’s just that it’s far more complicated than that.

“Years of research have led scientists to discover that breast tumors are not all alike. Some are fast moving and aggressive, others are never fated to metastasize. The problem is that right now we don’t have a surefire way to predict in advance whether a cancer will spread or how aggressive it might become.”

An excellent article, the rest is here and was first published here.

by Male Feminists

From here and much appreciated.  <3

• Domestic violence is lethal and there are fatalities every day.
• Domestic violence fatalities happen in rural and urban areas and to all age groups.
• Ending a relationship with a perpetrator of domestic violence does not ensure the safety of the victim. Women are often in more danger at the time and after they leave.
• Newspaper and television reports that label events surrounding these fatalities as “domestic disputes” undermine the seriousness of domestic violence and blame the victim.
• News stories about homicide/ suicide events are often written as if both parties are victims and blame the victim. (“Couple found dead,” and “Victims of Murder/Suicide Identified,” for example.)
• In the majority of cases, the perpetrator is a man and the victim is a woman.

Domestic Violence Watch

The internet can be so powerful, more often than not for bad, but sometimes for good.  The Susan G. Komen Foundation has reversed its decision.

“The nation’s pre-eminent breast cancer advocacy group, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, apologized on Friday for its decision to cut most of its financing to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening and said it would again make Planned Parenthood eligible for those grants. Some Komen officials had said that the decision to halt financing, which was made in December and became public knowledge on Tuesday, was made because of an inquiry by a Republican congressman, Cliff Stearns of Florida, who is looking into whether Planned Parenthood has spent public money for abortions. A new rule was created by the foundation to bar grants to organizations under federal, state or local investigation, but a Komen board member said the only current grantee the rule would apply to was Planned Parenthood. Critics also objected to the fact that the foundation seemed to be giving an inquiry by a Republican congressman, which appeared to be prompted in part by opponents of abortion rights, as muchcredibility as a criminal or civil investigation by a government agency.

“Ms. Brinker’s statement sought to change the impression that abortion politics prompted the decision.

“We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood,” the statement said. “They were not. Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.”

Link, Link

Link

Heart

• We are a membership organization.
• We honor each person’s commitment and energy to our mission.
• We are not afraid to examine all sides of all issues.
• We cannot be bought.
• We tell the truth about what we discover.
• We serve individuals while reaching the broader population.
• We value the involvement of grassroots activists throughout the country and around the world to further our mission.
• We encourage people to participate fully in decisions relating to breast cancer.
• We believe access to information is vital.
• We recognize that structural changes in society are needed to accomplish our mission.

I’ve just learned about this information from a beloved friend who is a breast cancer survivor.  I will be making a donation today. 

One of the most prominent charities working to prevent and cure breast cancer, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, has cut its ties with the women’s health organization Planned Parenthood, that organization confirmed on Tuesday. Reacting to the news, Planned Parenthood decried Komen for having “succumbed to political pressure” related to abortion politics. Planned Parenthood said representatives for Komen have been notifying Planned Parenthood divisions throughout the country that it will stop providing funding for breast cancer screenings and prevention.

I was never a fan of the Susan G. Komen pink, and I’m certainly not a fan if, as it appears, it’s gone red.  Planned Parenthood provides breast cancer screeninh, birth control, STD screening and a host of other services — besides abortion –  to the most marginalized and impoverished populations of women.  Come on, this is an outrage.

Tell the Susan G. Komen Foundation how you feel about this decision

Click here to see a very short video I made last year that shows what happens when I call my sheep in the morning. Enjoy!

“To see it as prostitution, is to see your own terror, to know that punters have pre-planned to hurt you bad, to understand that there is always some manager/businessman/pimp profiteering from your hell.

“That is too much for most prostituted women to bear – of course they make themselves dead to their own reality, of course they will speak of it as empowering and their free choice, of course they must believe without any real evidence that they are manipulating the men.

“To know the cold and death-loving reality of escorting and or girlfriend experience is so terrible is can destroy the essence of the prostituted woman.”

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