Entries Tagged 'Politics & Legislation' ↓

The Health Care Reform Bill passed the United States Senate yesterday.

This is a great day for girls and all other Americans. They will never lose their insurance. They can’t lose it if they “get” a pre-existing condition. They can’t lose it if their parents get laid off, if they marry the guy who gets laid off, they can’t lose it if they get divorced, they can’t lose it if they, themselves, get laid off.

And neither can we.

To Republicans who were against this bill: I’m sorry you feel that way. Fear seems to be the source of the angst about health care reform. To which I’ll quote the Motto of America: In God We Trust. Then I’ll quote the Bible and say, “Perfect love casts out fear.” I’ll further advise a shift in perspective to one of lack and limited resources to the reality that we’re still the richest nation on the Planet Earth and we live in a Universe of Abundance. We CAN afford it. It’s more efficient. Try to see it. It feels better.

I’ve noticed this about Republicans I know personally: though they say they are against social welfare programs, they seem to be pretty happy about cashing unemployment checks, having their babies on federal and state health care programs if they’re pregnant without insurance (many times on purpose), using public funds for family planning, feeding their kids on WIC and food stamps, filing for social security and medicare and medicaid when they need it. It’s a paradox I have not been able to puzzle out through the entire health care debate. I have no doubt they’ll all find the most beneficial way to use this health care bill too.

As they should.

I have equal faith that insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and health care providers will find a way to capitalize on this bill as well. It’s who they are and what they do. They’re freaking geniuses at it.

As they should.

Health care should focus on wellness and healing the sick.

I feel confident this Bill makes the best attempt possible  — in our complicated system of checks and balances and “great compromises” – to put the focus back on health, wellness and healing.

Now, if the American Citizens can get their own personal focus on compassion we’ll really be doing well. Perhaps that’s too much to ask of a Bill or a for-profit health care industry. Compassion can only happen in the hearts of Americans. I have faith we can pull that off too. It’s who we are. It’s what we do. We’re freaking geniuses at it.

There’s an atrocious story in The Economist about how the worldwide gendercide rate is rising at an alarming rate.

I’ll give you one guess which gender suffers from mass-extermination.

In some areas there are 130 baby boys to 100 baby girls being born. The culprit? Utrasounds and abortions have given parents the technology to choose whether they have a valuable boy or an expensive girl. Culture and tradition still hold that boys are better. Some laws, as in China, prohibit large families (you can’t waste your one allotted child on a girl). Economic suppression of women around the world hold that men are more valuable as bread-winners (because women are restricted from the earning of bread) and as retirement security for their parents. Boys are valuable, girls are costly.

Why should you care?

China alone stands to have as many unmarried young men—“bare branches”, as they are known—as the entire population of young men in America. In any country rootless young males spell trouble; in Asian societies, where marriage and children are the recognized routes into society, single men are almost like outlaws. Crime rates, bride trafficking, sexual violence, even female suicide rates are all rising and will rise further as the lopsided generations reach their maturity,” the article states.

In 1990 it was estimated that over 100 million girls are dead. The toll is millions higher now.

Only one country has managed to change this pattern. In the 1990s South Korea had a sex ratio almost as skewed as China’s. Now, it is heading towards normality. It has achieved this not deliberately, but because the culture changed. Female education, anti-discrimination suits and equal-rights rulings made son preference seem old-fashioned and unnecessary. The forces of modernity first exacerbated prejudice—then overwhelmed it, states the article.

Think about the 100 million dead baby girls next time you hear Glenn Beck promise that equality and the pursuit of equal and economic justice will cost you your “freedom.”

Equality is a matter of International Security. Make no mistake about it. A world ruled by single men will self-destruct in a violent ball of testosterone-fueled fury, led by the same power-crazed idiots that were deluded enough to call discrimination “freedom.”

Go read the full story in The Economist.

I just finished Going Rogue: An American Life by Sarah Palin, former Governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican Vice Presidential candidate.

I’m going out on a limb and asking readers to put aside their political venom to discuss the merging and blending of mothering and working.

Take a deep breath. This isn’t a post about abortion. It’s not a post about Bristol or teen pregnancy. This post doesn’t discuss energy, ANWAR, death panels or the health care bill.

For the duration of this post, if it’s humanly possible, put aside your opinions and positions and accept my invitation to look at Sarah Palin in the context of her ability to govern and mother simultaneously.

Sarah Palin is a bad-ass mom.

A quick-run down of what I consider bad-ass mothering: campaigning for mayor and city council door-to-door pulling a wagon full of toddlers, toting her children all over Alaska to campaign for Governor, giving birth while Governor, breast-feeding a Down Syndrome infant while on the campaign trail running for Vice President of The United States of America.

She didn’t strike a “balance” between work and motherhood – she cohesively merged her work and motherhood seamlessly. Doing so was to the benefit of her personal fulfillment, her children and her work.

She felt a calling for more than motherhood, didn’t see a conflict and just DID it. She didn’t wait for the historically patriarchal Republican Party’s permission. She just did it.

How did she do it? She did what mothers have always done throughout the history of mankind – she did what she needed to do and took her kids with her or found someone to watch them.

The youngest daughter Piper, one of the primary characters in the book, appears at her mother’s side at nearly every pivotal moment in Sarah’s political career. Piper might actually be the most empowered girl in America, next to Willow and Bristol. Like other children throughout the history of moms and kids, she tagged along behind or beside her mom. The only difference is that instead of cleaning the house and doing dishes, Piper’s mom campaigned, governed a city, then a state, and then ran for vice president. She made speeches, mingled with voters, went door-to-door, and posed for photos ops. She signed laws, dealt with reporters and balanced budgets.

The most beautiful thing about this book and Sarah Palin’s perspective is that there is no conflict at all between mothering and governing or mothering and working. She doesn’t even waste a single thought on it.

She does not apologize for having children, for bringing children on a campaign, for a baby crying in the background of a phone call, for a child’s presence at a press conference or a State dinner, for her child answering a reporter’s question, for her children being present at the signing of bills, at the governor’s office or even playing hide and seek in the halls while she hammers out a budget through the night.

Sarah is there, therefore, her children are there. Duh, of course they are.

Think about that for one second. Replay, in your own brain, the number of times you apologize for your children’s presence. Too loud in church, disruptive in a meeting, no babysitter for a social function, working from home due to ear infections . . . and on and on. Think of all the guilt you’ve wasted over it.

She doesn’t talk about the stress of it either. Mothering is a pleasure. Governing is a privilege. She loves doing both. She has passion for both roles and finds them fulfilling. Why would she surrender one to an outdated traditional expectation?

She also does not apologize for leaving her children to pursue objectives child-free. She went to a hotel in California, leaving her family for a few weeks for some precious peace and quiet to work on her book. During the Vice Presidential race of 2008, she campaigned away from her children on weekdays so they could continue going to school in Alaska. Her husband, Todd, their parents, their extended family, close family friends, her children’s friends and parents and a hired babysitter all pitch in to make sure family life keeps trekking along while she’s away. Of course they do. It made me think, “wait, why are we making this so hard?”

She didn’t quit when her family life got complicated. It got pretty complicated when she had an unplanned pregnancy while Governor of Alaska, then found out the baby boy had Down Syndrome. It was further complicated when, a month after giving birth to Trig, her teenage daughter, Bristol, confessed she was pregnant. Her oldest son had joined the military and gone to Iraq and could die at any moment. Any normal family would have a very difficult time adjusting to those circumstances. Before any adjusting could happen, Sarah Palin was asked to run for Vice President and hit the campaign trail. And she did it. Come on, I know women who have an emotional breakdown and take a sick day when they get their period every month.

There is a vital difference between her life and most working women’s lives: Sarah Palin is the boss.

She has no boss telling her its inappropriate to bring her kids to work, inappropriate to campaign pulling a wagon full of toddlers behind her as she talks to voters door-to-door. She has no human resources department counting her sick days and no one telling her she can or can’t be home at 3:00 to greet her kids after school. There is no one telling her she can’t work from her kitchen table when she needs to. No one telling her it’s unprofessional to bring children to a budget meeting or a major speech.

Some of us bang our heads against the brick wall of the patriarchal work-day establishment asking for maternity leave, paid sick days, family medical leave – talking to employers and trying to convince human resource departments of our worthiness as mothers and workers, and arguing over legislation, trying to convince politicians to support family medical leave and a flexible workday – and raging against the fact that our available choices all suck (I mean Me here).

Sarah Palin went around the brick walls. She just believed such nonsense didn’t apply to her. So it didn’t. I’m fairly certain it won’t apply to her daughters either.

Photos from (but not in this order) Positives in Politics, ivstatic, Kansans for Life, NY Daily News,  Telegraph.

The International Museum of Women has a wonderful online presence at Economica: Women and the Global Economy/.

The world is shifting, shrugging, adjusting its briefs . . . can you feel it?

There is movement. Women’s economic independence is key to any and every human rights and economic issue on the planet. Let’s help it gather some momentum.

Pop over to the site and look, take some action, donate some dough, submit your own story or photography.

The topics include: New vision, human rights, marriage, fertility, microenterprise, business, grassroots solutions, property and wealth, and giving.

This guy in my Sunday school class, Thomas Ratliff, is running for Texas State School Board. He’s the moderate Republican opposing a right-wing conservative Christian Republican, Don McLeroy. McLeroy is a dentist who leads a majority voting bloc on the Texas State School Board, which is literally rewriting American history in textbooks from a Christian, more specifically, a self-discribed, “fundamentalist” right-wing conservative Christian, perspective.

My husband forwarded me this article he read in The New York Times, How Christian Were The Founding Fathers? It has 10 pages of really scary, “it might be time to consider home schooling the kids,” quotes in it from the controlling members of the Texas School Board.

Lucky for us, we’ll be in Colorado, I said.

Yeah, except for Texas basically writes the textbooks for the rest of the states. They order the most textbooks, and textbook companies don’t want to lose their business, so they write them according to what the Texas School Board votes should be put in them.

From The Times article, Tom Barber, who worked as the head of social studies at the three biggest textbook publishers before running his own editorial company, says, “Texas was and still is the most important and most influential state in the country.” And James Kracht, a professor at Texas A&M’s college of education and a longtime player in the state’s textbook process, told me flatly, “Texas governs 46 or 47 states.”

Damn it!

You’ll probably want to send Thomas Ratliff some money (and vote for him if you’re a Texas Republican) unless you’re cool with the actual rewriting of history to include one very, very specific religious light on history.

Which, as a Christian, I’m totally cool with, as long as that Christian worldview is my Feminist-Mormon-Housewife-Methodist-Liberal-Democrat-Christian-Spiritual-Conciousness-Yogi perspective, of course.

…..The Founding Fathers did too share my perspective! I’ve read all kinds of historical documents to prove it.
……Yes, they did.
……Shut up. Yes, they did too. No Anti-Christian Fascist agenda is going to convince me otherwise.