sydneyisdeffonfire:

klairy-dust:

fairydustandklainebows:

brendanshaw:

p3n1s:

femistorian:

This is what a REAL rape prevention campaign looks like

All the awards.

DO ME A HUGE FAVOR AND REBLOG THIS!

This is perfection in a campaign

I love how they included a situation where a guy could’ve gotten raped. People don’t seem to realize that males get raped too. It’s less common, but it happens. That is what sets this campaign apart from others. 

think-progress:

This is a BFD, here’s why.

The problem is that angry, hostile rhetoric can produce a wide range of results, and when you start painting targets on people some of the more misguided sociopaths among us will elect to shoot at them. Some of us don’t handle passion well, and for those people, a passionate debate like abortion becomes an ideal breeding ground for the bacteria of hate. The FRC had long been part of the effort to demonize abortion providers, and the attack was at least in some small way an outgrowth of that. I wanted them to take responsibility for their role in stoking that public fervor, however minor a factor it may have been in that specific assassination attempt.

I thought about Dr. Tiller upon learning of Floyd Lee Corkins, and his attack on the D.C. offices of the Family Research Council. According to news reports, which for our purposes today we will assume are accurate, Floyd walked into the FRC lobby with a loaded pistol, ludicrous amounts of ammunition, some Chick-Fil-A sundry, and began running his mouth about how awful the FRC is. They are, by they way, awful. Upon questioning by a member of the security staff, Corkins started firing, shooting the security guard in the arm. The tables, it seems, had been reversed. This time, it was one of our people doing something violently stupid.

I want to make clear, I am not taking responsibility for this yahoo’s poor judgment or unstable psyche. Something exists in the mind of a potential mass shooter that is unique to their classification. These are people capable of packing up lethal weaponry, leaving the house, driving across town, parking, getting out of the car, putting change in the meter, walking into a public place in the middle of the day, taking a pistol out, and shooting someone. A shooting isn’t ever just one bad decision. It’s a deliberate series of bad decisions, each one being a necessary step in a process. At every stage of that bad decision, the assailant in question must renew their resolve to murder. To make it through each step, and to complete the devastating final act, takes determination of a sort that chills the blood. Ultimate responsibility belongs to the shooter. They’ve worked hard to accomplish their horrific goals, and have earned the appropriate recognition for their efforts. Hopefully involving orange outfits and lots of concrete.

What makes this personally conflicting is that I completely understand where his anger comes from. The Family Research Council, along with other like minded organizations like the American Family Association, and the National Organization for Marriage, deal in bigotry. The sole reason for their existence, the very premise upon which they have rented office space and obtained corporate letterhead, is to work to make the lives of LGBT people in this country worse. A good day for the FRC will almost always be a bad day for gay people. They cloak themselves in Christ, and then work as hard as they can to make sure that gay people can’t marry, have no federal protection of any kind, and are as despised and alienated as possible by the general public. If the FRC had its way, the United States would return to the days before Lawrence v. Texas, when homosexuality was illegal. They want me to be able to be fired from my job, or kicked out of my home for being gay. They would have gay teachers disgraced and removed from contact with their students. They would have us return to the days before Stonewall when we were hunted by our peers, lobotomized by our loved ones, terrified to leave our closets. There is no law supporting any aspect of LGBT equality that people like the FRC wouldn’t find time to oppose. What’s worse, mainstream media outlets frequently have FRC head Tony Perkins on their programs so that he can tell the American people all of this in person. The reality is that if not for hate, organizations like the FRC would have very little to do all day. Perhaps you can engineer a way that their behavior doesn’t positively define bigotry, but if so, I have yet to see a compelling case made for such a prospect.

[…]

I understand why Floyd Corkins felt like he was under attack. He was. We all are. He has a right to be angry. What he doesn’t have is a right to run around shooting people. I want to win this debate on the merits of our argument, not by inflicting damage on our opponent sufficient to run them out of the debate entirely. I want them to realize why they are wrong. I want our victory to be clean, and based on well considered fact. Floyd Corkins, by choosing a solution of violence, has undercut the righteousness of our struggle, injured a perfectly innocent security guard, and what’s worse, generated public sympathy for an organization that deserves nothing but national scorn. Violence, even against the empty suit that is Tony Perkins, is no way to solve our problems. Only through winning the hearts and minds of the American people can our struggles come to an end. Bigotry is a reaction to fear, and making bigots more fearful isn’t going to help solve our problems. It only makes things worse.

While the actions of Floyd Corkins are his own, both sides of the battle for equality must take time to acknowledge our casualties, and take responsibility for the damage the battle is causing. We would stop our defense in a moment if that were possible. However, as we remain gay despite the best efforts of the Family Research Council, we have little choice but to continue fighting. The only actor in this scenario capable of ending this confrontation are the bigots, the agitators, the ones who choose to assault our community. For us this struggle is mandatory. For them, it is decidedly optional. They elect to attack us, and we must therefore defend. Never through violence, as that sort of victory is never sustainable, but through the perseverance of thought and the never abating belief that equality shines through all other obstructions, and in the end will prevail.

tartantambourine:

At the White House, Obama denounced the vote, saying Republicans chose “once again to protect tax breaks for the wealthiest few Americans at the expense of the middle class.” In a statement issued after the vote, he said he would keep pressing Congress to help the middle class. “It’s just plain wrong that millions of middle-class Americans pay a higher share of their income in taxes than some millionaires and billionaires,” he said.

Thumbs up to Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the lone Republican to vote for this step toward fairness.

Thumbs down to Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, the lone Democratic defector.

progressivesunite:

Oh, what the U.S. military will do to protect itself.  It’s abhorrent and disgusting.  Women who were sexually assaulted were more likely to be discharged for having personality disorders.  This meant they lost all benefits and in some cases had to pay back the military.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/14/health/military-sexual-assaults-personality-disorder/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

liberalsarecool:

Rick Warren was on ABC’s This Week yesterday, and Jake Tapper asked him what he thought about President Obama’s suggestion that God tells us to care for those less fortunate than ourselves.

“I do not believe in wealth redistribution, I believe in wealth creation.” -…

Both Arizona and Kansas are considering bills giving your doctor the legal authority to withhold potentially crucial information about your health, and in this case your child’s.

This idea of lying to women has been in the quiver of the our-choice-for-you movement since before Roe v. Wade when abortion was legal only at the state level. In 1967, the first of what are now known as crisis pregnancy centers or fake abortion clinics was opened by a man named Robert Pearson in Hawaii. The blueprint for these ruses is still The Pearson Foundation’s manual, “How to Start and Operate Your Own Pro-Life Outreach Crisis Pregnancy Center,” published in 1984. Pearson writes, “Obviously, we’re fighting Satan. A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby.”

In this case, Satan is a girl.

And Satan, being the father of all lies and all — doesn’t have the right to the truth when he gets knocked up.

In the right-wing-maligned health care reform bill were strides for women’s health, equality and autonomy. The buried lede about Obamacare is it forced insurance companies not to treat a womb as a preexisting condition. Recently it came to focus (while being declared a war on religion) that birth control must be covered by insurance even if the employer is a religious institution (the exception being an actual church). For the last decade, Viagra was covered by insurance, no problem, and the pill was not. A dysfunction for men was covered and a function for women was out-of-pocket. The Affordable Care Act changed that.

And the right-wing opposes this as a “government takeover of health care.” But when they want to endow your doctor with the ability to dictate their values in the form of dishonesty — health care (specifically women’s) needs to be taken over by government. Stat!

As a culture, would we tolerate this if it were any other medical condition besides pregnancy? What if your doctor was being paid by the soft drink industry to tell you your obesity isn’t from your five liter a day habit? What if your doctor didn’t approve of vaccinations and you actually get Meningitis? What if your doctor thought it wasn’t right to tell you about your cancer screening results while in its operable window? And what if some yahoo state lawmakers decided – against all ethics and medical research – to agree with your quack doctor?

If those things seem outrageous then lying to pregnant women has to be too. If we want to live in a society where women have the same rights as men, being of child-bearing ability can’t be a caveat to equality.

Either women have equal rights under the law or they’re public incubators. And according to these attempted laws in Arizona and Kansas — we’re not equal.

Women have few public defenders right now and it’s our fault. As the years passed, we grew overconfident. We took our hard-won rights for granted, we assumed our enemies accepted our triumphs — abortion rights, equal pay, work equality, contraception — as a done deal. We underestimated how much we were hated, and look at us now.

American women are fighting a rearguard action for something as basic as birth control to be included in health-care plans. They are called “sluts” for doing so.

They are also fighting state government-mandated pre-abortion ultrasounds to shame them into cancelling the procedure. “I cannot believe I still have to protest this,” one woman demonstrator’s sign read in Virginia. The women were hauled away by police on Monday, the same way pregnant women who attempt suicide are arrested for child murder in the southern states.

[…]

As things now stand, women are condemned for existing. Whatever we do, we will always be wrong.

Our appearance is dissected as if we were crayfish pinned to a lab table. We wear too much makeup, our clothes are too tight and short, we are too attractive for the workplace but too ugly to be sexually harassed, “sluts” when we get pregnant and “sluts” for not having a husband, bad mothers when we seek child care in order to go back to work, bad wives for working in the first place.

We’re too fat for our clothes, too thin to be healthy, we inexplicably outdo males in school, we are unattractively aggressive, we are out of line.

Women simply cannot win. If we don’t fight back against this tidal wave, we are in desperate trouble. And a Happy International Women’s Day to you too.

thedailyfeed:

Last week we told you about America’s most unequal city, Bridgeport, Connecticut. This week, we’re taking you to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the most equal city in America. Benjamin Carlson reports:

Residents say the city reminds them of how America used to be, when there was no such thing as a “middle-class crisis.”

 “I guess I am not real surprised,” wrote Helene Capizzi of the Sheboygan Public Library in an email to The Daily. “Sheboygan reminds me a lot of what it was like to grow up in Milwaukee in the ’60s. We’re always a decade or two behind the trends, but I think that’s what we like!”

 Indeed, visitors to this modest, quaint town might be excused for thinking they stepped out of a time machine from the Eisenhower or Kennedy years. Here, polka bands still draw crowds in the summer, parents safely let their kids roam unsupervised and busy manufacturers keep pumping out goods proudly “made in the USA.”

While employment in the relatively well-paying manufacturing sector has plummeted nationally, now accounting for less than 10 percent of jobs, in Sheboygan, one-third of workers hold jobs with manufacturing firms that produce everything from plastic wares to shower heads for luxury spas.