In Which We Think We Like Campbell Brown

Had noticed her from time to time, not that I can recall why, but yeah. Way to take back the "sexism" charges surrounding Sarah Palin and turn them on their heads! For realz.

Headline of the Day

From the Chicago Tribune: Operation lets Muslim women reclaim virginity and lives.

To the Chicago Tribune (for that headline), the idiot men who view a rupturable hymen as a use-by date that supersedes every other attribute their brides have, and the doctors who perform the surgeries: fuck you.

Gynecologists report that in the past few years, more Muslim women are asking for certificates of virginity to provide proof to others. That in turn has created a demand among cosmetic surgeons for hymen replacements, which, if done properly, they say, will not be detected and will produce tell-tale vaginal bleeding on the wedding night. The service is widely advertised on the Internet; medical tourism packages are available to countries like Tunisia where it is less expensive.

Let's clarify a few very simple things. First, the presence or absence of a hymen is roughly as relevant to virginal status as the presence or absence of a hat is relevant to status as a Steelers fan. If you spend much time on a bike, or a horse, or a seesaw when you're little, chances are good your hymen is going to unzip itself without the help of a penis. Men who believe that blood on the sheets is the only guarantee they've married a virgin are ignorant; men who decide to punish their wives for not screaming and bleeding on initial wedding-night penetration are ignorant assholes.

Second, shelling out thousands of dollars to get a flap of skin sliced from your vaginal wall and sewn to the other side solely in order to enable your new husband to rip the surgical scar open and then thrust against the torn tissues repeatedly isn't reclaiming your virginity. It's just elective mutilation undergone to assure that your ignorant asshole of a husband will get enough of an ego boost from his bloody dick that he won't divorce you on your wedding night, beat you, or give you back to your father so he can beat you.

The furor followed the revelation two weeks ago that a court in Lille, in northern France, had annulled the 2006 marriage of two French Muslims because the groom discovered his bride was not the virgin she had claimed to be.

Some feminists, lawyers and doctors warned that the court's acceptance of the centrality of virginity in marriage would encourage more Frenchwomen from Arab and African Muslim backgrounds to have their hymens restored. But there is much debate about whether the procedure is an act of liberation or repression.

Wow, let me think about that for all of two seconds. Liberation or oppression, liberation or oppression... surgical mutilation designed to enable coital mutilation, the reduction of women's lives not to only to their sexual status, but to a small flap of tissue that may be absent even if the sacred virginal status is present, the complete focus on the woman's virginity and complete indifference to the man's, ownership of a woman's sexuality by her father... liberation or oppression? Do they seriously even need to ask?

I'm not even going to waste my time on the American women who apparently think this is the best Valentine's present ever for their husbands, independent of any medieval religious and cultural mores that threaten to destroy them if they don't comply. Because nothing says I love you like giving your guy the chance to rip you open all over again.

Comment of the Day

The finest summary of the problem, ever, from commenter Interrobang on PZ Myers' post recounting the repulsive story of an "honor" killing in Iraq:

People don't act this way because they are men.

Half right. They act that way because the culture has told them that because they're men, they're entitled to police what women do with their bodies, and that women aren't really human the way they are, so killing them carries approximately the same moral weight as getting rid of a malfunctioning machine.

This is seriously not an Islam-specific thing. We simply don't hear about the cases that happen every single day where women are tortured, raped, beaten, and killed by men for not conforming to the men's arbitrary standards. In our culture, we don't hide it behind a religious euphemism; we call it "domestic violence," and most people insist that it's a personal problem, rather than the inevitable, cultural result of a society that continually others and dehumanises women, and places men in the role of enforcing women's gender conformity.

When "honour killings" happen in Western society, we shrug our shoulders and call it "child abuse" or wonder what she was doing marrying that abusive loser in the first place, and asking "Why didn't she just leave?" Pointing this up as though it's specifically to do with Islam is misleading and mendacious; Islam simply provides a different sort of cover story to the standard Western narrative(s).

Incidentally, fundamentalist Christians would openly do this -- and claim it was part and parcel of their religion -- if they thought they could get away with it. They've been working hard, actually, to try to change the laws so that they can. (For a really scary time, look up "Christian discipline" and "voluntary slavery.")

I have nothing to add.

Certifying Board Has Standards for Certifying, Anti-Abortion Doctors Object

Oh, nice. What a wonderful thing when listening to NPR on the way to work makes you end up feeling even more stabby than you already did. In November, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued an ethics opinion directing physicians who don't want to perform a given standard healthcare procedure to refer their patients to other physicians who will perform it. Fair enough, right? Wrong. The administration finally noticed it last Friday.

The Bush administration says new ethics guidelines written by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists may violate federal "conscience" laws.

Of course the Bush administration says that. Abortion is the obvious bone of contention, but if conscience laws are put into play, emergency contraception, standard contraception, and prenatal care for lesbians and quite possibly unmarried straight women turn into pawns in the religious conservatives' power game.

"I'm not going to refer someone to a hit man to put to death someone that's inconvenient in their life," says Joseph DeCook, a retired Ob/Gyn from Holland, Mich., and vice-president of the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. "I wouldn't do that. This is the very same thing. I'm not going to refer a pregnant woman to a physician who will purposefully terminate her pregnancy — better known as purposefully kill the unborn child. I'm just not going to do it."

The forced-birth contingent is concerned that refusing to refer their patients to other doctors so that they can obtain a legal and standard medical procedure will lead to the ACOG stripping them of their board certification, which will put them out of business. Cry me a river? The administration is doing just that.

On Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt sent a letter challenging the policy to both the certifying board and ACOG.

"We had great concerns that technically competent, skilled, highly trained physicians could be denied board certification solely on the basis of refusing to refer for abortions, something that might be against their moral compass or ethical standard," says Don Wright, HHS principal deputy assistant secretary.

The entire kerfuffle may ultimately be posturing anyway, since the ethics opinion isn't part of the formal code and is nonbinding. Be that as it may, the ACOG is rightly more concerned about technically competent, skilled, highly trained physicians unilaterally denying women access to legal procedures, legal medications, and legal care that fall outside the umbrella of the physicians' personal religious beliefs. The government should share those concerns.

The ACOG should take the additional step of requiring full disclosure on the parts of the doctors. Every OB/GYN and primary care physician in the country should be required to prominently post a sign on their doors detailing the limits their religious beliefs place on the services they will provide, and the same information needs to go to the HMOs to put in their provider guides so that women don't enter into professional relationships with doctors who will, down the road, not only refuse to fulfill their legitimate medical requests but will refuse to issue the sacred referral required for them to acquire the services elsewhere. In this era of plan-specific providers and long waits to find physicians who are taking new patients, no one can afford to waste their time.

Those of us in urban areas with more doctors available--even with some who take our insurance and have openings!--are inconvenienced by these goons. Women in small towns or rural settings with one doctor per hundred square miles are facing involuntary life-changing situations if the one guy available won't refer them to the clinic in the city four hours away. If they're raped and he refuses to keep emergency contraception on hand, they're assaulted twice. Think back on every story the Bush administration has told about the Muslim oppression of women who do not conform to the religious standards of the men around them, stories used in part to justify the invasion of Iraq, and then ask why the same administration is leaping to the defense of Christian men who refuse to provide services to women whose needs do not conform to the men's religious standards. Men who, dare I say it, are asking for special rights exempting them from the standards set for their jobs.

In Which We Are Almost Speechless

Of course, we are never too speechless to say What. The. Flying. Fuck. (via Pharyngula)

Kansas activities officials are investigating a school's refusal to let a female referee call a boys' high school basketball game.

The Kansas State High School Activities Association said referees reported that Michelle Campbell was preparing to officiate at St. Mary's Academy near Topeka on Feb. 2 when a school official insisted that Campbell could not call the game.

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy's beliefs.

St. Mary's is run by the retro-Catholic Society of St. Pius X, a lovely little schismatic group that believes in rather arcane bits of theology from the totally old-skool Church as well as believing that major purchases should not be made on Sundays, that women shouldn't wear men's clothing and that standards of modest attire should be enforced more rigorously for women than for men, that surgery to remove an ectopic pregnancy is never okay until the embryo has died on its own, and, oh yeah, that slavery isn't necessarily always a bad thing. On the plus side, they teach that it's not a sin to serve soft drinks as long as they aren't drunk purely for pleasure or in excess, that you don't necessarily have to cut off all communication with your daughter who is living in sin, and that it is permissible to perform old-time country folk music on TV. But not Gospel music, ever.

Aaaaaannnnnnd where does the SSPX stand on feminism (or "the feministic movement," as they so charmingly refer to it on their website)? Do you really need to ask? Actually, the discussion opens with this howler:

The Church has always been, historically, a great defender of woman.

And kind of goes downhill from there.

The natural order differentiates the two sexes by subordinating the one to the other. In the order of creation the woman comes after man. She is subject to man though not his final end.

There is a subordination which many choose to ignore, a subordination given us by Divine revelation: "The head of every man is Christ; the head of the woman is man; and the head of Christ is God." Feminism refuses the true nature of woman, confuses the natural and supernatural relations between the sexes and embarks upon a deviant path at the end of which the suicide of thought and the death of womanhood is inevitable.

The suicide of thought? Come on now--there's no need for suicide when the Church kills your independent thought processes for you!

Getting back to the point, though, while I find the thought of living under such a stifling philosophy repugnant and am very sad for the women in the SSPX families, it ultimately matters to me not because of my personal emotional reaction to the crap trotted out on their website and likely in their weekly homilies, but because it's a prime example of religious extremism reaching out to gobsmack other people who do not subscribe to their beliefs.

How much cash did the referee miss out on by not working that game? If the Arizona interscholastic association pay scales are any comparison, it was probably in the neighborhood of forty bucks. Not huge in the grand scheme of things. But, as with so many other fights of principle, it's the precedent here that matters more than the specific economic opportunity being denied. In a publicly funded athletic association, denying employment to a certified professional on the basis of gender can't fly. The Kansas association is reviewing the incident and St. Mary's written policies before deciding whether to boot the school.

Beyond the seemingly cut-and-dried issue of whether a religious institution may discriminate while operating under the umbrella of a public association, I find myself shuddering at the kinds of assholes this school is churning out into the greater society when it teaches that an adult woman has no authority over minor boys. God, I hope the first female cop who pulls one of these guys (or their coaches or teachers or priests) over for speeding has a microphone on her dashboard camera. That's going to be just charming.

Women may hold no authority over men. Isn't that one of the facets of religious extremism we cite as a reason to invade other countries, at least as long as they (1) don't have nukes or (2) have leaders who like to go on long walks on the beach with our leader?

Slight update and props to the male referees at the gym who refused to play along with the bullshit and walked off the court with Campbell:

Fred Shockey, who was getting ready to leave the gym after officiating two junior high games, said he was told there had been an emergency and was asked to stay and officiate two more games.

"When I found out what the emergency was, I said there was no way I was going to work those games," said Shockey, who spent 12 years in the Army and became a ref about three years ago. "I have been led by some of the finest women this nation has to offer, and there was no way I was going to go along with that."

Hillary Haters: Classy to the End

The Clinton-Obama face-clawing match is becoming increasingly distasteful to watch and increasingly disquieting when thoughts turn to how the party is planning on presenting a united front behind whichever candidate gets the nod to go against McCain. But against this unsettling backdrop, thankfully, comes a lone rider who proves yet again that no one does distasteful quite like Republican smear specialists.

In short, GOP shitwad Roger Stone filed papers with the IRS this week to form a 527 organization whose sole purpose is to sell t-shirts with this so witty name and logo (h/t Top!Secret G-woman):


Vote Republican. Because you're never too old for 12-year-old-boy humor.

Get it? Get it? See the subtle design? What's that look like? No, look closer. And see those big bolded letters? Yeah, those. Now put them together and read them out loud. No, do it. C'mon, c'mon... What's that? Yeah! Ahhhhhh ha ha ha ha, you just said "cunt!" Because Hillary's a cunt, get it? And with this shirt you can call her a cunt without coming out and really calling her a cunt, so it's just a slayingly clever acronym that only like-minded sophisticates will understand, wink wink, nudge nudge, and it's sooooo fucking funny that everyone's going to want one and it's gonna go fucking viral, dude! Dude.

Christ.

Keep it up, GOPers. Did you learn nothing from the Chris Matthews blowback that's at least partially credited with giving Clinton New Hampshire? Misogyny sure seems like fun when you're cowing women into public submission, but it doesn't play so well in the privacy of the voting booth where there's no one standing there with a clenched fist to remind them that they need to grow a sense of humor and quit being so bitchy. Keep spewing this shit and see if you're left dumbfounded by a fuck you vote you never saw coming.