Concerned, But Not Terribly Concerned About Historical Accuracy

Ah, the Concerned Women for America. "Concerned" anything brings to mind the quintessential church lady frowning slightly, certain Something's Wrong with whatever issue has blundered into her line of sight, but unable to quiiiiiiite put together a cogent argument for why It (whatever it is) should be different.

Yesterday was Flag Day, so the CWA took the opportunity to wax indignant about... the Pledge of Allegiance, in support of yet another Republican base ass-kissing called the Pledge Protection Act (courtesy of Arizona's very own six-letter menace, Jon! Kyl!)--a proposed federal law that would prevent the phrase "under God" from ever being excised.

[Lanier] Swann said, “As Americans commemorate Flag Day, it is also appropriate to remember the importance of keeping God in our Pledge. CWA strongly supports the mention of God in our nation’s oath in keeping with our constitutional freedoms. We are free from an established religion and free to worship as we choose. Men of faith intentionally included the phrase ‘under God’ in an oath that serves as a symbol of loyalty and patriotism to our great country.

It's unclear if the CWA understand that while men of faith inserted the phrase into the pledge, they did so almost sixty years after the pledge was originally penned by an atheist socialist. It's equally unclear whether they understand the constitutional freedoms mentioned so reverently above, as Swann goes on to say:

“The Pledge Protection Act would uphold and protect the sanctity of our age-old Pledge. Children across the country must continue to have the right to recite our Pledge day in and day out. The words ‘under God’ make the Pledge not only a patriotic oath, but a public prayer for our country,” concluded Swann.

Hang on, let me rewind a moment here. In order to fulfill the religious freedoms mandated by the Constitution... we need a federal law... mandating the inclusion of a reference to a deity in the Pledge of Allegiance... in order to permanently establish said pledge as a public prayer.

Makes perfect sense to me.

The other reference I find curious is calling the Pledge "age-old," a phrase usually reserved for certifiably ancient things such as mountains and the British oppression of Ireland. The Pledge was written in 1892, which is definitely old, but not qualified as "age-old" even in the context of the US. To be age-old in America, you need to date to no later than the initial founding and framing spasms of the country, say Bill of Rights or earlier. And since I'm pretty sure the key bit being cited as age-old is the hat-tip to God, age-old apparently means "52" to the CWA, which makes not just the Pledge but also my boss and my Betty Crocker cookbook age-old as well. Who knew?

Recommended

After the weekend, focus is still slow in coming. I don't want to think about politics, immigration, feminism, organic farming, or gay marriage. I don't care to care that much about anything at the moment, truth be told.

In the interim before I get my angsty freak back on, here's a list of recommended diversions.

Books.

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and The Passion
Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
Franco Ferucci, The Life of God
Jay Winik, April 1865
Ruth Reichl, Tender At the Bone
MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating
Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
Andrea Barrett, The Voyage of the Narwhal
Ian Frazier, On the Rez
James Lileks, The Gallery of Regrettable Food
Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea

Music.

Natalia Zuckerman, On a Clear Day
Nortec Collective, The Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 3
DeVotchKa, How It Ends
Nada Surf, Let Go

Soccer.

Brazil.
Ghana.
Italy.
Not us.

Soccer coverage.

Univision.
Not ESPN. JP Dellacamera is a blithering idiot.

That is all. Deep insights tomorrow, really.

Better Living Through Polysyllabism

(Courtesy of PZ Myers over at Pharyngula.)

Hey, Ho, Way To Go, Ohio...

Some time ago, round about when South Dakota enacted their abortion ban and Missouri and Louisiana were prepping their own, I wrote something about the far-right giddily bounding up to the line, eager to out-insane each other in the new Alito-Roberts-Scalia-Thomas world. Ohio is the latest entrant and current holder of the yellow jersey in the Tour de Compulsory Birth, courtesy of Tom Brinkman's (R-Cincinnati) little gem of a bill that would criminalize all abortion, no exceptions. No exception for rape, either of the stranger, acquaintance, or incestuous variety--nothing new here, right? But wait. There is so much more. The bill includes no exception for saving the life of the mother.

Read that again.

No exception for the life of the mother.

This isn't South Dakota's refusal to include a "health of the mother" exemption. This is, finally, an honest acknowledgment of what we in the choice camp have been saying louder and louder since South Dakota, since Louisiana: in the view of the anti-choice camp, women are life-support systems for a uterus. Nothing more.

The bill is almost certainly intended more as a Roe v. Wade challenge than as seriously contemplated public policy, more a bit of one-upsmanship designed to appeal to the same ultra-conservative voters who support gay marriage bans, flag-burning amendments, and nuking Iran. As such (and given the short time since it was announced), I haven't been able to dig up too much of the intellectual background behind it. I'm very anxious, though, to hear the ethical reasoning that leads to the conclusion that it's preferable to sacrifice two lives rather than end one to save the other. I wonder if this is a Salvadorean-esque mindset that values even an ectopic implantation of a small clump of cells more than the actual thinking, breathing, living woman carrying it.

Let the red-dress frenzy begin.

The Wedding.

I was going to lead off with an unfounded generalization. I was going to say, "It's weird going to your ex's wedding." But instead of presuming to speak for everyone in the world, I'll revise and just say it was weird going to my ex's wedding. I get along with him just fine, obviously (otherwise it would have been quite weird indeed to show up at his wedding...), and I adore his family. Walking into the church and being warmly, delightedly greeted by his sister and brother and catching up with exactly how much the nephews have grown made it feel like a family reunion. The reunion of a family I don't quite belong to any more, or at least belong to in a relationship I haven't figured out yet.

I got through the ceremony without a single one of the welling tears escaping my eyelids, mainly by pinching the fingertips of my left hand in succession just short of the point of drawing blood.

It was maddening because I didn't know where the waves of emotion were coming from. The girlfriend was next to me crying like a... well, like a copiously crying person the whole time, but she also cries at Hallmark commercials so I don't think our tears were springing from the same well. Maybe it was because the last time I saw him in such a tuxedo-clad setting slipping a ring on someone's finger, it was me on the receiving end. Which makes no sense since I have no desire to be married to him or to any man, for that matter.

I just wasn't prepared. I don't think there's anything in life that really prepared me for that. The divorces I grew up with involved the salient parties pretty much hating each other's guts, so the proper place and behavior of the amicable ex-wife at the next wedding was never properly modeled for me. I wanted to hang with the ex-in-laws at the reception, but didn't want to barge in someplace I don't quite belong any more.

The next few weeks and months will be a learning process.

Special Report: Purity Pledges and Rape Reporting

When pressed for time and needing to gather your thoughts (World Cup starts in 45 minutes! Ex gets re-married in 30 hours!), post stuff from your dailyKos diary. Sure recipe for success. So now I reach back to April and rescue a piece I apparently never got around to putting up here...

Continuing the theme of purity pledges and a level of paternal involvement in pre-adolescent girls' sexuality, we turn to the wide world of chastity jewelry, divergent symbolism for girls and boys, and some of the unsettling implications for those kids' lives once they grow up. This was spurred by yet another Digby post, this one discussing the purity jewelry offered by a guy loosely connected to Operation Rescue’s Randall Terry.

The Heart to Heart jewelry guy provides the material manifestation of the queasy pseudo-incest imagery suggested by the Purity Ball's vows between daughter and father involving (1) saving the girl's purity as a gift to the future husband and (2) the father "covering" his daughter and protecting her purity until handing her off to the husband. Visitors to the H2H website can find a heart-shaped locket with a key for Daddy to keep until the wedding day, at which point he gives the key to the groom, who inserts it in his wife's keyhole (wink, nudge) and opens her heart. As a nifty bonus, the locket is designed to hold a note written by the girl to her future husband, promising to love and serve him faithfully despite never having laid eyes on him at the time the note was written. At least there's a "masculine cross" option for boys, giving equal time to genitalia depictions now adopted as symbols of religious sexual purity. No similar note-writing provision is made for the boy's locket, however; while his future bride will be given the key to the cross, the boy isn't expected to literally commit himself on paper to a woman he won't meet for several years.

Pumpkinseed Press carries even more incongruous gender-specific jewelry to go with their complete purity ceremony in a box. For the girls, a heart-shaped ring with a keyhole in the middle. For dad, a key-shaped lapel pin for him "to wear until the wedding day in which he places it on the lapel of the groom, signifying transition of protection and authority." Also included is a pre-printed covenant for father and daughter to sign. And for the boys? They get a wristwatch. Printed with "I will wait for God's timing." No accompanying symbol of parental control, no totem to be transferred to his future wife, no covenant to sign. Just... a watch. And the implicit assumption that, having decided to remain chaste, the boy is perfectly capable of seeing after that himself. Or not; apparently it doesn't matter much given the lack of a public vow and corroborating paperwork.

In both cases, the fathers are given the power and control over the girl's sexuality; the Heart to Heart folks at least make a half-hearted stab at trusting the boy's key to both parents. While the protection aspect is certainly appopriate in thinking about young children--as well as, let's admit it, the emotionally unready portion of the teenage population--the model falls apart when extended to adults of marriageable age. In fact, the entire program and the movement behind it looks geared to a social system that moves children directly from school to marriage. Explicitly--the "masculine cross" aside--it is a system designed to move a girl directly from her father's home to her husband's, with no intervening alone time during which she may venture out into the world, be exposed to dangerous new ideas, and, even worse, risk sullying her purity, which would render her potential as a gift to her husband void.

How does this translate to a world in which a girl graduates high school, graduates from college, and gets a job for a few years before settling down with Mr. Right? She is no longer a girl. She is a woman, an independent adult. Unfortunately for her, she is also an adult whose parents still claim sole authority to her sexuality, a claim they are likely to expect to see reinforced by the girl-woman continuing to wear the locket that only Daddy can open. What happens when this putatively independent adult woman runs into situations she was unprepared for or is unable to control?

I wasn't able to find anything dealing with how these newbie women cope when they find themselves in a guilt-inducing but nonetheless consensual sexual relationship before marriage, but I did find two rape accounts that underscore the additional emotional burden the Purity mindset can bring to a sexual assault. One woman was raped by a short-term acquaintance she met at a campus church group in Texas, the other by a long-term friend in Illinois. Both are religious; both made statements about how much they valued their virginity and feared their parents' disapproval for having been compromised, although it is unclear whether either formally made a purity pledge. The Texan filed charges and went through the trial:

During opening statements Tuesday, defense attorney David Barron described a different scenario in which the woman was a willing participant who made up the rape claims in order to save her religious reputation... Meanwhile, Barron urged jurors to question the woman's credibility. He described her demeanor on the stand as "flippant" and said the presence of her father - a youth minister - in the courtroom motivated her to minimize her involvement that night...

The woman in Illinois did neither:

Maybe it was the embarrassment. "I wanted to tell my parents, I wanted to tell a lot of other people. But I knew that one of the things my mom and dad thought was really great about me was the fact that I was a virgin, and I was very ashamed that this happened to me."

The stories are admittedly anecdotal, and reliable documentation of the effects of chastity vows on rape reporting are scarce on the Web. In fact, documentation of all sexual assault regardless of individual victim attributes is uneven at best, given the lack of consensus on what percentage of rapes are reported and what percentage of those may be false claims (sources here and here). The second complicating factor is the relative youth of the abstinence movement; while religious and social conservatives have essentially always expected chastity from their daughters, that expectation has only recently become formalized in public displays through ritual and adornment with specific jewelry.

The anecdotes related here do demonstrate, however, two different potential unintended effects of the chastity program stemming from the same cause; the additional guilt and turmoil injected into an unwanted sexual encounted by heavy parental expectations and praise of virginity are argued, by different parties, to lead to either false reporting or no reporting at all. In each case, the male involved did not have his behavior constrained by similar expectations, even when he came from essentially the same religious demographic as the woman.

This is not an indictment of the purity program. My personal biases and family background make me highly skeptical that a promise made at ten years of age to remain sexually pure is anything but a naive fantasy that places unrealistic pressure on post-adolescent women who end up outside the protective barriers put in place by their families. In an age of plentiful and deadly STDs and ever-decreasing abortion (and, in some places, even contraception) availability, chastity is not an option to be snorted at. But it should be an option that is chosen based on the individual's informed conscience (yup, I broke from the Catholic Church long ago, but I've always found that phrasing very useful), irrespective of gender, rather than being coerced only from girls by symbolically giving their fathers the sole authority over their bodies.

Emotional Hangover Remedy

Yesterday and the day before's marriage amendment kerfuffle sucked such raw emotional ass--and Boltgirl doesn't really go for that too much, although she's happy for the people who do--that I refuse to think deep thoughts today.

I did find this most excellent comic. Read them all. This one too. I think I'm in love.

More. It Never Ends.

Cornyn says protecting marriage is important because it's the most fundamental institution of American society. Funny me, I thought our most fundamental institution was the structure of the republic, with the Constitution as its source. He still thinks laws should be determined solely by We the People, rather than given on high by activist judges. Of course, he's a Texas Republican, so he's probably still chapped about the courts decreeing from on high that non-whites gotta be treated as full humans after all, even to the point of letting them marry white folk.

Oh, and the Clear Skies Initiative really would clean up our air, and drilling could be done in ANWR in an environmentally friendly way.

Is this the same guy who was standing up yesterday talking about what a surreal experience it was? Yeah. Still pretty surreal from this end too.

Things I've Learned Thanks to the Gay Marriage Kerfuffle

Random tidbits from the Marriage Amendment debate. My reactions, as always, follow in italics.

From Sam Brownback:
Massachusetts marriage licenses now have spaces for "partner A" and "partner B" instead of "husband" and "wife." This means the terms husband and wife will soon disappear, and if that happens, Lord only knows how the terms "father" and "mother" will be redefined (shudder). Because Lord knows that if I don't put my name on a line explicitly labeled "husband" on a form, that word will permanently disappear from my vocabulary.

More from Brownback:
How this impacts religious freedom: Catholic Charities was forced to leave Boston! Because "they're not allowed to do adoptions anymore!" Never mind, of course, that they chose to stop administering adoptions rather than consider same-sex couples.

Brownback's closing argument:
Ask in your own heart: is this the best way to raise the next generation? Hmmm. Should we raise them to believe conformity with a specific interpretation of the Christian Bible should be mandated for an entire society, or should we raise them to believe the individual informed conscience should be the arbiter? Let me think about that one for two seconds.

Whoops, Sam ain't done:
It's very hard for children to be raised by single parents. So it somehow follows logically that the problems encountered by single-parent households are solely due to the absence of the opposite gender, rather than the absence of a second parent. One of the best ways out of poverty is to get a job and get married! So we better make sure that option is never available to gays.

Oh, goody, now it's Cornyn:
We're not raising this issue gratuitously. It was brought to us by people who ran to the courts claiming that one man-one woman is discrimination. The facts that it's election run-up season and Dear Leader's numbers are tanking have nothing--nothing!--to do with it.

Throughout history, the marriage of a man and a woman has been viewed as the ideal. Except, of course, when it hasn't.

Lawrence v. Texas signaled the beginning of the threat to traditional marriage. The court not only struck down the sodomy law but created a new constitutional right saying your intimate adult sexual relationships can't be regulated. Because conservatives want nothing more than for government to butt out of... oh, wait a minute, that only applies to business regulation.

This almost seems surreal to me. Try spending a day inside my skin, bro.

This is our Constitution. And it's the people's prerogative to amend it and say what goes into that constitution. Funny, I thought it was my Constitution too, but I seem to have very little say about what goes in or stays out.

This amendment will protect the American people from having to live in a country where the laws do not reflect their will. Oh, John, John, are you sure you want to skate out on ice that thin? Forty years ago there were a hell of a lot of people in this country who vehemently disagreed with the notion that two people of different races should be allowed to marry.

I'd live-blog more of this, but it's just too fucking depressing and I can't listen to it any more. Much more later, I'm sure.

Happy Hate Day!

Yes indeedy do, today the White House "celebrates" the opening of debate on the Federal Marriage Amendment with the help of a stable-full of invited fundies, conservatives, and terrified Democrats who have to know they're marching themselves to the electoral guillotine by playing along with the Bushies on this one. John at AmericaBlog has a nice action alert up, for those who like to listen to their representatives' staffers sputter on the phone. I haven't called McCain or Kyl yet, partially because I suspect it would serve no purpose other than to give me some personal vindication, partially because I'm actually pretty shy and tend to avoid verbal confrontation.

This has been blogged to death, and I don't know that I have any original takes to offer. The proposed amendment is sheer grandstanding; some of its most vocal proponents have contributed plenty to the diminution of "marriage" through their own divorces and extramarital affairs. Evangelicals have the highest divorce rate of any demographic in the country, but somehow lifelong committed relationships between two people with the same chromosome set are the biggest threat to societal stability the world has yet seen.

Christ admonished his followers that whatever they did to the least among them, so they did to Christ himself. The mean-spiritedness of this amendment, which not only forbids same-gender marriage but also any legal contract securing a similar set of rights and responsibilities, suggests that the "Christian" howler monkeys on the right would rather live in the world of Leviticus than the world of the Beatitudes. Self-righteous hate and oppression of the Other is so much easier, requires so much less reasoned thought than selfless love. So much easier to tick a category on a checklist and write off every member of that category than to recognize the inherent humanity--recognize yourself--in the individuals who comprise every group of people on earth outside your own.

When Netroots Fail: Cecilia Fire Thunder vs. Male Hegemony in Pine Ridge

I thought this was going to be a nice little ray of sunshine piece, about how a modest netroots effort in the face of unjust legislation actually managed to make a difference. A little background for those who missed it the first time: the South Dakota abortion ban pissed off the president of the Oglala Sioux tribe in a major way.

''I'm always an advocate for women, it's all about women. To me, when I heard that [Gov. Mike Rounds] signed the bill including rape and incest, I was going, 'Wait a minute, we know that rape and incest occur - how do we allow white men to tell me what to do with my little brown body?'

''It was just intuitive as a woman to speak up. I shook the tree of denial on the Pine Ridge Reservation and now everyone is talking about it. Did you notice that it's mostly men criticizing what I've been doing?''

Her declaration took the blogosphere by storm and we all did little happy dances.

Her vow to open a women's clinic on the reservation, outside the SD legislature's jurisdiction, almost seemed knee-jerk at the time, a great idea or at least a bold boast that didn't have a chance in hell of becoming reality. But enough people were galvanized by Cecilia Fire Thunder's rhetorical flipoff to the SD governor to send thousands of dollars in donations and letters of support, and enough dollars piled up to make the clinic a reality.

Fire Thunder announced that the Sacred Choices clinic would be built on the reservation in the village of Kyle, to offer comprehensive women's health services--something that's been sorely lacking on the rez.

She said Pine Ridge has a population of beautiful young women who have no education or an awareness of making choices about their bodies.

''This is a good opportunity to do that.'' ''It's a hard enough decision to make, and how many women are strong enough to make that decision and stick by it? So when a woman makes up her mind, she doesn't need someone to undermine her decision. I'm just here to love you and hold your hand and support whatever decision you make,'' she said.

But the movement appears to have come to a crashing halt. The Oglala Sioux Tribal Council yesterday suspended Fire Thunder, pending impeachment, and enacted a ban on all abortions on the reservation.

"It was unauthorized political activity," said Will Peters, a tribal council representative from the Pine Ridge district. "It's just a matter of failing to communicate not only with the governing body but with the people that she was elected to serve."

Peters claims that if Fire Thunder had initially proposed the clinic as a comprehensive women's health center, the tribe wouldn't have had a problem with it. The perception that Sacred Choices was intended solely to provide abortion--despite the fact that Fire Thunder never explicitly used the term "abortion" when talking about the need for a clinic--was apparently too much for the council to take.

"Women need services. Women need support. Right now on the Pine Ridge reservation, there's very little support for women who have been raped," Fire Thunder said.

"If that's the way it was presented to people in the first place, I think she would have been OK," Peters said. "Her stand, by what we read and what we hear from all accounts, was to support abortion. I've never seen such a turn-around."

Peters went on to say that while he feels women should be allowed to control their own bodies, many of the people opposed to the clinic are themselves Lakota women, so he feels that he needs to support them as a Lakota man. I wonder if it bears repeating that Fire Thunder and the women on the Sacred Choices board of directors are also Lakota women who could use some support, that the simple presence of women among the detractors does not trump the greater numbers of female proponents. I fail to understand the logic that dictates a valuable project with the potential to improve the lives of half the reservation's people be discarded because it was initially pitched as an abortion provider.

Kim Tall Bear lauds Fire Thunder as a champion of both female and cultural sovereignity, and articulates the abortion conflict as a Lakota woman herself (emphasis mine):

For those of us who do not subscribe to certain Christian doctrinal teachings, but who do subscribe to cultural imperatives about the sacredness of life, our moral and political response to terminating a pregnancy is not captured by either of the most vocal positions in the American abortion wars: the ''pro-choice'' and ''pro-life'' positions.

My Dakota mother and great-grandmother, for example, did not let me forget the powerful potential of my body to bear children. I was taught that a child is sacred, and that an unwanted pregnancy was to be assiduously avoided through safe-sex practices and, when I was younger, through abstinence.

My mother and great-grandmother never used the words ''choice'' or ''rights,'' but rather they spoke of ''power'' and ''responsibility.'' But my mother and great-grandmother also took a leap of faith that I would have the space to be responsible for my body - that I would not, for example, face rape.

At the same time, I was raised with a politicized understanding of the world. Both women and men in my family and in our tribe endured their share of hardship, including sexual violence. I grew to understand that within a colonial context. Abortion, in that context, might be considered a sad but necessary decision.

We differed from the ''pro-choice'' position in that we spoke of this and all reproductive decisions not as a ''right'' or a ''choice,'' but as a responsibility that grew out of the power in women's bodies. We differed from the ''pro-life'' position in that we recognized that the decision could be shaped by the hardship and violence that haunt Indian people to this day. Our views about the sacred nature of the unborn child were not synonymous with fundamentalist Christian views. From my upbringing, I came to understand abortion as a difficult topic with only context-specific and imperfect solutions.

What happens next for the women of the Pine Ridge Reservation will be largely determined by what happens for the women of greater South Dakota. Betty Bull Bear, one of the board members, said it would be a wellness center, and the board would wait to see what happens with a statewide abortion ban referendum and any subsequent legal challenges before deciding whether to attempt to provide any abortion services.

Meanwhile, they'll start verifying and counting signatures next week from the referendum petition. Volunteers are claiming they already have more than three times the required 16,000-odd signatures, well ahead of the June 19 deadline.

Multiple issues are in play here--cultural views on abortion sometimes twined with and sometimes butting up against women's autonomy and power, entrenched poverty, domestic violence and rape that impacts Native women at a rate four times that of the non-indigenous population, and a mostly male (14 of 17 members) tribal council that has been resistant to the leadership of the first woman Oglala president since her inaguration. This is the second time Fire Thunder has been suspended and threatened with impeachment; she has been viewed as a maverick for going outside traditional channels to secure a loan from a different tribe to finance gaming operations (that impeachment attempt didn't stick). Depending on your perspective, she's either a mouthy woman who has forgotten her place or a courageous leader attempting to fight decades of oppression both within and from outside the Lakota Nation to better her people's lot. The support she enjoys among Lakota women--councilman Peters' claims notwithstanding--suggests the president is not the council member who's out of touch with the people she represents.

Would it have made a real difference if President Fire Thunder had gone through official channels to accept the thousands of dollars in unsolicited donations that poured into Pine Ridge from across the country? Would it have mattered if she had made "comprehensive health care" the first words out of her mouth any time she addressed the issue? As long as some people have a vested interest in keeping abortion or emergency contraception out of any discussion of comprehensive health care, and as long as others have an equally vested interest in maintaining their own gender-based power, I fear the answer will continue to be no.

Arizona Daily Star of Bethlehem

The Tucson Daily Star was purchased by Lee Enterprises some time ago, maybe a year, maybe a bit more, went through a couple of editors and format changes, and now appears to be seriously challenging the Phoenix paper for the coveted position as biggest religious trumpet in Arizona. Faced with so many choices for today's above-the-fold front page story, the editors bypassed the rising earthquake toll in Indonesia, the anti-American riots in Kabul, another 48+ dead in a Baghdad bombing, and the deaths and critical injuries suffered by a CBS news crew in a separate bombing for this story about a Christian teen abstinence dance group.

The real news was tucked away on page 2, conveniently flogged as "a second Page One" for national news, in the Star's quest to place local news more prominently. Yet again, a piece far more suited to the Accent section (if not the Sunday morning religion page) is popped into the hot spot, complete with links to more articles about faith.

Don't get me wrong. The fewer kids getting pregnant the better, and if taking an abstinence pledge contributes to that, great. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work that way, and the abstinence kids are at least as likely as the rest of us to engage in sexual activity before marriage; unlike the rest of us, they haven't--for the most part--been properly educated about the physiology of human reproduction, STD transmission, or barrier contraceptive methods. They're more likely to engage in oral or anal sex because they think only penis-vagina action is banned.

More disturbing is the fact that they're taking this act on the road in a huge way:

On July 14, BreakDown will travel to Kampala, Uganda, where it will connect with pastor and Pentecostal leader Alex Mitala with hopes of educating Ugandans about finding God and waiting until marriage to have sex.

Though they will not be promoting the use of condoms, group members hope their message, which is also anti-abortion, will help reduce the spread of the HIV virus that causes AIDS.

Phenomenal. I hope they include some mention of marital fidelity in their spiel, and perhaps also do something to disabuse men of the belief that sex with a virgin cures HIV, and maaaaaaybe clue the Ugandan women in on the fact that being married won't do shit to keep you healthy if your husband comes to the relationship already infected. I'm not holding my breath on that one, though.

The founder of the Tucson group is one Aimee Short.

Short's paying job is director of the Sexual Abstinence Values Education Program for Crisis Pregnancy Centers of Tucson, where her mother also works, and where Short said she practically grew up.

She practically grew up in a conservative Christian setting, so perhaps we should not be surprised that

Short, who was married briefly in her early 20s, also has re-pledged.

There seem to be plenty of those folks in this movement--they got their freak on as teenagers and young adults, but now get to "re-pledge" and become not just virgins again, but righteous virgins set on shaming other teenagers and young adults out of any sexual experience, set on reducing sex ed for these people to "don't." Maybe it's because the ringleaders of these movements know full well that they don't work, but will result in more pregnancies incurred by young women who have been taught that the only resolution to their shameful behavior is to have the babies and bring 'em up as succeeding generations of uninformed true believers who will beget prodigious numbers of their own uninformed progeny.

Anyway. Thank you, Daily Star, for the news that matters.

TIRADE!

It's TIRADE season on the right, a nifty little acronym I coined to describe most of the discussions surrounding gay rights, gay marriage, gay-please-don't-bash... Tired Invective Repeated And Discredited Endlessly.

This particular tirade comes courtesy of Big Jimmy Dobson and the Focus on the Family gang, with their shiny new letter-to-the-editor generator up (big hat tip to Pam's House Blend for the alert) so that the faithful minions not only don't need to form their own opinions, but also don't need to go to through the annoyance of coming up with their very own words articulating them. The form provides a four-paragraph letter and several options for each paragraph the plagiaristwriter can choose from. As a community service message, Boltgirl On The Loose provides you the text of all the options so you can recognize when your local newpaper's LTE section has been slammed; helpful translations of or comments on each are provided in italics.

Paragraph 1:

Option 1: For centuries now, in every civilized culture, marriage as the union of one man and one woman has been the building block of society. But it may not be true in America for long -- unless Congress approves the Marriage Protection Amendment. Marriage as the union of one man and one woman has been the building block of society, except where men have been allowed multiple wives. Like, say, that Solomon guy who racked up 700 better halves to go along with his 300 concubines.

Option 2: The U.S. Senate is poised to vote on the Marriage Protection Amendment, and the stakes couldn't be higher for our country and its future generations. Much higher stakes than the chump change represented by the NSA surveillance program, or outing a covert CIA operative, or the Abramoff scandal, or, oh, I don't know, maybe an illegal and disastrous war in Iraq.

Option 3: Liberals argue that the Marriage Protection Amendment, which would define marriage solely as the union of one man and one woman, would write discrimination into the U.S. Constitution. Nothing could be further from the truth. Because we say so. Trust us on this one. Just because it looks, quacks, floats, nibbles watercress, produces ducklings, and appears in AFLAC commercials... well, nothing could be further from a duck.

Option 4: Marriage has been under attack ever since no-fault divorce laws made it easier for us to discard our husbands and wives. Now, the attack is coming from those who want to open up marriage to same-sex couples -- and only the Marriage Protection Amendment can stop them. The Marriage Protection Amendment: keeping divorce heterosexual.

Option 5: Never mind that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose gay marriage. It's perilously close to becoming the law of the land -- unless citizens like us step up and demand our federal lawmakers pass the Marriage Protection Amendment. Never mind that an overwhelming majority of Americans have, at various times, opposed interracial marriage, the admission of women to institutions of higher learning, or suffrage for anyone not a landholding white male--civil rights are to be decided by majority rule, because that's what makes America great.

Paragraph 2:

Option 1: Yelling "discrimination" is just one strategy the left has used to defeat this amendment. They also have argued that gay marriage is a civil rights issue akin to the African-American struggle for equality. No less a civil rights icon than Jesse Jackson has denounced that claim, noting that "gays were never called three-fifths human in the Constitution." No less a civil rights icon than Coretta Scott King noted that discrimination anywhere equals discrimination everywhere. But what did she know; did you see how Those People acted at her funeral?

Option 2: Amendment opponents have asked, "How does one couple's gay marriage threaten anyone's heterosexual marriage?" This question misses the point: The goal of gay activists isn't the individual relationship of any two people; it is the revision of national policy to say that gender, especially in child-rearing, is inconsequential. Look at those uppity homos attempting to effect a policy that is broadly applicable to all couples rather than focusing on one individual relationship. Next they're going to argue that religion, especially in child-rearing, is inconsequential.

Option 3: Amendment supporters have been disparaged as "bigots." How can that be, when the language being proposed is similar to the language of the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by 427 members of Congress? Are they -- and former President Clinton, who signed the bill into law -- bigots, too? In a word, yes. The optional word for Democrats is "cowards."

Option 4: It's important to note that those who support the amendment aren't trying to deprive homosexuals of any of the legal protections they currently enjoy; gay marriage has never been a constitutional right in America. It is not "discriminatory" to want the law to continue to provide for reasonable limitations on who can marry. Just like it wasn't discriminatory to want to continue to provide for reasonable limitations on the types of jobs women could fill, or reasonable limitations on who is allowed to eat at my lunch counter.

Option 5: Backing the amendment is not about bigotry. Marriage is open to any two individuals who meet certain criteria regarding age and blood relationship, and who are of the opposite sex. Gay activists seek not to end discrimination, but rather to completely redefine -- and thus undermine -- the foundational institution of marriage. Again, just like voting being open to individuals who met certain criterial regarding skin color, gender, and property holdings. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her herd of banshees completely undermined the institution of suffrage, paving the way for abominations such as Barbara Jordan to be elected to public office.

Paragraph 3:

Option 1: Without the MPA, there's nothing to prevent activist judges -- like those on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which legalized gay marriage a few years ago -- from creating not only gay marriage, but legalizing polygamy and even marriages between people and their pets. Because the legal requirements for entering into a contract in this country (say, having attained the age of majority and being mentally competent) will never stand in the face of withering attacks by the legions of men seeking to marry their box turtles.

Option 2: If the MPA were to be voted down again, as it was two years ago, we may very quickly see as many as 50 different state definitions of marriage -- not just homosexual marriage, which has already been legalized in Massachusetts, but marriages among multiple partners or even between siblings or other blood relatives. And the reciprocity clause can't have any bearing here.

Option 3: Even some conservatives say there's no need for the MPA because state marriage-protection amendments are sufficient to preserve the institution. The problem with that logic is that a federal judge has already struck down Nebraska's marriage amendment -- only a federal amendment can put marriage outside the reach of federal judges. That, and a waiver of the requirement that federal law pass Constitutional muster.

Option 4: Think of the MPA as a shield between our traditional values and radical judges intent on forcing their politically correct agenda on our nation. Without that shield, it's only a matter of time until marriage loses all meaning -- and social science data indicate children will suffer the most when that happens. It's science if NARTH and Paul Cameron say it is.

Option 5: Why is the MPA so essential? Because without it, marriage is at the mercy of judicial activists bent on overriding the will of the people and the role of the legislative branch by creating homosexual marriage -- and maybe even legalizing bigamy while they're at it. And man on dog; never forget man on dog.

Paragraph 4:

Option 1: So don't delay: Contact your senators today and urge them to support the Marriage Protection Amendment when they vote the first week in June. Because doing otherwise will make Baby Jesus cry.

Option 2: The Senate must act next month, when a vote is scheduled, to pass such an amendment. Because legal recognition, societal acceptance, and their inherent beneficial effects on relationship stability are the last thing we need. If those homos act any more like us it will be twice as hard to demonize them.

Option 3: Efforts to pass such an amendment stalled in Congress two years ago, but we have another chance before senators vote in early June to convince them to do the right thing this time around. We're hoping the general dumbing-down of political discourse over the past two years has rendered more of them unconscious.

Option 4: The men and women we elected to serve us in Washington must understand these truths -- and vote the right way when they take up the matter in early June. Because otherwise the terrorists win.

Option 5: We must help our senators see beyond the liberal spin and demand they vote the will of their constituents when they consider the amendment in early June. Because the will of the 506,000 people living in Wyoming deserves the same weight as the will of the 19,000,000 people living in New York.

Keep an eye on the paper, and don't hesitate to call bullshit if some permutation of this fill-in-the-blank letter shows up. Feel free to wonder, in print, why the FMA supporters need to have their own thoughts spoon-fed to them before they can commit them to paper. There's nothing new in the arguments presented here, and nothing that hasn't already been refuted from here to Colorado Springs again. Vigilance!

The Perils of Journaling

Thought I'd read through an old journal tonight, to see if there was anything lurking in there that I could tighten up and post here in a bit of gratuitous ego-stroking (is there any other kind). Having done so, I want nothing so much as to find the nearest large rock and drop it on my head. I'm apparently a very patterned individual, the same mistakes and neuroses coming round again and again no matter the relationship.

I did find this little tidbit that might explain one of my stylistic quirks:

It must be my latent Catholicism that makes me consider things in threes, or maybe it's the structure of the language with its comparatives of good, better, best. The trinity, the states of matter, the measure of time, the three little pigs, the bowls of porridge in front of Goldilocks...

Apparently plasma wasn't around when I learned the states of matter in grade school, or it wasn't discussed in polite company.

I'm sure I've been saving this journal so I could read it one day and see how far I've come. Unfortunately, that progress must be measured more in laps completed around the same damn track than distance in a marathon. I still need more from others than they can possibly give. I still miss my family the way we used to be, before Grandpa died, before we all scattered from Illinois. Before I came out and my dad went nuts.

So many episodes I wish I could get a do-over for, both the innocuous one-timers and the excruciatingly drawn out hopeless entanglements I read about on those pages and scream at myself to GET OVER IT ALREADY and start behaving like a functioning adult.

Remind me, someone, to burn this fucking thing before I get too much older and run the risk of the book falling into my effects, for horrified descendants to read about the absolute nutjob great-grandma Boltgirl was.

Financial Guru-tude

Well, a hearty welcome to all the readers coming here via Google Finance's page on the Southern Peru Copper Corporation. Look around and stay awhile.

It's not the hot link I had anticipated, but I'll take it.

My personal financial strategy consists of (1) thrift stores, (2) 10-for $10 boxes of Stagg chili, (3) lots of rice, and (4) using puppy dog eyes to convince the other person to spring for dinner, and then stretching the leftovers into another couple of meals.

Hot Tucson Tip: that Valero gas station at Campbell/Prince has the bargain-basement unleaded for 2.87. Speaking of fuel and, indirectly, vehicles, I lucked into strategem (5) have wealthy grandparents who offer to pay off your truck loan out of your inheritance. It's a no-interest loan until you consider the guilt factor, which comes in at roughly 83%, compounded hourly when you don't call often enough. Subtip (a) you will never call enough.

Meanwhile, the ancient-by-Dell-standards desktop computer at home is groaning and straining ever more, and in fact had a major crash-freeze-burn episode a few months ago, so I bit the bullet and ordered a laptop that I hope will sustain the boy through at least a couple years of high school. It will have enough bells and whistles to let me work from home when needed, so the boss is going halfsies on it. I guess that's strategem (6) find nice boss who will pay for half of your laptop.

Somewhere in there should be (7) identify or develop a highly marketable skill. If your skillset is limited to archaeology, learn to love the rollercoaster thrill of the paycheck-to-paycheck existence.

In the end, though, I try to remember (8), pointed out by Homer: compared to most of the people living 65 miles south of here in Nogales, Sonora, I am rich beyond imagination.

The Waiting Place

I broke free some time ago, but I find myself, yet again, in the Waiting Place.

Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or a No
or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.

Everyone is just waiting.

I noticed it last night as the clock dragged on to half an hour past the time G was going to call so we could go out. The plants were watered, the dogs fed, the recycling taken out and the laundry hung, and I was sitting there in a clean shirt and jeans waiting, not wanting to start up another chore or book or crossword puzzle because I was waiting.

I realized, as I waited for the phone to ring, that I am waiting for more. I was waiting for my son to get home. I am still waiting for my woman to get home. I'm waiting for things to change. I'm waiting for my loans to be paid off. I'm waiting for the kids to go off to college. I'm waiting for things to get better.

I had a marvelous burst of energy about 6 years ago, if I remember correctly. I wish it didn't seem easier now to just sit back and let life happen to me rather than the other way around. This whole live in the moment, taking the middle path thing isn't working so well. Where does accepting the inevitable, finding peace with the unchangeable, merge into capitulation? Where is the border between sticking up for principle and simply banging your head against a wall?

Salvation in a Gig Bag

Flailing about for a topic today. I could write about how odd I find it to still be amazed that I'm actually using the stuff I learned in freshman algebra in my work. Thank you, Sister Jeanne Clennon, wherever you are. I hated algebra but got decent grades in it. My main memory of that class is Sr. Jeanne threatening to collect money from the boys who misbehaved to send to the Holy Cross missions in Bengal. She was an okay nun, kinda old even then but pleasant enough. The last time I saw her was when I bumped into her walking along the train tracks that led from St. Mary's College past the backside of our high school, a couple years after I had graduated. Nuns never seem to change very much.

Or I could write about the whirlwind of growing-up ceremonies my son sailed through last weekend as he exited eighth grade and promptly sprouted whiskers. He picked up a couple of awards and a token scholarship, was offered a roster spot on the club soccer team he's been wanting to play for, and hopped on the bus for his class trip to Disneyland, which he paid for out of his referee earnings. He's somehow managed to grow into an independent, responsible young man-child despite (as his grandfather never ceases to remind me) the huge--huge!--disadvantage of having a lesbian mother and living half time at the lesbo lodge with mother and said mother's girlfriend, who is also--also!--a big bad lesbian. The girlfriend's kid earned a slew of year-end high school awards of her own following a year of AP classes and straight A report cards. Despite being raised by dykes. Maybe Jesus is interceding and raising the kids without us knowing; I can think of no other rational explanation for their good grades, fine characters, and sarcastic senses of humor.

I could write about AG Gonzales threatening to charge reporters with espionage. I could write about the New York Times apparently running so low on salient news that a front-page expose on the Clintons' marriage made sense. I could write about John McCain getting his ass handed to him by the students of the New School during his ill-advised commencement address.

Unfortunately, my attention is elsewhere. I am partially in a sulk, since the girlfriend and her kid are off on a college visit to Notre Dame (!) and left me at home with the dogs and tomato plants. But--BUT--I can almost forget about that due to a certain brand new bitchin' little baby guitar waiting for me, snuggled into its bombproof gig bag, in the back bedroom. The Little Martin LX, a 3/4-size acoustic designed to be shoved into overhead bins or stuffed into the trunk, but with a rich, near-full-sized tone that belies its HPL (!) construction. Oh, what a sweet sound from such a little critter with not much actual wood in it.

I first ventured into the world of stringed instruments a couple years ago, trading an old trombone for a Laurel electric bass. Fun, fun! I was always leery of trying the guitar, though; a lifetime of playing horns had left me afraid that all those strings and fingers flying around were counter-intuitive and would be impossible to crack. But then I picked up the Little Martin and found that it's actually pretty intuitive after all, and was able to splat out some Dandy Warhols chords in no time without much trouble.

Ain't it just the cutest thing?

Book review

I am reading The Life of God (as Told by Himself), by Franco Farucci, picked up during the last trip to Bookman's. I carry a little notebook with titles of books and CDs I want written in it--it makes the Bookman's excursions like little scavenger hunts, oh! how exciting when I find something on my list--but this particular book wasn't in it. I like to just scan the titles, picking up volumes with interesting names or even just interesting designs. This one jumped out at me.

It's been a challenging read; I usually scream through fiction fairly quickly, but I can't do much more than an hour at a stretch on this one, often going back and re-reading paragraphs or pages to figure out what he's saying. God, in the first-person narrative here, is deeply flawed, confused, and at times doubtful of his own divinity or unsure what to do with it.

Essentially, it's God in my own image; thus the attraction. And of course the story meshes neatly with my own thinking about the Bible and some prominent organized religions. In the novel, God knocks heads with a stubborn Moses who's more invested in his own petty rules and regs than in discussing the nature of creation with God, ignoring his (His?) objections to Moses' heavy editing and creative re-writing of God's own texts.

It's a scene repeated in each of God's visits to various major philosophers, priests, and mystics through time, including Jesus (if you have a delicate constitution when it comes to dogma surrounding either the Annunciation or the Crucifixion, you probably shouldn't read this book). Only Buddha stumps him, only John and Magdalene recognize him without skipping a beat; the rest--Augustine, Ambrose, Heraclitus, Seneca--see him but are so possessed by their preconceptions of both the nature and will of the divine that they can neither recognize him nor hear the message he's trying to impart. They are ultimately destroyed by their inability to live up to the artificial, impossibly high divine standards they've constructed in their own minds. Indeed, even the devil is presented as insurmountable, not because he's evil, but solely because he's a creation of human imagination. A fascinating thought, that.

Anyway. I guess I find comfort in the notion that God doesn't know what the hell's going on either, a god seeking not perfection or adherence to man-made laws but collaboration in an inquiry into the nature of existence. Huh. No wonder the Greek philosophers have such significant roles in the book.

Format Change

*&#$^% Blogger... the orange background in the old template had a nasty habit of encroaching and eating the brown text, so we've gone austere here at the Jim-Jam. It's all about the content, right?

Those Who Would Give Up Liberty for a Little Security...

The girlfriend tells me I should stop reading the paper, or that, at the very least, my breakfast table letters-to-the-editor-reading privileges might be revoked. Maybe she's tired of me sputtering Cheerios everywhere at the latest in the long parade of mind-boggling letters from the right side of Tucson's citizenry.

Yesterday dawned hopefully, with a separate little section of letters about Qwest's refusal to cooperate in the NSA call data-mining operation. Then I actually started reading the letters and, well, the Cheerio deluge began.

Rick in Tucson writes:

I've written Qwest and demanded that my phone records be immediately turned over to the NSA and have also demanded that Qwest immediately begin assisting the NSA in any way possible.

I thought it was satire. I hoped it was satire. Maybe the hook at the end, the little emoticon wink letting us know it was satire, inadvertently got edited out. But then I moved on to another letter, from James, retired Air Force:

I'm a Qwest customer and am disgusted that my phone provider did not see fit to help our government compile data to ferret out those who would gladly kill us.

And finally, we have this from Rod:

Qwest once again has demonstrated its insensitivity to the communities that it serves by denying the National Security Agency the opportunity to collect data on telephone traffic over its system.

The decision is but another example of Qwest's historic contempt for their customers. This time it is their customers' safety.

Two pro-Qwest letters were interspersed with the above. Somebody demanded that Qwest turn over his phone records to the NSA? Holy Grail, anyone? Spank me first! No, me!!!

The multiple layers of blind trust are impressive, if disturbing. Rick and James and Rod are rock-solid in their conviction that (1) the data-mining system is an efficient means to identify a couple hundred? a thousand? how many? al Qaeda stooges both in the US and foreign countries by combing through billions of calls made; (2) being automatically covered in the net of suspicion by the mere virtue of subscribing to telephone service is a-okay, because (3) the NSA would never (a) make a mistaken connection between an innocent patriotic American and a terrorist cell due to a call for carryout baba ganoush or (b) start transcribing actual conversations rather than simple numbers called or (c) use the calling patterns to investigate activities other than terrorism.

This is the kind of shit we used to revile the Red Menace for, the kind of government-sponsored snooping that prompted so many people to try to climb the Berlin Wall. The general lack of outrage over the NSA program disgusted me enough. The subsequent desire by individuals to actively participate in the same leaves me speechless.

Gus

Yesterday was a bit frantic, so I didn't have time to properly reflect and then, of course, write a brilliant post. Yesterday, May 15, marked the four-year anniverary of my grandpa's passing.

The best parts of me, I think, in many ways came from him. He was a fallible human like any other, I'm sure, but thinking back on him I can't remember those faults in any detail.

He taught me the rudiments of carpentry--how to handle a saw, how to measure using a story stick. He was a prodigal musician (the picture is from his army service during the war, when he was the leader of the 8th Air Corps band over in Blackpool) but found time to be a student of the natural world. He could predict to the minute when it was going to rain. He knew all the wildflowers and the trees, where to find the best mushrooms, the secret spot where you could pick bitterroot. He had a wicked, droll sense of humor and a love of elaborate practical jokes.

He grew up in a Czech community, in a tiny town outside St. Louis in southern Illinois, the son of the high school principal, the grandson of Bohemian immigrants. He told me stories of growing up on their small farm, his mother baking pies every morning and drying wild mushrooms on an old screen door to keep in a bag over the stove, his father having to catch their ill-humored horse every Sunday if they were to have a chance of driving their wagon into town to visit his grandmother. How the horse, named Dan, usually escaped before being hitched. About Dan's predilection for following a mother hen across the barnyard, snapping up her chicks one by one until there was nothing left but yellow tufts around his mouth. Wondering why his dad ever kept that horse.

He went to college at Illinois Wesleyan, somehow a couple of years younger than the rest of his class. He joined an engineering fraternity that required the freshmen to entertain faculty members at dinner once a week, where they were expected to not only serve but sit and hold quality conversations. He always credited that experience more than anything for teaching him how to deal with people and handle himself in situations where he didn't know anyone. Maybe that's why he expected quality conversation from me, gently correcting my hicksville accent along with my posture.

He went on to be the high school band director in the slightly larger small Illinois town where he and Grandma settled down, and later was an administrator after retiring from the classroom. He gave me wheelbarrow rides around the yard and carried me on his shoulders, running to the back of the lot to see the freight trains rumbling by. He learned from an old woman how to barbecue chicken for hours until it would fall apart under your fork. He favored Foster's beer and escaped Grandma's imposed diet by wandering over to my dad's house for sandwiches when he got hungry.

His name was Leo, but he picked up the nickname "Gus" in college, which stuck for the rest of his life.

He was the most gentle, quietly confident and steadfast man I ever knew. I will always miss him.

Immigration, Again

W is set to address the nation tonight on the topic of (illegal) immigration, likely including the announcement that the National Guard will be deployed along the Mexican border. This administration is fixin' a veritable spiral-bound church social cookbook of recipes for disaster. At first blush, I'm all for anything that keeps the boys and girls out of Iraq, but a Sasabe-to-Douglas game of Red Rover with guns is not, perhaps, the most healthy alternative.

A few letters to the editor in the Tucson morning paper over the past few weeks have harped on the message that, well, my ancestors came over here legally, without sneaking in, so everybody else should do it that way too, because the illegals are just cutting the line in front of the people doing it the right way. Let's take a look at that. I'm making broad assumptions here that may be unfounded, but I'm guessing that most of the My People Came Through Ellis Island So Why Can't Yours crowd are of European descent. As I've pointed out before, the hordes migrating here from Ireland, Poland, Germany, Hungary, and Russia only had one option when it came to travel--get on a boat whose accomodations they could afford and get off in the port where it docked. Walking to the US was not an alternative, at least not since the Bering land bridge flooded several millenia ago. My immigrant ancestors didn’t have much money—farmers from England on one side, Bohemian miners on the other, a German here, an Irishman there—but most of them had the fortuitous timing to duck the waves of fill-in-the-blank anti-immigration sentiment that rolled through the country beginning in the mid-1800s.

The legal process of immigration those people went through bears little resemblance to The Process so reverentially referenced by modern immigration reformers. Depending on the ship line available to them, 19^th-century immigrants from Europe may have entered the US through any number of ports, and, given enough personal wealth, faced an “immigration process” as simple as signing on the dotted line:

First and second class passengers who arrived in New York Harbor were not required to undergo the inspection process at Ellis Island. Instead, these passengers underwent a cursory inspection aboard ship; the theory being that if a person could afford to purchase a first or second class ticket, they were less likely to become a public charge in America due to medical or legal reasons. The Federal government felt that these more affluent passengers would not end up in institutions, hospitals or become a burden to the state.

Passengers with limited financial means were required to jump through an additional hoop, although for most, the delay in admittance was on the order of half a day or less :

Upon arrival in New York City, ships would dock at the Hudson or East River piers. First and second class passengers would disembark, pass through Customs at the piers and were free to enter the United States. The steerage and third class passengers were transported from the pier by ferry or barge to Ellis Island where everyone would undergo a medical and legal inspection.

If the immigrant's papers were in order and they were in reasonably good health, the Ellis Island inspection process would last approximately three to five hours. The inspections took place in the Registry Room (or Great Hall), where doctors would briefly scan every immigrant for obvious physical ailments. Doctors at Ellis Island soon became very adept at conducting these "six second physicals." By 1916, it was said that a doctor could identify numerous medical conditions (ranging from anemia to goiters to varicose veins) just by glancing at an immigrant. The ship's manifest log (that had been filled out back at the port of embarkation) contained the immigrant's name and his/her answers to twenty-nine questions. This document was used by the legal inspectors at Ellis Island to cross examine the immigrant during the legal (or primary) inspection.

The automatic status accorded the wealthier immigrants and the cursory controls placed on the poorer ones expose the myth of the noble, legal Ellis Island immigrant who allegedly faced the same bureaucratic entanglements modern would-be immigrants face and still managed to build a fortune on the 43 cents he had in his pocket when he walked through the gates. The poorest migrants were delayed less than a day in their quest to enter the country, even if they had no resident relatives or job prospects. Modern migrants—even those with connections in the US—must navigate an extremely complicated, hierarchical system with built-in preferences and national origin quotas, and even then expect to wait six months to several years for a visa.

Because the number of immigrant visa numbers that are available each year is limited, you may not get an immigrant visa number immediately after your immigrant visa petition is approved. In some cases, several years could pass between the time USCIS approves your immigrant visa petition and the State Department gives you an immigrant visa number. Because U.S. law also limits the number of immigrant visas available by country, you may have to wait longer if you come from a country with a high demand for U.S. immigrant visas.

In a very real sense, then, the historical Ellis Island experience is more closely paralleled by the modern illegal immigrant crossing the Mexico-US border than by the “legal” immigrant waiting for official entry. Ease of access to the US was and still is largely conditioned by the financial resources at the immigrant’s disposal; those with little money face the danger of walking across the desert now and faced a long crossing made hazardous by crowded, unsanitary conditions in steerage then, compounded by an increased risk of denied entry due to disease contracted on the voyage or the determination by inspectors that the poor immigrant posed an unacceptable social risk. The better-off illegal migrants now increase their chance of a successful entry by being able to buy forged paperwork and a ride, just as the well-heeled legal immigrant in 1875 bought instant credibility and a free pass through Customs with his first- or second-class ticket stub.

In either scenario, though, comparing the current immigration requirements with the effective turnstiles at Ellis Island and other ports of entry in the late 1800s is dishonest. Why, people ask, don’t the lettuce pickers and construction day laborers do the right thing and get in line at the immigration office with the rest of the upstanding citizens of the world? Read the immigration preference system and see if you can find “unskilled laborer” listed under any of those categories. Actually, I’ll save you the trouble: you can’t. Why do they choose, instead, to risk death by walking across the desert or pay their meager savings to a coyote for the guided tour? Because they are desperate. And desperate people do not have the luxury of waiting for a visa number that will never be issued.

Yes, my ancestors and probably yours did it “the right way,” coming through an official port of entry, spelling their names for the man who wrote them in the ship’s registry, standing in front of a doctor who rubber-stamped their health as acceptable, answering a couple of questions from the form filled out on the ship, and walking directly through the golden door. Given the choice of that kind of “process,” don’t you think the hundred of thousands sneaking across the southern border would opt to do the same? And if today’s immigration restrictions and requirements had existed in 1850, would you or I be sitting here in the US today, or would our ancestors have decided they couldn’t hack it, and either stayed home or found more creative ways into the country?

Dig Dig Dig, Dig All Day...

The federal government cut secret (until today) deals with AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth to acquire telephone records. Of every call made within the United States. By anyone.

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

The White House, apparently sensing more immediately pending doom than in any previous point in this entire six-month NSA wiretapping story arc, trotted W hisself out to explain exactly what's going on here.

Making a hastily scheduled appearance in the White House, Mr. Bush did not directly address the collection of phone records, except to say that "new claims" had been raised about surveillance. He said all intelligence work was conducted "within the law" and that domestic conversations were not listened to without a court warrant.

"The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," he said. "Our efforts are focused on Al Qaeda and their known associates."

Okay... compiling a database of all telephone calls made within the borders of the US, by all of the citizens who are of phone-calling age, suggests upwards of 250 million known AQ associates, does it not? And if the government doesn't really suspect all of us MoviePhone dialers of being terrorist collaborators, well, excuse me, but what the fuck? W asserts no data mining will take place. So they're simply collecting the phone records for fun, then, no? Like stamps, or butterflies, or heads on pikes.

The confirmation hearings for the new CIA chief should be very interesting in light of this, especially given the fact--should the nomination not be withdrawn--that Michael Hayden has demonstrated either a fundamental misunderstanding or deliberate misconstruing of exactly what the Fourth Amendment contains.

Food Poisoning Fun!

What's that rosy glow, you ask? A souvenir of a bliss-filled day hiking under the Arizona sun? Perhaps a memoir of an erotic encounter?

No. The rosy glow would be the result of all my facial capillaries having exploded during a six-hour marathon session on the bathroom floor Sunday night, involving every plumbing fixture in said bathroom, to say nothing of every plumbing fixture installed south of said face. Let's just say the passionate relationship with Pei Wei teriyaki chicken is on hold for now.

I tend to fixate on one or two thought trajectories that whirl around violently in my head when I'm in that situation, usually apropos of nothing, and the intensity of the obsession causes almost as much discomfort as the nausea. This particular occasion had me wondering (1) what percentage of the calories consumed at dinner six hours ago have I heaved up, and (2) you know the actress who plays the mom on 7th Heaven? Yeah, what's her name, again?

Had no idea about the calorie thing; with my luck I probably absorbed all the fat and carbs within seconds of eating but hadn't quite gotten around to the protein and vitamins before they vacated the system; and about four hours into it managed to come up with Catherine Hicks.

While I was out, Bush apparently decided it would be a good idea to give the NSA job to a sitting general who's seriously misinformed re: the actual content of the 4th Amendment.

Meanwhile, I'm discovering that granola is not a good breakfast choice for a traumatized stomach.

What's in a Name?

This demonstrates how far beyond the pale the situation is in Iraq, "on the ground," as Dear Leader likes to say, how far removed from our day-to-day reality and powers of comprehension the place has become. Sunni men named Omar are rushing to change their name(s?) to Ammar in order to avoid being culled at Shiite checkpoints. Because "Omar" is an exclusively Sunni name, while "Ammar" is religiously neutral. One Omar, as recounted in the story's lead, was spurred to change his name after a dozen other Omars ended up dead in a trash dump near his home.

"It sounds like Omar, and if someone calls you, you will remember that it's you," he said.

Can any of us here truly wrap our brains around a life where every pedestrian approaching a crowd of people may be a suicide bomber, where every box or pile of trash on the side of the road may conceal an Improvised Explosive Device, where the name on your birth certificate effectively pins a "kill me" sign on your back?

Maybe the Bushies think Iran will be easier because at least it's all Shiite.

Science Calls

I have been so engrossed in the minutiae-based research currently commanding my attention at work that I completely forgot to go to the meeting yesterday where we were all supposed to talk about what we've been working on for the past month. Oops. The boss graciously accepted my e-mailed apology. I could go into detail about the work, but it's pretty damn dry.

In lieu of stone flake size parameters and their behavioral implications, here's a link to a horrifyingly interesting story about female hyaena reproductive anatomy. The possibilities offered by a 4-inch clitoris might be initially appealing, but the rest of it? Uh, not so much. Sweet Jesus.

Tomorrow's forecast calls for a 90% chance of more mind-numbing sets of calculations with scattered runs for coffee alternating with banging the scientific forehead on the scientific desk. Accumulations may be heavy at times; travelers to the Cube of Science are advised to take precautionary measures. Dangling a cold beer from the end of a stick might be a good start.

May Day mayday

Eric Zorn's column in the Chicago Tribune this morning addresses the immingrants' rights marches that were held across the country yesterday. He wandered down to the Chicago rally, looking for some unified message, trying to figure out what, exactly, those thousands of people want anyway. Then he threw the floor open for comments, and I must say it was far more right-leaning than I would have expected. The comments run probably 90% in favor of fuck 'em, they're criminals, send 'em back to Mexico if they don't like the way things are here, where they shouldn't be anyway because my grandparents took the time and effort to come through Ellis Island like everybody should.

My comment, as posted on the Trib website, below:

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The people who complain about illegals from Mexico (and other Latin American countries) "cutting the line" and sneaking into this country while legal immigrants wait to do it "the right way" appear to believe that the Mexicans come skipping across the border with ice cream cones, waltzing in droves down a wide paved street. I wonder if the complainers can understand the desperation that will spur people to walk a couple hundred miles across the desert in the middle of the summer, when the air temperature right above the ground pushes 120. Or to scrape together a couple hundred bucks to pay a coyote to cram them into a container truck, which may or may not deliver them to the place they thought they were going, and whose driver may or may not unlock the container and let them out before they asphyxiate or roast.

It's too complex a problem to be addressed by throw-away sound bites of either the "deport 'em all" or "give 'em all amnesty" variety. Did my desperate ancestors walk over here from Ireland and Bohemia? Nope, mainly because they couldn't walk across that ocean. Does that somehow make them--and, by extension, me--better than this generation's crop of desperate people looking for the chance to earn a living for their families? I don't think so.

Sanction the businesses that knowingly hire illegals to take advantage of a cheap labor pool? Absolutely--but don't naively assume there won't be direct effects on the economy. For most businesses, it's simple math, or at least one of those word problems from 8th grade algebra. Business B needs 3 workers in job X, two in job Y, and five in job Z. The available payroll is quantity P. For B to stay afloat, 3x + 2y + 5z better be less than or equal to P.

With gas climbing over $3 in many parts of the country, how happy will people be to see consumer prices rise as well, to the often cited $5 head of lettuce? Maybe a guest worker program would be a solution, but that legislation would effectively create a permanent official underclass of cheap workers who, American laborers could logically argue, actually are being sponsored by the gummint to take American jobs.

Meanwhile, as our knees jerk in both directions, a couple hundred people continue to die every year making that long walk across the desert. Consider them felons if you want, call for them to be deported if you want, but don't shrug at the desperation that drives them to risk their lives to get here and then work their tails off once they do. That may be any number of things, but "lazy" ain't one of them.