Refusing to address teen births

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By Bonnie K. Adams

The State’s Dec. 27 editorial about the nation’s rising teen birth rate expressed appropriate concern about taxpayers’ funds being used to put abstinence-only-until-marriage programs in our schools, stating “we need some assurance that specific programs do work before we keep spending tax money on them.” Indeed.

The editorial also bemoaned that rational conversations about sex education are nearly impossible because the debate about how to address teenage pregnancies is so ideologically charged. While true, it is an oversimplification to suggest that this issue is only about philosophical differences: The sex education debate in the United States is at least as much about the protection of large pots of money benefiting abstinence-only-until-marriage entrepreneurs as it is about genuine philosophical differences.

According to a recent study by USC’s Center for Health Policy and Research, births to young mothers 10-19 cost South Carolina’s taxpayers $156 million annually. When our state budget forecast is dismal, when our schools are hurting and when DHEC needs more funding for family planning clinical services rather than less, $156 million is enough to merit some public attention. Yet, since the Beasley administration, the General Assembly has continued to earmark taxpayer funds for its favorite abstinence-only-until-marriage program providers every year.

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Ladies’ choice

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By Dana Goldstein
The New Republic

Candidate is trying to mount a feminist challenge to Hillary.
For Barack Obama, it has all come down to the mommies.

Hillary Clinton’s commanding lead among Democratic women – as high as 20 points in some nationwide polls – has long been cited as a strength Obama can’t overcome. A November Zogby poll found that nationwide, Clinton’s 11 percent advantage over Obama was due entirely to her 18 percent lead among women.

But in recent weeks, Obama brought female voters into his column as he pulled even with Clinton in the early primary states. The Des Moines Register’s December 1 Iowa poll showed Obama not only winning the overall race by a narrow margin, but for the first time beating Clinton among women, 31 to 26 percent. As the air of inevitability around Clinton vanishes, so does her lock on female voters. And the Obama campaign is trying to lock down his new supporters with a very special appeal to the peacenik earth mother it apparently believes is lurking within every woman (or at least every Democratic primary voter).

A few weeks before Oprah Tour ’07, the Obama campaign rolled out a 19-minute web documentary on “why women across the nation are supporting Barack Obama for president.” It features a bevy of babies gurgling happily to the strains of folk rock. And with babies, of course, come mommies. Mommies supervising in the park, cutting their children’s food up into tiny squares, and generally worrying about stuff. “Ever since I gave birth to my son, which was two and a half years ago, I have felt this, like, my heart ripped open to the world,” says a choked-up Gabrielle Grossman, a stay-at-home mom and Obama supporter from Exeter, New Hampshire. “I want to create a world that’s safe for my son and has harmony rather than sadness and poverty and grief and fear.”

Lord help us if the right wing decides to use this video – it’s almost a parody of Democrats as the Mommy Party. We meet Obama campaign COO Betsy Myers as she prepares dinner for her little girl. After all, there’s lots of time for those home-cooked meals on the trail! “Women have a guilt gene that men don’t have,” Myers says. “We’re the ones who handle the school, and the days off, and the doctor’s appointments.”

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Bursey files for relief from free speech conviction

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Today, attorneys for SC Progressive Network Director Brett Bursey filed a writ of coram nobis, usually translated as “the error before us,” in Federal District Court in Columbia, SC. A coram nobis petition applies to persons who have already been convicted and have served their sentence. Such motions cannot be used to address issues of law previously ruled upon by the court but only to address errors of fact that were not known at time of trial or were knowingly withheld during and after trial from judges and defendants by prosecutors, and which might have altered the verdict were they presented at the trial.

The writ argues that the government withheld evidence of White House involvement in segregating peaceful protestors from from supporters of President Bush at presidential rallies. Bursey was arrested at a Bush rally in Columbia in October 2002 for refusing to be segregated from the general public.

“I said at the time of my arrest that the Secret Service was being used as an armed political advance team by the president,” Bursey said. He filed discovery motions and subpoenas during his trial for any White House directives to the Secret Service, but the government successfully moved to deny his efforts, calling them a “fishing expedintion.”

A recently discovered Presidential Advance Manual instructs the Secret Service to do what Bursey alleged they did to him. “There are several ways the advance person can prepare a site to minimize demonstrators. First, as always, work with the Secret Service and have them ask the local police department to designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferable not in view of the event site or the motorcade route.” (pg. 32, Presidential Advance Manual, see below).

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Women’s studies: still relevant?

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By Kendall Anderson
Minnesota Women’s Press

Founded in the late ’60s, the academic discipline of women’s studies has now expanded to include gender and sexuality studies as well as racism, environmental equity and peace studies. With all these changes … is women’s studies still relevant?

Boy have we come a long way baby (and girl do we have a long way to go).

That’s what many scholars and graduates think about women’s studies, the multidisciplinary field that sprang from the women’s movement of the 1960s. Founded and nurtured amid social activism and rampant gender discrimination in the late 1960s, women’s studies programs are now offered at more than 700 U.S. colleges and universities. The discipline’s success has also brought challenges, among them the everlasting question of relevance. There is a lack of knowledge among some students about the discipline, scholars say.

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“Female students today have so many opportunities: Their mothers work, they’ve seen female senators and maybe, soon, a female president, so they think the women’s movement is done,” said Prof. Joanne Cavallaro, chair of women’s studies at the College of St. Catherine. She pointed out that though white middle-class American women have more opportunities, “If you look at the statistics around the world on women, that’s obviously not true.”

Nearly four decades after it was founded, women’s studies is undergoing a kind of redefinition, said Jacquelyn N. Zita, an associate professor in women’s studies and former department chair at the University of Minnesota. Along with proving the field’s relevance to students who sometimes lack historical perspective, Zita and others work to keep society at large educated about what a feminist lens can bring to our complex issues of the day. Both goals must be accomplished at the same time women’s studies leaders protect their programs and grow their historically low funding in an increasingly competitive academic world.

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At Christmas, remembering those lost to war

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By Wade Fulmer, Columbia

War veterans and other victims bombed, maimed, or mentally disabled may be able to tell you where he or she and fellow soldiers were on a Christmas Day, what they were doing, or what they were remembering about their last time at home with family.  Often, they may not remember details of their destructive traumas, may not want to return to where one was, or may only numbly exist while still in the politicians’ war that bleeds them and their families. They were, are, so far away, and if they return they yet dwell in that war place of interventionist hell. Soldiers seek to serve by noble duty, to move one more day closer to home, and to return to family. In faith and horror they live to survive one day at a time, to come home, and to bring their fellow soldiers home, at least alive if not well.

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Partisan holiday wishes

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(Received from a Republican friend.)

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To my Democrat(ic) friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

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To my Republican friends:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!