I know it's pretty shitty being gay and having a raving homophobe for a father. I can't even imagine what it's like to be gay and having a father who, in part, makes his living preaching homophobia, calling you a sinner, declaring your sexuality, your identity, a "brokenness." It has to be a trying experience to be torn between your family, your faith, and your very self.
Jermaine Jakes, son of T.D. Jakes, the noted prosperity theologian, was arrested last month cruising a Dallas-area park for gay sex. It's no real surprise that a man whose own identity likely brings him great shame (I'm merely speculating here, mind you) would find his best available sexual outlet in an anonymous encounter in the bushes of a public park.
T.D. has gone on record stating he "would never hire a sexually active gay person." The bitter twist here is that Jermaine listed T.D. Jakes Ministries as his employer on his arrest record. Of course, it is patently stupid for T.D. to make a statement like the preceding anyway. How the hell does he know who his employees are fucking? He can't. And he doesn't.
So, I wonder, what will be the outcome of this for father and son?
Will daddy change his gay-hating ways? Or will he make good on his position and kick his son from the flock, have him fired from his job at T.D. Jakes Ministries? Or perhaps Jermaine will, in the saddest (and most likely) scenario, resign from his position, duck into some gay-fixin' therapy, and quietly return six to eight days/weeks/months from now, 110% heterosexual?
Personally, I'd like to see Jermaine declare proudly, "Father, I am gay. Take me as I am."
Son Of A Preacher Man
Crazy in Salt Lake City
[Trigger warning.]
Check out this full-page ad in the Salt Lake Tribune and substitute the word "Jews" or "Black" in every place you see the word "homosexual" or "gay."
It's like a flashback to Berlin in 1936 or Little Rock in 1957.
But as Andrew Sullivan notes, it's good to see the crazies show their hand and the world can get a clue as to what some people are capable of. Those of us in the gay community have known about this mindset all too well for all too long.
Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.
Question of the Day
Aside from your computer, what one modern convenience could you not live without?
("Live without" being not totally literal; that is, if you live in the Midwest, you don't need to say "central heating" and if you are dependent on some bit of medical miraclery to survive, you don't need to say "my pacemaker." I grant you permission to have a little fun.)
I'm pretty sure I could live without a toilet, but I'm not sure I could say the same about toilet paper.
Tied with a water heater. I actually prefer pretty lukewarm showers to the steamy hot kind, but I hate cold showers.
Maybe Women Would Read Newspapers If Newspapers Would Stop Insulting Us
Seattle, where I live, remains a two-newspaper town, but that's about to change. Last month, the owners of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer--a Hearst-owned paper that competes with the also-struggling Seattle Times--announced they were putting the paper up for sale. The assumption, of course, is that no one will buy it, and it will go out of business or move online. To listen to many in the local media, the death of the P-I is the beginning of the end for quality local coverage-- that if local papers die, local news coverage will die with them.
Frankly, though, I'd be a hell of a lot more worked up about our "dying local institution" if it didn't routinely waste front-page real estate with stories like this:
Taking up the Vixen 'Gauntlet' means swallowing a little prideLet's count the sexist assumptions embedded in that headline alone: a) Losing to a woman = emasculation, because b) everybody knows girls = bad at sports. However, c) Don't worry about the humiliation, because these bitches are sharks. And at least d) you get a little T&A with your humiliation--which makes you, wink wink, the real winner.
Look out, guys -- these pool sharks will put you behind the 8 ball
Yes, I get why lazy writers resort to leads like this:
Machismo may bring men to Bellevue's Parlor Billiards to challenge the Vixens, an all-women's pool-playing team, but more gentlemanly behavior leaves with them, thanks to a healthy helping of humility -- in heels, no less....but it seems to me that it SHOULD be possible, without undue exertion, to write about an all-female pool team without reducing the story to "who knew GIRLS could play pool--and look hot while they're doing it?"
What's most galling to me is that the writer--a woman who has recently been responsible for equally infuriating stories about "The Running of the Brides" ("Do not try to stand between a bridezilla and her dress") and an "ironic" fundraiser in which women (and a few men) auctioned themselves off to raise money to fight sex slavery--doesn't flinch at lines that should send any reporter's bullshit detector into overdrive:
"We wanted to start a ladies night, something besides drink specials," Olson said. "But we also thought, 'Let's empower women here.' Every woman is a Vixen on Monday night.""Vixen," by the way = Woman who has to wear heels to meet the club's dress code.
The male patrons, at least, like it:
Craig Nishina, 29, respects them, especially because he has yet to run The Gauntlet, even though he has been showing up since almost the beginning.Let us pause and note that Nishina is 29. The "girls" he "respects" so much range in age from 26 to 45.
"It's a fun concept. It's free, and they get more girls interested in pool. They help with morale," said the Lynnwood engineer, who has been playing competitively since 2000.
I don't expect daily papers to be on the vanguard of gender relations; nor do I expect every story to be of Pulitzer caliber. But given that women are deserting newspapers in record numbers precisely because they don't think newspapers respect them or write about their interests, finding a way to cover women without resorting to insulting stereotypes might be one key to winning back their loyalty.
Dreams of Someplace Else
David Brooks takes a look at city life and dreams of Denver.
I don't know if Mr. Brooks has actually lived in any of the cities he's mentioned, but I've spent time in all of those cities except San Diego, and I can tell you that based purely on my anecdotal experience, he needs to get out more.If you jumble together the five most popular American metro areas — Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando and Tampa — you get an image of the American Dream circa 2009. These are places where you can imagine yourself with a stuffed garage — filled with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots and boating equipment. These are places you can imagine yourself leading an active outdoor lifestyle.
These are places (except for Orlando) where spectacular natural scenery is visible from medium-density residential neighborhoods, where the boundary between suburb and city is hard to detect. These are places with loose social structures and relative social equality, without the Ivy League status system of the Northeast or the star structure of L.A. These places are car-dependent and spread out, but they also have strong cultural identities and pedestrian meeting places. They offer at least the promise of friendlier neighborhoods, slower lifestyles and service-sector employment. They are neither traditional urban centers nor atomized suburban sprawl. They are not, except for Seattle, especially ideological, blue or red.
They offer the dream, so characteristic on this continent, of having it all: the machine and the garden. The wide-open space and the casual wardrobes.
Sure, there are the nice neighborhoods that he describes in those cities, but they also have them in Miami, Toledo, Dallas, St. Louis, Boston, Minneapolis, Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago, Albuquerque, Baltimore, and Evansville, Indiana. And there are scary places in all of his dream cities, as well as the strip-mall sprawl that makes Denver, Seattle, Orlando, and Tampa all look the same. (I saw Orlando in 1966, years before Disney showed up to turn it into the "Magic Kingdom", and it was a quiet city with streets lined with cypress trees dripping Spanish moss. Now a lot of it looks like Anaheim.)
Mr. Brooks dreams of Denver. Well, I lived in the Boulder/Denver area from 1982 to 1990, and it's a great place. It has a lot of culture, good theatre, decent schools, and a spectacular view of Longs Peak on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. It also has some pretty sketchy neighborhoods, homelessness, rush-hour traffic nightmares, unpredictable weather, and the Rockies are often obscured by the "brown cloud," the smog that settles in during the winter months. You could say the same about Albuquerque or Minneapolis, substituting bone-chilling cold in the winter for the smog in the case of the Twin Cities.
Mr. Brooks seems to think that a lot of Americans have the luxury of just picking up and moving where they like because they can find a decent cup of coffee or walk to the office through the park. But as he says, it's a dream. John Steinbeck referred to it in Travels with Charley as "the desire to be Someplace Else." But most people live where they have family roots or can find a job, not where there's a Starbuck's or McDonald's, and when they do move, it's usually out of necessity -- a job or family obligation -- rather than just wanderlust or pioneer spirit. And while I agree that there's something fascinating in dreaming of Someplace Else, there's a certain sameness -- and comfort -- in finding that it's not a lot different than the place you left. Or, as Buckaroo Banzai noted, "No matter where you go, there you are."
Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.
Have I ever mentioned that I love Kelly Clarkson?
Oh, yes—I have. Well, let me mention it again: I love Kelly Clarkson.
Think Kelly Clarkson looks too good to be true on the cover of her upcoming CD? You're right, says the singer.I adore that she said "it's just healthier to get away from that kind of thinking," not just about oneself but about other women, too. One of the most important bits of teaspooning women can do is simply to love and respect other women—and it's not just important culturally, but also personally. We can't love ourselves if we hate other women. We can't be comfortable with our own bodies if we constantly judge the way other women look. We must extend outward the same generosity, flexibility, and esteem that we should each grant ourselves to be happy in who we are.
"No girl is perfect," Clarkson – who joked on her blog last month that "they Photoshopped the crap out of me!" on her sexy All I Ever Wanted cover image – told a group of Girl Scouts recently…
In fact, she told the group of about 20 pre-teens gathered in Nashville Feb. 11 for a self-esteem workshop sponsored by Dove, "just to let you know everyone in the magazines is Photoshopped! Beyoncé is one of the most beautiful girls in the world but she gets Photoshopped too. We're all human!"
…"I learned right then to stop reading press. Either you're going to get a big head or you'll get depressed and neither one is great. I don't buy magazines like that. Even if I'm not in them, it's just healthier to get away from that kind of thinking," she says. "It's horrible – they'll show celebrities with cellulite and it's like, 'Of course celebrities have cellulite!' We're not fem-bots!" (Link)
Letting go of the culturally-imposed obligation to judge everyone is hugely freeing—and it makes accepting oneself a helluva lot easier.
It's a gift to ourselves, and to everyone else who steps into our gazes.
Quote of the Day
"[Rush Limbaugh saying he hopes President Obama fails] was a terrible thing to say. I mean, he's the president of all the country. If he succeeds, the country succeeds. And if he doesn't, it hurts us all. Anybody who would pull against our president is not exactly thinking rationally."—Founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and noted cuckoo Pat Robertson.
When Pat "Ton o' Fun" Robertson is the voice of reason on your side of the aisle, your ideology is officially dogshit.
[Via Memeorandum.]
USA: Beacon of Stupid (again)
I wonder what, exactly, this says about our country. Is Bernie Madoff getting death threats? Alan Greenspan? Mortgage brokers? Republican leaders?For some reason, there are people in this country who are either too afraid or too fucking stupid to channel their anger about the current state of our country to where it really belongs.
Or they're just too easily distracted.
It really amazes me that we've survived as a country and species as long as we have.
Daily Kitteh
Sophie and Iain have a hard day of painting yesterday.
Work hard; cuddle hard.
Message from the Japanese Minister of Finance
"The economy is so bad, that as acting finance minister my recommendation is to get totally shitfaced—on, uh, cold medicine."
Stimulating
Today, President Obama signs the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law, and tomorrow, he will visit Phoenix, "one of the cities hardest hit with foreclosures, where he's expected to outline a $50 billion to $100 billion plan to help homeowners."
The plan will almost certainly involve convoluted tax credits, mortgage readjustment schemes, and other unnecessarily complicated programs to help homeowners which will require billions in administrative costs, result in various fuck-ups and failures by the well-intentioned people tasked with connecting programs and the people who need them, and generate a new generation of predatory scams, as these things always do.
If the government just outright paid the mortgage of every struggling family making less than $[insert dollar amount here], it would be the same amount of money but exponentially more valuable to all of us. The direct help would yield immediate results for the families at risk of losing their homes, which would in turn stop the freefall of home values affecting other homeowners and put cash back in the banks who will then be able to grant more credit to new homeowners and businesses seeking lending, more individual resources would be freed up to be spent in retail and service vendors, blah blah blah.
And the reason it won't happen? Because the federal government always insists on wasting enormous amounts of time, energy, and money trying to make sure that it doesn't look like it's giving anyone "an undeserved hand-out," instead of telling the caterwauling fucknecks who bark about nonexistent welfare queens to STFU.
Straight People Trying to Make France Explode
That's the only conceivable explanation for this:
Authorities in France say a civil union designed a decade ago for gay couples has become increasingly popular with heterosexual couples.Between this outstanding proliferation of the radical gay agenda, books in vending machines, and my dirty, shameful, uncontrollable lust for Gérard Depardieu, I may just have to move to France.
…The pact originally was understood as a way for homosexual couples to legalize their unions under French law, which prohibits them from marrying. For every two marriages held now in France, one heterosexual couple chooses the solidarity pact, the Post reported, noting 92 percent of the 140,000 couples choosing to be united by the pact in 2008 were heterosexual.
Also I just love their dressing!
(That's a joke for the Better Off Dead fans among us.)
Meresamun: A Life Reconstructed
A 2,800-year-old Egyptian musician-priestess is the subject of a new exhibit at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum. Here is more from ArtSlant (emphasis added):
The exhibit will show how Meresamun lived and what sorts of musical instruments she used. Details about her health, as revealed in CT scans using the latest equipment, help tell her life story. "In a virtual way, people will be able to meet this remarkable woman and, through her eyes, learn what it was like to live in Egypt 2,800 years ago," said Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute and the curator of the exhibition. "We will be able to ‘recreate' the life of an Egyptian in a way no one has attempted before."
The exhibit, "The Life of Meresamun: A Temple Singer in Ancient Egypt" will be presented at the Oriental Institute Museum from February 10 through December 6, 2009. The centerpiece of the show is a brightly decorated coffin that contains the body of a woman who lived in Thebes (modern Luxor) in southern Egypt about 800 BC. A brief inscription on the coffin records her name and that she served as a Singer in the Interior of the Temple of Amun. Such singers were elite priestess-musicians who accompanied the High Priest as he performed rituals before the god Amun.
Meresamun was the first subject in Chicago to be studied with the Philips Healthcare iCT ("Intelligent CT") 256-channel scanner, which gave dramatically detailed views. Visitors to the exhibit will be able to explore features of Meresamun's health and also to perform a "virtual unwrapping" of the mummy enabling them to see how the mummy was prepared. Meresamun's appearance has been recreated using the most advanced digital techniques. She was tall by ancient standards- 5 and half feet-her features were regular with wide-spaced eyes and she had an overbite. University of Chicago radiologist Dr. Michael Vannier and the team looked for clues about Meresamun's health and lifestyle. Dr. Vannier commented: "Meresamun was, until the time of her death at about thirty, a very healthy woman. The lack of arrest lines on her bones indicates good nutrition through her lifetime and her well mineralized bones suggest that she lived an active lifestyle."
[...]
Objects that attest to the remarkable legal and social rights held by women in ancient Egypt document her life outside the temple and at home. A papyrus in the exhibit is inscribed with an annuity contract. It states that in exchange for thirty pieces of silver that a woman gave to her husband, he, in turn, was obligated to supply her with a stated amount of silver and grain each year. Even if they divorced, the contract stayed in effect until either the women died or cancelled the agreement.
When I first heard this story on CNN’s The Situation Room, it was presented as a fluff piece that described Meresamun as “a temple dancer” (not singer) and a “beautiful young woman” with “wide-set eyes, a very full mouth, and very high cheekbones” (no mention of her overbite—that would be icky). Her skills as an instrumental musician and her status and duties as an elite priestess also disappeared in the CNN piece. The main point of their segment seemed to be “yeah, but was she hawt?" The real story is very interesting though and I'm glad I went and looked it up.
Update: Shaker cejo kindly left a link to a free downloadable exhibit catalogue from the Oriental Institute in comments. Thanks, cejo!
Below the fold is a video segment and transcript with curator Dr. Emily Teeter and Dr. Michael Vannier discussing the advantages of rescanning Meresamun with the new Philips 256-slice iCT.
Dr. Teeter:
Meresamun came into our collection in 1920. She was purchased by the founder of the Institute, James Henry Breasted, in Egypt. Meresamun was a singer in the interior of the temple of Amun. We know this because it’s written on her coffin. It’s—with the Egyptian material it’s wonderful because they leave us so much data, so we have her name, and her title. So it really gives us an insight into who this person was. There was a fairly heated discussion whether we were going to bring the mummy back to be examined on the iCT, because we had just had her imaged on the previous generation. But Dr. Vannier really impressed upon us the superiority of this particular imager.
Dr. Vannier:
The experience with the first set of scans raised as many questions as it answered, and this is an opportunity for us to look in much greater detail and depth. And there seemed to be some significant differences between this mummy and some others that have been described. For instance this mummy has some severe fractures, particularly around the thoracic inlet, which we didn’t expect to see.
Dr. Teeter:
This is all very exciting to us, because as you can see mummy is a sealed coffin, and this is a wonderful sort of non-destructive technology we can use. And, we’re finding all sorts of interesting aspects about her which help us fill in what her life was like. Also, for the history of Egyptology, it’s very interesting looking at the style of mummification, there are a lot of features that I’ve never seen before. It’s—it’s like magic; it is so extraordinary to be bale to—it’s like X-Ray eyes, you know, just looking beyond, and being able to see the relationship of the body in the coffin is extremely interesting, and things like seeing the wrappings, the amount of linen that’s used, Um, it’s just inconceivable that this technology exists.
In Which Portly Becomes a Noodge
So, I had occasion to ask 'Liss about how the monthly fundraiser went yesterday.
She informed me that, based on a conservative estimate of her weekly hours as blog-mistress, and the funds contributed, this month she'll be reaping a fabulous wage of $3.10/hour.
She cheerily added "Still -- a raise from last month, when I was working for less than $2/hour!"
When I checked the web-stats, this blog had over 11,000 individual visits just yesterday -- on a national holiday -- and averages between 200k and 300k visits each month.
Now remember:
If you really can't donate -- this isn't addressed to you.
If you've already donated -- this also isn't addressed to you.
However, if you can donate, and you read this blog daily, or comment, or enjoy the community, or benefit from touting your own blog in any of the numerous blog-roundups each week, or love that you do not have to look at Gaaaah!-worthy ads like "1 Rule To a Flat Stomach" when you visit here -- and you haven't made a donation . . . .
. . . . then please make a donation.
Even small donations help.
One of my greatest hopes at present is that we can somehow get out from under the tyranny of the monopolized and corporatized MSM -- because it nauseates and disgusts me.
A great way to help that happen is to keep responsible, thoughtful, progressive journalists thriving.
Lecture over.
And now, a busker's cookie for you --
(Oh, and one last little thing. I can't help but remember that 'Liss' dedication to progressivism was recently brought up for question because she purchased a pair of Nike shoes on ebay. I find that kind of ironic, when she's working a more than full-time job for less than half the minimum wage.)
More Rail!
To be filed under "Worse Things On Which to Spend Federal Revenue; Few Better"—high-speed rail.
Or, for that matter, light rail.
Or commuter rail.
Or any kind of passenger rail.
I know it ZOMG SOCIALIST!!!11!!eleventy! to suggest that the government should be in the business of public transport to voyager le country, but I'm going to suggest it, anyway. Because I've been all over this damn country care of insane summer holidays with my insane parents, traversing the American east, west, and everything in between in various unreliable vehicles that dropped transmissions and blew tires in exotic locales like DuBois, Wyoming and Adair, Iowa, looking out of windows at mountains and valleys and mesas and amber waves of grain, seeing skyscrapers and impossibly wide rivers and herds of wild stallion, hearing every American accent you can imagine, and I wouldn't trade that shit for anything.
Trains, lots of trains with fares significantly cheaper than airfare, would open up that experience to more families where the parents aren't teachers with lots of vacation and endless time to drive from here to there. Backpacking across America could be an alternative for American college students who can't afford to backpack across Europe, or a nice prelude in one's own big backyard for those who can. It would also create a whole new tourist industry for travel in America on the cheap.
It's a brilliant, beautiful country. I don't see the downside to our government making it more accessible to our visitors, much less its own citizens.
The Blame Game
[Trigger warning.]
There is in the news at the moment a terrible story about a man who beheaded his wife, reportedly after she asked him for a divorce following several calls to police about domestic violence. This case has captured the attention of a bunch of bloggers on both the left and the right, bloggers who don't generally blog about violence against women, because of this detail: The murderer is a prominent Muslim.
Muzzammil Hassan was charged with second-degree murder after police found the decapitated body of his wife, Aasiya Hassan, at the Bridges TV station in the Buffalo suburb of Orchard Park, said Andrew Benz, Orchard Park's police chief.Particularly in comments threads on posts about this story, there are a lot of jokes about how Hassan sure isn't improving Muslims' reputation by beheading his wife, all predicated, of course, on that most basic foundation of prejudice: The insistence that one member of a group represent the entire group. Certainly, I understand the source of the potential irony, but it's contingent on reducing Hassan to one piece of his identity—his religion—and suggesting that his religion is uniquely (or mostly) responsible for his crime. Which, as it turns out, there are people quite eager to do, too.
…Hassan went directly to the police station after his wife's death and confessed to killing her, Benz told CNN. Benz declined to give further details.
…He had two children, 4 and 6, with his wife. He had two other children, 17 and 18, from his previous marriage.
He launched Bridges TV, billed as the first English-language cable channel targeting Muslims inside the United States, in 2004. At the time, Hassan said he hoped the network would balance negative portrayals of Muslims following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The thing is, it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
Now you know the woman who constantly says like a broken record "This shit doesn't happen in a void" isn't about to argue that Hassan was not a product of his environment; I will, however, note that Islam was only one part of his environment. He is also an American resident, which made him the beneficiary of all the patriarchy-conferred privilege inherent to that environment, too. He is a member of a family, which likely granted him a higher status for being male. He is/was a businessperson working in corporate America, which favors and privileges men. Et cetera. In most or all of these overlapping and intersecting environments, violence against women will have been tacitly—and sometimes overtly—condoned via media imagery, advertisements, "jokes," turned blind eyes, public religious admonishments from multiple religions, and possibly intimate example.
So how much sense does it make to blame his religion, exclusively or even primarily?
None.
Which means that anyone who isn't just cynically using the occasion of a woman's gruesome murder by her husband's hand to advance an anti-Islam or anti-religion agenda needs to rethink their argument—because if they really care about the victim at the center of this crime, or any of the millions of women hurt or killed by domestic violence every year, they won't mask the real culprit behind a cheap, and misplaced, shot at a single religion.
The real culprit is undeserved male privilege and the resulting second-class personhood of women.
Patriarchal religion of any stripe is merely a symptom of that global menace. And using it as a scapegoat, or suggesting somehow that if the religion itself were eradicated it would take gendered violence with it, effectively provides an excuse for not looking the source dead in the eyes. It's a handy way of absolving oneself of any responsibility, too—it's just that religion; there's nothing I can do about it except hate that religion.
I suppose that's what the blame game's all about, isn't it? Never having to look too closely at how very much your own environment resembles that of a man like Muzzammil Hassan, lest you feel obliged to lift a teaspoon rather than simply point a finger.
Update on Dymond Milburn
by Shaker Sunless Nick
One of the trials in the Dymond Milburn case, in which a 12-year-old girl was arrested for "resisting arrest" after she was allegedly attacked and beaten severely enough to be hospitalized by three police officers who were responding to a report about prostitutes in the area, has come to an end:
GALVESTON — A deadlocked jury failed to reach a verdict Monday in the case of a girl accused of assaulting a police officer after officers allegedly mistook her for a prostitute.Not an acquittal, but at least Milburn isn't going to have to going to be prosecuted yet again. Well of course, she is, but I'll get to that later.
…[Judge Roy Quintanilla] declared a mistrial in the case, and Galveston County Criminal District Attorney Kurt Sistrunk said that, based on discussions with jurors after trial, the state won’t prosecute the case again.
The prosecutors claim that:
Milburn knew the men were officers, because they wore badges and had "police" displayed on their shirts.Uh, huh, an odd kind of plainclothes officers then. But even if they're telling the lily-white truth (remember that phrase, we'll need it again), that doesn't exactly explain why they mistook a 12-year-old black girl for any of three white women. The story also talks about a complaint of two men dealing drugs, but doesn't mention their races—but even if they happened to be black, that's just as far away from a 12-year-old girl.
Which brings us back to the question of what they were doing there in the first place.
Police should have admitted they were wrong to detain Milburn, [her defense lawyer Anthony Griffin] said, but prosecutors said it was the officers’ duty to investigate the complaint.By arresting—or kidnapping—a child who could not possibly have resembled any of the suspects complained about? That's some attention to duty there.
The officers claim she swore at them, ran away, and hit one of them in the face—yet any of that would be contingent on them going after her in the first place. And none of their claims offer a reason why they did so, why they assumed that this girl was conversant with the comings and goings of local prostitutes and drug dealers, or why they needed to inflict the injuries described in the Milburns' lawsuit (PDF; trigger warning) in order to defend themselves.
And the lawsuit is of course why Milburn will be prosecuted again, because even as the plaintiff, she will be attacked; not just by the cops' lawyers, whose job it at least will be, but by apologists and the media. The victim-blaming, cries of liar, and accusations of gold-digging began very soon after her case made the news—and it'll get worse once the focus on her trial of them rather than theirs of her.
Because Dymond Milburn is inconvenient. She stands in contravention to the "white truth" (there's that phrase again)—the one that positions black people, and other POC, as aggressive figures—the one that says she must have been the aggressor on that night, or lacking evidence of that, then it must be her quest for justice that's the act of aggression. The one that says no black girl can be allowed to stand as the victim.
And Another Thing…
The various news stories about the Milburn case attract commentators claiming that no matter what, there must be some "other side" to the story. And of course there is. But it's not the side that says the police were right to assault a 12-year-old and then harass her through the courts.
It's the one that says so what if she had been a prostitute like they said she was when they attacked her? They claimed it, they didn't deny they claimed it, so it's fair to assume they thought it. Which implies that their treatment of Milburn was the SOP when it came to prostitutes; at the time this case first hit the news, Jill from Feministe brought that up:
Police offiers and other people in positions of power can victimize and abuse sex workers with almost no fear of retribution or legal consequence. The police beat up a 12-year-old girl because they thought she was a prostitute, and, if the news report is accurate, have said as much. Had she actually been a prostitute, that treatment would have apparently been acceptable....but that angle has died down since then. And it shouldn't have.
Most of the comments in the stories above condemn the officers' actions. But much of that condemnation is based on Milburn not being what or who the officers assumed. Which at least implies, even if the writers don't intend it to, that if she had been a 12-year-old prostitute, then beating her into hospital would have been more defensible. I've certainly made that implication in things I've said, regardless of my actual views.
A case like Milburn's implies a long line of victims of similar violence. Her story could be used to bring their stories to light, or to drive them further into shadow. I know which I think it should be.
[H/T to Shaker AbracaDeborah.]
Current, My Ass
So, last night, I'm looking for something to put on the TV as background noise while we're working, and I see that Current is airing a collection of documentary profiles of "powerful women" under the title "I Am Still a Woman."
First reaction is that I hate the title (still a woman? you mean being successful doesn't turn you into a man?!), but the premise sounds interesting, so I put it on.
And it's pretty good. There was a bit about a playwright whose subject is Israel, a bit about the owner/manager of an alternative construction company, a bit about an inner-city educator, a bit about a women-run community in China, etc.
In between each "pod," the host, Michelle Lombardo, says something inane but unobjectionable, like, "That was great, wasn't it? I loved it! Powerful women are great, aren't they? Next up…" Except for one time, coming back from commercial, when she said (approximately): "Welcome back. We're profiling strong, powerful women—but don't worry, guys. It's not scary. You never know, you might even learn something!"
Let's see how many sexist assumptions were wrapped up in that one little communiqué:
• Power is a zero-sum game between the sexes.
• Powerful women threaten men.
• Men are scared of powerful women.
• Powerful women disinterest men.
• Men's interest can only be captured by challenging them.
Not bad for about 20 words.
Note to Current: If your hosts are going to take to the airwaves to promulgate retrofuck memes like "strong women make men's wieners shrivel," you might want to consider changing your name. Because that shit's as old as dirt, my friends.
Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime
I couldn't find an intro for the show (I'm not sure it really had one), so a promo is the best I could do. Todd and I used to love this show. Rolonda was a huge part of our college experience: We totally majored in Ro 101!
Question of the Day
What are the best and worst home improvement projects you've ever done?
This house is a never-ending DIY home improvement project. I can't believe this post was almost three years ago, and we're still. not. done. We've done so many projects, encompassing every single room, I can't even remember them all, but for sure the worst was removal of the Shredding Wallpaper of the Damned (as seen in above-linked post), and the best is always the one we're doing, bringing us one wee bit closer to feeling like we're finally living in our home.
And, yes, to those who asked, I will post pictures of yesterday-and-today's finished project once we're done. In the meantime, Iain has taken over painting the door because I am "too slow." Slow. Meticulous. Tomato! Tomahto! LOL.
Iain: Good loord, wooman. Yer like Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel oover there.
Liss: I'm meticulous!
Iain: Yes, ye are, tschoobs. But ye've spent the last five minutes painting a bit that's gaen tae be oonder the frame!
Liss: Oh, ha ha. Well, maybe someday someone in the future will take off the frame and think, "My, what a lovely edging job!"
Iain: Moore likely it will be me.
Liss: Thinking, "What a waste of time."
Iain: [laughs] Noo way, babe! I'll be finking it's AWESOOME.
Liss: Wev. [switches brush into left hand to get into corner more easily] You're just jealous because I'm ambidextrous and can paint with both hands.
Iain: That is pretty cool. Although I'm surprised it makes ye twice as sloo instead of twice as fast.
Liss: METICULOUS!
