[Trigger warning for transphobia and medical care horror stories]
Muncie Star Press: Ball Memorial Hospital will train staff in LGBT awareness.
You [TW: transphobia] may recall Erin Vaught, the trans woman who was denied health care at an Indiana hospital despite the fact that she had "coughed [up] almost a cup of blood." The Muncie hospital has just announced that all employees will undergo the sensitivity training that is obviously needed.
I'm still left to wonder what happened to the employees in question. Speaking from experience, I'll argue that there are two aspects to this type of injustice: 1) dangerously substandard medical care that 2) is substantially different than medical care given to members of other groups. Yes, the treatment that Vaught received was discriminatory, but leaving that aside for the moment, it clearly showed that several employees at said hospital are unfit to provide medical care. Unable to figure out what to do with a person who's coughing up blood? Fail.
My family's own experience last year shows a similar bifurcation. Based on our observations over several visits to one of our local hospitals, we feel that the care we received was discriminatory. However, our complaints include:
Patient denied call button (which incidentally, led to my partner laying in bed screaming for help; the ER staff largely ignored said screams)
Patient denied pain medication, including that prescribed by the same hospital for the surgery that lead to the ER visit
Patient denied ice pack
Patient not helped in and out of bed, not given assistance in leaving hospital (e.g., we're done here, you know where the door is)
Yes, we have other complaints including the nasty demeanor of the staff and the ejection of me from the room, but you'll note that the list above has fuck all to do with discrimination, and everything to do with a failure to follow the most basic standards of medical care. This is stuff that our nursing friends tell us is fundamental. I also imagine it's the sort of thing that accrediting bodies look at. :ahem:
FWIW, we received a letter from the hospital administration assuring us that they take our concerns very seriously, that they have core values, and that they're totally looking into it. Yawn. I'm not so sure that this means that they're looking to hire competent staff.
We've pretty much decided not to pursue the matter further, but this kind of garbage pisses me off. Yes, you need to work on cultural sensitivity, but you also need to stop being a sucky hospital. Any word on that?
Update: Erin Vaught
Question of the Day
What was a moment that by all rights should have been an embarrassing moment for you, but was so absurd you couldn't help but laugh?
I've had dozens of these moments, but the first one that came to mind was a time in high school when I was spending the night at a friend's house. She was in the shower, and I was puttering around in her bedroom, and found a brightly-colored (like the most putrid neon; hello, it was the '90s!) plastic water-gun. I put on my best Emma Peel and waited for her to come back to her room.
The door creaked. "Freeze, dirtbag!" I commanded, pointing the garish toy pistol.
Her father—who was actually the person coming into the room—startled, looked at me with a mixture of confusion, terror, and exasperation, tossed the blanket he was holding onto the floor, and scurried away.
LOL.
Her dad was just this 100% Grade-A humorless, bullying, patriarchal, fascist ass, so it was eighty million shades of hilarious that it was her dad, of all The Dads, who became the unintentional target of my misplayed prank.
When my friend returned to her room, I blurted out, "I just barked 'Freeze, dirtbag!' at your dad while pointing this water-gun at him." She collapsed into a heap, and we laughed for ten million years.
When I apologized to him later, he responded by looking at my friend and saying, "It's this kind of stupidity that I'm talking about," then walking away.
Which, naturally, made us laugh all over again, and we quoted that shit for fucking ever.
Quote of the Day
"When Snooki tweeted that she was mad at Obama for raising taxes on tanning beds, I tweeted back that I would not do that [raise taxes] and that she should wear sunscreen. ... That same week I gave a speech on human rights in Iran, and everyone just wanted to know about Snooki."—Senator John McCain, overtly on tweeting with Jersey Shore sensation Snooki, and obliquely on bread and circuses.
lolsob.
What You're Projecting Ain't Saying Much For Ya
[Trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence.]
So, according to Marine Corps Commandant General James Conway, if "Don't Ask Don't Tell" is repealed, the Marines should consider "voluntary" sexuality-segregated quarters, because a lot of Marines are "very religious" and have "moral concerns" about homosexuality and thus "don't want to room" with gay peers.
Okay, ignoring the incoherence of axiomatically equating "religious" with "homophobic," let's break down this logic: Religious (ahem) Marines object to rooming with anyone who engages in any activity that they deem immoral. Except not. Because there's no movement to create separate quarters for Marines who have premarital (straight) sex, or adulterous (straight) sex, or who gamble, or who take the lord's name in vain, or who fail to honor their mothers and fathers so it may be well with thee and thou mayest live long on the earth.
Once again, we meet a special argument reserved especially just for the very special case of gay people and their specialized sin.
Why would straight male Marines have a special concern about bunking with gay peers? Well. It's not fashionable for homophobes to say it these days, unless it's framed as a don't-drop-the-soap "joke," but they have the same fear as did the homophobes of yore, back when it wasn't politically incorrect to flatly say: "I don't want them queers trying to put the moves on me."
Nowadays, it's "politely" couched as a "moral concern," as if a religious (ahem) Marine's delicate sensibilities can tolerate killing another human being but not sharing sleeping space with a man who kisses other men.
But the reality is that what underlies their fear are pernicious narratives about gay recruitment and the stereotype of gay men as predatory and sexually aggressive.
Which itself is a projection created by straight homophobic men, who—by virtue of socialization in a patriarchal culture that casts women's bodies as men's property, to which they are rightfully entitled, and frames straight sexuality as a game between male hunter and female prey—assume that all men are sexually aggressive and indifferent to the concept of consent.
In short, they fear gay men treating them the way they treat women.
One would think that might make them reconsider their own philosophies on respect for bodily autonomy, ownership of self, and consent—but it just never seems to work out that way.
Daily Dose o' Cute
[Also viewable here.]
Video Description: Scenes of the three kitteh girls of Shakes Manor being generally cute, with cameo by Dudley, set to Kelly Clarkson's "My Life Would Suck Without You," mostly just because I like the music, but also a little bit because my life would suck without these adorable furry girls (and their brother) in it.
As always, still images for those who can't view the video below the fold.
Matilda lies on the chaise in the loft, an explosion of fuzz.
Olivia dozes on the couch.
Sophie plays one of her favorite games: Scoot Around on My Back in the Loft.
Dudley at the dog park, with maximum tongueage.
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Today In Xenophobic Films Starring Rutger Hauer
Wanted Dead or Alive
Nick Randall (Rutger Hauer, again) is a bounty hunter. He is the great-grandson of Josh Randall, the character played by Steve McQueen on the TV show Wanted: Dead or Alive. Rutger Hauer is not as cool as Steve McQueen, duh, especially since he now looks like Roy Batty with a mullet.
In addition to being a bounty hunter Randall is also a former secret agent. I assume he was with the CIA, but it isn't exactly clear. What I do know is that this group uses Gold's Gym as a front for its office in L.A. I'm not sure why they didn't pick a more low-key location, like a probate lawyer's office or something, but strategic planning doesn't seem this outfit's strong suit anyway. Years ago Randall left the agency, having grown tired of "walking around with a bull's-eye on [his] forehead." He's retired, lives on a boat, blah blah blah. 
Why does every tough dude on the edge have to live on a boat in movies like this? Is that substitution for characterization? "Oh, he lives on a decrepit trawler, he must be a badass!"
Okay, so, back to the plot: Super-Terrorist™ Malak Al Rahim, played by the always annoying Gene Simmons, sneaks into the U.S. and his first order of business is blowing up a crowded movie theater. A movie theater showing Rambo, to be precise. I think this is supposed to be some sort of joke, but I can't tell how exactly it's funny. I mean, the exploding theater isn't supposed to be funny, that's super serious (there were kids in there!), but why Rambo on the marquee? Whatever.
The Feds beg Randall to come back for one last job, and blah blah blah blah blah...
Do I even need to bother? Stuff explodes, there are gunfights and car chases and lots of people die. Right? Right. You've seen this shit a thousand times before. Sometimes it's been better done. Sometimes not. If mediocrity is what this movie was aiming for, it's hit its target dead on.
Anyway, Al Rahim is planning to next blow up a chemical plant in Los Angeles, and thereby release enough toxic gas to wipe out 50,000 Angelinos. Why is he doing this? Who knows? The film never bothers to explain his motivations. The fact he's Middle-Eastern should be reason enough for the audience to know he's evil.
Every Middle-Easterner in this movie is either a terrorist or a collaborator. And when they're not being portrayed as bloodthirsty sadists, they're being tortured and killed by the film's heroes. Almost invariably these latter moments are played for laughs. And when Gene Simmons finally gets his head blown off at the film's climax, what should be a joyous moment is spoiled by the racist tone that pervades the 100 minutes preceding it.
The only enjoyment I got out of this film was the way the Middle-Easterners were constantly passing around big bundles of dynamite. The sheer absurdity of it was comical. I half expected them to be marked with TNT in big letters, and maybe even have ticking alarm clocks attached to them. The Middle-Easterners in this film are such caricatures that it might not have been too surprising. If everything about their portrayal wasn't so offensive, this film might otherwise be forgettable. Instead it stands as a testament to anti-Arab sentiment that has only grown in this country since this film's release.
Directed by Gary Sherman • R • 1987 • 104 minutes
[Cross-posted.]
Two Facts
1. David Brooks has written yet another garbage column for the New York Times [trigger warning for a graphic description of a surgical procedure], because they inexplicably continue to employ him for his peerless garbage column-writing services.
2. This column is THE WORST, even by Brooks' own deplorable standards.
Where do I begin recounting everything that is wrong with this column? It starts right at the headline (which Brooks may not have written himself): "A Case of Mental Courage." As opposed to what? Testicular courage? Liquid courage? Where else does courageousness reside, if not in the mind? What other kind of courage is there? But never mind that. Brooks isn't even talking about courage, anyway; his thesis is about character.
But we must read five paragraphs, spent recounting the gruesome details of an early nineteenth-century mastectomy performed without anesthesia, before Brooks gets to his point (such as it is):
Burney's struggle reminds one that character is not only moral, it is also mental. Heroism exists not only on the battlefield or in public but also inside the head, in the ability to face unpleasant thoughts.WHUT.
Leaving aside discussion about the propriety of appropriating Fanny Burney's intimate recollections of her agonizing breast cancer surgery to launch into another one of his twaddling, pedestrian, insubstantial missives about how terrible it is that conservatives and liberals aren't as wise as middling milquetoast sages like himself, I can hardly conceive of any reference that could more conspicuously underscore the transparent banality of his jejune ruminations.
Fanny Burney: "I began a scream that lasted intermittingly during the whole time of the incision—& I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still."
David Brooks: "She lived at a time when people were more conscious of the fallen nature of men and women. People were held to be inherently sinful, and to be a decent person one had to struggle against one's weakness. In the mental sphere, this meant conquering mental laziness with arduous and sometimes numbingly boring lessons."
Only a privileged wanker of the highest wankery would romanticize a woman's profound suffering in order that he might scold the hoi polloi about their "mental laziness."
While Brooks lounges around his ivory tower waxing nostalgic for the strong characters built by incomprehensible suffering, he is insulated from a painful reality: The very people he thinks would benefit from a little old-fashioned suffering are, in fact, suffering the very indignities he considers a long-lost educational tool. I know someone who is scheduled to get surgery on an injured wrist using only local anesthetic, because he is uninsured, and cannot afford the high cost of a general. It will be painful.
This, almost exactly 200 years after Burney's surgery, in a nation where we could provide everyone with healthcare, but choose not to.
Somehow, I don't take a lesson of "moral courage," or character, from that anecdote.
And lest anyone forget, for a brief moment, that Brooks is a man of undiluted privilege, he compares the lack of character he finds among the US population to being weak/disabled, and then to being fat:
[I]n general, the culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one's own mental feebleness. Today's culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse.He is a parody of wankers.
The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics.
Brooks ends his garbage column thus:
To use a fancy word, there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate. ... Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.Insert your own joke here.
Schools and Education: Not the Same Thing
Have y'all heard about the new Ambassador Hotel cum high school in Los Angeles? Would you like to?
According to my friends at the Boston Globe (my source for all things SoCal-- the Globe grabbed the story off the AP Wire, BTW):
"With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation’s most expensive public school ever.
The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the crème de la crème of 'Taj Mahal’ schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting architectural panache and deluxe amenities....
At Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex’s namesake, a manicured public park, a state-of-the-art swimming pool, and preservation of pieces of the original hotel."
Well, that sounds pretty neat. In a way.
Let me go on record in favor of the construction and maintenance of grand social spaces replete with Diego Rivera murals (FWIW, the late painter was unavailable to help with the RFK schools). Libraries and rotundas (rotundi?) should be plentiful and made of limestone or better.
Speaking of large urban schools, I remember trips to play the Minnesota High School League Presents: Quiz Bowl! at Minneapolis North. In some of the classrooms the students' chairs appeared to consist of whatever had been dragged in from the curb. Everything wobbled. Ancient books were held together with duct tape. Tables (some of the fancier rooms had desks) were held together with duct tape.
I won't say that North was literally held together with duct tape, but there was a lot of the stuff. I like duct tape. I like how it holds my car together. I'm not such a big fan of it holding society together.
Crumbling half-assed schools send a variety of messages to students and the community. The Board of Education is broke. The Board of Education is broke because we don't have a tax base, on account of your community is broke. The Board of Education might not be broke if anyone cared about you, but, well, you know. Your community might not be broke if anyone cared about you too, but, yeah, that too. Just try not to go to other neighborhoods, lest other people call the police, okay? Also, stay in school, 'cause it's totes important to your future.
State of the art swimming pools represent an improvement. Among other things, they send a message to students and communities that they are important, and that schools are important.
Schools, education, whichever.
Call me an AFT member (I'm an AFT member), but there's something missing here.
"The pricey schools have been built during a sensitive period for the nation’s second-largest school system: Nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, and the academic year and programs have been slashed. The district also faces a $640 million shortfall, and some schools persistently rank among the nation’s lowest-performing."
I see a trend in how we address education. The trend is, well, trendy. Affluent do-gooders throw money into urban charter schools in order to feel good about themselves, or make some point about bootstraps or My Fair Lady or whatever. Colleges sink money into fancy rec centers and dorms. The US government rewards states for synergy or hopey-change or whatever.
There's more to education than trendy facilities, cutting edge business models and swimming. (What is it with you people and swimming? I didn't learn to swim until I was in my 20s, and I turned out as a perfectly happy roller skating atheistic transsexual lesbian socialist lady).
We need libraries that have decent selections of books. And are open when students (and others) wish to use them. We need teachers to do the messy, time-consuming work of teaching students. This takes money that, evidently, we don't have.
Schools and education: they're not entirely the same thing.
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
Just the concept of a conservative advice columnist makes me shiver, but this is a real stunner.
Dear John: Do not listen to Dave. Treating a 36-year-old person—who's just lost his business, exhausted his financial resources, can't find a job, has run out of time, and has to move back in with his parents—like a naughty teenager who's dragging his "sewage" home with him is quite possibly the worst conceivable approach. Negotiate boundaries with him like the adult that he is, and have high expectations for his future to which he can live up to. Your son will thank you. Love, Liss.
Thanks, But No Thanks
Shirley Sherrod has turned down a job offer from the Agriculture Department, after being forced to resign in July on the basis of Andrew Breitbart's doctored video.
[Sherrod] declined an offer Tuesday to serve as the agency's deputy director of the Office of Advocacy and Outreach. The newly created position was designed to improve the department's civil rights efforts and image nationwide.To be perfectly frank, I find it the height of patronizing bullshit that Sherrod was asked to be the director of the newly-created Office of Advocacy and Outreach. "Sorry we shit all over you; we don't know how to be reasonable or sensitive, but we sure want to look like we do to the public. So, um, can you do the very difficult task of building and leading a new department for us, so that we don't do the same shitty thing to someone else that we did to you? We totes swear that this isn't just a public relations stunt, and you won't be abandoned to bureaucratic hell, tasked with an objective we won't fund, as soon as the cameras look the other way. WE SWEARS IT!"
Sherrod said she also turned down an offer to return to her previous position as the department's director of rural development for Georgia.
Sherrod met Tuesday morning with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to discuss the offers. It was the first face-to-face meeting between the two since a controversial sequence of events last month culminated in Sherrod's stepping down.
...Sherrod said Vilsack pushed "really, really hard" for her to stay at the USDA during their roughly 90-minute meeting, but that she just didn't "think at this point with all that has happened" that it would be possible to continue working there.
She needed to "take a break" from the furor surrounding her dismissal, she said.
But "it doesn't mean I'm not interested in that work, because I am," Sherrod told reporters at the Agriculture Department.
Sherrod said she enjoyed her work at the USDA and "would want to see (it) continue."
"We need to work on issues (of) discrimination and racism in this country, and I'd certainly like to play my role," Sherrod said.
She praised "new processes in place" to prevent discrimination and inappropriate firings at the department, but said she doesn't "want to be the one to test it."
Typical.
As much as I want people just like Shirley Sherrod working for my government, I'm glad she didn't take the job, just on the principle of the thing. It isn't the obligation of people this (or any other) administration unfairly slights to fix the mess by letting themselves be used in a cynical public ploy.
I hope the Department nonetheless creates its Office of Advocacy and Outreach, and hires someone great to lead it, even and especially if the administration stands to gain nothing from hir employment.
Stem Cell Research Halted by Federal Judge
One of President Obama's first orders of business after taking office, and one of the things he's done with which I was undilutedly thrilled (despite my aversion to presidential fiat), was to issue an executive order lifting the Bush-era restrictions on stem cell research.
However, because we live in the United States of Jesus, the dildobrains at the conservative Christian Alliance Defense Fund, who partnered with organizations like Nightlight Christian Adoptions, a group promoting "snowflake babies"—the extraneous fertilized eggs from IVF procedures that are "adopted" so more white babies can be made and used in presidential photo-ops by mendacious shitheads—sued to halt Obama's order, and yesterday Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, a Reagan appointee, blocked the executive order, "saying it violated a ban on federal money being used to destroy embryos."
The ruling came as a shock to scientists at the National Institutes of Health and at universities across the country, which had viewed the Obama administration's new policy and the grants provided under it as settled law. Scientists scrambled Monday evening to assess the ruling's immediate impact on their work.The surest way to make this ruling irrelevant would be for Congress to stop annually passing the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which bans federal funding of any "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death," and instead write legislation prioritizing science that ultimately stands to save or improve millions of lives over prohibitions conceived in response to a narrow religious view our government isn't intended to sanction.
"I have had to tell everyone in my lab that when they feed their cells tomorrow morning, they better use media that has not been funded by the federal government," said Dr. George Q. Daley, director of the stem cell transplantation program at Children's Hospital Boston, referring to food given to cells. "This ruling means an immediate disruption of dozens of labs doing this work since the Obama administration made its order."
…Dr. Irving L. Weissman, director of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, said the ruling was "devastating to the hopes of researchers and patients who have been waiting so long for the promise of stem cell therapies." Dr. Weissman said he hoped that the judge's ruling would be overturned.
But that would, of course, require the Democratic Party to have a spine.
So, yeah. I guess I'm with Dr. Weissman, and I just have to hope that the judge's ruling will be overturned.
Hopey changey.
"Illogical and Cynical"
The New Republic's Richard Just has written a great piece, simply titled, "Disgrace," about President Obama's position on same-sex marriage.
In the fall of 1912, as his campaign for president entered its final stage, Woodrow Wilson was speaking in Brooklyn when he was asked for his opinion on women's suffrage. The issue was very much in the political ether, but Wilson had declined to take a stand on it. According to John Milton Cooper's excellent biography of the twenty-eighth president, he responded by insisting that it was "not a question that is dealt with by the national government at all." The woman who had asked the question was apparently displeased by this blatant dodge. "I am speaking to you as an American, Mr. Wilson," she retorted.Go read the whole thing.
I am speaking to you as an American: It was a wonderful rebuke, one that anticipated the rhetoric of Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders who would not rail against America but instead demand to be fully part of it. Wilson, however, was unmoved. And his slippery treatment of women's suffrage—like his slippery approach on matters of race—did not end once he was in the White House. Running for reelection four years later, he was still playing the same exasperating game. That year, the Democrats did not endorse a constitutional amendment providing for women's suffrage but, instead, called on the states to extend voting rights to women. Such a half-measure looks cowardly in retrospect, of course; but it also looked cowardly at the time. In November 1916, The New Republic excoriated Wilson for his weak stand on the issue. During his reelection campaign, TNR wrote, Wilson had told a group of suffragists that "[h]e was with them," even as "he confessed to a 'little impatience' as to their anxiety about method." From this, the magazine concluded that the president had "at best a vague, benign feeling about [the issue], and no conviction whatever that woman suffrage was creating a national situation which called for thorough sincerity, nerve and will."
An evasive stance on a controversial civil rights issue from a liberal president; an insistence that the issue is primarily local, rather than national, in character; a complete failure of sincerity, nerve, and will: If these things sound familiar in 2010, it is because Barack Obama is taking exactly the same approach on gay marriage.
My colleague James Downie has assembled a fascinating timeline of Obama's statements on gay marriage over the past 14 years, stretching from 1996 to earlier this month, when the White House responded to a judge's ruling on Prop 8 by reiterating that it opposes same-sex marriage. What the timeline shows is a pattern that can only be described as illogical and cynical.
...[Obama] seems to have convinced himself that he can't make a difference on gay marriage, so why wade into the issue? But, while he may not realize it, Obama is already leading on gay marriage; he is just leading in the wrong direction.
[Related Reading: Phobocrats.]
Out Today
Lost: The Complete Collection
All six seasons of the series on DVD and Blu-Ray. 38 Discs. 5074 minutes.
Special Features:
Black light
Custom Lost island replica
Special edition collectible Senet game as seen in Season 6
Plus all episodes and 30+ hours of bonus from Seasons 1-6
One full disc of never-before-seen content
Exclusive episode guide
Collectible ankh
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker Esme: Whose death have you most mourned, despite never having met the person? Says Esme: "I still miss Molly Ivins. Political reporting just hasn't been the same since she left us."
OMFG
I cannot fucking believe we are still talking about whether President Barack Obama is a Muslim.
No less that the people having this increasingly ludicrous conversation expect that we should be outraged at the possibility that he is.
...You know, saying I can't believe this shit isn't right; I can believe it. I just can't stand it.
Quote of the Day
"I'll be honest, most of what we can get done is have the big fight, have the big debate, and have the framework for the 2012 election."—Rep. Jim Jordan (R-EcycledIdeas), on the GOP's plan if they retake the House in the midterm elections. So, basically, elected Republican officials are now just openly admitting they've got no agenda other than being obstructionists. No new ideas. Party of No. Rinse. Repeat.
