[Crossposted at CultureKitchen]

File this one in the "What the Fuck?!" file:

Nota Bene
The following statement has been cross-posted at the blogs of the undersigned. If you would like to add your blog to the list, please leave a comment at CultureKitchen.

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To members of the Judiciary Committee and the Senate:

We are a group of writers who are passionately committed to supporting women's basic freedom as citizens of the United States. We are appealing to you as free citizens dedicated to political growth, fairness and the spirit of Liberty guaranteed in the US Constitution.

We are not paid pundits or political operatives. We are concerned citizens who represent the diversity of the United States: women and men, straight and gay, single and married, religious and atheist, of different races, religions and ethnicities. Some of us are even parents even after having abortions. And we all blog because we have to.

We have taken to this citizen media to create communities of hope. In our blogs people rant and rave, discuss and debate to share the one thing we all agree about : The United States Constitution is about creating common ground among the many, not limiting freedom for the benefit of the few.

Yesterday was my 37th birthday.  Today, I'm feeling older: when I got off my bed from watching TV to play with my cat last night, I was struck by a fairly intense lower back pain (it's fairly dull now)--I haven't really been able to bend over since then.  But, my cat, Harriet, is actually the lead-in for this piece.

Tonight, I'm having a birthday party.  One of the things I've been doing when throwing parties for myself out here in MA, is to bring a piece of Minnesota to the folks here.  My parents shipped me a bunch of bratwurst from Schmitt's Meat Market in Nicollet, MN and I'm making my killer German Potato Salad (I posted that recipe a couple years ago--it's undergone modification since then). This is definitely an artery-clogging party.

The other thing I try to do at these parties is raise a little money. In the invititation to the party, I sent people a link to this post, which was before Hurricane Katrina--otherwise the post would have included organizations like Noah's Wish and the American Red Cross.  Last year, I passed the hat for the Kerry campaign.  This year, I'm doing it for Noah's Wish:

As it's simple IF you ignore the complexity noted, the Massachusetts General Court, convened in Constitutional Convention, yesterday defeated a proposed constitutional amendment to bar same-sex marriage and creat Civil Unions by a vote of 157-39.  So, marriage equality in Masachusetts is safe....for the time being.

The defeat of this amendment was caused by four interrelated factors.  The first is electoral politics.  In the general election last fall, every single marriage equality supporter who ran won re-election, while a couple of marriage equality opponents lost.  Additionally, our supporters have won a few special elections since the general.  Not only did we pick up votes via elections, but those elections also showed people who were closet supporters of marriage equality that a backlash for such a vote was unlikely.  The legislature itself is different than it was during the 2004 ConCon:

We can only hope that the rest of the country follows the University of California's lead here (via the Panda's Thumb):

It appears that yet another creationism-related lawsuit is in the works. This time, the venue is in California, and it is the Creationists who are doing the suing. Apparently, the Association of Christian Schools International and Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murietta are no longer satisfied with being able to teach their students creationism instead of real biology. Now, they also want to make sure that their students will not have to suffer the consequences of this decision, and they are suing for that "right".

The University of California System, quite reasonably, requires that the students that they accept have a certain educational background. Several courses, including biology, offered by Calvary Chapel were determined to be insufficient to meet the UC standards. According to the LA Times article cited above, UC directed Calvary Chapel to instead, "submit for UC approval a secular science curriculum with a text and course outline that addresses course content/knowledge generally accepted in the scientific community." Typically, the creationists don't see this as a university excercising it's duty to ensure that its students are properly prepared for admission. Instead, they see it as yet more evidence of the anti-Christian "bias" that they see anytime they do not get things their own way.

Well, we finally have a date for the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention to vote again on whether or not to do away with marriage equality in Massachusetts.  It's September 14.  Here's some background.

Late in 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court handed down its ruling in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health.  They ruled that the Bay State's exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage violated the Commonwealth's constitution.

Last spring, the General Court met as a Constitutional Convention to debate an amendment to the Constitution that would bar marriage equality.  After four days of maneuvering, debating, and voting, stretched out over a couple of months, the General Court passed an amendment that would ban marriage equality but create civil unions by a vote of 105-101.  We lost, but the most odious amendments were all defeated.

The War over Amanda's vagina, actually everyone who has one's vagina (and penis), got me thinking about an earlier dustup Amanda had with the purity fetishists.  I don't feel like going back through all the comments in all the threads, but one of the reasons for the PF's objections to both the PP ad and the playful, mocking way that liberals responded, was that they "take sex seriously."  The reason we liberals joke about sex, talk about it openly, hell, enjoy it is because we don't take it seriously.  I'd offer this in response:  The reason we're able to joke about it, talk about it, and have a hell of a good time doing it is because we take sex seriously.

Taking sex seriously means recognizing its complexity.  Sex is messy, intimate, threatening, intimidating, intimate, spiritual, profane, exciting, mundane, pleasurable, awkward, intense...and funny. (C'mon, y'all know you have stories where somebody fell off the bed or pulled a muscle or farted at an inopportune moment or made the ugliest face you've ever seen or woke your parents...)  In order to understand this complexity, to deal with it in our own lives, we must first recognize it. We simply cannot give sex a singular meaning without doing violence to it.

[Note: I'm posting this upon my arrival home in Somerville, but I wrote it last night in the Vancouver airport.  I'm not changing the tense of the piece because I want to retain the immediacy of what I was feeling last night.]

I'm not the type of person who usually cries at weddings.  (I often avoid weddings altogether.)  Today, tears were rolling down my face.  Part of that was, of course, happiness for my aunts.  They had had a rough couple of weeks.  A friend of theirs died recently after a long and difficult struggle with cancer.  Additionally, prior to leaving for this trip, they had to put their dog to sleep.  Her own nine-year struggle with heart problems--Sweetie wasn't supposed to live more than a few months when they got her--along with breathing problems had finally become too much for her to bear.

Today, though, was a day for celebration.

[From the diaries by susanhu.] I didn't see last night's report on Paula Zahn Now, or this morning's Good Morning America, but I did catch this evening's report on Love in Action, a homosexuality extirpation program. I'm fucking pissed.

From what I gather from John's report at Americablog (link above), this evening's report was somewhat better than last night's. At least this evening, the opposition of the APA and AMA to "reparative therapy" were brought into the report, and there were bits of an interview with a psychiatric opponent of this practice. However, there was still an overwhelming heterosexist bias within the story. For instance, while she was interviewing the program's director, John Smid, Deborah Feyerick asked about the "dangers" people would face upon leaving the "safety" of the program. The teens who have been committed to these programs were referred to as "straightening out." The overall tone of the segment was highly sympathetic to the homohaters at Love in Action.

I started a new job yesterday and I was going to write about that, but this post of Jesse's really got me thinking.  (The first day at work wouldn't have been worth writing about anyway; I left work at noon, the migraine I woke up with at 4:00 having become too much to bear.).  Basically, the Broward County Diversity Committee has nixed use of the "We Are Family" video (the one got James Dobson all hot and bothered).  Via the Miami Herald:

Here come the Helen Lovejoys.

In a post from a few days ago, I wrote about the ways a certain class subjectivity can squeeze its way into a potentially romantic encounter. [Alas, there was no romance in that particular encounter.]  One of the things I find fascinating is the ways our social locations influence how we understand and interact with the world, and those who occupy it.

I just finished reading Foucault's History of Sexuality (yes, all three volumes).  Aside from feeling a little like stabbing myself in the forehead, I also find myself wondering how sexual desire was experienced--how it felt--during the 600 or so years Foucault was describing.  It's all well and good to describe the moral reflection that went on surrounding the role of sexual activity, but that still seems inadequate.  We can look at the moral reflection of an ear, the institutional arrangements, the first-hand accounts in diaries or letters, but we'll always, to some degree or another, be filtering those things through our own subjectivities. What I want, and know is impossible, is to get inside the consciousness of people living in those social positions other than my own, a pure intersubjectivity.  (Sometimes I want this; there are things I don't want to know...how someone like Jeffrey Dahmer experienced desire, for instance.)

[Crossposted at CultureKitchen.]

I have a date tonight, first one in about eight months.  I'm a little nervous, for both the regular reasons (Will I like him? Will he like me?  Will we both sit there suffering in silence?) and another reason that feels even more prominent at the moment.  He owns a business that has experienced tremendous growth in the past year.  I'm a temp who beat the poverty-care line by $20 for an emergency room visit this winter (I did have insurance, though).  There's a bit of a class difference here, and that's incredibly discomforting for me.

In part, that discomfort comes from what we can't do.   To be honest, at this moment in life, I can't even afford to go out for a decent dinner, something I really, really enjoy.  Right from the start, I have to place limits on what we're able to do.

He could, of course, pay for dinner if that's what we chose to do.  But that, too, leaves me feeling uncomfortable.  It's not that I don't like being treated, it's that I can't pay for dinner.  The difference in ability to pay flows from disparate control over resources.  In other words, he's got more power than I do.

[Crossposted at CultureKitchen]

As I write this, I'm watching the Canadian House of Commons' final debate on bill C-38: The Civil Marriage Act, a law to extend marriage equality to all Canadians (currently, eight of ten provinces and one of three territories have established equal marriage rights).  This bill's path to tonight's final reading has been a bumpy one, from the Liberal's surviving a no-confidence vote, to a bold strategy that caught the Tories off guard and passed the budget (keeping the Government from falling), to cutting off debate last night.  Cabinet member Joe Camuzzo resigned his cabinet position rather than follow Prime Minister Martin's order for all members of the Cabinet to vote for C-38.

The passage of C-38 is not in doubt tonight, nor is passage in the Senate.  The votes exist for marriage equality.  

In a previous installment, The Dictatorship of the Purrletariat, I tried to warn you of the impending Felinist assault on our American way of life.  Apparently, some of you haven't taken my warnings seriously, so I am forced to write again of the nefarious plotting I have uncovered.

Below, you will read the harrowing tale of an underground network, of the fighting skills they're developing, of the incendiary things they say about us humans.  Be afraid...the hairballs left in your shoes are just the preliminary phase.  

In my previous work, I introduced you to Tinkles, the Revolutionary intellectual who wrote the "Felinist Manifesto."  Another of the intellectuals in this movement is Emma Goldclaw, seen here: