Posted on Monday, September 17, 2012 by s.e. smith
Massachusetts held a Democratic primary recently; you might have missed it, in a haze of other election news and everything else that’s going on. But something really, really important happened there, and it wasn’t just who won the election. It’s something that didn’t get nearly as much coverage as it should have, even in progressive media, where there are growing concerns about what, exactly, is going to happen when we hit the polls in November.
Tea Party members turned out in Worcester, MA to intimidate voters with a variety of tactics including filming them, challenging their credentials, making false claims in fliers, and criticising Spanish speakers. Their reasons for organising the campaign were extremely transparent, and also lay the blueprints for more to come; they were responding to a massive voter registration campaign that had the audacity to attempt to get more low-income people and historically disenfranchised populations on the rolls.
At the same time, Tea Party members are organising a poll watching campaign they’re calling ‘True the Vote‘ in November. This nakedly partisan organisation aims to augment traditional voter suppression tactics like distributing false information about elections and the polls with policing polling stations, an activity allowed in 39 states. Groups like this one are actively lobbying for restrictions on voting rights, like the voting ID laws creeping across the nation, and they’re also hitting the ground with campaigns like Code Red, specifically and obviously targeting minority populations.
(Continued)
Posted on Tuesday, September 11, 2012 by Flavia Dzodan
I know feminism, as a movement, doesn’t particularly care about me. At least not anymore than any other political and/ or social movement. After all, it is merely a collective, a lose label under which anyone can more or less take a place as long as they uphold a few basic tenets (and even then, Sarah Palin dares call herself a feminist). So, it’s not that I have been abandoned by a caring lover that is mindful of my feelings or my preoccupations. If anything, I have been abandoned by the absent mother figure that never paid much attention to me. For me, these days, feminism is the kind of mother that would encourage me to play frisbee with a broken beer bottle and smoke joints at 8 AM with my morning coffee. You know, the kind of parent who never gave a shit about you.
(Continued)
Posted on Monday, September 10, 2012 by Emily Manuel
“Kalimera nanna, te kanis?” I ask, as I walk through the door.
She gets up, slowly, to greet me with a hug and a kiss. “Sit down, love, sit down,” she says, waving away my question.
She’d told me, years ago, how much she hates the Greek word for grandmother, yia yia. “Ya ya” she said, making a face. “Nonna would be better, if I were Italian.” She doesn’t remember that conversation anymore. She doesn’t remember much, anymore.
(Continued)
Posted on Monday, September 10, 2012 by s.e. smith
Either you believe abortion should be legal and we need to protect access to safe, compassionate, and confidential abortion services, full stop, or you want to fall right down the slippery slope of moral relativism and directly into the hands of conservatives. You do not need to justify abortion because a pregnancy endangers the life of a patient, because a pregnancy is the result of rape, because you think certain people shouldn’t be allowed to have children, because you think a fetus carries disabilities, or for any other reason.
Every time a progressive justifies abortion, one of those horrid ‘lamenting the preborn killed by pinko commie scum’ websites gets another set of animated sparkling angel wings and a dreadful midi. (Continued)
Posted on Monday, September 3, 2012 by s.e. smith
Despite the fact that the rest of the world celebrates labour on 1 May, the United States, ever determined to be contrarian, chooses to observe Labour Day on the first Monday of September. Today, it seems fitting to give a shoutout to all the people who work tirelessly in labour organising to make the workplace happier, safer, fairer, and more dignified for all workers, whether they be picking strawberries in the fields of California’s Central Valley or working on high-end negotiations for the Department of State.
No matter what a worker’s identity or origins may be, that worker deserves respect in the workplace. With the assault on labour and workers’ rights in the United States, many of the gains made in the last century have become very fragile, and there’s a slow growth in awareness of the fact that labour victories must be continually reinforced to keep them. A new appreciation for what the labour movement has wrought is developing in many communities that didn’t think about these issues before the economic meltdown forced them to realise the impact of labour on their daily lives.
Today is also a day when I think of the people who are working on Labour Day—those who keep the vital systems we need moving in motion, like doctors and nurses, bus drivers, firefighters. And those who must work because they have no choice, because they cannot afford the time off and they work for workplaces that don’t observe the holiday; restaurant staff, retail clerks, other service workers for whom the calendar never pauses. (Continued)
Posted on Monday, August 27, 2012 by s.e. smith
Two weeks ago, the news exploded with a shooting at the Family Research Council which injured a security guard in the arm. Conservatives immediately went on the attack, labeling the shooting ‘terrorism’ and a ‘hate crime’ and zeroing in on the fact that the shooter was associated with a gay community centre, creating the image of a rampaging army of armed queers preparing for war. They demanded immediate action and swift justice.
The FRC even tried to complain about its listing as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and a number of other organisations followed suit, demanding to be delisted because they claimed it made them ‘targets.’ They disliked, they whined, being compared to the KKK. The implication was that radical activists were scanning the list to work up a plan of attack; which explains the recent string of bombings, shootings, hate mail, and other actions directed at groups on that list. That didn’t happen, you say? Oh, my mistake.
Conservatives are attempting to catch the left in a gotcha here; they argue that people up in arms about acts of terrorism and hate crimes committed against minority groups should also be up in arms about this. Yet, they’re choosing to deliberately override some extremely important context in service of their end agenda.
(Continued)
Posted on Tuesday, August 21, 2012 by s.e. smith
I’m still seething over this post at Reproductive Health Reality Check, in which I am essentially informed that my life has so little value, is so not worth living, that I was such a burden on my father to raise, that I should have been aborted. Things like this are why I have problems interacting with the mainstream reproductive rights movement, which seems bent on using us as a tool just as much as the right is. In this piece, in which not a single actual living disabled person appears, the author proceeds to lay out an argument for abortion for disability that has, rightly, gotten the disability community up in arms.
It starts with a very dismissive, snide, flip introduction in which the author effectively says ‘read this or not, I don’t really care, but don’t hate me!’ The key sentence of the introduction tells you a lot about what is to follow: ‘I believe that abortion of a disabled fetus can be a compassionate choice made for morally sound reasons, and does not at all conflict with the respect due to disabled people.’
I…disagree.
(Continued)
Posted on Monday, August 20, 2012 by s.e. smith
One of the many things that used to distinguish freelancing from other forms of employment was the lack of sick days. If you were sick, you either worked anyway, or you didn’t work, and you lost out on a day’s income. That was just how things operated, and you seethed in jealousy at your conventionally employed counterparts with their lavish sick leave. Gosh, you could ‘earn’ a whole sick day a quarter! Alas, in recent years, times have changed, and now paid sick days are extremely unusual. I can only think of one job I’ve ever had with a sick leave policy; even my job with fairly good benefits and extravagant employment terms like paid lunch didn’t offer sick days.
Women, people of colour, and low-income people, groups that experience a considerable overlap, are the most likely to suffer from lack of mandates concerning sick days, because they’re the most likely to work in low-paid jobs in the retail and service sector, and they’re the ones saddled with responsibilities like managing a family and taking care of other household business. The people most likely to need paid sick days, in other words, are the ones least likely to get them, and that’s a serious problem when you consider the fact that 38% of private sector employees can’t access paid sick days. (Continued)
Posted on Thursday, August 16, 2012 by Garland Grey
For the next few months I’m going to be living in a place without stable Internet access, so I’ll be on indefinite hiatus from Tiger Beatdown for the foreseeable future. My parents are building a cabin on the family property in East Texas and while my dad works his last year before retirement in the city my mother wants to live in the woods. I’m not certain when I’ll be back; I might be joining the Navy this fall and that would make the hiatus permanent.
(Continued)
Posted on Monday, August 13, 2012 by s.e. smith
The escalating war on voting rights in the United States has come with a lot of discussion about voter identification, which is rightly pointed to as a form of voter suppression. Requiring people to have identification in order to vote creates another barrier to taking their rightful place at the polls, and means that voters are being disenfranchised. Inevitably, poor folks, people of colour, and people with disabilities are the most likely to be harmed by such laws; take, for example, the situation in Philadelphia, where it’s estimated that 18% of voters don’t have the documentation they need to vote.
But, as Hannah Jane Sassaman reminded readers on Reproductive Health Reality Check, identification in the United States is about more than voting. When states make it more difficult to obtain identification, and start requiring identification for more services, this creates additional burdens on already marginalised populations, and it can make those populations extremely vulnerable. It’s important to talk about these issues and bring them into the larger light, because this is an important subject.
(Continued)