On February 3, George F. Will published a column called “Lifting Up the Fatherless,” which at first glance looks like so many other “boo hoo, poor boys without fathers” handwringers until you get to the fifth paragraph.

Born to an unmarried, mentally ill prostitute, [Robert Lewis "Sugar Bear" Jackson] acquired his interest in driving from his grandfather, who would drive around the block with Sugar Bear in his lap. Not until Sugar Bear was 25 did he learn that his grandfather was his father, too, having had a sexual relationship with Sugar Bear’s mother.

Don’t you love the nimble use of the euphemism “sexual relationship” to define incest, an act that rarely occurs between consenting adults?  Especially not when one of them is already identified as having a mental illness?  I suppose the word “RAPE” is too unsettling for a guy who wears a bow tie.

Sugar Bear grew up mostly on the streets, episodically drifting into and out of the care, such as it was, of various female relatives.

Will doesn’t state that Sugar Bear would have been better off in the care of his rapist father/grandfather instead of “female relatives,” but I felt the correlation was strong enough to say so on my Facebook page.  A couple of readers thought I went a bit far in chastizing Ol’ Bow Tie, and perhaps they’re right.  I’m just very sensitive to the assumption that children suffer without a dude in their lives, for that assumption leads us down this stupid path:

Rick Santorum Dwells on Gay Marriage: he suggests to a New Hampshire audience that an imprisoned father is preferable to a same-sex parent (Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2012).

!!!  Emphasis mine!!!  Because any time I get even the faintest whiff of the suggestion that my friends Morgan, Mia, and Margaret are somehow not being loved adequately because neither of their parents has a dick, I want to scream!!!!!  And explode into a fiery ball of exclamation points!!!!!!!

Happily, a Facebook reader recognized that the fault lies neither with Will, the editor who crafted his column’s headline, or with Frothy Mix, for that matter.  We remain such a grossly sexist society that whenever something goes wrong, we’re quick to assume that a MAN ought to be able to fix it–in the case of Will’s column, a closer reading reveals that MAN not to be Sugar Bear’s bio-dad after all, but MAN some folks believe is The Good Lord Himself™.  As this reader so brilliantly wrote on my FB wall: “I object to the insinuation that biological or mythological fathers are the only options for good role models.”

Right on!  Sugar Bear was failed by much more than his father/grandfather/heavenly father.  Social problems as tough as entrenched poverty and mental illness aren’t going to be fixed with a Dad shaped band-aid.

(Confidential to the rad mom formerly known as Spike Laird: please don’t start a blog.  I have enough competition already.)

Interested in the thoughts of an actual honest-to-gosh cis-fella, I turned to the Radical Hubby.  ”Oh whatever,” he huffed.  ”People tell themselves that crap all the time.  I’m a good father, so I’m the reason that my kids aren’t in prison.*  When the truth is we are all a mess of nature versus nurture versus all the other bullshit the world throws at us.  Kids need people who love them.  Period.”

Yep.

*Matt is a wonderful parent, by the way.  He’s a great believer in quantity time as well as quality time.  Still, when my son was old enough to realize that his best buddy had two moms, he whined: “WHAT? Mo has two moms but I only get ONE? That’s not fair!”**

**True story!

Image: Drawn by Lian

I posted a blog in November that I called “The Awareness-Industrial Complex,” spurred in large part by my blistering rage against a world which lets us drown in cancer-support products, but not actual cancer cures.

Sure, the pink crap hawked by the Susan G. Komen Foundation at a Walk/Run/Crawl/Kvetch For the Cure™ makes people feel good, but here’s a newflash: maybe cancer shouldn’t make people feel good.  Cancer, to those whose lives are touched by it (like me), feels very, very bad.  Cancer, to those whose bodies are actually enduring it, feels more terrifying than anything imaginable.

What would a world in which cancer made people ANGRY look like?  For one thing, there would be none of this NFL players in pink shoes bullshit.

Don’t get me wrong–Tom looks cute in these shoes, but what he wears doesn’t do a damn thing for a suffering patient.  Not the way that a research program at Johns Hopkins would.

Honestly, the Komen vs. Planned Parenthood kerfuffle makes me happy.  I’m disappointed that PP is losing over half a million dollars of Komen grant money, of course, but I’m pleased that PP supporters have kicked in nearly $400,000 since Komen’s boner became public (pro-choicers are the nicest people).  Most importantly, however, the public is starting to question the motives of a foundation that has very deep ties to Republican lawmakers who oppose not only women’s health initiatives, but also the environmental regulation that could ….wait for it…. prevent cancer.  Worst of all, it has long been known that Komen’s founder, Nancy Brinker, is a great friend of pharmaceutical companies that depend upon cancer to make money.

Watching the Komen brand suffer is schadenfreude at its finest–but any amount of suffering they endure is a trip to Disneyland compared to the pain of a cancer patient, of her children, and of her family.

NOTHING.

FFI:

Behind the Pink Curtain: Komen’s Political Agenda (DailyKos)

The Marketing of Breast Cancer (AlterNet)

Think Before You Pink  (a project of Breast Cancer Action)

By now, I’m sure all y’all have seen the video of a Colorado Girl Scout complaining that your Thin Mint dollars are being spent on including transgender girls in the organization.  Sprinkled throughout last week’s Facebook timeline were sighs of relief, for our cookie addictions can now be reclassified as Important Political Statements.  I love when things come together like that!

What a cutie. I wonder what chromosomes ze has?  Normally I wouldn’t ask, but it seems everyone’s talking about what’s under those green skirts.  Used to be we just cared about the cookies, not the genitalia.

On a related note, my post on the conundrum of feminist mental health garnered this comment, with some unexpected advice:

the only thing helpful i have to offer is this: the more i move into separatism, the more i do whatever it takes to have less and less to do with men and male-identified women, the happier i become. and the easier it is to be happy and at peace. just personal experience, but it makes a lot of political sense too. 

As an aghast Mr. Beinstock said to Daphne and Josephine in Some Like it Hot (watch the clip here): “I BEG your pardon, miss!”

Occasional bouts of misandrist rage, I understand.  Patriarchy can turn any woman, whether cis- or trans-, into a lunatic.  But separatism?  Isn’t that what we’re fighting with our cookie purchases?

Admittedly, I always feel prickly whenever it is suggested that heterosexual feminists like me are Doing It Wrong.  Personal rebuff aside, it implies that Rick Santorum is correct in his belief that sexuality is a choice, which leads us all into a bullshit-filled rabbit hole.  And I defy any radical separatist to come to my house to have a crack at the difficult daily work of raising a feminist son.  I might even go out on a limb and suggest that it’s the most important work of our movement–that is, if I were the sort of person prone to the kind of “nyah nyah, my feminism is better than yours” that I try to avoid.

Really, I do.

You know who’s an unequivocally GREAT feminist, though? That boy of mine.  He could out-feminist a wannabe like Sarah Palin in a heartbeat.  And with his gorgeous hazel eyes, he’d look amazing in a green and white uniform.  Say, why does it have to be Girl Scouts, anyway?  Isn’t it time we had Kid Scouts, open to anyone interested in hustling Thin Mints for merit badges? (please don’t talk about Boy Scouts, that haven for god-fearing pedos who lack the patience to join the priesthood.)  Is there some way we could convince Kate Bornstein and Chaz Bono to spearhead a movement that untethers Scouting from gender entirely?

And for once, can we let cookies be cookies and kids be kids, regardless of flavor?

I love gossip.  Love it.  I’m into good old-fashioned dirt, not the phony baloney that is manufactured by Kris Jenner and shoved down our throats in a series of “exclusive” photo spreads and television specials.  Brangelina delights me, as did All My Children before it went off the air.  The scandalous campfest Valley of the Dolls is one of my favorite movies of all time.

But there remains a species of gossip so tantalizing, so unbelievably marvelous that it blows away the timeNeely O’Hara flushed Helen Lawson’s wig down the toilet.  I’ll give you a hint: Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, George Rekers. When a “family values” politician or activist gets caught with their hands in the cookie jar!

First, let us travel back to a more innocent time, namely 2009, when Minnesota Senator Amy Koch sponsored a bill that would amend our state constitution to limit marriage to heterosexuals only.  Koch, herself a heterosexual, is married to a man named Christopher.  One assumes that she felt her civil marriage contract with Christopher might be threatened by happily hitched gay folks, I dunno. It was something she felt deserved her time and attention during a recession, anyway.

It’s worth noting that in the 2009 session, Koch received a 100% rating from the Minnesota Family Council, a group so retrograde they oppose even popular measures like civil unions and, y’know, stopping the bullying of LGBT students (I hear their next piece of legislation will be to ban the phrase “don we now our gay apparel” from “Deck the Halls”).

In 2010, Koch became Senate Majority Leader, just in time to cram the divisive, expensive, and just gosh-darned Grinchy Marriage Amendment down our throats, which is just what Minnesota needed to create jobs…..for the soulless hacks at the ad agency for the St. Paul-Minneapolis Archdiocese.

But wait!  What’s this?  Did Santa leave a present a little early for us this year? Via CityPages:

Santa, who puts hypocrites, not necessarily adulterers, on his Naughty List, has made sure that this story gets the viral treatment it so richly deserves.  The giant, sparkly bow on this gift that many national outlets are missing?  That Koch’s alleged paramour is none other than Michael Brodkorb, founder of the giant blog o’ sleaze that is Minnesota Democrats Exposed, a site that deals in hearsay, innuendo, and “reliable sources.”   MDE joined my personal naughty list in 2008 when it implied that writing an article in an old issue of Playboy magazine OBVIOUSLY made Senate candidate Al Franken a misogynistic pornographer (the President of Minnesota NOW, however,  begged to differ).  The humiliating exposure of a former exposer is an irony even more delicious than eggnog.

I love gossip.  I love just deserts. I LOVE THE HOLIDAYS!  Enjoy, all!

This is what happens if you camp outside a Best Buy store for a week in hopes of obtaining the 55″ TV of your dreams:

This is what happens if you camp outside on the quad of your public university in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement:

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Tomorrow, registered voters in Mississippi will vote on whether a fertilized egg is a person.  Polling suggests that Proposition 26 just might pass.

I earned my bachelor’s degree in English and Media Studies (a fact I trot out often to assure people that my fascination with Jersey Shore is purely academic), not biology, so I turned to the internet to reveal to me just what in heck a “person” under this law would look like:

Interesting.

Minnesotans have a reputation for politeness, but we also have a fine tradition of asserting our superiority. One of my favorite local politicos, Matt Entenza, noted in a 2010 campaign ad that “if budget cuts were always the answer [to solving problems], then Mississippi would be a leader in this country.”  HA! HA! HA!  All snickering aside, Entenza forgot that Mississippi is, in fact, a nationwide leader in many issues affecting children–the kind of children that look like this:

• Mississippi has the nation’s highest rate of infant mortality, at 10.04 deaths per 1000 births.
• Mississippi children have the country’s highest obesity rate (21.9 percent).
• Mississippi children have the highest poverty rate in the country, at 21.9 percent. 

I am not going to gloat about Minnesota’s relatively luckier children, because the fact that there are ANY kids living in poverty ANYWHERE is something that should nag the conscience of us all, no matter where we live.

I am unequivocally pro-choice.  I have been ever since I was young enough to understand what reproductive rights meant, and I remained so during my two pregnancies.  But I do allow that there is a scenario in which I could be convinced that abortion could be considered a social ill that required the careful attention of government.

Shocking, I know!  So what on earth would that scenario be?

If every post-born child in America were ALREADY healthy, cared-for, well-educated and safe.  Every single one.  No child left behind, as it were.

As I wrote in my last post, I’m still waiting for living children to attain “personhood.”  If abuse like that suffered by Hillary Adams is abolished forever, I could engage in a discussion about the “rights” of two-celled globules.

Let’s hope that tomorrow, Mississippians do the right thing for the already-living children in their state who desperately need them.

I admit it: as a mom and a bit (!) of a Facebook junkie, I enjoy the site STFU Parents.  Though I am darkening the door of forty, I am still extremely immature and enjoy a good laugh at someone else’s expense whenever possible.  Happily, I am not so oblivious that I don’t recognize myself in some of the posts, especially the ones that are pointedly labeled “first world problems.”  Why, just last week I whined on my personal FB page:

 Did I get dumber? Or did the school picture order form get exponentially more difficult?

I got more replies to THAT post than about anything related to SlutWalk, let me assure you.* It seems I’m not the only one who finds the process annoying.  Yesterday, though, I got a much-needed real world reality check.  Yesterday, at the urging of a neighborhood supermom, I volunteered to assist in the photo-taking process at Miriam’s school.  I straightened collars, adjusted wobbly headbands, and urged kiddos to sit up straight and smile.  I was taken aback, though, by how many children didn’t have their annoying order forms in their hands.  Some asked if they would still be able to get their pictures taken, and I assured them that everyone, yes everyone would have a chance to be yelled at by the already impatient photographer.  Though the school office put out the word that scholarships for photos would be available, there were far too many children who either didn’t get the message or didn’t snap up available funds in time.  I strongly suspect the latter.

I felt very, very dumb.  Filling out that form have me headache, but not because a 5×7 photo for the Wisconsin grandparents was beyond my family budget.  And my daughter’s school is among the more comfortable in our large urban district.  STFU, indeed.

In the meantime, the fact that President Obama is finally committed to taxing America’s wealthiest individuals and corporations has supply-siders crying into their silk hankies.  Michelle Bachmann calls it “warfare,” but here’s a news flash: the rich declared war on the poor a couple generations ago.  While folks like the Koch brothers pour money into teabag campaigns like hers, ORDINARY FAMILIES CAN’T AFFORD TO BUY SCHOOL PICTURES.  School pictures!

It’s infuriating.  It makes me want to scream “STFU ALREADY!” at the top of my lungs.  It makes me want to make this face:

*Confidential to non-parent readers: thanks to the millions of school photo options now possible with digital technology, the order forms are as challenging to complete properly as 1040s.**

**Confidential to Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, et al: 1040s are the forms we little people use to pay our taxes. You’re welcome.

My state’s government shut down today. 20,000 employees were pink-slipped, important social services have been cut off, and perhaps most importantly for a family with two small children who are traveling to Grandma & Grandpa’s house for fireworks this weekend, all rest stops are closed. Why? An impasse between the Republican-controlled legislature and our Democratic governor over our state budget. Apparently it’s news to the GOP that corporations and churches don’t fix potholes. As Robin Marty just tweeted: “this is what happens when you elect a bunch of people to run the government who don’t like government.”

Image via Crooks and Liars

If every child in Minneapolis were as safe, well-fed, healthy, and appropriately educated as these two little girls, I would support your plan for a new football stadium.

But they’re not. These two girls are the lucky ones.

Consider this: the poverty rate in Minneapolis is 22.6 percent. Hennepin County admits that, within its borders, “on any given night….more than 3000 men, women, children and young adults are homeless.” Minneapolis Public Schools expects a budget deficit of at least $30 million, which will have devastating effects on the district’s already abysmal achievement gap. Recent reports that half of mortgages in the Twin Cities are underwater should tell you that the need for social services will only rise, not lessen, in the decade to come.

Just say NO to public funding for a football stadium.

I noticed an unusual amount of traffic on Ye Olde Blogge lately, most of it centered around my November post about Minnesota representative Tom Hackbarth. Remember him? He’s the exurban pro-lifer who was caught packing heat in the parking lot of St. Paul Planned Parenthood, then defended himself by admitting that he was stalking a woman he met online (an alibi that Scott Roeder’s attorney regrets not dreaming up first). Here’s what Tom Hackbarth looks like:

Nothing too interesting there–just the typically smug expression of an entitled white dude, (amirite, Cackle of Rads?). He lacks the clearly cuckoo-bananas visage of alleged murderer and admitted misogynist Jared Loughner. Ahh, I get it now! Journos, looking for a fresh angle on the Loughner story, are digging for stories about other well-armed men who get crabby when women tell them NO.