New York State Bill A1008/S323, cosponsored by more than a dozen state senators, would stop police and prosecutors from using possession of condoms as evidence of prostitution in specified criminal or civil proceedings. According to the summary of the bill, it “provides that possession of a condom may not be received in evidence in any trial, hearing or proceeding as evidence of prostitution, patronizing a prostitute, promoting prostitution, permitting prostitution, maintaining a premises for prostitution, lewdness or assignation, or maintaining a bawdy house.
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Stopping Police and DAs from Using Condoms to Convict Sex Workers — Feministe
About time. Sign the petition here: http://www.change.org/petitions/tell-new-york-state-legislators-condoms-arent-a-crime
(via workingsex)
[I]n moments of desperation, a lie can seem like the only option. Anita McLemore, a Mississippi mother of two, faced one of those unfortunate moments when filling out her application for food stamps — and now she’ll pay the price, by spending three years of her life behind bars in federal prison. Thanks to a federal ban on food stamps for people with felony drug convictions, people like McLemore are out of luck when it comes to getting assistance with putting food on their tables. Though states can opt out of the ban, those that don’t (like Mississippi) deny food stamps even to individuals who have already served their sentences or overcome previous addictions. It’s true that McLemore’s past isn’t perfect — she has four felony drug convictions and one misdemeanor, which place her firmly in the category of people the federal government has declared unfit to receive public benefits. Hence, faced with the prospect of being unable to feed her family, McLemore lied on her application.
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Mississippi Woman Receives Three Year Prison Sentence For Feeding Her Family | ThinkProgress
this woman has been in prison four times because she was sick with addiction. and now will be in prison again for trying to feed her family. this is what it means to be a mami in the US.
(via midwestmountainmama)
I still don’t understand why drug convictions bar you from receiving federal aid. No other crime does that including murder. If we want to rehabilitate people & reintegrate them into society wouldn’t it make more sense to make it easy for them to get back on their feet? Oh wait, I started thinking of prisoners as people. I already know that’s not part of the plan.
(via karnythia)
This Is How We Roll: unknowablewoman: mrsdalloway: theskinofourteeth: If “ableist slur” is...
If “ableist slur” is going to be used to mean “any word which refers to any ability in a negative way,” than any insult based on intelligence or rationality is out. There’s already a crowd insisting that ideas like rationality,…
I'll tumblr for ya: Excerpt from a new email Planned Parenthood has been sending around;...
Excerpt from a new email Planned Parenthood has been sending around;
URGENT: The House is voting today on yet another outrageous bill that undermines women’s health. Join me and Planned Parenthood in calling your representative at (202) 730-9001 and ask him/her to vote NO on HR 358. Tell…
Doug Henwood recently commented on this in a post where he lamented the ideological confusion of the protesters, and quoted a 25-year-old photographer stating that the protests were “not about left versus right” but about “hierarchy versus autonomy”.
The uncharitable reading of this is that it reflects a naive avoidance of politics and the worldview of, as Doug puts it, bourgeois individualism. But a more generous reading is that this man is simply partaking of the same collapsing of ideology and partisanship that pervades the society he grew up in. If you’re 25 years old, there’s a good chance you haven’t had much or any contact with what remains of an actual “left” in this country; instead, your experience of politics will be one in which “left versus right” is used interchangeably with “Democrats versus Republicans”. In other words, a discourse in which ideology is reduced to an empty, symbolic partisanship. Rather than an attempt to deny ideology and politics, we can see statements like the one I quoted as an attempt, however confused, to reclaim them from the clutches of the major parties and their hack apologists.
This country has faced serious problems before, and it has overcome them, and of all the tools it used to overcome them, “civility” is one of the least significant. The fight against slavery took place in a lot of different arenas, public and private, but in none of them was it civil. (Civility, in fact, was the excuse used by the defenders of slavery in 1835 when they enacted the infamous “gag rule” by which the subject could not ever be discussed in the Congress. It took 10 years of decidedly uncivil argument to eliminate that rule.) The battle for a unionized workforce had a substantial body count on both sides, and it extended into the years when the country was wrestling with the Great Depression. The civil-rights movement was polite, but it was not “civil,” in the sense that the word is used here, where modest people of good intentions air their grievances and come to a compromise solution.
As a shorter-term response to the epidemic, the Nobel laureates were convinced by research by the economist Lori Bollinger (PDF) that we could practically wipe out mother-to-child transmission of HIV by 2015 with additional expenditures of just $140 million a year. About 350,000 infants became HIV positive in 2008, through pregnancy, labor, delivery, or breast-feeding, accounting for approximately 20 percent of all new infections.
Significantly, even when individual black women are able to advance professionally and acquire a degree of economic self-sufficiency, it is in the social realm that racist and sexist stereotypes are continually used both as ways of defining black women’s identity and interpreting our behavior.
For example: if a black woman sits at a predominantly white corporate board meeting where a heated discussion is taking place and she interrupts, as everyone else has been doing, her behavior may be deemed hostile and aggressive. Often when I lecture with a black male colleague and I challenge his points, rather than being perceived as more intellectually competent, I am deemed castrating, brutal, etc. The reverse happens if he challenges me in a particularly winning way. He is seen as just more brilliant, more capable, etc.
— bell hooks, “Ain’t She Still a Woman?” (via nottingham)
Jamie Dimon will head to Zuccotti Park and join the drum circle before a majority of senators agree to give up their individual powers of obstruction so that the country can be governed effectively. But if Senate dysfunction is truly as bad as Reid says it is — and in my view, it’s much, much worse — stopping with the piddling rules change Democrats attempted last week is downright irresponsible.
— Ezra Klein. I tell every Republican I meet that I’d be happy to allow John Boehner to rule this country with an iron fist for as long as the GOP has a House majority, in exchange for making the Senate permanently irrelevant. So far, few takers. (via ilyagerner)
The observation that malgovernment is a major source of human ills is quite correct, but embracing fatalism about it only exacerbates the problem. What’s needed are efforts to push societies in the direction of taking honor and civic obligation more seriously, not less so. You want politicians and civil servants to feel worse, not better about behaving cynically. You want voters to broaden the interests they consider, not narrow them. In the early 19th century, “let’s kill Indians to steal their natural resources” was a winning campaign platform. In the 21st century, “let’s kill Canadians to steal their natural resources” is not. That makes all the difference. Suggesting that instances of public corruption and self-dealing simply show that corruption and self-dealing are inevitable just eats away at the moral and social fabric that underlies any kind of prosperity.
— Matt Yglesias, Against Public Choice, for Public Virtue, read the whole thing. (via ilyagerner)
