Please read this great article. Review the research. And help get-out-the-vote. You can help by talking to your unmarried female friends and family members and helping them to register to vote. And the remind them to vote on November 4, 2014.
According to Nancy Leong, “When research finds that women pay a price for appearing “sexy” in some way, the inevitable conclusion shouldn’t be that ‘women should change their behavior.’ Instead, it should be that ‘we should all try to change this stupid social attitude.’” Women can be happy and good looking in their own and in other’s eyes. And at the same time be smart, savvy and intelligent. To have researchers and the public say that a woman who “looks good” has to be “dumb” is misogynistic and patriarchal just as Julie Mastrine says in this article.
So the next time you hear someone disparage a woman’s mind because of how she looks, stand up and say something. Challenge that notion that women can’t look “good” and be intelligent at the same time.
It’s been 50 years since Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. One of his colleagues at that event was the Rev. Jessie Jackson, Sr. Rev. Jackson has continued speaking and advocating for that dream of “uniting people on common ground across race, culture, class, gender, and belief.” This idea of interlocking destinies was presented during his plenary speech at the National NOW Conference held in Chicago on July 5, 2013.
I was in the room during Rev. Jackson’s speech and took several video clips with my smart phone. One of them came out clear enough to post on this blog. So after getting back home, participating in a family reunion, and then spending a week and a half looking for a replacement car for our 253,000+ mile vehicle, I was able to upload the video and present it to you.
Video of Jessie Jackson at the 2013 National NOW Conference in Chicago, IL
The following quotes, along with the time tags are some of the best comments, IMHO, that Jessie Jackson made during this speech discussing the intersection between the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, which at 13:59 into this video, Jackson calls a “sharing of interlocking destinies.” He started off by discussing these Interlocking Destinies and shared rights.
3:10 Fifty years after the “I Have a Dream” speech, we still need the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment].
3:52 The right to vote should not be a state right. It’s a constitutional right for everyone.
4:10 Every child should have access to have access to high-quality public education.
4:20 No matter if you are in Mississippi, Maine, or in California, we live under one flag; you should have equal protection under the law.
5:52 Our goal is to learn to live together.
6:20 Civil rights cannot be another word for “black” and NOW cannot be another word for “white women.” Black women, in big numbers, should be members of NOW now!
7:00 We must pull down the walls [of cultural resistance] that leave us in the shadow of fear…. When the walls come down, we can all grow bigger, better, stronger with greater productivity. When the walls come down.
9:00 There’s a new South today that can have the Super Bowl, CNN, high-tech universities [showing that we are] learning to live together. Yet…
At this point, Rev. Jackson starts talking about some of the interlocking issues of racism and sexism still present that need to be addressed in the United States:
9:56 It’s interesting to me that during the Republican Primary, in my [home] state [South Carolina] with an open primary, not one candidate went to a single school or church of the black community. Not one! 33% black. Not only did they not go, the media did not challenge them to go. This instance [of the] reinforcement of apartheid was natural because it’s [still] normal.
Jackson then spends a bit of time framing these interlocking destinies and the problem of economics and access to justice. He gave several examples of this framework. The one that resonated with me was the one about the automobile industry, considering that my car had died the weekend before the conference and knowing that I would soon be car shopping. He said,
12:38 What does it mean that there are 21,000 automobile dealerships? 200 black-owned. Almost no women. Pepsi: one black franchise. Coke: zero. When you go get educated. You get your masters and PhD degrees. Business people, you cannot buy one of these franchises, by the way, because they were sold under the laws of perpetuity. Those that got the territories [back in the day] have the territory eternally. So it’s not about getting on the ball field. If you get on the ball field, there are no balls left…. Even money can’t buy them.
And finally, just as the battery in my smart phone died, he ended on a high note using history to look towards the future. He said that as in the past, we have not and can never be at loss for continuing to advocate for reform. This is what I caught on the video as it beeped “bye-bye:”
13:59 The agenda of race and gender equality are inextricably bound. We share interlocking destinies. African-Americans won the right to vote in 1879 – 15th Amendment. Women in 1920 – 19th Amendment. We [finally] got the right for blacks to vote in the Deep South in 1965 [with the Voting Rights Act] while women got the right to serve on juries in 1967 – 2 years later [as a result of the US Supreme Court decision inTaylor v. Louisiana]. Eighteen year olds got the right to vote in 1970; [before that] those [young people] serving in Vietnam could not vote…
I just read this blog by Michael J. Rosen about the extra scrutiny of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. I decided to repost his blog with three sets of comments. My comments give thought to three different sets of questions:
What else besides what we’ve heard about might have helped lead to this “scandal?”
Is it really a “scandal?” Do we know?
Is this issue likely to go away soon?
What else might be behind this scandal?
Besides a lack of training and oversight that we’ve heard about, I think another part of this whole problem is the backlog of applications in the non-profit division of the IRS. I talked to them the other day about a non-profit I work with that is attempting to get its 501(c)4 status reinstated due to the 990-N issue. The agent I talked to said that they are getting over 5,000 applications every month and are working on them on a first come, first serve basis.
The IRS website says that with the small staff they have, there is an even greater backlog on applications than what the agent told me. Here’s that IRS statement.
“All [non-profit] applications are sent to the IRS Determinations Office in Cincinnati. This office receives approximately 70,000 applications for tax-exempt status of all kinds each year [that averages out to 5,833 new applicants each month]. This includes applications from section 501(c)(3) and section 501(c)(4) organizations. This office, which includes fewer than 200 people working directly on applications, is primarily responsible for working determination applications.”
The agent helped me to figure out the current status of this VERY SMALL non-profit that I’m working with (if it brings in $400/year for this group, it’s doing well). He told me that the records show that all of the paperwork at our end is basically complete, but the application won’t be reviewed until the office gets to the applications marked as “complete” as of September 2012 (when he says my group officially completed the paperwork). And, directing me to another section of the website, he pointed out that the office is currently working on applications from early May 2012 – i.e., over a 1 year delay in processing!
The aforementioned web page also goes into more detail, from the official IRS viewpoint, of what happened with the Tea Party organizations. It says that approximately 70 Tea Party groups were put into the in-depth “centralized” review; that out of a total of, currently, about 470 organizations being given similar treatment.
Is it a Scandal? Do We Really Know?
A scandal is defined as “a circumstance or action that offends propriety or established moral conceptions or disgraces those associated with it.” A political scandal is “an instance of government wrongdoing” that offends or disgraces those directly associated with that wrongdoing.
In this case, so far, it doesn’t appear to be a scandal that rises to the level of the White House. According to the Washington Post, based on increasing evidence, the IRS issue is very bad press for the Obama administration. According to their report,
If we believe the agency inspector general’s report, a group of employees in a division called the “Determinations Unit…” started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency.
The White House fired the acting director of the agency [this week] on the theory that somebody had to be fired and he was about the only guy they had the power to fire. They’re also instructing the IRS to implement each and every one of the IG’s recommendations to make sure this never happens again.
And from all the evidence obtained so far, there is no evidence of any connection between the “Determinations Unit” and the Obama administration. So unless there is a smoking gun hidden somewhere, there is no political scandal within the White House. Time will tell.
Is this issue likely to go away anytime soon?
No, I personally doubt that the issue will “go away” anytime soon.
Three reasons:
partisan politics to continue attacking Obama’s executive branch;
long history of spying and intrusiveness; and
free-speech issues.
The first issue is purely partisan. Issues that Republicans think will make President Obama look bad are brought up again and again even when the public, to some extent (but not the base) has moved on. Has the Benghazi issue died? How many times will the Republican-dominated House vote to revoke Obamacare before they give up?
The second issue is spying and intrusiveness that, for the first time in a long time, concerns both sides of the aisle. There has been a long history of the feds, usually the FBI, targeting non-profits. Think of the Friends (Quakers) peace-related work for example or the Communist-baiting of the 1950s. Usually it’s the more progressive, left-leaning groups that are targeted. These groups have a long memory and I think may, in this case, support the concerns raised in this non-profit scrutiny case. And since there were progressive groups in this list of targeted non-profits, both sides have some ammunition to push back against the actions of the IRS.
The third is a First Amendment issue. Combine these IRS actions with the free press concerns over the Justice Department’s review of press reporters’ phone logs; both sides have screamed NO. What you have here are two different departments of the executive branch allegedly intruding on the First Amendment: one department—the IRS—may be attacking an individual’s free speech rights and another department—the Justice Department—may be attacking freedom of the press. Both protections are contained within the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
So no, based on all three routes of concern, I don’t think this issue will go away anytime soon.
This week, the US Internal Revenue Service acknowledged and apologized for behavior that had long been rumored. The IRS improperly targeted for extra scrutiny conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.
The IRS did not ultimately deny tax-exempt status to a single group receiving extra scrutiny. Some say this proves that the actions of the IRS were baseless.
President Barack Obama directed Jack Lew, Secretary of the Treasury, to request the resignation of Steven Miller, Acting IRS Commissioner.
Miller resigned and Lew accepted the resignation.
The Justice Department has initiated a criminal investigation.
Exercising its oversight responsibility, Congress has begun its own probe of the IRS scandal.
Obama addressed the nation on television saying, “It’s inexcusable and Americans are right to be angry about it and I am angry about it. I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but particularly…
“working to win the freedom to marry in more states, grow the national majority for marriage, and end federal marriage discrimination. ” http://www.freedomtomarry.org/pages/about-us
As a quick follow-up to my brush with history with the Loving v. Commonwealth of VA case and on interracial and same-sex marriage equality, I thought I’d provide some links to what happened this week in the US Supreme Court.
You can hear the oral arguments as well as read the transcript of the hearings on the Supreme Court’s website.
To hear or read the arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry (the Prop 8 case) from Tuesday, March 26, click here.
To hear or read the arguments in United States v Windsor (the DOMA case) from Wednesday, March 27, click here.
And for some other commentary on the possible outcomes of these two cases, you might want to check out SCOTUS Blog.
The commentary I think is particularly good was written by Tom Goldstein. He gives a great summary of the tension between these two cases entitled “The Relationship between DOMA and Proposition 8.
Overturning DOMA argues that the federal government can’t deny benefits to individuals whenever a state has said that a same-sex couple has a civil right to marry (a 10th amendment states’ rights argument). In contrast, overturning Proposition 8 is an argument for equal protection and due process (an 14th amendment anti-discrimination argument) and would therefore—like Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia in 1967—trump states’ rights.
Based on this blog, I have two sets of questions.
Will both amendments be upheld or will one trump the other? If one trumps the other, which one will “win out?” OR
Will the Supreme Court just dodge this conflict by deciding not to decide? i.e., Will they declare that they can’t rule on this case because the proponents arguing to uphold Proposition didn’t have “standing” or the right to bring the case in the first place?
Imagine a segment of Law and Order that begins with the scene of an unconscious drugged 16-year-old girl being dragged from one house to another over several hours while large football players stopped to sexually assault her, urinate on her, and spray their semen on her. No one intervened; they just called themselves the “rape crew” and joked while they took videos. The girl woke up the next morning, naked without jewelry and cellphone, in an unfamiliar house.
On this fantasy program, the police would identify the perpetrators, discover that this is a part of the male’s behavior, and then bring justice to the girl. Courts would try the male teenagers as adults and force them to serve actual time in prison. But I did mention that this program is a fantasy.
The first scene actually took place in Steubenville (OH); the rest of the events failed the raped girl…
DIY Resource for those wishing to have their Italian citizenship recognized through Italy's "jure sanguinis" birthright citizenship & “Jure matrimonii” by marriage
Progressive commentary from Gainesville, Florida, once called the Berkeley of the South. Potano was the chief of and the only known name of the Native American tribe inhabiting the area around what is now Gainesville at the time the Europeans arrived.
“It takes no compromise to give people their rights…it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.” – Harvey Milk
a feminist habit. thinking broadly about life and art. at peak. sometimes broadspoken. not a translation program. crushing the doublespeak. seeking free speech.
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Learn more about the state laws being introduced and passed around the U.S. that is limiting Women's rights. Did you know that the Women's Equal Right Amendment from 1983 still needs to be ratified by 3 more states before it goes into effect?
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