Where Credit is Due

Women’s Equality Day is already over in New York City.  That’s half a shame, because it’s the most under-appreciated holiday in America.  The schools should have had today off like they will next Monday for Labor Day.  And some day in October for Columbus Day.

The fact that we close post offices, libraries, and schools for this guy who invoked a genocide while “discovering” America while I don’t remember a no-school day honoring a woman shows something about this country’s values.  Saying Columbus discovered America is a white-supremacist statement that does not respect Native Americans and is frankly out of date.

But that’s not the point.  I’m sure that designating Women’s Equality Day a national holiday would be destroyed in Congress, where anti-choice Republicans would say “we’re done.”  We’re not.

And Christopher Columbus is certainly done, but nobody worried about that when they gave him a holiday.

Believe me, this would make a big impact.  Children would learn about women’s rights in school leading up to the holiday the way they learn about MLK (great holiday) and Christopher Columbus today.  At first, they’d talk about sufferage and equal pay for equal work; as children got older they could possibly move into more sensitive issues, like sexual assault awareness and prevention.

Doesn’t that sound like a better use of your taxpayer money than teaching kids Christopher Columbus was great?

In the spirit of the mood, I will blog this great editorial by Gail Collins of the New York Times, entitled “Where Credit is Due”  It is one of the best op-eds I’ve read recently and touches on every aspect of this issue from workplace equality to who buys the towels:

A few months ago, a saleswoman at Macy’s tried to wheedle me into renewing my expired store credit card by offering a deep discount on the towels I was buying. So I dug it out of my wallet, where it was nestled between an expired press pass to the Texas State Capitol and an expired library card from Manchester, N.H., and happily handed it over.

She looked at it, puzzled. “But this isn’t your name,” she said.

The card said Daniel Collins. That’s my husband, who I believe has never been to Macy’s, or bought a towel, in his entire life.

I flashed back to a moment when I was living in Connecticut. I have no idea what year it was, except that it is very possible Richard Nixon was still president. I was in the Macy’s in New Haven when a woman with a clipboard came up to me and asked me if I wanted to apply for a credit card.

“Absolutely,” I said instantly.

She took up her pen. “What’s your husband’s name?” she asked.

I wish I could tell you that I made a speech about equal rights and headed for the door, but I just let her fill out my application. This was an era when women still needed a male co-signer to get credit. In some places, you needed a husband or father to even get a library card.

Anyway, I was proud of being newly married and dumb about the women’s movement. I worked as a reporter in the Connecticut State Capitol, where the male legislators and male lobbyists and male reporters met in a place called the Hawaiian Room to drink. When a female journalist demanded that she be admitted, too, the media was barred completely. The guys in the press room blamed it all on the one woman, who, I am sorry to say, was not me. My only reaction was to wonder why anyone would want to go to the Hawaiian Room, which was in the attic, with steam pipes along the ceiling festooned with limp plastic leis.

I’m telling you all this because on Monday we will celebrate Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the 19th Amendment and women’s right to vote. That was in 1920, and there’s no longer anyone around who can tell us what that felt like to be disenfranchised because of your sex. But there are plenty of people who recall the time when women couldn’t get credit in their own name.

Next year, if we’re in the mood, we can celebrate the 40th anniversary of the day that Kathryn Kirschbaum, then the mayor of Davenport, Iowa, was told she could not have a Bank of America card without her husband’s signature.

The great thing about Equality Day is that it works in two ways. We can mull both how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. The one thought feeds the other. The idea of having 50 women in the U.S. Senate, or 250 female C.E.O.’s in the Fortune 500 seems less far-reaching if you contemplate the fact that in the 1960s, a spokesman for NASA said “talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach.” Now, one of the two American astronauts on the International Space Station is a woman, and that is so routine that we’re not even aware of her name. (It’s Karen Nyberg.)

Monday is also the anniversary of the 1970 women’s march for equality in New York, which almost no one expected to be a very big deal. The New York Police Department had only given the marchers permission to use one lane of Fifth Avenue. “Then more people came and more people came and we spilled over, and we took over the entire avenue,” recalled Robin Morgan, the feminist author and activist. “And that was the moment your heart really sang. People were hanging out windows. I kept yelling: ‘Join us!’ ” And some of them, Morgan said, did just that.

Parades are great. For a long time, the drive for suffrage was seen as a depressing slog of petition-gathering by middle-class clubwomen. Then the parades started, and the movement belonged to everyone.

“We did not eat our little lunches in lobster palaces, but out in the street in front of lobster palaces. We stand for plain living and high thinking, that’s it,” a marcher told The New York Times during the equality parade in 1912.

That comment does seem a tad reverse-snobby, but the mixture of socialites and factory workers, marching for one cause, sent a message. It also sounds as though it was a lot of fun. After the march ended, a woman The Times identified as “Miss Annie S. Peck, the mountain climber,” stood on a chair, “waved a Joan of Arc flag, and told her audience that this was the banner that she had planted 21,000 feet above the sea on one of the highest peaks of the Andes.”

There don’t seem to be a lot of parades planned for Monday, which is probably all for the best. Once a parade becomes an annual institution, it becomes less about a political point and more about the afterparties. But we are going to have one heck of a time in 2020.

I’m gonna try to be there in 2020.  I think I’ll be able to make it.

I certainly hope so.

Yes, this is the 21st Century

TRAVEL ADVISORY: I strongly advise any and all liberals against traveling to Wisconsin unless you are going to be civilly disobedient in which case, prepare for arrest.

Scott Walker has been arresting people lately.   Over 200 to be exact, including a fourteen-year-old, several older women (remember Texas?), a member of the Madison City Council, and a journalist.

Apparently, Scott Walker has never heard of the First Amendment.  Which is not surprising considering Michele Bachmann’s thoughts on this country’s history.

The journalist, Mathew Rothschild, was covering the protests.  Here is an except from his story:

Then I saw some state police officers move in to arrest a couple of the Raging Grannies, including my friend Bonnie Block.

So, as I’ve done every time I’m covering the capitol, I started to take pictures of the officers making the arrest. And then I followed the officers as they took Block, handcuffed and still defiantly singing, toward the elevator.

I was hoping to get a picture of Block as she entered the elevator, the kind of picture that has been taken many times in the last couple of weeks.

But the police officers said to stand back. I said I was a journalist, the editor of The Progressive magazine.

“You can’t be here,” they said.

“I’m with the press,” I said. “I have a right to be here.”

Whereupon, without a warning that I’d be arrested, Officer S. B. Mael grabbed my hands and put them behind my back, cuffed them, and said, “Obstruction.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Block said, as she was put in the elevator.

“This is getting absurd, guys,” I said to the officers, who refused to engage with me.

They took me to the basement of the capitol, frisked me, and put me in a chair.

I looked up “Obstruction charge”  which got me to “obstruction of justice” on the Free Legal Dictionary:

A criminal offense that involves interference, through words or actions, with the proper operations of a court or officers of the court.

Rothschild states that he was doing something he had done for weeks before: taking pictures.  Arresting a person is not a private thing-why would it be, with all those adds for public arrest records online?

The real reason is this: they want to fend off all the big publications so that the protests will die down.

So I request, my dear reader, for you to mention these protests and arrests on your blog/Facebook/Twitter/whatever, or even with your friends so that people know these protests are taking place and about what Scott Walker’s doing.

Want another incentive?  Scott Walker will be up for re-election in 2014.  Wisconsin needs a governor who will respect freedom of assembly, speech, and the press.   Or not Scott Walker.  Believe me, I’ve not even started talking about abortion.

Let’s just hope nobody arrests Democratic campaign workers.

 

 

 

Lying, Cheating, & Stealing: The GOP Strategy for 2014

Kay Hagan, the junior senator from North Carolina, is a freshman Democrat.  She will be up for reelection in 2014.  And according to a PPP poll released today, Hagan leads all GOP opponents asked about by 7-11 points.  She benefits from the unpopularity of the GOP state legislature, who, among other things, added abortion restrictions to a motorcycle safety law.

That same GOP legislature, backed by an ever-conservative Supreme Court; could be the only thing that stands in Hagan’s way in 2014.

The bill would be an extremely strict voter ID law, coupled with less early voting, and  an end of straight party voting (the check box in which you can vote for only democratic or GOP candidates would be eliminated).

Another ppp poll found that only thirty-nine percent of North Carolina residents survey supported the bill, compared with fifty percent who do not.

Although eliminating a week of early voting and straight party voting would be bad, probably the worst thing for democracy would be the Voter ID law (ironically, that’s the part with the most support).  It would be the strictest in the nation, limiting voters to five forms of identification: a North Carolina driver’s license, passport, a state ID, or a military or veteran ID card.    This is something lacked by thirty-four percent of North Carolina African-Americans; as well as a whopping fifty-five percent of North Carolina democrats (you heard me right, fifty-five percent).  By contrast only twenty-one percent of North Carolina republicans lack an ID.

In addition, the bill makes it easier for super pacs to give more money-making the political intentions clear.

No wonder Hillary Clinton called it, “a greatest hits of voter suppression”

This law will not only prevent the election of a candidate the voters want; it will also keep the unpopular state legislature in office.

In other words, they are essentially trying to cheat at elections.

Wait.  There’s more.  Look at all the states with Voter ID laws:

This is from January of this year. Green states are the ones with strict voter-ID laws, followed by less-strict in yellow; non-photo ID’s are acceptable in states in blue. And the awesome states in grey are the ones without voter-ID laws.

That map is in January. Still, look at all the states the are colored in.

Of course, the Republicans cry about voter fraud.  Voter fraud is one of the lies the GOP tells to convince people.  In reality, there were only two cases of in-person voter fraud in the last six North Carolina elections.  For GOPers with no sense of math, that’s ONE ATTEMPT FOR EVERY THREE ELECTIONS.

The fraud the GOP talks about will have no impact on elections; while their outrageous law will ensure that it’s easier for Republicans to vote than Democrats.

Since the Supreme Court threw out section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina has become just one of many state legislatures to pass disenfranchising measures.  This will create an uphill battle for Democrats in southern states in 2014, even those with great support from the public.

Luckily, the ACLU has already begun challenging the law in court.  But the law being turned over is not something to count on in an increasingly partisan court system.

What a shame that the party that loves to ramble on about the “founding fathers” is also the one that restricts the rights of minorities to vote.

Why don’t y’all turn y’all’s attention down to Austin, Texas, please?

The War on Women in waging down in Texas.  First we had Jodie Laubenberg talking crappy “science” about rape kits.  Then, we had Wendy Davis’s epic filibuster of Senate Bill 5, a bill aimed at preventing a woman’s reproductive rights.  Just like in the rest of this country, there are a lot more people who oppose this legislation than   support it.  Not that the Republicans care.

Then Rick Perry came in and called another special session, which shows us that the will of the people really doesn’t matter to Texas Republicans.  With that came another round of people waiting to testify, almost is vain because you can bet those Republicans won’t give a damn, as they didn’t to this woman.

I have so many issues with this I don’t know where to start.  Indeed, I could go on for a whole  post about how if Texas were a true democracy, SB5 would have failed while it was still a bill in the House.

But I’ll take another, equally pressing issue:  First look at a screenshot from that video:

Doesn’t that image resemble this one?

Or this one?

That second picture I showed you is from the Civil Rights movement, where one of the goals was to “fill up the jails” in order to lead to the repeal of Jim Crow laws.   In the Jim Crow Era, protestors were treated to large gusts of water, tear gas, clubs, and yes, arrest for peacefully protesting.

The first and last picture were not taken in the Jim Crow era.  As a matter of fact, both of them were taken in the Texas Legislature building within the last month.   This last picture is of a woman being arrested while everybody in the gallery of the Texas Legislature was cheering for Wendy Davis’s amazing filibuster.

Both of these women were peaceful protesters.  The woman in the orange shirt is in her seventies.  And yet they were arrested.  Why? For using their constitutional rights: freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

The era of police using violence to silence peaceful protests is far from gone.   Every week, tens of Moral Monday protestors are arrested in North Carolina.  In a way, everywhere in America is Austin, Texas.    Everywhere in America is Birmingham , Alabama in early 1963.

When  the 1st Amendment is being attacked, whether you are pro-life or pro-choice simply doesn’t matter.  The police should not be arresting people for verbally attacking state senators in front of them instead of on the internet.  Nor should they be forcibly arresting elderly women for sitting in a senate gallery (video).

Without free speech, there can be no true democracy.  The State Police at the Texas Legislature should be standing up to real democracy, not the half and half democracy the Republicans seem to want.