Monday, September 10, 2012

Blogaround


1. Soul Mates (posted August 28) I love you, xkcd! This post asks "What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?" and comes at it with logic and data on world population- to show how totally ridiculous that notion is. Yes!

However, I still have to deal with Christian version of this myth- "God will set you up with that one perfect person!" which is much tougher to address... See also my post on how the Christian version of this myth is a much stronger beast.

2. How child sponsorship through World Vision works (posted September 4) This is a very very informative post, by a blogger who visited Sri Lanka with a team from World Vision. The child sponsorship program sounds great- it helps the community as a whole, not just one child at a time.

3. The Incomplete Politics of Poverty (posted August 31) According to the bible, there are 3 causes of poverty. This makes a lot of sense.

4. This video: Jesus Wants the Rose.

The church's teaching on "purity" flies in the face of the gospel, and this video communicates that better than anything else I've seen.

5. The amazing speeches of women in the conventions makes the silence of women in the Church that much more deafening. (posted September 5) Yes. This.

6. Defriended Over a Wedding, a Straight Man Gains Perspective (posted September 3)

7. Dear Pro-Lifers: STOP ERASING WOMEN (posted September 6) "Because that's the problem, isn't it? If zygotes didn't live inside women's bodies, this wouldn't be an issue."

8. Seeing Faces, Not Statistics (posted September 6) "And what would it have hurt for me to hear it? Why, in all of those abstinence-only speeches, where they scared you on the failure of condoms and condemned Planned Parenthood, why did they not explain that some people need them?"

9. The myth of how the hijab protects women against sexual assault (posted September 6)

10. Please Don't Tell Me I'm Beautiful (posted September 7) "I can tell you from over 35 years of first-hand experience, from when my face first got smashed with a baseball bat and my teeth were ruined, that it's a mind-f*ck to be told 'you're beautiful' when nearly every single consequential, real-world factor tells you otherwise." I totally agree with this article, and I wrote something similar a while ago: We CANNOT say "everyone is beautiful".

3 comments:

  1. I was just wondering if you could clarify the point you're trying to make with the "Stop Erasing Women" article. As an active pro-lifer, it makes me sick when I see other "pro-life" people screaming at women and calling them all kinds of horrible epithets as they're walking into the abortion clinic, or saying things like "girls just need to suck it up and make the sacrifice" or whatever. NO. That's just not right. However, the vast majority of pro-life people I've met care deeply about women. It's because they care about women that they oppose abortion. I know people (most of them women) who work in shelters for pregnant women - shelters that provide them with medical, spiritual, emotional, and monetary resources. I know people (most of them women) who take several hours every week to stand outside the local abortion clinic and offer emotional support and tangible resources to the girls walking in. And when pro-life people focus on the baby in the womb, it's because there's so much misinformation as to what exactly it is that's in there, and people need to know. I agree that we have no right to ignore the woman carrying the child - we need to recognize that the life of the woman and the life of her child are equally important.
    I don't know if, in posting this, you were trying to imply that abortion shouldn't be prohibited, but based on this woman's views (as clarified under her "beliefs" tab), that underpinning is pretty clear in the article.

    You know, I'm glad article #8 shed light on the poverty of inner-city women. People are so blind to the hardships these women go through. I can't stand it when people criticize inner-city single mothers; most of us just have no clue how much they're probably suffering.
    That being said, I would really really encourage you to learn more about Planned Parenthood. I understand - yes, I really do - that defunding Planned Parenthood means a lot of women will have to look elsewhere for services. However, Planned Parenthood is so caught up in so many unethical practices (abortion being the most obvious, in addition to helping alleged sex traffickers and failing to report statutory rape: http://www.liveaction.org/projects/), that we can't justify supporting this organization. The thing is, women in poverty are not out of options. There are literally thousands of Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers around the country (exponentially more than PP clinics) that provide - for free - every single service that PP provides except abortion, in addition to dozens of other services that PP doesn't provide, such as mammograms, complete check-ups, even dental care, etc.
    If you knew your doctor performed abortions on 3% of his patients, failed to report that many of them were being raped and abused, and helped a few of them continue trafficking minors, would you say, "Well, at least he does a lot of other good things!" or would you look for another doctor? Why should we continue funding Planned Parenthood when they are harming so many women, instead of transferring their funding to FQHCs that give women even more services but aren't involved in unethical practices?

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    1. I post these links not necessarily because I agree with them, but because they're worth reading. The author of that blog is very pro-choice and has recently criticized the pro-life position in a lot of her posts. Maybe she's only perpetuating stereotypes, like you said- maybe the truth is that those who advocate most strongly against abortion do care about women very much.

      Thanks for your comment- I am trying to figure out what I think about this. I'm a feminist and I've read a lot of feminist blogs about abortion and stuff- and they only focus on the woman and her needs, without even addressing the existence of the baby- and I can't accept that. It seems like the pro-choice side focuses on the mother and ignores the baby, and the pro-life side focuses on the fetus and ignores the woman. So I don't know what to think.

      And yes, I do want to find out more about Planned Parenthood. Growing up, I always heard that they were horribly evil because they're all about abortion. Recently I found out that abortion is only a small percentage of what they do, and the rest is health-care stuff that people really need. I hadn't heard of the FQHCs before- I should look up some more info on them.

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  2. I'm jumping in months late (again). I literally just spent a couple of hours reading that very same article and its comments, stopping only when they stopped talking about abortion and started in on rape. I am a pro-choice person. Part of this, I imagine, stems from being from a part of the world where you have legalized abortion... covered by health care. I was raised to be a conservative Christian, and this has been a frequent debate in my family. However, if it was me, I would want the choice.

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