Just a small, heartfelt one-word entry

Yes.

Let it go for just one day, antis

Since my love of football is well known (and occasionally enough to bridge the yawning chasm between myself and antis) I’ve been getting semi-deluged with e-mails and stuff asking me my opinion on CBS’ decision to run a decidedly anti-leaning ad sponsored by our buddies at Focus On The Family during the Super Bowl. As a pro-choice woman AND as a serious football fan, I think I can shed some light on what may have factored into CBS’ call–and why the ad may not have nearly the impact FOTF is hoping for.

Boogedy!

Back in the day an anti challenged me to go into a abortion prevention center crisis pregnancy center to listen to their message. I replied that I was not their audience, which is frightened and desperate young women. But in case you’re curious as to what said frightened desperate young women might hear from those compassionate souls here is a video made by NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia. You all know my stance with NARAL but occasionally they redeem themselves.

New year, same old crap

In the past couple of months Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia has been sending out e-mails about a proposed pro-choice license plate to counteract the CHOOSE LIFE plates that came out last year. As I’ve stated previously Virginia may be the personalized license plate capital of the world. It’s fairly easy to get a new plate–propose the idea, get a set number of people to buy it, and it goes over. Here’s what the plate will look like:

Looks pretty spiffy, doesn’t it? I’d been thinking about getting a new license plate anyway–yes, I have a personalized one but the novelty’s worn off it for me–so here’s two birds with one stone, right?

Then I read the proposal and did a classic :headdesk:.

You’ll excuse me if I go WTF?!

In my experience with INS, I have learned never to trust an e-mail sent by someone using AOL. You may laugh, but invariably any time I open an email sent by somebody at aol.com it’s an anti. But still, much like the optimist searching for the pony in the pile of horseshit, I open them anyway as I did this morning. And … what a surprise, an anti! However, it was a pleasant and polite anti, albeit one with, by her own admission, a strange request. The text has not been altered:

What “Knocked Up” should have been

I’ve had a couple of people e-mail me about Obvious Child, a short film directed by Gillian Robespierre about a young woman who gets pregnant after a post-breakup one-nighter. However, this is not Juno or Knocked Up or any other movie where suddenly two strangers fall in love with parenthood and each other and live happily ever after with baby. In Obvious Child the protagonist, Donna, played by Saturday Night Live cast member Jenny Slate, gets an abortion. While I found the dialogue to be forced sometimes I liked that the abortion was dealt with relatively matter-of-factly and quite realistically–and it didn’t take over the film. It’s not Hollywood, but maybe some will sit up and take notice.

Obvious Child from Gillian Robespierre on Vimeo.

Still here, still clear

September has been my down month for a while now. While everyone else is going back to school, I’m taking vacations and celebrating birthdays. Both my husband and I have September birthdays as well as one of his sisters so we do an en masse celebration, although I’m now at the age where birthdays are kind of scary. I completely overdosed on baseball; our week-long vacation was to Chicago with a day trip to Milwaukee and we got in three White Sox/Red Sox games, a Cardinals/Brewers game and a Reds/Cubs game. I’ve fallen into the habit of taking solo road trips on the Natal Day Weekend (the last weekend of September) and this year treated myself to the entire Red Sox/Yankees series at the new Yankee Stadium in New York, culminating in watching my beloved Yanks take the American League East the day before my birthday.

Okay, there’s “What Patricia Did On Her Summer Vacation.” What about “What INS Is Doing,” hmm?

There’ll be an update to the site probably this week–the story box has gotten backed up and stares me in the face every time I check INS mail so I’ll get to work on that. I anticipate at least one more update in 2009, possibly two depending on volume. If you check INS’ main page you’ll see that the long-threatened link to Facebook is finally there. INS did have a dormant Twitter account that I may reactivate to get you links faster. There’s been some small media interest as well, one instance coming up next week that I’ll get out info on as soon as I have it.

In the meantime, thanks as always for supporting INS and my incredible laziness. Don’t think I don’t notice or appreciate!

Blowing covers on the internet

It’s kind of ironic that someone e-mailed me about Virginia Montanez, the blogger formerly known as PittGirl, and asked me if what happened to her made me nervous.

For those who don’t feel like clicking on the link Montanez is the author of the hilarious Burgh Blog, and as PittGirl she had her legion of devoted minions–myself included–following her every word about her hatred of pigeons, mocking tweeny girls in love with Ben Roethlisberger, “self-uniting husbands” and much more about living in Pittsburgh. Last year, however, she stopped writing the blog because she didn’t want her cover blown. Recently she revived the blog and revealed her true identity as a 35-year-old married mother of two and marketing director for a non-profit organization … a non-profit who immediately fired her once she came out. This is not a new phenomenon–in fact there’s even a word for it, “dooced,” taken from the popular Dooce mommy blog whose author, Heather Armstrong, was also canned from her day job after revealing herself. Armstrong has since gone on to become a full time writer and it’s widely speculated Montanez will do the same.

As I’ve stated in here previously, I work for a humongous “if I named it you’d know it immediately” corporation, with hundreds of thousands of employees around the world. I’ve also never been anonymous. Type my name in Google and you’ll get lots of stuff about me and INS (and the occasional Roadfood.com review and sports blog post–what can I say, my interests vary). However, in the 6.5 years INS has been online and the four that the blog’s been around, I can honestly say that I have NEVER had anyone come up to me unsolicited and say “you run that abortion stories site?” This includes family members and coworkers. True, INS doesn’t have remotely close to the readership of a Burgh Blog or a Dooce, but in six plus years you’d think someone would have made the connection.

I do take caution, though. I don’t name my husband or family members here, nor do I name my employer or friends. Once upon a time an anti got hold of my home address, gleaned from when I registered the site, and posted it on a forum. In the forum’s defense they immediately smacked the guy down for doing so. Here comes the irony–I found out about it two years after it happened.

So in short no, I don’t worry about getting dooced. I’m very small potatoes in the blogging world, and I think it would take something along the lines of getting featured on the front page of the paper or being on TV to even approach the possibility of doocing, and that’s not happening. If it ever did … well, I’ll deal with it if the time comes.

Getting caught dead

It’s been remarked that June of 2009 was a bad month to be a celebrity, as numerous people laying claim to the title (although in the case of infomercial yeller Billy Mays it was a stretch) died during that month. July fourth, however, brought another death that has sparked a lot of talk, controversy, and arguments over how the dead should be remembered.

Being a football fan I was well aware of Steve McNair’s remarkable journey from the crushing rural poverty of Mississippi to NFL stardom. A quarterback who played for a small traditionally black college, he was good enough to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated in his senior year and seriously contend for the Heisman Trophy (given to the best college football player for those not familiar). He was the third player chosen in the 1995 NFL draft by the Houston Oilers, who moved to Nashville and became the Tennessee Titans. He had a very solid pro career, taking the Titans to–and barely losing–a Super Bowl and sharing the NFL Most Valuable Player award in 2003. He was traded to the Baltimore Ravens in 2006, playing there for two years before retiring last year at the age of 35. He had a reputation for toughness and playing through injury as well as doing a lot of work in the community; after a tornado struck the Nashville area he showed up with a chainsaw to help clear wreckage. He was famously devoted to his family–his wife and four sons and particularly his mother, for whom with his first big paycheck he purchased land that had once been sharecropped by her family to build her a house. He had just opened a restaurant near Tennessee State University that he hoped would provide students with inexpensive healthy food and was generally regarded as a pillar of the community.

Then came the Fourth of July.

A sad ending to a sadder life

If you were alive in the eighties, there was no escaping the juggernaut that was Michael Jackson. He was twenty-four years old when he released Thriller, and even if you didn’t own the record chances were you knew all the songs on it just because it was all over the radio and MTV. Who knew as we watched the “Beat It” video for the millionth time that he was at the midpoint of his life, a life that would be dragged through the mud of the modern media, and that he would transform himself from a somewhat eccentric but respected performer to something resembling an extra in the Tim Burton version of Planet of the Apes who after his name was mentioned would invariably invoke a crack about kids’ pants being half off and “Jesus juice”? His death on Thursday at 50 promises that the circus will continue for years, if not decades to come.

I was never a big Michael Jackson fan–I was 16 when Thriller came out and although I liked what I heard I never bought the record–I did have Off The Wall which I consider to be a better album. The only thing of his I ever bought during the height of everything was the cassingle (how eighties) of “Dirty Diana” off his Bad album. But as the years passed and he descended into “Wacko Jacko” territory I sometimes wondered if he was just flat-out batshit crazy or just screwing with the media.

“Sun hats, tool.”

Major League Baseball has been playing up Mother’s Day for a while, but in the past few years they’ve tied it in with breast cancer awareness. The majority of teams have some sort of event or giveaway that day, survivors are honored, players use pink bats and wear pink sweatbands–the more adventurous have been known to dye their facial hair pink for the day. Good times and awareness of a good cause, if a little pink-saturated.

In 2004 the Oakland Athletics had a nice little giveaway in which the first 7500 women through the gates would get a floppy sun hat courtesy of the A’s and Macy’s department store. All well and good and typical.

But Alfred Rava, a San Diego-based lawyer, didn’t like it. Not one bit. So he did what any good lawyer would do–sued the A’s for sex discrimination because men couldn’t get a hat.

Are you ready for the WTF? There was actually a settlement in the case, in the area of $510,000. Half will pay for lawyers (natch). The other half will be distributed to men who can prove they were among the first 7500 that showed up at McAfee Coliseum on Mother’s Day 2004. They’ll get fifty bucks cash, a $25 Macy’s coupon and two-for-one tickets to an A’s game.

Lest you lose all hope for humanity, A’s fans are shunning this big time. The operator assigned to take calls from “victims” says the phone hasn’t rung once.

Rava likes to sue for stuff like this. In 2005 the California Angels–oh, ’scuse me, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim–had a similar giveaway with a tote bag. Rava sued the Angels. He’s been involved in over forty lawsuits like this, as either the plaintiff or the plaintiff’s lawyer. With the A’s and the hats, he’s also claiming age discrimination since girls under eighteen couldn’t get one.

As ESPN’s Rick Reilly says, “(Rava)’s a greasy manipulator who has found a small leak in American law and stuck an open wallet under it. When they wrote California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act in 1959 — the act Rava cites in his suits — they never thought soulless creatures like him would someday slink about the earth.”

When Reilly spoke to Rava, Rava compared the hat giveaway to a team giving away Nolan Ryan-autographed baseballs to the first 7500 men at a Father’s Day game. Wait, what? Did he just actually compare a hat that probably cost about seventy-five cents to make (giveaways like hats and t-shirts are notoriously cheap and flimsy) to a baseball autographed by one of the greatest pitchers of the modern era and deem them of equal value? As Reilly says, “Dude!” The funniest part is when Rava insists on calling the hats “fishing hats.”

Back in the day, probably early nineties, I distinctly remember the New York Yankees having a giveaway on Father’s Day where the first ten or fifteen thousand men got a Yankee logo-embossed shaving kit. Women didn’t get one.

HELP HELP I’VE BEEN DISCRIMINATED AGAINST I’M SUUUUUUUUUUIIIIIIIIING

Your weekend dose of WTF

Amanda Marcotte, best known for her Pandagon blog, links to one of the most fucked-up documents I’ve ever read.

Have you ever suspected that antis have a script to follow? Well, here’s proof–a link to part of an instruction manual for a group called Justice For All, which seems to specialize in haunting college campuses. There’s thirteen pages. I will admit to not having read all of them yet. I can only do little bits at a time before I want to break something and I like my stuff.

On an amusing note, our old friend JivinJ shows up in the comments. He hasn’t been here in a while, which is kind of a bummer because I wanted to know what he thinks about the Lions drafting Matthew Stafford. Ah, football, bringing pro and anti together since 2005 …

Pro-life, my ass

Dr. George Tiller shot and killed at his church in Witchita

Way to go, antis. You’ve been gunning (pun intended) for this guy for decades, and your perseverance paid off. Spare me the pious denunciations–I couldn’t help but notice that Operation Rescue immediately came flailing with the OMGWTFBBQ WE DON’T CONDOOOOONE THIS WE VALUE ALLLLL LIFE shit. Forums and boards are filled with thousands who share your views gloating over Tiller’s murder, doing everything but dancing down the hallway singing Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead. And guess what? They’re going to be the public faces of your movement. They ARE the public faces of your movement. It’s true that the majority doesn’t like abortion, but they damn well don’t like someone getting shot over it either.

I have always had the utmost respect for Dr. Tiller and the service he provided to women when no one else would. I salute his refusal to cave to the antis even after his first shooting–and how much does it suck to write that, “first shooting”–and the clinic bombing. It’s sad that his life ended as it did … and even sadder that it came as no surprise.

INS contributor Elena wrote of her experience at Dr. Tiller’s clinic; it can be read here.

Thank you, Dr. Tiller. You won’t be forgotten for your honesty and bravery. May your murderer be brought swiftly to justice.

ETA: A suspect is in custody. Also the Wichita Eagle has set up a guestbook at which you may leave condolences for the Tiller family.

The Competitive Parenting League, now in HD!

When I say I don’t watch TV, it occurs to me that I should clarify my position. What I mean is that I do not watch shows on a regular basis. Sports, hell yes. It’s spring so there is baseball (and my Yankees are in first place in the American League East, woo hoo!). In the autumn my ass indents the couch for ten hours straight on Sundays watching football. But as far as episodic TV? Nope. To give you an idea, the last show I always tried to catch was due South … which went off the air in the U.S. in 1996. It’s funny and occasionally annoying to me watching online friends wax and wane over various shows, particularly since after any season ends the show’s going to be on DVD anyway. Let’s not even start with Television Without Pity, a website whose writers will literally put together ten pages detailing every minutiae in the most recent episode of How I Met Your Mother.

I’ve gotten a few e-mails asking my opinion regarding the rapidly-becoming-infamous reality show Jon and Kate + Eight, which seems to have been on the cover of every magazine and news webpage as of late. I don’t feel I can offer one. I don’t watch the show, I’ve never seen it even in passing and I have no interest in it. I don’t blame the various channels who do these shows. They’re in the business of making money, these shows are ridiculously cheap to produce and are quite profitable. If no one was watching, these wouldn’t get made. What I always question, however, is what goes through the participants’ minds when they agree to do these shows–particularly since these types of shows have a history of, well, not presenting people at their best.

Going full retard in South Bend

As you may have heard, President Obama is giving the commencement speech at Notre Dame University this year. Some are not happy about this. So what better way to make your displeasure known than to … drive around in a truck with large pictures comparing abortion to lynching and showing lynched black men?

Secret Service, pick up the white courtesy phone.

Questions answered and various stuff

After story submissions, kudos and the occasional anti flame, the most frequent INS e-mails are about various anti-choice laws that are being proposed in various states. The senders, always good-intentioned, are usually disappointed that I don’t immediately OMGWTFBBQ over them. This is because these are only proposals.

Any legislative body gets tons of proposals for new laws. How many of them actually go through? Not many. Few even get to the point to be seriously considered. While it’s always good to be aware of which batshit-crazy legislators are wasting time, it’s equally good to be aware of the progress of the proposal and judge how likely it is to pass. For example, I’ve been getting e-mail for a while about a proposed license plate theme in Virginia (where we already have WAY too many themes, seriously–name the school, cause or disease and Virginia probably has a license plate for it) which echoes the one that a couple of states already have–CHOOSE LIFE. The cherry on the WTF sundae is that the profits from these plates will go to crisis pregnancy centers. On this one the worst is happening–Governor Tim Kaine, who is one of those “well, I hate abortion but I’ll condone choice” guys, is getting ready to sign off on this one. Not many of the unwashed are aware of where the profits will go, and despite my facepalm I want to see how many will get these plates. I’ve made two trips to Florida in the past few months and have been on the roads and have seen their CHOOSE LIFE plate … once. Yes, I did give the car the finger. So maybe there’s hope and the abortion preventors crisis pregnancy centers will have to get funds elsewhere.

Sad and sick and just … gah

Every time I hear some pretentious blowhard like Bono go on about how we have to make sure Africa gets money for food I want to scream. It’s not about food, it’s about fucking politics and outdated beliefs. The people of Africa could feed themselves fine if it wasn’t for the constant civil wars and, oh, I don’t know, not having to fear getting raped every time you walk outside.

Not that North America should feel so smug–not with the lovely rape trees that are springing up on the U.S./Mexico border.

Just about every woman I know–myself included–has experienced some sort of sexual assault. No matter how strong you are, it shakes you up to be reminded that you can be overpowered and forced to do something you don’t want to do. I commend the women who speak out in these articles and the effort that’s being made to bring these pieces of shit walking on two legs to justice, even if the justice is far less than they deserve.

WARNING: Don’t click on the links if you trigger easily.

Get on with the fascination

With the reality television boom still going strong and showing little signs of winding down, it stands to reason that there would be a few people who would make a significant living from the genre.  While in America our reality stars outside of American Idol or The Hills usually have had some measure of notoriety fame previously, our friends in the UK have a couple of stars who came into their fame out of nowhere by appearing on one of the numerous reality shows (quite frankly about 90% of US reality shows are based on British predecessors). The prime example of this is Jade Goody, a former dental nurse from east London whose appearance on the 2002 UK edition of Big Brother put her in the public eye. She didn’t win, but she made a name for herself mostly by her cheerful ignorance of geography and … well, just about everything else.

Never say never.

While things are well in my personal universe, others I know both in Real Life and Net Life aren’t so fortunate. Someone close to me in Real Life is going through a divorce after twenty-three years of marriage. An online acquaintance’s husband left her and their two small children to take up with a nineteen-year-old. Two of my neighbors got laid off from jobs they’d had twenty-plus years. Another online acquaintance is dealing with his daughter’s drug addiction while trying to raise her infant son. I offer what comfort I can, but they’ve all said/written one thing that disturbs me.

“I never thought this would happen to me.”

The other shoe drops

When I was being interviewed by Glamour, I was told that the article was going to run about eight or nine pages. The published article, however, ran maybe four. But Glamour apparently had a change of heart … and put the rest on the article on their website. Go read!