(no subject)

I went to the Youth Pride rally on Saturday. The rally was originally to be held at the Boston Common, but was held indoors at the Castle on Arlington Street instead due to the torrential downpour.

Despite the rain, they paraded. After watching them line up and file out the door, with banners and raincoats and plastic ponchos, i gathered my stuff and left The Network's table. On the way down Arlington Street to the T i saw the parade coming: a duck boat and about 2 blocks worth of mostly teenagers. So i stood, while getting soaked (my umbrella was irrelevant) and watched as they passed by, chanting,

"What do we want?"
"Safe schools!"
"When do we want them?"
"Now!"

Safe schools. That's the big gay agenda: "Don't harass or beat up gay kids, please. It would be nice if you didn't kick us out of our homes, too."

The parade is affiliated with the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. It came under attack last week because the governor, under pressure from homophobes because he's running for President, freaked out because his name appears on the letterhead the commission used when sending out a letter about the parade.

Gee, it's a governor's commission, created by a Republican governor in 1988 to address the astronomical rates of suicide and depression among gay and lesbian teenagers. Governor's commissions tend to have the current governor's name on the letterhead. Imagine that.

The Article 8 Alliance has the gall to say that they are "standing up for children." Attempting to silence teenagers and prevent them from expressing who they are, attacking efforts aimed at making their homes and schools safer, this is their idea of standing up for children? In future generations, people will think of groups like this the same way we now think of the Ku Klux Klan.

a woman speaks, and the world trembles with rage

Saturday night, lady_babalon and i went to see Deepa Mehta's film Water. It's been consuming our conversations and emotions ever since, and two days later, i still can't stop thinking about it.

Before the opening credits, we see seven-year-old Chuyia being asked by her father if she remembers being married. She cannot. Her husband died, he tells her. She's now a widow, and is required to live a life of ascetic denial at an ashram for widows, who are considered to be only half-alive and essentially outcaste.

Mehta tried to make this film in India for five years. Several attempts to make the film were prevented by violent protests, arson, death threats, and political posturing.

The day before filming was due to begin, the crew was informed that there were a few complications with gaining location permits. The following day we were greeted with the news that 2,000 protesters had stormed the ghats, destroying the main film set, burning and throwing it into the holy river. Protesters burnt effigies of Deepa Mehta, and threats to her life began.

... "Breaking up the sets was far too mild an act, the people involved with the film should have been beaten black and blue. They come with foreign money to make a film which shows India in poor light because that is what sells in the west. The west refuses to acknowledge our achievements in any sphere, but is only interested in our snake charmers and child brides. And people like Deepa Mehta pander to them."

from The Politics of Deepa Mehta's Water

Opposition to this project was so severe that Mehta had to film in Sri Lanka under a phony title.

Mehta did not make a movie about how evil India is. Mehta is indeed very critical of Hindu fundamentalism, but in Mehta's analysis, the mistreatment of widows in India is not, at heart, about flaws we find only in Indian culture or religion. As she sees it, it is about economics and male privilege. Families use ancient beliefs about widows as an excuse to clear up some space in the family home and feed one less person. "Disguised as religion, it's just about money." Gender inequity is also blatantly obvious. Widows in India constitute a large pool of desperate, starving women (by my estimate, they make up 3-4% of the population) and many of them are prostituted. Their situation is so dire that men who rent their bodies can tell themselves they are doing these women a kindness.

She also portrays the solution to the problem as coming from within Indian thought and culture, symbolized by talk throughout the film about Mohandas Gandhi and his movement to reform the caste system. His words are quoted and tut-tutted by people along the chain of privilege who stand to lose their bit of benefit if widows are actually liberated.

(It also bears pointing out that, judging from the energy spent protesting feminism, talking about the mistreatment of women appears to be a bigger crime than, you know, actually mistreating women.)

(no subject)

I just posted the original "Mother's Day Proclamation" on the bulletin board in my office. A day late, i know, but it still wouldn't hurt for people to read it and know that Mother's Day wasn't created by Hallmark.

holy crap!

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

from the ABC News blog post Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling (thanks to pamscoffee for the link