velvet-areola:

Please signal boost widely!

This is the easiest way to register to vote in the U.S. that I’ve found.

If you don’t have access to a printer or a car (like me), you can go to this website (TurboVote.org - translations in English or in Spanish), fill out your information, and they will mail you the printed forms AND a stamped envelope addressed to your county clerk’s office. All you have to do is pop it in the mail box once you receive them and you’re registered.

You can also sign up to do an absentee ballot/vote by mail so you don’t need to find transportation (or take the time off work) on election day.

It’s definitely legit because I just received and sent off the forms today. I’m not affiliated with the site in any way, I’m just excited to find such a great resource.

Please share the site on facebook, tumblr, twitter, and tell your friends and family about it.

(Source: obscenepromqueen, via ninjatengu)

After publishing an anti-pornography pledge on his website last week, Rick Santorum courted questions this weekend about how, exactly, he plans to attack smut. He didn’t make it clear and instead continued to rely on vague rhetoric about the threat to children.

On CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, he said, “Under the Bush administration, pornographers were prosecuted much more rigorously than they are … under the Obama administration.” He added, “My conclusion is they have not put a priority on prosecuting these cases, and in doing so, they are exposing children to a tremendous amount of harm. And that to me says they’re putting the unenforcement of this law and putting children at risk as a result of that.”

If one were prone to uncritical acceptance of political rhetoric, it would be easy to assume from Santorum’s remarks that the Obama administration isn’t prosecuting child porn. In all of his statements about smut, the GOP candidate is always careful to bring it back to the children. Santorum takes no care to clearly define what the threat to children is, exactly – whether it’s that they might be forced into illegal underage porn or that they might happen upon adult material online. The conflation of adult pornographers with child pornographers is a classic anti-smut move, much as child sex trafficking gets uncritically folded into debates about consensual adult sex work.

Let’s be clear here: The Obama administration continues to prosecute child pornography just as the Bush administration did. The real change is in obscenity prosecutions involving consenting adults: As I’ve written about before, the Obama administration hasn’t put a priority on these cases. Three holdover cases from the Bush years have been prosecuted, and to pathetic ends: a plea bargain with no prison time, a dismissal and, most recently, a mistrial. It’s hard to see how those cases – the very best the Department of Justice could find – were a good use of taxpayers’ dollars.

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A California woman who says she is dying from a brain tumor was kicked out of a California hospital this week for using doctor-prescribed medical marijuana.

Angel Raich told NBC Bay Area that the UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco asked her to leave after she refused to stop using the drug.

“I’m in a state university hospital in the state of California,” she explained. “And I have a right to have the same medical care that any other patient does, and [the pharmacist] says, ‘We’re going to have to ask you to leave then if you’re not going to not use your cannabis.’”

As Raich was speaking to the NBC Bay Area reporter outside of UCSF Medical Center, she had a seizure and was taken to St. Mary’s Medical Center in San Francisco.

UCSF Medical Center released statement saying that their smoke-free policy extended to marijuana use.

“Even a vaporized form of medical marijuana releases particles in the air that are damaging to the lung,” according to the statement. “Any particles from vapor and odor could have an impact on other patients and hospital employees. Under federal and state law, a physician is at legal risk related to any activity that could be construed as prescribing medical marijuana to a patient.”

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Why can’t GOP politicians trumpet their religious credentials without assaulting women?  

Because fundamentalist religion of all stripes has degradation of women at its core, and fundamentalist Christianity is no exception. Progressive Christians believe the Bible is a human document, a record of humanity’s multi-millennial struggle to understand what is good and what is God and how to live in moral community with each other. But fundamentalists believe the Bible is the literally perfect word of the Almighty, essentially dictated by God to the writers. To believe that the Bible is the literally perfect word of God is to believe that women are tainted seductresses who must be controlled by men. 

Listen to early church father Tertullian: “You [woman] are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die.”

Or take it from reformer John Calvin: “Woman is more guilty than man, because she was seduced by Satan, and so diverted her husband from obedience to God that she was an instrument of death leading to all perdition. It is necessary that woman recognize this, and that she learn to what she is subjected; and not only against her husband. This is reason enough why today she is placed below and that she bears within her ignominy and shame.”

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Of all the words one could have guessed that would completely shift the public discourse, “transvaginal” probably wouldn’t have rated very high before the month of February. Yet that simple word managed to finally draw national attention and outrage to an issue pro-choicers have been trying to highlight for years now — the anti-choice enthusiasm for passing laws requiring women seeking abortion to endure harassment ultrasounds before being allowed to abort unwanted pregnancies.

Anti-choicers claim the laws are necessary for “informed consent,” an argument that bafflingly presumes that women seeking abortions aren’t aware that they’re pregnant. Pro-choicers correctly point out that the laws are both about putting obstacles between women and abortion, and most importantly, forcing unwilling doctors to convey the legislators’ intent to shame and harass women for getting abortions. But this debate about consent and the difference between medically necessary procedures and nuisance ones was hard to get across to the general public. That is, until the word transvaginal came into the picture, after legislators in Virginia tried to join states like Texas in requiring a mandatory ultrasound for abortion.

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The Good News Club: The Stealth Assault on America’s Children by Katherine Stewart uncovers a right-wing conspiracy to infiltrate and destroy the nation’s public school system, using recent Supreme Court decisions as a lever. It’s a must-read for anyone who’s seen public school kids, perhaps their own, targeted for proselytizing by peers, teachers and adult volunteers. And for those who haven’t, it’s a wake-up call.  

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once wrote, “Religion is certainly a source of positive values, and we need as many positive values in the school as we can get.” It sounds benign. But what if the particular brand of religion is coercive, and in conflict with the teachings and values of the family of the students being targeted? It doesn’t matter. Because under the law as it stands now, evangelical churches have the right to gather, teach and proselytize in your neighborhood school. 

Spiritual Warfare in Your Neighborhood

How did it come to this? If you haven’t personally observed today’s aggressive “spiritual warfare,” it may be difficult to imagine that young children are being taught that their school is a battlefield and they are the warriors who must save their classmates from themselves. With a remarkable amount of grace and restraint, Stewart describes the havoc in communities around the nation as initiatives to evangelize public school students have increased. The effect is always the same: the polarization that results when the Good News Club shows up inevitably disrupts the ability of parents and teachers to work cooperatively as a school community. And the resulting dissension and loss of trust in the schools, says Stewart, is exactly the result the right wing has in mind.

The religious right’s big break was a 2001 Supreme Court case, The Good News Club v. Milford Central School, which unleashed a new wave of school evangelization. This decision essentially told schools they could not say no to church groups that wanted to use their facilities for after-school gatherings. Stewart describes “the new legal juggernaut of the Christian Right” —an army of legal advocacy groups, including the Alliance Defense Fund, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), Liberty Counsel, and others — that raise hundred of millions of dollars each year for the common goal of injecting stealth evangelism into public schools. They’ve spent the last 10 years figuring out how to use this decision as a wedge to maximize church control over school curricula, personnel and even the physical campus.

The spear point of this effort is the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), which was founded in 1937. For decades, CEF has run Good News Clubs — after-school Bible classes taught by church-trained mothers and pastors’ wives in suburban homes around the country. But the Supreme Court decision made it legal to bring these classes right into the schools; and the volunteers who teach them typically also volunteer as classroom aides, which gives them a mantle of school authority. To a primary-aged child, it looks as though this indoctrination is simply a part of the school curriculum.

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