I ask, because I’m genuinely unsure. And increasingly uneasy about the permanence of religious approaches to policy in the Obama administration.

From the Extremes to the Middle

As more information becomes public on Scott Roeder, the man suspected of killing ob/gyn Dr. George TIller just a few days ago as part of a politically-motivated anti-choice “hit,” we’ve heard statements from various religiously-affiliated anti-choice groups.

First, the most extreme voices:

Randall Terry of Operation Rescue decried the death of–but reserved no sympathy for–Dr. Tiller or his family, persistently naming him a “murderer” who’ll face “god’s judgment” as opposed to a skilled and valued medical professional providing a necessary and legal service to his patients. Rather self-servingly, in my opinion, Operation Rescue underscored their use of “legal” free speech means to disagree with laws that currently enable women to exercise reproductive choice in a highly personal matter. (A few of those “legal” means enumerated here.)

Kansas’ Operation Rescue president, Troy Newman, denounced Tiller’s murder as “vigilantism” and “cowardly”; many other anti-choice groups distanced themselves from the murder without criticizing the anti-choice organizations that *do* advocate violence.

At the same time, it seems there are some ties–the strength of which must be determined–between Roeder and Operation Rescue’s policy research director. That person from the organization helped Roeder track Dr. Tiller’s whereabouts in the months and weeks before his murder. Most recently, the FBI has opened an investigation into the Dr. Tiller’s murder in conjunction with the Kansas Attorney General’s office.

Army of God, an extremist group that advocates violent attack or outright killing of ob/gyns who provide women abortion services, had this to say (cited in an Institute for Southern Studies post):

“The lives of innocent babies scheduled to be murdered by George Tiller
are spared by the action of American hero Scott Roeder,” the website
states. “George Tiller the Babykiller reaped what he sowed and is now
in eternal hell.”

Those were the positions taken by the far religious right. Army of God hails Roeder as a hero.

Apparently, murderous means justify extremists’ religious ends. And the silence from leaders on the political right, bedfellows with the religious right, was deafening.

From the Middle to Common Ground

Looking around Belief.net as a sample of much more mainstream faith communities for their reactions, I was surprised to see this affirmation of Dr. Tiller as a devout Lutheran, a fact which is often discounted–as if the evangelicals or fundamentalists who oppose him “own” Christianity or morality. And I was mostly dismayed to see so many articles trying to equate the moral necessity of eradicating “baby-killers” to those who attempted to assassinate Hitler as a way to end the Holocaust. (See this incisive critique of the uses/misuses of Bonhoeffer, a powerful figure in the resistance to Hitler movement, by a former Operation Rescue activist. Contrast these Christian rhetorical uses of Bonhoeffer and the Holocaust with this progressive Jewish theologian’s view as to why abortion is not murder.) While Beliefnet.com’s readers and writers may constitute the more “moveable middle,” there’s still a bias held by many posters and commenters who believe that human life begins at conception.

In refusing to face the difficult choices women, and horribly, even some girls, must face when confronted with the need for a late-term abortion, these believers avoid unsettling facts: their God creates beings who aren’t viable, as terribly brain-damaged, malformed, or otherwise genetically aberrant late-term fetuses are not; and their God allows innocent girls to be impregnated as the result of sexual assault. Those horrific realities are the very reason why many look to religion, to explain and find comfort when we experience the inexplicable, unimaginable, and unjust. These are deep moral issues with tremendous ethical implications. But women and girls in dire situations can’t wait for religion’s ability to adequately address all theological and moral dimensions–they need the immediate solutions that medicine offers and law guarantees. Why? Because not everyone lives by the same beliefs, and even shared beliefs do not say one thing–Dr. Tiller offered a chapel at his clinic for clients who wanted to grieve or perhaps needed consolation in a religious way. He himself was a devout Christian and believer in choice.

BUT. Even as we move away from the extremist voices of pro-lifers, and the extremes of abnormal fetal development that spur women to consider late-term abortion, we have to realize that these are also extremes in incidence.

Those late-term or mercy abortions that draw vocal protest from Operation Rescue and others are rare happenings. According to an NPR news story, mercy abortions numbered “about 2200…or about 0.2 percent of the 1.3 million abortions believed to be performed” in the year 2000. The majority of abortions take place well within the first trimester; many many far fewer are barely pubescent girls who through shame, no one to turn to, or ignorance are pregnant as a result of rape. In fact, women who seek abortions in largest numbers are women who already have one or more child.

I believe it’s these very people in the moveable middle who can and should be most aggressively acting to reduce the need for first-term abortion by supporting changes in adoption law and fixes to the foster system so more children can find permanent homes. They are precisely the ones, you would think, who would be working hardest to educate young women and men about the difficulty of becoming parents at an early age and toiling to prevent teen parenthood.

And for all the outcry against Planned Parenthood clinics who purportedly fail to report underage girls pregnant as a result of rape, WHERE are anti-choice efforts to educate and protect girls and boys against sexual assault and prosecute the sex offenders? For that matter, where were churches, temples, and synagogues when religious leaders abused children and women in houses of worship, as they worshipped? These, unlike the allegations of unreported rape by family planning clinics, are actual, documented incidences of sexual abuse by priests, rabbis, and monks.

To my mind you cannot have any legitimacy to attack family planning clinics for supposedly covering up underage rape if within your own denomination, the same exact abuses occurred and WORSE, the religious hierarchies covered up these abuses and allowed perpetrators to continue to abuse children over decades.

Religious people who seek to limit other people’s actions on moral grounds need to look to their own houses before attacking others.

We need to stop being defined by the extremes.

This is a plurally-faithed nation, including the belief that no god exists.

With that in mind, as a person committed to reproductive justice, I see the challenge to open-minded adherents of various faiths as this. If we agree that it’d be good to reduce the need for abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancies, then I’d like to see what people of various faiths are doing along these lines:

With the exception, possibly, of the last three points, Planned Parenthood and other reproductive justice groups already provide counseling and services to women who need them. Choice means you know and understand the full range of options available to you. Other philanthropies, both religious and a-religious, have worked to further better and ethical adoptions and valuing the responsibilities of fatherhood.

There is nothing incompatible with working to prevent teen or unintended pregnancy and the belief that
life begins at conception.

But when there’s much abstraction over misappropriated metaphors such as the
civil rights movement or the Holocaust, and not enough vilification of religious extremists by religious moderates, I see much hypocrisy and downright inaction in the areas that single-issue people of faith profess to care about. Until preventing unwanted pregnancy and advocating for better maternal-child wellness programs or on behalf of children of adoption have as much energetic activism and strident vocalization as is given to hating, harming, and intimidating pro-choice doctors, I’m given to understand that “right-to-life” often means moral cover to control women by controlling their fertility.

Pro-choice is lawful. “Pro-life” has verged on lawlessness. Common ground must be made on the side of respecting the law.

President Obama’s Vision of Common Ground

When Obama revamped the Office of Faith-Based Neighborhoods and Partnerships and appointed Joshua DuBois its head, he fully expected this office to work with the relevant Cabinet-level heads of Education, Health and Human Services,
Housing and Urban Development, and Veterans Affairs.

In that respect, it’s too late to argue that the Office of Faith Based Neighborhoods and Partnerships be abolished. (That would be my personal preference.) To my disappointment, that horse has long left the barn.

From the announcement of the staffing of the post:

The Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will focus
on four key priorities, to be carried out by working closely with the
Presidents Cabinet Secretaries and each of the eleven agency offices
for faith-based and neighborhood partnerships:

• The Offices top priority will be making community groups
  an integral part of our economic recovery and poverty a burden fewer
  have to bear when recovery is complete.
• It will be one
  voice among several in the administration that will look at how we
  support women and children, address teenage pregnancy, and reduce the
  need for abortion.
• The Office will strive to support
  fathers who stand by their families, which involves working to get
  young men off the streets and into well-paying jobs, and encouraging
  responsible fatherhood.
• Finally, beyond American shores
  this Office will work with the National Security Council to foster
  interfaith dialogue with leaders and scholars around the world.

As the priorities of this Office are carried out, it will be done in
a way that upholds the Constitution by ensuring that both existing
programs and new proposals are consistent with American laws and
values. The separation of church and state is a principle President
Obama supports firmly not only because it protects our democracy, but
also because it protects the plurality of Americas religious and civic
life. The Executive Order President Obama will sign today strengthens
this by adding a new mechanism for the Executive Director of the Office
to work through the White House Counsel to seek the advice of the
Attorney General on difficult legal and constitutional issues.

I’ve highlighted the areas that serve as the Obama administration’s ground rules for engagement.

Currently, my layperson’s understanding is that the Constitution recognizes a privacy right via Roe v. Wade for a woman in her first trimester to select abortion as one of many ways to attend to her reproductive health; state laws can amend all that’s unstated by this as local communities see fit. The Constitution also recognizes the value of separating church from state. Put simply, the religious tenets of one faith should not be made the law of the land for others to be subject to, especially if others do not share that faith.

The law of the land is currently pro-choice in orientation. Anti-choice extremists are precisely that, extremists who use violence to further their goals. When politically-motivated assassination is acceptable, that’s not a legitimate pole of debate.

If we understand finding common ground to mean meeting from between reasonable poles of opinion, then we do not concede ground to religious extremists or recognize them as representing legitimate poles of debate. Instead, we’re engaging a range of positions that people can take on the spectrum of choice. Choice does not automatically mean abortion. Choice means abortion as one of a range of options, including pregnancy prevention and adoption, available to a woman who wants to control IF she should have a child, and if so, how many.

I see these strong admonishments as President Obama’s method to curb use of the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships as a means to promote abstinence-only education, a highly politicized approach under former President Bush. (See the introductory part of this nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute study, Matter of Faith: Support for Comprehensive Sex Education Among Faith-Based Organizations, for a description of abstinence-only programs and funding between 2000-2008.)

Instead, President Obama invites faith-based solutions that can observe the above legal parameters to come forward and present solutions to the narrowly-defined problem of unwanted pregnancies as part of reproductive health: preventing the need for abortion among those who risk pregnancy due to lack of information, for example.

It might be tempting to say, there are no sex education programs that would comply with Roe v. Wade as the law of the land and observe a bright line between church and state. Or at least there are no progressive approaches to faith-based sex education. But offhand, I can identify two.

From Common Ground to Action

The Unitarian Universalist Church and the United Church of Christ have joined to create developmentally appropriate education for children and teens that teaches about physical maturation, bodily boundaries, emerging and fully-formed sexualities, and specific components that address sex education and Christian faith. The series is called Our Whole Lives, and addresses spiritual, emotional, and physical dimensions of sexuality and sexual health across the entire life cycle from infancy to death.

The Union for Reform Judaism developed a program in 2005 called Sacred Choices: Adolescent Relationships and Ethical Choices. This program offers teaching from 6th-12th grade, with components for parents, and are integrated into summer youth camp settings as well as synagogue-based learning. This approach places emphasis on age-appropriate boundaries for sexual expression, use of drugs and alcohol, and other behaviors that have long-lasting, if not permanent, impact on a young person’s life.

These aren’t some cheesy, mandatory, hair-raising programs viewed with resistance and embarrassment by teens and their parents; rather, when surveyed

The Christian Community in 2000…[found] more than 5,800 teens from 635
congregations (mostly Protestant, but also from Roman Catholic,
Unitarian, Jewish and Islamic congregations)… [or] a large
majority of teenagers say they often do not receive the information
they need and want from their faith communities. Nine in 10 teens felt
that the information on sexual decision-making they had received from
their congregation was not adequate, and fewer than 14% indicated they
had received any significant information on contraception, preventing
sexually transmitted infections, rape and homosexuality.

The advantage mosques, temples, synagogues and churches have to presenting sex education, versus school-provided programs, is that they can often address these issues in the context of the entire family. This may be reassuring to parents for several reasons: 1) the religious leader is one the parent has specifically chosen and/or sees with greater frequency and duration than the public school teacher in charge of sex ed, 2) there’s room for both parent peer-to-peer and teen peer-to-peer discussions of the material, ensuring that individual and community standards can always be balanced, 3) parents have support from their religious leader talking about difficult subjects to their kids, as do kids in talking to their parents, 4) the context for sexual expression is spirituality, a dimension that may be missing in the secular/pop culture world’s treatment of the same subject.

I’m not arguing against sex education as taught as part of public school health curricula. Not at all. As a atheist, I’m absolutely looking for a secular, science-based presentation of human sexuality and reproductive health taught through my child’s public school. I fully expect to supplement what my child’s taught with my own values. I simply think it’s fair to acknowledge that an enlightened religious approach to fact-based, scientifically-supported education about human sexual health can augment what young people–actually, people of all ages–learn about reproductive health to make decisions that profoundly affect them.

With that, I’d like to see the White House Presidential Council on Women and Girls, and the Office of Faith Based Neighborhoods and Partnerships step up in the wake of Dr. Tiller’s death. Together, those two offices should turn the nation’s destructive obsession with faith and reproduction to instead illuminate the work of faith communities who are capable of offering programs within the guidelines President Obama set out, and to illuminate the gaping need for more work to reduce the need for abortion from people who claim their faith is important to them.

These offices had been quietly working behind the scenes to forge true common ground prior to Dr. Tiller’s murder. But the challenge I see is that any religious progressive who gives lip service to social justice must also account for the ways the betterment of women’s lives through decisions concerning their own fertility is central to any definition of social justice. Environmentalism, or “creation care,” is meaningless if the personal burdens of overpopulation and the overall impact too many people place on the planet are not accounted for through a woman’s exercise of her reproductive rights. Attempts to alleviate poverty are incomplete without recognition that a woman whose resources are taxed from forced procreation of child after child is likeliest to suffer from poverty.

Religions that proclaim a social justice orientation must contend with the absolutely central role of a woman’s right to choose as an integral part of social justice. Mostly male leaders of these progressive movements within evangelical Christianity, progressive Islam or Buddhism, leaders such as Revs Joshua DuBois, Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, and Jim Hunter, need to address this sooner rather than later.

And the lack of a feminist definition of social justice isn’t just limited to men. With this in mind, I challenge President Obama’s latest appointee to the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the Department of Health and Human Services, Alexia Kelley, to act in accord with the law of the land, Roe v Wade. I’m calling for Ms. Kelley to publicly acknowledge that while she may have personal misgivings about the prevalence of abortion that lead her to support “waiting periods and informed consent” or personal beliefs that life begins at conception, that she should nevertheless recognize that not all faiths accept this tenet.

I’m calling on Kelley to act in accord with Constitutionally-protected privacy rights and in keeping with the separation of church and state–and that reducing access to abortion through the numerous arms of the Department of Health and Human Services is completely unacceptable. She should be asked to reconcile the fact that waiting periods and informed consent are an added and inconvenient delay to the women seeking abortion when timeliness is of the essence. Kelley should be closely monitored to ensure that she can cooperate on the following goals, set out by Catholics for Choice, for example:

• comprehensive and medically accurate sexuality
  education,
• increased funding for family planning services,
• expanded
  Medicaid coverage for family planning,
• accessibility of emergency
  contraception for rape victims,
• and insurance coverage for
  contraception

I’m also asking Joshua DuBois to extend his reach to progressive faith communities, such as the UUA and URJ programs named above, who offer programs that are in keeping with Obama’s guidelines. A public statement of his commitment to put faith communities in service to our current laws regarding privacy and separation of church and state would be reassuring. Best of all would be his inclusion of feminist theologians in key positions of responsibility for whom the centrality of women’s well-being will be at the forefront of any progressive faith movement, or any understanding of social justice. Because a progressive faith movement that lacks feminist analysis is incomplete, and dangerously allows the opinions of men to vastly overshadow the decisions women must make about their own bodies.

And I urge that all faith communities turn within to find answers to the question: are we doing enough inside our own communities to keep our children safe from sexual predators even if that predator is a priest, rabbi, Buddhist monk, or other person entrusted with contact with young people taught to trust them? As vexatious and unpleasant as it may be to contemplate, educating youth so they can understand and protect themselves against violation from adults in positions of authority over them is also a part of ensuring their sexual health. Church hierarchies that defend sexual predators must heal themselves of this abhorrent and worldly tolerance of misused power. And this will not, and cannot, be addressed by projecting one’s own fears onto other communities.

Will the “Joshua generation’s” commitment to anti-poverty, eradicating global climate crisis, and anti-war efforts outgrow its Oedipal struggle with an older generation of evangelicals, and come to embrace a feminist analysis of anti-poverty that makes women’s decision-making in family planning a keystone of poverty elimination? To put it another way, forced procreation for women can lead them to a sentence of compulsory poverty and diminished goals, aspirations, and accomplishments. How is this just?

Will mainstream denominations take up the challenge? Are mega-churches all showbiz and personality, two things their adherents often criticize the president for, or do they mean to be part of the solution?

These religious communities have stepped up in concrete ways to reduce the need for abortion, just one of many choices available to women, with programs that emphasize contraception, sex education in prevention of unintended pregnancies, and expansion of access to the widest possible range of affordable family planning services:

Catholics for Choice
Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
Unitarian Univeralist Association
Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom

Who’s next?

Cynematic, an atheist, believes each person should be responsible for his or her own immortal soul only. As this post contains incendiary opinions, she’d like to emphasize her responsibility for its content as well. She blogs at P i l l o w b o o k.

Gratitude to @saraposner for the LAT “common ground” assessment, @amandamarcotte for the Democratic Party platform, @karoli for the Bonhoeffer post.

Excerpt from:
What’s The Role for Religion in Reducing the Need for/Number of Abortions?

The MOMocrats welcome guest poster Miguelina who has a few things to say about the nasty tactics the GOP is using to try to smear Sonia Sotomayor. Playing the racist card? You better come correct.

To Understand Takes Time and Effort, Something that Not All People Are Willing To Give

Anyways.

Here is the offending statement:

First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second,
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a
white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Let us not forget
that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on
cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society.
Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a
gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we
should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different
experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values
and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As
Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court
in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including
Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give.

Does this sound like a racist to you? I get that
“racist” is a charge that is guaranteed to get you press, but it also
makes you look desperate when it is thrown about so cheaply.

(And
yes, Hispanic is not a race, but the concept is clearly too difficult
for people to understand right now. Let’s keep things simple.)

Read the complete speech here and make up your own mind.

Cross-posted from Miguelina.

MOMocrats welcomes guest posts from progressive, fired-up mamas. Got something to say? Submit your post or story ideas to momocrats@gmail.com.

See original here:
Guest MOMocrats Post by Miguelina: Calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist? Make sure you have the facts first.

This is G. Gordon Liddy.

Yesterday, G. Gordon Liddy said on his conservative talk radio show that SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor was a member of La Raza, “which means in illegal alien, ‘The Race.’”

WOW. There’s now a language called “illegal alien.”

And then he said:

Now, take a second look at the picture above. Does that look like a man who knows anything about Latinos, women, or Latinas? Female reproductive cycles? Common sense?

Obviously, no.

A few conservative politicians have issued tepid reprimands.

What I want to know is–where are the conservatives who howled that Sarah Palin was being treated in sexist fashion? Where are the conservative women–Republican Latinas, even, if such people exist–who are decrying this ridiculous Neanderthal racism and sexism as something that should crawl back to the stone age where it belongs?

Feel free to leave any examples of right-wing outrage at what Liddy said in the comments. I’m curious to see if there are any.

They don’t even have to be wingnuts. They could be members of the media.

For example, if anyone sees Campbell Brown declaring “Free Sonia Sotomayor,” like she did for Sarah Palin, please let me know.

So far?

I mostly hear crickets.

Cynematic blogs at P i l l o w b o o k.

See the original post here:
Funny, G. Gordon Liddy Doesn’t Look Like An Expert on Women’s Health

Moderators: Jaelithe Judy, Julie Pippert, Joanne Bamberger & Cynematic of MOMocrats

Fem2.0 Twittercast: Feminism is Where You Are/What You Do
Sunday, May 24, 2009, 10 PM EST
We’ll be using Cover-it-Live to live chat (more than 140 characters allowed, hurray!) and also pull in tweets from Twitter tagged #fem2.

Today, we’re joining up with the folks at Fem2.0 to continue the discussion from last week, which started with the discussion of feminism, moms who blog, the feminist blogosphere, and what intersection there is among all three.

To start the conversation, we have a beautiful post by a GrandMOMocrat (who happens to be MOMocrat Jaelithe’s mother). Please read the lovely essay by Diana Harvestmoon-Stewart about combining motherhood, feminism, and activism.

It may shed new light on the previous Fem2pt0 conversation, which was framed here: “Mommies and Feminists: the Great Divide.”

Here’s how we’ve framed the Fem2pt0 chat for this week:

Cynematic says:

No matter where we are in our respective life cyclesraising children or choosing to be childfree, a young adult or older woman, mother to boys or girls, caretaker of the generations before youif youre a feminist, youve probably brought that sensibility with you to your activism.

We want to turn the question on end a little. What are you active in, and how does that inform your feminism? Where are you
geographically, so you can connect with others on the chat? What do you need to do your work? How would your work be different if there was a critical mass of feminists there? Or is that already the case?

Lets move off labels, identities, and the preconceptions that can come attached to those. Lets find as many different feminisms as we can through the kinds of way its practiced.

More food for thought: feminisms in the context of family or community, Naomi Wolf

<a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&task=viewaltcast&altcast_code=01778c3439" >Fem2-MOMocrats Live Chat: Feminism is Where You Are/What You Do</a>

Originally posted here:
Fem2.0-MOMocrats Live Chat: Feminism is Where You Are/What You Do

Washington Post writer Del Quentin Wilber penned today’s piece regarding the federal appeals court that upheld Judge Gladys Kessler’s original finding for the tobacco industry, namely, that they “violated civil racketeering laws by lying to the public about the dangers of their product.”

(The article ought to be read in its entirety because it’s outrageous and, frankly, totally gross.)

So, if you’re a tobacco-industry company and your industry is, pardon the lame-ass pun, going up in flames, what with all the recent banning by states of smoking in public, where do you turn for your next big infusion of profit?

TO THE (ignorant, easily-preyed-upon) KIDS!!

Senator Merkley, my state’s freshman senator of AWESOME, however, is on the job. To wit: keeping the ‘baccy bums from giving out tobacco candy, yes, TOBACCO CANDY, to our children, through an (already-approved) amendment, the Merkley/Brown amendment, to the Senate Health Committee; it provides the FDA with the legal authority to regulate tobacco products, and none too soon. The candies have already been introduced in three markets: Indianapolis, Indiana, Columbus, Ohio, and my town, Portland, Oregon. (Brazen.) And get this tidbit: according to the bulletin sent to me by Mr. Merkley’s media director, Sarah Lane Pierle, the companies producing this poison are overtly canvassing our kids.

With brightly colored packages and candy flavors, its
obvious that these products are attractive to children. The
packages are actually shaped like cell phones to make them easier to hide from
parents and teachers. And from a short distance, both the packages and
tablets resemble mint containers. Janitors are already finding used
packages in schools.

The Indiana Poison Control Center estimates that dissolvable
tobacco products like the Camel Orbs contain between 60 to 300 percent of
the nicotine in one cigarette.

Here’s a video featuring the Senator as he discusses the nature of the product during a recent Q&A:

Thank you, Senator, for doing your job so well. The future of our kids’ health depends on such legislation.

Read more from the original source:
Tobacco Companies: Convicted of Violating Civil Racketeering, Moving on to Do Same (or Worse) For the Next Generation. RAD.

Yesterday, I read this article, “Raising the Baby Question,” at The Nation. I was steamed in a way I haven’t been in a long time. Here comes this young (24 year old) reporter who writes an article with outrageous claims. Nona Willis Aronowitz, the writer, posits this theory: feminist writers ignore mother and family issues, and mother and family writers ignore feminist issues.

She cites a few blogs, books, and Web sites, which she claims proves her point.

Even though they don’t, really, and she ignores a huge, active population of women who are feminist and family writers who are actively not just writing about but are also doing something about feminism, politics, and family issues.

Case in point: the MOMocrats.

We are merely one among many, including: WomenCount, BlogHer, MomsRising, PunditMom, Political Voices of Women, The Girl Revolution, the late great Moms Speak Up, and more, including the many individuals who contribute their voices at group sites and personal sites. Just check out the Just Posts, for example, to see a lengthy list of women writers—some mothers, some not—who are delving into issues related to feminism, politics, social justice, life as a woman, life as a mother, and more. I became involved with the MOMocrats, in fact, because I was blogging so often about these topics at my personal blog, and had, through that, connected with both the Just Posts and Political Voices of Women.

Nevertheless, Willis Aronowitz claims that, “There’s a palpable disconnect between these two worlds [mother and feminist], and it’s
starting to worry me.”

Actually, that’s dead wrong.

I don’t think Willis Aronowitz means to be totally incorrect in an article on a national site.

I think she just missed a lot of relevant information.

Her side point, the one she ought to have pursued, is dead on, though, “Most feminist mom organizations and websites like Sistas
on the Rise or Hip Mama are
local and grassroots, often excluded from
discussions of feminism in the national media.”

Too true.

However, national media—collapsing under its own auspice currently—isn’t the end all be all, and grassroots organizations have a wonderful outreach.

Can it be bigger? Should it be bigger? Yes.

That doesn’t affect, however, how empowering and effecting it feels when a fellow mother at my daughter’s school catches me one morning to say, “My friends and I, we hate the news, but oh we love MOMocrats, read it every day!”

At MOMocrats, we cover news, national news, local news, policy news, economic news, all sorts of news, including news of interest to women, such as female candidates, family leave, health care, the environment, and more.

But those aren’t women’s issues. Those are all of us issues, my friends, it’s just that women happen to care more about them and tend to get involved to do something to improve those situations.

More than just writing and talking about feminism, though, MOMocrats (and others) are acting within the mother, political activist sphere. We may not have been offered a national stage, so we built our own. That’s what women do. Now we are out there, doing.

That’s activism.

Women who are mothers are not, as Willis Aronowitz erroneously implies, too busy to be activists. She disproves her own implication, in fact, when she concedes that mom blogging is a revolutionary act, as is political mom blogging and feminist mom blogging. It’s true that financially struggling mothers, single mothers, and so forth may have to sacrifice some forms of activism, but what Willis Aronowitz doesn’t seem to grasp is that motherhood is, in and of itself, activism and revolutionary.

Those single mothers may not have the time or venue to grab a national stage and talk all about feminism, but when they raise their children according to their personal values, they produce a new generation that will be more voices talking about family issues such as health care, maternity leave, and support for parents. When my friend, a single parent who is financially struggling, explains the challenges she faces getting health care for her children, she is being an activist, even though it’s me who calls our state senator and demands action.

In fact, all mothers are, in some way, activists.Their contribution just might be invisible or overlooked—this happens way too often, as Willis Aronowitz’s article proves.

As an activist who is politically involved, I have also found that society is not quite as kid unfriendly as parents might fear. Our co-founder and editor, Glennia Campbell recently said, “My kid got dragged around to so many political events last year he
thinks Al Franken is a relative of ours and that we have Obama on
speed-dial.”

That’s funny. It’s also funny that in a school report about “what mom and dad do” my seven year old wrote, “Dads go to work and moms go to political meetings.”

It’s funny, but important to consider, too, that my children have been to Town Halls and sat through meetings with Congressmen, have attended political debates, accompanied me to vote, started the first day of school with Dad instead of me because I was in Denver at the national convention, been to local political groups, kissed me good night before I left to attend a 10 p.m. meeting at a bar, and more.

That’s activism. That’s a palpable connection between mothering and feminism.

It’s also a palpable connection between mothering, fathering and feminism.

Willis Aronowitz makes a good point when she said, “. . .dads need to be part of the conversation. Whether or
not fathers live with their families, they are routinely excluded from
parenting and discussions surrounding it. Nearly every woman I
interviewed for this piece seems convinced that once we garner a
critical mass of men, parenting issues will be taken more seriously. The
more allies mothers have, the more mainstream these issues will become.”

Absolutely, but we need to not discount that many men are involved, and they are frequently included in parenting and discussions surrounding it. Can there be more? Should there be more? Absolutely.

But in my family, my efforts are possible because of my husband, and his part and support. I’ve interviewed countless candidates—men too—who are very devoted to issues affecting the status of families in the United States.

We don’t always agree, though, about what should be done. My elected members of Congress, for example, don’t think parents deserve leave, family leave protections, or health care reform. Well, I have to exclude Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison from that last one, because she is a heavy advocate for health care reform.

However, let’s not confuse disagreement and “outside my sphere” for “not happening.” That’s the biggest issue I have with Willis Aronowitz’s article: it seems that she thinks because she’s not in it, it’s not happening, and because it’s not everywhere, it’s not effective, and because moms are busy and not involved in large numbers in the same model of activism that she is, they are not doing anything.

Wrong.

Still, Aronowitz gets a lot right: the national media and culture at large does need to pay more attention and give more respect to women and mothers and all that they do. We do need to provide a better framework that is more supportive of parents.

Willis Aronowitz has a clue.

But like I told my little girl while we read the Nancy Drew mysteries together recently, “A clue is one piece of the puzzle. You have to seek out more clues of what is, rather than what you assume. Then you can see the whole picture.”

Talk outside your own sphere.

Then we can talk about what is, rather than what someone erroneously thinks isn’t.

Mothers are activists. Parenting is part of the feminist discussion. Feminism is a huge part of the parenting discussion.

The real question is why young feminists who aren’t yet mothers aren’t turning to and listening to the older women, many of whom are mothers. Is it a misapplication of severing the apron strings? Or is it the arrogance that moms aren’t anything beyond a vessel to raise children, the arrogant assumption the young and childless so frequently make? The assumption, also very arrogant and ignorant, that mom becomes the woman’s identity, and that mothering isn’t anything beyond serving? Is it that childish inability to comprehend a parent as anything beyond a parent? Is it the typical lack of understanding we all have before becoming parents about how very revolutionary parenting is?

In addition to that question—which will probably never change because you need to get older to realize how very much you do not know, and you need to become a parent to truly understand all that it involves—the real issue we need to discuss is along the lines of something Ann Friedman questioned today, “Is the niche-ification of the Internet amplifying or ghettoizing women’s voices?“

I think what we really need to discuss—what Willis Aronowitz is actually picking up on, and is a very valid worry—is whether the niche-ification of women, mothers, women’s issues, parenting issues and feminism is amplifying or ghettoizing women’s voices.

Like I said earlier, women weren’t offered a stage, so we built our own. Has this given us a better venue? Or has it marginalized us more?

Read more here:
Double X Double Slam: Women, Mothers Marginalized More Than Ever?