Friday, October 19, 2007 - Posts
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Alas, Dahlia, if you’re looking for a good argument for allowing condoms and not prescription birth control, I’m bound to disappoint. I somehow missed the info that the district has been passing out condoms for so long. At the risk of sounding like a fuddy-duddy (but to avoid being sexist) allow me to clarify: I’m not in favor of ANY school-sponsored birth control for 10- or 11-year-olds, for either boys or girls. Schools should not be condoning sex between middle-schoolers. Here’s a question: If a 12-year-old gets a prescription for the pill so she can have sex with her 17-year-old boyfriend, is the school contributing to statutory rape? And the flip side: If a school-provided condom breaks and a 12-year-old boy gets his girlfriend pregnant, is the school responsible? I smell lawsuit …
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Emily, you genius! Now that is the way to warm Hillary up for the true swing voter: get her out there single again, dating, and vulnerable. (I could see her with Mitt Romney, but never mind.) She would lose none of benefit of having been Mrs. Bill Clinton, and all those women who think she’s too calculating would have to admit that even such a well-deserved midlife reinvention in midcampaign is bold.
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I have been gaga over the Sarkozys and I love the idea that Cecelia is a role model. We shouldn't demand more from our first spouses. We should demand less. Or nothing at all.
A Hillary question from Rudy Giuliani. He said:
"Honestly, in most respects, I don't know Hillary's experience. She's never run a city, she's never run a state. She's never run a business. She has never met a payroll. She has never been responsible for the safety and security of millions of people, much less even hundreds of people. So I'm trying to figure out where the experience is here. It would seem to me that in a time of difficult problems and war we don't want on the job training for an executive..."
A fair criticism of most senators running for president, it seems to me. But isn't Hillary a solid exception to that rule, given her experience in the White House?
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The National Women’s Law Center and the Oregon Health & Science University released a truly grim report on Wednesday. Women’s health care in the U.S. is unsatisfactory overall, and no state earned a “satisfactory” grade for women’s health.
The two groups measured women’s health in all 50 states and D.C. by using 27 benchmarks (ranging from rates of obesity to routine breast cancer screening) designated by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Healthy People 2010 campaign. Only three of the benchmarks were met – women receiving regular dental, colorectal cancer screening for women over 50, and the percentage of women 40 and older getting mammograms. Among the 24 unmet goals: rates of obesity and diabetes are way up. In Mississippi (which was ranked last for women’s health overall), the report states that 31.5 percent of women are obese.
It's also discouraging that results varied significantly by race. The report found that 85.7 percent of white women received prenatal care, compared with 75.9 percent of blacks.
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Rachael, your post on the decision of a Portland, Maine, middle school to allow students to get prescription birth control without parental notification was prescient. Everyone’s gone bonkers toady and O’Reilly is hardly even the most unhinged. (Best line from O’Reilly’s post today “It is ironic that the week my book "Cultural Warrior" comes out in paperback, intense culture battles erupt across the country.”) Imagine, Bill’s book comes out in paperback and culture battles happen in America!!!
I agree with you Rachael that there is something ick-inducing about giving birth control pill to 10-year-olds. But I am still not hearing any good argument for how this differs from handing out condoms – something the school had been doing for eight years. Is it the difference between providing birth control to girls instead of boys? Is it O’Reilly’s distinction that condoms prevent disease whereas pills prevent “only” pregnancy? Or is there something about offering someone else’s child a pill that makes the Portland scheme more intrusive?
Largely agree with Anne and Ms. Thatcher, but a quick note on yesterday’s blog criticism: It’s bizarre to me to hear that Slate is somehow better for the “Feminist Project” without a women’s blog than with it. It’s even harder to fathom how our women writers are better “feminists” if they avoid discussing women’s issues. Is this some new half-starved Beverly Hills feminism: Do everything you can to present yourself as less of a person than you actually are?
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Regarding the quick dissolution of the Sarkozy marriage, a several decade melodrama -- this seems like something Hillary should be contemplating. When people really start envisioning both Clintons back in the White House, wouldn't it be better if instead Bill just went away, saying he, like Cecelia Sarkozy, preferred "jogging in Central Park" to being First Spouse? It's almost Elizabethan to imagine a President Hillary dating Nicholas Sarkozy. (I'd prefer to see her with the ultimate boomer dream date, Paul McCartney.)
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Or at least appears to be, I guess that makes things easier for the Creation Museum. Now they only have to choose between Tancredo and Huckabee for their '08 endorsement.
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Personally, I try to follow the example of a very famous woman in politics, Margaret Thatcher, who never read what newspapers wrote about her, ever, in principle. Which was just as well, because it was usually nasty. My only objection in the early reviews was the word "feminist." I don't see it anywhere in the tag "slate women blog about politics, etc". While I'm happy to use the word about myself some of the time, I'm not at all happy with much of the baggage that comes with it. And I don't see why a bunch of women talking to one another is necessarily a "feminist" project. I had assumed it would be more like the all-women dinner parties I started giving a few years ago, when I realized how much fun they were.
Now, on to what everybody in my neck of the woods is talking about: the Sarkozy divorce. Cecelia Sarkozy has shown so little enthusiasm for being the wife of the president of France that it warms my heart: Asked by one interviewer what she saw herself doing in ten years, she replied "I see myself ... jogging in Central Park." Implying, of course, that she doesn't even fancy living in Paris, let alone being French First Lady. It's hard to tell whether the lack of enthusiasm was for the job or for the husband - both she and he have had very public affairs, he with a well-known journalist (unthinkable in most countries, no?). But even if they are no longer married, I still like the precedent being set here. At last, the wife of a very senior Western politician who chose to play no public role whatsoever: no tree-planting, no campaigning, no hostessing, no health-care-policy-writing! The only comparable spouse is the husband of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who gets on with his job in molecular chemistry and doesn't appear on TV. That's what I call a truly independent, liberated spouse.
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