brethren priestess online

To: Jeff Vandergrift and Dan Lay

Re: ‘prank’ against Chinese restaurant and its waitresses

CC: Don Imus

Making sexist, racist jokes on air is not funny. You are not oppressed. Resign and stop making free speech look bad.
Thank you.

Voice of the People
Chicago Tribune

Re: Virginia Tech Tragedy

Dear Voice of the People,

We all mourn for the students senselessly massacred at Virginia Tech.
But where is the mourning for the American soldiers of similar age, a
similar number of whom are killed every week in Iraq? The Bush regime
even refuses to allow photographs of the caskets of American soldiers
who sacrificed their lives. The Virginia tragedy was a freakish event
that could not have been predicted. In contrast, we know with
certainty that dozens of Americans and hundreds of Iraqis will die
every month as long as Bush’s War continues. The American people have
spoken clearly and demand an end to the Iraq Disaster. Let us fly our
flags at half-mast until Congress does its job and shuts down the Iraq
War. If this means impeaching Bush (for lying to Congress to get the
war approved, for advocating torture, and for refusing to act on a
Congressional mandate to stop the war), so much the better.

Much can and should be said about the sadness of the violence at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg this week, but what I would say is to share my sadness and fear about my own mortality as a student. Schools should be safe places, as our Commander in Chief stated this week. Many/most/all places on Earth should be.

But schools fill a particular purpose in society, which makes the murders there all the harder to bear. Schools are the places where we go to develop ourselves in order to go into the world, to make a difference in our futures, and the students killed this week never got that chance. Their lives ended while they were just learning who they were to be in the world, before they got to use all they had been learning to become.

The lives of these victims, however long or short, were full, and blessings to the world. And death is not, inherently, evil; in fact, death should be a blessed part of the experience of life. But when death is perverted to take away the blessings of life, before their time, be it in war or in campus massacres, it is our Christian and human duty to rage against this violence. And rage starts with the deep knowing of mind-and-heart-felt mourning.

5 April 2007

Dear Funny Times;

I read with increasing disappointment the column by Garrison Keillor in the April 2007 issue of your paper (page three), “Giuliani’s Dress Rehearsal.” Keillor has been getting himself into trouble lately with his small-minded statements, and I had hoped he would avoid such gaffes in this article, but instead, he confirmed my conclusion that he is as much a part of the problem – that of certain, supposedly-patriotic Americans fostering oppression and hate, specifically against women, queer people, and sexual minorities – as the conservative leaders he claims to critique.

I, too, have a problem with Rudy Giuliani’s choice to parade around in a dress at in 2000 - but not for the same reasons as Keillor. Further, I have a problem with Keillor’s problems with Giuliani’s choice.

I do NOT have a problem with elected leaders having some fun, and in fact, I think they should have fun, when it is in the bounds of ethical conduct (practically assessed as anything they would not mind telling their electorate they had done). Fun keeps them human. I like fun. That’s why I subscribe to your paper.

Also, I do NOT have a problem with any person choosing to wear the clothing that has been socially-assigned to a particular gender. The assignment of dresses and pantyhose and makeup and earrings to women is a completely arbitrary, and ultimately fluid, choice of the white, middle-class and elite culture in the United States. It is not dictated by anything about the physiological composition of the people wearing the clothes. I fully support people ignoring those social assignments, and wearing whatever clothes they feel most comfortable or attractive wearing. The strict enforcement of these social dress codes is oppressive and a waste of time.

I DO have a problem with people wearing clothes that they specifically identify with another gender than their own, for the purpose of mocking people who choose to ‘cross-dress’ as a way of life or of best expressing themselves. It is rude and insensitive and snotty to make light of someone else’s identity by mocking them. I have a problem with the culturally-acceptable teasing and harassment of transgendered persons, which serves as a means to enforce the rigidly gendered clothing categorizations for all people, male and female as well as transgendered.

And thus, I have a BIG problem with Keillor’s blanket demonization of men who wear dresses, bras, makeup, high-heeled shoes, or any of the other trappings that have been randomly segregated as ‘women’s (only) clothing.’ Some men who wear ‘women’s clothing’ are doing so in an offensive way, but certainly not all are, and Keillor’s failure to differentiate the two groups, and his further assertion of a ‘White House dress code,’ are patently offensive to someone who would like to agree with his castigation of Giuliani’s campaign.

His narrow constraints on the ‘gender-appropriate’ attire for an occupant of the White House seem ludicrously sexist as well as heterosexist. He describes the ‘White House dress code’ he would support for Giuliani: “Trousers with legs and shoes without heels. No pantyhose. Makeup only for TV appearances…” etc. Unfortunately, Keillor doesn’t clearly state that he means this dress code only for Giuliani, and comes across as demanding a ‘cross-dressing’ dress code for female presidents (if he would even allow women out of the kitchen to run for president of his ‘old-fashioned’ ‘free world’). Even if he had bothered to articulate a dress code for female candidates, which he apparently didn’t see as viable enough to mention, it is discouraging that he would rather spend his time critiquing a candidate’s fashion choices as critiquing their policies. The constant cataloging of the clothing of women in elected office and wives of male politicians has long been the means of subjugating all women and setting these particular women apart as less deserving of serious consideration as political figures. The ascendancy of Rep. Nancy Pelosi should serve as a reminder to Keillor that women are real politicians, too, even though they wear dresses sometimes.

Perhaps Keillor thinks he is only demeaning Giuliani. He isn’t. He is insulting all people who see through the flimsy constraints that gendered clothing are, and choose to express their rejection of these constraints through personal choice of attire. That includes me when I, a ‘female,’ wear a dress shirt and tie, as much as it includes my male friends when they wears skirts or dresses. This is not strange. The rigidly binary classification of humans into genders is strange.

I for one would love to live in a country run by someone who had experienced more than the narrow life that a male person living in a patriarchal culture can experience. The leadership of someone who had lived a female experience of this country, or, even better, both female and male experiences, might do wonders for us in expanding our country beyond the limited vision of a male-centered society.

Many of us would no more want to live in the ‘old-fashioned’ world proscribed by Keillor than we would want to live in the world proscribed by Giuliani. I will call Keillor, not ‘old-fashioned,’ but insensitive to the power that he holds as a nationally-syndicated journalist and ‘humor’ columnist, even as he critiques national leaders out of his presumed right as someone impacted by their power.

Please, Funny Times, resist the temptation to go along with the lazy status quo and keep printing offensive columns by Keillor, until he apologizes and pledges a contract with America that he will strive to reflect the realities of America in his misguided insults. You have better columns to run. Yes, he has the freedom to write such saddening critiques, but he has unique access to vehicles to distribute his message, access most of us are not so privileged as to have. With that comes responsibility. I wish dearly that he would choose to use that freedom to unite the liberals and progressives in the United States, instead of turning his harassment against those of us who could be his allies, and winding up sounding a lot like those very people who are ruining our country, who he claims to oppose.

Real humor does not rely on sexist, homophobic, prejudiced harassment or hate speech.

Thank you for your concern.

Jessica Valenti, editor of the hip blog Feministing writes in the Guardian about “How the web became a sexists’ paradise,” specifically via the targeted harassment of female bloggers and other ‘public’ figures in the world of the internet.

…more evidence of how remoteness facilitates violence - the knowledge that comes from intimacy, proximity, being lost through technology (verbal language, web technology, etc.) and thus enables people to ignore the full life of the beings they are harming…

Are you a L.K. (Librarian’s Kid), too? Well, then, you need to read this article by Chip Ward, librarian for the Salt Lake City Library System: What They Didn’t Teach Us in Library School: The Public Library as an Asylum for the Homeless.

Although the public may not have caught on, ask any urban library administrator in the nation where the chronically homeless go during the day and he or she will tell you about the struggles of America’s public librarians to cope with their unwanted and unappreciated role as the daytime guardians of the down and out. In our public libraries, the outcasts are inside.

….

Ultimately, the indigent mentally ill are criminalized. If their presence in our libraries is a common and growing problem that we librarians would like the rest of society to be aware of, acknowledge, and commit themselves to helping us solve, here is a secret we would like to keep to ourselves: We are complicit. No matter how conscientiously and compassionately we try to treat our mentally disturbed users — and at the Salt Lake City Public Library we work very hard to be fair, helpful, and tolerant — librarians often have no good choices and, in the end, we just call the cops.

More can be found through National Public Radio (NPR.org), which interviewed Mr. Ward.