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Shut the barn door.
Remember my last post about the abortion ban in South Dakota? Apparently it's not all that new, since a series of legislative decrees have been chipping away at reproductive rights. The ACLU has more about it here. No petitions to sign, this time, just plain old facts if you want to take a gander at the slippery slope in action.
Secondly, on a more preventative note, are you in favor of proper sex ed being taught in schools? If so, go sign a petiton to get attention from Congress drawn to this issue.
...It's really weird, living in America and having this kind of stuff actually be an issue. Sex ed was taken for granted in Austria. You just didn't need to worry about kids being taught it or not, because the schools all had programs for it. I mean, I remember being embarrassed because I knew I was asexual and didn't need to know all that stuff. (Mind you, I went to a private school. They made us watch videos about puberty and what would be happening to our bodies, and I got so grossed out that I went and hid in the locker room to read books instead. Why can't I just be an android instead?)
That's a pretty far cry from teenagers here apparently finding out through trial-and-error.
And finally, to round this entry off, separate the church and state. The government shouldn't be allowed to give funding or withhold funding based on the religious affliation of a particular group.
And as long as we're on that topic, I'm fully on the side of the European newspapers that printed the cartoons of Allah. Did I think they were funny? No. Do I support mocking religious idols?Well, I do read Sinfest... In general, no. But I do think that newspapers have the right to print whatever they like. Free press, after all, and it's not like they were urging the populace to go out and riot against Muslims. If the newspapers only ever printed easy stuff to avoid disturbing people's world view, McCarthy would have never been dragged down. No Watergate either.
The job of the press is not to tell us which makeup brands to buy, or reassure us that we're the good guys on the right side of the war - articles are meant to provoke us, to make us think, to inform us about stuff we might not want to know about. Yeah, those cartoons caused a firestorm, so what? They also got people talking about freedom of the press vs responsible journalism, about the rights of a religious group to police what's printed through violence or protests, and reached a public that can be generally indifferent to such issues. On the whole, I'm glad those cartoons got printed, and any of you are free to disagree with me. XD Free speech in journals, right?
Secondly, on a more preventative note, are you in favor of proper sex ed being taught in schools? If so, go sign a petiton to get attention from Congress drawn to this issue.
...It's really weird, living in America and having this kind of stuff actually be an issue. Sex ed was taken for granted in Austria. You just didn't need to worry about kids being taught it or not, because the schools all had programs for it. I mean, I remember being embarrassed because I knew I was asexual and didn't need to know all that stuff. (Mind you, I went to a private school. They made us watch videos about puberty and what would be happening to our bodies, and I got so grossed out that I went and hid in the locker room to read books instead. Why can't I just be an android instead?)
That's a pretty far cry from teenagers here apparently finding out through trial-and-error.
And finally, to round this entry off, separate the church and state. The government shouldn't be allowed to give funding or withhold funding based on the religious affliation of a particular group.
And as long as we're on that topic, I'm fully on the side of the European newspapers that printed the cartoons of Allah. Did I think they were funny? No. Do I support mocking religious idols?
The job of the press is not to tell us which makeup brands to buy, or reassure us that we're the good guys on the right side of the war - articles are meant to provoke us, to make us think, to inform us about stuff we might not want to know about. Yeah, those cartoons caused a firestorm, so what? They also got people talking about freedom of the press vs responsible journalism, about the rights of a religious group to police what's printed through violence or protests, and reached a public that can be generally indifferent to such issues. On the whole, I'm glad those cartoons got printed, and any of you are free to disagree with me. XD Free speech in journals, right?
no subject
Oh, yeah, thanks for the links.
no subject
Though I do think that they're making too much of a fuss about this.
Numa
(Anonymous) 2006-03-08 01:32 am (UTC)(link)- Numa