Anne Thériault: “Not That Girl”
No, no, please don’t apologize. It was a good joke. Really funny.
Liquid panty remover. Hah. That’s great. I’ve never heard that one before! Oh man, that’s hilarious.
Don’t worry about telling jokes like that to me — I love those kinds of jokes. I’m not really the type to get offended, you know?
I mean, I’m not that kind of girl.
BooMan: “Casual Observation”
I suppose some Republican heads will explode when they learn that President Obama compared Nelson Mandela to George Washington. But there’s one big difference between them. They both stood up to an oppressive colonial regime. They both won in that struggle. They both helped found their countries. They both served as their country’s first presidents. They both stepped down voluntarily in the interest of promoting democracy.
But Nelson Mandela never owned any slaves.
Dorothy Boorse: “An Evangelical Scientist’s Notes on Climate Change and Faith”
Science helps me understand how human activities affect global conditions, but it is not my primary motivation in trying to call attention to climate change. That motivation comes from my faith commitment. I come from a broadly evangelical Christian faith tradition, and I teach science at a Christian college. I see four big principles in the Bible that relate to environmental degradation generally and climate change in particular: wisdom, compassion, justice, and stewardship of the natural world. Wisdom says you do what is sensible. It is sensible to make hay while the sun shines, or like the ant, to save summer harvest for winter eating. It is not sensible to sleep all the time, eat too much, fail to work, waste your money, build your house on sand, or save things that lose their value. Likewise, it is not wise to pollute ourselves today and harm our children, to waste materials we may want later, to make a giant bet on the climate that we cannot afford to lose, or to believe the world is so big we cannot harm it. There are many wise reasons to care about climate. Ask anyone losing jobs in tourism, logging, and fishing. Ask the Department of Defense, which called climate change a national security issue and has written a plan to lessen its effects.
President Barack Obama: “Remarks by the President on Climate Change,” June 25, 2013
Now, what you’ll hear from the special interests and their allies in Congress is that this will kill jobs and crush the economy, and basically end American free enterprise as we know it. And the reason I know you’ll hear those things is because that’s what they said every time America sets clear rules and better standards for our air and our water and our childrens’ health. And every time, they’ve been wrong.
For example, in 1970, when we decided through the Clean Air Act to do something about the smog that was choking our cities … some of the same doomsayers were saying new pollution standards will decimate the auto industry. Guess what — it didn’t happen. Our air got cleaner.
In 1990, when we decided to do something about acid rain, they said our electricity bills would go up, the lights would go off, businesses around the country would suffer — I quote — “a quiet death.” None of it happened, except we cut acid rain dramatically.
Libby Anne: “How I Lost My Fear of Margaret Sanger”
Growing up in the pro-life movement, I was taught that birth control originated as an attempt to eliminate “unfit races,” and that the chief instigator in this was Margaret Sanger. In my circles, Planned Parenthood carried a stigma because it was founded by that eugenicist, Margaret Sanger. Yesterday I wrote about Teddy Roosevelt and suggested that anti-feminists may want to look elsewhere for an endorsement of childbearing, because Teddy’s endorsement was rooted in his racist and classist eugenicist beliefs. As a child, I was given to believe that Margaret Sanger’s endorsement of birth control, like Teddy’s endorsement of childbearing, was rooted in her belief in eugenics. But then, as an adult, I happened upon Sanger’s own explanation of why she became such a strong advocate for birth control. Hint: It wasn’t because of eugenics.
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