The Quilt

I got my hair cut! And I can’t stop feeling it, since so much is gone. The woman who cut my hair at SuperCuts was amazing. I told her what I wanted and she just whooped it up.

And then I came home and worked on the quilt. I now have all the single pieces sewn together. Next is sewing all the double pieces into four.

And I thought this was a fun pursuit why? Ha ha ha.

If this doesn’t start to get funner… oh god… I actually wrote ‘funner’. Quilting was supposed to help me write and it is literally making me stupider. More stupid?

I don’t even know.

Prove How Bad It Was

So, by now, you’ve heard of the national efforts to allow funding of abortions only in cases of forcible rape, though “forcible rape” has no legal definition. I want to stress what McEwan says in her post–“The proposed law effectively, if not by design, gives veto control over terminating pregnancies resulting from rape to the rapist.” If you are poor or otherwise without resources to pay for an abortion, this law guarantees that your rapist, by deciding how you’ll be raped, gets to control whether you can have an abortion.

And this is the “moral” side.

Of course, in Tennessee, Blackburn, DesJarlais, Duncan, and Roe have signed on to co-sponsor the bill. I’m sure they’ll be asked by reporters just where they personally draw the line between rape victims not deserving of our sympathy and those who are.  But I want to get beyond that just for a second. You know I’ve been waiting for the ultrasound for abortion bill to be entered. I haven’t seen it yet, but I have little doubt that one’s coming–where women who want abortions will be forced to undergo an ultrasound and have to watch it.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about this because it involves such a level of sadism–that you would force a doctor to sexually assault a woman and force her to watch–that you can see people almost physically deny that that’s what it is, that it’s not that bad, that doctors have to do an ultrasound anyway, that they’re just trying to get a woman all the information she needs, etc. I don’t blame folks. Having to stare the truth, when it’s so ugly, right in the face is hard.

But this, deciding there’s a level at which a woman has been raped enough to entitle her to help with paying for an abortion, is a similar kind of sexualized sadism, in that it requires women to perform our degradation, to testify to our own violation in detail to whomever might require it, in order to receive medical care.

You know how we talked about how recent studies have shown that there really isn’t such a thing as the “accidental” rapist, the guy who thinks a girl is consenting when she isn’t? But how very deliberate rapists use the smoke-screen of the “accidental rapist” to serially rape women? By making all men, men who wouldn’t actually ever rape anyone, afraid of being accused of “rape by misunderstanding,” they have been able to create situations where well-meaning men provide them cover because well-meaning men don’t see that they are also being played?

I think we’ve reached a point where we may need to come to this realization about the abortion debate as well. Most people are having an intense discussion about which they feel strongly. And a small, but apparently influential, group have figured out that they can use people’s anxiety about the abortion issue to get laws passed that appeal to their sadism and allow them to get off by degrading women.

Dear Governor Haslam, Please Don’t Be Stupid

Oh, lord, I was prepared for Governor Haslam to be Republican (obviously) and I was prepared for him to be pro-business on some things and wishy-washy on others. After he was kind of blind-sided by that gun crap, I had even steeled myself for him being woefully unprepared.

But I never considered that he might be stupid.

Until now.

Now he’s claiming, possibly in all sincerity, that he didn’t know that implementing a rule freeze would affect Pilot, even though said rule freeze keeps them from having to update some of their fuel tanks.

One wonder who’s being played for a fool here? Are the people of Tennessee supposed to believe that an astute businessman didn’t have any idea what kinds of rules and regulations were affecting his family’s business? Or–and let’s have some sympathy for the people whose livelihoods are tied up in Pilot. Maybe they just learned that the guy who was President of their company doesn’t have any idea about the basic issues facing said company.

I mean, I don’t mean to belabor this, but I worked at a gas station one year right out of college (it was back in the 90s, kids, when we thought the economy was in the shitter because, when you graduated from college, you had to move home and work at a gas station. We had no idea there’d come a day when you graduated from college, moved home, and couldn’t find a job at all.) and I didn’t do anything more than work the register and I knew how big a deal the state of the tanks was and how you were constantly checking for water in them because god forbid you have a leak and have to replace those tanks.

And we’re all supposed to believe that a guy who was the President of the company didn’t constantly worry about the possible expense of having to replace those tanks? That he didn’t realize, even after he left the company, that this would be an ongoing concern of the company? And that, when he was elected governor, he didn’t realize things he does might affect that company?

I mean, is “I’ve been an idiot my whole adult life” really supposed to be more comforting than “Hey, I’m rewarding my family for helping me get to this office.”?