It began when an openly gay judge asked Miss California, Carrie Prejean, what she thought about same sex marriage. Prejean, a student at San Diego Christian College, said that although she recognizes and accepts that others may believe in same-sex marriage, “I think I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.” That created a firestorm of publicity for the Trump-owned organization. A large minority of Americans said they supported Prejean’s opinion. A large minority said she was reciting biased lessons of intolerance; Perez Hilton, the judge who had asked the question, on his blog called Prejean “a dumb bitch.” However, several prominent gay rights activists defended Prejean’s right to her opinion.

Pageant officials had ordered all of its contestants not to mention God on their applications or at any public event. Apparently, openly believing in God could be seen as detrimental to an organization which holds its beauty contest in Las Vegas, also known as Sin City, USA. Prejean’s view about gay marriage, she later said, was based upon her religious beliefs.

Prejean was second in the Miss USA contest itself; her views may have cost her the national crown.

The Miss California organization claimed that since the pageant in April, Prejean missed scheduled events and lied about pre-pageant semi-nude pictures of her. A month after Donald Trump had strongly defended Prejean and her right of free speech, he approved the pageant stripping her crown. Prejean, who said the Pageant’s action was retaliation against her views, sued for libel.

In October, the Miss California organization countersued, claiming Prejean owes it $5,200 for what it claims is a loan it made so she could get breast augmentation. In its countersuit, the organizers and officials claimed Prejean “attempts to cast herself as a virtuous young woman and the victim in a supposed conspiracy against her.” The suit also accused her of having a “new-found notoriety [and] an inflated sense of self.” This, of course, is the organization headed by a man who beneath a blonde pompadour enjoys firing reality shows contestants. This is also an organization whose backstage manipulations could make Chicago politics or New York’s Tammany Hall organization appear to be little more than grade school cliques.

The Miss USA pageant claims its contestants are “savvy, goal-oriented and aware.” In a pompous arrogance of self-deceit it even claims that contestants “display those characteristics in their everyday lives, both as individuals, who compete with hope of advancing their careers, personal and humanitarian goals, and as women who seek to improve the lives of others.” The organization, like the Miss America contest, also requires its contestants to be single, never married, never pregnant and, apparently, never nude.

What it doesn’t require is that its contestants have natural beauty or wisdom. There are coaches to train them in voice and poise. There are coaches who train them in what questions will be asked of them, and how to respond in the most circumscribed way possible to avoid showing they have any opinions. There are coaches to tell them what bikini, ball gown, or casual wear looks best on them. There are hair dressers and makeup artists. There are weight coaches and trainers—since pageant officials and their public audience undoubtedly believe that anyone over size 4 is morbidly obese. The contestants go to suntan parlors, and slather lotions and sprays to get an even tan to pretend that they’re sun-drenched gorgeous. They use double-edge sticky tape to keep skimpy clothes from falling from almost-emaciated bodies, as well as to enhance whatever it is that needs enhancing or reducing. They get cosmetic surgery on cheeks, belly buttons, and their breasts, apparently to enhance or modify whatever genetics—or, in the case of the highly religious, whatever God—has given them.

Like any good media celebrity, Carrie Prejean has written … or co-written … or had someone else write an autobiography. This one will be published in November. The Miss California organization has just assured increased sales by publicly demanding all royalties from the book, because its stable of cookie-cutter perfect beauties can’t say, write, or do anything without its permission, even after they are dumped as employees.

Unfortunately, cosmetic surgery and breast augmentation are something it does approve.

In this interview, Law talks specifically about how women are affected by solitary confinement and other forms of torture in US prisons, and what women are doing to fight back. Exposing solitary confinement as torture has been the focus of recent campaigns in Maine, Pennsylvania, and around the US. This is also a central issue in the campaign to free the Angola 3, who are a trio of Black Panther political prisoners: Robert King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace. King was released in 2001 after 29 years in continuous solitary confinement. Woodfox and Wallace remain imprisoned and have spent over 36 years in solitary confinement, where they remain today.

Angola 3 News: What do you think of the case of the Angola 3?

Victoria Law: The case of the Angola 3 is one of the most visible (and damning) indictments of the U.S. prison system.

As broadcast by NBC Nightly News, the widow of slain prison guard Brent Miller has even stated that she wants justice and that, if Woodfox and Wallace did not kill her husband (and there is so much evidence that they did not), they should be freed. It’s interesting to note how the voices of victims and their family are used to whip up pro-imprisonment hysteria, but when they speak out against railroading people, they are ignored. For example, the widow of Daniel Faulkner publicly condemns Mumia and urges people not to let out her husband’s alleged killer. The media loves this and uses her to play on public opinion against freeing Mumia. However, when Brent Miller’s widow Leontine Verrett says, “If these two men did not do this, I think they need to be out,” her words are ignored.

Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace should be released. The fact that they have not been released clearly demonstrates the racism that is rife in the prison system and how “justice” isn’t really a factor in who goes to prison and why.

A3N: Do you consider the use of solitary confinement in US prisons to be torture?

VL: I most definitely consider solitary confinement a form of torture. Solitary confinement is used not only to break the woman (or person) who is resisting, but also to scare others around them into not only complying but ostracizing the person who is challenging prison rules or conditions. And, unfortunately, it often does.

A3N: What other practices in US prisons would you consider to be torture?

VL: I consider the whole prison system to be torture. But to narrow it down to actual practices: I would consider the use of strip status, in which all of a person’s clothes and belongings are removed from the cell, as a form of torture. You have to remember that over half of incarcerated women have suffered past abuse and trauma. To strip them of all of their clothing and place them in a bare cell with guards watching them retraumatizes them. I recently reread an account from Lisa Savage, a woman who was placed on strip status for talking to the other women on her unit about the psychological reprogramming of the Close Management unit (a unit where women are held in their separate cells 23 ½ hours a day). Being on strip status meant that everything was taken from her—clothes, toothbrush, bedding, and sanitary napkins. She wrote, “As bad luck would have it, I just started my monthly. Now, I must beg for a pad for hours before receiving it.”

Other practices that I would consider to be torture are:

• The use of male guards in female prisons
• The shackling of pregnant women while they are in labor
• Loss of access and custody to their children simply because they are incarcerated
• The denial of health care and the life-threatening slow health care in prisons

A3N: How is solitary confinement used against women prisoners? How does it effect women in ways that are different from male prisoners?

VL: Solitary confinement makes women more vulnerable to staff sexual assault since no one can see what is happening. In my book, I write about the experience of Christina Madrazo, a transsexual immigrant who was placed in INS detention. Originally, the INS (now called ICE) did not know what to do with her since her assigned gender at birth was male, but she identified (and was seeking asylum status) as a transgendered female. Madrazo was placed in solitary confinement where she was raped twice by a prison guard.

Even when they are not being physically assaulted, the women have no privacy—toilets are in full view of the cell door windows, guards can look through those windows at any time and, in many prisons, male guards can watch the women in the showers, on the toilet or when they are trying to dress or undress.

In addition, solitary confinement is used to punish women who have either reported being sexually assaulted by staff, or who have been discovered to have “consensual relationships” with staff members. I put “consensual” in quotation marks because, given the power dynamics in prison, especially the ability of guards and staff members to withhold services and/or provide small amenities, the relationship can never truly be consensual. I recently received a letter from a woman incarcerated in Colorado whose cellmate was accused of having a “consensual” relationship with a staff member. While the accusation was being investigated, the staff member was allowed to continue working in the prison. The woman was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the investigation and only released once the charge was found to be unwarranted.

Also, with women, there’s the prevailing notion that women need to be “good girls” and “to behave.” Thus, women are punished for behaviors that violate gender norms, behaviors such as spitting or cursing or not following orders, behaviors that men are not punished for. This is also why women are sent to segregation when they report sexual misconduct or engage in sexual activity; they’re violating what we, as a society, see as “good girl behavior.”

A3N: Do you believe activist prisoners are disproportionately targeted with solitary confinement?

VL: Yes! This is obvious in the case of the Angola 3. This has also been true among women who have been challenging prison conditions. Most female facilities have some form of solitary confinement. At California’s Valley State Prison for Women, the Special Housing Unit consists of eight-foot by six-foot cells with blacked-out windows where women are confined for 23 hours a day. Even in their cells, the women have no privacy — toilets are in full view of the cell door windows, guards can look through those windows at any time and male guards often watch the women in the showers. If the women complain, the guards turn off the water.

In 1986, the Bureau of Prisons opened a control unit specifically for women political prisoners in the federal prison at Lexington, Kentucky. It was built underground and entirely white. Women were prohibited from hanging anything on the white walls, causng them to begin hallucinating black spots and strings on the walls and floors. Their sole contact with prison staff came in the form of voices addressing them over loudspeakers. The unit was shut down in 1988 following an outside campaign and a court decision that determined their placement unconstitutional, but the solitary confinement is still used to punish and silence jailhouse lawyers and other incarcerated activists (of all genders, I should add).

A3N: How have women prisoners resisted the use of solitary confinement?

VL: In 1974, a woman incarcerated in Bedford Hills (the maximum-security prison for women in New York) filed a lawsuit challenging the practice of placing women in solitary confinement without 24 hours notice and a hearing (basically any sort of due process). She won a court injunction prohibiting this practice. In response, she was beaten by male guards and placed in solitary confinement (again with no due process). Other women in the prison protested by rioting.

More recent ways in which women have resisted solitary confinement aren’t as visible. While she was in the Close Management unit in Florida, Lisa Savage joined the StopMax campaign and became part of the Steering Committee. Her participation added gender to the way that people were viewing (and organizing around) the use of solitary confinement. She also wrote a long (16 pages!) piece about the Close Management unit for Tenacious, the zine that I publish of women prisoners’ art and writings. Writing about that reality is, in and of itself, a form of resistance, but she also included ways in which she, as an individual woman being held in the Close Management unit, was resisting:

I’ve finally gained a firm sense of self by holding fast to my beliefs in equality, liberty and life without threats or coercion. Each accomplishment, may it be emotional, psychological, or mental “growth,” is a form of resistance.

Every time I teach someone geometry or basic reading or tell them of their own intrinsic ability to be autonomous and secure with themselves, I resist the mentacide, and hopefully arm the women with ways to combat their own mental slow death sentence here in CM SHU…

Every time I get mail from you or Anthony of the South Chicago ABC Zine Distro or Abigail of Burning River or the meeting notes from StopMax (I am on the Steering Committee for the National Campaign to End Solitary Confinement and Torture in U.S. prisons), it confirms that I am part of this resistance movement.

As I conclude this piece, I have been informed of an increase in my custody to CM Level I. I know this is only a label, not who I truly am. DOC may have condemned me for my actions, but I know in my heart that for the past 7 months, I have taken the measures necessary to ensure my beliefs and integrity remain intact within a corrupt system. I have done my best to stand up for my CM sisters and myself. Yes, I have been DR’ed [issued disciplinary reports”] and “gave up” my privileges to take up for women who would spit on me if given a chance. I’ve asked nothing from them, I’ve only tried to show them that they must fight for their beliefs and happiness. I’ve wanted to show them that they do not have to be the label placed upon them—dumb ho, loser, etc—that they can achieve positive healthy goals even while locked in a cell 24/7. I wanted them to have a piece of my courage until they could find their own. Yes, I shouted about the unjustifiable psychological abuse they suffer—I shouted so that they could at least whisper of their own hurts in their own hearts… For this I have no regrets, and I will not apologize.

These aren’t ways that are clearly visible to those on the outside looking for instances of prisoner resistance. Still, her actions are forms of resistance to solitary confinement.

1. Recently reviewed at Alternet.

The United States has a new opportunity to change direction in Afghanistan… We believe that this time, with the leadership of President Obama … women and girls will not be left on the periphery, but placed in the central focus of our new policy.
– Feminist Majority press release¹

As an historian and teacher of women’s rights, a former feminist organizer, and one who considers herself leftist/progressive, I can only be horrified at an American foreign policy which is unleashing horrible violence on the men, women and children of Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. And since the policy is being carried out by Democratic President Barack Obama and his Democratic majority party, I can only be horrified at him, Nobel Peace Prize winner(!) or not, and at them. You think? Well apparently there are many who identify themselves as feminist and progressive who do not agree.

Take the Feminist Majority, for example. Here is a group dedicated, according to their website, to “women’s equality, reproductive health and non-violence.” [Emphasis mine.] They were founded by veteran feminist leader Eleanor Smeal in 1986, to represent the then 56% of American women who said they were feminists. They publish Ms. magazine, and campaign for women’s health and education, global women’s equality, women’s leadership, and gender balance in politics. Ah. How do you get gender balance in politics? Apparently by being absorbed into the Democratic party to the point where your web page sings odes of praise to the magnificence of President Obama and Vice Present Biden, and of course Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—herself not exactly a shining example of promoting “non-violence.”

The melding with the Democrats has now led to the Feminist Majority becoming an advocate for Obama “ending terrorism” in Afghanistan, with, of course, a focus on human (and women’s) rights. And the Feminist Majority, along with NOW (National Organization for Women) is also campaigning for “Afghan women and girls” by supporting the passage of Senator Barbara Boxer’s Afghan Women Empowerment Act, S229, on their websites. The bill, now in committee (foreign relations), cites the lack of rights women have had under the Taliban, and then says “Despite efforts by the U.S. government … to improve [their] lives,” Afghan women apparently still “lack access” to most of life’s necessary resources.²

It’s all very well to want to empower and improve life for and make a central focus of Afghan women. But supporting the government’s war efforts, through support of the Democratic party’s huge expansion of the Afghan war, should not be part of it. As Tom Hayden wrote last July, Afghan women will not be liberated by an “invading, bombing, imprisoning American army.” The Taliban will not change its anti-feminist fundamentalism because of that army—and the U.S.-backed Kabul government has recently passed a law insisting women obey their husbands “in sexual matters.”³ So much for empowerment. Supporting that government, and expanding that war, means supporting the Democrats’ increased funding for U.S. troops. And that is going to mean more death, destruction and chaos for said Afghan women and girls.

Becoming enmeshed in the campaigns of the Democratic Party is a huge mistake. About 20 years ago, I wrote a book called Iron-Jawed Angels⁴ which details the dramatic campaign of the radically feminist National Woman’s Party of the early 20th century. Controversially, they modeled their political drive after the British suffragists who insisted on working against the party in power which was doing nothing for its issue: women’s suffrage. Similarly, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton eventually concluded in their earlier women’s rights campaign, that being identified with a particular political party, instead of with feminist issues, would only hurt and dilute their cause. Susan B. Anthony said in 1878 that “women should stand shoulder to shoulder against every party not fully and unequivocally committed to Equal Rights for Women.”⁵ Equal rights for women will not be advanced by women being subjected to bombs and occupation.

Throughout American history “third party” issue-oriented parties on the right and left, have been absorbed into the powerful vortex of the two-party system. The most extreme example would be when the farmer and labor-led Populist party, amidst much resistance by its members, succumbed to William Jennings Bryan and was sucked into the Democratic Party—which then went down to defeat at the hands of the Republicans in 1896, arguably the time when Big Business took control of our politics for good.

I experienced party takeover of feminism personally at the commemoration of the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Conference, held in 1998. Most of the speakers were (female) Democratic party operatives. During one of the speeches celebrating the wonderful feminist accomplishments of the Democratic party, I foolishly made some sort of joke to the woman standing next to me about the irony of President Clinton and feminism in light of Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, etc. She was not only indignant but also somehow totally not understanding how I could utter such disloyal perfidy. The disgraceful blind loyalty of Gloria Steinem, NOW’s Patricia Ireland and Eleanor Smeal, et. al. ad nauseam, with Clinton and against any of those pesky women who were allegedly victims of Clinton’s very nonfeminist attentions, was unbelievable to me.⁶ But these famous feminists had all very much become Democratic party insiders. Sexual harassment? Charges of rape/assault? Why believe (all of) these unreliable women? Bill Clinton was their man. Feminist equaled Democratic Party: end of story.

As long as feminists—or “progressives”—cannot imagine an American political world which is not divided into Democrat and Republican, and now there really is no difference between the completely corporate-run two parties, their issues will be totally subsumed by the parties’ only function, which is to stay in power and maintain their own gravy train, while sustaining the money behemoth which runs America.

One important function of this corporate-run political system is to maintain and expand the American empire—for corporate gain, yes, but also for pure nationalistic greed and glory. Our reasons for being in Afghanistan do not seem to be topped by working for “human rights.” “Zoya,” an Afghan woman who is an activist with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, argues that Afghan women do suffer from the Taliban, but also from U.S. and NATO bombs; in fact the latter kill many more civilians than either Taliban or “terrorists.” She says American troops must withdraw immediately, because their presence only hurts any chance for a needed radical change in the political system in Afghanistan.⁷

So if you say you are a feminist who wants human rights in Afghanistan, it’s time to step back from the thrill of being an insider in Washington; it’s time to step back and think about if maintaining empire, sustaining occupation, and killing thousands of civilians is really what your “human rights” campaign is all about.

1. Feminist Majority website, “Feminists Announce New Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls,” March 27, 2009.
2. Feminist Majority website, “Take Action Now to Help Afghan Women,” and National Organization for Women website, “Afghan Women and Girls Need Our Help.”
3. Hayden, Tom, “Pentagon Enlists Feminists for War Aims,” Huffington Post, July 18, 2009.
4. Ford, Linda, Iron-Jawed Angels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party, 1912-1920, University Press of America, Lanham, MD, 1991.
5. National Woman’s Party Papers, Congressional Union pamphlet, 1915, Reel 22.
6. Mink, Gwendolyn, Hostile Environment: The Political Betrayal of Sexually Harassed Women, Chapter 4, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2000.
7. “Voices from Afghanistan: Afghan Women’s Activist Zoya Speaks Out on Eight Years of Occupation,” Democracy Now, October 9, 2007.

“As long as I’m talking, I’m always learning about others,” she says. But, her rambling conversations are really a cover to keep others from probing too much into her life–”we’re very private people,” she says about her family. But, have a problem, especially about pets, and she’ll talk all night if she has to, and she’s not shy about talking about her English Springer Spaniels, three of whom were American Kennel Club champions.

Although she has raised AKC champions, her first English Springer Spaniel was from an SPCA shelter in New Jersey. “We had just lost Butch [a beagle],” she says, “and although we were still mourning him, we knew that you can’t have a home without a dog.” She doesn’t remember why she chose Joy, but it was the first of many English Springer Spaniels who would be her companion.

Carpenter, an award-winning freelance journalist, is executive director of Animal-Vues, a national organization which promotes “compassion for animals, and to help strengthen the bond between animal professionals and the public.” She takes no salary from Animal-Vues, and accepts only a fraction of the expenses to which she’s entitled. “The work is more important,” she says. In 1984, she and Dr. George Leighow, a Danville, Pa., veterinarian, founded Animal-Vues. The organization is an outgrowth of Animal Crackers, a popular weekly radio show they hosted for more than a decade on WCNR-AM (Bloomsburg). Animal-Vues, says Carpenter, “has given my life focus, purpose, vitality, and joy.” Animal-Vues has developed dog bite prevention programs and is now working with local agencies to help autistic children to be able to be safe with dogs.

Among Animal-Vues’ other mission is to assist in training individuals and local governments about emergency disaster evacuation. Until four years ago, most disaster organizations refused to take pets, forcing their human companions either to abandon them or not seek shelter. Hurricane Katrina changed a lot of attitudes. Television cameras showed the tragedy of abandoned animals, but it also showed another reality. “Far too many people refused to be evacuated in New Orleans unless their pets could go with them,” says Carpenter. Animal-Vues, which had pushed for pet evacuation for years, finally was able to help local and state governments figure out ways to provide shelter not just for people but their pets as well.

In addition to one-to-one counseling, Carpenter also taught non-credit classes about dogs and dog training at Bloomsburg University. Her six-session classes, with veterinarians as guest speakers, one of whom later became the president of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), covered first aid, animals rights, and grief counseling. “It put me in touch with pet owners, and gave me more purpose in what I do,” she says.

This caring 77-year-old was always surrounded by animals, almost in opposition to her parents who, she says, “were not animal friendly.” As a child, Carpenter brought frogs’ eggs home and watched tadpoles hatch and go through metamorphosis to become an adult frog. She also had dogs and cats, turtles, rabbits, and birds–”any animal that can love you back,” says Christian, her younger daughter and co-owner of Murphy Communications, an advertising/public relations firm in State College, Pa. But she especially loves horses. As a teenager, she and Red, a horse “with a lot of personality and playfulness,” would go into the woods. “I’d ride him sometimes, but we often just walked together,” she says. They’d stop, chat, rest, and think. Like many animals, Red died violently. A man who was boarding Red became annoyed at some of the horse’s antics “and just shot him,” says Carpenter. “You never get over that.” She never owned another horse.

In one of the few contradictions in her life, although Carpenter is uncompromising in opposing cruelty to animals, she also believes that hunting is necessary, but “I couldn’t be a hunter myself.” Her father, a businessman, was a hunter and trapper. As her father became older, says Carpenter, “he became more compassionate,” although he still enjoyed duck hunting. She doesn’t talk much about her mother, except to say she was a Realtor and art gallery owner who liked to shoot birds.

Carpenter entered St. Lawrence University on a New York State Regent’s Scholarship, planning to become a physician. In her senior year, she married, and decided to go to graduate school in education not medicine “so I could devote more time to raising a family.” She earned an M.A. in one year at Alfred University, and then went to the University of Buffalo for doctoral work in psychology with additional courses at the medical school. She thought she could handle the demands of motherhood, psychology, and medicine. Six months into her first year of doctoral study, Carpenter dropped out.

“They were operating on brain centers in cats to test responses,” says Carpenter, who says she will never forget having to decapitate the animals in order to take histological samples while the animals were still alive, then hearing their death gurgles. “I didn’t like it,” she says, not defiantly, but with reluctant acceptance. She pauses, thinks a bit, as if searching for the right words, and then quietly adds that the other reason she couldn’t continue was “because I decided I’d rather be a mother full-time,” something she could do to help develop life, not take it.

“She always wanted to be at home when we came home,” recalls her older daughter, Sherilee, now an editor at Penn State. At home, Carpenter made sure her daughters developed a love of reading and writing. “She loved books about horses and dogs, but we read everything we could,” says Sherilee, recalling that the family “seldom watched TV.” Their mother “was pretty strict about that.”

She was also strict about establishing rules and “making us be good to people,” says Christian. “She taught us the spiritual side of life and what school can’t teach you.”

Carpenter says she was neither helped nor hindered by the feminist movement for equality, even when confronted by the flaming rhetoric that questioned why women would want to give up careers for motherhood. “Equality really means that each woman should be allowed to be whatever she can be,” says Carpenter, proudly stating she is “so much because I am a mother.”

Both daughters, when younger, constantly said they wanted to be mothers–”just like Mom.” They married, but neither gave birth. “For many years, their nurturing instincts,” says their mother, “have been sharpened by cats and dogs.”

In 1969, Carpenter’s husband, William, by then a corporate executive, had a stroke at the age of 39, leaving his left side paralyzed. “He had given up hope for recovery,” says Carpenter, noting, “I don’t remember how many times I saw him fall.” But he had the support of his wife and a special assistant. “Willie just looked at him and wondered what he was doing,” says Carpenter. ” Willie was an English Springer Spaniel, Ch. Holly Hills Winged Elm—”We called him Willie Lump Lump,” says Carpenter. Willie was one of the first therapy dogs, an affectionate 50 pound bundle of encouragement. Willie helped William regain his will to do the necessary exercises to regain mobility; there was never any question as to which breed Sherry Carpenter would prefer over the next four decades. Because of Willie, Carpenter’s husband improved and “never had to go on permanent disability.”

The Carpenters had received Willie from the wife of a Penn State professor. “She told us that when Willie received his championship, we could have him.” It’s not uncommon for show dog owners to give away males, says Carpenter, noting ” the female is more important in breeding.”

Willie, “who gave us a great deal of joy,” died in 1978. “He just laid down under an apple tree and died,” says Carpenter. Willie, the fourth English Springer Spaniel the Carpenters owned was 10 years old. “He was such an influence on my life that I decided to pursue writing in order to give back to him all he had given to me.” Carpenter thinks a moment, makes a couple of random thoughts, and then quietly adds, “I hope there will be service dogs like Willie for all our returning veterans suffering from physical or emotional disabilities.”

Carpenter’s husband, having regained most of his muscle use except for his left arm, eventually returned to a career in corporate personnel, including work at Johnson & Johnson in Somerville and Princeton, N.J., the Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa.; and as personnel director of Centre County, Pa., home of Penn State, where both daughters graduated with journalism degrees. “I still go to the home football games,” says Carpenter, almost as agile in climbing the steps to Beaver Stadium in 2009 as she did in the early 1970s when her daughters were journalism students at Penn State. Sherry and William Carpenter separated in the early 1990s; William died in 1998. By then, Sherry Carpenter had established herself as a journalist. Writing “was my own therapy,” she says.

She had written her first magazine article while a high school student, using the income to “buy presents for my family and friends.” During her four decade career, she was a newspaper reporter and columnist in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania, a radio news director, a public relations account executive, and a substitute teacher, all part-time jobs, always a full-time mother. For almost 20 years, she wrote a monthly column for Dog World magazine. It was the first column to focus upon the Canine Good Citizen program, which is open to all breeds, whether pure-bred or mixed. Dogs must pass the program to become therapy or rescue dogs. Carpenter proudly recalls, “In some way, I hope my column had been the reason why that program expanded.” Equally proud, she has kept many of the letters she received from readers “who said they learned something from my column.”

Carpenter also wrote a weekly column for the Danville Daily News and the Sunbury Daily Item, both of them Pennsylvania dailies, and several articles for the AKC Gazette. She is the winner of five Maxwell medals from the Dog Writers Association of America (DWAA). In addition to her column, she was honored by the DWAA for a video about the Canine Good Citizen program and a widely-used handbook for police officers to learn how to deal with dangerous dogs. She and Leighow also won a special DWAA award for their Animal Crackers radio show. Among other awards she received for her writing are two from the New Jersey Press Association and the Thomas Paine Award for Citizen Journalism. The Pennsylvania Veterinary Medical Association honored her in 2005 for her columns, one of the few times the PVMA gave any award to someone not a veterinarian.

Her insight into both psychology and medicine gives her a special perspective few writers have. She occasionally reviews scientific articles for the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, and often contributes book reviews. “As a non-veterinarian, especially, it’s a real mark of distinction,” she says, her pride evident that she has been making a difference for pets, their companions, and those who work with them.

Like many who work for others, Sherry Carpenter doesn’t have a large income, now living off of social security, a few investments, and small monthly checks from her writing. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you make as long as you enjoy what you’re doing,” she says. She pauses again, another of her rare pauses. She doesn’t say much more about what she intentionally hides about her life, but she reveals all anyone needs to know. “Everything I do is an extension of my motherhood,” she says. “That’s just who I am.”

The sports world has been buzzing for some time over the rumor that Semenya may be a man, or more specifically, not “entirely female.” According to the newspaper The Age, her “physique and powerful style have sparked speculation in recent months that she may not be entirely female.” From all accounts an arduous process of “gender testing” on Semenya has already begun. The idea that an 18-year-old who has just experienced the greatest athletic victory of her life is being subjecting to this very public humiliation is shameful to say the least.

Her own coach Michael Seme contributed to the disgrace when he said, “We understand that people will ask questions because she looks like a man. It’s a natural reaction and it’s only human to be curious. People probably have the right to ask such questions if they are in doubt. But I can give you the telephone numbers of her roommates in Berlin. They have already seen her naked in the showers and she has nothing to hide.”

The people with something to hide are the powers that be in track and field, as well as in international sport. As long as there have been womens’ sports, the characterization of the best female athletes as “looking like men” or “mannish” has consistently been used to degrade them. When Martina Navratilova dominated women’s tennis and proudly exposed her chiseled biceps years before Hollywood gave its imprimatur to gals with “guns,” players complained that she “must have a chromosome loose somewhere.”

This minefield of sexism and homophobia has long pushed female athletes into magazines like Maxim to prove their “hotness”–and implicitly their heterosexuality. Track and field in particular has always had this preoccupation with gender, particularly when it crosses paths with racism. Fifty years ago, Olympic official Norman Cox proposed that in the case of black women, “the International Olympic Committee should create a special category of competition for them–the unfairly advantaged ‘hermaphrodites.’”

For years, women athletes had to parade naked in front of Olympic officials. This has now given way to more “sophisticated” “gender testing” to determine if athletes like Semenya have what officials still perceive as the ultimate advantage–being a man. Let’s leave aside that being male is not the be-all, end-all of athletic success. A country’s wealth, coaching facilities, nutrition and opportunity determine the creation of a world-class athlete far more than a Y chromosome or a penis ever could.

What these officials still don’t understand, or will not confront, is that gender–that is, how we comport and conceive of ourselves–is a remarkably fluid social construction. Even our physical sex is far more ambiguous and fluid than is often imagined or taught. Medical science has long acknowledged the existence of millions of people whose bodies combine anatomical features that are conventionally associated with either men or women and/or have chromosomal variations from the XX or XY of women or men. Many of these “intersex” individuals, estimated at one birth in every 1,666 in the United States alone, are legally operated on by surgeons who force traditional norms of genitalia on newborn infants. In what some doctors consider a psychosocial emergency, thousands of healthy babies are effectively subject to clitorectomies if a clitoris is “too large” or castrations if a penis is “too small” (evidently penises are never considered “too big”).

The physical reality of intersex people calls into question the fixed notions we are taught to accept about men and women in general, and men and women athletes in sex-segregated sports like track and field in particular. The heretical bodies of intersex people challenge the traditional understanding of gender as a strict male/female phenomenon. While we are never encouraged to conceive of bodies this way, male and female bodies are more similar than they are distinguishable from each other. When training and nutrition are equal, it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between some of the best-trained male and female Olympic swimmers wearing state-of-the-art one-piece speed suits. Title IX, the 1972 law imposing equal funding for girls’ and boys’ sports in schools, has radically altered not only women’s fitness and emotional well-being, but their bodies as well. Obviously, there are some physical differences between men and women, but it is largely our culture and not biology that gives them their meaning.

In 1986, Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez-Patiño was stripped of her first-place winnings when discovered to have an XY chromosome, instead of the female’s XX, which shattered her athletic career and upended her personal life. “I lost friends, my fiancé, hope and energy,” said Martínez-Patiño in a 2005 editorial in the journal The Lancet.

Whatever track and field tells us Caster Semenya’s gender is–and as of this writing there is zero evidence she is intersex–it’s time we all break free from the notion that you are either “one or the other.” It’s antiquated, stigmatizing and says far more about those doing the testing than about the athletes tested. The only thing suspicious is the gender and sex bias in professional sports. We should continue to debate the pros and cons of gender segregation in sport. But right here, right now, we must end sex testing and acknowledge the fluidity of gender and sex in sports and beyond.

In addition to this, American corporations have hired part-time workers and independent contractors in order to avoid having to provide healthcare. Yet the executives in the company have very attractive and robust health and welfare benefits. The majority of U.S. part-time workers are women who earn 69% of what males earn. One projection is that, by the year 2014, there will be around 38 million people who will be job hunting in underdeveloped countries,² adding to the already one billion plus people across the world who are unemployed and underemployed.³ In a November 2003 study by Alliance Capital Management which reviewed manufacturing jobs in the world’s twenty largest economies, it showed that, between 1995 and 2002, a total of 31 million manufacturing jobs were eliminated due mostly to advanced technology replacing the need for human beings.³ One example serves to highlight this. In 2002, Sprint’s productivity rose 15 percent and revenue increased 4.3 percent, yet the company eliminated 11,500 workers from its payroll. Jeremy Rifkin, author of The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, says that, of all the CEOs he has had discussions with, most agreed that intelligent technology, not human beings, will make up the workforce of the future.

In 1995, the rate at which U.S. corporations were eliminating jobs was two million annually. More than 75 percent of workers in most of the industrial nations are performing work that is primarily simple and repetitive.³ As of 2003, in the United States, out of 124 million workers, more than 90 million jobs were at risk for replacement by machines. As of the early 1990s, approximately 3.6 billion people (67%) in the world lacked adequate cash or credit to purchase goods and services.² As Barnet and Cavanagh (1994) state: “A huge and increasing proportion of human beings are not needed and will never be needed to make goods or to provide services because too many people in the world are too poor to buy them” (p. 17). With automated machinery and robots taking over, there is the very real possibility of a permanent underclass consisting of hundreds of millions, if not several billion people. Nobel laureate, Wassily Leontief, states that “the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.”⁴ This unprecedented global travesty will create a worldwide situation in which upwards of 80% of the world will be unemployed or underemployed. With several billion people unable to find work, what will prevent society from disintegrating into a state of perpetual lawlessness and chaos? Other ominous predictions regarding robots include the concern that when artificial intelligence is developed, these robots may be given similar rights to humans, including the right to vote.

Japanese Professor Ishiguro has created a human android that is so eerily like a real human being that, one day, the unreal will be indiscernible from a real human being.⁵ In December 2006, one of 200 studies commissioned by the British government was published which stated, “If granted full rights, states will be obligated to provide full social benefits to them [robots] including income support, housing and possibly robo-healthcare to fix the machines over time.”⁶ While it was nay-sayed by most in the scientific community, the fact that it surfaced is alarming. One scientist commented on his concern about who would be responsible if a robot kills or injures someone saying, “We need a proper debate about the safety of the robots that will come onto the market in the next few years. Military use of robots is increasing fast. What we should really be bothered about is public safety.”

Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote an article in Wired magazine in 2000 which very clearly elucidates the extreme ethical and moral dangers of technology, and specifically robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. Perhaps one of the most frightening about all three is that they can self-replicate which, as Joy points out, carries with it great power. In Joy’s article, he talks about the book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, written by Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind. In the book, Kurzweil advocates for a utopian world in which human immortality is attained by becoming one with robotic technology. The following frightening scenario is printed in the book:

THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite – just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.⁷

Kurzweil had included in his book ideas that Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, had written about a dystopian society. Joy goes on to say that he found Hans Moravec’s book, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, and it gave him more cause for concern. Moravec is a leaders in robotics research as well as the founder of the world’s largest robotics research program at Carnegie Mellon University. In Joy’s (2000) article, he provides an excerpt from Moravec’s book that is similar to Kaczynski’s disturbing vision.

The Short Run (Early 2000s)

Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.

In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence.

There is probably some breathing room, because we do not live in a completely free marketplace. Government coerces nonmarket behavior, especially by collecting taxes. Judiciously applied, governmental coercion could support human populations in high style on the fruits of robot labor, perhaps for a long while.⁸

These excerpts written by men echo the profoundly disturbing, dominating, and destructive quality that is inherent in masculine pathology, particularly in psychopathy in which there is a complete objectification of humankind, and an absence of human compassion and moral conscience. It has eery commonality with the story of Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus published in 1818 by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in which man, egomaniacally obsessed with power and control, creates that which destroys him. This is a psychopath—a man with no heart; essentially, a beast. Joy’s (2000) article is his vocalization of the extremely dangerous and unprecedented potential for extinction that exists as pertains to threats from technology, especially robotics. He emphatically states that “certain knowledge is too dangerous and is best forgone” (p. 11). The reason for his urge for moral caution is best summed up when he states:

By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today…And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species — to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself…A second dream of robotics is that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses…I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.⁹

Jacques Attali, French minister and technology consultant to former president Francois Mitterand, declared: “Machines are the new proletariat. The working class is being given its walking papers.”¹⁰ This is one reason for large increases in productivity despite the fact the employees are working harder than ever and putting in longer hours, and even though large numbers of workers have been laid off. With the elimination of layers of traditional management, shortening production processes, and streamlining administrative duties, restructuring and layoffs in corporations can result in a 40% to 75% workforce reduction.

American workers have been left standing at the curbside for decades holding the proverbial bag. They are paying more for the cost of those products and services which the corporation is producing for an estimated 30%-70% less cost due, in large part, to massive savings in the cost of labor as corporations lay off U.S. workers and hire cheap labor from foreign countries at a rate up to 90% of the cost of labor in the U.S. Meanwhile, the compensation of U.S. executives continues to escalate and skyrocket into the tens and hundreds of millions per executive. In addition, this creates a financial windfall for CEOs, senior executives, and the 5% who own stock in these corporations that are saving 60-90% in labor costs. Corporations have betrayed the American workers and have done so without many people being aware of the enormity of the betrayals. Because multi-nationals own virtually all major and mainstream media outlets, they have, for the most part over the past three decades, hid any news that was unfavorable to corporations and the wealthy elite. Hidden from front page or headline news in these mainstream media sources such as CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and Fox News was any news that had the potential to incite large groups of people to unite, engage, and oppose their agenda. The media did not inform the public, to any large degree, about the mass drain of labor out of America that began in the late 1980s. It was not until the early 21st century that large numbers of Americans became aware of the scope of the numbers of lost jobs as well as the fact that the hiring of overseas labor had been occurring for well over a decade. Some of this increased awareness was due to internet access which has non-mainstream sources that provides what many consider are far more accurate pictures and data that are representative of contemporary financial, social, cultural and psychological reality. The wealthiest power brokers have been very aware of the threat that the internet plays in the potential to educate and inform tens and hundreds of millions of people across the world. More crucially, they are cognizant of the potential that this creates for a worldwide organization and uniting of people against what has now become, when combined with overpopulation and global warming, the psychosocial pathology of free market capitalism.

1. Henwood, D. (1998). Wall Street: How it works and for whom. New York: Verso.
2. Barnet, R.J. & Cavanagh, J. (1994). Global dreams: Imperial corporations and the new world order. New York: Simon & Schuster.
3. Rifkin, Jeremy. (2004). The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.
4. Cited in Rifkin, 2004, pp. 5-6.
5. Whitehouse, D. (2005, July 27). Japanese develop ‘female’ android. BBC News. Retrieved 4/4/08.
6. Henderson, M. (2007, April 24). Human rights for robots? We’re getting carried away. The London Times online. Retrieved 3/20/08.
7. Joy, B. (2000, April). Why the future doesn’t need us. Wired magazine online. Retrieved 3/20/08.
8. Joy, 2000, p. 2.
9. Joy, 2000, p. 5.
10. Cited in Rifkin, 2004, p. 7.

Mother Earth Circling Grandmothers: Women’s relationship roles, revolving around motherhood, are the key to understanding Indigenius Socialism. Photo: Stewart Steinhauer

Ready?

By the the beginning of the 21st century—after the imagined end of history, and much to Euro-origin intellectuals’ surprise—a call for socialism in the 21st century arose in Latin America, first among Mayan Zapatistas and then spreading southwards across the remainder of Turtle Island.

Socialism for the 21st century became Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s electoral battle cry, where, in spite of the complete and absolute opposition of the privately owned public media, he won election after election on the promise to redistribute oil revenues to the 60 per cent of the Venezuelan population that was desperately poor. Following Chavez’s program of Catholic liberation theology mixed with a smattering of Marx and topped off with hefty doses of pragmatic state capitalism, nation states across the southern continent tilted Left, with the notable exception of Colombia—after Israel, the largest recipient of US military aid in the world.

Like Evo Morales and the Bolivian Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), Indigenous-led social movements throughout Latin America are openly anti-capitalist, because capitalism as a system of political economy means ongoing genocide for Indigenous Peoples and perpetual ecocide for the non-human portion of the Mother Earth Super-Being, of which humans are a part. (See CIBC and Me, Part IV for details.) Coming from a deep history of harmonious relations with Mother Earth, and having already spent millennia in systems of political economy based on simple egalitarian sharing, Indigenous Peoples have something to say about what a potential future steady state global system of political economy could look like.

The first thing I have to point to is the European model of industrial development. It doesn’t work for a multiplicity of reasons, and negates Marx’s theoretical explanation of how capitalism would automatically create a human society filled with workers who will, some day, transform capitalism into a socialist society. From an Indigenous perspective, the Euro-origin industrial model arises from a psychological pitting of human against nature, manufacturing an ideological division that does not exist in Indigenous reality. Further, it posits that something called “scarcity” exists, and that technological development is necessary to better this supposedly natural state of scarcity. Within this imagined dichotomy, nature is wild and humans are civilized; humans living in a state of nature are wild, and therefore not real humans. The real humans live in a state of technologically ameliorated scarcity, assembling vehicles for Ford, GM and Chrysler, with two mortgages and four credit cards. So much for Marx.

From the Indigenous-to-Turtle Island point of view, there is no dichotomy between wild and civilized. There is no such thing as wilderness. When Europeans arrived on Turtle Island they saw wilderness, while Indigenous Peoples saw the space as fully inhabited by culturally developed humans who were living in an active relationship with Mother Earth. Land that was fully, ethically, sustainably inhabited by Indigenous Peoples was seen by Europeans as undeveloped. John Locke’s labour theory of value claims that an Indian’s land is not worth one-thousandth of what the same acre of land would be worth were it located in England. Several hundred years after Locke’s writings, agricultural researchers are suggesting that, if all factors from the global industrial base are included, free-ranging a 60,000,000-head herd of buffalo is most likely the best agricultural use of the High Plains region of North America—exactly the use it was being put to prior to the introduction of Europe’s industrial development model.

From an Indigenous point of view, a logical recommendation for socialism for the 21st century is a complete redesign of humanity’s global industrial base. The redesigned industrial base has to abandon both the myth of scarcity and the myth of wilderness, while embracing the reality that humans actually are an integral part of an enormous Super-Being, whom Indigenous folks have long known as Mother Earth.

A quick dash back to reality for a moment: we humans aren’t going to voluntarily undertake a task of that magnitude while we are in our current antisocial state of mind. It’s easy to point to the global problems facing humanity and say that our self-induced trauma has shaped us to be the species we are now. The challenging part is imagining the way forward from here.

This brings my imagination to the crucial place: the crux of the matter; the originating point. The human vagina. Not being personally endowed with one, and certainly subject to the same forces noted by psychological studies concluding that a man’s imagination goes there at least once every 10 seconds, I realize I’m fair game for criticism.

However, as a once-popular song might have said had it been penned by an Indigenous lyricist, the vagina bone is connected to the stomach bone, and the stomach bone is connected to the heart bone. In an odd way, that just about sums up gender relationships while being anatomically correct, energetically speaking. Indigenous socialism arises from the relationship between mother and child, the first social relationship we humans experience. Looking into the structure of the social institution of Indigenous motherhood, prior to the cataclysmic assault staged by Christian missionaries hell-bent on their civilizing mission, I see some noteworthy features.

Connecting the heart bone to the head bone, I see the common thread of Indigenius Socialism expressed through a particular aspect of human sexuality. Modern medical researchers call it oxytocin, but you don’t have to name it to know it. Human females experience an inter-human bonding, or a primary socialism, during sexual arousal, sexual activity, sexual orgasm(s!), child birth, breast feeding, communal food preparation, communal feasting, and communal socializing in general, when the mood is non-violent. From the very specific Indigenous point of view found on the High Plains, where all those buffalos were roaming among the playful deer and antelope, pre-Christianized human societies practised a non-hierarchical matrifocal social form, where women’s relationships established the social norms. Men had roles, too, and I’ll get to that in time, but women’s relationship roles, revolving around motherhood, are the key to understanding Indigenius Socialism and the foundation of what I am proposing here as Syncretic Indigenius Socialismo.

In the human brain, there is a formation medical researchers call the limbic node; it is croissant-shaped, with one end arching around to almost touch the other. Almost, but not quite. Electricity-based human nerve impulses can jump the gap; stimulation on either end causes excitation on the other end. Oral receptors are at one end of the limbic node and genital receptors are at the other end of the limbic node.

Those crazy medical researchers! Their studies show that in societies with higher emphasis on general brain development, there is a corresponding higher level of oral-genital sexual activity. French and Cree societies both fit into the higher-brain development category and I’ll gamble a wager on the origin of the Metis Nation from the shared preference for oral sex. Is the Metis infinity symbol really just a clever play on a sideways 69?

The head bone is connected to the vagina bone, as many intelligent people know, and you don’t have to be able to articulate the mechanics of it all to get it. In pre-Christian Cree society, adventures in sexuality were separated from pregnancy by well understood and widely practised plant-based and practice-based birth control. You could have your cake and eat it, too. Women were free to choose when, where, and with whom they would conceive a child. Women chose to have children spaced about four years apart—two or three at most—in a lifetime and had children in age cohorts within their own circle of age cohort sister-cousins. Children grew up with an age cohort of cousins, without the burden of having immediate older or younger siblings and with the benefit of being born into a circle of similarly aged playmate relatives.

Women often chose to have a first child around the age of 16, when their mothers were about 32, their grandmothers were about 48, their great-grandmothers were about 64, and their great-great grandmothers were about 80. It was not uncommon for women to live to 100 years, so up to six generations of mothers could be present in an extended family, with the newborn infant representing the seventh generation. This meant that every new mother was surrounded by a depth of experience in the fine arts of Indigenous Socialism. She was certainly never on her own, without support, trying to care for several, or even a dozen or more children, all her own, often on her own, as was the European standard at that same time in history.

Out of this foundational matrix arose the basic form of Indigenous Socialism. By choosing fathers from across the bio-region, extended family villages were cross-linked with many other extended family villages, in an intricate web that formed the regional and national governance systems. It was literally all in the family. The genius of Indigenous Socialism was that it did not extend from an avant-garde of intellectuals as a theory imposed imperfectly, top down, on a mass population, but instead was an organic product of a matrifocal society. When Fredrick Engels travelled to upper New York State to see for himself Haudenosaunee society in action, he marvelled at how a territorially large and heavily populated region could self-manage without elected officials, judges, police or prisons.

Like technological development, the organization of daily affairs in human society was founded on a completely different paradigm. Men did have roles, but women’s expectations of men were adjusted to account for men’s inherent weaknesses, most notably a propensity towards violence and a severe shortage of oxytocin. The poor dears could only get a blast of the primal socialist juice during orgasm; all the more reason to assist them in attaining as many as possible during a lifetime. Along with frequent orgasms, ceremonial activities also played an important part in reducing the potential stressor on a socialist system caused by an overabundance of testosterone—for instance, the sweatlodge. This wasn’t just an Indigenous introduction; Scandanavian societies, too, recognized the social benefits of immersing men in energy-sapping hot steamy environments for prolonged periods of time.

The Indigenius twist was an emphasis on the latent altruistic nature possibly underlying male humans’ obvious violent nature, as a remedy to the anti-social behaviours otherwise all too dominant. Protocol rituals in a simple sweatlodge ceremony remind and reinforce the necessary immersion of humans in the natural world; many times I’ve heard Elders leading sweatlodge ceremonies ritually comment on how we humans must humble ourselves and crawl on our hands and knees into the lodge, re-entering the womb of Mother Earth. During normal sweatlodge proceedings, water, earth, wind and fire are acknowledged with gratitude, from the perspective of the human family, while reminding us of our survival-based obligations to the circle of natural forces we have emerged from. The combination of intense heat, complete darkness and an extraordinary soundscape often moves participants out of day-to-day mundane realities and into the immediacy of relationship with Mother Earth. Everyone simultaneously has a unique experience and a deeply bonding common experience. Real socialism.

The genius of Indigenous ceremony is that it intentionally creates a psychological space where Indigenius Socialism can come to life, rewarding co-operation, voluntary sharing and spontaneous acts of kindness, while penalizing greed, selfishness and violence. These actions are easy for women, but hard for men—that damn testosterone! Within the ceremonial space, Indigenous women have figured out a method, over millennia, for engaging men, by using the same tactics used with young children. Useful roles are identified and social prestige is offered, while steady, firm Elder female hands quietly steer the ceremonial proceedings from a discreet position in the background.

I realize that we seem to be a long way away from the way of life that Rosa Luxemburg called primitive communism; she was just looking at what Marxists call the mode of production and she didn’t mean the mode of reproduction of the reserve army of labour. A syncretic Indigenius Socialism for the 21st century has to account, in practice, for both the mode of production and the mode of reproduction and does so by putting the mode of reproduction where it belongs: first. You can’t build a socialist future among antisocial human beings; the 20th century is a fine illustration of that point.

Becoming pregnant, being pregnant, giving birth, nurturing a new life: here’s where we can see the transcendence of the notions of wilderness and scarcity. Mother Earth is not wild, nor is She short on essential items for Her existence. The same is potentially true for every human mother; the keys are sharing and co-operation. Exactly what a global human society would look like following those two simple concepts is not for me to say, but I can predict something.

Indigenius Socialism will be built by women, for humanity, utilizing everything now in existence, to rise above the barbarism of the present moment. We men can choose to be women’s assistants in this project; it could be an ecstatic experience. Imagine global human population plummeting in a women-led movement, while orgasms per lifetime are skyrocketing. Perhaps the Metis Nation is a signpost to the future: Indigenous Peoples will be Peoples indigenous to Mother Earth—one race, diverse, living locally while thinking globally, wickedly intelligent, one more species among many worth saving from extinction. There is a window of opportunity now, but, if we humans don’t take it, we will just create another one soon. We will eventually choose socialism over barbarism; our Mother told us to.

The most universal of these strictures, especially among religious fundamentalist and right wing political adherents is against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LBGT) population. Gay marriage — no way. Gays rearing children — no way. Equal rights for those of a non heterosexual persuasion — special privileges, not equal rights. Anyhow, you get the picture. Homosexuals are somehow not quite human and therefore do not deserve to exercise their human rights. Meanwhile, when it comes to the liberal side of the US political spectrum one hears words in support of equal rights only to be all to often followed by a refusal to support those rights when it comes to actually passing legislation.

With the brashness of the Stonewall rioters and the insight developed through keen observation and years of activism, author Sherry Wolf explores the history and theory of sexual politics in the United States in her recently published Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LBGT Liberation. Wolf begins her text with a discussion of the roots of sexual oppression. By discussing the construction of homosexuality, she addresses the complementary construction of heterosexuality and the resulting dichotomization of human sexual experience. Working from an understanding that it is capitalism that creates this dichotomy, Wolf examines the contradiction of early industrial capitalism that allowed for the autonomy of human sexual practices while demanding the stratification of those practices to make it possible for capitalism to work. Stating this theory quite succinctly — “capitalist society has transformed how people express themselves sexually yet simultaneously has aimed to restrict human sexuality as a means of social control” — Wolf begins an examination of how we arrived at the juncture we are currently at. By utilizing this contradiction, Wolf is able to turn a sharply critical eye on the successes and failures of the LBGT movement, while never forgetting that this fundamental contradiction is the genesis for a multitude of other contradictions around race and class that exist withing the LBGT and every other movement for social justice and true liberation.

An avowed socialist, Wolf does not only address the nature of sexual repression under the capitalist nations. She turns a critical eye towards those nations that called themselves socialist and breaks down the history and nature of those governments’ repression of sexuality, especially that of LBGT peoples. Noting that immediately after the Russian Revolution of October 1917 all restrictions on sexual expression were removed from the criminal code, Wolf continues her history by noting that it was the pressures of the counterrevolution and eventual leadership of Stalin that followed the heady years of the Russian Revolution that saw the rollback to traditional sexual practices being encouraged and enforced in the Soviet Union. Wolf attributes the repression of LBGT folks in Cuba and China to their essentially Stalinist nature, while noting that within the US communist movement, gays and lesbians were purged from the Communist Party, USA under similar circumstances. Despite the essentially Victorian attitudes towards sexuality in the CPUSA, the struggle against these attitudes continued inside the party and throughout the leftist movement in the US.

Because of the anti-gay sentiment prevalent in Left formations, many gays and lesbians looked elsewhere for a political understanding of their situation. Concurrently, the phenomenon of identity-based politics was gaining ground among many US activists. The essential apolitical nature of these politics was not apparent at first, yet the seed was sown. Movements supporting LBGT liberation ended up becoming focused on a single issue, and isolated from the greater political milieu. Like other left-originated movements, they found a home in academia and, instead of encouraging alliances across genders and race, they encouraged a politics of separatism and a hierarchy of victimhood. Wolf argues that although identity and queer politics did not (and can not) achieve sexual liberation, this trend in the politics of sexuality has done a lot to generate social acceptance by individuals of LBGT individuals in US society. However, they have not changed the fundamental basis of sexual oppression. Only organizing and mobilizing in the streets against sexual oppression can accomplish that.

One of the debates around homosexuality in the United States concerns whether or not biology determines one’s sexual preference. Wolf addresses this debate, pointing out its potential misuse by homophobes. If it is biologically determined, then can’t it be cured? At the same time, this argument has been used by advocates for equal rights for the LBGT population. Given the open-ended nature of this debate, Wolf presents arguments for and against, ultimately stating that it is virtually impossible to state how much of one’s sexuality is determined by biology and how much is related to other factors. She does insist, however, that it is under capitalism that the distinctions and classifications of sexuality have flourished and have been used by the ruling class to keep those they rule divided. Consequently, it is only by ending the capitalist economy that true sexual liberation can come.

Bringing the text into the heart of today’s struggle around marriage equality, Wolf addresses those critics that consider gay marriage to be a side issue. No matter what one thinks about the institution of marriage and its role in maintaining bourgeois society, she argues that it is essential leftists and progressives support the fight. In the same way that antiracists in the 1950s supported the struggle against laws forbidding interracial marriage no matter what they thought about marriage, we must support the rights of those who aren’t strictly heterosexual to marry.

Although this book looks primarily at the LBGT population, by doing so it explores the nature of all sexualities in US society, how they are influenced by that society and how their influence changes society. In addition, the growing belief that the struggle for LBGT civil rights is one of the most important struggles leftists in the 21st century should be organizing around becomes even more convincing under her tutelage. Sexuality and Socialism is the most intelligent and enlightened discussion on sexuality to come from the Left in a long time. No other work that comes to my mind explains the history of sexuality and sexual repression in the United States as comprehensively and compellingly.

The Imagined Latino Community

The media that focuses on the Latino communities in the United States has contributed to a pervasive misperception that exists about who Mexicans, Puerto Rican, Cubans, Salvadorians and other groups of Latin American descent are in the larger context of United States society. While the Anglo media has always perpetuated stereotypes about “latinos,” the “latino” media, in order to expand its markets beyond the ethnic niches of the various Latin-American origin groups, has also contributed to the idea that all Latin-American origin groups are alike. While there are many similarities among these groups there are also significant differences that are revealed in the discourse about the selection of a second generation Puerto Rican to be the first “latina” in the Supreme Court.

It is ironic that this process of racialization (erasure of the cultural and historical differences between ethnic groups) that has created a “Latino” pseudo-racial group is occurring at a time when a color-blind ideology is dominant in political, legal and pedagogical discourse in the United States. Although race is still the essential pivot around which American society is constructed and its hierarchies developed, the courts, politicians and the educational system are negating the role of race and racism in the inequalities that persist in our society. This ideology is so prevalent that it has become common sense and unexamined and is dominating our most important institutions. In the educational system, for example, Janet Schoefield, in study done in a school in 2001, revealed that white students did not know Martin Luther King was an African American. The courts have narrowed the use of race in redressing racial inequalities and politicians do not dare utter the word racism in the public sphere. Most recently, section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, while not overturned, was interpreted in a narrower, individualistic way opening the door to another possible examination by the Supreme Court in the future. Judge Sotomayor, will likely have, if approved, a crucial role in that future decision.

The recent election of President Barack Obama has led many to talk about a “post-racial” United States. Yet, the same inequalities exist, the same hate crimes exist and children of the various Latin American heritages continue attending substandard and underfinanced schools. Recently, evidence suggests we may be at the dawn of a new “post-racial” “Latino” politics emerging across the nation. Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa has increasingly distanced himself from appearing too ethnic, the California 32nd congressional district, until recently represented by progressive Hilda Solis — a majority “Latino” district — will no longer be represented by a politician of Latin American origin and in San Antonio Julian Castro became mayor following a similar strategy to broaden his appeal. In some sense, could it be that Peter Skerry, who wrote Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority might be right? Are “Latinos” just another temporarily racialized group on its way to becoming mainstreamed (which in the U.S. means white)?

However, the cacophony of strongly negative comments about Judge Sotomayor made by the Republican Party’s right wing, especially Tom Tancredo, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich reveals the power of race and racism in contemporary America. Judge Sotomayor’s mistake, in their view, is that she affirmed her social experience as a “Latina” woman and how it provides her a rich perspective to add to the various other world views that abound in mainstream legal discourse. In a culture where the “color-blind” ideology is dominant any enunciation of ethnicity or race is taboo. However, the reality is that Judge Sotomayor is not too far from mainstream legal thought.

Their stance also might place the party in a more difficult place as it tries to recruit among the emerging actors in the political arena. The Republican Party is increasingly becoming whiter and ideologically extreme. In terms of Latin-American voters, it only received 31 percent of the “latino” vote in 2008, down from 40 percent in 2004. Since, today, 22 percent of all American less than 18 years of age are “latinos” the future of the party seems tenuous at best.

Legal Background

President Obama, in announcing Judge Sotomayor’s nomination for a seat in the Supreme Court, mentioned a case that involved the baseball major leagues in 1995. Dave Zirin’s article in The Nation (“Sotomayor is a Sporting Judge,” May 29, 2009) argued that Judge Sotomayor “saved” the capitalist owners of the baseball franchises from themselves. She basically saved them from their own short sightedness and greed. In fact, her decision to squash the bosses’ lockout helped baseball grow from a business that produced $1.3 billion to one that produces $7.5 billion.

A recent analysis of her judicial decisions by the McClatchy news agency revealed that Judge Sotomayor has been in the Court of Appeals since January 2002. Since that time, in criminal cases she has decided 65 of 90 instances in favor of the government. In 450 cases she presided over, she was only revised in six cases; none of them were criminal cases.

What is not clear is her position on abortion. None of the cases she has been involved in have had anything to do with an interpretation of Roe v. Wade (1973) and in other cases tangentially related her decisions were diverse. Right wing conservatives like Rush Limbaugh are hoping that her Catholic background will determine her position on abortion. Five of the judges are Catholic and only Anthony Kennedy strayed away from an anti-abortion stance in 1992 when he supported the right of a woman to an abortion. It is ironic that those who critique Judge Sotomayor for being honest about her background and experience as a Puerto Rican woman now place their hope on that background for a particular interpretation of the law.

However, it is revealing that this dialogue, which pivots around this “latina” woman, is contradictorily being used to both reproduce the fiction of a “Latino community” and on the other hand to extol the culture of meritocracy that permeates American culture. “Latino” is a category that is still empty of content although it might truly become a social reality in the future as diverse Latin-American origin communities intermarry and begin to develop a hybrid “latino” culture and identity. But in the meantime, the real ethnic groupings are the Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican and other communities with their unique historical experiences and cultures. A recent survey (June 4) by Quinnipiac University indicated that 49 percent of whites and 66 percent of Jewish Americans support Judge Sotomayor for the court. Close to 85 percent of African Americans contrasted with 58 percent of “latino” showed support for Judge Sotomayor’s selection. Some have argued that a large number of conservative Cubans may have biased the survey.

In another survey by McClatchy news (May 28-June 8), which had a larger sample than the Quinnipiac University survey, “latino” support for Judge Sotomayor is 72 percent. If the media continues to emphasize her “immigrant” working class background it may continue to elicit the support of Latin-American communities. But ironically, the way this message has been communicated presents her story as a “rags to riches” epic without any social context that helps make sense of her achievement. It is important to acknowledge her efforts and at the same time nuance the individualistic message that is being used to explain her success. Her mother, Celina Sotomayor, an important figure in her life, led her to appreciate Puerto Rican culture, which nurtured a sense of place and significance in a society that was not always hospitable to differences. Also, it is important to acknowledge that she grew up in a New York where the struggles of the Puerto Rican and the Black community opened doors to Latin Americans to new opportunities. Organizations like the Young Lords, ASPIRA and others forced the powers that be to provide access to education, health care and housing. This fertile context of social struggles is the stage that catapulted the intelligence and determination of this Puerto Rican woman into the public sphere.

Her achievements, rightly so, belong to her and to those on whose shoulder many of us have been carried into the present.

The American anti-choice movement was ecstatic, claiming it represented a tremendous victory for “life.”

In cruel reality, it was anything but.

Completely overlooked was the grim fact that, throughout the impoverished Third World, clinics and other entities offering females vital medical attention were also, frequently, the only sources of health care for the general populace.

Thus, when U.S. assistance dried up, those facilities often either dramatically reduced what already inadequate help they were giving — in areas well beyond just women’s issues — or had to close their doors altogether.

We can only guess how many tens of thousands of people, sick from many causes, either suffered grievously or died because of this objectively destructive policy decision.

Thankfully, Barack Obama immediately reversed Bush’s horrendously wrong-headed prohibition, restoring hope to multitudes around the planet.

But anti-choice zealots, typically bereft of reason and rationality, are now viewing our new President as a facilitator of “murder”!

Their misplaced horror over what Obama did was doubled when the White House also rescinded a Bush-era proscription against embryonic stem-cell research, which is key to possibly finding cures for a host of diseases ravaging the human species.

All the anti-choicers can focus on is their fetish-like belief that even a simple zygote can and should be equated with already-born, living, breathing, socially functioning souls suffering in myriad, painful ways by the millions because progressive socio-politico-economic-scientific notions that would be their salvation are thwarted…by powerful reactionary forces of which the “pro-life” cause is a pivotal component.

We’ve all seen how this de facto barbarism works in our own country.

Women or girls who find themselves pregnant against their wishes and then seek abortions are deemed selfish and irresponsible at best, or full accomplices in murder at worst. Their alleged ethical failing is counterpoised with the heavily emphasized innocence of the “baby,” never mind if it’s just an early-stage fetus.

Always absent from this facile fixing of blame is the possibility, very real in countless instances, that the pregnancies in question might be the result of outright criminal rape, or that reprehensible male exploitation of females for sexual use, the “you’ll do it if you really love me” quasi-crime of date rape.

But we’re not supposed to think of such things. They’d rather have us just drive down the highway and be propagandized by those big billboards of cute babies well past birth happily playing with a top or a ball, in a cynical deception that they’re synonymous with what’s “killed” when a desperate female elects to have an abortion.

And don’t worry about the fact that, even before our current economic meltdown began taking a terrible toll on U.S. living standards, a new American baby was born into poverty every 33 seconds.

That circumstance is in no small measure the result of how conservatives, so piously devoted to embryonic life, commonly abandon all concern for life after birth, as it ought to be properly manifested in governmental/societal programs that would eliminate overall poverty, erase male-female income disparities, guarantee affordable day care and health care, or reverse any of countless other incredibly burdensome injustices that, combined, are a leading reason for females asserting, “No way can I have a baby now!”

Clinging to untenable positions wildly at odds with reality is the anti-choice movement’s sad hallmark, along with incendiary rhetoric that leads to violence against abortion providers.

Comprehensive sex education and ready contraceptive availability would unquestionably result in far fewer unwanted pregnancies, plus a great lessening in AIDs and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The very mechanism that would largely obviate much of their almost hysterical abortion concern, quite incredibly, is actually rejected by the anti-choice movement.

Clearly, abortion absurdity and intolerance need to be firmly resisted.

As anyone who just stops to think for a moment can quickly grasp, it isn’t right for somebody else, for whatever imagined reason, to force another person to not have (or have, for that matter) something so personal and difficult to decide upon as an abortion.

It has to strictly be a matter of each pregnant individual’s own decision, based on her assessment of all factors bearing on the situation.

There should be no Taliban-like moral imperialism that effectively demands, “I know what’s best, and you’ll do as I say!”

No deranged “justice” that kills those who actively prioritize women’s rights and health by appropriately and quite morally acceding to females’ pained need to obtain abortions.

We can respect, however, those who wouldn’t have abortions themselves, out of principle, but who are themselves tolerant enough to permit others to reach a possibly contrary decision regarding their own pregnancies.

May we speedily move forward to the badly needed enlightenment that this whole question unquestionably deserves.

I presume that political commentators will point at the fact that Obama equates violence on the side of occupied Palestinians to violence on the side of Israeli colonizers, or that he has not abandoned the idea that the USA should tell the world how to behave and fight for their rights, or that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is reduced to a religious conflict, or that he still justifies the war in Afghanistan, etc.

All those are important issues that need to be challenged. However, what affects me most, as an Algerian secularist, is that Obama has not done away with the idea of homogeneous civilizations that was at the heart of the theory of the “clash of civilizations.” Moreover, his very American idea of civilization is that it can be equated to religion. He persistently opposes “Islam and the West” (as two entities — civilizations), “America and Islam” (a country vs. a religion); he claims that “America is not at war with Islam.” In short ‘the West’ is composed of countries, while ‘Islam’ is not. Old Jomo Kenyatta used to say of British colonizers, “when they came, we had the land, they had the Bible; now we have the Bible, they have the land.” Obama’s discourse confirms it: religion is still good enough for us to have, or to be defined by. His concluding compilation of monotheist religious wisdom sounds as if it were the only language that we, barbarians, can understand.

These shortcomings have adverse effects on us citizens of countries where Islam is the predominant and often the state religion.

First of all, Obama’s discourse is addressed to ‘Islam’, as if an idea, a concept, a belief, could hear him. As if those were not necessarily mediated by the people who hold these views, ideas, concepts or beliefs. As Soheib Bencheikh, former Great Mufti of Marseilles, now Director of the Institute of High Islamic Studies in Marseilles, used to say, “I have never seen a Qur’an walking in the street.”

Can we imagine for one minute that Obama would address himself to ‘Christianity’ or to ‘Buddhism’? No, he would talk to Christians or Buddhists, to real people, keeping in mind all their differences. Obama is essentializing Islam, ignoring the large differences that exist among Muslim believers themselves, in terms of religious schools of thought and interpretations, cultural differences and political opinions. These differences indeed make it totally irrelevant to speak about ‘Islam’ in such a totalizing way. Obama would not dare essentialize, for instance, Christianity in such a way, ignoring the huge gap between Opus Dei and liberation theology.

Unfortunately, this essentializing of Islam feeds into the plans of Muslim fundamentalists whose permanent claim is that there is one single Islam — their version of it, one homogeneous Muslim world, and subsequently one single Islamic law that needs to be respected by all in the name of religious rights. Any study of the laws in ‘Muslim’ countries show that these laws are pretty different from one country to the other, deriving not just from different interpretations of religion, but also from the various cultures in which Islam has been spreading on all continents, and that these supposedly Muslim laws reflect as well historical and political factors including colonial sources¹ — obviously not divine.

This is the first adverse consequence of Obama’s essentializing Islam and homogenizing Muslims: as much as he may criticize fundamentalists, which he calls “a minority of extremists,” he is using their language and their concepts. This is unlikely to help the cause of anti-fundamentalists forces in Muslim countries.

It follows suite that Obama talks to religions, not to citizens, not to nations or countries. He assumes that anyone has to have a religion, overlooking the fact that in many instances, people are forced into religious identities. In more and more ‘Muslim’ countries, citizens are forced into religious practice² , and pay dissent with their freedom and sometimes with their lives. It is a big blow to them, to their human rights, to freedom of thought and freedom of expression, that the President of the USA publicly comforts the views that citizens of countries where Islam is the main religion are automatically Muslims (unless they belong to religious minority).

Regardless of the fact that one is a believer or not, citizens may choose not to have religion as the main marker of their identity. For instance, to give priority or prominence to their identity as citizens. Many citizens of ‘Muslim’ countries want to leave religion in its place and de-link it from politics. They support secularism and secular laws, i.e. laws democratically voted by the people, changeable by the will and vote of the people; they oppose unchangeable, a-historical, supposedly divine laws, as a process that is alien to democracy. They oppose the political power of clerics.

Obama is claiming to defend democracy, democratic processes, and human rights? How can this fit with addressing whole nations through their supposed, hence imposed, religious identities?

Where is the place for secularists in Obama’s discourse? For their democratic right to vote laws rather than be imposed laws in the name of God? For their human right to believe or not to believe, to practice or not to practice? They simply do not exist. They are ignored. They are made invisible. They are made ‘Muslims’. Not just by our oppressive undemocratic governments — by Obama too. And when he talks of his own fellow citizens, these “7 million American Muslims,” did he ask them what their faith was or is he assuming faith on geographical origin?

In this religious straight jacket, women’s rights are limited to their right to education — and Obama distances himself from arrogant westerners by making it clear that women’s covering is not seen by him as an obstacle to their emancipation. Especially, if it is ‘their choice.’ Meanwhile, Iran is next door, with its morality police that jails women whose hair slips out of the said-covering, in the name of religious laws. And what about Afghanistan or Algeria where women were abducted, tortured, raped, mutilated, burnt alive, killed for not covering³ ?

At no point does he raise the issue of who defines culture, who defines religion, who speaks for ‘the Muslims’ — and why could not it be defined by individual women themselves – without clerics, without morality police, without self appointed, old, conservative, male, religious leaders — if their fundamental human rights were to be respected. Obviously, Obama trades women’s human rights for political and economic alliances with ‘Islam’. ‘Islam’ definitely owns oil, among other things.

No, this discourse is not such a change for an American President: Obama remains within the boundaries of clashing civilizations-religions. How can this save us from the global rise of religious fundamentalism, which this discourse was supposed to counter? He claims that “as long as our relationship is defined by differences, this will empower those who sow hatred, promote conflict,” but the only thing he finds we have in common is “to love our families, our communities, our God.” Muslim fundamentalists will not disown such a program.

In God we trust.

1. For instance, from 1962 to 1976, the source for Algerian laws on reproductive rights was the 1920 French law; or, in 1947, the source for Pakistani law on inheritance was the Victorian law that the UK itself had already done way with.
2. One Malaysian state made daily prayers compulsory; Algerian courts condemned to prison non-fasting citizens in 2008; Iranian courts still jail women for “un-Islamic behavior.”
3. Shadow Report on Algeria.

Tiller was one of the few remaining doctors in the country who performed late-term abortions. His murder is the culmination of a decades-long campaign against both him and Women’s Health Care Services, the clinic he operated.

In June 1986, Tiller’s clinic was bombed — no arrests were ever made in that case. Last month, the clinic was vandalized, with wires to security cameras and outdoor lights cut. The building’s roof was cut through, and downspouts were plugged, leading to flooding that caused thousands of dollars in damage. Tiller had reportedly asked the FBI to investigate.

In 1993, anti-abortion fanatic Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon attempted to murder Tiller, shooting him in both arms. Shannon remains behind bars, convicted of attempted murder and charges stemming from at least six arson and acid-attacks at clinics in Oregon, California, Nevada and Idaho.

According to press reports, a suspect in the murder is in custody, though not charged–he is 51-year-old Scott Roeder of Merriam, Kan. Roeder was allegedly a member at one time of the anti-government militia group known as the “Freemen.” In 1996, he was reportedly found with bomb components in his car trunk.

In a comment left on an anti-abortion Web site two years ago, someone with the same name wrote: “Bleass (sic) everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp.”

Tiller is the fourth abortion provider to be gunned down by “pro-life” extremists since 1993.

That year, Dr. David Gunn was shot to death outside a Pensacola, Florida, clinic. The following year, Dr. John Bayard Britton and one of his volunteer escorts were shot and killed by former minister Paul Hill outside another abortion clinic in Pensacola. Hill had reportedly been “inspired” by Shannon’s attempted murder of Dr. Tiller the year before.

In 1998, anti-choice extremist James Kopp killed Dr. Barnett Slepian in his home in Amhest, N.Y.

As well, there have been dozens of clinic bombings, arsons and other attacks that have injured or frightened staff and volunteers across the country. This includes the 1998 bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., clinic in which nurse Emily Lyons was maimed, and off-duty police officer Robert Sanderson killed by bomber Eric Rudolph.

The immediate aftermath of Tiller’s death included predictable statements from anti-abortion groups claiming that this murder does not represent their movement.

The anti-abortion group Operation Rescue was among those that mercilessly harassed Tiller in life, only to feign surprise and concern at his death. “We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down,” the group said in a statement on its Web site. “Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice.”

Yet Operation Rescue’s director Troy Newman moved the headquarters of the group’s operations to Wichita in 2002 specifically to target Dr. Tiller. The group launched a “Year of Rebuke” campaign in 2004 that targeted what it termed Tiller’s “collaborators” — anyone with political, professional or social ties to the doctor.

The “Year of Rebuke” included plans for protests at the home of every employee at Tiller’s clinic. Typical of the campaign were hundreds of postcards showing mangled fetuses that were sent to the neighbors of clinic employees like Sara Phares. As author Kimberley Sevcik noted in a Rolling Stone article “One man’s God squad“:

[The card read], “Your neighbor Sara Phares participates in killing babies like these.” The postcard implored them to call Phares, whose phone number and address were provided, and voice their opposition to her work at the clinic. Another card soon followed. It referred to Phares as “Miss I Help to Kill Little Babies” and suggested, in an erratic typeface that recalled a kidnapper’s ransom note, that neighbors “beg her to quit, pretty please.”

One of Phares’s neighbors, a federal agent, called her at work to warn her. “Just be careful, ma’am,” he said. “You never know what kind of nuts these things will draw.”

Founder and former head of Operation Rescue Randall Terry didn’t even pretend to be sorry about the murder. “George Tiller was a mass-murderer,” Terry told the Associated Press. “We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God.”

Terry’s real concern was for the renewed scrutiny that the assassination might bring on the anti-choice movement. He told a reporter:

I am more concerned that the Obama administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions…Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches.

While a far-right fanatic may have pulled the trigger, the truth is that the “respectable” right–and the state of Kansas — put a very large target on George Tiller’s back.

Fox News blowhard Bill O’Reilly repeatedly attacked Tiller on air, referring to him as a “so-called baby killer” and the clinic as a “death mill.” In segments he called “Tiller the Baby Killer,” O’Reilly hurled wild accusations:

In the state of Kansas, there is a doctor, George Tiller, who will execute babies for $5,000 if the mother is depressed. And there are rapists impregnating 10-year-olds who are being protected by abortion clinics. It doesn’t get worse than that.

Tiller was also forced to defend himself against trumped-up criminal charges brought by the state. This March, he was acquitted on 19 counts of performing illegal late-term abortions in 2003. Jurors took just 45 minutes to find Tiller not guilty of failing to secure an independent second opinion, which, under Kansas law, is needed to perform late-term abortions.

The court case against Tiller was brought by then-Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline–an abortion opponent, who later lost re-election and has since become a law professor at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

Given this kind of harassment, it’s not surprising that the number of physicians willing to provide abortions — in particular late-term abortions — has dramatically declined in U.S. in the past several decades.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2005, 87 percent of all U.S. counties (with 35 percent of the U.S. female population) lacked an abortion provider. Just 20 percent of providers offered abortion services after 20 weeks — and only 8 percent of all abortion providers offer abortions at 24 weeks.

This, combined with recent statistics from a Gallup poll, show a troubling shift to the right in attitudes on abortion in the U.S. According to the poll, for the “first time, a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.” The poll found 51 percent describing themselves as “pro-life,” up seven points from a year ago.

As SocialistWorker.org columnist Sharon Smith noted:

Since [Bill] Clinton’s election in 1992, the anti-abortion crusade has remained defiant while the pro-choice movement has been in steady retreat. This is the only way to understand how a small but dedicated army of religious zealots has managed to successfully transform the political terrain in its favor — and why a figure as ridiculous as Randall Terry is now regarded as legitimate within the political mainstream.

Dr. Tiller’s violent death at the hands of an anti-abortion extremist should be a wake-up call to supporters of the right of women to control their own bodies.

Despite the rhetoric — adopted today even by mainstream abortion rights groups — that “no woman wants to have an abortion” and that abortion should be “safe, legal and, above all, rare,” the truth is that some women do desperately need and want to have abortions, and they shouldn’t be made to feel guilty for it.

That was something Dr. George Tiller understood — and ultimately gave his life for. As a statement from Tiller’s family following his murder emphasized:

Our loss is also a loss for the City of Wichita and women across America. George dedicated his life to providing women with high-quality heath care, despite frequent threats and violence. We ask that he be remembered as a good husband, father and grandfather, and a dedicated servant on behalf of the rights of women everywhere.

Although the study doesn’t call for it, it provides further evidence for the compelling case for “everybody in, nobody out” single payer health reform as necessary both to provide universal access to health care and as a blow against sexism.

Report authors Sheila D. Rustgi, Michelle M. Doty, and Sara R. Collings begin by placing their findings in the context of an economic crisis where millions of workers are losing their jobs (and with it their employer-provided health insurance) while “health care costs are rising at a rate of more than 6 percent per year . . . increasingly, health insurance and access to care are falling further out of reach for many working families.”

Women are disproportionately affected because on average they “require more health care services [than men] during their reproductive years” and “have higher out-of-pocket medical costs.” Considering that women are paid about 76 cents for every dollar a man makes, they face the triple burden of requiring more care, paying more each time they access care,and relying on less income to cover these costs.

Disturbingly, “in 2007, more than three of five adult women under age 65 reported a problem paying medical bills, a cost-related problem getting health care, or both.” And this data, from before the onset of the current economic crisis, is likely much worse today.

While U.S. Census Bureau data shows that some 47 million (nearly 16 percent) of U.S. residents are uninsured, the inclusion of the underinsured — those who have insurance but “incur out-of-pocket health care costs” such as co-pays and premiums “that are high relative to their income” — reveals that health care woes are spread across a much broader section of the population.

According to the “Women at Risk” report, 75 percent of adults with yearly household income under $20,000 and 60 percent of those with household income between $20,000 and $39,999 “had gaps in their insurance coverage or were underinsured…in 2007, 45 percent of women and 39 percent of men were underinsured or uninsured for a time in the past year.”

The financial burden of health care costs for the underinsured can be crushing, especially for those living paycheck to paycheck, and it’s growing at a rapid rate. In 2007, 55 percent of women with household income under $20,000 spent at least 10 percent of their income on health care, up from 29 percent of those women in 2001, an increase of nearly 90 percent in just six years. The underinsured have coverage, but financial barriers mean they must at times go without needed care or choose between paying for care and other necessities such as food, rent, or debt payments.

According to the “Women at Risk” study, 67 percent of low-income women and 65 percent of moderate-income women responded “yes” when asked if, during 2007, because of cost they’d “not filled a prescription; skipped a medical test, treatment, or follow-up visit recommended by a doctor; not visited a doctor or clinic when they had a medical problem; or did not get needed specialist care.” Working-class men fare better, but still face a crisis situation: for men in the same income brackets the percentages forgoing needed care are 57 percent and 52 percent, respectively.

Frequently, the un- and underinsured skip preventive care, such as cancer-screening: according to the Commonwealth report, “only 67 percent of underinsured women over the age of 50 received a mammogram in the past two years, compared with 85 percent of adequately insured women.” Going without preventive care has tragic consequences: patients with treatable but dangerous diseases such as cancer and diabetes may go years without a diagnosis, only finding out about their condition when it’s too late to prevent serious complications or even premature death.

According to Urban Institute findings based on Institute of Medicine methodology, 137,000 people died in the U.S. from 2000 to 2006 from a lack of health insurance. To put this in perspective, that is over 28 times the number of U.S. soldiers who’ve died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 23,702 more than the number of U.S. residents murdered during those same six years.

The United States spends more on health care than any other country in the world, yet is the only advanced industrialized nation that does not provide universal access to care and thousands of poor and working class residents die each year as a result.

They die because health insurance giants maximize profits, which increased 170 percent from 2003-2007 to $12.6 billion for the industry leaders, by providing less care and passing more costs on to those who are insured, providing insufficient coverage to those who are underinsured, and refusing to cover those who cannot afford to pay enough in premiums for the insurance companies to make a profit.

Until the profit motive is removed and the insurance companies excluded by the introduction of a single-payer reform or system of socialized medicine, millions will continue to suffer from forgoing needed health care.

Proposed reforms that maintain a role for private insurance, such as the “health insurance mandate” reform (the Massachusetts model), under which everyone is required to purchase health insurance, even if they contain enough subsidies to insure everyone (and even in Massachusetts over 2 percent aren’t covered) will amount to a massive public subsidy to the health insurance industry and fall short of providing universal health care.

As illustrated above, millions of the underinsured, those who have insurance but pay a prohibitively high percentage of their income in premiums and out-of-pocket costs, do not have access to the care they need. Having access to insurance is not the same as having access to care, and it is not enough to fill in the gaping cracks in the system.

Those who are oppressed and marginalized, such as low-income women, are more likely to fall through these cracks, or be “swept into them” (as described in Michael Moore’s Sicko).

Reproduction is one of the main reasons women as a whole require a greater amount of health care than men. Women must pay for birth control, abortion services, prenatal, maternity, and post-partum care (before during, and immediately after the time of birth), and other services associated with choosing whether or not to have children or ensuring the health of mother and child.

According to a 2007 Thomson report for the March of Dimes entitled “The Healthcare Costs of Having a Baby,” for the insured, the average vaginal birth in 2004 cost $7,737 (inclusive of prenatal and other care) while the average Cesarean section cost $10,958, the overwhelming majority paid for by the insurance company.

However, for the uninsured and underinsured, disproportionately low-income women, these costs are prohibitive and can have a devastating impact on the health of the woman and child. According to Dr. Jennifer L. Howse, president of the March of Dimes, “it is well documented that a lack of prenatal care is associated with poor birth outcomes, including prematurity and low birth-weight, and high out-of-pocket expenditures may discourage women from obtaining the care they need.”

Control over reproduction is essential to winning equality for women. Working-class women who cannot afford birth control or an abortion when they so desire, do not have full control over their bodies and therefore cannot enjoy equality with men.

Similarly, this control is denied women who would like to have children but are discouraged or go without proper care because they lack adequate health insurance and cannot afford the costs associated with the care necessary to minimize health risks to mother and child.

For working-class women especially and for the working class as a whole, health-care costs associated with reproduction are one of the ways the capitalist class passes the cost burden of raising the next generation of workers onto the working class. The capitalist class wants workers to have more babies for the former to exploit for profits when the latter grow up, but would much rather the working class pay the costs and perform the unpaid labor to raise them.

The enactment of a system of universal health care, one that includes full funding for abortion (and a repeal of the Hyde Amendment restricting federal funding for abortion), would be a major victory for the women’s rights movement, the labor movement (health care benefits are often used as a lever for employers to gain concessions from labor) and for the working class as a whole.

Today, according to a recent CBS/New York Times poll, 59 percent of Americans support government-provided national health insurance as opposed to 32 percent who think it should be left to the private sector. And numerous polls have shown that significant majorities of doctors support a single-payer system that eliminates the role of private health insurance.

Earlier this month, when nurses, doctors, and other “single-payer” advocates disrupted a Senate finance committee meeting on health care reform to ask why supporters of single-payer were not included and why committee chair Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana) refused to consider it, they were removed by police and arrested.

A government that would provide a seat at the table for health insurance executives who preside over a system that kills dozens every day by denying care, while arresting those who actually provide health care and speak for a majority of the population, is not going to pass single-payer unless pressured by a movement from below.

As Frederick Douglass wrote, “Without struggle, there is no progress.” Supporters of women’s and worker’s rights should join the movement for single-payer health care, health care for all. Everybody in, nobody out!

Although the text is occasionally uneven, with most of the testimony coming out of Iraq, Israel and Palestine, there is a consistency to the stories here. Some mothers express an inconsolable anger while others seem to have opted for an almost zen-like acceptance of their children’s deaths in the world’s battles. The consistency referred to is not in how they deal with their children’s deaths, but in their common desire that no other mothers suffer like they have. The most evocative stories come from Iraq and Palestine, in part because Galleymore spent the most time in those two broken nations, but perhaps also because the perpetrators of the death in those places are so close to Galleymore’s own life story. Indeed, her son served in Iraq and Afghanistan. This fact was not only the motivation for Galleymore’s visit to Iraq and other nations in the Middle East, but was also a motivation to write this book. It is part of her attempt to understand not only what her nation and its ally Israel have done to their chosen enemies that spurred this project but also to understand what compelled her son to join the US military.

Galleymore addresses this very issue in the book’s section on the United States. To be honest, this part of the text drew the least sympathy from this reader. Much of what is written here is difficult to sympathize with. We read the letters of a soldier describing his unit’s interactions with the Iraqi people–indiscriminate killing and fear accompanied by a growing hatred of the mission and the people he was told he was sent to liberate. More stories of poorly equipped US troops going into battles they should never have fought because they should never have been in Iraq. Underlying it all is a failure to understand that there is no lasting glory in their mission beyond the individual acts performed on that battlefield where they don’t belong. After these tales of the hardships of the occupiers, Galleymore asks the question she was asked by some of her interviewees in those nations under the US (or its ally Israel) military’s boot. How can American mothers allow their children to join in this endeavor of conquering and occupation? Why don’t the mothers of US children considering the military just tell them “no?”

In response, Galleymore considers the cultural assumptions that create the dynamic whereby young Americans join the military despite their mothers’ objections. In the United States, writes Galleymore, 18-year-olds can “make legally binding choices independent of parents and family, including the choice to enlist in the military.” Many parents go along with this choice, believing that the military will somehow teach their child discipline. It may very well do that, writes Galleymore, but it also teaches those children to kill. This is what most Americans refuse to openly acknowledge: that they have allowed their child to learn how to kill other humans. In more collectivist cultures like many of those in the Middle East and Central Asia, argues the author, where family, clan, and parental respect are paramount, it is extremely unlikely that a son would enlist without permission from the head of the family.

Then again, here in the United States, the military is everywhere–schools, television, video games. Our culture is permeated with the military’s presence. Boys and girls as young as eleven go to summer camps sponsored by the US Army. Recruiters roam the halls of many high schools and shopping malls looking for future soldiers and marines. Malls lend shop space to military recruiters for a weekend geared toward elementary and middle school age children that includes all the free video games kids want to play. All they need to provide the recruiters on site is their name and social security number. A few months later the phone calls, text messages and emails began coming, encouraging the youngster to consider joining the military. If these recruiters were working for a gang besides the military, they would be chased out of town and condemned for the predators they are.

The United States has the mother of two young girls living in the White House now. From all appearances Michelle Obama seems to be a wonderful mom. One wonders what she would tell a military recruiter if they called her home looking for Malia or sent her oldest daughter an email extolling the virtues of enlisting in the military. Hopefully, she would be appalled at the sheer audacity of a recruiter attempting to influence a child. Yet, this is what the military does. Without shame. Of course, if the United States was not so insistent on maintaining and expanding its reach via the sword, then perhaps the military wouldn’t feel compelled to kidnap the minds of middle-schoolers. One way to change (and perhaps the only way) the drive for empire Washington and Wall Street have locked this nation into is by resisting that drive. A good place to start is by making the mothers of those children who fight Washington’s wars aware of the consequences of their inaction is. A good place to start this awareness is at the top. So, let me suggest that when you finish reading Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak About War & Terror you mail your copy to Michelle Obama at the White House. Perhaps she’ll take the time to read it.

The 19-year-old Brown appeared in court on March 5 and was charged with two counts of felony assault for an incident in which 21-year-old Rihanna said he repeatedly hit, choked and threatened to kill her while they were having an argument.

For the most part, the media turned a serious topic into a sensation, exploiting every gory detail for no other purpose than to shock its viewers.

In the midst of the frenzy, talk show host Oprah Winfrey pulled together a show on dating violence in an effort to take the issue seriously, and reach out to women who might be living in violent situations.

Winfrey invited supermodel and talk-show host Tyra Banks to talk about her interviews with Rihanna, in which she described her parents fighting, and with Brown, who said he witnessed his mother’s abuse and swore he’d never put a women through what his mom went through. Banks also talked about her own experience of emotional abuse.

The show relayed the simple recognition that violence against women is rife in our society, and women aren’t to blame for it — observations that sadly not everyone shares. In a survey in the aftermath of the beating incident by the Boston Public Heath Commission, half of the teenagers surveyed, aged 12 to 19, boys and girls, said they thought that Rihanna was responsible for being beaten.

Statistics on dating violence and young women are shocking. According to the Family Violence and Prevention Fund, one in five female high school students reports being physically and/or sexually abused by a date, and 8 percent of high-school-age girls say that they have been forced by a boyfriend to have sex against their will. Forty percent of girls aged 14 to 17 say they know someone their age who has been hit by a boyfriend.

According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, every year women in the U.S. experience 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes. According to the Bureau of Justice, 1,181 women were murdered by an intimate partner in 2005 — an average of three women every day.

During the show, Winfrey and Banks repeated the advice that women must find the strength to get out of an abusive relationship. They made it seem as if abused women simply needed to summon the confidence inside to get themselves out of a nightmare. “When you feel great, you draw greatness to you,” said Oprah. You might as well tell a battered woman to pull herself up by her bootstraps.

Nowhere in this discussion was there any recognition of how difficult it is — financially and emotionally — for most women to get out of battering relationships, much less a real answer to why battering takes place.

Women escaping abuse often find themselves without the funds, credit or work history to find stable housing. A 2008 Equal Rights Center investigation of 93 rental properties in the District of Columbia found that, overall, 65 percent of test applicants seeking housing on behalf of a domestic violence survivor were either denied housing or offered less advantageous terms and conditions than an applicant not associated with domestic violence.

Shelters for women who seek to escape abuse and their children are scarce and pitifully underfunded.

A 24-hour census of domestic violence shelters and services by the National Network to End Domestic Violence found that more than 20,000 adult and child victims of abuse sought refuge in emergency shelters, and more than 10,000 adult and child abuse victims were living in transitional housing in a single day in 2008. According to the survey, on that same day, nearly 9,000 requests for assistance went unmet because of a lack of funding.

Of course, few people would look to Oprah Winfrey to provide all the answers to such serious questions as violence against women. But the discussion on her show with Banks says something about the way we are expected to view problems like domestic abuse and dating violence. The problem, like the solution, is always explained in terms of personal responsibility.

“Breaking the cycle of violence” is a favorite phrase of talk show advisors, but what does that mean exactly? That, by some force of nature, some men are batterers, and they pass this to their sons? The word “cycle” implies that violence is unstoppable and inevitable, until an individual man or woman makes it stop.

This isn’t to say that such individual solutions can’t and don’t happen — men and women change their situations for the better, despite the tremendous forces working against them.

But the “individual responsibility” way of looking at violence against women masks a greater, more systemic problem — that a society which treats women as less than equal opens the door for women to be abused.

In all sort of ways, our society views women as if they are of less value than men. This isn’t expressed only in music lyrics or sexism in popular culture, but in women’s overall status, including the unfair burden in the home that most women are expected to bear.

Add to this the difficult and contradictory relationships that can exist among family members. Inside families and relationships, the unexpressed frustrations of the outside world make themselves felt — and in some cases, the people closest and least responsible for the outside miseries become targets of abuse. It is little wonder that reports of domestic abuse have increased among military families, as the horrors of military services come back to haunt soldiers who take it out on their family members.

The answer to domestic violence lies in fundamentally changing the status of women in society. One first step would be to demand services, such as a safe place to live, for women who are facing abuse. Another is fighting for living wages, so that no woman feels the need to stay with an abuser because she cannot afford to leave. Likewise, free and accessible child care and health care would go a long way toward freeing women, and men, from the stresses and burdens of everyday life.

These things will come at no small price — and they certainly won’t be won by exhorting women to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”

They have to be organized for and fought for — by women and men together, committed to ending women’s oppression.

A sign of these times is a phrase from Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who refers to himself as a feminist: “True socialism is feminist.” Progressive Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa named “gender justice” — the end to discrimination against women — as part of his vision for 21st century socialism. And at the recent World Social Forum in Brazil, the Assembly of Social Movements issued the following declaration:

“The social emancipation process carried by the feminist, environmentalist and socialist movements in the 21st century aims at liberating society from capitalist domination of the means of production, communication and services, achieved by supporting forms of ownership that favor the social interest: small family freehold, public, cooperative, communal and collective property.

“Such an alternative will necessarily be feminist since it is impossible to build a society based on social justice and equality of rights when half of humankind is oppressed and exploited.”

This article revolves around the question: to what extent have conditions for women changed as a result of the left trend in Latin American politics?

The U.S. has had interests in Latin America throughout the 1800s (the acquisition of much of Mexico being one of them), but Yankee domination throughout the region began in earnest with the Spanish-American war in 1898. It continued, despite Cuba’s breakaway in 1959, for a full century, but is now declining as progressive countries assert their independence. In the process have come economic and social reforms, a number of which have benefited the women of Latin America.

In 1998, leftist Hugo Chavez won his first term as democratically elected president. Brazil elected Worker Party founder Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002. In Bolivia, the poorest republic in South America, unionist Evo Morales was elected in 2005 after mass rebellions forced out three presidents in two years. Daniel Ortega, who led the Nicaraguan Sandinista revolution in the 1970s and ’80s, was democratically voted back into office in 2006. Progressive governments have been voted into office in Ecuador, Paraguay, Chile and Argentina. Chile, the country once ruled by the fascist regime of Augusto Pinochet, is now headed by a female Socialist Party member, Michele Bachelet. The government of Argentina is also headed by a woman, Cristina Fernanedez de Kirchner.

Women in all regions of the world suffer subordination to men, in economic, political and social life and in the home. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is composed of the advanced capitalist democracies, Latin American women suffer less total gender discrimination — in ownership rights, civil liberties, family codes and physical integrity — than other regions of the world except for the OECD states. This isn’t to suggest women have achieved equality in Latin America (or in the OECD states), but they enjoy certain rights denied their sisters, particularly in portions of Africa and Asia.

OECD data also show that there is an important correlation between social institutions and the economic role of women. Female participation in the workforce is low in areas where discrimination is high, for example. Women who are denied ownership rights can’t start their own businesses. Social inequality is also pronounced in countries with low female literacy rates. Infant and maternal mortality rates are a measure of health care available for women.

Women constitute 40% of the Latin American workforce, but many of the economies cannot absorb all the women seeking work, especially the poorest. Also, many women who want to work in the economy are hampered by child care and housework responsibilities. In addition, many women work in the informal sectors or at home and have no access to worker safety nets. Women’s average wages are 60%-70% of men’s, averaging 64% as of 2007. (In the U.S women earn 77 cents to the male dollar.)

Most Latin American states have passed laws guaranteeing property rights for women, but because men often have more resources, women’s holdings are likely to be smaller.

Nearly 90% of adults in Latin America and the Caribbean can read and write, but many are at a low level of literacy due to inadequate educational systems. Yet Latin America has made more progress in literacy than many other developing regions.

Reproductive rights are a key indication of women’s rights. In most of the region, largely because of the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, abortions are a crime. But the abortion rate is far higher than in Western Europe or the United States with more than four million abortions each year and tens of thousands of resulting deaths. Only in Cuba is abortion legal on demand. A few other countries permit it for extreme circumstances. In the most recent abridgement of women’s rights, Nicaragua last year outlawed abortion without exception, including to save the life of the mother, the only exception formerly allowed.

Many Latin American women are agitating for legalizing abortion in all or some circumstances. The recent lifting of Washington’s global ban on abortions in health facilities funded by the U.S. may help move this forward.

Divorce is now legal throughout Latin America. The last country in the region to legalize it was Chile, in December 2004. (Now only two countries in the world ban divorce — the Philippines and Malta.

Violence against women is a serious problem in Latin America, as it is in most of the rest of the world. Approximately one in three women in Latin America and the Caribbean has been a victim of sexual, physical, or psychological violence at the hands of intimate partners, according to survey data collected by the Pan American Health Organization in 2006.

Since the 1990s, a majority of the countries in Latin America have taken some action to outlaw violence against women. However, conservative courts often choose not to rule for women, especially in cases of domestic violence. The region’s women and their allies have given a name to the worst crime of violence against women: femicide. This is defined as the murder of women by men because they are women.

The existence of an active women’s movement is an important factor in winning rights for women. Within the region, there have been active struggles for women’s rights throughout the 20th Century to the present, even under the most oppressive regimes. Women have been formidable opponents of tyrannical governments, such as the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. The indigenous women’s movement played an important part in Bolivia’s progressive gains. Women voted in large number for Venezuela’s Chavez, and supported the revolution in Cuba.

There are some tensions within the Latin American women’s movement as there are in such movements around the world. Women’s movements are often separated by social class. They have different goals, different needs, a different orientation, and they can’t always unite on gender. In cases of economic hardship, poor women’s struggles are more likely to unite brothers and sisters of the same class than they are to unite sisters across class lines. Similarly, there is often disunity between movements of indigenous women and European-descended women.

Where the interests of class, race and gender do intersect, there are different orientations about what to fight for. Very broadly, one polarity sees the fight for equality with men as meaning that focusing on traditional women’s work (child care, housework) will lock them into these gender roles. The other polarity begins by fighting where women are now (mothers, housewives) and wants rights and benefits right now for this women’s work: paid maternity leave, stipends and social security for housework, free and readily available daycare. The benefits women have won to date are in both realms.

Movements of indigenous women are helping to transform the politics of the region. Women account for nearly 60% of the 50 million indigenous people in Latin America and the Caribbean, and they face triple discrimination as women, as indigenous and as poor. Also, much of the ecological devastation of Latin America is taking place on indigenous land, and women are in the forefront of the battle for natural resources.

Here is more detail on a few specific countries:

CUBA: Literacy is 100% for women and men, and women are 65% of university graduates; pay equity is embedded in law; nearly 40% of women are in the labor force, constituting 46% of all workers and half of all doctors; some 43% of deputies in the National Assembly are women, the highest percentage in Latin America and among the highest in the world; maternal mortality, at 34 per 100,000 is extremely low; infant mortality of six per thousand births is the lowest in Latin America. Abortion is free, as is all health care.

The Cuban constitution grants women equal economic, political, cultural, social and familial rights with men and prohibits discrimination based on race, skin color, sex, national origin, and religious belief. These rights are further supported by provisions in various laws, including the Family Code (1975), which requires men to participate equally in domestic labor, guarantees equal rights to women and men in marriage and divorce, and equal parental rights; and 1979 and 1984 revisions to the Penal Code, which provide additional penalties for violations of sexual equality.

The women’s movement has been important in furthering women’s gains. Women took part in the revolution, including in leadership roles. The Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), a non-governmental organization with close ties to the government, is the national agency responsible for the advancement of women and is involved in every facet of society in promoting equality. Crimes of violence against women, especially rape and sexual assault, are severely punished in Cuba. The Federation of Cuban Women travels the country to find out if there is hidden violence and to set up mechanisms for reporting and for community intervention.

VENEZUELA: Women, especially poor women, have been a very large part of President Chavez’s base in elections, in the street to oppose the U.S.-backed coup, in the recall referendum in 2004, and in supporting his programs. With a majority of people living in poverty and 65% of households run by single women, Chavez’s social welfare programs are widely supported. These include adult education, free health and dental treatment, and care for women who have suffered domestic violence. There is also a high level of participation at the organizational and community level. But Venezuela also has its share of right-wing women, primarily from the middle class, who constitute the majority of demonstrators in opposition to Chavez.

The 1999 Venezuelan constitution guarantees total social, political and economic rights to all citizens. It clearly states that women are entitled to full citizenship, and it addresses discrimination, sexual harassment, and domestic violence. In addition to guaranteeing full equality between men and women in employment, it is the only constitution in Latin America that recognizes housework as an economically productive activity, thus entitling housewives to social security benefits.

In 2000, Chávez established the National Institute for Women by a presidential mandate, in accordance with the Law of Equal Opportunities for Women. The institute educates women to defend and expand the political, social and cultural rights they have achieved. It serves as a watchdog on the government and as a strategy for educating women about their rights, including how to report domestic violence.

Venezuela has set up Banmujer, the Women’s Development Bank of Venezuela. The only national financial institution of its kind, Banmujer gives small, low-interest loans to women in order to help them form business ventures. The economic and social needs of women are also being met by a set of development programs called “social missions” that began operating in 2003 using oil revenues. These include a nutrition and food distribution program, adult literacy and education, and free healthcare clinics primarily in economically depressed areas. Such programs have helped to raise the standard of living significantly, contributing to a 27.6% drop in poverty rates since the missions began.

BOLIVIA: When Evo Morales was elected president in Bolivia in December 2005, 70% of the population of just under nine million was living below the poverty line. Morales’s incoming cabinet consisted largely of indigenous people, trade unionists, and women. His cabinet also included the first woman to head the interior ministry — in charge of intelligence, the police, migration issues and the fight against drugs. Women were also at the head of the Ministries of Economic Development and of Health. All of these appointees have progressive pro-woman programs.

The just-ratified new constitution contains provisions that strengthen women’s rights. It prohibits discrimination based on sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation, as well as familial and gendered violence. It guarantees equal pay for men and women with the same job. It also requires equal participation of women and men in Bolivia’s Congress.

However, reproductive rights are not available to most women in Bolivia. Abortion is illegal except for victims of sexual assault or to prevent a life-threatening pregnancy. In fact, Bolivia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world — up to 80,000 procedures annually in a small-sized country, according to the UN. Many are relatively safe procedures performed in more than a dozen clinics around the country. But the average $150 fee is prohibitive to most women, driving many to seek alternative methods, resulting in at least one death a day.

CHILE: Under the Pinochet dictatorship, from 1973 to the 1990s, grassroots women’s movements sprang up, partly in response to extreme poverty and to survive economically. Women formed buying and craft cooperatives and communal kitchens. They also created organizations to reclaim women’s rights and basic human rights, and to search for the disappeared. This organizing transformed women into social activists.

Chilean women are well represented in government and political life. They also have advanced social benefits. When elected, Michele Bachelet named a cabinet with an unprecedented equal number of men and women – making good on a campaign promise. Bachelet administers a program of limited social democracy but with a good record on women’s rights, particularly in the areas of welfare, public pension benefits for women over 65, free childcare for working mothers, anti-discrimination legislation, and affirmative action to increase political representation. Starting in July 2009, all women 65 or older will receive a pension bonus for each living child they have. Women without a history of paid employment will receive public pensions.

Abortion is illegal in all circumstances and is the nation’s highest cause of maternal deaths. But the Bachelet administration did institute a program of expanded access to contraception. One of these measures was a policy to distribute the morning after pill free in public health clinics. The country’s high court outlawed this policy last April. Following this ruling, 10,000 people marched in the streets and hundreds engaged in a mass “apostasy,” renouncing their membership in the Catholic Church.

Violence against women in Chile reflects what is going on in the rest of the region. Last fall Chile’s Chamber of Deputies passed a bill that would recognize femicide as an official crime and increase punishments for violators. The bill also calls for new safe houses to be constructed for women who are victimized by domestic violence. This is now waiting for Senate approval.

MEXICO: Women in Mexico have won some important victories. Probably the most ground-breaking legislation was passed by Mexico City lawmakers (though not in the rest of the country) in April 2007, legalizing abortion during the first trimester. This was upheld by Mexico’s supreme court. Since the law was passed, 5,845 women have had legal abortions in the capital city. Mexico City has also implemented a policy aimed at reducing sexual harassment of women in public transport by placing women-only buses on the street. Still in the works is a law that will make it easier to prosecute those found harassing women in public spaces. Other important measures include the granting of paternity leave, which will not only promote gender equality, but will also aid in raising awareness of the need for men to participate in child care.

At the same time, in Ciudad Juarez there is an epidemic of rape and murder of young women – more than 600 since 1993. Domestic violence claims the lives of 14 women a day in Mexico, but the law in eight states does not consider domestic violence a crime and 12 do not penalize rape in marriage.

We can’t discuss women in Latin America without mentioning migration. Because of the vastly unequal trade arrangements between the U.S. and Mexico, for example, workers are driven off the land to the cities to find work. Many others are forced to try their luck in the U.S., leaving families behind to depend on remittances and on the low salaries of peasant and poor women. In other cases, couples or families migrate together. Not only do they suffer poverty but also poor working conditions, pesticide poisoning, violence and death.

As we asked in the beginning: are women’s conditions changing as a result of the left trend in Latin America? The answer is yes, but there is still a long way to go, as in most of the world. In Latin America we’ve seen a striking transformation of many political, legal and economic rights. Social rights and changes in mind-set and culture will take longer. But the left trend — from social democracy to the movements toward socialism — has made significant progress so far and there will likely be more to come.

Last month, Nawal al-Samarrai, Iraq’s State Minister for Women’s Affairs, quit her job to protest a lack of resources and government support. She faced the daunting task of helping women with a budget that had been slashed from $7,500 to $1,500 per month.

“I think it is wrong to stay as a minister without doing anything for my people, especially in this time and in this situation of Iraqi women — we have an army of widows, violated women, detainees, illiteracy and unemployment — many, many problems. I had to resign,” she said in an interview with National Public Radio.

Al-Samarrai says there are more than three million widows in Iraq, most of them with children and without a social safety net or steady source of income. Because so many men have been killed by consecutive wars, some estimates put the rate of women to men at 65/35.

As the six-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq approaches, the voices of the women who are dealing with growing unemployment, violence, and seclusion are still missing from the conversation about the continued occupation and President Obama’s decision to keep 50,000 troops in their country.

A new book attempts to give those women a voice and examine why military intervention and occupation have failed to “liberate” them. In What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq, authors Nadje Al-Ali, Reader in Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Nicola Pratt, Lecturer in Comparative Politics and International Relations at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, write, “Official rhetoric puts women at center stage, but we show that in reality women’s rights and women’s lives have been exploited in the name of competing political agendas.”

The authors also challenge the widespread held belief in the Western media and among many U.S. politicians that something inherent in Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Iraqi culture is responsible for the ongoing violence, sectarianism, and systematic erosion of women’s rights in Iraq. “We argue that it is not Islam or ‘culture’ that has pushed Iraqi women back into their homes. Instead we blame specific and rapidly changing political, economic, and social conditions as well as a wide range of national, regional, and international actors,” they write.

When the Western media does highlight the plight of Iraqi women, they almost always fail to note that Iraqi women activists have been organizing since the 1920 revolution against British occupation. The Women’s Awakening Club, the first women’s organization in Iraq, was founded in 1923. The Iraqi Women’s Union, a feminist organization founded in 1945, tackled previously taboo issues such as prostitution, divorce, workplace issues, child custody, and property rights.

“Iraqi women were once at the forefront of the region with regard to women’s education, labor force participation, and political activism,” write Al-Ali and Pratt.

They argue that it is essential for antiwar movements to address the issue of women’s rights and resist U.S. imperialism simultaneously. “Any analysis of what went wrong in Iraq must put gender firmly on the agenda.”

AlterNet caught up with Nadje Al-Ali on a recent visit to San Francisco. Al-Ali is founding member of Act Together: Women’s Action for Iraq, a UK-based group formed in 2000 to campaign against the economic sanctions on Iraq and since late 2001, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. On August 1, 2007, Al-Ali’s uncle and 16-year-old cousin were killed in their home in Baghdad by unmasked gunmen.

Rose Aguilar: March 20 marks the six-year anniversary of the invasion. When you look back at this occupation, what comes to mind?

Nadje Al-Ali: The death toll. That’s the first thing that comes to mind. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. You have hundreds of thousands of widows. Iraq has become a nation of widows. Sixty-five percent of the population is women. You have some areas of Iraq where about 70 percent are female-headed households and there is no functioning state, so women are forced to beg. Some are forced into prostitution. Some get $100 a month to survive.

RA: What else is new about today’s situation?

NA: We’ve never seen a situation where women were told to stay at home or forced to follow a dress code or told not to drive, which is happening in certain parts of Iraq. This is a totally new phenomenon. Last year in Basra, 133 women were killed by various Islamist groups for allegedly not being Islamic enough. This is not to say that things were wonderful under the previous regime, but one of the things that has been disturbing for me is the fact that some of the women and men I’ve talked to who suffered under the previous regime and under sanctions and wars, say it was better then than it is now.

Also, what I think is forgotten is the humanitarian crisis. Six years afterwards, people still don’t have electricity. They need generators if they want electricity. Seventy percent of Iraqis don’t have access to clean water. Eighty percent don’t have access to sewage. The hospitals are in very bad shape. We haven’t seen any reconstruction, really.

RA: What about the political situation?

NA: We had one Saddam Hussein. We had a dictator. Now Iraqis tell me, ‘We have 90 Saddam Husseins. We have many dictators.’ I’m in contact with scholars and university students. Everything is controlled by political parties. We had one radio station before; one TV station; one newspaper. Now we have many, but each one is pulling one specific line. That is not democracy.

I think it is wonderful that women went out to vote and in principle; it’s wonderful that women ran; but what people don’t realize is that many women who ran for election were not asked if they wanted to run. They were told to run. There’s a 25 percent women’s quota and lots of women ended up being told by their brothers, fathers, or other male politicians that you need to run because we have to fill the quota.

RA: What about security?

NA: Things are better than they were last year. In 2006 and 2007, it was really bad. Almost 90 people a day died. Things are better now, but why are they better? How is it sustainable? If you look at a city like Baghdad, mixed neighborhoods hardly exist anymore, so you have a Sunni neighborhood and you have a Shia neighborhood.

RA: Are neighborhoods still divided by walls?

NA: I’ve heard that some of the walls are being taken down, but there are still walls controlled by local militias. I hope that the country is going into a more stable phase, but I don’t trust the situation yet because in the first years after the invasion, the U.S. supported the Shia militia and armed them. The last few years, they have been arming Sunni groups. So now you have the Shia militias that are armed and the Sunni militias that are armed, both by Americans. What is going to happen? I don’t know.

Many people are fed up with sectarian political parties, but I don’t think this is the beginning of democracy. Fifty percent of the population voted. There had to be extremely high security at the polling station. Yes, Maliki is not an extremist Islamist, but he’s part of the Shia Islamist political party. It’s not a secular regime. What we have now is an establishment that is based on corruption. Everything is corrupt in Iraq.

RA: In this country, when we have conversations about Iraq, we tend to focus on the military and technical aspects, which are important, but it’s so rare to see the human side of the occupation. You said Iraq is not a functioning state. Talk about that.

NA: What does a state do? It provides security. It protects the borders. The state is also involved in providing services related to education and healthcare. That is still not happening. What you have are different political parties controlling different aspects of the state. If you want anything in Iraq, you need to pay for it. You need to prove that you are part of a political party, so that party can pull strings for you to get something done. For instance, if you want to enter university or get a scholarship, you have to go to a political party’s office. You pay your way through the system.

The billions of dollars that were supposed to go into reconstruction went into the pockets of American companies like Halliburton, but they also went into the pockets of corrupt Iraqi politicians. It’s on all levels from your local thug to the ministry.

RA: According to reports, the U.S. is still spending $12 billion a month in Iraq.

NA: I find it very strange that in the context of this worldwide crisis and the credit crunch, these connections are not being made. In terms of getting people to think about Iraq, if they don’t care about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died, think about your own lives. There is a connection between the money that is spent there and the money that could have been invested in your healthcare system, education system, and so on.

RA: You interviewed 120 women for your book. Tell me about the women’s rights activist you interviewed. How are they doing their work under such horrible circumstances?

NA: In 2004 and 2005, there was a mushrooming of women’s organizations in Iraq. It’s important to mention that the first people to deal with the mess after the invasion and looting were women. They tried to clean up the local hospitals and schools on a very practical level. They’re not passive bystanders.

RA: That’s how they’re often portrayed in the media.

NA: Yes, they’re either victims or they’re the heroines of the new Iraq. Iraqi women realized that despite the rhetoric of women’s liberation, women’s rights were not going to be handed to them on a golden platter. They had to fight for it, so they started to mobilize politically.

RA: In your book, you say it’s important to remember that Laura Bush and Condoleeza Rice constantly talked about women’s rights in Iraq.

NA: Yes, they started to think about women’s rights in Iraq a few months before the invasion. For years, many of us have been trying to point out how economic sanctions affected women’s rights. No one wanted to listen, certainly not the Bush administration. All of a sudden, there’s this interest in women’s rights.

Many Iraqi women inside Iraq decided to take things into their own hands. They said, ‘We had to keep the country together during these difficult times, during wars, during dictatorships, during sanctions. We want to be part of this new Iraq.’ But they knew they had to fight for it. So they started to mobilize. There was a mushrooming of women’s organizations that worked on humanitarian and political issues. In 2005, you saw women demonstrating on the streets. There were even sit-ins. People started income generating projects. There was a lot of activity. But in mid-2005, there was an outbreak in violence and women were targeted. Women’s rights activists received death threats. Many had to leave the country. Many stopped working. Despite the difficulties, many organizations continue. You still have over 100 women’s organizations throughout the country involved in providing basic services and lobbying politically. I don’t feel very hopefully about the political struggle. The first thing that is compromised is women’s rights.

In the current constitution, one of the outstanding issues is Article 41. It relates to the personal status code, which is a set of laws that govern marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance. Very few people know this, but in 1959, there was a new constitution. Iraq had one of the most progressive personal status codes. For instance, a man was not allowed to say, ‘I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you.’ He had to go through court. A man could not just marry a second wife or third wife. He had to get the permission of the wife. It was a codified set of laws that applied to all Iraqis, whether you’re Sunni or Shia, which allowed for mixed marriages. Now in the current constitution, Article 41 states that all Iraqis follow their specific set of laws depending on their ethnic and religious background. There is no law that is actually spelled out. It just says it’s up to interpretation. It’s not that Islamic law is inherently bad. If you had an egalitarian person interpreting Islamic law, you can come up with relatively egalitarian laws. But when I see the people who are controlling the streets of Iraq, I’m not very hopeful.

RA: What are you hearing from the Iraqi women’s rights activists about the occupation?

NA: Their views have changed quite drastically over the years. They had very divergent views in the beginning. Some women were pro-invasion. Many were not keen on the invasion. One woman said, ‘It happened. We’re hopeful.’ Some were vehemently against it, so there was quite a range of opinion when I started out. In 2005, there was a shift. Women who were optimistic in the beginning started to rethink their position and became much more critical of the occupation. Until 2007, some Iraqi women’s rights activists would tell me, ‘We don’t like the occupation. We want them to go. But they cannot go quite yet because we are more worried about the militias linked to the government and the Islamist insurgents. As long as they are targeting women, we need the Americans to protect us.’ Even they have changed their opinion. They are very disillusioned.

For a long time, they were still hoping that the Americans would somehow help them in their struggle for women’s rights, which in the beginning they [the Americans] were at least paying lip service to it. Now they’re not even saying that anymore. They’re not even pretending to be interested in women’s rights and there’s a great sense of disillusionment and disappointment among the women, who until a little while ago, were willing to go to the Green Zone and try to get support. But even they have realized that the American occupation is not helping in terms of security. If anything, they have worsened sectarian tensions and have been arming militias and insurgents. And they are not being serious about women’s rights and not even pretending to be.

RA: There were massive demonstrations in this country in the lead up to the invasion, but they’ve died down. There will be a big march in DC on March 21. As you speak in this country, what goes through your mind?

NA: When I entered the San Francisco airport, the immigration officer asked me, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m here for a book launch for What Kind of Liberation.’ He said, ‘So women’s lives are really good now in Iraq?’ I told him, ‘No, actually they’re not.’ And he was really surprised. It’s not that I like to be the conveyer of bad news, but I think people need to get a reality check.

This idea that because there was an election and women participated, Iraq becomes a model. Even when the violence stops, the implications for women’s rights and women’s roles are long term. They are the biggest losers in all of this because they are being used by everyone, whether it’s the Iraqi government using women to show they are different from the previous regime, or the resistance who see women as resistance to imperialism and therefore women should wear certain clothes and behave in a certain way. Women are caught between all these different forces. The irony of the situation is the louder we fight for women’s rights while the occupation is going on, the greater the backlash against women’s rights inside Iraq.

In a column titled, “Perversion of Justice: Gulag America,” Rudy Amanda, an investigative journalist, states that “female incarceration rates jumped 64% from 1995 to 2006.” Stunning! This only makes one imagine the percentages of wrongful convictions within this population. My years of research with the wrongful conviction of The Scott Sisters, led to reviewing transcripts of their trial and has been a life-changing event for me, as well as, others.

In 1994, Jamie and Gladys Scott were wrongfully convicted in the state of Mississippi. A corrupt sheriff used coercion, threats, and harassment to convict the Scott Sisters of armed robbery. This case is an intriguing one, with transcripts stating that perhaps 9, 10, or 11 dollars was stolen. It’s important to note that no one was murdered or injured, in the alleged robbery. One of the state’s witnesses, a 14 year old, testified that he did not have an attorney present when signing a statement prepared by the sheriff; he also testified that he did not read the statement.

The prosecution argued that on the night of December 24, 1993, Gladys and Jamie Scott, along with two minors and one young adult male planned and conducted the armed robbery. The prosecution also argued that the sisters were the masterminds behind this robbery. These facts were argued and substantiated with conflicting witness testimony and continuous leading questions – all allowed by the Trial Court. On direct examination it became apparent that the alleged victims failed to link the Scott Sisters to the commission of the robbery.

Jamie and Gladys Scott have served 14 years of double-life sentences, thus far, for a robbery they did not commit. That’s Double Life Each! The Scott sisters, with no prior convictions before their sentencing, now wallow in the belly of the Prison Industrial Complex.

The emotional strain this burden has placed upon their family is immeasurable. Their children, grandchildren, and mother have been forced to wade in the waters of financial-hardship. Their father, though a strong man, passed away, following the illegal incarceration of his two beautiful daughters.

From The Diary of Jamie Scott

My name is Jamie Scott and I do understand there are many people out there that don’t understand a lot about prison and what someone goes through in a situation such as this. Please don’t get me wrong; IF you commit a crime, then you should be punished.

In the state of Mississippi, the crime chart is just crazy. I have met so many women here, whose husbands were beating the living mess out of them and these ladies had legal action against their husbands, but as soon as she tries to stop him from killing her and she takes his life, she comes to prison. But keep in mind: they still do not receive two life sentences. Men are here for brutal raping of children and women, but yet they don’t have double life.

When I entered prison at the tender age of 22, I felt like my world was coming apart and life was not worth living. There were no more secrets and I had to strip naked in front of everyone, including men, because they thought it was funny. I was made to spread my buttocks and the officer looked. If I had a gun, I would have ended my life right then. In October of 1994, I was placed in a 12 x 12 cell to be under solitary confinement. I was let out of solitary in April 1995 and went to a unit filled with 100 females.

One bad part about this entire situation is the women I have encountered. I met this woman who told me she was driving down the highway and her baby would not stop crying, so she stopped and threw her child over the bridge. Guess what, she left me here. She has gone home. So many have killed their own children, but none have received the amount of time my sister and I have received. I have never been one to judge someone and that is why so many come to me and share their thoughts. I must admit, sometimes I get so angry when it involves a child. I get angry with the Mississippi judicial system because here my sister and I sit with double life and this person took an innocent child’s life.

In the midst of all the hurt I have endured, nothing could prepare me for the times I went on funeral detail. My sister and I had to go to the funerals of our grandfather, grandmother, father and sister, who died on my birthday, shackled like dogs.

When I think of the word “strongest,” I think of my mother. She is 4 feet 9 inches tall, and has the strength of Job in the Bible. I know it is only God keeping her alive. She had to bury her long time friend and soul mate of 30 years, and then she buried her oldest daughter… Yet, at times, Gladys and I feel dead to her because we are not there. Our mother has raised our children and is now raising our grandchildren.

One thing I do not have is hate in my heart concerning anyone who played a roll in Gladys and me being here. After reading our transcript over and over, I have come to realize that the Patrick men were really trying to help us, but to also save themselves during trial. That is why they said they never wrote the statements and that the statements were written out for them. They were trying to tell the jury that these statements were written out before we were arrested. Then, they tried to tell them how they were threatened, but it did not work. I am not bitter or angry with them. If I were to see them now, I would hug them and tell them I love them. They were just young victims, as well. They got played by the system, just as we did.

For all that don’t know, slavery in Mississippi has changed names. It is still very much active and alive in Mississippi. Its’ new name is called, the LAW! So, if there is anyone out there that thinks this cannot happen to their child or family, think about Gladys and Jamie Scott. We were not criminals nor were we drug addicts. I worked everyday. I have a right to be bitter, angry, mad as hell at the United States of America, but I choose not to because I know a higher power and Gladys and I WILL walk the streets again.

For more on the case of Jamie and Gladys Scott, please visit:

Free the Scott Sisters

Free Jamie-Gladys petition

Background

Many Muslims from Saudi Arabia and beyond chose to visit Medina and the Prophet’s Mosque outside of the Hajj season, particularly Shia Muslims, as they did this week. It was to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Prophet Muhammad on 28 Safar (in the Islamic lunar calendar) in 632 AD, corresponding to Feb. 24 this year.

Situated across from the Prophet’s Mosque is a cemetery known as Jannat al-Baqi or “The Garden of Heaven.” It is where many notable persons in Islamic history are buried, including the Prophet’s companions, wives, and the 2nd, 4th, 5th and 6th Shia Imams (who are direct descendants of Muhammad through his daughter Fatima, and his cousin, Ali). Hasan, the second Imam and grandson of the Prophet, was murdered on 28 Safar. Since the day of his martyrdom coincides with that of the Prophet’s death, many pilgrims were also drawn to al-Baqi.

Before continuing, it should be understood that although Saudi Arabia claims to follow the Hanbali school in Islam, one of the four main schools of Sunni jurisprudence, in reality they follow Wahabism; an ultra-puritanical and often intolerant version of the religion derived from the 18th century teachings of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab.

It was the Muhammad ibn Saud, the founder of modern-day Saudi Arabia, who first forged an alliance and secured a pact with Abdul Wahab, which continues to be honored to this day. The followers of Abdul Wahab (or Wahabis) are allowed control over the educational and religious institutions in the country in exchange for permitting the Saudi royals family to rule it.

It is the Wahabis who have branded Shia Muslims ‘infidels’ for, among other reasons, their deep respect for, and veneration of, the family of the Prophet Muhammad. They consider the practice of visiting the graves of the Imams (who the Shia believe to be the Prophet’s divinely appointed successors) tantamount to idolatry. Indeed, not only visiting graves but commemorating anyone’s birth or death is anathema according to Wahabi doctrine.

As a result, there is pervasive and institutionalized discrimination against Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia, where they form about ten percent of the population. Among other examples, they are barred from obtaining governmental positions; activists are routinely jailed; academic prejudice is commonplace; religious leaders are prevented from broadcasting on radio or television and religious rites are curtailed to the extent possible (which media are also prohibited from covering). In one instance, Shias were even banned from donating blood.

Pilgrims vs. Religious Police

And so they came.

Between 5,000-7,000 Saudi Shia pilgrims from Qatif and Al-Hasa in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where they constitute one-third of the population, arrived in Medina to visit the Prophet’s Mosque and al-Baqi cemetery in the days prior to 28 Safar.

The trouble started on the evening of Feb. 20 when the Mutawwa, or Saudi religious police, who work under the authority of the “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” were found to be illegally filming Saudi Shia women who had gathered outside al-Baqi (so much for virtue). Five male relatives who witnessed this demanded the police hand over or destroy the film. Instead, they were arrested.

After these arrests, thousands of pilgrims protested outside religious police headquarters. Scuffles ensued and riot police began beating protestors. In the following days, the religious police barred women from visiting al-Baqi, even in areas reserved specifically for them (women are not allowed to visit graves in Saudi Arabia) and were addressed with derogatory language at the Prophet’s Mosque. When all were prevented from entering the cemetery on Feb. 23, further clashes ensued. Three pilgrims were killed and nine arrested. Press TV also reports that a bus carrying them was attacked and a cleric stabbed.

Sheik Hussein Al-Mustapha, a prominent Shia cleric, told the Associated Press, “There was a flagrant aggression on women’s rights and the Shiite visitors. It was a premeditated action by extremist men who want to put an end to visits by Shiite visitors.”

It would not be the first time Shia pilgrims have been harassed and abused when visiting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. In 2007, American citizen Sayyid Jawad Qazwini and a group of US and UK pilgrims experienced first-hand the ruthless behavior the Saudi religious establishment exhibits toward Shias.

‘Reforms’ of King Abdullah

Less than a week prior to the violence in Medina, King Abdullah unveiled the most sweeping reforms and reshuffling of prominent department officials the country has seen since he became king in 2005.

They included:

• Sacking the head of the religious police, Sheikh Ibrahim al-Ghaith. His replacement, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Humain told Al-Arabiya news, “We will try to be close to the heart of every citizen. Their concerns are ours.”
• Removing Supreme Judicial Council leader Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan (infamous for his fatwa ordering that owners of satellite channels showing “immoral” content be killed).
• Expanding the Ulema Council (council of religious leaders) to include members of all four branches of Sunni Islam. Previously, it was limited to only those following the Hanbali school. No Shia members were included, although there are indications two eventually may be.
• Appointing the first woman deputy minister, the most senior job ever held by a woman in the Kingdom (although women are still prohibiting from driving).
• New heads of the administrative court, the Supreme Council of Justice, and the Supreme Court were named.

The Aftermath

The tragic events which occurred in Medina are sobering evidence of the grip that the Wahabi religious establishment has on Saudi society, its police, and judiciary. The wanton discrimination and violence which continues to be meted out against Saudi Shia citizens make the reforms of King Abdullah—no matter how well intentioned—appear empty and hollow. Saudi columnist Najib al-Khonaizi remarked, “There’s a feeling that the Shiites’ ambitions have not been realized as hoped, and that could have played an indirect role in inflaming emotions. We have to admit that there’s tension in the Shiite street.”

As a result of the clashes, arrests and killings in Medina, there are now reports of protests breaking out in the Eastern Province with demands for increased freedom of expression and equal rights becoming more vocal. As reported by the Associated Press, demonstrators were even seen carrying banners reading “down with the government” and spray painting anti-government slogans on billboards—all unheard of in the tightly controlled nation.

It may very well be that spreading anger over the harassment and violence directed against Shias in Medina—insultingly juxtaposed against King Abdullah’s purported reforms—will become the real nidus and driving force behind meaningful change in the Kingdom.

Until then, it will be Saudi Arabia’s Shia Muslims who will point to King Abdullah and the litany of his reforms and remind everyone that truly, “the emperor has no robes.”

Haneen Zoubi has made history: although she is not the first Arab woman to enter the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, she is the first to be elected for an Arab party.

Sitting in her home in Nazareth, the effective capital of Israel’s 1.2 million Palestinian citizens, she is dismissive of her predecessors, two women elected on behalf of Zionist parties. “They were worse than decorations,” she said. “Decorations don’t do any harm, but these women damaged our society. They were no role models at all.”

Ms. Zoubi, 39, a representative of the Tajamu Party, known for its Palestinian nationalist platform, has already shown she will not be following in their path. On a recent induction day for Knesset members, she made headlines locally when she pointed out to an official who repeatedly referred to “the territories” that he meant “the occupied Palestinian territories”.

Her election is not Ms Zoubi’s only pioneering moment. She was the first Palestinian citizen to graduate from a media studies course in Israel, at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and she established the first media classes in Arab schools. For the past six years she has headed an organization exposing Israeli media bias.

Her priority now, she said, is to advance both the cause of the fifth of the country’s population who are Palestinians, commonly referred to as “Israeli Arabs,” and the cause of Palestinian women in Israel.

“I don’t want to become the Knesset address for Arab women’s issues. I need to raise the interest of the men in my party on women’s issues, not allow their interest to wane because they can dump the issue on me.”

But she said she does represent a demand among the minority’s women for change and political involvement. “Women congratulate me in the street. Even women I know who are usually supporters of the Islamic movement or who were planning to boycott the election because of [Israel’s recent attack on] Gaza came and told me they voted for me.”

Alongside her will be nine male Arab party legislators: two from Tajamu, four from an Islamic party and three from the Communist party. A remaining one is Jewish.

They will be facing the most hostile Knesset in history. Of the parliament’s 120 members, at least 65 are classified as belonging to the right and far-right and may yet form a governing coalition.

Avigdor Lieberman’s party, Yisrael Beiteinu, which threatens to strip Israel’s Palestinians of citizenship unless they pledge loyalty to a Jewish state, has 15 seats. One of the National Union’s four legislators, Michael Ben-Ari, a former member of an outlawed anti-Arab terrorist group, is appointing two extremist settlers from Hebron as parliamentary aides.

“In a proper state, Lieberman’s program would be declared illegal. But the real concern is not his platform but that it has been legitimized by the main Zionist parties,” including Kadima, whose leader is Tzipi Livni, and the Likud Party of Benjamin Netanyahu, who is attempting to cobble together a ruling coalition.

Tajamu is almost universally despised by Jewish legislators. Its founder, Azmi Bishara, is living in exile after he was accused of treason over the 2006 Lebanon war; its officials are hounded by the secret police, the Shin Bet; and, as in other recent elections, Zionist parties attempted to bar Tajamu from running. The courts overruled the move.

Ms. Zoubi said she will not be fazed. “The Knesset is always hostile to Arab Knesset members and we are well used to their racist language. Even the building shows us we are not welcome. Everywhere there are Jewish symbols — from the Star of David on the flag to the menorahs — that we as Palestinians cannot identify with.”

Like other Palestinian citizens, she has watched the TV news bulletins showing Jewish legislators, even cabinet ministers, shouting down Arab legislators in the Knesset chamber and having them ejected.

The racist discourse that lies behind Knesset debates is a concern, she said. “It is frustrating and exhausting having always to be on the defensive about why I identify as a Palestinian, why I am not a Zionist, why the Jewish state is not democratic and cannot represent me, why I am entitled to citizenship. It is a Sisyphean labour.”

She admits to boycotting the first Knesset election after she turned 18.

“There is a significant group in our society that calls for a boycott, saying we will always be excluded from the political system here. But we need a Palestinian voice in the Knesset. I and the other Palestinian MKs are an obstacle to the Zionist parties’ success in trying to control our society’s consciousness.”

The party’s platform — developed by Mr Bishara — is to reform Israel from a Jewish state into a “state of all its citizens”, a program now advocated by all the Arab parties.

“The Jewish public don’t like self-confident, unapologetic Arabs, which is why Azmi was always feared. But actually I think there is a base of support even among Jews for reforming Israel into a proper democracy, maybe as much as 30 per cent.”

She hopes that her election — by breaking one of Jewish society’s stereotypes about the Palestinian public –– may start to win over more Israeli Jews to the party’s program.

In the meantime, she said, Tajamu will work to oppose confiscation of Arab land and house demolitions, and demand proper infrastructure in the minority’s communities, as well as have their educational and economic rights recognized.

But she is critical of the Palestinian minority’s dominant political demand for many decades: equality. “The struggle solely for equality treats me as a number, it reduces me to part of a mathematical formula. It ignores my history, identity and narrative as a Palestinian. I want to be a full Israeli citizen, but it must not come at the expense of my people’s collective rights to an identity and a past.”