Marital Rape

As anybody who has read this blog will know, I’m not one for posts with not a lot of research and documents backing it up. However, the following issue is very close to my heart, as I have a friend who has experienced something very similar. We’ll call her Caitlin, for the purposes of this post.

The following is a reaction to a Feministing post on comments made by Dennis Prager about how a wife should have sex with her husband even though she doesn’t feel like it. Or to quote the man himself:

It is an axiom of contemporary marital life that if a wife is not in the mood, she need not have sex with her husband. Here are some arguments why a woman who loves her husband might want to rethink this axiom.

…

First, women need to recognize how a man understands a wife’s refusal to have sex with him: A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him. This is rarely the case for women. Few women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body

This is just disgusting.  “Give her body to him” and “gives her his body”, because sex is a commodity, right? To be given and taken and sold and traded and bought.

Proposition 8: The Musical

A star-studded cast answer the tough questions regarding Proposition 8, which was passed in California during this year’s US elections.

Proposition 8 reads as follows: ”Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

This sentence not only disallows future marriages for gay and lesbian couples, but essentially annuls those marriages which took place in the months before Prop 8 was passed.

If you don’t already know about the proposition, some great posts about the topic and its controversies can be found at the following links: 

• The Mormon (Church of Latter Day Saints) involvement in getting the proposition passed
• The legal basis for overturning the proposition in the suit being filed 
• Fact vs. Fiction from the No on 8 campaign, addressing the lies told to voters from the ‘Yes on 8′ campaign
• A summary of the claim that African Americans and other minorities were to blame for Prop 8 passing

To see what happened after Prop 8 passed, see this post on Feministing. Basically the LGBTQ (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer) community mobilised and unified in protests across the nation. I have a feeling that Prop 8 might have actually strengthened determination for equal rights rather than hampered it.

On Christianity and Penguins

Ah the penguin. Man’s best friend. Well, not really, but we all love a good penguin. It waddles, it flaps, it does that cute thing where it shuffles the egg under that random flap of skin, they fly and holiday in South America. Yes, there’s nothing quite like a good penguin. But alas, there are some out there who want to ruin the innocence of our beloved penguins, and use them for a political agenda. I refer of course to none other than the Christian right. 

In 2006, the film March of the Penguins was released. It was a great documentary about penguins and their migration patterns in relation to chick-rearing and mating behaviour. Anybody would love the film for its cinematography and interesting content, if not for the fact that the awesome voice of Morgan Freeman narrating. Nevertheless, some members of the Christian right decided a point needed to be made, that penguins are not just cute, but moral. Yes, penguins are apparently the epitome of morality.

However, a recent story came to my attention which I think might change the minds of some Christians who spoke too soon and didn’t do their research before they made these claims. In fact, it is my hypothesis that those same Christians who claimed penguins = morality, must now admit that homosexuality = morality. If not, I fear they risk appearing like hypocrites. Which isn’t usually an issue for them, but hopefully will be when they discover this penguiny truth.

 

Refugee and Asylum Seeker Policy: A change ahead?

This story from ABC News and Sydney Morning Herald articles. First ABC News:

No-one in immigration detention should be held for longer than 12 months unless they pose a significant risk to the community, a parliamentary committee has recommended. The limit on detention is one of 18 recommendations made to the
Federal Government by the Joint Standing Committee on Migration today in its
report, Immigration Detention in Australia: A New Beginning.
…
The report recommends that the Immigration Department make public what the criteria is for deciding that a detainee poses an “unacceptable risk” to the community. It also says health checks should be completed within five days and if the
Department of Immigration can not establish a person’s identity or a security
assessment is incomplete within 90 days that a procedure should be developed
where they can be released from detention under certain conditions such as
strict reporting requirements. The report recommends that a person detained for
longer than 12 months have access to judicial review and those being held be
no longer charged for their detention.

First of all: they were charged for their detention? OUCH. Like it’s not bad enough that you’ve been persecuted in your home country, you then are locked up in conditions which have been compared to high-security prisons. After I dug around a little, I found a Crikey article which talks about this very issue, claiming that 18 months’ detention came to a cost of AU$160,000 for asylum seeker Kasian Wililo, who at the time of receiving the bill was already a NSW resident living with his wife and children and holding a full-time job.

A brief note on Sarah Palin which turned into a rant

Sarah Palin’s Alaska Office, image courtesy of The New York Times I would be surprised if you told me you had never heard of Sarah Palin before. Personally I am irritated by the way she is taking press away from Barack Obama when she is the VP candidate and not even the presidential candidate. BUT she is a phenomenon which needs to be addressed. So just some little points on why Sarah Palin should not be hailed and voted for by women. A woman candidate is not the same thing as a woman’s candidate. There are so many reasons why Sarah Palin is against women’s rights. Firstly she cut funding for a program in her state for young women who found themselves pregnant and wanted (or were forced) to carry the pregnancy to term. As the Washington post states in its 2 September article: Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, earlier this year used her line-item veto to slash funding for a state program benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live. … According to Passage House’s web site, its purpose is to provide “young mothers a place to live with their babies for up to eighteen months while they gain the necessary skills and resources to change their lives” and help teen moms “become productive, successful, independent adults who create and provide a stable environment for themselves and their families.”

Emissions Trading: Why we SHOULD NOT wait!

I entirely admit that this should have been posted a while ago, but better late than never!

So I’ve been working for a client these last few days who is very interested in issues of climate change and a carbon emissions trading scheme, and that has allowed me to hear a lot of perspectives (some more informed than others) in regards to the scheme. I get to hear political commentary, news bulletins, talk back programs, announcers rabbiting on about how God’ll take care of the weather, you name it!

So what’s all the fuss about? Well basically, the new Australian Government, led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, is fulfilling one of its election promises in regards to fighting climate change, which is bound to have a drastic effect on Australian economic and social factors, particularly in terms of agriculture. So Rudd commissioned a report from his Climate Change Advisor, Ross Garnaut (pronounced GARR-NO), in order to establish what industries should be included in an emissions trading scheme, what goals should be set, and who will be most effected.

Bullying in the workplace

It seems a bit strange that my first post should be about something that’s not technically a political issue, but I was so disgusted when I read this article that I felt I needed to have my say about it.

CHRISTINE HODDER, 38, was a much-loved woman with a husband and a three-year-old daughter, and had almost completed her Bachelor of Nursing degree when she killed herself in her backyard.

Ms Hodder, after enduring years of bullying by male colleagues at Cowra ambulance station, where she was the first and only female officer, hanged herself on her child’s swing in April, 2005.

The article goes on to talk about her frustration, and how despite approaching the issue with a sense of humour at first (I’m sure everyone knows how it feels trying to “laugh off” insults), she started questioning herself, doubting herself, and basically talking herself down. She took multiple bouts of stress leave and lodged two formal complaints.

Welcome to Sparliament

Hi there and welcome to the first post for Sparliament : Politics in Action, a political blog aimed at informing, expressing opinions, and letting you in on why all this stuff should matter to you. I’ll also be aiming to provide you with as much objective, fact-checkable information as I can, complete with links (and wikipedia entries!) so that you can form your own, probably-different-than-mine opinions in an intelligent and informed way.     First a bit about myself: My name is Anna Jean McDougall and I’m currently a student of Media and Communications (with a minor in Spanish and Latin American Studies) at the University of Sydney, Australia. I’ve been working casually in the media industry during my studies for almost two years, and my current job is at Australian Associated Press as a Broadcast Monitor. As such, my work allows me a lot of time listening to news headlines, reports, interviews and discussion panels on a variety of political issues.Also a warning: I have a tendency to get distracted so at time the posts may veer off from the course of mainstream politics and delve into a philosophical theory, an event or issue that ticks me off, or simply the cultural and social landscape of other parts of the world or other problems ranging from human rights to vegetarianism to something funny I’ve noticed about the differences between Spanish and English. It’s free range opinion day, every day, here at Sparliament. As such I always welcome comments involving constructive criticism, and I don’t mind a nice clean debate that doesn’t debase itself with insults or a closed mind. So all in all, I hope you enjoy Sparliament and all it (eventually) has to offer!Yours truly, Anna McDougall  P.S. If you feel there’s a topic you would like me to look at, or an issue you’re currently dealing with, you can send it to me at anna.mcdougall@optusnet.com.au