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.