Heartening stat of the day: Gallup finds that support for marriage equality has doubled since 1996, with approval now surpassing disapproval. Also see this animated GIF map of the geography of marriage equality since 1970 and the seminal 1993 essay instrumental in shifting the paradigm.
And don’t miss the most beautiful meditation on the issue yet – from a politician, no less.
I resigned from my job yesterday as a matter of principle. I was given a letter to type by a senior secretary to the auditing firm that had recently been in our books. A woman headed up the team of accountants at our company for several weeks.
The letter was opened to “Gentlemen.” I changed it to “Greetings.” I was told that the letter must be redone because it was the policy of the company to use the salutation “Gentlemen.” I was told that management determined company policy, not uppity secretaries who didn’t know their place. I decided to resign and didn’t redo the letter.
I’m looking for another job, but I did raise quite a few eyebrows and, hopefully, someone’s consciousness.
Name Withheld
September 12, 1982
President Lincoln’s General Orders No. 100, also known as the Lieber Code of 1863, set clear rules for engaging with enemy combatants. But the code also clarified how Union soldiers should treat civilians, and in particular women. Largely forgotten today, the Lieber Code established strict laws regarding an issue that was everywhere and nowhere in the consciousness of the Civil War: wartime rape.
Three articles under Section II declared that soldiers would “acknowledge and protect, in hostile countries occupied by them, religion and morality; strictly private property; the persons of the inhabitants, especially those of women” (Article 37); that “all robbery, all pillage or sacking, even after taking a place by main force, all rape, wounding, maiming, or killing of such inhabitants, are prohibited under the penalty of death” (Article 44); and that “crimes punishable by all penal codes, such as … rape, if committed by an American soldier in a hostile country against its inhabitants, are not only punishable as at home, but in all cases in which death is not inflicted the severer punishment shall be preferred” (Article 47).
[…]
Southern women’s wartime diaries, court marshal records, wartime general orders, military reports and letters written by women, soldiers, doctors, nurses and military chaplains leave little doubt that, as in most wars, rape and the threat of sexual violence figured large in the military campaigns that swept across the Southern landscape. Nonetheless, the Lieber Code made it possible for women to seek justice in military courts and eventually established the modern understanding of rape as a war crime.
If we all stood up to bigotry, we could change history.
Stirring PSA for the Anti-Defamation League imagines a world without hate through history’s fallen heroes.
(↬ Doobybrain)
The Facebook data team maps support for marriage equality based on the geography of those who changed their profile pictures to the Human Rights Campaign’s pink-on-red equal sign.
Juxtaposed here, for some striking correlations on the geography of open-mindedness, with a map of passport ownership.
In which a brilliant feminist Senator – New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand – stands up against rape and schools a U. S. General on how to do his job.
As we know, thousands of rapes are reported in the military each year, manifold more go unreported, and a female soldier in a combat zone is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire.
We are still a young country, and many of our landmark civil rights decisions are fresh enough that the voices of their champions still echo, even as the world that preceded them becomes less and less familiar. We have yet to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, but a society that denied women the vote would seem to us now not unusual or old-fashioned but alien. I believe that in 2013 DOMA and opposition to marriage equality are vestiges of just such an unfamiliar society.
Americans have been at this sort of a crossroads often enough to recognize the right path. We understand that, while our laws may at times lag behind our best natures, in the end they catch up to our core values. One hundred fifty years ago, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln concluded a message to Congress by posing the very question we face today: “It is not ‘Can any of us imagine better?’ but ‘Can we all do better?’ ”
The answer is of course and always yes.
Under present conditions, the intense consciousness raising about the “rightness” of personal choices that worked so well in the early days of the women’s movement will end up escalating the divisive finger-pointing that stands in the way of political reform.
Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let’s stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that, we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders. Feminists should certainly support this campaign. But they don’t need to own it.
Historian Stephanie Coontz, author of the indispensable A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, on why gender equality stalled as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s classic treatise.
Illustration by Melinda Beck, a self-admitted “stressed-out working mom.”
A female soldier in a combat zone is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. By official estimates from The Department of Defense, 19,000 violent sexual crimes occurred in the military in 2011 alone. Sexual assault is grossly under-reported in the military. In 2011, 3,191 assaults were reported when its likely that somewhere between 19,000 and 22,000 assaults occurred.
Silent No More – women in the military speak out against rape in a groundbreaking investigative documentary, all the more stirring and important as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique.
New York City’s controversial anti-Muslim subway ads get a fighting-free-speech-with-free-speech rebuttal from pro-tolerance group United Methodist Women, who raised $6,000 to match the anti-jihad group’s ad buy and secure media space for ”visual response.”
Same Love, a beautiful short film and song by Seattle-based artist Macklemore and Ryan Lewis enlists hip-hop – a genre notorious for its homophobic language – in the support of marriage equality.
Half of Hollywood has more prosthetic in their body than I do, but we don’t think of them as “disabled” … Our need to categorize just comes from our being lazy.
Athlete, model, public speaker, and double amputee Amy Mullins on defying labels.
