Katha Pollitt wants us to make sure we understand how terrible Mike Pence is on abortion.

Mr. Kaine talked about trusting women as decision-makers. Mr. Pence talked about the beauty of adoption — in the context of criminalizing abortion, that really means forcing women to bear children for other people — and “health care counseling” for women. When he says that, he is surely referring to so-called crisis pregnancy centers, which try to dissuade women from ending a pregnancy, often through deception, scare tactics and Christian proselytizing, and to which Governor Pence has funneled millionsof Indiana taxpayers’ dollars.

Mr. Pence’s demeanor on Tuesday may have been calm and friendly, but his record on reproductive rights is horrendous, and

Peter Tatchell urges the Home Secretary to revoke the visa of an Islamist cleric who endorses killing of gays.

“In a free society, Hamza Sodagar has a right to believe that homosexuality is sinful but not to preach about ways to kill lesbians and gay men. Many people with far less extreme views, who have never advocated violence, have been banned from entering the UK. Calling for death to LGBT people crosses a red line. The Home Office was wrong to grant him a visa and should now revoke it. The cleric should be ordered out of the country,” said human rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell.

US-born radical Shaykh Hamza Sodagar – who has dubbed non-Muslims “kuffars” and released a video

The propaganda about the terrible consequences of paying workers more is just that: propaganda, aka lies. Nick Hanauer explains it.

Minimum wage opponents continue to deride every proposed increase as a surefire job killer, while reporters and pundits reliably characterize the passage of every minimum wage ordinance and statute as a dangerous experiment that threatens to harm the very people it’s intended to help. “California makes itself a guinea pig in a massive and risky minimum wage experiment,” tweeted the New York Times’s Noam Scheiber. “Raising minimum wage risky,” the Lexington, Kentucky Herald Leader’s headline tersely warned its readers following $15 victories in faraway California and New York. “Raising minimum wage hurts low-skill workers,” the Detroit News bluntly chimed

The BBC is live updating Hurricane Matthew.

Reuters has a photo that indicates a complete nightmare in Haiti:

Reuters

There are photos of long lines of cars evacuating Miami…adding more CO2 to the climate change that has helped fuel storms like this.

 … Read the rest

Weirdly, the Daily Mail has a good piece on anti-abortion fanatics (their word) in the UK.

Vulnerable women suffering emotional trauma after an abortion have been referred by the NHS to an extremist pro-life group where they are fed the lie that termination can cause breast cancer.

Patients are left distraught by the devastating claim made by advisers at the Good Counsel Network – but which is dismissed by medical experts as untrue and ‘damaging’.

Yet one of Britain’s biggest NHS mental health trusts, South West London and St George’s, has been recommending patients to the London-based groups via leaflets and its website for five years.

Despite its misleading advice, GCN was described until recently on the NHS website as

Guest post by Maureen Brian.

We have spent the last several decades chipping away at the notion that body conformation = personality = social role = that’s the way things are, folks.

When I say we I mean, primarily but not solely, those of us who over a couple of hundred years of work have managed to carve out for ourselves the right to vote, to have an education, to have a degree of control over our own finances. Many of us have worked to help other people see what can be achieved and to offer help and support as they try out the prospect of being fully paid up human beings in less promising circumstances, perhaps in countries … Read the rest

The Independent has a piece on Maryam and the CEMB and ex-Muslims in the UK.

Speaking ahead of the release of Exposure, an ITV documentary that explores the lives of ex-Muslims faced with abuse and discrimination, Ms Namazie told The Independent: “There is a large group of people who are not seen and heard. Many young people living in Britain have left Islam and are facing huge ostracisation and isolation from their communities as a result.

“They’re very often silenced or they’re living closeted lives. They’re still acting as Muslims, still wearing the veil and still going to the mosque, but they’re really atheist.”

Ms Namazie, an Iranian-born activist and ex-Muslim herself, described the “silent challenges” faced by

Guest post by Josh Spokes.

Material analysis is the only political analysis that produces results. Religion, spirituality, the ever-proliferating variety of “identities” and “kinds of souls” and all the rest—-it’s vapor.

None of that will get you equal pay as a woman. None of it will make men stop raping and beating women, and raping and beating men they perceive to be feminine. None of it will give you a reliable roadmap on how to extricate yourself from exploitative situations.

The material world is the real world. It’s the only world that exists. We ignore the material world, and we deny our embodied, wholly material human existence, at our own cost and peril.… Read the rest

The protests in Poland worked – the government dropped the plan to pass a total abortion ban, and said it was the protests that did it. Polish abortion law is still horrific though.

A proposed total abortion ban in Poland will not be implemented, a member of the government has said, describing mass protests against the ban as a lesson in humility for the country’s leadership.

Jarosław Gowin, the minister of science and higher education, said on Wednesday that the protests by women had “caused us to think and taught us humility”.

The comments appear to indicate that Poland’s conservative leadership will withhold support from the highly unpopular proposal to ban abortions even in cases of rape, incest or

Goddy UK school punishes students for not attending mass at school.

Taylor High held its Patron Day Mass on Friday with Bishop of Motherwell Joseph Toal in attendance.

All pupils were told to be present as it also served as a memorial service for former members of staff who died earlier this year.

Some didn’t go, and they were punished with a week of lunchtime detentions.

One sixth year student believes it is unfair pupils who are not practicing Catholics should have to sit through mass. She said: “Although pupils are usually forced to go, there is not usually consequences for not being there and I believe it is unfair to have forced religious observance towards many pupils who

There’s a thing called The 519 Church Street Community Centre which has Queer Parenting Programs. There is, naturally, a guide to language. To inclusive language, that is. The kind that includes everyone by carefully avoiding words like woman and sister.

Pregnancy and Birth

Pregnant person

Person who gives or gave birth / Birthing Parent

Pregnancy Leave (vs Maternity Leave)

Parental Leave (vs Paternity Leave)

Carrier Mortality (vs Maternal Mortality)

Carrier mortality. You have to pause to savor that one. They be “inclusive” by hiding the fact that it’s women who die in childbirth. Carrier mortality. Women might as well be incubators.

But eventually it gets funny.

Families

Sparkle (an older beloved one, e.g. vs Auntie or Uncle)

Bill McKibben says it’s worse than we thought just last week or so.

Scientists say that to have even a two-thirds chance of staying below a global increase of two degrees Celsius, we can release 800 gigatons more CO2 into the atmosphere. But the Rystad data shows coal mines and oil and gas wells currently in operation worldwide contain 942 gigatons worth of CO2. So the math problem is simple, and it goes like this:

942 > 800

“What we found is that if you burn up all the carbon that’s in the currently operating fields and mines, you’re already above two degrees,” says Stephen Kretzmann, OCI’s executive director.

And two degrees is no longer the red line anyway.… Read the rest

Alec Baldwin does Trump on Saturday Night Live.

 … Read the rest