Troubles with complementarianism

Evidently it means that it’s legal to beat your wife and that that is not grounds for divorce. Some even think that abuse is warrented and that female submission is an absolute necessity. Those people are completely wrong.

Jesus wants sexual equality. A reading of the Gospels makes it abundantly clear that he supports rights for women. This is especially obvious in the works of Luke. Jesus was born of a woman, associates with prostitutes, has women be the first people to see the empty tomb, and saves a woman from being stoned to death for a sex crime.

Besides the fact that the most misogynistic “Pauline” Epistles probably weren’t written by Paul, some of the ones in the genuine epistles may be later interpolations. In addition, this blaming of the woman is rather at odds with the command for husbands to love their wives as is their marital duty. If your husband is beating you or abusing you, he does not love you.

Luna has more.

It’s not like I needed more evidence that the best synonym for “Complementarianism” is “Hierarchicalism”

A request

Tell me this guy is just an inappropriate comedian and not a sexist bastard.

Heart attack on a plate

It’s called the “Bacon Explosion” and it’s the latest meme bumping its way through the food corners of the internet. I’ll leave you with that, as being a near-vegetarian I refuse to discuss this dead pig any longer.

Music would suck without you

Kelly Clarkson’s latest single, “My Life Would Suck Without You,” has made the largest jump to number-one in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, climbing from 97 to 1. The song is pretty fantastic. Isn’t it obvious that Kelly is the best American Idol winner ever? Jordin Sparks is a clear second. Everyone else, well they don’t compare at all.

Blog for Choice 2009 #2

Blog for choice day 2009

It’s January 28, and on this day in 1988, the Supreme Court issued its decision in R. v. Morgentaler, which struck down federal laws on abortion. Since then, Canada has had no laws regarding abortion. The decision has been compared to the American Roe v. Wade, though the issues and facts of law and are more similar to Doe v. Bolton. Although Blog for Choice is organized by NARAL Pro-Choice America, I have decided to do an unofficial second blog for choice day 2009 because I am a Canadian.

Banning abortions has nearly no impact on the abortion rate. Women will find other ways to get one if they are desperate. Well-off women will go to somewhere where it is legal and get it. Not well-off women, they are the real victims. They will end up maimed or dead from back-alley abortions. If you say unsafe abortions are a “myth” invented by the pro-choice movement, take a look at this extremely graphic photograph and say it again honest from your heart with a straight face. Legalized abortion does not have much of an impact on the abortion rate; what it does is make it safe.

Even some people who personally oppose abortion acknowledge this. According to Wikipedia, Elizabeth May, leader of the federal Green Party, has stated that she is “against abortion” and does not “think a woman has a frivolous right to choose” and that she “talked women out of abortions.” And yet May also realizes that despite her personal opposition to it, abortion needs to be legal because “[i]f we make them illegal, women will die”.

Abortion: it saves women. That’s one of the reasons why I support pro-choicers. And why you should be too.

Image is from NARAL Pro-choice America.

Stumped

At YouTube there is a video taken of an anti-abortion protest in Libertyville, Illinois (hat tip). As embedding is disabled, I’ll summarize it for you. A film crew went to an anti-abortion protest, and asked them if abortion should be illegal. As expected, they all said yes. They were then asked what should happen to the women who have illegal abortions. Only one answer was anywhere near coherent, and some of them had never even thought about it. This leads to several questions:

• How much time should the woman do? If abortion is murder (for the purposes of this post, I’ll consider the word “murder” to include manslaughter) shouldn’t the woman receive the same sentence as any other sort of murder, namely life imprisonment or the death penalty?
• Why should we only punish doctors? If I hire someone to kill someone else, I should be punished just as if I’d done it myself. Doesn’t not punishing the woman mean that I shouldn’t be punished either, if I hire a hit man in a murder-for-hire?
• What about self-induced abortions? If abortion is murder, than conducting an abortion on oneself should be treated no differently than me actually going out and killing someone right?

There are several possible explanations after the jump:

• Some people may honestly believe that the woman should be given a sentence appropriate for murder. Among the possible explanations, this is theoretically the most principled because if abortion is murder, they are giving a punishment that fits the crime. As about one third of American women have an abortion, imprisoning or executing one sixth* of the population would rapidly result in one hell of an unpopular law.^
• They think abortion is wrong, but they do not believe it truly is murder. This explanation allows escape from the cognitive dissonance. But why then do they equate abortion with murder if they do not truly believe it is murder? And if it truly is less wrong than murder, wouldn’t this eventually lead to a position where  if the fetus has rights, and the woman has more rights, wouldn’t this lead to a position where (some) abortions would be allowed because in the conflict of rights, the woman has more?
• They do not believewomen are people capable of making their own decisions. This is the most horrific explanation. After all, if women are incapable of making their own decisions, when does the rights rollback end? Will suffrage and other rights go with it too? At Feministe, Jill Filipovic has more on this.

Women are people. That is feminism in three words. Anything less is oppressive for everyone.

*To simplify, I took females to be half the population (in reality it is slightly more than half) and one third of one half is one sixth: (1/2)/3 = 1/6

^In the interests of full disclosure, a relative of mine has had an abortion, and I obviously don’t want her thrown in jail

Tennis, Inc.

While flipping ahead in a textbook (Kieso, Donald; Weygandt, Jerry; Warfield, Terry; Young, Nicola; Wiecek, Irene. Intermediate Accounting, Volume 1, 8th Canadian edition. John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd. 2007) for an accounting course I am taking, I saw the following problem on page 557:

Arantxa Corporation made the following cash purchases of investments during 2008, the first year in which Arantxa invested in equity securities:

1. On January 15, purchased 10,000 shares of Sanchez Corp.’s common shares….
2. On April 1, purchased 5,000 shares of Vicario Corp.’s common shares….
3. On September 10, purchased 7,000 shares of WTA Corp.’s preferred shares….

When it comes to fictional companies, this is like totally creative naming, right?