Explanation Of Roe V Wade

Queer Democrats Warned About Threats to Reproductive Choice

The predominantly Queer San Diego Democratic Club heard two presentations at its June 23 meeting: a report on the likely strike by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) against southern California’s three largest grocery chains — Ralph’s, Albertson’s and Vons — and a warning about the potentially devastating effects of Republican and radical-Right policies against women’s rights to reproductive choice. Though the struggles of women to maintain safe and legal access to contraception and abortion may seem to have little in common with those of workers for decent pay, access to health care and other benefits, speakers on both issues noted how the radical Right has effectively linked them in the service of a paternalistic agenda that regards workers as mere cogs in a capitalist economy, and women as mere vessels for giving birth to the next generation. The predominantly Queer San Diego Democratic Club heard two presentations at its June 23 meeting: a report on the likely strike by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) against southern California’s three largest grocery chains — Ralph’s, Albertson’s and Vons — and a warning about the potentially devastating effects of Republican and radical-Right policies against women’s rights to reproductive choice. Though the struggles of women to maintain safe and legal access to contraception and abortion may seem to have little in common with those of workers for decent pay, access to health care and other benefits, speakers on both issues noted how the radical Right has effectively linked them in the service of a paternalistic agenda that regards workers as mere cogs in a capitalist economy, and women as mere vessels for giving birth to the next generation. The panel on reproductive choice was introduced by Jacqueline Palmer, the club’s membership chair, who said that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives “rejected the idea that people have the right to control their own bodies” when they voted overwhelmingly last February to bar all federal funding for Planned Parenthood. “In their attempts to gut Title X funding [the basic federal funding for women’s health clinics, ironically signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1970], House Republicans voted to let more people die of breast and cervical cancer and AIDS. Right-wing attacks on collective bargaining rights, same-sex marriage and reproductive choice are part of a united campaign.

Era Envy disparages realities of history | The Journal Gazette ...

In Woody Allen’s charming new movie, “Midnight in Paris,” Owen Wilson’s character, a modern-day novelist, travels through time to the 1920s. He wishes he could stay, so he could keep hanging out with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. His love interest from the ’20s wishes she were living in La Belle Epoque. Both discover when they travel back to the 1880s that Degas and Gauguin wish they were living in the Renaissance.

Most of us occasionally experience Era Envy, a wistful feeling, captured in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Miniver Cheevy,” that we were born too late. Cheevy “wept that he was ever born.”

Politicians, being more practical, wield such themes to win favor with nostalgic voters. Nowadays we’re past the point where Democrats invoke the 1960s and Republicans the 1980s. On the right, in particular, the time horizons are getting longer. Conservatives openly yearn for a pre-New Deal social contract under which Americans would largely fend for themselves as they did in the 19th century. (Glenn Beck went so far as to call Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Era a “cancer.”) And the tea party folks, of course, want to go even further back in time and restore the spirit of the Founders.

The problem is that spreading a romantic gauze over history distorts our sense of the present. It makes our politics treacly, trivial and unaccountable to historical truth. It doesn’t help that test results released last week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that students in fourth, eighth and 12th grades do worse in American history than in any other subject. This will leave them unarmed against distortion.

One explanation for this poor showing is that the No Child Left Behind Act has pushed schools to be so focused on reading and math that subjects such as history are left behind. Another is that a growing preference on the part of teachers for teaching social studies (which can double as civics) has meant that only about 60 percent of history teachers majored in history while in college. Imagine teaching physics if you majored in biology.

A bigger obstacle to understanding history is the instant gratification offered by the 24/7 social-media culture, where a Twitter posting that’s more than a few hours old might as well have not been posted at all. In this world, a story like the BP oil spill, which soiled everything in its path a mere year ago, leaves almost no media residue. This culture is increasingly non-linear, and thus divorced from narrative, which is a killer for a discipline that depends on great story-telling.

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