Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

*laughs* Yeah. While reading your comment, I had to twitch: I can perfectly imagine them banning women from reading porn of any sort. It'd be for our own protection, of course!

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metron-ariston.livejournal.com

Well, apparently we aren't allowed to buy sex toys unless they are specifically marketed as "novelties" rather than "sexual aids" or "fake cocks" like they really are. *sigh* But they'll take my porn from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers!

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Yeah, as that poor woman from Texas found out. Sigh! Why can't we all be adults about this? Women like sex, too! With or without men! With or without other people! Porn's nice, too!

Sheesh.

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metron-ariston.livejournal.com

Heh, I meant to put a 'here in Texas' somewhere in there. *shakes fist at state*

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America is so big, we should split it up into two countries! In "Bad America" we could stick the anti-gay, racist, women-haters, and in "Good America" we can be free and love each other and be happy!

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chichiri.livejournal.com

omg this is a great quote!

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Glad you like it!

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wikdsushi.livejournal.com

The Georgia Senate seems to be full of idiots.

And if this is the way reproductive rights are going, I'm glad I had my tubal ligation when I did. *grrr*bitch-slaps US Senate*

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I wish I could just say "*snort* It's just Georgia..." but unfortunately that seems to be the way the wind is blowing everywhere...

And if this is the way reproductive rights are going...

It seems to be, yeah. And if Bush gets elected again? We'll all be wearing collars and going to prison for showing our ankles.

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*is baffled* And why do they ban it? I don't get it.

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To "protect" women... Because, you know, we don't know what's best for us! Luckily there are menfolk around to make the hard decisions about what to do with our bodies!

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*slaps head*

I could understand them banning it when the procedure is life-threathening or something, but not if it's for other reasons.

Do all the states have control over such things? I thought some things were handled regionally and others nationally, like it's here in Belgium. Healthcare is handled nationally, culture regionally.

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Do all the states have control over such things?

I'm not really sure, I think so. (It's a complex and messy system.) Don't quote me on this, but I believe that anything the federal government hasn't already established, the states can set on their own.

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Dude, are you psychic or something? I just answered this LJ-comment and two seconds later you've already answered it. You're fast, woman! ;-)

I'm not really sure, I think so. (It's a complex and messy system.) Don't quote me on this, but I believe that anything the federal government hasn't already established, the states can set on their own.

Belgium's already complicated. I can definitely understand how complicated it must be for such a big country. I'm always curious how the government is arranged in other countries. Thanks for answering. :-D

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*laughs* Having comments mailed to you makes it easy to reply fast! :)

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But but but ... I get my comments mailed too and it takes me ages to reply! I do read them, but then I just can't reply until I feel too guilty not to reply.

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Oh! For me it's sort of the opposite: I'd rather reply and get it out of the way than be constantly reminding myself 'gotta reply to the comments, gotta reply to the comments!'. I'd rather just get it done, then I can forget about it! :)

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:) I'm a procastrinator. My e-mail box is always filled. Today I'm emptying it.

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chichiri.livejournal.com

I also am saddened. How did it manage to do that, I wonder? Pass that kind of bill that is PURELY OPINIONATED! --;

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Bad kitty. You left out the word 'HOUSE'. Note that Georgia hasn't banned female genital piercings. The Georgia HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES has. It still has to be ratified by the Georgia Senate and signed into law by the Georgia governor. At this point it was a unanimous vote because they all get to tell their constituents how nice and Catholic and moral they are. Before it becomes law, someone will put some real, controversial legislation on its tailcoats and then it'll get shunted aside because 'it was a nice moral bill until that other thing got tacked onto it'. This sort of thing happens all the time. It lets congressmen and jackasses point out how moral they are and that they voted for 'X' even though it didn't pass.

In the second quote, you got it right that it was only passed by the Senate. Same thing. Crackpot stuff gets passed by one house or the other all the time, then added to and shot down in the other so that it never becomes law. This is only news because the news decided to make a big deal out of this particular example of the (persistent, ongoing, actually quite normal and everyday) trend.

Just like Columbine wasn't the first time or the last time teenagers shot up a school, and OJ wasn't the first person to murder a spouse. It's all in where the press chooses to focus its attention.

Meanwhile, of course, people who 'know' the government is all in the midst of some horrid conspiracy to take away all their rights get to froth, panic, and say 'I knew it!'

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Yep, I left the word 'house' out of the link because I thought it would confuse people, and anyone who went and read the story could see exactly what's what. (My first thought on reading the link 'Georgia House Bans Genital Piercings' in someone else's LJ was that something like a B&B-type house banned them... that made a lot more sense than some official government people banning them!)

The bill had been passed once by the Georgia Senate, just without the piercing bit. I doubt seriously that that'll stop any of them from passing it again.

I hope it turns out as you think it will, or that the Georgia governor will be reasonable and not sign it, but I'm less trusting than you are. :)

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'Trusting' implies things that don't really mirror my feelings. One may not 'trust' one's enemies, but one can depend upon them to act in particular fashions. I don't 'trust' the government, but I understand many aspects of its motivations that the press doesn't cover and someone who hasn't directly studied those motivations probably won't grasp on their own.

Say instead that I find particular patterns of behavior dependable, and that I have seen them recur many times. You would probably be very amused by some of the bills that routinely are brought up in various legislative groups and are passed as 'feel goods' with all involved knowing damn well that they will never be made into law. Some of them, are, in fact, planned in just this way. 'Let's propose something that makes us all look big-hearted and moral and that is too outrageous to ever be made into law. We all get to look good. If it comes even close to being made a law, we'll tack something else to it that can't be passed under the current circumstances and bemoan how our bill was killed by that conflicting rider.'

There're a great many things like this. Download a transcription of what goes on in Congress on the floor of the House or Senate on any given day and the odds are you'll see some of these.

What's funny is that none of the people I've seen protesting this law seem to note that it can be said to be explicitly oppressive to specific religions. Specifically, Judaism and certain branches of Islam where 'genital mutilation' is part of the ceremony of becoming an adult woman. If it also applied to men, then branches of the Christian religion would also be up in arms as it would forbid circumcision.

Everyone's whining about how it's a blue law and they should be able to do what they want with their own bodies, and totally missing the point that it also steps on several religious practices. Funny.

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Understood on the trust/expected behavior part.

I suppose no one talks much about the religious end of it because it's a pretty darned foreign thing (at least the female side of it). I know lots of women with uncommon piercings, but if I've encountered a single woman with a female circumcision, I never knew it. I didn't even think about the law being applied to religious groups until you mentioned it (the rights of religions have never been high on my list of concerns).

I don't think that's odd, strange, or funny though. People can't be concerned about everything. (And I guess there are religious folks out there who are only mad about the religious parts and don't care about the piercing issue.)

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I guess what's funny is that so many liberal people I listen to are frothing about their freedom *from* religion and how the government is oppressing *them* but when the government does something that's casually oppressing members of some religion these same people aren't up in arms to defend the rights of that religion to exist. One of those common double-standards that I find sardonically humorous when I spot it in people. Everyone is viewing the bill as a religious-right attack on their personal right to have metal stuck through their or their girlfriend's genitals while ignoring the fact that it's actually attacking the freedoms of members of several religions at the same time.

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I understand your argument, but I don't agree with its use in this case. Some religions do force bad things upon women, very real genital mutilations. Does the fact that they're doing it for religious reasons make it okay? Do those rights need to be defended? If the government stops that, is it "oppressing" them and so should we defend those religious groups as much as we do Plain Jane walking down the street who just wants a piercing? In my opinion, no, and so I don't see it as a double-standard in this case (though I could see the potential in other situations).

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'Force' is an interesting word to use in a social context like religious doctrine. It's notable that at any time, members of a religion may choose to deviate from its strictest protocols. 'Sunday Christians' are a great example. People who follow their religion until it gets in the way of them doing what they want to do. Yes, the religion encourages them and they're raised to believe in doing X, but then there's this huge society out there that raises people to believe that fast food and conspicuous consumption is good for them... Is clitoral shortening worse than circumcision? They're both genital mutilations probably being performed on people beneath their age of majority by religions. But this bill only addresses women. Similarly, some people view the fact that it intrudes on piercings as being 'religious types getting into my sex life' while the same bill can be reasonably viewed as 'government interfering with my religion' by a member of Judaic society.

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I don't think you can treat all religions the same way. Sure, some you can just walk away from, some you can fight your way out of, but some are a lot more oppressive and harder for a woman raised within it to leave.

Is clitoral shortening worse than circumcision? They're both genital mutilations probably being performed on people beneath their age of majority by religions.

Agreed that they're both mutilations and both are wrong to do on someone who cannot consent to it. Is clitoral shortening worse? It was my understanding that it is, but I haven't done enough research to want to argue that point.

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I don't think you can treat all religions the same way.

Yeah, that whole 'being fair to everyone' thing really falls apart when you start dealing with different scales of morality. One side thinks its moral to chop small, non-necessary body parts off children, the other side thinks it isn't. Yay, cultural ethics.

And I was asking about the 'worse than' in the sense that I didn't know either, so I wasn't about to argue it in that sense, but in the sense that they are both genital mutilations being performed on people beneath age of majority they both seem as if they should be judged similarly...

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And I was asking about the 'worse than' in the sense that I didn't know either, so I wasn't about to argue it in that sense, but in the sense that they are both genital mutilations being performed on people beneath age of majority they both seem as if they should be judged similarly...

I think it would be interesting to know which is worse, but I bet it would be hard to get an answer on that. I suspect there'd be lots of bias on each side.

Agreed on the second part. Wait till the kids can make the decision on their own, let them weigh the good and the bad of each, and keep family/religious pressure out of the decision. (And then I woke up! Ha ha, nice little perfect world there.)

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