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Via Political Wire: a recent New York Times/CBS News poll found growing support in the U.S. for same sex marriage. 42 percent of Americans now say same sex couples should be able to legally marry - up 9 points from just a month ago.
There's also a widening age gap among respondents which isn't a huge suprise considering that the under 30 age block went 66 percent for Obama in last year's election.
31 percent of respondents over the age of 40 said they support same sex marriage while 57 percent of respondents under age 40 said they supported it. That's a 26-point difference, people.
I also wanted to share super interesting predictions from Nate Silver - the guy who called the electoral college break down in November - on when each of the 50 states will vote against a marriage ban on FiveThirtyEight, which was posted following the Iowa Supreme Court ruling earlier this month.
The Kerry-Lugar Amendment passed in the Senate today, restoring $4 billion in funding that had been cut from the international affairs budget, which includes crucial funding for diplomatic, health, and development programs.
Actual bipartisan cooperation that lead to a positive outcome. I'm happy.
In the midst of a global economic crisis, foreign assistance is important now more than ever. The world's weakest need support to prevent disease, provide education for their communities, and ensure essential health services.
We must keep moving forward in our efforts to lift up the nations most in need by both providing the resouces needed within communities to enable progress and by leading the international community by example in renewing the United States' commitment to global health and development.
It's great to see that Senators on both sides of the aisle can see the value of these investments.
On behalf of the member organizations of the University Coalitions for Global Health, I'd like to invite you to take part in the 2009 Global Health Week of Action, March 30 - April 3! There's still two weeks to plan an event to raise awareness and motivate action in your community!
More info after the jump.
Complications from pregnancy are the leading cause of death for young women ages 15 through 19 in low- and middle-income countries. Around the world, 200 million women wish to avoid or delay pregnancy but do not have access to modern methods of contraception. It is estimated that the unmet need for family planning among young women is twice that among adults.
Sign the petition to increase funding for U.S. international family planning assistance today!
...and fails.
But, thanks for playing (not).
Today, Sen. Martinez of Florida proposed an amendment to HR 2, the reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), reinstating the global gag rule (Mexico City Policy) in spite of the memorandum the President issued last Friday repealing it.
The amendment sought to ensure that "no funds authorized under part I of Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 for population planning activities or other population or family planning assistance may be made available for any private, nongovernmental, or multilateral organization that performs or actively promotes abortion as a method of birth control."
Abortion as a method of birth control? I mean, come on people.
It was voted on just after noon.
He lost. 60 to 37. Complete roll call vote here. Ah, change in Washington...
January 6th, nine gay men were tried before a court in Senegal and sentenced to prison for eight years for "indecent conduct and unnatural acts." Consensual sex between men is illegal in Senegal (punishable by imprisonment from one to five years and a hefty fine) but, on top of that, the judge threw in three to five years on top of the original sentence claiming these men were also part of a criminal group.
Most of them belonged to an organization established to provide HIV prevention services to men who have sex with men.
Well. Hmm. There are just so many things wrong with this.
While it has long been apparent that most African governments prefer to deny the existence of men who have sex with men in their countries over providing them with the tools needed for effective HIV prevention, in the recent past, the environment in Senegal has become particicularly antagonistic to LGBT men and women.
More evidence to back up common sense-- no matter what they say at the VMAs, virginity pledges are just silly.
According to this study from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,
This large federal study showed that while more than half of young people initiate sexual activity before marriage regardless of whether or not they've taken vows of abstinence until then, those who take virginity pledges are 10 percent less likely to use condoms consistently and 6 percent less likely to use any form of contraception than their non-abstinence-vowing peers.Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do.
The researcher suggests that this might just be a result of the information left out of the abstinence-only-until-marriage programs funded by the federal government. "There's been a lot of work that has found that teenagers who take part in abstinence-only education have more negative views about condoms," she said. "They tend not to give accurate information about condoms and birth control."
Apparently Obama's a friend of his.
You may know Rev. Rick Warren as the friendly author of The Purpose Driven Life. The New York Times describes his Saddleback Church as "an evangelical congregation averaging 22,000 weekly attendees, a 120-acre campus, and has more than 300 community ministries to groups such as prisoners, CEOs, addicts, single parents, and those with HIV/AIDS." Seems lovely, right? BUT.... there are are a couple itty-bitty pieces which were left out of this inaugural announcement that I just can't get over.
He also urged this 22,000 person congregation to vote YES on Prop 8 and is fervently, fervently anti-choice.
This World AIDS Day, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appointed Mr. Michael Sidabe as the new Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
After 13 years of leadership since UNAIDS' creation, Dr. Peter Piot is now passing the position on to his colleague who currently serves as UNAIDS Deputy Executive Director– Programmes and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations.
On November 20, as I joined up with many AIDS activists I have worked with at various points over the past four years, one friend greeted me with a hug and the exclamation which became the title of this post-- "First AIDS rally of the Obama era!"
As advertized on Facebook and reported in the New York Times, demonstrations took place across the nation. I was among those gathered in Washington, DC who marched from the Capitol to the White House in the rain demanding civil rights for all.
It was, in a word, amazing. I have planned quite a few protests in DC on HIV and AIDS issues and I've never seen anything like this. Besides being pulled together in 11 days, there were an estimated 5,000 people in attendence according to the Washington Blade. This kind of organizing is brilliant. And it mostly comes down to the Internets.
In the lead up to Saturday's protests, Rex Wockner discussed the role of technology:
But just like the mongo demonstrations we've seen in California since Nov. 4, Saturday's national protest-o-rama is being organized via Facebook, text-messaging, Twitter, blogs, RSS and e-mail. Totally grassroots. Totally fascinating. And I suspect it will be big.
Maybe Stonewall was Activism 1.0, ACT UP was Activism 2.0, the failed corporate activism of HRC and No On Prop 8 was Activism 3.0, and now we are witnessing Activism 4.0 being born.
It's virtually impossible to know you're experiencing history in the making when you're right in the middle of it. But our present generation with their SMS texting and their Twittering (aka "tweeting") and their Facebooking are mad as hell over this, and it's lookin' to me like they're not going to take it anymore.
Wockner went on to say that this is "probably the most interesting thing I've seen on my beat as a gay-movement reporter since ACT UP." And guys, ACT UP transformed activism.
And this weekend was big. And I think it will keep being big. But it's up to all of you. Now's not the time to stop. We've got quite the fight ahead of us so if you're not on this already, get involved now. You're not going to want to sit this one out.
Update: awesome blog from kos on these protests and taking on the system.
I know, tough math, right?
As reported by Bloomberg:
President-elect Barack Obama will reverse U.S. family-planning and AIDS-prevention strategies that have long linked global funding to anti-abortion and abstinence education, a public-health adviser said....I'm still in the haze of this whole President-elect Barack Obama thing and consistently certain that I must be reading a fake source when people talk about this sort of awesomeness.
Obama will bring "back a sense of balance and perspective and the use of good science and good medicine in these positions, and not just this narrow, political ideology,''...
President George W. Bush's $45 billion dollar "Emergency Plan" for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) made great strides in providing treatment to people living with HIV in countries and regions that at one time had been written off (yes, I did just kind of compliment the Bush Administration). BUT, and that's a big but, as Istvan wrote a few days ago, PEPFAR has majorly failed on prevention. And last time I checked, one can't end a pandemic, or even remotely slow transmission rates, by totally and completely botching prevention efforts.
So, admittedly, this didn't just happen on it's own. Following the genocide, the government of Rwanda implemented an effort to enlist women as politicians by designating more than one-fourth of the 80 seats in parliament for female representatives. But, it sure seems to have taken off from there. For a bit of history...
In the aftermath of the genocide, the emerging view was that women could better steer the country away from more horrors quickly. However, with the results of last month’s election, this reform has taken Rwanda even further than was perhaps anticipated, and on gender lines, the nation’s parliament is closer to an equitably representative body than that of any other country in the world.
This increase in woman lawmakers makes perfect sense, as women have taken on roles that are traditionally associated with men. The genocide in part resulted in hundreds of thousands of new woman-headed households. Heading up their family farms was only the beginning: now women are using that knowledge and the desire to improve the quality of their families’ lives to try more entrepreneurial ventures....
So the gender equality evident at the top of the government is evident all through the society here, and the spirit of Rwanda’s women is helping to create a general improvement in lives of thousands. What has happened is that this society has changed in one generation, moving away from the patriarchal model common elsewhere in Africa to a new, much more equal system.
Similiar efforts to designate parliamentary seats for women have also been undertaken in the Ugandan parliament. I have a friend who is currently doing research in Kampala to evaluate the broader effects of electing female politicians on the actual lives and rights of women. Now that's a question...
Also, to read more about the history of the genocide in Rwanda, I highly recommend We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch. It's excellent. And, look! The used ones are super cheap on Amazon.
I pretty much love everything about Google. The Gmail, the iGoogle, the Google calender, the Google docs... and the April Fool's jokes. They're really awesome.
Yet even awesomer in my opinion (and yes, I just decided awesomer was a word), this past week, Google did something unconventional for an Internet company--they took a stance on California's Proposition 8, a measure on the state's ballot this November 4th that would eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry.
Any summary wouldn't really do the post justice, so here's the company's stance directly from the Offical Google Blog, sandwiched between a post celebrating Google's 10th birthday and something about a new toolbar and Firefox...
Our position on California's No on 8 campaign
9/26/2008 03:23:00 PMAs an Internet company, Google is an active participant in policy debates surrounding information access, technology and energy. Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions -- Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all religions and no religion, straight and gay -- we do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues. So when Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot, it was an unlikely question for Google to take an official company position on.
However, while there are many objections to this proposition -- further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text -- it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 -- we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.
And yet, I'm ashamed to say, I was intrigued by one this past week.
The most recent edition of Us Weekly sports a cover with images of two actresses from this season's new series Beverly Hills, 90210, Jessica Stroup and Shenae Grimes, with a headline that reads "Too Thin for TV." The breaking news is that they are "trying to hard to be skinny" and their co-stars have planned an intervention. But it's not like this is the first time this has happened in Hollywood. And this is certainly not the first time it's happened in this country.
The article speaks to the pressures to be thin as the stars of a hit TV show and features quotes from worried co-stars. But when you go to the preview of the piece online one of the embedded links is "See photos of more scary skinny stars" followed by another which reads "Check out Us' weight winners of the year." This is where the magazine celebrates other Hollywood stars for the weight they've lost. Does anyone else find this severly messed up?
The media, and especially magazines like Us Weekly, constantly tell us that skinny is beautlful, that losing weight is a good thing, and that being fat is very very bad. And it's not just the famous actresses who end up on magazine covers who are suffering from these pressures in our society. Whether or not these two specific stars have legitimate eating disorders, eating disorders are a reality in this country and they are far more common than we would all like to admit.
Research shows that 1 in 100 young women aged 10-20 suffer from anorexia and 4 in 100 college-aged women suffer from bulimia. Even in the all girls high school I attended, which sought to reinforce young women's confidence and self-assurance in the face of outside pressures, at least two of my own friends there suffered from anorexia or bulemia to varying degrees as teenagers.
Less severe, but equally significant, the limiting societal standards of beauty perpetuated by the media contirbute to poor body image throughout this country. I shouldn't feel like shit every time I flip through a magazine at the grocery store and it shouldn't make me want to put my snack food back on the shelf. As much as we might know that Hollywood does not reflect reality and as much as we may want to fight the standards society and the media set for all of us, they do still effect us.
If only these magazines would start taking responsibility for the standards of beauty they propogate and the way they effect young women. Really, it's not like it's a secret.
To read more on body image and the media visit the Media Awareness Network... or google it. There are some very interesting stats to be found...
"You can call it whatever you want – idealism, friendship, faith, duty – but there’s something out there that each of us is willing to stand up and fight for. No one else is going to do it for us."
You'll find the above statement in the Act section of this beautiful new website.
Apathy is a force to be reckoned with in the United States Especially for the issues which lie outside of our borders. I'm tired of idealism and activism being stigmatized as radical, unreasonable, and extremist.
It's not radical to care that 45% of all new HIV infections globally occur among young people ages 15-24. Its not radical to care that pregnancy is the leading cause of death among young women ages 15-19 in low income countries.
We live in a globalized world where things like this very website are able to connect us all. We all have the same rights to information, education, and respect and our realities are all a part of the human experience.
Let's stand up and fight together. The world needs us to be idealistic. We must learn what we can. We must speak up. And hold our policy makers in the U.S. accountable for their polices that have failed our peers.
