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As part of the Christian Coalition's "Contract on the American Family", this act would pre-empt local, state, and federal laws which protect and educate children by allowing unhappy parents to sue in federal court to stop any educational, health care, or social service program they don't like. Critics of this bill say it will result in endless, costly litigation and bankrupt local school districts. This bill also limits the ability of the federal government to become involved in the family except in cases where there is already "clear and convincing evidence" - meaning that children may be forced to live with abusive parents since governments will be unable to investigate the situation without fear of litigation. Call Senators Robb and Warner and ask them to vote against this bill. -JM
Rally's Hamburger's has been using some offensive advertising. A sample letter follows which you can use to protest their advertising campaign.
Rally's Hamburger
1324 North Battlefield Boulevard
Chesapeake, Va
To whom it may concern,
I am writing to express my dismay at your current advertising campaign for the "Big Buford" sandwich. Using sexual innuendo to sell a hamburger is offensive enough, but airing it at times when it will be seen by children is not only offensive, it is highly irresponsible.
Children are extremely influenced by the images and words they see and hear on the television screen; when sex is used to promote product after product children take in the message that sex is the quickest route to acceptance and popularity. We live in an age where children are having children and we cannot ignore television's role in precipitating this crisis. I ask that you take into consideration the effect that the "Big Buford" campaign may have on our children and ask yourselves if this fits into your image as a family restaurant. I personally am asking all of my friends and their families to boycott Rally's until the offensive "Big Buford" ad is taken off the air.
Sincerely, - RL
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Virginia announced the addition of two new services to the Hampton Roads community. The Chesapeake clinic is now offering prenatal care in the Western Branch area of the city on a sliding scale fee structure. Also, Planned Parenthood clinics are now offering services for men! Men can receive testing and treatment for STDs, safer sex counseling, contraceptive education, prostate cancer screening, and at the Virginia Beach clinic, vasectomies. Keep up the good work.
"When I see a first-class individual who makes $80,000 a year, he's lower middle class. When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000 to $750,000 a year, that's middle class. When I see anyone
above that, that's upper middle class."
- Rep. Fred Heineman (R-NC), explaining that his yearly income of $180,000 leaves him short of middle-class status. (Raleigh News & Observer, 10/21/95)
In every generation, in every land, some men have truly loved the women in their lives, their wives, daughters, grand-daughters, and even their mistresses. These men wanted women to be happy, free, independent, educated, powerful individuals, equal to men in the eyes of God, man, and the law. They honored women as the mothers of the race: the people who bore them, nurtured them, educated them, and loved them. These are the men who changed restrictive laws in the 19th century, gave us the vote in the 20th century, and funded women's colleges and the women's movement in both centuries. To these men we owe a debt of gratitude. Without them we would not have access to education, professions, or the ballot. Often ridiculed for being less than men, these are the real men: men strong enough to encourage the women around them to be independent-minded and free. They are the role models for today's real men. To honor them and to give today's real men a sense of their own history, this month's Feminist Foremothers is replaced by Feminist Forefathers.
Thothmes I (c. 1550 BCE) raised his daughter to succeed him to the Egyptian throne. She became the first great queen-regnet of Egypt, the African Hatshepsut (1505-1485 BCE).
Francois Poulain Barre The Women as Good as the Men, or the Equality of Both Sexes (1555, French) polemicist and list maker
George Fox (1624-1691) founder and minister of the Quaker religion, pamphlet writer, and staunch supporter of equality for women
John Duncomb The Feminead (1754), list maker in poetry
John Stuart Mill The Subjection of Women (1861), polemicist
Fredrick Douglas 1817-1895 abolitionist, feminist, speaker, and political activist
According to the Human rights Campaign, voters associate the oft-used phrase "radical right" with militias and skinheads and many applaud "radical religious right" for being both religious and correct. The phrase which captures general voter distrust of those who want to mix religion with politics: "religious political extremists".
Although each investor is different, every investor wants a solid financial foundation. When your finances are in order, so many other things seem to fall into place. How can you build a strong financial foundation for yourself?
1) Create a plan of attack
Know your saving's goal. Do you want to save for a down payment for a new house, buy a new car, save for children's education, set up a rainy day fund, establish a retirement account? Then decide whether you need current income (income today) or long-term growth (money in the future). 2) Establish the right mindset: Pay yourself first
Determine how much you can comfortably afford to invest on a regular basis then always pay yourself first. Stick to it over time, in good times and bad. [ed's note - I use payroll deductions to put money into my savings acct. before I even get my paycheck and I have for 20 years. I've built up a tidy little nest egg over the years.]
3) Identify your risk tolerance level.
Risk is the price volatility of an investment: all investments move up and down in price. There's no such thing as avoiding risk. Investments that seem to offer no risk can lose value or purchasing power: your returns may fail to keep pace with inflation.
4) Determine your time horizon.
Determine the time between now and when you want to reach your financial goals. Otherwise good investments may be inappropriate for you because of your time horizon. If you're investing for a long-term goal, you'll want investments designed to produce attractive gains over the long haul. If you require monthly incomes, you'll need investments that can generate a steady distribution of income today.
5) Make your investments.
Numerous investment vehicles exist to meet your financial needs ranging from savings accounts, money market funds, mutual funds, stocks and bonds, to unit investment trusts. The right combination for you depends on your specific investment considerations and may be completely inappropriate for someone else.
6) Rely on a professional financial consultant to help you choose the best investment for your financial needs.
She or he should also be willing to educate you about the myriad of investment alternatives available to you.
Courtesy of MK..., Financial Consultant with Wheat First Butcher Singer (trademark of Wheat, First Securities, Inc., Member New York Stock Exchange and SPIC).
American Coalition of Life Activists (ACLA) announced the formation of the Nuremburg Files Project at their conference in Arlington, Va. which was held on January 20-22, 1996. "The goal of the project," according to David Crane, the group's national director, "will be to gather all available information on abortionists and their accomplices for the day when they may be formally charged and tried at Nuremberg-type trials for their crimes. The information in these files will be specifically that kind of evidence admissible in a court of law." He added, "The Project will set up several secret archives which will be safe from seizure by those who would allow criminal child-killers to go free."
Crane also said "our statements of truth is our contract with the American abortion industry." Among those statements of truth are:
At the "white rose banquet" honoring "prisoners of Christ" (those confined to prison for their anti-abortion crimes), speaker Michael Bray, author of A Time to Kill (a defense of the assassination of doctors who perform abortions) said of John Salvi's insanity defense, "I don't think Salvi is any less mentally balanced than Ted Kennedy. His actions are easily justified under the legal and ethical doctrine of justifiable homicide. He ought to be acquitted."
from Jan / Feb 1996 Freedom Writer (IFAS)
Approximately 80% of the consumer dollars is spent by women. We should support feminist women and men. Notice I didn't say women should support women: Some women, such as Phyllis Shafely, do not deserve our feminist dollars. When you are looking for a new hairdresser, doctor, lawyer, or other service provider, check out her/his politics and if s/he does not support our feminist goals, save your dollars for someone who does. It is time for us to quit financing our oppressors and to reward like-minded individuals.
In May the University of Chicago Press announced a forth-coming series of books, Other Voices in Early Modern Europe , which will bring into print translations of feminist works by European women and men of the 16th and 17th centuries. Although feminist women's works from these centuries are slowly coming back into print, feminist men's voices have been missing. Finally this oversight is being corrected and feminist men can learn about their forefathers.
The first volume, which is due out in July 1996, is Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex (1529) by Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. Previously translated as The Glory of Women from the original in German, this book describes man as brutish and woman as superior to man. The feminist men to whom I have mentioned this book are excited: they knew in their hearts that there were feminist men before them. Now they have a book, an author's name, a literary tradition, and a history. Encourage your local public or school library to carry this book and all books in this series. Cloth ISBN 0-226-01058-9 $33.00 Paper ISBN 0-226-01059-7 $13.95
Some argue that in prehistoric times, a matriarchy ruled: others that there existed an egalitarian society. Eventually, patriarchy became the norm: to destroy patriarchy, we need to understand how it was created.
With the advent of agriculture, children became economically advantageous and men sought to acquire and control women for our reproductive abilities. Since these early women were powerful enough to reject the domination of men, women must have voluntarily entered into permenant relationships with men because it was advantageous to them (because it was adaptive).
Gradually men acquired more and more control over women until women no longer had the power to reject men's domination, establishing patriarchy. As the adage says: "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" and the unlimited power of men allowed patriarchy to become maladaptive.
Food produced beyond that necessary for subsistence was traded for consumer goods and the first private property was established. Women were valued for their ability to create additional manpower which could be used to produce an additional surplus. Men acquired, then dominated, women for their reproductive capacity. After refining ways of controlling women, powerful men used these techniques to enslave other men.
Social class for men was (and is) based on their relationship to the means of production: those who owned the means of production could dominate those who did not. For a woman, class is determined by her sexual ties to a man, who then gives her access to material resources. This division of women into "respectable" (that is, attached to one man) and "not-respectable" (that is, not attached to one man or free of all men - prostitutes, mistresses, and single women) was codified into law. Eventually social opprobrium was also used to "punish" "not-respectable women."
Women had long had important religious roles in the worship of female deities. Slowly, women were excluded from the priesthood. With the emergence of Hebrew monotheism, female images of the divine disappeared.
Finally, in the early Christian era, women and women's sexuality came to be feared. The Aristotelian philosophy, which defines men as normative and which then must define women as incomplete and damaged human beings of an entirely different order than men, was fully absorbed into Christian theology and given the imprimatur of God's approval.
To undo patriachy, we reverse this process. We should:
For more on this view of history, read The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner and her sequel about the beginnings of the unraveling of patriarchy The Creation of Feminist Consciousness
On Sunday, April 21, "This Week with David Brinkley" focused on the late-term abortion ban passed by Congress and vetoed by the President. The program was slanted in favor of those who oppose abortion. For example, some of the questions asked were: "Now, isn't the real problem with cesarean section is that it delivers a live baby and the object is to produce a dead one?" (George Will) and "An almost entirely-delivered, living child is killed in plain view. That's infanticide, is it not?" (George Will). Urge ABC to more carefully balance its programs on sensitive, complicated issues by faxing (202) 222-7686 or e-mailing newsaol@ccabc.com. -JM
sunshine@pinn.net
Sunshine for Women encourages you to support our feminist sisters by purchasing their books, reading them, disseminating the ideas they contain, but most especially, by making their book available to our sisters, our daughters, and the community at large by requesting your school library, your public library, and area bookstores to carry their books. Remember it is not enough to write literature, history, and theology, we must pass these works on to future generations. Help us to preserve these works for a new generation by putting them on library bookshelves.
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