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When Clinton signed the Telecommunications Bill into law, it became illegal to transmit obscene or indecent material, defined as including information on abortion, HIV, AIDS, and human sexuality, over the Internet. It is now illegal for doctors, lawyers, and other American citizens to discuss these issues on the Net.
Several organizations, lead by the ACLU, have challenged these provisions in court. The Clinton administration has announced that it will not enforce these provisions. Any future President, however, could force the Justice Administration to enforce the ban.
Representative Patricia Schroeder (D-Co) will submit a bill on February 26 repealing that section of the telecommunications statue. Call your Senators and Representative and ask them to support Rep. Schroeder's bill.
1936: Margaret Sanger wins her court battle: birth control information is no longer legally synonymous with obscenity.
1965: In Griswold vs. Connecticut, the Supreme Court voided a state law that banned the distribution of contraceptives to married women.
1972: In Eisenstadt vs Baird, the Supreme Court voided a Massachusetts law restricting contraceptives for single women. Finally, all woman legally had access to contraceptives.
On 1/8, Robertson presented a shocking propaganda "docudrama" on "elder smuggling." According to c.c. watch, "the opening scene featured two guys driving a truck into a road block situation, getting stopped by government agents and losing their cargo of senior citizens. You see, due to new federal laws the elderly have outlived their usefulness; they will be detained and exterminated." According to True Witness, the thesis was that "shortfalls in Medicare and Social Security would lead to the Federal Bankruptcy Emergency Act, a fascistic society, and the murder of the elderly by the state."
An equally revolting "docudrama" aired on 1/10, continuing the same shocking theme, only with a new set of victims -- people of faith. Reverend Robertson pointed to the suppression of religion that occurred in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin, and said, "For decades, secular forces have assaulted religious freedom...the Supreme Court ordered students to stop praying in schools..." Robertson, expressing his paranoid vision of the future, continued "Right now the left isn't strong enough.... The forces of atheism, nihilism and destruction are biding their time.... They'll push you first back into your church or synagogue. Then they'll begin the next phase, which will be like Nazism."
from Political Women's Hotline
"Her world is her husband, her family, her children, and home. We do not find it right when a women presses into the world of men. Rather we find it natural when these two worlds remain separate ... Woman and man represent two different types of being. Reason is dominant in man."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (courtesy of Irene Stubers WOA Oct. 4, 1995)
In every age, in every country, in every generation women have spoken and written to improve the lives of women. All of the women listed below are renowned for their use of the pen to express their joy in being women, to improve the image of women in literature, to give women positive role models, to restore women's history, to change the culture or laws regarding women, or to call women to action.
Sappho of Lesbos ( c.650 BCE-c590 BCE): classical Greek poet known in her own time as the "Tenth Muse." Her works, tributes to both romantic and physical love, have come down to us only in fragments, in the works of others. A teacher of women who wrote poetry in tribute to them as they left her to marry, later commentators derived the terms Sapphism and Lesbian from her name. Will things never change.
Hypatia of Alexandria (c.370-415), renowned in her own time both for her learning and as a teacher of mathematics and philosophy, was the last pagan scientist in the western world. Hypatia was pulled from her chariot, stripped naked, and torn apart by a vicious mob incited to an anti-pagan frenzy by Cyril, who was later canonized as a saint. Hypatia's work was condemned and burned by the church; it is lost to us.
Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (c.930-c.990), whose pen name means the strong voice of Gandersheim, was a devout Christian canonness consecrated to the church at an early age. "She is the first known dramatist of Christianity, the first Saxon poet, and the first woman historian of Germany. Her dramas are the first performable plays of the Middle Ages, her epics are the only extant Latin epics written by a woman, and, finally, she is the first medieval poet to have consciously attempted to remold the image of the literary depictions of women."
Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), perhaps the greatest of the medieval Abbesses and advisor to popes, was renowned in her own time for her learning in art, medicine, and music. For a true listening experience, listen to the CD, Vision.
Christine de Pizan (1364-1430), the first woman to earn her living by the pen, was a poet, biographer, autobiographer, literary critic, historian, and political commentator. One of the earliest lists of famous women, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) presents roughly 100 mythical and historical women from antiquity to 1405 in a very positive light.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689): In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf says of Behn: "All women together should let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn. . . for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." More prolific than Shakespeare and an early abolitionist, this popular playwright and novelist advocated the education of women, for free love and for the right of women to marry whomever they please- or not at all.
All children, girls and boys alike, should recognize their names, just as we expect them to know the names of Homer, Aquinas, Donne, and Locke. If your children don't know of these women, go to their schools and find out why. Insist that these women and many others like them be part of every child's education. And take pride that you are one of a long line of distinguished women fighting for the dignity, rights, and freedom of all women.
"(T)he feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."
Pat Robertson, August 23, 1993
reported in Freedom Writer a publication of IFAS
from Dec 1995 Freedom Writer by IFAS (Institute for First Amendment Studies), a long-standing religious right watch-dog organization run by an ex-fundamentalist Christian minister.
The Christian Coalition boasts 1.7 million members, each of whom supposedly receives the bi-monthly Christian American magazine. According to U.S. Postal Form 3526, filed October 1, 1995, at Chesapeake, Virginia, the net press run for the September 1995 issue of Christian American is as follows: "Net press run: 353,937. Total paid and/or requested circulation: 310,296. Total free distribution: 43,141. Copies not distributed as of Oct. 1, 1995: 500. Total circulation: 353,437."
Additional figures report the average circulation per issue for the past year. The average paid and/or requested circulation before this past October was 352,222. So, the latest figures indicate an approximate 42,000 drop in circulation. Free distribution also dropped, from 66,079 to 43,141.
The Coors family, principle financier of the right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, is one of the biggest financial supporters of radical right organizations. I think that the Coors' family is more than welcome to spend every penny that they make from the right wing tea-totelers to support their right wing agenda. Girlcott (tm Marylin . .. . ) Coors beer. Write to them at: Coors, Mail NH 325, Golden Co, 80401-195 or call (800) 642-6116.
Last month Internet activists successfully forced OJ Simpson to cancel his 800 number and institute a 900 number to peddle his products by bombarding the 800 number with phone calls. We'd like to try again: call Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition at 800-455-9900, ask lots of questions, request lots of free information, and request a free subscription to their magazine Christian America. Opposition research is important.
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.
last updated Nov 1998