Surely there must be a law against using someone's name in an unauthorized made-up film or biography. Legislators: take note, please.

For Victim's Rights groups: How about pushing for laws which protect child victims at least, and, preferably, all victims who do not authorize any such treatments.

As Rep. Slaughter says, 'This bill takes us backwards'. Now many health insurance companies include coverage for abortion as a medical right. If this bill, with the anti-abortion amendment, passes, NO insurance companies will be ALLOWED to offer abortion coverage. This means that, in this economy particularly, not only middle class but all poor women and girls will be forced to either bear children they didn't want and can't afford but many or most will be forced to self-abort or turn to non-medical, non-sterile, noncompetent abortions, with risk to their bodies and to their lives. Many will die. Just as if we had never won the right to choice over our own bodies after Roe v. Wade.

Nancy Pelosi, though nominally 'pro-choice', is a Catholic. As I understand it, she was not only brought up a Catholic, with all its extreme authoritarian, patriarchal, immoral excesses -- like sexual abuse by priests and covering up such abuse; denial of equal leadership and other rights to women; actively and vigorously working to deny poverty-stricken women in many countries access to pregnancy-prevention techniques but to abortion, even to save the life of the woman; and actively preventing education on AIDS/HIV prevention through withholding the dissemination of condoms. These acts are completely unconscionable.

She has talked of respecting anti-abortion factions' views as being about 'conscience', in ways which, by entertaining these loud voices in the first place, seems to give equal weight to their intense, fear-of-death-originated, misogynistic, dangerous, male-dominated views. She was wrong to listen to them in the first place, to allow them a forum. She also has allowed silencing by rude, crude white male representatives of pro-health care women's legitimate voices. [See Huffingtonpost.com Sat.] She should have thrown out these immature men at the first sign of theirv silencing behavior. (Including Joe Wilson.) Silencing people who have a right to speak is a form of political and spiritual

violence.

We have seen an outcry all summer against the Democratic leadership and Reps. not standing up to egregious ploys and attacks by fundamentalist extremists, most of whom, when you look underneath to see who is paying them, are funded BY THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY. These are not principled individuals. These are ignorant dupes ('astroturfs') bussed to extremist rallies by insurance companies. These are US House of Representatives members leading and speaking at these rallies who are bribed by insurance companies.

If 'conservative Democrats' have been influenced by their own MIS-guided constituents they should have been taken aside and taught how to re-educate their districts; not allowed with their taints and prejudices into the room to negotiate with normal, ethical, reasonable people.

A story of being a helpless observer. Watching someone who intervened successfuy.

When I was in high school, about the 10th grade, I was walking with a friend to the shops from school, past a park, when we suddenly looked over in the park and saw a group of about ten girls, in a circle, silently pushing another girl back and forth and around the circle -- like a ball game. I was stunned, frozen, couldn't go, couldn't do anything to help the girl.

The victim was someone we'd all seen around, one of those 'different' girls, possibly learning disabled, 'not like us'. The girls who made the circle, and it seemed very organized, were 'older', taller, all of one race, likely Mexican-American. There was a lot of hate coming from the perpetrators toward the victim girl. There was silence, no taunting, just hate to propel the girl being pushed around the circle.

In this large high school, in the late 50's in North Hollywood, California, the Mexican girls were pariahs, just by definition of being 'non-white' or darker ir 'not like us'. They had their own group and we had ours and our concerns were about our place in the hierarchy within the Euro-American dominant population, not with them.

As we watched this scene, frozen, and maybe a few others gathered as well, the time we were helplessly riveted, seemed endless but was likely just a few minutes. The girl in the center was passive and not resisting. Then another girl, small but older, too, dressed neatly as I remember in a gray suit jacket which matched her skirt, walked up from behind us, calmly crossed through the low bushes bounding the park and into the circle. She put her arm around the girl who had been being treated so badly and walked her out and on down the street. The circle girls stood and watched, helpless now themselves.

..........................................

At the bottom of this article there is a link to one which is about : how to talk to your children about seeing another person being tormented. I recommend both. And that you print out my story and read it to them. And any others which may be useful and which wind up on this blog.

(Ask the questions what would you do? Who would you get help from? What if no adult were around?Where does hate come from? Why was this particular girl, in my story, being singled out to be tormented? Why, again?)