Letters to the Editor
melthough
Published Letters: 1212 Editor's Choice: 98
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Who the hell is talking about amendments?
[Read the article: Balls of their own]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Making fun of people is not the same as taking away their rights. When feminists start killing fundamentalist Christians and making them into soap, you can call us Nazis. Till then, we're free to exercise our own first amendment right to comment on bizarre religious practices proudly advertised in other people's press releases.
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The side of caution
[Read the article: To tipple or not to tipple?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I didn't drink a drop during pregnancy, but after mine were born and I was nursing, I drank my face off in a constant, stress- and sleep-deprivation-induced haze of caffeine and beer consumption.
My eldest took it all just fine (relatively speaking - he had colic, so he overreacted to pretty much everything I ate and drank except rice and water), but my middle child screamed his head off when I drank beer and then nursed him, and my youngest projectile vomited. I stopped drinking until both were old enough to wait a few hours for their next dose of milk.
There are alcoholics in my immediate ancestry, so when I saw what happened to my newborns when I had alcohol, I was awfully glad I hadn't had anything to drink while they were in utero. You really don't know their susceptibilities until later, and you can bet I'll be telling them what I noticed when they're older.
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She's absolutely right about "the rubbishing of men"
[Read the article: The reluctant feminist]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Except the part where she blames feminism. One of the worst cases I've ever seen is in the Berenstain Bears books. If you have never read them - DON'T. I don't let my kids get them out of the library anymore, because they're so sickeningly sexist. The father is a bumbling idiot who gets everything wrong while the mother and children look on and roll their eyes at him, but it's so cute and they all love him anyway.
The word for this is not feminism. THIS IS PATRIARCHY. Men aren't responsible for their own actions within the family because they're just stupid children, dogs, gorillas, cavemen - whatever. They just can't help their own primitive urges, they can't be faithful, they don't know how to do the laundry or dishes.... That is an attitude FULLY SANCTIONED by patriarchal thinking. This is why a woman's place is in the home - men just can't handle that stuff! Don't mistake it for feminist power. Sure, it's mainly women who get a giggle out of those men-as-dogs e-mails, but as a feminist, I am sickened by them. They are an example (and the examples are not rare) of how a sexist culture hurts men as much as women.
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The good ol' Mrs. degree
[Read the article: School for housewives]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What do Christian fundamentalist girls need to go off to Babdis college and learn to bake cookies for anyway? Like, they only retained the abstract part about fractions when they were baking cookies during 17 years of homeschooling? They didn't learn to raise children from helping take care of their 16 younger brothers and sisters? Come ON.
I know that that anonymous Jewish guy will attack us for criticizing these people, but I grew up in Ohio (southern Baptist, btw), and I am sorry to report that I am related to some of them. I'd love to foster mutual, interfaith understanding, but that is not their thing. INTELLECTUAL DEATH is their goal. They are authoritarians. Their idea of interfaith is when Baptists and Nazarenes deign to talk to one another. Puh. Lease. I played the wedding march at my sister's first wedding (at which she was pregnant with her second child) and it was all I could do not to leap over the piano and try to kidnap her while the preacher gave her a ten-minute sermon on Collossians 3:18. Too bad he didn't give a similar sermon to the freak she married on 3:19, as her failure to be submissive subjected her to her husband's bitterness, in physically violent form.
I am glad that people can go to school for whatever they want to learn - even baking cookies and learning to parent (as long as they aren't applying any actual rods...). But I wish there weren't such a powerful contingent in this country of people who readily welcome violence into their lives because when they open their bibles they only read the parts that celebrate a violent, primitive god. But you know, I have faith. There are a lot of smart, passionate, intellectually curious girls and boys in this world who are afraid to question their parents' beliefs for a while - but once they grow up, they do have choices. OK with me if one of the choices is a degree in homemaking, as long as that's only one of them.
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@tina
[Read the article: School for housewives]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There are lots of homeschooling traditions, so you can't lump them all together. Some promote deep inquiry, the point being to teach kids how to learn rather than how to take tests - a much better education than you get at most public schools. Others teach fear of questioning. They are worlds apart. Anyway, the government can't start going after people for miseducating their kids when they've had a pretty hard time getting it right themselves.