Weekend Reads: Tricky People, Human Reproduction is Ridiculous, and Goodbye Niki
Happy Weekend Readers! I hope everybody had a good September because October is finally here, bringing with it spooks, goblins, and all things pumpkin spice flavored. Lots of links to get to so let’s not waste time.
Instead of teaching our kids to be afraid of strangers, we should educate them on how to recognize “tricky people,” says child safety expert Pattie Fitzgerald.
Breastfeeding Nazis, you just need to stop!
Our own Kaven Senapathy also wrote about feeding infants at Forbes (CN: Forbes hates adblock,) with the excellent Beware of Starving Your Breastfed Newborn, Warns the Fed is Best Foundation.
As promised, Patheos blogger Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism has started writing about his new journey into the world of parenting. He starts with an overview of why Human Reproduction is Ridiculous.
Ruth Graham at Slate asks us why parents make parenting sound so God-awful?
A high school boys soccer team forfeits rather than risk losing to girls.
Faith Christian School in Mesa, Ariz. chose to forfeit rather than face Foothills Academy College Prep, whose team has two female players. The rationale, according to comments from Faith Christian administrative leader Dick Buckingham in The Arizona Republic, is that sports just aren’t the place for things like equality and honor:
“I know it appears to fly in the face of what everyone is wanting to promote today, and that is equality. It is based on a religious perspective that God created guys and girls differently…. We want to teach our men that honor of ladies is just not in sports.”
There’s been yet another study about how massively expensive childcare is in the US.
Six Signs Parents are Basically Heroes in an Action Film.
Why it is important that Wonder Woman is finally queer.
Which brings up an interesting point. It’s fantastic that Rucka has finally spoken on the elephant in the room but there has been sizable pushback from the comics LGBT community on social media that Diana needs to acknowledge her status on the comic page. Wonder Woman needs to say “Yes, I am queer.” On the one hand, I’m glad we’ve mostly moved past this kind of a ‘Very Special Episode’ where the minority character speaks directly to the audience. On the other hand, it still feels necessary. Today’s queer-coding can easily turn into tomorrow’s queer-baiting. See Marvel’s backpedaling on Hercules being bisexual.
Ellen DeGeneres is producing a reality show about 11 year old stand up comic Saffron Herndon. This kid is wicked funny.
And finally some sad news. The atheist blogging community lost a treasured member of our family, Orbit blogger Niki Massey, who died unexpectedly Saturday afternoon. I’ve only known her for a short time, but in that time I found her to be fierce, funny, wise and kind. She took no shit and pulled no punches when fighting injustice. This was her last post at the Orbit and it is perfect in every way.
It’s Basic Shit Season: Don’t Do This to Your Kids Edition.
Every year around this time I wonder if I will have something to gripe about around Halloween and the costuming therein. And every year, I don’t have to worry – it’s always something.
I love Halloween. I love the entire month of October. My birthday’s in October. Halloween is in October. There’s Autumn in October, hot apple cider, caramel, turned fall leaves, and SKULLS EVERYWHERE. What I don’t like about Halloween are the humorless Jokers who KEEP fucking up. Same shit every year. First we have Kid Blackface, sooner or later some jackass is going to smear the feces that is shoe polish or brown makeup all over their face and poof! become *insert black stereotype or dead black person* here. Cisguys suddenly get the urge to don dresses and shitty makeup for this night only, night of jackassery, night of “Oh god, fuck you.” And with the rise of the asshole-proudly anti-PC-alt-right, goodness knows how many of these fucksticks will use the Spookiest Night of the Year as license to be…well…fucksticks.
Hey, who knows, maybe someone will get creative and combine the two and go out as a named dead black transwoman! Wouldn’t that be oh so clever and anti-PC!
Rest in Power Niki, we’ll miss you.
Here’s Saffron to cheer os back up a bit…
Featured Image Credit: Blotz Photo Arts.
