Happy Weekend Readers! In the United States it is Mothers Day, a day set aside to honor our Moms if they are deserving of honor. In a world where many people have been abused, abandoned or neglected by their Mother, biological or otherwise, we should take care to avoid pressuring them to honor and respect someone who has harmed them. We should also care for our friends who are grieving the loss of their Mother, or Mothers grieving the loss of their children. Grief Beyond Belief is an excellent support group for folks dealing with death without religion, check them out if Mother’s Day is one of those days that triggers your grief.
For some Gay parents, Mother’s Day (or Father’s Day) can be a little awkward.
Patrick Green at Transparent Expedition wrote about the pride he feels as his son took steps to create his own online support group for transgender teens…
My son and his friends did the heavy lifting. They made and are making careful decisions. Maybe I was an inspiration, but he did the work. I was in my late 30’s when I started organizing on this level. He is a teenager. Seeing my son take this kind of action not only inspires me, but it reminds me of an important truth.
Misguided politicians can try to pass bad laws restricting the civil rights of my son and his peers. School districts will try to enact bad policies that make my son and his peers less safe. Churches will preach and teach deadly messages from pulpits. These institutions will try to hinder the lives of people based on their poor understanding of ancient books written by goat herders trying to understand their deity through their limited social lens. They can try, but my son and his friends are gathering together and taking action. They are already leaders facing off against the government, the school systems, and the church.
If the state’s are our “laboratories of democracy”, then Texas is democracy’s Mad Scientist Laboratory. Just last Thursday the Texas House voted 93-49 to allow Texas adoption agencies to reject applicants based on their religion. According to Matthew collects the details for us.
Why is this baby carrier designed for Dads causing a stir on Facebook?
And as Fatherly, a website aimed at millennial dads, put it: “the thing absolutely looks like something the SWAT team would wear on ‘Take Your Daughter To Work’ day.”
We have had some bristly run ins with Amy Tuteur here at GP, but this list of Five Myths About Pregnancy reminds us why we love her anyways.
Libbey Anne looks back at 10 years of marriage and discusses all of the Evangelical marriage teachings she had to unlearn.
In Defense of Harley Quinn, Elizabeth Bird examines the complicated character of Harley Quinn in a world that rarely portrays girls or women as tricksters.
If you aren’t reading Dale McGowan’s new blog The Lucky Ones, A Beginners Guide to Mortality then you should be. His most recent “Grandma Opts Out of the System” is awesome.
Just as she asked the question, the cemetery workers closed the lid of a metal box surrounding the casket, something I’ve since learned is called a burial liner, an innovation used in the U.S. and apparently nowhere else. They cranked down hard on four handles, sealing it tight.
The girls’ eyes ballooned as they realized what this meant. “So much for returning to the earth,” muttered Erin (11). “She’s never getting out of there.”
After all of our talk about the beauty of going back into the system, of being a link in an endless chain, Grandma’s atoms end up biking around a cul-de-sac until the sun swallows the earth. Until then, the license to dance is revoked. It struck them as just wrong.
Jeanna Jorgenson blogs about folklore and fairy tales at Foxy Folklorist and has some interesting insights on how fairy tale princess stories make an apt metaphor for the world of Trump.
The failure to question whether exceptional figures, literal or real princesses, have our best interests at heart is understandable on some level; after all, the stories we’re raised on valorize royalty and nobility. Throw in the American dream, telling us we can achieve high social status that’s not technically based on birth but just as good, and you’ve got a potent mix of ideologies.
Throw in the lack of intersectional feminism among white women in particular, and my reading of the appropriateness of the fairy-tale metaphor gets even more dire.
I’ve seen arguments that white women voting for Trump is more a general Democratic failing. In general, it seems that white women have little reason not to continue to uphold the status quo, as many of feminism’s gains have benefited them (I guess I should say us, though I’m trying to suck less at feminism by being more intersectional). And that’s for women supposedly sympathetic to the plight of other women! What about the rest?
Mother’s Day is complicated…
https://youtu.be/VPs8SZZTg68
Featured Image Credit: Mission Critical Baby Carriers
