Women as an identifiable group under attack?

Fire investigators are trying to confirm that a blaze that gutted an all-female rooming house in Ottawa late Saturday night was deliberately set.

Fire officials said it was lucky no one was injured in the fire that engulfed the ground floor of the 19-room facility. Women ran from the building wearing nothing but pyjamas and bathrobes, some with nothing on their feet.

Investigators sifted through the ground floor to confirm reports that a Molotov cocktail had been thrown into the residence, home to 17 tenants, including many international students at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University.

It is bewildering that Barack Obama sacrificed women's rights and health in a vain attempt to woo Republican ideologues.....

You know what I don't want to hear right now about the Stupak-Pitts amendment banning abortion coverage from federally subsidised health insurance policies? That it's the price of reform, and pro-choice women should shut up and take one for the team.

        "If you want to rebuild the American welfare state," Peter Beinart writes in the Daily Beast, "there is no alternative" than for Democrats to abandon "cultural" issues like gender and racial equality. Hey, Peter, Representative Stupak and your 64 Democratic supporters, Jim Wallis and other anti-choice "progressive" Christians, men: Why don't you take one for the team for a change and see how you like it?

        For example, budget hawks in Congress say they'll vote against the bill because it's too expensive. Maybe you could win them over if you volunteered to cut out funding for male-exclusive stuff, like prostate cancer, Viagra, male infertility, vasectomies, growth-hormone shots for short little boys, long-term care for macho guys who won't wear motorcycle helmets and, I dunno, psychotherapy for pedophile priests. Men could always pay in advance for an insurance policy rider, as women are blithely told they can do if Stupak becomes part of the final bill.

        Barak Obama, too, worries about the deficit. Maybe you could help him out by sacrificing your denomination's tax exemption. The Catholic church would be a good place to start, and it wouldn't even be unfair, since the blatant politicking of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on abortion violates the spirit of the ban on electoral meddling by tax-exempt religious institutions.

        Why should anti-choicers be the only people who get to refuse to let their taxes support something they dislike? You don't want your tax dollars to pay, even in the most notional way, for women's abortion care, a legal medical procedure that one in three American women will have in her lifetime? I don't want to pay for your misogynist fairy tales and sour-old-man hierarchies.

        Women Democrats have taken an awful lot of hits for the team lately. Many of us didn't vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary because the goal of electing a woman seemed less important than the goal of electing the best possible president. Only a self-hater or a featherhead didn't feel some pain about that. And although women are hardly alone in this, we've seen some pretty big hopes set aside in the first year of the Obama administration.

        The Paycheque Fairness Act, which would expand women's protections against sexism in the workplace, is on the back burner. Meanwhile, the Office of Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships is not only alive and well. It's newly staffed with anti-choicers like Alexia Kelley of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which, as Frances Kissling notes in Salon, has compared abortion to torture.

        I know what you're thinking: conservative Democrats like Stupak took Republican districts to win us both houses of Congress. Thanks a lot, Howard Dean, whose bright idea it was to recruit them. But those majorities would not be there, and Obama would not be in the White House, if not for pro-choice women and men - their votes, talent, money, organisational capacity and shoe leather.

        We knocked ourselves out, and it wasn't so that religious reactionaries like Stupak - who, as Jeff Sharlet writes in Salon, is a member of the Family, the secretive rightwing Christian-supremacist congressional coven - would control both parties. Elections have consequences, you say? Exactly: Obama, the pro-choice, pro-woman candidate, won. Stupak didn't put him in the White House, and neither did the Catholic bishops or the white anti-feminist welfare staters of Beinart's imagination.

        We did. And we deserve better from Obama than sound bites like "this is a healthcare bill, not an abortion bill. " Abortion is healthcare. That's the whole point.

Bill McKibben wants to have supermodels strip to help broadcast his message  to stop global warming.  He hopes to offend some folks so they will help spread the word. We'd like to ask Mr. Bill McKibben strip off his clothes on camera next to his intellectual cronies who join him wiggling and giggling as they strip, like the models do. This sort of stunt by a known environmentalist could have just as easily gone viral but Bill McKibben chose to exploit women in his plight to save the earth. Wake up McKibben, you needn't stoop so low. Consider letting him know he should not have to exploit anyone to help save the earth. His email is: [email protected]

But a molotov cocktail says something else entirely.

This registry is a step in the right direction of helping our police cope with domestic violence. One out of three women killed by their partners is killed with a long-gun. (Stats Canada) For a woman experiencing any form of domestic abuse, a gun in the home is an unspoken threat, a potential risk to her safety.

We need to keep this registry, we need to keep tools in the hands of our police so that more women are not killed. As we come upon the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, we reflect upon what that taught us, what preventative lessons we could learn. This registry was one of those lessons, one of the steps taken to protect women. Between 1991 and 2006, the use of shotguns and rifles in homicides declined by 65% because of stricter controls (Statistics Canada 2008).

This registry isn't about farmers and red tape, it's about women's safety

I remember going down to the University of Toronto in December 1989 and standing silently, in shock, with a large group of women, many current U of T students, thinking of these women who laid down their lives just because they wanted an education.

And now, on the 20th anniversary, the government wants to celebrate by revoking the very law that was brought in on account of these women, a law that helps keep women safe.

Girls face alarming rates of violence

Two recent studies carried out in Ontario schools, one conducted by Toronto’s School Community Safety Advisory Panel and the other by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), found that sexual harassment and sexual assault of girls are occurring at alarming rates. The Panel stressed that the problem requires immediate attention.

Following up on the Panel’s report, the Toronto Star ran an article on discussions with girls from five  Toronto high schools.  They reported being subjected to a barrage of hateful comments – girls are routinely called skank, ho (whore) and slut -- as well as being grabbed on the breast or backside “at any time in the halls”.  One 14-year-old student said, “You hear stuff like ‘What’s up, bitch?’ and ‘Hey, ho’ every other second”.  Dr. David Wolfe of the CAMH warns that, “All these behaviours, from physical violence to verbal harassment, can be harmful and have serious effects on their well-being.”