salty femme asks some excellent questions about gay marriage:
Gay marriage advocates are fighting for the same rights that straight people already have. I’d like to question why straight marriage is the model from which to build gay marriage. Is it convenience? Strategy (i.e. what is winnable?). Why aren’t we fighting for more, why aren’t we representing nontraditional family structures instead of just traditional nuclear family structures? (and no, I’m not talking polyamory right now). What good is the right to share health insurance with your partner when millions of Americans don’t have health insurance to begin with? Furthermore, why should the government get to police who shares our benefits, who can inherit from us, and who can adopt our children? Considering that only 25% of families in this country follow the traditional nuclear model, wouldn’t we be better off instead seeing what might be best for everyone? How do (or will) co-parenting families, cohabiting adults in non-romantic relationships, single parents living with a sibling, and elderly parents living with their child and their child’s partner (among countless other permutations of family) benefit from a marriage that only provides rights to two romantically involved adults?
Writhe Safely writes about peer support, humanism, and “the blatant devolution” in mental health, and quotes a paper on Peer Support and a Socio-Political Response to Trauma and Abuse. Here is part of the quote from that paper, which I found especially important and powerful:
[A]s managed behavioral healthcare has developed a stronger voice across all mental health treatment, we are losing many resources that might help us to work through the abuse, to build healing relationships and to move through the anger that has kept us bound to our cycles of pain.
In fact, rather than helping people truly to heal from the effects of past abuses and
offering them the opportunity to break the cycle of violence, we are creating lifelong “mental patients” – people who are firmly embedded in the notion that they have something permanently and organically wrong with them.Peer support programs must challenge the current system’s approach to how people with histories of abuse are treated. The devastating impact of abuse must be recognized for what it is and not viewed as psychiatric pathology or biological brain disorders. Through peer support services we can offer each other relationships that are respectful of our experiences, our ways of communicating, and how we have learned to tell our story. We can challenge each other to both face and to move beyond these stories and patterns. We
can build new community norms that replace the illness environments that have kept us trapped. Finally, we can conscientiously name and expose the cultural violence that caused us to end up in these institutions. If we can learn to tell our stories in new ways, we can create communities where the sanctioned outcomes include non-compliance to “mental patient” identities or expectations, rejection of unhelpful treatment regimens, the questioning of overuse of medication, and speaking out about the prevalence of trauma and abuse.
XY Online has a ton of articles and links about men, masculinities, and feminism.
XY starts from the belief that many of our society’s attitudes about masculinity are harmful to men and boys in a variety of ways, as well as being oppressive to women and children. XY is a forum for men who are seeking to build life-affirming, joyful, and non-oppressive ways of being.
Yeaaah! It doesn’t get much better than that. I have the feeling I’ll be spending a lot of time reading various articles there.
Finally, I just discovered Media Mouse’s news briefs, which seems like a really excellent resource for Michigan news relevant to radical/anti-corporate/anti-imperial interests.
