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  • The Puck Stops Here: A Hockey Coach Analyzes Palin’s Brand

    Today’s post is from Michelle McAteer, an Assistant Coach for the defending National Champion Women’s Ice Hockey team at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She’s a proud Canadian who desperately wishes she could vote in the U.S.

    In case you haven’t heard, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is an “average Alaskan hockey mom.” For anyone who didn’t grow up on skates, like I did, it’s a relatively new colloquial term that plays off of the term “soccer moms,” a moniker used extensively in the 1996 election season to neatly describe the type of white suburban woman who voted for Clinton (Bill, that is).

    Lately, I can’t seem to watch the news, read a paper, or browse the internet without coming across the effusive lingo of hockey moms. As a member of the hockey world, this is extremely odd to me. I’m used to my sport being largely ignored, but suddenly it’s the newest political catch phrase. Bowling gets more television airtime than hockey (so does cheerleading), but suddenly the word “hockey” is coming out of the mouths of Anderson Cooper, Bill O’Reilly, Larry King, and is at the heart of the political dialogue. Will this newfound fame propel my sport? Will hockey become this country’s sporting darling?

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  • Link Roundup: Gay Marriage in CT, Recognizing Abuse, Bill Ayers

    The Connecticut State Supreme Court ruled today that the state’s civil union provisions were discriminatory, effectively granting marriage rights to gay couples in that state. Gay marriage will continue to be a hot-button topic in Connecticut and in California on Election Day.

    At Daddy Dialectic, Jeremy Adam Smith weighs in on the Obama/Bill Ayers controversy. Be sure to check out the video of Ayers talking to a group of new teachers, also available on Beacon Broadside’s YouTube V-Log. For more information about the recent media coverage of Bill Ayers, check out this DailyKos diary: Deconstructing the Ayers Story. And for the perspective of someone else who has worked with Ayers in Chicago, read this piece in Slate by David S. Tanenhaus.

    October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. A new law in Rhode Island is aimed at teaching young people how to recognize abusive behavior in their personal relationships. The measure goes farther than any other state has gone before, mandating that the topic be taught annually from seventh through twelfth grade.

    At the Hometown Advantage, Justin Dahlheimer talks about exclusive deals with large retailers and how they may harm independent retailers, consumers, and the music and publishing industries.

    One woman decides to ask for something every day for a year.

    A profile of Forrest Church appeared on Religion and Ethics Newsweekly last weekend. If you missed it, you can watch it here.

    Monday is a federal holiday—Columbus Day—but you might want to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day instead. A post from our archive explains why.

  • In Markets We Trust

    Today's post is from Peter Laarman, executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting, a network of activist individuals and congregations headquartered in Los Angeles. He is the author of Getting On Message: Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel

    Laarman
    On the US Dollar bill: "He favors our undertakings."

    The Great True Faith of our times may have been badly shaken in recent days; but faith that is shaken remains, at its core, a matter of blind devotion.

    And while Merrill Lynch is gone forever, that big bronze bull still flares its massive horns down at Bowling Green Park, a few blocks south of Wall Street. The sculptor parked his four-ton creation right in front of the New York Stock Exchange immediately following the 1987 crash. He thought the symbol of a robust market might bring needed good luck, and to this day traders will sneak by and rub the behemoth's testicles to aid their fortunes.

    Just a harmless superstition, you may say. Yet the obeisance that our whole culture pays to the financial markets, to their "self-regulating" wisdom and beneficence, bespeaks a kind of mass enchantment or mass superstition. Surely there was something delusional in the huge bets that money managers were placing on financial instruments (credit default swaps, exotic derivatives) that even they and even the ratings agencies didn't understand. Surely there is something equally delusional in the idea that covering these bad bets with taxpayer money will "fix" the problem.

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  • In The Exam Room: Unexpected Pregnancies and Hard Choices

    Today's post is from Patricia Harman, author of The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife's Memoir. Harman got her start as a lay-midwife on the rural communes where she lived in the '60s and '70s, going on to become a nurse-midwife on the faculty of Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, and West Virginia University. She lives and works near Morgantown, West Virginia, and has three sons. In the interest of privacy, the names and some identifying details of the women she discusses in this post have been changed.

    Harman.jpg I am standing in the exam room, in the Women's Health Center, listening to the rapid heartbeat of a four-month-old fetus on a Doppler. The patient, Carey McDonald, 17, a slim blond cheerleader, is alone today. Sometimes her mother, a single waitress, comes with her. The father of the baby, a star football player on the hometown team, denies paternity. "But it's his!" Carey told me. "It is! He's the only boy I've ever been with and even that was only two times." Carey and her mom will raise this baby together.

    I don't ask the young woman if she thought of using a condom. I don't ask her if she had access to a birth control clinic. I don't ask if her mother ever talked to her about sex or if she had sex education classes at school. It's too late for that now.

    Natalie Lopez is a 29-year-old travel agent. She's seven weeks pregnant and accompanied, at this first exam, by her lover of three years. "I can't take birth control pills because of the other medications I'm on, but we used protection every time." Her eyes water over and she hands me a folded white paper on which are printed the names of two antidepressants and a mood stabilizer. "We want to be parents. I've always wanted a baby. But I can't have this one. The medications I'm on are toxic and there's a high chance the child will be born with a congenital defect."

    If Natalie had come to me sooner, to get a more effective method of birth control, this might not have happened. But Natalie doesn't have health insurance. There are over 17 million women in the United States that don't have health insurance.

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  • Nobel Prize – Is There an American Eligible?

    Today's post is from Rick Ayers, co-author (with Amy Crawford) of Great Books for High School Kids: A Teacher's Guide to Books That Can Change Teens' Lives, author of Studs Terkel's Working, a Teaching Guide and co-creator (with students) of the Berkeley High Slang Dictionary. Ayers blogs about politics at the Huffington Post.

    The American literary establishment is crying foul. The comments of Swedish Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl suggesting that an American is unlikely to win the Nobel Prize in Literature this week have provoked great patriotic upswellings. Engdahl suggested that the U.S. literary establishment is "too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

    Did this observation give us pause, make us hesitate, push us to ask for clarification? Indeed not. Americans don't take insults like this easily and the media took a quick break from following Sarah Palin's every utterance to chatter about the dis from these upstart Europeans. But, you know, Horace Engdahl might just have something there. We do translate too little of world literature – complaining, apparently, that such works would not sit well with the American literary sensibility. We do not really, as a culture, betray much curiosity about the world.

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  • The Shelter of Each Other: Comfort in a Crisis

    Today’s post is from Jeremy Adam Smith, senior editor of Greater Good magazine and author of The Daddy Shift , forthcoming from Beacon Press in Spring 2009. He blogs about the politics of parenting at Daddy Dialectic, where this post, in a slightly different form, originally appeared.

    My four-year-old son and I have a tradition: on certain Sundays we take the F train downtown and we spend the afternoon watching hockey or figure skating, playing on the playground, going to museums, eating.

    This past Sunday I took Liko ice skating. We had tried it about a year ago and I had concluded that it was too early. But on Sunday he took right to the ice, and we skated around and around the rink, holding hands, and neither of us could stop smiling.

    Later we went to the playground and Liko hooked up with two little girls, twins, about six years old.

    "Did you guys go ice skating?" he asked.

    They nodded.

    "Did you see me? I was really good!"

    They laughed, as they should have, and ran to the slide. Liko chased them.

    Later we rode the merry go round and I watched his face and I thought: I’m happy.

    That’s my little world. In the meantime, however, I read that Congress has voted to approve the massive bailout package political
    leaders of both parties claim is necessary to stave off total collapse
    of America’s economy. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to go
    badly. An internal Justice Department investigation has concluded that
    White House fired federal prosecutors for political reasons, while a
    former CIA official pleads guilty to fraud–just a few examples,
    plucked at random from today’s headlines, of the ideological corruption
    that now seems to permeate American institutions.

    The word I keep hearing in all these articles, the common thread
    that connects all these scandals, is "trust"–it seems that we no
    longer have enough of it. People don’t trust banks, banks don’t trust
    each other, and neither trusts our political leaders or judicial
    system.

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  • A Mother’s Perspective on Palin, Disability Issues, and Reproductive Rights

    Today’s post is from Penny Wolfson, whose National Magazine Award-winning essay "Moonrise" appears in Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs. The essay was the basis for Wolfson’s memoir, Moonrise: One Family, Genetic Identity, and Muscular Dystrophy. Wolfson is a faculty member in the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence College.

    Loveyoutopieces My son Ansel always hated the notion, growing up, that he should hang around with other "disabled’ kids. If I tried to hook him up with the other physically challenged boy in his school, or wanted to send him to muscular dystrophy camp, he resisted.  "Mom," he’d complain," Just because I use a wheelchair doesn’t mean I have anything in common with other people in wheelchairs."  He thought that, even though muscular dystrophy was a genetic illness he had, it was only a very small part of who he was. And I had to rather reluctantly agree.

    I’m reminded of that now in the weeks since the Palin nomination–weeks when apparently even so-called liberal women with "special" children have to remind themselves of their political affiliation because of what I see as their weird identification with Ms. Palin, and Trig, her now-famous Down’s syndrome son, displayed like a new brooch at the Republican convention and the Vice Presidential debate. 

    Well, even though I do have a couple of things in common with Ms. Palin—I am a working woman; I do have a disabled  child—I cannot for a moment ally myself or identify with her; in fact I abhor everything she stands for. She does not represent my interests, she will, I believe make it harder and more costly than ever to care for a child with a disability, and she would like to forbid other couples from making their own complex personal choices about having a child with special needs.

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  • Link Roundup: Welcome to New Readers, Rev. Forrest Church, Divorce as a Health Care Strategy

    In the run-up to tonight’s Vice Presidential debate, which will be hosted by Gwen Ifill, we’re seeing an slight uptick in traffic from conservative blogs linking to her cousin Sherrilyn Ifill’s post on The Relevance of Nooses and Lynching in the Age of Obama. For those of you who clicked through to read the entire post, then stuck around to see what else we talk about here, welcome.

    Or you might have come here from Galleycat, where Ron Hogan said something nice about us again
    this week. We’re happy to see you, too!

    Good Reading Elsewhere:

    "After two or three poignant farewell sermons, I’m almost embarrassed this morning to be seen in public upright." Rev. Forrest Church was featured in a moving story about last weekend’s sermon at the Unitarian Church of All Souls. Rev. Church posted on Beacon Broadside in July about his book Love & Death.

    Sara Robinson does some myth debunking regarding the Community Reinvestment Act and the subprime crisis. (Link via Susan Campbell’s Fear, Itself blog at the Hartford Courant).

    "Neither of us wanted a divorce. We thought we’d be soulmates, forever and forever. But we couldn’t afford to go to doctor any more and couldn’t afford medication." Long-married couples divorce in order to get necessary health care. 

    "Polar bears, Priuses and Ph.D.s aren’t going to do it alone." Green-collar dynamo Van Jones in Time on how green jobs can save the economy and the earth.

    Recent Beacon Broadside Posts:

    Weathering the Storm: Keeping Some Control in a Financial Crisis by Nan Mooney

    Books Still Burn Here by Christopher Finan

    The Unetane Tokef: A Jewish Model for Collective Responsibility by Danya Ruttenberg

    From the Director: Remembering Robert Giroux by Helene Atwan 

  • Weathering the Storm: Keeping Some Control in a Financial Crisis

    Today’s post is from Nan Mooney, author of Not Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class. Mooney’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, Slate, The Daily News, The Daily Telegraph (UK), The Seattle Weekly, Women’s eNews, and various other publications. Her website is www.nanmooney.com.

    Monney These days, whether you’re a college student or a retiree, it’s pretty hard not to reside on the edge of a financial panic. After all, if mega-institutions like Lehman Brothers and AIG can’t weather our current financial storm, how is one middle class individual or family, struggling even before the you-know-what hit the fan, supposed to scrape by?

    Though you can feel fairly confident that the government won’t be knocking on your door with a $700 billion check anytime soon (that money’s spoken for), as members of today’s struggling middle class it is possible to hang on to some control over our money and our future.

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  • Christopher M. Finan: Books Still Burn Here

    Today’s post, by Christopher M. Finan, honors Banned Books Week. Finan is president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the bookseller’s voice in the fight against censorship. He is the author of From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America, which recently received the American Library Association’s Eli Oboler Award for the best book on intellectual freedom in 2006 and 2007.

    Finanpic Some people will yawn at hearing that Saturday was the beginning of the 27th Annual Banned Books Week.

    The story is the same every year, isn’t it? Hundreds of titles are challenged in schools and libraries around the country. In 2007, the number was 420. This is fewer than the year before, but the number has fluctuated widely since the launch of Banned Books Week in 1982. The average is around 500.

    Even the book at the top of the hit list is the same as last year–And Tango Makes Three, a childrens book that has been condemned as "pro-homosexual" and "anti-family" because it tells the story of two male penguins caring for an egg.

    But this apparent sameness masks what is really going on. Behind the numbers are a lot of angry people–censors demanding the removal of books that offend them; teachers and librarians upset at finding themselves accused of trying to hurt kids, and the kids themselves caught in the crossfire.

    Book banning is an old story, but it is new and often intensely painful for the people who experience it for the first time.

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