The State of Alaska this week decided to quietly rescind LGBTQ+ discrimination protections
the Attorney General pressured Walgreens to stop administering mifepristone—despite that the right to abortion is upheld under privacy protections in the Alaska state constitution, and
the Governor just submitted a ‘parental rights’ bill which:
would prohibit teaching sexual education before fourth grade, require written parental permission for children to participate in sexual education after fourth grade, require parents to sign off when a child asks to change their name or pronouns and require children to use locker rooms and restrooms according to their ‘biological sex.’
I’m so worried for lgtbtq+, trans- and non-binary students, for pregnant people. This cruelty has to stop.
Meg Conley wrote a fantastic dive into what is really happening in the move to ban mifepristone—which is the first step in a medication abortion, and helps cells to detach safely from the uterine lining. It is also vital in helping to ease the risk of severe pain, secondary infections, and the need for further procedures in early miscarriage. Banning mifepristone is about controlling women and subjecting them to pain and jeopardizing reproductive health.
On a cathartic note, reading about the women samurai warriors of Japan, and how gender and roles for women and men became prescribed in binary terms following the opening of Japan to the rest of the world in the Meiji period.
An article on another fascinating woman philosopher—Damaris Cudworth Masham—a woman whose work is impossibly out of print, but who published and lived by her own rules as much as she could, and worked, collaborated (and lived) with John Locke.
On a lighter note, I really need to find a way to get this into my house.
Our fox friend visited again in the early evening this week and I confess I’m in love. Those eyes, and that beautiful tail…
And finally, a poem about caring for what others condemn as ugly and fearful, and marveling at the surprise of “when your belief in justice / merges with your belief in dreams.” What a gorgeous line.
Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy For some semitropical reason when the rains fall relentlessly they fall into swimming pools, these otherwise bright and scary arachnids. They can swim a little, but not for long and they can’t climb the ladder out. They usually drown—but if you want their favor, if you believe there is justice, a reward for not loving the death of ugly and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake, rats) creatures, if you believe these things, then you would leave a lifebuoy or two in your swimming pool at night. And in the morning you would haul ashore the huddled, hairy survivors and escort them back to the bush, and know, be assured that at least these saved, as individuals, would not turn up again someday in your hat, drawer, or the tangled underworld of your socks, and that even— when your belief in justice merges with your belief in dreams— they may tell the others in a sign language four times as subtle and complicated as man’s that you are good, that you love them, that you would save them again. —Thomas Lux from New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995
Commonplacing
“when your belief in justice / merges with your belief in dreams.” Amen to that my friend! Very words I try to live by!
The fox 🦊 looks like he escaped from some fantasy forest where the snow queen reigns 💜
Similar bullshit going on in Montana too.
But that fox! 😍