(from http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2014/09/republicans-dismiss-equal-pay-and-abortions-for-rape-as-minor-issues-dems-pounce.html/) [GOP lieutenant governor candidate Dan] Patrick was asked about the problem of unequal pay for women at a public forum and responded, “I don’t think it is a problem.”
“I don’t think government should tell businesses how to pay their staff,” he said.
On the equal pay issue, Texas Democratic Party spokeswoman Lisa Paul said Patrick’s dismissal shows that he is out-of-touch with the realities that women face in the workplace.
“Despite Dan Patrick’s nonchalance and insensitivity, Texas women know they deserve equal pay for equal work,” she said, citing statistics that show that Texas women make 79 cents on the dollar for the same work as men.
“If Dan Patrick wants to lead Texas he should be ready to tell our young women that if they work hard, they can expect a fair paycheck and equality in the workplace. Instead he plans to sit by and pretend this is not an issue that affects every family in Texas,” Paul said.
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD) OHO is Jay Graboski, David Reeve & Ray Jozwiak
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/opinion/bill-maher-isnt-the-only-one-who-misunderstands-religion.html?_r=1)
Bill Maher’s recent rant against Islam has set off a fierce debate about the problem of religious violence, particularly when it comes to Islam.
Mr. Maher, who has argued that Islam is unlike other religions (he thinks it’s more “like the Mafia”), recently took umbrage with President Obama’s assertion that the terrorist group known as the Islamic State, or ISIS, does not represent Islam. In Mr. Maher’s view, Islam has “too much in common with ISIS.”
His comments have led to a flurry of responses, perhaps none so passionate as that of the actor Ben Affleck, who lambasted Mr. Maher, on Mr. Maher’s own HBO show, for “gross” and “racist” generalizations about Muslims.
Yet there is a real lack of sophistication on both sides of the argument when it comes to discussing religion and violence.
On one hand, people of faith are far too eager to distance themselves from extremists in their community, often denying that religious violence has any religious motivation whatsoever. This is especially true of Muslims, who often glibly dismiss those who commit acts of terror in the name of Islam as “not really Muslim.”
On the other, critics of religion tend to exhibit an inability to understand religion outside of its absolutist connotations. They scour holy texts for bits of savagery and point to extreme examples of religious bigotry, of which there are too many, to generalize about the causes of oppression throughout the world.
What both the believers and the critics often miss is that religion is often far more a matter of identity than it is a matter of beliefs and practices. The phrase “I am a Muslim,” “I am a Christian,” “I am a Jew” and the like is, often, not so much a description of what a person believes or what rituals he or she follows, as a simple statement of identity, of how the speaker views her or his place in the world.
As a form of identity, religion is inextricable from all the other factors that make up a person’s self-understanding, like culture, ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexual orientation. What a member of a suburban megachurch in Texas calls Christianity may be radically different from what an impoverished coffee picker in the hills of Guatemala calls Christianity. The cultural practices of a Saudi Muslim, when it comes to the role of women in society, are largely irrelevant to a Muslim in a more secular society like Turkey or Indonesia. The differences between Tibetan Buddhists living in exile in India and militant Buddhist monks persecuting the Muslim minority known as the Rohingya, in neighboring Myanmar, has everything to do with the political cultures of those countries and almost nothing to do with Buddhism itself.
No religion exists in a vacuum. On the contrary, every faith is rooted in the soil in which it is planted. It is a fallacy to believe that people of faith derive their values primarily from their Scriptures. The opposite is true. People of faith insert their values into their Scriptures, reading them through the lens of their own cultural, ethnic, nationalistic and even political perspectives.
After all, scripture is meaningless without interpretation. Scripture requires a person to confront and interpret it in order for it to have any meaning. And the very act of interpreting a scripture necessarily involves bringing to it one’s own perspectives and prejudices.
The abiding nature of scripture rests not so much in its truth claims as it does in its malleability, its ability to be molded and shaped into whatever form a worshiper requires. The same Bible that commands Jews to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) also exhorts them to “kill every man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” who worship any other God (1 Sam. 15:3). The same Jesus Christ who told his disciples to “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39) also told them that he had “not come to bring peace but the sword” (Matthew 10:34), and that “he who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one” (Luke 22:36). The same Quran that warns believers “if you kill one person it is as though you have killed all of humanity” (5:32) also commands them to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” (9:5).
How a worshiper treats these conflicting commandments depends on the believer. If you are a violent misogynist, you will find plenty in your scriptures to justify your beliefs. If you are a peaceful, democratic feminist, you will also find justification in the scriptures for your point of view.
What does this mean, in practical terms? First, simplistic knee-jerk response among people of faith to dismiss radicals in their midst as “not us” must end. Members of the Islamic State are Muslims for the simple fact that they declare themselves to be so. Dismissing their profession of belief prevents us from dealing honestly with the inherent problems of reconciling religious doctrine with the realities of the modern world. But considering that most of its victims are also Muslims — as are most of the forces fighting and condemning the Islamic State — the group’s self-ascribed Islamic identity cannot be used to make any logical statement about Islam as a global religion.
At the same time, critics of religion must refrain from simplistic generalizations about people of faith. It is true that in many Muslim countries, women do not have the same rights as men. But that fact alone is not enough to declare Islam a religion that is intrinsically more patriarchal than Christianity or Judaism. (It’s worth noting that Muslim-majority nations have elected women leaders on several occasions, while some Americans still debate whether the United States is ready for a female president.)
Bill Maher is right to condemn religious practices that violate fundamental human rights. Religious communities must do more to counter extremist interpretations of their faith. But failing to recognize that religion is embedded in culture — and making a blanket judgment about the world’s second largest religion — is simply bigotry.
Reza Aslan, a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, is the author, most recently, of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.”
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD) OHO is Jay Graboski, David Reeve & Ray Jozwiak
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
(from http://www.today.com/entertainment/katy-perry-naked-female-pop-stars-put-it-away-8C11488069)
Naked pop stars, hear Katy Perry roar: In a recent interview with NPR's "Weekend Edition," the Grammy-nominated singer protested the ongoing nudity present among women in music these days, and said it was time to "put it away."
"I do see myself becoming this, whatever, inspiration out of default right now, 'cause it's such a strange world," she told Scott Simon during an Oct. 26 chat to promote her new album, "Prism." "Like females in pop — everybody's getting naked. I mean, I've been naked but I don't feel like I always have to get naked to be noticed."
Perry has pushed the envelope on her own nudity, posing on the cover of "Teenage Dream" in the nude (though covered in crucial areas), and has worn suggestive clothing in her videos, like a bra that shoots whipped cream ("California Gurls").
When Simon asked if she was speaking of any one particular too-naked musician, Perry demurred. "I'm not talking about anyone in particular. I'm talking about all of them. I mean, it's like everybody's so naked. It's like, put it away. We know you've got it. I got it too. I've taken it off for — I've taken it out here and there. ... I know I have that sexy card in my deck, but I don't always have to use that card."
. . . or the late Christopher Hitchens who I liked to refer to as 'our modern-day' H.L. Mencken. . .
(from 1999's No One Left To Lie To; The Values of the Worst Family by Christopher Hitchens where he is quoting his contribution to the Los Angeles Times in January of 1998)
Montesquieu remarked that if a great city or a great state should fall as the result of a apparent "accident," then there would be a general reason why it required only an accident to make it fall. This may appear to be a tautology, but it actually holds up very well as a means of analyzing what we lazily refer to as a "sex scandal."
If a rust-free zipper were enough on its own to cripple a politician, then quite clearly Bill Clinton would be remembered, if at all, as a mediocre Governor of the Great State of Arkansas. It is therefore silly to describe the present unseemly furor as a prurient outburst over one man's apparently self-destructive sexual compulsions.
Until recently, this same man was fairly successfully fighting a delaying action against two long-standing complaints. The first was that he had imported unsavory practitioners like the disgraced Webster Hubbell. The second was that he viewed stray women employees as spoils along the trail. . .
. . . Had Clinton begun by saying: "Yes, I did love Gennifer, but that's my business," many of us would have rejoiced and defended him. Instead, he disowned and insulted her and said he'd been innocent of that adultery, and treated the voters as if they were saps. Having apparently put Ms. Lewinsky into the quick-fix world of Jordan and Morris, he is in no position to claim that it's a private emotional matter, and has no right to confuse his business with that of the country's. Which is why he has a scandal on "his" hands, and is also why we need feel no pang when he falsely claims that the press and public are wasting his valuable time, when the truth is exactly the other way about."
". . .And now it comes out that the married Weiner (a/k/a Carlos Danger) engaged in even more and even dirtier stuff with even more women, since his resignation. (Alas, Spitzer may now seem almost clean by comparison.)
I never liked any of them. Spitzer and Weiner were both “progressive” blowhards. Spitzer was acclaimed as the “Sheriff of Wall Street;” I thought him a bully who abused his position and the law to curry popular favor shaking down unpopular targets. His governorship was a disaster even before the sex thing because he foolishly continued to act the bully. Weiner was no legislator, just a self-promoting publicity hound. . ."
. . . no, I am not criticizing the Miss America beauty contestant Marissa Powell, who fumbled her answer to a question about equal pay for women. I mean THE PRESS.
The media quickly called Miss Utah for her comically rambling response to the question, which by the way she has handled superbly to her own benefit. But on a daily basis, we are bombarded by the confounding eloquence of Boehners, Mitchells, Reids, Pauls, Dingells, Rangels, Waxmans, Grahams, Ryans and others, which the press dutifully reports to us verbatum and without question.
(. . . From Hugo Schwyzer http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/why-does-it-matter-how-many-partners-shes-had/)
". . . It’s understandable to be curious about the sexual lives of our
peers. It makes sense to want to know what the averages are. (According
to the experts at the Kinsey Institute, the average number of lifetime
sexual partners for men aged 30 to 44 is around seven, while for women
in that same age group, it’s four—both lower than you might think).
But the number has different meanings for men and women. The old double standard is still alive and well: a man with more
sexual partners than his buddies may be teasingly called a “man whore,”
but the epithet is a compliment, not an insult. Ask a woman who has
dared reveal her number to someone who considers it too high, and she’ll
surely tell you a story of being “slut-shamed.”
It’s quite common for a guy to worry about a girlfriend’s sexual
past. Too many men are still raised to see sex as crude competition, in
which bedding a woman who has already had a lot of lovers counts less
than scoring with a woman who is “hard to get.” But I think the average
guy’s worry is simpler than that. The more men his girlfriend has slept
with, the greater number of lovers to which she can compare his skills. . . "
My question, "Who cares?"
What
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http://www.rayjozwiak.com/guestbook.html
You can NOW download
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AMBIENCE & WINE
(from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/paycheck-fairness-act-senate-vote_n_1571413.html)
". . . Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a bill that would have ensured women are paid the same amount as their male counterparts.
The Senate failed to secure the 60 votes needed to advance the
Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have required employers to
demonstrate that any salary differences between men and women doing the
same work are not gender-related. The bill also would have prohibited
employers from retaliating against employees who share salary
information with their co-workers, and would have required the Labor
Department to increase its outreach to employers to help eliminate pay
disparities.
The final vote was 52-47, with all Republicans opposing the bill.
That included female Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Susan Collins (Maine),
Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Olympia Snowe
(Maine).
President Barack Obama called it "incredibly disappointing" that Republicans would block a bill relating to equal pay for women. . . "
Note: Guess Ayotte, Collins, Hutchinson, Murkowski and Snowe have no problem being second-class citizens at the mercy of a 'Man's World'. Opponents say this is a political move designed to court the womens' vote. I say GOOD. Who was it that said, "Women are people too."?
What
do YOU think?
http://www.rayjozwiak.com/guestbook.html
Also download
your
very own copy of
AMBIENCE & WINE
by Ray
Jozwiak
