The anti-child revolt

By Cathy Young

Read Cathy Young’s story Read Carina Chocano’s story

It is discriminatory to grant a benefit to one person or group and deny it (or an equivalent) to another person or group. Childburdened workers are often given benefits that are unavailable to childfree workers. The following are examples of what has happened to me and to other NO KIDDING! members:

Parents are often given first dibs on vacation dates so they can be with their families while non-parents are often left the dregs. Parents are often allowed to arrive late, leave early or skip meetings altogether while childfree workers are expected to be there and on time. During meetings, parents are often distracted, and meetings are disrupted, by “crises” at home (such as “Where’s the peanut butter?” or “Kim’s picking on me!”). Pre-natal doctor’s appointments cause expectant mothers to miss a lot of work, even before the baby is born. Non-parents are often told to work overtime, while parents are allowed to go home to their families. Weekend and holiday work, as well as the less desirable shifts, are often assigned to childfrees, as is work that requires travel. Childburdened workers often arrive late, leave early and are absent from work due to the kids, yet they make the same pay as those who put in a full day’s work. Flextime is often offered to childburdened workers, while childfree workers are held to a rigid schedule. When the childcare provider (the stranger being paid to raise one’s kids) can’t take the kid(s), parents often bring kids to work, which is distracting and dangerous. On-site daycare and lactation rooms are something for which everyone pays and few benefit. Health insurance premiums are often not proportional to usage — in many cases, a childless couple pays as much as a couple with 10 kids. Etc.

All of the above turn parents into a privileged class of employee and citizen.

I’ve heard some childburdened workers complain that they aren’t promoted as quickly as other workers. Well, imagine you decided to take a 50-lap pit stop at the Indy 500. Could you rightfully complain that you didn’t win the race? You consciously took six months or eight months or a year off. Everyone else was working and gaining work experience while you were away. And when you come back, time has to be spent to get you up to speed, as well.

Why are we expected to do more because someone else has chosen to do too much?

Many employers (and co-workers) think that childfree workers don’t have families. We do have families. We have mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, and we have lots of other people who are important in our lives.

All of the above would be less upsetting if the childfree were subsidized as much as those who chose to have children. People shouldn’t be bribed to create more consuming polluters, and compensation should be based on qualifications and job performance, not on the number of children one has produced.

– Jerry Steinberg
Founding Non-Father
NO KIDDING! www.nokidding.bc.ca
(A social club for child-free couples and singles)

I‘m 38, single and childless. While I like children and hope to have one in the roughly 10 years I have left, my opinions on this subject tend to lean toward that of those who advocate the child-free movement. Actually it’s not the children I have a problem with. It’s their parents.

It seems to me that these days, there is a general reproductive and parental irresponsibility that pervades our society. Why is it, exactly, that, in a time when we have a myriad of birth-control methods, we have an explosion of unwanted pregnancies, infanticides and neglected/abused children?

While I may not agree with some of the more fringe ideology of the child-free movement, I do agree that too many adults are neglecting the results of the choice they made in the first place and that all of us are reaping the harvest that many of us never sowed.

– Juliette Ochieng

While I realize that there are a lot of self-centered people who decided to whine and act militant about the child/childless issue, the response printed was, in my opinion, just as juvenile.

I have two children, but most of my friends are childless by choice, and one even started a NO KIDDING chapter in our town. Why? To meet other people who don’t have to be home by 8 p.m. for children’s bedtime and who still have time to play as hard as they work.

She’s the least militant person I know, and from the people I’ve met in her group, militant is the last thing I’d call most of them. When I asked her and some ladies in her group what their reasoning for the childless choice was, I got some very interesting and (I feel) sound answers:

One said that she felt her career was so demanding that in order to be the kind of mother a child deserved, she’d have to quit her job. She loves it and doesn’t want to quit, so she doesn’t want to be unfair to a child.

One had come from an abusive family. She knows that patterns repeat sometimes and she doesn’t feel desire to have a child, therefore she’s afraid that if she DID she might not be a good mother.

Another stated that there are so many unadopted children in the world, that she didn’t want to have any of her own. If and when she decides she’d like to be a mother, she’ll adopt or foster.

Many of these childless people actually like and enjoy children, but choose not to have them. They are content to play with the kids of their friends and take on the roles of the doting aunts and uncles.

I think we should all be thankful for the people who are smart enough not to get pregnant if they don’t want the responsibility!

– Dale Caliaro

Dear Ms. Young, what actually made you sick was swallowing that heaping helping of outdated pro-child propaganda. Kids are our future? Right now that future is freeways-turned-parking-lots and no affordable housing. And who relies on Social Security existing at all in 30 years? I sure don’t. Labor shortages? Puh-leeze. I’ll just be getting my Egg McMuffin from a vending machine.

Our society has romanticized parenthood and made children into household gods. Deciding NOT to have children requires tremendous effort and constant explanation. The anti-child movement is providing support for those who don’t want ‘em , can’t stand ‘em and shouldn’t have ‘em. Yes, it’s a selfish movement, but it’s also pointing out that parents are at least as selfish — in their children’s names.

– Kat Daley

Cathy Young calls the child-free movement “sheer narcissism.”

No. Sheer narcissism is the belief that your genes are so valuable to the Pool that you can’t resist bringing more children onto an overcrowded planet.

Reproduction is the ultimate expression of narcissism.

– Yolanda D. Seabourne

Congratulations to Cathy Young for a well-written jab at the latest whiny self-interest group. The only thing more ridiculous than listening to parents bemoaning the burdens that children have put in their lives is listening to non-parents crying over the awful burdens of not having children. I have personally made career choices that leave me more time for my children, but cost me a significant amount of additional income. Many of my friends and colleagues, parents and non-parents alike, have decided not to compromise the way I have and so enjoy higher salaries, but less time for themselves and their families.

Hopefully some day soon the victim mentality will be purged from our culture and people with pseudo-grievances, like the “child-free” advocates, will be reduced to bewailing their lot in life to the only people who care — themselves.

– Jeffrey King

Bravo Cathy Young! I am so glad that a single, childless, adult speaks for humanity.

I am a married, working mother of two children, now ages 7 and 10. I have been denied promotions because, as one male boss said, “You need to be there for your children.” I had always thought that was a choice I was free to make.

I have sat on long plane rides with my well-mannered children, only to suffer at the inconvenience of loud-mouthed, misbehaving adults, demanding more attention than a hungry infant.

It does take a village, for the young and the old. I would like to know who is going to take care of all these childless people in their old age? Hopefully, all these single, child-resentful folks, will make their plans now for caring for each other. My generation and our children will remember your mean-spirited, selfish ways. Watch out: We’ll be taking your handicapped parking spots.

– Jo Ann Aaronson

The idea that America may be a child-friendly nation makes me laugh my ass off. If you want to see countries where children are not treated like lepers, go to Europe. Children are doted on, provided for and seen in public! People smile at your kids!

I have made a choice to raise two children. I have also made a choice to spend over $1,000 a month on child care, and to feed, clothe and provide medical care for my children, in addition to nurturing them emotionally and intellectually so that they will grow up to be good people who make a contribution to our society. I have never asked for a handout for my kids, have never asked a friend to babysit and only talk about my kids with people who have shown a genuine interest in them. In the meantime, I live in a society that expects women to come back to work when they’re often still bleeding from childbirth, could care less about whether children are receiving adequate medical care and nutrition, and whether parents are receiving the support they need to raise the next generation of workers, doctors, professors and writers.

But, should the price of gas rise over $2 per gallon, making it a tad expensive to drive an gigantic, status-symbolic phallus (that flips in the snow, by the way) around town, the whining begins. This country has its priorities so far out of whack that some day, the whole system is going to collapse like a Texas A&M bonfire structure.

So, my word to those who continue to bitch and moan because some co-worker got to take half a day off to care for her sick kid is the following: Shut the fuck up. The rest of us are thinking of people other than ourselves. It’s time for you to do the same.

– Lorraine Berry

While I agree with almost all the points Cathy Young makes in her case against the anti-child movement, I think she leaves out the most unassailable point. Children are people, and our society attempts to accord equal treatment to everyone in it. Imagine the firestorm that would (and does, rightfully) erupt if someone attempted to form an African-American-free, or gay-free movement.

– Fred Maslin

I am glad some one finally had the gumption to stand up and say what I have thinking every time I read about the “Childless Movement”: What a bunch of prima donnas! Being a parent is hard work, and yes I asked for it, but do I have to listen to adults whine and cry about life being unfair? If my kids behaved that same way, they would be on time-out until they were 35! Get over yourselves!

Where are all these great perks parents get that I keep hearing about? Guess what? I get more tax credit for my mortgage interest than I do for my progeny. I have never seen a special parking space for pregnant women or parents with toddlers. As a matter of fact, I often have to drop off kids at school and cannot commit to a carpool, so I cannot park in the carpool spaces at work which are right by the door. And how many employers actually have on-site day care? (Hint: The answer is not very many.) I do not know anyone who has used the Family Leave Act to take care of sick kids, but I do know two people who used it to take care of sick parents and one who used it to care for a sick spouse. All three of these folks were childless, by the way.

Yeah, I made my choice and now I must live with consequences and that’s OK. However, the childless whiners need to realize that they made a choice and they have to live with it too. Society has determined that children are more important than your ski vacation or night out with the boys. You knew that and chose to not have kids. Now deal with it and stop setting such a bad example for my kids.

– Robyn Anderson

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s alternative abortion history

The Supreme Court justice reflects on her legacy -- and the little-known case she wishes had preceded Roe v. Wade

By Irin Carmon

US Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at Columbia Law School, February 10, 2012. (Credit: Eileen Barroso)

Topics:Abortion, Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Editor's Picks

Last Friday, some of the most distinguished scholars and litigants working on gender and the law gathered to honor a foremother and inspiration, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as Columbia University Law School marked the 40th anniversary of Ginsburg becoming the first tenured female professor there.

But there was another 40th anniversary as well, one less-known, but very much on Ginsburg’s mind. It has been 40 years since she filed a brief before the Supreme Court for a case she wishes had established the abortion right instead of Roe v. Wade.

That was the case of Capt. Susan Struck, who had become pregnant in 1970. The Air Force demanded she either terminate the pregnancy — abortions were being conducted on bases back then — or leave her post. Struck, a Catholic, said she wouldn’t have an abortion but would put the child up to adoption without taking off any unusual amount of medical leave. Though she lost both at the district court and the circuit-court level, she appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear her case until Solicitor General Erwin Griswold persuaded the Air Force to simply waive her discharge and change the rule. Ginsburg was disappointed.

“I thought if Susan’s case came first,” she said — before Roe, which would be heard a year later — it would be preferable for the goals of women’s equality, because “her choice was birth. Solicitor General Griswold saw to it that we did not have that opportunity.” (This was the same Griswold who, as dean of Harvard Law School, asked the rare women in Ginsburg’s class how they justified taking spots that should have gone to men. Ginsburg later transferred to Columbia Law School.)

Instead, it would be Roe that would invalidate state abortion bans, an outcome Ginsburg said not only “moved too far too fast” but failed to make a women’s equality argument. ”If you read the decision [in Roe], it’s as much about the doctor’s right to recommend to his patient what he thinks his patient needs. It’s always about the woman in consultation with her physician and not the woman standing alone in that case,” she said.

Yale reproductive rights scholar Reva Siegel wrote in a recent essay celebrating Ginsburg’s brief in the Struck case — it was overlooked in part because she never got to argue it — that “Ginsburg and the women’s movement talked about pregnancy discrimination in a way that ties together pregnancy discrimination and women’s equality, and women’s equality and reproductive freedom, before the Court split them apart in cases such as Roe v. Wade, Frontiero v. Richardson and Geduldig v. Aiello. The Court made some fateful choices in those cases: to focus its sex equality jurisprudence on cases other than pregnancy, and so to develop its sex equality jurisprudence in isolation from its abortion jurisprudence.”

That was also true of many of the litigants at the time, Ginsburg said Friday, including the ACLU, which had been involved with Griswold vs. Connecticut, the case overturning a state contraceptive ban with a substantive due process argument that focused on privacy. Ginsburg preferred “women’s change to chart their own life course,” consistent with her idea that full citizenship meant the right to choose a life distinct from sex-role stereotypes.

But an abortion rights case involving a woman who wanted to choose to give birth would also have been consistent with the current reproductive justice framework, which is about bodily autonomy and a woman’s right to moral dignity and self-determination. And Ginsburg, who brought several sex-discrimination cases with male plaintiffs, clearly understood the power of framing these choices with potentially surprising reversals that showed how traditional gender roles limited everyone.

It wasn’t to be. Ginsburg called Struck to try and see if there was any way to press on with her case once the Air Force changed its policy. “‘My dream is to be a pilot,’ she said, but the Air Force doesn’t give flight training to women.’ We both laughed because in 1972 that was an impossible dream. That’s one sign of how much things have changed.”

During the question-and-answer portion, I asked Ginsburg about her comments last year that she likely couldn’t be confirmed today because of her women’s rights work. I asked if that made her concerned about the legacy on the bench of the issues she cared about.

“My dear husband once said that the symbol of the United States really isn’t the bald eagle,” she said. “It’s the pendulum.” She referred to contentious confirmations that preceded hers, and to the fact that despite being warned by the coaches for her confirmation hearings that she would have to answer for her ACLU work, it never came up. “The Senate was then determined to do it the way it should be done,” she said. “I think my biggest champion on the Senate Judiciary Committee was Orrin Hatch.” Justice Stephen Breyer, she pointed out, had a similarly uneventful confirmation hearing. “And then the divisiveness started up again,” with Robert Bork.

“I’m hoping that a saner view will prevail and we will get back to the process the way it should be,” she added. She didn’t address the part about the legacy.

: Irin Carmon is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @irincarmon or email her at icarmon@salon.com. More Irin Carmon

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Inside Syria’s whirlwind of war

The most complex and dangerous conflict on the planet keeps getting worse. Will the U.S. intervene?

By Paul Mutter

Welcome to a nightmare (Credit: Reuters/Ahmed Jadallah)

Topics:Middle East, Syria

The situation in Syria is deteriorating.

On Sunday, the Arab League announced that it had formally decided to “open channels of communication with the Syrian opposition and offer full political and financial support, urging (the opposition) to unify its ranks” and to “ask the UN Security Council to issue a decision on the formation of a joint UN-Arab peacekeeping force to oversee the implementation of a ceasefire.”

This is the strongest call for foreign military intervention that has yet come from the international community regarding Syria, as more and more Syrians are getting caught up in government crackdowns and increased fighting between the Syrian army and a growing armed opposition movement. Yet questions about the nature and timing of such an intervention are far more complex than in Libya.

As Rania Abouzeid put it simply in Time, “Syria is at war.” A leaked report from the Arab League’s now-defunct fact-finding mission to Syria notes that the situation is rapidly degenerating into a contest between government forces and a growing, determined guerrilla movement (simply called the “armed entity”) that formed due to “excessive use of force by Syrian Government forces, in response to protests that occurred before the deployment of the Mission demanding the fall of the regime.”

“In some zones, this armed entity reacted by attacking Syrian security forces and citizens, causing the Government to respond with further violence,” wrote the observers. “In the end, innocent citizens pay the price for those actions with life and limb.”

This is what makes the newest argument for intervention advanced in the United States so troubling. The prospect of heavily armed militias fighting the government (and perhaps each other) is known. But for some U.S. politicians, this is acknowledged and seen as an acceptable risk. Some members of Congress are now advocating arming the anti-regime militias, suggesting that if better equipped, the militias could hold back (perhaps even defeat) Assad’s forces. The U.S., EU, Turkey, Libya and Saudi Arabia are looking for Assad’s departure (Israel’s interests are still unclear), while Russia, Lebanon and Iran appear willing to provide support for Assad. In short, the potential for proxy intervention has definitely increased since the UN failed to pass a resolution against Assad last week.

Joseph Lieberman and John McCain were the first to make such calls, and have been joined by other members of Congress in the past few days. Now a bipartisan group of senators is advancing a resolution calling for “the President to support an effective transition to democracy in Syria by identifying and providing substantial material and technical support, upon request, to Syrian organizations that are representative of the people of Syria.” It does not elaborate on who these groups are, or what constitutes material and technical support, but at the very least, it would mean financial assistance (which the militias could use to purchase arms on the black market) and intelligence dissemination, which would almost certainly result in the dispatch of military observers or advisors.

This approach is a gamble. So too are suggestions for creating no-fly zones over northern Syria, or counting on sanctions and brokerage by the Russian foreign minister to achieve a political solution. Any form of intervention or non-intervention will cost lives – lives that could have been saved, lives that might not have been lost. But of those options, the call to arm militias, or cooperate with them by providing Western funds and intelligence (which would likely be channeled through the Turks and Saudis), is more likely to become a reality since the United States could act without relying on the UN.

If this is just talk meant to encourage the opposition and scare Assad, then it runs the risk of achieving one, but not the other (and of falsely raising the hopes of the groups we’re ostensibly supporting, as happened in Iraq in 1991). If implemented, there are risks that the disbursement of arms will bring stalemate, not solution. Writes Syrian blogger Maysaloon, “we might see a drastic arming of the Free Syrian Army, and an escalation of the conflict to a fully blown civil war. If that happens I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if the Russians (and Iran) continue to arm Assad to the gills.”

“I don’t think anybody, apart from Assad, would want to see that happen,” Maysaloon believes. “Of course Assad would prefer this solution because it would justify his oppression and use of violence, and also extend the period of his rule.”

The program could actually lead to more direct foreign military intervention. Even should the militias succeed and Assad falls, nothing suggests that all of these now well-armed groups would lay down their arms. And who would secure the Syrian Army’s depots to prevent a militia from grabbing a few truckloads of munitions from an unguarded arms cache, as has happened in post-Saddam Iraq and post-Gadhafi Libya?

Additionally, the Alawites of Syria, as the Economist notes, have their own militias with access to the regime’s weapons stockpiles. Alawites and Christians are overrepresented in the officer corps, so even if many do abandon their posts, they are not likely to abandon their arms – especially given what happened next door in Iraq and Lebanon since the 1980s. They would be loath to do so; and so too would the victors fearful of an insurgency by unrepentant Baathists. It is worth remembering that the first insurgents the US faced in Iraq were ex-Iraqi army guerrilla cells, and soon Sunni and Shia communities were taking advantage of unsecured weapons to arm themselves, both in self-defense and for reasons of revenge.

Whether one supports intervention or not, past experience suggests that an international peacekeeping force would be required to secure these depots, which essentially defeats the purpose of arming the militias as an alternative to direct intervention. Such a force would also be necessary to ensure that the militias – including the pro-Assad ones – are turning in their arms and keeping to cease-fire agreements. Otherwise, Syria might end up in a scenario where many in the officer corps retain their arms, the arms depots are thrown open to everyone, and community self-defense becomes blurred with ethnosectarian revanchism.

And then there is the matter of border control, especially with respect to Lebanon and Turkey, as it’s clear that arms smugglers, refugees and militiamen are already easily moving across these borders. An enclave of militias and refugees has formed on the northern Syria-Lebanon border, and clashes between pro- and anti-Assad militias have reportedly occurred on the Lebanese side of that border.

The armed opposition is gaining, but also losing, ground throughout the country. The government’s brutal crackdowns have produced groups taking up arms to defend themselves, and also to take the fight to Assad. Paul Wood of the BBC says that the country is witnessing “an escalating guerrilla campaign” – one echoing the struggle between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood between 1976 and 1982 – and that the “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) claims to be planning a “general offensive” in response to the government’s siege of Homs, even though the government is closing its iron ring around the city.

Nic Robertson at CNN reports that in Homs, the epicenter of the opposition, the local opposition council “is not the only show in town. Salafists are moving in too, Islamic radicals … Reports abound of infighting both inside and outside Syria, the hard-liners already jockeying for post-al-Assad power.” Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), now allegedly operating in Syria to provoke further strife between Assad and the Syrian opposition, views Syria as a prize to be won, as do other jihadists throughout the region.

A split remains between the Syrian National Council (SNC), the most visible Syrian opposition group, and the FSA, the umbrella name for the various anti-regime militias that are now active in Syria. And while the SNC is increasingly recognized as the international voice of the opposition, it too has struggled to reach a consensus on foreign military intervention. The SNC is conspicuously absent from a “dialogue” with Assad that the Russians are trying to promote as an alternative to the UN resolutions they’ve vetoed. The SNC says it has been excluded on purpose. The Russian Foreign Ministry, for its part, has shown disdain for the SNC and a clear preference for Assad retaining power.

The Economist presents an overview of the domestic forces still supporting Assad, which shows that for the most part, “support” means acquiescence to his rule out of fear. Syria’s sectarian divides are sharpening in response to such fears of “Sunni triumphalism,” says the Economist – and Assad’s propaganda machine is playing these fault lines up. According to Patrick Seale, many poor Sunni youths were at the forefront of the nonviolent demonstrations that were suppressed. After years of limited opportunities, and in response to the government’s actions, they are now taking up arms against the regime.

As the violence mounts, pent-up grievances are coming to the fore and the unarmed majority is losing patience – but with whom, the government, or the emerging militias? No one can say for sure, or predict how more and more unarmed people in communities targeted by the government for repression (and by the opposition for liberation) will react as the violence continues. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that geopolitical maneuvering is rapidly eliminating any prospect of a “third way” that does not end in a proxy war, or a regional conflagration.

: Paul Mutter is a fellow at Truthout.org, as well as a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus, Mondoweiss, and The Arabist. He is currently on leave from NYU's graduate program in journalism and international affairs. More Paul Mutter

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Syria’s looming threat of civil war

As violence rages on, formerly mixed communities are splitting along old religious fault lines

By Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand, GlobalPost

Syrian rebels are seen outside of Idlib, Syria, Saturday, Feb. 11, 2012 (Credit: AP)

Topics:GlobalPost, Syria

This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Homs is now a war zone, a city under siege by the army of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. It is a city where rebel soldiers are being joined by jihadis to fight a guerrilla insurgency, and where once mixed communities have begun to split along religious lines as the seeds of a civil war take root.

“We’re working by candlelight because there is no electricity and our generator is running out of fuel,” a doctor known as Abdel Rizk from Homs’ easterly Karm Zeitoun neighborhood told GlobalPost.

Trained as an anesthetist but lacking any serious painkillers, Abdel Rizk has morphed from a practitioner of the exact sciences into a battlefield surgeon of the most basic kind, completing multiple amputations in a day, using underwear to bandage wounds in the absence of gauze, and appealing desperately for help.

“We’ve got almost no medical supplies left,” said the doctor, whose 15 patients, dying slowly in a single room of an old Syrian home, included two with serious chest wounds, five injured by mortars and three with amputated limbs.

“I was able to get a few stitches into the amputees, but they are going to die because we have no antibiotics or muscle relaxants,” he said, speaking to GlobalPost using a satellite modem because all mobile and landlines have been cut, as has electricity to the neighborhood for the past two months.

“We are calling on the Red Cross or Red Crescent to come right away as the situation is intolerable. Today there was no bread. Children are dying.”

Many in Homs fear a repeat of the massacre that took place exactly 30 years ago this month, when Assad’s father, Hafez, sent his artillery to pound neighboring Hama, another Sunni-majority city that dared to rise up against the oppressive rule of one family and a regime drawn largely from the minority Allawite sect, an off-shoot of Shiite Islam.

The 1982 assault on Hama, which was triggered by an armed insurgency by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, ended with Assad’s troops going house to house, killing, raping and looting, with an eventual death toll estimated between 20,000 and 30,000 people, the huge majority civilians.

Since the bombardment of Homs began on Feb. 3, activists estimate the death toll has exceeded 500 with more than 1,000 people injured. A researcher with the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), who has been traveling between neighborhoods in Homs, told GlobalPost that his group had counted 754 people killed, though accurate figures were impossible to verify.

Amid all the chaos, long dormant sectarian fault lines are beginning to open up, dividing neighbor from neighbor, Sunni from Allawite and opening a space for militants to operate freely.

In the Allawite neighborhood of Homs’ Nuzha district, a GlobalPost reporter met with Haidar, a successful 40-year-old lawyer, who is married to an Allawite school teacher and has two young boys.

Haidar and his family used to live in the Hamadieh area, a mix of Sunnis, Allawites and Christians. But after young Allawites volunteered or were paid to shoot and beat Sunni protesters alongside regular security forces, Haidar said he was “advised” by some of his Sunni neighbors to leave Hamadieh.

“President Assad and his father stacked the security forces with Allawites so now Sunnis see all Allawites as part of the killing machine,” Haidar said. “I understand their feelings, but what can I do?”

Haidar said he moved to Nuzha for “social protection from my community” and was now considering leaving Syria altogether for Qatar or another Gulf state.

“What is going on in Homs is a real civil war between the government and Allawites on one side and the Sunnis on the other,” Haidar said. “I don’t think we as Allawites have any future in Homs if the Assads go. We are shaking with fear for the future.”

Sectarian disintegration has also occurred the other way, with Sunnis, such as 25-year-old Firas, leaving Allawite neighborhoods. “I will be frank and say Homs is divided. There is no more national unity,” said the Sunni former resident of Haddarah who moved to the Sunni-majority neighborhood of Deir Baalbah. “The Assad regime created this sectarian war when it gave arms and money to young Allawites to attack us.”

In Homs’ Qusour neighborhood, home to about 35,000 people, an activist there said the majority of the one fifth Allawite population had moved away over the past six months.

“The pattern of sectarian consolidation that is taking place in central Syria and along the coastline has now spread to Damascus itself,” warned Peter Harling, the Damascus-based Syria Project Director at the International Crisis Group. “People are moving into homogenous neighborhoods, social ties are being cut, polarization is increasing.”

As communities divide along religious lines and the Allawite security forces continue to torture and kill Sunni civilians, forces long held in check by Syria’s secular system are emerging to stake a claim in an uprising many now fear is morphing into the nightmare of sectarian conflict suffered across the border in Iraq.

“I am not afraid to say that I support the opposition with money and weapons,” said Abu Annas al-Homsi, a Syrian Salafist fundamentalist who fought with Sunni militants against American-led troops in Iraq and who now leads Islamist militants fighting in Homs.

“The international community was too weak to protect civilians, so now we fight an open war to liberate our land and defend our religion.”

On Sunday, Al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri called for the first time on Muslims in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey — Syria’s neighboring countries — to join the uprising against Assad’s “pernicious, cancerous regime.”

His call came just days after twin suicide car bombs killed 28 and injured 235 soldiers and security members in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, so far noted for its relative stability. The Free Syrian Army denied involvement in the attack and no group claimed responsibility.

State-run Syria TV — broadcasting images of destruction from Aleppo within minutes of the explosions while ignoring Homs completely — blamed “foreign terrorists.” In Syria’s tightly-controlled police state, however, such high-profile attacks by organized terrorist groups are extremely rare. Opposition members say the regime staged the explosions in an attempt to divert attention from its massacres in Homs.

A reporter working with GlobalPost who spent two days in Homs this week said the city reeked of corpses. Since the crackdown on the popular uprising against the Assad family’s 42-year dictatorship began last March, rights group Avaaz has confirmed more than 5,600 Syrians killed. Several other rights groups say that number could be higher. Tens of thousands have also been injured. The regime, meanwhile, says more than 2,000 members of its security forces have been killed battling “armed gangs and terrorists.”

In interviews on satellite phones and with a reporter in Homs, residents said they were in shock. Many said they felt abandoned by the outside world after Russia and China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have condemned the Assad regime and opened the door for possible sanctions and military intervention.

On Sunday, the Arab League said it would end its observer mission to Syria — widely criticized by the Syrian opposition for failing to protect civilians — and would ask the UN Security Council to send an international peace keeping force to end the bloodshed.

For now Homs continues to suffer bombardment from afar by artillery and rocket launchers. A GlobalPost reporter in the city witnessed scores of tanks and armored vehicles being deployed in Sunni-majority neighborhoods, with sandbags, checkpoints and soldiers around all buildings of the secret police and ruling Baath Party.

Activists in Baba Amr, the neighborhood that has been the hardest hit so far, said residents were now terrified that a ground assault was imminent with troops amassing on the area’s outskirts, while a reporter for Sky News who spent time in Homs last week said rebel fighters of the Free Syrian Army estimated a build up of about 10,000 troops outside the city.

Fighting with only Kalashnikovs and the occasional Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher, the defected soldiers and armed civilian volunteers of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Homs are severely outgunned.

Several members of just one small FSA unit interviewed by GlobalPost last November have been killed fighting Assad’s forces recently, while several others wounded.

But an FSA commander in Baba Amr told GlobalPost this weekend that his fighters had successfully repelled a ground assault against the city.

“They will enter only over our dead bodies,” said the rebel commander, known as Captain Ammar al-Wawi. “We destroyed four tanks when they tried to enter and we prepared a lot of surprises for the regime if they try to storm Homs. But we do not have a lot of weapons because no one is supporting us. We appeal to the international community to support the revolt in Homs because there is a massacre ongoing.”

Western powers have so far ruled out arming the FSA, as they did with Libya’s rebel fighters, fearing such a move would hasten Syria’s descent into civil war and concerned that neither the FSA nor the political opposition Syrian National Council are sufficiently united.

A GlobalPost journalist in Homs contributed reporting for this story.

: More Hugh Macleod
: More Annasofie Flamand

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Santorum’s well-compensated love of fracking

His claims about the practice's safety puts him far to the right of his state's GOP -- and the oil industry

By David Sirota

(Credit: AP/Eric Gay)

Topics:Rick Santorum, 2012 Elections,

If any state was going to produce a Republican who might understand the dangers of unbridled oil and gas drilling — and specifically, of the drilling process known as “fracking” — you would think it would be Pennsylvania.

The state, after all, is the home of Dimock, a town near the crucial Delaware River watershed that has become the Erin Brockovich-worthy example of what can go wrong when fracking goes completely unregulated. As Vanity Fair reported in its shocking 2010 expose of the situation, Dimock is “the place where, over the past two years, people’s water started turning brown and making them sick, one woman’s water well spontaneously combusted, and horses and pets mysteriously began to lose their hair.” Similarly, the state has most recently seen a massive fracking blowout in Canton — one in which the Environmental Protection Agency subsequently found evidence of contaminated groundwater. And it is the state where a landmark Duke University study found “evidence for methane contamination of drinking water associated with shale-gas extraction.”

So when former Pennsylvania senator turned Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum late last week cited his roots in the Keystone State as reason to support more fracking and oppose any regulation of the process, it provided a disturbing example of the power of Big Money over our political system.

To review: In an Oklahoma speech last week, Santorum said, “I come from Pennsylvania [where] we’re doing a little bit of [fracking] in Pennsylvania, thank God.” He then went on to say fracking is “the new boogeyman” — the “new way [for environmentalists] to try to scare you [by] saying, ‘Look what’s going to happen. Ooh, all this bad stuff’s going to happen, we don’t know all these chemicals and all this stuff.’ Let me tell you what’s going to happen: Nothing’s going to happen.”

I don’t know for sure what sickened residents of Dimock or Canton would say in response to Santorum’s declaration that “nothing’s going to happen” — nor do I know for sure what the response would be from the Oklahomans who, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, have likely experienced pretty serious earthquakes thanks to fracking. My guess is that they wouldn’t cheer on such statements from a lowly city councilman, much less a presidential candidate — and they almost certainly wouldn’t mimic the right-wing activists who wildly cheered on Santorum’s head-up-the-ass statements.

That’s just a guess, of course — but what isn’t a guess is that Santorum has now put himself squarely to the far right of both the already-conservative Pennsylvania Republican Party and even the drilling industry itself.

As the Associated Press reports, the state’s Republican legislators just passed a bill “that could force Pennsylvania’s booming natural gas industry to help pay for a wide range of state and local government programs [and] toughen safety standards” for fracking. While the GOP bill is certainly not perfect — AP reports that “environmental groups were split over the bill, and the industry has been largely silent on it” — unlike Santorum, it at least acknowledges the reality of the health and safety concerns surrounding fracking. The legitimacy of such concerns are conceded even by the fracking industry in Pennsylvania: As Santorum’s hometown CBS affiliate previously reported, “The president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which represents natural gas companies, said the group now believes the natural gas exploration industry is partly responsible for rising levels of contaminants found in area drinking water.” And that admission came before the EPA’s headline-grabbing revelation of groundwater contamination in heavily fracked Pavillion, Wyo.

Considering this, Santorum’s, ahem, controversial position can only be explained as the behavior of a person who not only famously doesn’t actually live in Pennsylvania, but more important, was long ago bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry.

As the Center for Responsive Politics reports, Santorum is one of the top U.S. Senate recipients of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry — and what makes those numbers so stunningly outsized is the fact that he remains one of the top Senate recipients even though the last time he ran for Senate was in 2006. Put another way, this is not a run-of-the-mill legislator who happened to get a few afterthought contributions from the industry; this is a guy who was such a sycophantic apostle of the industry that he received enough oil and gas money to keep him on the top-recipient list a full six years after he was voted out of office — that is, a full six years after he raised a single dollar for a Senate campaign. In baseball terms, it’s the equivalent of Hank Aaron racking up so many home runs that he was able to hold the record well after he retired — only with Santorum, it’s not home runs, it’s oil and gas cash.

For the industry’s part, spending that kind of cash was clearly brilliant. With Santorum ahead in national Republican presidential primary polls, the oil and gas money has presciently purchased a potential major-party nominee who gives them an unthinkably powerful spokesperson: a candidate willing to actually cite his fracking-scarred state as reason to support less regulation of fracking. As expenditures go, that’s about the best political investment money can buy.

: David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota

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The Tea Party’s war on mass transit

House Republicans try to gut federal funds for subways as they extend the culture wars to urban policy issues

By Will Doig

(Credit: iStockphoto/Peterfactors)

Topics:Dream City, Editor's Picks

In the week since House Republicans introduced their proposed transportation bill, one thing has become clear: it has virtually nothing to do with fiscal responsibility.

The Tea Party soared to power on the notion that it was the antidote to wasteful government spending. It’s now clear that reigniting the culture wars was a top priority, too. From guns to abortion, the extremist wing of the Republican party has fought to turn back the clock on many socially progressive ideals.

Mass transit is their newest target.

“Federal transportation and infrastructure policy has traditionally been an area of strong bipartisan agreement,” says Aaron Naparstek, a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and founder of Streetsblog.org. “Now, it seems, Republicans want to turn cities into a part of the culture wars. Now it’s abortion, gay marriage and subways.”

House Republicans seek to eliminate the Mass Transit Account from the federal Highway Trust Fund. The Mass Transit Account is where public transportation programs get their steady source of funding. Without it, transit would be devastated, and urban life as we know it could become untenable.

And there’s the rub. “The Tea Party leaders and the Republicans who pander to them do not care about cost-effectiveness in the slightest,” wrote blogger Alon Levy in a comment about the bill on The Transport Politic. “They dislike transit for purely cultural and ideological reasons.” To the Tea Party, transit smacks of the public sector, social engineering and alternative lifestyles.

How do we know this is a cultural battle and not an economic one? Because transit spending is far more fiscally fair than spending on roads and highways. Transit riders subsidize roads to a greater degree than drivers subsidize transit. And cities, which are the chief engines behind the American economy, rely on buses and trains to function. “The economic future for states hinges largely on the performance of their metropolitan economies,” determined a recent Brookings Institution study.

Tea Party leaders know all of this. But they also knew that defunding NPR wouldn’t help balance the budget, and they voted to do it anyway. They knew that by law no federal money can go toward abortion services, yet they voted to defund Planned Parenthood too. The Tea Party is superb at disguising cultural battles as the pursuit of responsible thrift. And mass transit exists at the vortex of many of their number-one ideological targets. It’s brilliant, when you think about it.

Defunding transit is how you smack down urbanites, environmentalists, and people of color, all in one fell swoop. It’s how you telegraph a disdain for all things European. It’s how you show solidarity with swing-state suburbanites who don’t understand why their taxes are going toward subways they don’t even use. And it’s how you subtly reassure your base that you’re not concerned about the very poor.

Republicans haven’t pretended to care about cities for decades. In January, none of the candidates showed up to the annual Conference of Mayors. (Two of them didn’t even RSVP.) And even just a month ago, you could argue, as this web site did, that “today cities are more ignored than attacked” by Republicans. But the calculus just changed. The transportation bill sends an aggressive message: “Tea Party to Cities: Drop Dead.”

It doesn’t matter to the Tea Party that Ronald Reagan, in 1982, created the Mass Transit Account that Republicans now want to kill. Reagan was no friend to cities. But even he earned a respectable share of the vote in New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Things hadn’t yet gotten so personal.

That era is over. Over the past couple decades, the GOP has found that bashing “elites” can translate into victory at the polls. And by “elites” they don’t mean folks with Chevy Tahoes and McMansions in the exurbs. They mean urbanites, no matter what their net worth. When they tar Nancy Pelosi as a San Francisco liberal, or Barack Obama as a Chicago politician, they’re not just referencing those cities’ stereotypes. They’re referencing the stereotypes of city culture itself: full of swindlers and gays and blacks and other suspect types. Calling Obama the “food stamp president” conjures up images of housing projects. Sarah Palin calling small-town folks “real America” states unequivocally that urbanites aren’t real Americans. The offensiveness of that statement still boggles the mind.

The Tea Party plan to decimate transit is no less explicit a statement. “House Republicans are, essentially, declaring war on cities in the federal transportation bill,” tweeted Naparstek. It’s not just that they know they can’t expect many votes from urban dwellers — that at least would be political calculus. It’s that they despise cities in general. They see “smart growth” principles as a U.N. plot, gun control as fascist, and funding for transit not just as wasteful, but un-American. Don’t like it? Get a car like the rest of us.

The House transportation bill will not become law, but that doesn’t make it benign. Like the debt ceiling battle, it could become a political bargaining chip, or reframe the national debate: Maybe cities are getting more than their fair share? Are we overspending on transit? Why should I help fund some far-away bus system? It plants these questions in voters’ minds.

This is why transit advocates are apoplectic, and why Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (a former Republican congressman) called it “the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen in 35 years of public service.” If conservatives have truly decided that transit is next on their culture war hit list, anyone who believes in the importance of cities had better start firing back right now.