Salon.com > Nancy Goldstein

Hey buddy, can you spare some gay pride?

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:00:00 +0000

This has been an incredibly eventful week in LGBT/civil rights news . Topping it off comes a pair of provocative articles in the New York Times and Washington Post about New York City's aggressive push for LGBT tourist dollars.

The $1.9M marketing campaign is called (what else?) Rainbow Pilgrimage, and it "will highlight New York's reputation as a gay-friendly destination and tout a visit to the city as a 'rite of passage.'" What makes this campaign so delish? It launches just months after the New York legislature blew its opportunity to become the first in the country to vote same-sex marriage into law, thereby turning away potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in same-sex marriage-related revenue.

Seriously. Do not misunderestimate the wedding industry.

Enough with Meghan McCain already!

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:17:00 +0000

The appearance of yet another article about Meghan McCain anywhere, let alone an adulatory column in yesterday’s Washington Post ("Another McCain Throws Down a Challenge"), means that somewhere, a talented PR person is earning their fee.

Gallons of ink have already been spilled on McCain since March 9, when she kicked off an aggressive campaign to position herself as the new, progressive face of the Republican Party by trying to start a feud with Ann Coulter over anti-Semitic and anti-gay slurs that every other pundit on earth already blasted Coulter for eons ago. Despite the staleness of McCain’s charges against Coulter, and the fact that McCain has already been mentioned in the WaPo eight times in the past 16 days, the WaPo article breathlessly touts McCain’s mavericky-ness as though this tired talking point were new, or true, and never mentions that no feud ever emerged. (Coulter’s excellent political instincts led her to remain silent, for once, rather than allow a novice like McCain to elevate her profile by being seen battling Goliath.)

Why do teen birthrates keep rising?

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:25:00 +0000

Yesterday's news that teen birthrates rates rose in the U.S. for the second consecutive year has set off a fresh round of arguments about federally funded abstinence-only programs. Predictably, the pro-abstinence camp considers the statistics evidence that their approach is more essential now than ever. Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association told the Washington Post: "This is certainly not the time to remove any strategy that is going to provide skills for teens to avoid sex." Retorted Texan-chastity-pledge-devotee-turned-sex-ed-youth-advocate Shelby Knox, reached by email: “If you spend $1.5 billion to spew shame-filled garbage to young people and then pass laws that limit their access to good information, contraception, emergency contraception and abortion, then you shouldn't be surprised when the health outcomes aren't to your liking.”

As the Post's article notes, this debate is bound to be particularly intense right now, just a few weeks short of when President Obama is expected to announce whether or not he will seek to continue funding abstinence-only programs.

Annie Leibovitz and the gay tax

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:20:00 +0000

Poets swoon about it and singers croon about it, but LGBT people can calculate the cost of love down to the last penny. In my household it comes to around $329.25 monthly: that's the gay tax my wife and I shell out for me to be on her health insurance plan, because her company must treat that benefit as additional taxable income. It doesn't matter that our Massachusetts marriage is recognized in New York. Companies pay for their employees' health insurance with pre-tax money through a federal program, and same-sex marriage isn't federally recognized.

But that's chump change compared to what love is currently costing celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Back in late February the NYT noted that Leibovitz had borrowed a total of $15.5 million from a company called Art Capital Group using "as collateral, among other items … town houses she owns in Greenwich Village, a country house, and something else: the rights to all of her photographs."

Treatment by any means possible?

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:33:00 +0000

At a time when the national news features story upon story of bad behavior rewarded, a local effort to hold someone accountable for their actions should be heartening. Unfortunately, the local effort in question, Tennessee’s proposed Senate Bill 1605, is misguided, won’t work and may make life much worse for the very people it’s intended to help: drug-addicted pregnant women and their children. (Hat tip to the Women’s Health News Blog, which broke this story last week and replicated the full text of the bill.)

SB1605 mandates drug testing for women who fall into any of nine different categories, including obtaining "late" or "incomplete" prenatal care. (Ironically, the "failure" to access care often indicates poverty, and this bill requires women to foot the bill for their tests.) Don’t let the bill’s promise that women who test positive for drugs or alcohol "shall be referred to treatment” fool you into thinking it’s humane or benign: SB 1605 is fundamentally a dragnet with a law-and-order core. It requires the Department of Children’s Services to open a case on women who test positive and mandates that doctors report women patients who don’t want to go into treatment or miss appointments with child welfare officials.

The economy is a feminist issue

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:57:00 +0000

Now that the global economy has fallen apart, a badly compromised economic stimulus bill has passed that is worse for women than men and Obama has proposed a $275 billion housing plan that analysts and administration officials alike agree "will not come close to halting the tidal wave of foreclosures," I'm wondering: Where has the feminist outrage been? The economic crisis is in every way a feminist issue, so why the near silence?

Sure, some women have written great pieces about the meltdown, including the ways that women have been hit -- and missed. Two weeks back, Jennifer Barrett noted "that many of the jobs being generated for women [in the proposed stimulus bill] will probably come later and pay far less than the jobs being created in fields dominated by men." Linda Hirshman’s December NYT op-ed took Team Obama to task for weighting the stimulus plan toward creating jobs in sectors that employ very few women (construction and green jobs, to name two). She followed up with a virtual master class on how to unpack dicey numbers and squishy logic, toasting Team Obama for releasing an unrealistically rosy report on the stimulus bill’s projected positive effect on women’s employment. She also offers a smart, refreshingly understandable explanation of why it’s not quite right to say that the economic crisis is hurting men more and in greater number than it’s hurting women. (Hint: Women’s rate of unemployment is rising faster than men’s; women earn less.)

Women’s basketball, latest recession victim

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:18:00 +0000

Last week's bad economic news included fresh evidence that the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) is taking on water. The league's mandate that teams cut their rosters from 13 to 11 players follows the demise of the four-time championship Houston Comets, once the WNBA's most dominant team, this past December. "The way I figure it, the overall reductions -- the 13 spots lost when Houston folded, plus two more cuts from each of the 13 remaining teams -- means that there are 39 less spots in the league," says one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history, Sylvia Hatchell of the University of North Carolina.

It's terrible news whenever any organization eliminates 20 percent of its workforce and people suddenly find themselves unemployed in a weak economy. But as the WNBA struggles, and if it folds, it's taking along something else with it: the hopes of the first generation of Title IX-era female athletes who went through high school and college thinking they might someday actually be able to make a living playing a professional team sport.

Drug-addicted and pregnant

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:18:00 +0000

For more than a decade now, activists, scholars and researchers have all been saying the same thing: The "crack baby" epidemic, a generation of drug-addicted babies born to drug-addicted women, is a myth -- a politically advantageous, racist one at that, with virtually no basis in science.

But it took until this week for the New York Times to catch on -- kind of -- with the publication of "Crack Babies: The Epidemic that Wasn’t." Mind you, the story does get the main scientific point right. The long-term effects of prenatal exposure to drugs on brain development and behavior are relatively small, as shown by Barry Lester, a Brown University professor of psychiatry. He heads the Maternal Life Study, the longest and largest study of its kind in the United States, and is quoted as the central expert in the NYT article.

Who should get political pardons?

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:45:00 +0000

Let's face it: Presidential pardons have more often been doled out like political doggie treats than used as a serious tool for correcting judicial error. Whether you're looking at Dubya's or Clinton's list we're primarily talking about well-connected embezzlers, swindlers and perjurers (except that Clinton's list is three times as long). So it was refreshing to ask a number of prominent feminists whom they would pardon and discover a genuine interest in, well, justice.

Amanda Marcotte blogs at Pandagon and podcasts for RH Reality Check.

If only a president would pardon everyone in prison on a nonviolent drug charge. The money we'd save in keeping nonviolent offenders in prison alone would justify it. But more than that, it's time to reverse the cancer that is the drug war. It serves no purpose other than to erode civil liberties and start deadly wars that barely receive any media coverage.

Why Gene Robinson is too little, too late

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:10:00 +0000

Finally: Nearly four weeks and tons of negative press since Barack Obama announced his choice of the popular -- and notoriously homophobic and anti-Semitic -- evangelical pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the presidential inauguration, Team Obama has gone into damage control mode. Monday morning they announced that Obama has also invited the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, who was elected the Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop in 2003, to deliver the invocation for Sunday's kickoff inaugural event on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

How the Madoff mess hits women

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:54:00 +0000

For all the ink that's been spilled on the Madoff investment scandal, I've read nothing about its impact on funding for progressive women's causes -- which is considerable. Simply put, only a small pool of foundations are funding litigation and advocacy work related to criminal justice or constitutional rights; the pool that supports related programs targeted to women is smaller still. With the recent shuttering of two of Madoff's clients, the Picower Foundation and the JEHT Foundation, that pool has shrunk to a puddle.

Picower was one of a handful of foundations willing to stick their necks out and significantly fund the three organizations that handle virtually all major reproductive rights-related litigation and legal advocacy in the United States. Now the Center for Reproductive Rights needs to make up a $600,000 shortage in 2009; Planned Parenthood is out $484,000; the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project is off $200,000.