Are you keeping up with the trials of ACORN?

Here’s one view.

And here’s another.

And here’s ACORN’s website.

A day in the life of an abortion clinic escort

Here, linked through AlterNet.

The walk is usually no more than a minute from a woman’s car to the clinic door, but:

For some women, then, those sixty seconds are a nightmare. Well before they arrive in their cars, they’re afraid of that walk. They’ve been worrying about it, steeling themselves. They don’t know what they’re walking into, but they’re imagining a worst-case scenario. You can tell by how they’ll busily step from their cars, shuffling keys and bags or talking very loudly to their companions so as to plausibly ignore you, or pop up from behind the wheel with the words “You need to leave us alone right now” already out of their mouths, before they see you quietly standing and pointing to the word “ESCORT” emblazoned across your neon orange vest. You can tell from the plain relief that floods their eyes when they realize who you are and why you’re there. You can tell from the haste with which they apologize for their perfectly understandable mistake, and from the emphatic way they say “thank you” as you open the door for them at the end of that long, long walk.

Happy Monday to you

Mother rejects rhino. Zookeepers take over.

And thanks, Dependable Renegade, for the photo.

Are anti-discrimination rules anti-religion?

You wouldn’t think so.

The House of Representatives held a hearing last week on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2009. ENDA, as it’s called:

• Extends federal employment discrimination protections currently provided based on race, religion, sex, national origin, age and disability to sexual orientation and gender identity
• Prohibits public and private employers, employment agencies and labor unions from using an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity as the basis for employment decisions, such as hiring, firing, promotion or compensation
• Provides for the same procedures, and similar, but somewhat more limited, remedies as are permitted under Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act
• Applies to Congress and the federal government, as well as employees of state and local governments

That list is from the Human Rights Campaign.

But ENDA does not apply to religious groups. So religious groups are free to hire and fire at will in accordance with their theology. And if their theology does not allow them to practice fairness toward, say, homosexuals, then they are free to continue discriminating.

I get the separation of church and state. I don’t get the hatred.

And thanks, Ms., for the link.

And now, some family news from our Guantanamo detainees

After being detained at Guantanamo Bay for eight years as a suspected terrorist, Bahtiyar Mahnu has refused passage to Palau because his mentally ill brother Arkin has not been released from the prison, as well.

Bahtiyar and Arkin Mahnu are brothers, and they are Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs (Wee-gurs). From all indications, Arkin Mahnu was detained only because he went looking for his brother after Bahtiyar left their homeland to find work. The medical care in Palau is not sufficient to treat Arkin Mahnu’s illness, which hasn’t been helped with the two years he spent in solitary confinement while being detained.

There is no indication that either brother was ever involved in terrorist activity, and beyond the legality of their detention,k this situation also begs the question: Why detain a mentally ill prisoner? Oh, wait. We do that here. It also raises again the issue of how much responsibility our country needs to take when they’ve imprisoned someone falsely, and that someone — like Arkin Mahnu — has suffered from that.

(And those are Uighur folk songs playing there.)

Vast, right-wing conspiracies make me nervous.

Former Pres. Clinton has been talking about a concerted effort on the part of the right to thwart just about everything — echoing the phenomenon then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton said plagued his administration in the ’90s.

(Of course, no conspirasists — if that’s not a word, it should be — arranged to involve former Pres. Clinton in an extramarital affair; that was his own doing. But for a time there, the shouting class did seem overheated about all things Clinton — both Bill and Hillary.)

Former Pres. Clinton says the same thing is happening now with Pres. Barack Obama in the form of the tea partiers, the birthers, and the like. But he says the country is not necessarily buying the rhetoric from the extreme right.

I don’t know. A conspiracy? I think it’s dangerous and damaging to label everyone at those meetings part of a conspiracy. I do think some of the people there are faking it — or are whipped into a frenzy by sources who have a financial interest in getting those people into a frenzy — but a conspiracy sounds…overheated? to me. Maybe it’s because I’m from those people who worry about the size of their government — legitimately so, and they do so while knowing that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, and without throwing socialism around like it’s a fait accompli. In other words, they’ve given thoughtful attention to the state of their nation, and they’re concerned. They’re not nutjobs. I disagree vehemently with their politics — loudly so — and will stay in a conversation long past the time when most would have given it up for lost, but I wouldn’t call them nutjobs. Just wrong.

Your thoughts? Had any political arguments lately with a reasoned person who disagreed with you but who didn’t frighten you?

Yom Kippur started at sundown last night

And it ends today at nightfall. Rabbi David Aaron at Beliefnet calls the day the “fast-track to forgiveness.”

He also wrote this:

The Talmud teaches that in this world when something good happens to us, we praise G-d–”Blessed is He who is good and does good.” When something bad happens we must say–”Blessed is He who is a true Judge.” However, in the future we will say, “Blessed is He who is good and does good,” even about the misfortunes in our lives.

In other words, when we will look back and see the whole picture, we will realize that every bad act we chose and every dark event that happened to us, contributed to G-d’s plan–to bring upon us ultimate goodness.

I find comfort in that: Every bad act we chose contributed to a plan.

More on Yom Kippur, here.

I’d like to take credit for this.

But that would be wrong.

My friend, Susan Forbes Hansen, shot this on Martha’s Vineyard. Not to worry: The next time she goes, she’s promised to put us all up for the weekend. Party at Susan’s!!!

Save the boobs!

Made you look.

If we’re going to objectify the female body, anyway, how about doing it for a good cause, asks Feminist Philosophers. And I am — as I so often am — firmly of two minds about this.

1. If this public service campaign gets one young woman to pay attention to her risk of breast cancer, so be it.

2. When, o Lord, will we not objectify the female body? Really? Never? O.K. Good to know, I guess.

Invisible and homeless

And “living” in Newton, Mass. Thanks, BuzzFeed, for the link.