I wasn’t alone. Two of my youth sector workmates were with me, as were several of our colleagues in the wider community sector – which comprises disability support workers, policy advocates, youth workers, community centre co-ordinators, refuge workers, housing case managers and many more professionals. We were flanked by two branch organisers from the Australian Services Union (ASU), who had put us through our paces outside while we waited for our appointment with the (rather bemused) electoral office staff.

Dancing for equal pay was a key plank in the ASU’s campaign to secure equality of wage remuneration for workers in the community services sector; those nominally grouped under the Social and Community Services (SACS) Award. SACS (soon to be known as the SCHADS; or, Social, Community Health and Disability Services Award) indexes the wages of those who perform a range of work in non-government organisations. This work includes providing support services with, for and by people with disability, women, people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer or questioning their sexulity; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals, families and communities; young people; people who are transgender, intersex or questioning their gender; individuals, families and communities from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds; those who need housing, emergency financial assistance, mental health support; those experiencing social isolation and family breakdown; and more.

I came late to the party. In early 2011 I returned to working in the community sector after six years as a PhD candidate and casual employee in university admin, teaching and research. These days I work part-time in policy advocacy and as a relief worker at a refuge – both services that are provided in a non-government capacity. On returning, I found the community sector union leading a charge to make the case for a long-overdue pay rise. Headed by Sally McManus (a powerful woman leader if I ever saw one), the ASU sought an Equal Pay Remuneration order from Fair Work Australia, a ruling that would require the support of State and Federal governments. Whilst services are marked as ‘non-government’ it is governments who fund the vast majority of community service organisations and it is governments who would need to find the money to realise the Order. (Indeed, the amount now required by governments is enough to send any neoliberal-minded politician to the counsellor’s office – something like six billion dollars, to be distributed as a pay increase for SACS workers between 17% and 41%, as shown here, at Attachment A.)

The campaign was both playful and direct at every turn: members and supporters sent ‘a kiss‘ to Julia Gillard when she was Minister for Social Inclusion in the name of ‘no more lip service’, an ongoing slogan was ‘Pay Up!’, and the Elvis moves and teasing tut-tuts of the Equal Pay dance asked for ‘a little less conversation, a little more action.’ Check out the ASU’s video summary here (hackable and imperfect captions by moi, with thanks to Universal Subtitles).

From the counsellor and long-term activist who first marched for equal pay for women at the age of sixteen, to the clients of services who turned out to march for the people who help them, to the Young Laborites cutting their unionist teeth – the Equal Pay campaign will resonate across labour organising and activism, labour law-making and labour rights in Australia and beyond. And, most importantly, it is a shining new pillar in the debate about how we distribute resources in an unequal society that is divided by class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, ethnicity and religion; where privilege and prejudice often conspire to ensure that people cannot get enough to eat, a place to live, a nurtured body and a peaceful mind.

Community services work is not always-already ‘good’; it does not necessarily ‘provide a service’, it may be carried out in the name of a community no less oppressive than the one that has failed service users; our organisations may be plagued with bullying and incompetence. The Equal Pay win, I speculate, may actually ameliorate some of the sector’s human problems in this regard (which, of course, are not institutional, organisational or workplace problems limited to the community sector). Better pay (that can be roughly matched or considered competitive with similar roles in the public or corporate sector) will, I believe, both retain and attract skills in the community sector – skills that make a difference to people who have been excluded from accessing the goods that others benefit from. These are not necessarily the skills of ‘everyday heroes’ or ‘angels of mercy’ as those of us who do this work tend to be caricatured (NB: these are notions which we should interrogate with gusto!). They are the administrative skills required to distribute resources in a way that makes an ameliorative if not empowering difference to people: assisting a person to leave an unsafe home in favour of a safe one, to find an affordable place to live, or an emergency one hundred bucks, or a new skill to sell for wages, or a meaningful job, or a trip to the movies once a week. This administration is impossible without the relational and emotional skills that users of community services repeatedly say makes the difference for them. (Given that any of us could be users of community services at any one time, this is something you can probably appreciate).

The win also enacts a redistribution of capital away from those who benefit the most from a capitalist system and those who benefit far less. Indeed, in an age of austerity, where there is apparently not enough money to provide adequately for those who are unemployed, a pay rise for community service workers seems almost counter-cultural.

Whilst there remains a risk that, say, recipients of Newstart (the absurdly named unemployment payment here in Australia) will continue to be punished and ignored whilst community service workers only increase their social security – I think there are a number of reasons to be thrilled with the equal pay win, including:

1. As Megan Clement-Couzner explains, “women’s work” has been declared commensurate to that of men’s, and steps taken to ensure this is reflected in law and in wages.
2. Governments are now required more than ever before to pay what community services are worth -  rather than getting a cheap deal on social fabric by relying on the low wages of community service workers.
3. Given that advocating for service users is integral to the work of community services, better pay will retain and attract these skills to the sector, and improve the capacity of workers to carry this out.

As a political move, the Equal Pay win relies on a series of wagers and proxies: the state as a proxy for family and community in a particular form, wages as a proxy for caring in a particular form, the community worker as an advocate for the needs of an other in the service of this community. We don’t necessarily know to what ends the value of the contract between the cared for and the caring has been raised.

However, we know we made the claims for a renewed contract between ‘the carer’ and the state, with the implicit and sometimes explicit support of ‘the carees’ (who are not always so divisible – many community workers are people who have had lifelong contact with community services such as out of home care, youth centres and disability support services), from a clear conviction that to pay community workers so comparatively little, for that to have a basis in gender, and for a key impact to be the incapacity of the sector to attract and retain skills to help people who ask for help and have no other resources, was unjust.

It’s enough to keep me in the union, that’s for sure. That and getting to see some of my blokier comrades cutting up the dance floor.

Originally published at ABC’s The Drum.

I don’t call myself a feminist. But some of my best friends are feminists.

Some women don’t like the descriptor, and reject it because they don’t want to be associated with a certain stereotype. Or because they believe in countries like Australia there is gender equality now. Neither of these reasons is why I shy away from the label.

I originally abandoned the tag because I don’t agree with what is called patriarchy theory, with which feminism has been inexorably associated (especially inside the academy and social movements). Although that is in many ways an abstract debate, and I tended not to correct people who saw me as under the feminist umbrella.

More recently I have become irritated with the term, because ‘feminist’ increasingly has little specificity. As Nina Power argues in One Dimensional Woman, the term ‘feminist’ (and indeed the wider feminist project) has been stripped of much of its sharpness and liberatory potential.

I tend to say that I fight for women’s liberation. In the past calling yourself a feminist – or in the case of men who called themselves feminist allies or supporters – meant being part of a political and social movement fighting for gender emancipation. But the label has shed that meaning, with rapid growth along two axes.

On the one hand a more diverse group of women than ever before call themselves ‘feminist’, which is a problem only when those growing ranks are women like Sarah Palin. Or indeed if Sex in The City II is the result, where supposedly even those who wear a burka long for the choices of the so called ‘liberated’ woman – the choice to wear expensive designer clothes and many sequins, as the final sequences of the movie explain to us (those being sequins draped over a size six outfit, hairless torso and legs, plucked eyebrows, pedicured feet, liposuctioned butt, and a fake tan).

Palin is clearly not down with the sequins and consumerism as feminism, as much as thefirearms as feminism subgenre; her style is more uber-feminist and is leading the way in what is known as the ‘new conservative feminism’. For the likes of Camille Paglia and others she:

… has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment … A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn’t worth a warm bucket of spit.

I’ve always adored Paglia’s colour. Not. Not really at all. Although she highlights something important here – taking up the word feminist is now the rejection of the ‘feminist establishment’. This is code for a rejection of those who demand real deliverance on the question of equality and choice, and not the kind of liberty you find in a supermarket stocked with five different types of the same shade of lipstick (even if all made from organic components).

On the other hand it is no longer bizarre for men to call themselves feminists – as opposed to allies or supporters of the feminist movement. And while this is not troubling in the same manner as Palin, it seems often to say no more than, ‘In my view I’m not a sexist prick’. Which most aren’t. But the term still contains very little of its original meaning – very little that is about women’s emancipation as a political project and this is, in my view, a disservice to those men who actively support and act in the struggle for women’s equality.

In the end the debate about who does and doesn’t call themselves a feminist is less important than recognising the sanitising of feminism since the end of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. The rise of the ‘new conservative feminism’ of Palin and her ilk is problematic, but so too is the depressing individualism of many on the so-called progressive side of politics – those who argue that any view on what real liberation is can be as valid as any other, as it simply allows women’s voices to be heard. This posits that all women have the same beliefs, interests and agendas. Suggesting that all women have views that are equally sufficient to meet the aim of ending gender inequality abandons the political struggle over how that is best achieved.

It is as problematic as a feminism that takes gender out of its time and location – that fails to recognise how being a woman inhabits the same space as the colour of a woman’s skin, what country she lives in, what religion she is, and what socio-economic background she is from.

For example, while it is clearly a problem that the Institute of Public Affairs has no women on its board of 12 (white?) men, and only four of its 20 listed staff are women. (I say ‘listed’ as I don’t expect their researchers and public cajolers, whose photos adorn the website, are answering the switchboard or cleaning the toilets – jobs that are paid less and more likely done by women and those whose first language was not English.) The bigger problem is that the IPA are the highest profile lobby group for orthodox neoclassical economic reform in Australia. They are a group deeply committed to more laissez-faire economic policy, not less, more market control over public services, not less, and less of a social wage, not more. All policies that have seen the feminisation of inequality locally and globally and contributed to the growing gap between men’s and women’s wages in Australia in recent times.

But despite the negative impact of what they proselytise for, it is also an organisation where at least one of their female staff publicly calls herself a ‘feminist’. Another female staff memberwrites about the Wisconsin public sector protests as an example of the dilemma of ‘how to rein in rampant public sector unions’ – those being unions opposed to austerity measures and public sector cuts that would impact significantly on teachers and nurses, who are predominantly women, not to mention other low paid public sector workers.

In the end the argument about who calls herself or himself a feminist, and who doesn’t, is secondary. I want to know who is up for a fight for real emancipation from gender discrimination. Who will argue for social and economic policy that does good for women, not the exact opposite?

And on that question I can say that not only are many of my best friends feminists, but they are of the very finest kind.

On Monday it will be a year since my father took his own life. Since his death I have been thinking about writing about it, but felt the barrier of years of professional discipline insisting “what is the purpose of this piece? What do you want to convey?” I still don’t have an answer to those questions, and yet I feel I must write, so here it is. I think it’s just to bear witness, a process I believe in wholeheartedly, and to help me with my grief. But if you want to see the roots of my feminism and why I believe the personal is political, it’s here too. I’m not trying to give you a lesson or a message, but if you get something from reading, I’m glad.

How do you grieve for someone who hurt you profoundly, repeatedly, and tore your family apart? Who was also deeply intelligent, cursed with mental illness, incredibly funny, and when he could be, loving? I don’t know and really it’s a pointless question, because what I do know is that death happens to us all, and grief just is, and it will be. It is a physiological process as much as anything else that we dress it up as with our culture and plethora of abstract ideas, and our art. It is moving through me and with me, and I must and want to travel with it.

I used to explain my father thus: A terribly bright man, he was not mentally stable although we had no diagnosis for many years. But what I knew was that he really couldn’t handle the daily stress of life and the pressure would build in him relentlessly; that he suffered from deep and terrible bouts of depression, and he was never satisfied. All of this largely deserved sympathy and help. The only trouble was his coping mechanism was violence – physical and verbal and often sadistic – against his family, especially my mother.

Nothing in our life was very far from the clichés of family violence. We lived on eggshells interspersed with unpredictable periods of happiness, as we continued on through each cycle of compression-explosion-reconciliation- and trying again. Each cycle left its mark.

I learnt that when you grow up in a house of violence and fear, you’re inculcated, through collective silence and shame, into believing somehow your experience is unique. Armour shattered by the sudden death of a friend, when I finally confessed the truth to a high school counsellor, she held my gaze while she drew the cycle I had endured for 17 years on a piece of paper in seconds, and asked gently, “is this what happens in your family?” I nodded in relief and horror. There is nothing special about family violence, unless you count society’s role in keeping it taboo and enduring.

Lyn, that same counsellor, took my call from university over a year after I’d last seen her, when I realised I had to get out and needed help. “Hello Imogen”, she said. “I have been hoping you would call”. Those are still possibly the best words anyone has ever said to me.

I found out subsequent to his suicide that my father had been diagnosed with bipolar (I don’t know which type) about four years before his death.

The diagnosis is tangible and comforting, and I wish we’d all known sooner. I wish there’d been some point in my childhood after one of his threats to kill himself, or after he systematically threw mum into walls, or after he beat my scrawny 11 year old brother until he begged, or after he kept me up all night before my exams vowing he’d see me fail and working fat and miserable and alone in a corner store, or after he calmly told mum he would kill her children if she ever told anyone what he did; – that somehow professional help had been sought by my tertiary, medically qualified parents and we had all ventured down the path of trying to heal, out in the open.

But it didn’t happen. And of the few things to stay constant other than the cycle of violence was my father’s repeated refusal to ever fully admit what he did to us, or ask forgiveness, or make reparations.

After I finished university and my mother finally left him, the bouts of severe depression became worse, and dad did seek help. Over the last decade of his life he had several stays in treatment centres, including electro-shock therapy in the later years. With my mother safe and interstate and my brother overseas, the last years of our relationship involved me looking after his house and finances, and then him, once he came out of his first lengthy round of treatment. There was memory loss from the electro-shock treatment leading to paranoia, and two serious suicide attempts before our relationship deteriorated under the weight of his inability to cope.

A year later at 25 I wrote to him, explaining as calmly and fairly as I could why I could no longer have him in my life. Aside from the issues of family justice centred on his continuing denial, there was also the blunt truth that his presence was inexorably eroding my health. Twenty plus years of conditioning are not easily undone. He wrote back full of victim-hood and steadfast refusal, and we did not see each other or speak for over seven years.

One morning driving to work I received a call to tell me that dad had suffered an aneurysm, and was in emergency awaiting an operation. I spoke to my brother. Dad had a 50% chance of surviving, and was asking for me, so I went. Heavily drugged he was still relatively lucid, and clearly elated to see me. I met his second wife and ignored her pointed comments, and he and I exchanged small talk.

As he headed into the operating room I told him I loved him, and I still can’t tell if it was a lie. It is hard not to think that if he had not survived that operation, his last memories would have been of his loving second wife and his children with him, and while it would have been tragic, it would have been a good death.

After he survived the operation he was devastated that I would not come to see him. Nothing had changed for me, and I realised beyond my own needs, this meant I could quite possibly kill him. Having had his aorta split from brainstem to groin, recovery involved keeping his blood pressure as low as possible for nearly 6 months, and I could think of nothing I could bear to talk about that wouldn’t raise it.

Dad’s survival included the diagnosis that he harboured another potentially fatal brain aneurysm that could go at any time. Unable to cope, his violent behaviour resurfaced, costing him his second wife, who died two years’ later from cancer. Dad was left cut from her will, financially imperilled and fighting her children to stay in his house. Only my brother maintained a relationship. He was very ill, mentally, and as far as I can gather nothing in that time was anything other than a misery for him and my brother to endure.

Too many people see life simplistically and in absolutes, so I’ve faced scepticism my whole life when I’ve said I don’t hate my father. I didn’t and still don’t. Equally I find those who extol forgiveness usually just as simplistic. My first comment on talk-back radio was to Radio National’s “Life Matters”, featuring two experts in forgiveness and many stories of terrible wrongs and trauma done to people, who then tried to forgive. As I listened to a woman left paralysed by a drunk driver break down on national radio over her inability to forgive the man who hit her and drove off, I rang the call-back number full of anger.

I told them that it was all very well to talk about forgiveness, but so far their entire program had not once talked about the role of society in addressing wrongs and facilitating forgiveness. I spoke of how I felt it was profoundly unfair to ask victims of traumas deemed crimes by our society to not only survive and succeed after such experiences, but to also find the wherewithal to forgive those who had done them wrong. I spoke of my father and how many years on in the face of his denial of responsibility, and in the absence of a community judgement of his behaviour, it was too much to ask me to carry that burden as well. I remember the silence at the other end of the phone; and a dear friend’s mother telling me she heard me and I was the only one who made sense, and she finally understood.

To this day I still hold that view, and it was part and parcel of my internal dialogues on whether to see dad or not. I wrestled repeatedly with going to see him, constantly aware that there was a high probability of him dying and I would not get another chance.

But the simple truth was as soon as I got close to resolving to contact him, the anxiety and accompanying heart palpitations, night terrors and insomnia would renew and the worst memories would all come flooding back. I had always known that alive or dead, my father would never rest easy with me, that there was never going to be a resolution. But in our years of separation, the solace I found was that the distance meant some of the good childhood memories did, finally, come back. I chose them.

I remember the man who without fail listened to the Goon Show with us on a Saturday and was uproariously funny; who never once showed me anything but acceptance and love when I told him I was a lesbian; who gifted me my ability to articulate and love of language; who passed on his passion for a well-tended vegetable patch; and who was without fail a gentle, compassionate and skilful healer of animals, who taught me to cherish this bright little planet of endless wonder we share with them.

I remember the father that gently hugged me the week after my friend died and told me of losing his only brother at just 17 and I could talk to him any time. I still also remember that same man only weeks later holding me by the throat against my bedroom door, shaking with rage because I hadn’t smiled at him since she died. I chose to give space for the first man to come back to me.

Dad’s job in his last year was as the part-time vet for the dog’s home, where he spent the vast majority of his time putting down unwanted dogs, regardless of sickness or health. Knowing how much he loved animals, I wish I couldn’t imagine what that would have done to him. I wish I had known; just as I wish had known he was back in the clinic and on suicide watch months before he took his life.

My fathers primary career was a vet, and as a child I often helped him. I watched many times how the common drug used by vets to put animals down works. So I know it acts very quickly, limbs loosening almost instantly and death comes in seconds. My father euthanized himself with this drug. The constable told us he was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of red wine, and looked peaceful. I went to identify his body, in part because I don’t believe anyone should have to do that alone as my brother would have had to, and because I needed to see him.

I don’t have words for the sorrow I feel that he reached a point where ending his life was the only relief he could conceive. Some in our family have rationalised that he was going to die from the aneurysm anyway, so it was more like a clear choice in the face of physical illness.

I know that the illness above all was in his mind, and he probably felt utterly unloved and unwanted in this life; and I’m not sure it really matters whether you see the second part of that sentence as separate or different from the first.

I acknowledge and carry my part in dad’s final days, just as I carry the rest. An atheist like me, he did not believe in the afterlife. I can only hope, in the last few seconds that if dad had any thoughts, they were of release, and if by some quirk he glimpsed something else, it was a sweet hereafter.

Arguments that point to the long history of structures of power held by religious institutions are important, though the power keeps shifting in a so-called secular state. But such power is still manifest even in Australia, such as in the case of the religio-legislative stranglehold on the same-sex marriage debate. And it’s only ‘common sense’ that an anti-choice position on abortion is linked to religious views, as they certainly dominate that side of the debate. I’ll return to that ‘common sense’ later.

However, I fail to see how Melinda Tankard Reist’s anti-porn work has anything to do with her religion, and find it incredibly reductive to dismiss her arguments on that basis. It is a sleight of hand (and an ad hominem one) to say ‘I disagree with her anti-porn work because she’s a fundie Baptist and by the way you know she’s pro-life/anti-choice?!’ The logical fallacies therein are pretty obvious, and yet they’ve currently been amplified-while-under-analysed due to MTR’s (ill-advised, in my opinion) decision to threaten a blogger with defamation for pointing out her alleged membership of a Baptist church and suggesting she has been duplicitous about her religious affiliation. While I stand solidly in the camp of those decrying the legal threat, I’d like to examine the things that MTR probably should have argued instead of trying to silence the blogger.

I’ve learned a lot from the debate on twitter and in the blogosphere these past few days – someone asked me how I’d feel if I discovered that someone who was opposed to our pig farming turned out to be Orthodox Jew. I realised I wouldn’t really care, given the few atheist vegans who have challenged me recently for our farming of animals, the point is that I need to know my own moral position and defend it on its merits. If someone tells me I shouldn’t eat pork because it’s ‘unclean’, I’ll say I respect their position while I disagree (I might also add all the ways that piggehs are actually very clean…). If they tell me I’m immoral for believing in killing animals for human consumption, I’ll say I respect their position while I disagree. Before this week, I might have answered the question differently – that is, I might have dismissed the views merely on the basis of their religion.

In the case of eating animals, it’s easy for me to respect someone else’s view while maintaining my own, because from what I can see, their view is not damaging others. It must be harder for the vegans to respect mine, because their moral position is that I am harming animals for my own pleasure. I can appreciate why they advocate to stop me from farming or promoting the consumption of animals. It’s hard to deal with aggressive challenges, but given their moral view, it’s understandable.

On abortion – I am pro-choice, because I take the view that women and children’s lives are endangered where abortion is illegal. I am strongly opposed to anti-choice campaigners who would deny women the right to terminate an unwanted or unsafe pregnancy. I have views about the many difficulties children brought into the world unwanted (or unable to be cared for, etc) will face, in a world that is pretty complicated to navigate even if you are wanted. Views about the stigma and financial stresses women will face if they bring a child they didn’t want into the world when they’re too young, living with domestic violence, as a consequence of rape… the list goes on. My own personal decision of whether I would or would not have had an abortion had any of these situations been mine is irrelevant to another woman’s right to choose.

In the case of a pro-choice argument, I believe that a woman’s right to decide when she takes on the very big responsibilities of mothering is paramount. Health considerations and the other complicated reasons why not all women who become pregnant should be forced to carry on with gestation are also important. In this case, the termination of a fetus is a preferred option than the many years of consequences. Weighing up each agents’ right to a pleasurable life leads me to the conclusion in favour of pro-choice. I do not believe that forcing babies to be born to underage women, sufferers of rape, or mature women who do not want to carry on with an unplanned pregnancy is in the interest of those potential children nor the women. Nor the seldom-mentioned men who contributed to conception.

But take the anti-choice perspective for a moment. Their moral position is that ‘a child’s life’ is lost through abortion. I don’t want to enter into the well-rehearsed arguments about when life begins, but it’s well known that most anti-choicers believe it commences at conception. Many also believe that the physical and emotional act of abortion damages women. You don’t have to agree with those things to understand that if that’s your view, of course you will fight those who would promote choice.

The debate is almost impossible to have because both sides are quite convinced that they are protecting women and children. They try to outdo each other with arguments about which side protects more people, and I still take the pro-choice side, just as I still take the ethical omnivore side in the earlier example. But those on the other side are equally convinced that they are protecting people or animals. Their moral positions are really not so far apart.

Impasse?

Because the examples I’m outlining involve the very core of life and death – things we take into our bodies, expel from our bodies, are our bodies – they lead to very heated and emotional discussions. I suspect there’s not a lot we can do about that, though with the training I’ve been fortunate to receive as an academic, I’ve certainly learned a lot about the value of measured, rational debate. Emotional arguments cloud not only our reason, but also this moral compass I’m writing about – the capacity to know just why we take the position we do.

The real divide in the feminist debate comes around women’s choice to regulate our own bodies. Anti-choice campaigners believe that the State should regulate women’s bodies. Some believe the Church (whichever church that may be) should regulate our bodies. People who are pro-choice believe that women should regulate women’s bodies. That we should have the choice to use contraception or access abortion as we determine it to be in our own and others’ interests. These are very difficult decisions, but that doesn’t mean we should hand over the responsibility for them to the State. The moral position on either side has more in common than it does in opposition – we all want to minimise harm, but we disagree about what constitutes the most harm and how to mitigate it.

People of faith have strictures to guide their morality. People without have a long tradition of philosophy upon which to draw (most of which is based in theism). There is also ‘gut instinct’ and ‘common sense’, and as a scholar, I feel it is my duty to interrogate ‘instinct’ and ‘common sense’ to find the underlying cultural assumptions that guide these. I’m not a theological scholar, but I’m aware that although faith is a part of religion, the moral tenets of religion have been constantly explored, examined, and repositioned over time. To suggest that simply because a person is Christian that they are not rational is not only unfair, it’s inaccurate.

If we can accept that the people with whom we disagree, sometimes vehemently, actually share the same humanist concerns of minimising harm, we can more productively engage in the debate of how best to achieve this. Finger pointing about religion won’t help. Respectful discussions of women’s right to regulate and protect our bodies will.

A mob of black demonstrators, led bythe ‘Rev.’ Al Sharpton, occupied and closed the Statue of Liberty recently,demanding that New York be renamed Martin Luther King City ‘to reclaim it forour people.’ Hmmm. I hate to agree with the Rev. Al, but maybe a name change isin order. Welfaria? Zooville? Rapetown? Dirtburg? Lazyopolis? But Al, theStatue of Liberty? Next time, hold that demonstration at a food stamp bureau ora crack house.

[W]e do have a national responsibilityfor our borders. What I’m, sort of, tired of is all the money spent and liveslost worrying about the borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan, andforgetting about our borders between the U.S. and Mexico. We should think moreabout, you know, what we do at home.

I __________________ proclaim thatevery human being is created in the image and likeness of God, and is endowedby our Creator with the unalienable right to life.I stand with President Ronald Reagan insupporting “the unalienable personhood of every American, from the moment ofconception until natural death,” and with the Republican Party platform inaffirming that I “support a human life amendment to the Constitution, andendorse legislation to make clear that the 14th Amendment protections apply tounborn children.”

• 85% are white.67% are men.
• 53% are under 50.
• 59% say they are satisfied financially.
• 82% say government is almost always inefficient and wasteful.
• 67% say they’re politically independent, yet
• 70% say they’ll vote for a Republican in 2012.
• 27% say Mitt Romney is their top pick;
• 13% say Ron Paul.
• 36% say they don’t know where Obama was born.
• 38% regularly watch Fox News.
• 60% say we shouldn’t give up privacy to be safer from terrorism.
• 54% support legalizing pot.
• 71% say homosexuality should be accepted, yet only 43% support gay marriage.
• 63% say there’s no solid evidence of global warming.

Many young people like Ron Paul becausehe speaks from his soul! He has very deep convictions, and we know he mighthave the chance of a snowball in hell of winning, but at least people want givehim credit for being real/authentic. And I resonate with that as well. When hetalks about the American Empire, I say YES we need to talk about the AmericanEmpire. But when he goes off into his Libertarian projections, then I know he’sliving in a different world.