Category: Women’s Rights

Picket Darrel Issa outside Shadowridge Country Club in Vista (1980 Gateway Dr.), where he is featured at a $125/person “Meet the Leaders” cocktail party (630pm) and dinner (730pm) by the Vista Chamber of Commerce.

Picket Darrel Issa

Today – March 13, 2012

5:00pm until 8:00pm

Shadowridge Country Club

Gateway Drive and Shadowridge Drive, Vista CA

We will line the public sidewalks along Gateway Drive, leading up to the Country Club entrance, and at its intersection with the busy Shadowridge Drive.

Bring your sass and creativity — we want to let the Chairman of our House Oversight Committee who held a hearing on contraception and refused to allow any women to testify in the first panel, know that we WILL be heard and seen, despite his best efforts!

Since the right-wing and their attendant press refuse to run Doonesbury all week because Gary Trudeau is focusing the strip on women’s reproductive rights, we have decided to run them – all week. Here is Day No. 2.

Comics about women’s reproductive rights simply not “appropriate”

Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau takes on Texas’ controversial abortion laws this week, but you won’t see them in our big bold San Diego U-T. U-T editor Jeff Light joins a number of equally feckless editors in places like Kansas City, MO, pulling the strip completely, or providing “replacements.” Father knows best…

In today’s Doonesbury strip, a Texas woman walks into an abortion clinic and is introduced to the shaming room.

I arrived at the Federal Building while the San Diego Occupellas were still practicing. This Women Occupy group rewrites the lyrics of well know songs with punchy occupy themes. As one of the speakers would later point out, 99% of women use contraception, which is just one more reason to be part of the Occupy movement.

Editor: Our good friend Eugene talked to some of the women who took part in a rally downtown today, in front of the San Diego Federal Courthouse, about issues that are affecting women right now.

All videos by Eugene Davidovich

Come inside for Eugene’s Video interviews…

Editor: Here is an update on Larissa Danielli by OB blogger Gail Powell. Larissa, you may recall, was arrested November 3, 2011, in Ocean Beach when she returned to her Cape May apartment to find an adjacent apartment had caught on fire and firefighters had entered her unit. Medical marijuana was found and her troubles exploded. For three months, her young son was taken from her. Larissa has given her side of the story before, yet her travails just stagger the mind.

By Gail Powell

Last year, when a fire consumed the Ocean Beach apartment building where Larissa Danielli and her son, Silas resided, another fire of injustice and persecution started up that very day.

There were terrible consequences suffered by single mom Larissa and her sweet little boy who were doubly victimized by the tragedy that ensued.

Women from all over San Diego County will rally in front of the US Federal Courthouse in San Diego on Thursday, March 8th, to support women’s rights to contraception on International Women’s Day. The rally will be held from noon to 1pm, and the Courthouse is located at 940 Front Street, in downtown San Diego.

The rally will address a number of recent attacks on a woman’s right to contraception and family planning:

• US Rep. Darrell Issa convenes a hearing about contraception with 5 men on the panel, and no women.

• Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum touts the “dangers” of contraceptives and that sex is “only for purposes of procreation.”

• Foster Friess, main donor to a super PAC for Rick Santorum, suggests women use aspirin as a contraception method.

• Rush Limbaugh, on a national radio show, calls a young woman a slut and prostitute because she speaks out in favor of birth control.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / March 4, 2012

UPDATE: ProFlowers is suspending its Limbaugh ads (see comments below).

March is National Women’s History Month, and this year’s theme is “Women’s Education — Women’s Empowerment.” It’s a nice mom-and-apple-pie theme. Educating women is relatively noncontroversial in the United States, as long as students don’t expect affirmative action or public funding to get them past race and class access hurdles. And, unlike gals in Afghanistan, U.S. coeds don’t have to dodge acid-tossers on their way to school; they only have to contend with post-adolescents who want to rape them with the aid of ruffies in their Red Bulls.

From Ocean Beach Mainstreet Association / Feb. 21, 2012

The Ocean Beach Woman’s Club has been a “Hub of Activity” in Ocean Beach for eighty-eight years. The majority of the club’s history from 1924 to 1937 has been lost from the official records. The information that we do have comes from historians and newspaper articles of the time. On September 21, 1997 the building sustained major fire damage. Again much of the club’s records and history was lost or damaged by the fire. It is gratifying that the sons and daughters of old time members are finding and presenting the club with memorabilia of the club in years past.

The Ocean Beach Woman’s Club was founded on November 24, 1924, and is one of the oldest civic groups in San Diego. Forty five charter members are listed as having signed the charter. Many of the club’s charter members were married to the Chamber of Commerce men, so the women had long been involved in public affairs. Records indicate that the club was a member of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs prior to 1936. The club was organized with a Constitution, Bylaws, and its first Board of Directors on January 12, 1925.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / Feb. 19, 2012

I first saw The Vagina Monologues in 1998. One of my sisters bought tickets for the women in the family while I was back east for a visit from California. We trundled off to Manhattan to see playwright Eve Ensler perform her one-woman show at an off-Broadway theater. It was a stunning celebration of things down there, one that stunned my then 70-something mother into silence, which was a first and, perhaps, a function of her Depression era Southern upbringing. The rest of us cheered all the way home. The play was, as the title indicates, a lot of talk about vaginas. Or, more accurately, about vulvas, labia and clitorises, pubic hair and orgasms, and the grand diversity of women and girls who possess them — with varying degrees of familiarity.

Over the past few weeks a seemingly endless parade of dour old pontificating shriveled up white guys have set us straight on contraception, abortion, sex and even the definition of life itself. They have done it at all levels of government, from the pulpits and on the airwaves.

Now that they have fixed the economy, brought back jobs and lowered the deficits, those who have been aptly described as “the best minds of the thirteenth century” can now turn their attention to what they really seem to enjoy—sex talk and lots of it!

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / February 12, 2012

Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, seems to have been widely misquoted last Friday, after the Obama administration announced a compromise to the campaign-season conflict between religious liberty and women’s contraception coverage under health insurance plans provided by Catholic employers (hospitals, universities and other agencies, but not churches). With the compromise, responsibility for funding contraceptives was shifted to the insurers, and Dolan purportedly said the resolution was, “a first step in the right direction.”

But, oh no, no! What Dolan surely said was that the resolution was “a first step in the right direction — to hell!” and that was made clear when the bishops slammed the compromise later in the day.