Friday, June 14, 2019

In Alabama, Rapists' Fatherhood Rights Rule



Alabama's extreme forced-birth bill is not the only Tealiban*-type move there against the awful possibility that women might have some rights.  Alabama is also one of the two remaining states (Minnesota being the other) where rapists' fatherhood rights are strong. 

Take the case of Jessica Stalling: 

She has stated that her mother's half-brother began climbing into her bed when she was twelve or thirteen**.  By the age of eighteen or nineteen she had been pregnant four times and was the mother of two living children.  Her family forced her to marry her "uncle Lennie."  The marriage was later declared invalid because of the close familiar connection.

But now "uncle Lennie" has gone to court and won visitation rights to her two remaining children.


Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Women's Soccer. Or On Fair Pay And Using A Doll's Head As A Ball


Because it's the time of this year's Women's  World Cup*, several articles about women's soccer in more general terms have recently been published.

One, in today's Washington Post, has to do with the pay male and female soccer players in the US receive:

On International Women’s Day in March, all 28 members of the women’s team filed a class-action gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, alleging they do the same job as the men’s team in exchange for lower wages and inferior working conditions. The men’s national team has never won a world title and did not qualify for last year’s World Cup.
...

Defenders of the pay gap pointed to the significantly higher revenue generated by the men’s World Cup, compared with the women’s event. The 2010 men’s World Cup brought in about $4 billion, CBS reported, while the women’s World Cup in 2011 earned about $73 million. The men’s players got 9 percent of their event’s total revenue, while the women’s team got 13 percent of theirs, according to CBS.