Politics Daily

Another Mass Shooting, Another National Shrug in the NRA Era

Bonnie Erbe' — 2010-02-20T05:00:00 00:00

Yes, this was just another week in the gun culture wars. An Alabama professor with a long history of public outbursts and involvement with guns, a bomb -- even killing her brother with a shotgun many years ago -- is charged in a mass shooting on campus. Three fellow academics died and three others were wounded.

Half a nation away, the Virginia House of Delegates (my home state's legislature, regrettably) weakens a lengthy list of gun control laws, including the state's unconscionable, 17-year-long prohibition on the freedom to purchase more than one handgun per month.

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Candy Crowley: Incoming Queen of Sunday Morning Talk

Bonnie Erbe' — 2010-02-07T05:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Barack Obama, Education, Bill Clinton, Obama Administration, Culture, News Media, Jobs

This weekend, veteran CNN reporter Candy Crowley takes on a high-profile role in the often rough-and-tumble world of Sunday morning talk shows. As the new host of CNN's "State of the Union," Crowley will be the only female anchor in that time slot, and the first since Cokie Roberts stepped down as co-anchor of ABC's "This Week" in 2002.

Crowley has spent her adult life as a destroyer of heels and soles: a beat reporter and a political reporter, out on the streets, pounding pavements, getting on and off airplanes and spending nights in (some dingy, some palace-like) hotel rooms. From Bill Clinton's impeachment to Hillary Clinton's bid for the White House, Crowley has been in the front row asking questions.

Disclosure: I have known Candy for more than two decades -- since the time we covered Washington for two different radio networks. We worked as correspondents for NBC News back in the day, although in different bureaus and at different times. We've run into each other professionally on occasion (most recently last June, when we were honored with awards from the Women's Media Center ), but we have never socialized together.

After a half-hour phone conversation with Crowley this week, my impression is that she's up to her new task: She's a happy, smart, hard-working, well-grounded individual.

Is this your dream job?

You know, that would assume that I had dreamed of it. I didn't begin to dream of it until the opening came up. I said, "I'm going to call them up and say I want it." It was not in my sights.

Where was your career headed?

My whole career was not headed here. My career has been, well, organic. It's really good to have goals, but one shouldn't be so focused that you don't look right or left to see that there are other things out there. In many ways life has handed me many things I would not have expected, and this is one of them.

Do you feel like you're making history?

No, because I don't know what that feels like. In truth, I looked upon this first as a journalistic opportunity. It wasn't until Monday when my e-mail began to be flooded, that I realized this is something! I kind of expected that women might have written to me. But I didn't expect the outpouring from young women, strangers and people within and outside of our company. Then I said to myself: Wow! Well, good! If my new job is helpful to any young or old woman anywhere, then yay, I will raise the flag. But mainly I think of it as a journalistic challenge. At the same time, I'm clearly a woman. I'm telling the honest truth here. If you asked me: Who is Candy Crowley? I would say I'm a mother, I'm a journalist and I'm a daughter, a sister. I certainly am a woman and I would have gotten to that, but it's not my first self-identifier.

What was key to your rising in such a tough, competitive corporate environment?

Here at CNN we did a thing not too long ago that Dana Perino [former spokeswoman for President George W. Bush] suggested we do. She set up an event called "One Minute Mentoring." She brought together successful women and young women who were just starting out on Capitol Hill and at various media outlets. She asked the speakers to bring three top tips to give to these young women. My first and most important was to be who you are. Especially in journalism, which is about the truth. You also have to be lucky and I was enormously lucky. There is an enormous amount of being in the right place at the right time. But you have to stick with who you are and it's either got to work or it's not going to work. In the end, it was the most comfortable place for me to be. I guess if there's a secret, it's that I've been very, very lucky and I have an enormously supportive family.

Where has it not worked for you?

Oh, you know, there have been setbacks all along. Certainly you think to yourself, "I should have been given that job or beat or assignment, et cetera." "Nightline" was nirvana for journalism and I would have loved to have had a job there. But they had incredibly talented people there and they didn't need me. It didn't work out. I look at it now and I think back and it makes so much more sense if you look backward. Now I can say to myself that if that had happened, this never would have happened. And the truth is, if I got what used to be my dream job, I wouldn't be sitting here doing a dream job that I never dreamed of. So setbacks can be small things, like why I didn't get assigned a story, or big things, like why I didn't get a job. But you keep going and Jupiter aligns with Mars.

Do women have parity in broadcasting?

I would say no, I don't think so. But neither do minorities. Things are better but we are not there. It is a work in progress and it will get better still.

From what you do, from what I do, from what Andrea Mitchell does -- any time young women can take sustenance from that to keep going, then hallelujah!

Are women closer to parity in other fields?

I know they are, but I don't know in which fields. One of my sons is spending year in New Zealand and he took us to a dinner with a lot of doctors. He and my daughter-in-law are both doctors there. And we got into a discussion of whether it helps or hurts to be a female doctor versus female as journalist. My daughter-in-law thinks it actually helped her to be female in certain ways. And so in some ways, it can help. It can also hurt. Depends on who's making the selection.

Do you mentor young women, young journalists?

I try. In some official capacity? No. Do I address women young when they come in here? Yes. I answer young women's questions and try to help anytime I can. But it all comes down to time.

Are you or have you been called a feminist?

I don't know if I've ever been called it, but it depends on your definition. If it means being for equal rights and equal opportunity for women, you betcha! I think the term used to be disparaged, but I think that era is over frankly. There was a point when feminism was used as a pejorative term in the political world. But it's not a pejorative to me. And it's not a loaded word anymore.

Will the audience change when you take over "State of the Union"?

I haven't the vaguest idea. That's the biggest change for me: thinking about audience, because when you appear all over the network for short periods at different times, you think about audience in generic terms, not about specific demographics. I hope to not worry too much about it. My target audience is anyone who's interested in politics, and quite frankly I think that should be everybody, because their lives are affected by the outcome of politics. I want to know what they want to know, because that's what I want to find out and deliver.

As someone who's covered Washington politics, do you believe in bipartisanship?

Sure, it can exist where there's mutual agreement on something. But let's face it, bipartisanship generally is used as a term with one side when the other disagrees. On the other hand, that's why we have two parties. Or more, actually. Our system was set up to tolerate political differences. The majority also has to have a brake somewhere, and that's always been the minority [which can put brakes on programs backed by the majority].

Has the angry cross-talk increased in recent years?

I think sometimes when people refer to a lack of bipartisanship, I think they mean civility. If you look at President Obama last week [speaking at a Republican gathering] they didn't agree on much but they weren't calling each other names. I think that's what people are talking about. Politics has gotten uncivil and that's what people don't like. It's become like some awful kindergarten class.

How do you think Secretary of State Clinton is handling her job and and accomplishing her goal of offering special help for women and girls?

I don't know. I haven't watched that. But I will tell you this: Take a look at her approval ratings. They're way higher than the president's. People think she's doing a great job and she's one smart woman who works very hard, and it's hard to fail with that combination.

What's your favorite story that you have covered?

Oh, they are all my children. So many times throughout my career I've thought that this is the best story I'm every going to cover. You think: Oh, this is such a big story and you're there and this is going to show up in a history book somewhere. You cover the impeachment of former President Clinton and you say this is the story of my life. Then you roll into the political campaign of 2000 and by December we still don't have a president. Then you roll into 9/11 and I was on the streets of New York thinking this is the biggest story of my lifetime. After the Kerry campaign I thought, "I don't think I can go on and off the bus, and the plane and in and out of hotel rooms anymore." Then Hillary ran for president. Then Obama won and I stood in Grant Park that night and I said I'll never cover anything as big as this again. As I said it, I knew it wasn't true, for good or for bad.

Any tips to young parents on juggling career and family?

I can only tell you that for all the mistakes that I made in the juggling game, like dropping a ball, you never get over the feeling when your kids are young that you are in the wrong place if you are away from them, or if you're with the kids that you should be out covering a story. So there's always going to be discomfort and worry that you're doing right by your kids and your job. As long as that is your goal, and you know where your priority is, and that's your kids, you're going to be OK. I have spectacular adult children, and not because I didn't make mistakes but because they knew I loved them. [Candy has four children: two biological and two from a blended family.]

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Scott Brown's Election Holds The Key to GOP's Comeback in the Northeast

Bonnie Erbe' — 2010-02-01T04:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Republicans, Religion, 2010 Elections

Is Scott Brown's Senate election an omen of the possible resurgence of the moderate Northeastern Republican?Legions of disaffected moderates are hoping so.

On Sunday, the incoming senator told ABC's Barbara Walters he's pro-choice, a philosophy driven out of what famed and beloved Republican consultant Lee Atwater described as the party's big tent. [See a transcript of the interview here.]

But for now, that big tent is more of a revival tent dominated by the Christian right and conservative activists whose control has served to reduce the party to pup tent size in the Northeast.After the November, 2008 elections, the GOP lost its foothold in the Northeast. New England once served as the party's base. In Franklin Delano Roosevelt's landslide 1944 Democratic win, only Maine and Vermont cast their electoral votes for the GOP. In more recent times, the Northeast elected Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller as governor of New York, Jacob Javits as its senator, John Chafee (Lincoln's father) as senator from Rhode Island, Christopher Shays as a congressman from Connecticut , and John Lindsay from New York City, among others.

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France's Proposed Burqa Ban: Why Americans Might Want to Consider It Too

Bonnie Erbe' — 2010-01-21T05:00:00 00:00

Ban the burqa?

The French Parliament just completed six months of hearings promoted by a member of Parliament on the so-called burqa controversy. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has made no secret of his dislike for the Afghan-style garb and full-face veils, calling them "a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement."

At first, Sarkozy wanted burqas banned in all instances, but he has now stepped back to a more moderate position, seeking to have Parliament pass a law banning the full-body veil in public places and on public transportation. France, we should all remember, passed a law in 2004 banning young girls from wearing headscarves in public schools.

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Why Coakley Really Lost: Massachusetts' Health Care 'Reform'

Bonnie Erbe' — 2010-01-19T21:28:00 00:00

Filed under: Woman Up

Martha Coakley's devastating loss in Tuesday's senatorial race should be a lesson to members of her party on several important points. She was trying to fill the vacancy left by the death of perhaps the most powerful and certainly most well-known Democrat in the U.S. Senate and she should have coasted to victory. But several key warning signs to Democrats nationwide were ignored.

An Arkansas friend of mine sent around a blast e-mail posing the question, "Can you imagine a Republican winning in that bluest of states?" I answered, "Of course, Mitt Romney won statewide election there not too long ago." Massachusetts is no longer the reliably blue state it was during the height of Camelot.

Yes, there are plenty of liberals in the state, but they are outnumbered by blue-collar voters and conservative Catholics. According to the Massachusetts secretary of state, voter registration breaks down as follows: There are 1.6 million registered Democrats, 490,000 registered Republicans and 2.1 million Independents or registered voters who don't affiliate with either party.

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Bearing Children You Can't Support: Subsidies vs. Eugenics

Bonnie Erbe' — 2010-01-11T11:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Woman Up

Bad cases make bad law, or so the saying goes in legal circles. But if ever there was a bad case that cries out for a public reexamination of long-standing legal principle, it is this one.

A recently filed lawsuit reveals that a Massachusetts mother of nine is suing a hospital in Springfield for allegedly sterilizing her against her will.

As ABC News reported, Tessa Savicki "claimed that doctors at Baystate Medical Center had agreed to insert an intrauterine device, or IUD, that she brought to the operating room, but instead performed a tubal ligation that effectively ended her chances of having more children."

The universal first reaction to Savicki's story is "How horrible." But read on, because this woman is hardly a poster child for medical abuse. She, in fact, is filing her second, not first, lawsuit over medical issues. And, according to the Boston Herald, Savicki has nine children from several men, is unemployed and relies on public assistance for two of the four children who live with her. She said she receives supplemental security income, or SSI, for a disability, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Her mother has custody of three of her children. Two of her children are no longer minors.

The hospital has claimed from the start that Savicki, 35, signed a consent form to undergo the sterilization procedure. That form has mysteriously gone missing. If it is not found, it will probably force the hospital to settle or go to court with a dead-bang loser of a case.

Let me make clear I am in no way calling for legalization of forced sterilization. Far from it. I do not understand how the doctor in Savicki's case could possibly have done this to this woman without believing that Savicki had given her consent. As wrong as it may be for her to have any more children, or even the number she has had, that does not give the government or a doctor or anyone else the right to control her reproductive organs. They are hers and hers alone.

But what bears re-examination is how we, as a society (including the taxpayers and the environmentalists among us), react to her decision to have more children than she can possibly raise independent of federal and state subsidies. She is also bearing (selfishly as far as I'm concerned) an overly large brood at a time when U.S. and, indeed, world population growth is pushing the planet's ability to provide such needed commodities as clean air and water, housing and fuel to the planet's absolute limits.

Religious conservatives are quick to compare Savicki's case to one of the Supreme Court's more incendiary decisions, that of Buck v. Bell in 1927. The now-infamous opinion written by the otherwise revered jurist (who coincidentally also hailed from Massachusetts) Oliver Wendell Holmes declared:

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Such an opinion did not shock the pre-politically-correct world of 1927 America in the same way it shocks us now. Terms such as degenerate and imbecile were commonly used to describe people such as plaintiff Carrie Buck, who, by the way, became pregnant after being raped by a cousin. For that "act," she was also described as a loose woman.

The reason Savicki's case calls for a public re-examination of society's approach to profligate child-bearing is because we as a nation are vastly different than we were in 1927. We have changed our laws in a way that subsidizes reproductive behavior that is no longer beneficial to society, and we need to change them back.

In 1927, there were no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP or subsidized housing programs. With the exception of CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program), which came later, the other programs were all products of Roosevelt's 1930s New Deal and in response to the Great Depression. Various social safety net programs (11 percent) along with Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP (20 percent) now command a stunning 31 percent of the federal budget, more than defense (21 percent) and even more than Social Security (21 percent).

We are now spending, as we were not in Carrie Bell's day, billions of dollars to support millions of children whose parents bring them into the world knowing they cannot provide for their basic needs. I've come to the conclusion that societal support for such behavior is a net negative from two perspectives: I am a fiscal hawk and an environmental liberal. The United States is long past the point where additional population is needed or even, quite frankly, can be accommodated. Tessa Savicki's nine-child family leaves a considerable carbon footprint. She's also raising taxes for those of us who are working hard to support ourselves. I visualize such people coming up to me, tapping me on the shoulder and saying, "I want kids I can't support, so you're going to support them for me."

So does the medical system or government have a right to invade her person? Absolutely not! But in this day and age, does she have a right to foist her child-bearing costs on the rest of us? I say we need to change our behavior and stop subsidizing bad child-bearing decisions. When the federal subsidies go away, so will the irresponsible decision-making.

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Photoshop 'Til You Drop

Bonnie Erbe' — 2009-12-28T05:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Woman Up

The world of haute couture has always been one of make-believe, fantasy, outrageousness and the fantabulous. If high fashion were ordinary, who would buy it?

But even give those wide parameters, in its never-ending struggle to be more, better and different, haute couture has exploited high tech graphic design to a level many find troubling. Photoshop and other digital programs, while trying to scale new heights of outrageousness are pushing the reputation of fashion photography to new depths of depravity. And these digital remakes seem positively unnecessary, coming as they do at a time of increased anorexia-bulimia, lowered self-esteem for young women and a host of societal self-worth and image problems plaguing our culture and young girls.

Today's women are trying to fight back, at least some of them. Just before Christmas, a gaggle of protesters who couldn't take it anymore marched outside the New York City flagship Ralph Lauren store "to demand that the company stop using images of models who've been Photoshopped into unreality for its advertisements. Protest organizers said they even envision a legislative solution."

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Norwegians Must Be Asking: Why Obama for Peace Prize?

Bonnie Erbe' — 2009-12-14T05:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Woman Up

Norway, it seems, has gotten as good as it gave. After the six Norwegians on the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarded the coveted honor to a man who clearly and self-admittedly did not deserve it, Norwegians themselves have become upset with the man and, by inference, their decision to honor him in this singular fashion.

Two public opinion polls revealed dissatisfaction with Obama's decision to skip the traditional Nobel events, including a "Save the Children" concert in which the only presence of the U.S. president was a cardboard cutout brought in a kind of good-natured rebuke. "Norwegians's Verdict: Obama Is Impolite" blared the headline in one Oslo daily newspaper.

A little bit of background research might have alerted the Nobel Committee to Obama's annoying tendency toward expediency and away from commitment to principle. Instead, the Nobel Committee mimicked America's voters when they rushed to select Obama. Both votes, by the American public and the Nobel Committee, struck me as more appropriately viewed as a rebuke to former President Bush than as a rah-rah for Obama.

The Nobel Committee rushed into bed with Obama. When the alarm bell rang the next morning, six Norwegians found themselves sleeping next to someone quite apart from the person they had viewed through gin-altered glasses the night before. Hence his tepid public support from Norwegians Friday.

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To Curb Climate Change, We Must Curb Immigration

Bonnie Erbe' — 2009-12-01T05:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Woman Up

I wish President Obama the power of Jupiter and the wisdom of Minerva as he travels to Copenhagen for the U.N. Summit on Climate Change. He will be leading the first serious U.S. participation in productive global climate change talks in more than a decade. But do I believe he will accomplish anything meaningful at those talks, meaningful enough, that is, to begin to roll back climate change? No, sorrowfully, I do not believe he can.

Why? We Americans have been redeemed from the horrific nadir of anti-environmentalism by electing a pro-environment president. But our populace will not unite behind meaningful environmental regulation or comprehensive reform that's powerful enough to recapture the evanescent monster of heat-trapping greenhouse gas and slay it.

Rolling back climate change requires a two-pronged approach. Only one of those "prongs" is even on the table in Copenhagen -- reduction of greenhouse gases. To get there, we must curb many of our beloved activities that create them, including our affinity for big cars and trucks, our passion for fossil fuels, our dependence on smokestack industries and our love of sprawl development.

Americans haven't the spine for such concessions. Once we do, only then can we begin to approach the second prong. The second prong requires admitting that population growth here at home is a major factor driving climate change. We must begin to curb our ballooning population before we can draw up a plan to combat climate change. There is no political will for such an admission, much less action on that front.

President Obama is proposing a roughly 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen. According to a Chicago Tribune story, this is "in line with a climate bill that passed the House in June and is pending in the Senate, but well below what many scientists, along with political leaders in Europe and developing countries, say is needed from the United States to avert the most catastrophic effects of climate change worldwide."

At the outset, Mr. Obama is heading to Europe with a plan most experts find woefully feckless. Mr. Obama sees "splitting the difference" as the righteous path to progress. Despite the president's never-ending succession of compromises, he has yet to woo his own Senate into an alliance on greenhouse gases, much less his own party, which controls the U.S. Senate:

"The measure has deeply divided Democrats. With states in the Midwest, South and Rocky Mountain West dependent on fossil fuels for energy, many senators are worried about the legislation's impact on industry and consumers."

While Republicans and conservative Democrats fiddle over industry's rights and consumers' needs, the planet is burning. And the heat will go up and up and up while present-day Neros (country leaders) keep on fiddling.

So my pessimism about the president's mission is born of a realistic assessment that not only are we far from agreement on limiting greenhouse gas emissions, but we are even further from admitting their primary source: There are too many people living in developed nations, driving industrial production, the need for fossil fuels and therefore creating greenhouse gases.

There was a time when discussion of population stabilization was not verboten in the popular culture in conjunction with environmental progress. Organizers of the first Earth Day in 1970 called population growth a central issue in the fight to save the planet. A groundswell of support for environmental causes helped spur Congress and the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations to enact a host of sweeping environmental laws.

On Jan. 1, 1970, the president signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), often referred to as the nation's "environmental Magna Carta." The act included a "Declaration of National Environmental Policy" that began: "The Congress, recognizing the profound impact of man's activity on the interrelations of all components of the environment, particularly the profound influences of population growth . . ."

Can you imagine Congress passing and the president signing such a law today? Of course not! This would, and eventually did, cause the churches and the pro-immigration lobby to spiral skyward in a frenzy of fury and angst. And yet, environmentalists were much closer to conquering the greenhouse gas problem then, with many fewer people and much less development, than we are today as the president heads to Copenhagen.

How and why we drifted away from population stabilization as an environmental mantra is fodder for another column, or a book. But let me give you the headline version, which is to say, A) Immigration (the primary driver of U.S. population growth) interests formed a powerful lobby that painted immigration as a human right, rather than as an environmental wrong, and B) Churches, industry and developers realized that without a ballooning population, churches would lose followers, and industry and developers would lose customers. So they marketed the benefits of an unending population boom. And their campaign worked.

Let me state, as I always do when I write on the touchy issue of immigration, that I am the proud daughter of a Cuban citizen who entered this country penniless. It is mass immigration I oppose, not individual immigrants, most of whom are honest, hard-working people. That said, if we want to stop global warming while the earth is still salvageable, we must start by curbing immigration.

So as President Obama heads to Copenhagen with or without the power of Jupiter and the wisdom of Minerva, he must maneuver past fertility goddess Diana. And unfortunately, Diana appears ready to overwhelm Jupiter and Minerva.

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The Downside for Female Breadwinners: Losing Your Kids

Bonnie Erbe' — 2009-11-20T13:25:00 00:00

Filed under: Woman Up

A fascinating article in Working Mother magazine spans the quickly shifting landscape of primary custody battles in divorce cases.

Working women, the piece points out, are in the midst of a watershed tradeoff -- as they advance in numbers as family breadwinners, they are losing primary custody of children in divorce cases. More women are losing primary custody because one in four married women now out-earns her husband -- a tidbit not all women will view as advancement. These working women are spending more time at work than at home, and judges are noticing. The sad part is that much of the role reversal in women's earnings is a side effect of the recession, which has produced the highest percentage of job losses in industries where men are in the majority: finance and construction, for example.

So the Working Mother piece starts out as a "woe is me" (sorry, sistas) tale, spotlighting hard-working Boston business owner Julie Michaud who busted you-know-what to support a stay-at-home dad and their two children. The father hadn't worked in five years, even though Julie "begged him to get a job." They both sought primary custody of the kids, which he won in court, much to her surprise and dismay, in addition to a whopping $1,300-a-week in child support and alimony. All she got was "Wednesdays, Fridays and every other Saturday" with the kids, at least on a temporary basis.

This is obviously a nightmare scenario for a mother and business owner. No one can argue that point. But there are some positive glimmers penetrating the massive cumulonimbus of funk. I'll get to those in a moment, but first the facts.

"There are about 2.2 million moms in this country like Julie, moms who don't have primary physical custody of their children. And the number of working moms who lose primary custody has been rising steadily."

Julia Michaud is, unwittingly, a front-line warrior for women's advancement in the workplace and in society. She and other mothers like her are the first ones overboard as judges grapple with societal reformation of gender roles and expectations.

The change in the assumption that women always should have primary custody is a heart-breaker for these women. But it's also a needed change of outmoded stereotypes that women are by nature the preferred parent. The fact is some men are better parents than some women. And it's to women's overall advantage in the workplace and as ambitious, would-be high- wage earners that society starts viewing childrearing and homemaking as gender-neutral occupations.

Can men give birth? Can men breast-feed? Of course not. But that does not mean they cannot parent as well as women and in some instances, even better. No. Until employers understand that a young man is as likely as a young woman to get married and start a family, the wage gap will persist as an ugly adherent to women's careers. American women still only earn 77.1 percent as much as their men, well beyond the point at which many of us thought we'd be close to parity.

But what many people don't realize is that two equally well-qualified PhDs, one male and one female, get hired at almost the exact same salaries right out of school. She will earn 98 percent of what he earns. The wage gap sets in as she heads toward marriage and child-bearing, and employers begin to view her as likely to take time off from work to raise her children, or to leave the workforce entirely. By the time she's 50 and he's 50, even if she never got married or had children, the wage gap is quite pronounced.

Only when employers see that their male employees are just as likely to take family leave as their female employees will that nagging gender pay gap start to close. In recent years, the female-to-male earnings percentage has stagnated in the mid-70s range and even rose a bit last year.

The custody trend in the courtroom is real, but it must be put in perspective by other data which show the percentage of father-headed households is rising, but overall it is still quite small:

"The 2000 census found: In 2.2 million households, fathers raise their children without a mother. That's about one household in 45 (even though) the number of single-father households rose 62 percent in 10 years."

So fathers winning custody battles is a sea change, but perhaps one tantamount to a large current as opposed to the tidal wave one might otherwise be led to believe it to be.

The article ends on a somewhat positive note, which is where it should have started. It warns working mothers not to allow custody disputes to go to court -- they suggest women do much better in mediation than in court. Children, too, fare better when parents don't wage costly, emotion-ridden, drawn-out custody battles.

It also hints, as I have stated, that fathers can parent just as well as mothers, and children need involved fathers in their lives:

"Mental health experts reinforce the importance of two loving parents in a child's life. New research from Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe shows that kids brought up with shared custody or spending equal time with both divorced parents are physically healthier as adults than those living primarily with one."

The sooner society drops gender stereotypes, the better off both genders will be.

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Are Women Becoming More Violent?

Bonnie Erbe' — 2009-11-13T05:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Woman Up

Two viral videos of girl-on-girl and woman-on-woman violence grabbed the world by the throat this week and raised the question: Are American females becoming more violent?

In the first video, punch-throwing, hair-pulling, brawling high school soccer players were caught on tape by a Rhode Island TV station just before the match between their Woonsocket and Tolman high school teams was about to end.

Then, last Friday, the University of New Mexico suspended soccer player Elizabeth Lambert for a variety of violent moves, including pulling an opponent's pony tail so hard she jerked the young player to the ground and appeared to have wrenched her neck. Click play below to watch the video:

What's going on here? The first part of the answer is that violence in women's sports is nothing new. In soccer, for example, there's a lot of jostling, pushing and shoving, even among some of the youngest players. Lambert may have taken female violence in this sport to a new high, or to a recent high, but she certainly is not the first to perpetuate such foul and unexpected behavior. And she may not be unusual at all -- just unfortunate to have been caught on video camera.

The second part of the answer is that female-on-female violence outside of sports is nothing new, either.

To determine if female violence is really on the rise, we need to step back and look at a few statistics. There are many categories of female-perpetrated violence, but it's safe to say when women and girls become violent, it's more often against someone of their own size or smaller. The most horrific category of child-killing, neonaticide (killing of a child within 24 hours of birth) is committed almost exclusively by women. It's a rare occurrence, but one worth noting.

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Protecting Animal Rights: A Quiet Revolution

Bonnie Erbe' — 2009-11-10T05:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Woman Up

The querulous political scene seems to have blocked progress on many social issues, but there's a quiet social revolution underway that no amount of partisan bickering appears able to stop: the movement toward more compassionate treatment of animals and the increasingly serious punishment of animal abusers.

According to the Humane Society of the United States, every state in the nation has enacted some sort of anti-cruelty law to protect animals from abuse. Misdemeanor laws have been commonplace for decades, but here's where the revolution starts to roll. As of last month, 46 states had approved felony-level penalties for certain acts of animal cruelty, and 31 of those states upped the animal cruelty ante from misdemeanor- to felony-level charges during the last 10 years.

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