Can Healthcare reform change marraige?

It is not uncommon to hear proponents of gay marriage list access to health care as one of the many benefits of marriage. What happens if folks can access health care and not be married? Would access to health care change main stream ideas about marriage? Would marriage's pedestal shorten a bit if there is a public health care option?

I began with gay marriage because the use of the health care argument in favor of it indicates that health care, in part, is one of the things that makes marriage desirable. If health care becomes easier to access for non-married folks then perhaps there will be one less reason to get married. Perhaps access to health care could help us move towards untangling public benefits from heterosexual marriage. Perhaps I am too optimistic :) but if we get health care reform then we can change other things like inheritance rights.

How do we define intimacy?

I recently re-read "Sex in Public" by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner. I also recently saw Stranger than Fiction and Julie and Julia. Revisiting Berlant and Warner's questions and arguments about intimacy and watching these films made me wonder if Julie and Julia, and Harold Crick and Karen Eiffle interactions (this is not quite the word I need) constitute intimate relationships. What are relationships? How do we define them? What is intimacy?

In Stranger than Fiction Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell, is a boring IRS worker who follows the same routine everyday, down to the number of steps (which he counts) that it takes to get to the bus each morning. One morning while brushing his teeth (and counting the brush strokes), Harold hears a woman with a British accent narrating his actions. Harold's ability to hear the narrator means that he is no longer just the protagonist but also an audience member or perhaps he becomes a sort of reader of the book in which he is the main character. I haven't quite got this worked out yet.

Harold solicits help from Professor Jules Hilbert a professor of literature, played by Dustin Hoffman. Hilbert tells Harold that there are two kinds of stories--tragedies and comedies--and that they need to figure out which one he is in. If Harold is in a tragedy then he will die. The Professor eventually figures out that Harold's narrator is Karen Effile, played by Emma Thompson. Harold learns that Eiffle always kills her main character at the end of her books. He finds Eiffle and asks her not to kill him.

Throughout the film Eiffle plays out/visualizes varying deaths for Harold. The meeting between author and character leads to a change in Eiffle's novel. Instead of killing him she puts him in a body cast.

I think that the interplay or interactions between Harold and Eiffle constitute raises interesting questions about intimacy. As author Eiffle knows everything that that her protagonist does. If intimacy is a certain kind of sharing or knowing then perhaps Eiffle has an intimate relationship with Harold. But this relationship is one sided because Harold does not know about Eiffle. When Harold begins to hear Eiffle's voice the relationship changes. The confrontation between author and protaganist changes both their lives.

Obviously I am struggling to find a way to talk about their relationship. I'm going to stop for today. Maybe tomorrow I will figure it out.

New TSA regulations could be trouble for transgender folks

Beginning tomorrow, August 16th, airline passengers will be required to report their birth date and gender when purchasing an airline tickets. The Detroit News reports that

Because the government will have access to additional pieces of identifying information, the TSA says it will be better able to distinguish between, for example, a 25-year-old John A. Doe who is OK to fly and a 37-year-old John Z. Doe who is not.

In addition to the data required of passengers, fliers who have had difficulty with watch list confusion can include a "redress" number. Those are issued to cleared passengers who have been stopped or delayed before because of similar names or other confusion.

"By enhancing and streamlining the watch list matching process, the Secure Flight program makes travel safer and easier for millions of Americans," Gale Rossides, the TSA's acting administrator, said in a statement.

The Secure Flight program was born out of a Department of Homeland Security directive issued in 2006 that required the TSA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to start working together to implement a system to make sure airline passengers have been cleared.

While the intent is great, I worry what it means for transgender folks. What happens if you are a trans guy with a government ID that says female? Will you be harrassed? Will you be able to board the flight? Why do they need to know one's gender anyways? Date of birth, okay that makes some sense, as the above quote makes clear but gender, really?

During NPR aired some folks' comments about the ne regulations. Some folks commented that gender is a given, that it does not need to be asked. For some of us it is not a given. What will happen when we try to fly?

Frances Kissling and aborting the poor

In a recent Salon.com article Frances Kissling argues that it is better morally for a poor ignorant woman to have an abortion then to have a baby (I am paraphrasing, of course). She does not tell her readers what a poor smart woman or rich ignorant woman should do with an unintended pregnancy, perhaps for Kissling these kinds of women do not exist.

Kissling's argument is a response to Congresswoman Rosa Delauro's statement that the U.S. should

foster an environment that encourages pregnancies to be carried to term.

This statement is part of a promotion for the Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act. I must admit that I have not yet read this act. Delauro's statement and the Acts title, for me, suggests that this act is problematic on several levels.

For Kissling

In its extreme application DeLauro's ideal would applaud Pope John Paul II's plea to Muslim women in Bosnia and Herzegovina who had been raped by Christians during the war. In a 1993 letter he called on the community to draw close to these raped and degraded women and "help them transform an act of violence into an act of love and welcome" by having their rapists' babies.

Whoa!

Kissling starts off with a valid question: Should we encourage women to have babies? For me this question might lead to a discussion of heteronormativity, government sanctioned gender roles, or how the desire for parenthood is constructed. But Kissling isn't interested in thinking critically.
Instead she argues that sometimes it is morally better to end a pregnancy. The people whom she thinks should abort are poor ignorant 22 year olds who are caviler about the consequences of sex, are confused about life and have low self esteem.

And being poor and ignorant and living in a country that doesn't care that you are both doesn't eliminate personal responsibility or moral agency. Somewhere along the line it would be helpful if feminists acknowledged that far too many women (and men) are irresponsible when it comes to sex and pregnancy. If we want to say that women can be trusted to make good decisions about reproduction, then we need to demand of each other that we make good decisions about not becoming pregnant.

I am pro-abortion and pro-choice; I do not believe that having or not having a child is a moral decision. And though Kissling acknowledges that rich people can be bad parents and that poor people can be good parents her piece slides down a slippery eugenicist slope and lands squarely on the mind set of "if you can't feed them; don't breed them."