Maryland Judge: Some Domestic Violence Victims Like Being Hit

By houppert

Domestic violence cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute.

But every once in a while, prosecutors get handed the tools for a conviction on a silver platter: An impartial eyewitness who just happens to be a police officer.

Such was the case in a domestic violence trial that made the local papers here in Maryland last week. A cop pulling into an Exxon station saw a man hit his girlfriend in the face three times, called in back-up and had the man arrested.

Read More »

October 25, 2007

Nobel Prize Winner "Abandons" Family

By houppert

Why is it that when a man leaves his wife and she retains custody of the kids we say, simply, "he is divorced?"

Yet when a woman, say Doris Lessing, leaves her husband and he retains custody of the kids we say "she abandoned her family?"

…just something to mull over as we read the New York Times tribute to Doris Lessing, the fabulous feminist writer and 87-year-old winner of the Nobel prize for Literature....Just something to consider, lest us feminists get too cocky and drift toward any you've-come-a-long-way-baby reflection on The Golden Notebook.

Read More »

October 15, 2007

Soldiers Who Steal

By houppert

When it comes to this whole scandal regarding graft in US military contracts, I like to muse over the strange mea culpa put forward by military brass who admitted to The New York Times yesterday that officers in Kuwait may have been a little under-trained.

That's why they accepted bribes when they shouldn't have. They should have had more contracting experience and training, military officials explained, then they would have learned that skimming approximately $6 billion off the top of awards was the wrong thing to do. (Apparently, this is not covered in Contracting 101.) Further, brass says, they should have annual ethics training to...what? Remind them that 365 days may have passed, but that stealing is still wrong?

Read More »

September 25, 2007

Dispatch from War-Torn Baltimore

By houppert

I live in Baltimore, Maryland.

At the moment, that is slightly more dangerous than being an American soldier in Afghanistan.

In Afganhistan, just over eighty US soldiers have been killed so far this year. In Baltimore, we're up to 215 murders in 2007.

Read More »

September 13, 2007

Breastfeeding and Blow Jobs

By houppert

Yesterday was one of those days when, having read the paper you are quite certain it is full of misprints and mistakes--either that or you've slipped down Alice's rabbit hole into a logic-free world.

Are Muslim clerics really issuing salacious fatwas by ordering Egyptian working women to breast-feed their male colleagues five times in order to "establish family ties" and to enable unmarried men and women to work together without the usual Koranic restrictions?

Are young people in this country really serving 10-year prison sentences for consensual oral sex?

Read More »

June 13, 2007

Motives Behind Virginia Tech Massacre Found! Lit Profs to Blame

By houppert

Virginia Tech's commencement exercises took place this week. Columnists across the country weighed in to consider the impact of last month's massacre on the surviving students, to walk a minute in the shoes of the grieving families of the 32 dead, and to speculate again about the motives that drove Cho Seung-Hui to gun down his fellow students.

But rest easy, Nation readers, because one intrepid columnist has solved the riddle of Cho's rage: Literature professors who stray from the Western canon are to blame.

Not lax gun control laws. Not campus security or local police. Not holes in the system for treating psychologically disturbed students. But reading the wrong kind of poetry.

Read More »

May 14, 2007

Hillary, What Have You Done for Me Lately?

By houppert

My 10-year-old son is triumphant because he thinks he has me in a bind. He knows, from frequent dinnertime conversations, that I'm keen on Obama. And he assumes, because I wear my feminism on my sleeve, that I'll feel obligated to vote for Hillary so that we can celebrate the first woman president of the United States.

"You'll have to vote for her because she's a girl," he taunts.

"Woman." I correct, barely listening. How did I raise such an annoying child? "Eat your broccoli," I tell him. "I'm voting for Obama."

Read More »

May 11, 2007