Women in Combat

It was an article I received on the Twitter feed from the NY Post Opinion column.  When I tweeted my opinion, I had no idea there were so many people radically opposed to Women in Combat, despite the fact that we already are.

[caption id="attachment_1017" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Daughters of the American Revolution"][/caption]

Why are we here again?  Why are we discussing this, again?  This discussion was closed over 20 years ago.  We won, or did you not get the memo?  The issue of Selective Service registration is just part of the clean up after the battle.  It's not our fault that Politicians keep dragging their feet on the issue, making it appear to the Main Stream Media and the public at large that the issue is new, is not settled, and is still open for debate.

At first I thought it was just another vehicle Politicians could use in the 2012 Election to battle Social Policies which provide Equality and equal Freedom for Women.  In case you haven't been paying attention, Women have become the battle ground for the next Presidential Election.  The issue specifically is to require young women to register for the Selective Service at age 18, follow the links on the Opinion piece for reference.  The only requirement that continues to separate a Woman in the Military from her Male peers - they, men, have a national mandate to register while our service is entirely voluntary.  The very last hurdle Women need to be recognized as equals & peers among their Male peers.  The trickledown effect of Women in the Military and Social Policies within the United States have already proven to be effective in the application of the US Constitution & Amendments fully to Women Citizens of the United States of America - Selective Service.  They showed America that when given the option to Serve, we do so Freely.  That last hurdle means Gender Neutrality.  That means identifying a process for which American Women Citizens may demonstrate their Loyalty to their Nation, including the defense of their Nation even on the Battle Field.  It requires Strategy.  It requires the Sons of the American Revolution to look across the White House Lawn to the Daughters of the American Revolution and Strategically review our Assets.

Here we are again discussing women’s role in the Military.  Quite frankly, some of the opinions I have seen are insulting to the US Military.  To suggest that the United States Military, the most powerful force on the globe, is somehow incapable of training women to serve in combat is nearly treasonous.  And what’s more insulting, is the fact that many of the opinions either intentionally omit or are truly uninformed that women have been serving combat roles since 1973.

Charlie Wilson taught our Military Intelligence that Women's Freedom was an illusion, despite his well earned reputation of loving Women to his demise.  Through his efforts, and his ultimate failure to earn the votes necessary to build schools in Afghanistan after the Mujahedeen defeated the Soviets, Charlie Wilson allowed the United States to ransom Women's Freedom and the application of the US Constitution of our Citizenry without racial or gender bias.  Charlie Wilson's Jail Bait opened the door to educated women, giving them the opportunity to compete in the Job Market alongside their Male Peers for equal pay.  Not all Jail Bait was assigned to Embassy Duty or Congressional Committees.  They were sent to the Front Lines to learn how to send Equipment into Battle.  We were pretty enough, smart enough, brave enough and reckless enough to do the job.  Just like our Male Peers.  Pretty enough to Protect, Tough enough to Respect.  Some reference: George Crile, CNN Article

In 1980, Congress and President Reagan facilitated the US Military's first real, demonstrable efforts to faze Women into Combat Roles in a meaningful sense.  The repeal of the draft in 1973 was nearly 10 years old when they began programs that would put women in Combat and Combat Support roles.  For nearly seven years, from the end of the draft in 1973 and the start of Selective Service, women had been taking the opportunities open to them and were given a glimmer of equality in the Military.  It was Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada 1983 that proved Women, after 10 years of training, could serve in Combat Support, inching up as close to the battle as possible and performing not only well but effectively.  Charlie Wilson had begun his “bare knuckle” approach to providing assistance to Afghanistan in order to defeat the Soviet Union.  What people don’t know or want to forget, is that Charlie Wilson loved women, and it was because of his belief that women could literally do anything they put their mind to, he helped put us prominently in the face of politicians.  He loved women so much he filled his staff with “Jail Bait”.  His motto, “You can teach them to type but you can’t teach them to grow tits” rang through the House & Senate, garnering him the respect and envy of every Politician around him.  Some noble Congressmen even went so far as to emulate him by bringing more and more women into their staff rosters and voting in Congress to allow women expanded roles in the Military, including combat.  It helped that women performed exceedingly well in Grenada as loadmasters, engineers and pilots.

By 1987, Charlie Wilson and his covert War, was well under way.  The issue of Women in Combat was under review with “statutory limitations” applied to "eligible" Combat Support Roles, and the USAF was infusing women into Combat Flight Lines.  We had covertly entered the fight in the Middle East by supporting Afghanistan.  Then in 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was attacked by terrorists with ties to Lybia, and by 1990, Iraq marched into Kuwait.  I think that it was the backing down the first time we tried to engage Iraq in 1991 that Women lost footing in the US Military.  By the time we went into Afghanistan to chase bin Laden in 2001, then Iraq again in 2003, women had made significant inroads to serving in combat alongside their male peers, but made absolutely no in roads to reconcile the UCMJ and Sharia Law in regards to women.  We were an excellently trained Force with nowhere to go and our Country at War.  Now we are talking about Lybia again in 2011, the issue of women in combat is coming up for political review, and it only serves one purpose:  limit women’s role in combat and the US Military engages the Middle East with a significant reduction in troops – women can’t serve “on the ground” in Islamic Nations.

It was in between the backing down in Iraq and that time in 2003 when we returned with the force of 10,000 Orcs, when women in combat disappeared from the main stream media.  It was during this time that the US gave into Sharia Law, that the need for Air Space outweighed the UCMJ, and we, as a Nation, made our first demonstration of “backing down” to the Islamic Nations, and by extension, the Islamic Terrorist Groups.  We needed air fields and flight lines, to put our F-16’s and A-10’s so they could support the Ground Troops just in case we decided to ever invade someone in the region.  Saudi Arabia loved it; they had the most powerful Military in the world hosted on their Nation’s soil.  They became the big kid in the Sand Box with a baseball bat.  The US ransomed Women’s Freedom, something only Women living within the United States have an expectation.  We kept our women out of the Middle East, and in return Kuwait was set free from Saddam Hussein, or so the story goes.  In the years between 1991 and 2001, the US Military acquiesced time after time to every Islamic Nation on the Rules for Women.  Rules which stifle Freedom.  Rules which promote abuse and hint at slavery.  Saudi Arabia has been the biggest and most vocal opponents to US Military Women, with Lybia right on their heels.  While giving into the Terrorist demands, all the US Military could muster were a few strategically placed women in uniform, just to remind everyone that yes; the remaining 20% of our Troops are at home.

While Women’s Freedoms in the US flourished in both personal choices and career options in the 80's and early 90's, the image of the Free Woman became the dominant theme in US foreign relations with the Middle East.  All because of Charlie Wilson, John Murtha, and a little blind girl in prison, on death row, because she was raped.  They could not tolerate a Woman, their beautiful little Jail Bait being treated the same way.  This is the GOP who raised me.  I am a grown up Jail Bait.

It was Bush who sent women into combat on the Supply Chain in 2003; 20 years after Reagan drew on military women to prevail in Grenada.  For the first time, 20 years after they first entered the combat arena, women became part of the Ground Assault, delivering food and fuel and supplies to the units.  Just like Mad Maxx. Not just pilots and loadmasters, not safely ensconced behind the walls of a deployed command, but actually on the ground in enemy territory.  Twenty years after we began training, we lost our first true casualties of war.  Not just one woman in a single engagement, but multiple women in multiple skirmishes and some of them were even taken Prisoner.  In service to their country, in defense of their nation, in pursuit of their national freedom, they entered combat.  The psychological effect on the Islamic Nations was poignant.  In the nearly 10 years since our first female prisoners were taken in Iraq, the image of the Female Soldier continues to instill fear in the Islamic heart.  We have proven through our dedication to our Nation that we won't be taken without a fight and our military peers will retrieve us while dealing to our enemies a devastating death blow.  Imagine the philosophical conundrum of the Islamic mind - as a Muslim Man fighting Jihad, killed by a US Woman in a US Military Uniform.  So much for the promise of a Warrior's Death and those 40 virgins.  You can thank Gust for that little close combat psychological knife twist.

I served the US Military from 1987 to 1991, in the US Air Force as an F-16 Crew Chief.  I was on a flight line every day, loading jets with fuel tanks, bombs, missiles, gun ammo, and most importantly, a pilot.  My job was to get the plane off the ground at all costs.  Protect the asset, get it airborne – a jet on the tarmac is a sitting duck, but in the air it is a deadly force.  Get it up!  What I did not know, because I was too young and there was no Internet in 1986, was that the Graham Rudman Hollings Act of 1986-1989 a deficit reduction bill, affected Women in the Military and would by design of ending or significantly reducing the statutory limits on Women's Combat Training Programs, be a signal to the Islamic World that the US also treats it's women differently and we do have restrictions on Women's Freedom.  We promise not to send the Amazon's after you if you settle down share the oil and stop killing each other.

When I arrived at Tech school in Wichita Falls Texas, the male to female ratio was 3-1.  We were all crew chiefs in training.  It was easy - dangerously so.  The systems came to me so perfectly, the operational goals were so clear that when I received less than 100% on my exams, I demanded retraining until I reached a perfect score.  I received my orders 2 weeks before graduation – F-16, Shaw Air Force Base South Carolina.  Every day as I began the transition the male to female ratio began to change.  As my female peers were sent to Strategic Air Command, I was sent to Tactical Air Command.  They were preparing for large airplanes, large runways, and large facilities.  I was focused on small fast dangerous fighters, Falcons, capable of taking out a tank on the ground or a MIG in the air.  They were as dangerous on the ground to flight line personnel as they were in the air to enemy craft.  They were combat weapons and I was training to throw them up in the air to destroy enemies.

Prior to leaving for my final destination unit, the male to female ratio drastically changed to 5-1.  More times than not, I found myself the only female in a 10 man formation.  The Instructors from Tech School were replaced with Unit Personnel rotating through new recruit Training, preparing Airmen like us for the Operational Flight Line.  It got harder.  No longer was there an opportunity to demand re-training, it was Production Time, we were Live.  Then I reached the Flight Line.  There were 3 of us in the entire 300 man unit and only 2 of us were female crew chiefs.  For the first 30 days, every variation of the term Jail Bait was used, sometimes as a compliment, sometimes as an epithet. Within 6 months the only other female crew chief in my unit got pregnant and left both the unit and the flight line.  Then there was me.

For nearly 18 months, I was the only woman.  Crew chiefs, weapons, every specialty sub unit servicing the F-16’s – just me, the lone woman.  At one point I reflected back to Tech School and wondered where the hell all my peers went.  In less than 2 years I went from being just one of the crowd to the single woman in a sea of men, and not just any men, Crew Dawgs.  These men were hard, grizzled in only the way a United States Air Force Fighter Squadron Crew could be, at the tender age of 23.  They went to the gym daily, they went to the shooting range weekly, their jets came home Code 1 each and every time.  Anything less than a code 1 resulted in brutal fist fights between the various Specialties – pointing blame for not doing your job, for accepting less than 100% mission success.  It got harder.  This was a Fighter Flight Line.  This was Combat training Air Force style.

These seasoned Dawgs were our mentors, our leaders.  They directed the flow of the Flight Line process, prioritizing the fixes, ordering the crews, preparing for the next set of sorties.  Every mistake, every error was caught, questioned and examined by these men.  If they didn’t like the fasteners on an engine panel, they stood there yelling at you while you replaced it.  If they questioned your landing gear, they hovered over your shoulder berating you until the safety wire was replaced on every fastener.  They keep the jets in the air.  During the quiet times, this excessive hovering and barking seemed ridiculous, until we started War Week.  Following process is the only way to successfully completing the Mission.

In the Military, a week is officially 7 days, however, the definition is fluid.  A week could be 10 days.  It seems an insignificant observation, however, in the field, that 3 day differential can be excruciating.  It was during my first War Week that I discovered the horror of the Gas Mask.  Somewhere I got the notion I would never be in a situation where Gas Masks would be required, that was for Ground Troops.  I got “tagged” early in the War and spent 5 days filling body bags, also known as The Morgue.  We weren’t really dead; we were just out of play.

During my third War Week, I made it to day 6 before I got tagged.  This time however, I was tagged by my own unit as I was on my way to triggering a booby trap, so I was still in play.  Sadly, my mistake was not the only one – another group of our Dawgs also made a mistake and cumulatively the mistakes cost us a further day.  The penalty was an additional gassing with the loss of our physical buildings – we had to do everything from our makeshift bunkers scattered around the flight line.

At my fourth War Week, I found my niche – a dual role of Throw & Catch.  I spent the Launch at End of Runway, throwing the Falcons into the air, and then hauled ass across the flight line back to the unit command to catch them when they came down.  It was the first time I did not get tagged in an assault, as I was always on the move.  My little niche allowed a stronger male Crew Chief to remain at the Command manning the jets.  End of Runway was a role done in specific windows of time and can be defended far better than the actual flight line.  Therefore, the stronger Crew Dawgs were needed to remain with the earth bound predators.  Since I was capturing the operational data directly from the pilots, I was able to identify problem birds on the very last check point.  Because I was trained by intimidating Dawgs, I had the backbone to challenge Pilots on bogus maintenance issues and provide a full debrief to the Unit.  Often times, simply remembering that the light bulb in the clipboard map-mount is intermittent and the part is on back order resulted in a code 1 sortie.  It was my fourth War Week in 3 years that my unit won the Daedalion Award which kept us in the Training Competition.  The points which put us over the top were our accurate maintenance operations data.  My briefing of the EOR Crew assisted in a higher rate of Code 1 Birds during the training.  The strategic nature of our win was the placement of seasoned Dawgs manning the operational command, and the younger Apprentices in true support roles, keeping our unit in a constant state of movement - our Birds flew flawlessly 24/7 to exceed the Mission Goals.

The training we went through was specific, it was strategic, and it was combat.  To suggest that the training has become stagnant in the 20 years since I served is insulting.  What is difficult to deal with is this same disrespect to the Military’s training program feeds into the lack of women rising to the ranks necessary to hold a voice on the War Council.  The council from a battle seasoned multi-star General is taken far more seriously than that of a well trained Colonel who has never been allowed to join combat.  A Male President wants a Male War Council, never mind the fact that in order to attain the necessary rank & experience, women are prohibited from even trying.  It is a double edged sword of discrimination, both procedurally and psychologically.  Those women who are in leadership roles are buried behind bureaucracy and their efforts are intentionally kept silent by the main stream media.

Women have proven themselves in combat first in 1991 (Army Captain Karen Emma Walden) then in 2003 in Iraq (Jessica Dawn Lynch) and they continue to serve in Afghanistan.  The US Military has proven they are capable of training excellent female combat soldiers in every branch.  The only real reason to bring the long closed debate of Women in Combat is to re-address Sharia Law in the Middle East.  If we engage Lybia and we honor the treasonous agreements we made to keep US Women in Uniform out of the region, we go in with only 80% of our troops.  Women will be left at home, far from the battle.  Bringing the topic to the table and politicizing Women Soldiers only serves to provide our enemy with the information on our overall strength while deployed away from home.

There is a plus side to the suggestion of women registering for Selective Service, and that is opportunity.  The requirement would open doors within US Social Programs to young women graduating high school that they otherwise would not be exposed.  The very idea of serving 4 years in exchange for education has the potential to change that woman’s life forever.

Women registering for Selective Service will only lead to future generations preserving the freedoms of the US Constitution and instill the pride of Military Service.  After more than 200 years, our nation has an unspoken pride “My son is in the Army”.  The sentiment evokes “because only American Women raise American Soldiers”.  But what happens when those same American Women raise female soldiers?  Soldiers who then raise more American Soldiers, a Woman who understands the importance of Hunting for sport to train her daughter how to take down a 12-point buck.  A woman who understands how sacred American Freedom truly is and the importance of the discipline needed to defend that freedom at all costs.

Take a moment and reflect on how deadly Jessica Lynch’s sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters will be.  They will have been raised by a Woman who served her Nation in Combat, a Warrior and a Soldier.  There are thousands of women in the Military who are dedicated to protecting Freedom, defending the US Constitution, and have given up their rights as US Citizens to live and work under the UCMJ for the sole purpose of demonstrating their Loyalty to their Nation.  What force can overcome the loyalty of Hearth and Home?

http://www.womensmemorial.org/Education/timeline.html

No Poetry Controversy? - HUMAN EVENTS

 

 

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=30308

 

On this historic day, when America might feel tempted to bouts of self-congratulation, we might be counseled to reject the narrow-minded idea that America has any greatness, and be invited to embrace in rhyming lines that most of us are violent, gouging racists. I can already feel the warmth and the harmony. 

 

I think these concepts are very interesting

Pagans are not a Community nor a Tribe -- Not Yet

Pagan Community or Movement?

I got a hold of this discussion at Witch School CEO's Official Blog:
http://witchschool.wordpress.com/
By following my nose, I came across Chas Clifton's input. 
http://www.chasclifton.com/2009/01/pagans-are-not-community-nor-tribe-not.html
I have to say, there is a very good exchange of ideas here and something to think about. 

January 19th - Washington DC

 

Very interesting

 

Pagan Religious Rights - January 19, 2009

Sex Education

Did you know that the any discussion of the Human Reproductive organs – ANY discussion – is classified as Sex Education in the United States public schools?

From 1999 to 2001, I was an active member of the Endometriosis Resource Center (endocenter.org) and was listed as a Contact in my area for any women or Teens who needed information about the disease. In late 1999, after Endo nearly killed me, I discovered the volumes of emails begging for help were form girls 12-18 and young women 18-35. The idea was, get information to the school nurses so that Teen girls with Endo can get help.

Not allowed.

It is sex education and requires several things: a license to practice medicine in your state, a teaching credential, an approved permission slip form from the school district and a 6 month Board Review of the proposed curriculum.

In other words, no information about a deadly disease that affects teen girls can be shared on School Property. The place where Teen Girls spend all of their time.

Based on the fact that a certain Governor from Alaska is vehemently against Sex Education in public schools and has a pregnant teenage daughter, makes me wonder if Endo will ever truly be cured. With women like this in our local governments it makes me cringe when I think of all the little 12, 13 and 14 year olds dealing with their first menstrual cycle in a hostile and dark hearted environment.

I am very worried. We may have to live in a future of Mary Howell's, cruel and vicious women who harm their own "for the better good", blindly following a systematic break down of civil rights and spread a message of "freedom for me but not for you". This is what we will be forced to choose if we want to put a woman in the Executive Branch.

http://womenagainstsarahpalin.blogspot.com/

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/comments_blog/2008/09/gloria-steinem.html

Do I now have to worry that by placing a woman in the Executive Branch means I go back into the Broom Closet? Do I have to worry that the indigenous beliefs of my family heritage will be outlawed in this country? Does a vote for a woman mean a vote against freedom?

I am just not sure that a woman who is against sex education and has a pregnant teenager understands power – or rather the empowerment – knowledge can provide for a person.

Then again, maybe this same woman is simply a staunch defender of Free Will. Her unwillingness to interfere with the Free Will of her daughter might be evidence to support her true beliefs. Hey, maybe she's secretly a Pagan too!

 

Why My Aunt Judy Isn’t A Pagan

Cauldron Farm is a small homestead in Hubbardston, which is just south of Gardner in Central Massachusetts

Why My Aunt Judy Isn't a Pagan

Why My Aunt Judy Isn't A Pagan (Or How Far We Still Have To Go)

A few years ago, my Aunt Judy had a faithquake. Raised by one Baptist and one Methodist parent, she decided that her church wasn't doing enough for her and cycled quickly, in a period of a few years, through several different religions. She'd call up periodically and tell me about her perambulations, since I was the member of the family with the strangest religion yet.

I'm a hardline, polytheistic, pantheistic, animistic, died-and-born-again-the-shamanic-way pagan. Of course, I was perfectly willing to help when she decided to check out paganism as a potential faith - having already investigated and tossed Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, Hinduism, and Native American beliefs. I gave her a list of reading materials in books on and the Net, and sent her to investigate practicing groups in her area. After about eight months, however, she came back to me to talk about this final leg of her search, and to apologize, regretfully.

It seemed that she hadn't found what she wanted here, either, All right, I understand that religion is an intensely personal and intensely individual journey. There is no one path that's right for everyone, and sometimes a search is necessary. However, I have to admit that I foolishly assumed her issues would be with the theology and beliefs of my faith, or perhaps its politics. Of course, I had to ask where paganism had fallen short for her....and I got a surprise.

First, let me point out that Aunt Judy, although raised Christian, is by no means a Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Like most of the rest of my family, she's an environmentally aware liberal Democrat, a self-proclaimed feminist since I was in diapers, raised in a white-bread liberal church that politely tolerates queers and would never be so rude as to suggest that anyone short of a mass murderer is destined for Hell. She admitted to finding a surprising resonance with many pagan beliefs and values, admitted to being touched by its aesthetics and rituals, and will always carry with the skills of Tarot and astrology that she picked up on this leg of her search.

However, for her at least, a big part of religion is community of belief, and community action under that flag of belief. She pointed out that she could believe anything she wanted in the privacy of her bedroom, and intended to, but the point of her search was to find others of like mind with which to band together, worship, and serve. And, she felt, paganism fell down severely in that category.

But there are a lot of pagan groups! I protested, but soon discovered that what she really wanted was not a coven but a congregation - something with a built-in structure where she could step in and out without having to start over each time. She enumerated the things she'd liked about her church upbringing - the seeming effortlessness with which service projects were initiated and carried out, the willingness and enthusiasm of church members to pitch in and help, the regular schedule with some worship-oriented thing happening every week and sometimes twice. The child care and potluck suppers.

I remembered how hard I'd had to work the last time I tried to get a bunch of pagans to do a service project, First of all, just agreeing on something politically correct enough for all the members took months, and then, when we actually went to do the work at a local soup kitchen, half the people didn't show up. I was almost ashamed of us. Leading pagans is like herding cats, they say. I noticed the fundamentalist church had more people there than we did, and after asking I discovered that this wasn't a regular gig for them either, but just something they'd decided to do a week ago. A week ago! I tried to bring it up with my fellow pagans, to no avail. They're all just brainwashed, the tossed-off opinion seemed to be, and we're individualists. Creative. Not clones. Of course it's easier to get them to show up and work. Maybe that's the case, but I still felt bad about it, especially when I heard some of my fellow pagan workers trumpet proudly for months afterwards how they had actually done real service work, as if it was something terribly special for which they deserved extra praise.

If I'm a Baptist or a Mormon or even a Buddhist, Aunt Judy pointed out, "I can go anywhere in the country and get in trouble, and make a few phone calls and find someone who will come out and talk to me, even if I'm in jail. If I die anywhere in the country, my friends can find a clergyperson to speak at my funeral on a day's notice. I can be buried in a graveyard of my faith. I can get marital counseling on a day's notice. If I need food, I can call a church and they'll have a list of local food banks and help agencies. If I want to help with something, I can walk in, offer myself, and be sent to do something useful for the community in short order. If I'm pagan, I can't do any of those things.

She also missed, quite frankly, having a building. She agreed that one didn't have to have a building in order to worship, but she argued that buildings become community centers, and thus serve to bring people together, and that they also serve as places that members can give the gift of devotional art, long a satisfying spiritual experience. Gardens! she said. Even the Shinto priests have gardens. And there's no place for monasticism in paganism, so there are no retreat places. She feels that our rejection of monasticism, in whatever form, is a mistake.

She also pointed out the lack of older people in the pagan community - my Aunt Judy is no spring chicken - and suggested that part of this lack is our faith's serious lack of a service structure. Older people get a lot of their needs met through churches, she said, whether it's a community, company, delivered meals, or even a minister to show up every week and pay attention to them. That's why a lot of them stay in churches even when they might not necessarily believe the dogma. Paganism has a lot less to offer them than, say, the Catholic Church.

Of course, I had to bring up how many folks came to paganism after being somewhat religiously abused by harsh doctrines; they may see the concept of structure and buildings and Meals on Wheels as far too intertwined with harmful dogma to ever be separated. Her brow furrowed. Do you mean that most pagans are just reacting against their upbringings? she asked. Religions structured on rebellion against something, rather than being open to whatever is good, generally don't last very long. Then she grinned. With the possible exception of the Satanists, that is. But eventually you have to get over it.

Aunt Judy has joined a Quaker church now, and is happy. She still practices Tarot and astrology, and keeps a little goddess altar in her room. She's casually tossed off that she might look into the pagan community again someday....when we've grown up a little, she implies. I wish her well, and I hope she's found her place. Her cogent points did not shake my faith in my religion, but they did spotlight a number of big holes in its practice. Of all the people I know who call themselves pagan high priests or high priestesses, perhaps five percent do anything near the amount of religious scut-work performed by the average English Anglican vicar, or Brooklyn rabbi, or even the cheery old Methodist minister who served our family while I was growing up. And even with the question of stealth, I know more out pagans than I do in the closet ones.

Sometimes I feel like our religion is going through an extended adolescence, and it doesn't want to grow up. Part of this may be the all-too-young demographics of most pagans....I'm old enough now to remember the battles over child care at pagan festivals two decades ago, back when it seemed most pagans were college-age, and a few had just started to have families. Part of it may be that we've embraced, as a group, the archetype of the Youth, and are still warily coming to terms with what a community with as many Elders as Youths would look like. Would all those Elders start telling those Youths what to do, I can almost hear people thinking as a knee-jerk reaction. Would they start trying to Curb Our Freedoms? Would they try to Make Us Work? Would they start, God/dess help us, passing a Collection Plate for Maintenance on the Temple Roof? Or talking about Pagan Nursing Homes? What a Major Bummer!

Every day, though, my teenage daughter gleefully tells me how many new grey hairs I've grown. People who look like I once did have started to show up on my doorstep and treat me like I was....an Elder. I'm not sure what I think of this, or what's the best way to handle it. I'm beginning to think that it will be up to those of us with the grey hairs to build the buildings and set up the service projects, among ourselves. And maybe, somewhere along the line, the Youths will start to nose around, hungry for the satisfaction of Meaningful Work, drawn by the sound of people Making A Difference In The World.

And maybe I'll let you carry some boxes. Because my back is aching, and I cannot shoulder the work of dragging this community kicking and screaming into adulthood alone. ("2004", 2, "Raven Kaldera")

“Nasty Bad Pagans” – Kathy Lee Gifford Hate Speech

On Wednesday, June 25, 2008, during a live broadcast of a wedding reception on the TODAY Show, Kathy Lee Gifford gratuitously referred to Pagans as "nasty, bad Pagans." Ms. Gifford's hate speech has done harm to American Pagans' ability to live in peace with our neighbors of other faiths. By allowing her hate speech to be broadcast, her direct employer the TODAY Show, and their network, NBC, participate in that hate speech.

I am completely appalled that NBC has stooped to this level. This woman enslaves Asian and South American children and then turns her nastiness on Americans.

NBC, loose the trash and fire the hill billy!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is a petition calling for, at the very least, an on-air apology. A TODAY Show program devoted to dispelling misconceptions about Pagans and Paganism would go a long ways toward undoing the damage..

Clicking the link below will take you to this petition:


http://www. thepetitionsite. com/1/quotnasty-bad-pagansquot-protesting-hate-speech-on-nbc


Clicking the link below will take you to the site to view the video:

http://today. msnbc. msn. com/id/21134540/vp/25368216#25368216