As some of you undoubtedly know, the California Supreme court has ruled that doctors may not discriminate against patients because they are gays or lesbian because their religious beliefs regard homosexuality as sin..

It’s about damned time some court told the fanatics to sit down and shut up.

I’ve been reading a lot of books about religion lately—not surprising when I write so much about it, particularly about the Religious Right. This time, most of the books were about women coming to terms with faith, and how it changed them. In two cases, women discovered feminism and began to ask the hard questions.  I found myself  wondering how women (and men) here at DailyKos had handled issues of faith and feminism.

With the primary wars over, it’s time for a change.   Pooties rule!

As some of you know, we share a home with my 88-year-old Dad.  We always had cats, but after Mom’s beloved trio of flame point Siamese crossed the Rainbow Bridge, they didn’t adopt new kitties, so Dad has been cat-deprived for 15 years.  Now that he’s up here with us, he has 4 feline companions to choose from, and he’s been having  a ball.  

When I went out on the front porch today, I saw that the first of our lily plants had two blossoms on it, the first of the flowers we planted this year to bloom.  The first of the plants we lovingly placed in soil that is jointly owned by my husband and I and my father.  Actually, the Packhorse did the planting; I have the opposite of a green thumb.  My contribution has been limited to picking out the bulbs (we planted 27 of them, and so far 20 have come up)  and admiring them from the first tiny shoots to these first miraculous blossoms, talking to them and singing to them—they don’t seem to care that my alto is quavery and sometimes I go off-key (I make sure that Dad, who sang in choirs or choruses for 30 years, isn’t around to comment).  And I thought of the old Shaker hymn...

I’ve been away for over a month getting moved into the new house, which meant packing and unpacking two households (boy, was my mother a packrat), painting the master bedroom and bathroom and the dining room to mitigate the depressing effect of the Tacky Khaki the builders painted the entire house, and getting an 87-year-old deaf and cranky father  settled in.

Frankly, I haven’t missed the campaign diaries  at all.  But when I got back, I did search to see what had been said about the Texas polygamy case. I wasn’t surprised that there were only 4 diaries on it. This sort of issue is frequently ignored here. Three of them  were about the possible violation of the religious freedom of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS), the sloppy  handling of the raid,  and how terrible it was that these people are being persecuted for being weird or different and members of a non-mainstream faith. I wish I could say that surprised me, but it didn’t.  Certainly the protection of civil liberties is extremely important--but so is protecting children and women

The hardest thing about living with an elderly parent is that there are always unresolved issues that need to be worked out.  In my case, I have to get Dad to understand that I am an adult and deserve to be treated  with respect, not ordered around like a twelve year old. This has become a priority, since we’ll be moving into a house together and out of my MiL’s home. This means MiL is no longer interfering, which is good—but it also means we can’t use MiL to convince him of stuff (if I ask him something, he’ll automatically refuse; if she asks him, he does it). Dad’s developed a tendency to ignore any suggestions I make or, if he deigns to listen to them, automatically refuse.

In honor of Mark Halperin’s use of the word "pussy" to refer to weakness and cowardice and Elise’s masterful diary on it last night,  I’ve decided some Kossacks must have  slept through their high school English classes, because otherwise I am sure they’d find a better word that doesn’t offend every woman here on DKos and quite a few men, when vilifying an opponent as a coward.  Like the former college English teacher I am, I decided it was time for a vocabulary lesson.

It is primal scream time in the Irishwitch/Packhorse household. Either that or I am gonna run away form home.

On Friday, I learned, quite by accident,  that  my 87-year-old father, who now lives with us as diaried  [ here] has Alzheimer’s.  My husband mentioned it to me.—his mother, with whom we live temporarily until Dad’s house sells and he buys one here (or he gets a home equity loan and buys one) told him.

I haven’t set foot in a Catholic church since we buried my Mom in August, 2005.  It hasn’t been my faith since I was 20, 38 years ago.

I began questioning church doctrine at 14, when I realized women had second class status—we were supposed to be nuns, virgin spinsters or wives and mothers. We couldn’t be priests. If we married, we were expected to bear as many children as God chose to send us, because the only birth control permitted was Natural Family Planning aka the "rhythm method" aka "Vatican Roulette. It wasn’t very reliable in its early form (still has a lot of issues) and it required abstaining from sex for about ¼ of the month, if not longer—and you could pretty much hang it up if your cycle was irregular.  I knew a lot of families with six to ten children back then. Any other form of birth control was out. Sex outside of marriage was a sin. Sex within marriage was acceptable, but somehow marriage wasn’t a good as celibacy

A recent diary on the death of Ike Turner left me stunned and appalled. The diarist praised Ike’s talent (and rightly so; he was a brilliant R&B musician who influenced many artists who came after him), but went on to cast aspersions on Tina Turner’s truthfulness in her autobiography, where she described the emotional and physical abuse which characterized her fourteen-year marriage to Ike.  

Denver schools are considering granting a minimum of 4 weeks f maternity leave to teenage girls  who give birth, as some other schools systems in the nations do. Without a note from her doctor  justifying her absence, she is expected to return to school the day after she is released from the hospital or face being charged with  an unauthorized absence. I saw the CNN segment on this topic a couple of weeks ago. I hoped someone else would cover it, but apparently no one did. I think it’s important enough that it deserves to be disused here, even a few weeks later.

"My initial reaction is if we are punishing girls like that, that is unacceptable," said Nicole Head, one of the counselors who brought the matter to the school board last month. "We've got to do something."
http://www.denverpost.com/...

This has been the week from hell.  As some of you know, my 87-year-old father has moved to Atlanta. His house hasn’t sold, but the realtor thinks we have a much better shot at selling it without Dad  underfoot.  MiL, behaving in her usual steamroller fashion flew down and accomplished in thirty minutes what we hadn’t been able to do in 2 ½ years’ convince him that he needs to be with us.  Since Florida is pulling his driver’s license, he really had no other choice. He has Parkinson’s, but his mind is sound, although he does forget where he put things. Mostly he needs someone to keep track of his pills, cook him meals, do his laundry, and be company.

A lot of us here are in the same boat. The Dad Chronicles is place to vent for all of us in this predicament.  I plan to do a lot of venting because, other than my husband, I have no other place to turn.  Please share your stories and your concerns here.

I never danced for my father.  

When I was a child, doctors discovered that I had one leg  ½ to 1 inch shorter than other (later I found out it was due to a congenital scoliosis)  and a tendency to turn out my foot. The advised putting me in ballet. So at age 4 or so, I was enrolled in a ballet and tap class. I wasn’t fond of tap, but, like many little girls, fell in love with ballet. I had no talent and I was absolutely the wrong body type—sturdy build, not slender with long, long legs—but I loved it, and took classes for 7 years. And I danced at home, in the living room, to Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland albums my parents owned.  Sometimes I asked Mom to watch my "show"—but I never asked Dad. I was too afraid of the criticism I would face.

I’ve been mostly staying away from candidate diaries, but lately the  bad feelings have invaded other diaries. Throw in the enormous number of them and the disintegration of the  level of discourse, and I am  convinced it’s time for a break from DKos. Too many people I like and admire are too angry at each other to make the debates fun.  The Hidden Comments section has become a cess pool—and many of the folks occasionally visiting there aren’t actually trolls, but normally polite people overcome by Primary Season Disorder pr PSD. Tempers are short and feelings are running high.

And I really don’t need that extra helping of aggravation

Welcome to the First Annual Daily Kos Whine and Cheese Party, where you can bitch, kvetch, whine, and complain about everything that went wrong over the holidays. Did you Republican wingnut uncle lecture you on how a Democrat in the White House  will take this country straight downhill?  Tell us.  And you Aunt Matilda, who joined a fundamentalist church—did she inform you that you were goin’ to hell for being gay or Wiccan or Jewish or Catholic or atheist or living in that Sodom and Gomorrah (NYC, SF, L.A. Boston— anyliberal city)?  Did you SO give you a power tool for Christmas—when what you longed for was something for Victoria’s secret?  Or perhaps you got after shave when what you really wanted was a power tool? Did you get drunk at the office party and make a pass at the boss's bodacious wife? Share the misery!

NOTE: I wrote this two years ago, and it’s slightly updated.

I've been playing Christmas music lately, while reading or sewing or  wrapping packages (for financial reasons, we're lean and mean this year;  I scrounged through my  "I bought this and never gave it to someone" drawer" for many of them). One of my favorite CDs features Bing Crosby in a concert for the troop during WW IIs, and I always tear up when I hear "I'll Be Home For Christmas" and it resonates strongly with me.  The final line is "...If only in my dreams."  The song was written in 1943, at the height of World War II. It summed up the feelings of lonely G.I.s in Europe and the Pacific, dreaming of home and family while a war raged and hoping that next year they would indeed be home for Christmas.

The song has special meaning for me. As most of you Kossacks know, I was a Navy wife for 15 out of the 21 years I've been with my husband as wife and lover.  

There is a Grinch in Green Bay, Wisconsin—and I am betting that he’s not green and doesn’t live on Mount crumpet with a dog named Max.  I suspect when this grinch is caught, he’ll be found to be a disgruntled Christian right-winger.

The story is pretty simple.  The mayor Jim Schmitt and the City Council President decided to put up a Nativity scene in front of city hall. To avoid getting caught up in a court battle over the legality of the crèche, they invited members of non-Christian religions to put up a symbol of their own for the holiday season.  Six requested a chance to do so, and the Wiccans hung a wreath in the shape of a pentacle (the story did not say what the other religious group was).  

If you’re in a happy relationship, have lots of friends, are employed in a job you don’t expect to get laid off from any time soon, and have enough money to enjoy the holidays, Christmas is a wonderful time of year.  This is for the rest of us, for whom this Christmas will not be Dickensian, but more of a Tim Burton film.   If you are alone, without family and friends to support you, it can be difficult.  While there are actually slightly fewer suicides than usual at Christmas, it still isn’t an easy time for those who are unemployed, have friends, are in tight financial situations,  have just ended a relationship,  have problematical relationships with their family, or find themselves alone at a time of year which celebrates togetherness.

As the Center for Suicide Prevention tells us, holidays can be very stressful. It's a time when family conflicts can come to a head, and loneliness and depression can reach critical mass.  Financial problems are also felt more fiercely.  So while suicides are down, people still need a great deal of help to keep from becoming a statistic.