Street kid to crusader

This is one of the persons [ministers] who married us! Not only that, but this person is analogous to a State Senator here in the States. We’re not exactly friends, but we’re friendly to one another–a friendly collegial relationship mostly via email. In fact, when we head up to Toronto, we’re going to spend some time w/ Cheri. Had we been able to head this past summer, we could have had a place to stay! Perhaps some other time?! I value Cheri’s work, and should we ever have the opportunity, this would be my MPP of choice!

Memories of tough teen years help fuel MPP’s campaign to boost Ontario’s minimum wage. She lived on the streets of downtown Toronto when she was 15 years old, learning just what it’s like to be poor and hungry. written by TANNIS TOOHEY/TORONTO STAR

New Democrat Cheri DiNovo, shown at Queen’s Park on Wednesday, is one of the leading crusaders for a $10-an-hour minimum wage in Ontario. The Parkdale-High Park MPP knows what it’s been like to be poor, having spent some of her teen years on the streets of Toronto.

Now, four decades later, Cheri DiNovo is one of the leading crusaders for a $10-an-hour minimum wage.

Today, Ontario’s minimum wage goes up 25 cents to $8 an hour, making it one of Canada’s highest. But most people agree it’s not enough to live on.

To catapult her fight for a living wage and other social issues onto the public agenda, DiNovo gave up her job as a United Church minister and successfully weathered one of the dirtiest by-elections in recent memory.

The New Democrat MPP for Parkdale-High Park doesn’t even want to be thought of as a politician.

“People have an image of politicians. You get to Queen’s Park and you forget who you’re representing, you forget the motivation that got you there in the first place,” said DiNovo, 56.

“I hope that I never actually will be” a politician.

What she does want is a $10 minimum wage. About 200,000 Ontarians now make minimum wage and 1 million more earn somewhere between minimum wage and $10 an hour.

Finance Minister Greg Sorbara has said Ontario cannot afford a $10 minimum wage, that it is not the best way to alleviate poverty and that the Liberals will be unveiling other measures in the spring budget to help low-income earners.

If the Liberals don’t change their minds, DiNovo’s $10 wage bill has no chance of becoming law, but she’s undaunted.

“It’s an idea whose time has come and there’s nothing more powerful. We’re going to be successful on this. The only question is when, not if,” she said.

“Someone who works full-time shouldn’t be using a food bank,” DiNovo insists. “They should be able to feed the children and pay the rent.”

For DiNovo, the poor, the homeless, the sex-trade workers, the mentally ill and drug addicts who walk the streets of her Parkdale-High Park riding are every bit as much her constituents as the voting middle-class families most politicians cultivate.

DiNovo spent five years running a headhunting business for women before she decided the minister at her church had a better job than she did and so became a United Church minister herself.

After 12 years as an outspoken minister, most of the time at Emmanuel-Howard Park United Church in Toronto’s west end, she decided there was a way she could do more good for the poor and dispossessed and turned to politics.

“I kept wanting more for them and not being able to deliver that and seeing that there were things like affordable housing, a higher minimum wage, a raise in (disability) rates that would make a huge difference.”

Four months into her new job, DiNovo has shown she’s far from being a stereotypical politician. She’s no stereotypical anything.

There aren’t too many ministers who would tell their congregation they had once smuggled LSD across the border in hollowed-out bibles. As a minister, stories of her troubled teen years served to inspire people that they too could overcome adversity.

As a politician, memories of those days serve to connect her to the downtrodden.

“I know what it’s like to be on the streets,” she said. “I know what it’s like to be on the wrong side of everything. I know what it’s like to be hungry. I know what it’s like to have no money in your pocket.”

DiNovo was raised in a middle-class family in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, but after a series of tragedies, including her mother’s death, her life spiralled out of control. She lived on the streets, off and on, from 15 to 18.

The Liberals mistakenly thought they could use controversial elements of her past, and her past sermons – like the LSD story – against her, and ran an ugly smear campaign in last September’s by-election.

Taking statements out of context, they accused DiNovo of being sympathetic to child killer Karla Homolka and supporting the ordination of pedophiles and axe-murderers.

When she first told friends she was going to run in the by-election – prompted by education minister Gerard Kennedy’s departure to run for the federal Liberal leadership – some warned her about “all the blood and guts and gore and lying of politics.”

“And that’s different from organized religion in what way exactly?” DiNovo asked.

Still, the campaign was hard on her congregation, her husband, Gil Gaspar, who teaches at Humber College, and her two adult children, she said.

DiNovo isn’t one for false modesty. She willingly lists her achievements.

“I was very successful in business. … I performed the first legalized same-sex marriage in North America. … My book (Qu(e)erying Evangelism: Growing a Community from the Outside In) won the Lambda (Literary Award), that’s a civil rights award. … I was at (church) on Sunday night serving dinner to the dinner and drop-in program that I started. …”

She’s a woman who has struggled, strived, and succeeded all her life. She plans to continue that streak at Queen’s Park.

“There’s so much to be done. So watch.”

A Time Limit on Rape?

A Time Limit on Rape

Thursday, Feb. 01, 2007 By JENINNE LEE-ST. JOHN

Enlarge Photo

Illustration for TIME by Gerard Dubois

If a woman consents to having sex with a man but then during intercourse says no, and the man continues, is it rape?

The answer depends on where you live. The highest courts of seven states, including Connecticut and Kansas, have ruled that a woman may withdraw her consent at any time, and if the man doesn’t stop, he is committing rape. Illinois has become the first state to pass legislation giving a woman that right to change her mind. But in Maryland–as well as in North Carolina–when a woman says yes, she can’t take it back once sex has begun–or, at least, she can’t call the act rape.

That was the recent ruling by Maryland’s Court of Special Appeals in a case that may soon make its way to the state’s highest court and that has captured the attention of feminists and legal experts across the country. Advocates for victims’ rights insist it’s not just a matter of allowing a woman to have a change of heart. If the law doesn’t recognize a woman’s right to say no during sex, they say, there is no recourse for a woman who begins to feel pain or who learns her partner isn’t wearing a condom or has HIV. Those who are wary of these measures say they’re not arguing against having a man stop immediately when a woman no longer wants to have sex, but with how to define immediately.

When the California Supreme Court handed down a ruling in 2003 that codified the withdrawal of consent during sex, Justice Janice Rogers Brown, the lone dissenter, raised that very question. “The majority relies heavily on [the defendant's] failure to desist immediately,” she wrote in her minority opinion. “But it does not tell us how soon would have been soon enough. Ten seconds? Thirty? A minute?” Mel Feit, executive director of the National Center for Men, a male-advocacy group based in Old Bethpage, N.Y., says biology is a factor. “At a certain point during arousal, we don’t have complete control over our ability to stop,” he says. “To equate that with brutal, violent rape weakens the whole concept of rape.” His group has created a “consensual sex contract” to be signed before intercourse.

Victims’ rights activists don’t buy the loss-of-control argument. “It’s insulting to men to say they can’t stop,” says Lisae C. Jordan, legislative counsel for the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault. “Any one of us who’s had a toddler walk in on them knows that that’s not true. Or a teenager who’s had a parent walk in–they stop pretty quickly.” Still, even advocates concede it’s hard to set a time frame in which sex must cease after consent is taken back. “I don’t know where that bright line is,” says Scott Berkowitz of the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network. “We’ll leave that to juries to decide what’s reasonable in each case.”

The murkiness surrounding what’s reasonable has deepened further with the Maryland case, which was tried in 2004. The accuser and the defendant agree that after he began to penetrate her and she wanted him to stop, he did so within a matter of seconds and did not climax. Even so, during deliberations, the jury sent a note to the judge asking if it was rape if a female changed her mind during the sex to which she consented and the man continued until climax. The judge said it was for them to decide. They convicted the defendant of first-degree rape, among other sex offenses.

But the appellate court, citing a 1980 rape ruling based on the English common-law idea of “the initial de-flowering of the woman as the real harm,” unanimously ordered a new trial, essentially stating that how fast was not the issue, nor was whether the accuser had said no during intercourse. In Maryland, rape is determined at the beginning of the sex act, and therefore consent is officially given at that point. The court wrote, “It was the act of penetration that was the essence of the crime of rape; after this initial infringement upon the responsible male’s interest in a woman’s sexual and reproductive functions, any further injury was considered to be less consequential. The damage was done.”

This logic has inflamed feminists and editorial-page writers. “The decision is philosophically from another century, from a time when our rape laws were based on the concept of women being property of men,” says Berkowitz, whose organization will push for a legislative remedy if Maryland’s highest court doesn’t reverse the ruling. In the meantime, the defendant is serving a five-year sentence, and the legal world continues to debate how quickly–if at all–a man must go when a woman says no.

But the appellate court, citing a 1980 rape ruling based on the English common-law idea of “the initial de-flowering of the woman as the real harm,” unanimously ordered a new trial, essentially stating that how fast was not the issue, nor was whether the accuser had said no during intercourse. In Maryland, rape is determined at the beginning of the sex act, and therefore consent is officially given at that point. The court wrote, “It was the act of penetration that was the essence of the crime of rape; after this initial infringement upon the responsible male’s interest in a woman’s sexual and reproductive functions, any further injury was considered to be less consequential. The damage was done.”

This logic has inflamed feminists and editorial-page writers. “The decision is philosophically from another century, from a time when our rape laws were based on the concept of women being property of men,” says Berkowitz, whose organization will push for a legislative remedy if Maryland’s highest court doesn’t reverse the ruling. In the meantime, the defendant is serving a five-year sentence, and the legal world continues to debate how quickly–if at all–a man must go when a woman says no.

Politics and Self in the Age of Digital Re(pro)ducibility

Politics and Self in the Age of Digital Re(pro)ducibility

Robert W. Williams
This is a fascinating article from www.fastcapitalism.com.  Check out their website, and give this article a read–lengthy, but good!
Globalization is very much about individuals and freedom—a claim all the more reinforced by some politicians in the face of international terrorism. Freedom, often framed as the capacity to think and act autonomously, is an essential characteristic of the individual in many liberal-democratic and neo-classical economic theories. The globalization of liberal-democratic values and market principles, it is often asserted, brings with it a bright future for individuals around the world and their freedoms. But, as this work argues, globalization does not necessarily yield all of thepositive consequences so loudly heralded for individuality.