Not My Pope

Pope Francis visited the United States this month. I think of him as the Public Relations Pope, here to help distract everyone from the evils of the Vatican and how much his predecessor looked like Emperor Palpatine. He gets a lot of positive press for saying nice things about the poor and for addressing climate change in his discourse. But he’s still the head of the Catholic Church, and therefore still anti-choice, anti-queer, and anti-secular.

This pope doesn’t talk very much about abortion and same-sex marriage directly. He tends to obliquely refer to them in discussion of “the family” which he defines as “the fruitful covenant between a man and a woman.” However, if you don’t know that’s his specific definition, his statements can sound much more ecumenical and accepting than they really are. One of the Pope’s stops on his USA tour was Philadelphia for the World Meeting of Families, a Catholic pro-life event celebrating heterosexual child-bearing families. While there, Pope Francis had this to say:

All of the love that God has in himself, all the beauty that he has in himself, he gives it to the family. And the family is really family when it is able to open its arms and receive all that love.

Having “open arms” in this case means being open to becoming pregnant and carrying any pregnancy to term. It doesn’t mean loving your neighbor or donating to the food pantry. It means being fertile and open to the possibility of having children. A Catholic family using birth control (like virtually all Catholic women in the US do) is not satisfying this definition of family, nor is a same-sex married couple with numerous foster children.

The Catholic Church has lost countless members over the past few years, as the prevalence of clerical sex abuse became known, as the potentially fatal consequences of Vatican positions and Catholic hospital policy on pregnancy treatment came to light with the death of Savita Halapanavar, and as the youth of the world becomes more accepting of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and (to a lesser extent) transgender people. Pope Francis does not talk about these issues much, and has advised other priests and bishops to talk about them less. But that does not indicate a shift in position, only a shift in public relations.

In his speech on religious liberty, Pope Francis praised people of all faiths for “defending the dignity of God’s gift of life in all its stages” – a clear reference to the Catholic belief in prenatal personhood and the immorality of all abortion. He referred to ours as “a world where various forms of modern tyranny seek to suppress religious freedom, or try to reduce it to a subculture without right to a voice in the public square” which, if you’re listening closely, suggests that the Pope believes religion (namely Catholicism) does have a right to a voice in the public square. And the voice of Catholicism in public has always meant the legislation of Catholic policy as secular law.

Speaking before Congress, Pope Francis had the following to say:

How essential the family has been to the building of this country! And how worthy it remains of our support and encouragement! Yet I cannot hide my concern for the family, which is threatened, perhaps as never before, from within and without. Fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family. I can only reiterate the importance and, above all, the richness and the beauty of family life.

The threats to family the Pope hints at are, of course, reproductive rights and non-heterosexuality. The people calling into question the very basis of marriage are queers. The richness and beauty of our family life is not what the Pope seeks to find, and our fundamental relationships are being framed as threats to marriage to family, rather than expansions of them to encompass more people.

At the end of the day, he’s not my pope. He may have some nice things to say about economic inequality or global warming, but that doesn’t erase his otherwise conservative views or the history of complicity in global inequality, global warming, and global poverty of the Catholic Church. If you want to take the good with the bad, go right ahead. Just please don’t mistake his gentler tone for a change of church position. The Vatican is still anti-choice. The Vatican is still anti-birth control. The Vatican still shelters rapist priests and prevents them from being brought to justice. He’s a lot easier to listen to than the last pope, but their beliefs are the same.

6 Things People With Chronic Pain Want You To Know

1. We’re really good at faking well.

We’ve probably been accused of “faking” our illness or disability,  but the reality for most of us is the opposite.  We pretend to feel better than we really do at school, at work, and at family gatherings. Unless we’ve disclosed our symptoms to you, you might not even know we are sick.

2. We’re tired.

Pain is exhausting and distracting,  both wearing us out and preventing us from getting the rest we need. Everyday tasks like meal prep and personal hygiene may sap our energy for the day long before we’ve done anything “extra”.

3. Our sleep schedule is a mess

My bedtime is ten, but I rarely make it. If I know my pain level is too high for sleep,  I might avoid bed until I feel better, or concentrate on distracting myself until i am more tired than achy. Other days I’m so exhausted I fall asleep immediately after dinner and struggle to wake up the next day. The only thing I can count on is lack of predictability.

4. We have brain fog.

Pain is confusing and pain medication can impair cognition.  Pain is very immediate and it can be hard to think ahead or guess how abled we will be on a future date.

5. We’re probably under-medicated.

Over-medication has obvious risks, including addiction and overdose. Concern for these risks, and cultural detest for addicts, can make it difficult or impossible for a patient to get true pain relief.  Some patients will respond well to marijuana,  others to narcotics. Some patients do best with access to both.

6. We totally meant to clean. 

It can be hard to maintain a clean home with chronic pain.  Bad days can stack up, letting chores backlog and making it harder to catch up. Pain in some parts of the body can restrict movement and make housekeeping difficult to manage. If you are a friend, we probably want to see you even when we can’t keep up. Just please forgive the mess.

Pain & Sadness

Physical pain is emotional for me. Prolonged hurt feels like being disbelieved and unloved, disabled and undiagnosed in the faith healing cult of my childhood. It was easier for my family to believe that I was “faking” a hip injury for three years as a teenager than to admit that maybe they’d neglected me and I needed real care. A bad hip pain day is almost guaranteed to send me into a depressive funk, remembering how little my body was respected or my pain mattered.

Most of my pain could be treated, but I lack the means or access to treatment. Poverty, lack of car, and being a single mother without reliable childcare all converge to make getting treatment virtually impossible, no matter how simple the treatment itself might be. I end up feeling my low status in our society in my very body, each twinge or stab of pain a reminder that I am not respected or valued by the world around me.

Physical hurt makes me feel unloved and unsafe, powerless and pitiful. Perhaps if my pain had been acknowledged and treated as a child I wouldn’t have these associations, but maybe pain is really so wretched that depression and hopelessness are normal responses for people with more common upbringings.

For me, access to pain medication is never just about treating physical sensation. Pain is so overwhelming and so heart-breaking that so long as I am in pain, it’s hard to want to live. Once the pain subsides, of course I want to live, even through depression, and I regret feeling otherwise before. But pain is a double-edged sword. It is physical and it is emotional. And it cuts me to pieces faster than anything else.

The more distracting a pain is, the more I have to think about it, the more that thinking turns to self-loathing and self-pity. “Nobody loves me. Everybody hates me. I guess I’ll go eat mud.” It’s hard to be rational when your nerves are on fire sending pain signals to your brain and back. It’s also hard not to feel like a given moment of pain will be the new normal, and that pain will never stop. I went so many years in pain, without medication, without even someone to believe me. During that time I was mocked for my apparently low pain tolerance, while actually walking on a dislocated hip daily.

All pain brings me back there, brings me back to being sixteen and hurting, disbelieved by the people who should have had my back the most. I was made to feel like such a terrible burden and such an awful person, for daring to have needs and flaws. For not being impervious to pain. That betrayal still stings bad enough to bring tears to my eyes half a lifetime later. I needed a doctor and I needed my mother to take me to one, but I had to fight three years to get it. It’s really really hard not to interpret that time as a lack of love, and all pain really as the devaluing of my suffering and happiness.

We should care about people in pain. We should help manage, treat, and when possible stop pain so that people don’t go through life feeling unloved and desperate. Pain is often treatable, we just need to actually care enough about the pain of others to expand access and repeal some puritanical laws limiting use. We need to not just use marijuana patients to get bills passed, but make sure those same patients can afford enough marijuana to keep the pain and the sadness pain causes away. No one should go through life in pain and all alone in that pain.

Beauty Post: Anatomy of Contoured Cheeks

This face map shows where I apply various skin tone shades to create a contoured face.

I start with full coverage foundation or BB cream.

I add a tiny amount of my darkest shade. I’m using a matte brown lipstick in this case.

Next I use a blush brush to apply bronzer along my crown. ..

… and along my cheek bones…

… and under my jaw.

I apply blush across the apples of my cheeks.

I apply a lighter, brighter shade of blush just above that.

I use an angled eyeshadow brush to trace beneath my bottom lip…

… and to draw two vertical lines along the length of my nose.

Done. This look serves on its own as a natural look or it can be the base of a more dramatic look by doing up eyes and lips.

Beauty Post: Tools of the Trade

Today I wanna focus on brushes and how they are used.

This is a foundation brush. It’s used for applying liquid makeup in a smooth even layer. You can use it for foundation, BB cream, and face primer. It’s important to wash this brush weekly for hygiene and also to prevent the brush bristles from creating “streaks” on your face. To clean this, use water and a gentle bar soap like Cetaphil. Lay the brush flat to dry.

This is a blush brush. It’s best for applying blush and bronzer. This can be cleaned daily by dusting off extra pigment and weekly using brush cleaner spray.

This is a concealer brush with some green color correcting powder on the tip. It has a very fine point for precision application. You can use this to cover blemishes, to fill in eyebrows, or to line eyes. Clean it daily with a facial tissue and weekly with spray.

This is an angled eyeshadow brush. You can use it to apply eyeshadow or to contour nose and lips. Clean this as you would the concealer brush.

This is a flat eyeliner brush. This is best suited to lining the eyes.

This smudge tool is perfect for softening eyeliner.

This is an angled eyeshadow brush. You can use this for liner, especially to create wings. I also use this brush to fill in my eyebrows.

This is a point brush. This has short, stiff bristles. I use this brush beneath my eyebrows and in the corners of my eyes.

This is a blending brush, sometimes also called a crease brush. This can be used to apply shadow between the brow and crease, or to blend two or more shadows together.

Finally, this is an eyeshadow brush. It has long, flexible bristles. This brush is ideal for eyelids as it can sweep evenly across them. Again, clean it daily by dusting off excess pigment and clean weekly with spray.

Beauty Post: 5 Minute Exercise

Criminalized Fertility

This morning I read an article on child endangerment laws being used to charge people who used drugs during pregnancy, including sometimes under the supervision and direction of their doctors. It’s a very good piece and I recommend you read the full thing here. There were a few specific aspects of it I wanted to get into.

There are two kinds of patients swept up in these laws – people with serious addictions they were not able to fully combat prior to giving birth, or people with no history of addiction who used medicine as self-treatment or under doctor’s orders. Jail is not likely to help either patient, and the second kind does not need intervention.

There is a dimension of moral panic surrounding issues of substance use in pregnancy. Historically, concern over the harmful effects of alcohol and crack cocaine in pregnancy have at times backfired. Women with healthy pregnancies took fear-mongering to heart and believed that a single night of moderate drinking could cause Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). In reality there are numerous risk factors for FAS, including genetics, poverty, and binge drinking (defined by the CDC as four or more drinks in about two hours). The language, and in many places the law, does not reflect the reality that substance use and fetal harm are not perfectly correlated.

“Zero tolerance” policy flies in the face of medical standards. Opiate pain medication, methadone and medical marijuana may be the safest medical treatment for the patient and their fetus. Most of these arrests are for positive marijuana urinalysis yet there is no evidence that marijuana use during pregnancy causes birth defects or fetal harm. Even in cases where the drug used does cause fetal harm, a criminal charge is rarely the best way to proceed.

Child endangerment laws discourage pregnant people with substance abuse problems from seeking treatment for their addiction or pregnancy. Addiction is a disease with physical and psychological components. Effective treatment usually consists of medically supervised abstinence or tapering, along with developing new coping skills, getting any psychiatric medications necessary and entering into talk therapy. Jail is not a needed component and the threat of jail is not an effective addiction treatment.

Furthermore, these laws criminalize biology. The most law-abiding drug-abstaining responsible woman in the world is not guaranteed a healthy baby. Numerous risk factors influence neonatal health including genetics, accidental exposure to environmental toxins, coming into contact with a contagious person while immune suppressed by pregnancy, level of personal support, and socio-economic status all play their part, as does chance. 

Treating the bodies of pregnant people as environments for fetuses first reduces the people who own those bodies to nothing more than fetus-carers. Criminalizing pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes is a threat to the rights of all people capable of conceiving, but most especially poor and disabled women, and women of color.

Because these laws, of course, are not applied evenly. Wealthy women seeing doctors under private insurance may be warned early in pregnancy about the presence of marijuana in urinalysis, and advised to abstain shortly before birth. Only some counties and hospitals do drug testing of all Labor & Delivery patients. Sentencing and probation terms are largely at the discretion of individual judges, some of whom have very strong views about who is and is not fit to be a parent.

While healthy moms and babies is a worthy goal, ends cannot justify any and all means. Child endangerment laws applied to pregnancy criminalize biology, hold women and other patients responsible for outcomes beyond their control, and make fertility itself a risk factor for entering the criminal justice system. They interfere with effective treatment for addiction and pregnancy by introducing the threat of jail into the doctor-patient relationship and by penalizing methadone use. And they don’t work. There is no evidence that sending women to jail following poor pregnancy outcomes deters them or others from having poor pregnancy outcomes later.

Growing Up Weird

I grew up in such a weird little cult with so many oddities, sometimes I forget how far from normal I still am. I feel so woefully unprepared for adulthood. Somehow as an adult I’m supposed to be able to manage money and keep house and raise my child and somehow manage to do all three every day. Simply tracking all the tasks that need doing wears me out before I’ve started half the time. The older I get, the less capable I feel.

There are so many things I don’t know how to do, and don’t know how to get started on learning. Adulthood is a lot harder than I thought it would be. Some of that is this economy. A lot of that is due to me becoming disabled and impoverished as a result. But a lot of it just feels like me, not knowing how to decide the simplest things like where to put unopened mail and how often to open it.

Living without much furniture doesn’t help. Eating dinner over the sink without a plate because I didn’t remember to wash them until dinner was late feels pretty profoundly un-adult, yet there I am at least twice a week. I wish I’d done things in the proper order, with adequate support. As it is, I feel very untethered and overwhelmed  most of the time, and I also feel like it’s impossible to catch up. I think I’ve felt that way since my teen years, like it’s already too late for me.

Treating depression requires executive function skills that depression depletes. In my city it also requires a car because the places that accept Medicaid are nowhere near to where I live, and the bus doesn’t connect the directly. I wish so much that I had a normal family that had never been damaged by a narcissist and a cult that I could turn to. That could be turned to.

Dawkins vs. the Clock

This week in Texas, a young dark skinned Muslim teenager was illegally detained after being accused of creating a fake bomb. Ahmed Mohamed, 14, brought a homemade clock to school to show his engineering teacher, who liked it. However, a teacher in a later period insisted the clock was a bomb or fake bomb. Mohamed was brought out of school in handcuffs, then taken youth detention facility for interrogation. Ahmed Mohamed said he would never bring an invention to school again, and the hearts of a million science lovers broke. To many people it was obvious that Mohamed had been unfairly targeted for his religious and ethnic heritage, and he was illegally detained.

Some people rallied behind Ahmed and the hashtag#IStandWithAhmed, including Mark Zuckerburg of Facebook and President Barack Obama who tweeted Ahmed aeon invitation to the White House. Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and atheist polemecist, has spent the better part of the past two days calling Ahmed a fraud.

I can’t get over how petty this is. Richard Dawkins is a world-renowned highly respected scientist, television personality, and author, who used to host a children’s science television program and wrote a book on evolution for children. He should know how
important it is to encourage a love of science in young people, and not to discourage exploration and invention.important it is to encourage a love of science in young people, and not to discourage exploration and invention.

My first invention for a school invention fair was an apiron with numerous labeled pockets, meant for holding spice bottles. I took two existing inventions – the apron and the spice rack – and found a way to make something new from their parts. Richard Dawkins is claiming that Ahmed is no inventor and is therefore a fraud, because he made his clock from existing parts. Did Ahmed invent THE clock? No. Did he invent A clock from existing parts? Yes. And his engineering teacher was pleased with his work.

Ahmed was not pulled out of class, brought to the principal’s office, interrogated, and removed in cuffs over accusations of academic dishonesty, so all attempts to discredit the achievements of a fourteen year old boy are distractions, as well as obvious bullying.  Ahmed was not invited to the White House or Facebook’s headquarters or space camp on the basis of his exceptional invention, but as encouragement from the scientific community after the extreme discouragement of being arrested for a science project.

Ahmed was discriminated against and illegally detained on the basis of his religion and race. People saw that and some were moved to solidarity. The Streisand effect and the viral nature of online stories combined iwn a way that happened to help Ahmed, but that outcome could not have been reliably predicted. Yet Dawkins has questioned Ahmed’s motives and suggested Ahmed orchestrated everything from the arrest to the public response. Not bad for a young teen who can’t even invent a clock to Dawkins’ standards!

Fortunately, Dawkins does not speak for the scientific community as a whole. Chris Hadfield, the former ISS astronaut best known for his Major Tom music video in space, has invited Ahmed to his science fair in Toronto. Alabama’s Space Camp has offered a scholarship for Ahmed. Microsoft sent a gift basket full of electronics including a Surface Pro 3. Most people who love science want others to love science with them. They don’t want to see Ahmed discouraged away from his passion because of hatred. But Richard Dawkins has a long history of hateful comments to and about Muslims, and it appears his hatred of Muslim children exceeds his love of science.

Still Did Their Jobs

I’m sure you’ve seen the memes referencing Kim Davis and contrasting her with other, often fictional people who did their jobs despite some disagreement or impediment.  Although I myself wrote about the need to frame her conduct in terms of professional behavior,  I dislike praising thoughtless workplace obedience too. There are times when I very much want people to not do their job, because their job is unethical and harmful, unlike Davis, who is choosing harm and discrimination by refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses. 

The doctors and nurses and number crunchers who participated in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment were doing their jobs when they intentionally withheld effective syphilis treatment from an all black community. They were just following orders when they lied to their patients and when they allowed future generations to become infected prior to birth. Dr. Oliver Wanger ran the experiment and made choices that led to tremendous harm, and the people working under him doing their jobs helped. A whistleblower – someone refusing to just do their job – revealed the ethical issues and was instrumental in stopping the study.

Social workers and nuns who participated in the Baby Scoop global infant kidnapping epidemic were doing their jobs. They were doing them when they pressured young, poor, unmarried, disabled, women to give their children away. They were following orders when they lied to new mothers and told them their babies had died in delivery, only to give or sell those babies to more “deserving” parents.  The Baby Scoop spanned the globe, from the United States to Ireland to Australia,  and the exact number of displaced children (now adults) isn’t even known.

At the Nuremberg Trials,  Nazi soldiers tried to argue they had no moral responsibility for their crimes, because they were just following orders.  They were following orders when they rounded people up into camps and they were doing their jobs when they assisted Hitler in the murder of twelve million people,  including six million Jews.  The court was not persuaded, and sentenced them harshly. 

I don’t want Kim Davis or really anyone to do a job that conflicts with their morals. I want us to listen to our consciences. I want people to question the potential harm in doing their job or following orders, and then I want them to leave that job if they can’t agree with what that job requires. I’m sure there have been ordinary people just keeping their heads down and doing their jobs who have caused irreparable harm in the world.

Before same-sex marriage became the law of the land, there were county clerks questioning their jobs and the discrimination against same-sex couples built in. They were issuing same-sex marriage licenses in defiance of their jobs.  I want our discourse to be capable of applauding those clerks for not just doing their jobs,  while also condemning the discrimination and bigotry Davis perpetrated.  Do I want someone out there to competently perform Kim Davis’ non-harmful job? Yes. Do I want everyone everywhere to follow orders just because they were given? Absolutely not.