by Mai’a

Muslim Women Are Not Silent

In response to the Taliban beating, President Asif Ali Zardari strongly condemned the beating, and ordered an investigation on the matter. His protests ring hollow, however, because it was President Zardari who overlooked the predictably dire consequences that women would face when he recently signed a peace deal that allowed the Taliban in Swat to enforce penalties and sentences under the auspices of “sharia law.” Yet again, politics comes first, and women second.

That said, having been raised in a household of strong Muslim women, I can attest to the fact that the practice of forcing obedience onto women is a cultural, patriarchal and un-Islamic practice. It wont take me long to search within the American Muslim community to find strong women who are activists and professionals that are contributing in every way to the American fabric. It should also come as no surprise that the Afghan parliamentarians speaking out against this law, at risk to their own lives, are women. From women’s rights advocate Sima Samar in Afghanistan, to Asma Jahangir in Pakistan, the leading NGO’s in South and Central Asia are run by strong Muslim women.

Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, 11, Commits Suicide Over Anti-Gay Bullying

Today, hours after I watched the teabagging “party” over at the Wisconsin Capitol Building, I was watching the news when Wanda Sykes’ PSA popped up about teens curbing their anti-gay slurs: “When you say, ‘That’s so gay,’ do you realize what you say? Knock it off,” she says. It’s been appearing pretty regularly on Madison channels. Too bad it wasn’t playing in Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover’s Springfield, Massachusetts neighborhood.

Sweet Maybelle

One of my pet peeves as a parent of a baby with Down syndrome is the belief out there in the world that people with Down syndrome are naturally sweet. I encounter this belief in various ways. When I told one potential babysitter that Maybelle has ds, she said, “Oh, my mom works with kids with Down syndrome, and they are so sweet!” In the months after Maybelle was born, Biffle’s mom routinely told me how sweet people with ds are. An acquaintance–the mother of a challenging teenager–quipped, “Well, at least she won’t be backtalking you when she’s thirteen!”

I find this belief troubling for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s reductive. It flattens Maybelle’s personality, implying that she’ll have one mode or valence, and that will be sweetness. Sometimes this is offered in a kind of compensatory way: “It’s too bad that your daughter’s fucked up, but at least she’ll be sweet!”

Pew Reveals New Face of Undocumented Workers

The image of the undocumented immigrant has been, for years, that of a single man from Mexico who comes to the U.S. to work and lives alone. But according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a new study (PDF here) reveals a demographic shift which shows that undocumented immigrants tend now to be part of a family unit, with different immigration statuses between the members; some are married to documented immigrants, others have children who are U.S.-born, etc.