As a semi-tomboy, I sat cross-legged at her feet before school, watching her go through her makeup routine. It was an exhaustive process that began with an eye stick, incorporated a scary eyelash curling device and ended with tiny silver tweezers. She was particularly careful with her brows, always following their natural line, tweezing only what was necessary. Sometimes she noticed me and our eyes met. It was as if we were from foreign countries, me in my sloppy pony tail, she with every hair in place.

I lost my painter mother when I was 16. She had had a mastectomy six years before and the cancer had gone into remission. But several years later it resurfaced. By the time I was in high school, she was battling exhaustive treatments and endless medications. Too sick to paint by then, her makeup routine became her only creative outlet.

Sharing stories with the women of the DMSG was cathartic. This was just before Hope Edelman’s landmark book Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss opened the discussion, so the opportunity to talk to other women who understood was rare and profound. In addition to loss, we spent a lot of time talking about how to mother ourselves. While some women had managed to power through their grief, at 26 I still felt stuck in mine. My primary goal back then, via yoga, therapy and daily journaling, was to manage my sadness. Every day I asked my journal the same question: When will I be through with these tears?

The answer seemed to be “Never.”

No matter how hard I worked, the tears kept coming. Whenever they arrived, I retreated to an empty room at my office or holed up in my apartment. As I let the tears roll through me, I hated the heavy, cumbersome feelings of loss. I wanted to be someone else, the kind of person who could stuff it all down and make it disappear. I was angry at grief for taking so long to complete itself. “Screw emotional health,” I told my therapist. I didn’t want that; I wanted sweet, serene denial. I longed to be the kind of person who had small, tidy feelings–so small I could lose track of them altogether.

When the pain finally began to lessen in my early 30s, I was tentatively overjoyed. I thought maybe it was a result of acupuncture, lying for a half hour minutes with carefully placed needles in my skin. Or maybe it was the blue-green algae–nature’s superfood, with a complete list of amino acids that promised to alter the body’s chemistry on a cellular level. That’s what I wanted: to obliterate each grieving cell and replace it with a fully recovered one. Ideally one that had never experienced sadness in the first place.

Who knows what was helping, but eventually my mornings spent crying diminished. I found a steady job, formed a strong circle of friends and bought a house. When I was 33 I met my partner, a woman I had fallen for in college but had been too consumed with grief to pursue  as a lover. I moved to California and settled into her house on the side of a hill, beneath leaning Monterey pines. The exquisite feeling of being in love bloomed inside me. It was a fierce and powerful thing, and slowly, year by year, my grief became smaller and smaller.

Ten years later, when I was 44, I thought maybe, just maybe, I had gotten past it. As the annual anniversary of my mother’s death approached, a time when I normally felt a heightened sense of sadness, I felt lighter. But this wasn’t just any anniversary: I was now the age my mother had been when she died, an age I wasn’t convinced I’d reach. I was now poised to outlive her. To soothe myself, I made an appointment for a massage. At the last minute, unaccountably, I added an eyebrow waxing. I had never altered my eyebrows before or, for that matter, even taken a good look at them. And when I did, what I saw were two unkempt and overgrown strips.

When I arrived for my brow waxing, I got cold feet. I warned the aesthetician that I had never done this before. “Please don’t change much,” I begged, explaining that I liked my eyebrows thick. While she smoothed on a warm solution of wax and then a second later yanked it off, I imagined pruned little trails, the kind that looked great above many women’s eyes but that I couldn’t imagine above mine.

When she was done, she handed me the mirror. I took a breath and peered at my reflection. My brows were still there, thick and dark, but something was different. That’s when it hit me: In just twenty minutes, the wax had unearthed the arc of my mother’s brow. That was her line, her slight curve.

I touched the pink, stinging skin. It wasn’t until I lay on the massage table several minutes later that the tears began to fall. The massage therapist said nothing as I sniffed and asked for a tissue.

Photo of the author and her mother

But what if you don’t have the world’s best mom? What if you have a mom who couldn’t mother? Or no mom at all? Mother’s Day, and its attendant guilt-inducing advertising, used to twist me into rages. Beneath the fury was grief: I had left my mother’s house when I was 14 and never seen her again. But I couldn’t touch those feelings for a long time, so I focused on the corporate hijacking of these intimate, and often complicated, relationships.

Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother’s Day about 100 years ago, was pretty mad, too. She invented the holiday in honor of her mother, who had created “Mother’s Day Work Clubs” to improve sanitary conditions and provide medical care and untainted milk for mothers and babies in several towns in West Virginia. In 1908, Anna inaugurated the second Sunday in May, with the intention of making it a national holiday. She drafted a statement of purpose for Mother’s Day, and the first three lines still give me pause. Mother’s Day, Jarvis said, was:

To revive the dormant filial love and gratitude we owe to those who gave us birth.  To be a home tie for the absent.  To obliterate family estrangement.

President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Mother’s Day a national holiday in 1914, and Anna Jarvis spent most of the rest of her life and money fighting the commercialization of the day she had built. She organized boycotts, crashed a confectioner’s convention, attacked Eleanor Roosevelt for using Mother’s Day to raise charity money, threatened lawsuits and was arrested for disturbing the peace. She died penniless in a Philadelphia sanitarium.

I never got arrested for my aversion to the day; my hostility just became, as usual, a long boring battle with my own brain. But this year I did something different. I published a short book about my mother, Mother, Stranger. I wrote her into existence.

Three years ago my mother died, and suddenly I could see her again. Meaning I could write about her. Meaning I could find her through the tangled knot of memory—long blocked by pain and guilt. I could begin to understand her madness, the illness that had driven me to leave her house. As I wrote, I found others like me.

There are so many motherless daughters, or daughters with monsters or ghosts or simply broken bits as stand-ins for moms. For us, Mother’s Day is a reminder of the malfunction and the loss. And still. I think of Anna Jarvis and the way she wanted Mother’s Day to be about individual expression rather than store-bought gifts, about the way she wanted “to obliterate family estrangement,” which was endemic even then. And I’ve found that the answer to advertising’s “Best Mom In the World!” parade of imagery is a comeback with my own true story. This too, is a kind of home tie for the absent.

Photo of sculpture by Gustav Vigeland in Oslo by Flickr user Forest Runner under license from Creative Commons 2.0

I, for one, have always struggled to celebrate my mom on this day. The greeting card aisles overwhelm me, and I can never seem to find a card that resonates with me or my family. As I’ve grown older, I find that my friends, my peers and my-coworkers have felt a similar anxiety. We’re not being depicted in the mainstream media and it makes it difficult to celebrate our moms in the ways that we want.

I love my mom more than words could say, and I often think about the choices and sacrifices she must have made to raise me, her only child. When my parents left their home in India for San Francisco in the ’70s, my father was eager to make the move–my mother, not so much. She left her sister and her parents back home. Sometimes, when she talks about them, I hear something in her voice–a tone of mourning even after all these years. What it must have taken for her to build a new life and raise a child in a place that didn’t yet feel like home, I’ll never know.

Over the years, I’ve collected stories of motherhood and stored them away in my heart to recall when I consider parenthood: stories of women raising their children by themselves, of women who were not yet ready to become caregivers, of women who found each other and of the ways their love and their family have been made invisible by society. These are stories of struggle, but also of strength. I see that strength reflected in these women’s children. It’s pretty powerful. Yet every year I fail to find the right images and the right words to support these moms.

At Strong Families, we recognize a huge cultural gap between those who are recognized in mainstream Mother’s Day celebrations and the mamas in this country. Shanelle Matthews put this nicely over at the Strong Families blog:

Moms are so varied but we still see only one kind of mother portrayed each year. The commercialization of motherhood not so subliminally shames moms on the periphery by not acknowledging their existence on the one day devoted to celebrating moms.

So we decided to do something about it. We launched a “Mama’s Day Our Way” campaign, featuring beautiful e-cards that capture the varied aspects of mamahood–immigration, separation, disability and queerness–and the love, joy and appreciation we feel for our mamas. There are even cards to appreciate the people who helped birth and care for our children.

While Mother’s Day has different roots in different parts of the world, in North America it began in 1870, when Julia Ward Howe called for a day to celebrate peace and motherhood in response to the casualties of the Civil War. Her words are particularly relevant today:

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears!
Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies…”

We’re in the throes of the War on Women, battling with government agencies for our right to make decisions about our bodies, to have the resources and support we need to uplift our families and to thrive in our communities, without a constant threat to our freedom. How can we properly honor our mamas who combat poverty, whose partnerships are denied, who are separated from their children, who are dehumanized in prisons? How do we uplift single mamas and queer mamas and young mamas, and tell them that we support them and stand with them?

On Mother’s Day as on all days, the personal is political. We hope you’ll browse our cards, customize a message and send them to the mamas in your life. You can read testimonies of strength and courage in parenting on our Strong Families blog. And you can take action to ensure that all mamas have the support they need to be strong and the rights they need to be properly recognized.

Card image by Verónica Bayetti Flores of the National Institute for Latina Reproductive Health (NILRH).

Sites such as RH Reality Check and Abortion Gang have long comprised a thriving reproductive-rights blogosphere. In the past year, their numbers have swelled, as legions of pissed-off feminists take to the Internet to oppose the growing war on women’s reproductive rights.

One of the new kids on the repro-rights block is Keep your Boehner out of my Uterus, which started in early 2011 as an anonymous Tumblr in response to increasing anti-choice legislation and quickly amassed a following of thousands. After being interviewed for an article for Salon.com, Jessica Luther, the woman behind this fierce and furious Tumblr, has made her identity known and is ready to talk openly about her salvo against the War on Women and what she has learned along the way.

Ms. Blog: Why did you start Keep your Boehner out of my Uterus?

Jessica Luther: I started KYBOOMU back in February 2011 a couple of days after attending my first reproductive rights rally, The Walk for Choice. While there, my friend snapped a pic of someone holding a sign with those words. We laughed about how clever it was. And then over the next couple of days, both with friends here in Austin and in the community on [feminist blog] Shakesville, I joked about making a meme with Boehner and him saying all the things that anti-choicers actually believe.

I got incredibly encouragement from Shakesville commenters and so, having heard a bit about Tumblr, began my Boehner memes.

I thought it would simply stay memes and would fizzle out. But then the Pence Amendment came quickly to the fore, and here in Texas they were passing the forced ultrasound law, and I found myself starting to blog more generally about reproductive rights. And I haven’t gone back.

What has been the reception of the Tumblr so far?

Good, overall. The memes were really popular. The picture of Boehner inside the uterus (which two of my good friends made for me) has been reblogged thousands of times. My follower count continues to increase.

While I have received my fair share anti-choice hate mail (I allow people to send me anonymous messages), the largest area of contention on my blog has been the language I use to talk about the people involved in the reproductive rights movement. Tumblr is an interesting space in which to blog and I wasn’t quite prepared for it. When you blog something, it is very easy for someone else to reblog it. Things can move very quickly. I learned fast that the language I was using to discuss the battle over reproductive rights was not inclusive for people other than cis women. People would reblog things I wrote with commentary saying I was transphobic, that I was erasing trans* people from the reality of the reproductive rights struggle, that I just didn’t care. And I will admit–have admitted multiple times on KYBOOMU–that until I got onto Tumblr, I had never even considered how the language of the movement works to create insider/outsider groups, even if the laws and culture we are fighting have an impact on more than just cis women.

Over time, my language has evolved. Most of the time it is just me writing a note at the end of a blog post (either reblogging someone else’s commentary or linking to a post on another website) that reads “NB: More people than just cis women are affected by these laws.” Something simple.

I have had MAJOR arguments with other pro-choice advocates over my desire to be inclusive. I used to lose 20 followers whenever I would fight for inclusivity. That doesn’t really happen anymore. I have had many trans* people thank me for the inclusivity, though I don’t feel that I should be thanked. It should just be how we talk about reproductive rights. I have had other people tell me that they themselves try to be more inclusive now (including John Darnielle, lead singer of The Mountain Goats, who follows KYBOOMU on Twitter and actually reads the things I write).

What’s your take on how both mainstream media and feminist media tackle issues such as reproductive rights?

I think one of the things we can do and are doing and need to keep doing is simply inform people of the many different anti-choice laws that are getting proposed (some passed, some not) in the different states. One of the hardest things about reproductive rights is that it is often, especially now, fought at the state level. And even in your own state, it can be hard to keep track.

The media can serve to remind people–over and over again if necessary–of how many laws there are, the many different shapes they take, the beliefs of their sponsors, etc. It can help people to engage them on the local level, which is SORELY needed right now. Yes, national politics matter, but when it comes to reproductive rights the true battles are playing out in our backyards, and most people don’t know about their local battles until it is too late.

Further Reading:

• Team Uterati, founded in 2012 by Imani Gandy (Angry Black Lady), aims to provide comprehensive up-to-date information about anti-choice, anti-women’s health and anti-reproductive rights legislative measures in various states. Gandy started Team Uterati as a “community-based organizing tool for feminists fighting for equal rights and reproductive justice.” The project, which is the first of its kind on the Internet, also contains a continually growing Wiki with resources, articles, databases and a forum.
• Abortion Gang: Abortion Gang’s website says it best: “We are unapologetic activists for reproductive justice.” The site discusses reproductive health and justice, and reminds us again and again that the personal truly is political.
• Bebinn: A collection of pro-choice information, rants and unrelated gifs, “for all your pro-choice needs!”
• Care2: An array of comprehensive coverage under the heading “Dispatches from the War on Women.”
• Huffington Post – Laura Bassett: HuffPo’s politics writer tackles both state and national reproductive rights news in a concise, easy-to-understand fashion.
• Prolonged Eye Contact: With articles and commentary on abortion and reproductive rights, this site, according to Jessica Luther, “is REALLY phenomenal at being inclusive in how they talk about repro rights.”
• Rabble: “Radically pro-choice” site that offers the tagline, “It’s pro-choice or NO choice.”
• Radical Doula: Almost defying categorization, Radical Doula is site run by activist Miriam Zoila Pérez, and connects the dots between reproductive rights, birth activism, doula work, LGBT issues, immigrant rights and racial justice.
• Reproductive Rights Prof Blog: This website keeps tabs on reproductive rights issues from legal and academic perspectives.
• RH Reality Check: The one-stop shop for breaking news and opinion on sexual and reproductive health and rights, with updates throughout the day.
• Shakesville: At Melissa McEwan’s one-stop shop for progressive and feminist news, bloggers Misty Clifton and Shark Fu have done a great job of keeping the Shakesville community informed and aware of various reproductive rights news.

This list is only a sampling of the many fabulous folks who write about reproductive rights online. Please feel free to add your own in the comments!

Photo illustration by Cory Tobin, courtesy of the Keep your Boehner out of my Uterus Tumblr.

Last week, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a bill banning any state funding from going to Planned Parenthood, the state’s largest provider of basic gynecological care and family planning services, serving more than 70,000 patients a year. Arizona is not alone. Last year 43 states attempted to reduce funding to Medicaid, the major public-funding source for family planning services, and nearly all governors envision additional cuts this year.

Birth control and motherhood may appear to be competing goals. But studies show that the typical American family today wants two children and, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, women typically must use reliable contraception for three decades to achieve this goal. Consequently, over 99 percent of women age 18-44 who have been sexually active have used contraception at least once. Today, among the 43 million fertile, sexually active women who do not want to become pregnant, 89 percent are using contraception. Aside from condoms, women bear most of the out-of-pocket costs for contraception.

Some individuals hold strong personal beliefs about the use of birth control and should not be required to use it.  But the costs of contraception–or of discouraging its use–need to be well understood.

The National Bureau of Economic Research recently reported that the pill is responsible for the narrowing of the gender wage gap by 10 percent in the 1980s and by 30 percent in the 1990s.  Moreover, reliable birth control contributed to economic development by reducing women’s risk of dropping out of school associated with early childbearing and high fertility rates, contributing in turn to increases in women’s labor force participation, the continuity of their careers, and the standard of living of women, children and families.

Recent studies by the Guttmacher Institute and Brookings Institution demonstrate that every public dollar invested in contraception saves roughly $4 in Medicaid expenditures–or $5.1 billion in 2008–not to mention the broader health, social and economic benefits. A 2010 California study found that every dollar spent on a Medicaid family planning program saved the public sector more than $9 over the next five years by averting costs on public health and welfare that would have otherwise been incurred. In the private sector, over two decades of research has shown that the availability and use of highly reliable birth control reduce employee absences and turnover, particularly among women who would otherwise face unintended pregnancies. Indeed, it costs insurers and employers more not to provide contraceptive coverage.

And yet, for the first time in two generations, contraception is becoming harder to obtain. State and federal policies that reduce access to family planning services and contraception mean that individual women bear the cost for birth control–an additional $500 or more a year in the case of women with no insurance.

Such policies will allow insurers to profit directly from the considerable savings associated with these women’s use of birth control. Employers, states, and the general population will become “free riders,” enjoying the broader social and economic benefits while individual women shoulder the costs. What’s more, the public costs are only likely to rise as more women have less access to reliable contraception and are put at increased risk of remaining or becoming members of low-income households.

Should women bear the financial costs of contraception? Alternatively, might the costs and benefits be equitably distributed?

Consider for a moment what access to reliable birth control has done for you and your family. What are the costs you and society as a whole would bear from constraining access to birth control versus the benefits of eliminating cost sharing so that all women who want to do so can obtain highly reliable birth control?

Given that women bear the physical burdens of pregnancy and child birth, we would do well to honor mothers–and all women–by establishing policies that share the costs of birth control among the beneficiaries. Not only would it be equitable, it would be cost-effective.

Chloe E. Bird, a senior sociologist at the nonprofit RAND Corporation, is co-author of Gender and Health: The Effects of Constrained Choices and Social Policies (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Image from Flickr user cambodiaforkidsorg via Creative Commons 3.0.

Among these reviled mamas, young mothers figure prominently. During May, the month in which most mothers are honored, young moms have their very existence challenged: May is also Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month.

Though teen pregnancy prevention efforts are varied nationwide, many deal in shame and stigma. A notorious 2001 print ad campaign by The National Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy labeled young women of color “rejected,” “dirty” and “cheap.” But we don’t have to go that far into the past to find campaigns that stigmatize young parents. 2007 ads from the United Way are based on the idea that young mothers are so “disturbing” that young people shouldn’t be caught dead in their position.

This anti-teen-pregnancy programming often has very little to do with the real and material barriers young women face, particularly the young Latina and immigrant women whom the campaigns target because they have higher birth rates than white teenagers. Latinas are disproportionately poor, which means they are less likely to be able to afford health insurance and the birth control they need to prevent unwanted pregnancy. If they want to terminate their pregnancy, they are less likely to be able to afford the full cost of an abortion–an issue most teen pregnancy prevention organizations will not touch. They are less likely to be able to afford the cost of higher education, and many immigrants are not eligible for federal financial aid at all–rendering the point of delaying pregnancy to finish school moot. In short, there are larger systematic issues at work, and reproductive health advocates need to remove the barriers preventing young women from making informed choices about what’s best for them. Then, we need to support those choices, not dictate what they should be.

Now, to be clear: many of the initiatives supported by teen-pregnancy-prevention advocates are quite helpful. Comprehensive sexuality education and access to affordable birth control methods, for instance, are crucial for young people, and many teen pregnancy prevention programs often do work towards these goals. But a key problem with teen pregnancy prevention approaches is that the impetus for supporting these otherwise valuable programs is based on the decision by a group of powerful people that young women must not be mothers. The decision of a powerful group (adults) to work to limit the reproduction of a less powerful group (youth) can in no way be construed as falling into line with reproductive justice principles of supporting women in deciding when and whether to have children, and to parent the children they do have with dignity.

It’s true that many young mothers do not plan their pregnancies and may not have wished to become pregnant. This is indeed a problem. But to address it, the reproductive health and justice community must take a look at larger systems that deny young women of color, low-income young women and immigrant young women the information and material resources to prevent pregnancy.

We need to support sex education and access to birth control as part of a platform that gives all women–young women included–a real choice about whether and when to start their families. We need to support young women who become pregnant and choose to terminate their pregnancies by eliminating the Hyde amendment, which bans federal funding for abortion and means that many Medicaid-eligible young women are unable to get their procedure covered. We need to have the hard conversations around child sexual abuse and dating/intimate partner violence that are completely ignored in mainstream conversations about teen pregnancy. We need to fix the educational systems that shut out these young women, denying them opportunities for which they might decide to delay starting families. And finally, we need to support young women who choose to parent by providing them with the resources they need to parent with dignity. Being a young mom does not have to be devastating, and young parents should have as much opportunity to succeed as young women who choose to delay pregnancy or never give birth at all.

Treating young mothers as the problem is not only morally lacking, but also misses the mark. Instead, we must target inequity. Let’s be done with the shaming and the stigma–any less is not reproductive justice.

This post is part of the Strong Families Mama’s Day campaign, in collaboration with the National Coalition for Immigrant Women’s Rights. Mama’s Day cards available here!

Verónica Bayetti Flores is the Policy Research Specialist at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health and lives in Austin, TX.

Top right: Print ad by the National Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Below right: United Way Teen Pregnancy Prevention Ad. Left: National Institute for Latina Reproductive Health graphic (NLIRH). All rights reserved.

The economic slump in both the U.S. and Europe has prompted elites to call for “austerity.”  But we know that’s just a code word for cutting social programs women rely on disproportionately.  It turns out, though, that politicians who champion “austerity” will pay a price at the polls.  Just look at Europe: Last week, French voters ousted Nicolas Sarkozy and Greek voters threw the government into crisis — mainly in reaction to harsh cuts in social programs and (in France) an increase in the official retirement age.  Voters get it: austerity leads to a stagnant economy.

Here in the U.S., austerity imposed by state and local governments has thrown hundreds of thousands of government employees out of work, the majority of whom are women.  Want to know why the unemployment rate, while declining, hasn’t gone below 8 percent yet?  It’s mostly because of spending cuts imposed by conservative state officials like Texas Governor Rick Perry, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Florida Governor Rick Scott, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and others.

Despite elites’ call for across-the-board federal budget cuts and reductions in Social Security benefits, women’s organizations are calling for improvements in those benefits — specifically, child care credits for those who drop out of the work force to care for children or ill or disabled family members; an improved minimum benefit for lifetime low-wage and part-time workers, who are disproportionately women; fairer rules for disabled widows and surviving spouses, benefit equality for working widows; and equal benefits for same-sex spouses and partners, among other improvements.

In a report to be released today (Friday, May 11), the National Organization for Women Foundation, with the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare call for these improvements to be made. In “Breaking the Social Security Glass Ceiling: A Proposal to Modernize Women’s Benefits” (PDF) we call for updating the program to face the new demographic reality: many women are now both bread-winners and primary care-givers and our guaranteed social insurance system should recognize that fact.

Join us by sharing the posts below on Facebook, Twitter (using the hashtag #HERvotes), and other social media.

Part of the #HERvotes blog carnival.

Read More:

My Time, Intellect, Skills and Labor are Worth Less than Those of My Male Peers? Really? Yes, Really.- Anny Bolgiano, Intern, Coalition of Labor Union Women

The Gifts Mothers Really Want- Ellen Bravo, Director, Family Values @ Work

Thank You, Mom, for Teaching Me to Be Safe and Secure- Malore Dusenbery, Special Populations Associate, WOW

Can’t Afford to Work?- Shawn McMahon, Manager of Research and Innovation, WOW

Making a Vital Lifeline More Secure for Women- National Organization for Women

#HERvotes, a multi-organization campaign launched in August 2011, advocates women using our voices and votes to stop the attacks on the major advances of the women’s movement, many of which are at risk in the next election.

From the

Abstinence education posits the idea that the proper way to educate adolescents about sex is to instruct them to refrain from sexual activity until marriage. The way to avoid contracting an STD or an unwanted pregnancy, a typical program tells its students, is follow a few simple rules: “Respect yourself. Choose friends who are positive influences. Go out as a group. Get plenty of rest.” Doug Herman, a popular abstinence-until-marriage speaker at public high schools across the United States, sums up the message this way: “If the sun doesn’t touch it, nobody else’s son ought to be touchin’ it either!”

The typical abstinence program, however, is not against sex per se. Abstinence instructors often make a point of telling teenagers that they know how hard it is to refrain from sexual activity. Sex is wonderful, it is incredible, it is mind-blowing—if you are married. The principal goal of most such programs, in fact, is to imbue children with a certain view about the proper relationship between sex and marriage. Sex within marriage is a source of fulfillment and even ecstasy; sex in all other contexts is degrading and shameful.

Abstinence educators frequently promote this view by representing all sex that occurs outside the marital bed as harmful. Premarital sex is dangerous and dirty, they say—a gateway to decadence, depression, broken lives, and an early grave, especially for women. If you have sex outside of marriage, says Pam Stenzel, a nationally recognized “abstinence proponent” who delivers talks to public school students around the country, “then you will pay.”

Not having premarital sex, on the other hand, is always posited as beneficial. GamePlan, an abstinence course developed by A&M Partners (formerly Project Reality) and taught in public schools around the country, offers as evidence the instructive tale of Steve, who resisted his girlfriend Tina’s sexual overtures. Tina, the little tramp, was already pregnant when she asked Steve to have sex with her, and faced a dead-end future as a single teenaged mother. Steve, however, met his future wife, the virginal Karen, six years later at college.

Steve and Karen have now been married for over seventeen years and have four children. Steve is a teacher, and Karen enjoys caring for the children. Steve and Karen never have to worry about sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancy. Sex is a normal, natural, and exciting part of their lives together.

Of course, Steve wouldn’t have considered using protection when he had sex with Karen or Tina—A&M Partners opposes the idea that discussion about condoms and other methods of contraception belongs in sex education programs.

Many abstinence education programs make cheerful use of gender stereotypes. The Just Say Yes curriculum, used by twelve public school districts including Dallas’s exclusive Highland Park Independent School District, tells teens that abstinence means “you make a conscious decision to avoid turning others on,” and continues to explain that “if a guy is breathing, then he’s probably turned on.” The text continues by advising girls “to think long and hard about the way you dress and the way you come on to guys.” A woman who “shows a lot of skin” is either “ignorant when it comes to guys,” is cruelly “teasing” men, or is “giving her boyfriend an open invitation” to have sex with her. The responsibility for policing the boundaries of sexual behavior, evidently, rests on women alone; men, according to the Just Say Yes way of thinking, can hardly be expected to control themselves.

Abstinence-until-marriage sex education courses are taught by a wide variety of outfits. Some operate on a large scale, serving multiple communities in dozens of states. Others work with a single school district. In almost all cases, however, the sponsoring organizations are religious in nature or have thrown themselves into the business of sex education for transparently religious purposes.

Youth for Christ, which receives federal funds to teach abstinence education in public schools all over the country, makes no effort to disguise its agenda. “YFC goes where kids are,” says a 2010 press release from the West Michigan branch of Youth For Christ. “With programs like Campus Life (reaching public high school and middle school campuses) … YFC carries the Love of Jesus Christ to all different kinds of kids in many different situations.”

Some abstinence education programs do allow for discussion of the role of contraception and safe sex practices in preventing unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. In many cases, however, these “abstinence-plus” programs, as they are known, spread disinformation rather than information about sex. According to a report by the Texas Freedom Network, factual errors are taught in the health programs of 41 percent of Texas public school districts. The most common errors concern condoms and their efficacy, such as the notion that the HIV virus can pass through latex. In a theatrical exercise from the Brady Independent School District in Brady, Texas, students are told that condoms have a 30 percent failure rate in “preventing most STDs” and that “HPV and Syphilis are so small that they can slip through condoms.” One character in the theatrical production says, “Giving a condom to a teen is just like saying, ‘Well if you insist on killing yourself by jumping off a bridge, at least wear these elbow pads—they may protect you some?’”

Misinformation about other STDs is also pervasive. Programs such as the Austin LifeGuard Character and Sexuality Education, used in ten school districts, teaches that there is “virtually no evidence” that condoms reduce the risk of the HPV (human papillomavirus) infection and alleges that “about a third” of all in vitro fertilizations can be linked to infertility caused by STD infections —in spite of evidence to the contrary from the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. At least one Texas curriculum, Wonderful Days, taught the dangerously false notion that “natural fertility regulation”— the rhythm method —has the “highest user effectiveness rate.” In an attempt to help students understand fertility, Wonderful Days offered an outlandish little rhyme: “If a woman is dry, the sperm will die. If a woman is wet, a baby she may get!”

Abstinence education may not have stopped young people from having nonmarital sex or diminished the rates of unwanted pregnancies or STDs, but it has benefited at least one constituency: evangelical religious organizations.

Take Action: To demand that the U.S. government stop funding abstinence-only programs, sign here.

Excerpted with permission from Katherine Stewart’s The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. All rights reserved.

Photo from Flickr user ewedistrict via Creative Commons 3.0.

Following a vehement campaign fraught with religious zeal and bipartisan politics, North Carolina residents voted Tuesday in favor of Amendment One—which will change the state’s constitution to outlaw not just same-sex marriage, but all domestic unions.

An unusually high number of registered voters turned up at voting booths across North Carolina to cast their ballots. Although early reports speculated about voter fraud in several counties, Amendment One passed by more than a 20 percent margin (about 61 to 39 percent), erasing any doubt as to the sentiments of North Carolina voters.

North Carolina is hardly the first state to add a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage–in fact, it’s the 30th in the nation and was the only Southern holdout.

But the outcry over Amendment One extended beyond the gay marriage debate, because the amendment bans civil unions and domestic partnerships for all couples—gay or straight.

Religious rhetoric largely drove the Vote For Marriage campaign, which frequently claimed in television ads that heterosexual marriage has been the “foundation of our society … since the dawn of mankind.” The Vote For Marriage website also stressed that same-sex marriage would “redefine marriage for everyone.” Backers said Amendment One would make the state less vulnerable to “activist judges” who could overturn previous anti-gay-marriage statutes in a single ruling.

Amendment One can only be overturned with a three-fifths vote in the state legislature and voter approval.

Critics of the amendment not only advocated for marriage equality, but also raised concerns over the amendment’s overreaching wording. Domestic partnerships are utilized by both gay and straight couples, who now fear they and their children will lose health benefits because of the amendment.

Opponents of Amendment One also decried the bill for removing domestic violence protections for unmarried women. The amendment also jeopardizes health benefits, social security and pensions for single or widowed seniors.

Although members of the Vote For Marriage campaign said they were not anti-gay but “pro-marriage,” there has been an increasingly turbulent anti-gay attitude this year in state legislatures across the South and Midwest. The Tennessee state legislature recently introduced a “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” which would erase all language referring to homosexuality from their elementary and middle school sexual education programs. The bill has died in the House.

Earlier in the year, a Tennessee representative also introduced the transphobic “Bathroom Bill,” which would fine those who do not use the public bathroom that matches their birth-assigned sex. This bill has also failed to pass.

In April, Missouri proposed a similar anti-gay education bill, which would prevent sexual orientation and the “homosexual agenda” from being discussed in schools and extracurricular activities. The bill is still being debated by state politicians.

There are only eight states in which gay marriage is legal in the U.S. (including Washington and Maryland, where newly passed laws have yet to go into effect). Even smaller is the number of states that recognize civil unions. Vermont—which has since legalized gay marriage—was the first state to legalize same-sex civil unions; Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey and Rhode Island soon followed.

In California, where the unconstitutionality of Prop. 8 is still an on-going debate, domestic partnerships grant same-sex couples nearly all the rights of civil unions; Nevada and Oregon have similar domestic partnership provisions.

A majority of the country’s state legislatures, however, still deny gay couples the right to a legal partnership.

Photo from Flickr user Donald Lee Pardue via Creative Commons 3.0.

It is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.

We’ve come a long way from 1996, when congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act. At that time, Illinois congresswoman Cardiss Collins said that the bill “should really be called the Republican Offense on People who are Different Act because it is nothing more than blatant homophobic gay-bashing.” She continued:

As I walk past the Republican side of the aisle, I expect to hear something similar to an old joke from the civil rights era: ‘Some of my good friends are gay, I just wouldn’t want my son or daughter to marry one.’

That “old joke” betrayed the crass racism of whites who would claim to have black friends and then clarify just how little that friendship meant: Good enough to mention for political gains, but not full human beings you’d let your offspring marry. As the first black woman to represent a Midwest state, elected in 1973, Collins had no doubt heard this joke in her youth. She connected the dots between racism and homophobia: “My grandmother probably couldn’t envision a time when interracial marriages would be legal in America, but today they are. One kind of discrimination is just as onerous as another and neither should be tolerated.”

Earlier this week Joe Biden made waves by saying that he is:

absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights. All the civil rights, all the civil liberties.

Commentators parsed his every word to see how it lined up with the “evolving” views of the President and by extension the Democratic party. Then when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke even more emphatically in favor of marriage equality, speculation only intensified about how to interpret his views: one man’s opinion, an orchestrated attempt to curry favor with lesbians and gays or a new direction for the White House.

Back in 1996, members of Congress in the House debate on DOMA felt quite free to call homosexuality “immoral,” “depraved,” “unnatural,” “based on perversion” and “an attack upon God’s principles.” In the Senate, Jesse Helms said that the critics of DOMA were “demanding that homosexuality be considered as just another lifestyle–these are people who seek to force their agenda upon the vast majority of Americans who reject the homosexual lifestyle.”

America as a whole has evolved since then. According to a Gallup poll released this week, almost two-thirds of Democrats and half of all Americans support marriage rights for lesbians and gays. And in spite of the success of marriage bans as ballot initiatives, such as yesterday’s passage in North Carolina of Amendment One, the courts (here, here, here, and here), have found that marriage bans are precisely what Representative Collins said DOMA was back in 1996: a form of discrimination against gays and lesbians. These days, politicians tread carefully when they talk about homosexuality in general. You don’t hear anyone denouncing gays and lesbians as immoral on the campaign trail. Mitt Romney could have a gay campaign spokesperson, but under a Romney administration a gay man couldn’t marry his same-sex partner. Rick Santorum has said he has gay friends, and Sarah Palin famously had at least one.

Now President Obama has shown us what friendship really means. Civil unions, he made clear in his comments today, just aren’t the same thing as marriage. Mr. Biden expressed it best: “What this is all about is a simple proposition,” he said, “Who do you love? And will you be loyal to the person you love?”

Love and loyalty. Two qualities we all seek in our spouses, in our friends—and in our leaders. President Obama has shown true leadership today. For politicians who still want to say “I have gay friends, but” this administration has drawn a new line in the sand. When it comes to equal rights, you can’t have it both ways.  No joke.

TAKE ACTION: Click here to send a note of thanks to President Obama for showing his support for gay marriage.

TOP: Image of President Obama from Flickr user TijsB under Creative Commons. RIGHT: Photo of Cardiss Collins from Wikimedia Commons.

Audrey Bilger is coeditor (with Ms. Senior Editor Michele Kort) of the new Seal Press anthology Here Come the Brides! Reflections on Lesbian Love & Marriage, an exploration of how the legalization of same-sex marriages has irrevocably changed the way lesbians think about their unions and their lives.