Apparently, there is a wrong kind of feminist, and by both sides of the political spectrum, I am considered IT.

Last fall after the general election, I started a group for pro-choice women who wanted to find common ground for women’s issues with feminist-identified pro-life conservatives on the Sarah Palin supporters forum “TeamSarah”. Because I dared to admire Sarah Palin for her feminist qualities despite disagreeing with many of her political views, I was told by liberal women that I couldn’t call myself a feminist.

It’s been a couple of months since I checked in with my group there while I’ve been immersed in writing my latest novel. Today, a friend in the TeamSarah Hillary Clinton Supporters group posted something interesting about Republicans for Single Payer Healthcare. Intrigued, I clicked on the post, only to find out that I have been summarily banned from the forum.

I can only assume that someone simply could not bear the idea of a self-identified pro-choice liberal pagan queer who admired Sarah Palin being part of their little world.

The last time I checked in, we had about 25 or 30 members of Pro-Choice, Pro-Sarah. Unfortunately, I can’t contact any of them to tell them what’s happened. Then again, in all likelihood, those women (and a few men) were banned just for joining my group. To those few open-minded conservatives: I am truly sorry.

To the rest of the uptight, passive aggressive women out there on the intertubes (and this includes the liberal women who ran me out of their virtual town on a rail as well), thank you ever so for making women’s issues petty and irrelevant with your inability to think of the bigger picture. We had a chance here for women to come together after this giant slap in the face from the Democrats that (temporarily) woke a bunch of us up to the institutionalized hatred for women on both sides of the aisle. But it’s more important for you to hang on to your own hatred of people who think differently from you.

By all means, cling to those penised-Americans who keep doing SO much for you, as long as they have the right letter after their name, and just keep on spitting in your sisters’ faces.

It always pisses me off when women say “we’re our own worst enemies” when it comes to the question of why women, who make up the majority of people on this planet, still face so much oppression in this world. This always seemed to me to be a blame-the-victim mentality, putting the responsibility for oppression on the oppressed. I’m finally being persuaded that it’s actually true.

If we’re all so damn concerned that there’s a “wrong” kind of woman out there that we don’t want to support, then we don’t deserve equality.

I found out today that the world lost a unique and beautiful spirit just two weeks before Christmas.

Maddie Joan Blaustein was a beautiful and talented transgendered woman and an online friend who passed away on December 11, 2008. Maddie was only 48. I didn’t know her well, only through the online political communities we both frequented, but she was delightful, whip-smart, and deliciously snarky and I was proud to stand beside her in various political battles.

I wanted to talk about Maddie here because I have recently lost those online communities to what I’ll just call “irreconcilable differences,” so I cannot share the regret at her loss with others who knew her in those places I used to belong.

Maddie’s posts were always a breath of fresh air, cutting through the bullshit and not wasting time on the intellectually dishonest or the willfully deluded. Though Maddie was treated deplorably by her supposed allies in one of those communities when they turned on her for defending Hillary Clinton, she always stood strong against the mysogyny, homophobia, and transphobia that was allowed to run rampant in that allegedly progressive place.

Besides mourning the extinguishing of the bright spark that she was in an increasingly dreary world, I wanted to acknowledge her passing publicly because of something that was posted about her on the aforementioned forum after her death. Maddie’s brother, who was also a member of that online community, marked her passing with a condescending tribute. While he began his tribute with “Maddie was my brother and my sister,” he referred to her as male throughout the rest of it, negating her life as a woman and disrespecting her in a final attempt to have the last word. In the last few months of her life, he had defamed her publicly on the Internet, posting transphobic rants and calling her mentally ill. He eventually “turned her in” like a good little Hitlerjugend to get her banned from the forum for not falling into lockstep (and goosestep) with the party line, and continued to slander her when she was no longer allowed to defend herself there.

I’m sad and I’m angry that Maddie is gone and that this hateful person gets to define her after her death. I may be misjudging him. He may have loved Maddie. But his transphobia prevented him from seeing the beautiful person she was, and that comes through in his online eulogy. What happened in the name of “party loyalty” may have merely been a spat as he suggests, and Maddie may have already forgiven him, but that online spat was out there for the world to see, and it was ugly and painful, and was not just an insult to Maddie but to all transpeople, and to all women.

Anime fans may have heard Maddie as the voice of Meowth on Pokemon, among others, and comic book fans may remember her Deathwish miniseries by Milestone Comics. She had a wicked sense of humor, and brainy-hot geek-girl looks. I wish I’d had a chance to tell her how much I admired her.

I will miss you, MJ.

The same sort of spitting-and-foaming crowd that turned me off of a certain lame “underground” at which I wasted the last four years of my life, believing I was among liberals, are now apparently having a fit because PUMA blog The Confluence is a finalist for Best Liberal Blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards. Apparently, The Confluence cannot be liberal because they supposedly “endorsed McCain” in the general election. How interesting; that’s the same LIE that I heard at a certain forum that is equally reviled by the cave dwellers. In my best Flanders imitation, I find myself exclaiming, “You’re lying! What makes you lie??”

I’m tired of being told that I’m not a “real” liberal by people who extoll the virtues of pandering to homophobic, woman-hating conservative evangelicals; or by people who think “anything to win” was a great Democratic strategy because “it worked”; or by people who’ve done nothing to demonstrate their claims of liberalism other than taking supposedly “hard” stands when it’s politically expedient to do so. And after eight years of Republican rule under the worst sort of Republicans, I’m really tired of people twisting reality to suit their own whims and assuage their own feelings of inadequacy. In short, I’m really, really tired of listening to grimy pots calling slightly tarnished kettles black.

It seems that the weak-minded are only capable of believing and parrotting whatever meme the dominant group endorses—be that the majority party, the MSM, or a bunch of online wankers.

For those who are so inclined (and not weak-minded), check out the blogs in the Best Liberal Blog finalist list and decide for yourselves who represents a true liberal voice. (I know it’s hard; we spent the last year being told to vote for the “kewl” kid or face total character assassination and loss of friends, family, and community—and in some cases, even careers, or worse—but really, it’s okay to think for ourselves.) I’m certainly not going to tell you whom to vote for.

Instead, I suggest that everyone try a novel concept and actually read the nominated blogs and make an informed vote. (This newfangled technique could also be applied in elections that matter.) And this time, maybe don’t reward misogyny as a “kewl” tactic. If a certain blog encourages comments such as “maybe rape is a Good Thing for some,” use your vote to let them know how you feel about their unapologetic hatred of women that poses as “snark” and masquerades as ”liberalism.”

[This is a few days late, but I've been having trouble with WordPress. So better late than never.]

I was 14 when John Lennon was killed on December 8, 1980, and I wasn’t really aware of much outside my fundie upbringing. I knew who Lennon was, but mostly in the context of “the guy who thought he was bigger than Jesus”—in other words, a blasphemous sinner, not to mention a long-haired hippy who tempted teens to sin with rock and roll.

Two months later, my mother died of cancer and I had a really hard time grieving. I was just sort of empty. One morning while I was doing the dishes, they started playing several songs off of Double Fantasy on the radio, and it suddenly struck me hard just how much the world had lost with Lennon’s death. It was the first time I’d cried since my mother’s death and I cried until I was sick.

Shortly afterward, our family took a trip to visit my father’s relatives, and I was given the basement room of my aunt’s house as my bedroom while we were staying there. In that basement, there was an old record player and a collection of albums belonging to my older cousin who’d long since left home. In June of 1981, I discovered the Beatles.

In a way, you might say John Lennon saved my soul. He was bigger than Jesus.

Here’s what I’ve had enough of: whiny attention divas who take their balls and go home whenever the game isn’t going their way. The discussion lists, online groups, RL groups (that’s “Real Life” for those who think droids type everything on the Internet), Internet forums, and pretty much every grouping of people I’ve ever belonged to has ultimately ended in a tantrum on the part of one person or a faction of persons who felt that the group had “changed” on them and they just had to move on, but move on in a way that utterly destroyed the fun for everyone else.

Like the masochist I am, I’ve hung on way too long in most of these places, until I was either the only one left or I just didn’t recognize a soul there anymore. (Oh, no…I think I’m saying they “changed” on me!) But, seriously, in every instance, I have tried my damnedest to go with the flow and ride out rough patches and mollify the sensitive ones in the group who felt it wasn’t quite revolving around their personal view of life enough. And you know what? Nobody cared. Because it’s never about what’s actually going on or whether the people have actually changed or not, it’s about narcissism.

So I’m done holding the hands of delicate narcissists, especially when they start playing “liberal than thou.” Honey, it would take a hell of a lot to be more liberal than I am, but if you want to wear the “I’m better than you” tiara, then go for it. And while you’re wearing that tiara, why don’t you take your ball and shove it up your ass. How’s that for dissonance?

This song from “Once More, With Feeling”, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical, captures the mood for a lot of us right now, even some Obama voters.

The battle’s done and we kinda won….

Yes, we did kind of win. We sent a message to the Bush administration and like-minded Republicans that Americans have had enough. We elected the country’s first African American President and returned control to the Democrats after eight years of disastrous economic and foreign policies. Even though I’m not an Obama fan, I can see the positive in those facts.

But even those who danced in the streets on Tuesday night seem to feel a little dubious about the victory now that the dancing’s over — particularly those who believe in civil rights. Now that we see how so many Obama voters apparently feel about the rights of gays and lesbians, where do we go from here?

What Spike said. There’s not much more I can add.

Friends of mine danced in the streets on Tuesday night. They cried tears of joy. I burst into tears of hopelessness.

They began to flow when Hillary Clinton congratulated Barack Obama’s historic victory with the following words:

“In quiet, solitary acts of citizenship, American voters gave voice to their hopes and their values, voted for change, and refused to be invisible any longer.”

What jumped out at me was that word “invisible.” Yes, I thought. That’s what we are. That’s what we’ve become. Women are now invisible. Our voices our silent. That’s what this momentous occasion meant to me. I felt every moment of hatred for women that occurred during this election — every joke about how stupid Sarah Palin was, every post on “liberal” blogs about Hillary Clinton being a fucking whore, every mindless young person proudly wearing T-shirts proclaiming “Sarah Palin is a Cunt” — being validated. I no longer believe a woman can break that “hardest and highest of all glass ceilings.” Not in my lifetime. We’ve been shown our place in a very public, unabashed display.

How I’d love to feel the joy that others are feeling; how I’d love to celebrate this amazing moment in history. It’s not that I thought women “deserved” to get to the White House first. It’s not that “it should have been our time.” It’s the how. What kind of a victory is it to achieve this historic event by destroying the women who dared to seek it for themselves, by disenfranchising voters — by using the worst tactics of the right wing?

I wish I could close my eyes and forget the how, and believe the hope. I wish I could celebrate the moment for what it appears to be and not what it is. I wish it represented a new day in America, a more tolerant, accepting America. But the passing of Proposition 8 in California and Proposition 2 in Florida by the very same voters that came out to vote in droves for Obama should make it clear to at least some of us that it’s not. Arizona and Arkansas also passed anti-gay initiatives, prompting Arizona Democratic state representative Kyrsten Sinema to say:

“I think the country was like, ‘Look, you get Obama, call it a day and go home.’ And frankly, I’ll take it.”

Yes, Kyrsten, we’ll all “take it.” I just don’t think you understand what it is we’re taking yet. And we’ve been taking it for thousands of years. The struggles for equality for both women and LGBT people are inextricably intertwined, as the hatred for gays is at its core a hatred of the feminine.

I was going to title this post after a famous John Lennon song, but I couldn’t bring myself to type the racist word that makes the song so powerful. (Yet how many have balked at using similarly shocking language that denigrates women?) Instead I’ll just let John tell you himself:

Voting against the Democratic nominee, and such a historic nominee at that, is one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make. I agonized over the accusations of “loyal” Dems that people like me must secretly be racists. I agonized over what the consequences of either candidate winning might be. I agonized over what my friends might think of me if I did not vote for Obama.

In the end, I had to vote my conscience.

I turned 18 in 1984, and had just gone off to college when the general election came around. My father drove up to the campus and gave me a filled-out absentee ballot, telling me that he knew best, and I signed it, thinking that surely, he must. He was a man. He was the spiritual head of my household. I was nothing but a girl.

It didn’t take me long to realize what a foolish mistake that was, and it never happened again.

So when this election came along, I was truly torn. I’d made that youthful mistake once and voted for Reagan’s second term. Every vote since then had been a kind of penance, a deep soul-searching to be certain I was voting for the right candidate, that I knew the issues — that I owned my vote. This election was no different, though I worried that voting against Obama might be another electoral “sin” staining my soul.

But after much agony, I voted my conscience once more today. I voted against my party. I voted against the corruption and misogyny and race-baiting of the past 11 months. And as soon as I finally came to that decision, a decision that took me literally up until the moment I left to vote, I found myself singing this hymn from my childhood:

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

It is well, with my soul,
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Horatio Spafford wrote this hymn after life had buffeted him as if he were Job: the death of his only son was followed by financial ruin in the great Chicago Fire, and shortly afterward, his four daughters were killed in a collision at sea as he was on his way to meet them. His wife, alone, survived.

If Horatio Spafford can lift up his head and say that it is well with his soul after enduring such heartache, surely, it can be well with mine. And it is. It is well with my soul.

On the eve of the 2008 US Presidential election, I find myself filled with dread. It’s a somewhat familiar feeling. In 2000, the feeling of anxiously hoping my candidate would win turned into weeks of stomach-churning dread as the American democratic experiment began its descent into history. In 2004, hope began dissolving into dread as the “too close to call” states began flipping on their exit polls as election night wore on.

But this year is different. This year should have been the light at the end of a long, miserable tunnel. Instead, it has revealed that we are much farther gone than I had feared. And so on the eve of the election, I dread what my fellow Americans are going to do tomorrow; not just the voters, but the corrupters of the process: the lying media, the vote suppressors, the exit poll twisters, the hate mongers, the “anything to win” forces. Once upon a time, there was a line in the sand that “my side” did not cross. Once upon a time, the corrupters of the process would have belonged clearly on the other side of that line. This time, the line has been deliberately blurred.

What disturbs me is how accepting of this corruption so many have become. Some simply refuse to see it when it’s right in front of them; others bury their heads in the sand, believing that if they don’t know what’s going on, nothing bad can be happening; but some see it and welcome it, as if the corrupting forces of less-than-democratic elections can be used for the greater good. Many times over the past eight years, I heard people say, “We need to get smart and beat them at their own game. We need to play dirty.” I naively hoped this was the voice of a few bitter and misguided individuals, but the events of the past several months have shown that it was the moving force behind the New Left, a movement that was emboldened by its early success in the netroots with such an unlikely “progressive” tool as misogyny.

It was so easy, so eagerly embraced by so many, that it’s frightening. And its post-convention embrace by so many feminists as a bludgeon against Sarah Palin is bitterly stunning. The same women that decried what was being used against Hillary Clinton and her supporters in the primaries threw themselves wholeheartedly into vicious anti-woman rants all in the name of hating a woman on “the wrong side” (though to be fair, some of them, like Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL, jumped the shark a bit earlier). And when some women objected to this behavior, we got comments like this one, which epitomizes the entire past 11 months for me, though it is by no means the most offensive:

They need to pop a Midol and stop bitchin’. Show me the “extreme misogyny” and “pro-Obama sexism”.

If it were only the use of misogyny to win a primary, it would be bad enough. But the insults to the will of the voters—the decision of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee on May 31, 2008 to award the votes of uncommitted voters in Michigan to Obama, and to strip another four delegates away from Hillary Clinton to clinch the deal; the farce of a roll-call vote at the convention—ought to have disturbed even those completely inured to the sexism. Yet it was met with a yawn, and more than a fair amount of “Who cares how he got the nomination? As long as we win!”

If we don’t care how a nominee wins his party’s nomination, why should we care how a candidate wins the presidency? Why should we care that the last two presidential elections in this country were highly irregular? Shouldn’t George Bush have been congratulated for his clever strategy? Why should we even have an election? After all, the people of this nation, as we’ve been told repeatedly for the past several months, are too stupid and racist to be trusted with this sacred duty. Let’s just skip all this nonsense and send out an RFP. Let the top bidder win. (But wait, that’s what happens anyway, isn’t it?)

So what happens tomorrow…will it be legitimate? Will it matter if it’s not? I feel as if I’m standing on the edge of history—not the historical moment of white America expiating its sins against people of color by electing the first Black president, but the last stand for this democracy. No matter what happens tomorrow, I’m not sure I’ll be able to look my fellow Americans in the eye for fear of what I’ll see there. I think we’ve gone too far to come back. And I wonder now if I did enough to stand against the corruption.

So many other voices were speaking out that I thought mine wouldn’t matter. I thought taking a personal stand would be enough—my vote, my conscience. I’m not going to be able to change anyone’s mind here in San Francisco, I thought. I’m not going to be able to convince anyone of the corruption of the primary process if they couldn’t see it with their own eyes. I couldn’t even convince most of them to protest with me against the fraud in Ohio in “aught four.” I wonder what kind of comfort that’s going to be when things begin to unravel? Like Holly Hunter’s character in Broadcast News in answer to the sarcastic, “It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room,” I have to answer, “No. It’s awful.”

And like Heidi Li of the Denver Group, I’m more than a little sad.

Joe Biden told me so last night during the Vice Presidential debate, and I thought to myself, “Oh, so THIS one is the most important one!” Well thanks, Joe, because silly me, I thought it was the 2006 Congressional election, like the Democrats told me that year. And before that I thought it was the 2004 Presidential election, when Kerry told me it was. And I’m pretty sure I heard it a few times before that.

In the last several “most important elections of my lifetime” I argued myself blue (yes, bad pun intended) with Greens and Independents who didn’t seem to “get it.”

“Roe v Wade!” I screamed. “Endless war!” “This is the most important election of our lifetime!”

In the end, some of them held their noses and voted for Democratic candidates they didn’t particularly care for. Me, I never had to hold my nose, because I believed in the Democrats and I wasn’t about to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. I even voted for Diane Feinstein without so much as a facial twitch, because as imperfect as she is, she voted for things I valued more often than not. I was a true blue Democrat, the same way I was a true believer as a child.

This is the first election in my life where I would truly have to hold my nose, but I’d have to do more than that. I’d have to act like an abused wife and forgive and forget, believing the promise that “he really means it this time.” I’d have to, as some wise blogger recently wrote, “return to the bed of Humbert Humbert,” because after all, where else is there for me to go?

But I have found somewhere else to go. I’ve chosen the protest vote for the first time ever. Democrats and liberals around me are freaking out, shrieking, “Roe v Wade!” “Endless war!” “This is the most important election of our lifetime!”

In 2000, many of these people claimed that there was no difference between Gore and Bush, which was utter nonsense. People laughed when I warned them about Bush. They said, “Oh, he’ll never win! I’m glad he’s the candidate.” They voted for Nader, calling it a protest vote, even though the polls were uncomfortably close. But it was the most important election of our lifetime.

Now here we are again with the mother of all elections, and I have to wonder, if it’s so damned important, why did the DNC decide to play games with our primaries, alienating voters in Michigan and Florida? (Florida, of all places!) Why did they allow the character assassination of a great Democrat, the first viable woman candidate for President, a candidate who was tremendously popular with the working-class base? Why did they sling accusations of racism at the only Democratic President since FDR to win two terms?

And after their inexplicable manipulations, after they’d twisted the arms of superdelegates, threatened those who wouldn’t get in line, and prevented a true roll call vote at the convention, why did they (and do they, to this day) laugh and spit in the faces of 18 million voters and say they don’t need our votes? Why, for the love of whatever you most revere, did they not insist that Obama put Hillary on the ticket and bring true unity to the party? It wouldn’t have brought back all of the PUMAs, but it would have brought many. It certainly would have brought me.

I wanted a Democrat in the White House this time around. I wanted the “good guys” to win this one. But the past several months have shown me that we’re not the good guys after all. There are no good guys. There are just guys.

So forgive me if I just can’t work up the usual hysteria about this most important election, Joe. I’m tired of most-important elections.