I wrote a piece yesterday about how I felt US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was getting a bad rap from some for her speech at the United Nations the other day about gay and trans human rights. The speech was historic, regardless of whether we think the Obama administration has done enough on our issues.
Linda Hirshman, writing in the Atlantic, has a different concern, this one about women.
"In many places," she reminded her audience, which included numerous representatives of nations with harrowingly antigay laws and practices, "legal and social practices that relegated women to second-class status have been abolished."She concludes by asking when the women's community is going to do what the gay community did, get in the administration's face until they're forced to come through.
"Like being a woman..." she concluded, "being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights." It follows perfectly from the progress of women, does it not?
Today, the Department of Health and Human Services announced today that it had rejected the unanimous recommendation of the experts at the Food and Drug Administration to let young teenage girls buy the morning-after pill Plan B, like the condoms boys use, directly off drugstore and supermarket shelves without a prescription.
Secretary Clinton, phone home. All the high minded principles you lectured the world on yesterday are to the Obama Administration, well, so yesterday.
