(no subject)

I voted this morning before work. That's not too early in the morning to pick a president, but it was a little too early in the morning to think about legalizing baby abandonment.

I voted against directing my representative to vote in favor of a baby safe haven law for a couple of reasons. One is that, like the abortion debate, such an idea completely misses the point that if we put more effort into educating teens about how to not get pregnant (birth control and abstinence equally), it's likely that fewer of them would get pregnant. So I don't want to vote in favor of stop-gap issues, especially when I have serious doubts that the target audience for such a law would use the safe havens anyway. I think that people who might have kept their babies will be more likely to give them up as a result of this law. The other big reason is that a baby safe haven law would completely ignore the father's rights to his child, and I don't think that's right. On the same ballot, we had a question about whether in cases of divorce, each parent should be granted as equal access as possible to children, barring circumstances that make a parent unfit. It seems a little crazy to me that our state could declare that both parents have a right to their children's time in case of divorce, but that a father has no right to his child if the mother doesn't want it.

It's still hard to shake the feeling that I voted to put babies in the trash, though.

Pan update

Poor little Pan is still not doing well, but this morning he was scratching at the bedroom door asking to go out and he climbed up onto my lap for a treat, which I take as good signs. He's put a little weight back on but he's still way too skinny. I am literally counting the hours until the vet appointment on Thursday morning. We haven't gone to the emergency room with him because he is eating and drinking marginally enough (and producing the appropriate outputs), and also because when I brought Amelia to the emergency room back in 2001 when she totally crashed, the generalist vet we got knew pretty much nothing about ferrets and I had very little faith in her ability to help us (not helped by her awful bedside manner--it's never appropriate to giggle when delivering bad news, no matter how nervous you might be). I think whatever is up with Pan is species-specific enough that a generalist would just say "oh, you need to see a ferret vet." It's agonizing waiting though.

I'm pretty sick now myself, probably some form of sympathetic illness... I wouldn't be at work at all if I didn't have to deal with this stupid paycheck thing. I'd rather be at home feeding Pan pieces of kibble.

interesting

Winona La Duke, who ran as Nader's choice for VP in the last two presidential elections, has endorsed Kerry.

Her endorsement statement and News from Indian Country in general are pretty indicative of Native American perspectives across the country. Sometimes their rhetoric seems over the top and reactionary, but then you read of things like a Republican flyer in South Dakota which could reasonably be construed as referring to Native Americans as varmints and dogs (you may have to enter your zip code to view the article), and then that same rhetoric seems remarkably restrained.