With Friends Like These...

As a minor contributor to Dammit Janet! (who has, thankfully, not pushed any code buttons saying 'wipe blog out'), I'd like to say I am in concurrence with the senior writers at DJ! in withdrawing from an internet aggregator that does not serve the purposes of the information and opinions here.

I admit to a lethal bias, since I'm uhm...not actually aware of the aggregator as a waystation on the internets, except of course in the vague, annual reportage of their bloggy awards and the bunfest over the awards administrators' intransigent confusion over what feminism is.

I came to DJ! by googling around.  I use DJ!'s blogroll as my aggregator starting line to meander around to the other blogs that have interesting things going on at their virtual kitchen tables.  I use my own bookmarks otherwise.  I do not know what 'voting up' is.

 Everyone has opinions on what words mean and in this case Progressive is being defined by those that have the admin rights on the aggregator.  That is their prerogative and they are free to express it.

I would like to think that 'progressive' has at least a baseline definition of aligning with the Canadian Charter of Rights.  It was the Charter's existence that gave the Supreme Court of Canada the legal foundation to make a very unconfused decision January 28, 1988. 

If someone calling themselves a societal progressive cannot get behind that decision and the two following it, cannot comprehend that what they airily claim is merely an intellectual exercise, is in actuality a matter of literal life, liberty and equality to billions of human beings around the world at this-very-moment, I require that person to define what 'progressive' is and what exceptions they are willing to insert into the definition.

Why? Because it is my prerogative to not accept that I must stay quietly in place and accommodate someone who can look me in the eye and tell me that I, and any womb possessing human of a certain fertility, shouldn't mind if our bodies and lives are *debated* over cocktales as being *unworthy* of autonomy, by authoritarian, lying, anti-evidence, theocracy-pandering plutocrats who smugly know that whatever prescriptive law exists, exists for the 'little people', which of course, aren't them.

I cannot help but suspect exceptions in the definition of progressive will be ones the exceptionalist believes, or knows, will not affect *their* personal privilege in society.

I also invite that self-identified societal progressive to consider, since so much time has passed and science has progressed so amazingly, this topic of bodily autonomy should also be up for debate among people concerned for those members of a nation too irresponsible to be trusted to look after themselves and others.