My Thoughts on Circumcision

I wrote the following when I was pregnant with Ren, but it came up again recently when a friend of mine posted a link to an anti-circumcision video on Facebook. So, here are my thoughts on routine infant male circumcision. Enjoy!



All right, March mamas, I’ll get the ball rolling.

DISCLAIMER: I’m just going to do a really basic overview of what I found when I looked into circumcision, before I learned that my baby is (most likely) a girl [Guess what? She was! ;) ]. I’m not always going to site specific statistics or articles, because I am too lazy to go re-find the sources I originally looked at. Quoted sources will be cited. All of this information (and a LOT more) can be found by browsing through the MDC Case Against Circumcision thread (http://www.mothering.com/discussions/forumdisplay.php?f=44)

Here are the main questions I had when looking for info:

What is the foreskin?
“The foreskin is not an inconsequential "flap of skin", as I had been led to believe all of my life. It is actually a highly specialized organ with tens of thousands of nerve endings and grows to be up to 15" square or more in area when a boy becomes an adult. Throughout life, it performs many functions. In infancy, the foreskin provides protection from urine and feces since it is closed and tightly adhered to the penis like a fingernail to a finger (it stays that way until about the age of five, but sometimes until the age of 18 or more). In adulthood, it provides protection from the rubbing of clothing and it provides intense sexual sensations for the man and his partner.”
source: http://www.stopcirc.com/ilearned.html

What exactly is circumcision?
“Circumcision is not a "little snip" as I had heard many refer to it. Approximately 2/3 of the penile skin and most of the sensitivity of the organ is removed. It is an extraordinarily painful procedure, as the delicate foreskin is forcibly ripped from the penis and then slit, crushed and cut away. It takes about 15-20 minutes, with the baby separated from his mother and strapped spread eagle to a plastic restraint. Pain relief is not normally administered although circumcision is classified as surgery. It was thought years ago that babies this young felt no pain, but this theory has since been disproved. A matter of fact, the opposite has been determined through numerous studies - babies feel pain much more intensely than adults. Today, the AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) considers it unethical for a doctor to withhold pain relief during circumcision although many still do.”
source: http://www.stopcirc.com/ilearned.html

How common is male circumcision?
Not as common as most Americans think. In fact, it’s pretty rare in most non-Muslim parts of the world other than the US.

Why is it common in the US?
During the Victorian period (mid 1800s), male circumcision was introduced in the English-speaking world as a way to prevent masturbation. Popularity continued in the US through the 1950s and into the 1970s, with the new “medical” reason being that a circumcised penis is “healthier”. (I think they kept it up in order to keep making money from the procedure.)

How common is it in the US today?
It’s losing popularity, with about 50% of boys born in the US today being circumcised shortly after birth. Regional differences are big, though, with only about 30% of California boys being circumcised, versus up to 80% of Midwestern boys. [Since I wrote this back in 2007, the rate has dropped even more, down to around one-third of baby boys nation-wide in 2009 (http://www.drmomma.org/2010/08/us-circumcision-rate-falls-to-33.html)]

So, why would anyone choose this for non-religious reasons? (Common pro-circ reasons, and the rebuttals)

Circumcision prevents STDs and penile cancer - hmmmm... not really. Some studies may show a very slightly higher risk of contracting an STD for intact men, but your son’s foreskin status should NEVER be the first line of defense for STDs anyway. Teach your son to abstain or practice safe sex, and his foreskin won’t be an issue. The cancer thing has been pretty much debunked.

Circumcision prevents UTIs in infant males - although intact infant boys do have a slightly higher risk of UTIs in the first year of life, UTIs are still very rare in ALL male babies. It’s something between 1 in 100 to 1 in 800, depending on the study. Not a valid reason to deprive your son of a healthy body part.

Circumcision in infancy keeps him from having to be circumcised as an adult, when it would be more memorable/painful/scarring - There are a few medical conditions that might ultimately result in a medically necessary circumcision for an adult man, the main one being a persistent tight foreskin (phimosis). But again, this condition is rare, and not a valid reason to circumcise.

Basically, I see all the “medical” arguments this way: it makes the same amount of sense as ripping out our babies’ toenails (with little or no anesthetic) in order to save them from ingrown toenail infections and athlete’s foot in adulthood.

But isn’t an intact penis harder to keep clean? - No. The American Association of Pediatrics says: “Care of the uncircumcised boy is quite easy. ‘Leave it alone’ is good advice. External washing and rinsing on a daily basis is all that is required. Do not retract the foreskin in an infant, as it is almost always attached to the glans. Forcing the foreskin back may harm the penis, causing pain, bleeding, and possibly adhesions. The natural separation of the foreskin from the glans may take many years. After puberty, the adult male learns to retract the foreskin and cleanse under it on a daily basis.”
source: http://www.cirp.org/library/normal/aap/


So what about social reasons?

I want baby to look like dad - Huh. Yeah. Except a child’s penis looks NOTHING like an adult’s penis. What child compares himself that minutely to his father? If your son can handle the fact that he’s shorter than dad, less hairy, and may have different hair/eye/skin color, I don’t think he’s going to fret over foreskin differences.

Won’t he get teased in the locker room? - For one, circumcision is declining in the US, and rare practically everywhere else, so he’s not likely to be the only intact boy in his school. Plus, what adolescent boy points out another boy’s penis to his peers? Boys in locker rooms don’t generally announce that they’ve been checking out other boy’s penises. If your son notices he’s different, hopefully he has been raised with enough love and support that he has the self-esteem not to be bothered too much.

Religious reasons: I don’t really want to touch this, but there are a lot of resources for parents struggling with the religious aspect of circumcision. Many Christians feel circumcision is not at all required as part of their faith, since it is not part of the New Covanent (http://www.stopcirc.com/christian.html). Many Jewish and Muslim parents are also re-examining the roots of circumcision in their faiths, and coming to new conclusions (sorry I don’t have links).

So, what are the drawbacks of circumcision?
Pain, infection, breastfeeding difficulties, and loss of sexual sensitivity are just a few. I didn’t look too deeply into this aspect of the issue when I was doing my research, since I went in with a “Why should I?” attitude rather than a “Why not?” As you can imagine, there’s a ton of resources out there on this subject.

Tons of pages of links to various external websites can be found in the web resources thread of the MDC CAC board: http://www.mothering.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=207626


I hope you all find this helpful! (and also not too preachy) Mamas with more experience, PLEASE add your advice and stories.

Wishing you all happy and healthy babies!

On Nursing a Growing Girl

Yay, insomnia!

This is a little different than my normal political rants, but I can't sleep and I've got something on my mind, so here goes.

As Ren gets closer to being three, and as Erik and I prepare to start trying for a second child, I find myself more and more conflicted about continuing to nurse. It's not that I'm leaning more towards weaning, it's more that both the pros and cons are getting weightier.

For reference, I don't nurse Ren that much. She's cut way down in the last 6 months or so. We night-weaned (for my sanity) at around 18 months. We stopped nursing in public for the most part when she was around two, and now we don't do it at all. That pretty much went hand in hand with other forms of modesty. I've started feeling uncomfortable even nursing at other people's homes, although it does depend quite a bit on the person. So now it's pretty much just sometimes when we're hanging out at home in the morning, or right before bed. But she's showing no signs of wanting to stop entirely.

Before having Ren, I was one of those women who said that once my kids could eat food (or ask to nurse, or pull up my shirt), there'd be no reason to continue to nurse. Ha! Boy, was I ever wrong!

Once I realized what a boob-hog I had, I swung the other the direction. Child-led weaning FTW! I'd just let her stop when she was ready, right? After all, it's perfectly natural to breastfeed well into early childhood, right?

Well, I still believe that (and here's a really great article by Kathy Dettwyler that offers compelling evidence). But, gosh, she's getting so big. She's not a toddler, anymore; she's really a little girl. And I can't imagine she's going to give it up on her own any time soon, but sometimes I look down at her and it does seem a little strange.

I'd like to believe that I'm not being influenced by other people's opinions, that I'm only taking my needs and Ren's needs into account. But I don't think that's entirely true. Because we live in a culture where nursing a 2 year old is rare, and nursing a 3 year old is often seen as downright sick. So far I've been blessed with an army of friends and family who have been supportive of extended nursing. But I'm starting to feel that support subtly dry up, although that may be just paranoia or projection on my part.

It's always been vitally important to me to follow Ren's cues. It is my instinct to do so, and without that instinct I would have been utterly lost for the past (almost) three years. I believe that by following Ren's cues about things like breastfeeding, sleep, food, etc., Erik and I have been very successful in raising a happy, caring, curious, secure, boisterous little girl. It is my instinct that if were to try to wean Ren soon, even gently, it would be extremely painful for her, and it might cause undue strain on her relationship with me. It is such a haven for her.

But I'm not sure. Maybe she's ready, and all she needs is a little nudge.

I certainly don't want to wait until I'm very pregnant, or worse, have a new baby, because I really don't want her to connect weaning with the new baby in any way. I will not be able to deny her that comfort if I'm offering it to her sibling.

So, it seems like it's gotta be now, or much later. But I don't know, I don't know...

I'm going to have to figure it out soon, aren't I?

Another Wellstone Memorial?

It pains me to say that it looks like conservative pundits like Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh are turning the memorial for the shootings in Tuscon into another Wellstone Memorial.

I just need to get this all out of my system, because it upsets me so much; sorry if there is little or no coherence to my thoughts. [I'm also fixing typos as I can, sorry]

They're saying that the White House, Obama, the Democrats, the liberals, or whoever cynically turned the Tuscon memorial into a political pep rally, complete with T-shirts with a logo and a slogan. I'll admit that the T-shirts are a weird idea, and an incredibly tacky one if they, in fact, have a Rock the Vote slogan on them, which is as-yet unconfirmed, and I don't really believe it. They're even recycling that old chestnut from the Wellstone Memorial smear: that the closed captioning on the JumboTron was actually an applause sign. Seriously? Are people really this stupid?

OK. The thing is: I attended the Wellstone Memorial and I personally knew some of the people who organized it. So I feel like I have a little insight into what really happened there. It was NEVER intended to be a pep rally or a campaign event. It was four hours of intense emotions shared by tens of thousands of people. Did some people boo conservative politicians? Yes. But only a few out of the vast crowd. There are bound to be a few assholes in any crowd. Did some of the speeches get a little political? Yes. Especially Rick Kahn's. But you know what? Rick was Paul's best friend. He was crazy with grief. Everyone involved in organizing the memorial, all those people who had worked for and loved Paul and Sheila and Will and the other victims, they were all crazy with grief. So crazy that they didn't vet the speeches. It didn't even occur to them. So when Rick went insane in front of a national viewing audience, it was like, holy shit! And when the SAME DAMN pundits who are doing it again now used the "inappropriate", "don't-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste" spin to get Coleman elected, a little part of me died.

[One quick side note: the whole "don't let a crisis go to waste" thing? Lemme see, how'd that work out for Bush? Seems to me he converted 9/11 into that illegal war he wanted, PLUS a second term!]

But that's not the crux of it, I realized tonight. I think the main problem is a real disconnect between the way Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin view the memorials and how they should have been, and the emotional truth of those memorials. So let me spell it out. Because this is surely an honest mistake, right?

Sometimes, when people go through a terrible tragedy, they don't act the way one might think they ought to. In the case of both the Wellstone and the Tuscon memorials, we had all been through a rough few days. Most of us didn't know the victims personally; it was more a symbolic hurt, a symbolic grief. But truly felt, to be sure. The shooting in Tuscon felt like our democracy was under siege, to me, at least. For a member of Congress, a symbol of our government, our democracy and our way of life, to be gunned down on a street corner along with some of her constituents, while she was engaged in her civic duty to those constituents, felt like an attack on all I hold Holy about our nation. Based on the national reaction, I can't be the only one who felt that way. And so for days I felt adrift, hurt, scared. Then I watched the memorial, and here was finally a place where I felt understood and validated, but also uplifted. Our nation is still strong; we have been hurt but we will rise up; and, most important, we are all in this together!

So I can fully understand the reaction from the crowd in Tuscon that night. Here was a group of thousands who had been through a lot. No one stands in a line for a memorial for hours if they are not carrying some pretty heavy baggage about it. And then? Catharsis! We're OK! We're going to get through this! The PRESIDENT HIMSELF says so! The relief! So of course they cheered. And yes, it was loud and boisterous, but people in the extremes of emotion may react in myriad ways.

Cut these people some slack. And please don't let's turn this into another Wellstone Memorial.

Kick ass speech by the President, by the way. Here's my favorite part:
"Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."

"Sharpen our instincts for empathy...", that is just beautiful.

[ETA: I originally posted that Jeff Blodgett was the close friend who gave the inappropriately political speech at the Wellstone memorial, instead of Rick Kahn. My mistake, I was writing from memory. Jeff Blodgett was Paul's campaign manager, who also subsequently apologized for the tone of the memorial. My apologies to Mr. Blodgett.]

Literal vs. figurative

This isn't so much of a rant as just a jotting down of impressions. If you want something that's passionate and (kind of) well thought out, look elsewhere.


So on my way to work today, there was a story on the radio about the Tea Party in Michigan; something to do with a Democratic plot to start a fake Tea Party to split the vote on the right (which, if true, is vile). Anyway, one quote that struck me was an actual Tea Party member saying something along the lines of: "We don't want a political party; we just want to elect politicians who believe in the Constitution." Huh. Maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but I guess I thought that most politicians currently in office, on both sides of the aisle, do "believe in the Constitution." Why else would they bother being politicians?

Then I realized that the subtext behind the woman's statement was that there's pretty much only one way to interpret the Constitution, and that the Tea Party wants to elect politicians who believe in the Constitution in the "right" way. Which also got me started thinking about people who take the Bible literally, or at least who believe that there is only one way to interpret it.

I really don't want to make any value judgments about people who believe in a "strict" interpretation of either the Constitution or the Bible. But for me that kind of concrete thinking just doesn't work. I'm glad it works for them. I just can't imagine having that kind of certainty, that there is only one way to look at things and that my way is the right way.

So then I started thinking about concrete/literal thought versus abstract/figurative thought. It seems like some people believe that the former is better, more real. Which is true a lot of the time. In the real world, you have to put real food on the table, or you really will starve.

But I also think that there is something powerful about figurative thought that can feed the human soul. That sometimes literalism needs to be put aside so that the metaphor can speak to us more loudly. I think that millenia of human art speaks to this: sometimes a painting of a lilypad contains more lilypad-truthiness than a picture of one, or even the real thing. Sometimes there is more Truth to be found in the figurative than the literal.

Hence my Facebook status today.

Liz asked about the status as I was writing this, and after I explained (poorly) my train of thought, she wondered aloud whether those people who prefer concrete or literal interpretations might not also have less interest in art (or, as she put it, "less art in their lives"). It's an interesting question...

A couple thoughts on abortion

OK, I'm not going to launch into a whole big thing about abortion, because honestly I'm conflicted and I don't have all the facts. But the subject has come up twice today, in two otherwise unrelated instances, and so now my typical abortion thoughts are sloshing around my head. So here are my main two thoughts which occur to me every time the subject comes up, but seem to get very little airplay in the general discourse:

1) Our bodies can't keep up with our culture
Our bodies were designed to function perfectly in a culture and environment that no longer exists. There are a few of ways in which this problem manifests itself, but the one which is germane (I've used that word TWICE today!) to this topic is the fact that our bodies now become sexually mature a full ten years or so before we become socially mature. For the vast majority of human history, young people became sexually mature at roughly the same time that they entered into social maturation: a young woman became capable of childbirth at roughly the same time she was expected to get married, in her mid-teens. In our current culture, however, young women are hitting puberty at younger and younger ages and putting off having kids later and later. There is this widening gap between sexual maturation and the age at which it is wise to have children. Even "young" mothers who get married and have their babies in their early twenties have about a five year gap. Which is why I'm surprised that "pro-life" and "abstinence only" seem to go together so often. It seems so impractical. You really expect the vast majority of American women to remain abstinent for five to ten years after their sexual maturity? It has never been a problem before, because women didn't wait so long to have babies before. But in the society we live in now, a woman severely limits her financial, educational and professional choices if she opts to have children in her mid-teens or early twenties. I'm not saying abstinence is BAD, not at all. I have the utmost respect for young adults who make that choice for themselves. But expecting ALL young adults to be willing and able to live up to that standard is preposterous, to be honest. So it seems to me like practical people who understand human biology should support some kind of reproductive rights...

2) Let's stop fighting and try to support women and babies instead
As I said earlier, I am conflicted about abortion. I don't know that I could ever have one myself, even in the case of rape. I am happy, however, that I get to make that choice for myself. I also realize that I have been lucky enough to be well-educated and well-loved by supportive family and friends, and that this is not true for every woman or girl. Probably because I am conflicted, it really irks me that the debate is so polarized. I honestly wish we lived in a world where no one had to make that awful choice; so why can't we work together to make that world? I would be much happier to see abortion made illegal if we lived in a country where high-quality birth control was readily available to everyone, preferably for free; where high-quality childcare and early childhood education were affordable; where adoption was easier; where quality choices in prenatal care and childbirth were affordable and accessible; where all single parents who were willing to work could make a living wage for their families. Anyone who really cares about reducing the number of abortions in this country should focus their efforts on health care reform and workers' rights. Maybe I'm naive, but I firmly believe that most women who have a choice, a real choice, would choose to carry an unplanned pregnancy to term.

A few bonus thoughts, since Erik is too busy right now to proofread this:
I find it extremely disingenuous when people 1) claim they are not homophobic and don't hate homosexuals; 2) support abstinence only programs and; 3) do not support gay marriage. I see: they don't HATE gay people, they just don't think they should have sex. Ever. Never, ever.

I hate it when people say "pro-abortion" instead of "pro-choice." Like, no one is pro-abortion. Seriously. OK, maybe some seriously twisted people, but the great majority of people who believe in a woman's right to choose still do not think abortion is some great thing. They're not all, "Yay! Abortion! Woot!" So stop being a jerk.

I also get irritated by the pro-life billboards that proclaim "My heart was beating 18 days from conception!" and then show a picture of a six month old. You know why they show a picture of a six month old? Because six month old babies are cute and 18 day old embryos are not. They don't even look human. They look like this:

Gay Marriage

I've decided I'm going to start all my posts like Jerry Seinfeld:
WHAT is UP with Gay Marriage?

OK, maybe not. But, honestly, what is up? I don't see how the anti-gay-marriage folks have a leg to stand on. Let's break down their arguments, shall we? We'll start off easy:

God says homosexuality is a sin
First off, even that premise is up for debate. I will most likely get into a more detailed analysis in a later post, but for starters the Bible doesn't even mention lesbians. But even assuming that God cares what consenting adults do in their own bedrooms, since when have we passed laws based on Scripture? We don't. There are no laws against divorce or working on Sunday. There's no law enforcing the beatitudes. There ARE specific laws ensuring the rights of non-Christians, including atheists. God's Law is not federal.

Allowing gay marriage would be an unprecedented redefinition of an ancient tradition
Do you know which definition of marriage has the longest tradition? The one where two families haggle over a political and financial contract, and the wife, often a teen-aged girl or younger, is chattel. The most revolutionary redefinition of marriage was when it became something that two adults chose for themselves out of love (or something like it). "Traditional marriage" as we know it in the United States today is only about 100 years old. Not much of a tradition, and certainly not an iron-clad one. In reality, the "definition" of marriage has been pretty fluid throughout history and across societies. The only thing that has remained constant is that it is the convention by which we as a society recognize the creation of a new family. Gay marriage will certainly not change that.

Gay marriage threatens straight marriage
Huh? This doesn't even make any sense. For me, the strength of my marriage is based on the strength of the bond between me and my husband. It has nothing to do with other people or what their marriages look like. The strength of individual marriages shouldn't depend on what anybody else is doing. If your straight marriage is so fragile that the nice gay couple down the street gettin' hitched is somehow a threat, you might want to consider looking for a divorce lawyer regardless.

Marriage is about children, and homosexuals can't have kids
Wrong on both counts. Marriage is not fundamentally about children and it never has been. As mentioned above, it has historically been a business transaction. But even now we don't bar infertile couples or post-menopausal women from marrying, nor do we require all fertile married couples to procreate. And plenty of gay couples have kids. They have them in the same ways straight couples often do: adoption, artificial insemination, surrogacy and/or having them from a previous marriage. If you care at all about families, you should know that the children of gay parents deserve the stability of the institution of marriage.

But what about the children?
I was going to do a section on the "children need both a mother and a father" misconception, but when I looked online to find sources I was pleased to find that most new studies claim that lesbians actually make better moms! Go ahead, Google it. But I'd like to break down the old argument anyway. The studies that "prove" that kids "do best" with a mom and a dad are based on data comparing straight, two-parent homes with single-mother homes. Hmmmm, let me see if I can find the fallacy in that logic... Don'cha think that the number of parents might be more important than the gender, maybe? One of these so-called scientists, Dr. A. Dean Byrd, also came out with a study which "detailed the significant physical and emotional health risks of those who identify as homosexuals, including a reduced lifespan, suicidality, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and domestic violence." Once again he completely disregards context and confuses correlation for causation. You know who also had an increased risk for reduced lifespan, suicidality, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and domestic violence? Black people in the Jim Crow south. These "studies" are a joke.

Gay people already can get all the rights married people have
This may be partially to mostly true in some states, but so what? Separate but equal is not equal. I never quite understood what a big deal this was until one of my friends started detailing for me all the money she had to spend and red tape she had to go through in order to change her last name, get power of attorney for her partner, list her partner as their son's parent, etc. All the things that were free and easy for me as a married person were expensive, difficult and time-consuming for her and her partner. It's absolutely unfair and completely pointless.

It's a slippery, slippery slope
This one has always bugged me, but only recently did I fully understand why. I can't remember the source (thank goodness this is just a rant and not a scholarly paper!), but I read somewhere an analysis of why this argument is deeply misogynistic. The argument usually goes, "Well, if a man can marry another man, what's going to stop him from marrying his dog!" Hardee-har-har. But notice, it's never a woman marrying her dog. That's because the underlying supposition is that marriage is something a man does, and that the consent of the partner is irrelevant. How insulting. Once you realize that marriage is an agreement between consenting individuals, the slippery-slope, beastiality, pedophelia arguments become silly. I suppose that technically polygamy and incest are still on the table, but since historically both of those things have also involved lack of consent from one (or more) parties, they still cannot be logically compared to gay marriage.

Marriage is a sacrament and churches shouldn't be forced to allow gay marriage
This one actually makes some sense to me. Freedom to practice one's own religion is a right I hold dear. It is regrettable that our society has so entangled the civil institution of marriage with the religious sacrament. If it were possible to revoke ALL civil marriages and replace them with civil unions, leaving marriage to the religions, I would support that in a heartbeat. But that's not going to happen; they are too tightly linked and "marriage" shows up in our laws too much. But as I stated before, separate but equal is not equal, so I feel we have no choice but to legalize gay marriage with the caveat that various religions are protected and can continue to make their own rules about who they will or will not marry. Seeing as the Catholic Church still doesn't allow women to be priests, I am hopeful that the religious protection will stand.

Seriously, what about the children?!
The silliest, and newest, argument against gay marriage has something to do with what kids are taught in schools. Seriously? You guys are really grasping at straws, now. How do you make the connection between legal gay marriage and being forced to give kindergartners graphic details about homosexual sex? There is no connection. In my high school sex ed class, which was pretty comprehensive I'm happy to say, there was no "how to" component. Yes, we were taught about various sex acts, but only so we could learn the relative risks of each; it was never graphic or detailed. And unless you gays and lesbians are holding out on something really spectacular, we covered everything in my "straight" sex ed class, anyway. As for kids being taught in school that being gay is OK as part of some larger discussion about what marriage is, we never had a "marriage" unit in any class I ever took. I honestly can't recall ever discussing the definition of marriage in school. Teachers don't teach kids about what marriage is, so that's a moot point.

OK. I'm done. Any arguments I didn't think of?

Listen: we live in a country where individual freedoms are held sacred. That means that there are a lot of things other people are free to do that I might not like very much. But I will fight for your right to participate in a KKK march or wear a thong in public because, no matter how disgusting I personally find it, you have the right to do those things. You should have the right to do those things. Gay marriage doesn't hurt anyone. Legalizing gay marriage would help so many families already living in the United States right now. Everyone should have the right to marry the person they love.

Our America

So there's been a lot of talk lately about how some people "want my country back" and how Obama is destroying the "real" America and so on. To which I ask, "What America is that?" When did the US reach its pinnacle of American-ness that you yearn to return to? When were these good old days? It seems like these people have a view of America as a land of opportunity; a place where anyone with gumption can work hard and raise themselves up by their bootstraps, so long as the pesky government doesn't get in their way. But when was that American Dream ever truly a reality for all Americans? Since women and minorities didn't have even remotely equal rights in this country until the last 40 or so years, the good old days have to be fairly recent (and, by the way, gays and lesbians still don't have equal rights). So when in the last four decades were the good old days? I'm guessing that the Tea Partiers and their ilk would point to the 1980s. Ah, yes, Reagan years were the ultimate era of governmental restraint and personal freedoms! Those halcyon days! News flash, folks: taxes were HIGHER under Reagan. That's right! Obama, the tax-and-spend-socialist-America-destroying-anti-Christ would have to RAISE TAXES in order to equal those under Saint Ronnie.

But the American Dream is a beautiful dream. I believe in the American Dream, and I believe that it starts with opportunity. No amount of gumption or work ethic in the world is going to do you any good if you don't have an opportunity to apply them. Opportunity comes from high-quality public education available to everyone. Opportunity comes from freedom from being exploited. Opportunity comes from a reliable and safe infrastructure of roads, utilities and telecommunications. I'm happy to pay my fair share to ensure these opportunities for every American, even the ones who don't look or live like me.

For all their rhetoric of being in touch with the "real America" and the "heartland", the Tea Partiers seem to have a pretty low opinion of actual Americans. They seem to think that a strong infrastructure and a robust social safety net will lure Americans into complacency and dependence on the government. They seem to think that Americans are inherently lazy. I couldn't disagree more. I believe in American innovation, and I believe that it is strengthened, not hampered, by the sense of security which comes from knowing that if you fail, you will have the opportunity to try again. From knowing that even in the face of an medical emergency or the whims of Wall Street or a natural disaster you will have a chance to rise up again. I hope I never have to use this country's social safety net, but I am awfully glad it's there and I am glad to pay for it.

Ultimately, I believe in the greatness of our country and the ideals upon which it was founded. I believe that together we can put those ideals more strongly into practice. The government, elected and held accountable by the people, is our biggest, best and strongest tool to that end. Together we can create an America where every American is free to dream and strive and work and grow and create and reach for the American Dream in whatever way appeals to them, secure in the knowledge that should failure or misfortune befall them, their basic needs would be provided for. Imagine the world we could create then!