Sarah Palin is the New Paris Hilton.

I wish I was joking. The very last thing our country needs right now is another famous for being famous cult of personality that’s as vapid and clueless as Sarah Hilt..er, Palin, but the fact of the matter is the woman simply. Will not. Go. Away.

When I woke up on Wednesday, November 5th, I rather foolishly comforted myself with the naive thought that it was all over and Caribou Barbie would sink back into the obscurity from whence she came. Okay, there’s no need to look at me like that, I see I was being stupid. Clearly, national attention is like heroin to the woman; why else would she have started her own PAC less than a week after Obama took office? Or announce that she’ll be having dinner with the President? Or, FSM save us all, write a book? The last one is so deliciously ironic the jokes just write themselves. “I thought she only read magazines and newspapers.” “A book? Will it have a soft cover and cardboard pages?” My biggest concern is that no matter who they get to ghost it, it’s going to be so obviously doctored, there’s simply no WAY anyone will fall for the fiction that it’s in her own words. How can it be? I mean, you could probably get a FEW pages out of soundbites, but eventually you have to develop plot and characters, no? And the syllables! The poor tortured syllables! It ain’t right to do that to unsuspecting words.

I was SO angry when John McCain compared Obama to Paris Hilton. I thought unleashing that human STD back on an unsuspecting populace was one of the worst things he could do during his campaign. Ohhh, but that was before Sarah Palin. Infecting us with Paris as opposed to infecting us with Sarah? Sadly, there is no Vancomycin for television.

Prostitution or Capitalism? Virginity on the Auction Block

This week, a 22 year old student in San Diego is auctioning her virginity. Predictably, it has sparked a firestorm on teh intarweb regarding morality.

“Maybe this is the conservative in me coming out, but this seems so wrong,” wrote one blogger, Mike. “Isn’t this prostitution?”

“I must say I feel sad for the future of our society,” said Mike from Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Is it prostitution? Yes. Yes, it is. Rather predictably, it doesn’t bother me. Here’s the thing: prostitution should never have been a crime. Women (and men) are offering services for money. Some people are willing to pay for those services. The fact of the matter is….it’s their bodies. They’re the only ones who should have a say as to whether they sell it or not. I do wonder if there would be quite the black market trade for sex slaves were prostitution legal.

Let’s look at Nevada. Those women (and men)* have health insurance, are clean, are not mistreated, are in many cases earning money to put themselves through school….all legally.

Prostitution law is essentially legislating morality. Now…don’t get me wrong. Prostitution is not something I want my daughter to see as the best way of putting one’s self through school. But we’re not doing ourselves or those women any favors by criminalizing it. And from what I can tell, it hasn’t reduced the numbers significantly. Making the fines stiffer, imposing tougher sentences….hell, even the guy renowned for prosecuting hookers frequented them. And yet we continue to pretend that an adult willingly selling their body^ is somehow a criminal. I realize this may be a bit abstract, but … isn’t there a point where we all end up trading sex for something we want? If we were really honest with ourselves, I’m not sure how many people would be able to say they didn’t trade sex for something or something for sex. Security, marriage, a car, hell… I’ve even heard coworkers talk about giving their husbands blowjobs to get them to do various things around the house. How is that NOT trading sex for a payoff?

We like to pretend that sex is always (or should be) some pure thing, some high emotional transaction, a mingling of souls. When the fact of the matter is….we are human beings. Mammals. Animals. And we are at our most animalistic during sex. An orgasm isn’t a holy union. It’s a biological function. That happens to feel good. And I do not say this to denigrate it. I say this because I think people have turned sex into a false idol. We’ve put it on a pedestal and changed it into a mold it doesn’t fit. Hence all the neurosis. Sex is sex. It feels good, and we like it. But like most things, it’s been totally mangled and demonized by both religion and society.

Let the girl do whatever the hell she wants with her body. If someone finds worth in what she has to sell and she’s examined her innermost self and is okay with the repercussions….so be it. This is America. Where we believe we are free to live our lives as we like. Leave her the hell alone already.

*sorry I keep putting (and men) in parenthases. But I don’t see men prostituting themselves in nearly the numbers that women do. Not sure why that is. On the other hand…I’ve seen the business world. We’re all someone’s whore at the end of the day….

^ I am not talking about those who are forced into the sex slave industry or underaged or coerced people. Obviously, that’s another kettle of fish. I’m only addressing those who choose to do so of their own volition.

Indigenous tribe a publicity stunt

Okay, well…not ENTIRELY.

In a previous post, I pointed out that the main reason contact was made with this tribe was to highlight the fact that they exist in order to curb the unchecked clear cutting in the Amazonian rain forest. This morning, the Guardian broke the story that the tribe’s existence has been known since 1910, and:

the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that ‘uncontacted’ tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry.

The disclosures have been made by the man behind the pictures, José Carlos Meirelles, 61, one of the handful of sertanistas – experts on indigenous tribes – working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai, which is dedicated to searching out remote tribes and protecting them.

While I do not disparage Funai’s cause or reasoning, their methods may have just set that cause back substantially. Something happens in people’s minds when they feel they have been swindled, whether justifiably or not. There is no question that the clear cutting is a global concern with far reaching effects. But to give the public a focus for that concern, causing an emotional connection, and then revealing that they were, in fact, misled will no doubt garner backlash that has the potential of harming the very thing they wish to protect. Public interest and goodwill only extend so far.

While I do not waver in my support of the cessation of clear cutting or the protection of the Amazon’s indigenous tribes, I find the methodology of this group reprehensible, and fear for the fallout. For those tribes, and that area, this can only be seen as an unfortunate set back.

One More Reason Gay Marriage Makes sense.

I recently added a comment to someone’s blog regarding Gay Marriage and the inevitable “slippery slope” argument. While such arguments aren’t always fallacies, it’s usually the way to bet, especially when coupled with the emotional tag line “Won’t someone think of the chillllldrrrrreeeeeeeennnnnnnnn!!!” I responded to each point and hit enter, not at all confident that my comment would be approved. As it turns out, I was quite correct in my trepidation; the person to whom I posted was not only incorrect in their assertions, they were stubbornly closed to any disagreement.

Fortunately, I have this article to put forth yet another reason gay marriage is a brilliant success. It works economically. We have the potential of seeing nearly $700M infused into the state’s flagging economy over the next three years, as well as adding over 2100 new jobs. Considering the way the economy’s going right now, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

While this certainly helps to put yet another nail in the coffin of discrimination against the GLBT community, I do wonder if even pragmatism and cold facts will persuade where reason has failed. Anti gay groups are now grasping at straws, oblivious to the fact that it’s simply no longer a tenable position.