Columns 2012

I really believed what Lisa Murkowski said about representing the people who took a chance on her and gave her another term in office. Then she voted against health insurance coverage of birth control for women based on the claimed principle of religious freedom. I thought she was intelligent enough to see through that charade and understand the vote for what it was, the ongoing war against women by men who – while still overwhelmingly controlling this country and its institutions – are feeling threatened by women’s advances in society.

Don’t believe that? Let’s look at some facts. The Catholic

It’s simply amazing that all these many years later I find out my mother and father were secretly trying to wean me and my siblings from the religion that was an all encompassing part of their lives by insisting we attend college. All this time I just thought it was because they wanted a better life for their children, what used to be called the American Dream. Thank goodness Rick Santorum has corrected that obviously wrong idea.

My mother actually attended college, a rare to almost unheard of feat in her world at a time when both men and women

Most Americans look askance at the imposition of Shari’a law in many middle Eastern countries. Yet they don’t act very concerned at attempts being made in America to enact conservative Christian morality as the law of our land. Whether it’s Rick Santorum trying to keep birth control from women because it is against his religious beliefs or Newt Gingrich urging a constitutional amendment to keep marriage sacred as defined by his three sacred unions, we are skating dangerously close to a religious reign in America.

It doesn’t matter if you call them priests, ministers or ayatollahs, religion ends up trumping

It’s been a rough few weeks for women. First, a group of men who have only ever had relationships of whatever kind with other men (hopefully) pronounce us as condemned to hell if we use birth control. Then another group of 16th Century thinkers claims that if women go into combat situations, they will either be raped by the brutes that surround them or protected by the chivalrous knights that surround them.  Either way, this group states, women should not be in combat.

Do you realize that in this scenario, it’s the military that’s progressive? Truly we have fallen through

I’ve asked friends who are practicing Catholics how they reconcile their personal actions with the positions of their church when those things are in conflict. Since the Catholic Church is pretty clear that holding conflicting opinions in certain areas can lead to a very hot afterlife, it always struck me as strange that they could be devout Catholics and yet feel no need to adhere to every pronouncement made by their church.

This conflict is especially glaring in the area of reproductive issues. I know very few Catholics who do not practice birth control. I know even fewer who think

When I saw the story, I felt such an overwhelming sense of sadness. I had just spent an evening with an aaka and aapa and their 5-year-old grandson. He was bright, quirky, funny, full of energy, and so clearly well loved. That’s the way life is supposed to be when you’re just a little tyke. You shouldn’t be lying in a hospital bed or morgue from a beating. But that’s exactly what two little kids from Barrow were doing that very same evening.

The next day, while still trying to comprehend the horror those children must have endured, I went

Since some segments of our community are already sure I’m from the dark side, or heading there soon after my demise, I might as well explain my take on the Alaska Airlines’ prayer card issue.

The first time I got a prayer card I was slightly bemused. It was back when everyone was fed on a flight. I wondered if the card was their way of suggesting I might need divine intervention if I ate what they were euphemistically calling a chicken sandwich. My second thought was that they knew something I didn’t about the flight and wanted us all

Poor Blondie. She was finally getting over her surgery when her system decided it didn’t like the antibiotics she was on and thought to expel them forcefully from both ends of her body.

As a wise man once said, getting old is not for the faint hearted.

Of course, the alternative is not for the faint hearted either.

Whether or not Jerry Prevo broke the law with his church’s property tax exemptions is perhaps not as important as the fact that it all just feels sleazy. Churches shouldn’t feel sleazy. Given what most churches preach, they should be so far from the line separating legal from illegal that there is no doubt whatsoever that they are upright and honorable. Trying to get as close to that line as possible without going over it, while shifting a financial burden to those who perhaps can least afford it, is simply not something churches should do.

It’s like the New Gingrich

I love snow. It’s one of the reasons I moved to Alaska. I love snow and cold much more than I ever loved sun and sand. This makes me a bit of an oddball in a family where temperatures dipping below 60 F, except for a select few weeks in January and February, are considered a sign of the apocalypse.

When I was young, the colder it got, the happier I got. Barrow would hit twenty below and I’d feel my blood starting to churn at the thought of a brisk walk across the lower lagoon where the wind chill