Half Changed World

As Sandy noted, Elizabeth Marquardt posted an apology for assuming that the "dc mom" in my heading stood for "donor conception" mom rather than "[Washington], D.C." mom.  I was anxious to clear up her misunderstanding, not because I think that donor conception is a bad thing, but because I didn’t want anyone to attribute an inappropriate authority to my commenting on Katrina Clark’s essay. 

As futher evidence of how "the personal is political," I’d like to point to Mobian’s post about the FMLA.  She picked up on my FMLA post via the Carnival of Feminists, but then writes:

For LGBT employees, the issue may not be so much the “definition of an eligible employee,” but rather the “definition of a family member.” Employers are not obligated to give an employee FMLA leave for the birth of her child, if it is her same-sex partner carrying the child. Same goes for adoption if the state does not allow second-parent adoptions and it is the employee’s partner who is adopting. And if the employee’s partner is lying in the hospital dying of cancer? Too bad. Thankfully, many corporations are choosing to give LGBT employees leave that is equivalent to the federal rights, but many others still don’t.

I’m embarassed to admit that this issue hadn’t occurred to me when I wrote about FMLA, and I thank Mombian for pointing it out.

I’ve been reading some of the manifestos that Hugh MacLeod’s been collecting and one point jumped out at me from the Amiable Heretic:

"4. You’re only entitled to the opinions you’ve thought through. You can only do that if you use hard data. Opinions you adopt from others are other people’s opinions, not yours."

I agree, as long as "hard data" isn’t limited to statistics.  Real people, talking honestly about their own experiences, can be hard data too.

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