To the Editor:

Re: “Women: Bearing the Brunt Of Health Care Reform,” Opinion, Nov. 11

The Stupak Amendment to the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 is inaccurately characterized and described in this column. First, Hyde Amendment would not apply to AAHCA. The Hyde Amendment, which has been in place since 1976, only applies to appropriations from the Health and Human Services budget. On the most basic level, Hyde protects tax dollars that fund Medicaid from going to abortion — and politicians understood that this amendment was limited to the HHS budget, and that’s why they bothered drafting the Stupak Amendment in the first place.

Disclaimer: What you’re about to read is really, really gross. If you’re a weak-stomached pansy-ass, this is about as far as we recommend you go. Better luck next week, pansies-ass-pansies. You’ll have to get your superfuntimes another day.

So here goes. The other day, R and R went to the gym as they occasionally do after apple festivals, and they were feeling pretty good. One R took to the treadmill while the other R mounted her usual weird-elliptical-treadmill-hybrid-thing and began to ...

R: WORK IT!

Pandering for votes seems to be an inevitable part of politics. However, Hamid Karzai, the current President of Afghanistan up for reelection this coming fall, has crossed the line from political ingenuity to violating human rights.

Last month, Karzai signed a Shi’ite Personal Status Law, which the United Nations Development Fund for Women has interpreted as legalizing marital rape. Moreover, the law — which has yet to be publicly released — includes a provision that requires a woman to gain permission from her husband to work outside the home or to go to school. Thus, this law, approved by Karzai and both houses of Parliament, significantly endangers the gains Afghan women have made since the Taliban were ousted in 2001.

“I have another idea for a TV show. It’s called ‘Rape My House.’” A stand-up MC in New York City was warming the audience up for the next act. He was commenting on the strangeness of having an MTV show called “Pimp My Ride.” It is a show for a young audience that gleefully uses the word “pimp” as if it had no association with sexual exploitation. He made a good point, and was funny while he did it. Even though he used “rape” in the joke, it was to underline the seriousness of it. The audience laughed because we compared the gravity of rape to that of pimping and realized that the TV show lets the latter slide, even glamorizes it.

At first glace, Merrill Shatzman’s work seems to convey some sort of message, carrying traces of symbols and patterns that appear to be jumping off the page, just waiting to be decoded. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that any message she attempts to convey is infinitely multi-faceted, as increasingly more layers of etchings and connections reveal themselves. In a statement, she says her work “… questions and examines the ‘universal language’ created by signs, symbols and pre-imagined images … us[ing] surroundings as both an idea and an artifact.” She describes her muse as graphic communication, markings and forms that have the ability to convey meanings through simple rearrangements and displacements of lines and curves.

Two weeks ago, The Times printed an article about the up-and-coming movement for single-sex education. In the particular situation highlighted, boys and girls attend the same school, but are separated by different classrooms. The article started by relating a couple anecdotal pieces which show the benefits of being able to “tailor to each group.” Michael Napolitano, the boys’ teacher, “speaks to his fifth-grade class […] like a basketball coach.” When teaching his students “how to be a man,” Mr. Napolitano explains, “If I get in the face of a girl, she would just cry […] the boys respond to it, they know it’s part of being a young man.”

 While the future of the global economy remains uncertain, many look to the lessons of the past for advice on how to tackle today’s problems. Kirstin Downey, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from the Washington Post, explained this philosophy yesterday while discussing her recently released biography The Woman Behind the New Deal:  The Life of Frances Perkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secre­tary of Labor and His Moral Conscience.

Fannie Coralie Perkins was born in Boston in 1880 and quickly realized that her life would be based around helping others. Perkins, who later changed her name to Frances, worked with Jane Addams at the Hull House in Chicago and later worked for the Tammany Hall political machine and then-governor of New York, Al Smith.

Diversity has been a defining characteristic of our University since its founding, a critical factor in its success and is a personal priority. If we are to continue to lead, we must continue to seek and nurture exceptional talent without regard to gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status or other characteristics that too often divide us.

I am concerned, however, about our progress in a number of areas, including three related to the status of women at our University: the representation of women in specific areas of the student body, the representation of women on the faculty and the representation of women in senior leadership positions.

Cornell Global Development Club hosted the University’s first Summit on International Women’s Issues in Global Health and Development this past Saturday in Goldwin Smith Hall. Approximately 200 graduate and undergraduate students, professors, health professionals, civic leaders and women’s rights advocates gathered to discuss the challenges that women presently face around the world.

Last spring, Vanessa Coleman ’10, former president of the club, came up with the idea of holding a conference that would just focus on women’s issues. Current Club President Carrie Bronsther ’10 explained that the goals of the conference were to shed light on the international crimes against women that had often gone unheard, promote the sharing of ideas and get people motivated to take action.

When I was a kid, every boy had cooties. Didn’t matter who he was or if we were friends. If a kid had a pee-pee, that kid had cooties. You couldn’t see cooties, and there was no cootie-indicator — it was just that boys had cooties, and girls didn’t, or vice versa. Cooties were a family of germs: microscopic, contagious and dangerous. Worse yet, you only had to touch someone to get them. (Thankfully cooties, at least in my neighborhood, were not airborne pathogens.)