Lost recently- Molly Ivins. A fave quote: "The reason religion and policy make such a bad mix is that religion brings the dread element of certitude into what needs to be a constant process of questioning." Molly Ivins Dec 06I choose to be in a bad mood over this loss. Very few people have written well enough to make me laugh, wince and tisk all in the same article. The din of complacency is louder without her.
Molly is why I ask questions. Which has led me this week to what I think has got to be an obvious question among about 100 others: what privacy of Mary Cheney and her gestating spawn?
Should she have privacy? Yes, absolutely. But she has created or at least help ALOT to keep her pregnancy a matter of civil discourse. In fact I am sure that her pregnancy, juxtaposed with her efforts prior, will charge the batteries of some-dead legislation to ban single women from having children: single is spelled L-E-S-B-I-A-N. Cuz it jus tain't natchrul.
I hope she pays attention to all the states rights loving states out there who supported her daddy and his puppet. Because in some of those states if she were to get sick and Heather "herlesbianpartner" Poe were left to make decisions- even so much as decide to put the child in a car and take it home- she might not be able to. Infact, by law in some of those fine states, their extrastepswetaketoprotectourlovedonescuzwedon'thavetherights legal parenting documents would be null AND void.
Meaning, ol'Heather "herlesbianpartner" Poe would just be another Joe with no say and no way. But then if Darth Daddy comes to the rescue or folks choose not to follow the law then is it not simply a case of some Poe's are more equal than others?As for Mary's child and act of childbearing not being political- Mary, you have only aided and abetted gay pregnancy to be political. You cannot have rights and not work for them...let alone against them.
How much kool-aid does one have to drink to not see the personal and greater damage fighting against your own rights has? Does it come in flavors, pill form, or in a patch? It certainly has caused inflammation and poor judgement.
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Lone Starlets
By MIMI SWARTZ
The New York Times
February 3, 2007
HOUSTON - THE last few months have provided hard times for iconic Texas women and the Texans — and others — who worshipped them. Last September, we lost both a former governor, Ann Richards, and a former state first lady, Nellie Connally. When the columnist Molly Ivins died on Wednesday, it seemed that a certain kind of Texas woman might be gone forever.
If you’ve read the obituaries, you know the type: the funny, brave, irreverent kind, who spoke out against a life in a (supposedly) brutal, backward state. It was Ms. Richards who insisted that the elder President Bush was born with a “silver foot in his mouth,” and Ms. Ivins who insisted that the younger one had rightfully earned the nickname of “Shrub.” Mrs. Connally, less well known outside the state, was almost as funny and probably more beloved here, because she delivered her barbs in private.
As befits most icons, all of these women went by their first names among people who didn’t know them. They will be remembered for their strength and their wit, but what stays with me even more is their fragility and their anger. I wrote about them all over the years, and with each of their deaths I found myself thinking, amid the tributes, that being a Texas icon of the female variety probably wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
You can make the case that fury goes with the territory here. The male-dominated, rough-and-tumble Texas these women grew up in wasn’t hospitable to ladies in smarty pants; all three had to come up with novel ways to satisfy their needs and ambitions in a circumscribed world.
Ms. Ivins and Ms. Richards in particular were very interested in bringing about social change; the relationship between the state as a whole and the liberal coterie of which they were an integral part is one of the great, doomed romances of Texas history. Mrs. Connally was far from a liberal Democrat — her husband, Gov. John Connally, famously jumped from the Democratic Party to the Republicans — but she, too, triumphed over a youthful shyness to serve as her spouse’s most undying loyalist, whether he was pushing for school reform in Texas or, later, trying to escape scandal in Washington.
In other words, rather than flee the state for friendlier waters, all three far preferred to stay and swim upstream. All three, in fact, felt a deep obligation to their home state: it energized them as it defined them — favorably — to the outside world, which always felt better when it could look down on Texas.
Nellie Connally had little choice but to play the part of the gracious, loving wife; there wasn’t much else a woman of her generation could do (she was 87 when she died). She was a former beauty queen who married a true prince of Texas and became a very popular first lady. Yet when I last interviewed her in 2003 she was living in a two-bedroom apartment overflowing with memorabilia, waiting each day to have her two allotted drinks with Dan Rather at 5:30. She had attentive children and grandchildren, but she had by then lost a daughter to suicide, struggled with breast cancer, and endured her husband’s very public bankruptcy.
And, of course, after the deaths of her husband in 1993 and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis the next year, she alone lived to tell the tale of what happened in President John F. Kennedy’s car on Nov. 22, 1963. I heard her describe it three times to three different audiences during the course of a few weeks. (It was Nellie, ever smoothing things over, who said, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,” just before the shots were fired.) As horrible as that memory was, it kept her tied to history, and, more important, to the love of her life — a man who suffered from such profound arrogance and vanity that his personality has come to overshadow his many accomplishments.
When you saw Ann Richards’s weathered face you knew just what 73 years of life had cost her. Sure, she had given herself over to the harsh Texas sun on too many outings; but, like Nellie Connally, there had been other costs: she, too, had played geisha, not to an ambitious husband but to a group of ambitious Texas liberals. It was Ms. Richards who had planned the drunken, irreverent costume parties — memories of the time are hazy, but she once went, or dressed a friend up, as a tampon. Then she got up next morning to pack the children’s lunches.
She did it all, pretty near perfectly for a while: a beautiful young woman of supreme competency with a tart tongue and ambitions far beyond the P.T.A. Triumphing over all that — as well as smoking, drinking and divorce — formed part of her campaign story when she ran for governor in 1990, and made her victory all the sweeter.
But her pain, smoothed over in folksy public speeches and slick campaign commercials, could catch you up short: when I traveled with her during her first gubernatorial campaign I marveled at how trussed up and hostile she was, how her coterie of female supporters were protective to a fault, trying to shield her from criticism. In the end, she lost her taste for the fight, and essentially ceded the 1994 gubernatorial election to George W. Bush.
Being a decade younger than her friend Ann Richards, Molly Ivins never had to serve as anyone’s geisha, and she never would have. But she was a big, smart, ungainly girl in a state where a female could suffer something close to capital punishment for those crimes; in self-defense she turned the cracker vernacular on the crackers and won fame for herself in the process, playing the Professional Texan. (Those hacks in the Legislature wouldn’t have given a Smith graduate from ritzy River Oaks the time of day, but a hard-drinking, foul-talking, big-boned country girl? Well, that worked.)
But in private, Ms. Ivins, too, battled alcohol, and had her coterie of human shields; they were protecting a woman whose loneliness was as incomprehensible as it was omnipresent. She was a performer who rarely allowed herself to be offstage, which, of course, ensured that the majority of us kept our distance.
There aren’t so many iconic women left in Texas, now — Lady Bird Johnson and the oil baroness Lynn Wyatt come to mind — but maybe that’s to the good. We don’t have to fight so hard to be heard, or noticed, or to avoid being taken for a hick. It’s easier for us, but for everyone who knew them, maybe, not quite as much fun.
Mimi Swartz is an executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine.
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