Inky reader K.W., like me, can’t bear to see leftist playwright/ moral high-horser Arthur Miller trash his troubled and long-dead ex-wife Marilyn Monroe yet again. (See Good-By and Good Riddance, Norma Jean, Sept. 20.) K.W. e-mails:
“Arthur Miller just never quits. Marilyn Monroe has been dead for decades yet he’s still obsessing over their marriage and making a buck from her misery. By the way, Marilyn Monroe’s mental problems began long before she ever took a single pill. She attempted suicide twice before she was even 20.”
And those mental problems are something that Miller, ever so sensitive to the plight of the victims of American capitalism in his plays, never managed to see.
And here’s a letter from reader M.H. on the subject of the “I Had an Abortion” T-shirt invented by the self-promoting so-called “third-generation feminists” Amy Richards and her pal, Jennifer Baumgardner and distributed by Planned Parenthood–until PP apparently realized that there was something, uh, not in the best of taste about the shirt and pulled it from the organization’s web mart.
We at the IWF take no stand on abortion (we have both pro-life and pro-choice women in our ranks), but we hate: 1) turning one’s chest into an ideological billboard; 2) pushing into other people’s faces an intimate decision that most people regard as painful and morally troubling; and 3) the T-shirt’s ugly design and hideous maroon-brown color (see an image here.).
M.H. writes:
“This Salon article (Note: You have to be a Salon subscriber or plow through some ads to read the thing in full) is about the woman who designed the “I Had an Abortion” T-shirt. It’s a curious article to me. Basically, this woman wants to ‘remove the stigma’ of having an abortion, and make it socially acceptable to publicly announce that you’ve had an abortion: ‘People don’t want to sit there moldering in shame.’ Yeeks!! Maybe you should feel some shame about getting yourself in that predicament and then terminating an innocent life. That’s exactly the sort of thing a conscientious, thoughtful person would regret and wish to avoid going through ever again!
“I support legalized abortion, but I do not support ‘removing the stigma’ of something that is so sad and regrettable, something that our society should be seeking to reduce. There’s a reason for stigmas! They are to discourage behvaviour which is deleterious to society. I bet there will be some interesting letters to the Salon editors in response to this article in a few days.”
Yes, and if I know Salon readers, they’ll all be on the side of Richards and Baumgardner.