Up until the end of April this year, if you had run into former South African footballer Eudy Simelane, chances are that you would have met a happy woman. At 31, Simelane was still involved with the sport she loved as a coach and referee. She was a lesbian in a country in which homosexuality was not only legal, it is enshrined in the Constitution.

I said in my post Practicing Presence at V-Day that “I saw .. Eve Ensler weeping in the hallway, carrying a burden …” If you saw what she’s seen, heard what she’s heard, and have been where she's been, then you would know why this is so, that she walks sometimes and weeps.

V-Day, the global non profit founded by Eve Ensler in 1998 at the first benefit of her award winning play The Vagina Monologues, will celebrate it's 10th anniversary of working for the end of violence against women. "V To The Tenth" will take place April 11-12 and will reclaim and transform the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans into "Superlove."

On December 6, 1989 a twenty-five year old man man walked into L'École Polytechnique in Montreal armed with a rifle and a hunting knife. Over a period of approximately twenty minutes he would he would kill fourteen women, wound another ten women, as well as four men, before turning the gun on himself and taking his own life. The women were targeted because of their gender and they died because they were women. Before he started shooting the man had yelled, "I hate feminists." I don't know that any of the women who died thought of themselves as feminists. They were women pursuing an education in the largely male dominated field of engineering, or in the case of Maryse Laganière, working in the school's finance department. Perhaps they did. Perhaps they didn't. But today we remember them and acknowledge a National Day of Remembrance and Action of Violence Against Women.

A teacher in Medford, Oregon is seeking to bring a semi-automatic pistol into her classroom. The woman, who is a victim of domestic violence, wants to carry the weapon in order to protect herself from her ex-husband, whom she fears might show up to attack her at the school.