I was on NPR's "On Point" this morning, debating a lying-through-her-teeth anti-choicer (seriously, she claimed as often as she could that post-ejaculation contraception was "abortion", an evidence-free claim whose only purpose it to muddy the waters) named Anna Franzonello, and needless to say, it was interesting. You can listen to it here; I was on for about twenty minutes. What was interesting was watching the evolution of the demands based in facetious claims of "religious liberty". Since Obama has made it so that Catholic hospitals and univerisities don't actually have to cover their employees' birth control (though they do get to enjoy the cost savings as if they did!), the argument that forcing employers to directly cover it is a violation of religious liberty is off the table. So instead, the argument has now evolved into claiming that your employer has a right to step in and prevent you from dealing directly with your insurance company to get birth control coverage. That right is justified by the fact that the employer's money was used as part of your benefits package to pay for your insurance.
I dealt with this directly, arguing that your employer doesn't own you. That's what the argument about Taco Bell owners refusing to include contraception in their health care plans is about, whether or not an employer maintains the right to control your compensation package after you earned it. I see no difference in an employer telling you that a health care package you earned can't be used for birth control because of his moral beliefs than an employer telling you that you can't buy condoms with your own money because of his moral beliefs. Once they sign the check, either to you directly or to a service provider that processes your benefits, they should not be allowed to control the money as an attempt to control you.
But when I hung up, I realized that what she was claiming was even more radical that that. She said specifically that even with the Obama compromise, it's a problem, because while Catholic universities and hospitals may not pay directly for your contraception coverage (it comes out of the insurance company's profits, in sum), because they give any money at all to the insurance company, they should have complete veto power over what it covers.
If you step back and think about that, it's a far more radical assertion than even the Stupak amendment, which argued that any person in the entire health care system should, because a dollar that was once in their pocket is floating around in the system, have veto power over your abortion being covered. In this case, they're saying that anyone in the system anywhere should be able to veto any coverage they claim offends their morals. This is about more than the Taco Bell owner functionally fining their own employees for fucking. Franzonello was claiming that the Taco Bell owner, having paid an insurance company, should have veto power over not just his health care plan, but over any money the insurance company spends, since his money is in there, rubbing shoulders with those less pure dollars. That means that, as far as Franzonello was concerned, not only should the Taco Bell owner be able to veto contraception coverage for his direct employees, but for every single employee of every other company that contracts with the same insurance company. So the Taco Bell owner can force you, the H&R Block employee, to pay for your own contraception because you both are insured through Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and the Taco Bell employee doesn't want a dollar that was once in his pocket to ever circulate through the system and go towards your contraception, or else Jesus will cry.
And this isn't just about contraception, either. She made a broad-based argument that anyone should be able to veto anyone's coverage on any moral grounds. She claimed this would "only" affect contraception, but we know in the past that people have tried to block, on "moral" grounds, coverage for STD treatments and maternal care for single women. Since paying a single dollar into the system would give you ultimate veto power, in her estimation, it really could be anything. Anti-vaccination person buys insurance for his employees from your insurer? Good-bye vaccination coverage for everyone in the entire system.
That's how seriously they hate women. They're basically willing to burn the entire health care system to the ground rather than let some woman somewhere have sex without paying a penalty for it. Damn.
There's something intensely hilarious about Republicans acting like the election season was announced on them out of nowhere, giving them no time to prepare a suitable candidate. Steve Kornacki has an article about why the "white knight" fantasies Republicans are indulging, where some great candidate that can unify the nuts and the moderates will emerge and save them all from the black President, is just foolish. I recommend reading it; it has some good arguments with which to taunt your conservative friends indulging these fantasies. But really, the fantasy itself is fascinating enough:
This is why there’s suddenly loud talk about a new candidate jumping in the GOP race. If Romney melts down, Santorum looms as the next most likely victor — and his white hot culture war rhetoric these past few days is a perfect demonstration of why most November-minded Republicans believe his nomination would be a disaster. And after Santorum comes Newt Gingrich, whom those same Republicans tend to regard as poison, and then Ron Paul, who’s a nonstarter. As an unnamed Republican senator told ABC News late last week, “If Romney cannot win Michigan, we need a new candidate.”
Due to rioting in the streets and the eventual election of Richard Nixon, our country soured quickly on brokered conventions, but hey, Americans have short memories, so I can see the fantasy has emerged. But it just makes Republicans look stupid. They kicked off the primary season like 8 months early! Now they're running around saying, "Oh shit, we forgot to develop an acceptable candidate." For the 2008 election, both Clinton and Obama had their campaigns up and running before 2007, and the Republicans are suggesting that it's just fine to grab someone off a shelf in August and toss them into the race. In other words, the very thing that got them into this mess---believing anyone would do and not really putting any effort forward to develop a good candidate---is what they foolishly think will save them. Why on earth do Republicans persist in this delusion?
Well, I think the answer lies in the Republican fondness for teleprompter jokes about Obama. No, hear me out.
I'm sure it hasn't passed anyone here's attention that the now-mandatory jokes about Obama being unable to speak without a teleprompter* are racist dog whistles. These jokes substitute for swipes about "affirmative action" (not that conservatives don't make those as well, but those are more undeniably racist and so tend to exist more on the fringes), and "affirmative action", in turn, substitutes for more straightforward claims about race and merit, claims that have become socially toxic, unless you're Andrew Sullivan whining about the P.C. police shutting you down by making faces at you. But conservatives have a weird relationship with this spoken-in-code belief that the President is stupid and only has his position because the nation had a spasm of affirmative action impulse voting. On one hand, they do believe this. On the other, they only "believe" it, because they're not blind and can see just as well as the rest of us that he is a smart man. The result is that they initially believed any white dude in a suit could beat Obama, and that racism gave them an excellent tailwind in this race. And then, in a class too little too late fashion, they realized that they should have actually considered that Obama is a formidable candidate and beating him is going to be really hard to do. But, being conservatives, their solution appears to be, "Okay, get rid of all these other white dudes in suits, and grab someone else and throw him in! Surely he'll be better." It's weird. I've never seen anything quite like it. It's like someone who keeps buying the latest issue of US Weekly and then is surprised every time that it's not Harper's. I can't help but think if race wasn't such a distraction for conservatives, they could have put something better together.
*Which is an inverse of reality. All politicians use one, because it looks better than the previous era, when all politicians---yes, Lincoln, yes, Roosevelt---read speeches off pieces of paper. (In fact, this practice saved Teddy Roosevelt's life; he had the manuscript of his speech in his pocket when a would-be assailant shot him, and the manuscript slowed the bullet down and kept it from killing him.) But off-teleprompter, Obama performs way better than average. In fact, his ability to give clear but eloquent answers off the cuff is one thing that separated him at a young age from other politicians.
Sara Robinson has a really great summary of how effective contraception Changed Everything, and why---though it's utterly baffling to most of us---patriarchal dudes long for a time when there wasn't any such thing and every act of heterosexual intercourse had an undercurrent of doom for women. It's not because Doom Sex turns them on, though I think for some (Ross Douthat and Rick Santorum come to mind), they can't get it up without that feeling that this particular act could disrupt their partner's life at a moment's notice. It's because they long for a time when half the human race was most assuredly underfoot, and men could count on being the leaders of women, simply because they were born male. It's like the divine right of kings, but for every man.
Of course, most men like having sex more than getting crowned the petty king of a teeny country, which is why I want to quibble a teeny bit with this argument.
And, frankly, while some men have embraced this new order— perhaps seeing in it the potential to open up some interesting new choices for them, too — a global majority is increasingly confused, enraged, and terrified by it. They never wanted to be at this table in the first place, and they’re furious to even find themselves being forced to have this conversation at all.
I don't think a global majority of men oppose contraception. A plurality of men in this country support it being free to all women, regardless of who they work for. The rest are apparently too stupid to realize that they benefit from contraception, too, which immediately makes me think that women en masse should start demanding that men pay half the cost and do the work of picking up of birth control pills, until they get it into their heads that this benefits them just as much. (I'm assuming that gay men are probably more, not less, likely to see that women's rights to contraception and their rights to health care are firmly entwined.) Most men have a complex relationship to patriarchy. They do enjoy the benefits, but most of them pay a price, too, and having crappy sex because you're worried about having another mouth to feed is just one part of that. That effective contraception tends to take off wherever it's available suggests that in this way, men are just fine with the new order. That said, her general point is absolutely right; feminism does mean diminishing male control and the majority of men reject that. But I do think they have reason to believe that they both get to benefit from contraception without having to embrace its larger implications.
Sara mentions that we're three---actually four---generations into the pill now. (The first users were my grandmother's generation, then my mother's, then mine, and now the Millenials.) That's going to make it a hard entitlement to attack, since as far as most living Americans are concerned, this is how it's always been. But I think it's even more interesting than that. First of all, you can tack a couple more generations onto that, since birth control became socially normalized in the late 20s and 30s, and was considered pretty standard by the 50s. Before that, there were multiple attempts throughout history to find ways to have sex without pregnancy, usually crude diaphragms and condoms. What the pill did was bridge the gap between the already-existing expectation of being able to have sex without conceiving and many millenia of people wanting to have sex spontaneously. That it's female-controlled is what offends the patriarchs so much about it, but so was the diaphragm. I really do think spontaneity is what sells the pill.
But just to be a little wonky, I think what really makes a technology world-changing is that it neatly fills a desire that we always had, even if we didn't know it, to the point where we seamlessly drift into using it without much confusion or complaint. The pill was adopted faster and more readily than the cell phone, even though the pay phone indicates that the urge to be able to make a phone call on the run was already existing and already acknowledged. It took off faster than the computer, faster than internet, and faster than the television. Demand for it was so high that even in early stage testing, researchers were overrun with volunteers. The only thing I've seen take off as fast and make so much sense to people as soon as it was available was text messaging, which spoke to the deep desire to be able to share information with someone while minimizing the disruption that the phone has always represented. If you tried to take away text messaging, people riot in the streets. Something to think about.
All that said, I think Sara is right here:
But if we’re wise, we’ll keep our eyes on the long game, because you can bet that those angry men are, too. The hard fact is this: We’re only 50 years into a revolution that may ultimately take two or three centuries to completely work its way through the world’s many cultures and religions. (To put this in perspective: it was 300 years from Gutenberg’s printing press to the scientific and intellectual re-alignments of the Enlightenment, and to the French and American revolutions that that liberating technology ultimately made possible. These things can take a loooong time to work all the way out.) Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will, in all likelihood, still be working out the details of these new gender agreements a century from now; and it may be a century after that before their grandkids can truly start taking any of this for granted.
I honestly think half the reason that contraception isn't controversial is because most people aren't big thinkers, and therefore don't really see contraception as the straw that broke the patriarchy's back. Part of that is that abortion plays that role, since rejecting pregnancy after a man's seed has planted is a much more resonant symbol of rejecting male power and authority. The interesting thing about this is that many of the men who are up in arms about this are big, long-term thinkers. They're not wrong to see that contraception is far more the problem even than abortion (which has actually been more consistent and widespread in human history than contraception). Where I think they're going to fail is convincing others of it.
For some reason, this week's Newsweek was really great, with an interesting story about how sports wives and girlfriends are an easy target for fan rage and Andrew Sullivan's pretty good article on the contraception debacle, where he rehashes my theory that Obama set it up this way. (However, he still insists that abortion is different, even though anti-choicers have shown their true colors with the attacks on contraception.) But one article I found really fascinating was this brave one by Nancy Hass decrying the intense media indulgence of parental delusions attached to a bout of mass hysteria in LeRoy, New York. For those who haven't heard, a bunch of teenage girls have been overcome with a series of uncontrollable tics, much like Tourette's syndrome, and---this is critical to understanding what's going on---it's spreading. It's an open and shut case of mass hysteria: localized, no physical cause, contagious, and concentrated in teenage girls. While mass hysteria can occur in other groups, it most commonly occurs in teenage girls, probably because the stresses unique to being a teenage girl create the perfect situation for this. But the parents don't want to hear it. They want the answer to be roughly "anything else". And, according to Hass, a number of media sources are giving them a sympathetic audience to make their understandable but still deluded claims that it's something other than mass hysteria.
There's three major issues with indulging these delusions, beyond just the obvious problem of indulging delusions.
1) It contributes to the stigma around mental illness. What comes across loud in clear in the parents' reactions is that they can't accept the diagnosis of mental illness, because in their minds, mental illness is not "real" illness. Which is a common misconception, and I'm not especially mad at the parents for having it. They probably haven't really been educated on this or had experiences that would help fix their prejudices about mental illness. Where I am mad is at the media that treats their prejudice like it's a legitimate opinion that needs airing. I'm mad at self-styled environmentalists who are eager to use these girls' distress to raise awareness of fracking, which while certainly a bad thing, is just not the cause of this problem. The parents would probably be more willing to listen to the actual experts if there weren't so many other people---environmentalists, journalists---that also seem like authorities confusing the issue.
Mental illness is real illness. To say that these girls are hysterical doesn't mean that their suffering isn't real, or that they don't need help. Insisting that it has to be something other than a mental illness issue simply means creating obstacles to care. It's as if someone has a sinus infection and you insist that it's actually a twisted ankle. You're not going to help them by putting a bandage on their ankle. They need antibiotics. Mental illness is the same; treating it like it's physical means you're not treating it at all.
2) It makes concerns about fracking look like woo. Fracking is a legtimately serious concern. Sober, pro-science environmentalists agree that it's a real concern, and that there's real dangers to it. But when you attach false dangers to it, attributing problems to fracking that obviously have nothing to do with fracking, you open up your movement---for good reason!---to accusations that you're anti-science and no better than anti-vaccination idiots. Which could be used to discredit the whole thing. Which makes me wonder, as I have in the past, if Erin Brockovich is secretly working for the other side. After all, she sent an aide to test the soil in response to this mass hysteria, which ends up bringing attention to the anti-science bent of the environmentalist movement, and makes everyone involved look like an idiot.
3) It's sexist. There's two ways to interpret the fact that mass hysterias tend to take off amongst teenage girls and young women (see: Salem witch trials, multiple personality disorder) more than anyone else. You could go with the sexist explanation, that women are inherently unstable and hysterical. Or you could go with the more nuanced, anti-sexist explanation, which is that young women are under a specific set of stresses that make this sort of thing happen. From Hass's article, it's clear that the experts in this situation are opening door #2, pointing out how hard the lives of many victims are and suggesting they cracked under pressure. I would point out that the transition from childhood to adulthood is particularly difficult for women. You go from being an adored child who lives in a sea of mother-love to being, frankly, a second class citizen whose sexuality is considered the most important and often only relevant aspect of your personality. You're expected to start stifling yourself, accept being talked down to (often by men who know less than you do about a subject), and to constantly monitor your body to make sure you're striking that perfect and impossible balance between sexually alluring and "slutty". This is especially difficult if you're a teenager, with all the attendant awkwardness and raging hormones that implies. That's the baseline of stress for basically all young women. Add to that any more stress, and no wonder teenage girls crack.
By insisting that the symptoms must be physical and not mental, the parents and the media and everyone else involved in making this a "mystery" instead of an open-and-shut case of mass hysteria are basically engaging in a cover-up. They're ignoring the patriarchy and the damage it does to young women, probably in no small part because they're not really interested in actually challenging the social structures that caused this problem. But in doing so, as Hass suggests, they're just making it worse. They're signaling to the girls---to be clear, this is mostly subconscious---that the continued ticcing is the path to returning to that state of childhood, where you're an object of love and concern, instead of returning to your new life as a sex object. Hysterical ticcing is basically the only way for teenage girls end up getting media attention that isn't about sex, after all, and that kind of prejudice goes all the way down to the ground. What needs to happen is that teenage girls need love and support and, yes, attention for things other than what they do with their vaginas or if they're acting all crazy. Again, to be clear, I doubt very much that the girls want this. Their distress is real. Pointing out that the cause is mass hysteria---and that patriachy plays a role in mass hysteria---doesn't mean downplaying their distress. It just gives us a clear view of how to fix this and how to prevent it in the future.
In the annals of justifying Virginia's rape-through-ultrasound, many remarkably stupid things have been said; chief among them is, "Hey, let's force women to be vaginally penetrated in order to show them that they're pregnant...even though they already know."
A strong second, however, is that women deserve to be penetrated because they were penetrated before. This follows a longstanding American tradition of extrapolating indefinite consent from any previous voluntary touching. It is, of course, no longer assault to repeatedly stab a person with a needle once they have a tattoo, or to throw rocks at someone once they receive a hot stone massage.
Dana Loesch ("She Who Would Urinate On Corpses") has been a wholehearted advocate of this position since the uproar happened, but she goes one step further through the use of statistics: you deserve to have a giant probe shoved inside you even if you've already had a child and therefore know exactly what happens when you get pregnant.
Furthermore, the greatest number of abortions are obtained by women who already have a child/children, so they know how anatomy and physiology works. A lack of planning on the woman’s part doesn’t constitute a mandate for legalized (and in the case of Planned Parenthood, publicly-funded) murder.
If you "know how anatomy and physiology work", then the entire pretense for the ultrasound is meaningless. As in Texas, the theoretical point is to show you the heartbeat of the fetus, guilting you out of the abortion by requiring you to contemplate that one day, that fetus will become a child. However, if you already have a child, you know exactly how pregnancy works, how a child develops, what it's like to birth and raise a child.
If that's the case for the majority of women, as Loesch states, then the only cognizable purpose for the ultrasound requirement is to shove something inside a woman against her will because she had sex once. A thanks to her, at least, for making the case as simply and elegantly as possible.
Yesterday, my speculation about the individual motives of a lot of people who are jumping on the "take away the birth control" campaign was that for a lot of them, they believe---rightly or wrongly---that the missed out on the sexual revolution and they'll be damned if other people a good time. (There were the usual, and I believe false, claims in comments that more or less permission has absolutely no influence on people's choices, but I don't agree. More freedom has meant that women probably do say yes more often and sooner, and it certainly has meant women feel more free to ask. We have direct medical evidence to show that it's also increased rates of oral sex, at least oral sex men perform on women. Obviously, conservatives both exaggerate how much sex people are having now and downplay how much they had in the past, but they aren't entirely wrong that liberation means more and better sex. If liberation had no positive influence on people's sexual happiness, there is no point in fighting for it. But I digress.) But I didn't have time to talk about what I think is the ideological reason that there's so much fear of female sexuality. What about female sexuality is so disruptive and so scary to the right that they will make utter asses out of themselves fighting to suppress it?
Well, I think it goes back fundamentally to the belief that women should be subservient. To justify women's second class status, conservatives have always leapt on the theory of difference. The argument is that men and women are complete opposites and therefore should have separate spheres. Yes, women's sphere is lesser (though increasingly they deny this, sticking to the "separate but equal" argument), but that is just a fact of biology, in their opinions. The number one conservative whine that I get all the time is, "Feminists deny that men and women are different." Which is a strawman, of course. The question isn't whether or not there are differences, the question is how different are we, really. Feminists say that men and women have more in common than not---and point to people whose gender doesn't fall along a strict binary to show that there are hardly two polar opposite genders to even discusse at all---and that a lot of traits that have been characterized as male-only actually belong to women as well: courage, ambition, strength, intelligence, etc. For conservatives, it's critically important that the differences between men and women be extreme and stable. As they lose ground in many ways, finding themselves unable (as Rick Santorum recently realized when he basically tried to claim women were too "emotional", a code word for stupid, to be in the military) to argue that women are inferior outside of the bedroom, emphasizing differences in sexuality becomes even more important. After all, it's hard to deny that men and women both have brains, but cisgendered men and women do have different genitals, so that can muddy the waters sufficiently, giving conservatives opportunities to make broad statements about how female sexuality is "different", i.e. inferior, and therefore women's lives need to be constrained. The fact that the discussion is about contraception as much as about abortion lately is making that more obvious, with folks like James Poulos basically coming right out and saying that women's sexual difference means that women's role in life is as support staff for men. (He still didn't have the courage of his convictions enough to say so plainly, however, and instead buried that claim in a pile of incomprehensible wankery that he hoped sounded intellectual, but existed mainly to establish plausible deniability. If you can't quite understand his illiterate prose, then you can't really argue against it, right?)
This is why liberated female sexuality is so threatening. Conservative ideology holds that men and women are opposites. Men like sex, and so in order to keep the ideology intact, women can't. In this world, women instead want male approval and of course babies, and sex is something they have to endure to get it. Contraception and especially abortion undermine this theory, not just because they can't conceive of a woman saying no to babies, but also because they're operating under an image of pregnancy as being something that gets men who otherwise want nothing to do with women (outside of sex) to commit. That women themselves say no to babies but yes to sex makes it hard to believe that it's just women putting up with sex to get marriage-and-babies. That women often choose abortion in order to avoid marriage and babies (at least at this point in time) sends them around the bend. It suggests that people are individuals, not easily categorized genders with predictable and opposite behavior.
If you won't choose it, then they feel that they're in their rights to force it. When women can't access contraception and abortion, sex is, in fact, less fun for them because it's fraught. It does, in fact, introduce a power imbalance to sexual interactions between men and women because women are vulnerable in a way men aren't. Giving men that power over women restores what conservatives believe is the proper order. If they can shame women and convince them that only sluts like sex, they can also get women to engage as enforcers, implying that they're too good for that dirty sex stuff, unlike those lesser women. (Exhibit A.) That just bolsters the illusion that male and female sexuality are very different, and in that difference, they can find leverage to argue---though indirectly, as is their habit---that women are lesser than men.
On Sunday on Twitter, I placed my bet on Wednesday for the question, "When will a Republican tell women just to keep their legs shut on national television?" I should have given them more credit, since it took one more day than I thought. To my surprise, it happened on MSNBC. My money would have totally been on Fox, but I'm glad it was MSNBC because it really stuck out.
I love a conservative complaining that the country is obsessed with sex. Actually, no. Conservatives are obsessed with sex, especially the controlling and punishing of it. It's not "the country" that is passing laws that constitute state-sanctioned rape-with-an-object as punishment for women who want abortions; it's conservatives. It's not "the country" that believes that if a woman works for an employer, he owns her vagina and can functionally dock her pay as punishment for fucking by refusing to offer her full insurance coverage offered to everyone else; it's conservatives. It's not "the country" that is so angry that some women out there might be having unsanctioned orgasmic fun that they have to set aside questions of economy and environment to punish those women; it's conservatives. It's not "the country" that is telling women to shut their legs as the only acceptable form of birth control; it's conservatives.
This comment from Foster Friesse was telling, I think. A remarkable amount of this nonsense is driven by people who didn't get a chance to engage in the fun sexy playtimes they think everyone else is getting. Lots of older men who lived in an era where women were more likely to be reluctant to have sex for fear of getting pregnant or ruining their reputation, and now they look at the younger generations who aren't so encumbered and they are kicking and screaming and saying, "Not fair! If I didn't get any, neither should they!" If only they had that attitude towards people sitting on massive fortunes, since unlike some people getting laid more than others, income inequalities have genuinely bad effects on the country.
Which isn't to say that jealousy is the only thing fueling this. There's also sadism and misogyny. Not that I think jealousy is really any better; if you feel it was unfair to grow up in a sexually repressed environment, the answer to that is to work towards a world so others didn't suffer like you did, not to drag them down with you.
I'm in Wichita today, so for those who live here and want to see me speak, please come out to College Hill United Methodist Church, where I'll be presenting with a panel about progressivism in red states. If you are or if you aren't, however, may I suggest Panda Party? And a video by one of my favorite Kansas bands:
I should be able to Panda Party today, and that means hopefully blogging!
I'm traveling around Kansas for 3 days, doing various speaking gigs; if you're in Kansas and can come to one of them, here's the schedule. As you can imagine, blogging will be light. But that doesn't mean there isn't content for you to read/listen to.
Podcasts: Reality Cast this week is pretty great. I talk about the contraception debacle and the surging misogyny of the campaign season. You can also listen to Opinionated, with me and Samhita Mukhopadhyay. We talk about Chris Brown and Whitney Houston, though unsurprisingly, we have very different opinions of them.
Also, I'm happy with this post on anti-vaccination idiots at XX Factor. I got responses from some of them, which can be summed up as, "I don't have a superiority complex! It's just that my special snowflake of a child is too good for common vaccinations."
If you actually bothered to celebrate Valentine's Day and are currently stewing in the near-inevitable disappointment of frustrated expectations, I highly recommend cheering yourself up by reading Occupy Valentine's Day. And next year, do what I do: pretend that there's just two February 13s in a row.
Andy McCarthy has a problem with a lesson from high school civics:
Very clear constitutional commands that, for example, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”, or that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” or that “No state shall … deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”, have not stopped courts from upholding campaign finance reform, prohibitions against gun possession, or racial preferences.
Most of us, sometime around 11th grade or so, learn that there are no absolute rights in the Constitution. This makes sense, because about the time we're seventeen is when we realize that, while saying "penis" at competitively escalating volumes is hilarious, it's not really an appropriate thing to say during class and we deserve to be punished for it. While giggling, obviously.
Under a theory of constitutional absolutism, Andy McCarthy should support the free practice of sharia law. After all, it would almost certainly offend the conscience of Muslims who seek to practice it to have that practice banned. Yet...he doesn't. The First Amendment clearly states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof[,]" which would seem to indicate that private citizens choosing to govern their affairs by private religious laws should have that choice reaffirmed by the courts, rather than trampled on by intolerant secularist bigotry.
Or something, whatever. I'm not entirely sure what sharia law is, except that the Muslims in my apartment complex have nice curtains, so I assume that's part of it.
Of course, it doesn't, because the Constitution isn't a legal code. It's an outline applied to the world as it exists, within the context of society as it evolves. There are things it protects and things it doesn't, however imperfectly those realms are determined. Constitutional absolutism of the sort that results in a "right of conscience" to be free of laws you find offensive only works so long as you assume the Constitution was meant to protect you and only you, and that there was a mysterious Eleventh Amendment lost from the original Bill of Rights that tells everyone else to kiss your hairy ass.
Of course, if I had a constitutional right to play the penis game in school, I'm totally going to pretend to be the world's oldest high school senior next year.
The Pentagon has released a report chronicling the 64% rise in sexual assaults since 2006 and their strategies for fixing the situation. If the proposed plan is properly implemented, we should expect it to work. Gendered violence is surprisingly suspectible to pressure from the outside. The VAWA lowered domestic violence rates dramatically and while most violent crime has gone down, rape rates have gone down even faster, suggesting feminist awareness campaigns about rape have worked. So this is a good thing that the Pentagon is doing, right?
Well, of course not, if you live in Wingnutland, where every bit of progress, especially for women, is the opportunity to have a four alarm meltdown. Liz Trotta responded to this news by framing rape, well, as a necessary part of life for female service members.
Her rant is a thing of evil beauty:
I think they have actually discovered there is a difference between men and women. And the sexual abuse report says that there has been, since 2006, a 64% increase in violent sexual assaults. Now, what did they expect? These people are in close contact, the whole airing of this issue has never been done by Congress, it's strictly been a question of pressure from the feminist.
Emphasis mine. Sometimes the word "misogyny" really fails to capture the full viciousness of right wing support for male domination. This worldview has just as ugly a view of men as women, casting men as beasts whose purpose in life is raping, beasts who can no more not rape than piranhas can stop themselves from swarming you if you fall into piranha-infested waters. Despite claims that feminists are "man-haters", I will point out that unlike a straight up man-hater like Liz Trotta, I think men are fully capable of not violently assaulting women the second they get a chance to. In fact, we know that most men take a pass, since there are technically lots and lots of opportunities to rape women, and as noted, rape rates are actually down.
And the feminists have also directed them, really, to spend a lot of money. They have sexual counselors all over the place, victims' advocates, sexual response coordinators. Let me just read something to you from McClatchy Newspapers about how much this position on extreme feminism is costing us. "The budget for the Defense Department's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office leapt from $5 million in fiscal 2005 to more than $23 million in fiscal 2010. Total Defense Department spending on sexual assault prevention and related efforts now exceeds $113 million annually." That's from McClatchy Newspapers.So, you have this whole bureaucracy upon bureaucracy being built up with all kinds of levels of people to support women in the military who are now being raped too much.
Which of course, is the money quote. It makes sense; Trotta's casting of men as violent beasts who can't control themselves necessarily means some rape is just part of women's lot in life, and that can't be changed. But in the military, you're with dudes all the time, so it's a non-stop rape-fest. Trotta can cast around in her cold heart and find a teeny bit of feeling enough to decide that at a certain point, it's too much. But it's still your fault, rape victim! You should have known that men are just all raping machines, and limited your exposure. If it's raining outside, you grab an umbrella and expect to get your shoes wet, but you're an idiot if you go outside without an umbrella and complain because you got too much wet. Rape is just like bad weather, in this estimation---nothing you can do to stop it. That would require assuming men who rape are responsible for their actions, and we can't have that, can we?
I often like to point out that the sexist framing around rape implies that rape is a useful tool to punish and control women. Rapists are often portrayed on the right as an unfortunate but necessary (though this is euphemistically framed as unchangeable) vigilante police force, attacking women for getting out of line. That's why there's all these questions about what she was wearing, who she was with, blah blah. The idea is she broke the rules, she got her punishment, end of story. Trotta's just extending this to the military. She clearly doesn't think women should be in the military, and sees rape as the punishment that they've got coming to them for breaking her rules.
Steve Kornacki has a good horse race summary taking the temperature of Mitt Romney's campaign. Diagnosis: not good. While Romney basically can't lose, barring some kind of weird delegate wrangling that I suppose is always possible but seems unlikely, the knocks he's taking are leaving him in poor fighting condition to take on the general election against Obama. A huge part of the problem is that Romney is just a shitty candidate, something that got forgotten when he was looking good next to the slate of cranks and kooks that challenged him in the primary. But I think a larger part of the problem is that hating Romney has become a stand-in for conservative self-loathing and the current right wing mania for purity.
It's the same urge that is causing them to react to Obama accommodating their bullshit arguments about religious freedom by going on the full-blown warpath against contraception, functionally arguing that if you work for someone who is against contraception, you should be blocked from getting free contraception from a third party, even though it doesn't involve your employer at all. While the words "religious liberty" are being thrown around, that's just the usual right wing attempts to confuse the issue, much like when they deliberately conflate contraception, which prevents abortion, with abortion. In right wing land, preventing abortion is abortion, and allowing employees to have the religious liberty to obtain contraception is an attack on religious liberty. Also, up is down, black is white, cats are dogs, and pandas are ugly. Whatever blatant lie you need to believe to get you through the day.
But I digress. The point is that they're attacking contraception in a big way, blanketing the right wing media with screeching attacks on women who use it, impugning their moral character and conflating birth control pills with a party drug. Along with shitting all over Mitt Romney, who has moved to the right and accommodated them in every way, is just madness. But I was reading Corey Robin's book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin this weekend, and he had a lot of insight into this situation. Basically, he argues that when threatened with the reality that progress is going to happen and traditional power hierarchies are threatened, conservatives tend to turn on themselves, blaming themselves for letting this happen by not being tough enough. He describes those who denounce the French Revolution as blaming the toppled powers for their softness in letting this happen.
I think we're seeing a similar mentality here. They see a black President, women gaining equality, gay couples getting married, people in the streets demanding economic justice. And their conclusion was, "We let this get out of hand." And they're not wrong, for instance, to grasp that the popularity of contraception helped create the cultural context where women start to think of themselves as full human beings with full human rights. As I wrote at RH Reality Check, telling women we're entitled to contraception is just going to usher that process along even further. Where I think they make a mistake is belieivng you can unring that bell. They think that adopting the absolutist stances they've previously let slide will cause their opponents to start re-believing we don't deserve nice things. But we've tasted freedom, and now that we know that it tastes good, it's going to be a lot harder to take it away.
"This has nothing to do with access," he said. "This is having someone pay for it, pay for something that shouldn't even be in an insurance plan anyway because it is not, really an insurable item. This is something that is affordable, available. You don't need insurance for these types of relatively small expenditures. This is simply someone trying to impose their values on somebody else, with the arm of the government doing so. That should offend everybody, people of faith and no faith that the government could get on a roll that is that aggressive."
This is when a follow-up question would be nice. I hope someone asks Santorum what other "small" routine expenditures insurance companies shouldn't cover. Lipitor? Insulin? He's treating insurance like it's only there for catastrophes instead of to cover routine care.
With my co-pay, my pills are currently costing me $50 a month, which means $600 a year. An IUD can cost $1,000-$2,000 to put in. Depo-Provera is popular amongst uninsured low-income women because it costs $30-$75 a shot, which lasts three months, meaning about $300 a year. That may not seem like a lot of money to Santorum, but for people who don't make very much money or are unemployed, this is a pretty big cost. And it's one they can't skip, because getting pregnant costs even more. Unfortunately, that doesn't always work out for women. A significant portion of women skimp on contraception because they simply can't afford it. Many more use less effective methods because they're cheaper.
Of course, this is another opportunity to point out that Santorum doesn't understand birth control because he opposes it and has made noises in the direction of supporting bans on it, even as he admits that's unlikely to happen. Now if we could just get someone to ask Mitt Romney what he thinks about all this. The trap is ready and he's probably dumb enough to step in it.
I'm deeply amused right now. Before the White House announced the policy tweak on the contraception mandate, there was a lot of gloat-y "Obama is going to compromise!" stories from the more conservative-leaning press, and I really did think Obama caved. But I hopped on the White House conference call and realized as soon as it was over that Obama punked the Republicans. His speech at noon just confirmed it. I explained how at XX Factor. If there's any doubt, check out the weeping and wailing from anti-choicers. Even the ones who claim to be "for" birth control are steaming mad, exposing them as the knee-jerk woman haters they are. I'm having a blast.
Whether or not the Bishops accept this accommodation, I do think this has put birth control permanently on the sex police menu and it's not going to go away. From this point on, contraception will be "controversial" in health care politics. How can it not? It's "evil." So, in that sense they win regardless.
I agree that this was the Bishops attempting to flex their muscles, but no, I don't think they succeeded in any way. The anti-choice strategy has always been about chipping away at women's reproductive rights without coming out directly as anti-woman or anti-sex. They know that if the fight is about sex or about women, they lose. So they go out of their way to claim that the fight is about anything but sex or women's roles. It's about fetal life. Or religious liberty. Or parental rights. Anything but sex or women's rights. Obama called their bluff.
If in fact anti-choicers double down and start attacking contraception more directly, I welcome that like it was a birthday party thrown for me by a rich benefactor. Dragging this out and fighting about sex openly is what pro-choicers have always wanted, because once we start talking about what this is really about, we win. Being anti-sex is unpopular and makes you look like a complete weirdo. Even people who were against the mandate are probably going to get sour if this fight becomes more explicitly about a bunch of a religious nuts trying to tell us how to fuck. I want to fight about contraception. It's like fighting over cable television. The side against it is going to lose that one.
The liberal press is getting it. Greg Sargent has already called out Orrin Hatch for rising to the bait and claiming that employers should basically be able to block access to contraception coverage, while correctly describing contraception as a wedge issue against Republicans. Scott Lemieux concurs that it's a great wedge. I think we're going to see more people come around to seeing that Obama provoked exactly the fight we want to have.
Update: Well, it seems that the compromise is actually, for once, a real compromise. So I got all bent out of shape for nothing. The White House is saying that women who work at religiously affiliated employers will get coverage, but by the insurance companies directly, instead of through their employers. So far, no rub. If it's as clean a win as it looks, then this is very good news indeed.
I need a Panda Party more than usual today. While I haven't seen the details yet, the claim is that the Obama administration "compromised" on the birth control mandate. Which probably means the bishops got everything they wanted, since they said they would accept no compromise. The admininstration are idiots. If they had waited until Monday, something new and shiny would have come up, and this wouldn't matter.
The good news is this: By choosing to fight over this, the right has exposed their anti-contraception agenda. To win this battle, they may well have planted the seeds to lose the war. Pretending to care about "life" was always a key component to the war on female sexuality. But by doing this, conservatives insured that the abortion rate will be higher than it otherwise would be. Given the choice between reducing the abortion rate and fining women for fucking, they chose the latter. They need their noses rubbed in that fact every single time they pretend to care about fetuses to attack women.
For now a fight song. And join us for Panda Party.
