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Ezra’s eyes were opened to how much Republicans are controlled by anti-choice fanatics. He lists a number of very conservative, more experienced potential Republican V.P. picks that McCain could have gone with, and then says:
And so instead we got Sarah Palin. Sometimes I don’t think it’s fully appreciated how constrained the GOP is by its pro-life orthodoxy.
It is confusing. And it’s more confusing the more you fall for the lie that the anti-choice movement is about “life”, because the discussion of “when life begins”, while fun for some people to debate about on blogs is largely irrelevant to most voters, who are rightfully concerned about their actual lives more than about theoretical lives. But I think it’s less confusing if you really, fundamentally believe that “abortion” is a stand-in issue for feminism itself, a way to turn feminism---which was both a political movement and a social movement that’s somewhat out of the reach of policy-makers---into a voting issue. Pro-choicers aren’t really single issue voters in the way that the anti-choice voting bloc is. And that’s true even when you’re talking the biggest feminists out there. We understand that feminism is a multi-faceted thing, and while it would be painful to do so, most of us would hold our nose and vote for an anti-choice Democrat over a nominally pro-choice Republican, especially if we can believe the former is more supportive of contraception access, equal pay, enforcing the VAWA, and of course the set of issues that most feminists care about that aren’t explicitly feminist, like creating and maintaining peace, and running a just, productive economy.
But for the small cadre of hardcore anti-feminists, you have to understand that they’re deeply invested in a fantasy and in the fantasy that they can vote that fantasy into existence. That fantasy is, as cliched as it is to say, a fantasy version of the 1950s, where women knew their place and everyone was happy all the time. Where houses were spotless, dinner was homecooked and served on time, and each house had 4 kids* that had oodles of friends and didn’t have teenage angst. And for the crazy Catholic priests to whom reproductive rights is the only issue ever, it’s about a world where Catholics were obedient people who attended mass every weekend with a stream of children behind them, instead of the emptying pews that make priesthood increasingly pointless. That this fantasy never really existed is irrelevant---they believe in it as strongly, perhaps more strongly, than they do in god---and they’re looking to the government to provide the fantasy. And they’re hung up on the idea that the main obstacle between them and the fantasy is feminism.
And dismantling reproductive rights is the key to this fantasy. Topple that, topple feminism. There’s a weird logic to it---women generally maintain careers because they can limit their fertility and aren’t always taking time off to manage a brood of 5-10 kids. Once the cost of day care outstrips any salary you can command, you have to quit your job. PTAs and church bake sales depend on housewives to exist. Feminists were right to think that the right to contraception and abortion are fundamental to women’s liberation, and anti-choicers agree, so they want to take that away. The voting referendum on abortion is also about women working and food on the table every night. It’s about issues that hit close to home. For a lot of men, the loss of male control over female sexuality even hits so close to home that it can be blamed for their romantic problems---women’s ability to control our fertility means that we have the right to change our minds about someone we get involved with romantically. Or that we can leverage that right within relationships to get more power (and more housework done). The idealized housewife with 4 kids may not like deferring to her husband on every issue, but he’ll never know, because she has to smile and agree because fighting with him, much less leaving him, is out of the question because she needs him to take care of her brood. The very idea that this is a minor, unimportant issue is laughable---even the most economically obsessed of us spend a great deal of our time fretting over family and romantic relationships. If you convince yourself that there’s a magic bullet government policy mend for all your problems in a certain arena, you’re going to become a fanatic about it. If you think I’m kidding about all this, just google “men hurt by abortion” and sicken yourself with one man after another bewailing the woman who got the abortion and then out of his life.
The number of people obsessed with banning abortion and birth control are small in this country, but they’re incredibly powerful and have a lot of influence over other voters who may not be single issue voters, which is why the Republican party owes anti-choicers their shirts. Bitch PhD wasn’t kidding when she said that much of the Catholic church has been completely taken over by anti-choice hysteria---even Catholic weddings I go to have to take time aside to scold people for “abortion”, i.e. premarital sex and contraception as well as abortion. They’re so single-minded that the president of Priests for Life is declaring Sarah Palin more Catholic than Joe Biden, even though the former isn’t even a Catholic. Because he doesn’t worship god or Jesus; it’s all fetus all the time. My theory is that it’s a vicious cycle. The more the church obsesses over abortion, the less people want to go to church. And the empty pews make (some) priests even more obsessed, blaming abortion and women’s just general sinfulness on the lack of butts in seats. So the ante gets raised until you get comments like the Palin/Biden comparison. It would all be very comical if there weren’t a lot of anti-choice nuts in positions of authority that influenced other voters to vote Republican, even if those other voters don’t share the same obsessions or even the same opinions.
*Critical to the fantasy is the belief that no one white and middle class had to suffer too much from infertility, because there was a steady supply of white babies born to errant teenage girls to supply the adoption market.
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Posted by
Amanda Marcotte on 10:16 AM •
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It slays me that the Republican platform declares that human life starts at conception, but it’s somehow OK that John McCain supports embryonic stem cell research - even though it would require the slaughter of thousands of the fragile ensouled “snowflake babies.”
Amanda, you also overlook one other big driving aspect, that the wife is also the junior of the husband by 10-15 years. So the man gets to live until 35 sowing oats and still have that 20 year old neophyte waiting to bear his children and maintain his household in his 40s.
“abortion” is a stand-in issue for feminism itself, a way to turn feminism...into a voting issue.
Wow, this is the kind of “aha!” moment I read Pandagon for.
Bingo! This is the most canny and astute meta-reading of the resentment behind birth control & choice, and this inconvenient truth never sees the light of day in most discussions about it: the abject personal hurt behind male loss of control over female fertility and the obsessive fantasy, nourished by right-wing talk radio most of all, that men’s woes will be erased when these rights are defeated. Wow. You said it perfectly. Sarah Palin is this fantasy in the flesh. The much-divorced Rush Limbaugh has just this fantasy on a nation-wide scale about just this “babe.”
More women than men now attend college and are granted degrees. This is a result of birth control & choice. Men who nourish this fantasy resent this disparity. (And there are millions more men who are justifiably proud and see women’s success as progress and a great contribution to our national good. Yay.)
This election now demands that we fight this dangerous fantasy. We could start by joining Women for Obama on http://www.barackobama.com or starting a new group there. Hillary Clinton will be needed in the campaign through the next 70 days to delineate the differences between Palin and herself, freedom versus fanatic fantasy. Feminist icons like Steinem must compose additional (and I hope more just) NY Times editorials. Everyone of us that understands what you wrote here must fight the fantasy. I welcome every post you can make about the activism that must accompany this profound analysis.
Sarah Palin’s 17 yr old daughter is pregnant out of wedlock, confirmed by the McCain campaign.
Stick a fork in Palin. She’s done. Off the ticket within the week.
Here’s the link to the Palin story Ben referenced above.
Well, they are at least right that this story will probably drown out the stupid “She’s the grandmother, not the mother!” stories. But is it really going to go over well with all of the fundies who love Palin?
Mnemosyne-
She sure looked preggers to me in those pics I saw.
If those pics date to when Sarah was supposedly pregnant, like say 8 months ago or so, then it is over for Palin.
Srssly, did McCain vet this woman? At all?
“Srssly, did McCain vet this woman? At all?”
Of course. Didn’t you listen to him during the campaign. Someone was going to “do a google.”
(Seriously, I’m thinking party insiders are now weighing the damage of keeping vs. replacing her.)
Will anyone really want to run with McCain now though?
I mean T-Paw and Mittens are still pretty hacked off.
Eek, the first thing I thought about when I read the Palin’s daughter news was, ‘oh crap, too many Dems are going to jump on this.’ Think about it--we all call Palin/McCain out for being hypocritical and irresponsible, they benefit from the backlash of average voters who say, hey now, don’t talk that way about an innocent young girl. And honestly… they would be right. We have no business judging her daughter’s decisions, nor should we be judging the family’s decisions on such a personal issue. If we get into it about this issue, we will only be helping them gain points with voters.
I think this fantasy is behind a lot of thinking of the anti-feminist women as well. I have a co-worker who worked in a glamour field, got laid off in her early 40s and hasn’t been able to find work in her area of expertise again. (Although, she did show me her portfolio once, and I wasn’t impressed.) She is rather unhappily facing the realization that she is not going to have a comfortable retirement, unlike her married sisters. She’s the office’s lone Republican and supported Giuliani in the primaries.
She was horrified when eHarmony pegged her as independent and free-thinking. She sees herself as very conservative and not a feminist at all. She does blame feminism for ruining dating and gets terminally offended when men don’t behave towards her in proper etiquette book approved ways. And she is enraged when a man opens a door for a younger, prettier, higher social-class woman but not her. She just doesn’t get that it is her own messed-up head, not feminism, that is the cause of her problems. After all, her sisters survived the same era just fine.
I just picked up THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, and want to read BACKLASH right after it. I am becoming highly intrigued by the mechanisms by which worker rights collapsed not only with the ending of union power, but with the entry of women into the workplace. Remember - the start of outsourcing was when Microsoft fired its receptionists and secretaries and replaced them with temps from agencies. No one said a thing.
Note: My friend dropped the whole eHarmony thing because they paired her with a man in his 60s (apparently the default age gap is up to 15 years older/younger.)
Ben, I still think the “she’s not the baby’s real mother!” meme is idiotic. Like it’s so totally unheard of for a woman in her mid-40s to have a baby with chromosomal abnormalities that there’s no way it could be hers.
I do think that, sad as the situation is, there are some valid public policy questions for Palin about the what she supports. She’s a strong supporter of abstinence-only education—does she still support it? What kind of help does she think the government should give to girls like her daughter who aren’t fortunate enough to have the same strong family ties? Does she always advocate marriage for girls under 18 who get pregnant? What programs will she offer in schools to help them complete their educations?
We have no business judging her daughter’s decisions, nor should we be judging the family’s decisions on such a personal issue.
Except that Palin and McCain want to enact public policies that will directly affect girls like her daughter. Are we supposed to ignore Palin’s support for abstinence-only education because it might embarrass her now that there’s proof within her own family that it doesn’t work?
Great post. Now more than ever, sane Republicans need to abandon the party that has long since abandoned them. There will be no forgiveness for them later if they fail this test.
Andrew Sullivan has some pretty convincing pictures of a pregnant Palin right before the birth. It will be interesting to see if the whole thing was ratfucking, since the same announcement about Palin’s daughter Bristol was fuming about ‘liberal blogs.’
But good lord is Palin and her family the most perfect prism for Amanda’s points. That is one crazy-ass family that seems to be equal parts PR spin, fundy nutjobs, and complete dysfunction. And who gets burned by it all? A 17-year-old girl with no choice but to marry some jerk who knocked her up.
Mnemosyne I’m not buying it either. Just saying McCain hasn’t vetted her. I have a feeling the other shoe is going to drop within the week.
Done? Palin done? How so?
My Christer family will truly LOVE that the 17 year old got pregnant but decided to do the “right” thing by marrying the boy. That and Palin’s kid with Down’s syndrome? They’re all doing the right thing. Sure, Palin’s not staying home with her kids, but they aren’t relying on the government to take care of them.
My heart breaks for the daughter, though. Fascinating that she’s 5 months along and has only now decided to marry the father. And that it’s McCain’s people doing the talking. The daughter herself is completely erased from the conversation - why wouldn’t Palin’s people come out with this?
Palin wasn’t meant to appeal to women, she appeals to men.
Rachel II-
Swing voters will be turned off real fast.
Yeah, I put swing voters in the same category that I put god and terrorists - they don’t exist.
My family members who aren’t Christers are “swing voters” (I have a huge family) and I can tell you for certain that they are all going to be impressed that this girl is making a mature, selfless decision and that they respect her parents for not trying to make it a secret or not forcing to her to abort or whatever. Which is to say that this isn’t going to make or break their decision for them since they were probably going to vote for McCain anyway, but that this will certainly go on the “pro” side of the column.
This may be paranoid of me, but if they did replace Palin, would voters see the next guy (or woman) as a great choice, just in comparison, and somehow, over the next two months, the whole bad judgment thing gets explained away by the general media, who really want a horse race here, because if the election isn’t close it isn’t really good ratings for them?
There’s a really cool sci-fi novel called “Omega” by Jack McDevitt in which humans discover what appear to be the happiest aliens ever who have been at a pre-Industrial Revolution technology level living in the same strip of land for thousands of years. They have an amazingly egalitarian culture, have nearly stopped believing in their old gods, and spend at least half their waking hours at leisure activities like plays, concerts, and pubs.
The catch is that the females have biological control of their “ovaries”, hence they will not have children unless they so choose. With no population pressure there is no need for strong government hierarchies and militias to fight over resources.
I’m sure McDevitt owes earlier feminist writers for the plot inspiration. But his description of the society is so realistic that I can totally see it. I’m beginning to now think that anti-feminism is actively driven from the top by the capitalist class in order to keep that population pressure on the rest of us. More people == lower wages and less free time to think independent thoughts. My corroborating anecdotes would be the low unwanted pregnancy rates of Europe and the somewhat stronger social safety nets and freedoms of assembly and speech there.
Really outstanding analysis. Good work.
The anti-choicers are ruling the GOP by virtue of over-population alone.
I’m afraid Rachel II is right, Ben D.
if they want their mythical 1950s, they need to give us universal healthcare. there is no way i can afford that much valium without insurance.
Palin wasn’t meant to appeal to women, she appeals to men.
If you’re right (and I think you are), the internal polling for Republicans must be even worse than we thought. Republicans have had the white male vote sewn up since Reagan, and if they felt it necessary to shore it up ... yikes. Landslide a’ comin’.
I think they were hoping to peel off a few female voters as well, but that doesn’t seem to be going over as well as they hoped, and I don’t think it was their sole motivation.
I’m not sure people will look on this whole story positively. Remember, we just recently had a national shamefest about Jamie-Lynn Spears doing pretty much the same thing. A lot of people were very concerned about the message she was sending to other teenagers that early motherhood was a good choice. If a silly sitcom star is such a bad example, how much more so is the vice president’s daughter?
That said, I think Democrats should stay away from trying to score points on this because 1. Bristol is just a kid and didn’t ask for the spotlight and 2. it will backfire on the Democrats and make them look like dirty players who hate babies and motherhood, buying right into the GOP playbook. Not to mention that Obama’s mother was only a year older when she was in pretty much the same situation.
Let the people decide. I think most of them will not want to have a potential Jerry Springer show in the vice presidency.
Oops. Sorry about the Jerry Springer thing. 
But really, surprise teenage pregnancies are not what America likes to see in its political families.
“god and terrorists - they don’t exist.”
Uhhhh, there seems to be a lot more evidence for terrorists than God: they even have websites.
So, what DO you call those people blowing themselves up in Isreali shopping malls? Disgruntled shoppers?
An interesting take on things. It immediately made me think of all the Americans forecasting doom for us here in Europe. Of course, because we are so much more secular, it took the form of ideas like ‘Demographic Winter’ and the spectre of Europe being overwhelmed by Muslims who are bearing more children than white Europeans.
Basically the solution is the same. White women need to stay at home and start having more children and we all have to start filling the pews of the churches again.
Already I see signs of this same element exploiting the situation to try and export their brand of right-wing conservative Christianity.
The “pro-life” people are really just “pro-birth.” For them, life ends when the infant clears the uterus.
They don’t oppose the death penalty, they don’t ponder whether the invasion of Iraq is a just war. They don’t care about kids once they’re born—they don’t want to help feed it or clothe it, or provide medical care or even help educate it. And as the whole Jill Stanek affair shows, even if the fetus is certain to die in your womb, you must carry it till God pushes the stillbirth out.
I am amazed at the traction the hardcore anti-choice people get. I fundamentally don’t understand why it remians an issue in public debate. I think that anti-choice factions dictating to the general public is unacceptable. If you don’t want reproductive choice that is a personal...well choice. Choice is personal. I view limiting choice (except late in pregnancy) with the same disdain I view teaching the fraud of creationism in public school.
I do also think that unless there are some dramtic data that late term abortions are horrifying and should be avoided if at all possible. Anyway I hope this debate is decided and that choice remains. I just can’t believe the religious far right will get anywhere on this as it will tear the center away from the RNC.
My take is Palin is putting her political ambitions in front of the welfare of her daughter. I mean what kind of mother willingly puts her daughter in position to be motified, embarassed, and humiliated in front of the whole country (no the whole world!)? Is this how Palin is punishing her daughter?
And then of course there’s the whole rigamarole about the daughter having made the choice to keep the baby and marry the biological father-to-be. That should satisfy neither Palin’s own clique, who believe that the law should give woman no choice in the matter, nor any sane people, who know that Palin wants to take that choice away from every other female person in the country.
@ Rachel II
“Palin wasn’t meant to appeal to women, she appeals to men.”
Wow, is that so ever correct.
This reminds me, if even weirdly, of an incident on my college campus back in the late 80’s. There appeared this family consisting of a man, woman, and child who showed up in front of the student union one day. He let forth a diatribe against women in college, against women in the workforce, and against feminists, all the while his wife followed him around with a sign on her neck that read, “I love being my husband’s servant.”
The women on my campus were repelled and horrified, while many of the men seemed to think it was (at best) funny or (at worst) ‘right on’.
That woman was not a woman to whom I could relate. And neither is Sarah Palin.
Ugh.
Yeah, I put swing voters in the same category that I put god and terrorists - they don’t exist.
Wrong. Terrorists exist.
The women on my campus were repelled and horrified, while many of the men seemed to think it was (at best) funny or (at worst) ‘right on’.
That woman was not a woman to whom I could relate. And neither is Sarah Palin.
It sounds like some kind of wierd bondage play.
“the daughter having made the choice to keep the baby and marry the biological father-to-be. That should satisfy neither Palin’s own clique, who believe that the law should give woman no choice in the matter, nor any sane people, who know that Palin wants to take that choice away from every other female person in the country.”
Slightly different choice than ‘pro-choice’; she presumably chose between raising the baby herself, or putting it up for adoption.
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It slays me that the Republican platform declares that human life starts at conception, but it’s somehow OK that John McCain supports embryonic stem cell research - even though it would require the slaughter of thousands of the fragile ensouled “snowflake babies.”