If you've been listening to cable news for the past few days, two things immediately leap out at you. The first is that there are a lot of pundits who are willing to speak for lay Catholics' simmering sense of outrage at the Obama Administration's decision to mandate contraceptive coverage for Catholic hospitals and other non-clergy religious employers. The second is that this decision violates the free exercise rights of Catholics guaranteed under the First Amendment.
As Michelle Goldberg points out, it's hard to argue that the Catholic Church is somehow suddenly burdened by a rule virtually identical to the rules it complies with in twenty-eight other states. Currently lacking our future moon republics promised by Newt Gingrich, that's easily the majority of states.
At a more fundamental level, though, the HHS rule simply doesn't violate a cognizable free exercise right. In 1990, the Supreme Court decided a case called Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990). Two men, members of the Native American Church, used peyote in their rituals. They were employed in Oregon as counselors at a private rehab clinic. Oregon outlawed peyote, with no exception for religious use. The men were subsequently fired once their drug use was discovered, and applied for unemployment benefits. The state of Oregon denied them benefits because - guess what? - they were fired for committing a crime under state law, and had committed work-related misconduct.
The case found its way to the Supreme Court, where the court set down a new rule. The standard for determining if a regulation burdened the free exercise of a religious adherent or organization was whether the law was neutral toward religion and generally applicable, lacking any pretext designed to obscure a hostility toward religious practice. The court even stated that to permit otherwise under the First Amendment "would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself."
The author of this religion-destroying opinion? Noted Catholic Antonin Scalia.
And you know what? This makes perfect sense. If a private citizen or organization can escape laws that incidentally burden their religious practices, religion becomes a literal "Get Out of Jail Free" card. The purpose of the Constitution wasn't to subsume the rest of society to the wishes and whims of religious practitioners, it was to provide those practitioners a safe space to practice their faith free from direct government interference or mandates.
The burden on the Catholic Church is incidental, at best. The Church is required to provide health insurance coverage to their employees in the same manner as any other employer hiring the same people to perform the same jobs. That it offends them to do so is not unconstitutional.
Whatever the political fallout, the Obama Administration is on the right side of this, legally. And they've got lovable ol' Antonin to thank for it.
UPDATE: Via Felwith, in comments:
It makes perfect sense, but unfortunately it’s no longer the law of the land, at least as far as the federal government is concerned. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed in 1993 which required laws that restricted free exercise of religion to pass strict scrutiny, and while the Supreme Court ruled that it couldn’t apply to the states, in 2006 they did rule that it did apply to the federal government. So if this does go to court, I don’t really like their chances.
It’s bullshit, though, since there are many Catholic institutions that already provide contraception coverage to their employees without whining about it. Unfortunately, I don’t think the administration can successfully argue “But that’s not *really* a Catholic belief” in court, even though it’s the truth.
The government would then have to show that it had a compelling interest in its regulation of Catholic hospitals and charities, and that the means of achieving the interest were narrowly tailored to the goal.
Thanks for negating my post, law. And Felwith. Hrmph.
So far, I have no takers on the question of why it's okay for the city of NYC to force private buses that serve the public to stop making women sit in the back of the bus, but acceptable for Catholic-owned hospitals and universities to do the same thing by requiring women to pay out of pocket for preventive health services. I have my own theories about this, the main being that contraception use is private and so there's not a shocking visible representation of how unfair it is to treat women's medical care so differently than men's medical care. Which is why I think it's time to come up with one.
Basically, what the Catholic bishops are doing is demanding a right to fine female employees of Catholic-owned institutions for fucking.
After all, that's what this amounts to, a fucking fine that's leveled against women.*
It's clear that the Catholic bishops really just wish the government would ban contraception and abortion and force those foul sluts to endure unwanted pregnancy as punishment, but since they're not getting that any time soon, they're sure going to find other ways to punish them. And while they can't extract a monthly fucking fine out of all women, they---being conservative fuckwits---appear to believe their employees are theirs to control. They legally can't fine them directly for fucking, but they can create a de facto fine by manipulating the insurance system. It's worth pointing out that this fits neatly into the overall practice of Catholicism, where sin is rectified by basically paying fines. Most of the time, the currency is praying and maybe good works (since the majority of Catholics don't actually bother with the sin and redemption stuff, but just use the church as a marriage-and-baptism center, I'm a little hazy on this, since I've never heard any of the bazillion Catholics I've known talk once about repenting for sins in the real world), but in the history of the church, that has easily translated to money on many occasions, and I think we're seeing similar logic in play here now. They can't make you do the rosary to repent for your fucking, since that's overt religious discrimination. But they will get you to pay a monthly $50 fine for it.**
Maybe the compromise is allowing Catholic hospitals and universities to put up a version of the swear jar, except in this case it's the ladies fucking jar, and every time you have sex, you toss some coins in it. That way, at least the employers get to keep the money. The best part is that it really is up to your conscience; if you feel as bad about fucking as the church expects, put some cash in, but if you don't, you can just roll your eyes and say that it's none of their damn business what you do in your free time.
Of course, I suspect that means the jars will go completely empty,and not just because these institutions hire a whole lot of non-Catholics. (For instance, me for many years---I worked part time at a Catholic university while I was in school there.) It's also because no matter how much dudes on my TV wring their hands and talk about what "Catholics" think about this, the reality is that Catholics aren't really any different than the public at large. They fuck, they don't feel bad about it, and they use contraception. In fact, Catholics support this new contraception policy at higher rates than the public at large.
I really do hope someone tries to mount an argument about buses vs. hospitals. The utter lack of serious attempts to address the question is making me kind of sad.
*Interestingly, I'm pretty sure it's against men who want vasectomies, too, but men's contraceptive needs tend not to go mentioned in this, except by anti-choice apologists who imagine themselves benevolently "allowing" couples to use male-controlled condoms.
Women who ride the B110 bus in Brooklyn can't sit where they want unless they're okay with being berated by Orthodox Jewish men, even though technically the B110 is a public bus.
The B110, which travels between Williamsburg and Borough Park is open to anyone, has a route number, and goes to city bus stops. However, the line is run by a private company under a decades-old agreement with the city, and since the bus is designed to serve the Hasidic community in the area, a board of rabbis sets the rules. They've decreed that women should sit in the back and men should sit in the front to avoid contact betwen members of the opposite sex.
When it was exposed that a bunch of religious fanatics were doing this, the city came down on them and said, "God or no god, you can't discriminate against women if you're serving the public."
Catholic hospitals and universities are public institutions that serve the public and hire from the public, unlike private religious institutions. As such, they are being held to the same standard as all other public institituions in that they aren't allowed to deny their female employees the right to full health care coverage, no matter how much the Pope is mad that you're fucking and he's not. (Seriously, he didn't have to take a vow of celibacy. Why do the rest of us have to pay for his choices?) The Obama administration told them they aren't allowed to metaphorically send their female employees to the back of the bus. That supposedly serious people are treating this like an issue is baffling to me.
What I want to know is where are all the concern trolls on this bus issue? If waving the Bible around is reason enough for a public instititution, even those that take federal dollars like universities and hospitals do, to discriminate against women, then I want to see some consistency here. I want E.J. Dionne to claim that New York's Jewish population is going to rise up en masse in protest because a very small minority of religious fanatics want the right to treat women like shit. I want all the liberal dudes hand-wringing right now about how Obama went a step too far to expand that argument, and talk about why certain buses that serve the public should be able to force women to sit in the back to appease the fanatics' religious sensibilities. Riddle me this: if giving Catholic-owned businesses the right to discriminate against women is freedom of religion, then why isn't it okay when bus companies have signs requiring women to sit in the back to appease a small segment of the Jewish population?
As usual when women complain about sexual harassment and sexist wankery, there's a lot of bullshit excuse-making. Todays theme is, "It's only scary, uncomfortable and offensive to women to say sexist shit to them because women choose to feel bad!" It's the sexism apologist's version of "The Secret". Lots of it on this thread, with examples like:
The “C” word is another example of investing a word with much more power than any word deserves. It has now become the taboo word for women (feminist or not), like the “N” word or the “F” word. Only members of the group to which the words describe can use them. I don’t miss them but giving words such power to hurt gives too much power to people who would hurt you.
And the more illiterate and egregious:
But what I’m saying is that simply calling a woman you hate a ‘cunt’ is not necessarily sexist. It should really only be like calling a man a ‘bastard’ or a ‘twat’. But because our society (and sometimes feminism) infantilizes women it’s seen as worse.
And you see it all over this situation. TL;DR: A teenage girl who is an atheist activist posted a picture of herself with an open-mouthed "gleeful" face on Facebook. A bunch of men whose brains are addled from spending way too much time looking at porn saw an open female mouth on the internet, and confused about why there wasn't a cock in it already suggested to this 16-year-old that she would be doing everyone a favor contributing her image to a catalog of erotic images. When told, rightfully, that they are creepy motherfuckers, they whined and complained that people who believe that one should remember that women are more than sperm-draining machines are, to steal a phrase from Sady Doyle, trying to snatch away their boners.
All of which is why I'm not going to bother to argue any of this crap down, but instead to post this video, the premiere episode of "Fridays at Galweather", a new web series about management consultants on the one day a week they spend at the office. Maybe coming from a bunch of male comedians, the point will go down easier than having to listen to some stupid bitches with their constant yakking about how unfair sexism is.
In round one bazillion of the "man, atheists really need to deal with the misogynists" problem, we have Penn Jillette. I know, surprising that he's got a wide misogynist streak, right? I mean, I try not to judge a book by its cover, but if there were cash prizes for correctly guessing which celebrities are still bitter about not getting laid in high school, he would definitely be on my ballot. Now there's a kerfuffle because Jillette is a big fan of everyone's favorite C-word.
As you can imagine, his defenders are trotting out the "just because you call someone a cunt doesn't mean you're sexist!" argument. This is why I get a little frustrated with trying to prove sexism or racism on a single word. It has this tendency to narrow the playing field, make it all about "proving" whether this word or that word is an Official Utterance of -Ists, which distracts from the larger issues and encourages -Ists to use coded language for better ass-coverage in the future. ("Food stamp President" is a good example.) In this case, "cunt" was just the icing on the cake of an explosive bit of inexplicable misogynist diarrhea. You see, this is the piece that caused Jillette such profound anger. As you'll see, it's a harmless bit of goofing on Super Bowl ads, clearly written for an audience looking to pass some time while they're eating a sandwich at their desks, i.e. the bread and butter of freelance humor writing online. I would rate it as funnier than most of these pieces, because it has a clever conceit (marketers are worried about the apocalypse) and because it's breezily written and made me smile. In offensiveness terms, I would rank it somewhere between that video of otters holding hands and Kitten Covers.
In addition, the complaints the Jillette are trotting out are very much of the "those in glass houses" variety. I don't know that someone whose career started because he thought card tricks were first rate entertainment is really in the position to be judging whether or not something is quality sandwich-eating-time-passing material. As for the accusation of strained, repetitive comedy, well, when I think of that, well certainly I'd never think of "Bullshit". I mean, coming up with thin excuses to have naked ladies walking around and being able to say curse words on a TV show is a fresh joke every time, amiritefellas? Most importantly, my eyebrow raised at the accusation that someone is trying to "be superior". This from a man who, you know, has a show called "Bullshit". Within the tweet, he makes a pointless bid at superiority, bragging about how he didn't see any Super Bowl ads. Between the outsized reaction and the incredible double standard for himself and some female writer on the internet, we're already talking about 90+% chance that he's got issues with women. If men allow having sex, being arrogant, or making silly jokes for themselves but flip out on women for doing the same, it's almost surely sexism, and Jillette hit two out of three. (There's far more, of course: being slovenly, drinking, you could go all day with the list of things sexists allow for themselves but not for women.) The fact that he used the word "cunt" just makes it a near-certainty, hovering around the 99.9% region.
With that in mind, I made a list of things people can say, and potential totally non-sexist Penn Jillette reactions. All of them guaranteed to get a "nuh-uh, that's not sexism!" response from his fanboys.
The forecast for today shows clear skies and highs around 55 degrees.
Who does this bitch think she is with her weather predictions? Just because you have a map and a meterology report doesn't make you the queen of the fucking weather, sweetheart.
I'll have a skim latte and a blueberry muffin, please.
*snort* Jesus Christ, what a fucking diva. An ordinary muffin isn't good enough for you? You have to have blueberries? What, is your pretty princess tongue unable to choke down your breakfast unless it's all blue and fruity?
I was happy that the Giants won, but it would have been cool to see the Patriots pull it off at the last minute.
Useless fucking cunt. Hey, lady, instead of offering your pointless opinion on football, why not do something useful with your mouth and stuff a cock in it?
I like to sit around scratching my balls while writing blog posts insisting that unregulated markets, which have been shown to repeatedly fail when tried in the real world, are the one true path to peace and prosperity.
Carry on, good sir. Perhaps you would like to come on my show to pass off your anti-government crankery as if it were scientific fact?
Spoilers, for people who struggle maintaining the maturity levels not to hold the entire internet responsible for your inability to work through what's saved on your DVR.
Last week, I published a piece where I adopted the role of the bearer of bad news: TV's silly-but-loveable feminist Leslie Knope is getting defanged by NBC, probably in a last-ditch attempt to get the ratings up. Since the show is a spin-off of "The Office", which started off as a sharp satire of ordinary American work life but devolved into an unfunny but typical sitcom about the glories of the patriarchal family, I wasn't particularly surprised. Americans love the comfort of unfunny sitcoms that romanticize this stuff. It's our comfort food. Applying sharp comedy to gender role-playing is especially unwelcome; we don't want to come home after a hard day's work and have some snooty TV writers make us all uncomfortable with the sexism we perpetuate and rationalize by wrapping it in a blanket of romance. "Parks and Recreation" has shitty ratings, and as I've pointed out before, they clearly have no desire to blow a raspberry at the almost-inevitable helpful network suggestions that they dumb it down a little like "Community" did, so seeing them move in the direction of "The Office" isn't surprising.
However, my article, which came out the same day that the Valentine's Day episode came out, was controversial, with Maya at Feministing offering a rebuttal. This didn't surprise me, so I wasn't upset. The evidence that the show had taken a turn was far from conclusive, and my hope in writing the piece was to start dialogue, not offer the final word about it. At the time I wrote it, the show's direction was ambiguous enough to really allow for multiple readings, as it were.
But the episode that aired on the same date that my piece was published, titled "Operation Ann", removed all doubt. That episode was a fundamental betrayal of both the characters of Leslie and Ann, and of the show's quiet but persistent feminism they're now selling down the river in a desperate bid for ratings.
Since when is Ann Perkins one of those women who has so little going on in her life that the mere idea of being single sends her into a spiral of self-loathing? As far as I remember, Ann has never once suggested that being single is such an awful thing that one should seriously consider lowering your standards to rectify the situation. As recently as last year, in fact, Ann was having a fun time tearing through every dude in Pawnee, having fun sleeping with them but refusing to settle down. Nor was Leslie ever Ms. Everyone Should Have A Boyfriend. Sure, both characters like having boyfriends, but they've never considered it more important than having a full life with lots of friends or meaningful work. Nor have they ever thought that having a boyfriend is so important that considerations like compatibility or attraction should be shoved aside. Old Leslie, if Ann had been in a funk about being single, would have bucked her up like she did to Chris in this very same episode: reminded her that she has a lot going on and there's no rush. But now the show has a double standard. If Chris is sad about his single status, he needs to just cheer up and remember life goes on. Ann, however, should hurry up and settle down with the first person that she can have a halfway reasonable conversation with. Who turns out to be Tom. You know, the resident douchebag of Pawnee. I love Aziz Ansari, of course, but the whole point of Tom's character is that he's an insufferable douchebag.
Maybe the show will right itself. But right now, I'm skeptical. While I doubt that they're going to capture a bigger audience by abandoning the feminist subversion for more mainstream sexist romantic cliches, I can see that it might seem like the only hope of getting ratings up.
By the way, it's just telling that we live in a world where Zooey Deschanel has her own show, but no one can ever figure out what to do with the beautiful and talented Rashida Jones.
Komen has fallen to their knees and begged for mercy, and Planned Parenthood is doing a victory lap. So am I: I wrote a piece for The Guardian about what Planned Parenthood did right, and what it will take to replicate their success in the future. But not so fast!, say some on the left. If you read Komen's statement, it's clear that they're just retreating for now and will probably kill off the $700,000 in grants to Planned Parenthood in the near future, when they create a better excuse. This is true, and they should be called out for it. There's no reason to return to supporting Komen; they were already an iffy organization that crossed a line they can't uncross. It's clear their management is awash in anti-choice nuts who really do think there's something dirty about Planned Parenthood, and that this wasn't just a cave. No reason to support them.
But that doesn't mean those of us who are declaring victory and doing a victory lap are wrong. Even if the grants are eventually cut, we can safely say we won this one. Because this wasn't really about the money. Planned Parenthood is a billion dollar organization; cutting this extra service from some clinics, while horrible and regrettable, wasn't going to tank them. This was a proxy fight, and it was standing in for the larger fight over women's rights and women's health care. Shelby Knox had an awesome tweet explaining this:
This was a battle about values. Specifically, whether or not we value women as human beings or not. Anti-choicers are trying to marginalize comprehensive health care for women basically to put us in our place, to demote us from the status of people and return us to the status of objects. Saving breasts is all good and well---they are decorative, after all!---but health care for dirty sluts who go around having sex as if they have a right? I think, and said in my Alternet piece, that one reason this really hit home is anti-choice objectification of women had gotten to the point where they were pitting our own body parts against each other, creating a war between wholesome, all-American boobies and evil vaginas. A couple of astute writers put it really well.
In American politics, women’s bodies are not bodies, but parts. People like to talk about some parts more than others. Embryos and fetuses are the most charged subject in American political discourse. Saying the word “cervix” was the beginning of Rick Perry’s end. In politics, breasts are easier to talk about. I first understood this a few years ago, when I was offered, at an otherwise very ordinary restaurant, a cupcake frosted to look like a breast, with a nipple made of piped pink icing. It was called a “breast-cancer cupcake,” and proceeds went to the Race for the Cure.
I don't know if some people can understand how dehumanizing this is. Obviously, there are a fair number of both sexes who don't see it that way. But to me, this gets to the real gist of the issue, one I've only vaguely been able to grapple with by using hyperbolic phrases like "gestation vessel." But it's more than abortion or childbirth, although the desire to control that vital human function lies at the heart of this. It's about reducing women to their various body parts. "You get to control this bit, but we'll control that bit, and we like this part but don't want to talk about that part and ... are you complaining again?"
The obsession with fetuses and uteruses and birth control, the fetishization of breasts (in all ways, not just Komen's breast cancer branding) and the ongoing double standards in political and public spaces like this commonly forgets the human being who happens to own those body parts. I think that's what women commonly feel --- and one reason many of us are so adamant about this. It's not just about a discrete set of issues. It's about women being treated as fully human.
The debate over health care is basically about this ultimate fight over whether or not women are people. Conservatives see women as objects. Sex and reproduction the way the objects are used, and like with any other property, how and who uses it is the whole point. That's why abstinence-only classes compare sexually active women to lollipops that have been opened and licked, or toothbrushes that someone else has used. Taken to its extreme---and anti-choicers are nothing if not extreme---this view means that a woman who has sex before marriage is broken and useless, and providing her contraception and STD prevention/treatment is like putting a new paint job on a totaled car. But even for less extreme conservatives, they tend to see sexual health care as "condoning" sex, and just as you don't keep buying your kid a toy if he keeps breaking it, they think taking it away will cause women to stop "damaging" themselves by using those vaginas as we please instead of keeping them nicely wrapped for the true owner---a hypothetical future husband---to have. That married women also need these services is an inconvenient fact that tends to get brushed off. Some times, when you squeeze anti-choicers, they'll say that married women have no need for these services because as long as no one never has sex outside of marriage, STDs and unintended pregnancy just go away. Mostly, however, it's not a well-thought-out position, just a frantic panic attack at the idea that women---these objects---are making decisions for themselves like they're real people. More importantly, they're afraid that if this trend continues, it's going to occur to the public at large that women are people, and things will shift accordingly.
That's what this fight was about. By pressuring Komen, anti-choicers were basically trying to make "women are people" the pariah position, and trying to make anyone who holds the "women are people" position without apology seem like they were out of the mainstream. Having people scrambling to disassociate themselves from you is a really great way to discredit you and your ideas, and that's why so many people with what I consider poor morals really love a witchhunt. So the fight was over who basically owns the mainstream: anti-feminists or feminists, people who think of women as expensive sex toys/gestation machines or people who think of women as people? That's why everyone was so upset. And that's why the feminist win was so meaningful.
The reason that emotions were high around Komen is they position themselves as an organization that exists to save women's lives. Claiming to be pro-woman (or pro-black people or pro-poor people or even increasingly pro-gay people) while objectifying and dehumanizing women is a common tactic on the right. By making Komen squeal for mercy on this, we won a major moral victory. We said loud and clear that being pro-woman is about more than a bunch of empty homilies. You have to believe women are people, and like people, they have a right to have sex and have a right to full health care and a right to make their own damn choices. Anything less isn't pro-woman. It simply isn't.
We won a major public battle over values. We sent the message loud and clear that feminist values are mainstream values. We should be proud.
Komen for the Cure's decision to break with Planned Parenthood over a Congressional investigation based on doctored videos was, all things being told, a bad one. Bad for women, bad for Komen's credibility, and, as TBogg points out, bad for Komen's future viability.
TBogg points out that Komen's new fellow travelers are about as concerned with women's health as I am with NASCAR standings, which is part of the problem. But Komen has a deeper issue here: the impetus for those anti-choice conservatives flocking to their side in the first place.
Komen brings in substantially north of $300 million in revenue. Its grants to Planned Parenthood totalled roughly $600,000. This means that Komen's new friends were withholding support over .2% of its funding going to an organization that performed abortions with entirely separate money. Now that they've made the political decision to side with people whose main source of political knowledge is the archive of false e-mails at Snopes, there's a larger and far more precarious issue: anti-choicers' invariable tendency toward rubedom.
Within a month, there will be an e-mail or a WorldNetDaily article or a Washington Examiner column. And the column will allege, through a vastly simplified chain of events, that Komen is once again engaged in the perfidy of tangential liberalism. People for the American Way once co-sponsored a 5K, Komen let halal companies use the pink ribbon, Hillary Clinton gets mammograms; something is going to set them off.
Eventually, Komen's not going to be able to placate them, probably because the actual controversy will make no sense whatsoever. After a few weeks of trying to understand why it can't partner with Campbell's Soup, the donations rewarding this week's decision will dry up. The Planned Parenthood investigation will go away. All Komen will be left with is a vastly reduced donor pool, and a large group of former donors that either remember Komen's actual betrayal, or will spend every minute looking to manufacture betrayals.
The internet is awash in memories of "Soul Train" this week, because of the loss of Don Cornelius, the host, who died from an apparent suicide. A little-discussed fact of the internet is that watching YouTube clips of "Soul Train" is a surprisingly effective form of stress relief.
And so is partying down at the Panda Party! So come join us and spin some tunes. Sadly, we can't create a "Soul Train"-style line with our cute avatars, but you can play at home.
RIP, Don Cornelius. My memories of that era are really dim, since I was a little kid, but I remember that well into the 90s, every dance party occasion would burst, at some point, into a "Soul Train" line. Now it's more like a circle thing, where people are pushed into the middle to show off their moves. I am fine with both methods, though feel the line version was less pressure-intensive. Share your memories in comments! Or come into Panda Party and share them there.
Or, to be more thorough, this is something I've been thinking about ever since anti-choicers managed to get Komen to join in their crusade of shunning Planned Parenthood for what I've deemed below-the-belt health care.* The "breasts good/vaginas icky" divide that rules a lot of wingnut thinking on this is typical of why they obsess over sex. Sex and gender provide lots of opportunities to label people and divide them into categories. This in and of itself isn't bad. Labels are useful things that can clarify, as long as they're kept in their place. But conservatives---being black and white thinkers---see different groups labeled and imagine they must be total opposites. And that they therefore must be constantly at war with each other.
And boy do they like that! Nothing works better for conservatism than encouraging people to exaggerate their differences, minimize their similiarities and then imagine themselves as in constant struggle with each other. While we ordinary people are fighting each other over our supposed differences, we're not looking working together on issues that matter to all of us. There are a lot of places where differences to fight over can be found, but sex and gender strike so close to home for people that it's a well of opportunities for divide-and-conquer the right just drinks from constantly and frankly instinctually. You can probably think of the most prominent examples. There's the What's the Matter with Kansas? issue, where working class white people are encouraged to obsess over the dirty sluts that are supposed so different from them, and to bring us back in line, and this obsession keeps them voting Republican even as doing so hurts their pocketbook. Of course, the attempts to make straight people think LBGTQ people are foreign and subversive and strange is another example, and luckily one where the public is slowly beginning to stop buying what conservatives are selling.
Of course, the most consistently important artificial divide conservatives want to stoke, at least when it comes to sex, is between men and women. The idea that men and women might realize that we're not, in fact, complete opposites and that in fact our interests overlap the vast majority of the time terrifies conservatives. They need men and women to see ourselves as enemies who constantly struggle over power and sex, and definitely don't want us to look at each other as friends. That's one reason there's so much hostility with regards to reproductive rights. It's critical to conservatives ideology to imagine sex as a source of power struggle between men and women that prevents equality and friendship. They want a world where men are always trying to get it, and women are always trying to avoid having to have it, which makes platonic friendship impossible (because of suspicions that he's trying to get one over on you) and makes sexual relationships fraught. Reproductive health care changes that completely, giving women an opportunity to explore our desires without worrying too much about unwanted childbirth or disease, and when we do so, we realize that actually, we're just like men. And now instead of sex being the source of friction between men and women, it can bring people together. (Also, platonic friendships are a lot easier because people who are sexually satisfied aren't injecting sex into every interaction.) There's a reason that the same people who violently insist that men and women are complete opposites cringe at the idea of women having full reproductive health care; they fear men and women learning that in fact, we're basically the same. Nothing distracts from how alike men and women are like making women subservient to our biology while men are allowed to be free.
Feminism is dangerous not just because it can bring men and women together as allies. If anything, conservatives are just as terrified at how feminists have indicated that women are oppressed as a group and has encouraged women to stand together to resist that oppression. Turning women on each other is a major part of reactionary politics, and sex is a great weapon to use for that purpose. Women are still treated like the sex class, and that creates a lot of opportunities to divide women in various ways according to perceived sexual behaviors and desirability. There's a reason that conservatives are starting a "OMG GIRL SCOUTS ARE DIRTY SLUTS" campaign; it's about dividing women into "good girls" and "bad girls" and pitting them against each other, even before they even really have any kind of sexual urges at all. I think that's one reason they went after Komen so doggedly. Breast cancer is considered, inaccurately, as more of an older woman's concern. You start your mammograms just as your fertile years are winding down. Below-the-belt health care is considered, inaccurately, more of a younger woman's concern.** It's clear to me that they see this as another divide-and-conquer strategy, trying pit these two groups against each other. For antis, especially, they want to get more older women to snarl at younger ones that we shouldn't be clamoring for health care resources, but instead should just keep our legs shut.
This is bullshit, and I suspect won't work as well on older women as anti-choicers might think. My experience tells me that very few women go through menopause and then turn on their younger sisters who still have the needs of fertile women. On the contrary, I tend to find that older women are often more thoughtful and nuanced, having had enough experience to see that the division between "good girls" and "bad girls" is a lie, and that we're all bad girls. Sure, there are plenty of middle-aged and eldery church ladies, wagging their fingers at the sluts, but I suspect most of those women have been church ladies their entire lives, and have always preferred to throw stones at other women than see that we're all in this together. But since finger-wagging church ladies are a huge portion of the anti-choice movement, I could see how they'd see this as a way to beef up the divide between younger and older women. But even though I don't think this will work as well as they might hope, it's good to be mindful of it. And ask ourselves when we're getting all bent out of shape about the nerve of some people being at a different place in life and having different sexual and health needs, we have to ask why are we letting ourselves get riled up like that?
*Seriously, how long is it before fundie women start bragging about how they don't go to filthy gynecologists at all? On the fringes, you already have Christian fundies who believe that god wants women to give birth at home with a midwife, so I guess they're already there, looking for a way for women to go their whole lives without having a doctor address below-the-belt care. With the extremist turn as of late, I won't be surprised to see these sentiments spreading. Anyway, you can read my piece about the above/below divide wingnuts are carving out, and how to hold corporations who are coddling this accountable.
**I'm not an expert by any means on breast cancer, but I do know that the assumption that you don't need protection after you go through menopause means a lot of people being diagnosed with STDs when they thought they were too old for that.
As I noted last night, I have a blog post up at Slate about Susan G. Komen---who purports to be a women's health charity---abandoning their alliance with Planned Parenthood, even though 17% of Planned Parenthood's services are cancer screening and prevention. They claim that it's because Planned Parenthood is under investigation, but it seems that excuse was ginned up because it was easy cover for caving into anti-choice nuts. The investigation has been launched as a nuisance investigation by an anti-choice congressman, and is not compelled by any sincere concern that Planned Parenthood is violating the law with its funds. It's completely obvious that they're caving into anti-choice activists, and specifically, as I noted at Slate, into the ridiculous idea that you can separate "good girl" health care from "bad girl" health care, the latter being everything from cervical cancer prevention and treatment to abortion. And yes, before we forget, it's all lumped together with the anti-choice movement now. That's how they made the HPV vaccine an issue in the Republican primary, because it's widely believed that preventing cervical cancer gives girls "license" to be sluts.
In other words, a supposedly anti-cancer charity just threw their lot in with people who believe that cancer shouldn't be prevented if it's linked to sexually transmitted diseases. Objectively pro-cancer, at least for women they deem slutty, i.e. about 95% of us.
Cynthia A. Pearson, executive director of the National Women’s Health Network, doesn’t buy the foundation’s explanation, either. “That’s specious,” she said. Instead, Pearson says, “Komen’s chicken. Komen’s caving to pressure.” This is what antiabortion activists do so well: “They will target the providers and the people who relate to the providers,” she says. That’s because “they can’t make Planned Parenthood stop providing abortions” and “they can’t find any evidence that Planned Parenthood is inappropriately using federal funds.”
That's when I realized that anti-choicers do this so well because the war on reproductive health care is basically a witchhunt, and the religious fundamentalists behind it are the modern day version of medieval paranoids of old who believed that women who didn't conform to their exacting standards were consorting with Satan. In fact, considering the span of time and cultural change, the fact that the argument hasn't changed at all---they really do believe pro-choice health care providers are consorting with Satan---is almost startling. It's like they lifted it directly from their medieval ancestors. Except, instead of condemning witches to the stake, they simply want to keep them from doing their jobs, and allowing the other witches, i.e. women whose sexual choices they disapprove of, suffer from various afflications ranging from forced childbirth to death from cervical cancer as a warning to others to stay away from the devil's playground of sexual pleasure. And like traditional witch hunters, they have lurid imaginations, and project all their strange fantasies onto their targets, which is why abortion providers or even just pro-choice clinics have been accused of everything from running sex trafficking rings to instigating genocide to putting fetuses in food. And that's on top of the lurid accusations flung at the kinds of women who might visit a Planned Parenthood, especially unmarried young women. Those women are accused of creating sex cults around Plan B, organizing orgies for the strange purpose of getting really colorful penises in the room, and of using abortion as "birth control", i.e. preferring the no-doubt unequalled pleasures of a good uterus scraping to boring old pill use. I've definitely seen some medieval-style flights of fancy aimed at me personally, including a blogger putitng up a picture of me in a red sweater to make insinuations about the kind of woman who wears red. No, I'm serious.
But the most salient feature of a witch hunt is that the witch hunters, in their paranoia, are always looking to expand the circle of "guilt". They imagine demons in every corner, and vast conspiracies promoting what they believe is evil that need to be rooted out. In medieval witch hunts, if someone who didn't like you remembered you buying a chicken from the accused witch, you better fall to your knees and start accusing the accused of putting a curse on your family, or you might be assumed to be guilty, too. That's basically what's going on here. Because of the witch hunt logic, it does seem to be that more and more of women's health care is being rolled up under the word "abortion", which is why anti-choicers blithely claims that's all Planned Parenthood does. You can point out repeatedly that 97% of its services are not abortion, but in their mind, that's like saying that the accused witch spent some of her time not doing witchcraft. In their minds, while she slept she was consorting with Satan, and time spent with her pet cat now is her consorting with a familiar. I can't tell you how many times I've been called a "baby killer". Even if you are stupid enough to believe that abortion is killing babies, that accusation doesn't make sense; I've never had nor performed an abortion. But that's the point. The word "abortion" for anti-choicers long ago ceased to mean "terminating a pregnancy". Now it's just a catch-all scare term to be flung around whenever you want to whip people into a frenzy of hatred over women's liberation, especially women's sexual liberation.
Anyone who thinks breast cancer can be neatly cordoned off from this growing circle of hate for all things women's health care is fooling themselves. That's not how witch hunts work. The fear here is not about fetuses or babies per se, but a deep-set fear of female sexuality. Already anti-choicers have scooped breast cancer under the umbrella "abortion", claiming that abortion causes breast cancer. (It doesn't.) Komen would rather side with people who see breast cancer as god's judgment on you for having an abortion rather than side with people support comprehensive health care for women. That tells you all you need to know about their organization. I'm all for picking up your sneakers and taking up running as a hobby, but recommend now you do it for you, and not for the ever-elusive cure for cancer.
As usual, Jesse and I will be tweeting coverage of the Florida primary tonight, which you can check out here for me and here for Jesse. If you're not watching Twitter already, however, I highly recommend it. People are freaking out about the decision of Susan G. Komen to drop their support for Planned Parenthood. I'll be dumping links as fast as they're being created on this breaking story. It may seem like a small thing, but today was a big loss for women's health and a big loss for science.
At XX Factor yesterday, I joked that Gingrich and other anti-choice nuts are going to rethink their opposition to stem cell research in record time if, as hoped, a cure for a certain form of erectile dysfunction is created. Really, it was only half a joke. The ugly truth of the matter is right wingers' utterly different approach to women's reproductive health care and men's access to ED drugs demonstrates that contrary to their claims of simply acting on devotion to Jesus, these folks are using religion as a cover for a deep-set misogyny. From the Catholic Church to most info you can find on religious websites to the anti-choice members of Congress, when asked about Viagra, they are supportive. Republicans like John McCain have routinely voted against bills that would require insurance companies that cover Viagra to cover contraception. The reason for this is simple: plain misogyny. Anti-choicers tend to see contraception as a "party drug" that allows dirty sluts to go slut it up. But they see Viagra as allowing men their god-given erections. That this is a hypocrisy is glossed over with an argument I've seen all over religious websites, but is best voiced by Bill O'Reilly:
The argument is that erectile dysfunction is a condition that needs to be cured, but since pregnancy is "natural" (actually, so is erectile dysfunction, as it's often just part of aging), preventing it is dirty slutdom. It's the thinnest of excuses for naked misogyny, especially if you consider that the worst that will happen physically to a man who doesn't get an erection is that he doesn't get an erection, but a pregnant woman is going to suffer weight gain and severe pain no matter what, and some of the more serious side effects of pregnancy are diabetes, stroke, and even death.
Since anti-choicers by and large present themselves as devout Christians who are only doing god's will, however, that makes this misogynist bullshit even worse. Right now, the Catholic bishops are screeching because the HHS is going to require them to cover birth control prescriptions for organizations they control that hire from and serve the general public. What's nakedly sexist about this is the Biblical justifications for banning abortion and contraception are extremely thin, but the Biblical justification for denying access to Viagra is really sound. Anti-choicers have cast around wildly in the Bible looking for verses that mention abortion or contraception---which have been around in one form or another since roughly forever---and haven't found much. A little poetic language about the womb doesn't mean banning abortion, nor does a strange story about a man defying god's direct orders to impregnate his dead brother's wife say much about contraception so much as the importance of taking direct god-orders seriously.
But Paul's writings in the New Testament are pretty clear on this: he thinks while married sex is better than fornication, no sex at all is the best of all possible worlds. He reluctantly allows that married people, having already gone ahead and been dirty sex-havers, should continue to do that, but it's definitely less than ideal. With this worldview in mind, the Christian seems obligated not to see erectile dysfunction as a tragedy, but as god sending a hint to you that your days of being distracted from your worship by sexual concerns are being called to an end. Paul seems very clear on the point that people have sex for fun and not really for procreation, so the use of birth control strikes me as no more sinful by this measure than simply marrying in the first place. But trying to reverse god-given celibacy with modern medicine seems like directly defying god's obvious will when he struck you with ED. That is, if you read the Bible with an intention to actually doing what it says. Most Christians---even the good ones---come to the Bible with a predetermined belief in what's right and look for rationalizations in the verses. It's clear with anti-choicers that they just don't like women and seek verses that reinforce that, ignoring the fact that Paul is probably just as concerned with how filthy male sexuality is as female.
The good news is I'm not Christian, so I'm free to see all this hostility to sexuality as perverse, and believe instead that sex is up there with chocolate and warm days in reasons to be thankful to be alive, and that medical science should make it their business to make the enjoyment of life safer and less stressful. Thus, Viagra and birth control for all!
On that note, enjoy this story of a legislator in Virginia who has introduced a bill requiring that men who want Viagra undergo a rectal exam in order to do so. For their own health, you know. Just like those mandatory vaginal probes fro women seeking abortion.
Republican appeals to the white working class have always been fraught, and not just because Republicans are trying to hoodwink this group with talk of abortion and gays in order to get them to vote against their own economic interests. It's also because it's always been illogical. On top of race-baiting and sexism, one of the big rhetorical strategies has been to pit the white working class against well-paid professionals (who are in fact becoming more liberal, though that's a recent shift) they deem the "liberal elite", with the hopes of distracting the white working class from the independently wealthy. It's illogical, since the argument is that rich fat cats who make a lot of money off other people's work are somehow a less appropriate target for class resentments than doctors, college professors and laywers who make a lot of money, but do so clocking in to a productive job every day like their working class brethern. But it's been somewhat effective, in no small part because your average working class white person probably knows someone of the working upper middle class, and they probably don't know any of the obscenely wealthy. Most of us are more likely, in other words, to know someone like the Obamas than the Romneys. So they're an easier target to describe meaningfully while dredging up resentments against them.
But another reason a lot of conservative thought leaders are so good at painting a picture of a snooty professional elite who wouldn't deign to rub shoulders with ordinary working Americans is that they are those people. In fact, far more so than the liberal versions of themselves much of the time. And really, while they're good at setting up people of their own class as hate-objects, they can barely conceal their disdain for working class whites. They just project it on liberals, and hope that their target audience doesn't notice what's going on.
Well, Charles Murray has blown their cover. That's all I can say about his latest book where he simulataneously plays the same cards that conservatives have for a long time, accusing the professional elite of being out of touch with "real" Americans, i.e. the white working class, and then proceeding to tell professional elites that their duty is to appoint themselves the moral guardians of the white working class and scold them to keep it in their pants. As part of the marketing for his book, he's released a quiz where you can rate how "in touch" you are with the working man by counting your visits to Applebee's, which is a typical exercise in claiming that a certain kind of American is the ony real one, a standard issue strategy for conservatives. But most of the book is about how people who would presumably rate high on his Quiz de Vicious White Trash Stereotypes are intellectually and morally inferior to the professional class, and thus need a good talking-to.
Frankly, I think Murray needs to be forced to choose. Are white working class Americans the only Real Americans, and anyone who is less than keen on drinking a Miller Lite in a Chili's is an evil snob? Or are the evil snobs the superior people here, and Real Americans are an unwashed mass of perverts who need to straighten up and fly right?
See, what's nice about being an evil liberal is that I don't have to deal with these problems. I don't think that conservative working class white culture is either the One True Culture, nor do I think that it's the business of upper class or upper middle class folks to appoint themselves the moral guardians of the rest of the country, bleating about how everything is going to hell because someone somewhere is fucking without a marriage license. The beauty of the "We Are the 99%" slogan is that it gets to the heart of this: the real elite in this country has, by treating our markets like a big casino, laid waste to our economy and screwed over everyone else. What's interesting to me is that idiots like Murray can never get past unbelievably superficial anger about sex and getting conservative haircuts (which is presumably what he means by "work ethic", because it's ludicruous to think any actual working Americans have been slacking off when it comes to actual working, which we do too much of) to ever stop and think that perhaps different people make different choices about marriage and haircuts for good reasons. Of course, deeper analysis would reveal that in fact, it's not that Americans collectively got immoral and stupid so much as that the very elite who control this country economically have been gobbling up a larger and larger slice of the pie, leaving the rest of us fighting over scraps. And Murray can't have that.
By the way, I did start to take the quiz and got really bored, but unsurprisingly, considering my family background, I was scoring a lot of points on it. But I have to point out that the fishing question is a little geographical-ist, since people who live in the desert really have to travel far to go fishing much of the time. Also, my long-standing defense of the deliciousness of many American piss beers is, in my experience, has proven to be generally useless in getting the liberal elite to care or conservative America to be less wary of me. But perhaps my dedication to not doing something so bourgeois as get married is good for giving Murray the vapors.
Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach.
He spends a lot of time in this interview lying, claiming that things that the Republicans caused are Obama's fault (such as the "not working together" whine), but the boldness of this is breath-taking. But I'm glad he said it, because a lot of Beltway media is happy to convince themselves that the 1998 impeachment was an anomaly that was unique to the Clinton White House. Instead, I'd say that we're better off assuming that Republicans feel that it's always an option they're eager to take when an "illegitimate", i.e. Democratic, President is in the White House. That his race and family background causes conservatives to panic only makes the whole situation worse.
Republicans simply believe the White House belongs to them, and one party should hold it in perpetuity. Unfortunately, this idea that a Democrat holding that office is somehow an interloper has subtly seeped into the unconscious of people who would probably even voted for Obama. I've noticed a maddening habit in the mainstream media of claiming that Republicans are seeking to "reclaim" the White House, as if it was theirs to begin with. I haven't heard that verb used with relation to Democrats, who tend to merely "win" that election. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but I do listen carefully for these things. Subtle things like that end up reinforcing conservatives' belief that they're the only "real" Americans, and that therefore the White House is their property.
What's funny, of course, is that they just get more shrill about how they're the only "real" Americans when the people who have the markers of the tribe---white, Christian suburbanites who adhere to more traditional gender roles---are dwindling in numbers compared to the rest of us. Unfortunately, we need to realize that their panic over this is only going to make them more determined to impeach Obama the first chance they get on the thinnest of made-up charges. It's not like Republicans in Congress have anything better to do with their time. All they ever do is try to get more tax cuts for the wealthy and push anti-choice legislation. That's not really a full time job, giving congressional Republicans lots of time to concoct ways to impeach the President.
