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Contraception not mandated, either
Stupak-Pitts about class as much as choice
Bart Stupak and the C Street Family
Shouting down Democratic women
Catholic Bishops have other interests
Why do I even bother caring what Ann Coulter says about anything?
On this episode of Reality Cast, it's a whole lot of discussion and dissection of the Stupak-Pitts amendment to the House health care reform bill. I'll be looking at its impact and why it happened in two separate segments. Also, Megan Carpentier will be on to talk about the Oklahoma law requiring women who have abortions to put their private information on line.
I'd like to highlight a video posted on RH Reality Check with an article by David Neipert.
- Belmont *
Eight professors have filed suit with the EEOC, and the EEOC determined that it was indeed gender discrimination. Good for the professors of Belmont!
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Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard the terrible news.
- Stupak 1 *
That's right; the pigheaded religious fanatic that's Bart Stupak that's been on and on about how the health care bill needs to be rewritten so that women can't get coverage for abortion got his way. He got an amendment attached to the House health care reform bill that makes it illegal for insurance companies to provide abortion coverage to any woman who has subsidized care, even if they pay for it with non-federal money. A lot of anti-choicers are trying to play this off as if it was the same old thing they've always done, which is bad enough, which is stopping federal funding for abortion. But that's a lie, as Diane Archer explained on Grit TV.
- Stupak 2 *
What absolutely needs to be understood is that in no way, shape, or form is this an attempt to actually reduce the number of abortions. How do I know that? Because abortion coverage wasn't the only thing that anti-choicers blocked. There were many attempts early on to mandate that health insurance companies cover contraception, but no version of the bill has that language left in it. Anti-choicers made a fuss about abortion, and were able to quietly make sure that as many women possible are forced to have them. Because, and say it with me now, this is about punishing sex, and has nothing to do with life.
As Ezra Klein noted in the Washington Post, this is also and mainly a class issue. The anti-sex agenda doesn't really make sense until you look at it from this perspective. Most anti-sex folks are fine with sex for themselves, it's just those other people they don't like having sex. And other generally means poor people. The women that will be most affected by this ban on abortion and the lack of contraception coverage are women who need subsidies to buy insurance, because they can't afford this themselves. I guess the idea of poor people having sex just really makes some people mad, you know? Estimates suggest that 10 million women are at risk of forced childbirth for the sin of being working class and having sex.
Which probably goes a long way to explaining why many ostensibly pro-choice Democrats voted for this amendment. But part of it was that religious fanatics like Stupak were belligerent in their demands and said they would not vote for the health care bill if it was neutral on abortion. A lot of the media made it sound like the Democrats were facing a loss of 40 votes on this, but as James Clyburn explained on MSNBC, that's not so.
- Stupak 3 *
That said, those 10 votes were probably a make-it-or-break-it number for passing this bill. But it's hard to say, honestly. What we do know is this isn't over yet. The Senate has to reconcile their bill with this bill, and the pro-choice case is much stronger in the Senate. Representative Schultz went on MSNBC to explain.
- Stupak 4 *
Certainly, one reason this whole reason blew up like this is that it seemed, until the last minute, like Nancy Pelosi would be able to keep a lid on this anti-woman nonsense. As Terry O'Neill explains, even those of us who were aware of the anti-choice sentiment in Congress didn't think it would be this bad.
- Stupak 5 *
Well, the veil has been lifted and now we see how deep the anti-woman sentiment has gotten in Congress and in the mostly-male political circles of the federal government. So hopefully we won't be caught by surprise again. In the next segment on the Stupak-Pitts amendment, after the interview, I'll look at some of the machinations behind the scenes that allowed this amendment to pass.
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insert interview
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Now that the Stupak-Pitts amendment has passed, it's time to ask some serious questions about how this happened. The most obvious answer is that Capitol Hill is still dominated by a bunch of middle-aged men that will never be pregnant themselves, and so think that anyone who does worry about it is being silly. But the answer is really more complicated than that.
Let's start with the man who pushed forward this unconscionable legislation, Bart Stupak. Stupak is a Democrat from Michigan, and in interviews, he comes across as a tone-deaf sexist who particularly resents that he has to live under Nancy Pelosi's leadership. It turns out that Stupak is a member of the notorious C Street Family, an elitist fundamentalist Christian cult that many congressmen belong to. We've had Jeff Sharlet on this podcast before to talk about the Family, and he went on Rachel Maddow to explain further.
- Stupak 6 *
As Jeff noted in the book "The Family", this cultish group is big on the idea that women are inferior to men. Women in the house have to wait on the men, for instance, and even their clothes are constricted, and they're mostly excluded from power. So, unsurprisingly, the Family makes a big deal out of sperm power, and hate on the idea that mere women could interrupt what sperm causes.
Indeed, the most amazing part of this entire health care reform process is how it's drawn out so much hostility from so many male members of Congress towards women. For instance, there was the completely out of control behavior of many congressional Republicans when female Democrats got up to speak about health care reform and women. Think Progress posted a compilation.
- Stupak 7 *
- Stupak 8 *
Really, at this point, it's hard to avoid the sense that the shouters simply can't stand the idea of women speaking up for health care reform or speaking up for women's needs. A lot of the women speaking weren't even talking about abortion. But of course, this is never really about abortion, is it? It's about controlling women, and you got a full earful of that right there. But even I was astonished at how blatant it was.
The other big players in this were the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who basically dictated the content of this amendment. It's no big news that the Catholic Bishops are obsessed with sexuality in general, and female sexuality especially, but it's more than a little startling how much Congress is simply allowing religious groups to pretty much write legislation, in direct violation of the First Amendment.
But there's more than mere misogyny at hand. As Wendy Norris wrote at RH Reality Check, the Catholic Bishops are also protecting the Vatican's lucrative investment in the health care industry. Catholic hospitals that don't provide abortion are at a disadvantage compared to those that do, and so pushing abortion out of the health care package available to women means that these hospitals don't have to compete as much. Of course, hospital provided abortions are often done in emergency situations where the fetus is already dead, but when you're hating on sexual women, that's a minor distinction not worth bothering over.
Luckily, the fact that this is basically about a bunch of men deciding to flex their powers to make life miserable for women didn't pass the attention of everyone in the mainstream media. Dr. Nancy Snyderman was blunt, saying what a lot of us are thinking.
- Stupak 9 *
This fight isn't over yet, people. We still have the Senate on hand to get this out of the bill.
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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, still trying to defend murder of abortion providers edition. This time it's Ann Coulter, comparing the reaction to the Fort Hood shooter to the reaction to Dr. Tiller's murder.
- coulter *
Except that the shooter in the Dr. Tiller case has admitted that he did it as a terrorist act and he has associations with anti-choice terrorist groups like Army of God. And the shooter in the Fort Hood case's motivations were still in question. The cases are not comparable, since no one was saying that all Christians are responsible for Dr. Tiller's murder, but that's certainly Ann Coulter's implication about Muslims here.
