Amanda Marcotte's blog http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/987/atom/feed 2009-10-05T22:42:41-04:00 Ending the Epidemic of Sexually Transmitted Infections Starts with Talking http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/11/24/fighting-epidemic-sexually-transmitted-infections-starts-talking 2009-11-24T07:00:00-05:00 2009-11-23T21:47:45-05:00 Amanda Marcotte a new record in STD transmissions for 2008.  Will Wong analyzed the data for RH Reality Check.  As you can imagine, this public health disaster hurts black Americans more than white, young people more than adults, gay men more than straight, and people who rely on public health care more than those who don’t.  The only real surprise in this is that syphilis is on the rise, since there was a genuine reason to believe we might actually wipe that one out.

So how did it get so bad?  Considering the role young people play in this---half of the 19 million estimated STD transmissions occur in those 15 to 24---it’s tempting to say the abstinence-until-marriage programs that became ubiquitous in the past decade have something to do with this.  And I’m going to give into the temptation and say it’s likely.  Abstinence-only education---a legislative fetish that refuses to die---often teaches that condoms don’t work.  Educators like to believe that scaring kids off condoms will keep them from having sex, but of course, the likelier result is that scaring kids off condoms will simply scare them off condoms.  As Will noted, most of the STDs that we’re talking about can be prevented with regular condom use.

Another way that the prudery behind abstinence-only helps the spread of STDs is through inculcating shame about sexual activity and feelings that you’re “dirty” if you get an STD.  I think a lot of people would like to believe that shaming people about STDs helps reduce their transmission, but actually, it has the opposite effect.  Shame causes denial, specifically the denial that the symptoms you’re showing should be taken seriously.  A lot of people who show symptoms take a “wait and see” attitude, hoping that it’s not the STD that it looks like, but something more minor that will clear up on its own.  The problem with this is that avoiding treatment often results in the infection getting worse, which can cause scarring and infertility.  And it often means you’re having sex while waiting and seeing, which means that you’re likely to spread the infection.  And, as Will noted, having STDs like syphilis makes you more vulnerable to catching others, such as HIV.

Of course, another reason people take the “wait and see” attitude is they don’t have health care coverage, and they really can’t afford to pay for treatment out of pocket.  For this reason alone, we can expect the STD transmission rate to improve if we manage to pass a workable universal health care bill.

But simply having more health care access will not be enough.  As Will explains in his piece, public resources to combat STDs have been rolled back in recent years, due to lack of funding.  Since these kinds of groups are the only people out there talking about how to treat and prevent STDs, this is no small issue.

This is a situation that can be fought on several fronts, and average people can really do a lot to fight our ridiculously high STD transmission rates.  Yes, you can do more than insist on using condoms every single time you have sex outside of the context of a tested, monogamous relationship.  After all, reducing the stigma attached to sexual activity and STDs will mostly require social change, and that’s best effected by opening your mouth (or your blog) and talking.

Dan Savage set an excellent example years ago when he wrote about his youth, when he contracted gonorrhea.  (Reciting this from memory, since I can’t find a link to it.)  Or more specifically, when he contracted gonorrhea and, out of shame, failed to tell his partner about it, who contracted gonorrhea from Dan as a result.  Luckily, his partner rolled with it, which is exactly the attitude you want to have in order to reduce the shame and stigma around STDs.  And Dan learned the lesson, and came out with this story so that the rest of can see that the world doesn’t end if we’re honest about STDs.

Sex educators have exposed me to the idea that getting people talking about their own experiences with STDs can have the counterintuitive effect of reducing STD transmission rates.  Even herpes, which has the superpower of getting around latex barriers, can be reduced through honesty and lack of shame.  After all, if you communicate openly and without shame about break outs with your partner, you can shift into sexual practices that reduce the potential for transmission during those times.  It’s not foolproof, by any means, but it can help.

And while most people don’t have the courage to come out in a public forum like Dan Savage did, I’ve found that talking about your experiences with STDs with friends needn’t be as fraught as some people fear.  I’ve certainly heard people talk about contracting chlamydia, gonorrhea  or herpes in straightforward, humorous terms that normalized the experience….and made me realize that if I ever showed symptoms, it would be no big deal to go straight to doctor with my head held high.

Because of this, I’m grateful that the HPV vaccine, which targets strains of the virus that can cause cervical cancer, has started a national conversation about the prevalence of STDs.  There are many strains of human pappilloma virus (HPV), and while most are relatively benign, a few have been shown to cause cervical cancer in some women.  Because it is easy to transmit HPV, most people have one or another strain.  Yet until recently, misinformation about HPV, as well as other sexually transmitted infections, left us with little recourse except to treat the symptoms.  Even a few years ago, I would have found it hard to believe that so many people would easily accept that contracting HPV was more likely than not if they didn’t get vaccinated at a young age, and not feel weird or ashamed about that.  And while there’s been a lot of hysterics who want to turn contracting HPV into some kind of moralistic theater, there’s been more people who happily take their daughters to get the now available vaccine to protect them against the most dangerous strains.  If we can see more of that attitude, and expand it to other sexually transmitted infections, we’ll have taken a big step towards reducing the transmission rate.

]]> Sarah Palin, Health Care Reform, And Childless By Choice http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/11/22/sarah-palin-health-care-reform-and-childless-by-choice 2009-11-22T22:27:17-05:00 2009-11-23T12:10:06-05:00 Amanda Marcotte
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Sarah Palin won't go away, but perhaps Stupak-Pitts will. Also, childlessness by choice comes out of the closet.

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Sarah Palin won't go away, but perhaps Stupak-Pitts will. Also, childlessness by choice comes out of the closet.

 

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Links in this episode:

It's No Joke

Nancy Pelosi discusses Stupak-Pitts vote

Mitch McConnell talks about stalling health care reform out of existence

Sean Hannity exploits swine flu

Wanda Sykes on health care reform

Palin on Oprah

Media Matters debunks the lies

David Brooks is in denial

 

 

On this episode, I'll be interviewing author Laura Scott about childlessness by choice.  Also, the Stupak-Pitts amendment and attempts to kill health care reform, and Sarah Palin just won't go away.

 

Kudos to the Center for Reproductive Rights for this pro-choice ad called "It's No Joke".

 

  • no joke *

 

Remember, the fight is far from over on the Stupak-Pitts amendment. The Senate doesn't have such a thing in their bill, and with effort, we can keep it that way.

 

**********

 

And now for combining a topic I know is at the tip of your minds, the Stupak-Pitts amendment, and a theme that's dear to my heart, disingenuous conservative nonsense.  Nancy Pelosi went to the JFK School of Government at Harvard to explain the health care reform process, and when she was asked about how it came to be that the Stupak-Pitts amendment was put to a vote, she explained the reasoning. 

 

  • health care 1 *

 

Now I don't know about Bart Stupak's opinions on health care reform, though I'm sure you understand why I'm skeptical of the idea that he was all gung-ho for it.  Sure, he voted for the final bill that he managed to amend, but he pretty much had to, because he was selling the Stupak-Pitts amendment on the theory that he would vote for a health care reform bill with such an amendment attached.  It's worth noting that Pitts did not vote for the final bill, so he was amending a bill he had no intention of supporting. 

 

But if Stupak was sincere in his support for health care reform while attacking women's rights, he is what you might call a useful idiot.  As Pelosi explained, the people really egging Stupak on were eager to kill the bill altogether.  We don't even need to surmise this.  They're practically bragging about it.  Listen to Mitch McConnell dissemble, but make it clear that he plans to kill the bill through endless delays. 

 

  • health care 2 *

 

People really don't need this endless delaying.  Once this bill is passed, it's going to take a long time for all of it to get implemented correctly, and so every day that they stall is a day where people who are desperate for health care aren't getting it. 

 

But even as Republican politicians dissemble while expressing a desire to kill the bill, right wing pundits are waging all out war.  They will use anything to wage war on health care reform, no matter how inappropriate, misleading, or dishonest.  For instance, right wing pundits are making hay over the fact that Obama hasn't managed to cure swine flu yet, which they take as evidence that health care reform should be jettisoned.  Sean Hannity was up on that rant.

 

  • health care 3 *

 

Like how he slipped in some paranoia about the detainees in there?  Like it's not enough to hold these people without trial or evidence, but now we have to take swipes at their basic humanity? 

 

Anyway, the point is that opponents of health care reform have no shame.  No shame at all.  The reason there's a swine flu vaccine shortage is because the private company that makes it wildly underestimated how much they would need.  No telling why the manufacturers are dragging their feet, though it's worth wondering if the fact that vaccines aren't profitable for pharmaceutical companies might have something to do with that.  But I'm just speculating.  They may have just been ill-equipped to handle the amount of vaccine they'd have to make, and bluffed about it to the government. 

 

But if opponents of health care reform are willing to use terrorism and swine flu, they're sure going to be willing to use abortion to stall health care reform.  And while I think many of the side benefits of the Stupak-Pitts amendment were also appealing, such as stripping women of their already-existing coverage, at the end of the day, I think Nancy Pelosi is right.  This was always about stopping health care reform, by any means necessary. 

 

The good news is that Wanda Sykes has her own TV show now, and she lays out the ridiculousness of this entire situation. 

 

  • health care 4 *

 

**************

insert interview

 

**************

Sarah Palin, right wing nut and failed Vice Presidential candidate, has decided not only to be a person who can't take a hint and go away, but someone who will grab that hint, crumple it into a ball, and wipe her butt with it.  It's hard to miss the Palin extravaganza that's being rolled out because of her new book Going Rogue. Full disclosure: I submitted a piece to the Nation's new book criticizing Palin called Going Rouge.  I won't give it all away, but suffice it to say, I have some fun imagining the thorn that Levi Johnston will be in Palin's side as she transitions from politician to her new status as somewhere between a reality show contestant and an evangelical preacher. 

 

Which is why I was gleeful when Palin went on Oprah's show and fielded a question about the soon to be Playgirl model and the father of her daughter's baby. 

 

  • palin 1 *

 

From what I understand, this is pretty much her strategy.  Deny that you're going to go on the low road so you can go on the low road pretending it's the high road.  So deny that national TV is a good place to talk about it, and then proceed to take a bunch of potshots at this young man that's become an uncontrollable thorn in your side.  And have your dwindling followers refuse to see what's wrong with that. 

 

It only promises to get better from here.  Presumably, Palin wrote this memoir to save her reputation as well as cash in.  I'm afraid that while she may make the money, her tour is really going to backfire on the reputation front.  The less she talks, the more people can pretend she's smart, and so a whole book is going to do her in.  Already it's been revealed that she's a creationist.  And of course, for those of us who oppose her abstinence-only fundamentalist beliefs, this moment from the Barbara Walters interview was full of win.

 

  • palin 2 *

 

If you think about that statement for even a moment, you can see why Palin and her abstinence-only ilk are not the people to put in charge of educating the nation's young about sexuality.  You're shocked that 17-year-old has sex?  You're devastated?  While respecting that it's not easy for parents to adapt to their teenagers growing up, I have to say that people who have a more realistic view of the world might be better equipped to put together sex ed curriculum.  Shocked and devastated that human biology didn't change when you had kids isn't really a good starting point.

 

Palin, of course, is staying in the spotlight in part because she's a hero to anti-choicers.  This is because she chose to have a baby after a Down's diagnosis, and therefore she believes others should not have that choice.  Or any choice at all, no matter how early in a pregnancy.  People who hold themselves as heroes like she does should realize that without choice, they aren't so special.  They fade into the background with the women who are forced to give birth against their will.  But logic has never been a strong suit for the anti-choice movement, as you know.

 

If you want a full run-down of all the lies Palin tells in her new memoir, and what the truth is, please check out Media Matters.  Palin is pushing the thoroughly discredited lie about how doctors kill babies they've already delivered, and they have a thorough refutation.

 

Does Palin have a future as a politician?  I'm skeptical.  But I think David Brooks is going too far here. 

 

  • palin 3 *

 

That is a man in deep denial. Leaning on Bob McDonnell, who is on the record against women even having jobs, as some evidence that Republicans are going to get serious now?  I'd like to think Brooks is joking, but honestly, he's just cracked.  He wants to believe that the Republicans are going to be able to kick the Christian right habit, and he's ignoring the fact that McDonnell is just as much a Bible thumper, if not more so, than Palin.  Seriously, I can't even believe we're having this discussion.

 

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, minimizing rape while kicking up hysteria edition.  Glenn Beck, in his search for new lows to reach down to, came up with this.

 

  • glenn beck*

 

I will point out that he, like many wingnuts, has a really bad idea of how a metaphor works.  Within the space of 10 seconds, he moved the "American people" of his imagination from the role of rape victim to role of rapist.  Where are his sympathies again?

 

]]> The Stupak-Pitts Controversy is Based On--and Masks--A Deepset Fear of Women's Agency http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/11/17/the-stupakpitts-controversy-based-onand-masksa-deepset-fear-womens-agency 2009-11-17T07:00:00-05:00 2009-11-16T23:11:34-05:00 Amanda Marcotte   The media loves playing the misleading “both sides” card (falsely implying that the anti-choice movement is motivated by Deep Moral Concerns instead of archaic sexual paranoia and misogyny), and socially conservative politicians love how creating a panic over abortion can distract everyone from more pertinent issues.  Issues such as improving women’s overall health care.

 

In all the fuss over Stupak-Pitts, the fact that both houses of Congress removed mandated coverage not only for contraception, but also STD counseling and pelvic exams went largely unnoticed.  As Sharon Lerner explains in the linked piece, the reason goes right back to those anti-choicers who claim merely to be concerned about fetal life (and not about controlling female sexuality).  Fear of anti-choice hysterics made removing mandated contraception and cancer screening for women an easy choice for Congress.  And, just as anti-choicers would hope, all the fuss over abortion meant that few people were asking questions about exactly why contraception, which 98% of women will use at some point in their lives, suddenly became controversial.

The reason tells you a lot about how Stupak-Pitts got into the bill in the first place.  Sex-phobes have an outsized presence and power on the Hill.  Part of it is that they’re simply louder.  The Christian right has done a bang-up job of recruiting an army of bitter, underemployed misogynists and naïve teenagers who fear sex to march around on command whenever the word “abortion” is uttered, making the sex-phobic presence in the U.S. seem bigger than it is.

Part of it is that the Christian right also focuses so much of its energy on courting people in power. As Rachel Maddow reported, Bart Stupak is a member of the notorious C Street Family, and it seems very likely that he agreed to be the figurehead for the Stupak-Pitts amendment at their request.  This group of fundamentalist Christians preaching a theology of male dominance and something very close to the divine right of politicians has wisely chosen to start recruiting among Democrats, in order to spread its power.  The result is not only a startling number of Democrats becoming belligerent anti-choicers, but helping create an atmosphere of fear about touching the subject of female control over female bodies.

Another part of it is that anti-choicers, since they can hide behind a moralizing mask, have no problem talking about sex, but pro-choicers avoid the topic out of shame.  Everyone fears being tarred as someone who is openly pro-sex, which gets rewritten by anti-choicers as pro-promiscuity or pro-irresponsibility. Even though, of course, pro-choicers are the only people promoting a responsible vision of sexuality, where pleasure is balanced with honesty and mindfulness.

But watching all this nonsense go down, I’m forced to suggest that the major factor is that our government is still mainly run by a bunch of middle-aged men who’ve been shielded from having to deal honestly and empathetically with women’s lives their whole lives, and therefore are prone to seeing women’s concerns as disposable at best, and at worst, as frighteningly alien and needing to be controlled.  When you have that attitude, it’s easy to push aside all the ways you’ve personally benefited from contraception and abortion, and just assume the only women who need assistance in those areas are wayward sluts who need to be slapped down instead of given a hand.  After all, I’m sure most of these men have had the benefit of women who quietly make sure that fertility control is taken care of, without bothering the over-privileged men in their lives. 

Knowing this, it’s not hard to see why some folks are panicking over provisions aimed at lower income women that involve advice on using fertility control for better health outcomes for mothers and children.  On paper, this provision seems harmless enough. It provides optional at-home visits for new mothers under certain income levels in order to advise the new mothers on the benefits of pregnancy spacing, as well as giving them education in domestic violence and education options for their children.

As written, the only problem I see with it is that it’s limited to low-income women.  After all, the advice about pregnancy spacing is good for any woman who plans to have more than one child, and the information about this is relatively new.  The assumption that middle class but not lower class women have access to this information is both paternalistic and just plain wrong.  These restrictions imply that low-income women are especially ignorant on this subject, which doesn’t seem to be true.

But in an atmosphere where legislators on a woman-controlling kick are writing bills like this, a seemingly harmless provision about giving generally useful advice takes on an ominous light.  After all, our legislators have indicated that they’re willing to use health care reform to manipulate women’s bodies and deprive women of their reproductive choice. Add to that a history of compulsory sterilization of women that the powers that be think are illegitimate reproducers, and you have a situation where hyper-vigilance about provisions like this isn’t so much paranoid as smart.

The government could go a long way to earning back our trust.  First of all, stop using health care reform to manipulate women’s choices.  Make abortion and contraception available to all, as well we prenatal and post-natal care.  Post-childbirth advice about pregnancy spacing, healthy babies, and education aren’t something that only low-income women need, and implying that is paternalistic at best, overbearing and coercive at worst. 

]]> All About Stupak-Pitts (And Oklahoma) http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/11/15/all-about-stupakpitts-and-oklahoma 2009-11-15T17:57:48-05:00 2009-11-16T10:27:32-05:00 Amanda Marcotte
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Two segments examining the hows and whys of the Stupak-Pitts amendment. Also, Megan Carpentier talks about an Oklahoma law invading women's privacy. ]]>
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Two segments examining the hows and whys of the Stupak-Pitts amendment. Also, Megan Carpentier talks about an Oklahoma law invading women's privacy.

 

Subscribe to RealityCast:
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Links in this episode:

Belmont professors rebel

Stupak-Pitts passes

Grit TV on Stupak-Pitts

Contraception not mandated, either

Stupak-Pitts about class as much as choice

How many votes was it?

Can the Senate get rid of it?

Bart Stupak and the C Street Family

Shouting down Democratic women

Catholic Bishops have other interests

Dr. Nancy says it

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!

 

**********

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.

 

**********

insert interview

**********

 

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.

 

*********

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.


 

]]> Assaults On Public Option, Women's Right To Privacy http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/11/08/assaults-on-public-option-womens-right-to-privacy 2009-11-08T08:57:31-05:00 2009-11-09T08:00:16-05:00 Amanda Marcotte
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Nona Willis Aronowitz talks about her new book "Girl Drive". The public option seems viable, and health care reform opponents freak out, and a new law in Oklahoma invades women's privacy. ]]>
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Nona Willis Aronowitz talks about her new book "Girl Drive". The public option seems viable, and health care reform opponents freak out, and a new law in Oklahoma invades women's privacy.

 

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

Another sex scandal

Pelosi responds to a heckler

McConnell claims health care reform will kill you

Foxx compares health care reform to terrorism

Lieberman begs someone to debate him

Lieberman avoids debating Rachel Maddow and Glenn Greenwald

Lieberman's ties to the industry

Oklahoma tries to out women who have abortion

Limbaugh blatantly misleads on health care reform

 

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be talking to Nona Willis Aronowitz about her new book Girl Drive, about a cross-country feminist trip. Also, the public option seems viable, and opponents of health care reform freak out.  Plus, a segment on the Oklahoma law assaulting women's privacy rights.

 

Because I know that you guys love the sex scandals from family values politicians.  Here's the latest, from now former assistant attorney general of South Carolina Roland Corning. 

 

  • sex scandal *

Not only all that, but he was on his lunch hour.  Which just makes the whole thing seedier.

 

***********

So, the House released its version of a health care reform bill, and to no one's great surprise, it has a public option in it. In general, it's a very good bill, with a focus on preventive care that lowers costs and creating competition and collective bargaining that will do the same thing.  I was also impressed with the bans on dumping people for having pre-existing conditions or raising their premiums.  But it was the public option above all things that is causing the complete panic attack in the people who are basically coming out as insurance industry shills.  And thank you, Nancy Pelosi, for pointing that when heckled by a health care reform opponent. 

 

  • health care 1 *
  •  

Now that a public option is officially on the table, opponents of health care reform have moved from merely spreading misinformation to lying outright or stirring up ridiculous hysteria.  Mitch McConnell went on Dennis Miller's show to claim that public health insurance would kill you.

 

  • health care 2 *

 

You know what actually kills people?  Not having insurance, which is true for 47 million Americans and climbing.  But McConnell's doing that two-fer lie thing, where a conservative buries a lie within a lie so you don't know which one to refute.  He's linking the public option, which would just be a government-owned non-profit like the Post Office with the NHS and Medicare, which pay for your care with tax dollars.  That's a lie. But it's also a lie that the NHS and Medicare are bad things.  Medicare has demonstrably relieved poverty in the elderly, and Britain's National Health Services put them at #18 in the world, whereas the U.S. is #37.  So if you want better health care, you would actually embrace the British system.

 

And Representative Virginia Foxx pulled a favorite scare tactic out: use the word "terrorism" to rile them up.

 

 

  • health care 3 *

 

Because terrorists will just kill you, whereas under health care reform, you might find yourself in a waiting room next to the very poor people that you tried to keep out.  Glad to know where priorities lay. 

 

But for my money, the funniest public freak-out has been from Joe Lieberman, who swings from talking wild wingnut talk to oppose health care reform to pretending he's the last reasonable man on earth.  As part of his latter strategy, he's been claiming that no one will debate him on the public option. 

 

  • health care 4 *

 

Do you really want to have that debate, Joe?  Really?  Because from where I'm sitting, it doesn't seem like you really do.  Ask Rachel Maddow. 

 

  • health care 5 *

 

So much for that.  Why is it that Lieberman is so dead set against a public option?  The main purpose of it would be to set up competition for insurance companies, so they have to lower their prices.  The only real reason to be against it is that you're siding with insurance companies over the public. 

 

  • health care 6 *
  •  

So that's where we stand, everyone.  Right now, I think if it was just up to the House, a public option would be beyond question.  But we're up against the Senate, and the Senate has a lot more people taking a lot more money from insurance companies. 

 

************

insert interview

************

 

I apologize in advance for not covering this sooner, but things have been moving so fast on this, that it's hard to keep up.  But let's start at the beginning.  As you may well know, Oklahoma is often the ground zero for anti-choice nuttiness, and that includes that specific obsession that anti-choicers have with getting personal information about women who get abortions.  There's a couple theories as to why they're so damn interested in finding out so many savory details on women who get abortions.  The most obvious is that they're trying to intimidate them, but I think it also has a lot to do with an inability to mind their own business.  That, and they're uptight, weird people who enjoy titillating themselves by thinking about perfect strangers having sex while imagining punishing them for it.  So here's the latest in the realm of self-titillation from anti-choice nuts. 

 

  • Oklahoma 1 *

 

Well, since anti-choicers often take a pornographic interest in the lives of women getting abortions, well, it makes sense to put this on the internet with other pornography.  But what I object to is the taxpayers paying money to use women's private information in order to titillate anti-choice nuts.  Those people need to find consenting adults to make their pornography, and pay for it out of their own pocket.  When you get an abortion, you're not consenting to have your private information put online so some right wing nuts can get themselves all horrified and aroused. 

 

Maddow had Megan Carpentier from Air America on to discuss this odious law. 

 

  • Oklahoma 2 *

 

This is the danger that you step into with all this talk about finding common ground on abortion.  If we define common ground as simply finding ways to reduce abortion, and not looking too closely at whether or not those methods are ethical, then you get into this kind of situation.  Oklahoma is justifying creating porn for anti-choice nuts on the grounds that engaging women in this non-consensual practice will intimidate them out of abortions.  Most likely, it will just make them go out of state for abortions.  But we have to be clear that reducing abortion is only a worthy goal if women's rights and dignity are fully respected.

 

  • Oklahoma 3 *

 

And there you go.  If you have any doubt in your mind what's going on here, the fact that a bunch of skeevy right wing dudes took this private information and gave it to the king of sexual harassment via falafel references himself, Bill O'Reilly, should wipe all doubt from your mind.  I'm not going to suggest that these men are sexually aroused by abortion per se.  But I do think they get a lot of titillating pleasure out of thinking about women having sex, knowing the details, and then fantasizing about what it must be like to punish them.  Or acting on it with a public shaming like this.  Abortion just gives them the excuse for their behavior.

 

The good news is a judge has put a hold on the law for the time being.

 

*********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the biggest whopper about health care reform edition.  We've heard a lot, but I have to single out Rush Limbaugh for pure audacity.  

 

  • Limbaugh *

 

There is no prohibition on buying private insurance.  You buy it through the Health Exchange.  Limbaugh is pretending this is a ban on private insurance, but it's basically the same, just more streamlined and competitive.  Gotta love the way that the wingnuts have started to call this Pelosi care, by the way.  They couldn't be more obvious in their use of misogyny to raise concerns.  Pelosi is the sort of target they love to hate, a target in a skirt.

 

]]> "Law And Order" Panders and Lies About Anti-Choice Terrorism http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/11/03/law-and-order-panders-and-lies-about-antichoice-terrorism 2009-11-03T16:18:09-05:00 2009-11-04T10:30:52-05:00 Amanda Marcotte
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"Law and Order" anti-choice nonsense, with clips! Also, the laws and ethics regarding fertility treatments, and questions about whether or not to vaccinate boys for HPV.

]]>
Download
"Law and Order" anti-choice nonsense, with clips! Also, the laws and ethics regarding fertility treatments, and questions about whether or not to vaccinate boys for HPV.

 

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
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Links in this episode:

Reacting to Bob McDonnell's thesis

FDA permits vaccinating boys for HPV

Anti-choice extremists try to raise money

 

 

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Naomi Cahn on her book on fertility treatments and the legal issues surrounding them. Also, I watched the Law and Order exploiting Dr. Tiller's murder so you don't have to, and the FDA approves use of the HPV vaccination for boys.

 

Virginia's NARAL decided to take candidate for governor Bob McDonnell's thesis to the streets and have people read what amounted to a rant against anything threatening a strict patriarchy to see what the people think. The people think it is silly.

 

  • mcdonnell *

 

Funny stuff.

 

**********

 

I'm sure you've heard by now that "Law & Order" did a despicable episode based on the murder of Dr. George Tiller, and as is often the case with these shows, they pander so much to conservatives in the audience that they forget that women who have abortions and those who provide them are people who deserve respect. Early in the episode, you have an idea of how bad this is going to be.

 

  • l&o 1 *

 

Right away, they make sure to spare your average anti-choice nut responsibility for this, and even wrongly imply that they go out of their way to stop these murders. There is no reason to believe this. Those who shoot abortion providers tend to move freely amongst other anti-choicers, and even though someone like Scott Roeder spoke openly of his belief that murder was justified, as far as I know, no one tipped off the police or the potential victims. They are too busy spreading dehumanizing rhetoric about abortion providers that gives killers moral support.

 

Of course, they have to make one of the cops an anti-choicer, which means that the rest of us have to listen to the cheap sentimental stuff that assumes that women who have had sex, even forced sex, forsake their right to be treated like human beings.

 

  • l&o 2 *

 

Oh, way to make the pro-choicer look like a bad guy. Here's a better reply: You poor mother was in such hell that she threw herself down a flight of stairs in despair, and you can't even pause to think about what that must have been like for her? You weren't even around! Or maybe not write that story in the first place, because it's stupid and implausible. Most women who attempt to self-abort do so early in the pregnancy, because that's the best chance they've got. Remember kids, if you parents didn't have sex the night you were conceived, you also would have never been born. Do you think that means that abstaining should be illegal?

 

We also see an example of the anti-choice unwillingness to believe pregnancy occurs in women's bodies. The argument that the rape was the crime, but the life isn't makes no sense, if you believe women are human beings. He is completely uninterested in the 11-year-old's physical and mental well-being. As soon as she was raped, apparently she is not a person who deserves consideration. She is a nonentity; all suffering dealt out to her is irrelevant. What a horrible way to think.

 

They do show the anti-choice activists as smarmy people, but most of the episode takes anti-choice nonsense too seriously. It also hangs the show on the unlikely event that a judge would allow a defense of others defense in an abortion shooting. And then the clichés:

 

  • l&o 3 *

 

As Kate Harding as Salon noted, this notion that giving birth means you're comfortable forcing others is completely false. 60% of women getting abortions are mothers already. In addition, there's some evidence showing that parents of daughters become more liberal about reproductive rights. Your feelings on choice statistically are more likely to depend on your attitudes about women, not about fetuses.

 

And then there's the blatant lies:

 

  • l&o 4 *

 

This story comes from the obviously false story that Jill Stanek delivered to the Illinois Senate, causing then-senator Barack Obama to practically laugh in her face. It would be funny, if it weren't so sad. They are spreading lies about Dr. Tiller, who was a good man who gave his life to serve women's health, and he loved children. In fact, if you want children to do well, you don't attack their mothers. Unsafe, illegal abortion doesn't just kill women, it orphans children. Playing the anti-choicers love babies card doesn't fly if you look at the facts.

 

They also have another abortion doctor on the stand who is supposed to be a villain because he calls anti-choicers hypocrites and fools. I found myself liking him, and it occurred to me that the only reason that the audience is supposed to hate him is they've been fooled for so long about what anti-choicers are about.

 

And now for the part pro-choicers love---two dudes without uteruses talk about women's rights as if they're a rhetorical exercise and not a lived experience!

 

  • l&o 5 *

 

First of all, not every birth defect is correctable. And contraception is not always used or always perfect. But let's deal with the idea that abortion is like slavery. This is exactly backwards. Like slavery, forced birth is an old-fashioned, conservative idea based on the belief that entire classes of people should be stripped of their basic right to bodily autonomy. The people closer to the abolitionists of yesteryear are the feminists of today. You know, there's all on the left, pushing for greater rights and dignity for all human beings.

 

I'll spare you the humiliating scene where the tough female lawyer converts to being anti-choice. Suffice it to say, they might as well have had a good old horse-whipping of the murder victim's widow, while they were at it. Finding the defendant guilty doesn't make up for this. Dr. Tiller saved lives. Shame on Law & Order for this horrible misogynist pandering.

 

**********

 

  • insert interview *

 

**********

 

Semi-good news: the FDA recently approved the use the HPV vaccination for boys, and recommended it as part of the boys package of childhood vaccines, but they are still not officially recommending it, just staying in the permissive category. NPR did a segment on the pros and cons of vaccinating young men for HPV, which would mainly be done to prevent cancer. But not cancer in the boys, but cancer in their potential partners.

 

  • hpv 1 *

 

But the shots cost money. And so the question remains, should boys be required to get it in order to increase herd immunity? As someone who plans to get an H1NI shot so that I'm not a risk to pregnant women I encounter, I tend to say yes. But from a public health cost/benefit perspective, the question is up in the air.

 

  • hpv 2 *

 

 

And there lies the rub. In the U.S., at least, there's a lot of people that aren't going to get the vaccine for their girls. It's a combination of two factors. One is the general anti-vaccination hysteria that's out in the air, most of it sadly coming from the left. A lot of people see that Big Pharma will make money off the HPV vaccine, and as an impotent form of protest against capitalism in every part of our lives, they decide vaccines are dangerous and won't get them. That there is no evidence whatsoever for their fears, but plenty of evidence that cervical cancer is deadly doesn't deter them.

 

And part of the reason is coming from the right, and their belief that preparing young women for sex just inclines them to have it. The right continues to believe that abstinence will happen if you provide enough pressure, even though the continuing existence of the human race indicates that sex is as popular as ever.

 

These two ridiculous mindsets work together to create an extra special paranoia about the HPV vaccine. The combination of sex and medicine tends to be incendiary for whatever reason. That, plus the expense of the vaccine. What this means is that we might not get the herd immunity we need just by vaccinating all the girls. And then there's this.

 

  • hpv 3 *

 

Well, there's a couple flaws in the idea of only vaccinating gay men. For one thing, vaccinating only one group tends to escalate fears about the vaccine. For another, how do you separate gay men from straight men, especially before they become sexually active? Most gay people still are assumed straight until they say otherwise, and a lot of gay people don't come out until after they become sexually active. To make the vaccine the most effective, it's best to get people vaccinated before they start having sex. Plus, a lot of men have sex with men while identifying as straight. There are just so many flaws in the idea.

 

Personally, I think that vaccinating men to protect women's health is a smart idea. It helps drive home what people don't understand about vaccines, which is they are both about self-protection and about herd immunity. We get vaccines as part of the social compact, like paying your taxes. We all do our part, and we all benefit. Men may not get cervical cancer, but if someone they love does, they suffer, too.

 

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, life isn't Law and Order edition. Here's a clip from a Kansas news station covering attempts by anti-choice extremists to raise money for Scott Roeder's defense through an eBay auction.

 

  • roeder *

 

Sure, the show Law & Order portrayed the so-called necessity defense as something a judge would allow in court, but as I demonstrated earlier, Law & Order isn't very interested in reality at all. This entire thing is a joke, intended to do what 95% of anti-choice actions are supposed to do, which is create attention for anti-choicers, so they can feel righteous in their misogyny. Luckily, eBay will not allow the auction.

 

]]> "What If My Mother Had Aborted Me?" http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/11/03/what-if-my-mother-had-aborted-me 2009-11-03T06:00:00-05:00 2009-11-03T06:54:09-05:00 Amanda Marcotte Kathleen Reeves turned her eyes to the way the recent and immediately notorious anti-choice episode of “Law and Order” employed the “born alive” myth that’s so near and dear the anti-choice heart.  I would like to tackle another hoary myth of the anti-choice pantheon that made it onto the show, the “How would you like to be aborted?” ruse.  On “Law and Order”, it shows up in the form of one of the detectives suggesting he was nearly aborted by his mother throwing herself down the stairs at 7 months---but instead, he was just prematurely delivered.  Like most of the episode---including an exchange a few moments before when the same detective suggests that forcing an 11-year-old to give birth is nothing short of a the most wonderful thing you can do---the exchange only works if you share the writers’ assumption that once penetrated, a woman can be assumed to have no feelings or thoughts worth respecting, and should be regarded as nothing more than a womb, and abortion is a frustrating misfire, much like when the clutch goes out on your car.

But let’s deal with the attempt to get around women’s basic human rights by appealing to the egotistical assumption that your own birth was inevitable, and that the only thing that could have threatened this inevitable trot to you existing was the legality of abortion.  “How would you like it if your mother had an abortion?” ask the anti-choicers, without realizing that’s like asking, “How would you like it if the night you were conceived, your dad decided to go to bed early while your mom stayed up to watch Johnny Carson?”  The answer is, you wouldn’t be here to regret their selfish actions in the abortion or late show department.

It’s a trick of the brain that makes us think this question has any meaning. We don’t remember a time when we didn’t exist, and for the slower-witted amongst us, this means that not existing isn’t quite real.  But even anti-choicers who buy into this line have to know there was a period before their lives began.  They may not feel it’s true, but they know it intellectually.  In fact, the question buys into the premise that we accept that our own “not-existing” was possible, because the question assumes that before you were born, your mother had the choice not to have you.  The question therefore folds in on itself in a vacuum of self-contradiction.

To ask it is to ignore the fact that any of us exist by pure chance, and that many things could have changed it so we weren’t here.  What if your parents never met at all?  I probably wouldn’t be here for something as simple as my grandparents moving to a different neighborhood in El Paso than the one they lived in.  That’s how my mother met my father, after all, but if she’d lived on the west side instead of the east side, they probably wouldn’t have met at all.  It is, after all, a big city.  Does that make settling in one neighborhood and not the other immoral, and if so, how do you know which is the moral neighborhood?  What if my grandmother’s first husband hadn’t died in the war?  I wouldn’t be here; that doesn’t mean that we should think wars are some great thing because they set in motion series of events that lead to certain births.  Truth is they also shut down another range of possibilities; think of all the children that man could have had and didn’t.

Some of us are here today because of abortion and birth control.  Many women tell the story of the abortion that they had to have because the time wasn’t right for a baby, but it led them on a path that made having a baby possible in the future.  The writer Susie Bright is a good example. She wrote:

In the case of my first abortion, the aftermath was the beginning of my realization that I was capable and desirous of having a child. I could feel the possibility, the confidence, for the first time. I didn't see that coming. I ended a relationship that I hadn't had the guts to say "No" to before. It was like I grew a spine— and my maternal instincts— out of the abortion decision. She now writes a column at Jezebel with her grown daughter Aretha, a daughter that might not exist if it weren’t for legal and safe abortion.

Contraception and abortion (to an extent) allow birth spacing, which reduces the chances of having an unhealthy baby or having an infant die.  It also improves maternal health, which means that getting pregnant frequently increases the chance of miscarriage.  Abortion and contraception play a role in creating not just life, but strong, healthy life, and the medical community knows it even if anti-choicers don’t.

But at its base, the “What if you were aborted?” question employs a model of reproduction that has no basis in biological reality.  Anti-choicers treat the whole process of reproduction as if getting pregnant is a rare and precious event, like finding a giant lump of gold in your backyard, and as if nature was stingy about attempts to create life.  If this was true, they might have more of a reason to get offended at attempts to control when you give birth.  But outside of those people who suffer from infertility (in which case, they have every reason to grab onto every chance at childbirth that comes along), the biological fact of the matter is that our reproductive systems are all about waste, all about killing billions in order to have the few that have the best shot.

Using abortion and contraception to make sure that you can give the few children you do have the best possible life fits neatly in with the way biology does it.  Men make enough sperm in a week to populate the planet; women are born with almost half a million eggs.  Many eggs that are fertilized never even implant, and even when pregnancy happens, 15 to 20 percent miscarry.  Nature throws a lot at reproduction, with the purpose of only having a few healthy babies as the final outcome.  This creates a lot of “what ifs” that never come to fruition, and obsessing over what if too long will drive you mad.  On any given day, there are billions of theoretical babies never born for the thousands that are born.  In the grand scheme of things, abortion doesn’t even shut down that many doors as it opens new ones.

]]> "Law and Order" Lies and Panders About Anti-Choice Terrorism http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/11/02/law-and-order-lies-and-panders-about-antichoice-terrorism-0 2009-11-02T08:15:49-05:00 2009-11-02T08:24:44-05:00 Amanda Marcotte
Download
"Law and Order" anti-choice nonsense, with clips! Also, the laws and ethics regarding fertility treatments, and questions about whether or not to vaccinate boys for HPV. ]]>
Download
"Law and Order" anti-choice nonsense, with clips! Also, the laws and ethics regarding fertility treatments, and questions about whether or not to vaccinate boys for HPV.

 

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

Reacting to Bob McDonnell's thesis

FDA permits vaccinating boys for HPV

Anti-choice extremists try to raise money

 

 

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Naomi Cahn on her book on fertility treatments and the legal issues surrounding them.  Also, I watched the Law and Order exploiting Dr. Tiller's murder so you don't have to, and the FDA approves use of the HPV vaccination for boys.

 

Virginia's NARAL decided to take candidate for governor Bob McDonnell's thesis to the streets and have people read what amounted to a rant against anything threatening a strict patriarchy to see what the people think.  The people think it is silly.

 

  • mcdonnell *

 

Funny stuff.

 

**********

 

I'm sure you've heard by now that "Law & Order" did a despicable episode based on the murder of Dr. George Tiller, and as is often the case with these shows, they pander so much to conservatives in the audience that they forget that women who have abortions and those who provide them are people who deserve respect.  Early in the episode, you have an idea of how bad this is going to be.

 

  • l&o 1 *

 

Right away, they make sure to spare your average anti-choice nut responsibility for this, and even wrongly imply that they go out of their way to stop these murders. There is no reason to believe this.  Those who shoot abortion providers tend to move freely amongst other anti-choicers, and even though someone like Scott Roeder spoke openly of his belief that murder was justified, as far as I know, no one tipped off the police or the potential victims. They are too busy spreading dehumanizing rhetoric about abortion providers that gives killers moral support.

 

Of course, they have to make one of the cops an anti-choicer, which means that the rest of us have to listen to the cheap sentimental stuff that assumes that women who have had sex, even forced sex, forsake their right to be treated like human beings.

 

  • l&o 2 *

 

Oh, way to make the pro-choicer look like a bad guy.  Here's a better reply: You poor mother was in such hell that she threw herself down a flight of stairs in despair, and you can't even pause to think about what that must have been like for her?  You weren't even around!  Or maybe not write that story in the first place, because it's stupid and implausible.  Most women who attempt to self-abort do so early in the pregnancy, because that's the best chance they've got.  Remember kids, if you parents didn't have sex the night you were conceived, you also would have never been born.  Do you think that means that abstaining should be illegal?

 

We also see an example of the anti-choice unwillingness to believe pregnancy occurs in women's bodies.  The argument that the rape was the crime, but the life isn't makes no sense, if you believe women are human beings.  He is completely uninterested in the 11-year-old's physical and mental well-being.  As soon as she was raped, apparently she is not a person who deserves consideration.  She is a nonentity; all suffering dealt out to her is irrelevant.  What a horrible way to think.

 

They do show the anti-choice activists as smarmy people, but most of the episode takes anti-choice nonsense too seriously. It also hangs the show on the unlikely event that a judge would allow a defense of others defense in an abortion shooting.  And then the clichés:

 

  • l&o 3 *

 

As Kate Harding as Salon noted, this notion that giving birth means you're comfortable forcing others is completely false.  60% of women getting abortions are mothers already. In addition, there's some evidence showing that parents of daughters become more liberal about reproductive rights.  Your feelings on choice statistically are more likely to depend on your attitudes about women, not about fetuses.

 

And then there's the blatant lies:

 

  • l&o 4 *

 

This story comes from the obviously false story that Jill Stanek delivered to the Illinois Senate, causing then-senator Barack Obama to practically laugh in her face.  It would be funny, if it weren't so sad.  They are spreading lies about Dr. Tiller, who was a good man who gave his life to serve women's health, and he loved children. In fact, if you want children to do well, you don't attack their mothers.  Unsafe, illegal abortion doesn't just kill women, it orphans children.  Playing the anti-choicers love babies card doesn't fly if you look at the facts.

 

They also have another abortion doctor on the stand who is supposed to be a villain because he calls anti-choicers hypocrites and fools.  I found myself liking him, and it occurred to me that the only reason that the audience is supposed to hate him is they've been fooled for so long about what anti-choicers are about.

 

And now for the part pro-choicers love---two dudes without uteruses talk about women's rights as if they're a rhetorical exercise and not a lived experience!

 

  • l&o 5 *

 

First of all, not every birth defect is correctable. And contraception is not always used or always perfect.  But let's deal with the idea that abortion is like slavery.  This is exactly backwards.  Like slavery, forced birth is an old-fashioned, conservative idea based on the belief that entire classes of people should be stripped of their basic right to bodily autonomy.  The people closer to the abolitionists of yesteryear are the feminists of today.  You know, there's all on the left, pushing for greater rights and dignity for all human beings. 

 

I'll spare you the humiliating scene where the tough female lawyer converts to being anti-choice.  Suffice it to say, they might as well have had a good old horse-whipping of the murder victim's widow, while they were at it. Finding the defendant guilty doesn't make up for this. Dr. Tiller saved lives.  Shame on Law & Order for this horrible misogynist pandering.

 

**********

 

  • insert interview *

 

**********

 

Semi-good news: the FDA recently approved the use the HPV vaccination for boys, and recommended it as part of the boys package of childhood vaccines, but they are still not officially recommending it, just staying in the  permissive category. NPR did a segment on the pros and cons of vaccinating young men for HPV, which would mainly be done to prevent cancer.  But not cancer in the boys, but cancer in their potential partners.

 

  • hpv 1 *

 

But the shots cost money.  And so the question remains, should boys be required to get it in order to increase herd immunity?  As someone who plans to get an H1NI shot so that I'm not a risk to pregnant women I encounter, I tend to say yes. But from a public health cost/benefit perspective, the question is up in the air.

 

  • hpv 2 *

 

 

And there lies the rub.  In the U.S., at least, there's a lot of people that aren't going to get the vaccine for their girls.  It's a combination of two factors.  One is the general anti-vaccination hysteria that's out in the air, most of it sadly coming from the left.  A lot of people see that Big Pharma will make money off the HPV vaccine, and as an impotent form of protest against capitalism in every part of our lives, they decide vaccines are dangerous and won't get them.  That there is no evidence whatsoever for their fears, but plenty of evidence that cervical cancer is deadly doesn't deter them.

 

And part of the reason is coming from the right, and their belief that preparing young women for sex just inclines them to have it.  The right continues to believe that abstinence will happen if you provide enough pressure, even though the continuing existence of the human race indicates that sex is as popular as ever. 

 

These two ridiculous mindsets work together to create an extra special paranoia about the HPV vaccine.  The combination of sex and medicine tends to be incendiary for whatever reason.  That, plus the expense of the vaccine. What this means is that we might not get the herd immunity we need just by vaccinating all the girls.  And then there's this.

 

  • hpv 3 *

 

Well, there's a couple flaws in the idea of only vaccinating gay men.  For one thing, vaccinating only one group tends to escalate fears about the vaccine.  For another, how do you separate gay men from straight men, especially before they become sexually active?  Most gay people still are assumed straight until they say otherwise, and a lot of gay people don't come out until after they become sexually active.  To make the vaccine the most effective, it's best to get people vaccinated before they start having sex.  Plus, a lot of men have sex with men while identifying as straight.  There are just so many flaws in the idea.

 

Personally, I think that vaccinating men to protect women's health is a smart idea.  It helps drive home what people don't understand about vaccines, which is they are both about self-protection and about herd immunity.  We get vaccines as part of the social compact, like paying your taxes. We all do our part, and we all benefit. Men may not get cervical cancer, but if someone they love does, they suffer, too.

 

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, life isn't Law and Order edition.  Here's a clip from a Kansas news station covering attempts by anti-choice extremists to raise money for Scott Roeder's defense through an eBay auction. 

 

  • roeder *

 

Sure, the show Law & Order portrayed the so-called necessity defense as something a judge would allow in court, but as I demonstrated earlier, Law & Order isn't very interested in reality at all.  This entire thing is a joke, intended to do what 95% of anti-choice actions are supposed to do, which is create attention for anti-choicers, so they can feel righteous in their misogyny.  Luckily, eBay will not allow the auction.

 

]]> A Different Kind of Bake Sale: Anti-Choice Extremists Plan eBay Auction for Roeder's Defense http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/10/27/a-different-kind-bake-sale-antichoice-extremists-plan-ebay-auction-roeders-defense 2009-10-27T07:00:00-04:00 2009-10-27T08:15:05-04:00 Amanda Marcotte   The unfortunate and tragic murder of anti-choice protester James Pouillon gave a mainstream media eager to use the “both sides” narrative their chance, and they took it, no matter how little relationship anti-choice tales of victimization had to reality. 

But there really is no “both sides” here. The only murder of a protesting anti-choicer has come at the hands of Harlan Drake, a man who had exactly no relationship with the pro-choice movement, no strong opinions on abortion rights that anyone can discern, and only shot Pouillon for the same reason that spree killers pick all their victims---mainly because he was convenient and it was easy for Drake to rationalize the murder.  Drake also murdered another man in a completely apolitical killing, and had plans to do so to another for equally arbitrary reasons.

Contrast that with a long string of murders of abortion providers and bombings of clinics at the hands of people deeply entrenched in the anti-choice movement, and continually supported by their anti-choice buddies. For instance, take Scott Roeder, the man accused of shooting and killing Dr. George Tiller while Dr. Tiller was attending Sunday services in his Wichita, Kansas church.  Roeder not only relied on anti-choice stand-bys Operation Rescue for information on how to stalk Dr. Tiller and moral reinforcement for his choice to murder, but after the murder, he continued to enjoy the moral support and confidence of many prominent anti-choice militants, many of whom continue to visit him in jail.

And now the militant anti-choice activists are going a step further in their adoring love of Scott Roeder,  and providing financial support to the man accused of the latest anti-choice homicide. Dave Leach of Iowa, a militant anti-choice activist, is organizing an eBay auction so that fans of murdering your political opponents can buy souvenirs and help pay for Scott Roeder’s defense. Leach publishes a newsletter that supports killing abortion providers, and took the time to visit Roeder after Roeder made a name for himself in domestic terrorism by getting arrested on explosives charges in 1996.  Leach’s visit was while coming back after visiting Rachelle "Shelley" Shannon in prison after she was convicted for attempting to kill Dr. Tiller in 1993.

The eBay auction speaks to the love of misogynist, anti-choice kitsch that thrives in the anti-choice community.  Anti-choicers who fall into the less militant camp (by not overtly calling for murder of providers) love their fetus geegaws that imply that fetuses have personalities and violent imagery that refuses to acknowledge existence of pregnant women’s bodies and personalities, but the militants apparently prefer knick-knacks of a bolder, more sadistic sort.  Here are some items they’ve announced were for sale:

  • A bullhorn signed by Regina Dinwiddie.  Dinwiddie told the Washington Post of hugging Roeder in glee after she read a statement advocating violence against abortion providers.
  • An Army of God manual, which has more moral support for would-be murderers.
  • A cookbook by a woman doing time in prison for bombing a clinic.
  • Signed drawing Scott Roeder has done in prison.

 

A veritable cornucopia of kitsch for the right wing nut that loves murder and hates women’s rights.

The question is why does the anti-choice side produce violent criminals and their conspirators, while the pro-choice side does not?  It’s not impossible for the left to get militant and violent, but it simply isn’t happening in the abortion debate.

Reading The Eliminationists by David Neiwert gives us some clues. Neiwert explains what kind of rhetoric gears at least some of a group’s members to commit violence, highlighting especially the use of dehumanizing language (such as calling your opponents vermin), being absolutist, and suggesting that the only way to deal with opponents is to wipe them out.

On the third, the most obviously guilty offenders are the militants that Roeder associates with, such as the Army of God.  But on the other two points, the larger anti-choice movement thrives on that kind of rhetoric.

Abortion providers are dehumanized by anti-choicers on a level that would make the people who wrote the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion proud.  It’s not just that providers are accused of murdering for fun and profit, though that would probably be enough.  Anti-choicers accuse doctors of stabbing born babies in the head, and of eating fetuses.  Lurid accusations that providers engage in child sex rings are common.  Rush Limbaugh claims that there are feminists out there who want to abort every pregnancy possible.  Planned Parenthood is accused of pushing young women to have sex they wouldn’t otherwise, so they can make the money off abortions.  All these accusations are about convincing anti-choice followers that their opponents aren’t really full human beings, because these behaviors so differ from anything human beings would really do.

And that’s just with providers.  With women who have abortions, the dehumanizing goes to the level of rhetorically erasing them altogether, starting with insisting that the only question at hand is “when does life begin”, which implies that a fetus floats around in space, and there’s no question of a person’s rights and interests that may conflict with it.  This extends to visual representations of pregnancy that imply there is no woman involved.

Then there’s the absolutist rhetoric: “Abortion is never the answer,” is a common refrain amongst anti-choicers, while pro-choicers by definition believe that every person’s situation is different and those differences deserve respect.  Anti-choicers believe that it’s a full human being from conception (and sometimes before, it seems) on, whereas pro-choicers subscribe to a more nuanced view, where a fetus slowly turns into a baby over a pregnancy, and at each stage, it deserves more moral consideration, and remembering that women are human beings who deserve moral consideration as people.

Most anti-choicers use this sort of rhetoric to steel themselves for minor moral transgressions, such as harassing people trying to get medical care, invading privacy, and of course, supporting laws mandating childbirth for the unwilling. But in a few cases, this sort of rhetoric is going to compel some to violence, as we have seen all too often.

]]> Abortion Down, But Ridiculousness Up http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/10/25/abortion-down-but-ridiculousness-up 2009-10-25T22:59:35-04:00 2009-10-26T12:02:11-04:00 Amanda Marcotte
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Abortion down worldwide, but unsafe abortion remains high. Also, more on health care reform and why can't everyone just agree to be against rape?

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Abortion down worldwide, but unsafe abortion remains high. Also, more on health care reform and why can't everyone just agree to be against rape?

 

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Links in this episode:

South Park sends up abortion addiction

Peggy Robertson's C-section hell

Joining the Army for health care

 

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Susan Cohen of the Guttmacher Institute about a new report about the worldwide state of abortion.  And more health care reform coverage, and a segment on how Senator Franken's anti-rape amendment is receiving widespread support, despite the 30 votes against it. 

 

South Park recently did an episode making fun of WWE-style wrestling, and how the villains in it are completely over the top.  Cartman plays a female wrestler, and it was a little interesting what the character uses to "prove" that she's a bad guy. 

 

  • cartman *

 

I'm sure this is a reference to Irene Villar, the woman who recently published a memoir about her 15 abortions.  I doubt seriously that the creators of South Park are trying to make a statement about how women's morality is tied to their sexuality, and how stupid that is, but I think they managed to get that message across.  Having 15 abortions might be evidence of mental problems that keep you from being responsible with contraception, as Villar suggested about herself, but it certainly doesn't make you a bad person.

 

***********

It's increasingly looking like liberal Democrats and the White House are going to be able to pass some kind of health care reform, hopefully with a public option attached.  Which means opponents are increasingly getting desperate, and looking for ways to create general fear and paranoia about health care reform, which means that gender and sex are becoming a bigger part of the noise.  NPR finally got around to covering this, meaning that the story has gotten huge.  NPR does the whole thing where they report more on what the various sides are saying than explaining the truth, but at least they do get around to reporting on the facts.

 

  • health care 1 *

 

Unfortunately, they immediately ruin this by giving airtime to anti-choice misinformation and distortion. 

 

  • health care 2 *

 

Well, just because they say it doesn't mean it should be reported on, or at least in this horse race way.  I wish they'd put more effort into making it clear that anti-choicers are saying there's federal funding for abortion because they're lying.  And that they're lying, because the reality is inconvenient. NPR does manage to make it clear that the anti-choice demands would strip women who currently have abortion coverage of those benefits, but it would be nice if they explained to the audience that anti-choice claims are not based in reality.  I realize it's not fun having a bunch of anti-choice nuts come down on you like a sack of hammers because you tell the truth about what they're doing, but if you're reporting on this issue, it's your job.

 

Women's health care and the way that being female often puts you at a special risk to get dumped from your insurance is becoming a bigger issue in the health care reform debate, but the good news is that increasingly, the discussion is not about using sex to scare people into being against health care reform.  It's about getting sympathy for women who face loss of health care after being beaten, raped, getting reproductive cancers, or just generally being treated poorly because they're female. 

 

For instance, Peggy Robertson has been out telling her story of how the insurance company wouldn't cover her because of a prior C-section. 

 

  • health care 3 *

 

Yes, they told her she had to get sterilized.  Americans United for Change took this story and made an ad about it.  (http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/test-woman-sterilized)

 

  • health care 4 *

 

That's not the only way that women's health concerns are being used to reduce people's basic freedom. 

 

  • health care 5 *

 

Can you imagine being 39 years old and having to join the Army, just so your wife doesn't die of ovarian cancer?  The irony here is that now his wife is automatically on, you guessed it, government-funded health care coverage.  The kind that we keep hearing is such a threat, even though no version of the bill expands the scope of any kind of government health insurance.  Obviously, people don't agree that government-funded health insurance is so bad, since they're willing to give up their freedom and live away from their families to get their hands on it.  Bill Caudle is a hero. But he should not be forced to join the army at his age to save his wife.

************

insert interview

 

************

Last week, I reported briefly on Al Franken's amendment to an appropriations bill that would deny funding to defense contractors who actively stop employees of theirs that are raped from seeking justice.  The amendment was in response to a situation where an employee of Halliburton was gang-raped by her colleagues, and then locked in a shipping container in an effort to keep her from getting to a place where she could start the process of holding the rapists accountable.  She escaped, and was blocked from suing by an arbitration agreement that Halliburton makes their employees sign.  Senator Franken merely wants to stop doing business with contractors who insist on treating rape victims this way.

 

But it hasn't been so easy for him.  30 Republican Senators voted against the amendment, and now some Senators are trying to water it down to be meaningless.  The good news is that the struggle is getting a lot of coverage, because it's straightforward: the government shouldn't be subsidizing rape.  Most people don't even see why this should be controversial.  Rachel Maddow had the aforementioned rape survivor Jamie Lee Jones on her show to talk about the issue.

 

  • defense 1 *

 

And I think that's the crucial part of this story.  From the get-go, Jones has made it clear that what she wants is to keep things like this from happening to other women, and part of the process of stopping rape is speaking out against rape.  But for Halliburton, the fact that an employee was raped is just an embarrassment.  They don't care about her rights, which is why they locked her in a shipping container.  They just want to muzzle her.

 

  • defense 2 *

 

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like that will happen.  In fact, as I noted before, they're still fighting on this, even though the public at large is hardly going to say that defense contractors should just let their employees rape other employees with no consequences, or worse, punish the victim on top of that.  But the no votes largely came from socially conservative, pro-war politicians, and so of course they're not inclined to be overly sympathetic to rape victims, nor are they eager to hold defense contractors accountable in any way.  But what this is doing is showing the public that even when it comes to brutal gang rapes, some people can't be bothered to care.  Remember, Jamie Lee Jones was badly hurt physically as well as mentally, and had to have surgery to recover.

 

Thankfully, it's not just Rachel Maddow giving this episode major coverage.  So is the Daily Show.  Jon Stewart pointed out that the whole arbitration thing was ridiculous to begin with.

 

  • defense 3 *

 

They then played Senator Sessions denying that the government has any role deciding what private contracts will look like, which of course misses the point by a mile.  First of all, the Constitution gives the government that right over all interstate business.  But of course, there's also the fact that these companies are hired by the government.

 

  • defense 4 *

 

Every time an opponent of this amendment claims that it's a political attack to write this amendment, I hear them saying that if companies they like coddle rapists, then that's okay with them.

 

************

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, anti-choice nuts have a lot of issues edition.  There's a new website out called Choice Kills, and like many anti-choice materials out there, especially those put together by men, in features a man pretending to be the fetus. 

 

]]> Abortion Remains A Foil for Opponents of Reform http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/10/21/abortion-coverage-remains-a-foil-efforts-upend-health-reform 2009-10-21T07:00:00-04:00 2009-10-20T21:16:40-04:00 Amanda Marcotte school field trips to get abortion, and Senators pushing to restore abstinence-only funding---has resulted in a set of bills all of which that take roughly the same approach to abortion, what some call an “abortion neutral” approach. 

The House Energy and Commerce Committee, for example, included the Capps Amendment, under which private insurers would not use federal money to pay for abortion, but nor would these private insurers be required to drop abortion coverage they now offer.  Bills coming from the other House committees and the Senate have similar language.  In addition, the Capps Amendment has a gimme for anti-choicers---each state exchange would be required to offer abortion hysterics at least one plan that doesn’t cover abortion (so they won’t be tempted, I suppose).  This represents an improvement for Fetus People everywhere, as most of them currently are paying into insurance systems that cover abortion, though probably most don’t realize it.  After all, even for the most diehard anti-choicers, abortion seems only to matter when it can be used as a cudgel for a larger right wing agenda.

In order to maintain an abortion neutral stance, the Capps Amendment would require that insurance companies bookmark all money coming in from federal subsidies as non-abortion money, and only pay for abortions out of privately paid premiums.  Since this would require further bookkeeping, I was concerned that insurance companies would simply forgo covering abortion, rather than pay to keep track of what money they can and can’t use to cover abortion. But I contacted the National Partnership for Women and Families, who has been doing the hard work of keeping track of all the complicated details of the various bills and their potential effects, and they pointed out that the Capps Amendment requires there to be at least one insurance company that does provide abortion and one that doesn’t in each state exchange, and this creates an incentive for insurance companies who already cover abortion to keep doing so.  (However, this provides no more than incentive---the amendment doesn’t give the government power to require that any one company does provide abortion coverage.) That, and insurance companies are used to endlessly complex bookkeeping, so adding one more requirement separating this pool of money from that wouldn’t be too difficult for them.

All of this hard work on creating an abortion neutral stance might be for naught, however, as some (invariably male) members of Congress are promising to fight for abortion restrictions to be injected in the bill during the debate process.  The House Rules Committee could put a stop to such amendments, so the greatest danger lies in the Senate, where Orrin Hatch has indicated he will try to amend the bill so that it prevents any insurance company in the system from covering abortion, no matter whose money they use to fund it.

If he succeeds, this would strip abortion coverage from millions of American women who currently have that coverage under private insurance.  To make things worse, I have no doubt that such a victory would do nothing to satiate those who are screaming about how health care reform will turn the nation’s women into a sea of hussydom; they will simply move onto to protesting contraception coverage in the bill.  And since they’ve got no problem lying about what’s in the bill now---see again rumors about abortion clinics being established in schools---stringent bans on abortion funding will not keep the right wing rumor mill from churning out stories about how health care reform means federal funding for abortion.  For pro-choice congresspersons tempted to give in on abortion to move this thing forward, please remember this:  Our opposition isn’t constrained by the truth, and they’ll happily keep spreading misinformation about abortion funding if that’s what it takes to keep the protesters active and pressure high to kill health care reform altogether.

Right now, an amendment that would require insurance companies to drop coverage for abortion looks unlikely.  A coalition of 40 anti-choice House Democrats, led by Rep. Bart Stupak, are making factually incorrect claims about the Capps Amendment and abortion subsidies, in order to push for a bill that would strip women of already-existing abortion coverage.  Stupak has threatened that a bill without a ban on abortion coverage would be voted down by this contingent of badly-informed anti-choice Democrats, but in reality, this seems unlikely.  There might be a few Democrats willing to destroy health care coverage in order to force unwilling women to give birth, but at the end of the day, I’m sure most of them aren’t looking forward to being held accountable for stopping legislation that would relieve the voting public of many of their health care woes.

Anyone who uses abortion as a weapon to stall or kill health care reform should be ashamed to use such a feel-good term as “pro-life” to describe themselves. The only people demonstrating respect for life in this debate are the people who want to pass health care reform that will save actual human lives.  The willingness of so many anti-choicers to subject the public at large to escalating health care costs and lack of coverage in order to send a dogma-inspired message of disapproval for citizens’ private sexual choices should make it clear that they’re far from being anything even resembling “pro-life.”  After all, if you were really such a fan of life, you would put life and the saving of it before petty, reactionary attitudes about sex and gender roles that inspire all this anxiety over abortion.  It’s time for our representatives to stop pandering to the public’s impulse to lay sexual judgments, and start doing their job of protecting the public’s actual interests.  And right now, we the people need better health care coverage.  

]]> Teenage Oral Sex Panic! http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/10/15/teenage-oral-sex-panic 2009-10-18T23:57:00-04:00 2009-10-19T09:54:33-04:00 Amanda Marcotte
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Abortion continues to be a weapon in the health care reform debate, Dr. Phil panics over teenage oral sex, and Shannon Boodram talks about young people's sexual experiences.

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Abortion continues to be a weapon in the health care reform debate, Dr. Phil panics over teenage oral sex, and Shannon Boodram talks about young people's sexual experiences.

 

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Links in this episode:

Marriage marshmellow

Abortion and health care reform

Senator Franken's anti-rape amendment 

Dr. Phil flips out

Levi Johnston and pistachios

Abortion causes war?

 

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Shannon Boodram about her new anthology on young people's sexual experiences.  Also, the issue of sexual health in the health care reform debates continues to distract, and Dr. Phil does a ludicrous scare story about teenage girls and oral sex.

 

May I point you to a cute video about abstinence-only put together by the League of Young Voters? 

 

  • marshmellow *

 

Abstinence-only proponents are misrepresenting a study on delayed gratification.  The original study showed that kids who could resist eating a marshmellow not for the promise of two later tended to better in life. This doesn't actually mean that waiting for marriage will make you a better person.  The point was resisting temptation for a greater reward was evidence that some kids were a bit more rational than others. But there's no evidence whatsoever that resisting premarital sex results in a greater reward.  Delaying for no reason at all has not been shown to have any correlation to better life outcomes.

 

**********

NARAL's Blog For Choice has a nice little video up detailing how anti-choicers are using the issue of abortion in a cynical way, to obstruct health care reform altogether.  It's an interesting little game they're playing, because there are layers upon layers of deception going on here.  Anti-choicers are claiming that they merely want to stop government funding for abortion from happening, even though that was never on the table.  But if you listen closely, what they're really demanding is that women who currently have abortion coverage get that stripped.

 

  • health care 1 *

 

That was, in order, David Beriet of 40 Days for Life, and Rep. Bart Stupak.  Here's what the explicit exclusion they're demanding would do.  All insurance companies in the country would be part of the system, and so all of them would be forced to stop covering abortion.  That means that anywhere from half to 87% of women who currently have abortion coverage would lose it.  This is about depriving women of currently existing benefits.

 

But it's really more than that.  Here's the thing: Most people making these radical anti-choice demands would not support a health care reform bill that did explicitly exclude abortion coverage for all women.  If Democrats give in on this demand, they're immediately going to move on to raising a panic because health care reform will cover contraception and STD tests and treatment.  Abortion is only one tool they have to use female sexuality to raise a panic over health care reform.  This isn't really about abortion, or sex even.  It's about using these things to create noise and shut down health care reform.

 

There's no reason to try to believe that anti-choice hysteria over health care reform isn't just part of a larger anti-health care reform agenda.  In fact, anti-choicers themselves have done us the favor of linking the two explicitly.

 

  • health care 2 *

 

What was interesting was that the American Life League's signs didn't even bother to conceal that the real agenda is shutting down health care reform.  They didn't even reference the abortion smokescreen, and instead referenced the right wing obsession with Ted Kennedy, and celebrated his death.  How "pro-life" of them.

 

But as depressing as all this is, I do have some good news to report.  Senator Al Franken introduced an appropriations amendment that would bar defense contractors from government money if they cover up rapes committed by their employees or punish rape victims who press charges or file lawsuits. It was brought forth because of what happened to Jamie Leigh Jones, a woman who worked for Halliburton.

 

  • Franken *

 

30 male Republican Senators voted against this amendment to cut off defense contractors that do things like this to their employees.

 

***********

Insert interview

***********

Thank you, fine bloggers at Jezebel, for watching the Dr. Phil show so I don't have to.  Because Dr. Phil did a panic piece on teenagers having oral sex, and he doesn't even try to hide that this is one of those situations where everyone is going to work up some outrage so they can titillate themselves by talking about teenagers and oral sex.  He really gets into setting the stage, putting out some details to make this sound as filthy and perverse as possible. 

 

  • teen sex 1 *

 

Okay, even a libertine like myself has to admit that if your kindergartner is involved in this sort of thing, I'd blanch, particularly if it wasn't just a matter of a couple of kids playing doctor.  But in that case, that's child molestation and sexual assault, which is not what Dr. Phil is talking about here.  No, he's talking about consensual sexual relations between teenagers.

 

  • teen sex 2 *

 

Wait, did he just say 15 to 19 years old? 40% of the group he's trying to raise a panic about are legal adults who can vote, and the other 60% are pretty damn close.  And he doesn't let you know that the percentages go up dramatically every year in that cohort.  So here's what bothers me.  Dr. Phil paints a picture of a young woman who both sits in daddy's lap playing with dolls and who has oral sex with her male peers, and then he hits us with the big reveal, which is that she's probably 17 or 18 years old.  And we're supposed to find the sex part creepy?  I think if a 17-year-old is sitting in daddy's lap playing with dolls, that's the perverted crap that needs to end.  Gross, Dr. Phil.  Give me an anonymous bathroom encounter over a 17-year-old and her daddy playing like she's 5.  What, does he think girls that age should be wearing pinafores and Mary Janes, too?

 

Or, he could be suggesting that because a woman used to be a little girl, that means it is always gross that she has a sex life, even after she's an adult.  Or maybe he means that you should not have sex until everyone alive who remembers you as a little girl is dead.  That means most of us can probably start having that sex stuff in our 50s, though some of us might have to wait until our 60s or later.  That won't really keep the human race alive, this strategy of waiting until after menopause to have sex to protect your parents.

 

Of course, Dr. Phil is a firm believer that women don't have sexual desires of their own, so the hook for this episode is that teenage girls are having oral sex because they're all prostitutes doing it in exchange for money.  I'm not kidding.

 

  • teen sex 3 *

 

There's no doubt in my mind that some women have sex they don't enjoy with men because they're doormats.  That doesn't stop at adulthood, and in fact, social conservatives of all stripes argue that female sexuality is primarily about using sex to buy commitment from men.  But I would argue that women, like men, have sexual desires and primarily have sex because their hormones push them towards it.  I base my "women like sex" theory on this thing called "real world evidence".  In fact, and I know this might really throw Dr. Phil for a loop, there's strong reasons to believe that women even have orgasms on occasion, and that women enjoy these orgasm things so much that they even have them on their own through a process called masturbation.  If women only have sex for male approval, popularity, and new shoes, then there wouldn't be any such thing as female masturbation.  And yet, there it is.

 

The flip side of all this panic about teenage girl having sex is the nudge-nudge, wink-wink amusement at famous teenage impregnator Levi Johnston getting laid without bothering with boring girlie stuff like caring about contraception.  Johnston is advertising pistachios for some reason. 

 

  • teen sex 4 *

 

I bring this up, because it really shows how much this teen sex panic is about basic sexism.  On one hand, popular culture shows like Dr. Phil are arguing, with a straight face, that young women's sexuality is so disgusting that it's basically impossible that a young woman could enjoy sex.  On the other hand, you have ads like this that treat young male sexuality with a warm indulgence, because it's inevitable and if they deem to take even the slightest responsibility, they're treated like heroes.  Imagine how much less dysfunctional our society would be without this paranoia and these double standards.

 

*********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, you really think that edition. Rachel Campos-Duffy on "The View" has the most asinine argument against Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize I've heard to date.

 

  • nobel *

 

Saying there won't be peace until there's no abortion sounds like a threat to me, a threat to keep harassing, threatening, stalking, shooting, and bombing until women stop aborting.  Which they'll never do, because women have always, always found ways to end unwanted  pregnancies.

 

]]> Birth Control Boogeyman Returns in Time for Halloween http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/10/14/its-almost-halloweenand-birth-control-boogeyman-back 2009-10-14T07:00:00-04:00 2009-10-13T23:23:14-04:00 Amanda Marcotte It’s not hard to see why the mainstream media loves publishing scare stories about the birth control pill, even when they’re nonsensical or employ shoddy evidence.  These kinds of stories fill much of the criteria to attract eyeballs, since both sex hysteria and counter-intuitive ideas attract readers. The sex hysteria part is obvious enough, but what makes these stories counter-intuitive is that the invention of the birth control pill was such a massive bonus to people’s lives that merely questioning it attracts attention. Saying the pill is bad, or even hinting it at that argument, is a lot like saying the Beatles sucked.  Even if people disagree with you, you’re going to get a lot of attention.

It’s fun to kick around hypotheticals like "What if the pill made me less likely to pick a genetic match, whatever that means?" or “What if the pill deprives me of the 3 days out of the month where my skin is slightly plumper due to ovulation?”, but it’s also silly to think that minor concerns like these even have a fighting chance compared to the major concerns that women who don’t have access to reliable contraception have.  Concerns like, “What if I can’t afford to have 6 children?”  or “Shouldn’t I be with a man for a few years before I get pregnant, to make sure he’s the one?”  Knowing this, media outlets happily run with these stories, because they know that it’s more cocktail party fodder than it is information that could actually influence someone’s decisions and potentially hurt them by causing an unintended pregnancy.

Unfortunately, the forced birth brigade isn’t hemmed in by these ethical considerations, and as such, will take these stories and blow them completely out of proportion in an effort to discourage women from using effective contraception.  For instance, anti-choice blogger Jill Stanek, who never lets facts or understanding get in the way of a hysterical tirade about the evils of contraception and abortion, took one aspect of the Trends in Ecology and Evolution round-up on studies about the pill, and misread it in the most egregious manner, with a side of gay-baiting and pandering to the angry white men who make up much of her audience.  She cast used the Daily Mail’s coverage, which was guaranteed to maximize the misogyny and minimize the understanding of the actual study.

Scientists say the hormones in the oral contraceptive suppress a woman's interest in masculine men and make boyish men more attractive. Although the change occurs for just a few days each month, it may have been highly influential since use of the Pill began more than 40 years ago.

If the theory is right, it could partly explain the shifting in tastes from macho 1950s and 1960s stars such as Kirk Douglas and Sean Connery to the more wimpy, androgynous stars of today, such as Johnny Depp and Russell Brand....

The problem with that interpretation is it makes no sense, on a number of levels. Originally, the research was about comparing women’s choice in photographs during the few days a month they’re ovulating versus the entire rest of the month when they’re not. The researchers wanted to see if women on the pill made similar choices to women not ovulating but not on the pill, and to no one’s great surprise, they did.  But even if there was no pill, most women are not ovulating at any point in time, so this simply couldn’t have a dramatic effect on what Hollywood stars are most popular.  The Daily Mail also retrofitted the evidence to assert that women are emasculating men by not being in a constant state of ovulation, which women never were, even before the pill.   The notion that starts in the past were all rugged while stars today are all pretty doesn’t fit the evidence, unless you’re willing to pretend that Jimmy Stewart could out-square jaw Daniel Craig.

But Stanek isn’t going to let mere logic and facts get in the way of pandering to her audience that wants to believe that women controlling their fertility automatically makes men more feminine.  But I have to admit, I’m intrigued by the anti-choice insistence that their philosophy is a better fit for the glamorous masculinity implied by the picture of Sean Connery that Stanek chose as an illustration.  I’m trying to imagine a “pro-life” version of James Bond, since the argument seems to be that real men abhor contraception and abortion.  I’m not so sure that audiences would swoon over Sean Connery whispering huskily to a woman, “Let’s wait until we’re married, and then have awkward, unpracticed sex a dozen times until we can’t have any more children, when we can quit completely.”  Hollywood images of male virility actually rely on audience assumptions that women have access to reliable contraception and abortion.  Last time I checked, having a dozen children would put a crimp on 007’s style.

 

At Double X, I argued that the picture study can’t really be taken seriously, because you really can’t tell what a woman’s going to find attractive in the real world from what she prefers in a flat image of a celebrity when asked to choose, especially since I’m sure most women in the study would be perfectly happy with either Johnny Depp or Russell Crowe.  

But in general, it’s important to remember that these headlines blaring about the positive effects of not being on the pill are only talking about minor changes that only happen for a few days out of the month.  If women are slightly more attractive around ovulation, or if they are more likely to go for strong-jawed men, the effect disappears as soon as you’re not ovulating any more.  More honest headlines for these studies would be: “Women On The Pill Indistinguishable From Women Not On The Pill Most Of The Time”.  Or perhaps something less unwieldy that sends the same message.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to run a higher chance of an unintended pregnancy to buy myself mildly improved looks for 3 days out of the month, especially not when the massive cosmetics industry is happy to help you fake that glow at any time of the month that you please.

]]> The Sources of Right Wing Terrorism http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/10/11/the-sources-right-wing-terrorism 2009-10-11T23:07:04-04:00 2009-10-12T11:08:46-04:00 Amanda Marcotte
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David Neiwert discusses eliminationist right wing rhetoric, domestic violence impacts minors, and the health care reform debate enters its baroque phase.

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David Neiwert discusses eliminationist right wing rhetoric, domestic violence impacts minors, and the health care reform debate enters its baroque phase.

 

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Links in this episode:

That's Gay!

Zombie abstinence-only

Jon Stewart fights zombie abstinence-only

Blue Dogs messing things up

Michelle Bachmann spreads hard right nuttery

Domestic violence and children

Domestic violence and teenagers

John Derbyshire versus a century's progress

 

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing David Neiwert about the growing problem of eliminationist rhetoric on the right and what that has to do with terrorism. Also, sex continues to confuse the issue of health care reform, and domestic violence and its impact on minors.

 

Current TV's Info Mania is having so much luck with Target Women that they've added another segment that's similar, called "That's Gay", with host Bryan Safi.  Luckily, it's just as funny and works just as well. 

 

  • that's gay *

 

You can find it on Current TV or on iTunes.

 

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At this point, I might as well just admit that until health care reform passes, I'm probably going to have enough material to do a segment a week on it.  The crazy is just that out of control.  Indeed, I can't wait for immigration reform, because that's going to be off the hook in terms of the crazy.  But alas, there's not much a hook between our issues and immigration reform, so I won't be able to cover that as much.  Or will there?  It seems that conservatives are willing to inject sex and abortion into any legislative effort they disapprove of, if they think there's a chance of stalling or destroying it. 

 

This week, a number of Blue Dog Democrats joined up with Republicans to use sex to confuse the issue of health care reform, and distract people with sex hysteria from pushing for legislation to improve their health care access.  For instance, two Democrats on the finance committee joined up with Republicans to amend the health care reform bill to reinstate funding for abstinence-only programs.  Jon Stewart took them on for supporting an ineffective, unpopular program. 

 

  • health care 1 *

 

Spending money to encourage teenagers not to use contraception so they'll get more STDs and have more unintended pregnancies seems like the single stupidest idea ever for reducing health care costs.  STDs and unintended pregnancies cost a lot of money, you know.  And if the pregnant girls decide to have the babies, it will cost a whole lot of money, since childbirth doesn't come cheap in this country.  To make it all worse, anti-choice members of Congress from both sides of the aisle are trying their damnedest to make sure that women can't get coverage for abortion, even if they want it.

 

  • health care 2 *

 

Of course, the people taking a stand on this are either that misinformed or they're grand-standing on abortion because they object to health care reform and see this as a way to stall it.  Or they sincerely want to use health care reform as an excuse to reduce pre-existing coverage for abortion women already have.  Because they're playing this like it's going to mean that the government will be paying for abortion.  It's not.  All they're doing is telling insurance companies that already cover abortion that they can continue to do so.  The proposed anti-abortion amendments would force insurance companies who already cover abortion to quit doing so.  Anti-choicers pushing this use misleading language about "government-defined" health insurance, but under most proposed bills, that basically includes all insurance.  All insurance companies would be in the health care exchange, and therefore all insurance companies would have to stop covering abortion.

 

But the dishonesty inherent to claims about government-funded abortions and abstinence-only pales in comparison to the sort of stuff coming from the far right, who is in a full-blown paranoid panic over health care reform.  Recently, I noted in a column that the far right was peddling conspiracy theories about how health care reform would install abortion clinics in high schools so girls could get abortions between classes.  This isn't a conspiracy theory that we should poo-pooh, because lookie here, Representative Michelle Bachmann is spouting it from the floor of the House. 

 

  • health care 3 *

 

I love how she calls it a "sex clinic", which implies that you actually have sex on the premises.  But it's great, because it's yet more evidence that "abortion" is less about fetal life for conservatives, and more a scare word that they use to indicate that young women are having sex and they don't have the power to stop them.  Stopping young women from having sex outside of wingnut control is priority number one, it seems, and Rep. Bachmann is willing to overtly state that. 

 

But obviously, there won't be abortion clinics in schools or school field trips to get abortion.  In some states, young women can get abortions without telling their parents, sure, and it should be all.  That's because no matter what the right wingers would have you believe, this should not be a country where we use our laws to make it easier for abusive parents to beat their daughters senseless for having the gall to go through puberty.  But tying this issue to health care reform is ridiculous, since no bill that's been written even touches it.

 

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  • insert interview *

 

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October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and for this segment on domestic violence, I'm going to focus on young people, children and teenagers.  When we think of domestic violence, we tend to think of full grown men and women, but children can be victimized by it in a number of ways.  Public News Service did a report on the way that witnessing domestic violence at home can have profound effects on children. 

 

  • domestic violence 1 *

 

Turpin links the witnessing of domestic violence to a number of bad outcomes, particularly if the children don't get help.  Outcomes such as drug abuse, chronic unemployment, and sadly, repeating the cycle and abusing their own partners.  And while there's help out there, there is also a tendency to treat victims with children and those children as one unit.  Part of that, I think, is a resource issue.  There's not enough beds and counselors to go around for victims of domestic violence, and so having a focused effort on children is a problem.  Nonetheless, Children's Defense Fund Ohio called for exactly that kind of intervention.

 

  • domestic violence 2 *

 

I see that kind of intervention as an investment in the future.  Taking kids who have serious problems and helping them become productive adults pays back huge dividends.

 

The other way that domestic violence affects young people that's getting more attention is through their own encounters with it while dating.  I think, for a lot of us, believing that teenagers get into battering situations is a hard pill to swallow, but unfortunately it's true.  There's also preliminary research to indicate that domestic violence may play a hand in teen pregnancy, as girls who are abused may have partners who interfere with contraception.

 

NPR did a report on attempts to reduce dating violence in the high school years.

 

  • domestic violence 3 *

 

The growing concerns over dating violence amongst teenagers have been dealt with by these programs, and the one that NPR covers sounds like they're taking the right approach.  They're not just detailing out the warning signs of abuse, such as being with a partner who tries to control your movements and lays guilt trips on you when you want to hang out with your friends or family.  They're also out to define what a healthy relationship means, and what it should look like.

 

  • domestic violence 4 *

 

 

 

Sadly, they interview a young man who claims he's never seen such a relationship, and he frets that they're expecting perfection.  That's the kind of thinking that creates the baseline of dysfunction that makes it easier to accept domestic violence.  Not that I disbelieve him. I think way too many people have too low of standards, and it creates a sea of dysfunction.

 

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, I'm saying it but I'm not edition.  John Derbyshire wrote the case against female suffrage in his new book.  Now, he's backing off and claiming he didn't actually make a case against female suffrage.  Except he did.  Both.  Whatever you need to believe. 

 

  • the derb *

 

The idea that suffrage should be questioned on the basis of results is anti-democratic at its baseline, because it's basically saying the consent of the governed only counts if they consent to what authority wants.  Why not have ballots with just one candidate on them, if that's what you want?

 

 

]]> The Polanski Question: Why Does The Hollywood Elite Continue to Excuse Rape and Violence? http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/10/06/the-polanski-question-why-does-the-hollywood-elite-continue-excuse-rape-and-violence 2009-10-06T07:00:00-04:00 2009-10-05T22:42:41-04:00 Amanda Marcotte Even though it’s far from the most pressing news story of the day, it was hard to turn away from the extreme, voluminous response to Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland and his likely extradition to the United States to finally face sentencing for a crime he committed 32 years ago, when he drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl who, according to her testimony to the grand jury, protested every step of the way and begged to go home.  The fallout had less to do with any question about the details of the case---it seems they were never really in question---and more about a group of highly privileged wealthy people excusing child rape while the rest of the country gapes in disbelief.

Initially, it seemed most of the lashing out at the French political elite, Hollywood movers and shakers, and clueless pundits who defended Polanski came from feminists, for whom angrily reminding people that rape is a crime has become routine.  But then I started to see conservatives jump on board the same wagon, creating a weird alliance.  Unfortunately, right wing bloggers tend to get more up in arms about the rare false rape accusation than the exponentially more common problem of rape, and what little anti-rape blogging I’ve seen from them centers around painting Islamic cultures as hopelessly misogynist (while ignoring the misogyny in our own).  So what accounted for the outrage?  The youth of the victim?

Then it dawned on me that it was because the people defending Polanski were straight out of the right wing playbook on who to demonize: Hollywood liberals and the French being the primary targets.  (Never mind that online polls showed that 70% of French respondents wanted Polanski to be sentenced for rape.)   This muddled the conservative support for this particular feminist cause considerably, as it gave Polanski defenders some evidence for their outrageous assertion that Polanski was being targeted not because he’s a child rapist, but because he’s a French citizen who makes artful movies, and Americans are a bunch of philistines.  I would disagree, for instance, that I’m a philistine, but I can’t dispute that the anti-Polanski crowd had some philistines in our camp.  But we had everyone in our camp!  Very few people are comfortable with the idea that a child rapist should elude justice because he’s rich or because he directed Chinatown.

But even liberals who usually poo-pooh right wing complaints about the French, Hollywood, and liberal “elites” had to admit that Polanski defenders were fitting the right wing stereotypes of decadent liberalism to a "T."  Katha Pollitt described the situation as showing “the liberal cultural elite at its preening, fatuous worst.” Jeff Fecke noted that Hollywood culture, particularly with the heavy use of the casting couch, is the dictionary definition of a rape culture, and that makes it easy for Polanski supporters to just chalk up what he did to a 13-year-old as normal.  No doubt the proliferation of precocious child stars who have disturbing sex lives and drug use informs their opinion, as well.

But I’d suggest that the Hollywood rush to defend Polanski is something simpler: the same apologism you see every time a man assaults a woman with the same or lower social status that he has.  Every time a frat boy rapes a sorority girl, an athlete rapes a fan, a famous musician beats his girlfriend, a bunch of rich high school kids rape a classmate, high school athletes rape a mentally retarded girl, or a Hollywood star takes advantage of an underage girl, the story is the same: The man or men can expect friends, family, admirers, and perfect strangers invested in the sexist status quo to rally around and support him while denouncing the victim as a liar and a slut who asked for it.

The saddest part of the Polanski defense is how it sounds like every other rape apologist excuse that gets trotted out every time this happens.  The excuses are so common that various bingo cards have been made to mock the excuses. Here's an example of a bingo card, and it’s easy to match these standard excuses to the Polanski case. 

For this list, I will shamelessly rip off Amanda Hess.  

  • He’s a role model, not a rapist!   As Amanda found, Polanski’s defenders were willing to say his artistic genius precludes rape charges.
  • He’s rich; we all know what she’s after, hmmm?  As Katha Pollitt noted, Polanski defenders like Joan K. Shore accused the victim’s mother of being a grabby stage mom, as if this justifies raping her daughter.
  • She was a slutty groupie.  In the shamelessly dishonest documentary defending Polanski called “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired”, friends of his actually lean on the fact that the victim wasn’t a virgin to justify raping her.
  • But the police investigated and didn’t press charges.  The Polanski version of this is assuming that because he pled down to sex with a minor, then it was no big deal.  The truth is that he drugged her and raped her over her protests.
  • Hearing this must be so hard for his family.  This apologist excuse has been beefed up tremendously because Polanski, who has survived both the Holocaust and having his wife murdered by the Manson family, has suffered so much.

 

I could go on, but you get the idea.  We don’t need to believe that Hollywood culture is unique or that this is a manifestation of these people’s particular evil to understand this situation. The only thing unique about this round of rape apologism is that the defenders have an especially loud megaphone.

It’s been remarked upon that this list of celebrities who've denounced Polanski is populated with a lot more B-listers, C-listers and worse than the list of Polanski defenders.  That strikes me less as evidence that less talented people have more moral grounding (anyway, there are some really amazing artists on that list) than evidence that Polanski’s friends are all at the top of the heap in Hollywood.  People who don’t run in his elite circles and have no occasion to meet him or much hope of working with him aren’t invested in believing that he’s a good guy, and so are free to see the situation for what it is.  Kevin Smith and Chris Rock obviously can’t be touched by Polanski or punished for coming out against what he did, and I think that more than anything explains this disparity.

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