Amanda interviews the founders of a local branch of Law Students for Reproductive Justice, reviews an interview with sexual educators, and applauds Catholics for a Free Choice. Also: How long will Marc Rudov be on TV?

 

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Links in this Episode:
Slutty eyes
Katha Pollitt on the Catholic Church
CFC podcast series
Amy and Dan interviewed
Marc Rudov is delusional

 

Transcript:

This week on Reality Cast, we'll have an interview with the co-founders of Law Students For Reproductive Justice at Texas, highlights from the Catholics for a Free Choice's new podcast series, and a review of Amy Richards and Dan Savage getting interviewed together about sexual freedom. Also, more on the Marc Rudov firing watch!

 

Gotta love that Salon has video blogging now. Tracy Clark-Flory had a recent one about an empty "study" that was reported as finding that you can tell who's a slut from her eyes. Turns out the promises of headlines were not kept by the research.

 

• slutty eyes

 

But what if you could tell someone was open to casual sex and still didn't want to do it with you? Then you'd have to face up to the fact that maybe it's not them, but it's you.

 

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One of the reasons that reproductive activists can say with confidence that the anti-choice movement is less about saving babies and more about social control is the central place of religious dogma inside the anti-choice movement, a dogma that comes from a worldview that's more about stratified gender roles than about the issue of when life begins. To quote Katha Pollitt in a recent Nation column:

 

In the United States the Catholic church has lost some of its moral authority--thank you, pedophile priests--but it has more temporal power than you might think. Along with evangelical Protestants, it is the main force behind every attempt to restrict abortion, defeat prochoice politicians, make contraception and the morning-after pill harder to get, promote false and sexist abstinence-only education and discourage the use of condoms to prevent HIV by spreading unfounded doubts about their effectiveness.

 

It's weird that pro-choicers are supposed to assume the issue of abortion is separate from opposition to contraception, sex ed, and STD prevention when the Bible-thumping anti-choicers don't separate the issues themselves.

 

Obviously, the impetus behind mentioning the Catholic Church especially is the Pope's recent visit to the U.S., which was initially met with a deplorable silence from people who damn well don't agree that prayer is better than condoms for combating AIDS. Luckily, people like my fine colleagues here at RH Reality Check stepped in and started issuing stern reminders to the rest of the country that the Catholic Church's medieval attitudes on women's liberation and sexuality are the source of much suffering in the world. Protestants don't get off, either, but that's a bit different in that you can always start a splinter church if yours starts to go south in these areas. American Catholics are stuck with disobedience, which many of them are perfectly willing to embrace.

 

Some embrace open disobedience and that is who I'm applauding in this segment, particularly the wonderful organization Catholics for Free Choice. While some people dance around the idea that criticizing church dogma is somehow verboten, CFC is putting out a podcast series that addresses all the damage that the 40 year church ban on contraception has done.

 

The first one featured an interview with noted theologian Anthony Padovano.

 

• insert cfc 1

 

To outsiders, the contraception ban really does create the sense that the church doesn't hold with dissent or even discussion of the issues, which I think is something of a shame. Sure, on issues like this, there's defensive posturing from the Vatican, but it's not actually true that Catholics are generally discouraged from being thinking people who ask questions. They haven't started huge education systems because they're anti-free thought. The only explanation that I can think of as to why contraception is an issue where people have to disobey instead of hash it out in debate is because the powers that be in the church know deep down inside that they're wrong, and are afraid of a discussion that would expose that.

 

The second podcast that's up is an interview with feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether.

 

• insert cfc 2

 

Super interesting. Knowing the history behind all this doesn't make the ban on contraception better, but it does make it more understandable. I know that one reason periods were built into the original birth control pill was that the researchers hoped it would make it more palatable for the Catholic Church. Obviously, that not only didn't work out, the church got more determined about the ban.

 

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• insert interview

 

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Hat tip to Feministing for this link to an interview with Amy Richards and Dan Savage on Fora TV. Listening to them talk about abortion and adoption is great, but also made me really sad, because it seems like feminists, sexuality educators, and pro-choicers in general spend so much of our time trying to clear up misconceptions.

 

• insert amy and dan 1

 

I'll admit; I have my own take on this phenomenon that she's describing. I'm not sure that it's so much that abortion just happens to overshadow other reproductive rights issues, but that abortion overshadows them by design. Not to say that there's an open conspiracy, but more that the anti-feminist interest in abortion is opportunistic. Basically, there's a lot of people who oppose women's right to equality, and they want to demonize feminism. But they can't just say, "Oh, they're bad because they want women to have rights," because Americans are about fairness and democracy and will reject open arguments for inequality. So they latch onto abortion and make it an issue because there's a way, however dishonest, to spin abortion rights as a bad thing because of the babies. To make a long story short, abortion is the most attacked right because feminism itself is under attack, and that's just the most convenient weapon.

 

• insert amy and dan 2

 

There's two things here. To give feminists who are hostile to adoption some benefit of the doubt, it's worth remembering that far more adoptions are coerced than abortion, especially when you talk about historically speaking. Dan, I'm sure, knows this since he joked a lot in his book about how everyone in his adoption group was holding out for the healthy white newborn, which is such a rare thing on the adoption market precisely because few women, if given a completely free choice, will bring a baby to term just to hand it over to someone else. We aren't wrong to say that when right wingers talk about adoption, they're talking about a return to maternity homes, where unwed mothers were strapped to the delivery table and had their babies taken away from them against their will. Literally, that's the only way to restore the adoption market to the way it was before Roe v. Wade.

 

But I know that Dan gets that, which is why he talks up open adoption, which adheres to the principles of choice and consent in a way that closed adoption doesn't. The other thing I want to say about everything else he says is that this is why a lot of activists prefer to talk about reproductive justice instead of choice or even rights. There is no doubt that a lot of women have abortions who would rather not, but they can't afford to have babies. In order to help them make free choices, we need a society that embraces economic justice as well as civil rights. I'm pleased to see that this analysis is reaching even the levels of federal legislation more and more often.

 

And now why I love Dan Savage, who totally has my ass beat in terms of phrasing things in a straight to the point manner. Here he is, talking about abstinence-only sex education.

 

• insert amy and dan 3

 

That story doesn't surprise me one bit. More than anything, these anti-sex political agendas get steam from people's shame about sexuality that both makes them fear speaking up for the side of right, and makes it really easy to bash others. All it would take to take out a well-meaning teacher giving good information in a Texas school would be for one uptight fundie student to make some scandalous accusations that the teacher was teaching them how to masturbate or something. No wonder people are scared.

 

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Now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, which is quickly becoming Marc Rudov Firing Watch. He went on Fox News' Your World and spewed his woman-hating nonsense all over the place. He started off by claiming black is white and up is down.

 

* insert rudov 1

 

Someone that out of touch with reality needs to take a break, perhaps seek psychiatric care for his hallucinations. Only in America do we put him on TV like he's got some authority to speak about anything.

 

And then he called a major Presidential candidate a bitch, something that was basically impossible to do in the past because that's a frigging gendered term.

 

• insert rudov 2

 

But there's no such thing as misogyny!