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South Park sends up abortion addiction [15]
Peggy Robertson's C-section hell [16]
Joining the Army for health care [17]
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.
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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.
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insert interview
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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.
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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.
Follow Amanda Marcotte on Twitter, @amandamarcotte [18]