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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be diving back into how the secular movement still hasn’t resolved tensions over the role of feminism. And school’s back in session, so I have not one but two segments looking at the changing face of sex education as the country gets over the obsession with abstinence-only.

Pat Robertson blurted out the sort of thing that I’d usually reserve for the Wisdom of Wingnuts on this show, claiming gay men in San Francisco are a bunch of serial killers who run around giving you HIV with secret rings. But I thought I’d highlight Anderson Cooper’s response.

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Cooper went on to point out that Pat Robertson thinks being gay is a result of demonic possession and complains that you don’t have a “vomit” button on Facebook so you can taunt gay couples who post pictures on the social networking site.

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School is starting back up and there’s an exciting new development for Chicago area schools this year. Schools in the area are starting a new sex education program that will require instruction in every year of school, starting in kindergarten. It’s the largest sex education program in the country, and the hope is not only that it can reduce STD and unintended pregnancy, but also child abuse and dating violence. Indeed, the child abuse component is a major reason to start sex ed in kindergarten. While kids won’t be taught things like what sex is at the youngest ages or contraception or abortion or anything like that, they will be taught the difference between bad touch and good touch and how to report people who are molesting them. This is something I want you to keep in mind when I play some of the right wing responses to the news, because whatever they are saying about this, let’s be absolutely clear: They are prioritizing their sex panic and other concerns over making sure that kids have the language and means to turn in pedophiles. Which is why my blood boiled to see that this video from Fox News was making the rounds of right wing YouTube again, after its initial debut in March.

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May I take a moment to point out that Michelle Fields just basically said that the people who are in charge of your child’s safety and education are no-good, worthless leeches who don’t deserve to be paid a decent wage? I know this is a common right wing stance, but I never fail to marvel at how, on one hand, we’re supposed to swoon to talk about how children are the future and our most precious resource, but then, on the other hand, are supposed to assume anyone who actually cares for them is undeserving of basic respect and decent working conditions.

Anyway, the point stands: The policy is there in no small part to teach kids how to report pedophiles, but Fields clearly thinks preventing sexual predators from attacking children is a less important priority than undermining teachers unions. You must really, really hate teachers to be more worried that they’re getting away with being paid than to worry that pedophiles are getting away with rape.

So what’s actually in this scary, scary sex education? Huffington Post Live had Dr. Stephanie Whyte, the Chief Health Officer for Chicago Public Schools, explain the policy.

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Research-based and age appropriate? They are just learning the names for their bodies, the fact that cats have kittens, and now, again this is critical, how to report pedophiles? Gosh, that sounds awful harmless and it is. That’s why the other part of Fields’ rant, about how the “birds and the bees” should be taught at home makes no kind of sense. If a parent freaks out at the name of his or her own body parts or the fact that cats have kittens, that parent is not going to be in a good, healthy mental space to give that lesson. If you’re so backed up that telling kids to report pedophiles is too much for you to handle, then the odds that you’re going to be able to handle more complex discussions of what sex and contraception are when they are older are around nil. You may even be one of those parents who “forgets” to tell your daughter that her period is coming. You are failing your child and should be grateful the schools are saving them from what could be very serious trauma.

But screw all that healthy children nonsense! Let’s have a little more sex panic.

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Oh yes, it’s so offensive to suggest that a 5-year-old should make healthy choices about social interactions. Healthy choices like, say, reporting a pedophile who is sexually abusing them. What’s clear here is that Fox News knows that the term “sex ed for kindergartners” is so titillating for its ridiculous audience that they won’t even actually hear what is really being taught or the justification for it. What kind of monster actually opposes teaching kids healthy interactions, especially when such lessons help them with difficult problems like reporting sexual abuse? I don’t know that they’re monsters per se, however, but just that they don’t even hear what they’re supposed to be opposing. They just think they heard “teaching sex to 5-year-olds” and are reacting to that instead of to what is actually being taught. Of course, that’s the audience. The actual hosts, commentators and producers at Fox are being completely awful here. They are the ones who actually read the materials and they know that it’s not at all what they’re pretending it is, but they are prioritizing getting their audience riled up over the safety and well-being of small children.

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As with the last segment, the big but extremely quiet story in sexual health in the past few years is the slow recession of abstinence-only programs, which are very quietly being replaced by more comprehensive sex education programs. Now, of all places, Oklahoma is actually starting to give in and realize that abstinence-only was a failed experiment and that, if you want kids to avoid unintended pregnancy, you’re going to have to give them actual information about contraception. The new program is starting in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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If you take a step back and really think about it, the objections to sex ed have always been a little bit strange. They may not seem like it, because that knee-jerk hostility towards sexual openness and liberation is something we’ve all grown up with and see as “normal,” but if you set that aside, it’s actually quite weird. The idea that people make better decisions with pertinent information being withheld from them would insult our intelligence if the topic were anything but sex. For instance, imagine I’m making a trip from Oklahoma to California, and it’s fairly open-ended how and when I choose to leave. Do you think I’m going to make better decisions if you refuse to share information with me about the condition of the roads, the availability of airline travel, and the weather conditions? Or will knowing more about how I get there and when is good to travel help me make a better decision? Obviously, the latter. It makes no sense to think sex is an exception to the general rule that knowledge is power.

Of course, anti-choicers never actually really thought they’d get better health outcomes by withholding information. The whole thing was rooted in the same old urge to punish young people for having sex—the thinking, even if they are often loathe to admit it is that if you disobeyed their rules, then you deserve to get pregnant. But while that may satisfy a Bible-thumper’s sense of dominance and control, it’s not very practical. Indeed, what Oklahoma has found out is that high teenage pregnancy rates have a bunch of unintended consequences, as this sex education activist explained.

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Right wing myth: Refusing to tell kids about contraception means that their overwhelming fear of pregnancy will largely cause them to avoid sex, and the few that do get pregnant will serve as a warning about the evils of sex to others. Real world experience: Refusing to tell kids about contraception means that they will have sex anyway, because kids tend to do it on their own timeline and not the one given to them by others, especially others who think sex is dirty and sinful. When high numbers of teenagers get pregnant, they often drop out because of their overwhelming responsibilities, leading to more poverty and more social chaos, which ends up hurting everyone, even people who thought a few pregnant teens would be good for morale.

So, it’s a good start, but it sounds like there’s a long way to go.

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Eventually, the plan is to get regular teachers well-trained enough that they don’t need the specialists to do it, which is something I have no opinion either way. My gut instinct is to say that having this incorporated into regular school work should be the end goal, both to make it feel more normalized and to build on pre-existing relationships between students and teachers. My school had an outsider come in to do contraception education and it felt all weird and disconcerting and I think we learned less that we should. But actual experts probably understand the issues more. What I do know is that it’s a problem having the program built on an opt-in structure instead of an opt-out. Parents who don’t want kids to get sex ed should be the ones who have to make an effort, not parents who want their kids to get it. Frankly, I tend to run strong on the idea that minors have human rights to an education regardless and think parents shouldn’t be able to opt out of sex ed at all, but if you can’t have that, at least making the opt-out people work for it.

All credit to the Tulsa news station for not wasting our time interviewing some conservative spouting clichés about leaving it to the parents. We all know that some parents have no intention of teaching kids what they need to know, and that’s why it’s so critical for schools to step in and help out.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Miley Cyrus edition. While there were interesting commentaries out there about cultural appropriation, most of the critical reaction to Miley Cyrus’ performance at the Video Music Awards was the same old anti-sex harrumphing. It was hard to pick a favorite, but I kind of like Ray Comfort’s.

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I like how blunt they were about their belief that grown women’s sexuality is male property, specifically your father’s property. Presumably right until your husband takes ownership of it.

The post Sex Education Is Improving, Causing Right Wing to Panic appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Dr. Tracy Weitz will be on to talk about good news coming out of California. New Mexico’s got a clinic that does third trimester abortions, and the anti-choicers are turning up the terror on it. But there’s more good news in the second segment about teen birth rates.

Rape culture continues to be a major problem on campuses. A Canadian university is embroiled in controversy after some freshmen were caught chanting this.

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To be clear, I don’t think this kind of thing is going to turn non-rapists into rapists or anything asinine like that. However, there’s a good body of evidence to show that this sort of thing gives men who are inclined to rape the sense that they’re being supported and that their desires are not that big a deal. And so yes, it does contribute to more rape.

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This Friday, a long-awaited documentary about the four remaining doctors in the country who can do third trimester abortions is coming out. It’s called “After Tiller,” because the starting point of the film is the tremendous loss of Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas after a frequent anti-choice protester named Scott Roeder, who was fed information on Tiller’s legal battles and movements by Operation Rescue, followed Dr. Tiller into church and shot him through the head. The documentary follows the four surviving doctors in and out of work, showing why they do what they do and how different their work is from how it’s portrayed by anti-choicers. It was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival. It’s a very hard documentary to watch, because it really drives home how little regard for human life and well-being that anti-choice extremists really have, no matter how much they call themselves “pro-life.”

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I saw the movie in a preview screening and can tell you right now it’s an incredibly important movie that everyone should see, but you need to bring an entire box of tissues. Unless your heart has been hardened by anti-choice rhetoric painting women who seek abortion as monsters or bimbos, it’s really difficult listening to them tell their stories. In most cases, it was a wanted pregnancy. A lot of families were already decorating the nursery. Then the diagnosis came. Babies who would live for a few days and die painfully. Babies who would be born unable to move, ever. Fetal anomalies that would cause nothing but heartbreak, pain, financial ruin, and then death. And only four doctors in the country can help them. These doctors do a lot of earlier abortions, of course, so it’s not all pain and misery. But they have to take on an entire nation’s worth of women whose dreams are dashed and whose only chance of ever seeing their baby will be after it’s dead. And on top of that all, they have to deal with the ever-present harassment and fear of being murdered by some anti-choice nut who prefers to believe a bunch of misogynist myths about late term abortion rather than the truth.

Two of these doctors, Dr. Shelley Sella and Dr. Susan Robinson, opened a clinic in New Mexico together after Dr. Tiller was murdered. They are featured along Dr. Warren Hern and Dr. Leroy Carhart in the movie, and their practice feels really warm like an inviting place that gives great comfort to families making tough decisions. Here’s some clips of them in their practice from the trailer.

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Unfortunately, it seems that their clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico is becoming the new focal point for anti-choice extremists who are looking for something else to do now that Dr. Tiller is dead. The picketing, the outrageous tactics, the demonizing: It’s all starting up again. And people in New Mexico are not exactly happy about it.

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Because there’s no low that they won’t go to, anti-choicers have started to picket a Holocaust museum in Albuquerque, demanding that they put up an anti-abortion display full of ignorant, misogynist propaganda. Obviously, the museum is not interested, but it goes to show how viciously dehumanizing the anti-abortion movement really is. They’re equating a very small number of women who need to get third trimester abortions, usually because of fetal anomalies, with a systematic attempt to murder every Jewish person, an attempt that wiped out two-thirds of the Jewish population on the continent of Europe. That utter lack of respect and understanding of reality is endemic to the anti-choice movement, and now New Mexico is having to suffer through it.

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While so much is grim when it comes to news about sexual and reproductive health, for the young in America, things are looking up. Last week, I reported on how schools have quietly started to move back towards comprehensive sex education, in no small part because there was a small uptick in teen births in the heyday of abstinence-only that stood out from an overall decline in the birth rate in the past couple of decades. Now there’s a new report out from the CDC showing that contraception really does work. The teen birth rate is at an all-time low, not because teens aren’t having sex, but because they are using contraception. And when I mean an all-time low, I mean of all time.

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And we are only saying 73 years because that’s only how long the government has data on this. The blunt truth of the matter is that this may be the lowest teen birth rate in American history, in no small part because the very concept of the teenager isn’t much older than this data set. To be clear, that’s not a bad thing. Inventing the concept of the teenager was a very good idea, because it allows us to frame useful ideas like waiting until you’re more mature and stable to start having babies. But the point stands:  2012 was the best year yet since the struggle even began to start making it easier and more obtainable for women to avoid pregnancy in their teen years.

What’s amazing is how quickly the rate has plummeted.

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There’s a lot of reasons for this, but I have a pet theory for at least a huge chunk of it. Call it the Bristol Palin theory. For years, conservatives were trying to muddy the waters and claim that contraception-negative messages and telling kids to abstain until marriage were the best prevention for teen pregnancy. Contraception education was even suggested to be a bad thing for kids, on the grounds that it supposedly causes them to have sex. Then Bristol Palin, who was the living embodiment of a kid raised in the kind of Bible-happy abstinence-only culture that conservatives recommend, came into the national spotlight, pregnant with her son as a high school student. The Republicans tried to spin that every which way, but at the end of the day, there was no avoiding it. All the statistics in the world cannot do what a single girl who got pregnant after getting an abstinence-only message could do to drive home the point.

Eboni Williams of the Young Turks had a similar sense.

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Her instinct was right. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that 77 percent of viewers of the show came away feeling like they learned how hard parenting as a teen was and were more inclined to avoid it. Cenk and Eboni went back and forth, wondering if the fame that the girls on the show had might incline kids the other way, but ultimately decided that the show was really effective in driving home the message.

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The traditional narrative is to suggest that the huge amount of sex on TV and in music is bad for teens and encourages teen pregnancy, but in fact, if it’s doing anything, it might be the opposite. The “MTV narrative,” as it were, is to sell this kind of sexy and fun youth lifestyle that doesn’t have a lot of room for having babies in it. The sex-is-good-but-teen-pregnancy-is-bad narrative sets kids up to look to contraception as a way to achieve their goals. That it so happens to be the best way to achieve the goals that adults have for them is a very good thing indeed.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, acknowledging people’s existence is evil edition. Or that’s the claim of one Linda Harvey, of Mission America, who got a little overheated in denouncing the idea of sex education acknowledging the existence and needs of LGBT Americans.

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It’s straight from the school of thought that holds that if you pretend people don’t exist that will somehow make them go away. Hasn’t worked yet, but I guess she’ll keep trying.

The post California’s Pro-Choice Bill, Teen Births, and Anti-Choicers at It Again in New Mexico appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

This is the 300th episode of Reality Cast! Thanks for hanging in and helping grow this audience and all these awesome years of bringing you news and interviews on reproductive health care. I look forward to many more!

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I’ll be interviewing Jill Filipovic about the increasing hostilities over abortion in New Mexico. Plus two segments, both on conservative efforts to keep people from getting health care as the dawn of the Affordable Care Act fast approaches.

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October 1 is coming quickly for us, and that means the health-care exchanges are starting and this somehow, in a lot of minds, but especially conservative minds, means Obamacare is really for real. The exchanges themselves are really just marketplaces where people can buy insurance plans that fit the minimum levels to achieve the insurance mandate that goes into effect next year. They’re basically the living embodiment of the “free market” that conservatives are always yammering on about, displayed in a handy Internet form. So why is it being treated like the beginning of the apocalypse on right wing media? I’m serious. Just listen to the music Fox News has chosen as its Obamacare theme music.

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Do they still bother to pretend they’re “fair and balanced”? Or has that ship sailed? I guess I could look it up. Let’s see … Apparently it’s still their slogan but they don’t use it very much. Makes sense, under the circumstances. Even they have a limit where it gets embarrassing. Anyway, they have Elisabeth Hasselbeck on now, and she was extremely eager to make it seem like the nation is in a full blown panic over the impending existence of a website that allows you to buy insurance without much hassle.

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Yeah, I bet they’re scared. It can’t possibly be because the Fox News network has spent months and years airing alarmist reports that suggest that the second our country has universal health care, it will have no health care at all. Indeed, this segment was an incomprehensible one where Hasselbeck and her guest endeavored to scare the audience into believing that your doctor will be so angry that all of his patients have health insurance that he will rage quit. The claim is that somehow this will mean “more” paperwork and that alone will do it. However, this claim only makes sense if you believe health insurance is a new thing that was just invented. On the contrary, all Obamacare does is take pre-existing systems and put more people into them. That’s why, contrary to the claims of Fox News that doctors oppose it, the most important doctors association in the country is actually helping educate doctors about it so that the transition can go smoothly. The American Medical Association has a new website for doctors that explains not just that Obamacare is a good thing, but give doctors advice on how to get their patients signed up. So, basically, the opposite of what Hasselbeck is claiming.

Of course, the right-wing anger that more Americans will get health insurance is so out of control that the pressure on Republicans to shut down the government rather than let people get health insurance is reaching a fever pitch. Erick Erickson, always a reliable source of profoundly stupid reactionary freaking out on air, was a particularly gruesome example.

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The claim that businesses are shutting down rather than offer health insurance to full time employees is largely a lie, as most businesses already do offer that benefit. But this is where we’re at, with pundits demanding a massive government shutdown and even serious damage to their own party, to keep currently uninsured people from getting health insurance. Which is to say that Erickson wants to shut down the entire federal government to make a point about how much he hates anything that Barack Obama can take credit for. It’s not even particularly about some increased spending regarding the subsidies and Medicaid expansion, even, because most of this segment was about pointless bickering over some bureaucratic changes in implementation.

This level of right-wing nihilism was off-putting not just to those of us who don’t have a burning and irrational hatred for the President, but also by people who think perhaps the Republican Party should not set fire to itself in hopes that the President gets burned. People like the otherwise stalwart hater of the poor Charles Krauthammer.

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That last part at the end, of course, is pure fantasy. The claim that this kind of legislation is impossible to implement and will fall apart only works if you have an ignorant audience that doesn’t realize universal health care has worked everywhere it’s been tried, including in nations that have laws similar to the Affordable Care Act. And including in Massachusetts, where a program nearly identical to Obamacare has been in effect for years. He’s just trying to turn all the people Fox has whipped into a panic towards the goal of voting Republican instead of supporting action that will hurt the Republicans in the next election. But whatever his reason, he’s 100% right that a government shutdown is not the proper response to this.

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While the moaning and groaning about Obamacare in conservative media is mostly focused on the political side of the equation, the widespread anger on the right at the possibility that uninsured people might now get insurance is creating some seriously ugly problems. A small provision in the Affordable Care Act sets aside some grants and programs to help uninsured people navigate the insurance system. This provision should be non-controversial, even if you oppose Obamacare for supposedly small government reasons, because the provision says nothing about whether or not the health-care exchanges, Medicaid expansion or federal subsidies exist. All these programs do is help people who are interested sign up. Attacking these programs is about nothing more than attacking people who want health care because you believe that they, for whatever reason, do not deserve health care. It’s just pure sadistic abuse of the uninsured for no other reason than they are uninsured and you want to keep them that way.

Alas, this sadism is becoming public policy in Florida.

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They’re trying to use a small incident where the wrong documents were sent to the wrong person to claim that people simply can’t be allowed to get help signing up for health insurance. No one buys the claim that the 3 million uninsured people in Florida are is some kind of special danger if they get to join people like this Pam Bondi in actually being able to have health insurance. At a certain point, it’s unavoidable concluding that many conservatives are just straight up afraid of having to share waiting rooms at doctors’ offices with poor people. There’s no other reason to freak out about this, because getting the uninsured onto insurance will have no real impact on people like Bondi. It’s just the same griping about having to stand in line with poor people at the grocery store, but this time used to complain about people conservatives don’t want to see at the doctor’s office.

Unfortunately, this irrational panic about poor people being able to actually go to the doctor has led Gov. Rick Scott of Florida to actually try to stop navigators from showing people how to sign up for health care.

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In other words, on a thin pretext they’ve basically disallowed state health offices from working to help get people signed up for health care. That’s the equivalent of banning organizations from, say, not allowing the post office to advertise that you can buy stamps there or not allowing the department of motor vehicles from putting out pamphlets on how to learn to drive so you can get a license. Considering that people have to get health insurance or face fines from the government, this is particularly sleazy. But of greater immediate concern is that people really don’t know that they can get health insurance through Obamacare, and the outreach efforts need to be maximized right now.

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What also makes this kind of amazing in a truly awful way is that it’s really just fundamentally a short term stalling tactic. Sure, they’ll be able to keep some people ignorant of the law for a year or so and force those people to pay fines and not have health insurance, but eventually people are going to figure this one out. I mean, you can go right onto the Internet and find the exchanges. Word of mouth will help spread this one. Taking this stand does nothing, absolutely nothing, but maximize the number of people who are uninsured for as long as conservatives can get away with it. It doesn’t serve any other purpose but to make sure that some people who can get health insurance don’t get it, and even then, only for about a year or two. It’s sadism for the sake of sadism.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Rush Limbaugh honors all the hard work that feminists have done edition. Though, naturally, he has no idea that he’s delivering a major compliment.

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Well, Limbaugh might believe that it’s perversion to believe that women should enjoy sex, too, and that sexual assault is bad and birth control is good. But he’s completely wrong that most people think of that as sexual perversion.

The post New Mexico’s Abortion Wars, and Anti-Obamacare Sentiment Gets Ugly appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing Lindsay Beyerstein about the ongoing battle over the genuinely empirical question: Is the pill dangerous? You can probably guess the answer, but stay tuned. Also, the health-care exchanges start tomorrow, which means the battle over Obamacare is reaching a fever pitch.

The Daily Show inevitably had the best comic take on the whole battle over Obamacare’s implementation.

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More ahead on what conservatives are really afraid of when it comes to health-care reform.

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Tomorrow is the big day, y’all. The health-care exchanges are opening up, and if you don’t have health insurance, I highly recommend you immediately go to healthcare.gov to find out what kind of plan you can get through the new systems. This is, of course, exactly what conservatives don’t want you to do. So much so, in fact, that the Koch brothers-funded group called Generation Opportunity is actually running ads that basically imply that going to the doctor is so unpleasant that it’s probably best not to get health insurance at all. One ad insinuates that a giant Uncle Sam will sexually assault a woman if she gets health insurance through Obamacare, One aimed at men is just as bad. The doctor is done with the fully clothed exam and then he finds out the patient got insured through Obamacare, which by the way is not something your doctor would probably know from your chart.

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Both ads appear to argue that invasive medical tests are only something you have to endure if you purchase insurance through the health-care exchange. This is a harmful message on two levels: One, it’s intended directly to discourage young people from getting health insurance. They may say only through Obamacare, but for most uninsured people, that’s the only realistic option. Two, this sort of thing stigmatizes and raises fear around basic, necessary medical testing, making it seem worse and less necessary than it is. This is all super irresponsible.

Of course, that’s just one part of the attempts to derail Obamacare. The big thing is obviously this budget showdown, where Republicans in the House are trying to use the threat of a government shutdown to force Obama and the Senate to defund Obamacare. Then you have Senator Ted Cruz issuing more threats of what he’s supposedly willing to do to keep the uninsured from getting insurance.

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Ted Cruz is living in a fantasyland. If he thinks that he can convince House Republicans to hold the government hostage in order to defund Obamacare and that this will somehow convince the voters that Harry Reid is to blame, he’s living in la la land. The polling shows most Americans don’t want to defund Obamacare and that they’re ready to blame the Republicans if the government shuts down. Holding the military hostage is desperation that has nothing to do with what the public actually wants, but is clearly just an attempt to do any and everything to stop Obamacare before its major provisions go into effect. But why are they so desperate? Ezra Klein, sub hosting for Chris Hayes at MSNBC, had a good explanation.

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The big battle is over young people. On the conservative side, you have the Koch brothers trying to discourage young people from signing up for health insurance through Obamacare. On the liberal side, you have Corey Hebert, a professor from LSU, going on MSNBC and making an impassioned case that young people really need to get into Obamacare as soon as the open enrollment starts on October 1.

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Why is so important about young people that their participation in this has become so contentious? Part of it is that they’re highly likely to be uninsured and eligible for the subsidies, so if they enroll in big numbers, that will show that it’s working already. But more important is that their enrollment will help the whole thing reach financial goals. A big part of Obamacare is the expectation that insurance premiums will stabilize or even go down. We have to have lots of relatively healthy people in the system, because if it’s all just sick people, premiums will go up. That’s one reason Medicare has so many financial problems and they’re always tinkering with it, in fact. Getting young people enrolled is good for them, but it will also help keep premiums low. That’s why the Koch brothers are trying to scare young people off, though there’s no reason to think their corny ads will be able to do that.

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Let’s be absolutely clear: There is no doubt that a government shutdown showdown is not actually a good idea, either in terms of policy or politics. I don’t have the time here to really get into the nitty-gritty of why so many conservatives think it’s a great idea to have high insurance premiums and millions of uninsured people, but on the politics thing, it’s clear that even a lot of Republicans are really not happy about the grandstanding and shutdown threats in an last-ditch attempt to kill Obamacare before the public realizes that they really like it. Rachel Maddow talked about some of the intra-party conflict.

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Indeed, Ted Cruz is the focal point of it, since he’s been all over the TV, trying to crusade endlessly about how he’d rather hold the military hostage than allow uninsured people to get health care. He even held a long speech on Tuesday that he pretended was a filibuster, but was in fact not one, because he was under the impression that the problem with politicians is they don’t do enough empty grandstanding. Naturally, this is creating some grumbling, as was discovered when a reporter asked him about the reaction to his antics during a press conference.

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Har har. I always admire the courage of people who sit in safe seats to try to force their entire party to take radical measure that you know for a fact are going to backfire and cause a lot of your own party members to suffer lost seats, bad press, and having to campaign harder if they do want to keep their seats. Way to be a team player, Ted Cruz. I’m sure that’s winning you a lot of friends on the Hill. Well, if not, it’s not like politicians have to worry about people liking them, do they? Perish the thought.

That there will be political consequences for this showdown is widely believed by roughly everyone, Democrat or Republican, that isn’t living completely in a fantasy bubble where you’ve convinced yourself the entire American public is comprised of loyal Fox News viewers. But even the people that live in that fantasy land don’t even buy into the conservative fantasy that they’re going to end Obamacare, according to a discussion of Wall Street Journal editors and writers on Fox News.

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But even Republicans who believe that this government shutdown showdown is a bad, bad idea seem to be worried about the obvious alternative, which is just letting Obamacare go into effect and stop acting like it’s the worst possible thing in the world to let the legislative system of our country work the way its supposed to. Karl Rove, for instance, has been wildly critical of these shutdown shenanigans, but even he thinks that Republicans should try to find some way to keep Obamacare from happening.

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So why is it so, so, so critical that the effects of Obamacare not be felt by the American people before a Republican President is in office? Can’t a Republican Congress and President repeal it if they want to, even if we did have universal health care for a couple of years before the election? What are they so worried about? Well, I’ll point to what Ezra Klein said in the first segment of this show: Karl Rove and the rest of the anti-Obamacare crew know one thing for certain. If Obamacare goes into effect, people are going to like it and it will become politically toxic to repeal it and take it away. But think about that for a minute. They’re trying to end something because they know that it will end up being exactly what people want. Isn’t the point of democracy to give people what they want? So why are anti-Obamacare people trying so hard to stop that from happening?

***********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, forced childbirth will magically result in you getting a better job edition. Or at least that seems to be Rush Limbaugh’s take in a recent rant where the four times married man once again got really angry at women for having sex.

• Limbaugh *

The notion is that women stupidly voted for “free abortions,” which are not government policy and were never promised, and somehow this has meant a crappy economy. Of course, the reality is, just like with the Great Depression, we have a president who has done a lot to stymie the negative effects of a massive recession but who, for political reasons, couldn’t embrace policies to actually fix it. So, like the Great Depression under FDR, it’s dragging on. Which means that those no co-pay contraception benefits are actually helping, and yeah, free abortions would help, too.

The post The Birth Control Pill Debate, Obamacare, and the Government Shutdown Showdown appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Texas abortion lawsuit

More on the lawsuit

Anita Perry sounds awfully pro-choice

Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the same thing, but …

That word doesn’t mean what you think

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be covering the lawsuit to block the new Texas abortion law. A lawyer from the Center for Reproductive Rights will be on to help us understand what’s going on. Also, there’s a lot of lies out there about the Affordable Care Act. What’s that all about?

There’s a story on the contraception mandate developing.

• mandate *

This story is still nascent, but as it develops, there may be future coverage, depending on what the Supreme Court does with this.

**********

We all knew it was coming, but it’s a good day to hear that it’s finally happening: The law passed in Texas to shut down most of the abortion clinics in the state is getting challenged in court. And boy-howdy is the challenge a big one!

• texas 1 *

Two things: The supporters can say that this for women’s health all they want, but they know and we know and insects crawling on the ground and birds flying in the sky know that’s a lie. Not just misinformation, not just misleading, not any euphemism for it. A L-I-E lie, the kind that is forbidden by the Bible they hold so dear, a giant, honking, obvious lie. Indeed, it’s such a crappy lie that by and large most other states who have passed similar restrictions are finding them blocked in court because even conservative judges are like, “Oh come on, you are just lying.” In addition, I will say that the only thing that these restrictions will do is reduce the number of legal abortions in the state, and I really wish journalists would use that word. As has been covered on this show, we know that an illegal trade in abortion drugs has started in Texas already, and will almost surely just get worse if this law goes into effect.

So what are the plaintiffs suing over specifically?

• texas 2 *

The admitting privileges thing is really beyond bunk. Listen to this lying, dishonest anti-choice activist pretend that it’s about anything but shutting down clinics.

• texas 3 *

Remember, this guy claims to believe abortion is murder. So he’s not pretending he wants murder to be safer? He’s worried that murder is too dangerous? What kind of morally corrupt person thinks that something is murder and then runs around worried about the health and wellbeing of murderers? None. He neither thinks abortion is murder nor does he think that these admitting privileges will help anyone, since abortion has one of the lowest complication rates of any medical procedure you can get. In those extremely rare—much rarer than with childbirth, for instance—cases where a woman needs to be in a hospital overnight for observation, the E.R. doctor can admit her. Antis are actually trying to get you to believe you show up sick to the hospital and they’re like, “Nope, not without a very specific doctor who isn’t even your regular doctor but just a specialist to admit you.” It doesn’t work that way. Which is why other courts who have looked at this have blocked the law and the plaintiffs have a good chance in Texas.

While all this was going on, the governor of Texas’s wife, Anita Perry, was interviewed at the Texas Tribune festival and she basically said she’s pro-choice.

• texas 4 *

She tried to backtrack and say the state saw it differently, but came right back around and basically again said that she thought it really was up to the individual.

• texas 5 *

If you’re surprised, don’t be. As mentioned earlier, the whole claims from anti-choicers is not that they are trying to end legal abortion in the state of Texas, but they are simply trying to pass some innocuous health regulations that have nothing to do with halting legal abortion access in the state. All of a sudden you have the governor’s wife making sympathetic pro-choice noises that just so happen to make him look more open-minded and tolerant on this topic than he actuality is? Gosh, that could only help make the case that this isn’t an attempt to end legal abortion, because look, over there, Anita Perry is pro-choice! So I’d take her remarks with a grain of salt. More on this case in the next segment, when a lawyer who is working on it will fill us in on the nitty gritty aspects.

***********

insert segment

***********

Okay, I was Team Kanye during the latest beef between Kanye West and Jimmy Kimmel. That said, Jimmy Kimmel made it up to me a lot by giving over some airtime on his show to spread the word that people actually like Obamacare, if they know what is actually in it. This is a well-known fact in political journalism circles. Polling data shows people object to the bill when it’s called “Obamacare,” but when they are read the actual provisions in the bill, they support it. Kimmel’s people decided to take it a step further and ask people how they felt about Obamacare versus the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the same thing; Obamacare is just a derisive nickname given the Affordable Care Act by right wing nuts that happened to go mainstream since it’s fewer syllables than “Affordable Care Act.” The nickname is losing some of its negative connotations as the bill goes into effect, but Kimmel’s interviewer found that a lot of people were willing to confidently denounce it, while turning around and saying they supported the Affordable Care Act. Which is Obamacare. Same thing.

• obamacare 1 *

Hadn’t been thought out, said a lady who clearly doesn’t even know what it is. Of course, in reality, it has been thought out quite a bit, and if she had bothered to listen to anything but the propaganda on Fox News, she would have known that.

This guy definitely has gotten his entire idea of Obamacare from Fox News.

• obamacare 2 *

And so on and so forth. Jimmy Kimmel made his point very well.

People don’t like Obamacare because they’ve been told by right wing media not to like Obamacare, and they haven’t bothered to think about it any more deeply than that. A lot of that is because right wing media has tapped into a bunch of nasty stereotypes, especially racist stereotypes, to scare people about it. But a lot of it is that they’re just plain lying. Like aggressively, outrageously lying about what’s in it. Chris Hayes did a segment where he pretended to believe that the folks on Fox & Friends are simply mistaken about the bill to demonstrate how aggressively they lie about it. A big thing they’re pushing is the claim that somehow Obamacare is going to mean an end to your health care. Rep. Renee Helmers went on Chris Hayes show and told this amazing, unforgivable whopper.

• obamacare 3 *

Steve Doocy of Fox & Friends trotted out a version of the lie, once again implying that people who are currently insured will somehow lose their insurance because other people are getting insured.

• obamacare 4 *

This fits into a larger narrative that often has ugly racist undertones that emanates from the right, what Joan Walsh of Salon called a “strategy to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else.” While I have no doubt that the average Conservative pictures the person who is supposedly stealing their health insurance away as Black, he race-baiting of the past laid down this larger narrative of a zero-sum game that expands beyond just white vs. Black. For instance, the contraception mandate is a big honking deal on the right because it allows them to promote the notion that young, sexy women are stealing health insurance from older men in order to have lots of hot, consequence-free sex and that said older men don’t get to benefit from it. All this other stuff, this racism and sexism, gets attached to it, but at its core the narrative from the right is that the uninsured somehow can’t get health insurance without taking it away from you. This is a lie.

• obamacare 5 *

Republicans shut down the federal government in a desperate attempt to shut down Obamacare. If they really think it’s so bad that it’s worth causing economic disaster for, then why are they lying about it? If it’s that bad, then wouldn’t the truth suffice? Or is the reality that they’re lying because they know if you, the general public, knew the truth about Obamacare, you would actually support it? I know where my money is on this question.

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, that word does not mean what you think it means edition. That word is “shoo-in”, and Fox Business host Stuart Varney wildly misused it recently.

• shoo-in *

Zero women have been appointed to chair the Federal Reserve before. Larry Summers almost got the job until the controversy got to be too much. The notion that women have some kind of great power to get appointments men don’t have is disproved by the statistics and the recent past. But don’t let reality get in the way of your victim complex, Stuart.

The post Texas’ Anti-Abortion Law Challenged, and Refuting More Obamacare Misinformation appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Bill O’Reilly lying, being gross

Bill Kristol is dismissive

Limbaugh says WIC doesn’t help anyone

Limbaugh mocks WIC recipients

Pill ad

Terry McAuliffe attacks Ken Cuccinelli

Cuccinelli interview

Rush Limbaugh makes more stuff up

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll talk to a documentary filmmaker who is trying to capture what happens when women tell abortion stories. Just because the government shutdown is big news doesn’t mean sexism is on the backburner, and the governor’s race in Virginia encapsulates an electoral trend that’s not going away.

I’m looking forward to seeing this new film by Therese Shechter, called How To Lose Your Virginity.

• virginity *

I’m glad that more people are talking about how much virginity is a social construct that starts to fall apart the more you think about it.

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

If you thought that the government shutdown was one of those stories that’s so big that conservatives would float above their usual sexist nonsense, well, I hate to disappoint you, but there is apparently no such thing. For one thing, part of the bill itself that is forcing this shutdown is about taking a swipe at women and trying to give your boss a vote in your birth control use. Yes, the bill that Republicans offered that would basically defund Obamacare and therefore had to be rejected also had an item in it allowing any employer who wants to deny you your earned birth control benefits. So that was lovely.

But it was definitely the conservative media where things started to get weird. Like Bill O’Reilly turning up the volume of attacks on Obamacare in support of the shutdown by invoking a grossly inappropriate rape metaphor.

• shutdown 1 *

This is, of course, all a lie. The claim that Republicans were happy to go along with Obamacare until some unnamed bad effects happen—of which there aren’t any, by the way—is such a massive lie that I’m surprised that even consummate liar Bill O’Reilly didn’t lose his composure telling it. I guess he just hoped the ploy of comparing the expansion of our health-care system to include the working poor to being raped by a motorcycle gang was so emotional that you didn’t notice the whopping lie he just told. It’s a sort of use of sexism to conceal dishonesty maneuver. But I am not fooled by this, O’Reilly. I can notice that you’re both using gross rape analogies and that you’re lying all at once.

One of the big issues that touches on gender a lot is that the shutdown is causing the WIC program, which is a supplemental nutrition program providing food to needy women raising small children, to be short on funding. At first, it was assumed they had less than a week’s worth of food to distribute, but now they can hold out to the end of the month. If the shutdown goes on longer than that, however, this is a situation where food is being taken away from babies. This reality caused major dismissive behavior on the right.

• shutdown 2 *

That was Bill Kristol, echoing a common conservative refrain that conflates food assistance with charity, and blithely suggesting charity is more than enough. It is not, since more than half of infants in the U.S. are on WIC. As Media Matters noted, another problem with this is church food pantries are generally supplied by, you guessed it, the federal government.

Rush Limbaugh was more aggressive in his insistence that a program that supplies food to more than half the babies in the country is unimportant. His reason appears to be that the babies of single mothers, particularly of Black single mothers, don’t deserve to eat.

• shutdown 3 *

I do love the conservative belief that introducing a wedding ring into the mix suddenly means poverty and need dissipates. Yes, a lot of first born babies are born to women who are legally unmarried, but that doesn’t actually mean that most or all of them have no man in their lives. The notion that all these babies are from one-night stands doesn’t pass the common sense test. The fact of the matter is our economy is crap, unemployment is high, and for young people in their 20s—the age that most people have their first baby—employment prospects are particularly bleak. That’s why the 53 percent. But Limbaugh, who has been married four times, wants to blame sex.

He got really excited at the idea of babies going without food to punish women for perceived sexual misbehavior. Thought nothing was funnier, really.

• shutdown 4 *

Unintended pregnancy rates have gone down for middle class and wealthy women in the past few years, but they are actually going up for poor women, because of lack of access to reproductive health care. This shutdown is being conducted in order to make sure that lack of access to health care continues. And the babies born from those unintended pregnancies will be mocked for starving by the same conservatives that kept their mothers from getting access to birth control in the first place.

***********

Insert interview

***********

In all this discussion of the government shutdown and Obamacare, it’s easy to forget that there are actually campaigns going on right now. Such as the one in Virginia for the governor of the state, and it’s a campaign that shows that the “war on women” thing is not going away and it is creating serious problems for any candidate who is perceived as conducting the war on women. The race is interesting because it draws in some of the same problems Republicans faced in 2012 on a national scale, and shows that those problems may not be going away, but may in fact be getting worse. At the top of the list is reproductive rights. Anti-choicers have been pushing hard in recent years to expand the attacks on reproductive rights to include attacks on contraception, and let’s face it, that is just electoral gold for Democrats. Gold that Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe is spending as hard as he can. He’s running ads in the state that accuse Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli of trying to take the birth control pill away from women.

• Virginia 1 *

During the debate between the two candidates for governor of Virginia, McAuliffe reiterated the accusation, suggesting that Cuccinelli has an anti-contraception agenda.

• Virginia 2 *

So what are the facts here? The accusation about “women’s health” centers is employing a bit of euphemism. What McAuliffe means is that Cuccinelli adopted a single-minded obsession with trying to shut down abortion clinics in Virginia. When that couldn’t be done by legislative means, Cuccinelli, as attorney general, bullied and pressured the state health department to enact a bunch of unnecessary restrictions that were purportedly for women’s health, but were in fact just a pretext to shut down abortion clinics. The birth control thing is more confusing. What happened here is that Cuccinelli, when he was in the state assembly, introduced legislation that would define a fertilized egg as a person. It’s clearly a back door way to ban abortion, but there’s also concerns that it could be used as a pretext to ban the birth control pill. Anti-choicers routinely claim that the pill works by killing fertilized eggs. It doesn’t, of course, and actually works, as does emergency contraception, by suppressing ovulation. But that doesn’t mean anti-choicers wouldn’t try to use “personhood” laws to ban birth control pills. Scientific fact rarely gets in the way between an anti-choicer and their assaults on women’s rights. After all, Cuccinelli backed unscientific restrictions on abortion clinics based on lies. No reason to think he wouldn’t be amendable to other lies about women’s bodies, if that’s what it took to ban birth control.

But the accusations that Cuccinelli is waging war on women don’t stop there.

• Virginia 3 *

The McAuliffe campaign also ran ads highlighting Cuccinelli’s attempts to make it hard, if not impossible, for a person filing for divorce to get that divorce if their spouse objected. While the bill was technically gender-neutral, the fact of the matter was it would disproportionately affect women leaving emotionally or physically abusive marriages. Most couples who divorce are in agreement. In cases where there’s a dispute, the odds are really high that domestic violence is in the mix, even if the abused spouse can’t prove it. Without that proof, women in abusive marriages would not be allowed to divorce, at all. The law was an abuser’s dream law.

The result of all this is that Cuccinelli is losing. And the sole reason he’s losing is female voters. In an interview with Cuccinelli, the Washington Post reporter dropped how big the number really is.

• Virginia 4 *

Cuccinelli claimed that the problem was that the voters were misinformed as would learn as the election comes nearer that he’s actually a great candidate that has a lot to offer women. He didn’t elaborate what it was that he has to offer, however. Either way, this election is definitely serving up more of what 2012 showed: The tendency of Republicans to embrace Christian right ideas and attitudes about women’s proper role is finally catching up to them. Female voters are increasingly impatient with sexist politics, and more than ever are deciding not to vote for a candidate if they decide he’s not supportive of feminist goals. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in 2014 and 2016.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, just making stuff up because you wish it were true edition. Rush Limbaugh is a big fan of that, so it’s no surprise that his reaction to finding out that the life expectancy of some women has gone down was to say this:

• Limbaugh *

That’s right—wanting to be paid for your work makes you a “Nazi” in Limbaugh’s estimation. But there’s a reason that paid work and women doing it is not being considered a factor, and it’s not “political correctness.” The reason is that the women who are living shorter lives than their mothers are rural white women without much education. They are more, not less, likely, to be housewives than the women who haven’t seen a fall in life expectancy. Not that facts get in the way of a Limbaugh rant, of course.

The post Shutdown Sexism, and What Virginia’s Election Means for the Nation appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Medican’t

Gary Bauer vs. the pill

Rick Santorum vs. the pill

Lila Rose’s ego gets out of control

Utah Sen. Mike Lee vs. sex

Fox News contributor Dr. Ben Carson’s opinions on pregnancy

Yep, Nazis

Televangelist Pat Robertson lies about AIDS

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing Anna Holmes and Kate Harding about the new Book of Jezebel. The rest of the episode is all about the Values Voter Summit, an annual gathering of the Christian right that gives you a good idea what conservatives are saying about reproductive rights these days. Not good things, you can imagine!

If there’s one bright side to the federal government shutting down as Republicans try one last ditch effort to kill Obamacare, then it’s that the whole thing is drawing more coverage generally to the Affordable Care Act. It got the Daily Show to cover the lack of a Medicaid expansion in red states, for instance.

• Medicaid *

Yep, Republican-controlled states are rejecting free money to cover the working poor because they’re mad that the country re-elected Obama. There’s not much more to this story. Really, everything wrong with our country right now is explained by this story.

*********

The annual Values Voter Summit is always a delightful peek into what really gets your average right winger out of bed in the morning. The official leadership might say things like “fiscal conservatism” or even “pro-life,” but the Values Voters Summit is where the Christian right gets together and makes it clear that it’s really all about the gays and women who are “promiscuous,” a word whose definition has been expanded to mean any woman who has had sex at any point in time for any reason other than making a baby. Oh, you may think I’m exaggerating, but it’s clear from Gary Bauer’s irate speech that was exactly what’s going on. He’s really mad that President Obama made a call to Sandra Fluke to congratulate her for supporting the HHS requirement that insurance plans cover birth control.

• values 1 *

To reiterate, Fluke did not ask for you to pay for her birth control. She asked that women’s insurance plans, which they pay for either in cash or by working, cover their preventive health care, even if it allows them to have sex without being punished according to right wing standards. In other words, she asked that women not pay twice for their birth control is all. But what I really loved about this speech was it really seemed to make it official: The word “promiscuous” and its corollary “slut” have been defined down to mean “any woman who may have had non-procreative sex or simply appears to believe that’s a right.” If Sandra Fluke, who is engaged and didn’t even really speak about her own health care needs during her testimony, is “promiscuous,” then so are 99 percent of women. Indeed, by the Gary Bauer definition, pretty all women are sluts. While that may get your hackles up, I appreciate it. Makes it clear that he’s just a misogynist who wants to exclude all women from the public conversation, because most virgins are usually too young to be on the public stage in a prominent position.

Rick Santorum had a really awesome if completely confusing conspiracy theory about how the requirement that your insurance plan cover preventive medicine, including contraception, was all a plot to turn our country into a secular democracy like France. He was skeptical that the mandate was about making sure everyone had access to birth control pills if they want.

• values 2 *

No, I guess “they” did not. For one thing, it seems fairly obvious that your insurance coverage should cover your medications, and we didn’t need a separate system for what Santorum calls “those pills.” Where did we get this loony idea that your insurance should cover your medications? Even if you’re a woman? Next, you’re going to tell me insurance covers gynecological visits. Just kidding. No one tell Rick Santorum that, or he may go into total meltdown.

I mean, the irony here is that I’d love it if you could just get birth control pills for free from a vending machine, but if that was actually the plan, I can tell you right now that Rick Santorum would be at the front lines of the people fighting it.

Lila Rose reached new levels of self-congratulatory egomania during her speech.

• values 3 *

Yep, she compared her work in trying to end access to abortion and contraception to the fight for girls to get educated. In fact, those goals are in opposition to each other—even in the U.S., one of the major reasons girls drop out of school is an unintended pregnancy. She compared herself to a young woman who got shot fighting for women’s rights. That is, of course, completely backwards. People do get shot in the U.S. for defending women’s rights. Those people are called abortion providers, and 18 of them have been injured or killed in shootings or bombings by people who, egged on by rhetoric like Lila Rose’s, have decided there’s something noble about trying to end a woman’s right to say no to a pregnancy.

***********

insert interview

***********

And now for part two of the Values Voter Summit coverage! This year was a real smorgasbord of riches for those of us who try to follow the escalating hysteria of the Christian right over feminism and gay rights. Recent years have seen an onslaught of attacks on abortion rights and contraception access around the country, to the point where a lot of people are beginning to wonder if conservatives have a single-minded obsession with how women are using their vaginas these days. Despite this, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah felt that the fundies of America aren’t concerned enough with controlling sexuality.

• summit 1 *

“The family,” of course, being a euphemism for attacking reproductive rights and gay rights. Indeed, I sometimes think I need to come up with a translation dictionary some year before the Values Voter Summit so that the speeches make more sense. When they say “the family,” they’re talking about controlling and punishing sex. When they say “civilization,” they mean “patriarchy,” which makes all those warnings about the end of civilization make way more sense. “Religious freedom” means “the right to impose our fundamentalist faith on everyone else.” It makes otherwise confusing speeches easier to understand.

Anger at women for being disobedient and having sex on their own terms is always a popular theme at Values Voter Summit, but Dr. Ben Carson’s speech attacking women was even a standout under the circumstances.

• summit 2 *

Yep, he said that women should simply accept being forced to give birth against our wills and to go through our bodies being dramatically affected and the pain of labor and the serious hardships that often come from unwanted child-rearing … so that some people are occasionally nice to us and open doors for us. He felt that the only reason women don’t love being forced to give birth against our will is we’re stupid.

• summit 3 *

It’s not just that he blithely assumes that women choose abortion and contraception because we’re stupid and uneducated. It’s that he does so while exhibiting a profound lack of curiosity and understanding of women’s lives. This is a man who stood before an audience and claimed to believe that the entire experience of pregnancy is about having people pull out chairs for you. He doesn’t understand the weight gain and the morning sickness and the massive pain of labor and the way your body changes and the emotional and physical feat that is being pregnant and bringing forth a baby. But it’s women who need to be “re-educated.” Okay.

Of course, it’s not a Values Voter Summit without speakers repeatedly insinuating that legal abortion and contraception are going to bring on the end times or fascism or both. Like Joel Rosenberg.

• summit 4 *

He’s talking about abortion, of course. Never mind that abortion rates are actually higher on average in countries that restrict it. As long as it’s illegal and particularly hard for women to get, for conservatives, abortion stops being “murder” and starts being just a way to prevent having a baby when you don’t want one. But if it’s legal, it’s genocide.

*********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, non-Values Voter edition. Not all the crazy right-wing conspiracy theories available was going on at this single influential conference last weekend. Pat Robertson was happy to trot out some HIV-related conspiracy theories on his TV show as well.

• aids *

Literally not a single word of that was true, including the “ums.” That theory was floated in a 1999 book and disproved two years later. HIV didn’t come to worldwide attention until the ’80s, but researchers have traced the first incidence of it back to 1931. The World Health Organization was started 17 years after that and the polio vaccine was invented 21 years later. So not only wrong but impossible. But thanks for playing, Pat!

The post Values Voters, and Jezebels appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

How to Lose Your Virginity

How Left Eye of girl group TLC got her condom glasses

Maryville rape case

CNN interview with the Colemans

Rape apologist

Girl Scouts!

Threats

Transcript

This week on Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to Therese Shechter about How to Lose Your Virginity. A new case in Maryville, Missouri, sheds more light on what we’re talking about when we talk about rape, and why are anti-choicers threatened by the Girl Scouts?

VH1 recently aired a biopic of one of the greatest girl groups of all time, TLC, who just happened to also have a sex-positive, pro-contraception, feminist bent to their lyrics that was quite inspiring to people of my generation. The biopic reflected this sensibility by showing the other two members comfort Chili after she has an abortion she feels ambivalent about.

• tlc *

Left Eye Lopez then chose to start wearing condoms on her clothes during videos and other appearances, helping drive home a safe sex message to their young fans. Chili did go on to have a son. They were so awesome.

*********

The Steubenville, Ohio rape case highlighted for the nation exactly what the typical rape looks like in the twenty-first century: Young victims, targeted by sexual predators who think they are proving their masculinity who usually use alcohol both to make their victims easier to rape and also as protection from being held accountable. After all, the focus after an alcohol-associated rape is usually on blaming the victim for getting drunk instead of blaming the rapist for raping drunk women or even plying them with alcohol to do so. With Steubenville, I felt the narrative might have edged just a little in the right direction, with more people being outraged at young men who would ply young women with alcohol and then rape them than they are at young women making the innocent and common mistake of drinking too much at a party. There’s also more focus on how communities aid and support rapists by defending them and demonizing their victims. Now there’s a new case out of Maryville, Missouri, and it may even be an uglier situation.

• Maryville 1 *

Because of all the national attention, a special prosecutor has been assigned to the case to figure out what’s happening. What the Kansas City Star reported, however, does not look good. One of the accused rapists, named Matthew Barnett, has a grandfather who is politically well-connected, a former Missouri state representative. The Barnett family appears to be popular around town, whereas the family of one of the alleged victims, the Coleman family, was new to town and trying to overcome an outsider status. But what really jumps out at you is how the Coleman family says they were subject to levels of harassment that are kind of hard to even wrap your head around.

• Maryville 2 *

She elaborated more in a piece at xoJane.com. Her mother lost her job. The bullying got so bad they moved. She started cutting herself and tried to commit suicide twice. Their house burned down, though it’s not proven that it’s related to the case. Now that she’s taking charge of this case, her mental health has started to improve, it seems, so that’s good. But a lot of damage can’t be undone. What makes this case stand out is, as in Steubenville, the brutality of rape is impossible to minimize or ignore. With Steubenville, it was that horrifying video kids made laughing about it and the pictures. In this case, it was how they treated the alleged victim after they were done with her.

• Maryville 3 *

She was 14 at the time and the alleged rapist was 18. I say “alleged” because there hasn’t been a trial yet, but I must emphasize here that he confessed to sex with her and her blood alcohol level was .13, seven hours after she last had a drink, which is 1.6 times the legal limit. In Missouri, it’s illegal to have sex with someone too intoxicated to consent. This should have been an easy case, especially with an eyewitness at the scene confirming Daisy was too drunk to walk. But despite all this, you still have people eager to blame the victim, such as this toad Joseph DiBenedetto on Fox News.

• Maryville 4 *

Remember: she was found dumped in the cold, unable to move and scratching at the door for help. She could have died. The accused admitted having sex with her, despite her state. So, we can safely eliminate the “she lied” excuse. Which he basically takes back right away.

• Maryville 5 *

Yep, the “she was asking for it” excuse, which is still “she was asking for it” excuse even if you deny it. Rape apologists, a word of warning: She is lying and she was asking for it are logically incompatible excuses. To say she was asking for it is to say that it happened. You’re just saying this rape should be a freebie for the rapist because the victim did something that somehow “deserves” raping, in this case being a teenager who breaks the rules. You just don’t want to actually debate your assumption that a person can actually deserve to be raped, which also assumes that rapists are a vigilante police force dispensing justice to “bad girls” for things like, uh, sneaking out. Jesus. I can’t think of anything someone could do where rape is the appropriate punishment, but sneaking out as a teenager is definitely not on that list, nowhere near it. But sadly, this kind of nonsense, he is correct to say, often works on juries, because people have a lot internalized misogyny.

**********

insert interview

**********

Dealing with anti-choicers is hard, but sometimes I find it harder to deal with people who still believe the lie that anti-choice activists are somehow motivated by concerns about “life” instead of controlling women. Which is why I’m glad that the Internet has really taken right-wing radio and media out of channels where it was largely only accessible to people who were already true believers and put it where everyone can see what they really think. For instance, nowadays the fact that right wingers have it out for the Girl Scouts is becoming more well-known. When speaking to the public about it, they try to make it about abortion, but as this segment Right Wing Watch got from Generations Radio shows, it’s about so much more.

• girl scouts 1 *

Needless to say, the claim that the Girl Scouts promote abortion or even Planned Parenthood is pure stupidity. There is not and has never been evidence of that. They aren’t against it, either. They simply aren’t an organization that weighs in on these debates. Girl Scouts does promote health for girls of all ages, which means sexual health for girls who are old enough to need that, so yes, some individual affiliates reach out to Planned Parenthood for sex education. As they should, unless you’re against health, which anti-choicers often are, at least for sexually active women.  But enough of this rabbit hole of trying to disprove the allegations while also pointing out there’s nothing wrong with abortion or contraception. It’s clear that abortion and lesbianism are basically just buzz words to amplify their real concern, which is that Girl Scouts might teach female independence.

• girl scouts 2 *

Which to say that of course they object to lesbianism and abortion and reproductive health care, because all these things undermine their clearly stated view that God put women on earth as a servant class for men. This isn’t even an exaggeration. He stated directly there that women’s job is to be a “helpmeet” for a man, who is apparently the only person who actually counts in this world.

It is true that Girl Scouts do promote this version of “feminism,” one that has become so mainstream that outside of religious right circles it’s very rarely understood as feminism. But they are right that it is feminism at its most basic to tell girls, hey you are valuable as a human being. Your ambitions, your beliefs, your feelings actually matter. You aren’t here to be a compliant, unpaid servant for a man. Your life belongs to you. Basically, they’re arguing against self-esteem for girls. And the fact that girls and women are more than just servants for men is really threatening.

• girl scouts 3 *

Yes, they have overlooked the fact that simply being married doesn’t actually mean that a woman is not independent. It doesn’t mean she’s devoted herself to being a “helpmeet,” and most married women work outside the home. And yes, they have abortions and use birth control too. But that’s the point. What we’re seeing in the anti-choice movement, and the anti-Girl Scout movement and the quote-unquote men’s rights activist nonsense and various other anti-feminist movements is this basic unwillingness to accept something that should be obvious: Women can be treated like full human beings and the world won’t end. It doesn’t end when women get jobs. Or when women become leaders. Or when women see themselves as full human beings instead as accessories for men. Or when women have sex on their own terms. But conservatives clearly believe that if they keep saying the sky is falling, eventually it will.

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, threatening the country again in order to take away women’s rights edition. Bryan Fischer, on his radio show, was full of threats.

• fischer *

All of which is a fancy way of saying, either give up your human rights or you’re going to be sorry. Nice country there, be a shame if something happens to it. Look, antis. If you really don’t want a war, there’s an easy solution: Stop trying to provoke one.

The post Maryville Rape Case, Girl Scout Hate, and ‘How to Lose Your Virginity’ appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Pennsylvania bars touching pregnant women’s bellies without permission

Local coverage of Texas HB 2 decision

Rand Paul is scared abortion equals Gattaca

Abortion and politics in Texas

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking with Lori Frohwirth about magical thinking and pregnancy. There’s a major abortion court decision in Texas and Rand Paul makes a weird anti-science, anti-choice speech while stumping for Ken Cuccinelli.

So much of what I report on here is about legislative attempts to make pregnant women, all women really, public property and subject to conservative control. So it’s nice that one state has given pregnant women at least one more protection instead of taking them away.

• belly *

Okay, it’s not like a total restoration of full human rights in one of the most anti-choice states in the country. But it’s nice that there’s some recognition that pregnant women aren’t public property.

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

Three of the medically unnecessary regulations that Texas passed over the summer were set to go into effect last Tuesday. So there was a rather hasty court case in the days heading up to it, which we covered in an interview with Janet Crepps from the Center for Reproductive Rights a month ago. Now the court has come down with its decision.

• texas 1 *

In addition, the restriction forcing doctors to give an excessive and less effective dosage of RU-486 to women and make them come in for extra visits was upheld, in a ruling that made even less sense after I read it. It seems the judge was more interested in issuing a middle of the road decision than taking seriously the requirement that there be no undue burden on abortion access.

A local news station in Ft. Worth did some coverage of the decision. They interviewed people who oppose legal abortion, despite the claim from the state that these regulations are about protecting women’s health and not shutting down abortion access. Of course, you can’t actually get a real women’s health advocate to support these regulations. They did manage to find an anti-choicer who appears to have convinced herself that women are better off if they have their rights taken from them.

• texas 2 *

While I think the majority of anti-choicers don’t actually believe their B.S. claim that abortion hurts women, for those who do fall for that line, the logic goes something like this: Women are inherently asexual beings. The only reason women should want sex is to catch a man and make a baby. A woman who has an abortion or even uses birth control, therefore, is somehow in violation of her natural being. Some believe these women are being victimized by men who pretend to love them and somehow think that these women will be better off if unwanted pregnancy forces those men to stay. Never mind that being forced to be with someone who doesn’t love you sounds terrible and frankly, the idea that you can force a man to stay is a fantasy. When feminists point out that women frequently have sex because they enjoy sex, we’re accused of trying to hoodwink women into thinking they’re “like men.” It’s all very disgusting and all the more evidence that really people need to learn to mind their own damn business.

Wendy Davis, who represents Ft. Worth in the state legislature, weighed in, of course.

• texas 3 *

In a moment that really reflects how much our press just can’t wait to get a horse race angle on every single issue, the Washington Post immediately went for the “how does this affect Wendy Davis” angle by bringing in a Texas Tribune journalist and making her talk about that.

• texas 4 *

I don’t think the conservative opinion on this matters. That’s an odd thing to say. They hate her. But I must reiterate, it’s not like the election is tomorrow. The election is a full year from now and things can change a lot in that time. The real question is not how this affects the horse race, as exciting as that may be for people who see politics as if it’s just a form of entertainment. The real issue here is what’s going to happen next for Texas.

Late on Thursday, the Fifth Circuit Court took the stay on the law off, which means 13 clinics are likely to stop providing abortions in Texas. The court’s reasoning for this was basically to affirm that they didn’t think this law was a substantial burden for abortion access, which means that it’s very unlikely the court will rule in favor of the pro-choice side. [Editor's note: On Monday morning, an emergency petition was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court by attorneys for reproductive health-care providers in the state. Learn more here.]

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

Insert interview

***********

Rachel Maddow summarized [about Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)'s recent anti-choice speech at Liberty University]:

• gattaca 1 *

Yes, Gattaca. His speech was extremely weird, based on the assumption that abortion is somehow tied up in eugenics, implying that the main reason women have abortions is they find the embryo they’re gestating to be not good enough for whatever reason. This is quite literally the dumbest argument against abortion ever, and that’s saying a lot when most arguments against abortion are really dumb. The vast majority of abortions are done before any kind of genetic testing. There are abortions done because the fetus will have Down’s syndrome and other situations like that, but by and large most abortions are done in the embryonic stage. No gender is known, much less genetic blueprint. But Paul has a crappy grasp on science generally, it turns out. He thinks that the 1997 movie Gattaca is an accurate portrayal of how science will deal with genetics in the future.

• gattaca 2 *

Look, in 1997, when Gattaca was released, it was entirely reasonable to believe that once the human genome was mapped, we would have the secret to life and everything else. It was still theoretically possible that our DNA would indeed produce a literal roadmap to our lives. But now we know that’s not true at all. The information keeps coming in and the initial research is actually showing that environment has more impact than Gattaca or many scientists initially thought. For instance, there are genes that determine if you’re more likely to have fast reflexes or higher endurance, but studies show that they have surprisingly little impact on what sport people end up excelling in. But that’s okay, because Paul is happy to bend all sorts of facts to suit the anti-choice agenda. Such as the facts about what the Holocaust was about.

• gattaca 3 *

Okay, he didn’t say the Holocaust, but that was what he was implying. This is unbelievably offensive. The Holocaust was not about pulling people out of the population because they were physically less perfect. It was about targeting people, mainly for their ethnicity, specifically Jews. Unless Rand Paul is trying to say Jews are less perfect than Christians, I don’t see what he’s stabbing at here.

Look, there is no doubt that the government of the U.S. did allow deeply unethical forced sterilizations to happen, with eugenics as an excuse. Those programs, however, were about using ill-defined claims of idiocy to target people who were lower class. Interestingly, modern DNA testing is actually being used to protect people’s right to parent. In Europe, a Roma couple falsely accused of child-stealing had their daughter returned when her DNA test proved she was theirs. In addition, the pro-choice movement and legal abortion spring from the right to choose. We’re the ones fighting government control over women’s reproduction, which includes opposition to forced sterilization or forced abortion. But Paul thinks he has a nifty way around that.

• gattaca 4 *

So because he worries about state control over our bodies through DNA testing that he saw in a sci-fi movie, he proposes actually using state power to actually force real world women to give birth against their will. You can’t make this stuff up.

***********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, “it’s all in your heads, ladies” edition. John Stossel has a theory about why women go to the doctor more than men, and it’s of course because ladies are crazy.

• hypochondria *

Well, one major reason is that women’s reproductive systems require more medical interventions. Our cancer screenings start earlier, we use contraception services more than men, and let’s just say I don’t think those expensive babies that women push out of their bodies are just figments of the imagination. But John Stossel doesn’t care about any of that. He’s trying to build the narrative that Obamacare is about women “stealing” health care from men and to do that, it’s important to demonize women and use nasty stereotypes about them.

The post Magical Thinking and Pregnancy, and Texas’ Health-Care Crisis appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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John Stossel against insurance

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Miley Cyrus: Demon or pop star?

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to an activist who is working to stop rape on campus. Obamacare critics are trying to use sexism to demonize the new law, and Texas clinics started canceling women’s abortion appointments after the Fifth Circuit tells the state they can enforce a draconian new regulation.

Sketch comedians Key & Peele had a hilarious and surprisingly informative sketch about what it takes to please the ladies in bed.

• vaginas *

TV sketch comedy is often stuck in a sexist, tedious rut, but online, there’s some really funny stuff going on.

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

As noted briefly in last week’s Wisdom of Wingnuts, conservatives are trying to tie knee-jerk misogyny to Obamacare again. Before, it was all about trying to convince people, without a shred of evidence, that the Affordable Care Act somehow means your tax dollars will be paying for abortion. Then they added fussing and complaining about the requirement that insurance plans cover contraception. Now the new talking point is to claim that women are somehow taking more than their fair share of insurance, as if going to the doctor was some kind of treat that women are depriving men of having by hogging all the seats in the waiting room. Basically, what happened is twofold. One, the ACA bans gender rating outright. Gender rating was a practice of charging women more than men for insurance, and that’s gone now. Two, the ACA requires a slew of essential services to be covered, most of which are for all people, but some of which are more specific for those who can or are able to give birth, such as maternity coverage and coverage for breastfeeding support.

What the right has decided to do with this information is imply to their audience that women are stealing health care from men. I quoted John Stossel last week when he basically accused women of being hypochondriacs, but the context of the quote is, if anything, more aggravating.

• obamacare 1 *

Because that’s how insurance works? Everyone pays into a pool and we take as we need. What’s irritating is they’re sitting there pretending like this whole notion of “insurance” was just invented. Here’s reality: Prior to the ACA, insurance plans covered a whole host of services, whether you needed them or not. What John Stossel is trying to do here is basically use misogyny to try to advance an extremely radical, right-wing idea, which is that medicine should be paid on a cash-only basis. If the argument is that your “plan” should only cover what you use, then the very idea of insurance falls apart and you’re left arguing that people should only pay for what they are using. It’s just this argument, spiced with misogyny so you don’t know how radical it is.

• obamacare 2 *

That’s Sue Lowden, who lost the Republican primary to run for Senate in Nevada because she was caught basically saying that people should pay for health care in cash, or chickens if that’s what you’ve got. The fact is that this argument would mean medicine would be a luxury only the very wealthy could afford, and people see that immediately. And yet, if you put a “ladies are stealing health care!” spin on it, a lot of people suddenly are interested in hearing about why we shouldn’t have a general risk pool that everyone pays into and everyone takes from. Which is how this idiotic argument made its way into Rep. Renee Ellmers mouth while questioning Secretary Sebelius.

• obamacare 3 *

She clearly thought that was a killer argument and was so proud of herself, but it’s basically the chicken to the doctor argument. This is, I repeat, how insurance works. You pay into a pool. People take out of that pool. I will never need most of what my insurance covers. That’s true of most people. Thank goodness! But if you make it about women, all of a sudden the brain fries out, the misogyny narratives are activated, and people aren’t thinking straight. Women are stealing! Women are bad! Never mind the bizarre notion that men have nothing to do with pregnancy and have no responsibility for it.

Needless to say, Rush Limbaugh is always on hand to make the implications of these grossly misogynist arguments more obvious.

• obamacare 4 *

It’s actually not true that these things raise prices. Birth control pills and wellness plans specifically are there to lower costs through prevention. But notice how he argues that people who pay for insurance are not “paying for it themselves”. You know, they also pay premiums. So we’re back to the bring a chicken to the doctor argument. The only way the argument he’s making makes sense is if you believe that medicine should be paid for in cash and that insurance companies, with their risk pools and generalized coverage, are wrong because some people have more needs than others. He’s just hoping you don’t see that, because he’s stigmatizing women and claiming our health care needs don’t count as health care, presumably because lady parts are unholy or whatever. But take the misogyny away, and what you have is an argument against the very existence of a system where everyone pays in and people draw out as needed. Which is all insurance is and all it ever was.

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insert interview

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Last week, I reported on some of the turbulent problems in Texas with regards to its new abortion regulations. First, District Judge Lee Yeakel decided to pass an injunction against one part of the law, which requires doctors to have hospital admitting privileges, on the grounds that it would close down something like a third of abortion providers in Texas. There was much celebrating, but then it came quickly to an end on Thursday night.

• texas 1 *

To be clear, not all those clinics are shutting down. Many of the Planned Parenthoods in particular will stay open, because abortion is not a primary source of income and they don’t need it to stay in business. But they won’t be able to provide abortion. Other clinics, however, are primarily abortion clinics. They provide a very important service by focusing on abortion care, since abortion is a common outpatient procedure, and their loss is a big deal for women’s health.

This was also something of a surprise. As conservative as the Fifth Circuit is, it’s also true that there is no way to be intellectually honest and argue that the law isn’t a major obstacle for women seeking abortion. But basically, the court just blew past concerns of arguing in good faith and intellectual honesty. Because of that, clinics had to start calling women and canceling their appointments. Amy Hagstrom Miller runs five clinics in Texas, and she explained how terrible it is to Rachel Maddow.

• texas 2 *

This really drives home how serious these abortion restrictions are. It’s one thing to intellectually understand that abortion is being chipped away, but I think a lot of people don’t realize that this really is starting to mean that you can’t get an abortion if you need one. Now women are actually getting phone calls. They thought their abortions were going to happen. They were counting on those abortions. And now they are screwed. Marni Evans agreed to talk to the Texas Tribune about her situation.

• texas 3 *

She did get another appointment at a clinic in Austin that does have a doctor with admitting privileges. However, as she noted, she’s so scared that this will fall through that she booked a flight to Seattle as back-up. The scariest part is she, as she herself noted, is in a better situation than a lot of women who had appointments canceled, because she has some back-up options. For women in rural areas, such as McAllen, Texas, there’s not much hope. Amy Hagstrom Miller explained.

• texas 4 *

The clinics, along with the Center for Reproductive Rights and the ACLU, have appealed to the Supreme Court to reinstate the injunction and let the clinics start providing abortions again while this is hashed out in court. Justice Scalia gave the state a week to reply, so hopefully this week we’ll be getting some good news.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, “Miley Cyrus is a Satanist” edition. Right Wing Watch got this amazing clip of Good Fight Ministries minister Joe Schimmel losing his mind over Miley Cyrus, who ushered in the end of civilization by being sexy like approximately 99.5 percent of pop stars before her.

• cyrus *

I like how breathless he gets. He’s a bit turned on by this woman he claims is demonic and later even said was having “sex with some Satanic figure.” The titillation/condemnation cycle of right wingers who want to use women to arouse themselves and then punish women for it continues.

The post Sexists Against Obamacare, and Texas Clinics Canceling Appointments appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Ewwww

Just … no

Transcript 

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing a representative of Provide about the struggle to get abortion access to rural women. Rush Limbaugh has decided Obamacare is a plot for oversexed women to steal men’s money, and high school kids in Texas get a sexist abstinence-only Christian speaker prevented from coming to their school again.

I love reading advice columns, and love how, no matter how bad the letter writer’s partner is behaving, they inevitably describe them as an otherwise wonderful person. But this recent example from Dear Prudie struck me as a reach even by those standards.

• Madonna *

I get that people can have a lot of flaws while otherwise being upstanding folks, but someone who is always trying to make you ashamed of having a sexuality is beyond that. Luckily, Prudie advised that she dump him.

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

The highly gendered attacks on the Affordable Care Act continue. I covered this in the last podcast, but Rush Limbaugh has really taken to this idea that Obamacare is nothing but some kind of major plan to move money from men to women. And that it’s some kind of secret feminist subversive plot so that women aren’t dependent on men anymore and thus don’t have to get married to them and clean up after them. Which is just asinine. Because feminists make no secret of our distaste for forced female dependency on men. And a program that makes it easier to get health insurance for everyone is hardly what’s going to end thousands of years of sexist oppression of women. And yet, here’s Limbaugh and a caller calling in the show.

• Limbaugh 1 *

Yes, we’re supposed to be so offended that women pay health insurance premiums and get their health insurance covered. This is the worst thing that ever happened. It’s “communism” and “wealth transfer.” It’s none of those things of course. It’s always amazing to me how sexist arguments like these only work if you assume women don’t pay taxes or pay health premiums or anything like that. But of course we do. But since they’re already playing in a fact-free zone, I guess ignoring the obvious fact that women do, in fact, pay for our insurance just like men do will be an argument.

Limbaugh was humping his favorite thesis, that women only lean liberal because we’re evil people looking to steal from hard-working men. That came up in his supposed “analysis” of the Virginia race, where anti-choice fanatic Ken Cuccinelli lost to middle-of-the-road Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

• Limbaugh 2 *

So basically, the theory is that if the government starts depriving women of health care, and starts starving them if they lose their jobs, and starts starving their children out and takes away their basic right to abortion, we’ll be forced to get married. How romantic. How wonderful a worldview that sees marriage as something women have to be forced into through sickness and starvation, instead of a commitment made by two people who love each other. Oh, and it gets worse.

• Limbaugh 3 *

Seriously, his entire “argument” against not just any kind of government assistance for ordinary people—though he’s still perfectly happy with government giving massive aid to the already wealthy through grants, investment, and tax breaks—has increasingly just been that he worries that it makes women feel they can have sex without getting married. That’s his argument against Obamacare now, too, even though his argument there is that women should not receive services for the insurance premiums we pay because somehow that means we’ll be able to have sex without “paying the price,” i.e. of being stuck in an unhappy marriage. He’s been really quite focused on this fear lately.

• Limbaugh 4 *

Yep, he’s actually trying to pretend he’s trying to help women with his plan to terminate government benefits, end comprehensive health insurance, cut women off from legal abortion, and make it harder to get contraception, all in the vain hope that this will make you more likely to suck it up and get married to someone you don’t love and otherwise would like not to marry. Thanks for the offer, Rush, but I don’t think women need your, um, help.

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

insert interview

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

The kids today are pretty great. I’m frequently reminded of this, and the latest reminder is what happened in the town of Richardson, Texas, which is an inner suburb near Dallas. The PTA in Richardson arranged to have one of those obnoxious Christian right “motivational” speakers come in. This is a practice that the government really needs to crack down on, because while these speakers supposedly are there to present secular presentations, inevitably it’s just a bunch of lies and misinformation that is really meant to indoctrinate kids into fundamentalist Christian beliefs. Even if they’re really good at scrubbing the God talk from their presentations, it’s still a problem because inevitably they are promoting highly offensive and inaccurate gender stereotypes and lies about sex and contraception. The youth minister pretending to be a “motivational” speaker in this instance was a man named Justin Lookadoo, and he was there to supposedly teach kids about dating.

• lookadoo 1 *

Is this true? Was the quote that was flying around taken out of context? Well, the quote I saw being brought up over and over on Twitter and in the media was, “Dateable girls know how to shut up,” and that “They listen more than they gab.” Was that out of context? Well, no. If you read the website in question, it turns out that’s the least offensive thing on it. Other fun quotes: “Let him lead. God made guys as leaders,” which means that girls should never ask guys out, according to Lookadoo. Another quote: “Dateable girls know that guys need to be needed. A Dateable girl isn’t Miss Independent.” He describes girls as “soft” and “gentle,” and lets boys own all the fun qualities, saying that guys and only guys are “stronger, more dangerous, and more adventurous.” He says “guys don’t live by the rules of the opposite sex,” which is presumably why people said he was encouraging rape culture, which also believes that men prove their manliness by ignoring a woman’s refusals. He also says that “dateable” guys “keep women covered up.”

He has all sorts of delightful ideas about how women are weak and stupid and broken, in fact! These were easy to find online, where he advertises his quote-unquote “motivational” services.

• lookadoo 2 *

He then goes on to promise that as long as women carefully avoid having sex, avoid going to parties, and play mind games with men where they pretend not to like them in hopes that they’ll get guys to chase them, then they’ll get to marry a handsome, rich man. No, I’m not kidding. He portrays this as a matter of protecting their self-esteem, because he clearly believes the only reason women would go to parties, have sex, or show a guy they like him back is because they’re weak and desperate for men to like them. He says he doesn’t want women to “compromise” for a guy, but it’s only about these things, since his site clearly states that women are to compromise their desire to talk about themselves on dates. The possibility that we might like these things, too, is simply ignored. But men get to enjoy being horribly stereotyped too.

• lookadoo 3 *

He goes on to suggest that feminism is why guys like video games so much, because they’re pansies and yeah, it doesn’t make sense, but he needs to work any angle he can to scare people into thinking that believing in women’s equality and rights will destroy sex and relationships. In other words, it’s a lie. But don’t worry, most of his stereotypes about men are there for one reason and one reason only: To excuse bad and even abusive male behavior.

• lookadoo 4 *

Despite his claims to be a Christian, Lookadoo is openly lying here. How do I know? Well he says that he knows why his wife puts the garbage there, but then says that he steps over it anyway. That’s an admission that he’s just pretending not to know what she’s getting at. This is not some harmless sexist joke because he’s using it to blame a woman who is telling a man “no” and having that man “pretend” not to hear her. He’s basically saying it’s women’s fault if a man refuses to hear them say no to a relationship. This is all reasons why the students at Richardson threw a fit on Twitter about his presence at their school, and good for them! Luckily, he’ll never be coming back.

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Fox News just keeps getting more blunt with the misogyny edition. This is from a segment on the Fox Business channel.

• female brain *

I guess the phrase “politically correct” is now just being used to damn actual facts. No, there’s nothing wrong with the “female brain.” You want to believe so not because you’re so politically incorrect, but because you’re also just straight up factually incorrect.

The post More Anti-Obamacare Misogyny, and Abortion Access for Rural Women appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Eh, nope

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Scott Lemieux [an assistant professor of political science at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York] will be on to explain what exactly is going on with this contraception lawsuit Hobby Lobby is taking to the Supreme Court. I’ll examine the diverging trends in Texas and New Mexico. Also, is the country finally, finally getting smarter about the problem of rape?

Speaking of, Sarah Silverman has a new stand-up act out, and it has what I would call a good rape joke in it.

• silverman *

There’s this notion that feminists generally oppose any jokes about rape. But most of us don’t. We oppose jokes that are approving of or minimizing of rape. This joke, however, is mocking a culture where it’s often easier to make fun of rape victims than it is for rape victims to get support. Which is an important thing to mock and draw attention to.

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

Bad news coming out of Texas.

• states 1 *

Even if the pro-choice side eventually wins the case, many of the clinics that only do abortions will be shut down permanently. As the newscasters note, Planned Parenthood, which provides a variety of services with abortion only being a small fraction, will be staying open. However, there are a number of other clinics, some in rural areas, that only perform abortions. They will have no reason to be open while this case works its way through the courts, which could take months or worse, years. They’ll have no way to pay the rent and the doctors and nurses that work for them will have to go get jobs somewhere else. Because of that, even if they eventually win the case, they will never be able to reopen. Which means that even if anti-choicers lose, they win by at least preventing some women, especially poor women, from accessing abortion services.

Because this is such a major blow to abortion access in Texas, Sarah Silverman and Lizz Winstead decided to have a fundraiser to help women in the state out. They went on “All In” with Chris Hayes to talk about it.

• states 2 *

The notion that this is about red states vs. blue states is only floated by conservatives who are trying to confuse the issue. I get conservatives trying to play that card all the time. Oh you’re just a New York liberal and don’t tell us what to do. Except that I’m from Texas and care very much about what goes on in my home state where so many friends and family live. Which leads to what Lizz is talking about here: It’s not black and white and clearly there’s a lot of opposition to the law from inside the state. And finally, it’s worth pointing out that blue states will be helping out red state women no matter what. If abortion becomes unavailable in many red states, women will start coming to California and New York to get abortions. The help is going to happen, and it is wanted, and anyone trying to deny that is just blowing smoke.

Sarah Silverman was her usual funny self talking about this issue. Chris Hayes asked this elaborate question about how comedy can be a force to break taboos and talk about complex, touchy issues, and this was her response.

• states 3 *

The answer did prove the point better than an in-depth examination. Vaginas do scare people. But it’s also worth pointing out that while anti-choicers have created the illusion of having popular momentum of vagina-fear behind them, the reality is much different. Which was demonstrated, yet again, when abortion was put to a vote in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

• states 4 *

Time and time again, when legislators take their attempts to ban abortion to the voters, voters tell them no. The hope was that doing this with a 20-week ban would get a different result, because the hope is that people will assume that women who get those abortions are just lazy or something. But that lie didn’t work, and voters decided to keep their rights. Which is why they use backdoor methods like exploiting health regulatory power to pass unnecessary red tape on clinics, instead of just putting it to the voters for a vote.

***********

insert interview

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Is the tide turning in how this country understands and deals with the problem of sexual violence? The Steubenville, Ohio case continues to be a touchpoint, where the old way of doing things—cover it up, blame the victim, exonerate the rapists—is being abandoned and feminist demands that rape be treated like the crime it is are being honored. Not just because the young men who attacked the victim actually were punished for their crime, but because the possibility that there was a cover-up of the crime was actually investigated. And now we’re seeing results.

• Steubenville 1 *

A reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer came onto ESPN to explain the charges further.

• Steubenville 2 *

To be clear, these are only indictments and not convictions. The prosecutor may not be able to make a case and it may be that they really are innocent of the charges. However, the fact that a grand jury was convened and there was enough evidence to get an indictment is a huge deal. In all the years I’ve been doing this, I can’t think of many rape cases where conspiracy was taken so seriously. There has been some of this kind of thing when it comes to the Catholic priest sex abuse scandals, but that was a matter of adults molesting minors. Basically, this represents a new, emerging belief that yes, rape is not only not the victim’s fault, but that preventing rape and reporting rape is a collective responsibility.

Another thing that seems to be changing is the belief that victims should be cringing quietly in the shadows, instead of aggressively putting their face out there and demanding justice. While the Steubenville accuser has remained nameless, as is her right, other victims have decided that they want to come forward and share their name. That includes Daisy Coleman, who was 14 at the time of her alleged rape. And now it includes Courtney Andrews. Courtney was repeatedly raped by the same man during her adolescence, and while he was found guilty of the rape, he was also given a slap on the wrist and will never see the inside of a jail cell. Melissa Harris-Perry had Andrews on to talk about the case.

• rape 3 *

Coming forward is incredibly hard to do and someone who isn’t able to do it should not be blamed. But for those who can, like Courtney Andrews, it helps so much, I think, because if you can put a face to the victims of sexual violence, it becomes that much harder to dismiss them and dismiss their suffering. Inspired by Andrews, Melissa Harris-Perry opened up and spoke about her own experiences as a survivor.

• rape 4 *

It’s really amazing TV because Harris-Perry is trying not to cry, but clearly she has choked up. This is a really hard topic. No matter how many years go by, the fact that you looked in someone’s face while they decided to treat you like you were subhuman and undeserving of basic dignity will always feel bad. That’s why it’s even more important that people like Courtney Andrews and Melissa Harris-Perry are willing to talk about their own experiences surviving rape. Because it makes you realize that you are not alone and that lots of other people have been treated this way, and it really drives home how unfair and wrong it is.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, really bad rape metaphors edition. The Senate decided to end the filibuster for judicial nominees and leave it to a clean majority vote. Rush Limbaugh reacted in a classically tasteless way.

• Limbaugh *

He’s trying to argue against the basic principle of democracy, and he knows that’s a hard sell, so he uses rape as a distraction. It doesn’t even make sense, because in his metaphor, the majority of people are against rape. So, uh, whatever. He’s really hoping you don’t think about it.

The post Hobby Lobby, and New Indictments in Steubenville Rape Case appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Put on a bow on it

CBS coverage of the Supreme Court contraception case

MSNBC coverage of the Hobby Lobby case

Rick Santorum says employers lose religious freedom if they can’t control their employees’ health insurance

Cardinal Dolan on the health-care reform law

NPR coverage of ACLU lawsuit

Bryan Fischer whines

Lila Rose thinks your clinic is worse than Hitler

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, an examination of why birth control is good for long-term economic prosperity. More on the Hobby Lobby case before the Supreme Court, and the ACLU sues the Catholic bishops for preventing miscarrying women from getting help.

If you haven’t been following the Feminist Frequency series on video games, I cannot recommend it enough. Here’s a sample from the latest.

• put a bow on it *

She goes on to explain how often, in video games, male characters have a diverse set of personalities whereas the rare female characters have the personality of “female.”

********

Unsurprisingly, conservatives are all excited because the Supreme Court decided to hear Hobby Lobby’s complaint about not being able to deny employees earned insurance benefits if they use them for contraception. As Scott Lemieux explained last week, it’s in no small part because they want to generally expand the scope of your employer’s power to exert control over your private life, and are excited about using the combination of sexism and fears about this new health-care law called Obamacare as cover to expand the power of bosses over employees. Unfortunately, a lot of media coverage of the lawsuit fails to convey the scope of the argument. For instance, CBS gave a lot of airtime to an employer who wants to make this all about whether or not you have access to contraception, which implies that if you can get it somewhere else, then it’s no big deal.

• contraception 1 *

That softball question was unacceptable and allowed the guy to frame it as a live-and-let-live issue. A better question would be, “Why do you believe you should control an employee’s insurance plan after they’ve earned it?” Or maybe, “How is this different from telling an employee she can’t spend her paycheck on contraception, if you believe you control compensation after the employee earned it?” Or, “How much control do you believe an employer should have over an employee’s personal health decisions?” Or perhaps, “Why should my insurance plan that I earned be tailored to fit your religion I don’t share?”

MSNBC did a better job of focusing on the real issue here, which is that employers want to be able to manipulate how your compensation is issued in order to impose their religious beliefs on you.

• contraception 2 *

I’ll point out that the threat is actually more serious than simply giving corporations “the same” religious rights as everyone else. It’s actually about saying that corporations have more rights than people. I am not allowed to express my religious freedom by exerting control over something I have released to someone else. When I write a rent check, I’m not allowed to tell my landlord not to spend it on religious stuff that I don’t believe in. When you buy a TV, you don’t retain the right to tell Best Buy that they can’t spend that money on, say, buying ham sandwiches for lunch. If I give my next door neighbor a Bible and they decide to throw it away, I can’t sue them. The  insurance plan belongs to the employee—they earned it. This is an employer trying to control something you already own. It’s no different than them giving you a company t-shirt and then telling you that you’re not allowed to use it for rags.

That’s something to keep in mind while listening to Rick Santorum try to wax poetic about this.

• contraception 3 *

It’s true that most religious people don’t stop practicing when they leave church. But his argument seems to be that they can therefore walk out of church and straight into your house and start trying to impose rules on you. That in order for Hobby Lobby’s owners to have their religion, their employees will simply have to give up their own religious freedom. This notion that the religious right has that they have to be able to force you to live by their religious rules in order to preserve their religious freedom has been growing lately. This is basically a test case for it. Will the Court decide that in order for employers to have “religious freedom,” employees will have to lose the basic religious freedom to make your own health-care choices using health insurance that belongs to you? I really worry that the answer is yes, but we will have to wait and see.

Of course, Rick Santorum is hardly the only member of the religious right who is eager to bloviate about a health-care law that he clearly doesn’t understand. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who actually got a hard question to answer for once, was pushed by NBC’s David Gregory to explain why he refused to support Obamacare even though he supposedly believes in things like health care for all.

• contraception 4 *

Cardinal Dolan is being deeply dishonest, something I like reminding listeners is forbidden by the Bible. The claim that Obamacare doesn’t cover the unborn is idiotic. There is no universal health-care system, period, that has separate insurance plans for a fetus and its mother. That doesn’t make sense from a medical point of view. Obamacare does cover prenatal and maternity care, however, so anyone who wants those things should actually support Obamacare. Second of all, the claim that it goes against their religious beliefs. How so? I guess it goes against their belief that they should be able to interfere with other people’s ability to get contraception. But again, the problem here is that your religious freedom ends where mine begins. Obamacare does not force anyone to take contraception. So you should not be able to force me not to use my own insurance plan on it. Cardinal Dolan is clearly mad that the ACA [Affordable Care Act] doesn’t allow him to control other people, but that isn’t and never will be a right that he gets, no matter what collar he wears.

*********

insert interview

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One of the common talking points from anti-choicers, when trying to establish the claim that they’re more about life than misogyny, is to say that they believe in abortion if it’s to save the life of the mother. It’s a nice, neat little cover story that you should absolutely understand is total bunk. For one thing, abortion bans that make an exception for a woman’s life are nearly impossible to enforce—even if doctors plead for a woman’s life, often the authorities will say the 1 percent or less chance that she’ll survive means that they won’t allow it. But more commonly, you’ll find that even in situations where there’s no way the woman can bring forward a healthy baby, anti-choicers will opt to force her to keep carrying it, even though delivery is always more dangerous than termination. This is true even in cases where a woman is miscarrying. If a woman has an incomplete miscarriage, where the pregnancy is failing but it hasn’t failed yet, the longer you wait to terminate, the more danger she is in of getting sick or even dying from infection. And yet, that’s what the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops requires Catholic hospitals to do—wait until a fetus’ heartbeat stops on its own, even if there’s no chance of it surviving, rather than take simple measure to protect the woman from infertility, injury, or even death. Now the ACLU is suing.

• aclu 1 *

Running a fever? I’m not a doctor, but let’s be clear, that means your body is fighting off infection. This is exactly what happened in Ireland with Savita Halappanavar, who was refused a termination of her failing pregnancy even though she was clearly getting sick. Savita, was herself a medical professional, a dentist, which is probably one reason she knew what kind of medical care to ask for, even though it was denied her and she died. Luckily, Tamesha Means survived her ordeal, but she didn’t know that the hospital was refusing to give her the standard care in cases like hers. The care was refused, because the Catholic bishops believe that it’s more important to let the fetus have a few more heartbeats than it is to save a woman’s health or life. It’s hard to shake the sense that they’re punishing you for failing to be a better baby incubator.

NPR’s reporter talked to a medical professor about the actual standard for care, in case you fear there’s any confusion here.

• aclu 2 *

Again, we’re talking about, by and large, women who want their pregnancies and are already in emotional pain because they’re losing them. Refusing them basic care is just adding insult to injury. And it has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with life. These directives are issued by a bunch of Catholic bishops who don’t give two hoots about giving proper medical care at all. On the contrary, it’s a show of power from them that, even though they can’t tell an IV from a scalpel, they still get to make your medical decisions for you. Not you. Not your doctor. Not the medical researchers who have figured out the standard of care. A bunch of dudes in robes who basically make it up on the fly because they claim God told them to. That is ridiculous.

It’s so obvious that this is about misogyny and not life that even some anti-choice sources are unwilling to openly defend the bishops on this one, but that doesn’t mean that all aren’t. Like Bryan Fischer whining on his radio show.

• aclu 3 *

It did, of course, not only endanger the health of this woman but in fact caused damage. She did get an infection. She was running a fever. But more to the point, the weird whining about “imposing” morality. One is allowed to believe, as terrible a person as it makes you, that a woman who has the misfortune of miscarrying doesn’t deserve medical care. That makes you a misogynist and isn’t really “moral,” but okay, you have a right to believe that. But do you have a right to advertise yourself as a hospital, take people’s money, and then refuse to serve them? No. Hospitals have all this tax and community support, and because of that, they are obliged to provide the services they say they do. In addition, does a group like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have a right to force doctors to refuse care for fear of losing their jobs? Religious freedom is an important thing, but it’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card. You don’t get to murder people or torture animals and claim it’s just your religion. You don’t get to lie to people and tell them you’re caring for them when in fact you are putting them in danger of death. That is the question at stake here.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, reproductive rights are worse than genocide, fascism, and lynching edition. Or that appears to be the argument of one Lila Rose, who is really upset that Planned Parenthood makes it easier to have sex, which is, by her own measure, the greatest evil of all time.

• lila rose *

Yep, you sex-havers, who Lila Rose appears to believe are all having like 15 abortions a year or whatever. Planned Parenthood lets people have sex on their own terms without Lila Rose’s control, and in her eyes, that makes them worse than the Nazis, the KKK, and the Spanish Inquisition. Someone’s moral compass is all out of kilter here, but it’s not that of pro-choicers, the one-third of American women who will have an abortion, or the 95 percent of Americans who have premarital sex even though Lila Rose clearly disapproves.

The post ACLU Sues Catholic Bishops, and Why Contraception Grows Economies appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Young Lakota

Chris Hayes on GOP sensitivity

Mark Jacobs provides a bad example

Rush Limbaugh displays some sensitivity

Katie Couric walks it back some

Katie Couric’s HPV vaccine show

Unsurprisingly, the Christian right isn’t too happy with The Hunger Games

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to Brooke Tucker from ACLU Michigan about their lawsuit against the [U.S. Conference of] Catholic Bishops. The Republican Party tries to become more sensitive to women without actually changing policy, and Katie Couric airs an irresponsible program on the HPV vaccine.

PBS’ Independent Lens series featured a documentary called Young Lakota about three young people who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota going through a political wakening after Cecelia Fire Thunder declared that she would open an abortion clinic on the reservation if the state banned abortion.

• young lakota *

Fire Thunder was impeached for this move, and the film follows young activists as they deal with the fallout.

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

As if giving a gift to Twitter comedians the world over, Politico recently reported that the Republicans are now offering a class for male candidates on how to talk to and about women, especially if they’re running against a female candidate. Indeed, Twitter went quite nuts with it, spending a day offering sarcastic suggestions. But it’s easy to see why the Republicans are trying things out like sensitivity training and learning not to call your female opponent a “broad” or make fun of her for wearing high heels. Chris Hayes explained the serious problems that the Republicans are facing in elections as female voters, who vote more than men, turn away from the Republican Party.

• gop 1 *

To be clear, I don’t think the people who work campaigns actually believe that they’ll be able to convince the majority of women to vote Republican, in light, as Chris [Hayes] said, of the policy differences that the majority of women have with Republicans. Part of it is reproductive rights, as polling data shows women’s votes are more influenced by a candidate’s position on that issue than men’s votes are. But the blunt fact of the matter is that a stray, insensitive comment can lose you just enough voters to turn an election, even if you have the same policies as a winner who manages to be more evasive about his sexism in public. Todd Akin would be a recent example. He’s not all that different from a lot of Republicans on his preferred abortion policies, but that “legitimate rape” comment lost him some votes, probably enough to lose him the election. So while it pains me to see rhetoric elevated over policy, it’s actually a smart political move. They don’t need to win over most women. Just a handful enough to push candidates over the top.

However, Chris [Hayes] is right to say that knowing you have to be more quote-unquote “sensitive” and actually performing the job are very different things. A journalist, inspired by the Politico article, asked Speaker John Boehner about this issue, and his answer was quite telling.

• gop 2 *

A word to the wise: If you want to appear more “sensitive.” start by not calling women “females.” It’s grating and seems to reduce women to animals, which is why you almost always hear that usage in the mouths of men who haven’t really considered at any length the possibility that women are as human as they are. This is on a remedial level here. Creating the perception of sensitivity starts and does not end with learning a few basic rules about how to talk about people using the words they tend to prefer. But Boehner’s remarks, at least, didn’t engage in any negative stereotypes about women. Sadly, Republican Senate candidate Mark Jacobs did fall into that trap.

• gop 3 *

He made two major mistakes. One, engaging the stereotype that women are more “emotional” than men, which tends to carry the insinuation that women are less rational. Second of all, trotting out the “I know women, I married one and fathered one” line. Just don’t. It makes it sound like you live in a bubble where the only women you interact with are direct relations. It’s also insulting, because you’re implicitly comparing yourself to some other, unnamed man who doesn’t know any women. That is, a man who doesn’t exist, because, uh, women and men do not actually live segregated lives. People are going to start wondering where you got it in your head that you need to be congratulated for having basic communication with actual women, when, for most people, talking to women is roughly as remarkable as having a TV in your house or, perhaps, breathing air. So just avoid.

But no matter how much Republican politicians can learn to speak more sensitively—and they should start by dropping that word, too—they will always have to deal with the fact that their biggest spokesperson on the radio says stuff like this:

• gop 4 *

Sometimes I waver between wanting Rush Limbaugh to go away and appreciating him for being eager, time and time again, to just come right out and explain, in blunt language, what motivates the anti-feminist movement. Today, I’m in the latter camp. But check back with me again tomorrow.

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Insert interview

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Katie Couric is usually, as far as I know, a fairly responsible journalist when it comes to health-care issues. She famously went on air to get her colon tested after her husband died of colon cancer, which was a stunt that really did draw attention nationwide to how common and deadly that disease is. While cervical cancer is not nearly as widespread or deadly in the U.S., in no small part because the Pap smear is so effective at catching it early, it still kills 4,000 women a year. Which is why I was surprised to see Couric have a show about the supposed “controversy” over the HPV vaccine.

Now, there are some legitimate debates in medical science over whether or not the vaccine has been overrated as a tool to slow the disease, though it’s worth noting that both the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend the vaccines for both boys and girls. Those debates, however, will likely be resolved as more data comes in. But Couric didn’t represent that debate, not really. Instead, she made it a debate over whether or not the vaccine is dangerous, which is not actually a controversy in the world of medicine and science. It’s like having a debate over whether or not unicorns or, say, global warming is real. One side just doesn’t have an argument. The scientific evidence on this front is concrete: While there are very rare cases of side effects to the vaccine, the risks are relatively small, small enough to say that it’s quite safe. Far safer than many ordinary things we do in the course of a day, like crossing streets and driving in cars, for sure.

But Couric brought on two mothers, both deeply involved in the anti-vaccination movement and one daughter to tell a bunch of scare stories about the vaccine. The first mother blames her daughter’s death on the vaccine.

• hpv 1 *

This is incredibly frustrating, because as bad as you feel for this woman—and I feel terrible for her—the fact remains that there’s no reason to believe her death was caused by the shot. Indeed, the mother admits that her daughter’s death is due to undetermined causes. There are very rare cases of people having allergies to vaccines, but the symptoms show up within minutes, or at the most, hours after getting the shot. There’s no mechanism by which a vaccine can start causing symptoms days later, much less take 18 days to kill you. In that time, she could have encountered dozens of things, hundreds really, that are more likely suspects in her death. The ugly truth of the matter is sometimes people die and we don’t know why. It’s underhanded of Couric to use an emotional ploy like this, because most people are going to feel it’s unseemly to quote-unquote “attack” a grieving mother by pointing out that she just doesn’t have her facts straight.

The other mother had a daughter who was still alive, and it’s a little easier to see all the question marks that should be around their claims that the vaccine is dangerous.

• hpv 2 *

To be blunt, her story sounds like a lot of people with undiagnosed chronic illnesses that many experts believe are likely undiagnosed depression or some other disease that, for whatever reason, the doctors and/or the patients aren’t willing to accept are the likely causes. The doctor-shopping is a big, red flag. While there are bad doctors out there and getting a second opinion is smart in many cases, if you’re running around for years looking for a doctor to tell you what you want to hear, that’s bad. Doctors are there to accurately diagnose you, not tell you what you want to hear. There is no mechanism, again, that would cause a vaccine to do this. Vaccines are just dead viruses that teach your antibodies to recognize live viruses. The HPV vaccine is no different from any other vaccine in this regard. Both the mothers on the show are involved with the anti-vaccination movement, and a quick bout of research shows that their organizations and websites promote all sorts of nonsense and quackery, as well as the work of discredited and disbarred doctor Andrew Wakefield.

Couric also had on a doctor who, while she formally represents herself as someone who is just saying the vaccine is overrated, in reality was there to add credence to these women’s stories. Indeed, she directly cited their stories as evidences of the supposed dangers of the vaccine, which is alarmist and frankly untrue. Then, finally, Dr. Mallika Marshall, was the only person they brought on to talk about the actual, you know, facts. She got a sliver of the time as the distraught mothers.

• hpv 3 *

She went on to explain that the actual side effects of the vaccine are slight: Shots hurt, there might be a short, low grade fever. And there’s some teenagers who faint when they get shots. In other words, it’s shot-related stuff. Shots suck. But not as much as getting the virus sucks. It was a blast of good sense, but unfortunately, I suspect much of the audience wasn’t hearing it. Good sense is not as compelling on TV as a tragic story, no matter how many holes it has in it. So shame on Katie Couric for putting her thumb on the scale this way. There’s a legitimate discussion to be had about vaccines, but the truth of the matter is that if you exclude all the people who are making false claims and emotional appeals that aren’t rooted in fact, the pro-vaccine side wins this debate in a walk.

Katie Couric did walk it back, admitting that she didn’t emphasize the safety and efficacy of the vaccine enough on Huffington Post, though she didn’t offer a full apology. The link will be in show notes, so you can judge for yourself.

*********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, let’s panic because the biggest movie in America has a female lead edition. Yes, someone alerted Christian right radio host Kevin Swanson to the existence of the latest Hunger Games movie, and he is so upset.

• katniss *

Needless to say, there are a lot of men in The Hunger Games. About half the characters in the movie are men. But I guess if women are allowed to be equal characters to men in a story, then that’s as good as getting rid of all the men. Man, sometimes I’m astonished at how weak and fragile anti-feminists think men are, that they’ll just fold up and go away if women are given a modicum of power.

The post The ACLU Suit Against U.S. Bishops, GOP Sensitivity to Women, and HPV Misinformation appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Rob Ford wins for weirdest public statement from an official this year

Chris Hayes explains “rape insurance”

Sen. Gretchen Whitmer talks about her rape

Polygamy decriminalized in Utah

Facts on the Utah cohabitation case

Tony Perkins throws a fit over cohabitation case

Limbaugh thinks women are “intrigued” by leering

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Jessica Luther will be on to talk about the Jameis Winston rape allegations and what it all means for college football. Michigan becomes the latest state to ban private insurance coverage of abortion, and what does it actually mean that Utah decriminalized polygamy?

Happy holidays to you and yours! I’ll be taking next week off for the holidays, but will be back after the start of the new year. So I’d like to take this moment to play a clip of the most bizarre ladypart-related political moment all year that I didn’t get a chance to cover on this show. Bizarre Toronto mayor Rob Ford, while giving a statement denying allegations that he had sexually harassed colleagues, thought it wise to say this.

• rob ford *

Well, if you’re going to make glib denials of serious accusations, might as well go all the way.

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

Because of all the other attacks on abortion rights and contraception access, the creep of states that have decided to ban you from using your own money to purchase health insurance that covers abortion has gone relatively uncovered. That is a shame, because as I argued two weeks ago at RH Reality Check, the claim that because some people who pay for insurance with a company disapprove of abortion should mean no one gets coverage is an alarming precedent. I won’t go into it at length, but suffice it to say, if that’s true for insurance, it can be true for other businesses, such as anti-choicers arguing that banks should be banned from letting abortion providers hold accounts. Reminder, folks: Abortion is legal in America. Sometimes I think our legislators forget.

Michigan is the latest in a long list of states that has passed some kind of ban on insurance coverage for abortion. Most of them only ban it in plans that are sold over the health care exchanges, but Michigan, like 8 other states, bans it for all insurance plans.

• Michigan 1 *

So why is Michigan getting so much coverage when other states were able to get away with this more quietly? A big part of the reason is the amount of effort that anti-choicers put into passing this law. In other states that passed it, they had Republican governors who were happy to sign the law. In Michigan, however, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed the law, and the only reason it is becoming law is they managed to get a citizen’s petition to override his veto. Part of his reason was that he understood the terrible implications of just straight up banning people from having private financial interactions regarding legal medical procedures, but he also mentioned the rape angle.

• Michigan 2 *

Indeed, the “rape insurance” angle has been the popular one for opponents of this bill, because the phrase is shocking and it also drives home how ridiculous it is to expect people to get a separate insurance for a single medical procedure. It also helps drive home how we really can’t plan for every eventuality, and yes, bad things happen to good people. That’s why Sen. Gretchen Whitmer highlighted her own experiences as a rape survivor in her speech objecting to overriding Gov. Snyder’s veto to make this into a law.

• Michigan 3 *

I’m really on the fence about this framing. On one hand, it’s very important to remind people that abortion is not something that women generally plan for, and rape-related abortions do drive that home. However, most abortions are not due to rape. We always run the danger with framings like “rape insurance” of suggesting that the only people who “deserve” their abortions are those who didn’t make the active choice to have sex, as if making a choice to have sex means you lose your basic human rights. It also allows our opponents to get away with their behavior by simply adding rape exceptions that are usually unenforceable anyway, as cover. It’s not a framing I use, for this reason. A woman who had consensual sex and realizes she’s pregnant and really just can’t be is no less deserving of her abortion than a woman who was raped. I don’t like pitting those two categories of women against each other. I know people who use the “rape insurance” framing aren’t trying to do that, but I fear it’s the effect. Maybe I’m wrong and talking about rape opens up people’s minds to all the various ways your life can turn south super quick and you might need help. But for now, I think the better way to frame it is how Chris Hayes did in the second clip I played, as an attempt by anti-choicers to basically outlaw abortion without directly outlawing it, by chipping away at the financial transactions, from Medicaid coverage that was banned in 1976 to this new attempt to ban private transactions that help pay for abortion. That is the real story here.

**********

Most of the time, legal decisions striking down unjust and frankly sex-phobic laws are the result of lawsuits brought by pretty liberal people: Feminists, gay rights activists, that sort of thing. Which is why it’s kind of unusual to see people who are not only conservative but believe openly in a very gender restrictive patriarchy are just the latest plantiffs in yet another case tearing down a law that should have been struck from the books decades ago.

• utah 1 *

This was the correct decision. Yes, Mormon fundamentalists have nauseatingly retrograde views of marriage and women and believe that women are a subservient sex and housework class put here to serve men. But so do a lot of other monogamous fundamentalist Christians, and we don’t arrest them for it. The case hinged on one question and one question only: Can consenting adults who aren’t legally married live together and have sex if they want? All other questions are noise, since the polygamists in this case aren’t applying for multiple marriage licenses. The families that sued are families where all the second and third and fourth wives are consenting adults and they aren’t legally married to the husband. So really, they are just cohabitating, and that’s the only issue at stake here. The polygamous families where men are having sex with underage girls or there are coerced marriages will still be prosecuted under various criminal statutes involving sexual and domestic violence.

• utah 2 *

The critical thing to remember here is that Utah is one of the few states in the country that criminalizes it if a married couple has other sexual partners living with them. Since the polygamous families being targeted in Utah aren’t legally married, it was actually a ban on cohabitation that was being overturned here. Prior to this lawsuit, only four states in the country had a ban on cohabitation. Now it’s down to three. Unsurprisingly, Rick Santorum, who is a big fan of laws that regulate what consenting adults can do in their own bedrooms, threw a massive fit on Twitter.

• utah 3 *

Well, yes. But that’s good. We should not be throwing people in jail for having adulterous sex, something that statistics say like a quarter to half of people do at some point in their lives. It’s worth noting, too, that Rick Santorum’s wife was cohabitating for years in her relationship prior to her marriage to him. Does he really want to go on the record saying his wife should be doing time for her supposed crime? It’s important to make a distinction between behavior you may disapprove of, including cheating, and behavior that should be illegal. I don’t love religious polygamy, but throwing people in jail for it is not only a violation of their rights as consenting adults, but it also seems like a piss-poor idea. Polygamous families are not made healthier or stronger by throwing the children’s caretakers in jail.

For some reason, CNN thought it advisable to invite notorious homobigot Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council on to share his opinion.

• utah 4 *

Worth pointing out that the Bible that Perkins loves so dearly actually has plenty of plural marriage in it. Lots and lots of Biblical patriarchs had multiple wives. But he’s not wrong to say there’s a progression here, in that it’s true that once we decide that consenting adults who aren’t harming anyone else should be able to have sex when and how they like with other consenting adults. But he’s absolutely wrong to say that’s a bad thing. It’s a great thing. It’s a waste of resources to attack people because you don’t like the way they have sex, which is none of your business anyway. Indeed, it’s worth reiterating that the law he wants Utah to keep does not exist in 46, now 47 states. And yet somehow the world continues not to end just because consenting adults live together without being legally married.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Rush Limbaugh continues to extol the virtues of sexual harassment edition. After he claimed that liberals are trying to outlaw men looking at women, he then basically argued that babies can’t be made unless men grossly leer at women to make them uncomfortable. And then this:

• Limbaugh *

I don’t really believe that Rush thinks women love it when they see him leering at them like some yahoo who has never seen women before. Indeed, the claim that procreation could never happen without men harassing and leering at women is the exact opposite of my experience. Women are generally repulsed by men who leer and say nasty things, and we are much more into men who are charming and know how to do things like flirt with you. Going to dinner with a man who stars slack-jawed at your boobs all night is not a woman’s idea of a fun date. Conversation and subtle building of sexual tension is how, in the real world, men actually win women over.

The post Polygamy Decriminalized, Rape and College Football, and Insurance Abortion Bans appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Time to stop playing defense

Stop abortion “with a gun”

More guns and abortion talk

Panic over female breadwinners

“Abortion Machines”

Texas man can’t take his pregnant wife off life support

Laura Ingraham’s ignorant rant

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be reviewing the year in misogyny. Also, a Texas writer explains how bad the crisis pregnancy center situation is there, and a Texas man can’t take his pregnant wife off life support, even though that was her express wish.

NPR had a great segment worth checking out on attempts to move the ball forward for reproductive rights activists, instead of always playing defense.

• npr *

They have to do that thing where they let anti-choicers come on and tell lies for “balance,” but on the whole, it’s a great overview of attempts to actually codify and protect and even advance women’s access to reproductive health care.

********

After the debacle of 2012 where Rush Limbaugh’s insistence on calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” and insisting that she be forced to tape her sexual encounters for his pleasure, you’d think that conservatives would have learned. Limbaugh lost advertisers and there was a definite electoral hit for Republicans because of the perceived comfort with sexism. But despite that, 2013 was an over-the-top year for gross sexism in right-wing media. I’ve grabbed some of the biggest examples, culled from that wonderful organization Media Matters that is so great about staying on top of this stuff. The aggression towards women who advocate for legal abortion alone showed how little the anti-choice position is about life and how much it’s just base misogyny.

• 2013 1 *

Indeed, Limbaugh was far from the only person on the right to suggest that women who have abortions should die from being shot, presumably through the vagina. Steve Stockman, who is trying to primary Texas Senator John Cornyn right now, has a campaign sticker that says, “If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted.” Considering that anti-choicers have repeatedly, downright routinely, resorted to violence in an effort to prevent women from getting safe, legal abortions, this kind of language should be considered not just hateful, but provocative.

The hostility to reproductive rights has always been part of a larger anger at women for wanting to have more out of life than to be just appendages to men. Taking reproductive rights away is both about punishing women for demanding equality and using our biology as a weapon against us so that we can’t achieve it. It’s hard, after all, to compete with men in the workplace if you are constantly dealing with unwanted childbirth. But 2013 was the year that conservative media started to get more explicit about expressing the belief that women are second class citizens who exist primarily to serve men. Like Lou Dobbs panicking at the thought that women … might actually make as much money as men.

• 2013 2 *

Why is society dissolving around us? Well, the study he refers to shows that 40 percent of households are ones where women are the sole or primary breadwinner. Most of them are single moms, but a small percentage are homes where women make more money than their husbands. In fact, it’s only 37 percent of that 40 percent. The only real reason to be concerned is that the numbers of “breadwinning” mothers is not higher. If women were equal to men, then half of marriages would be one where the wife makes more. It would be random and not gender-based at all. But Erick Erickson of Fox just freaked the hell out.

• 2013 3 *

You know, if women are “naturally” an inferior servant class to be used by men, then it wouldn’t take the force of law to keep us there. It’s fascinating that simply letting us be free—giving us reproductive rights, letting us apply for jobs and have bank accounts, letting us go to college with men—somehow made us immediately abandon our “natural” state of subservience. In fact, one would think, looking at the evidence, that there’s nothing ”natural” about women living as second class citizens at all, but in fact that they were only kept there by oppression, and the second that oppression relaxed even a little, we rushed to embrace the chance to be men’s equals. Indeed, that would suggest that our natural state is as men’s equals, human beings just like them. I have a lot of natural instincts, and I can say they take a lot more than mere permission not to indulge them to squelch them. Telling me I don’t have to eat doesn’t mean that I don’t eat when I’m hungry. Usually the only thing that keeps me from my natural state of eating when I’m hungry is taking the choice to eat away from me. If something is natural, then people will largely do it even if they have a choice otherwise. That’s the problem with the claim that women have to be forced to perform our supposedly natural behaviors.

Erickson was also the dillweed who coined the term “abortion Barbie” to describe Wendy Davis. The joke is “funny” because women aren’t real people, just dollies like Barbies, and how dare Wendy Davis try to influence legislation like she’s people. But he was hardly the only one who used the word “abortion” to demean women and express the idea that we are quite literally subhuman.

• 2013 4 *

If it’s not immediately obvious how objectifying and demeaning that is, think about it this way: Imagine if a woman said giving men the right to control their own bodies turned them into “machines.” Imagine if, say, Hillary Clinton pretended to be concerned said that letting men have access to Viagra reduced them to “sex machines” and, for their own good, we had to take that away from them. She would immediately be seen, correctly, as a man-hater who is only pretending to be concerned in order to reduce men’s quality of life for sadistic reasons. That’s all Limbaugh is doing here, and more than any other quote, I think that sums up the conservative media’s approach to women in 2013.

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insert interview

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As listeners are no doubt aware, anti-choice legislators around the country have spent years upon years passing one law after another designed to build the case that legally, a pregnant woman should be considered more an incubator for her fetus than a full person with full human rights. While the intention of these laws is mostly to lay the groundwork for a challenge to abortion rights, these laws have to be enforced and end up therefore hurting people who often had nothing to do with abortion at all. The latest victims are Erick and Marlise Munoz, a Fort Worth couple who are being put in an awful situation against their will by the State of Texas.

• texas 1 *

She was only 14 weeks’ pregnant when she collapsed. Barely out of the first trimester. This isn’t even like previous cases where doctors try to get a maybe-viable fetus out of a woman before she dies or is allowed to die. This is a direct and nauseating case of the law forcing a man to treat his wife’s body like it’s a baby incubator for a baby that he’s already determined he does not want if this is the price that has to be paid. To not only have this happen to your wife but to have the State of Texas tell you that they see her less as a human being with rights and more just as a baby maker has to be devastating. That he can’t begin the process of grieving for months now while his wife’s body incubates this baby. They can’t even do an autopsy to determine what killed her, so it’s just a mystery right now. But say it was a pulmonary embolism. What will the lack of oxygen in her body before they put her on life support do to a developing fetus? It can’t be good.

And while anti-choicers love to portray people making these hard decisions as idiots who aren’t thinking things through, it seems both the Munozes had very carefully considered the choice to reject life support under such circumstances.

• texas 2 *

So, they are both medical professionals and have, between them, probably more experience with these kinds of issues than the entire Texas legislature combined. Their choice is really no surprise to anyone who knows anything about this issue, which of course none of these anti-choice legislators can be bothered to do. There’s a lot of research that shows that medical professionals who actually have to deal with these things day in and day out are much more likely than the general public to reject heroic measures or being put on life support when there’s almost no chance of recovery. Indeed, Erick Munoz consistently refers to his wife in the past tense, suggesting that as far as he’s concerned, she’s already dead. As sad as that is, it’s a much healthier attitude than the magical thinking that permeates the anti-choice movement.

CNN interviewed a lawyer to explain the legal reasoning behind this. Needless to say, it’s garbage.

• texas 3 *

The thing is that the “unborn” are not, in fact, citizens. But this man and his wife are. This law is really much more about stripping away personhood from women and the fetus is just an excuse. You can tell from that clip that the hospital staff is not particularly happy with the situation, either. I suspect that the people who drafted this law didn’t really think about the implications for families of women whose right to die with dignity has been stripped in order to create legal precedent for the idea that women are incubators first and human beings second. But the sadism of the anti-choice movement has grown to a degree that I can’t imagine most anti-choice activists can be bothered to care at this point.

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, imaginary women are threatening you by giving birth edition. Laura Ingraham went on an ignorant rant recently.

• ingraham *

There’s zero evidence for the phenomenon that she just described. Even if it’s happened once or twice, it’s hardly some kind of broad phenomenon that anyone should worry about. Are children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants? Of course, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that it’s a conspiracy. It’s just that people come here to live and work and babies get born. That’s all.

The post 2013 Media Review, and a Texas Law Takes Away a Woman’s Right to Die With Dignity appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

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B.S. “states rights” argument

Limbaugh calls contraception “abortifacients”

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Wishful thinking

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Amanda Allen from the Center for Reproductive Rights will explain what to expect in 2014 in the States. A lawsuit exposes the true motivations behind the attacks on the contraception mandate and it looks like the Texas anti-abortion law is headed to the Supreme Court.

Dr. Kenneth Edelin was a hero to the reproductive rights movement, an African-American doctor who was unfairly and unconstitutionally convicted for manslaughter for performing an abortion. He went on to be an adamant doctor and activist for abortion rights. He passed away recently.

• edelin *

That was from a tribute video made to celebrate his life from Planned Parenthood, which you can find online.

**********

The conservative objections to the contraception mandate have reached a new level of ridiculousness. Not only are they now claiming that employers of any sort have a right to deprive employees of their own, earned insurance benefits because the employer doesn’t believe in them, but now a group of nuns is claiming that merely signing a piece of paper is so unbelievably burdensome that the entire contraception mandate needs to be thrown out.

• contraception 1 *

Look, I don’t think this group should get an exception in the first place. They hire people to do a job, which is run a nursing home, and performing that job has nothing to do with adhering to Catholic doctrine about contraception. Since the benefits belong to the employees, who earned it right alongside their paychecks, then it has nothing whatsoever to do with the nuns and their beliefs. Withholding the benefit makes as much sense as refusing to pay people because you worry they’ll buy condoms with their paycheck. But they’re not even refusing to offer the benefit! They’re just refusing to sign a piece of paper. I suspect the real purpose of the lawsuit it to get rid of the contraception mandate completely by making it such a legal morass to enforce that the only solution is to get rid of it. I cannot think of another instance where people claim it violates their religion to sign a form stating what their religion is so that they can get an exception to the law. Which is one reason why we shouldn’t be too worried that there’s been a temporary stay put on the law for these groups. It’s just until the case is decided, but I’m skeptical that they’ll be able to argue effectively that signing a piece of paper is too substantial a burden on their religion.

Indeed, it’s becoming quickly apparent that the entire “religious liberty” thing is just a fig leaf to attack the idea of enshrining contraception as a normal part of health care. That becomes obvious when Mitt Romney went on Fox News and tried to pretend that the contraception mandate is wrong because, uh, “states rights.”

• contraception 2 *

That’s a non sequitur, though it usually is when conservatives start blathering about “states rights.” If the contraception mandate really is somehow anti-religious freedom, then it would be whether in Massachusetts or in Texas. What’s going on here is that conservatives are just tossing every B.S. argument they can out against the contraception mandate, and don’t care how silly they sound. The point is to gin up furor over the contraception mandate in order to stigmatize contraception itself, with an eye towards chipping away at access to it as they chipped away access to abortion. How do I know this? Well, in part it’s because it’s become commonplace in right wing media to claim that contraception is abortion, which is a naked attempt to borrow the stigma they’ve already applied to abortion and apply it to contraception.

• contraception 3 *

Never mind that all insurance plans cover a bunch of stuff you don’t need and there’s no such thing as a tailor-made insurance plan that only covers exactly what you need. The fact of the matter is that the ACA does not and has never required plans to cover abortions, or as Limbaugh calls it, “abortifacients.” There’s a reason he used that term, by the way. It’s because it’s the new conservative word for drugs that prevent pregnancy by suppressing ovulation, and clearly offend conservatives both because they’re effective and they’re female-controlled. Conservatives claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that these pills actually work by killing fertilized eggs and use that as an excuse to characterize them as “abortion.” The obvious motive here is to stigmatize hormonal contraception to the point where it becomes politically easier to start restricting access to it. Which is why conservative commenters like Fox News’ Stephen Hayes try to claim the mandate covers “abortifacients” at every chance they get.

• contraception 4 *

He’s also lying with that “on our behalf” part, of course, because the point is that the insurance plans belong to the employees, which is why it’s not a big deal for insurance companies to provide contraception coverage directly without going through the employer’s health-care plan. But what I want to draw attention to is the repeated use of the word “abortifacient” to describe, no doubt, hormonal contraception that works by suppressing ovulation. Conservatives know from experience that repeating a lie long enough can make it seem more true, at least to the public. This is about stigma, and making it socially taboo to take the birth control pill.

Unsurprisingly, one of the favorite tactics of right-wing media is to pretend that the Obama administration is ganging up on helpless nuns.

• contraception 5 *

While Tucker Carlson would love to paint nuns as a bunch of childlike virgins who can’t be treated like full citizens under the law, the reality is this order is a group that hires people. They are employers, and they have to comply with employment law. They are also adult women. They are also not being asked to supply contraception. No one is, because this is about health insurance owned by employees. But they aren’t even being asked to provide health-care plans that cover it! They are being asked to sign a piece of paper. Being asked to sign a piece of paper stating your religious views to get an exception to the law is not being treated as an “enemy,” and it’s simply a lie to state otherwise.

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insert interview

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Well, one way or another, it looks like the new Texas law [HB 2] is headed to the Supreme Court and probably quite soon. After the Supreme Court allowed Texas to start enforcing its new law requiring doctors to have hospital admitting privileges to perform abortions, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had a chance to hear the appeal itself.

• texas 1 *

This is it, folks. After this, it’s going to the Supreme Court and there is almost no way the Supreme Court isn’t going to take the case. I know that for a couple of reasons. One, there’s been so many laws like this one passed around the country that the court pretty much has to weigh in at this point. Anti-choicers have this novel strategy of claiming that they’re passing these laws to protect women’s health, a risibly transparent claim when there is no doubt on any side of the issue that the laws are there to shut down abortion clinics so women can’t get abortions. With that novelty, there’s been conflicting cases in the courts that make it pretty much mandatory for the Supreme Court to figure it out. Two, it seems that the Fifth Circuit is almost sure to basically sign off on the idea that you can make Roe v. Wade meaningless by allowing states to pass disingenuous restrictions until legal abortion is impossible to get.

• texas 2 *

As Rachel Maddow goes on to point out, the almost certain ruling in favor of Texas that’s about to come from the Fifth Circuit Court conflicts with what the federal appeals courts in other states have ruled on this issue. Which means there’s no way around it, the Supreme Court will have to weigh one court’s opinion against another and decide if, in fact, these kinds of laws are constitutional. If the Supreme Court decides to uphold Texas’ law, that means that other, similar laws in other states will start going into effect. The result will be the closing of probably hundreds of clinics around the country. This is bad, like really, really bad. There’s no way to sugarcoat it. The odds are highly likely that the entire fate of legal abortion rests on the shoulders of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who voted anti-abortion last time he had to cast a vote on the matter. I wish I had better news for you, but I don’t.

The one hope rests on the possibility that the naked intent behind these laws will cause Justice Kennedy to understand that they cannot be upheld at all while maintaining intellectual honesty.

• texas 3 *

In a handful of clinics, nearby hospitals have been swift to help them out by giving the doctors admitting privileges that they know they will never need to use, because abortion is so safe. But, if this goes to the Supreme Court, they will have an opportunity to rule on more than the narrow question of admitting privileges. They’ll be able to craft general guidelines to tell states if a regulation is acceptable or not, and that might mean going so far as to allow them to pass any regulation they want, even if it’s just a transparent attempt to shut down abortion clinics while only pretending to be health-related. The sky could be the limit, honestly. It’s not that hard to imagine how to come up with all sorts of red tape that make providing abortion impossible while still saying it’s technically legal. Hopefully, it won’t come to that, but the day of reckoning is drawing near. I wish I could say otherwise, but them’s the facts.

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, magical thinking edition. One reason Ken Cuccinelli lost his bid for governor of Virginia is that his extreme anti-choice agenda hurt him in the polls with female voters. But David Barton thinks the problem is Ken Cuccinelli wasn’t anti-choice enough.

• barton *

David Barton is a shameless liar is known for trying to pretend that the Founding Fathers were fundamentalist Christians and other such nonsense. But even by his standards, this is a massive whopper. I really do think he just made up that “analysis” he claims to have seen.

The post Looking Ahead to 2014, and New Objections to the Contraception Mandate appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Lindsay Beyerstein will report on what she learned spending time in the Rio Grande Valley, where legal abortion has been regulated out of existence. The battle over buffer zones in front of clinics goes to the Supreme Court and right-wing media is turning every story they can into an opportunity to bash women.

Thomas Ridgewell has a fun video up that is a six-minute version of the sex talk. I really liked that he included information about enthusiastic consent.

• sex talk *

Watch the whole thing at the link!

********

No, you’re not paranoid. Anti-choicers are feeling particularly entitled lately, which is probably the sole reason that they’re passing an epic number of laws restricting women’s access to abortion and making other efforts to reduce women’s access to contraception. If there’s any doubt about that, then the fact that they’re trying to make hay—again—over laws that keep anti-abortion protesters from blocking doors and yelling in women’s faces and otherwise harassing women should put any doubts to rest. The courts have repeatedly found that it’s perfectly legal for states to pass laws disallowing anti-choice protesters to stand in clinic doors or that forces them to stand at a distance to allow women and clinic workers to go in and out of clinics without being subject to direct, in-your-face harassment. But now they’re in front of the Supreme Court again with it, and for no other reason than anti-choicers think Justice Anthony Kennedy has grown more hostile to abortion rights in the past decade or so.

• buffer 1 *

Let’s think about this with even a modicum of common sense. Imagine if something as simple as a restaurant, say a Hooters, were suddenly targeted by a bunch of unhinged protesters who were absolutely obsessed with shutting the place down, convinced that all sorts of evil and debauchery was going on in there. Imagine if these protesters blocked the door, got into people’s faces and yelled at them, accused them of debauchery and murder, and routinely escalated the harassment until there is a real danger that one of the protesters will go overboard and start shooting customers. Would this even be a “free speech” issue? Absolutely not. The cops would be there all the time, rounding people up and tossing them in jail. If you have any doubt about that, look what happened to Occupy protesters who were far less invasive and harassing. And if the protesters said that they were just trying to “educate” people about the supposed dangers of Hooters, they’d be laughed out of court. If they claimed that their free speech rights are only protected if they are able to force people to listen to them through harassment, the judges would fall over laughing. They wouldn’t even need to pass a special law protecting Hooters. The existing laws about public misbehavior and harassment would be enough.

And make no mistake, concerns about harassment and violence are not being overblown here. CBS Boston interviewed Liam Lowney, who has personal experience with how ugly things can get when protesters aren’t kept in check.

• buffer 2 *

But despite claiming to be “pro-life,” anti-choicers are more worried about establishing the right to get up in your face and harass you than they are about piddling concerns about protecting actual people’s lives. There’s a distinct whiff of whininess coming from the anti-choice attorney, Philip Moran, in complaining that it’s supposedly unfair to make anti-choicers keep what is a really small distance.

• buffer 3 *

They show the buffer in front of Planned Parenthood on the video for the segment, so you can get a full eyeball of how small it really is. It looks like it takes about 5 seconds, max, to traverse. If you stand outside of it, believe me, people going in and out will see you. If women coming into the clinic are interested in what you have to say, they can easily stop and talk to you. So the only issue at stake, realistically speaking, is whether or not anti-choicers are entitled to a captive audience in order to have “free speech.” The issue here is whether or not they get to physically force women to listen to their bile and harassment by getting in their faces. It turns out that not only do anti-choicers think they own your uteruses, they also think they own your ears.

Martha Coakley is the state attorney defending the law before the Supreme Court.

• buffer 4 *

The freedom of association is also a constitutional right, and it seems to me that part of that freedom is the freedom not to have to put up with someone who wants to harass you. Indeed, this understanding has led to plenty of laws that are there to, as Coakley said, balance freedom of speech with a person’s right not to be harassed. For instance, anti-stalking laws and some public nuisance laws. And, like I said, if this was a Hooters or even just another medical clinic, the notion that “free speech” entitles you to get up in people’s faces and physically block their ability to get into buildings would be laughed out of court. But when it’s an attack on women’s rights, all of a sudden the issue gets confused. It shouldn’t be.

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insert interview

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Right-wing media notoriously and angrily threw a massive fit over the fact that liberals have characterized attacks on abortion rights and contraception as a “war on women.” It was supposedly off-bounds to claim that warring on women should be seen as a war on women, and wah wah wah. But despite being so hostile to the phrase the “war on women,” it seems that, in conservative media, obsessively hating on women is becoming more and more of a thing all the time. Lately, conservative pundits have started to make a point of trying to turn every topic, no matter how little it has to do with gender, into attacks on women. For instance, there was a spate of coverage of the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s War on Poverty. John Stossel managed to take the topic and make it a whine that women aren’t as trapped by marriage as they were back in the days when their economic and social opportunities were more constrained.

• women 1 *

I don’t even know what to say to someone who thinks that it’s so important to make sure that every man has a wife to pick up after him that he’s willing to force women into starvation and homelessness in hopes that they, in desperation, will marry a man they don’t want to be married to because they fear starvation is their only alternative. The breathtaking misogyny of that, I hope, stands on its own. It’s untrue, of course, that social spending breeds “dependency.” In fact, the war on poverty worked, and the only reason that income inequality is growing again is because many of the initiatives that liberals have passed throughout the years to reduce poverty have been done away with. Poverty, for being a big issue, is actually a pretty simple one. People are poor because they don’t have enough money. The solution, therefore, is to raise wages and bolster the social safety net. The only reason that single women are brought up at all by conservatives is they’re trying to use underlying cultural misogyny as a distraction from the basic facts. It’s like trying to get people so angry at women who dare to think that we deserve basic rights like choosing when and who we marry that people don’t think about how poverty is actually not that hard a problem to solve, if you want to solve it. Which John Stossel does not.

By the way, men’s wages have stagnated and dropped in past decades too, so the belief that women can get out of poverty by becoming financially dependent on men is just a myth.

The exploding amount of obsessive misogyny on Fox has grown to the point where somehow even the Chris Christie bridge traffic scandal is being used by pundit Brit Hume to whine that women have too much power in politics.

• women 2 *

In the real world, the issue with Chris Christie is that his administration is stocked full of cronies who think nothing of creating a traffic jam to exact petty revenge on someone from the opposing party who didn’t offer him an endorsement for an election he won. That kind of petty cronyism has never been considered a good trait in a politician, but sure, let’s pretend that the problem is that women are ruining everything because they are supposedly so weak and delicate. It’s absurd, but despite the fact that even other pundits on Fox News were skeptical that the problem with Chris Christie is that ladies ruin everything instead of Christie’s own corruption, Brit Hume went on the O’Reilly Factor to double down.

• women 3 *

Love that Bill O’Reilly thinks he’s a “tough guy” because he yells at people on his show and cowardly cuts off their mic if there’s a chance they might say something that counteracts his narrative. If this clip didn’t make it clear that these guys are consumed with anger that women are now allowed to be political leaders, then this digression should make it absolutely clear how true that is.

• women 4 *

Oh, Bill O’Reilly thinks men need to be able to “chastise” women, no matter how smart or powerful. Not criticize them, like equals do, but chastise them like an adult scolding a child. The reason that people call that sexist is because it is. You get the impression that O’Reilly feels entitled to bend Hillary Clinton over his knee and issue a spanking. Of course, men like that are skeptical of women being in politics at all, and these men’s anger that women are allowed to sit at the table is not well-concealed here.

But really, out of the most recent examples of conservatives bending every topic to complain about how women are ruining everything by supposedly making everything soft and feminine, this might be the winner.

• women 5 *

Banning millionaires from using drugs to cheat at baseball is not and never has been the equivalent of forcing anyone to give birth against their will. It’s not even particularly about bodily autonomy, but about whether or not paid athletes are allowed to get an edge that their competitors might not have. The notion that Limbaugh’s inability to watch a ‘roided up baseball player bat a ball around is the equivalent to a woman being able to exert basic control over something so personal as when she has sex or when she gives birth is laughable. Almost as laughable as Limbaugh trying to turn his grievance about a minor issue in the rules of baseball into yet another rant about how unfair it is that he doesn’t get to punish strange women for having sex he didn’t sign off on.

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, let’s minimize the dangers of domestic violence on Fox News edition. Thomas Gagnon was jailed for breaking a restraining order when he invited his ex-girlfriend to join Google Plus. On Fox News, this story was taken as reason to insinuate that restraining orders are just a matter of vindictive women depriving innocent men of their right to contact you whenever they want.

• google *

In the real world, the fact that the break-up happened so close to the proposal suggests that the likeliest explanation is that he was playing mind games with her—the flowers after the beating kind of trick. Roller coaster behavior like that is a red flag for domestic violence. The only question here is whether or not he sent the Google Plus invitation on purpose. If so, then yes, it’s intimidation of the I’m-watching-you variety. If not, then he should be set free. All this speculation only serves to undermine victims of domestic violence and their right to be safe.

The post Battle Over Buffers, and Texas’ New Abortion Desert appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Channeling the thoughts of God himself

Abortion restrictions are, uh, job creation

Steve King really thinks women who have abortions are lying sluts

Melissa Harris-Perry

Victim-blaming

Tucker Carlson is the worst

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to RH Reality Check’s legal analyst about the right to lie case in Ohio. The House of Representatives wastes time attacking abortion again, and online harassment starts to get the mainstream media attention it deserves.

Rebecca Watson decided to tackle the issue of biblical submission in her latest video blog.

• submission *

She goes on to talk about how this discussion always gets caught up in women angrily saying they choose their choice and that puts it beyond criticism. Which she rightly points out would mean they should, by their own measure, accept, say, men ceding control of their lives to their wives. And they don’t, so there you go. Watch the whole thing at the link!

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Because the House of Representatives has decided in recent years that the only meaningful work for Congress is to attack access to abortion specifically and access to health care generally, it was definitely not a surprise that the House spent much of January on HR 7, a bill banning federal money being spent on abortion. “But wait,” the attentive, feminist listener of this show is saying to herself, “Isn’t the government already banned from spending federal money on abortion?” Why yes, listener, the government is, under something called the Hyde Amendment, which already bans federal money from being spent on abortion in most cases. But that amendment has to be reupped every year, and even though it’s sadly in no danger of not getting reupped, that gave House Republicans an opportunity to indulge their twin obsessions of punishing women for having sex and denying low-income people access to health care. Certainly more fun for them than passing meaningful legislation intended to improve people’s lives in this country.

So it was a massive waste of taxpayer money passing a bill that will go nowhere for no other purpose than the House of Representatives seems to think their job description is posturing about how much they hate abortion. But there was one silver lining, which is the inevitable number of moments where the ignorance and mean-spiritedness of the abortion opponents in Congress was on full display. Such as Rep. Tim Walberg of Wisconsin, who arrogantly explained both that he is the expert about what God wants and how his interpretation of what God wants needs to be written into law, First Amendment be damned.

• abortion 1 *

Cutting it off there because he just keeps going on and on and on and it’s really boring. Anyway, you get the gist of it. Not only does he think that his particular interpretation of a single verse in the Old Testament should be imposed on the country, despite our supposed freedom of religion, he also seems to think that the words of kings should trump the democratic process. Is abortion a conduit for conservatives to impose their anti-democracy desires on the public? It appears to be, in part.

But at least the Bible-thumping has the advantage of being straightforward. Rep. Bob Goodlatte from Virginia thought that it was wise to propose forcing low-income women to give birth as a jobs program.

• abortion 2 *

This is a foolish thing to say generally, but is doubly foolish at a time of high unemployment, which definitely disproves Goodlatte’s theory that the number of jobs available automatically adjusts to encompass the number of people who need work. His comment also goes back to a weird tendency on the part of anti-choicers to argue about abortion as if having it legal and affordable means that human beings quit reproducing. If that was true, you’d think we would have noticed by now. It’s really quite amazing to me how frequently conservatives will talk about childbirth and marriage as things people don’t choose on their own and so have to be coerced, usually economically but sometimes legally, into doing it. I get that conservatives are hostile to science, but it’s a hypothesis that has been thoroughly tested and debunked. It’s so weird.

Then there was just the astounding lack of basic human decency on display. Rep. Steve King was so excited to characterize women who have abortions as stupid sluts that he actually had this exchange with Susan Wood, who was testifying against the bill by saying that abortions often cost more than a woman’s rent.

• abortion 3 *

Rep. Steve King is no doubt a wealthy man who pays a lot for housing and so thinks it’s just hilarious to imagine that women are getting multiple abortions a month, which is not even physically possible, because he thinks of them as stupid sluts. But the reality is that even a first term abortion can cost $500 or $600, which is often what women, especially low-income women, have to pay in rent. This isn’t even a matter of speculation. As any abortion fund can easily explain to you, women in need of abortion are often facing down the fear that paying for it will leave them homeless, and they often do things like pawn valuable items to get the abortion. It’s really quite terrible. But forget the real world! Steve King is bitter that women have sex without his permission and they will be punished!

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insert interview

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Targeted, misogynist abuse of women online that appears to exist for no other reason than to scare women into silence and run them offline has been with us from the first moment a woman identified herself as female on a BBS board. In the past year or so, the attention paid to the issue has grown dramatically, and in the past month, the discussion went big time mainstream when Amanda Hess published a moving and evocative account of her own and other women’s ordeals with online harassment, and how scary and time-consuming it can really be. Her piece was widely covered by the mainstream media, and Melissa Harris-Perry invited Hess and others onto her show to discuss why Internet harassment is not something that can be easily brushed off.

• harassment 1 *

Indeed, one of the reasons that Hess’ piece was so roundly praised was she put to bed permanently the inevitable response women get when we endure harassment, which is to blame the victim and say all she needs to make it go away is to shut her computer off. That was unfair back in the days when the Internet was still a novelty of sorts, because it assumed that it was A-OK for a space to be misogynist and deeply unfair as long as it wasn’t considered mandatory to be there. But now that argument is moot, as Harris-Perry explains, because our supposed virtual lives are, in fact, our “real” lives. As Hess explained in her article, being able to go online is a critical part of her job as a writer. Not only is it unfair to say that the victim needs to end the harassment by giving up on her ability to go online, but it’s also unrealistic. It’s like telling a woman she has to give up her telephone because of prank calls. And yet, you still hear the claim that harassment is the fault of the victim’s for daring to be female in a space instead of the fault of the harasser’s for trying to run her off , as was explained by Jim Sterling in his video podcast about gaming. He talks about a gamer named Zoe Quinn who was the target of a relentless harassment campaign because she dared to publicize a game she developed while being female, and she was subject to abuse and harassment and even having her phone number published.

• harassment 2 *

The “just ignore them or you deserve it” crowd also pointedly ignores another aspect of this, which is if the target does squelch the urge to go to forums and other areas where angry sexists are trashing her, then the angry sexists will start seeking her out wherever they can get to her. I don’t have the time to peruse the forums where misogynists whine about my existence all day and they know it, so they seek me out on Twitter or email me or show up in my comment threads and, when banned, create new usernames or even use elaborate IP masking software. It’s hard to ignore someone who is determined to get in your face. That’s why, for instance, anti-choicers want to ban buffer zones around abortion clinics. They don’t want to just be able to make themselves available for women to talk to, but instead want to chase them down and force an interaction.

Jill Filipovic explained how it’s getting increasingly ridiculous to burden victims of online harassment with the expectation that they leave the Internet if they don’t want to be harassed.

• harassment 3 *

Here’s another angle that I think is worth considering. Not only are our virtual worlds becoming increasingly quote-unquote “real,” but I don’t really see online harassment as different than offline harassment. Cat-calling, abortion clinic harassment, sexual harassment, all that stuff is aimed at the same purpose: Using harassment as a weapon to try to punish and control women for living their own lives. Trying to bracket it off as somehow not important because of where it occurs is just an exercise in trying to ignore what harassment is and what it’s for. Instead of telling victims not to take it seriously, I think it’s time to reshift the question to the harassers. Why do they take the presence of women as such a serious threat that they spend hours upon hours tracking women online in order to harass them and run them off the Internet? The harassers clearly think getting rid of women is deeply important, so it should follow that there’s good reason that women insisting on staying is also deeply important. They wouldn’t try to keep us out if there wasn’t something important there for us to have, you know.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Fox goes full bore transphobic edition. Fox was covering a recent case in Massachusetts where the court found, correctly, that transgender people should have access to gender reassignment surgery if they, in consultation with their doctors, deem it necessary. In a generally repulsive segment where the woman in question was misgendered and generally treated like garbage already, Tucker Carlson took it to a new level.

• tucker *

He then went on to lecture about “science,” something he doesn’t understand or he would know two things: 1) Actually, a lot of people are born with what appears to be female genitalia upon birth and are considered girls only to grow up and find they have XY chromosomes but their body developed to be female-appearing anyway. Most of them end up identified as female, so there are cases where DNA does not determine gender assignment upon birth. 2) The medical community has long studied the issue and discovered that trans people’s experiences are plenty real, and this is all recorded in the traditional medical science way. They certainly know more than Tucker Carlson, and it was expert testimony, in fact, that led to this decision.

The post Ohio’s ‘Right to Lie’ Case, HR 7, and Online Harassment appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Obama on college sexual assault epidemic

Mike Huckabee thinks contraception means you have no self-control

Bill O’Reilly lies about contraception again

Ilyse Hogue calls Lila Rose out

Media distortions of abortion issues

Andrea Grimes on Marlise Muñoz

Banning marriage rather than sharing it with gay people

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to Andrea Miller from New York NARAL about the crisis pregnancy center lawsuit. Mike Huckabee denounces contraception at the RNC, and a segment on some of the good news in the public discourse over reproductive rights.

The Obama administration launched a task force to address the problem of on-campus rape. The press conference announcing the task force was really great because Obama refused to indulge people who want to focus the discussion on blaming victims. Instead, he talked about the victims as full human beings deserving of dignity.

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Joe Biden, who was instrumental in drafting the original version of the Violence Against Women Act, was on hand to lend his support. It’s really great seeing this issue being treated with the seriousness and empathy that it is required to fix the problem.

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From the second that the Obama administration, following the advice of the world’s experts in health care, decided to mandate that insurance companies cover contraception alongside dozens of other services as copay-free preventive care, conservatives have had two attacks. One is the official, safe one that makes it easier to deny they’re waging war on women, which is to claim that the mandate is somehow an assault on religious freedom. The other attack is much less safe, but is what the base really wants to hear, which is that contraception coverage is wrong because dirty sluts are using it to have sex with men that aren’t you and aren’t you angry and bitter about that? The latter doesn’t do well in the courts, but it really kills with conservatives. So it’s not really a big surprise that Mike Huckabee, who lives primarily off backslaps by fellow misogynists, trotted the “big sluts” line in front of the Republican National Committee.

• huckabee 1 *

The defense of Huckabee has been that Huckabee wasn’t saying that women are big old sluts, but that Democrats believe they are big old sluts. This defense shows how empty it is for Huckabee to claim he respects women, because anyone who says that thinks women are incredibly stupid. Huckabee is clearly saying that contraception use is evidence that women are out of control. There’s no wiggle room there. He likes to imagine that women, when presented with the opportunity to use contraception, should take umbrage and say, “Well, I never! How dare you assume I would have sex like some common slattern! I only do it once every few years strictly for the purposes of procreation.” The comments don’t make a lick of sense unless you think there’s something shameful about using contraception, and trying to pretend otherwise actually is an insult to women’s intelligence. Which is also clear from Huckabee scolding women and telling us we should be insulted at the idea that we might have use for medications that allow us to have non-procreative sex. He’s implying that women are stupid sluts that are too stupid to know that we are sluts. He clearly thinks so little of women that he doubled down later on Fox News.

• huckabee 2 *

Of course, he made it clear that all that all that respect he claims to have for women is contingent on what their private choices in the bedroom are. He set up a dichotomy, where women could be respected or women could have sex for pleasure, but they had to choose. He even, if you’ll remember, told women they had to choose and that the only way to get his respect was to take umbrage at the idea that we have sex. The problem with his protestations, then, is that it’s clear that he doesn’t respect women. You don’t respect women or think they’re equal if your respect requires them to give up a very big, important part of their lives that is not your business anyway. Less than 1 percent of women in this country do what Huckabee says they need to in order to deserve respect, which is to “control” their libidos so the only sex they’re having is procreative sex. You don’t actually respect women if you only respect less than 1 percent of them.

Huckabee whined that his opponents supposedly refuse to have an intellectual conversation and then said this:

• huckabee 3 *

Personally, I don’t think that he’s capable of an intellectual conversation since he clearly seems to think that if you want women to have contraception, then you somehow don’t want them to have these other things. That is idiotic. Yes, there are plenty of men out there who, upon finding out that a woman has had non-procreative sex, can’t think of her as anything but a sex object and treat her like a toilet. After hearing Huckabee talk, it’s pretty obvious that he thinks that way. But he’s projecting his own deep disrespect for women onto his political opponents. In the real world, support for contraception access correlates with more, not less, support for women in a variety of ways. For instance, the politicians who support contraception access are far more likely to vote for equal pay laws. But really, the way you show that you respect women and don’t reduce them to sex objects is to treat them with respect regardless of when and how they have sex. Bracketing off women’s health care and saying not only that it shouldn’t be covered but that women who use contraception are sluts is pretty much the height of disrespect.

By the way, it’s worth remembering that as much as Huckabee claims this is about the government, the contraception mandate is not about the government. It’s about private insurance companies covering women’s prescriptions. What Huckabee calls “Uncle Sugar,” then, is women using insurance they paid for to cover their own medical expenses. It’s the equivalent of calling it a “handout” if I get a sandwich in exchange for paying cash for it. It’s not only demeaning and ungracious, but it’s just factually inaccurate. But it’s a lie that was too juicy for Bill O’Reilly to avoid telling.

• huckabee 4 *

Nope. That’s just a straight up lie. Fluke’s testimony was about how unfair it is that women at her school pay thousands of dollars a year in health insurance costs but can’t even get a simple birth control prescription covered because the Catholic Church thinks sex is strictly for procreation. It’s hilarious how conservatives are claiming that those of us who heard Huckabee perfectly well are misinterpreting him, but then they turn around and just lie through their teeth about what Sandra Fluke testified about. It shows how much the government thing is just a fig leaf, and what’s really going on here is trying to make hay out of the fact that women use contraception, full stop. There are government programs to provide contraception to low income women under Title X and Medicaid, but Huckabee and O’Reilly are focusing here on private health insurance coverage, showing this has nothing to do with government and everything to do with trying to reduce access to contraception.

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insert interview

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With all the stupidity and mean-spiritedness aimed at women out there, it’s easy to start to despair, so I thought I’d do a segment highlighting some of the strong, pro-woman voices that I’ve been hearing in the media recently. The expectation that feminists practically apologize for existing is fading away, and there’s just a lot more aggressive pro-choice and pro-woman rhetoric to get behind these days. Ilyse Hogue, the newish president of NARAL, was a delight in a TV debate with the permanently dishonest Lila Rose. Lila Rose was demonizing contraception, lying through her teeth and claiming that the pill is dangerous and insinuating that women who take it are bubbleheads who weren’t aware that abstaining from sex was an option. Hogue responded.

• feminists 1 *

I know this is mostly a good news segment, but I kind of think it’s good news that people like Lila Rose have decided to go on TV and basically say that women don’t actually like sex and therefore have no need for things like contraception.

• feminists 2 *

Rose is assuming, of course, that women have no sexual desire, and that because you’re taking the pill you have to have sex with anyone who wants. Neither is true, and since most women use contraception, they’re not going to be fooled by this. We know that we have sex because we want to and we also know that laws against rape are not suspended because you’re on the pill.

Moving on, Hannah Groch-Begley from Media Matters got to go on to MSNBC and explain how anti-choice lies hurt women’s access to health care.

*feminists 3 *

There’s no audio clip of this, but it’s worth pointing out that the pro-choice press has really taken charge of outing and exposing dangerous, rogue abortion providers. The New Yorker this week has a big expose of Steven Brigham, who is in constant legal trouble for operating substandard abortion clinics. Reporters here at RH Reality Check, particularly Sharona Coutts, have been on top of this story for months. This is great because being out in front of the story helps audiences understand that the reason that bad doctors flourish is that anti-choicers drive the good doctors out of business.

Pro-choicers were also doing well on the tragic story of Marlise Muñoz, a pregnant woman in Texas who was declared brain dead but whose body was being kept alive by a ventilator against her own and her family’s wishes because the hospital wanted to bring the fetus, which was unsurprisingly “deformed,” to term. I covered the story on this show and it really took off as a good example of how anti-choice policies quite literally reduce women to incubators. Thankfully, the mounting pressure helped bolster the family and they successfully sued to have Muñoz taken off life support. Andrea Grimes of RH Reality Check spoke with On Point about the case.

• feminists 4 *

There have been a lot of setbacks for the reproductive rights movement in the past couple of decades, but I do think the tide might be turning. The right is becoming more extreme with the attacks on contraception and stunts like trying to co-opt a dead woman’s body, and feminists are getting more assertive. The combination is helping, which is one reason you’re seeing conservatives panic. Hopefully, these are trends that will continue.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the kill marriage rather than share it with gay people edition. No, seriously, that’s what one state legislator in Oklahoma has decided has to happen, in light of the courts saying that they have to provide same-sex marriage licenses under equal opportunity rules.

• Oklahoma *

As silly as this is, it makes sense. You see conservatives denouncing the idea of having health insurance altogether rather than mandating minimum coverage standards that include contraception, so why not just kill marriage altogether rather than share it, while they’re at it?

The post Mike Huckabee’s Slut-Shaming, and the ‘War’ for CPC Disclosure Laws appeared first on RH Reality Check.