Read our coverage on the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases here.

Related Links

John Oliver on Hobby Lobby

Rachel Maddow on the Hobby Lobby case

Now even signing a form that says you have religious objections is being objected to

Married women use more contraception

No, not all women are dependent on the government or husbands

Rush Limbaugh recommends lifelong avoidance of non-procreative sex for women

Rush Limbaugh doesn’t want men having sex either

Fox’s Greg Gutfeld can only think in misogynist stereotypes

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be looking at the fallout from the Supreme Court’s ridiculous and transparent attempt to force women to include their boss’s opinion in their contraception choices. I’ll also have a representative from the Center for Inquiry on to talk about the role that secularism plays in pushing for better health-care access.

Most of this episode will about the Hobby Lobby decision from the perspective of concerns about women’s rights and health care access. However, John Oliver also addressed the problem of the Court giving corporations the same or greater rights than actual people.

• oliver *

He also goes on to point out that people who kill others get to go to prison, while corporations just get fined. Corporations were created as institutions precisely to limit liability in a way a person can’t. Giving them even more rights is about taking rights away from actual people.

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So, Hobby Lobby. I was off last week, but make no mistake, I was watching very carefully as the fallout started and just got worse and worse by the minute. As usual, Rachel Maddow had a really good segment on it, pointing out that the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Hobby Lobby to opt out of offering health insurance plans that cover contraception is not really about a sober-minded reading of the Constitution or even the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It’s actually just a bit of conservative sex panic and misogyny that failed in the legislature, due to most of the country not actually believing that all women should abstain from all non-procreative sex. Republicans pushed for something called the Blunt Amendment that would allow corporations to do just this, and it failed and arguably hurt Mitt Romney’s chances at beating Barack Obama in the 2012 election. But the Supreme Court stepped in.

• hobby 1 *

What became immediately apparent both in the decision and in the reaction to it, which I will get to in the next segment, is that “religious freedom” is clearly just a fig leaf for the real agenda here, which is hostility to female sexuality and an attempt to control and punish women who have non-procreative sex, which is, may I remind you, nearly all adult women. [Justice] Alito specifically claimed in his decision that contraception was some kind of special case and that religious claims to be offended by vaccinations or blood transfusions shouldn’t count. Why is contraception special? The official reason is that there’s a way for the [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] to make sure women are covered even without their employers directly providing plans for that, but it turns out that was, to be blunt, a bad faith argument. Let’s face it: The reason contraception was singled out is because of plain, old-fashioned misogyny and panic from conservative judges at women’s growing social and political power, power that could easily be reversed by returning us to the days when controlling childbirth was nearly impossible.

The lawyers for Hobby Lobby pushed for a very narrow exemption, arguing only against four kinds of contraception that they said cause “abortion,” though they do not. But the court dispensed with the B.S. arguments where we have to pretend someone thinks some kinds of contraception “kill” fertilized eggs and straight up said this decision includes all contraception.

• hobby 2 *

So when you see conservatives whip out the talking point about how “you”—and they seem to think everyone works for Hobby Lobby now for some reason—will still have access to 16 kinds of contraception, let’s be clear that is a lie. I mean, you probably will, since they forget a lot of us do not have misogynist employers who are going to cut our contraception coverage. But for those of us who do, the Court was clear: They can deny you any kind of coverage they want, as long as it’s contraception. No having to pretend they think it’s abortion necessary. No more need for anti-choice hand-waving equating contraception with abortion. The highest court in the land says just being angry at women for having unapproved sex is reason enough to dock their pay now.

Of course, the one silver lining in this was that while it did give an employer a right to dock your compensation package with their little sex fines, there is a path for the HHS to keep it from hitting your wallet. They could just allow corporations the right to fill out the same form that nonprofits use to say they don’t want to cover contraception, and when they fill that form out, the insurance company will simply step in and provide the coverage directly. But, anti-choicers have got a plan to stop that as well and it looks like the Supreme Court may back them up on this.

• hobby 3 *

Look, if you have a religious objection to a law, it is not a violation of your religious rights to say so. This is just a bunch of squealing and hand-waving to accomplish the only real goal of all this, which is to give your boss the right to block your access to contraception. Sure, you can still pay cash, but the aggressive bad faith of this paperwork argument should make us all worry that the next move will be to sue to block employees from spending their paychecks in ways that their bosses disapprove of. Indeed, Wheaton didn’t even really hide that they were arguing that their female employees and students are functionally their property and should be forced by any means necessary to live by their rules. The lawyer for Wheaton kept claiming the form was a “permission slip” to use contraception, as if adult women should be treated like children and their boss like a parent who forbids them from leaving the house after 9 p.m. This is a dangerous precedent and suggests we may be seeing that women are increasingly going to have to give control of their private sexual and reproductive decisions to their bosses in order to earn a paycheck.

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Interview

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While the official reason for Hobby Lobby’s objection to having contraception coverage in their health care plans was “religious freedom,” the right-wing media coverage of the decision, along with the reaction of conservatives online, made it undeniably clear that this is actually about hatred of female independence and fear of female sexuality. Right-wing media focused solely on shaming and marginalizing women, who are more than half the human population, for having entirely human and normal desires to have sex. Indeed, even though married women are actually more likely than single women to use prescription contraception, the focus was strictly on raising audience fears about the supposedly slutty single women out there. Jesse Watters, one of Fox News’s growing bench of guys that are there just to say mean-spirited things, had this to say in response to Hillary Clinton criticizing the decision.

• fail 1 *

Man, Fox News loves to lie to its audience, doesn’t it? First of all, this decision is not about government-supplied contraception, but about women getting the pay they earned by working, which includes standard insurance benefits. But Watters doesn’t seem to quite get that women work for a living. He portrays women as being dependent on either a husband or government. That’s not what this is about. Indeed, I’d say that this is actually about increasing anger at women because we work for a living and don’t need a husband to depend on. That’s threatening to a lot of men, because if women don’t need a husband to survive, then we can have higher standards when it comes to getting married. We don’t have to settle for someone who thinks that women are an unpaid servant class put here to put up with their crap, and we can hold out for men who are more interested in equal partnerships. For a lot of conservative men who grew up thinking that they are entitled, by birthright, to have a wife who is subservient and dependent, this dramatic expansion of women’s independence is a real threat. So that’s what’s going on here.

But this kind of misogyny actually seems downright mild compared to what you had going on, of course, on Rush Limbaugh’s show, with Limbaugh completely denying outright that we even need contraception at all, because women should simply have sex no more times than they need to get pregnant.

• fail 2 *

As long as I’ve been running this podcast, I’ve warned that the anti-choice movement angled to create the illusion that non-procreative sex in and of itself is controversial and that they wanted to introduce the idea that debating whether or not women should be allowed to have non-procreative sex is legitimate political discourse. Looks like they’re starting to get their way. This is where we’re at, with major conservative figures arguing openly that you should only have sex if you want to get pregnant, and suggesting, of course, that wanting to have sex for fun is a sleazy and despicable thing that only horrible perverts and criminals would want.

• fail 3 *

Again, it’s critical to remember that the whole purpose of the contraception mandate was to avoid having the taxpayers cover this and instead to have gainfully employed women able to pay for their own birth control using insurance plans they earned through working. Indeed, the only way this is even remotely close to the truth is there is a sliver of truth to the idea that men don’t have to pay because women are footing the bill themselves entirely by working for the plans that cover it. But that really is okay insofar as the main thing is finding the most efficient and cost-effective way to get coverage to as many women as possible, and this is it. But I want to point out that the anger at women for having sex is not actually aimed just at women. A lot of these kinds of rants are aimed at men, at least some kind of men. The implicit argument here is, “All this birth control means that all those hot young women are going to hook up with hot young men and have all this fun that you, the Limbaugh listener, are not invited to join. Don’t you hate them? Let’s punish them and take away their earned benefits!” It’s pure politics of resentment, taken to the bedroom. I mean, it always was, but now the mask is falling off.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, let’s use as many sexist stereotypes as we can edition. Greg Gutfeld used the anger at response to the Hobby Lobby case as an excuse to accuse women who speak out of being a whole host of misogynist stereotypes.

• gutfeld *

There’s something incredibly rich about this. Conservatives are the ones who are accusing the 99 percent of Americans who have sex of being perverts, are claiming that merely filling out a form that might make it easier for a woman to meet her private medical needs is somehow a violation of religious freedom, are screeching “close your legs” at anyone who dare speak up for sense on Twitter, are arguing that preventing your ovaries from releasing an egg is tantamount to murder and the Holocaust. But it’s feminists who want women to get the health care they paid for who are “shrieking.” Yeah, right. Sounds like projection to me, Greg.

The post ‘Hobby Lobby,’ and the Case for Secular Health Care appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Melissa Harris-Perry on how women of color are disproportionately hurt by anti-choice policies

Maddow show on the Women’s Health Protection Act

Bill O’Reilly’s DNA argument

Megyn Kelly misleads

Bill O’Reilly calls pro-choice senators “executioners”

Michele Bachmann tells story of rape as cudgel against immigrants

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be covering this new bill being offered in the Senate called the Women’s Health Protection Act that could, if it passed, reverse the tide of anti-choice legislation. Kristine Kippins from the Center for Reproductive Rights will be on to help flesh out what this bill could do.

This whole episode is going to be about abortion, but I do want to highlight that discussion about the impact of the war on contraception access is continuing in places like Melissa Harris Perry’s show.

• mhp *

This is why it’s so glib for conservatives just to tell women to pay full price. It’s really expensive for low-income people.

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The recent surge of state level attacks on abortion access are frustrating on many levels. Mostly it’s alarming because it’s working and abortion clinics continue to have to shut their doors, putting many women, particularly rural women, in a situation where the nearest abortion clinic is hours upon hours away. It’s also aggravating the way that politicians are going around Roe v. Wade and going around public opinion to cut off access. It’s aggravating the way that women who have abortions are marginalized and demonized, even though it’s one in three of us. On top of all that, it’s frustrating that anti-choicers are so flagrant with their lying. States have the right to regulate medicine to protect people’s health, but anti-choice politicians are using that power to do the opposite, and regulate clinics unduly so as to shut off access to safe health care. All while claiming to do so to protect women’s “health.”

Well, Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Sen. Tammy Baldwin have introduced a bill called the Women’s Health Protection Act that calls anti-choicers’ bluff.

• whpt 1 *

That was Steve Kornacki, sitting in for Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. What he’s talking about with the “intended electoral effect” is this: Since Democrats don’t control the House right now, there’s no way this bill would pass both houses of Congress to be signed by the president, though if it could, it’s certain President Obama would sign it. So a lot of people who aren’t as clever as they think were crowing about how stupid the Democrats are to bring this bill up, since it won’t pass. But, in fact, this is a really smart move. Republicans got creamed in the 2012 election because of the women’s vote, and while it’s as much because of economic issues as anything else, the perception that Republicans are obsessed about reducing women’s access to health care is also hurting them politically. That’s why so much of the attacks on abortion rights are on a state level, because it gets much less press coverage than on a national level. Forcing a national debate about this is good for Democrats.

So while there’s definitely political grandstanding going on, that doesn’t mean there’s cause to be cynical about any of this. For one thing, just because the bill doesn’t pass now doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. But even in the present, forcing a debate about this could have an impact on the Supreme Court, who will probably be hearing a case about the targeted regulations of abortion providers soon. Seeing the dishonesty and misogyny of anti-choicers come pouring out could help make the case of overturning these laws.

Sen. Baldwin [D-WI] came on MSNBC to explain what the Women’s Health Protection Act would do.

• whpt 2 *

This matters because right now, the Fifth Circuit Court has decided, straight up, that a new regulation on abortion providers does not need to be demonstrably safer than the previous regulations, freeing up conservative politicians to choose regulations not on whether or not they make women safer but whether or not they are impossible to meet. Indeed, the new regulations, such as requiring hospital admitting privileges, are known to make women less healthy and safe because they drive the abortion market underground. This would ban the favoring of unsafe regulations over safe ones. But Baldwin was a little unclear about how right there, so she got into more detail.

• whpt 3 *

I wish she had been even clearer, but since I have the advantage of not having to speak off the cuff, I will elaborate.

The Women’s Health Protection Act would work by doing one simple thing, which is require the abortion clinics be regulated the same as other clinics doing comparable medical procedures. Since an abortion is no more intrusive than a colonoscopy, then, they wouldn’t be able to pass a bunch of laws on abortion clinics requiring that patients hear scripts or endure waiting periods or that doctors have to have admitting privileges, unless those same regulations were put on people wanting things like biopsies, colonoscopies, and even tooth-drilling. It’s actually a genius bill, in that it will force everyone to confront how unfair it is to make women jump through a bunch of hoops for reproductive health care while men don’t ever have to worry about that sort of thing. And that’s a debate that I am ready to have.

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Interview

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If the purpose of the Women’s Health Protection Act was to goad anti-choicers into giving up the entire disingenuous claim to care about women and instead revert to their hollering about how you’re a murderer if you ever say no to a pregnancy, well it already seems to be working like a charm. While no one is under the impression that anti-choicers have given up trying to convince themselves and others than an embryo is the same thing as a 5-year-old, the entire reason this entire “protect women” gambit came up in the first place is that after 40 years of screaming about how the one in three women who gets an abortion is a murderer, they haven’t moved the needle on public opinion or really found a way around Roe v. Wade. But with the Women’s Health Protection Act making it impossible to feign concern for women, conservative pundits have gone straight back to the old, tired, and unconvincing rhetoric.

• response 1 *

O’Reilly would like you to believe that a bunch of laws passed in just the past few years are a reaction to “new” scientific information showing that fertilized eggs have DNA in them. Let’s be clear: No one has ever thought otherwise, not in the whole history of DNA. The notion that having DNA in a cell makes it a separate human being is beyond ridiculous. All cells have DNA in them. That’s what a cell does. Even if you say, “Oh I meant human DNA,” that doesn’t change anything. Skin cells, heart cells, blood cells, hair cells, all of that has human DNA in it and we don’t consider that a separate person. But what is really bananas here is his claim that we just discovered that a fertilized cell has DNA or separate DNA or something. Uh, no. DNA was first discovered in the 1870s, about 100 years before Roe v. Wade. Its structure was first mapped out in 1953, about 20 years before Roe, but let’s be clear that it was decades and decades before that that scientists understood the basic parameters of genetic inheritance. That a fertilized egg is made of the same stuff as the rest of the body is not news and definitely wasn’t news when abortion was legalized. The real question here is what is always has been, which is whether or not we believe women are people, and if they deserve full human rights.

Megyn Kelly, knowing full well that the tired claim that a fertilized egg has more rights than a woman doesn’t move the needle, tried to make this about “late-term abortion.”

• response 2 *

While there are some laws that ban abortion at 20 weeks that could be affected, this bill is crafted to and will primarily affect laws that make it hard to impossible to get abortions in the first 12 weeks, including laws requiring you to have an ambulatory surgical center in order to give women a pill that she uses to quietly abort in her own home. Roe actually allows for there to be restrictions on third-trimester abortions, so even if doctors were willing to do those for non-medical reasons, which they are not, that would not be affected. This is just the same old tired tactic that’s been tried and has failed, to convince people that a fetus at 40 weeks is the same thing as an embryo at six weeks, or even a fertilized egg. But again, what’s really telling here is that the entire faux concern for women is being dropped and they’re back to the old tactic of trying to paint women who seek abortion as being terrible, irresponsible “baby killers,” and implying that women wait until eight months to have an abortion because they’re too lazy and slutty to get them earlier. In reality, nine out of ten abortions are in the first 12 weeks, many of those in the second trimester are due to anti-choice laws making it hard to arrange travel in the first trimester. Only 1.2 percent of abortions are after 20 weeks, and a significant chunk of those are for medical reasons. That’s only halfway through a pregnancy, FYI, so the term “late term abortion” is seriously misleading, and I say that as someone who has been caught up in that language myself and must apologize for it.

But back to O’Reilly again to see how quickly anti-choicers revert back to form once the lie about protecting women is stripped away.

• response 3 *

For a little context: 63 percent of abortions occur in the first eight weeks, when the embryo is the size of a pencil eraser, or, at most, about half an inch long, and it has no brain and physically looks like a lump of stuff squished together with no discernible form. Another 26 percent of overall abortions happen between nine and 12 weeks, making the fetus about the size of your thumb at the very most, and still doesn’t have a brain, much less any sensory perception. No one actually believes that it’s “murder” or “execution.” We all know that women seek abortion for perfectly understandable reasons, which is why anti-choicers were so eager to feign “concern” for women. But this bill has ripped the mask off. Hopefully it will continue to pay dividends.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, who is “pro-life” again edition? It’s been really depressing seeing the very same people who swear to be “pro-life” having a meltdown over the very existence of migrant children in this country who have arrived without parents, many of them to escape violence and oppression in their home countries. The argument seems to be that these kids should be deported without due process or perhaps even bothering to figure out where they came from before demanding they get sent away. To excuse this cruelty, many conservatives like Rep. Michele Bachmann [R-MN] are accusing immigrants en masse of being rapists.

• Bachmann *

Bachmann is just one of many politicians to use the threat of rape to scare people about migrant children. The reality is different, of course, with 58 percent of the kids interviewed by the United Nations saying they were actually fleeing violence. Of course, Bachmann voted against the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization. Rape only matters to her if it can be used to scare people about immigrants, it appears.

The post On the Women’s Health Protection Act appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

The Daily Show tackles Hobby Lobby

Todd Akin’s infamous comments

Todd Akin tries to clarify, makes it worse

Todd Akin on the Christian Broadcasting Network

Cecile Richards on Bill Moyers

Teddy Wilson on anti-choice protests in New Orleans

Ted Cruz tries to gaslight people

Charles Payne’s cufflinks

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Teddy Wilson [reporting fellow at RH Reality Check] will explain what’s going on with anti-choice protests in New Orleans. Todd Akin is trying to make a comeback, and the fallout from Hobby Lobby continues.

The Daily Show took a break in the summer and came back to find that they had a lot of ground to cover. Their take on the Hobby Lobby case and the success of the argument that corporations can do what they want as long as they invoke religion was phenomenal.

• daily show *

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Todd Akin has wormed his way back into the news again. Akin became a figure of national infamy when he was running for Senate in 2012, after years of being a congressional representative. He lost the race after he told a reporter that there was no real need for rape exceptions in his proposed abortion ban because, well, let’s just give it one more go-round.

• akin 1 *

What most people didn’t understand at the time and probably don’t know now is that Akin came into politics by the way of the anti-choice movement, including a history of getting arrested at clinic protests. This wasn’t just some random argument from a guy who doesn’t think about this much. On the contrary, Akin is an anti-choice fanatic down to his bone marrow and trying to control women’s bodies is the most important issue to him. Because of this, he’s a pretty good stand-in for the way that anti-choice activists think about sex and women. This comment was offensive because it was biologically inaccurate, but it was also super misogynist. Not only did he accuse rape victims of lying to cover up for consensual sex, it’s clear he doesn’t think of women as people at all. He says punish the rapist not the “baby,” which is not a baby. But the woman herself doesn’t even factor. I’d say he wants to punish the woman for being a rape victim by forcing her to have a baby, but I don’t know that he even considered the possibility that women have feelings.

I’m retreading this ground because Akin is back, and he’s reminding everyone that anti-choice fanatics are just that, fanatics. In this case, fanatics devoted single-mindedly to this cause of reducing women to objects and stripping us of our basic human rights. Akin made a half-assed apology for his statements when he tried to win the election, but now that he’s lost and he’s promoting a book, he’s retracting that apology. His claim is that we just didn’t understand what he meant by “legitimate rape.”

• akin 2 *

The thing you learn when dealing with anti-choice fanatics is that what he’s doing here, which is clearly just making word salad garbled B.S. to deflect criticism, is fairly common. That’s what so frightening about anti-choicers. We’re talking about people who see a multi-celled zygote and have convinced themselves it’s a wee baby waving its hands and cooing at you. In some cases they’re glib liars and in some cases, just fantasists who struggle to tell reality from wishes, but in either case, we’re not talking about reality-based people. Just to be sure, I did a Google search for both “legitimate rape” and “legitimate case of rape” for the years prior to Akin’s statement and found no evidence that either term is used in law enforcement. In both cases, it mostly turned up people saying what Akin was saying in the first place, which is that rape victims are lying about being raped because they are trying to conceal consensual intercourse. There continues to be no evidence that this is more than a misogynist myth and actual law enforcement experts say most rape reports are real.

Things just got weirder from there during this interview with Chuck Todd from MSNBC.

• akin 3 *

See what I mean about wishful thinking? He is suggesting that pregnancy from rape is so rare we can assume that most women who say they are pregnant from rape are lying. But then he flips around and buys, wholesale, this notion that there’s just tons of people running around who were “conceived in rape,” enough to help build his staff. This is a pretty big contradiction, but basically it’s a result of just believing whatever is convenient. The “conceived in rape” thing is one of those big things on the anti-choice circuit. There’s a handful of people who make a living claiming that they were conceived in rape and arguing therefore that if you’re raped, you should not be allowed an abortion. Because you get to be a mother to someone who makes a living trying to get rid of women’s human rights. Yeah, it’s not an argument that actually persuades anyone outside of anti-choice circles, but really it’s more there to soothe their guilty consciences when they consider that they literally want to force rape victims to give birth. Plus, as with a lot of testimony in Christian right circles, a healthy dose of skepticism is well-advised. I mean, Akin believes that women emit some kind of contraception when raped, so he’s not exactly the most trustworthy source here.

The narcissism that really drives the anti-choice movement is also on full display when it comes to Todd Akin, who argued that running around accusing rape victims of lying and just generally denying the humanity of women is God’s work when he was a guest on the Christian Broadcasting Network.

• akins 4 *

Sounds terrible. I mean, not terrible like being raped and then having politicians accuse you of lying and trying to force you to have a baby. But that’s the sort of thing that can only happen to women, and it’s quite clear that Akin does not care one bit what happens to women.

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Interview

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The fallout from the Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby continues as people grasp the implications for religious freedom, for being able to protect your privacy rights with regards to your employer, and for contraception access generally. There was a lot of hope at first that the supposed limitations put on the decision would in fact be limitations, but since the Supreme Court turned right around and not only gave employers the right to not include contraception in their health-care plans but to openly sabotage women’s attempts to get that coverage elsewhere, it’s clear that the supposed limitations were offered in bad faith. Because of this, we have to worry about all the larger implications of the decision, including some of the concerns about giving corporations more rights than people, even to religious freedom, and the possibility that contraception will soon be subject to the same kind of major attacks on access you get with abortion. Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood [Federation of America], was on Bill Moyers to talk about the wide-ranging attacks on women’s rights, but I was particularly interested in some of the talk about the Hobby Lobby case.

• hobby 1 *

That’s the evil genius of this entire thing. Hobby Lobby and their supporters were able to hijack widespread misogyny and hostility towards female sexuality to push the larger corporate agenda of trying to take away the rights of workers and give rights to corporations. Even though your health-care plan belongs to you, since you earned it, and not your employer, your employer’s religious beliefs count for more than yours when it comes to how you can use it. The door is now open to more expansive arguments about how the employer’s religious freedom depends on taking it away from employees. We see that with the Supreme Court letting lawsuits go forward that could allow employers to refuse to fill out paperwork if doing so makes it easier for employees to get birth control. They are arguing that their religious freedom is only protected if your religious freedom to decide to go outside of their health-care plan for contraception is restrained. I worry they’re not going to stop here. I’m sure there’s already people looking for more ways that bosses will say their religious freedom can only be protected if they get to prevent employees from using contraception.

• hobby 2 *

This entire situation is a huge mess, because it’s not like corporations are “tricking” people into giving them rights to control our private behavior and religious beliefs by using sex-phobia. I mean, that’s part of it, but that implies incorrectly that the misogyny of all this is insincere. Believe me, it’s a both/and situation. Conservatives who threw a fit over the no-copay contraception aspect of the Affordable Care Act knew full well that it would do exactly what Richards said, which is even the playing field for women by making it much, much easier to choose your contraception based on how effective it is and how much control it gives you over your life and not on considerations like how much time you have to take off from work to get it or whether you can afford it. Above all other things, they don’t want women, especially low-income women, to have that control. Which is why any effort, including this Hobby Lobby gambit, that deprives any women of that control is considered a victory.

That’s why it was purely bad faith on Ted Cruz’s part to say this:

• hobby 3 *

It’s the “don’t believe your lying eyes” gambit. Cruz is trying to convince us that the Democrats just made the attacks on contraception up for political purposes. Even though Rush Limbaugh called women who use contraception “sluts.” Even though Hobby Lobby literally sued and won the right to stop women from using their own health-care plans to cover contraception. Even though there’s been a widespread statewide assault on family planning clinics that has created a documented surge in unwanted pregnancies in places like Texas. Did the Democrats pay all these conservatives to attack contraception to make Republicans look bad? Was this all a false flag operation? I doubt Cruz would go that far, so this needs to be understood as hand-waving to try to scare people from acknowledging what is clearly happening here.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, rape jokes are okay as long as they’re vintage edition. Charles Payne was the single male guest on the sexism-rationalization program Outnumbered on Fox News, and he had some vintage cufflinks.

• Charles Payne *

Yes, I do believe the point of the joke when it was popular in the 1950s was to remind women that they can be raped. But I guess that trying to gain power over women with a rape joke is just light-hearted humor on Fox News.

The post Todd Akin Is Back, and Anti-Choice Protesters Terrorize New Orleans appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Rachel Maddow on abortion in Kansas

Women’s Health Protection Act

Preterm risk debunked

Abortion and breast cancer

Abortion and mental health

Lila Rose is really hostile to sex

Geraldo Rivera has marriage advice

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Jeff Teague of Planned Parenthood will explain what’s going on in Tennessee with Amendment 1. I’ll review some of the recent anti-choice Senate testimony, and Lila Rose is arguing for, uh, “life” by suggesting it’s shameful to be curious about sex.

Rachel Maddow highlighted the way that abortion clinics often end up dealing with the ridiculous state laws regarding abortion.

• Kansas *

It was part of a larger segment about abortion in Kansas you can watch at RH Reality Check, but I wanted to pull that because it really shows how ridiculous it is to have laws forcing clinics to expose patients to information they know for a fact is untrue or misleading.

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The Women’s Health Protection Act, which is a bill that would simply require that states regulate abortion the same way that they do all other medical care and not subject it to extra regulations, was the subject of a Senate hearing in the middle of July. I covered this bill itself here on Reality Cast, but I’d like to circle around back to it to discuss the actual Senate hearing and a rather troubling thing that kept happening over and over again from anti-choice politicians testifying against the bill: They basically refused to argue about it on its merits and instead told a bunch of, and there’s no nice way to soft pedal this, lies about abortion and what it does. Rep. Diane Black [R-TN] kicked off her testimony with a statement that shows exactly how morally bankrupt the entire anti-choice argument is on this.

• whpa 1 *

Okay, so the argument here is that abortion is a terrible evil and really should be considered murder, and also that the “murderer’s” health and safety is so paramount that we need a whole bunch of regulations that don’t apply to medical care that is not murder? How does that even make sense? If you are actually “pro-life,” then waxing on and on about how much you love the so-called murderers and you want their experience of murder to be as safe as possible makes no sense at all. That is because they are lying. These regulations aren’t about health and safety at all. If it is, then anti-choicers are saying the health and safety concerns of people they believe are murderers matters more than the health and safety concerns of people who aren’t committing murder. Which is a transparent lie.

Black went on to tell more lies.

• whpa 2 *

Some of this is lying by implication, insinuating that the health risks of continuing a pregnancy are less than the health risks of having an abortion, which is patently and demonstrably false. 1 to 5 percent of abortions have minor cervical lacerations? Well, 33 percent of all births end in c-section, which is major surgery compared to a laceration. Less than half a percent of abortions require hospitalization, as a point of comparison to childbirth, nearly all of which is performed in a hospital. As for the higher chance of preterm birth, there was a study that showed that but later studies debunked it. The breast cancer line is cherry-picking. The most reliable studies have found no such link. The psychology stuff was also just pure B.S. The American Psychological Association states that, after reviewing the literature, they conclude there is “no evidence that a single abortion harms a woman’s mental health.”

But all this is in service of the ur-lie underlying this, which is that the proposed regulations have anything to do with any of this. Abortion doesn’t cause higher rates of depression, but even if it did, why would requiring a doctor to have hospital admitting privileges change that? Abortion doesn’t cause breast cancer, but even if it did, why would requiring someone to have an ambulatory surgical center to give a woman a pill at home change things. Abortions do have a small complication rate, but that’s why pro-choicers think it should be regulated like every other medical procedure. You can get a laceration during a colonoscopy, but that doesn’t mean you should be read a script guilt-tripping you about it and made to wait 24 hours before you get one.

Then there was Sen. Marsha Blackburn [R-TN].

• whpa 3 *

Yes, the law would require that abortion is treated like comparable medical procedures. Blackburn’s argument relies on the demonstrably false assumption that women are weaker and stupider than men and therefore need to be subject to more state interference when it comes to our medical decisions. Men are not forced to wait and think about it an extra 24 hours before they get minor surgery. Men are not assumed to be so stupid that they can’t take a pill without a physician watching them to make sure they swallow it properly. To say that abortion and only abortion requires a doctor to watch you to make sure you swallow a pill right is to assume women are too stupid to remember to swallow. Look, the fact of the matter is that these unnecessary regulations exist for one reason and one reason only: to make safe, legal abortion harder to get in order to punish women for having sex. Everything else that conservatives say on this issue is just hand-waving or outright lying.

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Interview

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Lila Rose is getting some attention in right-wing media again with her deceptively edited videos that are supposedly “stings” against Planned Parenthood. Rose claims to be motivated by her supposed concern for fetal life, but what is interesting about this latest so-called sting is, like with her previous ones, “life” doesn’t come up at all. Instead the entire thing is about how terrible it is that people have non-vanilla sexual interests. Basically, watching these videos teaches you little to nothing about the abortion debate or Planned Parenthood, but one thing you definitely walk away realizing is that Lila Rose could not care less about “life” but is strictly interested in pushing the idea that sexual pleasure is deeply shameful and that people who enjoy sex should be shamed and punished for it.

There’s plenty of reason to be skeptical about the latest videos, as Rose is well known for deceptively editing her videos. But honestly, watching them, the only reason to be deeply offended is if you think sex is naughty and you are dumb enough to think that lying to teenagers about sex will kill all their curiosity about it. Basically, Rose’s investigator, posing as a 15-year-old, asked pointed questions about bondage and the Planned Parenthood worker answered honestly. Here’s a clip from the Colorado one.

• lila rose 1 *

While Rose would like you to believe that Fifty Shades of Grey is some kind of underground deviant porn, it was actually a massive bestseller and is being made into a major Hollywood movie. That book is actually well-known for being fairly tame, about as mainstream and ordinary as you could get. It’s literally the least surprising thing in the world that people who are young and first having sex might have questions about it. Being tied up and spanked is a little silly, yes, but sex is kind of a silly activity. For most people, experimenting with bondage is just goofy play time. Dan Savage calls it cops and robbers with your pants off. Getting offended about it makes about as much sense as getting offended that kids have games like cops and robbers or people enjoy watching shows where there is conflict. Sex is, you know, supposed to be fun. God forbid.

Also worth noting is that when the investigator asked about this, the worker immediately went to the topic of safety and consent, immediately offering advice about how to explore this whole thing safely. Because her job is to make sex safe, and bondage is a common sexual practice that has some basic safety advice to go with it.

• lila rose 2 *

So, here we have the so-called investigator asking a sex educator a direct question about a sexual interest. The educator offers her a sincere and honest answer. She says that while she is not interested in this particular activity, many people are, which is true. She recommends going slow and making sure you don’t do stuff you don’t want to do. She doesn’t judge or scold, because she is a sex educator, and not some kind of prude put here to shame you for your sexual desires. She is doing a good job here. This is what sex educators are supposed to do. It’s important to remember this is a confidential appointment. If the people who hold themselves out as trustworthy people who will give you advice without scolding or judgment clutch their pearls and pretend to be shocked, shocked I tell you, that someone might get ideas from a bestselling erotic novel, where exactly are kids supposed to go for help? If sex educators refuse to educate, young people will try this stuff out anyway, but they won’t be as safe about it. You’d think that Rose wants young people to get themselves hurt, mentally or physically, for daring to try a little bondage.

In fact, it was hard not to draw the conclusion that she wants kids to hurt themselves because they’re bumbling around without guidance after watching the video from Indiana.

• lila rose 3 *

Someone tells a worker about her plans to explore S&M and the worker offers caution while making sure that she knows that she’s not a bad person for having these desires, and letting her know how to explore safely. In other words, exactly what a sex educator is supposed to do, because shaming someone doesn’t make them stop feeling desire. It just means that they’ll be afraid to ask you for advice.

As a reminder, Live Action claims to be a “pro-life” organization. And yet this entire thing is about pushing the notion that a health-care worker should respond to sincere sex questions by shaming girls and telling them they’re dirty. How does that prevent abortion, exactly? All I know is that shaming people and telling them they’re dirty is itself a sadistic action. Except Lila Rose isn’t just playing at sadism in bed, but she’s being a full blown sadist who is trying to actually get people hurt.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, a five-times-married man has relationship advice for the ladies edition. I swear, that Fox News show Outnumbered is just trying to get itself featured on the Wisdom of Wingnuts. This time Geraldo Rivera, who is on his fifth wife, has advice for women on marriage.

• rivera *

Marrying a woman for her youth is like buying a car hoping it will appreciate in value. If your boyfriend is that dumb, ladies, dump him already and find someone who understands that a lifetime commitment necessarily means watching someone get older. P.S.: It’s actually not true that most women are dependent on men. On the contrary, only around 20 percent of mothers stay at home while their husband works.

The post Abortion Access Threatened in Tennessee, and Lila Rose’s New Anti-Sex Videos appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Aw, cybersex

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s interview

Fox News overreacts

Second legal challenge to Texas abortion law

Tucker Carlson being hateful again

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Irin Carmon will be on to explain the latest wrinkle in the litigation against insurance coverage for contraception. Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaks some truth, and the Texas abortion law goes to court again.

Did you guys see this ’90s-era video instructing people on what cybersex is and how to do it, which went viral?

• cybersex *

At some point, her ridiculous ’90s sweater comes off and she is naked on top, suggesting this was somehow supposed to be arousing as well as instructional.

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Katie Couric, who now works for Yahoo! News, scored a sit-down interview with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in which they discussed judicial collar fashion, family life, and oh yeah, the Hobby Lobby case. Couric asked some very leading questions about whether or not the justices who ruled for Hobby Lobby, all men, are somehow blind to the fact that contraception is not only a routine part of women’s medical care but also something that just basically all women use.

• rbg 1 *

Really, no joke: Over 99 percent of women who have had sexual intercourse have used it. What I like about Ginsburg is she’s not hamstrung by people who pressure liberals and feminists to refuse to outright say things like people have sex and contraception is a necessary part of modern life. She’s happy to come right out and say just these things.

• rbg 2 *

What’s funny is I think no one has been more surprised than feminists and liberals at how so many conservative men have taken to acting like they imagine contraception to be some wild sexual fetish that only hippies and perverts engage in. I certainly was under the impression that, since nearly all women use it, nearly all men are familiar with it. But what’s become evident is a lot of conservative men are likely shielded from contraception by the women in their lives, and may not even fully realize that their wives and girlfriends and daughters and other women in their families use it. This is not something most liberals really grasped until this debate made it clear. And so Ginsburg is reacting to what the evidence points to. If you don’t want people to assume you’re ignorant about contraception, perhaps you should learn something about it before opining on it.

But the folks at Fox News refuse to accept that Ginsburg might be reacting to the strong evidence that her colleagues have no idea how important contraception is to women, and instead, well, basically accuse her of attacking men because they’re men.

• rbg 3 *

Luckily for you listeners, you just got to hear what Ginsburg actually said, so you know as well as I do that she didn’t accuse her colleagues of being unreasonable because they’re men. But here’s the thing that is true: Because they are men, they have the privilege of simply ignoring realities of female lives that they don’t want to understand, which is what Couric and Ginsburg were getting at. If you’re a woman, it’s nearly impossible to deny the importance of contraception to your daily life, and it would be completely impossible, outside of massive hypocrisy, to deny it while holding down an important job like being a judge. Does this mean that all men think this way? No, of course not. Some men have empathy for women and curiosity about women’s lives. But the justices who ruled for Hobby Lobby clearly display a complete disinterest in women’s lives and an incuriosity that often verges on being outright hostile.

Then we had the mansplaining portion of the segment.

• rbg 4 *

The problem is that while Hobby Lobby only sued over four kinds of contraception, the court sent out a clarification the day after the decision to let everyone know that this decision covers all forms of contraception. As is usual with mansplainers, Eric Bolling’s confidence that he knows better than the woman he is lecturing is inversely proportional to how much he actually knows compared to her. So you have layers upon layers of men opining about stuff they don’t understand and can’t be bothered to learn. Fascinating.

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Interview

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The battle over abortion in Texas is hardly over yet. The mega-bill that Wendy Davis tried to filibuster and Gov. Rick Perry forced through by holding multiple extra legislative sessions has another provision in it that starts taking effect on September 1. Because of this, arguments in district federal court over that part of the law took place last week.

• texas 1 *

This is incredibly frustrating, because the first part of the law, which requires doctors to have hospital admitting privileges, was upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court even though similar laws in other states have been struck down. Frustrating because while the “official” reason for the law is to protect women’s health, the court basically admitted that it’s really about reducing access to safe, legal abortion and for no other purpose. That is also true of this particular provision of the law. While it might sound nice on paper to have all abortions done in ambulatory surgical centers, if you actually start to look at the facts at all, there’s no reason for it. For one thing, a lot of abortions are medication abortions, where you take a pill and you can do it at home. But even with “surgical abortions,” it’s not really what you’d call surgery, since all they do is dilate your cervix. There’s no cutting necessary. This is about exploiting people’s ignorance of how safe abortion is, and allowing right wingers to basically argue that because they wish abortion was dangerous it should be treated like it’s dangerous.

The real danger here, however, is to women’s health-care access.

• texas 2 *

The six remaining clinics will likely start having waiting lists and may, in some cases, have to use their ambulatory surgical centers because these laws are going to cause many women to delay their abortions until later in the pregnancy, where more sophisticated and risky interventions are necessary. And, as has been pointed out many times before, a lot of women, especially in rural areas, will just try to get abortion pills on the black market. What is particularly aggravating is the state attorney, Jimmy Blacklock, just said that if women want abortions, they should just go to New Mexico. Basically, at this point they’re just admitting that the only real purpose these laws serve is to make abortion more expensive and more of a hassle, putting it out of reach for poor women and basically making you suffer to get your abortion for no other reason than they want to punish you. This has nothing to do with “life” or “health,” but is just about hassling women for the hell of it.

Naturally, there was an anti-choicer on hand to be interviewed at the protests in front of the court.

• texas 3 *

Again, anti-choice arguments make no sense. Okay, it’s easy to say you regret your abortion when you were allowed the choice to have one and professing regret after the fact costs you nothing and gets you accolades from your fellow church-goers. Bully for you. Doesn’t change the fact that very few women regret their abortions. More to the point, how does requiring abortion to be performed in an ambulatory surgical center address your abortion regret? Is this woman suggesting that if her abortions had been in more expensive facilities, she would have no regrets? Of course not. Because this isn’t about women’s health or safety, but about making abortion harder for women to get, and the abortion regret narrative is there to imply that childbirth should be forced on a woman for her own good. But of course, the abortion regret people are saying that you are the one who should be forced to bear children against your will, you know, because of their regrets. How nice for them that someone else has to pay the price for them to feel better about past decisions.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Tucker Carlson is talking again edition. This time, the Fox News host is talking about women who have children without being married first.

• tucker *

Sometimes you wonder if some men like him believe they’ll never convince women to like them, so instead they have to bully women into thinking we need them. By the way, ever notice how conservative opposition to single parenthood dries up the second a woman might consider an abortion in order not to have a baby “out of wedlock.” All of a sudden, they start swearing up and down that it’s not big thing having a baby while single. Funny how that works.

The post ‘The Next Hobby Lobby,’ and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Contraception appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Sleazy protester tactics

Rachel Maddow on sleazy protester tactics

Fremont sex education controversy

Men have all sorts of rights, but women apparently have not even the most basic ones

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be speaking with a researcher on the problem with women not getting heard, even when it really counts. New recordings show how sleazy anti-choice protesters are and even the Bay Area has parents against decent sex education.

BuzzFeed had a hilarious video called “What Men Are Really Saying When Catcalling Women,” where men say what’s actually going on with them, but you know, in the same idiot tones they use when cat-calling women.

• cat-calling *

I’d add to that, “I’d never do this to a woman who is accompanied by a man, because I think that women are male property!”

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Thanks to Andrea Grimes at RH Reality Check for bringing this story to my attention. Progress Texas and NARAL Pro-Choice Texas got some audio of anti-choice protesters holding trainings on how to use intimidation, under the guise of protest, to try to force women to have babies they don’t want to have. While anti-choicers like to portray themselves to the public as kind-hearted Christians who just want to talk to women and hopefully persuade them with their arguments, what NARAL discovered was that anti-choice protesters, in actuality, prefer to use intimidation, shaming, and force.

Karen Garnett, the director of an anti-choice Catholic group in North Texas, explained how to use stalking as a helpful intimidation tactic in order to try to scare women out of abortion and to scare providers, as well as to perhaps dig up information for legal harassment.

• anti 1 *

With this, you really get a good idea of how legislators are working in conjunction with anti-choice harassment and intimidation crews in order to run women off of safe, legal abortion and push them either toward forced childbirth or, in many cases, toward less safe black market abortions. The legislators pass a mandatory waiting period law, requiring a woman to come to the clinic twice. The first time she comes, the antis make a big fuss out of recording her license plate to let her know she is being watched by people who believe that they are the rightful owners of her body and not her. Then she knows that if she returns for the abortion, they are stalking her. That’s got to be incredibly scary. But if there was any doubt at all that the purpose of this exercise is not persuasion but intimidation, Garnett made it clear that scaring women and using fear as a weapon to control them is the point.

• anti 2 *

They’re stalking you because they want to “help” you choose life! Yeah, that’s the ticket. By the same logic, your possessive ex-boyfriend is stalking you because he just wants to help you choose to have a relationship with him, even though you know, you already told him no. Using fear and intimidation to control people is not about helping them, full stop. Antis are just so used to making the bad faith argument equating attacks with help and force with kindness that words like “help” don’t mean anything to them. The actual help is on the inside of the clinic. You can tell, because inside the clinic they ask you what you need and do what they can to meet your needs. They don’t try to scare you into doing what they want you to do. There’s a huge difference.

But lest there be any doubt that these people know they aren’t helping and know they are there to hurt, the next speaker, Eileen Romano, explained how to exploit poor women’s poverty to bully them into having children they don’t want.

• anti 3 *

“God is good.” That is the conclusion of someone who wants to exploit women’s poverty to hurt them. I’m not a Christian, but I have read the Bible and I don’t remember the part where Jesus said that his followers should target poor people for abuse and exploitation because they’re poor and they don’t have any alternatives. Jesus said you should help poor people. He was very clear on this. But anti-choicers are explaining to each other how great poverty is, because it makes it so much easier to force women to do what you want them to do. Damn.

The cruelty and viciousness that undergirds the anti-choice movement was also evident during protests in New Orleans recently, which I covered in an interview with Teddy Wilson here at Reality Cast. But Rachel Maddow also did a segment on it for her show.

• anti 4 *

Here’s the thing I try to remind people of, over and over: If your arguments are good, persuade people with your arguments. Use logic. Use rhetoric. But if you find yourself resorting to force and bullying, it’s because your arguments aren’t any good. You know you can’t persuade people, so you try to use force instead. So you have to ask yourself, how sure are you really of your arguments if you know in your heart you can’t persuade people, so you resort to threats and force instead? I have to say you clearly aren’t sure at all.

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Interview

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There’s a widespread myth that everyone in the Bay Area is super liberal and even downright radical when it comes to sex positivity. And while that’s definitely a big part of the culture out there, for which I tip my hat, the fact of the matter is that people who get completely unbent at the idea that sex is supposed to be fun are found in every corner of this country. And now the Fremont school district is having a battle over these new textbooks that are taught in ninth grade health because the sex education information in there does not hide the fact that sex is supposed to be fun and playful.

• fremont 1 *

There’s two basic categories of people who throw a fit over sex education. You have your religious conservatives who really do think that sex is naughty and evil and who attack sex education because they want to make it so hard to teach anything useful in school that schools either give up or institute programs telling kids they’re going to hell unless they wait until marriage. But you also have people who may not be anti-sex exactly, but they are confused. They assume that because they don’t feel ready to have kids that are interested in sex, then the kids themselves must not be ready. First of all, it’s important for parents to learn to separate their desire for their kids to be kids a little longer from the factual evidence that kids learn a lot more about this stuff than you’d think, and a lot faster.

But let’s also be clear that it’s absolutely true that most 14-year-olds are not ready to have sex yet, much less engage in sexting or bondage. To which I have to point out that this is true of, well, basically everything else you teach kids in school. We aren’t teaching kids writing skills so that their Facebook posts are more lucid. We aren’t teaching them math skills so they can, damn, I don’t even know what a teenager could use, say, calculus for in everyday life. The point of education is not to teach someone about something after they have already started to do it or use that knowledge. We teach them things so that, as they become adults and start to have more need for these skills, they are already prepared. That’s why it’s important to talk, in depth, with kids about sex before they start to have sex. So that when they start to explore, they have the tools to be safe.

And let’s be clear, this book is incredibly dry.

• fremont 2 *

I am not even remotely surprised that some parents looked at the book and thought, what’s the big deal? The critics of the book are using alarmist, overblown language, such as calling it “pornography” or arguing that it “introduces” high schoolers to bondage. It does no such thing. It acknowledges that bondage is a thing that exists, which is not news to roughly any teenager who is permitted to leave the house or see the ads for Fifty Shades of Grey. Also, I think “bondage” is one of those words that people just feel primed to react negatively to, but the book simply describes it, accurately, as a game where you get tied up or blindfolded, which are games that nearly all sexually active people try at some point. Same thing with oral sex and masturbation. On the very slight chance that there’s a 14-year-old alive who hasn’t heard of these things, the fact of the matter is that they will hear about these things in high school. It’s far better for a kid to first encounter these concepts by having them drily and professionally explained rather than try to figure it out from jokes and bragging and other forms of peer-speak that might distort the realities or make them feel that these behaviors require being unsafe or disrespectful to partners.

Unfortunately, the school district didn’t or didn’t feel able to take this hard line and tell parents that it’s better for kids to know before they try rather than vice versa. Instead,there was minimizing of the impact of the text, which was only about 20 pages of the whole book.

• fremont 3 *

That may be so, but it’s neither here nor there. Kids can be counted on to flip to the sex part and read it, being, you know, human. But that’s a good thing. Kids are curious about sex and will, whether you like it or not, seek out information. Better for that info to be accurate and safety-oriented than the fantasies offered in porn or the playground bragging that can distort perceptions. The school didn’t make a more full-throated defense of the books, so no big surprise, they eventually gave in and yanked the book, for review right now. Hopefully they’ll just wait for this temper tantrum to die out and put the books back in classrooms. Kids need this info, whether their parents like it or not, after all.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, watch someone just simply ignore the possibility that women are human beings with rights at all edition. This is David Barton, right wing “historian” who mostly just lies about history, argue that being for abortion rights means being against liberty.

• barton *

The fact that they don’t see women as really human couldn’t have been more distilled. A man’s right to own property, to have guns, to make money, all that is inalienable. But a woman’s right to determine something so basic as to whether or not to be pregnant, not a right. Because this is a worldview that doesn’t see women as rights-bearing people.

The post ‘The Silent Sex,’ Parents Against Sex Ed, and Anti-Choice Tactics appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) forgets the phrase “birth control”

Ireland obeying letter of law but not spirit

Anti-choicer goes to war against public nudity

Public protests of strip club causes public protest of church

Alliance Defending Freedom compares sex to cigarette addiction

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Tara Culp-Ressler will explain what’s so messed up about most polling data on abortion, and how to fix it. Ireland’s new abortion law flunks its first major test and a clash over a strip club is a reminder of what really motivates the anti-choice movement.

This was an amusing moment in a recent debate. Republican Rep. Mike Coffman is running for re-election in Colorado and was asked about his stance on reproductive rights. He had a brain fart.

• Coffman *

I wouldn’t read too much into this. We all blank out at times. But that this story got flagged shows that politicians are being watched very carefully on this issue, and I suspect we’ll see some real scandals before the midterms are over.

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After the death of Savita Halappanavar from sepsis in an Irish hospital, Ireland promised that they would do better. Halappanavar presented at the hospital with a miscarrying pregnancy that had gone septic, and asked for an abortion, but even though there was no way the fetus would survive, the hospital refused until the fetal heartbeat ended on its own. By then, it was too late for Halappanavar, who died of infection. In response, the government caved and passed the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, which supposedly allows for women who have life-threatening conditions to have access to abortions. So how’s it working out? Not well, it seems, according to RTE News.

• Ireland 1 *

Let’s be clear that this woman was 24 weeks along, almost 25, and the word “woman” is stretching it a little: She has just turned 18 and had been 17 when she first discovered the pregnancy. She is also claiming to be a rape victim. And, by the panel’s own findings, she qualifies for an abortion under Irish law, because her suicidal thoughts are chronic and serious, but they decided instead to exploit a loophole and argue that forcing her to give birth through a much more intrusive surgery counts as terminating the pregnancy and meets the law’s requirements. This is particularly upsetting because while the young woman is in her second trimester, it’s not because she blew off trying to get an abortion earlier in her pregnancy.

• Ireland 2 *

So what it sounds like was this woman first tried to get an abortion she is legally entitled to in Ireland when she was really early in her pregnancy. It was reported that she doesn’t speak English well and that one reason she couldn’t travel is that she’s an immigrant under travel restrictions. Basically, it seems that she was stalled by bureaucratic nonsense until she was far enough along that they could claim that the fetus was “viable” and force her into a c-section instead of an abortion. The same thing happened to a woman called Beatriz in El Salvador who had a legal right to a medical exemption to abort a pregnancy where the fetus was developing without a brain, and she was stalled and stalled by the government until it was far enough along that they could force her to get her abdomen cut open, instead of a less invasive abortion, and so that’s what they forced her to do. In this case, I repeat, the panel findings show that she was eligible for a termination, and by what we’re apparently supposed to believe is pure coincidence, she finally got a chance to plead her case right when she was far enough along that they could say they met their legal obligations through a c-section instead of an abortion.

The young woman did make a show of rebellion to what definitely feels like persecution.

• Ireland 3 *

She agreed. Kind of. I mean, they made her an offer that she couldn’t refuse, it sounds like, which is forcing her to stay in the hospital and forcing hydration on her. At least, so far, it doesn’t sound like force-feeding, which is torture. But this woman was being bullied and abused by a system that’s supposed to be helping her. What makes this doubly frustrating is that stuff like this happens for no other reason than to “make an example” out of someone. This young woman is a target because she’s easy to target: Young, an immigrant who doesn’t speak the language well, confused about her rights. But women with more privilege in Ireland, who are older or who can afford to travel, just go to England to get abortions.

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Interview

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Regular listeners of this podcast know that one of the ongoing struggles between the pro-choice and anti-choice movements is the question of arguing in good faith and specifically the problem of how anti-choicers refuse to do it. They like to style themselves as “pro-life” and suggest that it’s just a deep love of human life that motivates them, instead of a deep hostility to female independence and a fear and loathing of female sexuality. But that’s a story that only works if you pointedly ignore everything else that anti-choice activists do when they aren’t screaming about abortion. With that in mind, I’d like to look at a case study that’s arisen in Ohio. The director of Personhood Ohio, a group that wants to define fertilized eggs as persons in order to ban abortion and undermine access to contraception, is a man named Patrick Johnston. But wanting to empower the government to treat every tampon like a crime scene is not the only thing that gets Johnston riled up. He’s also deeply, deeply upset about breasts.

• breasts 1 *

I love how it’s children and married men, like single men aren’t a factor here. And what’s his definition of children? Is he worried that women who are breast-feeding are somehow molesting children? So many questions. But obviously the big issue here is that he’s openly and aggressively defining women’s bodies as public property. While I think there’s some value in laws that keep both men and women from flashing genitals in public, the idea that women’s bodies need to be kept under wraps because men might feel some kind of sexual temptation is just full-blown hooey nonsense. Her body shouldn’t be regulated because you can’t control yourself. You regulate you. It’s particularly insidious to claim that a woman who is a complete stranger to you is more responsible for caring for your marriage than you are. We all know how that kind of thinking really is a slippery slope. Maybe the next guy says that seeing women’s hair makes him a little less faithful in his heart to his wife, so what do we do then, force women to cover their hair? Same logic, as evidenced by places like Iran, where they really do have that rule.

So what brought on this entire new anti-breast agenda? Ironically, it was a church protesting women who bare their breasts in a place that you actually have to pay to get into and which people under 18 are not allowed.

• breasts 2 *

Anyone who was listening last week to the podcast will immediately recognize these tactics as ones borrowed from anti-choicers, in no small part because the people protesting the strip club are the same fundamentalist Christians that protest abortion clinics. Which goes to show how much these tactics are not about trying to help people but about trying to control them by shaming them. Anti-choicers say they’re just trying to reach out and help and all that, but if that was true, then how is it that there’s literally no difference in how they approach men going into a strip club and women trying to get abortions? Anyway, the strippers have started to retaliate by going to the church to protest, leading the leader of Personhood Ohio to demand strict laws that would ban all breast-baring in public, which would absolutely create major problems for women who are breast-feeding, amongst other things. But more to the point, the common thread here is female sexuality, which he openly argues is a threat to society and therefore needs to be stifled. This isn’t about “life,” but about sex. And just in case that wasn’t clear, his other argument for criminalizing breast-baring in public is a doozy.

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He sure does find excuses to go to a lot of gay pride parades to carefully count the breasts he sees on display there. For someone who thinks a mere glimpse at a nipple is enough to devastate a man’s marriage, he sure seems eager to get many, many glimpses. You know, to protect other people.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, anti-choicers have theories about what sex is all about edition. The Alliance Defending Freedom has a video out warning parents about the dangers of a sex education course apparently endorsed by Planned Parenthood, because, as usual, they seem to believe that if you don’t talk to kids about sex , they’ll never have any interest in it.

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It’s always so enlightening when antis talk to each other. They swear up and down that they aren’t against sex when speaking to outsiders, but amongst themselves, they freely discuss sex like it’s a dangerous and addictive drug. That metaphor falls apart upon any examination, but persists amongst anti-choicers for the simple reason that they really do think sex is wrong and want to stomp out the vast majority of healthy expressions of sexuality.

The post The Problem With Abortion Polling, and Ireland’s Abortion Law appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, author Roxane Gay will talk to us about being a “bad feminist.” The Obama administration updates it policies on the contraception benefit, and Beyoncé sends heads spinning by publicly embracing feminism at the VMAs.

James Wood is a congressional candidate from Arizona, and the National Pro-Life Alliance asked him to fill out their survey on the topic of abortion. His response is the sort of thing every pro-choice candidate should do from here until the end of time.

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I’m serious. All pro-choice candidates should do this. By calling anti-choice groups’ bluff, you put them in a situation where they kind of have to admit that they’re not so much pro-life as anti-sex.

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Late last Friday, the Obama administration announced that they have a new compromise on offer for employers who don’t want to offer health-care plans that meet federal minimum standards for contraception coverage. That’s the traditional time that presidential administrations, Republican or Democratic, use to dump news that they want to minimize the coverage of. Whatever the reason, coverage was light, which I discovered when I was trying to find some news coverage that actually explained what this new compromise even is. Seriously, there was barely anything. But the Wall Street Journal had a reporter explain it and she did a very thorough job.

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The reason it’s so complex is because of the bad faith of anti-choice employers. They claim to object to the contraception coverage because they don’t want their money to go to contraception, which is against their religious beliefs. So the administration said fine, fill out this form that says that and your money won’t go to it as the insurance company will pay for it directly. But since their actual reason for objecting is that they don’t want their employees to have contraception at all, this wasn’t good enough. Of course, they can’t come right out and say, hey we believe we should control our employees’ private lives and we want to stop them from getting contraception coverage elsewhere. So instead they claim that even signing the form violates their religious beliefs. So now, this new compromise means they don’t have to pay and they don’t have to fill out a form.

So, how are anti-choice power players reacting?

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If the concern is “religious freedom,” then that concern has been met. The federal government is paying. The employer doesn’t even have to fill out a form, but instead just writes a letter. Make it as flowery as you want, explaining in as much detail as you want why you think contraception is slutty, the government doesn’t care. But since the actual goal is to keep as many women as possible from accessing contraception, even that won’t do. I promise right now that they won’t stop coming up with novel arguments for why their religious freedom depends on stopping you from getting contraception coverage, either from them or from someone else. And since they have a majority on the Supreme Court that both agrees that employees should be subject to having their employers control their private lives and that women who use contraception are icky sluts, there’s real reason to fear their bad faith arguments will win the day.

Of course, Fox News’ Shannon Bream tried as hard as she could to try to make it seem like the Obama administration is yanking employers around for no reason.

• contraception 3 *

If your objection is to having your money go to birth control coverage, then yes, this changes everything. Granted, it was never their money in the first place, since it was part of their employee’s compensation package, but in the strictest sense, they were writing checks that went to plans that cover birth control. But since this means they don’t have to do that anymore, if that’s the actual objection, then this changes everything. However, if your real goal is to keep your employees from getting birth control coverage because you believe that, as their boss, you get to impose your religious beliefs on their home life, then this changes nothing. So we can safely assume the actual reason for this objection is not about being complicit in what you think is a sin, but because the employers in question believe they are entitled to stop their employees from getting coverage for birth control from anyone.

But the nonsense didn’t stop there.

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The Supreme Court decision actually suggested this exact compromise, where you fill out a simple form asking for an exemption and women get the coverage elsewhere, as a way to do this. The notion that filling out paperwork is an unbelievable burden for a major corporation is beyond laughable. It’s a single form, or maybe even just a letter. Certainly less of a burden than trying to figure out how to get your birth control covered when your employer is actively seeking ways to stop you at every turn. The ruse that this is about religious freedom is laughably transparent. This is about looking for any legal means possible to keep as many women as possible from using effective contraception, and that’s it.

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Interview

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So Beyoncé did something that was absolutely, as she herself would say, flawless during her performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. She was getting the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, and she capped the show off by doing a 16-minute performance that was a medley of the songs from her latest album. During the portion for her aptly titled song “Flawless,” Beyoncé chose to highlight the part of the song that features a speech by Nigerian feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, making it an unmistakable declaration of feminism.

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The words were lit up on the screen, so that everyone online could have an amazing screenshot of Beyoncé standing in front of the word “feminist” from now until forever. She really knows how to make a statement. It’s particularly cool to define the word “feminist.” Anti-feminists have always tried to discredit feminism by saying it’s about man-hating or trying to make women dominant or whatever. They do this because they don’t support women’s equality and, in fact, find it kind of threatening. But they know that coming right out and saying that makes them look like mean-spirited people who object to basic fairness, so instead they lie and argue in bad faith and spread stereotypes that aren’t rooted in reality. They know that if feminists are forever trying to defend ourselves against false accusations of man-hating, it eats up time that could be spent fighting misogyny.

And speaking of bad faith, the folks at Fox News decided that the angle they would take is to produce frowny faces and declare, in maudlin tones, that they think Beyoncé is bad for women and girls.

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A little of this is just plain ol aging crank get off my lawn nonsense. But it’s also bad faith, a way to push a racist argument while pretending it’s not racist. Anyone who actually knows Beyoncé’s music knows that she’s a direct heir to much of the uplift of ’60s R&B. “Single Ladies” is a direct heir to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” “Crazy in Love” owes a lot to love songs like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Bill O’Reilly’s focus on girls suggests he’s mostly upset about the sexual content of Beyoncé’s lyrics. Well, songs about sex have always been a part of pop culture and they have always been angering conservatives. Make no mistake that if O’Reilly had been an aging TV personality in the ’60s, he would have been denouncing Diana Ross as a bad influence. The fact of the matter is Beyoncé is a good role model for little girls. She puts out a very consistent message about how it’s good to be ambitious, good to want more, good to be proud of yourself, and good to demand power. And she does that all while showing that you can have a happy family life, too. That’s a good message and I want girls to hear it.

Then, of course, there was the segment of people who hate feminism telling feminists that we aren’t doing feminism right, something they believe they get to sit in judgment of even though they want to end feminism. This is Megyn Kelly and Mollie Hemingway, anti-feminists, telling feminists that we’re not doing feminism right.

• beyonce 3 *

They weren’t naked, of course, because it was on MTV, not on HBO. But Kelly and Hemingway’s argument rests on a false assumption that feminists are against sex. I don’t know how they got it into their head that “feminism” should be indistinguishable from fundamentalist Christianity, but uh, from the beginning feminism has always been about the idea that a sexist society’s disapproval of female sexuality is oppressive and wrong. The song where Beyoncé is doing a “stripper” dance is a song about having sex, called “Partition.” In context, it’s not some kind of call for all women to be strippers, but a celebration of how it’s fun, when you’re having sex, to be admired by your partner. Seriously, watch the video for the context. Her actual husband is in it.

Sex is a thing that many pop songs are about. That is not inconsistent with feminism, because feminists have always been about sexual liberation. That’s why we think birth control and abortion are important rights for women, because we know that people have sex and we think people should have sex if they want to, and women need things to do that and control their lives and be healthy. Sorry, guys, but you don’t get to make up rules for feminists and then get mad when we don’t do what you want us to do.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Rush Limbaugh just can’t take it anymore edition. Limbaugh is really angry at feminists attacks on rape culture because, and there’s no nice way to put this, he thinks men just can’t help themselves and must violently assault women.

• Limbaugh *

Boys chase girls, so I guess that means that boys must, if they catch a girl, forcibly penetrate her while she says “no” and “stop.” Got it. I don’t know why they say feminists are man-haters, because Limbaugh seems to be the man-hater with his belief that men’s attraction to women leads inevitably to rape, and therefore the only thing that can be done is for women to try not to be attractive. Never mind that one of his favorite things to do on the show is shame women for not being attractive enough in his eyes. We’re supposed to be attractive and it’s also our fault if a man rapes us because we were so attractive. Here’s a fact: Research shows only about 5 to 6 percent of men are rapists. So his suggestion that men are hardwired to rape women is clearly, demonstrably false.

The post Roxane Gay on ‘Bad Feminism,’ the New Contraception Compromise, and Beyoncé’s ‘Flawless’ Performance appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll have some researchers on to explain why sex education needs to start young and be integrated into larger health and safety education. Kirsten Gillibrand tries to highlight the problem of sexual harassment in Congress and confused conservatives amplify attacks on feminism without really know what it is.

RH Reality Check’s own Andrea Grimes has started the taco or beer challenge to raise money for abortion access, and she has a video up at the website updating us on its progress.

• taco or beer*

So if you haven’t joined in, as Andrea says, it’s super easy. Eat a taco or drink a beer. As a fellow Texan, I would say you should ideally do both together. Then give to an abortion fund. RHRealityCheck.org has plenty of information to help you decide where to donate!

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I realize it’s the end of the summer and that means a somewhat slow news cycle, but even I was surprised to see how much sturm und drang accompanied Kirsten Gillibrand’s utterly non-surprising revelation that many of her colleagues, both congressmen and lobbyists, have said sexist things to her over the years.

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The revelation provoked a telling response out in the punditry. Not a few men working for major publications like the New York Times and Politico hinted that Gillibrand was lying or exaggerating what happened to her, even though any woman could probably tell them that she was, if anything, soft-pedaling the kind of crap men often feel free to dish out to their female colleagues. In fact, hinting that she’s lying morphed into a demand that she start naming names. The Daily Show grabbed a few prominent examples.

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There were two basic flavors of people demanding that Gillibrand name names: Men who were insinuating that she made the harassment up and people who believed the harassment happened but think that Gillibrand, who is a Democrat, must be protecting her fellow Democrats. But while everyone who claimed they wanted her to name names fashioned themselves as good-hearted people who simply wanted to bring an end to all this sexual harassment, the fact that they were mostly conservatives and Republicans suggested that they, in fact, have ulterior motivations. After all, if you name someone publicly, that man, no matter how guilty he may be, will almost surely deny it. And so the same people who are insinuating that she’s lying now will continue to say that, but now they will say it louder and more angrily, because they’ll imagine that they’re defending a man who swears innocence. The likely outcome is her career would be completely derailed while the harassers got off scot-free. Not to be too cynical, but I suspect the people demanding that she names names know that it would ruin her while likely doing no damage to any harassers, and that’s the outcome they’re trying to make happen. But since Gillibrand is not so stupid as to do that, they’re going to try to score points anyway by suggesting she’s a liar or somehow doing something unethical, even though she didn’t, you know, ask for some dudes to be constantly monitoring her body.

But while male conservative pundits of all sorts were congratulating each other on their ability to victim-blame and insinuate that Gillibrand is a liar, female pundits were telling a different story, one where it’s literally the least surprising thing in the world that this happens to someone like Gillibrand. Again, the Daily Show gathered up clips.

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Such is our sexist society, however, that basically women from every corner can say, yeah, that happened to me, too, and yet you still have a bunch of men treating it like it’s absolutely preposterous to suggest that it ever happens. But no really, guys, it happens! I had a colleague once who basically put himself on make-up watch over me, checking in with me multiple times a week to determine if I was wearing what he thought was enough make-up. Not that he could tell, because I could trick him by skipping foundation and mascara but simply putting on red lipstick, but neither his lack of basic knowledge of how make-up works nor my unsubtle suggestions that his attentions were unwelcome would present a barrier to his self-assigned role as the make-up police. If women don’t tell you about this stuff, it’s not because it’s not happening. It’s because you either act bored by it or you immediately start telling them that you know more about what happened to them even though you weren’t there. If you actually shut up and listened more often, hyper-skeptical dudes, you might learn a thing or two about what women have to put up with on a regular basis.

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Interview

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If you’re starting to feel like conservative media has been ramping up the attacks on feminism lately, well, you would definitely be right. It’s actually kind of baffling, because they all claim they hate the whole “war on women” meme, and yet the response to it has been to up the ante on the war on women, getting ever bolder about claiming that women should just suck it up and give up any hope of ever achieving basic equality with men. The show Fox & Friends recently had the hosts of the Internet show Politichicks on to promote their new book What Women Really Want, a strange title because I can assure you that I, as a woman, do not want any of what they’re selling, and somehow I continue to exist, you know, as a woman.

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You know, if it irritates conservatives so much to have feminists forever talking about women’s sexuality and reproductive health, I have a very simple solution: Stop using sex to oppress women. Stop trying to take away the right to abortion. Stop calling women “sluts” if they want birth control. Stop telling women they have to put up with it when men sexually harass them. Stop making excuses for sexual violence. Stop trying to take away sex education that is known to reduce STI [sexually transmitted infection] and teen pregnancy rates. If you stop attacking women’s sexuality, I guarantee you that you will stop hearing so much about it. All we want is to be left alone to be sexual beings, due to being human, without conservatives looking for any angle they can to use our sexuality to oppress us.

Of course, the problem here is that these conservative women are arguing that women are inherently, well, asexual, and feminists are somehow forcing women to be sexual.

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It’s deeply dishonest to conflate “objectification” with “sexualization.” Objectification is reducing someone to an object, for instance having a woman show off her body while insisting that she stay silent and submissive, so men can do what they want to her. “Sexualizing” is a garbage word that means nothing. With all this “God” talk and “femininity” talk, it’s clear what she’s trying to argue is that women inherently are asexual and have no authentic sexual desires of their own, but just, well, put up with sex because they have to in order to get husbands and children. But if it’s true that women are inherently asexual and feminists are making them sexual, then why would conservatives need to ban abortion and restrict access to contraception? Yes, feminists worked to make contraception co-pay free. But just because the contraception is available doesn’t mean you have to take it. If women are inherently asexual, then there would be no reason to oppose co-pay free contraception, since no one would use the service. But, in fact, we know that 99 percent of women use contraception, which suggests that women are, in fact, inherently sexual and the only people trying to make women act in ways that are contrary to their nature are conservatives.

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So let’s follow along here. The argument is that women are not sexual beings and that we’re simply being tricked into thinking we’re sexual by Beyoncé’s magic dance routines. Never mind that women were having sex, using contraception and yes, even masturbating long before Beyoncé was born, much less making records. Seriously, I want these women who are insisting women are born with no interest in sex to explain the sales of the Hitatchi Magic Wand to me. But now they’re arguing that rape itself is the result of women foolishly believing that we like sex. That makes no sense. Like none. I mean, by definition, rape is about forcing someone who does not want to have sex with you into having sex with you. At this point, they’re just so eager to demonize feminists they’ll say any random weird thing. I fully expected them to accuse feminists of worshipping Satan and drinking blood from living goats, anything so long as it sounds bad. Doesn’t have to make sense. But I do think the larger problem is that they are so wrapped up in the idea that sex is dirty, they start to think the reason rape is wrong is because of the sex part, instead of the force part. So, just for clarity’s sake, let me explain: Feminists think sex is great if everyone involved is an adult and wants to be there. Feminists also think that violence is wrong, and forcing sex on an unwilling person is violence. This is not that hard to grasp. For instance, while there are few pleasures in life more wonderful than sharing a good meal with friends, being tied to a chair and force fed is torture. If you can get that, you can understand how one can think sex is wonderful while thinking rape is very, very wrong.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Phyllis Schlafly is trying to get women badly hurt edition. In a recent radio address, Schlafly gave what might be the worst advice I’ve ever heard, which is telling women that they can turn abusive men into kind, loving partners by marrying them.

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Well, while you’re lying, why not go all the way and claim marriage makes you poop gold nuggets and makes your sweat smell like flowers? This is deeply irresponsible advice because women in abusive relationships often want to believe, very badly, that they can do something to make the man they love stop hitting them and start being nice to them, and so they may actually listen to this terrible advice in the vain hope that it will work. Needless to say, the actual experts in domestic violence strongly disagree, and the prevailing evidence shows that the best way to keep a woman safe from an abusive partner is to separate them, permanently. In fact, there’s substantial evidence to show abusers actually increase their violence after a wedding or a pregnancy or childbirth. Basically anything that makes it harder to escape emboldens them to think they hit you more and hit you harder while being assured that you won’t leave them.

The post Harassment in Congress, and Sex Education for Early Adolescents appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Andrea Grimes will be on to fill us in on what’s happening in Texas. Wendy Davis comes out about her abortion, and a segment on the Ray Rice domestic violence video and its fallout.

So there’s a small bit of good news coming out of Texas.

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The McAllen clinic will be basically the only one in the entire Rio Grande Valley offering abortion. This is good news, but I do worry, as we’ll get to later in the show, that this victory will be short-lived.

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Despite the fact that abortion is a very personal topic, for most politicians who talk about it, the personal tends to be avoided. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. Abortion should be regarded as the sort of thing you shouldn’t have to talk about in public if you don’t want, which is why Roe v. Wade was all about privacy rights. But it also means that Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis’ revelation that she had not one, but two abortions for medical reasons is a big deal. Doubly so because one of her abortions would have been banned under the new law in Texas that bans all abortions after 20 weeks, even in the case of fetal abnormality.

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Davis became a major figure in pro-choice circles last year, when she used her position as a state senator to successfully filibuster [what became] HB 2, a massive bill intended to regulate most abortion clinics in the state out of business. It was a big victory at the time, but then the Gov. Rick Perry just called another session of the state legislature and pushed it through, anyway. Since then, the law has been tied up in courts but also have been used successfully to shut down a whole wave of clinics, making access in the state much harder to get.

Davis has been running for governor, putting women’s rights at the center of her campaign. It seems she’s banking on the idea that the issue will get out the vote and turn enough female voters away from her opponent Greg Abbott that she will have a chance to win in what is traditionally a very red state.

Under the circumstances, talking about her own abortions makes a lot of sense. She had already been out about one, an ectopic pregnancy that was terminated. That wasn’t really controversial, in part because most people don’t realize that the anti-choice movement wants to ban aborting even ectopic pregnancies, even though they are never really viable. Indeed, many Catholic hospitals refuse to abort the embryo, instead saying you have to have your entire ovary removed rather than to give you a drug that just kills it and saves you from surgery and from losing some of your reproductive capacity. But this new abortion that Davis is out about is the sort that is controversial even outside of rabid anti-choice circles.

Davis went onto ABC News and explained what happened with this second abortion.

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There’s a debate to be had about the problem of focusing on medically necessary abortions at the expense of talking about abortions that are necessary because the woman simply does not want or cannot be pregnant right now. However, this is someone specific’s actual life and she certainly had no control over what happened to her, so I think I’ll leave that discussion for another time. This is a reality that women who want their pregnancies nonetheless have to abort them. And the anti-choice reaction to her story has given lie to their claims to be motivated by Christian charity.

Rachel Maddow had Davis on and asked her about one response.

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Part of the issue here is that a story like this shows exactly what the stakes are with these 20-week abortion bans. Anti-choicers prefer to tell a story about lazy women who blow off the abortion until they start to show, or selfish women who balk at the first sign of a sick baby. Setting aside the idea that lazy or selfish people are, in the anti-choice mind, the ideal candidates for forced parenting, the larger issue here is that once you actually hear people’s reasons for termination, it becomes a lot harder to judge. So instead, they make accusations of dishonesty, which is really, really rich coming from any anti-choicer, since the entire movement is constructed out of a series of lies.

Next segment, I’ll have on Andrea Grimes to talk some more about the on-the-ground reaction to Davis and her announcement.

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Interview

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We’ve known for months and months that Ray Rice, a running back for the Baltimore Ravens, badly hurt his girlfriend Janay Palmer in an Atlantic City casino back in February. Security video from the hotel hallway showed them fighting as they entered an elevator and then, a few moments later, showed him dragging her unconscious body out of the elevator in a manner that was shockingly callous. However, everything that’s happened since then has served to shore up Rice’s claim, backed up by the NFL and the Ravens, that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. The Ravens got Janay to repeatedly state that she shared the blame and the NFL suggested that this is a dual-blame situation and therefore they shouldn’t have had to punish too badly. Ray also married Janay, and she’s changed her name to Janay Rice. For people who understand the issue of domestic violence, that wedding screamed “red flag,” because it’s really common for abusers to reach for big gestures like proposing marriage in order to get their victims back on their side. But for the Ravens, who put pictures of the wedding on their website, it was touted as just further evidence that since she forgave him, the rest of us should not want him to be held accountable for his actions.

Then the gossip blog TMZ released a video from inside the elevator that showed that the story about how the Rices share the blame is complete hooey.

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There’s legitimate and important debate about whether or not it’s ethical to release this video, knowing that it is contributing to Janay Rice’s pain and embarrassment. With that in mind, I have linked coverage that edits out the worst parts of the video. I will say, however, that it does single-handedly destroy the entire narrative about how there is shared blame in this because it’s clear in the video that he is pushing her and badgering her and her behavior is both reactive to his. And it’s utterly laughable to suggest that the knock-out punch he delivers has any resemblance to self-defense. Because of this, the Ravens terminated Rice’s contract and the NFL put him on indefinite suspension. However, a lot of people, including myself, are frustrated that the management needed the public to see this awful video before they were willing to let go of their insinuation that it wasn’t that bad. Ryan Van Bibber of SB Nation made some points about how serious this problem is.

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He goes on to say that it shouldn’t take graphic footage of domestic violence being released to embarrass the NFL before they take measures to hold batterers accountable. This should be common sense. This shared-blame narrative was always hooey, because even if you were open to the idea that Janay Rice might have been as aggressive as Ray Rice, it’s ridiculous to suggest that it’s even close to a fair fight between an ordinary sized woman and a big old football player. But, to the surprise of literally no one who understands this issue, it turns out that nope, she was not as aggressive as Ray Rice’s defenders claim.

Sadly, even in the face of such a terrifying glimpse of what domestic violence actually looks like, there were some responses that were deeply inhumane. On Fox News, the focus was on blaming the victims and making crass jokes.

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CNN host Carol Costello brought Jan Langbein, an expert in domestic violence, to explain how wrong-headed all this is.

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I know I’m playing a lot of clips, but I also want to highlight Tamron Hall’s interview with Joe Biden. Hall lost her sister to domestic violence, after her sister’s abuser killed her. Biden has been instrumental in pushing the Violence Against Women Act into law and advocating for strengthening it. These are the people who actually have something of value to say about this issue.

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Maybe now that we’ve faced, yet again, how wrong-headed the victim-blaming approach really is, there will be some change on this issue. Hopefully the NFL, at least, will recognize that trying to minimize instead of correct is not the way to go with this.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Rush Limbaugh’s priorities edition. Rush Limbaugh has had enough of all this talk about the evils of domestic violence, since it’s ruining his precious football watching experience.

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Jesus, it’s “feminized” and “politically correct” now to simply say that men shouldn’t hit women? What next, arguing that your balls fall off if women are permitted to look you in the eye? Just when I thought he can’t get any lower, he does. Unbelievable.

The post Reactions to Wendy Davis’ Abortion Stories and Ray Rice’s Violent Video appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, a lawyer from the National Women’s Law Center will explain some of the frightening new attacks on contraception post-Hobby Lobby. Some anti-choice politicians are calling for over-the-counter birth control pills, but is their plan all it’s cracked up to be? And more controversy over the affirmative consent bill in California.

The Ray Rice story is continuing to unfold, which is kind of amazing since most discussions about domestic violence rarely get more than a centimeter deep in the United States. Rachel Maddow talked some with sports reporter Shira Springer about it.

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The problem is the NFL keeps seeing domestic violence as a PR problem, and not a criminal or social problem. Until that changes, I don’t imagine we’ll be seeing much improvement.

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It’s a trend that’s only cropping up this year specifically for Senate races in swing states, but it’s nonetheless a strange one: Republican, anti-choice conservatives who have decided they support over-the-counter birth control pills. NPR did a great segment on this issue and why it’s suddenly become a thing.

• OTC 1

Okay, let’s get one very important issue out of the way first: Over-the-counter birth control is actually a good idea. Not all birth control, of course, because things like the IUD or an implant will always need a health-care worker to actually put it in your body. But the pill is sold over-the-counter in places like Mexico, where it’s actually associated with better usage because it does, indeed, make it easier to get. The ideal situation in the U.S. would be to do what we’re doing now, where most birth control is available through a prescription and offered without a copay for those who need it. But it would also be available without a prescription and just on the shelf. That would be great for women who can’t make it to a doctor right now and need some pills to tide you over. Ever been on vacation and lost your pills? Moved and didn’t have time to make a doctor’s appointment? Just plain forgot to re-up your prescription? This would help.

But that’s not what these guys want to do. They’re just offering this idea is lieu of having insurance coverage of contraception. The argument is that you don’t need insurance coverage of contraception, because you could, in theory, buy your pills over the counter. This ignores many basic and pressing facts about the issue, such as the fact that some kinds of contraception like the IUD will never be available over the counter. It also assumes, incorrectly, that everyone can afford the over-the-counter costs. It’s actually so thoughtless to think you can just exchange one for the other that it reeks of a gross and transparent political move, which is exactly what Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood told NPR it is.

• OTC 2 *

A few cynical conservative media sources have latched onto Planned Parenthood’s denunciations of this move to argue that Planned Parenthood is somehow against greater access to birth control. I don’t know who they think they’re fooling with that weak attempt at a gotcha, but as NPR notes, Planned Parenthood is all for making it easier to get the pill and has even started telemedicine programs on the West Coast in order to make it easier for women to get the pill without seeing a doctor in person. What Planned Parenthood is against is offering this as some kind of alternative to insurance coverage of contraception, since that would leave low-income women without much access.

What was really shocking was that the Republican spokeswoman they spoke to basically came right out and characterizes this not as a sincere policy move, but simply a political ploy to confuse the issue of health care and contraception access.

• OTC 3 *

Her focus is strictly on trying to “neutralize and defang” the opposition’s talking points, and she didn’t even really try to pretend to care about women’s actual health-care needs. Here’s the thing that’s most important to remember about this issue: The men who are rolling out this over-the-counter birth control line are all running for Senate. That means that, even if they win, they have no power, none, to make this happen. The people who have the power to approve drugs for over-the-counter sale are all FDA officials that are hired through the executive branch. You know, people who answer to the president and not really the Congress. It doesn’t really matter if these men are sincere when they say they believe it should be over the counter, because they can’t do anything to make that happen.

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Interview

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One common complaint aimed at feminists these days is that we have basically done all we need to do and are coming up with new problems to justify our existence. This complaint should be laughable on its surface, but if you have any doubts, the debate over California’s “affirmative consent” bill should put them all to rest. Reuters did a short video explaining the bill, which has been nicknamed the “Yes Means Yes” bill.

• consent 1 *

The only bad thing about this bill is it doesn’t go far enough, because it only covers university disciplinary systems and not criminal proceedings. It requires schools to define “consent” as, well, consent. Sex would be considered an opt-in sort of thing, not an opt-out. You don’t have to have sex unless you want to. And if someone else has sex with you when you don’t want to, that’s their fault, not yours, much in the same way that it’s someone else’s fault if they come into your house uninvited and not your fault for say, not buying a big dog that bites intruders. And just as we understand that you can be invited into someone’s house both verbally or with hand gestures, the affirmative consent standard merely requires that both people are interested in having the sex throughout the sex. No specific wording is required. It’s just there so rapists can’t argue that it’s not sexual assault because she didn’t say no. Or didn’t say it loudly enough or didn’t say it often enough or didn’t say it in the exact words they want to hear. It simply says that it’s on you to make sure you aren’t having sex with people who don’t want sex with you.

Unfortunately, a lot of critics of this bill start with the assumption that men are entitled to sex and that it’s asking too much of them to give up that sense of entitlement long enough to make sure their partners want sex, too. Or, in Rush Limbaugh’s case, he was willing to argue against even the no-means-no standard, saying that just because she has refused consent does not mean you can’t have sex with her if you want. Just make an executive decision that you decide what her words mean, not her!

• consent 2 *

Here’s the thing that bugs me about that argument: So what? Even if some women say “no” but mean “yes,” so what? If you’re in a situation and a woman is saying no, why on earth do you think it’s better to run the risk of raping her than to run the risk that you don’t have sex? Is your entitlement to sex such that you think it’s better to take that risk than just wait until you have more clarity? What’s the worst that could happen if you wait or even, god forbid, ask for clarity? That you discover that the no was sincere and you don’t get laid? Well, at least you didn’t rape someone. It’s just so aggravating. Let’s say there are women out there who do play games and say “no” when they mean yes. I believe that happens, though not as much as Limbaugh says. Well, if you find yourself making out with such a woman, men, then the thing to do is not guess that she means “yes” with that “no” and risk raping her, legally and morally. The thing to do is not have sex with her. If she’s playing games, then that will teach her not to play games. Simple as that. Someone who plays games with something as serious as consent is really not someone you should be wanting to have sex with. That’s dumb and, if you misread the situation, criminal. Why not move onto someone who is more sensible?

Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks struck back.

• consent 3 *

He really nails what’s going on here. A lot of what’s going on is an attempt to codify what is, to be blunt, already understood amongst people who aren’t sexual predators. Most men easily grasp the idea that, for instance, if you start kissing someone and reaching under her shirt and she pulls away or looks displeased, it’s best to stop. You might ask if something’s wrong or just give up altogether, but the idea of pushing on while someone else is not signaling her shared enjoyment of the moment is screwed up. At best, it’s treating someone like a masturbation object, but it can also turn into assault. This is common sense. But rapists and apologists want to confuse the issue so that they can attack people and say, hey, I didn’t knoooooooowwwwww, after the fact. No wonder they are all riled up at any attempt to take that excuse away from them.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, forcible sterilization edition. Russell Pearce used to be in the Arizona legislature, before his brand of cranky old man racist wingnuttery got to be too much even for Arizona voters. Now he’s a radio host and it appears he hasn’t learned anything.

• pearce *

It’s bad enough reading this quote, but his tone makes searingly clear how hateful he really is. He was basically pressured into resigning his position as the vice chair of the Arizona Republican Party after this. Hopefully, it will be the last we hear from him.

The post Over-the-Counter Access to Birth Control, and the Affirmative Consent Controversy in California appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Read more of RH Reality Check‘s coverage of abortion in El Salvador here

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to Allison Yarrow about her exposé of crisis pregnancy centers for Vice. NPR takes an in-depth look at abortion in El Salvador and the new White House anti-rape campaign makes Rush Limbaugh whiny.

Anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has thrown her support behind a loosely organized online campaign to harass feminists out of gaming, mostly because some oversensitive crybabies in the gaming world hate it when someone points out that some games are sexist. Sommers made a video claiming to disprove that games are sexist, but she actually had to admit most games have male heroes and treat women like sex objects. She just said that is somehow not sexism because some men like it, because men liking something is apparently the measure of how sexist it is. Jonathan Mann, a video blogger who writes a song a day, autotuned her dumb video and rebutted it in song. An excerpt:

• gaming *

I like this. I want to see more video essays rebutted through song, especially when they are as poorly argued as Sommers’ original one was.

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NPR has kicked off a series, run by their team at the Goats and Soda blog that chronicles life in the developing world, on the health implications of abortion laws in the developing world. It’ll be going on for about two weeks, but the first two stories involve El Salvador, which has some of the strictest and most strongly enforced anti-abortion laws in the world. So strict, in fact, that it’s not uncommon for women to be jailed there for miscarriage or stillbirth merely on the suspicion that they somehow did something to make it happen.

• El Salvador 1 *

In El Salvador, the law requires that doctors and nurses reported suspected abortions. That’s why, instead of getting proper medical care, Quintanilla was handed over to the authorities for a cruel and needless investigation. Quintanilla and her family say they were excited for the baby and that they’d even had a baby shower, but in El Salvador, if you’re young, single, poor, or all of the above, that often means that health officials automatically suspect you of aborting. And because she had so little access to any real help, Quintanilla was basically railroaded.

• El Salvador 2 *

Dozens of women, mostly poor and single, have been railroaded in just this way. Which makes sense: Abortion bans are about punishing women for not fitting what conservatives believe is the model of a “good” woman, and so women who are pregnant and single are treated like they must be guilty of something, and so they get accused of illegal abortion even when they didn’t do it. Punishing women for miscarriage, too, fits into this mentality, because the anti-choice view is that if you fail to produce a healthy baby, you’re a failure as a woman and deserve punishment. Intent just gets lost in the shuffle.

Quintanilla did four years of a 30-year sentence before a defense attorney found her case and appealed it, rightly pointing out that the law doesn’t actually allow you to jail someone for abortion when you have no evidence for abortion beyond just not liking a 17-year-old pregnant girl. But these kinds of cases continue, in part because no matter how much they try to ban abortion, people are still trying to get abortions, usually by buying illegal abortion drugs on the black market, which was covered in another episode in this series. They spoke with an herbalist who sells a tea that she says can abort pregnancies up to six weeks, which I will bet a lot of money is a tea made from the herb rue.

• El Salvador 3 *

This is no big surprise to anyone who has been following abortion politics in Texas. Since Texas borders Mexico, a lot of women in Texas are picking up on what they’ve been doing in Mexico, where abortion is illegal in most states. And that’s just buying misoprostol to terminate unwanted pregnancies, either from pharmacies or on the black market. It’s terrifying that it’s come to this and women are aborting without a doctor’s supervision and, as we’ve seen, running the risk of going to jail for it. However, the fact that this drug is becoming more known and widespread has been, strangely enough, a big victory for public health in El Salvador.

• El Salvador 4 *

Things are so bleak for women in El Salvador that the proliferation of a black-market drug has been a major improvement in women’s health. Just think about that for a moment. Of course, it’s easy for those of us living in the United States to feel superior, but in fact, we have the same problems here and it’s getting worse. A woman in Pennsylvania was just sent to prison for nine to 18 months for buying abortion pills online for her daughter who wanted them. The mother was caught when she took her daughter to ER for stomach cramps. It turned out the girl was fine, but the ER called the CPS anyway. They didn’t go to an abortion clinic because they couldn’t make the 75-mile drive and endure the 24 hour waiting period in a dual-income family with only one car.

[Read more of RH Reality Check's coverage of abortion in El Salvador here: http://rhrealitycheck.org/tag/el-salvador/]

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Interview

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One of the big myths that anti-feminists like to hide behind is the claim that feminists are a tiny minority of quote-unquote radicals and that most people, women even, are perfectly happy with the status quo. You know, the one where there’s really high rape and domestic violence rates, women don’t get equal pay, and just the basic act of controlling when you have a child is politically contentious, leading to many women not having basic access to abortion and contraception. But, in fact, feminist ideas are not only more popular than anti-feminists would like you to believe, but they tend to be very persuasive if and when feminists are given a fair shot at making an argument. And so very few things freak out anti-feminists as much as when someone like a popular, say actor or politician, steps out in public and makes a common sense feminist argument. It demonstrates that feminist arguments are, in fact, mainstream and are nothing like the radical man-hating scariness anti-feminists make them out to be.

I mention this, because the White House is rolling out another anti-rape campaign called It’s On Us, which demands that we all contribute to the fight against sexual assault. They got some big celebrities to help.

• rape 1 *

So there were celebrities like Kerry Washington, Jon Hamm, Joel McHale, and Questlove in the ad. It’s really important in particular to note the number of men in this ad, because men are in a unique position to prevent sexual assault. Sexist guys who might not listen to women who are discouraging them from, say, trying to take advantage of a woman who is took drunk to stand might listen a lot harder if it’s another man interfering. This campaign also takes advantage of research that shows that one reason sexual assault happens is that rapists take advantage of other people’s unwillingness to interfere or to draw attention to themselves by standing up to creepy behavior, but that people can be encouraged to break that habit and instead find ways to keep the creepy, predatory guys away from women. Like, if you see a man feeding a woman drinks and trying to get her drunk, to stifle that instinct not to interfere and instead go up to her and offer to give her a ride home or get one of her girlfriends to. That sort of thing.

Unsurprisingly, Rush Limbaugh was absolutely livid.

• rape 2 *

I have to break in to say that if this was a written article, I’d have a gif of someone laughing hysterically, that lie is so enormous. The reason the NFL is getting so much grief is they don’t take violence against women seriously. Jeremy Stahl at Slate looked over the rosters of various NFL teams and found there are 13 teams who currently have a player on the roster who has been arrested or charged for sexual or domestic violence. Some of those teams, including the 49ers, the Cardinals, the Seahawks, and the Bears, have multiple players who have been arrested.

But Limbaugh knows who the real victims are here.

• rape 3 *

Yes, you may have been violently assaulted by someone you trusted and then subjected to victim-blaming and shaming after the fact, rape victims, but did you know that some people argue with conservatives when they say dumb things? I mean, have some perspective.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the only corporation whose profits are apparently evil edition. A student at an Arkansas junior high was sent home for wearing a “Virginity Rocks” t-shirt because the principal thought shirts with sexual content were inappropriate for school. But Todd Starnes, on the Family Research Council radio show. decided it must be because the principal is on the take from Trojan.

• starnes *

That comment was pure right-wing nut, starting with the claim that a public school has “profits” and that somehow the condom company is providing them through what? Magic? Who knows. You will not be surprised to find that it took five seconds of Googling to discover that Arkansas bans schools from buying and distributing condoms. But nice of Starnes to admit that “abstinence-only” is primarily a campaign to discourage the use of contraception.

The post ‘Misconception’ About Crisis Pregnancy Centers, and Abortion in El Salvador appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to Sarah Roberts about the relationship of domestic violence and abortion. Texas loses all but 8 abortion clinics, but it’s the conservatives in D.C. who are claiming to be oppressed.

Jessica Williams of The Daily Show has been on fire in recent months attacking all sorts of sexist nonsense. After she called out cat-calling and got the usual men telling her she obligated to like it because it’s supposedly a “compliment,” she fired back.

• Daily Show *

Hiring Williams might be the best decision that show has made since they decided to do a spin-off called The Colbert Report.

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Starting Friday, absolutely devastating news in the State of Texas.

• Texas 1 *

That leaves eight and only eight clinics in the entire state. I think some people who haven’t been there or haven’t spent much time there don’t quite realize how seriously low that number is, but I lived there for over 30 years and can tell you that when people say Texas is big, they mean it. It’s over 800 miles from El Paso to Texarkana on the east side of the state. It is actually easier to drive from El Paso to Los Angeles.

There will be no clinics left in the south or western parts of the state. That’s the entire Rio Grande Valley, the Panhandle, the Big Bend area, El Paso, and the Permian Basin. Everything will be in central Texas or Houston, convenient for the families of the politicians who passed this law, but for one in six women of reproductive age in the state, it’s over a 300-mile round trip or more to get an abortion. Which is, may I remind you, a procedure that takes about five minutes to do and is easier and less stressful on your body than getting a cavity filled. And it’s a common procedure, too. 73,000 women a year in Texas get an abortion. To handle that volume, each clinic would have to do 25 abortions a day for 365 days a year. It’s impossible.

• Texas 2 *

As I’ve covered extensively on this podcast, the hardest-hit parts of Texas are places like the Rio Grande Valley, which are geographically isolated and have far more people who are trying to get by on poverty wages. Now that the clinic in McAllen has closed, it is a nearly 4-hour drive to the nearest abortion clinic, in San Antonio. There’s also a waiting period, so a woman who wants to make that drive needs to arrange overnight stay and child care for that time. With gas prices the way they are and with so many people in poverty having unreliable cars, it’s not just workable. But even if it is workable, the amount of stress that it puts on you is really unhealthy for you. It’s obvious the whole point of this law is to make the process of abortion as miserable and painful as possible, in order to punish women for having sex in the first place. But anti-choicers claim they are just trying to “help” women by passing all these medically unnecessary regulations. Help them how? By making their lives a living hell, emptying their pocketbooks, forcing them to resort to illegal means, or, worst, forcing them to have a baby they probably can’t afford? RH Reality Check added up the cost for someone who lives in Harlingen, which is also in the Rio Grande Valley, to get an abortion, and found it is about $1,500 with child care, hotel, gas, and of course, the price of the abortion itself. Only a miserable misogynist would actually think that $1,500, which is a month’s salary for a minimum wage worker, should be the fee for having had sex.

The excuse for claiming that the new restrictions, which require abortion clinics to meet ambulatory surgical center standards, is that this is necessary to make abortion safe. Anti-choicers would like you to believe that abortion clinics currently are not meeting minimum standards for outpatient care like abortion. But Andrea Grimes of RH Reality Check toured Whole Woman’s Health in San Antonio and found, no big surprise, that it’s actually very nice and a completely professional, clean, well-equipped clinic. It’s not a hospital surgery, no, because abortion isn’t really a surgery. There is no cutting of anything. They literally just stick a tube in your cervix and empty out its contents with a machine that takes only about a minute or two to do it. In some cases, it’s not even that and you just take one pill there and another at home. Andrea Ferrigno, who manages the clinic, explained.

• Texas 3 *

This is about hurting women, and nothing else. There is no other reason to take this away from women. Not that anyone doubted otherwise, but the audacity of people who are trying to hurt women claiming they only want to help should never stop appalling us.

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Interview

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Time yet again for the Values Voters Summit and, of course, Reality Cast’s coverage of it. The Values Voters Summit is an annual gathering of religious conservatives, thrown by the Family Research Council, a group that’s so rabidly anti-gay that it’s been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This does not stop a stampede of right-wing leaders and conservative politicians from going to it in order to preen and pose about how they’re such huge victims because they don’t want to share the country with feminists, gays, and non-Christians. The summit kicked off with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins engaging in some deep delusions of oppression by comparing American Christians to Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese Christian woman who was jailed for not converting to Islam, which he equated with occasionally having people criticize you in the U.S.

• Values 1 *

What is the evidence for the claim that conservative Christians are being bullied? As far as I can tell, any time you argue with a conservative Christian, especially if you win the argument, that’s considered bullying. They are free and happy to hold conferences like this, which get a lot of coverage. They have their own media and an entire cable network that caters to them. They not only get to have blogs and websites of their own, but they are so dogged and hateful that they actually silence others by running them out of those spaces. The Supreme Court just opened the door to Christians exempting themselves from all manner of federal law, just because they want to. I personally am not only not silencing Perkins, but I am quoting him on this show.

There were many subjects that were offending the values voters during the summit, such as the fact that Islam continues existing and universal health care hasn’t been abolished yet, but fury that people were having sex without their permission was still at the top of the list. Jerry Boykin was all over that.

• Values 2 *

Christian conservatives have been swearing for 40 years now that the nation is just on the verge of realizing that all this having sex for pleasure business is evil and we’re one minute away from strapping on our chastity belts, giving up our birth control and picking up Bible study instead. I’m beginning to think it’s all a con job just to string their followers along, particularly since people who say they have no religion at all is the fastest growing religious group in America. Which is true in no small part because the religious right has convinced so many Americans that being religious necessarily means being a Bible-thumping, misogynist bigot, and given the choice between being a bigot or not having religion at all, people take the latter. I don’t make the rules, just an observation.

Then there was Mat Staver, arguing that having sex for fun is the moral equivalent of rounding up families and gassing them to death in concentration camps. Or actually, he thinks it’s worse.

• Values 3 *

I don’t know if people like Anne Frank would agree that participating in a genocide is what you’d call voluntary. But of course, Staver isn’t thinking about how the Jewish or Rwandan victims of genocide are people. He just thinks of them as objects, tropes to use in order to raise the stakes in his war on women who suppress their own ovulation. That possibility that someone who dies in a genocide might have been worth more than an egg that didn’t get ovulated because its owner was on the pill doesn’t even occur to Staver. People are having sex for fun and since, in his mind, that is the worst thing that could ever happen ever, he can’t be bothered to actually ponder what he’s really saying when he equates your choice to have no more than two children with Hitler’s choice to kill millions of innocent people.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, have you considered that women are just inferior edition? Of course, bigots who bust out the it’s-not-bigotry-if-it’s-true line never outright say that women are simply inferior to men. No, the favorite euphemism is the word “different”, on display by Bill O’Reilly here.

• O’Reilly *

After implying that women are merely born to be a servant class and sexism has nothing to do with it, O’Reilly suggests that women who stay at home or work part time are the reason for the gender pay gap. That is a blatant lie. The figure of women making 78 cents to a man’s dollar only compares full-time, year-round employment. So, it really is just discrimination and nothing else.

The post Texas Down to Eight Abortion Clinics, Values Voters Claim Oppression appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Katha Pollitt will talk about her new book arguing for abortion rights. I’ll have more on the Texas abortion law and a segment on radical right wingers on reality TV.

Aziz Ansari outed himself as a feminist on David Letterman recently, and I really liked his example of what makes you a feminist.

• Aziz Ansari *

I realize there’s a lot of debate in feminist circles about all these celebrities coming out and saying they’re feminist, often because they might have what the feminists call “problematic” stuff in their work or because they might be afraid to talk about more controversial issues like abortion. But as this example shows, it really isn’t so light as that. There are a lot of people who find Beyoncé threatening or think powerful women are emasculating, and pushing back against that is a big deal.

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I’m so used to anti-choicers telling blatant lies about abortion that it takes a lot—a lot I tell you—to shock me. But Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee managed to pull it off, and by “it”, I mean he told a whopper so huge I had to pick my jaw up off my desk. He was being interviewed by Chuck Todd of MSNBC and Todd asked him about the law in Texas that is shutting down nearly all the abortion clinics in the state, forcing some women to drive hundreds of miles to get an abortion, a distance some cannot afford to travel. Priebus responded with two rabid fire lies in a row, lies that were so stunningly and obviously untrue that it was really remarkable.

• Texas 1 *

So I’m going to work backwards here. The second lie he told is that this is about “taxpayer funded abortion”. It is not. He’s just throwing a bunch of nonsense words out. The issue here is that they are shutting down abortion clinics. It has nothing to do with funding. If I burn down your sandwich shop and they come arrest me for arson, it’s not a defense to say I was just against taxpayer-funded sandwiches. That is basically what he’s doing. It’s a lie so big it’s like a mega-lie.

But the first one is a little more in line with what the anti-choice movement is trying to argue generally, that their attempts to ban abortion shouldn’t be construed as misogynist because of all their supposed compassion for women. Priebus and anti-choicers generally like to imply that the abortion restrictions come with a side dose of help and support for having your baby. That is a ridiculous lie, as evidenced by a new report out by Ibis and the Center for Reproductive Rights shows that, to quote Laura Bassett at the Huffington Post, “a state’s performance on indicators for women and children’s health and well-being is inversely proportional to the amount of anti-abortion laws in that state.” So no, there isn’t a desire to support pregnant women. Just a desire to hurt and punish them for having sex.

And of course, there’s the dangers to women who need abortions but can’t get them, from maternal mortality to higher poverty rates. And, as we covered last week, there’s also the higher domestic violence rates. Huffington Post brought an abortion doctor on to explain how women can be terrorized by forced pregnancy and need abortions to escape.

• Texas 2 *

The notion that these restrictions are meant to help women is so laughably thin that only the Fifth Circuit Court has even bothered to sign off on it, as Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights explained on the Rachel Maddow show.

• Texas 3 *

The conflict between the Fifth Circuit Court and all the other courts on this issue is scary, really scary. I personally don’t see a way out of this besides having the Supreme Court look at all these different decisions on what is basically the same law in many different states. And while I usually feel confident about predicting how the court will see various issues, I have to say, I have no idea when it comes to these abortion laws. Justice Anthony Kennedy will almost surely be the swing vote and he takes a paternalistic, controlling view on abortion and could be very amendable to the argument that it has to be taken away for women’s supposed own good, even though, as we’ve seen here, taking legal abortion away can raise a woman’s chances of poverty, medical complications, and even domestic violence. But maybe he will see reason on this. We can only hope.

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Interview

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Conservatives are always accusing Hollywood of being run by the “liberal agenda,” but that has always been an extremely simplistic view. Hollywood has many products that are downright conservative, such as many right-leaning action movies and offensively sexist romantic comedies. But there’s also reality TV. Now, not all reality TV is conservative. Some of it is apolitical, like dance or singing contests. Some, like RuPaul’s Drag Race, have a sly progressive agenda. But overall, I’d say that reality TV leans more to the right, with fare like The Bachelor that pushes retrograde gender ideals or the relentless wedding propaganda of the TLC network. Not that you have to be conservative to enjoy those things, of course, but taken as a whole they send the message that women’s ambitions and education matter less in the long run than their ability to snag a husband. And the less said about misogynist clap-trap like the Real Housewives franchise, the better.

But that’s just the mildly conservative stuff. What’s really interesting to me is how reality TV has given voice to right-wing radicalism. I’m not talking about everyday conservatism, but fundamentalist Christian, science-denying, majorly anti-sex, super-homophobic Bible-thumping fringe right wing ideology. Such as the Duggar family of the show 19 and Counting. The Duggars often get packaged as a harmless, if shocking large, bunch of well-meaning cuddle bears. In reality, they are adherents to a form of Christianity so misogynist and controlling that even most fundamentalists don’t go that far. They don’t believe in birth control but also don’t believe women should be able to say no to sex when their husbands want it. They believe that your dad should basically arrange your marriage for you if you’re a woman and you shouldn’t even kiss before your wedding. Oh yeah, and women shouldn’t really be educated because they exist only to serve men and make babies. One of the many elder daughters on the show made headlines with the nutty statements recently.

• Reality 1 *

This sort of statement is not only ahistorical and misogynist, it’s also blatant anti-Semitic. I mean, I’m sure they don’t see it that way because hey, they are against genocide and not for it. But that’s a really low bar, which I hope is obvious. No, this is anti-Semitic because for all the “pro-life” bleating, it’s actually a way to reduce the suffering and murder of millions of Jewish people by making it all about this radical anti-sex agenda. That the desire of the Duggar family to control your sex life and end women’s equality is somehow the moral equivalent of the resistance movement that fought the Nazis. That is an unbelievable hijacking of a very real historical event for the sleazy and frankly immoral purposes of the radical Christian right.

Less risible but just as head-scratching is this video from one of the wives of the Duggar boys, Anna Duggar, and her sister Priscilla Waller, in which they talk about marriage.

• Reality 2 *

They go on to talk about how the purpose of a woman’s life is to be a “helpmeet” who exists solely for no other reason than to be a wife and mother. But even though the point of your life is to be a wife, the amount of control you’re allowed to have even over that decision is miniscule and apparently your parents are the ones who decide.

• Reality 3 *

All of which suggests that the idea here is that you agree to an engagement with a man you barely know, because they have all these rules against socializing with the opposite sex. So maybe now you’re engaged and you actually get to talk to him and you discover you aren’t into him. Sounds like you’re not allowed to break the engagement unless your parents do it for you. So you’re left praying that your parents don’t make you marry a man you don’t love and who may even scare you. I’m guessing that part gets edited out on TLC.

Shifting gears to another radical right-wing family whose out of control misogyny and homophobia hasn’t prevented them from getting a cutesy reality TV show on A&E: The Robertsons of Duck Dynasty. Phil Robertson was at it again recently, giving this bizarre sermon at a West Monroe church. After claiming the church dictates that marriage is one-man-one-woman, he goes off.

• Reality 4 *

And if you never leave the house you’ll never catch a cold. And if you never love anyone, you’ll never suffer grief. And if you die today, you won’t risk feeling sad tomorrow. This logic is as endless as it is ridiculous. Sometimes we have to balance risk with our need to live and learn and enjoy our lives. Needless to say, Mr. Preacher Man here doesn’t know his Bible, or he’d know that many of the patriarchs of the Bible committed adultery or had multiple wives. But simply telling people to give up the opportunity to experiment, to learn about themselves and what they like in favor of marrying someone you barely know with the vain hope that their spouse will happen to satisfy them sexually? Crap, I’d rather get gonorrhea. At least you can cure that with antibiotics. An unhappy marriage from which there is no escape sounds exponentially worse.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, racist eugenics paranoia edition. Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council was on a conference call with E.W. Jackson this week and he had some theories about Muslims.

• Boykin *

For people who are quick to accuse liberals of “eugenics,” conservatives sure are quick to push the idea that we need to manipulate people’s private reproductive choices for the purpose of engineering a society they want to see, aren’t they?

The post Katha Pollitt on Abortion Rights, and Reality TV’s Right-Wing Radicalism appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Sean Fieler

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking with Sharona Coutts about a relatively unknown but extremely generous funder of all sorts of religious right causes. The Supreme Court temporarily stays part of the Texas abortion law and George Will claims the war on women is a myth.

Anita Sarkeesian, who has been subject to terrorist threats and run out of her home because, no joke, she has a video series exploring sexism in video games, gave a speech recently about the harassment she has endured.

• Sarkeesian *

The fact that there’s a rather explicit goal to “take her out”—not argue, not criticize, not persuade, but to silence through a relentless harassment campaign—shows how much these men know, in their hearts, that they cannot win an honest argument.

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

I have to say I was not expecting to hear a bit of good news regarding the Texas abortion law that continues to be battled out in court.

• Texas 1 *

The stay only applies to one part of the law, the part requiring abortion clinics to meet ambulatory surgical center standards, even though first-trimester abortions done with either the pill or the vacuum aspiration machine are so simple and non-invasive that they are no more surgery than a colonoscopy is. Only eight clinics in the entire state are equipped like this, because it costs a lot of money and is only worth doing if you’re doing more intensive procedures. The Supreme Court previously denied a request to stay another Texas abortion regulation requiring that abortion providers have hospital admitting privileges. They didn’t say why one medically unnecessary regulation is okay but another is so bad it requires a stay, because the Supreme Court doesn’t need to justify these types of decisions.

Rachel Maddow explained the extent of the damage of this law.

• Texas 2 *

This stay will allow 13 clinics to reopen, though it’s unclear if all of them will have the resources to do so. But that shows how bad the damage is already, because 13 plus eight only equals 21 clinics, which is only half of what Texas had before this law went into effect. Part of that is the stay doesn’t cover the hospital admitting privileges provision. That said, I fully expect both the hospital admitting privileges provision and the ambulatory surgical center requirements to be looked at should this law reach the Supreme Court. And what is going to happen on that day is obviously what everyone is thinking about and worrying about. Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights took that question on during her short interview with Rachel Maddow.

• Texas 3 *

I realize this is complex, but here’s the most boiled down take I can make: Most of the other appeals courts have struck down laws requiring hospital admitting privileges or ambulatory surgical center standards because they are clear violations of the requirement that no undue burden be put on abortion access and because the laws are clearly meant to be an undue burden and not a legitimate attempt to protect women’s health. The Fifth Circuit court is the exception, holding up the hospital admitting privileges requirement so far and signaling a supportive attitude towards the ambulatory surgical centers requirement as well. Should they uphold that part of the law, the only way to resolve this tension is for the Supreme Court to look at it. The problem is that there’s no way to know how the Supreme Court feels about this. Only three judges have made it clear that they intend to vote for every abortion restriction that comes down the pipe, no matter how disingenuous. Four intend clearly to vote against the restrictions. But now we have a situation where two judges supported one stay on the law and rejected another. It’s already hard to tell where a judge stands on a law when it comes to the power to stay it, but this mixed messaging makes it even harder to tell. However, if they had let the law go into effect, that would have suggested there is little chance they won’t allow the law to stand in the long run. This decision creates reason to hope.

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

Interview

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

If you watch the Sunday news shows or any cable news, you’ll know that pundits say fool-headed, ignorant things like it’s their job, which, in the case of Fox News, it is. But rarely do they speak in ways that cause you to wonder if they even read the news. I mean, generally speaking, pundits do actually read headlines at least, and often entire news stories before they bother opining about stuff. But with this George Will comment, I can’t help but think the man hasn’t picked up a newspaper or turned on a newsfeed for at least a decade and gets all of his news from D.C. cocktail chatter.

• war 1 *

Your concern that women are being treated like they’re illiterate is noted, as is the utter and complete falseness of your pose, George. It’s really rich to pivot and pretend that you respect women’s intelligence within seconds of joking that someone’s name sounds like “uterus” and therefore he should be ashamed. Or that there’s something gross and “gynecological” about addressing women’s very real health care needs. Shorter George Will: Talking about women is gross and icky, but I respect women because I say so. But for all his concern that Democrats are supposedly treating women like they are illiterate, he doesn’t seem to be too concerned about how illiterate he sounds when he claims that contraception and abortion are settled issues and that the only reason they’re mentioned at all is because pro-choicers keep bringing them up.

• war 2 *

• war 3 *

• war 4 *

I put this montage together, and believe me, I could make it hours long if I wanted to, not to make you bleed from rage stress, but to prove the point that George Will is either illiterate himself or he’s being deliberately dishonest here. The sole and only reason the “war on women” narrative has taken off is because conservatives keep waging the war on women. The attacks on contraception are real. The diminishing number of abortion clinics due to regulation is real. Conservative pundits whole-heartedly arguing that women’s sexuality is strictly for procreation is real. I have no doubt that conservatives hate the “war on women” meme. But the way to make it go away is to stop waging it. It’s that simple.

Of course, what Will hopes he can accomplish here is to get liberals to simply stop talking about the war on women so that it can be waged without paying any political consequences for it. Or, as was made clear with his swipe at Mark Udall, he wants to return to a situation where being seen as pro-woman or associated with women is bad for you, politically. But women are more than half of voters and more than half of women are single now. There’s no going back.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Phyllis Schlafy is sad that men won’t just beat women into submission edition. I would like to say I’m overstating the case, but she quite literally blamed men’s supposed reluctance to be violent to women as the reason feminists won’t go away. She learned this lesson from watching a nature documentary.

• Schlafly *

I like how she had to tell us not once, but twice, that these were real bears and not actor bears. But that amazing bit aside, I think her implication is clear, that male violence against women is a good thing and it’s a shame that men don’t beat back feminism. You know, in the literal beating way, not the actor bear fake beating way.

The post Who Is Sean Fieler? appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll have both a segment and an interview on the topic that won’t go away, #GamerGate. Also, Fox News is really irate that a university might teach abortion instead of just leaving it up to people to figure it out for themselves through trial and error.

Before we get into the major segment on GamerGate, I’d like to point out one of the most unintentionally hilarious aspects of it, which is that any time someone is defending it, they tend to be exhibit number one showing how rotten the whole thing is. Like this guy who called into NPR to defend it.

• Angry Gamer *

He continued on to complain about one game review site that gave a game a negative review because they thought it was sexist. So when you see GamerGaters saying that GamerGate is about “corruption in journalism,” know that they define “corruption” as allowing game reviewers to give games honest reviews. That is, of course, the opposite of corruption, but a good rule of thumb with Gamergaters is whatever they say they stand for, the opposite is true.

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

I’ve been doing a lot of writing and tweeting about GamerGate, including a piece that ran last week at RH Reality Check called “What #GamerGate and the Anti-Choice Movement Have in Common.” But I haven’t addressed it on this podcast because it never made the leap into the mainstream media spaces that I usually wait for before tackling a subject on here. But that has changed, folks. The mainstream media is paying attention and they are alarmed. Melissa Harris-Perry did her best to sum up what is going on with GamerGate, despite the fact that it is confusing by design.

• GG 1 *

The woman in question is named Zoe Quinn and the allegations were not true, but that didn’t stop GamerGate from exploding. The pretext has been that it’s some kind of protest of bad ethics in gaming journalism, but since they’ve never actually produced a single example of bad ethics, besides some sexual urban legend that isn’t true, that’s hard to buy. That, and the fact that they have also been harassing Anita Sarkeesian, an independent culture critic whose journalistic ethics are impeccable. She funded herself through Kickstarter, unlike some YouTube gaming critics who have been called out for taking payola from the industry by people that are not GamerGaters. Sarkeesian was on Harris-Perry’s show.

• GG 2 *

No matter how obvious the misogyny of GamerGate, the people in it continue to claim it’s about journalistic ethics. However, the main people who are targeted, on a list of seven that was being circulated in GamerGate circles, belie this claim. For one thing, a lot of them aren’t journalists but game developers. For another, not one of them has ever been accused of violating any of the commonly understood ethical rules of journalism. Indeed, the only thing they have in common is they are women and they are feminists. Which suggests that is what GamerGate is attacking. Zoe Quinn herself was on Ronan Farrow’s show to talk about her perspectives.

• GG 3 *

Dan Olson, the host of Folding Ideas, which is a show that uses current events and pop culture to talk about critical ideas, took on GamerGate and he had some interesting points I think are worth examining. His video is 20-minutes long, so I can’t cover it all here, so I recommend you watch it. But there’s a couple of points I pulled to get you started. He also notices what I noticed, which is that the targets of GamerGate are not picked because of some abstract notion of ethics in journalism, which GamerGaters clearly don’t care about, but because they are feminists and feminists are seen as the enemy.

• GG 4 *

There’s been a lot of mainstream focus on the most lurid part of GamerGate, which is the overt threats of violence, one of which caused Sarkeesian to cancel an engagement at Utah State after finding that the university, due to the concealed carry laws in the state, couldn’t forbid people from bringing guns to her talk. Yeah, I know. But there’s so much more going on than threats. In fact, most of the GamerGaters don’t threaten but instead just engage in dishonest, sleazy tactics that are supposed to frustrate their targets into giving up and going home. Olson talks about this, as well.

• GG 5 *

On my next segment, I’ll be talking to a woman who was targeted by GamerGate about her experiences and about her theory that GamerGate makes the most sense if you think of them as a hate group.

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

Interview

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

In recent years, anti-choicers have been claiming that they are concerned about the health and well-being of women getting abortions and, even though they don’t agree with abortion, they claim, they want it to be safe. This is obviously a paper-thin pretext that exists for no other reason but to come up with medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion clinics in order to shut them down. But still, it’s funny to see how, as soon as the topic switches away from shutting down clinics toward some other aspect of abortion, the purported concern for women’s safety is dropped like a hot potato. Take, for instance Bill O’Reilly’s outrage over a new online course offered by the University of California San Francisco on abortion care. Now, if you actually care about women’s health, you’d applaud them for this, because it means that people who are interested in doing abortions are going to learn more before training and be safer and more skilled. But that’s not the angle Bill O’Reilly took.

• Abortion 1 *

Try to imagine this kind of umbrage taken over any other medical course on any other medical topic. They’re offering a course on cancer, but being pro-biology zealots, they refuse to include counter-theories about how cancer can be cured with homeopathy! They’re offering a course on vaccinations, but being pro-vaccination zealots, they refuse to let Jenny McCarthy share her anti-vaccination views. They’re offering a course on infectious diseases, but being germ theory zealots, they’re excluding the view that disease is caused by sin. And so on.

The segment was like watching a transmission from another world where people cannot believe that a doctor would think that there’s any reason to think there’s any educational interest in a medical procedure that one in three women will get.

• Abortion 2 *

Or perhaps she correctly realizes there’s no reason to talk to people who are saying one moment that they are worried that abortion isn’t safe and therefore needs to be regulated out the wazoo but then the next minute are freaking out at the very possibility that anyone might learn something that makes abortion safer. Such people have outed themselves as unserious people. The fact is this segment clearly suggests that O’Reilly, his staff, and the crisis pregnancy center people they interview want abortion to be unsafe. Why else are they so terrified of the idea that someone might actually learn something that makes abortion safer? Why on earth would you talk to people who are so hostile, so paranoid, and make no pains to hide that they hope that women lose access to safe medical care and have to resort to using coathangers instead?

• Abortion 3 *

I’m trying to imagine how you’d have this “balance” or “both sides.” Like one doctor gets up and talks about some of the tools or medications you can use to help a patient seeking abortion and then what? Give someone five minutes to talk about how women who want abortions are dirty sluts who need to be forced to give birth to teach them a lesson? That’s not what I’d call “education.” There’s just nothing informative that anti-choicers have to add to this discussion. They’re just against sex. We’ve heard that opinion, and there’s no reason it needs to be included in an educational course. No more than we need to hear the opinions of people who oppose psychiatric care in a course teaching about the various techniques of psychiatric care.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Fox News really, really hates young, single women edition. Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was a former assistant district attorney, suggested that young women are too stupid to sit on juries.

• Juries *

Of course, young men, being male, are born oh so wise, right? My guess is the prejudice against young women isn’t really about how they’re supposedly so stupid but because they tend to be more liberal and open-minded, they are probably more open to defense arguments and don’t roll into the court room ready to throw the book at the defendant, as more conservative types, who are more likely to be older or male, would be. Considering how out of control our prison industrial complex is, I think that should be treated like a good thing.

The post The Misogyny of GamerGate, and Outrage Over Abortion Education appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll speak to an activist fighting against a personhood amendment in North Dakota. Fox News has been really down on single women voters, and Colorado is facing the third iteration of a personhood amendment ballot initiative.

Stephen Colbert took on #GamerGate last week and did not disappoint, giving Anita Sarkeesian plenty of room to talk about the harassment she has endured. I found this bit to be particularly funny:

• Colbert *

Of course, as I covered on this show, the claim to be standing for ethics in journalism is based on the presumption that it’s unethical, somehow, for game reviewers to share sincerely held opinions on games. Which has no relationship to what we in the real world consider “ethics.”

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

Last week, for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, I played a clip of a Fox News host saying that single women shouldn’t sit juries but should instead just be on Tinder or something. Unsurprisingly, the comment got criticized all over the place, both on feminist blogs and in the mainstream media. So much so that the folks at The Five on Fox News felt like they had to respond. Their response, however, was dishonest and condescending, to say the least.

• Fox 1 *

Sadly for them, the tape is readily available for checking. In fact, I still have a clip sitting in a file from last week. I only clipped the relevant part where she is talking about juries, but in context, that all important context, she was saying that single women are bad voters for the same reason that young women are bad at sitting on juries. The context, if anything, made it worse, since it was a lengthy, sexist conversation painting unmarried women as people who are terminally incapable of thinking for themselves.

• Fox 2 *

It’s a comment that has it all. There’s stoking of the sexual insecurities and sexual hysteria in the audience by mentioning Tinder, and of course Match.com for the folks who haven’t heard of Tinder. There’s stoking of resentment of single women for supposedly having it so good while you sit at home living your sad, responsibility-laden married life. Man, if the viewers think marriage is such a raw deal, one wonders why they went with it. There’s holding out marriage as a mechanism for taming women and making them submit to a conservative agenda. Toss in a mention of Lena Dunham, and it would have been a perfect culture warrior moment, sculpted to maximize viewer hatred and resentment of single women for merely existing.

And that was just in the context of that particular segment. When you look at the overall context at Fox News, you realize this wasn’t a one-off, but in fact, they are constantly stirring their audiences up about the supposed single ladies who are supposedly having all this fun while you, the sad Fox viewer, never gets to have any. If you want to talk about context, you have to consider this:

• Fox 3 *

So yeah, we all need to give up on our universal health care because of some urban legend. But this is just part of a larger Fox News push to characterize single women as some kind of layabouts who abuse the system while the poor married people have to pay the bill. Like this.

• Fox 4 *

Another classic. The implicit argument, made mostly to male viewers, is that they are having to support all these women and they’re not even getting sex in return. He even paints your paycheck as some kind of social service being provided, with that “equal pay” swipe. It’s a mentality that assumes the only value women have is sexual and therefore if they get paid to do anything but have sex, it somehow doesn’t count and is a giveaway. Then there’s the swipe against Beyonce, for added race-baiting and, of course, to make Fox viewers think single women are having all this fun they’re missing out on.

While these attacks are designed to flatter both men and married women by suggesting that it’s single women who are ninnies who are too stupid to participate in our political process, if you give it a moment’s thought, it becomes clear these attacks are actually attacks on all women. After all, all married women were single once. The only thing that changes is you have a husband now. The unsavory implication, therefore, is married women can only be trusted because they have a man making their decisions for them. Sure, they may dress it up and say oh it’s about mortgages and children and bills and whatnot, but the fact of the matter is single women also have bills to pay, jobs to go to, and yes, they often have children to care for. The only difference is a man, and at Fox News, that apparently makes all the difference.

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

Interview

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

North Dakota is not the only state where there’s a personhood amendment on the ballot. In Colorado, anti-choicers have put a personhood amendment on the ballot a third time. It’s been defeated at the polls twice, so antis have changed tactics a little, making it a little more narrow than in the past, by claiming that it would only define a fertilized egg as a “person” in the Colorado criminal code and for the Colorado Wrongful Death Act. And they’re even claiming this time around that it’s for the protection of pregnant women, because it would increase the penalties for assaulting a pregnant woman. But that’s a bunch of balderdash, because pregnant women were already protected, because it’s illegal to assault anyone, pregnant or not. These kinds of laws insult all women by insinuating that an assault against them is somehow less awful if they happen not to be pregnant at the time. It assumes your value as a person is tied up in your ability to have a child, and that you’re not valuable on your own.

Keith Mason of Personhood USA is the man behind most of these personhood amendments, and he is glib and dishonest in his defense of them.

• Colorado 1 *

Basically, the idea is to just keep putting this on the ballot, with slight wording and campaign changes each time, until they trick the voters into passing it. This would take it to the next level. Nathan Woodliff-Stanley of Colorado’s ACLU explained some of the problems with this law.

• Colorado 2 *

Keith also told Politico that he can’t imagine that these laws would be used to ban abortion or prosecute pregnant women because, he claims, our society isn’t like that. But since he’s openly trying to change society, that defense rings hollow. Also, it’s simply not true, because even in Colorado they’ve prosecuted women for giving birth to stillborns. Colorado law professor Aya Gruber called B.S. on this, explaining that if it’s law, then no matter what the supposed intentions were behind it, it can be used to prosecute women for miscarriage.

• Colorado 3 *

On top of banning abortion, outlawing IVF, and making it possible to prosecute women for miscarriage, this law might be used to outlaw the use of the IUD or prosecute women for having them. That’s because many of the supporters of the bill believe that IUDs are basically a form of abortion. They claim, falsely, that IUDs work by making it impossible for fertilized eggs to implant. Now, even if that were true, it still wouldn’t make it abortion since pregnancy doesn’t start until implantation and I can’t believe we’re literally arguing about what is just a small ball of cells anyway. But it isn’t even true, as Dr. Stephanie Teal of the University of Colorado explained to the Rachel Maddow Show.

• Colorado 4 *

If you actually thought that fertilized eggs were people, then this should be a relief to you. Instead, anti-choicers persist in this lie. I’m forced to conclude, then, that the only reason they want to equate the IUD with abortion, against all scientific evidence to the contrary, is that it’s a pretext for banning the IUD, presumably under a personhood amendment. What about the IUD is so offensive to anti-choicers that they hate it above all other forms of contraception, even the pill? Probably because it works, and it works especially well for young women.

• Colorado 5 *

While there’s a lot of complex stuff going on with anti-choicers, at the end of the day, the primary thing that drives the movement is just this fear that young, single women are having sex without having to endure an unwanted childbirth. They dislike modern society where women can have long youthful periods where they date a bunch of different men and concentrate on their careers. Having a baby at a young age is seen as a way to bring that to a halt, by forcing women into shotgun marriages or, in some cases, single motherhood. Whatever it takes to bring an end to youthful carefreeness and career-oriented thinking. And since effective forms of contraception are even more central than abortion to protecting women’s right to choose when to have a baby, of course they’re going to shift to attacks on contraception.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, sexual harassment edition. As I detail in this week’s column for RH Reality Check, mainstream conservatives are starting to sound like fringe MRA-types when they talk about things like street harassment. This one example was particularly silly.

• Limbaugh *

Yes, Rush Limbaugh openly blames not men for cat-calling, but feminists for somehow being unable to single-handedly stop men from cat-calling. His actual argument is that if you can’t fix a problem overnight, then trying to fix it at all somehow causes it. Yeah, that makes no kind of sense.

The post Anti-Choice Ballot Initiatives, and Attacks on ‘Single Ladies’ Voters appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to a lawyer from the Center for Reproductive Rights about what’s going on in Oklahoma. I’ll also talk about how anti-choice politicians beat the “war on women” narrative, and what happened with ballot initiatives dealing with reproductive rights.

I know a lot of you are bummed this fall, for good reason, so here’s a moment of sublime weirdness that happened on MSNBC that I hope cheers you up a little.

• Kama Sutra *

Sadly, cable news isn’t a place where you can just be quiet for a moment and let the silence punctuate a statement, because I do think that moment needed a second to sit in instead of pivoting to the next one.

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

Voters aren’t anti-choice. That’s something that we know from polling study after polling study. They’re basically pro-choice, though many of them cling to the illusion that there’s a way to ban abortions for “bad” girls while keeping them legal for the women whose sex lives they approve of. They generally support economic policies the pundits would recognize as liberal. So why on earth did a bunch of anti-choice fanatics who have economic policies the voters reject get elected last Tuesday? Did the voters misplace their reading glasses on voting day?

It’s nothing like that. A lot of different factors go into every election, but I thought I’d flag some analysis of particular interest to the RH Reality Check audience. NPR had an excellent segment explaining the one way anti-choice candidates pulled it off: they presented themselves as far more moderate than they actually are. Colorado is a really good example of how this played out. NPR went to Colorado to talk to voters about the way that reproductive rights and appeals to single women have influenced the voters in that state. Personhood, as listeners from last week know, is a ballot measure there.

• Election 1 *

So from the get-go, Gardner’s strategy was to minimize and deflect and present himself as a changed man who was not the misogynist firebreather who wants to ban the birth control pill that Mark Udall was painting him as. Painting him as reasonably, I have to point out. It’s undeniable that Gardner has a long, unsavory history of associating with hardline anti-choicers and who has been dogged in pushing for laws that not only would ban abortion but could do things like criminalize miscarriage or be used as a pretext to ban birth control. Gardner couldn’t hide that past, so instead he just simply argued that he was unaware of the ramifications of personhood laws and would therefore not support them going forward. In order to bolster this narrative, he basically lied about how much he had supported them in the past, because if voters knew how dogged he was about these laws in the past, his claim that he just didn’t know what was in the legislation would sound false. This dodging and weaving and minimizing really frustrated the debate moderators during one debate.

• Election 2 *

That statement summarized a pose taken not just by Gardner, but by many other anti-choice fanatics in other states who were running in close elections and didn’t want voters to think they are anti-choice fanatics. The stance was to imply that you are personally against abortion, but weren’t going to take measures to actually ban it. Gardner’s claim that the bill was just a “statement” isn’t true, however, because if the bill in question became law, it would absolutely ban abortion, as the moderator said. But this anti-choice wolf in pro-choice sheep suit maneuver was something Gov. Scott Walker did a similar thing in a campaign ad.

• Election 3 *

Anyone watching that ad would assume that Walker was personally against abortion but had not supported any legislation to regulate it. That is, however, totally untrue. Walker signed a bill that would have banned more abortion clinics in his state by forcing doctors to get medically unnecessary hospital admitting privileges, with the full knowledge that most doctors will not be able to get them. It’s a law that shut down half the abortion clinics in Texas and, if a court hadn’t blocked it in Wisconsin, would have done the same. It’s not really leaving the decision to a woman and her doctor if you’ve banned doctors from taking patients. That’s like saying I have a legal right to buy milk from the grocery store, but putting landmines along the front door of the grocery store. It doesn’t work that way.

But the fact of the matter is that the strategy worked and worked well. Walker and Gardner and many other anti-choice politicians like them were able to deflect the issue. Young people who are most affected by these issues barely turned out to vote, no doubt because they didn’t feel like they were under the threat they are actually under. There were nearly three times as many voters over 60 as under 30. And now you know why.

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

Interview

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

It wasn’t all just about electing officials this year, of course. There were also a number of ballot initiatives in the states, ranging from popular ones like marijuana legalization and a minimum wage hike to some rather confusing ones regarding gun control. Huffington Post had a good rundown, with an explanation of why ballot initiatives exist even though we supposedly have a legislative system to handle laws for us.

• Ballot 1 *

Three states had ballot initiatives that addressed reproductive rights: Colorado, North Dakota, and Tennessee. I’ve covered all three on this podcast, with Colorado and North Dakota being addressed last week. This election turned out to be a mixed bag. In Colorado, amendment 67, which I covered last week, failed.

• Ballot 2 *

Nearly two-thirds of the voters voted against it. This is particularly interesting because, unlike the previous two attempts to get personhood laws passed through ballot initiatives in Colorado, the proponents disguised the intention behind the law a little better. Didn’t matter, voters were still against it. I think this shows, and is an important lesson to take home, that voters are not as easily fooled as some think they are. That’s a hard pill for a lot of liberals to swallow, of course, because that means that people vote against their own rights and economic self-interest because they really, truly mean it. But it’s important to remember. When voters support abortion restrictions, for instance, it’s not because they are too dumb to know what will happen. It’s just that they, often correctly, assume that poor people will bear the brunt of the misery, and they don’t care. It’s worth it to them to make a statement about the naughty ladies having sex.

But Amanda, you may ask, if people are so down on women, at least single women, having sex, why did they vote down personhood? Good question, and one I answered in my recent piece at RH Reality Check, which you should read. But the short answer is that personhood isn’t meaningfully better at punishing single women who are sexually active than extremely restrictive abortion laws, but it does have the side effect of damaging the interests of married, conservative people who want things like IVF and the right to miscarry without the cops getting involved. That’s why a personhood amendment also lost in North Dakota. But on the flip side, you have Tennessee.

• Ballot 3 *

Previously, Tennessee had strong constitutional protections for the right to privacy, which this law amends to make an exception for abortion. Basically, it’s straight up saying that if you’re a woman of reproductive age, you don’t deserve the same right to privacy as everyone else. But what it does is allow the legislature, which is really conservative, to go nuts in passing anti-abortion laws of the sorts we’ve seen in places like Ohio and Texas. This is scary, as Tennessee has a relatively high number of abortion clinics compared to its red state neighbors, and has become a place where women in neighboring states can go to get the abortions they aren’t able to get at home. With this passing, we can expect to see Tennessee go the way of so many states before it, making abortion inaccessible to all but the privileged and relatively wealthy.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Rush Limbaugh got a little wound up before the election edition. While Republican politicians were careful to take moderate poses during the campaign, right-wing media was all-out in trying to whip up older, male voters about how everyone is trying to steal marriage away from them.

• Limbaugh *

And wah and whine and so on. I do love him accidentally tossing science in there. It isn’t liberals who deny global warming or how birth control works, Rush. But the fact that four-times-married Limbaugh is complaining about the supposed assault on marriage shows how empty this sort of thing is. It’s all code for what he’s really talking about, which is the white male privilege to declare what reality is, regardless of the facts, and force everyone else to fall in line. And yes, that is under assault by liberals.

The post Post-Election Reproductive Rights Roundup appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Cats vs. cat calls

Gilbert school board acting out

Arizona Honors Biology

Maddow’s first segment on Gilbert

Maddow’s second segment on Gilbert

Virgin Coaches

Clips from Virgin Coaches

Pat Robertson is going off again

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, a researcher will explain how the HPV vaccine is linked to lower cancer rates even before its protective effects kick in. Textbook wars in Arizona show that abstinence-only is not completely dead, and a new show on TLC tries to pretty up the abstinence-until-marriage ideology.

From Feministing, this L.A.-based group of high school girls from a group called ImMEDIAte Justice made an extremely cute video calling for more cats and fewer cat calls, by rewriting the lyrics to that Lil Jon song that somehow never gets old.

• Cat call *

I recommend checking the video out, just to see the special effects magic that makes it look like actual cats are coming out of the mouths of teenage boys attempting to cat call.

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

Support for abstinence-only education is in a freefall, which might lead some to believe this issue is over and we don’t need to worry about it anymore. But verily I say unto you, the religious right is a zombie movement and they will continue rising up and trying to push their discredited agenda over and over again, in any way they can. If that involves acting like outright fascists who are literally destroying books, then they will do that. Which is what is happening in the town of Gilbert, Arizona.

• Gilbert 1 *

Two things here. One, the law says that schools can’t promote abortion above childbirth, which is so paranoid I don’t even know what to say to that, but either way, the book is not in violation. You can go to Arizona Honors Biology dot com and see where MSNBC has uploaded the pages and verify for yourself. The page in question is a one-page description not of abortion, but of contraception. Abortion is only briefly mentioned to distinguish it from the morning-after pill. Which all leads me to believe the real objection to the passage is the fact that it contains information about contraception, and abortion is only tacked onto the complaint as a cover story. Second of all, the school board’s recommendation is to, and I’m not joking here, go in and deface the textbooks by ripping pages out, old school fascism-style. So yeah, teach kids to violate the first amendment and destroy ideas you disagree with, all in service of trying to hide the fact that people sometimes have sex for reasons other than baby-making, something they already learned from TV. Great plan, guys.

You will not be surprised that the reason the pages in question have been uploaded to a website by MSNBC is because Rachel Maddow, who is nearly as great a lover of conservative religious anti-sex idiocy as I am, is all over this story.

• Gilbert 2 *

This is what is so frustrating about all this. The law, which was passed in 2012 in what Maddow calls an anti-abortion frenzy, is already an overreach, because it demands the injection of natalist ideology into the classroom. But these books don’t violate the law! It would only be a violation if the books promoted abortion. Anti-choicers are trying to imply that even mentioning abortion is promotion. Or contraception, for that matter, because, as I said before, the pages they want to rip out are almost exclusively about contraception. And they’re not wrong that human beings are inherently interested in information about how to have sex without making babies. But that shows how futile their efforts are. Indeed, I would say that it’s so self-evidently futile, this effort at fooling kids into thinking there’s no such thing as non-procreative sex, that there’s no purpose to it at all. This is more culture war muscle-flexing, censoring books for the pleasure of feeling self-righteous and not out of any sincere attempt to make change.

But there’s been a development.

• Gilbert 3 *

So now there’s a really strange situation going on where the people who are coming into office don’t want to censor these textbooks but the people who are still there might, as one last act of defiance against basic decency and common sense, go get to ripping pages out of books. Personally, I can’t think of a better symbol of what’s up with the religious right. They know they’re losing, they know they’re on their way out, but they’re going to do as much damage as they can before they leave. Let’s hope they are thwarted in this.

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Interview

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TLC, which was supposed to be The Learning Channel, continues its strange trajectory of functioning as something of a propaganda channel for religious right sexual ideals, most of which are so ridiculous that even their adherents tend to reject them when it comes to living their lives. The newest show is Virgin Coaches, a show about Christian sex therapists Bill and Janean Fuller, who run a kind of boot camp of sex ed for engaged couples, actual adults, who are trying to remain chaste until marriage and want help for figuring out that married sex thing. Because, you know, they’re not allowed to warm up to it slowly like the rest of us, but expect themselves to go from 0 to sex expert overnight, which is a way of setting yourself up for failure. Here’s a bit of the promo for the show.

• Virgin 1 *

Yes, “practice making love” does sound incredibly risqué, like they’re going to take a bunch of virgins and plunge them into some kind of over-the-top orgy situation that none of them are even remotely able to handle. The truth, however, is much dorkier than that, for better or for worse. What really happened on the show was they had a maze painted on the ground and the couples were supposed to walk through it and at the middle there were seats and buckets of water. Because, if you’ve ever done group activities in a church or religion-based setting, you know that the default setting is “goofy.” But here, let’s have them explain what the purpose of all this is.

• Virgin 2 *

It’s almost like they’re daring feminists to get mad at them, like see feminists! We’re all about a woman’s pleasure and this about men serving women! But I will not take the bait, and not just because feminists are for equality, not for some chivalry-reminiscent attitude taken to the bedroom. Yes, men should care about women’s pleasure and vice versa. And I do think it’s useful to tell men to take their time and really pay attention, not because men should “serve” women but because sex is a mutual thing and not just masturbating into someone’s body. But setting up women’s bodies like they are some kind of puzzle to unlock reinforces sexist stereotypes about how women are mysterious creatures that are totally unlike men. A better way to handle this is to teach people to learn to communicate with each other about what they like, but of course, they can’t do that, because that would mean having a good idea of what you like, something that can only be learned through the experience they are supposed to deny themselves. So, unable to give truly good advice, they have mazes and rigidly gendered ideas of how sex is supposed to work.

And I mean incredibly rigid ideas about how sex is supposed to work. Really, really rigid.

• Virgin 3 *

Not that you should have your eyes closed, of course. Do what you want with your eyes! That’s the issue here. One reason people have problems with sex is because they get it into their heads there’s one right way to do sex and every other way is wrong or unhealthy. But people who have happy sex lives tend to be flexible and generous. Someone who takes this “God sex” advice to heart is likely to get a complex every time their partner closes his or her eyes during sex. You’re not likely having fun if every closed eye moment causes you to wonder if you’re screwing up somehow. Also, as everyone who has no need for a class for about to be married virgins could probably tell you right off the bat, this requirement that you have your eyes locked at all times precludes a little diversity in your sexual positions. And monotony is really death to a good sex life.

Not that everything they do draws my ire. I liked this part, for instance.

• Virgin 4 *

I considered this a tacit admission that even though their religion strongly forbids it, most of these guys are probably looking at porn and might feel inadequate about it. So that was cool. But overall, I feel the problem with these kinds of classes is they are there to paper over a very serious problem, one that doesn’t need to be a problem. The Christian right has long sold the idea that the way to be happy, sexually and romantically, is to be as sexually inexperienced as possible before entering marriage, but what people all too often find is that instead of the sexual bliss they’re promised, they find that it’s hard to be good at something you’ve stifled for so long. Classes like this are supposed to help people by lowering expectations and teaching some skills so they aren’t so far behind the curve. I think it’s well-meaning, but ultimately it’s just another futile effort to salvage the idea that waiting for marriage is some kind of master key to unlocking happiness. It’s simply not, and in a country where 95 percent of people have sex before marriage, it’s getting ridiculous to continue pushing the idea that waiting is something everyone should strive for.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, good ol’ Pat Robertson edition. Robertson is not becoming less nutty or hateful or weird about sex in his old age, I’m sure you’ll all be pleased to learn.

• Robertson *

Pat Robertson’s world is one where having a bunch of sex or choosing not to have a baby is on level with murder. But only if you’re a woman, of course. Believe me, this entire rant was about sexual so-called sin, and the only sinner whose sins interested him was a woman who had multiple partners, not the men she slept with.

The post Abstinence-Only Ideologues, and New Research on the HPV Vaccine appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Cornell William Brooks on the Ferguson decision

Glenn Beck thinks asking questions is rape

Rush Limbaugh making excuses for Bill Cosby

Long list of Cosby accusers

Don Lemon victim-blaming

Don Lemon apologizes

Jessica Valenti abortion speakout

Favianna’s story

Talking with protesters

Nick Conrad mansplains rape

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be speaking to Cristina Aguilar of COLOR about their fight against the personhood amendment in Colorado. The Bill Cosby rape allegations bring the worst out of the usual suspects and I compare women’s actual abortion stories with the myths that anti-choicers churn out about them.

This is a little out of my wheelhouse on this podcast, but I thought I would take note of what has become one of the biggest stories of the year: the lack of an indictment for Darren Wilson, the cop who shot Mike Brown, an unarmed teenager, in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. Here’s a comment from Cornell William Brooks, the head of the NAACP.

• Ferguson *

Many people have spoken more eloquently on this than I could, but, simply put, part of the blanket of reproductive rights people should enjoy is the right to raise the children you want without fear of violence taking their lives for no good reason. For Black parents in this country, they do not have that right. That must be changed. This is inexcusable.

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There’s this widespread notion on the right that feminists just made up the idea of “rape culture.” They would have you believe that women who allege sexual assault are generally taken seriously and that if any questions arise, it’s because of the individual specifics of the case and not because of a knee-jerk, widespread tendency to disregard any rape allegations or to blame the victim and tell her she brought it on herself. If it was true, however, that there was no such thing as rape culture, then having people dog-pile an accuser with claims that she’s just making it up for attention and/or money would be the exception to the rule. The fact that you can predict with 99 percent certainty that a rape allegation against a popular, rich, or famous man will be immediately denounced as lies made by crazy women suggests that we have, you guessed it, a pattern. A pattern resulting from a culture. A culture that systematically refuses to take rape seriously. I do believe it’s getting better in many ways, but the fact remains that it’s impossible to come out in public about a famous man raping you and not have tons of people claim, without a shred of evidence, that you are a fantasist and a liar. If we didn’t have a rape culture, the absolute certainty that this will happen to you simply wouldn’t exist.

I bring this up, you will not be surprised to hear, because of the reaction to the reemergence of long-standing rape allegations against Bill Cosby. A theme emerged from many corners, and there’s no nice way to put it: Many commentators basically seemed to believe the media interest in exposing the alleged rapes was illicit and, well, that Cosby is the real victim here. Some commentators didn’t even bother mounting arguments about how the victims are supposedly lying, which is hard to do when you have over 17 of them, many of whom are public. No, the narrative that emerged in some corners was that media interest in this story is somehow just as bad, if not worse, than raping someone. Like Glenn Beck here, who is furious at an AP reporter for asking Cosby a question that Cosby didn’t want to answer.

• Cosby 1 *

Conservatives are always accusing feminists, absolutely falsely, of trying to turn all sorts of things into sexual abuse, from consensual sex to flirting. That’s all a lie, of course, but it also appears to be a bit of projection. Because here is Glenn Beck suggesting that it’s rape, perhaps worse than rape, to be asked a question you don’t want to answer. Which you can say no to, and Cosby does, by the way. Saying no comment is definitely easier than trying to escape when you’re drugged and a man is holding you down and forcing sex on you.

Rush Limbaugh was singing a similar tune, suggesting that no one actually cares about rape, but is only using it to push some kind of weird agenda.

• Cosby 2 *

Breaking in to remind you that it’s not one woman. There are over 17 separate accusers as I’m writing this. There’s not much need to speculate on why Limbaugh would ignore the many other accusations of sexual assault here, because it’s just a lot easier to write it off as a single crazy woman if it’s just one. So that’s what he’s going to pretend happened.

• Cosby 3 *

It’s tempting to write all this off as just right wing talk radio stuff, though I have never understood the urge to write off media that millions of influential voters listen to as if it doesn’t matter. But this sense that the accusations shouldn’t be taken seriously infected even Don Lemon’s interview on CNN with one of the accusers, Joan Tarshis.

• Cosby 4 *

Despite what Don Lemon might think, there is actually a pretty good reason not to bite someone who has already demonstrated he’s a violent person by sexually assaulting you. Odds are he’s not going to take it well. But I don’t need to belabor the point, as this is classic victim-blaming, and regardless of Lemon’s intentions, this line of inquiry fuels the notion that women are lying when they say they’re raped, because the insinuations that real rape victims would fight back even at the cost of their own safety or even lives. Lemon’s line of inquiry isn’t as offensive as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh openly suggesting this isn’t a big deal, but it serves the same purpose of suggesting that the alleged crime isn’t as serious as the accuser says it is. Lemon apologized, though it was one of those mealy-mouthed if-you-were-offended apologies.

• Cosby 5 *

Every time a big rape story gets in the news, we see the same kind of things happen over and over. And every time, feminists point out the problems with it. So it can’t just be that people are randomly screwing up. There’s a pattern here, and that’s what you might call rape culture.

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Interview

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Advocates for Youth has had a long-running campaign called the 1 in 3 Campaign, which I’ve covered for Reality Cast before. The idea is to educate people on how common abortion is and, because it’s so common, the experiences of women are rather interesting and diverse but always very human. Anti-choicers stereotype and paint women who have abortions as either selfish sluts who abort to fit in prom dresses or, if they’re trying to be “compassionate”, they instead stereotype them as stupid sluts who have to be saved from their own supposed inability to make good choices. So to fight back, the 1 in 3 Campaign held an eight-hour livestream of women speaking out about their own abortions. Since it was a livestream, I don’t have anything to pull from it, but feminist writer Jessica Valenti made a separate video talking about her abortion experiences.

• Abortion 1 *

She goes on to explain that she had to abort a second pregnancy in her 30s because, after her first daughter was born and it nearly killed her, the doctors told her no more pregnancies. So she aborted that rather than run the risk of leaving her daughter without a mother and her husband without a wife. She notes that her second abortion is often considered the more “justified” one by the public, but suggests that’s not how it should be.

• Abortion 2 *

That’s the video from the speakout that’s up at the website, but there’s another that’s just a little over a couple of months old from a woman identified as Favianna, who also has a compelling story.

• Abortion 3 *

Both of these stories really reflect what you hear from women who are telling their own, actual, abortion stories. It does cause pain and reflection, but not how anti-choicers imagine it to be, with women regretting the fact that they aren’t virgins or that they’re not going to have a baby. It’s more about thinking about your life and your choices and really assessing what your priorities are, and yes, you hear very little regret about the abortion itself. In fact, abortion is what it has always been: A solution to a problem, not the problem. In light of these complex, personal stories, it’s doubly weird listening to the anti-choice protesters that Jill Filipovic of Cosmopolitan interviewed in the Boston area.

• Abortion 4 *
• Abortion 5 *
• Abortion 6 *

The gulf here is just tremendous. You have pro-choicers believing that women are human beings, with all the complexity and diversity that implies, and that we need to be able to decide for ourselves what our lives will be. But then you have anti-choicers who believe there’s one single path for all women, all the billions of women on earth: Abstinence until marriage, very little sex within it, not having a career and instead dedicating your life to raising children with no control over when you have them. One side simply sees women as people and the other as appliances for baby-making that have little use outside of that function.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, British rape apologist edition. BBC host Nick Conrad got criticized recently for resorting to the very old, very discredited argument that women bring rape on themselves by teasing men sexually and then not giving up the goods.

• Nick Conrad *

Self-flattery about how men have this sexual rapaciousness that mere women cannot understand aside, this is simply a discredited theory about rape. Research done by David Lisak has shown, beyond any quibbling or whining, that rapists aren’t ordinary men who get carried away, but a small subset of sexual predators who deliberately set out to rape women. Often, they use the promise of consensual sex to get a woman alone and then spring a rape on her. Or they target women who are too drunk to consent. But one thing that doesn’t actually happen much, if at all, is men thinking they’re going to get laid and then being denied at the last minute, and, too horny to stop themselves, violently assault a person. That’s not how it works, and telling women they are obliged to get a guy off after making out a little, or else they have it coming, is pure nonsense and misogynist as all hell. It’s not just that we all have a right to change our minds. It’s also that men generally respect that, and those who don’t were probably going to rape anyway.

The post Abortion Stories, Bill Cosby, and Defeating ‘Personhood’ in Colorado appeared first on RH Reality Check.