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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Jeff Teague from Planned Parenthood will be on to explain what’s going on in Tennessee. The Supreme Court is hearing arguments about same-sex marriage and I’ll have a round-up of some of the more egregious anti-choice laws being passed this session.

Cecily Strong was the comedian for this year’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner and she got in a few jabs about reproductive rights. This was the best one.

Strong *

This made me go look up all the women who have been comedians for this event. It hasn’t been many: Wanda Sykes, Elayne Boosler, and Paula Poundstone. That’s basically it. Conclusion: More women should be asked to perform at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

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Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments over whether or not same-sex marriage should be treated like a constitutional right across all 50 states. The Court has dealt with the question of same-sex marriage before, but they only considered it within the context of California and punted on the larger question of whether or not it should be the law of the land in every state. But now, the delays are over and we’re finally going to have a decision, one way or another. Most court watchers are confident that the Court will uphold the right to marry someone of your own sex, if only because the arguments against gay marriage laughable and weak. It’s not just that, either. Gay marriage is growing in popularity so fast that, at current rates, it will be a non-issue in the same way interracial marriage is a non-issue within a generation. But of course, people who have staked their entire careers as right-wing demagogues on this issue aren’t going to just roll over. Fundamentalists held a so-called “March for Marriage” at the National Mall the weekend before arguments, and the general tone of the speeches was full-blown hysteria. Matt Staver gave a stomach-turningly disingenuous speech, comparing the fight to deprive gay people of rights with older fights to give Black people their rights, even though that makes no kind of sense at all. Then he called on people to disobey the Court’s decision if they rule in favor of gay rights.

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In all seriousness, how exactly would this resistance look? How does one not obey this particular law? Not get “gay married”? Uh, well, you don’t have to. Is this some kind of veiled threat to harass and terrorize gay couples in the way abortion providers are harassed and terrorized? I have no idea. It’s probably just a bunch of empty rhetoric, but still, weird.

The March for Marriage also featured some hoary old lines bigots still think are funny.

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That was Father Johannes Jacobse. I must point out that, by that logic, anyone not named Adam or Eve shouldn’t be allowed to marry, either, if marriage is strictly an Adam-and-Eve thing.

On top of the march, there was also a press conference held by a bunch of anti-gay nuts. The tone continued to be one of sustained hysteria, as epitomized by Bill Jonhson of the American Decency Association. I swear, you cannot make this stuff up.

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You know they’re getting desperate when they’re left promising supernatural consequences if you don’t do what they want. This particular tactic is especially sleazy because it’s based completely on back rationalizations. By which I mean that bad things are going to happen in the future, but these sleazy mofos are going to claim that the bad things happened because God is punishing us, even though bad things happened in the past prior to the “God punishing us” days. Hurricanes fall on the homobigots and the pro-gay alike, but somehow gays will get blamed for the weather.

But while these D.C. events featured a bunch of bottom feeders, there are still people considered mainstream politicians who were spouting the same hysterical nonsense. Marco Rubio, for instance, bust this out in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network.

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He then went off on state’s rights, because the only amendments to the Constitution conservatives seem to know about are the Second and the Tenth, both of which they misread. But there is another amendment, called the 14th, which says explicitly that no state can, quote, “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” That’s state, by the way, which means that this “states’ rights” nonsense is explicitly outlawed in the Constitution. Equal protection is straightforward enough, too. Straight people are allowed to marry so, by law, gay people should be allowed to marry, too. There’s a little legal wiggle room there, but the notion that it’s absurd to see strong equality protections in the Constitution is a flat out lie.

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Interview

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State legislatures are in session and that means, these days at least, a depressing and endless amount of anti-choice legislation pouring out of state houses. So here’s a roundup of some of the latest iterations you need to be keeping an eye on. North Carolina is a state that is swiftly heading to swing state status, so anti-choicers there are trying to shove through a bunch of ridiculous anti-choice legislation while they still have the votes to get it done. Which includes one of the longest waiting periods—72 hours—in the country. You will not be surprised to hear that the rhetoric defending this treats women like they are idiots. Such as this justification from state representative Jacqueline Schaeffer.

abortion 1 *

Uh, no. Real estate waiting periods are not the same, in no small part because they’re often imposed by contract and not law. But more to the point, there’s legitimate reasons that it takes time to finalize a house deal. You can’t tell everything you need to know about a house by looking at it, which is why inspectors have to come in. But whether or not an abortion is a good idea doesn’t require a bunch of external information. It only depends on one thing: whether a woman wants to have a baby right now or not. Since the relevant information is information the woman already possesses, making her wait and endure a bunch of irrelevant lectures is just a harassment technique. Also, those so-called medical waiting procedures? They aren’t there for the purpose of guilt-tripping and putting women in time-out so they can feel bad about their supposedly slutty ways. Most of the time, it’s just about scheduling, not thinking it over. Like when I had surgery, yes, I waited a week between diagnosis and surgery, but only because my doctor only does this surgery a few times a month. If I could have done it sooner, I would have. But the main thing is those waiting periods are not standardized and not imposed by the state, but based on a doctor’s judgment. The very thing antis want to remove from the equation.

Florida imposed a waiting period, too, of 24 hours. It’s the usual cruel, misogynist nonsense.

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Forcing women to document their rape is a rather unsubtle way of calling them liars. It’s also there to create the appearance of compassion for rape survivors while functionally imposing the waiting period on them. After all, cobbling together documentation of a rape will probably take more time and be a bigger hassle than just enduring the waiting period. Even if rape victims do have the ability to get the paperwork in order, they’ll probably just opt for the waiting period instead, since it’s less of a hassle.

Meanwhile, Texas is considering a whole new slate of abortion restrictions, because they are single-minded and obsessed. But because anti-choicers aren’t just anti-abortion, they are also, sigh, attacking resources to make contraception available and to prevent STI transmission.

abortion 3 *

95 percent of Americans have sex before marriage, but because one guy was a virgin until he was 29, we all have to suffer. Anti-choice logic at its finest.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, more anti-gay hysteria edition. I mean, you had to know I have like a million of these clips, right? Todd Starnes on the American Family Radio all but accuses gay people of trying to put conservatives in concentration camps.

Starnes *

They weren’t sitting there minding their own business. They were selling cakes and when a gay couple came in, they basically said we don’t serve your kind around here. No one is trying to ban Christians from owning businesses or run them out of their homes. We are saying that if you run a business, you benefit from community support in all sorts of ways, from the roads that we collectively provide to get customers to you to the clean water we provide to make your cakes to the trade agreements that help you buy flour and sugar to make cakes. In exchange for all these services we the people provide your business, you in turn have a responsibility to not discriminate. If you do not wish to follow the law, you are free to not own a business. This is not that hard to understand.

The post Hysteria Against Gay Marriage, Egregious Anti-Choice Legislation appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Texas bans insurance from covering abortion

Texas Republicans vs. rape exemptions

Crane High School’s chlamydia problem

Yup, abstinence-only education

Keith Ablow’s continuously monstrous opinions

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Heather Boonstra from Guttmacher will explain how public schools could do more to help students get contraception. Texas bans insurance coverage of abortion, and a West Texas school has an alarmingly high chlamydia rate.

How much do modern conservatives absolutely hate birth control? So much so that House Republicans are willing to overturn a law in Washington, D.C. that bans discrimination against women for fear that more women will get birth control.

D.C. *

The vote was largely symbolic and not expected to go anywhere. On one hand, that’s a good thing. On the other hand, it appears that House Republicans are so eager to show voters how much they hate women that they will take time out of their day to schedule a vote just to show you they wish your boss could fire you for having sex.

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In case there was any doubt that attacks on reproductive rights are, in no small part, about increasing income inequality by making contraception and abortion a privilege for the rich instead of a right for all, Texas Republicans have set out to remove all doubt. The state senate passed a bill that bans all insurance companies, private and public, from covering abortion.

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And no insurance companies bother offering that, anyway. And who would buy it? It’s obvious anti-choicers just want you to think of it as slut insurance. So much for that much-ballyhooed nonsense about conservatives supporting free enterprise. Not if it allows women to think their vaginas belong to them, no sir. And man, do legislators in Texas think about anything but how much they hate the idea of women having sex without their explicit permission? You get the impression that the first thing these folks think about when they wake up and the last thing on their minds when they go to bed is how women are out there, right now, having sex, and nothing they do seems to stop it. Well, low-income women and young women, anyway. A lot of the legislators involved in this are themselves women, but they are older and better-off, so should they need abortions, they can just go out of state and pay cash. Maybe even make a little vacation out of it: Go to New York and see the Statue of Liberty while reflecting on how glad they are that they are making liberty a privilege of the well-off.

As expected, Democrats tried to amend this bill by at least tacking on some rape and incest exemptions, and as these things go, some anti-choice legislator had to insinuate that rape victims are mostly filthy liars and so they cannot be trusted and need an outside authority—preferably male—to sign off on their claims.

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That was Texas State Sen. Donna Campbell. The whole debate, which I won’t subject you to, was grotesque. Sen. Kirk Watson kept pointing out that many victims don’t report out of fear of retaliation or, you know, because the assailant is a family member. Campbell disingenuously pulls faces and claims she’s just trying to help by forcing them to go to law enforcement. Which is nonsense, because even a modified amendment allowing for those who do go to law enforcement to get abortions was rejected. It’s gross seeing people fake compassion when they really figure it’s better to force someone to bear a rapist’s child, for instance, than to run the risk that someone, somewhere has consensual sex without being punished for it.

Senator Watson was certainly trying hard here, but I find this line of argument depressing.

insurance 3 *

I know that they’re amending a bill that’s already lost and so they have to play on the opposing team’s turf, but it’s really depressing that this is where it’s come from: In order to even be considered even remotely eligible for some modicum of compassion, you have to be a virgin who was waiting for marriage—something almost no women do in this country. I don’t like conceding that ground. Women don’t lose their humanity because they choose to have sex. On the contrary, our desire to have sex is one of the many things, like the desire for naps, having ambition, and loving cats, that makes us human. But at least it goes to show that the territory this is being debated on has nothing to do with “life.” It’s all about the ridiculous expectations put on us by social conservatives—expectations they themselves do not follow—to squelch this part of ourselves lest we lose all claim to basic human rights.

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Interview

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So this is a story that’s hitting close to home for me, because I went to high school about an hour or two from this school, which is close by West Texas standards, and we competed with them in debate and sports and such things. So it’s kind of amazing to see this become not just a national, but international story.

Crane 1 *

Well, other news outlets did some digging and found that there were 20 reported cases of chlamydia at this high school. For context, Crane High School only has about 300 students, which means that literally 1 in 15 students at the high school has contracted this disease. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more, since these are just the reported cases. This should be a lesson in how it’s important to teach kids to use condoms and a reminder that we all are vulnerable to these kinds of diseases. But instead, as you can imagine, people are drawing exactly the opposite conclusion: treating this like it’s anomaly and that there must be something wrong with Crane, instead of an entirely predictable happenstance.

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What nasty stuff is that? Sex? People having sex with multiple partners? Diseases spreading around a community? Hate to break it to you, sir, but if you want to raise your kids away from all that, you will have to move to a desert island far away from society and when they eventually grow up and start having urges, explain that while you clearly think sex was good enough for yourself, which is how you got them, you’re not going to allow them the same privilege. Good luck with that!

I wish I could say this guy is the exception, but this attitude is really predictable in the face of this. No, Crane is not dirty or especially slutty. They just got especially unlucky, and even then, it’s not that especially unlucky. The entire West Texas area is a veritable ground zero for STIs, because these exact attitudes discourage people from communicating with partners, getting tested regularly, and using condoms, which are the best ways to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Repression, in other words, is the problem, not the solution. I’m not the only one who sees this clearly.

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Unfortunately, that video goes on to blame hip-hop and advertising for kids having sex, even though the whole of human history suggests that people were having sex all the time in every generation long before anyone scratched a record or took a photograph. Kids have sex because, and I can’t believe this needs saying, sex is a biological imperative that is dialed into us on a genetic level. Not to mention that these classes don’t just tell kids to wait, they tell them to wait until marriage, which, on average, would mean a full eight years after you graduate high school. Let’s just let go of the fantasy that post-pubescent people having interest in sexual intercourse is some new-fangled idea and start dealing with reality, which is that a certain percentage of people are going to do it before they graduate high school and pretty much all of us will do it before we get married. And that’s okay! As long as it’s with age-appropriate partners, it’s consensual, and you really do feel ready and not pressured, sex is a good thing. A lot of us had sex in high school or shortly thereafter and feel just fine about it. If we continue to lie to kids and tell them that’s not true, they will continue to see through our lies and decide we are not to be trusted. That’s just a straight-up bad idea.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, “Whose Uterus Is It Again?” edition. Keith Ablow of Fox News has a very strong opinion: Your uterus belongs to the last man who put some semen in it.

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Not that any of this is a surprise. Ablow has always been a strong proponent of the idea that women should be forced by law to do what men want them to do. Never mind that forced pregnancy is one of the favorite tactics of domestic abusers. In fact, that’s almost tautological, because trying to force someone to get pregnant or have a baby against her will is clearly a sexual violation intended to hurt and control and therefore is inherently abusive. He just would make this form of domestic violence legal. And that’s what it is, make no mistake: Forcing your partner, against her will, to go through nine months of pregnancy, with all the bodily changes and risk to her life and pain that entails, cannot be considered anything else.

The post In Texas, a Chlamydia Outbreak and Fight Over Abortion Care Insurance Coverage appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

John Oliver on family leave

Rachel Maddow on recent spate of anti-choice legislation

Republicans crawling all over themselves to cheer proposed federal abortion ban

37 new abortion laws this year alone

Wisconsin tries to ban abortions after 20 weeks

Tennessee onslaught on abortion rights

Good news in Virginia

So many offensive Holocaust comparisons. So many.

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Kathryn Joyce will explain the fight over Marshallese adoptions in Arkansas. The House votes to ban abortions after 20 weeks and state-level assaults on reproductive rights continue.

John Oliver insisted on using blind hiring practices for his writing staff, leading to the hiring of more women writers than is typical for comedy shows. The choices of topics they cover has really reflected this wise move. For instance, Mother’s Day meant that Oliver eviscerated the U.S.’s pathetic family leave protections.

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Congress may be horribly anti-feminist right now, but man, comedy has really taken a turn for the ladies.

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So what do you think is the biggest problem facing our country these days? Civil liberty violations? The continued use of drones despite the fact that they are known to kill civilians? Income inequality? Campaign finance reform? Well, last Monday, Rachel Maddow convincingly argued that, for Republicans, all these issues pale in comparison to their biggest concern, which is that women continue to have sex without getting permission from the religious right. As the New York Times reported, so far this year, state legislatures have passed a whopping 37 new abortion regulations, bringing the total over the past four years to over 200 new laws trying to punish women for having sex by making abortion a more miserable experience, if you can get one at all. And make no mistake, this is about sex, as evidenced by the fact that Colorado Republicans just voted to have a higher abortion rate by terminating a program giving IUDs to low-income women and teen girls. But this single-minded obsession is not limited to the state legislatures. House Republicans have tweaked the bill banning abortions after 20 weeks, to make it less overtly hateful to rape victims, and are bringing it back.

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The waiting period gives the game away. The excuse for this ban is that fetuses at 20 weeks are developed enough to feel pain. That’s not true, of course, but that’s the excuse. But if they really were worried about that, why would they start delaying and putting off the abortions so that the fetuses have time to develop even more?

The good news is that this bill is a go-nowhere bill. Even if it does get to the president’s desk, which it won’t because the Senate won’t allow it, President Obama would veto it. The bad news is that this bill is basically a huge gesture to indicate to the religious right that they still wholly own the Republican Party. Which is why every presidential candidate is crawling over himself to wax poetic about the beauty of forced childbirth.

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Humane and compassionate to make a woman who has been told she is going to be gravely injured if she has this baby to go ahead and do it anyway? Pro-woman to make rape victims endure a two-day waiting period that only exists to make them feel like they’re bad and have done something wrong by being raped? Common sense to override a doctor’s medical judgment with the religious, anti-science blathering of a bunch of misogynists? The political posturing of all this becomes even more grotesque when you realize the vote was scheduled on the anniversary of the day Kermit Gosnell was convicted for murder. The implication is that a law like this would somehow have prevented what Gosnell did, which was things like terminating very late pregnancies or outright killing babies. But that is simply untrue. May I remind you that Gosnell was convicted and is in jail. Which means, for any slow-witted anti-choicers in the audience, that there were already laws in place banning people from doing what he did. Passing more laws won’t stop people who are breaking laws that already exist. There’s some common sense for you.

But while this particular vote was mainly symbolic, there are material considerations in play here. As Maddow explained on her show, reproductive rights have become the number one most partisan issue in the country. By which I mean that you can accurately predict where a politician stands on the issue by party affiliation more than any other issue.

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As a member of the press, I can tell you, one reason is that journalists, editors, and audiences are burned out on this issue. Relentless, non-stop abortion abortion abortion talk is driving people a little nuts. If you cover this story, you get accused, constantly, of being obsessed with abortion. I know I do. But we’re not the ones with an obsession. Conservatives are. I wish I never had to write about this issue again. I wish that abortion was considered no more controversial than getting a cavity drilled. I wish contraception were no harder to get than aspirin. I wish the Republican Party wasn’t completely controlled by people who cannot stop looking for vindictive ways to punish women for having sex. But here we are. And I promise that as long as they are obsessed, I will call them out for their obsession.

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Interview

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It’s the state legislative season which means that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the anti-choice legislation that’s pouring out of Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country. Like, really, really hard. As the New York Times reports, there are 37 new anti-abortion laws just this year alone and more are coming all the time. While the House voted on a go-nowhere bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks, state legislatures have been far more successful at restricting access by making those bills into law. Here’s a round-up of some of the uglier attacks on women’s rights in recent days.

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I am so frigging exhausted of debunking this lie, which I suppose is why they repeat it so often. Conservatives really have figured out that they can just keep telling the same lie over and over again, and reality-based people will just give up, too worn out to keep doing this dance until the end of time. But let’s be utterly clear: There is zero evidence that fetuses feel pain at 20 weeks. There is substantial, irrefutable evidence that their nervous system is not developed enough for that to be possible. Saying that fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks is the equivalent of saying that handless embryos can play pattycake. It’s just a weak excuse to pretend that they have some kind of new argument when they don’t. It’s the same old “sex is bad, women need to be punished” nonsense. With 20 week bans, it’s particularly sadistic, because women needing those abortions disproportionately have serious medical or personal issues.

Tennessee is having a veritable feeding frenzy of anti-choice activity, after a ballot measure was passed amending the constitution exempting women seeking abortion from the privacy protections afforded all other people in the state. Already the governor has signed a bill requiring abortion clinics, even ones that just dispense the pill, to meet ambulatory surgical center requirements that are medically unnecessary but expensive enough to shut down a significant number of clinics. Now he’s moving onto a bill that targets women, to make abortion a hassle and to shame them.

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Indiana also quietly passed another abortion regulation aimed at shutting down clinics. It’s all very depressing, but there’s one state where things are actually getting better. Pro-choice Democrats absolutely swept Virginia’s midterm elections, and the effects have been great for women.

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Those building codes were put into place by anti-contraception, religious right fanatic Ken Cuccinelli after Republicans hit roadblocks trying to pass them through legislature. But now it’s been undone and, for now, safe and legal abortion clinics in Virginia are safe.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, gay-marriage panic edition. With most political watchers feeling positive that the Supreme Court is going to legalize gay marriage, many conservatives are running away from the issue and pretending that they weren’t raging about it just a few years ago. But some diehards, like Mat Staver, will hang on until the bitter end.

Staver *

Yep, first you have to treat a gay couple with the same basic decency and respect you treat straight couples with. Then, concentration camps! The logic is sound, if you don’t think about it for even a moment.

The post Federal and State-Level Assaults on Abortion Rights appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Left obsessed with sex

John Diehl sex obsession

John Diehl’s assault on birth control

Uh, girls play with water guns

Transcript

On this episode, I’ll interview a researcher who has a new paper out measuring prevalence of sexual assault at one campus. John Diehl’s sex scandal reveals anti-choice hypocrisy and I’ll have a segment honoring Mad Men’s long reign as an adamantly pro-choice show.

As I was going into to record this episode, there was a big scandal breaking out about TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting series.

Duggar *

I don’t know that anyone is actually surprised by this. I’ve covered the Duggars on and off on this podcast for a long time, and their public persona is one of uber-creepiness on the sex stuff. But this scandal is what will finally end their terrible show that puts a positive spin on their creepy home life. If there are new developments, I will cover next week.

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Recently, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, understandably trying to weasel out of expressing some of his more unpopular opinions on things like gay rights, told a reporter who was asking him about it that the left is “obsessed” with sex. No, I’m serious. A reporter asked him about gay rights and he whined, “Is there something about the left—and I am going to put the media in this category—that is obsessed with sex?” Because clearly the only reason you might ever want gay people to have human rights is you’re a compulsive masturbator.

Of course, there are political ideologues in this country who are, in fact, obsessed with sex. But they aren’t liberals who would, if they had their druthers, probably love to get sex out of politics entirely. What a glorious day that would be if people could just have sex on their own without having to worry about losing human rights or the ability to control their own lives and bodies because of it? But that day is not here, because of the right’s continuing and unwavering obsession with sex.

Earlier this month, we got a hilarious and almost picture perfect example of how this works. The Missouri legislature, under the leadership of House Speaker John Diehl, has been churning out a dizzying number of bills aimed at punishing women in the state for having sex. Checking the RH Reality Check Data Center [http://data.rhrealitycheck.org/], I see that, under Diehl’s leadership, it’s been a non-stop assault on reproductive rights. There was even a bill that amended the state’s sex education standards to mandate lectures about how sexting is wrong and inappropriate and you should never ever do it.

So yeah, this happened.

Diehl 1 *

Hey y’all. He’s only 30 years older than her. That’s not like too bad, is it? Obviously, inappropriate sexual behavior is not limited to one party or one ideology, but this particular scandal is particularly ugly because the girl slash woman in question is a college freshman. She’s not even a sophomore! I mean, this is just egregious. I mean, we all have our sexual mistakes, but surely waiting until someone’s been an entire year out of high school before having sex with them behind your wife’s back is not too much to ask. It takes a high level of entitlement to chase after thirsty kids right out of high school, sir. That’s a new low.

But while John Diehl feels so entitled to sex he goes hunting amongst those who haven’t had the ink dry on their high school diplomas yet, he feels that your sex life is so wicked and out of bounds that your boss should be able to deny you the birth control of your choice.

Diehl 2 *

That’s right, the Missouri legislature is so hostile to birth control that they overturned the governor’s veto of a bill that would allow your boss to veto your choice of birth control, based on his religious beliefs. I’ve covered this issue extensively on this podcast, so it’s not worth rehashing here. The issue here is that Diehl doesn’t think you deserve even the basic right to privacy that allows you to make your own choices about birth control without your boss getting a vote. But when he was found out to be planning a sexual encounter with a girl that was barely of age, he initially refused to resign. So your age appropriate relationship is so naughty you deserve punishment, but his adulterous shenanigans are none of our business? Not buying it.

But of course, he did eventually resign because, at a certain point, these religious hypocrites have to keep up appearances. But make no mistake, this is not about conservatives suddenly growing a conscience and learning how to treat people with dignity and respect.

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Yep, because some adult hypocrite can’t keep it in his pants, a bunch of college kids are being forced to lose career and educational opportunities. Because conservatism has never been about right and wrong and treating people fairly. It’s about protecting the powerful and shifting blame and punishment, as much as possible, on those who are vulnerable and haven’t done anything wrong. This is just more of the same.

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Interview

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After seven seasons and eight years, the critically acclaimed and endlessly compelling TV series Mad Men, about ad executives living through the ’60s, has come to an end. There’s reams and reams of things that can and have been said about the show, but I want to focus on one of the more subtle but long-standing themes that was really brought to a head this season, which was how this was an era when mandatory motherhood was really called into question and started to fade as an unquestioned ideal. The ’60s was an era when reliable birth control really started to shape society, causing a lot of people to come around to the idea that motherhood should be something that’s chosen, not forced upon you by an accident of nature. And while this theme never got as much attention as other themes about consumerism or political change, it was persistent until the very last episode when a minor character, named Stephanie, gave this speech at a hippie seminar that is a thinly disguised version of the Esalen Institute at Big Sur.

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The idea that many women of this era had babies when they weren’t ready and that created trauma that could never be forgotten or erased was with us from the very first season of the series. It was most obvious in the decision to have Peggy Olson get pregnant and, in denial, ignore all the symptoms and weight gain until she actually gave birth. The event is so traumatic that she is put in a mental ward and her baby is put up for adoption. Her boss, Don Draper, figures out where she is and visits her in the hospital and gives her one of the most famous speeches in the history of the show.

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I imagine that sentiments like that were often shared with the many thousands of women at the time who, like Peggy, were unable to admit publicly that they were pregnant and therefore were sent away to give birth and give their babies up for adoption in secret. And since we all wanted Peggy to be happy and do well, I think a lot of us kind of agreed with Don at the time. But it became clear, as the series went on, that she never could really get on board with pretending this never happened. Oh, she kept the secret, like women of her era did. But it haunted her. It turns out that hiding that secret in shame was not good for her, and her character lights into her best friend Stan, angry because he doesn’t seem to understand that women are trapped by childbearing in a way men are not.

Mad Men 3 *

At this point, he realizes that she must have had this experience and asks her about what she did when she was pregnant unexpectedly.

Mad Men 4 *

Peggy finds some measure of peace, realizing that she did what she had to do and that it’s not like she had any great choices. But that expectation, that you simply bury it and pretend it didn’t happen, isn’t working for her. I don’t think it worked for a lot of women. That’s a story that didn’t get told a lot, and Mad Men tells it in many ways. Peggy’s is the most obvious, but you also see Don’s first wife, Betty, who clearly had kids without thinking about it and she ends up being a selfish, angry person who makes her kids sad all the time, though she really doesn’t mean to be that way. Eventually, though, the show shifts into the late ’60s, and we get to experience Megan, Don’s modern second wife who uses the birth control pill and who resists getting pregnant against his wishes because she’s unsure of him and worried about her career. That ends up working out for her. The show wasn’t polemical. I bet a lot of viewers didn’t even really grasp what they were doing here, since it was so subtle. But cumulatively, it made a very careful and convincing case for the importance of birth control and legal abortion. Not just because it helped free women to work, but because it prevented these sad and often forgotten tragedies. This is the world anti-choicers want to bring back, a world where women like Peggy are always burdened by the knowledge that their child is somewhere in the world without them. Or women like Betty who want to be good mothers but fail all the time because they weren’t ready for it. We should definitely not want that world back.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Fox News has weird ideas about what girls are capable of edition. So the Boy Scouts have a long-standing ban on water gun fights, mostly as a CYA maneuver because they have a ban on pointing any kind of firearm, toy or otherwise, at people. A blog post reminding scout leaders of this policy caused many to think this was a “new” thing and that caused the right wing press to go into an absolute frenzy, including Fox News, of course.

Boys *

I was unaware that girls do not have water gun fights. I guess I grew up as a boy, then, because water gun fights were a staple of my childhood. This entire issue is really ridiculous. So what if the Scouts don’t want leaders organizing water gun fights for outings? Kids can have them at home in their spare time. The best water gun fights are spontaneous anyway.

The post Hypocrisy in Missouri, Pro-Choice Themes in ‘Mad Men’ appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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How dare Planned Parenthood educate the voters about facts?!

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll talk to a Texas researcher about obstacles between women and birth control. The Duggar sex abuse scandal spins out of control and anti-choice politicians are getting nuttier and more radical.

Elizabeth Plank has a fun new video out about male celebrities picking up the whole feminism thing.

Male feminists *

She interviews actor Matt McGorry about how he discovered feminism. It’s a fun and light video that will give you some hope for humanity. I recommend as a good way to wash out the taste of all the people, men and women, out there whose anti-feminism makes you despair.

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

As I promised last week, I’d keep covering the Josh Duggar situation if more developments arose. And boy howdy did they! This story keeps getting weirder and more disturbing all the time. The first big reveal was the family’s bizarre complicity and shielding of Josh from consequences.

Duggar 1 *

Or that’s how it was first reported. But, as Irin Carmon of MSNBC found when she dug around, in fact, the statute of limitations had not expired when Duggar was reported to the police. According to the Washington Post timelines, Josh was first discovered to be molesting girls, mostly his sisters, in 2002 when he was 14 years old. His parents then proceeded to keep him out of legal trouble by sending him off to hang out with a family friend over the summer and telling their church, who should have been mandatory reporters, that he was getting “Christian counseling”. In 2003, an officer of the law was finally involved, but the guy was a family friend who gave Josh a quote “stern talking to” but did not file charges or otherwise officially engage the law. That officer later was caught with child porn and is doing 56 years in prison. In 2006, when Josh was 18, the authorities were finally alerted by an anonymous tipper. That was when they supposedly determined that the statute of limitations had run out, but as Carmon explained, Arkansas’s statute of limitations on child abuse is actually seven years, not 14. The state had until 2013 to arrest him but they didn’t do that. So something shady is going on here. And it gets worse.

Duggar 2 *

Considering that most of the victims were his sisters and most of them still live with the parents that colluded to protect Josh from legal consequences, this development is ringing all sorts of alarm bells. The Duggars are a clan that believes women should basically have no right to self-determination at all, especially on matters pertaining to sexuality. So that compromises the ability of any of the victims in this case to be acting strictly of her own accord, as they have been raised their whole lives to believe they are not smart or strong enough to make their own decisions.

And then it gets even worse from here.

Duggar 3 *

This is disingenuous. Josh Duggar’s behavior is a problem, especially since he doesn’t seem to have had any interest in taking responsibility until he was outed like this. But talking about the lesser moral responsibility of minors is a distraction from the real issue, which is that the Duggars covered up the crime, didn’t get Josh any real counseling, allowed him to continue living with the victims without getting any real help, and then put their family on TV where the victims were supposed to smile and act like everything in their family is normal and wholesome. Oh, and where Josh got to make jokes like this.

Duggar 4 *

Yep, that’s him joking about his sister going on a date with his brother. It would be a silly enough joke if, you know, he hadn’t actually molested his sister. In context, however, it reads as incredibly creepy. At this point, it’s worth noting that, as this clip makes very clear, he is well over 18, making the claims about minors and responsibility moot. But is it any surprise that he seems not to give a crap at all? He molested a bunch of girls and his parents covered up for him and put him on TV as some kind of role model of wholesome Christian manhood. Then he got a job lecturing other people on their supposed morality for the Family Research Council. Where he tried to argue that LGBT people are a threat to children.

Duggar 5 *

It’s never been clearer that the supposed concern for children is just a feint to cover up for the real agenda here. The whole thing shows that all this conservative Christian talk about personal responsibility and family and life is just a cover for their real agenda, which is giving straight men control over the rest of us, even if that means protecting men who abuse women and girls.

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Interview

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Anti-choice politicians just keep getting stranger and more radical all the time. In Texas, the fear that he might lose an opportunity to foist unnecessary suffering on women made state representative Jonathan Stickland absolutely lose his mind. Stickland’s bone-deep issues with women and his childish behavior have gotten him into the news before. Stickland decided to taunt Planned Parenthood representatives visiting the state capitol by putting a sign identifying himself as a former fetus on his office’s name placard, and when it was removed, he threw a temper tantrum that made him sound about 10 years old.

abortion 1 *

The whininess! The false sense of victimhood! Not that this is surprising from someone who identifies as a “former fetus”, which is a classic conservative maneuver of pretending to be victimized in order to victimize others. Part of me was a former sperm but you don’t see me denying men the right to masturbate because of it. But counting nonsense grievances appears to be this man’s deal, as this clip masterfully shows: Pretending to be afraid when he wasn’t, pretending that he’s under some kind of assault because he lives in Austin where liberals live, pretending that Planned Parenthood is out to get him personally because they defend women’s rights. Well now this perpetually aggrieved man nearly came to blows with another Republican because he ran into obstacles trying to attack women’s rights even more.

Texas Republicans decided to temporarily table a bill that would deny women insurance coverage for abortions, and Stickland was so furious that he got into the face of Bryan Cook, reportedly nearly punching him in the face. Stickland had to be escorted from the house chambers. This is what we’re dealing with when it comes to anti-choice politicians these days: They say they’re all for protecting babies, but when it comes down to it, it’s more that they are all about acting like babies.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin was being similarly slimy, going on Dana Loesch’s radio show and pretending that a bill he signed that would force women to undergo an ultrasound in order to get an abortion was just him doing a nice favor to the ladies.

abortion 2 *

Walker would have you believe that, for some reason, one was not allowed to have an ultrasound without being forced to endure one, even if your doctor thinks it’s unnecessary. This is not true or else how would he have gotten an ultrasound picture of his own sons in the womb? In fact, you are 100% free to get an ultrasound if you want. Many abortion providers already do them to determine the best course of care. But Walker’s bill would require them to harass you while they’re doing it, by forcing the doctor to point out all the features on the embryo and trying to draw you into staring at it, even if you don’t want to. This is clearly just there to make women feel bad, to punish them for not having a baby. It’s also about making sure that vaginal wand is up there as long as possible, which is clearly just straight sadism. It’s not a gift. It’s just making an already unpleasant procedure even more unpleasant.

Sanctimonious, dishonest posturing isn’t just limited to state politicians, either. Rep. Trent Franks got all saccharine on the WallBuilders show defending a go-nowhere bill banning abortions at 20 weeks.

abortion 3 *

Oh blooey. This bill wasn’t about high-minded ideas about life, but about finding a way to undermine legal abortion by, like cowards, attacking a tiny subset of abortions that are poorly understood by the general public. Part of me is tempted to wonder if people who voted for this bill are ever kept up at night with the guilt caused by being both misogynist and deceitful, but it’s been a long time since I last believed that nasty, mean-spirited people ever feel anything but proud of themselves for being so ugly.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, things get stupid, real stupid edition. Fox News host Elisabeth Hasselbeck was furious that Planned Parenthood dared point out presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina’s anti-choice policies. So furious, in fact, that she said this.

Hasselbeck *

Answer: Because Fiorina opposes women’s rights, especially with regards to health care. The ability of conservatives to take umbrage at anything, no matter how ridiculous, continually amazes me. I mean, the implication of this segment is that it’s somehow off-limits for a political action group to take note of the political positions of people running for offices. Since when is Planned Parenthood obliged to help candidates hoodwink the public about where they stand on women’s rights?

The post The Josh Duggar Scandal, Barriers to Birth Control Access in Texas appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Eve Andrews will describe some promising efforts to help teens get better birth control in Washington state. The Duggar family drama continues, and the battle over abortion in Wisconsin gets weirder by the minute.

Texas activists, going by the name Jane Doe, showed up at the Austin capitol building in a clever protest. Andrea Grimes of RH Reality Check got the protest on video.

Jane Does *

Check out the video at RH Reality Check!

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It appears that, as much as we might wish otherwise, we are not done with the fallout from the revelation that Josh Duggar molested four of his sisters and a babysitter in his teen years, and that his parents basically covered it up so they could present their family and their Quiverfull religious cult like it’s just wholesome family fun on the TLC network show 19 Kids and Counting. The absolute, unquestionable smartest move the anti-choice right could pull right now is to put as much distance between themselves and the Duggars as possible. After all, the religious right’s official stance is that they want to ban abortion to “protect” women and that they want to restrict contraception because, uh, religious liberty. But they are adamant that it is not, I tell you not because of some kind of anti-woman agenda or desire to return to a more patriarchal society where women are reduced to breeders and chattel with very little control over their own lives. Under the circumstances, it was stupid before these allegations to align themselves with the Duggars, who make no bones out of their belief that women are inferior beings made to shut up and do what men tell them to do. Now that the Duggars are revealed to be so committed to their misogynist philosophy that they seem to view female unchastity as worse than male violence, it would really be a good time to put some distance in there.

But instead, that tribalism that the right is so famous for is kicking in. Even though most conservatives live a lifestyle that’s a lot closer to the liberals they hate than to the Duggars, a lot of them see the Duggars, with their sanctimony and priggishness and misogyny and blinding whiteness, and think, “one of us, one of us!” And so they’re rushing in, and oblivious to how it makes them look, defending the Duggars. Last episode, I chronicled how Mike Huckabee defended them. Now you have Bristol Palin basically kind of saying the liberal media owes Josh Duggar a freebie on this one because, uh, Lena Dunham.

Duggar 1 *

Not that anyone ever accused Bristol Palin of being the brightest bulb, but this argument is so wrong-headed that it’s impossible that it’s being offered in good faith. Lena Dunham told a silly story about looking at her sister’s vagina, with no sexual interest at all, when she was 5. Josh Duggar, fully admitting that he was forcing himself sexually on girls, touched girls over and over and over as a teenager who was post-pubescent. Nor has Lena Dunham held herself as some kind of moral exemplar who has a right to tell everyone else how to live and have sex. In contrast, that’s Josh Duggar’s job, both in the media and with his lobbying work for Family Research Council. But all Bristol Palin knows is that Lena Dunham is an urban liberal and Josh Duggar is a rooting tooting red state mega-conservative, and that means he’s a good guy and Lena Dunham must be the bad guy.

Fox News also joined in the Duggar defense brigade, because throwing red meat to conservatives matters more to them than, say, helping the right seem slightly less misogynist. Megyn Kelly brought Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar onto Fox News for a lengthy interview where they could make excuses, minimize, and blame anyone but themselves for what happened. Oh and paint themselves as the victims, of course.

Duggar 2 *

This is from a woman who participates heavily in political campaigns against legal abortion and transgender and gay rights. It’s unbelievably rich of her to claim anyone else has an “agenda”. The Duggars have always had a fairly obvious agenda: To make a lot of money and to promote their vision of a hardcore patriarchal world where women have very few legal rights, men are considered an absolute authority in the home, and sexuality is obsessively policed like it’s some demonic force out to destroy you. When you relentlessly push your bizarre, hateful agenda on others, you can’t complain if they take very strong note of you own indiscretions and, in this case, outright criminal behavior. To be blunt, no one gets a free pass for sexual abuse. But you especially don’t get to spend your life demonizing people who have consensual adult relationships and personal choices, and then turn around and make excuses for non-consensual, criminal sex abuse.

The part of all this that is most appalling, which is saying a lot, is that two of the victims have been conscripted to stand up for their brother, who, may I remind you, molested them.

Duggar 3 *

Victims are accorded a lot of respect and room to define their own experiences in our culture, as they should be. However, these two were raised in and now promote a faith that teaches that women do not have autonomy, but are and should be little more than puppets doing the bidding of fathers and husbands and, in some cases, brothers. They believe women are not to have opinions of their own, that you are to think and do what men tell you. It’s awfully convenient now to hold them out as autonomous people who are supposedly thinking for themselves, when they are not allowed to ever do that. It just goes to show how cynical and corrupt to the core this family is. Oh they are followers of a philosophy of radical female submission, but if it’s convenient for preserving their reputation, they will pretend for the cameras that women are allowed to draw conclusions on their own. It’s telling that so many in right-wing media are eager to defend these people rather than chalk this up as a lesson in the dangers of aligning yourself with members of radical religious cults.

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Interview

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

Last week, I made note of the fact that Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin was trying to defend his mean-spirited support for forcing women to endure lengthy, guilt-tripping ultrasounds by saying he was just trying to give women a “cool” thing.

Wisconsin 1 *

Man, conservatives do not understand the concept of consent, do they? I doubt Walker would like it very much if I told him he had to have a wand stuck up his butt for 10 minutes while I explained the joys of liberalism to him before he was allowed to get medical care, and I doubt even more he’d appreciate it if I got huffy and told him that some people like having large objects put in their butts. But Walker’s iffiness around the issues of consent and treating women like our bodies do not belong to us got, if anything, even worse after this. When he was asked about banning abortion at 20 weeks, even for rape and incest victims, while shrugging, he said this:

Wisconsin 2 *

So much shrugging! Eh, rape, who cares. This quote is a perfect distillation of how anti-choicers can get all gushy about the lives of fetuses that aren’t even that developed yet, but shrug off the idea that woman have lives worth caring about or respecting. It’s not true that rape victims have all this time to decide. A lot of post-20-week abortions for rape happen because the victim was in denial or was so overwhelmed that she didn’t know she was pregnant until that late. In some cases, the victims are very young, think pre-teens or early teens, and may not know what pregnancy symptoms look like until they are showing. That’s why abortion access is so important, but Walker doesn’t care. Faced with questions about women’s humanity, he just shrugs.

But Walker is not the only mean-spirited fool who feels like he has a right to force his ignorance on you by the law. Wisconsin state Sen. Mary Lazich, who supports the 20-week bill, seems to believe that medical experts have nothing of value to add to the abortion discussion. It started with pro-choice Democrat state Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa decided to ask Lazich about whether any medical experts had been involved in drafting the legislation.

Wisconsin 3 *

Lazich then implied that some kind of Christian right woman-hating doctor automatically provides better care than the people who head up, oh, every major medical association in the country, and then this happened:

Wisconsin 4 *

The Republicans wiggled and squirmed, but the honest answer is they just don’t care. They don’t care if you’re injured or killed or traumatized or put through unnecessary pain or suffering. They think that’s just what God has in store for you if you dare decide to have sex or made the mistake of being born female. They got this bill, like all these legislators do, off model legislation written by religious right groups that want to force their dogma about female sexuality on everyone by force of law. Everything else is just noise.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, yes, they really are coming for your contraception edition. Listen to Don Feder, the communications director of the World Congress of Families, at a recent event warning that if you give people the option of not having babies, they will opt never to do it. Apologies for the translator talking over the clip.

extinction *

Reality check time: The human population is growing and the real danger is that our growth rate may outstrip our ability to keep us all alive. In 1960, right around the time reliable contraception really became a thing, the world population was right around three billion people. Now, a mere 55 years later, it’s over seven billion. 100 years ago, it wasn’t even quite two billion. The reason other animals go extinct most of the time these days is because our species is overwhelming and destroying their environments. We have a lot of problems, but too few people on the planet isn’t one of them.

The post Duggar Drama Continues, Wisconsin’s Abortion Battle appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, a representative from North Carolina’s NARAL will explain what’s going on in their state. Texas gets closer to all but banning abortion and Jeb Bush gets in trouble for his hateful comments from 20 years ago.

People are gearing up for another female-centric election and the fabulous Joanna Coles, the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, made the case that women’s magazines have a crucial role to play.

Cosmo *

It’s been interesting watching the conservative press freak out about this. It’s so telling that they think that media aimed at older, whiter, more conservative voters can be political, but god forbid you suggest young women have a right to participate in the political process, too.

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Well, horrible news going into the summer. After two years of court battles, the Fifth Circuit Court has upheld [provisions of] a Texas omnibus abortion law that was built to shut down all but 7 or 8 clinics in the state. It’s no big surprise, since the Fifth Circuit Court has been gunning for abortion rights since this all started. The court is extremely conservative, downright wingnutty, and they’ve embraced every bad faith and stupid argument that Texas lawyers have made to defend this law. NPR had a report.

Texas 1 *

The regulations were carefully crafted by anti-choice organizations to be the sort of thing that slips under the average person’s radar. Most people think abortion is surgery, so the hospital level standards also might sound reasonable. That was clearly the intention, to trick people into thinking this was really about women’s health and not some backdoor attempt to ban abortion. And Rick Perry was holding that line, arguing that legal abortion needed to be all but banned to protect women’s health.

Texas 2 *

It’s really telling how much anti-choicers hate women, that they not only attack women’s rights but lie like this about it. It’s clear that Rick Perry doesn’t think we deserve honesty or the truth. That’s how much contempt he has for women, that he will lie this easily and smugly, telling us he’s trying to protect us when he’s clearly trying to hurt us. The amount of hate you must have for people not only to attack them like this but then lie about it? It’s truly stunning. Just to drive home what a filthy, despicable, hateful liar he is, this law requires you to have a full anesthesia machine to hand out a pill you take at home. It’s the equivalent of requiring someone to be checked into a hospital to have a filling replaced. At that point, you realize they just don’t want you to have dental health-care access. That Perry has never even bothered to hide that he opposes legal abortion is just the icing on the cake. They should just admit what they’re doing here. The lying about it shows that they know it’s wrong, or else they would be more confident about their beliefs.

The lawyer for the Center for Reproductive Rights made a similar point on NPR.

Texas 3 *

A lot of anti-choicers, including the one they had to interview for NPR, are claiming women still have access because they can either travel out of state or go to one of the remaining clinics in the state. To give you an idea of what that means, over 73,000 women had an abortion in Texas in 2011. In order for 8 clinics to handle that workload, each would have to do one abortion an hour every hour for every day of the year. So yeah, women don’t have access. But that shows the evil genius of this law. No one actually believes it’s there to protect women’s health. But since it doesn’t close down all the clinics, it allows women, especially middle class and wealthy women, to believe that their access is safe and it’s just other women, poorer women, that are shut out. Anti-choicers are basically positioning abortion as a luxury instead of a right. It’s brilliant marketing, especially in Texas where there’s a lot of classism and racism fueling the politics there. But it’s also a lie. Anti-choicers think all women who have sex for pleasure are sluts and that we all should pay. But they are smart enough to know that message will never sell well, so instead they go with the whole “it’s just those other women who are sluts, your sex life is fine” messaging. Sadly, it may work.

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Interview

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So Jeb Bush’s 1995 book Profiles in Character, a title so stupid you already know this is going to be bad, recommended public shaming as an answer to the supposed problem of single motherhood. Here’s David Pakman reading that section.

Bush 1 *

Bush went on to praise the Scarlet Letter as a model for what he’s talking about. It’s worth noting that the Scarlet Letter is not a book about unwed motherhood. Hester Pyrnne, who is forced to wear the scarlet A, is married. That’s the problem: She got pregnant without her husband being around, which means she is guilty of adultery. You know, a common sin amongst Republican politicians, but somehow I don’t think Jeb Bush wants to start pinning scarlet As on their shirts. But Bush’s reading comprehension aside, this story is interesting because he also put his money where his mouth is, signing a law when he was Florida governor requiring women who can’t or won’t name the father of their child to publish a detailed account of their sexual history in the newspaper in order to give their child up for adoption. Just as a reminder of how much misogyny lurks in the hearts of anti-choicers. The law, for what it’s worth, was quickly struck down in court.

Republican strategist Cheri Jacobus went on CNN to try to spin this, but ended up sounding like an idiot.

Bush 2 *

Of course, if you read more of the quote, you’ll see that he basically did just that, praising the institution of the shotgun wedding and arguing that pregnancy, as opposed to love or compatibility, should be what forces people to get married. But it’s worth remembering that the era of the shotgun wedding did not actually lead to stable marriages. A lot of single parents were married at one point but ended up divorced. But our divorce rate is actually going down in this country, in no small part because the shotgun wedding is disappearing as an institution. Making people who aren’t compatible try to live as husband and wife was always a bad idea. A better idea would be to promote birth control and abortion so that people have children when they want to have children. But of course, conservatives don’t want that, because that implies that having sex is okay. And this is about sex, and not about children at all. Which was amply demonstrated by the law requiring women to be publicly humiliated in order to give up a child for adoption, something Jacobus also tried to excuse.

Bush 3 *

Anti-choicers claim they want kids to be available for adoption, but given a chance to shame women for having sex, they went for it, even though it meant that women would be afraid to give children up for adoption. So how is that pro-child again? But typical: Given the choice between helping children and hurting women, conservatives will take the latter every time. Bush is now claiming his views have “evolved” on this. No surprise there. In the past decade or so, anti-choicers have developed this strategy of pretending they care about women and want to take away our rights for our own good. So admitting you want to publicly shame women for having sex is forbidden now. Even the people who show up at abortion clinics to publicly shame women walking into them claim they are “sidewalk counselors.” It’s all very silly and their basic urge to hurt and shame women hasn’t changed one bit. But the way they portray themselves has gotten a lot more dishonest.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Ann Coulter has another book out edition. And she’s really desperate for attention, so let’s give her some. Here’s Coulter on Gavin McInnes’s show.

Coulter *

It’s fashionable now to roll your eyes at Coulter, call her a clown and try to ignore her, claiming she’s a troll and only does this for attention. I think that attitude misses the point. Even if liberals all collectively chose to ignore her, she would still sell a lot of books and be a big star on the right. Her opinions, like it or not, influence people. Ignoring her does not change that.

The post Reproductive Rights Advocates Suffer Setbacks appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Guttmacher’s Adam Sonfield will be on to explain why we need Obamacare to cover men’s contraception. I mix things up with a segment of good news, and for some reason, a lot of conservatives are saying really weird things about abortion lately.

RH Reality Check’s Andrea Grimes was on HuffPost Live to talk about the Texas HB 2 law and how it was upheld, to the ruination of women’s abortion access in the state.

Andrea *

You can watch the whole thing, which is about 20 minutes long, at RH Reality Check. The link is in show notes.

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

I don’t get many opportunities to share good news on this show, but the legislative session is winding down and a few court decisions are starting to come in that are rolling back some of the more aggressive attacks on reproductive rights. In particular, abortion doctors regained some free speech rights they had been losing in state legislatures. It’s popular on the right these days to pass laws forcing doctors to lie to patients or guilt trip them, even though it should be obvious that mandatory lying or emotional abuse is not only a violation of free speech rights, but of basic medical ethics. Doctors are often forced to say that abortion causes mental distress or breast cancer, even though neither is true. But Arizona took it to another level earlier this year.

States 1 *

Oh yes, they claim there are “both sides” to this story, which means that it’s a victory for anti-choicers no matter what happens, because now they’ve got the idea out there that there’s some confusion over whether an abortion can be, uh, reversed. The answer to that question is a big fat you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me no, followed by a reminder that women do not, in fact, have abortions and then suddenly start freaking out and asking doctors to put it back in. Which is the other lie that anti-choicers want to get out there, to lay the groundwork for the idea that abortion needs to be banned to stop that kind of regret from happening. In the real world, women who decide after an abortion that they do want a baby tend to just get pregnant again. Nearly all women who have abortions are either mothers already or will be mothers one day.

But while they’ve hijacked the legislature to push two giant myths that have no foundation in truth, at least, for now, anti-choicers can’t actually make doctors lie to their patients about this. The state has agreed to put a hold on the law until it can be heard in federal court. Hopefully, the court will have the common sense to see that forcing doctors to tell such a ridiculous lie is a grievous assault on free speech and medical ethics.

While most of the attention to mandatory ultrasound laws focuses on the actual wanding itself, and how terrible it is to drag it out longer than necessary for diagnostic purposes, there’s also free speech issues involved. The North Carolina mandatory ultrasound law came with a script where a doctor was supposed to lecture a woman about holding the father responsible and about adoption and all sorts of issues roughly 99.9 percent of women getting abortions have already considered. And because of this, it was struck down as a violation of free speech by the Fourth Circuit Court. Now that decision is sticking.

States 2 *

The downside is that this means that other ultrasound laws won’t be dealt with. The Supreme Court is being really cowardly on the issue of abortion, basically, which makes me worried about what’s going to happen with Texas. But this is a good news segment, and I have even more!

States 3 *

The state is asking a federal appeals court to remove the injunction, but the fact that it got put there in the first place is good. It’s obvious what antis are doing now. They get a few 20-week bans in and, having established the idea that 20 weeks is more than enough time to get an abortion, they try to shorten the window. If they can get 12 weeks to be the new standard, they’re going to start arguing that if you can’t get it done in eight weeks, you don’t deserve an abortion. And then it’s going to be six weeks. Then four weeks. And they’ll be running around implying that everyone who needs four whole weeks to get an abortion is a lazy, no-good slut, without ever acknowledging that you really can’t get an abortion before four weeks, because a lot of doctors worry it’s too early to get it done safely. Or admitting that most women don’t even know they’re pregnant at four weeks, since you may not even have noticed a missed period yet.

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

Interview
***************

For a while, it felt like right-wingnuts were so busy blaming gay people for everything that they forgot to blame abortion for everything. But abortion is back on the docket, probably because of all the political attention being paid to the issue, and we are all the poorer for it. The Fox News reaction to the horrible shooting in Charleston, South Carolina has been a shameful endeavor: mostly a bunch of attempts to downplay the obviously racist motives of the shooter and try to spin it as some kind of attack on Christianity. But they also found time to blame abortion, courtesy of Alveda King, an anti-choicer who exploits her familial connection to Martin Luther King Jr. to get on TV. King performed her duty, downplaying the racism of this attack and trying to make it about abortion.

Abortion 1 *
Abortion 2 *

The entire display is baffling as well as insulting. This man, Dylann Roof, murdered nine innocent people. He is a murderer. We all agree on that. But apparently at Fox News, calling him a racist is just a bridge too far, because they’re that committed to propping up the illusion that racism is not a thing that happens. And the abortion thing. I thought I’d become inured to right-wingers equating the choice to end a pregnancy with the loss of actual people, people with lives and families and memories and feelings. But once again, I just can’t even deal with this. It minimizes the realities of violence to suggest that the life of a person is worth no more than the life of an embryo. It’s outrageous to me that people who can’t see that think they should be treated as moral arbiters. Just, no.

Much less awful but just as nutty: California Assembly member Shannon Grove is under fire for blaming California’s drought problems on legal abortion and suggesting that taking away a woman’s right to choose brings the rains. No, I’m not kidding. A news station quoted RH Reality Check’s own Zoe Greenberg on this story.

Abortion 3 *

Grove is denying that she blamed the drought on abortion, but she’s denying it in a cagey way. I mean, she didn’t say exactly that abortion restrictions bring the rains. She just held it out as a remarkable coincidence that probably had a causal relationship. Like it’s only like 99 percent likely.

On the Faith and Freedom radio program, hosts Mat Staver and Matt Barber were just beside themselves with glee over the news that Texas is cutting breast and cervical cancer screenings through Planned Parenthood. They falsely claimed that doing this would somehow defund abortion, though it only defunds cancer screenings. To justify their desire to see funding for cancer screenings cut, they, well, just listen.

Abortion 4 *

Yes, that’s the reason one in three American women will get an abortion, as a sacred rite of a widespread American death cult. That must be it. There could not be any other reason, such as finishing your education, waiting for a better relationship, or wanting to care for the children you already have. Death cults. It must be death cults. The irony here, of course, is that the only people who are pushing death are the people who would rather see women go without cancer screenings than accept Planned Parenthood’s sex-positive, pro-choice philosophy.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, period-splaining edition. Rabbi Daniel Lapin is this nutty right-winger that is deeply beloved by Glenn Beck because of his anti-woman opinions. And he came onto Beck’s show to explain that we women are so desperate to be pregnant all the time that our periods cause mourning. I’m not exaggerating.

Periods *

That’s because it is not. Because that might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, and that’s saying a lot when you consider the history of this show. May I remind you that, in the real world, women deliberately take pills to suppress ovulation? The notion that we’re all sitting around just praying to get pregnant every month for the entire span between menarche and menstruation, which is like 35 to 40 years, mind you, is just, yeah. No. This might be the greatest mansplaining of all time, between its pseudo-intellectual wankery, putting men’s B.S. over women’s lived experience, and just utter and hilarious falseness.

The post Insurance Coverage of Vasectomies and Condoms, and Blaming Abortion for Everything appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

The Supreme Court saves Obamacare

Phyllis Schlafly at Road to Majority

Jeb Bush at Road to Majority

Mitch McConnell at Road to Majority

“Enough Is Enough”

Google vs. revenge porn

John Oliver vs. revenge porn

Troy Newman blames California drought on abortion

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be covering the Road to Majority conference held by the Faith & Freedom Coalition and some recent victories in the war on sexual abuse. Jessica Mason Pieklo will also be on to help us sort out some recent reproductive rights court decisions.

Speaking of court decisions, the Supreme Court, on Thursday, saved Obamacare yet again!

Obamacare *

Word is that a lot of Republican politicians were secretly grateful, because they know if they took away people’s health care, they would feel it at the polls. Hopefully that means that this issue is done and there won’t be any more creative court challenges.

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

Over last weekend, Ralph Reed’s newish conservative Christian organization, the Faith & Freedom Coalition, had an event titled Road to Majority, where all the big movers and shakers in conservative politics got together to see who could hate women the most and thump the Bible the hardest. Reed started the organization as part of his rehabilitation campaign after it was discovered he was involved in the Jack Abramoff scandal, but as long as you’re white, call yourself a Christian and hate women and gays, it’s all good on the right, I guess. And when I say hate, that’s what I mean. When the conservative Christians get together, the whole veneer about “life” gets peeled off and they show their true faces. And that face believes, make no bones about it, that a woman’s place is to submit to men, to have children whether they want to or not, and to face government and economic discrimination to keep her in her supposedly rightful place. Which is why Phyllis Schlafly was a warmly welcomed speaker who dug right into how proud she is that she defeated a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to equality.

road 1 *

There’s all sorts of conservative tap-dancing around this issue, but let’s not play games here. The only reason to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment is you believe women are not equal. Schlafly doesn’t really try to hide this, building her entire career on pushing the idea that God wants women to be submissive helpmeets who stifle their own ambitions to live as unpaid servants for their husbands. She speaks out against laws that make it easier for domestic violence victims to get away from their abusers and says that there is no such thing as marital rape. The fact that she is so well-loved for it tells you everything you need to know.

So that gives you a general idea of the gender politics going on. As you can imagine, there was a lot of talk about the evils of abortion and sneering at Planned Parenthood. Chris Christie bragging about cutting Planned Parenthood funding, so everyone knows how hostile to contraception and even just STI testing the man is. Overall, the politicians at hand all knew that the trend in anti-choice posturing now is to pretend that you’re trying to protect women. You know, from their own rights. Because women can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, the silly dears. That was the message of Senator Mitch McConnell, who bragged about his efforts to ban 20 week abortions and then said this.

road 2 *

This is dishonest on so many levels. First of all, he’s trying to imply that 20 week abortion bans would have some major impact on convincing young women facing unintended pregnancies that they really want to be mothers. No, just no. Nearly all of the real world examples of the tender young women of his imagination abort before 20 weeks, 98.2 percent to be exact. More, really, because a significant chunk of post 20 week abortions are not the weeping maidens who McConnell thinks just need a Bible and a shotgun wedding. A huge chunk of post 20 week abortions are wanted pregnancies that went wrong or women who wanted abortions earlier but couldn’t get them.

But even if you’re talking about the 99 percent of abortions that are before 20 weeks, his rhetoric is hateful and, even as it pretends to be benevolent, it’s deeply misogynist. He imagines that women who seek abortions are basically, to be blunt, children. Not even teenagers. He seems to assume a post-pubescent woman or teen girl has the mental capacity of a 5-year-old and assumes the only reason that women get abortions is that they’re being steered the wrong way by nefarious people for reasons of mustache-twirling evil. The possibility that women actually have thought about it and are choosing abortion because they know themselves is dismissed out of hand. Women aren’t adults! He clearly thinks of our mental capacity as somewhere between a houseplant and a dog. Why beings who are assumed too stupid to make even very basic decisions for themselves are considered smart enough to raise babies, I’ll never know.

Jeb Bush’s speech was just as dishonest.

road 3 *

Love how he said it limited the number, as if that was just a side effect and not the intention. These people, may I remind you, consider themselves Christians and moral role models, but they lie with an ease and passion that suggests they don’t really get this morality thing. It’s also just plain bizarre, if you take a step back, to hear someone just regurgitate the talking point that abortion is murder, but they want the murder process to be as safe as possible for the murderer. Again, that only makes sense if you believe that women are basically very tall children you can legally have sex with, but who cannot be trusted as moral actors. The assumption here is that a woman who aborts isn’t accountable because she’s too stupid to know what she is doing. And so has to have access “limited,” you know, to protect her from actually having access.

This is hate. It’s disguised as benevolence, but it is hate. Characterizing an entire group of people, in this case women, as fundamentally too stupid to have rights is hate. It has a smiley face now, but if you push back against it, the benevolent act is dropped quick enough and you see the snarling misogynist underneath.

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

Interview

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Feminist noise and activism on the subject of gender-based interpersonal violence, especially domestic violence, has been growing louder in recent years. And this summer, we’re seeing results. New York state just passed a bill to be signed by Gov. Cuomo called the “Enough Is Enough” bill, aimed at curbing sexual assault.

victory 1 *

The law does a few things. First of all, it installs an affirmative consent standard. Now, instead of expecting the victim to prove she said no loudly and frequently enough, the standard will be only have sex with people who want to have sex with you. That should be common sense, but it helps get around the rules-lawyering and quibbling over how a woman says no. Rapists will have a harder time saying, “Well, sure, she kept asking me to take her home and telling me to leave her alone, but she didn’t outright say the actual word no.” Now, knowing that someone doesn’t want to have sex with you is reason enough to be responsible if you have make them have sex with you anyway. Two, it protects victims from being punished for drinking or drug use that they may have been engaged in during the rape. Three, the bill requires that any student found guilty of sexual assault will have that on his transcript, making it harder for him to escape responsibility simply by transferring schools.

This bill is important not just to get justice for victims, but to prevent rape. A rapist might think twice if he knows it’s going to be harder to wriggle out of it. Also, we know that most rapists are serial offenders who keep doing it, confident they won’t get caught. Catching and punishing them changes that equation.

There’s also a huge victory in the war against revenge porn, which is when people release unauthorized naked pictures of you online to get revenge for dumping them or just to generally hurt and humiliate you for daring to be female and sexual.

victory 2 *

There’s still a lot of questions about how this will be enforced, but this is an important first step. A lot of men who share revenge porn include the victim’s name and personal details, often including her workplace and address. The idea, of course, is to get other misogynists involved to harass you, and it works. And, of course, to scare employers and schools from hiring or admitting you. It’s ugly, but true, that in a competitive job market, a lot of employers might hold it against you that you have a crazy stalker. Or, let’s be honest, that you’re a, God forbid, sexual being. There’s still a lot of stigma attached to that in some areas. So making sure these images don’t come up with you Google someone’s name is a number one priority.

But that’s on the policy front. On the cultural front, I was stoked to see John Oliver take on the issue, and treat men who do this with the contempt they deserve.

victory 3 *

I wish it weren’t so, but having a man explain this is a huge deal. Men get listened to, still, when women don’t. And he does it in such a normalizing way. He takes it for granted that sharing intimate pictures of yourself is a normal part of life, like owning a house. Which it is, even if some prudes would like to deny it. We don’t blame someone if they trust someone enough to have sex with them, only to have that person betray their trust later. So why, the second that sex involves a little bit of digital playfulness, we suddenly blame the victim? No, not buying it.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, more abortion drought nonsense edition. Last week, I covered a Republican legislator who blamed the California drought on abortion. Now you have Troy Newman of Operation Rescue doing the same.

Troy Newman *

Funny how all these right wing nuts think God has the same obsessions they have. You get the feeling they think they are God.

The post The Road to Majority Conference, and New York’s ‘Enough Is Enough’ Bill appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Unbelievable

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Jacqueline Ayers of Planned Parenthood will tell us about Congress’s sneaky attempts to kill family planning funding. And I’ll be reviewing conservative reactions to the Supreme Court rulings on health care and same-sex marriage.

Speaking of the court, the Supreme Court has issued a very important stay.

SCOTUS *

This will keep these clinics open until, likely, the Supreme Court makes a final ruling on these regulations. This is a good sign, folks, but we have a long road ahead.

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

On Thursday, June 25, the Supreme Court struck down yet another major challenge to the Affordable Care Act. It wasn’t a huge surprise, because the case conservatives brought was laughably bad and the plaintiffs didn’t even really seem to have standing, as some journalists, particularly at Mother Jones, discovered. The plaintiffs in King v. Burwell tried to argue that the government had no right to offer health-care subsidies in states that didn’t establish their own exchanges, and that argument should have been laughed out of court on day one. That it even got this far is a testament to how much power conservatives have over the judicial system. But that was not, as you can imagine, enough to placate conservatives who want all the power. Of course, they only had 24 hours to pack in their freakout before the Court legalized same-sex marriage and that became the new thing to freak out about. But this is the American right, y’all, and they can pack a lot of screaming into a 24-hour news cycle.

Karl Rove kicked things off by trying to make the anti-Obamacare argument more true through repetition.

ACA 1 *

For those who haven’t been following this case closely, a quick explanation: The part of the bill that sets up tax credits for people to use to buy health insurance with says that if you buy through the state exchange, you can use this tax credit. Conservatives tried to argue that this means you can’t therefore use it if you’re on the federal exchange, which was only set up because some states refuse to participate in the state exchanges. Yep, it was basically a long, childish attempt at a “gotcha.” But the law doesn’t work that way. Intent and context do, in fact, factor into court interpretations of the law. Since it was obvious to all people, even the dissenters, that the people crafting this law didn’t mean to limit subsidies to state-only exchanges, the Court correctly decided not to go along with this childish attempt to gotcha millions of people out of their health insurance. But conservatives like Karl Rove are trying to pretend that it’s somehow illegitimate to take context into consideration when interpreting a law, even though that’s literally how all court decisions have been handled since the beginning of time.

Rush Limbaugh decided to get conspiracy theory minded.

ACA 2 *

In typical conspiracy theory fashion, he hints and dances around the argument for some time, but the general gist of it is this: He thinks that Justices Roberts and Kennedy, the two conservatives who sided with the liberals to uphold this decision, were somehow benefitting from the immediate surge in hospital stocks after this decision was announced. So yeah, kind of implying that they were, well not bribed, but sellouts for sure. This is all silly, of course. But I do like that conservatives are so hateful to low-income people that they’d rather see a significant financial sector, the health-care industry, tank in the stock market rather than see low-income people get health insurance.

Sean Hannity got even nuttier with the conspiracy theorizing.

ACA 3 *

Yep, Hannity went there, actually trying to argue that unless we strip health care tax credits away from low income people, um, the government is going to forcibly kill you with morphine. Who the “you” is that will be killed is awfully vague? Old people? Sick people? Conservatives? Liberals? Random people chosen by lottery? Hannity doesn’t say. He just wants you to know they’re coming for you, for reasons unknown. Because reasons, that’s why.

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Interview

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The freakout on the right over Obamacare being saved was bad, but nothing, as you can imagine, like what came pouring out of conservatives in response to the news that the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. The response to that was pure apocalyptic raving. Now, to be clear, gay marriage has been legal in a number of states, including my own State of New York, for years now without blood running in the streets or plagues of locusts attacking us. You would think this would calm conservative fears about the supposed dangers we are facing. But that would assume that they’re making these kind of arguments in good faith, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned reporting on social conservatives all these years, good faith arguments are not really their thing. Mike Huckabee was particularly livid.

SSM 1 *

See what I mean about bad faith? Huckabee sure wants you to believe that there’s going to be some kind of massive resistance that will somehow make this not happen, but what exactly would that look like? He likes to compare himself to civil rights activists who refused to honor the rules of segregation, but they were able to flout those rules with their own bodies, by being Black in places where Black people were banned. How do you exactly resist gay marriage? By not getting gay married? Uh, doesn’t work that way? By disrupting gay people’s weddings? Maybe. I could see them trying to do that, like how they tried to physically force women not to go into abortion clinics until the police crackdown caused anti-choicers to scale back and simply call it “protesting” and now “sidewalk counseling” or whatever. But that was easier, because there’s only so many abortion clinics and they can be targeted, whereas weddings happen everywhere and are very decentralized. I just don’t see that happening. He’s full of hot air, trying to seem tough and brave without actually having to put his money where his mouth is.

This whole thing was so dumb that even Megyn Kelly of Fox News took a break from giving flattering and welcoming interviews to anti-gay activists to ask Huckabee what flavor of dumbass he really is.

SSM 2 *

Here’s the thing: You can sit around pouting in your living room about how you don’t accept this, nuh-uh, and no one cares. You can deny that gravity works but that doesn’t make you able to fly. You can’t just change reality by whining about it. This is the law of the land, the marriage certificates are being issued, this is a done deal. Temper tantrums don’t change that. Kelly finally had to feed him the constitutional amendment idea. I suspect Huckabee knows that’s literally the only way, besides violent revolution. But he doesn’t want to say it, because as soon as he does, you realize how silly and futile all this is. The majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. Even amongst those who don’t, a lot of them don’t care that much. The chance that the Constitution gets amended to nullify the court’s decision is less than zero. Even mentioning it makes it clear that Huckabee is just a demagogue who is latching onto an impossible issue for no other purpose but to pander to the religious right for money and support for his go-nowhere presidential campaign. It’s silly.

Not that I think this is going to go away after this initial temper tantrum, however. I hope it does. But people like Huckabee are endlessly interested in controlling your sex life and don’t give up that easily. They don’t have good ideas right now, but I’d keep an eye on them.

The apocalyptic talk was coming from all corners of the right. Like Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association.

SSM 3 *

You know, if you believe that God thinks that gay people are so unnatural, you would think you’d start wondering why he keeps making them.

Glenn Beck, as is his way, tried to make it all about himself.

SSM 4 *

Yeah, just like they banned saying that you’re anti-abortion after they legalized abortion. Oh, wait. Honestly, I could quote clips like this all day. According to the religious right, this is an assault on free speech and religious liberty and puppies and rainbows—well not rainbows, as they seem to officially hate those now. Honestly, I think this is why gay marriage activists made so much progress in a relatively short time on this issue. Conservatives were so over-the-top with their ridiculous claims about what this would do that people who were on the fence realized that the right doesn’t have any good arguments about this. And that helped push them over to the left on this.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, unbelievably tasteless edition. Craig James of the Family Research Council is, as you can imagine, feeling victimized because gay strangers are allowed to marry even though he doesn’t like it. And he reached for what may be the most tasteless comparison of his suffering to others ever.

James *

Yep. He just compared the suffering of having to know that other people have marriages you don’t like to the suffering of the families of the nine people shot in Charleston by a white supremacist. I have no words.

The post Conservatives Melt Down Over Supreme Court’s Same-Sex Marriage and Obamacare Decisions appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Read more of our articles on the misleading Center for Medical Progress video here.

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Rick Santorum admits that it’s all about controlling other people’s sex lives

Supposed evils of contraception

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll dig into the furor over that hoax video accusing Planned Parenthood of selling fetal tissue, complete with an interview with a representative of Media Matters analyzing how that video lied. Also, National Right to Life had a conference, with lots of dishonest speakers.

But before we start tackling lurid right-wing nonsense, a small study reminding us what the real world looks like.

Regret *

Since a lot of anti-choice rhetoric these days is about how women have to be prevented from getting abortions to protect them from regret, knowing that just isn’t a thing is a useful and crucial piece of information. Not that the truth ever stopped a right-wing legend, as the rest of this podcast will sadly demonstrate.

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No doubt listeners of this show in particular are well aware that a group that claims not to be Live Action but staffed by Live Action people and who publishes through Live Action put out a video using Live Action’s M.O. for attacking Planned Parenthood. Step one: Get an undercover interview with someone who works for Planned Parenthood under false pretenses. Step two: Publish a highly edited version of it that makes a bunch of lurid but utterly false accusations. Step three: Within moments of publishing it, start accusing the media of “ignoring” the story, in hopes that they will scramble to cover it without doing even basic research. Step four: Posture in public about how outraged you are and how there needs to be an investigation and defunding, as irresponsible journalists take your bait, publishing stories that report on the quote-unquote “controversy” without taking even an hour to verify if any of your claims have merit. Step five: Retreat from public view as more responsible journalists start debunking your lies, knowing that no matter how thoroughly they debunk your lie, it will live on for years as right-wing legend.

This time the lie was that Planned Parenthood was selling fetal tissue from abortions, which is illegal. It was a lie, a total lie. The video showed an interview with a doctor explaining how Planned Parenthood, with patient consent, donates fetal tissue to medical research for things like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. They edited all the stuff out about donation and disease and instead made it seem like she was selling fetal organs for scary unknown purposes, possibly for eating during Satanic rituals. The luridness of the accusations should have been enough for journalists to not run with the “accusations were made” story without taking 10 minutes to see if there was any, you know, validity to the accusations. But sadly, that didn’t happen, and the first debunkings didn’t come out until hours after the story was published in the New York Times and Washington Post, giving it enough time to get traction.

The good news is, I think, that the debunkings are starting to take and most reasonable people are embarrassed for ever thinking for a moment that this was anything but a hoax. Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood also hit the right note in her video response.

PPFA 1 *

The only thing I’d add is that Live Action, who technically didn’t make this video but was clearly involved and who was the first to release it, doesn’t just oppose legal abortion. Their president, Lila Rose, has been up front on multiple occasions about her objections to contraception, which she says that contraception was “promised to eliminate the exploitative attitude of men toward women” but that it had “the opposite effect.” That’s right. The people behind this video think that if you choose to have sex with a man for fun instead of procreation, then he is exploiting you. And they call us man-haters. I believe the reason they hate Planned Parenthood so much has as much, if not more, to do with birth control than abortion.

As you can imagine, the utter falsity of the video did not stop the folks at Fox, uh, News from striking a bunch of phony outraged poses. Like Bill O’Reilly, who had David Daleiden, the guy in the video, on his show. Daleiden shamelessly lied, saying Planned Parenthood sells fetal body parts, which is, without any doubt now, a complete and total lie for which there is no evidence whatsoever. After letting this man with no moral character whatsoever lie shamelessly on his show, O’Reilly got into a snit.

PPFA 2 *

You’ll notice that O’Reilly was afraid to say that this is true, because he probably knows it’s a lie. But that bit of ass-covering is not good enough. He allows Daleiden to lie at length on his show, without a single bit of fact-checking or correction. That is deeply, deeply immoral, not that it surprises me, coming from O’Reilly.

Megyn Kelly tried a similar thing, trying to squeeze this story for maximum impact while carefully not saying if she thought it was true, because she knows it is not.

PPFA 3 *

Yes, yes, the people who made this video are lying liars who lie for a living, but let’s make this about someone’s tone. Someone who doesn’t lie. Someone who helps people for a living. Someone who was on video talking about how she helps women who are having abortions feel that some good has come out of it, by donating the tissue to science that goes on to help people. Let’s make this about her tone. Because otherwise we might have to talk about issues of substance, such as why a video that is nothing but a sack of lies is getting so much attention and outrage. Luckily, Robert Zimmerman of the DNC was on and he did not mince words.

PPFA 4 *

Of course she interrupts him, because he’s speaking truth. And it is right-wing pornography. Kelly’s own titillated tone that pretended to be outrage shows how true that is. The fantasies about body parts and babies and evil is just that, a fantasy. A titillating fantasy that both gets them excited and justifies hating this group they hate for irrational reasons, mostly having to do with anger that other people are having sex and not asking their permission first. That is what is morally disgusting, not women in a hard situation of abortion deciding to donate the tissue instead of throwing it out.

I’ll give the last word on this segment to Alex Wagner of MSNBC, who explained what exactly this tissue is used for.

PPFA 5 *

If this video means you think we shouldn’t have vaccines or treatment for cancer or diabetes, by all means, go ahead and refuse those treatments. But don’t impose your irrationality on the rest of us.

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Interview

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National Right to Life had a conference last weekend in New Orleans, and regular listeners will not be surprised to find out that the eleven billionty Republican candidates for president showed up to preen about how they will outdo each other in showing quote-unquote “compassion” for women by stripping away basic human rights. Unsurprisingly, their remarks were self-serving nonsense full of lies and misinformation. Some of it was so self-deluding that it was actually funny, such as Marco Rubio’s attempt at soaring rhetoric.

NRLC 1 *

Ha, yeah, no. I think it hardly bears mentioning, but the anti-abortion movement is a right-wing movement. They are the people who worked and continue to work in opposition to all those movements he mentioned. The anti-abortion movement grew out of the pro-segregation movement, in fact. In show links, I have a historical piece written by Randall Balmer that lays out exactly how pro-segregationists, looking to increase their power and take the Christian right in a new direction, latched onto abortion as an issue. Basically, the same people who organized to create white-only schools in the South, after a couple of defeats in the courts, decided to take their organizations and turn it to abortion. That’s why, I believe, a lot of the legal tactics employed by segregationists seem a lot like the ones employed now by anti-choicers, particularly in terms of creating laws that claim to be about one thing but really are about enforcing their reactionary views on the public. Anyway, not to belabor the point, but comparing the anti-abortion movement to the civil rights movement is not only false, but an inverse of reality, where the anti-abortion movement was the very same people who made up the pro-segregation movement.

That ugly history is important to keep in mind when listening to Rick Perry’s statements.

NRLC 2 *

It should be self-evident that anti-choicers do not want to heal bupkis. On the contrary, this entire fight is 100 percent, one thousand percent their fault. If they could learn to mind their own business and not try to control and punish other people for having sex, this wouldn’t be a problem. If they would let women use contraception and abortion as we see fit, there would be no battle. If they stopped trying to hijack health classes to push their anti-sex agenda, this would all be over. If they literally could just let other people, people they don’t even know, live our lives in peace, this would all go away. But they refuse. So are they for peace and healing? No, they are for pain, and increasing it, by forcing women to have children they do not want and cannot care for. If you want to stop being accused of waging war on women, start by not waging war on women.

He had more to say, sadly.

NRLC 3 *

Research shows that showing a woman a sonogram image of her pregnancy does not influence her decision to abort or keep the pregnancy. That’s because, while Rick Perry may think women are stupid, women are not actually stupid. We know what’s in there when we get pregnant, a developing embryo and fetus. The way he talks, you’d think we think we have a bushel of oranges up there or something. Women are not stupid. I feel that this might be a major case of projection with right-wingers, honestly.

Leave it to Rick Santorum, however, to really get a head of steam going on how evil and wrong it is for other people to do sex in ways he doesn’t approve of. He comforted the poor, suffering anti-choicers, knowing as he does that they are all furious about gay marriage.

NRLC 4 *

I will say this: At least Santorum can barely be bothered with the pretense that this is about “life”, much less “protecting women.” He really comes out with it there: The objection to same-sex marriage and the objection to abortion rights is about being angry, downright furious, that other people have sex in ways and for reasons he doesn’t like. He can’t believe that we are allowed to decide our lives for ourselves, when he thinks that authority belongs to Rick Santorum. I’ve never heard him make a good argument for why Rick Santorum should be the boss of my sex life or your sex life or whatever. Just some noises about God and nature that don’t make sense, especially when you realize that when he talks about what “God” thinks, he means what Rick Santorum thinks. I suppose that’s the narcissism we’re dealing with. Of course someone who thinks he should be able to dictate your sex life also thinks that he knows, without a shred of evidence of support, what God thinks. Not that it matters. We live in a secular democracy, not a theocracy, so whether you believe Rick Santorum is God or not, it doesn’t matter. You can’t impose your religion on others. We still have a First Amendment, even if it’s being chipped away at day by day.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, they just keep getting bolder about opposing contraception edition. This is Jennifer Roback Morse of the Ruth Institute, talking about how contraception supposedly ruined everything.

Morse *

That is, needless to say, not true. Not just the weird fourth-graders thing, either. The argument for contraception was never intended to limit it to married couples for health reasons. Yes, the Supreme Court decision that first legalized contraception was limited to married couples, but they weren’t told they had to give a reason for using contraception. The whole point was they had a right to privacy that protected them from having to justify themselves. A few years later, the Court reasonably agreed that single people also have a right to privacy. But of course the right has never respected the idea that other people have a right to make private choices that don’t affect them for ourselves.

The post Debunking the Planned Parenthood Video Hoax appeared first on RH Reality Check.

See more of our coverage on the misleading Center for Medical Progress videos here.

NPR on the Planned Parenthood hoax

Second hoax video

Research on fetal tissue saves lives

Dr. Ann Davis explains the reality of medical research

The New York Times denounces failed efforts to entrap Planned Parenthood

Who is behind the Center for Medical Progress?

Hagee plays the Hitler card

Nazis were strongly anti-choice

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll do a political analysis of the Planned Parenthood hoax videos, which I think may, in the long run, end up hurting anti-choicers more than helping them. I also have an interview with Erica Hellerstein about how abstinence-only didn’t go away, but just got rebranded.

As I’ll lay out, this entire campaign against Planned Parenthood has been a total derail from the right wing attempts to recast the anti-choice movement as a lady protection movement. Indeed, much of the reaction to the video was a reversion back to the anti-choice tradition of telling women they don’t matter at all. Like Gov. Bobby Jindal, who seems to forget that women even exist.

Jindal *

It’s not just the insistence that a fetus is the same thing as a baby, which is the same categorical mistake as calling an acorn a tree. It’s the complete erasure of women and attempts to deny that women are the patients that abortion doctors are serving. That’s a far more chilling form of dehumanization than the use of fetal tissue in medical research ever could be.

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

Last week, it seemed a little touch-and-go on the politics of this Planned Parenthood video hoax. Most pro-choice activists and experts in right-wing conspiracy theories understood right away that even though this was supposedly a brand-new group that is releasing a supposed undercover investigation, it was likely the same old anti-choice fanatics that have been behind video hoaxes coming out of Live Action, a group run by Lila Rose that is notorious for putting out deceptively edited videos making lurid accusations that are invariably debunked. It’s not like the ruse was particularly sophisticated. David Daleiden, the guy running this supposedly “new” group, the Center for Medical Progress, used to work for Live Action and Live Action “broke” the videos within minutes of them going up on YouTube. It may technically be a new group, but they were coordinating with Live Action. I suspect that the reason they made a new group at all was because they knew the Live Action name was hopelessly tainted and this was a way to try to trick the media into thinking it was someone else.

When last week’s podcast went up on Monday, it was really up in the air whether the hoax was a success. In the “yes” column was the number of Republican officials who rushed to use this hoax as a pretense for calling defunding Planned Parenthood.

PPFA 1 *

But anyone who knows Live Action’s M.O. knows that they usually try to fire their biggest bullet first. The first video showed no evidence of wrongdoing. But what did happen was that once journalists finally had time to sit down and watch the whole, three-hour unedited version was that they found that the edited version was really, really deceptive. They left out all sorts of important context, such as the many times that the doctor they interviewed insisted that Planned Parenthood does not sell fetal tissue. Or the way she described how careful they are about getting patient consent. Or the way that the tissue is used for necessary research into devastating diseases. So by the time the second one dropped, the media knew to be cautious and skeptical. And sure enough, this one, which purports to show Planned Parenthood medical director Mary Gatter “selling” fetal tissue, does nothing of the sort. In fact, she says this.

PPFA 2 *

They try to scratch away, but for whatever reason, they left that in there. I don’t know if it’s because Gatter talks fast and it made it hard to cut it out, or what. But they cut out similar comments from Dr. Nucatola, who was the object of the first hoax video, so let’s be clear that they are usually happy to hide exculpatory evidence. But most of the right-wing media focused on this part.

PPFA 3 *

Since the entire conversation was about how this was only reimbursement for costs and that there was no profit motive whatsoever and she has no interest in money, this is clearly an ironic joke, like someone with a small apartment jokingly calling it their “manor.” It was actually kind of darkly funny watching right wingers pretend they’ve never heard of the concept of sarcasm in order to generate outrage. Meanwhile, the more mainstream media journalists learned, the better Planned Parenthood looked while the worst the Center for Medical Progress looked. I will get into that part in the second segment, after the interview.

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Interview

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As noted in the first segment, I’m going to look at how the attempt by a Live Action spin-off called the Center for Medical Progress to falsely accused Planned Parenthood of selling fetal body parts might actually be backfiring on them. At first, a lot of people were surprised to find out that fetal or embryonic tissue extracted from abortions is sometimes donated to science, with the full consent of the woman getting the abortion. But where there is surprise, there is an opportunity for reporters to research and report, which is what happened. A number of media outlets used this as a chance to investigate what happens with this fetal tissue and found out that it’s actually pretty important and life-saving stuff.

Planned 1 *

Considering the fact that anti-choicers often try to claim to be “pro-life”, the fact that they oppose research into life-saving technology calls that claim into question. Anti-choice forces made a similar misstep a decade or so ago, when they made opposing stem cell research a major issue. The point of it was to shore up their false claim that they are about “life” and not controlling sexuality, but the real world impact was that they looked like a bunch of religious fanatics who were so caught up in their weird supernatural beliefs that they were blocking important, life-saving medical research. They’ve since shifted priorities and don’t talk much about that stem cell stuff, so a return to that tactic of demonizing medical research isn’t just dumb, but surprising.

The “trickling out” strategy, which they probably thought was genius, is actually giving journalists some time to learn more about this issue and experts more time to explain the facts in public. Dr. Ann Davis of Physicians for Reproductive Health went on MSNBC on Tuesday to explain the realities of this.

Planned 2 *

I just can’t imagine what kind of political value that anti-choicers expect to gain in the long term by reviving people’s suspicions that the anti-choice movement is anti-modernity, anti-technology, anti-medicine, and anti-all these things especially when it comes to helping women live healthier, better lives. I mean, that’s exactly what the anti-choice movement is, a movement that opposes medical developments because they help women live healthier, better lives. But they know as well as we do that they have to lie about that and pretend to be something else, in order to get any public traction. So why portray yourself as just anti-medicine so blatantly? It’s actually kind of weird if you think about it. But here’s more of Dr. Davis.

Planned 3 *

She also helpfully explained why storing and transporting tissue for research costs money, in case you were under the impression that it’s free.

Planned 4

This is just so obvious and commonsensical when you point it out that it’s become undeniable that the Center for Medical Progress was just trying to trick you. There’s no other way around this: They were using a lot of medical discourse that sounds gross to outsiders in order to scare people about what turns out to be responsible, humanitarian work that helps save lives. People don’t like being tricked, it turns out. The editorial board of the New York Times put out an op-ed denouncing the quote “years long campaign of deception.” They note that the Center for Medical Progress tried to offer Planned Parenthood $1,600 for a fetal liver and thymus, in an obvious attempt to entrap them into accepting more than simple reimbursement for storage and shipping. Planned Parenthood, you will not be surprised to find out, did not take the money.

That these anti-choice activists think they can lure people into unethical behavior isn’t that surprising to me. These anti-choice activists are, themselves, deeply unethical people who think nothing of lying all day long. People like that, I think, honestly do think the rest of us are as sleazy as they are. But they’re finding that is not the case and their targets aren’t walking into their traps. More to the point, I think this campaign has had the effect of reminding people that the anti-choice movement is full of sleazy, unethical people and, in many cases, it’s worse than that. After all, Troy Newman is on the board of the Center for Medical Progress. He is also the president of Operation Rescue, a harassment campaign that harassed Dr. George Tiller every day until he was murdered in 2009 by one of the regular Operation Rescue protesters. That organization’s second in command has also done time for anti-choice terrorism, an attempt to bomb a family planning clinic.

It has seemed for a time that the anti-choice movement was really abandoning the guts-and-sluts strategy for a new strategy of pretending to care about women, arguing that abortion rights and contraception access need to be taken away from us to protect us. That strategy assumes women are mental children, but it was, at least, politically effective. I don’t know why they’re going back to grossing people out, implying women getting abortion are murderers, and making it clear that they just generally oppose modern science and medicine. I feel that this whole hoax is really going to be a misfire for anti-choicers.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, ah jeez the Hitler thing again. You know that this Planned Parenthood hoax was going to bring back that favorite and utterly discredited right-wing trope about how abortion is Hitler, which John Hagee was spouting.

Hagee *

As I mention every time the right goes there, the opposite is true. The Nazi policy on abortion is actually right in line with what anti-choicers want. Abortion was illegal during the Weimar Republic, but under the Nazis, it was even further penalized, with the death penalty being prescribed if you performed an abortion on an Aryan woman. That’s just a fact and no amount of overheated rhetoric from the right will change it.

The post Will the Planned Parenthood Attack Backfire on Antis? appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

BOB

Donald Trump has theories about “all the raping”

The Daily Beast reminds us of a rape accusation against Trump

New York on the Bill Cosby accusations

RHRC’s Jodi Jacobson on the “elaborate ruse”

Jeb Bush wants to defund Planned Parenthood

So many Rand Paul lies

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing a researcher who worked on the study showing abortion regret isn’t really a problem for women. Also, a segment on the rape accusations against Bill Cosby and Donald Trump, and one more, hopefully the last, on this Planned Parenthood hoax.

Macy Gray has a hilarious song about how much she loves her vibrator and it’s even more delightful than you are already thinking.

BOB *

I look forward to the dance remix where the DJ drops in a sample of a buzzing sound.

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

I find myself surprised frequently that Donald Trump is still conducting his fake presidential campaign, which mostly exists to give him an excuse to say ridiculous things about Mexican immigrants and whatever other fool thing pops into his head that he wishes to share with America. Such as this bizarre interview with Don Lemon at CNN.

rape 1 *

If I may translate this garbled nonsense for you: Donald Trump has been running around claiming that undocumented immigration is this country’s biggest problem, because he thinks Mexican immigrants in particular are a bunch of rapists. Yes, it’s fear-mongering hysteria of the sort that makes Rush Limbaugh sound like a calm, rational person, but a bunch of the conservative base is eating this up. To justify this claim, he points to statistics that show that a lot of immigrants are rape victims, which is true, and presto blammo! He concludes this must also mean they are rapists. Why is uncertain, though it is worth noting he’s far from the first right-wing nut to suggest that rape victims are somehow the cause of rape. Apparently you can be a bigot or understand cause and effect, but you can’t do both.

Well, some reporters at the Daily Beast apparently heard Trump ask who is doing all the raping and thought this would be a useful time to remind the world that Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana Trump, accused him of rape when they were divorcing. That accusation ended up in 1993 expose on Trump, but Trump’s lawyers got a last minute statement in by her claiming she wasn’t speaking literally, though the rape as described reads like a literal rape, as in the literal description of it is forced sex. She responded to the story by releasing an even stronger denial where she blames her willingness to say this on her anger over the divorce. It doesn’t seem anyone is going to outright accuse her of perjury, however. Anyway, what she said drew a lot less attention than what Trump’s lawyer said to deflect this story.

rape 2 *

“Not exactly true” is an understatement. 100%, undeniably false is the better wording, the wording I would have chosen. Spousal rape has been illegal in New York since 1984 and the accusation claimed this happened in 1989. So yes, it was illegal, if it happened. Also, it’s a lie to call Trump a private citizen while also claiming he’s running for president. You literally cannot be both at once, or the term “private citizen” has no meaning. Sorry, minor derail but it bugged me.

I don’t think this story will hurt him with his fans, half of whom probably think he was just showing his wife who was boss and the other half who believe that women make up rape accusations for giggles, but I was interested in the rest of the world’s reaction to this story. And pleased to see that by and large it was full agreement that what was described is indisputably rape. I meant, if it happened, that’s what it is, but it wasn’t that long ago that you’d have a bunch of people out in public declaring that it was just a couple’s squabble or somehow trying to claim that it doesn’t count if your wife is being mouthy. So, progress. Also on this.

rape 3 *

He has indeed, for years and years now. And by and large, those denials worked, especially since Cosby would send out of a school of flying lawyer monkeys should anyone dare suggest in public that perhaps we should consider listening to these women and considering the possibility that this did happen. But with this New York magazine cover, I think we can safely say that era has passed. And a lot of what has changed is people just can’t pretend, anymore, to think that it’s anything but rape to force yourself on an incapacitated woman. Remember, it was only in 2009 that Whoopi Goldberg claimed that it wasn’t “rape-rape” when Roman Polanski gave Quaaludes to a 13-year-old girl so she was too sedated to fight him off while he forced himself on her. And Goldberg had the support of dozens, possibly hundreds of celebrities. So yeah, I think things are getting better, bit by bit.

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Interview

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As I reported last week, it seems that this attempted undercover sting of Planned Parenthood is really not turning into the momentous political victory that anti-choicers thought it would be. It’s true that the time crunch, minute to minute pressures of the modern news cycle all but ensured the media would cover the story without doing the necessary fact-checking on it. But that same hungry maw ensured that there would dozens, possibly hundreds of reporters who were all searching for their own angle on this and so just as quickly, there was an absolute crush of information debunking the claims: Stories on what fetal tissue is used for, stories about the sleazy people behind this video, stories just analyzing the video and determining that the claims made about it weren’t upheld by anything said on tape. The smart thing to do at this point would be to scrap it all and try to find some other dumb angle to go after Planned Parenthood. But that isn’t happening quite yet, and I think comments made by RH Reality Check’s own Jodi Jacobson on RT TV suggest why that might be.

PPFA 1 *

So basically, this is all just a dog and pony show. And the show, I guess, must go on, even though the reviews are coming in and it’s becoming clear that no one who argues in good faith is actually falling for their tricks. Republican candidates for president, especially, are dutifully striking fake poses of outrage, going through the motions and pandering to a base that doesn’t really care if the accusations against Planned Parenthood are true or not, so long as they can wallow in hatred for women, especially low-income women, who need these kinds of health services. Painting those services as luxuries that women don’t deserve is frequent go-to talking point, such as with Jeb Bush here.

PPFA 2 *

The hope here is that you think of it as just a big vat of money that Planned Parenthood patients dip into and use on, I don’t know, vibrators and fancy lingerie and expensive dinners while you, the middle class conservative American, are watching your own sex life wither and die. That’s the resentment button being pushed here, and that line works really well on the base. It is, of course, completely silly. Most of that money comes from Medicaid billings and Title X. There isn’t just a big vat of money and what it’s spent on is pretty tightly controlled: It has to be contraception and necessary reproductive health care like Pap smears and STI tests. I don’t know what planet Bush is living on, to talk about getting a Pap smear like it’s some kind of luxury spending that could be easily cut. As for contraception, well, I guess we’re talking about the same political operatives who literally sit around making lists of what kind of cheese that people on food stamps should be allowed to buy. There’s no bottom to what these folks will begrudge people who don’t make as much money as they do, which includes something as simple as being able to connect sexually with your partner without having to worry about unwanted pregnancy. If it wasn’t so damaging to others, I’d almost pity conservatives who worry this much about it. How sad is your life that you have the time and energy to sit around worried that somewhere, somehow, a low income woman is having an orgasm and you can’t punish her for it? Sounds exhausting.

But it’s Rand Paul who is really hustling hard and trying to be the face of the defund-Planned-Parenthood movement.

PPFA 3 *

So there are three or four lies in there. There’s no evidence that the vast majority of Americans would rather see fetal tissue thrown away than used in medical research. The claim that community health centers can handle the overload when all of Planned Parenthood’s gynecological patients are cut off from their doctor is also a lie. The claim that federal money goes to abortion is a whopping lie. It’s almost dizzying how many lies he packed into such a short statement. It’s kind of astonishing how blatant Paul is, when other supposedly serious candidates like [Jeb] Bush prefer to coat themselves in plausible deniability by only insinuating false things about Planned Parenthood, rather than lying outright.

But it makes sense that Paul would really go after this issue like this. It allows him to pander to the religious right while subtly assuring his libertarian base that he’s not trying to take away their sex lives. It’s only poor people he’s trying to cut off from STI testing and contraception. His supporters don’t care so much that he lies, just so long as they can keep feeling it’s someone else’s sex life that’s under threat.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the shameless double standard edition. Rush Limbaugh famously lost a lot of advertisers a couple years ago when he declared the law student Sandra Fluke is a “slut” because she takes birth control. He had a much different reaction upon reading a study showing all teens, not just girls but boys, are having less sex than they used to. Limbaugh believes that this is because we’re ruining boys.

Rush *

So Limbaugh thinks feminism has somehow wimpified men, by, uh, making them less aggressive. But unless you believe sex is something you have to browbeat out of or force on women, that doesn’t make much sense. If it is, then that does literally mean those who do it are brutes and bullies. Honestly, the only person here saying that you’re either a bully or a wimp is Rush Limbaugh. In the real world, the main reason boys are having somewhat less sex is, like girls, they are waiting a little longer to do it. But most 18- and 19-year-olds are having sexual intercourse these days. It’s just that fewer 15- and 16-year-olds are. My guess is that kids these days are smarter about delaying tactics, like mutual masturbation and oral sex, that they can use to satisfy themselves until they’re ready for a bigger leap, but I also guess most conservatives don’t want to hear that.

The post Debunking ‘Abortion Regret,’ and Donald Trump’s Rape Problem appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Vox video explainer

Democrats block attempts to defund Planned Parenthood

Elizabeth Warren speaks out

CNN puts David Daleiden on the spot

Operation Rescue’s violent history

Louisiana cuts Medicaid patients off from Planned Parenthood

Rush Limbaugh riding the Planned Parenthood lie hard

Dana Perino thinks abortion is worse than torture

Ah jeez

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Meaghan Winter will be on to dive into her investigative report on crisis pregnancy centers. I wish I was done with this Planned Parenthood hoax, but it keeps being a big story. So I’ll have a good news and a bad news segment on this continuing bunch of right wing idiocy.

Sarah Kliff at Vox had an explainer video on this whole fake scandal that I think is really useful to watch. Here’s a small clip.

Vox *

You can check out the video in show notes. I hope that they have a follow-up video on the actual scandal here, which is that a bunch of lying charlatans in service of a radical anti-sex agenda have been able to get so much media and legislative attention.

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So let’s start with the good news. As I said last week, I don’t think these false accusations that Planned Parenthood is selling fetal tissue are really taking off in the public at large. There was a lot of chatter about it at first, but it hasn’t really moved the needle. People who are hostile to female sexuality bought the lie hook, line, and sinker. People who are feminist and pro-sex quickly debunked the lie. The mushy middle of people who like having sex but are still afraid of women being liberated are all confused about it. So it’s about the same as it always has been, with most people being generally pro-choice but with some of them feeling weird about it. That hasn’t changed meaningfully in any way, and I doubt it really will in any short term way. Getting the country to be less sexist and hateful about female sexuality is going to take decades of work, day in and day out. You don’t upend thousands of years of patriarchy overnight. That sounds like bad news, but there is good news in that, which is that we have a lot of open feminists in Congress and they were able to stop a Senate bill that was meant to defund Planned Parenthood.

PPFA 1 *

Mitch McConnell is running around declaring that the organization is “scandal-plagued,” which is the equivalent of kicking someone in the knee and then declaring that they have to be put down now because their bruises are unattractive. No, the organization is not scandal-plagued. They are the victim of false accusations. The real scandal here is that a major political party is playing along with an overt lie that was constructed for no other purpose but to prevent women from getting contraception and affordable health-care services. We know this, because the money that they intended to cut only goes to contraception and stuff like cancer screenings and STI testing. It does not go to abortion, much less fetal tissue donation.

Some people have been critical of Elizabeth Warren, claiming she hasn’t been in front of this issue enough. But the good news is she came out swinging last week.

PPFA 2 *

I hate to say this, but you should really watch the whole video, where Warren lays out the long and shameful recent history of conservative attacks on women’s health care, including attacks on insurance coverage of contraception, attempts to force sex trafficking victims to give birth, assaults on federal family planning programs, and the relentless drumbeat of attacks on legal abortion. This kind of full-throated defense of women’s rights is what we need. I am sick of seeing liberals equivocate on this issue. There is no need to do it. Call out this nonsense for what it is, an attack on the right of every American to decide their own private sex and reproductive life for themselves. Make conservatives explain why they think they should get to tell you how and when to have sex. This is not rocket science.

The fact that the organization behind these fake videos, the Center for Medical Progress, tried to trick the media also seems to be backfiring. In the past, conservatives have successfully guilt-tripped mainstream media into not looking at their lies too closely for fear of being called out for bias. But there is a line, and CMP crossed it, by lying and lying and lying and lying so much, and treating journalists like they are stupid. That and by having a bunch of associations with some of the most unsavory people in the anti-choice movement, which is saying a lot. CNN host Alisyn Camerota actually grilled CMP head David Daleiden about the way he lies shamelessly and frequently. First, he claimed, falsely, that Planned Parenthood doesn’t incur any costs that would require reimbursements and therefore the $30 here and there that they get must be getting is big money profit. Camerota was not having it.

PPFA 3 *

He kept lying, of course, because he is chronically dishonest and like his buddy Lila Rose can’t open his mouth without lying. But it’s just laughably obvious that his claims are false. The notion that people are getting rich off a very small number of donations for which they get $30 reimbursements is, yeah. First trimester surgical abortions cost around $400 to $600. Second-trimester abortions run over $1,000 to often up to $3,000. And for a nonprofit like Planned Parenthood, those costs are mostly about recouping expenses. The notion that they’re making bank off an extra $30 here and there is beyond laughable. It’s clearly the product of a conspiracy theory-style mind. It’s embarrassing to even debunk this, it’s so silly. Anyway, she kept grilling him, this time about his associations.

PPFA 4 *

Nice seeing such a slick liar get a little flustered there, isn’t it? It is a fair characterization, since the last anti-choice murder, of Dr. George Tiller of Kansas, was committed by an active protester with Operation Rescue. Yes, they tried to distance themselves from him, but it’s also a fact that Scott Roeder, the doctor killer, was deep in the Wichita anti-choice extremist community that Operation Rescue has created there. He got Dr. Tiller’s church address from them, most likely, as Operation Rescue publicized it on their website. In addition, the second in command at Operation Rescue is an anti-choice terrorist. She did time in federal prison for attempting to bomb a clinic. Even beyond that, Operation Rescue has a long history of intimidation and other terrorist style tactics, including stalking abortion clinic employees, following them around town and screaming at them at random in public places. It may not be shooting someone in the head, but stalking is a form of violence and a form that Operation Rescue loves promoting.

So, anti-choicers are failing in Congress and finally getting the skeptical attention they deserve in the media. Unfortunately, this whole misinformation campaign has had some successes, which I’ll detail after the interview.

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

Interview

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

As I noted, while the entire video hoax thing is not working out as anti-choicers hoped, there have been a few anti-choice victories to come from it. The defunding bill didn’t make it out of the Senate, not that President Obama would have done anything but vetoed that nonsense. But Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, desperate to get some attention in a crowded primary for the Republican presidential nominee, went all out.

bad 1 *

Anti-choice logic in a nutshell: Because some guy lied about a fetal tissue donation program in California, women in Louisiana have to be cut off from their birth control pills and Pap tests. Of course, as the clinic vandalism suggests, that was the point all along. The fetal tissue thing was just a feint to gross people out and shut off their rational brains, so that Republicans could hammer through a bunch of cuts to women’s health care. This was never about fetal tissue donation, much less selling. If that was the problem, you ban fetal tissue research. You don’t cut women off from their birth control pills.

That is, so far, the biggest political victory, but it was probably coming anyway, as Jindal has been aching to find a way to cut women’s health care to pander to the anti-choice right for a long time now. But while Senate Republicans utterly failed to defund Planned Parenthood through legislative means, right-wing media is milking this nonsense for all its worth.

bad 2 *

How can you be angry about an endangered animal being senselessly killed by an egomaniac when the world is so full of women just having sex like it’s their right? Women. Are. Having. Sex. Everyday! And not having their lives derailed by it. Next you’re going to tell me that polar bears drowning from global warming is a worse problem than people enjoying a warm day or that terrorism is a worse problem than someone waking up in the morning, feeling good about herself. How can you be worried about pain and suffering in the world when there’s so much joy out there to snuff out?

I mean, that’s what they’re really worried about. It can’t be the selling of fetal tissue, because that’s not happening. Dana Perino of Fox News was pushing the same nonsense, but it was, if anything, even more offensive.

bad 3 *

Yep, she outright claimed that the life of mindless embryos is worth more than full grown human beings, many who died from the torture she is defending. I cannot stand being lectured by people like that about morals, as it’s unclear to me that they have any at all. It’s literally saying that a human life is worth less than that of a protohuman life. Which is to say, this is about pushing the idea that it’s literally worse for women to have bodily autonomy and a right to a private sex life than to take actual people, actual people who have feelings and thoughts and consciousness and are actual people, and to torture them. Sometimes to death.

I don’t even know what to say sometimes.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, women should be slavishly grateful for any male attention edition. Glamour magazine recently published a really, really sexist article of tips to make your man love you, most of which were variations on the idea that you should be quiet, submissive, and act like an unpaid servant. Seriously, one of them was literally to make him a sandwich after sex, as if he was doing you a favor instead of it being, you know, a mutual thing. Glamour took it down after feminists mocked it on Twitter, and Fox News’ anti-feminist lady brigade was furious.

divorce *

Actually, divorce rates have gone down dramatically since the ’80s. It’s just kind of sad seeing this pandering on Fox News. Are there really that many men in their audience who confuse having a girlfriend with having a dog? The issue here isn’t doing nice things. It’s about creating a narrative in your relationship where he’s the boss and she should always feel insecure and achingly grateful that a man will deign to let her kiss his feet. It’s demeaning, and women deserve better than that.

The post Conservatives Struggle Sorting Fact From Fiction in Baseless Planned Parenthood Attacks appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

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Erick Erickson is a hack

Erick Erickson opposes equal pay because “science”

Scott Walker is not a doctor, no matter what he says

Nope, still not a doctor

Bush dances around Planned Parenthood issue

Rubio backs off his support for rape exceptions

Rubio thinks he has a great “gotcha”

Bizarre Erick Erickson eugenics

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, author Jane Ward will explain the phenomenon of straight men having sex with each other. Donald Trump causes a misogyny controversy, and Republican candidates express odd opinions about abortion.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did one of their famous in-depth reports on the continuing problem of abstinence-only education in this country, which we covered on this show recently in an interview with Erica Hellerstein. Well worth watching the whole video, which is in show links, but what was really fun was they made a short, star-studded video of their own covering what they would like to see covered in a good sex ed class. Including, and this made me really happy, consent.

Consent *

Consent is not confusing, and most people arguing otherwise have an agenda that is, to say the least, not good. Glad to see John Oliver’s show gets this. I ask someone before I, say, offer them food. I don’t just grab the soup and start pouring it down their throat. It’s not confusing with food, and nor should it be with sex.

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So a straight up bizarre dogfight over misogyny is going on in politics these days, and being conducted almost entirely on the right while amused liberals watch on. It started during the Fox News Republican primary debate, which was a rather unsubtle attempt by Fox to go after Trump hard while throwing softballs to candidates, like Marco Rubio and Scott Walker, that party leaders would prefer to see leading in the polls. Part of that meant having Megyn Kelly bait Donald Trump in a rather overt, though admittedly amusing way.

Trump 1 *

That laughter and overwhelming applause is something to keep in mind as you watch this whole debacle unfurl. Because shortly after this happened, all of a sudden all these conservative leaders started striking outraged poses about how terrible it is that Donald Trump says these things about women. But in reality, that conservative crowd thought that as long as the target was Rosie O’Donnell, who is a liberal and a lesbian, then Trump’s tendency to lob misogynist abuse at women is just great. Hilarious, even. But then, after he stewed a bit over how out of line he thought it was for Fox to allow a mere woman to ask questions of him, Trump decided on his next target for misogynist abuse.

Trump 2 *

I hesitate to call that a joke, because comments about how women are somehow lesser than men because they menstruate strike me as too tired to qualify as actual humor. I quoted him at length, because he’s claiming, of course, that he wasn’t actually making a sexist comment. But you can tell from the larger context that this was a man who is resorting to sexist condescension in an effort to put a woman in her place, all to punish her for daring to defy him. The “blood” comment was just the icing on that particular cake. Very gross icing.

Well, in a show of some extremely transparent opportunism, a bunch of conservatives are now pretending that they’re all opposed to misogyny because of this. Like Erick Erickson of RedState, who disinvited Trump from his site’s annual conference and told Neil Cavuto that he was glad he did.

Trump 3 *

Erickson doesn’t want Trump in the race, because he thinks Trump is tarnishing the Republican brand. Plus, there’s plenty of reasons to believe that Erickson’s supposed anger over the evils of misogyny is 100% a put-on to achieve his real goal, getting rid of Trump. Just look at his Twitter feed, which has gems like, “That’s what the feminazis were enraged over? That’s what being too ugly to get a date does to your brain.” Or, “All these angry feminists in my timeline today. I thought Sam Alito ordered them all home to make sandwiches this morning.” Or, “Good thing I didn’t suggest the feminists . . . you know . . . shave. They’d be at my house trying a post-birth abortion on me.” On Cavuto’s show, he tried to defend these as jokes and try the “feminists have no sense of humor” line. But what these tweets show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that Erickson has no sense of humor, because anyone with an actual sense of humor is laughing at what a hack he is. Also, his sexism is often not even thinly disguised as an unfunny joke. Such as when he went on Fox News and explained why it’s wrong for women to make as much money as men.

Trump 4 *

Ha….ha? I guess I must be a humorless feminist to not get how he’s just kidding around with this crap.

Anyway, the whole conservative argument against Trump can be summed up as, “Misogyny isn’t wrong, unless it’s against Megyn Kelly, then it’s bad.” Which is tremendously unconvincing. More persuasive is Hillary Clinton’s reaction to all this.

Trump 5 *

I’ll have more on what she meant after the interview.

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Interview

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Hillary Clinton’s accusation that misogyny was hardly limited to Donald Trump during the Republican primary debate got a bunch of scoffing responses on Fox News, but I have to say that she was 100 percent right. Because of those Planned Parenthood hoax videos, Republican candidates were all under a lot of pressure to crawl all over each other to brag about how much they hate abortion and how much they were going to keep as many women from possible from getting quality medical care at Planned Parenthood.

Scott Walker freaked people out the most, because of his blasé answer to Kelly’s question about whether abortion should be allowed to save a woman’s life.

debate 1 *

In other words, he would just let you die if it were up to him, and he very much wants it to be up to him. And yes, he did say that he knows better than your doctor if your cancer or eclampsia or whatever other condition you have will kill you.

debate 2 *

Thanks for the diagnosis, non-doctor Walker! I will say he is right about one thing: It’s a false choice between the mother and the fetus. You can’t choose between the mother and the fetus, because letting a woman die from pregnancy almost always kills her fetus, too. So in that sense he’s not lying. He’s not asking you to choose, but instead condemning both to death. That’s because, as much as antis would like you to believe otherwise, the fetus is not separate from a woman’s body. She dies, she takes the fetus with her. Yet another reminder this is about hating women, not trying to save fetal life.

Walker, like many of the other candidates, bragged about defunding Planned Parenthood, which of course means cutting off contraception and STI testing, as none of those funds went to abortion in the first place. Jeb Bush also eagerly pandered on this issue, talking up how he hated Planned Parenthood and whatnot. And then he got caught up in a gotcha.

debate 3 *

Anti-choice websites aren’t happy with him, which makes sense. They do not want women getting contraception. While he was publicly posing about the evils of reproductive rights, there’s reason to think that he was privately cool with it. Which is what we all expect. Most of these men who are performing outrage at Planned Parenthood have fairly smallish families, suggesting that while they denounce affordable contraception services for you, they quietly enjoy contraception availability at home. It’s all a charade.

Kelly also asked Marco Rubio a question on abortion, asking him why he favored a rape and incest exception to abortion bans.

debate 4 *

It’s also called apple pie and mom and dogs named Skippy. It was nice of Fox to give Rubio an opportunity to show he’s not as soft on rape victims as antis feared he might be, but he went out on CNN to show that he really does mean it when he wants to reduce all women, including rape victims, to incubators. And he clearly thought he had this hilarious gotcha, too.

debate 5 *

Well, if Scott Walker can declare he knows better than doctors how dangerous pregnancy is, I guess Marco Rubio can declare, by fiat, what science supposedly says. But that cats and donkeys line suggests he might not be the brilliant biologist he thinks he is. After all, sperm and eggs are also human, even before conception. And they exist for the sole purpose of developing into a separate human being. I’m guessing that Rubio isn’t interested, however, in banning people from killing sperm or eggs. But he should, by his own reckoning, ban both menstruation and male masturbation. After all, what you’re shedding won’t turn into a donkey. Or a cat. It can only turn into a person if its development course is allowed to play itself out. So if that’s your argument, start by banning male masturbation. After all, each ejaculation kills millions of sperm, all of which would develop into humans—humans, not cats or donkeys—if allowed to develop instead of dying in your gym sock. Whereas an abortion only kills one. So clearly, on the not cats or donkeys scale, ejaculation is a million times worse than abortion. If this is about human life, and not, you know punishing women for having sex, that is.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, a totally flawless plan edition. Erick Erickson doesn’t just have oh so brilliant ideas on how women should be silent and servile. His tendency to reduce women to breeding machines spills out into his culture war opinions generally.

Erickson *

I do apologize for subjecting you to his voice. I know that his combination of smugness and ignorance makes him especially irritating. His self-regard seems be directly proportional to the lack of justification for it. Take this issue, for instance. How does society progress if, as he assumes, people just believe what their parents believe? A hundred years ago, most people opposed gay rights, abortion rights, and even women’s right to vote. Now most people support that. I realize that anti-choice men might be motivated by this fantasy that women are just incubators churning out little mini-mes for the men they sleep with, but that’s not how it works.

The post GOP Candidates’ Views on Women, and Sex Between Straight Men appeared first on RH Reality Check.

70 instances of Fox News sexism

Huckabee defends his belief that the president can be a dictator

Santorum endorses dictator powers for the president

Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture—and What We Can Do About It

Planned Parenthood investigations turn up no evidence of wrongdoing

Penny Nance accuses Planned Parenthood of coerced abortion

Debunking Ben Carson

What is with sandwiches?

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, author Kate Harding will explain why rape culture is a real thing, Republican candidates get even more extremist with anti-choice rhetoric, and conservatives try to argue that Planned Parenthood is somehow “preying on women.”

Media Matters decided to mark the 95th anniversary of women’s suffrage by compiling a video of 70 of the worst displays of sexism on Fox News. A sample.

Media Matters *

Link in show notes to the whole video!

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If the only access you had to American culture was listening to Republican politicians talk, you’d think that women having sex is some brand-new thing that is causing the collapse of civilization and needs to be stopped right now before all this sex-having kills us all. I despair to think of who this argumentation appeals to, but apparently the candidates think the answer is, “Republican primary voters.” Because things are getting way out of control. Like way out of control.

Take Mike Huckabee, for instance. He was at a town hall where someone asked about his plan to declare that fertilized eggs were people whose rights supersede women’s rights, and how that would work, considering that the Supreme Court disagrees and believes women have more rights to their bodies than embryos could.

GOP 1 *
GOP 2 *

By “every person”, to be clear, he is not including women. His supposedly constitutional argument rests on simply reversing, by fiat, Supreme Court findings that show that women are people and embryos are not. He’s trying to frame this as simply “having a debate.” But no one is stopping anyone from having a debate over whether or not embryos have more rights than women. That debate goes on all the time. What he is saying, even if he uses evasive language, is that he would use the power of the President to void out the Supreme Court’s power and simply declare, by fiat, that embryos are now people and women are, by virtue of this decision, not people.

I realize some people aren’t aware that declaring embryos to be people means, by necessity, declaring that women are not people. But it does, for a very simple reason: People do not have the right to use another person’s body against their will. I cannot, for instance, force another person to donate a kidney. So for Huckabee’s plan to work, it’s not enough to declare embryos are people. It requires declaring women are non-people, so they lose that basic right to decline to have another person use their body against their will. That brings up a bunch of other legal questions, since most rights come from the personhood he would strip from women, but for right now, it’s important to note that he’s using abortion as cover to declare the president has dictator powers and therefore can simply void out any Supreme Court decision he doesn’t like.

Sadly, he’s not the only one anymore. Rick Santorum has also taken to arguing that the president should simply ignore any Supreme Court decisions he disagrees with.

GOP 3 *
GOP 4 *

The decisions that he’s thinking of, and I know this because he brought them up in the debate and does so all the time, are Roe v. Wade and now Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Santorum likes to name-drop Dred Scott, which is a pro-slavery decision from the 19th century, in justifying this argument. But that’s not actually the correct historical analogue. This argument that leaders can simply ignore court rulings they don’t like is actually an argument that was developed in the 1960s, in response to the civil rights movement. Specifically, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama declared that he could, by fiat, reject any federal court ruling requiring schools to admit Black students. JFK had to call the National Guard on him to force him to stand down.

Now you might be thinking, “Sure Amanda, these arguments are alarming and have a whiff of fascism to them, but who cares what these two clowns think? I mean, they’re not really running for president, so much as getting media attention they can parlay into speaking gigs and running advertisement-heavy emails lists.” But the problem is that they are creating this competitive environment over who can say the most outrageous, far-right things about reproductive rights. This is the most anti-choice group of candidates we’ve ever seen, and this level of competition is one reason why.

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Interview

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I don’t blame you if you’ve dropped out of following this Planned Parenthood video nonsense. It’s been clear for a while that all the videos that have been released are lies and that any future videos they release are probably just going to be bigger lies. If they had some smoking gun, they would have released it already, instead of completely blowing all credibility first. In addition, the HHS has completed their investigation of Planned Parenthood and found no wrongdoing. Four states have already wrapped investigations, showing no wrongdoing . Future ones will no doubt find the same. It’s like those 1980s-era accusations of Satanic conspiracies at day cares. Just because some nutty folks say it’s happening doesn’t mean it’s true.

But Fox News keeps yammering on about how your local nursery school worships Satan, I mean, that Planned Parenthood is selling fetal parts. And now with an added wrinkle: arguing that Planned Parenthood is forcing women to have abortions in order to get their hands on that fetal tissue. Which Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America said on Fox News.

PPFA 1 *

I don’t know why she didn’t just accuse them of eating fetuses and, hell, worshipping Satan. I mean, if you’re going to lie so outrageously, just go for broke. Say they practice witchcraft while you’re at it. Have some fun with it. There is, needless to say, no evidence of this aiding and abetting sex traffickers line, or the claim that they profit off fetal tissue. And you can imagine, then, that they are not actually forcing women to have abortions.

What’s going on here is that anti-choicers can’t admit that women actually choose abortion. Instead, they prefer to believe that women, by nature, only want sex to make babies. And if they’re getting an abortion, it’s because their natural desire to only have babies is being thwarted. The idea that a woman has sex for pleasure and that a pregnancy could be an unwanted result from it is not something they’ll admit. So you get this elaborate claim that Planned Parenthood is somehow forcing women to get abortions. In the real world, of course, not only do women know what they’re doing going in, but research shows that years later, 95 percent of them say it was the right decision. But when has reality ever shaped how right-wingers view the world?

Ben Carson was also pushing this notion that abortion is something that is somehow forced on unwitting women, this time arguing that women of color are somehow being “targeted” for it.

PPFA 2 *

This is just the same argument, except with a gross twist that is designed to appeal to racists. He brings up Margaret Sanger in hopes of going down the rabbit hole of debunking various quotes attributed to her that float around out there, but that’s just a bunch of smoke and mirrors to distract from the larger point he’s making, which is to argue that Planned Parenthood is trying to trick Black women into having fewer babies than they supposedly want. It’s the same argument that Penny Nance was making, but with a racial twist that paints women of color as particularly incapable of making decisions for themselves.

If you take a step back, the claim is utterly absurd on a couple of levels. For one, it suggests that providing quality, affordable health care is somehow “targeting” people. Which is nuts, because quality, affordable health care is one of those things people inherently want. But it’s also just straight-up false that there’s any attempt to quote-unquote “target” anyone, as ABC reporter Martha Raddatz explained to Carson.

PPFA 3 *

Yeah, “maps.” Sure, you’ve seen “maps.”

Look, it’s not about a legitimate concern that Planned Parenthood builds in Black-majority neighborhoods. This is trying to stop Black-majority neighborhoods from having the same access to Planned Parenthood’s quality health care that people in white-majority neighborhoods get. What makes Planned Parenthood great is that they can specialize. That means that if you need birth control and a well-woman check, you can get it in one visit. It also means shorter wait times than at a community health center. You also get the well-known benefits of seeing people who specialize over people who provide general care. General care doctors and nurses are great, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a reason that we have people who specialize in gynecology. Killing off Planned Parenthood is about depriving women of the benefits of specialization. The fact that Black women’s access is under special attack is because of racism, not an attempt to fight it. The fact that Carson himself is Black shouldn’t matter. He’s trying to appeal to voters who don’t like women’s health care access and especially don’t like Black women getting it. Everything else is just noise.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, what is with Fox News and sandwiches edition? I recently played a clip of the hosts of Outnumbered saying the divorce rate is so high because women aren’t making men enough post-sex sandwiches. Andrea Tantaros circled back to this weird idea that acting like your husband’s servant is just “kindness” and then Rachel Campos-Duffy popped in.

Sandwich *

Setting aside the fact that “make me a sandwich” is a common phrase to insult women, that is not what this is about. No one is against partners treating each other with kindness. What is a problem is when a relationship is about him sitting on his butt while you wait on him hand and foot. Research shows that women already do more housework and cooking than men, so telling them to do even more is not about kindness, but the opposite: about making women do all the work so that men don’t have to do any of it.

The post Fighting Rape Culture, and the Rise of Anti-Choice Extremism appeared first on RH Reality Check.

FAQ about Ashley Madison hack

Josh Duggar outed

Sam Rader apologizes….sort of

Jeb Bush calls children of immigrants “anchor babies”

Bush backtracks….sort of

Sean Hannity loves the term “anchor baby”

Dana Loesch blames crime on abortion

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Katherine Cross will explain why attacks on transgender people’s health-care access are so misguided. Anti-choicers use the term “anchor baby” to attack women for having babies and the Ashley Madison leak has some interesting lessons about the internal politics of the Christian right.

Bernie Sanders included some thoughts on women’s rights at a recent rally in New Hampshire.

Sanders *

I am wondering if one side effect of Republicans moving to the right on this issue is that Democrats, in turn, are getting blunter about what they mean when they say they are pro-choice.

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Last week, I reported on Republican politicians who are really, really upset at women not having babies. So upset, in fact, that both Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum have started to suggest that the president should just ignore the Supreme Court and ban abortion by fiat, turning himself into a dictator, rather than let all these women have the power to decline motherhood if they want. But now the narrative has shifted. Now women are being demonized by various Republican candidates because they have babies.

anchor 1 *

Yes, that was Republican candidate Jeb Bush using, to borrow his phrasing, what is called a racial slur. “Anchor babies” is an offensive term to describe the children of undocumented immigrants who are born in the United States and, under the 14th amendment to the Constitution, granted automatic citizenship. But now Donald Trump is running around denying this, instead arguing that the children born to parents who immigrated here without all the legal documentation should not be citizens. He claims that they are quote-unquote “anchor babies”, that their mothers are having them specifically to create a legal rationale to stay here. There’s no truth to it. It’s just a conspiracy theory used to justify a racist belief that white people are somehow more American than people with Latino heritage, which is why I consider the term “anchor baby” to be a racial slur.

But it’s also a misogynist slur, because the whole point of the term is to demonize women in particular for having children. Yes, the same people who just minutes ago were denouncing women for not having babies turn around and denounce women for having babies. The common theme here is that because you are a woman, everything you do is wrong and because you are a woman, your body is public property to be controlled by a bunch of angry conservatives because reasons.

Bush is backtracking hard from the term, now that journalists are calling him out.

anchor 2 *

Well, sort of. He still endorses this bizarre conspiracy theory but instead blames Asian immigrants for it. It’s still nonsense. Having a child who is a citizen is not actually very good prevention for deportation, as the children of thousands of families broken up because their parents got deported could tell you. Bush is in a weird position. He wants to be seen as a reasonable candidate who doesn’t truck with this misogynist, racist abuse towards Latinas. But he also wants Fox News viewers to vote for him. And Fox News loves the fact that Donald Trump will fling around terms like “anchor babies.”

anchor 3 *

That’s Tucker Carlson loving the term “anchor babies,” even as Geraldo Rivera seemed a little more sour about it. But this whole “just telling it like it is” nonsense is being used frequently to defend this term in right wing media.

anchor 4 *
anchor 5 *

This is a guy, may I remind you, who loves getting weepy and sentimental about embryos. Embryos, people. But if you’re an actual born person, as long as your parents are immigrants, you barely rate as a person in his eyes. I don’t even really want to call that hypocrisy. He’s definitely consistent in his belief that whatever women are doing with their bodies, it’s probably wrong and the law should punish them for it. Don’t want a baby? Too bad, he wants to force you. Having a baby? Too bad. He wants to strip that baby of citizenship rights. It is worth remembering that Sean Hannity’s grandparents were Irish immigrants, so, by his own reckoning, his parents are “anchor babies.” But of course he doesn’t see it like that because, no matter how conservatives like to frame it, this is about race and nothing else.

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Interview

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Earlier this summer, some hackers threatened the company Ashley Madison, a dating website that markets itself as a site for people who are looking to commit adultery. The hackers, going under the name the Impact Team, have a garbled rationalization for their action, both accusing people who sign up for the site of immorality and accusing the company of not working hard enough to delete the profiles of people who decide they want out. So they somehow simultaneously claim to be for privacy but also want to out a bunch of adulterers. It’s very strange. Either way, the company was unable to meet the hackers’ extremely strange and contradictory demands, and so 30 plus million user profiles were released online.

It’s a shame that this is happening at all, but some of the stuff that’s come out has been interesting. For instance, I learned that Ashley Madison markets largely to conservative people. As Amanda Hess wrote in her Slate piece about this hack, “The site stands to profit off of a host of conservative social trends: Closeted gay men who are afraid to come out, religious invectives against divorce, and couples marrying young before sexually experimenting with other partners.” Liberals cheat, absolutely, but I suspect it’s because they find themselves attracted to someone specific and slide into it. The mentality of “I’m going to cheat and now it’s just a matter of finding a partner” really does feel conservative, and particularly feels like the reasoning of conservative men who have Madonna/whore syndromes and want to have a relatively chaste relationship with a wife at home but still want exciting sexual encounters.

All of which is to say that it’s therefore unsurprising whose names are being found in the data leak.

Madison 1 *

Obviously, this story has a lot of prurient value, and I would hesitate to cover it but for the public confessions. But I think what’s more interesting here is that this entire scandal doesn’t just reveal the widespread hypocrisy about sex that is endemic to the Christian right. It actually reveals something darker and more sinister, which is they way that the quote-unquote “family values” set is, above all, about protecting and enshrining male dominance.

Women are expected to be submissive on the Christian right, but they are frequently told that in exchange for that submission, they will be protected and cherished. But this scandal shows that is an empty promise. Take, for instance, the case of Sam Rader, who is a Christian vlogger whose name came up. He and his wife Nia present themselves as this perfect Christian couple, and he even says he’s the kind of man he wants his daughter to marry. But, of course, while he was saying this, he was messaging tons of women on Ashley Madison in hopes of having an affair. You will not be surprised to find out his response.

Madison 2 *

The whole selling point of the male headship/female submission thing is to tell women that if they submit to their husbands, their husbands will in turn be loving, responsible men who provide spiritual leadership and just generally take responsibility for their wives and families. But as we see, in reality, when men fail to take even basic responsibility to keep their promises, there’s immense pressure on women to forgive and forget immediately. Failing to take responsibility never threatens the man’s prerogative to be the leader and the authority over his wife’s life. Instead, there’s just automatic forgiveness and a return to a situation where he gets to be the boss no matter how bad he is at his job, just because he’s a man. How nice for him!

One problem is that the same Christian right that extends automatic forgiveness to male philanderers has zero forgiveness for gay people or women just being themselves, even though it doesn’t hurt anyone else. On the right, it’s day in and day out war on gay people or women who have sex in a fully ethical manner that doesn’t involve lying or breaking promises. I don’t like that this Ashley Madison leak invaded the privacy of so many people who, unlike these two, don’t hold themselves out as moral leaders. But these public confessions, I think, offer an opportunity to really consider what kind of moral system they’re pushing in the first place.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, all problems are women having sex edition. Dana Loesch decided that the culprit behind the recent on-air murder of two journalists in Virginia is women and their stupid health care.

Loesch *

It’s really rich that someone who is attacking life-saving medical research as a pretext to shut off life-saving sexual health care for women would say anyone else lacks respect for life. But her insinuation that legal abortion causes crime and disregard for life is easy enough to test against statistics. The murder rate in 1972, the year before abortion was legalized nationwide, was nine murders per 100,000 people. In 2013, it was half that, at 4.5. Looks like legal abortion is teaching people to respect life. Maybe [abortion] shouldn’t be so damn hard to get.

The post Conservatives Try to Dehumanize Immigrant Women, Trans People appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

“Taste of their own medicine”

Pope Francis’ latest statements on abortion

Jeb Bush on the Pope’s letter

Clinton on the “war on women”

Jeb Bush says Planned Parenthood isn’t doing “women’s health issues”

Independent analysis shows Planned Parenthood videos make false claims

Ugh, Mike Huckabee

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be covering the Pope’s new abortion proclamation and the continuing war on women. Also, Annalee Newitz will be on to explain why the Ashley Madison hack isn’t about what you thought it was.

After a study came out showing that the supposed Planned Parenthood expose videos had dozens of misleading edits in them, Ultraviolet put together a video showing how easy it is to use deceptive editing to make it sound like people are saying whatever you want.

Ultraviolet *

A perfect rebuttal to conservatives telling your videos don’t lie.

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Say what you will about Pope Francis, but the man is good at getting people to believe that he’s way more progressive than he actually is. Take, for instance, the recent news story about him supposedly liberalizing the church’s approach to abortion.

Pope 1 *

As CBS notes, there’s really not a big change here, and yet you are getting a gushy reaction from some quarters.

Pope 2 *

Yeah, no, he doesn’t get a cookie for that. Posing like you understand while still passing judgment and telling women they need to beg for forgiveness for simply doing what’s right for themselves and their family? Nope. Nope nope nope. More to the point, nothing has really changed. The church still views it as a grave sin, claiming it’s as bad or even worse than murder. There’s in fact something creepy about the Pope acting like he’s doing women some big favor here. Look, attendance at Catholic churches is declining rather rapidly, in no small part because people are sick to the teeth of hearing that the only right way to have sex is to wait for marriage and then only do it for procreation after that. Catholic women get abortions at the same rate as other women. No doubt it’s nearly impossible for many of them to tolerate having to hear, every time they go to church, how they are the worst kind of sinner possible, the kind who can’t even be forgiven, worse than rapists and child molesters. Streamlining the forgiveness process might, on its surface, seem like a quick fix for that. Women get to feel like they’re not going to hell, while the church gets to maintain its claim that it’s the worst possible thing you can do. But I don’t know, it’s just so condescending.

If there’s any doubt about that, listen to Jeb Bush’s response to the comments.

Pope 3 *

Oh so carefully trying to strike a balance between agreeing with the Pope that women who get abortions are just silly children who don’t know better and not offending the part of the base that still insists that women are sluts who need punishing. I don’t doubt that Bush is anxious about this. The whole point of the anti-choice movement is to make women pay for having sex with forced childbirth. Getting an abortion and being forgiven for it, even if you have to do this whole humiliating song and dance about contrition, is not going to be seen as good enough in some eyes. But realistically, the Pope’s comments are a godsend to the Christian right. He didn’t actually change anything about the policy, after all. He just advertised that forgiveness is possible in hopes of getting more women to ask for it. But the idea that abortion is wicked and that you have to beg forgiveness is still there. But now it’s being bundled, falsely, as “compassion,” which fits neatly into the modern anti-choice movement’s claim that they’re trying to help women. As propaganda, it’s genius. But it still perpetuates this idea that women who get abortions are doing something wrong and they need to beg absolution from people who will never understand what it’s like to have to decide to terminate an unintended pregnancy.

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Interview

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So the right-wing press is all up in arms over some comments made by Hillary Clinton recently.

GOP 1 *

But no matter how much they fussed and whined about Clinton comparing conservatives to terrorist groups, the faux outrage just didn’t capture mainstream media attention. And that is, to be blunt, because there was nothing she said in there that wasn’t true. If anything, she soft-pedaled it a little, talking mostly about how anti-abortion extremism is out of control but not talking about the larger “war on women.” She didn’t, for instance, mention how hostile attitudes about abortion are expanding and manifesting as hostile attitudes towards any health care that women use to make it easier to have a safe, healthy sex life. Take, for instance, Jeb Bush/s comments recently.

GOP 2 *

I suspect what he’s talking about is how Florida gave money to crisis pregnancy centers. So let’s be clear about this. On the list of things that Jeb Bush denies are “women’s health issues” are services Planned Parenthood provides. That list includes not just abortion but also well-woman visits, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and contraception. That also includes basic gynecological care, which I know because I got a UTI treated there once in college. That is all, according to Jeb Bush, not women’s health care. But he thinks that crisis pregnancy centers are women’s health care. Sure, you can’t get exams there. Or treatments. Or contraception. Or a cancer screening. Hell, you can’t even get a blood test. What they will do for you is give you a drug store test to tell you if you’re pregnant and a lecture about how you need to either stay pregnant, or if you’re not pregnant, stop using birth control so you can become pregnant. In other words, ladies, you are just a baby bucket. Any needs you might have outside of growing babies do not count as health care. If you, heaven forbid, want to have sex without getting pregnant or getting sick? Too bad, so sad. That’s not legitimate health care. Your health doesn’t matter, ladies. The only thing that matters is baby production and whether you’re doing it.

This represents a radical shift to the right so far that it’s Duggar family territory. But instead of talking about that, we spent the summer talking about some fake videos making false accusations about Planned Parenthood. There’s news on that, by the way.

GOP 3 *

I recommend reading the whole report. The amount of deception going on is absolutely shattering. It’s not just that they cut 30 minutes out of a video that was supposed to be full-length. In the short videos, they made really malicious edits. For instance, they had one woman seeming to say that the fetal tissue donation was about increasing revenue streams. But in the full-length video, it’s clear she’s not talking about fetal tissue donation at all, but about improving the number of services her clinic offers. But it’s probably just stuff like STI testing and contraception services, so not what 21st-century conservatives consider real women’s health care anyway. Give a woman a Bible and tell them to shut their legs until they’re ready to start making babies, and then you’ll be considered a real doctor, in their eyes.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Mike Huckabee goes for broke again. Huckabee continues to use his not really real presidential run to push the idea that we should be having civil war and military coups and blood running in the streets in order to stop women from getting legal abortion.

Huckabee *

And blah blah and so forth. I do realize that the original Constitution didn’t recognize women as full citizens. But it sure as hell didn’t recognize embryos as that, either. Since then, women’s humanity and citizenship has been recognized, but Huckabee’s plan would end that. As I’ve said before, not only is Huckabee’s plan predicated on the idea that it’s acceptable for a president to declare himself a dictator who ends rule of law, it’s also predicated on the idea that we need to end “personhood” for women. There is no legal right to use another person’s body against their will. In order to declare that right for fertilized eggs, it’s not enough to declare them persons. You also have to declare women un-persons, which is what I suspect the whole point of Huckabee’s little scheme is.

The post The Fembots of Ashley Madison, and Pope Francis’ Abortion Proclamation appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Ultraviolet abortion ad

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Tony Perkins spouting misinformation

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Healthy Masculinities Week

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be covering the awful so-called Planned Parenthood hearing and the Kim Davis saga. Also, Gretchen Sisson on the portrayal of abortion in movies.

Ultraviolet has been running an ad about abortion deemed “controversial” by some squeamish advertisers, including and bafflingly those at Gawker Media. Jezebel, which is owned by Gawker, did, however, post the ad on their main website. Apparently simply stating facts is controversial these days.

Ultraviolet *

Good on Jezebel for immediately front-paging the ad, which probably gave it more views anyway. But it’s an utter shame that something as simple as stating basic, measurable facts about abortion is treated as controversial to advertisers.

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The Planned Parenthood hoax just keeps dragging on and on as conservatives try to squeeze every last drop of faux outrage as they can over false accusations against the organization for supposedly selling fetal body parts, an accusation which has repeatedly been shown to be fabricated and for which there is absolutely no evidence. Things got even more surreal last week, when congressional Republicans decided to hold a hearing over the accusations, though I hesitate to use the word “hearing.”

The idea of a hearing is that you hear evidence on an issue. This, by and large, did not happen. No one from Planned Parenthood was invited to share the organization’s side of the story. Quite literally, only one invited speaker managed to say things that were reality-based at all. That person was Priscilla J. Smith of Yale Law, who reminded everyone that the videos accusing Planned Parenthood of this are utter and complete nonsense, created by creative editing but not actually providing a single iota of proof. But mostly it was an opportunity for a bunch of self-righteous woman-loathing politicians to speechify about things they don’t understand but they know they don’t like, such as women making their own choices and people who think women have a right to do that.

First up, we have Louie Gohmert of Texas, most recently seen threatening to quit Congress to protest Obama trying to avoid war with Iran. He thought this was a very convincing argument against women’s right to choose abortion.

PPFA 1 *

Ugh, men who call women “females.” You know, not one man who makes this argument would hesitate to call a feminist a man-hater just because she has a boyfriend. Which is beside the point, as feminists are not man-haters, because we don’t want to strip men of their rights, but anti-choicers absolutely are woman-haters because they want to literally force us to give birth against our wills. Kind of definitional, really. And the claim that you can’t hate women because you saw some on a TV show is particularly laughable, especially to listeners of this podcast. I quote Outnumbered all the time on this show, so listeners are aware that they exist mostly to put some of the most outrageously misogynist statements floating around out there in women’s mouths to make it seem more okay. So really, if you’re a fan of that show, at least in a non-ironic way, that’s exhibit 2 in the proof of your misogyny. Exhibit 1 being, you know, the desire to force childbirth on women to punish them for having sex.

PPFA 2 *

Yep, he went for the baby-eating thing. Which is your weekly reminder that the anti-choice movement is not, on its merits, substantively different than people who believe that heavy metal records lead to Satanic orgies or that if you say “bloody Mary” in the mirror three times, a demon will come out and kill you. I thought they’d learned that the baby-eating accusation would make them look like a bunch of deranged yokels, but I guess not. Indeed, this was far from the only old school anti-choice moment of the hearing. You also had Rep. Trent Franks, who seems to have been watching that 1980s anti-abortion film Silent Scream.

PPFA 3 *

Mmmmmm….sounds scientific. Also, love how letting women terminate pregnancies is the worst human rights atrocity, like ever. So, he’s literally saying that it’s worse than the genocide of Native Americans. Worse than hundreds of years of enslaving African-Americans, which led to quite a few actual children dying terribly, by the way. Worse than the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. Worse than Jim Crow. He’s literally saying that letting women decide if and when they give birth is worse than all that. And people scoff when I suggest that the anti-choice movement is being driven entirely by anti-choicers having major issues when it comes to sex and gender.

It’s also clear when you hear rhetoric like this that it’s about something else, as well. It’s about conservatives trying to convince themselves they are good people despite opposing basically all social progress. This is a man who is telling himself that even though he fights against racial equality and makes apologies for things like the Confederacy, he’s still a good guy, because he’s decided that abortion is worse than things like slavery.

Then we had this shining example of hypocrisy, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner.

PPFA 4 *

A couple of things here. 1) The money in question is Title X and Medicaid funding. The proposal is not to eliminate either funding stream, but to simply redivert the funds. Cutting Planned Parenthood’s budget will not feed one hungry child. On the contrary, Brookings Institute’s analysis shows that the subsidized contraception that Republicans are trying to take away from women saves money. They found that $235 million spent on contraception nets a whopping $1.32 billion in savings. You can feed a lot of hungry kids with the money you save! 2) Sensenbrenner doesn’t care about hungry kids. He voted to slash billions from the food stamp program he is pretending to care about here. He voted against expanding the children’s health care program. If you’re born, you can starve to death or die from lack of medical treatment, for all he cares. But if you’re an embryo and useful for punishing your mother for having sex? Then he cares. Hell, since this hearing was aimed at cutting off Planned Parenthood’s contraception funding, I won’t even go that far. Sensenbrenner cares more about embryos that haven’t even been made yet than he does actual children. Making sure sperm meets egg and puts you into a situation you don’t want? That’s more important than anything else could possibly be.

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Interview

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The hysteria over contraception funding and abortion access wasn’t the only right wing nonsense going on last week. Hell, it didn’t even get the most headlines. No, that honor goes to the circus swirling around Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky who got it in her head that her religious freedom somehow means she gets to stop gay couples from getting marriage licenses. And yes, I mean stop. There seems to be some confusion, or what I suspect is outright lying, by conservative pundits on this fact. Such as Tony Perkins and Megyn Kelly.

Davis 1 *

That is simply untrue. I don’t think she should be allowed to sit on her hands and refuse to do the job she’s paid to do just because a gay couple comes in. However, it’s also irrelevant. The judge offered her that option and she refused. Her deputies wanted to issue the licenses, but she was not letting them. This isn’t even remotely confusing. There’s a lot of squawking about “religious freedom”, but what Davis wants, simply put, is the right to declare that everyone else in her county has to follow her religious beliefs or they don’t get to get married. And she will stop you from trying to get someone else to help you. As soon as she was arrested, the deputies popped right up and offered the licenses, because they grasp this basic fact that religious freedom means allowing others to believe what they want. Indeed, because the deputies were freed up to issue the licenses, Davis was allowed out of jail, which she left with great fanfare, with “Eye of the Tiger” playing and Mike Huckabee, of course, on hand to hustle the rubes as hard as he could.

Davis 2 *

Oh yeah, they were trying to make it seem like they had won some big victory when she got out of jail, but yeah, no. Her entire stand was for two things: The ability to stop other people from getting married and the right not to face consequences, such as losing her job, for depriving others of religious liberty. She failed, utterly and completely. She did face consequences, namely jail. She did not stop the marriages. She had to touch Mike Huckabee. They can play whatever loud rock songs they want, but they can’t hide the fact that this effort was an utter failure that should embarrass everyone involved. At least one person at Fox News, Shepard Smith, was unafraid to point this out.

Davis 3 *

Exactly. Davis’s lawyers were throwing a Hail Mary, hoping they could create an uprising of county clerks that refuse to sign the licenses and therefore they could create an extralegal method to ban gay marriage even though the courts said no. It was never about “accommodation” and never has been, not when it’s about gay marriage or birth control or whatever else they want to take away from you and claim it’s for their religious freedom. They were hoping to model it, I suspect, on the way that white Southerners joined together to re-segregate the schools after Brown v. Board by creating private schools that banned Black students and collectively enrolling their kids in them. But the blunt fact of the matter is there was no evidence for this political will. More people disapproved of interracial marriage when it was legalized. They had a really hard time finding even one county clerk that cared enough about this to do this for them. This was a loser case from the beginning, and no amount of Rocky III songs at rallies will change the fact that it ended as an even bigger loser than they could have anticipated.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, I want my men to be unhealthy edition. Or I don’t, but apparently the entire conservative media does, because they were exploding in anger at the thought of Vanderbilt University having a “healthy masculinities” week. Outnumbered, of course, had an outraged segment on it, complete with homophobic jokes and then this tantrum from Andrea Tantaros.

Tantaros *

Well, I looked at the courses and none of them were about being thumb-sucking betas. They had titles like “The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt and How All Men Can Help” and “Maintaining ‘Bro’ Status: Fraternity Men Discuss Masculinity and Mental Health.” So it sounds like men helping each other get past stifling gender roles that teach them that so-called real men stifle their emotions, don’t have meaningful friendships, and are irrationally aggressive. They’re always on and on about how feminists supposedly hate men on Outnumbered, but the Fox News hosts are the only people I hear who are hating on men, shaming men for wanting to have better lives, and trying to deprive men of mental health care.

The post Misleading Portrayals of Abortion in the House Judiciary Committee and Onscreen appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Tamara Winfrey Harris tackles some ugly stereotypes about Black women. Bobby Jindal has weird ideas about how sexual health care works and it’s time for round two of the Republican debates.

Amber Rose, who rose to fame as a model in hip-hop videos, has been speaking out against slut-shaming, which she gets a lot of both because of her profession and because she’s dated famous men. She did a video for Funny or Die where she imagined a world where people had a better attitude about female sexuality, called the Walk of No Shame, where she’s walking home in her club clothes after a night of casual sex.

No Shame *

It does a good job of showing why it’s absurd to act any other way about it.

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So the Republicans had another debate last Wednesday, this time on CNN instead of Fox. I hate to say this, but the Fox one was better. Both debates drove me up the wall because the moderators simply allowed the candidates to lie their heads off without correcting them. Yes, I realize that people like me can do that work online, but it’s not as effective. They need to whip out a buzzer and hit it every time some candidate says something that is straight up not true. Of course, that means during the discussion of abortion and Planned Parenthood, the buzzer would be going off every few seconds. It’s hard to say who lied the hardest, but the person who lied the most luridly has got to be Carly Fiorina.

debate 1 *

Yeah, no, that didn’t happen. Anti-choicers keep sending me videos, even with timestamps, that they claim show this, but it doesn’t. It just doesn’t. As Emily Crockett explains at RH Reality Check, in one of the misleading videos created by the Center for Medical Progress, there are a couple of images that they edited in from other sources. One shows a stillborn baby, which has nothing to do with abortion and which the family in question did not give to them. The other is some anti-choice stock imagery. But neither image has anything to do with the claims made by the woman who claims she saw this stuff. They want you to think they filmed this happening, but in fact it’s just more trickery. It’s not even good trickery, which is why I doubt very much that Fiorina sincerely thinks that she saw what she says she saw.

But while that whopper, with its vividness, got most of the attention, there were some other ones that are jaw-droppers, too. Like Ted Cruz.

debate 2 *

Every word of that is a lie. The videos, especially if you watch the unedited versions, actually prove the opposite: Repeatedly on them, Planned Parenthood officials clearly and repeatedly state that they do not and will not and have not sold any fetal tissue. They do talk about donating the tissue, with patient consent, which is 100 percent legal and which Dr. Ben Carson has personally benefited from, as he did research on such donated tissue. The only other option for the tissue, which these people pretending to be outraged refuse to acknowledge, is tossing it in biohazard. His claim that this is for profit is tautological in its untruth. Planned Parenthood is a nonprofit, with the financial disclosures that come with that. They cannot, by definition, profit.

Chris Christie told an even bigger lie, if you can believe it.

debate 3 *

So he took the lie that Planned Parenthood sells fetal body parts and builds on it, arguing, it seems, that it’s systematic and that the purpose of abortion is to get to this fetal tissue.

Let’s think about that for a minute.

Does Christie think women get pregnant on purpose, so that they can go down to the abortion clinic and sell the fetal tissue? In the real world, the tissue is donated and women cannot profit off it. So even if you think women would do that, they can’t. Or maybe he thinks that Planned Parenthood is kidnapping women and forcing abortion on them in order to get at the fetal tissue? Again, nope. We know why women get abortions. In the vast majority of cases, it’s because they got pregnant on accident and can’t or don’t want to have a baby right now. There are some cases where women want to have a baby, but can’t for medical reasons. And then there are some that are rape cases. That’s about it. Not many reasons outside of that. Most fetal tissue is thrown out. In a few cases, often with medically necessary abortions, women donate the tissue for medical research. But that is not why Planned Parenthood or legal abortion exists. If you banned fetal tissue research tomorrow, abortion would still be necessary and in demand.

But of course, these supposedly outraged politicians have yet to actually suggest banning fetal tissue donation if it bugs them so much. Instead, every single politician on stage recommending cutting off contraception and cancer screening funding instead. Because that’s what they are really after, not fetal tissue donation programs.

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Interview

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While radical anti-choicers in Congress keep running around and posturing about how they’re going to shut down the government rather than let the federal government continue to give money to Planned Parenthood to buy condoms, in the State of Louisiana, things are getting really ugly. Using the hoax videos that falsely accuse Planned Parenthood of selling fetal tissue as a pretense, Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered Medicaid in his state to stop letting their patients go to Planned Parenthood. It’s clear this is just a pretense, and not just because the accusations are false. Jindal has been steadily chipping away at sexual health-care services generally for years now. This is just a continuation of that process, with a clear end goal of completely ending government-subsidized contraception, STI testing and treatment, and basically any sexual health care that isn’t prenatal care.

Jindal’s hostility to the very idea of sexual health care was evident in a recent interview with Iowa talk radio host Simon Conway.

Jindal 1 *

Har har. Of course, what Jindal neglects to mention is that he’s been slashing budgets for sexual health care for years and years now, as Kyle Kulinski from Secular Talk Radio pointed out.

Jindal 2 *

There are only two Planned Parenthood clinics in all of Louisiana and they handle about 30 percent of the publicly funded contraception services in the entire state. In other words, the reason that Louisiana has so many public health problems is not because Planned Parenthood is bad at their job, but because it’s impossible to do a better job when you’re underfunded, geographically restricted, and under constant attack from the politicians in your state. But I suspect that when Jindal expresses skepticism about Planned Parenthood, it isn’t about their competence at all, which most observers on the ground say is excellent. I suspect he’s hostile to the idea of sexual health care in and of itself. Because there’s this theory, in anti-choice circles, that providing sexual health care is what causes problems like STIs and unintended pregnancy. The American Life League has a video explaining this theory.

Jindal 3 *

After asserting that masturbation is a gateway drug that leads to the supposedly hard stuff, he continues.

Jindal 4 *

By the way, you don’t hit puberty in high school, like he says. You hit it in middle school. But overall, you get the idea. And let’s be clear, they aren’t just talking about kids, as the video goes on to fear-monger about sex education on college campuses. It’s clear, throughout, that the idea is that the belief is that people have little to no natural desire to have sex until they’re taught to want it. So why do they believe that Planned Parenthood is deviously trying to convert people from their natural, sex-hating state to one where they desire sex?

Jindal 5 *

So that, I suspect, is the theory that is driving not just Jindal’s joke about how Planned Parenthood somehow causes STIs and unintended pregnancy, but behind his entire drive to run them out of his state. Indeed, this was made more clear recently in court documents filed by Louisiana to justify cutting Medicaid patients off from Planned Parenthood. The state argued that women could just get medical care elsewhere, and submitted a list of over 2,000 other places they claimed would take them. However, it turned out that only 29 of those places offer family planning services, and of those who do, many have a waiting list of months or are not taking new patients at all. In other words, the message was that women can go to a doctor, but only if they want something besides sexual health care. This isn’t about abortion or even, ultimately, about Planned Parenthood. It’s about telling women that the only sexual health care they need is to shut their legs and read the Bible, and to only have sex to make babies.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, altars of Baal edition. In this one, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) accuses pro-choicers of demonic worship based around child sacrifice. And yes, I think he means literally.

Baal *

Sometimes I get the feeling that anti-choicers have confused real life with some kind of fantasy role-playing game, like they are Buffy the Vampire Slayer breaking up demon gangs, except that Buffy didn’t hate women. Rest assured, women don’t get abortions because they are demon-worshippers who derive either magical powers or sexual satisfaction from baby-killing. They are people who don’t want to have a baby right now and so are terminating a pregnancy long before the fetus and, in most cases, the embryo inside develops into a baby. That is demonic baby-killing in the same way that planting half a packet of tomato seeds and throwing the rest away is tearing down the rain forest.

The post Lies and Distortions in the GOP Debate, and ‘The Sisters Are Alright’ appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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