The recent federal-court decision invalidating California’s ban on gay marriages was of course welcome and long overdue. And there’s a lot of commentary from across the political spectrum predicting that it will be upheld at the Supreme Court level, given Justice Kennedy’s authorship of both major recent groundbreaking decisions favoring equality for gays (Romer, invalidating an exception to equal-rights statutes in the case of gays, and Lawrence, invalidating the criminalization of gay sex), and his status as inevitable swing vote on discrimination issues. So – while nothing is yet assured – this is a watershed, and very hopeful, moment for the cause of equality.

The question it raises, however, is what kind of backlash this will trigger. One likely possibility is an attempt to push through a Constitutional amendment imposing discrimination nationwide. Although that possibility concerned me greatly, I am – with fingers crossed – hopeful that such a movement would be unavailing. By the time any such plan could gain traction, there will have been several years’ worth of experience with gay marriage, and increasing experience of life under a national-level Supreme Court decision for equality, tending to reduce the panic over the supposed consequences of gay marriages. The political winds have shifted, also; it’s true that the GOP is somewhat resurgent, but the grounds for debate are now dominated by economic issues, and the religious-right/teabag movement is proving more and more of a liability for the GOP. I suspect the homophobic firestorm the GOP deliberately stoked in 1996, which created gay marriage as a political issue for their base, will not be possible in 2012. And, too, Constitutional amendments over controversial issues are hard to pass, and this one is unlikely to have enough momentum to overcome the inevitable decline of the homophobic movement as the reality of gay marriage proves their crazy ranting is just pointless. So I suspect there will be an attempt to pass the first-ever Constitutional amendment creating a new form of discrimination, but it will fizzle out.

However, I just read speculation elsewhere that gay marriage will become “another Roe v. Wade” – that is, a cultural flashpoint issue that will polarize society and give the right wing something to agitate about forever. That is no reason to oppose equality, of course, but it is a daunting prospect nonetheless. And that commenter was surely right that the (presumptive) institution of equality by the Supreme Court, and the failure of legislative or Constitutional processes to maintain discrimination, will energize the right wing and serve as a focus of grievance for them for the forseeable future. And yet, as I think about it, it occurs to me that this outcome may not be as destructive as it would seem, and could even have an upside. I suspect that the wingnuts will indeed agitate interminably over gay equality, and this will have two consequences: (1) it will further marginalize the religious right, and (2) it could conceivably bolster support for abortion rights as well.

The argument for the first possibility above is obvious. As gay marriages become more and more commonplace, and as disinformation about priests being forced to perform gay marriages, or children being “indoctrinated” in schools, are disproven by everyday experience, the disingenuous fearmongering that drives the hate movement will be undermined. The haters will simply serve to highlight the unhinged and bigoted streak that infects the Republican party and, as Sarah Palin is quickly becoming, and Sharron Angle already has become, will be an albatross around the neck that the GOP will eventually be glad to be rid of.

The argument toward a pro-autonomy rebound is less intuitive, but not implausible, I think. The idea that gay marriage will galvanize conservatives like abortion did is likely true. The parallels between the issues are strong: each is a cause celebre’ for the religious right, grounded on religious visions of morality, driven by a deep-seated revulsion to sex, and centering on a despised group whose claims to equality and autonomy the religious right hates and resents.  And the campaigns waged by the right against autonomy and self-determination in both cases are again similar: bizarre predictions of the consequences of allowing people to make their own decisions, Biblical injunctions against equality and non-patriarchal sex, deliberate lies and disinformation about the implications of freedom in each case, hateful moralistic judgmentalism, simply deluded scientific disinformation, and a manipulative pretended concern “for the children”, all of it as grossly distorted and dishonest as it is possible to be. As wingnut hot-button issues, they do have much in common.

It is that close parallel that, I think, spells (indirect, and uncertain) good news for the pro-choice position. The campaign against equality for gays is very similar to the campaign against self-determination for women. The basic idea at the bottom of both campaigns – that one particularly backward and restrictive religious view of how people should live their lives should be made mandatory for everyone, by law – is the same, and the attempt to regulate sexual behavior that they disapprove of is likewise a common central element in both campaigns. The gay-marriage controversy brings this to the fore because that issue is clearly solely driven by sex-based animus, but the same elements are at work in the abortion issue. And so, as the gay marriage controversy is exposed as the panicky, lunatic hatefest that it is, all other attempts to restrict the rights of autonomous adults to make their own decisions in areas reflecting on their sex lives will be simultaneously undercut. To the extent it becomes obvious that “gay marriage” is a wholly invented controversy based on ludicrous and bizarre apprehensions about other people’s sex lives, and the characterizations of its proponents and participants were absurdly false and fantastical, and its presence in the community is not a threat or a curse, and the claims and predictions made about it were false and invented, it will become that much easier to see how those same distortions have driven the anti-choice campaign in the same ways. And, most of all, the more it becomes obvious that the anti-gay-marriage people are simply hateful and barely sane, and that their movement is a product of their religiously-inspired reactionism, and that they are the same people who are driving the anti-choice campaign, the true nature of that project will become more obvious as well.

The bottom line is, letting the wingnuts discredit themselves over gay marriage can only work to the advantage of the pro-choice community (and related progressive movements). It will be an ugly and hateful process, but a necessary cleansing, and possibly a road to a better day in the future.

There’s a lot of blogging today over a sensationalistic post at NRO by Shannen Coffin, a former Bush lawyer who was responsible for anti-choice litigation surrounding the so-called “partial birth” abortion ban. She He notes a 1996 memo from the files of the Clinton administration, predating Clinton’s veto of the anti-choice bill, in which Elena Kagan, then a Clinton legal advisor, recommended a change in language in the policy statement eventually issued by the American College of Gynecologists supporting their opposition to the bill. They originally stated that “in the vast majority of cases, selection of the partial birth procedure is not necessary to avert serious adverse consequences to a woman’s health”, and that they “could identify no circumstances under which intact D&X would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman”, but – on Kagan’s recommendation – clarified that by also noting that it “may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman”. (Note that ACOG explicitly reaffirmed this policy, using the same language, at least three more times, in 1997, 2000, and 2003). That policy statement was later referred to by at least one federal judge, in litigation on the constitutionality of the ban later enacted by Bush.

Quelle horreur!

Coffin’s conclusions are that this is a “distortion of science”, that “language purporting to be the judgment of an independent body of medical experts devoted to the care and treatment of pregnant women and their children was, in the end, nothing more than the political scrawling of a White House appointee”, and that “Miss [sic] Kagan’s decision to override a scientific finding with her own calculated distortion in order to protect access to the most despicable of abortion procedures seriously twisted the judicial process” – naturally she he rolls this up into the ongoing Kagan Supreme Court confirmation hearings as well. The right-wing idiotocracy is all a-Twitter, too, natch: Powerline declares this is a “smoking gun” and “shocking”; Riehl calls it “misrepresenting science” and “dishonest”; the risible Betsy, of Betsy’s Page, reads this and concludes that “there was a doctors’ opinion that said that partial birth abortion was not necessary and she, with no medical background at all, drafted a statement that said the exact opposite”. Yuval Levin, the severely bioethics-challenged former staff manager of Bush’s Presidential Council on Bioethics, declares this to be a “war on science”, “astonishing”, and “easily the most serious and flagrant violation of the boundary between scientific expertise and politics I have ever encountered”.

This sort of nonsense is particularly astounding from Levin, who was a central player in the workings of an “ethics” commission that remains a watchword for right-wing distortion and duplicity, whose major policy statements drew dissenting opinions from its own most scientifically-qualified members, and which then censored, and later fired, those same members. Levin – a political scientist and former Bush White House policy staffmember who has spent his entire career crafting right-wing bioethics policy - also castigates Kagan for her lack of medical expertise and her involvement in healthcare policymaking. You really just can’t make this stuff up.

It’s especially disingenuous for people like Levin and Coffin – political hacks whose entire career consists of trying to influence policy to fit their ideological leanings, from both inside and outside the government – to claim that there’s something untoward in political policy staff conferring with the policy-making boards of professional organizations to shape language on statements issued in clearly political and legal contexts. That sort of thing goes on all the time, and it’s appropriate for such bodies of experts to confer with political authorities to ensure that their statements are effectively written and focused. It would be inappropriate for them to turn themselves over to the political authorities as tools of policy, and to issue statements they did not believe were true, but it’s not inappropriate to get guidance on language and emphasis in order to convey an effective message. (As Coffin herself notes, ACOG already opposed the anti-choice bill. Obviously they would want their policy statement to reflect the reasons why.) To suggest that a policy expert drafting language for a policy statement endorsed by a professional body is somehow scandalous – let alone unusual – is simply stupid. And to suggest, as Coffin and others have recklessly done, that ACOG is somehow compromised or tarnished in doing so, is not merely stupid and dishonest, but libelous.

Aside from the completely manufactured, and fictional, scandal that the right-wing noise machine is busily whipping up over this, there is also the simple fact that the language Kagan suggested does not replace or contradict the language previously present. The statement that there are “no circumstances under which intact D&X would be the only option” is entirely compatible with the claim that it “may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman” (emphases added). It’s simple, really: the fact that something is never the only option in no way means that it is a bad option; the revised language not only implicitly acknowledges this but clarifies for the dim-witted (i.e., conservatives) the even more important point that it is in fact sometimes the best option. (Obviously, Intact D&X is never the only option: you can always perform an unnecessary Cesearean section or force the woman to deliver a fetus that may be dying and may possibly kill her - options that are much prefereable, for conservatives, than allowing a woman to choose the safest option on her own authority. ACOG’s point, which Kagan nudged them towards, is that there are often better  options – and that women should have the right to choose them.)

The fight over Intact D&X was particularly nasty because it encapsulates so much of right-wing misogyny, so clearly: it was not a ban on abortion, and it was not a ban on late-term abortions; in fact, it did not ban any abortions under any circumstances. It was only and entirely a ban on one particular procedure for performing abortions. It banned the procedure that was preferable in specific circumstances – leaving abortions entirely legal under those circumstances but forcing women to submit to a procedure that was less safe and more debilitating for them. It was straightforwardly an attempt to punish women by making them accept higher risks and a lower standard of care, as the price for choosing a procedure the right wing disapproved. And ACOG’s policy statement implicitly recognized this: it notes that there are always alternatives to the ID&X procedure, but that in some circumstances those alternatives are worse, and ID&X is, in those circumstances, the best or most appropriate procedure. Kagan’s contribution – appropriate, useful, and highly pro-woman – was to encourage them to clarify that distinction. (Note, again, that ACOG explicitly reiterated this policy, and the important distinction it makes, three times after Kagan supposedly “overrode” their scientific judgment in the matter by forcing them to include language that does not contradict that judgment.)

Raising this issue is simply another example of the right-wing’s reflexive insanity over sex and abortion, coupled with their inherent inability to read and comprehend basic logical statements. (Note “Betsy”‘s analysis: “there was a doctors’ opinion that said that partial birth abortion was not necessary [no, there simply wasn't] and . . . [Kagan] drafted a statement that said the exact opposite” [no, she didn't].) Honestly, the relationship between “not the only” and “sometimes the best” is really not that tricky. It’s too tricky, of course, for the average right-winger, and for people like Coffin and Levin, whose deficiencies were all too apparent back when they were writing policy for Bush, but to people of normal intelligence and reading comprehension, this entire farce is an obviously groundless, and all-too-familiar, political hackery.

The right wing is also up in arms over this because, as Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, & Money notes:

the only point of this feeble “smoking gun” is to allow Senate Republicans to mention the phrase “partial birth abortion” a lot [and] I should note once again that for reasons Judge Posner and Justice Stevens have explained the entire issue is a farce. The distinction between D&X abortions and other abortion procedures is wholly arbitrary, and for people who have supported irrational laws making such a distinction to pretend to care about rigorous medical science is nothing but comedy of the lowest form.

Mahablog was fast out of the blocks on this, in a post I wish I’d written:

if you actually understand the issue in question — which leaves out righties, naturally — you’d know there is no “there” there. . . . Somehow, in the fevered imagination of righties, a professional organization representing 90 percent of U.S. board-certified obstetrician-gynecologists was duped by Kagan into telling a lie, or something, and because this wording came from Kagan it must not actually reflect the views of ACOG. . . . no scientific finding was “overridden,” just clarified, and ACOG must have agreed with the statement or they wouldn’t have continued to repeat it in their position papers ever after.

Lemieux gets the content issue exactly right:

There’s no contradiction between the two drafts, because D&X abortions are, in fact, not medically necessary in a majority of cases. But this fact doesn’t mean that they are never medically necessary, and indeed the original statement implies that there are cases where D&X abortions are necessary or preferable for a protecting a woman’s health. Adding a statement to clarify what was implicit in the first draft doesn’t “distort” anything, and of course if ACOG didn’t think the statement was accurate Kagan had no power to get them to change it. There’s nothing here.

UPDATE: Corrected pronouns referring to Coffin; he’s a “he”, not a “she”. My apologies to Coffin for the mistake.

UPDATE: Another right-wing website breathlessly announces that Kagan “pressured a second group” on its wording of its pro-choice policy. That group was the AMA. Their claim: “Kagan discussed with other Clinton administration officials whether the AMA could reverse its policy saying there is not an identified situation in which partial-birth abortion is the only appropriate method of abortion. The AMA also noted ethical concerns with partial-birth abortions and said that it should not be used unless it is absolutely necessary.” Note that this repeats exactly the same mistake all the other commentators made about the first memo: the two positions described are not contradictory, and there is no “reversal” in evidence! And Kagan’s particular crime: she wrote an e-mail saying “We agreed to do a bit of thinking about whether we (in truth, HHS) could contribute to that effort . . . . Chuck and I are meeting with the AG on Tuesday; Donna offered to send over some doctors this week”. They don’t even identify who the e-mail was sent to (obviously it was internal), or whether any such meeting ever took place, let alone had any effect. (Apparently the AMA does the bidding of any government staff lawyer who offers to “contribute” to their policy development.) Truly, the stupid knows no bounds with these people.

The latest entry in the “creepy personified fetus” category: the “Feti” – weird/cutesy Christmas-tree ornaments shaped like tiny embryos at about the 6-8 week stage (bulbous head, no digits, visible tail). As is usual with this genre, they sport adult-appropriate personal characteristics, including clothes, personal possessions, and in one case a moustache. You can buy Santa fetuses, “happy” fetuses, candy-cane-carrying fetuses, and an “Adam Lambert” fetus displaying a punk hairdo and clutching a Star of David – a cultural mishmash that I refuse to attempt to understand.

Happy Fetus

Feto Incognito

Adam Lambert Embryo

The purveyor of the site insists that “Feti is just for fun, no political statements being made here.” I’m tempted to believe that in her case, but the thing still strikes me as weird,  and indicative of a mindset that is worth noting.

The vendor suggests these are intended as gifts for expectant parents, as appropriate additions to the “Baby’s First _____” category of remembrances. (Exactly how, I’m not sure: “Baby’s First Disembodied Hanging on a Christmas Tree”?) In that vein, they play off the very common and understandable practice of many expectant parents in personifying their fetus as it develops – talking to it, playing music, naming it before it is born, and so on. They also seem to accept as a cultural commonplace the fetishizing – literally, in this case! – and personifying of the fetus that is a mainstay of anti-choice propaganda. (Anti-choicers often wear gold-plated fetal-footprint jewelry, and they are forever trying to force abortion patients to look at pictures or sonograms of the fetus.)

I don’t know if the anti-choice movement has so far succeeded in turning the fetus into a fetish object that you can now literally market them to the general public as holiday ornaments, or if the common desire to see fetuses as sort of reverse-extensions of babies simply makes this a natural marketing move, like Cabbage Patch dolls or those weird Anne Geddes photographs of babies in flower petals, and the right wing has merely piggybacked off that common emotional trope for their own purposes. The former would scare me a bit, the latter is merely infuriating. Either way, this sort of thing leaves me with a creepy feeling.

I’m happy for people to be happy about their pregnancies, and to embue their future offspring with emotional valence or even a somewhat overgrandiose sense of promise or accomplishment. In the same way that all parents think their kids are smart and talented, and I wouldn’t quarrel with that, expectant parents can and should go ga-ga over the cute little buns in their respective ovens. There is no point, in the case of people’s emotional experience of the events in their lives, to go around insisting to them “you know it has no functional higher nervous system, right?” . . . “that’s not a ‘person’ you’re carrying, in any meaningful sense of the term – just wanted to let you know” . . . “don’t get too close to it – there’s about a 1-in-12 chance you’ll lose the pregnancy”. But when it comes to law and policy-making, clear distinctions do have to be made – and at that point, the conflict between stark reality and parents’ expectations may be uncomfortable.

Regardless of parental beliefs, not all kids are smart or talented, and thus some won’t make it into selective academic or sports or art programs. And regardless of the fervent, desperately dishonest myth-making of the anti-choice right, the early fetus is not a person and does not make moral claims on a woman’s body and life sufficient to override her autonomy. It is unfortunate to have to disappoint people emotionally invested in believing otherwise, but it is far worse to make policy based on wishful thinking in defiance of the truth.

By all means, have yourself a merry little Christmas, and hang a smiling Adam Lambert Jewish punk fetus upon the highest bough. But let’s keep the “personified fetus” myth firmly in its place when we go to making important decisions about real issues in real people’s lives.

So, much has been made this week of the fact that the Republican National Committee, throughout its longstanding berserker campaign against women seeking control of their own bodies, has in fact been providing comprehensive healthcare insurance to its own employees – including female employees – for almost 20 years. Many fingers were pointed over the hypocrisy of attempting to prohibit abortion access for all women in America by every means possible, while covering abortion care for its own employees under their internal health insurance plan. (This in fact is in keeping with right-wing approaches to the issue generally: their values legendarily evaporate when it’s their personal interests at stake, and stories of women’s clinics providing abortion care to the same women who were picketing those clinics before and after the procedure are legion.)

Predictably, Michael Steele, the hapless RNC head, announced less than 24 hours after the story broke that that coverage provision had been rescinded unilaterally. The usual right-wing hysteria has erupted, with demands that people be fired and angry denunciations that donors to the RNC had not been allowed to deny healthcare to its female employees as they wanted to do. As Ben Smith rightly points out, not one female employee of the RNC – the ones whose coverage has now been stripped without their consultation (and presumably without any reduction in their premium contributions) – has been quoted or consulted in this move.

I note also that pro-choice ideology within the Republican party has run at about a steady 35-38% for most of a decade (a recent poll shows it down somewhat among Republicans, but is widely regarded as an outlier). I presume the large majority of those are women. Assuming further that women are half the GOP membership, that would mean that roughly two-thirds of GOP women are pro-choice (I suspect they’re actually less than half the membership, which would push the prevalence of pro-choice ideology even higher within that smaller female group). Now, I don’t know if the RNC employee base is representative of the Republican Party generally, but if it is, that would mean that about a third of its staff, and about two-thirds of all its female staff, are in favor of abortion rights. There are other factors to be considered, for which we don’t have data (what percentage favor having abortion covered in their health plan, as opposed to its just being legal; to what degree the RNC staff skew even crazier on abortion than the rank and file; what percentage of the staff are female; and so on), but any way you slice it it seems inevitable that there is at least some considerable degree of support for abortion services among the RNC’s staff, to say nothing of the GOP generally. Yet the RNC leadership revoked their own staff’s coverage without consultation, and without the slightest apparent consideration for that staff’s wishes, needs, or rights.

The message is clear enough, and, I suppose, fair and consistent in that peculiar GOP way: for Republicans, hurting women is more important than anything else – certainly more important than providing real healthcare for an entire nation, but more important also than seeing to the needs of their own membership. The Republican National Committee – a body that exists solely to cater to the interests and welfare of registered Republicans – stripped healthcare services that had been available for almost 20 years away from Republican women employed in the service of that body and their party, without the slightest hesitation or apparently without even talking to them.  Within the highest levels of the Republican Party itself, your lack of status as a woman trumps your preferential status as a Republican.

Michael Steele could have just made it much more simple and direct:

The AP reports that Scott Roeder, the terrorist who killed Dr. George Tiller, publicly and in cold blood, last May, has openly confessed to the crime and justified it with the usual religious-radical gibberish about “unborn children”. In the article, he explicitly equates fetuses with independently-living persons and claims that killing to prevent abortion is justified if at least one forced pregnancy results; he encourages others to perform similar terroristic murders, and states he intends to base his legal defense on an argument for a religious-political justification for murder. None of this is new, except possibly that he has stated all this on record now.  It confirms what we knew about him, anyway.

The real question is whether those who are so agitated about real or imagined terrorism of other kinds (especially by Muslims), and who have been so complacently accepting of anti-woman terrorism in the US for decades, will condemn or even acknowledge an open statement of Christian religious-terrorist ideology in the case of yet another anti-choice fanatic.

Just this week we’ve seen a terrible mass murder committed by a Muslim military officer who was apparently distraught over the war in Afghanistan and his possible deployment. Literally before the bodies were cool, various right-wingers jumped in to denounce “Muslim terrorism” and to cite vague links between the suspect and Al Qaeda (he visited a mosque which was also visited by someone who knew someone who was connected with Al Qaeda); however, it is not clear that the apparent perpetrator’s motives were intended for a political end at all – as opposed to merely an outburst of personal anxiety – and there is little to suggest that it was terrorism in any reasonable sense. The murders of doctors by anti-choicers, beyond any question, are defined by the features of terrorism found in most of the commonly-used definitions: they are acts of violence committed against civilians for the purpose of inciting fear in other, third-party individuals, to promote a particular political end. We heard nothing of this at the time of Dr. Tiller’s death (nor of any of the previous murders and other acts of violence); will we hear it acknowledged now that the terrorist has so openly proclaimed his murderous religious ideology?

Anti-choice terrorism is intended to prevent women from exercising a legal and moral right involving their bodily health and autonomy, by terrorizing those women and their healthcare providers – it is violence intended not merely against its chosen (often random) targets, but to terrorize and thus paralyze a larger group, to further the religious and political ideology of the perpetrators and their vast army of supporters and admirers within the religious right. Yet it has never been acknowledged as such, and the large subculture on the right wing who have made a profession of terrorism scare-mongering have never acknowledged the persistent anti-choice terrorism ongoing in the US. (Nor has the FBI: fake anthrax attacks had been staged on almost 700 abortion clinics in the US in the days before 9/11 – not one of them resulted in an arrest, or any obvious urgency about the issue, and they were not treated as domestic terrorism. One person was charged with terrorism for fake anthrax attacks on clinics in the wake of 9/11 and the Congress anthrax mail attacks – the first and only such charge in the entire history of anti-choice terrorism. None of the anti-choice murderers, including Roeder, have been charged as terrorists.)

Now we have an admitted terrorist openly advocating further political killings to promote his religious obsessions. If Roeder were a Muslim and his targets were not women and their healthcare providers, the shrieking loons of the right would be off their heads screaming about his crime, his religious beliefs, his unrepentant stance, his advocacy and rationalization of violence, and his links to other extremists with similar religious and political beliefs. Will we see even the slightest acknowledgment of Christian anti-choice religious terrorism and its dangers in this blatant case?

At this moment, debate is proceeding on the House votes on the landmark healthcare bill. I haven’t blogged about it, because, frankly, it was overwhelming and I didn’t know what I could say that would help. (The Democrats’ stealth approach to bill-crafting, while possibly politically astute, made it hard to get a clear handle on the thing, too.) This will be, without question, one of the most important legislative events of my lifetime; if the bill passes the Senate and is finally voted into law in a reasonably intact form, it will be the most significant development in American history that I will see. More importantly, it will be – largely, though not entirely – an end to crippling insecurity and lifelong anxiety for hundreds of millions, and of irremediable pain and suffering for tens of millions who now live in the only affluent country that permits its business class to sell life itself for profit.

The bill on offer is far from optimal. It locks in the profiteering on death and misery that the vast majority of the country is burdened with, and is needlessly complicated and limited in what it offers to the rest. It deliberately cripples its own modest offering by restricting it only to those whom the profiteers have absolutely refused to serve at any price, prohibiting the rest of the country from accessing healthcare organized on any saner and more humane basis. But worst of all, the bill is being held hostage by the insane and vicious anti-choice army that infests the right wing and has wholly captured the Republican party. And, too predictably, the omnipresent contingent of grandstanding asshole Democrats is giving them exactly what they want, as they always do.

Right now, the “Stupak amendment” is being debated: an amendment that will prohibit any person enrolling in the government-backed “healthcare exchange” – which is to say, the poorest and most desperate, who are the only ones eligibel to enroll in that plan – from being offered a full range of healthcare services in cases of unwanted pregnancy. For those people, the “public options” will be forced pregnancy, death in childbirth, or an abortion that she likely can’t afford and the right-wing terrorists have likely made unavailable anyway. The Republican House caucus has already stated explicitly that they will refuse to vote for the healthcare bill in any form. But they – with their unconscionable Democratic allies – are holding up the bill to demand the anti-choice amendment in a bill they will not support even if they get it. And enough Democrats are equally indifferent to women’s lives and women’s needs to help them do it.

Democratic women are putting up a good fight – and their male allies deserve thanks, too. The Republicans have shrunk from merely legislative misogyny to outright thuggery, as they so commonly do. Michele Bachman led crowds of right wingers through the Congressional office buildings earlier today, invading offices and screaming at people to, in her words, “scare” them away from supporting women and healthcare for all. House Republicans staged an organized disruption on the floor today, systematically interrupting Democratic women as they spoke in favor of women’s interests and full healthcare coverage. The healthcare debate is being conducted the same way the Florida recount was in 2000: in the face of Republican assaults and intimidation, and without regard for the truth or significance of the actual substantive issue.

I have little to say about the whole thing. I feel helpless – particularly frustrating in the face of an issue so central to my personal and professional concerns – and am waiting as on election night for the outcome of votes that will – with great good luck – mean so much to so many, and move American one huge step closer to the decency and commitment to humanity that has been so sadly lacking in so much of our history. I can only wait and hope, like everyone else. In the meantime, there is an organized, vicious, and relentless minority that is fiercely dedicated to their own hostility to any notion of a decent regard for others, and to the freedom of others to live their own lives unconstrained by that minority’s backward and reactionary values. They are fighting – in the most literal sense – right now to keep tens of millions of people at the mercy of any illness they may suffer, to keep hundreds of millions at the mercy of an insurance system that rivals only those reactionaries themselves in its hostility to the needs of the people they nominally serve, and to keep every woman in America at the mercy of the nasty and bitter men who despise them and their bodies.

I can’t stand watching this unfold. And I can’t say, can’t express even fractionally, how much, how gut-wrenchingly much, I hate and revile these disgusting creeps.

UPDATE: Rayne at Firedoglake reports “Stupak Amendment Passes: 64 Dems Ask for Primary Opponents“. That’s exactly how I feel about it. I had already promised myself that I would contribute to the primary opponents of any misogynist Democrats; I’m saddened, and shocked, that there are so many of them. I will certainly target all that I can afford to. Read the rest of the post; it’s exactly right.

UPDATE: The final bill has passed, 220 – 215. Exactly one Republican voted in favor – 39 Democrats voted to withhold healthcare from over 40 million Americans. This is a great – but very partial – victory. There still remains the Senate bill – which will be a far tougher fight, with looser rules and a larger percentage of heartless and misogynist Democrats in the mix – followed by the conference committee and the final vote. The Republicans and reactionaries will do everything they can to destroy other people’s hopes for a decent life, and their control over their own bodies and life plans – the rioting, disruption, demagoguery and thuggery seen today are just a taste of what is coming. And this step, momentous as it is, comes bitterly. The discussion in the followup post at Firedoglake captures it perfectly; as one commenter put it: “It’s like winning a huge battle, but half of your friends were killed or wounded.”

UPDATE: I’ve added the reference to Democrats in the headline. I didn’t make it clear above that Bart Stupak, who led the charge to destroy healthcare reform for over 300 million Americans if they didn’t let him destroy autonomy for 150 million female Americans, is a Democrat. Along with 63 other misogynist traitors, he put the people’s party against 51% of the people, to indulge their personal medieval religious obsessions. Fuck him and all of them.

UPDATE: Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money gets the power dynamic exactly right: “Certainly, there are many potential criticisms of how Democratic leadership has dealt with health care, although when you actually care about expanding access to health care it’s hard to negotiate with the Stupaks of the world who don’t, but want to use other people’s progressive impulses to attack women.”

A former healthcare clinic administrator in Texas today announced that she had quit her job, joined a far-right anti-healthcare group, and dedicated herself to harassing other women to prevent them from receiving surgery and other forms of “icky” healthcare, after seeing a video of an appendectomy that she didn’t like.

I just thought I can’t do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that’s it,” said Jonhson. . . .

Johnson said she was told to bring in more women who wanted [icky procedures], something the Episcopalian church goer recently became convicted about.

“I feel so pure in heart (since leaving). I don’t have this guilt, I don’t have this burden on me anymore that’s how I know this conversion was a spiritual conversion.”

Johnson reports that she is likewise convicted about gall bladder removals, most forms of cancer surgery, and liposuction, although she does not criticize the decisions several of her friends have made to have such procedures, because “that’s different”. She is semi-convicted about breast implants, believing they are the work of the Whore of Babylon but also something you could understand that a woman needs sometimes. She justifies these distinctions with random Bible quotes and references to her own idiosyncratic feelings, which she cannot coherently articulate but is happy to impose on others by law.

This otherwise trivial story about one small-town individual’s weird religious hangups was trumpeted by the religious right as a stunning victory over the right of other people to make healthcare choices they don’t like, claiming other people’s healthcare was now “in meltdown mode” and “total disarray”. Every healthcare clinic in the country, including the one that has now hired a new director, went about its business as usual.

Today is National Coming-Out Day (one day after President Obama promised yet again to repeal the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy and work toward fuller equality for all people, and yet again did nothing tangible about it).

I don’t have much to say about that, except to offer support and the wish that the homophobia that infects our society, among other lingering forms of discrimination and prejudice, will soon fade, and “coming out” can be the act of celebration and affirmation that it should be, rather than an act of courage and risk-taking in the face of dangers that should not be allowed  to exist.

I’ll note, by way of parochial hyper-focus, that the pressures and threats that impede coming out and living openly in one’s chosen orientation have health consequences as well as many other harmful impacts; they cause stress and depression, create barriers to healthcare access, often result in abusive or discriminatory treatment in emergency care, and not infrequently result in violence. And of course the pervasive legal discrimination LGBTQ people face, in particular regarding health insurance, visitation and decision-making rights for gay couples, and barriers to assisted fertility and adoption, are also health and family-rearing issues as well as being rank discrimination in the basic sense.

Ending homophobia for reasons of good health is an odd and circumlocutory approach to the problem, but it’s one reason among many. Simple moral necessity is a better one. It’s long past time.

The announcement yesterday that Elizabeth Blackburn has won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was no surprise, but surely a much-deserved recognition. Her work on the function of telomerase was a breakthrough in molecular genetics, and she had long been among the informal class of Laureates-in-Waiting.

It cannot but bring to mind, however, the shameful episode in which Blackburn was hounded off the Bush-era President’s Council on Bioethics by its erratic right-wing chair Leon Kass. Blackburn was one of the few voices of sanity on that board (along with ethicist William May, also purged at the same time). She had distinguished herself by filing a “minority opinion” to the Council’s first official position paper; after that, minority opinions were no longer allowed, and eventually she and the other dissenter were replaced by pliable right-wingers (notable for their ravings about “ejecting God from the public square” and the coming wave of “forced abortions”). Kass himself, of course, is well-known for his flamboyantly idiosyncratic reactionism (he’s against, among other things, dating, virtually every form of reproductive technology including ones that don’t exist yet, and, infamously, eating ice cream cones in public*).

As Kass finally fades into his richly-deserved irrelevance, and even with the right-wing anti-science circus still in full cry, it’s refreshing to see one of science’s stars – and, for her forthrightness in the face of the intellectual debacle that was the Kass Council, one of its heroes – acknowledged for pursuit of the truth by means of reason and fact. Whatever distortions the right clings to, and whatever political means they use to deny science’s truths and withhold its benefits from those who choose to make use of them, truth is what it is and science reveals it. Blackburn, in a peculiar and distinctive way, exemplifies both the majesty of the search for truth and the dangers of its repression. Though her prize is based on the scientific importance of her work, her personal story gives it particular salience, and makes her success particularly triumphant, in these darkling times.

* Yes, really.

Apparently, tea-baggers protesting healthcare reform have adopted the slogan “Keep your laws off my body”. This is what passes for wit on the right-wing: people who are presumably largely anti-choice have appropriated a pro-choice slogan for their own purposes.

Mind-bogglingly, they claim they are not merely poking fun by making progressive symbols retrogressive, but are adopting the tools and techniques of left-wing activism for purposes that they regard as similar in motivation and intention. Adam Brandon, press secretary for the tea-bagger organization, claimed:

If we had been alive back in the 1960s, we would have been on the freedom bus rides. It was an issue of individual liberty. We’re trying to borrow some from the civil rights movement.

Right. Freedom Riders:

But that wasn’t my main point. I wanted to note just that one slogan: “Keep your laws off my body”.

It seems undeniable that the vast majority of tea-baggers would strongly oppose the liberty that slogan advocates. Surely their Congressional enablers do. But with the characteristic ignorance and lack of shame that makes it possible for right-wingers to say any of the things they say, they’ve co-opted words they don’t believe in into a context in which they don’t even make sense.

Unlike the issue of abortion rights – wherein the same noisy faction that opposes healthcare for others also aggressively campaigns to prohibit women from controlling their own bodies, and to force them to undergo pregnancy and childbirth against their will – the proposed plan for universal healthcare access doesn’t impose any unwanted procedure on anyone’s body. The access plan incorporates no specific treatments at all – it is a funding mechanism, not a treatment regimen, still less a mandatory one.

Naturally, of course, the wingers who oppose both abortion and healthcare in general, while demanding “keep your laws off my body”, also oppose abortion funding under any healthcare plan that is passed: that’s right, they insist that the healthcare plan they oppose because it would impose laws on their body must also be crafted so as to assist them in imposing laws on other people’s bodies. But more fundamentally, it is the characteristic right-wing solipsism and sheer imperviousness to fact that makes this absurdity possible: their aversion to healthcare means other people can’t have any, and their valorization of unplanned pregnancy means other women must have them; laws that have nothing to do with actually imposing upon people’s bodies are opposed with liberal slogans regarding bodily freedom, while the liberal demand for bodily freedom is opposed by people who spout that same slogan.

As always, the interpretive question here is whether these people are simply mind-bogglingly stupid, or deliberately dishonest. And as always, it’s hard to tell the difference in their cases.

So there’s a lot of commentary, and no doubt there will be more, about the just-released Gallup poll showing that people self-identifying as “pro-life” outnumber those calling themselves “pro-choice”, for the first time on record, and by a considerable margin. No doubt the wingers will be beside themselves, given the moral significance they attach to slogans and labels. There are a few things to be said about this, however.

First off, it doesn’t matter who call themselves what – bodily autonomy is a fundamental part of women’s freedom and moral independence, and must be protected regardless of public opinion. Laws trampling women’s freedom are unjustified no matter how many people support them. To the extent that the political balance shifts – or is even seen to shift – the legislative practicalities of safeguarding women’s status as citizens and full moral persons becomes complicated, but that is only a measure of the misogyny of a political system that puts some citizens’ freedom at the hazard of other citizens’ whims and prejudices.

Second, it’s interesting to note that, while the supposed balance between self-identifying pro- and anti-choicers has shifted, the same poll of the very same respondents shows almost no change in opinion on the broad spectrum of options regarding the legality of abortion. (It does show that those holding the extreme anti-freedom position – no abortions ever for anyone – slightly outnumber those holding a full pro-freedom position – abortion legal under all circumstances – also for the first time, and that in general attitudes toward women’s freedom have harshened slightly across each category, but those shifts are only a few percentage points.) So, what has changed is the labels people apply to themselves, not so much what they actually think in practical terms.

Regarding that shift in labels, it strikes me as odd. Gallup is a reputable pollster, and this is a periodical survey they have been doing at intervals for some time. I would normally accept their findings, but this one is clearly anomalous. A shift from 50% pro-choice/44% anti-choice to a balance of 42/51 the other way is a relative shift of 16% in just one year (i.e., the pro-choice position went from up by 7% to down by 9%). It dwarfs the year-to-year shifts at any other point since at least 1995 (the range shown on their graph), and probably longer. That requires an explanation.

The situation becomes more intriguing when you note that, as Gallup discovered:

The percentage of Republicans (including independents who lean Republican) calling themselves “pro-life” rose by 10 points over the past year, from 60% to 70%, while there has been essentially no change in the views of Democrats and Democratic leaners. . . . [A]ll of the increase in pro-life sentiment is seen among self-identified conservatives and moderates; the abortion views of political liberals have not changed.

So: right-wingers have not greatly changed their views on abortion in practical terms, but have shifted considerably toward explicitly identifying themselves as anti-choice. Hmmm . . .

I’ll tentatively float two hypotheses:

First, this is part of the winger backlash. The same sort of thing that is driving gun nuts to stockpile firearms and ammunition so they’ll have something Obama can pry from their cold dead hands, and which is driving anti-government morons to protest the fact that Obama is giving them a tax cut, is also driving anti-sex misogynists to stake out seemingly more-extreme positions on women’s rights: they’re terrified that they’re about to lose the thing that defines them politically, and they are ratcheting up their rhetoric both out of fear and in order to remain relevant. With right-wing and religious groups in a panic over the Republicans’ loss of Congress and the White House, and responding with ever-more-extremist rhetoric on abortion, the public has become superficially polarized. (In a country where you can get thousands of low-tax advocates to join a protest against their own tax cut just by giving it an idiotic name, it’s not surprising you can get misogynists to call themselves “pro-life” if you scream it at them enough.)

Second, this is also part of long-standing winger hypocrisy on abortion. They want to be morally righteous hardliners, but they don’t want major changes in abortion rights because they also avail themselves of that service in considerable (for Catholics, greater than average) numbers. As with many other public policy issues, conservatives retain their far-right rhetoric while gradually accommodating themselves to modern reality. (Remember when “civil unions” was the progressive option for gay rights?*) Now, apparently, among the group that say they are anti-choice, more than half favor legal abortion “under certain circumstances”.

This is not to minimize the importance of these kinds of data, or of shifts, even if only nominal (in the literal sense), between the two broad categories of opinion on women’s freedom. It matters not only that women have a legal right to abortion, but also that it is not constantly under siege by disingenuous and insidious restrictions, and that women are supported in choosing and exercising the options that are right for them. Public opinion is important to all those issues. And this reported shift in opinion, even if it is more superficial than it seems, is evidence both of the continuing right-wing backlash and of the continuing negligible status of women and their moral and civil liberties. The “certain circumstances” the pro-choice misogynists deign to approve are likely only the most restrictive cases, and the ones they find politically untenable.

Continuing to engage the fight for women’s true freedom, and a reasonable understanding of moral personhood and the assignment of legal rights, is more vital than ever as the backlash grows. I remain optimistic in the long term – reality cannot be evaded forever – but this is not good news in the immediate term, there’s no question about that. Fundamentally, and especially given how thin the poll results are on practical issues, I think little has changed. Given where things stood already, though, that’s hardly reason to be satisfied.

* Obama certainly does!

NB: Crossposted to Lean Left, the politics blog I contribute to.

The North Dakota House of Representatives has deliberately passed an unconstitutional law intended to foster a legal challenge to Roe v. Wade. It will probably fail in the state Senate, and almost certainly go nowhere even if it does pass, but it’s a classic example of the kind of gleeful, obstructionist bomb-throwing that characterizes the anti-woman brigade. It’s also – and equally characteristically – immensely stupid, and grossly ignorant.

North Dakota’s House of Representatives has passed a bill effectively outlawing abortion.

The House voted 51-41 this afternoon to declare that a fertilized egg has all the rights of any person.

That means a fetus could not be legally aborted without the procedure being considered murder.

Minot Republican Dan Ruby has sponsored other bills banning abortion in previous legislative sessions – all of which failed.

He also sponsored today’s bill and says it is compatable with Roe versus Wade – the Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion.

(Rep. Dan Ruby, -R- Minot) “This is the exact language that’s required by Roe vs. Wade. It stipulated that before a challenge can be made, we have to identify when life begins, and that’s what this does.”

It took some digging (for some reason, it appears, no newspaper reporting this could be bothered to include the name or number of the bill, and North Dakota’s legislative Web site seems almost designed for impenetrability), but this turns out to be North Dakota HB 1572 (2009), and it is a doozy. Apparently written by Rep. Ruby himself (clearly not by anybody faimiliar with the law), it is filled with folksy expressions of opinion, ungrammatical and ungrounded assertions, weird non-sequiturs, and vaguely written legal directives referencing “pre-born citizens”.

It is also a perfect illustration of the utterly bizarre, distorted, and obsessive fantasies that inform the anti-sex misogyny crowd’s perfervid agitation over controlling women’s reproduction, and of the deep and thoroughgoing ignorance that in many ways makes that movement possible.

First, Ruby is completely wrong on the Roe decision – which explicitly states that its holding is not dependent upon a determination of when personhood obtains, because that question has been so contentious throughout history. That particular point (along with the central holding defending abortion rights in general) was reiterated in Casey. These decisions do not require, and certainly do not request or encourage, the states to pass definition-of-personhood bills, or imply that doing so will invalidate the central holding regarding abortion. But that’s just ordinary ignorance – he simply doens’t know what he’s talking about and doesn’t let that stop him. But Ruby’s brand of ignorance is of an extraordinary kind. He reaches great heights of stupidity when he tries to describe, and legislate for, women’s actual bodies.

The sections of the bill on abortion are filled with references to, and descriptions of, procedures that either don’t exist or are so badly garbled that it’s obvious the author simply has no idea whatsoever what he’s talking about. In an apparent attempt to ban abortion by intact dilation and extraction, the bill stipulates that:

Personhood may not be denied:
a. If all the body parts are pulled out of the uterus except the legs or arms or portions of legs or arms are still inside the uterus;. . .
f. Once a uterus is placed back inside the mother.

and states that:

When the uterus with a child inside is placed back inside the mother, personhood extends to all other preborn children due to equal protection of the laws.

This is just insane. He obviously just doesn’t know how childbirth and abortion actually work. (If it weren’t so scary, it would be humorously reminiscent of the bizarre fantasies about sex entertained by the title character of The 40 Year Old Virgin: “You know how when you grab a woman’s breast… it feels like… a bag of sand?” Yeah – and abortion involves taking a woman’s uterus out of her body and putting it back in with a fetus inside it. Good God – why doesn’t Dan Ruby just write a bill entitled “Whereas: I’ve Never Seen a Woman’s Body, Be It Resolved That I Desperately Need to Get Laid”?)

It goes on from there. After all the abortion stuff (or what appears to be abortion stuff, given the unimaginable ignorance and complete fantasy that makes up the content of the bill), there are a bunch of catch-all concluding sections, amending various parts of the state criminal code to stick the words “born alive child” (i.e., partially-delivered fetus) into them. And what crimes, exactly, is Dan Ruby desperate to prevent?

12.1-20-11. Incest. A person who intermarries, cohabits, or engages in a sexual act
with another person related to him . . . is guilty of a class C felony. If the victim is a born alive child, as defined
in section 1 of this Act, the person is guilty of a class B felony.

Subsection 2 of section 12.1-20-17 . . . A person who, [has HIV and] willfully transfers any of that person’s body fluid to another person is guilty of a class A felony. The person is guilty of a class AA felony if the victim is under the age of fifteen or the victim is a born alive child as defined in section 1 of this Act. Section

12.1-27.2-04.1. Possession of certain materials prohibited. A person is guilty of a
class C felony if, knowing of its character and content, that person knowingly possesses any
motion picture, photograph, or other visual representation that includes sexual conduct by a
minor. A person is guilty of a class B felony if the minor is a born alive child as defined in
section 1 of this Act.

Yep. Dan Ruby amended three sections of the North Dakota criminal code to prevent incest or child pornography with a fetus during the course of a birth or abortion, and to criminalize the deliberate infection of a fetus with HIV+ bodily fluids during those same procedures. Because apparently, to Dan Ruby, these are crimes that need to be deal with . . . right now. (Odd that he assigns them lower penalties in the case of fetuses – blatant discrimination, I would say.)

It’s just breathtaking how pervasively and openly ignorant the anti-choice movement is. They hide behind pseudo-feminst camouflage, pretending concern over the danger to women’s health of wholly imaginary abortion traumas, and giving pro-woman names to their anti-choice organizations and fake health clinics. They claim they are merely concerned for the “human rights” of microscopic non-persons. But at bottom they simply loathe women, and sexually independent women most of all. And like most forms of prejudice, misogyny harbors a vast pool of ignorance at its core. They don’t understand sex, women, or women’s bodies; they’ve been taught to hate and fear them, and have – either deliberately or accidentally – avoided acquiring the familiarity or comfort that would lay those fears to rest. Misogyny requires ignorance (part of the reason for the knowingly false propaganda anti-choicers spew, and their desperate hostility to factual sex education). Nowhere is that ignorance more obviously – and hilariously – displayed than in this insanely stupid bill.

That ignorance is accepted as unremarkable within the anti-choice movement. This level of complete factual incompetence would be unacceptable in any other area – let alone one that touched on the freedom and autonomy of more than half the human race, or on technical issues of medical procedure – but is no barrier to anti-choice policymaking, because factual accuracy is not a pre-requisite to policymaking about women’s lives. If this clown had submitted a bill demonstrating an equal level of scientific illiteracy in any other area of healthcare, any other technical subject at all, or any issue involving the fundamental rights of any group of people whose rights are taken seriously, he would be a laughingstock. Apparently, however, no other member of the North Dakota legislature spoke against this bill even on grounds of factual meaninglessness, to say nothing of pro-choice principle. Complete incompetence and paralytic ignorance (it is not clear how this bill even could be implemented) are no barrier to being a leader of the pro-choice movement, or to legislating away women’s control over their own bodies and lives.

I don’t know whether we should laugh to keep from crying, or cry through our laughter. But it remains clear how utterly negligible women’s interests are. You don’t even have to know, or be able to identify, what rights, exactly, you are stripping away from them, and what parts of their bodies you are criminalizing, to vitiate women’s own interests in their own lives.

It could be almost any news story from the developing world, and any of many from the rest of the world, but this one will do:

Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, has signed a law which “legalises” rape, women’s groups and the United Nations warn. Critics claim the president helped rush the bill through parliament in a bid to appease Islamic fundamentalists ahead of elections in August.

In a massive blow for women’s rights, the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman’s right to leave the home, according to UN papers seen by The Independent. . . .
The most controversial parts of the law deal explicitly with sexual relations. Article 132 requires women to obey their husband’s sexual demands and stipulates that a man can expect to have sex with his wife at least “once every four nights” when travelling, unless they are ill. The law also gives men preferential inheritance rights, easier access to divorce, and priority in court. . . .

Even the law’s sponsors admit Mr Karzai rushed it through to win their votes. Ustad Mohammad Akbari, a prominent Shia political leader, said: “It’s electioneering. Most of the Hazara people are unhappy with Mr Karzai.”

The fault in this case lies squarely with the Afghani men, of course. (British officials, rushing to the defense of women, have “raised concerns at a senior level”. Thank God!) But it’s worth noting that this government is America’s “ally” – in the sense that if we don’t acquiesce in their doing these things, and pay them a lot of money besides, they’ll . . . be even less cooperative against Al Qaeda. One might also note that this sort of thing is once more on the rise in Iraq, where women had once had full legal equality under Sadam, now that de facto separatist governments under religious extremists have been established, with American approval, in parts of the country.

It has to be acknowledged how disastrous the situation has always been for women in most of the world, and how little leverage the nascent democracy movements in the most backward countries are. Except in places like Iraq and Iran, where modernist governments have been fully or partially replaced by theocracies, it’s not clear that, however horrendous conditions are, things are getting much worse for women, even in the worst countries. In a practical sense, the new Afghan law may not change anything, since the practices in question are widespread there anyway. The fact that there is even a tiny amount of freedom for women in the capital city is a – very depressing – step forward.

But those facts, inescapbable as they are, do not tell the real story. What’s most galling is not that conditions for women are so bad, but that that is regarded as a negligible problem. Women’s rights, and women’s freedom, are simply not issues worth caring about, to virtually any government or any influential group of (male) people.

We’ll go to war over oil, land, religion, vaguely-articulated political and economic beliefs, other countries’ refusals to do our bidding, or a soccer match. We’ll claim as justification for our wars other people’s freedom to vote for the candidates we approve, be Christian whether they want to or not, and buy American consumer goods. The one thing we’ll never fight for, or even claim as justification for fighting, is women’s freedom to live their own lives. It’s simply not an issue. The idea that we should invade Iraq to establish a quasi-democracy in some parts of the country while igniting an indigenous religious war and all but completely destroying the country’s economy and material infrastructure is somehow not seen as ludicrous. The idea that we would invade Afghanistan – or refrain from invading Afghanistan – because it’s women are subject to widespread, organized rape and open murder – legally – now that is seen as ludicrous. The idea that we would threaten preemptive nuclear war with Iran because they might someday have one warhead to our current 10,000 is not absurd; the idea that we would threaten any serious engagement of Iran because the women of that country have virtually no legal rights and are subject to arbitrary imprisonment, rape, abuse, and murder by the religious police, is beyond absurd – it is unthinkable.

The idea that women’s rights and women’s freedom is an issue that commands our involvement – that it is one of the things we must pursue and protect, among the many things we accept as justification for our adventures and misadventures around the globe – that it would constitute any kind of reason at all for any kind of action at all, let alone aggressive engagement or sacrifice on our part – is quit obviously a joke. Of all the places we’ve invaded, bombed, or threatened over the past few decades – Nicaragua, Grenada, North Korea, Panama, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Russia, and on and on and on . . . – and usually on the most ridiculous pretenses (Reagan invaded Grenada because they were building a runway, which he then continued building after occupying the island), in which of these is it even imaginable that the same things could have been done because the women of that country did not have full equality, or even basic rights?

Women’s interests are negligible. Whatever misery, oppression, or lack of freedom motivates political concern, in the US or anywhere else, it is not women’s misery or oppression that provides that motivation. The US courted Afghanistan for decades without any overt action on the basis of the grinding, indescribable misery and abuse of the women of that country, and we continue to tolerate those same conditions while occupying that country and propping up its government. But that occupation was prompted – on little notice and with little debate – by the fleeting presence there of a small group of terrorists we still haven’t managed to locate. That minor military problem was sufficient justification for occupying and remaking the country; the horrific abuse of its female population for all time up to that moment was not such a motivation, and its continuation during our presence there is not motivation for any proportional expenditure of energy on their behalf. Women are not a reason for doing anything, in Afghanistan, though smaller groups of people who catch our male leaders’ attentions are more than enough reason. The US invaded Iraq, twice, on the pretext of its supposed military ambitions; in the process we eliminated the freedom for women that existed there at the time, and returned them to the insecurities of religious politics, and for many of them outright partriarcal theocracy. The oppression of a small percentage of its population who were political opponents of its leader was justification for destroying that country and its government; that that government was the only source of liberty for more than half its population – the female half – was not justification for not doing so. Women simply didn’t count, in that equation. And they never do.

Until women count – until women in and of themselves are a reason for doing anything – until the oppression and misery of women is seen as human oppression and human misery, the sort of thing we say we care about and act on – there will be no progress. And until we powerful nations, nations who shake the world and make and unmake governments and laws and wars, do what we do because women matter at least as much as oil, or land, or religion, or markets, or men, women will not count where it counts.

“Choice” – the exercise of the fundamental value of autonomy as it affects the most distinctive, and most embattled, aspects of women’s lives – is always under siege by the right wing and its religious foot soldiers, as much so today as at almost any time. And today, “Blog For Choice Day, 2009″, the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision and nearly coincident with the the New Year and the Obama Inauguration as well, it is worth taking stock, and seeing just how encroached and relentless that battle has grown, and what hope of progress arises at this time of new beginnings.

The manifold horrors of the Bush years are finally behind us, and President Obama is already taking steps to end their ravages and wipe away the stains they have left upon the United States. In the area of reproductive autonomy, he has sent encouraging signals that he will repeal the odious “Gag Rule” and “Conscience Clauses” and oppose legislative attempts to further intrude upon women’s freedom. Hopefully the discriminatory Hyde Amendment will finally bite the dust as well. But that those are salient issues is only evidence of how much has been lost in a short time.

That we have to beat back absolute absurdities, such as that hospital personnel may refuse to treat patients in need out of personal prejudice alone, or that any yahoo with an ideological grudge, down to and including pharmacy clerks and cash register tellers, can withhold products and prescription medications on the same whim, means that the first promise of the unfolding Obama administration is simply to undo some of the trespasses of recent years, restoring what, under Clinton, nobody imagined could be lost. Actual progress will have to be a follow-on goal.

So it is not merely “choice” – reproductive autonomy in the area of birth control and abortion – that is under siege, but the entire range of choices women may make regarding their healthcare, sexual and reproductive lives, and liberty in general. Not only the right to abortion has been restricted, but, as part of their war on women’s sexual health, women’s rights to make factually informed choices about their own health and treatment options, to choose, purchase, and receive medicine and healthcare products prescribed or recommended for them, to choose how to balance their sexual and healthcare needs without interference, to choose their own goals and methods in family planning without prohibition on extremist religious grounds, to choose to use scientific medical advances without arbitrary religious restriction, and to make any number of other choices regarding their health and bodily autonomy, have systematically been assaulted, hamstrung, and denied by legions of religious-extremist obstructionists inside and outside the Bush administration. The first item on the “choice” agenda must now be restoring the basic set of choices that existed before the whackos got loose; only then can we begin to extend and refine the range and accessibility of those choices.

There is good reason to be hopeful, as, barely days into the Obama Presidency, a new sense of decency emanates from Washington and the most egregious crimes of the recent past are repudiated and undone. There is little reason to be ecstatic, however - and those who value women’s autonomy know too well that women are always the first to be thrown overboard for political expediency, and that women’s bodies and lives are of little weight in the traditional political balance. It would be foolhardy to expect President Obama to be too radical a departure from business as usual in that respect, though he has been generally good on choice, and on scientific, vs. religious, policymaking. Sadly, I expect that “Blog for Choice Day” will be an annual tradition that outlasts even this administration. But this is certainly the beginning of better things to come, and the victory has never been out of sight, however hatefully it has been contested. Good days ahead!

Man, they are insane over at National Review! I mean it literally – their minds don’t work normally. I usually think that’s just the inherent limitation of being a right-wing second-stringer (you’re already lower than a very low bar), but here I’m not even talking about their developmental team at The Corner – today NRO runs a feature piece by some professional abortion-myth peddler that simply takes a wig-out and keeps on flippin’. The reason Sarah Palin is a laughingstock, you see, is that . . . her critics all feel guilty about abortion.

[Digglah: Forget the baseball tie-ins. The Gibbering Abortion-Rights Exquisite Corpse Dadaesque Word Association Prize has now been retired.]

Here’s Kevin Burke explaining what everyone else pretty much figured needed no explanation:

Some of the very personal and often uncharitable criticism of vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her family may have a relationship to [the country's] collective grief, shame, and guilt from personal involvement in the abortion of an unborn child.

Right. The massive outpouring of largely political, fact-driven, and entirely reasonable criticism of a complete airhead who consistently offers an unrecognizably garbled version of basic constitutional principles affecting the job she is currently seeking, began her campaign for that job by stating she did not know what it entailed, invariably responds to the simplest substantive questions with idiotic evasions and irrelevancies, cites the most bizarrely tangential facts – often incorrectly – as evidence of her own preparedness for office, conducted personal vendettas in office and attempted to ban library books as mayor, has been cited by her own state’s attorney for abuse of authority as governor and is still under investigation for related transgressions, cannot name any Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade, cannot name any magazine or newspaper she herself reads (while claiming to read “all of them”), constantly infantalizes her office and her own supporters by filling public appearances with childish slogans, jargon, meaningless folksy expressions, and winking in lieu of answers to topical questions, campaigns almost exclusively by vague generalizations and character assassination, denies scientific consensus on environmental protection, global warming, and creationism, and adheres to extremist religious superstitions about witchcraft, “the apocalypse”, and God’s supposed direct intervention in her career and electoral campaign . . . is an expression of everyone’s personal feelings about . . . abortion.

What kind of a nut thinks so? The kind of nut who spends his life promoting the entirely made-up, and repeatedly scientifically disproven, myth of “post-abortion syndrome” – a supposed psychological malady that afflicts women who have had abortions (and now apparently the entire nation). It’s particularly an issue in Palin’s case, you see, because she has a child with Down Syndrome, but the majority of such pregnancies are aborted, so all those women are – he knows this – racked with guilt over the fact that Palin is a better woman and mother than they are. They attack her to assuage their own feelings of guilt and inadequacy. I’m not making this up (though, obviously, Burke is):

Seeing the Palin family, in a very visible public forum, with an uncompromising and public pro life philosophy arouses deeply repressed feelings in post abortive parents, as well as media members, counselors, health care professionals, politicians and others who promote abortion rights, especially the abortion of children with challenges such as Down Syndrome. These powerful repressed feelings of grief, guilt and shame can be deflected from the source of the wound (i.e., abortion) and projected onto an often uncharitable focus upon the trigger of these painful emotions…the Palin family.

Burke, by the way, is a founder of a Catholic anti-choice organization specifically dedicated to promoting the “post-abortion” myth. It’s his job to say nonsense like this. But it’s important to re-emphasize that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any of this is true – this Burke clown, and people like him, made this up and just keep saying it. The “post-abortion syndrome” lie has been disproven again and again, by multiple studies in different settings over a period of almost 30 years – there is simply no general phenomenon of depression or regret following abortion (though individual women have differing reactions, of course), and on average women who have had abortions are happier after having done so than they were before. As to whether people’s reactions to Palin have to do with guilt over abortion, he obviously can’t know that and it’s obviously insane. It makes as much sense as saying they love Obama because of feelings of guilt about suntan lotion. He made it up, and asserts it as fact because it serves his purpose. He’s been doing that for decades, shamelessly, in direct contravention of established evidence proving his statements to be lies, and with no evident regard for that fact.

What strikes me, more and more over the years, is the bizarre lengths the anti-woman crowd goes to to promote their false and absurd view of women, sex, and the world in general. They really do see everything as related to those topics. Archbishop Egan, in the risible and obnoxious essay cited in my last post on this topic, claims to hope for “one day, please God, when the stranglehold on public opinion in the United States has been released by the extremists for whom abortion is the center of their political and moral life”. Can he really be that un-self-aware? Is there anyone who better fits that description than people like him and Burke – for whom the merest mention (or photograph) of a fetus is grist for an unhinged and reality-free rant about abortion, in whose minds the entirely predictable failings of an absurdly unqualified political candidate are actually caused by a fictional product of abortion that they themselves made up out of whole cloth? (I guess Colin Powell, Christopher Buckley, Charles Fried, and Ken Adelman are all suffering from “post-abortion syndrome”.)

There is a kind of funhouse-mirror aspect to the ways these people’s minds work. Back in 1994, when the Edvard Munch painting The Scream was stolen from the Norwegian National Gallery, an anti-abortion group announced that they could get it returned if anti-abortion propaganda were shown on national television (in fact they had no connection to the incident and were just grandstanding). After 9-11, Jerry Falwell famously declared that “the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this  because God will not be mocked.” (It also turned out that gays, lesbians, feminists, and the ACLU were involved.) In 2006, a panel of Republicans in the Missouri State Legislature investigated the problem of illegal immigration (into Missouri?), and discovered it was the result of “the effects of 30 years of abortion.” It is a commonplace within the crypto-racist right that Western (i.e., white) societies are facing a “demographic bomb”, resulting from the different birthrates of white and non-white population groups, caused by abortion and birth control. Certain Catholic scholars, including John Noonan and Philip Rieff, have declared that abortion is itself the product of the “therapeutic culture” which seeks “wellness” (scare quotes always, please) rather than rule-following – sexual autonomy is for them a mental illness. The latest fad phrase among conservative thinkers is “the culture of death” – our entire society, or at least its progressive faction, is devoted to killing human beings, not because preserving biological life is not always the only goal in the healthcare setting, but as some sort of ideological principle in itself. Another fad phrase is “the contracepting culture” – society that accepts the horrors of sex with contraception (do you really think I’m making this up?). And of course, Sarah Palin declares that William Ayers, who helped bomb a number of government installations during an illegal war while causing no deaths, is a terrorist, but when questioned whether the bombers and shooters who murdered numerous people in legal abortion clinics were terrorists refused repeatedly to address the question.

It appears there simply isn’t any issue or circumstance, however far-fetched, that isn’t relevant to abortion; there isn’t any problem or trend, however dubious, that isn’t caused by abortion; there isn’t any need or difficulty, however unlikely, that can’t be solved by criminalizing sexual freedom. The bizarre obsession that leads to such thinking, and the contortions and delusions it requires to make such leaps while ignoring the glaring contradictions they entail, is difficult to grasp. It is simply very hard for a normal person – one who isn’t terrified by sex and obsessed with controlling and limiting other people’s sexual freedom – to imagine how this kind of thinking originates.

Make no mistake: this has nothing to do with taking a reasoned position on the appropriate balance of moral rights and interests between a pregnant woman and her fetus. This is simple full-gone loony craziness. These people make up absurd factual claims and baldly lie when they are refuted, hypothesize bizarre psychological projections upon those they disagree with, and obsessively posit – with dizzying certainty – the most tenuous and far-fetched links between virtually any event or phenomenon in the world and their consuming misogynist bete noir. They’re nuts. And these are the leaders – the thinkers – in the anti-choice movement. This is what the anti-choice movement is like when it’s not ranting at patients in front of health clinics or shooting doctors. This is what being anti-choice is like at its most subtle, sophisticated, and learned: bat-shit loony.

[NB: Crossposted to the blog Lean Left, where I also contribute. I don't usually cross-post, but Lean Left is picked up by the aggregator Memeorandum, and this blog is not, so on topics where I think it's important to reach a wider audience, or to respond directly to posts from Memeorandum, I sometimes do.]

Cardinal Egan, supremely obnoxious Catholic Archbishop of New York, has an essay up on some Web site, complete with the standard handwringing condescension and heart-tugging photos, declaiming how desperately we need to take control of women’s bodies and impose forced pregnancy as a matter of law and culture. Its contents are typical of this well-worn genre: a lame argument about whether a human fetus is a “human being”, willful elision of the difference between biological identity and moral status, sweeping moral declarations grounded on nothing but his unreflective certainty, and of course obligatory references to Hitler, Stalin, and Dred Scott.

The heart of this superficial and nonsensical (or perhaps it could be said: “a-sensical”) piece is a photograph of a 20-week fetus – a photograph which, Egan declares, proves by itself that abortion is wrong and it is utterly worthless to even consider the actual moral issues raised by the question.

Why, you might inquire, have I not delved into the opinion of philosophers and theologians about the matter? And even worse: Why have I not raised the usual questions about what a “human being” is, what a “person” is, what it means to be “living,” and such? People who write books and articles about abortion always concern themselves with these kinds of things. Even the justices of the Supreme Court who gave us “Roe v. Wade” address them. Why do I neglect philosophers and theologians? Why do I not get into defining “human being,” defining “person,” defining “living,” and the rest? Because, I respond, I am sound of mind and endowed with a fine set of eyes, into which I do not believe it is well to cast sand. I looked at the photograph, and I have no doubt about what I saw and what are the duties of a civilized society if what I saw is in danger of being killed by someone who wishes to kill it or, if you prefer, someone who “chooses” to kill it. In brief: I looked, and I know what I saw.

Why it is that the moral attack dogs of the right wing are always so eager to proclaim their own lack of comprehension I don’t know, but it is no longer surprising as a practical fact, and still less in light of the product of their “reasoning”. But ask yourself: who would take such idiocy seriously in any other context? On what moral issue would anyone seriously say “I saw a picture of an organism affected by this subject that moves me in some way, so I refuse to think about it carefully or read what the best thinkers on the subject have said, and that justifies both my unsupported, idiosyncratic religious beliefs about it and my intention to impose them on everyone else in the country!”? Who would seriously claim that not thinking about, reading about, or analyzing a serious problem could possibly produce a correct answer, or was a proper ground for imposing a solution to it as a matter of law and policy? Well, who but a religious right-winger?

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The Sarah Palin nomination is so ludicrous it’s hard to grasp. People are still trying to get a handle on what it means, and what the relevant aspects of her tissue-thin background are. There’s been a lot of good commentary so far, including her relatively minor political experience, all of it in (literally) bush-league environs, and the obvious pandering – to pro-Hillary defectors and religious-right goons – that constitutes the only justification for her nomination. There is also her utter lack of background or preparation for assuming the Presidency without warning – as is her most important, and almost sole, Constitutional responsibility. And there is her apparent penchant for using her office and state agencies for personal vendettas. No doubt all of this will get more thoroughly aired, as it should. (My only fear is that McCain will come to his senses before the official nomination and force her to “reluctantly withdraw” to “spend more time with her family” – I want her on the GOP ticket!)

But there has been some other stuff entering into the discussion that I think is very ugly and ill-advised. Of course there have been some idiotic sexist remarks (and some equally idiotic attempted defenses of her “women’s work” as a qualification for President that are just as sexist in their condescension); that’s bad enough. And it’s hard to know just how to evaluate her “life story”, since much of her qualification for office – according to those who support her – is that she hunts moose and has a passle of kids. If they really think those are qualifications*, then it’s fair game to point out that they are not.

But there are other personal issues that are not fair game.

I hardly like to even bring the subject up, but it should be confronted. There are all kinds of weird rumors going around about Palin and her kids. Many people have suggested that her last child, born when Palin was 44 years old and not known to have been pregnant at the time, was actually the child of Palin’s oldest teenage daughter, who had dropped out of school claiming illness for over 6 months leading up to the birth. In addition, that child was born with Down Syndrome, and some other clown is now posting suggesting that that condition was the result of Sarah Palin’s behavior during the pregnancy. Alan Colmes has suggested Palin could have endangered the fetus by traveling more than 9 hours to a rural Alaskan hospital, rather than go to any of the many larger and closer hospitals, while supposedly in labor. (Note that the two rumors conflict with one another.)

Aside from this being a highly personal issue (and, if the rumor about the teenage mother is true, then apparently something the family does not want to acknowledge), it’s hard to see what legitimate relevance it has. Once, this would have been a career-killing scandal; thankfully, as the result of progressive social activism and the victories for women’s reproductive freedom that Palin herself opposes, there are now many options for forming families, and one’s personal choices in that regard are granted much more respect. Ironically, it is only Palin’s own base that would find anything scandalous in this. But it can certainly be used to create discomfort for the candidate and her family, and, again, among all the irrelevant lightweight issues Palin brings to the campaign, this seems to bear no relation to the question of her fitness for office.

To deliberately pick on an uncomfortable and private issue for the purpose of embarrassing or harassing a candidate is despicable. And to use women’s reproductive choices as weapons against them only involves us in the worst abuses of the right wing. This is absolutely the sort of thing we – decent progressives who support women’s freedom to choose their reproductive pathway – must not be doing. Yet highly-visible blogs like DailyKos and Andrew Sullivan (not a defender of choice, it’s true) are pushing the issue, and others are spreading it with their concern-trolling.**

There is perhaps one argument that makes the issue sound relevant, and that is the question of hypocrisy. The religious right and the GOP are on hair-trigger to judge other people’s lifestyles, family structures, and reproductive choices, so when one of them finds themselves enmeshed in a “non-traditional family” saga, perhaps we are entitled to some schadenfreude? And perhaps we are, but the only decent response is to welcome that family to the community of freedom of choice and freedom from condemnation. Palin, as far as I know, has not been one of the overt persecutors of others in that respect, and does not deserve to be persecuted in return.

Lee Stranahan, of the Huffington Post, offers this odd defense:

The whole story is based on an insulting view of fundamentalist Christians; that they’d be so freaked out by a teenage pregnancy that they’d have the Governor — the most highly visible and public women in the small fishbowl of Alaska — fake a pregnancy to cover up the sins her of daughter Bristol.

Actually, I find that perfectly possible to believe. But it’s just as much none of our business as it is none of theirs. We’ve got to stop making political fodder out of people’s health and reproduction, out of their attempts to just live their lives as best they can by their own lights, without interfering with anyone else. I have little hope that this story – whatever is behind it – will have any such effect on the GOP; in fact I have little hope that it will even encourage Sarah Palin to think that women who make different reproductive choices from hers might deserve the kind of privacy and respect that she wants for herself. But if we’re going to see a future in which people have the freedom and security to live their own lives and make their own choices, we have to let everyone do so, even those who oppose that freedom for others. We can’t let ourselves be the thing we oppose and expect anything good to come of it.

Update: Palin herself has just announced that the rumors her 17-year-old daughter had the baby (Trig) in May are false, because . . .  the daughter is pregnant now.

ST. PAUL (Reuters) –  The 17-year-old daughter of Republican  vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said  on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by  liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up  for her child.

That would seem to lay the other rumor to rest. It also explains why the daughter was seen wearing an engagement ring – she’s marrying the father of her expected baby (yes, 17 years old, with a baby and a husband, neither of which she planned for). Palin has requested privacy for her family over that issue, and again it seems to me they ought to have it. This does raise the tantalizing question of how her insane fundie supporters are going to react, but I think we know the answer to that already: they would be screaming and howling at any Democrat who made the same announcement, but nothing matters if you’re a Republican, so it’ll be just fine.

* I’m highly suspicious that any of her supporters actually believe she is qualified for this office, or that they really mean the things they say in claiming so.
** I hope that’s not what I’m doing here, also. That’s not my intent, at least.

[Crossposted from my group political blog, Lean Left.]

Update: Revised description of one of the rumors; my original explanation was wrong.

Michelle Malkin now takes on the cause, and the rhetoric, of the misogynist anti-autonomy movement and its efforts to eliminate accessible reproductive healthcare.

Planned Parenthood is the largest single provider of prenatal, contraceptive, and abortion care in the US. In a country in which over 85% of all counties have no abortion services provider at all, in which health insurance plans are not required to provide contraception, and in which government-provided health programs for the poor are prohibited from providing abortion or, at times, even information about abortion, Planned Parenthood is often the only reproductive health provider available in many communities, and usually the only one available at reduced cost.

This drives the anti-woman brigade screaming crazy. There has been an organized campaign against Planned Parenthood by the sex-negative right wing for years, using a combination of smear tactics, lies, distortions, and political lobbying. Attacks range across everything from Margaret Sanger’s racism (don’t believe what you hear from hypocritical liars), Planned Parenthood’s practices of murder, malpractice, and coverup (don’t believe what you hear from anti-woman liars), and the – in Malkin’s terms – “obscene profits” Planned Parenthood makes from the lucrative business of providing subsidized healthcare to uninsured patients in poor communities (don’t believe what you hear from financially illiterate liars). The reason, of course, is that Planned Parenthood is doing what they are dead set on wiping out: making reproductive autonomy real for the most vulnerable women in America.

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There has been a kind of mini-carnival developing across the blogs lately, on the subject of sexual violence in prisons. It began with a recent LA Times Op-Ed on the subject by high-profile blogger Ezra Klein. It’s good to see attention being paid to this issue; the number of bloggers getting involved is encouraging.

But, as important as the issue is, and as vital as it is to re-assess and reform our justice and prison systems overall, I think viewing this as merely an aspect of the mis-management of prisons is a mistake. Systemic sexual abuse occurs not merely in prisons but in the military, among the “contractors” of KBR in Iraq, between priests and congregants, in the workplace, and throughout society. As feminist critics of violence against women have long been saying, the problem is not one of sex in itself, but of the use and abuse of power in general. It is just one manifestation of an issue that pervades the authoritative control of human beings by other human beings.

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Michael Gerson, Bush administration tool and terminal sufferer from Conservative Comprehension Disorder, continues his pattern of getting everything exactly backwards in his Washington Post-sponsored campaign of attacks on Barack Obama. The day after April Fool’s Day (he must have missed a deadline), Gerson published another misinformed screed, this one claiming that Obama is an “extremist” on abortion for opposing laws that would have sentenced women to death. As usual with Gerson and the forced-pregnancy crowd generally, almost everything he says is factually false, and a repetition of standard right-wing myths. The column consists of nothing more than Gerson and the Post carrying water for the organized anti-woman crowd by repeating their well-worn talking points verbatim, with no pretense of originality or reportorial integrity. (more…)

“Reproductive Health Reality Check” is running an April Fool’s Day blog carnival against “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” that mislead patients seeking abortion with deliberately deceptive tactics and false information. “CPCs” are medical fraud – there is no other description for it. And they are an increasing problem as abortion services are continually targetted and women have fewer real options; currently they outnumber real, full-service reproductive health clinics 2:1.

College women are specifically targeted by these charlatans – sometimes with official support from the colleges themselves. Shockingly, not only does Georgetown University – a Catholic school – refuse to provide any form of contraception or abortion referral through its campus healthcare center or hospital, they apparently have also been blanketing the campus with anti-abortion stickers whose only pregnancy-care referral number is to a CPC, not a real health clinic. (Full disclosure: I have an MA from GU, from the early 90s, and their behavior in this regard was even more reprehensible then.) UNC Chapel Hill students have had to create their own sex-ed programs for fellow students, who mostly come from local high schools with “abstinence only” programs and literally don’t know anything about reproductive health, and then are targeted for lurid propaganda by a CPC located just off campus. Students at other schools have had to do the same.

CPCs are a threat to the larger patient population as well. Vicki Saporta of the National Abortion Federation documents many of the problems they represent, including their deceptive tactics, medical fraud, and the support they receive from the anti-choice right (including over $30 million in taxpayers’ money from the Bush administration, and more from state legislatures). Allyson Kirk reports her experience with a CPC that had deliberately located itself along the entranceway to a real health clinic; after receiving an appointment at the real clinic, she mistakenly entered the wrong door, deliberately made up to look like a pro-choice facility, and was treated as if she was the expected patient, then subjected to invasive questioning and fraudulent misinformation.

This kind of behavior would be criminal in a real health clinic. CPCs present themselves in a deliberately fraudulent manner, impersonating real clinics with trained personnel (almost invariably, nobody at a CPC is a licensed healthcare practitioner) offering appropriate healthcare services, for the deliberate purpose of manipulating patients’ decisions and foreclosing their options; they then defend themselves legally by denying that they are subject to the professional obligations of real healthcare providers. The more this is known, and the more their tactics are exposed, the safer women will be.

I don’t usually write link-only posts, but this is worthwhile and the stories some contributors have to share are appalling. Go take a look.

The anti-choice brigade has a peculiar fondness for chirpy slogans, including many that don’t even make any sense. (“It’s a Baby, Not a Choice”; “Attention, Rebellious Jezebels“) Among their most annoying tics are the constant equation of marginally-differentiated embryos with whatever else they can think of that seems to carry some kind of emotional punch but has no moral parallel with the issue at hand (toddlers, black slaves, Holocaust victims), betraying not the slightest comprehension that the equation of those persons with marginally-differentiated embryos is an insult to the people they are piggybacking their obsession on. But logical rigor is not a part of that movement. For that reason, children’s story-books are as meaningful a moral argument, to them, as anything else.

In particular, I have heard the catchphrase from Horton Hears a Who - Dr. Seuss’s paen to tolerance and understanding – used as an anti-choice slogan. The story, as I’m sure you recall, involves Horton, an elephant who, with his big ears and profound moral sensitivity, hears tiny noises coming from a small speck of dust he finds one day; listening carefully, he discerns that there is an entire world of microscopic creatures living inside the dust speck. When he reports it, he is declared insane by the moral troglodytes around him, who seek not only to imprison Horton but to commit genocide by boiling the dust speck to put an end to all such nonsense. Horton goes to heroic lengths to save the dust speck until the Whos inside finally succeed – by joining all their voices together equally, including that of the youngest child in the town – in making themselves heard and thus acknowledged as persons in their own right. Horton bountifully concludes: “A person’s a person no matter how small.”

As Wikipedia notes, the book was published in 1954, and the roles of the chief villains in the book seem to parallel that of Joseph McCarthy in his witch-hunts against unpopular or dissenting voices. It has been co-opted by anti-choice activists and organizations since then, however.

Which brings me to the point of this post, which is merely to predict and warn against a resurgence of ironically Seuss-based medical McCarthyism in the wake of the upcoming live/animated film version of the book, slated for release on March 14th. Seemingly unnecessary, given the existence of the lovely 1970 Chuck Jones animated version that brightened my childhood so long ago, the movie stars the annoyingly talented Jim Carrey, as well as Steve Carell and a raft of guest stars. It’ll probably be fun, but will probably kick off an incessant clangor of smug, misogynist voices chanting “A person’s a person no matter how small” with absolutely no appreciation of the irony that in doing so they thereby embrace the concept of “personhood” that the anti-choice movement usually tries to avoid or obscure.

I don’t advocate starting a slogan war over a children’s movie, nor do I advocate hanging women’s freedom from slogans and catch-phrases to begin with. But, as with the annual Roe v. Wade Day protests, organized clinic harassment, and the like, it’s as well to be aware of what’s coming.

UPDATE: It’s beginning. From the movie review page of Christianity Today: A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction:

Seuss’ beloved phrase, “a person’s a person, no matter how small” . . . embodies a principle as simple as it is profound, and speaks to so all areas of our lives and, indeed, our faith. It is a mantra that endows all created things with a sacredness and value found only in their Creator. While Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) never intended his phrase to become a salvo in the abortion debate, many see in its simplicity the totality of the pro-life message.

The film also acts, equally inadvertently, as a model of religious conviction. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” says the writer of Hebrews, “the evidence of things not seen.” Contrasting the words of Hebrews 11:1, Sour Kangaroo tells Horton, “If you can’t hear, see or feel something, it does not exist.” But Horton is persuaded. He knows that the Mayor and the Whos of Who-ville are real, despite not being able to see them. In the same way, Horton’s immensity actually makes him invisible to the microscopic Mayor. When trying to describe Horton to the rest of the Whos, the Mayor frequently employs the sort of language one uses to describe a God who has yet to make himself visible to us.

Here we have a grand Christian missing-the-point Double Stuff.

Of course “a person’s a person” at any size. The question is, are the Whos persons? And the answer, again of course, is that they are. Why do we think so? Because we see that they are – they have houses and villages, a Mayor, a community, thoughts and interests and fears. They’re aware of themselves and care about what happens in their own lives. They have all the moral content of personhood, living lives of interest and value to themselves as persons. Sadly for them, they’re easy to overlook, which decreases the likelihood that their interests will be recognized, let alone valued. But nobody questions that their interests deserve consideration, as soon as it is recognized that they have interests. Which captures in a nutshell the utter boneheadedness of the attempt to analogize their plight to the issue of abortion. The Whos’ problem was that nobody knew they existed; as soon as their existence was demonstrated, their personhood was self-evident. (Once they were heard, they could claim their own interests, which is pretty good evidence of having some.) Not the most evil anti-dust-speck denizen of Seuss’s world denies the moral standing of the Whos, once it is known they exist. But no such question arises at all in regard of the human fetus. The controversy in that case is precisely the opposite of the one facing the Whos. We have always known the fetus exists – but even having seen them, there is no evidence whatsoever that fetuses are persons. It is not merely that they can’t be heard, like the Whos (or, more exactly, can’t speak at all) – it is that they have no thoughts to express, no awareness of themselves to get anxious about, no consciousness of their own existence, no interests, no values, no moral content to the biological processes that make up the sum and total of their lives for at least most of their gestational period if not beyond. The Whos are persons – no matter how small. Fetuses are not persons – no matter how big. That’s the crucial difference that is nowhere acknowledged in anti-choice nattering about tiny little dust-speck lives. And, ironically, that idiocy is actually expressed using the term “person” – but using it in a way utterly oblivious to its meaning, and to the moral difference between entities that are, and that are not, persons. Hilariously, Dr. Seuss uses the term correctly, but his anti-choice followers lack the perception to understand the moral meaning of even a Dr. Seuss story.

The second blunder is just as dumb. Virtually nothing in the second paragraph quoted above is correct. “Faith” may well be as dunderheaded as the Bible describes it to be – certainly it seems to be in common practice. But Sour Kangaroo is exactly right (speaking in somewhat metaphorical terms), and both Horton and Dr. Seuss know it. Horton does not know the Whos are real “despite not being able to see them” – he knows they are real because he perceives them (by hearing them, not by seeing them, but with his physical senses in any case). And it is precisely because the other jungle citizens finally gain physical evidence of the Whos’ existence (supplied by the purely physical process of sound amplification by increased power input) that they finally come to believe as well – and immediately change their minds about the existence of the source of the sensory input that was previously undetectable, after once detecting it. It may be that the Mayor of Whoville “employs the sort of language one uses to describe God”, when referring to the larger world, but if he does so he’s as dumb as a Christian movie reviewer. Why would his constituents believe him when he persists in talking like an idiot? The reason their world shakes and trembles, of course, is that it is subject to large forces imposed from outside – and when the citizens of Whoville gain clear knowledge of the source of those forces, they then change their minds about the existence of the elephant, just as the jungle citizens changed their minds about the existence of the Whos when presented with evidence. And both groups are justified in refusing to believe until they are presented with that evidence – but neither persists in a false belief when the evidence has been supplied. The story is a beautiful illustration of the scientific method. Not only does this reviewer not understand that, but, unlike either the Whos or Horton’s fellow jungle-dwellers, she is incapable of seeing what is put right in front of her. Throughout and throughout the Who story, people insist on physical evidence for claims of the existence of physical objects, and then accept the evidence as soon as it is made perceivable. This reviewer insists on claiming, in sheer defiance of that obvious sequence of events, that they are acting on “faith”. They simply are not – there’s no two ways about it – but you can be sure that fact will in no way stem the flood of false and stupid nonsense we’re going to hear about this – and related – issues.

Chris Muir is the bizarrely unfunny cartoonist behind “Day by Day” – a conservatively-themed Webtoon that is so consistently incomprehensible that it has spawned an entire cottage industry consisting of the reworking of his strips by liberal bloggers on a desperate quest to force them to make some sense. Adding to the through-the-looking-glass fun are Muir’s many signature artistic tics: utterly non-sequitur dialog, references to Muir’s personal political hotbuttons that are so obscure many of the cartoons appear to have no recognizable content, a cast of characters that consists of weirdly-drawn urban hipsters spouting conservative cliches while striking pointless poses, a female cast that consists exclusively of huge-breasted slim-waisted sexpots with low necklines and bare tummies, artistic skills so marginal that his human poses often simply leave out major body parts or appear deformed, and a strange penchant for showing dialog balloons emerging from implausible parts of the speaker’s body. Plenty of nutty goodness there for those who have the time and energy to wade through it, which I rarely do.

This week, however, Muir joined the creepy talking-fetus brigade of conservative ‘toonists. It’s been discussed before, but it’s apparently a growing meme on the right wing – fetal “personhood” taken to such a bizarrely literal extreme that they imagine fetuses as having fully-functional adult personalities, and sometimes adult bodies (and why not? – with all the retrograde scientific claptrap the right wing has latched onto, the homunculus theory is hardly out of place). This can’t be a coincidence. Literalizing the claim of fetal personhood distinctly changes the relationship between, and relative moral standing of, a woman and her fetus, to the detriment (need it be said?) of the woman. That this delusional characterization of pregnancy has become so common and so widespread of late signals another move in the ongoing assault on the effective moral personhood of women. Here is Muir’s contribution to the war:

 Classic Muir. The first panel makes no sense. (Emphasizing the word “must” makes the second woman’s response seem like a logical deduction from the first woman’s statement – but it’s non-sequitur. As commentary on the immigration bill issue, it’s equally nonsensical: who is legal? why “must”? what the hell is he talking about?) He hits bottom in the second panel, when the woman’s fetus addresses her directly and declares itself to be an “illegal immigrant” in a voice loud enough to be heard by the woman next to her. This panel’s a three-fer: creepy fetus fetishization, self-contradiction (the fetus appears to be claiming solidarity with illegal aliens, which is against Muir’s own point of view [does he not actually read his own strip?]), plus nutjob rhapsodizing about marriage that is both false and idiotic (there’s nothing illegal about being conceived before your parents were married, as this fetus is said to have been; he’s somehow elevated a right-wing obsession with adult women’s sex lives to the level of a criminal act on the part of the fetus, which is impressive doing even for Muir). The third panel is just dumb. (What has late-night TV got to do with a talking fetus? Is she hallucinating the voice? That would undercut the fetus-fetish message, plus the other woman seems to hear it, too. Is the fetus watching TV? That’s even creepier.) It’s like he feels no responsibility to relate the content of one panel to another, let alone make his weird asides and personal in-jokes make any sense to anyone else.

The bottom line, though, is the talking fetus. No matter how dumb the rest is, talking fetuses are weird, scary, and implicitly misogynistic.

Which means, of course, that it’s time for another Chris Muir cartoon upgrade project. I’ve posted my weak efforts below the cut. Feel free to pile on. (Add your edited cartoon in comments, or just quote the dialog for the balloons.)

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Mingle² – a blog that links a lot of quizzes, surveys, and other online game-type-stuff, offers this nifty service: What’s My Blog Rated? Enter the URL of your blog, journal or other Web site, and it gives you an MPAA-style rating of its content.

I’m delighted to report Sufficient Scruples received the following:

Why, however?

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

• sex (17x)
• abortion (14x)
• breast (6x)
• death (3x)
• drugs (2x)
• gay (1x)