Smacking down Feminists For Life and talking about holiday movies. Also, Sara Cleveland from NARAL Pro-Choice Texas discusses the upcoming legislative session.

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NARAL Pro-Choice Texas

Gavin Newsome explains it all

Feminists For Life releases misleading videos

Vampires!

Mexicans. Taking over the country. With Viagra.

This week on Reality Check, I’ll be addressing Feminists For Life’s new video series and running down upcoming movies that address sexual themes.  Also, what’s going on next year in what Molly Ivins dubbed the National Laboratory for Bad Government, the Texas legislature?  I’ll be interviewing Sara Cleveland from Texas NARAL to find out the scoop.

As I predicted last week, the fight over Prop 8 and same sex marriage in general is far from over.  Gavin Newsome was on CNN explaining a court challenge to the law.  

• gavin newsom *

At first I wasn’t so sure that the revision not an amendment argument would hold water.  But since this is the first instance of legal discrimination being written into the state constitution, which is against the principles of the document, it seems like the lawyers have a case.

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Feminists For Life has started a new video series.  I’m obsessed with this organization, probably because I’m especially embittered by people who deceive and misrepresent themselves for political purposes.  Feminists For Life has never shown any interest in feminism that I can tell.  They grab at the label "feminist" in order to deceive people about whether or not abortion bans are bad for women.  Their sole purpose is to deceive people into thinking safe, legal abortion is not absolutely necessary for women’s health.  Their definition of "feminism"  is a weird one indeed, since their view of women is indistinguishable from that of paternalistic sexists who think women are too dim to know what we really want, and that all women everywhere are happy to give birth at any time, and if they think otherwise, it’s because they’re deluded.  They claim to be neutral on the subject of contraception, but when they do discuss it, it’s always negatively, such as when they spread lies about the danger of the birth control pill.

Anyway, they have  video series.  The most recent one is a speech given by Chaunie Saelens Brusie, a student who became pregnant and fought for more support for pregnant students at her university.  On its surface, a good cause.  But when you dig even a little, you see how profoundly anti-feminist Feminists For Life is.

• ffl 1 *

Right off the bat, you can pick up the tone of the work that Feminists For Life focuses on.  For all that they claim to be a feminist anti-abortion organization, what they tend to be in practice is an organization dedicated to convincing college women that they should start having children while still in school.  And that getting on the baby train in your youth is—as the speaker implies—more important than any course you will take.  Like most anti-choice organizations, they tend to promote an image of the average woman who gets an abortion as a young white woman on her first pregnancy.  Someone who is ripe for being pressured into the Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle, perhaps, or at minimum, the kind of girl who needs to pay for her fornication by delivering a child and handing it over to a worthy white Christian couple.

In reality, most women who have abortions are mothers already.  

• ffl 2 *

This is where Feminists For Life’s deceit gets most maddening.  They do push for things that feminists are on board with, such as improving maternity benefits and day care for students.  Though I can’t say that the family housing thing seems fair.  We shouldn’t kick out students from dorms so we can convert them to family housing that will mostly stay empty.  But Feminists For Life doesn’t do these things for women.  They do these things to take away your so-called excuses for not having babies in college.  Notice that they don’t go out of their way to make sure that university health coverage also covers contraception, much less abortion.

• ffl 3 *

And of course, the boyfriend marries her.  And this might be the ugliest deceit of all.  Feminists For Life is extremely dedicated to convincing young women that giving birth in college is not only not a bad idea, but will make your life so much better.  That the boyfriend will commit to you, the parents will glory in it, and nothing will get in your way.  That this is true for a few women doesn’t mean it’s true for most.  What about those who don’t want to commit to the boyfriend?  What about women who want to go on to grad school?  Feminists For Life would have you believe the only things that keep women from wanting to bear children young and frequently are obstacles put in their way by others, such as unsupportive universities.  But some things can’t be done away with.  Changing university policy won’t make that boyfriend a good husband.  It won’t mean that grad school won’t require 60 hour weeks.  

And the thing is, I think Feminists For Life knows this.  And they don’t care if their lies screw up your life.  They don’t care if you believe that keeping a pregnancy will mean perfect bliss only to find out that you have to drop out later because you can’t keep up.  Often, I’m inclined to think that’s the whole point of the operation.

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• interview with Sara Cleveland *

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This podcast is releasing on the first day of December, so we’re already a few days into the holiday season.  Which means shopping, Christmas carols, parties, eating too much, and of course, a run of movies designed to attract Oscar attention or just give you and your family an excuse to hang out together without talking.  Since it’s Oscar bait season, there’s going to be a lot of movies about Nazis, of course, but there’s also  many movies touching on issues of sexuality and reproduction.

First off the bat is alas, a brain dead blockbuster that is going to make money even if it’s terrible. Right now it’s rating a weak 56 on Metacritic.  For our purposes, though, it’s interesting because it’s a classic reactionary horror story, even if it seems light on the horror.

• twilight *

Yep, "Twilight".  Our own Sarah Seltzer has explained the reactionary politics of the book, which soaks young readers in romantic ideas about how young love leads naturally to young marriage and young pregnancy, even if you’re a vampire.  I’d think immortality would mean you realize some things can wait.  If I had a tween or young teenager begging to see this, I confess I’d drop them off and pick them up.  I can’t handle the "I’d die rather than be apart from you," dialogue, which ironically has been known to kill people allergic to insincere clichés.

Much more interesting looking is the biopic of Harvey Milk’s life, titled simply "Milk".  

• milk *

I won’t lie, I’m excited about this movie.  A movie about America’s first gay mayor, who was unfortunately assassinated by the homophobic Dan White because White was embittered over not getting his job back because Milk’s administration was trying to diversify.  The movie is directed by Gus Van Sant, Sean Penn plays Harvey Milk, and Josh Brolin plays Dan White.

The next one in the Oscar bait single word movies is one called "Doubt", and it has Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Phillip Seymour Hoffman in it.  

• doubt *

It’s about a nun confronting a priest she thinks is abusing a student.  But it seems that she has other reasons to dislike this priest, because he wants to modernize the church.  It takes place in the 60s, and it seems like it might genuinely be suspenseful, though who knows whether or not sexual abuse will be handled with honesty, or just be a MacGuffin to drive the plot forward.  Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

And the last on the wait-and-see list is "Revolutionary Road", which comes out in late December.  It stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, but it’s not a what if Jack didn’t die in the Titanic crash movie.  No, this is an adaptation of a 1962 novel about a 50s-era couple that tries to escape the stifling suburbs but finds that they’re trapped.

• revolutionary road *

Skip ahead if you don’t want to hear a potential spoiler.  Apparently, the wife of this very unhappy couple becomes pregnant and, rather than make her already stressed marriage even worse, seeks out an illegal abortion and it goes badly.  This sort of plot was beginning to work itself into popular culture in the 60s, and it accelerated the push to liberalize abortion laws.  But nowadays, filmmakers are sketchy about showing abortion honestly, so there’s always the danger that the screenwriters get scared and back off this plot.  Let’s hope they stay true to the reality of it.

Okay, spoiler over!  Hope you find at least a few good films this holiday season.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts.  Jim Quinn is quickly surpassing Michael Savage in the guano huffing crazy department.  He’s panicking because the Mexican government, which has national health, is covering Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs.

• quinn paranoia *

Yep, he just said that Mexican doctors only treat erectile dysfunction because of their plot to take over the U.S. through baby-making.  I can’t wait until his next theory.  Probably that the Martians funded Obama’s campaign as part of the Martian takeover strategy.

Next week, I’ll be interviewing Aimee Thorn-Thomsen about the Pro-Choice Public Education Project’s new research into what young women of color are feeling and doing with regards to sexual and reproductive health.