Jen Nedeau talks about blogging and feminism, Obama overturns the ban on stem cell research, and Michael Steele catches heat on abortion.

 

 

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Links in this episode:

NPR on stem cell ban overturn

Dear Science

Glenn Beck on stem cells

Michael Steele puts his foot in his mouth

Olbermann on Steele

Limbaugh takes more misogynist shots

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing Change.org’s feminist blogger about moving feminism into the 21st century.  Also, Obama overturns the ban on stem cell research, and Michael Steele puts his foot in his mouth regarding abortion.

Anti-choice politician David Vitter is one of my favorites, because he really shows how much the culture warriors just like to vote for men that are, frankly, bullies.  You’d think you’d get that from the fact that they push women and minorities around, but no, it takes an incident like this to draw attention.

• david Vitter *

Everything you need to know about social conservatives.  Sticking their noses where they don’t belong, and then lying about it when they get caught.

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The question to ask yourself is this: Is our long national nightmare finally over?

• stem cells 1 *

I appreciate what Obama is doing, but the fact of the matter is that science is in fact political in the U.S., and it will be until that day that we finally get rid of our strong streak of anti-intellectual sentiment.  What’s fascinating about our culture warriors is that the issues that draw their attention are pretty much never about "life", but about sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong, oppressing women, and hating on liberals and intellectuals.  Halting research on stems cells is incoherent if you are actually pro-life, for reasons I’ll get into in a bit.  But one of the obvious issues here is that stem cell research is aimed directly at saving human lives, and real ones that belong to real people with names and memories who will be missed.  Alas, our country is swamped with enough patriarchal nutbars who are flattered by the idea that their newly planted sperm is more a person than grandpa with his diabetes or kidney failure.  

• stem cells 2 *

This sort of thing, I think, just emboldens anti-choice nuts.  Remember, all these struggles are about power and control, and scientists are certainly in the echelon of official targets of right wing abuse.  Usually the demagogues attack college professors and academics in general, in part, I think, because going after scientists specifically calls into question those who do things conservatives like, such as developing new weapons.  But for social conservatives, I’d imagine, scientists are the absolute scariest of the pointy-headed intellectual crew, because they see science as replacing religion’s authority.

They aren’t wrong on this.  Science has pretty much destroyed, for instance, the myth that god made us out of dirt and made women to be subservient to men.  In fact, the same kinds of scientists that are doing stem cell research are the ones who work in the field of biology, and biologists are definitely hated by creationists, who have significant overlap with anti-choicers.  

Like check out this guy:

• stem cells 3 *

First of all, saying that you’re testing on "human subjects" when the subjects are literally balls of undifferentiated cells is a profound insult to actual people, especially those who’ve been hurt in unethical experiments in the past.  But I want to draw attention to an assumption he makes about how scientists are just amoral people who have to be firmly controlled by fantasists who believe in demons and talking fetuses, as if fundies have the  moral high ground over the sorts of people who developed, say, the polio vaccine.  The idea is that because of egg-headery, we should automatically treat scientists as morally suspect, a position I find troubling.  

Truth is, most unethical research in the past was the result not of scientists who are too egg-heady to know better, but because of scientists who had the same prejudices as the people around them, the very ones that conservatives are often seeking to preserve.  The infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment wasn’t the result so much of how science dehumanized the experiments, but how racism did.  Given the choice between a random scientist and a random pro-lifer to treat me like a full human being, I’d pick the scientist any day.  Because I know that the pro-lifer has already retreated into fantasy.

The Dear Science podcast looked deeper into these issues, and I think it was really useful.  First of all, they explained very well how, even if you believe that embryos are full persons, then stem cell research still should not trouble you.  Everyone on the show is a scientists that works with stem cells.  (http://podcasts.thestranger.com/dear_science/)

• stem cells 4 *

The also explain that the choice for these embryos is to use them for research or flush them down the drain with bleach.  That’s it. What I’m glad for is that Obama and his team are rightfully positioning this as a fight between anti- and pro-science forces.  Which is what it is, more than about "life".  

Of course, none of this reality will ever stop some mouth-breathers on TV from saying the most asinine things.  Like Glenn Beck.  

• stem cells 5 *

Of course, stem cells have nothing to do with the master race or anything like that.  Nor should we consider right wing nuts more ethical because they’re louder and whinier and stupider, even though the mainstream media often makes that mistake.

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insert interview

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It was already obvious that RNC chairman Michael Steele is in major trouble.  Hard it may be for the rest of us to believe it, but he’s apparently not wingnutty enough for the conservative base.  First he insulted Rush Limbaugh.  And then he had to grovel and apologize and admit that Rush is the boss.  He also is having major staffing issues, but that seems to be less of an issue than his inability to stand far to the right of Attila the Hun on every issue.  But now he’s gotten into it on abortion.  

I got a clip of Chris Matthews reading this interview Steele did in GQ magazine where he apparently didn’t come down on the evils of womanhood hard enough.

• steele 1 *

I just want to interrupt at this point out that Steele tripped over a sticking issue for the finger-wagging right.  Which is this—they get off on being able to judge others, right?  And being a woman who chooses abortion means you get to be the object of their delighted scorn.  But if women have that choice taken away, you don’t have as easy a time separating the good women who chose to have a baby and the bad women who chose not to.  In a sense, Steele’s right.  If you like being sanctimonious on this issue, legal abortion helps you out, because it means that you have a steady stream of bad women to judge.  

Of course, what he doesn’t get is that abortion happens whether it’s legal or not, but when it’s legal, it’s harder to find out who had abortions so you can judge them.  Because of the right to privacy.  The hope, I suspect, is that illegal abortion means women getting arrested or being outed during raids of illegal clinics.  Public humiliation of sexually active women is easier under the illegal abortion regime.

• steele 2 *

Matthews has no idea what happened there, but I have a theory.  My theory is this—Steele started off on the foot of the moralizing prig, and then he realized halfway through that he’d screwed up big time.  At this point, he tried to back out of it by using the "leave it to the states" excuse.  But as we all know, no one really believes it should be left to the states, because that would mean some evil sluts in New York or Massachusetts can get away with having sex.  Anti-choicers would hop on a federal ban if they thought it was at all possible.  States’ rights is and always has been a lie.

Anti-choicers deliberately engage in confusion on this issue, because they want people to declare that they’re "pro-life" even though they know most people are hostile to abortion bans.  The way to do this is to imply that all you need to do to be a moral person is to think abortion is very bad.  So you get a lot of confused people who say they don’t want a ban, but that they’re pro-life.  I think Steele just got his wires crossed in what is a very confusing area.  

If he didn’t have a bunch of wingnuts already straining to find a way to get rid of him, I think this quote would have gotten a pass. But now he’s scrambling to save himself under an onslaught of abuse.  

• steele 3 *

But then Steele came back around and said he was against such an amendment.  What to do?  Steele’s in between a rock and a hard place.  If he does his job of getting the Republican party in a position where people will vote for them, he needs to shy away from extreme right wing views, and especially away from supporting a constitutional amendment that may threaten contraception as well as abortion.  But if he doesn’t toe the hard right line, he risks getting tossed out of the party.  

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, yes, it really is about hating women edition.  What I fail to understand, and is probably the major theme of this podcast, is why we’re supposed to believe that conservatives are motivated by fetuses and not misogyny when you hear them say stuff like this as soon as the topic changes away from abortion?  

• rush Limbaugh *

Sometimes I think that hating on women is the only thing that conservatives got left, and some of them, like Rush Limbaugh, are just going to go on overdrive.