Emily Bazelon talks about the movement to improve access to abortion by creating more providers. Opponents of the 14th amendment move on to “terror babies” as a tactic. Also, some good news for once.

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Muslim community center controversy

Ludicrous “terror babies”

Maddow on “terror babies”

Arkansas sex ed to include actual sex ed

Ella approved

Aniston on sperm donation

O’Reilly freaks out

“Illegal” U.S. citizens?

On this episode of Reality Cast, Emily Bazelon will be on to talk about her article in the New York Times on the new abortion providers.  Also, the war on immigrant women’s reproductive rights takes a baroque, conspiracy theory turn, and I’ll wind up with a segment on some of the good news in the world of reproductive rights.

I’m sure you’ve heard about this whole controversy about a Muslim community center in lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center.  The Daily Show had the most commonsensical coverage of it, as they sadly often do. 

• mosque *

I just want to take the time to note that if you’ve been following the battle for reproductive rights, this kind of flare-up isn’t as much of a surprise.  The culture warrior right has always been opposed to freedom of religion, and forcing their religious beliefs about sex and abortion on women has been the forefront of that war.  This is just another example.

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Just when you thought the right wing assault on the 14^th amendment couldn’t get sillier, a brand new conspiracy theory emerges.  Granted, it’s for the same old purpose, which is to stigmatize the child-bearing of some women, namely immigrant women.  It’s the flip side of the forced childbirth brigade, as in right wingers often want to ban abortion and limit access to contraception to force some women to have babies, and then, without missing a beat, they want to penalize the child-bearing of other women.  Not that they want the women they oppose having babies to have better access to contraception or abortion, mind you.  They just want to make it so hard on immigrant women that they just give up on life. 

And in doing so, they’re arguing that babies can be terrorists.

• terror 1 *

Of course, one could say that a conspiracy theory aimed at tourists having babies isn’t an attack on immigrant women.  But that’s not really true, because this is all a part of using racist fears in order to mount a pseudo-campaign against the 14^th amendment.  And I say “pseudo” because the chance of actually repealing it is a super long shot. 

But this really does take the cake in terms of  nutty conspiracy theories.  The idea that the best use of resources for a terrorist organization is to ship pregnant women to the U.S. to have babies that have American citizenship with the hopes that 20 years from now they’ll be able to use that citizenship in service of terrorism is roughly the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long time, and my job is to trawl the internets looking for stupid things that wingnuts say.  And yet the terror babies thing is all over the place all of a sudden.  Like on the floor of the House from a Texas representative.

• terror 2 *

Anderson Cooper was all over how ridiculous this story was, getting actual people who actually know about these sorts of things to comment on it.  I’m sure their first inclination was to laugh hysterically, but of course, the realization of what this conspiracy theory is in service of is enough to make anyone somber.

• terror 3 *

Cooper confront Representative Gohmert about how he has no evidence for this claim that people are producing terror babies, and showed him this clip of Thomas Fuentes calling the whole thing absurd.  And Gohmert’s reaction reminded me of what happens when the trolls in blog comments are confronted with their lack of logic.  I suspect the cameraman had to wear a spittle shield.

• terror 4 *

I won’t torture you with his flip-out any more, but I do think it’s interesting that Gohmert thinks that the mere existence of U.S. citizens with non-citizen parents means that everyone involved is a terrorist.  Since this is a land of immigrants, by that logic, all of us are terrorists.  Barring Native Americans, of course.  I’m sure even Rep. Gohmert’s family immigrated here at some point in time.  Does that make him a terrorist, or was it just the first family members of his that were born here that count as terrorists?  Just kidding. One reason that Gohmert is losing it is that he knows that he can’t just come out and say that the difference between babies we’re to assume are “terrorists” and babies that aren’t actually planning on blowing up buildings in between watching Teletubbies and their afternoon nap has everything to do with skin color and country of origin. 

Rachel Maddow had some fun mocking this entire conspiracy theory.  I’ll take this segment out with her thoughts on this.

• terror 5 *

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Insert interview

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Since there’s a tendency in news programs like this podcast to be all doom and gloom, I thought it would be nice to take a break and do a round-up of some positive developments in the world of reproductive health and rights.  In a sense, it’s not surprising that there is some good news to report.  We have a pro-choice majority in power, and economic hard times sometimes make the forced pregnancy brigade’s demands seem even more outrageous. The enthusiasm for abstinence-only education has wilted for years as Americans actually start to find out what it actually entails.  And on that note, here’s the first bit of good news.

• good 1 *

Of couse, the bad news is that this news report is unnecessarily and bafflingly reactionary about all this.  The reporter starts the segment with a placard behind him that says “Lessons in Sex”.  That strikes me as close to the right wing framing, which is to say minimizing understanding and trying to use titillation to maximize people’s fears.  Most of us, when we hear “Lessons in Sex” think about lessons in technique, something you might get from the Joy of Sex or Cosmo magazine.  The truth is way more mundane.  The lessons are in contraception.  And the reason is that telling kids to just say no isn’t working for Arkansas.

• good 2 *

This is fairly typical.  The more conservative a state, the more likely kids are to be shamed about sexuality, and the more likely it is that they’ll have trouble overcoming that shame and other obstacles to get contraception.  The result is more teen pregnancies.  As in, 47% more teenage pregnancies per capita than the national average.  Even a Bible Belt state has to admit that means you have to change tactics. 

But this isn’t the only bout of common sense that’s broken out.  I’d like to highlight this good news to contrast it with the battle we had just a few years ago.

• good 3 *

There was, of course, no doubt that anti-choicers would object to this.  The abortion thing is a smokescreen; as the first story demonstrates, objecting to emergency contraception is far from the only way that anti-choicers fight contraception and for a higher unintended pregnancy rate, meaning that anti-choicers, while objecting to legal abortion, fight to make the abortion rate as high as possible.  A bunch of dooking around making preposterous claims that they know better than the researchers how morning after pills is just so much hand-waving.  At the bottom of this is an objection to contraception itself.  The fury over emergency contraception is due to a combination of two factors.  One is that it’s relatively new, and that gives them a news hook to attack it.  Two is that contraception taken after sex triggers the same deep-set anger that abortion does about women’s right to control their bodies even after a man has, in their eyes, laid claim to it.

In fact, Bill O’Reilly comically made explicit this fear that if men can’t exert some kind of physical claim to women’s bodies through sex, then the whole world will fall apart.  It was all very silly.  Jennifer Aniston is in this new movie The Switch that’s about sperm donor baby-making.  As part of the promotion of the film, Aniston told some gossip rag that she’s glad women have the option of sperm donation if they want to do the single mom thing.  Which I would have thought was a banal, Hollywood thing to say, but Bill O’Reilly acted like Aniston showed up at his house to cut off his testicles and take his wife off to join her Amazon commune. 

• good 4 *

I’m more worried that O’Reilly thinks it’s good for 12-year-olds to think they need a man while making babies.  I’m pretty sure there should be a little more daylight between playing with Barbies and settling down into marriage and babies myself.  But if it makes O’Reilly feel any better, I doubt that those 12-and-13-year-old girls who he fears might be comfortable being single are really lining up at the sperm bank.  On the whole, I think that most of them simply aren’t into baby-making by any means at this time. 

Luckily, Aniston replied, saying sarcastically, “And, of course, many women dream of finding Prince Charming (with fatherly instincts), but for those who’ve not yet found their Bill O’Reilly, I’m just glad science has provided a few other options.”  Glad she zoomed right in to the anxiety that drives all this.  I, for one, prefer to spend my time with men who don’t feel that they have to use a little force to have women in their lives, due to the fact that they can coast on charm itself.  I do see why O’Reilly perhaps doesn’t see that as an option. 

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, proof positive that this is all just a bunch of bigotry edition.  This anchor on Fox & Friends has a very interesting opinion of what the 14^th amendment does.

• slur *

This is a tautology, so I apologize.  But by definition, a native born American citizen is not an illegal immigrant.  So the term “illegals” in this case is absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a racial slur and not defensible in any way as a descriptive word.