Sara Marcus chats about the history of Riot Grrl and the history of 90s rock feminism. Election Day is upon us, and MSNBC produces and excellent, if short, documentary about the assassination of Dr. George Tiller.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution

Aaron Gouveia confronts anti-choicers

Christine O’Donnell doesn’t regret anything she said

That would include this masturbation stuff

Anti-Ken Buck ad

Michelle Malkin lies about abortion funding

PFAW anti-Toomey ad

Reflections on Maddow’s “The Assassination of Doctor Tiller”

Cheryl Sullenger’s number

Say what?

On this episode of Reality Cast, Sara Marcus will be on to talk about the history of Riot Grrrl.  Also, more election craziness, and a review of Rachel Maddow’s documentary about the assassination of Dr. George Tiller.

When Aaron Gouveia had to take his 16 week pregnant wife to an abortion clinic to terminate a much-wanted pregnancy because of a birth defect, the horrible protesters yelling at them was the last thing that he and his wife felt they needed.  So he took his cell phone while she was in surgery and decided to confront them.

• protestors *

I liked that part, because they threatened to call the cops. Because he was saying what he thought in public.  Right next to them. I guess they thought they had more rights than him because they’re just so self-righteous about the lives of people they don’t understand or want to understand.  I was also struck by the lack of sympathy they had for someone who was going through such a horrible trauma.

********

Election day is nearly upon us, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself when it’s all over.  Sleep, I guess.  Certainly, this has been a crazy election season, both in terms of hilarity and in terms of the anti-choice movement trying to move the ball down the field in their war against abortion rights and contraception.  There are so many questions to be asked post-election.  Like will Christine O’Donnell go away quietly after she takes a beating in polls?  Or will she try to be Sarah Palin Part II, this time with a sterner eye towards self-pleasure?

Speaking of, I think we have a firm answer from O’Donnell on how she feels about those videos from the 90s where she equates masturbation with adultery, and blames it for spreading AIDS.  She did a sit-down interview with CBN’s “The Brody File”, and when asked about her long history of saying nutty things on TV, she said this.

• election 1 *

So, in other words, she believes every word, but she does wish she’d done a better job of hoodwinking the voters about her real beliefs.  Not that this is an uncommon sentiment for a politician to feel, but few are so blunt about it.  As a reminder, one of the things she doesn’t regret saying is that talking about how masturbation is a safer sex practice will just encourage the spread of AIDS.

• election 2 *

The issue being that if people totally believe sex is fun, then they’re going to do it.  The implication is that you can only fight AIDS by making sex off-limits, though good luck enforcing that.  I will note that she also touted the line that once you can do it, in marriage, it’s this crazy amazing thing. Telling kids that sex is this wonderful thing only married grown-ups get to do and that it’s forbidden but so delightful is not the way to encourage them not to experiment with it.

O’Donnell doesn’t have a snowball’s chance, but Ken Buck does, and he also has a pattern of extremist views on reproductive rights.  For instance, he supported Prop 62, a measure anti-choicers are putting on the ballot in hopes that it can be used to attack not just abortion, but contraception, IVF and certain medical treatments for women that are or could be pregnant.  He’s backed off that extreme position somewhat, but the DSCC has put together an ad highlighting the various ways he has a problem with women.

• election 3 *

One of the issues that’s been plaguing the election is basically a fact-based one.  A lot of anti-choicers have been hitting the airwaves, claiming falsely that the health care reform bill has funding for abortion in it, when in fact it severely restricts access to even private funding for abortion.  Some Democrats, like Joe Sestak, may be pro-choice but have highlighted their lack of support for federal funding for abortion.  Despite this, they still get accused of supporting federal funding for abortion.  Here’s an example.

• election 4 *

That’s Michelle Malkin, and needless to say, she’s straight up lying about the health care reform bill, which not only forbids federal funding of abortion, but also makes it such a headache for private funding to pay for it that it’s probably going to disappear soon.  I’m sad that supposedly pro-choicers are crowing about how they helped deprive low income women of their right to choose.  I’m sad that conservative pundits lie about it anyway. The whole process is despicable, and the people getting left out are women who need access to this kind of health care.

Sestak’s opponent is Republican Pat Toomey, and the People For the American Way put together an anti-Toomey ad that just quoted Toomey directly.

• election 5 *

On the hate crimes thing, I just want to say.  You don’t get thrown in jail for thinking bigoted thoughts.  You don’t get thrown in jail for saying bigoted things.  You can’t be convicted of a hate crime until you throw a punch, fire a gun, or otherwise enact violence.  The notion that it’s a “thought crime” fails when you realize actual violence is the issue.  Most people who oppose hate crime legislation are fine with other statutes that take motive into account, such as anti-terrorism laws.  Since hate crimes are terrorism against oppressed groups, I can only conclude that people who don’t support hate crimes legislation don’t see this kind of terrorism as a real problem.

**********

 insert interview

**********

I promise and I deliver. The Maddow show put together a documentary about the assassination of Dr. Tiller and aired it last Monday.  It was a really good documentary on many points, especially since they only had an hour plus commercials.  As Jodi at Rewire noted, the documentary didn’t really do much in terms of drawing connections between Scott Roeder, who actually pulled the trigger on Dr. Tiller, and the larger radical anti-choice movement to which he belonged. 

They did sit down Randall Terry and Troy Newman of Operation Rescue, who worked the most closely with Roeder before he pulled the trigger and they started pretending they didn’t know much about him.  As you can imagine, Newman  denied that it was his second in command Cheryl Sullenger’s number that Roeder had on his dashboard when he was caught.

• tiller 1 *

My biggest disappointment was they didn’t take the time to expose his dishonesty here.  At the time of the murder, Operation Rescue admitted that it was Sullenger’s number, and she admitted that she personally fed Roeder a lot of information about Dr. Tiller’s whereabouts. She simply said that her number was easy to get.  Now they’re changing their story again.  Interesting.  As reported here before, there is a grand jury being convened in Kansas to see if there was a conspiracy.  Who they’re looking at, I don’t know, but Newman’s assurances that this will be treated like a lone wolf thing don’t strike me as accurate.

Regardless of an actual conspiracy to murder Dr. Tiller, I think the documentary leaves no room for dedicated anti-choice activists to deny guilt in good faith.  The producers carefully build a case demonstrating that anti-choice forces built up an ongoing, sustained, out of control harassment campaign against Dr. Tiller.  Basically, it was a way of begging someone to shoot him without coming out and saying it. 

• tiller 2 *

The disavowals coming from radical anti-choicers are half-hearted, in part because they can’t help but be celebratory when one of theirs picks up this constant threatening drumbeat and actually does something.  It’s also because it’s ridiculous to think that you could post pictures, addresses, license plate numbers, and names of relatives without it being taken as a signal to your followers that someone should use this information for violence.  Remember that right after Dr. Tiller was murdered, Jill Stanek posted pictures and addresses for Dr. Leroy Carhart of Nebraska.  It was as close as you can come to focusing the violence on the next target without coming out and saying it directly.  Which I’d call cowardice.  They incite violence, but are too chicken to take responsibility for it.

The one thing I really wanted to see addressed in this documentary was how great a guy Dr. Tiller was and how important the work he did is.  And that was addressed very well in the time allotted.

• tiller 3 *

They also took the time to show how stubborn Dr. Tiller was, and how determined he was that this was his calling and the morons at the gate weren’t going to stop him.  Even when he was shot the first time, he came back to work the next day. 

• tiller 4 *

When people pooh-pooh the idea that this is bona fide terrorism, I think it does well to remind them that not only have anti-choicers shot doctors before, but this wasn’t even the first time one of them shot Dr. Tiller. Or bombed his clinic. In this country, the experience of being hunted down like this by a mob of haters, some with violent intentions, is one that the vast majority of us can’t even imagine.  But for many abortion providers, that is their lives.  And for too many of them, sadly, it is their deaths.

You can find the documentary on iTunes from Rachel Maddow’s show page.

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, opposite land edition.  I’m sure by now you’ve seen the video of a group of Rand Paul supporters tackling and then curb stomping a MoveOn activists at a Kentucky Senate debate.  Well, the curb stomper was caught, and he actually had the nerve to say this. 

• say what *

Demanding an apology from the victim for making you hurt them seems to be a tactic embraced by more and more right wingers. Borrowed, perhaps, from rape apologists who insist that the victim was asking for it.