A right wing nut with anti-feminist views kills dozens in Norway; how did his views on women’s rights and reproductive rights contribute to his choice to unleash so much violence? Also, the IOM recommendations cause a right wing anti-contraception freakout.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

Stephen Colbert’s It Gets Better video

Breivik anti-feminism

Norway questions its tolerance of extremism

Kathryn Joyce on “demographic winter”

O’Reilly trying to see how many wrong things he can say in 60 seconds

Sandy Rios just comes out with it

O’Reilly’s delusions

On this episode of Reality Cast, Pam Chamberlin will be on to talk about the political beliefs of the Norway shooter.  I’ll have some more feminist-specific analysis of that situation, and ongoing coverage of IOM recommendations that birth control be made available to women without a co-pay.

Stephen Colbert, being himself and not the character he plays on TV, put out a really nice It Gets Better video.

• Colbert *

I’ve had to endure endless amounts of hand-wringing over Slutwalk by people who claim that words have a static meaning, and there’s no way to use the word “slut” in a way that’s ironic or humorous and robs it of its power to hurt.  Those folks should watch this video.

*********

By now, I’m sure that you’ve heard of the horrific crimes of Anders Breivik, who bombed the Prime Minister’s office in Oslo and then went to a Norwegian summer camp for young Labor party activists and opened fire, killing dozens of teenagers.  There was an immediate knee-jerk assumption that the attacks had to have been committed by Muslim extremists, perhaps because Al Qaeda has threatened Norway in the past.  But the terrorist Breivik is a Christian conservative with anti-Muslim views.  Breivik was obsessed with the idea that Europe is being taken over by Muslims, and as those familiar with these views can probably guess, that means that Breivik was also obsessed with the notion that white women aren’t breeding enough and therefore should be forced by the state to have more children.

Breivik’s views on this were not easy to distinguish from the rantings on any random anti-abortion blog.  David at Man Boobz excerpted parts of Breivik’s manifesto, and demonstrated that Breivik had the same obsessions as other anti-feminists: Sex and the City, the supposed problem of declining birth rates because of contraception and abortion, what Rush Limbaugh likes to call “chickification”, and women’s supposed stupidity in being more willing to support liberal causes.  The one big difference is that Breivik was, if anything, more mild in his anti-abortion views than your average anti-choice activist, because he acknowledges that a ban on abortion would interfere with women’s rights, and your typical anti-choicer in America won’t even acknowledge the concept of bodily autonomy.

Extremist right wing views have grown in popularity over the past few decades in Europe, and these shootings have caused Norway to look at itself and ask why.  NPR reported on it.

• Norway 1 *

They went on to cover the various ways that some Scandinavian countries, using multiculturalism as an excuse, have managed to keep the worlds of Muslims and everyone else completely separate, right down to separate football leagues.  This, in turn, causes Muslims to seem extra foreign and allows the racists to get more traction with their views. 

Racism is definitely a motivation behind anti-choice philosophy.  This is particularly true in Europe, where right wingers are raising the alarm of a supposed shortage of white children because of women’s reproductive rights.  They call this the demographic winter, even though winter is a time when things typically get more white. Kathryn Joyce wrote about the problem in the Nation a few years ago, and talked about it on video.

• Norway 2 *

A lot of the ideas that Breivik was batting around originate in the United States, with our right wing extremists.  What’s going on here is that this kind of race hysteria doesn’t really serve anti-choice ends very well in the U.S., for reasons that are too complex to get into here, it does have a big audience in Europe.  But, as Kathryn explained, the whole demographic winter paranoid theory is something that’s been concocted by people who are just as interested in turning back the clock on women as they are stoking war between Christians and Muslims.

• Norway 3 *

The result of all this anti-choice paranoia and race-baiting is what we see here.  An estimated 76 people have been murdered by a man who sat around absorbing these paranoid anti-Muslim, anti-feminist fears, and who decided after being wound up this way to take action. 

Pam Chamberlain from the Public Eye will be on next to talk in more depth about Breivik’s views and where he got them.

***********

insert interview

***********

As you can imagine, the right wing couldn’t just stay quiet and let it go when the Institute of Medicine recommended that the HHS require insurance companies to cover birth control without a co-pay.  It’s in their best interest to let this one slide, since screamingly opposing contraception on so-called moral grounds makes it clear that “pro-life” has never been about life but about sex.  And, needless to say, this right wing freakout has not only been creepy and mean-spirited, but also stuffed to the gills with lies and misinformation.  My favorite so far has been Bill  O’Reilly’s.

• iom 1 *

I’m going to just stop that clip there to correct the lies in it.  The IOM did not, repeat, not recommend that the government pay for everyone’s birth control.  The recommendation is that insurance companies cover birth control without a co-pay, under a new regulation that requires insurance companies to cover preventive medication without a co-pay.  The insurance companies would foot the bill, not the taxpayers. 

I don’t know where that $4 billion number comes from, but I’m guessing directly out of O’Reilly’s ass.  One of the major reasons that the government is requiring no co-pay prevention is that it is known to lower costs for health care.  The overall assessment is that this will save money, which means that they’ll spend less money.  If I pay $4 now to avoid paying $20 later, I’m actually making $16 more than I would have had.  Anyway, this clip gets even more mind-boggling.

• iom 2 *

Like many people online said, O’Reilly probably thinks that because women have to be blasted out of their minds to tolerate touching his penis, that’s a standard condition for women to be in to have sex.  It’s clearly silly to think that unintended pregnancy is strictly a case of women being too drunk to use birth control.  And one reason you know that he’s full of it is that this isn’t how the birth control we’re discussing even works.  Being drunk has, at times, been a factor in people not using condoms.  But condoms aren’t the contraception that would be covered.  The contraception we’re discussing is the kind  your doctor provides: birth control pills, implants, rings, and IUDs.  All of these methods work just as well when you’re drunk as when you’re sober, because they aren’t methods that you use at the time that you’re actually having sex.  So really, the HHS could lower accidental pregnancies caused by drinking too much and getting sloppy with this move, because a lot more women would consider long term or hormonal birth control now that it’s affordable to them.

But O’Reilly wasn’t the only one dropping nutty responses to this perfectly commonsensical IOM recommendation.  Greg Gutfeld said the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard.

• iom 3 *

At least it was a tacit admission that forced childbirth is used as a tactic to keep poor women from climbing out of poverty, by making it that much harder for them to get the job skills and training they need to get better employment.  That or he thinks poverty is genetic.  I continue to be amazed at how right wingers don’t understand the concept of consent.  Gutfeld refuses to acknowledge that people don’t have to use birth control just because they can.  Which causes me to wonder if Gutfeld denies that rich and middle class people, who can in fact afford the out of pocket costs for birth control, ever have kids.  If being able to afford contraception means you never have kids ever, then certainly he must think rich and middle class people never reproduce, right?

And then, of course, you have the inevitable right wing nut who just comes out and says it: Birth control is wrong because sex is wrong.  That was Sandy Rios’ point.

• iom 4 *

I don’t know why she bothers to modify the term “sex” with the word “irresponsible”.  After all, using contraception is being responsible, by definition.  So protected sex is responsible sex.  Unless, of course, you think all sex is irresponsible.  Then you don’t need the modifier.  Rios should have just said what she clearly meant, which is that the government should just take a “women should stop having sex” position.  Just because the just-say-no philosophy has never worked in human history is no reason to reconsider its wisdom, right?

***********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Bill O’Reilly is delusional edition.  O’Reilly has decided to double down on lying to his audience about the religious beliefs of Anders Breivik.

• delusional *

Except of course the extensive writings of Breivik where he identifies as a Christian, the huge impact of Christian right writings on his thinking, and his obsession with running off Muslims to keep Norway a Christian nation.  Other than that, I suppose, no reason to think he’s a Christian.