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Candidate trolls anti-choicers

Obama administration offers new compromise

The administration should have let the chips fall where they may

Fox News tries to claim that even paperwork is too big a burden

Beyoncé at the VMAs

Bill O’Reilly is on about Beyoncé again

Conservatives are mad that feminists don’t live by the rules conservatives made up

Rush Limbaugh’s blatant rape apology

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, author Roxane Gay will talk to us about being a “bad feminist.” The Obama administration updates it policies on the contraception benefit, and Beyoncé sends heads spinning by publicly embracing feminism at the VMAs.

James Wood is a congressional candidate from Arizona, and the National Pro-Life Alliance asked him to fill out their survey on the topic of abortion. His response is the sort of thing every pro-choice candidate should do from here until the end of time.

• james woods *

I’m serious. All pro-choice candidates should do this. By calling anti-choice groups’ bluff, you put them in a situation where they kind of have to admit that they’re not so much pro-life as anti-sex.

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Late last Friday, the Obama administration announced that they have a new compromise on offer for employers who don’t want to offer health-care plans that meet federal minimum standards for contraception coverage. That’s the traditional time that presidential administrations, Republican or Democratic, use to dump news that they want to minimize the coverage of. Whatever the reason, coverage was light, which I discovered when I was trying to find some news coverage that actually explained what this new compromise even is. Seriously, there was barely anything. But the Wall Street Journal had a reporter explain it and she did a very thorough job.

• contraception 1 *

The reason it’s so complex is because of the bad faith of anti-choice employers. They claim to object to the contraception coverage because they don’t want their money to go to contraception, which is against their religious beliefs. So the administration said fine, fill out this form that says that and your money won’t go to it as the insurance company will pay for it directly. But since their actual reason for objecting is that they don’t want their employees to have contraception at all, this wasn’t good enough. Of course, they can’t come right out and say, hey we believe we should control our employees’ private lives and we want to stop them from getting contraception coverage elsewhere. So instead they claim that even signing the form violates their religious beliefs. So now, this new compromise means they don’t have to pay and they don’t have to fill out a form.

So, how are anti-choice power players reacting?

• contraception 2 *

If the concern is “religious freedom,” then that concern has been met. The federal government is paying. The employer doesn’t even have to fill out a form, but instead just writes a letter. Make it as flowery as you want, explaining in as much detail as you want why you think contraception is slutty, the government doesn’t care. But since the actual goal is to keep as many women as possible from accessing contraception, even that won’t do. I promise right now that they won’t stop coming up with novel arguments for why their religious freedom depends on stopping you from getting contraception coverage, either from them or from someone else. And since they have a majority on the Supreme Court that both agrees that employees should be subject to having their employers control their private lives and that women who use contraception are icky sluts, there’s real reason to fear their bad faith arguments will win the day.

Of course, Fox News’ Shannon Bream tried as hard as she could to try to make it seem like the Obama administration is yanking employers around for no reason.

• contraception 3 *

If your objection is to having your money go to birth control coverage, then yes, this changes everything. Granted, it was never their money in the first place, since it was part of their employee’s compensation package, but in the strictest sense, they were writing checks that went to plans that cover birth control. But since this means they don’t have to do that anymore, if that’s the actual objection, then this changes everything. However, if your real goal is to keep your employees from getting birth control coverage because you believe that, as their boss, you get to impose your religious beliefs on their home life, then this changes nothing. So we can safely assume the actual reason for this objection is not about being complicit in what you think is a sin, but because the employers in question believe they are entitled to stop their employees from getting coverage for birth control from anyone.

But the nonsense didn’t stop there.

• contraception 4 *

The Supreme Court decision actually suggested this exact compromise, where you fill out a simple form asking for an exemption and women get the coverage elsewhere, as a way to do this. The notion that filling out paperwork is an unbelievable burden for a major corporation is beyond laughable. It’s a single form, or maybe even just a letter. Certainly less of a burden than trying to figure out how to get your birth control covered when your employer is actively seeking ways to stop you at every turn. The ruse that this is about religious freedom is laughably transparent. This is about looking for any legal means possible to keep as many women as possible from using effective contraception, and that’s it.

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Interview

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So Beyoncé did something that was absolutely, as she herself would say, flawless during her performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. She was getting the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, and she capped the show off by doing a 16-minute performance that was a medley of the songs from her latest album. During the portion for her aptly titled song “Flawless,” Beyoncé chose to highlight the part of the song that features a speech by Nigerian feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, making it an unmistakable declaration of feminism.

• beyonce 1 *

The words were lit up on the screen, so that everyone online could have an amazing screenshot of Beyoncé standing in front of the word “feminist” from now until forever. She really knows how to make a statement. It’s particularly cool to define the word “feminist.” Anti-feminists have always tried to discredit feminism by saying it’s about man-hating or trying to make women dominant or whatever. They do this because they don’t support women’s equality and, in fact, find it kind of threatening. But they know that coming right out and saying that makes them look like mean-spirited people who object to basic fairness, so instead they lie and argue in bad faith and spread stereotypes that aren’t rooted in reality. They know that if feminists are forever trying to defend ourselves against false accusations of man-hating, it eats up time that could be spent fighting misogyny.

And speaking of bad faith, the folks at Fox News decided that the angle they would take is to produce frowny faces and declare, in maudlin tones, that they think Beyoncé is bad for women and girls.

• beyonce 2 *

A little of this is just plain ol aging crank get off my lawn nonsense. But it’s also bad faith, a way to push a racist argument while pretending it’s not racist. Anyone who actually knows Beyoncé’s music knows that she’s a direct heir to much of the uplift of ’60s R&B. “Single Ladies” is a direct heir to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” “Crazy in Love” owes a lot to love songs like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Bill O’Reilly’s focus on girls suggests he’s mostly upset about the sexual content of Beyoncé’s lyrics. Well, songs about sex have always been a part of pop culture and they have always been angering conservatives. Make no mistake that if O’Reilly had been an aging TV personality in the ’60s, he would have been denouncing Diana Ross as a bad influence. The fact of the matter is Beyoncé is a good role model for little girls. She puts out a very consistent message about how it’s good to be ambitious, good to want more, good to be proud of yourself, and good to demand power. And she does that all while showing that you can have a happy family life, too. That’s a good message and I want girls to hear it.

Then, of course, there was the segment of people who hate feminism telling feminists that we aren’t doing feminism right, something they believe they get to sit in judgment of even though they want to end feminism. This is Megyn Kelly and Mollie Hemingway, anti-feminists, telling feminists that we’re not doing feminism right.

• beyonce 3 *

They weren’t naked, of course, because it was on MTV, not on HBO. But Kelly and Hemingway’s argument rests on a false assumption that feminists are against sex. I don’t know how they got it into their head that “feminism” should be indistinguishable from fundamentalist Christianity, but uh, from the beginning feminism has always been about the idea that a sexist society’s disapproval of female sexuality is oppressive and wrong. The song where Beyoncé is doing a “stripper” dance is a song about having sex, called “Partition.” In context, it’s not some kind of call for all women to be strippers, but a celebration of how it’s fun, when you’re having sex, to be admired by your partner. Seriously, watch the video for the context. Her actual husband is in it.

Sex is a thing that many pop songs are about. That is not inconsistent with feminism, because feminists have always been about sexual liberation. That’s why we think birth control and abortion are important rights for women, because we know that people have sex and we think people should have sex if they want to, and women need things to do that and control their lives and be healthy. Sorry, guys, but you don’t get to make up rules for feminists and then get mad when we don’t do what you want us to do.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Rush Limbaugh just can’t take it anymore edition. Limbaugh is really angry at feminists attacks on rape culture because, and there’s no nice way to put this, he thinks men just can’t help themselves and must violently assault women.

• Limbaugh *

Boys chase girls, so I guess that means that boys must, if they catch a girl, forcibly penetrate her while she says “no” and “stop.” Got it. I don’t know why they say feminists are man-haters, because Limbaugh seems to be the man-hater with his belief that men’s attraction to women leads inevitably to rape, and therefore the only thing that can be done is for women to try not to be attractive. Never mind that one of his favorite things to do on the show is shame women for not being attractive enough in his eyes. We’re supposed to be attractive and it’s also our fault if a man rapes us because we were so attractive. Here’s a fact: Research shows only about 5 to 6 percent of men are rapists. So his suggestion that men are hardwired to rape women is clearly, demonstrably false.