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Jessica Williams takes on cat callers

Rachel Maddow announces the news about HB 2

$1,500 to get an abortion?!

Touring an abortion clinic

Tony Perkins feels oppressed

Jerry Boykin has thoughts on abortion, pornography

Now contraception is worse than genocide

Bill O’Reilly is being a pig again

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to Sarah Roberts about the relationship of domestic violence and abortion. Texas loses all but 8 abortion clinics, but it’s the conservatives in D.C. who are claiming to be oppressed.

Jessica Williams of The Daily Show has been on fire in recent months attacking all sorts of sexist nonsense. After she called out cat-calling and got the usual men telling her she obligated to like it because it’s supposedly a “compliment,” she fired back.

• Daily Show *

Hiring Williams might be the best decision that show has made since they decided to do a spin-off called The Colbert Report.

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Starting Friday, absolutely devastating news in the State of Texas.

• Texas 1 *

That leaves eight and only eight clinics in the entire state. I think some people who haven’t been there or haven’t spent much time there don’t quite realize how seriously low that number is, but I lived there for over 30 years and can tell you that when people say Texas is big, they mean it. It’s over 800 miles from El Paso to Texarkana on the east side of the state. It is actually easier to drive from El Paso to Los Angeles.

There will be no clinics left in the south or western parts of the state. That’s the entire Rio Grande Valley, the Panhandle, the Big Bend area, El Paso, and the Permian Basin. Everything will be in central Texas or Houston, convenient for the families of the politicians who passed this law, but for one in six women of reproductive age in the state, it’s over a 300-mile round trip or more to get an abortion. Which is, may I remind you, a procedure that takes about five minutes to do and is easier and less stressful on your body than getting a cavity filled. And it’s a common procedure, too. 73,000 women a year in Texas get an abortion. To handle that volume, each clinic would have to do 25 abortions a day for 365 days a year. It’s impossible.

• Texas 2 *

As I’ve covered extensively on this podcast, the hardest-hit parts of Texas are places like the Rio Grande Valley, which are geographically isolated and have far more people who are trying to get by on poverty wages. Now that the clinic in McAllen has closed, it is a nearly 4-hour drive to the nearest abortion clinic, in San Antonio. There’s also a waiting period, so a woman who wants to make that drive needs to arrange overnight stay and child care for that time. With gas prices the way they are and with so many people in poverty having unreliable cars, it’s not just workable. But even if it is workable, the amount of stress that it puts on you is really unhealthy for you. It’s obvious the whole point of this law is to make the process of abortion as miserable and painful as possible, in order to punish women for having sex in the first place. But anti-choicers claim they are just trying to “help” women by passing all these medically unnecessary regulations. Help them how? By making their lives a living hell, emptying their pocketbooks, forcing them to resort to illegal means, or, worst, forcing them to have a baby they probably can’t afford? Rewire added up the cost for someone who lives in Harlingen, which is also in the Rio Grande Valley, to get an abortion, and found it is about $1,500 with child care, hotel, gas, and of course, the price of the abortion itself. Only a miserable misogynist would actually think that $1,500, which is a month’s salary for a minimum wage worker, should be the fee for having had sex.

The excuse for claiming that the new restrictions, which require abortion clinics to meet ambulatory surgical center standards, is that this is necessary to make abortion safe. Anti-choicers would like you to believe that abortion clinics currently are not meeting minimum standards for outpatient care like abortion. But Andrea Grimes of Rewire toured Whole Woman’s Health in San Antonio and found, no big surprise, that it’s actually very nice and a completely professional, clean, well-equipped clinic. It’s not a hospital surgery, no, because abortion isn’t really a surgery. There is no cutting of anything. They literally just stick a tube in your cervix and empty out its contents with a machine that takes only about a minute or two to do it. In some cases, it’s not even that and you just take one pill there and another at home. Andrea Ferrigno, who manages the clinic, explained.

• Texas 3 *

This is about hurting women, and nothing else. There is no other reason to take this away from women. Not that anyone doubted otherwise, but the audacity of people who are trying to hurt women claiming they only want to help should never stop appalling us.

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Interview

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Time yet again for the Values Voters Summit and, of course, Reality Cast’s coverage of it. The Values Voters Summit is an annual gathering of religious conservatives, thrown by the Family Research Council, a group that’s so rabidly anti-gay that it’s been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This does not stop a stampede of right-wing leaders and conservative politicians from going to it in order to preen and pose about how they’re such huge victims because they don’t want to share the country with feminists, gays, and non-Christians. The summit kicked off with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins engaging in some deep delusions of oppression by comparing American Christians to Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese Christian woman who was jailed for not converting to Islam, which he equated with occasionally having people criticize you in the U.S.

• Values 1 *

What is the evidence for the claim that conservative Christians are being bullied? As far as I can tell, any time you argue with a conservative Christian, especially if you win the argument, that’s considered bullying. They are free and happy to hold conferences like this, which get a lot of coverage. They have their own media and an entire cable network that caters to them. They not only get to have blogs and websites of their own, but they are so dogged and hateful that they actually silence others by running them out of those spaces. The Supreme Court just opened the door to Christians exempting themselves from all manner of federal law, just because they want to. I personally am not only not silencing Perkins, but I am quoting him on this show.

There were many subjects that were offending the values voters during the summit, such as the fact that Islam continues existing and universal health care hasn’t been abolished yet, but fury that people were having sex without their permission was still at the top of the list. Jerry Boykin was all over that.

• Values 2 *

Christian conservatives have been swearing for 40 years now that the nation is just on the verge of realizing that all this having sex for pleasure business is evil and we’re one minute away from strapping on our chastity belts, giving up our birth control and picking up Bible study instead. I’m beginning to think it’s all a con job just to string their followers along, particularly since people who say they have no religion at all is the fastest growing religious group in America. Which is true in no small part because the religious right has convinced so many Americans that being religious necessarily means being a Bible-thumping, misogynist bigot, and given the choice between being a bigot or not having religion at all, people take the latter. I don’t make the rules, just an observation.

Then there was Mat Staver, arguing that having sex for fun is the moral equivalent of rounding up families and gassing them to death in concentration camps. Or actually, he thinks it’s worse.

• Values 3 *

I don’t know if people like Anne Frank would agree that participating in a genocide is what you’d call voluntary. But of course, Staver isn’t thinking about how the Jewish or Rwandan victims of genocide are people. He just thinks of them as objects, tropes to use in order to raise the stakes in his war on women who suppress their own ovulation. That possibility that someone who dies in a genocide might have been worth more than an egg that didn’t get ovulated because its owner was on the pill doesn’t even occur to Staver. People are having sex for fun and since, in his mind, that is the worst thing that could ever happen ever, he can’t be bothered to actually ponder what he’s really saying when he equates your choice to have no more than two children with Hitler’s choice to kill millions of innocent people.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, have you considered that women are just inferior edition? Of course, bigots who bust out the it’s-not-bigotry-if-it’s-true line never outright say that women are simply inferior to men. No, the favorite euphemism is the word “different”, on display by Bill O’Reilly here.

• O’Reilly *

After implying that women are merely born to be a servant class and sexism has nothing to do with it, O’Reilly suggests that women who stay at home or work part time are the reason for the gender pay gap. That is a blatant lie. The figure of women making 78 cents to a man’s dollar only compares full-time, year-round employment. So, it really is just discrimination and nothing else.