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Kama Sutra jokes

NPR looks at how Colorado shook out

Cory Gardner wriggles

Walker ad

Ballot initiatives 2014

Colorado’s personhood ballot goes down in flames

Tennessee abortion law passes

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to a lawyer from the Center for Reproductive Rights about what’s going on in Oklahoma. I’ll also talk about how anti-choice politicians beat the “war on women” narrative, and what happened with ballot initiatives dealing with reproductive rights.

I know a lot of you are bummed this fall, for good reason, so here’s a moment of sublime weirdness that happened on MSNBC that I hope cheers you up a little.

• Kama Sutra *

Sadly, cable news isn’t a place where you can just be quiet for a moment and let the silence punctuate a statement, because I do think that moment needed a second to sit in instead of pivoting to the next one.

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Voters aren’t anti-choice. That’s something that we know from polling study after polling study. They’re basically pro-choice, though many of them cling to the illusion that there’s a way to ban abortions for “bad” girls while keeping them legal for the women whose sex lives they approve of. They generally support economic policies the pundits would recognize as liberal. So why on earth did a bunch of anti-choice fanatics who have economic policies the voters reject get elected last Tuesday? Did the voters misplace their reading glasses on voting day?

It’s nothing like that. A lot of different factors go into every election, but I thought I’d flag some analysis of particular interest to the Rewire audience. NPR had an excellent segment explaining the one way anti-choice candidates pulled it off: they presented themselves as far more moderate than they actually are. Colorado is a really good example of how this played out. NPR went to Colorado to talk to voters about the way that reproductive rights and appeals to single women have influenced the voters in that state. Personhood, as listeners from last week know, is a ballot measure there.

• Election 1 *

So from the get-go, Gardner’s strategy was to minimize and deflect and present himself as a changed man who was not the misogynist firebreather who wants to ban the birth control pill that Mark Udall was painting him as. Painting him as reasonably, I have to point out. It’s undeniable that Gardner has a long, unsavory history of associating with hardline anti-choicers and who has been dogged in pushing for laws that not only would ban abortion but could do things like criminalize miscarriage or be used as a pretext to ban birth control. Gardner couldn’t hide that past, so instead he just simply argued that he was unaware of the ramifications of personhood laws and would therefore not support them going forward. In order to bolster this narrative, he basically lied about how much he had supported them in the past, because if voters knew how dogged he was about these laws in the past, his claim that he just didn’t know what was in the legislation would sound false. This dodging and weaving and minimizing really frustrated the debate moderators during one debate.

• Election 2 *

That statement summarized a pose taken not just by Gardner, but by many other anti-choice fanatics in other states who were running in close elections and didn’t want voters to think they are anti-choice fanatics. The stance was to imply that you are personally against abortion, but weren’t going to take measures to actually ban it. Gardner’s claim that the bill was just a “statement” isn’t true, however, because if the bill in question became law, it would absolutely ban abortion, as the moderator said. But this anti-choice wolf in pro-choice sheep suit maneuver was something Gov. Scott Walker did a similar thing in a campaign ad.

• Election 3 *

Anyone watching that ad would assume that Walker was personally against abortion but had not supported any legislation to regulate it. That is, however, totally untrue. Walker signed a bill that would have banned more abortion clinics in his state by forcing doctors to get medically unnecessary hospital admitting privileges, with the full knowledge that most doctors will not be able to get them. It’s a law that shut down half the abortion clinics in Texas and, if a court hadn’t blocked it in Wisconsin, would have done the same. It’s not really leaving the decision to a woman and her doctor if you’ve banned doctors from taking patients. That’s like saying I have a legal right to buy milk from the grocery store, but putting landmines along the front door of the grocery store. It doesn’t work that way.

But the fact of the matter is that the strategy worked and worked well. Walker and Gardner and many other anti-choice politicians like them were able to deflect the issue. Young people who are most affected by these issues barely turned out to vote, no doubt because they didn’t feel like they were under the threat they are actually under. There were nearly three times as many voters over 60 as under 30. And now you know why.

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Interview

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It wasn’t all just about electing officials this year, of course. There were also a number of ballot initiatives in the states, ranging from popular ones like marijuana legalization and a minimum wage hike to some rather confusing ones regarding gun control. Huffington Post had a good rundown, with an explanation of why ballot initiatives exist even though we supposedly have a legislative system to handle laws for us.

• Ballot 1 *

Three states had ballot initiatives that addressed reproductive rights: Colorado, North Dakota, and Tennessee. I’ve covered all three on this podcast, with Colorado and North Dakota being addressed last week. This election turned out to be a mixed bag. In Colorado, amendment 67, which I covered last week, failed.

• Ballot 2 *

Nearly two-thirds of the voters voted against it. This is particularly interesting because, unlike the previous two attempts to get personhood laws passed through ballot initiatives in Colorado, the proponents disguised the intention behind the law a little better. Didn’t matter, voters were still against it. I think this shows, and is an important lesson to take home, that voters are not as easily fooled as some think they are. That’s a hard pill for a lot of liberals to swallow, of course, because that means that people vote against their own rights and economic self-interest because they really, truly mean it. But it’s important to remember. When voters support abortion restrictions, for instance, it’s not because they are too dumb to know what will happen. It’s just that they, often correctly, assume that poor people will bear the brunt of the misery, and they don’t care. It’s worth it to them to make a statement about the naughty ladies having sex.

But Amanda, you may ask, if people are so down on women, at least single women, having sex, why did they vote down personhood? Good question, and one I answered in my recent piece at Rewire, which you should read. But the short answer is that personhood isn’t meaningfully better at punishing single women who are sexually active than extremely restrictive abortion laws, but it does have the side effect of damaging the interests of married, conservative people who want things like IVF and the right to miscarry without the cops getting involved. That’s why a personhood amendment also lost in North Dakota. But on the flip side, you have Tennessee.

• Ballot 3 *

Previously, Tennessee had strong constitutional protections for the right to privacy, which this law amends to make an exception for abortion. Basically, it’s straight up saying that if you’re a woman of reproductive age, you don’t deserve the same right to privacy as everyone else. But what it does is allow the legislature, which is really conservative, to go nuts in passing anti-abortion laws of the sorts we’ve seen in places like Ohio and Texas. This is scary, as Tennessee has a relatively high number of abortion clinics compared to its red state neighbors, and has become a place where women in neighboring states can go to get the abortions they aren’t able to get at home. With this passing, we can expect to see Tennessee go the way of so many states before it, making abortion inaccessible to all but the privileged and relatively wealthy.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Rush Limbaugh got a little wound up before the election edition. While Republican politicians were careful to take moderate poses during the campaign, right-wing media was all-out in trying to whip up older, male voters about how everyone is trying to steal marriage away from them.

• Limbaugh *

And wah and whine and so on. I do love him accidentally tossing science in there. It isn’t liberals who deny global warming or how birth control works, Rush. But the fact that four-times-married Limbaugh is complaining about the supposed assault on marriage shows how empty this sort of thing is. It’s all code for what he’s really talking about, which is the white male privilege to declare what reality is, regardless of the facts, and force everyone else to fall in line. And yes, that is under assault by liberals.