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Jane Doe protest

Bristol Palin gets fussy over the Duggar situation

The Duggar interview

Duggar daughters cover for Josh

Ugh, mandatory ultrasounds are not “cool”

Scott Walker’s gross attitudes on rape

Wisconsin anti-choicers don’t care about medical facts, of course

Yeah, sure, humans are going extinct

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Eve Andrews will describe some promising efforts to help teens get better birth control in Washington state. The Duggar family drama continues, and the battle over abortion in Wisconsin gets weirder by the minute.

Texas activists, going by the name Jane Doe, showed up at the Austin capitol building in a clever protest. Andrea Grimes of Rewire got the protest on video.

• Jane Does *

Check out the video at Rewire!

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It appears that, as much as we might wish otherwise, we are not done with the fallout from the revelation that Josh Duggar molested four of his sisters and a babysitter in his teen years, and that his parents basically covered it up so they could present their family and their Quiverfull religious cult like it’s just wholesome family fun on the TLC network show 19 Kids and Counting. The absolute, unquestionable smartest move the anti-choice right could pull right now is to put as much distance between themselves and the Duggars as possible. After all, the religious right’s official stance is that they want to ban abortion to “protect” women and that they want to restrict contraception because, uh, religious liberty. But they are adamant that it is not, I tell you not because of some kind of anti-woman agenda or desire to return to a more patriarchal society where women are reduced to breeders and chattel with very little control over their own lives. Under the circumstances, it was stupid before these allegations to align themselves with the Duggars, who make no bones out of their belief that women are inferior beings made to shut up and do what men tell them to do. Now that the Duggars are revealed to be so committed to their misogynist philosophy that they seem to view female unchastity as worse than male violence, it would really be a good time to put some distance in there.

But instead, that tribalism that the right is so famous for is kicking in. Even though most conservatives live a lifestyle that’s a lot closer to the liberals they hate than to the Duggars, a lot of them see the Duggars, with their sanctimony and priggishness and misogyny and blinding whiteness, and think, “one of us, one of us!” And so they’re rushing in, and oblivious to how it makes them look, defending the Duggars. Last episode, I chronicled how Mike Huckabee defended them. Now you have Bristol Palin basically kind of saying the liberal media owes Josh Duggar a freebie on this one because, uh, Lena Dunham.

• Duggar 1 *

Not that anyone ever accused Bristol Palin of being the brightest bulb, but this argument is so wrong-headed that it’s impossible that it’s being offered in good faith. Lena Dunham told a silly story about looking at her sister’s vagina, with no sexual interest at all, when she was 5. Josh Duggar, fully admitting that he was forcing himself sexually on girls, touched girls over and over and over as a teenager who was post-pubescent. Nor has Lena Dunham held herself as some kind of moral exemplar who has a right to tell everyone else how to live and have sex. In contrast, that’s Josh Duggar’s job, both in the media and with his lobbying work for Family Research Council. But all Bristol Palin knows is that Lena Dunham is an urban liberal and Josh Duggar is a rooting tooting red state mega-conservative, and that means he’s a good guy and Lena Dunham must be the bad guy.

Fox News also joined in the Duggar defense brigade, because throwing red meat to conservatives matters more to them than, say, helping the right seem slightly less misogynist. Megyn Kelly brought Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar onto Fox News for a lengthy interview where they could make excuses, minimize, and blame anyone but themselves for what happened. Oh and paint themselves as the victims, of course.

• Duggar 2 *

This is from a woman who participates heavily in political campaigns against legal abortion and transgender and gay rights. It’s unbelievably rich of her to claim anyone else has an “agenda”. The Duggars have always had a fairly obvious agenda: To make a lot of money and to promote their vision of a hardcore patriarchal world where women have very few legal rights, men are considered an absolute authority in the home, and sexuality is obsessively policed like it’s some demonic force out to destroy you. When you relentlessly push your bizarre, hateful agenda on others, you can’t complain if they take very strong note of you own indiscretions and, in this case, outright criminal behavior. To be blunt, no one gets a free pass for sexual abuse. But you especially don’t get to spend your life demonizing people who have consensual adult relationships and personal choices, and then turn around and make excuses for non-consensual, criminal sex abuse.

The part of all this that is most appalling, which is saying a lot, is that two of the victims have been conscripted to stand up for their brother, who, may I remind you, molested them.

• Duggar 3 *

Victims are accorded a lot of respect and room to define their own experiences in our culture, as they should be. However, these two were raised in and now promote a faith that teaches that women do not have autonomy, but are and should be little more than puppets doing the bidding of fathers and husbands and, in some cases, brothers. They believe women are not to have opinions of their own, that you are to think and do what men tell you. It’s awfully convenient now to hold them out as autonomous people who are supposedly thinking for themselves, when they are not allowed to ever do that. It just goes to show how cynical and corrupt to the core this family is. Oh they are followers of a philosophy of radical female submission, but if it’s convenient for preserving their reputation, they will pretend for the cameras that women are allowed to draw conclusions on their own. It’s telling that so many in right-wing media are eager to defend these people rather than chalk this up as a lesson in the dangers of aligning yourself with members of radical religious cults.

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Interview

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Last week, I made note of the fact that Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin was trying to defend his mean-spirited support for forcing women to endure lengthy, guilt-tripping ultrasounds by saying he was just trying to give women a “cool” thing.

• Wisconsin 1 *

Man, conservatives do not understand the concept of consent, do they? I doubt Walker would like it very much if I told him he had to have a wand stuck up his butt for 10 minutes while I explained the joys of liberalism to him before he was allowed to get medical care, and I doubt even more he’d appreciate it if I got huffy and told him that some people like having large objects put in their butts. But Walker’s iffiness around the issues of consent and treating women like our bodies do not belong to us got, if anything, even worse after this. When he was asked about banning abortion at 20 weeks, even for rape and incest victims, while shrugging, he said this:

• Wisconsin 2 *

So much shrugging! Eh, rape, who cares. This quote is a perfect distillation of how anti-choicers can get all gushy about the lives of fetuses that aren’t even that developed yet, but shrug off the idea that woman have lives worth caring about or respecting. It’s not true that rape victims have all this time to decide. A lot of post-20-week abortions for rape happen because the victim was in denial or was so overwhelmed that she didn’t know she was pregnant until that late. In some cases, the victims are very young, think pre-teens or early teens, and may not know what pregnancy symptoms look like until they are showing. That’s why abortion access is so important, but Walker doesn’t care. Faced with questions about women’s humanity, he just shrugs.

But Walker is not the only mean-spirited fool who feels like he has a right to force his ignorance on you by the law. Wisconsin state Sen. Mary Lazich, who supports the 20-week bill, seems to believe that medical experts have nothing of value to add to the abortion discussion. It started with pro-choice Democrat state Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa decided to ask Lazich about whether any medical experts had been involved in drafting the legislation.

• Wisconsin 3 *

Lazich then implied that some kind of Christian right woman-hating doctor automatically provides better care than the people who head up, oh, every major medical association in the country, and then this happened:

• Wisconsin 4 *

The Republicans wiggled and squirmed, but the honest answer is they just don’t care. They don’t care if you’re injured or killed or traumatized or put through unnecessary pain or suffering. They think that’s just what God has in store for you if you dare decide to have sex or made the mistake of being born female. They got this bill, like all these legislators do, off model legislation written by religious right groups that want to force their dogma about female sexuality on everyone by force of law. Everything else is just noise.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, yes, they really are coming for your contraception edition. Listen to Don Feder, the communications director of the World Congress of Families, at a recent event warning that if you give people the option of not having babies, they will opt never to do it. Apologies for the translator talking over the clip.

• extinction *

Reality check time: The human population is growing and the real danger is that our growth rate may outstrip our ability to keep us all alive. In 1960, right around the time reliable contraception really became a thing, the world population was right around three billion people. Now, a mere 55 years later, it’s over seven billion. 100 years ago, it wasn’t even quite two billion. The reason other animals go extinct most of the time these days is because our species is overwhelming and destroying their environments. We have a lot of problems, but too few people on the planet isn’t one of them.