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The Supreme Court saves Obamacare

Phyllis Schlafly at Road to Majority

Jeb Bush at Road to Majority

Mitch McConnell at Road to Majority

“Enough Is Enough”

Google vs. revenge porn

John Oliver vs. revenge porn

Troy Newman blames California drought on abortion

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be covering the Road to Majority conference held by the Faith & Freedom Coalition and some recent victories in the war on sexual abuse. Jessica Mason Pieklo will also be on to help us sort out some recent reproductive rights court decisions.

Speaking of court decisions, the Supreme Court, on Thursday, saved Obamacare yet again!

• Obamacare *

Word is that a lot of Republican politicians were secretly grateful, because they know if they took away people’s health care, they would feel it at the polls. Hopefully that means that this issue is done and there won’t be any more creative court challenges.

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Over last weekend, Ralph Reed’s newish conservative Christian organization, the Faith & Freedom Coalition, had an event titled Road to Majority, where all the big movers and shakers in conservative politics got together to see who could hate women the most and thump the Bible the hardest. Reed started the organization as part of his rehabilitation campaign after it was discovered he was involved in the Jack Abramoff scandal, but as long as you’re white, call yourself a Christian and hate women and gays, it’s all good on the right, I guess. And when I say hate, that’s what I mean. When the conservative Christians get together, the whole veneer about “life” gets peeled off and they show their true faces. And that face believes, make no bones about it, that a woman’s place is to submit to men, to have children whether they want to or not, and to face government and economic discrimination to keep her in her supposedly rightful place. Which is why Phyllis Schlafly was a warmly welcomed speaker who dug right into how proud she is that she defeated a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to equality.

• road 1 *

There’s all sorts of conservative tap-dancing around this issue, but let’s not play games here. The only reason to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment is you believe women are not equal. Schlafly doesn’t really try to hide this, building her entire career on pushing the idea that God wants women to be submissive helpmeets who stifle their own ambitions to live as unpaid servants for their husbands. She speaks out against laws that make it easier for domestic violence victims to get away from their abusers and says that there is no such thing as marital rape. The fact that she is so well-loved for it tells you everything you need to know.

So that gives you a general idea of the gender politics going on. As you can imagine, there was a lot of talk about the evils of abortion and sneering at Planned Parenthood. Chris Christie bragging about cutting Planned Parenthood funding, so everyone knows how hostile to contraception and even just STI testing the man is. Overall, the politicians at hand all knew that the trend in anti-choice posturing now is to pretend that you’re trying to protect women. You know, from their own rights. Because women can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, the silly dears. That was the message of Senator Mitch McConnell, who bragged about his efforts to ban 20 week abortions and then said this.

• road 2 *

This is dishonest on so many levels. First of all, he’s trying to imply that 20 week abortion bans would have some major impact on convincing young women facing unintended pregnancies that they really want to be mothers. No, just no. Nearly all of the real world examples of the tender young women of his imagination abort before 20 weeks, 98.2 percent to be exact. More, really, because a significant chunk of post 20 week abortions are not the weeping maidens who McConnell thinks just need a Bible and a shotgun wedding. A huge chunk of post 20 week abortions are wanted pregnancies that went wrong or women who wanted abortions earlier but couldn’t get them.

But even if you’re talking about the 99 percent of abortions that are before 20 weeks, his rhetoric is hateful and, even as it pretends to be benevolent, it’s deeply misogynist. He imagines that women who seek abortions are basically, to be blunt, children. Not even teenagers. He seems to assume a post-pubescent woman or teen girl has the mental capacity of a 5-year-old and assumes the only reason that women get abortions is that they’re being steered the wrong way by nefarious people for reasons of mustache-twirling evil. The possibility that women actually have thought about it and are choosing abortion because they know themselves is dismissed out of hand. Women aren’t adults! He clearly thinks of our mental capacity as somewhere between a houseplant and a dog. Why beings who are assumed too stupid to make even very basic decisions for themselves are considered smart enough to raise babies, I’ll never know.

Jeb Bush’s speech was just as dishonest.

• road 3 *

Love how he said it limited the number, as if that was just a side effect and not the intention. These people, may I remind you, consider themselves Christians and moral role models, but they lie with an ease and passion that suggests they don’t really get this morality thing. It’s also just plain bizarre, if you take a step back, to hear someone just regurgitate the talking point that abortion is murder, but they want the murder process to be as safe as possible for the murderer. Again, that only makes sense if you believe that women are basically very tall children you can legally have sex with, but who cannot be trusted as moral actors. The assumption here is that a woman who aborts isn’t accountable because she’s too stupid to know what she is doing. And so has to have access “limited,” you know, to protect her from actually having access.

This is hate. It’s disguised as benevolence, but it is hate. Characterizing an entire group of people, in this case women, as fundamentally too stupid to have rights is hate. It has a smiley face now, but if you push back against it, the benevolent act is dropped quick enough and you see the snarling misogynist underneath.

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Interview

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Feminist noise and activism on the subject of gender-based interpersonal violence, especially domestic violence, has been growing louder in recent years. And this summer, we’re seeing results. New York state just passed a bill to be signed by Gov. Cuomo called the “Enough Is Enough” bill, aimed at curbing sexual assault.

• victory 1 *

The law does a few things. First of all, it installs an affirmative consent standard. Now, instead of expecting the victim to prove she said no loudly and frequently enough, the standard will be only have sex with people who want to have sex with you. That should be common sense, but it helps get around the rules-lawyering and quibbling over how a woman says no. Rapists will have a harder time saying, “Well, sure, she kept asking me to take her home and telling me to leave her alone, but she didn’t outright say the actual word no.” Now, knowing that someone doesn’t want to have sex with you is reason enough to be responsible if you have make them have sex with you anyway. Two, it protects victims from being punished for drinking or drug use that they may have been engaged in during the rape. Three, the bill requires that any student found guilty of sexual assault will have that on his transcript, making it harder for him to escape responsibility simply by transferring schools.

This bill is important not just to get justice for victims, but to prevent rape. A rapist might think twice if he knows it’s going to be harder to wriggle out of it. Also, we know that most rapists are serial offenders who keep doing it, confident they won’t get caught. Catching and punishing them changes that equation.

There’s also a huge victory in the war against revenge porn, which is when people release unauthorized naked pictures of you online to get revenge for dumping them or just to generally hurt and humiliate you for daring to be female and sexual.

• victory 2 *

There’s still a lot of questions about how this will be enforced, but this is an important first step. A lot of men who share revenge porn include the victim’s name and personal details, often including her workplace and address. The idea, of course, is to get other misogynists involved to harass you, and it works. And, of course, to scare employers and schools from hiring or admitting you. It’s ugly, but true, that in a competitive job market, a lot of employers might hold it against you that you have a crazy stalker. Or, let’s be honest, that you’re a, God forbid, sexual being. There’s still a lot of stigma attached to that in some areas. So making sure these images don’t come up with you Google someone’s name is a number one priority.

But that’s on the policy front. On the cultural front, I was stoked to see John Oliver take on the issue, and treat men who do this with the contempt they deserve.

• victory 3 *

I wish it weren’t so, but having a man explain this is a huge deal. Men get listened to, still, when women don’t. And he does it in such a normalizing way. He takes it for granted that sharing intimate pictures of yourself is a normal part of life, like owning a house. Which it is, even if some prudes would like to deny it. We don’t blame someone if they trust someone enough to have sex with them, only to have that person betray their trust later. So why, the second that sex involves a little bit of digital playfulness, we suddenly blame the victim? No, not buying it.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, more abortion drought nonsense edition. Last week, I covered a Republican legislator who blamed the California drought on abortion. Now you have Troy Newman of Operation Rescue doing the same.

• Troy Newman *

Funny how all these right wing nuts think God has the same obsessions they have. You get the feeling they think they are God.