Victory over invasive anti-choice laws in Oklahoma. Plus, Bart Stupak’s honesty problem and the Today Show claims men and women can’t be friends.

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Free-associating feminism

Painful ABC segment on Bart Stupak

Rush Limbaugh threatens to leave the country

On this episode of Reality Cast, a lawyer from the Center for Reproductive Rights will talk about how they won an important case in Oklahoma and preserved women’s right to privacy.  Also, Bart Stupak spills misinformation so fast that even he can’t keep up with it, and the Today Show asks if men and women can be friends.   I’m sure you won’t be surprised by their answer.

Nona Willis Aronowitz hit the streets of New York and asked people to free associate on some words that are important to feminism.  Here’s what she got when she threw out the word choice. 

• choice *

It’s a fun, short video.  Well worth checking out, especially for the funny stuff people come up with when asked to free associate on the word “woman”. 

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You know, my favorite thing about the whole situation with Bart Stupak, abortion, and health care reform has to be the way that Stupak continues to insist that he’s not actually using this as a weapon to stop health care reform.  But this is laughable for a number of reasons, the main one being that he lies through his teeth about what’s in the bill, like he did on ABC. 

• Stupak 1 *

Last week on the show, I pointed out that we know that anti-choicers are never happy with just attacking abortion but always have to go after contraception. And that this is why it’s good that pro-choice Democrats are taking a stand and swearing they won’t vote for a bill with anti-choice language in it, because it at least holds the line and dissuades anti-choicers like Stupak from attacking contraception.  Looks like I was right.  Even the Senate bill, with the stupid separate rider stuff in it, is functionally a ban on insurance companies covering abortion.  No one is going to get that rider, and I doubt insurance companies will offer it.  Now that Stupak and his cronies have gotten that, lookee here!  They’re claiming that all reproductive rights are, you guessed it, abortion.  That includes contraception, cancer screening, STD treatments and other things.  Seems like Stupak is calling all those things abortion in an effort to separate women from the majority of health care they receive in their younger years.

That’s one reason I think he’s dishonest about his intentions around health care reform.  He’s willing to tell bold-faced lies in an effort to stop this bill from going through.  It’s impossible at this point that he’s so stupid that he believes his own lies.  He’s been told over and over and over again that the bill doesn’t have federal funding for abortion.  If he really cared about abortion, he’d stop misrepresenting the Senate bill.  Hell, he was told on this very show by Kathleen Sebelius that this bill doesn’t have federal funding for abortion.

• Stupak 2 *

George Stephanapoulos was gracious in showing us how bad the state of television journalism really is by asking Sebelius a question that may be the winner for the dumbest question ever asked on TV.  First of all, implying that whether or not there’s funding for abortion is a matter of opinion is strange.  That’s a question of fact.  Either it’s there or it’s not, George.  And it’s not, and your job as a journalist is to report on the facts, not just give air time to Bart Stupak’s misinformation.  Second of all, asking Sebelius if the President can compromise by doing something that has already been done is just stupid.  How can they take about funding for abortion if it’s not there?  I suppose by shutting down women’s health services completely and letting thousands and possibly millions of women die from lack of basic reproductive health care, but even if they did that, I have a funny feeling Bart Stupak would still mindlessly insist that it’s all free abortions for everyone with vibrators and gay marriage certificates thrown in.

The other reasons that I don’t think we can trust Bart Stupak when he says that he wants to pass health care reform and is just getting stuck on abortion have to do with his connections to a highly conservative religious cult and his general dishonesty that makes believing anything he says impossible.  The Rachel Maddow show did a report on how Bart Stupak is deep inside the C Street Family, something Stupak denies despite all the evidence against his claims.

• Stupak 3 *

There’s been a suspicious amount of scrambling to hide the fact that Bart Stupak is a member of the Family, that the C Street House is owned by the Family, and basically that Stupak’s behaving exactly as one might if one was a member of a secretive conservative organization pushing an anti-health care, anti-woman agenda, but needed a Democrat as cover to make it seem less like an overt agenda.  The Maddow show demonstrated that attempts to claim the Family don’t own the C Street House are undermined by the paper trail, and attempts by Stupak to claim he doesn’t know anything about them are undermined by the fact that he had a room in that house, and the owners have overtly stated in the past when they thought it didn’t matter that living there is contingent on being part of the Family.

• Stupak 4 *

Remember, the amendment attached to the bill wasn’t just the Stupak amendment.  It was the Stupak-Pitts amendment, with Pitts being a Republican congressman who has been a prominent, long term member of the Family.  The Family exists as a religious organization, but they also exist to promote each other’s careers and tell each other that they’re the chosen people who deserve to rule over the rest of us.  The advantages of being a member are great, and I imagine that those advantages make selling someone on an anti-health care reform agenda very simple indeed. 

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insert interview

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You know what we feminists like to say?  The only people that sexists think as little of as women are men.  In the sexist worldview, men are permanently incapable of seeing women as full human beings, and see us only as vaginas with legs, there for relieving male sexual urges and to produce offspring.  Of course, some men do see women this way, which is why there’s an anti-choice movement at all, because they can’t fathom the idea that a woman has a brain and makes choices.  Sadly, some women buy that worldview, too.  But a lot of straight men have more complex, interesting attitudes towards women, and some believe, gasp, that we have more to offer than our reproductive organs.

But when I have that masochistic desire to hear a counter-opinion on this subject, where else to turn but the Today show?  They brought on the hosts of a Sirius show called “Whatever With Alexis And Jenny”, and I get the impression that the “whatever” in their show isn’t supposed to be the same “whatever” I uttered as I waved my hands at their inane blather.  The topic is, can straight men and straight women ever be platonic friends?  The answer is, are you silly?  That would require believing men are capable of caring about a woman beyond her uterus and vagina and what it can do for him.

• today 1 *

I get the impression we’re supposed to be charmed by this, but I’m not. They make it clear that they’re forbidding not just relationships to male friends that are your friend friends, men that you might go to the movies or out to shows or out shopping or whatever with.  They’re also casting suspicion on women, especially married or otherwise partnered women, even allowing themselves to be alone in friend-like situations with coworkers.  Which basically could ruin the careers of women trying to make it in male-dominated professions.

They’re also promoting the idea that men cannot control themselves or see women as friends or colleagues, so women bear the responsibility to control the situation.

• today 2 *

They try to play it off like it’s innocent, or that the reason not to do this is just that it’s weird.  But these are old-fashioned rules, and the reason for them has always been that men aren’t to be expected to behave themselves, so women are supposed to constantly police their behavior.  If I thought my man was going to hit on my female friends the second he got alone with one of them, I’d worry about my relationship and trust, not scold my friend if she thought lunch with a man she thinks of as a friend is innocent.  These attitudes always result in holding women solely accountable for all sex policing, whereas I tend to think if a married man hits on a woman, that’s his fault.

The other thing stuff like this does is reinforce the idea that men and women have nothing in common but sex.

• today 3 *

Some people may think this is cute, but when you propose that men and women are so different that they can’t even carry on a friendship without having sex, think of the implications.  For instance, if you accept that men might have an interest in music—and that’s obviously possible since there are so many male musicians and fans—then you’re setting yourself up to believe women are incapable of caring about that.  Or if women have book clubs, which they often do, the implication is that men aren’t readers.  And you see that stereotype all the time, as well. 

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out edition.  Rush Limbaugh is making what he thinks are threats if health care passes.

• Limbaugh *

Before that, he was theorizing, though he admitted he didn’t know, that doctors would be forced to participate in a “federal program”.  Basically, what this shows is that right wing radio talk show hosts are blatantly lying about health care reform, implying that the changes are going to be more radical than they are.  And since Limbaugh will lie about that, I can’t imagine he’s telling the truth about leaving the country. So we’re all so much the poorer for it.