Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Homophobic men and Misogyny–do they go hand in hand?

Posted on May 20, 2005 by Pseudo-Adrienne

From DED Space, a very interesting post and personal musing on the psychological fears of homophobic men and their attitudes to not only to Gay men but women as well. It’s all about the fear of not being masculine and being associated with anything in the least bit feminine.

Male homophobia=misogyny

It has always seemed to me that there are a lot more homophobic men than women. Women who hate gays tend to be those who were told to do so by their churches, but with men, fear of male homosexuality cuts a much longer and wider path.

And this brings me to a subject I don’t think gets enough discussion: Men who freak out over men being together in a romantic/sexual relationship freak out because for them, it all comes down to their own fear of being someone’s butt-boy. Which would be really humiliating and would turn a man into something truly loathesome–a woman.

The fear of being made “a woman” by another man will send an otherwise shallow and apathetic man into a letter-writing, Focus on the Family-contributing, Republican-voting lunatic. Show me a man who hates gay males and I’ll show you a man who despises women.

I think it does have some very sobering and valid points. Granted from pure empirical evidence and not knowing every single homophobic guy in the world (I personally know far too many unfortunately), I’ve seen this hyper-phobia and misogynist attitude displayed by homophobic men. They despise Gay men out of the fear of themselves becoming “the woman” or “the feminine” in a sexual relationship or social setting, and they long for their women to be submissive so they can reaffirm their traditional masculinity and manhood. If they become “the woman” or “the feminine” in a relationship or social setting, they are no longer a man and they loose their “power.” Traditional masculinity is valued as powerful and dominant, while traditional femininity is associated with weakness and submission. Traditional femininity solely exists to reaffirm the traditional masculinity’s power and dominance. Homophobic men who treasure traditional masculinity (and even hyper-masculinity) view the relationship between Gay men to be unnatural because there is no woman or feminine being to reaffirm the masculinity and manhood–the so called “power” aspect is missing. Pretty damn insecure, but I’ve seen it before and we all see it in our culture. “Who gets to be the ‘man’ and who gets to be the ‘woman’ to make the guy feel better about his insecure self?” What a miserable relationship that must be.

Your Grandmother's and Cleopatra's contraception

Posted on May 20, 2005 by Pseudo-Adrienne

According to this Women’s eNews article, there’s a new museum in Cleveland, Ohio called the History of Contraception that displays contraceptive devices and remedies used back in the good ole days and ancient times. Ironically, the museum opened right when the Ohio Legislature was trying to push anti-choice/anti-contraceptive measures into law. Very clever.

A new mini-museum in Cleveland puts the history of contraception–from crocodile dung to the pill–on display. Launched quietly in March, it emerges as the new federal budget threatens the access of millions of women to contraceptive services.

CLEVELAND (WOMENSENEWS)–Sheep intestines fashioned into a condom; crocodile dung with acidic properties for vaginal insertion; and hundreds of metal and plastic swirls, squiggles, loops and bows that form various intrauterine devices are some of the artifacts in the 11 display cases in the History of Contraception Museum in Cleveland, the nation’s only museum dedicated to the world of birth control.

The museum was quietly inaugurated into the Dittrick Medical History Center of Case Western Reserve University with a March opening reception. The museum had been under consideration as a site since 2003.

[…]

The contraceptive exhibit was donated by Percy Skuy, past president of Ortho Pharmaceutical (Canada), maker of contraceptive products and pills, who began building the collection 40 years ago as what began as a trade show novelty.

Now retired and living in Toronto, Skuy is still on the lookout for new items to add to the display.

While called a museum, the contraception collection is contained in 11 handsomely-designed cabinets that, at present, snake around in an oval, allowing viewers to circulate around and view its contents, including a video, artifacts and minimal textual explanations. Contained within the 1920s university building that houses the medical museum, a separate room is being fitted to house the contraception display in an area adjacent to a re-created 1930 pharmacy and an 1870 doctor’s office, complete with a skeleton in a closet.

Not Yet a Major Attraction
So far, the museum is hardly a tourist attraction to rival the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, which is a mere five miles away.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” said an operator for 10 years at the Convention and Visitors Bureau of Greater Cleveland.

The collection of ingenious products to prevent pregnancy extends to cervical caps, diaphragms, sponges, amulets and condoms of all sorts, from the manufactured to the homemade candy wrapper and saran wrap.

[…]

The exhibit and its 650 artifacts–ranging from beaver-testical tea believed to prevent pregnancy to tiny pills in circle packaging–may serve as a reminder to U.S. politicians that the 93 percent of U.S. women who are at risk of pregnancy and who use contraception have plenty of historical precedent.

“Some of the American political debate comes from an absence of appreciation of this long, long history of contraception practice across the globe,” said Andrea Tone, a professor in the social studies of medicine at McGill University in Montreal and an advisor to the museum. She also has written a book about contraception, “Devices and Desires,” published in 2001. “American society still has to come to terms with sexuality and women’s sexuality and the possibilities of a society that doesn’t think twice about their rights to safe, quality and affordable birth control.”

Skuy added: “If people think no one should use contraception, they are entitled to their opinion. But this is the history, this is what people did.”

The history, he said, shows not only technique and motivation, but attitude. “The political struggle manifests itself,” he says. “When we consider how this has now become an everyday item, the answers should come through better education, better use of the products, not negative legislation.”

Controversial Times
The museum emerges in a time of intense controversy over contraception.

In March, the same month that the museum opened, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which researches reproductive health issues, reported a high level of hostility to reproductive health rights in Congress and state legislatures and potential harm to contraceptive services from proposed cuts in Medicaid.

“You can count on some attack on family planning in Congress and something you didn’t expect,” Adam Sonfield, a public policy associate with the Institute’s Washington, D.C., office, said.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that 16 million sexually active women rely upon two publicly funded programs–Medicaid or Title X of the Public Health Service Act–for contraceptive services. These include nearly 700,000 in Ohio alone.

Medicaid funding could take the brunt of a $20 billion cut in domestic programs in the budget plan submitted by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in April. Even a 1 percent loss in family planning funding would affect tens of thousands of women, reported Guttmacher.

Although Senate Democrats are countering with a proposal to add $100 million for family planning programs, Guttmacher’s Sonfield considers its passage unlikely.

[…]

Advice from Casanova
Casanova, the famous Italian 18th century libertine, reportedly recommended that his lovers insert a half-lemon with the juice extracted as a cervix cover.

Text dating to 1580 B.C. suggests grinding dates, acacia and honey to coat the vulva. The Biblical description of “spilling seed,” or withdrawal, has its place as do items for trying to find the rhythm in the method of measuring safe periods for copulation without conception.

The pill, now 44 years old, is featured in a case of its own, showing its dial-a-pill and other formulations.

[…]

Skuy says he has never encountered protests to the exhibit during his years of displaying them at pharmaceutical conventions.

Tone, however, reports that the late curator of a Smithsonian exhibit in Washington received hundreds of complaining letters only five years ago about the mere inclusion of the birth control pill among 20th century inventions.

Permanent placement of the museum in Cleveland arrives just in time for the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. Faced with state laws making it a crime to use or dispense contraception, the court in 1965 ruled for the first time that a right to privacy prevents arrests for the use of contraception.

The National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, a Washington-D.C. advocacy association of family planning clinics, will mark the occasion with a forum on legal access to birth control on Capitol Hill on June 6.

We’ve come along way since using dung and sheep entrails. But how long will we enjoy our advances in contraception if the vehemently anti-choice/anti-contraception forces have it their way in the Legislature? Do we really want to go back to dung and jamming lemons inside of us? Hopefully this museum will create more dialogue and appreciation for the very long history of contraception.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Anti-Contraceptives/EC zaniness, Feminism, sexism, etc, Whatever | 1 Comment

The 'Fill My Pills Now!' guide on the war on women's reproductive rights

Posted on May 20, 2005 by Pseudo-Adrienne

‘Fill My Pills Now’ is a website and an affiliate of Planned Parenthood and an extension of Save Roe, which has plenty of very important information on not only the attacks on Roe v. Wade, but also pharmacists’ attack on women’s reproductive rights. All throughout the country, states are making laws either permitting or denying pharmacists to turn down women seeking to have their contraceptive medication refilled or obtain emergency contraceptives. You can also find out which states are ‘doing what’ with this issue and the ‘report card’ on pharmacies apart of all this. It’s nice to know your enemies’ tactics against your rights.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Anti-Contraceptives/EC zaniness, Anti-feminists and their pals, Feminism, sexism, etc | 52 Comments

Horrible track records and the possible rolling back of women's rights and racial civil rights

Posted on May 20, 2005 by Pseudo-Adrienne

Senator Frist is determined to roll women’s rights and racial civil rights back a couple of decades via to extremist conservative judicial nominees–both female and one African-American. Frist and his comrades are insidiously playing the race and sex card in hopes hitting the Achilles’ heel of the Democrats who regularly promote the advancement of women and people of Color. However it isn’t about the sex or race of these judicial nominees, instead it’s their politics. And the Democrats battling Frist’s minature regime are once again proving that they are indeed for women’s rights and racial civil rights. These two female judicial nominees are anything but proponents of women’s rights and racial civil rights, which the Democrats have already pointed out by looking at their track records as judges and their own words. These two women prove that sometimes certain women and African-Americans can be their own sex’s and race’s worst enemy and actually roll back their rights, rather than preserve them. The National Women’s Law Center certainly were not impressed by their track records and see them as a danger to women’s rights and racial civil rights.

[…] Senator Frist has made it clear that he plans to use two female nominees as the triggers for the “nuclear option,”? and in an attempt to turn the truth on its head, some of his colleagues have suggested that those who oppose these nominees are opposed to progress for women. One of his Congressional allies said last week that opposing these nominees risks “reversing decades of progress for all females,”? and Senator Hatch has called it a “slap in the face”? to American women to stop nominees like this.

The true slap in the face to American women would be the confirmation of nominees like Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen. As you have heard from previous speakers, these nominees’ records demonstrate that they are hostile to many of the basic legal rights that American women cherish. Their willingness to use their positions as judges to impose their agendas on the cases they hear has real implications for real Americans, especially American women.

You have heard that Justice Priscilla Owen’s sympathies lie with big business rather than with consumers. Let me give you one example. A woman was raped in her home by a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. She sued the manufacturer who made the vacuums and the distributor, who failed to check the salesman’s references and so did not discover his history of improper sexual conduct, including an arrest for indecency with children. Justice Owen, a member of the Texas Supreme Court, joined two dissents arguing that the manufacturer should not be held responsible for the negligence of its distributor, even though it required its vacuums to be sold door-to-door. Justice Owen would rather have shielded the manufacturer from liability than protect real women, like the victim in that case, from being attacked in their own homes.

Let me turn to Janice Rogers Brown. Justice Brown has demonstrated hostility towards the New Deal, that era that brought us Social Security and minimum wage laws, calling it a “socialist revolution.”? As you heard, as member of the California Supreme Court Justice, Justice Brown recently questioned the longstanding legal rule that prosecutors cannot discriminate against African-American women when choosing juries. Imagine the world that would exist if Justice Brown’s opinion had carried the day. If an African-American woman were discriminated against at work because of her race or her sex and she brought suit against her employer, her employer could remove all the African-American women from the jury pool, leaving the plaintiff without a jury of her peers and without any legal recourse. In another case, Justice Brown argued that the continued use of obscenities and racial slurs against Latino employees in the workplace was protected by the First Amendment. Justice Brown’s proposed legal rule would be devastating to women and people of color, who for far too long have been subject to the worst forms of harassment at work, who now have the law on their side ““ no thanks to Justice Brown.

Majority Leader Frist has said that these nominees deserve confirmation votes, votes by the way they do get in the form of the Senate votes to end debate on their nominations. In fact, what American women deserve is federal judges who respect their hard-won legal rights. It is important to have a judiciary that is diverse, with more women on the federal bench. But it is wrong to confirm judges ““ male or female ““ who cannot even get the 60 votes, and who will roll back our rights far into the future. Women need the protection of the filibuster ““ the nuclear option targets their legal rights.

All of us long to see a diverse Judiciary that represents the true face of the country, but one that will also preserve our rights, and not roll them back. Believe me, as a biracial woman I would love to see more than just a bunch of old white men occupying all the benches in the land, but I would still like to have judges that will preserve my rights. These two judicial nominees are a threat to women’s rights and racial civil rights. We are our own worst enemies at times. Oh, the tragic irony.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Anti-feminists and their pals, Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc., Elections and politics, Feminism, sexism, etc, Race, racism and related issues | 8 Comments

Annie, Drop Your Gun!

Posted on May 19, 2005 by Ampersand

As the war in Iraq continues, abatement of the violence does not seem on the horizon. Oddly enough, while the US struggles to enlist soldiers to replenish the ranks, Capitol Hill Republicans are yet again making moves to reverse the direction of women’s rights as they reopen the debate of women in combat. In the recent defense authorization bill the house slid an amendment in that would ban women from both combat and combat support units.

While the left has outspokenly opposed many of the decisions that led up to and accumulated with regards to our actions in the middle east, especially Iraq, this new angle by conservatives to diminish the roles women have in in the military is an attack that can’t be overlooked.

Some interesting quotes have surfaced with regards to this issue from the would-be saviors of the delicate female soldiers. Representative Duncan Hunter of California (R), tells us that “It’s time for Congress to step in, provide some stability to the situation and draw a line of demarcation and ensure that women do not go into direct ground combat.”

Interestingly enough, this attempt is being met with a rather cold reception from the upper officials in the military itself, according to the Washington Post:

Army leaders strongly criticized the legislation in letters to Congress yesterday, saying women are performing “magnificently” in a wide range of units, working where battlefields have no clear front lines.

“The proposed amendment will cause confusion in the ranks, and will send the wrong signal to the brave young men and women fighting the Global War on Terrorism,” Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff, wrote in a letter delivered to the House yesterday. “This is not the time to create such confusion.”

He said that the Army is in “strict and full compliance with Department of Defense policies regarding women in combat,” but that it continues to “study” the role of women in light of an ongoing reorganization of Army units and the complex, changing nature of warfare. Cody wrote that Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, concurred with the letter, an identical version of which was sent to the House by Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey.

While the attempt in and of itself is an affront to the courageous women whom have served through out the Iraq War, all hope may not be lost according to MSNBC:

There are about 9,000 U.S. Army women in Iraq. Banning them from combat support units could further stress the Army, already stretched thin in Iraq.

“27 percent of the Army’s people are women right now, and it would devastate the Army,” says Capt. Lori Manning, retired from the Navy and now director of the Women in the Military Project.

Despite the debate, Pentagon officials are confident Congress will leave the current policy as is … and U.S. military women on the front lines.

More on the subject:
BBC: US Mulls Ban on Women In Combat

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc | 119 Comments

Cathy Young's Reasoning is (Insert Generic Fat Reference Here)

Posted on May 19, 2005 by Ampersand

Before the fisking, a digression.

May I beg for a ban on titles for articles about fat issues featuring faux-clever wordplay? I’m talking about titles and subtitles like “Weight of Evidence” or “fat haters’ arguments flabby” or Cathy Young’s latest entry, “A Fistful of Lard.” It’s not clever, folks. It’s an embarrassing negation of cleverness; it’s saying “I’d like the idea of giving my article a clever title, but I’m fresh out of clever at the moment, so here’s some unbelievably obvious crap instead.”

Ahem. Pardon my digression.

Cathy Young’s latest Boston Globe column takes a critical look at a recent JAMA study, written by Katherine Flegal and colleagues, which found that being mildly “overweight” is in fact associated with a longer lifespan than being the so-called “normal” weight, and that overall only 25,000 “extra” deaths per year are caused by obesity and overweight combined. (That’s actually over 110,000 obesity-related deaths, minus the deaths “saved” per year because overweight people live longer than “normal” weight people). Unfortunately, Young’s analysis is flabby – pardon me, lacks weight – oh, I mean, pound for pound it’s not so sound – no, it’s thin on facts – no, it’s a glutton for…

Oh, heck. It just isn’t very good, all right?

Flaws in the “300000 to 400000 deaths caused by fat” studies

Cathy Young writes:

The new study by Katherine Flegal and her colleagues claims that excess weight causes “only” about 25,000 deaths in the United States annually, far below the earlier Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figure of 365,000. Yet, significantly, the CDC is not revising its official estimate…which is based on six previous major studies. It’s not unusual for different studies to yield contradictory results; the scientific consensus emerges from an overview of all available research.

It’s true that the CDC’s official estimate uses data from six previous studies, whereas the Flegal study draws data from only three previous studies. In fact, there are many studies supporting both points of view. What matters isn’t how many studies are done, but if they’re done well or poorly. I will argue that the CDC studies supporting the idea that there is an obesity crisis, with hundreds of thousands dying every year, are poorly done.

There is no single study supporting the CDC’s high death counts; they’ve revised their official number multiple times, and each revision represents a new study. However, all the studies share a common methodology, and share some terrible errors. W. Gibbs, in the current (June ’05) issue of Scientific American, criticizes one of the CDC’s high-death studies (written by Dr. David Allison and colleagues), but his criticisms apply to all of them:

Continue reading →

Posted in Fat, fat and more fat | 57 Comments

We've come to it at last

Posted on May 18, 2005 by Pseudo-Adrienne

Senator Frist’s itchy trigger finger on “the nuclear option” never allows us to forget how quickly doomsday is approaching the Legislature, and perhaps even the Judiciary Branch. Two of the most anti-women’s reproductive rights judicial nominees (yes they are women–imagine that!) are up for debate, which could lead Frist to activate the nuclear option, and possibly bring business on Capitol Hill to a hault.

Frist Opens Debate on Far-Right Judge, Could Trigger Nuclear Option

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) opened debate today on Priscilla Owen, an extreme right-wing, anti-women’s rights judicial nominee. This is the first step in a possible chain of events that could lead to a vote on the so-called “nuclear option.”? To change the Senate rules requires a two-thirds vote. The nuclear option, however, would change the Senate filibuster rules by only a simple majority vote. The nuclear option would ban filibusters on judicial nominees ““ including Supreme Court nominees ““ by requiring only a simple 51-vote majority to close debate and move to a vote on the judges. Present rules require 60 votes to close the debate.

“I can only conclude that the true purpose of the nuclear option is not to win confirmation of some or all of the small handful of nominees Democrats filibustered last year,”? said Reid on the Senate floor yesterday. “Rather, the goal of the Republican leadership and their allies in the White House is to pave the way for a Supreme Court nominee who would only need 50 votes for confirmation rather than 60. They don’t want consensus, they want confrontation.”?

Oh, they’ll get it alright. While we sit here and watch with glee the demise of our government.

Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Patty Murray (D-WA) held a press conference in the Capitol today opposing the nuclear option, joined by leading Congresswomen such as Nita Lowey (D-NY), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Hilda Solis (D-CA), Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), and Lois Capps (D-CA). Feminist Majority President Eleanor Smeal joined these women leaders in Congress, along with other women’s and reproductive rights leaders such as Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women; Kate Michelman, past president of NARAL Pro-Choice America; Karen Pearl, interim president of Planned Parenthood; Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America; Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center; and Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation.

Nice coalition.

The press conference emphasized the anti-women’s rights records of the contentious Bush judicial nominees, including Owen. Currently a justice on Texas’ Supreme Court, Owen has consistently shown herself to be hostile to women’s rights and workers’ rights . In every abortion-related opinion on the Texas Supreme court, Owen has voted against abortion rights.

I’ve been hearing some blurbs here and there about how the Democrats protesting the nuclear option and these two judges are being “racist and sexist”, and even hypocritical against the Democratic Party’s platform of promoting women and people of Color to higher offices of political power. It doesn’t matter what sex or race these two judges are, it’s about their track records as judges. They’re attacking their political ideologies, not sex or race. Anyway, I’ll enjoy the firestorm on the floor of Congress. We really should thank Frist and the other neoconservatives on the Hill for all of this ridiculously obnoxious, yet hysterical fun in the Congress.

Posted in Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc., Elections and politics | 6 Comments

As we keep rollin' back the clock to the ominous times for women

Posted on May 18, 2005 by Pseudo-Adrienne

Dark days loom ahead for women who value their reproductive rights. With religious arch-conservative pharmacists being given special privileges to deny women access to their birth control prescriptions, hospitals refusing to give or even tell a rape victim about emergency contraception, state legislatures making women practically run a humiliating shame gauntlet before obtaining a safe and legal abortion (or even contraception), and worst of all–medical science being replaced by religious superstition and ignorance. All in the name of war against women’s reproductive rights. Other countries are beginning to recognize that reproductive rights are essential to women’s civil rights period, but the United States and others are slowly, painfully, but surely returning women to the dark days of desperation, fear, and turning to the worst and lethal options in wanting to end an unintentional and unwanted pregnancy. And we still see no “shame” gauntlet being thrown at men for the role they played in all of the unintentional and unwanted pregnancy–not even rapists. Neither have we seen nor heard of any man being lectured about his “immoral” choice to have a vasectomy, or buy a box of condoms, or refill his prescription for Viagra. No, only women with our ever burdensome reproductive organs which we can easily see as a liability to our civil rights in this country (under this presidential administration), will be forced to bear the full brunt of the “darker days.”

It most also be noted and acknowledged that these misogynist anti-reproductive rights laws, policies, and rhetoric are mostly made by powerful arch-conservative men, obsessed in controlling the bodies and lives of women via our organs. Though they are calculating and manipulative, and cloak their laws, policies and rhetoric with sob stories and so-called “moral issues” of protecting the “weak” and “frail”, while turning women–the most vulnerable especially when pregnant–into inanimate objects and incubators. Inanimate objects and incubators easily discarded after being used and abused by misogynist anti-choice/anti-contraceptive politics and religious fanaticism in bed with politics. Now allow this article from Planned Parenthood to illustrate the ominous days instore for us…

Abortion Restrictions Ease Worldwide, U.S. Clamps Down

by Meera Subramanian
05.18.05

Despite the rise of religious fundamentalism worldwide and the Bush administration’s global gag rule, which denies U.S. funds to foreign family planning organizations that promote or advocate abortion, more and more countries around the world are making it easier for women to access safe, legal abortions. But a small number of nations, including the United States, are passing laws that further restrict a woman’s right to control her reproductive health.

These are the findings of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which recently released a briefing paper assessing the global state of legal abortions 10 years after the Beijing Platform for Action explicitly called for governments to reevaluate restrictive abortion laws that harm women. As part of an overall commitment to women’s health, the declaration acknowledged that unsafe abortions are a major public health concern. The World Health Organization estimates that 70,000 women die annually due to clandestine abortions performed under unsafe and unsanitary conditions, with millions more hospitalized.

And those deaths which could have been prevented had these women had access to a safe and legal abortion, mean nothing to the Bush Administration, the neoconservatives trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, the pharmacists who deny women their contraceptives and EC, and certainly not the religious fundamentalists who view pregnancy as a just punishment for women having sex period.

Abortion Access Eased

While most of the world moves toward recognizing abortion access as an essential women’s right and its role in women’s health, a handful of nations, including the United States, are moving in the opposite direction.

Nearly 70 countries, representing more than 60 percent of the world’s total population, currently allow abortion with few or no restrictions. Over the past 10 years, 15 countries have liberalized access, and a third of those (Albania, Cambodia, Nepal, South Africa, and Switzerland) have completely legalized abortion and eliminated any constraints. Numerous other countries, many in Africa, have also relaxed laws limiting access to abortion. France eliminated a parental consent requirement for minors, instead requiring teenagers to be accompanied by an adult of their choosing.

Funny. And we call ourselves the great purveyors of liberty, civil rights, and individual freedom. Why, we even view some of those countries such as Cambodia and Nepal to be “inferior” to us when it comes to freedom and civil rights.

Abortion Access Restricted

But while most of the world moves toward recognizing abortion access as an essential women’s right and its role in women’s health, a handful of nations, including the United States, are moving in the opposite direction. In 2003, Congress passed and President Bush signed the country’s first federal abortion ban. The law was deemed unconstitutional in three federal courts after Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the National Abortion Federation filed separate lawsuits claiming that the broadly written law prevented doctors from providing the best and safest health care to women. Enforcement is barred pending appeals.

Other countries turning their backs on the Beijing Platform and women’s health include El Salvador and Poland. In El Salvador, abortion is now illegal under any circumstance, even when necessary to protect a woman’s life and in cases of fetal impairment or pregnancy resulting from rape. Poland’s parliament and courts have been in a tug of war over abortion rights since 1993, but by the end of 1997, abortion had become a crime.

The U.S. Senate recently voted to eliminate the global gag rule, but the House is not expected to follow suit. While more countries are liberalizing abortion laws, supporting the Beijing Platform and its commitment to women’s health and well-being, for many women around the world, abortion remains illegal or inaccessible.

Planned Parenthood believes that the ability to control your own fertility is a fundamental human right. It is working to end the global crisis of unsafe abortion by helping to provide health care around the world and by urging the U.S. government to abandon the global gag rule.

Women’s civil rights, especially reproductive rights, always seem to be expendable and no where near as important as institutionalizing–though subtely–misogynist politics, intertwined with religious fundamentalism. This is the legacy we shall leave to younger generations of women if we don’t act now. This is our fight.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Anti-Contraceptives/EC zaniness, Anti-feminists and their pals, Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc., Feminism, sexism, etc | 45 Comments

The Definition of Marriage in 1886

Posted on May 18, 2005 by Ampersand

As we’ve been told often by same-sex marriage opponents, the historical definition of marriage has never changed and must never be allowed to change, or else civilization will collapse. (I’m exaggerating their views, but only very slightly). Marriage is, and has always been, about “heterosexual intercourse, child bearing, and child well-being.”

Roderick Long (who is, by the way, a genuine libertarian feminist) points out an opinion written by Judge Valentine of Kansas in 1886, ruling that a couple was not married:

In my opinion, the union between E. C. Walker and Lillian Harman was no marriage, and they deserve all the punishment which has been inflicted upon them. … In the present case, the parties repudiated nearly everything essential to a valid marriage, and openly avowed this repudiation at the commencement of their union.

So what, according to this legal ruling in 1886, was “everything essential to a valid marriage?” Roderick describes the objectionable parts of their ceremony:

What “essentials” had the couple repudiated? In their marriage ceremony Harman had declined not only to vow obedience to her husband (such a vow being repugnant both to her feminism and to her libertarian anarchism) but also to vow love unto death: “I make no promises that it may become impossible or immoral for me to fulfill, but retain the right to act, always, as my conscience and best judgment shall dictate.” She also declined to submerge her individuality in another’s by taking her husband’s last name: “I retain, also, my full maiden name, as I am sure it is my duty to do.” Walker for his part vowed that “Lillian is and will continue to be as free to repulse any and all advances of mine as she has been heretofore. In joining with me in this love and labor union, she has not alienated a single natural right. She remains sovereign of herself, as I of myself, and we … repudiate all powers legally conferred upon husbands and wives.” In particular he repudiated any right as husband to control his wife’s property; he also acknowledged his “responsibility to her as regards the care of offspring, if any, and her paramount right to the custody thereof should any unfortunate fate dissolve this union.” Harman’s father added: “I do not ‘give away the bride,’ as I wish her to be always the owner of her person.”

So she retained her own identity, her own name, and reserved the right to divorce if need be; and he refused the traditional husband’s right to rape his wife, control her property, and own any children of the union.

(Damn, they sound cool!)

In 1886, the idea that a woman owned herself, even when married, and had the right to not be raped was a radical redefinition of marriage, so much so that a court refused to acknowlege it as a marriage at all.

As Roderick points out, if tradition determines what makes a legitimate marriage, then virtually no current marriage in the US is legitimate; coveture laws no longer exist, for example, and nearly all the states have fully outlawed marital rape (although of course it still happens).

Since tradition must always be respected, on what grounds would SSM opponents have allowed marital rape to be outlawed, or coverture laws to be undone?

Posted in Same-Sex Marriage | 33 Comments