Red states, white popes, blue bloods: Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, and the Republican war on women

By Ramona

In almost every war, there are those moments when soldiers have to sit back and laugh at the absurdity of it all. Think M*A*S*H, Stalag 17, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five. Like that. In the war of the Red States against American Women, while the scale may be worlds smaller, and while there's actually been no official declaration, the time has come. To laugh, I mean. Honest to God, it is to giggle.

Could even the wildest, zaniest futurist have predicted these hysterical days, when lawmakers in a dozen red states would be falling all over each other to see who could come up with the nuttiest demand to probe into the sex life of Femalus Americanus?

Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett capped last week's antics, turning the usual Republican clown show into an Extravaganza de Burlesque with his lame punchline, "I don't know how you can make anyone watch... you just have to close your eyes," after a reporter asked the governor if state-sanctioned ultrasounds for women seeking abortions "went too far."

This clip from The Rachel Maddow Show shows the madness in a nutshell:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

ThinkProgress Health does another recap, this one with an interactive map showing the states that either are planning or already have hardline, punitive anti-abortion laws in place. (Okay, this one isn't funny... not funny at all.)

But then there's Rick Santorum. Rick Santorum is running for president, I guess you know. But is he? His speeches are sermons and his sweater-vests are the closest he could come to a cassock without drawing attention to his real hope for the presidency. But listening to him pontificate, don't you just know he's itching to wave at the crowds from his Rickmobile and turn the White House into a papal palace, where he can do what every American president should have been doing all these many years, which is to work tirelessly at saving us sinners from ourselves?

What The Great Santorum doesn't seem to understand is that most of us don't want to go back to the Dark Ages. Inquisitions are so yesterday. Self-flagellation hurts. And women might be ladies but they'll never be chattel again.

So, given that Rick Santorum can't stop showing his inquisitor's hand, in all likelihood Mitt Romney will be the Republican presidential candidate. Mitt Romney can't help that he was born a blue blood, but somebody needs to tell him his impression of Thurston Howell III is wearing thin. It was funny at first -- even hilariously funny -- but verbal pratfalls from haughty billionaires have never a president made.

Blue-blood presidents, from Washington to Jefferson to Roosevelt to Kennedy, at least pretended to be egalitarians. Equality is what our constitution is all about. The president, as leader of the country, is a representative for the people, not a bottom-line, for-profit CEO. Maybe this Mitt Romney needs to go back to his Massachusetts governor roots. That Mitt Romney could at least, every once in a while, be convincing in his role as public servant.

And Newt Gingrich. Where is poor Newt? As hard as he might try to insist otherwise, he's on the outside looking in. Delusions of intellectual grandiosity failed to impress his peeps. They yawned and moved on. Color him green.

It's settled, then: Women, we're at war

By Ramona

Don't expect me to be going over every single attack on women's rights just because I'm writing about modern-day, 21st-century, 2012, just-in-the-last-month attacks, which, as you might have noticed, are escalating at such a dizzying pace we can no longer ignore the rumblings of war.

It's ugly and it's all out there. Even Rush Limbaugh's scrubbed transcripts of his diatribes against Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University student who had the temerity to attempt to testify before certain members of congress about the need for free contraception. Even Patricia Heaton's deleted tweets about that same student (aka G-Town Gal). They're out there. They're not going away.

No, we're here today to look at the big picture: How did this latest war of the sexes start? What was the catalyst? And what can we do to grind it to a halt now that it's started? 

The obvious answer to question number one is that it's all Obama's fault. As a part of his health plan (the catalyst), he told insurance companies they would have to offer contraceptive care at no cost to women. (That would mean, for most, no co-pay.) Birth control aids would be free and available everywhere, and since it was mandatory, not to mention laudatory, not to mention commonsensical and a long time coming, that was supposed to be it. End of conversation.

Ha! We wish!

President Obama's first mistake was that he thought he was taking steps toward helping women more effectively and responsibly manage their reproductive years, when what he was actually doing was antagonizing pissants who have been posing as Manly Men for so long they're not about to be ousted from their comfy zones.

A whole host of Catholic Bishops, pseudo-religious politicians, and paid-to-be-mean pundits jumped on the bandwagon called Control the women by denying birth control, and weren't they surprised when the women they were so itching to suppress wouldn't give in? A real donnybrook ensued, with everybody weighing in, pro and con, and here we are, in the middle of it all, coming out swinging, and if they want a war, okay, they've got one.

Some highlights:

• The Susan G. Komen Foundation is taken over by a right-wing zealot who makes it known from Day One that Planned Parenthood can kiss SGK goodbye. Susan Komen's sister/founder helps figure out a way to do it. A huge, unprecedented fuss ensues. Right-wing zealot goes on to greener pastures. The sister stays and apologizes -- a Pyrrhic victory that nobody feels good about.

• Long probes up the vagina with cameras on the end used not as medical tools but as instruments of shame -- Zap! Gone! Battle won!

• Gooey cold stuff massaged onto a bare belly so a government-issue wand can be waved, not to detect a zygote already determined by other methods to be there, but to establish once and for all that a woman doesn't actually have control over her own body -- still working on it but we've got them in our sights.

• Dozens of state legislatures scrambling to make laws against contraception and abortion so harsh Draco the Greek, if he were still alive, would be crying foul -- this one may take a while.

The legal issues, having some semblance of form and substance, are easier to deal with. There are wise and learned people on our side ready to take them on. But there's another, uglier issue and it's one we've faced many times before. It's our old but formidable nemesis: blind, consuming hatred toward people of our gender.

With the rise of the Tea Party and pressure from the Religious Right-to Life-Until-It-Actually-Becomes-A-Child, fortified by resident misogynist Rush Limbaugh and hardline Catholic men in red robes and black robes and pullover sweater vests, the battle to enforce the reproductive rights we've already fought long and hard for is a battle we can't afford to lose.

The spotlight is on Rush Limbaugh at the moment, but it's Rick Santorum we need to keep an eye on. He showed his hand when he talked about his reaction to John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech to the Baptists, where JFK said he would fight hard for the separation of church and state.

Santorum wanted to throw up when he read that. Why? Because it's disgusting and unforgivable that  Kennedy had the chance to pave the way for an American Pope and he didn't take it. Rick will remedy that when he's president. And guess who will suffer the most under his reign?

The obvious goal is to make sure Rick Santorum never becomes president, but once that threat is gone we'll still be fighting those others working to take us down. We thought that war was over, but all we really won, we know now, was détente.

Men (and, incredibly, other women) are fighting against those of us who go on believing our reproductive rights are sacrosanct. Suddenly they're coming out of the woodwork, no longer pretending that Roe v. Wade is all that's keeping us apart. Now it's about contraception -- a real puzzler, since birth control is the obvious remedy for unwanted pregnancies.

Only women can incubate babies. It's a fact. If they get knocked up and it's not a good time, the sex police want us to believe they have no one to blame but themselves. Really? What other species on the planet punishes the female for being impregnated by a male? Birth control is a two-way street. It's irresponsible and gutless to pretend that women did this to themselves, and yet we're hearing it louder and clearer every day.

And why is that? Because to the people who are coming at us with the same hoary arguments, it's not about the control of birth, it's about the control of sex. That nutty comment by Santorum backer Foster Friess about birth control being as simple as holding an aspirin between our knees? The admonishment from Rick Santorum that all birth control should be banished because it can only lead to badness? Rush Limbaugh's crazed, three-day masturbatory fantasy about the reasons women want free birth control? Sex, sex, and, yet again, sex.

It's the same tiresome struggle, but this time we're going to win. Why? Because we have a secret weapon.

It's men. There are more than just a few good ones out there and they're on our side. They're men who work with us, talk with us, and see us as equals. They're men who live with us and see our roles as complementary and not competitive or without merit. They're men who can love unconditionally and have grown so far beyond the ancient need to keep women bound and tethered, they're willing to fight beside us until this war is ended. Some of them are already at the front lines.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, you dirty old men of yesterday. A new day dawns and you've been left behind. It has to be this way. It's the way human progress works.

(Cross-posted at Ramona's Voices.)

The right wing's ancient evil

Guest post by Infidel753 

Infidel753 was born in New York state, grew up in California, and now lives in Oregon. His area of academic specialization was the Middle East. He is a life-long atheist and long-time liberal with a special interest in social issues and technology.

(Ed. note: This is Infidel's fourth guest post for us. You can find his first, on the ignorant fundamentalism of the Republican Party, here; his second, on the incoherence of the Occupy Wall Street movement, here; and his third, on the parasitism of Romney and Bain, here. -- MJWS)

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I suppose this proposed Virginia law, which I first heard about via Progressive Eruptions, was the final straw -- but I've known for a long time that there's far more at stake this year than in an ordinary election. We're facing a bizarre, atavistic evil here. It does not control the whole Republican Party -- yet -- but wherever they attain power, so does it.

It's not enough that our country has become a land where a few people who have learned to game the system accumulate obscene wealth by destroying jobs and producing nothing of value, while the incomes of the workers who produce everything of value stagnate. It's not enough that taxes on the wealthiest have been cut relentlessly for half a century until, we are told, the government can no longer afford to provide even the threadbare safety net we've come to know. It's not enough that the opposition elite's hand-picked candidate for the presidency is a man whose career exemplifies these nation-wrecking trends. No, there's something even more dark and horrible looming behind all that.

This is a war against modernity and modernity's central premise, the value system based on the individual's right to self-determination so long as his or her actions do not interfere with the self-determination of others, in favor of the older value system based on arbitrary taboos and edicts recorded in ancient religious texts, where our lives should be shaped not by our own desires but by the plans supposedly drawn for us by an imaginary deity. I could fill paragraphs with examples of the sophistry and obfuscation I've seen Republicans use to re-frame opposition to abortion and birth control so as to avoid mentioning the issue of women's self-determination -- to make the question about anything other than individual choice. That's the basic clash of world-views here: is your life your own, to be run based on your own wishes, or are you created as a utensil for some divine plan?

Theirs is clearly a religious world-view, even if the divine plan was replaced by the will of the state in earlier, semi-secularized variants of it (Fascism and Communism). Hence, too, the sin-and-punishment model exemplified by the Virginia law. Any supposed medical purpose is window dressing; the point is to humiliate a person who (must have) violated a sexual taboo and is now trying to evade the divinely-ordained punishment. If the Old Testament's dietary laws were still taken seriously by fundamentalists, they might be proposing laws to require similar degrading treatment for people who seek medical help for food poisoning after eating shellfish.

The sin/punishment model suffuses all their thinking. Republican rhetoric about the poor and unemployed is laced with a penalizing stance. Drug-test them, take away their benefits, impose this or that rule -- punish, degrade, humiliate. In the religious model, suffering is redemptive, so the more of it the better. It's sadism and deliberate cruelty, puffed up with a stance of moral superiority.

One sees the same in the conservative austerity policies being forced on southern Europe by the EU bureaucracy, privileging deficit reduction over jobs at a time of brutal unemployment. Never mind that the economic contraction caused by austerity is destroying the basis of future growth which would actually reduce the deficits. Solving the problem is not the point. The bureaucrats ignore the terrible suffering austerity creates -- if anything, they seem to relish it. Sin must be punished. The moral superiority of the north over the south must be asserted. And of course Republican deficit hawks in the U.S. are eager to impose the same sick model here.

It's no wonder that gays are such a target of choice. Their very existence is not allowed by the taboo system. In the fundamentalist world-view, there are no gay people, just a special case of sinful temptation and the necessity of resisting it. Even if gay sex can't be criminalized any more (and don't doubt for a moment that these people would still do that if they could), gays must be excluded from marriage, excluded from the military, excluded from teaching, excluded, excluded, excluded. The casting-out of the taboo-breaker, the branding with the scarlet letter, the public verdict "there is something wrong with you, you are not fit to be among us" -- that is the point.

Everywhere where they took power in 2010, they've been showing their true colors. Attack gays, attack women's self-determination, attack the poor.

It's always mostly about sex, of course. Repressed people are always fixated on it. There was never any real-world possibility that shellfish would be an issue. 95% of the Christian Right's obsessions are about other people's sexual self-determination and how to stop them from transgressing taboos. And like other psycho-sexual criminals, they escalate over time. So they have now reached the point of decreeing that women in Virginia who seek abortions be subjected by law to a procedure that meets the legal definition of rape. And make no mistake, if they get away with that, the next thing they come up with will be worse. It won't stop until somebody stops it.

The opposition today no longer embodies the spirit of Eisenhower and Goldwater, but that of the robber baron and the Grand Inquisitor of centuries past. Its face is no longer Reagan's sunny optimism, but the rapist's triumphant snigger.

There is one other matter which is seldom raised, but which is desperately important for the future of our country.

The world is entering an era in which proficiency in science and technology will outweigh everything else. The pace of technological change has accelerated beyond what seemed possible even a decade or two ago. In the world of the near future, it is the nations with the best brains that will lead. A nation that bets on cheap labor will not lead. A nation whose science classes teach that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that solid scientific fact must be rejected if it contradicts primitive dogma, will not lead. A nation where every proposal for major government investment in public education is met with whining about the burden on the taxpayers, will not lead. The right wing is setting up our children to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Germans and Japanese.

We've got to win this thing. Re-electing Obama is necessary (think Supreme Court picks) but not sufficient. We must take back the House from Boehner and the teabagging lunatics who are so extreme even he can barely cope with them. We must restore a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, plus a margin of error to allow for a few Blue Dogs. We must make sure Elizabeth Warren gets in this year, so she'll be in position to run for President in 2016 and finish the work Obama started. We must get Walker and the other union-busting Kochroaches out. But beyond that, we must smash the troglodytes and bullies on the other side so hard and bury them so deep that they can never, ever dig themselves out to torment and destroy the decent people of this country again.

Women of GOP Land: What do you see in those men?

By Ramona

Hello, women of the Republican Party: Democratic female of the liberal persuasion here. I know it looks like we couldn't be any farther apart when it comes to ideology, but I know us. I know when it comes to the big issues -- our futures and the well-being of the ones we love -- we're sisters under the skin.

We should talk. I mean really talk. I don't mean the usual chit-chat, the talk about kids and work and what's for dinner. I mean about politics. When we're together we do everything we can to side-step the issue and it does keep us friendly, but you must have noticed that the upcoming presidential election is becoming the bull elephant in the room.
 
I know you won't want to hear this, and I hear you when you tell me it's none of my business, but for a couple of weeks now I've been especially worried about where you're going with the men in your life. It strikes not just me but a lot of us that the relationship is becoming, well -- abusive.

At the moment these four men -- Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul -- are vying for your affections, and from where I sit no matter which one you choose it'll be bad news for you. And, okay, if any one of them wins, it'll be bad for me too. But it's you who has to take control of the situation. When any one of the four tells you he's going to work hard to take away a woman's right to free birth control, it's really disheartening for the rest of us to have to watch you applaud and cheer, as if he was God's gift and aren't you lucky to have him?

At least one of them, Rick Santorum (father of seven, no surprise), doesn't believe in birth control in any form. He says birth control can actually be "harmful to women," suggesting that it promotes sex outside of procreation, which apparently, even for those of us not still living in Medieval times, is a bad thing:

One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country... Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that's okay, contraception is okay. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

He blames "radical feminists" for taking women out of the home and into the workplace, yet he's done nothing to help improve the economy enough so that women who want to stay home can stay home. In his book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, written in 2005, he wrote, "Sadly the propaganda campaign launched in the 1960s has taken root. The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness."

Ron Paul, a former OB/GYN and a libertarian to boot, said, "Forcing private religious institutions to pay for contraception and sterilization as part of their health care plans is a direct assault on the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty. On my first day as President, I will reverse this policy."

Sexual harassment in the workplace? No problem, women. Dr. Paul says, just quit:

Employee rights are said to be valid when employers pressure employees into sexual activity. Why don’t they quit once the so-called harassment starts? Obviously the morals of the harasser cannot be defended, but how can the harassee escape some responsibility for the problem? Seeking protection under civil rights legislation is hardly acceptable.

Newt Gingrich believes strongly in a Personhood Amendment that says life begins at conception -- a loony view with ramifications for everything from the morning-after pill to in vitro fertilization. In his bid to destroy Planned Parenthood, he lied when he said the organization's main thrust was performing abortions. He went so far as to pull a fantastical number out of the air -- 90% of all services were abortions -- when the truer number is three percent out of nearly five million visits a year. In truth, only 34 percent of visits to Planned Parenthood are for reproductive services.

Mitt Romney wants to cut off contraceptive services at community centers as well, and, if he had his druthers, he would kill Planned Parenthood entirely. Even after all the evidence to the contrary, he is still trying to convince you that nothing good comes out of Planned Parenthood, when we all know that in so many communities they've become an essential health-care lifeline. not just for women of reproductive age but for men and women of all ages.

My question is, what is it that you see in these men? When you're out there applauding and encouraging men who want to take womanhood back to the status forced on us even as late as the middle of the 20th century, does it bother you even a little bit that you're egging them on, knowing -- because they've told you in every way possible -- they want to own every little piece of you?

The Catholic contraceptive controversy: Where's the health care part?

By Ramona

(Ed. note: Ramona did five excellent guest posts for us -- her last one is here, with links to the others -- and I'm very pleased to welcome her as a regular contributor to The Reaction. -- MJWS)

Effective August 1, thanks to a provision in the Affordable Care Act, most working women will have their contraceptives fully paid for, without a co-pay. That's the good news. The bad news (you knew there had to be bad news, right?) is that the unenlightened among us see it as nothing more than an unconscionable threat to virile manhood. Especially Catholic virile manhood.

The U.S Conference of Catholic Bishops, all male at last count, have decided amongst themselves that they will not be pushed into reversing their age-old hoo-haw laws forcing Catholic women to have as many babies as their wholly-owned bodies can produce. (The laugh's on them: Most Catholic women use artificial birth control. (The Guttmacher Institute says it's as high as 98%.) When was the last time you heard a Catholic woman talking about the rhythm method, except to marvel at how crazy that whole notion was?

Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, president of the USCCB, sharply criticized the decision by the Obama administration in which it "ordered almost every employer and insurer in the country to provide sterilization and contraceptives, including some abortion-inducing drugs, in their health plans... Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn't happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights."

We're talking about birth control here. We're talking about a woman's right to choose when the time is right to carry and bear a child. This is not baby-killing, it's responsibly managing an event as life-changing as it's ever going to get. It's the smart, sane way of controlling the use of our own bodies and, oh, by the way, preventing the birth of unwanted children.

We're talking about birth control products already approved and already a part of most insurance policies. The only mandate is that insurance providers will now be required to provide those products without additional cost to all women who want to use them. The mandate isn't for the use, it's for the availability and the cost.

This is a manufactured right-wing controversy designed to kill yet another positive outcome of "Obamacare," and the Catholic Bishops are more than happy to become the spark that creates yet another phony firestorm.

Mitt Romney, Republican candidate for president and a Mormon who, until now, apparently had no problem with that particular provision in the Affordable Care Act, has jumped on the bandwagon and is now on the side of the Catholic Bishops, taking this grand opportunity to to rail against his expected opponent, Barack Obama, about an issue he clearly doesn't even begin to understand:

"I'm just distressed as I watch our president try and infringe upon our rights, the First Amendment of the Constitution provides the right to worship in the way of our own choice," Romney said to nearly 3,000 people gathered in the gymnasium of Arapahoe High School, in Arapahoe County, an area known as a so-called "swing county" that Obama won in 2008.

"This same administration said that the churches and the institutions they run, such as schools and let's say adoption agencies, hospitals, that they have to provide for their employees free of charge, contraceptives, morning after pills, in other words abortive pills, and the like at no cost," Romney said. "Think what that does to people in faiths that do not share those views. This is a violation of conscience."

"We must have a president who is willing to protect America's first right, our right to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience," he said.

In addition to Romney, two other manly-men candidates for Obama's job, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, are outraged that women should be able to get free birth control. (It only adds to their outrage that women should have the audacity to think they can control their own bodies):

Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Mitt Romney, said in an e-mail that he regarded the administration's rule requiring religious employers to furnish birth control as wrong. "This is a direct attack on religious liberty and will not stand in a Romney presidency," she said. Mr. Romney has also pledged to end a federal program, Title X, that provides family planning services to millions of women. 

Mr. Santorum has taken the position that health insurance plans should not be required to cover birth control. He also favors allowing states to decide whether to ban birth control. He and Mr. Gingrich both support "personhood" initiatives that would legally declare fertilized eggs to be persons, effectively banning not just all abortions but also certain contraceptives, including IUDs and some types of birth control pills. 

Mr. Gingrich wants to withdraw government money from Planned Parenthood because it performs abortions in addition to providing contraceptives, though the federal money cannot be used for abortion.

A lie dressed in pink

I wonder how they feel about Viagra and other male enhancement "medications." Say there was a group of people who believed with their whole entire hearts that workplace insurance coverage of male sex-tool enhancement was not only outside any notion of "health care," it was maybe even "unconscionable." Should that group be exempt from providing it?

And if those bishops had wombs, would they be open to letting someone else tell them what they could do with them? (It's a rhetorical question. No, they wouldn't be open to letting someone else tell them anything.)

Addendum: Well, looky here: Catholic hospitals and universities already provide contraceptive coverage:  Here it is. What's their excuse now? 

(Cross-posted at Ramona's Voices.)

Apple's Siri for iPhone is anti-abortion (and not terribly supportive of women's reproductive health generally)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I realize that Siri, the much-ballyhooed AI "personal assistant" for the iPhone is a work-in-progress and, from what I understand, produces some, er, interesting results when you ask it something, but it would appear that, with respect to women's reproductive health at least, it has a decidedly right-wing bent:

Ask the Siri, the new iPhone 4 assistant, where to get an abortion, and, if you happen to be in Washington, D.C., she won't direct you to the Planned Parenthood on 16th St, NW. Instead, she'll suggest you pay a visit to the 1st Choice Women's Health Center, an anti-abortion Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) in Landsdowne, Virginia, or Human Life Services, a CPC in York, Pennsylvania. Ask Google the same question, and you'll get ads for no less than 7 metro-area abortion clinics, 2 CPCs and a nationwide abortion referral service.

Ask in New York City, and Siri will tell you "I didn't find any abortion clinics."

It's an experience that's being replicated by women around the country: despite plentiful online information about actual places to get an abortion, Siri doesn't seem to provide it. It's a similar experience for women seeking emergency contraception: in New York City, Siri doesn't know what Plan B is and, asked for emergency contraception, offers up a Google results page of definitions.

Was this intentional? It's hard to see how it could not be -- how could Planned Parenthood not be Siri's first answer? -- and it reminds me that I was probably right to get a new Android phone last week instead of an iPhone (though I do have an iPod and use iTunes).

It could be that Siri was programmed so as not to be seen to be an enabler of abortion (though of course this would also mean it was programmed to be extremely conservative on women's health and "opposed," if it can be understood that way, to abortion rights. I really don't know. Maybe there's some other reason for it. But it looks awfully suspicious.

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Apparently Siri doesn't know much about gay marriage or mammograms either.

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Now, while Siri may be on the right on women's health, it is decidedly libertarian on other matters. Apparently it will direct you to find Viagra, pot, strippers, and a blow job. All you have to do is ask.

Good times.

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Yes, I realize that 2001's HAL 9000 is supposed to represent IBM, which is decidedly not Apple. But of course there wasn't Apple at the time and, well, the connection between HAL and Siri is just too obvious to ignore.