Did you go VOTE today?? If not, the polls don’t close until 7:30! GO VOTE NOW!!
Arkansans - Find your polling place: https://www.voterview.ar-nova.org/
fuuuuu I didn’t know voting was today I’m such a bad feminist. Apparently today was the Judicial general election. At least now I found the voters calender and I was able to see that my voters registration is still active. Info on Arkansas voting is difficult to find online but everyone who can vote needs to do your research so that you can!
(via fuckyeahnaturalstate)
North Dakota Religious Freedom Amendment Would Allow Employers To Deny Birth Control
“Government may not burden a person’s or religious organization’s religious liberty. The right to act or refuse to act in a manner motivated by a sincerely held religious belief may not be burdened unless the government proves it has a compelling governmental interest in infringing the specific act or refusal to act and has used the least restrictive means to further that interest. A burden includes indirect burdens such as withholding benefits, assessing penalties, or an exclusion from programs or access to facilities.”
This amendment, put on the June 12, 2012 ballot by the North Dakota Catholic Conference (NDCC) and the North Dakota Family Alliance (local affiliate of Focus on the Family), will further support people and organizations in violating the human rights of others based on their religious beliefs. North Dakota activist Don Morrison said, “It will legitimize hurtful acts towards people in North Dakota who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender, and people who are not the ’correct’ kind of Christian. The people promoting this are people who use fear of others as a tactic to move their agenda, and if this measure passes, it will give some powerful institutions, like hospitals and churches, more power to say it is okay to ostracize people they don’t like.”
It could allow people to break nearly any kind of law, provided their actions are motivated by “a sincerely held religious belief.” This means hiring discrimination, denial of insurance coverage, and discriminatory firing (say, firing an unmarried pregnant person). This means denial of emergency health care, or denial to fill a birth control or emergency contraception prescription.
“North Dakota,” [Steven R.] Morrison noted, “is a large, sparsely populated rural state, and many people may have access to only one pharmacy or one hospital…. The amendment will protect religious practice, but its negative externalities may severely curtail others’ enjoyment of their own constitutional rights.”
Measure 3 will be on the ballot in June, and we’re likely to see similar propositions in other states as well. The religious right and anti-choicers will attack from any angle to bend the country to their will. North Dakotans, please get out there and fight. You can learn more at North Dakotans Against Measure Three, by contacting Sarah Shanks of Feminist Campus at sshanks@feminist.org, or by contacting Emily Krueger, Legislative Assistant of Americans United for Separation of Church and State at action@au.org.
Undecided Women, Don’t be Fooled: Your Control of Birth IS ABOUT Jobs
Women, especially young childless undecided women voters, are talking about jobs, not abortion rights, right? What women really care about is not contraception, not access to family planning resources, not social issues like gay marriage, abstinence-only sex “ed” or Mitt Romney’s 50 year old bullying. Nope – it’s the economy. Women, “like everyone else,”– that would the norm – men, just want to be able to go to work, earn a fair wage and support their families. These “social” things are a “distraction” leading Americans to avert their gaze from what’s really important: the economy. Polls are clear: jobs and the economy are their number one concerns.
This oft-repeated juxtaposition, superficial and irresponsible, between The Economy and Social Issues (especially, in polls, “jobs” and “contraception”) is like a political media Greek chorus. People believe it, especially women who are disinclined to think about themselves as discriminated against by virtue of their sex. Young women answer these questions and pollsters ask them the way they do based on the assumption that women, armed with education and “girl power,” have equal access to newly created jobs and will be paid fairly for their work. Those are false assumptions that women, especially young childless ones, need to consider before they vote, because this year’s elections, both state and presidential, will affect their ability to do both for years to come.
We’re engaged in a mass delusion that misleadingly pits The Economy against what are at their core, Reproductive Rights. Don’t be fooled when considering who to vote for – women can’t participate equally in the first until they have the second. The very phrasing of the questions and the reporting of the answers hide the complex and interdependent relationship between the two. Contraception, reproductive rights, gay marriage (defined as it is by conservatives as a threat to male/female hierarchies) – all have critical implications for women’s economic well-being and for the economy at large.
Insistence on splitting these two concerns is particularly useful to Republicans, because it allows them toblame women’s economic woes on their “choices,” a specific irony. If a woman gets paid less or doesn’t have a “seat at the table” it’s because she chose a lower paying job, or because she chose to have children and works part-time, or she chose to not complete her education. If women make “bad choices” it’s their own fault, their decisions and they have to pay the consequences. Which gets us to the second half of this equation. Simultaneously, for the “less important” Social Issues, the word “choice” is completely anathema to Republican legislators and presidential hopefuls. Girls and women cannot possibly be trusted with “choices” when it comes to their own bodies, sex ed, birth control, health care, sexuality, domestic violence and marriage.
Most importantly, however, in terms of the economy, is that what all of these secondary-in-importance social issues boil down to is that women especially cannot be allowed to “choose” for themselves when to become mothers – arguably the single most important contributing factor to their, and our economies, long-term well-being.
What single factor arguably has the greatest impact on a woman’s work life? In other words, what enables women to participate in the economy and become productive workers and engines of economic growth and expansion?
That would be motherhood.
So, even single, childless, undecided women who may one day get pregnant, should consider what happens to a woman when she gives birth:
- She is 44% less likely to be hired
- She makes 11% less than her non-mother female counterpart (who is already just making 78cents to the male dollar)
- She is less likely to go to school or complete her education.
- She works part-time with more frequency, so that she can provide child care for which she is uncompensated and can derive no benefits as child care is invisible labor.
- She is less able to work overtime.
- She is unable to get maternal health care coverage as part of a basic insurance policy. Already discriminated against by gender rating in insurance prices, she is now doubly financially harmed by the fact of her parenthood.
- She is more likely to have to limit herself to lower paying job sectors where she thinks she will have more “flexibility” even though this has been proven not to be the case.
- She is more likely to be impoverished and become state dependent.
And, what is motherhood? In it’s simplest terms, it is reproduction.
Control of reproduction is an economic issue. This isn’t an academic abstraction, it is a practical reality for any human endowed with a uterus.
This is why instead of The Economy and Social Issues being unrelated as people keep suggesting, they are integrally related. The very nexus of The Economy and Social Issues then, from a policy perspective, is the question “Do you believe women should work, for (fair) pay and outside of the home?” Republicans do not. That’s why their dedication to controlling female sex and reproduction is an economic policy choice – it affects women’s abilities to pursue education, get hired, be paid, stay in the workforce.
If you believe yes women should be able to work and be paid fairly outside of the home, then you do everything possible to create family friendly work structures, fair pay regulations, health care access, planned parenting provisions, that enable women to do just that. If no, then you don’t. You do the opposite. You create a disabling “social issue” legislative scaffold on which to build a “it’s your own fault” Temple to Patriarchy. This is precisely what the Republic party is doing. If you are an undecided woman voter you should pause to consider the impact of these intersections on your own life and the lives of other, often far less privileged, women.
As it is now, even for a woman who has access to birth control, health care, safe and legal abortion, becoming a mother in this country, planned or unplanned, is the single worst economic decision a woman can make. She is still cobbled by inadequate health care, higher gender-rated insurance premiums, discriminatory pay, poor return on her educational investment, greater responsibility for child care and an inability to save effectively for security in her old age.
Republicans have shown repeatedly and without remorse that they want to keep women vulnerable, dependent and at home:
- Lilly Ledbetter? What’s that? “Money is more important for men.” I finally support it, but (wink, wink) my surrogates will make sure it never happens. Fair Pay in Wisconsin? Don’t want to force employers to prove they are paying women fairly. Definitely don’t want to “clog up the legal system” unless, of course, it’s to send black boys and men to jail.
- Domestic Violence? Let’s make sure the Abuser Lobby is happy, given the mail order bride business and more, and ensure that women most vulnerable to violent abuse are isolated and left even more at the mercy of mostly men who will rape and beat them without recourse to the law.
- Reproductive Freedom? Let’s pursue husbandry-informed blunt force trauma legislation ensuring that women’s bodies and reproduction stay in the control of men. Eliminating Planned Parenthood, making it hard to find birth control and abortion services, mandating transvaginal ultrasounds that women themselves have to pay for, requiring waiting periods that require expensive travel – all of these things impede women’s freedom and ability to compete fairly in the job market.
- Health Care: What, you mean the stuff that keeps people healthy and able to go to work? Hell, no. We’ll not only fight against affordable health care (the opposite of which is unaffordable health care) but we will also stop federal funding for Planned Parenthood, even including monies dedicated to non-abortion services like…family planning – often the only services that poor women have access to. Title IX? The only federal program devoted to family planning, you almost cannot make this up it’s so ridiculous: Romney will eliminate it entirely, to save money for The Economy.
- And yes, even Mitt Romney’s 50 year old bullying of a gay boy. Why? Because the exact same attitudes that informed that incident inform his support of abstinence-only education, gendered societal roles, fair pay provisions, reproductive freedom – namely, there are rules, boxes which people are supposed to fit into – and when they don’t conform to his world view they should be punished and forced to. The roots of his high-school bullying escapades and his “Social Issue” policies both reside in an inability to empathize with people who don’t look like and sound like him. It’s why he saw nothing wrong in explaining that Ann Romney was responsible for translating females. Empathizing with women is just not a possibility if you’re a man.
All of these issues profoundly affect women’s ABILITY TO ENGAGE FULLY AND EQUALLY IN THE ECONOMY WITHOUT PENALIZATION. If Republicans were serious about their commitment to women’s unimpeded equality in the workplace, then they would not insist that “social” policies are unrelated to “the economy” and they would not be pursuing broad legislation that affirmatively harms women’s ability to participate in the economy on multiple levels. Basic control over her own body, that would be reproductive freedom and health care that is affordable, non-discriminatorily priced, and relevant to her body and not men’s, affects whether a woman can seek and complete her education. The type of job she can get. How many hours she can work. If she can afford to start a business. Whether or not she can work full time or has to work part time. Whether she can afford childcare and health care, if she works. Whether she can safely leave an abusive spouse without fear for her children and seek work to support herself.
That’s why Social Issues, like contraception, are ABOUT The Economy not separate from it.
(via bebinn)
Iowa Governor Nominates Anti-Abortion Catholic Priest to Serve On Board Of Medicine
The Iowa Senate simply did not have enough time to consider the nomination of a Catholic priest to the state’s Board of Medicine, which is composed of ten seats, including three for non-physicians. Because of that, Monsignor Frank Bognanno is now an active, albeit temporary, board member. The Iowa Senate revisits the nomination in January when the body resumes work, and Bognanno could get a three-year term. But for now, he’ll serve for the rest of 2012.
Bognanno’s nomination to the Board of Medicine, however, could be a problem for women’s health in the state because Bognanno is anti-abortion which means he may also be anti-contraception. Republican Governor Terry Branstad nominated Bognanno after Senate Democrats flatly rejected his previous choice of Colleen Pasnik, a “feverishly” anti-abortion activist. But Bognanno may be just as anti-abortion as Pasnik. Not only did Bognanno join Pasnik as “part of a group that urged the board to reject a Planned Parenthood abortion-pill dispensing system,” he’s already admitted that he would come down on the anti-abortion side if he can find room for interpretation in state law.
[…]
The issue here is that most anti-abortion advocates already believe that state law is wrong and that we should be following Biblical law. As a Catholic priest, Bognanno is required by church law to oppose abortion and contraception. Will he really be able to “fairly apply state law” as he says? Or is that just his way of making himself seem like a nominee the Senate can approve? Once he is approved, Bognanno can vote based on his religious beliefs all he wants, which could put the lives and health of women in Iowa at serious risk.
This also sounds like a violation of the separation of church and state because Branstad has selected a Catholic priest to serve on a state board. He didn’t choose just a Catholic citizen. He chose a priest who takes orders from the bishops, who take their orders from the Pope. Conservative Republicans have been furious about President Obama ordering insurance companies to offer contraception services to female employees of religious institutions. This nomination may be a clear Republican response that they want religion to dictate medical and health policy. I have no doubt that Bognanno is a respected clergy member, I simply doubt that he can objectively protect the health of women. The State Board of Medicine should make decisions based on what is best for people’s health. They should not make decisions based on what someone’s religion says.
FUCK YOU BRANSTAD. One complaint about abortion providers, one complication with a telemedicine abortion, and we know where these assholes are coming down. I don’t care how respected or inspiring Bognanno is to his clergy, he does not have Iowans’ best interests at heart - he only has his, and his church’s. Religion has no place in determining health care policies.
There is so much time for these guys to do their damage by next January. Fucking anti-choicers.
(Source: sarahlee310)
White House Threatens To Veto House GOP's 'Violence Against Women Act' | TPM Livewire
The White House on Tuesday issued a veto threat to the House Republican version of the Violence Against Women Act.
“The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 4970, a bill that would undermine the core principles of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA),” reads a statement from the Office of Management and Budget. OMB griped about provisions that, unlike the Senate-passed version, exclude protections for Native Americans and LGBT domestic violence andundocumented immigrants.
The Administration urges the House to find common ground with the bipartisan Senate-passed bill and consider and pass legislation that will protect all victims. H.R. 4970 rolls back existing law and removes long-standing protections for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault – crimes that predominately affect women. If the President is presented with H.R. 4970, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.
Good.
No, Bubba Carpenter. Mississippi has NOT stopped abortion. You have only stopped SAFE abortion.
Mississippi State Representative Bubba Carpenter, speaking to the Alcorn County GOP on Thursday, said as much:
“We have literally stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi. Three blocks from the Capitol sits the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. A bill was drafted. It said, if you would perform an abortion in the state of Mississippi, you must be a certified OB/GYN and you must have admitting privileges to a hospital. Anybody here in the medical field knows how hard it is to get admitting privileges to a hospital…
“It’s going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to— Roe vs. Wade. So we’ve done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They’re like, ‘Well, the poor pitiful women that can’t afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger. That’s what we’ve learned over and over and over.’
“But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi.”
I think one of the most important things we could do is to continually find ways to make pro-choice people proud and forthright about their beliefs, to puff them up with moral superiority and FACTS and send them out into the world with the conviction that abortion isn’t shameful, not even a little, that supporting abortion is not merely the right thing to do but opposing abortion is morally obscene, and that anyone who questions these two premises is more invested in self-righteousness than they are in human lives. I think if we could drain the residual shame from the movement and create activists who aren’t simply pro-choice but who understand that being “pro-life” is a symptom of not knowing what the fuck you’re talking about and not giving a damn as long as you can think of yourself as morally superior, we could move this fight toward a decisive victory.
What Bubba Carpenter says here, that it doesn’t matter if people seeking abortions die because forcing people into unsafe abortions is a winning MORAL position, shows how completely morally-corrupt the anti-choice position actually is. Bubba Carpenter is “pro-life”, via Garland’s on-spot definition, because he doesn’t give a damn about any actual people. Carpenter sees himself as morally superior to every person who has gotten an abortion or will ever get one. It’s hard to see the humanity in others when you are looking down at them from so far up on high.
Bubba Carpenter and the “morality” that he represents are truly disgusting. And there is nothing - NOTHING - pro-life about it.
How convenient for Bubba and other anti-choicers that they think morality starts and ends between your legs, because I can’t see where else they could be keeping theirs.
Also of interest: Bubba voted against a bill that would require the State Board of Education and State Board of Health to establish a pilot program for comprehensive (minus abortion), age-appropriate sex ed in high risk school districts. The bill, of course, stalled in the Senate committee. Mississippi must really love unplanned, unwanted pregnancies!
(Source: keepyourbsoutofmyuterus)
Why Obama's announcement won't throw black voters
When President Obama made his historic announcement in favor of marriage equality, activists in the African-American community may have predicted trouble. In many places, African-Americans vote disproportionately against marriage equality and other pro-LGBT causes; for example, many black precincts voted 2-1 in favor of North Carolina’s Amendment One last week.
But as this article points out, many black voters have decided they’ll “agree to disagree” with Obama’s position on marriage equality. Some said they saw his announcement as a political move to get him reelected, but they’re taking on a “whatever it takes” approach and asserting that the most important thing is that he’s reelected. More from the Chicago Sun-Times:
Obama won North Carolina in 2008 by a mere 14,000 votes, thanks largely to a huge black turnout. Nationally, 95 percent of black voters chose Obama, and 2 million more black people voted than in 2004. No one doubts Obama will carry the black vote this year, but whether he can again turn out such large numbers could prove crucial to his chances.
African Americans have historically been more hostile to gays and lesbians than other racial and ethnic groups.
Only 39 percent of African-Americans favor gay marriage, compared with 47 percent of white Americans, according to a Pew poll conducted this April. Forty-nine percent of blacks and 43 percent of whites are opposed.
So interesting; I hadn’t thought about it this way. I truly hope this announcement doesn’t lose him any votes. If anything, I’m starting to think it could have the opposite effect.
Wait one second, are they seriously implying that all black people are heterosexist? Can we get over this stereotype already?
The Sexual Politics of Poverty
Young women are, socially speaking, the proverbial canary in the coalmine. Their fate prefigures the troubles that lie ahead.Once an optimistic middle-class defined capitalism’s post-WWII glory days; it distinguished what is known as the American century. Against much resistance, it fostered the ‘60s sexual revolution, Roe v. Wade and increasingly risqué (if sometimes over-the-top) expressions of sexuality in fashion, dance, music, ads or other popular media. Over the following half-century a new, freer erotic sensibility took shape in the U.S. and throughout much of the advanced industrial world.
In the decades following World War II, sex changed in America. Alfred Kinsey revealed the nation’s deepest, darkest secret: America was not a Puritan paradise but a land where lots of people had lots of sex, lots of different sex. During that half-century, people lived longer lives; the pill separated pleasure from procreation; the birth rate fell. This was an historical new social condition, one defined by rock-and-roll, the women’s movement, gay liberation and a more egalitarian, polymorphic eroticism. Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler represented the mainstreaming of this new sexuality.
Today, a dispirited, vindictive and pessimistic white Christian right is attempting to once again impose its Puritanical morality on the nation. Freighted by the increasingly more liberal, polymorphic sexuality embraced by a multi-ethnic and sexually-accepting youth culture, the Christian right is using the power of federal and state governments to impose its repressive beliefs regarding abortion, contraception, sex ed, obscenity and commercial sex. The Christian right is engaged in a campaign to discipline Americans into accepting a new condition of sexual austerity.
This is the third campaign by the Christian right to repress sexual experience over the last century. In the 1910s-‘20s, Prohibition’s second front was female sexual excess. A half-century ago, the battle expressed itself as Cold War McCarthyism’s war against homosexuals. Today, a new authoritarian value system, promoted by a reactionary Christian conservatism, is attempting to repress American sexuality and one of its targets is teen female sexuality.
The Christian right’s war against teen girls is an extension of its long-waged war against a woman’s right to an abortion, easy access to contractive [sic] products (e.g., condoms, the pill) and opposition to medically accurate comprehensive sex education.
Read the rest at Counterpunch here.
Colorado kills civil unions bill
On the second-to-last day of the House session in Colorado, Republican Speaker Frank McNulty quickly ended a news conference and effectively killed a measure that would have allowed same-sex couples to enter into civill unions.
At least five Republicans supported the bill, so if it had been debated it’s very likely it would have passed. Conservatives had lobbied McNulty to kill the bill in any way possible, and in the process, a number of other bills were immediately shot down, like one for statewide water projects and another regarding driving while stoned.
The fate of a civil unions bill has dominated the session ever since it passed the House Judiciary Committee last week with the support of Rep. B.J. Nikkel, R-Loveland.
Supporters of civil unions rallied Tuesday outside the Capitol.
“No matter what happens today or tomorrow, the unspoken truth in this whole debate is we will win,” Jace Woodrum, deputy director for One Colorado, the state’s largest gay-rights group.
“Whether it is today or tomorrow or next year or the next, we will win. Gay and lesbian couples in this state will have full protection under the law. We all know it, and everybody in this building knows it,” he said.
Such a roller coaster of a week.
Why I don’t like the phrase “The War on Women”
I wrote this over at my blog. It’s a long post, so I’ll just put here on KYBOOMU the three main reasons I have a problem with the phrase “the war on women”:
- WOW is cissexist and erases the lived realities of plenty of people.
- WOW flattens all people affected by anti-choice measures into a single, equal category despite HUGE differences in how the so-called WOW affects people based on race, class, etc.
- WOW makes this seem like this is an issue that is just about the ladies.
(Source: keepyourbsoutofmyuterus, via bebinn)
