Wisconsin Republican says gender discrimination in the workplace is a myth. Some things do snark themselves, don’t they?
Category Archives: Women’s Issues
Republicans vs. Women
Just as Mitt Romney was making the case to Newsmax, that paragon of journalistic integrity, that the so-called Republican war on women is entirely concocted by Democrats, Republican Scott Walker was quietly signing a law that repealed Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement law, which made it easier for women to seek damages in discrimination cases. Driven by state business lobbies, the repeal passed the GOP-dominated Legislature on a strict party line vote, and Walker signed it, with no comment, Thursday afternoon.
President Obama, meanwhile, was hosting a White House summit on women and the economy Thursday. Predictably, Republicans howled that the president is merely courting another “interest group†and playing politics. There was no doubt some politics at play during the summit; at one point participants chanted, “Four more years!â€
But really, when Republicans are repealing equal pay laws and proposing federal budgets that disproportionately hurt women, as well as restricting funding for contraception, who’s playing politics with women’s issues?
I read about what the leaders of Fitzwalkerstan did to Wisconsin’s women yesterday, and once again I was astonished at how tone deaf these jerks are. It isn’t just that they dissed women; it was that they couldn’t restrain themselves from dissing women at a time when the dissing of women by Republicans is headline news. They couldn’t even wait until all those caterpillars were distracted by something else.
And as for women being an “interest group” — yes, it’s the default norm syndrome. In their heads white maledome is the default norm, and any part of the population that deviates from the default norm exemplifies some kind of exceptional circumstance that doesn’t require serious consideration.
If you understand that’s how righties think, that they view the world through “default norm” syndrome, then you might see how they could see women as an interest group and the President’s recognition of women’s issues as nothing but “playing politics.” Walsh continues,
We know that most women who use the pill, for instance, use it for a health reason other than contraception only. Republicans are the ones fetishizing birth control and putting it outside the boundaries of women’s health care.
Mitt Romney and the GOP just don’t get it. Everything about the way they’re approaching these issues is backfiring.
Of the tone-deaf wonders who influence conservatives, possibly the most clueless of all is Rushbo himself. He honestly seems to have no idea why women would not want to vote for Republicans.
Women like being free, don’t they? Women love liberty. See, we’re being asked to accept the notion that women are monolithic. That all you have to do is approach every one of them with a lie that Republicans want to take away their birth control pills and just like the independents who don’t like confrontation, women, when they hear Republicans want to take away their birth control pills, make a mad dash to the Democrat Party and looky here, we got a poll to prove it.
Closing Planned Parenthood clinics really does amount to taking birth control away from a great many women. That’s not a scare story; it’s happening. The Blunt Amendment threatened to put contraception out of reach for many other women.
Yes, women do like being free. But for women, if we don’t have control over our own reproduction, none of the rest of the freedoms are going to do us much good. There’s a reason the phrase “barefoot and pregnant” stands for the subjugation of women. IMO it takes a particularly pernicious level of narcissism for a man not to be able to see this at all.
Polls show that most of the independent women who are running from Republicans and toward President Obama are college educated, says Steve Kornacki. These women are primarily concerned about reproduction rights. Might stunts like Walker’s raise the consciousness of blue collar women? If they hear about it, maybe.
See also Ed.
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Now They’re Saying We’re Insects?
A few days ago a Gallup poll found a widening gender gap in swing states.
The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney’s support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.
Romney’s main advantage is among men 50 and older, swamping Obama 56%-38%.
One poll does not an election make, but this was a Gallup poll, and I understand Gallup tends to overstate Republican support. But instead of trying to reassure women voters that the GOP is not anti-woman, the freaking idiot Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus compared us to insects.
Well, for one thing, if the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars, and mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we have problems with caterpillars. The fact of the matter is it’s a fiction and this started a war against the Vatican that this president pursued. He still hasn’t answered Archbishop Dolan’s issues with Obama world and Obamacare, so I think that’s the first issue.
This is right up there with the claim, repeated many times on the Right, that the reason African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats is that they’ve been snookered into staying on the Democrat “plantation” by food stamps and welfare. That righties don’t realize this as a slap in the face of African American voters exemplifies why African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.
Now Reince Priebus is saying the war on women is a media fiction that women, apparently, are falling for out of stupidity. And apparently our concerns are of no more importance than an insect’s. This is not reassuring us that you’ve got a clue, Reince.
Of course, there are women who do support Republicans. Women who diss their own gender are a common phenomenon. (I blame their fathers, but that’s another rant.) This columnist at the New York Daily News is an example.
The truly compelling — and frightening — finding from the Pew poll on the gender gap isn’t about abortion or contraception. It’s that women prefer big government solutions. And this is where feminism meets its match.
The percentage of women who favor bigger government providing more services outpaced men by 9 points in 2011, and has since at least 2000, with widest gap in 2004 at 12 points.
Women, it seems, are falling for the left’s “we’ll take care of you†economic paternalism, the insistence that women need the state, or wealthy taxpayers, to rescue them from a life of oppression, squalor and servitude.
The way I’d put it is that women are more realistic about their own vulnerabilities than men. They are much more likely to actively seek emotional support systems and to realize that sometimes they need help from others. Men are more likely to be in denial that they need anything from anyone else, which is a big reason why men commit 75 percent of suicides. When the fickle finger of fate points at men, they are less emotionally prepared to deal with it.
For most of us, beyond our friends there are big, ominous powers out there capable of either helping us or jerking us around. The government is one of those powers. Employers are another one. For some, Church is a third. According to Republicans, the only one of those likely to harm you is government.
But in their real lives, women are far more likely to have been jerked around and otherwise treated shabbily by their employers than by the government. Government can be annoying and unhelpful sometimes, but it usually doesn’t make your day to day life a living hell the way a bad employer can. And these days, even Catholic women are ignoring their Church on “women’s” issues.
So when anyone, including another woman, sneers about the left’s “we’ll take care of you†economic paternalism, it does not resonate with the real-world experience of most women. Sure, some fall for it, such as the Tea Party ladies who want to keep government out of their Medicare. But I think more women would vote for the “paternalism” of government over that of their employers when it comes to, say, why they are on the pill.
I don’t think most women look to Democrats to create a government that will “take care” of us. But when Republicans clearly take the side of corporations and churches over individuals, that ought to scare the stuffing out of us. And I think it is scaring the stuffing out of some of us.
And it ought to scare the stuffing out of men, too, but in my experience white men at least are more likely to be loyal to the powers that be. Yes, there are many exceptions, but on the whole I think I am right. This is another reason they are more likely to commit suicide when their trust is betrayed.
The fact that Republicans can’t seem to imagine why it would be bothersome to a woman to have to get a permission slip from their employers to get their pills paid for tells me these people cannot be trusted.
Government programs that benefit the poor, especially children, don’t impact the day-to-day lives of most women nearly as much as programs that give our employers more power to jerk us around or corporations more power to rip us off with impunity. And messing with our health care is the last straw. Steve Benen:
As we’ve reported on the show many times, the effort on the part of GOP policymakers at the federal and state level to undermine women’s health care is as severe as anything we’ve seen from a major party in many years. Unlike the war on caterpillars, Republican efforts are real.
I’ll spare you the full list of every bill in every state, but the policy offensive is, well, offensive. Restricting contraception; cutting off Planned Parenthood; state-mandated, medically-unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds; forcing physicians to lie to patients about abortion and breast cancer; abortion taxes; abortion waiting periods; forcing women to tell their employers why they want birth control, going after prenatal care, possible abortion permission slips … this is no minor policy initiative.
For the chairman of the Republican National Committee to dismiss concerns as “fiction” only adds insult to injury.
Eric Boehlert documents that righties are in massive denial about how much they are hurting themselves with women. They think we are insects? Let’s show ’em how hard we can sting.
Big Gubmint Is Coming for Your Women
Joan Walsh has a fascinating column out about why right wingers chose to declare war on women, right now, in 2012, even as it clearly is working against them politically. She presents the argument that on some probably unconscious level they fear that Big Gumbint is trying to steal their womenfolk.
I want to emphasize that this is probably subconscious. But what we’re looking at are deeply insecure men (and some women) who resent, even fear, anything that helps women be less dependent on men. Their nonsensical rhetoric about how “government dependency” is tearing families apart actually makes some sense if you understand that somewhere in their heads, “tearing families apart” translates into “independent women will reject me”
Be sure to read Walsh’s whole column for the argument.
Women Fighting Back Through Social Media
An Oklahoma judge overturned an ultrasound law today. Score one for us.
The more interesting story is that women around the country are organizing through social media to push back against what is going on in their states. A record number of abortion restrictions were passed in 2011, but so far in 2012 a lot of similar bills are hitting a wall of resistance. Some of them are getting passed, but many others have been blocked by a lot of pissed-off women.
Here’s a great article at Salon explaining how women are using social media to get the word out and organize protests. Many of these women have never been active before, but they’ve been shaken up by attacks on Planned Parenthood as well as by things said by some really, really stupid state politicians —
In Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that hundreds of people attended hearings on the state’s proposed ban on abortion after 20 weeks – a law based on scientifically spurious claims of “fetal pain†that six other states have passed since 2010. It failed partly because legislators couldn’t agree on an exception for “medically futile†pregnancies. In Pennsylvania, a forced-ultrasound bill “has been shelved indefinitely by House leaders, in part because of outcries by more moderate GOP lawmakers who don’t want to deal with it in their election year,†according to the Harrisburg Patriot-News. (But not without Gov. Tom Corbett, who weighed in cluelessly in another widely circulated comment: “I don’t know how you make anybody watch, OK? Because you just have to close your eyes.â€) In Tennessee, a legislator felt compelled to back off posting abortion records online, citing a fierce backlash and, he claimed, death threats.
“Every time a politician says something terrible, people respond emotionally to that,†says Luther. “It makes people in Florida care about what’s happening in Idaho.†It was harder, she adds, to get people fired up about Utah’s mandatory waiting period, maybe because there was no single tweetable moment.
Some pro-choice organizations have talked about an “enthusiasm gap†among the younger generation, which doesn’t remember back-alley abortions and which they say isn’t fired up the way young anti-abortion activists are. But social media has made it possible for women and men to keep up with the laws that emerge seemingly by the minute — and then sign a petition or, if they’re up for it, flood legislators’ Facebook pages with graphic updates about the vulvas the politicians are so interested in regulating. For progressives in conservative states, who often feel alone in their views, all this can be particularly galvanizing.
People are organizing on their own initiative. NARAL hasn’t been part of it, which doesn’t surprise me. More than 30 years ago I stopped paying dues to NARAL because I felt they were completely out of touch with anything going on outside of Washington, and sending them dues was a bit like throwing money into a black hole — you never saw any results from it. And the Democratic Party hasn’t been any better, especially at state level in right-wing states.
So this is a good thing. Maybe there’s hope.
A Crazy Gun Law Too Far?
Last night Ed Schulz interviewed Dan Gelber, a former Florida state senator. Gelber had been in the Florida legislature when the “stand your ground” law passed; he was one of the few senators who voted against it. He said that during the legislative session he asked repeatedly for the name of a single person in Florida who had been unfairly prosecuted for defending himself. And no one could produce such a person.
In other words, there was no wrong that needed to be remedied by the “stand your ground” law. Nothing was broke that needed to be fixed. “The NRA is a victim of their [own] success in that they have won all the major battles and look for these fringe issues now” Gelber said. “This was a solution in search of a problem.”
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Gail Collins said essentially the same thing in a column a few days ago.
There is nothing so dangerous as a lobbying organization that’s running out of stuff to lobby about.
I am thinking in particular of the National Rifle Association. These people are really in desperate straits. The state legislatures are almost all in session, but some of them have already pushed the gun-owner-rights issue about as far as it can go. You can only legalize carrying a concealed weapon in church once.
This year, in search of new worlds to conquer — or at least to arm — a couple of states are giving serious attention to bills that would allow gun owners to carry their concealed weapons in places like day-care centers and school buses.
People, do you think there is a loud public outcry for more guns on school buses? I truly believe that this is all the product of a desperate N.R.A., trying to show its base that there are still lots of new battles to be won.
On the other hand, a few hours after videos of then-Gov. Jeb Bush signing and endorsing the “stand your ground” law popped up on TeeVee and the web, Jebbie endorsed Mittens for president. Coincidence?
For example, see the Ed Show again, about 53 seconds into this clip:
Heh. Anyway — Lately we’ve seen several examples of the Right pushing too far and getting smacked for it. Susan G. Komen for the Fail is still smarting from its recent public humiliation. Several scheduled events have been postponed or canceled, and several executives have resigned.
It may be awhile before we get a clear picture of how much Rush Limbaugh hurt himself with his Sandra Fluke rant, but the Right remains in denial about what happened and is unlikely to moderate its behavior in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, right-wing state legislatures continue to pass more and more ridiculously crazy anti-abortion laws, and in some place a backlash is well underway.
Political processes are broken and have failed to protect us from right-wing insanity, but it appears a lot of people are learning to fight back on their own. The Crazy may finally have exceeded its bounds.
Equivalence? In Your Dreams …
According to most of the Right and also the perpetually clueless Stanley Fish (note to Protein Wisdom: If Fish is a “progressive,” I’m Pat Robertson. And Jesus.), this …
… is equivalent to this …
For those of you who are not able to watch the videos, in the first Bill Maher tells a joke about Sarah Palin — that when she heard about last year’s disaster in Japan, she demanded that we invade Tsunami. And then he introduced the next joke with “speaking of dumb tw*ts….” The second video shows highlights from Rush Limbaugh’s three-day rant against Sandra Fluke. (I realize that Maher has said other naughty things about Palin beside this, but again, the Rush video only shows some of what he said about Fluke.)
To say these are equivalent is a bit like saying an average-size rain puddle is equivalent to Lake Superior. And I’m not defending Maher. As I wrote a few days ago, using gender insults to ridicule a particular woman puts down all women in the same way that calling one black person a N—– puts down all African Americans.
But the fact is that if Rush had only said that Sandra Fluke was a “dumb tw*t it probably would have gone unnoticed. Instead, Rush went on, and on, and on, for three freaking days.
But beyond quantity of verbiage, we might also consider another measure of difference between these two “examples.”
What was the effect? Did Maher’s line have any measurable effect on public opinion or the quality of serious political discourse? Comedians make fun of politicians all the time, and the public is free to either be amused or offended. But I doubt that what Maher said changed anyone’s opinion about Palin one way or another.
On the other hand, Limbaugh flat-out lied about Fluke’s testimony for three days (and no doubt beyond), and judging by comments on rightie sites, in large part thanks to Limbaugh a big chunk of the American public actually believes that Sandra Fluke demanded that taxpayers pay for her contraceptives so she could have more sex. And no amount of linking to or explaining Fluke’s actual testimony can change their minds. In other words, Rush utterly poisoned any discussion we might have had on the issue of private insurance mandates and contraception.
Fish’s argument appears to be that we are supposed to see these two as equivalent because it’s the fair thing to do —
These questions come naturally to those who have been schooled in the political philosophy of enlightenment liberalism. The key move in that philosophy is to shift the emphasis from substantive judgment — is what has been said good and true? — to a requirement of procedural reciprocity — you must treat speakers equally even if you can’t abide what some of them stand for. Basically this is the transposition into the political realm of the Golden Rule: do unto others what you would have them do unto you. Don’t give your friends a pass you wouldn’t give to your enemies.
So if you come down hard on Limbaugh because he has crossed a line, you must come down hard on Schultz and Maher because they have crossed the same line; and you should do this despite the fact that in general — that is, on all the important issues — you think Schultz and Maher are right and Limbaugh is horribly and maliciously wrong.
However, I don’t think Schultz and Maher were “right.” But Ed Schultz was taken off the air for a week because of his use of a sexual insult, and I think that was appropriate. The price was paid. The scales were balanced in his case. He probably won’t do that ever again.
I don’t think Maher received any punishment for the “dumb tw*t” remark, but once again, if that is all Limbaugh had done, those of us who never listen to Limbaugh probably wouldn’t have noticed, or cared.
Fish continues,
The idea is that in the public sphere (as opposed to the private sphere in which you can have and vent your prejudices) you should not privilege your own views to the extent that they justify treating those with opposing views unequally and unfairly. (Fairness is the great liberal virtue.) This idea is concisely captured by the philosopher Thomas Nagel when he says that in political life we should regard our most cherished beliefs, “whether moral or religious … simply as someone’s beliefs rather than as truths.†In short, back away from or relax your strongest convictions about what is right and wrong and act in a manner that grants legitimacy, at least of a formal kind, to the convictions of others, even of others you despise.
The difference between Maher and Limbaugh is the difference between insult and slander. Maher insulted Sarah Palin; but all he communicated was that he doesn’t like her. He didn’t make any substantive claims about her that one could judge to be true or not. But Limbaugh spent three days telling outright lies about Sandra Fluke’s testimony.
So where’s the equivalence, Mr. Fish?
If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal — that is, non-formal — perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?
I reject making moral judgments about behavior based on how I feel about the people acting out the behavior. The more useful measure is to consider the effects, actual and potential, of a particular act. And again, by that measure comparing Maher and Limbaugh is comparing a puddle to Lake Superior. They are both “wrong,” but wrong on an entirely different scale. And not equivalent.
See also Whiskey Fire.
And They Deny There’s a War on Women
It just keeps coming — Senate Republicans are fighting to kill the Violence Against Women Act. It’s like they can’t help themselves.
VAW is up for renewal. Although some Senate Republicans supported VAW in the past, the Dems have added two measures to the bill that Republicans are calling poison pills. One, they want to make it easier for battered women who are illegal immigrants to get temporary visas. Two, they want to include same-sex couples in programs for domestic violence.
Some conservatives are feeling trapped.
“I favor the Violence Against Women Act and have supported it at various points over the years, but there are matters put on that bill that almost seem to invite opposition,†said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, who opposed the latest version last month in the Judiciary Committee. “You think that’s possible? You think they might have put things in there we couldn’t support that maybe then they could accuse you of not being supportive of fighting violence against women?â€
I don’t know if that was the plan. But considering all the creative ways Republicans in Congress have used “poison pills” so that they could bash Democrats for one thing or another (here’s just one example, from the maha archives), I say — choke on it, dude.
Meanwhile, some righties are still trying to trash Sandra Fluke. This time, they find she is dating a liberal Jew. Oh noes! Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns and Money provides insightful commentary.
Sandra Fluke’s boyfriend is…wait…a JEW!!!!
And not the good kind of Jew that likes to kill Palestinians in order to further bizarre apocalyptic fantasies of right-wing Christians.
No, Fluke likes the kind of Jew who might know leading Democratic players like….oh my god….CASS SUNSTEIN!!!!!
What’s next? Black men hugging each other? Sorta kinda related — Tbogg.
And wading further into the murky world of guilt by association, Little Lulu has discovered that Soledad O’Brien knows somebody who knew Derrick Bell, and that she has read one of Derrick Bell’s books, twice. Obviously, this “pro-Bell bias” disqualified her from attempting to crack through the dense wall of stupid known as “Joel Pollack.”
Actually, it’s not a war on women. It’s a war on humanity.
They Don’t Learn, Do They?
A Bloomberg poll says that 77 percent of Americans side with progressives on the question of contraception and women’s health.
Americans overwhelmingly regard the debate over President Barack Obama’s policy on employer-provided contraceptive coverage as a matter of women’s health, not religious freedom, rejecting Republicans’ rationale for opposing the rule. More than three-quarters say the topic shouldn’t even be a part of the U.S. political debate.
More than six in 10 respondents to a Bloomberg National Poll — including almost 70 percent of women — say the issue involves health care and access to birth control, according to the survey taken March 8-11.
Meanwhile, the yahoos in the Arizona legislature think that employers need to be informed about their employees’ contraception use.
A proposed new law in Arizona would give employers the power to request that women being prescribed birth control pills provide proof that they’re using it for non-sexual reasons. And because Arizona’s an at-will employment state, that means that bosses critical of their female employees’ sex lives could fire them as a result.
This is all about “freedom,” of course.
Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.
“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,†Lesko said. “So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.â€
Yeah, I’m sure the women of Arizona will be fine with having to get permission slips from their bosses to be on the pill.
Meanwhile, just weeks after the Komen for the Fail debacle, Mittens promises to get rid of Planned Parenthood:
“The test is pretty simple. Is the program so critical, it’s worth borrowing money from china to pay for it? And on that basis of course you get rid of Obamacare, that’s the easy one. Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that. The subsidy for Amtrak, I’d eliminate that. The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities,” he said.
I’d borrow money from China to buy Mittens some integrity. Or maybe even a brain.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Recently there’s been a substantial swing of women voters toward the Democratic Party. Gee, I wonder why that happened?
In other entertainment news, I see that comedian Louis C.K. was invited and then dis-invited to appear at the Radio and TV Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner, because a couple of years ago he tweeted some naughty things about Sarah Palin.
Now, this is no where in the same ball park as what Rushbo did to Sarah Sandra Fluke. But I’m not sorry some rightie “correspondents” like Greta Van Susteren complained about Louis C.K. It really is not OK to use sexual “jokes” to slam any woman, no matter how much you don’t like her. It’s as bad as using the “n” word to insult, say, Michael Steele. Sexually aggressive language puts down all women, because it suggests there is something substandard about being a women. And truly, Palin’s gender is probably the least objectionable thing about her.
So call Palin a twit, but not a tw*t, please.
Update: Some newspapers pulling next week’s Doonesbury.
Update: A Louis C.K. video that’s kind of on topic.