Reality Cast - Our Weekly Audio Podcast with Amanda Marcotte

Assaults On Public Option, Women's Right To Privacy

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:57:31 -0500

Nona Willis Aronowitz talks about her new book "Girl Drive". The public option seems viable, and health care reform opponents freak out, and a new law in Oklahoma invades women's privacy.

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Another sex scandal

Pelosi responds to a heckler

McConnell claims health care reform will kill you

Foxx compares health care reform to terrorism

Lieberman begs someone to debate him

Lieberman avoids debating Rachel Maddow and Glenn Greenwald

Lieberman's ties to the industry

Oklahoma tries to out women who have abortion

Limbaugh blatantly misleads on health care reform

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be talking to Nona Willis Aronowitz about her new book Girl Drive, about a cross-country feminist trip. Also, the public option seems viable, and opponents of health care reform freak out. Plus, a segment on the Oklahoma law assaulting women's privacy rights.

Because I know that you guys love the sex scandals from family values politicians. Here's the latest, from now former assistant attorney general of South Carolina Roland Corning.

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Not only all that, but he was on his lunch hour. Which just makes the whole thing seedier.

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So, the House released its version of a health care reform bill, and to no one's great surprise, it has a public option in it. In general, it's a very good bill, with a focus on preventive care that lowers costs and creating competition and collective bargaining that will do the same thing. I was also impressed with the bans on dumping people for having pre-existing conditions or raising their premiums. But it was the public option above all things that is causing the complete panic attack in the people who are basically coming out as insurance industry shills. And thank you, Nancy Pelosi, for pointing that when heckled by a health care reform opponent.

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Now that a public option is officially on the table, opponents of health care reform have moved from merely spreading misinformation to lying outright or stirring up ridiculous hysteria. Mitch McConnell went on Dennis Miller's show to claim that public health insurance would kill you.

health care 2 *

You know what actually kills people? Not having insurance, which is true for 47 million Americans and climbing. But McConnell's doing that two-fer lie thing, where a conservative buries a lie within a lie so you don't know which one to refute. He's linking the public option, which would just be a government-owned non-profit like the Post Office with the NHS and Medicare, which pay for your care with tax dollars. That's a lie. But it's also a lie that the NHS and Medicare are bad things. Medicare has demonstrably relieved poverty in the elderly, and Britain's National Health Services put them at #18 in the world, whereas the U.S. is #37. So if you want better health care, you would actually embrace the British system.

And Representative Virginia Foxx pulled a favorite scare tactic out: use the word "terrorism" to rile them up.

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Because terrorists will just kill you, whereas under health care reform, you might find yourself in a waiting room next to the very poor people that you tried to keep out. Glad to know where priorities lay.

But for my money, the funniest public freak-out has been from Joe Lieberman, who swings from talking wild wingnut talk to oppose health care reform to pretending he's the last reasonable man on earth. As part of his latter strategy, he's been claiming that no one will debate him on the public option.

health care 4 *

Do you really want to have that debate, Joe? Really? Because from where I'm sitting, it doesn't seem like you really do. Ask Rachel Maddow.

health care 5 *

So much for that. Why is it that Lieberman is so dead set against a public option? The main purpose of it would be to set up competition for insurance companies, so they have to lower their prices. The only real reason to be against it is that you're siding with insurance companies over the public.

health care 6 *

So that's where we stand, everyone. Right now, I think if it was just up to the House, a public option would be beyond question. But we're up against the Senate, and the Senate has a lot more people taking a lot more money from insurance companies.

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insert interview

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I apologize in advance for not covering this sooner, but things have been moving so fast on this, that it's hard to keep up. But let's start at the beginning. As you may well know, Oklahoma is often the ground zero for anti-choice nuttiness, and that includes that specific obsession that anti-choicers have with getting personal information about women who get abortions. There's a couple theories as to why they're so damn interested in finding out so many savory details on women who get abortions. The most obvious is that they're trying to intimidate them, but I think it also has a lot to do with an inability to mind their own business. That, and they're uptight, weird people who enjoy titillating themselves by thinking about perfect strangers having sex while imagining punishing them for it. So here's the latest in the realm of self-titillation from anti-choice nuts.

Oklahoma 1 *

Well, since anti-choicers often take a pornographic interest in the lives of women getting abortions, well, it makes sense to put this on the internet with other pornography. But what I object to is the taxpayers paying money to use women's private information in order to titillate anti-choice nuts. Those people need to find consenting adults to make their pornography, and pay for it out of their own pocket. When you get an abortion, you're not consenting to have your private information put online so some right wing nuts can get themselves all horrified and aroused.

Maddow had Megan Carpentier from Air America on to discuss this odious law.

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This is the danger that you step into with all this talk about finding common ground on abortion. If we define common ground as simply finding ways to reduce abortion, and not looking too closely at whether or not those methods are ethical, then you get into this kind of situation. Oklahoma is justifying creating porn for anti-choice nuts on the grounds that engaging women in this non-consensual practice will intimidate them out of abortions. Most likely, it will just make them go out of state for abortions. But we have to be clear that reducing abortion is only a worthy goal if women's rights and dignity are fully respected.

Oklahoma 3 *

And there you go. If you have any doubt in your mind what's going on here, the fact that a bunch of skeevy right wing dudes took this private information and gave it to the king of sexual harassment via falafel references himself, Bill O'Reilly, should wipe all doubt from your mind. I'm not going to suggest that these men are sexually aroused by abortion per se. But I do think they get a lot of titillating pleasure out of thinking about women having sex, knowing the details, and then fantasizing about what it must be like to punish them. Or acting on it with a public shaming like this. Abortion just gives them the excuse for their behavior.

The good news is a judge has put a hold on the law for the time being.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the biggest whopper about health care reform edition. We've heard a lot, but I have to single out Rush Limbaugh for pure audacity.

Limbaugh *

There is no prohibition on buying private insurance. You buy it through the Health Exchange. Limbaugh is pretending this is a ban on private insurance, but it's basically the same, just more streamlined and competitive. Gotta love the way that the wingnuts have started to call this Pelosi care, by the way. They couldn't be more obvious in their use of misogyny to raise concerns. Pelosi is the sort of target they love to hate, a target in a skirt.

"Law And Order" Panders and Lies About Anti-Choice Terrorism

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:18:09 -0500

"Law and Order" anti-choice nonsense, with clips! Also, the laws and ethics regarding fertility treatments, and questions about whether or not to vaccinate boys for HPV.

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Reacting to Bob McDonnell's thesis

FDA permits vaccinating boys for HPV

Anti-choice extremists try to raise money

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Naomi Cahn on her book on fertility treatments and the legal issues surrounding them. Also, I watched the Law and Order exploiting Dr. Tiller's murder so you don't have to, and the FDA approves use of the HPV vaccination for boys.

Virginia's NARAL decided to take candidate for governor Bob McDonnell's thesis to the streets and have people read what amounted to a rant against anything threatening a strict patriarchy to see what the people think. The people think it is silly.

mcdonnell *

Funny stuff.

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I'm sure you've heard by now that "Law & Order" did a despicable episode based on the murder of Dr. George Tiller, and as is often the case with these shows, they pander so much to conservatives in the audience that they forget that women who have abortions and those who provide them are people who deserve respect. Early in the episode, you have an idea of how bad this is going to be.

l&o 1 *

Right away, they make sure to spare your average anti-choice nut responsibility for this, and even wrongly imply that they go out of their way to stop these murders. There is no reason to believe this. Those who shoot abortion providers tend to move freely amongst other anti-choicers, and even though someone like Scott Roeder spoke openly of his belief that murder was justified, as far as I know, no one tipped off the police or the potential victims. They are too busy spreading dehumanizing rhetoric about abortion providers that gives killers moral support.

Of course, they have to make one of the cops an anti-choicer, which means that the rest of us have to listen to the cheap sentimental stuff that assumes that women who have had sex, even forced sex, forsake their right to be treated like human beings.

l&o 2 *

Oh, way to make the pro-choicer look like a bad guy. Here's a better reply: You poor mother was in such hell that she threw herself down a flight of stairs in despair, and you can't even pause to think about what that must have been like for her? You weren't even around! Or maybe not write that story in the first place, because it's stupid and implausible. Most women who attempt to self-abort do so early in the pregnancy, because that's the best chance they've got. Remember kids, if you parents didn't have sex the night you were conceived, you also would have never been born. Do you think that means that abstaining should be illegal?

We also see an example of the anti-choice unwillingness to believe pregnancy occurs in women's bodies. The argument that the rape was the crime, but the life isn't makes no sense, if you believe women are human beings. He is completely uninterested in the 11-year-old's physical and mental well-being. As soon as she was raped, apparently she is not a person who deserves consideration. She is a nonentity; all suffering dealt out to her is irrelevant. What a horrible way to think.

They do show the anti-choice activists as smarmy people, but most of the episode takes anti-choice nonsense too seriously. It also hangs the show on the unlikely event that a judge would allow a defense of others defense in an abortion shooting. And then the clichés:

l&o 3 *

As Kate Harding as Salon noted, this notion that giving birth means you're comfortable forcing others is completely false. 60% of women getting abortions are mothers already. In addition, there's some evidence showing that parents of daughters become more liberal about reproductive rights. Your feelings on choice statistically are more likely to depend on your attitudes about women, not about fetuses.

And then there's the blatant lies:

l&o 4 *

This story comes from the obviously false story that Jill Stanek delivered to the Illinois Senate, causing then-senator Barack Obama to practically laugh in her face. It would be funny, if it weren't so sad. They are spreading lies about Dr. Tiller, who was a good man who gave his life to serve women's health, and he loved children. In fact, if you want children to do well, you don't attack their mothers. Unsafe, illegal abortion doesn't just kill women, it orphans children. Playing the anti-choicers love babies card doesn't fly if you look at the facts.

They also have another abortion doctor on the stand who is supposed to be a villain because he calls anti-choicers hypocrites and fools. I found myself liking him, and it occurred to me that the only reason that the audience is supposed to hate him is they've been fooled for so long about what anti-choicers are about.

And now for the part pro-choicers love---two dudes without uteruses talk about women's rights as if they're a rhetorical exercise and not a lived experience!

l&o 5 *

First of all, not every birth defect is correctable. And contraception is not always used or always perfect. But let's deal with the idea that abortion is like slavery. This is exactly backwards. Like slavery, forced birth is an old-fashioned, conservative idea based on the belief that entire classes of people should be stripped of their basic right to bodily autonomy. The people closer to the abolitionists of yesteryear are the feminists of today. You know, there's all on the left, pushing for greater rights and dignity for all human beings.

I'll spare you the humiliating scene where the tough female lawyer converts to being anti-choice. Suffice it to say, they might as well have had a good old horse-whipping of the murder victim's widow, while they were at it. Finding the defendant guilty doesn't make up for this. Dr. Tiller saved lives. Shame on Law & Order for this horrible misogynist pandering.

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insert interview *

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Semi-good news: the FDA recently approved the use the HPV vaccination for boys, and recommended it as part of the boys package of childhood vaccines, but they are still not officially recommending it, just staying in the permissive category. NPR did a segment on the pros and cons of vaccinating young men for HPV, which would mainly be done to prevent cancer. But not cancer in the boys, but cancer in their potential partners.

hpv 1 *

But the shots cost money. And so the question remains, should boys be required to get it in order to increase herd immunity? As someone who plans to get an H1NI shot so that I'm not a risk to pregnant women I encounter, I tend to say yes. But from a public health cost/benefit perspective, the question is up in the air.

hpv 2 *

And there lies the rub. In the U.S., at least, there's a lot of people that aren't going to get the vaccine for their girls. It's a combination of two factors. One is the general anti-vaccination hysteria that's out in the air, most of it sadly coming from the left. A lot of people see that Big Pharma will make money off the HPV vaccine, and as an impotent form of protest against capitalism in every part of our lives, they decide vaccines are dangerous and won't get them. That there is no evidence whatsoever for their fears, but plenty of evidence that cervical cancer is deadly doesn't deter them.

And part of the reason is coming from the right, and their belief that preparing young women for sex just inclines them to have it. The right continues to believe that abstinence will happen if you provide enough pressure, even though the continuing existence of the human race indicates that sex is as popular as ever.

These two ridiculous mindsets work together to create an extra special paranoia about the HPV vaccine. The combination of sex and medicine tends to be incendiary for whatever reason. That, plus the expense of the vaccine. What this means is that we might not get the herd immunity we need just by vaccinating all the girls. And then there's this.

hpv 3 *

Well, there's a couple flaws in the idea of only vaccinating gay men. For one thing, vaccinating only one group tends to escalate fears about the vaccine. For another, how do you separate gay men from straight men, especially before they become sexually active? Most gay people still are assumed straight until they say otherwise, and a lot of gay people don't come out until after they become sexually active. To make the vaccine the most effective, it's best to get people vaccinated before they start having sex. Plus, a lot of men have sex with men while identifying as straight. There are just so many flaws in the idea.

Personally, I think that vaccinating men to protect women's health is a smart idea. It helps drive home what people don't understand about vaccines, which is they are both about self-protection and about herd immunity. We get vaccines as part of the social compact, like paying your taxes. We all do our part, and we all benefit. Men may not get cervical cancer, but if someone they love does, they suffer, too.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, life isn't Law and Order edition. Here's a clip from a Kansas news station covering attempts by anti-choice extremists to raise money for Scott Roeder's defense through an eBay auction.

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Sure, the show Law & Order portrayed the so-called necessity defense as something a judge would allow in court, but as I demonstrated earlier, Law & Order isn't very interested in reality at all. This entire thing is a joke, intended to do what 95% of anti-choice actions are supposed to do, which is create attention for anti-choicers, so they can feel righteous in their misogyny. Luckily, eBay will not allow the auction.

"Law and Order" Lies and Panders About Anti-Choice Terrorism

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:15:49 -0500

"Law and Order" anti-choice nonsense, with clips! Also, the laws and ethics regarding fertility treatments, and questions about whether or not to vaccinate boys for HPV.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
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Links in this episode:

Reacting to Bob McDonnell's thesis

FDA permits vaccinating boys for HPV

Anti-choice extremists try to raise money

mcdonnell *

Funny stuff.

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l&o 1 *

l&o 2 *

l&o 3 *

And then there's the blatant lies:

l&o 4 *

And now for the part pro-choicers love---two dudes without uteruses talk about women's rights as if they're a rhetorical exercise and not a lived experience!

l&o 5 *

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insert interview *

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hpv 1 *

hpv 2 *

hpv 3 *

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roeder *

Abortion Down, But Ridiculousness Up

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:59:35 -0400

Abortion down worldwide, but unsafe abortion remains high. Also, more on health care reform and why can't everyone just agree to be against rape?

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South Park sends up abortion addiction

Peggy Robertson's C-section hell

Joining the Army for health care

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Susan Cohen of the Guttmacher Institute about a new report about the worldwide state of abortion. And more health care reform coverage, and a segment on how Senator Franken's anti-rape amendment is receiving widespread support, despite the 30 votes against it.

South Park recently did an episode making fun of WWE-style wrestling, and how the villains in it are completely over the top. Cartman plays a female wrestler, and it was a little interesting what the character uses to "prove" that she's a bad guy.

cartman *

I'm sure this is a reference to Irene Villar, the woman who recently published a memoir about her 15 abortions. I doubt seriously that the creators of South Park are trying to make a statement about how women's morality is tied to their sexuality, and how stupid that is, but I think they managed to get that message across. Having 15 abortions might be evidence of mental problems that keep you from being responsible with contraception, as Villar suggested about herself, but it certainly doesn't make you a bad person.

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It's increasingly looking like liberal Democrats and the White House are going to be able to pass some kind of health care reform, hopefully with a public option attached. Which means opponents are increasingly getting desperate, and looking for ways to create general fear and paranoia about health care reform, which means that gender and sex are becoming a bigger part of the noise. NPR finally got around to covering this, meaning that the story has gotten huge. NPR does the whole thing where they report more on what the various sides are saying than explaining the truth, but at least they do get around to reporting on the facts.

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Unfortunately, they immediately ruin this by giving airtime to anti-choice misinformation and distortion.

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Well, just because they say it doesn't mean it should be reported on, or at least in this horse race way. I wish they'd put more effort into making it clear that anti-choicers are saying there's federal funding for abortion because they're lying. And that they're lying, because the reality is inconvenient. NPR does manage to make it clear that the anti-choice demands would strip women who currently have abortion coverage of those benefits, but it would be nice if they explained to the audience that anti-choice claims are not based in reality. I realize it's not fun having a bunch of anti-choice nuts come down on you like a sack of hammers because you tell the truth about what they're doing, but if you're reporting on this issue, it's your job.

Women's health care and the way that being female often puts you at a special risk to get dumped from your insurance is becoming a bigger issue in the health care reform debate, but the good news is that increasingly, the discussion is not about using sex to scare people into being against health care reform. It's about getting sympathy for women who face loss of health care after being beaten, raped, getting reproductive cancers, or just generally being treated poorly because they're female.

For instance, Peggy Robertson has been out telling her story of how the insurance company wouldn't cover her because of a prior C-section.

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Yes, they told her she had to get sterilized. Americans United for Change took this story and made an ad about it. (http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/test-woman-sterilized)

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That's not the only way that women's health concerns are being used to reduce people's basic freedom.

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Can you imagine being 39 years old and having to join the Army, just so your wife doesn't die of ovarian cancer? The irony here is that now his wife is automatically on, you guessed it, government-funded health care coverage. The kind that we keep hearing is such a threat, even though no version of the bill expands the scope of any kind of government health insurance. Obviously, people don't agree that government-funded health insurance is so bad, since they're willing to give up their freedom and live away from their families to get their hands on it. Bill Caudle is a hero. But he should not be forced to join the army at his age to save his wife.

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insert interview

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Last week, I reported briefly on Al Franken's amendment to an appropriations bill that would deny funding to defense contractors who actively stop employees of theirs that are raped from seeking justice. The amendment was in response to a situation where an employee of Halliburton was gang-raped by her colleagues, and then locked in a shipping container in an effort to keep her from getting to a place where she could start the process of holding the rapists accountable. She escaped, and was blocked from suing by an arbitration agreement that Halliburton makes their employees sign. Senator Franken merely wants to stop doing business with contractors who insist on treating rape victims this way.

But it hasn't been so easy for him. 30 Republican Senators voted against the amendment, and now some Senators are trying to water it down to be meaningless. The good news is that the struggle is getting a lot of coverage, because it's straightforward: the government shouldn't be subsidizing rape. Most people don't even see why this should be controversial. Rachel Maddow had the aforementioned rape survivor Jamie Lee Jones on her show to talk about the issue.

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And I think that's the crucial part of this story. From the get-go, Jones has made it clear that what she wants is to keep things like this from happening to other women, and part of the process of stopping rape is speaking out against rape. But for Halliburton, the fact that an employee was raped is just an embarrassment. They don't care about her rights, which is why they locked her in a shipping container. They just want to muzzle her.

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Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like that will happen. In fact, as I noted before, they're still fighting on this, even though the public at large is hardly going to say that defense contractors should just let their employees rape other employees with no consequences, or worse, punish the victim on top of that. But the no votes largely came from socially conservative, pro-war politicians, and so of course they're not inclined to be overly sympathetic to rape victims, nor are they eager to hold defense contractors accountable in any way. But what this is doing is showing the public that even when it comes to brutal gang rapes, some people can't be bothered to care. Remember, Jamie Lee Jones was badly hurt physically as well as mentally, and had to have surgery to recover.

Thankfully, it's not just Rachel Maddow giving this episode major coverage. So is the Daily Show. Jon Stewart pointed out that the whole arbitration thing was ridiculous to begin with.

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They then played Senator Sessions denying that the government has any role deciding what private contracts will look like, which of course misses the point by a mile. First of all, the Constitution gives the government that right over all interstate business. But of course, there's also the fact that these companies are hired by the government.

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Every time an opponent of this amendment claims that it's a political attack to write this amendment, I hear them saying that if companies they like coddle rapists, then that's okay with them.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, anti-choice nuts have a lot of issues edition. There's a new website out called Choice Kills, and like many anti-choice materials out there, especially those put together by men, in features a man pretending to be the fetus.

Teenage Oral Sex Panic!

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:57:00 -0400

Abortion continues to be a weapon in the health care reform debate, Dr. Phil panics over teenage oral sex, and Shannon Boodram talks about young people's sexual experiences.

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Marriage marshmellow

Abortion and health care reform

Senator Franken's anti-rape amendment

Dr. Phil flips out

Levi Johnston and pistachios

Abortion causes war?

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Shannon Boodram about her new anthology on young people's sexual experiences. Also, the issue of sexual health in the health care reform debates continues to distract, and Dr. Phil does a ludicrous scare story about teenage girls and oral sex.

May I point you to a cute video about abstinence-only put together by the League of Young Voters?

marshmellow *

Abstinence-only proponents are misrepresenting a study on delayed gratification. The original study showed that kids who could resist eating a marshmellow not for the promise of two later tended to better in life. This doesn't actually mean that waiting for marriage will make you a better person. The point was resisting temptation for a greater reward was evidence that some kids were a bit more rational than others. But there's no evidence whatsoever that resisting premarital sex results in a greater reward. Delaying for no reason at all has not been shown to have any correlation to better life outcomes.

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NARAL's Blog For Choice has a nice little video up detailing how anti-choicers are using the issue of abortion in a cynical way, to obstruct health care reform altogether. It's an interesting little game they're playing, because there are layers upon layers of deception going on here. Anti-choicers are claiming that they merely want to stop government funding for abortion from happening, even though that was never on the table. But if you listen closely, what they're really demanding is that women who currently have abortion coverage get that stripped.

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That was, in order, David Beriet of 40 Days for Life, and Rep. Bart Stupak. Here's what the explicit exclusion they're demanding would do. All insurance companies in the country would be part of the system, and so all of them would be forced to stop covering abortion. That means that anywhere from half to 87% of women who currently have abortion coverage would lose it. This is about depriving women of currently existing benefits.

But it's really more than that. Here's the thing: Most people making these radical anti-choice demands would not support a health care reform bill that did explicitly exclude abortion coverage for all women. If Democrats give in on this demand, they're immediately going to move on to raising a panic because health care reform will cover contraception and STD tests and treatment. Abortion is only one tool they have to use female sexuality to raise a panic over health care reform. This isn't really about abortion, or sex even. It's about using these things to create noise and shut down health care reform.

There's no reason to try to believe that anti-choice hysteria over health care reform isn't just part of a larger anti-health care reform agenda. In fact, anti-choicers themselves have done us the favor of linking the two explicitly.

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What was interesting was that the American Life League's signs didn't even bother to conceal that the real agenda is shutting down health care reform. They didn't even reference the abortion smokescreen, and instead referenced the right wing obsession with Ted Kennedy, and celebrated his death. How "pro-life" of them.

But as depressing as all this is, I do have some good news to report. Senator Al Franken introduced an appropriations amendment that would bar defense contractors from government money if they cover up rapes committed by their employees or punish rape victims who press charges or file lawsuits. It was brought forth because of what happened to Jamie Leigh Jones, a woman who worked for Halliburton.

Franken *

30 male Republican Senators voted against this amendment to cut off defense contractors that do things like this to their employees.

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Insert interview

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Thank you, fine bloggers at Jezebel, for watching the Dr. Phil show so I don't have to. Because Dr. Phil did a panic piece on teenagers having oral sex, and he doesn't even try to hide that this is one of those situations where everyone is going to work up some outrage so they can titillate themselves by talking about teenagers and oral sex. He really gets into setting the stage, putting out some details to make this sound as filthy and perverse as possible.

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Okay, even a libertine like myself has to admit that if your kindergartner is involved in this sort of thing, I'd blanch, particularly if it wasn't just a matter of a couple of kids playing doctor. But in that case, that's child molestation and sexual assault, which is not what Dr. Phil is talking about here. No, he's talking about consensual sexual relations between teenagers.

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Wait, did he just say 15 to 19 years old? 40% of the group he's trying to raise a panic about are legal adults who can vote, and the other 60% are pretty damn close. And he doesn't let you know that the percentages go up dramatically every year in that cohort. So here's what bothers me. Dr. Phil paints a picture of a young woman who both sits in daddy's lap playing with dolls and who has oral sex with her male peers, and then he hits us with the big reveal, which is that she's probably 17 or 18 years old. And we're supposed to find the sex part creepy? I think if a 17-year-old is sitting in daddy's lap playing with dolls, that's the perverted crap that needs to end. Gross, Dr. Phil. Give me an anonymous bathroom encounter over a 17-year-old and her daddy playing like she's 5. What, does he think girls that age should be wearing pinafores and Mary Janes, too?

Or, he could be suggesting that because a woman used to be a little girl, that means it is always gross that she has a sex life, even after she's an adult. Or maybe he means that you should not have sex until everyone alive who remembers you as a little girl is dead. That means most of us can probably start having that sex stuff in our 50s, though some of us might have to wait until our 60s or later. That won't really keep the human race alive, this strategy of waiting until after menopause to have sex to protect your parents.

Of course, Dr. Phil is a firm believer that women don't have sexual desires of their own, so the hook for this episode is that teenage girls are having oral sex because they're all prostitutes doing it in exchange for money. I'm not kidding.

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There's no doubt in my mind that some women have sex they don't enjoy with men because they're doormats. That doesn't stop at adulthood, and in fact, social conservatives of all stripes argue that female sexuality is primarily about using sex to buy commitment from men. But I would argue that women, like men, have sexual desires and primarily have sex because their hormones push them towards it. I base my "women like sex" theory on this thing called "real world evidence". In fact, and I know this might really throw Dr. Phil for a loop, there's strong reasons to believe that women even have orgasms on occasion, and that women enjoy these orgasm things so much that they even have them on their own through a process called masturbation. If women only have sex for male approval, popularity, and new shoes, then there wouldn't be any such thing as female masturbation. And yet, there it is.

The flip side of all this panic about teenage girl having sex is the nudge-nudge, wink-wink amusement at famous teenage impregnator Levi Johnston getting laid without bothering with boring girlie stuff like caring about contraception. Johnston is advertising pistachios for some reason.

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I bring this up, because it really shows how much this teen sex panic is about basic sexism. On one hand, popular culture shows like Dr. Phil are arguing, with a straight face, that young women's sexuality is so disgusting that it's basically impossible that a young woman could enjoy sex. On the other hand, you have ads like this that treat young male sexuality with a warm indulgence, because it's inevitable and if they deem to take even the slightest responsibility, they're treated like heroes. Imagine how much less dysfunctional our society would be without this paranoia and these double standards.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, you really think that edition. Rachel Campos-Duffy on "The View" has the most asinine argument against Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize I've heard to date.

nobel *

Saying there won't be peace until there's no abortion sounds like a threat to me, a threat to keep harassing, threatening, stalking, shooting, and bombing until women stop aborting. Which they'll never do, because women have always, always found ways to end unwanted pregnancies.

The Sources of Right Wing Terrorism

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:07:04 -0400

David Neiwert discusses eliminationist right wing rhetoric, domestic violence impacts minors, and the health care reform debate enters its baroque phase.

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That's Gay!

Zombie abstinence-only

Jon Stewart fights zombie abstinence-only

Blue Dogs messing things up

Michelle Bachmann spreads hard right nuttery

Domestic violence and children

Domestic violence and teenagers

John Derbyshire versus a century's progress

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing David Neiwert about the growing problem of eliminationist rhetoric on the right and what that has to do with terrorism. Also, sex continues to confuse the issue of health care reform, and domestic violence and its impact on minors.

Current TV's Info Mania is having so much luck with Target Women that they've added another segment that's similar, called "That's Gay", with host Bryan Safi. Luckily, it's just as funny and works just as well.

that's gay *

You can find it on Current TV or on iTunes.

**********

At this point, I might as well just admit that until health care reform passes, I'm probably going to have enough material to do a segment a week on it. The crazy is just that out of control. Indeed, I can't wait for immigration reform, because that's going to be off the hook in terms of the crazy. But alas, there's not much a hook between our issues and immigration reform, so I won't be able to cover that as much. Or will there? It seems that conservatives are willing to inject sex and abortion into any legislative effort they disapprove of, if they think there's a chance of stalling or destroying it.

This week, a number of Blue Dog Democrats joined up with Republicans to use sex to confuse the issue of health care reform, and distract people with sex hysteria from pushing for legislation to improve their health care access. For instance, two Democrats on the finance committee joined up with Republicans to amend the health care reform bill to reinstate funding for abstinence-only programs. Jon Stewart took them on for supporting an ineffective, unpopular program.

health care 1 *

Spending money to encourage teenagers not to use contraception so they'll get more STDs and have more unintended pregnancies seems like the single stupidest idea ever for reducing health care costs. STDs and unintended pregnancies cost a lot of money, you know. And if the pregnant girls decide to have the babies, it will cost a whole lot of money, since childbirth doesn't come cheap in this country. To make it all worse, anti-choice members of Congress from both sides of the aisle are trying their damnedest to make sure that women can't get coverage for abortion, even if they want it.

health care 2 *

Of course, the people taking a stand on this are either that misinformed or they're grand-standing on abortion because they object to health care reform and see this as a way to stall it. Or they sincerely want to use health care reform as an excuse to reduce pre-existing coverage for abortion women already have. Because they're playing this like it's going to mean that the government will be paying for abortion. It's not. All they're doing is telling insurance companies that already cover abortion that they can continue to do so. The proposed anti-abortion amendments would force insurance companies who already cover abortion to quit doing so. Anti-choicers pushing this use misleading language about "government-defined" health insurance, but under most proposed bills, that basically includes all insurance. All insurance companies would be in the health care exchange, and therefore all insurance companies would have to stop covering abortion.

But the dishonesty inherent to claims about government-funded abortions and abstinence-only pales in comparison to the sort of stuff coming from the far right, who is in a full-blown paranoid panic over health care reform. Recently, I noted in a column that the far right was peddling conspiracy theories about how health care reform would install abortion clinics in high schools so girls could get abortions between classes. This isn't a conspiracy theory that we should poo-pooh, because lookie here, Representative Michelle Bachmann is spouting it from the floor of the House.

health care 3 *

I love how she calls it a "sex clinic", which implies that you actually have sex on the premises. But it's great, because it's yet more evidence that "abortion" is less about fetal life for conservatives, and more a scare word that they use to indicate that young women are having sex and they don't have the power to stop them. Stopping young women from having sex outside of wingnut control is priority number one, it seems, and Rep. Bachmann is willing to overtly state that.

But obviously, there won't be abortion clinics in schools or school field trips to get abortion. In some states, young women can get abortions without telling their parents, sure, and it should be all. That's because no matter what the right wingers would have you believe, this should not be a country where we use our laws to make it easier for abusive parents to beat their daughters senseless for having the gall to go through puberty. But tying this issue to health care reform is ridiculous, since no bill that's been written even touches it.

*************

insert interview *

*************

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and for this segment on domestic violence, I'm going to focus on young people, children and teenagers. When we think of domestic violence, we tend to think of full grown men and women, but children can be victimized by it in a number of ways. Public News Service did a report on the way that witnessing domestic violence at home can have profound effects on children.

domestic violence 1 *

Turpin links the witnessing of domestic violence to a number of bad outcomes, particularly if the children don't get help. Outcomes such as drug abuse, chronic unemployment, and sadly, repeating the cycle and abusing their own partners. And while there's help out there, there is also a tendency to treat victims with children and those children as one unit. Part of that, I think, is a resource issue. There's not enough beds and counselors to go around for victims of domestic violence, and so having a focused effort on children is a problem. Nonetheless, Children's Defense Fund Ohio called for exactly that kind of intervention.

domestic violence 2 *

I see that kind of intervention as an investment in the future. Taking kids who have serious problems and helping them become productive adults pays back huge dividends.

The other way that domestic violence affects young people that's getting more attention is through their own encounters with it while dating. I think, for a lot of us, believing that teenagers get into battering situations is a hard pill to swallow, but unfortunately it's true. There's also preliminary research to indicate that domestic violence may play a hand in teen pregnancy, as girls who are abused may have partners who interfere with contraception.

NPR did a report on attempts to reduce dating violence in the high school years.

domestic violence 3 *

The growing concerns over dating violence amongst teenagers have been dealt with by these programs, and the one that NPR covers sounds like they're taking the right approach. They're not just detailing out the warning signs of abuse, such as being with a partner who tries to control your movements and lays guilt trips on you when you want to hang out with your friends or family. They're also out to define what a healthy relationship means, and what it should look like.

domestic violence 4 *

Sadly, they interview a young man who claims he's never seen such a relationship, and he frets that they're expecting perfection. That's the kind of thinking that creates the baseline of dysfunction that makes it easier to accept domestic violence. Not that I disbelieve him. I think way too many people have too low of standards, and it creates a sea of dysfunction.

***********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, I'm saying it but I'm not edition. John Derbyshire wrote the case against female suffrage in his new book. Now, he's backing off and claiming he didn't actually make a case against female suffrage. Except he did. Both. Whatever you need to believe.

the derb *

The idea that suffrage should be questioned on the basis of results is anti-democratic at its baseline, because it's basically saying the consent of the governed only counts if they consent to what authority wants. Why not have ballots with just one candidate on them, if that's what you want?

Corporate Christianity And Extremist Anti-Contraception Activism

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:33:10 -0400

Bethany Moreton on the creation of Christian free enterprise. Also, Texas health care news and anti-choicers reveal the anti-contraception agenda.

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Jay Leno and Bill Maher read love notes

Texas moves towards the light

Secular pinky swear

Anti-contraception protests

Bob McConnell and extreme social conservatism

Your mom

To Serve God and Wal-Mart

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Bethany Moreton about her new book To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Also, Texas news about health care and sexual health, and more progress is made in exposing the hard right's anti-contraception agenda.

Making fun of hypocritical family values politicians who cheat on their wives never gets old, does it? So thanks, Jay Leno and Bill Maher for reading out loud Mark Foley and Mark Sanford's notes to their targets of harassment and amours, in that order.

leno maher *

Note: The laughter of the audience is all their own. We at RH Reality Check do not endorse or condemn any individual's choice in language for writing smutty emails, so long as everyone is consenting and you're not an enormous hypocrite who wants to ruin everyone else's fun.

*******

Last week, I had a little fun with a former school teacher who showed up at a school board meeting on the history curriculum, and made a speech about the importance of comprehensive sex education where she revealed that she's a virgin for no discernible reason. A refresher:

tea speech *

Well, I owe her an apology for mocking her unorthodox methods. Because right after she did that, Texas did indeed start to move away from abstinence-only programs towards more comprehensive sex education. Okay, not across the state, but just in some more liberal school districts. Therefore, it seems that the teacher's impassioned and pointless reveal probably didn't have any positive effect. But it didn't hurt anything, and it had the added bonus of making the Texas school board, which is a clearing ground for Bible-thumpers and wingnuts, deeply uncomfortable. So carry one, former Texas school teacher!

Perhaps instead of pressuring students to take an abstinence pledge taken unconstitutionally straight from religious materials, and replace it with this secular pinky swear put together by a group of humanists.

pinky swear *

Okay, I know that's way too much to ask for, but I do hope that school districts that are moving in the right direction start thinking long and hard about how to teach sex education in a productive, effective way.

In other Texas news, an annual free clinic held every year in Houston, TX doubled this year as a protest for health care reform, particularly when Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is the host of a medical show, decided to join up. Which meant that CBS covered it on the "Early Show".

free clinic 1 *

This sort of event is really useful, because the opposition to health care reform has leaned heavily on scare stories about how doctors will refuse to work if they have to do so under a reform system. They imply, incorrectly, that doctor salaries are in serious danger of being reduced. While price controls are hopefully going to be a part of health care reform, I don't think doctors have much to worry about. On the contrary, doctors and hospitals will be facing far fewer situations where they treat patients that have insurance, only to find out that they can't bill the insurance company, because the insurance company has found some small print somewhere to get out of paying the bill.

Doctors across the country will benefit from having their constant headaches from dealing with insurance companies relieved. Polls show that a majority of doctors support a public option. But Dr. Oz is putting a human face on the doctor support for health care reform.

free clinic 2 *

I will say that obviously the only way to make sure that people get care for chronic diseases is to get them insured. People put off care until it's too late because they can't afford it, full stop. Nothing short of making sure they're insured will change that. There aren't enough free services to go around. Doctors need to be paid, facilities need to be paid for, drugs need to be covered. These things cost money. And so money is what it's going to cost. Without health insurance for everyone, we can't even start the conversation of finding ways to use group power to get more effective, less expensive care.

***********

Insert interview

**********

A few news items about how the anti-choice movement is having more trouble denying their long-standing hostility not just to abortion, but to contraception, STD prevention, and anything else they think means you won't get punished for sex. Here at RH Reality Check, Hunter Stuart took it upon himself to go visit one of the clinics that's getting protested during another 40 day hate-a-thon for women's reproductive health care. The antis do these a lot; their main purpose is to set aside 40 days that will make it harder for women seeking abortion, contraception, and basic gynecological care. The excuse is that they don't like seeing fetuses destroyed. But how well is that excuse holding up in the face of evidence? Not well, as Hunter discovered. The clinic that's been targeted for protests in Wisconsin isn't exactly what the casual observer would suspect would be a target for anti-choice protesters.

birth control 1 *

Of course, one of the official excuses for their antagonism against female-controlled hormonal contraception is their completely evidence-free belief that it kills children. There's a long dissembling excuse for this that I've covered plenty here, but in sum, I think they feel free believing this because what goes on inside women's bodies is invisible, and female-controlled contraception is bad because it interferes with the magic that sperm would do when you can't see it anymore.

But it's all excuses. Birth control methods are coincidentally hated by degrees that match exactly to how effective they are and how much control they give women. Therefore abortion, which men don't play a role in at all, is the most hated, followed by hormonal contraception, which women don't need male cooperation for. Condoms are also hated, but not as much, and surprise, they're male-controlled. But they still allow women to escape unintended pregnancy, so they're the object of protests, too.

birth control 2 *

I sometimes wonder if people just play along with pretending that the anti-sex brigade is just concerned with "life" because we don't really want to point out that they come across as bitter people who lose sleep because they can't stand that other people are having fun and they're not invited. All this dreary talk about consequences, and this bizarre fantasy where they can force people to cut the amount of sex they have at least by half, but it's clear from listening to this dude that he'd prefer it if most people had sex no more than 12 times in their lives to make sure you have a couple of kids, and then stop completely. There's an extreme hatred of pleasure that's hard to account for going on here.

But it's not just that anti-choicers are protesting birth control clinics that have no abortion services. There was also a recent coup in admitting the truth about the anti-choice movement when it was discovered that Bob McConnell, a Republican running for governor in Virginia, wrote a graduate thesis where he came out against not just abortion rights, but against the right of women to use birth control, divorce their husbands, or hold jobs while married. As these are all popular behaviors with Americans, and deemed necessary by most, it was a politically uncomfortable moment. McConnell is trying to play like he doesn't believe this stuff now, but Chris Wallace caught him in a lie on, believe it or not, Fox News.

birth control 3 *

He dissembled, but at this point, that's what we expect when so-called pro-lifers are faced with evidence that they're radicals who see banning abortion and birth control as part of a larger agenda to deprive women of their status as full citizens, and instead install them in homes as biological appliances that exist to clean up after men, praise and flatter when required, and provide biological offspring as evidence of their master's virility. Luckily for us, most Americans, both male and female, do not actually want to have a dozen children, no real sex life to speak of, and loss of almost half the adult population's income.

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, your mom edition. Often on this segment, I just play something wingnutty that someone said, and leave it at that. But once in great long while, someone will say something wingnutty and get the smackdown for it in public. This is one of those occasions.

your mom *

The wingnutty statement was by Senator Jon Kyle, and the epic smackdown was by Senator Debbie Stabenow. Senator Kyle's stance is ridiculous, for what it's worth. I am pretty sure that his insurance currently has maternity benefits, because that's how insurance works. Everyone pays into a pool. At this point, opponents of health care reform are resorting to arguing that there's no such thing as the common good at all.

Abstinence-Only Violates First Amendment Protections

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:05:20 -0400

Valencia Robinson talks about the ACLU lawsuit against Mississippi's HHS. Also, the Values Voters said some weird stuff, and why health care reform is a woman's issue.

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TMI!

Playboy makes boys gay

We wanna watch!

92% of Iowans agree that gay marriage didn't hurt a bit

Michelle Obama on health care reform

Domestic violence is considered a pre-existing condition

The worst states

Tom Delay gives me more nightmares

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Valencia Robinson about the religion-heavy abstinence-only program in Mississippi and what the ACLU is doing to fight back. Also, the Values Voter Summit is a pile of laughs, and why health care reform is a women's issue.

Most of the time, I would like to applaud people who get out there and push for more and better sex ed for young people. But I'm afraid that this former schoolteacher who testified about the importance of sex ed at a Texas Education Agency hearing missed the mark and went straight into TMI territory.

tea speech *

Unfortunately, the topic that night was history curriculum. So this woman admitted her virginity for no reason whatsoever.

********

Over last weekend, America was subjected to yet another year's Values Voter Summit. The values they believe in can be summed up in one word: patriarchy. Okay, well there was also a huge dose of racism on the side, making the religious right's interest in not being seen as a racist institution seem all the more a pipe dream. But most of their attention was on sex, and how all these people just out doing it without permission is laying ruin to good Christian white manhood.

It's hard to say if the Values Voter Summit was nuttier this year than last. It certainly seems so, but then again, everything to do is so nutty that it's always fresh and surprising. It's hard to pick my favorite moment, but I think this one sticks out for sheer incoherence. This is Michael Schwartz, who is Senator Tom Coburn's chief of staff, talking about a supposed ex-gay friend of his.

values 1 *

Yes, he said if you tell 11-year-old boys that looking at Playboy will make them gay, they'll stay away. I'm personally skeptical of his story, as I often am when someone slips into sermonizing like this. His mystery friend owns a hospital, and he implies that he mostly helps men with AIDS die, which made me realize that anti-choicers stop screaming about so-called death panels the second that it's gay men dying. But ex-gays exist more in mythology than in actuality, so I'd like to see some documentation of this guy's existence.

Right Wing Watch did a bang-up job of putting up videos of some of the speakers at the Values Voters Summit. I was particularly weirded out by Lila Rose, who spun a fantasy of punishing women who have abortion with some old-fashioned, titillating public shaming.

values 2 *

When you hear something like this, it's easy enough to conclude that the Christian right would love it if we returned to having stocks in the town square. That way, women caught fornicating could be put in the stocks and they could throw eggs at them, and then go home and masturbate furiously while thinking of the hot, forbidden non-procreative sex. And then whip themselves for being dirty. Fun for everyone, but the woman put in the stocks.

You can really tell how high level intellectual this whole event is by the sort of people that are held up as the real heroes of the event. For instance, you have Stephen Baldwin, who is about a year away from insisting he didn't get an Oscar for "Bio-Dome" because Hollywood hates Christians. And of course, you had Carrie Prejean, a hero for inarticulately saying homophobic things straight to a gay man's face during a beauty pageant. Maggie Gallagher introduced her and the excitement was palpable. (http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/maggie-gallagher-introduces-carrie-prejean-values-voter-summit)

* values 3 *

I suppose they all aspire to speak insulting gibberish while wearing 8 tons of make-up and competing in an anachronism. Maybe next someone will rant about how the feminists are out to take their male heirs while doing Civil War reenactments. But I love how Gallagher literally cannot speak for 15 seconds without being dishonest. It's true that the voters are increasingly disinterested in gay marriage. But that's evidence that they are increasingly for it! They don't think it's right to interfere if your neighbor wants to get married. 92% of Iowans have decided that gay marriage doesn't really affect their lives.

The only people being inexplicable here are Gallagher and her homobigot crowd, because they are fighting gay marriage tooth and nail, while most of the public is moving on and realizing that it's not a big deal. Unless of course you're gay. Then it's a big deal to be a second class citizen. That the public doesn't fret about it means that Maggie Gallagher is the weirdo who needs to just let it go, not that the rest of us need to start getting our hate on.

*********

insert interview

*********

The Obama administration employed Michelle Obama to press a new tactic in selling health care reform to the public: Discuss how health care reform is a women's issue. I think her points are well taken and effective.

women health 1 *

These past couple of weeks have been good for highlighting how women face discrimination through the current insurance system. A lot of credit goes to SEIU for digging through the various ways that insurance companies label something a pre-existing condition, and then use that as an excuse to deny you coverage, even after you've been handing them money for years. For instance, did you know this?

women health 2 *

The profit motive here is, if you look at it from a cold, cynical, inhuman way, understandable. Domestic violence is a major cause of injury for women, but more to the point, it's a major cause of repeated need for health care. If a woman is hit by a man, he's likely to do it again. If he hits her hard enough that she gets care and the insurance company finds out, then it's likely been going on for a long time and he has her trapped through financial dependence and lowered self-esteem. This means she's at a strong risk of being hit again. In an actuary table, she's a high risk.

From a human standpoint, however, giving up on women in abusive relationships is monstrous. It's not their fault! And if they can just get away from the abuser, they often get better. The fact that this isn't even a disease, but something that another human being caused makes it even worse. How come the victim is held responsible, and not the abuser?

The Rachel Maddow show got into the program, looking at the various statistics on women's health care on a state by state basis. HPV vaccinations, infant mortality, teenage pregnancy rates, that sort of thing. The states with the worst outcomes were mostly concentrated in the South, unsurprisingly.

women health 3 *

Insurance has a lot to do with this. Across the nation, around 15% of Americans are uninsured. But in Mississippi, that percentage climbs to 18%, and in South Carolina it's 19.4%. Obviously, with these high rates of uninsured people, you're going to see women with poor health outcomes. Reproductive health care is concentrated quite a bit on prevention, but prevention is what uninsured people tend to skimp on since it's not a pressing need. Less prevention means more cervical cancer, more premature births, and higher infant mortality.

Less access to contraception also means abortion, but unfortunately, those stats are hard to track by state because lack of abortion access often means that women have to leave the state, go underground, or simply go without abortion.

*********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, you must share my pain edition. Tom Delay is on "Dancing With the Stars". Of course, you already knew this, but like me, you may have been in deep denial until you actually saw the travesty. Here's a clip.

please god no *

His homophobic comments about his feminine side were appalling, but the trainer intrigued me. Not teaching Tom Delay to swivel his hips strikes me as a good idea, but not to spare him. To spare the rest of us from having to see that should be her first priority.

Health Care Reform For Better Sex And Less Paranoia

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:26:31 -0400

Tiffany Campbell talks about clinic protests at Dr. Carhart's clinic. Also, the backlash against anti-health care protesters, and how health care can improve your sex life.

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We're #37!

Rachel Maddow on the teabaggers

Bill Maher on the teabaggers

Sean Hannity lies about John Holdren

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Tiffany Campbell about NOW's clinic protection counter protests at Dr. Carhart's office. Also, people are calling out the anti-health care crazies, and more reasons health care will improve your sex life.

So, here's the good news that we've been hoping to hear for awhile.

hpv *

Sadly, most of the mainstream media coverage of the HPV vaccine that I've seen has been about raising unnecessary alarms. I can't help but think people are having paranoid reactions, because it's about female sexuality. Now that it's about young men as well as young women, maybe people will calm down.

**************

The public debate over health care reform gets crazier by the minute. On one hand, this could be a good thing, because the more that the opposition reveals themselves to be unmoored from reality, the less esteem their arguments will have. On the flip side, the crazier the right wing nuts act, maybe the more reasonable unreasonable things like the trigger option will seem. I suppose we'll just have to see how things shake out.

But before that, I have to share a clip from a song that our own Jodi Jacobson sent by a musician called Paul Hipp.

health care 1 *

Number 37 refers to where we rank in the world in terms of health care systems. Richest nation in the world. It's shameful.

As expected, the rumors and lies continued to fly around, but I want to concentrate this segment on the pushback, which is beginning to grow. One thing that inspired a lot of mainstream media pushback were the 9/12 protests in DC, which were awash in racist signs and very little coherence in meaning or argument. Rachel Maddow had a dead-on segment.

health care 2 *

Maddow also dedicated huge portions of her show to asking the question of whether there were any non-nutty conservatives left, and when they were going to take on the responsibility of pushing back against this nonsense. She's had on guests who have this goal in mind, but by and large it's been a failure, because they're too eager to use the "both sides" tactic, which disinclines me to think they're interested in discussion so much as doing image control for the right.

Bill Maher is just as freaked out as Rachel Maddow, though of course he tried to take the more humorous approach.

health care 3 *

The 9/12 anti-health care rallies were expected to be an outpouring of racist resentment, but I think even the most cynical of us were shocked at how bad it was. I saw an endless stream of signs that made fun of immigrants, black people, anti-racist activists, and our President for being black. To my great delight, CNN is acknowledging the racism of the health care opposition, and they're using Tim Wise as a guest expert on this issue.

health care 4 *

The host Don Lemon wondered if they were being wittingly or unwittingly racist, and Wise wisely said that it doesn't matter, that results matter. I see why he said that, since it's pointless to get into a debate about what's in people's hearts when you can judge them by their actions. But still, I think they're being cynically and wittingly racist.

**********

insert interview *

**********

no sex 1 *

Before I finish playing this clip that I found on MSNBC, I have to say that we health care proponents have not been working hard enough to find sexy angles to promote health care reform. The opposition works the sexy angle, well, sort of it. They use the angle of telling people that if they aren't getting it, no one else should be either, though I suppose the way they do this is by screaming about abortion. But most of us are more interested in bridging the have and have not sex divide by getting more, and not by making other people have less sex.

With that in mind, perhaps an important thing to highlight is how increased health care coverage will mean the potential for increased sexual activity for you personally. This is true even if you already have health care coverage that pays for your contraception, Viagra, or medications that keep you healthy enough to keep doing it. Because besides U.N.-approved masturbation, you usually need a partner to have sex, and if more people are healthy and using contraception, that just increases your pool of potential partners. That is, if you're looking. But even if you've got one at home, there is a reason lack of health care might mean less booty knocking for you.

no sex 2 *

Yes, allergies! It makes sense that hay fever would lay ruin to many an unfortunate sufferer's sex life. There's the obvious, which is that no one wants to have sex with you if you're dripping snot and you've rubbed your face red. Well, maybe a few folks with fetishes, but I imagine the hay fever sufferers outnumber the hay fever lovers exponentially.

But I suspect there's more to the story. It's not just that you're dripping snot. Some hay fever sufferers don't drip snot, after all. Some are just so plugged up that they have to breathe through their mouths. And that, my friends, is a sure fire way to turn from a good to mediocre lover to bad in bed. There is a lot of nose-breathing in good sex, is all I'm saying.

The point is this: Clearly, we are a nation of snifflers who need to get laid more. And health care access could help with this problem. Because while a lot of allergy medications that are effective without knocking you out cost a fortune over the counter, if you have a low co-pay, you can get a prescription and knock yourself out. You could even put your allergy meds with your contraception, and call them the fun pill twins.

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, they're not even trying to sound rational edition. The wingnuts got Van Jones, and the Obama administration is learning that throwing one to the wolves doesn't satisfy them, but just makes them hungrier for more. So here's Sean Hannity, going after John Holdren:

holdren *

Oh yes, he accused him of pushing compulsory abortion. You can check the show notes for why this is a lie, though it seems obvious on its face. But why is Sean Hannity so angry at the science and technology advisor? Is Hannity trying to prove science isn't real? Well, They Might Be Giants has an answer to that:

science is real *

Vampires For Sexiness, Lady Parts For Scariness

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:01:37 -0400

Pushing back against health care reform scare tactics. Also, North Carolina wakes up and Susie Bright talks about the cross between erotic fiction and horror.

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War Zone

Michelle Bachmann's covenant

Dana Perino and Sean Hannity misrepresent abortion and health care

IWF tries to scare you with cancer

North Carolina gives up abstinence-only

Condom education rates going down

Michael Duvall keeps it classy

On this episode of Reality Cast, more coverage of lies and nonsense about health care reform. Also, North Carolina rethinks abstinence-only, and Susie Bright talks about her latest collection of erotic gothic fiction.

This is kinda old, but still super cool, so I'm going to link it. Feministing put up a clip from a documentary called "War Zone", where a woman got a camera and decided to confront men who holler at her on the street, asking them to repeat what they said to her and catching them being embarrassed.

war zone *

It's hilarious, actually. Men harass women on the street precisely because they know that they'll never be held accountable. But when they are in fact held accountable, they don't know what to do.

************

Now that opponents of health care reform have had a whole month to whip themselves into a frenzy of anger, fear, and misunderstanding about health care reform, I'm really expecting the worst when it comes to the bloodbath of a fight in Congress. Because god forbid ordinary working Americans be able to access basic health care, and god forbid people get sick without going bankrupt. But I don't have to guess at how the right wing is going to behave. They're not hiding their intentions in the slightest. On Ed Schultz's Psycho Talk segment, he played Michelle Bachmann making a speech where the blood talk moved further away from being just an expression and inched closer to being literal.

health care 1 *

I really don't like how Schultz does the high pitched thing, which is sexism and undermines the larger point, which is that Bachmann actually said that right wingers should slit their wrists and become blood brothers in the fight against health care. At this point, the whole thing is overtly tribal. For a long time now, I've been arguing that most of the opposition to health care reform is organized around race-baiting, and less than subtle messages to racists about how they should oppose this because they shouldn't be forced to share with black people, immigrants, and whoever else is on their hate list. But this blood brothers talk raises it to a new level.

And then there's the lies. There's so many out now that it's hard to keep track of them all, but I thought I'd concentrate on ones that explicitly target women's sexual and reproductive health care. Unsurprisingly, this is a focus for conservatives for a couple of reasons. First of all, they just have a lot of practice. Second of all, they think associating female sexuality with health care reform is a good way to stir people's anxiety about women's roles and sex and use that anxiety to turn them against health care reform. It's a sleazy attempt at subconscious politicking, and so no surprise it's the preferred one.

Abortion is at the top of the list. Dana Perino was on Sean Hannity's show, misrepresenting the relationship between abortion and health care reform. That was after showing Claire McCaskil being booed at a town hall event for telling the truth about how the Hyde Amendment prevents federal funding for abortion. That's where they're at now, booing you for telling the truth.

health care 2 *

Fact Check did not actually say they're wrong. Perino and Hannity are basically lying about this. Fact Check did accurately explain that the proposed public option would not use federal money to cover abortion. It might be covered, but since the public option would be paid for, as insurance companies all are, by premiums paid for by consumers, then it would not be using federal money to cover abortion. There is still no reason to think that taxpayers will pay for abortion. Period. All attempts to suggest otherwise are playing fast and loose with the truth in order to dupe people. If you're absolutely against helping pay into any system that funds abortion, then you have a right to buy insurance from a company that doesn't. In fact, health care reform will make that easier, as you'll have more options to buy insurance under the exchange than you have now, so if hating women and sex is a priority for you, you can seek out insurance just for that reason.

But it's not just abortion that's creating the female sexuality panic response that's being applied to health care.

health care 3 *

The ad, which is all nonsense of course, is produced by the Independent Women's Forum. The truth is that this woman lived because she had health insurance. And now she's out there trying to make sure that other women don't have that health insurance, so that they die of breast cancer. Health care reform is about making sure more people have health insurance. This is so straightforward that wingnuts have resorted to saying black is white and up is down and having health insurance means you won't.

Why breast cancer? I honestly think that they're more attracted to health care issues regarding women's sex organs and secondary sex characteristics because they know that the panic that women's sexual bodies creates in people can be used to up the general sense of panic. But it's a long shot to suggest that women with cancer will be better off if many of them have no health care at all.

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Insert interview

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From Amplify's blog, I bring good news. Well, sort of good news. The good news is that North Carolina is giving up on abstinence-only sex education. The bad news is that they had to put a lot of kids through a lot of misery in order to get there.

north Carolina 1 *

And when they say that these rates went up, they went way up. Even I was shocked, and I'm pretty much sold on the idea that if you tell kids not to use condoms, they will react by having sex but not using condoms. In fact, the percentage of students receiving education in condom use in schools went from 50% in 2000 to 39% in 2006. So we shouldn't be shocked to hear this:

north Carolina 2 *

It's incredibly frustrating that the anti-sex forces are given the benefit of the doubt, and their beliefs about the evils of sex are considered the norm up until we start to see the ugly effects that their beliefs have on the public health. Even without these dreadful stats on teen pregnancy, we should have been able, as a nation, to see the problem with abstinence-until-marriage. The problem is that it's so against most American values. 95% of Americans have sex before they're married. You can't get 95% of Americans to agree there's 26 letters in the English alphabet. Vegetarians are probably a bigger group than people who are virgins on their wedding night, and yet you don't see us bullying schools into teaching that eating meat is wrong and will kill you. So why do we let the tiny virgin minority bully us on this?

They interviewed some youth activists who fought for comprehensive sex education, and the interview really drives home how farcical the whole thing is if you look at it for even a moment with your sanity cap on.

north Carolina 3 *

Let's think about this for a moment, and really consider how surreal this is. Odds are very good that the teacher telling kids that sex without the benefit of marriage will kill them has herself had sex without being married. It is literally impossible for every teacher selling this message to have been a virgin on their wedding night. Believe me, there are occasional women who claim to be virgins, and even an occasional man, who teach abstinence-only through religious groups, and they go on and on applauding themselves for their virginity. The majority, I'd say vast majority, of teachers using these texts weren't virgins. And yet there they are, alive and able to teach lies. Their very existence undermines the message. No wonder kids tune out.

As they should. The ugly truth of the matter is that not only do the vast majority of Americans have sex before they're married, the vast majority don't regret it, either. Oh, they may regret certain partners or that it was too soon or too late, but if you said, "Don't you wish you'd waited until you were married?", most of us would stare at you as if you'd asked, "Don't you wish that you'd never learned to drive?" It doesn't compute at all. Abstinence-only was only an easy sell because most people didn't think about what it really means to tell kids to wait until marriage. But as soon as they clue in, they don't like abstinence-only anymore.

Of course, they had to give a resident wingnut some airtime to be full of it.

north Carolina 4 *

You know what? Odds are he didn't wait and he doesn't regret it, either. Anyway, of course proponents will recite the same line over and over, no matter how much evidence you give them that their line is increasing the teenage pregnancy and STD rate. Because this isn't and never was about making kids healthy. He said it right there---it's about the almighty consequences. It's about increasing human suffering, punishing people for sex. I suspect that getting kids to wait, while important to conservatives, is a secondary concern compared to increasing the teenage pregnancy and STD rate. Having people out there suffering is the payoff. Look, they're mostly the law and order conservatives that would put you away for life for shoplifting, and the kind of people who scream at women trying to get reproductive health care at clinics that provide abortion. The idea that someone out there is getting the maximum punishment for defying their stupid rules gets them off, end of story. We need to stop letting them get their hands on kids, who don't deserve lifelong punishment for doing something that 95% of Americans do, and most don't regret.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, conservative hypocrites edition. First, here's a description of our hypocrite California Assemblyman Michael Duvall, who represents Orange County.

duvall *

Yes, he has been caught on open microphones bragging about sex with multiple lobbyists who are not his wife, lobbyists who work for industries he's supposed to regulate. He's not just a little graphic about his sex talk. He even gets into lavish descriptions of the fluids involved. I guess that's consistent with the family values stance against condoms!

Quit Ignoring Health Care Reform And Quit Demonizing Divorce

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 23:42:00 -0400

Speaking with a directory of a documentary on first sexual experiences. Plus, what does divorce have to do with abstinence and why are mainstream media health care stories ignoring reform?

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Links in this episode:

Rachel Maddow interviews Dr. Leroy Carhart

Ohio abstinence-only

Operation Keepsake

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll have an interview with the director of a documentary on women and first sexual experiences. Also, why are abstinence-only programs out there slamming divorce? And why are news segments about the health care crisis ignoring the health care crisis?

If you're not following Rachel Maddow's hard work making sure anti-choice violence doesn't slip off the mainstream media radar, well you should start now. Maddow covered the anti-choice protests slash targeting of Dr. Carhart, and she had him on to talk about it.

carhart *

Operation Rescue obviously thinks that they can target doctors for violence, and egg on people who are threatening violent action against health care reform, and no one will do anything about it. I sure hope the FBI is doing more about this problem than they appear to be doing.

************

Thanks to Joe Sonka for his dogged willingness to dig into the depths of the abstinence-only world to point out the ongoing depravity funded by your tax dollars. Well, hopefully not anymore, with the new budgets, but there's always the fear that even in the absence of federal money for abstinence-only, states will still hand these charlatans cash they don't deserve to promote unhealthy ideas. (His blog post about a well-funded Ohio abstinence-only group called Operation Keepsake caught my eye, because he reprinted hilarious excerpts from a quiz called "Are you a treasure or a target?", which is just more evidence that abstinence-only proponents are happy to threaten non-compliant girls with rape. I rooted around their website and found that Operation Keepsake, like most abstinence-only programs, doesn't even try to hide that they're not about health so much as pushing a very patriarchal view of marriage. The very first video I looked at took a view I'd imagine is pretty controversial in mainstream America.

divorce 1 *

Now, if you're out there peddling a message about how teenagers shouldn't be having sex, that's an easy sell, because the only people who tend to strongly disagree are powerless teenagers. But this whole thing about how you're supposed to stay married no matter what? Look, Americans may say they don't like divorce, but Americans actually like getting divorced. Or keeping that option available. Much harder sell.

What I want to know is how on earth does this fit into a public health campaign? I was always led to believe the official reason for abstinence-only nonsense was not that they were using government money to push religious dogma about marrying young and not divorcing ever. After all, that would be illegal. Oh no, it's supposed to be about health, except that it's obviously not.

divorce 2 *

If they're so against divorce, why do they oppose the best prevention? If you never get married, you can't get divorced, and no one can make a mournful video about how selfish you are because you decided that divorcing your spouse might be more merciful than smothering them in their sleep.

divorce 3 *

Well, that means that all those kids basically don't have to go through a divorce. Anyway, I'd like to know who this supposed demographer is. Interesting how he doesn't have a name or any information to verify that he's real and he's not some crank writing right wing screeds out of his basement. Probably because following up would verify one of those two things. The imperial Rome thing is the kicker. Wingnuts are obsessed with the idea that we're going down like Rome because we, like the Romans, have discovered that sex feels good. They rarely note that Rome's decline occurred not as the orgasm rate went up, but as the rate of Christian conversions went up.

But I really like the idea that we can just tell that the old way of doing marriage, where you get married young and it's hard to escape, was just automatically better, because it was older. People who think like this probably wouldn't want to roll back the clock as much as they'd think they would. They'd miss the air conditioning, for one thing, and they'd probably not love the high polio rates or the outrageous levels of car fatalities because they didn't use seat belts in the good old days. When they claim that all of human history is better than what we've got now, you have to remember they're talking about slavery, feudalism, and torturing people for religious heresy. Also, they're talking about an entire human history that had lower hygiene standards than we enjoy now. Smelly!

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insert interview

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I know this is going to be hard to believe right now, because it seems like it's covered in every news hour on TV, but right now, the disaster of a health care system that we've got right now is just not getting enough coverage. Part of the reason is that most of the coverage of the health care reform debate is horse race stuff---will the Republicans be able to block it, will blue dogs get concessions, will the crazies with guns showing up at town halls scare the Democrats into giving up, that sort of thing. You're not getting much in the way of coverage about what is actually in the potential bills, and what that would do for you. And nor is the mainstream media doing the work of showing why health care reform is so critically necessary.

They aren't even doing that story when they do that story. For instance, MSNBC had a short segment on the growing trend of women who treat their ob-gyns as their general practioners, and somehow the question of whether or not their health care coverage might have something to do with this was mostly dodged.

ob gyn 1 *

You know, I don't doubt that has something to do with it. But from experience, I can tell you that it's more the result of the insurance industry. I even had a gynecologist once joke to me that they use the pill as bait to get women in for cancer screenings. Well, he wasn't really kidding. He was just telling the truth, but in a twinkly way. But basically, you have to go to an ob-gyn to get birth control and cancer screening that is the most regular health care young women get. And you really don't want to have to go through the hell of combing through the insurance paperwork to start up a relationship with another doctor, so when you get the sniffles, it's tempting just to call your ob-gyn.

Which isn't to say that they ignore the issue of insurance all together. They dedicate one entire sentence to it.

ob gyn 2 *

Of course, what goes unmentioned is how many women don't even have the luxury of a co-pay, because they're uninsured and have to pay for all this out of pocket. But either way, the co-pays are too high or you have to pay out of pocket completely, and at this point the temptation is high to stick with the doctor you know, or to have him check out that persistent cough while getting a Pap smear.

ob gyn 3 *

Another consideration, when it comes to insurance, is concerns about whether or not they'll even pay or if they'll find some small print somewhere that says they don't have to. Most of us have no way of guessing what the insurance company is going to do in the future, so we try to manage the risk by sticking with what's worked in the past. If the insurance company has paid your ob gyn without much fuss in the past, then it seems like the easiest thing to do is stick with him. You know that he takes your insurance, too.

The real story here that's not really being explicitly addressed is that this trend points to a new for health care reform. In fact, they not only didn't explicitly address it, they basically glided right past that. I wonder if the doctor and patient they interviewed were more explicit. I'd think so, because when they mentioned the doctor talking about co-pays, they didn't quote him directly, but just paraphrased him.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, you utter and total sleaze edition. This is more from Rachel Maddow's show. She read the Operation Rescue statement on their protests targeting Dr. Carhart in an effort to shut him down.

carhart 2 *

Except that Dr. Tiller's clinic was closed down when he was murdered, which is illegal, whether Operation Rescue believes that or not. They do take advantage of the government's allergy to pursuing domestic terrorists as they should, but I wouldn't call it legal and I certainly wouldn't call it peaceful to single out individuals who provide health care, call them murderers, and then play innocent when someone cracks and shoots them. Taking credit for shutting down a doctor who was shut down by murder certainly demonstrates that there's nothing peaceful about it.

Abortion Is Too Health Care And Killing Your Wife Is Too Domestic Violence

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:36:55 -0400

Dr. Patti Feuereisen speaks on teenage girls recovering from sexual abuse. Also, the Jasmine Fiore murder is sadly not unusual, and why abortion is legitimate health care.

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Links in this episode:

NAPW on who has abortions

Statistics on intimate partner violence

Ryan Jenkins had a history of domestic violence

Over the top homophobia

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Dr. Patti about the second edition of her book on helping teenage girls survive sexual abuse. Also, abortion won't be covered under any health care bill, but should it be? And the most recent murdered wife scandal results in another missed opportunity to talk about domestic violence.

The National Advocates for Women has put out a video chronicling and refuting the language anti-choicers use to describe women who have abortions.

napw *

But National Advocates refutes this nonsense, pointing out that 61% of women who have abortions are already mothers, so anti-choicers are calling mothers murderers and Nazis. That the mother you see on the street snuggling her baby is a Nazi who would just as soon kill as snuggle a baby. It's ridiculous.

**********

Even though the federal government expressly forbids federal funding for elective abortion under the Hyde Amendment, and even though there's not even a whiff of a hint that any potential bill would reverse the Hyde Amendment. Representative Massa of New York addressed the issue in forceful language.

abortion 1 *

It's the tone that most of the coverage of the issue has taken on this show, primarily because I'm not a fan of liars, and the anti-choicers spreading this story are, above all other things, pants of fire liars. No matter how many times the lie about abortion funding is debunked, they spread it. God, I hate lying. And so most of my attention has been focused on the fact that this is just a plain, old lie.

But what's getting lost in this discussion is an opportunity to ask whether or not we should be paying for abortion. And as much as it's important to debunk the lies, every time we do so forcefully, we fall into the trap of assuming that the people who are hysterical over the possibility of funding abortion are in the right. But let's take a moment and listen to what they're saying, and how it's wrong on many levels. I got this off Anderson Cooper's show.

abortion 2 *

There's two separate claims and one implication that this hysterical wingnut screaming at a town hall is making, and all are wrong. First, that the health care bill will include funding for abortion. This is wrong, as I've already stated. The second claim is that abortion is not health care. This is also wrong. The implication is therefore that we shouldn't fund abortions under universal health care, and this is also wrong.

Of course abortion is health care. The fact that a procedure is technically elective doesn't mean it's not proper health care. Contraception, for instance, is elective, but all but a few loonies accept that it's a proper use of the health care system to prevent pregnancy. A lot of the time people come down with conditions that can be dealt with in two or more ways, and what they decide to do depends on a number of factors, and not all of them are health-related. For instance, people with blood sugar or cholesterol problems often have a choice between going on drugs or trying to control their problem with diet and exercise first. Pregnancy is a condition, a medical condition. You can choose to continue or abort.

Ironically, from a strictly medical viewpoint, the healthier and less expensive choice is usually abortion, since childbirth is expensive and very stressful on your body. But we don't pressure women into abortion, because we respect that one has a right to choose what's best in a holistic sense, and of course, if every pregnancy ever was aborted, that would be the end of the human race. But still, something to think about.

Of course, the other side of this is that women will get abortions whether they can get safe, medical ones or not. Which often means they end up in emergency care for septic abortions. From a medical viewpoint, then, providing federally funded abortion is about saving women's health and money through prevention.

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Insert interview

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I'm sure by now you've heard this tragic story.

jasmine 1 *

The suspect, Ryan Jenkins, was found hung a couple days later in a hotel room. Cause of death was suicide. Jenkins was married to Fiore for a short time, and it appears that he killed her so she couldn't leave him. Jenkins was a reality TV star, and Fiore was a swimsuit model, however, and because of these facts, the news is going bananas. That, and Fiore's body was so mutilated that they had to identify her with the serial numbers off her breast implants.

When something like this happens, it's always a twofold nightmare. Once, because it happened. But also because when the victim was young and beautiful, and especially if she worked in an industry like modeling and had a lot of plastic surgery, the public and the media don't seem to be able to realize that what was lost was a human being's life. She's objectified, and her half-naked pictures are flung about everywhere. But perhaps what's most worrisome is that the TV and modeling aspects of this entire escapade are overshadowing the fact that this crime is far from unusual. Every day in the U.S., an average of three women are killed by intimate partner violence. But most of them aren't models, and so most of their deaths get very little media attention.

What was disturbing to me is that the coverage largely ignored this context, and instead of treating Fiore's murder for what it was, which is a classic domestic violence case, they're basically grasping for any other explanation. For instance, CBS had Michael Welner on during a segment that was titillatingly titled "Fatal Attraction". The CBS interviewer tried to make this more about Jenkins being a reality TV star than the sadly banal truth, which is he's a classic wife batterer who uses the ultimate tactic to try to control his victim.

jasmine 2 *

To his credit, Welner tries to get the interview closer to the real point, which is that Jenkins, who already had a history of beating Fiore and a girlfriend before her, isn't some super special psychopath, but the garden variety wife beater who resorts to murder. It happens on average three times a day in this country, remember.

jasmine 3 *

But the interviewer insists that this is somehow special, somehow beyond, because Jenkins cut off her fingers and pulled her teeth. Again, a man murders his supposed loved one three times a day in this country. Just most men who murder their lovers and wives weren't on TV, so we don't consider it news. Luckily, Welner's not having it.

jasmine 4 *

I wouldn't usually take the time to do a segment on the celebrity crime of the week, but I had to call attention to the fact that this segment wasn't unique, and most of the coverage I've seen is studiously trying to ignore the fact that what Ryan Jenkins did to Jasmine Fiore isn't all that unusual, and that we have an epidemic of intimate partner violence in this country. This was an opportunity to educate, but instead you're just seeing more covering up of the problem.

*********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, old school style. I could have kept going with more wingnut lies about health care reform, but once in awhile, you need to break it up by playing some unvarnished hate speech. Pam Spaulding found these sermons from Pastor Steven Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona.

Anderson *

This dude is obsessed with Barney Frank, and he's also suggested that the President should be murdered for his pro-choice views. Unsurprisingly, he is one of those homophobes who describes pictures of naked men as unbearably tempting, and assumes that all other straight-identified men agree with him.

100th Episode of Reality Cast, Plus Business As Usual

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:15:01 -0400

It's the 100th episode of Reality Cast! Interview with Lizzie Skurnick, segments on right wing madness and sexphobic sex podcasts. Party on, podcast audience!

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Links in this episode:

Rachel Maddow on anti-choice terrorism

Guns at town hall events

Paul Krugman speaks out

Puns are the lowest form of humor, and this is the lowest form of puns

It's the 100^th episode of Reality Cast, y'all! It's been a crazy time since I started this podcast in the summer of 2007. We've elected a pro-choice President, gotten a new pro-choice Supreme Court judge, and we've even started a serious process of moving towards comprehensive health care reform. We've seen the defeat of many anti-choice bills, but unfortunately, we've seen an uptick in anti-choice activism and a law banning gay marriage go into effect in California. We've seen abstinence-only education lose in a big way, but we still haven't seen comprehensive sex education really come to the forefront. We've still got a pro-choice majority, but abortion is still treated like a dirty word. We've made the public more aware of the anti-choice movement's fight against contraception, but we have seen the teenage birth rate go up. Obviously, there's still a lot of fighting to do.

Thanks to listeners who've supported this show. You guys are the best, and I love that you're out there, caring and talking to friends and keeping up with the news and having a sense of humor about it all along. If you enjoy the show, I'd much appreciate it if you could go to our iTunes page and leave a positive review. Again, you guys are the best, and you've helped make RH Reality Check what it is.

Our interview guest is writer Lizzie Skurnick, and I'll have segments on right wing nuttiness, as usual, and another on my obsession with the podcast Sex, Really.

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As we're coming close to the end of August, I can safely say at this point that this was a summer of right wing angry violent madness. The birthers and the town hall protesters showing up to protest a fake version of the health care bill is just part of it, of course. As I record this, the actual violence has been minimal, though a lot of men have started to show up at events with penis substitutes, I mean, guns. But it was also the Holocaust Museum shooting, the Pennsylvania gym shooting, and of course, the murder of Dr. George Tiller back in May. But even though Dr. Tiller's murder was the first shot in what was going to be a summer of threats and violence, it's still not being taken seriously enough by the authorities. Amy Hagstrom Miller, who I've interviewed recently, was on Rachel Maddow's show to talk about a disturbing lack of security around Scott Roeder, who is accused of murdering Dr. Tiller.

terror 1 *

So why the history lesson from Rachel? For a simple reason: Many members of the terrorist breeding ground Army of God, which has had 6 members do time for anti-choice terrorism, have been visiting Scott Roeder in jail. One has written a how-to book on violence, and another has done time for clinic bombing. Here's what Amy Hagstrom Miller had to say on the topic:

terror 2 *

The lone actor thing is clearly a joke, clearly nonsense. But I'd go a step further and point out that we have to see the connections between domestic terrorism aimed at clinic workers and the larger patterns of threats and intimidation that we're seeing in response to health care reform. In many cases, it's exactly the same thing. Many of the people moving from town to town to protest health care reform cut their teeth protesting a woman's right to choose, I'm sure. More importantly, the anti-choice movement has been active in working its networks and mythologies on behalf of opponents of health care reform. They're experts at slurring doctors who provide abortions or end of life care, and they're willing to tweak those narratives to fight against health care access for millions of Americans. And they'll use the same intimidation methods that they've used against clinic workers.

terror 3 *

Unfortunately, the strong presence of conservatives showing up at events carrying guns has inclined some liberals to arm themselves in self-defense. This is the kind of error that comes from not seeing the connections. Clinic workers have had to deal with these crazies for a long time now, and as far as I can tell, they've decided that arming themselves is not a legitimate strategy. All you're doing when you do that is make the wingnuts even more determined to scare you and hurt you, because now they can pretend they're the victims.

Instead, what we need to do is do what clinic workers have had to do for a long time: Grow up and realize that these people aren't reasonable. They aren't misguided but moral people. They're paranoid and their mean-spiritedness has caused them to lose it. Thankfully, prominent liberals in the mainstream media are beginning to make this point. Like Paul Krugman.

terror 4 *

And that's the meat of it. They're unappeasable. Those of us who've been watching this disaster of trying to find common ground on abortion have been saying this for a long time. The right wing nuts don't want to talk about common ground, concessions, anything. They're interested in screaming and making a ruckus and total shutting down of any attempt to improve people's actual lives and give them more freedom and choices. It's a hard thing to grasp, because no one wants to believe this level of unreason could really exist. But this is the truth on the ground and the only way to deal with the crazies is to go around them. Taking them seriously is a waste of your time.

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insert interview

**********

We haven't checked in on the Sex, Really podcast in awhile, but I thought that a recent episode was really too juicy to pass up. Laura Sessions Stepp does this podcast for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, but a recent episode appears to be less about preventing unplanned pregnancy and more about demanding that young men in college have professional levels of income before young women condescend to date them. Oh yes, Sessions Stepp is on yet again about how awful it is that kids don't date anymore, but she's defining dating based on income levels that are usually beyond college kids.

dating 1 *

See if you can follow: It used to be dating when you ate food, watching a movie, watched a sporting event, or listened to music with each other. Now it's not dating when you eat food, watch a movie, watch a sporting event, or listen to music. Because you said, "We hung out," instead of "we went on a date". Even though the behavior is basically the same. The notion that couples don't go to sporting events together in college is particularly laughable to me, since I live right next to one of the biggest football stadiums in the country, and I can assure you, properly heterosexual young blonde couples still appear in droves nowadays as they do in Sessions Stepp's dreams of a time that never was.

What Sessions Stepp has discovered in her research is that kids actually still date. But she can't admit that, because that means she can't raise some sort of horrible panic about kids these days. So instead, she's freaking out about what is a shift in the words they use to describe dating. If she were doing this schtick in the 60s, she'd be complaining that kids don't court anymore, because they're too busy going on these nefarious dates to football games and movies. She'd also be worried that they're too busy doing the Twist to remember to do the waltz.

Unfortunately, she's used this definitional slide on a bunch of young women, to give them nostalgia for a time that never was.

dating 2 *

The problem is that no one uses the word "date", it seems. The notion that there was some golden era when college aged boys had a lot of money to dump on fancy dinner dates at restaurants that cost $100 a plate is just a fantasy that Sessions Stepp pumped these girls up with. If she wants real old-fashioned dating, then that used to mean strictly that young men came to your house or dorm and visited with you under the watchful eye of a chaperon. I did a quick google search and found that in the 50s, dating guides suggested going to ice cream parlors, pizza parlors, drive-ins, bowling alleys, coffee houses and record shops.

Half of these are things that Sessions Stepp would deny are dates now, and the other half have been replaced by something equivalent. Movie theaters aren't cheap like they were in the 50s and 60s, and there's no drive-in to give you privacy, so watching videos at home is the equivalent. In other words, things are exactly the same. But these girls are feeling shortchanged because they don't put on an evening gown and go to a fancy restaurant. They also get angry that guys want sexual contact, which is considered unromantic, but the big joke in the 50s was get a girl into a drive-in and start to feel her up. I fail to see how this has changed.

dating 3 *

Hey, I've seen movies about young adults in the 50s and 60s. It was mostly necking in the car, going to dances and bars, and getting cheap food. What Sessions Stepp is doing here is incredibly sleazy. She's feeding young women an image of dating that's borrowed from what people do now in their mid 20s and beyond, when they have jobs and feel less awkward wearing grown-up clothes. But she's pretending that those kinds of dates are something very young women did in the past. In reality, dinner dates and high heels are part of the future, their futures. Everyone I know who was drinking beer and watching videos in their college years on dates, and most of us became the sort of people who go to concerts, drink liquor, and eat expensive food on dates when we had, you know, jobs.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, that's not really a joke edition. Seriously, I don't understand what Rush Limbaugh thought was so funny about this.

Limbaugh *

Sex-retary. Get it? Because she's a woman and sex sex sex sex sex. She has a vagina so that means grope and sex and she's not doing a real job, because did he mention that women have sex organs? Sheesh. Gotta love how he claims she was doing something meaningless in the supposed swamps. She was in the Congo in part of a diplomatic effort to reduce violence there, particularly sexual violence against women. But of course, rape and war are the sort of issues Rush Limbaugh thinks are meaningless.

Girls Rocking, Politicians Lying, and TV Shows Hedging

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 23:01:00 -0400

Jessica Hopper talks about girls rocking out. Also, the health care lies continue, and is a new ABC show pushing an anti-choice message?

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Contraception junkies?

Defying Gravity

James Parriott responds

Girls Guide To Rocking

Palin drops a stinker

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Jessica Hopper about her book "The Girls Guide To Rocking". Also, more coverage of the escalating lies about health care reform, and what's with the new TV show "Defying Gravity" and abortion?

Leave it to Stephen Colbert to leave me in stitches in a segment about a Virginia high school teenager who got busted under a zero tolerance policy for the most absurd reason.

baby poofies *

She was busted for taking her pill at lunch, which is what you're supposed to do. The school claimed she had possession of a controlled substance and tried to expel her. They actually get a representative from the school board to say the pill is as bad as heroin.

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Last week, I covered the way that the euthanasia lie is being trotted out in an attempt to shut down health care reform. But don't let that fool you into thinking that the taxpayer-funded abortion lie is going away any time soon. For instance, Mike Huckabee is all over Fox News telling people that if we get health care reform, there will be coverage for elective abortion paid for with tax dollars. This is a complete falsehood.

abortion 1 *

There's so many layers of dishonesty in that statement. First of all, anyone who supports the war in Iraq, as Huckabee does, supports using tax money to kill. You don't even get away with that hedge about how the only life you think is sacred is unborn, since I guarantee that the war has taken the lives of some fetuses, as well as the women surrounding them, not that we can get Huckabee to care about that. Second of all, Huckabee carried out the death penalty more than any other Arkansas governor. He not only supports using tax money to kill, he's a cheerleader for it.

But Huckabee's whole schtick during the campaign was about how he was conservative, but he wasn't a monster. He was the real compassionate conservative. Socially conservative, of course, but not against all forms of assistance to the needy. If that's so, then how come he's lying about abortion funding in a direct bid to maximize the number of Americans without health insurance? How come Mr. Compassion is not on the "kill health care reform" bandwagon? Could it be that his compassionate conservative face was simply a façade?

abortion 2 *

Shows you how shallow the term "pro-life" is. Huckabee would shoot down a bill that would save, at bare minimum, the 18,000 real people Americans that die each year straight up from lack of health insurance. And that's not including all the people that die that wouldn't have to if they had more lifelong health care access. The lives of real people don't count one bit in Huckabee's world. Just the lives of potential people, and then only if they can be used to punish fornicators and oppress women.

Of course, he's lying. The reason not to include the language is that the Hyde Amendment already bans using federal money to pay for abortion. The amendment was a direct attempt to force private insurers not to cover abortion. And, knowing the wingnuts, there was probably an outside hope they could read the amendment in such a way as to make the birth control pill impossible to get or to shut down Planned Parenthood.

Unfortunately, the lies about abortion and euthanasia have grown to the point where it's doing its job, and wasting the time of the serious people out there who are trying to deal with reality. Such as Senator Claire MacSkill, who called a press conference and had to spend a bunch of time debunking the nonsense.

abortion 3 *

The problem with these lies is that they're easy to understand. Most of the health care debate is complicated, with a lot of policy wonking about stuff most people don't really understand. But they understand women trying to have sex without punishment, and they understand the concept of euthanasia, since most people have put down a family pet at some point. And so they latch onto these lies, because even though they're lies, they're lies that are easy to understand. And being simple and loud is the hand that right wingers know how to play, so they are going to play it. And play it. And play it. No matter how dishonest it is. It's like playing poker with cheaters, except the stakes are the lives and health of ordinary Americans.

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Insert interview

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Thanks to Jessica Valenti for finding, clipping, and posting on ABC's new sci-fi show Defying Gravity. On the show, which is set in 2052, abortion is outlawed, as are pregnancy tests. Of course, the idea that you could render women helpless against pregnancy without a drugstore test is laughable, but to the show's credit, they do establish in the first two episodes that women are smart enough to know what pregnancy symptoms are.

gravity 1 *

Okay, so far, I'm actually on board with this. It's all very dark and serious, but the law on this show reflects how much laws trying to control women's fertility rest on the assumption that women are incredibly stupid. As if women wouldn't figure out how to tell if you're pregnant without pregnancy tests! They didn't have them throughout most of history, and yet women still managed to figure out that they were pregnant and get abortions early on in the pregnancy. But after that, I have to agree with Jessica's assessment that the show falls into the trap of moralizing about the evils of women who want to control their own bodies after they've had sex.

For one thing, they have the requisite smart-mouthed feminist character who is naturally amoral because she's so smart. Or I think that's the point of this bit of dialogue.

gravity 2 *

Or maybe I'm wrong, and the show will come around to showing that someone who mistakes a 10-celled embryo for a child is the one who is actually short on morality. I can't think of anything more dehumanizing that valuing a living, breathing child the same as you do something with fewer cells than you lose when you pick off a hangnail. That's an insult to children. It's weird that people who call themselves "pro-life" have so little regard for child life that they'd suggest that it's no more than that of a 10-celled embryo.

Anyway, I hope the show realizes how ridiculous this character is being, and that the scientist is obviously in the right. But I'm not holding my breath. Why not? Because the character in the first clip who was scared that she's pregnant is, as you can imagine, pregnant. And because abortion is illegal in this world, she has to get an illegal abortion. And she's punished---I kid you not---by hearing a crying baby all over the place. She's haunted by a crying baby.

gravity 3 *
gravity 4 *

I can imagine every wingnut watching will sagely nod about how this is what happens to sexually active women who are seen as suppressing their maternal side. It certainly plays that way in the clips. But I found myself baffled. Since when is a crying baby an argument for the evils of fertility management? Personally, every time I'm out in public and some baby starts crying his head off and his mother is distressed and trying to shut him up, I both feel bad for her and check to make sure I remembered to take my birth control pills.

I'm not crazy, either. There was a clever German condom ad bouncing around the internet a couple years ago that went with this same idea. A man is shopping with his son, and he denies the small boy a bag of candies. This is what results.

gravity 5 *

Tagline: Use condoms. But leave it to a bunch of pious, preachy, sexphobic Americans to think that the endlessly crying baby thing is supposed to make you sad that you don't have one.

In interest of fairness to the writers of "Defying Gravity", I'll be putting a link up on the show notes page of head writer James Parriott's reply to Jessica. He claims he wanted to make a pro-choice statement by showing that abortion isn't easy, and that anti-choicers who think it is are in the wrong. Well, it's not easy for a lot of women, but it's also not something that causes crying baby hallucinations. And frankly, sci-fi dystopia's really don't work like that. You're supposed to make the forbidden thing seem like it's important and necessary for people's lives. It's not like the characters in Fahrenheit 451 were like, "Well, we finally got to read some books, and frankly, we found it as distasteful as the government said it was."

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, why lie a little when you can lie a lot edition. I'm sure you've heard about Sarah Palin's infamous death panels speech, but if not, I have a clip of the host of the Young Turks reading it.

death panels *

Obviously, that's a level 10 lie. Up until she spouted this, most conservatives were trying to tie their lies to some kernel of truth in order to get away with it, but Palin realized that you can just make stuff up and that will always sound even scarier. And I am scared. But not of death panels, since that's just nonsense.

Virginity: Losing It, Talking About It, Praying For It With Tax Money

editor@rhrealitycheck.org (RH Reality Check) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 23:50:49 -0400

Talking about women talking about virginity loss with Abby Kincaid. Also, the ACLU vs. abstinence-only in Mississippi and more lies about health care reform.

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Female comedians on aging

Mississippi using tax funds for religious abstinence-only programs