Monday Reads: Women as Political Footballs

Good Morning!

It never ceases to amaze me how women, their bodies, and their most intimate moments can be co-opted by male politicians.  It makes me want to sing a rousing chorus of “You don’t FUCKING own me!”. I’m not sure how we became political footballs, but I sure feel like my privacy and the privacy of every woman in the country has become a source of intense male interest.  The absolutely salacious way that the male-dominated press and republican party are going after Hillary’s most personal emails is just one example of how the current patriarchy feels they have a right to view anything of ours and control it.  Like James Carville said recently  Hillary Clinton ‘Didn’t Want Louie Gohmert Rifling Through Her E-Mails’.  Who would?

 Longtime Clinton ally James Carville said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account might have been about more than convenience.

Appearing on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Carville defended Clinton, saying her e-mail practices were legal. But, he added, she may also have had prying Republican eyes in mind when she chose to do business through a private e-mail server.

“I suspect she didn’t want Louie Gohmert rifling though her e-mails, which seems to me to be a kind of reasonable position for someone to take,” Carville said.

Jeb Bush released some emails but, low and behold!  None of them are about what he was up to when he was getting in the way of Terry Schiavo’s right to die.  It was all information that was basically political propaganda and ‘forward facing’.  Remember when we got to see Mitt Romney’s taxes?  Neither do I.

As part of presidential hopeful Jeb Bush’s quest to counteract his last name, he released a trove of purportedly personal emails in the name of “transparency.” That’s nice, but utterly symbolic: The emails he released were from a public-facing account that he used primarily to communicate with random constituents, not to actually govern. It’s as though he released his spam inbox and proclaimed it as a window into his soul. If Bush really wants to make a statement, he’ll give us the data that actually matters.

In addition to being filled with personally identifiable information that his constituents sent to him in the hopes of resolving their various troubles with state agencies, Jeb Bush’s big noble email dump is completely misleading. “In the spirit of transparency,” Bush states on his newwebsite, “I am posting the emails of my governorship here.” But all that he’s made available is the contents of one email account—jeb@jeb.org. That domain was registered via GoDaddy in 1997 and is owned by his political campaign operation—it is unaffiliated with the state of Florida or the office of governor (his official account was like some variant of[name]@eog.state.fl.us). The emails the public has been given are as much “the emails of [his] governorship” as my ancient live.com inbox would be “the emails of my Gawker job.” It’s a ploy.

The state of womanhood in the US is being significantly diminished. DAILY.  There is no obsession on the real issues that make women’s lives miserable.  There are only more side distractions that basically put in more intrusions in to our moral and legal personhood.

Early last week, while the political world was waiting for Hillary Clinton to address the moral, diplomatic, and technological questions posed by her e-mail habits, the United Nations issued a report asserting that more than one in three women experience sexual or physical violence in their lifetimes. One in ten females under the age of twenty is subjected to “forced sexual acts.” In more than thirty countries, it is not illegal for men to beat their wives. In the United States, eighty-three per cent of girls between twelve and sixteen confront sexual harassment in school. Even the earnest bureaucrats of the U.N., who tend to favor euphemism and skip over cruelties like honor killings and “corrective rape,” could not help but label the rate and the variety of mayhem regularly exacted upon half of humankind as “alarmingly high.”

The report went on to say that female political representation, while creeping higher, is still depressingly low––not least in the world’s oldest constitutional democracy, the United States. The parliaments of South Africa, Ecuador, Finland, Senegal, Sweden, Cuba, Belgium, and Rwanda are all more than forty per cent female. The percentage of members in the U.S. House of Representatives who are women is eighteen. And, since it will soon be political high season on cable TV and at the town halls and diners of Iowa and New Hampshire, it bears repeating that no woman has ever been the President of the United States.
It was hard not to think of this status report on the condition of women in the twenty-first century while Hillary Clinton stepped into the lights before an agitated crowd of reporters at the U.N. last Tuesday. A large tapestry of “Guernica” hung behind her, and she looked no happier in that setting than the tormented figures in Picasso’s image of civil war. And yet contrition was not in her plans. Instead, she chose a familiar course, offering explanations that were by turns petulant and pretzelled. Asked about the way she chose to deal with federal guidelines on e-mail when she was the Secretary of State, she said, “I opted for convenience.” Clinton’s further explanations were so familiar, such a ride in the Wayback Machine, that you had to wonder, Why do I suddenly feel twenty years younger yet thoroughly exhausted?

That’s not the only thing waiting on old white men to intrude.  The nomination of the first black woman to be appointed US Attorney General–Loretta Lynch–languishes while Mitch McConnell pitches a fit that victims of Sex trafficking might be able to use recovery funds for an abortion.  Do we get any more intrusive than that?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday said he plans to hold up attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch’s confirmation until the Senate passes a now-controversial human trafficking bill.

“This will have an impact on the timing of considering a new attorney general,” McConnell told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.” “I had hoped to turn to her next week, but if we can’t finish the trafficking bill, she will be put off again.”

Democrats are now holding up the trafficking bill, which glided through the judiciary committee, after they noticed an abortion provision embedded in the bill that would prevent victims of human trafficking from using restitution funds to pay for an abortion.

“We have to finish the human trafficking bill,” McConnell said. “The Loretta Lynch nomination comes next.”

A vote on Lynch’s nomination was slated to take place this coming week, more than two weeks after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Lynch’s nomination.

Democrats have pointed out that Lynch’s nomination has been held up in the Senate longer than any U.S. attorney general nominee in three decades.

President Barack Obama nominated Lynch to lead the Justice Department in November, but Lynch’s committee hearing didn’t come until after Republicans took control of the Senate.

The No. 3 Senate Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer responded to McConnell’s threat on Sunday, calling on Republicans to “stop dragging their feet” on Lynch’s nomination.

“For months and months, Republicans have failed to move forward with‎ her nomination using any excuse they can, except for any credible objection to her nomination itself,” Schumer said in a statement. “Loretta Lynch, and the American people, don’t deserve this. At a time when terrorists from ISIS to Al-Shabaab threaten the United States, the nominee to be attorney general deserves an up or down vote.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee, said McConnell’s argument that the Senate first needs to pass the trafficking bill amounts to a “hollow excuse.”

We continue to get stories from white male republican men that are actually passing laws that show no understanding of women’s bodies, fetal or human development, or the concept that women are moral agents perfectly capable of making decisions without the injection of any one’s pet religious myth. They continue to say that women who become pregnant by rape should just accept “god’s gift”.

A Republican state lawmaker in West Virginia said on Thursday that while rape is horrible, it’s “beautiful” that a child could be produced in the attack.

According to Huffington Post, Charleston Gazette reporter David Gutman was on the scene when Delegate Brian Kurcaba (R) said, “Obviously rape is awful,” but “What is beautiful is the child that could come from this.”

Kurcaba made the remarks during a House of Delegates discussion of a law outlawing all abortions in the state after 20 weeks’ gestation. At 20 weeks, anti-choice activists and lawmakers allege, a fetus can feel pain and is therefore too viable to abort.

The bill was passed by West Virginia Republicans in 2014, but vetoed by Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin. Now the state GOP has revived the bill and voted to remove an exception for victims of rape and incest.

This kind of mentality leads to the idea that white men can basically do what ever they want to with women and children.  We are all chattel to be tossed about as they will.  Remember the story of the Arkansas official that ‘rehomed’ and abused two small girls to a rapist after deciding they were possessed and too unruly? Republicans are defending him.

A pair of Arkansas Republicans have stepped up to the plate to defend an embattled state lawmaker accused of “rehoming” his adopted daughters to a rapist, using Facebook to attack the media coverage of their colleague.

On Wednesday, the Arkansas Democratic Party called upon Rep. Justin Harris (R) to resign following revelations that he and his wife made the “unilateral decision to move two of his adopted daughters into another family’s home” where one of the girls was sexually assaulted. The call for his resignation comes following a week of stories reported by the Arkansas Times, — which originally broke the story — containing interviews with Department of Children and Families staffers, previous foster parents, and baby sitters, saying Harris and his wife mistreated the two girls and have lied to the press about their dealings with the DCFS.

All of this comes right in focus with the move to tell these folks that Black Lives Matter too so that overwhelmingly white male police departments do not use deadly force every time they see a black person. It also goes with the idea of driving out immigrants and Republican politicians telling the LBGT community that any potential gay marriage will “offend them.”  It’s not about any one else’s right to live their life.  It’s all about the privileged white male and his right to force the rest of us to conform to his control.  We are all in this struggle together.

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a potential Republican presidential candidate, is a self-described libertarian, a position that usually indicates positive feelings on LGBT rights — but Paul showed in a Friday interview that that’s not the case for him.

When Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier asked Paul about his position on same-sex marriage, the senator responded, “I’m for traditional marriage. I think marriage is between a man and a woman. Ultimately, we could have fixed this a long time ago if we just allowed contracts between adults. We didn’t have to call it marriage, which offends myself and a lot of people.”

Having some form of contract rather than state-licensed marriage would give same-sex couples “equivalency before the law” and “would have solved a lot of these problems, and it may be where we’re still headed,” Paul continued.

The degree to which these white Republican Men want to control and determine other people’s lives offends me.

This is an open thread.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?