Thursday Reads: Holder Witchhunt, SCOTUS and Health Care, Colorado Wildfires, and Mocking Mitt

Posted: June 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign, immigration, Mitt Romney, morning reads, Rush Limbaugh, Scott Brown, SCOTUS, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Healthcare | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

UPDATE: Supreme Court upholds Affordable Care Act, Including Individual Mandate!

Good Morning!!

Since today is going to be a mostly serious news day, I’ll begin with a silly story. A new survey by the National Geographic Channel found that 65% of Americans think President Obama is more qualified to handle an invasion from outer space than Mitt Romney.

And lest you are tempted to dismiss this poll as pure silliness, the study also found that 36 percent of Americans think UFOs exist, while another 48 percent aren’t sure. Which means that at least some of the respondents judging the presidential candidates’ alien-fighting abilities may see it as a plausible scenario. (According to the poll, 79 percent also say the federal government has been hiding information about UFOs from the public – which may actually say more about the public’s overall distrust of government than its views on aliens.)

UFO = Unidentified Flying Object. Of course UFOs exist. Haven’t we all seen things in the sky that we didn’t recognize? Whether these objects are of extraterrestrial origin would have been a better question. Now the ones who want to “befriend” a visiting alien–those people have got to be looney tunes. But this story isn’t as silly as I originally thought, since it’s obviously just an ad for the National Geographic Channel.

And now the real news. Today will be a big day for politics junkies. Will the House go through their idiotic plan to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress? Will Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy decide to vote to keep the current Supreme Court from going down in history as a laughingstock?

Eric Holder Witchhunt

On the Holder issue, I think the House probably will call the vote, especially since some Democrats are planning to vote for the contempt resolution because they’re scared of the NRA.

Cognitively challenged Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown today called on Holder to resign.

“He can’t effectively serve the president,” Brown said last night on “NightSide” with Dan Rea — in a one-man debate after Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren chose to sit the event out.

Going at Holder on the eve of an expected contempt of Congress vote tomorrow, Brown said, “For the best interest of the country, I think he should step down and resign. He’s lost the confidence of the American people. Certainly he’s lost the confidence of Congress. He misled Congress. They have a right to know.”

That quote is from the ultra-conservative Boston Herald, so I’ll interpret for you. The “debate” referred to in the article was an appearance on a conservative radio talk show that Brown proposed as an alternative to the public debate that would have been sponsored by U. Mass. Boston and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute.

The announcement came shortly after representatives of Vicki Kennedy said she would not agree to Brown’s demand that she remain neutral in the race, in exchange for the senator’s participation in a late September debate she had proposed be hosted by the University of Massachusetts Boston and Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate.

Barnett had said Monday that Brown would participate only if Kennedy, president of the board at the Kennedy Institute, not endorse in the race and that MSNBC not be the broadcast sponsor of the debate.

Instead of “debating” with Scott Brown on a rinky-dink local conservative radio talk show, Elizabeth Warren appeared on Rachel Maddow’s national cable show last night.

Scott Brown and Darrell Issa are both complete idiots, IMNSHO.


The SCOTUS Decision on Health Care

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the Roberts and Kennedy will both vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act. I think, based on what they did with Arizona’s immigration law, that Roberts and Kennedy will also vote to uphold “Obamacare.”

When this happens, Antonin Scalia may freak out completely and embarrass himself even more than he did after the Arizona decision. And then perhaps his friends and colleagues will sit him down and suggest that he retire and get his own radio talk show.

At Slate, Judge Richard Posner harshly criticized Scalia’s behavior as political.

The nation is in the midst of a hard-fought presidential election campaign; the outcome is in doubt. Illegal immigration is a campaign issue. It wouldn’t surprise me if Justice Scalia’s opinion were quoted in campaign ads.

Would Chief Justice Roberts be proud of his Court if that happened?

House progressives say they will introduce a single-payer plan if the law is struck down.

The last thing House progressives want is for the Supreme Court to strike down President Barack Obama’s health care law. But if the high court rules Thursday that some or all of the law is unconstitutional, progressives are ready to renew their push for the model of health care they wanted all along: the single-payer option.

“It’s easy to see it’s a good idea,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told The Huffington Post. “It’s the cheapest way to cover everybody.”

Ellison said all 75 members of the caucus have already signed onto a bill by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) to create a single-payer, publicly financed, privately delivered universal health care program. The proposal would essentially build on and expand Medicare, under which all Americans would be guaranteed access to health care regardless of an ability to pay or pre-existing health conditions.

Now, now. We don’t want to give Scalia a conniption fit, do we? He would be more likely to agree with libertarian economics blogger Tyler Cowan who thinks the wealthy naturally will have better health care and poor people should just die if they can’t afford health insurance.

A rejection of health care egalitarianism, namely a recognition that the wealthy will purchase more and better health care than the poor. Trying to equalize health care consumption hurts the poor, since most feasible policies to do this take away cash from the poor, either directly or through the operation of tax incidence. We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor. Some of you don’t like the sound of that, but we already let the wealthy enjoy all sorts of other goods — most importantly status — which lengthen their lives and which the poor enjoy to a much lesser degree. We shouldn’t screw up our health care institutions by being determined to fight inegalitarian principles for one very select set of factors which determine health care outcomes.

The health care decision should come out around 10AM, and I’ll update this post when the news breaks.


Mitt Romney Report

I know everyone is just dying to know what Mitt Romney is up to. Well yesterday he had quite a hissy fit about the Washington Post article on how he pioneered outsourcing when he was at Bain Capital. He actually sent some of his representatives to the Post to demand a retraction! As you might imagine, the Post wasn’t intimidated.

Good grief! They even gave a Power Point presentation! What a bunch of crybabies. And on Hardball today, Howard Fineman reported that Romney campaign staffers complained to him that Obama has been running lots of negative ads against Romney. Hey Mitt, politics ain’t beanbag.

From today’s Washington Post: Mitt Romney shifts focus from Post article on Bain to health-care law.

On the eve of the Supreme Court decision on President Obama’s health-care law, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney predicted Wednesday that “they’re not sleeping real well at the White House tonight.”

He said that the court’s decision is a constitutional one, but that “one thing we already know, however, we already know it’s bad policy and it’s gotta go.”

Romney’s comments marked a shift in focus after several days in which his campaign sought to deflect attacks from the Obama campaign over the role that Bain Capital, his former firm, played in the overseas outsourcing trend that accelerated in the 1990s.

Obama, Vice President Biden and top campaign operatives have seized on a Washington Post article published Friday that said Bain Capital invested in companies that specialized in moving work overseas. The Obama team released tough ads in the swing states of Iowa, Ohio and Virginia on the subject.

Romney tried to “work the refs,” but he forgot that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Now he’s irritated the Washington Post. Not real smart, Mitt. Yesterday, even Rush Limbaugh dissed the Republican candidate.


Colorado Wildfires (and More Mitt)

The wildfires in Colorado are really getting out of control.

Firefighters struggled on Wednesday to beat back a fiercely aggressive wildfire raging at the edge of Colorado Springs that has forced at least 35,000 people from their homes and was nipping at the edges of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

The so-called Waldo Canyon Fire, fanned by gusting winds, has gutted an unknown number of homes on the wooded fringes of Colorado’s second-most populous city and prompted more evacuations as flames roared out of control for a fifth day.

President Barack Obama plans to pay a visit to the area on Friday to view the damage, the White House said.

The blaze flared Tuesday night with sudden ferocity and quickly overran fire containment lines, invading the northwestern corner of the city. But officials have declined to characterize the extent of property damage there….

The blaze left an orange hue over Colorado Springs, and a smoky haze hung in the air, so thick in places that the giant, roiling pall of smoke that continued to billow into the sky over the city was obscured from the ground.

Local TV station channel 9 news provides a summary of fires in many different locations. It’s really shocking how widespread they are. Yesterday the fires threatened the Air Force Academy, and many residents there were evacuated.

Voters who live in Colorado and other states where there are disasters like fires, mudslides, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, should be aware that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney opposes federal disaster relief and would probably eliminate FEMA if he were elected. He thinks natural disasters should be handled by individual states. From one of the debates last year:

Here’s a transcript:

KING: Governor Romney? You’ve been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it’s the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?

ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better. Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut — we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we’ve got to stop doing, because we’re borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we’re taking in. We cannot…

KING: Including disaster relief, though?

ROMNEY: We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.

Because “our kids” will have a great future if they go through an earthquake or other horrible disaster and there’s no federal help for the state they live in to recover. Brilliant!

That’s about it for me. I’ll just leave you with this bit of good news: Eric Cantor may be in trouble

New polling from Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, one of the more reliably conservative districts in the country, shows surprising vulnerabilities for Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, especially on the issue of women’s health.

In the poll from from Harrison Hickman obtained exclusively by ThinkProgress, voters say they would support a pro-choice candidate over a candidate who is pro-life by an unexpectedly large margin, 68 percent to 23 percent. The finding comes after intense media coverage of efforts by state Republicans to mandate transvaginal ultrasounds prior to obtaining an abortion, a procedure described by critics as “state-sponsored rape.” The resulting backlash from women in Virginia forced Governor Bob McDonnell (R) and his allies at the statehouse to moderate their efforts.

Eric Cantor has a 100% rating from the National Right To Life Committee.

AND

asked about Cantor specifically, voters disapprove of his handling of government spending, health care and reigning in the budget deficit, three key issues that Cantor and House Republicans have campaigned heavily on since 2008.

While Cantor is not among Republicans who are considered at risk by political prognosticators, 43 percent of voters would replace Cantor compared to just 41 percent who would reelect him.

So…..what’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Just Call me a Conscientious Objector in the Mommy Wars

Posted: June 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: War on Women, We are so F'd, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights, worker rights | Tags: | 24 Comments

I have no idea why this war even needs to be fought.  I also object to the frame that redefines feminism as something it isn’t and then casts it in the catalyst role. Frankly, my lifestyle choices are no one’s damn business.  I also don’t want to hear any whining about put upon stay at home mothers or selfish working moms or whatever freaking black and white witchy stereotype folks dream up and embrace. This would include the appalling cartoon I used for this post.  There seems to be a media obsession at the moment with painting women into corners and guilt tripping them for which ever corner they wind up in.  Women are even participating in the self immolation. We’ve been regaled by lectures like this one on “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All“.  Like we need some other woman defining what “all” is for the rest of us. We also don’t need a bunch of self righteous right wing wind bags that continue to blame all of the world’s problems on mothers.

It’s enough to make Betty Friedan spin in her grave.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel took up the keyboard today at WAPO with a reminder that most working mothers aren’t struggling to “have it all”.  They are struggling to feed their kids and provide homes. For some reason, a lot of folks seem to think there’s all these great, supportive, bread-winning men out there just dying to reproduce and do right by their wives and families. I frankly don’t recommend marriage to any woman. Most husbands are bigger pains-in-the asses than colicky babies.  A lot of them can’t even hold down jobs these days and then there’s the entire emotional trip that goes along with marriage. You know the TV sitcom stint that goes like this.  Asking men to do the right thing by their families puts them in the position of being the oppressed, hypernagged hubbie who goes to work and takes it out on the resident working women and stirs up the other men in one big woe-is-me session. There’s a lot of reality out there that these BS narratives miss. Even the best intentioned man can get pulled back into the old boys club after a number of years of marriage and fatherhood.  The media, their jobs and the entertainment industry absolutely empower them to be reckless with their family relationships.

This is the reality that faces millions of working women. More than 70 percent of all mothers and more than 60 percent of mothers with children under 3 are in the workforce. Two-thirds of them earn less than $30,000 a year. Nine of 10 less than $50,000. In the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson’s powerful image, “They catch the early bus,” or, in Vasquez’s case, the late bus. They work out of need, whether they want to or not. Half are their family’s primary breadwinner.

These mothers don’t have the luxury of flexible time or the ability to leave when a child is in trouble or sick. Most can’t afford to take unpaid sick leave to care for their children — and many would lose their jobs if they did, despite the federal law guaranteeing unpaid leave. Many work in jobs — as home-care workers, farm workers, cleaning people — that have scant protection of minimum wage and hours standards. Many cobble together two or three part-time jobs. Child care gets done by grandmothers, neighbors or simply the TV.

Okay, so this is the deal.  The problem is not with WOMEN.  The problem is with the way “work” and “income” is structured in this country.  It doesn’t change because most men in power don’t want it to change. Things used to be different when most businesses were family run and family owned or when most families lived off farms.  Working for some one else in this country but a few enlightened companies basically means placing your family outside your major time commitments.  That is not the way it should be.

Here’s something that caught my eye as I thought about this. This is written by a journalist as a response to the articles run by The Atlantic recently in the vein of mommy wars. I like it because it states what I find is obvious.  Feminism is about finding options and accepting and empowering women’s choices.  It’s not about pitting our various roles against each other.  Every woman should make her choice.  There is no sainthood or martyrdom prize for whatever that choice is so can’t we just knock it off now?

The average American worker gets something like 14 days of paid vacation. In my school, you’d use up ten of those taking care of your kids on teacher professional days, then tack on a couple more for kids getting sick. When you do the simple math, the American workplace seems utterly inhumane in its unwillingness to adapt to the fact that women make up half of all workers.

Economist Claudia Goldin has made a career out of studying what she calls the “career cost of family.” The industries that thrive and hold onto talented women are the ones that figure out how to minimize the cost of taking time off for your family. It’s not all that complicated. They take advantage of technologies to let parents work at home or be more efficient, they schedule shifts, they minimize face time, they let people do what Sheryl Sandberg says she does: go home at 5:30 and pick up again later after her kids are in bed.

Feminism was about making women’s lives less constrained and giving them more choices. Right now, most women have none — not because they are spoiled and unrealistic and want to do lunchtime yoga, but because they are working hard to support their families and everyone is colluding in the fiction that they have nothing else on their minds. I return to a modest proposal I made last week in Slate, inspired by Slaughter: Mothers, fathers, don’t lie to your employers about the kid things you have to (or want to) do during the day. If you are taking a kid to the doctor, say so. Ditto for parent teacher conferences or the school play. At this point, honesty would be a radical act.

One of the bottom lines to me is that if men would actually do something about making the country, the work place, and their family more children friendly, we wouldn’t be having these problems or this discussion.  Our situation exists because men do not treat women or children as anything valuable unless there’s something at the time that they need from them.  There are work environments out there that are family friendly.  They are very successful.  They got that way because the men in charge made them that way to attract and maintain talent.  They attract men and women to work for them that value families. There are far too few companies that do that because there’s a lot of men that get away with ignoring their families.  They’re rewarded for it. European countries do not do this.  France doesn’t do it.  Germany doesn’t do it.  None of the Scandinavian countries do it. It’s an American value to fuck over you family because you have to work.

The other interesting thing in all of this is the role of birth control and the empowerment of controlling when you have children.  Economist Claudia Goldin calls this The Quiet Revolution.  I have no doubt that there is an equal role in all the re-ignition of the mommy wars with the attack on birth control.  Reproductive rights is essential to women’s freedom and children’s well being. It’s also necessary to the transformation that could occur in the work place if more women got into positions of power and more men were motivated by family concerns and demanded the work place empower them to parent.  Taking away this important right means undoing women’s autonomy.

All of this just continues to impress upon me how little this country actually cares about its children. There seems to be this silly idea that if you just strand a woman at home with children and giver her a husband with a paycheck then all the problems of the world will just fade away.  This couldn’t be farther from the truth.  Just reading literature on depression and unhappiness should put this damaging canard to bed.  Again, look at that damn cartoon up there.  We need to be a society that supports family choices and provides resources to all our children to be in the environment in which each child thrives.  This will never happen in less our institutions stop prioritizing the wrong things and until every one refuses to participate in the Mommy Wars.

There’s still something very wrong with Kansas

Posted: June 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | 6 Comments

ImageInstituting religious doctrine is something that just shouldn’t happen in this country.  Yet, many Kansas legislators just want a theocracy.  What’s the matter with Kansas, still? Do they confuse acorns with trees and scrambled eggs with fried chicken too?  Don’t women deserve to keep their medical records out of the hands of their state governments?

On Friday, the Kansas Board of Healing Arts refused to reinstate the medical license of Dr. Ann Neuhaus, who provided second opinions to abortion provider Dr. George Tiller between 1999 and 2006. Kansas law requires a second opinion to perform some late-term abortions. Neuhaus’ license was revoked by an administrative court in February following a 2006 complaint from the anti-choice group Operation Rescue alleging she did not take the safety of teenage patients seriously in 2003 because of the short length of patient record files for her cases.

But the sparseness of her patient notes was an attempt to protect their privacy from the anti-choice crusade of a state official. Around the time Neuhaus performed the abortions, the Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline was investigating abortion providers — going so far as to subpoena medical records and discuss those cases on right-wing television shows. Indeed, Neuhaus specifically cites Kline’s “investigation” while arguing her exams met accepted care standards:

She…testified that she didn’t put more details in her records to protect patients’ privacy. After the hearing, she said she was “unapologetic” for that, noting the Kansas attorney general’s office began investigating abortion providers, including Tiller, starting early in 2003, and in 2006, Fox television’s Bill O’Reilly strongly criticized Tiller and discussed a few of his patients’ cases on his program.

Kline faces an ongoing ethics complaint case alleging he “lied to the Kansas Supreme Court, misled a Johnson County grand jury investigating an abortion provider and discussed an ongoing case on ‘The O’Reilly Factor’” that throw weight behind Neuhau’s fears, but whether or not she could get a fair hearing was doubtful. Gov. Sam Brownback (R) recently appointed former Operation Rescue attorney Richard Macias to the board, and one expert witnesses called by the Board testified there were no cases in which providing an abortion could be beneficial to a patient’s mental health.

While Neuhaus plans to appeal, the entire saga paints a stark portrait of how pervasive anti-choice influence is at some state levels — and the untenable position that influence means for health care providers. Then again, perhaps it’s no surprise a state that seriously debated legislation that would force doctors to misinform their patients about health risks would put an anti-choice agenda before the well-being and medical privacy of it’s citizens.

Republican state legislators are just dying to get all women’s constitutional rights put before those Opus Dei freaks on SCOTUS.

More information on this from RH Reality Check.

According to the Associated Press, Neuhaus was hoping to have her full medical license restored after spending years only allowed to provide limited medical care for charity work.  Instead, an ongoing investigation into 11 patient cases obtained by Operation Rescue became the center of a movement to have her license stripped all together.

The cases all involved girls who sought abortions due to mental health issues from depression to suicide, with an age range from 17 years old to as young as 10. The board alleged that Neuhaus’s exams were not thorough enough based on the available records provided, and that her follow up care was inadequate, as she did not recommend counseling or hospitalization afterwards.

Neuhaus called the accusations ridiculous.  She said she refused to put too much identifying information in the records because she knew that they could eventually end up in the hands of outsiders and violate the patients’ privacy. As for abortions not being necessary, Neuhaus found that laughable as well.

“To even claim that isn’t medically necessary qualifies as gross incompetence,” said Neuhaus.  “Someone’s 10 years old, and they were raped by their uncle and they understand that they’ve got a baby growing in their stomach and they don’t want that. You’re going to send this girl for a brain scan and some blood work and put her in a hospital?”

Terrorist Attacks on Georgia Women’s Clinics Tied to “Fetal Pain” Bill

Posted: June 22, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Politics, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

GA Rep. Doug McKillip

The FBI is investigating a series of break-ins and arson attacks at Georgia women’s health clinics as domestic terrorism. From Care2 on May 25:

Within just a few months Georgia has had empty women’s health clinics that provide abortions burglarized and equipment stolen to arson investigations that doctors and lawmakers fear are connected to the contentious 20 week abortion ban passed during the 2012 legislative session.

Each of the four clinics targeted are linked to doctors who either visited the state Capitol or expressed concerns to lawmakers about the 20 week abortion ban. As Robin Marty reports, police are not yet willing to officially connect the violence targeting the clinics to a coordinated campaign targeting abortion clinics and providers, but they have brought in The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to assist with the investigation.

According to ATF spokesman Richard Coes, the Department is looking at the cases as possible acts of domestic terrorism or civil rights violations.

The federal authorities moved in after two clinic fires happened within just days of each other. The first fire happened on a Sunday morning and when the clinic was closed. The second fire though happened during the day, while the clinic was open and could have easily injured staff and patients at the clinic, not to mention innocent bystanders.

I think JJ wrote about these attacks back in May, and she has covered the Georgia legislature’s anti-abortion campaign extensively. The fetal pain bill, HR954, was introduced by Rep. Doug McKillip of Athens, GA. McKillip was elected as a Democrat and as soon as he got into the legislature, he switched parties–so not really a stand-up guy.

This is the bill that received nationwide media attention when another legislator, Terry Englund, compared pregnant women to livestock.

After an emotional 14-hour workday that included fist-fights between lobbyists and a walk-out by women Democrats, the Georgia House passed a Senate-approved bill that criminalizes abortion after 20 weeks.

Commonly referred to as the “fetal pain bill” by Georgian Republicans and as the “women as livestock bill” by everyone else, HB 954 garnered national attention when state Rep. Terry England (R-Auburn) compared pregnant women carrying stillborn fetuses to the cows and pigs on his farm. According to Rep. England and his warped thought process, if farmers have to “deliver calves, dead or alive,” then a woman carrying a dead fetus, or one not expected to survive, should have to carry it to term.

The law has no exceptions for rape or incest.

A couple of days ago, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that the attacks appear to have specifically targeted doctors who testified against McKillip’s bill and/or met with McKillip to express their concerns.

Metro Atlanta physicians who participated in the General Assembly’s debate on new abortion restrictions say they warned lawmakers that they were being targeted for reprisals. And they are skittish about returning to the state Capitol next year when the topic is all but certain to come up again.

Four of the five offices targeted are run by doctors who had voiced concerns — sometimes publicly, sometimes privately — about the so-called fetal pain bill, which shortened to 20 weeks the time frame during which women can have an elective abortion.

“These are despicable acts and if there is some relationship between these acts and the legislation, then it’s even more outrageous,” said House Speaker David Ralston. “I’m concerned that Georgians might have some fear of coming to the Capitol and voicing their opinions on legislation. Obviously, that troubles me.”

Four physicians interviewed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, some of whom declined to be named, said they suspected — but could not prove — that whoever targeted their clinics was exceptionally well informed about their activities in the Capitol during the 40 days of the session. Even those activities that occurred out of the public eye.

“The circle of people is not that large,” said John Walraven, a lobbyist for the Infertility and Perinatology Consortium of Georgia. “That’s what’s creepy about it.”

HB 954, which was ultimately signed into law by Gov. Nathan Deal, is the most substantial abortion restriction to pass the General Assembly in several years, and was designed to provide a new constitutional basis — the pain experienced by fetuses during the procedure —for further restrictions.

McKillip has denied leaking information about the bill’s opponents, but if in fact someone is encouraging these attacks in order to frighten doctors and keep them from testifying in the future, the tactic seems to be working.

Republican Freak Out in Michigan: Don’t Say Vagina!

Posted: June 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 36 Comments

It’s been a few days since Michigan State Rep. Lisa Brown and her colleague Rep. Barb Byrum, both Democrats, were silenced by the Republican House majority for speaking out against a highly restrictive anti-abortion bill.

Republican males were so horrified by these transgressions that they punished the women by banning them from speaking on the House floor the following day–the last day of the legislative session.

A spokesman for Michigan Speaker James Bolger said in a statement that Brown would not be allowed to give her opinion on a school employee retirement bill Thursday because she had “failed to maintain the decorum of the House of Representatives.”

Republican Rep. Mike Callton added that Brown’s remark went over the line.

“What she said was offensive,” Callton told The Detroit News. “It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.”

Brown was punished for uttering the word “vagina”:

Brown, a West Bloomfield Democrat and mother of three, said a package of abortion regulation bills would violate her Jewish religious beliefs and that abortions be be allowed in cases where it is required to save the life of the mother.

“Finally, Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means ‘no,'” Brown said.

Byrum offended the powers that be by trying to introduce an amendment to the bill

banning men from getting a vasectomy unless the sterilization procedure was necessary to save a man’s life.

“If we truly want to make sure children are born, we would regulate vasectomies,” Byrum told reporters Thursday.

You’d think these men would be embarrassed after turning themselves into a national laughingstock, but apparently not. The controversy continues. Today Lisa Brown will participate in a reading of The Vagina Monologues on the Capital steps in Lansing. She will be accompanied by other female legislators and a teenage actress from Howell. The play’s author, Eve Ensler is flying in for the occasion.

What is so upsetting about the word “vagina?” At the WaPo, Susan Thistlethwaite says the male fear of the female organ goes all the way back to Aristotle.

The obvious revulsion of these Michigan male legislators at the term “vagina” goes well beyond politics. If you really want to understand why some Michigan legislators find the word “vagina” disturbing and unsuitable for “mixed company,” you’ve got to go all the way back to Aristotle.

Aristotle thought women were more material (carnal) and men more rational (active). According to Aristotle, the fully developed human is male, and a woman “is as it were a deformed male” (Generation of Animals, 737a. 28). This has disposed western culture, and especially Christianity, to consider women’s bodies as profane rather than sacred, and thus by extension too offensive to talk about in public.

But wait, this isn’t the mid-fourth century BCE, the time when Aristotle wrote. It’s not even the Middle Ages. It’s the 21st century, and women will not sit still and have their bodily parts considered “disturbing,” while simultaneously being regulated without their consent.

And at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick has a suggestion for a new bill for Michigan Republicans:

The scourge of women being allowed to speak the word vagina in a legislative debate over what happens when women use their vaginas must be stopped. And if women are not capable of regulating their own word choice, the state should regulate it for them. To that end, we propose that the Michigan House promptly enact HB-5711(b)—a bill to regulate the use of the word vagina by females in mixed company.

The bill will include Part A(1)(a) providing that any women who seeks to use the word vagina in a floor debate be required to wait 72 hours after consulting with her physician before she may say it. It will also require her physician to certify in writing that said woman was not improperly coerced into saying the word vagina against her will. Section B(1)(d) provides that prior to allowing a female to say the word vagina a woman will have a mandatory visit with her physician at which he will read to her a scripted warning detailing the scientific evidence of the well-documented medical dangers inherent in saying the word vagina out loud, including the link between saying the word vagina and the risk of contracting breast cancer.

Read the rest of the bill’s language at the above link.

Will any of this affect the Republican Party’s obsession with reversing women’s rights? Probably not, but I’ll bet some of their female constituents will be paying attention.

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