Justin's Political Corner
Bill O’Reilly recently got into a little hot water with the religious right. The abrasive talk show host dared to suggest on his show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” that the anti-gay movement would be better off using secular arguments against same-sex marriage than resorting endlessly to biblical ones. “The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals,” O’Reilly argued, adding, “And the other side hasn’t been able to do anything but thump the Bible.”
Since the beginning, the Christian right has been aware that the First Amendment makes it impossible for them to use “God said so” to justify legislation. They’ve spent decades grafting secular reasons onto what are fundamentally attempts to foist their views on the rest of the country, often going out of their way to conceal the religious origins of their policy ideas. In response, I created this list of what the religious right wants; what nonsense secular reason they give for wanting it; and the actual, true reason, usually down to chapter and verse.
1) What they want: A rollback on environmental protections. This is but one of many ways the religious right has merged its interests with that of corporate America.
The secular reasons they give: Many on the Christian right scoff at the science of global warming. Sadly, Americans in general are resistant to the science of global warming, but white evangelical Christians are even worse than the general public. Pew Forum found in 2009 that 47% of Americans accept the science of climate change, but only 34% of white evangelicals. The objections the religious right offers are fed to them by oil industry lobbyists, such as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council calling global warming theory “speculative.”
The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: They justify this to themselves religiously coming and going. The fundamentalist Cornwall Alliance claims that belief in climate change is anti-Christian, because it “rests on and promotes a view of human beings as threats to Earth’s flourishing rather than the bearers of God’s image” and implies that God’s creation is “the fragile product of chance, not the robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting product of God’s wise design and powerful sustaining.” On the other side of it, as Ben Jervey of GOOD argued, 41% of Americans believe Jesus Christ will usher in Armageddon before 2050. If you believe the world is about to end, it seems pointless to make huge sacrifices to preserve its health into the future.
2) What they want: For the government to take money from the public school system and give it to private schools in the form of vouchers. They’ve had remarkable success at this by hijacking the larger, secular debate over education.
The secular reasons they give: The claim is that “school choice” creates competition among schools that improves educational outcomes. Public school charter systems are seen as an inadequate alternative, because they are supposedly not flexible enough.
The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: They want the government to pay for the religious indoctrination of children. Even though the vouchers can, in theory, be spent on private secular schools, the way the program works in places like Louisiana makes it clear that this is about government-sponsored religious education.
3) What they want: No Equal Rights Amendment. While this battle to prevent the Constitution from being amended to give women equal rights, which the right won, was mostly fought in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Christian right-controlled legislatures occasionally take time to vote against it today.
The secular reasons they gave: In many ways, Phyllis Schlafly used the battle against the ERA to invent the modern conservative strategy of making bad faith secular arguments to advance a religious agenda. As Rachel Maddow recounts, Schlafly and her comrades claimed the ERA would mandate unisex bathrooms, make it illegal for women to be housewives, and destroy families.
The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: The Bible is pretty clear that women are not equal to men, calling them “the weaker vessel” (1 Peter 3:7) who must live “in silence” to “not usurp authority over man” (1 Timothy 2:12), because women are to basically worship their husbands, “and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16).
4) What they want: A ban on gay marriage. Often cast as “protecting” traditional marriage.
The secular reasons they give: The argument presented in favor of Prop 8 before the Supreme Court is that marriage was established to make sure children are raised by the parents who created them through sexual intercourse, and that expanding it to include gay couples (it’s already expanded to include stepfamilies and infertile couples) would redefine it in a way that would cause vague damage the anti-gay lawyer refused to describe.
The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: The Old Testament harshly condemns homosexuality, saying, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 20:13). Christian fundamentalists have downgraded this simply to mean that their government shouldn’t endorse marriages that go against right-wing religious teachings.
5) What they want: To end the teaching of evolution in schools. This battle has been going on since at least the 1920s, and every time it comes around, the religious right gets a little better at hiding its religious motivations behind secularist claims.
The secular reasons they give: The current strategy is to claim that evolutionary theory is scientifically controversial, and therefore schools should “teach the controversy.” Clearly, they hope to give students reason to doubt the theory of evolution. In reality, there is no controversy. As the National Center for Science Education has stated, “There is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism of evolution.”
The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: For Biblical literalists, evolution is an uncomfortable topic because the Bible says God created the world in the space of six days. While evolution correctly holds that human beings are primates who evolved from a common ancestor, the Bible teaches that God made them out of “the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7). Why that is supposed to be less demeaning is hard to say.
6) What they want: To restrict access to abortion and contraception. Everyone knows the religious right has it out for abortion rights, but recently attacks on contraception access have also been increasing.
The secular reasons they give: Abortion is “baby-killing,” it’s unsafe for women, and it causes breast cancer and suicide. Emergency contraception is really “abortion” and birth control pills are unsafe. Telling kids just to abstain from sex is the only public health strategy we need. Condoms don’t work to prevent HIV.
All of these claims are lies, as is the secular pose that anti-choice activists take when promoting these lies.
The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: Right from the beginning, the Bible is big on the idea that a woman’s role is to be frequently pregnant, whether she likes it or not. “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). He commands it again to Noah: “And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein” (Genesis 9:7).
So, in a very real sense, even when Bill O’Reilly is right, he’s wrong. He’s not wrong to say that social conservatives would do well to come up with secular arguments for their positions, instead of tell a country with strict protections for religious freedom to obey their interpretation of the Bible. He’s just wrong to think they don’t already know that. After all, they wrote the instruction manual.
h/t: AlterNet
It’s that time of year again when Girl Scouts sell cookies… and right-wing activists attack the Girl Scouts. Today, Linda Harvey of Mission America took offense that the Scouts support “radical feminists” and “homosexual lifestyles” and “feature prominent female homosexuals in some of their materials.” She alleged that they dismiss “authentic morality, Christianity, conservative viewpoints and just plain old motherhood” and “sexual self-restraint” while at the same time promoting “an attitude of suspicion toward males.”
(via Fox News Guest Receives Racist Rape And Death Threats After Arguing Guns Aren’t The Solution To Rape)
Zerlina Maxwell is a feminist writer and frequent guest on Fox News. Last week, while a guest on Sean Hannity’s show, Maxwell argued that arming women is not a way to solve the problem of rape. Among other things, she pointed out that “if firearms were the answer, then the military would be the safest place for women, and it’s not.”
In the wake of her appearance, Maxwell was bombarded with harassing messages calling for her to be raped or murdered, often in explicitly racist terms. She provided ThinkProgress with screenshots of three examples:
These kinds of online threats are not simply cowardly and repulsive, they also may be criminal. In New York, where Maxwell resides, a person who “[w]ith intent to harass, annoy or alarm a specific person, intentionally engages in a course of conduct directed at such person which is likely to cause such person to reasonably fear physical injury or serious physical injury, the commission of a sex offense against, or the kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment or death of such person or a member of such person’s immediate family” is guilty of stalking in the third degree, and may be punished by up to one year in prison. At least some of the attacks on Maxwell also could qualify as hate crimes, which would lead to a higher sentence.
It’s a sign of how anxious the right wing is about the possibility that Ashley Judd might run for Senate against Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that the attacks on her have geared up before she’s even formally entered the race. There’s the American Crossroads ad trying to frame her as out of touch with a series of relatively anodyne and contextless quotations. And now, the Daily Caller, which has been trying to frame Judd’s feminist beliefs as fringe, has launched the stupidest salvo against her at all: arguing that Judd, because she has done nude scenes for her work as an actress, “has—literally—nothing left to show us.” In an exceptionally gross piece, Taylor Bigler, the Caller’s Entertainment Editor (Entertainment, in Caller parlance, apparently means surfing Mr. Skin and publishing clickbait trash gossip) writes:
We are used to knowing just about everything there is to know about serious political candidates. But will Judd be the first potential senator who has — literally — nothing left to show us? The actress has bared her breasts in several films and has had some raunchy sex scenes in others. According to MrSkin.com, which bills itself as “the largest free nude celebrity movie archive,” Judd has flashed just about everything on-screen. It seems like she was particularly liberal with nudity early on in her career…Judd did a lesbian sex scene in 2002′s Oscar-nominated “Frida” and has nine other films categorized as “sexy” by Mr. Skin, meaning that there is at least one racy scene in those films.
It may come as a surprise to the Daily Caller, but actresses don’t generally take their clothes off on-screen as an expression of some sort of groovy seventies lifestyle, or as a way to have sex with people who are not their spouses or partners. Rather, getting asked to take off some or all of your clothes is, for a lot of actors, a frequent requirement of the job, and something that until recently, tended to be asked of women more frequently than men.
Attacking Judd for her nude scenes is part and parcel of the right’s current strategy to discredit promising female advocates. Like Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on Sandra Fluke, the Caller’s attempts to impugn Judd as an exhibitionist are an attempt to make her seem less serious by impugning her sexual chastity (that this tactic remains in the playbook is a whole other world of crazy). But the evidence is even more specious and pathetic here. Fluke, who became engaged shortly after enduring nationally-broadcast attacks on her character, stumped for birth control access in the real world. Judd took her clothes off as part of fiction. The Daily Caller may not know the difference, but voters do. And Judd, who already knows a thing or two about the insanity of media scrutiny, is getting a real, and sadly valuable education in what you have to be willing to take if you want to be active in American public life as a woman.
WASHINGTON — The Violence Against Women Act is finally heading to the president’s desk this week after a dragged out political fight over expanding protections to Native American, LGBT and immigrant victims of abuse.
The House voted 286 to 138 on Thursday to pass the bipartisan Senate version of VAWA.
The vote came just after the House rejected its own GOP bill, 166 to 257, which drew loud cheers in the chamber. Sixty Republicans voted against the GOP bill.
Throughout the debate, House Republicans maintained that their bill would have covered all women. But the reality is that it didn’t go as far as the bipartisan Senate bill. The House bill stripped out protections for LGBT victims of abuse, it didn’t give tribal courts new authority in certain domestic violence cases and it added new eligibility restrictions for U Visas for abused immigrant women. The House bill also entirely left out two separate measures attached to the Senate bill: the SAFER Act, which helps law enforcement address a backlog in untested rape kits, and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which targets human trafficking.
The House Republican bill appeared doomed before it hit the floor. It had zero support from Democrats, and a growing number of Republicans were saying they couldn’t support it.
Whether or not film star and progressive activist Ashley Judd decides to challenge Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for his seat in 2014, conservatives seem to be gearing up for a fight. On Tuesday morning, right-wing website The Daily Caller compared Judd’s unabashed feminism and environmentalism to former Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), whose campaign failed after he claimed women couldn’t get pregnant from“legitimate rape.” Akin’s comment was not only medically wrong, but also insulted and dismissed rape victims. Judd’s “most stunning comments,” according to the Daily Caller, range from harsh rhetoric against mountaintop removal to criticism of patriarchal institutions:
She has spoken out against having kids, saying it is “unconscionable to breed” while there are so many starving children in the world.
She has criticized the tradition of fathers “giving away” their daughters at weddings, calling that practice “a common vestige of male dominion over a woman’s reproductive status.”
She has even compared mountaintop removal mining to the Rwandan genocide, and has criticized Christianity as a religion that “legitimizes and seals male power.”
By getting in the race with this sort of baggage, Judd runs the risk of being portrayed as a Todd Akin-esque candidate – meaning voters simply decide she’s unqualified to serve as a senator, because her comments are so outrageous and extreme that people can’t bring themselves to vote for her.
The Daily Caller equates Judd’s and Akin’s comments as gaffes. But Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment cost him the election not because it was “outrageous” but because it shed light on his radical anti-choice voting record.
As the Obama administration continues to be a complete nightmare for antifeminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, the Eagle Forum president is out with a new column attacking Defense Secretary Leon Panetta over his decision to end the ban on women in combat. She claims the policy shift is “lacking in common sense and it is toadying to the feminist officers who yearn to be 3- and 4-star generals based on the feminist dogma of gender interchangeability and on their desire to force men into situations to be commanded by feminists” and even makes a bogus analogy to the NFL.
Schlafly said that the rate of sexual assaults “will skyrocket” if the ban is removed and also attacked the “feminist ideology” for blaming men for such incidents: “Only men will be deemed at fault because it is feminist ideology that men are innately batterers and women are victims.”
H/T: Right Wing Watch
WASHINGTON — Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is lifting the military ban on women in combat, allowing them to officially serve on the front lines for the first time in the history of U.S. armed forces.
The policy change, to be announced Thursday at the Pentagon, “will initiate a process whereby the services will develop plans to implement this decision, which was made by the Secretary of Defense upon the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” a senior Defense Department official said Wednesday in a statement to The Huffington Post.
Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, lauded the change. “After a decade of critical military service in hostile environments, women have demonstrated a wide range of capabilities in combat operations and we welcome this review,” McKeon said in a statement Wednesday.
The Department of Defense notified members of Congress of the change on Wednesday afternoon, according to a congressional source who didn’t want to be named because the policy is not yet officially announced. Following Thursday’s announcement, Congress will have 30 days to weigh in on the decision. The military services will have until May 15 to inform Panetta of implementation plans, and until January 2016 to seek exemptions.
Despite the ban, some women have been serving in combat for more than a decade. Often, though, their service is not officially recognized, which can obstruct professional advancement or access to benefits. Active-duty female personnel make up roughly 15 percent — or 207,308 members — of the more than 1.4 million armed forces, according to the Department of Defense.
Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Mass.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, called Panetta’s decision “welcome news.”
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), a twice-deployed combat veteran, called the decision “overdue, yet welcome.”
“Today is a historic day for not only women currently serving in our armed forces, but for all of the women who have selflessly put their lives on the line in theaters of war throughout our nation’s history,” Gabbard said in a press release Wednesday.
Retired Army Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum, a Purple Heart recipient taken captive after her helicopter was shot down in Iraq in the Gulf War, told The Huffington Post she did not have much to say, other than: “It is about time.”
See Also: http://justinspoliticalcorner.tumblr.com/post/41296814547/breaking-us-defense-sec-leon-panetta-removes-the
h/t: Huffington Post
Despite the deep unpopularity of fetal personhood bills in 2012, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has again decided to cosponsor the Sanctity of Human Life Act, a bill that gives full legal rights to human zygotes from the moment of fertilization.
Ryan, who reportedly has 2016 presidential ambitions, had to de-emphasize his opposition to abortion without exceptions during the 2012 election to align his position with presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But this year, Ryan has been tapped as a keynote speaker for the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List’s sixth annual Campaign for Life Gala, and he is re-upping his support for the most extreme anti-abortion legislation in the country.
The personhood bill, first introduced in 2011 by Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) and reintroduced by Broun last week, specifies that a “one-celled human embryo,” even before it implants in the uterus to create a pregnancy, should be granted “all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” Similar legislation has been rejected by voters in multiple states, including the socially conservative Mississippi, because legal experts have pointed out that it could outlaw some forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization as well as criminalize abortion at all stages.
Broun said in a statement that a zygote’s right to life should be “defended vigorously and at all costs.”
The bill died in the House of Representatives in 2011, when a record number of anti-abortion bills were being passed, and it is equally unlikely to advance this year. The Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down a state personhood initiative in 2012, deeming it “clearly unconstitutional” because it blocks a woman’s legal right to have an abortion.
H/T: HuffPost Politics
If there were fewer women and more “male aggression” in Sandy Hook Elementary School, the massacre there never would have taken place, according to a contribution to a leading conservative magazine.
National Review, whose in-house editorial suggested Newtown was the price of the Second Amendment, published a piece on Wednesday from anti-feminist Charlotte Allen suggesting the reason the shooter was able to kill so many students was because Newtown was a “feminized setting:”
There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.
Via Jessica Valenti, who notes that this is extraordinarily “disrespectful to the female teachers and staff at Sandy Hook. Allen mentions their heroism as an anomalous aside rather than exceptional bravery that saved lives. The bravery of the women in Newtown – principal Dawn Hochsprung and psychologist Mary Sherlach who rushed the shooter before being killed, teacher Victoria Soto who died protecting her students, Kaitlin Roig and Abbey Clements who hid their students and calmed them – is remarkable.”
From the 12.07.2012 edition of Premiere Radio Networks’ The Rush Limbaugh Show:
Dear Mr. Mourdock,
Sometimes I still flinch when I’m touched a certain way, even if it’s the loving embrace of my husband. I can’t stand to watch TV shows where rape is the central plot line. Even some seasons of the year are harder for me. Those of us who are sexual assault survivors call these triggers. We spend our lives — the lives we lead after the attack — avoiding and managing these triggers.
A congressional debate shouldn’t have to come with a trigger warning. But apparently, Richard, yours should. Because in Tuesday’s debate for Indiana’s U.S. Senate seat, you said this Tuesday night during a debate in New Albany, Indiana.
“I believe that life begins at conception…The only exception I have, to have an abortion, is in that case of the life of the mother. I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”
Rape and sexual assault are complicated experiences for survivors. Some of us fight, kick, scream, and resist at every moment. Some of us eventually give in to save our own lives or to manage the horror. Some of us know that what is happening is rape, others of us just know it is wrong, but don’t have the words to describe why. Some of us push the memories down and try to forget, others of us battle openly with the nightmares and scars every day. There is no one right way to survive. There is no one right way to feel.
But the whole point is choice. Consent. You see, Mr. Mourdock, the violation of rape is more than physical. Rapists strip women of our right to choose, of our right to say no, of our right to control what is happening to our bodies. Most assailants tell us it is our fault. They tell us to be silent. Sometimes they even tell us it’s God’s will. That is the core violation of rape– it takes away choice.
Richard, you believe it is fine to ignore a women’s right to choose because of your interpretation of divinity. Sound familiar?
Let me explain something to you. When we survive sexual assault, we are the gift. When we survive, when we go on to love, to work, to speak out, to have fun, to laugh, to dance, to cry, tolive, when we do that, we defeat our attackers. For a moment, they strip us of our choices. As we heal, we take our choices back. We are the gift to ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nation when we survive.
Now let me say this very clearly to you Mr Mourdock, and to all of your shameless endorsers: we did not survive an attack on our consent just to turn around and give up our right to choose to you. Not without a fight.
Are you sure you want to have that fight?
Sincerely,
Melissa
Expounding on her belief that feminism is a pagan philosophy that promotes witchcraft and is “destructive to the church,” Linda Harvey of Mission America told listeners yesterday that feminism is trying to “disguise” their “sexual permissiveness agenda” as “concern about harming women” and “human rights.” She argued that feminists and their allies in the Democratic Party “are the ones truly making a war on women” by opposing the criminalization of abortion. She added that “homosexuality, wasteful government spending, dependency on welfare, our weak national defense and many of the other items the Democratic Party proudly stands for” also harm women, and that “every liberal woman” is at war with God’s design.
Rush Limbaugh, the world’s most impotent man, took to the airwaves to discuss a very serious and important scientific breakthrough that not even noted scientist Rep. Todd Akin could discover: feminists (or ‘feminazis’ as Rush calls them) are responsible for the current outbreak of shrinking male genitalia. If anyone knows about defunct and flaccid penis issues, it’s Rush Limbaugh.
It seems an Italian study found that the average male penis was 10 percent smaller than 50 years ago, though it must not apply to former Congressmen from NY. Regarding the factors that lead to embarrassing “a group of cheerleaders laughing at you” shrinkage,
“I think it’s feminism,” he declared. “If it’s tied to the last 50 years — the average size of [a male’s] member is 10 percent smaller than 50 years — it has to be the feminazis, the chickification and everything else.”
From the 09.20.2012 edition of Premiere Radio Networks’ The Rush Limbaugh Show:
