Where Things Stand... Read it and Weep

By John Ballard

Peter Daou summarizes a sad state of affairs with The clamp down on American women. I see no way to parse and it's too good to miss so I'm grabbing the whole post.

In a post on the travails of the left, I described the new (un)reality:

• George W. Bush is steadily and surely being rehabilitated and now the question is how much gratitude we owe him.


• Sarah Palin can move the public discourse with a single tweet, promoting a worldview consisting of unreflective, nationalistic soundbites.


• Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Fox are dominating the national conversation, feeding a steady stream of propaganda packaged as moral platitudes to tens of millions of true believers.


• In the face of overwhelming evidence, climate deniers are choking the life out of the environmental movement and willfully condemning humanity to a calamitous future.


• From ACORN to Van Jones, liberal scalps are being taken with impunity.


• Feminism is being redefined and repossessed by anti-feminists.


• Women are facing an all-out assault on choice.


• Martin Luther King Jr.�s legacy is being co-opted by a radio jock.


• Schoolbooks are being rewritten to reflect the radical right�s anti-science views.


• The rich-poor divide grows by the minute and teachers and nurses struggle to get by while bankers get massive bonuses.


• We mark the end of a war based on lies with congratulations to all, and we escalate another war with scarce resources that could save countless lives.


• An oil spill that should have been a historic inflection point gets excised from public awareness by our own government and disappears down the memory hole (until the next disaster).


• Guns abound and the far right�s interpretation of the second amendment (the only one that seems to matter) is now inviolate.


• Bigotry and discrimination against immigrants, against Muslims, against gays and lesbians is mainstream and rampant.


• The frightening unconstitutional excesses of the Bush administration have been enshrined and reinforced by a Democratic White House, ensuring that they will become precedent and practice.


• Girls and women across the planet continue to get beaten, raped, ravaged, mutilated, and murdered while sports games induce a more passionate response.

Kay at Feministe expands on the steady infringement of women�s reproductive rights:

Yesterday the Center for Reproductive Rights released a report that gave a deeply depressing rundown of all the ways states have worked to restrict reproductive rights this year. Reading the whole report is worthwhile, but here are the highlights.

There are some major trends in states this last year:

• 
  Ultrasound requirements or restricting doctors to read state-mandated language: It seems requiring ultrasounds before women can obtain an abortion are the hot new thing in the states, even though requiring an ultrasound seems to have no effect on a woman�s decision have an abortion.


• State Stupaks�a.k.a. exchange bans: The Affordable Care Act, which was passed by Congress earlier this year contained a compromise on abortion coverage known as the Nelson Amendment. That amendment allows states to enact their own bans on abortion coverage in private insurance plans sold through state-based exchanges. As of the writing of the CRR report, five states�Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee�have enacted bans and two other states, Florida and Oklahoma, have passed bans that were vetoed by the governor.


• Personhood and parental notification ballot initiatives: I already wrote about Alaska�s parental notification ballot initiative that was passed by voters last week, but Colorado and Mississippi are both going to be voting on initiatives that would define life as beginning at conception. Colorado will have this initiative on the ballot this fall�possibly aiding in turnout for Republican candidates�and Mississippi will vote on it in 2011. Defining life as beginning at contraception is problematic. The proposed initiative is designed to be a direct challenge to Roe vs. Wade thus defining abortion as murder and miscarriages as involuntary manslaughter. It would also likely outlaw most forms of contraception. Also because changing the definition of �person� would literally affect thousands of laws.

The CRR also has a rundown of what happened in several states this year�

The basic disposition of the anti-choice movement is that women and their doctors, left to their own devices, are natural born baby killers. Government is the enemy, except when it involves curtailing women�s rights.

Any hope that Democratic rule would advance the cause of women has been dashed � and now it�s a daily struggle to avoid getting Stupaked, not to mention holding on to some shred of a definition of feminism:

Several years ago, when antiabortion protesters realized that screaming �Murderer!� at women wasn�t winning hearts and minds, they launched more palatable campaigns claiming that abortion hurts women � their new protest signs read �Women Deserve Better.� (Not surprisingly, this message is much more effective than spitting invective at emotionally vulnerable women.)

When members of the conservative Independent Women�s Forum argue against efforts to address pay inequity, they say the salary gap is a result of women�s informed choices � motherhood, for example � and that claims of discrimination turn women into victims. Conservatives have realized that women respond to seemingly feminist arguments.

But, of course, Palin isn�t a feminist � not in the slightest. What she calls �the emerging conservative feminist identity� isn�t the product of a political movement or a fight for social justice.

It isn�t a structural analysis of patriarchal norms, power dynamics or systemic inequities. It�s an empty rallying call to women who are disdainful of or apathetic to women�s rights, who want to make abortion and emergency contraception illegal, who would cut funding to the Violence Against Women Act and who fight same-sex marriage rights. As Kate Harding wrote on Jezebel.com: �What comes next? �Phyllis Schlafly feminism?� �Patriarchal feminism?� �He-Man Woman Hater Feminism?� �

Given that so-called conservative feminists don�t support women�s rights, how can they paint their movement as pro-woman? Why are they not being laughed out of the room?

It�s because people who would have been �laughed out of the room� are now controlling our public discourse.

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And I thought last year's August was a shitty month.
Little did I know how much worse it could get...

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