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Neat! Pseudo-Adrienne’s post on Janice Brown was mentioned on MSNBC today!

Maziltov, P-A!

Egalia at Tennessee Gurilla Women reproduces NOW’s “Bill of Rights” from their first national conference, which took place in 1967. As Egalia says, it’s interesting to look at this, nearly 40 years later, and see what has - and hasn’t - been accomplished, and what is still under fire.

BILL OF RIGHTS

WE DEMAND:

I. That the United States Congress immediately pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to provide that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” and that such then be immediately ratified by the several States.

II. That equal employment opportunity be guaranteed to all women, as well as men by insisting that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforce the prohibitions against sex discrimination in employment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the same vigor as it enforces the prohibitions against racial discrimination.

III. That women be protected by law to insure their rights to return to their jobs within a reasonable time after childbirth without loss of seniority or other accrued benefits and be paid maternity leave as a form of social security and/or employee benefit.

IV. Immediate revision of tax laws to permit the deduction of home and child care expenses for working parents.

V. That child care facilities be established by law on the same basis as parks, libraries and public schools adequate to the needs of children, from the pre-school years through adolescence, as a community resource to be used by all citizens from all income levels.

VI. That the right of women to be educated to their full potential equally with men be secured by Federal and State legislation, eliminating all discrimination and segregation by sex, written and unwritten, at all levels of education including college, graduate and professional schools, loans and fellowships and Federal and State training programs, such as the job Corps.

VII. The right of women in poverty to secure job training, housing and family allowances on equal terms with men, but without prejudice to a parent’s right to remain at home to care for his or her children; revision of welfare legislation and poverty programs which deny women dignity, privacy and self respect.

VIII. The right of women to control their own reproductive lives by removing from penal codes the laws limiting access to contraceptive information and devices and laws governing abortion.

From Sisterhood Is Powerful, a great anthology which is available on Amazon for a quarter.

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This post was removed by request of the author.

Quoted from “The Backfiring of the Domestic Violence Firearms Bans,” by Lisa May, published in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law in 2005.

Dale Barsness was a convicted wife batterer. At the time of his conviction, he had a full and fair opportunity to be heard. He admitted in open court that he assaulted his wife, and the court found him guilty in a final adjudication of the matter. Because he was a convicted abuser, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(9), which prohibits all persons convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor from possessing firearms, applied to Barsness.

Barsness’s employer, the Minneapolis Police Department, required him to possess a gun. Since the federal law compelled Barsness to surrender his gun, he faced losing his job. A local judge took it upon himself to expunge Barsness’s domestic violence record, not because the matter was wrongly decided, or because it had been reversed and resolved in his favor, but simply because Barsness would otherwise be subject to suffer the consequences of the federal gun control law. The Hennepin County judge set aside Barsness’s adjudicated conviction, stating that because the federal law would force him to relinquish his gun and likely his job, the conviction created a “manifest injustice.” That local judge single-handedly overrode federal legislation, and Barsness was reissued his firearm and restored to his gun-carrying position (subject to appeal by the County Prosecutor).

In February 2003, a rural Missouri judge credited the testimony of a severely battered woman who described her husband throwing her to the ground, threatening her with death, and waking her in the middle of the night by holding her down and beating her. The woman’s husband admitted to the abuse in testimony under oath. The judge, however, denied the victim’s request for an order of protection, instead advising the woman to change the locks on her doors to keep herself safe. By denying the protective order, the judge allowed the batterer to escape the Domestic Violence Gun Safety Law, which prohibits individuals with civil protective orders entered against them from owning or possessing firearms. Later that day in open court, the same judge cited the approach of quail hunting season in open court as one reason not to issue another protective order.

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UPDATE: Several folks in the comments, especially Portia and Radfem, read more closely than I did and noticed that there’s a disturbing pattern here; regardless of whether or not she really did want him to hit her to cause a miscarraige, the boyfriend is an abuser.

From the Houston Press:

“Later that morning, Davis and Lieutenant Mike Shapaka picked up Jerry at Lufkin High School for questioning. In the interview room, Jerry admitted to hitting Erica the night before, but only on the arms. He’d been out with friends, he said, and she tore into him about coming home so late. So he hit her a few times, just to get her to leave him alone.

Davis and Shapaka asked if he’d ever hit Erica before.

Yes, he said, but he always aimed for the arms.

As Thomas wrote:

If he was only attacking the fetuses there would be, at most, a strray bruise here or there. He’s a liar. His admitted abuse, and his likely pattern of abuse, also brings into question whether she really wanted to terminate the pregnancy, or was coerced into that by her boyfriend. (From my view on abortion, it follows that she had an absolute right to carry the pregnancy to term, and she’s entitled to be vindicated for the deprivation of that right as well.)

Like I said, if _all_ he did was help attack fetuses in her body with her consent, I have no problem with it. But that’s not what happened here. If he coerced her to terminate a pregnancy, threatened her or abused her (and he admits that he did), then he belongs in jail (for abusing her, not the fetuses, to which I concede no rights). The articles you supplied, Radfem, makes it clear to me that the latter is what happened, which totally alters my view of what ought to happen to this guy. He wasn’t trying to help her terminate an unwanted pregnancy. He was abusing her, and maybe forcing her to terminate a pregnancy that, whether planned or not, she had not freely chosen to terminate.

Clearly I posted too soon. My apologies to everyone for screwing this one up, and thank you Radfem and Portia for spotting my error.

Original post follows.

Read the rest of this entry »

George Lakoff’s idea of “framing” is very much “in” among liberals nowadays. Frances Moore Lappé sums it up well:

“Frames,”? according to Lakoff, are the key to understanding how political ideas are received. Human beings don’t absorb information as raw material; we sift input through frames of meaning carried in the language we use.

Lakoff’s central idea is that conservatives see the world through a “strict father”? frame emphasizing discipline, self-reliance, forceful defense, while progressives see the world through a “nurturant parent”? frame…supportive, nourishing, emphasizing mutual responsibility. Lakoff claims that thirty-five to 40 percent of Americans fall into each camp, although most are some sort of mix.

The Right, Lakoff points out, is extremely good at selling their policies in clear, easy to understand “strict father”? frames. Progressives, on the other hand, too often seem to offer laundry lists of issues lacking any overarching moral framework.

So, it’s easy to see why progressives are rallying around Lakoff’s call to arms. Since polls show majorities actually agree with the progressive agenda on many key issues, including corporate power, the environment and abortion, focusing on “framing”? issues in ways that Americans can understand them seems like the answer they’ve been praying for. Certainly, much of Lakoff’s advice about communicating progressive ideas is powerfully insightful and right on target.

I’ve been resistant to Lakoff’s frames, partly because they seem too crude to really say much about real-world politics. Doug Muder’s reformulation of Lakoff’s two categories into the Inherited Obligation family and the Negotiated Commitment family seems, to me, much more likely to reflect how people are really feeling:.

The right distinction isn’t between the conservative nuclear family and the liberal nuclear family, but between two completely different ways of experiencing family. Those two modes of experience may express themselves in families that are not nuclear at all.

The key distinction in Ault’s account is not strictness vs. nurturance, but the Given vs. the Chosen. What, in other words, is the source of your responsibilities to other people? Are you born with obligations? Or do you choose to make commitments? As with strictness and nurturance, every actual person experiences some combination of obligation and commitment. But emphasizing one or the other makes a striking difference. […]

Several liberal/conservative issues become much clearer in this analysis than they are in Lakoff.

Abortion. In the Inherited Obligation model, having children is an obligation, not a choice. Of course a pregnant woman may find it inconvenient to have a child at this point in her life, but that’s no reason to let her opt out - obligations are almost always inconvenient. In the long run, however, children are a good deal; their obligation to you pays off when you are old. In demanding that a young woman carry a fetus to term, then, society is looking out for long-term interests she may not yet have the perspective to see.

Conversely, in the Negotiated Commitment model nurturance is a gift, not an investment. A child is more like a work of art and less like a retirement plan. Having a child out of obligation, without a sense of commitment, is seen as a recipe for disaster. Pregnancies that result from rape, ignorance, or a birth-control failure are set up for such a disaster. If society is going to hold a prospective mother responsible for the welfare of her child - and it should - she must be given a chance to decide whether this child is her project or not.

Same-sex marriage. The husband/father and wife/mother roles in the Inherited Obligation model are timeless, unchangeable, and necessary. Someone has to be the husband/father and someone has to be the wife/mother. Same-sex couples just can’t cover both roles, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.

But no comparable difficulty exists in the Negotiated Commitment model. A child has needs, and the parents have to negotiate a plan to meet those needs. Whether the parents are a mixed-sex couple or a same-sex couple - or even a single parent with a lot of committed friends - the problem is the same.

Mulder is also very interesting discussing why it is “Inherited Obligation” families often see the “Negotiated Commitment” model as a threat to their way of life, rather than just a harmless live-and-let-live alternative.

Our belief in negotiated commitment - that people are not obligated to relationships they did not choose - is like one of those devastating European germs that white settlers spread throughout the world three centuries ago. We are immune; our families are based on negotiated commitments and (though they are far from perfect) work quite well in that environment - as long as we can maintain the social safety net.

But Inherited Obligation families are not doing nearly so well. Blue states consistently lead red states in statistical measures of familial success - low divorce rate, low drop-out rate, low violent crime, low teen pregnancy. Divorce rates in particular seem to vary inversely to liberalism: conservative Baptist marriages fail far more often than those from more liberal Christian denominations.

We have trouble grasping how tolerance can be threatening. Ault explains:

Liberally minded people often do not realize … that rather than respecting fundamentalists views, they are denying them by insisting that religious beliefs or ethical standards be seen as personal, private matters we must all tolerate in one another - that moral standards are relative, not absolute. … Shawmut River’s commitment to absolutes was in keeping with the binding character they saw in the family obligations through which their world was organized. To see moral standards as personal and relative, on the other hand, widened the scope of individual autonomy and freedom in ways that denied and threatened to undermine lives that depended upon seeing family obligations as nondiscretionary - not as something individuals can choose or not choose, but as absolutes they have to accept.

Meanwhile, a lot of Democrats, drawing on Lakoff (sort of), are saying that we have to “reframe” our advocacy of reproductive rights; we have to talk about “freedom” rather than “choice,” and so on. I’m pretty much a “whatever works” person; there are dozens of correct arguments in favor of keeping abortion safe and legal, and we should be willing to try all of them out and see which ones work.

But talking about how to “frame” arguments in favor of legal abortion and other feminist issues seem a bit besides the point. As Egalia at Tennessee Guerilla Women sharply observes, “Dems spend far more time trying to find new and clever ways to talk about abortion rights than they actually spend talking about a woman’s right to choose motherhood or not. ” She links to this terrific article by Martha Burk:

Lakoff is probably right that Bush’s appeal to women and men alike was more emotional than rational. But the erosion of women’s support for Democrats was also a result of the Kerry campaign strategy. The Kerry campaign shied away from talking to women at all, choosing instead to go for the white male warrior vote. Women’s advocates were alarmed about this from the beginning, when the Democrats refused to fund a strategy to get women to the polls, while the Bush team had a person in every precinct who was responsible for turning out the female “W”? vote.

Even female Republican pollsters like Kellyanne Conway admit that women lean Democratic “if left to their own devices.”? That’s because women depend more on the social safety net (the compassionate “parent government”? in Lakoff-speak), and the Democrats have traditionally stood for better social services like expanding health care and child care, and ensuring retirement through Social Security (women’s main source of retirement income ). But the Democrats failed to exploit this natural advantage, instead trying to out-tough-guy Bush on the war and homeland security. According to the Votes for Women 2004 project, Republican women’s events were about how much the campaign valued women, while Democratic women’s events were about extracting money from female donors to use on general campaign themes. Significantly, among women who stayed away from the polls, homeland security ranked third behind the top concerns of jobs and economic security and health care security.

Leaving women out of the debate was not new for the Democrats. They have shown us in the last two elections that they don’t want to be too vocal about women. Every time George Bush said to Al Gore, “I don’t trust the government, I trust the people,”? Gore had the perfect opportunity to counter with “except for women in making their own decisions about their own bodies.”? He never once took that opportunity. In 2004, the Dems avoided “women’s issues”? at every turn, even taking the Equal Rights Amendment out of the platform for the first time in 40 years. When their own internal polling showed the pay gap as one of the top concerns for women, the candidate didn’t want to talk about it publicly. As for the abortion issue, only those far inside the Beltway could decode Kerry’s rambling answer in the final debate to conclude he was…sorry, Howard…pro-choice. Even so, the DNC is now blaming the loss on “being forced into the idea of defending the idea of abortion,”? according to Dean.

(Curtsies to Marriage Debate and Lucinda Marshall.)

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This post was removed by request of the author.

• Make sure to read this excellent Scientific American article which very nearly destroys the “fat is death” paradigm. (Curtsey: “Alas” reader Justice.)
• This BBC article reports on a study which found that, in women, it’s healthier to have a lot of fat around the hips and thighs. “Compared to the group of women with the smallest hip circumferences, women with the biggest were found to have an 87% reduction in deaths. They also had an 86% reduced risk of having coronary heart disease and a 46% reduction in the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, according to the researchers.” (Curtsies to Kristy and Robert.)
• Stay Free! Daily has a good critique of an Independant article which implied that anorexia is all about the genes and has little to do with social norms.
• As Big Fat Blog reports, Buenos Aires, in an attempt to combat eating disorders, has passed a law forcing clothing stores to carry a range of sizes.

This Nicholas Kristof op-ed in the Times, about rape in Darfur, is brutal, but also a must-read.

On March 26, a 17-year-old student named Hawa went to a French-run clinic in Kalma and reported that she had been raped. A French midwife examined her and confirmed that she was bleeding and had been raped.

But an informer in the clinic alerted the police, who barged in and - over the determined protests of two Frenchwomen - carried Hawa off to a police hospital, where she was chained to a cot by one leg and one arm. A doctor there declared that she had not been raped after all, and Hawa was then imprisoned for a couple of days. The authorities are now proposing that she be charged with submitting false information.

The attacks are sometimes purely about humiliation. Some women are raped with sticks that tear apart their insides, leaving them constantly trickling urine. One Sudanese woman working for a European aid organization was raped with a bayonet. […]

I’m still chilled by the matter-of-fact explanation I received as to why it is women who collect firewood, even though they’re the ones who are raped. The reason is an indication of how utterly we are failing the people of Darfur, two years into the first genocide of the 21st century.

“It’s simple,” one woman here explained. “When the men go out, they’re killed. The women are only raped.”

Read the whole thing. Thanks to Robert for the tip.

UPDATE: And read this post by Seth Chalmer, as well:

Even from Darfur activists, I’ve usually heard the victims described as “non-Arab tribes”, or “African tribes”. I’ve used that terminology myself, because I’ve heard it from others.

Why aren’t we saying the blunt truth? Complexities there may be, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Janjaweed are trying to murder all black people.

Interesting AP article about the issue of women and driving in Saudi Arabia. Here’s a few bits, but it’s worth clicking over and reading the whole thing:

He just wanted his colleagues in the government’s legislative arm to discuss the possibility of conducting a study into the feasibility of reversing the ban on women drivers … the only prohibition of its kind in the world.

But Consultative Council member Mohammad al-Zulfa’s proposal has unleashed a storm in this conservative country where the subject of women drivers remains taboo. […] There even have been calls to kick al-Zulfa from the council and strip him of his Saudi nationality. […]

Conservatives, who believe women should be shielded from strange men, say driving will allow a woman to leave home whenever she pleases and go wherever she wishes. Some say it will present her with opportunities to violate Islamic law, such as exposing her eyes while driving or interacting with strange men, like police officers or mechanics.

“Driving by women leads to evil,” Munir al-Shahrani wrote in a letter to the editor of the Al-Watan daily. “Can you imagine what it will be like if her car broke down? She would have to seek help from men.” […] The driving prohibition has forced families to hire live-in drivers, who, strangely, are allowed to be alone with women. […]

Many women activists also welcomed al-Zulfa’s suggestion. But others lashed out at him for using the issue to project himself as a reformer.

Via Darnell Clayton at BNN.

Never heard of the Salerno standard? It just might be at the center of the most important abortion-related court struggle this decade.

The Supreme Court will definitely be hearing a parental notification law abortion case from New Hampshire, and there’s a partial-birth case from Virginia that some folks are speculating the Court might hear as well. But as All Deliberate Speed, Fantasy Life and SCOTUSblog point out, it’s possible that’s what’s really at stake here isn’t parental notification or partial-birth abortion laws as such. It may be more important to look at the relatively obscure - but crucial - issue of if “facial challenges” can be legally made against the Constitutionality of abortion laws.

From SCOTUSblog:

Here is a key passage from [the Supreme Court’s United States vs. Salerno decision]: “A facial challenge to a legislative act is, of course, the most difficult challenge to mount successfully, since the challenger must establish that no set of circumstances exists under which the act would be valid. The fact that [a law] might operate unconstitutionally under some conceivable set of circumstances is insufficient to render it wholly invalid…”

But, in the abortion context, state laws have been rendered “wholly invalid” by facial challenges not applying the Salerno standard. Instead, they have applied what is known as the “undue burden” test.

The undue burden standard, first recognized by a Court majority in the celebrated 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, provides that an abortion law will be struck down if it imposes an undue burden on the right to abortion of a significant number of women ““ even if it is possible to cite some situations in which the statute could be validly applied.

In the worse case scenario, the Court could conceivably decide to apply the Salerno standard to abortion laws. What would happen then? Well, in the Virginia case, “Virginia argued that the plaintiff should not be permitted to challenge the statute on its face. That is, Virginia argued that the statute could not be challenged until a woman came along with a health need for this kind of abortion.” (Quote from Lawyers, Guns and Money.) In other words, if the “undue burden standard” is replaced by the Salerno standard, there’d be no way to ask a court to examine if an anti-abortion law is unconstitutional until after a woman who wants an abortion has been denied it.

And even if one lawsuit is successful in overturning the law “as applied” to the particular person who sued, the law could still apply to other women in other circumstances - meaning all those women would have to sue individually if they think the law is unconstitutionally being applied to them. The net effect could be to make it much harder for pro-choice activists to get Courts to consider whether or not new abortion-related laws are Constitutional.

If pro-life activists can succeed in getting the Supreme Court to apply the Salerno standard to abortion cases, that would be a huge victory for them - a much more significant victory than either parental notification or a partial birth abortion ban. The good news is, I doubt they will succeed, so long as the case is heard before O’Connor leaves the Court; O’Connor might not be eager to see the “undue burden” standard, which is pretty much her invention, trashed.

(Link to SCOTUSblog via Lauren at Feministe).

Amanda of Pandagon (who is also a frequent poster on “Alas”) will be appearing on Glenn Sacks’ radio show today. (Glenn has been mentioned on “Alas” a few times in the past).

As you might recall, Glenn’s show, “His Side,” is men’s rights activist central, so if anyone’s free from 5pm to 6pm pacific time (8pm to 9pm eastern) today, I’m sure Amanda would appreciate feminists calling in to give her some support while she’s in “enemy territory.”

You can listen to the show live on the web here, where you’ll also find instructions for calling in.

And even if you can’t call in, join me in sending “good luck vibes” Amanda’s way today!

Two (relatively) new feminist blogs for y’all to check out:

Znetter Lucinda Marshall is doing some kickass radical feminist blogging (and pissing off a lot of Z Magazine’s regular readers). Very cool.

And if you’re jonesing for a fix of Brit feminist, the F-Word, long one of my favorite feminist sites, has started a blog - also kickass but from a more liberal-feminist perspective.