Tag / women’s rights

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Nancy Cohen

In this 45 minute radio interview, political historian Nancy Cohen discusses the sexual counterrevolution, the ongoing assaults on women rights, parallels between gay rights and civil rights, and even challenges Thomas Frank on his evidence.

Nancy Cohen appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #446. She is most recently the author of Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution is Polarizing America.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Getting in touch with his humanist side.

Author: Nancy L. Cohen

Subjects Discussed: Rep. Darrell Issa and the contraception hearing, Komen for the Cure, when the Republican Party was better about women’s rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, the McGovernik principle that has crippled progressivism, challenging Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the 2010 special election in Massachusetts in which Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s seat, Stanley Greenberg and Reagan Democrats, why gay marriage is only accepted in certain states, Prop 8, the Defense of Marriage Act, civil unions, the Democratic reluctance to embrace gay marriage, Chris Christie, parallels between civil rights and gay rights, Howard Dean’s early efforts to embrace the Internet, Democrats who “run into the present,” Reagan’s nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor, Reagan’s silence on AIDS, conservatism as a three-legged stroll, silly attempts at a political Theory of Everything, Phyllis Schlafly, Ford’s support of the ERA, Carter blaming the feminists, political pragmatism as an excuse for diffidence, reproductive rights as a core right, Carter’s personal opposition to abortion, the Tea Party Express’s financial contributions, the influence of money on politics, the Arkansas Project, David Brock’s Blinded by the Right, why birth control hearings is now a wedge issue, the Tea Party as a rebranding of the Christian Right, efforts to dismiss Hillary Clinton, Gail Sheehy’s attacks on Hillary, attracting mythical male voters through the Margaret Thatcher strategy, motivating young people to vote as a winning progressive strategy, Obama’s timidity on reproductive/gay rights, the clown car of presidential candidates, the lingering effect of Sarah Palin, whether Republican women voters can be courted by Democrats, Lieberman as the first Democrat to denounce Bill Clinton about Lewinksy from the Senate chamber, Sen. Moynihan settling a score with Clinton, the mythical conservative middle, the problems with the 2000 Presidential election, Gore’s centrist campaign, the influence of the far right sexual fundamentalists, Mitt Romney’s effect on the sexual counterrevolution, and women’s rights in 2013.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Your timing is quite impeccable. Because I’m talking with you the day after Representative Issa to basically not allow a woman to testify at the all-male hearing on contraception. I’m talking with you a week after Komen for the Cure initially pulled its funds from Planned Parenthood, saying, “Well, we can’t support any organization that is under congressional review,” and then changing this to be “Well, we can’t support any organization that is referring out its mammograms.” So I gotta say, maybe this might be the opportune time to discuss how we got to this point in American political history. How does this constantly wavering excuse fit into the political strategy of the religious right and the forces of what you identify as the sexual counterrevolution? How did this come into play?

Cohen: Well, I’m an evil genius. And when I came up with this idea a couple years ago, I planned for these hearings to take place.

Correspondent: Aha.

Cohen: No, seriously, the first line of my first chapter is “Perhaps if the pill hadn’t been invented, American politics would have turned out very differently.” And at the time, it was kind of a literary allusion. A way to get some history down. So what we’re seeing is really the logical end point of what I call the sexual counterrevolution. Delirium tells the story about how a small group of reactionaries who want to control sex have hijacked American politics. And what we’re seeing this week, and last week, is really the essence of the Republican Party. The id of the Republican Party coming out to play because they are so intoxicated with the power that they got in the last elections.

Correspondent: Yes. Well, the id wasn’t always there. As you point out in the book, I mean, it’s become increasingly id-like over the years. What of the sensible conservative idea? What of the rational reactionary?

Cohen: The sensible conservative ideas Back in the ’60s and the ’70’s, the Republican Party was the small government/personal freedom party. They actually meant it. They were better on women’s rights. They were better on sexual freedom really. Even before the sexual revolution, the Republican Party was better. But what happened was, with the sexual revolution and feminism and gay rights, a group of people — surprisingly mostly women — were appalled, freaked out about all these changes and sexual life and women’s roles and gays coming out of the closet. And they organized on a grassroots level against these changes. And so they went up against the Equal Rights Amendment. And they won. And then they went after publicly financed child care. And they won. And then they took civil rights away from gays. And they won. And then they methodically started taking over the Republican Party from local, state, and county committees on to the school board until 2008, when they had one of their own, Sarah Palin, on the presidential ticket.

Correspondent: Let’s get into this. You point out that George McGovern is one of the key figures responsible for Democratic timidity in relation to the sexual counterrevolution. You suggest that McGovern losing his temper, telling a voter to kiss his ass — that was one factor. The really terrible decision he made involving ordering milk with a liver sandwich in a Jewish deli. Not exactly the smartest choice. There was also this idea that McGovern, because he encompassed this cultural radicalism and failed, that this was what encouraged the Democrats to backpedal. So I’m wondering to what degree is this political temperament and to what degree is this, I suppose, a cultural radicalism that Democrats are afraid of? I mean, 2004, you have Howard Dean’s famous scream. And even before that, everybody was like, “Wow, this guy’s finally standing up for progressivism.” I mean, it seems to me that if you have a situation where the Democratic presidential candidates are limited in what they can say and how they can act, that this kind of progressive idea of, say, supporting something like the Equal Rights Amendment, you’re almost not allowed to do that. So how did this state come to be and what solutions do we have for the future?

Cohen: Good question. So the sexual counterrevolution has affected both parties. And in the Democratic Party, it’s really about their overreaction to every time they lose. And the way it goes back to McGovern’s election is that they convinced themselves that the reason McGovern lost by a landslide is because of all the gays and feminists and multiculturalists that he associated himself with. And so there’s this idea that Democratic progressives alienate mainstream America. Mainstream America is conservative. That idea is a fixation of the Democrats. But if you look at the studies of elections and you look at the studies of public opinion, it’s not true at all. Democrats have actually won elections for being the more culturally progressive party on women’s issues and gay issues and race issues. And so Democrats, I believe, would actually do better if they did embrace their voters’ live and let live attitude about people’s personal lives and stood on principle for civil rights for every American. But Democrats are timid and they have convinced themselves that they lose on this issue. So it would be good for them to start to recognize that it’s a winning issue.

Correspondent: But what data are they using? I mean, it can’t just be McGovern that’s the linchpin for this.

Cohen: No. So what they generally look at is exit polls and focus groups. And to get a little wonky here…

Correspondent: Sure. Feel free.

Cohen: What I looked at in the books so that no one else really has to — except maybe Democratic strategists can start looking at this stuff — is a lot of research by political scientists and sociologists that do regressions of public opinion polling and elections, and conclusively show that all the things we think are true — you know, that the white working-class man is an economic populist, but a social conservative? Wrong. It’s the reverse. He’s pro-choice and doesn’t like the Democrats’s economic policies. That Bush won the election on gay marriage? Wrong. No evidence. That Democrats lose elections for being pro choice? Wrong. Clinton won the election in 1992 on a huge upsurge of pro-choice women and pro-choice men.

Correspondent: You challenge Thomas Frank’s ideas in What’s the Matter with Kansas? by saying that he was condescending in believing that Kansans were duped into voting for more right-wing candidates and so forth. How do we go ahead and factor in, oh say, scenarios like Scott Brown in Massachusetts? Which is very much a scenario in which arrogance and technocratic approaches tend to destroy a Democratic seat. I mean, how does this play into the sexual counterrevolution? And how do you reconcile this, what seems to me, legitimate Thomas Frank idea with this?

Cohen: So I do criticize Tom Frank for being condescending. But I also criticize him for having no empirical evidence for his argument. And that’s the main case. His idea is premised that, one, the working class doesn’t vote for Democrats. They actually do. It’s premised on the idea that Kansas has been some bulwark of Democratic politics. It’s actually been a bulwark of right-wing evangelical fundamentalism. So there’s a number of other factual errors. I actually went into the book assuming that I was going to extend Tom Frank’s thesis. And I found that it actually went back to this anti-McGovern idea and discovered that there was no evidence for it. And that’s when I started moving in this other direction on the sexual counter-revolution. So an election like Scott Brown’s, a lot of health care money went in there. A lot of the people that they say are white working-class populist men are actually middle income or better off people. So what you have in a lot of these elections, like 2010 and the Scott Brown election, is you have very low turnout from poor Democratic groups. Young people. Single women. Low income people. And so when the exit polls do show a surge of white men, they often don’t figure out, well, where are these men economically? And I do agree that the smugness of the Democratic candidate in that election.

Correspondent: Who we don’t want to name. (laughs) And you didn’t name in the book and I won’t name on this show.

Cohen: Yes.

Correspondent: Traitor!

Cohen: I think she’s probably reformed. So I do think that was a case of a sense of the Democrats being entitled to a seat and didn’t really see this both right-wing and corporate money coming into that election that year.

Correspondent: If Tom Frank is so wrong with his evidence, then why is that book constantly cited? Why over many decades does the idea of the McGovernik still hold within the Democrats? I think that’s the thing I really don’t get. If all of the scientific evidence says otherwise, then why are serious Democratic leaders going by this?

Cohen: Well, actually, serious Democratic leaders aren’t going by it anymore.

Correspondent: It only took them several decades. (laughs)

Cohen: Yes, well, they read the polls and they read exit polls and they do their own political polling. They don’t necessarily read the academic literature. But the key person who articulated this idea of the McGovernik, about the Reagan Democrat: Stanley Greenberg, who I hear is a wonderful man and has done a lot of good work for progressive causes, was one of the people who kept this idea alive. And he runs a polling company. And he uses his own polls. So just after, since 2008, he’s basically said, “You know what? The Reagan Democrats aren’t the key voting bloc anymore. Democrats need to go for this multiethnic, cosmopolitan, progressive base and they’ll pick up enough of these white working-class men to win elections. So it is Tom Frank — and I haven’t read his new book, so I don’t know how he’s amended his thesis. But there has been a shift among the leadership of the Democratic Party. And I think you see with Obama not defending DOMA [Defense of Marriage Act], right? Saying, “I think it’s unconstitutional.” This is a sign that they’re starting to see that good principles are good politics.

The Bat Segundo Show #446: Nancy Cohen (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Komen for the Cowards: Betraying Breast Cancer

What Komen for the Cure’s cowardly capitulation to Rep. Cliff Stearns means for the future of breast cancer and the preservation of lives.

It is estimated by The American Cancer Society that 39,510 women will die of breast cancer in 2012. But the death rate, as severe as it is, has plummeted considerably since 1990 — in large part because women were screened at an early stage. One clinic these women went to was Planned Parenthood, which conducted 747,607 breast exams (PDF) (or 14.5% of its total services) during the year 2010.

You’d think these great dents to a serious threat would be celebrated by politicians of all stripes as an American innovation. Breast cancer is nonpartisan. It doesn’t care whether the victim is Republican or Democrat. But the politicians would rather paint the town red with their twisted tales. Newt Gingrich has recently pledged to defund Planned Parenthood by 2013, conveniently omitting the fact that the organization isn’t just about abortion. He said that he would rather use the money “to promote adoption and other pro-family policies.” But how is family unity bolstered by restricting the ways in which women get screened? Gingrich is right about one thing. If the blessed matriarchs of his twisted Handmaid’s Tale fantasy have dropped dead from breast cancer, then someone will certainly need to spring for the adoption costs.

The anti-abortion, pro-breast cancer screening type may well ask why an “abortion mill” like Planned Parenthood should be funded at all. Well, it’s the same reason why Big Mac haters occasionally dip into a McDonald’s for the addictive fries. If the previously cited breast screenings aren’t enough for them, what of the pap smears, the prenatal care, the diabetes screenings, the STD testing, the male infertility screenings, and the menopause help? Even if we confine Planned Parenthood’s acceptable services to breast screenings, consider the many free exams that Planned Parenthood has offered, including gratis screening in Boise last June. Financially strapped and uninsured women were able to get the needed treatment for early stage breast cancer.

Funding for the Boise exams was provided by Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a leading breast cancer charity based in Dallas. This financial support allowed Planned Parenthood to perform more than 170,000 breast exams over the past five years. Yet on Tuesday, Komen put a stop to its PP partnerships. $680,000 of badly needed funds will be withheld because Komen is too gutless and too cowardly to stand up to the ignorant bullies who cannot comprehend that breast cancer is a nonpartisan issue. It has opted to cave to what Nancy L. Cohen identifies as “the sexual counterrevolution” in her recent book, Delirium. And in so doing, Komen aligns itself with a long litany of spiteful mongrels like Jerry Falwell declaring that “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals, it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals” and deranged outliers like Mike Huckabee, who remarked last year of a pregnant Natalie Portman, “It’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out of wedlock children.”

Komen has claimed that newly adopted criteria prevents the charity from offering grants to any organization that is under investigation by local, state, or federal authorities. This would include Planned Parenthood. The investigation which Komen is referring to involves Rep. Cliff Stearns’s probe from last September, in which the Florida Republican ordered Planned Parenthood to turn over numerous financial documents at considerable inconvenience. But as Reps. Henry Waxman and Diana DeGette responded, “The HHS Inspector General and state Medicaid programs regularly audit Planned Parenthood and report publicly on their findings. These audits have not identified any pattern of misuse of federal funds, illegal activity, or other abuse that would justify a broad and invasive congressional investigation.” It’s also worth pointing out that, last year, when an anti-abortion activist attempted a James O’Keefe-style undercover video, Planned Parenthood was quick to alert the FBI.

But which organization is really being the opaque one here? Komen certainly hasn’t been transparent about releasing its new guidelines to the press, much less entering into a discussion about what “investigation” implies under this new policy. Shortly after the defunding news was reported by the Associated Press, Komen spokesperson Leslie Aun scurried away from The New York Times‘s efforts to seek clarification on Tuesday night. Nor did she offer another representative to answer Times reporter Pam Belluck’s claims. It was more cold corporatese about “[implementing] more stringent eligibility and performance criteria.”

In other words, Komen wishes to engage in kangaroo court politics whereby Planned Parenthood is deemed guilty long before the trial is done. As Slate’s Amanda Marcotte has helpfully pointed out, this is hardly the first time that Komen has played needless hardball with organizations fighting the good fight against breast cancer.

That Komen’s move comes in the wake of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels signing a bill last May cutting all government funding to Planned Parenthood in his state is fitting. With one draconian sweep of his pen, Daniels refused to consider how federal law already prohibits federal funds from being spent on abortion, as well as the fact that abortion accounts for only 3% of all Planned Parenthood services. Much as Daniels’s preposterous and self-serving effort to woo hard-line conservatives was a redundant piece of legislation unfairly singling out a group providing vital services, Komen’s turncoat tactics are equally callous in the way organizational image has been prioritized over human lives. The Komen capitulation is a disgraceful deracination, a move more attuned to Afghan moral crimes than a country predicated on separation of church and state. It’s a giant gob of spit dripping down the graceful face of a courageous woman who found hope and humor as she was dying and who longed for other women to live. Under the current Komen regime, these noble ideals have evaporated. The time has come to seek more courageous foundations and win the war against breast cancer.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Michelle Goldberg

Michelle Goldberg appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #286.

Michelle Goldberg is most recently the author of The Means of Reproduction.

segundo286

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering if there’s any fate in what we make.

Author: Michelle Goldberg

Subjects Discussed: [TK]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

goldbergCorrespondent: You use the words — the modifier “seemingly liberated’ — to describe this educated Indian woman who goes and, of her own volition, says, “I want to have boys. I don’t want to have girls.” Let’s actually take this into consideration, along with the case of Fuambai Ahmadu, who would feel very much insulted by the notion that she is not empowered. Here is someone who has been circumcized and who finds the notion of being mutilated — that particular verb as applied to her — very gravely offensive. So now we’re dealing with a scenario in which, if we are trying to talk about broader problems like reproduction and reproduction rights, we are also talking about having to deal with people who have values that are 180 from us. And simultaneously we’re trying to get through to them. But now we’re in a situation in which we have to find some kind of Venn diagram of how we talk with them. And if you think that this is not reconcilable, as you suggested two answers ago, I must point out some problems with this overall thesis. Because if we cannot communicate to these people; if we cannot respect the rights in a cultural relativist way of these people to make decisions that are converse to pro-choice, that are converse to women’s right (at least as they are established in our country), how then do we find common ground here?

Goldberg: Well, I’m not saying that we can’t discuss them. I’m saying that I don’t think it’s always — or maybe it’s just beyond me — to create some kind of absolutist system in which we can kind of hallucinate and create a hierarchy of what falls under the category of universal human rights, what is multiculturalism, and how we value the right of people to perpetuate their own cultural practices vs. the rights of dissidents to be protected by universal human rights guarantees. I clearly, over and over again, tend to side with people who say — with minorities who do demand to be protected by the same kind of universal human rights guarantees that I cherish. I’m not particularly sympathetic to multiculturalist or relativistic arguments, as opposed to universal kind of enlightenment type arguments. But I guess what I’m saying is that this book is about — I’m often interested in the ambiguities and the hard questions and the human stories in which it’s not as easy to sort out this hierarchy of values. You know, I’m not a philosopher like Martha Nussbaum, who has created this very rigorous and well thought out taxonomy of these different issues.

Correspondent: I guess that the question here is: When someone like Eve Ensler goes to Kenya and gives a V Day jeep to Agnes Pareyio, is there not something imperialistic about that notion of taking our particular values and stamping them onto another country that doesn’t necessarily reflect it? I mean, this is really what the problem is in terms of your complaints about the Cairo conference — the UN convention — in which you complain about the Vatican and you point out, “Well, it’s a country of 1,000 people. Mostly celibate men.” Nevertheless, it is a country. Nevertheless, we do have to have some sort of communicative process. The question is what conditions would seem to be fair to present these messages in ways that don’t feel imperialist and that don’t encroach upon these terms that we may consider here in America to be terrible or perjorative or just really against our notion of human rights and what someone else considers to be, “Well, this is my form of empowerment. This is the way I go about the universe.”

Goldberg: Well, let’s back up and explain what we’re talking about here, right? We’re talking about the context of Agnes Pareyio.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Goldberg: And Fuambai Ahmadu. We’re talking about female genital cutting, or female circumcision. Fuamabi Ahmadu is a woman in this book who is from Sierra Leone, who undergoes circumcision as an adult, who is someone who talks about it being a valuable part of her cultural identity, who is probably the most eloquent defender of the practice on the global stage. In part because, although it’s clearly very valued in these societies — otherwise, people wouldn’t fight so hard to keep the practices alive — the people who genuinely practice it aren’t people who have a lot of access to NGOs and the media, etcetera. So I think she’s an important voice. At the same time, I think the question of whether Eve Ensler is being imperialistic by supporting these women in Kenya who are fighting female genital cutting, I don’t know. To me, it’s not that interesting. And I think if you brought that up with Agnes Pareyio, who is someone who’s from the community who practices this, who’s underwent it herself, who’s regretted it her whole life, who’s a grassroots activist against it. Girls were running away from home to escape this practice and she was finding them places to stay and enrolling them in school. And then she finally met Eve Ensler. And then Eve Ensler started to support her. I think that the question of “Well, is it imperialist to support Agnes Pareyio?” is kind of insulting to her. Because she has just as much right. She’s just as authentic a voice for her community. She has just as much right to try to change and create progress in her community as we have to create progress in ours.

BSS #286: Michelle Goldberg (Download MP3)

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