Bitter Pill

Okay, in light of the fact that Trump has expanded the ability of employers to deny women contraception coverage through the Affordable Care Act based on religious or moral objections, let me see if I have this straight (bear with me here):

Many Democrats, especially many female Democrats, were so insistent on making Hillary Clinton the first female President that they rigged the system to ensure her the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.  The party needed to win the 2016 election.  They needed to win to protect the advances in women's rights against misogynistic Republicans.  They wanted to ensure that contraception coverage and other women's health services would remain available to all women.  But at the same time, they were so desirous of getting a woman in the White House that they got behind Hillary Clinton, a lousy candidate whom many people suspected could not win a general election.  There were ten women that the Democrats could have nominated for President in 2016.  The first was Hillary and no one cared who the other nine were.  And they cared even less about any of the cisgendered white males who were Hillary's opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

Moreover, Hillary partisans tried to shame women who dared to support one of said opponents, namely Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley.  Remember when Madeleine Albright said there was a special place in hell for women who didn't support Hillary?  And how about Gloria Steinem's comment that female Sanders supporters were only supporting Sanders to meet guys?  The message was clear: Hillary was going to be the Democratic presidential nominee because it was not just a woman's turn, it was this woman's turn - and cisgendered white males need not apply.  Despite everything at stake for women's rights, the Hillbots were hell-bent (Hill-bent?) on making Hillary Clinton the Democratic presidential nominee and counting on her to make history for women in America by getting elected President, even though it turned out that she could not beat Donald Trump, instead of nominating a man - Sanders or O'Malley - who could have beaten Trump and would have protected contraception access and other women's health services.  But Democrats just weren't going to bother with a cisgendered white male nominee.  Now we have a cisgendered white male Republican President taking away contraception coverage for millions of American women . . . all because the Hillbots in the Democratic Party preferred a woman who couldn't win over one of two men who could have won.

You Hillbots didn't think this thing through, did you?

I could have told you that this was too big a risk to take back in 2016, but ahh, who would listen to a cisgendered white male like me anyway?

And you really blew it by choosing not to at least consider Elizabeth Warren.

Equal Frustration For Different Women

The Supreme Court committed the biggest assault on the rights of female workers and workers in general since Friday. A Wal-Mart worker named Betty Dukes led an attempt by women to sue collectively against the giant retailer for sex discrimination typified by receiving lower pay and fewer promotions. But in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., v. Betty Dukes, et al., the Court ruled this past Monday in a 5-4 decision that female employees Wal-Mart women could not band together in a single class-action lawsuit because the individual cases were found not to be similar enough in nature to comprise a single class. Justice Antonin Scalia, the kind of patriarchal fellow my Italian-American mother would call "the bigga da boss," wrote so for the conservative majority.

Scalia said that the women could still sue Wal-Mart individually. Great news, until you realize that individual cases would clog the judicial system and take much longer to resolve, and that Wal-Mart has little interest in settling on a case-by-case basis, which mean most of these women don't have a snowball's chance in Borneo of winning. A people united will never be divided, but if they have to divide, they're easier to conquer.

But the fight for fair pay is far from over - or so the National Women's Law center would have you believe. They are getting behind a bill pending in Congress, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and urging its swift passage. The Paycheck Fairness Act is meant to increase enforcement of the Equal Pay Act (which was passed in 1963), train people to enforce the law, and allow permit employees to share salary information with co-workers without punishment. A second bill, the Fair Pay Act, would require an employer to pay equal salaries for equivalent jobs, regardless of race, gender, or national origin of their employees.

Good luck with any of that happening soon. The Republican majority in the House and the filibuster-capable Republican minority in the Senate will be quick to express their opposition to either bill, and the argument will go like this: "It just so happens that they comprise government intervention into the affairs of private business, enforcement of the law means more government control over the private sector, and it disrespects the fact that God made men and women different, so shut the hell up, you feminist pinko subversives!!!"

If you don't have enough reasons to boycott Wal-Mart, this should do it. You can do without all that cheap Chinese plastic they sell.

"Stop comparing everything to the Nazis. Republicans aren't like the Nazis. Even neo-Nazis aren't like the Nazis. Nothing is like the Nazis. Except Wal-Mart." - Bill Maher

The Abortion Debate Is the "Pitts"

Here's the latest on the abortion legislation in the house that no one in the media cares enough to cover. (It's apparently one of those stories Rachel Maddow would say that no one is talking about!) Although the bill sponsored by U.S. Representative Christopher Smith (R-NJ) no longer redefines rape, its cessation of tax breaks for health plans that happen to include abortion coverage would essentially bar women who work for the government or serve in military to receive abortion coverage, and it would deny any access to such coverage for poor women as well. Even worse, by ending tax breaks for such plans, it would manage to prevent private employers from covering it as well.

If you think Smith is a horrible person, wait until you hear what Joseph Pitts, a House Republican from Pennsylvania, has in store. The Pitts bill, called the Protect Life Act, would bar insurance plans in the new system set up by the health care law from providing abortion coverage to anyone who receives government aid while permitting just about any hospital, clinic, or insurance company to refuse to provide, cover, or pay for abortions. They wouldn't even have to refer patients elsewhere for abortions. But here's the clincher - the so-called "Protect Life Act" would allow religiously affiliated hospitals to impose religious beliefs and refuse to provide emergency abortion care even in cases where it's necessary to save a woman's life.

Protect life? Whose life is it, anyway?

Of course, you can't blame Americans for being outraged if no one's informing them because the media are too busy covering President Obama's quixotic attempts to kiss and make up with big business.

And while all of this is going on, an anti-abortion group based in California is trying a sting operation comparable to the one that brought down ACORN not too long ago. Live Action, based in San Jose, sent men posing as pimps to Planned Parenthood offices to get information about abortions for prostitutes and sex workers, getting it on secret videotape. Planned Parenthood insists that the videos do not accurately portray their practices and they that they try to get underaged girls who ask about abortion themselves to talk to a social worker and that they screen these girls for abuse and neglect. They insist that they take the health and well-being of girls very seriously - and why wouldn't they? - and Live Action is trying to prove otherwise.

Let me just state my own beliefs on abortion, if I haven't already done so on this blog. I'm against it, except in cases of rape, incest, and life-threatening pregnancies. I oppose abortion for the same reason I oppose the death penalty - I do not condone the idea of human beings deciding who gets to live and who does not. But - while I am opposed to abortion, I am even more opposed to enforcing my own beliefs on those who think differently, and so I therefore believe the practice should remain legal. Smith and Pitts - and the people at Live Action - are entitled to speak out against abortion as I have just done. They are not entitled to force their opinions on others. Unfortunately, that's what these mendacious House bills would do.

Abortion and the Media

Representative Christopher Smith (R-NJ) was forced to reword his anti-abortion bill to avoid redefining rape. The bill as originally drafted would have limited taxpayer funding of abortions to cases of "forcible rape." That is, women impregnated in cases of statutory rape or women who are drugged into a state of mind that would render them unable to resist sexual contact would have been out of luck. Smith, in a rare show of moral ambiguity on this issue, backed down in response to public outcry.

This is a negligible upward blip in the fight for women's rights. This bill would still end tax breaks for health insurance plans that include coverage for abortions and abortion-related procedures, and it would ban women from using their health savings accounts for abortions. Of course, the bill has no chance of passing in the Senate, and the President would veto it anyway. But this ongoing attack on abortion rights - a sign that the misogynistic policies of the Reagan era, like the Reagan era itself, haven't really gone away - is enjoying new life thanks to a far-right Tea Party movement that was only supposed to be about taxes and spending. Well, this bill is called the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," so maybe Smith thought he could make it sound fiscally relevant.

I couldn't help but notice, by the way, that this legislation is getting no coverage by the mainstream media. No coverage when I've checked, anyway. Perhaps the press thinks this bill is too insignificant to cover in light of the ongoing crisis in Egypt. Not to mention the Giffords shooting, although reporting on that story has diminished somewhat, lest you start calling for gun control. (Breaking news: Her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, is going to command the last Endeavour space shuttle flight.) The truth is, the mainstream media don't want to cover issues affecting people's daily lives. If they did, you'd start seeing Lafayette Square in Washington fill up with protesters just like Tahrir Square in Cairo. And that might actually lead to progressive change in this country that threatens the established order of which the mainstream press is part.

But it would be a great story to cover.

By the way, the United States remains the only industrialized country where abortion is still an issue; other industrialized nations have long since settled it, one way or the other. I may have said this once before, but when a Japanese official pointed this out on American television, he was laughing.