Supreme Court Rules on Census, Gerrymandering, and Consent Cases

First, the big one for which we were all waiting with baited breath: Whether the Trump Regime would be allowed to add a nativist question to the 2020 census, which could "allow for electorate boundaries throughout America to be redrawn, almost certainly favouring the Republican party" and "result in billions of dollars in federal funds being withheld from some of the most vulnerable communities in America."

The court ruled that they cannot add the citizenship question — but only because their reason for doing it was garbage.

"The reasoned explanation requirement of administrative law, after all, is meant to ensure that agencies offer genuine justifications for important decisions. ...What was provided here was more of a distraction." LOL wow. https://t.co/n0v8OcaWAP

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) June 27, 2019

Problem is, I'm not certain at all that wasn't just direction on how to come back with an argument that the Supreme Court would find acceptable.

As SCOTUSblog notes: "For now, the question is out. It is unclear if there is enough time left to add it back in."

So, unfortunately, we may not have seen the end of this fuckery yet.

* * *

Next up: The gerrymandered maps case.

The court ruled that "partisan-gerrymandering challenges to electoral maps are political questions that are not reviewable in federal court, dismissing challenges by Democratic voters to North Carolina congressional map drawn by Republican officials and by Republican voters to 1 district drawn by Democrats in Maryland."

Since when are "political questions" not reviewable in federal court?

Their definition of "politics" is certainly interesting if it doesn't include electoral maps but does include healthcare access, reproductive rights, and same-sex marriage. Cough.

Also, I'm old enough to remember when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act six years ago, so.

Cripes.

* * *

And finally: The "assumed consent" case.

The court ruled that "state law assuming driver's consent to blood test for drugs/alcohol, even when driver is unconscious, provides exception to 4th Amendment's warrant requirement, allowing law enforcement to draw blood from unconscious drivers without warrant."

YIKES.

I understand that it's a real fucker to not be able to prove inebriation in the case of driving under the influence when the driver is out for the count, but "the requirement to get consent is inconvenient" isn't a good precedent for ruling that consent is therefore unnecessary.

That is, quite obviously, a gateway to eroding legal protections of consent in many other areas.

Fuck.

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Republicans Protect Rapists' Parental Rights in Alabama

[Content Note: Sexual violence; anti-choicery; rape apologia; hostility to consent.]

As I have regrettably had occasion to observe many, many times in this space over the last 14 years, the Republican Party does not have a solid history of taking sexual assault seriously, to put it mildly.

There was that time House Republicans tried to redefine rape so that it was only "real" rape if it involved force. Then there was the time that Senate Republicans blocked votes on military sexual assault legislation. There was that other time New York state Republicans blocked a proposal to eliminate the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse. And let's not forget that time when Georgia state Republicans didn't want to consider a proposal on rape kits and accused the Democratic sponsor of "politicizing" the issue to get votes.

There was that time former GOP Senator and two-time presidential candidate Rick Santorum said that pregnant rape victims should make the best out of a bad situation. And that time former GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin argued that pregnancy from rape is really rare, because "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." And that time Akin also accused women of lying about rape. And that time GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said that getting pregnant from rape is god's plan. And all the times Republicans have told women how to avoid getting ourselves raped, as if it's our responsibility to stop rapists rather than predators' responsibility to not rape people.

There's Joe Walsh. And John Koster. And Phil Gingrey. And Thomas Corbin. And Jonathan Stickland. And Roy Moore. And Blake Farenthold. Just the tip of the iceberg of Republican politicians who have said stupid shit about sexual assault and/or been accused of sexual assault themselves.

And then there's the current Republican president, whose opening salvo in his campaign was to call undocumented Mexican immigrants rapists; who compared trade deficits to rape — twice; who is himself a confessed serial sex abuser; and whose Secretary of Education has rewritten campus assault guidlines to favor predators; and whose Supreme Court justice was confirmed despite (or because of) credible allegations of sexual assault.

This is hardly a comprehensive list. The litany of examples of Republicans blocking legislation that would address sexual assault or support survivors, and of Republicans saying inappropriate things about rape and/or its victims, and of Republicans who have themselves engaged in sexual harassment and/or assault is interminable. And intolerable.

Which is all preface to say that it it not surprising, but it is nonetheless absolutely rage-making that the Republican Party of Alabama continues to protect rapists' parental rights while eroding pregnant people's bodily autonomy and rights to access a legal healthcare procedure to terminate their pregnancies.

Emily Wax-Thibodeaux at the Washington Post reports:

Alabama is one of two states with no statute terminating parental rights for a person found to have conceived the child by rape or incest, a fact that has gained fresh relevance since its lawmakers adopted the nation's strictest abortion ban in May. That statute even outlaws the procedure for victims of sexual assault and jails doctors who perform it, except in cases of serious risk to the woman’s health.

...Last month, Alabama lawmakers considered a bill that addressed ending parental rights in cases of rape that result in conception, but the legislature removed that language, limiting the law to cases in which people sexually assault their children. State Sen. Vivian Figures (D)...said she didn't know Alabama lacked a statute preventing rapists from gaining custody of their offspring but told The Washington Post that she now plans to introduce a bill in the next legislative session.

"It's just...unfair and even dangerous to these mothers and children," said Figures, who voted against the state's abortion ban.

There is much more at the link.

Naturally, opponents of a law limiting rapists' access to children conceived via rape are relying on ancient narratives about women being liars who constantly allege rape fraudulently in order to defend not having a law that protects victims from having to maintain contact with men who raped them. Women, they say, will lie about having been raped in order to deny fathers access to their children.

Suffice it to say, these men's rights advocates are not concerned in the slightest about the possibility that rapists will leverage impregnating their victims in order to guarantee a lifetime of access to them, despite the fact that reproductive coercion is a documented endemic phenomenon, while women accusing men of rape to deny them parental rights is not.

Republicans' hostility to consent is legendary and central to their ideology. And we must be blunt about this: They are empowering rapists as part of their war on agency. This isn't just a fortunate byproduct of their contempt for women's agency; abetting rapists' control over women's reproduction is by design.

Republican leadership at any level of government is an urgent health crisis and a pressing safety issue for women. That is not a matter of opinion. It is a fact.

[Related Reading: #StopTheBans.]

Open Wide...

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We Resist: Day 747

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

* * *

Earlier today by me: Fox, Henhouse, Etc. and Bernie Sanders, What Are You Even Doing Now?

Here are some more things in the news today...

[Content Note: Racism; racist imagery] In case you're wondering where I stand on the Ralph Northam debacle, he should fucking resign. Not only that: He never should have run in the first place. Honestly, it shows me how not sorry someone is for having been brazenly, shamelessly racist when they fail to consider the damage it will do to people targeted by that shit to have to see that image over and over and over if/when it's inevitability dragged up and made public. I can only imagine how much it hurts a Black person who voted for him (no less the Lt. Governor) to see those ugly pictures and words. And he didn't care about that potential harm. Asshole. Resign.

Azeen Ghorayshi, Jason Leopold, Anthony Cormier, and Emma Loop at BuzzFeed: Secret Files Show How Trump Moscow Talks Unfolded While Trump Heaped Praise on Putin. "As a candidate, Donald Trump had a lot of praise for Vladimir Putin — and no business, he kept insisting, in Russia. These documents tell a different story. ...The documents, many of which have been exclusively obtained by BuzzFeed News, reveal that — despite Trump's claim that the development was never more than a passing notion — the effort to get the tower built was long-running, detail-oriented, and directly entwined with the ups and downs of his campaign."

When Michael Chertoff is concerned about the declining state of the U.S. democracy and freedom...yikes. https://t.co/9UZMbXAkWc

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) February 5, 2019

Rosalind S. Helderman and Michael Kranish at the Washington Post: Federal Prosecutors Issue Sweeping Subpoena for Documents from Trump Inaugural Committee, a Sign of a Deepening Criminal Probe.

Federal prosecutors in New York on Monday delivered a sweeping request for documents related to donations and spending by [Donald] Trump's inaugural committee, a sign of a deepening criminal investigation into activities related to the nonprofit organization.

A wide-ranging subpoena served on the inaugural committee Monday seeks an array of documents, including all information related to inaugural donors, vendors, contractors, bank accounts of the inaugural committee, and any information related to foreign contributors to the committee, according to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post.

Only U.S. citizens and legal residents can legally donate to a committee established to finance presidential inaugural festivities.

...The subpoena — issued by the U.S. attorney's office in the Southern District of New York — indicates that prosecutors are investigating crimes related to conspiracy to defraud the United States, mail fraud, false statements, wire fraud, and money laundering.

Sounds about right.

Emma Loop, Anthony Cormier, Jason Leopold, Tanya Kozyreva, and John Templon at BuzzFeed: A Lobbyist at the Trump Tower Meeting Received Half a Million Dollars in Suspicious Payments. "A Russian-born lobbyist who attended the controversial Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 received a series of suspicious payments totaling half a million dollars before and after the encounter. Documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News show that Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet military officer turned Washington lobbyist, deposited large, round-number amounts of cash in the months preceding and following the meeting, where a Russian lawyer offered senior Trump campaign officials dirt on Hillary Clinton. The lobbyist also received a large payment that bank investigators deemed suspicious from Denis Katsyv, whose company Prevezon Holdings was accused by the U.S. Justice Department of laundering the proceeds of a $230 million Russian tax fraud." JFC.

In a televised meeting with foreign and defense ministers Putin suspended the INF agreement and instructed ministers not to initiate disarmament talks with Washington
Putin said Russia will start work on creating new missiles, including hypersonic ones https://t.co/aRiFBOtMfQ

— Olga Lautman (@olgaNYC1211) February 2, 2019

Niels Lesniewski at Roll Call: Donald Trump Is Ignoring the Law Today — and No One Really Cares. "The fiscal 2020 budget request was due Monday, even though the fiscal 2019 appropriations process has still not been finished. ...A 1990 budget law says that Monday was the deadline for the request, but there is no penalty for not hitting the target date. It has been missed throughout history, and Congress has often failed to follow federal budget deadlines as well. ...A senior OMB official said in a statement last week that the budget would not be sent to Capitol Hill on schedule. 'We will not be transmitting the president's budget next week,' the official said Friday." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Oh well!

Nancy Cook at Politico: The Plan to Keep Trump's Taxes Hidden. "The new House Democratic majority is widely expected to test one of Donald Trump's ultimate red lines by demanding the president's personal tax returns — and the Trump administration has been gearing up for months to fight back hard. Trump's Treasury Department is readying plans to drag the expected Democratic request for Trump's past tax filings, which he has closely guarded, into a quagmire of arcane legal arguments. At the same time, officials intend to publicly cast the request as an nakedly partisan exercise. The two-pronged scheme was developed by a handful of top political appointees and lawyers inside the department — with the ultimate goal of keeping the president's past returns private, according to four people familiar with the administration's approach." Of course.

* * *

[CN: Nativism; white supremacy. Covers entire section.]

While everyone else is busy making all the jokes about this, your favorite humorless feminist will just note once again that Trump's obsession with eugenics lies at the center of his nativist, white supremacist malice. https://t.co/JJZpTMNYpX

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) February 3, 2019

Staff at AP: Pentagon Sending Another 3,750 Troops to Southwest Border. "The Pentagon said Sunday it will send 3,750 more troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to put up another 150 miles of concertina wire and provide other support for Customs and Border Protection. The additions will bring the total number of active-duty troops on the border to 4,350. The announcement is in line with what Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan had said on Tuesday when he provided estimates for the next phase of a military mission that has grown in size and length."

Nicole Lafond at TPM: Trump: If No Physical Wall, Then I'll 'Build a Human Wall'. "Trump on Tuesday announced he was sending additional military personnel to the border to combat the supposed 'tremendous numbers of people' entering the U.S. from Mexico, by tweeting that he would 'build a human wall' if he couldn't get the physical one he's gunning for. The tweet comes just hours before his State of the Union address, where he's expected to harp on what his administration is calling a 'crisis' at the southern border and reignite his push for border wall funding... 'Tremendous numbers of people are coming up through Mexico in the hopes of flooding our Southern Border. We have sent additional military. We will build a Human Wall if necessary. If we had a real Wall, this would be a non-event!'"

Shani Saxon at Colorlines: Asylum Seekers Face Danger in Mexico as U.S. Begins Deportations. "The Trump administration is potentially exposing migrants to grave risks with its new policy of sending asylum-seeking migrants to Mexico while they wait for a hearing in U.S. courts — a program now being referred to as the Migration Protection Protocols. Some migrants run the risk of 'kidnapping or death' once they are deported to Mexican border cities, according to a report in Reuters. The city of Reynosa in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, for example, is often where cartel members battle to the death over their stake in the lucrative drug game. ...Reynosa's mayor, Maki Ortiz, tells Reuters it will be almost impossible to to protect Central American migrants in his troubled city. 'We don't have the capacity. We don't have the resources, the infrastructure, or the budget for them,' he warned."

Julie Small at KQED News: ACLU Demands Government Account for Thousands More Separated Migrant Children.

In a court declaration filed Friday, Jonathan White, a commander with the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps who is leading HHS's efforts to reunify separated families, said his team had identified all the separated children in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of HHS, as of June 26, 2018. That's the date U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw issued an injunction [in the class action lawsuit Ms. L vs. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to stop family separations and ordered the government to promptly reunite children with their parents.

...White said in his declaration that the total number of children his agency was responsible for returning to their families is 2,816.

...But last month, the inspector general for HHS issued a watchdog report, which found that thousands of additional children may have been taken from their parents at the border beginning in 2017, "before the accounting required by the court."

Sabraw asked the government to respond to the inspector general's report, which states, "Public attention has focused largely on children separated from their parents who are covered by a widely reported federal court order. But, more children, over a longer period of time, have been separated from their parents or guardians and referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for care."

Attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing plaintiff parents in the Ms. L case, say the government should be held accountable for the earlier separations — and ensure that all those children are also returned to their parents.

"We believe that even if the family were separated and the children were released from U.S. custody before June 26, those families should be included," said Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the case.

"What we suspect is that many parents believed that the only way to get their child out of government custody was to agree to allow the child to be sent to a foster family or some other sponsor ... And we have no idea if those parents have now gotten their children back or not."

But in his declaration, White said it was unfeasible to try to account for children who had been separated from parents and then released by ORR prior to the June injunction.

...Even if it were possible to locate previously separated children, White stated that HHS lacks the authority to take a child back from a sponsor in order to reunite the child with their parent. White, a social worker, warned that doing so would "destabilize" the child's environment and could be traumatic to the children.

"The option more consistent with the best interest of the child," he asserted, "would be to allow the child to remain with their sponsor and focus instead on the ongoing work of reunifying parents with separated children presently in ORR care."

The ACLU's Gelernt called that answer horrific.

"It can't be that we can't account for thousands of children who were separated just because it may be too much work," Gelernt said.

"The Trump administration's response is a shocking concession that it can't easily find thousands of children it ripped from parents, and doesn't even think it's worth the time to locate each of them."

Not only is the Trump administration confessing that it can't find children they forcibly separated from their parents and doesn't even give a fuck, but they're trying to cloak their not giving a fuck in a veneer of caring about those children, asserting that it's the people who want families reunited who will be "traumatizing" children. Fucking hell, the unmitigated chutzpah! Goddammit, I hate this regime.

* * *

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: Texas Republicans Are Lying About Voter Fraud to Justify a Massive, Racist Voter Purge. "On Jan. 25, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tweeted a 'VOTER FRAUD ALERT' that quickly rocketed around the internet. Texas Secretary of State David Whitley, Paxton asserted, had discovered that approximately '95,000 individuals identified' as non-citizens are registered to vote in the state, '58,000 of whom have voted' in Texas elections. Whitley promptly urged counties to begin purging these 95,000 people from their voter rolls, demanding proof of citizenship within 30 days or canceling their registrations. Donald Trump joined the action, tweeting on Jan. 27 that Whitley's numbers 'are just the tip of iceberg.' Voter fraud, Trump wrote, 'is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!' Within days of Paxton's alarming tweet, Whitley had substantially backtracked. The secretary of state quietly informed county officials that a 'significant number' of people on the list are actually citizens. ...Despite this obvious defect, Whitley has pushed ahead with the purge."

Andy Towle at Towleroad: Howard Schultz Doesn't Like the Term 'Billionaire,' Says He and Mega-Rich Should Be Referred to as 'People of Means'. "Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO with a net worth of $3.4 billion, who last week announced he's exploring a presidential run as a 'centrist independent' (which would likely hand Trump a second term), told CNBC that he doesn't like the term 'billionaire' and would like the mega-rich to be called 'people of means.'" Shut the fuck up, you human dragon.

And finally, in potential good news... Amy Littlefield at Rewire.News: California Could Be First to Ban Medically Unnecessary Surgeries on Intersex Babies.

A California lawmaker has introduced a landmark bill to ban doctors from performing medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex children until the child can give informed consent.

As many as 1.7 percent of people are born with chromosomal or anatomical differences that put them outside the typical definition of "male" or "female." About one in 2,000 babies is different enough that doctors may recommend surgery, but there's no comprehensive U.S. database tracking the procedures. While some surgeries are medically necessary — to allow babies to pass urine, for example — others are performed to "normalize" genitalia.

The California bill, introduced last week by state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), outlines a process for intersex minors to give written consent to surgery after being informed of the risks, benefits, and alternatives. It allows surgeons to operate on intersex children without their consent if the operation cannot be safely deferred.

"We believe that people should be able to make their own decisions about their own body," Wiener said at a news conference Monday. "They certainly can't make that decision as a baby."

Absolutely. Center consent.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Brett Kavanaugh, Consent, and Listening to Survivors

[Content Note: Sexual assault; rape culture.]

On Friday, I wrote about the anonymous allegation that had been made against Brett Kavanaugh that he attempted to rape someone in high school. The story was that Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein had gotten a letter from the woman who had been assaulted by Kavanaugh but had not made it public, and the implication was that she concealed it because she didn't want it used against him, for some inexplicable reason.

A lot of people decided to immediately go after Feinstein, based on zero actual evidence of this nefarious plot — and despite all evidence to the contrary, given that Feinstein has generally been a reliable advocate for survivors. (For example.)

I was not convinced it went down the way far too many people reflexively believed that it did, not only because it seemed out of character for Feinstein to me, but also — and primarily — because I hadn't heard from the woman herself, and I had no idea what her actual wishes were regarding coming forward in a formal way.

And having spent a damn lot of years of working with and listening to survivors, I suspected that it did not go the way that people were keen to presume, because of their own various agendas, none of which had anything to do with actually caring about the human being who alleged that she had been harmed by Kavanaugh.

In a private conversation with colleagues on Friday, I wrote: "My guess — and it is entirely a guess, but based on many interactions I've had with survivors over the last 14 years — is that the woman reached out in good faith, and then when Feinstein told her what it would require for them to use the information, and what the Republicans would do in retaliation, she backed off. I don't see why else Democrats were meeting with her attorney."

Because that was my guess, I wrote the piece I did, urging people to consider that we hadn't heard from the woman, whose name we now know is Christine Blasey Ford, and urging caution about making assumptions about what happened.

Well, unfortunately, because this issue was made public without her consent, Ford has been obliged to publicly share her story about what happened then, and what happened now, and my guess was not far off, it seems.

Emma Brown at the Washington Post reports [please note there are descriptions of assault at the link]:

She contacted The Post through a tip line in early July, when it had become clear that Kavanaugh was on the shortlist of possible nominees to replace retiring justice Anthony M. Kennedy but before Trump announced his name publicly. A registered Democrat who has made small contributions to political organizations, she contacted her congresswoman, Democrat Anna G. Eshoo, around the same time. In late July, she sent a letter via Eshoo's office to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.

In the letter, which was read to The Post, Ford described the incident and said she expected her story to be kept confidential. She signed the letter as Christine Blasey, the name she uses professionally.

Though Ford had contacted The Post, she declined to speak on the record for weeks as she grappled with concerns about what going public would mean for her and her family — and what she said was her duty as a citizen to tell the story.

She engaged Debra Katz, a Washington lawyer known for her work on sexual harassment cases. On the advice of Katz, who said she believed Ford would be attacked as a liar if she came forward, Ford took a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent in early August. The results, which Katz provided to The Post, concluded that Ford was being truthful when she said a statement summarizing her allegations was accurate.

By late August, Ford had decided not to come forward, calculating that doing so would upend her life and probably would not affect Kavanaugh's confirmation. "Why suffer through the annihilation if it's not going to matter?" she said.

Her story leaked anyway. On Wednesday, the Intercept reported that Feinstein had a letter describing an incident involving Kavanaugh and a woman while they were in high school and that Feinstein was refusing to share it with her Democratic colleagues.

...As the story snowballed, Ford said, she heard people repeating inaccuracies about her and, with the visits from reporters, felt her privacy being chipped away. Her calculation changed.

"These are all the ills that I was trying to avoid," she said, explaining her decision to come forward. "Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation."

Katz said she believes Feinstein honored Ford's request to keep her allegation confidential, but "regrettably others did not."

"Victims must have the right to decide whether to come forward, especially in a political environment that is as ruthless as this one," Katz said. "She will now face vicious attacks by those who support this nominee."

Emphases mine.

I am absolutely furious and deeply sad that Ford's story was made public without her consent, by an outlet whose editors don't give a single fuck about Ford, but were eager to dunk on Senator Feinstein. Fuck the Intercept forever, for not caring about Ford's consent any more than Brett Kavanaugh did.

And I am equally rageful and grieving that Ford ultimately made the entirely understandable calculation to not come forward, because she knew that it probably wouldn't have mattered — which is the consequence of being governed by a Republican majority whose members are as eager to tolerate sex predators in their ranks as they are to legislatively undermine women's consent and agency at every turn.

It doesn't say anything good about the GOP that their response to credible allegations against Kavanaugh is not to say, "No problem. We'll find you a candidate whom no one alleges to be an attempted rapist." That's because 1. They don't really GAF and 2. They might not have any.

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) September 17, 2018

The thing is, men who make careers out of denying women their agency tend not to give a drip about our consent in interpersonal situations, either.

See, for example: The current Republican president.

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) September 17, 2018

And now the Republican Party and their deplorable base will commence tearing Ford alive in the press, not only to try to discredit her, but also as a warning shot across the bow to any other women who Kavanaugh has harmed, who might consider coming forward to tell their stories.

This is what will happen to you if you dare.

I am sorry that Ford was put into this position without her consent, and I take up space in solidarity with her. I will do the same if there are any other women who will risk the gauntlet to tell their truth.

And I will listen to them. Not just to their stories, but to what they want and need from their fellow countrypeople.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Heinous Radical Anti-Choice Law Passes in Indiana

There is a reason I call Indiana the Conservative Legislation Lab: As I've said many times before, if you want to know what garbage policies are coming down the conservative pipeline, look no further than Indiana, where Hoosiers are used as guinea pigs by the American Legislative Exchange Council, aka ALEC, which has a massive influence in the state, to test out the latest and greatest in Republican governance theory.

The Republican takeover in Indiana has been extraordinary. And people who sneer at Hoosiers from outside the state (where I grew up and lived most of my life) to simply vote out the Republicans, who are the majority, or to vote in better Democrats, don't understand what the population is facing there.

Like everywhere else: Gerrymandering and voter suppression and dark money and ratfucking. But also the cutting edge in authoritarian consolidation of power. See: Mike Pence and Glenda Ritz.

And it's not like Indiana doesn't have decent Democrats in state office. To the contrary: In 2011, Hoosier Dems fled the state to deny the Indiana House of Representatives the required quorum needed to pass a union-busing "right-to-work" bill. They were in hiding out of state for nearly six weeks, only returning once the Republican majority agreed to take the bill off the table — and after having held out while Republicans fined them and suspended their pay.

It's also important to understand that the Republican-held legislature routinely acts in contravention of the majority of the people in the state. Just one of many examples was 2014's same-sex marriage ban, which was proposed despite the fact that Indiana already had a state law restricting same-sex marriage; despite the fact that legislators were acting in flagrant disregard of the will of the people, who by a clear majority did not want such an amendment added to their state constitution; and despite the fact that, instead, a majority of Hoosiers wanted the existing ban repealed.

All of this is backdrop to the latest bit of heinous fuckery passed into law in Indiana, so you can understand what progressives are up against in the state:

OMFG. "A new state law directs Indiana doctors and hospitals to investigate every time a woman seeks treatment for a physical or psychological condition whether she previously had an abortion that is in any way connected to the ailment." https://t.co/yhAAFmmzDW

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) March 27, 2018

Not only does the law require healthcare providers to launch an abortion inquiry, but it further requires healthcare providers to report "abortion complications" to the state:

A new state law directs Indiana doctors and hospitals to investigate every time a woman seeks treatment for a physical or psychological condition whether she previously had an abortion that is in any way connected to the ailment.

If so, the care provider is obligated starting July 1 to submit a detailed "abortion complications" report to the State Department of Health, or risk being charged with a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine, for each instance of noncompliance.

Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, who routinely describes himself as "pro-life," approved Senate Enrolled Act 340 with little fanfare Sunday afternoon prior to departing on a three-day Canadian trade mission.

He said similar reporting requirements already are in place in 27 states and exist solely to gather information about abortion complications, without restricting access to the procedure.

Indiana's new law, however, employs a broad definition of abortion complication that ranges from an immediate physical injury due to a surgical abortion to psychological or emotional pain, including anxiety and sleeplessness, that arises possibly years or decades after having an abortion.

Under the statute, doctors who identify an abortion complication must then report to the state: the patient's age, race, and county of residence; the type, date, and location of the abortion; a list of each complication and treatment; the date of every visit to every doctor relating to the complication; and any abortion drugs used by the patient and how they were procured.

This is utterly despicable. It needs national attention. I hope people will amplify what is happening, as the ACLU considers whether to mount (yet another) challenge to (yet another) heinous anti-choice law passed in Indiana.

And I hope that as people do amplify it, they convey the reality of what Hoosiers are facing in their state, instead of making shitty jokes about Republican voters getting what they deserve or casually admonishing progressives to move, which isn't always possible and which shouldn't be a requirement, anyway. No one should have to abandon their home to be safe from autocratic abuses of power.

Tell this story. And tell it in a way in which you align yourself with Hoosier resistance, not in a way in which you stand outside their struggle and shame them for being victimized by the same party that threatens us all, in every corner of this country.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

You Don't Own Him

[Content Note: Entitlement; hostility to consent; racism.]

Something you may not know about me (or may recall, if you've been around long enough) is that I am a football (soccer) fan.

I have always loved the game. I was a Chicago Power fan when I was a teenager, seeing many a game during the now-defunct indoor league. And I was a diehard Manchester United fan even before David Beckham became a household name. I fell for them because of things I read in, of all places, British music magazines I bought to get the latest Morrissey news.

I am still a Man United fan; the reddest of Red Devils. I love them when they win, and I love them when they lose.

Last year, they acquired Paul Pogba in the most expensive player purchase of all time. (After selling him a few years back. Whooooops!) He is a terrific young player, exciting to watch and easy to cheer. At least for me.

Like any extraordinary player in the English Premiere League, Pogs (as he is affectionately known at Shakes Manor) is in demand. For endorsements and interviews. And fans are often keen to get a moment with him, a picture, an autograph.

On Sunday, Man United won the League Cup. Pogs had a great game.

On Monday, he was attacked by fans at a restaurant where he was dining, because he refused them an autograph.

Footage has emerged, via The Sun, of Pogba being Snapchatted by some fans just minding his own business in Akbar's curry house before they eventually plucked up the courage to ask the world's most expensive player for an autograph.

Much to their dismay, though, Pogba declined the request which prompted an angry reaction from the supporters, who then accused him of being disrespectful.

The video then shows the Man Utd star being backed into a corner of the room while the furious fans are being held back.

The Sun also claim things got so heated a plate was even thrown at Pogba, although that doesn't seem to appear in the footage provided.

..."The lads were furious that Pogba had the nerve to say no to their request for an autograph. But Pogba was enjoying a quiet meal with friends and felt uncomfortable with the attention."

So, to recap: They recorded him without his permission, and he did not object. Then they interrupted him to ask for an autograph, which he politely declined. So they attacked him and accused him of being "disrespectful."

Because Pogba, who is Black, did not show these fans the proper "respect" by interrupting his dinner to perform at their entitled command, he was assaulted.

Intolerable. Your favorite footballer is allowed to set boundaries, like every other human. You don't own him. https://t.co/xNuug0CMsZ

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) February 28, 2017

Not that it would matter if Paul Pogba were the biggest asshole on the planet—he still has a right to set boundaries—but he seems, as much as one can tell from interviews and the comments of his teammates and managers, to be just a super kind and decent guy. He is generous with his time (when he's not in the middle of fucking dinner!), and he has spoken about the profound gratitude (example, starting just after the five-minute mark) and appreciation he has for being able to play a game he loves for a living. He does not take for granted his able-bodiedness, and has often (as have other players) given his jersey to a disabled child in the stands after a match.

I'm not suggesting he's a saint; just that he gives without being asked and has remarkable perspective for a young superstar in his field who broke the record for being the most desired player on the planet.

That's the human being who was called "disrespectful" because he didn't want to sign an autograph during his dinner.

And although I'm writing this about Paul Pogba, a player who I cheer every week and like very much, I'm writing it about everyone who is a lot or a little bit famous, because there is this persistent idea that doing something in public means conceding your right to consent, privacy, and self-governance.

We don't own celebrities. And fuck anyone who behaves like they do.

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In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today...

[Content Note: Police brutality; death; racism] READ THIS: "To be Black in America is to be afraid."

Hillary Clinton wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on her plans to address poverty: "My Plan for Helping America's Poor."

[CN: Racist slur] At a Trump campaign event in Cleveland Heights billed as a "town hall meeting on African American concerns," Don King used the n-word while introducing Donald Trump. While I'm not about to police whatever words King wants to use, seeing Trump chortling away about it in the background is deeply disturbing.

[CN: Video autoplay at link; hostility to consent] Joss Whedon and a bunch of celebrities put together a video about the importance of voting in this election, with a pretty clear message about for whom to vote. Two big problems: One, I don't find the joke (even though he's clearly in on it) about Mark Ruffalo getting naked funny, since the joke is still premised on the appearance of non-consent. Two, I don't really think this works to convey the seriousness of this election. Too clever by half.

GOOD: "Congressional Democrats Campaign to Prove Hyde Amendment's Undue Burden."

[CN: Domestic violence; death] Another family annihilator "is in custody after a quadruple homicide left his four children dead and their mother in critical condition from an apparent stabbing." (But let's continue to not have a public conversation about toxic masculinity.) My condolences to the woman who was harmed herself and has lost all four of her children. I don't even know how one could begin to process the scope of that sort of violence and loss. I ache for her.

"On Wednesday morning, 31 countries officially ratified the Paris climate agreement, pushing it over one of the required thresholds needed for the agreement to enter into force. Sixty parties, representing 48 percent of the world's emissions, have now officially joined. For the Paris agreement to enter into force, at least 55 nations, representing at least 55 percent of global emissions, must formally ratify. That means that the agreement needs just 7 percent more greenhouse gas emissions before the agreement can enter into force."

"Clever Dog Saves the Life of a Newborn Puppy Abandoned on a Garbage Pile." Awwww good dog!

What have you been reading?

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In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today...

[Content Note: Bombing; stabbing; injury; death] This is about as good (by which I mean as non-alarmist and non-presumptuous) an article as you'll find offering details on the spate of attacks in the NY-NJ area over the weekend. (Originally, it also contained details about the incident in Minnesota; then it didn't; then some information was back. The story keeps getting updated at the link.)

[CN: Bombs; guns; incitement] Meanwhile, without a trace of damn irony, Donald Trump says that people who incite violence "should be arrested immediately."

[CN: Privilege] Do you have someone in your life who keeps trying to tell you how awesome Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson is? Well, here is a handy primer to show them why you disagree!

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton writes: "Here's What Millennials Have Taught Me." I love the opening line: "We hear a lot of things about the millennial generation. But too often, the people who are busy trying to define you are the ones who have spent the least time listening to you."

This this this: "This is why I get so angry when you insult Hillary Clinton." Hell yes.

[CN: Harassment] "This Fifth Grade Girl Should Teach a Class on Boundaries." Accurate. But more importantly: The boy to whom she was obliged to write that list of rules should get a lesson on boundaries.

What have you been reading?

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In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today...

[Content Note: Carcerality; violence] This is good news: "Henry Montgomery is 69 years old. He has spent his entire adult life in prison. In 1963, Montgomery killed a sheriff's deputy in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was 17 years old at the time of his crime and was sentenced under a state law that required a sentence of life in prison without parole. On Monday, however, the Supreme Court announced in Montgomery v. Louisiana that 'prisoners like Montgomery must be given the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect irreparable corruption; and, if it did not, their hope for some years of life outside prison walls must be restored.' Under this decision, thousands of people sentenced to life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles could be given back some portion of their life."

[CN: Transphobia; abuse; carcerality; racism] "On Friday, January 22, trans people and their allies marked the first International Trans Prisoner Day of Action with solidarity events and letter-writing campaigns taking place all over the world, from Toronto to Vienna. In the United States, where an estimated one in six transgender people have been incarcerated in their lifetime, the Day of Action generated events in more than a dozen states. ...In a zine produced to mark the occasion, trans activists referred to the initiative as a 'call to action against the system which seeks to erase our very existence,' adding that the survival of trans people and other sexual and gender minorities is not a 'quaint conversation about awareness, but a struggle for us to live in a world determined to marginalize, dehumanise, and criminalise us—especially trans women, and especially Black, brown, and indigenous trans people.'"

[CN: Violent entitlement; guns; death; hostility to consent] Rage seethe boil: "A mother of two was followed to her car, shot, and killed after she reportedly rebuffed a man's advances in a Pittsburgh bar. According to WTAE, Janese Talton-Jackson, 29, of Penn Hills, Pa., located just outside Pittsburgh, was leaving the bar around 1:50 am when the suspect followed her to her car, where she was shot, Pittsburgh police said." The man who is alleged to have shot her has been taken into custody following a police chase. My condolences to Talton-Jackson's family, friends, and colleagues. I resolve once more to continue to do whatever I can to help dismantle the culture of violent male entitlement.

[CN: Illness] Fuck: "The Zika virus is likely to spread across nearly all of the Americas, the World Health Organization has warned. The infection, which causes symptoms including mild fever, conjunctivitis, and headache, has already been found in 21 countries in the Caribbean, North and South America. It has been linked to thousands of babies being born with underdeveloped brains and some countries have advised women not to get pregnant. No treatment or vaccine is available." But many otherwise healthy people recover quickly. On Friday, New York state health officials said "that three people in New York State, including one from Queens, tested positive for Zika, a mosquito-borne virus that has prompted concern as it has spread rapidly, mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean. All three had traveled to places outside the United States where the virus had been spreading. ...One person has fully recovered, and the two others are recovering without complications."

[CN: War on agency] Senator Bernie Sanders has finally committed to repealing the Hyde Amendment. It's a good thing Hillary Clinton is in this race to push Bernie Sanders to the left. Ahem.

Gold toilet aficionado Donald Trump's big pitch (and astonishingly well-received pitch) to Republican primary voters is that, as proved by his grotesque wealth, he is very greedy, and, if elected president, will be greedy on behalf of the United States.

Perfect headline is perfect: "Resurfaced Video of a Young Ted Cruz Reveals He Was Always an Entitled Douchebag."

[CN: Militarism] Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has developed an app, which is "an incredibly devilish version of solitaire" based on World War II. Yeah, that sounds about right.

Yawn: "Facebook has turned the word 'friend' into a verb, but just because you've friended someone on Facebook does that make them your friend in real life? Not according to a study that found almost all Facebook friends are entirely fake. Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, conducted research into how Facebook friendship correlates with real-life friendship. Of the 150 Facebook friends the average user has, Dunbar found that only 15 could be counted as actual friends and only five as close friends."

[CN: Video autoplays at link] And finally! Tian Tian the Giant Panda frolicking in the snow at Washington, DC's Smithsonian National Zoo is just colossally cute!

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In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today...

Today is National Hugging Day. Never hug anyone without their consent! Also: Not everyone likes hugging, and that is okay.

[Content Note: Class warfare; institutional harm; clean water access] President Obama has declared a state of emergency in Flint, Michigan, because of the water contamination crisis. [CN: Video may autoplay at link] Julie Bosman, Monica Davey, and Mitch Smith detail, for the New York Times, how local officials minimized and mocked residents' complaints about the toxic water, as those people were being slowly poisoned.

[CN: Assassination] "The murder of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 in the UK was 'probably' approved by President Vladimir Putin, an inquiry has found. Mr Putin is likely to have signed off the poisoning of Mr Litvinenko with polonium-210 in part due to personal 'antagonism' between the pair, it said." How surprising, said nobody. Because Putin is a terrible and terrifying nightmare human who regards international law as quaint suggestions that don't apply to Garbage Kings.

[CN: Hostility to consent; anti-choice fuckery] This would be unbelievable if I didn't believe that Republicans are capable of just about anything but decency: "Carly Fiorina has been accused of 'ambushing' a group of children, after she ushered pre-schoolers, who were on a field trip to a botanical garden, into an anti-abortion rally in Des Moines. ...The alleged ambush occurred when Fiorina hosted a 'right to life' forum at the Greater Des Moines botanical garden. Entering the rally, before a crowd of about 60 people, she directed around 15 young children towards a makeshift stage. The problem, one parent said, was that the children's parents had not given Fiorina permission to have their children sit with her—in front of a huge banner bearing the image of an unborn foetus—while she talked about harvesting organs from aborted babies. 'The kids went there to see the plants,' said Chris Beck, the father of four-year-old Chatham, one of the children Fiorina appeared with." WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.

Right on: "Low-wage workers will strike and protest in Charleston, South Carolina in the lead-up to the Democratic debate there Sunday night, according to the Fight for 15, the union-backed movement to raise the minimum wage. Hundreds of fast-food, home care, child care, and other low-wage employees will converge on the city, according to Fight for 15 Organizing Director Kendall Fells, with more actions targeting both Democrats and Republicans planned for the primary season."

[CN: Racism; sedition] Good grief: "As the armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge nears its fourth week, the militia is now raking through Native American artifacts housed on the property. In a new video posted to the Bundy Ranch's Facebook account, several ranchers search boxes of artifacts that belong to the Paiute tribe. As members of the group sift through documents and objects, holding them up to the camera, LaVoy Finicum talks about how poorly the artifacts have been stored and proposes a dialogue with local Paiute. ...Members of the tribe have repeatedly slammed the militia, telling the ranchers to 'get the hell out.' 'We as Harney County people can stand on our own feet,' Jarvis Kennedy of the Burns Paiute Tribal council said at a press conference earlier this month. 'We don't need some clown to come in here and stand up for us.'"

[CN: Racism] Idris Elba on the lack of diversity on television: "I knew I wasn't going to land a lead role [in the U.K.]. I knew there wasn't enough imagination in the industry for me to be seen as a lead. In other words, if I wanted to star in a British drama like Luther, then I'd have to go to a country like America. And the other thing was, because I never saw myself on TV, I stopped watching TV. Instead I decided to just go out and become TV." (Note: Elba has criticism for the US, too. He doesn't think it's a bastion of diversity, just because he found more opportunity here than in the UK.)

Awwwwww: "President Barack Obama revealed on Wednesday that he had turned down a chance to speak at his own daughter's graduation later this year. ...'Malia's school asked if I wanted to speak at commencement and I said no,' Obama said, according to ABC. 'I'm going to be wearing dark glasses...and I'm going to cry.'" ♥

Cool: Over the next few days, "Mercury will be close to the Sun, over in the East, and Jupiter will be over in the West, with Venus, Saturn, and Mars between the two. Pluto is near Mercury, but is invisible to the eye, requiring a telescope for viewing. The last time an alignment such as this occurred was about 10 years ago. This pre-sunrise configuration will be similar for other northern latitudes."

And finally! I love this so much: "A Fair Shake For Youth is a New York City-based organization using dogs to build empathy and self-esteem in students. Students are given the opportunity to work with therapy dogs each week. Through structured activities, they are able to build relationships with the dogs based on honesty, positive communication, mutual respect, and trust. ...After spending time with the dogs, students learn to appreciate each dog's differences and relate that same idea back to the people they encounter. The program encourages students to work towards building respectful relationships, and to advocate for others. In doing so, students begin to feel valuable, lovable, and empowered."

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Charlie Sheen Discloses He Is HIV+

[Content Note: HIV stigma; extortion; sex worker stigma; domestic violence. Video may autoplay at first link.]

It has been long rumored that Charlie Sheen is HIV+. Yesterday, Sheen started trending on Twitter, as stories were published on celebrity news sites that he would be appearing on the Today show this morning to confirm the rumors.

And so he has.

In an interview with Matt Lauer, Sheen disclosed that he was diagnosed with HIV four years ago, and he has been trying to keep it a secret, owing to the continuing cultural stigma, ever since. He decided to publicly disclose his status to put a stop to what he described as "shakedowns" from the people in his life who knew and threatened to go public if he didn't pay them. According to Sheen, he has paid out millions to people to secure their silence.

Extorting someone by threatening to reveal zie is HIV+ is a despicable act. Revealing anything about anyone's health without their consent, even when there is not a marginalizing stigma attached to it, is loathsome. I am genuinely sorry that Charlie Sheen was subjected to such profound betrayals.

That said, this is Sheen's version of events, and he has a vested interest in controlling the narrative so that he is not portrayed as a person who knew he was HIV+ and was careless about protecting his sex partners.

And one of the ways to do that is to focus on sexual partners, especially sex workers, who betrayed his trust, to redirect any concern about whether, perhaps, he had betrayed theirs by failing to disclose his status or practice safer sex.

There has been some suggestion that at least some of the people whom Sheen accuses of blackmail had filed or were planning to file lawsuits because of exposure to the virus. Lauer explicitly asks Sheen about that, and Sheen denies it, though not entirely.

Lauer reads from a letter Sheen sent to him, in which he wrote that he "hired the companionship of unsavory and insipid types" and "regardless of their saltless reputations, I always led with condoms and honesty when it came to my condition," then asks Sheen: "Were these people that you had had sexual contact with and were claiming that you had transmitted the virus to them, or were these people who simply found out about your status and were threatening to tell the world?" Sheen replies: "Um, more the latter."

More, but not exclusively. Lauer asks again if "we're talking about lawsuits or shakedowns," and Sheen responds "shakedowns." He relates a story about a sex worker whom he'd hired taking a photo of his antiviral meds, and says she did so after he told her they weren't going to be seeing each other anymore, implying that she threatened to expose him out of a retribution—a woman scorned.

There runs throughout the interview a negative commentary on sex workers, who also implicitly get the blame for infecting Sheen, who says he doesn't know exactly how he was infected but that it wasn't intravenous drug use.

He was, he confesses, heavily abusing drugs and alcohol before and after his diagnosis. He explains why he continued to allow people who were extorting him to have access to his life by saying he was high and depressed and making bad decisions. But one bad decision he never made, he says, was exposing sex partners to HIV without their knowledge.

Lauer gives him plenty of opportunity to reiterate that he practiced rigorous safety and honesty:

Lauer: Have you knowingly, or even perhaps unknowingly, transmitted the HIV virus to someone else since your diagnosis?

Sheen: Impossible. Impossible.

Lauer: We're gonna talk to you with your doctor in a second about that.

Sheen: I look forward to it—good.

Lauer: Have you had unprotected sex on any occasion since your diagnosis?

Sheen: Yes, but the two people that I did that with, um, were under the care of my doctor, and they were completely warned ahead of time.

Lauer: Have you, since the time of your diagnosis, told every one of your sexual partners, before you had a sexual encounter, that you were HIV+?

Sheen: Yes I have.

Lauer: No exception?

Sheen: No exception.

Maybe this is true. Maybe Charlie Sheen, who has a long history of violently abusing women, really did get a wake-up call and decide that women's lives and safety are not his to play with as he wishes, and maybe he really did disclose his status to every sex partner he's had since his diagnosis.

Or maybe the Today show just provided a man with a history of harming women a very visible platform in which to preemptively call any woman, any "unsavory and insipid" sex worker, a liar, should she be fixing to allege that she was infected by Charlie Sheen.

A man who was not regularly getting HIV tests despite being sexually active with multiple partners and who evidently believes it's okay to have unprotected sex as long as your partner is "under the care of [your] doctor," as though there is no potential to muddy meaningful consent under the care of a single doctor, especially one who serves at the pleasure of a famous, wealthy, and influential man.

I have a very bad feeling about how this is going to publicly play out. I hope I am wrong. I desperately hope that Sheen is being honest now about being honest then, and that all his partners are safe.

* * *

UPDATE: And here we go: "Charlie Sheen's Ex Bree Olson Claims He Never Revealed HIV-Positive Status to Her: 'I Couldn't Be More Angry'."

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What Lurks Beneath (the Hospital Gown After Surgery)

by Tekla, who tweets about feminism, history, and jokes under @alketrolyat. And is very, very professional and serious.

[Content Note: Hostility to consent; discussion of illness and surgery.]

Frankly, this is kind of a story about pubes. I'm super embarrassed to even write that to you! But shouldn't we fight to talk about our bodies as normal? It still feels like a feminist act to talk about women's bodies in ways that would make dudes go "groooossssss" and say whatever, dudes! The grownups are talking!

So a week ago I went to the hospital and got operated on. I have Crohn's disease and a recalcitrant section of intestine was slowly losing its grip and not meeting ANY of its quarterly performance review goals (like: stop necrotizing, already). After like two years of feeling really sick every single day, I caved. Slice me! Do it already!

This particular slice was only supposed to be about five inches long, which it is. The incision starts in my belly button and extends downward about 4-5 inches and then stops, kinda right below the curve of my belly. Therefore, I didn't think this would involve any shaving of any hairy areas. Or anything. (dun dun dunnnn)

I woke up from surgery in the blissful cloud of Our Lady of Intravenous Opiates, so I didn't notice anything weird for like a day. But on day two, I was hobbling unassisted to go pee, and when I arrived in the restroom, I discovered someone (HOPEFULLY A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL) had shaved, like, half of my area. My lady garden. WHATEVER. This gave me, essentially, a labial mullet. It was horrible. I didn't sign up to have my downstairs styled after what's his name in the Breakfast Club.

I guess this was done in case the incision had to go lower, though it would have had to go several more inches in length before said shaving became relevant. But okay, I get that you might have to do that just in case.

My problem is that nobody TOLD me. When you have surgery they tell you a billion things to watch out for, like there's a .0001% chance they'll accidentally leave forceps inside of you or something. But you shave an intimate area of my body and you don't even let me know? Like, "hey, we might have to give you an extremely dated hairstyle on your sex organs!! Just FYI!!"

Seriously though, this may seem frivolous but I think there's a lot to be said about how this was treated so cavalierly. Like, if there was any chance at all they were going to shave half my HEAD, I think they would have absolutely told me and probably made me sign a dozen consent forms. But because it's my vulva, nobody says anything?

Did they think I wouldn't care, like they already thought these millennials all shave down there and they would be doing me a favor? But I'm supposed to have control over that. Any hair on my body should be subject to MY choice for removal or glorious hippie growth or any maintenance level in between.

And there's endless wrangling over body hair, mostly by anti-feminists who want to act like all feminists do is sit around and talk about plaiting Gloria Steinem quotes into their pits. It's not like it's "more feminist" to adhere to one grooming ideal or another, but it's feminist as shit to make sure any body modification is subject to my informed consent.

After a major medical intervention, I should never wake up to any surprises about my body. I've had severe chronic illness since I was eighteen, which equates to seven years of trying desperately to control the rights to my body. Having that control means everything to people with disabilities and chronic illness.

And even in seemingly small ways—it's not like hair doesn't grow back—it's still important for health care providers to respect every part of the patient. And I'm allowed to be mad as hell that you interfered in my personal biz.

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This is so good.

[Content Note: Racism; entitlement; hostility to consent.]

Terrell Jermaine Starr: "There's a good reason protesters at the University of Missouri didn't want the media around."

I'm not even going to excerpt it. Just go read the whole thing.

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An Observation

[Content Note: Hostility to consent.]

There is a video, which I am not sharing here for reasons that will become obvious, of North West, the two-year-old daughter of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, being taken to ballet class by her nanny. (As an aside, her mother usually accompanies her to ballet class, but is currently heavily pregnant, which I suspect is why the nanny was taking her.) Paparazzi snap millions of photos and shoot video of her. In her little toddler voice, she says, "No pictures! I said no pictures!" Her nanny repeats, "She said no pictures."

The paparazzi make "Aww, how adorable!" noises, while they continue to take pictures of her.

Against her explicit request that they not.

The hostility to consent starts so fucking early.

Her "sassy" response to be photographed is "adorable," read the news stories. She is "taking control of her image," just like her parents!

They assign grown-up motivations to a child, and reduce her resistance to being exploited to something "cute," in order to justify this gross disrespect of her consent.

There are people who will certainly be inclined to argue that North West is fair game, because her parents are famous, and/or because her parents have shared images of her.

But those arguments are irrelevant—not least of which because her parents weren't there. North West was asserting her own agency. She was saying in her own voice that she didn't want her photo taken.

And everyone laughed at how adorable it was. This tiny female child imagining that what she wants matters.

I heard you, Nori.

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This Fu@#king Guy

[Content Note: Rape culture.]

This fucking guy posts a picture of himself holding up a sign reading "This is not what a rapist looks like," as if there is a particular way that rapists look, and then writes a piece about how being asked to attend a university seminar on consent and bitterly moans: "To be invited to such a waste of time was the biggest insult I've received in a good few years."

You know what, dipshit? Shut the fuck up and go attend the seminar and think about the extraordinary privilege you have that being compelled to spend an hour listening to someone talk about consent is "the biggest insult" you've received in "a good few years," a time period during which millions of women around the globe were raped, which is rather a more significant insult.

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And More Peeple

[Content Note: Hostility to consent; stalking; abuse.]

There is some suspicion this morning, based largely on this Snopes article, which is hardly conclusive, that Peeple is a hoax. And a number of people, possibly in anticipation of the possibility that it was all some big fucked-up social experiment, are making noises to distance themselves from the outrage, by way of claiming they don't even care about it anyway blah blah fart.

I don't know if Peeple will turn out to be a hoax, or a social experiment, or a colossal scam by two attention-seeking assholes, or a real app that will really stumble its way into hideous existence next month. But I have a few thoughts on the possibility it was not exactly what it seems.

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More Peeple

[Content Note: Hostility to consent; stalking; abuse.]

Background here.

Peeple's Facebook page is filled with positive comments they're getting via email, they're deleting comments and banning commenters who are abuse survivors trying to explain to them problems with their app, they're wondering (without a trace of irony) how to prevent people giving them feedback, and this shit is just sitting there like a big fat turd:

If they were truly hearing their critics "loud and clear," they would pack up their shit and go home, not promise to expand their contemptible app to a second platform.

"People are genuinely good." I don't even know where the fuck to begin.

Not every person is "genuinely good." I can't imagine the sort of enchanted life one has lived to make such an extraordinary statement about the universality of human goodness.

Perhaps she meant "generally" good, which is still debatable, to put it politely. But even if we agree with that subjective assessment, it's irrelevant. The supposition that most people won't use the app for nefarious purposes doesn't mean that no one will.

An app literally designed to appeal to and be used by people who are at best indifferent and at worst overtly hostile to consent is OF COURSE going to be rife with abuse.

To respond to people, many of whom have themselves been victimized by precisely such abusive tactics online, who know from personal experience that not all people are genuinely good, or that if people are generally good it matters fuck-all when you encounter someone who isn't, by asserting that there's no need to worry because people are good is breathtaking in its audacious cruelty.

Basically, whatever fears anyone has about this app are founded. Big time. Because its creators are deeply resistant to hearing that their app will be abetting harm against vulnerable people.

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This Is a Terrible, Dangerous Idea

[Content Note: Hostility to consent; stalking; abuse.]

Peeple (get it? peep + people) is a new app in which human beings can rate other human beings like businesses are rated on Yelp. I can think of a dozen different ways, right off the top of my head, that this app could be used to harm people personally and professionally:

When the app does launch, probably in late November, you will be able to assign reviews and one- to five-star ratings to everyone you know: your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door. You can't opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it's there unless you violate the site's terms of service. And you can't delete bad or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose.

Imagine every interaction you've ever had suddenly open to the scrutiny of the Internet public.

"People do so much research when they buy a car or make those kinds of decisions," said Julia Cordray, one of the app's founders [with co-founder Nicole McCullough]. "Why not do the same kind of research on other aspects of your life?"

...A bubbly, no-holds-barred "trendy lady" with a marketing degree and two recruiting companies, Cordray sees no reason you wouldn't want to "showcase your character" online.

Maybe because you are shy; maybe because you have social anxiety; maybe because you don't want an online presence at all; maybe because you are hiding from a stalker; maybe because you are an educator who doesn't want every student you flunk to have a public way of getting revenge; maybe because you work in any one of a number of fields in which people are routinely unhappy with you just because of the nature of the work; maybe because you are a marginalized person who does public advocacy that makes you a target for privileged bullies; maybe because you have a shitty ex or shitty family members or shitty coworkers; and certainly no one should be obliged to even provide a reason why they don't want to be publicly rated by anyone with an internet connection, and to explain to Julia Cordray that they are not the same person that she is.

Given the importance of those kinds of decisions, Peeple's "integrity features" are fairly rigorous — as Cordray will reassure you, in the most vehement terms, if you raise any concerns about shaming or bullying on the service. To review someone, you must be 21 and have an established Facebook account, and you must make reviews under your real name.

You must also affirm that you "know" the person in one of three categories: personal, professional or romantic. To add someone to the database who has not been reviewed before, you must have that person's cell phone number.

Which isn't much of a threshold, considering that many people are required to make their cell phone numbers public for their jobs, and that there are garbage companies online who will provide private cell phone numbers for a small fee, or for free.

Positive ratings post immediately; negative ratings are queued in a private inbox for 48 hours in case of disputes. If you haven't registered for the site, and thus can't contest those negative ratings, your profile only shows positive reviews.

"If you don't want negative ratings, just don't sign up!" Of course, you have to sign up if you want to contest any reviews at all. Like, for example, if someone slips into a "positive" review personal information you don't want broadcast.

"As two empathetic, female entrepreneurs in the tech space, we want to spread love and positivity," Cordray stressed. "We want to operate with thoughtfulness."

Unfortunately for the millions of people who could soon find themselves the unwilling subjects — make that objects — of Cordray's app, her thoughts do not appear to have shed light on certain very critical issues, such as consent and bias and accuracy and the fundamental wrongness of assigning a number value to a person.

To borrow from the technologist and philosopher Jaron Lanier, Peeple is indicative of a sort of technology that values "the information content of the web over individuals;" it's so obsessed with the perceived magic of crowd-sourced data that it fails to see the harms to ordinary people.

...It's inherently invasive, even when complimentary. And it's objectifying and reductive in the manner of all online reviews. One does not have to stretch far to imagine the distress and anxiety that such a system would cause even a slightly self-conscious person; it's not merely the anxiety of being harassed or maligned on the platform — but of being watched and judged, at all times, by an objectifying gaze to which you did not consent.

I am really just rage-exhausted with privileged tech developers who imagine that every app they develop will be appreciated by every other person for the same reasons they appreciate it, who imagine that everyone will use their apps only in the way they intend and want them to be used, who never spend a hot second investigating how their apps might have negative consequences for people who don't share their privileges.

If you're a person who works in tech development and you assert to be unaware of the way technology is used by dangerous, abusive people to harm other people (especially women), then you are either a liar or an unfathomably ignorant fool.

True to her site's radical philosophy, she has promised to take any and all criticism as feedback. If beta testers demand an opt-out feature, she'll delay the launch date and add that in.

So, she's only going to listen to requests for an opt-out feature from people who opt-in to a beta test. Fuck that, fuck this app, and fuck its careless creators.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Stop Using Me and Say What You Mean

[Content Note: Appropriation; homophobia; transphobia; anti-immigrationism; racism; misogyny; class warfare; war on agency; sexual assault; guns.]

There is a particular strain of political discourse that I despise: The use of "the American people," or "voters," or "taxpayers," followed by some assertion of what we want, or need, as if we are a monolith. It's a lazy and mendacious rhetorical tool, at best—and, at its worst, it implies that anyone who cannot read themselves into agreement with what "the American people" supposedly universally support is not a "real" American, a no-account, a traitor.

It makes my teeth grind, every time I see it, this insistent pretense that a diverse populace is in unanimous agreement about anything.

Worse yet is the monolithization of groups who are subsets of "the American people," groups whose presumed agreement and asserted collective need is frequently used, especially by conservative politicians and pundits, for the explicit purposes of justifying discrimination.

My identity, and my experiences, are appropriated over and over by conservatives in this very way—and I want them to stop using me.

Stop Using Me to Justify Homophobia

I am a woman married to a man, and "the sanctity of my marriage" is not undermined by same-sex marriage. In fact, my marriage isn't even sacred: God has nothing to do with my marriage; religion has nothing to do with my marriage; none of the things associated with sanctified marriage have anything to do with my marriage.

Our marriage is a contract taken out in a courthouse between two atheists, each of whom made a commitment contingent on continued happiness and fulfillment, not on some terrible belief that ending a dysfunctional relationship is a galactic failure while grimly sticking it out for "eternity" is a success.

We are not interested in a consecrated union. We are not delighted by the idea that we were ordained to be together. We have no need of the weight of eternity resting upon the foundations of our partnership. We want the choice to be together, so that we may choose every day whether to be together.

There is nothing sacred about my marriage—and I like it that way, thank you very much. It is earthly and profane and eminently human by design. And by virtue of the two people who comprise it.

The blanket assertion that marriage—any marriage, my marriage—is sacred, as long as it's between one man and one woman, undermines my ability to define my marriage outside of religion. And that redefines my marriage in a way that same-sex marriage does not and never could.

Not only does legalized same-sex marriage neither demean nor diminish my different-sex marriage, I am of the very firm opinion that expanding legal access to marriage makes my marriage worth more, not less, by virtue of the value conferred by inclusivity.

I have absolutely none of the desperate insecurity held by privileged bigots about their super-special relationships losing the shimmering, golden glow that only denying equality to same-sex couples conveys upon their gloriously gilded unions. They want marriage to be a members-only country club. I want it to be a rave under the stars across an expansive desert, to which anyone who wants to dance has an invite.

Stop using me.

Stop Using Me to Justify Transphobia

I am a cisgender woman who uses public bathrooms, and I am well aware that there are trans* women, some of whom might well have a penis, using the same public restrooms I do—Spoiler Alert: AND I DON'T FUCKING CARE—and anyone who's under the misapprehension that no trans women ever currently use women's bathrooms is a cloistered ignoramus who may well have been deliberately misled by a transphobic asshole with an agenda.

Trans* women and men and cis women and men already share bathrooms. This is not a tragedy or cause for alarm. OH NOES BATHROOM PANIC! is unmitigated bullshit. The End.

As is any other transphobic shit that is peddled under the auspices of "trans* predator" memes, and justified under some variation of the argument that I need to be protected from trans* people.

I am a cis woman, and a survivor of sexual violence. I am exactly the type of person who is routinely invoked as needing protection from trans* predators. I don't need your protection. No one has my permission to pretend that they're "saving" me by endangering trans* people

I am not in danger from sharing a bathroom with trans* women. But trans* women could very well be in danger from not being allowed to share a bathroom with me.

Stop using me.

Stop Using Me to Justify Anti-Immigrationism

I am a white person, who is married to a documented immigrant, who lives in a place with too few jobs and a not-insignificant population of undocumented immigrants. In a very real way, Iain and I are the people with whom anti-immigration rhetoric should most resonate. We live in an economically depressed area and Iain is a documented immigrant whose citizenship was secured through a time-consuming and costly process; he had to wait several months for a work permit after arriving; he had difficulty finding work in this area; I had difficulty finding work in this area when I still did office work; we have friends who have had difficulty finding work in this area. We're supposed to take the scapegoating bait and be irate, or feel cheated, or something.

And we do—but our ire is not directed at the undocumented immigrants who live in our community. It's directed squarely at our jackass governor and his conservative cronies running the state (into the ground), who discourage businesses from opening their doors in our state by making the state hostile to female and LGBTQI employers and employees, for fucking the state infrastructure via defunding and privatization, and for trying to dismantle our public education system and social services, just for a start.

The fact is, there's plenty of room for me to have a job along with my community's undocumented workers—which, I admit, is easier for me to say since we're not competing for the same job. But most US workers aren't competing for the same jobs generally held by undocumented immigrants, and not because they're "jobs no American wants to do," as John McCain would have us believe, but because the employers actively seek out an exploitable workforce comprised of people who don't know their rights and who can be easily controlled via the threat of deportation, a category out of which most US workers would self-select in favor healthcare benefits and livable wages, even if the crummy employers who exploit migrants would consider hiring citizens in the first place.

Iain came to the States not because his life was dreadful or his family was starving or because he couldn't find work. He came on a fiancée visa (a resource, btw, still only available to us because we're of different sexes) because he fell in love with an American. He had the great fortune of being born in a country with lots of opportunity, and moving to one with the same. He doesn't need to be here to survive—and yet he is routinely regarded as "deserving" to be here specifically because of the fact that he was privileged in the first place.

Demonizing people who are our neighbors as somehow less American because of geography and law doesn't resonate with people like us. Being "American" is more than that, and sometimes the people who weren't born here seem to understand that better than many of those who were.

The truth is, if conservatives were interviewed to see exactly what qualities lay within the soul of a Real American, their idealized Civis Americanus—fearless, adventurous, independent, enterprising, entrepreneurial, optimistic, indomitable, visionary, and irrepressible—would look an awful lot like the undocumented immigrant who makes hir way across the border in search of a better life, risking deportation and detention and bodily harm to realize a dream arbitrarily denied on the accidental circumstances of one's birth.

Would that it took at least walking across the border to become a US citizen. We'd certainly have fewer citizens who used the gift of their unearned citizenry as a justification to behave like intolerant, isolationist assholes.

Stop using me.

Stop Using Me to Justify Defending a Racist Justice System

I am a white, middle-class woman; the granddaughter of a cop and a victim of both random and not-random crimes; I live in a majority-white community which is increasingly ethnically diverse, which sits in the middle of a drug-trafficking corridor, and which is near a majority-black community with a high crime rate.

People like me are incessantly invoked to justify the war on drugs, the criminalization of need, the militarization of the police, minimum sentencing, three-strikes-and-you're-out laws, the death penalty, the school-to-prison pipeline, conceal-carry laws, Stand Your Ground laws, the acquittals of white citizens and white police officers who kill black men and women to keep "us" safe.

It's all necessary, I'm told, all of these law enforcement policies that disproportionately target people of color and wreck black communities in particular, in order to protect me.

I do not need this kind of protection. Even if it weren't aggressively ineffective, I would reject these policies on the basis that they are colossally indecent.

Protecting me from some vague possibility of harm, a possibility conjured into existence from a bubbling cauldron of stereotypes and fearmongering, is not necessary and it is certainly not a valid justification (there is none) for teargasing children and incarcerating recreational pot smokers and manipulating grand juries until they see dead teenagers as the ones on trial for their own murders.

It's mendacity in the extreme—invoking people like me and the manufactured fears of people like me in order to mask what is nothing more than the exploitation of racist institutions to generate revenue from for-profit prisons and put more money in the pockets of war profiteers by putting their weapons of war into syndication with local police.

I don't need protection. The people who are being harmed under the auspices of "protecting me" do.

Stop using me.

Stop Using Me to Justify Voter ID Laws

I live in Indiana, which has a shitty voter ID law upheld by the Supreme Court, and has been justified on the premise that it's necessary to protect the integrity of the voting process; to make sure that my vote really counts.

There is virtually no history of documented voter fraud in the state, but reams of evidence that voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise poor, minority, and disabled voters.

I have absolutely zero need to be "protected" from voter fraud that doesn't exist, especially at the expense of other voters (who, ahem, happen to largely lean Democratic).

Stop using me.

Stop Using Me to Justify Gutting the Social Safety Net

I am a taxpayer—and thus I routinely hear how my "tax dollars are being wasted" on social programs, and on the people who need them.

Never mind that many of the people who depend on government assistance are themselves working people who are paying taxes, which makes this entire line of reasoning (such as it is) bullshit on its face. I don't need to hear fairytales about rampant fraud, and about welfare recipients being lazy, shiftless, unhelpable moochers who can't be convinced "that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives," and about the jobs that working poor people work not being "real jobs," and about how raising the minimum wage kills jobs and ambition.

We don't get a say in how our tax dollars are spent, but, if we did, I would not seek protection from the taxes I pay being used to robustly fund a comprehensive social safety net; I would seek protection from the taxes I pay being used to buy bombs and build drones and fund interminable wars that are themselves justified on the need to protect me from a threat that isn't fucking real.

Stop using me.

Stop Using Me to Justify Abortion Restrictions

Every single thing about the anti-choice movement is terrible and exhausting, including the intractable assertion that people who seek abortions haven't thought it through. Study after study has found that this claim is categorically not true—and the reported lived experiences of people who have gotten abortions also reveal its manifest dishonesty—but still we get legislation like fetal heartbeat bills and mandatory ultrasound bills and required waiting periods.

If only these wicked women (it is always women in their framework, despite the fact that not only women need access to abortion) hear the heartbeat…! If only these wicked women see that there's a "baby" inside of them…! If only these wicked women are forced to think about their decision…!

And thus we are in need of "protection" from ourselves, and our own lack of thoughtful consideration about our choices.

Further, we need restrictions and regulations to "protect" us from predatory abortionists and unsafe clinics and evil feminists who love killing babies. Just an endless parade of men who propose legislation to rollback abortion access, giving garbage speeches on statehouse floors about "protecting women."

They need to "protect" us, they say, by robbing us of our agency, of our bodily autonomy, and of our consent.

I have previously noted on many occasions that I'm hard-pressed to see why I should be any less contemptuous of a man who sits at a big mahogany desk in a government building making decisions about my body without my consent than I should be of the man who used physical force to make decisions about my body without my consent.

It is an observation by which anti-choice legislators are outraged. They are horrified to be compared, even obliquely, to sexual predators. As well they should be. I am horrified to have to make it. But anyone who holds the position that zie should be able to legislate away my bodily autonomy and supersede my consent about what happens to my body shouldn't be too goddamned surprised by the comparison.

Especially when they are claiming to be "protecting" me as they do it. I do not need their protection.

Stop using me.

Stop Using Me to Justify the Presence of Guns on College Campuses as "Rape Prevention"

I am a survivor who was assaulted by someone I met in a classroom. Thus, my experience is often invoked to justify urging female college students to wield weapons as self-defense and rape deterrence.

Many of the objections to these proposals I laid out here: "Five Reasons Why 'Teach Women Self-Defense' Isn't a Comprehensive Solution to Rape." Particularly sections 4 and 5: Women who deter rape with violence, especially women of color, are often punished for doing so, and not every woman is prepared to use violence against her attacker, especially since many victims of sexual assault know the person assaulting them.

Further, making weapons more available in more places empowers people who are going to use them to commit violence at least as much (and, realistically, more so) than people who are going to use them to deter violence. If someone is seriously concerned about rape prevention, then limiting rapists' access to guns is a good place to start.

Even a rapist who might not rape at gunpoint may later use a gun to enforce his victim's silence.

And what of a rapist who is attempting rape at gunpoint? Is a woman supposed to pull out her own gun and have a shoot-out on campus in order to defend herself?

At what cost to the safety of other students does such a scenario come? It doesn't matter to the advocates of gun-slinging as rape deterrence.

Because they don't actually give a single, infinitesimal shit about rape or victims of rape. All they care about is guns everywhere all the time.

And if that comes at the cost of the people they invoke in fantasy narratives about rape prevention, they just hope no one will notice.

Well. I see you.

Stop using me.

Stop using me to justify disablism (more fraud rhetoric; more people who are "taking advantage of " people like me); to justify class warfare (protecting my "middle-class family" at the expense of people in poverty); to justify union-busting (because unions are job-killers; sure); to justify tax cuts, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, environmental devastation, nationalism, sanctions, war, all manner of fuckery from which I allegedly need protection.

I do not want your protection, and I want no part of your contemptible rhetoric suffused with faux concerns for my well-being that puts a thin veneer of compassion on your campaigns of discrimination and hatred.

I will not sit quietly while I am co-opted as part of a despicable strategy in which one group of people is monolithized in order to harm another group of people. Conservatives may say that "taxpayers" or "middle-class families" or "voters" or "women" want this or that bit of legislated bigotry, but they will be lying.

So stop using me, and say what you mean: You simply don't believe that same-sex couples deserve equal rights; you loathe and fear trans* people and want to keep them away from you and out of any spaces you might inhabit; you don't like brown immigrants; you don't believe black lives matter; you want to disenfranchise as many likely Democratic voters as possible to win elections; you are greedy and just don't want to give money to people in need; you hate women having control over their own reproduction, or control over anything at all, really; you love guns; you hate people.

My identity, my experiences, my life are not yours to appropriate. Especially under the guise of protecting me.

The primary thing from which I need protection, conservatives, is you.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!