Someone in the Obama administration has finally admitted there's a war on women and other people with uteri:
"I think the war on women is real," Biden said in an interview he sat for with MSNBC's Ed Schultz as part of a campaign trip to New Hampshire to talk up the Buffett rule.
Well, I'm not happy that the President, while himself still refusing to say he even believes there's a war on women, is subcontracting this stuff to Biden, at least someone is saying it. And one imagines Biden, champion of the Violence Against Women Act, actually believes it. So good news, right? Ha ha wait for it!
"And, look, I tell you where it's going to intensify: the next president of the United States is going to get to name one and possibly two or more members of the Supreme Court."
You don't want
Roe overturned, DO YOU, LADIES?!
Swell. The Vice-President of the United States now sounds like every pro-Obama troll who harassed me during the last election when I had the temerity to question whether Obama was really a solid ally on reproductive rights.
Hey, speaking of the last election,
here's something I wrote four years ago, which is terribly even more relevant today, four years after Obama was elected, after a record number of abortion restrictions were enacted
in state legislatures , after our ostensibly pro-choice Democratic President has remained silent on that fact, than it was then:
Even before the primary had ended, feminists/womanists (hereafter FWs) who had become disenchanted with Senator Barack Obama as a result of
worrying rhetoric on reproductive rights,
his and
his campaign's use of sexist dog whistles, and/or his silence in response to
an appalling onslaught of misogyny unleashed upon his opponent, were being bullied at any indication (real or imagined) that we would not vote for him. The usual rhetorical cudgels were brought out to browbeat us—
Roe (to which I'll return later) and the ominous accusation that if McCain won, it would be
our fault. As ever, it was the people
calling out sexism and/or anti-FW policies who were charged with creating division among progressives, as opposed to the people engaging in sexism and their defenders.
Given Obama's most recent flub on abortion rights,
first stating he doesn't "think that 'mental distress' qualifies as the health of the mother" regarding late-term abortion exceptions,
then clarifying by reiterating the same thing and fleshing out the pregnant straw-woman who wants a late term abortion just because she's "feeling blue," plus more of the "
pastor and family" rhetoric—a veritable symphony of rightwing talking points, infantilization and mistrust of women, and hostility toward their autonomy—one might expect the bullies to realize that perhaps the FWs who had concerns about Obama also had a point, but if bullies were rational, they wouldn't be bullies. And so the drumbeat to cast FWs with legitimate complaints as the root of progressive discordance has only intensified.
This oft-wielded strategy to silence FWs who cry foul at sexism expressed by political allies is wrong for the following reason, which I cannot state any more succinctly than this:
When someone engages in divisive behavior, any resulting division is their responsibility.
It is, simply, not the duty of any person who is repeatedly subjected to alienating language, images, behaviors, and/or legislation to nonetheless never complain and pledge fealty from the margins. If women, men of color, gay/bi/trans* men, et. al. are valued, then they should not be demeaned-and if they are demeaned, they should not be expected to pretend it does not matter.
Pretty straightforward stuff. There are some related ideas I want to address, though, which complicate the issue, especially from the perspective of those who earnestly cannot understand why feminists don't see the "perfect logic" of:
• Candidate A is sexist, and at worst will not make things any worse for women.
• Candidate B is sexist, and at best will not make things any worse for women.
• Therefore, feminists should vote for Candidate A.
I get why that appears to make sense—and for some FWs it does, particularly Democratic partisans, which is totally legitimate—but then there's that whole
my vote is mine thing, and this subject is really bigger than for whom anyone will or will not vote, because the (typically) unspoken corollary to "Therefore, FWs should vote for Candidate A" is "...and they should not do anything to undermine him like point out that he is not their ally."
The reasoning behind the "perfectly logical" calculation above—and the related compulsion to cajole alignment with that strategy and/or silence FW criticism—is predicated on a couple of commonly-held (and oft-cited) assumptions:
1. Voting for/Supporting the more liberal of two mainstream party candidates is always and necessarily the most consistent with feminist/womanist principles.
2. Voting for/Supporting the more democratic of two mainstream party candidates is axiomatically the most feminist/womanist choice.
3. Feminism is an "issue" or a "cause" akin to other political issues or causes like protecting social security or fair elections.
4. The best possible America for a straight, white, cis, able-bodied, wealthy man is the best possible America for everyone.
5. More rights for "everyone" means more rights for women.
All of these are wrong—or, at minimum, not always correct. Let's take them one at a time.
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
