As you know, I’m blogging these days at Lawyers, Guns & Money. I’m still blogging as bean. I wasn’t cross posting this week but will try to from now on, or to at least post links to the posts at LGM.
Here’s what I wrote this week:
Here’s Why It’s a Mistake to Pin Dems’ Problems on Abortion
The Problem with Prosecutorial Discretion
And Now for Something Completely Different
As I mentioned earlier this week, the times they are a’changin around here. As of tomorrow, I will be a permanent fixture on Lawyers, Guns and Money. It’s about time they had a woman over there. Anyway, I haven’t figured out yet what will happen with this site. I will probably cross-post for a while and see how that goes. Maybe when my job ends and school resumes i’ll be able to write for two separate blogs.
But for the time being, for your daily dose of bean-ness, head on over to LG&M. And update your blogrolls…
Filed under: bullshit, civil rights, feminism/s & gender, law, politics, reproductive justice, sexuality, war
Not so shockingly, the US government has sold out American military women yet again. There’s news today (via Majikthise) that Congressional Dems have withdrawn legislation that would have required U.S. military bases to stock emergency contraception. Here’s a snippet:
For reasons that remain unclear, Michaud [the sponsoring Congressman] withdrew the legislation the next morning. According to [his press secretary], it was purely a logistical snafu: “Key supporters had to be in their districts.” But sources close to the issue tell a different story: The legislation, an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, with bipartisan support, was dropped by a Democratic leadership unwilling to go to bat for pro-choice issues. Despite Michaud’s confidence that the votes were there, Democratic leadership wasn’t so sure, and they didn’t want to hang around long enough to find out. The legislation might not have sunk, but they jumped ship anyway.
Newsflash for all of you women in fatigues: if you are sexually assaulted by a fellow officer, there’s no guarantee that you’ll have access to EC. How’s that for supporting our people in uniform?
Filed under: civil rights, education, feminism/s & gender, is our children learning?, law, news & views, politics, reproductive justice, sexuality, wingnuttery
The fabulous Ms. Lindsay Beyerstein has taken a new job as a reporter for In These Times. Her first piece, up today, takes on the Democrats and their recent support for abstinence only funding. What do the Dems have to give up, she wonders, in order to secure the success of some of their other priorities? Here’s a snippet:
Even opponents of abstinence-only education might concede that a few extra million for abstinence education is a small price to pay for easing the passage of a very important domestic spending bill that contains a lot of spending that’s important to Democrats.
Yet, principle is at stake here. Few people realize that the CBAE program promulgates out-and-out quackery and barely disguised religious dogma. These programs don’t just encourage students to remain abstinent as teenagers. By law, they are required to teach “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity,” among many other stipulations. In other words, the program must teach that all sexual activity outside of marriage, even between consenting adults, violates some nebulous “expected standard.”
Go check out the whole thing here.
Whew. Things are flying at a breakneck pace ’round these parts.
And I’ve got some less than exciting news and some really exciting news.
The less stuff first: I will be traveling for business until Friday and am not sure whether or how much I will have access to the internets and blog-o-sphere. I am hoping to post at least once between now and Friday…but we all know how that goes.
The more exciting stuff is this: The dudes over at Lawyers, Guns & Money have very generously invited me aboard there. So I will be joining the ranks at LG&M, and am proud to be their first female full-time blogger. I am not yet sure what I will do with AB&B. I may keep it up and cross post. I may keep it up only for posterity. We shall see. But beginning Monday, look for me over at my new virtual home.
Interesting news from ACSBlog: The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to hear a case challenging the disparity between sentences for crack cocaine and those for powder cocaine. As I have discussed — at length – the fact that crack possession is punished 100 times more harshly than cocaine possession is both nonsensical and racist (which might make it sensical to some, I guess).
Anyway, the Supreme Court will hear the case, Kimbrough v. U.S., in its next term after a nice long summer vacation. Kimbrough concerns a question of judges’ sentencing authority: does a judge have the power to sentence outside the 100-to-1 guidelines? SCOTUSBlog has a more full (and somewhat technical) explanation.
It’ll be interesting to see how this one comes out. It’s not just going to be a decision about drug war policies. Scalia has been surprisingly pro-defendant on sentencing, and Breyer supports giving judges more leeway. We could end up with a strange group in the majority and perhaps finally an end to one of the most overtly racist practices in today’s criminal justice system.
Filed under: feminism/s & gender, frivolity, funnies, media, news, reproductive justice, sexuality
Well, color me surprised.
I was already to write a post deriding Judd Apatow‘s new film Knocked Up. I haven’t seen Apatow’s other work (Freaks & Geeks, the 40-year-old virgin), so this was not what you might call an educated opinion, but I figured that a movie called “knocked up” couldn’t be good. The phrase knocked up just rings of misogyny.
But I was pleasantly surprised. SF and I saw it last night. A.O. Scott was right. It was funny. It was sweet. And, for the most part, it lacked the misogyny that often pervades the two genres with which it toyed: so-called chick flicks and stoner movies.
I was nervous about the film’s treatment — or lack thereof – of abortion. I had heard that the film sort of glosses over it. Apparently, the topic was interesting, and obvious enough, to make its way into the NY Times Styles section this week. While it’s true that “abortion” is never uttered in the film, the issue is not ignored either. More than that, what (admittedly little) conversation there is about abortion in the film seemed to me to be a fairly biting satire of our inability to talk honestly and apolitically about abortion in the U.S. And the film’s general treatment of pregnancy, reproduction, and birth (in a very impressive Stan Brakhage-esque scene) is often much better than the Hollywood standard.
And I’m not alone in my relief: Amanda Marcotte’s review at her new blog Unsprung echoes a lot of my thoughts.
Still, I can see why some pea-brained conservatives seek validation for their misogynist political opinions from the previews of the movie. From the preview, the movie seems like a wet dream for anti-choicers, a story of an uppity bitch who gets hers by getting trashed and sleeping with the wrong guy, which leads to punishment-by-pregnancy. Add in the college Republican fantasy of being able to trap a wife through pregnancy, and you’ve got a bit of anti-choice propaganda. Those folks will be sorely disappointed by the movie, unless they’re too dumb to pick up on the not-really-subtle subtleties, particularly with the way that the movie sides with Alison’s right to have her own life and career despite being pregnant.
All of this praise doesn’t mean I don’t have a bone to pick with the film. And that nit to pick is this: why is it that the only people who actually sorta kinda talk about abortion in the film are men? Ben’s (the guy who gets Katherine Heigl’s Allison pregnant) stoner friends are the ones who get closest to saying the word “abortion,” while Allison’s mother says only that Allison should “get it taken care of,” or something to that effect. One of Amanda’s commenters also picked up on this; she sees it as yet another example of the “father knows best” mindset. I’m not so sure. Maybe it just speaks to the fact that it’s easier sometimes for men than for women to talk about abortion — and to pontificate about it. But maybe I’m just being too optimistic.
Whatever the case, I was impressed by the film. Anyone else seen it and have an opinion? I’d love to know…
Filed under: 2008, civil rights, criminal justice, drug war, feminism/s & gender, news, politics, religion, reproductive justice
I know you’re all waiting with baited breath, but I still haven’t decided whom – if anyone – to “endorse” going into the Democratic primary. It’s still early. I might. But not yet.
That said, damn Obama’s rhetoric works for me.
Andrew Sullivan’s got the full text of Obama’s recent speech (which Sullivan somewhat derisively though perhaps somewhat accurately calls a sermon) at Hampton University. Obama used the story of the shooting of a pregnant woman (in white, natch) during which the bullet lodged in the arm of the woman’s fetus. The fetus survives but has scar as a reminder.
The story makes my skin crawl a little. But what he does with it is damn good. There’s this:
And so God is asking us today to remember that miracle of that baby. And He is asking us to take that bullet out once more.
If we have more black men in prison than are in our colleges and universities, then it’s time to take the bullet out. If we have millions of people going to the emergency room for treatable illnesses like asthma; it’s time to take the bullet out. If too many of our kids don’t have health insurance; it’s time to take the bullet out. If we keep sending our kids to dilapidated school buildings, if we keep fighting this war in Iraq, a war that never should have been authorized and waged, a war that’s costing us $275 million dollars a day and a war that is taking too many innocent lives — if we have all these challenges and nothing’s changing, then every minister in America needs to come together — form our own surgery teams — and take the bullets out.
And this:
If we want to stop the cycle of poverty, then we need to start with our families.
We need to start supporting parents with young children. There is a pioneering Nurse-Family Partnership program right now that offers home visits by trained registered nurses to low-income mothers and mothers-to-be. They learn how to care for themselves before the baby is born and what to do after. It’s common sense to reach out to a young mother. Teach her about changing the baby. Help her understand what all that crying means, and when to get vaccines and check-ups.
This program saves money. It raises healthy babies and creates better parents. It reduced childhood injuries and unintended pregnancies, increased father involvement and women’s employment, reduced use of welfare and food stamps, and increased children’s school readiness. And it produced more than $28,000 in net savings for every high-risk family enrolled in the program.
This works and I will expand the Nurse-Family Partnership to provide at-home nurse visits for up to 570,000 first-time mothers each year. We can do this. Our God is big enough for that.
So he hits my two pet issues in a single speech: first, the country’s unconscionable jailing of hundreds of thousands of mostly poor and mostly black men and women; and second, the empty rhetoric of the American “pro-life” movement and what an America that really supports families would look like. And he gets both issues right.
Sullivan calls Obama a compassionate conservative — made in the model that Bush supposedly was. I don’t buy that. It aggrandizes Bush and ties Obama to his sinking ship at the same time. It’s also patently false. Obama’s speech rings more of the Democratic Great Society era than of early 21st century compassionate conservatism.
At root, it doesn’t really matter how we label Obama’s speech. The bottom line is that he’s talking about important issues, connecting faith to progressivism, and doing what’s even more improbable — inspiring this cynical blogger.
Filed under: activism, civil rights, feminism/s & gender, is our children learning?, news, politics, reproductive justice, sexuality, wingnuttery
The mantra in the six weeks or so since the Supreme Court handed down its truly awful decision in Gonzaels v. Carhart has been that elections have consequences. After Gonzales, that phrase was used to wag fingers at all of those supposed social liberals who voted for Bush. The phrase has also been used to rub Republicans’ faces in the new Democratic congressional gains.
However it’s been used before, I am feeling today like it’s a bit of a silly phrase, lacking meaning. Why? Because a Democratic Congressman, David Obey of Wisconsin, is pushing for an increase in funding for abstinence only programs. Obey, who is part of the Democratic House leadership and the head of the House Appropriations Committee, is supporting an increase in Community Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) funding by $27 million — up to $150 million. CBAE is one of the many abstinence only programs that has been proven to be both ineffective and filled with lies. And yet, a Democratic leader in the House is throwing bad money after bad money in support of abstinence only programs.
I’m sure this is a political move on Obey’s part to placate some of te more conservative members of his home state. I get that politics is a game. But Obey shouldn’t roll the dice when young people’s lives are on the line.
SIECUS has an action alert. Got tell Pelosi and Obey what you think.
So you can’t go anywhere these days without hearing about Lindsay Lohan’s ignominious return to rehab or seeing Paris Hilton’s most recent mugshot. For the most part, celebrities have tended to get away with snorting and driving — a stark contrast to the rest of us, and particularly to those of us living in communities of color. It’s been a jarring and almost blinding hypocrisy.
Today, in an article on TomPaine, the Brennan Center‘s Kirsten Livingston calls our attention to the hypocrisy of American justice. And it’s not only drug rehabilitation that has failed people like Lohan and Hilton — it’s carcereal rehabilitation that has failed them and the wider public. And especially women:
These trends have been especially harsh for women. Since 1970, the rate of incarceration of women has increased more than twelvefold, and although about half of women in state prisons had been using drugs or alcohol at the time they committed the offense for which they were incarcerated, treatment for substance abuse remains grossly inadequate in our prisons and jails. Similarly, there is limited mental health treatment available, though nearly three-quarters (73.1 percent) of women in state prison in 2005 had a mental health problem, compared to 55 percent of men.
As our incarceration rate has grown, moreover, governments have adopted policies that limit the access of people convicted of crimes to student loans, jobs and the right to vote long after they have paid their debts to society. Together, these trends mean that staggering numbers of Americans are either behind bars or disabled from reclaiming responsible, productive lives after prison. Their substance abuse and mental health problems go untreated and, predictably, are often greatly exacerbated by life behind bars.
Research and common sense show that these punitive responses fail to prevent future crimes or provide rehabilitation, while wrecking lives and devastating families. Seven in 10 women enmeshed in the criminal justice system, for example, have minor children to care for.
Not surprisingly, the system has been unduly harsh not only on women but also on racial minorities:
Although African Americans and whites use illegal substances at about the same rates, African Americans are far more likely to be incarcerated for drug offences. Between 1990 and 2000 the number of African Americans incarcerated in state prisons for drug offenses increased by over 80 percent to 145,000, a number that is 2.5 times higher than that for whites. Affluent whites like Ms. Lohan are far more likely to be let go with a warning, to avoid prison time, or to avoid criminal scrutiny at all. Their substance abuse problems lead them to places like Promises, not the penitentiary. Race and class, then, play a powerful role in determining the consequences of unlawful behavior.
Livingston is optimistic though. She sees glimmers of hope in programs being implemented around the country, from New York’s Drug Treatment Alternative to Prison program to a California program that — shock! — is in jeopardy and may lose its funding. I’m not as optimistic as Livingston. I wonder, as Professor Plum pointed out in a comment yesterday, if the racism in our criminal justice system is so ingrained at this point that we don’t even see it anymore except for when it’s smacking us in the face.
I mean, we make jokes at Paris Hilton’s expense, and at the expense of the myriad other celebrities who get caught with drugs but get away scot free. Given today’s biased system, isn’t it they who should be laughing?
Some days, I think that the jury system should go the way of the dodo. As in, go away. Go extinct. Die out. As it has in the UK and other parts of the world. Juries – if they are fair and reasoned – could be a good thing and a check to the power of a single judge. But as they operate today they are often neither fair nor reasoned.
Today, for example, there were two articles in the NY Times about how far the jury system has strayed from its ideal as a deliberative body that metes out real justice — not racially biased (or otherwise biased) “justice.” In the first article, the times reported on today’s Supreme Court decision that makes it much easier for prosecutors to strike any juror who is not gung ho in favor of capital punishment from a death penalty jury. The Supreme Court, in (yet another) 5-4 decision penned by swing vote Justice Kennedy, overturned notorious conservative judge Alex Kozinski’s opinion at the appellate court level. This Court is not a moderate one. Not on abortion rights. And not, it turns out, on issues of criminal justice and the basic fairness that is necessary to lend credibility to the American criminal justice system.
The second Times article — a column by Adam Liptak — points to a fatal flaw in today’s jury sytem. A flaw that today’s Supreme Court decision will only exacerbate. In his column, Liptak, who is himself a trained lawyer, discusses the practice of peremptory strikes. During the process of jury selection, the prosecutor and defense attorney each have a set number of peremptory strikes; that is, they can cut a certain number of potential jurors for no cause and without the acquiescence of the adversary. Legitimate reasons to do this might include the belief that a juror will not be fair to the state or to the defendant. The most obvious illegitimate reason to use a peremptory strike is racism. but that’s of course, exactly when peremptory strikes are often used and when they do the most to undermine the fairness of the trial process. Liptak provides a case in point:
Allen Snyder, a black man, is on death row in Louisiana. An all-white jury in Jefferson Parish, in the New Orleans suburbs, sentenced him to death in 1996 for the fatal stabbing of a man his wife was seeing.
It took some work to get an all-white jury in a parish that is almost one-quarter black, but the prosecutors were up to the task. They used peremptory strikes — ones not requiring a reason — to remove all five eligible potential jurors who were black. (Four more blacks were removed for cause, all at the request of the prosecution.)
The purge had a purpose, according to a dissenting justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court, who called for a new trial.
“The prosecutor’s intention to utilize racial bias became crystal clear when he commented during closing argument in the penalty phase that O. J. Simpson ‘got away with it’ in the California verdict that had been rendered shortly before this trial,” the justice, Harry T. Lemmon, wrote.
Peremptory challenges are at odds with the goal of driving racial bias (and other biases) as far away as possible from the criminal justice system. Yet their use in racist ways continue. Liptak has more:
According to a 2003 report of the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, which studied 390 felony jury trials in the parish from 1994 to 2002, the district attorney’s office used peremptory strikes to remove eligible black jurors three times as often as white ones.
In the two decades since Batson [the Supreme Court case supposedly ending exclusion of jurors based on race], there have been 20 murder trials in Jefferson Parish that ended in death sentences. Information about the race of the jurors is available in 18 of them.
Because the parish is 23 percent black, according to the 2000 census, you might expect to see about 3 black jurors on each 12-member panel. But of the 18 juries, 10 had no black members. Seven had one. One had two. None had three.
So today’s news and analysis provided a one-two punch that might prove to be a K.O. Now prosecutors have much more leeway to strike jurors they don’t like without using their peremptories. And not only that, but they can continue to use their peremptory strikes in a racist fashion with impunity. And the mass incarceration of black men and women marches on.
Filed under: criminal justice, feminism/s & gender, guests, news, news & views, sexuality
(Guest post by SF; no connection to San Francisco)
As the NYTimes recently reported:
Gay and lesbian prisoners in California will be allowed overnight visits with their partners under a new prison policy, believed to be the first time a state has allowed same-sex conjugal stays.
The change arrived over two years after a 2003 California law provided equal rights for registered domestic partners in California, both same sex and non-married heterosexual couples. The delay, according to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, was due to considerations of whether allowing the visits would expose gay inmates to danger inside the prison, where they are sometimes singled out for attack. The policy shift – finally enacted under the threat of an ACLU lawsuit – is a double victory: for gay rights and prisoner rights. But the sum of the victories is greater than their individual parts.
As a rule, groups that are doubly (or triply) discriminated against (black poor women, for example) are redressed only in one capacity or, in the best case scenario, in each of their individual discriminated capacities. What remains unaddressed is the harm inflicted by multiple, simultaneous discriminations. The situation is even worse in the case of prisons. Scholars and activists like Angela Davis have convincingly demonstrated that racism lies at the heart of the American penitentiary system; in sum: if the people being locked up weren’t black, America would be much less willing to lock ‘em up under such harsh conditions and for so long. (Slavery’s long lasting legacy.) We lock up the Other much sooner that we’d lock up our Selves. Viewing the prisoner as Other allows us to deny their basic humanity.
Many states don’t even offer conjugal visits. The fact that California – which now spends more money on its notorious prisons than it does on its vaunted universities – allows conjugal visits in the first place is a recognition (small as it may be) of the humanity and basic human needs and desires of prisoners. That this recognition would be extended to a group whose basic human needs and desires have only rarely been recognized in America is all the more impressive.
It is sad, of course, that gay prisoners in California – deprived of so many freedoms taken for granted outside the prison walls – now have basic human needs and desires recognized in a manner that much of the rest of the country (the current Supreme Court included) likely would reject even for gay female and male American citizens walking freely.
Filed under: civil rights, feminism/s & gender, law, news, politics, reproductive justice, sexuality
Over the last few years there has been a drumbeat of paternalistic rhetoric in American politics, particularly in the realm of women’s health and reproductive justice. In South Dakota, which last year passed an abortion ban that made exception only if the woman’s life was in danger, those who supported the ban touted it as necessary to protect women from the emotional and medical perils that supposedly would befall them if they had an abortion. The line was such bunk that anti-abortion wingnuts (er, activists) “>had to recruit fake doctors to make an ad in support of it. (The South Dakota law was subsequently rejected by popular ballot.) The siegelin South Dakota (pdf). But for perhaps the first time, it gained adherents. And it seemed to work.
Then, of course, there was the Supreme Court’s truly horrendous decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, which exalted the paternalistic, daddy state knows best language about abortion rights and echoed the rhetoric used to support the South Dakota ban. As Linda Greenhouse noted in the NY Times, the language of the decision was groundbreaking:
But never until Wednesday had the court held that an abortion procedure could be prohibited because the procedure itself, not the pregnancy, threatened a woman’s health — mental health, in this case, and moral health as well. In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy suggested that a pregnant woman who chooses abortion falls away from true womanhood.
And then there’s news today, via Broadsheet, that a pharmacy in Montana refused to dispense the birth control pill to a local woman because they were trying to “protect” her health. Nevermind that the woman was 49, unable to conceive, and using the pill for medical purposes (I really don’t think that should matter, but it’s worth mentioning). According to Broadsheet:
When the woman called the pharmacy to inquire why the pills were being discontinued, the owners claimed that the pills are dangerous for women.
This from the same pharmacy that ran a Mother’s Day ad that included this language:
On this Mother’s Day 2007, we wish to express our gratitude to all mothers for their unselfishness in our behalf. As health-care professionals, we call upon the American people to once again reaffirm the right to life for future generations of the unborn and join with us in our efforts to restore respect, dignity and value to each human life — born or unborn.
Apparently, this pharmacy, under new ownership, has decided across the board to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions. Daddy state (or daddy pharmacist) apparently knows what’s best for his women clients. And now he’s got a Supreme Court decision to back him up. And, in keeping with the paternalistic, anti-woman slant underlying the decision of both the Court and the pharmacist, such decisions are ok. Because, dammit, if a woman is going to open her legs for sex, she better be willing to open them for labor.
A Haiku that will give you some insight into my current extracurricular activity:
Manhattan Island
Apartment Hunting Is A
Bummer in Summer.
