Feminists say the darndest things

Especially when they talk about pro-lifers and religious people.  For your entertainment, I have a few examples.

For the pro-choice argument to really take hold, feminists have to paint their opposition as misogynists who simply want to punish women for having sex.  From Feministe, in a post offering ten reasons to support “reproductive justice“:

8. Anti-choicers care about controlling your sex life, not saving babies.
For all their talk about valuing babies and life, anti-choicers have demonstrated time and again that they could actually care less. They’re more interested in punishing women for sex and in maintaining a male-dominated family model. And they’re only “pro-life” up until the moment of birth — then you’re on your own. Anti-choice politicians opposed extending health care to low-income kids; they routinely vote against Head Start and early childhood education programs; they abhor welfare programs that give aid to single parents and low-income families; and they are at the forefront of opposition to state childcare aid. It’s no surprise that 100% of the worst legislators for children are “pro-life,” and many of the most “pro-life” states are the worst for children and for women. While children are hardly their first priority, anti-choicers are extremely concerned about what you do with your private parts. They are the architects of “abstinence-only” sex education that flat-out lies and misleads students in order to promote conservative values of female submission, homophobia and general ignorance. Many of them opposed a vaccine that could save thousands of women from cancer — because the vaccine prevented cervical cancer and had to be given before the onset of sexual activity, meaning that anti-sex nuts had one less tool in their slut-punishing arsenal.

I’ve gone to the March for Life more time than I can remember, and sat through speeches and youth rallies and college pro-life seminars, and I can tell you that most pro-lifers aren’t big on “slut-punishing.”  And while a lot of us don’t support bigger government, many support private charitable groups aimed at helping young mothers.  One of the main points that stuck out at me at one college conference was the emphasis on what could be done to help women financially and emotionally so that they wouldn’t feel like abortion was their only option.  Some of us oppose birth control on religious grounds, others on the fact that it gives women a false sense of security, and others support it wholeheartedly.  As for the cancer vaccine, the real issue was that trials didn’t show that women were protected past a 4 or 5 year period.  So if you give it to a girl at 13, and it stops protecting her at 18, when she goes off to college and is more likely to start having sex, what good have you done?  Also, a lot of conservatives objected when politicians wanted to make it mandatory.  Mandatory vaccinations are justified on the grounds that the diseases they protect against are communicable enough to endanger the health of students.  That argument is a lot harder to make about an STD.

Feminists also hate crisis pregnancy centers.  Feministing covered Huckabee’s visit to the Carolina Pregnancy Center, and found some things about the CPC’s website objectionable:

Telling young and low-income women that they shouldn’t worry about the financial burdens of caring for a child: “It can be very scary to have financial difficulties, but there are a lot of possible solutions…Today’s schools often give aid to single mothers or a job could always come through…A lot can change financially in nine months!”

Lying to rape survivors: “You are in a very unusual circumstance (conception from rape is extremely rare) and it is understandable that you would be frantic. But don’t allow the rapist to further impact your situation by causing you to end the live of an innocent child.”

Downplaying the reality of pregnancy: “A normal pregnancy lasts only 40 weeks, a relatively short amount of time in your whole life.”

Shaming women considering abortion: “If you get the abortion, you will always remind him of something he isn’t proud of.”

Crisis Pregnancy Centers lie to women. They intimidate women. They manipulate women. No candidate should support their work–no matter what they believe about choice.

That’s right, encouraging women to seek options other than abortion is manipulative and intimidating.  But when Planned Parenthood tells women that abortion is their best or only option, that’s just fine.   The best part of this post, though, was a comment after it:

After reading that huge list of bullshit from the CPC’s website, I quite genuinely feel like crying. It fucking sucks knowing that people that cruel, hateful and emotionally manipulative exist in this world.

Once again, the people at the CPC don’t just have the worst of ideas, they also have the worst of intentions.  I know when I see people volunteering at a crisis pregnancy center, my first thought is “wow, they must really hate women.”

Now, from Pandagon, we have a little bit of commentary on religion:

The patriarchy really needs religion to exist, which is why the term “people of faith” has become synonymous with “fans of an old-fashioned patriarchy” in the media. The motivator of the Bible-thumpers is not so much love of some 2,000-year-old Jewish carpenter living under Roman rule, but the need to have the bitches at home under the thumb, and religion, because of the inarguable irrationality aspect, is the perfect disguise.

Wow.  Just wow.  This is so senselessly provocative I can’t even formulate a response.  Normally, I’d assume that the blogger is just trying to get a rise out of people, but she spends a lot of time criticizing religion (Christianity, specifically), so I think she actually means this.

Anyway, for those conservatives who still  think bipartisanship is a peachy idea, just keep in mind that feminists hate you.  They don’t just disagree with your ideas - they actually think you are evil people for being pro-life or religious.

 

Is abortion a religious issue?

Gary Wills, writing for the LA Times, thinks not.

And frankly, his is one of the most transparently idiotic pro-choice arguments I’ve heard in a long time. And since I read a lot of feminist blogs, that’s really saying something. The man musters a great deal of cherry-picked religious evidence and some arguments by incomplete logic. Wills, a historian at Northwestern University, has the classic tone of an academic who thinks very highly of himself trying to explain to those poor, benighted religious folks how very silly they are.

First, and perhaps most disturbing to me, is this passage:

But is abortion murder? Most people think not. Evangelicals may argue that most people in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons. It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons.

Oh boy, where do I even start? If a fetus is not a person, than what is it? And what standards should be applied to decide what is and what is not a person? A fetus has all of the genetic components of a human person. A fetus has the potential to grow into a human person. Depending on the level of technology available and the age of the fetus, that fetus may be able to survive outside of the womb. Really, the only things that differentiate a fetus from a “person” (as defined by the pro-abortion movement) are size, age, location, and state of dependency. I’ll leave the implications of such distinctions to my readers. He picks up this argument later in his column, attempting to illustrate logical inconsistencies in pro-life rhetoric:

And if one were consistently pro-life, one would have to show moral respect for paramecia, insects, tissue excised during a medical operation, cancer cells, asparagus and so on.

He concedes that evangelical Christians are concerned not with all life, but with human life. But, he says:

The universal mandate to preserve “human life” makes no sense. My hair is human life — it is not canine hair, and it is living. It grows. When it grows too long, I have it cut. Is that aborting human life? The same with my growing human fingernails. An evangelical might respond that my hair does not have the potential to become a person. True. But semen has the potential to become a person, and we do not preserve every bit of semen that is ejaculated but never fertilizes an egg.

This is also a classic rhetorical technique: use your opponent’s weakest argument and twist it into one that you can easily defeat. Then, you get to look smart. The problem with his set up of the argument is that fact that semen doesn’t have the potential to become a human life; only semen and an egg together do, at which point the DNA of the semen/egg combo (also know as a zygote, embryo or fetus, depending on stage of development) is distinct from the DNA of either the individual semen or the individual egg. The crux of the issue, according to Wills, rests not on “whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person, and when it becomes one.” But he ignores what may be the strongest argument we pro-lifers have on our side: that a fetus is, by virtue of its DNA, an individual distinct from its two parents. This, along with the potential to grow into a person (if you don’t recognize the fetus as one already) is what distinguishes a fetus from other forms of human life (Wills’ argument about hair and nails as human life doesn’t hold water in any case, since both are dead cells already).

Wills isn’t terribly good at marshaling evidence to convince his targets. He keeps referring to evangelicals, using the term interchangeably with “abortion opponents,” but much of his evidence comes from a Catholic perspective. Some snippets:

Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past.

Even popes have said that the question of abortion is a matter of natural law, to be decided by natural reason.

I’m not sure you’re going to convince a lot of evangelical Christians by citing the Catholic Church and the Pope. Especially now that the Catholic Church has condemned abortion, making it very much a religious issue for Catholics. By far the most obnoxious “evidence” Wills uses is the following:

The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion is not treated in the Ten Commandments — or anywhere in Jewish Scripture. It is not treated in the Sermon on the Mount — or anywhere in the New Testament. It is not treated in the early creeds. It is not treated in the early ecumenical councils.

The fact that the Bible doesn’t spell it out doesn’t mean that abortion isn’t a religious issue. And while we don’t keep statistics on abortions at the time of the early Christians, it’s probably safe to say that it wasn’t as big an issue then as now. Wills also relies heavily on Thomas Aquinas’ philosophical meanderings on when life begins, a huge mistake when you consider how little was known about conception and genetics at the time Aquinas was writing; scientists and philosophers still believed that sperm contained a tiny little person inside.

I think some of Wills’ logical confusion comes from the fact that he himself isn’t quite sure what argument he’s trying to make, and to whom. Consider: for any particular set of Christians, abortion may not be a matter of established doctrine, but they would be perfectly right to extrapolate from other teachings (thou shall not kill) that abortion is wrong as a moral argument.

Wills has written extensively on Catholicism and Catholic philosophy, so this may be where he is a little confused. For a Catholic, theology is determined by the higher-ups in the Church hierarchy. But for Protestants who reject the Pope’s authority, the whole point is that people other than highly-trained theologians can interpret Scripture. Thus, they don’t need early ecumenical counsels or the tradition of the Church to make a moral or religious argument. Even if Wills were right, and abortion wasn’t a religious/theological issue, it would still be a moral one, and therefore of concern to Christians.

 

Shorter Dana Goldstein: “Why don’t these stupid Republican women agree with me?”

Probably because we think you’re wrong, Dana. No, we haven’t been taken in by saber-rattling male politicians. No, we aren’t self-loathing or confused. We just don’t like your ideas. Is that simple enough for you? Apparently not, because you’ve written two columns now for the American Prospect in which you just don’t get it.

Liberals, especially liberal women, tend to get very confused when confronted with a conservative woman. If you’ve ever wanted to watch someone’s head explode, try walking into your local NOW meeting and saying “I voted for George W. Bush.” I promise you won’t be disappointed.

My first column for the George Street Observer, which unfortunately is not available online, described my experience attending a NOW meeting at C of C undercover and listed just a few of the ways I thought they were wrong. Next week, the NOW president wrote a lengthy Letter to the Editor in which she tried to clear up the misunderstanding. She explained that I probably agreed with her and her cohorts on all of the important things: pay equality, affirmative action, health care access, Euro-style family leave policies, increased minimum wage, “marriage equality” and better part-time jobs.

Nice try. I actually don’t agree with you on any of the above. But this is the typical liberal woman’s response to a conservative woman: “she’s just misguided or confused. I’ll help her understand.” Maybe the reason we disagree is because we understand all too well where the path of bigger government leads.

Back to Dana Goldstein, the catalyst for all of this. In her November 7 column for The American Prospect, she attends National Review’s “The Right Guy” panel at the National Press Club. This panel brought together top women staffers from the various Republican campaigns to discuss why their candidates would be better choices than Hillary Clinton in 2008.

Goldstein falls pretty quickly into being snide about Republican women:

Fred Thompson’s deputy communications director, Karen Hanretty, intoned, “I have yet to meet a woman who wants the federal government to step in and say here’s how you’re going to get your health care.” (Except when it comes to reproductive health care, of course. Then women should be extra grateful for government interference!)

In Goldstein’s mind, this is a contradiction. It’s really not that hard to grasp; I’ll even use short sentences so that no one gets confused. Annual physicals are health care. Cancer treatment is health care. Abortion is not health care. Abortion is the deliberate taking of a human life. At any other stage of development, we call that murder. We don’t want the government rationing our health care. But we do want laws that protect human life.

Hanretty promised that Thompson would “explain” to female voters that America is facing “an enemy who would take rights away from women, who would take rights away from homosexuals.” Never mind that the GOP has done far more than “the terrorists” to deny Americans reproductive freedom and marriage equality.

Dana, when we talk about rights, we aren’t talking about a right to abortion as conjured from Constitutional thin air by activist judges. We’re talking about the right to report a rape in criminal court and not be stoned to death if our story isn’t corroborated by a male witness, the right to go to school, the right to drive a car, the right to hold public office, the right to go unveiled in public places, the right to not endure genital mutilation. That’s a difference not just in magnitude but in kind.

The condescension gets even worse in Goldstein’s July article on GOP Moms: Between a Rock and the Hard Right. Here, she covers an event co-hosted by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute (full disclosure: I interned for CBLPI. It was the best summer job ever), which brought Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) to speak at the Conservative Women’s Network luncheon. Goldstein describes a scene in the elevator:

[A] young Heritage staffer tells McMorris Rodgers how happy she is that Republican members of Congress are beginning to doubt the utility of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

The Congresswoman nods and smiles. “That’s what’s important,” she agrees. “Don’t get caught up in, ‘Oh, health insurance for children.’ Step back and see the larger picture.”

It’s moments like these when I want to look at conservatives and say, “Really? I mean really?”

Yes, Dana, really. We don’t think it is the appropriate role of government to hand out middle class entitlements. We don’t want to endanger the quality of health care by creeping slowly towards socialized medicine. We understand the economics behind it. Really.

It’s mind-boggling, of course, how McMorris Rodgers can advocate for women’s economic mobility even as she opposes programs, like S-CHIP, that help mothers pay for their kids’ medical needs.

Yours must be a fairly easy mind to boggle, Dana. S-CHIP has nothing to do with women’s economic mobility and everything to do with increasing the size and scope of government.

There is a pernicious tendency in Democratic circles to equate women’s needs with bigger government. Women need more of this handout and that program. How will they function/advance/survive/flourish if Democrats don’t sweep in with ever-greater generosity? I’ll let Susan B. Anthony answer that one for me:

There is not the woman born who desires to eat the bread if dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for any one who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.

The same principle applies to government - the least feminist act I can think of is to deny that women are capable of acting for themselves and standing tall on their own merit. I doubt early feminists fought against dependence on family members so that the modern Democratic party could entice women into dependency on Uncle Sam.

Goldstein even manages to end on an even dumber note than she started:

As we file out of the auditorium for lunch, I look around me at my conservative peers, just starting their own ambitious political careers. For a second, I feel for them. All women are subject to societal schizophrenia when it comes to balancing work with domesticity, but these girls have it especially tough. The ideological cause to which they’ve dedicated themselves can’t decide what it values most in them, their office hours or their ovaries.

You mean there might be conflicting viewpoints and values inside of a larger movement? Of which movement has this not been true? In any case, our ideological cause doesn’t have to decide, because we can decide for ourselves. Which, if I’m not mistaken, was the entire point of feminism. Save your sympathy, Dana, we don’t need you feeling for us.