March 2008 – Page 11

Attacking Native Women’s Rights — And Why “Pro-Life” Democrats Aren’t All They’re Cracked Up To Be

“Pro-life” lawmakers have targeted Native women in their latest anti-choice bill — led this time by prostitute-hiring family warrior David Vitter.

The controversy swirls around a federal law—known as the Hyde amendment—that prohibits abortion coverage under Medicaid, Medicare and Indian Health Service programs. While the Hyde law must be renewed by Congress each year, the Vitter amendment—which the Senate approved on Feb. 26—would apply Hyde’s restrictions permanently to IHS beneficiaries. For that reason, tribal health advocates charge that the Vitter language treads on the sovereignty of Indian communities and places unique constraints on native women.

“It’s a very racist amendment,” said Charon Asetoyer, executive director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center, “[because] it puts another layer of restrictions on the only race of people whose health care is governed primarily by the federal government. All women are subject to the Hyde amendment, so why would they put another set of conditions on us?”

I’m pretty sure she already knows the answer to that: Because Native women are easy targets.

Do read the whole article — it does a great job of detailing why this is important, and explains how Native women are sexually victimized at extremely high rates.

But it’s not only Republicans who are going after Native womens’ rights. Several Democratic senators voted to pass the bill, including Sens. Ken Salazar (Col.), Evan Bayh (Ind.), Robert Byrd (W.Va.), Robert Casey (Pa.), Tim Johnson (S.D.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Pryor (Ark.) and Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.).

If any of those senators represent you, consider writing a letter to let them know that attacking Native womens’ access to health care is not a Democratic value.

Oh, this is painful.

No time to do a real post about this right now, but be sure to check out this chat at the WaPo with Charlotte Allen in which she defends her “bitchez is dumb” op-ed piece.

A taste:

Knoxville, Tenn.: So, um, after skimming your previous responses, apparently you were somewhat serious in the overall point you were making about women’s dumbness. Then my question is this — how can you think this would be funny, when you’re basically regurgitating all the old arguments for women’s inferiority, with very little humorous spin at all? If someone were to write a piece like this about Afridan Americans, do you think they should consider it funny? Even something like this about men — arguably the least repressed group of human beings throughout history — would be in poor taste at best. So what made you think people would take the disparagement of women’s intelligence lightly?

Charlotte Allen: People are always writing pieces just like mine about men. It’s called feminist humor. As for African-Americans, for heaven’s sake! Women aren’t a historically oppressed minority; they’re half the population or more! What–are we women always supposed to portray ourselves as victims of patriarchy? That’s absurd in 2008 when we have every conceivable opportunity.

Virginia Pro-Lifers Work to Increase the Abortion Rate

Good baby:

Bad baby:

“Pro-life” politicians in Virginia are cutting off hundreds of thousands of dollars in preventative services at Planned Parenthood.

The Virginia Senate voted Wednesday to cut off state funding to Planned Parenthood of Virginia because it offers abortions, an action that could endanger hundreds of thousands of dollars in state aid for women’s health-care programs.

The decision, a major setback for the Senate’s new Democratic majority, marks the first time in more than a decade that the Senate has decided against giving state aid to the organization because of its abortion-related activities.

Let’s be clear: Federal aid, and state aid from Virginia, are not paying for abortions. They are paying for pre-natal care, women’s health care, birth control, and sexual health education. Millions of women across the country benefit from those programs — and I’m one of them. I’ve used Planned Parenthood’s health care services in New York and in Washington State for annual exams and birth control when I didn’t have insurance. Without Planned Parenthood, I simply would not have been able to see a women’s health provider. I would not have been able to afford birth control. Planned Parenthood provides crucial services, and it does real damage to all sorts of women (but mostly lower-income and uninsured women) when those services are cut off in the name of “pro-life” politics. It also makes it more difficult for women to take care of the babies they already have when you make it harder for them to prevent pregnancy.

It also jacks up the abortion rate when women don’t have the resources to prevent pregnancy. If you make birth control expensive or inaccessible, it doesn’t mean that people will stop having sex — it just means that they’ll have riskier sex. It means that more women will get pregnant when they don’t want to. And that means that more women will terminate pregnancies.

It’s not rocket science, it’s common sense. And if “pro-life” legislators actually cared about saving fetuses (and born people), they’d be championing Planned Parenthood as the organization that has prevented more abortions in this country than any other. They’d be throwing money toward birth control, sex education, and HIV/AIDS programs.

Instead, they’re cutting them off.

And because they care about children so much, Virginia pro-life Republicans are also trying to cut teachers’ salaries by $227 million.

Thanks to ElleBeMe for the link.

Feministe Feedback: Challenging Sexism in High School

This time around, a high school student writes in with an issue that I imagine is pretty common among women of all ages — dealing with sexism, and especially sexism from other women.

I’m a seventeen year old student at an all girls’ Catholic school. From Feministe I found other blogs; “Feministing”, “Pandagon” and “I Blame the Patriarchy”, and I’ve been reading and thinking these new concepts over. I’ve also tried to share them in my school during discussions in World Issues, English and World History. I usually get shot down pretty hard.

There are girls who I enjoy drinking with or talking with between classes, but in class they will say racist or sexist concepts like “Why don’t they just stop having babies overseas? Are they too dumb to realize they’re ruining the world?” and simply not understand how it’s racist or sexist and just shout “It’s my opinion!” in defense if anyone challenges their ideas. A lot of these girls believe that women are just inherently inferior to men and say things how most women do belong in the kitchen. A few of them have no intention of paying for their own lives and are working on finding a man to get engaged to. It’s so backwards, but it feels like nothing I say can snap them out of it.

How can I educate and inform in an environment hostile to my ideas?

The upside: I was not nearly this smart nor brave nor aware when I was 17. So to the young woman who sent this in: You rock. And while you may feel like your efforts are futile, I’d imagine that the issues you’re raising in class are at least planting seeds in the minds of some of your classmates. Some of the most important feminist lessons I learned were from sitting back and shutting up — or even from arguing and realizing that, in hindsight, I was dead wrong. So my bit of advice would be, don’t be discouraged. Someone is listening. You’re doing good.

But I imagine other readers have better, and more specific, advice. Suggestions from the peanut gallery?

______________________
We’re always soliciting questions for Feministe Feedback. If you have a question you’d like to pose, email us at feministe -at- gmail.com.

Love Feministe? It’s getting even better.

For you.

In our ongoing efforts to improve Feministe and keep content coming, we’re going to be adding a few regular features. The first, as I mentioned in a previous post, is Feministe Feedback — a weekly (or as often as we receive them) question for the peanut gallery about how to deal with various real-life feminist issues. If you have a question for Feministe Feedback, we’d love to hear it — email us at feministe -at- gmail.com.

The second thing is that you can now help us to spread feminist messages ’round the interwebs. Tools like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other content aggregators are great resources for people of all political persuasions to find news, opinion and other information. So we’ve added a “Bookmark” button at the end of all of our posts — just scroll your mouse over it, and you can add Feministe posts to Digg, MySpace, Reddit, Furl, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Facebook and more. You can also add posts to your favorites and your Google bookmarks with one easy click. And, not to be too obnoxiously self-promoting, but we would really love it if you would Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc our posts, and other feminist posts that you like — the more we spread the feminist message the better, right?

Another feature we’re going to be adding is a weekly highlight of a blog we love. We try to link to other blogs as much as possible, but there are a lot of good ones that just don’t get the attention they deserve. So every Wednesday, we’ll be highlighting one of our favorites. (No catchy name for this feature yet, but we’re accepting suggestions). That’ll start today.

Lastly, this isn’t a Feministe thing, but it’s worth mentioning: Feministing has started a meet-up alliance so that feminists across the country can get together in person. It’s a great tool, so check it out.

Further suggestions for how we can improve Feministe are always welcome.

Violence Against Women and Girls in the C.A.R.

via UN Dispatch, some disturbing statistics:

Over 15 per cent of women and girls in the violence-ridden north of the Central African Republic (CAR) are victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said today.

Reports coming in on a weekly basis describe such incidents as two 12-year-old girls being raped while searching for firewood in the bush and a 13-year-old girl assaulted on her way to sell palm oil at a market.

“Sexual violence is a disturbingly common feature of the insecurity in the north of the Central African Republic,” said UN Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes. “We must ensure that those responsible are brought to justice.”

According to some reports, the number of rapes during the 2002-2003 civil war exceeds the number of extra-judicial killings in the same time period. And the plight of women is exacerbated by being displaced:

Over 1,000 rape survivors among 20,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the region have received medical and psychological care, including HIV testing and counselling, in the past six months from aid groups.

…and John McCain is lame.

His speech amounts to, “We’re the best choice, given what the Democrats are offering.” (He possibly said that verbatim). That’s a real winning slogan, John. “We’re not as bad as them” always plays well.

Plus low taxes blah blah I hate big government blah blah Islam is teh suck blah blah AMERICA RULEZ. If you missed his speech, that’s the redux.

I’ve gotta say, he’s lucky he’s a white dude. This shit wouldn’t fly otherwise, and that’s the only thing keeping his boring ass viable against Obama or Clinton.

Shortly after sitting down, an older white man sat in the seat next to mine. He then proceeded to spread his legs wide open as if, to quote a wise person I know, “he thought he had balls the size of pumpkins.” In response to the uninvited pressing, I requested room for my legs. The man then proceeded to imperiously point his finger to the floor to emphasize that his feet were within the boundary of his seats. He never addressed the fact that his legs were spread beyond them so as to invade my space and press up against my body. Instead, he said to me, “You’re a big girl.” Talking on my cell phone, I interrupted my conversation to calmly tell the man “Don’t fucking talk to me that way.”

With his right hand, the man reached across himself to grab my left arm. With my arm in his grip, he looked me in the eyes through his glasses and replied, “I’m going to slap you in your mouth.” I freed myself from him and then stood up.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Month: March 2008