April 2008 – Page 2

More About the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints

FLDS founding patriarch Rulon Jeffs with his last two wives — sisters Edna and Mary Fischer — on their wedding day. He received the pair as a 90th birthday present.

The recent raid on a fundamentalist Mormon sect in Texas has been all over the news, and it’s a tragedy from all angles — sad that it happened in the first place, sad that there are hundreds of children with no place to go, sad that only the women and girls are having their faces shown on TV while the men who exploited them maintain some privacy. But as Sara Robinson points out, there’s a lot more to the story than just the headlines about polygamy — this is about a right-wing cult’s ability to completely separate itself from the rule of law and the protections and oversights that our society is supposed to afford all its citizens.

The FLDS had its own hospitals, which it used as tools of social control:

FLDS communities put a priority on providing as much health care inside the community as possible, so they’re not dependent on outside medical professionals. (To this end, pregnant mothers have often been sent to Hildale or Bountiful in their last months, so they can be attended by the FLDS midwives there.) Hildale/Colorado City has its own hospital — built partly with public funds — that has employed only doctors and nurses who have pledged their first loyalty to the Prophet.

As a result, the group’s women and children get much of their primary care from people who feel no accountability to established medical standards of practice, state record-keeping requirements, or any of the existing mandated reporter laws. (Most people in these communities have no idea these laws even exist.) The spotty record-keeping that results is why the state of Texas has made the wise decision to do DNA testing on all the kids: it cannot be taken for granted that their birth certificates are accurate (or, in some places, exist at all).

The FLDS has also co-opted mental health services into another form of wife abuse. In Hildale/Colorado City, FLDS doctors have proven quite willing to declare unhappy women crazy. Daphne Bramham found that up to a third of FLDS women are on anti-depressants; and that women who are express acute dissatisfaction with the life have often been committed to mental hospitals in Arizona by the community’s doctors. According to Bramham, the fear of being labeled insane and shut away in an institution is one of the most potent threats the community has used to keep women in their place.

And their own police and court system:

Much of the power of the prophets has been drawn from the fact that they historically controlled both the cops and the courts that served the Hildale/Colorado City area. Though these were officially chartered law enforcement agencies and nominally public courts, they weren’t concerned with civil law. Instead, their task was to enforce the law according to the FLDS and its Prophet. The people in these communities had no effective recourse to the laws the rest of us live under. They could be arrested, fined, jailed, and have their property seized by nominally “official” cops and courts, acting under full authority of civil government, for violating church laws.

And women who tried to escape were dragged right back to their families, or to the hospital for a mental health examination.

There’s not even oversight for the dead:

These communities also bury their own dead (and at least one has its own crematorium), which opens the way to record-keeping anomalies with death certificates — and ensures that no questions will ever be asked, and no autopsies will ever be performed. Given the genetic instability and volatile control issues within this group, it may not be wise for them to have the means to dispose of dead bodies without official oversight. We need to be asking questions about who’s in their cemeteries and crematoria, how they got there, and what kinds of records are being kept.

Lots of disturbing stuff. Read it all.

Anti-Choicers: Punishing Women with Non-Consensual Invasive Medical Procedures

Anti-choicers in Oklahoma again demonstrate how much they care about women: So much that if women want to terminate a pregnancy, they’ll be forced to undergo an ultrasound, whether they consent or not. Making women undergo an unnecessary medical procedure against their will is bad enough — especially when medical professionals do not recommend unnecessary ultrasounds, and when ultrasounds are expensive and add significant and totally unnecessary costs to the abortion. But the Oklahoma law is even worse:

Under the guise of obtaining informed patient consent, this new law requires doctors to withhold pregnancy termination until an ultrasound is performed. The law states that either an abdominal or vaginal ultrasound, whichever gives the best image of the fetus, must be done. Neither the patient nor the doctor can decide which type of ultrasound to use, and the patient cannot opt out of the ultrasound and still have the procedure. In effect, then, the legislature has mandated that a woman have an instrument placed in her vagina for no medical benefit. The law makes no exception for victims of rape and incest.

Emphasis mine.

Nobody should be forced to undergo a medical procedure against their will. Nobody should have to undergo an invasive, expensive, non-consensual and wholly unnecessary procedure as a prerequisite for another procedure. No right-thinking person should promote a law that requires doctors to penetrate a woman’s vagina with a medical instrument against her will.

It’s disgusting. And I’m trying not to sound hyperbolic here, but it’s awfully close to sexual assault.

It’s not surprising, though. Anti-choicers are willing to do anything — even make women suffer through invasive, sometimes painful procedures (as anyone who has had a vaginal ultrasound can attest, they are not pleasant) — to punish women. It’s not about “life,” and it’s not about saving babies. It is about controlling, punishing and doing harm to women who make unapproved sexual choices.

Speaking of Speaking For Herself

Once upon a time I wrote about this woman, who fought back. Inevitably, some guy showed up to defame her and defend her oppressors. Time passed and the comments closed. But last night, she apparently found what was said about her, found another thread to put in a comment on, and spoke for herself.

Speak For Yourself

Some of you know me from the comments, and from my past guest spots here. I’ll be around to fill in for a couple of weeks. I’m not big on introductions.

Back when the Spitzer story broke, there were posts (notably this one) here and a lot of discussion about sex work. Whenever that happens, someone reminds us (err … I mean “me”) that, whatever the rest of us have to say about sex work, sex workers can and do speak for themselves. Renegade Evolution, the last link and no stranger to Feministe’s comment threads, is one, and her blog links more. Lately, I have been reading another.

Those of you who read certain blogs by women of color, Sudy’s for example or BlackAmazon’s, may have run across Joan Kelly in the comments or even visited her blog. She does the kind of writing that there isn’t space for anywhere else but blogs; she lays out long-form personal ruminations and self-exploration. Lots of people do that, and not all of them well.

(As an aside, BA’s blog is now apparently friendlocked in the wake of the dual Marcotte controversies and dual Seal Press controversies; a sad loss for those of us who had a lot to learn from her. Sudy’s is still up and her Saturday post in particular requires readers to employ real intellectual chops. I recommend reading it and ruminating.)

I first saw Joan comment on Feministing, a year or more ago, and I thought, “it can’t be that Joan Kelly.” But it was: the former professional submissive Marnie, already a published memoirist. The book focuses on her work in the pro BSDM scene and skews heavily positive. On her blog, she deals with class issues and and race and racism and with white privilege a lot, and links WOC blogs heavily. She also deals both with sex work and with BDSM, but she is much more critical. Including sometimes pretty self-critical.

(That’s an endorsement of her writing ability, her intelligence and her willingness to dig into issues, though certainly not agreement with everything she says.)

I’m always impressed with bloggers who are willing to dig both hands into deeply personal stuff; as Jill posted about recently, it’s hard to do. Carol Hanisch recently reminded all of us, 38 years after the original was published, what she meant by “the personal is political.” And reading Hanisch’s new intro has reminded me that women’s stories about their lives, about the “personal” misogyny and indignities of patriarchy, should not be dismissed as “personal,” that in sharing them the pattern emerges and the structural nature of these dynamics is laid bare — to quote Hanisch, “women are messed over, not messed up.” Women who share their deeply personal stories do a service of inestimable value to other women and to male allies. Joan did that this month, posting frankly about her past experience being raped by a coworker and sometime lover. It was one of those posts that I expect lots of folks would write and erase instead of posting. But she didn’t. She put it up.

In Trying To Show How Silly Anti-Racist Liberals Are, Racists Assholes Again Prove Themselves To Be Racist Assholes

Jeff Goldstein may have outdone himself with this one. He describes black men assaulting and gang-banging a hot white chick in order to get everyone riled up about how stupid feminists who discuss “white privilege” are — as in, stupid white chicks feel so guilty about their white privilege, they’ll get wasted and pass out so that animalistic black men can rape them. It’s a great way to show that lefties are overly-sensitive about this stuff, it really is. And remember, kids: Rape is always funny! Especially when you can use it to simultaneously tap into peoples’ fears about over-sexed black guys who are going to violate pretty white things.

Yes, I am a humorless feminist about this one. Fuck you, Jeff. But thanks for proving the point that the people who resist concepts like racism and privilege are often the ones with the most fucked-up racial issues.

Prediction: Next, I’m going to be described as “the racist one” for pointing out that Jeff played on long-established racist stereotypes of black men. Because surely, Jeff and his commentariat are colorblind, and it’s those of us who notice these things who are the people who must really think black men are the over-sexed animals.

Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

What have you been writing about this week? Leave your links to specific posts, and a short description, in the comments.

On Those Pictures and On Privilege

It’s been said a lot of times over now, but I’ll add my voice to the chorus: This is fucked.

Those images are tremendously racist — it’s not that they might be interpreted as racist or that they’re ironic and contributing something to the text. They’re just flat-out racist. They are everything Holly said. So I’m really glad to see that Amanda has apologized, and that Seal Press will be pulling the images from future copies and attending a training on racism. It doesn’t un-do what’s been done, but it is a really good first step, and I’m really glad that Amanda and Seal stepped up on this one.

I read It’s a Jungle Out There. And it’s not that I didn’t notice the images were racist — it’s that I didn’t bother to look at the images. It’s not that I don’t understand why images of white women kicking dark-skinned natives are problematic. It’s that I was a sloppy reader who didn’t check out the pictures, even though they’re part of the book and I should have. My not looking at the pictures is part of the problem. Obviously I saw the pictures, because I had to turn the page. If I had taken two seconds to look at them, I would have been pretty pissed. But I didn’t — because, as a white girl, there’s nothing about “jungle theme” that puts me on notice. There’s nothing in my experience that makes me take notice and actually look when I glance past a retro jungle cartoon. That is privilege. I failed to check mine. I failed in a lot of ways.

This is a Feminist Issue Too

Sean Bell

It’s been a year and a half since Sean Bell and his two friends were shot 26 times by five NYPD officers. Bell was to be married later that day. He and his friends (who both survived) were unarmed. It seems likely that they didn’t even realize they were being confronted by plainclothes police officers, as opposed to being carjacked at gunpoint.

This morning, all of the police officers got off scot-free. They didn’t even receive a token “reckless endangerment” conviction, perhaps because the presiding judge was of the opinion that “Carelessness is not a crime.” Really? Somehow I thought that’s what reckless endangerment and manslaughter charges were all about. I guess police can’t commit those crimes. If shooting 31 times — including pausing to reload — into a car full of unarmed men doesn’t qualify, I’m not sure what does.

There was no jury, just the judge, who acquitted the three cops on the grounds of faulty prosecution.

Justice Arthur Cooperman said he found problems with the prosecution’s case. He said some prosecution witnesses contradicted themselves, and he cited prior convictions and incarcerations of witnesses.

He also cited the demeanor of some witnesses on the stand.

In other words, how dare you bring witnesses to testify against police officers who have run afoul of the criminal justice system before? They’re too sketchy to be in my courtroom. Seriously… isn’t this the crux of the problem? A blatant example of who is listened to in our courts and who gets the shaft? This is exactly why it’s horrifyingly unsurprising that cops walk.

I Guess It’s a Jungle in Here Too, Huh?

You know, the jungle. Where the savage brown people and ferocious animals are defeated by heroic white folks:

It’s a Jungle Out There Chapter 8 Illustration

Jill is writing her own follow-up post about this subject, but I feel so nauseous and sleepless about this whole thing that I felt the need to weigh in as well. I felt the need to post these pages, which I saw in person earlier tonight at a bookstore. The images were scanned by Wolfa and posted by Ico after being poitned out by Radfem. These pages are chapter headers from It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, published by Seal Press and written by Amanda Marcotte.

More than 20 years ago, I made my very first contributions to feminist writing in a book that was published by Seal Press. This might be a little surprising given that I’m in my early 30s. But at the time, I spoke better English than the editor and translator of that anthology of fiction by women authors: my mother, a Japanese immigrant and a lifelong feminist. She grew up in a city that was devastated by American bombs when she was a young girl, and then run by American soldiers. When she got older, she attended the first women’s college in Japan, and eventually immigrated here, although she never naturalized; she couldn’t stomach the “swear to defend and bear arms” loyalty oath. In the early 80s, Seal started publishing her collections of translated stories, fiction by Japanese women writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before the war. I was a little too young to help out with the first book, but as I got older she’d ask for my help with editing and choice of words more and more. I was so proud to be helping out.

Today I don’t know where that pride has gone.

Sexual Violence in the Congo

A few great pieces. First, Mark Goldberg speaks with filmmaker Lisa Jackson, who recently released the documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo:

Stephen Lewis, the co-director of AIDS-Free World, has another must-read piece up in The Nation — it’s the transcript of the remarks he gave on V-Day in New Orleans. (Also at AlterNet).

Women in the Congo are also speaking out. Rural women have started radio shows to tell their stories, disseminate information and connect with others.

We posted about this a while back, but don’t forget to hold the corporate rapists accountable as well.

And a reminder that this is not a new issue: A Ms. Magazine article about rape in the Congo from 2005.