feminist blogs

Alabama journalist Gita Smith imagines the Supreme Court oral argument that will take place if the Court accepts a challenge to Alabama’s law banning the sale of vibrating sex toys. The 11th Circuit held in favor of the state, writing that there is no right to sexual privacy in the state. Gun sales? Go for it. Vibrator sales? Too dangerous.

The (ridiculous) Alabama law is similar to a Texas statute that the late, great Molly Ivins took on a few years back. Ivins really nails it. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you not to watch the clip at work.

(via C&L; also at LGM).

To my surprise, my food posts (I am, after all, supposed to be feminist & foodie) have sparked serious controversy ’round these parts. So let’s see what happens today, when we throw religion into the mix.

Interestingly, though, here it is religion that is the issue around which people are converging, or at least a motivating factor for that convergence. Yesterday, the NY Times Dining & Wine section featured an article pithily titled “Of Church & Steak,” which surveyed various religious movements working toward more ethical food production. Movements are emerging among Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, and Muslims that push not only to slaughter animals in the most humane way possible (a focus of the Jewish kashrut laws or Muslim Halal), but also to ensure that the animals live cage free and that the people who care for and slaughter the animals are treated with respect and are paid living wages (not minimum wage). It’s food as social justice.

It’s not that this blending of green/sustainable/humane living and religion is anything new (eco-Kashrut has been around for about 30 years, as the Times notes, and which finds a modern home here). What’s new is the growing popularity of these movements, and their increasing power within their own religions. In Judaism, for example, the Conservative movement (less tied to the texts of Jewish law than Orthodox but more concerned with tradition and law than Reform) is in the process of creating a new kind of Kosher seal that would take into account issues of sustainability, humaneness during life, and treatment of human workers. (Apologies for the focus on Judaism; it’s what I know most about and would welcome perspectives from other religions on comments).

This change is clear both in the growth of interreligious work on ethical meat and in each religion. In the words of the inimitable Joel Salatin, proprietor of Polyface Farms, and a central figure in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, put it well in the Times article:

“Ten years ago most of my farm visitors were earth muffin tree-hugger nirvana cosmic worshipers,” Mr. Salatin said. “And now 80 percent of them are Christian home schoolers.”

I can’t preach from a bully pulpit on this issue — I’m headed to Peter Luger’s tonight, where I doubt they use what I would call ethical and sustainable meat. But for me it’s something to aspire to, for ethical reasons that are both religious and secular.

(also at LGM)

Nothing like a little self-congratulation to get a blogger going in the morning.

Amanda’s got a post up at Pandagon and Offsprung bemoaning the horrendous job the MSM does addressing or qualifying the false claims made by the wingnuts in interviews, op-eds and other appearances. Case in point: An 8/20 article in the Denver Post about a new Planned Parenthood clinic planned for the Denver area.

Amanda points out the most egregious quote, which the article’s author, Karen Augé, leaves flapping in the breeze:

Leslie Hanks, vice president of Colorado Right to Life, said her organization will continue its opposition to Planned Parenthood and likely would fight efforts to build a clinic.

“Let’s face it, they’re in the business to kill babies for profit,” she said. “First and foremost, they get young girls hooked on their birth control pills, which don’t work,” Hanks said.

And then nothing. There is so much wrong with this quote that it’s hard to know where to begin. First, Planned Parenthood does not “kill babies for profit.” If I have to explain why that’s wrong, you’re probably reading the wrong blog. Second, the quote equates birth control pills (BCP) with an addictive drug with no legit purposes. Given that BCP is neither addictive nor useless, it’s a BS move. Third, BCP does work. I can testify to that myself, as can the hundreds of millions of other women around the world who use it. It’s not foolproof, but then again, neither is abstinence, really.

Amanda has some praise for the MSM on this issue, though it’s short-live and tongue in cheek (at least the first sentence):

It’s good that reporters aren’t helping anti-choicers conceal that they are opposed to the prevention of unwanted pregnancies through contraception, which does serious damage to their strange claims that they’d like to reduce the abortion rate. (Note to idiots: You don’t reduce abortions by increasing the main cause of them, unwanted pregnancies. That’s like trying to reduce the auto fatality rate by banning seatbelts.) Still, the fact of the matter is that this he said/she said style of reporting that’s fact-free creates the wrong impression that it’s all just a matter of opinion, and since these ridiculous, fact-free claims are being trotted out in articles from reporters that are supposed to be trustworthy, it’s all too easy for some readers to think there must be some truth to them.

Bloggers aren’t perfect (ahem), but I am sick of all the O’Reilly style invective calling us name-callers and flame throwers (oh the irony). At a time when it has become abundantly clear that the MSM too often leaves behind its mantle as the fourth estate, it’s bloggers who can fill the gaps.

“Fair and balanced” reporting (something I make no claim to provide) is a good thing, but only when it takes form as something other than a place for people to air their opinions unmediated by the journalist.

(Also at LGM)

In Daniel Lazare’s smart and biting review of books about America’s incarceration culture, appearing in last week’s Nation, he highlights an incendiary argument from Marie Gottschalk’s book, The Prison and the Gallows (which I have not yet read but which is on my Amazon wishlist. Hint hint). Here’s Lazare’s take on Gottschalk:

Gottschalk’s assault on ’70s feminism is sure to raise the most eyebrows. She argues that the women’s movement helped facilitate the carceral state by promoting a punitive approach to sexual violence that was unmitigated by any larger political considerations. This single-minded focus led to what The Prison and the Gallows describes as unsavory coalitions with tough-on-crime types. In the State of Washington, women’s groups successfully marketed rape reform as a law-and-order issue so that, when the measure finally passed in 1975, it was “in part by riding on the coattails of a new death penalty statute.”

In California a new rape shield became known as the Robbins Rape Evidence Law, in honor of one of its legislative sponsors, a conservative Republican named Alan Robbins. In pressing for limits on the cross-examination of alleged rape victims, feminists “generally did not consider what effect such measures would have on a defendant’s right to due process,” Gottschalk adds, even though due process at the time was under assault from a growing war on crime. More radical elements, meanwhile, strayed into outright vigilantism. In Berkeley, antirape activists picketed an accused rapist’s home. In East Lansing in 1973, they “reportedly scrawled Rapist on a suspect’s car, spray-painted the word across a front porch and made warning telephone calls late at night.” In Los Angeles, a self-styled “antirape squad” vowed to shave rapists’ heads, cover them with dye and then photograph them for posters reading, This Man Rapes Women. A feminist publication called Aegis ran a notorious cover showing a gun with the warning, “You can’t rape a .38; we will defend ourselves.”

The National Rifle Association was no doubt delighted. Gottschalk contends that such activists wound up “profoundly co-opted,” since “by framing the rape issue around ‘horror stories,’ they fed into the victims’ movement’s compelling image of a society held hostage to a growing number of depraved, marauding criminals.” She notes that feminists threw themselves into the battle for the Violence Against Women Act, which passed in 1994 as part of an omnibus anticrime bill that “allocated nearly $10 billion for new prison construction, expanded the death penalty to cover more than fifty federal crimes, and added a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ provision mandating life imprisonment for federal offenders convicted of three violent offenses.” Yet feminists’ involvement was relatively modest two years later when a few liberals tried to rally opposition to Clinton’s plan to abolish Aid to Families With Dependent Children, which heavily benefited poor women. Like their nineteenth-century forebears, who advocated bringing back the whipping post to deal with wife beaters, late-twentieth-century feminists got more excited about punishment than defending the welfare state.

The trouble for me is this: Gottschalk is probably on to something. Which bothers the prison reformist part of my brain. But the fact that the feminist movement would be criticized for doing its part to protect women’s sexual autonomy also rankles me — men’s sexual power over women, sometimes expressed through rape, is a big part of what the second wave feminist movement was fighting against (and what third- and post-wavers continue to fight). This conflict is perhaps nowhere clearer than in my posts about exonerations: because of the availability of DNA in their cases, the vast majority of those exonerated were wrongly convicted of rape or rape/murder. The fight to hastily “get” alleged rapists and to make examples of them clashes with the desire to ensure that defendants’ due process rights are not infringed.

Prison reform and criminal defense work are not the only areas in which feminists have forged odd alliances in order to facilitate their goals (and in which they have allowed themselves to be co-opted after doing so). Most notoriously, Catharine MacKinnon worked with conservative Christians in her fight to ban pornography. But her alliance came back to bite her: the first books and films confiscated under the Canadian law based on her theories were from gay and lesbian shops.

Most damning to feminists, I think, is the movement’s general passivity (which Lazare notes) when it came to opposing laws that would hurt (predominantly poor and minority) women, like the 1996 Welfare “reform”. It’s not fair to feminism to make generalizations about the movement based on the old trope of the middle class white feminist leader. Feminists were, in 1996, on the whole opposed to the parts of the welfare law that incentivized marriage and allowed further intrusion into women’s private and sexual lives. Still, Gottschalk’s portrayal is not far off: historically, it’s been easier to rally the feminist movement offensively than it has been defensively. Reproductive rights advocacy is a stark exception to this, since we have always been on the defensive. But it’s not an exception that I think we should hold up as a model of effective feminist activism.

What to make of all of this? The tension I feel is a microcosm of the tension in the feminist movement: at what price women’s autonomy? Or at what price a less aggressively carcereal state? I’m not sure. This is uncomfortable and, I think, should remain so. Problematic alliances and mis-steps are part of any political movement. The question is how to resolve a tension that sometimes seems intractable.

(Also at LGM)

Under the headline “White House Acts to Limit Health Plan for Children,” I just read this gem:

The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.

Administration officials outlined the new standards in a letter sent to state health officials on Friday evening, in the middle of a month-long Congressional recess. In interviews, they said the changes were aimed at returning the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.

After learning of the new policy, some state officials said today that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children by imposing standards that could not be met.

So. During a recess, the president acts to prevent implementation of a law that Congress has passed and for which it could likely override what would be a very unpopular veto. Because the Bushies are so afraid (at least ostensibly) of the specter of socialism (so far off at this point that it’s laughable), that they prevent kids (KIDS!) from getting health insurance.

It gets worse. One of the conditions the Bush administration wants to impose is to mandate that states which set their cutoff for SCHIP participation at a level the federal government deems too high (above about $50,000 per year for a family of four) must require a family to be uninsured for a year before the children of that family can benefit from SCHIP. So a kid must be uninsured for a whole year before she or he can be covered by SCHIP. Nevermind what might happen during that year.

Jaw on the ground yet? Mine is. Can I hear it for the so-called champions of a culture of life?

Go read the whole article to find out more about the Bush administration’s vindictiveness.

Hi everyone. I’m bean, formerly of A Bird and a Bottle and now of Lawyers, Guns & Money, where I blog alongside the fabulous Scott Lemieux et al. I’m visiting here this week from NYC while Jill travels beautiful Italy, where I am a third year law student and a reproductive and criminal justice activist and advocate. And with that, I’m going to dive right in.

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It’s time for your weekly installment of Liptak love, wherein I sing the praises of the New York Times’ Adam Liptak and his Monday (Times Select-shielded) criminal justice columns.

Today, Liptak takes on the death penalty. Specifically, he exposes the provision in the recent reauthorization of the PATRIOT (blech) Act that allows the A.G. (Gonzo himself) to decide whether condemned men and women have had adequate legal representation, and that shortens the time period for filing a habeas petition and narrows the factors a court may consider in evaluating that petition.

Liptak makes clear (through the quotes of others, of course) the incoherence of the law:

“After the courts had repeatedly found that the states were not providing competent defense representation in capital cases, Congress decided to solve the problem by the simple device of having the attorney general announce that it did not exist,” said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra who submitted testimony opposing a version of the new law for the American Bar Association in 2005.

“The attorney general can certify that the moon is made of green cheese, but that will neither make it so nor advance scientific knowledge,” Professor Freedman said. “The way to fix capital defense systems is not to deny that they need fixing, but rather to dedicate the needed resources to improving them.”

Death penalty prosecutions in this country take a long, long time. In California, as Liptak notes, executions are virtually at a standstill, with only 13 executions taking place since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. In Texas, on the other hand, the most execution happy state in the nation, 379 people have been put to death since 1974.

The federal government’s desire to speed executions, or “grease the wheels of the machinery of death,” per Liptak, is nothing new. In 1996, Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). AEDPA put in place the federal habeas restrictions on which this new law builds.

Before the 1996 law, death row inmates who filed habeas corpus petitions in federal court succeeded in overturning their convictions or death sentences about 40 percent of the time. According to the study, which looked at the years 2000 through 2006, that number has dropped to 12 percent. And it continues to fall.

The conservative Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals grants habeas petitions in death penalty cases about 2 percent of the time.

Efficiency might be an admirable goal; death penalty litigation is notoriously inefficient with its mandatory appeals and many opportunities for review (again, narrowed by recent laws). In fact, a favorite statistic of anti-execution advocates is that the litigation surrounding a death penalty prosecution together with the execution itself is more expensive than a life sentence. But efficiency cannot come at the cost of accuracy when death is on the line.

(Also at LGM)

Sorry, but that's all I can manage to say after reading this. Seriously, what else can you say? But, a hearty thanks to Twisty for compiling all of this horrifying news and for the brilliant analysis.

And that would be Mandolin's brilliant post at Alas, where she is guest blogging this month. Expanding on Hugo's post from last year, Words are not fists: some thoughts on how men work to defuse feminist anger, Mandolin examines how this observation becomes even more true the less privilege the "attacker" is perceived to have. But I want to take it farther than Hugo does. People don’t just say “

Sorry for the extended absence, kids. Between the beginning of work and my partner’s return from his year in Germany, it’s been a busy few days…

…but the bizarre news just keeps on comin’. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday (via TalkLeft) that Berkeley, that bastion of progressiveness, is struggling under the weight of its homeless problem. The city’s proposed solution? Ban smoking on city streets and then just arrest the homeless for smoking. Because they’re the most likely smokers, of course, and throwing them in jail will get them off the streets. The Chron has more:

As Mayor Tom Bates sees it, the alcoholics, meth addicts and the like who make up a good portion of the homeless population on Shattuck Avenue downtown and Telegraph Avenue on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus “almost always smoke.” And because smoking bans are the hot ticket these days for California cities, why not meld the two as part of a “comprehensive package” for dealing with the street problem that Bates says “has gone over the top”?

In this case, vagrants could be cited for taking a drag on the town’s main drags.

The program will be paid for by raising parking fees by fifty cents per hour around the city.

There are so many things wrong with this program that it’s hard to know where to begin. First, at least in NY, there are lots of people, homeless and homed, who smoke on city streets. Is the ordinance only going to be enforced against the homeless (which would be illegal selective prosecution)? And since when is the best way to reach out to the homeless to punish the behaviors that may have contributed to their predicament in the first place? While the mayor may be correct that many of the Berkeley homeless are meth users or are addicted to alcohol, fining or incarcerating them based on those addictions (and the addiction to nicotine) neither helps solve the level of homelessness nor addresses the cause of homelessness. If the mayor — and the progressive people of Berkeley — are really concerned about decreasing homelessness around their city, maybe they should consider providing support systems for homeless people, including drug treatment, mental health services, and — gasp! — help securing shelter. Laws like the Berkeley law make it even more difficult for the homeless to get off the streets: by ensuring criminal records and preventing access to social services, the city makes it harder for people to obtain and keep jobs.

At least there is one voice of reason in Berkeley. Kriss Worthington, a city Councilman who proposed a law in 2001 that would have prevented cops for ticketing people for sleeping on sidewalks (the law failed of course), recognized that the proposed law would accomplish little:

“My interest is in making things better for the homeless and business,'’ Worthington said. “And none of these things — a bunch of new laws — look like they will do.

You know what I think is bad or business? Having restaurants tell people they can’t step outside to smoke because they might be mistaken for a homeless person and arrested. Sheesh.

(also at AB&B; thanks to Jill for inviting me to guest blog this week.)

It’s ridiculous that this law was (and is) considered “controversial.”

Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell today signed a bill that will require all licensed health care facilities to provide emergency contraception (EC) to victims of rape and other sexual assaults. The law, which will go into effect on October 1st of this year, mandates that healthcare providers offer accurate and objective information about EC and that they provide the drug upon request to any woman who has been assaulted.

Sounds good, right? Women who have been raped or sexually assaulted should not have to carry the child of their attacker against their will. Seems like common sense. Or simple human decency. Especially in a state where up to 40% of sexual assault victims report that they were not offered the drug.

But of course it’s not that simple. The Ms. Feminist Wire explains why:

Out of the state’s 31 hospitals, only the four Catholic hospitals objected to the bill. In order to appease concerns by Catholics who oppose distribution of contraception, the bill allows a third-party provider, such as a rape crisis nurse, to dispense the medicine. Catholic officials, however, are not satisfied with the provision; Archbishop Henry J. Mansell still objects to the distribution of EC on hospital grounds, the Hartford Courant reports.

The reason the church objects? Because, though the law requires a totally superfluous pregnancy test (since EC will not affect an already existing pregnancy), it does not mandate an ovulation test, which Catholic hospitals in the state currently require before dispensing EC.

I really can’t believe we’re still fighting about this. I can’t believe that the science has been twisted so far and that women are hated so much that we would deny rape victims a pill that could — if offered promptly — help prevent an unwanted pregnancy. But I should expect this at this point…it’s just another example of the ironically pro-abortion “pro-life” agenda. Culture of life my ass.

(Also at AB&B)