Hey, look! More depressing news coming out of my home state!

Less than three months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ban on a controversial late-term abortion procedure, a Cincinnati Republican has reintroduced legislation to outlaw all abortions in Ohio. Rep. Tom Brinkman Jr. hopes his bill will become the vehicle for overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which legalized abortion.

I didn’t know much about this guy prior to these events, as he’s not my representative– he covers the eastern segments of Cincinnati, such as Hyde Park, Mt. Lookout, and Mt. Washington. However, a quick skim of his campaign website makes a strong case in my mind for him being an asshole.

This is, of course, not the first time he’s tried this; in 2005, another bill banning all abortion in Ohio was introduced by the same legislator. Luckily, it didn’t pass; unfortunately, another anti-abortion bill introduced around the same time did, and was signed into law by the outgoing Republican governor only a few weeks before our current Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, took office. As a result, “it is the public policy of the state of Ohio to prefer childbirth over abortion to the extent that is constitutionally permissible”, and “None of the funds appropriated to administer [health assistance for poor Ohioans] shall be used to counsel or refer for abortion, except in the case of a medical emergency” (HB 239, as sent to the governor and signed into law). In effect, there’s discrimination against allowing poor women in Ohio to have access to a full range of reproductive choices, including abortion, since the procedure is often expensive and can’t be subsidized by any governmental funds below the federal level in Ohio.

Reading the comments on a Cincinnati Enquirer blog post on the subject made me feel vaguely sick. Relatively safe in Oregon, which just passed laws granting domestic partnerships and subsidizes reproductive health care for patients under a certain income level, it’s always a shock when I take a quick glance at what average people in Ohio are saying. There’s so much work to be done in educating people that abortion rights are deeply necessary to offering women free choice in their reproductive health, and with more and more of the people in my generation fleeing the midwest, how are we ever going to manage it?

Time to go write to my state representatives. You should write to yours, too.

I came across this link via Feministing’s Weekly Feminist Reader (a weekly weekend trove of articles and news on feminist [and queer and class and race] issues) and was intrigued:

[Anti-choice protester Joseph Logsdon] will get a chance to prove in court that police violated his rights when they arrested him during a protest outside a Cincinnati abortion clinic.

Ah, the home town. I grew up in Cincinnati, which is considerably more conservative than my current home, Portland (and, as my father likes to say about his own hometown, Dayton OH, “an excellent place to be from“). Still, the article itself didn’t immediately scream “anti-choice bias!” at me. Feministing offered up the link in the following frame:

An anti-choice protester wins his appeal after being arrested outside a clinic. His lawyer said, “It struck a very positive tone for a pro-life protestor [sic]. In most courts around the country, they are treated like they are maniacs.” Gee, wonder why that is?

I don’t disagree with Feministing’s basic point here (at least, not their basic point as I read it)– anti-choice protesters generally support a lunatic platform that is hugely detrimental to women’s health. They linked in their blurb, too, to a recent post on the incredibly creepy memorializing by “pro-life” activists of violence against abortion providers– a connection which is maybe a little alarmist in this guy’s case, but definitely not an unreasonable parallel to draw when discussing the trend in louder and more daring anti-choice protests.

That said, I don’t see the fact that Joseph Logsdon won his appeal as a feminist issue one way or another, except in that we should be celebrating our civil rights.

While his lawyer casts it as a recognition of the sanity of a “pro-life protestor[sic]”, a quick read of the actual article implies instead that the decision just dealt with whether or not Cincinnati police violated the protester’s constitutional rights when they arrested him for trespassing at the clinic. A read-through of the decision itself [PDF download] also inclines me to believe that the court decided rightly in this case, although my opinion is, admittedly, informed by a non-lawyerly understanding of the law.

See, the case isn’t about whether or not anti-choice protesters are nuts. It’s about whether or not the Cincinnati police should have arrested Logsdon for trespassing at the Cincinnati Women’s Services Clinic (side note: this clinic is a scant two miles from where I went to high school), given that they weren’t present when the trespass occurred and (allegedly) ignored the input of witnesses when making the arrest. The case also isn’t a blanket statement of approval for Logsdon, an unqualified “win”: it just says that he should– and will– have the chance to argue his side of the story in court. My resident lawyer not-quite-lawyer says he seems unlikely to win the actual case. Plus, I have to admit here to a certain wariness towards the Cincinnati police when considering whether they might have ignored someone’s civil rights. After all, in 2001 their apparent disregard for a young black man’s rights sparked race riots.

So where does that leave us? In short, I wouldn’t be too quick to say that this decision was a bad thing, let alone a decision that set back women’s rights or supported anti-choice activism. All the decision says is that protesters have civil rights, too, even when they do some stupid things. I can’t disagree with that in good conscience, just as I can’t look too negatively on the ACLU defending the Phelps from a charge of “flag desecration”. The Phelps have an incredibly hateful, vicious, ridiculous message, and we should all wish they’d pick a more decorous way of presenting it, but they still have a constitutional right to say what they do. Likewise, Joseph Logsdon may be protesting in favor of a miserable women’s health policy and a culture of enforced conformity and religious oppression, but he has a right to be treated fairly by the police.

I’m not trying to say Feministing hates the constitution. They don’t. But their presentation of this case is a little misleading, and while I hope Logsdon stops harassing the people at the Cincinnati Women’s Services Clinic, he at least has the right to make his case in court. And that’s the way it should be.

My excellent friend Friar Yid has a terrific skewering of Pat Boone’s latest sexist and moronic column on WorldNetDaily. (I won’t link directly to either of those since I don’t want to be seen raising idiots’ Google rankings—if you care, you can find links and lengthy excerpts on the Friar’s blog.) In a nutshell, the erstwhile rock singer Boone claims that strong women only exist by contrast with men who are weaker than usual:

Consider the women, in our day, who have become the heads of state in India, Pakistan, Israel and Great Britain. Question: Is it likely that these very accomplished and brilliant women would have attained these positions if there had been men in evidence who seemed equally or perhaps even better qualified? … Don’t get all defensive, ladies; hear me out. I’m praising and complimenting you here. Thank God for you!

It wouldn’t be worth commenting on this (except with great humor and brilliance, as is Friar Yid’s wont) except for the fact that lots of people take crap like this seriously and those of us with an ounce of sense are left to flail our arms wildly and wonder: What the hell?

Commence wild arm-flailing on the count of three. Ready? One…

There have been, what appears to be, an influx of ‘security alerts’ at the Claremont Colleges, an increase that seems to be congruent with the recent escalation in threats of violence on campuses nation-wide after last week’s the shootings at Virginia Tech. Although the threats here have been mild – robbery, an attempted break in, grand theft auto, stalking, and a possible attempted abduction – they do garner attention from the students and administrators of a group of colleges that pride themselves on being extremely safe places for to work, study, and live. While Asian American and immigration activists vocalized critiques of the insensitive media reporting about the Virginia Tech Shooter’s race and immigrant status I can’t help but wonder why the Claremont Colleges isn’t engaged in a similar dialogue about race-based discrimination in crime reporting. With the goal of starting a discussion about racial-profiling at the Claremont Colleges, I intend to consider how we might go about identifying this tendency and examining why racial profiling is normalized at the Claremont Colleges

In the past week, three security alerts have gone out across the Claremont Colleges that give descriptions of suspects. The first alert described an incident where a man in a car summoned a student from the sidewalk and made several attempts to coerce her into his car. The suspect was described as “an older male with gray hair and a slightly receding hairline. He was wearing a short-sleeve blue and white striped shirt and a gold signet ring with initials.” The second incident describes an attempted break in to a residence hall. Although the suspect was confronted and claimed that he was “trying to reach his girlfriend,” the only available description of the man is that he is an “African-American male in his late twenties/early thirties.” The third report was for “suspicious behavior,” and describes several men in a car – who appeared to be following a student – simply as “of Hispanic descent.”

The suspect from the first security alert, it is safe to assume, was white, because his racial identity was not deemed to be of importance by either the student who reported the incident or the campus safety officer who took down her report. White privilege, after all, is invisible for a reason. In the second and third reports, how is it that all those involved thought it justified to describe the suspects only in terms of their perceived race? My best guess: Claremont College students (assuming that a student reported these incidents), who are overwhelmingly white, embrace the racist notion that all brown people look the same. Markedly, in the case of the second alert no one can claim that they didn’t get a good look at the suspect. In regards to the third incident, it is important that we examine racialized accusations not as inconsequential crimes, but as physical manifestations of enculturated racial stereotypes. This is not to say that stalking threats do not merit appropriate judicial response; rather, it is crucial, when presented with incidents such as these, that we thoroughly investigate the racist ideological roots at the heart of racial profiling.

In a culture that indoctrinates women (or rather all white people) to fear men of color as violent sexual predators, we create artificial “security alerts” that meaningfully impact the lives of women and men of color. When campus administrators (and society at large) tell women to “Trust [their] instincts, better to be safe than sorry,” without first asking why whites tend to label men of color as ‘suspicious,’ ‘threatening’ or ‘dangerous’, we can’t expect much more than the proliferation of racist ideology, racially-motivated discrimination, and in fact, an overall artificial increase in ‘security alerts.’ This is why our prisons are bursting at the seams with people of color; dominant white society has the ability to label people of color as lazy or troublesome at best and as threatening or violent at worst, without ever investigating the racist foundations of such “instincts”.

None of this is meant to undermine the importance of security alerts to the maintenance of safety at the Claremont Colleges (I myself often wish that safety threats against LGBT populations at the 5C’s were more widely distributed); rather, I hope that we might challenge ourselves and the larger community to investigate the racist underpinnings of crime reporting on our colleges, and its implications for the lives of individuals and anti-racist activism.

So there’s this television show called House. You might have heard of it: FOX medical drama, Hugh Laurie, Tuesday nights at nine. Well two weeks ago, towards the beginning of April, we were treated to a special episode cleverly entitled “Fetal Position” wherein Emma, a pregnant photographer hospitalized with a stroke and other serious symptoms, faced the classic dilemma of a) terminate the pregnancy and save herself or b) risk her life in an attempt to save the baby. She picks b.

“You’ll both die,” Dr. House tells her, but Emma refuses the abortion, even with the prognosis of two days left to live. The rest of the episode is, of course, a scrambling attempt to cure Emma and allow her to keep the baby, wherein we’re treated to touching moments such as empathy from another doctor and the fetus reaching for House’s fingers during one of the surgeries. Awww. Or Ewww depending how you look at things. Miraculously, Emma and her baby both live.

So allow me to pose a riddle:

Q: If “Fetal Position” aired today, how would the moral dilemma be different?

A: Terminating the pregnancy would NOT be an option because abortions this late in the term are now illegal regardless of whether or not the mother’s life is as risk.

The Supreme Court ruled on this ban yesterday. No late term abortions, and no legal exceptions for when the mother’s health is in danger.

It’s possible you didn’t hear about it in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy on Monday (CNN hasn’t even reported on this yet, as far as I know). If anything, the media has so far downplayed the ruling. So if you’re interested in the details, here are a couple of articles I dug up:

• Denying the Right to Choose
• Doctors Weigh Next Move on Legality of Abortion
• Abortion Law is Upheld
(googling “supreme court abortion ban” will inevitably bring up more)

I’m not about to start an abortion debate, but I think this particular issue goes a little beyond whether you do or do not believe a fetus is a life. It’s about the government denying a woman a life-saving procedure.

So what’re we going to do about it?

ETA:  It was brought to my attention that my presentation might be “exaggerating” the ban, as it refer to second/third trimester partial birth abortions–and whether the removal of a fetus through a C-section-like procedure (the issue on House that I mentioned prior) would be okay or not under this ban isn’t totally clear.  The NPR article I linked to above shows a concern from doctors that the actual meaning of “partial birth abortion” (not a medical term) is not as specific as it could be.  So not being a doctor myself, I can’t say for certain that the way that pregnancy would have been terminated would have technically been illegal.  But it certainly raises the issue.

My entire academic career has been spent trying to imagine how feminists, queers, and trannies could embrace fluidity and diversity in a real way – a way that expanded our understanding of identity in a profound and transformational way, that did not simply assimilate differences of race, class, gender, ability, religions (and etc. etc. etc) into a preset category but rather adapted to those differences, shifting from within its liquid center. But to be perfectly honest, I never imagined so extensively as to actually conceive of a way that this would be possible. I’ve never reached the point at which I could believe. I’ve studied the shifts from second-wave to radical third-wave to post-colonial to gay to GBLT to queer to transsexual to transgender . . . and a feminists tossed out women of color and gays, and queers called gays sell-outs for marrying, and transexuals bitched that everyone else has always neglected their issues (all the while they were ignoring communities with much more gender diversity than theirs), I became unable to imagine that genuinely diverse communities could ever coexist and embrace their multiplicity, their variety.

Tonight my youthful exuberance for community was reinstilled at the L.A. Transgender Task Force’s “community dialogs variety show”, entitled “Fully Functional - Variety is a Transgender Disease”. The show, directed by Ryka Aoki de la Cruz, featured the “Fully Functional Players,” Charlene Mackenzie, Shauna Madrigal, Trystan Reese, Alexis Rivera, Skim, Lauren Steely, Jade Ross, Studs Clothing, DJ Trannity, Mr. Tuff N’ Stuff, with art by the renowned Trisha Van Cleef and others.

Besides making me feel hot and bothered, voyaristic, young, old, in love, close to tears, free, and elated, Fully Functional also fulfilled my wildest fantasies (minority identity fantasies). MTF transexuals of all races and ages, studs, femmes, genderqueers, heteros, butches, and entirely unidentifiable individuals all gathered in one room to exchange energy, music, poetry, comedy, dance, fashion, and love for four glorious hours. And on top of that, this diverse crowd made up our community. By the end of the night everyone seemed to know one another: we were all old friends – we had incredibly different lives and experiences, but we shared a deep connection that had been forged in another time and place, and it would remain despite our differences in the present.

It is difficult for me to recall exactly what happened in that space, but the feeling of hope is still with me. What is clear is that in that room no one was connected because we were all trans (or trans-loving), there was something much stronger than that among us. There was a desperation, a sense that many of us had been lost, searching for something; but there was a collective sigh as we realized, that we had finally come home.

http://www.myspace.com/skimmusic
http://www.myspace.com/tribeofthediasporas
http://www.myspace.com/studsclothing
http://www.myspace.com/jaderoxs

Almost every site I know has linked to this news item, but I feel that it’s necessary to do it one more time –

Rest in peace, Molly Ivins. You were a giant among us.

The Quiverfull movement is a small Christian sect which believes in having as many children as possible– that is, using no birth control or methods of family planning. They’ve been covered recently by many excellent blogs, all of whom commented on the disturbing nature of the group’s beliefs and practices.

What I find particularly interesting– and evocative of some of the movement’s disconcerting intentions– are the close similarities between Quiverfull’s stated goals and those of the Augustan marriage legislation of 18 and 17 B.C.E. (the Leges Juliae). While Augustus’ marriage laws are perhaps most famous for his attempt to outlaw adultery (a resounding failure that later forced him to exile his adulterous daughter Julia), they also included the Ius Trium Liberorum, a law that provided special rights and privileges for the parents of more than three children and penalized those who could procreate but were not doing so.

Augustus’ rationale for supporting this legislation, so far as we know, was to increase the falling birth rate in Rome and separate the intermingling social classes by restricting intermarriage. The similarities to Quiverfull are clear– their movement seeks to provide “weapons for the culture wars” in the form of numerous children raised strictly within their ideology, just as Augustus hoped to encourage “traditional values” in Rome by reducing the mixing of social classes. As Amanda at Pandagon aptly points out, Quiverfull carries a strong undertone of race consciousness; Augustus likewise hoped to bolster the native Roman population in the face of a swelling population of foreign freedmen.

The implications for the status of women are, in both cases, also quite worrying. The Quiverfull movement believes in the full submission of women to their fathers until marriage and their husbands afterwards, a regression to social practice common both in the Roman world and earlier. We also know that gaining the ius trium liberorum in Rome didn’t always increase the status of the “honored” woman. Instead, since married women or widows with fewer than three children were punished by the law, having three or more children simply became the expected norm in Augustan and post-Augustan Rome. While Quiverfull adherents are careful to claim that there is no “competition” among themselves to see who can have the largest family, it isn’t difficult to imagine the social problems that might arise for a Quiverfull woman or couple struggling with infertility.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that there is such a correspondence between these two cultures, but there’s some comfort in the fact that the Quiverfull people would likely be disconcerted by the similarities between their movement and Roman legislation. After all, it’s telling that a movement supposedly predicated on the ideals and history of Christianity isn’t substantially different from an ancient movement predicated on the religion and history of pagan Rome. What holds each of these cultures together, modern and ancient, is their attitude towards women as little more than bearers of children, not the sincerity of their different faiths.