For
Cosmopolitan, Jill Filipovic
went out to see what makes anti-abortion "sidewalk counselors" tick. As Amanda Marcotte notes, the answer proves to be
remarkably straightforward.
"Men and women are made different," Father Andrew Beauregard explains on camera while protesting at a clinic, "in that women, as the church teaches, reach their full potential in motherhood." There's a tight if inhumane logic to this thinking: Women exist to give birth. Thus, if a woman is choosing not to give birth, she is not working as she is supposed to. Which means she must be broken and needs fixing. Ergo, "counseling." [...]
"If women want careers and education and everything and they don't want children," one protester named Ruth explains in the video, "what are they doing having sex?" She also told Filipovic that her profession is "having been a mother and a grandmother."[...]
Nostalgia for a time when women were more submissive and stuck to traditional gender roles was a common theme at the Worchester clinic. "That's where equality comes: where the mother stayed home and raised the children in God's light, and the husband worked, and everything was great," protester Fred Delouis told Filipovic. "When I grew up, there were no problems."
What is remarkable about this video is how much it shows that the controversy over abortion—and increasingly over contraception—is not about the complex balancing of women's rights and embryonic life that it's so often regarded as. As these interviews show, the real point of struggle between anti- and pro-choicers is the simple question of who should define a woman's life. Should it be the woman herself? Or traditional "roles" that these protesters cling to? Sadly for women who are just trying to get some reproductive health care, this debate (that is amazingly still ongoing) is happening right in front of the clinic door.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2013—No, food stamps don't cause obesity:
A recent story in the Washington Post provided a look at the cheap food options affordable on a food stamp budget, and the health problems and obesity that diet causes. All well and good, but reporter Eli Saslow's big question was "Has the massive growth of a government feeding program solved a problem, or created one?" The chain of thought that got him to that question:
Hidalgo County has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation ... which has led almost 40 percent of residents to enroll in the food-stamp program . . . which means a widespread reliance on cheap, processed foods ... which results in rates of diabetes and obesity that double the national average ... which fuels the country’s highest per-capita spending on health care. |
This is some messed-up logic. Seriously messed up. Let's do a thought experiment and take food stamps away from poor people who are currently using them to buy cheap, processed foods. Is there a scenario in which those people buy more expensive, healthier food, having lost the benefits that are currently providing much of their food budgets?
The reason people are relying on cheap, processed foods is not that people's food budgets are coming from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—heaven knows it's not like it's a program requirement that benefits be spent on junk food—it's that they are poor. Maybe they live in food deserts. Maybe they don't have the kitchen facilities to keep or cook fresh foods—one woman portrayed in the story doesn't have a fridge. But whatever you can say about the diets of food stamp recipients, poverty, not food stamps, is the starting point.
Tweet of the Day
13 members of the St. Louis Klan without their faces covered. Is your neighbor or co-worker pictured? #HoodsOff
http://t.co/...
— @AnonCopWatch
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show,
Greg Dworkin rounded up election postmortems, tax policy & inequality, Obama's departure from the humility narrative, and
David Jarman's reminder that, "You win elections to enact policy, not the other way around." Plus, a week-long
NatGeo series on the science of "personhood," and Kaci Hickox speaks out.
Armando joins an extensive discussion of CNN's scoop, "How the GOP used Twitter to stretch election laws." Another "Imagine the Outrage if" story, as Orrin Hatch calls progressives "straight old dumb-ass liberals." Is AOL's "Digital Prophet" just a random nut and no one will say it?
High Impact Posts. Top Comments