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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll speak to an activist fighting against a personhood amendment in North Dakota. Fox News has been really down on single women voters, and Colorado is facing the third iteration of a personhood amendment ballot initiative.

Stephen Colbert took on #GamerGate last week and did not disappoint, giving Anita Sarkeesian plenty of room to talk about the harassment she has endured. I found this bit to be particularly funny:

• Colbert *

Of course, as I covered on this show, the claim to be standing for ethics in journalism is based on the presumption that it’s unethical, somehow, for game reviewers to share sincerely held opinions on games. Which has no relationship to what we in the real world consider “ethics.”

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Last week, for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, I played a clip of a Fox News host saying that single women shouldn’t sit juries but should instead just be on Tinder or something. Unsurprisingly, the comment got criticized all over the place, both on feminist blogs and in the mainstream media. So much so that the folks at The Five on Fox News felt like they had to respond. Their response, however, was dishonest and condescending, to say the least.

• Fox 1 *

Sadly for them, the tape is readily available for checking. In fact, I still have a clip sitting in a file from last week. I only clipped the relevant part where she is talking about juries, but in context, that all important context, she was saying that single women are bad voters for the same reason that young women are bad at sitting on juries. The context, if anything, made it worse, since it was a lengthy, sexist conversation painting unmarried women as people who are terminally incapable of thinking for themselves.

• Fox 2 *

It’s a comment that has it all. There’s stoking of the sexual insecurities and sexual hysteria in the audience by mentioning Tinder, and of course Match.com for the folks who haven’t heard of Tinder. There’s stoking of resentment of single women for supposedly having it so good while you sit at home living your sad, responsibility-laden married life. Man, if the viewers think marriage is such a raw deal, one wonders why they went with it. There’s holding out marriage as a mechanism for taming women and making them submit to a conservative agenda. Toss in a mention of Lena Dunham, and it would have been a perfect culture warrior moment, sculpted to maximize viewer hatred and resentment of single women for merely existing.

And that was just in the context of that particular segment. When you look at the overall context at Fox News, you realize this wasn’t a one-off, but in fact, they are constantly stirring their audiences up about the supposed single ladies who are supposedly having all this fun while you, the sad Fox viewer, never gets to have any. If you want to talk about context, you have to consider this:

• Fox 3 *

So yeah, we all need to give up on our universal health care because of some urban legend. But this is just part of a larger Fox News push to characterize single women as some kind of layabouts who abuse the system while the poor married people have to pay the bill. Like this.

• Fox 4 *

Another classic. The implicit argument, made mostly to male viewers, is that they are having to support all these women and they’re not even getting sex in return. He even paints your paycheck as some kind of social service being provided, with that “equal pay” swipe. It’s a mentality that assumes the only value women have is sexual and therefore if they get paid to do anything but have sex, it somehow doesn’t count and is a giveaway. Then there’s the swipe against Beyonce, for added race-baiting and, of course, to make Fox viewers think single women are having all this fun they’re missing out on.

While these attacks are designed to flatter both men and married women by suggesting that it’s single women who are ninnies who are too stupid to participate in our political process, if you give it a moment’s thought, it becomes clear these attacks are actually attacks on all women. After all, all married women were single once. The only thing that changes is you have a husband now. The unsavory implication, therefore, is married women can only be trusted because they have a man making their decisions for them. Sure, they may dress it up and say oh it’s about mortgages and children and bills and whatnot, but the fact of the matter is single women also have bills to pay, jobs to go to, and yes, they often have children to care for. The only difference is a man, and at Fox News, that apparently makes all the difference.

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Interview

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North Dakota is not the only state where there’s a personhood amendment on the ballot. In Colorado, anti-choicers have put a personhood amendment on the ballot a third time. It’s been defeated at the polls twice, so antis have changed tactics a little, making it a little more narrow than in the past, by claiming that it would only define a fertilized egg as a “person” in the Colorado criminal code and for the Colorado Wrongful Death Act. And they’re even claiming this time around that it’s for the protection of pregnant women, because it would increase the penalties for assaulting a pregnant woman. But that’s a bunch of balderdash, because pregnant women were already protected, because it’s illegal to assault anyone, pregnant or not. These kinds of laws insult all women by insinuating that an assault against them is somehow less awful if they happen not to be pregnant at the time. It assumes your value as a person is tied up in your ability to have a child, and that you’re not valuable on your own.

Keith Mason of Personhood USA is the man behind most of these personhood amendments, and he is glib and dishonest in his defense of them.

• Colorado 1 *

Basically, the idea is to just keep putting this on the ballot, with slight wording and campaign changes each time, until they trick the voters into passing it. This would take it to the next level. Nathan Woodliff-Stanley of Colorado’s ACLU explained some of the problems with this law.

• Colorado 2 *

Keith also told Politico that he can’t imagine that these laws would be used to ban abortion or prosecute pregnant women because, he claims, our society isn’t like that. But since he’s openly trying to change society, that defense rings hollow. Also, it’s simply not true, because even in Colorado they’ve prosecuted women for giving birth to stillborns. Colorado law professor Aya Gruber called B.S. on this, explaining that if it’s law, then no matter what the supposed intentions were behind it, it can be used to prosecute women for miscarriage.

• Colorado 3 *

On top of banning abortion, outlawing IVF, and making it possible to prosecute women for miscarriage, this law might be used to outlaw the use of the IUD or prosecute women for having them. That’s because many of the supporters of the bill believe that IUDs are basically a form of abortion. They claim, falsely, that IUDs work by making it impossible for fertilized eggs to implant. Now, even if that were true, it still wouldn’t make it abortion since pregnancy doesn’t start until implantation and I can’t believe we’re literally arguing about what is just a small ball of cells anyway. But it isn’t even true, as Dr. Stephanie Teal of the University of Colorado explained to the Rachel Maddow Show.

• Colorado 4 *

If you actually thought that fertilized eggs were people, then this should be a relief to you. Instead, anti-choicers persist in this lie. I’m forced to conclude, then, that the only reason they want to equate the IUD with abortion, against all scientific evidence to the contrary, is that it’s a pretext for banning the IUD, presumably under a personhood amendment. What about the IUD is so offensive to anti-choicers that they hate it above all other forms of contraception, even the pill? Probably because it works, and it works especially well for young women.

• Colorado 5 *

While there’s a lot of complex stuff going on with anti-choicers, at the end of the day, the primary thing that drives the movement is just this fear that young, single women are having sex without having to endure an unwanted childbirth. They dislike modern society where women can have long youthful periods where they date a bunch of different men and concentrate on their careers. Having a baby at a young age is seen as a way to bring that to a halt, by forcing women into shotgun marriages or, in some cases, single motherhood. Whatever it takes to bring an end to youthful carefreeness and career-oriented thinking. And since effective forms of contraception are even more central than abortion to protecting women’s right to choose when to have a baby, of course they’re going to shift to attacks on contraception.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, sexual harassment edition. As I detail in this week’s column for Rewire, mainstream conservatives are starting to sound like fringe MRA-types when they talk about things like street harassment. This one example was particularly silly.

• Limbaugh *

Yes, Rush Limbaugh openly blames not men for cat-calling, but feminists for somehow being unable to single-handedly stop men from cat-calling. His actual argument is that if you can’t fix a problem overnight, then trying to fix it at all somehow causes it. Yeah, that makes no kind of sense.