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Cosmo reaches women

Fifth Circuit Court upholds extensive abortion ban in Texas

Rick Perry lies through his teeth

Jeb Bush on shaming single mothers

Pathetic defense of Bush

Ann Coulter still opposes women’s suffrage

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, a representative from North Carolina’s NARAL will explain what’s going on in their state. Texas gets closer to all but banning abortion and Jeb Bush gets in trouble for his hateful comments from 20 years ago.

People are gearing up for another female-centric election and the fabulous Joanna Coles, the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, made the case that women’s magazines have a crucial role to play.

• Cosmo *

It’s been interesting watching the conservative press freak out about this. It’s so telling that they think that media aimed at older, whiter, more conservative voters can be political, but god forbid you suggest young women have a right to participate in the political process, too.

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Well, horrible news going into the summer. After two years of court battles, the Fifth Circuit Court has upheld [provisions of] a Texas omnibus abortion law that was built to shut down all but 7 or 8 clinics in the state. It’s no big surprise, since the Fifth Circuit Court has been gunning for abortion rights since this all started. The court is extremely conservative, downright wingnutty, and they’ve embraced every bad faith and stupid argument that Texas lawyers have made to defend this law. NPR had a report.

• Texas 1 *

The regulations were carefully crafted by anti-choice organizations to be the sort of thing that slips under the average person’s radar. Most people think abortion is surgery, so the hospital level standards also might sound reasonable. That was clearly the intention, to trick people into thinking this was really about women’s health and not some backdoor attempt to ban abortion. And Rick Perry was holding that line, arguing that legal abortion needed to be all but banned to protect women’s health.

• Texas 2 *

It’s really telling how much anti-choicers hate women, that they not only attack women’s rights but lie like this about it. It’s clear that Rick Perry doesn’t think we deserve honesty or the truth. That’s how much contempt he has for women, that he will lie this easily and smugly, telling us he’s trying to protect us when he’s clearly trying to hurt us. The amount of hate you must have for people not only to attack them like this but then lie about it? It’s truly stunning. Just to drive home what a filthy, despicable, hateful liar he is, this law requires you to have a full anesthesia machine to hand out a pill you take at home. It’s the equivalent of requiring someone to be checked into a hospital to have a filling replaced. At that point, you realize they just don’t want you to have dental health-care access. That Perry has never even bothered to hide that he opposes legal abortion is just the icing on the cake. They should just admit what they’re doing here. The lying about it shows that they know it’s wrong, or else they would be more confident about their beliefs.

The lawyer for the Center for Reproductive Rights made a similar point on NPR.

• Texas 3 *

A lot of anti-choicers, including the one they had to interview for NPR, are claiming women still have access because they can either travel out of state or go to one of the remaining clinics in the state. To give you an idea of what that means, over 73,000 women had an abortion in Texas in 2011. In order for 8 clinics to handle that workload, each would have to do one abortion an hour every hour for every day of the year. So yeah, women don’t have access. But that shows the evil genius of this law. No one actually believes it’s there to protect women’s health. But since it doesn’t close down all the clinics, it allows women, especially middle class and wealthy women, to believe that their access is safe and it’s just other women, poorer women, that are shut out. Anti-choicers are basically positioning abortion as a luxury instead of a right. It’s brilliant marketing, especially in Texas where there’s a lot of classism and racism fueling the politics there. But it’s also a lie. Anti-choicers think all women who have sex for pleasure are sluts and that we all should pay. But they are smart enough to know that message will never sell well, so instead they go with the whole “it’s just those other women who are sluts, your sex life is fine” messaging. Sadly, it may work.

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Interview

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So Jeb Bush’s 1995 book Profiles in Character, a title so stupid you already know this is going to be bad, recommended public shaming as an answer to the supposed problem of single motherhood. Here’s David Pakman reading that section.

• Bush 1 *

Bush went on to praise the Scarlet Letter as a model for what he’s talking about. It’s worth noting that the Scarlet Letter is not a book about unwed motherhood. Hester Pyrnne, who is forced to wear the scarlet A, is married. That’s the problem: She got pregnant without her husband being around, which means she is guilty of adultery. You know, a common sin amongst Republican politicians, but somehow I don’t think Jeb Bush wants to start pinning scarlet As on their shirts. But Bush’s reading comprehension aside, this story is interesting because he also put his money where his mouth is, signing a law when he was Florida governor requiring women who can’t or won’t name the father of their child to publish a detailed account of their sexual history in the newspaper in order to give their child up for adoption. Just as a reminder of how much misogyny lurks in the hearts of anti-choicers. The law, for what it’s worth, was quickly struck down in court.

Republican strategist Cheri Jacobus went on CNN to try to spin this, but ended up sounding like an idiot.

• Bush 2 *

Of course, if you read more of the quote, you’ll see that he basically did just that, praising the institution of the shotgun wedding and arguing that pregnancy, as opposed to love or compatibility, should be what forces people to get married. But it’s worth remembering that the era of the shotgun wedding did not actually lead to stable marriages. A lot of single parents were married at one point but ended up divorced. But our divorce rate is actually going down in this country, in no small part because the shotgun wedding is disappearing as an institution. Making people who aren’t compatible try to live as husband and wife was always a bad idea. A better idea would be to promote birth control and abortion so that people have children when they want to have children. But of course, conservatives don’t want that, because that implies that having sex is okay. And this is about sex, and not about children at all. Which was amply demonstrated by the law requiring women to be publicly humiliated in order to give up a child for adoption, something Jacobus also tried to excuse.

• Bush 3 *

Anti-choicers claim they want kids to be available for adoption, but given a chance to shame women for having sex, they went for it, even though it meant that women would be afraid to give children up for adoption. So how is that pro-child again? But typical: Given the choice between helping children and hurting women, conservatives will take the latter every time. Bush is now claiming his views have “evolved” on this. No surprise there. In the past decade or so, anti-choicers have developed this strategy of pretending they care about women and want to take away our rights for our own good. So admitting you want to publicly shame women for having sex is forbidden now. Even the people who show up at abortion clinics to publicly shame women walking into them claim they are “sidewalk counselors.” It’s all very silly and their basic urge to hurt and shame women hasn’t changed one bit. But the way they portray themselves has gotten a lot more dishonest.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Ann Coulter has another book out edition. And she’s really desperate for attention, so let’s give her some. Here’s Coulter on Gavin McInnes’s show.

• Coulter *

It’s fashionable now to roll your eyes at Coulter, call her a clown and try to ignore her, claiming she’s a troll and only does this for attention. I think that attitude misses the point. Even if liberals all collectively chose to ignore her, she would still sell a lot of books and be a big star on the right. Her opinions, like it or not, influence people. Ignoring her does not change that.