Let’s stop and think for a minute about what it means that conservative Republicans are being quite open about the fact that they support the Hobby Lobby decision because it will make it harder for women to have “consequence free sex.” I think this really gets to the heart of the problem. In societies where women cannot have consequence free sex, their autonomy is usually restricted by their own families, who may have to bear the burden and responsibility for any children their daughter may produce. But in societies that have easy access to effective birth control, women can delay marriage, pursue careers, achieve financial independence, and forge their own course in life.
If you oppose consequence free sex, you basically oppose female autonomy and equality whether you quite realize this fully or not. And a political party cannot expect this to be popular with the ladies. This is especially true when the party is also opposed to equal pay for equal work, which undermines women’s opportunity to achieve financial independence, and opposes abortion services which help mitigate consequential sex where the consequence is unwanted. In fact, by opposing sex education and the availability of female contraception, the party is promoting unwanted pregnancies (consequential sex) across the board. And they’re doing it in the guise of being anti-abortion. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that increasing the rate of unwanted pregnancies will increase the pool of women seeking to end their pregnancies, which will result in more abortions, not fewer of them.
My main point here is that we need to look at this not from the perspective of whether or not the decision to have an abortion is moral or legal, but from the perspective that Republicans want women to get pregnant if they have sex because that will take away their autonomy and make them reliant on their families again. If they can’t risk pregnancy because of their economic insecurity, they will have to marry to have sexual relations. If they can’t get decent pay in the workplace, they can’t overcome their economic insecurity on their own.
This battle isn’t really over abortion. It’s over female equality. And the Republicans are going to lose.
There’s a simple fix for this (presuming good intentions) – make the father of any child 100% responsible for the child’s support and the support of the child’s mother. It’s essentially child support and alimony even if they were never married. Subsequent mothers could get less depending on the man’s ability to pay (NBA/NHL/MLB players could afford a small village, your average worker less so), but that would put the onus on the woman to know the man well enough to know if he could support her if he gets her pregnant.
Everyone should take responsibility for their choices.
Well Louis, in Oscarville there might just be married women with a ton of kids who want to have sex with their husbands but don’t want to get even more kids. Maybe even one is enough for some or perhaps none. Wouldn’t they also be affected by this law? Can you please tell me what is irresponsible about their behavior? Or do I have to ask his highness the high priest of Rome who pontificates over the four black robed adherents to his book of rules? And then there are the many women who take THE PILL to regulate or alleviate their menstruation. Got it Oscar? What about them too?
It’s the 5 black robed male adherents subject to the high priest of Rome. That’s why we get the 5-4 decisions.
I wouldn’t put it past this Pope to come out and say explicitly that Catholic employers must not impose upon others their religious values regarding contraceptives.
The waves that would create would be very, very entertaining.
He’ll never do that. He’s devious, otherwise he would have never have become the high priest of Rome. His organisation is not open to improvement or change.
Actually, in this case Hobby Lobby only excluded 3 forms of birth control from the items that it covered – there were at least a dozen other items covered – so unless you are saying that the morning after pill and two specific types of IUDs are the only available birth control options then I think married women would have plenty of options – single ones too. Even if that is the case, it’s simply a matter of who pays for it – I don’t believe those items are prohibitively expensive, so we’re not talking access to care, we’re talking principles.
But that’s not what Booman was talking about.
In the words of the Hobby Lobby decision, you’re correct. However, the next day SCOTUS issued a clarification which I covered in my (unread) diary “Those Sneaky Devils.”
Yes, but you were talking about ‘responsibility’. Not principles.
That was regarding my point that men would have to take financial responsibility for creating a life and women would have to take responsibility for making sure that they’re not entering into a sexual context with someone who cannot support her and the child if he gets her pregnant. The implication above was that consequences are bad, and my point is that this is not so.
By the way, what the hell are you talking about? Everyone should take responsibility for their choices? That’s precisely why you use contraception. You choose to have sex, but you don’t choose to have a child, so you choose to use contraception.
Not that there’s any point presuming good intentions, anyway…
I’m referring to Booman’s main point:
My point is that this should not be something that only impacts women, and if it is current so then we should make adjustments to ensure that men who father babies feel the full brunt of the economic impact that they have created, and that this should provide more options for women. In my scenario the man is responsible for the woman’s upkeep even if she has a job, even if she makes more than him. She has options. That’s the point.
How about a simple fix of the government paying for and providing birth control and if necessary abortions?
It’s not who can vote. It’s who goes to the polls.
No, it’s also who can vote. And it’s only a matter of time before Republicans’ efforts and voter suppression and registration purges are aimed at women. In targeted precincts, of course.
There’s already people in Wingnuttistan who call for the 19th Amendment to be repealed. As the Grand Old Patriarchy follows through on the logical implications of these issues and gender gap inevitably grows, I expect there will be lots more of them.
Voter ID laws often make it harder for people who’ve had legal name changes to vote. Legal name changes are an extraordinarily common happening in women’s lives, and a much rare one in men’s lives.
We’re already there.
That’s a fair point.
But even that is only a piece of a larger game. We already have several SCOTUS justices who claim to subscribe to the idea of the original Constitution as some sort of sacred text embalmed in amber, whose intent (as interpreted by them) must never be questioned. They won’t be truly happy until only propertied white men can vote. And even then, no doubt, it’ll only be the right propertied white men.
As Boo has stated many times, these are people who simply don’t believe in democracy. They’ll do whatever they can to eliminate it, while, for political reasons, retaining a few minimal trappings that don’t threaten the power of Real Americans. Which is to say, transnational corporations, and the people who own them. Everybody else, ultimately, is disposable, one class of people at a time.
The impact of GOP-inspired voter restrictions will pale beside the number of eligibles who simply won’t show.
Orders of magnitude differences.
Andrew Sullivan, without a hint of irony:
Empathy, how does it work?
” Why should one group be protected and another left to the tender mercies of discriminating employers?”
I don’t know, Sullivan. Why don’t you tell me?
The man is just oh so shallow. His quipsand quirks and postures are basically a high-class (literally and figuratively) form of dessemblilng.
ummmmmm…..Boo?
“…cannot expect this to be popular with the ladies”
will it be popular with women?
(assuming, of course, it wasn’t sarcasm. It’s getting real hard to tell …)
You seem to think that there is a segment of Republican voters who are not quite aware of what the Party stands for and who would be repelled if they were aware.
That is not true.
What the Party is trying to do is bring out its demotivated voters. It can only do that by going much, much further to the Right than ever before; much further than “the norms of civilized discourse” would once have permitted, or would permit even today, which is why those norms have been undergoing continous and coercive redefinition.
Just as there are 20 or 25 million potential voters who have been sitting home for decades because nothing coherently and unapologetically decent was on offer, there are 20 or 25 million potential voters who have been sitting home for decades because nothing sufficiently sadistic was on offer. The “Tea Party” game is to get them to come out and vote. This strategy cannot succeed completely and all at once, but neither can it fail completely and all at once. It can only be fought kind for kind — and then only to a draw; if voting were compulsory, this would still be the 50/50 nation.
F=MA, not just in physics.
Minorities of committed, enraged people roll apathetic and detached minorities all the time in politics.
The GOP are trying to keep up with a declining M by increasing A by more than the decline in M.
While we’re making tenuous analogies to Newtonian physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The rage isn’t exactly flowing one way here.
Tell me that after we see the exit polls in November.
We’ll see. All the people who are dismissing the importance of the decision and chiding the Democrats for making a political issue of it suggests otherwise to me.
Financial guru told Chuck Todd this morning that what the economy really needs is for the younger set to start having babies cos there’s no boost to the economy like more babies!
Oh now I understand…HobbyLobby decision was really at the forefront of the new GOP economic plan! Babies, more babies!
Good God, and I was just wondering if there’s anybody who actually thinks that the world is underpopulated at this point.
It’s white babies that the anxiety is about.
Chuck Todd shows his complete and absolute ignorance of anything related to economics. Nothing stimulates an economy like having free land and unlimited nonrepayable capital as well. Maybe Chuck show ask why the current level of baby production is not stimulating the economy. It isn’t a bootie shortage.
Well of course Chuck didn’t follow up with a question about whether the guru was referring to white babies.
Kind of where the argument falls apart for a consequential GOP thinker, eh? Forced motherhood under GOP terms doesn’t translate into Rep votes on even a good day.
As long as we have positive population growth in Southeast Asia and Africa we don’t have to worry about running out of human beings anytime soon.
Alternatively, if the only acceptable new humans are those of European descent, just wait about 10 or so more years. Shit is || close from hitting the fan in the EU. If they don’t pull their heads out of their asses it’ll ‘solve’ the problem the whites here think they have. … this is assuming that the United States remains a generically attractive place for OECD citizens to emigrate to. But conservatives are so blitheringly incompetent that they’ll mostly assuredly bungle Operation: Eurodude.
Whether the Republicans are going to lose depends on how many misogynists remain in the Democratic Party and on whether Democrats can convince
womennon-misogynists to turn out in large numbers in a mid-term election across gerrymandered geographical districts.There are a number of Democratic base constituencies that are conflicted (the result to watch are how much) on the issue of the role of women. And part of that conflict has to do with various forms of disempowerment of men in those constituencies. Which is why the misogynist bigots of right-wing radio play up the anti-male line so much–it seems to have suckered the Allen Wests and Herman Cains of this world.
But I’m thinking that a substantial portion of men in these constituencies who would otherwise be of the “I am the law in my household” persuasion will stand by their women against the five old white Catholic guys. November will tell whether the Supremes have whacked the hornets nest here.
After forty years of trying, they’ve just never figured out how to enact free birth control and mandatory abortions for women of color and a prohibition of both for white women.
They had to make that shift in 1863. Yep, still not accomplished. The contradiction at the heart of misogyny. Feminists were writing about it back in 1968. It’s why Rush is still unmarried. Or about to be again. Or something.
Limbaugh (Sex Tourist – FL) probably doesn’t feel like going through the trouble of going all the way to Aentral and Aouth America in order to have sex with children, so he’s just settling for a diversion here at home.
I wouldn’t put too much thought into it. It’s disgusting.
It’s also worth noting that the whole concept of consequential or consequence free sex is 100% strictly, purely, and entirely religious in nature. Which would make any public policy based in it a flagrant violation of the establishment clause.
There are so many ways to be offended by this decision, but one of the worst for me is how it tramples on the religious freedom of Hobby Lobby’s employees. They’re just women, of course, and they aren’t even rich, but the First Amendment doesn’t put any qualifications on the free exercise clause.
They hate us. They truly hate us.
I have been feeling inexplicably sad since the Hobby Lobby ruling came out. I wasn’t able to articulate just why this felt worse than all of the other hateful actions they’ve taken against women in the past few years.
Then I read this comment by the Conster at Balloon Juice, and she said it for me:
She is definitely not the only one.
We feminist “cynics” of a certain age have been trying for 35 years to explain what each and every attack on women’s full autonomy wrt to reproduction means about where this country is headed. We understood that reproductive autonomy was essential to full autonomy and it would take a couple of generations after the former for the latter to be integrated in the culture. Unfortunately, that the chipping away at that first piece began as soon as it was almost put in place. The Hyde Amendment specifically directed at the poor.
The workplace overt sexism in the late seventies/early eighties was far easier for me to constructively deal with than the late nineties/oughts covert sexism. There were humorous moments within the former, but the latter was mostly creepy.
For me, this time it feels different. Very different.
It’s not some crazy, rabid republican politicians. It’s the Supreme Court that is telling us that all women in the United States are second class citizens, that we have no agency, that the head of some corporation has a say in our private lives and our medical care.
The Supreme Court has clearly gone off the rails, and they are the top of the food chain, which is why, I guess, this feels so hopeless.
Remember when Mitt Romney said on the campaign trail that “no one’s trying to take contraception away from women- that’s ridiculous”, even though The Lying Mittster had publicly supported an Amendment to a Bill in the 2012 Congress which would have done almost exactly what the SCOTUS did this week?
Good times.
I agree. And the permanence of that decision weighs heavily. Even though it is based on statutory construction and can be reversed by congress, we know it won’t be anytime soon because of the gerrymandering of the house that took place in 2010 unless there is an uprising that I can’t foresee.
And it was so blatant in the decision what little value they placed on women’s reproductive health even though they found a legitimate governmental interest.
I have been angry since Monday even though I was expecting this decision. It has been so deflating. It feels like a small vocal minority is winning and we are powerless.
Different? Or closer?
SCOTUS is but one branch of our federal government. Congress and the executive branch have been whittling away at reproductive freedom for certain classes of women for decades. The Hobby Lobby et al case merely expanded on the type of employer that could opt out of ACA contraception mandate under a religious conscience clause.
A poetic reminder:
Poor women mattered as much to me in 1976 as those employed by religious organizations and “closely held” corporations owned by a RWNJ does today. A shame all women didn’t feel the same over the decades and made sure this day never came.
“If you oppose consequence free sex…”
Make that “consequence free LADY sex…” because man-sluts are most certainly A-OK with these folks.
More than A-OK. Although to simplify their lives, they would appreciate tattoos on women identifying themselves as either a madonna or a whore.
Whoa, spin doctor.
You are, of course, deliberately ignoring the shotgun and its evident meaning.