“The Politics Of Sex”: The Bad News Is Good News
There was one brief shining moment last week when Mitt Romney appeared to be saying something sensible about sex.
“The idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I’m not going there,” he told reporters.
This was the way Republicans used to talk, oh, about a millennium or so ago. The state legislators wore nice suits and worried about bonded indebtedness and blushed if you said “pelvis.” A woman’s private plumbing? Change the topic, for lord’s sake. Now some of them appear to think about women’s sex lives 24/7, and not in a cheerful, recreational manner.
And it turned out that Romney misspoke. He apparently didn’t realize that the subject he was proposing to steer clear of was a Republican plan to allow employers to refuse to provide health care coverage for contraception if they had moral objections to birth control.
He was definitely going there! Mittworld quickly issued a retraction making it clear that Romney totally supports the idea of getting into questions of contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman. Particularly when it comes to reducing health insurance coverage.
Really, what did you expect? If Romney couldn’t even take a clear stand on Rush Limbaugh’s Slutgate, why would he say anything that forthright unless it was a total error? This is why we can’t get the dog-on-the-car-roof story straightened out. The reporters have their hands full just figuring out Mitt’s position on the biggest controversy of the last month.
We’ve certainly come to a wild and crazy place when it comes to the politics of sex. Perhaps this would be a good time to invest in burqa futures. However, I like to look on the bright side, and I am beginning to think we may actually be turning a corner and actually getting closer to resolving everything.
All of this goes back to the anti-abortion movement, which was very successful for a long time, in large part because it managed to make it appear that the question was whether or not doctors should be allowed to cut up fetuses that were nearly viable outside the womb.
But now we’re fighting about whether poor women in Texas — where more than half the children are born to families whose incomes are low enough to qualify them for Medicaid coverage of the deliveries — should have access to family planning. As Pam Belluck and Emily Ramshaw reported in The Times this week, the right has taken its war against Planned Parenthood to the point where clinics, none of which performed abortions and some of which are not affiliated with Planned Parenthood, are being forced to close for lack of state funds.
Or about whether a woman seeking an abortion should be forced to let a doctor stick a device into her vagina to take pictures of the fetus. The more states attempt to pass these laws, the more people are going to be reminded that most abortions are performed within the first eight weeks of pregnancy, when the embryo in question is less than an inch-and-a-half long.
And the more we argue about contraception, the more people are going to notice that a great many of the folks who are opposed to abortion in general are also opposed to birth control. Some believe that sex, even within marriage, should never be divorced from the possibility of conception. Some believe that most forms of contraception are nothing but perpetual mini-abortions.
Most Americans aren’t in these boats. In fact, they are so completely not in the boats that very, very few Catholic priests attempt to force their parishioners to follow the church’s rules against contraceptives, even as the Catholic bishops are now attempting to torpedo the health care reform law on that very principle.
Every time a state considers a “personhood” amendment that would give a fertilized egg the standing of a human being, outlawing some forms of fertility treatment and common contraceptives, it reinforces the argument that the current abortion debate is actually about theology, not generally held national principles.
And, of course, every time we have one of those exciting discussions about the Limbaugh theory on making women who get health care coverage for contraception broadcast their sex lives on the Internet, the more the Republican Party loses votes, money, sympathy — you name it. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, which last summer found women almost evenly divided on which party should control Congress, now shows that women favor Democrats, 51 percent to 36 percent.
The longer this goes on, the easier it will be to come up with a national consensus about whether women’s reproductive lives are fair game for government intrusion. And, when we do, the politicians will follow along. Instantly. Just watch Mitt Romney.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times Opinion Pages, March 9, 2012
“The Pillbox Primary”: GOP Women Being Pressed Into Service To Do What Their Husbands Cannot
It seems time to declare this election cycle the “pillbox primary,” as every day seems to bring a name, idea or concept about women in America that is so vintage it still smells like the mothballs in your grandmother’s attic.
Forget about sluts, the pill, sluts taking the pill or all-male congressional panels — those offenses are so three days ago. Let’s move on to the image of Ann Romney, Karen Santorum and Callista Gingrich cleaning up after their husbands on Tuesday night.
Ann Romney greeted the crowd in Boston with a genuine smile and an I-get-it introduction for her husband. “Do you know what women care about?” she told the hometown crowd. “Women care about jobs. Women care about the economy. They care about their children, and they care about the debt, and they’re angry.”
Darn right, Ann. Would Mitt mind if we offered you up for the brokered convention?
Or Karen Santorum, who just by standing next to Rick Santorum on stage in Steubenville, Ohio, on Tuesday night told voters there’s more to the man than the caricature he has allowed his image to become. Would a lawyer-turned-neonatal nurse like Karen really marry a caveman in a sweater vest, her smile says. Of course not.
And she’s gone one better in the last week, conducting her first national interviews of the entire campaign season to give voters a better sense of who her husband really is beyond someone who calls college graduates snobs, even though he has a law degree and an MBA.
She also revealed herself to be a keen strategist in her own right, telling CBS’s Jan Crawford that she often weighs in on Santorum’s message and suggested he not get bogged down in the contraception issue, advice he obviously ignored.
“My advice to him was stop answering the question,” she said. “Tell ’em, ‘I’m not going to answer this question. Let me tell you what I know about national security. I know a lot about national security.’ ”
For her part, Callista Gingrich has begun introducing her husband at events and even headlining a few of her own, all with a not-so-subtle message that while Newt has had his problems in the marriage department, now that he’s devoted to a brainy, blonde French horn player, how bad could he be?
Should this former Hill staffer and very poised woman really have to try to make up for Newt’s spotty track record? No, but she’s doing it with a smile on her face anyway.
There is a very June Cleaver feeling to all of this that seems below the women being pressed into service to do what their husbands cannot — come across as trustworthy, relatable and aware that the 21st century started a while ago.
A better strategy for the candidates might be for them to listen to their wives — or say goodbye to the women’s vote in November. (You do know women make up 55 percent of voters, right?)
After polls earlier this year showed women voters drifting away from President Obama, an NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll this week showed Republicans have reversed that trend.
They are now losing ground so fast among women that they will have a hard time making it up in the general election. Women now approve of the job the president is doing 54 percent to 40 percent, while the president leads Romney in a head-to-head match up 55 percent to 37 percent among women.
It’s hard to think that the last month in Republican politics did not have nearly everything to do with that.
No amount of sending Ann, Karen or Callista in front of the cameras will make women forget seeing only men discuss contraception for women, or hearing Rush Limbaugh unleash a sickening perversion against a female law student, only to be greeted by silence on the right.
The Republican candidates can turn the tide by leading their party in a better direction — with policies that strengthen the country, plans to improve the future for children, and a little respect in the form of telling Limbaugh that his instinct to talk about prostitutes while the rest of us were talking about health care and religious liberty is making us all wonder what he does in his free time.
Maybe somewhere out there is a woman who can help him clean up his mess, too.
By: Patricia Murphy, She The People, The Washington Post, March 8, 2012
Tea Party Nation: “We Simply Will Not Accept Mitt Romney
What is it about southerners and Mitt Romney? As a life-long southerner, I can tell you a few things. First, we do not trust Mitt Romney. As one southernism goes, “He is as fake as a three dollar bill.”
Southerners believe in a number of things. First, we believe you are a man or a woman of your word. Want to make a southerner mad? Lie to us. We expect honesty in our dealings. It does not always happen, and southerners are not always paragons of virtue, but we do expect it. Mitt Romney has taken at least two positions on every issue, with the possible exception of how you spell his middle name.
In the South, we are self-reliant. We do not like the government, we do not trust the government, and we do not want the government running our lives. Two years ago, Nashville flooded. We took care of it ourselves. We did not wait for the federal government to come in and rescue us. In fact, Barack Obama has not visited Nashville since the flood. There must be more Democrats in New Jersey where he did visit during flooding last year. That’s OK. We did not need him, nor did we miss him.
In the South, we do cling to our religion and our guns. Romney backed gun control legislation in the past. In the South, gun control means being able to hit your target.
There is a reason why the South is called the Bible belt. Mitt Romney does not understand this. The establishment and the left laughed when tapes of Rick Santorum came out talking about Satan, “the father of lies.” They thought he was speaking another language. In the South, this is what we hear in church every Sunday morning.
The South is conservative. We know conservatives. We do not like Mitt Romney because he is not a conservative. There is simply no way Mitt Romney can win without the South and there is no way he can win the South.
Tennessee is a great example. Mitt Romney spent a lot of money in Tennessee and Rick Santorum spent very little and Santorum decisively defeated Romney. We simply will not accept Mitt Romney. He is not a conservative. And like John McCain in 2008, he will never carry the South.
By: Judson Phillips, Founder, Teaparty Nation; Published in U. S. News and World Report, Debate Club, March 7, 2012
“They Go All Wobbly”: Rush Limbaugh Instills Fear In GOP Candidates
How’s this for political cowardice? Right-wing bloviator Rush Limbaugh launches a vile attack, full of sexual insults and smarmy innuendo, against a young woman whose only offense was to speak her mind. Asked to comment, the leading Republican presidential candidates — who bray constantly about “courage” and “leadership” — run from the bully and hide.
“I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used,” said Mitt Romney. I wonder what language Romney thinks Limbaugh should have used to call Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.”
“He’s being absurd, but that’s, you know, an entertainer can be absurd,” said Rick Santorum. I doubt seriously that Fluke found it entertaining, in an absurdist kind of way, when Limbaugh creepily suggested she and other women post sex videos on the Internet. I hope and trust that Santorum wasn’t entertained, either.
As for Newt Gingrich, the cat got his tongue, and apparently didn’t return it until Limbaugh had already apologized to Fluke for his “insulting word choices.” Gingrich went out on a limb Sunday and called Limbaugh’s apology “appropriate.”
Which it wasn’t, by the way. Limbaugh’s claim that “I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke” is an obvious lie; there’s no impersonal way to call a woman a slut. His abuse of Fluke — who advocated publicly last week that the health insurance she receives through Georgetown, a Catholic university, should be required to cover birth control — was no one-time gaffe. He poured it on, day after day.
And when he decided to back down, Limbaugh apologized only for his choice of words — not for the bitter misogyny he now believes he should have cloaked in prettier language.
Of the GOP candidates, only Ron Paul seemed to notice the insincerity of Limbaugh’s regret. “I don’t think he’s very apologetic,” Paul said. “He’s doing it because some people were taking their advertisements off his program. It was his bottom line he’s concerned about.”
Why will Paul say the obvious while Romney, Santorum and Gingrich are barely willing to clear their throats? Because Paul, who is in this campaign to spread the gospels of libertarianism and Austrian economics, knows he can’t win the Republican nomination. The others, who think they do have a chance to win, are afraid of making Limbaugh into an enemy — or, in Romney’s case, into more of an enemy than he already is.
So let’s get this straight: These guys want us to believe they’re ready to face down Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Eun, the Taliban and what’s left of al-Qaeda. Yet they’re so scared of a talk-radio buffoon that they ignore or excuse an eruption of venom that some of Limbaugh’s advertisers — nine, at last count, have said they would no longer sponsor the show — find inexcusable.
I would have thought that crass political calculation might lead the would-be GOP nominees to the correct position on Limbaugh’s rhetorical depravity. Women constitute a majority of voters. If they merely lean toward the Democrats this fall, as they usually do, Republicans still have a mathematical chance to win the presidency by racking up a big majority among men. But if the GOP is perceived to endorse Limbaugh’s hateful rhetoric about “feminazis” and his stance of male grievance, female voters could turn what looked like a winnable election for Republicans into a debacle.
But Romney, Santorum and Gingrich are so frightened of being labeled insufficiently conservative — in this context, meaning “not nice enough to Rush” — that when given the opportunity to show some backbone, they go all wobbly.
What does this say about these men? To me, it suggests that maybe Romney isn’t as smart and disciplined as he’s said to be. Maybe Santorum isn’t as sincere, compassionate or moralistic as he appears. Maybe Gingrich’s vaunted intellectual courage is afraid of its own shadow.
As it happens, President Obamacalled Fluke last week to express his support. Perhaps, as a father, he imagined how he would feel if one of his daughters were attacked so viciously. Perhaps, as a canny politician, he saw the benefit of denouncing Limbaugh’s caustic caterwauling.
Either way, Republicans spent yet another week talking about contraception. Casey Stengel once said that “most ballgames are lost, not won.” He could have been talking about elections.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 5, 2012
“From Eve To 2012”: What’s Behind The Slut-Shaming
As leading Republicans have been asked about Rush Limbaugh’s typically despicable attacks on Sandra Fluke—the law student who testified before congressional Democrats about the importance of health insurance coverage for contraception—they’ve offered some pretty weak responses. Mitt Romney said that when Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” “it’s not the language I would have used.” Perhaps he meant that he would have called her a “harlot” or a “trollop.” Rick Santorum, whose opposition to contraception is well-established, said that Limbaugh was “being absurd, but that’s, you know—an entertainer can be absurd.” Before we move on to this week’s controversy, it’s important to note just what kind of venomous beliefs this episode has brought to the fore. Republicans are insisting that this isn’t really about contraception, it’s about religious freedom. But for some people, it’s about something much more fundamental: the dire threat of uncontrolled female sexuality.
Limbaugh is indeed an entertainer, and he’s an entertainer who understands his audience very well. Does anyone think that when he called Fluke a “slut” that millions of his listeners didn’t nod in agreement? The real threat, as Limbaugh sees it, the thing that must be shamed and ridiculed, is the idea that a woman might be in control of her own sexuality. As Limbaugh said, “So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex. We want something for it. We want you post the videos online so we can all watch.” In other words, her sexuality is only acceptable if it can be placed in a context where it exists for his pleasure and not hers.
In rushing to Limbaugh’s defense, Bill O’Reilly offered only a slightly different take. “Let me get this straight, Ms. Fluke, and I’m asking this with all due respect,” he said. “You want me to give you my hard-earned money so you can have sex?” Displaying his typical ignorance, O’Reilly, like Limbaugh, is under the impression that this issue is about taxpayer money and not what is being covered by the private insurance that women themselves are paying for. It’s convenient, because that way he can still consider himself involved, and claim the right to withhold his payment. And that way, the decision about whether a woman will have sex, and what will happen to her if she does, still lies in some measure with him.
It’s no wonder that even when a group of conservative state legislators passes a law requiring any woman who wants an abortion to get it only if she’ll submit to a series of humiliations, they usually insert exceptions for rape and incest. If it were about the fetus, it wouldn’t matter how a woman became pregnant. But if she was raped, then she wasn’t committing the violation of willingly having sex, so she need not be punished. So long as her sexuality doesn’t belong to her, she hasn’t fallen.
This is an old story, of course, going all the way back to Eve, through Hester Prynne, and going strong in 2012. So if you thought there weren’t still people, lots of them, who view the idea of a woman controlling her own sexuality with horror and rage, then the last week was a helpful reminder.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 5, 2012
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