It’s Not Conservative Logic, It’s Male Supremacy

By Jacqueline S. Homan, author of Classism For Dimwits and Divine: Right the Truth is a Lie

 

People are asking why the medical community has been silent in the wake of all the punitive policies of mandatory ultrasound laws, waiting periods, and other woman-hating laws that are “forcing” doctors to withhold vital information from pregnant patients that may influence their decision to get an abortion or even request tubal ligation before any unwanted pregnancies occur. None of this cultural apathy and cruelty towards women and girls occurs in a vacuum, or happens in a society where most men are “good.” Let us remember that the majority of doctors — members of one of the most privileged groups of “professionals” who are above reproach because the paternalistic and patriarchal medical establishment is self-policing — support Mitt Romney. And by default, that means they also support the rest of the Congressional poster boys for the right-wing’s pro-forced birth/rapists’ rights bowel movement.

It’s not only because the members of this privileged, male-dominated profession (who are supposed to be “ethical”) care more about buying their second million-dollar home, their yachts, their Mercedez Benz, and their country club memberships than poor and uninsured women having any access to health care; it’s also because they care more about their own comforts, luxuries and privileges than they do about the basic human rights of women and girls — namely, the basic human rights to bodily autonomy and bodily integrity which is the first pillar of bioethics.

And it’s no secret that misogynistic, patriarchal men have the support of cruel, selfish women who have sold their souls — those willing handmaids of the patriarchy to do their dirty work for them, who are eager to throw their least fortunate sisters and our daughters under the bus in exchange for some temporary and transitory privileges and power under patriarchy. Hence, the “honorary men” who have everything but the penis like Kathleen Passidomo, the Florida lawmaker who referred to 11 year old rape victims as “prostitutes.”

The male-centric medical profession has a long, sordid history of self-administered black eyes where women’s human rights are concerned. Its membership knows full well that Mitt Romney and the men he backs as vice president, judges and Congressmen have a well-documented track record of woman-hating policies. The medical community knows full well that Mitt Romney, if elected president, will appoint US Supreme Court judges that will overturn Roe v. Wade and sign Congressmen’s bills that would get rid of Planned Parenthood, forcing women and girls to become pregnant and give birth against their will no matter the harm to us, and without any consideration for how we feel about it.

They know full well that Mitt Romney backs pro-rapist, hyper-patriarchal Congressional candidates who would have your sister, your wife, your girlfriend, or your 11 year old daughter bear her rapist’s progeny against her will no matter the harm to her since a “legitimate rape” would have “shut the whole thing down.” The medical establishment did not even utter a tepid response to refute Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” tripe by stating that pregnancy can happen regardless if the sex that caused it was consensual or not. This has not gone unnoticed.

The paternalistic medical constabulary has been conspicuously silent throughout the War On Women and has even quietly supported and promoted lawmakers and leaders who passed and enforced policies of forced pregnancy/childbirth — contravening the UN Convention On Torture which specifically includes in its legal language the definition of “torture” to also mean “rape, sexual assault, and forced pregnancy”; which was ratified by the US Senate in 1994.

None of this should come as a surprise. It’s not like there’s never been a precedent of socially sanctioned and approved medical torture and cruelty towards women and girls for the good of “God and country.” The male-dominated medical establishment of Reich medicine in 1930’s Nazi Germany, which boasted some of the finest minds of Berlin, supported and carried out some of the most horrific and torturous medical experiments primarily targeting women and children in Auschwitz. Does Dr. Josef Mengele ring a bell, anyone? The Reich medical establishment also supported and willingly participated in carrying out the Nazi’s Liebensborn Programme of state-sanctioned rape and forced pregnancy/childbirth against “Aryan” women and girls in order to cement the “divine” social order of male supremacy and increase the “master race.”

Hitler’s adversary Joseph Stalin also implemented policies of forced childbearing in the East Bloc and the Soviet Union using the moral imperative to replace Soviet troops that sustained the largest military casualties out of all the Allied Forces and it is also well-documented that Soviet soldiers raped and sexually tortured defenseless female civilians. Male violence and cruelty towards women is not solely within the purview of religious zealots and right-wing goose-stepping fascists.

As an aside, the women and girls who were raped by Nazi soldiers and high ranking Nazi officers and forced to give birth were not left destitute, homeless, and without food, clothing, decent housing and medical care — unlike America’s working class and poor jobless women and girls are today who are also victims of our rape culture and forced childbirth laws and policies. That is what is really telling about the degree to which America hates its daughters.

And it’s almost impossible for women and girls to prove they were raped. Even when it is caught on video tape or captured on iPods and cell phone cameras, men deny that it’s rape. It’s only rape when it happens to males, and just “sex” when it happens to females. The word “rape” has been banned in many courtrooms across the US. Judges often demand that women and girls say that they “had sex” with their rapists, not that they were raped by them. 31 states grant rapists “fathers’ rights”, including the right to joint custody (eliminating child support for the mother), and visitation rights, forcing their victims to not only give birth against their will to their rapists’ progeny but also forcing the victims to have ongoing contact with their rapists who use the children they’ve sired as a ready-made tool for controlling every aspect of their victims’ lives for 18 years. These “fathers” can petition courts (and have) to prevent their victims from moving to another state or even another town in order to get a job and pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. It is downright sadistic to compel women and girls to participate in their own degradation, enslavement, and abuse to support the rapist.

Pennsylvania state lawmakers are trying to pass a state law that not only cuts miserly inadequate welfare assistance to needy families but also contains a provision stating that if a woman is raped and gets pregnant and needs welfare as a result, she will be required to prove to the satisfaction of some middle class bureaucrat that she was raped or else she won’t get anything — not food assistance, not medical assistance, nothing. That dubious law is House Bill No. 2718. Pennsylvania also set a legal precedent a few years ago in which the courts ruled that when a woman says “No”, she doesn’t really mean it. It’s just foreplay. So that’s the Catch-22: How can a woman prove she was raped when the courts refuse to recognize anything as rape? Even when they had a videotape (males can’t help but brag about their “conquests”) of 5 boys raping an unconscious under-aged girl, they still said that the boys were not guilty of rape.

Normalized and legitimized cruelty towards women and girls is not because of a few isolated incidents of misogyny reduced to the deeds of a “few bad apples.” It’s the natural outcome of an entire male supremacist society full of enablers, justifiers, enforcers, reinforcers, excuse-makers and promoters across ALL racial and socio-economic class lines in support of the patriarchal status quo. A society that never cared about women and girls except to use, abuse, enslave and exploit as sexual currency and reproductive chattel as disposable sperm receptacles and fetus containers with a limited shelf life.

One need not look back to the 20^th century horrors of Nazi Europe to find socially and politically motivated male supremacist-driven policies and practices of medical torture and sexual cruelty specifically aimed at women and girls. One only needs to look at contemporary doctors and policy-shaping medical organizations, including university teaching hospitals, to find plenty of examples of unethical medical abuse and misogyny against women and girls — doctors like Dix Poppas, Chief of Pediatric Urology at Cornell University who experimented on female children under anesthesia, removing pieces of their genitals and then stimulating them with vibrators to “prove” that his surgery “spares nerves.” In order to test the girls (whose average age was only six) to see if they were still capable of sexual arousal after having their clitorises altered, Poppas used a vibrator to stimulate their surgically altered clitorises — often while the parents watched on. [1]

How does a 6 year old know what a “healthy” or “normal” active sexual response is supposed to be to an older man in a sterile suit applying a vibrator to her now-operated-on genitals? And just who defines the “proper” sexual response criteria for a 6 year old child having her clitoral region stimulated? This study, which ended in 2007, apparently passed the (male-centric) guidelines of medical ethics.

Then there are doctors like Lloyd Hammon Barlow, the FLDS physician who attended the 12 and 13 year old girls that gave birth at the Yearning For Zion Mormon compound in Eldorado, Texas before it was raided in 2008 by Child Protective Services. Dr. Barlow stated in an affidavit filed by CPS worker Paul Dyer that he didn’t believe that the forced arranged marriages of these adolescent girls to much older men and the subsequent forced pregnancies and births constituted “abuse.” In the FLDS, women and girls are expected to give birth without any pain relief and, adding insult to injury, are expected to give birth in utter agony without crying out from the pain. Screaming from the excruciating pain of giving birth without pain relief is grounds for the offending female to be “disciplined” by her husband. If that’s not abuse, torture and cruelty and sanctioned male violence against women, then what is?

Then there are doctors who aren’t in any zealous religious community who find nothing wrong with abusing, torturing and terrorizing gravid women in the delivery room by denying them pain relief and verbally abusing them for crying — even while administering episiotomies and then stitching them up after the birth — because they think that women “deserve to suffer pain.” That was the sort of maternity “care” that Catherine Skol, a Chicago policewoman, was subjected to by Dr. Scott Pierce, the on-call OB/GYN who delivered her fifth baby.[2]

Dr. Pierce got a mere fine. He didn’t lose his license and he faced no criminal charges. In fact, Catherine Skol’s sadistic medical abuser got more public sympathy and support than she did as the victim. People reacted horribly to Skol for her unwillingness to just shut up and suffer quietly like a good little girl, blaming her (and other women who suffered similarly that tried to seek legal remedy) for skyrocketing health insurance premiums and a dearth in OB/GYN’s due to “frivolous lawsuits” and cost-prohibitive malpractice insurance.  Our woman-hating society blamed every patriarchal wrong — everything from abuse and medical torture to unaffordable health care — on the victims of misogynistic male cruelty and sadism. The American public blames the women who have been hurt.

Inconsiderate people even justified their victim-blaming with even more victim-blaming, saying that maybe she (Skol) and other women who suffered in childbirth “should have thought about that before having sex.” And it was not only men doling out this vitriol; there were plenty of women who piled on, too: Women who sold their souls for a generous helping of the toxic lentil soup prepared and served up by patriarchy’s professional bullshit chefs.

If just one man were to suffer comparable abuse at a physician’s hands like being denied pain relief during a vasectomy and being held down and yelled at while being cut and sutured, the whole world would come to an end. But in our male supremacist society, women are “less than” and therefore subjected to all sorts of social condemnation and punishment for trying to speak up about their rights and trying to fight back against abuse. Women are routinely silenced because we’re expected to just suck it up and take it because we’re not fully human — men are the only “real people” who matter.

Rape. Torture. Medical abuse. Sexual and reproductive cruelty. Sexual exploitation. Job discrimination. Poverty. All of this and so much more is the price this woman-hating male supremacist society inflicts on women and girls — for the “crime” of being female. Need anyone really ask how things got so bad for women and girls that even access to birth control is being eliminated? This society allowed it to happen the same way that all those “good Germans” allowed the Holocaust to happen — by accepting male violence against women, the male chauvinism, the abuse, and discrimination against an entire identifiable group of people they deem as sub-human.

The War On Women is not the result of conservative logic, it’s the result of socially accepted and unquestioned male supremacy.

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[1] “Bad Vibrations”, Alice Dreger and Ellen K. Feder, Bioethics Forum, 06/16/2010; The Hastings Center Report, September-October 2012, Vol. 42 No. 5; http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=4730&blogid=140

[2] Skol v. Pierce and Rush University Medical Center d/b/a Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center

Call It What It Is — MALE Violence Against Women

by Elaine Charkowski

If you like this article, please post and share it with at least three women and it will go viral!

Breaking the silence by naming an atrocity — and its perpetrators — is the first step toward ending it. Patriarchy is a 6,000 year-old, male-supremacist social system. To maintain it, “Women’s agony at the hands of men must never be revealed. If women steadfastly and courageously began to tell the truth and would not stop, would not be co-opted, would not become afraid, the truth of our enslavement would be undeniable and the jig would be up,” said Sonia Johnson in “Telling the Truth,” which is chapter 10 of her book Going Out of Our Minds-The Metaphysics of Liberation.

MALE violence against women must be named specifically in order to isolate it so it can be eradicated. Women, who outnumber men, are the single largest group of oppressed humans on the planet. Men have oppressed women nonstop for the longest length of time of any oppressed group, roughly 6,000 years (The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler).

A young woman once told me that dealing with male violence “was just part of being a woman!” However, it’s the moral responsibility of the group holding the most power to keep its members from oppressing people in groups holding less power. Thus, ALL men are responsible for stopping male violence against women. Violent men must stop assaulting women. Non-violent men must not sit by and allow male violence against women to continue. To do so is to condone it. Their inaction-or indifference-is passive male violence against women.
Silence is complicity.

Here are nine of the most popular evasions often used to avoid naming MALE violence specifically and to avoid holding ALL men responsible for ending male violence against women:

1. “Not all men are violent.”
No one said they were. Since men collectively hold more power than women, and since all men benefit from living in a sexist, male supremacist society, non-violent men are also responsible for stopping male violence against women. In the same way, whites, who collectively hold more power than people of color (in the U.S.) are responsible for ending racism, even whites who don’t commit racist acts. This is because all whites benefit from living in a racist society that gives whites unearned advantages.

2. “Women are violent too.”
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Mary Daly calls this “universalism.” Muddying the waters, it blurs the specific focus on male violence against women by blending it with violence in general (universal violence) and casting it as a gender-neutral human issue (see examples of universalism in excuse #3 below).

Also, under patriarchy, women are blamed for their own degradation (being violent, collaborating with men against women, etc.) As Mary Daly wrote in her book  Pure Lust, (p.365) “Within the Virulent State of phallocracy, women have been attacked and divided against our Selves. From the earliest times of the patriarchy, countless mothers have been broken and the resulting broken daughters have carried on the chain of fragmentation. . . .

“They have been reduced to responding to the fettered/fathered urge to reproduce their altered–(that is, patriarchally identified selves)– in an endless circle of Self destruction. Such forcibly altered women have appeared to be normal within the man made milieu.”

Although it exists, female violence pales in comparison to male violence. Men commit 88 percent of violent crime (US Bureau of Justice statistics). Women don’t build rape camps to torture and molest men to death. Women don’t control the U.S. government which spends more than half a trillion dollars a year on mass murder (war). Globally, women can’t walk alone without the possibility of men assaulting them. The reverse is not true. Even though some broken token women may collaborate with patriarchal men to gain power (Condi Rice, Margaret Thatcher etc.) it doesn’t change the fact that patriarchal men are in charge and allow selected token “honorary men” into the boys club–if they identify with, and behave like, patriarchal men.

3. “Since violence is a human problem committed by both sexes, and since women also commit violence against women, MALE violence against women doesn’t have to be isolated and named specifically.”

Here are some examples of universalism (“women are violent too” etc.) The power disparity between women and men is the reason for some women’s dysfunctional behavior. It is not an excuse for it:

• “Some lesbians also better their partners”
This results from internalized dysfunctional heterosexual behavior absorbed from a patriarchal society in which the dominating partner (the man) batters the woman. Male violence against women is the blueprint for lesbian vs lesbian battering.

•“Some women also commit racist violence against women”
Racism (male violence based on race) was created and implemented by dysfunctional men to “divide and conquer.” Male violence based on the “otherness” of the oppressed is the blueprint for racist attacks inflicted by some women upon “other” women. This results when women internalize racism and identify with the dominating race (including men)-instead of bonding with oppressed women. Racism is only possible when inflicted by the race possessing the most political and economic power (racism=prejudice+power over). Thus, women of dominated races cannot commit racism against women of the dominating race-only prejudice. Male violence against women of the same race is clearly seen as sexism. However, male violence against women of different races is often obscured by being seen as just racism instead of racism and sexism.

•“Some women also exploit women sexually and economically.”
Hatred and contempt of women-including themselves-is the underlying issue. Women who exploit other women identify with and see themselves through the eyes of the oppressor (male supremacists who have contempt for women).

4. The absent referent.
The “absent referent” refers to something without naming it. Mary Daly in her book “Quintessence” wrote, “Naming the agent is required for an adequate analysis of atrocities.” As linguist Julia Penelope has shown in her book, “Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues,” “agent deletion is a dangerous and common mind-muddying flaw.” Agent deletion is common, concerning male violence against women. Timid terms such as “sexual violence,” “domestic violence” “gender-based violence,” and “violence” refer to men without naming them, even when describing instances when it was obviously men who raped hundreds of thousands of women in Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda and many other nations. Even Amnesty International, which calls it “a global scourge,” uses the term “violence against women” and “sexual violence” instead of “male violence against women.”

5. “Men also rape men and boys.”
Rape is a male hate crime against women. However, the use of universalism (see #3) attempts to portray rape as a gender-neutral atrocity. The fact that men also rape men and boys doesn’t change the fact that in every nation on earth, in all levels of society, men rape women. Even when men rape males, contempt for women is the underlying issue. Men rape males to degrade them by treating them like raped women.

If white supremacist men batter or murder a black man, it’s clearly seen as a racist hate crime, even though white man also batter white men. In the same manner, rape is a hate crime against women, even though men also rape men.

6. “What we resist persists.”
Supposedly, opposing something directly “gives it more power.” If racism and sexism were not opposed directly in the U.S., black people would still be enslaved. Women would still be men’s property, unable to vote, own a business or keep their own wages. If the Nazis were not opposed directly, they would now run the world.
Opposing women’s oppression directly is only one tactic. Another is being proactive by supporting women in their efforts to gain universal human rights. This can be done by volunteering at women’s shelters, donating to groups that help women in impoverished nations and many other ways. Both tactics are necessary.

7. The “passive voice.”
In English grammar, using the passive voice (women were raped by men) instead of the active voice (men raped the women) shifts the focus from the perpetrators and their actions (men doing the raping) to their victims (the women being raped).

8. “Boys will be boys.”
Patriarchal cultures promote “nature over nurture” (biological determinism) and claim men are “naturally violent.” This legitimizes and perpetuates war and men’s abuse of women. Abnormal violent “manhood” is regarded as the norm. However, men are naturally peaceful. Archaeological evidence shows men enjoyed and maintained 1,500 years of peace in ancient Crete! It’s proven today by famous non-violent men such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and many other men who organize against warfare and who speak out against male violence against women. It takes years of traumatic conditioning (while being immersed in a violent society) to make men violent. “Military training camps, police academies and even some self-defense pros are constantly searching for more effective methods of suppressing the human revulsion to taking human life.” – See “The Science of Creating Killers”
If men were “naturally violent,” years of brutal conditioning by violent media and in boot camps would not be needed.

9. “Societies were always patriarchal and men have always dominated women.”
Thousands of years of women’s history has been nearly erased by patriarchal men. Marija Gimbutas, the world renowned archaeologist who wrote Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe unearthed many relics from around the world that proves men didn’t always dominate women and that women and men once shared power in peaceful non-patriarchal Goddess worshipping. societies. Riane Eisler’s book The Chalice and the Blade cites many more instances proving this.

“Democracy does not yet exist anywhere”

Robin Morgan wrote The Demon Lover which is a study of the link between terrorism in the home (“domestic violence” or more accurately, MALE violence against women in the home) and global terrorism. Terrorism, (MALE violence against women) both in the home and in ALL the societies of the world, supports patriarchy and is a necessary component.

Morgan said, “The majority of the population in virtually all nation states is female and is forced by patriarchy to obey, be silent, and acquiesce-which means that ‘democracy’ does not yet exist anywhere.”

The necessary foundation for the creation of democracy is universal human rights for women. This cannot be achieved unless global MALE violence against women is eradicated. The question is how can we accomplish this? Men have had more than 6,000 to stop their endless war against women, and they haven’t stopped. So it falls to women to accomplish this.

From The Ship that sailed into the Living Room by Sonia Johnson:

“My formative years were spent during men’s so-called Second World War. From that war and from reading since, I learned some of the tactics that had had to be invented to prevent the escape of prisoners.

Generally, when a group of men was captured, as soon as possible the captors got them into some sort of holding corral—some cordoned-off space—and set guards to watch them.

“Among the prisoners, leaders would soon arise, those men who might, for instance, urge others around them not to cooperate with the enemy until they were all given water. In some way, those who were less afraid, surer of themselves, and therefore most likely to organize rebellions or escapes, soon identified themselves.

“Their captors discovered through trial and error that to prevent trouble they had either to execute these leaders immediately or to put them in solitary confinement—one man to one cell with his own private guard. The analogy is obvious.

“When men dreamed of controlling women and hence the world, every woman was just such a leader—one of those who would disrupt and defeat the hell-plans. So during the war men have fought against us for thousands of years, they have had either to kill us or to put us in solitary confinement—one woman to one guard in one cell . . . .”

There has been only ONE war fought literally worldwide, affecting every living thing, and that has been men’s all-out, non-stop, millennia-long war against women, a war that not only continues to this moment without the slightest abatement but intensifies hourly.

UPDATE: All is Not Well In Viagraland

by Jacqueline S. Homan, author of Classism For Dimwits, Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie, and Eyes of a Monster

Well, since my previous post concerning the problems of rampant misogyny and sexism in the atheist/skeptics community, which has really become more of a haven for MRA’s/PUA’s and their misogynist male chauvinist fellow travelers, I received only one follow-up email from JREF’s Communications Director, Carrie Poppy the same day as the original post went up.

Thank you for your questions, Jacqueline.

Could you provide your deadline and outlet? Thanks so much.

Best,

Carrie Poppy

Director of Communications, James Randi Educational Foundation

www.randi.org

            (213) 293-3092       ext. 2  |              (703) 226-3785       fax

From: Jacqueline Homan <jacquelinehoman7@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 10:05 PM
Subject: These are my specific questions
To: djgrothe@randi.org
Cc: Carrie@randi.org

To which I immediately responded:

My deadline is three business days. And as to “outlet”, I believe I made it perfectly clear to DJ Grothe that I am unembedded, therefore you may submit your responses to me in the same fashion in which I asked the questions: by email.

As of midnight, June 26 2012, I have not received ANY further response. To the best of my knowledge, neither have the others who have also been inquiring.

This is not an accident or an ‘unfortunate miscommunication.’ There is something to be said when valid questions go ignored about women being threatened, harassed, and retaliated against for complaining that atheist/skeptics conferences more closely resemble Nerd Boys Gone Wild with “enlightened” men exhibiting frat boy mentalities. The Vatican and the Christian Right are not the only patriarchal powerhouses with a vested interest in perpetuating misogyny, male privilege, sexism, and discrimination against women and girls. The “freethought” community needs to own up to that and stop blaming misogyny on religion when religion has merely been one of the vehicles that legitimized it.

The dead giveaway was the conspicuous absence of all these “reasonable” men in the fight against the War on Women. Not a single loud-mouthed atheist/skeptic pontificating know-it-all gasbag male from this colossal fart convention could be found among most states’ Unite Against the War on Women rallies on 4-28 counter-protesting the misogynistic fetal idolators of popery that want everyone to forget about women’s right to life and bodily autonomy.

Sikivu Hutchinson, an African-American feminist and atheist said something to that effect at the Women in Secularism conference at the Center for Inquiry last month: where has the secular community been for poor women in the battle for reproductive rights? 

How is the fight for birth control and abortion NOT a “science interest” being threatened by patriarchal religious powerhouses when it is medical ethics and specific medical technology that is under siege precisely because it is something that saves women’s lives?

The overwhelmingly white upper-middle class ‘good ol’ boys club’ dominating the atheist/skeptic community has been trying to pressure biology professor PZ Myers to “shut Sikivu up” and chastised him for giving her a platform so her voice can be heard, so that the “freethought” community is not one more bastion of male privilege.  Many of these same “usual suspects” in the “freethought” community have also sent Taslima Nasrin vicious, threatening emails, because they’re trying to silence her, too.

If all that money that Rebecca Watson and the rest of the Skepchicks raised that ended up going into JREF’s coffers (rich white dudes’ pockets) for sending women to TAM conferences had instead gone to Planned Parenthood or the National Abortion Network Funds — that would have done far more to empower women and girls than sending women to these atheist/skeptics conferences when all that material can be found online for free anyway. Why should women further enrich these over-privileged alpha dipshits who never gave a fuck about us and who don’t want women to be liberated or even have basic human rights?

If we are going to educate women and girls on breaking the shackles of misogyny and freeing womanity from the cruel yoke of patriarchy, let’s do it right: Let’s examine suppressed history, and the wealth of knowledge unearthed by archaeologists and anthropologists that was buried under tons of patriarchal debris and demand restorative justice for women. Let us eschew ANY “enlightenment movement” , “educational foundation”, or “social justice” movement that relegates women to the margins as the  inconsequential “Other” except to provide (often unwillingly and without just compensation) expected free grata gestational “duty”  — no matter the harm and cost to us. Let us stop rewarding promoters of the rape culture.

Advancement and progress for only half of the human race but not the other is no advancement or progress at all.

All is Not Well in Viagraland: Misogyny, Sexism and Sexual Harassment in the Atheist Community

by Jacqueline S. Homan, author of Classism For Dimwits, Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie, and Eyes of a Monster

I wandered over to the Freethought Blog forum when a “little birdie” told me that I needed to do some feministing in support of my fellow atheist/skeptic “sisters” who were being blamed for TAM registration declines and who were accused by MRA/PUA drama queens of launching a “witch hunt” — to which I posted a scolding response on Jason Thibeault’s blog which he put up as a stand-alone blog piece. TAM is an annual conference that costs several hundred dollars per ticket and is connected with the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Apparently, atheism and skepticism is dominated by Big Money (read: patriarchy) — like religion.

Of course, it was over the next 48 hours after my scathing post on Jason’s Freethought blog that the Great Penis Debate (posted by Stephanie Zvan on her Almost Diamonds blog) was broadcast live via Google podcast where these guys showed their asses for the whole world to see them as they really are: vile, rape apologist, mansplaining, misogynistic alpha dipshits and they just kept digging their own holes deeper on the FtB posts thereafter.

And I thought the Vatican had problems washing its dirty underwear in public, but these guys (Emery Emery, Wendell Henry, BJ Kramer, Travis Roy, and Mallorie Nasrallah and Sara Mayhew) in the Great Penis Debate really take the cake. I am really glad that Jason Thibeault, who blogs under the name Lousy Canuck on Freethought, constructed the sexual harassment timeline of the events, which seems to keep building as more and more outrageous faux pas are committed — by the very same men (and a couple of their Stepford groupies) claiming the “superior” position of being “rational.”

From what I have seen, the only thing they’re superior at is alienating a sizable chunk of the atheist/skeptics movement at the most inopportune time when the godless community had the greatest chance of a victory against religious tyranny, given the fight women are waging in the trenches in defense against of the stripping of our human rights with the War on Women launched by the Teahadists, the Christian Right, the Vatican and the USCCB. Could these actors in the atheist/skeptics movement be agent provocateurs trying to help the Religious Wrong out by wrecking the freedom from religion movement? (Seriously. Nobody could fuck things up this bad!)

So after yet another woman has been targeted for threats and harassing emails (Ophelia Benson) and decided to bow out of TAM, I decided to put my unembedded/freelance investigative journalism hat on and call DJ Grothe myself to ask him point blank what the hell is going on with him, JREF, TAM and these accusations against the women that had been JREF’s and TAM’s biggest cheerleaders (until the shit hit the fan with this fiasco). I got his answering machine and within 10 minutes he called me from his cell phone and promised to call me back when he returned to his office within 15 minutes. He never called me back. Instead, I got this email on Facebook from Carrie Poppy:

Hi Jacqueline,

My name is Carrie and I am the Communications Director for the JREF. I understand you called our president to request an interview today. I apologize that you didn’t hear back from us sooner. Unfortunately, DJ has been tied up with urgent TAM meetings and preparations, and isn’t able to call you back today. If you have any specific questions, would you email them to us? I will make sure you get a response quickly. My email address isCarrie@randi.org, and DJ’s is djgrothe@randi.org.

Thanks so much, Jacqueline, and sorry again for the delayed response.

Best,
Carrie

So here are those tough “specific” questions I planned on asking DJ on the phone:

1. Women are saying they’ve suffered retaliation for speaking out about sexual harassment and/or for making harassment reports to TAM staff. Is this true?
   
2. Did you accuse feminists of trying to destroy JREF and/or TAM because they spoke out about harassment and retaliation and a “sweep it under the rug” approach to the handling of harassment complaints? (i.e. the accusations of ‘witch hunts’ and demanding criminal evidence as in the case of “Dr. Buzzo” (aka Monopod Man, who was stalking female TAM attendees and taking up-skirt photos and who was/is well-known by TAM staff as a harasser of women because he has been doing this for several years in a row at TAM conferences)
   
3. Why would Emery Emery of the Ardent Atheist show claim that Rebecca Watson is trying to destroy TAM after she had been a solid endorser and supporter of JREF and TAM and is that YOUR position as well?
   
4. What is your position on the copy of a threat/harassing email received by Ophelia Benson, the scheduled TAM 2012 speaker who has now decided to bow out, which she says she sent you on June 19^th 2012 and will you answer her email to you about it?
   
5. Why did you blame your falling numbers of women TAM registrants on the very same women (Skepchicks’ Rebecca Watson in particular) who praised TAM while raising funds for more women attend TAM?
   
6. Did you or anyone else in JREF give Emery Emery the authority to speak for you and for JREF?TAM regarding what he said during the Great Penis Debate podcast?
   
7. Did you make accusatory complaints/comments/statements — including press releases — saying that women who complain about harassment are making women afraid to come to TAM conferences?
   
8. Why did you deny that a specific harassment incident occurred involving a conference attendee (Ashley Miller) after you, according to several witnesses, removed the offending jerk yourself?
   

I will share the answers I get, if any at all, with my readership here, on Facebook and with the rest of Freethought Blog forum’s readership because I think the public deserves to know the truth, not just a polite kiss-off answer but the truth. I can already guess what the response will be — if I get any response at all.

Eyes Closed, No Peeking

By Tracy Lynne Stout Meisky

“Dedicated to the governor of Pennsylvania, who suggested that women upset at being forced to have an unnecessary internal ultrasound should ‘close their eyes’, and to the Georgia legislator who wants to outlaw abortion even for a woman carrying a dead fetus because ‘cows and pigs do it all the time’ , and to the gentleman in Wisconsin who wants to outlaw divorce and says that women who are abused by their husbands should just ‘remember the good times’, and… and…. and….

“Just close your eyes” he said.

Close your eyes and maybe it won’t hurt so much. Maybe you can make the shame go away if you don’t have to look at it, don’t have to meet the eyes of the doctor who is ready to violate you, who is no longer allowed to address your pain and need.

Close your eyes and deal with it because from this point on, health care for you is nothing more than a power play, the political blood sport of men, drenched in your own desperate blood.

Close your eyes, ladies, and think of Jesus who wants you to know that you are a sinner- and a slut for having dreams beyond the ones given to you by your pastor, your employer, and your governor.

See, they are worried that you might get an abortion mistakenly thinking it’s a treatment for the flu or something, eager to brand you a wanton for having sex at all, a Jezebel for enjoying pleasure without consequence…the way that they get to.

Close your eyes and pretend that you are still a person with the right to make your own, most intimate decisions about your future.

Close your eyes and remember when planning your own family wasn’t considered dirty, when owning your body was still your birthright and the right to give birth also included the right not to.

Close your eyes and forget that you are supposed to be a mindless object of desire, to be salivated over and then dismissed, used by men to sell beer and shoes and laundry detergent, expected to exist only for their sexual pleasure, reviled for feeling it yourself, condemned for being what they so determinedly make you: a sexual being.

So come here, little girl, here’s a push-up bra, stilettos and a chastity belt. Learn now that sex is something for a man to do to a woman, not actually with her.

Understand that you must grow up to be either a slut, a dyke or a mother…and a mother, and a mother.

Close your eyes, girls, and enjoy your patent leather Mary Janes and princess dreams that don’t yet end in blood and probes and congressmen playing doctor behind the statehouse, insisting that the princess carry even death in her womb, all in the name of life.

Close your eyes and think of your grandmothers, and of their grandmothers owned by their fathers, traded to their husbands, needing permission to go to college.

Think of the days when the few lady-like jobs that existed were only for those un-natural old maids unable to join the ranks of the real women doing a woman’s real job of having babies.

Think of not even being allowed to learn or to help support yourself and your family, of depending on a man to feed and clothe you and your children, your own love and need to protect them a chain and an anchor that keeps you in the harbor of even a loveless, abusive marriage, your yards and yards of beautiful sail forever stowed belowdecks, because the open seas of life is no place for a woman.

Close your eyes, ladies, and think of England; and of Iran and Afghanistan where women are chained for their own good, beaten for showing their faces, stoned for going to school, sewn shut between babies, robbed of the ability to feel passion, used for a man’s desire but allowed none of their own; receptacles, incubators, cooks and maids.

So close your eyes, and shut your mouths, and be thankful that you live in such an enlightened, modern land.”

Brava Tracy! I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Biblical “Morality”, Rape, and Serial Killers

Jacqueline S. Homan, author: Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right: the Truth is a Lie

Chilliwack, BC is home to many First Nations peoples such as the Sto:lo who are part of the many bands of Coast Salish in the Pacific Northwest. Chilliwack is also home to many non-aboriginal people as well. Unlike the US, which is a Third World country, Canada has a welfare safety net for its poor and social medicine.

Canadians are really lucky. And many are spoiled insofar as they feel justified in maintaining racism against their aboriginal communities while they hypocritically wag their scolding finger at the US for being a social mess.

I am referring to the racist and rude February 14^th letter by Sandy Van Eysinger published in the Chilliwack Progress. Ms. Van Eysinger complained that the artwork commissioned by the hospital for its newly renovated emergency room didn’t belong in the hospital because the Sto:lo artists displayed Native spiritualism reflecting their culture. She said:

“No one will deny, least of all our community’s aboriginal folk; that these artworks are of a spiritual nature and embody or represent spirits in the local aboriginal tradition. I would like to point out that many conservative people of the three great monotheistic faiths (Jews, Christians, and Moslems), and possibly others such as Sikhs and atheists might find such public depictions not only deeply disturbing but also against the tenets of their belief system…”

She then cited the Bible/Torah/Quran verses prohibiting idolatry and the worship of other gods and the making of images, asserting that many non-aboriginal Canadians might even forego care at the ER because of wanting to avoid the “sin” of seeing something reflective of Sto:lo spiritualism. I have more than just a few rebuttals for Sandy Van Eysinger, and I hope she reads what I’m about to say because she’s long overdue for a reality check. I hope other Canadians read this, too.

The Cultural Effects of Christianity in the US — Poverty and Suffering is God’s Will:

In my country (the US) there are about 60 million poor, jobless and low-income working Americans who are without access to health care. As a long-term unemployed middle-aged woman, I am one of them. Many without access to health care are poor pregnant women who are not getting any pre-natal and pre-birth gynecological care at all. We have a maternal disability and death rate and infant mortality rate that rival that of many Third World nations.

The same militant Christian “pro-lifers” who have bombed family planning clinics and murdered doctors because they believed their “god” commanded it, got laws passed that are hurting women in the name of their Christian “moral beliefs.” They have also flexed their political muscle to prevent any real universal health care measure from being passed and have also pushed for the cuts in programs of critical importance to the survival of poor pregnant women and poor children.

Per the most recent US Census, 84% of the US poor unable to afford housing, food, utilities and medical care are women. An estimated six to ten million poor US households are without at least one life-sustaining utility and thousands of poor Americans freeze to death in the winter because of deregulated “privatized” utilities and a real lack of adequate help for the poor.

We have no social medicine and no welfare safety net thanks to the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. Funding for subsidized housing was eliminated during the Reagan Revolution. The life expectancy among the poor in the US is the lowest in the West, second only to Haiti. And it’s not just those without educations suffering in poverty without job opportunities and hope; many poor people have gone into steep unaffordable student loan debt for “marketable” degrees. I am one of them.

Last year, 50,000 Americans died for lack of access to health care. My 37 year-old unemployed neighbor who died from an abscessed tooth was one of them. Those of us here in the states who are suffering life-threatening deprivation and inescapable poverty due to deeply entrenched classism, racism, sexism, misogyny, and theocratic fascism would be more than grateful to have access to medical care.

Remote Area Medical, which normally goes to places like Haiti and the Congo, have added the US to their growing list of poor countries’ people without access to basic medical care. The last US region where Remote Area Medical visited was downtown Los Angeles, California in 2008. Those of us who have been economically excluded and socially marginalized — regardless of the superhuman efforts we’ve made escape poverty and the utter despair that goes with it from being told every day that we don’t count and that we’ve got no chips to get into the game of life — we would be damn grateful for access to medical care like our more fortunate Canadian neighbors.

Canadians like Sandy Van Eysinger whose biggest health care gripe is having her delicate sensibilities “offended” by First Nations/Native American art and cultural expression in a renovated emergency room need to get a grip.

I don’t find the blatant racism against the First Nations/Native American communities to be “civilized” and brimming with the effervescence of humanitarianism. How can any Canadian reconcile its disease of racism while proclaiming Canada’s moral superiority to the US?

The God That Promotes Rape, Torture, Pillage, Murder Sexism, Genocide, Colonialism and Slavery:

Let’s talk about those “values” and “tenets” of the “three great monotheistic faiths” versus the values and cultural traditions of First Nations/Native American spiritualism and traditions. All three branches of Abrahamic monotheism derive from the mad ramblings of misogynist, sexist, racist, Bronze Age men with camel shit for brains.

The very same Bible — the Old Testament in particular — is the basis for all three imperialism-promoting, rape-condoning, genocide-justifying cults of cruelty and misogyny centered on an angry vindictive male god who is an obsessed sexual sadist and social deviant. The same “holy” book cited to justify griping about aboriginal artwork promotes rape, incest, murder, treachery, deceit, thievery, and the oppression of women and people of different races and beliefs.

It also promotes child sacrifice and calls these men “righteous.”(Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Isaac to God in Genesis 22:1-19, and Jepthah’s sacrifice of his virgin daughter as a burnt offering to God in exchange for fame and glory in Judges 11:31-39). Abrahamic monotheism promotes an unhealthy loathing towards love-making and humanity in general. Genesis 3:16 sets women up as “less than” where “god” blames women for the entrance of “sin” into the world and leading her man astray, resulting in the death of men. This “moral” male god curses women with painful (and even sometimes fatal) childbirth and domination by men, justifying misogyny, tyranny and patriarchy.

This verse was not only used to justify centuries of legal discrimination against women by depriving women access to educations and good jobs, it was also used to justify the anti-atheism laws with the jailing of any physician who used any medical remedies to ease women’s pain and trauma during childbirth. These laws prevailed in the US well into the 20^th century.

The practice of denying women sexual and reproductive autonomy, adequate pain relief, and denying women safe and non-traumatic (or at least, less traumatic) childbirth experiences has become normalized as acceptable oppression and cruelty towards women in modern obstetrics and gynecology even today. This same male god promotes one of the most heinous human rights violations: rape.

Anyone who gets their moral guidance from a book centered on a god that not only approves of rape, but even commands it, is someone whose moral compass lies between “criminal misogynist” and “criminal sociopath.” In many Biblical passages there are references to “taking a wife” by force. These are not voluntary marriages — murder and force was used to “take” these “wives.” Here are just a small few of the Biblical passages where “the Lord” approves rape, commands rape, orders the “honor-killing” of women, and the stoning of non-believers:

1. Murder, rape, and pillage at Jabesh-gilead (Judges 21:10-24).
2. Murder, rape, and pillage of the Midianites (Numbers 31:7-18). “The Lord” commands Moses to kill all the Midianites, sparing only underage virgin girls who are to be taken by the Israelites as war spoils and raped. Before Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt, he was on the lam for killing an Egyptian overseer. It was a Midianite who gave Moses shelter, employment, and his daughter Zipporah for a wife while Moses was in hiding. So when Moses led a genocide and child rape campaign against the Midianites in the name of “divine right”, he raped and killed his wife’s people and her family. What a way to show gratitude for hospitality.
3. Colonizing a community, rape, murder, and slavery (Deuteronomy 20:10-14). God tells the Israelites to feel free to enjoy raping the virgin girls and the loot of conquered peoples. It’s beyond offensive to claim that a religion centered on a god that orders genocide, theft, rape, and slavery and the treatment of women and children as livestock to be bartered and disposed of as men see fit deserves any respect at all. Especially when that religion justified the most egregious human rights violations throughout history. And this same deity held by Christians, Muslims and Jews as the only legitimate moral arbiter even set the standards for how “righteous” men are to rape in a “holy” way (Deuteronomy 22:28-29) and how the victims are condemned to accept it. What kind of psycho would force a rape victim to marry the cretin who brutalized and raped her? Answer: the “god” of the Bible.
4. The “divine” blueprint for the “honor-killing” of rape victims who fail to cry out loud enough by stoning them to death (Deuteronomy 22:23-24).
5. The stoning of non-virgin women (Deuteronomy 22:20-21)
6. Stoning unbelievers and “idolaters” and Sabbath-breakers to death (Exodus 31:14-15, Exodus 35:2, and Numbers 15:32-36).

The “pro-life” Christian Reconstructionist movement, which has been aggressively influencing all branches of the US government, admittedly seeks to supplant the US Constitution with Mosaic Law. They plan to impose this without any regard to the human rights of women or other people who do not share these beliefs, customs, or traditions.

This is no different than the Islamic theocracies that impose Sha’ria Law like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan where female rape or incest victims are routinely brutally “honor-killed” as punishment for violating the Biblical/Quranic “modesty laws” for the “dishonor” to their male owners and masters — their husbands, fathers, or brothers.

The Bible is a sick book written by sick men about a sick god that doesn’t give a damn about women and children’s human rights. The only concern is for the violation of another man’s “property.” And Christian Reconstructionists and other Christian Dominionists want this to be the Supreme Law of the land!

Their “god” and their Bible heroes are immoral and inhumane — and so is anyone who uses their belief in this “god” and the Biblical code of ethics to justify their actions in the name of “divine right” and “morality.”

The Bible is pregnant from Genesis to Revelations with sexual sadism, genocide, rape, slavery, incest and murder. The god of the Bible represented by the “three great monotheistic faiths” despises women, relishes cruelty, savors rape and abuse, and approves of crimes against humanity. Hell of a way for such a “god” to show his love for his creation, isn’t it?

Abraham — the “founding father” of all three branches of monotheism —pimped out his own wife, who was also his sister (Genesis 12: 11-13), and was called a “righteous man.” Abraham’s nephew Lot, whose wife was turned into a pillar of salt (killed) for the “crime” of looking back at the burning cities of Sodom and Gomorrah they were fleeing, had incestuous sex with his daughters to preserve his line. (Genesis 19:32-36).

Before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot offered to hand over his virgin daughters to a violent rapacious mob and tells them to do whatever they want to his daughters so his male guests would not be harmed (Genesis 19:32-36). Lot was called a “righteous man.”

Any sentient human with an IQ above a houseplant who has actually read the Bible cannot ignore the blatant misogyny and cruelty aimed at women. The prominent “men of god” who wrote the Bible were the products of a patriarchal, violent, bigoted and tribal society. Their “god” and “moral” teachings reflect the ignorance and inhumanity of that society and fundamentalists and conservative adherents to Abrahamic monotheism insist that everyone be bound by that same society’s biblical law.

The doctrines of Abrahamic monotheism promote contempt for women’s bodies and natural functions. Even the acts of making love and giving birth is held in contempt — the Bible commands women to bring a “sin offering” to the temple after she is purified from her post-childbirth bleeding when the priest makes atonement on her behalf for her “sin” of having sex and giving birth. (Leviticus 12:1-8).

Women are nothing but disposable sexual and reproductive livestock that aren’t human enough for harm to us to matter. That is the esteem the “three great monotheistic faiths” confers on women. Cultures which press women into sexual and reproductive dhimmitude while demanding chastity and virginity in women have a double standard morality code as their bedrock. If men are encouraged to view women as depreciative chattel, they will never see women as human. And in disregarding women, all kinds of atrocities and injustices are permissible against us.

The Christian Right in the US uses the Bible as the authoritative manual for the enslavement of women. The Bible is infested with sexism, racism, violence and perversion. Under the guise of Christian “morality” and “family values”, the Christian Right is succeeding in reversing all of women’s hard-won gains towards human rights and full citizenship:

1. The right to own property.
2. The right to an education.
3. The right to paid employment and equal pay.
4. The right to childcare.
5. The right to plan their families.
6. The right to sexual and reproductive autonomy, including safe childbirth with dignity.

It’s time women saw the Bible for what it is. And despite apologists’ attempts to sugar coat or white-wash the Bible with endless excuses, it does not change the fact that the Bible is anti-women. And the New Testament Jesus with his message of “forgiveness” no matter what evil or what harm a man has done is the ultimate license for abrogating personal responsibility.

Serial killer Robert “Willie” Pickton is a Christian. Christianity teaches that Pickton only has to hit the “Jesus Forgives Me” reset button and then he’ll get to sit at the right hand of god in heaven when he dies. It was the Bible that helped inspire Pickton to feel justified in slaughtering 49 poor and marginalized women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, according to some of Pickton’s prison cell writings.

Of course, the Bible’s “god” approved of a concubine being gang-raped and butchered (Judges 19) — giving Christian sexual sadists and psychopaths like Robert Pickton and Gary Leon Ridgeway the green light to murder women; especially poor women from the very bottom of the socio-economic heap that were forced into the sex trade for lack of other options for economic support due to a legacy of discrimination and misogyny. As a feminist and incorrigible atheist, I think I rather prefer the company of “heathens”, “infidels”, fellow atheists and heretics.

Fetus “Rights” Means No Human Rights for Women

Tea Pottyers, Libertarians, and other “patriots” worried about “freedom” should be vehemently supporting freedom for women by fighting to repeal the Hyde Amendment, the Stupak Amendment, and all the “Conscience Clause” and “fetal personhood” laws that have caused women across this country to be denied their birth control prescriptions by pharmacists because of the pharmacists’ “moral” or religious beliefs, and women rape victims being denied emergency contraception in the ER as part of the standard rape kit.

Compulsory pregnancy and childbirth puts women in harms way. Why are there NO laws against forced reproduction? Oh, that’s right. It only harms women — disposable walking incubators that aren’t human enough for harm against us to matter.

Pregnant women whose pregnancies turn into life-threatening complications are slapped with a death sentence because of these specious “fetal personhood” and “conscience clause” laws which allow healthcare providers to deny pregnant/miscarrying women their right to life by denying care that disagrees with “pro-life” policies protected under the “conscience clause” laws, and transfer to another hospital 80 miles away while hemorrhaging is NOT a reasonable nor feasible solution to this pro-forced birth phantasmagoria.

80% of US women have no access to affordable, reliable contraception or early term abortion in the event of contraceptive failure, even in the event of rape.

87% of all US counties have no abortion provider.

When half of the population is cruelly deprived of the right to have control over their own bodies and lives because of misogynistic policies draped in the habiliments of “morality”, then that half of the citizenry is NOT free. You don’t have a free country when only half of the citizens get to enjoy freedom while the other half is forcibly conscripted into childbirth chattel slavery at peril to their health, well-being and lives as well as at the expense of their liberty — because of a web of policies and laws effecting forced pregnancy and forced childbirth.

Forced childbirth against women’s will at peril to women’s wellbeing, liberty, health or lives — is ASSAULT. And imposing the conditions for fetal personhood effecting forced childbirth on a woman that results in the woman’s death is MURDER.

And since we all have the right to self-defense because self-preservation is the first law of nature, I, as a pre-menopausal woman, have EVERY right to defend myself against harm, including that of a nonconsensual pregnancy.

Consent to sex does not equal consent to pregnancy and childbirth.

Consent to pregnancy does not equal consent to death from unexpected health complications made worse or untreatable due to the pregnancy.

You cannot force someone else to risk their life or their health for you. This is why you cannot be forced by law to undergo risky surgery to give up a kidney or bone marrow to save someone else’s life, not even for your own child if he/she needed it.

If that were not so, the even more valid and stronger case could be made to force all men to get vasectomies and freeze their sperm and go through a licensing procedure, including adequate proof of a fully consenting woman willing to be impregnated with it, in order to procreate.

Childbirth does a really bad number on women’s bodies and health, and imposes some very debilitating and limiting physical conditions, often with very negative permanent results. Childbirth is one of the most, if not THE most, excruciatingly painful experience anyone can go through. Sometimes it even causes death from cardiac arrest or “stroking out” while giving birth.

Do we debate whether or not it’s OK to beat someone until they have an equivalent amount of physical damage, which would send them to the hospital? So why should it even be up for debate when it comes to the imposition of something even more traumatic with permanent damaging effects on women?

The risk of death associated with childbirth, even with access to good medical care, is about 11 times as high as that associated with safe, legal abortion. Women, even in the USA, are TEN TIMES as likely to die due to pregnancy related causes as someone in the military is to die in combat.

Only women are deemed as undeserving of self-determination, including OUR right to life because of these debates on whether or not we’re entitled to equal human rights. No heterosexual woman should be given the choice between living in utter terror of unwanted pregnancy making them a nervous wreck over sex, or having to live a life of loneliness in total celibacy from menarche to menopause since it’s impossible to have a healthy and full intimate adult relationship without sex.

Pro-forced birthers raising the “human rights for fetuses” argument who claim that pregnancy and childbirth is a “beautiful” and “empowering” that no natural woman would want to forego, pay nothing but lip-service to their value of women — especially mothers.

And it’s no accident that most virulent anti-abortion clinic terrorists are men, and that many are affiliated with white male supremacist “homegrown” terrorist groups. They enjoy seeing women suffer and forcing women to suffer. They’re too self-centered and egotistical to put a woman’s life, health and well-being above their own narcissism of begetting a genetic xerox copy of themselves to “carry on the [male] legacy” that requires the use of someone else’s body to get it. And they truly hate women and hate ALL aspects of our sexuality that they cannot oppress, dominate and control — by any means necessary.

For all the talk about valuing life and motherhood, and how “beautiful” and “empowering” that the pain/anxiety fest of pregnancy and (frequently) traumatic childbirth is, why are college girls who “bare all” at Daytona Beach during Spring Break Week admired while not-so-gorgeous-looking nursing mothers who discreetly breastfeed their babies in public get ejected from venues where women and children normally have a right to be?

Why is it that post-partum women are never promoted as the standard of “sexy” and “attractive-looking” and why do middle and upper-middle class men dump the women whose bodies get ruined from giving birth to their spawn, or push their wives into getting vaginal rejuvenation and labiaplasty after their lady parts got messed up and stretched out “down there”, making vaginal sex like “throwing a hot dog down a hallway” from giving birth?

We never see those with permanent lingering pregnancy fat, stretch marks, varicose veins, loose wrinkly stomach pouches and saggy deflated looking boobs on pin-up calendars and in magazine centerfolds or as the heroines of “reality” TV shows. While nubile young college girls are encouraged to show off their beauty, nursing moms are routinely publicly and loudly humiliated, and told to “cover up” if they don’t want to be ejected from restaurants, airlines, or even courthouses.

And it is highly doubtful that two middle class American women with “good” pregnancies and deliveries, Claudia Mejia and Katy Hayes, would classify their childbirth experiences as “beautiful.” Each of these women got an invasive Strep-A flesh-eating bacterial infection from childbirth, resulting in having to choose between death or the amputation of both arms and both legs. Both Mejia and Hayes had partners that stood by them, despite their horrific permanent disability and disfigurement that was a direct result of pregnancy and childbirth. One can only imagine how much more tragic it would have been for them if they were abandoned by the co-conceivers and been rendered permanently helpless and horrifically maimed as a result of UNWANTED pregnancies.

Meanwhile, poor women from the underclass of all ages are America’s most disposable and hated group. Whatever we have had to suffer never mattered — our conditions of deprivation are always somehow our fault. Job discrimination, lack of access to advanced education, lack of health and dental care, lack of any real safety net, and an invisible economic caste system in our “free country” couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it. Tragic outcomes in difficult pregnancies and childbirths, whether planned or wanted or not, are never reported for poor women who aren’t “important” enough to make the news. (Poor women should have “kept their legs shut.”)

As hard as these anti-woman/anti-abortion “moralists” push for “fetal personhood” and “conscience clause” laws that take away women’s personhood rights — such as the right to self-determination and bodily integrity — I have yet to see ANY “pro-lifer” push as vehemently for a generous compensation package including a generous pension for motherhood, which is an unrewarded and undervalued permanent sacrifice, a hazardous 24/7 occupation with permanent negative consequences for women’s bodies, decreased earning capacity and job opportunities, risk of abandonment by the co-conceiver/partner, psychological trauma (childbirth-induced PTSD), and potentially diminished sexual attractiveness and reduced sexual enjoyment.

Anti-abortionists promoting “fetal personhood” which imposes de facto childbirth chattel slavery upon women without regard to how the reproductive “livestock” feels about it, or if the “breeder chattel” survives the ordeal of pregnancy and childbirth, use misogyny cloaked under “fetus rights” as a convenient tool for ensuring that women remain poor and oppressed — and in misery from long-term debilitating effects on their bodies from pregnancy and childbirth.

Pregnancy and childbirth is the number one cause for women having to forego an education, and for removing women from the workplace and impoverishing them. This works out very nice for the beneficiaries of unearned privilege who don’t want to have to compete with poor women for university seats and jobs in post Welfare Reform AmeriKKKa.

With the full gamut of common and permanent risks and side effects of the reproductive process, if pregnancy and childbirth was a drug, the FDA would have taken it off the shelf eons ago. And if you think a fetus is more important than a woman, try getting a fetus to wash the shit stains out of your underwear for no pay and no pension.

Let’s be honest, shall we. Depriving women of our fundamental human right to have ownership and control over our own bodies and self-determination is not about ethical concerns over the “human rights” of fetuses — it’s about unethically depriving women of personal freedom and sexual autonomy. It’s about legalized enslavement of women. It’s about the legal torture and killing of women with forced childbirth and pregnancy complications. And it’s about legalized rape.

Jacqueline S. Homan is the author of four nonfiction books: Divine Right: the Truth is a Lie, Eyes of a Monster, Classism For Dimwits, and Nothing You Can Possess.

When Religion, False Morality, and Medicine Collide — EC and “Conscience Clauses”

Jacqueline S. Homan, Author: "Classism For Dimwits", "Nothing You Can Possess", "Eyes of a Monster," and "Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie"

Most hospitals across the US have emergency rooms. Emergency rooms deal with the full gamut of medical emergencies ranging from accident victims to emergency childbirths involving women who may be poor and uninsured without any other access to medical care. Emergency rooms essentially triage care in order of medical emergency priority.

And one of those medical emergencies that ER staff commonly see are victims of rape. According to the US Bureau of Crime Statistics, one woman in every five has been raped.

Because rape involves multiple types of physical and emotional trauma, and because rape is a crime involving the need for forensics, most ER’s have at least one member on staff who is specially trained as a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) — a specialty forensics nurse.

Becoming a SANE requires at least 40 hours of didactic training in addition to other intense training in order to qualify to sit for the SANE-A exam. Additional training is required to sit for the SANE-P exam. SANE-A refers to a SANE who is Adult/Adolescent certified and SANE-P refers to a SANE who is Pediatric certified. Both are highly specialized health care and forensics fields. The training and credentialing standards are very tough.

Being board certified as a SANE is a statement that a nurse has accepted the challenge of preparing for and passing difficult and demanding examinations demonstrating a mastery of refined knowledge and critical thinking skills in clinical practice.

One cannot become either a SANE-A or a SANE-P (or both) without successful completion of extremely rigorous education. This specialty certification is increasingly becoming an essential nursing credential.

SANE candidates are taught about the trauma and PTSD suffered by rape victims because rape is traumatic. Female rape victims must not only deal with the fear of developing or contracting an incurable STD as a result of the rape, they must also worry about getting pregnant as a result of the rape.

Since pregnancy and childbirth are non-benign medical conditions even under the best of terms where the sex AND the pregnancy were consensual and desired, the last thing society should be doing is forcing women and girls to endure a pregnancy and childbirth that resulted from a rape.

Yet, 47 states have enacted “conscience clause” laws that allow health care practitioners and pharmacists the right to impose their objecting religious beliefs on women by denying them access to contraceptives, and, if need be, abortions. [It would be almost a valid argument if their "moral" objections involved anything besides making sure women are made as miserable and socially devalued as possible.]

These widespread “conscience clause” laws that are now in effect in all except three states (Alabama, New Hampshire, and Vermont) came in on the heels of the US Supreme Court Webster ruling. Disenfranchising women has become an accepted and approved political tool by Congressional candidates such as the newly elected Massachusettes Republican Senator, Scott Brown.

Lawmakers win votes by draping themselves in this “pro-life” mantle which is not about valuing life or about morality — rather it is about oppressing women by forcing them to get pregnant and remain pregnant, even at peril to their own health, well-being, and lives at the expense of their liberty, their happiness, and their freedom. It’s about compulsory maternity against their will.

"Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie", by Jacqueline S. Homan

The Center for Reproductive Health Rights states that almost immediately after the Webster ruling, over 500 various fetal personhood laws and “conscience clause” laws have popped up and were enacted. Unprecedented numbers of health care professionals and pharmacists have increasingly denied women across the country access to birth control. Many drug stores in rural areas have even refused to stock condoms, diaphragms, and contraceptive sponges and Nonoxinol-9 spermicide jellies and foam — none of which require a prescription. This has left countless women and girls unable to defend themselves from unwanted, high risk, and medically dangerous pregnancies.

The answer of telling these women to “just go someplace else” is not a realistic or minimally feasible solution because in many areas, there may not be a “someplace else” they can go. In the Bible Belt and in rural Rust Belt communities, it is not uncommon for every medical facility and pharmacy to refuse to stock and dispense contraceptives — leaving women as hostages with NO choice at all.

And these moves which are causing deliberate harm and inflicting intentional cruelty on women are promoted by politicians — most whom are rich white males who don’t give a fuck about women. At all. Men like Scott Brown who recently won the Senate Congressional seat in the state of Massachusetts. Men who will never have to endure the risks, the permanent bodily damage, the excruciating pain, and possibly death from pregnancy and giving birth.

To give their misogynist pro-childbirth chattel slavery agenda legitimacy, they also trot out and support rich women like Ann Coulter and Alaska’s former governor and US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin who are no more of a friend to women than Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh.

Privileged and powerful lawmakers, governors and judges have done everything they could (and are still doing all they can) to disempower, abuse, endanger, and enslave women.

From Sarah Palin denying funds to reimburse Alaska hospitals for rape kits to the majority of Republican Congressmen who voted on laws that served to deny rape victims their day in court (as well as deny them access to pregnancy prevention) — the Republican (and sell-out Democrat) platform of being “tough on crime” holds that rape victims deserve some rights; so long as those rights do not conflict with those of ruthless corporations, tea-baggers, “patriots”, or super devout Christians — all who want government off their backs but in between your legs.

Scott Brown falls into the last category (at minimum). In 2005, Brown sponsored legislation to allow doctors and nurses to turn away rape victims from Massachusetts emergency rooms if they objected to providing rape victims with emergency contraception (Plan B). Brown stated that a rape victim “could be referred to another facility at no additional cost.” He also said “It’s not about the victim.” Rather, it is about the SANE and the hospital’s “right” to deny contraceptives or abortificants to patients if they’re morally opposed to doing so.

Now, SANE training is supposedly “patient-centered, promoting the health and well-being of rape victims. Why would anyone choose to become a SANE if imposing their “moral” views on traumatized rape victims is more important than that patient’s well-being? A rape victim has already had control over her own body, her bodily integrity, forcibly taken from her against her will by the rapist. How “healing” or “patient-centered” is it to deny rape victims emergency contraception after a rape? And Brown claims this is “not about the victim?”

Really? Okay, so who is it about if it’s not about the victim?

It’s not about the hospital administrators, or the ER staff — the doctor, nurse, or SANE — because they do not have to take emergency contraception themselves if they don’t want to and they are professionals in what is supposedly the humanitarian field of providing “patient-centered” care and healing. So if it’s not about the patient — the rape victim — then who is it about?

Pro-lifers want everyone to believe that it’s all about life, that it’s about “the baby.” But in the case of rape, it is the woman rape victim — not a zygote, a blastocyst, or even a non-viable fetus — who is the patient, brought to the hospital’s ER by police for “patient-centered” care and healing. It’s not about “the baby” unless we’re talking about an infant rape victim. And it’s not about “the baby” because we’re talking about contraception — preventing pregnancy. So again, who is this about?

There is only one logical conclusion here. Denying rape victims emergency contraception is about the rapist.

It’s about giving the rapist’s (or rapists’) sperm (that was implanted without consent) more rights than the woman in whom it was forcibly injected. Denying rape victims in the ER access to emergency contraception isn’t about anybody’s rights except the rapist’s “rights.”

So let’s call it for what it is: denying emergency contraception to rape victims (or any woman for that matter) is a Rapists’ Rights movement.

As for health care providers including pharmacists who refuse to dispense birth control, including emergency contraception, because of their “religious beliefs” or “moral objections”; they are in the wrong field and they don’t deserve their jobs.

With emergency contraception such as Plan B, there is a narrow time window involved (72 hours) for it to be effective in preventing pregnancy. Rape victims cannot be taxied from hospital to hospital before someone is finally willing to give them Plan B as part of the rape kit that also takes time to complete.

Becoming a SANE is a choice. Becoming a rape victim is not.

If one chooses to become an ER doctor, nurse, or SANE, expensive and exhaustive training is involved. Any SANE, ER doctor or nurse with such strong objections to providing legal medical services and care should exercise their right to choose a different profession — not enter the medical field just so they can impose control and degrading abuse on patients who are female rape victims.

The rights of a hospital, pharmacy, and health care professional should never be allowed to supersede the rights of patients — especially women rape victims. It isn’t the well-being, health, or future life of that health care worker that is at stake. It is the woman rape victim’s.

And every pregnancy is a potential threat to a woman’s health, well-being, and life — including her economic well-being. Anyone from a nurse to a doctor to a pharmacist to a lawmaker or a judge who deprives a woman of the choice to prevent a pregnancy, to end a pregnancy — especially as the result of a rape — should be forced to contribute to the support of every unwillingly pregnant woman and to both mother and child after that fetus becomes a post-born child.

Rape victims who are ER patients should not be made victims again by hospital staff and religious organizations — especially religious hospitals that qualify for tax-exempt 501(3)(c) status for whom the public at large must pick up the shifted tax burden tab.

There is nothing decent, caring, or moral about forcing a physically and emotionally traumatized woman to risk pregnancy or track down an emergency contraception provider. There is nothing moral about stopping a rape victim (or any other woman) from preventing a pregnancy she does not want, or cannot endure.

Rapists do not have a Constitutional right to force a woman to breed for them and ER staff, hospitals, et al, have no Constitutional right to force rape victims to bear their rapist’s progeny.

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