a bird and a bottle

The mantra in the six weeks or so since the Supreme Court handed down its truly awful decision in Gonzaels v. Carhart has been that elections have consequences. After Gonzales, that phrase was used to wag fingers at all of those supposed social liberals who voted for Bush. The phrase has also been used to rub Republicans’ faces in the new Democratic congressional gains.

However it’s been used before, I am feeling today like it’s a bit of a silly phrase, lacking meaning. Why? Because a Democratic Congressman, David Obey of Wisconsin, is pushing for an increase in funding for abstinence only programs. Obey, who is part of the Democratic House leadership and the head of the House Appropriations Committee, is supporting an increase in Community Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) funding by $27 million — up to $150 million. CBAE is one of the many abstinence only programs that has been proven to be both ineffective and filled with lies. And yet, a Democratic leader in the House is throwing bad money after bad money in support of abstinence only programs.

I’m sure this is a political move on Obey’s part to placate some of te more conservative members of his home state. I get that politics is a game. But Obey shouldn’t roll the dice when young people’s lives are on the line.

SIECUS has an action alert. Got tell Pelosi and Obey what you think.

I’ve never fully understood why people get so angry when famous Hollywood stars throw their celebrity behind an important social issue. That’s probably because they’re usually championing progressive policies with which I agree (well, except for Patricia Heaton who makes my skin crawl). Why not cheer when people who are overpaid and often overhyped actually use their fame for positive ends?

Case in point: Rapper Jim Jones’s recently released single excoriating the drug war and putting pressure on NY Governor Elliot Spitzer to live up to his campaign promises and reform New York’s harsh Rockefeller drug laws. The song, “Lockdown,” which Jones wrote with the help of the Drug Policy Alliance for an upcoming documentary of the same name, highlights the racially imbalanced effects of the War on Drugs . And Jones isn’t coy. He’s released a music video:

And here’s what he has to say for Spitzer:

“This one goes out to the governor. Gov. Spitzer. Eliot Spitzer, you say you want to make change? Well, we waitin’ on it. Matter of fact, we’re dependin’ on it.”

The Rockefeller laws were first reformed in 2004 with the passage of NY’s Drug Law Reform Act, but those reforms, touted as groundbreaking, have meant little practically:

Prisoners sentenced under mandatory minimum Rockefeller drug laws now number more than 13,000, and an astonishing 91% of them are black or brown. The reforms enacted in 2004 have resulted in the release of only 300, leaving thousands of prisoners serving mid-level mandatory minimum sentences still in purgatory.

So Spitzer’s got to keep his promise and push for real change. If not, because of Jones’s song, a lot more people will be ready to take him to task.

Abstinence only “education” programs are chock full of misogyny and are totally ineffective. This we know.

Yet the Bush administration has allotted more and more money to them at every turn.

That’s the bad news.

The good news? With the help of the new Democrat-controlled Congress, that might be about to change. Jessica’s got the word that Congressional Democrats are planning to let Title V — the main funding stream for federal abstinence only programs like the one Jill wrote about here – quietly die.

How’s that for legislative inactivism?

(also at Feministe).

Last week, in a flurry of chest puffing and pounding, President Bush threatened to veto the hate crimes bill passed by the House and headed toward approval in the Senate. The bill, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers, would expand the definition of hate crimes to include crimes motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation, gender, gender identity (i.e. trans men and women), or disability. Bush laughably claims that state law already protects the rights of these groups.

The trouble is, the L.A. Times, whose editorial page is usually spot on, seems to have taken the Bush bait. In an editorial yesterday, the paper lauded the bill as it applies to sexual orientation, but claimed that it’s unnecessary to protect people from gender or gender identity motivated violence:

The problem is that the House bill goes further, by including gender and disability in its definition of hate crimes. According to the FBI, fewer than 1% of hate crimes in 2005 reflected a bias against the disabled. Although the FBI doesn’t keep count of gender-bias crimes, California does, and only 1.3% of the state’s hate crimes in 2005 involved “anti-gender bias.”

Huh? I wonder how the FBI and the state of California got those statistics. Because it seems to me that they must have relied on a very narrow understanding of what violence is gender motivated. Take rape, for example. I would argue that rape can be a hate crime (usually against women). But I’m pretty damn sure it wasn’t included in that 1.3%. For perspective, according to the FBI, hate crimes based on sexual orientation account for over 14% of the hate crimes nationwide.

And what about gender identity? According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, while 29 states have laws that protect people based on sexual orientation, only seven and D.C. protect people based on gender identity. Transgender people are estimated to be 7-10 times more likely to be murdered than the national average. Yet gender identity is only implicit in the new hate crimes bill; the bill’s sponsors in the House have indicated that they intend “gender” to cover gender identity, but it’s unclear whether the Senate will agree.

The LA Times is right to point to the importance — necessity, really — of a law that explicitly protects the rights and safety of gay women and men. But by minimizing the need for a similar spotlight on women and transgender men and women, the article plays a part in the continuing normalization of violence against them.

(also at Feministe).

I’ve stayed silent so far on the 2008 presidential election — specifically, on which democratic candidate I will support in the primary. I still haven’t decided.

But I do have to say…it would be an easy choice for Kucinich if I felt he could win (and if he could promise support for abortion rights, which Alon points out has not been his strength).

Exhibit A (via Blue Gal):

Exhibit B:

He and Mike Gravel are the only of the Democrats to even mention the bad policy that is the War on Drugs on their websites.

So here’s the question: support the guy who can’t win the general but is the most inspiring in the primary? Or support the candidate who really has a chance to get a Dem back in the White House after 8 years of Bush disasters?

Seems that last week’s report that abstinence only “education” programs are totally ineffective has emboldened some of ab-only’s opponents.

Earlier this week, Salon’s Broadsheet reported that the ACLU (full disclosure: where I will work this summer), Advocates for Youth, and SIECUS, hot on the heels of last week’s report, have sent a letter to the director of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), warning him that if HHS doesn’t comply with federal law (which the groups claim abstinence only programs violate), they’ll file a lawsuit challenging the Federal abstinence programs. Salon tells us that the case would be based on:

evidence that 1) many federally funded abstinence-only programs are filled with medically inaccurate information about condoms, HIV and other sexual health issues and 2) the programs have not proved to be effective in preventing teens from having sex.

But it’s not only the advocacy groups that are getting on the case now. Even the NYT is getting in on the action, though they did bury their editorial in the little-read Saturday paper. In their Editorial this morning, the paper writes:

Reliance on abstinence-only sex education as the primary tool to reduce teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases — as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress — looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

I take issue with the fact that the Times is totally hedging here — these programs are not becoming “increasingly” foolish or indefensible. They always have been, but no one was willing to stick out their neck before this report came out and made support of abstinence only a losing game. I appreciate that the Times is helping make this an issue. But their “eh” language won’t help much.

The truth is, it’s on Congress now to defund these programs. Congress has been complicit in their expansion for too long (the Republican Congress, I might add). Now, led by Democrats and changing the priorities, this Congress needs to use the recent report as support for its decision to defund these programs and mandate real, comprehensive sex ed in all our schools.

via Jessica -

Today is NARAL Pro Choice America’s National Call in Day to Support the Freedom of Choice Act (discussed here). Here’s how it’s done:

Call 202-224-3121 and ask to be connected to both of your senators and your representative. You can even use the following script:

“Please cosponsor the Freedom of Choice Act (H.R.1964/S.1173) to codify Roe v. Wade and guarantee the right to choose for future generations of women.”

Pick up the phone. Stick it to SCOTUS.

Since it became all too clear last week that the Supreme Court is unconcerned with actually protecting women’s health, advocates and activists have been scratching their (our) heads. It’s safe at this point to assume that this supreme court is going to be hostile to reproductive justice. So what does a ‘movement’ that has long relied on the Supreme Court to champion it (or at least not to gut it) do when it loses the Supreme Court as its ally?

Look for new allies, of course. In a post Monday on The Nation’s blog The Notion, Katrina van den Heuvel calls for a new legislative strategy for protecting and reenforcing reproductive justice.

[...] Since the courts can no longer be relied upon to protect a woman’s right to choose, new strategies are needed. And what’s critical is that Democrats stand strong–not only in championing legislation that will help prevent pregnancies (and here), promote affordable childcare, and provide real family values funding–but also support the right of a woman to control her own body and health choices.

Yep, it may be time for reproductive justice advocates to turn to legislatures, both federal and state. The democrats in the U.S. Congress have already showed their disdain for last week’s decision, introducing the Freedom of Choice Act immediately after the Court’s holding was handed down. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (my representative, thank you very much), would provide significant protection for women whether or not they carry a pregnancy to term. From Planned Parenthood:

FOCA would prevent the government — state and federal — from discriminating against a woman on the basis of reproductive health care decisions like having a child, using birth control, or having an abortion. The bill would forbid government interference in a woman’s right to make private, personal family planning and reproductive health decisions and would also invalidate harmful laws, such as the law recently passed in South Dakota to criminalize abortion.

Of course, the legislation’s chances for passage are gloomy, and one can assume that Bush would veto it if it were to pass. Prospects in state legislatures are similarly glum, with North Dakota passing a new anti-abortion law only yesterday. A legislative strategy might make things more difficult in the short term (more holes to fill), but be better in the long term, or at least for the long haul of the Roberts court. Then again, a court pronouncement has a lot of power. I just don’t think we’ll be hearing pro-woman pronouncements from this Supreme Court, or from many state courts, any time soon.

Want to do something about it? Write to your Senator or Represenative and tell her/him to support FOCA.

(translation: (1) Bush, like the pope, is against abortion. (2) Yes, he prefers that they become adults and that they have the opportunity to die killing in Iraq).

Anyone in desperate need of some good news on the women’s health front? Yeah, me too.

Well, here it is: Mexico City today legalized abortion. And by a landslide — the vote in the city council was 49-16!

Here are the details, via the NY Times:

The new law will require city hospitals to provide the procedure in the first trimester and opens the way for private abortion clinics. Girls under 18 would have to get their parents’ consent.

The procedure will be almost free for poor or insured city residents, but is unlikely to attract patients from the United States, where later-term abortion is legal in many states. Under the Mexico City law, abortion after 12 weeks would be punished by three to six months in jail.

OK - so it’s not a perfect law (the parental consent provision is strict and 12 weeks is fairly early). But it’s pretty damn good, and the city should be commended not only for taking a stand in a country where abortion is generally proscribed, but also - and perhaps more importantly - making that stand more than symboling by requiring that the procedure be provided free to poor women. If the “pro-lifers” here were really concerned about life, and about respecting fetal life for that matter, they would take similar steps and push for both birth control and much greater access to abortion.

So, kudos to Mexico City. And thank you, Mexico City, for some badly needed good news.

After Gonzales came down last week, the mantra was elections have consequences.

Boy do they ever.

Happily, today those consequences are good ones. Governor Spitzer (of NY) has announced that he will introduce legislation to legalize same sex marriage in New York.

Such legislation faces an uphill climb in the New York state legislature, and it’s unclear how much political muscle the Governor will put behind it. Still, it’s gratifying to see the governor we progressives elected pursuing the agenda we want.

Tomorrow, in memory of the lives lost at VT on Monday and in the hopes that such tragedies can be avoided in the future, students will wear the Hokie colors — maroon and orange.

Here’s the call for solidarity from Tech’s school paper:

College students across the country have united to declare Friday, April, 20 “Orange and Maroon Effect Day.” Students are creating groups on Facebook to announce and spread word about the day-long memorial. A student at Virginia Commonwealth University created the group, writing that the point of the group is to get everyone to wear Tech’s colors and show support.

“We are all part of the Hokie Nation now, touched by their tragedy and one in their healing.”

I encourage you to take this easy step to show support for a community in mourning and trying to heal.

(hat tip SZE)

This photo from martha martha martha’s flickr sums up all that was good about yesterday’s rally:

The amazing Lynn Paltrow (a mentor and friend of mine), founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, has cranked out a strong rebuke to the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday. It’s up at The American Prospect. Here’s an except. But go read it all.

And yet the Bush administration is actively supporting policies to limit poor children’s access to state child health insurance programs. In short, the Court’s decision in Gonzales v. Carhart — and Bush’s professed support for it — reinforces the sense, once again, that only the unborn deserve protection in this country. Not by ensuring universal health care, paid maternity leave, or an end to workplace pregnancy discrimination — only by restricting pregnant women’s access to health care.

Hope you will be too.

Today marks a dark day for women’s health and safety, reproductive rights and civil liberties. In a 5-4 decision announced this morning, the Supreme Court upheld the 2003 Federal Abortion Ban, disregarding over 30 years of established law and effectively banning most second-trimester abortions – without even an exception for situations in which a woman’s health is in danger.

This radical ruling is the first by the Supreme Court to legislate a specific medical procedure. It’s a setback not just for women but for all Americans who believe medical decisions should be made by patients and their doctors, not by politicians.

Now is the time to make our voices clear: The government must get out of our clinics, and the Federal Abortion Ban must come off the books.

Join the New York Civil Liberties Union and NARAL Pro-Choice NY at the south end of Union Square Park at 5:30 TODAY to denounce the decision, mobilize New Yorkers and talk about the importance of getting active to protect a woman’s right to choose.

I’ve been writing a lot about prison reform issues recently, and for all of you looking for more about abortion rights and other feminist issues, I apologize. But there’s been some great journalism recently about prison issues. And given that so little Mainstream Media (MSM) time and breath is given to prison reform, I’m doing my piece here.

That said, AlterNet has had two insightful and interesting pieces about American prisons over the last few days.

The first is an interview with Sasha Abramsky, author of the new book American Furies: Crime, Punishment and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment. Given that in less than thirty years, the U.S. has grown (or devolved) into a nation that incarcerates over 2.13 million people, when in the 1970s the number was 475,000, it’s fair to ask how we got here. And that’s the central question driving the interview (conducted by AlterNet’s Prema Polit). Abramsky’s answers are interesting and not totally predictable.

He says:

I think one of the reasons is that America took a distinctly conservative turn in the 1970s. Other countries went through their conservative moments, England being a case in point with Margaret Thatcher, but they didn’t quite have the sort of populist conservatism that we have here. One of the effects is that there has been a pandering to really very ill thought out prejudice on an array of issues. Then a result of that in the criminal justice debates are very simplistic laws like “three strikes and you’re out.” They sound good in 15-second sound-bytes, and they’re lousy public policy.

I think that the other reason, paradoxically, is that we’re extremely wealthy, and extremely powerful. Most states, when they’re at the zenith of their power, in addition to projecting themselves out onto the world also seem to impose order on their own populaces. America is the big cheese at the moment, so we’re seeing those social policies playing out in America in a way that they’re not playing out anywhere else right now.

Strange that the richer the US becomes, the worse our civil liberties are. Though perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising if we just take a quick look around schools. It’s always the coolest kids in middle school who inflict the most misery on the nerds (I speak from nerdly experience), even though the cool kids don’t need to in order to maintain their power.

He also addresses growing victims’ rights movements, which advocate for both harsher sentencing and more voice for victims in the criminal justice system. While he acknowledges the importance of giving voice to victims, he warns against their policy goals more broadly:

My argument with the victims’ rights movement is that it has outgrown its original role, and that it’s channeling the emotional response of the victim into making public policy. And I think that’s dangerous, because when you’re victimized you’re almost certainly going to have an extremely emotional response. As an individual, that response makes perfect sense. If I were a crime victim or my family was, I would have an emotional response, and I would want that emotional response to take center stage in the criminal justice system. But that’s not how the system is supposed to work.

Finally, he touches on how the criminal justice’s involvement with (really, its enabling of) the War on Drugs has affected women — the issue that first got me thinking about the problems of the American prison system in the first place. The image he gives is startling:

I went out in 100-degree heat into the desert early one morning with a group of women. They had mostly been convicted of parole violations or probation violations, but very minor offenses. For the next three or four hours I watched them lower coffins into a pauper’s grave, in the desert, next to an air force base. There was this extraordinary image, surrounded by these shotgun-toting sheriff’s deputies. And they’re these two-bit characters, these women who were addicted to cocaine, young women convicted of welfare fraud, that kind of thing. They’re chained at the ankles, and they’re sweating and they’re miserable, and there’s no point to their work.

Well said. Though he fails to mention that the majority of those women are mothers. My guess: programs that help these women avoid/kick addictions and become more responsible parents would go a much longer way toward societal improvement. Anyway, his book is on going straight onto my Amazon Wishlist.

AlterNet also had a column up today about the Angola Three. Nope, not a rock band out of the African country but a group of three men who have been held for thirty years in solitary confinement in an Angola prison. That’s Angola, Louisiana. The one in the U.S. I bet you didn’t think we treated people like this anymore. But we do. The three men were convicted thirty years ago by an all-white jury of murdering a correctional officer. There was no physical evidence tying them to the crime and all the “eyewitnesses” against them were promised leniency and favors by the warden for their (truthful, I’m sure) testimony. Yet despite all this, and despite the biweekly farcical “hearings” these men endure regarding their conditions of confinement, they remain in solitary. Even if the men had committed the murder, a thirty year stint in a 6×9 concrete solitary confinement cell is inhumane and should be, in the U.S. today, unthinkable. But there these men have sat. For thirty years. Apparently, they still hold a glimmer of hope for themselves and for the broader implications of their case:

According to Sam Spital, one of the attorneys from Hollland & Knight, which represents the Angola Three in the civil suit, the lawsuit also challenges that there is “no legitimate penological reason for keeping our clients in CCR, and (2) there is persuasive evidence that, in light of the duration of their confinement and their advancing age, our clients are at risk of and/or have already suffered serious physical and psychological harm — it is cruel and unusual punishment to keep our clients in CCR, which violates the Eighth Amendment.” Should the suit go to trial as expected within the next few months and should a verdict be rendered in the three men’s favor, the face of (and regulations surrounding) solitary confinement in America could change drastically for good. The case could serve as a precedent, forcing accountability by prison administrators to reserve solitary as a last-ditch and temporary measure with sharply defined restrictions. In an age of Supermax prisons where huge populations of prisoners spends months and years in solitary, the ramifications could be enormous.

With this Supreme Court, my hopes are not high. It’s a joke that the U.S. holds itself out as an arbiter of international human rights. The story of these three men is just one example of why.