Tag Archives: reproductive rights

Job 1 for GOP: Pretending Not to Be Crazy

by 5b2w3u7o Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last month, we1 told you about the crackpot congressional candidacy of Virginia’s Dick Black. A week later we told you he had dropped out of the race. That didn’t take long! Black tried to put a heroic spin on his withdrawal (it was to prevent Democrats from gaining a majority in the Virginia state senate), but the truth was more prosaic: everyone was against him. The Chamber of Commerce. The party leadership. Even the Koch Brothers.

In other words, it wasn’t just the Republican “establishment” that was opposed to Black. It was also tea-partyish groups like the Koch-funded American for Prosperity. But why? Dave Weigel explains:

Why did AFP join the blanket party against Black? Because Black was going to make social conservative gaffes. And that element of the party, not a huge problem in office, causes problems during campaigns.

That’s what “stopping the next Todd Akin” means. It doesn’t mean crushing the Tea Party or electing moderates. Akin was not the Tea Party candidate in Missouri’s 2012 primary—national Tea Party groups endorsed either the former state treasurer or a businessman who was making his first ever political run. Akin was a social conservative who went on to bungle his abortion views in an easy interview. And everyone on the right, from the RNC to the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, has been working to train Republicans to avoid sounding like Akin. Not changing what they stand for.

The Republican Party isn’t trying to move to the center. It’s just trying to prevent abject idiots from running for Congress, especially in red hot media markets like Northern Virginia, which command the attention of every political reporter in the country. When you start babbling about spousal rape in a town hall in West Bumcluck, you might pull it off with no one noticing. But if you do it in NoVa, it won’t just be Mother Jones that notices. Everyone will notice. And let’s face it: Republicans have no greater challenge these days than fooling moderates into thinking that the party isn’t controlled by a flock of raging fanatics. Getting rid of embarrassments like Dick Black is all part of the plan.

1Meaning Mother Jones. It was Molly Redden who reported these stories, not me.

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Job 1 for GOP: Pretending Not to Be Crazy

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Rand Paul: There’s No GOP War on Women, But Remember the Lewinsky Scandal?

by Shelby Morris Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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In 2011, after Republicans in Congress introduced a bill that would ban taxpayer funding for abortions except in cases of “forcible rape,” Democrats adopted a new line of attack: the GOP was waging a “war on women.” Instead of changing their policies, Republicans changed the subject, arguing that the sexual behavior of individual Democratic politicians—such as Anthony Weiner—proves the GOP “war on women” is a fiction.

On Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) became the latest GOPer to adopt this strategy, arguing on Meet the Press that former President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky means Democrats are in no place to cry foul about the Republican party platform.

Paul made the comments after host David Gregory highlighted a moment in a September Vogue profile of Paul in which Kelley Paul, the senator’s wife, said, “Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky should complicate his return to the White House, even as first spouse. I would say his behavior was predatory, offensive to women.”

Gregory asked Paul if Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior in the White House would be fair game in a 2016 race involving Hillary Clinton. Here’s Paul’s response:

I mean, the Democrats, one of their big issues is they have concocted and said Republicans are committing a war on women. One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office.

And I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this. He took advantage of a girl that was 20 years old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that, and that is predatory behavior, and it should be something we shouldn’t want to associate with people who would take advantage of a young girl in his office.

This isn’t having an affair. I mean, this isn’t me saying, “Oh, he’s had an affair, we shouldn’t talk to him.” Someone who takes advantage of a young girl in their office? I mean, really. And then they have the gall to stand up and say, “Republicans are having a war on women”?

When Democrats say there’s a “war on women,” they are not criticizing the personal conduct of GOP lawmakers. They’re talking about Republican policymakers’ sustained attacks on women’s reproductive rights. It’s hard to see what Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct tells us about today’s battles over reproductive rights policy—especially when he hasn’t held elected office for nearly fourteen years.

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Rand Paul: There’s No GOP War on Women, But Remember the Lewinsky Scandal?

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Raw Data: It’s Elites Who Drive Polarization, Not the Working Class

by JoanSanderz Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Who’s responsible for increasing political polarization? Andrew Gelman suggests that one of the “cleanest pieces of evidence” is public attitudes toward abortion. If you look at the polling data, what you see is that attitudes between Democrats and Republicans start to diverge markedly around 1990. If you dig a little deeper, you find that the change is almost entirely among whites. If you dig a little deeper among whites, you get this:

The biggest change in party polarization on abortion appears among those with mid to high incomes; those with college degrees; and those who are heavily tuned into politics. Among the fabled blue-collar whites, party ID doesn’t really predict attitudes on abortion very well at all.

Gelman avoids drawing any broad conclusions from this, and so will I. But it’s interesting, especially since we’ve seen lots of evidence like this before. It’s elites who have largely turned our major parties into polarized war zones, not the heartland.

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Raw Data: It’s Elites Who Drive Polarization, Not the Working Class

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Following the Dark Money Would Be Easier if This Goverment Agency Did Its Job

by SommerLathrop Posted on December 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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A recent headline over at the Atlantic captured the mood when it comes to the state of money in American politics: “There’s No Way to Follow the Money.” The author, former Reuters editor Lee Aitken, was referring to the web of “social welfare” nonprofit groups moving hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money all around the country with the goal, ultimately, of influencing elections and shaping policy. Aitken has a point: As deep as reporters dig, it’s harder than ever to track where the money’s going, how it’s being spent, and who’s taking a cut along the way.

Following the dark money isn’t any easier when timid or dysfunctional watchdogs plainly fail to do their jobs. Fingers point most often to the Federal Election Commission, which is at the moment an underfunded, ideologically divided, broken institution. But a new Sunlight Foundation analysis identifies another culprit: the Federal Communications Commission, the nation’s top cop when it comes to TV, radio, and broadband.

Here’s the back story: Tucked inside the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, a landmark piece of legislation better known as “McCain-Feingold” after its two sponsors, was a new requirement that local TV stations make available to the public information about political ad buys, including how much was spent and what candidates or issues were mentioned in the ad. Post-Citizens United, spending on political ads has exploded—$5.6 billion was spent in 2012, a 30 percent increase from 2008. Broadcasters’ ad data can provide journalists, campaign staffers, activists, and anyone else with detailed and useful information on the ads running all over the country.

The problem? TV stations are ignoring the law, leaving the public in the dark.

A Sunlight Foundation analysis of 200 randomly-chosen ad buys by PACs, super-PACs, or nonprofits found that fewer than one in six actually disclosed the name of the candidate or specific election referenced in the ad. The most important fields on the ad buy paperwork are blank, and the TV stations that are so eager to rake in all those revenues aren’t prodding the ad buyers to fully disclose what they’re doing.

The FCC could crack down on this if it wanted. Sunlight’s Jacob Fenton explains why the agency isn’t acting:

TV stations could be penalized for leaving out disclosure information, but the FCC has shown little appetite for doing so. Although occasional enforcement checks took place in the years after the reforms were adopted, more recently the FCC has fallen back on a “complaint driven” process. In other words, the agency won’t act unless someone asks it to. But because the vast majority of the political ad filings are hidden away in file cabinets at broadcast stations, available only during business hours when most voters are working, few people ever see them, let alone complain.

Steve Waldman, an Internet entrepreneur and journalist who worked as a senior advisor to former FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, said the nation’s communications watchdog was leery of getting stuck with the unenviable position of campaign cop. “When it comes to political stuff, there’s extra sensitivity at the commission because it’s the one area where Congress jumps up and down and says, ‘If you do that we’re going to come and slap you in the head,'” Waldman said.

Tom Wheeler, who just replaced Genachowski, saw his Senate confirmation vote held up by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, over the issue of political ad disclosure. In a statement, Cruz said he lifted the hold after Wheeler said he’d make political ad funding disclosure “not a priority.”

It’s not all bad news on the political ad transparency front. In August, a judge ruled that the FCC could proceed with a plan to require several hundred broadcast stations located in the nation’s 50 largest cities to post their ad files online. Sunlight, among others, is working to make those files accessible and easily searchable to anyone with an Internet connection.

In the campaign finance world, that’s progress. But it’s enough. The FCC and the TV stations themselves need to feel more pressure to ensure that those ad files comply with the law. It’s one of the few useful tools we have nowadays for following that shadowy money trail.

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Following the Dark Money Would Be Easier if This Goverment Agency Did Its Job

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The 9 Worst Things Said About Women, Abortion, and Rape in 2013

by ThedaStapleton Posted on December 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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Opponents of reproductive rights had a busy 2013. By the end of June, state lawmakers had passed 43 abortion restrictions into law—as many restrictions as were enacted in all of 2012, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights think tank. By August, when many state legislatures had wrapped up their 2013 session, lawmakers had introduced more than 300 abortion restrictions, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Defending these restrictions inspired a string of public figures to make foot-in-mouth statements about women, their choices, and their bodies. Below, we’ve assembled the worst of these comments.

Pregnancy from rape is too rare too justify rape exceptions to abortion bans.
Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) sponsored the year’s most high-profile abortion restriction—a House bill to ban all abortions in the United States at 20 weeks after conception. So it’s only appropriate that he uttered the most notorious abortion-related gaffe of the year: “The incidence of pregnancy resulting from rape are very low.”

Franks made that statement in June, by way of explaining to the House Judiciary Committee why it wasn’t necessary to amend the bill to include an exception for women who became pregnant by rape or incest. (In fact, women who are victims of rape frequently become pregnant.) But his comment generated so much backlash that, a few days later, Republicans quietly amended the bill to add an exception for rape and incest victims. Franks’ bill passed the House but was never taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate. A spokesman for Franks told Talking Points Memo later that the congressman meant to say that abortions of pregnancies that resulted from rape were rare.

Rape is like a car accident: It calls for “extra insurance.”
Legislation that banned Obamacare health insurance plans from covering abortion was all the rage this year. Nearly half of all statehouses passed some form of a measure forcing women who wanted abortion coverage to purchase it as a separate abortion-only policy, called a rider.

Some of these state laws, including one the Michigan Legislature passed this month, did not include exceptions allowing insurance to cover abortions in cases of rape or incest. This May, when asked why should women be forced to pay extra to cover their abortions in these cases, Barbara Listing, the president of Michigan Right to Life, explained, “It’s simply, like, nobody plans to have an accident in a car accident, nobody plans to have their homes flooded. You have to buy extra insurance for those.”

Listing’s statement generated a lot of outrage—but it didn’t matter to Michigan legislators, who passed the ban anyway.

Male fetuses masturbate at 15 weeks—proving the need for an abortion ban.
Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) said as much while defending that same 20-week abortion ban that inspired Franks to doubt that rape causes pregnancy. Burgess, who is a pro-life OB-GYN, told a House committee that he was positive fetuses could feel pain at 20 weeks after conception, despite a medical consensus to the contrary: “Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” he said. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. They feel pleasure. Why is it so hard to think that they could feel pain?”

Transvaginal ultrasounds are not intrusive because women get “vaginally pregnant.”
In February, abortion rights foes in the Indiana Legislature pushed a bill that would force women who wanted to use an abortion pill to end their pregnancies to undergo not one, but two medically unnecessary ultrasounds—one before taking the pill, and one after.

Many Indiana residents found the idea of forcing doctors to probe women for no good reason to be repugnant. But Indiana Right to Life legislative director Sue Swayze didn’t see the problem. “I got pregnant vaginally,” she said. “Something else could come in my vagina for a medical test that wouldn’t be that intrusive to me. So I find that argument a little ridiculous.”

The Indiana Legislature removed the second ultrasound—but not the first—from the bill before it eventually became law in May.

Moving across state lines while pregnant is “reprehensible.”
Earlier this year, Olympic skier Bode Miller and his short-term girlfriend Sara McKenna became embroiled in a nasty custody battle over their newborn son. Miller—despite skipping McKenna’s prenatal appointments because, as he texted her, “U made this choice against my wish”—fought for custody of the child after a pregnant McKenna moved from California to New York to attend Columbia University.

Miller briefly prevailed in May when a New York family court judge found McKenna’s “appropriation of the child while in utero”—i.e., her decision to move while pregnant—to be “irresponsible, reprehensible,” and just shy of abduction. The decision incensed women’s rights advocates. A five-judge appeals panel reversed that decision in November, explaining, “putative fathers have neither the right nor the ability to restrict a pregnant woman from her constitutionally protected liberty.”

Rape is okay when the victim seems “older than her chronological age.”
Montana Judge G. Todd Baugh caused a scandal this year when he sentenced teacher Stacey Rambold, 54, to just 30 days in prison after Rambold was convicted of raping a 14-year-old student. But Baugh was resolute in the face of a national outcry. He told the Billings Gazette that the student, Cherise Moralez, was “as much in control of the situation” as Rambold, and was “older than her chronological age.” Moralez committed suicide while Rambold’s criminal trial was ongoing.

Baugh later apologized for his remarks, although he did not apologize for his sentencing decision. And in his apology, he took pains to explain that he didn’t think Rambold’s crime was that bad: “I think that people have in mind that this was some violent, forcible, horrible rape…It was horrible enough as it is, just given her age, but it wasn’t this forcible beat-up rape.” Montana prosecutors are still fighting for a harsher sentence for Rambold—who finished serving his 30 days this September.

Pregnant women are just “little girls” who don’t understand their own bodies.
Supporters of mandatory ultrasounds or waiting periods for women who want abortions often say they want women to fully contemplate the consequences of an abortion before having one. It’s a patronizing sentiment—especially when articulated by Greg Brannon, a pro-life North Carolina OB-GYN and a GOP candidate for the US Senate. Brannon, a Rand Paul endorsee, has described pregnant women as “little girls who don’t understand what’s going on to their bodies”—adding that if they show up to his office with their boyfriends, he will “whoop on them with love” to get married.

Rape exceptions to abortion bans are “little gotcha amendments.”
There are those who think that placing rape and incest exceptions in bills restricting abortion access is a common-sense nod to overwhelming public opinion in favor of these exceptions. Others think proponents of abortion rights only harp on rape and incest exceptions to embarrass abortion foes.

GOP Kansas Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce is among the latter group. This spring, his party advanced an omnibus abortion bill that would have defined life as beginning at conception. As Democrats proposed amendments, including exceptions for cases of rape and incest, to make the bill less draconian, Bruce said, “These amendments are little gotcha amendments. I’m getting a little irritated at it.”

Getting an abortion after being raped is criminal evidence tampering.
In January, Republican state Rep. Cathrynn Brown of New Mexico caused an uproar with a bill to make obtaining an abortion in cases of rape or incest felony evidence tampering punishable by up to three years in prison.

Brown quickly clarified that the bill was only meant to give prosecutors a means to go after rapists. But you’d be forgiven for fearing that the legislation could be used to target abortion providers or rape victims themselves. The bill defined tampering with evidence to include “procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.”

The bill, introduced to a Legislature controlled by Democrats, was doomed from the start, moving Huffington Post‘s Kate Sheppard to call it “some world-class trolling.”

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The 9 Worst Things Said About Women, Abortion, and Rape in 2013

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Millions of Women Now Pay Nothing for Birth Control. Thanks Obamacare!

by Jane Adams Posted on December 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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The percentage of privately insured women who didn’t pay a dime for birth control pills almost tripled this year, rising from 15 percent in 2012 to 40 percent in 2013. That’s according to a new study from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that backs abortion rights. The study, which was published in the journal Contraception, examined the effects of an Affordable Care Act rule requiring private insurers to cover contraceptive products and counseling with no co-pay.

This same rule has come under sustained, delirious assault by Republicans who paint it as an attack on employers’ religious beliefs. During the debt ceiling crisis this fall, some House Republicans were willing to let the government default if the final financial deal did not include a “conscience clause” allowing employers to sidestep the mandate if it violated their religious beliefs. (The Obama administration has already exempted a narrowly defined set of religious institutions.)

That battle will come to a head this spring, when the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. Citing their Christian beliefs, owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores are refusing to provide their female employees with insurance that covers contraceptive services. A decision in favor of Hobby Lobby could blow a hole in the contraception mandate, allowing any private employer to withold birth control coverage simply by citing their religious beliefs.

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Millions of Women Now Pay Nothing for Birth Control. Thanks Obamacare!

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Oops: Republican Obamacare Amendment Expanded Abortion Access for GOP Staffers

by StormyV37lwvv Posted on December 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Nearly 9 in 10 health care plans that members of Congress and their staff must choose from include abortion coverage, a fact that has Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and right-wing media outlets raising hell.

But the only reason that congressional staffers have to choose from these plans at all is because a Republican amendment to Obamacare requires it. Thanks to this amendment, congressional staffers, who once had to pay for abortions out of pocket, can now buy insurance that covers abortions.

The bizarre story of how a conservative, anti-abortion Republican ended up expanding abortion access for congressional staff dates back to the initial fight over the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Here’s how it happened: The Obamacare exchanges were expressly designed to provide insurance to the uninsured, so congressional staffers—who, like most Americans, already had insurance—were initially excluded. Republicans claimed that this amounted to Democrats “exempting” themselves and their staff from Obamacare, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced an amendment that would force members of Congress and their staff to use the exchanges. Grassley’s proposal was intended to embarrass Democrats. But Democrats called Grassley’s bluff, and the law passed with his amendment.

But Grassley’s measure forced congressional staff out of the Federal Health Benefits Program, which federal law prohibited from offering any abortion coverage. Under the the federal plan, any congressional employee who wanted an abortion had to pay for it out of pocket. Now that they’re on the Obamacare exchanges, though, congressional employees will only pay out of pocket for abortion insurance. They’ll be able to choose any of the 112 plans available via Washington, DC’s health care exchange, only 9 of which do not cover abortion.

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Oops: Republican Obamacare Amendment Expanded Abortion Access for GOP Staffers

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Texas Anti-Abortion Law Looks Likely to Survive Court Challenge

by Seraphinakbj Posted on November 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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Ever since the Republican landslide of 2010, conservative state legislatures around the country have been busily erecting barriers to abortion. The question is, how far can they go? At what point will the Supreme Court rule that these new laws have no legitimate motivation—improving patient safety, say, or guaranteeing informed consent—but are instead designed merely to make it burdensome for women to get abortions?1 Today brought a discouraging but oddly ambiguous omen on just how far the Court is likely to allow states to go:

The justices voted 5-4 to leave in effect a provision requiring doctors who perform abortions in clinics to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital….Justice Antonin Scalia, writing in support of the high court order Tuesday, said the clinics could not overcome a heavy legal burden against overruling the appeals court. The justices may not do so “unless that court clearly and demonstrably erred,” Scalia said in an opinion that was joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy did not write separately or join any opinion Tuesday, but because it takes five votes to overturn the appellate ruling, it is clear that they voted with their conservative colleagues.

This is discouraging because five justices voted to permit this Texas law to stand, despite abundant evidence that its only real purpose is to make it harder for clinics to hire doctors to perform abortions. But it’s weirdly ambiguous because Roberts and Kennedy declined to join the majority opinion. Unfortunately, my guess is that this is mostly for technical reasons, since this case will probably be back before the Court after the circuit court issues its final ruling. When that happens, I suspect that both Roberts and Kennedy will come down pretty firmly on the side of allowing states to enact virtually anything short of an outright ban.

1In case you’re not up on the lingo, these are known as TRAP laws—Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers. They’re nothing new, but enactment of TRAP laws picked up serious steam after the 2010 midterms. More here if you’re interested.

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Texas Anti-Abortion Law Looks Likely to Survive Court Challenge

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Vaginas Are Like "Little Hoover Vacuums," and Other Things Abstinence Lecturers Get Paid to Tell Teens

by LilianEldredge Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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I went to public high school in Montana, where at least once a year we were shuffled into the gymnasium for lectures from abstinence-only educational speakers on how to make “good choices.” Young, sprightly twentysomethings, who often resembled Ken and Barbie, would dance around the auditorium playing Christian rock and trying to convince us that having sex wasn’t cool. In between all the jokes and music, I learned that condoms cause cancer and that sex is a bad deal for women. Turns out, I wasn’t alone. Across the the United States, public schools—even ones that teach comprehensive sex education—invite religious abstinence speakers to come in to talk to students about sex, and sometimes spread information that is factually inaccurate in the process. Here are five such speakers, many of whom have generated local headlines for their controversial presentations. And they might be coming to a school near you—they’re all still active on the sex-is-bad circuit.

Justin Lookadoo: “God made guys as leaders.”
Lookadoo is a spiky-haired Christian lecturer who bills himself as a “professional Speaker who CONNECTS with the audience.” He is on the road 200 days a year and on his website, he lists his age as “legal in every state.” Lookadoo’s presentations can be paid for “under many federal programs, including Safe and Drug Free Schools, Campus Improvement, Title I and Title IV.” Last week, he caused controversy at Richardson High School in Texas when he gave a presentation for teenagers in which he said: “Girls, the reason it’s so hard for you to succeed these days is not because of guys…You’re doing it to yourselves,” according to the Dallas Morning News. His online dating recommendations have also drawn ire from students and parents: “Men of God are wild…They keep women covered up” and “dateable girls know how to shut up.” The Richardson High School principal apologized to students and parents, promising that “we will not invite this speaker back to RHS.” Responding to the widespread media criticism, Lookadoo wrote on his Facebook page that “the complaints are based on relationship stuff posted on a website that I don’t even talk about in schools.”

Lookadoo.com

Jason Evert: “Girls…only lift the veil over your body to the spouse who is worthy.”
Evert has two theology degrees and tours the country promoting abstinence with his wife, Crystalina Evert, with whom he runs the Chastity Project. According to Evert’s bio, he speaks to over 100,000 teens each year. Evert tells Mother Jones he speaks to “lots of public schools” and his upcoming schedule shows that he’s speaking next month at several in Texas. He says, however, that he removes all religious content from his public school presentations and is not paid personally for these events. Half of his honorarium for each event is spent on giving the students free copies of his pro-abstinence books and CDs.

Evert is passionate about women dressing modestly (or as he puts it, “Girls…only lift the veil over your body to the spouse who is worthy to see the glory of that unveiled mystery.”) In this 2008 YouTube video, he says: “A culture of immodest women will necessarily be a culture of uncommitted men.” He elaborated on those remarks for Mother Jones, saying that “true feminine liberation isn’t about having the ‘freedom’ to dress like Miley Cyrus”â&#128;&#139; and that that his views “could be judged as misogynist, but I think this would be an unfair assessment.” He adds, “It’s a joke to think the girl needs to be the chastity cop…but to reach a level of mutual respect in society, I don’t think Daisy Duke shorts are going to expedite the process.” Evert also maintains that birth control pills cause abortions. (In reality, they prevent conception, and if an egg is fertilized, they make the uterine lining inhospitable for implantation. The Code of Federal Regulations and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists define pregnancy as beginning at implantation.)

Pam Stenzel: “If you take birth control, your mother probably hates you.”
Stenzel is a lecturer who, according to her bio, “provides a structured and unambiguous message of abstinence that will mobilize and empower adolescents to make responsible choicesâ&#128;&#139;” and claims to speak in-person to about 500,000 young people annually. She makes about $4,000 to $6,000 per appearance and has an extensive line of DVDs. She was also consulted for President George W. Bush’s abstinence programs. This April, at George Washington High School in Charleston, West Virginia, a public school, she allegedly made some female students cry by “slut-shaming” them. According to the Charleston Gazette, she said, “If you take birth control, your mother probably hates you” and claimed she could tell which teenagers are promiscuous by looking at them. Stenzel told LifeSiteNews that she never said those things, but acknowledged that her presentation was “a little tough.” In her YouTube videos, Stenzel tells students that sex is worse for girls (because they “are much easier to infect and easier to damage”). She also asserts that the HPV vaccine “only works on virgins,” and that chlamydia—even when treated—is likely to make women infertile, with a 25 percent chance of infertility the first time it’s contracted and a 50 percent chance the second time. Her HPV claim is 100 percent false, and her chlamydia statement is mostly false. (Of women with chlamydia who go untreated, about 10 percent will develop pelvic inflammatory disease, which in some cases may cause infertility.)

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Joi Wasill: “According to your health textbook, and all of the medical textbooks, and science textbooks, and biology texts, conception is when life begins.”
Wasill is the founder and executive director of Decisions, Choices & Options, Inc., a Tennessee-based organization with strong Christian and Republican ties that has provided educational programs that have reached about 40,000 high school students (her organization is currently available for public school bookings.) For speaking gigs outside of the Nashville area, the organization charges for travel fees and a per diem. In May, she spoke at Hillsboro High School, a public school in Nashville, Tennessee, along with Beth Cox, a presenter for Wasill’s organization. One student recorded her presentation and leaked it to the press. RH Reality Check, a daily publication covering sexual health, noted the talk included a host of inaccurate information.

The speakers claimed that condoms have holes in them and a failure rate of 14 percent (it’s actually less than 3 percent); that first-trimester abortions can cause infertility (the National Abortion Federation says they’re one of the “safest” medical procedures); and that the morning-after pill is a “chemical abortion” (nope, it prevents sperm implantation). They also said that “according to your health textbook, and all of the medical textbooks, and science textbooks, and biology texts,” life begins at conception. Wasil tells Mother Jones that her curriculum is “based upon information obtained from the Centers for Disease Control, SEICUS Sexual Information and Education Council of the United States, National Center for Health Statistics, the health textbooks adopted by the state, and other sources such as these.” Teaching “sexual risk avoidance” is in accordance with the law, she says, adding, “the avoidance of the risky behavior that leads to infection, disease, and teenage pregnancy is the best outcome for all students and enables them to live healthy, productive and successful lives.”

Pro Life in TN

Shelly Donahue: “Girls are more feelings-oriented, and boys are more facts-oriented.”
Donahue is a speaker for the Colorado-based Center for Relationship Education, an abstinence-only education program that works with students in 42 states and has received millions in federal funds. In 2006, Donohue caused controversy at Natrona County High School, a public school in Casper, Wyoming, when she gave a religious-themed abstinence presentation. According to the Casper Star-Tribune, she asked students, “Do you get closer to your God or do you get farther away when you have sex?” (The answer she wanted: “Farther away.”) She also said that boys are “wired” to like math, science, and numbers, and girls are wired to be more feelings-oriented. She held up a bag of noodles to indicate that girls “are like spaghetti, with their feelings about parts of their lives entangled,” according to the Star-Tribune. (She told the paper: “The outpouring and the positive was so much greater than this one kid’s complaint.”) In a training video posted by the Denver Westword in 2011, Donahue tells students that if a guy gets sperm anywhere near a girl’s vagina, it will turn into a “little Hoover vacuum” and she will become pregnant. (No. Vaginas don’t vacuum sperm off the couch.) In another 2011 video, she says, “the boys want to love and respect these girls, and the girls won’t let them. The girls are backing up the booty, the girls are being assertive, these girls are emasculating these boys.” She continues to conduct sex-ed training programs for teachers on public Title V funds and is holding one this month in Greeley, Colorado.

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Vaginas Are Like "Little Hoover Vacuums," and Other Things Abstinence Lecturers Get Paid to Tell Teens

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The Republican Freakout Over This Feminist, Pro-Choice Federal Judicial Nominee

by Bernadine Posted on November 12, 2013

Mother Jones

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is expected to hold a confirmation vote today for Cornelia “Nina” Pillard, who was nominated by President Obama to sit on the second-highest court in the United States: the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Pillard is a Georgetown University law professor and a magna cum laude graduate from Harvard Law School who has argued and filed briefs on dozens of cases that have come before the Supreme Court. She is also unabashedly feminist and pro-choice and supports access to contraception and comprehensive sexual education. As a result, she’s attracting a wave of attacks from Republicans, who are waging a battle to make sure she never gets to join the conservative-dominated court.

“I have concerns about your nomination…Your academic writing, to me, suggest that your views may well be considerably outside of the mainstream,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said during Pillard’s July hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which in September voted to advance her confirmation to the full Senate. Conservative think tanks have been less diplomatic with their views: Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, wrote that Pillard promotes “militant feminism,” and “America can’t afford to give a lifetime appointment to a radical ideologue.”

The two biggest Supreme Court cases that Pillard worked on helped affirm rights for both men and women in the United States. In 1996, her brief helped persuade the US Supreme Court to end the Virginia Military Institute’s decades-old men-only policy. And in 2003, her argument led the Supreme Court to uphold the inclusion of men in the Family and Medical Leave Act. It’s not these cases, but rather Pillard’s academic writings on reproductive rights, that have sparked Republican fears of her “militant feminism.”

At a September Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) went so far as to read Pillard’s writings to another DC Circuit judicial nominee to see if he disagreed—without revealing that Pillard wrote them. A Democratic Senate aid told the Huffington Post he found the exchange “super weird.” The writings Grassley quoted came from a 2007 Georgetown University Law Center paper, in which Pillard noted that “reproductive rights, including the rights to contraception and abortion, play a central role in freeing women from historically routine conscription into maternity.” That insurance plans were not required to cover women’s contraceptives was, she wrote, “emblematic of a much broader failure,” and she expressed support for more comprehensive sex education in schools.

In a 2006 entry for the Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties, Pillard wrote that “accurate health education can help to make abortion less necessary by teaching teens about reproduction and birth control.” Republicans aggressively attacked this viewpoint. “You have argued that if a state decides to teach abstinence-only, that that decision…in your judgment, may be unconstitutional. Is that indeed what you were arguing?” Cruz asked at the July hearing.

Pillard replied: “I’m a mother. I have two teenage children, one boy and one girl…I want both of my children to be taught to say no, not just my daughter. I want my son to be taught that too. The article was very explicit. I don’t see any constitutional objection to abstinence-only education that does not rely on sex-role stereotypes.”

Cruz said that he found that to be “an extraordinary position,” and Ed Whelan, writing in the National Review, accused Pillard of “false testimony” on the abstinence education issue. “No one who seeks to use the Constitution to impose and advance her own dogmatic belief…should be trusted with judicial power,” he wrote. Pillard has said repeatedly that her personal views will have no place in her judicial decision-making, and Media Matters has called the National Review‘s attacks on Pillard “sexist, hypocritical, and flawed.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) also brought up Pillard’s writings at the July hearing, accusing Pillard of comparing anti-abortion protesters to white supremacists. “Do you believe that pro-life protesters are fairly analogous to Klu Klux Klan members who lynched African Americans?” he asked. Pillard disagreed, noting that the brief in question referred to why protesters shouldn’t interfere with law enforcement, and, at the time, there wasn’t a more relevant statute to cite. She said that after that case, Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinics Entrances Act in 1994, which made it illegal for protesters to obstruct people going to health clinics.

If Pillard’s confirmation is blocked by Republicans, it will be because they can’t handle an openly feminist, pro-choice federal judge—or because, as Reid has pointed out, they are stonewalling all of the Obama administration’s nominees, no matter their background. Obama has nominated two others to the DC Circuit, one of whom has already been filibustered by Republicans. “While Senate Republicans are blocking President Obama’s nominees to this vital court, they were happy to confirm several judges to the DC Circuit when Presidents Reagan and Bush were in office…Pillard is incredibly qualified and dedicated,” Reid said.

At least one conservative legal scholar agrees: “I know well Professor Pillard’s intellect, integrity, and temperament…I know her to be a straight shooter when it comes to the law and legal interpretation,” wrote Viet D. Dinh, who served as the assistant attorney general for legal policy under President George W. Bush. “I am confident that she would approach the judicial task of applying law to facts in a fair and meticulous mannerâ&#128;&#139;.”

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The Republican Freakout Over This Feminist, Pro-Choice Federal Judicial Nominee

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