By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Seems the far Right just can’t stay out of – or quit throwing – the muck. The Huffington Post reports that University of Rochester econ professor, Steve Landsburg, has launched his own attack on Georgetown law school student, Sandra Fluke, who had the temerity to speak her mind to a congressional committee discussing contraceptive services. Landsburg apparently dabbles in English grammar when his dismal graphs and computer models become tiresome. In his off-hours, he seems quite content to edit Rush Limbaugh’s right-wing attack pieces, adding some of his own insights. On his blog he felt compelled to share:
[Limbaugh] wants to brand Ms. Fluke a “slut” because, he says, she’s demanding to be paid for sex. There are two things wrong here. First, the word “slut” connotes (to me at least) precisely the sort of joyous enthusiasm that would render payment superfluous. A far better word might have been “prostitute” (or a five-letter synonym therefor), but that’s still wrong because Ms. Fluke is not in fact demanding to be paid for sex. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) She will, as I understand it, be having sex whether she gets paid or not. Her demand is to be paid. The right word for that is something much closer to “extortionist”. Or better yet, “extortionist with an overweening sense of entitlement.” Is there a single word for that?
But whether or not he chose the right word, what I just don’t get is why the pro-respect crowd is aiming all its fire at Rush. Which is more disrespectful — his harsh language or Sandra Fluke’s attempt to pick your pocket?
Seems he may be on to something etymologically speaking but he fails
miserably in the free speech/separation of church-state class. I’d think he’s also getting a “D-” for comprehension in my class. Fluke made no claim on the public funds and instead merely advocated that private insurance cover contraceptive services to further women’s health rather than cater to religious convictions of a particular sect.
While Professor Landsburg doesn’t get it, the University’s students did. Thirty of them dressed in black and made a rather dramatic entry into his classroom passing out summaries of the professor’s musings and then opted to stand between him and his charges staging a pedagogical wall of separation between scorn and student.
Landsburg called security to disband the protest, but the students left of their own accord making their point for both civility and free speech. “We are appalled by how often women and their bodies have been used for political theatrics, and we refuse to remain passive on this issue,” Kelly Rickert, a Rochester student who was a part of the protest, told The Huffington Post. “To do so would be to condone the actions of Professor Landsburg.”
University of Rochester President Joel Seligman acknowledged his employee’s right to the academic freedom to express unpopular opinions but added:
“I am outraged that any professor would demean a student in this fashion,” Seligman said in a statement. “To openly ridicule, mock, or jeer a student in this way is about the most offensive thing a professor can do. We are here to educate, to nurture, to inspire, not to engage in character assassination.”
Well, Dr. Segilman some of you are. On the other hand, seems some in the ivory tower like to attack from the comfort of their office. Landsburg was undeterred, “[Fluke] deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered,” and “Rush stepped in to provide the requisite mockery” with a “spot-on analogy.” And in one of the most ironic statements I’ve heard from the academe in a long time said of the protestors, “in their contempt for the free exchange of ideas, they appear to be comrades-in-arms of Sandra Fluke.”
Comrades-in-arms by personal ridicule and thus chilling the free speech of another? In Rochester, it seems it takes one to know one.
In keeping with our academic theme, in a hundred words or less, pick the victim(s) and defend your answer:
a. Sandra Fluke
b. Professor Steve Landsburg
c. The University of Rochester
d. First Amendment
e. Academic Freedom
Source: Huffington Post
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
You know sometimes it gets tiring trying to make people understand what to me is simple logic. Anyone who has any doubt about where I’m coming from when it pertains to the governance of the US can read my guest blog from last Saturday. Yet despite my belief that our political system is run by a loose oligarchy, I’ve voted in every election every election since 1964.
That is not a dichotomy. While the US is certainly not run by the people, the electoral process defines the parameters of how far the 1% can go. If Republicans win in Congress and the Presidency this year the polls will allow the war on women’s rights to reach fruition. Women will again become chattel, losing control of their freedom and their bodies. There of course be some with as dyspeptic a vision as mine who willnot vote, or pick a candidate who can’t win, but will be politically pure by their lights. They will feel pride in their purity as women’s independence will be shredded, but they will feel they have done the “right thing”.
Creator save us from the purisrs of this world, they allow innocent to die as the role of their purity defends them from reason.
Bush ran for governor of Texas on an anti-abortion platform. He beat the feminist Ann Richards. Cecile Richards carries on the tradition of her mother. Obama has too much in common with Bush on civil liberties for my taste, but he does not share his views on women’s healthcare and women’s rights.
Bush was anti abortion and so were all his court appointees. Obama’s appointees to the Supreme Court have been pro-choice women. Bush also appointed only anti-abortion judges to the federal courts. This has not been the case with Obama. Bush also packed the justice department with graduates of Regent law school. For a woman there has been a difference between the two. Bush was never endorsed or supported by planned parenthood, Quite the opposite was true.
Not sure who posted the porn or whom it was directed…. Clearly this does not have any applicability here…. But for the professors desire to have the ability of free thought speech etc….It and you would be banned as well as the posting suppressed and/or deleted…. Think of the ladies here that are addressing real issues that affect them and because of that it affects us the men folks….
To post such things suggest you have no respect for yourself and are doing so only to glean attention from the matter at hand…. You are as guilty and devisive as the recognized political party’s……notice I didn’t say organized…… As the parties are as organized as trying to heard cats…… It ain’t gonna happened unless you have a great ringleader….. So far no one is capable of taking the command……not even Obama….. He is not much better than bush…so far Gomer Joe has not stated publicly acknowledging he considers it acceptable practice…. No please whoever you are show respect for all of the folks here….Thank you…..
Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding
JoAnn Wypijewski
March 21, 2012
http://www.thenation.com/article/166961/reproductive-rights-and-long-hand-slave-breeding
Excerpt:
I hate liberalism’s language of “choice.” I always have. Redolent of the marketplace, it reduces the most intimate aspects of existence, of women’s physical autonomy, to individualistic purchasing preferences. A sex life or a Subaru? A child or a cheeseburger? Life, death or liposuction? In that circumstance, capitalism’s only question is, Who pays and who profits? The state’s only question is, Who regulates and how much? If there is an upside to the right’s latest, seemingly loony and certainly grotesque multi-front assault on women, it is the clarion it sounds to humanists to take the high ground and ditch the anodyne talk of “a woman’s right to choose” for the weightier, fundamental assertion of “a woman’s right to be.”
That requires that we look to history and the Constitution. I found myself doing that a few weeks back, sitting in the DC living room of Pamela Bridgewater, talking about slavery as the TV news followed the debate over whether the State of Virginia should force a woman to spread her legs and endure a plastic wand shoved into her vagina. Pamela has a lot of titles that, properly, ought to compel me to refer to her now as Professor Bridgewater—legal scholar, teacher at American University, reproductive rights activist, sex radical—but she is my friend and sister, and we were two women sitting around talking, so I shall alternate between the familiar and the formal.
“What a spectacle,” Pamela exclaimed, “Virginia, the birthplace of the slave breeding industry in America, is debating state-sanctioned rape. Imagine the woman who says No to this as a prerequisite for abortion. Will she be strapped down, her ankles shackled to stir-ups?”
“I suspect,” said I, “that partisans would say, ‘If she doesn’t agree, she is free to leave.’ ”
“Right, which means she is coerced into childbearing or coerced into taking other measures to terminate her pregnancy, which may or may not be safe. Or she relents and says Yes, and that’s by coercion, too.”
“Scratch at modern life and there’s a little slave era just below the surface, so we’re right back to your argument.”
Pamela Bridgewater’s argument, expressed over the past several years in articles and forums, and at the heart of a book in final revision called Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom, presents the most compelling conceptual and constitutional frame I know for considering women’s bodily integrity and defending it from the right.
In brief, her argument rolls out like this. The broad culture tells a standard story of the struggle for reproductive rights, beginning with the flapper, climaxing with the pill, Griswold v. Connecticut and an assumption of privacy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and concluding with Roe v. Wade. The same culture tells a traditional story of black emancipation, beginning with the Middle Passage, climaxing with Dred Scott, Harpers Ferry and Civil War and concluding with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Both stories have a postscript—a battle royal between liberation and reaction—but, as Bridgewater asserts, “Taken together, these stories have no comprehensive meaning. They tell no collective tale. They create no expectation of sexual freedom and no protection against, or remedy for, reproductive slavery. They exist in separate spheres; that is a mistake.” What unites them but what both leave out, except incidentally, is the experience of black women. Most significantly, they leave out “the lost chapter of slave breeding.”
I need to hit the pause button on the argument for a moment, because the considerable scholarship that revisionist historians have done for the past few decades has not filtered into mass consciousness. The mass-culture story of slavery is usually told in terms of economics, labor, color, men. Women outnumbered men in the enslaved population two to one by slavery’s end, but they enter the conventional story mainly under the rubric “family,” or in the cartoon triptych Mammy-Jezebel-Sapphire, or in the figure of Sally Hemmings. Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself. That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm X’s distinction between “the house Negro” and “the field Negro,” erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the “favorite” that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Jill,
I have been anti-war since the late sixties. I blame both Democrats and Republicans for our wars of choice.
*****
“Now about those other groups who are not women?
1. women killed or raped in wars of choice
2. women who are poor or very ill who can’t get coverage for abortion
3. women who live in poverty”
*****
Women are raped in this country. We have politicians in the USA who would like to force these women to carry their pregnancies to term should they become impregnated by their rapists. Who has been trying to cut funding for family planning, contraceptive coverage, social programs that help support the poor and elderly? Who is pushing anti-woman legislation in different states across this country and in Congress?
I may not trust many Democratic politicians–but I find what the GOP has been trying to do to Planned Parenthood, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other “safety net” programs unconscionable.
Swarthmore,
You are right that our best chance of protecting women’s rights is to vote the Teapublicans out of office.
We had this same discussion about voting the democrats out in 2010. It did not turn out so well. Now we have sonograms with probes instead of democrats that are not totally pure on every issue.
Jill, The Planned Parenthood people are formidable opponents. Just ask the people at Komen. Romney pledged to get rid of pp.
Jill, You are not on the same page as Planned Parenthood and that is okay. Defeating Obama is your thing and you definitely won’t be getting any help from them in achieving your goal.
From Cecile Richards
As we ride out another month of attacks on women’s health care, let’s take a moment to mark an important milestone. It was two years ago this week that President Obama signed into law the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a significant step in fixing the country’s broken health system.
ACA started a revolution that is decades overdue and represents one of the greatest advances for women’s access to health care in a generation. It ensures that all new insurance plans cover preventive care for women — including birth control, annual well woman exams, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and immunizations — without expensive co-pays or deductibles. It stops the discriminatory practice of charging women more than men for health insurance and ends practices such as denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions and dropping individuals after they become sick. It expands coverage for young adults by allowing them to stay on their parents’ health plan until age 26. And by 2014, it will extend affordable health coverage to tens of millions of women and families who now lack it.
As the trusted health care provider to one in five women, Planned Parenthood hears from patients every day about the urgent need to improve access to affordable, preventive health care, especially from those who need it the most.
That’s why Planned Parenthood supports ACA, and its multitude of health benefits to help women, men, and families lead healthier lives. And that’s why President Obama should be applauded for championing ACA.
Unfortunately, Mitt Romney, the leading Republican presidential candidate, is desperate to woo his party’s most extreme elements, and pledges that he would “get rid of” ACA’s health benefits if elected president. This is on top of his campaign promise to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood.
In other words, Mitt Romney wants to take a major step backwards on women’s health, undermine access to preventive health care such as cancer screenings and birth control, take away protections against medical discrimination, and allow insurance companies to charge women more for health care.
So Elaine,
I wonder if you’re O.K. with what I mentioned above at 6:26. We are in agreement that cutting funding for Planned Parenthood is very wrong. I am asking a deeper question that people keep skirting.
Can a person really be for women’s rights if they are willing to stop the sickest and most vulnerable women in our society from getting an abortion? Women who will die from this decision? Can a person engage in multiple wars of choice which will knowingly result in the rape and killing of women, really be called pro-woman? Can a person whose economic policies which will knowingly put more women and children into poverty and deny them access to health care really be called pro-woman?
I don’t think so. Either we stand for all women or we don’t really stand for women’s rights. Rights should not be contingent, that is why they are called rights. If someone sells them out for the most vulnerable, they will eventually sell them out for most every other “woman”. That’s because a person willing to sell out the rights of others when they can get away with it, pretty obviously doesn’t really believe in those rights. If they did honor those rights, they wouldn’t trade them out in the first place. I’m not supporting anyone who trades out other people. It’s not ethical. Practically speaking, you will end up with your worst fears realized. A person has to really honor something to stand up for it.
Planned Parenthood Defunding: Family Planning’s Not a GOP Family Value?
1 year ago
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2011/02/19/planned-parenthood-defunding-family-plannings-not-a-gop-family/
Excerpt:
When it comes to family planning, apparently the ability to decide whether or when to have a child isn’t part of Republican family values.
That’s the message the GOP-controlled House sent by voting to cut not only all of Planned Parenthood’s $75 million in federal funding for family planning but also the entire $317 million Title X budget. Title X money helps pay for birth control, screening and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, breast and cervical cancer testing, prenatal care, sex education and vasectomies for men. About 4.7 million Americans get health care from clinics funded by Title X money, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Indiana Rep. Mike Pence represented his successful gutting of the funding as a victory in preventing abortion, even though the Hyde Amendment, enacted in 1977, prohibits federal funding of abortion except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. And President Barack Obama signed an executive order last year preserving the funding ban under the new health care reform law.
In addition to the money from from Title X, which was signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1970, Planned Parenthood and other health care providers receive Medicaid money for health services to low-income people. Under Pence’s amendment, approved in a 240-185 vote, Planned Parenthood wouldn’t be allowed to receive any federal dollars, including money from Medicaid.
S.M.,
What is the basis of your criticism of Rick Perry? He cut off funding to poor and vulnerable women? If so, we are in agreement about this being wrong. What I find strange is that you criticize one candidate for cutting off funding to poor and vulnerable women while fully backing another candidate who does the same thing. The difference between these two candidates is not their action. It seems to be their party affiliation. If something is wrong when candidate R does it, wouldn’t it also be wrong when candidate D does it? Why support candidate D for doing it but condemn R for the same action? This doesn’t make sense.
And for the record, again. I think people should definitely vote. I’ve said that so many times but will say it again so that people will know what I actually said!
Planned Parenthood is an organization that supports democratic candidates because the are so few republican candidates if any that support them these days. It did not used to be that way. They will endorse Obama over Romney. Jill, take it up with Planned Parenthood if you don’t like the candidates they back. I have a friend that works there and she is not too fond of republican legislators or presidential candidates these days. They don’t waste their time on third party candidates nor do they tell women to abstain from voting.
Jill,
just read your post. excellent analysis. Sure, it’s obvious you say.
But how many men fuckers realize it is their ass up for grabs when women are tanked.? Stupid assholes.
Women are 50 % + of the pop. And we men ain’t going anywhere without them. Although they could get by producing clones and ev cross-genetic models from their gene pool. Just so you know guys. Shape up.
Just as most don’t, within the frame of the law, protest laws which bite others.
Old Niemöller should be obligatorily recited every day and each week some student shoud be selected to hold a speech on the subject and at least 5 questions should be assigned to be found by 5 other students, which the speaker will attempt to answer as best he/she can.
I mean if 1984-ism is alive now, then let’s use some of our own “Truth” tactics.
Planned Parenthood does help many poor women. I was not aware it was a Democratic party organization. Are you certain it is? I thought it was a non-profit which helped anyone who needed care to the best of their ability.
Now about those other groups who are not women?
1. women killed or raped in wars of choice
2. women who are poor or very ill who can’t get coverage for abortion
3. women who live in poverty
“Mitt Romney’s comments today that he would ‘get rid of’ Planned Parenthood show how low he is willing to go to pander to the most extreme elements of the Republican base,” Stephanie Cutter said. “Planned Parenthood is a vital health care provider for millions of American women, giving them affordable access to life-saving services like mammograms and cervical cancer screenings.” CNN
Rick Perry’s Planned Parenthood Revenge: Kill Health Care For Poor Women
This is why Rick Perry can never be President of the United States. Mimicking his fellow Merck buddy Nancy Brinker, Perry decided to punish Planned Parenthood by going forward with a state law banning treatment for any condition at a clinic with any ties to abortion providers, specifically:
But under a state law taking effect Wednesday, Henry and other eligible women won’t be able to get care at Planned Parenthood clinics — which treat about 44% of the program’s patients — or other facilities with ties to abortion providers, meaning those women will have to find new health-care providers.
The $40 million program is at the center of a faceoff between conservative Republican lawmakers and the federal government, which provides 90% of the program’s funding. Although Texas already forbids taxpayer money from going to organizations that provide abortions, the law will cut off clinics with any affiliation to a provider, even if it’s just a shared name, employee or board member. Source:Crooks and Liars
Jill, Not really…… Planned Parenthood serves many poor women. In Texas it is often the only place they can get healthcare. Perry has cut off their funds and Romney says he wants to get rid of Planned Parenthood.