The Conservatives' War Against Women Really Is A War Against The 99%

When Connie Morella served in Congress, there still really were moderate Republicans-- and she was one them. But Connie is 81 now and those days are far gone. There are no moderate Republicans; there aren't even mainstream conservative Republicans. The party has gone institutionally insane-- and Connie agrees with that assessment. She started life as a Democrat in Massachusetts but switched when she married a moderate Republican who worked for Maryland Senator Charles Mathias. An 8 term congresswoman, she never felt all that comfortable with the radical right take-over of her adopted party. She was outspokenly pro-Choice, pro-pot, pro-immigrant and pro-gun control, favored equality for minorities and gays, was an advocate for a clean environment and was the only Republican in the House to oppose both Bushs plans to invade Iraq (1991 and 2002)-- not popular positions among an increasingly deranged GOP base that ceded any semblance of independent thinking to Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Michael Savage and the Fox News hate and propaganda machine. Democrats in control of the state legislature gerrymandered her district to guarantee a win for then state-Senator Chris Van Hollen, also a moderate whose record is pretty much the same as Morella's. In 2010 President Obama appointed her to the American Battle Monuments Commission.

Friday she gave an exclusive interview to Josh Israel of TPM in which she lambasted her fellow Republicans for their War on Women. She explained that the Republican Party is not just not a big tent party, it's "not even a small tent, It collapsed." When she helped reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act in 2000, it passed in a Republican-controlled House 415 to 3, only certifiably insane GOP wingnuts/human garbage voting against it, Helen Chenoweth (R-ID), John Hostelttler (R-IN) and adulterer Mark Sanford (R-SC).

"I think the [Republican] Party has moved more towards the right and it has become more solidified in terms of not offering opportunities for other voices to be heard. Look at [Indiana Republican Senate Nominee Richard] Mourdock’s statement when he proclaimed victory: I’m not going to give into them, they’re going to come over to me. The word compromise is not even in the lexicon, let alone an understanding of what it means."

...I went to Harvard in 2008. My program’s theme was “An Endangered Species: A Moderate in the House of Representatives.” If I were to go back now, I think I’d have to say “An Extinct Species,” not endangered, extinct.

...I’ve always said that when you look at Congress, you had more bipartisanship with Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues. The number of issues has gotten smaller… I was the prime sponsor in 2000 of the Violence Against Women Act, when it was reauthorized… On the floor, there was hardly a vote against it. And now, I don’t know why these women have been cornered, so to speak. Maybe they are motivated by the fact that this is an election year-- and in a presidential election particularly, they want to act to counter the concept of the War on Women. That’s why they’re coming up with their own caucus, I suppose. I’ve always felt [the women's caucus] needed to be bipartisan… I think it’s a defensive attempt on the part of this caucus, because they’re concerned... Women are a majority of the voting bloc. If they sense that some of the equities they worked so hard for are being taken away, you’ll see a backlash."

Naomi Wolf agrees-- and she did a feature in The Guardian Thursday that explores why conservatives are waging a war against women and why now. She sees it as part of Empire's relentless struggle to gain social control over all of our lives. And she's well aware that Murdoch's and the Koch brother's ALEC is leading the battle.

[S]tate by state, a well-funded legislative war on women is being unleashed. Many of these new proposed bills, or recently passed state laws, attack in novel ways women's rights to ownership of their bodies and their basic life choices, which second-wave feminists thought long won.

Planned Parenthood appears to be target No 1: Maine, Texas, Arizona, Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, North Carolina and Kansas have all either had bills to defund Planned Parenthood successfully passed or else bills introduced to begin the process of defunding.
 
Target No 2 is abortion rights. Since 2011, 92 new laws against abortion took effect, in 11 states: some states, such as Tennessee, are passing creative new restrictions on abortion rights. On 12 April, Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a new law banning abortions later than 18 weeks after fertilization, and imposing new regulations making abortion more difficult to obtain.

What is this flurry of legislation about? Is it about the sanctity of life?

I would love to believe that-- and some grassroots opposition to abortion rights does, indeed, I have argued elsewhere, arise from a genuinely feminist perspective on social conditions that treat women as disposable sexual objects, and women's fertility as without value, or as an inconvenience to a consumer sexual culture; and these give desperate pregnant women no options at all except termination. Feminists for Life is an organization that I respect a great deal-- though I don't agree with their policy goals-- for creating a seamless pro-life feminist analysis of this kind.

But the groups and representatives that are wallpapering state legislatures with identikit legislation to penalize women's sexual and reproductive rights are the same bloc that gleefully kill food stamp programs used by the same desperate women if they choose to bear the child. This is the same constituency that happily supports sending moms of small children who are in the military into harm's way in corporate wars of choice. So what is this push deriving from?

I had an "Aha" moment recently in Oxford. I was speaking about the British Contagious Diseases Acts-- legislation passed in the 1860s that caused thousands of women be arrested and locked up for up to eight months at a time for looking as if they might have had sex. A graduate student asked me, perceptively, if I had looked at this issue in relation to issues of empire at that time, and another student noted in response that imperial British forces had, at around the same time, set up a complex and expansive equivalent of "lock hospitals" to incarcerate and manage prostitutes in colonized regions.

It was a moment of realization for me because, indeed, that is what empire does; and that is what empire is doing now: systems of control are practiced and, in a sense, perfected "elsewhere" on "the other"; and then, they are too temptingly effective to gatekeepers not to bring them home to use, at length, on their own populations.

Some have argued that this present "war on women" is a war against progressivism-- or a war against feminism, in particular. I would say, looking at the big picture, that it is more serious than that-- not that those options are not plenty serious enough. I would say that the call for transvaginal probes, for gagging medical providers, for sending the state to shake a finger for an extra 72 hours at a distressed woman and stand between her and the discussion she is having with her inner-most and private conscience, is all part of the larger crackdown we see on privacy, private space, freedom and personal choice.

It is on the same spectrum of control: the will to gag Bradley Manning or Julian Assange also seek to gag a medical provider in South Dakota. The same impulse to peer into personal emails and listen to private phone calls that has led the NSA to pour billions into surveillance stations in Utah, is the same impulse of panopticon state control that wants to get between the sheets of men and women in consensual sexual decision-making, and monitor or restrict their access to condoms and contraception. And it is the same Big Brother impulse for control that maintains that what a woman does with her own care-provider is a function of state management.

In other words, women have always had their sexuality managed, surveilled, and controlled by governments; this has been called "gender." I have said here before that getting granular with people's sexual privacy is one of the standard forms of traumatizing state control which closing societies reach for.
 
But in fact, the bigger crackdown shows us that it is merely the genderized manifestation of state control. This impulse to mediate and regulate personal choices has been inflamed, I would argue, not by women being particularly uppity-- but by people being uppity. The awakening of protesting and demanding behavior of Occupy communities and of Ron Paul supporters, of the unions in Wisconsin, and the students in Montreal, and the rebellious Greeks in Athens, has made the gatekeepers seek every kind of method of control available to them.

So, identical bills have been proposed in Albany, New York to criminalize anonymous postings online-- to "protect business people and government officials" from criticism.  And the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act has language legalizing the directing of propaganda at United States citizens. And so on.

Dusting off the same old panoply of woman- and sex-controlling initiatives-- with updated and technological twists-- is simply a useful extension of the general arsenal of control whose purpose is to manage and subdue what is generally an increasingly insubordinate population. We can see this backlash through a feminist lens. But we miss an important insight if we restrict our vision to the feminist lens alone.