Miriam,
My spin is that the Left not only is divided into sub groups, but each
one has its Principles, and each one judges all others by them. The
Right has only one goal, total control. And it's a no holds barred
fight, anything goes.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/21/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yes, except that most of us are flawed. Look at any individual, politician,
doctor, author, scientist, philosopher, etc., and you won't find anyone who
is pure and free of flaws. I think that's why the Left has so much
difficulty gaining power. Everyone has these tests for purity for everyone
else so they can't organize. The Right, on the other hand, has no problem
with compromise, so long as they can achieve some of their goals.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2019 10:29 AM
To: Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx>
Cc: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed for
Decades as Hysterical
Yes, she was also a strong advocate of eugenics. But the article author
tried to tuck that under the rug by saying that she did great things, but
was a flawed person. That certainly shows a bit of bias, don't you think?
Carl Jarvis
On 5/20/19, Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx> wrote:
I notice that this does not say anything about something else about her.
She was also a strong advocate of eugenics. Somehow that usually gets
left out.
---
David Hume
“ In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all
imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the
lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions
his belief to the evidence. ”
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
On 5/20/2019 10:56 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Hi Miriam and All,
Women's Rights is one of those topics I normally stay out of.
Although I am deeply moved and saddened by the direction we are
headed. But I feel about as out of place as a Priest counseling
teenage girls on the advantages of the Rhythm Method for birth
control. I recall far too clearly the horror stories of young
desperate pregnant Lower Income girls, visiting backroom "doctors",
who took away their ability to ever have a baby, if they lived.
In Seattle there was a Doctor Bamey(unsure of spelling)who defied the
law, and provided safe abortions despite threats by both the
government and by "kind, loving" Christian organizations crying for
his blood.
This was in the 1950's.
Here is a piece about Margaret Sanger:
Sanger_Fact_Sheet_Oct_2016.pdf
1
Margaret Sanger — Our Founder
A trailblazer in the fi ght for reproductive rights, Margaret
Sanger’s history is layered and complex Our founder, Margaret Sanger,
was a woman of heroic accomplishments, and like all heroes, she was
also complex and imperfect. It is undeniable that Margaret Sanger’s
lifelong struggle helped 20th century women gain the right to decide
when and whether to have a child — a right that had been suppressed
worldwide for at least 5,000 years (Boulding, 1992).
Anticipating the most recent turn of the millennium, LIFE magazine
declared that Margaret Sanger was one of the 100 most important
Americans of the 20th century (LIFE, 1990) — along with Jane Addams,
Rachel Carson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Betty
Friedan, Martin Luther King Jr., Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Mead,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary McLeod Bethune, Jonas Salk, and Malcolm X1
(Le Brun, 1990).
Motivated by a deeply held compassion for the women and children
whose homes she visited around the world, Sanger believed that
universal access to birth control would:
• Reduce the need for abortion — a common and dangerous method of
family planning in her time; • Save women’s and children’s lives; •
Strengthen the nuclear family; • Lift families out of poverty; •
Increase the good health and well-being of all individuals, families,
and their communities; and • Help women gain their legal and civil
rights.
1 In the hope of building new alliances, former President Guttmacher
organized an informational meeting between the director of the Harlem
clinic and Malcolm X in 1962 (Lepore, 2013, 131) Sanger was a true
visionary. In her lifetime, she convinced Americans and people around
the world that they have basic human rights:
• A woman has a right to control her body; • Everyone should be able
to decide when or whether to have a child; • Every child should be
wanted and loved; and • Women and all people are entitled to sexual
pleasure and fulfi llment.
2
MARGARET SANGER — OUR FOUNDER
Sanger’s battle for family planning was unrelenting, unyielding, and
totally focused. Her crusade made it legal to publish and distribute
information about sex, sexuality, and birth control. It:
• created access to birth control for, as she saw it, poor women,
women of color, and immigrant women; • spearheaded the development of
contemporary safe, effective, and affordable oral birth control pills
and other hormonal methods; • became an early 20th century model for
nonviolent civil disobedience, empowering the American civil rights,
women’s rights, anti-war, gay rights, and AIDS-action movements
(King, 2008[1966], 6, 7); and • helped promote new ideas about
volunteerism and grassroots organizing in the U.S.
On 5/19/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
You're right. It's irrational and it's cruel. For me, it's not just
theoretical. I remember life before abortion. My life was profoundly
affected because abortion wasn't available to me. And I remember
other women who suffered as well. I also remember helping someone
obtain an illegal abortion when one of the social workers
recommended a doctor for another employee at the agency where I'd
previously worked. It was terrifying.
That's what we're going back to.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2019 10:47 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed
for Decades as Hysterical
Where do these people get off at?
They are, to a man...and to a woman, the same people who scream
their opposition to "government interference". They are the self
same people who tearfully applaud as the drums and bugles play, and
the banners fly as the cream of our youth march off to sacrifice
their lives in another of our continuous wars.
They are the same people who gather in their local churches and pray
to a God of Forgiveness, and then demand that any doctor assisting
in a woman's decision to abort a fetus, be sent to prison for 99
years.
How is it that on the one hand we should down size government and
allow people the freedom to conduct their own business, while on the
other hand they want to post officials in every woman's bedroom with
their noses between her legs?
There's only one word which explains it. Insanity!
Carl Jarvis
On 5/18/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
She omits Hillary who, I remember, in around 2005 or 6, was talking
about abortion being only a last resort and how the Democratic
Party should welcome people who are opposed to abortion and include
their voices.
Miriam
Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed for Decades as Hysterical
By Rebecca Traister, The Cut
18 May 19
have been thinking, like so many people this week, about rage.
Who I'm mad at, what that anger's good for, how what makes me
maddest is the way the madness has long gone unrespected, even by
those who have relied on it for their gains.
For as long as I have been a cogent adult, and actually before
that, I have watched people devote their lives, their furious
energies, to fighting against the steady, merciless, punitive
erosion of reproductive rights. And I have watched as politicians -
not just on the right, but members of my own party - and the
writers and pundits who cover them, treat reproductive rights and
justice advocates as if they were fantasists enacting dystopian
fiction.
This week, the most aggressive abortion bans since Roe v. Wade
swept through states, explicitly designed to challenge and
ultimately reverse Roe at the Supreme Court level. With them has
come the dawning of a broad realization
-
a clear, bright, detailed vision of what's at stake, and what's ahead.
(If not, yet, full comprehension of the harm that has already been
done).
As it comes into view, I am of course livid at the Republican Party
that has been working toward this for decades. These right-wing
ghouls
- who fulminate idiotically about how women could still be allowed
to get abortions before they know they are pregnant (Alabama's
Clyde
Chambliss) or try to legislate the medically impossible removal of
ectopic pregnancy and reimplantation into the uterus (Ohio's John
Becker) - are the stuff of unimaginably gothic horror. Ever since
Roe was decided in 1973, conservatives have been laboring to roll
back abortion access, with absolutely zero knowlege of or interest
in how reproduction works. And all the while, those who have been
trying to sound the alarm have been shooed off as silly hysterics.
Which is why I am almost as mad at many on the left, theoretically
on the side of reproductive rights and justice, who have refused,
somehow, to see this coming or act aggressively to forestall it. I
have no small amount of rage stored for those in the Democratic
Party who have relied on the engaged fury of voters committed to
reproductive autonomy to elect them, at the same time that they
have treated the efforts of activists trying to stave off this
future as inconvenient irritants.
This includes, of course, the Democrats (notably Joe Biden) who
long supported the Hyde Amendment, the legislative rider that has
barred the use of federal insurance programs from paying for
abortion, making reproductive health care inaccessible to poor
women since 1976. During health-care reform, Barack Obama referred
to Hyde as a "tradition" and questions of abortion access as "a
distraction." I've spent my life listening to Democrats call
abortion a niche issue - and worse, one that is somehow repellent
to voters, even though support for Roe is in fact among the most
broadly popular positions of the Democratic Party; seven in ten
Americans want abortion to remain legal, even in conservative
states.
You can try to tell these Democrats this - lots of people have been
trying to tell them for a while now - but it won't matter; they
will only explain to you (a furious person) that they (calm, wise,
knowledgeable about
politics) understand that we need a big tent and can't have a
litmus test and please be reasonable: we shouldn't shut anyone out
because of a difference on one issue. (That one issue that we
shouldn't shut people out because of is always abortion). Every
single time Democrats come up with a new strategy to win purple and
red areas, it is the same strategy: hey, let's jettison abortion!
(If you object to this, you will be told you are standing in the
way of the greater progressive project).
I grew up in Pennsylvania, governed by anti-abortion Democrat Bob
Casey Sr.; his son Bob Jr. is Pennsylvania's senior senator now,
and though he's getting better on abortion, Jr. voted, in 2015 and
2018, for 20-week abortion bans. Maybe my rage stems from being
raised with this particularly grim perspective on Democratic
politics: dynasties of white men united in their dedication to
restricting women's bodily autonomy, but they're Democrats so who else
are you going to vote for?
Which reminds me of Dan Lipinski, the virulently anti-abortion
Democratic congressman - whose anti-abortion dad held his seat
before him. The current DCCC leader, Cheri Bustos, is holding a
big-dollar fundraiser for Lipinski's reelection campaign, even
though it's 2019 and abortion is being banned and providers
threatened with more jail time than rapists and there is someone
else to vote for: Lipinski is being challenged in a primary by
pro-choice progressive Democrat Marie Newman. And still, Bustos, a
powerful woman and Democratic leader, is helping anti-choice
Lipinski keep his seat for an eighth term. So I've been thinking about
that part of my anger too.
Also about how, for years, I've listened to Democratic politicians
distance themselves from abortion by calling it tragic and
insisting it should be rare, instead of simply acknowledging it to
be a crucial, legal cornerstone of comprehensive health care for
women, people with uteruses, and their families. I have seethed as
generations of Democrats have argued that if we could just get past
abortion and focus instead on economic issues, we'd be better off.
They never seem to get that abortion is an economic issue, and that
what they think of as economic issues - from wages and health care
to housing and education policy - are at the very heart of the
reproductive justice movement, which understands access to abortion
to be one (pivotal!) part of a far broader set of circumstances
that determine if, when, under what circumstances, and with what
resources human beings might have and raise children.
And no, of course it's not just Democrats I'm mad at. It's the
pundits who approach abortion law as armchair coaches. I can't do
better in my fury on this front than the legal writer Scott
Lemieux, who in 2007 wrote a blistering rundown of all the legal
and political wags, including Ben Wittes and Jeffrey Rosen and
Richard Cohen and William Saletan, then making arguments, some too
cute by half, about how Roe was ultimately bad for abortion rights
and for Democrats. Some like to cite an oft-distorted opinion put
forth by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has said that she wished the
basis on which Roe was decided had included a more robust defense
of women's equality. Retroactive strategic chin-stroking about Roe
is mostly moot, given the decades of intervening cases and that the
fight against abortion is not about process but about the
conviction that women should not control their own reproduction. It
is also true that Ginsburg has been doing the work of aggressively
defending reproductive rights for decades, while these pundits have
treated them as a parlor game. As Lemieux put it then, it was
unsurprising, "given the extent to which affluent men safely
ensconced in liberal urban centers dominate the liberal pundit
class," that the arguments put forth, "greatly understate or ignore
the stark class and geographic inequites in abortion access that would
inevitably manifest themselves in a post-Roe world."
Or, for that matter, that had already manifested themselves in a
Roe world.
Because long before these new bans - which will meet years of legal
challenge before they are enacted - abortion had grown ever less
accessible to segments of America, though not the segments that the
affluent men (and
women) who write about and practice politics tend to emerge from.
But yes, thanks to Hyde and the TRAP laws and the closed clinics
and the long travel distances and paucity of providers and the
economically untenable waiting periods, legions of women have
already suffered, died, had children against their will, while
columnists and political consultants have bantered about the
necessity of Roe, and litmus tests and big tents. In vast portions
of this country, Roe might as well not exist already.
And still those who are mad about, have been driven mad by, these
injustices have been told that their fury is baseless, fictional,
made of chewing gum and recycled copies of Our Bodies Ourselves.
Last summer, the day before Anthony Kennedy announced his
resignation from the Supreme Court, CNN host Brian Stelter tweeted,
in response to a liberal activist, "We are not 'a few steps from The
Handmaids' Tale.'
I don't think this kind of fear-mongering helps anybody." When
protesters shouted at Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings a few
weeks later, knowing full well what was about to happen and what it
portended for Roe, Senator Ben Sasse condescended and lied to them,
claiming that there have been "screaming protesters saying 'women
are going to die' at every hearing for decades" and suggesting that
this response was a form of "hysteria."
It was the kind of dishonesty - issued from on high, from one of
those Republicans who has inexplicably earned a reputation for
being "reasonable"
and "smart," and who has enormous power over our future - that
makes you want to pull the hair from your head and go screaming
through the streets except someone would just tell you you were being
hysterical.
And so here we are, the thing is happening and no one can pretend
otherwise; it is not a game or a drill and those for whom the
consequences - long real for millions whose warnings and peril have
gone unheeded - are only now coming into focus want to know: what
can be done?
First, never again let anyone tell you that the fury or
determination to fight on this account is invalid, inappropriate,
or inconvenient to a broader message. Consider that this is also
what women and marginalized people are told all the time about
their anger in
general: that they should not express it, not let it out, because
to give voice to their rage will distract from their aims,
undermine them; that it will ultimately be bad for them. This
messaging is strategic. It is designed to get angry people to keep
their mouths shut. Because if they are successfully stifled, they
will remain at the margins, isolated, alone in their fury. It is
only if they start letting it out and acting on it and working in
tandem with others who share their outrage that they might begin to
form networks, coalitions, the building blocks of movements; it is
when the anger is let loose that the organizing happens in earnest.
Second, seek the organizing that is already underway. In the days
since this new round of state abortion bans have begun to pass and
make headlines, secret Facebook groups have begun to form, in which
freshly furious women have begun to talk of forming networks that
would help patients evade barriers to access. Yet these
organizations already exist, are founded and run by women of color,
have long been transporting those in need of reproductive care to
the facilities where they can get it; they are woefully
underfunded. The trick is not to start something new, but to join
forces with those who have long been angry about reproductive
injustice.
"Abortion funds have been sounding the alarm for decades," said
Yamani Hernandez, who runs the National Network or Abortion Funds,
which includes
76 local funds in 41 states, each of them helping women who face
barriers getting the abortion care they need, offering money,
transportation, housing, and help with logistics. Only 29 of the
funds have paid staff; the rest are volunteer-run and led with
average budget sizes of $75,000, according to Hernandez, who said
that in 2017, 150,000 people called abortion funds for help - a
number up from
100,000 in 2015, thanks to the barrage of restrictions that have
made it so much harder for so many more people. With just $4
million to work with, the funds were able to help
29,000 of them last year: giving abortion funds money and time will
directly help people who need it. Distinguishing the work of
abortion funds from the policy fights in state houses and at the
capitols, Hernandez said, "whatever happens in Washington, and
changes in the future, women need to get care today."
And whatever comes next, she said, it's the people who have been
doing this work for years who are likely to be best prepared to
deal with the harm inflicted, which is a good place for the newly
enraged to start. "If and when Roe is abolished," said Hernandez,
"the people who are going to be getting people to the care they
need are those who have largely been navigating this already and
are already well suited for the logistical challenges."
The fights on the ground might be the most current and urgent in
human terms, but there is also energy to be put into policy fights.
In 2015, California Congresswoman Barbara Lee authored the EACH
Woman Act, the first serious congressional challenge to the Hyde
Amendment, which came after years of agitation and activism,
especially by All Above All, a grassroots organization led by women
of color and determined to make abortion accessible to everyone.
Those who are looking for policy fights to lean into can call and
write your representatives and candidates and demand that they support
the EACH Woman Act.
Rage works. It takes time and numbers and a willingness to express
it, but it is among the most reliable catalysts of social and
political change.
That's the story of how grassroots activism can compel Barbara Lee
to compel her caucus to take on Hyde. Her willingness to tackle it,
and the righteous outrage of those who are driven to end the harm
it does to poor women and women of color, in turn helped to compel
Hillary Clinton to come out against Hyde in her 2016 primary
campaign; opposition to Hyde is now - for the first time since it
was passed in
1976 - a part of the Democratic Party's platform.
In these past two years, fury at a Trump administration and at the
Republican Party has driven electoral activism. And at the end of
2018, the Guttmacher Institute reported that 2018 was the first
year since at least
2000 in which the number of state policies enacted to expand or
protect abortion rights and access, and contraceptive access,
outnumbered the number of state restrictions. Why? Because growing
realization of what was at stake
- and resulting anger and activism, pressure applied to state
legislatures
-
led representatives to act.
Of course: vote.
Vote, as they say, as if your life depended on it, because it does,
but more
importantly: other people's lives depend on it. And between voting,
consider where to aim your anger in ways that will influence
election
outcomes:
educate yourself about local races and policy proposals, as well as
the history of the reproductive rights and reproductive-justice
movements. Get engaged not just on a presidential level - please
God, not just at a presidential level - but with the fights for
state legislative power, in congressional and senate elections, all
of which shape abortion policy and the judiciary, and the voting
rights on which every other kind of freedom hinges. Knock doors,
register voters, give to and volunteer with the organizations that
are working to fight voter suppression and redistricting and expand
the electorate; as well as to those recruiting and training
progressive candidates, especially women and women of color,
especially young and first-time candidates, to run for elected office.
You can also protest, go to rallies. Join a local political group
where your rage will likely be shared with others.
Above all, do not let defeat or despair take you, and do not let
anyone tell you that your anger is misplaced or silly or in vain,
or that it is anything other than urgent and motivating. It may be
terrifying - it is terrifying.
But this - the fury and the fight it must fuel - is going to last
the rest of our lives and we must get comfortable using our rage as
central to the work ahead.
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