Friday, October 26, 2012

Romney-Ryan and the Rape Apologists

I've returned from blogger purgatory to finally opine about the presidential campaign. In lieu of TV news, I'm now getting my news almost exclusively from internet memes and Daily Show clips; these days, the results are pretty much the same. Cable news distills complex, multi-faceted issues into facile left-right debates (or, more accurately, centre-right vs. extreme right debates). Internet memes, Buzzfeed gif-a-thons, and Jezebel rants just make the whole thing a bit more palatable.

All of us who studied media or journalism in school learned that infotainment is the scourge of mainstream journalism and the culture at large. I agree that news programs that privilege entertainment over in-depth reporting are damaging. But something J-school doesn't teach you - at least in the U.S. - are the potential dangers of 'fairness' and 'objectivity', the unimpeachable virtues of North American journalism. Which leads me to my current bugaboo: the Right's obsession with women's bodies. Why should mainstream news sources, in the interest of fairness, present without comment the opinions of a few elderly white men who seek to impose "God's will" on a nation of women? Why does CNN give voice to inaccurate, misleading information about abortion, contraception, and rape? And since when was rape up for debate?

Of course, the right wing has long fixated upon control of the body, especially female ones. Political arguments founded on female sexuality are a Western tradition. But this is 2012, and many of us had become complacent about the progress feminism had fought for and won in the U.S. Brave women (and men and transfolk) have battled for decades, and have succeeded in widening access to birth control, helping to make abortion legal and safe, and changing the way our culture looks at sexual assault and violence against women.

But these days, with the tacit (and sometimes vocal) approval of the Romney-Ryan campaign, extremists are seeking to redefine rape and limit women's health care access and choices. Todd Akin made a splash with his theories about "legitimate rape" and the magical fallopian tubes that bitch-slap a rapist's sperm. Then Richard Mourdock, a Senate candidate from Indiana whom Romney has endorsed publicly, argued that if a rape victim gets pregnant, she must carry the fetus to term because it's "something God intended." Let's just forget that God's sick little plan is something that a man will never have to endure.    

Now you might say "Oh, but Mitt Romney says he doesn't believe that shit!" Well, you would be wrong. Romney said he supports personhood amendments, which would declare a fertilized egg a human being. Thus, all abortions would be illegal. (By the way, this shit is so crazy that it lost easily in Mississippi.) Also, Paul Ryan sponsored a Personhood Amendment in the U.S. House of Representatives. Ryan - and Romney,  too, before his convenient slide toward the political center - believe that abortion should be illegal in all situations. These things are not a secret. It's just that most news sources are doing such a terrible job of reporting them. Further, the retirement of a liberal Supreme Court justice could make these evangelical dreams a reality. A Court with a Romney-appointed conservative justice could easily overturn Roe v. Wade and inflict generations-long damage on this country.

'Social issues' are divisive, and they are deployed at critical times using loaded language to instill fear and rile up the base. But 'social issues' are always economic issues, too. A great fallacy of American politics is that social and economic issues can and should be separated. Republicans, who beat the anti-abortion drum, complain that the economy should decide this election, and that these silly social issues need to take a backseat. But politicians' decisions on wedge issues like abortion and contraception have acute economic effects on women. We cannot pretend that the freedom to choose whether to have a child, or access to health care, are distinct from the 'economy.'

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