Many people, (including our editor) are wondering why the Catholic Church doesn’t just ditch this requirement. They note that most Catholics ignore it, and that most everyone else finds it divisive, or “out-dated.” C’mon! It’s the 21st century, they say! Don’t they SEE that it’s STUPID, they scream.

Here’s the thing, though: the Catholic Church is the world’s biggest and oldest organization. It has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the Soviets. It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every area of human endeavor. It’s given us some of the world’s greatest thinkers, from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard. When it does things, it usually has a good reason. Everyone has a right to disagree, but it’s not that they’re a bunch of crazy old white dudes who are stuck in the Middle Ages.

So, what’s going on?

The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together. That’s it. But it’s pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it’s probably never been as salient as today.

The hodgepodge of evidence they marshal to make their case that the Catholic Church is right about contraception being wrong (aside from the aforementioned and logically fallacious appeals to the Church’s longevity and popularity) includes a 1968 papal pronouncement, a 1996 Slate article about unwed mothers, Kim Kardashian’s brief marriage, statistics on cohabitation and births to single mothers, and China’s coercive family planning policies. Their claim also rests on a sanitized view of pre-1960s life that seems to come straight out of black-and-white TV shows and movies, which leads them to babble incoherent ahistorical strawman piffle like this:

Instead of two parents being responsible for the children they conceive, an expectation that was held up by social norms and by the law, we now take it for granted that neither parent is necessarily responsible for their children. Men are now considered to be fulfilling their duties merely by paying court-ordered child-support. That’s a pretty dramatic lowering of standards for “fatherhood.”

Child support laws date back to at least 1910, when the Uniform Desertion and Non-Support Act was adopted. The Act was amended several times later to make it reciprocal between states and strengthen enforcement. Broken families and desertion by one or both parents were problems long before the advent of the Pill and it was necessary for federal and state legal authorities to step in to ensure that children were supported. Some people are either unfit or don’t have the resources to care for their kids and that has always been the case. But it’s clear that Dougherty and Gobry, despite all their sentimental blather about love and families, have a categorically ugly view of humanity. According to them, men have no intrinsic interest in relationships with women other than as sex objects and will abandon their offspring unless they are under intense social pressure (or a shotgun) to get married. Similarly, women are idiots who, armed with contraception and absent the strict guidance of (male) religious leaders, will take their moral cues from Britney Spears.

Yeah, it’s just like we’ve been saying all along. Social conservative opposition to contraception comes from the same place as their opposition to abortion: It is all about their obsession with sex and keeping women in their place. Everything else is window dressing and smokescreens.

2. Define “medical emergency” to encompass “significant health risks,” namely only those circumstances in which a pregnant woman’s life or a major, physical bodily function is threatened.

Nebraska passed a similar law last year and this New York Times piece described that ghastly consequences to one Nebraska woman as a result of their 20 week abortion ban:

They permit abortions after 20 weeks only to avert the death or “serious physical impairment of a major bodily function” of the mother. There are no exceptions for rape or incest, none for less dire medical threats or mental health.

Nor, under the laws, is an abortion allowed after 20 weeks when a fetus is discovered to be catastrophically impaired but still living, as is sometimes discovered by routine ultrasounds in midpregnancy.

Last fall, Danielle and Robb Deaver of Grand Island, Neb., found that their state’s new law intruded in a wrenching personal decision. Ms. Deaver, 35, a registered nurse, was pregnant with a daughter in a wanted pregnancy, she said. She and her husband were devastated when her water broke at 22 weeks and her amniotic fluid did not rebuild.

Her doctors said that the lung and limb development of the fetus had stopped, that it had a remote chance of being born alive or able to breathe, and that she faced a chance of serious infection.

In what might have been a routine if painful choice in the past, Ms. Deaver and her husband decided to seek induced labor rather than wait for the fetus to die or emerge. But inducing labor, if it is not to save the life of the fetus, is legally defined as abortion, and doctors and hospital lawyers concluded that the procedure would be illegal under Nebraska’s new law.

After 10 days of frustration and anguish, Ms. Deaver went into labor naturally; the baby died within 15 minutes and Ms. Deaver had to be treated with intravenous antibiotics for an infection that developed.

Ms. Deaver said she got angry only after the grief had settled. “This should have been a private decision, made between me, my husband and my doctor,” she said in a telephone interview.

These arbitrary abortion restrictions spring from the fervid imaginations of social conservatives who believe that women routinely abort late term, viable pregnancies on a whim. SB2838 is riddled with language that patronizes women and treats us like mentally and morally deficient children. In the fantasy world Kimberly Yee inhabits, there are practically never valid health reasons to terminate a pregnancy and she, despite her complete lack of medical credentials, is qualified to substitute her judgment for that of trained health care providers on the medical necessity of the procedure. And such a necessity is practically nonexistent, as far as she’s concerned. A severe fetal deformity is no reason to abort until the woman has gone into a life threatening infection.

Mind you, this will probably be held out as the “moderate” alternative to Sen. Smith’s personhood bill.

1. Komen/Planned Parenthood smackdown. Supporters of comprehensive (and that includes reproductive) women’s health care pushed back hard on the Komen Foundation’s ideologically driven decision to pull breast cancer screening grants to low income women from Planned Parenthood and came out the winners. For some good national-level analysis on it, check out the excellent work Amanda Marcotte and Lauren Kelley have done. If you still doubt the extent of the victory, look no further than Arizona’s own Cathi Herrod of the socially conservative Center for Arizona Policy, who is very miffed about what she sees as Komen’s “waffling” and the pro-choice movement’s refusal to back down on women’s health.

Planned Parenthood has activated their base and is in full attack mode. We need to send a positive message to the Komen Foundation and pray they have courage and boldness during this time.

In that same blog post Herrod grouses about the Obama administration standing strong against the attempts of theocratic reactionaries to deny women contraception in private health plans. The moral of the story is that when we fight back, we win. And it hacks off Cathi Herrod, which is always a worthy endeavor.

2. Goldwater Institute exposed. The AZ legislature dropped a spate of bills designed to break public sector unions and cut the pay of teachers and first responders. It’s been described as “Wisconsin on steroids” and already the response is rivaling what happened in Wisconsin with educators, public safety workers, and advocates for working families amassing protests and press events to fight back. The Goldwater Institute was instrumental in drafting the anti-worker legislation, having feted WI Governor Scott Walker back in November at a fundraiser. GI is getting national exposure for this and much of it is not flattering. EJ Montini of the Arizona Republic called foul on both the Legislature and the (unelected) Goldwater Institute, whom he describes as “waging war on children, on sick people, on poor people, on teachers and on unions.” Kudos for the Mother Jones reference, EJ.

The moral of the story here is that the Goldwater Institute, which has presented itself for years as an objective academic organization serving lofty libertarian principles, is being exposed for what it really is – a big business lobbying group pushing ALEC legislation. Like the radical “pro-life” zealots who have finally gone too far by going after breast cancer screenings and birth control, GI has gone too far with this attack on highly regarded public servants.

Arizona progressives, let’s have a toast with the beverage of our choice over the nice victories of the past week and brace ourselves for next week.

Liberals do tend to think that government should maintain a social safety net that keeps people from falling into poverty and provides health care. Conservatives tend to disagree and insist that private charity should take care of the indigent. As I’ve said in previous posts, most liberals think private charity plays a role but it can only fill in the gaps in the social safety net, not be the entire thing. History and current events show that religious institutions can and do provide assistance in the community, but sometimes while enriching themselves substantially along the way.

And it seems that even some secular charities headed by conservatives are so freighted with a political agenda that it detracts in a large way from their mission. When the Susan G. Komen Foundation announced they were pulling grants for breast cancer screening from Planned Parenthood under the flimsy premise of a trumped up Congressional investigation, the response was swift and explosive. The internets not only rained down reams of condemnation upon Komen, they also stirred up a tempest of criticism that presents the organization in a much less flattering light than their carefully crafted public image would have you believe. Daily Kos diarist Betty Pinson is not too impressed with Komen, and for good reason.

Upon calling my GOP senator and speaking with his aide, I was shocked to hear her tell me “Sen.__ can’t sign on as a co-sponsor to the bill because all the breast cancer groups aren’t in agreement on it.” Shocked, I asked her who was opposing it. She told me that Komen opposed the bill. When I asked her why, she explained that Komen felt that treatment for uninsured breast cancer patients should be funded through private donations, like the pink ribbon race. I was speechless, in shock. A phone call to another activist confirmed it was true – Komen was lobbying behind the scenes to kill the bill. A moment later, Sen.__’s aide called me back and begged me not to repeat our conversation to anyone, that she had given me the information by mistake.

Thus my lesson about Komen began in 2000. They spend a lot of money lobbying for a very different agenda.

The bill passed anyway and Bill Clinton, who pushed hard in Congress for its passage, was happy to sign it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the end of Komen (and its founder, Nancy Brinker’s) political maneuvering to stall or kill legislation in Congress and in state legislatures that was supported by other breast cancer advocacy groups.

They fought behind the scenes in my state to prevent the governor from adopting the Treatment Program. They worked for several years to stall or kill the Breast Cancer & Environmental Research Act. In the end, they eviscerated it by removing new funding for environmental research and substituting a panel to review all research on breast cancer & environment. Using private funds, they recently collaborated with the Institute of Medicine to develop said report. Released last December, it sadly detailed the same old arguments that there’s no evidence of links between environmental toxins and that no further research should be done on the subject since everyone has those toxins in their bodies already. Instead they chose to blame breast cancer patients for getting the disease (more here).

In 2009, Komen lobbied behind the scenes to weaken the health care bill (ACA) as it was being debated in Congress. They hired Hadassah Lieberman, wife of Joe, in an effort to convince Joementum to vote against the Public Option. Komen spent over $1 million in 2008 & 2009, on behind the scenes lobbying related to the health care reform bill, so who knows what else was on their agenda.

She goes on to describe Komen’s founder, Nancy Brinker, as a major GOP fundraiser and would-be power broker. Brinker and other conservatives in leadership positions in the Komen organization clearly subscribe to a right wing worldview – emphasizing personal responsibility over corporate accountability, and private charity over public assistance. They are entitled to those views but it’s worth noting that despite all the races and the pink ribbons and the millions Komen has raised to find a cure for breast cancer, no cure is in sight and breast cancer rates continue to climb. That’s not to say it’s their fault but it’s not smashing evidence of their success either. This Komen affair just reinforces my contention that right wing authoritarians are as incompetent and self-serving at running charities as they are at running the government.

They just announced on the news that they’re reinstating the funds to Planned Parenthood. I think PP should turn them down and raise their own funds.

Okay, people, did I not tell you the other day that being vigilant about reproductive justice is important? Personhood has reared its head in Arizona.

2010 was the year Arizona voters lost their damn minds and sent a bunch of reactionary whackaloons to the Arizona Legislature, essentially to show that Kenyan Usurper in the White House what was what. So we lost people like Rebecca Rios, a veteran Dem legislator and a strong advocate for children and the working poor, who had served her constituents and the state well. Pinal County voters sent Senator Rios packing and replaced her with Steve Smith, a businessman and Teabagger neophyte from the city of Maricopa.

It turns out that Senator Smith, in addition to being a simple-minded reactionary who marches in lockstep with Russell Pearce, is a dudebro with a massive preoccupation with what ladies are doing with their ladybusiness. I know. Shocking.

I really have to commend reporter Howie Fischer for asking Smith direct questions and making him go on record about his intentions with this “personhood” bill rather than let him blather about “the sanctity of life” and how much he cares about us delicate, fragile little ladies. Smith certainly tried to pull that paternalistic horsepuckey but couldn’t avoid making it crystal clear what a nasty piece of misogynist work he truly is.

But Smith said he sees a benefit in the legislation regardless of whether it ultimately leads to abortions once again being illegal in Arizona. He said the current informed consent requirements go only so far.

“But when they see what you’re killing is a human being in front of them, I think that’s hopefully just one more stopgate in their mental processing to say, ‘Oh, it’s not just an amalgamation of cells and globs of this and plasma this and blood this,’” he said.

“Mental processing”? WTF? It’s so unbelievably insulting. And creepy.

Smith’s legislation would apply in both cases of surgical and medical abortions, the latter involving the use of RU-486 which induces a woman to miscarry.

Less clear is how a law defining life as beginning at conception might affect the legal use of the “morning-after pill.”

One theory is that the pill, essentially a large dose of hormones, prevents a woman from ovulating. Smith said he subscribes to an alternate theory that the hormones prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus

I never cease to be amazed by how indiscriminately anti-choicers spew out uninformed medical opinions. It’s like they think that a lifelong burning obsession with what ladies are doing with their ladybits somehow bestows a license to practice medicine upon them. And the overwhelming consensus of medical science is that emergency contraception works by suppressing ovulation. You can “subscribe to an alternate theory” that it kills tiny little fertilized egg people all you want to but the doctors and scientists are still right and you are still wrong.

The first-term lawmaker said if it were up to him, all abortions would be illegal. That separates him from several “pro-life” politicians, including Gov. Jan Brewer who said she would allow exceptions, including in cases of rape or incest.

“I guess I’m a purist,” he said. “It’s easy for me as a man to say that because I’ll never be in that situation.”

Yeah, I guess.

Smith said his reasons go back more to his religious beliefs.

“God doesn’t make mistakes,” he said. “I believe that God is still on the throne and that’s happening for a reason, whether we get it or not.”

Just so we’re clear: The theology that guides Smith’s public policy views is that of a God who sits on a throne inflicting rape and incest upon his subjects for reasons known only to Him.

SB 1494 would require a specific mention of depression and related psychological distress as well as the risk of infection, hemorrhage, danger to subsequent pregnancies and infertility.

Smith acknowledged nothing in the law requires a woman to be told about the impacts of carrying a child to term, including how that will affect her life or finances. He said that is justified.

“They’re not going to a childbirth clinic, they’re going to an abortion clinic,” he said. “At an abortion clinic, they should be told the risks of having an abortion, not having the risk of having a child.”

He said any woman interested in the latter information should see a family doctor.

An OB GYN would be the best person to talk to about that. Some of them do abortions too, which would probably blow Steve Smith’s mind if he were aware of that.

The bill does require women to be informed of the “medical risks associated with carrying the child to term compared to undergoing an induced abortion” but that is the extent of the language dealing with that. It doesn’t state what risks of childbirth are to be discussed. The provisions dealing with risks of abortion are more specifically delineated.

(i) DEPRESSION AND RELATED PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS.
(ii) THE RISK OF INFECTION, HEMORRHAGE, DANGER TO SUBSEQUENT PREGNANCIES AND INFERTILITY.
(g) A STATEMENT SETTING FORTH AN ACCURATE RATE OF DEATHS IN WHICH THE ABORTION PROCEDURE WAS A SUBSTANTIAL CONTRIBUTING FACTOR.

A comprehensive study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology determined that childbirth poses a risk of death to the woman 14 times higher than abortion. Postpartum depression is a very real and debilitating condition that affects a not insignificant percentage of new mothers. There are undoubtedly women in Arizona who don’t have good access to information about abortion, childbirth, or medical procedures in general. so a law intended to inform them should cover all the risks to the extent possible, not just those cherry-picked and distorted by anti-choicers in the hopes of steering women toward certain decisions. Of course, anti-choicers tend to drop their feigned concern for women’s health the second they are confronted with the fact that abortion is safer than childbirth. “Abortion is safer than childbirth? For whom?”, asked the very first comment to the Reuters article I linked. When their b.s. about harmful effects to women is debunked they shift seamlessly back to the fetus, as if that had been what the discussion was about all along. You are never going to get a straight answer out of a rabid anti-choicer because that would require them to admit their movement is based on misogyny and not a concern for “life”.

The aspect of the bill that’s going to get the most attention is the “personhood at conception” part but the rest of it is pretty damned offensive too and I appreciate that Howie Fischer covered it in his report. As far as the personhood thing goes, Smith told Fischer he wants this bill to be the test case for Roe v Wade. We’ll see how far that goes. So far no other legislators have co-sponsored it. Though it’s not a ballot referendum as has been tried (very unsuccessfully) in other states, a “personhood” bill is a risky move in an election year nonetheless. Smith was careful not to target birth control in the language of the bill but it’s bleedingly obvious from his statements that he’s set his sights on that too. If other legislators join him the Democratic campaign ads will write themselves. And it was Smith who introduced last year’s spate of anti-immigrant bills that didn’t end up passing because the “business community” stopped pretending to be neutral and helpless and intervened to stop them. So it’s hard to tell at this point where this thing is going to go. But this is certainly no time to be complacent

Last week, someone prefaced a comment to me thusly. I’ve heard variants of that line for years, mostly from fellow liberals and centrists who think some of us ladies spend too much time dwelling on reproductive justice when there are so many more Important Things^TM we ought to be caring about. Such as the economy. Or the Fiesta Bowl scandal.

I care about reproductive justice for women, a lot. So much so that I devote a lot of time to researching and blogging about it. And it’s about far more than safe, legal abortion, thank you very much. It’s about access to contraception to prevent unplanned pregnancy and also about STD screenings to detect conditions that could lead to infertility or deadly cancers. So I consider it a worthwhile use of my time and energy, thank you very much. I honestly wish I didn’t have to devote any time to this. I wish it were commonly accepted wisdom in this country that women should be able to determine when and whether to have children and that everyone deserves respectful medical care and accurate information about sexual health. But it’s not. The radical right certainly isn’t backing off on their freakish crusade to regulate the ladies. When the Tea Party freshman class took over Congress in 2011, the first thing they did was to try to defund Planned Parenthood. This was after the media assured us that this Tea Party movement was totally driven by anger over excessive government spending and corruption.

Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Phoenix diocese is having a hissyfit over the health care law’s mandate for private insurance to cover birth control. This makes total sense, if you’re not a crazy sex-obsessed authoritarian, since contraception prevents unplanned pregnancies and saves a lot of money. It’s so sensible that 77% of Americans approve of insurers having to cover contraception. Not that public opinion should be the determinant of these things but public opinion (including that of most Catholics) is clearly on the side of birth control. Yet Olmsted and other extremists who oppose birth control are wielding influence over public policy. Recently the Obama administration overruled the FDA on expanding over-the-counter-access to Plan B. The move drew a lot of criticism from pro-choice groups and it was largely based on wild falsehoods about the Morning After Pill (that it causes abortions and leads to promiscuity). So a medication that reduces the risk of pregnancy after unprotected intercourse, and therefore the risk of needing an abortion, remains less available in order to placate the “pro-life” people. That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

Liberals and moderates who treat reproductive rights like a trivial issue obviously aren’t paying attention to the extent that opposition to them is a central issue in right wing politics. Anxiety and anger over women’s liberation and the sexual revolution have definitely fueled the ascendance of more than a few Republican politicians in Arizona and across the country. For example, Congressman Trent Franks isn’t where he is because of his position on marginal tax rates. He was motivated to go into politics and won primaries for the state legislature and Congress because of his rabid “pro-life” stance. I would argue that this issue has more to do with the GOP going hard to the right and driving out moderates than any other. And 2011 was the year that the movement really came out and admitted they’re after birth control access in addition to legalized abortion.

So yeah, it’s actually important.

They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues.

That is not how traditional conservatives view the world. There is no such society that I’m aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

– Rick Santorum

Iowa’s eventual winner, Santorum, came in third in South Carolina. The winner was the guy who proposed an open marriage to his second wife because he didn’t want to give up his mistress.

Per Jamelle Bouie in American Prospect

This was the Gingrich that Republicans love. A confident, combative firebrand, who exudes a persona of erudition, even as he offers an incoherent take on the world, the issues, and the views of his opponents. To wit, Gingrich accused Barack Obama of believing in a “Saul Alinsky European radicalism where the stage is sovereign and we are its subjects.” This is absolute nonsense—Obama is a center-left Democrat with centrist instincts—but it sounds correct to he audience. They were thrilled.

Indeed, the enthusiasm was infectious. Everyone I spoke to was either a long-term fan of the former House Speaker, or a new supporter, who was eager for Gingrich to win the nomination, and—as one attendee said—“destroy” Obama in debates. “I like him because I really enjoy watching him debate…he could just tear people apart and be really intelligent about it. And I would to see him do that to Obama”, said Cathy Nichols, a local high school student who plans to vote in Saturday’s primary.

For everyone I talked to, I asked if they were concerned about the recent revelations from Gingrich’s ex-wife, who alleged that the House Speaker wanted an “open marriage.” Chuck Gregoire, a semi-retired internet marketer, had a response that was pretty typical of the reactions I received. “We really need someone to come out and kick some but, and I think that’s really where the country is now, and he’s got the ego to get it done.”, said Gregoire. He clarified—he wouldn’t “trust him with my wife,” but he does believe that he could lead the country and correct for Obama’s presidency.

Brian and Cathy Renaud, who moved to South Carolina from Michigan after losing their homes to the Great Recession, were also dismissive of the allegations against Gingrich. “I think we all see through the media’s ploy,” said Brian, “Putting her up to talk two days before a primary? Give me a break.”

As popular feminist blogger and Facebook friend of mine Amanda Marcotte observed: “‘Family values’ is code for “putting bitches in their place”. Gingrich’s behavior is consistent with that.” South Carolina GOP primary voters preferred Gingrich to Santorum because Gingrich comes off as a tougher opponent against the Kenyan Usurper, not because there’s any difference between the two on the culture war. Individual liberty and privacy are reserved for straight white Republican men. It’s “radical”, to use Santorum’s description, for people who aren’t straight white Republican men to have those things.

That’s it in a nutshell.

There will always be excuses to dismiss the mountain of contextual factors that were stacking up in Tucson that winter and consider this a force majeure beyond all human control.

But to ignore the cluster of enabling factors right now is even more risky than it was to dismiss them back in the tense days before the shooting.

One of the ways to commemorate Jan. 8 is to stop kidding ourselves that Jared Loughner came from nowhere. Because he didn’t.

Zoeller’s friend, author Jon Talton, weighed in with his blog post “Heywood and Giffords”.

This was a tragedy. The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, along with the wounding and murder of others, including a federal judge, was a crime. The one-year anniversary of this monstrous act was commemorated Sunday with much coverage and little clarity. The Republic did print an important essay by my friend Tom Zoellner, who has written the book, A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America. Don’t be fooled by the “let’s don’t offend anyone” headline. Zoellner raises profound questions, including about the social detachment that has become the norm in the state and neglect of mental health.

Opinion leaders and most “liberal” politicians were quick to distance themselves from Pima County Sheriff Dupnik’s truth-telling, that a climate of political extremism provided the tinder for this conflagration. The mental illness of the shooter helped give camouflage. The political extremism is on the right, by the way, and the whipped-up Tea Party, guns-everywhere-legislation, show your shootin’ irons when the president visits, Sarah Palin “don’t retreat, reload!!” atmosphere has barely abated in its tip-of-the hat to violence. The threats against Giffords were real and more severe than faced by any other member of the delegation, save Rep. Raul Grijalva. No gun control measures followed this quickly dubbed “tragedy.” Indeed, guns on campus is the big deal for the Legislature in a state facing huge real issues. Few now will call what happened a year ago what it was: An attempted political assassination.

Talton is right, of course, and notice that he emphasized legislation here. The GOP controlled the executive and legislative branches of Arizona’s government in 2011 and they not only expanded access to guns on college campuses but they also cut thousands of Arizonans off from extended unemployment insurance and health care (including desperately needed mental health services).

And as aggravating as the constant false equivalence claims over rhetoric – both sides are just as bad! – are to us liberals, the real crux of the matter is class. The elites don’t give right wingers so much more latitude (which is essentially what the false equivalence does) because they necessarily prefer their ideas (though some do). More often it’s because the worst conservative proposals and enacted policies don’t tend to hurt people who matter to them.

The onslaught of restrictions on abortion (and increasingly contraception) are mostly inflicted on poor women. Anti-gay laws harm wealthy LGBT folks but not nearly as much as they devastate those without money or influence. In 2011 the AZ lege passed a law allowing divorcing spouses to petition for more time to reconcile before a divorce is final. Again, while this poses difficulties for divorcing spouses of means, it puts a real hurt on poor women trying to leave an abusive marriage. The aforementioned are all Center for Arizona Policy (CAP) measures. Most of the reporting on them vis a vis CAP has had to do with how “influential” CAP is and is not directed on how their agenda impacts low income people vs affluent people.

Cuts to AHCCCS (Medicaid) threaten the state’s entire health care delivery system, and a lot of jobs (so much so that the AZ Chamber of Commerce and Industry is alarmed), but thus far there’s been no real push back on the right wing insanity (not enough to stop them on their crusade to deny health care to all low income and uninsured people) because, again, mostly its the easily expendable plebes paying the price right now.

Class figures into gun legislation in Arizona, too. I mean, seriously, if the elites really thought lax gun laws were primarily arming low income people to go after affluent people, do you think anyone would be able to get an automatic weapon and high volume ammo clip so easily?

It’s very easy to separate issues into “economic” and “social” silos, when your money and privilege shield you from the economic consequences of laws passed based on “social” issues. If you possess neither money nor privilege, EVERYTHING looms large, is important, and is your economy.

Yowie! It’s been over a week since I last posted due to holiday stuff and end of the year wrapping up of work stuff. It certainly wasn’t because there haven’t been blog-worthy things happening, since any day ending in Y is a day where conservatives are trying like hell to keep the ladies down. But every so often they are foiled in their efforts. One such time was last Friday when the wonderful Judge Roslyn Silver blocked a law passed in Arizona in 2011 that denies tax credits to any organization providing abortion referrals starting in 2012. The ban would impact not just Planned Parenthood but also domestic violence shelters and other organizations that help low income women. This is that famous social conservative concern for “life” from conception to birth only on display yet again. The block is only temporary while the lawsuit waged by various groups opposed to the law proceeds but hopefully sanity will prevail in the end.

With that in mind and because my dear friend and the fabulous communications director of Planned Parenthood AZ Michelle Steinberg put out a reminder on Facebook: Please consider a last minute contribution to Planned Parenthood AZ for tax year 2011. It’s deductible for federal tax purposes and you can claim the Arizona Working Poor Tax Credit up to $200 for individuals and $400 for couples. There are 5 hours left in 2011 in Arizona as I post this so get in a donation to a great organization that protects women’s health and freedom.

Happy New Year to all you Democratic Divas and dudes who love Divas out there. Stay safe and I’ll be back next year with snarkalicious coverage of 2012!

I hadn’t gotten around to blogging about the recent Plan B decision because I wanted to devote the time to tie it to the larger context. I was going to post today and then I saw that Scott Lemieux drew the big picture very well in his post for The American Prospect yesterday:

“Modest” restrictions on reproductive freedom don’t ever work the way their centrist supporters intend. They always end up hurting women least capable of shouldering the burden. Two new studies underscore this point. First, Amanda Marcotte points out research in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that the Plan B restrictions supported by the Obama administration—against the advice of its medical professionals—will have effects more far-reaching than keeping the emergency contraceptive out of the hands of 11- and 12-year-olds. The JAMA study shows that this decision not only requires 15- and 16-year-old young women to get a prescription to obtain Plan B; it makes it harder for adult women to obtain Plan B as well.

This is always the problem with “centrism” on reproductive choice. The “let’s find middle ground” people are naive for two reasons:

1. Centrists take social conservative activists at face value that it’s by and large about saving lives for them. They assume we can all come together on contraception and sex ed to reduce abortions to a negligible number. You’d think the sheer amount of hyena-like screeching about birth control, not abortion, but birth control, coming out of the right this year would disabuse them of this silly notion, but no.

2. They think these compromises impress the public and earn the pro-choice side political capital, or at least mitigate political hits.

That latter belief was clearly what drove Sec. Kathleen Sebelius to overrule FDA recommendations to make Plan B emergency contraception available over the counter to girls under age 17 and President Obama to agree with her. It’s also what drove a lot of Dems to hail the move as plain common sense. Which is maddening to those of us who pay a lot of attention to reproductive issues. It’s cowardice as a political calculation and a bad strategy overall. Why give credibility to the worst sorts of right wing lies about emergency contraception (such as that it causes abortion or leads to promiscuity, both of which are complete b.s.) when there’s nothing to be gained by it? Sec. Sebelius and the President needlessly pissed off pro-choice activists and adopted a position that puts a lot of girls and women at risk of unintended pregnancy and the need to decide whether to abort or not, which is the very thing Plan B was designed to help prevent.

And those who are supposedly “moderate” on the abortion issue, such as Democrats who favor some restrictions on abortion but also support birth control should be at the forefront of defending over the counter access to Plan B, no questions asked, to any sexually active female. But then, “moderates” never like to be at the forefront of anything, and too many of them probably believe the b.s. about Plan B causing abortions or teenage promiscuity anyway. So that leaves strong pro-choice politicians to defend common sense policies that actually reduce abortions, like making emergency contraception available. However, even they are reluctant to take on the fight:

Gwen Moore, a Democratic Rep. from Wisconsin whose statements on the House floor on the importance of reproductive choice made her a viral video star earlier this year, told the Huffington Post:

“I think that while this was huge, [the birth control decision] is really, really huge and has an impact on millions and millions of women who would not have access to birth control…I’m withholding my dragon fire for that. I think the president has not been with us 100 percent, but I don’t think he’s thrown women totally under the bus — if he says he did not intervene in this decision, I believe him.”

If our staunchest prochoice voices in Congress keep withholding their dragon fire for the “bigger battles” while we keep losing ground, eventually there will be no big battles to win.

Sarah Jaffe, writer of the Alternet piece I linked, is right about that. The upcoming battle on birth control Rep. Moore refers to is the Affordable Care Act’s mandate for insurance plans to cover contraception as preventive medicine. Exceptions have already been carved out for religious institutions but many social conservatives don’t want any coverage for contraception, period. So we can expect more unhinged rants about the dangers of birth control from Republicans on the floor of Congress and more caving to the unreasonable and unpopular demands of anti-contraception social conservatives from Democrats.

Keep in mind that birth control is one of the things the centrists tell us we can find “common ground” on in the debate. Same with sex ed. Let’s do an accounting: We’ve been told we’ll get expanded contraception, comprehensive sex ed, increased funding for adoption and childcare programs etc. if we don’t push back so hard and try to accommodate the “pro-life” movement. What we’ve actually gotten for compromising is late term abortion bans, parental notification laws, mandatory ultrasounds, numerous attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, “conscience” clauses, “personhood” initiatives, and impediments to every girl and woman attempting to access Plan B, among other things. With successes like these I’d hate to see what failed compromising would look like.