Democratic Diva

Hold the damn phone.

I finally got a chance to peruse the preliminary report (h/t to Tedski for the download) of the ethics investigation against Tucson Rep. Daniel Patterson. The team did a thorough job vetting all the complaints and they go far beyond the domestic violence allegations most of us are aware of. Patterson is also accused of all sorts of other vile and menacing behavior toward legislative colleagues, staffers, and lobbyists. The evidence of Patterson’s “dishonest, inappropriate, unprofessional, indecorous, and disorderly conduct” goes back to 2009, the first year Patterson was in office.

Patterson defeated incumbent Tom Prezelski (and 6 other Democratic challengers) in the 2008 primary election for Tucson LD29. Fair enough, he won. But it appears he began exhibiting troubling and scary behavior right off the bat.

2009
Rep. Patterson engaged in harassing and inappropriate actions towards lobbyists, which was reported to Democratic leadership.

2010
Patterson had an aggressive, inappropriate, and unprofessional exchange with Rep. David Gowan.
He impugned former Senator Russell Pearce (see the video here) during a committee meeting, and was subsequently removed from the committee.

That was all well before the 2010 election. In that primary election Reps. Matt Heinz and Daniel Patterson faced no primary challengers. It was during the general election season that the allegations of domestic violence by Patterson toward his ex-wife Jeneiene Schaffer surfaced. Democratic activists in Pima County who were upset by them and speaking out were warned to stay quiet lest a precious Dem seat be put in jeopardy, by none other than Pima County Democratic Chair Jeff Rogers.

From: Jeffrey Rogers [mailto:jrogers@jrogerslaw.com​]
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 9:43 AM
To: -X-
Subject: Patterson

-X-, I would truly appreciate it if you would not engage in any negative statements about Daniel. We already have a “safe” Dem seat in play in LD 28 because of Ted Downing’s move. We can’t afford to have another “safe” seat in play. This is not a primary. We most hold the seats we already have – especially since we have a legitimate chanced to pick up a Senate seat in 26 & 30 and a house seat in 30.

So, even if you have strong opinions about this and a strong friendship with his soon to be ex-wife, please don’t stir this up any more than it already has been.

Thank you.

That’s simply indefensible on it’s own but now that we know Patterson had already exhibited a pattern of disturbing behavior from 2009 on, it raises the obvious question: Why the hell wasn’t Patterson primaried in 2010? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.

Oh my, they are worried.

It’s from March 25th but Robert Robb’s column in the Republic that day perfectly illustrates the Republican angst over their nosedive with women voters. Robb put on his brave game face and boldly claimed that Democrats are exaggerating and deliberately stirring up this “alleged GOP war on women”. He warned them against pursuing it by citing an outlier NYT/CBS poll bandied about by right wingers for the past month to prove that most ladies in America are really copacetic with their employers denying them contraception coverage due to their religious objections.

That said, supporting an opt-out for Catholic institutions, thus requiring women who work for them to buy their own contraceptives, doesn’t amount to much of a “war” on women. In fact, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, women support such an opt-out by a strong margin, 53 percent to 38 percent.

So, do a majority of women support a war on themselves? Or do Democrats have a distorted view of women and their political beliefs?

So, Pew Research found that women opposed allowing religious institutions to opt out of the contraception mandate by 48 to 42%, with a full 53% of women 18-49 years old saying that religious institutions (not just bosses with religious objections but actual churches and organizations with a religious mission) should be mandated to cover contraception. And the conservative position that birth control coverage is a matter of religious conscience got positively spanked in a recent Bloomberg poll, with 70% of women saying that contraception in employer-sponsored health was a matter of women’s health, not religion. Someone’s got a distorted view of how the Republican position on birth control is playing out with women but, at least according to the latest Gallup poll, it doesn’t look like it’s the Democrats.

In the fifth Swing States survey taken since last fall, Obama leads Republican front-runner Mitt Romney 51%-42% among registered voters just a month after the president had trailed him by two percentage points.

The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney’s support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group…

…In the poll, Romney leads among all men by a single point, but the president leads among women by 18. That reflects a greater disparity between the views of men and women than the 12-point gender gap in the 2008 election.

Michael Bryan of Blog for Arizona shares Republican CD8 Congressional candidate Frank Antenori’s statement about how we leftists are ripping people from the bosoms of their families:

“The family is the core unit that makes this country great. And if you dismantle it, like the left loves to do—they love to divide and conquer. They love to pit us against each other. They love to tear apart families. They don’t want families. They want individuals that they can control. So the key thing to that is for them to destroy families.” (h/t to Jim Nintzel writing for The Skinny)

Per Michael:

Frank owes half of America an apology.

He may be an effective conservative firebrand, adept at bashing his hometown to score points with his team of wing-nuts in Phoenix, but he is not the sort of person who can claim to represent all the citizens of this district.

Now, let’s take a closer look at Frank’s claim.

We liberals hate families. That’s why we are trying so hard to create more of them by allowing same-sex couples to marry and raise children. That makes sense.

Seems to me this claim is just ridiculous on its face. If anyone hates families – same-sex ones at least – it is conservatives, who get their knickers in a twist because gays and lesbians want the same rights as heteros. How someone else enjoying the benefits and satisfactions of stable family life denigrates my own hetero marriage, I have always failed to see. If anything, the fact that there is a population of people clamouring to be allowed the same rights as my wife and I enjoy is an affirmation of the continuing relevance and vitality of the institution.

Oh Michael, you clearly don’t understand what Antenori means by “family”! His definition of that is a unit of related people organized under the principle that the adult male person bosses the female adult person around and the children (there must be children!) are the property of the male person but the responsibility for rearing them falls upon the female person. Same sex couples simply cannot be allowed to participate in this institution because who can tell who the boss is?

You may be confused about Frank Antenori invoking the concept of the “individual”. This is understandable because guys like Frank are known to speak of the “individual” in fond terms:

Ed, that’s an easy one. I campaigned on reducing spending, balancing the budget, reducing the size and stop of government and protecting your individual liberty and property rights.

But those aren’t the kind of “individuals” (i.e., women, minorities, poor people, children, etc.) who want to have all kinds of stupid “rights” and “freedoms” that allow them to discomfit the real individuals! Those would be white, straight, property owning, Christian dudes. Like the Founding Fathers intended! Freedom!

Per AP’s Paul Davenport on the (temporary) defeat of AZ’s birth control bill today:

“She can go to Walmart and buy it,” said bill supporter Cathi Herrod of the Center for Arizona Policy, adding later: “We’re not restricting birth control here. It’s a question of who is paying for it.”

Oh really? Well guess who has been working diligently to make it so pharmacists can deny birth control prescriptions to women? That would be Herrod’s Center for Arizona Policy.

Rights of Conscience

Overview

The freedom of religion includes not just the right to maintain a set of beliefs, but also the right to act according to one’s conscience. This freedom is listed at the forefront of our Bill of Rights and has historically been called our “First Freedom,” highlighting its revered distinction.[1] There is a false notion that there is a “separation of Church and State” that intimidates people from letting their religious beliefs affect their public lives in society. In fact, “recent Supreme Court decisions that have had the effect of excluding religious expression from the public square cannot be justified by the original intention or original meaning of the First Amendment.”

The U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a freedom just “to worship.” It guarantees our right to practice and promote our faith in every area of civic life. Religion is not restricted to within the four walls of the church. Religious beliefs inform our consciences and affect our public lives morally and pragmatically.

Issue Analysis

Matters of conscience are not just theoretical. They affect real individuals and religious organizations and have the potential of forcing them to violate their conscience or stop doing the job they have chosen to do…

…A pharmacist for Target in Michigan was fired after he refused to sell morning-after pills to customers. He claims that Target agreed to allow him to refer these customers to other pharmacies. He filed a federal lawsuit against Target in November 2007. The case is still pending.

Don’t be confused by the morning after pill thing. Emergency contraception works exactly the same as the regular Pill, the only difference being when you take it (prior to sex or after) to avoid fertilization. EC is simply a high dose of the same kind of hormones used in the regular birth control pill. And anti-choicers have been attacking all forms of female-controlled hormonal birth control for years, under the scientifically flimsy theory that they may prevent fertilized eggs from implanting. They’re also hostile to birth control in general, since it lets women have sex without “consequences”. I guarantee if a Walmart pharmacist approached CAP to complain that she didn’t want to dispense regular birth control, not the morning after pill but ordinary birth control prescriptions, to customers CAP would be falling over themselves to defend her. After all, they’re pushing to let employers with “moral” objections deny all forms of contraception through their health plans.

And despite the supporters of HB2625 acting like any woman can pop into a Walmart and buy her slut pills for $9 from a slut-friendly pharmacist, it’s not that easy. With the exception of that infamous morning after pill, you have to get a prescription for birth control pills and other forms of hormonal contraception. The prescription process isn’t just the Rx you take to the pharmacy. You have to visit the doctor to get the prescription. Those visits aren’t free. There’s nothing in HB2625 that explicitly states that the initial visit for the prescription, or subsequent consultations with the doctor for refills must be covered. If that doctor visit is all or in part with the purpose of getting the prescription, then the woman who gets her health care through her employer with a religious objection covered by HB2625 has to prove that the consultation with her doctor for contraception, at least based on my reading of Subsection Y of the Arizona statute the bill would amend.

Here’s the relevant part of Subsection Y:

2. If the contract provides coverage for outpatient health care services, the contract shall provide coverage for outpatient contraceptive services. For the purposes of this paragraph, “outpatient contraceptive services” means consultations, examinations, procedures and medical services provided on an outpatient basis and related to the use of approved United States food and drug administration prescription contraceptive methods to prevent unintended pregnancies.

Here’s the part of Subsection Z that permits the religious exemption:

Z. NOTWITHSTANDING SUBSECTION Y OF THIS SECTION, A CONTRACT DOES NOT FAIL TO MEET THE REQUIREMENTS OF SUBSECTION Y OF THIS SECTION IF THE CONTRACT’S FAILURE TO PROVIDE COVERAGE OF SPECIFIC ITEMS OR SERVICES REQUIRED UNDER SUBSECTION Y OF THIS SECTION IS BECAUSE PROVIDING OR PAYING FOR COVERAGE OF THE SPECIFIC ITEMS OR SERVICES IS CONTRARY TO THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EMPLOYER, HOSPITAL SERVICE CORPORATION, MEDICAL SERVICE CORPORATION, HOSPITAL, MEDICAL, DENTAL AND OPTOMETRIC SERVICE CORPORATION OR OTHER ENTITY OFFERING THE PLAN OR IS BECAUSE THE COVERAGE IS CONTRARY TO THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE PURCHASER OF THE COVERAGE…

That would appear to mean that the insurance company can make the woman pay for doctor’s visits out-of-pocket to the extent they’re for slut pills and not a purpose more conducive to the proper policing of her virtue.

Will Saletan’s NYT critique of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is getting passed around quite a bit among my friends and acquaintances. We liberals find sociological and psychological explorations of those zany conservatives endlessly fascinating and I have no doubt Haidt’s book will be gangbusters with our crowd but there’s something about him that strikes me as, well, off.

This isn’t an accusation from the right. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The ­Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about ­manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them.

Haidt told NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof that he became a centrist while writing the book. Erm, what? How does that work? He talked to a bunch of conservatives and, upon being impressed by the way the conservatives spoke about their values, moved away from his open-minded and compassionate liberal positions toward meaner and more authoritarian ones? I haven’t read his book yet but maybe he explains in it what positions he previously held that he changed as a result of working on it. And to evoke that famous aphorism of lefty blogosphere “what Digby said”, what Digby said:

I will have to read the book. I’m sure it’s full of interesting data that could be useful in understanding our ideological divide. But let’s just say I’m a little bit skeptical of an author who characterizes his work that way. After all, the country is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans and we have a Democratic president who serves as a living symbol of liberal accomplishment. Are we to believe that the only voters who matter are those who don’t vote for them? They seem to connect quite well to certain parts of the electorate:

Barack Obama’s lead over [Mitt] Romney is attributable in large part to his wide advantage among women, younger voters, and nonwhites. Women favor Obama over Romney by 20 points – virtually unchanged from a month ago – while men are divided almost evenly (49% Obama, 46% Romney). This gender gap is particularly wide among voters under age 50. Women ages 18-49 favor Obama over Romney by nearly two-to-one (64% to 33%), while men the same age are split (50% Obama, 46% Romney).

But then those are the very people who tend to reject traditional values such as “loyalty”, respect for authority and sanctity since these values have tended to marginalize them.

Exactly. Haidt is basically aiding the Right in marginalizing other groups by putting conservatives and their values at the forefront of his argument. But Democrats don’t win elections and policy debates by tiptoeing around the tender feelings of butthurt reactionaries who will never vote for us anyway. There’s no reason to be tempted to do so since Democrats win when our voters, the ones who are already on board with some or most liberal ideas, turn out. And that’s a larger number of Americans than the conservatives whose innermost motivations Haidt insists liberals must worry about more. Republicans know that. It’s why they’re hard at work passing voter suppression laws all over the country. They can’t win without dampening Democratic turnout.

And I guess since conservatives are so tuckered out from worrying about sanctity and purity all the time that the burden for improving political discourse falls upon, guess who? From Saletan’s piece:

The hardest part, Haidt finds, is getting liberals to open their minds. Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia. And in a survey of 2,000 Americans, Haidt found that self-described liberals, especially those who called themselves “very liberal,” were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. Liberals don’t understand conservative values. And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.

Haidt isn’t just scolding liberals, however. He sees the left and right as yin and yang, each contributing insights to which the other should listen. In his view, for instance, liberals can teach conservatives to recognize and constrain predation by entrenched interests. Haidt believes in the power of reason, but the reasoning has to be interactive. It has to be other people’s reason engaging yours. We’re lousy at challenging our own beliefs, but we’re good at challenging each other’s. Haidt compares us to neurons in a giant brain, capable of “producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.”

Well, it looks to me like he’s mostly scolding liberals. And the values of authority, loyalty, and sanctity are the foundations of bigotry and oppression. As for liberals supposedly not understanding conservative values, it’s cute that Haidt assumes right wingers answer survey questions about their motivations honestly and in good faith. I have to wonder where he’s been the last several years that he hasn’t noticed how much conservative activists and voters are coached to stick to scripts that disguise their true aims, especially when specifically asked to defend their positions. Has he considered that the “very liberals” might be ascribing motives to conservatives that more accurately describe their real, as opposed to stated, goals? I also have to wonder how Haidt could have missed the current ruckus over contraception, where many right wingers have demonstrated themselves to be utterly incapable of staying on script, when the argument is over something so fundamental to their worldview: punishing women for being sexual and wanting independence. What are we liberals supposed to be teaching right wingers when they alternate between lying and going flat out nuts? It’s like dealing with a domestic abuser. No, really, it IS dealing with a domestic abuser.

Haidt’s recent conversion to centrism leads him to put forth ideas intended to mitigate the much-vaunted (especially in elite circles) problem of “extremism on both sides”.

How can we achieve these goals? Haidt offers a Web site, civilpolitics.org, on which he and his colleagues have listed steps that might help. One is holding open primaries so that people outside each party’s base can vote to nominate moderate candidates. Another is instant runoffs, so that candidates will benefit from broadening their appeal. A third idea is to alter redistricting so that parties are less able to gerrymander partisan congressional districts. Haidt also wants members of Congress to go back to the old practice of moving their families to Washington, so that they socialize with one another and build a friendly basis on which to cooperate.

Instant runoffs and altering redistricting are good ideas and I guess it would be good for Democratic and Republican members of Congress and their families to socialize in DC (not sure how he proposes to extend that inter-party schmoozing thing to state legislatures, where much of the crazy rhetoric and legislation takes root). But from where I sit in Arizona the notion that voters here don’t have enough moderate candidates to choose from is absurd. They have plenty, particularly in Congressional and statewide races. They’re called the Democrats. And when Democratic voters show up, we win. So while it’s interesting and maybe useful to understand the thought processes of reactionaries, it’s not at all conducive to progress or good governance to give credibility to their horrid views.

AZ Republic Political Insider couldn’t resist the false equivalence in covering yesterday morning’s morning’s press conference at the State Capitol, where Democratic lawmakers called attention to HB2625, the crazy anti-contraception bill that the “pro-life” GOP majority is pushing. It being a press conference, the people presenting it used strong language to get their point across.

Sen. Linda Lopez, D-Tucson, called the bill “asinine” and described Republican lawmakers supporting the bill as “Rush Limbaugh Republicans” with “fundamentalist, Taliban-like religious beliefs.”

“Tea party Republicans are launching an all-out attack on women’s health and women’s rights,” Lopez said. “We need to quit wasting time legislating their version of morality.”

The context of the bill is still causing confusion, even among lawmakers. Several of the Democrats opposing the bill mentioned that it would require women to prove to their employers that they are taking birth control pills for reasons other than to prevent pregnancy.

“The most disturbing part of this is having to get permission and give personal medical information to your employer,” said Rep. Matt Heinz, D-Tucson, a physician.

I don’t see the problem with anything said there. The bill is asinine. The Republicans in the AZ Lege are of the same ideological temperament as Limbaugh. And it’s not a stretch to compare American social conservatives with the Taliban. The difference in religiosity, misogyny, and authoritarianism is in degree, not in kind. They aren’t the Taliban. Yet.

When the Dems were done and walking away from the podium, Rep. Debbie Lesko, prime sponsor of the No Slut Pills if Your Boss Says No Bill, rudely hijacked the podium along with CAP attorney Deborah Sheasby.

But bill sponsor Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, standing at the back of the news conference, called them “liars.”…

…They said this bill is not about limiting women’s rights, but about protecting employers’ religious freedoms.

“My bill does one thing and one thing alone,” Lesko said. “It allows an employer with religious objections to opt out.

We got it, Debbie. A bill that is specifically about denying birth control coverage is really about religious freedom of employers. Their religious freedom to limit women’s rights. Who’s the liar, Debbie?

But this was the tweet sent out to promote the Insider piece:

Dems’ news conference re:contraception evolves into name-calling by both parties.

If only the issue were politicians not using their indoor voices instead of an outrageous attempt by one party to deprive women of dignity, autonomy, and basic health care.

Per the AZ Republic Political Insider:

“Personally I’d like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a “surgical procedure”. If it’s not a life it shouldn’t matter, if it doesn’t harm a woman then she shouldn’t care, and don’t we want more transparency and education in the medical profession anyway? We demand it everywhere else.

Until the dead child can tell me that she/he does not feel any pain – I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living – I will be voting YES.”

That’s an email from AZ Rep. Terri Proud, responding to a Tucson constituent who opposed HB2036, which would ban abortions in our state after 20 weeks. Why, Terri, I thought all these intrusive restrictions on abortion were supposed to be about “protecting women” from the harms of the procedure!

Someone should tell Cathi Herrod that one of her sheep has wandered astray from the flock and is crapping all over her carefully cultivated “We Just Care About Women So Much!^TM“ pasture.