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Last weekend some forty Wesleyan students entered a closed meeting of the university’s Board of Trustees, looking to give input on a matter of university governance. The students were advocates of need-blind admissions, a policy under which students are accepted for admission without consideration of their ability to pay. (Admissions have traditionally been need-blind at Wesleyan, but at the start of the summer, after many students had left campus, the trustees voted to scrap that policy for the class of 2017.)
This wasn’t a long occupation — it lasted only about fifteen minutes before students left voluntarily. It wasn’t particularly aggressive — video of the incident shows a conspicuously quiet, and respectful, discussion. And it was far from unprecedented — on the video, one trustee is seen declaring that “students barging in [to trustee meetings] is a long and time-honored tradition at Wesleyan.”
But now at least five of the students who participated in the action are being brought up on campus judicial charges. As the campus online newspaper Wesleying notes, the five stand accused of “disruption” and “failure to comply.” According to the campus student handbook, it looks like punishment for these two violations could be anything from a warning to expulsion.
I watched the video, and I gotta say — that’s some seriously non-disruptive disruption, and some seriously compliant non-compliance. Shame on Wesleyan for making it into a judicial issue.
I’m going back to writing about student stuff after this, I promise. Thanks for your patience.
• • •
On Twitter last night, my buddy Malcolm Harris declared that
“The abortion rights argument for Obama is such a big red herring.”
He went on to say that Roe v. Wade is showing no signs of getting overturned in the Supreme Court, and that Obama isn’t doing anything to expand on-the-ground access to abortion in states where there are few providers.
I pretty much agree with Malcolm’s follow-up tweets. The Republicans have had plenty of chances to put together a Supreme Court majority against Roe, and their continuing failure to do so has long looked more like a decision than a fumble to me. And no, Obama hasn’t been anywhere near as aggressive in expanding abortion access as I’d like.
But reproductive freedom is one of those areas where presidents get to make a million small decisions, many of them invisible to the average voter, and those decisions add up to a lot. Let’s review Obama’s record.
- In 2009 the president rescinded the Mexico City Policy, which restricted US government funding to overseas NGOs which provided abortion services. A 2011 Yale study found that the policy had had a devastating effect on access to reproductive health services in poor countries.
- The administration has acted aggressively to punish states which have attempted to cut off Medicaid funding to abortion providers, and those which have attempted to eliminate Medicaid funding for abortion in pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.
- Obama supports expanding abortion access for women in the military under the Shaheen Amendment, which was blocked by House Republicans this summer.
- The Obama HHS ended a grant to a Catholic organization working against human trafficking because of the group’s refusal to provide women with abortion referrals, directing the money to groups that would do so.
- And although Roe is unlikely to be overturned, that doesn’t mean that new legislative or judicial restrictions on abortion are impossible. In 2003 Congress passed (and George W. Bush signed) the Partial Birth Abortion Act, and in 2007 the Supreme Court upheld it as constitutional. A second Obama term means a likely veto of similar legislation and likely confirmation of new Supreme Court justices who would vote to strike it down.
And of course reproductive freedom isn’t just about abortion. Around access to contraception, the Obama administration has also done good in all sorts of ways.
- The administration rolled back a Bush-era expansion of the so-called “conscience clause,” which granted federal protection to healthcare providers who refused to supply women with birth control and family planning assistance.
- Obamacare famously imposes new requirements that private insurance plans cover contraception.
- Obama has cut funding for abstinence-only sex education programs by two thirds.
- The Obama Department of Defense issued an order in 2010 mandating that all military healthcare facilities worldwide carry Plan B.
- The Obama FDA approved Ella, a “morning-after” pill with a five-day window of effectiveness.
- Obama supports, and has protected, federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Romney opposes it.
Now, Obama’s record on reproductive rights is far from perfect. There’s a lot more he could be doing, even given congressional Republicans’ opposition. But to say that it makes no difference to abortion rights whether he wins in November or not is just false. It’s just not supportable.
This is what I was getting at in my post office post last week. The deeper you dig into the specifics of policy, the more the differences between the players reveal themselves. They may not be huge differences, and they may not reflect the kinds of dramatic contrasts some of us would like to see being drawn, but they’re there. They matter. They have a real impact on real people’s lives, and a disproportionately powerful impact on the lives of those with the fewest resources.
There are some victories that I doubt we can win through electoral organizing. There are some ways — some excruciating ways — in which Obama and Romney are essentially identical. I don’t condemn anyone who refuses to participate in electoral politics — there’s plenty of vital work to be done outside the political system, and there are lots of crucial struggles that can’t be waged inside it.
But the decision to opt out can’t be made on the basis of the false premise that nothing of consequence will be lost if Mitt Romney wins this election. Make the strategic argument that the gains aren’t worth the price, if you like. Hell, make the argument that Obama is in some ways more dangerous. I can respect that.
But that cost-benefit analysis isn’t legitimate unless you also tally up the costs.
In 2008 Conor Friedersdorf voted for Barack Obama, hoping for an end to Bush’s immoral, unconstitutional recklessness in foreign affairs. But then Obama won, and things — Friedersdorf believes — got worse.
It’s not strange that this sequence of events soured Friedersdorf on Obama. Lots of smart folks have had exactly that experience. What is strange is that, having witnessed voting for Obama failing to fix the country’s constitutional crisis, the only follow-up question he can think to ask is “Okay, so who should I vote for?”
And in fact it’s worse than that. Though Friedersdorf says he’s “supporting” Libertarian Gary Johnson this time around, he’s not sure if he’ll vote for him. And he seems to believe that the act of not voting can itself bring the change he seeks:
“If enough people start refusing to support any candidate who needlessly terrorizes innocents, perpetrates radical assaults on civil liberties, goes to war without Congress, or persecutes whistleblowers, among other misdeeds, post-9/11 excesses will be reined in.”
Voting isn’t a particularly effective mechanism for making political change on issues like civil liberties, and voting in presidential general elections is perhaps the least effective of all. If Gary Johnson somehow manages to draw a higher-than-expected number of liberalish votes this cycle, the most likely result is a shift in marijuana policy, not drone policy, from the Democratic nominee.
Why? Because, for starters, drones aren’t unpopular with the American electorate, and neither are the rest of the practices that Friedersdorf rightly condemns. And unless that changes, there’s zero chance that presidential candidates will come wooing folks like him and me on that issue.
Nobody has any magic beans. Voting Obama won’t end drone strikes, and neither will voting Romney, and neither will voting Johnson or Stein or not voting at all.
As for what will, there are two schools of thought that I find compelling:
The first says that you shift party policy at the grassroots. Vote for — and far more importantly, work for — candidates that support the stuff you support. In Senate races, in House races, in presidential primaries. Work like hell to get good folks into positions of power, and you change both the people at the top and the calculus they face when they get there. More civil libertarians in Congress means more pressure in a hundred mostly-largely-invisible ways for better policies. More civil libertarian presidential candidates means a better shot at a better national debate, and a better shot at better governance.
Then there’s the second, which says that the American political process is so hopelessly compromised that there’s no point in trying to bring it around. Folks I respect who believe this are mostly working like hell to make social change outside of electoral politics, in any one of a hundred different ways.
And that, finally, is what separates the folks I respect — liberal and radical alike — from Friedersdorf. Both camps understand that we’ve got huge problems in this country, and both understand that victories aren’t going to be won without a huge amount of really hard work.
Voting isn’t hard work. Voting is easy. (Not voting is even easier.) And that’s one reason that voting, on its own, rarely gets the goods.
Nobody has any magic beans.
The University of California has agreed to make payments of tens of thousands of dollars each to the two dozen students hit with pepper spray at UC Davis last November, and to provide the students with individual written apologies from Davis chancellor Linda Katehi.
The settlement, filed in federal court this morning, provides for $30,000 payments to each of 21 named defendants, and a pool of $100,000 to be divided among other students who may come forward. Attorneys for the students will receive $250,000, and the ACLU will be given $20,000 to conduct a review of university policies on demonstrations.
The University of California had already spent more than $1 million to conduct its own investigations of the incident.
Although Lt. Commander John Pike, the primary sprayer, has been fired by UC Davis, and the campus police chief at the time of the incident later resigned, no officers or university administrators were charged with crimes as a result of the incident.
Chancellor Katehi survived a no-confidence vote by faculty early this year, and remains in office.
My sister can’t read.
Her disability usually isn’t obvious when you meet her. And when she’s home visiting my parents, she spends a fair amount of time out in the city on her own. She takes the bus, she shops, she goes to restaurants. She gets her nails done.
My dad gives her her walking-around money as five-dollar bills to limit how much she can lose if someone decides to cheat her when giving change.
But like I say, mostly her disability is invisible. And when folks do notice, they’re usually cool about it.
(I remember once, years ago, I was out with L and we got into some sort of awkward situation. I wanted to explain to the woman we were inconveniencing, and so I said “she’s…” And then I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. The woman said “a little slow.” It wasn’t a phrase I’d ever use myself, and I cringe a little typing it, but she said it with love, and when she said it I felt my shoulders loosen. We were among friends.)
But here’s something I wish I could tell everyone in the city: Not everyone can read.
I see it a few times a year, when I’m out and around. Someone on the subway or the street or in a shop will ask a question. “Is this 14th Street?” “How much is a Big Mac?” “What kinds of iced tea do you have?” Usually, whoever’s asked will answer appropriately, but too often they’ll glance up and say “read the sign.”
My sister will take a menu when she’s offered it. But she can’t read.
She’ll flip through a magazine when she’s bored. But she can’t read.
She has a library card. But she can’t read.
She’s 38 years old, and she looks like any other 38-year-old on the subway. But she can’t read.
My sister is good at keeping her disability to herself. She likes keeping her disability to herself. When she’s out on the street, away from all of us who know and love and worry about her, she’s just another New Yorker. But every once in a while, she could use a little help maintaining her public face.
As we all could.
Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day, and you can read. Go read.
(Note: This is an old post from back before I started SA.net, and today is not actually Blogging Against Disablism Day. It came to mind because of something that came up in class, and figured I wouldn’t wait until May to repost it. The link is to the BADD roundup for 2012, and you can find the roundups for 2011, 2010, and 2009 here, here, and here, if you’re interested.)
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