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George Galloway, a controversial member of the British parliament, is suing the country’s National Union of Students for calling him a “rape denier.”
Galloway, a supporter of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, said in August that though Assange was accused of “sordid” behavior and “bad sexual etiquette,” the allegations did not “constitute rape … as anyone with any sense can possibly recognize it.”
One of Assange’s accusers has said that after she repeatedly refused to have unprotected sex with him, she awoke to find that he was penetrating her vaginally without a condom. The other says that he attempted to pry her legs open so that he could penetrate her while he held her arms down to keep her from reaching for a condom. The courts that considered Assange’s extradition appeals consistently held that these allegations amounted to rape under British law.
A few days ago the National Union of Students voted to ban Galloway from speaking at NUS-sponsored events, saying in a statement that the organization would not “offer a platform to speakers who are rape deniers or apologists, or support events where such individuals speak.”
A BBC article on the lawsuit does not specify what damages or other redress Galloway is seeking.
I’m going back to writing about student stuff after this, I promise. Thanks for your patience.
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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- In 2009 the president rescinded the Mexico City Policy, which restricted US government funding to overseas NGOs which provided abortion services.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.
I spent a few days in Missouri last week, giving a talk and hanging out with local campus activists. They’ve got a fascinating senate race in Missouri this year, between Todd “legitimate rape” Akin and embattled incumbent Claire McCaskill.
We talked a bit about the race while I was in town, my hosts and I, and so when I stumbled across a lifestream of the campaign’s first debate yesterday morning, I watched a bit of it. As it turned out, one of the first questions was on the post office.
The mail is one of a relatively short list of government services that are explicitly mandated in the constitution, but both Akin and libertarian challenger Jonathan Dine took aim at the USPS, arguing that its current financial setup is unsustainable. (Akin argued that postal rates need to go way up and Dine said he’d be happy to see the end of Saturday delivery and the closing of a bunch of rural post offices.)
Only McCaskill was willing to stand up for the mail, and to say that the current “crisis” in the postal service is a fiction. Here’s the deal:
Until 1970, the Post Office was a regular government agency, funded both through paid services and government appropriations. But Congress began the process of phasing out government support that year, and by the late ’80s federal funding for the mail had all but disappeared. In 2006 Congress went even further, passing a law that mandated that USPS — alone among all federal agencies — completely pre-fund all its retirement benefits. At a cost of billions, and with no help from the taxpayer, the postal service was required to set aside funding for the pensions of postal workers who haven’t even been born yet.
This was a dumb idea in 2006, but it became catastrophic after the financial collapse of 2008, as declines in postal revenue shattered the assumptions on which it had been based. In the last four years, the USPS has run up a deficit of some $20 billion, entirely as a result of this wrongheaded law. Repeal it tomorrow, and the financial prognosis for the USPS is transformed overnight.
Now, the politics of the mail are complex. The 2006 law arose out of previous federal budget shell-games, and there are corporate pressures on USPS policy from a huge number of sectors of the capitalist economy — advertisers, publishers, private delivery companies, even insurers, convenience stores, and winemakers. Postal policy is a mess in a lot of ways, and not all of those pushing to weaken USPS have been Republicans.
But here’s the thing: The mail is the mail. It’s an unsexy but essential component of the government safety net. It’s a public service we need, one that’s used most by folks with the fewest resources — the elderly, the poor, people with disabilities, people with limited internet access.
If you screw with the mail, you’re screwing with people in need. You’re screwing with the common good.
On that stage in Columbia, Missouri yesterday, only one of the three candidates was willing to stand up for the mail, and it’s no accident that it was the Democrat.
Claire McCaskill is no leftist. She’s not even particularly liberal. Her ads boast that she stands at the exact center of the Senate as its “most moderate Senator.” But she’s liberal enough to believe that the postal service is worth protecting, and her opponent isn’t.
And it’s stuff like that which keeps me voting for Democrats, in spite of the drones and Manning and everything else.
Because until the revolution comes, I want six-day delivery.
There’s not much I can say that everybody doesn’t already know about Mitt Romney’s attack on the 47% of Americans who, he says, just won’t “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” But I do want to make a couple of small points.
The problem Romney has with the Democratic base — the reason they won’t vote for him no matter what he does — has very little with any supposed dependency they have on government handouts. The 47% who pay no federal income taxes are spread out across the ideological spectrum. They include white Alabama retirees, Idahoans on Social Security disability, active duty military. Hell, a third of American voters with household incomes under $30,000 went for McCain.
So that’s the first thing, that he was slagging a big chunk of his own base. But that’s been pointed out before. What’s more important is to note that it’s not just 47% of Americans who believe, as Romney put it, that “the government has a responsibility to care for” poor people, and to provide them with “food [and] housing.”
Because it turns out that this very question gets polled by the Pew Research Center on a regular basis, most recently in June of this year. And they found that not 47% but 59% of Americans agreed that “the government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep.”
Fifty-nine percent. And that includes 36% of Republicans and 49% of those Pew identified as “high income.”
Now, no candidate for president would ever say they believed that all Americans should be guaranteed decent food and reliable shelter. Americans don’t have such a guarantee now, and they’re not going to get it from the Democrats or the Republicans in anything like the near future. But if every American who believes in such a guarantee voted against Mitt Romney, he’d lose in the biggest landslide in forty years.
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