Bill Pryor (this is one of his more flattering portraits)

I’ve never liked Bill Pryor.

Why not? Well, there is, for example, his amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas, in which he opines that gay sex between consenting adults is fundamentally akin to necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and pedophilia and that a right of privacy protecting the former would logically have to extend to the latter. Or there is his on-going one-man war to waste as much of Alabama tax-payers’ money as possible (in a time of fiscal crisis) by defending the state’s idiotic sex toy ban from the neferious machinations of the federal court system.

One might also mention his winning record on women’s rights–not only as a militant opponent of Roe v. Wade, but also as the only state Attorney General in the nation to file an amicus brief opposing key sections of the Violence Against Women Act in Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute. (The court agreed and struck down the provisions, which empowered rape survivors to seek recompensation through a civil suit in federal court. Thanks, Bill.)

Bill Pryor has, in short, made some enemies. Not surprisingly, as a dangerous theocratic Rightist, he’s a prime candidate for a Bush Administration judicial appointment to the federal bench. As much as I like to see a hometown boy making good, I can’t say that I disagree with the on-going effort by women’s rights, civil rights, and religious liberties groups to stop his nomination. And I have to say that I’m rather glad that Senate Democrats are filibustering his nomination.

But liberals and Internet anarcha-feminist weblogs are no longer the only people calling for Pryor’s nomination to be scotched.

Pryor has made some new enemies lately, and–in what may be a paradigm case for the Strange Bedfellows principle–supporters of ex-Chief Justice Roy Moore have joined the fray and called on Bush to drop the Pryor nomination.

A group of supporters of ousted Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore asked Friday that President Bush withdraw the nomination of Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor to be a federal judge.

The Rev. Frank Raddish, founder and director of the Washington-based Capitol Hill Independent Baptist Ministries, said Pryor abandoned his previous position supporting public Ten Commandments displays when he prosecuted Moore before the Alabama Court of the Judiciary.

The court removed Moore from office for refusing to obey U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson’s order to move a 5,300-pound Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building.

Given my frequent fulminations of Roy Moore’s anathemas, you may find it a bit surprising that I actually welcome Roy Moore’s supporters to the fold. And not just as a matter of political expedience–they are actually right that Bill Pryor’s stance on the prosecution of Roy Moore make him completely unfit for a federal judgeship. This may strike you as odd, since I vociferously lauded Moore’s prosecution and removal from the bench, and I think that Bill Pryor’s prosecution of Moore was entirely the right thing to do. So what gives?

The short answer is that Bill Pryor chose the right action, but he chose it for entirely the wrong reason. Pryor has urged in repeated public statements that he agrees with Moore about State-sponsored display of the Ten Commandments, but that he is prosecuting Moore because Moore defied a federal court order that both he and Moore consider to be fundamentally mistaken. Pryor’s mouthpiece put it this way: It’s one thing to support the idea of having a monument in a court building. It’s an entire [sic] different issue to support defiance of federal court orders. So Pryor’s position is this: the federal court order is a mistake; it has no foundation in Constitutional law, and is in fact an illegal violation of the prerogatives of the several states; and yet Roy Moore has no business disobeying it.

It’s bad enough to be, like Moore, a dangerous theocrat with complete contempt for the law. But how much worse is it to combine, like Pryor, theocratic Right-wing politics with blind obsequiousness to federal power? If the federal court order were in fact illegal what possible argument could there be that Roy Moore should be forced to comply with it? Roy Moore’s position in this fracas is pernicious; but Pryor’s is beneath contempt.

So welcome to the fold, Mooreans! Écrasez l’inf?@c3;a2;me.

Thirty-one years ago today, the United States Supreme Court made a remarkable human rights ruling: it finally recognized that a woman has a fundamental human right to control her own body, including her uterine lining. January 22 is Roe v. Wade Day, the anniversary of the decriminalization of abortion in every state of the union, and one of the most remarkable victories of radical feminism in the late 20th century.

Yes, I said radical feminism (gasp!). Most people don’t realize it today, but (as Susan Brownmiller documents in her history-memoir In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution) it was radical feminists–such as Kathie Sarachild and Carol Hanisch of the Redstockings, Susan Brownmiller, and Flo Kennedy–who organized and led the struggle for abortion rights, when no-one else would; it was radical feminists such as who pushed for the repeal of all abortion laws when liberal feminist groups (especially NOW) were afraid to touch the issue or thought the demands should be limited to calling for some mild reforms. It was radical feminists who understood that abortion is not just a medical issue (although it is that), or an issue of sexual privacy (although it is that, too). They framed it as an issue of choice: that is, of a woman’s human right to choose what to do with her own body. They, too, recognized that because abortion was a human right, the criminalization of abortion and the back-alley butchery that went on underground was a form of State violence against women. It was radical feminists, too, who brought the urgency and the clear justice of the cause into the public eye through consciousness-raising, through speeches, and especially through speak-outs and confrontations with the men who claimed power over them:

On the same wintry day in mid-February when NARAL’s founders were traveling to Chicago for their first conference six state legislators held a public hearing in Manhattan on some proposed liberalizing amendments to the New York [abortion] law. Typical of the times, the six legislators were men, and the speakers invited to present expert testimony were fourteen men and a Catholic nun.

On the morning of the February 13 hearing, a dozen infiltrators camouflaged in dresses and stockings entered the hearing room and spaced themselves around the chamber. Some called themselves Redstockings, and some, like Joyce Ravitz, were free-floating radicals who were practiced hands at political disruptions. Ravitz, in fact, had been on her way to another demonstration when she’d run into the Redstockings women, who convinced her to join them.

As a retired judge opined that abortion might be countenanced as a remedy after a woman had fulfilled her biological service to the community by bearing four children, Kathie Amatniek [Sarachild] leaped to her feet and shouted, Let’s hear from the real experts–women! Taking her cue, Joyce Ravitz began to declaim an impassioned oration. Ellen Willis jumped in. More women rose to their feet.

Men don’t get pregnant, men don’t bear children. Men just make laws, a demonstrator bellowed.

Why are you refusing to admit that we exist? cried another.

Girls, girls, you’ve made your point. Sit down. I’m on your side, a legislator urged, raising the temperature a notch higher.

Don’t call us girls, came the unified response. We are women!

–Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, 106-107

The victory in that struggle is one of the most remarkable victories in recent history — in 1968 abortion was criminalized in every state; in 1970 the first major victory was gained with the repeal of the abortion law in New York; on January 22, 1973, only 5 years later, the United States Supreme Court recognized the right to choose in every one of the 50 states.

The passion, radical energy, and fundamental justice of that movement — a movement against the colonization of women’s bodies by the male-dominated State, and against the mutilation of women’s bodies by back-alley butchers — should never be forgotten. Take the time on Roe v. Wade Day to say a Thank you! to the radical Women’s Liberation movement, and to remember the victory that Roe v. Wade represents — for all its many limitations (which I will have more to say about later). This is a day for celebration, and don’t let the anti-choice jerks in Washington (whether they are visitors or residents) intimidate you into silence. Happy Roe v. Wade Day–and here’s to many happy returns!

Here’s some more good news on the Emergency Contraception front: while the FDA process has advanced to the point where EC will probably be available over-the-counter sometime or another soon, Australia is quickly moving one step ahead of the United States: Emergency Contraception is set to become available over-the-counter in Australia tomorrow, January 1.

This isn’t to say that Australia’s EC situation is advanced over that of the United States in every respect. One major difference is that whereas the medical community in America largely supports the FDA’s move towards OTC availability, the medical community in Australia is at best nervous about the move, and in some cases directly opposed. The main issue for them, though, seems not to be the sort of religious Kulturkampf that flares around the American side of the debate. Rather, Australian doctors just seem to be more accustomed than American doctors to controlling the medical lives of their patients, and more jealous at giving up that power. For example, consider this Foucaultian bit of paternalism:

But Australian Medical Association president Bill Glasson said he was concerned that pharmacists were not legally required to record a woman’s visit.

I think that they really need to rediscuss how it is going to operate in the interest of good medical care, Dr Glasson said.

The pharmaceutical society’s national president, Jay Hooper, said many pharmacists would take it upon themselves to record each time a woman wanted the pill.

Not that American doctors don’t also sometimes engage in this tracking and scummy hectoring. At the Auburn University Student Health Center, for example, you could obtain EC–but they’d note when you got it, throw a bunch of red tape in your way, and if I recall correctly, they’d only let you have it once a semester. (The idea in both cases is for doctors to be able to lecture women that they decide are making unhealthy lifestyle choices. I am all for encouraging women to make healthy lifestyle choices, but I can’t imagine that an emergency situation to prevent a pregnancy is the appropriate time to do it, or that forcing women to listen by restricting access to EC until you’re done lecturing them is the appropriate way to go about it.) But the American medical community does not seem particularly squeamish about giving up that control if it means that women are more able to prevent unwanted pregnancies: the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists both lobbied for, and strongly supported, the FDA advisory panels’ decision. In Australia, however, the Australian Medical Association seems nervous and is ready to develop their own house guidelines to try to minimize the freedom it will offer women.

I don’t think, incidentally, that the attitude is a matter of misogyny, exactly. But it is directly connected to patriarchy–it’s a matter of the authoritarian sense of entitlement that modern doctors have always felt and acted out vis-a-vis their patients. The condition exists in Australia and America both, but with regard to over-the-counter pills the Australian medical community seems to have divorced itself from it less than their American counterparts. Consider: at the same time as EC becomes available over the counter for the first time in Australia, so will ibuprofen. And this has caused no small degree of consternation for the Australian Medical Association:

Also from Thursday stronger pain relief medication will be available in supermarkets, a move that has angered and confused doctors and pharmacists. Dr Glasson said the pain killer ibuprofen, contained in products including Nurofen, should only be sold under the supervision of pharmacists. It’s a dangerous move and it’s a backward step.

Patients have to look at the medical aspects of these drugs and get good advice that only the friendly pharmacist can give. Paracetamol is much kinder on the stomach.

Ibuprofen, an anti-inflammatory drug, was only available in pharmacies until the Government ratified the new regulations in October.

. . .

Products containing ibuprofen have been available in supermarkets in the US since 1984 and in Britain since 1996.

The teeming masses of Ozzies will now be able to buy Advil without a doctor’s learned advice! O tempora! O mores!

But however the doctors and pharmacists may whine, the women of Australia have every reason to celebrate. A happy New Year’s to the reproductive rights community in Australia — good show!

Good news this month for women’s reproductive freedom! The widespread availability of emergency contraception (EC) is one of the main breakthroughs for women’s reproductive freedom in the past 10 years. So it’s even better to see that two advisory panels of the FDA recently voted to recommend that EC be made available over-the-counter without the need for a doctor’s prescription. You need to take EC within 72 hours of unprotected sex for it to prevent an unwanted pregnancy, and it gets less effective as time goes on; waiting around for a doctor and a pharmacy are not always a viable option. And there is no possible case to be made that it fails the FDA requirements for over the counter availability. Drugs are supposed to be made available OTC when (1) it is safe to use without a doctor’s supervision, and (2) the instructions are simple enough for self-medication based on the included instructions. That EC is safe, and doesn’t need close observation from a doctor, has been made obvious by all the scientific data and by the past 30 years of experience with both off-label uses of conventional oral contraceptives, and dedicated morning-after pills like Preven and Plan B. How about the simplicity of use? Well, here I’ll defer to Connie Schultz, who investigated the matter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Still, . . . I thought it only fair that I try to decipher them for myself. The kind folks at Planned Parenthood of Greater Cleveland gave me a sample packet. To make it as difficult as possible, I imagined being a sexually active teenager who had abstinence-only sex education.

Would I, could I, understand what I was reading?

Instruction No. 1: Take the first tablet as soon as possible within 72 hours of unprotected sex.

Instruction No. 2: Take the second tablet 12 hours after you take the first tablet.

I think we women can handle it.

This is some great news. Unfortunately, it is only a promissory note for things to come: the FDA nearly always follows the recommendations of its advisory panels, but even if it is pretty sure that it will make EC over the counter, it is entirely unclear when it will do so. The Bush Administration’s FDA has a long record of foot-dragging on this issue, and it has taken two years of untiring activism to get to this point — quite in spite of the fact that the petition obviously meets all the relevant criteria. But the most recent events are a victory to be celebrated, and the light at the end of the tunnel is now in sight.

Now, here’s a question: chemically, Emergency Contraception is indistinguishable from a large dose of conventional oral contraceptives; dedicated EC drugs were developed based on a good 30 years’ worth of doctors’ off-label recommendations for using OCs. (If a patient needed emergency contraception, the doctor would offer a prescription for OCs and suggest that the patient take several at once.) So if safety and ease-of-use arguments show that EC meets the FDA’s requirement for over the counter drugs, then a fortiori they ought to show that the good old birth-control pill meets those requirements too. So while we work towards getting the government out of women’s medical decisions for the morning-after pill, why shouldn’t we also start thinking about a campaign to get the government out of women’s medical decisions for the conventional birth-control pill too?

If there is some Evil Genius or cabal of Illuminati out there behind the cycle of repetitive human interest stories that somehow reach every corner of the United States mass media, they’ve at least picked up one of the interesting on-going stories for today.

Because of Father’s Day, a number of outlets have chosen to dust off a standing human interest story that is, at least, a somewhat interesting and quasi-positive feature: the growing number of stay-at-home fathers.

The trend is a good one: although households with stay-at-home fathers are still a tiny minority (about 4% as well as I can estimate) of all households, they are on the rise (the 2000 Census showed an increase of 70% over the 1990 Census). Now, Right-wing polemics to one side, there is absolutely nothing wrong with households in which both parents share childrearing duties and also work outside of the house. But—as feminists have pointed out many, many times–homemaking and childrearing are important work in society, and they are only regarded as not real work—or simply not mentioned at all in discussions of labor and the economy—because they are jobs that are gender-coded female. The result of more women entering workplaces outside of homemaking and childrearing has been a number of significant shake-ups in the cultural and material underpinnings of patriarchy. One can hope that the result of more men entering into homemaking and childrearing will be the same.

Of course, worry-wort that I am, I have plenty of cavils and downsides to worry about. In particular, although an encouragingly large amount of the coverage has been purged of this disease, the old Backlash refrains still come around: CNN, for example, reported on the increasing number of men helping with childcare, etc.—as if spending all day at home cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids, etc., were some gift that men were chivalrously pitching in to help out the little woman, rather than necessary work that, in this particular household, a man is doing a disproportionate share of in return for financial support from his wife.

Another worry: every single family portrayed in these stories, as far as I can tell (including the San Fransisco Chronicle, Cherry Hill Courier Post, the CNN television report, etc.) has been a family where one or both parents have spent their time in white-collar, upper-middle class professional jobs. Nearly all of them have been white-skinned. Needless to say, all of them have been heterosexual married couples. Just a reminder of how constrained the debate is: all of the debating, measuring, studying, hectoring, and congratulating in the world is completely irrelevant to the many, many, households that simply can’t afford for either parent to stay at home or which are headed by single mothers or which are headed by gay, lesbian, or transgendered couples.

That’s to be expected, I suppose. But if it is important to open up our social norms to include stay-at-home fathers and make them visible, it is certainly just as important—and perhaps much more so—to open them up to include the huge variety of family structures that lie outside the whitebread, heterosexist norms that are standard requirements in the mass media human interest story. And we must continue to work for material improvements (like better access to childcare and healthcare, more flexible work arrangements, etc.) that can make happy, healthy families a reality—no matter what their demographic make-up happens to be.