Category: Commentary

Human Rights Day 2012: Time to Ratify CEDAW Women’s Treaty

On By erintothemaxIn CommentaryLeave a comment

Today is International Human Rights Day, a yearly effort of the United Nations to celebrate and “advocate for the full human rights by everyone everywhere.” A perfect time to remember the ladies.

This year’s theme focuses on the right of everyone to be heard in public life and decision-making. It adds some much-needed urgency to the decades-long effort to get the United States to ratify the UN Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which will be more simply referred to as the CEDAW Women’s Treaty in the rest of this post.

Related: Today an acting head of the women’s affairs department in eastern Afghanistan was killed on her way to work. Nadia Sediqqi was the replacement for Hanifa Safi, who was killed by a car bomb in July of this year. If this disturbs you, if you care even a smidge about international women’s rights, you need to care about the United States ratifying the CEDAW Women’s Treaty.

So what is the CEDAW Women’s Treaty? Crafted in 1979, it says simply that women’s rights are human rights and offers ratifying countries a practical blueprint for improving the participation and status of women in critical areas including education, healthcare and employment. Nearly every country has ratified it except Iran, Palau, Somalia, Sudan, Tonga and … the United States.

Not ratifying the CEDAW Women’s Treaty is a huge deal because ratifying countries regularly meet within the United Nations to discuss their progress. Absent signing on to the CEDAW Women’s Treaty, the U.S. has no structured international forum for addressing the treatment of women in other countries that remains intact in times of war and peace. We are absent from discussions. What an embarrassment for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, an undisputed champion of international women’s rights.

It is strategic to lead with the international angle, because it tends to be the case that the United States has an easier time discussing women’s rights as human rights, and reaching ever-elusive bipartisan consensus, when the women being discussed happen to live in countries that overlap with countries that are thought to be our national security interests. (Even George W. Bush — anything but a champion of women’s human rights much less women’s political participation — took on Afghan women as a cause in conjunction with the war he declared in Afghanistan.)

But it shouldn’t be lost that ratifying the CEDAW Women’s Treaty would also improve the lives of women and girls in the United States. Why?

When we ratify the CEDAW Women’s Treaty, our country will go on record for the first time that women’s rights are human rights. (Contrary to what the majority of the population believes, the United States does not yet have a constitutional guarantee against discrimination on the basis of sex.) We’ll also be able to learn from other countries successes in areas where our laws are still catching up to reality — to address discrimination against mothers in the workforce, for example.

Okay, gravy equality train, good and great – but stop. Rick Santorum and Pat Robertson and Republican extremists! Didn’t they just kill the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities and embarrass the living daylights out of the United States? In front of former Senate Majority leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.)?

All of the major arguments leveled against the CEDAW Women’s Treaty are simply without merit. As some players are wont to do, you say “women,” they say “abortion,” and create a circus. Well, the fact is that the CEDAW Women’s Treaty does not address abortion. There has been concern at times that Mother’s Day would somehow be attacked, but that hasn’t happened anywhere else in the world. Cross-cultural truth: It’s generally uncool to dis your mom.

The other two main arguments were leveled against the Disabilities Treaty and were thoroughly debunked before and after the shameful Senate vote. The CEDAW Women’s Treaty, just like the Disabilities Treaty, does not obligate the U.S. to change its laws. Second, the United Nations is not some anti-sovereign plot to dissolve this nation into a monolithic new world order.

Just as the Disabilities Treaty should be revisited and ratified, so too should the CEDAW Women’s Treaty be ratified. This is an opportunity for those “kinder, gentler” Republicans who were supposed to come out after the election thumping to demonstrate a support of women. And it’s also an opportunity for President Barack Obama, a champion of women, to create a a capstone legacy for the history books.

The United States has a moral obligation to acknowledge women’s rights as human rights, and to participate in helping to bring equality for women at home and around the world. This International Human Rights Day again reminds us its time to ratify the CEDAW Women’s Treaty.

I’m Pregnant!

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary12 Comments

Pregnant. Pro-choice! Knocked up. Fired up. Expecting a baby.

Stork-a-doodle-dooo000 …

Before I was pregnant, before this transformation that makes me want to eat popsicles at all times, I advocated every day for women’s human rights, most notably around reproductive justice – the right to bear children, the right to not bear children, and the right to adequate health care and social support for all families.

What follows is a commentary that is both intensely personal and political.

Let’s start with the gentleman driving down the street with the “CHOOSE LIFE” license plates.

I see your opinions. I see you can afford to drive a Mercedes. I see clear as the obliviousness on your face that you have NO IDEA.

NO IDEA what it is like to be pregnant.

NO IDEA how warm piss can turn a ten dollar piece of plastic into the most expensive thing at Tiffany that you just broke.

NO IDEA how painful your suggestion can be for a woman who couldn’t complete a wanted pregnancy.

It is so offensive to me that you think you have the right to speak to me, your target audience, a pregnant woman not visibly so, about my reproductive health and decision-making whenever you want. You don’t know me. I haven’t even told all my friends and family I’m having a baby.

Messages like yours, that personal pregnancy is properly positioned as public property, make we want to puke. Your message makes me want to let loose my hot tomato-flavored morning sickness all over your flawless black paint job and glistening silver hood ornament. It is harassment of women who walk and drive and breathe in public.

There is no “choosing life” in the movement represented on license plates like yours from 27 states, with proceeds funneled into unregulated crisis pregnancy centers filled with non-medical poseurs willing to lie to me until some teeth fall out: Telling me abortion will make me go to hell. Telling me abortion will make me commit suicide. Telling me abortion will give me breast cancer.

I’ll tell you what the “pro-life” cause to shame and ban abortion does: It kills women. It kills women just like me.

I am fourteen weeks pregnant, my due date is June 2, my start date is August 26 – that’s Women’s Equality Day (the epoch has not yet been reached).

I am three weeks less pregnant than Savita Halappanavar was when she died in Ireland after a dangerous miscarriage could not be completed with an abortion she begged for because – “This is a Catholic country.”

There is a woman who didn’t die the same hospital death in Arizona recently, and the price was paid with the excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride. Sister Margaret McBride’s alleged crime was saving that 27-year-old woman’s life. In doing that, Sister Margaret McBride angered the “No Girls Allowed” club up top in Rome.

I couldn’t go to my hometown candlelight vigil for Savita. I couldn’t go because I wasn’t ready to tell others I’m pregnant, and every time I seriously considered that case I would start to cry. I’m crying now.

You can work so hard for people’s inherent equality, you can work so hard for reproductive freedom and reproductive justice, but when it comes down to it, pregnant women are still so vulnerable. Yesterday. Today. And still, tomorrow.

The equation is too simple: If you are pregnant and in the wrong place at the wrong time, you die. Not because you had to. Not because the medicine isn’t available yet. Because people, often laws they create, won’t trust you with your power.

I am thrilled to have a baby but the expectation to have a baby, even a dead baby, at any cost, even a dead woman, even me, fuels the wetness on my cheeks.

Let’s leave the Mercedes driver behind and talk about some other expectations.

If you think I’m going to have “a new focus,” or less passion or ambition about my career and the causes I are about, I ask that you kindly ask yourself if you have the same expectation of my husband. Now why does that sound ridiculous? As the authority on myself, it sounds equally ridiculous for me.

I am so proud to show my little girl or boy what it’s like to have a mother who does not slow down, who provides that example that you can have love and devotion to your family and love and devotion to the broader world.

I am not trying to “have it all” or achieve “work-life balance.” I have never seen that referenced as a recipe for personal success alongside the extraordinarily successful men on the covers of magazines – all 96% of those Fortune 500 CEOs, 83% of those members of Congress, 100% of those presidents in history.

I know you can’t self-help your way out of societal discrimination, for which “having it all” and “work-life balance” are guilt-ridden code words. I know you have to work to change the system. That is my work and I will continue that work to the best of my ability, as I always have.

A wise mentor of mine told me that activism is being willing to live your life as an example of what should be, even when it comes with personal cost. And that is why I’m coming out now. You see, I’m in exactly a position to lose right now: I’ve gone on some interviews for jobs, and I’m pregnant. I know that discrimination against openly pregnant women is real. The New York Times recently ran a piece on this. It was called Why Women Hide Their Pregnancies.

I know why women hide their pregnancies. I know why I’ve kept this information longer than I probably would have if I weren’t in transition. I’m afraid people will discriminate against me, make assumptions about me and my career decisions past, present and future, downgrade me or dismiss me simply because I’m having a baby. I know the law is behind where we need to be as a modern workforce. And I’m telling you openly, as a pregnant woman who is taking her career to the next level whether that’s intuitively acceptable for you or not, that this must change for everyone. I am real, other women like me are real, and we are not going away.

This is the first time I’ve been pregnant. I was quite surprised to find I was pregnant two weeks after resigning from my job, without future paychecks in place. At other points in my life, with those facts and without the current support structure I have, I probably would have had an abortion. I’m thrilled to be pregnant today and I don’t feel at all guilty to know this truth. We are not guilty for having sex, for having children, for having abortions. We are human.

So much more to say. For now I will leave you with my strongest Pregnant Pro-Choice Lady wish to end a world where lesbians, gays, single women, single men, young people and undocumented immigrants are not congratulated, supported and welcomed as future parents in the way my husband and I so warmly have been; where low-wage workers need to express breastmilk in a filthy bathroom stall but their wealthier counterparts get leather couches, privacy and respect; and, without question or hesitation, to end a world where accessible, affordable contraception and abortion care is shrouded in shame and dangerous bans that kill pregnant women in the wrong place at the wrong time, rather than celebrated as one of the greatest public health advances in our history.

We should be so proud to stand for reproductive justice.

Elections! Elections! Elections! (Femfreakingtastic, Okay!)

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary3 Comments

Progressive feminist values jumped out of a cake, and they are singing our names! All of us, you and me and everyone! The 2012 election returns presented, on the whole, a night coated in awesome. Here are some of my favorite moments:

1. President Obama is re-elected.
We worked together. We knocked on doors, we made telephone calls to people who told us to buzz off, we did not get down, we just kept on going. Re-electing this president, who had been called the most vulnerable incumbent in 20 years, was no small task. When he made missteps (during his first term, as well as that disastrous first debate), feminists and reproductive justice advocates spoke up and held him accountable to being a true champion for women. It paid off this election. And this strategy of demanding accountability to work for women should be continued in his second term.

2. Mitt Romney is defeated.
Increasing inequality and division between the haves and the have-nots is a great moral stain upon our time – and Mitt would have turned that beast into a bigger one. He presented a grave threat to abortion rights, reproductive health and the composition of the Supreme Court. Mitt’s defeat also shows that all the unregulated, undisclosed money in this post-Citizens United world can’t necessarily buy an election. That’s something to celebrate in itself.

3. Marriage rights win on the ballot for the first time EVAR.
Before yesterday, every single time the civil right to marry was placed on the ballot, voters awarded same-sex couples with an inferior set of constitutional rights. Not yesterday! Minnesota defeated a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a man and a woman. Maine, Maryland and Washington state gave same-sex marriages the go. With the president with equal marriage rights, the majority of the population with equal marriage rights, and the overwhelming majority of the youth population with equal marriage rights, last night’s victories are a game-changer. Anti-gay bigotry has disproved itself as a successful get-out-the-vote tool, and we can expect the party that typically profits from these efforts to take notice. If you’re not smiling yet, two Maryland women got engaged at the Obama victory rally in Chicago last night.

4. The Republican party gets a No Rape Mandate to the price of the U.S. Senate.
Lots of jokes about God intending for Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock to lose, but their defeats in races that should have been winnable for the GOP are no laughing matter. Look, last night’s victories sent a clear message that it’s actual, not speculative, political suicide to say horrible things about women who have been raped. It is a validation of every person who has been raped, doubted, minimized, trashed, called a slut. We can bemoan that the conversation was there in the first place, but these defeats have the power to change the dynamics of a party that has empowered the most sexist of viewpoints.

5. We get the brink of a movement-building moment for reproductive justice.
In the past two years, more than 1,000 bills restricting reproductive rights and women’s health have been introduced in Congress and the state legislatures. Last night’s election doesn’t call an end to the War on Women (reference the election of leading anti-Planned Parenthood bully Rep. Mike Pence to Governor of Indiana) but it does present an opportunity for abating the attacks, strongly suggested by last night’s results to be a losing strategy for the House of Representatives in growing allies in the Senate and the White House. This is a great time for reproductive justice advocates to get much louder about full funding and availability of full reproductive health care, and yes, I mean calling for federal dollars to abortion care.

6. Check out these women in the Senate – a record number at 20!
Elizabeth Warren wins, presenting a major victory for what the late Senator Paul Wellstone called “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” Tammy Baldwin wins, becoming the first out lesbian Senator in the history of our country. One out of five is not anything close to proportional, and no one should be satisfied here, but the bottom line is that progress is moving in the right direction and we’ve picked up some amazing new women to add to the bunch.

7. Surely there are more things to be added to this list.
So many wonderful things just happened – Tammy Duckworth elected, a voter suppression initiative failed in Minnesota, an anti-abortion rights initiative failed in Florida, there are so many more – add your favorite moments in the comments!

Mitt, Assault Weapons and Single Parents

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary4 Comments

Last night, Mitt Romney appeared to blame mass shootings on single-parent families.

His non-sequitur response to debate moderator “Don’t You Silence Me” Candy Crowley’s delightfully rogue question as to whether the Republican presidential nominee would support the reinstatement of expired bans on assault weaponry that used to enjoy Republican support is important for several reasons.

1. We have a fundamental violence problem.

Violence cuts across poverty, it cuts across wealth, it cuts across privilege. The problem is not who does it but that we as a culture refuse to confront guns, we refuse to confront dominance, we refuse to confront the reality that the only accomplishment of the sham war on drugs is the mass incarceration of African American men. Mitt Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan and his House Republicans buddies refuse to reauthorize 18 years of bipartisan support for the Violence Against Women Act. It is as dangerous to lay the blame for violence on the feet of single parents as it is to lay it on Marilyn Manson, because naming a black sheep is exactly how to pull attention away from the fact the whole farm is burning.

2. It’s time to get real about guns.

Whether you are a PhD student in Aurora, a mentally ill undergrad in Virginia, two Littleton high school students from wealthy two-parent families, an abuser whose girlfriend is trying to leave, or frankly anyone in the United States, guns are easier to get your hands on than the more popular Happy Meal toys. The Supreme Court is an outpost of the National Rifle Association devoted to trampling the rights of local governments to regulate guns. There is not a single defensible reason to have assault weapons on the consumer market. In this climate, the gun lobby sits there smugly like a Grover Norquist of mass death above the silence of elected officials. No action was taken after a sitting member of Congress was shot.

3. Basically, Mitt told those slutty women to put assault weapons between the knees.

Single parent families are part of life, and a class divide is at work. More than 40 percent of births take place outside a marriage, with just 10 percent of those attributed to college-educated women. Last night Mitt outright lied about his well-documented intention to allow employers to dictate which women can get birth control and which can’t, and it’s also unclear how his plan to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood, his desire to overturn Roe v. Wade, and his running mates’ assertion that rape is a “method of conception” will increase two-parent families so there won’t be any more violence.

Let’s face it, people are driven to have consensual sex (how fun!) and half the population is encouraged to grow up with toy guns and violent entertainment until they too are big enough to carry a concealed AK-47 wherever they want.

For some time Mitt Romney has appeared to agree with those who believe a woman with an IUD is committing mass murder for years at a time. What is most frightening is that now he is saying a woman who raises children without the watchful eye of a man is responsible for mass murder in our streets, schools and movie theaters.

Lena Dunham Is Worth It

On By erintothemaxIn CommentaryLeave a comment

The attacks on Lena Dunham’s $3.6 million book deal are attacks on talented young women in general.

Granted, few are as talented as Lena, who with Girls, her HBO series, has made us laugh, cry and have a national conversation about the cold truth that even young women who appear to have all the privilege in the world still have real struggles navigating exploitative employers and agonizing, often disappointing sexual relationships.

Sure, the show has flaws, but so does Facebook. Where were the calls for Mark Zuckerberg to wait his turn? Who has suggested Chris Hughes should rescind his seat at the helm of The New Republic?

The public loves its millennial superstars, when they are men.

Lena Dunham isn’t the only breakthrough young woman currently fielding sexist criticism that she’s entitled and non-deserving of a major public voice, with Sandra Fluke serving as an obvious second example.

Why the social discomfort with equally educated and unusually brilliant young women?

Could it be some of the naysayers — women and men — don’t realize they are uncomfortable with the implication that a new generational leap toward women’s equality is already in flight?

Todd Akin Is Mainstream Republican Party Politics

On By erintothemaxIn CommentaryLeave a comment

Todd Akin is no fringe on the rug. Todd Akin represents and clearly articulates mainstream Republican party politics in 2012.

Let’s look at some examples:

—–

Akin Says “Legitimate Rape”: Akin defends his no exceptions anti-abortion rights view, saying a woman is less likely to get pregnant by a “legitimate rape,” because a woman’s body can just “shut that whole thing down.”

House Republicans Already Tested “Forcible Rape” In A Bill: The attempt to redefine rape to “legitimate” or “forcible,” particularly in the context of abortion, is an existing GOP priority. In this 112th Congress, H.R. 3 (they are numbered in order of priority) the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act” contained these provisions.

—–

Akin Opposes Abortion Rights In All Cases, Including Rape.

Republican Party Platform Opposes Abortion Rights In All Cases, Including Rape. Further, the latest anti-abortion rights bill introduced by House Republicans, the D.C. 20-Week Abortion Ban, had no exceptions for rape. Mitt Romney supports ‘personhood’ measures awarding constitutional rights to fertilized eggs (outlawing not just abortion but also forms of birth control), and his running mate Paul Ryan cosponsored a ‘personhood’ bill with Akin.

80 percent of people in the United States disagree with the Republican no-exceptions approach to abortion rights.

—–

Akin Says A Woman Elected Official Is “Unladylike”: Akin trashes his opponent, Senator McCaskill, with a sexist slur: “unladylike.”

Republican National Convention Applauds A Joke That A Woman Elected Official Is Shrill: To the applause of the Republican National Convention, Governor Huckabee uses a sexist, ‘political women are shrill’ slur to compare Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz practicing a speech to “an awful noise.”

—–

Akin Admits Arrest Blocking An Abortion Clinic, Operation Rescue Style: Akin said he was arrested demonstrating against abortion rights a few decades ago.

Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner’s Chief of Staff Meets With Randall Terry: In the limited time between the election assuring his speakership and taking the gavel, Boehner’s staff met with a terrorist.

—– 

It doesn’t end there.

Out of the elected official category, Mike Huckabee, Trent Franks, Newt Gingrich, Jim DeMint, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum (and presumably his arsenal of big funders) have all jumped publicly on board. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has hinted it may take Akin back.

Because Akin is one and the same with mainstream Republican party politics, it’s critical for everyone — not just people in Missouri — to vote. Many undecided voters do not follow politics closely, and may not realize the guy painted on TV as the outlier is actually mainstream. Debunk the idea that Akin is a lone wolf, as the Republicans try to paint him. He is, dangerously, a leader of the pack.