• PERSONHOOD: The Virginia General Assembly’s very first bill, House Bill 1, is a “personhood” measure that defines life as beginning at conception and would essentially outlaw abortions. Modeling it on Mississippi’s failed measure, Virginia Republicans threaten to outlaw birth control and in vitro fertilization for couples trying to have a baby. Anti-choice activists hope to push similar measures in at least 11 other states, including Ohio and Kansas.

• RACE-BASED ABORTIONS: Following in Arizona’s footsteps, Florida Republicans introduced a bill that would “require abortion providers to sign an affidavit stating they’re not performing the procedure because the woman did not want a child of a particular gender or race.” Despite a complete lack of evidence, they insist that minority women are seeking abortions, or have a higher abortion rate in their communities, because they loathe the race of the fetus.

• FETAL PAIN: Florida Republicans are simultaneously pushing a bill that prohibits abortion after 20 weeks based on the unfounded idea that fetuses can feel pain. “They suck their thumbs,” said state sponsor Rep. Daniel Davis (R). “They get hiccups. They get excited when their mom talks. They feel pain.” The medical community, however, insists that it is highly unlikely the fetus registers pain as its brain is not developed enough. U.S. Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) introduced the same measure to ban post-20 week abortions for women in Washington, D.C in order to protect a fetus from “the agonizing process of being aborted.”

• HEARTBEAT BILL: While a more radical heartbeat bill is slowly proceeding in Ohio, another kind of “heartbeat” bill is also gaining a foothold in the Oklahoma legislature. State Sen. Dan Newberry (R) and state Rep. Pam Peterson (R) filed companion measures that “require abortion providers to use a fetal heart rate monitor on the fetus of a woman who is at least eight weeks pregnant and make the heartbeat of the unborn child audible before an abortion is performed.” The heartbeat can often be detected as early as “six to seven weeks,” before a women even knows she is pregnant.

House GOP Reps. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) are also pushing their own anti-abortion bills in Congress. Duncan’s bill would “require abortion providers to obtain written certification from a woman seeking an abortion, then to wait 24 hours after that certification before performing the abortion.” Jordan’s bill would “require women seeking an abortion to be given the chance to view an ultrasound of their unborn child before obtaining the abortion.”

Tanya Somanader
Think Progress

• Redefining Rape: Last May, every House Republican and 16 anti-choice Democrats passed H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act. Anti-choice activists Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) tried to narrow the definition of rape to “forcible rape,” which meant that women who say no but do not physically fight off the assault; women who are drugged or verbally threatened and raped; and minors impregnated by adults would not qualify for the rape and incest exception in the Hyde Amendment. Smith promised to remove the language but used “a sly legislative maneuver” that essentially informs the courts that statutory rape cases will not be covered by Medicaid should the law pass and be challenged in court.

• Abortion Audits: The No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act also bans using tax credits or deductions to pay for abortions or insurance. Thus, a woman who used such a benefit would have to prove, if audited, that her abortion “fell under the rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception, or that the health insurance she had purchased did not cover abortions.” This requirement turns the Internal Revenue Service into “abortion cops” who, agents noted, would have to force women to give “contemporaneous written documentation” that it was “incest, or rape, or [her] life was in danger” which made an abortion necessary.

• Let Women Die: This October, House Republicans also passed the “Protect Life Act”, known by women’s health advocates as the “Let Women Die” bill. The measure allows hospitals that receive federal funds to reject any woman in need of an abortion procedure, even if it is necessary to save her life. Though federal law already prohibits federal funding of abortions, the GOP insisted that the health care law “contains a loophole that allows those receiving federal subsidies to use the money to enroll in health care plans that allow abortion services.”

• Personhood: Mississippi entertained the idea of passing a “personhood” amendment to its constitution this year, one that defines a person as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.” The measure’s “profoundly ambiguous” language regarding the definition of fertilization not only would ban all abortions, it could potentially outlaw birth control, stem cell research, and in vitro fertilization for couples struggling to conceive. Mississippians rejected the amendment but personhood activists are making headway with versions for other states and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is championing a national personhood amendment.

• Race/Sex Abortions: Taking their queue from Arizona, House Republicans introduced the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) — a so-called “civil rights” bill that bans physicians from performing abortions based on the fetus’s race or sex. The problem of selective abortion is virtually non-existent, as not one state official or independent research offered any evidence of race-based abortions. Only 5 percent of abortions occur after the point when a fetus’s sex can be determined. Arizona’s measure, now law, sends doctors and clinicians to jail for three years if they knowingly provide such abortions. The federal bill PRENDA allows for civil suits against the physicians.

• Forced Ultrasounds: Several states pushed bills that force doctors to show a woman seeking abortion services an ultrasound of the fetus, and in some cases, describe the image to her. The Kentucky bill, for instance, required doctors to describe the image if the woman chose to avert her eyes or face a $250,000 fine for disobeying the law. The bills are designed to dissuade women from undergoing the procedure, and in Michigan’s case, provide a “gift to the medical device industry” by forcing doctors to use “the most advanced ultrasound equipment available” to get the most “distinct” image of the fetus possible. North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue (D-NC) vetoed her state’s version of the bill, viewing it as “a dangerous intrusion into the confidential relationship that exists between women and their doctors.”

• Fetal Pain: This year, multiple states pushed legislation limiting or banning abortions past 20 – 22 weeks “based on disputed research that fetuses an feel pain at that point of development.” The idea is widely panned by many in the medical field, with the Journal of the American Medical Association determining that “pain perception probably does not function before the third trimester.” Regardless of the science, Republican lawmakers and even presidential candidate Rick Perry endorsed the fetal pain concept in order to challenge the Roe v. Waderuling and push an earlier ban on abortions. So discredited is the concept of fetal pain that even a Kansas Republican slammed the “false research,” adding “I would be embarrassed to be a state that bases its laws on untruths.”

• Heartbeat Bill: Ohio Republicans are leading other states on the path to pass the “heartbeat bill,” which, if enacted, will be “the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the nation.” The bill outlaws abortions if a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can occur as early as “six to seven weeks into pregnancy” or before a woman even knows she is pregnant. There is no exception in the bill for rape, incest, or mental health of a woman. What’s more, the bill forces doctors to wait until a woman is actually in danger of dying to ensure the abortion falls under the “threat to life” exception.

• Government Shutdown: The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is an international development agency that promotes universal access to reproductive health services. UNFPA does not, nor has it ever, funded abortions — as dictated by its steering document and by its members. But as Matt Yglesias reported, Republicans were determined to believe that UNFPA funds abortion and thus held up negotiations to fund the government with a policy rider eliminating funding for UNFPA. U.S. law also forbids foreign funding to any entity that supports abortion, but House Republicans were so committed to their unfounded belief that the U.S. might be doing so that they threatened to shut down the entire government over it.

• Attack On Planned Parenthood: While simultaneously trying to ban abortions outright, GOP lawmakers on a state and federal level launched a full-scale effort to defund Planned Parenthood. Only 3 percent of the women’s health organization’s services are related to abortion, but it’s association with abortion compelled Republicans to enact legislation cutting or completely defunding Planned Parenthood clinics. Without the funds, many clinics across the country were forced to close, leaving hundreds of thousands of women without vital services like breast cancer screenings, STD testing, and contraception. Texas, the largest state to defund the organizations, may also shut down the entire Women’s Health Program that served 125,000 Texas women in 2012 because some of the family planning clinics in the program are affiliated with Planned Parenthood. Arizona even passed a law banning charity contributions to any organization that is related to abortions or even donates to an organization that is related to abortions. Indeed, this year’s Republican war on Planned Parenthood left thousands of low-income women and children who benefit from tangential health programs as collateral damage.

Tanya Somanader
Think Progress

But in classic Bristol “Let me be the poster child for abstinence even though I was an unwed mother” Palin-style hypocrisy, McCorvey tried closing the barn door after the horses were out and, in 1998, testified to Congress:  ”It was my pseudonym, Jane Roe, which had been used to create the ‘right’ to abortion out of legal thin air. But Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee never told me that what I was signing would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, ‘Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it wouldn’t have been possible.’ Sarah never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes.”

First, I’d bet my bottom dollar no woman ever said that to her.  And yes, I’m calling her a lying sack.  But second, she apparently recreated herself as a much less appealing – and typical – self-serving conservative type:  McCorveny sure didn’t mind availing herself of abortion services when she needed it, but now wants to deny that right to others – and wants to control and dictate the manner in which and the reasons for which other women seek those services.  Frankly, it’s none of her – or any other anti-choicer’s – business how many abortions a woman has, or why.  It’s legal.  And that’s enough said.

But Ohio, apparently, doesn’t believe Roe v. Wade applies to its state; Ohio is seeking to ban abortions as early as six to seven weeks, or as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected – with no exceptions for rape or incest.  Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant 6-7 weeks into it – which, of course, is probably the point.  But let’s go through a woman’s basic rights under Roe v. Wade again, for the cheap seats:

“. . . a person has a right to abortion up until viability.  The Roe decision defined “viable” as being “potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid,” adding that viability “is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.”

I don’t see anything in there about a heartbeat, and surely don’t see anything in there about 6-7 weeks, and I know a 6-week-old blob of tissue isn’t gonna be surviving outside of a womb.  In fact, what Roe v. Wade guarantees is almost four times the 6-7-week timeframe Ohio is trying to push through – a timeframe in which a woman has to figure out she’s pregnant, schedule, and have the abortion procedure.  Ohio was apparently out to lunch when Mississippi’s radical anti-abortion “personhood” law dismally failed, because what Ohio is proposing doubles down on what we at that time thought was the craziest and most extreme anti-abortion law yet.

It’s mind-blowing in the extreme that states - such as Ohio, Mississippi before it, Kansas, Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Oklahoma and others - believe they can just do the big blow-off of Roe v. Wade and strip women of rights that are guaranteed under federal law.

To states run by Republican crazy trains, federal laws are, apparently, just suggestions.

Julie Driscoll
Politics Anonymous 

But in classic Bristol “Let me be the poster child for abstinence even though I was an unwed mother” Palin-style hypocrisy, McCorvey tried closing the barn door after the horses were out and, in 1998, testified to Congress:  ”It was my pseudonym, Jane Roe, which had been used to create the ‘right’ to abortion out of legal thin air. But Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee never told me that what I was signing would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, ‘Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it wouldn’t have been possible.’ Sarah never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes.”

First, I’d bet my bottom dollar no woman ever said that to her.  And yes, I’m calling her a lying sack.  But second, she apparently recreated herself as a much less appealing – and typical – self-serving conservative type:  McCorveny sure didn’t mind availing herself of abortion services when she needed it, but now wants to deny that right to others – and wants to control and dictate the manner in which and the reasons for which other women seek those services.  Frankly, it’s none of her – or any other anti-choicer’s – business how many abortions a woman has, or why.  It’s legal.  And that’s enough said.

But Ohio, apparently, doesn’t believe Roe v. Wade applies to its state; Ohio is seeking to ban abortions as early as six to seven weeks, or as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected – with no exceptions for rape or incest.  Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant 6-7 weeks into it – which, of course, is probably the point.  But let’s go through a woman’s basic rights under Roe v. Wade again, for the cheap seats:

“. . . a person has a right to abortion up until viability.  The Roe decision defined “viable” as being “potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid,” adding that viability “is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.”

I don’t see anything in there about a heartbeat, and surely don’t see anything in there about 6-7 weeks, and I know a 6-week-old blob of tissue isn’t gonna be surviving outside of a womb.  In fact, what Roe v. Wade guarantees is almost four times the 6-7-week timeframe Ohio is trying to push through – a timeframe in which a woman has to figure out she’s pregnant, schedule, and have the abortion procedure.  Ohio was apparently out to lunch when Mississippi’s radical anti-abortion “personhood” law dismally failed, because what Ohio is proposing doubles down on what we at that time thought was the craziest and most extreme anti-abortion law yet.

It’s mind-blowing in the extreme that states - such as Ohio, Mississippi before it, Kansas, Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Oklahoma and others - believe they can just do the big blow-off of Roe v. Wade and strip women of rights that are guaranteed under federal law.

To states run by Republican crazy trains, federal laws are, apparently, just suggestions.

Julie Driscoll
Politics Anonymous 

New York's Sistah II Sistah / Hermana a Hermana organization

Resisting Gender Violence Without Cops or Prisons: An interview with Victoria Law

Activist and journalist Victoria Lawis the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press, 2009). Law has previously been interviewed by Angola 3 News on two separate occasions. Our first interview focused on the torture of women prisoners in the US. The second interview looked at how the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s advocated for the decriminalization of women’s self defense. Taking this critique of the US criminal “justice” system one step further, Law presented a prison abolitionist critique of the how the mainstream women’s movement, then and now, has embraced the same “justice” system as a vehicle for combating violence against women.

While citing the important work of INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, Law argues that “today, abuse is treated as an individual pathology rather than a broader social issue rooted in centuries of patriarchy and misogyny. Viewing abuse as an individual problem has meant that the solution becomes intervening in and punishing individual abusers without looking at the overall conditions that allow abuse to go unchallenged and also allows the state to begin to co-opt concerns about gendered violence.”

Furthermore, “the threat of imprisonment does not deter abuse; it simply drives it further underground. Remember that there are many forms of abuse and violence, and not all are illegal. It also sets up a false dichotomy in which the survivor has to choose between personal safety and criminalizing and/or imprisoning a loved one. Arrest and imprisonment does not reduce, let alone prevent, violence. Building structures and networks to address the lack of options and resources available to women is more effective. Challenging patriarchy and male supremacy is a much more effective solution, although it is not one that funders and the state want to see,” says Law.

In our new video-interview, Law builds upon her earlier prison abolitionist critique by discussing practical alternatives for effectively confronting gender violence without using the prison system. She cites many success stories where women, not wanting to work with the police, instead collectively organized in an autonomous fashion. Law stresses that at the foundation of these anti-violence projects is the idea that gender violence needs to be a seen as a community issue, as opposed to simply being a problem for the individual to deal with.

One group spotlighted, Sistah II Sistah / Hermana a Hermana, in New York City, was formed to confront both interpersonal violence and state violence. They formed discussion groups where experiences are shared and the women collectively decide what tactics and strategies to employ. In one instance, they confronted an ex-boyfriend who was stalking a member of the group by going to his workplace, where they demanded he stop and successfully enlisted the support of his employer and co-workers.

Vikki Law

Self defense advocacy and training is another tactic employed by many of the groups cited by Law. For example, in the 1970s, two feminist martial artists founded Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts (BWMA), later renamed the Center for Anti-Violence Education in the 1980s. Along with teaching practical self defense techniques at sliding-scale classes, Law emphasizes that the Center also focused on the larger picture of how violence “holds different types of oppressions together,” resulting in a complex situation for poor women of color.

Our interview is being released in conjunction with the Unite to End Violence Against Women campaign first initiated in 1991 by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. This campaign began sixteen days of action on November 25, the International Day Against Violence Against Women, and will conclude on December 10, International Human Rights Day. We will be releasing two more segments of our video interview with Victoria Law during the sixteen days of action, so stay tuned to learn more about how Chinese sisterhood societies dealt with gender violence, as well as an update on new stories of women prisoners’ resistance that have happened since the first edition of Resistance Behind Bars was released in 2009 (a second edition is scheduled to be released next year).

Angola 3 News is an official project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com, where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. Additionally we are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more. Our articles and videos have been published by Alternet, Truthout, Counterpunch, Monthly Review, Z Magazine, Indymedia, and many others.

Toronto's Slutwalk

Feminism is dead, and yet it lumbers forward in high-heeled shoes and cleavage-heaving costumes.

SlutWalk is a worldwide phenomenon in which women parade through the streets in “slutty” clothes. It began as a backlash against a Toronto policeman who publicly declared that women should minimize the risk of rape by not “dressing like sluts.”

The most obvious message of SlutWalk is credible. Women should be able to dress as they want without being raped or blamed for violence against them. But the raw politics and hypocrisy surrounding SlutWalk expose mainstream feminism as an exhausted movement that continues to have influence only because it has been institutionalized into laws and academia. As a result the underlying messages have quickly overwhelmed the explicit theme.

Do Not Respond

One message: It is fabulous for women to publicly flaunt their sexuality but an intolerable offense if men respond nonviolently. Wolf-whistles are taken as an attack. Disapproving or overly approving comments from men are an assault. But isn’t provoking a response the entire purpose of wearing fishnet stockings topped by a leather bustier?

Another message, as pointed out by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail: “Slutwalks are what you get when graduate students in feminist studies run out of things to do.”  In other words, SlutWalks are an expression of privileged women who mistake a costume party for a political cause. While Iranian women fight for the right to pursue an education, North American feminists fight to reclaim pride in the word “slut.” SlutWalk is an extreme expression of mainstream feminism’s political impoverishment.

Yet SlutWalkers proclaim they are performing a political service by protesting the trivialization of rape. Nonsense. They are using the ill-considered words of one ignorant policeman as a reason to throw a street party.

I do not begrudge anyone having a good time but as a woman who has experienced rape, I object to the political agenda being attached to a costume party. I object to the posters and attitudes that vilify men as predators. I do so because I was attacked by one man, not by mankind, and when I was helped, it was by men. I object to the notion that women do not bear any responsibility for controlling their circumstances, such as attire. I object to rape being trivialized by associating it with sluttiness and making it part of a celebration.

Not Trivialized

Moreover, SlutWalk’s basis premise is flatly wrong. It is difficult to imagine a cause that is less trivialized by society than “preventing rape” and other sexual offenses against women. For example, the definition of sexual assault has been expanded to include verbal abuse and intimidating gestures. The legal standards by which rape is judged have also been watered down. Recently, the Department of Education imposed the weak “preponderance of the evidence” standard on the adjudication of on-campus charges of sexual offense, including rape.

Nevertheless, organizations such as the American Association of University Women (AAUW) stir the dying embers of controversy by making inflated claims. For example, in its report “Drawing the Line”, the AAUW claims that 62 percent of female students have been sexually harassed. The AAUW arrives at this high statistic by defining sexual harassment in an extraordinarily loose manner. First on the list of indicators is: “sexual comments, jokes, gestures, or looks.” Using this standard it is amazing that 100 percent of the female students did not report harassment.

The AAUW makes other amazing claims that go virtually uncontested: for example, “95% of [sexual] attacks are unreported.” By their very nature “unreported” crimes cannot be counted or quantified. And yet such claims are blithely repeated and used to promote policies such as the aforementioned lowering of rape adjudication standards within academia.

Such statistics are generated in a politically correct environment, so they often receive uncritical acceptance. Academia has been oriented toward gender feminism for decades, and the idea of “the predatory male” has been institutionalized within university policies.

“Mechanism outlasts policy.” The phrase refers to the tendency of ideas and ideology to outlive the circumstances that gave them birth. They survive through being embedded into laws and policies that continue in an automatic fashion.

Gender feminism in America is now a movement reduced to SlutWalks and tenured professors.

Wendy McElroy
The Free Life

I went to the county fair last week, around the corner from my house. I run my dogs on the fairgrounds, and the space is usually a quiet oasis in a busy city. The Morgan County Fair fills that space with exactly what generations of people have sought at a county fair. You can get food on a stick. You can pet the hogs. You can hear good music.

There were kids everywhere: babies in strollers and teenagers checking each other out and everyone in between. Behind the scenes, too, children displayed their creativity and skills. In the Junior Progress Fair at the 4-H building, children from 8 to 18 showed off their hard work in 20 categories of fresh vegetables, 11 kinds of cakes, plus breads, sweatshirts, photography and floriculture.

The organizers created lots of awards for young entrants — best daylily and coleus, best angel food cake and best in show for preserves, best mounted still life photograph. Kids had followed recipes, tended gardens, and composed photographs, and now they were being recognized and congratulated.

Illinois 4-H says its purpose is “To help youth learn skills for living.” That education “empowers people to voluntarily help themselves and others.” The collective efforts behind the Morgan County Fair youth exhibits are exactly what our youth need to learn to live well.

They will need other ideas and skills that they learn in school, in jobs, and at home, but the traditional 4-H skills are central to American life, in rural Illinois and everywhere else.

Kids learn from everything we do, so we should keep thinking about everything we encourage them to do. Not all traditional children’s activities at county fairs teach our youth empowering skills or useful ideas. That’s how I feel about the Princess Pageant.

Here are the rules: “Contestants must be 5 years old by July 5, 2011, and not be 7 by the same date. Contestants will be judged on beauty, personality and charm. Each contestant will be judged in swimwear and a party dress and interviewed at the judges’ meeting prior to the pageant.”

These girls are not old enough to enter the 4-H contests, where seriousness of purpose and planning are required. But they are old enough to show their little bodies in swimwear to meet some judge’s standard of beauty. I guess they need to learn that they cannot be charming or display their personality in jeans and T-shirts. For this contest personality means dressing up, and charm is how you display your body.

The Princess Pageant brings up questions for me. Is this what we want to teach 5-year-olds about how they will be judged in the world? Are these the only useful qualities that the fair organizers think 5- to 7-year-olds have? Why should 5-year-olds be sexy?

And why just girls? Little boys are not judged on their beauty, they are not encouraged to be charming, they don’t get to parade in swimwear. That is definitely girly stuff.

I know I’m out of sync here with society around me. My bank and the YMCA, the pizza chains and fast food joints all sponsor the Princess Pageant.

I suppose the Princess Pageant prepares little girls for their lives in the modern world. In our society, men are supposed to look at women as sex objects, even when they are working. In preparation for the 2012 London Olympics, the officials who run women’s badminton have decreed that women must wear skirts or dresses, very short, of course. Because so many of these elite athletes wear shorts, or worse, pants, the officials said, they needed a new dress code to appeal to fans and corporate sponsors. At least that’s the idea of the men who run this women’s sport: 23 of the 25 members of the Badminton World Federation’s council and executive board are men.

Do these efforts to teach little girls to show their bodies and to force female athletes to be sex objects teach skills for living or empower anyone? I would like to get rid of the tradition of educating girls at a very young age to think of themselves as people to be looked at, rather than people who do things.

What could we say to a 5-year-old who asks “why am I being judged in a bathing suit?”

Steve Hochstadt

Steve Hochstadt of Jacksonville is a professor of history at Illinois College. His column appears every Tuesday in the Journal-Courier and is available and on his blog at stevehochstadt.blogspot.com.

Every month, more states are proposing craftier anti-abortion laws and provisions with blinding speed.  Anti-abortion legislation, anti-abortion billboards, fetal homicide laws, restrictions on family planning access and the gutting of child welfare services have become the moral virus of American public policy, cutting a bloody swath through poor working class communities.

The violent moral policing of women’s bodies has always been crucial to American national identity.  And the rising tide of public policy that is fundamentally anti-family and anti-woman is rooted in a very particular regime of gender, race and class.

In the 19^th century, when the U.S. was in its ascent as an imperial power, the Cult of True Womanhood was the standard for American femininity.

Central to the Cult of True Womanhood was the ideal of white women as the moral protectors of home, hearth and family.  As the model of purity, religious piety and supreme sacrifice, the “true woman” was the moral symbol of American nationhood reigning over the dark uncivilized “Other” of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The mainstream media’s slobbery obsession with the Casey Anthony trial underscores how deeply the ideal of white womanhood is steeped in reverence for white motherhood.  As many cultural commentators have observed, Anthony was appealing because she was a perverse representation of the Middle American “us.”

She epitomized the seductive quandary of how seemingly good middle class white girls, good white mothers, could go so colossally bad.  The white masses were transfixed and outraged by the tawdry saga of innocent little Caylee Anthony’s disappearance because she was “every child,” thus putting the sanctity of white motherhood on trial.

Rennie Gibbs

Being marked as bad “bitches” already, women of color don’t have far to fall when it comes to the pathological mother immorality sweepstakes.

To paraphrase Gil Scott Heron, the realities of neglectful mothers of color will not be televised.  They will not be the object of round-the-clock cable news, Court TV or supermarket tabloid frenzy.  They will not elicit thousands of dollars in donations to defray their legal expenses because the subtext of the bad black or Latino mother is the good white mother whose children are America’s children.

For example, fetal homicide laws disproportionately criminalize poor pregnant women of color.

Like decades-old legislation that has penalized generations of pregnant black women for crack cocaine use, fetal homicide laws are the new frontier in the anti-abortion backlash.  One of the more egregious examples of this is the case of Rennie Gibbs. Gibbs is an African American Mississippi woman facing a life sentence for murder after giving birth to a stillborn baby in 2006 when she was 16-years old.

The state of Mississippi has charged that Gibbs’ stillbirth was due to her alleged cocaine use.  Although medical reports concluded that Gibbs’ cocaine was not a contributing factor in her child’s death, the case is nonetheless progressing in criminal court after five years.

In some states, fetal homicide language loosely defines a person as an “unborn child in utero at any stage of development regardless of viability.” And it is no accident that the majority of these laws have been enacted in the South and the Midwest, where unrestricted access to safe, legal abortion resources is rapidly disappearing.

In an amicus brief in defense of Gibbs, several Mississippi health providers argue that these policies further criminalize drug addiction and discourage women from seeking treatment.  White women drug abusers are far more likely to receive counseling, treatment and other rehabilitative care than are black women.  Consequently, racist drug enforcement and sentencing policies, coupled with mainstream assumptions of bad black motherhood, make fetal homicide policies far more insidious for black women.

Currently, black women constitute over 30% of the U.S. prison population.  They are primarily incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses and a significant majority of them are mothers. As the proportion of incarcerated black women swells the right wing assault on child social welfare services will cause both the ranks of black children in the foster care system and amongst the homeless to grow.  Dispossessing black women of their humanity, the new cult of true womanhood trains a bullseye squarely on communities of color.

Sikivu Hutchinson

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars.

The news about both Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger has brought renewed attention to what seems like a myriad of past allegations of sexual harassment by the two politicians. Strauss-Kahn and Schwarzenegger have also both now acknowledged relationships with women who worked for them.

So, when something happens between a boss and employee, where’s the line between harassment and a consensual relationship? It turns out the law isn’t as clear as you might think.

In the United States, certain situations are considered inherently coercive. For instance, sexual contact between prison guards and inmates—even if it’s entirely consensual—is sexual abuse by definition. However, laws governing the workplace are far more permissive, though companies may adopt their own, more stringent policies.

Under U.S. federal anti-discrimination law, sexual advances or comments in the workplace aren’t necessarily against the law, and that’s even if there’s a big power gap at play, Ernest Haffner, a senior attorney at the government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, told me.

“If that were true, a romantic relationship could never be consensual or welcome in a particular workplace,” Haffner said. “I don’t think case law supports that.”

Instead, the test is whether the sexual comments or conduct was unwelcome. Sound simple? Not so fast.

Experts say there aren’t hard-and-fast rules for judging whether conduct is unwelcome. “Unwelcomeness is tricky,” said Haffner. “The person may subjectively believe that the conduct is unwelcome, but you have to objectively be able to show it.”

In some cases, a person may be able to show that advances were unwelcome even though he or she didn’t protest or say so at the time. “Consensual” isn’t the same thing as ”welcome,” experts say. It all comes down to a close analysis of any given situation.

Lawyers told us that power dynamics can be a factor. Past history between the two people can also be a factor. Even body language can be a factor.

“The bright line is it being unwelcome, but the facts that make that up are really going to depend on the circumstances,” said Fatima Graves of the National Women’s Law Center, noting that courts have ruled differently. “Some courts have said that it’s important for the employee to communicate clearly that it is unwelcome,” Graves noted.

That’s why the government and anti-discrimination groups encourage people who believe they’re being harassed to inform the harasser directly that the advances, comments or conduct are unwelcome. Legal Momentum, a women’s rights group, warns the targets of harassment, “Your legal claims can be hurt if you keep silent.” It also provides a sample letter [PDF] to send to a harasser, suggests reporting the harassment to the company and recommends holding on to all records documenting the harassment itself and complaints about it.

Once it’s established that the conduct was sexual harassment, it’s up to the company to prove that it’s not liable. If the harasser was in a supervisory role, the company is almost always liable, though companies can try to argue that the person didn’t make use of internal channels to report the harassment or waited too long to do so.

Under U.S. anti-discrimination law—civil statutes—there are caps on how much companies can be forced to pay if the case goes to trial. They’re based on the size of the company—and awards for even the largest companies are capped at $300,000, though this doesn’t include compensation for, say, medical or therapy expenses incurred as a result of the harassment.

More often than not, however, these cases will settle out of court. President Bill Clinton famously paid Paula Jones $850,000 to make her sexual harassment lawsuit go away, with no apology or admission of guilt needed on Clinton’s part. Just last year, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd settled for an undisclosed amount a sexual harassment claim brought by a company contractor.

Not all workers in the United States are covered by federal sexual harassment laws, however. The housekeeper with whom Schwarzenegger fathered a child out of wedlock, for instance, most likely was not.

“You have to have so many employees before you’re covered,” said Michelle Caiola, a senior attorney at Legal Momentum who previously worked for the government’s EEOC. “Being an employer of one person in a household—that wouldn’t be covered.”

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Hollywood Moguls Join Drive to Return to Pre-Feminist Era

It was technically only a coincidence that France’s leading Socialist Party presidential candidate engaged in his latest sexual assault on the same weekend that major television networks promoted such new shows as the “Playboy Club,” “Pan Am” (based on stewardesses of the 1960’s) and a remake of “Charlie’s Angels.” The only surprising element was that International Monetary Fund head and French Socialist leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested by New York City police for a sexual attack against a hotel maid that news reports reveal is part of a longtime pattern.

Why did Strauss-Kahn think he could get away with it? Because he had many times before. We can now expect an all-out assault on the integrity of the 32-year old African immigrant who was the target of Strauss-Kahn’s attacks. Meanwhile, Hollywood is sending its own retro messages about women accepting sexual harassment as a job condition, as the female actors required to prance around in “corsets, fishnets and stilettos” as a condition of employment either accept such roles or face unemployment.

The story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest while trying to flee the United States to avoid sexual assault charges could make a great movie, particularly if it showed his long history of prior sexual assaults. What better evidence of the worldwide drive to return women to the pre-feminist era than for the media to finally be forced to acknowledge that the head of the International Monetary Fund and the leading French Socialist presidential candidate has regularly assaulted women – and that this has not stalled his career.

And perhaps even advanced it.

A Profile in Courage

According to media reports, the maid entered Strauss-Kahn’s suite at the Hotel Sofitel believing it was unoccupied. He then came out of the bathroom naked, chased her down a hallway to the foyer, and pulled her into a bedroom and began his sexual assault. After she pulled away and tried to escape, he grabbed her and assaulted her in the bathroom.

It took incredible courage for a young immigrant maid to report a sexual assault by a powerful man staying in a $3,000 per night hotel suite. Media reports are already scrutinizing her employment record – which her employer says is “satisfactory” – and you can just imagine the money Strauss-Kahn is spending on investigators seeking any information they can get their hands on to destroy her credibility and save his career.

Other victims of Strauss-Kahn’s sexual attacks chose silence, knowing the risks to career and personal reputation that can come from charging a powerful man with such a crime.

According to a New York Times report, Mr. Strauss-Kahn behaved aggressively toward a young female journalist and novelist, Tristane Banon, in 2002. Banon stated during a 2007 television interview on Paris Première, a cable channel, “that a French politician – whom she later said was Mr. Strauss-Kahn – had tried to rape her in an empty apartment in Paris after she had contacted him for a book she was writing.”

According to Banon, “he wanted to grab my hand while answering my questions, and then my arm. We ended up fighting, since I said clearly, ‘No, no.’ We fought on the floor, I kicked him, he undid my bra, he tried to remove my jeans.” Banon “contacted a well-known lawyer who already had ‘a pile of files on Mr. Strauss-Kahn,’” but never filed a complaint. “I didn’t dare; I didn’t wish to be the girl who had a problem with a politician for the rest of my life,” she said.

Since the maid came forward and Strauss-Kahn was arrested, reports are widespread that Banon’s experience was not unique, and that the IMF and French Socialist Party knowingly allowed a man widely charged with being a sexual predator to assume a leadership position.