Tag Archives: George W. Bush

Bush Signs Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003

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On September 4, President George W. Bush signed the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 into law — the first federal act ever designed to address the problem of sexual assault in prisons.

The law, passed without opposition by both the Senate and House in July, creates a 9 member National Prison Rape Reduction Commission to investigate and report on the problem of rape in the nation’s prisons. In addition to providing for an annual Department of Justice review of prison rape rates, it provides funds for states to spend to prevent prison rape and prosecute alleged prison rapists.

As Wendy McElroy noted in a column commending the passage of the bill, estimates of prison rape rates are all over the map. A 2001 Human Rights Watch report on the topic estimated that anywhere from 250,000 to 600,000 prisoners — mostly men — are raped every year in American prisons.

McElroy also notes that feminist groups, who after all insist that rape is a gendered crime committed by men against women, were nowhere to be found lobbying for the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Instead it was the conservative Concerned Women for America along with a number of faith-based groups that lobbied for the bill.

The full text of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 can be read here.

Source:

Confronting prison rapeA. Wendy McElroy, Fox News, September 16, 2003.

Law targeting prison rape signed; diverse coalition backed measure. Trom Strode, Southern Baptist News, September 8, 2003.

Prison Rape Elimination Act Becomes Federal Law. Press Release, Stop Prison Rape, September 4, 2003.

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Feminists and the War Against the Taliban

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In an op-ed piece for The Washington Post, Amy Holmes wonders why the National Organization for Women seems to be largely ignoring the United States’ war against the Taliban.

Holmes notes that NOW did put out a press release a few days ago quoting NOW Action Vice President Olga Vives saying, “In this time of national and global turmoil, the reasons we celebrate Coming Out Day are more visible and more important than ever,” but aside for demanding more money for Afghani refugee camps in Pakistan, NOW is silent about the U.S. attack on Afghanistan.

Which is weird since if you search on “Afghanistan” in NOW’s web search engine, you will find numerous press releases condemning the Taliban, including on urging the world to Stop the Abuse of Women and Girls in Afghanistan! But now that a Republican president is actually attempting to end the Taliban regime, there’s not a peep.

Holmes contrasts this with Eleanor Smeal and the Feminist Majority Foundation which maintains that “the United States has a unique obligation to end the Taliban’s atrocities toward women” and explicitly calls for the United States to remove the Taliban and replace it with a constitutional democracy which will guarantee the rights of women in Afghanistan. Though that may not be possible — although the Northern Alliance, the main threat to the Taliban, is certainly an improvement over the Taliban, they are hardly a group of liberal democratic constitutionalists.

Holmes doesn’t mention it, but the obvious question is whether or not NOW would maintain this weird silence over the war in Afghanistan had it been prosecuted by Bill Clinton or Al Gore. The few things NOW has released related to the terrorism attacks are meshed in with NOW’s theme of fighting George W. Bush and the Right. I suspect that for NOW giving Bush credit for trying a government run by misogynistic religious fanatics simply wouldn’t mesh very well with their theme that Bush is “like a vampire who will suck our rights away” as Patricia Ireland described him last October.

Source:

Feminism goes to battle. Amy Holmes, The Washington Post, October 14, 2001.

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NOW Elects New President

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In June the National Organization for women elected executive vice president Kim Gandy to take over the organization for outgoing president Patricia Ireland. The change at the top of NOW is unlikely to mean very little change for the direction of NOW as Gandy is definitely from the same mould as Ireland.

National Review Online recent ran a brief profile of Gandy including some interesting quotes. Like many of NOW’s ilk, Gandy believes that feminism and pro-abortion politics are largely one and the same thing,

To say you’re a feminist and to say you’re anti-choice is definitely a contradiction. They focus all their attention on this little bit of tissue in the womb, and ignore all the tissue surrounding it.

Not that the father of that bit of tissue counts either. When Congress was proposing to give money to nonprofits to encourage men to marry their pregnant partners Gandy said, “I think promoting marriage as a goal in and of itself is misguided.”

In fact Gandy slammed the a widely circulated statement by The Marriage Movement which said, among other things, that,

Nostalgia for the high hopes of the 1970s should not blind us to the hard truths discovered over the past thirty years: When marriages fail, children suffer. For many, the suffering continues for years. For some, it never ends. Children suffer when marriages between parents do not take place, when parents divorce, and when spouses fail to create a “good-enough” family bond. We recognize that there are abusive marriages that should end in separation or divorce. We firmly believe that every family raising children deserves respect and support. Yet at the same time, we cannot forget that not every family form is equally likely to protect children’s well-being.

Gandy simply kicked in her boilerplate anti-marriage messages saying, “The marriage movement is giving women the message that a bad husband and father is better than none at all. Single moms are being demonized. NOW is committed to exposing and organizing this deliberate return to the days of unchallenged male control.”

Apparently Gandy missed the paragraph in the statement that begins, “Supporting marriage does not require punishing single parents or their children. The Marriage Movement is a movement for a better marriage culture, not a movement of the smug marrieds for the smug marrieds. Many of us in the marriage movement are single parents or the children of single parents. We know firsthand how children suffer and parents struggle when marriages fail.”

But NOW long ago gave up any pretense of even a small sliver of objectivity or of rationally approaching complex social issues. Like others in the organization, Gandy campaigned for Al Gore and appeared on a number of talk shows defending the vice president. An appearance on CNN highlighted her (and NOW’s) love of extreme scare tactics. Gandy asked,

Why are elderly people eating dog food? Because our Social Security system doesn’t take into account all the years of unpaid caregiving that they contributed to society.

What a bizarre statement giving the huge redistribution of income from the young to the elderly that Social Security has created. I’d be ashamed to go on national television and use such an obvious scare tactic, but apparently that’s all in a day’s work for a NOW president.

Source:

NOW’s new gal. Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review Online, July 2, 2001.

The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles. The Marriage Movement, 2000.

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Some Harsh Words about the Equal Rights Amendment

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Wendy McElroy recently wrote an article for Fox News (E.R.A.: R.I.P.) that had some extremely harsh — but accurate — words for feminists who have decided to resuscitate the Equal Rights Amendment. As she sees it, feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women are resurrecting the ERA because they have nowhere else to turn.

McElroy, for her part, has no use for the latest attempt to push the ERA,

THere are many reasons to oppose the new ERA, not the least of which is that the Constitution already applies equally to both genders. What organizations like NOW are hoping to achieve is not equality, however. They wish to sneak in some agenda items through the back door.

What sort of things would NOW like to sneak through the back door? As McElroy points out, NOW would almost certainly use the ERA to demand that all states fund abortions. Section 1 of the ERA says, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” (emphasis added). The Supreme Court has previously ruled that states may fund abortions if they choose, but cannot be compelled to do so.

But with the ERA in place, NOW and other groups would likely argue that when a state says it will pay for, say, an appendectomy but not an abortion, that this decision is a prima facie denial of a woman’s right to equality under the law.

Think this is some absurd right wing idea? NOW and others filed legal briefs in a New Mexico abortion which case which argued just this: that a version of the ERA adopted by New Mexico required state funding for abortions. The New Mexico Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of this notion in 1998, and ordered the state to begin paying for abortions.

Like McElroy, I am pro-choice but against forcing taxpayer to fund of abortions, and the feminist duplicity on this point is difficult to stomach. On the one hand filing briefs in New Mexico arguing that ERA language means states can’t opt out of funding abortions, but simultaneously attacking as a right wing myth that the passage of the ERA means mandated funding for abortions.

On the other hand, the mainstream feminist movement has become its own worst enemy when it comes to preserving abortion rights. According to McElroy,

Eventually, gender feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon refused to share a stage with women who argued on any grounds for the right to publish pornography. At that moment, I knew the feminist movement would not be able to regroup should abortion rights ever come under sustained attack. The most innovative voices in the movement — most notably Camille Paglia — were relegated to the status of “anti-feminist” because they disagreed. What happened to the feminism in which every woman’s voice should be heard?

You can see this inability to defend abortion rights in the rhetoric that has been coming out of NOW ever since the election of George W. Bush. I expected to see a sophisticated, coordinate opposition to Bush’s initiatives on abortion, but instead NOW seems reduced to shrieking that Bush will create some sort of Afghanistan-style oppressive regime if we don’t all hit the streets in protest today. All NOW and other groups seem to have left when it comes to abortion is hyperbole and vicious ad hominem attacks — most pro-abortion groups, in fact, don’t even seem interested in actually defending the morality of abortion (which might not be so bad, since for the last decade they have been decisively outmaneuvered by abortion opponents on the rhetoric front).

But while they don’t seem to be able to make the case for abortion, they have no problem with regularly sending me fund raising letters/pamphlets that highlight their continuing campaign against Rush Limbaugh. I guess for NOW that’s enough of a consolation prize for the organization’s continuing irrelevance.

Source:

E.R.A.: R.I.P.. Wendy McElroy, Fox News, April 20, 2001.

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Lesbians for Bush

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Beth Elliott recently wrote a wonderfully provocative column for FrontPageMag.Com about lesbian and gay men supporting George W. Bush for president. Exit polls showed that 25 percent of voters who identified themselves as gay or lesbian voted for Bush.

The libertarian Elliott doesn’t find that result as odd at all. She writes,

One obvious explanation, one that runs counter to the assumptions of both left and right, is that many of us place higher importance on issues like the benefits of constitutional government over statism, or America’s safety in the world, or restoring honor and dignity to our highest institutions, than our particular parochial issues.

Moreover, Elliott contends that gay and lesbian activists need to be more consistent in the way they approach the state,

Ultimately, there is also the matter of following through on positions and applying them not just to ourselves but to others as well. Because we have decried government interference in our lives, and the harmful effects of derogatory stereotypes, it behooves us to be sensitive to similar legitimate complaints from religious conservatives.

Of course Elliott realizes there probably isn’t a lot of room for common ground with social conservatives who, in their own way, are every bit as statist as the Leftists Elliott deplores. Still, she writes, “Even an uneasy peace between conservatives and freedom-loving gay men and lesbians could tip the scales away from statism. We can certainly agree that would make our country a better and freer place for all of us.”

Source:

How gays and conservatives can work together. Beth Elliott, FrontPageMagazine.Com, February 12, 2001.

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Are Bush’s Pro-Life Views Extremist?

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Feminists from the National Organization for Women and other feminist organizations claim that George W. Bush’s pro-life views are extremist. In fact whether you agree with Bush or NOW, Bush’s anti-abortion views are very mainstream. One of the biggest problems feminists are creating for themselves is exaggerating the level of support there is for abortion, and more specifically vastly overestimating the public support for the sort of restriction-free abortion that NOW and other groups advocate.

A poll conducted by the Gallup organization in October 2000 found 47 percent of Americans described themselves as “pro-choice” while 45 percent described themselves as “pro-life.” Although polling data on abortion varies widely over time, probably due to the controversial nature of the procedure, that is a marked change from 1995 and 1996 polls by Gallup that found 56 percent of those polled described themselves as “pro-choice” and only 33 percent described themselves as “pro-life.”

Still, every poll Gallup has conducted in the past 5 years has found a majority of people in the “pro-choice” column. Unfortunately for NOW and Planned Parenthood, what many Americans consider to be a “pro-choice” view is close to what those groups consider “pro-life.”

Although 46 percent of respondents said that abortion laws shouldn’t be made any stricter, when asked about specific procedures overwhelming majorities favored additional restrictions on abortions. Only 28 percent of those polled by Gallup said that abortion should be “legal under any circumstance.” Forty-nine percent said it should be legal only in “most circumstances”or “only in a few circumstances” while 19 percent said it should be “illegal in all circumstances.”

In what sort of circumstances shouldn’t abortion be legal? For one, most Americans oppose so-called “partial birth abortions.” When asked whether they would personally vote for a law to ban “partial birth abortion except in cases necessary to save the life of the mother,” 63 percent of those polled said they would vote for such a law. This level of support has remained relatively consistent over time, with 57 percent of respondents in a 1996 poll telling Gallup they would vote for such a law.

These sort of results indicate a public that is generally in favor of abortion, but on the other hand believes that strong regulation and restrictions on the procedure are also a good idea, especially when it comes to late term abortions.

Source:

Majority of Americans Say Roe v. Wade Decision Should Stand. Joseph Carroll, Gallup News Service, January 22, 2001.

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Cathy Young on Bush’s Ending Abortion Subsidies

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The National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood and the other usual suspects were outraged when, after only two days in office, George W. Bush issued an executive order blocking federal funds from going to international family planning groups that perform abortions or provide abortion counseling. But is supporting government-funded abortion really a consistent pro-choice position.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Cathy Young argues that federal funding for abortion is wrong “both as a matter of principle and as a matter of strategy.”

As Young writes,

The most powerful pro-choice argument is that a woman’s decision about something so personal as whether or not to bear a child should be free from governmental interference. A fundamental belief in individual rights has led a majority of Americans, however uncomfortably, to support legal abortion, at least in the early stages of pregnancy. But asking the government to finance abortion is a very different matter.

In fact it is absurd for pro-choice activists on the one hand to argue that an abortion is essentially a decision that must be solely left to a woman and her doctor, but then drag the rest of us along into the doctor’s room by demanding we open our wallets to subsidize other people’s choices.

If a woman wants to have an abortion, I have no problem whatsoever with that, but I do have a problem when NOW and Planned Parenthood says I should be required to pay for abortions.

This sort of hypocrisy highlights one of the main problems at the core of big government feminism. On the one hand we are told that women are independent and capable of making their own decisions, thank you very much. In the next breath, of course, NOW and others inform us that women’s independence can only exist so long as women have access to a whole bevy of government programs.

Which is it — are women independent creatures or are they wards of the state?

Personally, I don’t think Bush went far enough. He should have forbidden all federal funding of abortion, period. That’s the only consistent pro-choice position.

Source:

Choice Yes, Subsidy No. Cathy Young, The Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2001.

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NOW and the Voting Gender Gap

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The National Organization for Women keeps making a claim in its press releases about the recently concluded election that while technicaly true completely glosses over the reality of the election. Here’s a random sample by Tanya Melich,

Unlike Florida, the proof of our power is not sullied with statistical probabilities. Nationally, women gave Gore their vote by an 11-percent margin while Bush won men by 11 percent. In Florida, the margins mirror this national vote with women backing Gore and men Bush. Whether by age, education or economic status, the pattern holds.

This paragraph is disingenous. Yes the pattern holds by age, education or economic status — unfortunately it does not hold by race and by marital status.

The so-called gender gap is in fact largely a racial gap. Black and Hispanic women broke overwhelmingly toward Gore, while depending on which polling data you rely on, Bush barely won or barely lost the white female vote. If, in fact, NOW had been able to deliver its core constituency of white women to “fight the right,” Gore would have won in a landslide.

Bush also beat Gore among married women (as well as men). NOW activists may indeed “have begun outreach in their communities to tell the cold, hard truth about the threat that George W. Bush, if elected, poses to the nation” early in the campaign, as one of their press releases claimed, but if they did a lot of women simply weren’t buying what they were selling.

Source:

Anti-Women Backlash Strategy Dwindling. Tanya Melich, WomensENews, No date given.

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Are High Marginal Taxe Rates a Feminist Issue?

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Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore has railed against a proposal by Republican candidate George W. Bush to reduce taxes saying it would benefit only the top one percent of income earners. Writing in the New York Times, however, Virginia Postrel points out that high marginal tax rates at higher income levels encourage married professional women to reduce the number of hours they work, which has strong affects their future promotion potential, or to quit the workforce altogether.

Feminists typically complain that there aren’t enough women at the upper echelons of corporations. While women are more and more represented at mid-level management, they claim, there are not enough women breaking through the “glass ceiling” into executive level positions. As Postrel points out, though, married professional women get screwed by the high marginal taxes if they get promoted too high. Since women are more likely than men to consider not working outside the home, if a woman’s income pushes her family’s income into a higher tax break, there is an economic incentive there not to work.

But does this actually make a difference in the real world? Yes. Postrel cites a 1995 study by University of California at Berkeley economist Nada Eissa on the Tax Reform Act of 1986 which, among other things, reduced the highest tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent. The result, the percentage of married women in the highest tax bracket who worked outside the home jumped from 46 percent to 55 percent, and those who had jobs increased the number of hours they worked by 13 percent. Looking at women in the 75th percentile, who didn’t receive as dramatic a tax cut, the percentage of married women who worked increased by only 7 percent and the number of hours they worked increased by only 9 percent. As Eissa told Postrel, “There is a relationship between taxes and labor-force participation.”

Eissa found similar results when looking at the effects of the earned income tax credit which provides an economic incentive for poor families not too raise their incomes to high since it applies a de facto 21 percent marginal tax rate on all income above about $12,000 for a family of four. Women in that situation were 5 percent less likely to work outside the home if they were in a position where working would bump their family income above that level.

As Postrel notes, however, this is a topic that neither liberal or conservatives want to raise,

Democrats don’t want to admit that the soak-the-rich taxation wallops working wives, lest they split feminists and redistributionists. And Republicans don’t want to admit that cutting taxes will lead more married women to get jobs, lest they split economic libertarians and social conservatives. So everyone stays mum.

But the empirical evidence is pretty clear. Tax rates are a feminist issue.

Personally I tend to think the liberal feminists are the biggest hypocrites here, as they seem committed to maintaining that a professional woman has the right to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy but then is too stupid or too mean spirited to control her own finances, but instead must hand much of it over to the government which presumably knows better than she does. Much of the pro-choice movement has little use for truly giving women (much less men) the ability to make wide ranges of choices over their lives, turning incredibly statist once anything besides the narrow issue of abortion is put on the table.

Source:

Tax System Discourages Married Women from Working. Virginia Postrel, The New York Times, November 2, 2000.

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RU-486 Becomes A Hot Political Issue

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The recent FDA approval of the abortion inducing RU-486 became a hot political issue this week as Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush tried to dodge statements he made back in January that if he were president he would have serious reservations about the FDA approving the drug, while several politicians chimed in to say they would do all in their power to reverse the FDA’s decision.

Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan reaching deep into his rhetorical bag referred to RU-486 as “a human pesticide,” adding that if he should be elected, “I would use all the power of my office, including appointments at the FDA, to prevent its being put on the market.”

Unlike Buchanan, who has no real chance of winning in November, Sen. Tim Hutchinson, R-Arkansas, does hold elective office. Hutchinson told ABC’s “This Week” that there “a lot of questions” about whether or not the drug is safe and hinted that Congress might try to put additional restrictions on the drug. Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okalhoma, said he would introduce legislation that would do just that. Given all of the burdensome restrictions that are already placed on the drug’s use, it’s hard to know what else they want to do.

For a variety of reasons, the Republican position on abortion is not the dominant view of the American people (neither is the pro-choice view, however — most Americans seem to be somewhere in between, wanting abortion to remain legal, but sometimes approving of limited restrictions on its use). Using backdoors like this to try to get their way is a bit unseemly.

On the other hand, if they succeed they’re just beating the feminists at their own game. After all there are any number of feminist tracts likening the birth control to the poisoning of women by patriarchal power brokers (the difference being when Mary Daly attacks birth control, feminists hail her as a genius, whereas were some Republican Senator to do so, he’s immediately pounced upon by feminists).

RU-486 is certainly safe, and since it leads to abortion very early in the first trimester (and by manipulating hormone levels rather than through a surgical procedure), it also meets the objections of a lot of Americans with concerns about late 2nd and even early 3rd trimester abortions. The FDA placed too many restrictions on its use, but overall it did a good thing by finally bringing this drug to market.

Source:

Abortion opponents question safety of new pill. The Associated Press, October 1, 2000.

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