Over at the National Review, Kathryn Jean Lopez essentially urges the million of us who marched yesterday to lighten up and stop being so rude to the President acting like the right to choose is important and threatened, while “Peter Smith” urges the faithful to do whatever is necessary to defeat Arlen Specter tomorrow – or else he might stop the Republicans from ending legalized abortion. Perhaps the two of them should have a conversation. Although, given that Peter Smith is apparently a pseudonym for an anonymous “close observer of the judicial-confirmation battles,” that might be difficult.
Author Archives: Josh Eidelson
Eric Schlosser, who just had a book published on the topic, slams the hypocrisy, injustice, and inefficacy of the federal war on marijuana:
More than 16,000 Americans die every year after taking nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen. No one in Congress, however, has called for an all-out war on Advil. Perhaps the most dangerous drug widely consumed in the United States is the one that I use three or four times a week: alcohol. It is literally poisonous; you can die after drinking too much. It is directly linked to about one-quarter of the suicides in the United States, almost half the violent crime and two-thirds of domestic abuse. And the level of alcohol use among the young far exceeds the use of marijuana. According to the Justice Department, American children aged 11 to 13 are four times more likely to drink alcohol than to smoke pot.
None of this should play down the seriousness of marijuana use. It is a powerful, mind-altering drug. It should not be smoked by young people, schizophrenics, pregnant women and people with heart conditions. But it is remarkably nontoxic. In more than 5,000 years of recorded use, there is no verified case of anybody dying of an overdose. Indeed, no fatal dose has ever been established.
Over the past two decades billions of dollars have been spent fighting the war on marijuana, millions of Americans have been arrested and tens of thousands have been imprisoned. Has it been worth it? According to the government’s National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, in 1982 about 54 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 had smoked marijuana. In 2002 the proportion was . . . about 54 percent.
Some thoughts on yesterday’s march:
It was gigantic. I’m not great at estimating crowds, but I’m confident saying there were significantly more folks there than the last rally I attended in DC, the anti-war one in January which drew several hundred thousand people. The organizers reported distributing over a million of the “count me in” stickers given to marchers when we signed forms identifying ourselves, which is a number I’m inclined to trust and a method which, based on personal experience, is much more likely to under-count than to over-count people. That, and just look at those photos. A truly enormous crowd (were I to use an even less scientific measure, the number of people I know whom I unexpectedly ran into at the march, I would reach a similar conclusion).
What impressed me most about this march, as I alluded to earlier, was the self-conscious manner in which it broke out of the mold of white, upper/middle-class feminist/ pro-choice activism which has too often marked the movement. The choice of whether or not to continue a pregnancy to term was contextualized in terms of the various and urgent structures which regulate women’s fertility and impact their lives and those of their born children. Speakers and placards unapologetically tied the right to choose with the rights to a progressive welfare system, progressive immigration reform, and global sexual education. Too often, as some have observed, it’s left to the anti-choice movement to discuss the realities of urban poverty. Yesterday, the right to choose was proudly claimed as part of a comprehensive struggle for the liberation of women. Women of color, poor women, and disabled women were not only present but central on the podium and in the crowds. Cheri Hankala, of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, spoke right after Hillary Clinton.
About the big-name Democrats: There were a lot of them. Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Poxer, Terry McAuliffe, Carol Mosely-Braun and Howard Dean all marched or spoke. It was somewhat heartening to see them there, insofar as it makes it more difficult for the party, or its candidate (several of whose relatives apparently were there) to Sister-Souljah the Pro-Choice movement over the next several months or once in office. And it demonstrates, God willing, a recognition that this is a constituency which will be vital to rebuilding the Democratic party.
There was, of course, a good deal of dissonance at times between the speakers, and between the narrowness of some of the more famous speakers’ messages and the agenda of the march. Hillary Clinton, proud booster as First Lady and now as Senator of a welfare reform which punishes women for having children, deteriorates their access to healthcare and childcare, and make it that much more difficult to find education and living wage work, appeared all too happy to divorce freedom of choice from liberation from poverty. Yesterday, not for the first time, Clinton seemed to get a free pass from much of the left on account of the venom directed at her from the right. I would have liked to see someone like Cheri Hankela call Clinton on the impact of her policies on women’s freedom to direct their lives. But, much like John Lewis’ planned critique of John Kennedy at the March on Washington, it didn’t happen.
There were lots of families there. There were large delegations from very “red” cities and states which in the conventional wisdom would have sent no one to a pro-choice march. I spoke to women on their first march and to others who had been to the capitol for the same cause a dozen years before. There were Doctors and medical students, some in appropriate dress, declaring their preparation to perform an operation for which others have been murdered. We Jews were very, very well-represented, particularly the Reform movement, which endorsed the March.
What most surprised me about the counter-protesters was their scarcity. They stood in a designated space along the sidewalk, maybe one every several feet, for a few blocks. Mostly they held signs holding pictures of aborted fetuses and comparing abortion to slavery and/or the Holocaust. I observed no physical confrontations between us and them.
I came away from yesterday’s march with something that many of us worked for but never saw completely coalesce in the same way within the anti-war movement (whose circumstances, of course, made such much more difficult) last year: a sense of hope and alternative positive vision. The March’s organizers, speakers, and participants effectively conveyed not only the tremendous threat posed by the Bush administration but also an incipient sense of the process of forging progressive alternatives. It was a small piece of a conversation about what it would mean to build a society which fully respected and fostered the autonomy of women and children and men over their bodies and their lives, and in so doing made possible the full flourishing of the human spirit.
From the Times:
Hundreds of thousands of abortion rights supporters rallied Sunday in the nation’s capital, protesting the policies of the Bush administration and its conservative allies and vowing to fight back in the November election. The huge crowd marched slowly past the White House, chanting and waving signs like “My Body Is Not Public Property!” and “It’s Your Choice, Not Theirs!,” then filled the Mall, turning it into a sea of women, men and children for the first large-scale abortion rights demonstration here in 12 years. Organizers asserted that the marchers numbered more than a million, in what they said was a clear demonstration of political clout.
Just got back – for now I’ll just say it was a tremendously powerful event. More tomorrow…
Over at the March for Women’s Lives site, marchers set forth why they’ll be in DC today. And check out New Voices:
Going Beyond Choice: For the first time, the concerns of women of color and low-income women will be fully integrated into a major reproductive rights demonstration. Reproductive justice recognizes that any discussion of reproductive rights must include the right of women to have children—a human right that is incessantly threatened by hostile welfare reform policies, immigration policies, poverty, violence and racism—as well as economic issues that affect access to a wide range of reproductive health services.
Hope I’ll see you there.
Wal-Mart Watch: Took part in a great rally in Hartford yesterday protesting Wal-Mart’s attempts to dodge the city’s living wage ordinance. Wal-Mart, repeat after me: “I am not a sovereign country. I am not a sovereign country…”
In the latest round of the struggle for political license over Catholicism, Democrats, including my Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, have prepared a “Catholic Voting Scorecard” designed to demonstrate that when one integrates candidates’ stances on issues, from DOMA to child tax credit refunds, on which the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has taken stances, Democrats are better Catholics. Personally, I’d rather see John Kerry et al articulating the kind of Catholics they are and the policies that dictates (“My personal faith and political conviction demand that we mean what we say when we promise that no child is left behind”) than touting their fidelity to the policy proscriptions of the Conference of Bishops (“I’m 74% faithful!”). But this scorecard seems worth it, if nothing else, only for having elicited this tragically ironic condemnation:
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said both the bishops and the Democrats are confusing means with motives. “Many of the issues they’re talking about really have nothing to do with actual Catholic teaching or religion,” he said. “It is interpretation of economic policy.”
As I’ve alluded to before, the modern permutation of religion in political discourse into apologetics for social conservatism and the hollowing out of the economic justice which is central to all faiths is a deeply cynical and tragic abuse of the tradition. Where Jesus preached that the meek shall inherit the earth, Congressman King insists that whether the poor will have a share of the wealth of this nation is a matter of interpretation. This reminds me of nothing so much as last summer’s declaration by the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations that “the budget is not a Jewish issue.”
Yale History Professor Emeritus David Montgomery writes to Historian and Columbia Provost Alan Brinkley:
It is high time for the administration at Columbia to obey the law of the land and sit down to negotiate with the union formed by its teaching assistants and research assistants. Two years ago a clear majority of graduate students made their choice for a union in an NLRB election.
They followed the procedure created by the New Deal in its finest hour to determine a bargaining agent chosen by employees with which the employer is legally obliged to negotiate terms of employment. Columbia’s administration has taken refuge behind the myth that those who teach sections and carry out research for the university are not employees and counted on a federal government determined to do all it can to create a “union free America” to let Columbia, and the Bush administration, evade the intent and the letter of the law. By forcing the graduate employees to strike for recognition, you have done precisely what Senator Wagner sought to avoid: resorted to the law of the jungle. Columbia today can be a better citizen than this.
Jacob observes that it’s sad to see a liberal historian defending such an illiberal stance. I agree, but as one of the few people in 12th grade history who really liked Brinkley’s massive textbook, I still say (as I think Jacob himself may imply) that Brinkley’s choice to keep his job and defend the status quo deserves more outrage than pity.
In a joint operation in the Darfur region of Sudan, government troops working with Arab militias detained 136 African men whom the militias massacred hours later, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch has documented dozens of attacks by Arab militias, known as janjaweed, in almost a month of research inside Darfur. All but two of the attacks were carried out in conjunction with government forces.
“The janjaweed are no longer simply militias supported by the Sudanese government,” said Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. “These militias work in unison with government troops, with total impunity for their massive crimes.”
From the Times:
And when she marches on Sunday, she said, she will also be representing women across South Asia whose access to social services has been limited by an American policy that bars financing to international organizations that perform or provide information on abortions.
“The impact of these laws is intensely personal and far-reaching to me,” said Ms. Krishnamurthy, 27. “What we need to do is find a way to talk about reproductive rights so it hits as deeply and personally to other young women in the United States.”
As abortion rights advocates prepare for Sunday’s event, which they call the March for Women’s Lives, veterans of the movement say they have been striving to address a decline in support among women under age 30. But young first-generation Americans and recent immigrants, many of whom maintain connections to countries where reproductive rights are part of a still-burgeoning struggle over women’s issues, are bringing new energy and broader perspectives to the cause.
It’s time for our Party to show some backbone. It’s time to stand for the repeal of the Patriot Act. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, I spoke against it, I voted against it, and I introduced legislation for its repeal. In campaigning across America, it’s unmistakably clear that there is an almost universal rejection of the Patriot Act.”
Democrats can strengthen the Party’s commitment to basic civil liberties by standing for the repeal of the Patriot Act and by blocking the government’s attempt to continue pursuing a policy of unreasonable search and seizure, of snooping into the private lives of our citizens, and of violating our Constitutional rights and freedoms…It is wrong for the United States government to ask our citizens to defend our country and then to ignore and violate the very rights we are called upon to defend.
Unfortunately, the rest of his party remains to the right of Grover Norquist on this one.
Back in Pennsylvania, far-right challenger Pat Toomey (the bizarro Dennis Kucinich) is gaining on five-term Senator Arlen Specter (the bizarro Joe Lieberman – actually, much the same as Joe Lieberman) with four days before Tuesday’s primary:
Political analysts and aides in both campaigns said they expected turnout to be relatively low, a factor that experts said could favor Mr. Toomey. A staunch fiscal and social conservative, Mr. Toomey, 42, is more likely to appeal to the dedicated conservatives who tend to vote in Republican primaries.
With that in mind, Mr. Specter’s campaign is preparing to deploy hundreds of campaign workers this weekend, particularly in Mr. Specter’s base in the Philadelphia suburbs. Those workers will be focusing on carefully identified undecided voters: moderates and former Democrats who may be attracted to his more centrist voting record.
I’d call the November election for my Democratic former Congressman, Joe Hoeffel, either way, which would make it one of a few potential Democratic pick-ups in the Senate. Hoefell, alas, is more of an Arlen Specter than, say, a Barack Obama. But it would be progress.
Josh Eidelson 