This week at CCLaP, I investigate Gynecocracy, by Viscount Ladywood for the NSFW Files. In the novel, a wayward aristocratic man gets a stern lesson in forced feminization and the proper wearing of a corset. Who knew the Victorian era was so naughty?
Posted in book reviews, books, CCLAP Fridays, NSFW Files, The NSFW Files, TV
Tagged book reviews, books, culture, fantasy, fiction, NSFW Files, pop culture, series, sex, Victorian
Today in CCLaP’s essay series on subversive erotic classics, “The NSFW Files,” I look at Petronius’s first-century AD ribald romp through the Roman Empire, “The Satyricon.”
Posted in book reviews, books, CCLaP, CCLAP Fridays, The NSFW Files
Tagged book reviews, books, catholic, catholicism, culture, economics, erotica, fiction, LGBT, NSFW Files, philosophy, poetry, politics, pop culture, religion, Rome, sex
A limited-run series where I review three books about the Supreme Court of the United States, exploring its historical and ideological conflicts, and the transformations it wrought upon law and society.
i•de•ol•o•gyˌaɪ diˈɒl ə dʒi, ˌɪd i-(n.)(pl.)-gies.
Origin of ideology: 1790–1800; cf. F idéologie
Random House Webster’s College Dictionary
The Federalist Society: the Resurgence of the Judicial Conservatism
In the long and storied history of the United States, conservatism suffered two major blows in modern times. The first was the Great Depression and President Herbert Hoover’s intransigence. The Republican president believing that the market would right itself without heavy-handed government meddling. Hoover’s miscalculation created the groundswell for the Democratic Party’s decades long domination of the executive and legislative branches. The second major blow was the constellation of scandals known as Watergate. Whereas Hoover’s failure to act discredited the economic foundation of conservatism (laissez faire capitalism), Watergate exposed a corruption and moral sickness at the epicenter of the executive branch. The constitutional crisis and Nixon’s authoritarian paranoia made the party of Law and Order seem comically hypocritical. (Understandably, there are multiple causes and multiple interpretations one can find in explaining both the Great Depression and Watergate. But the point of this essay is to underscore how the ordinary American citizen comprehended these crises.) Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine highlights the conservative comeback and how a grassroots movement worked towards creating a comprehensive plan to take back the judiciary. In addition, the conservative comeback can be further understood by the in-depth investigation of the Burger Court and its ideological turf battles as chronicled in The Brethren.
The groundwork for the conservative comeback occurred with the Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian think tank devoted to judicial issues. Toobin illustrates the agendas of the Right and Left in very practical terms. In 1982 the Federalist Society galvanized young conservatives into action, while the Left became preoccupied with Comparative Legal Studies. The difference is striking. Reeling from the double-punch of a discredited economic system and the morally questionable actions of President Nixon, conservatives sought one thing: power. As opposed to the armchair discussions and morally self-righteous complacency of Comparative Legal Studies, the Right is to be commended for its program and its call to action. Like it or not, results only occur when power is attained, be in the legislature, the Oval Office, or the judge’s bench. One can have a comprehensive ideological outlook and sensible solutions to social problems, but if one isn’t connected to those with power, then it is rather pointless. One can have demonstrations and petitions and eloquent public speeches, but if one can’t change the laws one is protesting, what are you doing out there?
The clarion call of overturning Roe and the Federalist Society’s agenda of limited government created a formidable opposition to the entrenched Democratic establishment. Following the disastrous presidency of Jimmy Carter, the Age of Reagan allowed for a full-on assault of political liberalism in both economic and social spheres. In terms of the public’s imagination, Reagan pushed back against the onslaught of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” turned into “Government is the problem not the solution.”
The Brethren sums up the conservative position in this brief description of Justice Rehnquist:
And they [the liberals on the Court] when Rehnquist began promptly to live up to his advance billing as a solid conservative vote, siding invariably with the prosecution in criminal cases, with businesses in antitrust cases, with employers in labor cases and with the government in speech cases.
Through Nixon, Ford, and Reagan presidencies, the Right had created a political atmosphere conducive to nominating conservatives to the judiciary. Once ensconced on these benches, it provided future opportunities for nominations and promotions. The Federal judiciary became a minefield for any case involving liberal causes.
MARTIN: It’s a revolution in Washington, Joe. We have a new agenda and finally a real leader. They got back the Senate but we have the courts. By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the Federal bench – Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine. And we’ll get our way on just about everything: abortion, defense, Central America, family values, a live investment culture. We have the White House locked till the year 2000. And beyond. A permanent fix on the Oval Office? It’s possible. By ’92 we’ll have the Senate back, and in ten years the South is going to give us the House. It’s really the end of Liberalism. The end of New Deal Socialism. The end of ipso facto secular humanism. The dawning of a genuine American political personality. Modeled on Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Angels in America: Millennium Approaches
Tony Kushner
And the key to landing conservative justices in these positions was the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Dune Buggy Driver: Where’s the damn race?
Duke: Beats me. We’re just good patriotic Americans like yourself.
Dune Buggy Driver: What outfit you guys with?
Duke: The sporting press. We’re friendlies. Hired geeks.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998, Terry Gilliam)
The Senate Judiciary Committee: Fulcrum of Democracy
There are few places in our government where all three branches converge. One of them is the Senate Judiciary Committee. It’s importance cannot be underestimated. The committee plays the role of advise and consent on the President’s nominees for judicial posts, most importantly those of the Supreme Court. It is the greatest manifestation of checks and balances between branches. The importance can be seen in what is at stake for all involved. For the President, successfully nominating a candidate for Supreme Court will allow the President to have influence when his or her term or terms is up. (One can see this is the liberal legacy of FDR’s appointees.) For the Senate, it is a chance to wield its power. They are a guaranteed stopgap against executive overreach. The Senate fought back when FDR pursued his ill-fated Court Packing scheme. Added to this political calculus is the nature of the Supreme Court position itself. First, these are lifetime appointments. (Unlike, say, the Federal Reserve Chairman who needs to be appointed and re-elected to the position.) The lifetime appointment is coupled with the microscopic nature of the Supreme Court. Unlike the 535 Representatives in Congress and the 100 in the Senate, there are only nine Supreme Court justices. Congressional appearance fluctuates with the attitude of the electorate. The Supreme Court is (allegedly) immune from the winds of public opinion and popular electioneering. The Nine chronicles the longest period without a change in the Supreme Court’s make-up (1994 – 2005).
In recent years, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings for Supreme Court nominees have been televised, turning the TV-watching populace into amateur Court watchers. Newspapers, magazines, and more recently the Internet become abuzz with speculation, hysteria, and analysis. Nominees are confirmed, others denied. Over the past decades, the hearings have taken on a different pallor. Instead of denying nominees for being too conservative, nominees have been denied for not being conservative enough. Hence, the Senate Judiciary Committee becomes a kind of ideological litmus test. The slow transition from a liberal-leaning Supreme Court to a more conservative-leaning Supreme Court has taken decades. This has also changed the mindset of the electorate, the Congress, and politicians. The events of 9/11 cemented a rightward tilt in the populace, at least until the economic meltdown of 2009, again putting the free market fundamentalists on notice.
Toobin, to his credit, illustrates the importance of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the rightward tilt of the judiciary throughout the Seventies and Eighties. But he seems to put to much emphasis on ideology alone. Because the Supreme Court is such a small government body, demographics also plays a key role. The Supreme Court will always be a body given to firsts. Amidst the recently confirmed nominees, the Supreme Court has seen its first female Hispanic justice. And now the Supreme Court has a majority of Catholic justices. Now there are six, instead of three. This has given the secular-minded pause. Alas, anti-Catholic hysteria has followed these nominations, especially in more extremist circles.
The Court’s nominal Catholicism should not be caricatured. While it is too early to tell what the judicial philosophy of the newer Catholic appointees will be like, one shouldn’t characterize the Catholic justices as a religious monolith. There are left-leaning Catholics (Sotomayor) and right-leaning (Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Kennedy). So let’s play the demographics game: Scalia, Thomas, and Alito form a solid conservative bloc. Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg are women. Kagan, Ginsburg, and Breyer are Jewish. And Kennedy, Breyer, and Souter are reliable swing votes. The best way to comprehend the votes of the Court is to consider not just ideology, but the race, sex, and religion of the nine justices.
Affirmative action was designed to keep women and minorities in competition with each other to distract us while white dudes inject AIDS into our chicken nuggets.
Tracy Jordan, 30 Rock (Pilot episode)
The Trouble with Clarence Thomas: the Contradictions of Modern Conservatism
Like it or not, Justice Clarence Thomas may be the most fascinating personality on the Court. Catholic, African-American, Southern, ultraconservative, and a bit of a porn aficionado. His complex profile is on par with the late Reverend Peter J. Gomes, a gay black Republican Baptist who was Harvard’s Dean of Divinity. Gomes and Thomas represent challenging personalities, one not easy to wrap the mind around. Thomas is erudite, passionate, an ideological firebrand, an extremist, and, most recently, totally silent on the bench.
Nominated by President George H. W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate to replace the vacant seat of Justice Thurgood Marshall, Thomas appeared as the polar opposite of Marshall. Ironically, it is these ultraconservative values that make him such a contradictory figure. Thomas adamantly opposes affirmative action, yet his entire career has been based on its tenets. A devout Roman Catholic and crusader for family values, his nomination was one of the most controversial in decades. Amidst allegations of sexual harassment and of renting porn videos, his nomination was confirmed. Added to this rather curious interpretation and practice of Catholicism, he is a die-hard advocate of free market capitalism. In addition, in speaking engagements, Thomas has repeatedly mentioned his disgust at “the elites,” the wonderful catch-all term beloved to Right and Left. It is ironic, since Thomas, a Supreme Court Justice, is a member of one of the most elite institutions in the United States government. It seems his high position and ideological extremism has made him immune to such obvious ironies. Toobin pointed out how Thomas would have his clerks watch The Fountainhead, the film based on the “philosophy” of atheist Ayn Rand.
While Thomas and Scalia are darlings to the Right, their ideological extremism makes them only so useful in the decision-making process of the Court. In the operations of the Court, strong decisions happen when there is a consensus (Brown v Board, Nixon v U.S.). Divided opinions are more contentious (Roe v Wade, Bush v Gore). In the end, an agenda must be taken: remain faithful to one’s ideological base or get things done. Chief Justice Roberts has now received the ire of the Tea Party because of his consensus-building activities on the bench. But in the end, the Supreme Court, like all political entities, derives its prestige not from passing arbitrary ideological purity tests, but from getting results. The words of the fictionalized Roy Cohn seem apt, “You want to be Nice, or you want to be Effective? Make the law, or subject to it. Choose.”
Ideology provides a comprehensive philosophical framework for political action and social change, but without those in power getting their hands dirty it remains useless, a bauble, a hobby, a passing fancy.
Up next, Supreme Court Longrunners
Posted in book reviews, books, film, Mondays with the Supremes
Tagged book reviews, books, capitalism, catholic, catholicism, Clarence Thomas, communism, culture, economics, film, hollywood, non-fiction, philosophy, politics, porn, Rehnquist, religion, SCOTUS, Senate, Senate Judiciary Committee, series, sex, TV
Because I read a many books here at the Driftless Area Review, I can’t hope to give them all a thorough long-form review. Reviews in Brief are short-form reviews that offer a concentrated dose of information.
One doesn’t have to walk very far to see the impact of the shapeshifter on popular culture. As the last installment of the Twilight movie series lumbers through cinemas nationwide, it is important to take a step back from the marketing onslaught and Robert Pattison-induced hysterics. Werewolves and Other Shapeshifters in Popular Culture, by Kimberley McMahon-Coleman and Roslyn Weaver, approach the material through thematic analyses. The pair of Australian academics investigate how things like marriage, sexuality, disability, addiction, gender, and spirituality come to play within the novels and films.
The material covered is vast, including the Being Human TV series (UK and US versions), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series and comics), True Blood (books and TV series), Twilight (films and books), and the Vampire Diaries (TV series and books), among others. Included in the analyses are more obscure Australian novels like Jatta by Jenny Hale. For those oversaturated on the Twilight phenomenon, the “Works Cited” list offers some fascinating recommendations.
Werewolves proves its usefulness in its good timing. Coleman and Weaver investigate the numerous pop cultural pieces here, analyzing how specific treatments reflect attitudes of society at large. For those curious as to why Twilight is so huge with teens these days will find the thematic analyses illuminating. Make no mistake, not every TV series, film, or book covered here would fit into the Great Literature category, but it is a wonderful addition to the growing field of reader reception theory. (Similar reader reception studies have been done with romance novel readership.) The book is a handy resource for those interested in understanding pop cultural trends, but who have neither the time nor inclination to read through the primary source material.
The thematic analysis is an advantage but also a liability in Werewolves. The various rubrics (addiction, gender, etc.) put the primary source material through various lenses, all thought provoking. Conversely, the numerous lenses make the analyses thin and superficial. As a theoretical starting point in exploring shapeshifters in popular culture, the approach delivers. Unfortunately, the weakness shows itself most in the section on spirituality, itself a soft, mushy term acting as a catchall for ritual, religion, and cultic social behaviors. This is seen when McMahon-Coleman and Weaver apply Christian symbolism to the Twilight series. While spiritual and ethical issues like sacrifice, eternity, and morality get explored sufficiently, the analysis of spirituality in Twilight would have benefited immensely from a specific reading attuned to the uniqueness of the Mormon faith. The Mormon concept of blood atonement in a vampire novel series would have proved fascinating, along with the Mormon’s specific understanding of links between Native American and Jewish groups. In Mormon theology, Native Americans are descended from the ancient Jewish population. What does this mean in light of Twilight’s Native American shapeshifter characters, especially since those shapeshifters pass on their powers via hereditary transmission?
Werewolves is a great starting point for those interested in the significance of the shapeshifter in popular culture and how it reflects modern mores.
Posted in book reviews, books, film, Reviews in Brief, TV
Tagged book reviews, books, buffy, capitalism, culture, economics, fantasy, fiction, film, gay, hollywood, mormon, movie reviews, non-fiction, philosophy, politics, pop culture, religion, science fiction, series, sex, team edward, TV, twilight, UK, UK fiction, vampire, werewolf, whedonverse
A series dedicated to literature in translation whether classic or contemporary.
Originally published in 1990 as Cocuyo
Translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried
Archipelago Books (Available March 2013)
Lauded by French semiotician Roland Barthes as a creator of a “paradisiac text,” a “teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure,” Severo Sarduy recreates a pre-Castro Cuba in his late novel Firefly. Unfortunately, Barthes premature death in 1980 prevented him from reading Sarduy’s slim novel. (He did however praise Sarduy’s earlier novel Cobra in the seminal work, The Pleasure of the Text.) Linguistic pleasures abound in Firefly, about the misadventures of a child named Firefly whose giant head and poor sense of direction get him in all sorts of trouble.
Sarduy creates a kind of decadent picaresque, painting a Cuba immersed in occultism, decay, and danger. We meet Firefly’s aunts “all in shining silk” and wearing “crocodile-leather high heels with red platforms and over their shoulders see-through handbags like round canteens for a thirsty outing.” After faking his death from rat poison, Firefly ends up in a hospital where he gets examined by two doctors, Gator and Isidro. Gator, “lean and olive-skinned”, wears a pinstriped suit, rimless glasses, and “a silk tie decorated with four-leaf clovers.” But his footwear is most disturbing, since “His shoes are made of his own skin.” His rotund counterpart, Isidro, teaches anatomy, and “owns a mouse-infested grotto” that functions as a makeshift medical school, where students gather to learn “his Frenchified skills in the pestilent art of dissection.”
Once freed of the machinations of the two doctors, he goes to live with Munificence, sleeping on a couch below an office used by notaries and situated next to a charity school. Sarduy creates an atmosphere of decay and corruption as Firefly becomes employed as a gofer for the notaries and falls in love with Ada, a beautiful redhead student at the charity school. Unlike the decadent works of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Sarduy leavens the atmosphere with color and energy. As Firefly matures, he desires escape from the claustrophobic atmosphere.
The setting is asynchronous, existing in a hallucinatory past, with slave markets, mysterious cults, and Soviet advisors. A dream logic persists throughout, with patterns repeating themselves, or reconstituting into different identities. The novel is filled with mismatched pairs, usually one thin and one fat, whether it is Gator and Isidro, along with the two ladies who seduce him.
Along with Reinaldo Arenas (1943 – 1990), Sarduy belongs to the Gay Cuban literary heritage. Both were expatriates, although Sarduy left in 1960, shortly after Castro dictatorship overthrew the Batista dictatorship. Firefly is a meditation on exile, a sensual love letter to a Cuba of a childhood imagination, its exuberance and wit poking holes into the gummy haze of nostalgia. Sarduy misses the Cuba he had to flee, but the hothouse corruption and rot, as evidenced in the notaries, the quack doctors, and the legacy of the nation’s slave trade, remind one that nostalgia can inform as much as delude the writer and reader. Prior to Castro, Cuba was every bit as hellish for the poor and blacks as after. Sarduy meditates on the knot of Catholicism, race, and slavery:
The catechumens always returned to their venerable orishas, hidden on the top shelf of their armoires – the inheritance, along with the cinnamon skin and thick lips, of some maroon ancestor if not of a great-grandfather who, being from Africa itself, was respected in the neighborhood as a man black by birth. [Emphasis in original.]
Written in 1990, Firefly can be seen as a parody of the novels of the Latin American Boom and a harbinger of things to come (Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marías). The novel’s tone and structure have it swinging between a kind of magical realism (the opening chapter involving the hurricane) and long-form dream sequences (the chapter with Firefly in The Pavilion of the Pure Orchid, a Lynchian nightmare in cloying tropical heat). Sarduy’s verbal richness sets it against the now-standard Magical Realist novels (One Hundred Years of Solitude, etc.) and Bolaño’s tricksy epics like The Savage Detectives and 2666, works exploring the post-NAFTA socioeconomic situation through a combination of flat journalistic prose and gut-wrenching horror and violence. Sarduy’s pre-Castro Cuba is far from idealized, but he deftly avoids devolving into simplistic agitprop.
An overly nostalgic interpretation of the past can be crippling in its construction of false idols, assuming one doesn’t take Faulkner at his word when he said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”* The carnival of grotesques, the decadent corruption, and the dreamlike atmosphere dissolve into a mélange of beauty, cruelty, and comedy. Sarduy is unencumbered by chronological exactitude and the evangelizing obsession to assert that the past was better.
Firefly and Severo Sarduy are worth the time, especially given Mark Fried’s luminous and playful translation. Sarduy is a master stylist, his writing radiating the refined sensuality of Jean Genet, the formalist experimentalism of James Joyce, and the verbal richness of Joris-Karl Huysmans. A gorgeous and decadent seam of literature is revealed in the pages of Firefly, offering yet another aspect of Latin American literature.
*Requiem for a Nun (1950)
Posted in book reviews, books, Translation Tuesdays
Tagged barthes, Batista, bolano, book reviews, books, Boom, Castro, catholic, catholicism, chaos, communism, cuba, culture, David Lynch, dictatorship, economics, fantasy, fiction, gay, Latin America, magical realism, Marias, politics, pop culture, race, religion, sex, slavery
Today in CCLaP’s “On Being Human,” I look at humanity as explained through various famous pieces of pop culture: It’s Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s infamous “Venus in Furs,” the 1870 book that inspired the sexual term ‘masochism.’
Posted in book reviews, books, CCLAP Fridays, On Being Human
Tagged Austria, bdsm, book reviews, books, culture, fantasy, fiction, krafft-ebing, masoch, philosophy, photography, politics, pop culture, ritual, sade, sex
My essay on a Jack Gilbert poem is over on thethepoetryblog. Click the link to go to the essay.
Posted in Critic's Notebook, film, Poetry
Tagged culture, economics, fantasy, fiction, film, hollywood, jack gilbert, philosophy, poetry, reviews, sex
A limited-run series where I review three books about the Supreme Court of the United States, exploring its historical and ideological conflicts, and the transformations it wrought upon law and society.
So … who wants to talk about abortion? Abortion, like health care and gay marriage is a political third rail topic. Nevertheless, it is an important topic to discuss, preferably with cool heads and open minds. The latest verbal atrocities from the Right (all this talk about “legitimate rape” and incest) and the inevitable hysterical reaction from the Left, make this a challenging topic to elucidate and explain. The George Carlin and Bill Hicks video clips make things a little easier, since both stand-up comics are expert rhetoricians who cut through the bullshit to confront the contradictions, hypocrisy, and sanctimonious doublespeak that seems to attach itself to any conversation about abortion and the right to choose.
In this installment of Mondays with the Supremes, I will examine three cases covered The Brethren and The Nine. The next installment will investigate the ideological sea change that occurred on the Supreme Court. The sea change arose from a movement conservatism galvanized on college campuses, law schools, and talk radio programs. One central issue that caused this passionate galvanization was Roe v. Wade and the desire to overturn it. Since this ideological agenda is so radical and the consequences so wide-ranging (Cf. Brown and the Civil Rights struggle against Southern intransigence), the Right has hidden their agenda from view, preferring to use the Supreme Court case Dred Scott as cover in their rhetoric. Equating Roe with Dred Scott has a kind of Satanic genius to it, since the Dred case remains one of most notorious and repellent opinions handed down from the Taney Court. (And the pun of Dred and dread is a nice touch.)
We’ll look at Roe v. Wade and its judicial shortcomings, including how legislators have sought to restrict the right to choose. If it can’t be overturned, it can be restricted. (See the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and Jim Crow and the theory of “Separate, but equal.”)
In the words of Bill Hicks, “Because he’s a Hitler and here’s a fetus, go get him!” And in the words of a Mr. Show sketch, “Because life is sacred and God and the Bible.”
By the way, I’m pro-choice.
My own ideological bias will inform the piece, but the challenge will be to not this bias overshadowing the work. A tricky task in the practice of history and made trickier with a topic this inherent volatile. (Hence, the use of jokes and humor in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”.)
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113(1973)
Holding:
Texas law making it a crime to assist a woman to get an abortion violated her due process rights. U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas affirmed in part, reversed in part.
Majority: Blackmun, joined by Burger, Douglas, Brennan, Stewart, Marshall, Powell
Concurrence: Burger
Concurrence: Douglas
Concurrence: Stewart
Dissent: White, joined by Rehnquist
Dissent: Rehnquist
The Brethren is chock-full of set-piece Court cases, this time Woodward and Armstrong’s book covers the origins, interpretations, and outcomes of Roe v. Wade. Roe remains one of the most divisive and controversial Court cases. It is comparable to Brown v. Board of Education in its social impact and what critics claim as “legislating from the bench.”
Throughout the case coverage, we find Justice Harry Blackmun struggling to resolve this difficult task assigned to him by Chief Justice Burger. Justice Blackmun’s previous work had been as a General Counsel for the Mayo Clinic and, like Burger, was a Minnesota native. As Burger and Blackmun develop their respective law practices, we see how they eventually diverge from each other. Burger continues to practice law as a by-the-books law-and-order conservative Republican. In investigating the Roe case, Blackmun eventually pairs up with Justice William Brennan, the Court’s lone Catholic.
Blackmun plunges into the legal challenge by heading back to Rochester, Minnesota and reading up on medical literature at the Mayo Clinic’s library. The product of these researches is the creation of an “abortion test,” resting on the concept of fetal viability. Abortions become less and less permissible in each successive trimester. Following the publication of the opinion, Blackmun and Brennan met with a vituperative reaction. Catholics likened Brennan to Hitler and Blackmun received mailbags full of hate mail.
Let’s dig deeper than the opinion and the superficial reactions. While the case centered on “a woman’s right to choose,” the female patient was not the issue. The issue stemmed from a more libertarian idea, “When does the government have the right to interfere with a doctor’s medical practice?” The answer: It doesn’t in the case of a doctor offering medical term regarding a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy.
What does the government know about medical care? Is this the government’s job to decide? The Supreme Court opinion tried to square that circle with its “test.” In judicial terms, Roe’s importance is undisputed. In medical terms, it is sorely out of date. Prenatal care has improved and the concept of “fetal viability” has become less the subject of arbitrary boundaries set by a former hospital lawyer.
The just plain idiotic rhetoric and legislation spewing from Republicans these days does not help matters. The latest law purporting that “life begins two weeks before conception,” hence abortions should be illegal. This seems less like “life is sacred,” than having a political script written by meth-addled Dadaists. That makes menstruating women murderers and, well, just replay the George Carlin clip. Life conceived before conception sounds like a moral Moebius strip. How does one argue with a Black Hole of Dumb?
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992)
Holding:
A Pennsylvania law that required spousal notification prior to obtaining an abortion was invalid under the Fourteenth Amendment because it created an undue burden on married women seeking an abortion. Requirements for parental consent, informed consent, and 24-hour waiting period were constitutionally valid regulations. Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in part and reversed in part.
Plurality: O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter (jointly)
Concur/dissent: Stevens
Concur/dissent: Blackmun
Concur/dissent: Rehnquist, joined by White, Scalia, Thomas
Concur/dissent: Scalia, joined by Rehnquist, White, Thomas
“Spousal notification”? How 19th century of Pennsylvania to write a law so retrograde and insulting to women. I’ll throw another two words out there, “bodily sovereignty.” While the case’s strange opinion – a three-person plurality, flip-flopping concurrences and dissents, alliances forming and collapsing faster than a Big Brother episode – let’s focus on what the Pennsylvania law wanted to accomplish. Namely, that a woman was mandated by law to notify her husband when she sought to terminate a pregnancy. Seriously, Pennsylvania, what the hell? Why not abolish the women’s right to vote while you’re at it, since they should confer with their husband before making an important decision like that.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a diehard conservative, didn’t even cotton to that kind of horseshit. Unlike the Brethren, where the Supreme Court was all male, albeit racially and religiously diverse, the Supreme Court of Casey is another beast entirely. O’Connor’s presence would become a harbinger for more women to appear on the Supreme Court, including women of diverse ethnic backgrounds.
But let’s back up a bit. The pompous gasbags of the Pennsylvania legislature, when not cheating on their wives and taking bribes, er, campaign contributions from ethically questionable sources, had the gall to scribble this ridiculous law. Why is it ridiculous? You really want it spelled out for you?
While Roe involved the concept of government meddling in medical affairs, Casey reeks of paternalist condescension. It is also an egregious violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law. Simply put, it states that women are not equal to men when it comes to medical decision-making. (I bet dollars to donuts that there is no complementary law in Pennsylvania mandating a man has to gain spousal permission before he gets a vasectomy or a Viagra prescription.) In the eyes of Pennsylvania lawmakers, the concept of abortion makes women special, and not in a good way. This isn’t a doctor advising that a woman should consult her husband before she terminates her pregnancy; this is the government making it a law that she must do this. One wonders what the penalty entails, since a woman making a decision of her own independent volition would mean breaking the law. Thus, the concept of bodily sovereignty.
Casey’s paternalism is part of the common trend of legal prohibitions, including the Volstead Act’s banning of alcohol and Rockefeller anti-drug laws. Both have been resounding failures that have caused more harm than good. A patient should be able to make informed decisions about his or her body in regards to reproductive issues without the meddling of some overfed sanctimonious cretin sitting astride a chair in the state legislature. Having bodily sovereignty involves the ability to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy. (I concede that cases involving pregnancy with an underage individual is a separate issue, especially if rape or incest is involved.) But the lawmakers are saying you can’t choose.
This wouldn’t be as offensive to common sense if the same lawmakers of an ideologically right-wing persuasion were utterly and fanatically committed to banning contraceptive information and supporting “abstinence education,” a sex ed. program that has created thousands of American bastards.
One of the circuit court judges who upheld Casey was Samuel Alito, who now has his condescending paternalistic ass on a chair in the Supreme Court.
(So much for objectivity on my part. It is challenging to be dispassionate and levelheaded when a law this insulting and downright stupid is besmeared across the law books in a democracy.)
The previous outrage stems from the assumption based on a stereotypical vision of the American family, everyone belonging to a vast amoebic middle class and in general law-abiding suburban types. The spousal notification law would be a hassle, but there’s no inherent danger in it. Now imagine a family where domestic and emotional abuse is common currency. The wife is pregnant and she has to inform her husband. (She may even been raped by her husband.) While the Right concocts fairy tales based on Fifties television shows and passes that off as sociological fact, making Leave It To Beaver as a kind of Nuclear Family Template, the historical facts don’t bear any resemblance to the Cleaver-esque White People Utopia. The woman in this abusive relationship may not see every child as a blessing from God.
One of the challenges of the abortion debate is its simultaneous impact as an economic and ethical question. Only the naïve or very wealthy would fail to realize that a child is a serious economic burden on a family. An unplanned birth could pose a financial difficulty for a family already strained. But it isn’t just a simple line on a budget either. To terminate a pregnancy is a major decision. Heck, people get emotional when they have to put down the family dog. While the tone of this essay verges from outrage to snark, don’t let the tone imply I’m undercutting the actual nature of this decision. The problem is that the terms pro-life and pro-choice are too simple. The abortion debate has become the main battleground in the Culture Wars and warlike rhetoric shuts down nuance, independent thought, and intelligent criticism. (The same things get shut down in real wars.)
The rhetoric of the Culture Wars have become heated to such a degree it’s like that Mr. Show sketch about the East Coast-West Coast ventriloquist rivalry. Professor Murder and Kill or Be Killed will take it from here:
Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 914 (2000)
Holding: Laws banning partial-birth abortion are unconstitutional if they do not make an exception for the woman’s health, or if they cannot be reasonably construed to apply only to the partial-birth abortion (intact D&X) procedure and not to other abortion methods.
Majority: Breyer, joined by Stevens, O’Connor, Souter, Ginsburg
Concurrence: Stevens, joined by Ginsburg
Concurrence: O’Connor
Concurrence: Ginsburg, joined by Stevens
Dissent: Rehnquist
Dissent: Scalia
Dissent: Kennedy, joined by Rehnquist
Dissent: Thomas, joined by Rehnquist, Scalia
Every ideological camp has their fetishes and bugaboos. On the Christian Right, it is the partial-birth abortion. To those committed to the concept of pro-life, the procedure smacks of legalized murder. And nothing is more abhorrent to common decency than the murder of an infant. Like everything else in this essay, we need to do some linguistic unpacking. With the raft of “personhood bills” being passed by Tea Party-influenced conservatives, the legislatures are doing what the Supreme Court did in Roe v. Wade. They are playing doctor with disastrous results. Granted, the lawmakers’ intentions are good (cf. Prohibition, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, etc.), but it brings up an unpleasant reality. Namely, that a “person” is defined in different terms depending on the context. These contexts include a legal definition, a philosophical definition, an economic definition, a moral definition, and a biological definition. (I’m sure there are others I’m missing.)
And the recent verbal word-vomit spewing from the Right these days, flies in the face of Stenberg. Unlike the other cases profiled today, Stenberg explicitly brings up a woman’s health. There are some cases where an abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother. (These would be cases that wouldn’t fit into the rubric of pro-life vs. pro-choice. Whose life? Whose choice?) In the end, the phrase “life is sacred” is nothing more than an applause line uttered at mid-level Bible colleges. More accurately, it is fetal supremacism. To the Right, the fetus has more value than the mother does.
One of the many ironies is that the same people so obsessed with saving the lives of fetuses are just as obsessed with defunding neo-natal care, Head Start, public education, public health initiatives, and countless other facets of social welfare. This moral hypocrisy occurs not because they want to see non-aborted fetuses grow up to be malnourished stupid potential criminals, it’s because of the specific nature of this obsession. They are not simply obsessed with the fetus, but with the Idea of the Fetus. The fetus isn’t a growing accumulation of cells and organs dependent on the mother’s nutritional intake, but an idol to be raised up and worshiped like a golden calf or Baal. It is a further development of the trend associated with Family Values and Children Are Our Future. (The Left commits the same act with its nutritional Puritanism, railing against anything genetically modified.)
The rape-talk represents the final stage of conservative fetal idolatry. It is one short leap from regarding the mother as a special member of the family to reducing women to nothing more than fetal carrying cases. “Brood mares for the State,” as Carlin aptly puts it.
This is a further reflection on the concept of law between the conservative Right and the social libertarian Left. The Right wants to see law as diktat. “Thou shalt not have abortions,” bringing the full authoritarian power of the State to enforce this doctrine. The Left sees the law as a means of keeping one’s options open. No one wants to have an abortion, but it is good that the option is available. Not every gay person wants to get married, but it would be wonderful if he or she were legally allowed to, at least in the sense of paying $75 for the marriage certificate. One of the great paradoxes of the United States is the ideological contradictions imbued in both Right and Left. The Right wants a completely deregulated economic sphere with a highly regulated moral sphere. The Left wants a deregulated moral sphere and a regulated economic sphere.
While this essay doesn’t purport to solve the Abortion Question, I hope that the discussion of the cases gives you a more informed opinion when discussing the matter.
Up next: the Ideological Litmus Test
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Tagged book reviews, books, capitalism, catholic, catholicism, culture, economics, fantasy, fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, politics, pop culture, religion, series, sex, the internet, TV
This week’s installment of my essay series, On Being Human, examines the feminist science fiction novel Swastika Night, an alternate history predating Orwell’s 1984 that explores the darker regions of human behavior in a far future Europe ruled by medieval Nazi knights.
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Tagged alternate history, book reviews, books, culture, fantasy, feminism, feminist sci fi, fiction, GLBT, medieval, nazis, philosophy, politics, religion, science fiction, sex, UK, UK fiction
The new Akashic anthology Venice Noir, edited by Maxim Jakubowski has something for everyone, a delicious sampling of tastes, styles, and stories.
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Tagged akashic, anthology, book reviews, books, capitalism, catholicism, CCLaP, culture, economics, europe, fiction, Italy, maxim jakubowski, mystery, noir, series, sex, venice
