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      in US Politics

      ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it

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      ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it For Black women in Congress, maternal mortality hits close to home. The Black Maternal Health Caucus seeks changeWhen Alma Adams’s daughter complained of abdominal pain during a difficult pregnancy, her doctor overlooked her cries for help. The North Carolina congresswoman’s daughter had to undergo a last-minute caesarean section. She and her baby daughter, now 16, survived. “It could have gone another way. I could have been a mother who was grieving her daughter and granddaughter,” Adams told the Guardian, following a week in which the White House highlighted the crisis of pregnancy-related deaths among Black women. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Black women die at three times the rate of white women.For Adams and other Black women in Congress, who formed the Black Maternal Health Caucus, the issue hits close to home. Last week, during Black Maternal Health Week, they talked about how their experiences and the work of advocates had propelled legislation, known as the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021, to fight a healthcare crisis that disproportionately affects Black women regardless of income.The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among industrialized countries. Since 2000, the maternal mortality rate has risen nearly 60%, making it worse now than it was decades earlier. More than half of these deaths are preventable.Health experts point to the fact that other industrialized countries have significantly different approaches to motherhood than the US, including paid maternity leave, access to comprehensive postpartum care and enough maternity care providers, especially midwives, to meet the needs of their populations. Policy advocates add that the crisis among Black women is a symptom of racism in the nation’s healthcare system – from who has access to care to attitudes toward Black people and their bodies.“It doesn’t matter what your socioeconomic status is. It doesn’t matter how much insurance you have, or how much education you have,” Adams said, adding that her daughter, Jeanelle Lindsay, had a master’s degree and health insurance. “Those things don’t matter. This could happen to anyone. Look at women like Beyoncé and Serena Williams, who had these near misses because the doctors really didn’t pay the kind of attention that they should have.”Black women in the House used the week of recognition to bring attention to several bills that are part of a sweeping Momnibus package to address the dangers of birthing while Black. Their efforts to elevate the longtime work of organizations such as the Black Mamas Matter Alliance showed the power of representation in putting issues affecting Black women on the congressional agenda, said Lauren Underwood, an Illinois congresswoman and registered nurse.“It takes women in these spaces to call out problems, set an agenda, and bring together a coalition of legislators, advocates, and community members to work toward comprehensive, evidence-based solutions that will save moms’ lives,” Underwood said in an email.In January 2019, after Underwood received her committee assignments, Adams met with her to see if she wanted to launch a caucus focused on Black maternal health. One of Underwood’s friends, an epidemiologist at the CDC, had died three weeks after she gave birth. “I was still grappling with her death when I came to Congress,” Underwood said.Three months later, they launched the caucus with 53 founding members, including Ayanna Pressley, Lucy McBath and Barbara Lee. Today, it has 115 members from both parties.After consulting with maternal health advocacy groups, Underwood and Adams introduced the Momnibus Act in March 2020, nine bills aimed at combating maternal health disparities through investment in community-based programs and other efforts to rectify social determinants of health – the conditions in which people live, work and grow up – that affect who lives and who dies in childbirth.Their legislative pursuit was timely, coming before a pandemic that would bring racial health disparities to the public’s attention. Between 2019 and 2020, the mortality rate for Black and Latina women and birthing people rose during the first year of the pandemic.Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black and South Asian female vice-president, amplified the issue last week during a speech at the Century Foundation, a progressive thinktank based in Washington DC. Harris called for “building a future in which being Black and pregnant is a time filled with joy and hope rather than fear”.As a US senator from California, Harris was lead sponsor for the Senate version of the Momnibus Act in 2020, which stalled in committee. Underwood and Adams, along with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, reintroduced the Momnibus bill in February 2021.Most of the proposals in the package are included in the Build Back Better Act, a social spending bill that is stuck in gridlock.“Were it not for Black women in the Congressional Black Caucus, there would not be a Black Maternal Health Caucus,” said the Massachusetts representative Ayanna Pressley. “When we say that we are the voice of Congress, we mean that.”Pressley lost her paternal grandmother, whom she never knew, when she died giving birth to Pressley’s uncle in the 1950s. “Decades later, the Black maternal mortality crisis continues to rob us of our loved ones and to destabilize families,” she said during the Century Foundation event.What explains the disparities in outcomes between Black and white mothers boils down to what Pressley called “policy violence”. It’s not just the discrimination that Black women and birthing people experience, but also the lack of access to quality healthcare and medical coverage.“These are the result of centuries of laws in a systematic, systematically racist health care system that too often discounts our pay, ignores our voices, disregards our lives,” Pressley said. “Birthing while Black should not be a death sentence.”In November 2021, Joe Biden signed into law one of the bills in the Momnibus package that invests $15m in maternity care for veterans. But other legislative efforts remain stalled in Congress. Eight bills that were part of the original Momnibus package are part of the Build Back Better Act, according to a tracker by The Century Foundation. They include awarding grants to community organizations to help pregnant people find affordable housing, documenting transportation barriers for pregnant and postpartum people, expanding food stamp eligibility and permanently expanding Medicaid coverage for mothers in every state for a year after childbirth.And on Friday, Booker and seven other lawmakers introduced Mamas First Act, which would expand Medicaid to cover services from doulas and midwives.“We’ve made historic progress, from the enactment of the first bill in my Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act to the recent cabinet meeting Vice-President Harris led, the first-ever White House cabinet meeting convened to address maternal health disparities as a national priority,” Underwood said.Adams pointed to another piece of the legislation that feels very close to home: the Kira Johnson Act, named after a 39-year-old Black mother who, after complaining of abdominal pain, died in 2016 from a hemorrhage following a routine caesarean section. The bill would direct the health and human services department to send grants to community groups focused on improving the maternal health outcomes for Black, Latino and other marginalized communities and for training to reduce racial bias and discrimination among healthcare providers.The connection between Johnson’s and her daughter’s situations resonated with Adams. The pain they experienced was dismissed – a familiar form of racial bias that the Momnibus package attempts to address.“Either you have a mother, you are a mother, or you know women who are moms,” Adams said. “When we raise the tide for Black women, who are among the most marginalized and the most vulnerable, we ultimately raise the tide for all women.”TopicsUS CongressParents and parentingFamilyKamala HarrisAyanna PressleyHouse of RepresentativesUS SenatefeaturesReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Four Opinion Writers on How the G.O.P. Fringe Took Over American Politics

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      Lawmakers in Ohio this week proposed legislation that would restrict discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, borrowing from Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. It’s the latest in a raft of culture-war legislation in Republican statehouses aimed against abortion, transgender rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and critical race theory.Meanwhile, Democrats are struggling to advance a national agenda amid spiraling inflation and energy prices.The Times columnists Jamelle Bouie and Ezra Klein join the Times Opinion podcast hosts Jane Coaston and Lulu Garcia-Navarro to discuss these and other issues.Their conversation, recorded Thursday morning, is available in the audio file and the transcript below.Four Opinion Writers on How the G.O.P. Fringe Took Over American PoliticsThe following conversation has been edited.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Ezra, I’m going to start with you. The thing that strikes me about these Republican bills is that they’re staking ground on some things that are not necessarily popular with the majority of voters. That would seem to suggest to me that there’s political risk in doing them, but instead these laws have been copied from G.O.P. statehouse to G.O.P. statehouse. Why do you think that’s happening, in your view?Ezra Klein: So I think there are a couple of levels you can think about these bills on. One is to think about what you might imagine as the modal Republican strategy for a year like this. Every Republican could spend the next couple of months just saying, “Huh, gas prices are pretty high, aren’t they?” And that would be it. They would win the midterms. It would be done.And instead, the Republican Party, in part due to the incentives of modern media, in part due to the example offered by Donald Trump and how he shot to prominence and then ultimately to the presidency, has become extraordinarily attention-hungry among its rank-and-file legislators. And so if you can create the next culture-war kernel by passing a really brutal piece of legislation — and these are brutal pieces of legislation that will hurt a lot of very just ordinary kids who need some help — then you can catapult to the center of the national debate.So I don’t think Mitch McConnell wants to be having this conversation. I don’t think Kevin McCarthy wants to be having this conversation. I think they want to talk about how Joe Biden is a failure. But the Republican Party doesn’t have that kind of control over its own structure and its own institutional members now. And so at a time when there’s a lot of tailwinds for them, they are nevertheless pulled along by the more extreme and attention-driven members of their own caucus.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: It’s kind of like applying the attention economy to legislation. Jamelle, what are your thoughts?Jamelle Bouie: I largely agree that this is an attempt to do something like what Trump did: capture attention, generate energy amongst one’s most fervent supporters. Sort of draw the opposition into an argument and hope that you’re able to frame the argument in your direction, and capture the attention of people who may just be marginally paying attention to the whole thing.There’s a good case to make that Republicans can be successful at this precisely because they have this very sophisticated media apparatus: not just Fox News, but a broad constellation of outlets and different modes of delivery that allow them to, if not shape a message from its inception, then shape how its supporters receive any given message or any given piece of information.Having said that, I do think that Republicans are making something of a strategic mistake based on a misunderstanding of how Donald Trump was able to get into a position to win the presidency in the first place. And that is, Trump — as much as he calibrates anything — calibrated the kinds of offense that he caused. And so he both leveraged and utilized nativism, and racism, and these sorts of things, but he also presented himself as pretty liberally minded on L.G.B.T. rights, even though that his likely appointments and nominations were not going to be that. He himself presented himself as, I’m a New York libertine, so of course I have no problem with the L.G.B.T. community.He presented himself obviously as more of a moderate on economic policy, on the social safety net, which also appealed to voters who like Medicare, and like Medicaid, and like Social Security, and don’t want to give those things up to vote for a Republican. And I think that the Republican politicians, Republican officials, they may be generating a lot of fervent enthusiasm amongst their strongest supporters. But it’s unclear to me whether this is going to really make an impact with voters at large.I mean, I live in Virginia, and we just had our gubernatorial election last year. And for as much attention as the C.R.T. stuff got in the Virginia gubernatorial race, later analysis suggests that it wasn’t the C.R.T. stuff that drove Glenn Youngkin’s victory. It was traditional kind of midterm backlash to the party in power. And also, Youngkin ran on lowering the grocery tax and increasing teacher pay. So, bread-and-butter issues are what helped attract a lot of voters to him.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: So you’re saying that maybe these very controversial things that the G.O.P. is enacting are kind of a sideshow to what really matters for voters. Jane, I want you to jump in, because G.O.P. strategy aside, these laws are having real-world consequences, as Ezra said, that will be hard to undo. It wasn’t so long ago that same-sex marriage was legalized in this country, and it seemed that things had turned a corner. Why do you think this is the issue the G.O.P. are trying to mainstream, and where do you think it’s going?Jane Coaston: Well, I mean it’s because we live in hell.But it is interesting how repetitive this strategy is. I went back to some old Times pieces talking about the Southern Baptist Convention’s boycott of Disney, because Disney started offering same-sex health care benefits in 1995. I think that for anyone who is L.G.B.T. and over the age of 30, this all seems very repetitive.Ezra noted that one of the challenges that the G.O.P. is having now is that they’ve got this wave of people who are just screaming, “OK, groomer,” at literally any L.G.B.T. person on the internet. And then you’re having National Review articles, like, “Maybe don’t say that?” And no one’s listening.But I think that part of this is because these issues have to do, one, with a conceit of what L.G.B.T. people are and how L.G.B.T. people become L.G.B.T. I think we’ve seen over the last couple of days, some social conservatives who essentially argue that bills like in Florida, which keep being posited as being about sex ed — they aren’t about sex ed. There’s no mention of sex education or sexual activity in that bill. It mentions sexual orientation and gender identity. But the idea is that if you simply do not ever let people know that there is such thing as gay or trans people, then people will not be gay or trans.Rod Dreher, the conservative writer said that, oh, no, no, when we’re talking about grooming, we’re not talking about pedophiles — which is ridiculous. But he essentially said that, oh, it means that an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity to inspire confusion in them, which just reminds me of Anita Bryant in 1978, essentially arguing that homosexuals must recruit, and that all children are cisgender and heterosexual until something happens.I guess I just keep thinking, like, I saw the movie “Mannequin” once when I was a kid. And that was it! It just did it. I saw Kim Cattrall and that was it, I was off to the races.But I also think that for as much as Trump held a Pride flag and made some bones out of performatively not caring about the “debate” about L.G.B.T. rights and L.G.B.T. people, that’s not to say that people within the conservative caucus stopped caring. They are still mad about Bostock. They’re still mad about Obergefell.For people who are troubled by trans rights, and specifically the rights of trans kids, I think that you’re seeing a lot of people who are like, “Oh, you’re just being homophobic. You’re yelling at teachers who mention that they’re gay. You’re very upset about gay and lesbian kids, gay and lesbian parents.” That’s something that we keep needing to relearn: that there is no part of the L.G.B.T. community that’s OK for some social conservatives. It’s not as if like, “Trans rights went too far, but we’re totally fine with gay couples. We’re totally fine with everything like that.” That might have been how it was parlayed, but that was never true.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: You all seem to agree on this fundamental point that there’s a great deal of danger for the G.O.P. in pushing these culture-war issues.Jane Coaston: I mean, I want to be clear here because I don’t think that the danger is not to the Republican Party. I think that there’s a good chance that at the end of this year they win in the midterms having an entirely different messaging set. What I do think is that the real risk is to L.G.B.T. people and to see L.G.B.T. people as a danger once again. This is the caravan, but even more so because this has been going on for 50 years.Ezra Klein: I want to add something also to that, that Jane’s comments jogged for me, because one of the dangers is the composition and motivating energies of the Republican coalition. And I think a story you could tell about conservatives over the past 10, 15, 20 years is this constant mainstreaming, this constant effort to figure out how to harness the energy of the most toxic parts of their coalition that two years earlier they were pushing to the side. So birtherism is a relatively fringe movement that becomes the core of the party. They nominate the guy who is leading the birther charge a few years after most of the more sober politicians are pushing it to the side. And this, “OK, groomer” stuff, this is the mainstreaming of QAnon. I think it’s important to be very clear about this.I mean, to coin a term here — I’m in California, so there’s a fair amount, or was a fair amount, of Woo-Anon out there, like yoga-doing QAnon followers — but this is “Trad-Anon,” right? This is a point where the traditional Christian conservative coalition is finding a way to meet the QAnon energy and come up with this strange —Jane Coaston: It’s a secular fundamentalist religion. It’s QAnon, but they’ve taken — you don’t hear talk about traditional marriage anymore. You don’t hear talking about sincerely held religious beliefs. This is not the RFRA fight of 2015, 2016. This is QAnon, but an areligious QAnon.Ezra Klein: Well, it’s both, right? Because on the one hand, you have a Rod Dreher version of it, which is very, very Christian, “We’re trying to protect traditional gender roles.” It’s why he’s out there tweeting that Viktor Orban in Hungary is now the leader of the entire West. And on the other side you have this groomer thing, which is an attempt to take QAnon’s view — which is one reason it’s resonating on the far right — that all of politics is an effort by Democrats to protect pedophiles and then find some way to sort of wink, wink that you’re on board with that view of politics while saying it’s actually a little bit about something else.And so this is just one of the dimensions of it that I find really unnerving. Countries live or fall on how well they police the fringes in their political parties. And the Republican Party is so unbelievably bad at doing it. And every two years you think they can’t possibly be worse at not keeping out the worst elements of their party. And they show you, no, no, no, no, they’re going to bring those people into the core, too.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Jamelle, I want to ask you this, though, because we’ve been talking a lot about the G.O.P., but what can be said about the Democrats? Because what is always fascinating to me is that you have Democrats that have policies that enjoy broad support. But they can’t seem to get their agenda passed while they are in power. I mean, one thing is the G.O.P. and what they’re doing. But it seems like the Democrats can’t seem to get traction on things that enjoy broad support.Jamelle Bouie: I think there are a few things here. I mean, in terms of getting policies through Congress, they just don’t have the votes. They’re reliant on their majority in the Senate — in particular on one senator, Joe Manchin, whose entire political brand kind of depends on him publicly being an obstacle to Democratic priorities, and then another senator, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who seems to want to try to cultivate a kind of John McCain maverick energy, which for her also means publicly and visibly standing in the way of Democratic priorities.And so I think this picture would look very different if there was one more or two more senators, right? If Cal Cunningham in North Carolina had won, if Susan Collins’s opponent in Maine had won, we’d be looking at a very different situation than we are now.But I think beyond the problem of winning elections and having a larger majority, which is just ultimately what the issue is here, I do think Democrats have adopted a faulty idea of what is going to drive political success. It’s very clear that the idea Democrats had going into 2021 was if they just delivered economic growth, and they delivered policies, and they kept their heads down and did hard work, then that would produce a public that was inclined to re-elect Democrats.But what seems to be happening, what Republicans seemed to have figured out, is that the actual popularity of the things you’re saying may be a little less important than your ability to seize attention, drive conversations, create a strong impression in the minds of people. And I don’t think Democrats have really been doing that. And I think that the arguments over these bills are actually a good example of it.I think the Democratic Party is having a hard time figuring out exactly how to go about pushing against this stuff because it runs into this theory of the case they have. There doesn’t seem to be an inclination to really just swing — to make what may sound like outlandish accusations, but that push strongly against the messaging and the rhetoric coming from the Republican Party.Ezra Klein: I think that Jamelle gets that right, on both the levels. The reason the Democrats can’t pass bills is they don’t have enough votes to pass them. It’s as simple as that. It’s not a messaging problem, fundamentally. Although, I will say that the point of Joe Biden is that he was going to be good at negotiating with egotistical, hard-to-deal-with members of the U.S. Senate.And I do worry about a sense of resignation that has set in at the White House around Joe Manchin. I would like to see more constant efforts at trying than I’m currently seeing. They seem to be letting their poor relationship with Manchin simply deteriorate when they need to be figuring out how to fix it. And at least from my reporting, what I can tell, I’m not seeing it.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: But Ezra, I want to ask you this about the Democrats. I mean, it is a numbers game. Of course it is. But on the other hand, I don’t see Democratic leaders really standing up and saying, this is the ground that I’m going to die on, this is the hill that has to be crested, in the same way that the Republicans are on these very controversial bills.Ezra Klein: So, one, I don’t think that it’s the national Republicans who are trying to make the controversial bills the center of it. But to this broader point you’re making, and to something Jamelle said, the Democratic leaders have had a theory that they’re going to push popular bills. They’re going to try to pass those bills and they’re going to try to run on them.And that theory basically has failed. They passed the American Rescue Plan. It was a very popular bill. They tried to run using it to generate more momentum for Build Back Better. They did not get Build Back Better passed, and now the child tax credit is expiring. And now they’ve fundamentally lost agenda control.So it’s like, the agenda is now Russia, which is a world event. They can’t do anything about that. And I think broadly speaking, Joe Biden’s been doing a good job, with the exception of occasional ad-libs. And then there’s inflation, which they’re also really struggling with and to some degree bear some responsibility for.What they are not doing is the other side of populism, which I think of as unpopularism. And agenda control in American politics comes from courting, choosing, engaging in controversy. For something to dominate the news, it needs the energy of not just support but opposition. That’s why some of these G.O.P. bills in Florida and elsewhere are dominating the news in the way they are.There are things that Joe Biden could do that would have that internal electricity. They could cancel student loan debt. I don’t know that they think that’s a good idea at the moment. But if they decided to actually try, which is something Chuck Schumer wants them to do, something Elizabeth Warren wants them to do, that would be controversial enough that it would reshape the agenda. American politics would be seized by arguments over whether or not canceling student loan debt is a good idea, and that might be territory more favorable to them. I do not myself understand what fights Democrats want the 2022 election to be over. They seem to me to be in a fundamentally quite reactive place right now —Jamelle Bouie: Yes.Ezra Klein: — responding to world events, responding to every month’s economic news drop. And at some point, if they want to do anything differently than that, they’re not just going to have to choose which popular things they say. They’re going to have to choose which controversial things they say, such that Republicans and others engage on the other side, and the locus of American political conflict moves back onto ground they’ve chosen.Jamelle Bouie: An example of this, pulling from what we’ve been talking about, is if Joe Biden were to, on Friday, give a national speech — from the Oval Office, from the Rose Garden, wherever, a big national set piece speech denouncing the Republican Party as embracing gross homophobia, this would be controversial. People would get upset. But it would seize the agenda. It would reorient things toward talking about these issues on ground that might be more favorable to Democrats. And I see no indication that Democratic leaders are even thinking in those terms.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Jane, I want to think about this idea of unpopularism, that the Democrats, as Ezra says, are not wanting to push something that might not have broad support. But of course, there is someone who loves to do that a lot: Trump. And I am wondering about what you see his role is coming up in the 2022 midterms. Because we have him endorsing a lot of candidates, including Sarah Palin for Congress this week, targeting some major G.O.P. incumbents who have stood up to him, like Lisa Murkowski and Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, all the while still peddling the big lie. How much influence do you see him having these days? And how should we regard Trump as a force in politics, a force in society — and, I guess, are those two the same thing?Jane Coaston: I know that I’m probably the only extreme sports fan on here. But I feel like sometimes when we’re talking about Democratic strategy, it’s like, if only they would run the offense we think they should run, they would win. I actually don’t know what Democrats should do or what would be best. There’s what I would want them to do, and I don’t know if it would work.But as to Trump, I think what you’re going to see is actually a decline in his influence, because he absolutely will not move on past the 2020 election. He can’t do it. He is physically unable to do so. And you’re seeing with his endorsements in the upcoming cycle — actually a number of his endorsements aren’t doing very well.You’re seeing this in Georgia. You’re seeing this in other places, with Herschel Walker or something like that where, yes, Mitch McConnell has said that he’s got his support, but there is some concern, I think, on the ground that that could be another losing race. Because, again, if your litmus test for Trump has nothing to do with anything that is taking place in 2022, but all has to do with whether or not you’re willing to say that Trump actually won the 2020 election …He is a losing one-term president who is existing interminably as a losing one-term president. It is important to note that Democrats want him to be more influential than he actually is because he is a major vote-driver for Democrats, as we’ve seen in Georgia and elsewhere.And so I think that you’re seeing a lot of Republicans who are like, “Can we move on, can we move on,” and Donald Trump will not. Donald Trump will talk about how, oh, Ron DeSantis is fine, but I would absolutely beat him in 2024. He will do interviews. He will put out very bad failing social media networks. And so I think how he should be considered is, he is an angry man who won’t move on and who won’t go away. And no matter what Republicans want him to say or want him to do, he will not be on any party line that is not his own.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Trump’s influence is solidified in one very particular place, and that’s on the conservative Supreme Court. And today, a big win for Democrats — the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. I want to bring her into this because it actually fits into what we’ve been discussing. Because the G.O.P. slammed her in the hearings with a lot of partisan attacks about C.R.T., asking her to define what a woman is and QAnon-adjacent questions about child pornography. And yet, in polling, people said that they hated the attacks, and she has a majority of support. So, Jamelle, what should we take away from that?Jamelle Bouie: We should take away from that that these attacks are not some sort of, pardon the expression, trump card. That when you have someone like Judge Jackson, who looks like a perfectly lovely woman, and is obviously very qualified and obviously very successful, and you have Ted Cruz shouting about how she is friendly to criminals and child pornographers. I think that for ordinary people who aren’t paying super close attention — they’re really just taking in images and impressions — it just looks ridiculous. And it seems unconvincing.To go back to what we’ve been talking about, I think that something similar may happen with these bills. Screaming that your kids’ gay third-grade teacher is a pedophile or a groomer when you know that this person has been absolutely lovely to you, your child and your family — it’s not going to fly, I think, for most people or for people outside of this narrow bubble.One thing I will say about the experience of Judge Jackson and her nomination and how this has all played out, is I think it is a point in favor of the argument that back in 2016 President Barack Obama made a grave mistake in nominating Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court in an attempt to find bipartisan support. Not because Garland was not qualified to be on the court — although I think I have somewhat idiosyncratic views about what it means to be qualified — but because Garland didn’t engender really any kind of popular support in his favor. No one was excited by him. Just another boring guy you put on the Supreme Court.I think what Jackson has in her favor is simply that she’d be the first Black woman on the court. And that excites people. That makes people enthusiastic. And that makes people much more willing to buckle down in her defense than they would otherwise be.And so I think one lesson to take away from this, should Joe Biden get another Supreme Court nomination, either in the next two years or if he serves another term, is that for as much as it’s clear that Democratic Party elites and people at the highest echelons of this stuff very much believe that a Supreme Court nominee must be someone with a lot of judicial experience, etc., etc., they should also be looking for people who would actually excite the public, who would get people interested and excited about what’s going on in the court. Those are the sorts of nominees they should be looking for and putting forth and putting in public. Even if that nominee may fail, the mere fact of generating that enthusiasm is an important thing.I think this actually connects to our broader conversation about Democrats, which is that Democrats need to stop thinking of politics as some sort of mechanistic system in which, like, Good Input A gets you Good Result B. It’s much more fluid, much more chaotic in that oftentimes you just need to swing. You need to aim at people’s passions and see what happens. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it won’t. But I think connecting the people’s passions and their enthusiasms, can be much more successful than trying to be openly and outwardly and ostentatiously respectable.Ezra Klein: Democrats are very taken, I think in general at the moment, with something political scientists like to call the median voter theorem, which is to say that the key thing in politics is getting to that median voter, the voter right in the middle, who’s the most ideologically moderate, and convincing them. And if you get that 50 percent plus one, or maybe you correct for the Senate bias, or it’s 55 percent plus one — whatever it might be — then you win.And there is some truth to that. I think that a lot of folks on the left and critics of Democrats underrate the importance of ideology and policy positioning in politics. There really are moderates. But the flip side of that, to what Jamelle is saying, is that you have to reach the median voter. They have to hear what it is you’re saying. And the thing about the voters you need to reach is they’re often not paying super close attention. The people who are paying super close attention almost, by definition, have already made up their minds, otherwise they would not be paying such close attention because they wouldn’t care that much.And so you need to do things that don’t just control the agenda but actually echo through the country. And that requires you to have not just a theory of what it is voters will find popular, but what it is that they will talk about, what it is the media will talk about. And this maybe goes to a big through line of this whole conversation. Democrats have a lot of theories of policy. They have a lot of theories of politics. They just do not have a theory of attention. And what I would say for the Trumpist Republican Party is it mostly doesn’t have a theory of policy. It has a middling theory of politics, and it is overwhelmed by its own theory of attention. And I don’t think there’s some kind of grand strategic plan happening over there.But I think that one way to think about the asymmetry, or maybe the inversion of the two sides right now, is that Republicans know how to get attention, but they don’t know how to be strategic about it. And Democrats know how to be strategic, but they don’t know how to get attention.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I want to pivot to a piece of news that is less domestic culture wars, and more of a global culture war. The Boston Marathon announced this week that Belarusian and Russian citizens who reside in those countries are not allowed to run in the race as a response to the war. The Boston Athletic Association, which runs the Boston Marathon, announced that they were “horrified and outraged” by the war, and they believe that they must do what they can to “support the people of Ukraine.”I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I’d like to hear yours. I’m going to start with Jane, as I know you’re a sports aficionado. So I want your thoughts on this.Jane Coaston: I personally think that this is not quite like freedom fries territory. But I do think it seems to be targeted at a very small group of people — as you said, it was Belarusian and Russian citizens who do reside in those countries. But Belarusian and Russian citizens who don’t reside in those countries will be allowed to run, but they’re not going to recognize their affiliation or flags.I think it’s worth remembering that the process to enter or qualify for the Boston Marathon started for many people a year ago. You do not just decide to run the Boston Marathon. You are either running for a charity or you have a time in another marathon that qualifies you to run in Boston. And I’m trying to think, what is this going to do? Vladimir Putin is not going to be like, “Oh, no, a Russian citizen was not able to run a 2:03 at the Boston Marathon. I will ne’er sin no more!”I think that there is an element to so much of our politics, especially on foreign policy, where we’ve got the “we got to do something” impulse. But one of the challenges is that there isn’t something that the Boston Marathon organizers, or people who run an opera house, or people who work in the art world — there’s not something they could do exactly that will in their view adequately punish the aggressions of the Russian government. It falls flat. And I think it’s kind of repulsive.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I have to say, Jane, I agree with you. I think this was a real misstep. I don’t know that banning citizens of particular countries because they actually live in the countries of their citizenship, and those leaders are autocratic and there isn’t the freedom to protest or do any of the things that you would think of in a democracy, is actually beneficial to the cause of freeing Ukraine. But I’m interested in, Jamelle, your thoughts, and then Ezra.Jamelle Bouie: I don’t disagree. It makes no real conceptual sense why you would do this. So Russian and Belarusian citizens who live in their countries cannot run in the Boston Marathon. OK. That doesn’t put any pressure on the leaders of those countries. If anything, it may encourage the view amongst the citizenry that the West is against them, that the West isn’t simply against the government or to the government’s actions, but actually actively against the citizens themselves. And it may prompt people to double down in their support for the government. So it just seems counterproductive.Issue a statement. Condemn. Say that government officials can’t participate, they can’t watch, they can’t be there. If you want to go as far as to say, you can’t fly the flag, I actually think that’s probably fair because the flag is a symbol of the government as well. But banning the citizens, like Jane said, it seems like just doing something for the sake of doing something, and it doesn’t really seem very constructive. It doesn’t even seem like it was particularly well thought-out, like anyone was thinking about what you actually are trying to accomplish by doing this.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Ezra?Ezra Klein: I have a hard-and-fast rule that on any sports story I just think whatever Jane thinks. So on the specifics of this, I think whatever Jane thinks, and everything she said sounded correct to me.From a consequentialist perspective, we need to think a bit about whether we are creating pressure on citizens in these countries to pressure their governments, or whether we are hardening their support for their governments. And recognizing that they live in highly censored, highly manipulated media ecosystems, I think we have to be pretty thoughtful about whether we’re just giving grist to their leaders to manipulate them more. And for the people who are only half in and out of that ecosystem — because Russian and Belarusian control over media is not absolute — whether we’re actually doing things that are going to make those wavering feel more nationalistic.There’s a very big difference between strategically trying to win over a population and just trying to punish a country because it at a certain point just feels like we need to keep punishing. And, look, I want to punish Putin and those behind this war in every way that is possible. And I broadly support the sanctions, despite the tremendous pain they’re causing, because I do think that they are creating pressure in the long-run for Putin to end this. But I don’t know that doing things that actually target Russian citizens — without any obvious mechanism for pressuring the regime — makes a lot of sense.And I’m worried about some of the news I hear and some of the polling I see coming out of Russia. You can only believe what you can believe in it, but that there is rising support for Putin, that there is a rising belief that the entire West is arrayed against Russia. And that this might actually, in terms of the domestic political pressures Putin faces, be making him more worried about the hard-liners who think he needs to go further, further, further and show Russian strength in the face of Western opposition rather than what our initial effort was, which was to try to get the more Westernized Russians — these oligarchs with their lofts in London — to pressure Putin to bring an end to this. So I worry that our view of this has, without anybody noting it, kind of flipped. And we may not be creating the incentive system that we had hoped to.Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a Times Opinion podcast host. Ezra Klein is the host of “The Ezra Klein Show” and a Times columnist. Jane Coaston is the host of “The Argument” podcast. Jamelle Bouie is a Times columnist.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Times Opinion audio produced by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Alison Bruzek and Phoebe Lett. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Alex Ellerbeck. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and mixing by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, and editorial support from Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Lauren Kelley and Patrick Healy. More

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      America’s culture wars distract from what’s happening beneath them | Gary Gerstle

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      America’s culture wars distract from what’s happening beneath themGary GerstleWhen it comes to economic questions, there’s more agreement between culture war opponents than you might think The neoliberal order that triumphed in America in the 1990s prized free trade and the free movement of capital, information, and people. It celebrated deregulation as an economic good that resulted when governments could no longer interfere with the operation of markets. It hailed globalization as a win-win position that would enrich the west (the cockpit of neoliberalism) while also bringing an unprecedented level of prosperity to the rest of the world. A remarkable consensus on these creedal principles came to dominate American politics during the heyday of the neoliberal order, binding together Republicans and Democrats and marginalizing dissenting voices to the point where they barely mattered.Somewhat paradoxically, this broad agreement on matters of political economy nurtured two strikingly different moral perspectives, each of them consonant with the commitment to market principles that underlay the neoliberal order. The first perspective was ‘neo-Victorian’, celebrating self-reliance, strong families, and disciplined attitudes toward work, sexuality, and consumption.These values were necessary, this moral perspective argued, to gird individuals against market excess – accumulating debt by buying more than one could afford and indulging appetites for sex, drugs, alcohol, and other whims that free markets could be construed as sanctioning. Since neoliberalism frowned upon government regulation of private behavior, some other institution had to provide it. Neo-Victorianism found that institution in the traditional family – heterosexual, governed by male patriarchs, with women subordinate but in charge of homemaking and childrearing.The Republican party is obsessed with children – in the creepiest of ways | Osita NwanevuRead moreSuch families, guided by faith in God, would inculcate moral virtue in its members and prepare the next generation for the rigors of free market life. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, George Gilder, and Charles Murray were among the intellectuals guiding this movement, the legions of evangelical Christians mobilized in Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority its mass base.The other moral perspective encouraged by the neoliberal order was cosmopolitan. A world apart from neo-Victorianism, it saw in market freedom an opportunity to fashion a self or identity that was free of tradition, inheritance, and prescribed social roles. In the United States this moral perspective drew energy from liberation movements originating in the new left – black power, feminism, multiculturalism, and gay pride among them.Cosmopolitanism was egalitarian and pluralistic. It rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated as the norm. It embraced globalization and the free movement of people, and the transnational links that the neoliberal order had made possible. It valorized the good that would come from diverse peoples meeting each other, sharing their cultures, and developing new and often hybridized ways of living. It celebrated the cultural exchanges and dynamism that increasingly characterized the global cities – London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Toronto, Miami among them – flourishing under the aegis of the neoliberal order.The existence of two such different moral perspectives was both a strength and a weakness for the neoliberal order. The strength lay in the order’s ability to accommodate within a common program of political economy very different constituencies with radically divergent perspectives on moral life. The weakness lay in the fact that the cultural battles between these two constituencies might threaten to erode the hegemony of neoliberal economic principles.The cosmopolitans attacked neo-Victorians for discriminating against gay people, feminists, and immigrants, and for stigmatizing the black poor for their so-called “culture of poverty”. The neo-Victorians attacked the cosmopolitans for tolerating virtually any lifestyle, for excusing what they deemed to be deplorable behavior as an exercise in the toleration of difference, and for showing a higher regard for foreign cultures than for America’s own. The decade of the neoliberal order’s triumph – the 1990s – was also one in which cosmopolitans and neo-Victorians fought each other in a series of battles that became known as the “culture wars”. In fact, a focus on these cultural divisions is the preferred way of writing the political history of these years.Just beneath this cultural polarization, however, lay a fundamental agreement on principles of political economy. This intriguing coexistence of cultural division and economic accord manifested itself in the complex relationship between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. In the media, they were depicted (and depicted themselves) as opposites, sworn to each other’s destruction. Clinton offered himself as the tribune of the new America, one welcoming of racial minorities, feminists, and gays. He was thought to embody the spirit of the 1960s and something of the insurgent, free-spirited character of the new left. Gingrich presented himself as the guardian of an older and “truer” America, one grounded in faith, patriotism, respect for law and order, and family values. Gingrich publicly pledged himself and his party to obstructing Clinton at every turn. Clinton, meanwhile, regarded Gingrich as the unscrupulous leader of a vast right-wing conspiracy to undermine his presidency.Yet, despite their differences and their hatred for each other, these two Washington powerbrokers worked together on neoliberal legislation that would shape America’s political economy for a generation. They both supported the World Trade Organization, which debuted in 1995 to turbocharge a global regime of free trade. Their aides jointly engineered the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which did more than any other piece of legislation in the 1980s and 1990s to free the most dynamic sector of the US economy from government regulation.Major pieces of legislation deregulating the electrical generation industry and Wall Street followed closely in the telecom bill’s wake. Clinton and Gingrich also worked together to pare back the welfare state, sharing a conviction that the tough, disciplining effects of job markets would benefit the poor more than state-subsidized “handouts”. Clinton’s collaboration with Gingrich had facilitated the neoliberal order’s triumph.That order is now on the wane, its once unassailable principles of free trade, free markets, and the free movement of people now disputed on a daily basis. Meanwhile, public attention focuses on yet another chapter in the culture wars, with the American people divided, irredeemably it seems, over vaccination, critical race theory, and whether Donald Trump should be lauded as an American hero or jailed for acts of treason.Yet, beneath the churn, one can detect hints of new common ground on economic matters emerging. Trump and Bernie Sanders have both worked to turn the country away from free trade and toward a protectionist future promising better jobs and higher wages. Senators Josh Hawley and Amy Klobuchar have both been warning the American people about the dangers of concentrated corporate power and the “tyranny of high tech”; and bipartisanship is driving movements in Congress to commit public funds to the nation’s physical infrastructure and to industrial policies deemed vital to economic wellbeing and national security. It is too soon to know whether these incipient collaborative efforts indicate that a new kind of political economy is in fact taking shape and, if it is, whose interests it will serve. But these developments underscore, once again, the importance of looking beyond and beneath the culture wars for clues as to where American politics and society might be heading.
      Gary Gerstle is a Guardian US columnist. Excerpted and adapted from The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022)
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      Texas Youth Gender Clinic Closed Last Year Under Political Pressure

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      A Texas clinic for transgender adolescents closed last year amid pressure from the governor’s office, hospital officials said in phone recordings.On a tense conference call last November with half a dozen doctors and executives at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dr. John Warner relayed a somber message: The only specialty clinic in the state to treat transgender adolescents was facing unrelenting political pressure to close.State lawmakers had already sent formal inquiries about the clinic, Genecis, which was financed by the public university and housed at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas. Activists calling the clinic’s treatments “chemical castration” had shown up at the office of one of the children’s hospital’s board members.And then there was Gov. Greg Abbott.“We received a reach from the governor also requesting information about the clinic,” said Dr. Warner, an executive vice president at the medical center, according to a recording of the call obtained by The New York Times. “And with that came an expectation that something different would occur.”“Time is not on our side,” he added. “The conversation is intensifying — not the reverse.”The next week, hospital executives closed the clinic, taking down its website before staff members or patients were informed of the change.The demise of the clinic, which saw around 500 patients in 2021, shows how treatments for transgender minors have become a highly contentious issue in Republican-controlled states across the nation, with elected officials challenging widely accepted medical practices in an echo of the debate over abortion.That fight has reached a fever pitch in Texas.Days before he won a contentious Republican primary last week, Mr. Abbott and the Texas attorney general directed the state’s child welfare agency to investigate “‘sex change’ procedures and treatments” as child abuse, arguing that even hormone therapy should be considered an “abusive procedure.” The directive drew sharp criticism from medical groups and a swift lawsuit from civil rights groups, which said the directive violated the rights of transgender adolescents and their parents.But months ago, before these moves were making national headlines, executives at U.T. Southwestern were discussing closing down Genecis because of what they described as direct outreach from the governor’s office, according to recordings of several phone discussions among hospital executives obtained by The Times.What the governor’s office purportedly said to pressure the hospital’s leadership is unclear.When asked about these interactions, U.T. Southwestern said in an emailed statement that the governor was not personally involved. But the hospital did not answer questions about whether Mr. Abbott’s office had contacted hospital executives. “Inquiries regarding actions by the Governor’s Office should be directed to the Governor’s Office,” the statement said.Mr. Abbott’s office did not answer questions about the substance of these conversations or whether they took place, but it denied involvement in U.T.’s decision to close Genecis.“The Governor’s Office was not involved in any decision on this issue,” Nan Tolson, a spokeswoman, said in an email. Genecis, the only pediatric gender clinic in Texas, was housed in the Children’s Medical Center in Dallas.AlamySince its founding in 2014, the Genecis clinic had offered patients aged 5 to 21 counseling, pediatric care and, starting at adolescence, puberty-blocking drugs and hormones. (The clinic did not perform surgeries.) With no other options for such comprehensive care, the clinic was sought out by families across the state. It also published scientific research about its patients.“The Genecis clinic has been a leader in producing data about the youth they see — data that everyone on every side of this issue has argued that we need,” said Kristina Olson, a psychologist at Princeton University who studies gender development in children.Early evidence suggests that these hormone treatments, part of what’s known as “gender affirming” care, improve the mental health of trans teenagers. But few studies have looked at the long-term outcomes of adolescents who take these medications, which may also come with risks, like fertility loss.Gender-affirming care has been endorsed by major medical groups in the United States. Although some doctors have debated which adolescents will benefit most from such treatments, many say that the decision to take them should be made by patients, their parents and their health care providers, not the state.Legal experts have also questioned whether shutting down the clinic could constitute discrimination under federal statutes. Pediatric endocrinologists around the country — including those at U.T. Southwestern — routinely prescribe similar drug regimens to children with hormonal disorders who are not transgender.“The U.S. Supreme Court has held in the ‘Bostock’ case that discriminating because of sex does include gender identity,” said William Eskridge, a professor at Yale Law School. “Ultimately they are denying medical care based upon gender identity.”The federal government has taken a similar stance. “Denials of health care based on gender identity are illegal, as is restricting doctors and health care providers from providing care because of a patient’s gender identity,” according to a statement released last week by the Department of Health and Human Services.On the campaign trail in Texas, transgender health care has often come to the forefront. Last summer, after legislation that would have banned such treatments for minors failed in the state legislature, Mr. Abbott’s primary opponent, Don Huffines, attacked the governor for not taking a bolder stance in favor of the bills.Weeks later, Mr. Abbott said on a conservative radio program that although the bills had not passed, he could “game the odds” and had “another way of achieving the same exact thing.”On a call with other hospital leaders around the same time, Dr. Warner said that hospital executives had been responding to “some questions from the governor’s office” as well as from state lawmakers, according to a recording obtained by The Times. The executives discussed how they would try to keep the clinic open in some capacity despite political pressure to close it.“There is the possibility that we as a state agency cannot provide this care,” Dr. Warner told the group on the July call. “So the question we’re going to be asking of ourselves is what should U.T. Southwestern do as a state agency that provides the most benefit to the kids but also protects the institution.”But in another call several months later that was also recorded, any possibility of the clinic staying open seemed gone.“I do not think that in our current circumstances that — without some modification of the clinic — that it would be allowed to continue,” Dr. Warner said on the November call. “People will come after it until it’s gone.”U.T. Southwestern and Children’s Health took down the Genecis website on Nov. 11. A week later, staff members were told that existing patients could still be treated at the hospital, but no new patients could be accepted. The decision was made without consulting the medical center’s ethics boards.Texas’s Push Against Gender-Affirming TreatmentsCard 1 of 6Limiting trans care. More

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      Abortion rights advocates vow to fight on after supreme court hearing

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      Abortion rights advocates vow to fight on after supreme court hearingLeaders say they will look to statehouses and lower courts if justices allow undermining of Roe v Wade In the wake of Wednesday’s supreme court hearing in which a majority of justices appeared willing to significantly curb abortion rights, reproductive rights advocates said they would continue to fight in statehouses and lower courts for the right to choose.The supreme court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, widely regarded as the most important abortion rights case in nearly five decades.The case before the court pits Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s last abortion clinic, also known as the “Pink House”, against the state health director, Dr Thomas Dobbs. A decision is expected in June 2022.Conservative US supreme court justices signal support for restricting abortion in pivotal caseRead moreMississippi intends to ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a move blocked so far by lower courts.While a significant blow to abortion rights is far from a foregone conclusion, questions from the supreme court’s conservative justices on Wednesday appeared to show a willingness to allow restrictions on abortion at 15 weeks and perhaps earlier in a pregnancy.The case also requests the court overturn Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 supreme court decision that established a constitutional right to abortion and is the only safeguard for such rights in dozens of conservative US states.Under present law, pregnant people have a right to terminate a pregnancy up to the point a fetus can survive outside the womb, widely regarded as 24 weeks gestation. A full-term pregnancy is considered 39 weeks gestation.In a consensus shared across the political spectrum, at least five justices appeared divided over whether to significantly curb or overturn Roe v Wade.Six of the nine justices lean to the right, with three of them nominated by Donald Trump during his one-term presidency. “Congress could fix the issue right now,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), the organization that represented abortion providers in the supreme court on Wednesday.Although abortion was legalized in 1973 and has been relied upon by women nationally since then, Congress has never affirmed the right to abortion in legislation. That left the Roe v Wade precedent as the principle protection of the option for termination, while anti-abortion campaigners have brought many legal challenges and also pushed laws undermining access to the procedure.“All these bans and undue burdens in abortion care would be addressed by the Women’s Health Protection Act,” Northup said, referring to a bill recently passed by the US House of Representatives. “That would make sure women can access abortion without unnecessary bans.”Thus far, the bill has been viewed as highly unlikely to pass into law because it would need to overcome the Senate filibuster rule, requiring a 60-vote majority in the evenly divided chamber, where the Republicans would oppose it.Joe Biden said on Wednesday: “I support Roe v Wade. I think it’s a rational position to take.”Julie Rikelman, CRR’s litigation director, who argued before the justices, said campaigners would continue to fight if the supreme court went against reproductive choice. “We will continue to make every argument we can in the federal courts, we will continue to litigate in the state courts … we will not stop fighting, because it is just too important,” Rikelman said.Shannon Brewer, the director of the Pink House, said the coming months would be tough, with her providers “sitting and waiting and twiddling our thumbs” in anticipation of a decision.“It was a difficult day for everybody [but] I listened to the arguments and I think they did a great job at representing women today,” Brewer said.Following what was widely viewed as a hearing favorable to anti-abortion forces, conservatives chimed in.“What we want to see is the court do the right thing and overturn Roe,” said Chip Roy, a Republican US representative from Texas. He decried fears over a threat to choice as a “wailing and gnashing of teeth from the left”.Sam Brownback, the former US ambassador at large for international religious freedom under Trump, said it was time to overturn Roe “and let states address the issue”.Overturning Roe v Wade would effectively return the issue to be decided at state level, where swaths of the south and midwest would be “certain or likely” to ban most abortion. Already, several states have banned abortion at six weeks, though all those laws have been blocked by courts, with the prominent exception of Texas.Some reproductive rights advocates remained optimistic.Schaunta James-Boyd, co-executive director of Trust Women, an organization dedicated to providing abortions in underserved states, said her group “look[s] forward to a positive outcome later in 2022”.The pressure to legislate an affirmative right to abortion in states not openly hostile is likely to increase as a supreme court decision nears. While 26 states are “certain or likely” to outlaw abortion if Roe v Wade were overturned, states such as New York and Illinois have worked to protect abortion rights. Polling shows about six in 10 Americans believe abortion should be legal in “all or most” circumstances.Meanwhile, the House speaker and California Democrat Nancy Pelosi said: “The House is committed to defending women’s health freedoms and to enshrining into law our House-passed Women’s Health Protection Act, led by Congresswoman Judy Chu, to protect reproductive health care for all women across America.”She added that the supreme court “has the opportunity and responsibility to honor the constitution, the law and this basic truth: every woman has the constitutional right to basic reproductive healthcare”.TopicsAbortionHealthGenderUS politicsUS supreme courtLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Kyle Rittenhouse isn’t crying for those he hurt. His tears, tellingly, are for himself | Moira Donegan

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      Kyle Rittenhouse isn’t crying for those he hurt. His tears, tellingly, are for himselfMoira DoneganWhen conservative men like Rittenhouse and Brett Kavanaugh express their feelings, it is an act of thwarted entitlement – or a threat His voice choked up and his face went red. The young man squinted and panted, his mouth pulled up plaintively towards his nose, his answers to the questions coming out in gasping little bursts. Kyle Rittenhouse, on the stand testifying at his trial for killing two people and wounding a third last summer at a racial justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was not crying for the men he killed, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. He was crying for himself, describing what he said was his mortal fear that night in August 2020, when he opened fire on the protesters using an AR-15. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Rittenhouse gasped, describing how he had confronted and ultimately killed the two men while he was guarding the lot of a car dealership. “I defended myself.”Rittenhouse was 17 at the time of the shooting; he is 18 now. The young man’s emotional testimony had a practical purpose: it was a performance meant to make him seem helpless and childlike, and to convince the jury in his homicide trial that there was a reasonable possibility that he was in fear for his life when he shot the three men. But to many, the emotion of Rittenhouse’s testimony seemed to stem not from his memories of the incident, but from the indignant entitlement of a white man thwarted in the enforcement of his own privilege.Many compared Rittenhouse’s tears during his testimony to those of Brett Kavanaugh, who shouted, red-faced and spitting, during his confirmation hearings, when he was asked questions about his alleged assault of Christine Blasey Ford, back when he was Rittenhouse’s age. Both of the displays prompted questions about their sincerity and opportunism. Was Rittenhouse really crying? Was Kavanaugh just putting on a show for Donald Trump to watch on TV? But they both also pointed to a peculiar phenomenon that remains little understood: the rightwing use of public displays of white male emotionalism as a political tool.In one sense, the two men’s conduct under oath was quite strange. Both of them appear to be self-conscious avatars of white conservative masculinity, and their ideology would seem to preclude male emotionalism, as traditional gender norms have historically justified male dominance precisely because of men’s supposed stoicism and self-control. As Vox’s Jamil Smith put it: “We’re generally unfamiliar with seeing boys and men exhibit their emotion in such a public way. Vulnerability and common conceptions of manhood, especially among conservatives, have not traditionally been bedfellows.”And yet conservative white men’s emotions are increasingly coming to the forefront of political life, and they seem to animate much of the Trumpist right. In practice, such men express their emotions all the time. They express them at Trump rallies, when they jeer at the mention of perceived enemies and cheer for lines of chauvinism and anger. They express their feelings when they picket abortion clinics, screaming at women walking inside and threatening the staff. They express their feelings when they fly Confederate and “Blue Lives Matter” flags; they express their feelings when they vote, and when they pick petulant fights with the service workers who ask them to wear their masks inside stores and restaurants. The common thread in these rightwing expressions of masculine emotion is that when conservative men express their feelings, they don’t do so as a gesture of humility or need. Instead, they wield their feelings as a threat.Kyle Rittenhouse judge in spotlight after angry reprimand of prosecutionRead moreArguably, both Rittenhouse and Kavanaugh were expressing their emotions when they committed their famous acts of alleged violence. It’s impossible to know what was in his mind, but Rittenhouse’s actions leading up to that night in Kenosha indicate that what brought him there was anger, or maybe a desire for glory. Rittenhouse says that he came to Kenosha to protect local businesses from demonstrators; he had appointed himself a vigilante, out avenging the interests of property and police against the protests. It’s hard not to suspect that he daydreamed about himself as a lone wolf who doesn’t play by the rules, like an action movie hero who wears a bandana as a headband and a cutoff denim vest. The rifle that Rittenhouse used to kill Rosenbaum and Huber was illegal for him to possess. Asked why he didn’t use a handgun, he told the court that he had chosen the semiautomatic rifle because “it looked cool”.For Kavanaugh, the project of decoding his emotions the night he allegedly assaulted Christine Blasey Ford is also speculative, but Ford’s testimony, along with documents made public during the hearings, paints a portrait of Kavanaugh as a young man with a vivid, if not especially varied, emotional life. His calendar from what was probably the month of the party shows him working out and calling his football friends by nicknames; he goes to their houses for “’skis” (“brewskis”: beers). In Ford’s account, he sounded satisfied with himself. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. “The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” Kavanaugh was a boy, like Rittenhouse, with an inflated sense of his own importance. The emotion he seemed to have expressed most clearly in those years was a consuming and profoundly unearned sense of his own superiority.The fact of the matter is that for Rittenhouse, the question of emotion will be central to his case. The question of his legal guilt or innocence hangs on whether he felt endangered at the time of the shootings – a subjective experience that, conveniently, only Rittenhouse himself can speak to. Meanwhile, Kavanaugh now sits in a position of superlative power. Maybe the problem is not that these white men don’t express their feelings enough. Maybe the problem is that their feelings have too much power.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsUS newsOpinionGenderUS politicsThe far rightWisconsinBrett KavanaughUS supreme courtcommentReuse this content More

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      Republican senator Josh Hawley worries feminism has driven men to ‘pornography and video games’

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      RepublicansRepublican senator Josh Hawley worries feminism has driven men to ‘pornography and video games’Far-right senator from Missouri ridiculed for his homilies on ‘manly virtues’ Adam Gabbatt@adamgabbattMon 1 Nov 2021 13.14 EDTLast modified on Mon 1 Nov 2021 14.03 EDTThe effort to combat toxic masculinity in the US has led men to consume more pornography and play more video games, the Missouri senator Josh Hawley claimed in a speech to a group of Republicans.Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, Hawley addressed the issue of “manhood”, which he said was under attack, and called for men to return to traditional masculine roles.The Donald Trump supporter who notoriously raised a fist in support of a mob outside the US Capitol on 6 January appeared to echo talking points made by the likes of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that opposes feminism and believes men are under attack from liberal elites.“Can we be surprised that after years of being told that they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games?” Hawley said.“While the left may celebrate this decline of men, I for one cannot join them. No one should.”Hawley, 41, did not cite sources for his belief that men were watching pornography more frequently. Nonetheless, on Monday his speech was republished by the Federalist, a rightwing outlet. In the address, Hawley said he wanted to discuss “the left’s attempt to give us a world beyond men”.“The left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic,” he said. “They want to define the traditional masculine virtues – things like courage, and independence, and assertiveness – as a danger to society.”Hawley is the son of a banker who attended private school before studying at Stanford and Yale. He clerked for the supreme court’s chief justice, John Roberts, and later became a law professor.Given his background, he has repeatedly raised eyebrows for railing against elites. Hawley’s apparent claim to speak for all men, in the name of a return to a vaguely defined masculinity of old, swiftly became a new subject of ridicule on Twitter.If Josh Hawley is an expert on masculinity then I’d like to take a few minutes to share my thoughts on quantum physics.— Jason Kander (@JasonKander) November 1, 2021
      In the good old days, uncriticized American men fucked real top-heavy silicone queens and machine-gunned their way through actual space aliens on a daily basis. Also, don’t shake the junior Missouri senator’s hand until you see him wash it. https://t.co/VrN3irWqKy— David Simon (@AoDespair) November 1, 2021
      Josh Hawley says American men are “watching porn and playing video games because their masculinity is being criticized.” Mostly by their parents who keep asking, “Josh, when are you going to move out of our basement, stop picking your nose and get a job?” pic.twitter.com/NSY6sbo2aP— Paul Rudnick (@PaulRudnickNY) November 1, 2021
      Hawley, who was a staunch defender of Brett Kavanaugh when he was accused of sexual assault during his supreme court nomination hearings in 2018, claimed: “Boys are increasingly treated like an illness in search of a cure.”“Hollywood delivers the toxic masculinity theme ad nauseum in television and film,” he said, going on to link traditional masculinity as “vital to self-government”.“Observers from the ancient Romans to our forefathers identified the manly virtues as indispensable for political liberty,” Hawley said.As well as pornography, Hawley tied the supposed decline in masculinity to issues including unemployment, people marrying at a later age and the preservation of liberty.Hawley said: “For centuries, lovers of liberty have praised these qualities as the highest standard of manhood. That’s not to say that women don’t possess them. But it is to say that these virtues are the bright side of the aggression and competitiveness and independence that psychologists, no less than philosophers, have long observed in men.“Assertiveness and independence are strengths when used to protect and empower others.”Hawley offered few solutions to the problems he claimed to present. On Monday, he used Twitter to promote his new podcast, co-hosted with his wife.“In the second episode of This is Living, Josh and Erin Hawley share the story of how they met, what drew them to each other, and how two people so different decided to get married,” a blurb for the podcast reads.The Hawleys met while studying law at Yale. Erin Hawley also clerked for Roberts and became a law professor.TopicsRepublicansThe far rightFeminismGenderUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Condom ‘stealthing’ is a vile practice. California is right to ban it | Moira Donegan

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      OpinionUS politicsCondom ‘stealthing’ is a vile practice. California is right to ban itMoira DoneganTwelve per cent of women have experienced stealthing – and 10% of men have perpetrated it. The law is finally catching up Tue 14 Sep 2021 06.19 EDTLast modified on Tue 14 Sep 2021 06.20 EDTShe told him a condom was “non-negotiable,” and that if he would rather not use one, she would leave. The young woman, identified as “Sara” in a 2017 study, describes the encounter, saying, “I set a boundary. I was very explicit.” Yet she then discovered that her partner, a man she’d been seeing for a couple of weeks, had secretly removed the condom during sex.“I ended up talking to him about it later,” Sara told the study’s author, the feminist civil rights attorney Alexandra Brodsky. “He told me, ‘Don’t worry about it, trust me.’ That stuck with me, because he’d literally proven himself to be unworthy of my trust.”The man who removed the condom was telling her to trust him not to put her at risk for the potential consequences of unprotected sex – for STD infection, or for unplanned pregnancy. But if he was someone she could trust on those issues, he never would have removed the condom in the first place.Sara was a victim of a phenomenon that 12% of women say they have experienced, and that 10% of men say they have perpetrated, but which for years has had no legal recognition and no name other than the one given to it by its practitioners: “Stealthing”, the non-consensual removal of a condom.Now, the violation experienced by Sara and others may finally be made illegal, at least in one state. A bill introduced by California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia has passed both houses of the state’s legislature, and would make non-consensual condom removal a civil offense. It now awaits a signature from Governor Gavin Newsom.If the bill goes into effect, it would give victims the power to sue men who removed condoms without their permission for the non-criminal charge of sexual battery and open the door for monetary damages. The Wisconsin and New York legislatures are considering similar bills. If California’s is signed, the state will become the first in the nation to recognize stealthing as a violation in law.Because the bill makes stealthing a civil offense, not a crime, it does not create the possibility that perpetrators will serve prison time. Instead, it makes them liable for fines and penalties if their victims prevail in court. (The pending bills in Wisconsin and New York do have criminal provisions.) But Brodsky believes that the worthiness of a civil avenue for justice should not be overlooked. “I’m glad to see California pursuing this approach,” she told me. “In my experience, many survivors find the kinds of outcomes available in civil litigation – including money damages – more meaningful and useful.”Brodsky points out that civil courts have lower burdens of proof and offer rewards for the victims, not only punishments for the assailants. The symbolic value of the bill, too, is worth noting: the possibility for stealthing victims to have their day in court, and be remunerated for the harm they suffered, offers a route to recognition for a kind of sexual abuse that institutions have historically ignored.For women like Sara, the reality that what their partners did to them was not right is intuitive. In Brodsky’s study, victims of stealthing recount being worried about STIs and pregnancy. These worries, they observed, seem to fall almost exclusively on their shoulders, even though the removal of the condom had not been their idea and had happened without their permission. One woman, referred to as “Rebecca”, told Brodsky that after the incident, her assailant refused to help her pay for emergency contraceptives.“None of it worried him,” she said. “It didn’t perturb him. My potential pregnancy, my potential STI. That was my burden.” Rebecca had a reason to be worried: a 2019 survey on stealthing found that men who engaged in the practice were much more likely to be infected with an STD than men who didn’t (at a rate of 29.5% to 15.1%) and were much more likely to have sired an unintended pregnancy (at a rate of 46.7% to 25.8%).But in addition to the medical and material concerns, women and others who have been victims of stealthing describe the incidents as degrading, hurtful and wounding to their self-respect. The removal of the condom represents a willingness to discard their preferences, an indifference to their safety and a contempt for their right to control their own bodies – and all of this comes from men who, only a few moments earlier, they had believed they could trust.There is empirical evidence to support their sense of betrayal: the 2019 survey found that men who engaged in stealthing also had greater hostility towards women. In Brodsky’s study, a review of online communities for stealthing practitioners supports the notion that non-consensual condom removal by heterosexual men is motivated by misogynist disdain; the men, quoted at length, spoke of their own contempt for women and scorn for their partners’ desire for a condom in terms that I will not repeat here.Stealthing poses high-stakes material risks to victims, as well as deeply felt harms to their dignity. It is galling that the practice was not already illegal. Both our law and our culture have a long history of ignoring gendered violence, and of lacking the rhetorical frameworks that make such harm legible – even when, as seems to be true in the case of stealthing, that harm is very common.Rebecca, the survivor quoted in the 2017 study, said that she fielded many calls about the practice in her job at a local rape crisis hotline. “The stories often start the same way: ‘I’m not sure this is rape, but …’”Melissa Sargent, the Wisconsin state representative who has sponsored the anti-stealthing bill there, also says she has been contacted by women who say they were victims of stealthing. “Everyone has their own story,” Sargent told the Associated Press. “But the common thread is, this happened to me, I knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t know what to call it.”One hope is that the passage of the California law might help such victims know what to call it. The stealthing bill can help make clear and definite what might have otherwise been an inchoate sense of having been wronged. With the passage of the California bill, stealthing victims will be able to see themselves as worthy of dignity, of having a right to control their own bodies, and of being entitled to negotiate their own sex lives without coercion or tricks. And the law will see them that way, too.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionGenderRape and sexual assaultSexCaliforniacommentReuse this content More