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Will the Senate Stand Against Stupak?
By Emily Douglas
"That's the price of healthcare reform." That's what plenty of oh-so-well-meaning pundits have told those of us making a fuss over the Stupak amendment, the late-night attachment to the House healthcare reform bill that will leave virtually any woman accessing insurance through the health insurance exchange without abortion coverage. (Another argument that's cropped up is that the Stupak amendment won't actually affect abortion access for that many women, a claim that's based on faulty analysis of Guttmacher data on billing for abortion care, as Adam Sonfield explains.)
But both pro-choice and progressive healthcare reform leaders and members of Congress have come out swinging against the amendment, some going as far as to make it clear they'll refuse to support reform if Congressional Democrats decide to pay for it with women's healthcare. Calling the amendment a "middle-class abortion ban," Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said Wednesday that her organization would not support healthcare reform with an amendment further limiting access to abortion. Meanwhile, Senators Barbara Mikulski and Diane Feinstein have begun strategizing how to keep Stupak off the Senate bill, the New York Times reports.
"Keeping Stupak off the Senate bill is our primary goal right now," Laurie Rubiner, PPFA vice-president, said, "and chances are very good for that." "We're definitely hearing a lot of encouraging talk [about the Senate]," Donna Crane, public policy director at NARAL Pro-Choice America, adds. "The Senate thinks the House went too far."
(46) CommentsNovember 13, 2009
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The Stupak Stupor
By Emily Douglas
We know that the House healthcare reform bill passed after an eleventh-hour compromise (you might say betrayal) on abortion access. We know the compromise, the Stupak-Pitts amendment, is bad. But do we know exactly how it's bad for women (and their partners)? Here's a quick primer on what the amendment actually means for any woman accessing healthcare through the newly-created health insurance exchange.
Over the summer, legislators struck an agreement on abortion funding in which private plans offered through the health insurance exchange couldn't use federal dollars to cover abortion care. They could, however, cover abortion care with funds from individuals' premiums, and the agreement, the Capps Amendment, required at least one plan in every region to offer abortion care, and at least one not to. As many observers predicted, the Capps Amendment didn't mollify anti-abortion crusaders, namely the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which commands an outsize role in the debate over healthcare reform.
So what we ended up with was drastically worse. After the initial compromise fell apart, Rep. Bart Stupak introduced the eponymous amendment, under which any plan purchased with any federal subsidy cannot cover abortion services--even with private funds. Plus, the public plan won't cover abortion care. While plans participating in the health insurance exchange are legally permitted to offer a version of the plan that does cover abortion--enrollment limited to those who pay for the entire plan without any subsidy--it's unlikely plans will go the extra mile to offer that coverage, Planned Parenthood's Laurie Rubiner said this morning on the Brian Lehrer Show. That would be "awfully complex," Rubiner explained. Because the majority of Americans purchasing insurance through the exchange would be using affordability credits, the plan without abortion coverage will become the "standard plan." Rubiner also cited privacy concerns over purchasing abortion-inclusive coverage. The Wall Street Journal observed, "Insurers may be reluctant to [set up abortion-inclusive plans] because it could complicate how they pool risk and force them to label policies in a way that could draw attention from abortion opponents."
(170) CommentsNovember 9, 2009
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Marriage in Maine: Losing Forward
By Emily Douglas
Last night, in a voter referendum, Mainers narrowly, nail-bitingly voted to repeal the law extending marriage rights to same-sex couples, with the Bangor Daily News now reporting a margin of 53 to 47 percent.
It wasn't only bad news for LGBT rights on election night--voters in Kalamazoo, Michigan, approved an anti-discrimination ordinance adding sexual orientation and gender identity to existing civil rights law in their city, and Washington state's referendum to approve everything-but-the-M-word protections for same-sex couples is winning, though the race hasn't been called yet.
Still, on a morning after like this, you could be forgiven for thinking that it's the elite institutions in American life--courts and state legislatures (although, are you noticing, the sphere of what's "elite" keeps expanding?)--that are ready to contemplate marriage for gay people, and that Americans themselves (Liz Lemon's insistence that no Americans are any more real than any others notwithstanding) aren't. The State Supreme Court extends marriage rights to same-sex couples in California. Californians use a ballot initiative to take the right away. Maine's state legislature passes marriage equality legislation, and voters take the right away. In some jurisdictions (namely, Maine and California), public policy may be slightly outstripping public opinion. But the New York Times has recently taken a close look at whether public opinion on gay rights issues leads or lags behind public policy in all 50 states, sparked by a paper in the American Political Science Review (via Nan Hunter's indispensable blog). Only in Iowa does partnership recognition (in that state's case, marriage) outstrip public support. (In fact, illustrating the vagaries in polling and voting, in this survey, just over half of Mainers support the right to marry.) But the study does not stop at examining attitudes on marriage. Over 50 percent of residents in almost every state (Oklahoma and Utah being the two exceptions) support health benefits for same-sex partners, and yet only 14 states offer this protection. A few more states have enacted workplace and housing discrimination protections, but again, virtually all states see a majority supporting this protection. In fact, average Americans want gay people to have protections--not necessarily marriage, yet, but we're getting there.
(317) CommentsNovember 4, 2009
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Franken's Anti-Rape Amendment
By Emily Douglas
In April of 2008, KBR employee Dawn Leamon went public. A few months earlier, she had been raped and sexually assaulted by co-workers while deployed at Camp Harper, in Iraq, and after weeks of being pressured not to report the incident, forced to work alongside her attackers, and medically neglected, Leamon brought the story to a Houston attorney and to The Nation. Leamon joined a slowly building chorus of female defense contractor employees who'd been raped or sexually assaulted by co-workers while in Iraq, to utter impunity on the part of their assailants. In response, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called a hearing to investigate why the Justice Department had not prosecuted any sexual assault allegations in Iraq since the going to war in the country.
When it turned out that defense contractors often required employees, as a condition of employment, to submit to binding private arbitration in disputes with the contractors (including allegations of sexual assault), instead of bringing complaints to public courts, and that the Department of Defense claimed they couldn't prosecute for this very reason (even though these clauses only prevented civil suits), Senator Ben Nelson, who called the hearing, offered a simple solution: "This might be something you want to require and include in your contracts--before you award them," Karen Houppert reported in The Nation.
Freshman Sen. Al Franken took Nelson's suggestion seriously, and has pushed through an amendment to a Defense Appropriations bill that would prevent the Pentagon from doing business with contractors who force employees into binding arbitration over rape and sexual assault charges. (As Jon Stewart put it, "How is that a loophole that needs closing?")
(98) CommentsOctober 16, 2009
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Stop Bullying the Anti-Bullying Czar
By Emily Douglas
In the mid-nineties, when Kevin Jennings was the executive director of a fledging non-profit supporting LGBT youth and teachers called GLSEN (for the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Educators Network), he gave a lecture to my all-girls high school in Baltimore. I remember almost nothing about the content of his presentation; what I remember is that the school brought an openly gay man to address us directly on the matter of being gay. (Still, prior to the speech, our guidance counselor warned us that while homosexuality was okay, "experts advise" against coming out in high school.) Jennings, meanwhile, was appealing, accessible, and seemed to be working a circuit - going to any school that would let him be a warm, unashamed gay person in front of young people.
More than ten years later, my sister, now a junior at the same school, tells me that there's a Gay-Straight Alliance, several out teachers, and a popular annual Day of Silence. Kevin Jennings, meanwhile, is no longer heading a small advocacy group - he's part of the Obama administration.
Jennings has been appointed head of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, a post focused primarily on violence and drug prevention. He should know a thing or two about the kind of violence that can face LGBT youth: GLSEN has documented the prevalence of anti-LGBT violence and harassment in schools, finding in a 2007 survey that 39 percent of students experienced physical assault because of their sexual orientation; 81 percent of students were harassed on a regular basis. In last weekend's New York Times magazine cover story on gay and questioning middle school students, author Benoit Denizet-Lewis notes that a University of Nebraska-Harvard Medical School study found anti-gay harassment to be the most "psychologically harmful type of bullying." In Denizet-Lewis's article, teachers and students interviewed describe anti-gay slurs as ubiquitous. One teacher told him, "If I have to stop what I'm doing every time a student says ["That's so gay"], I won't have any time to teach!"
(109) CommentsOctober 1, 2009
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