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NEWS & LETTERS, April 2004Lead ArticleFight the Christian Right's attacks on women's livesby Terry Moon and Gerard Emmett On April 25, hundreds of thousands of women, children and men will demonstrate in Washington, D.C., in the "March for Women’s Lives." One reason the march will be huge is that women know President George Bush is a liar. He lied about weapons of mass destruction; he lied about the link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein; and he lies about women. While Bush appropriates the language of "feminism" as a way to give a moral justification for his immoral wars, he at the same time wages war on women in the U.S.--and for that matter, the world over through his global gag rule, among other things. The march follows on the heels of the Democratic primaries where the desperate need to stop Bush was palpable. It was why the most widely used word was "electability." The damage Bush has done to women globally is so deep and wide-ranging that many feel it is a life-and-death issue to get him out of office. It is not only that under Bush’s reign the quality of women’s lives has been undermined in many concrete ways--abortion rights, that is, women’s right to control their own bodies; healthcare; welfare rights; literacy; privacy; trafficking of women and girls; rape in the military and on U.S. playing fields; and the list can go on and on and on. It is also that being destroyed is what it means to be a woman--women’s humanness is being devalued. Bush is initiating the Talibanization of America. Bush’s ideological attack on women goes hand in hand with his drive to make the U.S. THE single world power dominating the entire globe, both economically and ideologically. Bush uses the rhetoric of "democracy," of "feminism," of a "compassionate" Christianity, as he does everything within his considerable strength to bolster U.S. capitalism. INTERNATIONAL SEXIST In Iraq and Afghanistan this means that women’s very lives are subordinated to U.S. interests. The U.S. put in power the Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan, who espouse a rabid political fundamentalist anti-woman Islam. Bush has done nothing in Iraq to stop the widespread rape of women, nor the kidnapping and selling of girls that has now reached epidemic proportions. The fact that he is doing this because U.S. capitalism prefers relying on local surrogates to do their bidding, rather than direct imperialistic control, reveals how capitalism not only works hand in hand with sexism but also exacerbates it. In the U.S. that intensification of women’s oppression means the gutting of welfare that Clinton began is being accelerated, even as the economy worsens and more women and children are thrown into poverty. It serves capitalism when women on welfare are forced to work, even if conditions are unsafe, even if the job doesn’t pay a living wage, even if they have to be bused for hours to get to the job and then cross a picket line to get in. Capitalism’s interests are served when women have become so demoralized from the constant attacks on their humanness that they either end up thinking that they are less than human, or become so depressed at what the world has become and how it views them that they become incapable of fighting back. That is why Bush doesn’t have to be DIRECTLY behind every attack on women. It is his personification of the present stage of capitalism that sets the rabid misogynist tone of his rule and has given reactionaries a green light to put into practice any and all retrogressive, anti-women ideas that the Women’s Liberation Movement had forced them to suppress. As Bush works to bolster U.S. capitalism as the best of all possible worlds, every horror that exists in developing countries is now plaguing women in the U.S. * Sex slavery now exists in the U.S. on an unprecedented level. It has two manifestations:
* What women now have to endure to achieve an abortion is coming close to conditions in countries where it is illegal. U.S. women have to negotiate a gauntlet of persecutions reminiscent of Jim Crow laws that attempted to keep Blacks from voting after Reconstruction--everything from unnecessary waiting periods lasting days, to lectures full of lies about abortions causing breast cancer, to being forced to have an ultrasound; and now, in Texas, a woman must show her photo ID, which will then be copied and put on file. Several states are trying to ban abortion altogether, some with no exceptions for women whose life or health is endangered or who became pregnant through rape or incest. * Illiteracy is reaching epidemic proportions. An amazing 50% of women in the U.S. have levels of literacy lower than an average high school graduate; 23% of women have very limited reading ability, while 17% of men fall into that same category.(3) The cause? Women drop out of school because of abuse, poverty, pregnancy, undiagnosed learning disabilities. Illiteracy is a symptom of poverty and of the undervaluation of women and girls. * Religious political fundamentalism as the law of the land is something we’ve seen women in Iraq and Afghanistan battle. Now we have the U.S. version as the purposefully misnamed "Constitution Restoration Act" (H.R. 3799; S. 2082), introduced in Congress by Republican hardliner Robert Aderholt. It aims to mandate "God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government." Among other outrages, the bill would stop federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, from hearing cases involving "expressions of religious faith by elected or appointed officials." The ramifications of such a law would be devastating, opening wide the doors of intolerance and hate. AMENDMENT TO OBLITERATE HUMANNESS One of the most retrogressive acts of Bush’s presidency has been his support for a new Constitutional amendment to outlaw same-sex marriages. But we can’t let Clinton off the hook. In 1996 he signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined "marriage" as being solely between a man and a woman, and said that states are not required to recognize marriages or civil unions performed in other states or jurisdictions. When Democratic Party presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry invokes the notion of "states’ rights"--discredited by the Civil Rights Movement--in his own waffling opposition to gay marriage, he is simply remaining within the Clinton paradigm. This would force same-sex couples who marry to move--or perhaps flee--from one part of the country to another because a bunch of fundamentalists can wield control over a piece of territory. The genuine, mass spontaneity in which gay and lesbian couples seized the moment to make their demands for equality public began, fittingly, with the marriage in San Francisco of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, decades-long activists for lesbian and women’s rights, and founders of the Daughters of Bilitis. Many in the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Intersex (GLBTI) movement compare their struggle to the Civil Rights Movement--including GLBTI African Americans. While the comparison is being debated by African Americans, Black legislators in Georgia voted en masse against a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and Black Representative Phillip West of Natchez, Miss. spoke for many when he declared, "The bottom line is we know what it’s like to be discriminated against." Any comparison with the Civil Rights Movement can’t ignore the fact that political emancipation has not equaled human emancipation for the masses of Black people in the U.S. who still face discrimination and oppression in employment, housing, education, health care, and a racist prison-industrial complex that U.S. capitalism created to deal with the whole situation. The history of the gay and lesbian liberation movement shows it reached beyond political emancipation, as did the Civil Rights Movement. The Stonewall rebellion in New York in 1969 against police harassment of gay men was never a struggle to be seen as "the same" as straight people. Rather it was a fight to be seen as human beings who should be respected regardless of difference. The gay liberation movement of the 1970s and beyond (which was quite clear about what it owed to the revolutionary Black struggle) has shared much of the critique of patriarchal social relationships, including marriage, with the Women’s Liberation Movement. Lesbians in the women’s movement were often a catalyst towards deepening that critique. GOING BEYOND EASY ASSUMPTIONS ACT UP, a radical movement employing creative demonstrations and mass civil disobedience in the 1980s to demand funding for AIDS research and treatment, also demonstrated the necessity of going beyond the easy assumptions of capitalist society. Worldwide, groups like the Treatment Action Coalition of South Africa pushed this further. From a "simple" matter like health care, the question arose, what does it mean to be a human being? What concretely is meant by "human rights"? What does it mean, in the most profound philosophic sense, when the most oppressed and despised rise up to seize, not only power, but respect, beginning with self-respect, and freedom? Bush and his ideological allies are nullifying the rights of people who wish to enter same-sex unions. But they are also negating the very existence of a whole class of people who can’t so easily be described by the simple terms "man" or "woman." There are hundreds of thousands of transgender, intersex and other people who would be defined as non-persons under Bush’s proposed amendment. It is a profound attack on human freedom if the law, in all its arbitrariness, were to substitute for free, human choice. By defining marriage as legally now and forever only pertaining to "a man and a woman," the naked fascism of Bush’s proposed constitutional amendment is revealed. As every new Bush outrage is announced, mainstream women’s groups do make their voices heard. Through press releases and email, the National Organization for Women (NOW), Pro-Choice America (formerly the National Abortion Rights Action League), and Planned Parenthood express women’s anger and fears. But such responses are woefully inadequate, and, too often, simply reacting to the latest right-wing moves. We can see how much these groups have taken the ground created by the Right even in how the name of the April 25 march was changed from "Save Women’s Lives, March for Freedom of Choice," to simply "March for Women’s Lives." So defeatist has the mainstream movement become that first, like Pro-Choice America, they ditched the word "abortion"; and now even the word "choice" is jettisoned for the March. This is more than an abandonment of words. It is a sign that part of the movement is so mired in fighting what they oppose--because under Bush the retrogression has become so overwhelming--that what we are FOR has gotten lost. Thus much of the movement has been reduced to reacting to whatever is Bush’s latest outrage. What the GLBTI and women’s movement, or any movement for that matter, cannot forget is that oppression of any group is unseparated from the latest stage of capitalism. When the two get separated, women are under the illusion that our lives can be made better WITHIN the present degenerate system. But sexist, racist, homophobic capitalism cannot be reformed. Rather it must be done away with altogether so that a new human society has the space to be born. Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism, spoke about capitalism’s penchant for creating scapegoats and why certain groups are singled out:
Certainly one reason that women have been singled out is their opposition to this stage of capitalism. This will be seen in the outpouring at the March for Women’s Lives, that, despite the contradictions of those who called it, will show hundreds of thousands of women’s anger and determination to end Bush’s attacks on women. It is not only that women are the majority in opposing Bush’s wars; it is also that many demands of the women’s movement--from the right to control their own bodies, to being able to love and marry whom they please, to peace, to taking their place in the world as complete and recognized persons, to creating a world where what is important is humanity--is in opposition to capitalism’s existence. That it is the LIMITATIONS of capitalism that exacerbate the misogynist and homophobic ideology makes even more important what the women’s and GLBTI movements are achieving. While contradictions in the movements remain and must be worked out, where Bush is trying to dehumanize women and make his gaybashing divide the country to give him political capital and to protect the decaying social order, many in the GLBTI movement have transformed a question of "gay rights" into a question of "human rights" and freedom; and the women’s movement continues to be one of Bush’s most vigorous foes. To stop him, the movements must break through their own ideological roadblocks. When we understand that the intensity of Bush’s misogyny and gaybashing is a measure, not of his strength, but of his, and capitalism’s, weakness, then we see that masses of people suffering under this retrogression can overcome sexist, racist, homophobic capitalism through our own actions and ideas. The elements for transcending the present retrogressive reality, and for creating a new human society, are within the movement itself. We can find that path, but only if we don’t shy away from the knowledge of how deep and total any change must be to create a new, truly human society. * * * NOTES 1. "The Girls Next Door," by Peter Landesman, THE NEW YORK TIMES, Jan. 25, 2004. 2. "Exploited Girls in U.S. Seek Same Protection Afforded Foreign Women," by Jim Lobe, ONEWORLDNET, March 5, 2004. 3. "Women’s Literacy: Not a Given," by Mev Miller, OFF OUR BACKS, November-December 2003. 4. "The roots of anti-Semitism," by Raya Dunayevskaya, NEWS & LETTERS, February 1960. |
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