Congressional committee hearings are usually the domain of dark-suited men speaking in carefully-modulated tones. So Gay Culverhouse, who showed up to a House Judiciary Committee meeting in an unapologetically purple suit and spoke with both intelligence and anger, was startling. Culverhouse, a former president of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, wasn’t a breath of fresh air; she was a bracing gust of wind as she outlined the ways in which (in her view) the NFL abuses and then abandons its players.

While seated next to a current NFL doctor at the witness table, Culverhouse delivered a withering assessment of the role that team doctors play in keeping their players off the injured list:

One of the things you as a committee need to understand very clearly is the fact that the team doctor is hired by the coaches and paid by the front office. This team doctor is not an advocate for the players. This team doctor’s role is to get that player back on the field, even if that means injecting the player on the field. I have seen a wall of players surround a player and seen his knees injected, seen his hip injected between plays, and him [put] back on the field. This is inexcusable. ... The team doctor dresses as a coach on the sidelines, and he acts in many ways as a coach on the sidelines. He is not an independent advocate for the player. If a player chooses independent medical counsel, he is considered to be not a team player. He becomes a pariah to the team. We’ve got to stop that.

During the question-and-answer portion of the hearing, Culverhouse was asked how it makes her feel to see former Buccaneers suffering the effects of their football careers. Instead of talking about how she feels, Culverhouse described what she does:

This morning as I was coming over here, [an injured former player] said, "Gay, you’ve always been a rebel. But you’re a rebel with a cause. Make them hear that we’re hurt. Make them hear that we can’t fill out all of their forms. We can’t do it. Our mental capacity isn’t there to answer the questions on the phone and fill out the forms. They’re missing those of us that are severely disabled." And so what I’m doing is I’m filling out the forms. I’m going through the networks for them to access the benefits that they may be entitled to ... I’m going to Little Rock, Ark. to find [former Buccaneer] Jerry Eckwood and take him to the doctors myself and fill out the forms and get this man the help he needs. I don’t want to read about another one of my players is dead. I don’t want to tell my children their favorite gentle giant is dead. This isn’t working for me.

Photograph of Gay Culverhouse testifying before House Judiciary Committee by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: football, health, sports

I grew up in a household in which the normal mode of verbal interaction started at banshee and escalated to supersonic, so I was interested in the New York Times piece “Shouting is the New Spanking” that KJ wrote about last week. The article says that yelling at children is becoming as socially unacceptable as whacking them. I agree that regular shouting is ineffective and counterproductive. Just think of your reaction when you’re in public and you see a parent screaming at a kid. Even if you don’t know what the offense was that set off mom or dad, you recoil at seeing an adult so out-of-control. And the yelling just leaves an aftermath of gloom and resentment over the whole family. I’ve made a conscious effort over the years to reduce what was becoming habitual voice-raising. And whenever I hear my own decibel level increase, I’m aware that I’ve just damaged my authority. This doesn’t mean I never lose it (and I think it’s important for kids to understand that people can get really mad at each other and then make up), but I’ve found that when a raised voice is a rare occurence, your child hears you much better.

Tags: child rearing, spanking, yelling

Senate Republicans and their shameful Democratic enablers have rallied around one major idea for why they need to stop health care reform: too expensive. Well, that's debatable, of course, but in a sense it doesn't matter. Because—and I know this will surprise you, because we're talking politicians here—they aren't exactly being honest about their priorities. Exhibit No.1: Senator Orrin Hatch has attached an amendment to the health care reform bill that would give abstinence-only programs $50 million a year. That's $50 million for programs that have repeatedly been shown not to work. It would be more cost-effective to flush that money directly down the toilet, because at least we wouldn't be funding programs that discourage condom use.

Abstinence-only programs have exactly nothing to do with health care. Proponents advertised abstinence-only as a way to better health outcomes for teenagers, because they promised it would reduce STD transmissions and teenage pregnancy rates. But we already had decades of information showing that teenage pregnancy rates have been declining as contraception use has grown more popular, and methods have become more effective. Taking strategies that work and turning them on their head seems like a bad idea, but since that was the M.O. of the Bush administration, we shouldn't be too surprised that abstinence-only was a favored boondoggle of that era. During the Bush years, the public grew increasingly suspicious of abstinence-only, and a report showing that teenage pregnancy rates were up for the first time in 15 years seemed to be the final bullet to kill abstinence-only. Indeed, the Obama administration zeroed out funding for abstinence-only programs, and I think far too many sexual health advocates thought that meant it was finally behind us.

But like many right-wing obsessions—such as missile-defense shields and assaulting Social Security—abstinence-only has taken on zombie-like qualities, and won't die. Presumably, Senator Hatch tacked this onto the health care bill because he knew that Democrats won't stop the bill over a $50 million boondoggle, and he gets to earn major brownie points with the religious right, which often seems to think sex (and the punishing of it) is the only political issue worth getting out of bed over.

There are a couple of reasons abstinence-only means so much to the religious right. People don't talk about it much, but financial considerations are a big part of the religious right's enthusiasm. Most of the abstinence-only texts in circulation are adapted from materials initially developed by Christian publishing houses to be used in evangelical youth programs. Schools often avoid having sex education in the classroom, and instead just hire an outside lecturer to berate kids about abstaining until marriage, and the vast majority of the people to hire come from the evangelical community. Of course, this isn't just about the money, but also about the esteem—controlling these aspects of children's education gives the religious right the warm glow of cultural dominance they crave so badly.

Another reason this is such a major issue for the religious right is that they, as a group that puts a premium on proselytizing, are eager to get their hands on the captive audience of high school students. Often, abstinence-only "educators" openly flout the law about proselytizing in schools. The ACLU is currently suing the state of Mississippi for using taxpayer dollars to fund what amounted to a religious service against premarital sex; these kinds of problems are common. Even if the textbook writers and lecturers manage to obey the letter of the law and keep their message technically secular, they use the banner of abstinence-only to promote their religious ideals about marriage, gender roles, and homosexuality. The introduction of the religious ritual of the virginity pledges to the classroom is especially unnerving, since kids who don't want to participate in a fundamentally religious ritual are exposed to pressure to do so that's hard to resist.

From a health care perspective, the most important thing to remember is that for abstinence-only proponents, the fact that these programs discourage sexually active teenagers to forgo condom use is a feature, not a bug. This quote sheet put together by SIECUS (PDF) shows the extent to which abstinence-only programs attempt to convince teenagers to quit using condoms. Since the evidence strongly demonstrates that abstinence-only messages don't do much to discourage sexual intercourse—true believers not only have as much sex as other teenagers, but have it at younger ages—we have to assume the result and possible intention of all these "condoms don't work" messages is to get kids to skip the contraception and get pregnant. For the religious right, this is the moral path, because it's not about stopping the sin so much as making sure the sinner pays for her sins, which is why the religious right's reaction to Bristol Palin's pregnancy was more celebratory than ashamed. But from a public-health perspective, this is a complete disaster of a policy. It's not much better for the majority of nonevangelical Americans who are less inclined to think sex is a sin you need to punish.

In other words, abstinence-only cannot be separated from the larger anti-choice movement from which it sprang, a movement that sees the separation of sex and pregnancy as a grave evil that must be stopped. They're zeroing in on teenagers not because they're concerned for their health or well-being, but because they're a captive audience and it's easy to get the public at large to feel uneasy about teenagers having sex. Teenagers are the most vulnerable population for the anti-choice program of mandatory pregnancy for all sexually active people (and the complete termination of homosexual sex). No wonder Senator Hatch thinks this is an easy way to score points with the base. It not only satisfies the need for sex hysteria, but it's also an act of dominance over a vulnerable population.

Choice USA is organizing a call-in day today to pressure the Senate to drop this amendment from the health care bill. You can find out more here.

Photograph of Sen. Orrin Hatch by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Tags: abstinence-only, health care reform, sex education

Top law firms report having few or no women on their list of the top 10 "rainmakers." Fifteen years out of law school and a veteran of big-firm life, I asked former classmates and colleagues why women don't bring in the bucks. Should I be surprised that the answers turned out to reflect their own gender divide?

Men, while offering a nod to the idea that perhaps women led more balanced lives (proper rainmaking behavior is a 24/7 job: If you've seen Ari Gold on Entourage, you've seen somebody making it rain), seemed inclined to put the new statistic (from a study the National Association of Women Lawyers and reported on Law.com) in the category of "change that hasn't filtered up yet." Top rainmaking men, they proposed, just haven't died out. Most "new business" isn't really new, of course—law firms collect new deals from the same old banks and clients, and those relationships, many established decades ago, still persist.

The women in my totally unscientific survey (just as professionally accomplished as the men) saw it differently. They noted the macho culture that still walks the walk at many top firms—and at the offices of their clients. The men at the top are still more comfortable hanging out with men, along with which goes the chest-thumping, the desire to hold conversations that aren't exactly PC. One recalled men who refused to socialize with women colleagues out of fear of what their wives would say—which doesn't exactly encourage the kind of comfortable interaction that leads people to want to continue working together. All of them tagged the ruthless competition. Rainmaking is a zero-sum game; any edge has to be played to the hilt, and if you can knock a woman out of the game by taking a client to Hooters, so be it. (Let it be said that I know women who've done that to other women, too.)

I have to admit that my first take on this question was to write it off, as did the men I asked, as a leftover, something likely to change sooner than later. Hearing from my colleagues still in the fray reminded that it's probably not quite so innocuous. It also reminded me that we probably won't hear much more about this statistic—because not one of the women I talked to would even breathe on this topic until I promised not to name names. Maybe, Emily, this all has something to do with why we don't hear the women of the White House on the subject of Obama's all-male basketball games. Unfortunately, nobody ever got to the top by trying to level the playing field.

Photograph of businesspeople by Jupiterimages/Getty Images.

Tags: law, women in the workplace

The ban on travel to Cuba was as pointless seven years ago as it is today, but somewhere in the interim, a significant number of Cuban-Americans turned against it. In a 2002 poll, 46 percent of Cuban-Americans said they wanted the restriction lifted. According to a September survey, 59 percent said the same. This is especially striking because in April of 2009, Cuban-Americans won the right to visit family members with relatively few restrictions; it's the rest of us who still have to deal with a blanket ban.* The poll's sample size is not large, and the margin of error is a full five points, so the swing may not be as great as it appears. Still, the future belongs to the would-be tourist; when you exclude the 65-and-over set, the percentage of people who support a change of policy shoots up to 62.

Two bills circulating in the House and one in the Senate would end the ban for everyone, which in effect means allowing Americans to fly directly to Havana instead of stopping in Mexico first. Joe Lieberman, meanwhile, continues his proud tradition of being wrong about everything.

*changed from orginal with thanks to commenter ChelseaBridge.

Tags: Cuba

Like you, Emily, I thought the NYT piece on the President Obama’s all-male basketball game hit just the right note in capturing the nuance of questions about the president’s inner circle and whether it’s too male-dominated. While it is important for women to have access to all-male clubs at the workplace in terms of inclusion and having input when big decisions are made, I don’t believe the women staffers at the White House have to be in on the basketball games in order to, well, be in. There are other ways to ensure they get a seat at the table. By pointedly asking for a seat at the table, for instance, or pointing out when necessary that there aren’t enough, or any women, at the table. Sounds a bit simple, I know, but it’s doubtful that the women occupying high-profile jobs in the Obama administration are shrinking violets who would sit by quietly while the alpha males rolled over them.

U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice? I don’t think so. Melody Barnes, Obama’s chief domestic-policy advisor, or Mona Sutphen, his deputy chief of staff? Not likely. Sec. of State Hillary Clinton? Oh, please, who can forget her toughness on the campaign trail. These smart and able women got where they are through hard work (and yes, having the right connections, too), but they also had to have the self-confidence to know that they could play with the big boys, and I’m not talking about shooting hoops or traipsing the greens. They managed to negotiate, bypass, and overcome the restrictions and obstacles sometimes purposely put in front of them, and do just fine. They likely did this without having had to dunk basketballs with their male peers.

Maybe Obama is a more comfortable around his male staffers, but this doesn’t mean he’s uncomfortable around his female staffers. The woman he often refers to as the “love of my life” is, by many accounts, an equal partner in their marriage and a strong, independent-minded individual. Men who marry strong women don’t tend to lean toward sexism, and men who do lean toward sexim don't tend to hire strong women. I understand that the NYT article was touching more on subtle perceptions of women being shut out than outright exclusion of women, but I don't know that it's fair to hang those perceptions on a harmless basketball game.

If Hillary Clinton had become president, would we be worrying about men in the White House feeling shut out by the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pansuits? Probably not. I'd be among the first calling on these men to get over themselves.

I know sexism in the workplace is a very serious issue and I'm not trying to make light of it, but sometimes we have to see a basketball game for what it is—a simple basketball game. I’ve never believed that I had to play sports or be on men’s teams, or pretend I even understood, much less cared about, the finer rules of basketball, baseball, football, hockey, etc., to be considered part of the team. And let’s be honest, how many of us, unless we happen to have played for the WNBA, would really want to spend a Saturday afternoon hooping it up with a bunch of sweaty, aggressively competitive, wonky men—even if one of them were the POTUS? All the chest-bumping, trash-talking, butt-slapping, elbow-throwing, and in your-face-dunking that is part of the game would come to a screeching halt in a co-ed game, making it less fun for the men and less real for the women if the men went out of their way not to touch, bump into, or otherwise injure us physically, or offend our “delicate” feminine sensibilities.

If some people are wondering whether the guys playing with Obama aren’t “atremble” about possibly beating the boss and making him look bad, imagine how they would feel beating a bunch of women. Or worse, getting beaten by a bunch of women.

Photograph of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Pres. Obama's all-male basketball game