Kathleen Parker warns in the Washington Post that "federally funded abortions are in our future." Her argument is that Obama's executive order stating that the Hyde Amendment restrictions on abortion funding apply to community health centers isn't "judicially enforceable" because "an executive order cannot override a statute."

Parker is right about one thing: The overall meaning of the executive order and its relationship to the bill is not obvious. That's why the White House and Stupak don't agree about it. But let's get out of the legal thicket and back to the practicalities here. Nothing in the bill say that federal funding can be used for abortions at community health centers—it's silent on the issue, not favorable. That's why a judge could look to the executive order on this point, I'd think (statutory interpretation mavens, tell me if I'm wrong). What's more important, though, is that the president has just signed an order saying that federal money won't be used for abortions at community health centers. How likely is it that his administration is going to turn around and do the opposite, after a hugely contentious battle over abortion that the White House did its best to sidestep at every point along the way? You don't have to be an Obama lover to see why, politically speaking, it's a nonstarter.

Consistently since his candidacy began, Obama has tried to neutralize abortion, not detonate it. If anything, this whole uproar makes it even less likely that the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal Medicaid money for going to abortions and has to pass as a rider each year, is going anywhere. On abortion, health care reform is about maintaining the status quo: Poor women get state funding for abortions in the 17 states that provide it. Everywhere else, they'll continue to pay their own way.

Tags: abortion, healthcare bill, hyde amendment, medicaid

In this week's New York magazine there is a gossipy article about Patricia Cohen, the ex-wife of hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen, and her accusations that Steve hid assets from her at the time of their divorce. This is the second piece in the past month about the ex-wives of Wall Streeters—see "Lehman's Desperate Housewives" from the April issue of Vanity Fair. Now that the economy has tanked, these articles about the unhappy culture surrounding Wall Streeters are commonplace. What emerges from this particular pair of articles is an utterly predictable and unsettling portrait of what it's like to be married to a high-powered executive. Which is to say: It's not so good.

The Cohens divorced in large part because Steve's work was his life. According to the New York article, "His moods would swing up and down with the Dow. 'He used to come home beat-up, impatient, at the end of his wits,' Patricia says, and then take it out on her. 'He could be demanding, hypercritical, and a screamer; if he had a bad day, he’d explode.' " It goes without saying that his time spent with the kids was limited. And so it was with the "desperate housewives" of Lehman Bros. Karin Jack, wife of former Lehman C.O.O. Bradley Jack, tells this story:

"I knew the culture," she says, "so I knew he couldn’t come home if there was an important meeting. I was in labor with our daughter and had to lie there without him & but I wouldn’t get mad at him—he had called the entire Hong Kong office in for a meeting. We knew that it would have been used against him. If you made a personal choice that hurt Lehman, it was over for you."

This is the life that women sign on for when they marry men who have these sorts of jobs. The New York article notes that Steve Cohen's new wife "takes care of her man. She doesn’t complain that he works too much; she lauds his devotion to their kids. If he has a bad day at work, she cooks his favorite meal, pasta with anchovies." If you want an egalitarian companionate marriage, you can't marry a CEO.

Photograph of women by Joe Raedle/Getty Images News.

Tags: housewives, lehman brothers, stay at home mothers, Wall Street

Periodically, I see folks in the mainstream media discover the existence of mean female rednecks, standing beside their bigoted brothers with the same look of incomprehension and rage on their faces, and I'm always surprised that anyone could be surprised by this. Growing up in the thick of redneck country, I well knew that the only thing meaner than a right-wing male ignoramous is his wife, standing beside him glowing with the joy of finding a politically feasible excuse to act with the anger and viciousness usually reserved for men. So I wasn't the slightest bit surprised to see the report showing that half of the Tea Partiers are female. Women have always kept up with men in the conservative movement, and, as Politico argues, they can outshine the men as well.

History alone should remind us of thise fact. Women stood right alongside the men when it came to harassing civil rights activists. Women have often been the shock troops in the anti-choice movement. Defense attorneys for accused rapists try to stack the jury with women, who are often eager to hear what a horrible slut the victim was (and how much better they are in comparison). Female conservative students at Dartmouth joined in with the men in destroying anti-apartheid protest art in the '80s. There's nothing about being female that prevents someone from becoming a reactionary.

None of this is to deny that angry white women in conservative environments don't face a great deal of oppression because they're women. On the contrary, they tend to face way more of the slings and arrows flung at women. They're way more likely to have to cook dinner and then to clean up everything while their husbands slink to the living room to watch the game, and they're way more likely to have to smile and bring him a beer while they do it. Many women in this world never seem to sit down at home, and, just as bad, they never seem to get up at work, because they face so much sexism that they really do have to work twice as hard to be seen as half as good. Women in this world accept a lot of shame for their sexuality and have to put up with way more jokes about how women are feeble-minded from their male relatives. So, definitely, they're bullied.

But as much as we'd like to believe that the bullied automatically have more sympathy for others who are bullied, we have all seen the ugly reality of the bullied person finding someone smaller to pick on. Responding to sexism by becoming a feminist and separating from your community doesn't seem feasible to many women, so instead they try to compete with the men in the arena of being hateful toward racial minorities, the poor, and women who don't conform to strict gender roles. Some of the meanest misogynists I've met have been female; they seem to think by hating on other women, they'll get an exception for themselves as one of the good ones. You'd think a stay-at-home mother in conservative country would see what she has in common with a woman who needs public assistance to get by, but often the reaction instead is to gloat about being superior and to deny any connection whatsoever with the unworthy unmarrieds.

Sexism means women have less, not more, space to dissent from the prevailing opinions in their community. Since women are judged more, gossiped about more, and considered easier targets by the bullies in their community, they have all the more reason to conform to right-wing standards. There's a strong incentive for conservative women to un-sex themselves, Lady Macbeth-style. Borrowing some of the social esteem that men enjoy by outdoing the men in paranoid, hateful right-wing rhetoric is an easy path to glory for many conservative women. Witness the career trajectory of Sarah Palin if you have a moment's doubt about that.

Photograph of couple by Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: michelle bachmann, right wing women, Sarah Palin, tea partiers