Amanda, isn't the war on contraception just another way that "fiscal responsibility" always mean cuts to social programs? "Zeroing out" Title X funding (that's all federal funding of family planning) would save $327 million. I headed back to the New York Times' fantastic Budget Puzzle from last November to look for a few things we're not talking about when it comes to cutting the budget. How about eliminating farm subsidies? That's 14 billion right there--a whole lot of condoms. We could cut foreign aid by just 1% and more than cover Title X. Return the estate tax to what it was in the Clinton years and fund Title X for decades. But none of those options offers the moral superiority that comes with defunding programs that provide benefits to low-income women, benefits that, as you put it, can be painted as a luxury that only those who've earned it really deserve.

In at least one county in Maryland, you can add preschool to that list. We can debate the effectiveness of Head Start—early childhood educators say that a report released last January suggesting that the program's positive effects don't last past the end of first grade just means "disadvantaged kids need more than a year-long hit of high-quality early education," while detractors argue that Head Start ("a 1960's era relic") simply doesn't work—but even the Heritage Foundation would fund preschool choice, not end early education or the help it offers low-income working families.

But at least two County Commissioners in Frederick County, Maryland aren't looking to offer help to anyone. C. Paul Smith and Kirby Delauter both linked the county commission's vote to end Frederick County's contribution to its Head Start Program to its "make marriage work" program. Smith says his wife stayed home with the kids at "that critical age ... I know everybody isn't able to do that, but clearly, as we can strengthen marriage we can decrease the children we have to reach ... that is the best long-term way to help our children, as marriage is strengthened in our community." As his colleague, Kirby Delauter, says, "I mean, education of your kids starts at home, okay? I never relied on anyone else to guarantee the education of my kids."

So: stronger marriages equal fewer kids in Head Start. No Head Start means, of course, stronger marriages. It's tough to argue with that kind of logic, because it's obviously not logic at all. It's rhetoric, and ugly rhetoric at that. I have no idea whether the elimination of Head Start was the best way to balance this county's budget (I do note that it spends a few hundred grand yearly on weed control). What's troubling here is that it's become acceptable—again—to blame the parents whose kids are enrolled in Head Start. Obviously, if they just had stronger marriages, and better jobs, and just were better in general, they wouldn't need to rely on anyone else for the education of their kids. That same urge for blame drives the witch hunt against Title X funding. Any responsible individual—any fiscally responsible individual—so clearly wouldn't need it. It's a throwback to the Reagan era: politicians in need of a scapegoat, pointing a finger at the "welfare mom."

Frederick is just one county in one state, of course: a few benighted fogeys arguing that the best way to help low-income children is to return all responsibility for their pre-school education and care to their mothers, whose marriages will somehow be strengthened by this additional stress, are scarcely cause for national alarm. But I'm sounding one just the same. It's so easy for even the most politically-minded of us to stay clueless about the races that take up the lower half of our ballots. (Guilty.) Commissioners Smith and Delauter are proof that even we shouldn't get so caught up in the national rhetoric that we forget what's happening in the trenches close to home.

Tags: Frederick County defund Head Start, Head Start, war on low-income women

It’s been a terrible week to have a uterus. From redefining rape to defunding family planning services, Republicans continue to fight a breathless battle against women’s bodies. Shortly before Congress voted to strip Planned Parenthood of its funding today, the Health and Human Services Department delivered a rare piece of good news. According to the Washington Post,

The Obama administration rescinded most of a federal regulation Friday designed to protect health workers who refuse to provide care they find objectionable on personal or religious grounds. The Health and Human Services Department eliminated nearly the entire rule … that was widely interpreted as allowing such workers to opt out of a broad range of medical services, such as providing the emergency contraceptive Plan B, treating gay men and lesbians and prescribing birth control to single women.

Abortion, of course, is still subject to conscience protections. The new regulation would leave in place the 30-year-old policy permitting health care workers to opt out of providing abortions due to personal, moral, or religious beliefs. Hospitals and clinics risk losing federal funds if they do not comply.

It’s a small victory, to be sure, but in the present political climate, it feels like a major triumph. Obama’s muscular policy shift serves as a much-needed rebuke to the rising tide of dangerously misogynistic legislation coming out of Congress.

Tags: congress, conscience laws, government funding family planning, Kathleen Sebelius, Obama, planned parenthood, pro-choice, pro-life

As a native of a country that was also once ruled by a longtime dictator (actually two successive dictatorships lasting nearly 30 years) it was hard not to feel happy for triumphant Egyptians when they finally showed Mubarak the door. Even though Haiti has little in common with Egypt, I still felt a certain kinship with Egyptians and shared in their hopeful exuberance about the months and years ahead. But after reading, watching, and listening to news reports about Egypt’s severe problem with sexual harassment of women, I’ve gone from wanting to visit the country to being terrified to step foot  there. I’m sure I’m not alone.

It’s beyond troubling to learn that the despicable attack on CBS reporter Lara Logan was just an extreme manifestation of the sort of sexual, verbal, and emotional harassment the majority of women in Egypt, both native and foreign, are subjected to on a daily basis. That the everyday occurrences are not as violent is small comfort when you consider the environment is ripe for what happened to Logan to happen to other women. For all we know other, less high-profile, women could have been similarly struck and not reported it because of the stigma attached to such attacks in Egypt.

Most Americans are just now hearing about this problem, but news reports about sexual harassment in Egypt, such as this one on CNN last year, and this one on Al Jazeera English in 2007 are not new.

Yesterday, NPR reported that “according to one recent report by a women's rights group, some 80 percent of Egyptian women and 90 percent of foreign women visiting the country have been sexually harassed. And the former government did little to stem the problem.”

“If you type in 'harassment Egypt' on YouTube, dozens of videos showing women being mauled will pop up,” NPR correspondent Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reported. “In one particular incident, a mob of men rips the clothes off of a woman. It's horrific and terrifying.”

I went on YouTube and while I couldn’t find the video she mentioned, I saw enough to give me pause, but also to give me hope because the Egyptian women are fighting back. I love this video of Egyptian girls taking karate classes to defend themselves from aggressive men. The reporter notes that families are spending money that they would normally use for food to pay for the classes. The video also shows a group of girls on a street being surrounded and harassed by a large and scary group of men.

That some Egyptian men are involved in the efforts to help women protect themselves is also encouraging. Mohammed Saffi is one of those men. He is the spokesman for harassmap.org, a program started in 2010 to help women report, track, and avoid areas where women have been harassed or attacked.

"The Arab world is a male-dominated society," he told NPR. "And you can imagine if you mix a male-dominated society with an oppressive way of life for the past 30 years, that's not gonna garner good results in the field of women's rights."

I get this, but what I don’t understand is why all over the world, in other parts of the Middle East, in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and other places experiencing civil or political disorder or societal breakdown, men feel compelled to attack the most vulnerable members of their population –  women and girls. Why, in addition to denying them basic human rights, must they emotionally and physically demean and violate them? (Remember the extensive raping of women during the Bosnian war?) The widespread rapes currently taking place in troubled corners of Africa are hard to fathom. Now rapes of women and girls are on the rise in the tent cities housing already traumatized earthquake victims in Haiti.

That’s not to say we don’t have our own problems with sexual harassment and violence against women here in the U.S. But we certainly have many more means to fight back and we have a government and laws to help us do that. Women in Egypt and elsewhere deserve no less.

One member of the Egyptian parliament, clearly in denial about the extent of the problem, told Al Jazeera that only certain women are targeted: “There is no way people will attack her if she is dressed modestly or if she  is walking in a respectable manner.” Polls taken about sexual harassment in Egypt have proved otherwise, and so have the experiences of many women.

"I also find that many veiled women get harassed and many little girls get harassed and people who are not particularly hot get harassed. I think it has more to do with denigrating femininity in whatever guise," Hania Shuleimy a professor of gender studies at the American University in Cairo, whose breasts were grabbed by a man on the street, told NPR.

If Egyptian authorities hope to see robust tourism return to their country they will need to get more serious about confronting this problem and put in place tough policies and penalties that signal that this behavior is not acceptable and will not be tolerated in any form.

Tags: Lara Logan attack, Sexual harrasment of women in Egypt

The basic structure of Annie Proulx’s new memoir, Bird Cloud, is simple. Proulx is a woman who comes from nomadic forebears and has lived a peripatetic life. As she enters old age, she longs to finally build her dream home.  After one false start, she acquires what she believes to be the perfect piece of Wyoming land and undertakes the monumental task of designing and building her vision—only to be disappointed by the realization that Bird Cloud (both the name of the house and the cliff near which it sits) is riddled with unforeseen complications and, ultimately, fatal flaws.

In theory, it’s perfect memoir stock. Proulx’s book seems to fit neatly into a hot new genre that Sandra Tsing-Loh described in the Atlantic last summer: books written by middle-aged women about finding happiness not through love, but through real estate. Tsing-Loh writes that in home ownership, as opposed to relationships, “whatever the problem, we can engineer the solution—we just need to roll up our sleeves, invoke a panel of experts, troll for the best prices online, rearrange, rehydrate, tinker, fix, hammer.” And frankly, who doesn’t like to live vicariously through someone else’s housing drama? (If you disagree, I dare you to watch just one episode of HGTV’s House Hunters.)

Bird Cloud may seem to be an ideal example of Tsing-Loh’s formula, but really, it’s a far stranger book than most in its class. In a genre characterized by often painful oversharing, Proulx—both refreshingly and exasperatingly—offers up virtually nothing of her personal or emotional life.  We learn little of the events that landed her in this particular circumstance. As she builds her fantasy home in the Wyoming wilderness, her only companions are the people she employs and a shadowy set of adult children who float in and out of the narrative with nary a biographical detail to set one apart from another.  Nor do we learn much of Proulx’s own feelings: Her emotional range, if this memoir is to be believed, flows between peaceful (sometimes smug) satisfaction and mild, good-humored aggravation.  What we do learn about, in four distinct sections, are less interior matters: the genealogy of the Proulx family, the history of the land on which the author builds, the intricate details of the process of constructing her house, and the almost human dramas of the birds whose daily activities can be observed from its many windows.

Proulx’s writing—sometimes stilted and corny, sometimes wonderfully illustrative—lurches through several distinct registers.  The chapters on house-building feel like they’re taken from an enthusiastic first-time homeowner’s blog.  The bird-watching section reads like it was lifted directly from the journal of a rather verbose naturalist.  But Proulx shines when she explores the intersection of history and her own experience, and when she brings to life the rarefied culture of Wyoming and the West.  Bird Cloud is an homage to the West—its particular inhabitants, customs, nature and history.  But it’s also an exercise in excavating the foundations of things. The history of the Proulx family is the foundation of Annie Proulx, just as the history of the land is the foundation of her dream house.  These themes are fertile and fascinating, but it’s the house itself, imbued with so much expectation and attention, that turns out to be tricky—for both author and reader. After a long hard winter, Proulx admits that “no matter how much I loved the place it was not, and never could be, the final home of which I had dreamed.”  The pathos is evident, but Proulx never allows us in to explore.  The house, as a result, is as challenging a literary device as it is a practical dwelling place: a spacious metaphor, but ultimately an empty one.

Tags: Annie Proulx, Bird Cloud, book of the week, House Hunters, memoir

This is the third legislative session in a row in which Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), the sponsor of the “Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act,” has introduced a bill that would bar federal funding for family planning clinics. This time he is finally getting some traction: Astoundingly, House Republicans have expanded his attack to encompass all funding for contraception, zeroing out funding for family planning services in the continuing resolution to fund the government through September, which passed the House this afternoon.

Why are Republicans going after birth control while most of the country worries about record unemployment? The move against contraception funding is a surprising turn towards the right, even for such a conservative Congress. Historically, inroads against contraception access have been difficult for activists on the Christian right because, unlike abortion, contraception is politically popular in this country: A Harris interactive poll conducted on the 50th anniversary of the pill demonstrated that 86 percent of Americans think the pill was good for society, and the Guttmacher Institute reports that contraceptive use is near-universal among sexually active straight women.

The short answer is that the recent emphasis on fiscal discipline has opened up a new path towards restricting contraception access. Remember, funding is the common theme of two other bills attacking reproductive health access in the House, HR 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act,” and its cousin, HR 358, the "Protect Life Act", both of which would make insurance plans that cover abortion ineligible for tax deductions. Anti-abortion activists and legislators have calculated that by framing anti-abortion proposals as austerity measures, they can bring along Tea Partiers and other fiscal conservatives. As Pence has put it: “What is more fiscally responsible than denying any and all funding to Planned Parenthood of America?”

The timing couldn’t be better, from the Christian right’s perspective: Its last best effort to take on contraception, abstinence-only education, faces an uncertain future, because after a long decline, teenage pregnancy rates started to rise right around the time such programs went into effect. Tying contraception to spending cuts gives them a new chance for victory. By painting Planned Parenthood as the 21st century version of Reagan’s welfare programs, social conservatives can portray all federal spending on family planning as a corrupt giveaway to the undeserving. Dana Loesch tested this rhetoric out to heavy applause at CPAC last week, bellowing, “But you’re not empowered when you’re expecting Uncle Sam to act like your sugar daddy, and take care of your abortions and take care of your birth control, and pay your bills and everything else?”

Others opponents of reproductive rights have also figured out how to wield the fiscal conservatism card. Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council wrote an op-ed last June pressuring Mitch Daniels to support cuts to contraception funding by using fiscal conservatism as the rationale, raising the alarm that money spent on family planning “BREAKS DOWN TO $391,506 A DAY.” Last month, Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review, not usually one to forefront fiscal conservatism in her writing, vividly outlined the strategy and compiled a hefty number of quotes from conservatives who cast the opposition to Title X in strictly budgetary terms--for example, by calling contraception spending “special-interest giveaways.”

Of course, rhetoric that attacks federal funding for contraception as a state-subsidy for promiscuity obscures the fact that continuing Title X is one of the more fiscally sound things the government can do: Research from the Guttmacher Institute demonstrates that every dollar spent on family planning saves the government four dollars down the road.

But how will the strategy play politically? Better, certainly, than attacking legal access to contraception, which is about as popular as ice cream. If attitudes toward abortion funding are any indication, the approach may play well: Although Gallup polling routinely demonstrates that most Americans want abortion legal in at least some circumstances, a hefty majority supports the ban of federal funds for abortion, and a slim majority opposes insurance funding of abortion. A lot of people in these last two groups aren’t anti-abortion, but when abortion is portrayed as luxury item instead of a medical procedure, they come around to the view that it should only be available to those who can afford it, like liquor or video games.

The question now is whether Republicans will be able to put contraception in the same category.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: contraception, planned parenthood, Title X

While the debate over Planned Parenthood's funding in the House is fascinating as a story on its own, I expect that the story that's going to be discussed into infinity today is Rep. Jackie Speier standing up during the debate and speaking about her own abortion experience at 17 weeks. Nothing grabs the headlines like the revelation that a flesh-and-blood woman has been outed as someone who has touched a penis at least once in her life, though most of the time this prurient urge is expressed through "baby bump" watching in tabloids.

Speier taking a stand against Rep. Chris Smith and his "wouldn't sit next to him on the subway" levels of creepy investment in ladyparts and controlling the use of them was admirable, especially considering the sea of threats and hate mail her staff is surely combing through this morning. Still, I have to admit I'm annoyed that anti-choice Republicans were able to steer the conversation toward abortion, when the debate on the floor has nothing to do with abortion.  The debate is over ending Title X funding, which goes only toward all other reproductive health services, such as STD screening, cancer screening, and contraception.  By letting the A-word dominate the conversation, Republicans were able to conceal the anti-contraception agenda they're pushing.

But that's a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things.  I appreciate any and everyone who talks openly about abortion, STD treatment, and contraception.  Anti-choice activists are able to fill the void with lurid, false stories about what these things are all about, because people who have the direct facts and experiences don't talk about it.  A little truth-telling goes a long way to fight all the Junior Anti-Sex League hysteria that is being whipped up right now in support of Republican anti-choice initiatives.

Tags: contraception, jackie speier, planned parenthood, pro-choice, pro-life

When South by Southwest put out its comedy lineup for this year's forthcoming festival, which runs from Mar. 12-19 in Austin, Tex., the initial roster looked fantastic, save for a glaring omission. There was only one woman comic—the excellent Tig Notaro—out of more than 30 performers listed. Generally I'm not a fan of bean counting, but that ratio seemed egregious. The Internet upset over the lack of women was swift. As writer Lindsay Robertson pointed out, "What the f*** is up with the fact that SXSW comedy has booked TONS of male comedians and only ONE female*"?  I contacted SXSW comedy programmer Charlie Sotelo to find out.

In an e-mail, Sotelo says he is "heartbroken" over the reaction to the paucity of women performers. He explained that the "initial announcements are rarely complete, and this year is no exception," and that they're already in the process of finalizing arrangements with some well-known female comedians. Sotelo went on to list a few reasons why more women were not in this initial press release. First off, only three women applied in the SXSW open auditions this year. Secondly, they did try to reach out to several women comedians, but many had scheduling conflicts. Finally, SXSW runs at the same time as television pilot season. "This year, it cost us some great women," Sotelo said.

These all sound like decent explanations. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that there will be an equal number of women as men in any comedy festival, as the pool of women stand-ups is not huge. One female comic I spoke to said that she estimates that in most cities, about 10 percent of working comics are women. Still, the 31 men to 1 woman ratio of SXSW is pretty shameful, and it's heartening that Sotelo seems committed to fixing it. Let's see how this progresses. And hey, good job in nabbing the hilarious Donald Glover from Community.

*Correction, Feb. 18, 2011: The original version of this post included an erroneous mention of a SXSW panel.

Tags: donald glover, marc maron, sxsw comedy, sxsw comedy and women, tig notaro