Why The Supreme Court’s Rulings On Marriage Equality Have Nothing To Do With Roe v. Wade

As the Supreme Court takes up two landmark cases for marriage equality this week, the impending decisions have sparked comparisons to another one of the Court’s rulings on a so-called “social issue” — the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion rights exactly 40 years ago. Since a politically contentious battle over abortion rights has continued throughout the four decades after Roe, some pundits argue the Justices moved too quickly to grant legal rights to reproductive care, and a similar move toward marriage equality before the country is ready could incite the same kind of public backlash.

But the idea that Roe created the Religious Right — fueling public outrage over abortion that spurred religious conservatives to mobilize across the country — is actually a myth. As Sally Steenland, the Director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress, explains, religious conservatives actually began organizing to prevent the IRS from revoking tax-exempt status from a Christian college that was practicing racial discrimination. Evangelicals didn’t welcome what they perceived as “government intrusion” into privately funded, faith-based institutions, and a movement began brewing. In fact, abortion wasn’t added to the Religious Right’s agenda until several years after Roe, when the movement’s leaders began seeking to expand their issues.

And it wasn’t necessarily political backlash from the Religious Right that began chipping away at reproductive rights in a post-Roe nation. In many cases, it was actually the Court itself. In 1980, Harris v. McRae upheld the Hyde Amendment, which bars low-income Americans in the Medicaid program from getting abortion services covered by public insurance. In 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey narrowed Roe‘s broad abortion protections to a less rigid standard — specifying that states may restrict abortion as long as they don’t impose an “undue burden” on women seeking to terminate a pregnancy — which paved the way for today’s state-level restrictions, spanning everything from mandatory waiting periods to forced ultrasounds.

Even aside from the unfounded myths about the history of the United States’ abortion rights battles, there’s even more evidence to suggest that Americans won’t revolt if the Justices advance LGBT equality. Although abortion and gay marriage have been the two pillars of the Religious Right’s “values issues” for the past two decades, serving as political wedge issues that go hand-in-hand, that’s not necessarily the case anymore.

“As recently as 2004, we talked about abortion and same sex marriage in the same breath,” Daniel Cox, the Public Religion Research Institute’s research director, told the Washington Post. “They were the values issues. Now, it doesn’t make sense to lump them together anymore. We’ve seen a decoupling.” Cox explained that’s partly because of the increased visibility of LGBT people, and the personal connections with gay and lesbian people that are leading growing numbers of Americans to support pro-equality policies — the kind of public awareness that doesn’t necessarily exist for women who have abortions.

So, although support for legal abortion has remained fairly steady throughout the past three decades, without much of a discernible shift between different age groups, the support for gay marriage has recently soared to historic highs — particularly among young people. The nation didn’t actually erupt into a political firestorm directly as a result of the Court’s decision on abortion rights, and there’s no evidence to suggest that a ruling in favor of marriage equality will spark that response, either.

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Bill O’Reilly Finally Admits ‘Homosexuality Has Nothing To Do With The Crime Of Pedophilia’

Bill O’Reilly has been campaigning against Colorado House Speaker Mark Ferrandino (D) because he won’t allow a vote on a bill to “Jessica’s Law.” Jessica’s Law imposes excessive penalties on individuals who commit sexual abuse against children, and O’Reilly has repeatedly inferred a connection between the fact Ferrandino is openly gay and not “protecting the kids.” Earlier this week, he responded to criticism over this comparison by doubling down on it. On Tuesday’s broadcast, he finally admitted the connection doesn’t exist, but took no accountability for reinforcing it:

O’REILLY: I have to report the truth here. First truism, homosexuality has nothing to do with the crime of pedophilia. Second, everyone we report on is defined and that guy is proud of his circumstance and promotes it, so we reported it.

Watch it (via Equality Matters):

A “truism” is something so obviously true that it isn’t worth mentioning, and the supposed link between homosexuality and pedophilia hardly fits that description. It’s true that there’s no connection, but it has been made or inferred for decades. More importantly, O’Reilly brazenly made it himself without any subtlety to hide behind just seven months ago. He can’t just shrug it off like everybody knows better when he has a history of miseducating his viewers on the issue.

His admission is also compromised by his description of Ferrandino as having a “circumstance” that he “promotes.” Being gay is not a condition, nor can homosexuality be reinforced in anyone. Under the premise of a campaign to “protect the children,” O’Reilly is only continuing to reinforce stigma against gay people with this kind of rhetoric. If he actually supports civil unions as he claims, he has no grounds for demonizing others for doing the same.

Tonight, Denver Post Opinion Editor Curtis Hubbard, who criticized O’Reilly for his smear campaign against Ferrandino, will appear on his show to confront him in person. Maybe fourth time’s the charm for O’Reilly figuring out how to respect the inherent dignity of an elected official.

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Paul Ryan Learns Nothing from Historic Gender Gap: Budget Guts Women’s Health Programs

Our guest blogger is Lindsay Rosenthal, a Research Assistant for Health Policy and Women’s Health and Rights at the Center for American Progress.

The 20 point gender gap in the 2012 election was the largest since Gallup poll began tracking in 1952 — the Obama-Biden ticket beat the Romney-Ryan ticket by a large margin with women, driven largely by women of color turning out at high rates for the President.

That loss was predictable based on polling that asked women questions about specific proposals in Paul Ryan’s previous budgets, which showed that women highly disapprove of cutting Medicaid, Medicare, and other vital programs that meet their health care needs. But the budget Ryan released this week suggests he learned nothing from women’s responses at the voting booth.

Ryan has never been a friend to women’s health, and has repeatedly taken action to limit women’s rights and access to health care — and his new budget is just more of the same. It would dismantle the advancements made through the Affordable Care Act and institute dramatic reductions in the services available through key programs, on top of the cuts women’s health services are already facing as a result of the sequester.

Here are the top four ways the new Ryan Budget (which is just the same as the old Ryan budget) guts key programs for women’s health:

Millions of women would lose the consumer protections and access to affordable health coverage that they gained under the health law. These reforms are critical for both women’s health and economic security.

The Ryan budget would eliminate the ban on discrimination against those with preexisting conditions, including breast cancer, Cesarean sections, rape, and health needs related to domestic violence; provisions that allow young women to stay on their parents health insurance plans until age 26; premium tax credits that help individuals and small businesses purchase health insurance; Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid; and a slew of other benefits that the law provides for women’s health.

By repealing protections in Obamacare, the Ryan budget would preserve an individual health insurance market that routinely discriminates against women. Insurance companies in the individual market charge women $1 billion more in premiums than men each year for the same set of benefits. Under the health reform law, insurers will also be required to cover maternity care — only 12 percent of plans on the individual market currently do.

Women are 70 percent of adult Medicaid beneficiaries. In fact, more than one in ten non-elderly women receive their health insurance coverage through Medicaid.

But the Ryan budget would replace guaranteed federal funding for Medicaid with block grants to states — fixed sums of money set in advance, regardless of actual costs. By 2023, the Ryan budget would reduce federal Medicaid spending by 810 billion, forcing states to cut back on coverage and benefits. And by repealing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, the Ryan budget would deny Medicaid coverage to at least 7 million women who are expected to become newly eligible for the program if the law is fully implemented, leaving them with nowhere to turn for coverage.

Women represent over half of Medicare beneficiaries and 62 percent of those over the age of 80.

The Ryan budget would move toward a privatization of Medicare, proposing that those currently in the health program get vouchers for private insurance. Under the Ryan plan, the first seniors hit by these changes could pay up to $59,500 more during retirement, with those who will be Medicare eligible in 2050 paying up to $331,200 more.

Women on Medicare generally earn less in social security benefits than their male counterparts and have higher out-of pocket-medical costs. Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare threatens both the health and economic security of elderly women.

By repealing Obamacare and gutting Medicaid, the Ryan budget would severely undermine access to reproductive health care, especially contraception, for millions of women.

47 million women are projected to benefit from the no-cost preventive services that have already gone into effect, including mammograms, Pap smears, well-baby care, contraception, preconception and prenatal care in well-woman visits, gestational diabetes screening, lactation supports, and much more. In addition, the Medicaid program provides 75 percent of public funding for family-planning services and is expected to play an even greater role in providing access to family planning once the ACA is fully implemented.

Women of reproductive age spend 68 percent more on their health care expenses than men and their reproductive health care and the expense of birth control is a significant part of that spending. Surveys show that nearly one in four women with household incomes of less than $75,000 have put off a doctor’s visit for birth control to save money. More than half of young adult women say they have not used their prescribed contraceptive method as directed because it was cost-prohibitive.

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Joss Whedon’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ And The Challenge Of Modern Shakespeare Adaptations

One of the reasons William Shakespeare’s work is so enduring is that it’s perceived to be timeless. Romeo and Juliet are stand-ins for every teenage couple that perceives themselves to be or actually is pulled apart by family or other societal forces. Hamlet is every son with a dead father and an uncertain sense of himself. Bands of brothers will continue to charge into battle from this day to the ending of the world, and they and we will need to believe they do so for a greater cause to enable them to keep doing it. But while many of Shakespeare’s psychological insights may feel unmoored from time, in the same way Lizzy Bennet and Mr. Darcy could have met, sparred, and found each other in almost any time period, with adjustments along the way, the means by which Shakespeare delivered those insights vary widely in how tightly they’re tied to particular historical circumstnaces and mores, and in how much structres from the past have reinvented themselves for new eras. This poses enormous challenges for the success of a contemporary Shakespeare adaptation: it’s easy to turn the Capulet and Montagues’ relatively amorphous family fued into a gang rivalry or a spat between business empires, but rather harder to come up with a modern equivalent of the Salic Law that will get audiences juiced.

I say all of this as a roundabout way of approaching Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, a play that’s a perfect example of a relatively modern relationship that’s brought together under difficult-to-translate circumstances. Beatrice and Benedick, two wits who have each other as their favorite targets, are brought together in a horribly traumatic moment that’s difficult to imagine today: Beatrice’s cousin has her chastity impugned at the altar on her wedding day, is left at the altar, and her family pretends that she’s died of shame in order to build time to restore her reputation. The process by which Hero’s wedding is ruined is essentially a timeless one—she’s framed for cheating with another man on the night before her marriage to Claudio—but the reaction to this news is not. Claudio isn’t just disgusted by the idea that Hero has cheated on him: the fact that she has sexual experience at all is at the root of Claudio’s complaint to Hero’s father at the altar:

Sweet prince, you learn me noble thankfulness.
There, Leonato, take her back again:
Give not this rotten orange to your friend;
She’s but the sign and semblance of her honour.
Behold how like a maid she blushes here!
O, what authority and show of truth
Can cunning sin cover itself withal!
Comes not that blood as modest evidence
To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear,
All you that see her, that she were a maid,
By these exterior shows? But she is none:
She knows the heat of a luxurious bed;
Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.

I wrote on Friday that this is a scenario that’s exceedingly hard to move into the modern era, and I thought the success of Much Ado About Nothing would depend on the ability of the movie to find a contemporary scenario into which this conflict fit without seeming jarringly anachronistic, making it easier to suspend disbelief about the characters’ reactions. While there’s no question that cheating on your wedding night is a big deal in modern society, we’re—fortunately—not a society where it would be a reasonable test of your lover’s affections to ask him to kill his best friend for besmirching your cousin’s sexual reputation. There are options here, of course. I would have been curious to see a slightly larger social context where Hero and her family are Christian, and the film took seriously the idea that her honor is valuable to her because she’s been taught it’s the most important thing about her. And even more interesting could have been a setup where Claudio’s reaction seems to come more from a sense of anxiety about the revelation that his bride has more sexual experience than he does than from the idea that Don Leonato has offended him by pretending to honor him but offering him “this rotten orange” as a sign of that honor.”

So it’s an interesting choice for Whedon that he does add one significant bit of modern context to Much Ado. But it’s meant to flesh out the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick, the part of the play that transitions most smoothly into a modern setting, rather than to render less jarring the conflict that lets them end the “merry war of words” between them. In the scene that opens the film, it’s revealed that Beatrice (Amy Acker) and Benedick (Alexis Denisof) slept together before he went off to the wars, and for reasons unclear, they’re both embarrassed and angry with each other about the encounter. It’s a decision that works surprisingly well for all its lack of necessity, giving new meaning to Beatrice’s barb that Benedick is “a good soldier to a lady,” or her insistence that “I know you of old” after he slips out of their conversation with “a jade’s trick,” just as he slept out of her bed early in the morning to avoid awkward conversation. When the Prince tells Beatrice at the party that “You have lost the heart of Senor Benedick,” Beatrice’s reply that “He lent it to me for a while” has a new and lovely melancholy.

But the dynamic between Beatrice and Benedick has larger problems. Denisof, a veteran of How I Met Your Mother plays Benedick like womanizer Barney Stinson, rather than as a man who’s hesitant to see the military unit that’s given his life meaning and companionship broken up by marriage—this is bro-hood, not brotherhood. In his readings of lines like “I hope you have no intent to turn husband,” or Benedick’s declaration that the woman he marries must be “Virtuous, or I’ll never cheapen her,” I could almost see MacLaren’s Pub breaking through the background as if conjured for another realm. Acker’s performance as Beatrice is better, a melancholy rather than merry read on the character, which wisely means she’s competing less with Emma Thompson than Denisof is with Kenneth Branagh, even to the extent of stealing his voice concealment schitck during the garden party, and she suffers less by comparison as a result. But the new backstory between her and Benedick would have required slightly more context to explain why an independent woman in a contemproray setting who has repeatedly rejected the idea of marriage would be so wounded by a one-night stand. Explaining that reaction might have provided a set of norms that would have clarified the Claudio-Hero story, and given more context for Beatrice and Benedick’s reactions when Hero is falsely accused, and Benedick takes her side rather than standing with his friends, giving him more reason than simply wanting to impress Beatrice.

The real problem is with what happens after Hero is accused and pretends to have died. Fran Kranz and Jillian Morgese do very nice work with the most fundamentally boring parts in the play, and in particular, someone should really cast Kranz in an indie romantic comedy already. But watching Beatrice demand that Claudio be killed for the sin of falsely accusing Hero, or watching Denisof flash a pistol at Claudio in the tastefully-appointed library in Joss Whedon’s real-life house just feels silly and histrionic. Rather than Shakespeare’s words giving us the gravity we’ve scrambled after in contemporary life, something that worked so well with contemporary war in Ralph Fiennes’ excellent 2011 adaptation of Coriolanus, here, his scenario just feels ludicrous, diminishing everyone involved, and making the challenges of contemporary romance feel histrionic rather than blesssed with a vocabulary that can express their proper gravity. That’s not to say there are no pleasures to be had here, particularly the channeling of Nathan Fillion’s spectacular gift for pomposity into Dogberry, a performance that would do Michael Keaton proud, and the lovely use of Clark Gregg’s decency as Don Leonato in perhaps the most deft and subtle casting in the movie. But Whedon’s interpretation ultimately makes the much ado about nothing in the title seem like a negative reflection on his characters rather than a charming reflection of the inherent nonsense and complication of true love.

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Joss Whedon’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ Slut-Shaming, And Hero And Claudio’s Story

I’m hoping to catch Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing at South By Southwest, though it looks like scheduling may not allow for it. But looking at the trailer, I’ve got two thoughts:

First, I love me some Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker, but I think it’s going to be hard for me to see them not in the context of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson’s performances in those roles in from twenty years ago. Acker’s so good at retiring roles that it’s hard for me to really imagine her with a delightfully poisonous tongue.

And second, I’m curious as to how the adaptation is going to handle Hero and Claudio, played respectively by Jillian Morgese and Fran Kranz. Their story, in which Hero’s chastity is called into question, the wedding between the young lovers is called off, and Claudio is made to feel guilty by being told that Hero’s literally died of grief is a much harder thing to bring into the moder era than a clash of wits between a much more contemporary couple like Beatrice and Benedick. There’s very interesting stuff to be done with Hero and Claudio about anxiety about relative sexual experience, slut-shaming, and the anxiety of marriage. But getting there and doing it right in this setting probably means jettisoning the set-up in which Claudio believes that Hero is dead. I’m curious to see how Whedon will work it all out. Giving us modern screwball with Beatrice and Benedick is awfully fun, but it’s the easy lift here. Transforming Hero and Claudio and doing it well will be the much more impressive feat.

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Obamacare: Nothing to Brag About

During last week’s State of the Union address, one item curiously went almost unmentioned. We heard all about President Obama’s past triumphs and future plans, but his health-care-reform law was strangely missing. Sure, there was one throwaway line about how Obamacare was reducing health-care costs, but the seminal achievement of the president’s first term was almost ignored.

Perhaps that is because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has brought little good news of late.

Insurance premiums are set to explode. Already health insurers, citing the increased cost of various Obamacare provisions, are seeking and winning double-digit premium hikes. For example, California health insurers are proposing increases for some customers of 20 percent or more: 26 percent by Blue Cross, 22 percent by Aetna, and 20 percent by Blue Shield.

Young people are especially likely to face higher premiums. Obamacare’s “community rating” provisions prohibit changing premiums based on health status and limit the degree to which insurers can charge based on age. Thus, premiums will rise more slowly for older and sicker individuals, but will shoot up for young people. According to a survey by the American Action Forum, healthy young people in the individual or small-group insurance markets can look forward to rate increases averaging 169 percent.

“The president’s health-care law increasingly does less and costs more.”

Further, a study in the American Academy of Actuaries’ magazine found that 80 percent of young adults aged 18–29 not eligible for Medicaid will face higher costs, and that 20- to 29-year-olds on the individual market not eligible for subsidies will see their premiums increase 42 percent.

New federal subsidies will offset rising premiums to some degree. But that will only further drive up the law’s already rising price tag. The cost of the average exchange subsidy per person is now projected to be $5,510 in 2014, $700 more than it was projected to be last year.

And those subsidies might not exactly make exchange plans affordable. The IRS recently estimated that in 2016, for a family of five, a policy available through the exchange would cost roughly $20,000. At the same time, the IRS has decided that subsidy eligibility will be based whether one’s employer offers an “affordable” individual plan (meaning the employee-paid premium is less than 9.5 percent of his income), whatever the cost of a family plan might be.

That’s become a theme for Obamacare: costs more, does less.

For example, the Congressional Budget Office has again lowered its estimate for the number of people who will gain insurance coverage as a result of Obamacare. Just 27 million more Americans will be covered by 2023 than would be otherwise, leaving 30 million Americans still uninsured. And roughly 12 million of the 27 million newly insured won’t actually get a real health-insurance plan but will simply be dumped into Medicaid.

At the same time, the CBO now estimates that 7 million Americans can expect to lose their current insurance because their employer will decide to pay the penalty/fine/tax rather than provide Obamacare-compliant insurance (this number is up from 4 million). Not only does that belie the president’s oft-stated promise that “if you have health insurance today, and you like it, you can keep it,” it means that as many as 11 million fewer Americans will have private unsubsidized insurance than before Obamacare, making it look more and more like a government takeover of the insurance industry.

Then again, one has to wonder if Obamacare will ever get off the ground at all. For example, the administration once confidently predicted that governors and state lawmakers would quickly fall into line, establishing exchanges and expanding their Medicaid programs. But 26 states have refused to set up exchanges, and seven will require the federal government to operate at least part of the exchanges in their states. (And in at least two states, Idaho and Michigan, state legislators are challenging their governor’s decision to establish exchanges.)

Those exchanges need to be set up by this October if they are to be operational by January 1, 2014, as the law mandates.

Yet there is little evidence that HHS has the money, manpower, or expertise to meet this deadline. While HHS insists that everything is on schedule, they have refused to disclose their plans or release their implementation schedule. Even Democratic Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus is alarmed: He recently ordered detailed accounting of the efforts to set up the federal exchanges by February 26. At the same time, industry groups and others have quietly begun to talk about the possibility that the opening of the exchanges, and therefore the commencement of other key Obamacare provisions, may have to be postponed.

The law’s Medicaid expansion is not going much better. Obamacare advocates were once certain that even Republican governors would not be able to resist the promise of “free” federal money provided by the expansion. Yet, while a handful of high-profile Republicans, such as John Kasich of Ohio, have indeed folded, the vast majority, most recently Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, have resisted the siren song of federal dollars.

Even the president’s one State of the Union mention for Obamacare, boasting of lower health-care costs, is suspect. It is true that health-care costs have risen more slowly over the past couple of years. But the vast majority of health-care economists attribute that to the recession rather than to a law that has barely begun to be implemented. Indeed, the administration’s own actuaries predict that in the future health-care costs will grow faster than they would have in the absence of Obamacare.

No wonder the president had so little to say about Obamacare. It increasingly looks to be nothing to brag about.

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