Democracy vs. Kyrsten Sinema

by David Balashinsky

Back in January, when the world was a very different place, Kyrsten Sinema delivered a speech on the Senate floor explaining her refusal to vote to eliminate the filibuster.  Because  two critical pieces of legislation, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, lack enough votes in the Senate to pass by the 60-vote threshold, eliminating the filibuster, which the Democrats could do on a simple majority vote, is the only way that these bills can pass in the senate and eventually become law.

Everything that need be said about Sinema on this topic already has been said.  In particular, I strongly recommend Michelle Goldberg's Opinion piece in the Times, "Sinema and Manchin's Nihilistic Bipartisanship."  Even more to the point, the Replace Sinema Project has issued its own rebuttal to the assorted errors, outright falsehoods and absurd rationalizations that comprise Sinema's stated objections to filibuster reform.  Notwithstanding, I found it impossible to read a transcript of Sinema's speech without giving vent to my own reactions to it.  First, though, some thoughts on the filibuster, itself.

There are as many good reasons to eliminate the filibuster as there are reasons why it is bad.  My view is that the Senate filibuster, in its current form, is simply anti-democratic because it obstructs the will of the majority.  (Of course, the composition of the senate is, itself, anti-democratic, but that's another matter.)  

Supporters of the filibuster often try to defend it on the grounds that it prevents "the tyranny of the majority."  It may be time to retire that argument.  So long as the fundamental, constitutional rights of every person are guaranteed, majority rule by voting is not a form of tyranny but of fairness.  It is the most reasonable solution for determining a course of action among more than two people.  Majority rule is so inherently natural that most of us wouldn't even consider anything else.  Who hasn't had the experience of having to make a collective decision about something - where to order take-out for the office party, or where to rent the airbnb for the family reunion - and deciding the question by putting it to a vote?  When a simple majority - even by one vote - carries the day, no one ever says, "That's not fair!  You need a margin of 20 percent to win!"  Imagine a sport like baseball in which, at the end of nine innings and with a score of six to five, the team with six doesn't win.  Rather, in order to prevent the "tyranny" of the victorious - that is, the better team or the one that had a better day, which would be very unsportsmanlike of it - one team would have to vanquish the other by a margin of at least 20% - say, six to four - in order to be declared the winner.  Such a scheme doesn't prevent one form of tyranny - it simply creates another.  It gives one side - in politics, the less popular side - proportionally greater power to determine an outcome and to establish public policy than the majority.  That's an even more unjust form of tyranny: a tyranny of the minority, which is exactly what we now have in the Senate.  

The 60-vote threshold to pass legislation simply negates the power of the majority.  That doesn't foster compromise or civility.  It does the opposite.  It undermines the morale of the majority by proving that their votes don't matter.  It undermines democracy itself by discouraging citizens from participating and voting - why bother? - rendering Americans embittered and cynical.  Currently and in practice, it enables the Republican Party, which represents a minority of the electorate, to obstruct the will of the majority that wants to see their representatives do what it elected them to do (including passing the two voter-protection laws that have been stuck in the Senate).  That's not my idea of democracy and I do not think that it was the founders' idea of democracy either, which is probably why the filibuster is nowhere to be found in the constitution.  (Not that the constitution, as originally drafted, is so democratic either, but that's also another matter.)

In the real-world context of the Republican strategy to disenfranchise as many non-White and non-Republican voters as possible, the battle is not between Republicans and Democrats but between Republicans and Democracy.  The Party of Trump has demonstrated time and again that it will stop at nothing to seize political power by any means, fair or foul, legal or illegal.  Refusing to lift a finger to oppose the Trumpist agenda of ending democracy is not a repudiation of partisanship, as Sinema would have us believe,  but a unilateral surrender to it.  The ground-rules of democracy itself - how elections are held, who gets to vote and whose votes get counted - are being subverted in such a way as to entrench, likely for generations, minoritarian rule by the Republican Party in the United States at both the state and federal levels and in all three branches of government.  

In this dark reality, it seems almost too good to be true that the Independents and Democrats in the Senate should have just enough votes to eke out a legislative victory that might very well be the last, best hope of preserving democracy in our nation.  Well, it turns out that it is too good to be true, thanks in large part to Kyrsten Sinema.  That is what makes her refusal to vote to do away with the filibuster so galling.  She actually has the power, right now, to prevent what may ultimately prove to be an irrevocable Republican subversion of democracy but refuses to exercise it.  

Sinema, of course, is not the only nominal Democrat thwarting the will of the Democratic Party and of the American voters.  The other one is the coal magnate and multi-millionaire Joe Manchin.  Manchin is as responsible for the unilateral surrender to the Republicans as Sinema is but I am focusing here on her partly because I had much higher hopes for her but, also, because, as I have mentioned already, having read Sinema's speech, I simply cannot allow to go unchallenged the naive and specious arguments with which Sinema attempts to justify her refusal to vote to get rid of the filibuster.  What follows, then, is a semi-annotated rebuttal to her speech, excerpts of which appear in italicized block quotations. 

It is more likely today that we look at other Americans who have different views and see the “other,” or even see them as enemies – instead of as fellow countrymen and women who share our core values.

In this statement, as she does throughout her speech, Sinema treats the partisan estrangement between Republicans and Democrats as reciprocal and equal, as though the views of both are  equidistant from the center.  This is a false equivalence.  For years, Republican strategists, politicians and right-wing hate mongers on Fox and other like-minded media platforms have been vilifying, demonizing and deliberately misrepresenting the views of Democrats and Independents in ways unlike anything that emanates from the center or the left.  Republicans  disparage Democrats as internal enemies of the United States and as a threat to our very way of life.  In fact, the idea that our nation and our way of life are under attack is now the predominant theme of White-nationalist, Republican and Trumpist discourse.  This has been building for years, as Ronald Brownstein explains:

Late in the 2016 presidential campaign . . . Michael Anton, a conservative scholar who later joined the Trump White House, described the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as the "Flight 93 Election." . . .  Anton insisted that a Democratic victory would change America so irrevocably that conservatives needed to think of themselves as the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11 - the ones who chose to bring down the plane to save the U.S. Capitol from al-Qaeda hijackers.  Letting the Democrats win, in other words, would doom the country. . . .

For at least the past decade, GOP candidates and conservative-media personalities have routinely deployed rhetoric similar to the Flight 93 argument.  Only about 40 hours before the [January 6] insurrection, at a campaign rally hosting an enthusiastic, virtually all-white audience in rural Georgia, President Trump insisted that if Democrats won the state's two Senate runoff elections . . . "America as you know it will be over, and it will never - I believe - be able to come back again."

And, of course, on January 6th, 2021, while inciting his mob before it assaulted the capitol in order to prevent the certification of Biden's electoral victory, Trump declaimed "We fight like hell.   And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

In his speech accepting the Republican Party's nomination for him to run for president again in 2020, Trump declared "this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life, or whether we will allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it."

As CNN reported last year, the day before leaving office, former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo tweeted, "Wokism, multiculturalism, all the -isms - they're not who America is.  They distort our glorious founding and what this country is all about. . . ."  In the same story, CNN notes that in remarks he delivered the previous July,

Pompeo fanned the flames of division stoked by Trump, warning that "the very core of what it means to be an American, indeed the American way of life itself, is under attack" amid nationwide protests for racial justice and against police brutality.

Writing in Vox, Zack Beauchamp drew essentially the same conclusions as Brownstein, namely, that "The Capitol Hill mob was the logical culmination of years of mainstream Republican politics."

The animating force of modern Republicanism is this: Democratic Party rule is an existential threat to America and is by definition illegitimate. . . .

Whether elite Republicans genuinely believe what they tell their base is beside the point.  The fact is their delegitimizing rhetoric has been the fuel of the conservative movement for many, many years now.

Beauchamp noted that, on the morning of January 6th, 2021 Lauren Boebert, a Republican representative from Colorado, "tweeted that the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results amounted to a new American revolution.  'Today is 1776,' she wrote."  Ten years earlier, Sharon Angle (a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate) had stated in an interview "that she believed that Americans might need to take up arms against the tyranny of Barack Obama and the Democratic congress."

Writing for the New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser pointed out that

In one alarming survey released this week, nearly thirty percent of Republicans endorsed the idea that the country is so far "off track" that "American patriots may have to resort to violence" against their political opponents.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat reported in the Washington Post that 

In June, an anchor of One America News suggested that execution might be an apt punishment for the "tens of thousands" of "traitors" who, he claimed, stole the election from former president Donald Trump.  A sitting member of congress, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told Americans in May that they "have an obligation to use" the Second Amendment, which is not about recreation but "the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government if that becomes necessary."

. . . 

This Republican culture of violence and threat builds on histories of racial persecution and on policing used as an instrument of terror against non-Whites.  Habituation to such violence, reinforced by the presentation of non-Whites as an existential threat to the future of America (as in the "great replacement theory" that Tucker Carlson has referenced on Fox News) makes it easier for the public to accept violence around political events, like elections, as necessary to "save the country."  Tellingly, the participants in the January coup attempt, which was billed as just this kind of patriotic act, included 57 local and state GOP officials. . . .

Only last month, the Republican National Committee officially labeled the attempted coup against our government on January 6, 2021 as "legitimate political discourse."

Clearly, it's long past time to acknowledge that, while the majority of Americans who identify as Republicans may, indeed, be "fellow countrymen and women," they do not, in fact, "share our core values," as Sinema insists on giving them credit for doing.  Our core values include respect for free and fair elections.  They include respecting the results of free and fair elections.  They include respect for the peaceful transfer of power from one presidential administration to the next.  Our core values also include honesty, decency, integrity, fairness, equality, belief in facts and belief in science: the diametric opposite, in other words, of everything that Trump and his cult of followers represent.  So, no, the majority of Americans do not share core values with Trump's base and the Republican Party in its current incarnation.

It’s more common today to demonize someone who thinks differently than us, rather than to seek to understand their views.

Ah, but we do understand the views of Republicans, only too well.  Sixty-eight percent of them believe the 2020 election was stolen.  Forty percent of them believe that "political violence is justifiable and could be necessary" in the near future.

Our country’s divisions have now fueled efforts in several states that will make it more difficult for Americans to vote and undermine faith that all Americans should have in our elections and our democracy.  These state laws have no place in a nation whose government is formed by free, fair, and open elections.

That is precisely why the filibuster needs to be eliminated: so that the two voting-reform bills that are stuck in the Senate can be passed on a simple majority vote.  These bills would prevent or undo the damage to our democracy that these anti-democratic state laws would otherwise do, potentially, for the foreseeable future.  Sinema, herself, acknowledges that "These state laws have no place" in our nation.  Yet her response to these coordinated assaults on our democratic system of government is simply to surrender and to declare her surrender before the entire Senate. 

Threats to American democracy are real.

Yes, they are, and they require real responses, not hand-wringing speeches justifying doing nothing to oppose these threats to American democracy.

Our politics reflect and exacerbate these divisions. . . .

That is absolutely true.  And one of the most powerfully destructive ways that our politics exacerbates these divisions is through the mechanism of extreme partisan gerrymandering.  When a congressional district is drawn in such a way that a candidate can completely ignore the views of the minority within that district, the only real competition she or he is likely to face is during the primaries from ever more extreme fringes of her or his own party.   That is exactly how political gerrymandering promotes extremism and, inevitably, the very divisions that Sinema claims to want to repair.  Political gerrymandering is one of the structural flaws in our electoral system,  so toxic to our politics and to our society, that the Freedom to Vote Act would remedy.  If Sinema really wants to bridge political divisions and restore bipartisanship to our politics, she should be doing everything in her power to ensure passage of the Freedom to Vote Act - not forestalling any possibility of its passage by blocking filibuster reform.  

These bills help treat the symptoms of the disease [which, according to Sinema, is our nation's political polarization, or "division"] – but they do not fully address the disease itself.

That is both a misreading and a misstatement of the crisis of democracy in America today.  The disease is not "division": the fact that people disagree politically or on specific policies.  Rather, the disease is that one major political party is, at this moment, rewriting election law so as to give an insurmountable structural advantage to Republican Party candidates while disenfranchising millions of Americans.  That's the disease.  

It's not difficult to understand why the Republican Party no longer believes in democracy.  Its strategists and leaders grasp only too well that the Republican Party represents the views and interests of a minority of citizens in this country; it knows that changes in demographics as well as the ongoing, broad liberalization of our society's views of race, gender, equality and abortion rights make the Republican Party appealing to an ever-shrinking share of the electorate; and it knows that, for all these reasons, the only way Republicans can win elections in much of the country - and in the electoral college - is by preventing the "free, fair and open elections" that Sinema claims to support but which, by her refusal to do away with the filibuster, she has, in fact, chosen to allow the Republicans to prevent. 

"Division," in and of itself, is neither dysfunctional nor pathological.  Republicans have every right to disagree with Democrats and they have every right to try to convince voters that their vision for America is one Americans ought to support at the ballot box.  That's how democracy is supposed to work.  Indeed, disagreement can even be healthy for a democracy.  But when one party no longer is willing to abide by the foundational ground rules of democracy, that is when democracy itself can be understood to be "diseased."

[E]liminating the 60-vote threshold will simply guarantee that we lose a critical tool that we need to safeguard our democracy from threats in the years to come.

What Sinema doesn't seem to grasp is that eliminating the Senate filibuster is virtually the only tool that we have left to safeguard our democracy right now.  Sure, it would be nice if things had not gotten to this point.  But here we are.  We can either recognize that our democracy is on the precipice and prevent its irrevocable descent into the abyss, or we can do what Sinema has chosen to do: nothing.

Our mandate . . . [i]t seems evident to me [is] work together and get stuff done for America. 

In a two-party system, that approach only works when both parties agree to abide by it.  Unfortunately, ever since the Obama administration, the Republican Party has stuck tenaciously to a policy of rigid and relentless obstructionism.  The Republican leader of the senators in Sinema's own legislative body, Mitch McConnell, said it himself back in 2010: "our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office."  He reaffirmed the Republican policy of refusing "to work together and get stuff done for America" once Biden was in office, declaring that  "one hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration."  In 2020, McConnell boasted about killing close to 400 separate pieces of legislation that had passed the House of Representatives, many with bipartisan support.  Clearly, working "together to get stuff done" is diametrically opposite the Republican Party leadership's political strategy.  (And when some Republicans have demonstrated bipartisanship - not as an end in itself but simply because they were voting in the best interests of their own constituents - they have received death threats, apparently, from Republican voters.)   

We must commit to a long-term approach as serious as the problems we seek to solve – one that prioritizes listening and understanding. One that embraces making progress on shared priorities, and finding common ground on issues where we hold differing and diverse views.

How does one find common ground with people who believe that the Democratic Party represents a global cabal of pedophiles?  How does one find common ground with people who believe that Obama is not a native-born American and a Christian but a foreign-born crypto-Muslim who is hostile to our nation's interests?  How does one find common ground with people who believe that Sandy Hook and Covid19 are hoaxes created by nefarious forces, including our own government, for the purpose of depriving Americans of their civil liberties?  How does one find common ground with people who claim, against all evidence, that Biden didn't win the election?  How does one find common ground with members of a political party that, collectively, refuses to repudiate Trump and refuses to repudiate Trump's lies and his attempts to destroy our constitutional system of government?  How does one find common ground with people who consider the insurrectionists who attempted the overthrow of our constitutional order on January 6th "patriots" and who regard those now charged for their participation in that shocking assault on our nation as "political prisoners"?  More to the point, should we attempt to find common ground with such people?  Isn't it more the case that reaching out a hand to them, searching for common ground and trying to "understand" them merely validates them and confers upon them a political and a moral legitimacy that they do not deserve? 

So I find this question answers itself:

Can two Americans of sharp intellect and good faith reach different conclusions to the same question?

Yes. Yes, of course they can.

Except that Donald Trump has neither a sharp intellect nor is he acting in good faith - quite the reverse.  So, indeed, that question does answer itself because the Republican Party is not what it was in the 1960s.  It is now the Party of Trump.  And if its spiritual and de facto leader is not acting in good faith, the party that supports, legitimizes and empowers Trump cannot - must not - be assumed to be acting in good faith, either.

Some have given up on the goal of easing our divisions and uniting Americans. I have not.

That's commendable.  But there's a principle in emergency medicine that applies to our political crisis: First, stabilize the patient.  The long-term objective of restoring civility and bipartisanship to our politics and our government is laudable.  But a long-term strategy of recovery and reclamation is not an appropriate response in an emergency.  That is the critical difference here.  Sinema does not seem to recognize that we are in uncharted territory: a break-the-glass moment in our nation's history in which Republican subversion of the ground rules of our democracy, unless prevented by passage of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, will be entrenched likely for decades, possibly for generations.  That can only be prevented by first eliminating the Senate filibuster so that these two voter-protection bills can pass by the simple majorities that already support them.

Nothing less than democracy, itself, is at stake now.  History will record that Sinema had the power to save democracy in the United States before it let out its last gasp and she refused to do so.

Update - 9 December 2022:  Sinema has now announced her intention to leave the Democratic Party.  In her statement explaining this decision, she refers to "the edges" of the Democratic and Republican parties and cites "the loudest, most extreme voices" within those parties as though both sides are equally to blame for the vitriol, partisanship and outright assaults on our democracy that are making our system of self-government dysfunctional.  This is just one more example of Sinema's attempting to distract from and to justify her betrayal of those who helped put her in office by creating a false equivalence between the Republican and Democratic parties.  To be clear, it was not a mob of Democratic Party supporters that invaded the capitol and attempted to stage a violent coup preventing the legitimate transfer of power from one presidential administration to the next.  And it was not Biden but Trump - the de facto head of the Republican Party - who, only this week called for the suspension of the United States constitution.

Update - 11 Deceber 2022: Additionally, because Sinema is now no longer a Democrat, the Primary Sinema Project has now changed its name to the Replace Sinema Project.  I have edited this column to reflect that name change.

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David Balashinsky is originally from New York City and now lives near the Finger Lakes region of New York.  He writes about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics.  He currently serves on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.

 

 

Gaslighting, Thy Name Is Andrew Cuomo

by David Balashinsky

Let's begin by acknowledging a few facts.  

First: there were numerous allegations of inappropriate touching and comments of a sexual nature made against Andrew Cuomo beginning in 2020.

Second: the Office of the Attorney General of the State of New York investigated these allegations and issued a report on 3 August 2021 in which it concluded that these claims were credible.  As the report states in its Executive Summary,

. . . we find that the Governor sexually harassed a number of current and former New York State employees by, among other things, engaging in unwelcome and nonconsensual touching, as well as making numerous offensive comments of a suggestive and sexual nature that created a hostile work environment for women.  Our investigation revealed that the Governor's sexually harassing behavior was not limited to members of his own staff, but extended to other State employees, including a State Trooper on his protective detail and members of the public.  We also conclude that the Executive Chamber's culture - one filled with fear and intimidation, while at the same time normalizing the Governor's frequent flirtations and gender-based comments - contributed to the conditions that allowed the sexual harassment to occur and persist.

Third: all of these allegations were made by women.  This matters because Cuomo has claimed that there is nothing sexual in nature about how he physically interacts with people: "You can go find hundreds of pictures of me kissing people, men, women. It is my usual customary way of greeting."

Fourth: in the face of these credible allegations of sexual harassment, overwhelming public pressure to resign (including from many members of his own political party, up to and including President Biden), the unequivocally damning findings of the Attorney General's report, and facing the likelihood of impeachment, Cuomo resigned in disgrace on 24 August 2021.

Fifth: Throughout this entire episode, Cuomo has denied doing anything that rises to the level of illegal sexual harassment, as defined under the law.  Only this week, Cuomo reasserted this claim as though the decision by several local prosecutors not to formally charge him amounted to a full exoneration:

Now, they did a report that said there were eleven cases against me.  Since then . . . five district attorneys have investigated the report of the much-publicized eleven violations of law.  And do you know how many cases of the eleven they found to bring? . . .  Zero.  Zero.  Zero cases.  Why?  Because there is a difference between an individual's opinion as to what they believe is offensive behavior and a legal violation.  You can have an opinion about what is right and wrong, but that doesn't make your opinion the law.

At the same venue where he delivered these comments, Cuomo explicitly equated not being prosecuted with being exonerated: "And now the truth has actually come forth and I feel vindicated."

A decision by a district attorney, or even several, not to indict someone is not the same thing as an exoneration, of course, just as a finding of "not guilty" by a jury is not the same thing as a finding of "innocent."  

Fortunately, none of this matters for my purpose here, which is not to argue that Cuomo is guilty, under the law, of having committed sexual harassment but, rather, to dispute the central premise of his claims of innocence.  Namely, that those instances (those, that is, that are not in dispute) that have been described by numerous women complainants as sexually inappropriate touching and comments all amounted to nothing more than a misunderstanding due to "generational and cultural shifts that I just didn't appreciate."  Cuomo made this argument in his resignation speech: "In my mind, I've never crossed the line with anyone, but I didn't realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn."  And he did so, again, the other day at God's Battalion of Prayer Church, in Brooklyn: 

Last February, several women raised issues about my behavior.  As I said then, . . . my behavior has been the same for forty years in public life. . . .  But, that was actually the problem.  Because for some people, especially younger people, there's a new sensitivity.  No one ever told me that I made them feel uncomfortable.  I never sensed that I caused anyone discomfort. . . .  But, I've been called old-fashioned, out of touch.  And I've been told that my behavior was not politically correct or appropriate.  I accept that. . . .  Social norms evolve and they evolve quickly. . . . But I didn't appreciate how fast their perspective changed.  And I should have.  No excuses. . . .  However, the truth is also that, contrary to what my political opponents would have had you believe, nothing that I did violated the law or the regulations.

Call this what you will - deflection, denial, gaslighting, a stratagem in which Cuomo tactically concedes a little bit of ground in order to occupy a more advantageous position from which to mount a defense - what Cuomo is doing here is making a feint of being out of touch and socially clumsy in order to represent his behavior - which the Attorney General's office determined to be sexual harassment - as behavior that was essentially non-sexual in nature and therefore totally innocent of any sexual inappropriateness.  To the extent that the many women who lodged complaints against Cuomo felt uncomfortable or violated in some way, this did not result from Cuomo's behavior but rather, from their "sensitivity."  In other words, It wasn't me - it's all in your head!  You're misconstruing something that was totally innocent!  How many times have women been told things like these and made to feel as though the problem is all in their heads?  That they're hypersensitive.  That we are living in an age of political correctness run amok.  That's gaslighting.

That Cuomo not only would persist in his campaign of gaslighting these women (and not just them but the public, too) but would choose a Black church in which to do so is reprehensible.  And that he would invoke Black History Month, the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the names of John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. in his self-serving campaign of gaslighting is beyond reprehensible.

So, who or what, in Cuomo's telling, is really to blame in all this?  Why, "cancel culture," of course:

Don't underestimate the strength and the virulence of the cancel culture.  It's not just in politics.  Today, even some members of the press are afraid to ask questions that challenge the so-called politically correct cancel-culture thinking.  Do you know how many reporters told me they knew the report against me was a fraud but they were afraid to challenge MeToo claims?

Even as he offers denials, deflections and non-apology apologies for his conduct, Cuomo paints himself as a victim of "prosecutorial misconduct," "abuse of power" and "government corruption":

So eleven months later, the truth is known.  But it's too late.  Justice too long delayed is justice denied.  The report did the damage it was designed to do.  My father was right.  Politics can be a dirty business. 

Cuomo goes on to portray himself as a martyr and compares his struggle for justice against the accusations of sexual harassment to the civil rights movement:

Seeing what they did here broke my heart.  And I'm trying to cross the bridge.  And I'm trying to get from a negative place to a positive place.  Romans Five: We can find glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance. . . .  Congressman [John] Lewis said these words: "Do not get lost in the sea of despair.  Be hopeful, be optimistic, our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, a year but the struggle of a lifetime. . . . "  I find inspiration in those words.  Genesis tells us that good can come from suffering, and that life is about tomorrow, not yesterday.  They broke my heart, but they didn't break my spirit. 

All this in an attempt to avoid accountability for "sexually harassing behavior" toward eleven different women on numerous occasions.  I can only imagine how Cuomo's sanctimonious and self-serving pietism must turn the stomachs of these women.

To return to the essence of Cuomo's argument, it is that the world has changed and that his only fault is having failed to change along with it.  He claims that it's all about "generational and cultural shifts that I just didn't appreciate."  What Cuomo is asking us to believe is that he, someone who came of age in the early 1970s, at the very time that second-wave feminism was burgeoning and exploding upon the public's consciousness, when "Miss" and "Mrs." became "Ms.," when women were routinely out in the streets protesting sex discrimination and criticizing the sexualization and rampant objectification of women's bodies, when the first sexual harassment cases were making headlines, when the very term sexual harassment entered both the legal and the popular lexicon, - that he, a graduate of Fordham University who went on to receive a law degree from Albany Law School (1982) and who entered public life working as a district attorney and a practicing lawyer at precisely the period during which sexual-harassment law was being established in case law, culminating in its codification in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, when sexual-harassment training was being instituted in colleges and universities, offices and factories, becoming nearly ubiquitous and, in many cases, mandatory - that somehow, Cuomo missed all this.  Really?

Okay, let's give Cuomo the benefit of the doubt.  Cuomo's claim is that all of these monumental social and legal changes throughout the '70s, '80s, '90s and beyond somehow occurred without his knowing about any of them because of the "generational and cultural" milieu in which he has lived the entirety of his life.  If Cuomo is to be taken at his word - that is, to treat his explanation as a hypothesis - I think that the only fair test would be to compare Cuomo's position to that of a similarly-situated person, meaning someone from the same generational and cultural milieu.  In order to be fair, such a comparison should be to someone who shares not one but several demographic characteristics with Cuomo - and the more particulars in which Cuomo and this control agree, the more fair the comparison and the more valid, therefore, the results of the test.  

Toward which end I volunteer myself.  I am the same age as Cuomo.  I am from the same state as Cuomo.  I am from the same city as Cuomo.  I am even from the same borough as Cuomo (Queens).  We are both White, cis-gender, hetero males.  We both come from middle-class families, we are both college-educated and we are both considered professionals.  I'm even a registered Democrat, just like Cuomo.  It's true that I am not trained as an attorney, although I was trained and served as an investigator for the Sexual Harassment Committee at the college that I attended.  That could count against me in the sense that I'm more sensitive to what constitutes sexual harassment, making the comparison between Cuomo and me less fair to Cuomo, but any such benefit that Cuomo gains in this respect is more than offset by the fact that Cuomo's father was, by all accounts, an honorable man, so Cuomo benefited from having honorable behavior modeled for him throughout the formative years of his life.  In contrast to this, my own father was not only an inveterate sexist but a serial sex-abuser.  If either of us might be expected not to know how to recognize borders or where "the line" is, it shouldn't be the former governor.

All of these circumstances - these points of similarity between Andrew Cuomo and me - enable me to state with certainty that "the line has [not] been redrawn," unbeknownst to Cuomo.  He doesn't get to use that as an excuse.  None of the behavior described in the Attorney General's report, such as running one's finger down the spine or caressing the abdomen of a woman state trooper who isn't one's wife or girlfriend (and doing so in pubic, even if she is) has been permissible at any time in my life that I can remember.  Likewise, asking creepy questions about a subordinate's sexual-assault history and whether she is into dating older men, and the various other sexually-harassing things that Cuomo is alleged by these eleven women to have done.  

Two points must be borne in mind here: first, I speak as someone whose "generational and cultural" background is identical to Cuomo's and, second, this generational and cultural background is what Cuomo would have us regard as exculpatory of his behavior.  It is precisely because our backgrounds are so similar that I no more believe Cuomo is genuinely, naively and innocently ignorant of where "the line" is than I believe he didn't cross it.

                                                 Credit: Chris Rank

                                                 Copyright: © 2019, Chris Rank/RANK STUDIOS

About me: I am originally from New York City and now live near the Finger Lakes region of New York. I am a licensed physical therapist and I write about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics.  I currently serve on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.

 

 

Compulsory Penile Surgery and Abortion Rights: Let's End the Gendered Double Standard on Gendered Double Standards

by David Balashinsky

In the wake of SB8, the Texas anti-abortion statute that empowers bounty hunters and vigilantes to sue anyone who helps a girl or woman exercise her constitutional right* to terminate her pregnancy, at least one Texas urologist has seen a 15% increase in the number of men seeking vasectomies.  This is reported in yesterday's Washington Post and, while one angle of this particular article is the increased rate of vasectomies as a response to the decreasing availability of abortion services, the other is the emergence of "parody legislation" (it could also be called "parity legislation") that would require men to undergo vasectomies.  As the Post reports, "In their own form of protest, state lawmakers in Alabama, Illinois, and Pennsylvania introduced legislation that highlights the gendered double standards with regards to reproductive rights."  Women's bodies are regulated and their freedoms curtailed by states such as Texas in ways that men would never contemplate, let alone submit to were they faced with a comparable restriction of their bodily autonomy.  That, at least, is the theory behind such parody laws: to get people to think about the disparate effects that abortion restrictions have upon the rights and dignity of people with uteruses but not on those without.  As Christopher M. Rabb, one of the sponsors of these proposed bills explains, 

For far too long, the public debate around abortion, contraception and related reproductive matters has thrust government into the center of restrictions on the bodily autonomy of women and girls.

Rarely is there a meaningful dialogue around public policy focusing on the personal responsibility of cisgender men in this sphere.

The rights of cisgender men have always been paramount in our society with little focus on their responsibility as inseminators to change their behaviors for the good of their partners, families and society at large.

Rabb's proposed legislation "blew up in a way he didn't expect," prompting "thousands of hate-filled emails, Facebook posts and even death threats."  Afterward, Rabb commented on the reaction:

I underestimated the vitriol that this proposal brought.  The notion [that] a man would have to endure or even think about losing bodily autonomy was met with outrage, when every single day women face this and it's somehow okay for the government to invade the uteruses of women and girls, but it should be off limits if you propose vasectomies or limit the reproductive rights of men.

Rabb's heart may be in the right place, yet his statement seems oblivious of the fact that more than 80% of men living in the United States today have been subjected to a radical penile surgery as neonates and that, to this day, more than half of all males born in the U.S. still are subjected to this harmful and medically-unnecessary surgery.  Because penile circumcision is irreversible, the boys, the adolescents and the men that these infants become will never fully experience either bodily autonomy or sexual autonomy.  The shape, the appearance, the sensory-capacity and the function of their genitals was decided for them, without their consent, before they were capable of resisting and making known their own wishes (other than through their anguished screams during the surgery itself).  Likewise, the nature and the diminished quality of their sex lives was decided for them before they could effectively object and exercise their right to own and control their own bodies.  If that isn't a denial of bodily autonomy, I don't know what is.

While a fine distinction might be made between "reproductive rights" and the sexual rights that necessarily follow from the right of bodily autonomy (since not all sex aims at reproduction and not all reproduction originates in sex), it is undeniable that the term "reproductive rights" is meant to refer broadly to a woman's right to control her sexuality and every other aspect of her life that is liable to be affected by an unwanted pregnancy.  The underlying rationale of anti-abortion statutes, after all, is to control not just reproduction but women's sexuality.  If laws denying women ownership and control of their own bodies and control of their own sexual lives constitute an abridgement of their "reproductive rights," it follows, then, that the "reproductive rights" of men also are routinely limited in this country.

Clearly, the outrage directed at Representative Rabb isn't based on an objection to denying men bodily autonomy or reproductive rights - at least not consciously - since, statistically speaking, many of the same people who object to his proposed legislation undoubtedly also endorse and practice male genital cutting.  The more plausible explanation is simply that these objectors simultaneously hold multiple sets of contradictory views and "gendered double standards" regarding bodily autonomy.  On the one hand, they claim to support individual liberty and freedom of choice, yet they would deny girls and women exactly these by impeding and obstructing their access to safe, legal, affordable and timely abortions.  More to the point, they maintain a particularly "gendered double standard" in their opposition to Rabb's proposed legislation, presumably, because it would impinge male "reproductive rights," yet they countenance or even actively support legislation that is just as much an intrusion (if not more) upon the reproductive rights of girls and women.  

But there is still another whole level of gendered double standard here.  Many of those who are so up-in-arms at the mere mention of legislation that would subject men to compulsory penile surgery do not object in the least when the compulsory penile surgery in question is non-therapeutic neonatal circumcision which, because of its permanence, affects men every bit as much as (and, in crucial ways, much more than) it does the infants these men were when they were subjected to it.  And it goes without saying that penile circumcision is incomparably more invasive, damaging and risky than vasectomy is.  Yet one form of compulsory penile surgery elicits a yawn while the other elicits outrage.  The explanation for this double standard is that, in our highly gendered culture, non-therapeutic circumcision is regarded as an important male rite of passage that serves to inscribe male bodies with masculine gender.  In contrast, vasectomy, because it obstructs male fertility, undermines masculine gender.  Thus, support of male genital cutting and outrage at the mere mention of compulsory vasectomy are, in fact, opposite sides of the same gendered coin.

These sorts of double standards are to be expected of those who oppose abortion rights.  They are even to be expected of those who celebrate the sexuality of some (mainly hetero, cisgender males) but not of others (females and LGBTQIA+ persons).  These are double standards that abortion-rights advocates are absolutely right to criticize.

What is more disappointing and difficult to comprehend is the double standard of those abortion-rights supporters themselves who claim to base their support of abortion rights on the more fundamental right of bodily autonomy yet remain silent in the face of - or even actively participate in - the denial of that right when it comes to the right of persons born with penises to own their own genitals and to control their own sexual lives.  This, too, is a gendered double standard: the notion that "My Body - My Choice" applies only to women and to female bodies but not to men and male bodies or to intersex bodies.  Thus, as gratifying as it is to see the gendered double standards that harm women (regarding their sexuality and reproductive rights) called out, it is galling to see the gendered double standards that harm men given a pass.

While Representative Rabb is making a valid statement by his proposed legislation (given that he entertains little or no expectation that the legislation itself ever will become law), I would like to see him champion the right of bodily autonomy for boys, men (or people with penises) and intersex persons with as much pluck and conviction as he champions the right of bodily autonomy for girls and women (or people with uteruses).  The same holds for all abortion-rights advocates.  The right to abortion rests on the same ethical and moral foundation as the right not to be subjected to genital cutting.  That foundation, common to both, is the right of bodily autonomy. 

* This essay was, of course, written prior to the infamous Dobbs decision.  See here for my take on that.

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About me:  I am originally from New York City and now live near the Finger Lakes region of New York.  I'm a licensed physical therapist and I write about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics.  I currently serve on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.
 

 

 

What Kyle Rittenhouse Can Do to Heal America

by David Balashinsky

Much has been made by Kyle Rittenhouse's champions of the right to self-defense and of this young man's justification, therefore, in killing Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber.  Tomorrow, Rittenhouse is scheduled to be interviewed on Fox where he will have an opportunity to tell his side of the story.  I hope he will do more than offer a self-serving account of why he did what he did.  There is absolutely no need for him to provide any further rationalization or justification for his having shot Rosenbaum, Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz since, from a legal standpoint, he has already been exonerated.   

Under oath, Rittenhouse has stated, "I didn't do anything wrong."  What if we were to take Rittenhouse at his word, meaning that he did not go to Kenosha secretly hoping to try out his semi-automatic rifle on BLM protesters but because he sincerely wanted to do some good there.  (I know, it's a stretch.  After all, Rittenhouse was recorded on video several weeks earlier saying how much he wished he had his AR with him so he could "start shooting rounds" at several men he observed exiting a CVS.)  If Rittenhouse's aim was only to do good, maybe he can do some good now.  The nation is deeply divided and hurting.  Rittenhouse could use the platform that comes with fame (or notoriety) to deliver a message that might help heal the nation's wounds - not unlike when Rodney King went above and beyond what anybody had a right to expect of him under the circumstances and asked, "Can't we all just get along?"  Here are my suggestions to Mr. Rittenhouse on how he can rise to the occasion and help heal the nation.

First - acknowledge your own culpability.  All of the tragic events involving you, Rosenbaum, Huber and Grosskreutz that unfolded the night you showed up at the protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin occurred because you were openly carrying an assault rifle.  The mere fact that you were carrying that weapon made the protesters there view you as a threat to their safety, and rightly so.  Carrying a weapon in public is not a neutral act and it isn't an innocent state of being prepared to defend oneself should the need arise.  It is an act of intimidation.  It is a form of bullying.  It is a threat to others.  And in conflicts where tempers are high, exactly like the one in Kenosha, carrying an assault rifle is a provocation.  Simply by being there with a lethal weapon, you had a role in provoking the response that led, ultimately, to your shooting Joseph Rosenbaum.  If your aim was not to provoke or to intimidate, this would be a great time to acknowledge that bringing an assault rifle to that protest was a colossal miscalculation on your part.  You should take this opportunity to encourage wannabe vigilantes across the country to learn from your mistake.

Second - express remorse for the deaths of Rosenbaum and Huber and sympathy for their families and loved ones.  Maybe it's just that I don't want to believe that you went to Kenosha because you were seeking an opportunity to shoot people.  If you didn't, and if you pulled the trigger multiple times only in self-defense, surely you can take no joy or satisfaction in the deaths of the men you shot.  So, instead of basking in the glow of adulation that gun-fanatics and right-wing extremists already are heaping on you, renounce that adulation and ask them and the nation to join you in remembering the men who died and to reflect on the systemic racism that was the cause of the unrest in Kenosha in the first place.  Whatever they were doing in Kenosha that night, and whatever threat you perceived to your life or safety, Rosenbaum and Huber didn't deserve to die for it.  Their lives also mattered, and they should be remembered as human victims, not as nameless, faceless, two-dimensional excuses for the taking of human life.

Third - don't be a tool of the right-wing media.  You have already been lionized as a hero by those who want to use you as a poster boy in support of their political agendas.  But these opportunists are not going to have to carry the burden through life that you are of having taken human lives.  It's easy for them to put you on a pedestal; it's also expedient for them to do so.  But you're the one who's going to have live with the consequences of your actions.  This would be a good time to remind your fellow Americans that the taking of human life is never a good outcome.  It's nothing to be celebrated.  Even veterans who have killed for the noblest of causes do not, as a rule, take any joy in having ended another person's life.  Why not take this opportunity to reject the increasingly violent rhetoric of the right wing - and of some within the Republican Party in particular - and remind Americans of all political stripes that we are Americans first (and people, even before that) and that violence and killing have no place in our political discourse, much less in our streets.

Finally - don't be a tool of the second-amendment extremists.  It has long been recognized that guns don't make us safer.  They actually have the opposite effect.  (I'm sure Mr. Grosskreutz can attest to that.)  There is no doubt in my mind that, had you done everything exactly as you did that night with the sole exception of bringing a gun to the protest, Joseph Rosenbaum would be alive today, Anthony Huber would be alive today and Gaige Grosskreutz would not have been seriously injured.  Nor would you have had to endure the ordeal of standing trial for murder, let alone having to live with your role in the deaths of these men on your conscience for the rest of your life.  Second-amendment extremists live in a fantasy world where guns are fetishes and real-life mass shootings have no more moral significance than the wanton killing that occurs in video games.  Your experience belies that fantasy and demonstrates, in all its horrors, the grim reality of an irrationally and dangerously armed population.  Use what I hope you have learned from this experience to reject the culture of guns and tell those who want to exploit your encounter with the men you shot that guns, especially when carried openly, do not lead to peace and tranquility but to conflict, death, and, ultimately, to a shredding of the social fabric that makes civil society possible.

Update: Subsequent to the publication of this piece, Rittenhouse did, in fact, express something that at least approaches regret.  As Newsweek reports, Rittenhouse stated, "Hindsight being 20/20, [it was] probably not the best idea to go down there."  Rittenhouse said this while appearing as a guest on the right-wing podcast, You Are Here.  The Newsweek article further reports that,

Co-host Sydney Watson at one point celebrated Rittenhouse, stating "it was kind of impressive, when you think about it, that all the people that you shot at, you killed probably two of the worst on the planet.  Congratulations.  Good job you.

[Rittenhouse] responded, "It's nothing to be congratulated about.  If I could go back, I wish I would have never had to take somebody's life."

Rittenhouse deserves at least some credit for resisting these efforts to glorify his actions that night, but, as of this writing, the fact remains that he could and should do much, much more.  Particularly, if he is truly regretful for his actions in Kenosha that resulted in the needless deaths of two men and the injury of a third.

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David Balashinsky is originally from New York City and now lives near the Finger Lakes region of New York.  He writes about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics.
 

 

 

"My Body - My Choice": Abortion Rights, Genital Autonomy and the Vaccine Mandate

by David Balashinsky

There is no right more important than the right of bodily self-ownership.  I cannot conceive of a right that is even a close second.  Without a territorial boundary that demarcates one's entire body as belonging exclusively to oneself and prohibiting all others from trespassing on it or restricting one's control over it in any way, liberty means nothing.  Without the right to exercise sole authority over one's body, full personhood is impossible.  (It should go without saying that when I refer to "personhood," I am speaking about persons who actually have been born - not zygotes, embryos or fetuses.)  Bodily self-ownership is the starting point of personal liberty.  Or, as William O. Douglas put it, "The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."

Because I have always had a healthy contempt for authority, I am biased toward personal liberty.  At the same time, I recognize that ours is a quintessentially social species.  Just as individuals have rights, groups of individuals, acting together, also have rights.  That is particularly true when the group in question is a society or a nation.  In that case, group rights are especially compelling when they are legitimately exercised in pursuit of the public good.  I believe that the guiding principle of any rational and just political system, therefore, should be maximizing personal liberty while simultaneously maximizing the public good.  

These two ideals - personal liberty and the public good - exist in equilibrium.  An increase of one often entails a decrease in the other and, yet, both are necessary.  We routinely sacrifice some of our personal liberties for the public good.  The entire concept of laws - which mostly limit what individuals are allowed to do but also sometimes compel us to do things we otherwise might not - is based on this principle.  A law that prevents an individual from driving drunk is one example of laws that limit our personal liberties.  A law against smoking in a restaurant is another.  Likewise, laws against public spitting or urination.  Some laws compel us to do things; military conscription is an example of this.  Other laws are conditional, imposing obligations on us as a condition of being permitted to engage in certain activities.  Obtaining a valid license before practicing medicine or nursing or physical therapy is an example of a conditional regulation.  No one is obliged to work in healthcare but, if one chooses to work in healthcare, one must accept the conditions under which she or he may be permitted to do so.  Completing the required degree program and getting that license is one of these conditions.  Abiding by a code of ethics is another.  Another is getting vaccinated so that one doesn't spread a highly contagious and deadly disease to one's patients and colleagues.

While both concepts - personal liberty and the public good - represent goods in and of themselves, both also have the potential to be misused, or weaponized.  For example, claims on behalf of the public good - typically made by governments - can be and are used to justify abridging individual liberties.  This is often what occurs when repressive governments prohibit public demonstrations or other forms of expression that are critical of the government.  The rationale typically provided is that it is for the public good - usually to maintain "public order" - despite the fact that curtailments of individual rights almost never have anything to do with the public good but, rather, are imposed in order to preserve the power of the ruling party in government.  Lately, there has been a discouraging and frightening increase in this sort of authoritarianism and repression around the world, from Hong Kong to Belarus and beyond.  This is even happening in our own country as more and more Republican-controlled state legislatures enact statutes criminalizing public protests.

But just as the claim of the public good can be used to curtail individuals' civil liberties and justify harm to individuals, the claim of personal liberty can be used to justify or excuse harm to society and harm to other individuals.  Until recently, the gun-rights lobby demonstrated probably the most extreme example of this phenomenon.  Believers in an individual's absolute right to own any and all kinds of weapons are not concerned in the least by the harm to others and to others' rights that necessarily ensues from an unlimited, "personal-liberty" right to own military-grade weapons with high-capacity magazines.  

A more recent example of the misuse of the claim of personal liberty is the refusal by many Americans (mostly Republicans, it turns out) to get any of the Covid-19 vaccines that have been proven safe, effective, are widely available and absolutely free.  As a result, the Covid pandemic rages on in the United States, with deaths now surpassing 700,000.  Had every American, who could have done so, done his civic duty by getting vaccinated, the pandemic likely would be behind us now and life and the economy would have returned to normal.

It may not be surprising to see antisocial behavior on the part of those who condemn virtually anything that benefits society as "Socialism!" (they use the word as a pejorative because, apparently, they regard anything that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people as an assault on their individual liberties).  What is surprising, however, and disconcerting - and I speak as someone who has worked directly with patients in hospitals for more than 20 years - is the refusal even by some healthcare workers to get vaccinated.  As a result of their intransigence, New York and several others states have recently had to institute a vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.  In response to this mandate, some of these opponents (and others) have appropriated the phrase, My Body - My Choice.  To me, this represents a new low in the history of those whose rights aren't being violated appropriating the discourse of those whose are.  This is either a shrewd if transparent tactic or just plain persecution envy. We see this in the Men's Rights Movement which, although there certainly are kernels of truth in what it has to say about sex discrimination, is based on the manifestly false premise that it is boys and men, not girls and women, who are, in fact, more often victimized and systematically oppressed.  Claiming persecution also has become a favorite tactic of Christian Conservatives and Evangelicals.

Invoking My Body - My Choice in support of anti-science, antisocial, anti-vaccine obstinacy is a misappropriation of the phrase in several important ways but what is particularly objectionable is the insensitivity that it shows toward those for whom the phrase has real meaning.  As is widely recognized, My Body - My Choice has been the battle-cry of the abortion-rights movement for at least the past half century.  There is a reason for this.  It encapsulates the fundamental issues raised by abortion: bodily self-ownership and the exclusive right of the individual, as the owner of that body, to exercise her own choices about it.  Every human being must be free to chart her or his own course in life and to control her or his own destiny.  Above all, every human being has a fundamental right to exercise absolute ownership of her or his body.  For girls and women, that necessarily and unquestionably entails the right to terminate a pregnancy.¹

It also necessarily entails the right to bodily integrity which is why, although its use in this context is not as widely familiar,  My Body - My Choice also has been taken up by the genital-autonomy movement.  It is frequently phrased as His Body - His Choice in recognition of the fact that, whereas genital cutting of girls is illegal and rare in the United States, genital cutting of boys is still legal and widespread.²   For this reason, the genital-autonomy movement here necessarily advocates on behalf of the right of boys not to be subjected to non-therapeutic circumcision.  Despite the unequal legal status of girls and boys insofar as the right to genital integrity is concerned (one of those truths about which men's-rights activists happen to be right), or rather, because of it, I prefer the universality of My Body - My Choice.  Taking sex out of the equation emphasizes that growing up with one's genitals intact and unharmed is a human right.³

The sex-neutral My Body - My Choice also emphasizes that the right to abortion and the right to genital integrity stand on the same ethical and philosophical foundation: the principle that every individual is born with an innate right of bodily self-ownership.  It is the denial of this right, and specifically in these contexts - the profoundly significant and life-altering human-rights violations that are forced childbirth and involuntary circumcision - to which the phrase My Body - My Choice is an appropriate response.  It is not a catchall for every law and regulation to which those who are irrationally jealous of their personal liberty might object.  There simply is no comparison between either compulsory childbirth or forced genital cutting and being expected, as a condition of employment in healthcare, to get vaccinated against a deadly disease in the middle of a pandemic.  

Invoking My Body - My Choice in opposition to something as benign (not to mention positively beneficial) as the Covid vaccine is a misappropriation of this phrase, then, in part because it trivializes it.  In sharp contrast to the Covid-vaccine mandate, whether we are speaking of preventing girls and women from obtaining timely and safe abortions or whether we are speaking of genital cutting, when an individual is deprived of her or his right of bodily self-ownership in either of these two ways, real harm ensues.

A girl or woman who, against her will, is forced by the state (or, under a provision of SB8 in Texas, by any private citizen in the United States who wants to score ten grand) to undergo the ordeal of a pregnancy and childbirth has no remedy available that can undo the harm that will have been done to her.  Her life will be irrevocably changed.  If she keeps the child, doing so will have major ramifications for her education, her employability, her financial stability and economic independence and her ability to choose to have a family when she is ready to.  It will affect every almost aspect of her personal life, her social life and her professional life.  Even if her child is adopted, the girl or woman who bore her will have gone through not just the trauma of forced pregnancy but the additional trauma of giving up a now, fully formed human being who is her offspring.  Conversely, if she is forced to obtain an illegal abortion, she runs a considerable risk of medical complications and serious injury including sepsis, hemorrhage, sterility and death, to say nothing of the potential legal sanctions.  Pregnancy and childbirth, themselves, pose much greater risks to woman's health and life than abortion does, and those risks increase significantly for younger women and girls.  Beyond all this is the affront to personal dignity and autonomy - the negation of one's full personhood - that is an inevitable part of being denied the right to make one's own reproductive decisions and the right to exercise exclusive control over one's own body. 

What is getting vaccinated against Covid-19 in comparison to any of this?  The most common effects of the available vaccines are not dying or getting seriously ill.  More importantly, a vaccinated healthcare worker is much less likely to spread Covid-19 to others.  Needlessly infecting one's fellow healthcare workers (to say nothing of one's patients), besides causing them harm and being, therefore, unethical on its face, also results in a further depletion of already critically understaffed hospitals.

As with forced childbirth, in the case of forced circumcision there is no remedy.  Ablation of the prepuce is irreversible - it can never be undone and its harms are life-altering and life-lasting.  Non-therapeutic male circumcision removes the primary sensory structure of the penis.  As a result, those who are subjected to this surgery in infancy or childhood can never know what intercourse is supposed to feel like.  They are permanently prevented from experiencing the degree of sexual intimacy and bonding - the shared, mutual sensuality - that is only possible when both partners have fully intact genitals.  If this were not enough, as with any surgery, circumcision subjects the victim to a range of risks and complications,  from meatal stenosis to excessive scarring to complete loss of the penis, to sepsis, hemorrhage and even death.  Also, as with any invasive surgery, non-therapeutic circumcision necessarily subjects the victim to pain.  Beyond all this is the affront to personal dignity and autonomy - the negation of one's full personhood - that is an inevitable part of being denied the right to make one's own decisions about one's sexuality and the right to decide for oneself which parts of one's body one is permitted to keep and which parts get cut off.

Again, what is a vaccine mandate, as a condition of employment, in comparison to any of this?

Another crucial distinction between the vaccine mandate and either forced childbirth or involuntary circumcision is that the vaccine mandate has a rational, reasonable and justifiable public-health objective.  In contrast, there is no justifiable public-health objective in denying women the right to abortion or in subjecting male minors to involuntary circumcision.  Not only are the public-health claims in support of neonatal circumcision - namely a reduction in risk for transmission of STIs - not supported by the evidence but what evidence there is now actually points in the opposite direction.

Of course, the most significant difference between forced childbirth or forced circumcision and the vaccine mandate (and this is a difference not of degree but of kind) is that - the label mandate notwithstanding - no healthcare worker is being forced against her or his will to get vaccinated.  The mandate is being instituted simply as a condition of employment.  Healthcare workers who do not want to get vaccinated remain free to choose not to do so.  They simply are being required to forego, as a consequence of exercising that choice, the privilege of working in healthcare.  They may not like that choice, but it is still a choice.  That is fundamentally different from denying someone access to abortion and it is fundamentally different from subjecting someone to genital cutting without consent - both of which deny the victim any choice in what happens to her or his body.

In addition, the choice for healthcare workers that the vaccine mandate actually allows them to make is not between bodily autonomy and a forfeiture of bodily autonomy.  It is between retaining one's job at the cost of a relatively small degree of one's bodily autonomy and retaining one's absolute bodily autonomy at the cost of one's job.  Even that is still a choice.  Giving up one's job - even one's profession, if it comes to it - is no small thing, and I am not minimizing it in the least.  But one's job doesn't even begin to compare in importance to one's body.  We routinely accept conditions of employment, precisely because they are undertaken voluntarily,  that we would never accept if they were imposed on our bodies without our consent.  That is the difference between forced childbirth and genital cutting as opposed to the vaccine mandate as a condition of employment for healthcare workers.  It is the difference between the fundamental right to own one's body and the everyday compromises we all make in order to hold down a job.  And, while everyone may be entitled to a job, not everyone is entitled to a job in healthcare.  That is because working in healthcare is a privilege - not a right.  Bodily autonomy, on the other hand, including the right to abortion and the right to grow up with one's genitals intact, is a right - not a privilege.

Update (25 March 2025): This essay was written in 2021, at the height of the Covid pandemic.  When I wrote it, the U.S. death toll had recently passed the 700,000 mark.  By the beginning of 2023, 755 million people had contracted Covid worldwide and 6.8 million of them had died.  In the United States, as of about a year ago, 111.82 million Americans had contracted Covid and 1,219,487 of them had died.

I also wrote (in footnote no. 1) that the constitutional right to abortion was "hanging by a thread."  That thread was cut less than a year later when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in its infamous Dobbs decision.

1. It seems strange that the right to terminate a pregnancy is not explicitly and universally recognized as a fundamental human right and that that right has not been formally codified.  And, yet, even here, in the U.S.A. - a nation that cherishes the ideal of personal liberty - women's and girls' right to own and control their own bodies is under relentless assault, is now widely and significantly curtailed throughout much of the nation and the constitutional right itself, as recognized a half century ago in Roe v. Wade, is hanging by a thread.  (The Senate can remedy this by passing the Women's Health Protection Act.  The House did so last month.)

2. It also seems strange that the right not to have part of one's genitals cut off without consent is not explicitly and universally recognized as a fundamental and universal human right.  And yet, here we are in 2021 and 3,000 times every day in the United States an infant boy is subjected to a traumatic and totally unnecessary genital surgery for no other reason than that the practice has become a self-perpetuating cultural norm.  Worldwide, at least 200 million girls and women have been subjected to female genital cutting (FGC) and more than one billion boys and men have been subjected to male genital cutting (MGC).  It is not known how many intersex individuals are subjected to genital cutting every year. 

3. It is a paradox that abortion restrictions and involuntary circumcision are both so alike and yet so different.  Feminists cite the unequal effects of abortion restrictions - because they apply to (biological) girls and women only - as an example of systemic, sex-based discrimination.  MRAs, for their part, cite the practice of male genital cutting (MGC) - hence the unequal effects of anti-FGM statutes because they protect girls but not boys from genital cutting - as an example of systemic, sex-based discrimination that affects only boys and men.  Both are right and it is perplexing that feminists and MRAs have not generally made common cause with one another on the principle of bodily autonomy.  They should, because, in theory, at least, their shared belief in bodily autonomy ought to make them natural allies.

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About me: I am originally from New York City and now live near the Finger Lakes region of New York.  I have been a physical therapist for about 25 years.  When I'm not doing that or working on my house, I write about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics.