Dianna Anderson writes about this week's setbacks for women, addressing both the contraception brouhaha and Ryking. Some excerpts:
Today started with Darrell Issa’s GOP Oversight committee on the birth control mandate and the religious exceptions to it for large organizations like religiously affiliated hospitals. This could be an entire blog post in itself, but it’s worth noting a couple of things:
1. There were no women on the panel giving testimony before Congress. Issa was requested to have at least one female testify, but refused on the grounds that it wasn’t a women’s rights issue, but a religious one. Yes, you read that right.
2. There were also no doctors on the panel, which allowed them to repeat the myth that birth control acts an abortifacient. It’s important to note that hormonal birth control only has the theoretical potential to do so (and this is if and only if you view a pregnancy as beginning at fertilization, not implantation). Restricting a necessary medication on the basis of a theoretical potential is kind of ridiculous, especially if the grounds you’re restricting it on are shaky to begin with (my ibuprofen has the theoretical potential to give me liver failure and kill me – do we say I can’t have it based on that idea?).
And then it got real. [Ryking] searched way back in her blog archives and found a photo of her from last year when she was working as a clinic escort – it features her flipping off some protestors outside the clinic as she was making her rounds. He copied it, put it on his blog, and basically wrote her an open letter, saying that she had violated clinic escort protocol and would be calling up the clinic she works at in order to get her fired. All because she was a woman who spoke up against him.