Issue #294
GOP’s culture war disaster: How this week highlighted a massive blind spot
Progressives often comfort themselves that while they’re losing a lot of economic battles, at least they’re winning the so-called culture wars. But lately it’s impossible not to notice that even our culture war victories are uneven. They mostly involve gay rights, particularly marriage equality, and rarely women’s rights. In the same few years that one state after another has legalized gay marriage, with occasional help from the Supreme Court, dozens of states have restricted abortion, and contraception has become controversial and divisive in a way it hasn’t since the Supreme Court’s Griswold v. Connecticut ruling almost 50 years ago. Why, when women’s concerns stand alone, are their rights so often abridged? Advancing female autonomy and freedom is still perceived as threatening and undermining to family and society, particularly when it involves (as it always essentially does) issues of sexual freedom. The Hobby Lobby decision, and the conservative reaction to it, made this dynamic particularly and depressingly clear. Joan Walsh, Salon, 7-3-14.